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Comment Re:Super neat, alas not a solution to the issue (Score 1) 29

Well, I'm pretty sure your bank has a web interface, so you don't have to use the banking app to do your banking.

Your work auth app may be more complex - if it's TOTP, you might be able to export the seed and key and there are plenty TOTP generators. (It's also one of the easiest programming assignments to do so any competent programmer should be able to come up with something in under an hour without vibe coding). Unfortunately there are a few TOTP systems that make it extremely difficult to get the seed and key values to use a third party TOTP generator.

Your state legal filing app, well, I'm sure there's a web based version of that as well - I can't imagine the state restricting legal filings to owners of Android or Apple phones.

Now, the car sharing app might be more complex - I think most car sharing sites have regular websites so you can book them from the desk, but there is also a good possibility a lot of them are app only for no good reason. Though many do use app based "car keys" which use some NFC thing to control the car.

Comment Re:Civilization collapse (Score 1) 85

Jane Jacobs wrote a great book on civilization collapse in 2004 titled "Dark Age Ahead":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
        "Dark Age Ahead is a 2004 book by Jane Jacobs describing what she sees as the decay of five key "pillars" in "North America": community and family, higher education, science and technology, taxes and government responsiveness to citizen's needs, and self-regulation by the learned professions. She argues that this decay threatens to create a Dark Age unless the trends are reversed. Jacobs characterizes a Dark Age as a "mass amnesia" where even the memory of what was lost is lost."

She makes many good points. That said, like John Gardner wrote in the 1964, "Every generation must learn for themselves what the words on the monuments mean":
"Self-renewal : the individual and the innovative society"
https://archive.org/details/se...
        "The only stability possible is stability in motion."--John William Gardner
        In his classic treatise Self-Renewal, John W. Gardner examines why great societies thrive and die. He argues that it is dynamism, not decay, that is dramatically altering the landscape of American society. The twentieth century has brought about change more rapidly than any previous era, and with that came advancements, challenges, and often destruction. Gardner cautions that "a society must court the kinds of change that will enrich and strengthen it, rather than the kind of change that will fragment and destroy it."
        A society's ability to renew itself hinges upon its individuals. Gardner reasons that it is the waning of the heart and spirit--not a lack of material might--that threatens American society. Young countries, businesses, and humans have several key commonalities: they are flexible, eager, open, curious, unafraid, and willing to take risks. These conditions lead to success. However, as time passes, so too comes complacency, apathy, and rigidity, causing motivation to plummet. It is at this junction that great civilizations fall, businesses go bankrupt, and life stagnates. Gardner asserts that the individual's role in social renewal requires each person to face and look beyond imminent threats.
        Ultimately, we need a vision that there is something worth saving. Through this vision, Gardner argues, society will begin to renew itself, not permanently, but past its average lifespan, and it will at once become enriched and rejuvenated."

Also on ideas from that book: https://fluidself.org/books/ps...
        "Every individual, organization or society must mature, but much depends on how this maturing takes place. A society whose maturing consists simply of acquiring more firmly established ways of doing things is headed for the graveyard--even if it learns to do these things with greater and greater skill. In the ever-renewing society what matures is a system or framework within which continuous innovation, renewal and rebirth can occur.
        Our thinking about growth and decay is dominated by the image of a single life-span, animal or vegetable. Seedling, full flower and death. "The flower that once has blown forever dies." But for an ever-renewing society the appropriate image is a total garden, a balanced aquarium or other ecological system. Some things are being born, other things are flourishing, still other things are dying--but the system lives on. ..."

For example, as I wrote elsewhere on July 4th, even as the USA is facing political issues, the internet has become a place where people provide each other support about health issues in a Patch-Adams-style participatory wellness community. That is an amazing revolution in itself. As Patch Adams said: "The most revolutionary act one can commit in our world is to be happy. (Patch Adams)" Or, I'd add, to help others be happy too.
https://soylentnews.org/commen...

I think a big part of self-renewal in our society may come from both humans and their AIs learning to laugh at the irony in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Comment Re:PJ must be losing her mind over this! (Score 2) 54

Does anyone actually have any evidence PJ was a real person and not just a persona created by IBM's PR department? PJ appeared mysteriously, exclusively posting stuff supportive of IBM's position in this case. They never turned their attention to any other litigation. It's awfully suspicious. You'd think a real person who knew that much about the relevant law would have opinions on other cases as well, and you'd expect them to market themselves using the fame/goodwill generated with Groklaw. You'd also think they'd have done at least one interview, or you could find at least one person who's met them. I'm not saying anything posted on Groklaw wasn't true, just that it always seemed like a very successful IBM PR exercise to me.

