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silveradeptTo start, engineer simple systems. The more work done up front to make the systems simple, reusable, and understandable, the less you allow complexity to creep in and cause problems (and additional lines of code). To reward simplicity, however, you have to appreciate it, rather than simply base your metrics on "numbers go up."
And sometimes, when you do things simply, there are some really cool things that you can do with them. Like achieving having gotten so far past the original designer's belief in you that you crash the game. (That's the first human-capable Tetris crash. If you want to know why that's so awesome, there's also the Keeping Classic Tetris Interesting primer.)
synecdochic has a list of cyber-security tune-ups you can do to make your accounts more secure and less likely to be used for malicious purposes.
An except from a podcast that talks about what meditation is and is not, which is much, much simpler than a lot of things that recommend meditation as part of their system of health and wellness. Sudden or gradual insight may or may not come from practice, but the point is the practice. Just sitting and coming into awareness.
Franchisees of Pizza Hut have chosen to lay off all of their delivery drivers rather than pay them a wage that will allow them to live in California. They will tell you this is because the business of being a franchise is difficult and they have to do it to cut costs. If they say that, demand to know what their compensation to the owner and what their profits were, so you can tell just how much they're lying to you.
One half of the legendary smothers Brothers comedy duo, Tom Smothers, has died at 86 years of age. Their most famous item, a variety show with both brothers doing music, comedy, and having guests who also pushed the envelope made it clear that TV that was incisive and funny could be done on network television, at least until the censors got to them.
Laura Lynch, one of the founding members of the group currently known as The Chicks, passed from injuries sustained in a car accident at 65 years of age. Lynch left the Dixie Chicks (as known then) before they became both more popular and a lightning rod of controversy in the country and western world for being one of the few acts that broke with the conservative view that the genre is best known for.
Journalism and science and social attitudes all work in concert to shape our opinions of what is going on with pandemics and the experience of long COVID, and far too often, the shaping is moving away from empathy and understanding, exacerbated by all of the dismissal that has come before, for similar conditions. Which we put withsynecdochic offering the potentially curious situation where taking H1 and H2 anthistamines (so, usually, an allergy med and an antacid if they're the right ones) may increase the ability of someone to fight off a COVID infection and to make the symptoms of an active infection much less worse. There are links to papers as well, which represent an evolving line of thinking about what might also get activated during an infection and how to keep those things quiet.
The world's opinion is fairly firmly in favor of Israel stopping its campaign in Gaza, which makes perfect sense, given how that campaign has been conducted so far. But because there's still support for Israel's campaign from their major backers of arms and funds, they can continue to ignore how the campaign is damaging their international reputation.
Rudy Guliani was ordered to pay $148 million USD to two elections workers that he defamed and directed the worst elements of fascism to attack through baseless accusations of election manipulation. There will be appeals and offers and other attempts to weasel out of having to actually pay the reparations that have been demeanded of him, because Rudy, much like the one he serves, intends to be the kind of person who gets plenty of judgments against him but never pays any of them and tries to delay everything for as long as he can, until someone else gives up. (Even worse, he still seems to believe what he said and that he has evidence to prove the truth of it. Which means he got sued again immediately after this judgment, with the intent of trying to force Guliani to stop defaming the people he had already been found to be defaming.) The judgment is good, and one hopes that judgment against other persons who repeated the defamations, including the one who tried to get the Georgia Secretary of State to change the election results, is also swift and punishing.
The Colorado Supreme Court said that the person responsible for the January 6th riot and attempted insurrection is ineligible to be on even a primary ballot in the state of Colorado, due to being disqualified by Amendment 14, Section 3 of the United States Consitution. There will be an appeal, of course, to a higher Court, and we will have to see whether or not the SCOTUS decides they have to follow the Constitution, or whether they are going to follow the man and damn the Constitution.
Finding yourself in places you may not have known you were there: the discovery of Joseph Bologne, classical composer and violinist, and the festival devoted to his music. Also, Vogue's first model with trisomy 21, which is quite the accomplishment for someone told she wouldn't be able to do any such thing like walk or talk.
Old arguments never die, they simply change into new forms: an interview with Roz Kaveney and how she's been fighting and making fun of TERFs since they were the anti-sex movement.
It happened on the 27th of December, but there are days where authors all get together and ask you to stuff your Kindle, but presumably this will work for any item that is connected to a Kindle account.
The pictures from the newest telescope continue to show us that our cosmos is beautiful, and very, very old.
