otakucode

Quite a few years ago I recall watching a presentation by a leader of a child advocacy organization that was dealing with the various governments in the EU and providing technical guidance to them. They were very close at the time to moving forward with a plan to require video card manufacturers to build things into their firmware to check every single image before it is displayed on screen against a database of known illegal imagery. The crux of the talk from the advocate was that they, child advocacy organizations, spend an awful lot of time and resources fighting against these sorts of high-profile attacks against imagery because it is known to not actually help kids in abusive situations. I keep expecting that sort of policy to re-appear. As technical people, we know that the technical aspects of such a proposal are insane and impractical, but that often doesn't constrain policymakers.

If you were immortal, would that confer some kind of meaning on your actions? How do you define meaning, and does it make any sense? Philosophical issues like these can have, I believe, substantial effects on a persons mental health. It's an area of thinking that we view in a very dysfunctional way in our society, generally discouraging even exploration of the topics as 'meaningless' (which is a bit ironic since those ideas are how one determines meaning). And if you do wish to investigate the ideas, you're mostly on your own. I personally credit my study of philosophy with a great deal of my general contentment with life, and feel it gave me the tools I needed to address most of the concerns I always wrestled with. Not even any specific philosopher or school of philosophy. Just the process of being introduced to so many radically different viewpoints on life, along with the strong foundation in argumentation and reason, itself seems to have aided my greatly.

If the universe will die, and that establishes that anything which occurs within it has no meaning, perhaps meaning becomes entirely worthless as a concept. It distinguishes nothing. It becomes identical with mere existence.

>Does YT have a quantifiable monopoly it abuses in an economic sense?

I really don't see how YouTube could be seen as anything but anticompetitive in many of its practices. Primarily, the fact that they have used and continue to use revenue driven by search from Google to maintain the tremendous infrastructure necessary to run YouTube. This means that anyone who wishes to compete with YouTube needs to be able to find investors (or pay themselves, but the number of people or organizations that could do that can be counted on one hand) willing to foot the bill to build billion-dollar infrastructure and then expect to run it at a profound loss, burning hundreds of millions of dollars a year for potentially a decade or more. Google is probably making some money on YouTube now, but they ran it at a mountainous loss for years and years for no reason other than suppressing the possibility of competition being developed. There also other smaller things, like the US government deciding to host all of their video content on YouTube without even considering following the legally-required bidding process - because there was no realistic competitor. That's pretty telling.

It surprises me that a multitude of separately developed systems acting in the same 'playground' don't give rise to more emergent behavior. I would expect accidental death spirals as systems unknowingly couple together and get caught in a loop of failing together, along with the polar opposite of just astronomical growth spurred by nothing but the systems bidding logic interlocking in unexpected ways.

Sure there have been catastrophic failures like Knight Capital, but those, at leas the ones I am aware of, all boil down to the system having flaws. I have yet to see a system which worked and followed the logic the designers intended, but which is accidentally (or purposely?) exploited by other automated systems doing the same. Shouldn't the complexity of these systems make such a thing almost inevitable and common?

When it comes to trademark, companies are compelled to act. Failing to defend your trademark will make you incapable of defending it in the future. The DMCA can NOT be used for trademark disputes, however. The DMCA exclusively deals with copyright.

Normally, the "interoperability" defense is used to protect instances of circumventing copyright protection mechanisms, not for copying itself. For instance, that was the defense in the case where Lexmark brought a DMCA claim against a third party ink cartridge manufacturer, claiming that by making their ink work, they circumvented protection mechanisms Lexmark claimed existed to protect their copyrighted firmware code in their ink carts. The court didn't buy it, Lexmark lost, it was established that you can do that kind of circumvention. But this copying of the word list... it's different in a couple fundamental ways, and I don't know if there has been a case that has dealt with this sort of thing.

Wow. I have never heard of this and not considered it before, but you are right. If you had pushed a fix for the nightly build prior to a fix being available on the main branch, it would have amounted to a disclosure about the stable version to any watching would-be attackers. At least for critical vulnerabilities like these, holding off for a coordinated disclosure like this which raises user notice as much as possible while not tipping your hand does seem like a very smart policy. I follow security stuff pretty regularly (I'm not a user of iTerm2 and read this article and these comments to find out what the exploit would be and what bug led to it, for instance.) but I have never come across a developer doing this intentionally. Is it a well-known security posture thing that I have just missed?

