I was involved in writing a history book of an organization, and we used what was termed "journalistic integrity."
We couldn't put something into the book, unless it was corroborated by three separate sources (this was before the current situation, where you will get a dozen different sources that basically all come from the same place).
The onus was on us; not the people we interviewed. We were responsible for not publishing random nonsense.
Sure, but a lot of major news orgs publish things that are later found to be patently false or incorrect, so the onus is on the facts presented for me and many readers, the journalistic integrity angle is dead in my eyes.
At least since 2016 and beyond I've seen insanely verifiably false claims from mainstream media if you just look up raw sources. Starting with the Covington High Schoolers, within minutes of the story dropping I was able to validate that CNN a major news corporation was in fact lying, why?
Then there was a lot of shenanigans regarding the Hunter Biden laptop. There was a headline from a letter written by Intelligence Officers that made it sound like the actually forensically valid laptop itself was faked Russian disinformation, but it turned out to be valid.
When it comes to politics every major news org fails misserably. Their inability to contain personal biases is astounding to me. I want raw facts if you're going to make political assertions or its just propaganda. I don't care which side is doing what, if they're doing wrong expose them all, but use facts and evidence, not just TMZ / tabloid level shenanigans. Everyone is behaving like teenagers whenever politics is brought up these days.
Well, that may be, but that's still on the news outlet.
We currently reward outlets that spew out junk, right off the bat, and penalize outlets that take the time to validate the data. Some outlets almost certainly make it up, on the spot. No downside.
Back in the 1990s/early 200s, Michael Ramirez (a political cartoonist) posted a comic, showing three pairs of shoes.
On the left, were a massive pair of battered brogue wingtips. Under them, was the caption "Cronkite."
In the middle, was a very small pair of oxfords; both left. Its caption was "Rather."
The right, was captioned "Couric," and featured a big pair of clown shoes.
I've been writing Swift daily, since the day it was announced, and have shipped a number of apps, written in it.
I have learned to like the language. It's not perfect, but comes closer than most. I've written in a lot of languages, over the years.
My other language is PHP, which I use for my backend work. I've probably been writing that for over twenty years, but I still don't like the language.
As I was learning Swift, I started this series of posts[0]. It's still ongoing, but I haven't added anything in a while, and the language has progressed, since the earlier posts.
My understanding is they both have their strengths. If you want to build everything yourself, Hummingbird seems like the way to go but Vapor is more batteries-included.
I really like the practicality and simplicity of this.
Designing stuff for real humans to use, is really difficult, and really humbling.
In my experience, defense contractors really have to take the user context into account. It can be life or death. I used to work for one, and seeing the stuff come back from the field, was a lesson in humility.
Many A-listers are polymaths. For example, Phil Hartman, used to be Phil Hartmann (extra "n"), and designed some of the most iconic album covers of the 1970s, and Steve Martin is one of the best banjo players out there. It used to be part of his standup bit.
Dick Van Dyke came from the tail end of Vaudeville, where performers had to have a whole variety of skills.
Remember: Every one of these folks that hits the limelight, beat out thousands of others.
We think our vocation is competitive? Showbiz says "Hold my beer."
> Steve Martin is one of the best banjo players out there
And he’s great with a lasso!
I love his albums with Edie Brickell, he’s good with Steep Canyon Rangers, and more recently have heard him shine with Alison Brown (banjo), Sierra Hull (mandolin), and others in his latest tour.
If you’re looking for the top banjo players technically, you might check out Béla Fleck, Jens Kruger, Noam Pikelny, Tony Trischka, Bill Keith, Don Reno, and Earl Scruggs. I’ve personally heard superhuman performances by Jens Kruger in-person and I grew up on Scruggs.
Just looked it up and saw he did an album cover for Steely Dan. It reminded me that Chevy Chase was an early drummer for Steely Dan (well, before they became "Steely Dan")
Hedy Lamarr was a prolific inventor. Among other things, she developed a frequency-hopping spread spectrum radio transmission technique for torpedo guidance and donated the patent to the US Navy during WW2.
Kodak should have ruled the digital imaging space. Instead, they collapsed.
A lot of it was because the film people kneecapped the digital folks.
Film was very profitable.
Until it wasn't.
The company that I worked for, was a classic film company. When digital was first getting a foothold (early 1990s), I used to get lectures about how film would never die...etc.
A few years later, it was as if film never existed. The transition was so sudden, and so complete, that, if you blinked, you missed it.
Years later, I saw the same kind of thing happen to my company, that happened to Kodak.
The iPhone came out, with its embedded camera, and that basically killed the discrete point-and-shoot market, which was very profitable for my company.
When the iPhone first came out, the marketing folks at my company laughed at it.
I'm sure they're not all scammers, but what's the upside to the consumer? Why not just give the money directly? Seems to me like all the upside is on the company, and all the risk is on the user.
In some countries, where people receive conditioned social security benefits, just sending the money via bank account will have disadvantages (at worst the next sum from social security is lowered 1:1 by the money received and they try to keep it that way). So, if you do not meet the gift receiver in person and do not trust the postal service with cash, a gift card can be a solution.
The theory is that if you give someone cash, they're just going to put it in the bank or buy gas with it, but if you give them gift card to e.g. a game store then they're going to buy a game, without you having to know which game they want.
It's the same premise as buying someone any gift instead of just giving them the money so they can buy whatever they want.
