It is literally true… until it’s not.

everything old is new again…

Also came in to recommend URLCheck! Fantastic tool, everyone should use it.

The IT worker pipeline:

help desk > sysadmin > CTO/CISO > goat farmer

Hmm, the timing of this statement about human rights suddenly makes a lot of sense.

Punitive measures might feel emotionally satisfying in the moment, but what they actually incentivize is hiding the corruption and exploitation better (avoiding getting caught, rather than avoiding the bad activity in the first place). Also, while an angry mob might have a taste for violence and actually perform it for a little while, it doesn’t last and it’s not a basis for a stable government or economy.

If you want long-term stability you have to organize a system so that it incentivizes the behaviors that you want, even more than it disincentivizes the behaviors that you don’t want.

I’m not sure what that looks like in this context, in a practical sense. But ultimately the problem is that everything in our society rewards the hoarding of wealth. This is not just a problem with capitalism - every communist or supposedly socialist society ever established also rewarded hoarding of wealth.

For things to be different, actually different, a different value system with a fundamentally different reward structure needs to be established, and it needs to be competitive long-term with the current system in order to exist alongside it and/or eventually replace it.

Like I said I don’t really know what that looks like in practice. The only example I can think of is the “gift economy” described in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Green Mars, in which the participants in every exchange always seek to give more than they get (essentially the reverse of normal behavior).

OK, you’re right, in a purely ethical world.

But why would the economy change its behavior on a broad scale? What practical incentives would you use to adjust it?

Ah yes, the beforetimes, how could I forget.

The biggest problem with measuring any such effect is our frame of reference. All of our measurement tools are stuck in Sol’s gravity well, which is itself stuck in the Milky Way’s gravity well, and so on.

There’s a lot that we don’t know, because our viewpoint is limited. For example, the gaps in this chart of observed galaxies:

are caused by all of the objects in the Milky Way which are blocking our view of more distant objects.

We do know that there are a lot of other galaxies around ours, and that they move through space along measurable and predictable paths. Gravity affects time, so time doesn’t necessarily progress uniformly everywhere, but at least for the observable universe it must be fairly consistent otherwise we would see strange behavior in the frequencies of light from observed astronomical objects (it would mess with redshift/blueshift). Astronomy relies heavily on redshift/blueshift data, so anomalies would not go unnoticed.

I mean, we do know that time slows down in a gravitational field. And it speeds up for fast objects. We have to consider that with our GPS (and similar) satellites. They are basically just atomic clocks sending down their current time. They have already drifted from clocks on the ground by several seconds.

GPS is my favorite demonstration of relativity in practice. Technically, the clocks have not drifted, but are in fact self-correcting and account for the effects of special and general relativity.

Special relativity predicts that as the velocity of an object increases (in a given frame), its time slows down (as measured in that frame). For instance, the frequency of the atomic clocks moving at GPS orbital speeds will tick more slowly than stationary clocks […] The result is an error of about -7.2 μs/day in the satellite.

According to general relativity, the presence of gravitating bodies (like Earth) curves spacetime, which makes comparing clocks not as straightforward as in special relativity. […] In case of the GPS, the receivers are closer to the center of Earth than the satellites, causing the clocks at the altitude of the satellite to be faster by a factor of 5×10−10, or about +45.8 μs/day. This gravitational frequency shift is measurable.

Combined, these sources of time dilation cause the clocks on the satellites to gain 38.6 microseconds per day relative to the clocks on the ground. This is a difference of 4.465 parts in 1010. Without correction, errors of roughly 11.4 km/day would accumulate in the position.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_analysis_for_the_Global_Positioning_System

Humans spent thousands of years without rulers.

orly? which thousands?

It just means no rulers, but that’s not how it works

…anywhere in reality.

effectively work with AI and know how to QA.

These are antithetical.

Using generative algorithms to perform a complex skill leads to deterioration of the skill. The more you rely on the algorithm to perform a given task, the less effective you will be at performing QA of that task, as your grasp of the specifics of the task fades.

Any developer who has not spent time learning to “reliably hand-code” will be completely useless for performing any code QA. If the industry does not provide time, space, and incentives for junior developers to learn those skills on their own, the future will be void of any effective QA.

I know where it frequently fails, I’m very pleased with the output. And, I’ve shipped 4 fully QA’d apps in the past month.

Yes, well, you don’t know what you don’t know.

I would still be on the first one without AI.

The quality of a product is proportional to the amount of time and (human) attention spent on the product.

Er, and you think ARM is somehow not involved?

European far-right has received Russian financing for decades. Probably US too.

The NRA was a funding conduit between the Kremlin and the GOP:

https://www.npr.org/2019/09/27/764879242/nra-was-foreign-asset-to-russia-ahead-of-2016-new-senate-report-reveals

Afghanistan has basically always been a warzone. The territory there changed hands fairly often, especially after Alexander, centuries before it became the area identified as Afghanistan today.

