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Jwarder

Re:Where Are the Sanity Checks? on Tuesday December 26, 2023 @11:31AM (#38773190)
I don't think the issue is with the number, but rather the context. What should the end user think when finder reports that there is 60TB of data on a 2TB drive? People with above average file system knowledge can generate an explanation for it, but what good does that number do?

When programming a feature like this it can be hard to spot the problem. The calculations for the backup's size can be 100% right, but still not appropriate to show.

Re:AutoGen: Enable Next-Gen Large Language Model Applications on Wednesday October 18, 2023 @09:49AM (#37928637)
It isn't too bad; naming stuff is always hard. If the Microsoft marketers knew about it then I would expect to see Azure™ Gen.NET™ Live™.
Re:Atlassian prepares to abandon on-prem server products on Monday October 16, 2023 @10:34AM (#37900404)
Can anyone speak about YouTrack/Space's warts? The marketing blurbs makes Space + YouTrack look like a decent replacement for Jira + Confluence + Bitbucket, but I don't recall ever hearing a developer talk about it.
> How many military bases does Russia have in Germany

Not the direction you are aiming, but I find Kaliningrad/Königsberg a fascinating example of soviet imperialism.

Re:Microsoft Edge Is Leaking the Sites You Visit to Bing on Wednesday April 26, 2023 @02:23PM (#35717975)
Oddly Bing seems to like PDFs more then other pages. I have a project that generates PDFs for logged in users. I see a handful of Bing/MSN IP addresses that keep on trying to view that page everyday, but MS has never tried to index other pages that need user authentication. So either Microsoft is really eager to index PDFs or my code the logs unauthenticated access attempts doesn't work on other pages.
Re:Missouri House Republicans vote to defund libraries on Monday April 17, 2023 @05:36PM (#35606942)
Because we all know that banning photo books that include that statue of David protects your children.
Re:Cyclists Now Outnumber Motorists in City of London on Monday March 20, 2023 @10:52AM (#35232370)
I would add boots that are high enough that there is no gap between the rain pants and the shoe. An old pair of "hiking" boots did the job for me. Riding through a puddle and getting your socks even mildly wet feels terrible.
Re:How to tell if AI threatens YOUR job on Wednesday March 15, 2023 @01:15PM (#35171533)
I've been thinking about it in terms of the transition from pre-1950s human computers to electronic computers. How much should we morn the loss of rooms of people doing calculations by hand? Making it easier for people to solve problems seems like an obvious win even if puts the "just give me the requirements in a ticket and let me code" programmers out of their jobs. Even outside of big software projects, imagine the business benefits from allowing an office worker to describe a problem and get an excel formula to try.
Re:SQLite WASM: Something subtle in the browser on Monday February 13, 2023 @12:29PM (#34776844)
Are there any gotchas around the sql parameterization? Looks like you're passing in an array into db.exec. I would have thought that would be enough, but if I search for org-mode then I see an error on the console complaining about no such column: mode.
Re:Jira is awful, welcome to AJIR on Friday February 10, 2023 @09:32AM (#34740076)
The Try For Free link is a bit awkward. It points to a page that just says Jobs, that in turn just points to a empty black page.

I assume the intention is to use the Login link. If so then I think that should be at the forefront instead of the empty pages.

Re:Where does ChatGPT fall on the political compass? on Friday December 30, 2022 @10:24AM (#34185824)
I remember hype in the early-mid 2000s for turning the semantic web into a general purpose knowledge engine. Are there projects trying to merge the natural language parts of a ChatGPT-esque system on top of a knowledge graph? Seems like there has to be, but the solvers I've seen are all very specialized and esoteric (speaking from surface level knowledge).
Closest I've seen is when UAE's Darkmatter was revoked as a sub-CA. Darkmatter claimed their "Trust Services" business unit was separate from the business units accused of spying for the UAE government.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1427262

You can install uBlock Origin on Firefox for Android.
Re:.NET 7 is Available Today on Tuesday November 08, 2022 @02:47PM (#33523375)
Seems like it makes the problem worse because you are then tied to a specific version at time of publishing and need to republish to get any framework patches.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/runt...

Re:The next time Wikipedia asks for a donation, ignore it on Wednesday October 12, 2022 @09:22AM (#33176571)
Weird, I haven't seen any recent banners frame it in terms of demise of Wikipedia. The urgent banners I've seen are about the time to complete the fund drive. Along the lines of: If X% of users paid $Y then the goal would be reached in Z minutes.

If you assume the fund drive exists to help keep the lights on then I think it is natural to treat it as an existential issue for Wikipedia, but that doesn't seem to match the specific language used.

Re:Take Advantage of Git Rebase on Thursday October 06, 2022 @11:18AM (#33109325)
I think it depends on what problems you want git to solve for you.

