julian_sark

It was a cascade of sorts.

Step 1, running my tests on Gemini. Having it argue two sides of radical social systems and realistic seeming implementation routes. Collaborative story telling into the absurd. Having it solve impossible seeming riddles (though that still leads to hallucinations).

2. Gemini explaining arcane BIOS settings to me not found anywhere on Google, mostly correctly.

3. Claude dissecting a tongue-in-cheek theory/blog post of mine, deeply analyzing it while catching flaws and catching on to irony and sarcasm.

4. Several non-coder friends building fully automated AI slob distribution and sales/BI platforms with Claude, and forking and greatly improving projects on GitHub. I did some tests with Vibe Coding myself, had Claude write a small game from one prompt. This is a bit insane, I must admit.

I'm a former skeptic who was written a lot on AI and society, published some, and held public discussions with experts.

I have since sung the praise of, especially, Claude in closed forums for hundreds of county and government digitalisation and security people in a way I'd have never expected two years ago.

Background, I'm an IT and security guy myself with 30 plus years of light coding and heavy, broad enterprise stuff. I'm on record now for saying things on AI I would have had myself hospitalized for two years ago.

Many of the people around me go "eh, just check your code for security" and "I tried coding in ChatGPT, i had it output some puny script, it's not that great".

In return I had Claude (free tier) make a PDF for them on uses, chances, risks, legal framework and integration with other AI and services for them, nicely formated, from one prompt. It seems 100 percent factually correct and Claude fixed a bug in the PDF generation code it pulled off of the web from the same prompt to complete the task.

I also explained to them why especially the library pool for Python and JavaScript enables Claude to write stuff that is rather impressive, and that while not fully scalable (yet), it might be "good enough" for 90 percent of the tasks people want done these days.

I suddenly find myself berating people on government forums, where some people from the national IT security advisory body are part of the (mostly silent) audience, to wake up in some way and consider what it means. Yet our national approach to security is mostly still "Vibe coding is a toy and a party trick, that will blow over eventually, get a code audit or follow some security check lists."

Meanwhile I believe that in two years, most of GitHub will be written by non coding hobbyists like my friends.

And having seen how insanely laissez faire some commercial software folks treat security and product service for extremely pricy products, maybe DIY vibe coded stuff does not even look bad in comparison.

While some of 1000s of people around me doing the "real world" work around me can't wait to give agency to the AI, many others here, including many people in charge, still seem blissfully ignorant. Or want to be.

Ultimately, I only know one thing for certain: Society is currently heading full yolo into this, and systemically, that might be the only way because that is the true nature of AI.

They say people don't understand the exponential function. This is true.

But most people also don't seem to understand the implications of this new approach to exponential pattern recognition and reassembly, that operates on the microsecond scale, and with an insane pool of information at its disposal. It will probably never make NEW stuff, but it will assemble old stuff so fast and complete it will still seem indistinguishable from magic.

Society is in for a wild ride.

Didn't know fences contained copper ;)

I took mine extra heavy, I love it.

If not for comforting my neuro divergeny, I also love it for staying put and not dropping off of the side, or foot, of the bed and falling on the floor.

Only caveat is getting it into the sheet covers. That is hard work lol, quite the workout. Considering skipping that part and just putting it on top of a light bedsheet.

I add a warm, thick blanket on top of the weighted one if needed, e.g. in winter.

It's important to stack it that way. Putting the weighted one on top keeps everything put, but the compression on the warm blanket negates the temperature isolation and it gets cold quick.

I'm getting so tired of Reddit's antics. Also removing content seemingly at random without any meaningful explanation, and ignoring any messages about it. Which both makes mods look bad and is a blatant violation of the Digital Services Act.

Woman with Fake Voice to do Hundreds of Tests on Single Drop of Blood:

"Arrest the witch!!"

AI to Diagnose Diabetes Based on Seconds-long Snippet of Voice:

"Uh. Interesting ...!"

Just sign up at my company. Job done!

My company used to title me: "System Architect". Yes, always singular, they're Germans and have no feel at all for English language.

Then HR bought a pricy scheme from some consultant, and now I'm suddenly an "Advanced System Engineer". And also mightily pissed off for not being a senior title.

