Notices by David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) (david_chisnall@infosec.exchange), page 4

Finally, I managed to tell a joke that’s too geeky for Mastodon!

https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/113668722646200120

@alexr @encthenet In the early 2000s, Maxtor were the absolute worst. Their drives came with fairly short warranties and they invariably failed within a few months of the end. They were the reason I was never worried by the small number of rewrite cycles on early SSDs: even the lower-bound estimates for lifetime were longer than I ever got from a Maxtor disk.

In 2006, they were purchased by Seagate.

@GossiTheDog @darkling I’ve not tried Copilot for M365 but I believe it’s being folded into the base M365 subscription because businesses aren’t willing to pay for it and some high-profile customers who tried it have stated that it was a waste of money and stopped.

GitHub Copilot is okay. I have been using it because it’s free and I wanted to see if it’s actually useful. It’s been a slight net reduction in productivity: it’s introduced a couple of very subtle bugs that have cost me more debugging time than it’s saved in typing. It stopped working for a few days last week and I felt subjectively more productive. I was a bit sad when it started again. I’ll probably turn it off soon. If GitHub started charging for it, I definitely wouldn’t pay. In contrast, my editor’s LSP-driven autocomplete broke briefly yesterday and that was really noticeable. GitHub Copilot is mostly good for writing code that you shouldn’t write. Anything that a machine-learning system can generate, a better abstraction layer could eliminate the need for and eliminate all of the associated bugs.

@NanoRaptor I have a couple of boxes of 3.5” floppies. I recently bought a USB floppy disk drive to see if any of them have anything worth saving (most are magazine cover disks, a few are personal files that were backed up. Some are more fun things like [legal!] copies of MS DOS 6.2, Windows 3.11, and a few versions of Corel Draw). So far, none of them have been readable.

They are probably fine if I format the, so if anyone had a use case for 80 or so 3.5” floppies, let me know…

To all of the 'journalists' who are blaming Among Us for turning people into murderers:

I have recently been playing Assassin's Creed Odyssey. This game has a fairly simple problem-solving model. You have a problem? You probably need to murder someone. Need to talk to someone? Murder their guards. Need to weaken Sparta's hold on a province? Murder some Spartans (optionally, also set fire to their stuff). Need to upgrade your spear? Murder some people who have the magic shards that you need. In trouble for murdering too many people? Murder the person who sponsored the bounty.

And yet, oddly enough, I have not murdered anyone. Not even people who mistake correlation for causation in a sample size of one and write inane articles about it.

@GossiTheDog Didn’t the September 11 Hijackers practice with MS Flight Simulator? I vaguely remember reading that in the news at the time.

To put a billionaire in perspective, it's more interesting to think about the income than the capital. You can get a 5% annual return from some fairly low-risk investments (and you can further reduce risk by spreading your money across a load of these). You can often get higher, but 5% is a fairly good baseline.

If you start with $1bn and do nothing clever, you can get an income of $50 M per year by doing nothing. Even with the kind of 95% tax rate that we had for the highest income levels when The Beatles sang about it, that leaves you with $2.5M/year in income.

That's enough to buy a nice house every year, with no mortgage. It's a daily disposable income of almost $7K. It's enough to take a first-class transatlantic flight every day.

And that's just one billion.

Even with a 95% tax rate on investment income and a conservative investment strategy, someone with a billion dollars would have a daily disposable income that's more than the monthly income of anyone in the bottom 99% of earners, without having to work.

Now try these calculations again with real tax rates and Musk or Bezos' wealth.

@dalias @afewbugs @aku @leadegroot @Gargron

Is there a list somewhere of all of the things that you need to do to make the Mastodon web UI usable? And, ideally, a way for instance operators to make these the defaults, if upstream won't?

That said, I do want to see boosts, I just don't want to see boosts of replies to a post that's already on my feed.

@afewbugs @aku @leadegroot @Gargron I came with exactly the same question. About 80% of the things in my feed are cats and dogs, and sometimes I want to just see the cute animals, other times I want to just see the things in between them.

The other thing I'd really like for decluttering my feed is to not see replies to a post if that post is in my feed. I unfollowed someone today because a huge amount of my feed was filling up with their followers replying to their posts, which they then boost. And, because the feed is in reverse-chronological order, I see the replies first, so if I do click on them I then see the entire thread.

But my number one feature request to Mastodon would be stop doing whatever you do that breaks open in new tab. Given that both the back button and opening in new tab are broken, navigating in the web app is far harder than it should be. If I click on a post and come back, I lose my place because the feed is refreshed in the middle and I end up somewhere random. If I try to open in new tab so I don't lose my place, it doesn't work (the least discoverable bit of UI: The date in the corner actually does let me open in new tab if I click on it, but it does so on the original instance that made the post, not mine).

