This is always the danger of beginning birders adding their findings to ebird. Many of us use another app, Merlin, made by the same organization, to listen to birds around us to help us identify birds by their sounds. The preferred method (the one we hope everyone does, but know that they don't all do) is to use Merlin to give you a list of birds to look for, then once you can confirm the bird is in the area, track it on ebird. Merlin uses "AI" to identify birds in the area, but makes mistakes. People trying to use Merlin to ID a bird using a picture are even more prone to errors than the part that identifies with sound. If someone just dumps what Merlin hears into ebird, and it's not a particularly uncommon thing for people to do, it can clog up the database with this AI spam.

I'm certain any ornithologists using the data would treat it like a CAPCHA, where they only count data that agrees among several accounts, instead of treating any individual count as being truthful.

LLM-based AI can do some pretty impressive things. It *seems* to answer questions with remarkable accuracy, and it instantly produces code in response to often ridiculously vague input queries:

"Write me an app to track ant farms in Vietnam"

And what do you know? You get something that seems surprisingly useful!

Except that it's all an illusion.

I'm an experienced software developer (25 years now) and I focus on information lifecycle apps targeting workgroups and enterprise - organizations of 50+ people. As I write this, about 20,000 people are concurrently using an app I created.

Over the past year or so, I've been trying to deeply integrate AI into my workflow. It's there when I write code in VSCode, it's there when I write sysadmin/shell code, and it's there when I'm refactoring.

The more I use it, and the "better" it gets, the more frustrating I find it. It's only somewhat useful in the area that most coding projects fail: debugging.

No matter what it seems, LLM-based AI doesn't *understand* anything. It's just an ever-more-clever trickery based on word prediction. As such, it serves only as another abstraction that still must be understood and reviewed by a real person with actual understanding, or the result is untrustable, unstable, and insecure "vibe code" that is largely worthless outside of securing VC funding, which is the thing that AI perhaps does best: help unprepared people get VC funding.

You still need real people to get code you can live with, depend on, and grow with.

Technologies like OAUTH 2.0 have been around for a long, long time, and their purpose is to provide a verifiable audit-trail for users.

And it works! Although there have been (and will always be) security issues, the reality is that technologies like SAML and OAUTH do provide a very useful level of trust.

Except that, although these technologies do allow for a useful transfer of identity, the agents widely used to provide this identity (the IDP) is never an entity that provides a uniformly useful level of identity.

Here I am: Bill Jones (not my real name) citizen of the UK (not my real country, either) and I have no way to properly assert that to, say, Bank of the West (not my real bank, either) or Northern Airlines. (not my real airline)

If I have to assert my true identity, I have a state-issued driver's license or passport. Why do I have no way to assert either of these identification documents electronically?

Why can't I use my passport ID to assert myself to the bank, or the airline?

Seems to me that it would be HIGHLY USEFUL if I could. And it seems to be self-evident and proper that the agencies that issue drivers licenses or passports could offer electronic identification, even if it's sourced out to a tech company with a good reputation.

In the US, it's now become increasingly common to have a unified electronic ID to interact with agencies: see id.me. This is a start, and I know government agencies work GLACIALLY SLOWLY so maybe by the time my grandkids are having babies this could be a thing.

Eh?

> At some point you have to ask why you're using RAID at all. If it's for always-on, avoiding data loss due to hardware failures, and speed, then RAID 6 isn't really am great solution for avoiding data loss when disks get to these kinds of sizes, the chances of getting more than one disk fail simultaneously is approaching one, and obviously it was never great for speed.

If you're at this point, then using drives at all is probably already off the table. But I think this position is probably ridiculous.

I have many years of experience managing file clusters in scopes ranging from SOHO to serving up to 15,000 people at a time in a single cluster. In a cluster of 24 drives under these constant, enterprise-level loads, I saw maybe 1 drive fail in a year.

I've heard this trope about "failure rate approaching 1" since 500GB drives were new. From my own experience, it wasn't really true then, any more than it's true now.

