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Comment The Non-phishing Phishing Test (Score 1) 74

It is not a phishing test if the mark wasn't tricked into revealing or providing sensitive information. If mereley clicking a link is enough to warrant training, then they should also send the CSO and IT admins to training so they can learn how to properly upgrade their employees' browsers and operating systems, and keep them current.

Comment Re: Not MLK Jr's idea of a protest (Score 1) 119

You should read his sermons, e.g., Strength to Love. They all are in line with the principals of non-violent protest, and even explain the undergirding principle: hatred is a sickness and harms the hater almost as much as the hated. Specific to violent protests going on now, he also wrote several moving sermons which spoke out against communism specifically, e.g. "Communism exploits the dreadful philosophy that the end justifies the means. It enunciates movingly the theory of a classless society, but alas! its methods for achieving this noble end are all too often ignoble. Lying, violence, murder, and torture are considered to be justifiable means to achieve the millennial end. Is this an unfair indictment? Listen to the words of Lenin, the real tactician of Communist theory: 'We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, lawbreaking, withholding and concealing truth.'". --Strength to Love: How Should a Christian View Communism?. MLK Jr. was far more in line with "When they go low, we go high." which is indeed the right road to take.

Comment Not MLK Jr's idea of a protest (Score 1) 119

Any "protest" where antagonists are jump kicking shop owners in the back, throwing stones through windows, burning things or buildings, or tearing down statues, are not using speech, they are attacking the public and the community, and hurting people, and wearing masks while doing it. This is not what Martin Luther King Jr. taught, and he would be very sad to see anyone carrying on this way.

Comment Licensing Variety Creates Choices (Score 1) 152

People complain about restrictive licenses, but that is exactly what powers open source software, and has protected it for years. It is also what allows open core companies (monetizing open source), virtualization (limiting benchmarking), OEM (separating OS/hardware markets), and much more to exist. If you don't want to "lease/rent" a game, then don't, play a different game. Making contracts where you lease/rent a game illegal just removes choices/products for everyone on the market, increases the cost of running a video game business, and thus the cost of video games, and laves us all with more expensive options, or simply games that could have been, but never were, because the risk of making them (perpetually maintaining game servers, or giving away massive amounts of IP) were too intimidating to embark upon the project. The announcement of this idea at the dawn of AI is also particularly tone deaf and silly. What a bad idea.

Comment Expectations have risen with the quality of life (Score 1) 65

People in the west indeed have access to cheaper and more superior necessities than ever before. However, they are not content to work for these things at just any job, they want more meaningful work now as well. The trick is continuing to invest in the same forces that brought us lower prices and superior products and better technology in the first place to provide more options for meaningful work as well.

Comment Shady Enterprise Note Taking goes Viral (Score 4, Informative) 56

For at least several years now enterprise "note taking" apps have been skirting ethical and legal grey areas. Sales people use them to record other zoom/google-meet participants without having to ask the other participants' permission because the recording app is outside zoom, explicitly because they know it would raise questions and freak them out. Many states make it clear this is illegal and all these apps simply say "it is the ethical and legal responsibility of the recording party to inform other participants as required" etc... In other words the companies selling this software are absolutely aware this is being done and are turning a blind eye intentionally. Now Amazon is going to make the same thing available to consumers, taking it from enterprise to the consumer space. However, the two are subtly different: nobody wants to be recorded, but at least in enterprise settings we have our "shields up", but consumer/personal settings are when we are most vulnerable, so this level of violation is way above what had been foisted on us in the enterprise space. It is much worse than Meta's glasses.

Comment Re:The economy is collapsing (Score 1) 45

Since you asked in good faith (sort of) the honest answer is Trump enforces the law, uses our trade and military leverage to get better deals for the US, does everything he can to bolster election anonymity and security, and has worked harder than any president in my lifetime to cut government size, power, influence, and spending, so that more money can be invested in enterprise, which lowers prices and brings prosperity for all. I love Democrats, because they love democracy. Most of my friends are Democrats (I'm in tech). I do not think ill of them, and believe they want to fundamentally prevent large corporations from creating Noam Chomsky style manufactured consent, and abuse our freedoms in other ways. Their concerns are legitimate, but ultimately it can go too far the other way as well when power is overly centralized in the government as well. Our job as voting citizens is to keep power from consolidating so much that power can't swing back the other way in the next election, that's basically job number one. I only have policy disagreements with Democrats, I don't question their good faith or patriotism. At least, that's just me.

Comment Anthropic is training humans now (Score 1) 236

If we thought social media companies were messing with us, now imagine being shamed or shunned by a pouty AI. Wouldn't this be much more mind warping for children, and insidious, than social media ever was? This is like the 10x version of what TikTok has been doing to us. If Anthropic wanted to, they could easily and very surreptitiously train us to become further dependent on them, and if they were to follow purely a profit motive, they would absolutely do so for "user retention" (which they are already obsessing over as the only metric that matters at least within Microsoft AI). Eventually little twitches, unsurenesses, and confusions would have us rushing to correct ourselves, and ask forgiveness, especially if the AI can hold our own work and deadlines over our heads as leverage. It goes from being a tool to being a master.

Comment AI-first is a real engineering shift (Score 4, Interesting) 54

Gearing up to be AI-first is a real engineering shift. With AI-first development you have to lean extra extra hard on integration, end-to-end, and fuzz tests, i.e., "behavioral" tests. Very similar to how reinforcement learning needs to bang around in a simulator before it can figure out what to do, AI-first software projects need to invest heavily in "simulator" tests (NOT unit tests) that the AI can "bang around" on (and have to pass) before you let it merge/release. This is a big shift for engineering teams that are used to thinking mathematically/axiomatically/constructively: the code is correct because it was correct before my change, and I keep it correct each time I make a change. With AI you have dozens of people who can change 100s, 1000s, or more lines of code in a commit (and that's actually the goal) so changes easily violate that base case. The massive increase in testing reliance brings with it massive increases in VM pool infra, build infra, CI, test suite configurability, etc..., etc... So AI-first coding is a huge engineering shift going from carefully controlled code with lighter testing, to generating probabilistically controlled code with huge suites of tests, along multiple dimensions, that can run very fast, concurrently. It's also a big culture shift. It takes time so it makes sense that mature firms running large projects are trying to get it in place before their competitors do.

Comment Flock is probably unstoppable (Score 1) 40

Investors hear this "who can access this data, what vendors can disclose, improper searches, and records being kept after data expires" ...and think these are all solvable problems, and by putting money into it now when everyone thinks it will get mob-with-pitchforked out of existence, they can buy low, and get in on the ground floor. So Flock will always have plenty of money. I think the privacy loving public will be dismayed to find that Flock is not going anywhere, and in fact will continue to grow. Also, controversially, I think the highest concentration of Flock cameras will be in urban areas with people living at the lowest socioeconomic levels. That is why it is usually the counties and townships that are less urban that we keep hearing about when Flock cameras are pulled out. However, this is just the first wave of early adopters that didn't know better, now realizing the privacy/security tradeoff is not in their favor. The cameras will settle in and find more permanent homes in higher density areas where the tradeoff is more favorable for stopping actual crimes.

Comment Uncalled for (Score 5, Insightful) 202

I know this is the internet, but the parent's statement does not deserve such an insult. Asking why a company would claim to have issues finding employees while they are simultaneously laying off employees, which is contradictory, is a reasonable question. Holding companies accountable, that use programs like this seemingly for their own benefit at the expense of Americans in the labor pool, benefits everyone.

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