off_brand_

@off_brand_@beehaw.org
1 Post – 73 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

Right, I recall news from years ago where a bunch of celebrities' very private photos backed up to iCloud were leaked. They may or may not have known they uploaded those to iCloud, I dunno. But imagine what's up there if you don't realize you're doing a backup. Not just photos, but like scanned documents with vulnerable information. And all that personal info in a centralized server is a big ol honeypot for a malicious actor.

It's not hard to see why this is a vulnerability, is what I'm getting at.

Yup, it's why O(N+10) and even O(2N) are effectively the same as O(N) on your CS homework. Speaking too generally, once you're dithering over the efficiency of an algorithm processing a 100-item dataset you've probably gone too far in weeds. And optimizations can often lead to messy code for not a lot of return.

That's mostly angled at new grads (or maybe just at me when I first started). You've probably got bigger problems to solve than shaving a few ms from the total runtime of your process.

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Hate it hate it. This game is so good, and it's like I'm playing my old favorite again. The fact that they marred my baby with MTX like this is just gross. DD1 should be more popular, and what they did to DD2 may keep it from being the powerhouse it could because people will see the "mixed" ratings and second guess. Or they'll open the store page and see a wall of MTX and get the wrong idea.

But that's just part of it of course. If this works for them, it'll explode. And it will work for them. And everyone will get these fucking MTX in their full priced AAA games. And then once sales on MTX aren't up to snuff -- or if they are up to snuff, but in a few quarters when sales are merely consistent rather than continuing to grow -- they'll start pushing it. Just like they did with Shadow of Mordor where the gameplay gave you a nasty grind and a quick "buy your way past it" option.

I'll never buy the "it doesn't effect you in a single player game" argument. It will, because the market incentives a worse experience for those less willing to buy in.

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Obvious Beehaw bias but I don't get the whole weirdness about defed. Like maybe it's a hammer where some problems are screws, but elegant solutions are for people with VC funding.

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So this was recently pointed out to me, and it really changed my view. You've seen how tv treats withdrawal, right? Try that on the street. Try that when you have to beg for the cash that feeds you, and without a lock on your door to keep your things safe.

In an ideal world, if you're suffering from addiction on the streets you'd be able to get treatment. But harm reduction programs like that aren't always available, and they are basically never popular or well funded.

Untreated withdrawal can be fatal without being homeless. But if you're already in such a precarious situation, it seems so much more likely that you'll die.

I live in the city, and when I start asking myself what they're doing with the money I remind myself they're already willing to endure panhandling. If they're willing to endure harassment from cops and people who hate them for like $20, I'm sure whatever they need it for is valid.

Also, it's cheap to speak total bullshit, but it takes time, effort, and energy, to dispel it. I can say the moon is made of cheese, you can't disprove that. And you can go out and look up an article about the samples of moon rock we have and the composition, talk about the atmosphere required to give rise to dairy producing animals and thus cheese.

And I can just come up with some further bullshit that'll take another 30 minutes to an hour to debunk.

If we gave equal weight to every argument, we'd spend our lives mired in fact-checking hell holes. Sometimes, you can just dismiss someone's crap.

Bleh. I'd love to get excited but it's gonna be another live service game, or mtx online crap.

When Blue users where getting pushed to the top. The vitriol was always bad, but it was altogether too much when you couldn't open the replies to anything without reading the most heinous shit imaginable.

This is good, actually. Teach the kids to game robots from a young age!

I wonder how easy it would be to make an extension and fake it's popularity? Make make it intentionally broken or something, so users immediately uninstall it too.

Sounds like an easy $10k, assuming the scammers would actually pay.

+1 Hate that Connect uses a chrome browser and not my system default. :T

Yooooo that's actually awesome. If they hit Apple next that'd get even better.

The play store has some weird security items attached to it that blocks your bank or even some games if your phone is rooted. I'd love if Google was forced to drop stuff like that to retain users.

