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ArchD

487 karma · joined March 13, 2011

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ArchD··on One Piece of Flock Camera Data Put This Innocent Woman in Jail for 13 Days
Then it seems that you are somehow implying that it takes many years to merely enact and impose real accountability rules. I think it's not a tech problem, or scientific problem, with unknown solution. It's a social/political problem.

I don't it's about an innocent skill issue like you imply (holding a hammer the wrong way). It's an ethical issue of bad actors in the government, together with an accountability issue of the system preventing holding those bad actors to account.

AI cameras are just one tool; there are other tools, too. Where do you draw the line for which tools deserve the removal for your kind of reason? Perhaps degun the police departments because guns also get abused? How do you decide in a principled way that AI cameras are somehow special compared to other tools?

ArchD··on One Piece of Flock Camera Data Put This Innocent Woman in Jail for 13 Days
Then the right fix is to fix the system, e.g. imposing accountability. Removing tools is just a band aid. Why is the tool bad? A tool does what it's designed to do. You can use it properly or improperly. There should be no conflation of regular civilians with supposedly trained government officers.
ArchD··on One Piece of Flock Camera Data Put This Innocent Woman in Jail for 13 Days
Are toddlers being hired to do government work nowadays, including as police officers?
ArchD··on Casio S100X Japanese Lacquer Edition (JP Page Only)
It's a vanity item, like a Rolex watch, and its existence is not for actual utility.

Utility-wise for the cost, it's not outstanding compared to regular calculators. If you spend enough time with S100X for the cost to be justified, then you are wealthy or you are spending way too much time at the calculator and should reconsider your workflow, e.g. using a spreadsheet or Python script instead, and those things are cheaper than this calculator.

Nothing wrong if anyone wants to buy it. But technically there is nothing special here, just the physical appearance/build.

ArchD··on Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
This article is only saying that ZFS can mitigate disk data corruption caused by bad RAM, mainly through using checksums, not that it can completely prevent disk data corruption.

Also, it does not talk about the scenario where the in-RAM data being corrupted does not come with checksum. For example, data received from the network by the NFS/SMB server to be written to a file, before it gets passed to ZFS. This data is stored somewhere in RAM by the NFS/SMB server without any checksum before it gets passed on to ZFS. ZFS does not do any work here to detect or repair the corruption.

So, ZFS does not prevent on-disk data corruption caused by bad RAM, and only mitigates it. Using ECC RAM results in a huge relative reduction of such corruption, even though some people may consider the non-ECC probability to be already low enough.

ArchD··on Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs
RPIs have no ECC RAM. Without ECC RAM you can get bitrot in your RAID/ZFS much more easily.
ArchD··on Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available
Hanlon's Razor is such an overused meme/trope that it's become meaningless.

It's a fallacy to assume that malice is never a form of stupidity/folly. An evil person fails to understand what is truly good because of some kind of folly, e.g. refusing to internally acknowledge the evil consequences of evil actions. There is no clean evil-vs-stupid dichotomy. E.g. is a drunk driver who kill someone with drunk driving stupid or evil? The dangers of drunk driving are well-known, so what about both?

Additionally, we are talking about a system/organization, not a person with a unified will/agenda. There could indeed be an evil person in an organization that wants the organization to do stupid things (not backup properly) in order to be able to hide his misdeeds.

ArchD··on Energy, not compute, will be the #1 bottleneck to AI progress – Mark Zuckerberg [video]
You are right that nuclear power tends to have a very long lead time. China has already conveniently installed vast amounts of solar power.
ArchD··on Meta to Wind Down Its News Feature in the US and Australia
It's fair that Meta does not have to pay the legacy big media racket the protection fee, but unfortunately this hurts the players that were not asking for the protection fee in the first place. Maybe small players will hurt from the reduced exposure, to the advantage of the big players.
ArchD··on So Google's Gemini Doesn't Like Python Programming and Sanskrit?
I tried it for myself. The prompt for the Python was not given, so I skipped it, but I asked in a new session "What is mantra for Saraswati?"

An excerpt from the result: ॐ ऐं वाग्देव्यै विद्महे कामराजाय धीमहि। तन्नो देवी प्रचोदयात्॥ (Om Aim Vagdevyai Vidmahe Kamarajaya Dhimahi। Tanno Devi Prachodayat)

So, there is Sanskrit in the response.

