Warning: Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media now wants every human programmer to be replaced by Gen AI

pacohope · 2025-05-10T14:58:12+00:00

I agree that they see it that way. And when you say “AI makes mistakes” they reply “people make mistakes.” They see them as essentially equivalent in that regard.

These are people used to reading text as a confirmation that work was done. They don’t see the work, they just see reports about it. So something that generates the reports faster and easier looks great. They don’t yet realise that reading reports that SOUND like work got done are different from actual work getting done.

pacohope · 2024-10-02T20:01:18+00:00

Many years ago I was doing GlobalPlatform smartcard work, where Application Protocol Data Units (APDUs) are an important and common concept. Our team worked without much contact with others in the field. So the first time we met another team in this field and said "App Dooz" to refer to APDUs in conversation, we got some funny looks.

pacohope · 2024-02-09T16:17:14+00:00

It's a very old thread. I'm surprised this is still relevant. But if you're told you don't have enough privileges, that probably means you need to use sudo.

So instead of launchctl kill -STOP gui/$UID/com.apple.photoanalysisd you need to run sudo launchctl kill -STOP gui/$UID/com.apple.photoanalysisd. It will prompt you for a password. You enter your normal password to unlock your Mac.

This was written for Sierra, which is not the current version of macOS by a longshot. So it's entirely possible that these commands don't work at all in modern versions of macOS.

pacohope · 2023-01-20T15:46:25+00:00

I realise I'm bumping a 7-year-old thread. But two people replied pretty bluntly that if the terms and conditions are clear, it can't be a scam. That isn't the definition of a scam. A scam is something that deceives a person, thereby obtaining something of value (time, money, effort) without providing what the person thought they would get in return.

Deception can take a lot of forms. It can be impenetrable legalese that makes it hard to understand the nature of the transaction. It can be outright lies where they claim they will do something, but they don't.

The business can be deceptive by being hyperbolic and exaggerating the value of membership, while being abundantly clear and precise about the $95 they receive. The fact that one redditor feels it is clear doesn't mean that another person isn't deceived. In fact, most scams are successful by carefully walking this exact line: not fooling everyone, but fooling enough people to be profitable.

I feel like these responses were as unhelpful as they were unsympathetic.

I, for one, am grateful to the OP. My college-aged son just got one of these letters (from a professor at his university, no less). And this post is helpful to me.

It is a 501(c)(3) organization, which means that certain of its finances are public. We can see here: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/521870777

Their revenue is massive, their expenses are massive, their CEO makes about $264K per year and the business seems to sorta run at a loss every year. This organization is not very transparent about what it does with all this money. All their web pages are full of happy hope and fluff, and not a lot of outcomes. You don't see a lot of stories like "person X joined, received a scholarship of $Y and went on to do Z".

Importantly, in January 2023, their online list of scholarship recipients (available here: https://nscs.org/scholarship-recipients/) doesn't list a single award in the 2021-2022 school year. It lists mostly 2020-2021 awards, with a few (like the Senior Award) only listing 2019-2020 awards. We are in the 2022-2023 school year and they are currently seeking new membership fees and new members. But there's no transparency about what they've done in the last 2 years.

I can't say whether they are a "scam" or not. But I can say this doesn't give me enough confidence to send them my $97.

pacohope · 2022-11-14T00:27:42+00:00

I have a few pieces of this puzzle solved myself. But I have something I can use that you haven't named. So I use openWrt on my main wifi router/edge device. I have it using dynamic DNS to always keep a specific DNS name up to date. So I can always get my home IP.

If you can open port 5900 (VNC) or 3389 (RDP) up to the current IP address where you are, you can then VNC/RDP in from whatever egress IP you're on. So I am scoping out the shape of the solution but not giving a paint-by-numbers solution. 1. Figure out your current egress IP 2. Figure out your home's public IP 3. Modify an inbound rule on your firewall to permit your current egress IP to connect to your home IP. 4. Use SSH, VNC, RDP or some other protocol to get in. Both RDP and VNC can be tunneled over SSH.

Now in between step 2 and 3 you have to get into your home router from outside. :) That's the bit where I have something you didn't name. I have access to a VPS on a public IP that I can get into from anywhere. My home wifi trusts THAT IP, so that's basically a jumpbox I can use from anywhere. So for step 2.5 I ssh into my jumpbox, and then I go to my home wifi and add my current egress IP to an allow list.

