I know there is an XKCD about standards (and adding yet one more to create yet more confusion).
"Standards"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fxkcd.com%2F927%2F

But that said, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are all terrible standards in many ways because of their complexity (and major design flaws like JavaScript having vastly too many global variables). Asa an alternative, what if, say, we all just used something like Scheme (or Common Lisp) to encode web documents and web code as S-expressions in some semantically standardized formats? Scheme can be very compact in its implementation.

Or as the XKCD mentioned here says:
"Lessons learned from implementing minimal Scheme six times"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwolodzko.github.io%2Fpo...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fxkcd.com%2F297%2F
"Lisp cycles XKCD #297: âoeThose are your fatherâ(TM)s parentheses. Elegant weapons for a more⦠civilized age.â"

Now, it doesn't have to be Lisp-like.I get the paren hate:
"What makes Lisp difficult to read?"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2Flisp%2F...

And there is a lot to be said for significant-indentation languages like Occam or Python. Smalltalk is another great language. Or even some variant of a safe C.

Even a Forth-derivative perhaps that could be literally less than ~2K in size at the core. Although I get that there is a fine line between flexible and flabby in readability in a language that can change its own fundamental syntax or that makes naming intermediate variables unlikely as a form of documentation. Same with any language that supports arbitrary macros like C or Scheme which can change the fundamental nature of the language. Although at least in, say, Racket Scheme you see the language level set at the start of some code to know what you are getting into.

The main point is just that yet another adhoc problematical language like JavaScript was not needed (even as TypeScript papers over the worst warts). And CSS conceptually is broken for big projects ("Atomic" CSS is one style to help with that). And adding end tags with names in HTML (like XML) is another broken concept as are other aspects of HTML. Yes, programmers can work around and manage the issue in these web fundamentals, but why should we have to?

While a simpler browser for HTML etc is a good thing if it really is well written, better standards for encoding and sharing information will ultimately get us further and be more energy efficient and be more reliable and be more programmer-friendly.

I've long been a fan of triples for doing some of that data encoding, but that is even further out.

Tangentially, here is a Libre Plane 2021 talk I put together on free standards for social media being more important than free implementations:
"Free/Libre Standards for Social Media and other Communications"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpdfernhout.net%2Flibrepl...

I know this all may sound pie in the sky (and it is, given current social dynamics), but consider if we used the usual buggy lot-of-library junky (and now AI slop) code only with an intent to translate web content encoded in problematical standards into content encoded in better simpler standards for other code to consume. Sort of like Amazon did at one point with a server-side engine to process HTML pages and transform them for low-end Kindle browsers -- but in this case converting HTML plus CSS plus JavaScript into something like, say, S-expressions for web content that was not yet written directly n the simpler standards. Maybe the junky translator code might not be perfect, but it might be good enough and runnable in distant containers so that the local code that processed the simpler standards could be more secure and reliable.

Also related: "Simple Made Easy"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.infoq.com%2Fpresenta...
"Rich Hickey emphasizes simplicityâ(TM)s virtues over easinessâ(TM), showing that while many choose easiness they may end up with complexity, and the better way is to choose easiness along the simplicity path. ... We should aim for simplicity because simplicity is a prerequisite for reliability. Simple is often erroneously mistaken for easy. "Easy" means "to be at hand", "to be approachable". "Simple" is the opposite of "complex" which means "being intertwined", "being tied together". Simple != easy. ..."

Ideally a group like the US National Institute of Standards and Technology or the US Library of Congress should fund this sort of work. And a group like Archive.org should have a lot of input to those standards on how to make the content simply versionable and simply archivable.

Anyway, just something I have been musing on and off again for many years...

12PM is fucking noon is when the fucking sun is at its highest position in the sky.

It has been like this for at least a millennia. DST is bullshit.

Live with nature and quit fucking denying it like a conservative.

Ever since deep-fakes became practical, artists and others should know they may be asked to show their work.

These days that means keeping all intermediate materials and revisions. If possible, time-stamp them in a way that is very resistant to being accused as being faked. There's 20th century precedent for creating immutable, time-stamped records.

Should artists have to prove a negative - prove they didn't use AI? Whether they should or not, the reality is these days they do, and any artist paying attention to the world should know this by now.

Perhaps you need to read Malthus instead of /.

We now live in a fully connected world where most users are connected through web browsers and are the intended victims.

