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jj4211

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Microsoft in damage-control mode, says it will prioritize security over AI (arstechnica.com)

Microsoft is pivoting its company culture to make security a top priority, President Brad Smith testified to Congress on Thursday, promising that security will be “more important even than the company’s work on artificial intelligence.”...

jj4211 , (edited )

A lot of the ‘big establishment’ companies will imediately sue when they lose a contract.

A few years back, the JEDI acquisition triggered Oracle and IBM:

I imagine it must suck to be involved in a big government procurement, because you are pretty much guaranteed to have to get pulled into legal proceedings by one or more of the losers.

jj4211 ,

I’m 6’0 245lbs - not obese mind you…

Technically obese. You’d have to lose 25 lbs to not be obese.

Of course Obesity is defined by BMI, and BMI is probably not as good as BRI and you might be closer to healthy by waist circumference. However your weight is probably not as healthy as you might think it is.

jj4211 ,

Strong is not mutually exclusive with fat.

I have a friend who made ability to lift heavy stuff basically his whole identity. Correlated with that was at any gathering he made a big show of eating just way more than everyone else because he’s a “big guy” and his muscles demand that much. So long as he could lift, obviously he must be fit, he works out after all. Basically his concept of masculinity is lift the heaviest stuff and eat the most stuff.

Now he’s struggling with diabetes and liver problems, despite being crazy strong. Never did cardio, and ate way more than he needed.

Yes, BMI can be misleading and being a bit muscular can have a higher BMI and be healthier than BMI says, but odds are if you are up in the obese territory, you probably are packing a lot of visceral fat screwing up your gut.

HP bricks ProBook laptops with bad BIOS delivered via automatic updates — many users face black screen after Windows pushes new firmware (www.tomshardware.com)

On May 26, a user on HP’s support forums reported that a forced, automatic BIOS update had bricked their HP ProBook 455 G7 into an unusable state. Subsequently, other users have joined the thread to sound off about experiencing the same issue....

jj4211 ,

fwupd under Linux also pushes firmware updates, if you let it.

jj4211 ,

Some Linux distros probably did push the bad HP firmware. Vendors push updates via fwupd.

jj4211 ,

Fedora pulls fwupd by default. If you use one of the ‘check for updates’ UIs, fwupd, dnf, and flatpak sources are all polled.

jj4211 ,

Sentiment changed when the “BIOS” became a component for enforcing security architecture via “SecureBoot” and also Bitlocker sealed to PCRs only does so much if the BIOS code is vulnerable. Now they really badly want a “trusted” chain from some root of trust until the OS bootloader takes over. Problem is that the developers have historically enjoyed being in a trusted, single user context for decades and so the firmware has been full of holes when actually pushed.

jj4211 ,

Updates for my laptop show up in the ‘update’ view of Discover. I currently manually decide whether to proceed, but the ‘click to update all’ I suspect is close enough for most people to be fully automatic, and perhaps even is fully automated for some people.

jj4211 ,

Even if it isn’t “bitlocker” branded, most Windows PCs ship with “BitLocker” enabled. The distinction between Windows Home disk encryption and “BitLocker” is that BitLocker additionally allows external management of the key material, while Home only supports the TPM and your microsoft account for the key/recovery codes.

jj4211 ,

I can tell you every factory preload of windows on a Lenovo I have seen for the past few years has disk encryption on by default (windows home, so not “bitlocker”, but it’s the same thing with respect to being tied to TPM.

jj4211 ,

I mean, he’s trying. You’ve seen his diet…

jj4211 ,

Actually, is there such a requirement for VP? You don’t have to meet the requirements to be in the chain of succession, you just get skipped.

jj4211 ,

Last time it was at odds with the presidential candidate. This time they both would fit right in with each other.

jj4211 ,

Ah, and so Air Bud’s VP prospects have been sadly dashed.

jj4211 ,

I like this edit: en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chevrolet_Ci…

jj4211 ,

Well now the question is why they don’t put an extra AA battery in the glove box.

