See the UK Post Office accounting scandal, in which a persistent computer error went unfixed for decades and caused hundreds of post office employees to be fired and dragged through courts for corruption that never happened. A good chunk of them committed suicide.
The database is the least important part of the system: the organizational structure, rules, and procedures are way more important, because they actively help or harm people.
no no, it’s an input to a Palantir database
As someone in the software/networking space, I have a hard time with the author’s lack of attribution of the control/evasion characteristics of networks to people (developers of protocols, network operators, and users). Yeah, he admits the MPAA exists, but dude doesn’t mention Bram Cohen.
Describing files as “artificial life” in
Because peer-to-peer networks on which all files replicate are unpredictable complex systems, the files themselves can be seen as a form of nonorganic life. The reproduction of files can be described with a family tree in the same way that genetic family trees show the relationships between biological relatives.
is tortured.
Yeah, control/evasion is an arms race, but it isn’t meaningfully described as interactions within file sharing networks. It’s interactions between people, institutions, laws, legislators, courts, and software owned by different actors.
Generally speaking, no programmable networked device is guaranteed to be under your control.
You can make strong arguments about certain types of hardware and software, but it is always possible that it contains a backdoor from the manufacturer, and it is almost guaranteed that it has multiple vulnerabilities that would give a remote attacker full control.
Edit: Generally, I agree with the sentiment that things shouldn’t be this way, but that’s the world we live in. Given how we build software and hardware, we need to be able to update our devices to fix vulnerabilities. As long as that requirement exists, no device can be considered trustworthy.
I fully expect that to make a comeback in the aftermath of the climate wars.
too real
While the stats vary depending on who’s measuring, the story is consistent: web publishers, who provided the content that trained these AI models, face dramatically diminishing visitors, which means lower advertising and subscription revenues, even amid overall growth in search impressions.
AND MY AXE!
Your example didn’t mention the use of the function keyword. Instead, it seemed to be questioning the placement of the return type - placing it after the argument list seems pretty common in newer languages.
Rust and TypeScript use the return-type-at-the-end convention as well.
In modern BASIC variants, DIM has become a backronym: “declare in memory”.
TIL. I always thought it was a backronym for declare in (yo) momma.
only the linter gives a hoot - the interpreter will happily leave that footgun for later
The Photos editor menu is incredibly unintuitive. I hope this update makes it a little easier to use.
In theory the biometric data lives in a special part of the phone hardware that the software can’t (generally) access. It’s one of the big deals about phone biometrics - it should be really hard to leak.
AFAIU, the fingerprint stored on the phone is incredibly low quality, so I’m not sure how much value it would have.
Could they mess with that? Yes. Is there profit in getting a really low quality hash of every user’s fingerprint? Probably not worth the hassle.
The developers building Lemmy are very different from the folks building bots. I’ve got a half-assed repost bot working, but there’s no way I have the time or inclination to work on Lemmy itself.
Generally speaking, a bot needs to meet a much lower quality/reliability bar than the server does.
I think I’m one of the few users that enjoyed Reddit’s random bots. Seeing the Accidental Haiku bot restructure a comment as haiku, or the Consecutive Number bot point out a number progression was fun.
As long as they’re polite, and respect community boundaries, I think they’re fun.
People can post from anywhere, but need to be physically present to show up to a parade. And it’s easy for a single person to post multiple times. FWIW apparently the weather sucked too.
Weirdly, I haven’t seen news outlets provide estimates of the number of attendees. The closest I’ve seen is
attendance appeared to fall far short of early predictions that as many as 200,000 people would attend
from CBC. It sounds like it was low turnout, but I’m not clear how low.
Assuming the photos are legit, the No Kings protests clearly got a lot of people out.
That’s how I roll.
We’re already seeing them do that without a database. 🤷♂️
Other countries are able to maintain internal databases without using them to screw over their own citizens (except when they do). The problem isn’t the database.