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They were never giving it away. They included wordpad with your purchase of windows. They no longer do. I don't think anyone is saying that windows is not "within their rights", they're saying that this degrades the product we already pay for. That is worth complaining about, even if our ultimate recourse primarily ends up being to find an OS that better serves our needs.

Honestly though I'm struggling to understand why you'd think that's about Microsoft's rights to begin with??

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Certainly. There's a big difference between me giving cash and uplifting someone who is actively harming people today, and supporting a dead man's art.

Of course remember there's nuance as well. It doesn't cost me much to stop interacting with JKR's output, but buying quality shoes that don't in some way support sweatshop owners or fast fashion represents a significant time/money investment on my part.

And if there's something important for my health than it goes right out. idk, maybe Dr. Scholl was there on Jan 6 and I was prescribed those Dr. Scholl's foot goobers by a podiatrist, I'm not going to quibble too much.

Which ties in to the privilege of being socially conscious. It costs me nonzero money and energy that some might not have to do all of these things. I cannot blame or fault the person who works at Chick-fil-A paying rent, even if their work supports CFA.

Okay so this is a wild article, but don't forget she did really actually vote to block a strike. She went out and supported an illegal wild cat strike not so long ago. Still pissed she thought railroad workers weren't worth that kind of support.

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At least here, if you're not a fan of de/federation practice, it's minimal work to change servers.

I'm not excited at the idea of my posts on another service entirely getting shipped off to a meta server for them to reconstruct my network through that activity. It's the same issue of as their shadow profiles, where meta knows who you and who you know by watching the posts your mom makes on FB.

Some of this is inevitable, I know, but I'm at least here for adding more barriers to privacy theft.

This does suck though. To start, a counter-offer-based model begs discrimination. You should be getting yearly raises commensurate with (at absolute bare minimum, not even necessarily accounting for inflation) the increase in productivity from year to year.

This is to say nothing of work environments. Unions could reduce or end crunch. Not just as hard blockers, but mandating the kind of project management that doesn't require crunch.

There's also a history of wage suppression.

https://www.inc.com/jeremy-quittner/silicon-valley-wage-collusion-class-action.html

They'll only get better at it, especially as the market continues to turn and companies continue to consolidate.

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(edit: God I'm sorry about this big ass wall. I ranged and rambled. It's too early to write this much lol. Tl;Dr 1: law enforcement. Police don't need a warrant to buy your info. In the US, we have warrants for a reason. Constitution outlines restrictions on "unreasonable search and seizure. 2: Consent. Like, I should have the right to just say no. It's my data, let me be part of the conversation. 3/4: Safety and equity. It's still illegal to be gay in some parts of the world. An insurance company or an employer could check your race online if they wanted, whether or not you've made that available. )

The problem extends across a few metrics.

First, probably the most tangible. The police can and do use data purchased from civilian companies to bypass regulations. For example, you don't need a warrant to check phone contacts if you can buy it. You might be saying you don't do anything illegal to worry about. Have you ever been to a protest? Have your friends? If climate change bothers you, could you see yourself going to one?

Protests are frequently targeted by law enforcement. Even if you think that would only happen if the protest becomes a riot, you don't control the crowd. If you're there but not rioting, your phone location can be used as proof of participation. There is precedent, too. They used location data to arrest capitol rioters. IMO those were good arrests, but how many BLM protestors were arrested based on phone data?

Second, consent. Even if I change nothing else in your mind here, consider that we might simply value our personal data differently. I should have a right to be part of the conversation about me. Let me pay $20 to use a product without observation. Products should be up front about what is collected too (GDPR has helped lots with website tracking). Facebook is known to collect "shadow profiles", where data is compiled on you even if you aren't on the platform. I should be allowed to say no to that, for any reason, simply by virtue of it being my information.