jj4211 ,

I think we will see that car manufacturers will start to

They started to do this decades ago. Generally any given part in a car might be left unchanged for 5 or 6 model years before it gets changed, often for completely arbitrary reasons. For many cars, if it’s over ten years old your only hope for a replacement part is the junkyard.

jj4211 ,

Yeah, options open up for some massively popular models or otherwise very well loved models. I got replacement gears for headlight motors for a 90s car with pop-up headlights, because people got tired of the OEM design wearing out so easily. I suspect someone trying to keep a Pontiac Aztek going might have a harder time finding enthusiasts keeping things alive.

jj4211 ,

In LA County, looks like the median home price is $1M. The proceeds of such a sell, combined with presumed other typical sources of retirement income and social security should provide for an above-average retirement lifestyle.

jj4211 ,

Considering the proposal is only about LA county, figure I’d use that, but we can consider things either way.

I would expect that whatever means had the retiree have both a home and at least another property left them with other typical sources of passive income. So in aggregate, I would expect social security, with retirement savings, plus the value of the house produces an overall viable income.

Whether the mortgage is paid off or not is immaterial unless they are somehow “upside down” on it. If the mortgage is not paid off, then selling it also removes the mortgage payment.

But let’s say that it is unreasonable to sell, maybe somehow the person has all of their money tied up in the property and can’t sell the property for an amount to get enough passive income. This measure would not force her to sell, it simply caps her rental income increase to 3% a year. Her property value may go up, but that doesn’t make her mortgage go up (if she even has one). County assessments would make her tax bill increase some, though generally a pittance. Even if you are concerned about the tax bill, you could have some clause that assessments or property tax for people with rental properties is similarly capped if the owner is subject to a rental income cap. In most contexts, the ability to guarantee oneself a 3% a year raise would be pretty respectable.

jj4211 ,

That nails it exactly. “Complex and multifaceted” is the mantra of high schoolers everywhere.

jj4211 ,

Yeah, that was particularly bad habit of SNL back then. They hit upon a mildly amusing joke and then just beat it to death by doing it over and over when it was barely a little funny the first time.

It’s a wonder they didn’t create a “making copies” movie with how they were back then.

jj4211 ,

What’s up with all these washed up celebrities coming back to the spotlight just to make an ass of themselves?

jj4211 ,

Well, tar.zstd is starting to be the thing now.

jj4211 ,

The problem is that ‘everyone knows’ but Congress did not hold designate him as doing so. While Colorado declared he did, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that section 5 of the 14th amendment says it’s up to congress, not courts (neither state or federal) to make the determination.

jj4211 ,

The Supreme court’s reply: Section 5 14th Amendment

They said only the national legislature can make this determination, based on section 5.

jj4211 ,

given the current extremely partisan court

Note that on this particular matter, they ruled unanimously that Trump couldn’t be removed from ballots.

jj4211 ,

Agreed, though to be fair, since we all saw it with our own eyes, you would hope we would move to prevent it by voting against him.

jj4211 , (edited )

I’m all for and good eye rolling at institutional Agile (basically checkered with bad management who doesn’t know what to do, but abuses buzz words and asserts Agile instead), but this article has a lot of issues.

For one, it’s a plug for someone’s consultancy, banking on recognition that, like always, crappy teams deliver crappy results and “Agile” didn’t fix it, but I promise I have a methodology to make your bad team good.

For another, it seems to gauge success based on how developers felt if they succeeded. Developers will always gripe about evolving requirements, so if they think requirements were set in stone early, they will proclaim greatness (even if the users/customers hate it and it’s a commercial failure).

jj4211 ,

I think the take away should be:

new research conducted for a new book, Impact Engineering,

By contrast, projects adopting a new Impact Engineering approach detailed in a new book released today only failed 10% of the time.

So the people who want to sell you ‘Impact Engineering’ say ‘Impact Engineering’ is better than Agile… Hardly an objective source.

Even if they have success with their ‘Impact Engineering’ methodology, the second it becomes an Agile-level buzzword is the second it also becomes crap.