In any case, thanks for your contributions with a tool that is obviously so useful to so many. I almost never use macOS, but I do own a 2015 MBP from some development I needed it for in the past. Next time I boot it up, you can be sure I will be installing iTerm2. (I might actually have it and just not remember, but I don't think so, I never invested too much into the platform.)

I hope the battery was replaced? There's a recall affecting the battery for mid-2015 MBPs. The batteries can explode even when not being charged and the system not in use, it's definitely worth complying with the recall (which they make very easy, I did it with mine right after the recall was announced and got mine back within 4 business days).

I'd like to add an additional possible threat model that gets ignored pretty comprehensively and, in some cases, intentionally: Your data being fed to automated systems that provide summaries or derivative information based upon your data. People ignoring this is behind much of the NSAs snooping. They believe that until a HUMAN operator views the cleartext of some communication, the communication can not legally be said to have been 'intercepted' at all. And if you look up any statement ever made about reforms done at the NSA after Snowden's revelations, you will find that all of them, every single one, spoke exclusively about human analysts reading communications directly. They avoided addressing analysis, profiling, ML training, summarization, and other automated things very intentionally. The government has dropped a good many cases, serious cases involving child pornography even, to avoid ever testing this idea of theirs in court. We learned about this particular legal opinion of theirs (which would almost certainly never survive any court challenge at all) before Snowden even, back when the AT&T whistleblower came forward.

The likelihood a company like Google is reading your emails directly and trying to scoop your business on a product idea or something like that is slim. The likelihood they are profiling your communications in aggregate and producing derivative information like "how many companies in the space are considering hiring" or "do the employees at this company talk about Chipotle" and using that for advertising or data products is, I would guess, pretty high.

Who audits Google? Serious question.

Because we invented it specifically to establish a system in which some answers were right (those which could be proven given a set of axioms and a set of legal reasoning techniques) and some were wrong. Why would it being invented affect whether it could have right and wrong answers?

I think reading things which were believed in the past, and how they were justified, what 'proof' was held up, etc, is tremendously helpful. We can imagine re-walking their path and understand how they came to believe what they believed, and be confident that those techniques are not reliable. If you see those exact same justification or reasoning being used in modern times, you can know to be suspicious. You always have to account for the fact that a correct conclusion can be happened upon with an entirely wrong reasoning, but in most cases you will also have a head start on know how to disprove the conclusion if it's in doubt. It's surprising how often conclusions are abandoned, but the style of argument that supported them manages to stick around. You would think that if someone says 'clearly X is true because only an evil Creator would make it otherwise, and the Creator is not evil' but X is then thought to be false, that you couldn't justify anything else with the same argument, but its very common that they would just throw out X when it became impossible to ignore its truth, but preserve a whole host of ideas based on the same reasoning.

>We are unable to specify the objective completely and correctly, nor can we anticipate or prevent the harms that machines pursuing an incorrect objective will create when operating on a global scale with superhuman capabilities.

This is obviously incorrect. If an AI system of superhuman mental capabilities is installed on a system with no network connection and no physical interfaces, we can completely control the harm is might create. It would be unable to directly act, of course, requiring humans to authorize and carry out whatever plan it devises. But failing to do this should be prosecuted and treated no differently from if a person or company built a tank and then permitted it to drive over and through people. The biggest difficulty here will be that our legal frameworks have no established way to assign liability and criminal culpability to any system involving software. With no legally-enforceable industry standards (like the electrical code followed by electricians, things like that) any prosecution fails as the company can either claim ignorance of the potential harm their system might cause or simply throw individual employees under the bus, claiming they were not acting on direct orders.

It is true that we can not fully specify the goal, and that is a grave concern. It's partially due to this that AI systems shouldn't be directly connected to the ability to act in the physical world unless their attempted actions go through some sort of 'filtering' first.