It's like they roll dice around here. People went from being Data Analysts to being developers and vice versa. People were assigned titles that don't fit, purely so they could be outfited with certain benefits exclusively tied to those titles in a rigid scheme.

Leave it to HR to screw over any industry naming conventions and to make my future job applications great fun, when I will explain why I'm not really that thing that's actually on my CV.

Many years ago I went camping and snails entered the tent. They proceeded to eat the pages out of a book, rasping the top layer of paper off of pages while leaving the lower layers of the pages intact. It was one of those "The Reality of Dan Brown's Fiction"-style books which were all the rage back then, proving to me that snails will literally eat anything, no matter how little sustaining.

Kudos!

I cracked open (both out of curiosity and for recycling) my own 1999 Logitech QuickCam Express just a few days ago, then tossed away the parts. It was a decent webcam for the time, which was when Windows 98 was all the rage.

My desktop admittedly being a Windows system, I dabbled for a while trying to get the old drivers and software to work on Windows 11, alas, not a chance.

I liked the quirky thing especially for the physical visor that assured me nobody is watching me when the camera SHOULD be off, and saved me the masking tape (except for a single strip permanently glued to the inside of the visor, because for some odd reason, the thing was semi-translucent!)

I went out and bought a Trust webcam with Windows 11 support which astonishingly cost me less than three Euros (!!) new, at the bargain store. The Logitech, once upon a time, was more than ten times as much, not adjusted for inflation. Alas, the Logitech QuickCam had lower resolution, but still a better picture.

This was a very intreresting read, as I naively assumed that USB cameras had to follow some HID-like standard also for polling images off of it, like a scanner's TWAIN driver model back in the days. It was enlightening to read that they indeed seem to have had a unique encoding not shared with other cameras.

Bird-Roulette-as-a-service in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...

The AI will not be happy when it hears about this ...

SoundBlaster / Cambridge SoundWorks set of subwoofer and satellite speakers with long wires did this, too. Freaked me out when I suddenly heard voices inside my apartment at night. Turned out it had suddenly started to pick up a radio talk program.

Benchmark it once on each device. Then have a user-friendly slider.

"Do you want your security to be:"

a) "It only secures pr0n from my aunt" (1s for fetching a password) b) "Not great, not terrible": (5s for fetching a password) c) "Pretty Good Protectivity": (10s for fetching a password) d) "The CIA haunts me and my name is Edward: (24 minutes for fetching a password)

Sorry, I left said shell script at a company I have now departed from.

As for the other thing, not at this time. Again, truly sorry! I'm a bit overwhelmed in my life right now, maybe some later time. But can you send me a link to the project nonetheless, if there is one?

You're absolutely right!

Man, I used to download so many no-cd patches back in the days, but lumped it all in with "real" copy protection in my mind.

+2 for the trip down memory lane. -1 because now I need to drink before noon to forget about the horrors of fiddling with CD-ROM based games and their silly schemes. So yeah, +1 :)

Used to work for a software company in 2008 or some such. Back when IBM acquired the company, two remarkable things happened:

One, I heard Microsoft's Ballmer shout through a conference phone (MS had wanted to acquire it, too, but IBM prevailed).

Second, and within context here, I quickly excused myself from the all-hands and discovered that IBM had failed to get the ibm-whatever.com (or was it ibmwhatever.com? not sure) domain.

So I registered it. The next year, I would get loads of miss-guided and personal mail. I used to joke that I was now much better informed about product road-maps than when I was employed there.

My intention with the domain was to hand it over to IBM anyway, for a shirt and some pens or some such token. However, I was informed that much like the US government with terrorists, IBM does not negotiate, and would likely send me the lawyers instead of a shirt. So I caved to the suspected chilling effects proactively, and let the domain expire after a year.

It used to be the same in Germany. There is still the right to "Privatkopie", meaning that one is technically allowed to make both backup copies, and things like a mix tape for a friend. After all, if they denied this, there would be no justification for upholding the leech farm that is GEMA, i.e. the body collecting fees for blank media. These fees are then given to the musicians, fairly (at least if one believes in fairy tales ...).

