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Comment Re:Question is (Score 1) 71

It's been mangled by culture.

Once upon a time, it was unambiguously a pretty debilitating mental state. If you had that diagnosis, everyone could see issues and it wasn't at all something that anyone would aspire to.

Then Asperger's came along and thus began the 'diagnosis as an excuse for selfish behavior'. The general impression was "a smart person who has a tendency to be a jerk", which sounded totally awesome to a lot of people. They didn't need to try not to be a jerk, they had a pass in the diagnosis. People *wanted* this diagnosis.

Then, at least in part, some felt that Asperger's had become a very coveted 'diagnosis', and self-diagnosis was popular. They said 'oh, you know what, maybe if we group it with general autism, maybe people would be more reluctant to want that association, and it can go to being an aid for those that needed it.

But no, bereft of their diagnosis, they would instead do the same with autism, really diluting it and making a lot of people end up not taking autism seriously.

Nowadays, Gen Z highly values 'neurodivergent' as a badge of honor, that anyone cool *must* be neurodivergent.

So we end up with everyone saying they have a diagnosis, that they are neurodivergent, and they absolutely are not anything so pedestrian as 'normal'. Meanwhile those that really need it are generally taken less seriously because it's been diluted so much.

Comment Re:Is each pixel a discrete RGB LED? (Score 1) 47

Looks like the displays have something like a 128x78 'pixel' active LED display as a backlight, and then put an LCD on top of it.

So if a tiny region of the display is just dim reds, then it can get a backlight that is doing just that and the LCD doesn't have to block as much other stuff.

Comment Re:Blurb wording (Score 1) 47

No, this is still backlit LCDs.

The LEDs are still 'just' a backlight, but now a colored backlight. You basically have an OLED-like characteristic of emissive lighting at some resolution. The problem is the resolution of these LEDs would be something like a 128x78 display. Impossibly low even by old fashioned 'SD' standards.

So you have a 128x78 active LED display, and then an LCD panel on top to give it resolution. So you get to pick a good tiny local backlight color and minimize how much extraneous unwanted color that tiny dimming zone needs to filter out.

Comment Re:Just why? (Score 1) 36

But less convenient than version numbers, particularly since Ubuntu uses very predictable versioning.

So I know that even numbered years are LTS and the version number is YY.MM, and the month is always April for LTS and October is the other possibility.

So with that all in mind, one says "ok, I know I need to add stuff for Ubuntu 24.04 to this configuration". Except some configurations don't do version number and take the codename. So now I've got to remember 'noble'. Canonical themselves in their web site sort of de-emphasizes the codename. The 'tag' results for the blog all fixate on the version number. The download page doesn't mention the codename. The release cycle page does, and the *original* blog announcement mentions it, but not the subsequent ISO refresh release announcements.

Comment Re:How's the general prosperity? (Score 1) 150

I'd say the likely scenario is that the person actually buys stuff but doesn't consider the stuff an 'investment'. I bought a house to live in, not to turn it around for a profit.

To the extent people are 'investors' in things like 401k, they may not be 'active' investors and would just as much prefer something like a massive expansion of social security instead of letting investment companies play with their money. Or to the extent they do want to 'invest', they actually want to contribute to the potential success of things they intrinsically want to succeed, rather than chasing the best percentage return without regard for anything intrinsic to the people using the money invested.

The sentiment I think is plain enough, that they don't like the thought of handing their money over to a group of folks that will mostly enrich themselves above all else while their money is used for who knows what without regard for his deeper consideration of what is going on.

Comment Re:Huge problem (Score 2) 150

Nvidia is therefore a bubble. This article is complaining that Europe is an obstacle to further bubble inflation.
No amount of Nvidia etching IP onto wafers is worthy of a 4.6 TRILLION market cap - bigger than the 4.2 Trillion market cap of the ENTIRE name-brand pharmaceutical industry.

Comment Re:He might still be alive (Score 2) 102

When you mentioned "third partner" who cashed out early, I thought for a minute you were going to be talking about Ronald Wayne - what a life of bad decisions he made ;)

For those not familiar:

He got 10% of the original Apple stock (drew the first Apple Logo, made the partnership documents, wrote the Apple I manual, etc).
Twelve days later, he sold it for $800.
Okay, but he could still try to claim rights in court... nah, a year later he signed a contract with the company to forfeit any potential future claims against the company for $1500.
Okay, well, it's not like he had an opportunity to rethink... nah, Jobs and Wozniak spent two years trying to get him back, to no avail.
Okay, but he still had, like memorabilia he could hawk from the early days, like his signed contract. Nah, he sold that for $500 in 2016.
And that contract went on later to be sold for $1,6 million.
Okay, well, I'm sure he went on to do great things... nah, he ended up running a tiny postage stamp shop.
Which he ended up having to move into his Florida home because of repeated break-ins.
Which he then had to sell after an inside-job heist bankrupted him.