This is one of my concerns. If there is a large-scale collapse, that is a very concrete statement of "what you tried did not work." Preserving as much of that past as possible would be a mistake. Any large collapse should be an opportunity for rebirth. We already drag along old mistakes in the technology industry after many repeated attempts at a fresh start always failing to a competitor offering to hack in backwards-compatibility making the initial deployment easier.

A collapse would be the perfect and likely sole opportunity to ditch the mistakes of the past and forge something completely new with the benefit of a "foresight" forged from hindsight.

I worked on a billing system for a government service in the USA. The system served both government clients and non-government ones. The government ones were tracked as 'federal' and others 'non-federal'. There were mostly minor differences between how the two were handled, but one of those distinctions was in what type of transactions the different category of customer was allowed to use.

From the customers perspective, the only real difference when it came to reading the billing information they received was that federal agencies received a bill that said 'federal' and others received a bill that said 'non-federal'. No big deal, right? Well, not to most agencies. But the US government works pretty closely with, and extends government-style permissions to, various native American tribal authorities. Native American tribes... do not like to be considered to be part of the US government. At all.

It's entirely understandable, but we had to make a bunch of modifications because they wanted to retain the ability to run 'federal agency' style transactions, but wanted their bills to say 'non-federal'. It actually caused quite a lot of drama, but most of it was isolated to the political side of the agency (software changes are not free, after all, so they tried to be diplomatic and begged the tribes lodging the complaint to just ignore the word 'federal' on the monthly bills they received, but they would not budge and demanded it be changed ASAP) luckily. As software lead on the project I did get to hear about some of the firestorm secondhand when working with management to figure out exactly how we were going to change things. The 'federal' designation was a boolean in the database, used both by us in the billing system to determined what kind of processing to do (it impacted amount charged too, with federal customers getting a small discount) and the frontend of the system to kick out attempts to use transaction types not supported for non-federal agencies. So they couldn't just flip the bit and make them non-federal or it would cause even more chaos. It's been a long time ago now, but I believe we ended up special-casing it so that the report templates for the non-federal bills were applied in cases where the agencies were on a hard-coded list of 'federal but non-federal' agencies. All over text maybe 2 people even ever saw.

Whatever happened to QuarkXPress? I remember seeing it all over the place and it was the de facto standard in desktop publishing for quite awhile in the 90s, but then it just sorta... disappeared. Do you know of anywhere I could find a good technically-aimed history or breakdown of what went wrong?

Where does it mention that? And is asking what a persons preferred pronoun is considered rude?

Not to mention the capability to execute any arbitrary executable.

Just a channel that is used for exfiltration. It's not a specific sort of thing.

Automation is or was an overblown fear? Consider that when these children were making their astute predictions, a company would have entire rooms filled with secretaries and typists handling mail. Each individual could read, compose a response, and mail out a few dozen letters a day to communicate with suppliers, vendors, customers, etc. Today, a companies communications department might be a couple people. And they can handle a few hundred emails before lunch. And they don't get paid any more (adjusted for inflation and all that jazz) than the individual working as a typist in 1980 would have been.

One of the ladies in the video shared a concern that there would only be jobs for high-IQ people who could use a computer. That certainly didn't take into account that computers would become tremendously easier to use, but I do think it hints at a problem. It's easily seen that our societies have been eliminating the middle class and splitting into a much more widely disparate lower and upper classes... but I think it might more be moving such that the 'middle class' is only knowledge workers, particularly those working in software. This movement likely would have been quite abrupt if not for the establishment early on of wage fixing by the largest companies (which they were convicted for), but it seems to have been accelerating the past 10 years. It makes some sense economically (not its magnitude, it should be much larger, but its existence) because software is a productivity multiplier unlike anything in world history, but doesn't it bear out her concerns?

Sure when factories came around, craftspeople could transition to working in restaurants, or as cashiers, or working in the distribution chain, etc, because those were things that could be picked up on the job. While using computers has gotten simpler, building systems fundamentally cannot beyond a certain point. If you're building a system which must track 100 things, you must be capable of dealing with those 100 things. If that's something which is beyond your capacities, then its not just a matter of getting trained.

