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Comment Shitty code (Score 1) 86

Well written code is self-documenting, specifically because once you start putting documentation somewhere else, you start getting a divergence in truth. And I'm not talking about leaving comments in the code - that's also documentation, as anyone who has had to reconcile business processes with code can attest upon discovering that the comments and the code also don't agree with each other. (This is where I try and sell people on having detailed commit messages, and then realize that they're all going to be lost the next time someone advocates for a squash merge...)

Refactoring is how you refresh your knowledge of the code and remove any accumulated cruft. Stuff like "Oh, we meant to do that in the next release, but we've completely removed that functionality, so this stub can go too.", and "Well shit, this algorithm doesn't work the way we thought it did - and the test suite is missing the test that would tell us that it doesn't work for that last 10% of use cases.", and "Uh... this method doesn't only do that one thing anymore, time to refactor and dry things out."

The moment you start relying on "tribal knowledge" to manage your code, you're fucked. Because very soon, as you have turnover (doesn't have to be layoffs - people can get promoted up or sideways, a bunch of people get hired, some people get transferred to special projects and start forgetting the stuff they maintained), the tribal knowledge distills to one thing: "If it isn't broken, don't touch it - you'll break it."

In other words... If your codebase is in decent shape, AI code bots are not a net negative unless people are blindly approving commits. If your codebase is in shitty shape, you're probably already having issues with diverging truth (and inability to scale), and you're fucked either way.

Submission + - Wi-Fi Routers Can Scan Your Body to Identify Exactly Who You Are (futurism.com) 1

JoeyRox writes: New research out of Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology found that the types of Wi-Fi routers we all have in our homes come with a major privacy vulnerability that can be used to identify any human body that comes within their range.

The study, flagged by Gizmodo, used machine learning systems to identify individuals with an accuracy rate of 99.5 percent. To do so, the researchers exploited a vulnerability in a process known as beamforming feedback information (BFI), which was introduced to allow routers to focus Wi-Fi signals on connected devices, as opposed to the older approach, which is to blanket an entire area in coverage.

While BFI is great for network connectivity, it has a major downsides for privacy. For starters, devices connected to a router using beamforming need to send constant feedback in order to be found. As routers send out and receive network feedback, the signal is inevitably impacted by real world factors like pets, walls, and people.

Making matters worse is the fact that this data is basically wide open for anyone to grab — not only is that feedback data unencrypted, it can also be accessed without ever connecting directly to the router.

Submission + - I found a second vote.gov -- and it's registered to the White House

As_I_Please writes: The Drey Dossier reports that the National Design Studio, an office created by executive order and which reports only to the White House, has been building copies of federal agency websites like vote.gov, passports.gov, login.gov and others.

What [the National Design Studio] is doing is taking the parts of the federal government that touch you directly, your prescription, your voter registration, your passport, your federal login, out of the agencies that legally own them and rebuilding them on White House infrastructure. Vote.gov belongs to the Election Assistance Commission, and the studio built a copy. Passports belong to the State Department, and the studio is building a replacement this week. Login.gov belonged to GSA, and the studio’s guy runs it now.

Trump has said publicly that this infrastructure is for other presidents, and he is right about that. It is the one thing in this story I take him at his word on. The infrastructure outlasts him. Whoever wins in 2028 inherits the websites, the vendors, the data, and the hardware, sealed and waiting.

NDS Infrastructure Map — my live working github map of every National Design Studio subdomain I have found, filterable by status, registrant, and parent domain. If you want to retrace this investigation or watch new subdomains appear in real time, start here.

Comment Re:The Profit Effect. (Score 1) 112

This kind of thing comes from American Puritanism on the internet.

Well, the last piece of that sentence is the key part. I, and most everyone I know, have no problem using English language words. It seems to me that the only reason to censor yourself with weird, invented terms is because you want to be able to monetize your content on YouTube.

Comment Re:Think of the school children (Score 1) 141

DST works by tricking people to wake up and get to their daily activities an hour earlier than they normally would. And it is sold as "giving" people an hour extra in the evening. They could do that without changing their clocks by just waking up at 5 instead of 6 and working 7-4 instead of 8-5, but most people don't want to wake up earlier. So we use DST to trick them into doing it.

Doing DST as a whole society also helps for people who don't have flexible hours for their daytime activities.

But i realized a while ago that the twice a year time change is the PRIMARY reason why DST even works. Because without the constant change, people would just adapt to the new timezone. Daily activities (like school and work) would shift to starting an hour later. Lunch would start being eaten from 1-2 instead of 12-1, as the new time would be when the sun is at its highest. Dinner would be 6-7 instead of 5-6, because that is closer to when the sun is setting. It would take several years, but eventually, society would shift its schedule to closer match the sun. And the way that DST "tricks" people into getting up an hour earlier would stop.

btw, your preference (and mine) for year standard time is the way most of the world works. Gray countries in that map do not do DST. It's really only US, Canada, Europe and a few other places. And I'll never understand DST in Alaska, which is already entirely in the wrong time zone.

Comment Re:Weaponization of lockouts (Score 1) 66

DVRs were the starting point. The namesake for what you're talking about, tivoization, is Tivo, the DVR that existed way back when TV was still analog and being displayed on CRTs.

It's why the GPLv3 was made: to add clauses to forbid tivoization. Instead, a lot of the open source community moved in the opposite direction, moving to licenses that allowed companies even more freedom to lock up their code.

At some point people have to learn and fight back.

Good luck. This is not a new fight by any means. You could argue that the FSF has been fighting it for almost half a century. People by and large do not care.

Comment Re:Win the battle, lose the war (Score 3, Insightful) 66

More likely they'll separate the OS and the TV code so they can ship the open source OS along with their closed source software

I'd be amazed if this wasn't already the case. We've already been through this with Tivo, it was one of the reasons behind the creation of the GPLv3. Tivo based their DVRs on Linux, and provided downloads of the Linux code. But their DVRs used hardware DRM to ensure that only code signed by Tivo would run, making it so that even with the open source code, you couldn't run changes on the hardware.

From what I can tell, Vizio is doing the same thing, but isn't providing downloads to the kernel code they're using. It's possible that there's some proprietary hardware drivers that they don't want to release code to, but Nvidia has already show how to work around that.

I expect the end result to be like Tivo: a bunch of archives of the open source software used in the TV, but none of the code required to make it useful and no signing key necessary to allow any changes to run on the TV itself.

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