Her name is Pamela Jones, she was a paralegal. She's done real interviews in the past. She was/is real!

Comment Re:Who cares? (Score 1) 53

You left out informative, but otherwise I pretty much agree with you. The problem is that I expect MANY jobs are going to evaporate. Whether enough new jobs will appear (that are easy to cross-train into) is another question, and I really find it dubious.

We won't find out the answer this year, but we may find out next year.

Comment Re:My job is now reviewing AI code (Score 1) 85

Or I might only choose to identify as a transition person. My pronouns are revert/rejected.

My pronouns are majesty and eminence. You may refer to my as "Your Majesty".

And how DARE anyone tell me those are not pronouns! I can define my pronouns as I wish, and others must accept and cherish that.

Comment Re:kids vs the world (Score 1) 23

When you put up a roadblock, teens will take it as a challenge to get around, even if they would otherwise never have pursued the goal of whatever is beyond the restriction. And teens are very creative; they will break these guardrails in so many ways. It'll be a black-hat/white-hat back and forth for awhile. We'll all learn something, I would hope, without too many casualties along the way.

This. a million times this. Even way back in the day. As teens, my buds and I had zero trouble getting alcohol, cigarettes, had no trouble getting pR0n, some of us had little trouble getting devil's lettuce.

All while we supposedly were not able to so such things. But we figured out how. I even figured out how to make wine.

Some of us got pregnant, some of us figured out not to get pregnant. Some of us figured out how to commit crimes. Sadly, some of us deleted ourselves.

All without ChatGPT. At that time, things like the Beatles Helter Skelter. or Black Sabbath was causing teens to do bad things, along with Dancing and youth subcultures, comic books movies like horror films and television.

This isn't an argument against protecting the teens, but it is saying that whatever we do, they'll figure out how to get around it.

Comment Re:rrriiiight... (Score 1) 72

Huh? It's an unsecure and unmaintained open-source driver that's causing the issue. The OS is running perfectly fine.

Perfect illustration of the thinking problem here. You don't even get WHAT the problem is.

Why is a driver able to fuck up a system? The OS should be the watchdog that says "WTF are you doing there?", not the obedient slave executing whatever.

A great illustration is W^X - first found not in Windows, but in OpenBSD. Because Windows happily goes "whatever you say, master", while the guys at OpenBSD said "no actual use case of non-broken, non-malicious software should ever behave like that, so we'll block it".

since a non-MS open-source driver is actually the problem here.

If you are responsible for a sensitive location, and a five-year old kid from the neighbourhood one day just wanders in and take a look around out of curiosity, pressing a few buttons to see what happens - you would definitely not keep your job by claiming that the little kid is actually the problem here.

Comment So close and yet so far (Score 1) 29

This could be my next phone but has two big problems I see immediately. No earpiece so you can't, you know, hold it up to your ear and make calls like on a normal phone, you either need to have a bluetooth earpiece at all times or use speakerphone. The other thing I don't like is the Blackberry-like form factor. Nothing beats or comes close to the landscape slider layout. That said if it's open-source hardware I could at least potentially mod up a landscape slider version with an earpiece.

Comment Re:How is that even possible? (Score 1) 52

If the C code does something unsafe, how can it be machine-translated into safe Rust, without knowing the intention of the programmer?

The key word being "if".

There's a ton of C code out there, the vast majority of which doesn't do anything unsafe. Take say, Apache httpd - what unsafe thing would it do? It just forks, spits a file out over a socket and that's it. The most unsafe thing it does would be to run a plugin, but that's mostly handled by the dynamic loader.

In fact, most userspace code out there isn't really doing anything irrational or unsafe - they're using kernel interfaces to do the unsafe bits, and everything else is just system calls and library functions.

And even if you can't convert all code, you can protect most code. Never let perfect get in the way of good enough. The few bits of C code that need to exist because it's unsafe is much easier than millions of lines of C code that doesn't do unsafe stuff but can become unsafe in certain weird situations.

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