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Comment Re:Just what we need (Score 2) 94

So we're taking a superior, simpler power source and drive chain and adding a fake clutch to make it simulate an older, inferior power source and drive chain. Brilliant. In 25 years people will look at these and wonder "what the hell were they thinking?"

Frankly I'm thinking... whatever it takes to sell bikers on replacing their painfully noisy kill-me machines with silent kill-me machines is worth it.

As for the "it's loud so car drivers know I'm there", sorry but the only times I've ever not known a bike was near me is when they were doing something illegal, unsafe, and unpredictable. People who refuse to wear high-vis reflective clothing don't get to pick how loud their vehicles are.

Comment Re:MFA (Score 1) 106

If the desktop/laptop/phone isn't registered in the client's MDM

We gotta have your cell phone number. Because security, you know.

As it happens, MDM doesn't (necessarily) need that. AFAIK you can use a tablet or a phone with Wifi only. And I mentioned MDM-managed desktops and laptops.

While yes, situations like your anecdote exist, MDM isn't some excuse for capturing employee data.

Comment Re:MFA (Score 4, Interesting) 106

With MFA, it should not be a catastrophe if someone obtains your password. That's the point of it.

MFA is - to a certain degree - compromised.

There are real-world exploits for - for instance M365 - that work like this:

A user gets a malicious, disposable link via e-mail.
The user clicks the link.
The link takes them to a carefully crafted web site, and asks for their username & password.
The user has been partially phished.
The web site initiates an logon call back to M365 in the background and harvests the two-digit code that the end-user needs.
The web site displays the two-digit code.
The user's authenticator app is asking the user for the code... for the bad guy's login session.
The user enters the two-digit code they're seeing.
The bad guys are now in, add their own MFA device and exploit everything they can.

The same thing can happen with TOTP. Anything that an end-user can do can be repeated in near real-time. The phishing site asking for your OTP just re-uses it and feeds it into the real place.

We've been shifting our clients to a "compliant device" position. If the desktop/laptop/phone isn't registered in the client's MDM, it isn't allowed to log on. Yes it's got some overhead to it and yes, getting client buy-in is a struggle. But the days of allowing logons from anywhere, any device are dwindling.

Here's a video about how this works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Comment Re:and an exploit will be published in 3, 2, 1 ... (Score 1) 89

As a friend of mine in an uncharacteristic fit of insight once said, as long as there is a decision point that can be discovered, yes and the code goes this way, no and the code goes that way, it is in principle possible to write a patch to circumvent any DRM.

Not to disparage your friend but... that a thing is possible in principle does not necessitate it being possible in practicality.

Worse, it is unhelpful to adopt a position of "yet another restriction will inevitably" be circumvented. Side-loading is more difficult on Android than it has ever been. Jailbreaking on iOS is more difficult on Apple than it has ever been. Piracy is more difficult than it has ever been (since the inception of the Internet). Every time a convenient torrent indexer is shut down, sure, three more may pop up but they tend to be less convenient, have less content, and have more malware and fakes. When a manufacturer does something unpleasant, it is not useful to say "it's going to be okay... it is always going to be okay." It's not.

Comment Re:They're grasping. (Score 4, Interesting) 110

There isn't a shortage of water in Michigan.

They're grasping.

Good.

These datacenters are driving up electricity and water prices by increasing demand, regardless of there is currently sufficient supply to meet that demand. A community may have enough generation capacity and treatment capacity today, but when tomorrow's development of X new homes happens, the capacity either comes from today's excess or from having to add more capacity... which costs.

Datacenters don't contribute to communities financially the way home or even factories do. There are virtually no jobs, and definitely no secondary jobs. They negotiate bulk purchasing discounts and tax breaks.

The quantity of datacenters is just going to go up, dramatically over time. We need to figure out how to make their owners pay for what they really consume where they're built before there's an order of magnitude more of them.

Comment Re:Same as it ever was (Score 4, Informative) 296

Short sighted idiots and people trying to justify "I want a new car" that they clearly can't afford will "justify" it with fuel savings or lower operating costs. It almost never works out. Nothing to see here. The same thing happens literally every time fuel costs spike.

There's nothing in the summary that supports that holier-than-thou take.

That enquiries and sales of EVs have increased does not imply or require that people are buying cars when they weren't otherwise going to, and doesn't imply or require that they cannot afford those cars.

You are just painting these buyers as "short-sighted idiots" to make yourself feel superior but there's nothing presented to support that. What I'm saying is that there were already X people looking to buy new cars. There's nothing - nothing - here that says overall sales are greater than X, only that the number EV sales, searches, and enquiries are up.

Comment Re:not to disrespect the late Val Kilmer but fuck (Score 1) 90

I can understand all that, but it still doesn't say why acting deserves special treatment.

I'm not sure how you interpreted what I wrote, but I thought it was pretty clear. Acting - as part of "the arts" - is more play than work for the people who do it. That merits not automating it because without enjoyable things to do, we become nothing but consumption machines.

Coders enjoy coding.

Citation required.

Okay, no, I'm just kidding. I think it's safe to say some coders enjoy it, but for most it's probably just "work".

AI has taken a chunk out of that, and people treat it as beneficial. It's taken a lot of translators out of the picture. They enjoy what they do.