Cats do play fetch, but they play getch longer and more when they're the ones saying they want to play fetch, because cats,
In technology, An oops in the Windows Store had computers installing HP's Printer App regardless of whether HP Printers were connected and known to the machine. After taking responsibility for the issue, Microsoft offered a troubleshooting tool to those affected that would fix the issue.
The genetic aggregator 23AndMe was severely hacked and significant amounts of private data exfiltrated. Once they knew how bad the hack was, the company sent out a change to their Terms of Service that basically said "unless you specifically object, you agree not to participate in class action lawsuits." Which in and of itself, as soon as it was discovered they had done so, should have resulted in getting slapped hard from a governmental regulator, because it's pretty clearly a transparent dodge to avoid the responsibility for the hack and the exfiltration of the data. But, of course, there aren't any regulators with teeth enough here in the States to make them face the consequences of what has happened.
In the vein of those who have more money than sense, Elon Musk has apparently contributed a small amount of seed money (100 million USD) toward launching a university with a STEM focus. One wonders, given the ideological positions that Musk has regularly taken, whether the STEM parts will be leavened with anything resembling ethics and the question of should.
Because Teslas are expensive to repair and maintain, rental company Sixt in Germany is replacing them with cheaper and easier-to-repair electrics from BYD in China. Even though it's phrased as a monetary decision, I suspect that they've also improved the safety of their fleet by doing this.
Indiana-based Cummins has been accused of, and has paid a significant fine for, the installation of devices in the engines of Dodge Ram trucks designed to defeat emissions tests. The last major scandal of this note was Volkswagen doing the same in 2017. It probably says something good about emissions standards when we get to the "cheating is the easier and cheaper option" part of the situation. It says bad things about those who choose to cheat instead of make their engines work, but that suggests, at least, that the standards are starting to become exacting enough.
Dropbox opted its users into program where their files could be sent to an LLM to generate answers about those files. Even though Dropbox clarified about what purposes the files would be put to and what they wouldn't be put to, and that they wouldn't be used to train the LLM models, the opting-in of someone to a program instead of making them opt themselves in has made many users mad at Dropbox.
Google has declared that its issues with lost files from Google Drive are over, and are moving swiftly to make sure anyone who disagrees with them can't do so on Google's forums. Even as people claim their fixes don't, or they don't address the actual problem.
Comcast let their servers remain unpatched against an attack that was in active use after the patch was announced and distributed from one of their vendors, Citrix, and now has to announce that data was stolen from them using that specidic attack. Which should result in firing and demotion and fines and having to make restitution in such amounts that Comcast will not let that happen ever again because the punishment nearly bankrupted them. It won't, but it should.
Using sophisticated techniques and attacker-in-the-middle situations, as well as some specific encryption algorithms being available, it is possible to compromise the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol thoroughly. It's not an attack that's easy to exploit, nor is it one that any script kiddie can use, so most people are probably not going to be attacked with it. All the same, expect patches to disallow the compromised protocols and otherwise prevent the situation from happening as best as possible.
An electric car completed a trek from a magnetic north pole to the south pole, using electric charging and renewable solar and wind power as much as possible along the way. (They did have gas generators and support trucks accompanying as well, so it wasn't a completely electric trip and company, but they definitely did their best to make it as electric as possible.) Pretty cool, honestly.
Physical buttons and knobs are on the comeback for at least some cars, having head from drivers that they're not actually interested in having all of their controls locked behind a touchscreen that requires them to divert their focus, or to make all the necessary adjustments before beginning a journey.
A cryptocurrency exchange is forfeiting approximately $2.7 billion USD in fines after it settled with the U.S. government over allegations that it was not properly vetting U.S. customers and directing the company employees to ignore Know Your Customer laws and similar requirements.
If you must have the newest forms of Apple Watch, hope you got it before the 24th of December 02023, before an import ban went into effect preventing Apple products from being sold in the US that have patented technology alleged to be stolen from Masimo. Although the ban only officially restricts Apple from selling their products, presumably third parties who have stock will not be able to reorder them from Apple. And Apple, for its part, is trying to find some way of working around the ban and continuing to sell their product, rather than admitting to any wrongdoing or trying to strike a licensing deal. The ban was temporarily reprieved, but there was no permanent action taken to remove it.
Last for tonight, a high-level overview of what it would take for a person to emigrate to Canada, which, for the most part, involves a lot of expense and a lot of doing things on a very specific schedule.