Third and fourth go together some. Safety and equity. People are still killed for being gay. Legally. And the collection of data on people enables that. Just buy data off of Pornhub to identify who is browsing their gay section. And if someone is found in a country where it is illegal to be queer, all you need is a list of their contacts to find more. Maybe Apple refuses to unlock their phone for you, but that's okay. Just buy their contacts off Meta.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_by_country_or_territory

But that's the straightforward issue of equity. Consider someone who has gone to jail. They've done their time, they've reformed, and now they want to rejoin society. The judge even goes so far as to expunge their records. Well, a background checking company can buy that info still. And that's just talking about criminal acts that should be reformed. Maybe you don't care about that. What about crimes that just target BIPOC? In the US, weed is legalizing, slowly. People were still arrested for it, and that history is indelible, regardless of the official record. If even the US Justice System wants to wipe the slate, than the slate should be wiped.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_in_the_United_States_criminal_justice_system

Special mention to Google btw. Good and bad. They do a lot to tell you what and how they collect data, and how they anonymize it. Purportedly don't sell your data, since they also own the ad network. Like you say, I'm not really worried about the ads, and a lot of their products really are good enough that I don't mind making that trade. However, I do take umbrage with the idea that it's fine still. A company does have analytics on their ad campaigns. John Oliver did a funny bit where they put an ad targeted towards Congress. He got a couple of hits too, with their location and had the power to fingerprint their browsers if he wanted. Once you click an ad, you're in the care of whatever site put that ad out. That means they collect whatever they want on you. Additionally, theyll know what ad brought you in. So if you put an ad out targeting "pregnant people in Texas looking to make a trip", you'll have a list of people that Google thinks match.

This whole post misses a lot of nuance and context. It's a social media post, ultimately. I'm not sure I have enough mental capacity right now to hunt down more links, and I'm about to start my work day. I don't have any trouble with folks who don't care -- frankly I'm jealous. I'm annoyed that I can't just use products like most people and not care. It's just everywhere. Walking down the street I'm on someone's TikTok, meaning Facebook, YT, Bytedance could get my location without me even interacting with them (shadow profiles from earlier). When I got a covid test recently, I had to download their stupid app to fill out a form. That app has the power to collect endless data points about my phone. Buying concert tickets means signing over my information to your favorite ticket vendor. It's just endless and exhausting for me.

/s ?

Not the person you responded to, but: left economically is not left socially.

Want to make a point clear here -- never put anything on your resume that you aren't prepared to answer questions about. That means if you're lying about freelance (whether the above commenter means to imply you should), then you should be ready to answer questions about your freelance lie.

Same goes for any projects. For CS, if you have a pet project you wrote 12 years ago, but it's interesting enough to note on a resume, glance over it enough to know what it's about. You might be surprised by your interviewer installing your app on their phone or something.

It comes from the case against Henry Ford after he saw his company was making gobs of cash and decided to give some of that to his employees. Shareholders successfully sued him to stop this on the grounds that he has a fiduciary duty to shareholders.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

As with anything legal, there is nuance, but the basic assertion that there is fiduciary duty to shareholders is not wrong.

Wait what source would you consider Communist outside of relevant state medias?

I would question the efficiency claim. Uber and the like claimed incredible market dominance, driving local food delivery and taxi services out of business. They're only now really being forced to find profitability.

I wonder if AI is going to be similar. The powerful models right now, as I understand it, have ludicrous power requirements. I don't know their balance sheets, but in the current race to market share, I'm skeptical that most of these services are in the green.

What that ultimately says about the future I don't really know. Like it could be we reach some point where the models get better, or more specialized, or something and profit arrive. Or maybe theres a point of diminishing returns where the profit just can't be made, and once the hype falls off (and investors stop clamoring for AI) these companies will ask what they're getting for the money spent.

(And of course I could just be straight up wrong about profits today not being there.)

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The fuck? Sorry your here telling us that the American prison system is too soft? And that the treatment of r Uygher minority is justified actually?

It's actually a bad thing that slavery exists. Letting people use slave labor from the prison population creates an economic incentive to imprison innocent people.

Good! I'm in a nice spot at work where I'm ramping down on one project and ramping up on another, so it's two very light tasks. Plus someone actually complimented my work, which is a nice change of pace.

