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mikro2ndon Amazon lists book on Maui wildfires that was published days after fires started

How hard would it be to write a script that downloads books and "reads" them -- i.e. exercises the Kindle app (say on a desktop-alike) -- giving Amazon plausible excuse to say "n words read"?

Point being: if there's a way to game a system, people will game that system.

mikro2ndon A search for technosignatures around nearby stars

2 Points:

1. We do not have advanced AI. We have LLMs. They're not intelligent, not creative, and are never going to be. I'm with you on the other things, though.

2. The planet will not be destroyed by anything we do. H. sap. might go extinct along with many, many other species, but give the biospehere a couple of million years and it will all bounce back, sans humans.

I've been living/trialing the path you suggest in your last paragraph for 30 years. Sadly it's not gone viral. AMA. ;)

mikro2ndon Bots can complete CAPTCHAs quicker than humans

You appear to have trouble spelling xitter...

mikro2ndon CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Google Search ranking

Does anybody actually browse CNET on purpose? I mean, the content has been the quality of LLM-generated for a decade or more and the only way any sane person ends up seeing it is if you get redirected through a link-shortener/link-obfuscator, surely. Surely?

mikro2ndon How Zoom’s terms of service and practices apply to AI features

Funny how people have been granting pretty much the same batch of rights to Microsoft for decades when they used Skype, and nobody minded.

In addition Skype's ToS granted MS a licence to any and all IP you might discuss during a Skype call.[1] I wonder why no businesses were bothered by that...?

[1] ...decades ago, I don't know how it reads now, can't be arsed to check.

mikro2ndon Tesla created secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints

The point is that "as designed" was really "designed to mislead" aka "lying", and they got caught red-handed.

mikro2ndon Tesla created secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints

Except they did not fix anything. The battery readout was lying as so ordered by Musk. This caused people to complain, wanting it fixed. Instead of fixing it (in a service centre or remotely) they lied some more. What's so hard to parse here?

mikro2ndon Tesla created secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints

I don't think you need more data. Tesla had a team of people "managing" this issue to relieve demand on their service centres. What more data do you think would be useful to clarify Tesla's actions?

mikro2ndon How do you handle N Google calendars?

Step 1: let n = 0

There is no Step 2.

mikro2ndon Threads is losing active and engaged users. I think I know why

Ah the sweet smell of Astroturf in the morning...

Article claims that Fediverse (Mastodon) engagement is down, when, in fact, the past weeks have seen an increase in both sign-ups and active engagement.

mikro2ndon Sleeping through the technical interview (2022)

Seriously? I can't think of a single instance where an interviewer has spent more than a cursory 5 seconds reading a candidate's CV before interviewing them. Many times not even that much courtesy.

mikro2ndon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

http://one.mikro2nd.net/

More WebGarden than Blog these days. No trackers. No analytics.

mikro2ndon YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad blockers

There is no obligation on you or I to provide those companies with a viable business model, nor any moral compulsion to cooperate with their invasive, privacy and mental-health degrading ad-based monetisation strategy.

edit: My browser, my rules. Don't like 'em? Feel free to go out of business.

mikro2ndon YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad blockers

"I don't allow ads" because ads are malware for the human brain. An ad is explicitly designed to hack our minds/emotions, and I, for one, won't go there (as far as I am able).

mikro2ndon Baseball-sized hail destroys Scottsbluff solar farm

(speaking as someone who has just recently installed a solar installation): The panels are around 15% of the system cost (small-scale residential system, so things will likely be different for municipal/grid-scale systems -- I can't speak to those...)

mikro2ndon Baseball-sized hail destroys Scottsbluff solar farm

Insurance is cheaper than tracking hardware.

mikro2ndon Baseball-sized hail destroys Scottsbluff solar farm

Speaking as someone who recently installed solar panels on the roof... you get insurance! Not a big deal.

mikro2ndon To save money on insurance, drivers agree to intrusive monitoring technology

And if you don't have a phone?

mikro2ndon Can Gmail Ads Get Even More Annoying?

> We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads.

is not the same thing as "We will not scan or read your Gmail messages".

mikro2ndon 34% of AP CS Students Couldn't Solve This Java-Based 2D Array Question

At wethinkcode.co.za (A non-profit coding academy in South Africa) that's exactly how exercises and projects are done. Students are encouraged to add more tests than we provide initially, but grading is done by running the provided tests.

Disclosure: I work on curriculum matters for WeThinkCode_. I like the exercise in the article and I'll be proposing we add it to the Java curriculum. I'd be surprised (and not in a good way) if the majority of our students fail to make it work.

mikro2ndon Object-oriented Programming with ANSI-C (1993) [pdf]

OOP was never "centered around deep class inheritance hierarchies". It was centred around message passing and dynamic method dispatch. The only significance of inheritance is to resolve the receiver of a message.

I feel strongly that most of the people who think OOP was bad are people who have only ever experienced C++/C#/Java or some even weaker instantiation of OOP.

What do you suppose you're writing when you implement a (micro)service? It's nothing different than an object -- some implementation whose details you don't need to care about when you use it, which details can be changed at any time without disturbing clients (modulo idiocy), and an interface that you use to communicate with it via messages.

And don't even get me started on the OO vs. Functional nonsense...

mikro2ndon FF4J – Feature Flags for Java

Realy? I saw "Spring", suddenly acquired a skin rash, and swore I'd never look at this again...

mikro2ndon Research on harvesting electricity from humidity in the air

OK, I'll bite: How much energy can they harvest? While realising that this is still highly experimental, early days and bleeding edge (and also very exciting!) it would be very interesting to get some idea of the actual energy harvest, even though this will surely be an area of intense future research. I did not see any mention of it in the article, though, and the original paper seems to be paywalled.

mikro2ndon No_color

And yellow on white is completely unreadable...

mikro2ndon Meta preps new social app

Ah... so the one that myriad people have been chasing for at least 2 decades, now. I've lost count of the number of companies I've consulted to who were chasing that chimera. Good luck to them, I say, while gleefully taking money off them.

mikro2ndon Choosing a Name for Your Computer (1990)

One place we named all the (Unix) machines with names beginning with a 'C': cbed, cnic, cweed, csun (a Sun box, of course!), cmen,... We were (obvs?) developing in C, and our office was known in the company as "C-centre". All seemed to make sense at the time.

mikro2ndon Meta preps new social app

And what is that model?

mikro2ndon Wind is main source of UK electricity for first time

I heard, just the other day, about someone (in the UK) using their Tesla to make money by buying cheap (night-time) power and selling it back during high-rate times, and I was moved to wonder... Does this "profit" making scheme still work when you take into account the lifespan of the Tesla's batteries -- I'd guess they're good for something like 4000 cycles, and then you're facing the cost of replacement. I have my doubts whether it really works out, but lack the data.

Anyone with insight?

mikro2ndon Ask HN: Fired for Using Firefox

It sounds like the tooling was just being used as an excuse, that they'd decided to fire you regardless for reasons that they wouldn't want to articulate because they'd be grounds for legal action. Just guessing, of course, but don't believe ~everything~ anything you've been told. I believe you've already made good choices in this: take a deep breath and move on, having "dodged a bullet" as others have commented. Good luck with your next gig.

mikro2ndon Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users

The email that is important to me is not in Gmail. Gmail is there for all the throwaway/don't-care email, like signing up to websites I "don't know" or for corporate zombie OSIAs[1].

[1] Old Slow AIs, aka "companies". http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2019/12/artifici...