Posts by [email protected]

Three competing wants.

People want to: 1) Protect children from porn, 2) Allow adults to see porn if they wish, 3) Allow anonymous access to the internet. You cannot have all three things at one time. Many argue that anonymity of access and the right to adult porn is more important that protecting children. Southern US states are arguing that protecting children is the most important thing, so either anonymity of Internet access or access to porn must go.

Personally, I'd be okay banning porn online. Adults could still access porn offline. so that "freedom of speech" would still be upheld. The strong identity needed keep children from accessing porn, while allowing adults to access porn would be a nightmare.

A modest proposal

"Social media" makes money by having citizens create stuff that other people want to view. This approach creates content for social media companies for free. Why tax the social media companies at a very high rate so that the product created by the citizens contributes to the local economy. So, for example, in India there are about a quarter billion Indian citizens producing content for Facebook. Assuming that Indian subscribers make up 10% of all Facebook subscribers, make Facebook pay a tax of say 70% on 10% of their global revenue.

This might seem extreme, but let's face it, Facebook, Google, etc... are getting that content for free. Why not tax them?

Change takes time

Porting a massive installed base takes forever. The first step is to stop creating new projects in C/C++

Fear of missing out

All this waste and pollution because some CEOs and investors are suffering from FOMO. Maybe AI will be the next big thing - can't risk not investing in it. It reminds me of Web3.

Blame the Tech Bros!

John Scalzi explains all this in his book, "Starter Villain". His best fictional example was the pitch that proclaimed, "Your testicles as a service!" The pitch was for a type of contraceptive that involved testicular surgery and a phone app to turn your fertility on and off. That's too unrealistic you say? I expect to see it announced any day.

Anyway, the book is a fun read about this common complaint.

Marketing...sigh

If desktop search is not enough... Make it spicy!

Who do they think they are?

McAfee?

More of the same

Who do these people think they are? Crypto Tech Bros?

Way too dumb

Ignoring the issue of whether they were intentionally being sexists, do you want to invest in a company run by people so stupid that they did not know they were going to be called out for literally objectifying women? In a way though, it isn't surprising. Sexism seems to be inversely proportional to intelligence.

It is a lot like crypto

Block-chain and proof of work algorithms have many applications, but crypto was/is mostly a pyramid scheme run by hucksters. I suspect that LLMs will end up being about the same. There will be many applications where it is applicable. Right now, this seems to be different variations on the "spicey search" application. If the tech bros want to convince me that AI is really the future they will need to show me more applications.

So, KnowB4 only knew afterwards... Interesting.

Missing the point

It is interesting to know the reason CrowdStrike missed the bug in its software, but it does not matter that much. Bugs are going to happen. The real problem illustrated by this disaster is the fact that organizations like Delta Airlines allow automatic updates to their systems without testing them first. I understand that inside places like Delta Airlines people are desperately searching for someone to blame. Placing blame will not prevent this sort of mass outage from happening in the future. Switching to another OS or another programming language will not prevent it either. What is needed are operational changes to how software is deployed. Automatic updates to systems that require continuous uptime is the root problem.

Unfortunately, CEOs get rewarded for taking bold risks rather than being prudently cautious. The soon to be ex-CEO of Boing is a good example. Under his direction, Boeing became less of an "airplane manufacturer" and more of a "profitable corporation". This was a risk but in the short term, increased profits were almost guaranteed. Planes fell out of the sky. The CEO was "punished" with a 33 million dollar payout package. As long as CEOs of major corporations continue to be thus incentivized, future computer mass outages are assured.

Hey Microsoft, want to make Edge more popular

Instead of hiding the ability to block third party cookies down deep in the settings of Edge and allowing third party cookies by default, block them by default. Heck, surfacing the switch to block the cookies up three or four levels in the settings menu tree would be helpful. Your users would like it and it would cost you next to nothing.

The data center is part of a community.

I've noticed that Google, Microsoft, and Amazon all carefully ignore one reality - renewable energy is not an infinite resource. It is not just the tech companies that need to convert to renewable energy, it is people's house, regular business, government, etc... When a company like Amazon, for example, builds out quickly in one area it outstrips the region's capacity to grow renewables. The result is dirty energy production methods are needed to heat houses in the winter. https://wapo.st/3zSSFgi. It doesn't matter much if Amazon, Microsoft, and Google can meet these public relation goals, it is the overall conversion to renewables that counts, and those companies are hurting that effort.

The problem is operational

The issue is not the operating system. If you have software that must be continuously available, you cannot blindly trust updates to the OS, any OS, from the vendor. Regardless of whether the OS comes from Red Hat, Microsoft, or whoever, update needs to be tested outside production before you roll it out. This can be expensive since security updates can be frequent but if you want your software to be continuously available without fail there is no way around it. After all, even if you can trust the vendor not to break the OS (clearly you can't) you certainly cannot trust the vendor not to break any application software that the vendor doesn't know about.