The adblock stops malware, makes my browser perform better, and stops things from disrupting me. The most common result of anti-virus the complete opposite of each of those 3.
simple, don’t use an antivirus, stick to windows defender (before the linux crowd comes in yes I know there are basically no viruses threatening you chill), your own brain, and also not an admin account!
Don’t download shady shit, and if your PC asks you for some mysterious admin permission - the answer is “no”. If something does slip through windows defender will most likely handle it no problem!
Linux gets viruses too (see recent xz-utils vulnerability that almost got into production environments) and its kind of a shame that corporate antivirus software like Norton and McAfee end up ruining the reputation of antiviruses. In theory the idea of having a software that can scan for common viruses is a great way to increase security, even if it shouldn’t replace common sense. I’m not too sure if there are any good FOSS antiviruses, but if there aren’t there should be.
we’ll never be a 100% safe, no matter what OS we use. We can’t defend ourselves against backdoors and newly abused vulnerabilities in any meaningful way
That’s partially my point. You can never be 100% safe, but there’s a lot you can do to increase your safety besides just relying on intuition (edit: because intuition is usually the weakest link, see social engineering/phishing tactics). Anti viruses (when they aren’t just bloatware) are part of that.
Your second point about not meaningfully defending against backdoors and vulnerabilities is kind of against the point. You can totally defend against backdoors by not giving apps admin privileges, limiting network access, etc. so that damage can be limited even if an exploit happens. Then, if some backdoor or exploit is discovered, it’s only as dangerous as the permissions you give that app.
I used to have it on my Raspberry Pi to test some shady files. Besides of the Linux thing, they’d also need to get around the fact I was running things on AArch64, which is a rare combination. Maybe Windows on AArch64 would have been an even safer choice.
I cannot express how much I loathe antivirus software. Mostly it’s been because it has been nothing but trouble in my work environment, without ever catching anything, for over twenty years. It’s the modern corporate snake oil.
Good for you. If your company is regularly the target of industrial espionage and your coworkers have a hard time detecting phishing mails, you’re happy to have a good AV suite as a further security measure.
Yes, I’m well aware security is a team sport. All it takes is one person to make a mistake, once. I still remember that the Iloveyou virus penetrated our network back when I was in university, through the Unix lecturer…
Still fucking annoying though.
Although I do realise most of my annoyance comes from shitty configuration and poor human decisions. Oh, let’s run a full deep scan at 15:00 everywhere Friday. It’s not like the students will need to use those machines during their Comp. Science lab, right?
The proposed time zone is to drift about 1 second every 50 years. I also suspect it wouldn’t really be a time zone in the same sense as the time zones we know - it would just be a standardised calibration reference. Dates and times expressed in “moon time” would probably just be some leap second off of a known Earth time zone, and because it’s mere seconds over centuries, I think the only use of this time zone is to calculate ultra-precise time diffs between two earth datetimes when the observer is on the moon. At least, that’s how I interpret the articles I can find about it.
It’s also important for things like GPS, as related to other planets, as well as orbital maneuvering.
What they’re actually being told to build is “write down the rules for moon time”, which is basically what you said but defined in terms of “this much faster than earth time”, and a system doing the same thing on other planets or places in the solar system.
So it’s less a timezone and more a time system, and instructions for how you calibrate your atomic clock on the moon and reconcile the difference with terrestrial clocks.
Serious question…why would an entirely isolated GPS constellation need to have “a time zone” as opposed to it’s own epoch (like unix)? It’s on the receiver side that all the computation happens, aren’t the satellites essentially just announcing an agreed-upon time? Wouldn’t the client be able to do it’s own comparison of “it’s time”, as long as it’s source of time is also synchronized with the constellation?
I believe, and we’re at the edge of my understanding here, that the satellites need a consistent adjustment for local relativity. Because the satellites also have their clocks tick differently.