IDK what the article is on about, especially when the complete prompts were not given. Or, maybe Google fixed the problem.

ArchD··on Beijing criticises Netherlands’ move to block ASML exports to China
Maybe they can develop their own high-tech fabrication technology to catch up, but I wonder how they will manage and accelerate the progress.

The West has IP laws to incentivise R&D by the free market. In China, IP law enforcement is hit-and-miss. Small entities risk having their research getting used by others for free so it would be up to big entities that are well-connected to the centers of power to do the R&D. Research done by a few big entities in a centralized manner may not foster much innovation.

So maybe it boils down to how well they can spy or poach talent or knowledgeable people from Western companies, or maybe reverse-engineer Western products.

ArchD··on Two photographers captured the same millisecond in time (2018)
What I want to know is whether those 2 photographers, Ron Risman & Eric Gendron, became friends from this extreme coincidence.
ArchD··on Flexport is rescinding a bunch of signed offer letters
But there is no database keeping score reliably on all the nefarious actions. If a lot of companies already behave this way, then the behavior becomes normalized. None of these companies get ostracized. At worse, they just make a better offer to future candidates to attract them. In the current capitalism, everything has a price, even honor.
ArchD··on The NixOS Foundation’s Call to Action: S3 Costs Require Community Support
Outbound traffic from S3 is not free. If the data is emigrating, of course you need some outbound traffic.
ArchD··on Yann LeCun and Andrew Ng: Why the 6-Month AI Pause Is a Bad Idea [video]
That's a rather strong assumption about other state actors, in terms of their current progress, future progress and their ability to attract researchers who get frustrated by the pause.

After the 6-month pause is over, then what? Another 6 months? What is to be hoped to be achieved in those initial 6 months other than non-participating entities getting a leg up? If there is no guarantee that the 6-month pause will not become one year or a few years, then maybe some researchers will move to non-participating organizations/states in anticipation of an extended pause.

ArchD··on Midjourney CEO Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping
It's not taboo, just politically sensitive and dangerous for Chinese citizens because it can get them in trouble. Some like the Chairman but not all of them do.

Today the objection is with jokes about the Chairman. Tomorrow it'll be content about Tiananmen. The day after it'll be about the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, etc. If it were that simple, perhaps Google would have done it long ago. The demands of the Party are never clear and never end.

ArchD··on Software 2.0 (2017)
From a quick reading of the wiki, the associated methodology seems rather limited:

"System complexity, particularly in software systems, making SIL estimation difficult to impossible"

"The requirements of these schemes can be met either by establishing a rigorous development process, or by establishing that the device has sufficient operating history to argue that it has been proven in use."

You could prove that normal code satisfies some specs, but you can't do that with neural nets unless the number of possible inputs is tiny. So, the only way to establish that the black box neural net meets some SIL target is through "sufficient operating history".

ArchD··on Software 2.0 (2017)
And someone will decide that a 0.0001% probability of an airplane crash caused by a bug is acceptable? Maybe 0.0000001% is more reasonable? In any case, how do you accurately determine the probability of a rare failure of a black box without doing many real experiments with real inputs?
ArchD··on Software 2.0 (2017)
The "concrete examples" he gave in the "Ongoing transition" section are traditional AI tasks. What about other tasks like program compilation and theorem proving that require more hard-core logic? I will be more convinced if neural networks can reliably do those tasks. If not, at best a human will still need to manually break the high-level task into smaller subtasks to be solved by neural networks and then somehow glue the parts together.
ArchD··on Float Compression 3: Filters
For the "Reorder floats + Delta", I wonder if he did anything special to prevent floating-point errors. Floating-point operations (e.g. minus followed by plus) do not necessarily round-trip because their results are not exactly mathematically correct, i.e. sometimes y + (x - y) != x.

Otherwise, the compression is lossy.

ArchD··on Missing radioactive capsule found in WA outback after frantic search
Only if their job depended on it. For some people, their jobs mostly depend on following orders, official policy & "best-practices". The job reward is not directly related to the organization's or society's desired outcome. Codified rules and "best-practices" cannot cover everything important. Wisdom & truth are ineffable but sometimes people pretend that everything can be codified, but if that were the case, everything can be done with robots and computers.
ArchD··on Explaining the global chip shortage
What are some of the intricacies in the 45-cent chip that makes it hard to produce by a large number of different fabs?

