Best “AI”-Rant

Most organizations cannot ship the most basic applications imaginable with any consistency, and you’re out here saying that the best way to remain competitive is to roll out experimental technology that is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than anything else your I.T department runs, which you have no experience hiring for, when the organization has never used a GPU for anything other than junior engineers playing video games with their camera off during standup, and even if you do that all right there is a chance that the problem is simply unsolvable due to the characteristics of your data and business? This isn’t a recipe for disaster, it’s a cookbook for someone looking to prepare a twelve course fucking catastrophe.

How about you remain competitive by fixing your shit? I’ve met a lead data scientist with access to hundreds of thousands of sensitive customer records who is allowed to keep their password in a text file on their desktop, and you’re worried that customers are best served by using AI to improve security through some mechanism that you haven’t even come up with yet? You sound like an asshole and I’m going to kick you in the jaw until, to the relief of everyone, a doctor will have to wire it shut, giving us ten seconds of blessed silence where we can solve actual problems.

After some general ranting the author answers several common “reasons” why a company might want to use LLMs/AI tools.

JavaScript History’s Future as Seen From 2022

Brian Sletten presents an overview of the WebAssembly landscape, the development direction and applications it enables. I can’t but notice that we’re really on the path to WebAssembly becoming the JavaScript-derived universal runtime Gary Bernhardt promised in 2014. 🤯

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3hK7O5Oc2Y

Using Posteo With Custom Domains

I tried to find out if you can use Posteo with a custom domain. And the short answer is: no.

Andy Schwartzmeyer found out the long answer. 👏😀 I implemented it for my blog and so far I’m happy. Interestingly enough it’s the receiving side that needs an external service. I currently use Forward Email‘s free tier, because I already have publicly known email addresses that I automatically collect emails from.

I always had the impression that sending mails is made more difficult in order to combat spammers, but what do I know. 🤷 Sending only needs to include Posteo in the SPF rules and adding a sender identity (usable after a one week cool down 🙈).

X: the dumbest OS you’ve ever seen

For future reference: Daniel Stone dispels myths about “great” X is and why it’s actually former X maintainers that designed and implemented Wayland.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ

“Grown-up” Chinese Jedi Elsa

Holy moly … CellSpex has the best, most eloquent (scathing) review of Disney’s live-action Mulan. Period. It starts with a hilariously satirical summary and goes on to dissect the maelstrom of bad decisions the film displays with its story adaptation (both from the folk tale as well as the Disney animated movie), characters, themes, style and production. I agree with each and every point.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONVyLTBPz8E

Tony Abbott and Tap Water

What could go wrong if-as a joke-your being asked if you could hack the former prime minister of Australia Tony Abbott? Well Alex Hope has documented it. Finding pictures of boarding pass he could log into the booking system of the airline (without additional authentication). Then he found out that the systems leaked sensitive information (passport number, telephone number, airline-internal comments about the passenger). He then went through the whole charade of finding someone in government responsible for concrete data security issues. 😵

There’s even an interesting section on when he finally gets through to Tony Abbot and they talk on a very personal level. Given the reason they were talking in the first place it also revolved about how complicated technology seems to be and how you learn how it works.

This lead Alex to reflect about how he started learning things and how you have to change your thinking when you are “hacking.” He gives a great example which he summarizes with:

In conclusion, to be a hacker u ask for tap water.

😂