sylver_dragon

Every new “feature” I hear about in Windows Privacy Invasion Goes to 11, the happier I am that I switched to Linux. It’s been mostly smooth and games have just worked. Though I know that much of that is because of Proton.

Java is dying in the same way that Linux is winning the desktop war, it’s always going to happen “next year” but never “this year”. I spent a lot of years as a sysadmin and while I would have been quite happy to piss on the grave of Java, we always seemed to be installing some version of the JRE (though, usually not the latest version) on systems. There is just a lot of software which is built with it. This was especially true when dealing with US FedGov systems. Developers for the USG loved Java and we had both the JRE and JDK (because why not require the Development Kit for a user install?) sprinkled about our environment like pigeon droppings.

That said, don’t get too caught up focusing on one language. A lot of the underlying data structures and theory will transfer between languages. What you are learning now may not be what you end up working with in the future. Try to understand the logic, systems and why you are doing what you are doing, rather than getting too caught up on the specific implementation.

By combining Mozilla’s scale and trusted reputation with Anonym’s cutting-edge technology…

Ya, that reputation is taking a big hit right now.

Congratulations, you have now arrived at the Trough of Disillusionment:

It remains to be seen if we can ever climb the Slope of Enlightenment and arrive at reasonable expectations and uses for LLMs. I personally believe it’s possible, but we need to get vendors and managers to stop trying to sprinkle “AI” in everything like some goddamn Good Idea Fairy. LLMs are good for providing answers to well defined problems which can be answered with existing documentation. When the problem is poorly defined and/or the answer isn’t as well documented or has a lot of nuance, they then do a spectacular job of generating bullshit.

I have to believe the actual poll and report aren’t as glaringly stupid as that headline. If you ask nearly anyone, “do you want peace?” They are going to respond with “yes.” The devil is always in the details though. Ask them, “should the war in Ukraine be ended by the Ukrainian Government capitulating to all Russian demands to secure an immediate peace?” And, you might find a lot of folks are suddenly less peaceful. This reminds me of the old saw:
There’s lies, damned lines and then there is statistics.

With a crafted question and a bit of p-hacking you can get a lot of results you want out of people.

Russia could do that. But, they are kinda busy trying to keep up with demand from their own forces. And that’s only going to get worse as they run out of mothballed Soviet shitboxes to reactivate.

Sort of yes, sort of no. This is one of those places where the US Federal system of government would be beneficial. For the most part, Homicide is a State crime. This means that the State where the crime occurred would have jurisdiction and The US President would not have the power to pardon for that crime. So, let’s say that Biden sends a private hitman (and not Seal Team 6, the FBI or whatever fevered dream part of the US Government Trump comes up with next) to kill Trump. Said hitman would be indicted in New York under New York law for the homicide. President Biden’s power to pardon would not be able to help the hitman. By contrast, New York Governor Kathy Hochul probably could (I can’t be arsed to look up the power of pardon in New York). Where this breaks down is in DC or other Federal land (e.g. military bases). Since those are Federal lands, the Federal Government would have jurisdiction and the President probably would have the power of pardon.

That is a possibility. To be honest, I haven’t tried very hard yet. I’m currently working on spinning up a Win10 VM in KVM and I’ll see how that works. And Android emulator is another good idea, I’ll have to give that a go.

And once you have found your specific collection of plugins that happen not to put the exact features you need behind a paywall but others, you ain’t touching those either.

And this is why, when I’m investigating phishing links, I’ve gotten used to mumbling, “fucking WordPress”. WordPress itself is pretty secure. Many WordPress plugins, if kept up to date, are reasonably secure. But, for some god forsaken reason, people seem to be allergic to updating their WordPress plugins and end up getting pwned and turned into malware serving zombies. Please folks, if it’s going to be on the open internet, install your fucking updates!

Did the same. The writing has been on the wall for a long time, Microsoft’s anti-user behavior is only set to get worse. I made the jump to Linux (Arch) and things have been reasonably smooth. I did have a few issues with Enshrouded, but was able to get past those with Proton-GE. The only issue I haven’t worked around yet is Roblox with the kids. But, I may just have to pick up a cheap tablet for that.