To a certain degree, coding is - theoretically - a job that AI will eventually do more reliably than humans. And matters. To me, that puts it in the same category as surgery. Once the technology is clearly superior, too much counts on it for us to continue to rely on humans. Again, when it's actually superior. A world without bugs is... part way to utopia.

It's taken a slice out of countless jobs that people enjoy doing, and there's been a bit of a murmur about job losses.

I mean, I think there's more than a murmur. But again, there isn't a whole Hollywood city full of aspiring coders waiting tables just waiting for their breakthrough moment to get into coding. It's just not the same type of career.

Then we get to acting, with a famous actor being deep faked into a movie with the consent of his estate, and everyone is up in arms because actor and celebrity.

Ohhhh. I think I see. Personally I don't give the slightest concern to the celebrity or fame. I don't care about this dishonoring his memory or any such sentimental stuff. Nope. What I care about is that there's a parade full of Jimmy Noname kids who would amputate a toe for the chance to audition for this role. If you give them the role, the toe might even be theirs! Basically, I care that there's no benefit (except fiscal to the already-rich companies).

The sad bit is yes, this obsoletes many aspects of human engagement, just as the industrial revolution rendered a lot of manual work. It will continue to do it. The question is how we as a species adapt to it, and utilise it to our benefit.

Agreed. The problem is that once you automate the drudgery of "production" - which few people actually enjoy doing - all that's left is stuff like sportsball and regurgitating the fundamental seven plots over and over on stage. Basically the things that most people find "fun" to some degree or another. And that is what I think we should be defending.

Comment Re:not to disrespect the late Val Kilmer but fuck (Score 3, Interesting) 90

why would acting deserve special protection from automation?

I'll give it a shot.

There are some tasks that people enjoy doing. Replacing a career path that most participants want to do (or at least claim to want to do) obsoletes the human race.

It's one thing to automate drudge work that almost nobody wants to do. Clean toilets? Make a robot. It's also understandable to replace humans in jobs where computers/robots can do it better and it matters. Soon robot surgeons will be the clear best choice. Additionally it makes sense to keep some neutral jobs available for people who enjoy doing manual tasks like farming. Automate most of food-growing but leave it a viable career path for people who legitimately take pleasure in growing things.

But the arts? Why - aside from maximizing bullshit profits for faceless corporations - would we want to deprive the throngs of aspiring artists? Sure, sure, it someone's crap at it they should find a different job. But why are we even contemplating AI music when there's a nearly limitless supply of people who are quite talented but there isn't a slot for them in the money machine?

Without things people enjoy doing, there's no point in being people. We might as well just turn on a looping game of SimCity and euthanize our species. Having a robot eat your breakfast for you is unfulfilling and so is this.

Disclosure: I am in no way an artist. I don't have skin in this game and never could. But I'm enough of a left-brained individual that I can recognize the logic in preserving right-brain purpose.

Comment Re:Fake Issue (Score 1) 364

No, the one that answered:

"You know what he means, ahole. If this were truly a problem the jet fuel would be rationed and private aircraft would be at the bottom of the priority list"

The entire point of rationing would be to REMOVE the pure market forces that would deal out the limited commodity to those with the largest wallets and replace it with a scheme that benefits the most people, instead of the most money.

Nope. That's not how it reads. It's an IF, THEN statement.

IF (it were truly a problem) THEN (the jet fuel would be rationed)

As written, the logical result of "truly a problem" is "rationing". While there may be cases other than true problems where rationing could take place, in the logical condition the AC poses, the consequence of "truly a problem" is "rationing". Absence of rationing demands absence of problem, per the AC.

Again, according to the AC, without rationing there cannot be a true problem. Which is bullshit. Because you can have shortages that impact the vast majority of people, excepting the rich. In reality, you can have a problem without rationing. Because the world isn't fair. And we've got problems in addition to shortages.

Comment Re:Fake Issue (Score 1) 364

This is one AC that deserves to be modded up. I already commented, so I can't.

The dude who thinks that the litmus test of if a problem is true is "it impacts rich people fairly"? That AC?

I mean, that sort of works for earthquakes, but I'm pretty sure "being rich" is famously synonymous with "innoculated against commodity shortages."

Comment Re:Fake Issue (Score 5, Funny) 364

This is all fake until I see the European elites private jets grounded.

I just want to make sure I'm following what you're implying.

Your standpoint is that as long as the richest, most influential people in Europe... those with the greatest capacity to trade for any commodity or service that exists... as long as they can leverage their way into a fuel load, then reports of limited supply are false.

That's your position?

Comment Re:No UFOs. It's American Paranoia. (Score 4, Insightful) 114

Wake up guys. Maybe if you locked your nutcases up.......

That's one take, but I don't think it's the most helpful one.

People want to believe (reassuring) fantasies. Religion, for instance. The fantasy that aliens are walking among us is an appealing one. It comes with a side-order of "and some day they may help us with our woes." It comes with a side-order of "we are interesting and valued." It comes with a side-order of "I have figured out things the government is hiding from me."

It's not - in most cases - anything to do with mental illness. It's about the human condition, feeling things like inadequacy and being uncomfortable with responsibility and helplessness. Emotions are not insane, in most cases.

Lock up jihadists (of all sects, not just the ones whose primary languages that word comes from) way before worrying about UFO believers.

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