And some levity: Shopkeepers and owners can't resist a good pun (or a bad one.)
(Materials viaadrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
And sometimes, when you do things simply, there are some really cool things that you can do with them. Like achieving having gotten so far past the original designer's belief in you that you crash the game. (That's the first human-capable Tetris crash. If you want to know why that's so awesome, there's also the Keeping Classic Tetris Interesting primer.)
synecdochic has a list of cyber-security tune-ups you can do to make your accounts more secure and less likely to be used for malicious purposes.An except from a podcast that talks about what meditation is and is not, which is much, much simpler than a lot of things that recommend meditation as part of their system of health and wellness. Sudden or gradual insight may or may not come from practice, but the point is the practice. Just sitting and coming into awareness.
Franchisees of Pizza Hut have chosen to lay off all of their delivery drivers rather than pay them a wage that will allow them to live in California. They will tell you this is because the business of being a franchise is difficult and they have to do it to cut costs. If they say that, demand to know what their compensation to the owner and what their profits were, so you can tell just how much they're lying to you.
One half of the legendary smothers Brothers comedy duo, Tom Smothers, has died at 86 years of age. Their most famous item, a variety show with both brothers doing music, comedy, and having guests who also pushed the envelope made it clear that TV that was incisive and funny could be done on network television, at least until the censors got to them.
Laura Lynch, one of the founding members of the group currently known as The Chicks, passed from injuries sustained in a car accident at 65 years of age. Lynch left the Dixie Chicks (as known then) before they became both more popular and a lightning rod of controversy in the country and western world for being one of the few acts that broke with the conservative view that the genre is best known for.
Journalism and science and social attitudes all work in concert to shape our opinions of what is going on with pandemics and the experience of long COVID, and far too often, the shaping is moving away from empathy and understanding, exacerbated by all of the dismissal that has come before, for similar conditions. Which we put with
synecdochic offering the potentially curious situation where taking H1 and H2 anthistamines (so, usually, an allergy med and an antacid if they're the right ones) may increase the ability of someone to fight off a COVID infection and to make the symptoms of an active infection much less worse. There are links to papers as well, which represent an evolving line of thinking about what might also get activated during an infection and how to keep those things quiet.The world's opinion is fairly firmly in favor of Israel stopping its campaign in Gaza, which makes perfect sense, given how that campaign has been conducted so far. But because there's still support for Israel's campaign from their major backers of arms and funds, they can continue to ignore how the campaign is damaging their international reputation.
Rudy Guliani was ordered to pay $148 million USD to two elections workers that he defamed and directed the worst elements of fascism to attack through baseless accusations of election manipulation. There will be appeals and offers and other attempts to weasel out of having to actually pay the reparations that have been demeanded of him, because Rudy, much like the one he serves, intends to be the kind of person who gets plenty of judgments against him but never pays any of them and tries to delay everything for as long as he can, until someone else gives up. (Even worse, he still seems to believe what he said and that he has evidence to prove the truth of it. Which means he got sued again immediately after this judgment, with the intent of trying to force Guliani to stop defaming the people he had already been found to be defaming.) The judgment is good, and one hopes that judgment against other persons who repeated the defamations, including the one who tried to get the Georgia Secretary of State to change the election results, is also swift and punishing.
The Colorado Supreme Court said that the person responsible for the January 6th riot and attempted insurrection is ineligible to be on even a primary ballot in the state of Colorado, due to being disqualified by Amendment 14, Section 3 of the United States Consitution. There will be an appeal, of course, to a higher Court, and we will have to see whether or not the SCOTUS decides they have to follow the Constitution, or whether they are going to follow the man and damn the Constitution.
Finding yourself in places you may not have known you were there: the discovery of Joseph Bologne, classical composer and violinist, and the festival devoted to his music. Also, Vogue's first model with trisomy 21, which is quite the accomplishment for someone told she wouldn't be able to do any such thing like walk or talk.
Old arguments never die, they simply change into new forms: an interview with Roz Kaveney and how she's been fighting and making fun of TERFs since they were the anti-sex movement.
It happened on the 27th of December, but there are days where authors all get together and ask you to stuff your Kindle, but presumably this will work for any item that is connected to a Kindle account.
The pictures from the newest telescope continue to show us that our cosmos is beautiful, and very, very old.
