Tragic.

That was pretty interesting. I was expecting cost/benefit on adopting quantum computing, which I suspect isn’t going to be terribly useful to the everyday person soon. But it was refreshingly targeted on the Cybersecurity impacts, which are valid for the everyday person, already.

TL;DR - Quantum computing is great, if you’re the bad guy. For the rest of us, there’s a cost/value tradeoff in defending against quantum computing threats. People will tell us it’s too much hassle to upgrade our encryption, but it can be done with reasonable effort.

most evidence suggests that piracy goes down in response to easily accessible and affordable market conditions.

The assholes know this too. We’re about due for another round of deshitifcation, just long enough to restore complacency.

I do not advocate for piracy. I advocate for archiving.

Exactly. And if the assholes make it illegal for librarians, well then yo ho ho.

Salutes

Yeah. Rockefeller pretty much owned the government in his heyday, too.

And then at some point he didn’t anymore. Money can buy power, but it does run out eventually.

Rockefeller was a lot smarter than Musk, and got a bit ahead of it with publicity stunt donations, before his influence ran out.

Musk thinks he can achieve a better outcome by controlling the media or the courts.

I think it’s objectively true that controlling the media does work, but I also think Musk wildly overestimates his own competence, and is in for a worse time than Rockefeller had.

Hooray for Risc-v, anyway.

I think I joke too often about ruling benevolently over the world’s robots someday after everyone lays off their Cybersecurity staff.

But if we continue this trend, this community may have the only clean secure laptops after everyone else sells out and fills their shit with backdoors.

Maybe we can rule together as a benevolent collective…

Yeah.

And there’s a very good chance that Elon spends his waning years in and out of every court, trying to stay out of jail.

Source: Rockefeller’s biography.

And that’s actually the optimistic version, from Elon’s perspective. There’s been plenty of rich assholes in history that didn’t have to worry about the courts.

It means that pirates don’t have to wait for release dates, because Netflix didn’t secure their servers.

But it’s a good thing that Netflix serves DRM to my devices through my paid account. We wouldn’t want me watching it later without paying them again!

“the lawsuit states that Google is profiting from the scam, too.”

Google has the resources to prevent this. Google’s leadership chose not to.

–yolo

Thanks. I hate it.

Fair enough.

Here’s what I remember: invoking SQL containing inserts from bash has resulted in lost data, when fairly unsurprising database things happened, since bash didn’t really expect to be in charge of logging the details of the attempted change. For the error, it wasn’t something surprising - maybe it was “max connections reached”, stuff that will just happen sometimes.

The data loss was probably solveable in bash, but the scripter didn’t think to (and probably would have needed more effort in a full development tool).

Sorry about that. I copy pasted the wrong thing.

I’ve corrected it to the intended link at:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham

Agreed on all points.

That said, I am smarter than the asshole CEOs, and the current state of computer security is abysmal.

So there’s still some hope that we are barreling toward my (mostly) benevolent reign over endless Michael Bay blockbuster summers.

Hopefully, for everyone’s sake, reality will fall somewhere in between.

But joking aside, money isn’t the only form of power. There aren’t that many billionaires (compared to he rest of us) and a billionaire’s influence is limited by what the rest of us will or won’t do.

You’re oversimplifying things here there are a lot

I think… we’re agreeing?

My point is that what is currently possible with AI doesn’t solve any of that.

People in this thread keep discussing growth in programmer productivity as if programmer typing speed and number of languages known are the limiting factors of programmer productivity. They are not. It’s all the other bullshit that makes (the vast majority of) programming projects fail.

My source: I know so many programming languages and I type insanely fast. My team is also productive beyond all reason. These two tidbits are only related in that I tried and failed with the first before succeeding with the second.

but how do people have the patience to deal with all of that in the beginning?

Whenever I was frustrated with a stupid undecipherable error message, I would just tweak my vim config a bit.

Within a few minutes, my rage at the error would be completely replaced with rage toward vimscript.

Then I would revert my vim config change, and return to the undecipherable error message with a fresh perspective. mainly relief that at least it’s not vimscript.

Joking aside, I really did learn vim mostly during coffee breaks or while waiting on some long running build process.

I’m actually anxious this is where it’s going.

If we end up there, I’m going to charge so much money, and I’m going to have all kinds of pain-in-the-ass clauses in my contract.

If I have to clean up the stupid again, everyone else is going to be doing doing some stupid shit that I find funny, in exchange for my help cleaning up their mess.

Yeah. In this wild scenario, only the people who can crack the robots security protocols, and reprogram them, will have any influence over society.

I promise to be a benevolent ruler.

Except Michael Bay will have to return to making Transformers movies full time. Sorry about that, in advance.

Yeah. The whole job is figuring out just the right away to say “pretty please” to the computer. The ways it’s done changes every decade or so. The fact that it’s a huge pain in the ass has yet to change, in spite of decades of marketing promises.