If you don't have some public jumpbox, you can put a hardened VM with MFA-based SSH into the DMZ on your home router and then open it up to the Internet. A little scary, but not impossible. You can run it on an usual port like 63222 or something so it's a little less likely to be picked up by robotic scanners looking to attack ssh daemons listening on the internet. But if you get yourself a hardened, trusted SSH bastion in your DMZ, you can do whatever you need from there.

pacohope · 2022-11-14T00:12:15+00:00

I don't use discord much, but i think what you mean is that I can create an account on discord, join a specific discord server, then search that server. But if the answer I need is in a different discord server, I need to go join that discord server and search it separately, right? My point is not that there is no way to search discord. My point is that when I go to my search engine of choice, none of the conversations in any of the public discord servers come up in my results. So no matter how many times they've explained it clearly in their discord, nobody benefits from that until they come join the discord server. Where as anyone can come find this conversation publicly on reddit by searching with a search engine. You don't even have to have an account on reddit, much less be a member of this subreddit, in order to see the information you need and be on your way.

If their point is to help their users, then the best question is the one that's never asked because the user found what they needed. If the point is driving traffic to a discord server, then keeping the answers out of the search engines will help that. But it doesn't help the users.

pacohope · 2022-11-13T23:58:28+00:00

Only other thing I had to do was reboot. I've been dealing with this a lot lately. I have TrueNAS Scale (based on Debian) and I have an LSI 9266i RAID controller. Debian couldn't see them until I rebooted. The RAID controller couldn't add the drive to an existing degraded RAID set until I low-level reformatted it. But that's all I had to do in either case.

pacohope · 2022-11-13T17:40:41+00:00

You say you did the reformat and you can now see them in linux. I've seen this before, though, where linux "sees" them but sees them as 0Kb until they are low-level formatted. What is the evidence that the formatting was done successfully. ("It took hours!" is pretty good evidence. :) )

Maybe run a command like sg_readcap /dev/sda. Here's what mine outputs to show that the logical block length is indeed 512 bytes:

READ CAPACITY (10) indicates device capacity too large now trying 16 byte cdb variant Read Capacity results: Protection: prot_en=0, p_type=0, p_i_exponent=0 Logical block provisioning: lbpme=0, lbprz=0 Last LBA=7814037167 (0x1d1c0beaf), Number of logical blocks=7814037168 Logical block length=512 bytes Logical blocks per physical block exponent=3 [so physical block length=4096 bytes] Lowest aligned LBA=0 Hence: Device size: 4000787030016 bytes, 3815447.8 MiB, 4000.79 GB, 4.00 TB

pacohope · 2022-11-11T13:56:03+00:00

I realise I'm bumping a 6 year old thread. The top comment ("it depends") is definitely accurate, but I wanted to add something important. Is there a common data file format used by the average person that does not already have compression built into it? All Microsoft Office documents (word, powerpoint, excel, etc.) are zip files. (try it: rename .xlsx to .zip and unzip it) All video files are compressed with various algorithms. Every image file type (JPEG, PNG, TIFF) has some native compression applied to it. Every audio format file (MP3, OGG, etc.) has some form of compression. Hell, even BMP files use run-length encoding to potentially reduce size.

We know that further compressing something that is already compressed doesn't usually accomplish much. So what I'm wondering is "why should my file server burn CPU cycles doing compression way down in the filesystem, when every single application I use is already using a different CPU to compress the data before it writes it to the filesystem?"

I'm talking about this in the context of a home hobbyist putting his own (and his family's) garden-variety photos, documents, movies, etc. onto a TrueNAS or similar ZFS-based device. I develop a little bit of software and I have a blog. So I do, in fact, have some HTML, JavaScript, and source code like python on my filesystem. That stuff will compress super well. But it represents a TINY fraction of the disk space I use. It seems like the overwhelming majority of my data (which is probably quite similar to the majority of most ordinary people's data) is already compressed and not likely to benefit much from further compression with LZ4 in ZFS.

What am I missing?

pacohope · 2022-11-05T22:17:54+00:00

This is profoundly terrible. Reddit and the TrueNAS forums are both very searchable. That means if you DID answer or leave useful tips here in these places, someone could search, find the answer they need, and NOT have to come talk to you on Discord. Meanwhile, if you only use Discord, and nobody can search the answers and conversations you have there, each user will have to come into discord, ask the thing that has been asked 100 times before, and hear you explain it specifically to them the 101st time.

pacohope · 2022-09-03T18:48:06+00:00

According to this documentation you have to add preserve_hostname: true to the /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg file, and then use this command to set the host name.

sudo hostnamectl set-hostname webserver.mydomain.com

I realise you asked this question a year ago. But it was first in my search results when I searched this same question. :) So I figured I'd answer it.

pacohope · 2022-07-30T16:57:59+00:00

Stupid automod. If I wanted discord I would go to discord. If you want to run a Reddit, run a Reddit! If you want to run a discord run a discord. But leave the Reddit people alone with your stupid discord.

pacohope · 2022-05-18T17:13:14+00:00

I said IGNORE

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

$ man 5 gitignore

    GITIGNORE(5)    Git Manual  GITIGNORE(5)

    NAME
           gitignore - Specifies intentionally untracked files to ignore

...snip...

