The Doctor

Generally speaking, if the oligarchs don't think you'll be useful to them, you don't make it far enough up in the food chain to be considered a candidate. They don't play the game of "Maybe this person will do what I tell them once they're in office," they play of the game of "Only people I know will do what I say will get onto the ballot."

I lived and worked inside the DC beltway for ten years. They don't care. The stuff they worry about is so far removed from our everyday lives it doesn't even register.

We care about stuff like getting to work on time, covering rent, and not yelling "This is all bullshit!" during daily standup. They care about getting a position paper from a lobbyist summarized to read in the car on their way to a meeting (they tend to be one or two hundred papers in length and can serve as general anesthetic) and making sure that some other person on the same committee will vote the way they agreed ("You back my $foo, I'll back your $bar").

As a rule, if you have Money you can hire folks that do all of the drudgework for you. For example, a secretary fields all of the requests for meetings, looks at your calendar, comes up with a couple of possible time slots, and negotiates the time and place.

We're cleaning up our living room as crash space again for folks leaving red states.

SpaceX's track record for orbital insertion definitely had something to do with that. When last I knew, N-G didn't have its own launch facilities (that might've changed in the last few years but I doubt it).

The political machine does terrible things to people who are at least somewhat fundamentally good.

Conventionally Point Nemo is the target.

Probably jet lagged, too. A lot of pre-prods are worked on during the flight home from a conference and after one gets home when they can't sleep.

Longer - fifteen, closer to twenty years. It took this long for there to be one or two companies that they could be sure wouldn't just cut and run (especially given how cutthroat the aerospace industry is).

They have had a plan for it, from the very beginning. Big-budget space projects like ISS don't get anywhere without a wrap-up plan. ISS is in LEO, and its mass contraindicates moving it into a graveyard orbit. Conventionally, stuff in LEO gets de-orbited; same thing happened with Skylab in '79.

I've had this happen before on some weird systems. Unplugging and replugging the keyboard woke the keyboard back up.

If it's advertising, what is it advertising?

You might want to reconsider patronizing Sticker Mule, especially if you're family.

Outfits that haven't installed patches since February are getting popped in May by a vuln that was published in January.

I'm going on professional year 24 of clients requiring that IPv6 be deactivated on every device in their network. Whee.

Publishing everything on a blockchain means that everybody who's running a node has access to a copy. If confidentiality of communications is an issue, this may as well be a data breach with a few more steps. Also, how does giving everybody running a part of or monitoring the blockchain equate with "control over personal data?"

Centralized control: Only one entity can see it. Blockchain: Lots of third parties run a node, so every node can see it.

Each channel has a separate ledger: That makes surveillance of a particular communications channel much easier. Thanks. Also, each user has to have a keypair; great for pseudnonymity, lousy for repudiability.

Messages cannot be altered but they can be audited to prove their metadata. Did they learn nothing from the Obama administration? At this point in the paper I can't shake the feeling that this is a deliberate effort to invert all of the properties of privacy.

Smart contract: Yay, more deliberately memory unsafe programming. I guess they never played with Core Wars as kids, either.

An attacker would be unable to breach the network: An attacker would just have to stand up a node. If channels are side ledgers on a blockchain, and the network assumes that nodes can come and go (which they all do, as far back as bitcoind), any node can join, say "Hey, I'd like to join this channel," and get at the very least a pointer to the side ledger for that channel.

Long-term storage of communications is dangerous, mm'kay?

Oh, for fuck's sake... no. It isn't. And I find myself pondering whether or not the article's authors are themselves sapient.

For non-profits (like 501(c)(3)'s) that's not unusual. Non-profits are more like specialized tools for the board of directors than like companies.

Source: First ten years of my career were at non-profits.

More and more, companies are giving their sysadmins and coders Macbooks rather than Wintel laptops. It's been an upward trend in last eight or nine years. I've always thought it was to head 'em off at the pass so they won't install un-remotely managed and un-monitored Linux distros on company equipment. At any rate, a lot of proprietary stuff winds up on corporate Macbooks, which means targets worth going after. As for availability of exploits for OSX, folks have been hoarding them for this kind of situation. These days, you wait for an optimum target environment before you unleash your 0-days.

Oracle doesn't have customers, it has hostages.

Wow. That's certainly a creative take on things.

It's Apple.

What's the catch?

Parents said the same things about rollerblades, skateboards, and regular bikes.

Drug discovery is one thing, but the trialling processes are another.

I think this is their PR team.

So, working as designed.

I don't think they misread the room at all. HP is pretty much at the top of the heap due to its corporate hardware installs and support contracts (which aren't going away any time soon). Their lower end stuff is all over the home office and small office markets. Their older stuff is used by much of the open source community. The number of folks who're going to switch to another manufacturer in disgust because of the tone of this marketing campaign will barely put a dent in their revenue streams for the next fiscal year, perhaps a fraction of a percentage point.

Incidentally, "we suck less than our competitors" is not a new marketing technique. It's probably the second oldest marketing technique.

There are ways to tell.

https://www.followthemoney.org/

https://www.opensecrets.org/

Pick the corporation of your choice and start there.

There are quite a few of them out there. Just a few from my notes (in reverse chronological order)

• https://github.com/persimmon-ai-labs/adept-inference
• https://github.com/shellc/laozy
• https://github.com/imartinez/privateGPT
• https://github.com/Josh-XT/AGiXT
• https://github.com/tloen/alpaca-lora

The self-hosted AI/ML system has been here for a while. Granted, the vast majority of them require downloading pre-trained models before they can be used due to how much it costs to build a system of weights from scratch.

I sometimes wonder if it would be possible to build and train a truly open source model with BOINC or something. The last 30 years of history show that it's entirely feasible to build a massively distributed computing cluster, why not leverage this to build a model? I know how naive that sounds immediately after writing it, mostly because of the difficulty of getting a large enough training data set, which unfortunately has risk written all over it (read: people poisoning the model, ala Microsoft's experiment with Tay on birbsite some years back).

The number of people who actually change their default settings is quite small. Those of us who have these discussions are a distinct minority in the sum userbase.

I wonder how many folks are just refusing to use Rust to spite the Rust Evangelism Strike Team.

With the overall state of IoT security, they don't need to backdoor it. The terrible engineering practices are more than sufficient.

Because they enjoy it. That it screws over a stranger means much less chance of facing any blowback for it.

Don't think police procedural villain, think school bully that never grew up and their actions make more sense.

htop is my go-to these days. It tells me what I need to know, and it's just nice to look at.

We know what's wrong with them already.

The question is, what do we do about them right fucking now?

The point isn't that they used ChatGPT to pick books to ban. They may not have even used ChatGPT, they just said they did so they can point to a service and say "See? It wasn't us, it was that!"

They've shown time and again that they lie. That they do not act or argue in good faith. That they make excuses to distract people from what they're doing.

Stop treating these assholes as if debating them will do a damned thing. We're playing checkers, but they're fighting an MMA match.

In other words, don't interrupt your enemy when they're making a mistake.

When in doubt, assume "no" and hope you find evidence to the contrary.

For whatever it's worth, this is the first I've ever heard of it (I thought you were referring to the IM client at first). It doesn't seem to be on any of the popular self-hosted software lists (like https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted).

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.