Comment Re:who is dumber, the author or EditorDavid? (Score 1) 81

Presuming it can ultimately 'work as advertised' the key word might be 'more', but lower paying programming jobs.

If it makes it more accessible with less experience and interest required, the labor pool expands and suddenly developers are cheap enough to afford for that software someone wants but isn't worth it today.

All that said, I'm a bit more skeptical that it 'works as advertised', or that it will anytime soon, but instead it can expand productivity of already strong programmers and do next to nothing for those without the skills. It screws up constantly and even as I try to lean into it and try asking it to fix its own mistakes, it's really terrible at it. It generally creates code that is really hard to maintain and further is the worst at trying to modify code that is hard to maintain.

Now I do know of some dysfunctional development teams that employ dozens of interns and give them just shit tasks that are ripe for LLM fodder. Those teams may find it hard to justify the same volume of junior devs when the LLM can just take care of those shit tasks with no more supervision than the junior devs but with a much quicker responsiveness.

Comment Re:He might still be alive (Score 5, Informative) 102

Jobs committed suicide-by-woo. He didn't "turn away from traditional therapy because it can't keep up with rapidly advancing metastasis", he turned away from treatment for a perfectly treatable form of cancer for nine months to try things like a vegan diet, acupuncture and herbal remedies, and that killed him.

Steve Jobs had islet cell neuroendocrine tumor. It's much less aggressive than normal pancreatic adenocarcinoma. The five-year survival rate is 95% with surgical intervention. Jobs was specifically told that he had one of the 5% of pancreatic cancers "that can be cured", and there was no evidence at the time of his diagnosis that it had spread. Jobs instead turned to woo. Eight months later, there was signs on CT scans that his cancer had grown and possibly spread, and then he finally underwent surgery, it was confirmed that there were now secondary tumors on his liver. His odds of a five-year survival at this point were now 23%. And he did not roll that 23%.

Jobs himself regretted his decision to delay conventional medical intervention.

Comment Wildly Absurd Clickbait (Score 1) 41

Is reddit inherently insecure? I mean, anyone could post anything there! Which... isn't that the point of software repos? They are just a place to store data. What data is being stored there and how safe or effective it might be are issues of trust and reputation. The article talks about how vulnerable a repo is because a single developer being phished can lead to compromise. It doesn't even address the larger potential rug pull scam that is possible. What happens if a major framework decides to go scorched earth and burn their reputation for a quick attempt at a payout? The article summary makes a few points about how can we do more to protect things, but all of them are only targeted on making sure the version you are getting is the one you expect. There is nothing in there about suitability for purpose or the inherent security or trustworthiness of the code itself.

The entire open source movement is predicated on the Many Eyes theory. Which, is just a theory and more a question of philosophy. Do you think we're all largely trying to work together, or is it all dog eat dog out there? And what are the alternative? Do open source developers need to hire independent auditors to review their code and check for back doors before they are allowed to push new versions? Which just leads to the Who Watches the Watchers problem. Where you expect software security to come from? Who is responsible for it? Is it all caveat emptor or should there be some requirement around manufacture or publisher? And who should pay for it under the free software model?

As a developer, this all seems like click bait nonsense. Source code is just source code. Trusting it without reading it is a risky prospect. And that's before you take into account the broader issues explored by Ken Thompson in his Reflections on Trusting Trust which scared the hell out of me the first time I read it. An exploit in my security frame work is bad enough. But what if someone smuggles it into my compiler? Or the hardware I run the compiler on? Or the hardware or operating system I run the application upon?

Software paranoia aside, we have come a long way since the Morris Worm bug went on a rampage or left-pad vanishing reminded everyone that trusting your build system to third part repositories can cause issues. Could we do more? Of course! But like most developers, I'm just a wage slave or an unpaid volunteer. So I will stick to whatever security policies my employer requires and otherwise do my best and continue to assert: All services are provided "as is" and provide no warranties of any kind.

Comment Re: Your mouse is a microphone (Score 1) 39

I did some proof of concept tests with both Pointer Lock and PointerEvents, but both failed because you don't get *any* data if you're not moving the mouse, and only get (heavily rounded) datapoints when you do move the mouse. You'd need raw access to data coming from the mouse, before even the mouse driver, to do what they did.

You *might* be able to pull off a statistical attack, collecting noise in the fluctuations of movement positions and timing in the data you receive when the mouse *is* moving. But I can't see how that could possibly have the fidelity to recover audio, except for *maybe* really deep bass. And again, it'd only apply for when the mouse is actually moving.

Neat attack, but not really practical in the browser.

Comment Re:drive demand for highly skilled software engine (Score 1) 81

Why would you need to be highly skilled to use an automated coding tool?

If the automated coding tool is reliable, you wouldn't need to be skilled. OTOH if the coding tool keeps emitting code that contains bugs or misfeatures, then someone will need to analyze and debug the emitted code, which is a skill. In some cases, that might requires more skill than simply writing the software by hand.

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