avidphantasm

Microsoft is a major provider of cloud services and artificial intelligence for the Israeli military, according to internal documents related to the contracts between the Israeli Ministry of Defense (MoD) and Microsoft Israel obtained by Drop Site News.

My first grader has a pretty nice Dell 2-in-1 from school (with 8GB of RAM!!!). She had a school-provided iPad in kindergarten. I don’t think either of these things did her any good educationally (except making sure every kid has a device to do remote learning, which thankfully they haven’t had to do yet).

I really think schools should follow the model I had when growing up in the 80s and 90s: use non-internet connected devices once or twice per week in a computer lab until high school.

At least in the Python world, it’s trivial to bring up an isolated DB instance using a docker compose file and a simple pytest plugin. Hardly seems worth the effort to mock the DB in cases like this.

My primary memory of this screensaver was while working as a desktop support work-study in college. Our NT 4 servers (PDC and its backup) ran the 3D pipe screen saver. I pointed out to the admin that it was using a software OpenGL renderer and so likely wasting CPU cycles. They then switched to the Star Field or maybe the blank screensaver (can’t remember now).

I’m not smart enough or interesting enough to be hired by OpenAI to expertly solve problems and explain how to the AI. However, I like to think there isn’t enough money in the world for me to sell out my colleagues like that.

I remember being struck a few years back when shaking the hand of a friend’s farmer father. He was about six-inches shorter than I am (6’1”) but his hands were MASSIVE.

It’s clearly not practical now, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be at some point.

It seems like unified memory has to be the goal. This all just feels like a kludgy workaround until that happens (kind of like segmented memory in the 16-bit era).

I would like you to explain why you think the creation of infrastructure involves low-skill jobs.

Cold War.

And those markets relied upon the US Army to remove Native Americans to create the “free” real estate upon which the whole thing relied.

I feel similarly, but come at it from a different angle. I first learned C++ in undergrad ca. 25 years ago. I never used C++ much professionally, going first to Java, then Python, and then C. About two years ago I started doing more work in modern C++, and after the initial shock of “this isn’t the same language I learned years ago”, I’m constantly terrified at the growing complexity of C++. I’m glad to hear people with unbroken C++ experience admit that they don’t think anyone understands this thing well.

There wouldn’t be free markets without the state. So he either doesn’t actually want free markets and wants to run a mafia state like Putin, or he is a complete idiot.

I guess WWIV has been on a slow burn for going on three years now.

Is multicast a thing on the commercial internet? Seems like that could help.

First hit on DDG: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1

I got it when I was around 40. Before getting the three doses, I would get 3-4 nasty viral sore throats per year (white blistery lesions, very painful). Now I get zero. I was probably on my way to getting throat cancer like Michael Douglas. Hopefully I have avoided or at least forestalled that.

I know AI is the buzzword du jour, but this is really ML, and really just advanced cybernetic control systems. Deep learning systems have a high enough degree of variety necessary to control short time step nonlinear systems like the plasma in a tokamak.

Yeah but if H5N1 strains have a high fatality rate, a 50% effective vaccine is a big deal.

You mean like this [1]? I would shocked if OWC didn’t have a version of this for the new mini form factor in the works.

[1] https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/external-drives/owc-ministac...

It's a desktop. Use an external disk. Much cheaper.

In America 2024, $250 dinner eats you!

But now someone at Apple can treat themselves to a very nice dinner.

What does this high level of integration mean for repairability? Lack of/difficulty in repairability can raise lifecycle costs or reduce longevity. The latter is especially worrying for lifecycle carbon emissions.

Building a new app at work using Web Components and WebSockets for dynamism. I’m using Bulma for CSS, which is still about 300KiB. However, the site loads instantly. I’m not using a Javascript framework or bundler or any of that (not even npm!), just vanilla Javascript. It’s a dream to program and I love not having the complexity of a framework taking up space in my brain.

Wearing VR/AR headsets in public spaces is extreme anti-social behavior that deserves extreme sanction.

The US intelligence community cares about that? All evidence points to them not caring about who gets killed.

Yeah, it’s annoying, but it’s the right thing in this day and age. Condoms are annoying too, but often necessary.

Maybe it’s because having the broken systems in use sometimes (often?) benefits the intelligence community.

Good point re. Windows’s default configuration being less secure due to file extensions being hidden. This is another manifestation of the continuous tax paid for Windows’s insane level of backward compatibility. I think the root cause is that Microsoft thinks files ending in .EXE are ugly (but they don’t want to stop using this convention, which I don’t think is strictly required by the kernel or filesystem, but would probably break other things in the OS and 3rd party tools), so they hide that and all other file extensions (which maybe they also think are ugly, but I don’t see an alternative since files with multiple data streams are not handled well for interchange). Not sure why the default isn’t just to hide the extension of executable files, though I think this is more trouble than it is worth, for the reasons demonstrated by this attack.

I would also consider disabling USB ports in air-gapped systems. You can still buy PS/2 keyboards and mice. Server and maybe some workstation motherboards still have PS/2 ports (and there are PS/2 PCI cards). For sneakernet file transfer you can allow use of an SD card. That way, if you see a USB cable or other device in an air-gapped environment, it should be an immediate red flag.