So they define a new time standard for the moon so that lunar operations can function based on that time standard, rather than having to recalculate relative to earth.
That’s the paper from NIST that’s basically the timezone part of it all.
They’re basically defining how to calibrate moon clocks so we all agree exactly how they differ from earth clocks.
Honestly, the longer I work in tech, the less confidence I have in anyone’s title. Even searching for a job, different companies have different ideas of what, pretty much everything is…
I’m more on the side of IT support (sysadmin/netadmim/systems engineer/network engineer/second/third level support/engineer/whatever tf)… And even looking for a job for myself, it’s a nightmare… Even mundane details about the job are messed up. I saw a posting for a “remote support technician”, by their definition, this was “remote” as in, not from an office. The job was on-site support for remote sites. I don’t even think it was an IT position, more like mechanical maintenance IIRC. So you were “remote” aka, not at their office, doing support (for something not electronic), as a “technician”.
It’s bullshit all the way down.
When I was last looking for a job someone commented that I had “only” applied to x positions in y weeks, when their search for (some vague title related to my usual employment) had z search results, where z was more than 10 times x. I didn’t bother replying but I couldn’t help but think, did you look at any of those postings? I literally had a search filter for jobs that was “CCNA” (Cisco certified) and I literally had administrative assistant positions coming up… Those are little better than secretarial jobs. I know because I clicked on it because maybe, just maybe they meant an assistant to the systems administrator, but no, it was exactly what it said on the tin.
This is my frustration with IT. There are zero standards for what a job is. Developer? Is it software or something related to construction? Engineer? Are you examining the structure of something or building out IT solutions? Admin? Office admin? Systems admin? Department admin? There’s too many “admin” related jobs… “Support”? Supporting what exactly? Am I programming switchports, or is this some other kind of bullshit support.
That’s not even getting into all the actual IT jobs that are clearly out in left field. Sysadmin jobs that require years of experience with an application that’s extremely specific to one industry; an application you could learn likely in a matter of days, which isn’t very complicated, but your resume goes in a bin if you don’t have some very specific certification and a number of years of experience with the related app… I know that because I’ve applied to such positions and didn’t even get a courtesy email telling me to pound sand.
Which takes me to another point, you don’t get rejected. You get ghosted. They don’t want you? Fine, tell me that. You don’t even have to give me a reason, just some copy pasta about pursuing other candidates. That way I will know to not expect anything further, and keep trying. I mean, I’m going to keep trying no matter what, but still…
The whole job market is a hellscape.
Then, I can turn my attention to the pointless titles people have, which often don’t mean shit outside of your specific workplace. “Lead customer success technician” … Ok, wtf is that? What does any of that mean? Are you technical in the sense of working with information technology? Or is it one of the DOZENS of other “technical” things? Everyone is a technician and everyone is an engineer now. Those terms used to mean something. Now they’re just keywords to blast your resume with to try to match some AI filter so you can get a call. If you don’t play the game, your left behind.
I feel bad for all the professional engineers out there who hold degrees in real engineering. Now anyone, everyone and their mother is calling themselves some kind of engineer. It’s all word salad and I hate it.
The reality is also, that development is so extremely diverse, that it’s hard to find umbrella-enough terms to describe a job.
For example, I’m a senior software developer on paper.
I’m not senior, not even 10 years job experience. But I seem to be rather good at what I’m doing, so I’m a senior now.
I’m also hardly writing any code. I talk to customers about what they want their software to do, I talk to management about how many people I need, I review pull requests, I talk to junior devs about their problems, etc, etc. Maybe 10% of my time is actual code. But what title other than “developer” should I have?
Maybe “software producer”? (a term I’ve never seen used anywhere but that sort of makes sense when you think about what a movie producer does, for example)
It’s not a huge project (3-4 devs, including myself), there’s simply not enough to do for a dedicated architect. PM and SM are done by dedicated roles, but as a lead dev, I obviously have to play translator quite a bit.
