You may have came across this infographic being shared on various social media platforms. However, at face value and taken out of context, it can be considered misinformation — and I will explain why.

This is giving people an absolute false sense of security! It gets much more complicated than just a simple chart like this. This chart gives NO information on the contributing [critical] factors towards these calculations.

But Stephenson is far more pessimistic about today’s AI than he was about the Primer. “A chatbot is not an oracle,” he told me over Zoom last Friday. “It’s a statistics engine that creates sentences that sound accurate.” I spoke with Stephenson about his uncannily prescient book and the generative-AI revolution that has seemingly begun.

made some more tongue-in-cheek ha-ha no-seriously images to help you manage replies in lieu of affordances to help you manage replies please steal and use if you find useful or so help me funny

1. Do not reply unless you have direct experience
2. Do not reply with a software suggestion
3. This is an observation. Do not attempt to help. No reply necessary.

you can check if a site uses cloudflare by appending /cdn-cgi/trace to the domain.

I need privacy, not because my actions are questionable, but because your judgement and intentions are

I hate apps that don’t allow you to copy text from a comment field. It gives you a taste of the world without Larry Tesler and Tim Mott, and it’s not a magnificent one

[Note: Tesler worked at Xerox PARC, Apple, Amazon, and Yahoo!. While at PARC, Tesler’s work included Smalltalk, the first dynamic object-oriented programming language, and Gypsy, the first word processor with a graphical user interface (GUI) for the Xerox Alto. During this, along with colleague Tim Mott, Tesler developed the idea of copy and paste functionality and the idea of modeless software. ]

In particular, the Commission has failed to provide appropriate safeguards to ensure that personal data transferred outside the EU/EEA are afforded an essentially equivalent level of protection as guaranteed in the EU/EEA.

"Furthermore, in its contract with Microsoft, the Commission did not sufficiently specify what types of personal data are to be collected and for which explicit and specified purposes when using Microsoft 365."

The EC has been ordered to suspend all data flows through the use of Microsoft 365 to Microsoft and any of its tentacles that might reside outside the EU / EEA and not covered by an adequacy decision.

ChatGPT is a great example of a not-thinking tool: a tool that you use to avoid having to think.

…

Not-thinking tools have the appearance of creating efficiency, but ultimately they just make you faster at doing the wrong thing.

Product professionals (whether designers, PMs, or developers) would do well to take away the same lesson: we ask too much of our tools. Doing perfect Agile will not produce good software, but that’s not Agile’s fault.

A lot of people ask me, what should we use instead? My answer is always: use your brain.

A tasty, self-hostable Git server for the command line. 🍦

Right now, I want to talk about the heritage of these input/output mechanisms. Why is it that punched paper tape and the teleprinter were the most obvious way to interact with the first electronic computers? As you might suspect, the arrangement was one of convenience. Paper tape punches and readers were already being manufactured, as were teleprinters. They were both used for communications.

Wer in letzter Zeit auf einer Demonstration in Wien war, hat sie vermutlich bemerkt: Die Polizei setzt Drohnen ein, um Teilnehmer*innen vom Himmel aus zu beobachten. Aktuell baut das Innenministerium die Drohnenüberwachung aus. Dafür legte es sich ein „IMSI-Catcher-System zur Verwendung mit Drohnen“ zu.

Mit dieser Anschaffung wird eine neue Ära der Überwachung eingeläutet. Die Kombination aus Drohnen und IMSI-Catcher ermöglicht es, Personen unbemerkt zu überwachen oder Teilnehmer*innen von Versammlungen zu identifizieren.

I experienced the disconnect between the torture I was comfortable with and the torture that drove me away during my first year in college. As I’ve mentioned here a few times, most recently in my post on Niklaus Wirth, from an early age I had wanted to become an architect (the kind who design houses and other buildings, not software). I spent years reading about architecture and learning about the profession. I even took two drafting courses in high school, including one in which we designed a house and did a full set of plans, with cross-sections of walls and eaves.

Then I got to college and found two things. One, I still liked architecture in the same way as I always had. Two, I most assuredly did not enjoy the kind of grunt work that architecture students had to do, nor did I relish the torture that came with not seeing a path to a solution for a thorny design problem.

That was so different from the feeling I had writing BASIC programs. I would gladly bang my head on the wall for hours to get the tiniest detail just the way I wanted it, either in the code or in the output. When the torture ended, the resulting program made all the pain worth it. Then I’d tackle a new problem, and it started again.