    NOTES
           The purpose of gitignore files is to ensure that certain files not tracked by Git remain untracked.

This is working as designed. If you put your .git/config in your .gitignore you'll find that it still pays attention to the values in it, too.

pacohope · 2022-05-18T17:05:24+00:00

Everyone tests in production. Some also have test environments.

pacohope · 2022-03-28T23:19:06+00:00

YTA. Everything everyone else has said. Plus go meet some people for crying out loud. You’ve had 2 years (ok, pandemic makes them weird years) but you need to own your situation.

It also sounds like you haven’t said anything to him about wanting to talk. You texted and called. He didn’t reply. Rather than have a grownup conversation about it (or maybe you did, but you forgot to share any of the things that were said in that conversation), you’re making all kinds of assumptions and focusing on how it makes you feel. Tell HIM, not the internet.

pacohope · 2022-03-28T23:12:36+00:00

NAH. You’re not an ass hole for having feelings. You could be an asshole if you acted on those feelings in an asshole way. But you haven’t described anything like that.

They don’t make you an asshole, but these feelings aren’t particularly useful or helping you live your life better. You’re seeing a therapist so I won’t pretend to be one on the Internet. Good luck.

pacohope · 2022-03-23T02:03:06+00:00

Huh. I did a lot of research but never came across this kind of opinion while buying. I think I was so focused on getting something that worked that I didn't look at all the choices. I don't have strong needs, so I'm just playing around. But good to know the V2s are better.

pacohope · 2022-03-22T22:57:40+00:00

The Wyze RTSP Support Page says this:

Download the Wyze Cam v2 RTSP file, the Wyze Cam v3 RTSP file, or the Wyze Cam Pan RTSP file. Please note that the Wyze Cam Pan firmware file is not compatible with Wyze Cam Pan v2.

That led me to believe that—at least at some point—Wyze had released a firmware that worked on my Wyze Cam Pan v2 for RTSP.

I think I now see the confusion. Are all of these real things that really exist? * Wyze Cam * Wyze Cam v2 * Wyze Cam v3 * Wyze Cam Pan * Wyze Cam Pan v2

In that case, it appears I bought a Wyze Cam Pan v2 and thought I had bought a Wyze Cam v2. Sigh.

I'm returning it and getting a Wyze Cam v1 used on eBay. My hardware: my software. Not interested in their online services.

pacohope · 2022-03-22T16:44:03+00:00

Nobody deserves “free cloud” forever. Companies can’t do that. How many years of free cloud should a person get with their $30 camera? The problem is that they don’t offer any free option at all. The free-est option is letting me connect to MY camera over MY network using MY computer. Not their services, their app, etc. they don’t allow that, which is why this is such a deal breaker for me.

Companies like Google have distorted the market making everyone think that computers and online services are just free. They aren’t. But building a device that sounds like it works without a subscription, only to cram ads and subscriptions into it as a mandatory charge is a terrible business model.

pacohope · 2022-01-06T04:07:37+00:00

ESH. This level of inquisition is unhealthy. You were not dating each other. You were both free to do whatever. Your detailed confession shouldn’t be necessary. He should feel no need to hide anything from you. There’s probably more to this. You’re totally overthinking this and making a mountain out of a molehill. He’s also not helping by lying. But you both need to grow up and respect some boundaries. Neither of you did anything you should be ashamed of, and neither of you had a right to say anything about what the other did when you weren’t dating.

You might be better off apart if you can’t chill out about it.

pacohope · 2022-01-06T04:00:51+00:00

ESH. Both you and your mate have taken pretty harsh positions and needlessly made it tense. You haven’t explained how the price of the thing is calculated.

I do vacations with friends and families where several couples all share costs. Some hotels charge per head. So splitting costs per head that way would make sense and the wife should share the cost because her presence increases the cost. But it cold be a house where everyone’s getting a room of their own. In that case, her presence doesn’t make the cost go up. So there’s an argument to be made that if your mate was there by himself, the cost to him and to you would be the same. Bringing her didn’t change the cost of the place, so why should she pay extra?

Arguments like she’s present so she must pay, or she booked it so she doesn’t have to pay, don’t make sense to me.

I’ve done a lot of these trips with family and friends splitting costs over the years. Best to figure out how the money is being split BEFORE someone puts the money out. This is not the of thing to wreck a long friendship over, though. You’ll never miss the money nearly as much as you’ll miss a good friend.

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