Bill Zaumen

@nixCraft@mastodon.social The officers of a corporation cannot be prosecuted for damages caused by a corporation unless they personally violated a law. So the CTO/CEO/CSO are off the hook. This arrangement was parodied by Gilbert and Sullivan in Utopia Limited, so it is nothing new: William Gilbert simply could not accept the idea of a corporation being some sort of legal person, and liked to make fun of that notion. https://enosoc.co.uk/synutopia/

@QasimRashid@mastodon.social Democrats should not just support El-Sayed: they should make him a key campaign advisor. People who can win elections in spite of being seriously outspent are just what we need to counter oligarchs.

@stux@mstdn.social Here's a funny picture I saw somewhere showing The Roadrunner and Wile E Coyote collaborating on a prank:

@qurlyjoe@mstdn.social The claim (with no citation) that a robotics team burned down an insurance company's headquarters sounded a bit off, so I tried a search and found the following article (age and wheelchair costs match up, but the robotics team built a wheelchair by using parts from a toy electric car): https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/437225-high-school-robotics-team-builds-electric-wheelchair-for-2-year/

@AkaSci@fosstodon.org Political interference in scientific research has been tried before: in Germany from roughly 1933 to 1945, with predicable results: a lot of very talented people moved out of Europe (the ones lucky enough to escape).

@sirwumpus@tilde.zone @arstechnica@mastodon.social It is not just ISPs: when I first considered getting a cell phone, I asked what the monthly bill was and they wouldn't tell me. I simply said "Bye, bye." Obviously they can figure out the price to send you a bill, so when they said they "couldn't", scam alarms went off. Finally an employer had a deal on getting one, which made the price predictable.

@FinFangFoomed@mastodon.social @zackwhittaker@mastodon.social If a company wants to use Claude and Claude wants an ID, how about giving Claude your employee ID? If your employer won't trust them with your employee ID, you shouldn't trust them with your driver's license.

@QasimRashid@mastodon.social The latest news (appeared on Google News about 10 minutes ago) is that passengers in the vehicle (arrested but not shot) are disputing ICE's claims, stating that Mr. Araujo did not swerve towards anyone and that the ICE agents started shooting immediately.

@SeanPLynch@mastodon.social @stargazersmith@social.linux.pizza @sundogplanets@mastodon.social @emilymbender@dair-community.social @alex@dair-community.social If "All LLM's built so far become racist, given time," that could well be the result of the training material. If you train it on social media such as X, it is hardly surprising: kind of like what a parrot might spout after being taken to a Klan rally.

@mattblaze@federate.social Peter will be missed. BTW, for some years, I worked in the same building as Peter, but in a different group. He was always pleasant and, of course, highly competent.

@Mae @rebeccawatson I recall reading that researchers at the Chinese lab in question checked the COVID virus's DNA sequence against those of the viruses they were studying, and found that COVID was not likely to have come from their lab. This check was simply a case of being careful and responsible. Some people in that lab got sick early in the epidemic, most likely due to living near where it originally spread.

@adavid@aus.social @nixCraft@mastodon.social I've been using emacs, but the initial reason was that it ran on a VAX, TOPS-20 system, and eventually Unix, and it was the only one we had running on all three. The subsequent reason is sloth: I have better things to do than learn how to use a different editor. I didn't have any objections to people using vi, vim, or even ed (line oriented and works on a teletype spewing out lots of paper). So I can't quite figure out why people would fight over a choice of editors.

@sundogplanets@mastodon.social That title may be a bit of a misnomer because, as a field, AI is more than LLMs. For instance, I'm using a AI-based grammar checker, apparently more of an expert system, for a long document. I wrote some code to prune out equations, coding examples, etc., and turned the output of the AI program into compiler-like error messages with line numbers. All changes to the document were done by me manually.

@woe2you@beige.party @marco@mastodon.skup.in @kamstrup@fosstodon.org Keystrokes were a bit expensive when Unix was created. Those teletypes tended to use a lot of paper (thermal paper, which came in long roles). And they were slow (I've used them). Warning - the video shows these things, but there is a lot of typical you-tube babbling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeL3mbq1mEg

@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io While only tangentially related, I once read about a guy who ordered custom license plates. The form had a second option in case one's first one was taken, so he wrote "NO PLATE", meaning he only wanted his first choice. So they sent him a license plate with the text "NO PLATE". He thought it was funny. Then he started getting notices for traffic tickets for the cars in the state with no license plates as the officers wrote "NO PLATE" when the license plates were missing.

@davebiff@mas.to @mattblaze@federate.social Peter once told us about an incident where an X-ray machine killed a patient. Its snazzy GUI got a lot of testing for sequences of inputs, but when used by a technician, the inputs came in much faster. There was a race condition resulting in an inappropriate configuration. Peter mentioned the lack of sanity checks - the patient complained about feeling warm and the technician ignored that, passing it off as babbling.

@Satin_Therese@piaille.fr @evacide@hachyderm.io Slide rules were used through the 1960s and into the 1970s, fading from use once pocket calculators became available and not too expensive.