However, they then decreed that circumventing any copy protection makes this illegal. Also, if the source of the material is "evidently illegal" (i.e. unlicensed), it's not applicable either. So eventually, downloading off of Bit Torrent without ever uploading MIGHT still be legal in Germany, unless courts declare that this constitutes an evidently illegal source.

And that's the other fascinating thing: there are, to my knowledge, no truly binding judge rulings in Germany most of the time. Unlike English-born case law, a judge might rule for a pirate bay downloader one day, and the next judge rule against another downloader the next day, every other aspect of the cases being equal.

Last I heard, some court had opined that even consuming streaming content, like sports, was illegal now, even with no uploading happening, if the source isn't an established, evidently licensed one.

It's a friggin' mine field really.

(edit): Oh yeah right, there's more. I learned during my defense against their claims years back that it's all as horrible as you'd expect from judges mostly clueless about technology, and then some.

Apparently there was precedence for the following: Let's say someone torrents a Miley Cyrus song. I have no idea why one would do that, but for the sake of example, let's assume. Then the music industry would say: "But there is a torrent, or a zip file or whatever, with that song, and 50 others. Because you downloaded that one song, we legally assume that you downloaded the 50 others, too!" There was at least one court decision where this stood. The state has tried to reign in the rampart threats against citizens by copyright lawyers (it's ** publicity when a grandma gets sued for outrageous amounts). The one thing they did was limit damages to a set amount. Then the copyright holders circumvented that with "legal" "theories" such as the one above. That was also why they stopped going after movie shares for some time, and concentrated on those sharing TV series. Many more individual claims of 10k each to be made, when people download a whole series of TV episodes.

I'm also personally convinced after doing some research that copyright holders give material to specialized companies who in at least some cases are then doing the seeding themselves, in order to catch offenders. There is at least one company in Germany where I have strong suspicion of this happening ca. 2012.

Exactly!

Jason Pargin, aka David Wong, is the main reason I listen to (and yes, re-listen) the Cracked podcast. I have recommended some of his articles to many folks over the years for it's insightful content, and occasionally revisit them myself. It's literally a case of "come for the jokes, stay for the insightfulness".

Sadly I never really got into his comedy horror books (even though I own one or two). But Pargin has said so many insightful things that are meaningful to me and my psyche, I have once asked him to compile these things into a genuine self-help book. But the man's to humble, I recall he essentially said that there are likely people better suited to do this.

I knew of his new ventures, glad he's still going strong, and yes, of course I do listen to 1-900 with him (as guest) and the incredibly funny Seanbaby. But thanks so much for mentioning it!

I have recently bought a new PC, without a DVD drive, naturally. And tried to re-install my copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020.

This copy is a "pre order" DVD set I got off of eBay simply because it was a good price, but it's bound to my "Microsoft Account", the same account used in my Windows 11 install.

I spent a good part of an hour trying to get this to install. The Microsoft store (also slow as **) didn't let me do it; it doesn't know of this edition nor my license. I eventually discovered that there is a web page somewhere deep on Microsoft.com, which has a download button, which (after three time-outs) opens a secret link into Microsoft Store which ONLY THEN lets me reinstall the product from the Microsoft Store.

So I must admit I read that with great joy. Yeah Bill ... Karma!

Somewhat unrelated: The icing on the cake, naturally, is that even a full digital install of the DVD edition of MS Flight Sim "requires" the DVD #1 to be in the drive. But since people don't HAVE physical DVD drives in 2020 and upwards, I use an ISO image. You can in fact make an ISO image with just a few tiny files from DVD #1 without the huge data files, that's sufficient.

You'd think "oh yeah, copy protection" but there is NOTHING about this DVD image that is akin to any copy protection. It just wants these files as part of a drive (or mounted image), which I'm sure they could even detect the difference, as I'm even mounting it with built-in Windows Explorer functionality these days, without special software). I literally don't know why they would force me to present a (virtual) DVD if there is no other checks whatsoever. This makes no sense but to hurt customers.

Somewhat more unrelated: Microsoft still owes me 20 bucks. I once bought a PC with a Windows XP to Vista upgrade coupon. The web site let me select Vista 64 bit, so I gave that a try. Alas, the XP shipped with the PC was 32 bit, so they simply never carried out the order. I called their customer support, where I was nearly chastised in very broken, hard to understand language for selecting the 64 bit version from the drop-down menu. They never carried out the order, and didn't refund my twenty bucks for S&H. Thank God for alternative software distribution methods back then that rhyme with "Pi rate day".

