tete

I was Team AM long before an actual thing people talked about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...

(not sure if that makes me liked or hated though)

To be fair though there were quite some attempts to see it from the other side.

I think the end of the story line ruined it though and the fact that all side stories and characters were all a lot more interesting than any of the "main characters". It's like each and every minor side character excelled in amazing and surprising ways coming out of nowhere, while the main plots main characters were largely kind of dull (with exceptions once in a while).

Maybe they just overdid it with two shows largely running in parallel and then wanting to wrap things up?

That said I think the asymmetric war was always - throughout all of history - a classical topic. Everyone wanted to portray themselves as the rebels fighting an impossible fight. From David and Goliath over the French and American Revolutions, to Putin and Netanyahu trying to frame things as "being surrounded by enemies, fighting on their own". Heck even the Roman Empire tried to internally portray imperialism as just, being attacked by the whole world of wild people. Or look at how the left and the right nowadays portray the government as that big oppressor secretly or openly working with the other side.

There is an interesting... not even a show.. let's say "animation series" called Aeon Flux (not the movie, not the comic show) that tries to go into these perspectives a bit, but it kind of stands out among all the media that is either "that evil oppressive regime" and "those horrible terrorists". Wished there was more like that that didn't feel so try-hard.

Also Melinda M. Snodgrass wrote this episode.

I think just watching the scene makes it very very dull. I think watching the whole episode and of course even more adds a lot, because this is the culmination of many things and while in many situations the conclusion is the important bit I think here the context really matters. In this scene for example the role of the other side's "lawyer" is extremely central also to the title of the episode, as well as the relationship between the judge and Picard. None of this is apparent without context.

It would be sad if all that was left of this are small memes that people don't know the context of and I think for that scene in particular most viewers only find it great, because of all that led up to it.

It's like how in movies often the end is quite an epic or emotional scene, but it feels kind of generic without context. Sometimes it's sad that many shows or movies feel more like a series of such situations without buildup. For some shows it fits, but when you need/want to describe characters and inter-character relationships and how they fit into a story summarizing it feels... almost dehumanizing.

Cliche characters are the worst and something that is really enjoyable about Star Trek is that the most serious characters are goofy at times, just like that coworker. People simple have something "cringy" and "weird" to them, even when it cannot always be seen.

I'd even go so far to say that leaving that out in a world where people love to present themselves to the whole world like selling a product the absence of such things or the very intentional display of kind of "fake" goofyness is a thing even worse than beauty unrealstic ideals.

Lot's of words to say: Actually watch the show. Not with some episode guide, not with checking on reviews. Just open. You don't need to make it a marathon. People watched this an episode a week. You'll enjoy clips and memes so much more. Even if you don't end up a Trekkie, even if you are from a very different time. Just kick back and enjoy a nice show. :)

Step 1: Don't use docker, if you obviously cannot handle being depending on it.

Japan is great, because they realized that if you stop giving a fuck about public debt you can make a great country happen.

Who could have thought that with investment rather than letting everything crumble things would get better?

Meanwhile here everyone is close to tears if you propose anything for the public, because that might lead to lowering the tax break for some huge multi national that then would not get the well-deserved pay-off for their lobbying work.

And to be fair who wants to live under a regime that is the worst kind of communism, treating people who want need pee, but don't pay with respect, like Japan? (sarcasm)

> I think the main example on the landing page is a bit counterintuitive?

Still a million times better than the current Go landing page, and I am saying that as a huge fan of Go.

The award for the worst name goes to...

Seriously, it's long and still common, even in the context of computing, even in programming languages. Why would you choose a long name with two words and then not choose something somewhat unique? Such a horrible decision.

Really sad given that otherwise this seems like one of the more interesting new languages I've seen on HN.

I think one has to keep in mind where that slogan came from. A time where every OS tried to start a million services listening on the network, when OpenBSD ended up minimizing that, because it was aware of attack surface.

Nowadays it does the same with being very defensive of complexity and adding features just for the sake of it. They actively remove features and technically break standards to reduce surface. So while the phrase might be dated the whole idea of doing the minimal thing to provide minimal attack surface is something that some other projects could very much benefit from. Especially in times where people use LLMs that happily write ten classes instead of a simple five line function everyone can easily understand and verify.

