redwall_hp's recent activity
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Comment on CrowdStrike global outage to cost US Fortune 500 companies $5.4bn in ~tech
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Comment on Atheists of Tildes, what alive religions do you find fascinating, excluding Abrahamic ones and Buddhism? in ~talk
redwall_hp (edited )Link ParentI'd also say Shinto. It's a little bit of an anti-religion: it doesn't really elevate deities to worship so much as passively respects an expected multitude of Kami. As such, it happily lays claim...I'd also say Shinto. It's a little bit of an anti-religion: it doesn't really elevate deities to worship so much as passively respects an expected multitude of Kami. As such, it happily lays claim to and demotes deities from other religions. In the modern sense, it feels more like a set of unobtrusive culturally engrained rituals and superstitions than the active, in your face following done by Abrahamic religions, for instance.
I get a kick out of the idea that my (Japan-made, according to the VIN) car was built in a factory in Suzuka that was probably blessed at least in a groundbreaking ceremony, if not the individual car. Cars are vey personal and easily anthropomorphized, so it seems appropriate.
If you want another one like Santa Muerte, Vodou has some similarities in syncretism and hiding things under the nose of Christianity.
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Comment on Let's build a playlist! in ~music
redwall_hp LinkRATATATA - Babymetal Destination Calabria - Alex Gaudino, Crystal Waters Hibikase - Giga, Reol, Hatsune Miku Twilight Zone - 2 Unlimited 4Blood - KIRA, Hatsune Miku-
RATATATA - Babymetal
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Destination Calabria - Alex Gaudino, Crystal Waters
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Hibikase - Giga, Reol, Hatsune Miku
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Twilight Zone - 2 Unlimited
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4Blood - KIRA, Hatsune Miku
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Comment on CrowdStrike outage aftershocks cause Delta to cancel over 1,000 more flights in ~transport
redwall_hp (edited )Link ParentMore likely there are established payouts they owe their customers. They undoubtedly have a Service Level Agreement that spells out monetary compensation they must pay for outages they cause. It's...More likely there are established payouts they owe their customers. They undoubtedly have a Service Level Agreement that spells out monetary compensation they must pay for outages they cause. It's standard procedure for SaaS/PaaS.
Similarly, Amazon has to pay up if AWS has an outage and causes the company I work for large amounts of lost revenue.
Hypothetically, hospitals may have a case for negligence or at least breach of contract, given the nature of the outage. They were trusted to not break critical systems that have a direct effect on hospital capacity and risk to human life, and clearly cowboy-deployed changes without sufficient verification (on a Friday, too, seriously?), which demonstrably effect all Windows machines the software runs on, not just some subset. Automated integration tests could have and should have caught this.
I bet some HIPAA and PCI compliance types would like to take a closer look at that. Basically running a glorified rootkit that pulls changes, bypassing any staged rollouts IT has in place, on machines that may be handling patient information or PCI data (e.g. credit card information) seems questionable. Having your compliance box-ticking software be an enormous hole in regulatory compliance isn't something companies tend to appreciate.
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Comment on US President Joe Biden announces that he will not run for re-election in ~news
redwall_hp Link ParentWe just need a candidate who's willing to take the gloves off and position their campaign as being against Project 2025: drag that dirty laundry out into the public in attack ads plastered...We just need a candidate who's willing to take the gloves off and position their campaign as being against Project 2025: drag that dirty laundry out into the public in attack ads plastered everywhere. Pepper that with cuts of Trump's dementia-addled ramblings.
Show people that 1) they should be very afraid of the Republican Party and 2) if they were uncomfortable with Biden's cognition, Trump's a lot worse.
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Comment on CrowdStrike code update bricking Windows machines around the world in ~tech
redwall_hp Link ParentI very much appreciate that Apple forbids kernel extensions these days, and locks system folders down with SIP. Security happens at a design level, not by bolting on third-party malware. Third...I very much appreciate that Apple forbids kernel extensions these days, and locks system folders down with SIP. Security happens at a design level, not by bolting on third-party malware. Third party software should never, ever be allowed to render a machine unbootable or have OS-level privileges.
I have enough daily rage about corporate "security" software on my development machine, so I'm glad Apple keeps it locked inside userland, at least.
