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Comment Re:What legal challenge? (Score 1) 26

Do they want them to spin up the supercomputers and brute force the passwords?

Apple uses 256 bit AES from what I remember. Theoretically using a single computer, it would take 10^59 years to crack a single key. Using all world’s computers including supercomputers, it will be less but not meaningfully less.

I assume this is really about them putting in a backdoor of some sort. Yeah, fuck that.

Yes, UK government wants Apple to modify their entire encryption scheme so that Apple can grant the UK government access to user data anytime that government asks. Existing data is protected unless Apple is forced to replace existing keys.

Comment Re: Hold on to your papers... (Score 1) 139

You're entirely right, but Fixed vs Variable costs are a well understood distinction that OpenAI's bean counters aren't merely glossing over here.

If your up-front investment is $1M, each unit of output sells for $2000, and costs $1900 in operational expenses - Your profit is $100 per unit. Once you sell 10000 units, you've broken even and every additional sale is $100 in pure profit. Presuming you expect to sell significantly more than 10000 units, the initial cost is literally irrelevant over the long term.

For a more physical-manufacturing analogy, consider a modern chip fab costing double-digit billions of dollars to build, just to sell fancy chunks of melted sand for a few hundred bucks each. Yet TSMC is one of the most profitable companies on the planet, with net margins slightly over 50%.

Comment Re:Make a silent drone I'll be more impressed (Score 1) 55

Not sure what you think is or isn't subject to being disproven here. "Security" isn't some monolithic "do X and call it a day", it's 100% situationally dependent.

If the situation requires radar, we use radar. If the situation requires strong passwords and MFA, we use strong passwords and MFA. And if the situation calls for giant concrete acoustic mirrors - Yes Virginia, that's why the UK coast is dotted with exactly those.

Comment Re: Let them choose (Score 2) 119

For the same reason you can't just drop in at your former childhood home to dig up Sparky's corpse: Not yours anymore. It sucks what happened to Hawaii, but the opportunity for the people to say "yeah, not happening" and send a handful of American stuffed shirts on a long trip in a short canoe expired 130 years ago.

The idea that we're sacrificing basic science in the interest of not offending ghosts is utterly insane. Mauna Kea is uniquely suited to ground-based observatories; if we were talking about any other group, that land would simply be taken by eminent domain and there'd be nothing to discuss. Case in point, did you all know there's an eminent domain case going on right now in North Dakota where ranchers are fighting a pipeline going through their own land... Which in turn was seized from the Sioux? Guess which group isn't even at the table.

Comment Ding ding ding ding! (Score 1) 139

Astra correctly answers all 10 questions in the $2000 lightning round!

And now on to the final round. To win $32,000 cash, a brand new Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser, and an all-expense paid vacation for two to Puerto Vallarta, all you have to do is answer this single question to the satisfaction of our judges:

The Riemann Hypothesis: True or False?

Comment Re:Pretty simple (Score 1) 119

Well, what manner of person who thinks ahead decides to live hours away from teh workplace?

What part of "Before Covid Dell had generous remote work policies" is unclear to you?

I know - people who don't plan ahead.

The people I know worked remotely for Dell a decade before Covid, and Dell had no issues with them living hours away from an office .

If you don't want to go back because you live several states away, that is definitely a you problem.

Wow you really don't understand the point. Team members live several states or countries from each other. When you have a large global company like Dell, that will happen.

. Y'all have so many excuses. Do a risk/reward analysis. Then if you want to live in Alaska, or wherever you want to live, and find employment there.

WTF are you talking about "risk/reward" analysis. I'll say it again: Before Covid Dell had generous remote work policies. No one said Dell people lived in a cabin in Alaska. They just lived far away from a Dell office. People, based on those policies, lived a few hours from an office rather than 30 minutes from an office. And Dell encouraged it.

And let's say we get that universal no one in the workplace Utopia. The cheap housing that is so tempting will just go up in price.

Affordable housing is just one reason why people would prefer not to live whenever you want them to live. Clean air, better schools. etc.

But I didn't move to say Alaska because I like it there, when the company is in New Jersey. Then again, guess I'm not very smart.

No you're not very smart if you think not living close to a Dell office == living in Alaska. Your entire assumption is based on very flawed logic.

Comment And a new set of updates just dropped too (Score 1) 47

I've just compiled the latest 6.18 kernel, released this morning ("Mon Aug 3 11:22:13 2026 +0200" on the 6.18.42 commit message), and there's a 6.6, 6.12 and 7.1 as well. To my layman's eye there appear to be enough "leaks" and "corrupts" in the changelog to warrant security concerns. With the way Linux kernel CVEs work there won't be any yet, the team needs to now look at this new set of releases to judge each commit.

So, expect another Debian kernel update in the next week or so.

Comment Reddit as we knew it died the weekend of July 4th (Score 4, Interesting) 80

Reddit's problems have nothing to do with Google and everything to do with gross incompetence.

I've been a prolific Redditor for some 10-15 years. That ended overnight when they stopped allowing anonymous access to old.reddit.com. If I and a handful of fellow geeks were the only holdouts against their god-awful "new" experience, that wouldn't matter. Problem is, the vast majority of Reddit's mods are - were - in the same camp.

Accordingly, Reddit has effectively rolled over and surrendered to the bots, and now Spez wonders why their stock price is tanking? They have bots policing bots posting for bots learning from bots and arguing with bots. Far from improving the situation, AI has made the whole mess even harder for the rapidly dwindling pool of humans to deal with.

MMW, a year from now Reddit will be nothing more than playground for AIs. Whether or not it remains viable as a company largely depends on how long they can hide that information from investors and advertisers.

Comment Re:Relax and then read them again, completely. (Score 1) 119

You appear to be violently agreeing with me.

Yes, those articles all say we need better managers. Why? Because the current crop largely suck at the actual task of managing, conflating oversight with line-of-sight. And some aren't even interested in managing in the first place, only in maintaining their micro-fiefdom to stroke their egos. What part of that disagrees with my stance?

If you're taking issue with my choice of quantifiers, yes, I'll readily admit good managers can absolutely make most jobs easier. Good managers are rare, and Covid gave us the receipts. None of that has anything to do with whether or not the work itself can be done remotely - If a car's steering wheel is broken, do we punish the tires?

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