I have a few friends who were involved in the creation of the US Digital Service, and as it stands it is one of the absolute best parts of our government. Formed after the Healthcare.gov disaster, the USDS brings Silicon Valley tech knowledge to the government in an attempt to ensure that we all have the online government services that we deserve. It's a tiny agency up against a massive bureaucracy that is anything but open to new ways of doing things. And they've made progress, but not enough.
I'm going to try to look on the bright side and say that maybe this means the wonderful people at the USDS are about to get a huge influx of funding and staffing, and will get to better fulfill the promise of their agency. But at the same time, I'm afraid that this White House may not have the best interests of this particular agency in mind.
Fun side story: on my first day working on Barack Obama's presidential transition, I spent about four hours watching a presentation from the Section 508[1] department about how to make screen-reader accessible PDFs. It took three people to give that presentation – one to speak, one for the live demo, and another to advance the slides. It was quite a downshift from the campaign, where we'd moved very quickly to harness the tech we needed.
It's not necessarily illogical, but it can just as easily be a smoke cloud around some sinecures, and the details of this effort (including but not limited to the meme name) don't fill me with confidence that they're going to fix real problems.
I work in AI product eng for a larger company. The honest answer is that with good RAG and few-shot prompting, we can consider actual incorrect output to be a serious and reproducible bug. This means that when we call LLMs in production, we get about the same wrong-answer rate as we do any other kind of product engineering bug.
And FWIW loved Final Fantasy VIII. More then VII. The soundtrack was fantastic, I used to have an imported full orchestral arrangement that was in heavy rotation in my tweens.
Yeah I think FFVIII hit this really artistic note in a way that very few other games were able to at the time. I get that might not be everyone's cup of tea but it remains one of my favourite FF games.
I wouldn't call Monkeypox a maybe virus, especially along with these. Its spread was mostly limited to a single community (sexually active gay men), and it absolutely would have spread out of control had there not been a very strong vaccination campaign with high rates of compliance. Within that community, there were many people who were impacted and many others who changed their behavior to help mitigate to spread.
You don't even need a bug. Just a wrong system clock.
We had a few windows laptops where something caused them to time travel to 8000 years in the future. Then, they'd slowly spend a few hours deleting every local profile, as nobody had logged in to them for 8000 years. Then, they'd do something to their time zone database and travel back 8000 years.
When they started the process, it was unstoppable. Trying to modify the system clock to something sane just caused them to depart to the future again, even if disconnected from the network. None of our users was very amused by this behavior, even if everything important was backed up.
It happened specifically to 1 type of laptop and we only had about 30 of them. So we pulled all of them out of roulation. Then covid struck, so I reformatted most of them with Debian and we gave them away for home schooling. I wonder if I managed to linuxify some kid in the process.
Yeah, the idea is that by expecting the deletion logic you can make it simpler and more rigorously tested than regularly changing business logic or application code.
If you organizationally cannot prioritize quality then nothing can help you.
When I was a student at Brown, Facebook would report which dorm you were logged in from, right there on your profile (for all to see!). If Facebook knew where you were on campus, campus IT certainly has a view into your physical location. Nothing about this surprises me.
Was that on ethernet? If so, there's nothing particularly nefarious: each building had a /24 and the building's name was in the reverse dns. It's not particularly different from how many [citation needed] commercial ISPs have town names in reverse dns, except the subnetting mirrors geography in a bit more detail. Dorm ethernet has since died.
If it was over WiFi, I would be much more concerned
What's different about it being on WiFi, where you most likely would be connecting to a base station in the same building that was then wired in over ethernet?
They didn't (and probably still don't) subnet by building on wifi, so more precise location than "on Brown's wifi" would have required intentional information sharing.
I remember these days when it helpfully pre-filled in Bronson as my probable location as a freshman. That was back when you could list all your courses and sections, which was incredibly helpful to find people to complain about Math 17 problem sets.
This seems worth taking with a grain of salt. I've never heard of this source before today, and the top story on the homepage opens with "MOST MAINSTREAM MEDIA MAVENS ARE BRAZEN PUBLIC RELATIONS AGENTS FOR THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY." At the very least, "The National Pulse" has an agenda that they're pushing.
Alphonso, for example, was singled out by The New York Times in 2017 for its aggressive collection of user data, including personal information such as “age, gender, income and more”
Like the rest of the ducking modern web! I just spent an infuriating half an hour trying to locate somewhere to eat breakfast close by tomorrow. It will be faster and much better for my blood pressure to just walk around the neighbourhood until I see something that looks nice.
WTF happened? Seriously? It wasn’t long ago things like Google and google maps were actually helpful. And establishments had websites with menus and opening hours.
With regard to the phone number spoofing: I recently had an actual call from American Express's security department marked by AT&T as "Fraud Risk," presumably because it's been spoofed in the past. It delayed the detection and resolution of the theft of my card number (not by much, but still...). It's criminal that we haven't better secured the Caller ID system.
I'm going to try to look on the bright side and say that maybe this means the wonderful people at the USDS are about to get a huge influx of funding and staffing, and will get to better fulfill the promise of their agency. But at the same time, I'm afraid that this White House may not have the best interests of this particular agency in mind.
Fun side story: on my first day working on Barack Obama's presidential transition, I spent about four hours watching a presentation from the Section 508[1] department about how to make screen-reader accessible PDFs. It took three people to give that presentation – one to speak, one for the live demo, and another to advance the slides. It was quite a downshift from the campaign, where we'd moved very quickly to harness the tech we needed.
[1] https://www.section508.gov/