Yes siree, the excitement never stops!

  • 0 Posts
  • 50 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
cake
Cake day: December 7th, 2023

help-circle
  • As a person who used to work at MSFT:

    I can almost guarantee you there are a whoooole lot of people who have made their careers basically championing the very old chat bot model, and they are probably now either directly in charge of the OpenAI stuff, or at the very least ‘stakeholders’.

    They will do nonsense corporate bullshit to make them selves seem very important, never really wrong about anything, and this will result in extremely slow and gradual actual adoption of the GPT stuff, all the while stressing all the reasons their old stupid bullshit can’t be seriously modified because of reasons that have to do with synergizing with other MSFT products.

    The process of the company gradually figuring out that none of that matters when it comes to producing something that is actually better will be slow, painful and incremental.

    Itll probably take half a decade.

    For reference, as an aside, I was doing a contract of DBA kinda stuff when they unveiled Windows 8. We had to dogfood it, ie, the MSFT process of everyone working at MSFT has to beta test everything else MSFT is making.

    Well… Windows 8 initially broke basically everything we were using to actually do DBA.

    I got angry and pointed out that Windows 8 had removed the ‘windows’ from Windows. The initial version was soley the tablet based design, only allowing a maximum of two ‘panes’ open at a time.

    We had to wait about a month for the various problems with SQL Manager Studio to be ironed out, and for them to basically allow the option to just use the more or less Windows 7 desktop for you know actually working on our PCs.

    Point of me mentioning this is: I saw how ludicrous this all was, and was frequently verbally abused by our team lead for pointing it out.

    Youre not allowed to go against the grain at MSFT unless youre a big dog. And… you become a big dog by bullying people and vastly overstating the necessity of what your team is doing.

    The culture there is downright psycho and sociopathic.


  • MSFT appears to still be using a fundamentally old chatbot model that they’ve just slapped a bunch of extra ‘features’ (namely, Wooow! It has APIs and works on other MSFT stuff!) to, much like Bethesda’s game engine.

    Probably barely different from Tay in terms of broad conceptual design, just patched and upgraded to do what it does faster.

    The core design is garbage, and just like Windows itself, its nearly certainly a giant fucking mess of layers upon layers of different versions of itself hiding under a trench coat, all standing on top of something 10 to 20 years old.



  • Sats that beam data to other sats do not have to worry about the atmosphere, nor are they using anywhere near the kind of power involved to fry the other sats. Its orders of magnitude greater power for that, which means more more weight and thus launch cost.

    Beam decoherence is a /huge/ problem when trying to go from ground to low earth orbit.

    You would again end up needing a pretty significant power supply along with exceptionally precise tracking.

    Im talking military grade equipment here, massive expensive and complex. Not something you could whip up in your garage, unless you worked at it for a decade, and if you did that, youd end up in jail.

    I really want to stress how precise your tracking needs to be. Assuming you precisely know the orbital trajectory, your /exact/ location, the rotation of the earth… you would need to have a mechanical system capable of sustained tracking to… what like a few (roughly 3 by updated calculations) arc seconds, something like that, to hit something /and stay on target for probably 30 minutes/ that is 120 miles away, roughly the size of an SUV

    EDIT: Fixed up my numbers, I was thinking in terms of the wrong unit.

    Point is… this approach requires an astounding degree of tracking precision that is basically impossible unless you are a defense contractor.

    Tracking a thing this accurately alone is practically impossible. And I mean that literally. There is no practical way you can do this, unless you consider starting up your own engineering firm to solve this, and you are allowed to use a whole bunch of tech with current security classifications, unless you consider that practical.

    If you do, hi Elon Musk, didnt realize you were on lemmy.


  • Are you talking about launching your own satellite with the ability to aim a laser at another satellite while in orbit, or are you talking about attempting to point a ground based laser at something moving at roughly Mach 24 or faster?

    Beam decoherence is a pretty big problem when you are lasering through the entire atmosphere, and both scenarios require an astounding degree of precision.


  • This person asked if they can make PopOS secure via TPM.

