Gregory's Server
I also added this gorgeous poster from Sam Wallman "You Donβt Have To Hate Your Job To Want A Union"
https://justseeds.org/graphic/you-dont-have-to-hate-your-job-to-want-a-union/
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  @dgar My eldest son's high school punk band were named "The Disgruntled Postmen". I really don't like using Uber. It's fine as a service (in the sense that it works), but I can't help feeling uncomfortable about the fact that (at least in the part of the UK I'm from) it seems to be a service through which white people obtain chauffeur rides from underpaid non-white people. Maybe it's just a matter of that existing inequality becoming more visible, but I can't get the optics of it all out of my head. It seems to be a sort of stochastic enabler of racial inequality tropes. The speed at which I reversed my car when I saw these ladies modding their yard sign
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@misc What a waste of sign their should've replace it with one of "Trump 2024" π #NeverHarris Mastodon is the world's biggest community of people who deeply love computers and also think that the world would probably be better off without computers
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 Mastodon is just a platform. community is Fediverse and it contains tens of different platforms.
The Democrat party has to be hands down one of the most useless political parties in history. The republicans have built a comprehensive 4 year plan to dismantle democracy, meanwhile it's 6 months into the election year and the democrat party is still busy eating glue.
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@malwaretech Yes, but in fairness (and the whole Biden thing is obviously a debacle), some of this is just, liberalism is hard to defend. The liberal message is inherently a complex one, one that embraces nuance (government can help extend freedom, but bad government can hurt it) and leaves room for the other side. Fascism is, of course, seductively simple: youβre either with us or against us.  Itβs really not fair to blame CrowdStrike for the outages today. The blame lies with the people in a position to make procurement decisions, who saw a product that added a load of additional code that runs in Ring 0 and though βyes, this will make us more secure, I will mandate this must be deployed across the entire companyβ. A large part of the blame lies with the people who created auditing frameworks that would lead people to believe that this was necessary for compliance.
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@david_chisnall I'm a supposedly decent German writer (or that's what ppl keep telling me) and I think ChatGPT output sucks.   I agree with this take on the AI Hype in that, pretty obviously what we have in general AI applications is a regression to the mean. The real shame is that there are quite a few fields in science where machine learning is really extremely useful in finding patterns in data that might be too subtle for ordinary perception. The hype covers up (for people in the general public) this actual advance. When I was a teenager I spent a large amount of time tweaking my operating system: how the user interface looked, its behavior, sometimes it's low-level plumbings. While I did learn some stuff doing that, learning wasn't the goal. I did it because it was fun. It was useless, but fun! In a world of corporate-infused boredom, I think you should have fun too with computers. 1/3  Some things have changed for the worst: back in the day you could tweak the user interface to your heart's content. That was before Steve Jobs wanted to have knobs and other bullshit. Before "touch interfaces" ushered an era of idiotic minimalism where you can't tell what an icon does, or how it's different from the other. Back in a day where interfaces were supposed to be consistent between applications, and *customizable*. When the *user* was supposed to be in charge. 2/3 In an unexpected turn of events, a sensible take on #Crowdstrike from the Orange Site.
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  @calamari Compliance is meant to be a tool, to expose businesses to robust thinking around problems. IMO anyone, who knowingly does check-box compliance, (we'll just buy in / defer compliance) for any reason, should be shown the door.  @calamari At Amazon in 2019 I argued against the Falcon sensor on the hosts I was responsible for. I agreed their service was good, but the lack of transparency, control and even ability to test changes made it a no go for me. I asked why we weren't either building our own solution or just buying them. I was overruled and I'm sure those systems, if they still exist, had a fun past few days. Again, I like CS, but major tech companies are not short on resources or expertise. I'm still mad that as a society, we basically let the idea of "sideloading" become normalized. Just the idea that the software you run on your device is subject to DRM is so inherently and extremely wrong, and yet it's just normal now. So many other abuses of power in computing come back to that; to adapt Doctorow somewhat, there was a war on general-purpose computing, and we lost. (edit: see replies below for important discussion of "lost," and why that might not be the best word.)  (We can fight that war again and win, but damned if it's not harder now that DRM is just the norm, and user-owned devices are the rare exception.)  @xgranade we agree with you in general but as an activist, we feel it's our duty to say that the war is ongoing. we have not yet lost. there is plenty of hope, in part because people are starting to understand how important it is.  This shift *must* be reversed. But it's true β it has happened in people's minds already. This is now an uphill battle π Their products are flawed not just because they're badly implemented - which they are - but because they are based on a stupid idea. The idea that you improve your IT security by adding more complexity. Doing the opposite is the right approach. But you can't sell that as a product. (You can still sell it, but it's not something you just plug into your network and get security magically.) Honestly, if we could get that one basic message out, that if their IT security is based on more complexity, not less, that they're doing it wrong, maybe we could start putting crap companies like crowdstrike or citrix out of business. @hanno Byzantine designs are marketable, simple reliable, dependable (and, hence, secure) designs are not. Let's cut the bullshit and spell out a few things. The IT security industry is about as trustworthy as the food supplement and vitamin industry, but somehow they escaped the same reputation. Their products are overwhelmingly based on flawed ideas, and the quality of their software is exceptionally bad. And while not everyone will agree with the harshness of my words, I'll say this: Essentially everyone in IT security who knows anything in principle knows this.
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 @hanno It's sort of the health care industry approach. You can't sell more medications if you cure diseases, right? So why would anyone work on a pill that you taken once and cures something? @hanno Also, the people. At some point in the early 2000s we collectively decided that foxes were *exactly* the people we wanted to guard the henhouse.  ps blaming "human error" for catastrophic systems failures is like blaming gravity for buildings falling over    @fasterthanlime "most good ideas discovered in the first 20" my dude is winking at the lisp crowd, and I'm HERE for it π @fasterthanlime Doing my bit in Northern France while cycling through. Only had electrical tape on me.
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 @ChrisMayLA6 All good synoptic points. Maybe whatβs missing is the malicious change in responsibilities when the National Rivers Auth & the Pollution Inspectorate were combined into the Environment Agency *and* their legal powers were curtailed in the Act. But the main thrust - the utter stupidity of expecting merchant banks to not securitise and debt-load govt-backed assets - is spot on. Chuck Ofwat on the fire next to Ofgem.  @ChrisMayLA6 The big takeaway for me from this article is that the worst excesses were instituted in the 2000s under Labour governments, who appeared to do nothing to restrict the water companies. @ChrisMayLA6 to answer his final question in the article, ofwat must ban any bonuses or dividends in any company where debt exceeds 20% of its capital assets, ( not the stock market price!) being a programmer is hard when you wanna share your work like your arty friends but your program output looks like this and no one will ever understand or appreciate the complexity involved  |