I've been pissing around in Blender as a time killer, which has been fun. Not really good at drawing, so its nice to have a creative outlet that doesn't frustrate me as much like writing.

This is good and bad to me. I like the idea of a series of little neighborhoods. You know your home well, and have a place of comfort if you don't feel like dealing with the wider world, but it's all still very accessible (or ideally very accessible. Discovery is an ongoing issue without for you algos). Forums were nice, but it was always annoying if you were on more than one proboards (or what have you) and you were switching sites to see your variety of friends. Discord solves the same problems, but I also don't trust that company at all.

Reddit gave you that comfort zone for certain topics, but only if it's not a popular or contentious one. And like it's nice to be able to have my comfort zone be more diverse than my 5 favorite topics.

Why would you say that? Do you think everyone is just really jazzed about death? I think you seem to have missed the point of the outcry.

Oh god.

My service went down at timestamp x

This message looks like a potential root cause and has a lunar origin

the lunar box reports sending a message to me at timestamp y

the relay station reports relaying said message from the lunar box at timestamp z

Can you confirm the lunar message was sent at the right time to have been the cause?

Do the logs on the lunar box come timestamped with a "helpful" string representation? If they're in unix epoc, is that time dilation adjusted?

How do satellites do it, I wonder?

The problem breaks down into a few broad sub problems, as I see it.

  1. Confirming the reviewer or voter is who they say they are (to prevent one entity from making multiple reviews).
  2. Confirming the reviewer or voter is a valid stakeholder. This is domain-specific, but can be such metrics as "citizen of country", or "verified purchaser".
  3. Confirming the intent of the reviewer. This meaning people who were paid off (buyers who are offered a gift card for a positive review, which happens plenty on Amazon), or discounting review bombs when a game "goes woke".

1 and 2 have solutions. Steam cares about whether you're a verified purchaser, and the barrier to entry of "1 purchase of a game per vote" is certainly enough to make things harder to bot. Amazon might be able to do the same, but so much of the transaction happens outside their purview that a foolproof system would be hard. Not that it's in their interest to do so, though.

For places like Reddit or Lemmy, verifying one human per up vote is going to be impossible. New accounts are cheap and easy as a core function of the product. bot detection is only going to get harder, too.

If you used some centralized certificate system (like SSL certs), you could maybe get as granular as one vote per machine, but not without massive privacy invasions. The government does this for voting kinda, but we make a point to keep those private identifiers the government gives private.

I can't speak for the original commented, but I'm personally quite tired of the thin veneer that's slapped into these statements. I would prefer a company just be honest and talk about the profit incentives. They want people using the free version to please pay for the expensive one.

For my experience, I still retain the general irritation at product quality going down regardless of how they word it. But now I'm also annoyed that MS isn't being straightforward about it.

Do you? Genuinely, not trying to snark. I see this point lots, but Im skeptical that people actually do.

As a dev, I read plenty of commits, and the idea of voluntarily prodding through commits on a FOSS project is just not happening. I'd rather just trust the dev, and the community to pick through the code in my place. The obvious issue being, what if everyone also does that.

They also charge you to access a copy of last year's tax returns :/

Microsoft tried to kill borrowing and lending, and this just seems like ankther attempt. Someone with a real presence on other sites (and is good at social media) should stir up a backlash.

I hate digital-only media. :/

✌️

I keep a lot of my TTRPG PDFs in my drive. I'm wary of Google generally, but I do have to admit it was pretty cool to see it pick out bits and bobs from my PDFs with not-very-much guidance on my part.

looks at steam library

Yup, this last month-ish has been wild for my backlog. Remnant 2, BG3 (Which I honestly expected to bounce off of), AC, Starfield next week.

Honestly I'm just skipping Armored Core until I can give it some actual time.

Yikes

It would actually be pretty cool to see TPUs you can just plug in. They come stock in a lot of Google products now, I think.

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Terrarium