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Comment on CrowdStrike code update bricking Windows machines around the world in ~tech
redwall_hp Link ParentThe Associated Press coverage mentioned that surgeries are being postponed because anesthesia is off the table without equipment to manage and monitor it. I'm sure radiology equipment is also...The Associated Press coverage mentioned that surgeries are being postponed because anesthesia is off the table without equipment to manage and monitor it. I'm sure radiology equipment is also affected. Never mind charting...
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Comment on Donald Trump does not get post-shooting poll boost in ~misc
redwall_hp Link ParentIt's been awhile since I did college statistics, but that number should be fine so long as it's sufficiently random sampling and not limited to one locale. For the US population, that's something...It's been awhile since I did college statistics, but that number should be fine so long as it's sufficiently random sampling and not limited to one locale. For the US population, that's something like a 2% error margin (findings are +/- 2%) and a 95% confidence level (surety of the error margin). Very reasonable if the methodology is sound.
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Comment on LGBT and marginalized voices are not welcome on Threads in ~lgbt
redwall_hp Link ParentYouTube allows video uploaders to moderate their own comments, so if you don't follow terrible people, you probably won't see terrible comments. It is sort of outsourcing the issue, but it seems...YouTube allows video uploaders to moderate their own comments, so if you don't follow terrible people, you probably won't see terrible comments. It is sort of outsourcing the issue, but it seems to work out.
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Comment on Dr. Ruth, renowned sex therapist and Holocaust survivor, dead at 96 in ~life
redwall_hp Link ParentWe need someone like her now, more than ever, to push back against the corporate prudishness that permeates media. The world needs more openness about sexuality and less tolerance for brands and...We need someone like her now, more than ever, to push back against the corporate prudishness that permeates media. The world needs more openness about sexuality and less tolerance for brands and religion.
Her shows were probably a little before my time, having been born in the early 90s, but she has a solid record of candor and progressive messaging and education. Being willing to publicly speak about safety surrounding AIDS in the 80s is also a fairly big deal.
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Comment on US history shows swapping candidates is a losing game for Democrats in ~misc
redwall_hp (edited )Link ParentYep. Social media for me, after slashing and burning most of what I followed (and cutting Reddit out of my life entirely last year) is just J-Pop, anime and video games, and YouTube is either...Yep. Social media for me, after slashing and burning most of what I followed (and cutting Reddit out of my life entirely last year) is just J-Pop, anime and video games, and YouTube is either music or videos on synthesizers and music production. If someone were to send me a video even slightly related to politics, I watch it in incognito mode. If a political video pops up in recommendations, I immediately flag it as not-interested to avoid that changing.
Yet, I probably still knew about Project 2025 before it was even being talked about on Tildes. PACs never stop emailing you no matter how hard you try to unsubscribe, and I do skim news aggregators, so it's basically impossible to not be more informed than the average person...just cutting out excessive Internet users' commentary is a major improvement for mental health and changes nothing of value.
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Comment on Joe Biden calls Volodymyr Zelensky 'Putin' right before huge press conference in ~news
redwall_hp (edited )Link ParentTrump cognitive decline increasingly difficult to conceal despite setting low bar Donald Trump Dementia Evidence 'Overwhelming,' Says Top Psychiatrist Daily Show montage of Trump's phonemic...Trump cognitive decline increasingly difficult to conceal despite setting low bar
Donald Trump Dementia Evidence 'Overwhelming,' Says Top Psychiatrist
Daily Show montage of Trump's phonemic aphasia
Interview with Dr John Gartner about Trump's signs of dementia
Hundreds of psychiatric professionals have spoken out about Trump's clear signs of advanced dementia, including those associated with Dr John Gartner and his Duty to Warn organization.
Trump notably does not just misname people, but demonstrably confuses identities and merges people into boxes of the same archetype (e.g. talking about winning an election against Obama or merging Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton into one). He doesn't trip up and forget words, he constantly slurs and makes up things that sound phonetically similar without being aware. He gets disoriented and talks like it's a different decade. He pauses and loses focus, then jarringly starts shouting in an agitated fashion.
There are real psychiatric professionals expressing concern about Trump's mental state. Not so much Biden. He seems a bit tired and has a lifelong stutter. He is old, but present and is demonstrably running the most progressive administration in my lifetime right here and now.