Totally unrelated (really going of on a tangent of story telling now):

Another company that still owes me roughly 20 bucks is Dell. I once ordered a server from them, and discovered that they had a catalog error. Adding the biggest, meanest CPU would not add money to the bill, but subtract several thousand dollars from the total. So using that trick, for some giggles, I configured a server to be around 20 bucks total and ordered it. I pre-paid the total amount. I didn't expect to get the server, of course, but I expected them to contact me and refund my money. Never heard from them.

Content vanishing is the reason I archive e.g. favorite podcasts and some YouTube videos. For example, the whole cracked.com podcast's back catalogue seems to have effectively vanished from (useful) streaming now, for monetary reasons.

Though even here, backup copies gets increasingly harder to create. Another podcast I listen to has now stopped having an RSS/xml feed and while it seemingly is available still, it's available only in a proprietary player on ne web site.

Warehouse fires are one thing. But increasingly, change of distribution model is ruining the availability of stuff that was free to access when created, for purely profit reasons.

Why can't they have two huge, red, flashing lights at either side of the crossway, thus avoiding the costs to dig up runway asphalt altogether? Better than what they seemingly have now ...

Myth #6:

Mixing SI and imperial units makes for good reading. How many millimeters are three inch again?

I learned that lawyers are allowed to lie like there's no tomorrow, especially in civil cases pre-trial, in my jurisdiction.

This was especially emotionally scarring when I hired a lawyer to rebuke civil claims of several thousand Euros for (supposed) downloading of some TV show episode, a practice which is either considered a national sport, or a major contributor to GNP in Germany (the copyright claims, not the downloading).

The lawyer sent his usual spiel, his €300 template letter to the opposing council, which claimed that I'm a bumbling idiot who has no clue how to power up a PC, let alone plug in a network cable the right way 'round, and thus, can't possibly be guilty of any such shenanigans.

I asked her whether a Linked In-profile that identifies me as a Sys Admin and IT Systems Architect might become a problem with this tale, but various lawyers assured me that this is a highly scripted industry (both the copyright claims and the defenses) and nobody cares. And the scripts are actually legal students sitting at home with access to a fax gateway.

I find it even technically outstanding. Is that some sort of natural Moire pattern on it's back? Spliced-in turkey genes? I find this cat oddly fascinating.

This is right up my alley.

I'm known for writing documentation that is useful AND, let's say, entertaining. Or, depending on your inclination, sed 's/entertaining/hilarious/g'

Besides docu and Wiki pages (what unfortunately counts for docu in many companies), I've written man pages and shell scripts with more jokes than a longint can probably count.

Once had a shell script that did something really, really impactful and asked the user in increasingly aggressive prompts if he is sure, then delved into existentialism and how he can even be sure that he is so sure. Another prompted the unfortunate victim to validate that gravity, in fact, still works. Long story.

Some have deemed that "unprofessional", especially management. I am elated to see that this has precedence in print, and shall use this to make my case.

Oh, I have writing samples available. If anyone wants to hire a guy to write funny manuals or some other stuff, ping me :D

I have read this somewhere, not sure where, but by someone very much in touch with nature. He called it the "lost car keys" approach. Always approach animals as if looking for your car keys on the ground: avoiding eye contact, and not in a straight line.

Cute. A secure messenger for the state.

And "Chatkontrolle", i.e. client-side inspection and surveillance of every message, for the unwashed masses.

> cat file | grep -v THING1 | grep -v THING2 | grep -v THING3 | grep -v THING4

Keyboard manufacturers HATE this simple trick:

grep -vE "THING1|THING2|THING3|THING4" file

Just turn the Spanish Island of Lanzarote into a huge power station, dig 50m deep there, and be done with it.

Mostly.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reac...

Home server, occasional rsync to external disks. Encrypted of course. Yes, at present, a house fire would fark me over, or so would a stroke b/c the pass phrase is in my head. Or, it would allow to start over with life without the balast of the past, depending on your point of view.