A brief look at certain native American tribes might show quite a lot of talking and consensus building, like if some war chief wants a war he needs to drum up support for that. Hours of talking ensue! Not to say that ancient tribes didn't have the worst of what modern corporations have to offer as far as leadership goes, but a claim "basically every village" is basically wrong, or "bascially" is carrying a heck of a lot of weight.
Except that when you did connect Windows to anything it was hacked in less than 30 seconds (the user ignored the "apply these updates first, and then connect ..." advice, they wanted some keyboard driver. Hacked, whoops, gotta waste time doing a wipe and reinstall. This was back when many places had no firewalls). IRIX would fall over and die if you pointed a somewhat aggressive nmap at it, some buggy daemon listening by default on TCP/0, iirc. There was code in ISC DHCPD "windows is buggy, but we work around it with this here kluge..." and etc etc etc etc etc
Not just dhcpd. Besides the entire existance of Wine and Samba, Qemu has a workaround for win2k. Mkudffs has a workaround for MS-Windows not being able to read the filesystem without an mbr. Libc can work with local system time for those who dual-boot. Git can work around the difference in line endings. There are probably more of these kludges than you can shake a stick at.
> I think Marvin Minsky was the first person that I saw take a stand against "knowing yourself"
Ordinarily M. de Villefort made and returned very few visits. His wife
visited for him, and this was the received thing in the world, where
the weighty and multifarious occupations of the magistrate were
accepted as an excuse for what was really only calculated pride, a
manifestation of professed superiority—in fact, the application of the
axiom, _Pretend to think well of yourself, and the world will think
well of you_, an axiom a hundred times more useful in society nowadays
than that of the Greeks, “Know thyself,” a knowledge for which, in our
days, we have substituted the less difficult and more advantageous
science of _knowing others_.
"The Count of Monte Cristo". Alexandre Dumas. 1846.
Did Dumas explore the liminal space between "know thyself" and "know others", also known as "know one another"?
Did Villefort's wife or "The Count"'s romantic interests help them patch up their blind spots?
One can ofc argue that mutual learning has been the death of many a marriage/family, but I'm more interested in how self-reliance taken to its "rational-agentic-alignment" extreme is a primary obstacle to self-improvement :)
That's a framing Minsky didn't take in his Society of Mind.. but I'm not obviously looking forward to a hallucinated sequel Mind of Society
And, spoiler alert, Villefort is nouveau riche, Mammon-oriented, and has pretensions of philosophy. Where have I seen that before? He is also the villain of the story.
Athens spending like drunken sailors during the Peloponnesian War and the subsequent Oligarchical Coup d’Etat comes to mind. Or must the dictator be just one person and not a bunch of Orwell's pigs?
Eh, well, if your guns are trained on the "copyright" portion of the ship and you can sink it from there, no need to waste ammo or time trying to figure out if code bits are as explosive as the copyright bits are. Probably the code is just as sinkable, e.g. here's a recent response to some other AI slop:
I didn't look closely at most of the code but one thing that caught my eye, pid is not safe for tempfile name generation, another user of the system can easily generate files that conflict with this. Functions like mktemp and mkstemp are there for a reason. Some of the other "safety" checks make no sense. If the LLM code generator is coming up with things which any competent unix sysadmin (let alone programmer) can tell are obviously wrong, it doesn't bode well for the rest.
It's a complicated picture. Some Americans did not like the advice to "turn down the thermostat, and wear a sweater", and the next president removed the solar panels from the White House. It may be amusing to learn the country some of those panels ended up at, and the propaganda value in having such. Other Americans have improved water conservation ("Cadillac Desert" is a short and relevant read here) and those horrid land whales now leak far less oil; it used to be every parking spot had huge stains of oil beneath them. And the leaded gasoline, yum! Still other Americans howl about the toilets that use less water, and hoard inefficient light bulbs that do not last too long. So there are folks moving both towards and against reneable energy and conservation. Granted maybe there has not been as much movement as should have happened between now and when "The Oil Crisis: This Time the Wolf Is Here" (1973) got published, but that's not saying nothing has happened. Trends may help rule out some of the noise, or one might try to model things like the "Limits to Growth" study did, though other folks really did not like that report, and so these things go on and around.
I think a lot of people simply want to be contrarian to their perceived opponents: People in the other political clan like X so I have to hate X. No matter how much X might help them or how much better it is, they have to oppose it.
> Office was considered a very solid product for many generations.
When was that? My introduction to Excel was in the 1990s when a scientist asked about data corruption, and my response was "oh, yeah, Excel does that, you need to fiddle with these options and hope the options do not get turned off, seeing as companies may randomly screw over user preferences". The look in their eyes...they probably had done a whole bunch of data entry before they even noticed the corruption. Anyways, a few decades later those genomes got renamed, for some reason or another. Other customers came to me and pleaded, please do not install Word 6, it's bad, and I was like, well, be that as it may, but Microsoft has broken the file format, again, so if someone sends you a Word 6 document you will not be able to read it. They've got you over the barrel, perhaps consider not using their software? Unless you like being chained to that main-mast, of course, don't shame the kink! Later on a coworker said, try Visio, and I was like, this is sort of bad, and they were like, yeah, it was better before Microsoft bought it. So, when was Microsoft not producing kusogeware? Sometime during the semi-mythical 80s, perhaps?
Attacks employing invisible characters are not a new thing. Prior efforts here include terminal escape sequences, possibly hidden with CSS that if blindly copied and pasted would execute who knows what if the particular terminal allowed escape sequences to do too much (a common feature of featuritis) or the terminal had errors in its invisible character parsing code.
For data or code hiding the Acme::Bleach Perl module is an old example though by no means the oldest example of such. This is largely irrelevant given how relevant not learning from history is for most.
Invisible characters may also cause hard to debug issues, such as lpr(1) not working for a user, who turned out to have a control character hiding in their .cshrc. Such things as hex viewers and OCD levels of attention to detail are suggested.
reply