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Comment Re:Typical Stupidity (Score 1) 132

If the people building the stuff are not onboard with security issues, then have a modern kernel which could run on their hardware will not improve the situation.

Why the distinction? The point is that in some cases security would be just fine if the software were kept up to date. The fact that a device has a listening port open doesn't mean security is good or bad, it means it has specific functionality. One of the biggest problems in the consumer IoT world is that 99% of the shit out there is set and forget, open to any bug regardless of whether the vendor has patched it in newer products. Deploying modern software is fundamental to the issue under discussion.

In order for a product to upgrade to newer kernels, they necessarily have to build their system so that you CAN upgrade it to a newer kernel, and then you have to have a team periodically rebasing the product onto the newer kernel - with a ton of testing to figure out if things still work (hopefully mostly automated, but you still need proper real testing behind that). This is just not the case in a lot of embedded systems, because building your system to those standards takes proper engineering capabilities in the first place and an ongoing engineering support team. Generally they ship with the kernel they were using when developing the product, and they have a bunch of half-assed patches against that kernel to customize it to their hardware. If you're lucky they'll pull in some patches backported from later kernels, but often even that is asking too much.

Hmm. Let me invert the entire point - as a result of this change, we aren't going to see tons of i486-based embedded systems only upgrade to 6.19 or whatever and then be orphaned. Because there were likely still running on 2.0.28 or 2.6.16 or something at the point where they stopped releasing firmware updates 12 or 15 years ago.

Comment Re:It's the future. (Score 1) 91

A large proportion of existing meetings aren't really necessary, and yet we have them. Often you're only having the meeting because someone in a position of power over you requires it of you. In many cases because they simply couldn't be bothered to simply review the information available to them, so instead they optimize their time by requiring everyone else to update them every week forever. Why would they stop requiring this farce just because there is a different way to package discussion?

Non-meeting contacts with colleagues are to exchange information. In many casese, non-meeting contacts happen because your colleague is a dumbass who would rather waste 30 minutes of your time to solve something than spend an hour of their own time figuring the damn thing out for themselves. Or just reading the docs. Again, why would they stop doing this just because there is a different way to waste your time? Them having an AI assistant doesn't make them any smarter or more diligent. They'll ignore your AI assistant just like they previously ignored the design docs and other documentation, because they still are trying to leverage your time to accomplish their goals.

Comment Any best practices for personal crypto? (Score 1) 7

For instance, which OpenSSH private key types should be used, and which types should be removed from circulation? How often should they be rotated to help prevent issues? Are there tools to point at a site to query whether it is following best practices or not? I'd ponder a browser extension, but ... obviously that's how the malware would be carried in, sigh.

Comment Re:The problem with the analysis (Score 1) 197

True. If more people in the US beat the $133k bottom edge of their definition, but most of the growth is in expensive metros, then that is pretty suspect. And given that metro areas are concentrations of population, well, it seems reasonable to assume that most of the people in this basket are in metro areas and not in Sioux City.

[I just looked up Des Moines housing prices, and now I am sad. Not sad enough to move back to the Midwest, but still.]

Comment Re:Typical Stupidity (Score 1) 132

If the people building the stuff are not onboard with security issues, then have a modern kernel which could run on their hardware will not improve the situation. Such people probably already forked the kernel ages ago to patch it to run on their device, and they've included 23 explicit compromises to ease their internal needs (wouldn't an open remote shell be useful for debugging?). They won't be merging in security fixes unless the issue has made the news with their specific devices, and they won't be patching their fixes to new kernels and pushing those. And even the bare minimum that they do at first will fall away to nothing after a few months when their new device hits the market.

Comment Re:Really? (Score 1) 153

I write 600-word responses to technical questions in emails. Then I go back and edit because nobody asked for an essay.

But this isn't a "younger generations are weak" issue. We only notice this with younger people because they are being asked to do it. We have entire generations who skip right past explaining their position to insults, because they don't actually have any rationale for why they think what they think. They've never actually sat down and thought about it.

Comment So, what's the point of AI, then? (Score 3, Insightful) 142

Many of these techbros miss that the point of the economy is to provide a context for human livelihood. We could build a perfectly decent Earth without any AIs at all, if we decided to. For humans, there is no point to Earth without humans.

I could understand making an argument for some sort of evolutionary thing, though I wouldn't agree with it. But right now, today, that is also a dumbass argument. In a human-scale apocalypse (high-death-rate plague, nuclear winter, asteroid, etc), AIs will be among the first things to be discarded. Regardless of the current status of AIs or where they'll be in the next few years, we are a minimum of decades aware from AIs being self-hosted, even if you just give up all semblance of stewardship of the the ability of earth to host biological entities.

Comment Not sure who to root for, here! (Score 2) 47

On the one hand, Apple grabbing other people's revenue stream.

On the other hand ... Patreon's entire business model is to stick their fingers in other people's revenue streams. I was so excited about Patreon back when I signed up over a decade ago. Aggregating micropayments and then efficiently disbursing them! Awesome! But AFAICT they have turned into a cozy wrapper around credit-card fees, plus they keep trying to turn themselves into a social network or media platform or something of the sort. I mean, great, everyone is trying it, but why should I shed tears for their problems?

Comment Meetup does this. (Score 1) 38

A weekly gathering uses Meetup. Meetup SUCKS, but they layer in all of these appeals to getting a subscription, because ... I guess they we get access to the Prime Suckage? Like, do they have an entirely different set of engineers and managers running a parallel system which is much more user-centric?

I can't imagine this will be any better. Facebook is terrible in so many ways. I am willing to pay for a YouTube package to get out of YouTube's ads, but over time I'm gradually realizing that doesn't solve the core problem (productive YouTube watching is a contradiction in terms). I _might_ be willing to pay for a Facebook package which had no ads, no AI come-ons, and didn't surface rando rage-bait to me, but I suspect their offer will be the existing Facebook but moreso.

Oooh, ooh, or if they had a version of Facebook where they didn't run scammer/counterfeiter ads, where the scammy sites are re-using the original IP holder's exact marketing materials to sell their counterfeits. Hahahaha, imagine!

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