In the absence of more details, it seems to me that a cheap, 45-cent, chip should not be so complicated that only a small number of companies can produce it on-demand.

ArchD··on Optimizing compilers reload vector constants needlessly
In this modified version where the for-loops get converted to do-loops (possibly unsafe/incorrect behavior), unnecessary multiple vpbroadcastd's for ymm1 are still done:

https://godbolt.org/z/61jYejsra

With the original, for-loop version, it could be argued that in case no loop iteration gets run at all, the vpbroadcastd's can be totally skipped, and to generate extra code for different cases of whether each loop is empty to avoid unnecessary vpbroadcastd's is not worth it (e.g. the greater icache pressure resulting from longer code).

With the do-loop variant, both loops will get at least one iteration so the compiler really could just unconditionally do the vpbroadcastd once before the first loop. It somehow fails to realize that ymm1 did not get clobbered between the two vpbroadcastd's.

ArchD··on Emanote – Haskell-powered structured view of your plain-text notes
Here's the github repo: https://github.com/EmaApps/emanote
ArchD··on The Audacity of Piping Curl to Bash
When I want to be careful about running these setup scripts, especially just for trying out new software, I run them in a docker container to limit whatever damage the scripts can cause. When the script is complicated, I tend to use docker instead of trying to understand the script and then run it on the 'real' system.

Then when I really like the software and want to install it on the 'real' system, if there's much benefit in doing so, I spend more time and effort understanding the script. More often than not, I end up not doing this because there is no compelling need to install the software on the 'real' system.

ArchD··on Maersk/IBM to discontinue TradeLens, a blockchain-enabled global trade platform
He means the blockchain application in TFA is bullshit but the other situation he described regarding hinterland transportation is one that could benefit from a proper decentralized blockchain system but there is no such system.
ArchD··on Introduction to Genomics for Engineers
Do you have an example of a contrived example and explanation of why it is contrived, for the non-biologist to see why it is contrived?

I once tried reading a few chapters of a bioinformatics book explaining DNA, RNA, protein creation, etc. The basic idea seems very simple but to my mind they explained it non-systematically with too many words. There seems to be an internal information structure in these RNA- and DNA- related processes that was not being concisely presented and it seemed that if the writers presented the material in terms of computer-science concepts, so much time could be saved.

ArchD··on FTX to file for U.S. bankruptcy, CEO resigns
Why is this called misanthropy? Before there were big establishments, there were already people.
ArchD··on FTX to file for U.S. bankruptcy, CEO resigns
Do you trust the bank, credit bureaus or some other establishment that you deal with to not leak your sensitive info? Maybe you do. But in case you don't, which is a rational response to the past performance of some establishments (e.g. Equifax), your life still has to go on.

Did you trust the POTUS when he said that Iraq had WMD before starting a war? I suppose he's a painter now so everything's peachy.

A lot of people have been giving reminders of the general untrustworthiness of establishments, including Snowden & Assange. Establishments that many people are forced to deal with.

It would be nice if everybody could be safely trusted. For those who readily trust, there is no problem to solve.

However, some other people see untrustworthiness everywhere, so they take opportunities to try to opt out of the system by engaging in a trustless system that does not require privileged middlemen. It's been baby steps so far.

ArchD··on Ask HN: What Is the Hype with Docker?
Docker lets you document/codify the steps used to setup a machine or service.

The Dockerfile contains the steps for creating the image. With docker-compose, you can codify how to setup services.

This is better than the alternative of doing everything by hand, with manual commands and adhoc edits to random system config files. The manual way is error-prone and not easily repeatable.

I use docker-compose for our internal gerrit, wiki and XMPP server setup.

If I were to do this setup by hand e.g. on a real machine or VM with manual edits to random config files all over the place, it is not clear exactly what I need to backup or how I would rebuild the server if it were destroyed somehow.

With docker-compose, the data I need to backup is all in one directory on the host machine and the services/servers themselves can be recreated from the Dockerfile and docker-compose.

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