Yes, HDDs have failure rates to keep in mind, but outside the occasional "bad batch", they are still shockingly reliable. Failure rates per unit haven't changed much, even though with rising capacities, that makes the failure rate per GB rise. It still doesn't matter as much as you think.

You can have a great time if you follow a few rules, in my experience:

1) Engineer your system so that any drive cluster going truly offline is survivable. AKA "DR" or "Disaster Recovery". What happens if your data center gets flooded or burns to the ground? And once you have solid DR plans, TRUMPET THE HECK OUT OF IT and tell all your customers. Let them know that they really are safe! It can be a HUGE selling point.

2) Engineer your system so that likely failures are casually survivable. For me, this was ZFS/RAIDZ2, with 6 or 8 drive vdevs, on "white box" 24 bay SuperMicro servers with redundant power.

3) If 24x7x36* uptime is really critical, have 3 levels of redundancy, so even in a failure condition, you fail to a redundant state. For me engineering at "enterprise" level, we used application-layer logic so there were always at least 2 independent drive clusters containing full copies of all data. We had 3 drive clusters using different filesystem technologies (ZFS, XFS/LVM) and sometimes we chose to take one offline to do filesystem level processing or analysis.

4) Backups: You *do* have backups, and you do adhere to the 3-2-1 rule, right? In our case, we used ZFS replication and merged backups and DR. This combined with automated monitoring ensured that we were ready for emergencies, which did happen and were always managed in a satisfactory way.

About 3 years ago, they imposed a rule that would forbid English tutoring by foreign teachers online. They said that the expectations for kids getting into better schools were getting so difficult that it was causing families to not be able to afford having multiple kids. So, the government just made the blanket statement that forbid that tutoring, so they could say, "There! Now, education is cheaper! We fixed the problem!"

I know Ice Road Truckers isn't quite a documentary, but they've shown people drilling down and pumping water up onto the ice is an effective way to thicken the ice already. That part isn't the new concept -- it's already shown to work. Whether the long term effects are beneficial is being determined by the project, but not whether you can use the technique to thicken the ice.

This. You can only do what you can do. If you can't get other people to stop polluting, but you have a way to reduce the effects, that's worth doing! Whether it will work is a different question (I hope it does!), but the slow inevitability of doom isn't a good reason to stop trying to push it back.

If you have important files that live only on your computer - especially if they only reside on one computer, then you're an even bigger fool and deserve what you get.

For the most part, cloud providers do a much better job than individual people do. Putting it on Google's servers is generally safer than keeping it only on your own computer.

Also, have you ever tried to back up a Windows host? It's ridiculously complicated! Sure, there are plenty of "easy" solutions, but does that back up SQL Server? That fancy accounting package you spent $4000 for? Where *does* it keep those files?

I found this out recently when I upgraded a hard drive and reloaded the OS onto the new drive. Why would you think it would be so danged difficult to get Quickbooks client files transfered to a new hard drive?

hahahaha

I have been back in the office since May 2020. At first it was just 3 days a week and then by July it was every day as per normal. Here in Perth, lockdown was just 6 weeks and thankfully we have kept it at bay since then.

As long as this nasty UK strain stays away, we should be able to avoid another lockdown and keep going.

Also I wrote a song called Caves of Steel.

https://soundcloud.com/pudgene...

Hey! I was thinking about you but had no way to get in touch. Ping me somehow!

Sorry I’ll do better next time my bad

I don’t know if she did, and don’t care. She was great and we were sad to see her go.

I left because the company was bought, and the new owners laid off some of its more expensive long-tenured employees, since they were putting the site effectively into maintenance mode, trying to sell if off. They just wanted to keep ThinkGeek and didn’t care to improve the other properties. I was forced out, but I was there a long time, and it was good for me to move on when I did.

So you did not read the story. OK.

So the text contradicts the headline: it is not about climate change, but about criticizing the company in public.

This is a fake news headline. Please fix it.

(I worked with Maren briefly. She was great to work with. I also worked at Slashdot for many years, and this headline is trash.)