This particular story is an exception to that. Remote software, accessed through a web browser, normally does not have read/write access to your local filesystem. But people are granting local filesystem access to proprietary AI services.

I think that granting such access is .. wow. I wouldn't do it, though I can see how if you use a specialized account for it, and if you're confident that your OS has no local user priv escalation bugs, it might be ok. In your sandbox you trust.

But GP's comment is about whose decision that is. If you use Linux, then it's your decision. If you use iOS, then it's Apple's decision. And MacOS is becoming less Linuxy and more iOSy every year. I think it makes plenty of sense for stories like this to result in people dumping MacOS for Linux. (But daaamn, their values surprise me. You wanna make your computer less secure instead of more? Oh well, like Rumsfeld said, freedom is untidy!)

That's one part of the equation! Satellite bus cost is another part of the 'magnitudes of order' reduction equation. Where I work right now is addressing that.

No, if the state were renamed, it would be to Old America. NM might not be the true original, but if you look at it through the eyes of European colonization and continuous governance, then New Mexico has the best claim of the fifty. (Though if you take a less racist view, then I guess Alaska had the real OGs.)

Randi McGinn, a lawyer for New Mexico, said applying the full $5,000 penalty to the number of violations would create too large of a penalty under the US Constitution's protections on due process.

I ass/u/me this refers to the Eighth Amendment, but I don't remember seeing any monetary constants encoded within that text.

Google's telling me Meta is worth about $1.8 trillion so how would a mere $40B be "excessive?" It's only about 2% of their worth! Civil penalties in excess of 2% of someone's worth are routinely accepted as constitutional, aren't they? If this case were about me driving drunk and killing a whole family, I bet no one would flinch at the 8A implications of taking 2% (!?!) of my assets, and everyone would laugh at my lawyer if he brought up 8A for such an insignificant fine.

I understand why we have 8A, and everyone deserves mercy, but I don't see why Meta deserves exceptional mercy as a singular special case that we would be horrified to see applied anywhere else. Bringing up 8A for such a tiny fine would be giving Meta a very unique carve-out that we normally would not apply.

It may be that $5k is too much to charge criminals per act, in that each crime didn't really cause that much loss, but bringing up due process concerns seems like bullshit when the fine is already so small. NM and Meta had been trying to negotiate the cost of illegal business for years before negotiations failed and it went to trial. Meta decided to let a jury decide, and the jury's come up with a fairly tiny fraction of their assets.

If Meta thinks the price of illegal business is still too high, then they can lower the number of willful violations they commit per year, to optimize the advantage they gain from illegal actions at an affordable rate.

Geez, Zuck, just do less of it. If $40B seems like a lot, then maybe try only $10B worth of crime next time. What's the big deal? Live and learn. After this little fine you still have 98% of the company left to go on and incur the next wave of liabilities.

If the seller knows the chip cannot be used for all of the normal purposes a typical buyer would expect it to be used for, that's a material defect. Failure to disclose could be grounds for a refund and for additional damages if his other components were blacklisted as a result.

Now, if the buyer got it third hand and can't prove the person he bought it from knew or should have known of the problem, he will be out of luck.

Uhh, console makers already do hardware lockdown and game companies work with that and even include their own sorts of shenanigans. Have for at least 20 years, now.

What rock are you living under?

This is the guy who fired the Army's Chief of Staff who was championing a battalion drone unit that was drawing on experience from the Ukrainian army and learning how to operate on a modern battlefield. In addition, the former commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa was also in full support of this unit, but he too was fired by Hegseth.

One of the reasons Hegseth fired both generals was because he wanted to "refocus" to "help ensure the army revives the warrior ethos, rebuilds for the modern battlefield and deters our enemies around the world."

Well golly gee, that sounds exacly like what the drone battaltion was doing until you got rid of it then fired all the generals who supported it and put in your lackey. Now comes this announcement.

Now we're being told of this new command.

Incompetence doesn't begin to describe the drunk.

It's SpaceAmericaNet.

for warfare.

Log reviews are the kind of thing that an automated tool would be good at pointing out things that "don't look normal" for further human review.

Unfortunately, a well-skilled adversary will know to only do things that look "normal enough" to get flagged as "normal." Doing so will fool even a skilled human reviewer if they aren't specifically looking for the adversary's specific technique.