I don't expect automation to be a large-scale problem as quickly as some do (how long have we been hearing about automated factories and how many do we actually have? A long time and not many. They are hard problems.) but I do think concerns are warranted. Concerns were warranted when factories were developed, and we probably would have benefited from some forethought there too. We still carry many of the social changes that occurred to handle the densely packed urban centers that grew up around factories despite none of their original motivating factors still existing. We will most likely see changes on that scale, and strife to match if we just let things happen.

If a research does not release the code used in their research, their papers should not be trusted. We wouldn't trust a paper where the researchers hid their experimental methods or analysis - it wouldn't even be allowed to be published. But if their experimental methods or analysis are done in code, those parts are allowed to be a black box and we're supposed to trust them. If we were willing to just trust them, there wouldn't even be a peer review process and it certainly wouldn't deserve the imprimatur of 'science'. This has been a problem for years, and I will personally not be the least bit surprised if we eventually see a death toll attached to it.

This is not simply a matter of social science being soft. This was caused by exactly 1 thing: researchers not releasing the code they write or use. Their code was bad, and it produced an incorrect result. There is probably TONS of this in research from the past 30 years, and most of it goes uncaught because, for some insanely unwise reason, the scientific community has tolerated researchers keeping their procedures, tools, and experimental processes secret... but only when software is involved.

Science isn't just a matter of what people believe. It often gets considered when governments create policy. Bad science can kill millions. I've run into many 'bugs' in the algorithm descriptions published in computer science and mathematics papers, I shudder to think what the code backing nontechnical research is like.

While attending college, I worked as a mainframe operator in the evenings at a data center for a bank. There are parts of the financial system which are most definitely not digital and not 'online' at all. For instance, each night I would have to dial in to a national server to download the transactions from ATM cards, then load those into the banks system. I don't know if that has changed, but that introduced a great deal of lag. The bank only operated on weekdays. And not on holidays. So anything done on those days didn't update the account information until the night after the next bank day. So if you went and withdrew money via ATM after 5PM or so (this is assuming the national system WAS online and realtime... I don't actually know that for a fact) on a Friday and there was a bank holiday on the following Monday, your account at the bank would not reflect that until Tuesday evening (I worked in the evening, and it was my responsibility to do that).

This was awhile ago, up until 2001, so things may have changed but I strongly doubt they have changed very significantly given that even then they were using an NCR mainframe which was literally the very last operational one of its kind (the owner of the 2nd to last one gave us theirs for free when they replaced it with a PC, so we got a DR site!). Their policy was to never change anything that cost a penny if it still functioned. When I left, the bank had been acquired by a larger bank and the plan was to move the smaller banks processing into the larger ones data center. I ran into one of my coworkers 5 or so years later and none of that had happened. Everything was still as it was.

My suggestion of a better solution would be better tools. For instance, when viewing or editing the code, a call to CopyFile should appear something like

   CopyFile([from] 'presentation.md', [to] '/home/presenter')

with the "[from]" and "[to]" parts not being actual tokens that are part of the source file, but annotations that appear to assist the developer. They would appear as little badges, non-editable or selectable, with distinctions in their display to make it clear they are UI elements rather than part of the source code.

No reason? Hey, let's assume you're running a business. Only it's a special business. The customers really need your service. And they don't pay for your service. Someone else pays the bill for them. And they are extremely interested in acquiring the absolute top quality possible when using the service. So when you charge $50, but the guy across town charges $500, the customer will fight tooth and nail to get in and use your competitor instead. Call it 'reverse capitalism.'

That's insurance-supported medical care in the US. No one wants to go to the cut-rate bargain-basement doctor. And the majority of patients aren't paying their own medical bills. The insurance company is footing that bill. So when their kid gets sick, they're price-shopping in reverse. They only want the premium level, and offering a good deal actively stops people from using the service.

And that doesn't even get into the price-fixing that insurance companies engage in, entirely legally, because insurance is determined to be "not commerce" and therefore exempt from all antitrust laws. There is definitely a reason why Americas sub-standard care is so expensive - insurance.

