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Comment Re: People who anthropomorphize software make me (Score 1) 55

Science hasn't made any progress on the nature of sentience since Descartes went all tinfoil hat on reality before walking himself back.

You can tell because they can't really create something we would recognize as true sentience. Maybe it's an impossible ask, maybe it's one product release away.

But the best scientific reasoning has come up with to date is a way to sample from a probability distribution that approximates human output. And a lot of philosophical woo to assert without proof that that same process accurately describes what's going on between your ears.

Comment In war you target the enemy's ability to make war (Score 2) 138

By dropping bombs on the enemy's strategic assets that enable him to make war.

Bridges, railways, factories, communication nodes.

Grandma and grandpa used to tell me stories about how when the Germans invaded and started bombing Kiev, they were sent east of the Ural mountains, along with all the factory machinery that could be put on railcars, so that the munitions plants could keep running (staffed by kids too young to fight and oldtimers too old to fight) to keep the front lines supplied.

Comment Insightful use of protest as self-promotion (Score 1) 119

Not jumping ship until a politically fashionable trigger event offers itself is a fine way to profit from a system to which one expediently objects. That's an admirably shrewd career move, not rage against anyones machine.

Bailing out "in protest" when you're making phat bank to go make even phatter bank is great self-promotion with no downside. Seriously capable people don't stay unemployed long. The departing will be easily replaced which reinforces corporate policies they object to. No one loses anything because nothing is sacrificed.

Comment Proprietary tech has its price long after purchase (Score 2) 40

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pcmag.com%2Fnews%2Fbos...

"In addition, the SoundTouch app will no longer function after Feb. 18, 2026, though it will still be available for download until then in markets outside of Japan. Users' My Bose accounts will remain active.

As for why itâ(TM)s cutting support now, Bose says technology has evolved since the speakers first launched in 2013 and that itâ(TM)s âoeno longer able to sustain the development and support of the cloud infrastructure that powers this older generation of products.â

This likely isnâ(TM)t welcome news for audiophiles who have spent large sums of money on the SoundTouch rangeâ"particularly as units such as the SoundTouch 30 retailed for north of $1,000. One Reddit user claims heâ(TM)s now sitting on âoe$4,000 worth of bricks" following the move. Meanwhile, others called the ending of support "exploitative,â shared links to a petition calling on Bose to renew support for the SoundTouch range, and asked their fellow users to send emails to Bose's management team."

Comment Re:PHP (Score 4, Interesting) 91

These are also many of the most looked at, most often fuzzed, SAST scanned, valgrind'd things in the world.

I really don't think it will be as bad as all that. We have not seen Apache, Nginx, etc pwnd like this, or OpenSSH, or Bind, or postfix ...

I could go on. I think the actual posture and condition of most of these project is far better than you apparently expect. (I guess we are going to see who is right).

What AI is finding is stuff the other scanners miss, which is stuff where there is a clear temporal component. We are going to see races, toc-tou, probably more stuff like these PHP issues which if I understand correctly is a use-after-free or something you could at least force into that taxonomy.

So there are going to be new bugs found, even seriously impactful appearing ones, but the reach-ability and chances of successful exploitation outside laboratory conditions is going be low... Do they work when it is a VM on you lab server you can hammer away at with 1000 threads yes; when there is a AWS ELB in-front or a waf that has any impact on request ordering or pipe-lining, good luck..

I am not saying people won't be spending more hours patching over the next year or so than they have been, they will but the sky probably also isn't falling

Comment Re:PHP (Score 5, Interesting) 91

People say that but I think they say it without a lot of real understand of what the web was like when it was born, and second that PHP5(+) does not look much like PHP 4(-)

Before PHP there were CGI scripts/programs, which were Perl, sh, or C or if you were on Windows classic-asp. If you wanted maintainability your wrote in Perl (yeah I am being serious) and if you wanted performance or needed to do something complicated you wrote it in C. Remember we are talking 1995-97 here there isn't even a C++ standard yet! These were you main choices for 'web development'.

PHP let people do what demanded C in something that did not have to be compiled and did require understanding C style memory management. Here comes the big BUT though, all the really good, really useful library code out there was C. All those library authors did not talk to each other so everyone was different in terms of conventions, who allocates the the caller or the called, who frees, are we passing references or values for primitives, etc. All different and php did not attempt to hide any of that as it pulled in those libraries it wrapped them in its runtime and memory management without attempting make their use orthogonal and part of some consistent ecosystem.

It wasn't a 'hack' it just was not a complete abstraction.

That was 'fine' for people who came to PHP from writing C, and were using PHP because it let them make changes on the fly, saved writing a lot of boiler plate request life-cycle management stuff, etc. It all made sense, if you can at it not from C though it was confusing mine-filed of gotchas. It made web development possible for a whole lot of people who never got access to compiler. That was cool, but it also put a lot of power in the hands of people the way the Visual Basic "Declare" keyword did, and unsurprising they did hack-y things with it, cause themselves all sorts of problems..

Comment Re:Microwave beam is not a "heat ray" (Score 0, Troll) 132

In the grand scheme of things someone being here illegally and working construction is about last on my list of priorities

They bother me.

They are taking up housing that US citizens could use....everyone keeps complaining about needing more housing, eh?

They are a burden on our schools and other public resources.

They are dead weight on our medical system...in many cities they overrun the ERs of hospitals making it difficult for true US citizens to get emergency care in their own country.

Just a few examples.,,....the US budget would save a lot of money if they were GONE.

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