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bezout

304 karma · joined January 16, 2021

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bezout··on Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft
“Microsoft always lands on top”
bezout··on Worst Examples of Meta's Dystopian AI Influencers
The reels looks too realistic though. I’m guessing they made the actual celebrities record them and left the AI to take care of the pictures and convo.
bezout··on Costco now offering virtual medical care for $29
If US insists on keeping healthcare private I’d expect soon or later for these money-sucking “health” insurance companies to be replaced by VC-money-sucking tech companies offering a fairly priced subscription for accessing drugs and treatments.

The only obstacle is - and it’s a big one - drugs and health insurance companies crying out to the gov about how tech companies are stealing their lunch and they should broke down.

bezout··on An algorithm that blew up Italy’s school system
It doesn’t. It’s not an attack on the programming languages. It’s just that they have a sweet spot for using old ass versions which might or might not have known vulnerabilities and they don’t care about updating it.
bezout··on An algorithm that blew up Italy’s school system
To be fair some nations do have their software development teams. Italy has Sogei which is fully controlled by the Ministry of Economics. They had a reputation for developing crappy software but I heard they are getting better

PS: they were not involved in the development of this algorithm

bezout··on An algorithm that blew up Italy’s school system
The way it works in Italy: the design and implementation of the algorithm in Java 8 or an even older version of C# was probably outsourced to one of the Big 4 consultancy companies.

A group of underpaid graduates was put together to crack the problem. All of them crammed for their algo & ds exam since that’s what the Italian university system incentivises so none of them did actually remember a thing about algorithm design. They googled a bunch of words and forked the first PoC they found on GitHub.

Everything was wrapped into a nice PowerPoint full of corporate BS and delivered to the government.

Edit: As expected, the algorithm was developed by a company owned by Dxc Technology [1] and Leonardo which is the Italian defence company. The contract was worth 5 million of euros.

[1]: https://www.wired.it/article/algoritmo-scuola-supplenze-mini...

bezout··on Oops Google Did It Again
It’s not right now but it will be when combined with WEI or if Safari gains more market share. Overall, I agree with the sentiment expressed in this blog post: https://httptoolkit.com/blog/apple-private-access-tokens-att...
bezout··on Apple’s Parental Controls Are Broken
Apple Screen Time API is a hot mess. It’s definitely one of the most poorly documented APIs out there. I dare you to take a look at Apple’s documentation. While playing with it, I also found out - I wasn’t the only one - that some stuff such as the STWebpageController does not work correctly in the Simulator and you must use a real device.
bezout··on Retweets have been renamed to ‘Reposts.’
It’s still called “retweet” on the iOS app though. Even though I understand they cannot go exactly together since the mobile app has an approval process before it goes online, I’d like for web and mobile to have the same copywriting
bezout··on Unpacking Google’s Web Environment Integrity specification
The post states it. This is not a problem because Safari is not the leading web browser. Apple has very limited power over what they can do with it.
bezout··on LinkedIn adopts protocol buffers and reduces latency up to 60%
Do you really need that many endpoints even at LinkedIn scale? I’d expect a lots of them is due to engineers reinventing the wheel due to undocumented endpoints
bezout··on GitHub merge queue is generally available
Yeah, the embedded video helps a bit.
bezout··on xAI
It’s basically all dudes that jumped from FAANG to FAANG. Impressive but I would expect to see biologists, neuroscientists, physicists, psychologists etc
bezout··on Tell HN: Books Printed by Amazon
They’re legit - most of the times. Most of the times it’s cheaper to print on-demand if you don’t know how many copies you’re going to sell. For instance, OpenStax usually prints its books through Amazon.

I’m surprised hearing about big publishers such as Penguin using the on-demand service though. Maybe they use it to provide books which are out-of-print or which don’t sell a lot.

Given Amazon scale, I’d not be surprised if some of them are being sold by non copyright owners though.

bezout··on Stanford Graduate Students Won Their Union Vote
Going on a tangent here: I live in Europe where unions have been present for decades and it’s scary how much I give them for granted.

They are not perfect - far from it - but to think of everyone who fought to establish them and keeps them running to this day… it’s inspiring.

Good for Stanford.

bezout··on Twitter Is DDOSing Itself
TIL about jitter
bezout··on “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”
Your message would push maintainers to put even more focus on the patches, thus invalidating the experiment.
bezout··on “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”
I don’t know much about penetration testing so excuse me for the dumb question: are you required to disclose the exact methods that you’re going to use?
bezout··on “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”
This is a huge stretch. It’s more of a technical or operational experiment. They are testing the review process, not the maintainers.
bezout··on “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”
It depends.

Does creating a vaccine justify the death of some lab animals? Probably.

Does creating supermen justify mutilating people physically and psychologically without their consent? Hell no.

You can’t just ignore the context.

bezout··on “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”
We should ban A/B testing then. Google didn’t tell me they were using me to understand which link color is more profitable for them.

There are experiments and experiments. Apart from the fact that they provided the fix right away, they didn’t do anyone harm.

And, by the way, it’s their job. Maintainers must approve patches after they ensured that the patch is fine. It’s okay to do mistakes, but don’t tell me “you’re wasting my time” after I showed you that maybe there’s something wrong with the process. If anything, you should thank me and review the process.

If your excuse is “you knew the patch was vulnerable”, then how are you going to defend the project from bad actors?

bezout··on “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”
“Hey, we are going to submit some patches that contain vulnerabilities. All right?”

If they do so, the maintainers become more vigilant and the experiment fails. But, the key to the experiment is that maintainers are not vigilant as they should be. It’s not an attack to the maintainers though, but to the process.

bezout··on “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”
You could argue that they are doing the maintainers a favor. Bad actors could exploit this, and the researchers are showing that maintainers are not paying enough attention.

If I were at the receiving end, I’d think checking a patch multiple times before accepting it.

bezout··on “Buy and Hold” No More: The Resurgence of Active Trading
Thanks
bezout··on “Buy and Hold” No More: The Resurgence of Active Trading
I’m not arguing the opposite, but I’m very interested in learning more about this. Can you suggest some references?
bezout··on A man who tried to redeem the world with logic (2015)
Just don’t assume that your field is the only one key to the holy grail. Be open to the other scientific fields
bezout··on A man who tried to redeem the world with logic (2015)
I find it a bit naive that scientists assume that their field can explain everything there is to know about a certain topic. We should weight every assumption very carefully - especially when dealing with complex biological entities such as the brain.
bezout··on What does any of this have to do with physics? (2016)
Life is too short for these shenanigans. But, I think that you should still go for it if and only if you understand what you’re getting yourself into. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
bezout··on The Mathematical Engineering of Deep Learning
I know that it’s not related to the course’s content but: I never liked the “deep learning is the new electricity”. It sounds dumb.
bezout··on Everything is broken, and it’s okay
Well, your argument would only apply to software which operating contexts are not known to the developers ahead of its release. Is it the case for every piece of software? I’d argue not. Most of the times, you know what to expect . And you can always put up some guards to ensure it fails gracefully.
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