The short of the real problem is that the typical software development project is subject to piss poor management, business planning, and/or developers and that piss poor management is always looking for some ‘quick fix’ in methodology to wave a wand and get business success without across the board competency.

jj4211 ,

"new sw development methodology seems to have a much lower failure rate than agile dev, claims people who stand to make money if new sw development methodology has a lower failure rate. "

jj4211 ,

I’d say it’s that people tend to use Agile because consultants tell them they can be piss poor managers dealing with the crappiest developers and stupid business ideas and still make awesome stuff if they just make everything buzzword compatible.

I’d say projects without much of an upfront project plan can still be very successful, but it’s all about having a quality team, which isn’t something a two week ‘training and consultancy’ session isn’t going to get you, so there’s no big marketing behind that sort of message.

jj4211 ,

Even internal projects have a facet of ‘milking customers’ even those customers are internal. There’s a rather large internal team that has managed to last years by milking the fact their stuff always sucks but any moment when they are challenged about their projects they always have a plan to fix all that’s wrong within ‘3 months’.

jj4211 ,

Yeah, look at the most prolific language at a given time. There’s your crappy projects or your soon-to-be-crappy projects. What are the universities and ‘coding academies teaching’? That’s going to be the crappiest stuff in the world when those students come out.

So too it goes with ‘management’, the popular ‘self-help’ style crap of the moment is what crappy teams will adopt, and no matter what methodology it is, that crap team is still crap, and it will reflect on that methodology.

jj4211 ,

“agile” is being flexible. Being “Agile” more often than not means your company’s incompetent management paid some hack consultants to come in and bless your flavor of stupid bureaucracy as “Agile”.

jj4211 ,

In my workplace, that happens in the moment of the blocker being incurred. When people are continually in communication, the daily standup is redundant and frequently for the sake of some manager/project manager who “technically” shouldn’t be part of the standup.

jj4211 ,

Yeah, Agile isn’t really at fault here. If done right

This is what ticks me off about the “Agile” brand, it’s chock full of no true Scotsman fallacy (if a team failed while doing “Agile”, it means they weren’t being “Agile”).

I can appreciate sympathizing with some tenets as Agile might be presented, but the popularity and consultancy around it has pretty much ruined Agile as a brand.

Broadly speaking, any attempt to capture nuance of “best practices” into a brand word/phrase will be ruined the second it becomes “popular”.

jj4211 ,

Any team that calls itself an Agile team that doesn’t actually follow the processes properly is doing it wrong and will fail.

I mean, this statement is also weird, to imply that not following Agile implies failure. I’d say it’s quite possible for a team to “falsely” execute on Agile and still pull off success. However, if that story is prominent and successful, no one is going to make a peep about it not being “true Agile”, they’ll only do that when it’s a failure.

But really this detail is beside the point, that people want to use ‘Agile’ as shorthand for good methodology, but it’s the way of the world that any shorthand that is popular will get co-opted and corrupted to the point of uselessness. You end up with various “interpretations” and so the meaning is diluted.

Now at a glance, this may seem an innocuous scenario, ok, Agile doesn’t “mean” anything specific in practice because of people abusing it to their objectives, but it still carries the weight of “authority”. So if you have a criticism like “there’s way too many stupid pointless required fields in our Jira implementation, and there’s a super convoluted workflow involving too many stakeholders to walk a simple ticket to completion”, then you get chastised because “our workflow is anchored in Agile, and you can easily see online that Agile makes success, so you obviously don’t understand success”. You can try to declare “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”, but then they’ll say “oh, but the stuff on the right is valuable, and it’s used to facilitate the interactions between people”. Thanks to Atlassian marketing, for a lot of the corporate world if you implement it in Jira, then it is, by definition, “Agile” and your peons can shut up because you are right.

Basically, things get ruined by trying to abbreviate. You may be able to cite the Agile manifesto as something specific enough yet still short, though it’s still wishy washy enough to not be able to really “win” an argument with someone when deciding how you are going to move forward.

jj4211 ,

This weekend I proposed to my girlfriend, here’s what it taught me about B2B sales…

jj4211 ,

I was not familiar and I’m American. Guess they’ll have to exile me somewhere…

jj4211 ,

I also speak English, and now I’m extra exiled and will have to go to some country that I don’t speak the language.

jj4211 ,

Most of those ‘SUVs’ are what we used to would call ‘station wagon’ or ‘compact wagon’.

