The Fediverse is a bit more like the old USENET days in some regards, but ultimately if it ever becomes more popular the same assholes that ruin other online experiences will also wind up here.

What made the Internet more exciting 30 years ago was that it was mostly comprised of the well educated and dedicated hobbyists, who had it in their best interest to generally keep things decent. We didn’t have the uber-lock-in of a handful of massive companies running everything.

It’s all Eternal September. There’s no going back at this point — any new medium that becomes popular will attract the same forces making the current Internet worse.

…until the CrowdStrike agent updated, and you wind up dead in the water again.

The whole point of CrowdStrike is to be able to detect and prevent security vulnerabilities, including zero-days. As such, they can release updates multiple times per day. Rebooting in a known-safe state is great, but unless you follow that up with disabling the agent from redownloading the sensor configuration update again, you’re just going to wing up in a BSOD loop.

A better architectural solution like would have been to have Windows drivers run in Ring 1, giving the kernel the ability to isolate those that are misbehaving. But that risks a small decrease in performance, and Microsoft didn’t want that, so we’re stuck with a Ring 0/Ring 3 only architecture in Windows that can cause issues like this.

That company had the power to destroy our businesses, cripple travel and medicine and our courts, and delay daily work that could include some timely and critical tasks.

Unless you have the ability and capacity to develop your own ISA/CPU architecture, firmware, OS, and every tool you use from the ground up, you will always be, at some point, “relying on others stuff” which can break on you at a moments notice.

That could be Intel, or Microsoft, or OpenSSH, or CrowdStrike^0. Very, very, very few organizations can exist in the modern computing world without relying on others code/hardware (with the main two that could that come to mind outside smaller embedded systems being IBM and Apple).

I do wish that consumers had held Microsoft more to account over the last few decades to properly use the Intel Protection Rings (if the CrowdStrike driver were able to run in Ring 1, then it’s possible the OS could have isolated it and prevented a BSOD, but instead it runs in Ring 0 with the kernel and has access to damage anything and everything) — but that horse appears to be long out of the gate (enough so that X86S proposes only having Ring 0 and Ring 3 for future processors).

But back to my basic thesis: saying “it’s your fault for relying on other peoples code” is unhelpful and overly reductive, as in the modern day it’s virtually impossible to do so. Even fully auditing your stacks is prohibitive. There is a good argument to be made about not living in a compute monoculture^1; and lots of good arguments against ever using Windows^2 (especially in the cloud) — but those aren’t the arguments you’re making. Saying “this is your fault for relying on other peoples stuff” is unhelpful — and I somehow doubt you designed your own ISA, CPU architecture, firmware, OS, network stack, and application code to post your comment.

——- ^0 — Indeed, all four of these organizations/projects have let us down like this; Intel with Spectre/Meltdown, Microsoft with the 28 day 32-bit Windows reboot bug, and OpenSSH just announced regreSSHion.
^1 — My organization was hit by the Falcon Sensor outage — our app tier layers running on Linux and developer machines running on macOS were unaffected, but our DBMS is still a legacy MS SQL box, so the outage hammered our stack pretty badly. We’ve fortunately been well funded to remove our dependency on MS SQL (and Windows in general), but that’s a multi-year effort that won’t pay off for some time yet.
^2 — my Windows hate is well documented elsewhere.

Chuck E Cheese was founded by Nolan Bushnell — the same Nolan Bushnell who was one of the co-founders of video game company Atari (at one time, the biggest player in the home console industry). He started it in part as a way to promote Atari games and cabinets.

So it was both — and the “entertainment centre” part was always part of its “core mission” from its inception.

Chances are very good the AI technologies they were working on involved developing a GAN, then the knowledge and experience of creating a GAN is fully transferable.

It’s the skills of the developers I’m talking about transferring — not the source code or neural net output.

Except news always was that Apple was pushing pretty hard into self-driving vehicles, which would use much the same AI learning systems as you need for generative AI.

I don’t know anything about the system in the US, but I know that here in Canada they won’t take you to court instantly if you don’t fill in the census (short or long, similar to the US). Instead they’ll send you a few reminder letters first, and if that doesn’t work they’ll try to send a census working to your home to ask you the questions you missed. AFAIK, this is done to try to prevent a situation where you’re taking to court someone who perhaps can’t read (due to vision or literacy or language problems), or who has other trouble filling out the forms.

So long as you cooperate with the census worker, you won’t see the inside of a courtroom. AFAIK they only take people to court who don’t cooperate with the census taker.

Just to add, while I don’t think they’re the cause of the decline of RSS on the web, Apple hasn’t entirely helped here either. They did some great work adding RSS support to both their Mail.app client and Safari, only to remove them a few releases later.

It’s been 25 years for me, so fortunately the patents have all expired (technically it was more than 2 because of publication in a few different countries, but it was for two inventions). However, during the time when they were all still valid I always had to tread a fine line with other employers — one the one hand, of course they’re on my resume (and LinkedIn profile). But on the other, if they knew about the contents of the inventions and someone in our organization ran afoul of them, they at least needed some plausible deniability that they didn’t know about the contents of the inventions. And for at least one of them, I always feared if they knew about it they might be tempted to try to use it, and be driven insane by the knowledge that if they did, IBM could sue them into the ground 🤣.

