The NSA tries incredibly hard to not make public which of the many many options in their toolbox are in active use at any given time. Not sure anyone outside the org can say for sure what they are and aren’t using.

Does homeboy not know about crabcakes? All the taste, none of the pain in the ass and paying for the privilege of preparing your own food. Just get them somewhere that doesn’t use filler.

Oh fuck off with this shit Capcom. I hope no one has forgotten where all the fan support for Megaman Legends 3 got us.

Bastards couldn’t even be assed to release the already finished 3DS demo (which we know was in a decently playable state from videos they released).

Beyond my Megaman saltiness, I have a very hard time believing that fucking Marvel needs fan support to prove profitability. You just need to not make some bullshit microtransaction filled live service game like the ones that are repeatedly failing.

Solarwinds Orion

We don’t curse in this household.

Anyway, guessing it’s the classic “sales sold the demo of a perfectly configured setup maintained by a dedicated team, management expects you to make that happen alone on top of everything else you already do” situation? Multiple years into cleaning up the mess of that shit at my place.

That’s a combination of too simple/short in your sentences, mixed with too specific jargon with no clarification. It’s dumb as hell that people don’t know stuff like what a server is, but if they don’t you have to abstract it more.

My go to is some form of: I’m in IT, I do systems administration. I help keep all the things behind the scenes working so that everyone’s stuff works at my workplace. Less of making your email work, more of making everyone’s email work.

Obviously I work with a hell of a lot more than just email. I’m mostly scripting out custom automation jobs to bridge gaps in the integrations between different systems. But like you said, keep it simple.

Thank you. I’m getting quite tired of people posting the most fucking obvious takes about problems in the US, then going “why haven’t americans fixed this? are they stupid?”, when we have exceedingly small control over the actions of our shitass policy makers.

It’s some real “everyone is dumb except for me” energy.

So for those not familar with machine learning, which was the practical business use case for “AI” before LLMs took the world by storm, that is what they are describing as reinforcement learning. Both are valid terms for it.

It’s how you can make an AI that plays Mario Kart. You establish goals that grant points, stuff to avoid that loses points, and what actions it can take each “step”. Then you give it the first frame of a Mario Kart race, have it try literally every input it can put in that frame, then evaluate the change in points that results. You branch out from that collection of “frame 2s” and do the same thing again and again, checking more and more possible future states.

At some point you use certain rules to eliminate certain branches on this tree of potential future states, like discarding branches where it’s driving backwards. That way you can start opptimizing towards the options at any given time that get the most points im the end. Keep the amount of options being evaluated to an amount you can push through your hardware.

Eventually you try enough things enough times that you can pretty consistently use the data you gathered to make the best choice on any given frame.

The jank comes from how the points are configured. Like AI for a delivery robot could prioritize jumping off balconies if it prioritizes speed over self preservation.

Some of these pitfalls are easy to create rules around for training. Others are far more subtle and difficult to work around.

Some people in the video game TAS community (custom building a frame by frame list of the inputs needed to beat a game as fast as possible, human limits be damned) are already using this in limited capacities to automate testing approaches to particularly challenging sections of gameplay.

So it ends up coming down to complexity. Making an AI to play Pacman is relatively simple. There are only 4 options every step, the direction the joystick is held. So you have 4ⁿ states to keep track of, where n is the number of steps forward you want to look.

Trying to do that with language, and arguing that you can get reliable results with any kind of consistency, is blowing smoke. They can’t even clearly state what outcomes they are optimizing for with their “reward” function. God only knows what edge cases they’ve overlooked.

My complete out of my ass guess is that they did some analysis on response to previous gpt output, tried to distinguish between positive and negative responses (or at least distinguish against responses indicating that it was incorrect). They then used that as some sort of positive/negative points heuristic.

People have been speculating for a while that you could do that, crank up the “randomness”, have it generate multiple responses behind the scenes and then pit those “pre-responses” against each other and use that criteria to choose the best option of the “pre-responses”. They could even A/B test the responses over multiple users, and use the user responses as further “positive/negative points” reinforcement to feed back into it in a giant loop.

Again, completely pulled from my ass. Take with a boulder of salt.

OWS crumbled in ways right out of various leaked three letter agency guides to disrupting grass roots movements.

I’d love to see it get another try, with how news sources have become far more decentralized. Less opportunity for major news orgs to kill the momentum.

Full disclosure, the destruction of OWS is pretty much the one thing I allow myself to go “full tinfoil hat” over.

You’ve missed my point entirely.

Blame absolutely is fair, but people can’t vote on just the best options for SS alone, ignoring everything else. Also, as seen in recent presidential races (cough cough 2016), you can have a massive contigent of voter will just effectively erased by very thin margins or technicalities. On top of all that, voters can’t directly effect what the policy makers actually do in office.

My point is, it’s not useful to blame such a wide and diverse swath of people. Painting with such wide brush strokes only serves to create an us vs them situation that distracts from the actual policy makers, lobbyists, and news media complex with far more direct influence over all of this. Most of those people are boomers, but all boomers are not part of those groups.

The shortsightedness is thinking that new generations are the first people to go “Hey, maybe we need to pay into SS for enough money to be there. Maybe we shouldn’t waste money on proxy wars on false pretenses.” plenty of Boomers were shouting this from the rooftops as this shit was happening. Your objections and concerns are not new.

