So the poor might not be able to participate in the judicial process?

As in, 28 per day of work missed? Or even less than that

Hold the fuck up. Am I getting this right?

You have to register to be able to vote. If you register, you might have to work in court, losing out on pay. You don’t get any compensation for that. The lost pay can ruin you financially.

What the fuck?

I believe that thinking you’re immune to something makes you even more vulnerable, because it creates a cognitive blind spot. If you think you can’t make mistakes, you don’t stop to wonder if you are making one.

Easy there, you’re making a bunch of assumptions and accusations here. For starters, I do understand how spoilers work, I read the spoilers and I don’t think it adds a lot of value to the conversation.

I’m technically from a CS background, but not in the field relevant to this post. I also don’t think people assume this topic to be basic. I happen to understand about 80% of it, but only ever have contact with about 20%, and that’s despite working in a CS-related field myself. And yes, I’ll keep using that abbreviation, because it’s convenient and I know that you understand it.

The short answer to “how does this affect me?” is “if you don’t know what npm is it, it doesn’t affect you”.

The intention of the blog article and the post sharing it is to get a specific warning out to a specific technical group. This group doesn’t want to scroll past three paragraphs of context they already know to get to the parts that matter. They can’t cater to every audience, so they prioritise the people that can do something with their understanding.

Unfortunately, that means that other people are left out of the conversation, because frankly, they have nothing to contribute. That’s neither malice nor arrogance, but simply expediency.

However, you’re welcome to ask! Chances are, someone will be happy to answer and fill you in on the background. More specifically, someone may be able to give a subject-specific explanation. Most importantly, that explanation will be more reliable if it comes from a human familiar with the topic.

Chatbots, no matter how diligently made to look like they know stuff, don’t and can’t know anything except the likelihood certain words occur together. They don’t have the required structure to understand the concepts behind the words. At best, they have memorised hundreds of generic explanations they can reconstruct, and hopefully that reconstruction will be accurate. But how would you know? You yourself don’t have the expertise to tell if they’re right.

And because they don’t understand the concepts, they also can’t reliably connect the dots the way a human can. The more dots to connect, the greater the chance something will go awry. The bot can’t tell you “I don’t know” if it doesn’t understand what it means to know. It will generate a text that looks plausible, and you can’t verify whether it’s actually true.

In the interest of actually getting a useful understanding, ask humans. The answer might look something like this:

NPM packages are boxes of highly specialised supplies and tools. NPM itself is an assistant that keeps your supplies stocked and your tools in shape. You tell it what you want for your project and it’ll make sure you have it.

The thing this post is about is a kind of evil robot that hides in these boxes. When your friendly NPM helper restocks, the robot crawls out of the box and starts exploring your workshop. It tells others what you’re building, what it looks like, shares any secret technology you’re using, creates and sends out copies of your keys – anything you’ve got lying around, it will attempt to make available for the people that built it.

The worst thing is that it’ll build copies of itself and hide them in any boxes you create and send out to other people. If one supplier ships to five others, that’s five more recipients under attack. If two of them also ship out to five other people each, that’s another ten. And it gets bigger and bigger from here.

So there we have it: An evil robot stealing your secrets and sending clones to anyone who trusts your product.

We realise we’re not mundane. We just don’t have the time to explain everything all the time. That’s a problem all sciences (and many other disciplines) face: When you’re working in a deep well, you can’t come up to the surface after every step of your work or you’ll never get anything done.

For CS, it’s probably more visible because the field is fairly young, rapidly changing, pretty large and the “basics” aren’t taught anywhere near as much as those of other, more well-established sciences.

But if you ask, there’s a chance someone is available to help you out. Be friendly, and they’re more likely to be friendly back.

I understand you care about making knowledge accessible and I applaud that. I acknowledge that CS has a long way to go still on that front. Let’s work on it together, shall we?

Kind regards, LVK

The basic rule with conservatives is that they want to control others. Their reputation is about power, not about fairness. Every law and every move has to be considered from that point of view: If they get silenced, it is bad, but if they silence others, that shows power and is good.

My part-timer gives me his schedule on Monday.

It’s project work, the “schedule” is really just “when do we do our regular check-in?” and I don’t give a rat’s ass when he does his work, as long as I can reach him whenever he said I could. My boss doesn’t give a shit either, as long as our work gets done.

Why do you tell us that?

Why would you call them a liar for relaying what some data scientists supposedly thought, then conceding that we won’t know whether they’re right because the people who could have had it investigated didn’t do so?

If true, that’s an intent I can get behind. But even if it isn’t, given my own inclination towards contrived shenanigans to scratch some weird itch in my brain, I’ve come to accept such things as harmless quirks and treat them with the same patience I’d want others to treat my own with.

And every now and ðen, I try someþhing myself and realise what fun it can be ;-)

Something about the density of innocent and helpless prey really appeals to people who like to prey on the helpless and innocent.

Nerds doing something unnecessarily complicatedly for the fun of it? I’m not particularly surprised.

I hope your weekend is as awesome as you are

Rough estimate using 30 days as average month would be ~35 months (1050 = 35×30). The average month is a tad longer than 30 days, but I don’t know exactly how much. Without a calculator, I’d guess the total result is closer to 34.5. Just using my own brain, this is as far as I get.

Now, adding a calculator to my toolset, the average month is 365.2425 d / 12 m = 30.4377 d/m. The total result comes out to about 34.2, so I overestimated a little.

Also, the total time is 1041.66… which would be more correctly rounded to 1042, but has negligible impact on the redult.

Edit: I saw someone else went even harder on this, but for early morning performance, I’m satisfied with my work

if you have nothing worth bragging about, resorting to basic functions of sapient life for clout is the best you can do. I’m a thinker too. I’m also a breather, an eater and plenty moee things that aren’t special.

I’ve got some actual achievements too, such as being a former piece of shit, so I’ve actually got a leg up on him!

I never had one of my wired earbuds fall off the platform at the train station and disappear in the gravel, nor did I ever have isues with forgetting to charge them, let alone their case being brolen and not charging at all. And if I want to switch my favourite headphones over from my PC to my phone, I’m really glad my old phone still has a jack.

Money in my bank account I can spend on just about anything. If I realise “shit, I’m out of toilet paper”, I can go to the grocery store and pay by EC, with the money in my bank account. The money that I keep in there, just in case there’s something I want or need to spend money on literally anywhere.

Besides, my bank is subject to my local jurisdiction and my own country’s laws and regulations. If my money is with some US company, I can’t be sure whether they’ll suddenly go “sorry, pal, your money has been confiscated on some bullshit pretense you have no way of actually fighting back against”.

Valve could extend a limited credit for the first two hours of play time. If after downloading and playing for two hours there’s still no confirmation from the bank, they’d then block your access to the game.

You’re just being a reminder that we shouldn’t want those things and give up.

No, I’m being a reminder that you should be strategic in how you go about it. Don’t just dream – work towards it. Gather support, particularly in smaller, local elections, where the consequences for spoiling aren’t quite as bad. Talk to people. Get people on board. Once you have enough backing, try to swing bigger elections around.

I’m not a centrist, nor a neoliberal, nor whatever else you may associate with the Democrats. I don’t even live in the US, and where I do live, I vote left. But that only works because we have a representative democracy, where my vote counts even if it’s not a plurality vote.

So please spare me your moral grandstanding and deflection and consider what I’m actually talking about instead.