I suspect Politico fixed it. When I first loaded the page, it had the same image you see in the thumbnail. And that’s was what prompted my comment. Looks like they updated the page and it’s now an appropriate image.

Story about Belgian F-16s.
Picture shows US F-35.
Guess the AI’s came for Politico’s editors first.

I think AI is good with giving answers to well defined problems. The issue is that companies keep trying to throw it at poorly defined problems and the results are less useful. I work in the cybersecurity space and you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a vendor talking about AI in their products. It’s the new, big marketing buzzword. The problem is that finding the bad stuff on a network is not a well defined problem. So instead, you get the unsupervised models faffing about, generating tons and tons of false positives. The only useful implementations of AI I’ve seen in these tools actually mirrors you own: they can be scary good at generating data queries from natural language prompts. Which is, once again, a well defined problem.

Overall, AI is a tool and used in the right way, it’s useful. It gets a bad rap because companies keep using it in bad ways and the end result can be worse than not having it at all.

what is the advantage in using Windows 11 over 10?

Many years ago, I was at a Windows XP launch event and the Microsoft Rep had a really honest line:
“Why should you start using Windows XP? Because we’re going to stop supporting Windows 98!”

And ya, that’s pretty much been the cattle prod Microsoft uses to push new versions, eventually you stop getting security updates for the older OS and at some point there are enough security vulnerabilities which make it no longer safe for daily use. That said, with Windows becoming more and more user hostile, other options start to make more sense.

Microsoft: “We’re sorry, this is all just a misunderstanding. We thought you were too stupid to notice.”

“High Impact” like a body hitting the ground at the bottom of a cliff.

Unfortunately, yes. There have been a lot of efforts to shift the energy mix in the EU away from Russian oil and natural gas. But, the effort has been slow and has meant rising costs. Also, by removing Russian production from the supply side, prices will invariably increase. Ukraine does have to balance the damage that can do to foreign support, against their war aims. Personally, I think it’s pretty selfish of the EU and US to ask Ukraine not to strike those resources. It’s essentially the US/EU saying, “more of your people need to die, so we can save money.” It’s a really crappy thing to ask.

War is logistics. If the Russian war machine can be starved of fuel and money, the machine will grind to a halt. It’s just a question of, can Ukraine cause enough damage to Russia’s oil infrastructure fast enough to survive the advantages Russia has in manpower and equipment?

I mean, the US could do that, but it’s kinda pointless. Ukraine would just be buying them with money that the US Government gave them in the aid package. It would mean the US Treasury moving money from the “aid going to Ukraine” column to the “US DoD budget” column. Sure, some of the aid is structured as loans. However, the President has the power to forgive half of those loans by the end of the year and the next President will have the power to forgive the rest of those loans in 2026. Unless the war suddenly ends and Ukraine suddenly finds a shit-ton of money somewhere, those loans are just going to be forgiven. As there is just no way they will ever be paid back.

Handy Infographic from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO):
.

• Total Federal outlays: $6.1 Trillion
• Federal Social Spending
  • Social Security: $1.3T
  • Medicare: $0.839T
  • Medicaid: $0.616T
  • Income Security Programs: $0.448T
  • Total Social Spending: $3.203T

Math warning:

(3.203T / $6.1T) * 100% = 52.5%  

So, not quite the previous poster’s 55%, but pretty close. There is also an “Other” column which likely includes other social spending and may have gotten us to that number. But, it’s enough of a mixed bag, and way too much work, to try and pick it all out.

While the US could certainly adjust it’s spending in a lot of good ways, the idea that the US spends “nothing” on social programs is provably false. These numbers also get weird and much harder to pin down when we look at State level taxes and spending. Many years ago, I dug into education spending in the US. And while Federal Education spending is a drop in the bucket, the actual number is pretty large, because it’s considered a State responsibility and each State spends large amounts of money on it.

For example, my home State of Virginia budgets $29.9 Billion for “Health and Human Services” this Fiscal Year 2024 and $25.0 Billion for “Education”, those two line items eating up about 62% of the State budget.