Basically, please stop talking about boomers as some singular homogenous entity. Please stop thinking that the situation we now find ourselves in is caused by some sort of lack of sense from older generations instead of politicians doing what is best for them at the expense of the general populace. Please stop blaming the average populace from before your time for the choices made by politicians.

Trump should be a burning hot example that politicians actions and the peoples’ will are often very disconnected.

We do have to find a way to fix this. Taking time to dunk on people just as downtrodden as us is wasted effort that could be put towards trying to fix things.

That assumes that anyone can reliably be a single issue voter their whole life, and that people somehow only have to live in the reality they voted for instead of the reality of whichever politicians actually won.

It’s a very beguiling idea to simply blame the current problems of the world on negligence or a lack of effort by those who came before you. On strictly personal failings. It’s also incredibly short sighted to do so, and often leads to repeated mistakes.

Inb4 “then they should have tried harder to convince their friends/family! They should have protested! They should have stormed the capital in violent revolution!” Keep moving the goalposts so long as you can keep blaming the previous generations.

It’s a classic trap in business for newly hired managers: Come into a new to you situation, pick out the obvious as hell problems, insist upon the most logically simple solution. Ignore the history, company politics, confounding variables, and end up making the situation worse because you never understood how things got so bad to begin with.

In complicated situations, it is a trap to think that the obvious solution just hasn’t been tried or investigated because no one as smart as you has been involved yet.

Now blame where blame is absolutely due. There’s plenty to go around.

That said, very little of what the powers that be do is truly new. Blaming the older generations eliminates an opportunity for us all to learn from the past, identify patterns in history, and just makes it that much easier to keep us all oppressed.

A big takeaway I’ve found from elderly family members is that you absolutely cannot rely on inflation increasing at a standard pace. A fortune saved up 25+ years ago does not go anywhere as far as it used to.

Anyway, to try and cut my ramble short: We can sit around feeling smug about some perverted idea of “what goes around comes around”, or we can try to learn from the knowledge aand mistakes of previous generations.

We’ll all be old one day.

I would hope, but I’ve been burned enough to not assume big companies are doing things the sensible way.

This is a common thing in online discourse, and reviews. People aren’t usually going around posting “Yet another day of no issues with my computer”. There’s no emotional motivation there.

I’ll take a swing. I’ve had no issues with my Windows 10 desktop since I built it in 2020. None of the bloat, ads, forced updates, OneDrive pushing. None of the shit people regularly cite as problems inherent and unavoidable with Windows.

I did my research and used the proper official tools to configure it before and immediately after a fresh install. Used third party scripts and programs for messing with configuration shit as minimally as possible.

I’ve only had to adjust things maybe three times a year, and most of the time it’s been to re-enable shit that the average user would never disable like printing or hibernation, rather than having to fix or adjust anything from an update.

It’s amazing how incentives at high levels can absolutely twist someone.

Rather than discuss or investigate the situations that lead to these hire/fire cycles, potentially find a better way, they accept it as inevitable and build off of that.

They get to take the lazy route and still have room to internally satisfy their withered conscience that they are somehow “doing good” by making vague attempts to offset the shit situation, rather than trying to eliminate said situation entirely.

Fucking hell why does this explain so much of the bullshit I am dealing with at work right now?

It doesn’t take many times being on the hiring side of the table or talking with someone who is, to hear the horror stories of why the stupid questions get asked.

Or, to frame it a different way:

Modern work enviornments being what they are, as a worker you will be required to have some bare minimum soft skills in order to interact with co-workers and your boss in a manner that isn’t completely deranged.

Shitty questions like these, with an obvious difference between the blunt honest answer and the “workplace acceptable” answer, serve as quite possibly the lowest bar possible to measure your ability to cater your communication properly to an audience.

These stupid questions are a litmus test for whether you are capable of reasonably functioning socially in a work environment. Very few jobs exist where you never interact with others.

I’d rather not spend my 8 hours a day listening to someone rant constantly about UBI and hating the job. That only makes the grind worse and drag on longer, even when the complaining is on the mark.

Most of all: for as dumb as a lot of this song and dance is, very few people ask these questions because they want to. Most people in recruiting have experienced times where they skipped the stupid question, and ended up missing the red flag to not hire the person.

Please get yourself an actual IT team. This is basic conditional access policy configuration for an Azure tennant.

Microsoft has learning materials available on this. It’s part of their free Azure Admin online learning courses.

Where meme?

I’ll give you that, but it seems to me that you must not have been around for the surge of iPhone bootlegs earlier in the smartphone era.

Lock screen, default background, fonts, literal stolen icons (not just stupidly similar ones), Chrome labelled as Safari, etc.

Settings panel design and especially the icon are super minor.

Hell, what about new Samsungs disabling the App drawer by default and tossing all apps on the home screen?

Don’t worry, Google’s own Messages app does the same thing as iMessage, but using a different (and on paper more open) standard that isn’t compatible with iMessage (yet, I think the EU is forcing Apple’s hand).

Where? Unless you’re saying people need to pull over on the shoulder because someone wants to speed in the right hand lane.