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Comment Re:CVE process must step up (Score 1) 9

Such a shame that CVE quality is generally crap, as it's flooded with dubious 'findings' from people trying to build a resume as a security researcher. I'm not sure why you assert this is largely still done manually, reconciling with SBOM tools in my neck of the woods is pretty much automated for detecting and flagging issues because *no one* has time to deal with the gigantic volume of CVEs. Of course another problem in those SBOM tools is they have a terrible false positive rate. Trying to follow their guidance 100% may be impossible (complete misidentification) or requires significant work (SBOM tools don't do great with 'backported' fixes, and many software components don't bother with maintaining backward compatibility, so rebasing to a new version is big).

Updating software that is vulnerable is a key component, but I wager a greater general risk is how folks configure and operate credibly secure software stacks in insecure ways.

Comment Re:How about the unbanned? (Score 1) 134

Forget the kids, they don't vote so they can be safely trod upon.

I care about the kids, and I don't think this is treading on them, I think it's pushing them to have IRL relationships, and that's a good thing. I say that as a nerd who had few friends when I was a teen (in the 80s), but even normal, social kids today have far fewer real friendships and many of the geeky kids like I was now have none at all.

We're a social species, we need and crave socialization, but social media is to real relationships like drugs are to the normal joys of life; a false but massively-amped substitute for the real thing, addictive and harmful. It's perfectly possible to get high or drunk from time to time and still enjoy real life, but you have to use the artificial happiness in moderation and control. There are really good reasons why we try to keep kids away from drugs and alcohol, and keep adults away from the really powerful and addictive stuff, and get them into treatment when they get hooked (well, in the US we mostly just put them in prison, but some parts of the world are getting smarter and focusing on treatment).

The same logic applies to social media. We need to figure out how to tame its effects on adults, especially those who are for some reason especially vulnerable and get very warped by it. IMO, it makes perfect sense to just try to keep kids off of it entirely, especially since we don't really understand it yet.

Comment You said "cheap" and "Wifi", but... (Score 5, Insightful) 139

So this isn't at all what you asked for, but I'm going to throw it out there anyway: Ubiquiti. You'll pay more and they're all PoE rather than wireless, but if you spend the money and run the wires (hey, you have to run a wire for power anyway, might as well use it for data, too) you won't regret the results.

Comment Re:I can see the point. (Score 2) 134

USENET was never this bad.

The audience for USENET and slashdot was about 400 times smaller than the people participating in broader social media. It was much harder for a critical mass of fringe ideas/susceptible people to coalesce into isolated circles when the population was just so tiny.

Comment Re:Now we're just haggling over the price (Score 1) 95

Biden tried and failed, because it wasn't legal.

Actually he tried and partly failed because it was only partly legal.

But he definitely cannot create a new revenue stream and direct it however he chooses.

That might not stop him from trying, and unless Congress or the courts rein him in, it won't stop him from doing it. As I pointed out above, in this case it's unclear that anyone would have standing to sue (not taxpayers; it wouldn't be tax money -- maybe nVidia or China, but they like the deal), so stopping him would probably require Congress to act. And what are the odds that the Republican Congress would grow a spine?

Comment Re:Now we're just haggling over the price (Score 2) 95

It may have been more useful to have already known that it would not be possible for Trump to do what you described.

"Not be possible" is too strong.

It's clearly possible unless Congress or the courts prevent it, even though it is clearly illegal. But Trump is doing lots of things that are clearly illegal, which is why the courts keep issuing injunctions to stop him (and then SCOTUS keeps staying the injunctions to let him go ahead and do it anyway, at least for a while). In a sane world, the fact that an action is illegal would be a stronger constraint because the president would have to be concerned that Congress would impeach and convict him, and he would have to be concerned about potential criminal liability. In the world that exists, the GOP leadership in Congress refuses to do their job to rein in the executive, and SCOTUS has declared the president above the law so there are few practical limitations on his power.

So far, the only thing that seems to really make Trump back off is when the stock market crashes.

Nevertheless, a slush fund of several billion dollars per year that the president is truly able to spend with complete discretion would be a significant additional increase in power because it's not clear that anyone would have standing to sue, so courts could not intervene regardless of constitutionality. Congress would be able to intervene, of course, but, again, the GOP-led Congress has almost completely abdicated. I had to add "almost" only because they actually did stand up to him on the Epstein files (sort of; the bill left Pam Bondi with near-total freedom to withhold anything she wants, not legally, but practically).

Trump is more open than other Presidents.

No, Trump is more secretive than most other presidents. You're confusing "unfiltered and disorganized" with "transparent". I do have to grant that he's incredibly transparent about his corruption. Well, maybe. He has been transparently corrupt in lots of ways, but it still seems likely that there's more corruption which he's keeping hidden.

Comment Re:Huh. Do nothing = win? (Score 2) 55

Oh should this bubble pop, it will take out a *lot* with it.

A lot of tech companies have effectively retooled themselves so they don't know how to keep being a functional business without the AI hype spending.

The level of dedication to the LLM game dwarfs the dot-com bubble, and so too will the negative consequences...

Comment Re:Not enough to make a difference (Score 1) 27

It's the boiling frog approach to revenue. Start at an attractive rate and increase it by 'no big deal' until eventually it would be a big deal.

See also, microtransactions.

Companies have learned that customers barely pay attention to the absolute costs, and just note the incrementals they incur in the moment.

Comment Re:College education is still worth it (Score 2) 142

Might not be about the popularity, the popularity is good, it's about the affordability.

The student loans were well intentioned, but just turning the money faucet on has significantly reduced practical concerns about pricing.

There are two sorts of campuses that have been *way* nicer than almost any corporate campus I've ever seen, medical and universities. In my day it was already pretty plush, and recently toured some and it's just gotten even more crazy, super large campus in the middle of some of the most expensive real estate with just amazingly nice amenities...

These easy loans started to help tackle the problem of higher ed being a *little* expensive and unfortunately made it a *lot* expensive over time. Needed to come with some regulation on the pricing side, at *least* for public universities.

Similar story on health care, by all means help people with premiums (even better would have been public option, but putting that aside), but don't just write whatever checks the insurance companies demand, regulate the health care costs.

Comment Re:Now we're just haggling over the price (Score 1) 95

But last I read of it, it goes into a fund controlled by the President -- a slush fund, in olden terms.

Where did you read that? If it's true it would be momentous. A totally discretionary fund of $2-6B per year (based on nVidia's projections of selling $2-5B per quarter to China) would give the president enormous unchecked power.

I've spend some time searching and haven't found anything to substantiate this claim. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'd like to see where you got the idea from.

Comment Re:AI? What's that? (Score 2) 81

Think the point would be that even if you try to opt out of AI summaries, you end up hearing someone read a script that they used AI to generate, or read comments or emails that AI generated without your awareness. Then there's a tendency to adopt speech patterns that you see in use.

So even if you refrain, you are still inundated by the content by virtue of everyone else overusing it without specifying. Even if you have a tendency to recognize AI BS a few sentences in and go away from it, you still read probably two or three sentences and may have influenced your speech a little.

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