Arguably, they'll be happier with the video game than with a tank of gas, which you've ensured they'll choose by not giving them the cash
Edit to add: kids often don't have bank accounts, i mostly received gift cards as a child, from relatives who wouldn't want to mail cash and couldn't give me cash in person. On a dark note, giving a kid a gift card to a toy store makes it harder for the parents to steal it for themselves.
The whole practice originates from "gift certificates" where you'd maybe go to your favorite spa and get a gift certificate to give someone, so that the spa treatment is the gift you're giving, but the recipient redeems it whenever they want. That just got abstracted to non-service gifts as well, with the same idea ("treat yourself to a new video game, whichever and whenever you feel like it" -- that's the gift, facilitated by the card)
Also for kids at least, sometimes they really will be happier with less choice. Sometimes kids make bad decisions and limiting choice to good options is helpful.
Additionally the inverse is true. Sometimes kids choices are restrained, and they really would like to do a thing they are not allowed to, and gift cards offered them away to do that. Case in point: my tween figured out that we don’t let him buy in game currency for any the games that we do let him play, however, when a relative gives him a gift card, we let him redeem it, making gift cards incredibly popular gifts.
I joke that a $100 gift card is an "inferior $100 bill", because you can spend the bill anywhere, but the gift card only in one place. People give them as gifts because it shows marginally more effort than just giving cash.
I’m not particularly interested in training models, but it would be nice to have eGPUs again. When Apple Silicon came out, support for them dried up. I sold my old BlackMagic eGPU.
That said, the need for them also faded. The new chips have performance every bit as good as the eGPU-enhanced Intel chips.
eGPU with an Apple accelerator with a bunch or RAM and GPU cores could be really interesting honestly. I’m pretty sure they are capable of designing something very competitive especially in terms of performance per watt.
They are inseparable for Apple. CPUS/GPUs/memory. They can use chipsets to tweak ratios, but I doubt they will change the underlying module format—everything together.
My suggestion is to accept that format and just provide a way to network them at a low level via pci or better.
There's a lot of performative "security" in such companies. You need to employ the right people (you need a "CISO", ideally someone who's never actually used a terminal in their life), you need to pay money for the right vendors, adopt the right buzzwords and so on. The amounts of money being spent on performative security are insane, all done by people who can't even "hack" a base64-"encrypted" password.
All while there's no budget for those that actually develop and operate the software (so you get insecure software), those that nevertheless do their best are slowed down by all the security theater, and customer service is outsourced to third-world boiler rooms so exploiting vulnerabilities doesn't even matter when a $100 bribe will get you in.
It's "the emperor has no clothes" all the way down: because any root-cause analysis of a breach (including by regulators) will also be done by those without clothes, it "works" as far as the market and share price is concerned.
Source: been inside those "companies of public significance" or interacted with them as part of my work.
Equifax? Capital One? 23andMe? My basis for this is that you can leak everyone’s bank data and barely have it show up in your stock price chart, especially long term.
Stock price is an extremely narrow view of the total consequences of lax cybersecurity but that aside, the notion that security doesn’t matter because those companies got hacked is ridiculous. The reason there isn’t an Equifax every minute is because an enormous amount of effort and talent goes into ensuring that’s the case. If your attitude is we should vibe code our way past the need for security, you aren’t responsible enough to hold a single user’s data.
I feel as if security is a much bigger concern than it ever was.
The main issue seems to be, that our artifacts are now so insanely complex, that there’s too many holes, and modern hackers are quite different from the old skiddies.
In some ways, it’s possible that AI could be a huge boon for security, but I’m worried, because its training data is brogrammer crap.
Security has become a big talking point, and industry vultures have zeroed in on that and will happily sell dubious solutions that claim to improve security. There is unbelievable money sloshing around in those circles, even now during the supposed tech downturn ("security" seems to be immune to this).
Actual security on the other hand has decreased. I think one of the worst things to happen to the industry is "zero trust", meaning now any exposed token or lapse in security is exploitable by the whole world instead of having to go through a first layer of VPN (no matter how weak it is, it's better than not having it).
> quite different from the old skiddies
Disagreed - if you look at the worst breaches ("Lapsus$", Equifax, etc), it was always down to something stupid - social engineering the vendor that conned them into handing them the keys to the kingdom, a known vulnerable version in a Java web framework, yet another NPM package being compromised and that they immediately updated to since the expensive, enterprise-grade Dependabot knockoff told them to, and so on.
I'm sure APTs and actual hacking exists in the right circles, but it's not the majority of breaches. You don't need APT to breach most companies.
Around here, folks wipe off the paint from their license plates with paint thinner. The plate still has the number, but an ALPR won’t be able to read it.
I’m told the reason is so that they don’t have to pay bridge tolls (which are quite high).
It’s illegal, but I see cars with bare-metal license plates, all the time.
(Assuming this is NY) Worth noting that NY license plates had a defect that caused the paint to delaminate [1]. I am not surprised that people intentionally do it, but this delamination used to be extremely common.
I have seen youtube videos saying that if you put some tape over your licence plates the cameras won't read them. I think it was tape to make a skateboard grip better.
We couldn't put something into the book, unless it was corroborated by three separate sources (this was before the current situation, where you will get a dozen different sources that basically all come from the same place).
The onus was on us; not the people we interviewed. We were responsible for not publishing random nonsense.