Also I think it simply became a bit of a meme and like with the art and music it became a bit of a project culture thing. Don't overanalyze it. It's a joke like "days since last accident" and how Shodan is a video game reference and firewall probably came from some fantasy nerd. Hey, the term sharding came from a video game as well!

There is another take on "heavily audited". Many OSs and eg. browsers have the issue that there are huge amounts of pretty complex codes. OpenBSD is extremely inviting and among actual general purpose operating systems used on a daily basis in production one of the projects that sees a quite big amount of reads because of the relative simplicity and (intentionally) low amount of code.

Really, try making sense of pretty much anything in the Linux kernel compared to the OpenBSD kernel or any of the bigger browsers. Like fully grasping it. There is worlds in between.

This has secondary effects of people actually looking at code that is not their area of expertise and developers also working outside their subsystems.

Meanwhile in eg Linux you have huge swaths of code that essentially only some guy in some company somewhere has somewhat of a grasp of. And that's where Linux constantly sees its vulnerabilities, while OpenBSD actively removes such things, eg they removed Bluetooth support back in 2014. This leads to a situation where people actually are able to dig into things. They also have a huge amount of guardrails turned on and I know people that compile their code on OpenBSD despite not targeting the OS at all because of those guardrails uncovering issues.

Think about any bigger software company. There is a huge chance you basically have no idea how the stuff outside your team works maybe not even all of your team.

These kind of are the attack vectors we see in Open Source all the time (and actually closed source software too). It's not the stuff that everyone uses and wants to understand deeply in browsers that cause exploits. It's that one tiny thing that is part of the standard or somehow support was added, but despite nobody using it it's still there, either because well.. it's a standard or because nobody bothered to remove it.

OpenBSD even decided to break some standards for security reasons, but that's another topic.

What I wanna say with that is: I can think of a lot of projects that have more devs and more people looking at parts of it, but these projects tend to be quickly changing huge codebases, where no single person can have a good understanding of everything. This means that there is a good likelyhood that parts are not audited until some group or individual comes along and picks such a bit.

It's actually also what likely happened in this case, given it's 37 years old.

This isn't to defend OpenBSD, but to point out that X amount of people doesn't mean much without taking the size of the audit into consideration. I would think that big projects is something where LLMs really shine, but I also think that reducing attack surface by reducing code and complexity might be the biggest defense and as far as I have seen OpenBSD does a great job there and should be considered something that others can learn from.

And it's not just these kinds of software. It's not even just software per se. It's also infrastructure, where complexity usually means increased attack surface. And just to be clear: One always adds complexity, but it should be the minimal amount to fulfill the goal and not more and try to not add side goals you don't actually care about and want to maintain.

Especially with LLMs it's so incredibly easy to add complexity only for tomorrow's LLM (or human) to find huge amounts of bugs.

I really don't think it's an America only thing, since I sometimes feel like the only person who still has them in and I live in Europe.

I was an early Amazon user and introduced many people to it (was nice to easily acquire books). Have deleted my account 15ish years ago and noticed weird mindsets people developed, thinking they cannot get products elsewhere, thinking that Amazon ships faster than others when using Amazon Prime, thinking Amazon has cheap products and so on.

Showed what make believes people have.

I'm a guy that is pretty lazy and spends most of his money on convenience and not having to do stuff. It's not even convenient.

It's always a bit scary what things people believe end up believing about completely depending on one company.

Ah, I see, Ireland and McKinsey are trying to copy and capture McDonalds audience. /s

Yes, you said burger, but also AlphaNIST is not a technology conglomerate holding company. And the term Alpha is not at all used in their products. It's neither Alpha Phones, not AlphaGemini, nor is Google called Alpha. More than that Alphabet is never shortened Alpha.

That's silly. Neither is Discord the only one with that layout (Slack and even things like Gajim have similar layouts) nor would/should it count as something that cannot be copied.

The fact that Apple back in the early iOS days thought it invented desktop icons is still absolutely ridiculous.

In my opinion Disney is a horrible company, but not for these reasons and sorry, but the connection you are making is kind of sick.