@Satin_Therese@piaille.fr @evacide@hachyderm.io It's a picture of a slide rule - a device people used to do multiplications easily before there were pocket calculators. There are also scales for computing trigonometric functions, etc., Mechanically, it adds lengths, but there is a logarithmic scale so the lengths are the logarithms of the numbers that are on the scale. I have one that I'll take out of storage sometimes to see how people react to it.

@Tutanota@mastodon.social Curiously, gmail sort of supports end to end encryption (excluding subject lines). The steps to enable it are: (1) Install gpg if you haven't already. (2) Install an email client that supports GPG/PGP and IMAP (3) Use IMAP to connect to gmail and the really, really hard part: (4) get your contacts to use GPG as well.

@sundogplanets@mastodon.social At first glance - for a second or two - I thought the FCC's "Weird Space Stuff" was bureaucratese for FRBs (Fast Radio Bursts). It reminded me of the time someone supposedly wrote a humorous article about the neutrino bomb. Alas, a senator got wind of it and supposedly held up the NFS budget to find out who was holding out. This led to the interesting task of explaining to the senator that he'd been had without saying that he'd been had. (prob. not 1st): https://inis.iaea.org/records/4qj8b-gbf56

@carlrichell Thanks, Carl! BTW (and this has to be run past a lawyer), is there still a problem with software distributed under a GPL, which requires that software that uses GPL-licensed code be open source as well? It depends on how broadly the word "restriction" is taken.

@Npars01 @anselmschueler @QasimRashid Don't forget that the Republicans will call themselves "the party of Lincoln" and will then blame Democrats for segregation. What actually happened is that after the Civil War the racists couldn't stand the Republicans so they signed up as Democrats. Then when the Civil Rights Act passed, the racists got mad at the Democrats and signed up as Republicans. You want to track where they are today so they don't do any more damage.

@komali_2@mastodon.social @sundogplanets@mastodon.social At one point at work, the AI group (same building & floor, around the corner) had developed a robot (dubbed Shakey 2) that was kind of a hexagonal can on wheels, a bit like one of the Star Wars robots. It would wander around the hall. The original Shakey needed a radio link because the computer at that time filled a room and Shakey would sit for quite some time "thinking": a good reason for developing efficient search algorithms such as A* that are still used today.

@QasimRashid@mastodon.social Officially released "UFO" evidence is not faked. For example, during the Vietnam war, there were lots of anomalous radar readings, apparently the result of extreme humidity and temperature inversions in the tropics that resulted in radar signals following a curved path. These were initially unexplained or unidentified because it took some effort to figure out what was happening. Initially it could look like aircraft accelerating to impossible speeds.

@evacide@hachyderm.io Simple age verification test. You pop up this image and ask "What is this?" 20 seconds to respond (in case you type slowly). https://imgs.search.brave.com/Yeo08ZMpSf94z4H5_vPhXOirKzaA_9iCKEU3FVQIH9o/rs:fit:500:0:1:0/g:ce/aHR0cHM6Ly90My5m/dGNkbi5uZXQvanBn/LzAxLzE4LzkxLzM0/LzM2MF9GXzExODkx/MzQzMl9PSjR5ckJG/bzMza0RyN1p0bzBp/bGVXblhqVXpBOFZu/TS5qcGc

@gitrebel@mastodon.social @Tutanota@mastodon.social POP can have encryption today, but that has to be configured. Even if unencrypted, you can use relatively safe authentication procedures. Check the RFCs for details.

@JackMexa4@mastodon.social @QasimRashid@mastodon.social While I don't think Qasim made this mistake, blaming a whole ethnic group for the behavior of some can be counterproductive due to a sociological effect called a "self-fulfilling prophecy". https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/social-sciences-and-humanities/self-fulfilling-prophecy

@rbreich@masto.ai Here's the counterexample (they made a lot of money but it was kind of accidental): https://www.patagonia.com/company-history/

@rbreich To give an example of how the billionaire tax could really hurt someone, take a hypothetical guy who bought $1000 of bitcoin on July 14, 2010, when the price was $0.06. Today the price is around $80,000, so that person would now be a billionaire. But suppose he is the guy I read about who bought some bitcoin as a joke or conversation piece when bitcoin first came out, and now is trying (unsuccessfully) to remember the password for his "wallet". Oops.

@dozymoe@mastodon.social You don't have to put your gpg keys on a server, but of course you can if you wish: you can exchange keys privately, possibly signing them. If you have a lot of contacts, a key server makes life a lot easier.

@dansup I have a small, foldable electric scooter that I bought from a Canadian company, Dynamic Scooter, based (I think) on a Chinese design with some tweaks for North America. When folded I can put it in a small pack and drop it off at "coat check" for the opera or ballet. It more than pays for itself in 2 years from reduced car insurance alone. There is no U.S. equivalent (doesn't fit the "bigger is better" business model). https://dynamicscooter.com/product/model-b/

@QasimRashid Meanwhile the administration our oligarchs paid for seems intent on "making everything about race" (by encouraging racism) so we won't notice how those oligarchs are getting an ever increasing slice of the pie. It seems crazy given where I live: our county's demographics are 26.5% "White alone, not Hispanic or Latino", 24.8% "Hispanic or Latino", and 43.3% "Asian alone" according to the U.S. Census. So many of us see Trump as someone going after our friends and neighbors.