    I am saying that while yes, you can, there isnt much point, because setting up LUKS to work with TPM is inconvenient, easy to fuck up, and basically offers no additional protection against all but extremely implausible security scenarios for basically everyone other than bladed server room admins worried about corporate espionage who are for some reason running bare metal PopOS on their server racks.

    Like the only actual use case I can see for this is /maybe/ having a LUKS encrypted portable backup drive, but even then you can still base the encryption key in the actual main pc’s harddrive without using tpm, though at /that and only that point/ are we approaching parity between the difficulty of using or not using tpm to accomplish this.


  • Oh ok so the use case here is if this casual linux user asking this question has only their harddrive stolen from their pc or their laptop in their home or apartment or workplace, not their whole pc.

    Mhm that seems likely.

    I guess this maybe makes sense if youre running like a server room, but chances are low thats the actual context of this question.

    Why would you run PopOS on a large operation’s servers?





  • Ok… so… if you have TPM… and LUKS…

    You still have a scenario where the encryption key is still on your physical device, LUKS with or without TPM, or … some kind of TPM based Linux encryption solution I have never heard of?

    Does Windows Secure Boot work on Linux via the TPM?

    No…

    Am I missing something?

    Theres no point in involving TPM in securing a linux computer.

    In a scenario where you’ve physically lost your computer, using TPM or not it wont matter if your pc gets into the hands of someone who can attempt to brute force the keys.

    If your pc is remotely compromised to the point it has something on it that can grab your keys, it also will not matter if you are using TPM in some way.

    The only practical use of full disk encryption is if your linux pc and or laptop gets stolen and falls into the hands of a non tech savvy person, and in that scenario, going through the trouble of correctly binding LUKS to TPM will have just been a waste of time.

    Thus, you should probably just use LUKS and not bother routing it through TPM.


  • Sure but you dont need to use TPM at all to use LUKS.

    You can store the encryption key on the harddrive, in the LUKS partition layer.

    Like thats the default of how LUKS works.

    Im really confused why people think TPM needs to be involved in anyway when using LUKS.

    Generally speaking you have to go out of your way to correctly cajole TPM v1 or v2 to actually correctly interface with LUKS.





  • I would just like to point out that being terminally online has almost nothing at all to do with being technically savvy.

    Huge numbers of people who are terminally online are really only adept at using tech at a surface level, and often confuse this /skill/ for things like knowing how back end programming works, understanding what software development entails, etc.

    Actually technically competent people go to great, astounding lengths to make decent software very easy to use for the average person. UI/UX, front end devs, back end devs, database management, and I would say testing paradigms for possible bugs, but the industry seems to have largely abandoned giving a shit about that.

    Even here on lemmy I often find myself in discussions which turn into arguments which turn into me finally realizing that the person I am talking to has absolutely ludicrous ideas about tech, the tech industry or a specific software.

    Such people say and truly believe in obviously nonsensical things, or approach topics from a standpoint that makes it obvious they are really just power users of a particular kind of software, and have developed into basically superficially convincing fanboys or fangirls for it.

    They reveal that they only have knowledge from a bit of experimentation and mostly just following a whole bunch of uninformed discussion about some new tech buzz word, and lack understanding of the important basic concepts, or actually relevant dynamics at play, which they likely would /not/ believe if they had ever actually worked in the tech industry, or developed their own software, or contributed usefully to some open source project.

    A whole key thing about the tech industry is that it is dominated by reverence for impressive sounding tech buzzwords that promise some new and revolutionary feature, when in reality such things are nearly always minor, iterative improvements on something that came before.

    A high number of people are easily bamboozled by such things.

    Basically… you are not immune to propaganda?

    Then tech world has: You are not immune to marketing.

    A great example is the current craze over ‘AI’ generated content.

    OpenAI, Stable Diffusion, these kinds of things?

    None of them are capable of the vast majority of the kinds of processes that describe intelligence, but people will argue vehemently that they do, because they are not tech savvy, do not know anything about how the underlying tech actually works or what its capable of, or even what the word intelligence means.

    It can do cool and neat things, and its branded or marketed as AI, so it is!

    But, its not.



