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Comment Welcome to the world of tomorrow (Score 4, Insightful) 60

Get used to it. Here is an easy rule of thumb to understand where you'll encounter robot puke:

Is the combined cost of (robot output + cost of remediating robot mistakes) less than (human output + cost of remediating human mistakes)?

Adjust the value of humans up a bit if the humans served have more money. Adjust up significantly if there are regulatory reasons why a human needs to be in the loop.

As far as ads, well, robots are tireless, very good at recycling striking images into attention-grabbing slop, and this is actually one area where concern for the truth is far lower than elsewhere. You already know where this is going.

Comment eh (Score 2) 224

There's a strange form of the class divide here. You say you can't be sure that kid can't feed themselves away from mommy, hiring them for an office job. But if you call someone to build a garage, you won't think twice about that 18 year old helper.

More generally, I find the Theil anti-college stuff to be a bit weird. On one hand, it is trivially true - well-adjusted smart kids can totally jump in to many fields without college. I dropped out after a year, and a year after that was working for a software company (And I'm not very well-adjusted.)

But on the other, this will not work for everyone. A lot of people do need a few more years of figuring themselves out, or shrugging off Mom's neuroses, or just getting their shit together.

So the Palin-tier strategy can work for them - cherry-picking the right kids early enough to mold the way you want them. But it probably also encourages kids who do need a little "life with training wheels" to jump in over their heads.

As a final point, I see people complaining about that last point, but I suspect that's one of the more acceptable things they do. Think about how kids are manipulated into life-altering choices by adults all the time - think how "abstinence-only ed" functions as a "trap kids with their own kids" program. Messing with someone via a job offer is small beans compared to saddling them with a kid at 18.

Comment Re:Will make things less secure (Score 4, Interesting) 83

They have all the solutions to hard lessons learned written in C for reference, so if they aren't lazy, this shouldn't be too bad.

I agree that, if I had some engineers lazing about and wanted to do something to raise the security bar, this is probably not where I would start.

I think it is more likely that Canonical is worried about IBMHat's increasingly possessive behavior and feels the need to increase it's "ownership" stake in Linux writ large. Depending on Debian gives them a massive leg up on development, but is at best not helpful (and generally a liability for) for strategic control struggles, which is where this is going.

Comment Re:Sometimes silence is the best answer (Score 3, Insightful) 57

The "Proven" Owner has proven he is not a very smart business man, and seems to have emotional regulation issues.

The funny thing is, the company started responding to this correctly - there was a video where they responded somewhat reasonably. I assume that was the office manager or someone else who actually has to interact with the real world sometimes.

Then dude goes stalking, suing and attempting to be insulting by calling people "liberal" (apparently he thinks MAGAts can't pick locks and wants to reduce his potential customer base by over half, or something, I dunno).

The thing is, lots of crappy locks sell just fine. People use them because the vast majority of people are deterred by them. While a lot of normal people who consider themselves honest will steal something under some conditions, even a cheap lock will stop them. And that's all a lot of things need.

The other side of that is that high-security locks by themselves also won't stop people. If you are actually protecting something, you're buying Abloy or Bilock locks the same way you buy a safe - to delay an attacker until other measures can be brought to bear (usually guards).

But all the neat cylinder tricks, pick traps and false drops in the world won't stop a hydraulic cutter.

Comment Gimp me up (Score 2) 8

I've been trying to come to terms with Gimp's UI. For some reason it is more difficult for me than most other application switches.

But there is no way I'm going to rent core functionality, like text editing and image manipulation. And Canva here is already declaring they're going to use file format changes strategically, anyone who has been around the block knows how that game works.

So using these tools is accepting you're going to be bent over a barrel at some point. Expect it.

Comment He's not wrong (Score 3, Insightful) 26

Sounds like a douchebag, but he isn't wrong.

There's a cliche in SV about that - "First time founders talk product. Second time founders talk distro."

The best product in the world will fail if nobody knows it exists, and depending on who the market is, it can be very hard to get the attention of possible customers. If you're mass-market, well, look at all that noise you need to cut through. If you're some niche enterprise product, identifying customers is easier, but getting their attention is hard, and building enough trust as a new entrant to take a risk on is much harder.

So you need to attract or buy attention, or hire someone who can. And frequently that means making deals with intermediaries, matchmakers, etc.

Dude still sounds insufferable.

Comment Sadly yes (Score 4, Interesting) 55

A software dependency on an adversary is bad enough, but Microsoft is busy coercing users into storing data on Microsoft machines.

For someone like the ICC, that would be a hard-no even if the US weren't lead by a demented fascist antagonistic towards them.

Sadly, since January it has become rational to worry about weaponized interdependence on the US.

Trump can use that for a while, but in the end the result will be a much-diminished US. Probably already too late to reverse the academic brain-drain - we've convinced a generation of smart kids to look for an education elsewhere, breaking an innovation-spigot that's benefited the US since WWII. And if he keeps up with his bullshit, the dollar will not remain the reserve currency. That will feel like new tax on everything, likely much worse on specific stuff. (People argue about what will happen, but almost certainly: higher borrowing costs, lower Dollar, lower stock market returns, bigger constraints on the government running a deficit.) Software will fragment, we'll see more Great Firewalls (although probably not in the US - they're intentionally leaving us vulnerable).

I expect open source to suffer heavily. Sure IBMHat will persist, but thousands of small project will die or never happen because if increased barriers. I also expect to see more attempts at subverting projects and laying traps in them.

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