Sorry, but that's just a silly comment. There are many many things causing suicide, including things like celebrities dying or marrying. Should that now be outlawed?

Talking about suicide can cause people to commit suicide, should it be outlawed?

And there were books banned for similar ideas and society at large decided that in most cases it's overreacting and does more harm than good.

Yes, I'd do everything for children to not die, but I wouldn't want them to spend their whole lives in a padded room being only allowed to consume nutritional paste and essentially have no life at all.

There is that idea of laws shouldn't be made for individual cases. It's a bit like how many people believed things like rock music made people into murderers or suicidal only to now have lots of people claim it saved them.

There are people claiming that LLM systems helped them through harsh times.

I say claim, because I neither know all the details about those cases nor claimed suicides, but the idea of absolutes like that is a lot more bothering than what you quoted. And not being able to take (maybe understand?) nuanced stances.

Fun fact, BSI has that sending out security emails when they find a security hole. A client once got that and was on the edge. It was a bit odd, cause the article they linked to literally said this wasn't affected (so no patches existed). Really wished they didn't do that. It was OpenSSH on OpenBSD.

There were other laughable things like that.

But in a world dominated by FUD (that HTTPS connection that only allows one fingerprint needs to go over VPN, that SSH port cannot allowed to be reachable (but that gaping hole on HTTP(S) is fine), without a firewall that server is insecure, ...) that's not exactly surprising.

That's just plain silly. The whole idea of "AI" is to have something that behaves like a human in that you give it a task and it will fulfill it. So at best you can have human skills. If you say your skill is "AI" you probably don't.

The whole "you are holding it wrong" argument for LLMs is just used by people getting defensive of LLMs and various issues that (currently?) exist.

> Every time this resurfaces I like to remind people that this is mostly impractical and not how things actually work at the commercial level.

Sorry, but that's simply not true. It's actually the default way of how people eg track people across installs in app stores ever since they started removing that feature.

No they are not. Stop comparing LLMs with brains. Even way before LLMs and the AI craze people realized that ANN (Artificial Neural Networks) are a bad bane and bad abstraction. At this point they are at best "inspired by", but partly also based on misunderstandings.

Basically every new learning about how neurons and the brain works is increasing the distance between how neurons and "artificial neurons" work. There are so many ways in which they are different that I have to stop myself from giving examples, so basically google for it (or use an LLM if you must). The whole memory and computation part, the fact that there are many different types of neurons doing different things, the fact that so much stuff isn't still understood.

And it's not like ANNs are per se changed or adapted to come any closer. A brain or neuron simulation is something very distinct from an artificial neuron.

Yes, it's good enough to emulate something learning, it's probably even an excellent choice to build an AGI and despite LLMs being far from it I think that ANNs will be the right choice, simply because they are a simple basic piece, but they are still not what a biological neuron is. It's simply a different thing.

Also just to be clear: That doesn't mean to say that an artificial biological neuron cannot be made or that we will not be using that or anything like that or that neurons are somehow magical and cannot possibly be replicated or anything like that.

It's just LLMs, ANNs and biological neurons, brains etc. are widely different. Just like a stick figure, a doll or a (current day) robot, an NPC, a chatbot, etc. might be a usable "abstraction" of a human, but is very dissimilar nevertheless. Making artificial and biological neurons equivalent is like pretending your phone has feelings and a bad day, maybe needs to rest, because some app malfunctions. Maybe letting it sit for a while will make things work again, but it's not because it overcame its bad day.

Really great channel! I love the "down to earth" history format it provides.

I think there is that huge misunderstanding that people were much different a hundred, a thousand or two thousand years ago, when it's mostly different language, technology. The politics part feels very contemporary.

Eg. soldiers singing rude songs during campaigns or celebrating coming home. Or during Saturnalia some people getting shitfaced all night, while others complaining about these "idiots".

Or politicians trying to make shady deals, or having their own agenda, putting their own people in place. Or talking about food/money for the poorer population (yes, there was free government food for the poor even 2k years ago!) or making bad decisions like giving veterans free land to grow crop on, and people realizing just because they are good soldiers doesn't mean they are great farmers.

Or that obsession of calling every war just and defensive, even when the main goal is expand the empire and being hailed as "imperator".