It is impossible to control the actions of other people. What they will or will not do should play little role in your own moral determinations. At the end of the day, anything done in business is only done for money. If you do something which you believe to be immoral, being able to say "but I got paid" will not help. If others step in and do it instead, they bear the moral consequence rather than you.

>evolved into a group think belief that management could function as fungible & completely replaceable units of work

That is just an element of consistency. Since the 1980s management 'wisdom' has been centered around the idea that all workers should be fungible, replaceable units of work. Ideas like 'if you are irreplaceable, you are expendable' and the notion that your degree of importance to the functioning of a company is also a measure of how much of a liability you are, etc. They're ideas rooted in the notion that a business should prefer to close its doors rather than do anything which could raise the cost of labor in the market. If an individual becomes important in the functioning of a business, they should be eliminated as swiftly as possible because otherwise they will remain and eventually ask for more money. Since you can never, ever, consider granting that request, you will have to fire them at that point and the damage would be even harder to repair than if you had disposed of them when you first realized their importance. So better to eject them when you first realize it and clean up whatever damage that causes when it is more containable. Perhaps that viewpoint might have had some relevance in industries centered around commodity repetitive physical labor, but I would argue that it is overall destructive in knowledge-based industries. It has been phenomenally successful at suppressing the cost of labor (between 1950 and 1980, the median wage of workers rose 75%, between 1980 and 2010 it rose by only 1%) but it's caused a widespread host of much larger problems that threaten the very foundation of the economy.

I started meditating when I was a young teen, and am 40 now. I go through periods where I don't do it as much, but I've been off and on meditating for quite awhile. Not so much 'mindfulness' meditation as has become the trend lately, but more of the 'empty of everything' style where you count breaths, etc. Fairly similar in results though it seems. Same avoiding of engaging with random thoughts that float by, which was probably the biggest thing I got out of it. Especially when I am stressed, it can become very difficult to sleep as my mind just won't shut down. Meditation helps with that.

I don't know if it is meditation or more my studying of philosophy (both in college and on my own time) that has led to my ability to control my emotions better. I would also say my emotions are ephemeral, but that's really because I understand them better. When they are justified, and helpful, I can nurture them and encourage them and indulge in them just fine. And if they're not, usually I can let them pass. There are exceptions, of course, for deep-seated things that I need more repeated attempts at suppression to change. Emotions are essentially a trained response, after all. Even if you intellectually know they're nonsensical, it has to be retrained.

In my prior job, I worked with a few (really skilled) interns that were just finishing up their CS degrees. I found out that they didn't learn any SQL at all and their interactions with databases was severely limited overall. This really surprised me, as I had a whole databases course when I went through college (different school, but in the same state, just 20 years earlier). Is not teaching SQL or relational database concepts no longer common at colleges? I should mention that the school they went to otherwise was excellent and taught a great many things my own schooling never touched on and I had to pick them up later myself. I'm just curious if it's a matter of just that school, or if other courses have been prioritized across the academic field generally for some reason.

I didn't mention anything about other things they've done, I'm just looking at what the organization actually provides to the market. While it is true that they did all of the things you mentioned, that is unfortunately what's known as First Mover Disadvantage. They pave the way, and now anyone can crop up and make use of the tough road they laid down.

McDonald's is popular, at least this is what I was told in business courses, because people like familiarity and they know when they get a meal at a McDonald's it's going to be mostly the same everywhere. Uber doesn't really enjoy that. They do enjoy that it is a unified app and service no matter where you are, they have that going for them for a certainty, but they do not have control over their drivers to the level at which McDonald's has control over their franchisees. That's down to the fact their drivers are independent contractors, although it likely couldn't work any other way. It might be moot since the service is the same, getting from point A to B, so the part people want stays the same.

I would almost be inclined to see it as Uber being more valuable for their management of driver reputations than the software they provide, really. They set a standard, and hold drivers somewhat accountable to that standard, which is something that a more 'open' solution would make very difficult or impossible to do.

Since the beginning I have always wondered when I came across complaints about there not being enough multi-core software. Am I the only one with more than 1 process running on my system?