Ageism notwithstanding, our realistic choice is two people of an almost identical age, one who demonstrates competency, and has a reasonable vice president, or a fascist with overt dementia. You can't just slap a new name on a ballot and expect to win; it's forfeiting by another name. Elections are decided by how many apathetic swing state voters you can talk into getting off their ass and voting, set against voter suppression and gerrymandering. That doesn't happen when you suddenly change the candidate to someone nobody knows three months beforehand.
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Comment on Gladiator II | Official trailer in ~movies
redwall_hp Link ParentNon-serious (or is it?) answer: the original Gladiator. Orchestras and their component instruments didn't exist in ancient Rome. (In a similar vein, Spaghetti Westerns used a fair bit of electric...Non-serious (or is it?) answer: the original Gladiator. Orchestras and their component instruments didn't exist in ancient Rome. (In a similar vein, Spaghetti Westerns used a fair bit of electric guitar.)
Peaky Blinders leans heavily into that dirty early 2000s rock sound, for a show set just after WWI. White Stripes, Arctic Monkeys, etc.. I think they threw in Black Sabbath a few times too. It definitely works.
I've heard Bridgerton uses Vitamin String Quartet pieces a bit, which are all contemporary songs rearranged for a string quartet.
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Comment on Crunchyroll announces the removal of its comment section across all platforms to 'reduce harmful content' in ~tech
redwall_hp (edited )Link ParentI definitely understand the desire to remove the ability to comment from a web site...keeping spam off a simple blog is an Sisyphean chore at best, to say nothing of the nasty things people write...I definitely understand the desire to remove the ability to comment from a web site...keeping spam off a simple blog is an Sisyphean chore at best, to say nothing of the nasty things people write on higher traffic sites. It is, however, incredibly sad to watch the slow erosion of the social nature of the 2000s-era Web.
Things were more social before the rise of social networking sites: people had personal blogs, comments, blogrolls of sites they read and commented on (trackbacks/pingbacks were a cool thing too). Larger publications were all adding comments...and now they've mostly went away or become tiresome to even look at.
I have pondered whether this is something machine learning or even simple Bayesian filters would help with: why not train a "spam filter" on some comments scraped from Fox News or Breitbart or such, and automatically nuke ones it matches? An API that can successfully banish those types to the shadow realm would be well worth paying for.
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Comment on James Carville: Joe Biden won’t win. Democrats need a plan. Here’s one. (gifted link) in ~misc
redwall_hp Link ParentMysteriously, the media is only interested in piling on Biden. I can find cuts of Trump rambling incoherently and slurring while making up nonsensical almost-words, and attestations from medical...Mysteriously, the media is only interested in piling on Biden. I can find cuts of Trump rambling incoherently and slurring while making up nonsensical almost-words, and attestations from medical professionals that he is exhibiting signs of severe dementia. There was a thread right here on Tildes a few months back.
Even if Biden were at that level, which he's not, you just cross that off both columns and you have a fascist party or a non-fascist party, with a vice president as a backup.
People need to rid themselves of the notion that our system works any different from the Westminster one: we vote for parties, not people, and the actual officials don't matter.
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
redwall_hp LinkThe new Final Fantasy XIV expansion, Dawntrail, is out...so that's what I'm playing for the foreseeable future. It's great so far. There's a rich, new continent to explore and learn about. The...The new Final Fantasy XIV expansion, Dawntrail, is out...so that's what I'm playing for the foreseeable future. It's great so far. There's a rich, new continent to explore and learn about. The main story has been fun, though with a constant sense of foreboding...something crazy is going to happen and it just hasn't yet, I can tell. The new character it's focusing on has been good. The graphical upgrade is also nice.
I'm less crazy about the changes they made to my main job (Black Mage). Some nice additions, but a lot of the rework feels like a major nerf (on a class that already has a high skill floor) thus far. I'm starting to pick up on some of the new ways to keep all of the moving parts going smoothly, but it's a major change and the rotation we've had for multiple expansions is basically muscle memory.
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Comment on Google’s greenhouse gas emissions jump 48% in five years in ~enviro
redwall_hp (edited )Link ParentThat is majorly overhyped too. Copilot is far less useful than IntelliJ's built in (non-LLM) autocomplete and I've never known ChatGPT to be helpful with anything beyond generating well-tread...Other than for helping programmers which seems to be an actual useful tool
That is majorly overhyped too. Copilot is far less useful than IntelliJ's built in (non-LLM) autocomplete and I've never known ChatGPT to be helpful with anything beyond generating well-tread things that you'd know if you read framework docs. It's also good at making up APIs that don't exist in the tools you're using. It appeals to the sort of people who blindly copy and paste things off of Stack Overflow, but tends to lose its usefulness when you work on more complicated things. Kind of like how Stack Overflow stops being helpful midway through a bachelors degree program, and most of the responses refer to the same pseudocode example in the algorithms textbook you already have.