The feuds between people groups there are from long before “Western nations” were even a thing. Some of them pre-date recorded history. The biggest mistake any Western nation has made is believing they could somehow establish peace by getting involved in conflicts older than Rome. The West can certainly be blamed for being foolish, for meddling, for not really helping in any way… but not for starting the fight. The responsible parties are long dead, their remains crumbled to dust.

Sort of.

In 2017 China passed a law requiring Chinese user data to be held within the country: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-privacy-censorship.html

Following that, Apple paid for a local data center which is managed by a Chinese company. Functionally this means that the PRC has access to all of the data stored there, because the government exerts direct control over Chinese companies, especially anything related to data collection and storage. Most likely, the PRC is able to access Apple users’ iCloud data if it resides in the China-based data center.

In response to a 2017 Chinese law, Apple agreed to move its Chinese customers’ data to China and onto computers owned and run by a Chinese state-owned company.

Chinese government workers physically control and operate the data center. Apple agreed to store the digital keys that unlock its Chinese customers’ information in those data centers. And Apple abandoned the encryption technology it uses in other data centers after China wouldn’t allow it.

Independent security experts and Apple engineers said Apple’s concessions would make it nearly impossible for the company to stop Chinese authorities from gaining access to the emails, photos, contacts, calendars and location data of Apple’s Chinese customers.

This is not really different from what’s been happening with other countries requiring their citizens’ data to be held within their borders, and the UK has similarly forced Apple to withdraw the Advanced Data Protection for iCloud users: https://www.theverge.com/news/608145/apple-uk-icloud-encrypted-backups-spying-snoopers-charter

[…] British security services would have access to the backups of any user worldwide, not just Brits, and Apple would not be permitted to alert users that their encryption was compromised.

First and most important:

In the context of long-term data storage
ALL DRIVES ARE CONSUMABLES

I can’t emphasize this enough. If you only skim the rest of my post, re-read the above line and accept it as fundamental truth. “Long-term” means 1+ years, by the way.

It does not matter what type of drive you buy, how much you spend on it, who manufactured it, etc. The drive will fail at some point, probably when you’re least prepared for it. You need to plan around that. You need to plan for the drive being completely useless and the data on it unrecoverable post-failure. Wasting time and money to acquire the fanciest most bulletproof drives on the market is a pointless resource pit, and has more to do with dick-measuring contests between data-hoarders.

Knife geeks buy $500+ patterned steel chef’s knives with ebony handles and finely ground edges and bla bla bla. Professional kitchens buy the basic Victorinox with the plastic handle. Why? Because they actually use it, not mount it on a wall to look pretty.

The knife is a consumable, not an heirloom. So are your storage drives. We call them “spinning rust” for a reason.

The solution to drive failure is redundancy. Period.

Unfortunately, this reality runs counter to the desire to maximize available storage. Do not follow the path of desire, that way lies data loss and outer darkness. Fault-tolerant is your watchword. Component failure is unpredictable, no matter how much money you spend. A random manufacturing defect will ruin your day when you least expect it.

A minimum safe layout is to have 2 live copies of data (one active, one mirror), hot standby for 1 copy (immediate swap-in when the active or mirror fails), and cold standby on the shelf to replace the hot standby when it enters service.

Note that this does not describe a specific number of disks, but copies of data. The minimum to implement this is 4 disks of identical storage capacity (2 live, 1 hot standby, 1 on the shelf) and a server with slots for 3 disks. If your storage needs expand beyond the capacity of 1 disk, then you need to scale up by the same ratio. A disk is indivisible - having two copies of the same data on a disk does not give you any redundancy value. (I won’t get into striping and mucking about with weird RAID choices in this post because it’s too long already, but basically it’s not worth it - the KISS principle applies, especially in small configurations)

This means you only get to use 25% of the storage capacity that you buy. Them’s the breaks. Anything less and you’re not taking your data longevity seriously, you might as well just get a consumer-grade external drive and call it a day.

Buy 4 disks, it doesn’t matter what they are or how much they cost (though if you’re buying used make sure you get a SMART report from the seller and you understand what it means) but keep in mind that your storage capacity is just 1 of the disks. And buy a server that can keep 3 of them online and automatically swap in the standby when one of the disks fails. Spend more money on the server than the disks, it will last longer.

Remember, long-term is a question of when, not if.

*reaches for parking brake

*grabs cactus

The fact is AI can make as-good or better art than most “artists” because most “art” is just cookie-cutter shit for morons.

This is an obvious misstatement. If you actually believe this then you’re not qualified to have opinions on art in general.

“AI” (in this context meaning generative algorithms, because there is no intelligence) can no more “make art” than it can think, or care.