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  RE: https://aus.social/@skribe/117510274571019947 Wonderful homage. Chekov was a shallow rôle that didn’t give Koenig much scope to demonstrate talent and he squeezed far more out of it than anyone would reasonably expect. But he really shined as Bester. I’ve seen all of Babylon 5 at least four times and I’m still shocked reading how few episodes he was in: he felt like a main character in spite of appearing in only around 10% of the total episodes. I had no idea his first appearance as Bester...

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  BREAKING NEWS: A new vulnerability has been discovered in all versions of PHP. Details will be forthcoming, but I’m told that, under certain unusual conditions, it will execute PHP code. This has numerous exploitable consequences, not least of which is that it leads to more PHP code in the world. The details are currently embargoed but the team responsible for discovering the vulnerability report that a similar class of problem exists in GCC and Clang as well.

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  Given the EU’s push to simplify the GDPR to make compliance easier, I propose the following replacement text: Nope. With the following additional non-normative additional guidance: No. Seriously, what’s wrong with you people? Why would you ever think anyone would consent to that. No. Just no.

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  Reminder to people who have international meetings: the next week is George W Bush Golfing Time. The USA and Europe had an agreement to move clocks at the same time, so the time difference remained constant. George W Bush decided he wanted a few weeks more golfing time, so unilaterally moved the USA’s Daylight Saving Time. This move remains in effect so there are a few weeks of annoying disruption each year. I made the mistake of flying the first time this happened, which is how I knew about it...

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  I have had a lot of discussions over the last decade on correct handling for out-of-memory conditions. There are two very distinct philosophical camps. The Windows kernel has a policy of 'don't make promises you can't keep'. This means that a call to malloc will either return memory that is already available or the result of a new call to VirtualAlloc2, with committed memory. When the NT kernel says it has 'committed' memory, it means it promises that memory will be a...

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  One of the patterns I’ve seen with people using Claude for programming is: A programmer in the past looked at a tradeoff space and decided to make a common operation fast and an uncommon operation slow. Claude lacks proper context of the use of the software but spots a pattern that looks like things it’s training set has flagged as slow and so points to the slow path as a bottleneck. The user asks for a test case and Claude provides a simple microbenchmark that triggers the slow path. Now th...

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  Wow, SwiftUI and all of the competent designers retiring has made #Apple so bad at UIs. I helped my mother set up a MacBook Air yesterday. We set the UI size to the maximum so she could see it easily. Around half of the setup boxes then had buttons that were either off the bottom of the screen or obscured by the dock (and therefore not clickable). Almost all of them had huge amounts of empty space in the middle and so could easily have fitted if some idiots private aesthetic had been considere...

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  I really hate the access control on Fediverse quote posts. If you have a public post and you opt out of quotes, the following are possible: Posting it on a web site and inviting abuse.Posting it on Xitter / ColourSky / Instathingy / ClokNoise and inviting abuse.Posting it on Mastodon but as a link (which shows up with almost an identical UI) rather than the quote post and inviting abuse.The following are not possible: Automatically notifying the original poster when you have quoted it.For priv...

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  Hmm, MSFT is a bit over the price at which I sold half of my shares a year ago. I had been holding on because I thought there was a reasonable chance that Satya ‘pump and dump’ Nadella would get to 600 before the bubble burst but now I’m wondering if I should just sell now. I don’t like to guess what will happen after the crash. In the .com burst, MSFT lost half of its share value quite rapidly and didn’t recover for a decade. Microsoft was not one of the tech companies least exposed during the...

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  RE: https://mastodon.sdf.org/@netbsd/117396625341557692 Hey #FreeBSD folks, NetBSD hit more than double their funding target after adopting a strong no-LLMs policy. Something to think about while you draft yours, perhaps?

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  When the kittens were small, I thought my fist was roughly cat-head sized and shaped and so might be easier for them to relate to than an entire human, so I’d hold out my fist for them to investigate and get comfortable with. And it worked. Except friendlykitten has developed a habit of not just sniffing it but full-on headbutting my finger with his nose. Walks up, sniffs fist, hits closest finger as hard as he can with his nose, then consents to scritches. This cannot be good for his nose. He’...

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  I haven't seen the kittens much since one ran away (he's back, everything's fine) but just now friendlykitten jumped down onto the fence where he can state into my office. I went outside and he came over to say hello. I also looked up at the little window that he comes out of had the big cat that lives in the same house staring down at me. A tiny little judging cat face! Sadly, I didn't take a camera when I went outside.

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  One of our SaaS providers sent out a marketing email to all of their customers about new AI features. I replied saying that we used them as a secure solution and integrating things that add no value for our use case but add significant attack surface undermines our trust in their product and will cause us to consider alternatives. It turns out that the reply-to header was the CEO’s email address and I initially got an out-of-office auto responder then a worried reply saying that of course the A...

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  Ah, apparently it is the time of the year when we identify and honour the best self publicists among hundreds of people who contributed to scientific discoveries.