Cats do play fetch, but they play getch longer and more when they're the ones saying they want to play fetch, because cats,
In technology, An oops in the Windows Store had computers installing HP's Printer App regardless of whether HP Printers were connected and known to the machine. After taking responsibility for the issue, Microsoft offered a troubleshooting tool to those affected that would fix the issue.
The genetic aggregator 23AndMe was severely hacked and significant amounts of private data exfiltrated. Once they knew how bad the hack was, the company sent out a change to their Terms of Service that basically said "unless you specifically object, you agree not to participate in class action lawsuits." Which in and of itself, as soon as it was discovered they had done so, should have resulted in getting slapped hard from a governmental regulator, because it's pretty clearly a transparent dodge to avoid the responsibility for the hack and the exfiltration of the data. But, of course, there aren't any regulators with teeth enough here in the States to make them face the consequences of what has happened.
In the vein of those who have more money than sense, Elon Musk has apparently contributed a small amount of seed money (100 million USD) toward launching a university with a STEM focus. One wonders, given the ideological positions that Musk has regularly taken, whether the STEM parts will be leavened with anything resembling ethics and the question of should.
Because Teslas are expensive to repair and maintain, rental company Sixt in Germany is replacing them with cheaper and easier-to-repair electrics from BYD in China. Even though it's phrased as a monetary decision, I suspect that they've also improved the safety of their fleet by doing this.
Indiana-based Cummins has been accused of, and has paid a significant fine for, the installation of devices in the engines of Dodge Ram trucks designed to defeat emissions tests. The last major scandal of this note was Volkswagen doing the same in 2017. It probably says something good about emissions standards when we get to the "cheating is the easier and cheaper option" part of the situation. It says bad things about those who choose to cheat instead of make their engines work, but that suggests, at least, that the standards are starting to become exacting enough.
Dropbox opted its users into program where their files could be sent to an LLM to generate answers about those files. Even though Dropbox clarified about what purposes the files would be put to and what they wouldn't be put to, and that they wouldn't be used to train the LLM models, the opting-in of someone to a program instead of making them opt themselves in has made many users mad at Dropbox.
Google has declared that its issues with lost files from Google Drive are over, and are moving swiftly to make sure anyone who disagrees with them can't do so on Google's forums. Even as people claim their fixes don't, or they don't address the actual problem.
Comcast let their servers remain unpatched against an attack that was in active use after the patch was announced and distributed from one of their vendors, Citrix, and now has to announce that data was stolen from them using that specidic attack. Which should result in firing and demotion and fines and having to make restitution in such amounts that Comcast will not let that happen ever again because the punishment nearly bankrupted them. It won't, but it should.
Using sophisticated techniques and attacker-in-the-middle situations, as well as some specific encryption algorithms being available, it is possible to compromise the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol thoroughly. It's not an attack that's easy to exploit, nor is it one that any script kiddie can use, so most people are probably not going to be attacked with it. All the same, expect patches to disallow the compromised protocols and otherwise prevent the situation from happening as best as possible.
An electric car completed a trek from a magnetic north pole to the south pole, using electric charging and renewable solar and wind power as much as possible along the way. (They did have gas generators and support trucks accompanying as well, so it wasn't a completely electric trip and company, but they definitely did their best to make it as electric as possible.) Pretty cool, honestly.
Physical buttons and knobs are on the comeback for at least some cars, having head from drivers that they're not actually interested in having all of their controls locked behind a touchscreen that requires them to divert their focus, or to make all the necessary adjustments before beginning a journey.
A cryptocurrency exchange is forfeiting approximately $2.7 billion USD in fines after it settled with the U.S. government over allegations that it was not properly vetting U.S. customers and directing the company employees to ignore Know Your Customer laws and similar requirements.
If you must have the newest forms of Apple Watch, hope you got it before the 24th of December 02023, before an import ban went into effect preventing Apple products from being sold in the US that have patented technology alleged to be stolen from Masimo. Although the ban only officially restricts Apple from selling their products, presumably third parties who have stock will not be able to reorder them from Apple. And Apple, for its part, is trying to find some way of working around the ban and continuing to sell their product, rather than admitting to any wrongdoing or trying to strike a licensing deal. The ban was temporarily reprieved, but there was no permanent action taken to remove it.
Last for tonight, a high-level overview of what it would take for a person to emigrate to Canada, which, for the most part, involves a lot of expense and a lot of doing things on a very specific schedule.
And some levity: Shopkeepers and owners can't resist a good pun (or a bad one.)
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
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