Or the fact that many actually found the coliseum pretty brutal just like parts of the Triumph (parade after conqueror new land) being upset and demanding to spare various people.

Also love the context that is often added, like whose perspective something is based on and where historians disagree.

Great channel for everyone that cannot stand that whole "Ave, Caesar" style talk or making everything sound grand instead of real.

Really wished history was taught that way in school. Right now it almost feels like anti-history. Instead of events it feels like the thing that's important are names and dates, which (most of the time) is the least important. At least in my opinion "learning from history" doesn't mean getting to know names and dates.

I think that's because there is differences in comparison. When an HDD reached 5 (or X) years it's much more likely to live to 10 (or y) years than one that died at 2 (or Z) years already. ;)

There is both the mathematical truth to it, but also the physical/chemical one. If something eg. deformed or had a slight manufacturing mistake the wear will be quicker. If everything works perfectly and eg. there are little vibrations (can be everything from earthquake to noise) then HDDs also tend to live longer and run faster. Of course the shipping process also can take its toll and vary greatly.

I think in the world of computers it's all to easy to forget that things largely aren't binary and "logically perfect". Even with advancements in manufacturing and materials drives are physical things in the real world influenced by many things inside and outside of the manufacturer's and user's control.

> That gave us what was a stable-seeming, old "replace drives at 5 years, or you're getting risky" rule of thumb (unless you prefer to replace on failure, of course).

That's not exactly what this means. This is like life expectancy at birth vs life expectancy at current age. (which is the thing where people act like "only kings got old" in the past, when while there is some truth to it also doesn't mean "you would be dead by 30" when you already reached adulthood. The biggest difference we got regarding life expectancy at birth by far was doctors and nurses cleaning their hands, followed by things like vaccines for childhood diseases)

Manufacturing errors are likely to hit early. So replacing a drive means you might replace a perfectly healthy drive with one that will eat your data.

Just use SMART and you have a way better insight of how well your drive does than any such advice.

And also you likely won't run your drives in the same conditions as Backblaze, so things might vary in both directions.

There is shipping, storage, running conditions, series, manufacturing, and many variables. So you have a way better understanding of your drive than what Backblaze can provide if you just look at your drive's SMART data and run a self test.

There is another option. Going to the source of information (eg. the official project site or code), trying stuff yourself.

Holy moly people feel entitled about joining a volunteer run (even things like health and security) organization.

The same way that the world was gonna end before AI.

By some dumb human doing something dumb on a large scale.

The only new part is "... because the AI said so."

> Realistically pretty much anything in orbit is a viable space to space weapon

Isn't pretty much anything viable as a weapon on earth as well? A knife, a fist, a car, a rock, a baseball club, a (non-military) drone, a lot of supermarket chemicals, etc. Viable enough that all of them have been used countless times to kill people.

Still we ban weapons in many places where a lot of these things might be allowed.

> I've found sorta the opposite - in any area, it can just do everything for you, or it can be an incredible teacher.

Please don't. I've had all of Codex, Claude and Gemini convincingly tell me absolutely wrong stuff, pointing it out with easily verifiable example they come up with more and more weird reasons.

Things don't become correct simply because most sources are again - easily and logically verifiable - wrong. This already was a plague when people "just googled" stuff and effectively returned with the most SEO optimized answer. Now we have very convincingly written instances all over the place.

If these were singular instances I wouldn't be so worried, but if you are learning it already is very easy to learn something wrong. This is why back in the days when people still used physical books to learn new things it was a good idea to check first which books are actually recommended. There have been a lot of "experts" that wrote things they clearly misunderstood but worked for all the examples in their books.

To give a common example for both the backend and frontend devs, that isn't about a specific projects. LLMs and Google searches frequently turn out wrong results regarding CORS caching and how it works in relation to domains/hostnames. The circumstances under which Content-Disposition work are another example. I think a lot of wrong statements that LLMs are "convinced" about are due to wrong statements (sometimes in otherwise correct response) of popular Stack Overflow answers.

It's saddening how much wrong "common knowledge" exists in the industry. I have been bitten by a lot of these, but it feels when people don't even actually code and think anymore this will just rise forever.

OpenTelemtry is the perfect example of an overengineered mess.