Ioniq 5, Kia EV6, Mach-E, Model 3, Lyriq, and Blazer EV I would say aren’t particularly ‘big’ but all are ‘SUV’. You have Model 3 which is not even ‘technically’ an SUV. You also have the Leaf, the Niro EV, the Mini Cooper SE, which are all relatively smaller.

The models that are typical ‘large’ SUVs are relatively few. The EV9, the Rivian, maybe the Model X are the ones off the top of my head that are “Ford Explorer” big or larger. Yes the pickup trucks are blighted by the same “cosplay as a big rig” design language inflicted on the ICE pickups, except for CyberTruck which somehow managed to be even worse.

jj4211 ,

I read a report that Model 3 LFPs were down to around $7k. CATL claims te be under $5k this year for a brand new pack good for about a 200 mile range. Analysts predict under $3k for that pack in 2025. This is even ignoring the potential to remanufacture an existing pack, reusing the parts of the packs that don’t degrade, and potentially reclaiming some value for recycling the cells. LFPs also have more durability, so likely to be a 15 year workable lifespan for most drivers.

This is a rapidly evolving situation, with prices going down dramatically for battery. If it lands at less than $5k for a 15 year maintenance item, then that’s even less than I spent keeping my 15 year old Acura in working order toward the end, ignoring the extra costs I had to spend on the gas compared to the EV charging. About half the gas cars I’ve owned have been a money pit for maintenance, and the other half haven’t been super cheap either. The EVs have been much lower maintenance, though admittedly the maintenance cost will be high years down the line, but I wager in aggregate it’ll be cheaper than the maintenance costs of my traditional cars have been.

jj4211 ,

Well, there is the mini Cooper, but if you are considering the leaf a big SUV, that’s hardly “big American” and would fit in with most four door vehicles for decades globally, certainly anything with four doors that could pass collision and pedestrian safety standards today… to get smaller you have to go down to the little two door things, and for most people those are too impractical as a daily driver.

jj4211 ,

I would suspect that even if it is an engineered crisis, it’s not our own wealthy class doing the engineering. They can have what they want in a more stable way by not having this nonsense happen. It’s not like the democrats are suddenly going to actually start making their lives notably harder. In fact, a lot of the ‘MAGA’ is stuff they would not want (high tariffs when they want to import cheap and sell high instead, abusing immigrants by detaining and deporting instead of abusing them by making them be a cheap labor source afraid to exercise any rights they might have for fear of getting deported).

Foreign interests are about the only ones that stand to gain from this sort of instability.

jj4211 ,

I don’t want anyone that won’t live with the consequences of their political decisions to be in a position where they get to decide for those who will.

On the flip side, young folks vote influences things like social security and medicare. Given that everyone of all ages is subject to various government policies, often uniquely, you cannot have a system where you can identify a subpopulation that ‘shouldn’t count’ by that logic.

jj4211 ,

Yeah, right now the loudest voices are either “AI is ready to do everything right now or in a few months” or “This AI thing is worthless garbage” (both in practice refer to LLM specifically, even though they just say “AI”, the rest of AI field is pretty “boringly” accepted right now). There’s not a whole lot of attention given to more nuanced takes on what it realistically can/will be able to do or not do. With proponents glossing over the limitations and detractors pretending that every single use of LLM is telling people to eat rocks and glue.

jj4211 ,

The analogy about Nikki Haley is apt, to ‘pivot’ is trivial, to credibly pivot is another. I promise not a single Trump supporter suddenly believed Nikki’s change and it didn’t buy her any clout. If anything, it undermined her previous bet of ‘party will move beyond Trump soon’.

Similarly, Netanyahu pivoting won’t appease any of his hard core supporters. Also, this presumes that Netanyahu is some secret moderate trying to appease extremists rather than actually being a key proponent/leader of the extremist agenda. This would be like saying “Trump is looking for an opportunity to pivot toward a pro-immigration stance, but his party just won’t let him”.

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