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  @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu The Digital Markets Act is a nice idea but it's ignoring how these platforms became so powerful. The problem is that other big entities use them as their sole (or primary) means of communication. How about defining a set of rules that apply to: All governmentsAll companies over a certain EU turnover.All companies providing essential services (e.g. banking, utilities). Where the rules are, by the end of 2027: They may not require customers to crea...

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  Periodically I try LLMs to see if they actually are useful for programming. This week I was writing an AsciiDoctor plugin. I’m not particularly familiar with Ruby (I struggle to imagine the mindset that believes Smalltalk, or, indeed, any language, can be improved by adding Perl syntax) and I find the internals of AsciiDoctor to be very poorly documented and hard to follow. So this seemed like a great task for LLM assistance: I know the problem domain very well (I’ve written other document proce...

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  At this rate, I’m expecting Pope Leo to be one of the lead authors of the Orange Catholic Bible.

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  Wow, moderators are killing the accounts for the new spam wave so quickly that I get errors when I try to report them because the account has been suspended and so the report refers to nonexistent posts.

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  RE: https://universeodon.com/@georgetakei/117363062318327919 The america.gov thing is an embarrassment but the middle of the rant about US government web sites being worse than the private sector reminded me of how much I appreciate the gov.uk infrastructure. It’s designed to work well with low-bandwidth devices. It works well on large and small screens. It runs in ancient browsers. It has a consistent interface. The buttons are big and clear. It doesn’t use colour contrast that’s problematic...

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  I have a lot of sympathy with the lawyer charged with contempt in this story. He used an LLM to summarise a proceedings and it made up nonsense. Most of us know that this is a risk, but I routinely talk to people who think an ‘AI summary’ of a document is going to be a distillation of information in the information in the source text, rather than some statistically probable sequence of words that would follow a request to summarise the source text. And that’s entirely because that’s precisely...

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  Stock market reporting is so weird. Headline from MarketWatch: Microsoft stock is on track to post its biggest quarterly gains in 28 years. Zoom out on the graph slightly a Microsoft stock is trading at just below its high, which was a year ago. Yes, there was a big jump in July but there was an approximately equal crash at the end of last year. Alternative headline: Microsoft stock exhibits high volatility with swings of almost 50% in one year.

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  I don’t understand the panic over ‘LLMs can tell people how to build biological weapons and plan assassinations’. So can Tom Clancy novels. And both sources will tell you things that are more likely to get you killed than achieve your nefarious goal.

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  Apparently using ‘agents’ can increase productivity. I have been trying this for a while and can confirm that having agents assassinate people who put meetings in my calendar does significantly increase the amount of useful time that I have.

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  I'm increasingly of the opinion that the right time to try to sue LLM vendors for copyright infringement is after the bubble starts to burst. At the moment, politicians buy the line that these machines will magically cause massive economic growth (and, because politicians think the stock market reflects the economy, they even see some evidence of this). That means that they're seeing it as a choice between protecting existing industries and protecting a new major source of growth. E...

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  My LinkedIn posts: 80% marketing, 20% trolling. It probably says something about the platform that the trolling posts get more views. Still slightly shocked people read LinkedIn. I view it as a purely write-only medium.

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  @s10n@mastodon.social @newsguyusa@flipboard.social Your implicit assumption is that the BBC, with close to a hundred years of television archives and probably the highest concentration of award-winning material of any television archive, to which they are constantly adding, cannot attract the interest of a typical British person. And, if that’s the case, the BBC has some very serious problems that need to be addressed urgently.

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  I talk a lot about building software for user customisation. I wanted to share a bit about what I did with igk. This is a tool written for precisely one user (me). I wanted, for the CHERIoT book, to have a single source of semantic markup that could be used to generate typeset PDFs (for print and online, with different styling), ePub (XHTML plus some metadata) and web versions. I initially tried AsciiDoc but it made a lot of design choices that are the opposite of what I want. The design of ig...

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  Butterfly is much less fun to say than papillon so I am using the standard process in the English language: deprecating a common-usage word and replacing it with a foreign word that I like better. From now on, all uses of the word ‘butterfly’ shall be deemed archaic. Thank you for your patience during the transition.

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  Please stop enforcing mandatory time limits on credentials that are trivial to revoke! The point of mandatory expiration is that revocation happens eventually. In the case of a compromise and leak of that credential, an attacker has a guaranteed sunset when their stolen credentials will stop working. This is sometimes a useful property. For example, checking certificate revocation lists on every TLS session is slow. It's common for clients to skip this and rely on revocation sets that a...

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  I am trying a new thing: Only boosting posts that make me happy or have something actionable for readers. It's good to be informed about depressing issues, it's not good to be constantly bombarded with things about them. Not posting about things that annoy me unless I have an actionable proposal for how to improve them. Grumbling can be cathartic but is not especially helpful. I don't promise I'll be good at this, but I'm going to try!