Some people like having the context from the complete the history of little commits without the risks of rebase breaking something.

Some people like using rebase to group all changes needed for a feature into isolated(ish) commits.

Some people just like the aesthetics of a straight master branch without the clutter of little "corrected typo" or "fixed bug for real this time" commits.

Re:Talking to your customers: a disruptive Agile framework on Thursday August 18, 2022 @09:52AM (#32509579)
As has been said before: Users are almost always right when they say a problem exists; but they are almost always wrong when they suggest a solution.
Re:Polio Detected in US on Friday July 22, 2022 @01:50PM (#32194953)
I don't want to put works in cies's mouth, but it possible to read the comment in a reasonable way. It is not necessarily a claim that polio isn't real, but rather that patient's signs and symptoms can overlap with other medical issues. Stefan Lanka doesn't pass my sniff test, but reference to him and to test contamination can be read as examples that these sorts of tests are not always clear.
Re:A fake job offer took down Axie Infinity on Wednesday July 06, 2022 @11:55AM (#32002803)
Is there a good no-nonsense way to clean PDFs of possible threats? Hunting around I see mentions of converting PDF->Postscript->PDF to remove junk, but I also see mentions that Postscript is its own security mess.
I agree with your points, but I think you're painting with too broad of a brush with:

> They really mean they hate trans people and want them to go away.

It is certainly an issue; viz various bathroom panics over the last decade. But, at least in the tech sphere, most of the fear I've seen comes from Twitter BS and hate. There are vocal people who want to use "wokeness" as a tool to attack people. I can see how it would be easy to conflate those kinds of attacks with progressivism for people who are predisposed against progressivism from the start.

Re:Learnings from 5 years of tech startup code audits on Thursday May 26, 2022 @10:27AM (#31518718)
At what point should I push for a code audit?

I don't think any of the codebases I worked on ever had a "real" audit. Best case was reviews pre/post acquisitions. An external audit seems like a good thing, but I have no idea how to argue for such a thing.

Re:Firefox DNS-over-HTTPS on Friday April 08, 2022 @09:47AM (#30956703)
Didn't the UK run into a problem a decade-ish ago where the group compiling the list of porn sites to block by default included the websites for their rival political parties? I just tried searching for references, but I can't find anything with details. I can't speak with certainty and it sounds like it was just a grunt being a jerk, but still a risk with these types of restrictions.
Re:U.S. Secret Service Launches Cryptocurrency Awareness Hub on Thursday February 24, 2022 @09:45AM (#30455293)
> There is nothing in bitcoin's code that makes it deflationary.

Depends on how strict you want to be. The number of coins the system allows is fixed. But the number of usable coins will decrease as coins are trapped in lost wallets. Software bugs, hardware failures, deaths, and simple forgetfulness will always make some coins unusable.

On the other hand, while "Bitcoin" on its own is deflationary, the whole ecosystem is wildly inflationary. There are uncounted forks of Bitcoin and related systems filling every speculation niche people can imagine.

Re:Privacy Sandbox on Android on Wednesday February 16, 2022 @02:02PM (#30364202)
Looks like they are trying to create a distinct set of APIs for third-party advertising (and I think everything else) SDK libraries. Those libraries are submitted to Google independently from the app. The apps now have to declare they are using library X version Y and Google will deploy that library to the end user's device when the app installs.
At this point how can they trust any installers they get from the company?

The risk the manufacturer bundling some "legitimate" remote access tool that won't show up as a virus seems high to me. Once burned twice shy.

I remember these being a bit of a nerd cred item in the early 2000s. Googling around I don't see anything too new in this space. I wonder if there was a problem with that approach or if SSDs just filled that niche.
Re:Microsoft buys Xandr, AT&T’s advanced advertising business on Thursday December 30, 2021 @09:36AM (#29737006)
I think echelon is referring to the "Automatic Sample Submission" option that is enabled by default in Windows Defender. It will upload exes and dlls without asking. It can also upload documents, but it should prompt the user first.

Windows telemetry is also a black box, but they admit to collecting some browsing history.

Re:Plans you're not supposed to talk about on Wednesday December 15, 2021 @09:43AM (#29566554)
I think this would work in the scope of vaccines, but I fear the effects of inflaming xenophobia. There were plenty of reports of random violence against asians the past year; I'd rather avoid increasing that.
When it comes to international relations I would depend on (not exactly trust, but close enough) my government more than Mozilla. When it comes to browser implementation topics I trust Mozilla more than any government.

There is nothing intrinsic to any system of government that would make any of them good at solving technical issues on their own.

Mozilla says so.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DgJe-Ku4u66JF2D6zha28tSKxPB...

I can't speak with authority, but my reading of PKI issues suggests Google is just as strict, while Microsoft and Apple are less strict. However, that just might be because MS and Apple are less public with their root programs.

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