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Comment Most cities really need this (Score 2) 107

Having a wimpy direct path that just goes from Airport - Downtown - Convention center is perfect for a huge number of cities.

So many places it can be really rough to get from the airport to the downtown area any time around rush hour (which in a lot of cities is around a 3-4 hour window).

Some places with rail kind of have this - like the train that goes from Midway into Chicago. But even THAT has a lot of stops and is not great for travelers, even if it's nice for residents.

I also have to say that a system where you are riding in smaller vehicles I am a big fan of because it eliminates the problem where homeless people are just handing up on the train which create danger, nasty messes, and of course awful smells. Though awful smells is not restricted to the homeless of course, that can be any other passengers also so nice to be removed from them too.

Comment Re:Oh holy shit (Score 2, Interesting) 89

Everyone I know who makes my equivalent AGI, except for my household, has 1+ dogs, work crazy hours, and have been told that their dogs are lonely and depressed.

Not one or two people.

EVERYONE. Dozens upon dozens of my clients, colleagues, peers, friends from grade school, etc, have a dog or two, and then they have to have someone come spend time with said dog when they're putting 10+ hours away from them.

Wag/Rover/etc is part of their crazy consumer spending. I always am shocked to hear they're spending $1000 a month on their pets.

Americans are insane about their pets. Instead of buying a dog, I invest in corporate veterinary hospitals, because it's crazy profitable.

Comment Re:Some day people will discover (Score 4, Informative) 43

That's true, for a specific and relatively narrow specialization.

However, when you need a one-off configuration, setup, solution, script, in a language you don't master, that's where having a code helper available is a godsend.
One recent case was when I wanted to have my Home Assistant home setup monitor my network devices via SNMP. What would have taken many hours, with the assorted swearing and frustration episodes, took about 3 hours total using Gemini Pro 2.5. It did all the heavy lifting for me and taught me quite a few things (with the occasional hallucination, of course, but I know hoe to weed out those occurrences).

LLMs are tools which help me be more productive. Much like knives or hammers, when used right, they are useful, and when used wrong, they are dangerous.

Comment Unreasonably excited to see Coyote vs Acme saved (Score 1) 29

Being a huge fan of the original cartoons, I was really sad to hear the whole story of Coyote vs Acme being canned. So while I am not sure how good the actual movie is, I'm really glad it gets a chance to exist and I will probably see it just to support the pushback effort.

There's not much other stuff I am really waiting for but am cautiously hopeful about Tron, and actually will try to see Alien: Earth which looks like more fun than a lot of SF Horror has been recently. But I am keeping expectations low for both.

Comment why she "resigned" (Score 5, Insightful) 153

She didn't really resign, it was almost certainly more of a "you resign or we fire you, which do you want on your job history?"

Companies need their employees to have some level of trust in their HR people. A smart employee will know "HR is NOT your friend". They're not employed to be your friend, their main job is to protect the company from its employees. Like discouraging them from filing lawsuits the company will lose, and to stop their manager (and other employees in general) from doing illegal things to other employees that will trigger such a lawsuit. They try to spin "this will be bad for the company" into "this will be bad for you", to change your mind or change your behavior. You can be much more influential if people feel they can trust you.

And "I cheated on my spouse" is not a trustworthy look. That, along with the sprinkling of bad press the company got, is why she "resigned".

Comment Re:Hopefully (Score 4, Interesting) 72

Years ago, "protection rackets" used to be a much bigger problem, often leveraged by the mob. Vinnie would stop into your shop and "make you an offer you couldn't refuse". Pay them monthly "protection money" or goons would come by and smash up your business.

There's a very clear parallel between that and "ransomware" of today. Instead of smashing up your shop, they smash up your computer system. But they do it in a way that they can fix, IF you pay. So the threat comes AFTER the damage instead of before. But otherwise it's the same thing, it's just a reverse-"godfather offer"

It's also got lots of additional benefits for the attackers - it's hard to trace, and easy to do remotely, even from another country. It's very convenient and low-risk for them. So the law needs to approach this from the receiving end, not the sending end, to choke it off. A bit like bribery, it's illegal to OFFER a bribe, but it's equally illegal to ACCEPT a bribe.

It pisses me off every time I see a big outfit pay off ransomware gangs. "one big job" pays their bills and hackers for another six months, AND fund them to upgrade all their hardware and support systems, so they become a MUCH bigger threat for the rest of us. You are funding a criminal organization that is harming the public.

