We have gone from cruise control to cars being able to drive themselves quite well in about a decade. The last percentage points of reliability are of course the hardest, but that’s a tremendously pessimistic take.

Just pattern recognition it is not the neural net everyone assumes it is.

Tesla’s current iteration of self-driving is based on neural networks. Certainly the computer vision is; there’s no other way we have of doing computer vision that works at all well and, according to this article from last year it’s true for the decision-making too.

Of course, the whole task of self-driving is “pattern recognition”; neural networks are just one way of achieving that.

I got a chef’s knife as a gift. I was a bit put out that came from Wilko (a very budget brand) and it turned out to be absolutely excellent. I think it won’t have cost any more than £20. I am astounded that anyone apart from professionals pays more than £100 for a knife, never mind the even more insane prices you can pay

Yep, it’s a big problem in audio and other subjective areas, because you have no way of knowing what the anonymous reviewer’s point of reference is, and most professional reviewers’ reference points are not suitable. It’s worse too, because purchaser-reviewers self-select into their category, so you expect most people to be satisfied with the subjective aspects of a product they’ve purchased, even though most people would not be satisfied with a random cheap product. This is all not helped by the fact that, in audio when differences are so minute, virtually no-one is conducting blind reviews so confirmation bias probably accounts for huge amounts of the final score. Sure, any professional reviewer is going to be able to identify a bum product that costs thousands, but I bet most of them will rate an identical product more highly if they’re told it costs 10x as much and comes from a fancier brand.

I’ve ended up crowdsourcing my recommendations from places like reddit where people tend to make tiered recommendation lists so you at least know they have the goal of producing the best products at each price level.

Comparing huge multinational countries which serve every country to the half of countries with the smallest energy usage is not terribly illustrative.

And my comment only used social media as an example. The point is, big websites have more draw than small websites, leading to a self-amplifying effect.

From the user’s perspective it’s not about “reach”; it’s about simply having people to interact with. If you go to a thread on reddit there’ll be hundreds or thousands of people to talk about it with, and there’ll be active communities for all kinds of niches. If you want to avoid reddit - whether because of privacy issues or site policy or mods or whatever - you have to deal with the fact that everyone else is sticking with reddit.

Shouldn’t the engineer be a bit more worried if the cable’s been cut?

If UDP drops packets it’s probably nothing. If TCP drops packets it’s because something’s actually wrong.

If you’re using TCP and losing packets you should be panicking though, because something is very wrong…

An overarching principle of security is that of minimum privilege: everything (every process, every person) should have the minimum privileges it needs to do what it does, and where possible, that privilege should be explicitly granted temporarily and then dropped.

This means that any issue: a security breach or a mistake can’t access or break anything except whatever the component or person who had the issue could access or break, and that that access is minimal.

Suppose that you hit a page which exploits the https://www.hkcert.org/security-bulletin/mozilla-firefox-remote-code-execution-vulnerability_20230913 vulnerability in Firefox, or one like it, allowing remote code execution. If Firefox is running as root, the remote attacker now completely controls that machine. If you have SSH keys to other servers on there, they are all compromised. Your personal data could be encrypted for ransom. Anything that server manages, such as a TV or smart home equipment, could be manipulated arbitrarily, and possibly destroyed.

The same is true for any piece of software you use, because this is a general principle. Most distributions I believe don’t let you ssh in as root for that reason.

In short: don’t log in to anything as root; log in as a regular user and use sudo to temporarily perform administrator actions.

P.S. your description of the situation shows you don’t know the nature of vulnerabilities and security - if you’re running servers then this is something you should learn more about in short order.

Damn this couldn’t have come at a better time for me. I’ve been thinking a lot over the past months how it used to be that when you disagreed with someone, you’d still have something shared with them. Not quite the same as the social media aspect, but when TV was all broadcast on a few channels, you’d probably find a show in common. When the only news was national newspapers and broadcasters, you might both be reading the same paper but disagreeing on the articles. My thinking was going down the lines of “this meant everyone had a shared truth” which is kind of like the social media bubble that the research seems to disagree with, but also down the lines of “this meant everyone had, to an extent, a shared identity” at least within a large group like a country, linguistic or ethnic subdivision.

There was something special about the old internet. The idea that the acrimonious disagreements might have been less bitter due to their nature is tantalising. There’s also something to bear in mind for Lemmy: the old internet, as much as the interest groups it spawned, was united by a shared interest in the internet specifically - and technology in general. The internet wasn’t as necessary and ubiquitous, so most people there had to have some other motivation to be on it. That itself was a shared interest that allowed people to find commonality. Lemmy is the same: people here are a subsection of the internet, brought here because they’re drawn to openness not provided by unfederated platforms. That is its own commanlity, and it won’t exist if Lemmy outgrows those other platforms.

you could instead do:

dcl() { docker container ls -aq -f name="$1" }

in bashrc or wherever you’re setting this up.

Why create the function _dcl()?

Must be time for a new Linux audio system. The pipewire-pulseaudio-ALSA stack of compatibility layers is old hat already.

I remember looking into the situation with non-destructive editing about… 20 years ago. I wonder how long it’s been a desired feature!

If you’re hosting it, prepare to get sued out of existence!

And here I was typing out iso-8859-1 like a scrub to make sure I wasn’t misremembering the encoding when doing the analogous thing in python…

Their employees have failed Unicode college >:(

They don’t have anything to do with alphabets in theory of computation…

So… UTF-8 interpreted as ISO-8859-1? You have failed Unicode college >:(