It's also good at helping people cheat at interviews, which has been a problem lately.
Writing code is a minuscule fraction of time spent engineering software, and probably the most enjoyable part, so even if it was effective, the productivity gain doesn't come close to justifying the massive economic and ecological resource suck.
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Comment on Rapper BG ordered to have all future songs approved by US government in ~music
redwall_hp (edited )Link ParentIt's toward the end of the article, but it appears BG served 14 years for "illegal gun possession" in conjunction with a traffic stop. That seems pretty uneven itself, given the state of gun...It's toward the end of the article, but it appears BG served 14 years for "illegal gun possession" in conjunction with a traffic stop. That seems pretty uneven itself, given the state of gun ownership policy and rhetoric in this country.
While I'd love 14 years in prison to be the norm for possessing a firearm (outside of hunting rifles with annual licensure and storage inspections, like Japan's model), clearly the state of things is about as far from that as you can get, with open carry and radical gun maximalists being endemic...
So the impression I get from this is the crime in question smells like some major prejudice in the first place. We can't stop conservatives who establish a pattern of warning signs from owning guns, legally or illegally, and then they go and commit mass murder and people still shrug it off...but this is okay. And something tells me the sets of people who are all for gun maximalism and the people who see no problem with this conviction or unconstitutional parole have a strong intersection.
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Comment on Algorithms are deciding who gets organ transplants [in the UK's NHS]. Are their decisions fair? in ~health
redwall_hp Link ParentThis is the correct definition of an algorithm. I have to point this out, because I have a computer science background and the about of eye-rolling I do when I hear the term "algorithm" used to...Note that this isn't an AI and doesn't seem to use training data in the way that machine learning would. At least as far as I can tell, this is basically a formula, designed to convert all the salient aspects of each case into a single number
This is the correct definition of an algorithm. I have to point this out, because I have a computer science background and the about of eye-rolling I do when I hear the term "algorithm" used to mean "some kind of magic" probably isn't good for my migraines.
An algorithm is a series of steps, defined with logical rigor, that solves a problem. You can define and carry one out on paper, with no computer involved.
So, the process of deciding whether someone gets a transplant or not is ideally an algorithm, which historically has been performed by humans. You run down an enumeration of potentially disqualifying factors and remove the candidate if any of them is true. Maybe there are vital figures used to weight the chance of success, and an overall score is calculated to rank the candidates. All things you could simplify with a spreadsheet or a dedicated computer program, that the same panel of doctors can use to make the decision. Maybe this offers more accountability, too, since figures could be attached to patient records and there wouldn't be room for a hypothetical unethical doctor to fudge something on papers used during a meeting.
I have a strong distaste for this sort of handwavy fear-mongering in journalism. We already have enough braindead distrust in institutions without fostering neoluddism.
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Comment on Japan's mini kei truck sales surge in US despite safety concerns in ~transport
redwall_hp LinkI firmly want to import the keijidousha regulations to the US. Light, compact, efficient vehicles should be encouraged and there should be severe financial and licensing downsides to owning a...I firmly want to import the keijidousha regulations to the US. Light, compact, efficient vehicles should be encouraged and there should be severe financial and licensing downsides to owning a larger vehicle, progressively scaling by weight.
If you need a dumb monster truck for work reasons, that's commercial activity and should require separate licensing and taxation.
Yep, as they usually do.
I'm coming around to the argument that ultimately Microsoft has a large share of the fault, actually. To run something at that level in the kernel, Microsoft requires an approval and code signing process. They're the ones who rubber stamped something that basically downloads executable code (bypassing that approval process) and blindly assumes the downloaded file isn't corrupted...
CrowdStrike's apparent lack of automated or manual testing is also ridiculous, but Microsoft opened the door to the problem...and that's even with them not freely allowing just anyone to run things in ring zero. They might not want to be making noise about this before the US and EU start asking pointed questions in the inevitable hearings...