@TheConversationUS@newsie.social Curiously, the county I live in went from 70% White in 1980 to 28.7 percent White in 2020. Over the same time frame, it went from 7.7% Asian to 38.91% Asian. No idea if this is "replacement" or "new housing" (a lot of which has been built), but in general, you don't hear people in my county complaining. The "multiculturalism" makes it a much more interesting place.

@gamingonlinux Carl's efforts on this will really help us. It should be a lot easier to convince elected representatives in other states to do the same thing if you can point to another state. That indicates that the political risks are far lower than they might imagine. Saying "we are just doing what Colorado did and it worked there" is an effective argument when someone yells, "what about the children."

@briankrebs I'm not surprised that people think someone is tracking their every movement: about a year ago, I got a light breakfast at a coffee shop in San Francisco, which accepted credit cards but not cash because of "break ins". A few months later I got a promo from this company as a "reward", and had never given them my email address. Obviously their credit-card processing company was data mining. I put the coffee shop on my #@()# list.

@gitrebel@mastodon.social @Tutanota@mastodon.social If you use gmail via a browser, you'll use SSL for your connection, which can be claimed to be end-to-end between the mail server and your browser. I think they do that with IMAP as well. Years ago, people using POP3 did not have any sort of encryption at all.

@loius@mastodon.social @kimzetter@infosec.exchange Re "which agency is investigating the crime": my guess is the NSA, which at least has the technical expertise to pull it off. There's an old joke that NSA stands for either "No Such Agency" or "Never Say Anything".

@HakeemG @QasimRashid I'm not sure if I qualify as a "leftist", but some years ago, I did send one of my senators a letter asking that they let Afghans who would be in trouble with the Taliban move to the U.S., citing some women climbers and LGBT individuals as examples. If they would be in trouble for behaving in ways that reflect our values, they would likely do well here.

@mattblaze I can image a tee shirt with the caption "8647 is prime": a true statement about the natural numbers. The reaction could almost be like the scene in the 1942 version of 'To be or not to be" where an aide tells Col. Ehrhardt, "Oh you don't have to worry about him. We shot him yesterday. He was telling supposed to be funny stories about our Fuehrer."

@sundogplanets@mastodon.social The other problem is that, for this to work at all, you might need a heliostationary orbit, creating kind of a traffic jam over the poles. Think Kessler syndrome on steroids.

@justaguylinux@fosstodon.org You missed the point, which was that the law is superfluous for Linux: it is a multi-user system that allows system administrators to place restrictions on what non-root users can do. My suggestion to Congress would be to simply fund a project that would provide a package that, when installed, would provide the appropriate restrictions for a user based on age, etc., which a system administrator (e.g., a parent) can configure. "Concerned parents" can install it & we can ignore it.

@justaguylinux@fosstodon.org Linux has had parental controls for decades: iptables, etc. It is just that those aren't called "parental controls." You can also use chroot. Hint: don't give impressionable kiddies root access. It is not necessary for the OS to check ages when their parents are the system administrators.

@eff The other issue is that you can print a "gun" with all the necessary parts but for it to actually work, you need the right materials. Meanwhile, a realistic looking, non-functional, replica could be quite useful as a theatrical prop. If made out of a soft plastic, it might not be capable of being fired and if you did get the explosive to detonate, it would possibly just explode in your hand.

@tanyakaroli@expressional.social @QasimRashid@mastodon.social While there are other issues - training, hiring, etc. - one problem is the lack of reasonable gun regulations (the Supreme Court seems to have discounted the "well-regulated" part of the 2nd Amendment). With how easy it is to get a firearm, the police are nervous. If there are several officers and one mistakenly shoots a gun, the others might react to hearing the gun shot and start shooting as well.

@worik@mastodon.social @micahflee@infosec.exchange As another example of using Docker, I'm using it to run an AI program named language tool, which runs as a web server. I wrote some code to send it text, removing LaTex commands, equations, and verbatim text used for coding examples. The response was then turned into compiler-like error messages. I fixed errors manually.

@nazokiyoubinbou @oddhack @FallsMom @stux The line "I know nothing" was already used in an old TV program. Part of what happened is that (a) Trump indicated ICE would target only hard-core criminals, and (b) some billionaires spent a fortune near the end of the 2024 campaign, funding attack ads against Kamala Harris and seriously outspending the Democrats. It was enough to flip a few "swing states". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgcxGFmYyPs

@BLTpizza @mattblaze Candlestick Park was in a different location and eventually torn down. It was noted for being cold and windy. The replacement is close to downtown, opening just when "naming rights" became a thing.

@sab38@infosec.exchange @mattblaze@federate.social It was hydrogen peroxide. They probably got it in quantity at a big-box store. BTW, the algae do not have a supreme leader: it is more of a anarcho-syndicalist commune (like the one in Monte Python and the Holy Grail). Here's Trump negotiating with them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7qT-C-0ajI