While I usually think that at least having some standard that people agree on I think OpenTelemtry should be dropped.

A lot of the less popular alternatives (just going with Prometheus, Victoriametrics, etc) are de-facto competing smaller standards and a lot better both in terms of less added complexity and the results you get.

I think OpenTelemetry turned metrics into a farce. In many situations even self-rolled telemetry works better even with the added stuff. The annoying thing is that OpenTelemtry is that big standard now one kind of has to to add compatibility. So please, if you write software, make sure you don't lock yourself into OTel.

That's all nice on a theoretical but such ideas quickly fall flat in a world where corporations are owned by rich people and create pollution often whole countries are even unable to pull off, often completely unpunished often economically and politically ("we need more jobs") encouraged.

I think reducing individuals to two people whose only difference is wealth in respect to which goods they can buy is wrong when applied to real world societies in the same way that weather prognosis based on a very limited set of parameters is wrong.

Wealth is not a measure to pay just fines or good, but today effectively the approximation for power that individuals, groups of individuals or legal entities hold. And measuring wealth is a huge complex topic on its own which also makes the taxation topic very complicated.

I think that's a huge flaw in present day economical thought. X is good because it increases X/Y ignoring secondary effects. It's like predicting whether it will rain on a given day by just looking at which way the wind goes on your weather station. There is theoretical truth to it, but given both secondary effects and the rest of the world that you might completely ignore but might have complete or partial reversal effects.

And then you have various groups that anyway mess with the details of the rules and people that ignore them through various other means, like not getting caught.

Classic example is also "We raise taxes, because then the rich will go away" which ignores things from "the rich" potentially not giving you anything if they don't give you taxes and the fact that your country might be able to offer a bit more both as a living and a working place than the level of taxes. In fact there have been studies conducted and the reality is that it barely has an effect. Turns out that people don't just leave for paying something that might even indirectly benefit them. Just like if you are rich you probably don't care much if the price for base goods increases, because you might have way bigger incentives like being in a secure place, having a house and family at a place and your company currently running smoothly with no downtrend in sight.

Well, this is just silly.

"We can all agree: the incentives are bad."

Seriously?!

If I kill someone, or behave like an asshole, everyone will hate me, so I've got an incentive not to. Is that so horrible?

The reason that people talk about incentives when it comes to politics is that laws and large parts of present day's richer countries economic systems are controlled by laws, contracts, associations between countries, companies, people, etc. and are an artificially created ruleset. That means if you change rules you change incentives. Eg. if you know a government will bail you out, you lose the incentive to avoid risky things, if there is a tax on something you are it will influence your monetary incentives, if being an asshole is looked upon favorably then you have an incentive to be one. Also if tax fraud isn't considered a crime by large parts of people or is seen as smart then you have an incentive to commit it.

A lot of social change good and bad came from shifts in good and bad incentives.

Even more. If you look at the legal and prison systems in Norway vs eg the US the incentives that individuals, governments and corporations have are a reason for a 5 year recidivism rate of 70% vs 20%.

In general if you think your life will be better as a criminal than the alternative then you will be incentivized become one. If you can choose between joining the mafia that might even care for you or barely getting through with day jobs then you are incentivized to do so.

So if a government manages to make sure your life will certainly better, than the incentive to join is a whole lot lower.

If you are shamed vs praised (or otherwise feel supported) for sexism or racism you will have an incentive to go a certain way.

Cults and so on used incentives in a bad way, many parents use incentives in a good way ("if you clean up your room/finish your homework/behave you'll get ice cream later").

The reason people talk about incentives is because they shape whether things are likely to work out. As we've seen big public companies usually will do everything they can get away with and will break laws if the expected profit is higher than the potential fine. That is a wrong and very much changeable incentive.

And it doesn't have to be laws. It can be public opinion. If the marketing is more expensive than just not doing a bad thing in first place then that's an incentive as well.

Incentives are the things that make people do things good and bad. Incentives are the reason people go out of bed and be it just the incentive to ease the pressure on their full bladder. And even there if getting up will cost you great pain you might have a higher incentive there.

Just like people going to doctors is often dominated by incentives of getting rid of a sickness vs not having to pay money or endure a potentially painful or side effect rich treatment.