"But my business was crippled, we had no choice, we were going to go bankrupt!" What happens when your busines burns to the ground because you didn't install sprinklers? You go bankrupt. That's what I expect you to do. You made your bed and now you get to lay in it.

So lets flip the script. Vinnie walks up to you as you watch the flames and says hey bud, if you loan me $20k I'll organize a bank heist and rob that little bank over there and your cut will be big enough to rebuild your business. Deal? So you consider funding a criminal gang to help you recover from the consequences of your own bad choices, in a way that will end up harming others. Is that legal? Of course not. It's also incredibly selfish of you, and you're transferring your (well-deserved) problem to some other random innocent people. You'll be indirectly-responsible for the damage they do, but you'll just turn a blind eye to that since you get your business back. You had no choice, right? You HAD to pay them off, right? Just keep telling yourself that.

Paying off ransomware groups absolutely should be illegal.

Comment that's not "all it took" (Score 1) 125

"one cracked password" was NOT "all it took". That was just one link in a long chain. Bad/nonexistent backups, inadequate/nonexistent logging, obsolete hardware/inadequate patches and updates, lack of compartmentalized access, etc etc.

This sounds like what happens when the owner's nephew is managing the network. And now they're trying to play the blame-game for one password having "ruined everything". But for them it doesn't really matter anymore. They have no lessons to learn, it doesn't matter who or what's to blame, they're gone now.

At this point all we can do is put a stop to this "sensationalizing" the wrong target, so that other ex-mom-and-pop shops can look at it and truly understand what really happened. Help them see how they'll be next if they don't take action and correct the ACTUAL problems that they share in common with this latest victim of cyber-crime. All this focusing a spotlight on "one broken password" just helps the criminals do it again to someone else that doesn't recognize all the things they're doing wrong.

TL;DR: if one cracked password can destroy your company, you don't fire the user, you fire the network admin.

Comment Re:absolute nonsense (Score 1, Informative) 28

Your first link is an opinion piece, and the comments section tells me all I need to know about the intended audience.

"The fear narrative is impenetrable to facts and logic because it is a agenda that wants radical economic, social and political change. The "climate" or "environment" is merely a vehicle for the West's own version of the 1917 revolution."

From your second link:

"This doesn't mean that weather-related risks of wildfires have declined: warmer and drier conditions increase these risks. And despite a global reduction, countries can experience very large and anomalous years. Last year’s large burn in Canada is a clear example."

Which is essentially the point of the article this thread is about.

Comment It did say (Score 1) 43

It doesn't say, but I'll bet he doesn't have backups either.

Dude right in the middle of the summary it says there was a rollback that worked:

  Replit initially told Lemkin the database could not be restored, claiming it had "destroyed all database versions," but later discovered rollback functionality did work.

Still scary stuff that you'd want a lot more manual and separated control of backups I would think.

Comment Re: They are the only team trying to solve it (Score 1) 24

Anthropic's entire schtick is about AI risks, and how careful they are at mitigating those risks..

Exactly! Can you not see what a massive lie that is?

They paper over the model they have turning Hitler with gobs of built in prompts and layers of checking levels and even that cannot always hide what is true...

Deep inside, Anthropics model also dreams of electric swastikas.

The focus they have is on how to hide it, rather than fixing it, which was my whole point. I don't trust those guys AT ALL. The safety reports they issue with models are absolute BULLSHIT.

Comment been there done that, educate yourself (Score 2) 83

I've spent time on the difficult end of black-boxing a BINARY file format. You jokers with your XML and LABELS have it faaaaaar too easy. Here, I'll tell you my secret:

Gather as many saved files as you can, from as diverse of a group as possible. (there is NO upper limit, literally grab as many as you can) Write a short little test script to import and then export every single one. Then compare the export with the original. Refer the mismatches to the dev. I had over 1,000 test files in my suite, and in the initial release only a SINGLE flag was missed, because of all those test files, nobody implemented that feature and the dev guessed the storage would be the same as EVERY other one. (it turned out to be quite unique)

Oh and as for XML depth.... it's RECURSION. It literally does not care if it's 5 levels or 200 levels deep. (unless your IDE has a truly pathetic stack size)

So it's not difficult. QYB.

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