I did have a pre-existing Open Source project from prior to working at IBM which I ensured was adequately documented prior to my employment. It was eventually forked and became an IBM alphaWorks project — I never got any money for it (they offered, but it was a pathetic amount for losing all rights to my own pre-existing code that took years of effort), and after leaving IBM had to go back to working on the original pre-IBM codebase.

Overall, my experience at IBM as an inventor/innovator wasn’t great, but was better than most other organizations I’ve worked for since. Honestly, I wish we could just remove software patents altogether, making IBM’s move here moot.

When I was at IBM I won three such awards — one for publication, and two for patents.

At the time at least, they had an online form you had to fill in if you thought something you had developed was potentially patentable; that would go to some small committee for analysis and a decision as to whether or not it was worth pursuing — if it was, it went off to the patent lawyers. You then spent a good deal of time describing your invention to them so they could write up all of the patent documents in a manner that would cover as many bases as possible.

The awards weren’t huge. I don’t remember getting a monetary award for the publication — just a framed certificate. The patents paid $1500 CAN each.

At least one of the patented inventions would have happened anyway, because it was just a solution I came up with during the course of my work. I didn’t even consider submitting it as a patentable idea until a few team members encouraged me to do so. But if there wasn’t a monetary award I would have been less likely to fill out the form for the patent in the first place. All IBM is likely going to find by removing the award is that a lot fewer people (outside IBM Research) are going to have incentive to self-declare their potentially patentable ideas.

EVs need at least 30 minutes with the fastest charger to get from say 20 to 60 right? In either case they take up the bay. So you need to be able to handle many more at once.

No. The Hyundai IONIQ 5 and 6 (and likely 7) only need 18 minutes to go from 10% to 80%.

My daughters school (in Canada) uses several. They’re not only quiet, but they’re not spewing gas/diesel fumes where kids are standing around when loading, especially in the winter. They’re not at 100% electrification yet, but they appear to have around 50% of the busses as EVs.

Nice for the local residents too, as they’re much quieter running and up down the residential streets around the school.

Towards the beginning of the current school year, I was standing in my child’s classroom with other parents on a “meet the teacher” night, when she showed everyone her cabinet of “challenging” books — those with LGBTQ2S+ themes and books on very basic (and age appropriate) sexuality. Parents had the option to opt-out permitting their kids from reading books from that cabinet.

I think that’s a fairly reasonable way of handling such books in the classroom — but at the time as the parent standing closest to the cabinet my first thought was to say (out loud for all the other parents to hear) “Ooh, they have Hustler for Tweens now!”.

Sadly, better judgement took hold and I kept my mouth shut. Certain local weirdos who can’t seem to stop thinking about what other adults do with their sexy bits in private were fairly riled up at that time, and I decided it was better to keep the teacher from having to defend herself from them were any int he room with us.

While I still think that Hyundai engineering and design did some real magic with the IONIQ 5, I just can’t help but feel like the rest of the company is just screwing the pooch on this car. They’ve flooded the US market with models people there don’t seem to want to buy, and dealership lots often have a dozen or more waiting to be sold.

Meanwhile, here in Canada buying one is damn near impossible. That doesn’t seem to stop them from sending out mass marketing materials and ads trying to sell them (or the IONIQ 6), mind you — I just wish they had focussed first on ensuring their biggest boosters globally were getting the cars they want, as opposed to putting lots of cars nobody seems to want on US dealership lots.

(FWIW, my dealership told me they weren’t being allowed by Hyundai to order any 2023 IONIQ 5s. This seems to be a fairly common occurrence across all dealerships here in Canada, with just a few cars trickling in each month).

Meanwhile, up here in Canada I put a down payment on an IONIQ 5 Ultimate Edition (Canadian equivalent of the US ‘Limited’ model) back in early April 2022, and it still hasn’t been ordered, because Hyundai decided to flood the US market while stiffing the Canadian market.

Hyundai (and other EV makers) are fucking around, and then blaming the market.

Don’t get me wrong — I wasn’t saying it’s a good idea. But absent any fancy technology it’s not entirely impossible to plant fast growing trees, harvest them, and then bury them in a mine or at the bottom of a hypoxic body of water.

It would certainly have to be a global, multi-generational undertaking. But it looks like that’s going to be the case with every other solution as well.

Trees also don’t really sequester carbon for long. They die, and the carbon gets eaten by organisms and the cycle continues. Or it burns and most of the carbon is released instantly and only ash remain.

Unless humans get involved and harvest and sequester the tree remains themselves.

Hyundai

I want an EV.

I have the money for an EV.

I put a down payment on an EV back in April 2022.

It still hasn’t been ordered, because the manufacturer won’t permit the dealership to order any, and is barely shipping any to Canada, even though they advertise it as their flagship EV.

Meanwhile, lots in the US are full of unsold units.

I want an EV.

I have the money for an EV.

I put in my order for my EV in early 2022.

I am still waiting on my EV to be ordered, nevermind manufactured and delivered.