  • Specifically for antiwork:

    Because they are either generally not very well informed or politically well versed and just know that work sucks,

    Or they do not have very much free time to follow meta news about reddit and are unaware of what is going on,

    Or they just have not heard of lemmy yet,

    Or they have had some kind of technical trouble trying to sign up for or use lemmy in the way they would want to,

    Or they are not very not very tech savvy and do not understand the FOSS benefits to a discussion board or why or how thats relevant to capitalism,

    Or they are basically hypocrites who prefer an echo chamber that is comfortable to a somewhat less echo chambery option and are really just into the whole scene superficially and do not really actually care for having non contradictory and inconsistent views + personal actions/behaviors.

    Lots of them probably fall into different categories and many probably fall into more than one.


  • That is a neat story, thanks for sharing!

    Best I’ve got doesn’t have to do with Godot, but I think its neat.

    The year is 2003 or 4, and I am beta testing the 0.5 release of Project Reality, which later more or less evolved into Squad.

    I know nothing about coding at this point being still in middle school.

    What I do possess is apparently pattern recognition.

    We are in a last minute waaay overextended beta testing session trying to iron out a mystifying bug:

    The whole new feature of implementing squad specific kit bags that are only obtainable at certain in game locations is working.

    But… sometimes it is not. At all. Sometimes you can grab an unlimited number of kits without restriction, sometimes you cant and have to follow the newly coded rules that limit kits by being in a squad, and having a total pool of requestable kits per squad and per your whole team.

    We get in vehicles, we get out of vehicles.

    We go to different parts of the map.

    We die then respawn via suiciding.

    We die then respawn via being shot, killed as infantry with different weapons, killed inside different vehicles.

    We join and leave amd create and disband squads.

    We die on the water, we die on the land.

    We die on islands, we die on beaches.

    We shall never surrender!

    Er, well the goof off testers wont, the devs are getting frustrated.

    Absolutely none of this has any discernable effect on the problem.

    After what must have been about 3 hours… we are basically just fucking about as testers as the actual devs including the one who actually coded the new system is in despair, we are gonna have to push back the massively advertised release date of about 8 hours from now.

    Fucking about a bit and watching random zany attempts at most impressive suicides with those who we are at this point joking are just the chosen ones able to spawn unlimited specialist kits with c4 and anti tank weapons…

    Something clicks.

    I hold down the tab button to bring up the scoreboard with player names.

    I start telling a few of the testers who have not already left to try spawning kits at various locations.

    Everyone goes sure man why not.

    After doing this with myself and 5 other people… I have a theory.

    Everyone who has non alphanumeric characters in their name is able to break the kit limitation rules, everyone else is bound by them.

    The lead dev is skeptical, but checks the code again anyway.

    About a minute later he screams over the mic on teamspeak.

    About 10 minutes later, he has fixed what was probably a really simple but easily overlooked bug in how early python parses string values and passes them to other functions or data types.

    The server is back up, everything works correctly now, and Project Reality 0.5 is released only a few hours behind schedule, instead of the next week or two when the team would be able to organize another large scale testing bout.

    Lol and thats the story of how i saved a mod release date wooo!


  • Ding ding ding, winner winner chicken dinner.

    Sure if you are a bigger entity and have more money to throw around, there are other engines that’ll probably be a much better fit.

    If youre a broke ass indie dev, I am not really seeing a better choice than Godot right now, as youre not gonna be able to afford a more expensive engine without /usually/ pulling some kind of asset flip scam type thing.

    Sure there are some very good more niche 2D only development engines, but even with a lot of them youve still got some kind of liscensing to deal with.

    That basically leaves Unity and … OGRE, as far as I am aware for possibly good choices for a 3D game.

    Unity is currently self destructing, and OGRE, at least as far as I have tried, is pretty hard to get a native dev environment working on linux. Maybe I missed something or got confused, but I kept running into error after error trying to set up its more advanced features, which seem to require windows specific dependencies.

    I guess you could run it in a VM but that seems basically insane, and even if I was to set up a dedicated Windows machine just to develop on OGRE, it is far more clumsy to work with than Godot.