ethbr0

78 ms·

961.
by ethbr0 4y ago
> Windows 11 widgets[0], which I'd suggest disabling either way. In case you were curious, apparently the full widget removal is via group policy. gpedit.msc > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows C
962.
by ethbr0 4y ago
And your thoughts on how democracy, despite being the least effective approach to extracting resources and suppressing dissent, was pushed on them by the US? Afghanistan wouldn't be under Taliban control today, if the US had installed
963.
by ethbr0 4y ago
Nothing except concrete military capability, defensible border positioning, and an ingrained culture of territorial defensive without offensive aspirations has a good track record for lasting peace. Any sort of peace acceptable to the Ukrai
964.
by ethbr0 4y ago
Democracy has a well-known blatantly US backing. Not just being punchy: if you accuse pro-democracy movements of being US-backed coups, then that's a low bar for association. The US even tries to foist democracy where it's a terri
965.
by ethbr0 4y ago
Exactly. I can't imagine some accountant hasn't come up with a way to quantify this. {Revenue attributable to previous R&D} (aka coast) vs {Revenue attributable to current R&D} (aka acceleration)
966.
by ethbr0 4y ago
A bad middle manager tends to be a bad middle manager because they're empowered to do dumb things: set upcoming workload, badger people about adherence to mythical project schedule, etc. The majority of these tasks could be devolved to
967.
by ethbr0 4y ago
Middle management should be like jury duty -- something assigned randomly to a team member, then served for a set period. And company processes should be engineered so that a bad/ineffectual manager can't break them, with everythi
968.
by ethbr0 4y ago
Kenneth Lay died after being convicted but before being sentenced, so afaik his family still has the money.
969.
by ethbr0 4y ago
The most ethical way to do it would have been to tell your candidates "We're hiring for excess capacity, so this would be a contract to hire position." Then candidates might have made different decisions, like "Maybe thi
970.
by ethbr0 4y ago
One may follow the other, but not vice versus. It's a pretty strong argument to say that Microsoft under Gates was technically obsessed, but that really faltered under Balmer. Microsoft continued to win profits, but they made major str
971.
by ethbr0 4y ago
To me, with regards to density, the US is 4 slices. A) East of the Appalachian Mtns B) Appalachians to Mississippi River C) Mississippi to Rockies D) Rockies to Pacific Of those, (C) is one or two orders of magnitude more remote than the ot
972.
by ethbr0 4y ago
My takeaway is that the more we turn to larger and larger models (developed by third parties) that obscure their underlying nuances, the more risky swapping models in a particular domain becomes. Cue MRE/MLOps job listings.
973.
by ethbr0 4y ago
Other forms of intelligence fascinate humans because we're fundamentally lonely. What's the point of being smart if you're alone? (in a species, as-we-understand-and-define-cognition sense)
974.
by ethbr0 4y ago
The current furore, from the more reasonable heads in Congress, is that the military has historically not done that. They had (a) no centralized collection point or widely used reporting mechanism, (b) no staffed office tasked with invest
975.
by ethbr0 4y ago
I look at it from the opposite perspective. If you were a foreign power running things in military ranges that gave odd sensor readings (say, balloons with radar characterization gear), wouldn't it be convenient if your adversary dismi
976.
by ethbr0 4y ago
This speaks to both sides of the problem in getting to the truth. On the one hand, we sensationalize events farther than the data supports ("My radar showed extremely high velocity, so there must have been a craft moving at those speed
977.
by ethbr0 4y ago
The problem with the classic "burn the CEO" knee-jerk is that it only leads to security theater. CEO hires CISO. CISO makes a big splash, and spends a ton of time getting the business certified in various ways, to prove to CEO stu
978.
by ethbr0 4y ago
The NSA isn't some all-powerful entity. They play by different rules, but there are still rules. If ATT had really pushed back, the NSA would have been hard pressed to install and run tapping equipment. And that's on hardline voic
979.
by ethbr0 4y ago
Encryption doesn't require certificate authorities and TLS. And the NSA is doing that because they can break a percentage of it, or anticipate they can in the future. And it's order of exabytes of data.
980.
by ethbr0 4y ago
Metadata is increasingly shifting into the encrypted payload, and networks are shifting away (conceptually and physically) from p2p channel-based to packet-routed via intermediaries. At some point, the metadata is (user X talks to SaaS serv
981.
by ethbr0 4y ago
Parent's point is that any NSA system falls far short (in comprehensiveness and freshness) of what Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple have (in addition to their analogs in other countries). At the end of the day, worldwide profit s
982.
by ethbr0 4y ago
The Holocaust would have been horrendously more effective had Nazi Germany convinced Europe's citizens to self-register on Facebook and declare their own religion.
983.
by ethbr0 4y ago
If someone is transiting sensitive data without encryption over the internet, and the NSA is included in their threat model, then they need to rethink a lot of things. Assuming the NSA catches and stores the traffic (i.e. it passed a keywor
984.
by ethbr0 4y ago
But people are people. They get nervous/scared in situations. Maybe the boots on the ground snap and murder a bunch of civilians they thought were threatening. A perfect drone wouldn't do that. But on the other hand, a perfect dro
985.
by ethbr0 4y ago
Mhmm. And what separates a gadfly from not-gadfly?
986.
by ethbr0 4y ago
There are only ever two high level options: 1) Put someone in charge, so that they can overrule the evil of the masses 2) Put the masses in charge, so that they can overrule the evil of individuals Naturally the Romans, governmentally smart
987.
by ethbr0 4y ago
In goriest form, I think of this as the drone argument. Is it better to put boots on the ground, some of whom may die and who may cause collateral casualties in executing their mission, or a (hypothetically idealized) drone that kills only
988.
by ethbr0 4y ago
Indeed. Presumably that's why it made the very first amendment. If only they'd thought to explicitly state that included privacy. :(
989.
by ethbr0 4y ago
15% of my day job (for going on a decade now) is helping people untangle Excel hairballs. It's opened my eyes to how creatively badly people can solve problems, given no alternatives.
990.
by ethbr0 4y ago
Amen. Every year.

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