"Suspected ransomware attack"? How to you have a suspected ransomware attack? The defining feature of ransomware is (wait for it) the demand for ransom. That pretty much gives away the game. If no one has demanded ransom, it's not ransomware. QED.

"It's when I first realized, wow this is really not a safe model."

No, it's not a safe model. You train a model with unsafe data, you get unsafe output. If you train a model with uncurated crap and tell it to figure out the connections for itself, don't be surprised when it does. Pro-life supporters often use terminology describing the pro-choice advocates as demonic or monstrous, and often show pictures of bloody aborted fetuses. Is it any wonder that the model learns to associate "pro-choice" with such things?

No amount of guardrails is going to stop this from happening. The only way to avoid it is to train the model on human-vetted input. And that will only stop accidentally producing such things. It won't stop the models from following explicit prompts to produce disturbing output. If it was trained on pictures of violence, and pictures of puppies, you can tell it "Now, produce a picture of violence being done to a puppy."

I just don't get how some people think they can declare certain subjects to be digital thoughtcrime that are off limits to the AIs, which have been specifically trained to make exactly those associations.

In other words, water prices are too low.

From a strictly free-market point of view you're correct, of course. So let's think about the ramifications of that.

The current residents are using water. They're happy, their demand is pretty much on par with the supply, prices are low. Then the data center is built. Water prices are low so they decide to go with evaporative water cooling. Now the demand exceeds the supply. But it's a free market, so the prices go up. The company who owns the data center isn't concerned. Water is still priced less than alternative cooling systems. But now, the residents' water bills skyrocket. They're competing with a big company with deep pockets for a limited resource. The company can afford it. The people can't. Eventually people start moving away because they simply can't afford to live there. Yay, free market. Sure, the prices eventually stabilize but only after the demand decreases because so many people have left.

Or heck, why stop there? The water is from a river, right? Who says it belongs to the townies? Let's just locate the pumps upstream from the town and divert it all to the data center. In a free market, isn't that a smart idea? Why pay someone else for a resource that they're just scooping up from the environment when you can go out and scoop it up for yourself? (We'll just ignore the fact that the Colorado River is already the subject of tons of treaties and regulations shackling the power of the invisible hand. Those are bad things, right?)

0xjessel, who posted the announcement, also posted "there are no plans to support APIs for 3p clients. but posts from federated threads users can be seen on other mastodon apps if you follow them".

So, no. Just a way to facilitate bulk posters to post in even more bulk. You, the lowly end user, need to stick to the approved interface that earns them ad revenue.

Clearly the only fair thing to do is to sell by auction. Not the food, necessarily. At a place like Wendy's there is rarely a shortage of product. No, auction off the wait time. Auction off the place in line.

When you enter the queue you pay some amount to expedite your service. You're slotted into the line based on the amount you pay. If the next person offers more they get slotted in in front of you. If they offer less they get slotted in behind you. If they offer nothing they get added to the end of the queue. You can always increase your payment to move up, but it's non-refundable. You forfeit the fee if you leave the queue.

There. A perfectly fair free-market solution that considers the resource that's actually scarce and quickly settles in to whatever pricing the market will bear at any given moment. You're welcome.

- Augmented reality glasses will now work as intended

Except for parallax. If you move your head at all, the overlay no longer lines up with the background. Could maybe be solved with eye-tracking software in the camera. (Is there a camera in the display? Or is it one of those stupid up-the-nose cams on the keyboard?)

- Museums and exhibishion halls/events

This might be about the only useful application.

- Windows with smart features.

See above about parallax, but eye-tracking won't solve it for multiple viewers at a time.

- could be used in an ATC tower

Parallax, again.

The best use for a transparent display is so you can show what's being displayed and the faces of the actors looking at it in the same shot. Even that's questionable because it makes your set designer look like an idiot. (Ditto for those transparent whiteboards that seem to be all the rage on TV shows.)

I agree. As I said, I'm happy to answer such questions in the interview, though it's not really the appropriate time to question our choice of language. C wouldn't be my first choice either, but that's what we're stuck with. It's not like we're going to rewrite a 20 year old codebase at this point. I'd probably invite the candidate to stick around after all the interviews were over and we could discuss such matters over a beer. But right now, let's just see how you'd code it as asked, okay?

We have several coding problems for various languages, some based on actual product code. I had a candidate tell me flat out that the actual product code was using the wrong algorithm. (Narrator: It wasn't.) He just didn't understand the reason we were doing it the way we were, didn't listen when I tried to explain, and refused to code the solution asked for. He did it the way he thought it should be done. That kind of arrogance is something I don't need in a co-worker.

I had another one who couldn't code C. No worries, we can do this with other languages. What's your best language? He said Python. Cool. Here's a Python problem. Go for it. "Can I access Google? NOBODY codes without Google any more!" Dude, I'm not asking for exotic language features, specialized libraries, or even perfect syntax. You can literally solve this one with an 'if' statement and a 'for' loop. "This isn't a realistic test! It's not fair!" He actually said those words. I thanked him for his time and showed him to the door.

Both these were on-campus interviews with graduating students in CS-related majors, so not exactly "senior positions", but still.

You're incorrect here. You're counting the bits in the lower octet from the wrong end. It should be 128+64+32+16+8 = 248

The way I'd calculate it is:

10.0.0 -- 24 bits, need another 5 to make 29
91 dec = 5B hex = 01011011 bin
5 bits of mask = 11111000
AND with mask = 01011000 bin = 58 hex = 88 dec

So the network address is 10.0.0.88/29.

The tricky part for me would be the decimal to binary (or hex) conversion. I can't do that reliably in my head.

P.S. What kind of lame-ass "news for nerds" site doesn't have a way to preserve whitespace in monospace text? Sheesh!

Perfectly valid questions and ones I'm happy to answer in the interview. Yes, C is a requirement. While we have some C++ in our products, the vast majority of it is plain ol' C. And yes, of course we have libraries that handle linked lists, as well as hashes, b-trees, and other types of data structures.

There are a few reasons why we ask a linked list question. First, it's a basic data type that anyone who claims to be a programmer should be familiar with. Second, it involves pointer manipulation which is something anyone programming in C specifically needs to be familiar with. A basic problem like this lets us check some language-specific skills (pointer manipulation) as well as general programming skills (loops and debugging techniques). It makes a good jumping-off point into discussing things like algorithmic complexity and unit tests. The third (and possibly most important) reason is that we have limited time in the interview. We can't possibly teach you enough about our problem domain to give you a "real world" programming task. And that's not what we want to test, anyhow. We can teach you the specifics of what we do on the job - if you know how to program. We can't (or rather, we don't want to take the time to) teach a non-programmer how to program.

I know some people find this kind of thing beneath them or demeaning. But as I said in my original post, you would be *amazed* at how often candidates talk a good story but fall apart when it comes to putting talk into practice.

When we were hiring like crazy a few years ago I did a lot of on-campus job fair interviews. By the end of the day I was always ready to say, "Pick a language. Any language. Write 'hello, world'." Because so many people, even seniors graduating with a CS-related degree, were unable to answer even the simplest questions.

People give us shit for giving a simple coding test like, "reverse a linked list" for C programmers. But oh my god, the number of people who can bullshit their way through the phone interview but can't code themselves out of a wet paper bag is mind-boggling. (The test is done in-person and we talk through it with the candidate, giving hints where needed. We understand that people can choke under pressure. We don't care about misplaced semi-colons. Hell, I don't even care if you use a real language, as long as you can demonstrate that you understand the concepts. Too many people can't even do that much.)