In my career i have gone from Systems Engineer to professional services to Profesional services team lead to Senior Systems administrator to now just Systems administrator. All doing basically the same IT stuff at progressively higher levels other than the team lead part.
When i was looking for my last job i applied for a remote admin job and experienced exactly what you described. I was on the third interview and was asked when i was going to move to the area and if i wanted a relocation allowance as part of the offer. Uhh what? To them a remote admin was an administrator that went to remote sites. What a waste of my time
Yeah, you can technically write object oriented code in C. Or any other language. Just that actual OOP languages provide a nicer syntax and compile time checks.
Rust is kind of a good example of this. It’s technically not an object oriented language, but the trait system brings it close.
I’ve seen like 5 posts about “AI BF/GF” today and it never ceases to surprise me how fucking easy it is to dupe people with these products, like holy shit humanity is fucked.
I’m always waiting for another ethical disaster trend to end but everybody is always in line for Mr Bonez Wild Ride.
If all you need is a one sided conversation designed to make you feel better, LLM’s are great at concocting such “pep talks”. For some, that just might be enough to male it believable. The Turing test was cracked years ago, only now do we have access to things that can do that for free*.
A pretty early chatbot called Eliza simulated a non-directive psychotherapist. It kind of feels like they’ve improved hugely but not really changed much.
Nah, bullshit, so far these LLM’s are as likely to insult or radicalize you as comfort you. That won’t ever be solved until AGI becomes commonplace, which won’t be for a long ass time. These products are failures at launch.
… Have you tried any of the recent ones? As it stands chatGPT and Gemini are both built with guardrails strong enough to require custom inputs to jailbreak, with techniques such as Reinforcement learning from Human Feedback uses to lobotomize misconduct out of the AI’s.
It’s wild that people brag that it’s able to do essentially the same as copying and pasting someone else’s basic code but with only a few extra imagined errors sprinkled in for fun but that just makes it more useful for pretending you aren’t again lljust literally copying someone else’s stuff.
It’s a search engine that makes up 1/8 of all it says. But sure it’s super useful.
Oh thanks, I really wanted to read another defence of an unethical product by some fanboy with no life. I’m so glad you managed to pick up on that based on my previous comments. I love it. You chose a great conversation to start here.
The tech is great at pretending to be human. It is simply a next “word” (or phrase) predictor. It is not good at answering obscure questions, writing code or making a logical argument. It is good at simulating someone.
It is my experience that it approximates a human well, but it doesn’t get the details right (like truthness or reflecting objective reality), making it useless for essay writing, but great for stuff like character AI and other human simulations.
If you are right, give an actual Iogical response only capable by a human, as opposed to a generic ad hominem. I repeat my question, Have you actually used any of the GPT3 era models?
It’s a very nuanced situation, but the people being sold these products and buying them are expecting a sentient robot lover. They’re getting another shitty chatbot that inevitably fails to meet bare minimum companionship standards such as not berating you.
There currently exists no ethical use of LLM AI. Your comment can be construed as defence of malicious people and actions.
I’ve never met anyone who uses them, but I’m also not sure people actually think it’s sentient. I’m sure some do, but I’d assume the vast majority are just looking to have a conversation, and they don’t care if it’s with a person or a (pretty good) chat bot.
Also, there is a way to use it ethically. As the post mentions, run it locally and know what you’re doing with it. I don’t see any issues if you’re aware of what it is, just as I don’t see any issue using auto-correct or any other technology. We don’t need to go full Butlerian (yet).
You are coming at this from your perspective which knows them to not be real. That’s not gonna be how the average moron thinks and there is more of them than you think. And they absolutely believe their is a tiny sentient brain somewhere in there that is alive. I’m all for people doing what makes them happy but also this is a loneliness confirming hole to get trapped in and absolutely opens doors to influence people through their imaginary friends that they think they can trust.
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