@jwildeboer Do you know how these numbers have changed over time? Battery densities have increased, which would naively lead to an increase in fire risk, but the safety designs (especially safely venting pressurised hydrogen that can build up when the cells deteriorate) have also improved. I wonder if there was a period when they were very unsafe, or if it was always just a marketing-driven perception.

@mcc It’s not that you can’t do the thing with UTF-8, it’s that you can’t do the thing with UTF-8 and retain your sanity. You gaze too deeply into Unicode, lest Unicode gazes back into you.

It’s not surprising that a society that values confidence more than competence would become excited by machines that generate text that sounds confident and is entirely wrong.

@thesamesam @dalias @negative12dollarbill @futurebird

I had so much fun with the copyeditor my second and fourth books because 'run-time' (compound adjective), 'run time' (noun phrase) and 'runtime' (noun, abbreviation of 'run-time library') were all valid, used repeatedly, and each had a different meaning. Eventually they just highlighted every occurrence of any of them for me to double check.

@negative12dollarbill @futurebird

This is one of my favourite linguistic quirks and relevant to the other thread about hyphenation from yesterday. In English, you hyphenate based on root words, so helico-pter is the correct hyphenation, but in American you hyphenate based on syllables and so heli-copter is correct. I prefer the American rules because they give a pronunciation hint, whereas the English rules are just there to let you say 'Oh, you don't speak Latin / Greek / French / Celtic / Proto-Germanic / ... ? Peasant!'.

This makes quad copters a silly word, they really should be quad pters or similar.

Mind you, that's nowhere near as meaningless as 'quad bike', a noun phrase that just means four two. It's lost the cycle (bi-cycle: two wheels) but kept the root word that describes the one bit that it's changed. And I will insist on referring to them as quadracycles.

@DJGummikuh @GossiTheDog

My experience at Microsoft was that the culture revolves around lying to management.

The entire incentive system (bonuses and promotions) revolves around being able to demonstrate short-term impact. Claiming that a thing is done and ready when it’s actually an early prototype is rewarded.

If you’re an engineer, you claim features are done and downplay bugs and you’ll get a nice bonus and the opportunity to transfer somewhere else before anyone notices that you’ve built a mess.

If you’re managing a team, your best strategy is to over claim on the status and make sure that meetings with PMs and your management exclude any engineers who might tell the truth (and you promote the ones who are willing to lie, because that helps you).

By the time you reach Nadella’s leadership team, all information has gone through multiple rounds of exaggerations or outright lies. And because he says the right things about culture but has absolutely no follow through (and rewards people whose bonuses he directly reviews who directly contradict the things he says are important), this is amplified. People like Kevin ‘must have the shiny thing’ Scott, who exemplify the Peter Principle and would be totally unable to actually judge competence even if his reports weren’t incentivised to lie to him, make strategic decisions.

The company is not able to innovate and is not able to plan any project that extends beyond a semester, unless some people below CVP level manage to do it without their management noticing (if it succeeds, you will learn that the CVPs were outspoken advocates of the project all along, in spite of the fact that they didn’t know it existed until a week earlier).

@DJGummikuh @GossiTheDog

I really wonder when and why they lost their focus on quality

I believe it was with the release of MS DOS 4.0.

I can’t remember if I posted this here before but, I case I didn’t:

LLMs are the new memory-safety bugs.

The reason that memory-safety bugs are so bad is not that they’re common (they are, but they’d still be bad if we fixed 90% of them), it’s that they step outside of the language abstract machine. When a memory-safety bug occurs, the program will do something completely unpredictable. You can’t reason at the source level about what will happen. Some piece of unrelated state will me modified or used as input to some calculation.

This is how LLMs work by design. This is not a bug. They arrange data in an n-dimensional latent space and will give outputs that are nearby in that space, but you have no way of articulating the shape of that space in anything the resembles source code. If you ask a question about a topic, the latent space may contain nearby replies that include knowledge of that topic, or the gaps may have been painted in with something totally unrelated.

Almost 20 years ago, I saw a talk by Alan Kay where he described progress in computing as a process of building layers of abstractions and then collapsing lower layers together once we’ve worked out what the higher layers need.

So, just wondering, are there any plans to start on the second step any time soon?

A Student’s Guide to Not Writing with ChatGPT . Perfect, no notes.

@aral @frechdachs It’s not a complex concept, it’s a complex thing to enshrine in legalese. And when you do, you are giving power to lawyers and people who can afford to pay lawyers, not to individuals.

If you want to peg a small tech thing to copyleft, that’s your choice. As someone who has written and released a few hundred thousand lines of code under permissive license, I won’t be joining in. I’ve seen people adopt the position that you are taking (that copyleft is the only true way) and it almost never achieves the goals that are stated.

You’re starting by saying that your licensing ideology is more pure than that of many successful projects. I don’t know how you expect that to build an inclusive environment.