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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Does make me think about the story of Thales of Miletus; ancient Greek philosopher, got asked what use was philosophy if it doesn’t make you any money. Predicted good weather, and monopolised all the olive presses, made a fortune.

    For a modern example; shares in Rheinmetall (German firm who make, amongst other things, the turrets for tanks) have gone through the roof after the recent US debacle. I could have told you a year ago that Trump getting in would have meant the US abandoning Ukraine; obvious in hindsight that that would mean a boon for European arms manufacturers.

    I don’t think you need to be quick to take advantage. I think you need insight. If there’s a topic that you’re knowledgeable about and you can see which way the wind is blowing, then you can make your own boat.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thales_of_Miletus#Olive_presses






  • Man alive, all that time I wasted learning LaTeX in that case. Supports tables properly, “floats” pictures and figures about without messing up the flow of text, exceptional support for equations, beautiful printed output…

    Suffers from a completely insane macro-writing language, and its markup is more intrusive in the text than markdown’s is. Also, if you have very specific formatting output requirements (for a receiving publication, for instance) then it can be somewhat painful to whip into shape. Plain-text gang forever, though.



  • Memory safety is just a small part of infrastructure resilience. Rust doesn’t protect you from phishing attacks. Rust doesn’t protect you from weak passwords. Rust doesn’t protect you from network misconfiguration. (For that matter, Rust doesn’t protect you from some group of twenty-year old assholes installing their own servers inside your network, like you say.) Protecting your estate is not just about a programming language.

    “Infrastructure”, to me, suggests power, water, oil and food, more than some random website. For US infra, I’m thinking a lot of Allen-Bradley programmable logic controllers, but probably a lot of Siemens and Mitsubishi stuff as well - things like these: https://www.rockwellautomation.com/en-us/products/hardware/allen-bradley/programmable-controllers.html.

    Historically, the controllers for industrial infrastructure (from a single pumping station to critical electrical distribution) have been on their own separate networks, and so things like secure passwords and infrastructure updates haven’t been a priority. Some of these things have been running untouched for decades; thousands of people will have used the (often shared) credentials, which are very rarely updated or changed. The recent change is to demand more visibility and interaction; every SCADA (the main control computer used for interactive plant control) that you bring onto the public internet so that you can see what it’s up to in a central hub, the more opportunity you have to mess up the network security and allow undesirables in.

    PLCs tend to be coded up in “ladder logic” and compiled to device-specific assembly language. It isn’t a programming environment where C has made any inroads over the decades; I very much doubt there’s a Rust compiler for some random microcontroller, and “supported by manufacturer” is critical for these industries.



  • AI does give itself away over “longer” posts, and if the tool makes about an equal number of false positives to false negatives then it should even itself out in the long run. (I’d have liked more than 9K “tests” for it to average out, but even so.) If they had the edit history for the post, which they didn’t, then it’s more obvious. AI will either copy-paste the whole thing in in one go, or will generate a word at a time at a fairly constant rate. Humans will stop and think, go back and edit things, all of that.

    I was asked to do some job interviews recently; the tech test had such an “animated playback”, and the difference between a human doing it legitimately and someone using AI to copy-paste the answer was surprisingly obvious. The tech test questions were nothing to do with the job role at hand and were causing us to select for the wrong candidates completely, but that’s more a problem with our HR being blindly in love with AI and “technical solutions to human problems”.

    “Absolute certainty” is impossible, but balance of probabilities will do if you’re just wanting an estimate like they have here.






  • Not that I disagree with your point about walled gardens, but “better” hardware for a handheld gaming machine needs to have a decent balance between performance and battery life. Longest plane or train journey that I’m likely to take is about five hours, and I’d need to rate any gaming hardware on the ability to run for that length of time. On that basis, the Switch is pretty much optimal. My phone has a higher resolution and can probably push more frames, but it would run hot for about forty-five minutes maximum. Plus, I’d then not be able to make calls or listen to tunes at my destination.

    Steam deck would probably be a better choice, though. Fuck Nintendo.





  • So far we’ve had “amazing Fallout RPG on a janky engine” when (Black Isle / Obsidian) developed it, and “bland Fallout RPG on a janky engine” when Bethesda have developed it. Having both great writers and a decent engine would be amazing for Fallout, although just Obsidian and their Pillars of Eternity engine would be perfect with me.

    Larian have said that they’d like to get away from DnD 5e after working on BG3 for so long, so I’m assuming they won’t have licensed Pathfinder either. If we take the set of all possible IPs and strike out those two, then that must make Fallout more likely. (Albeit not very likely.)