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180709962
comment
byfuzzyfuzzyfungus
nuary 31, 2026 @01:56PM
(#65961228)
Attached to: White House Scraps 'Burdensome' Software Security Rules
I don't doubt that the previous requirements were effectively impossible for nontrivial portions of the industry and their customers; though, given the wall-to-wall dumpster fire that is IT and IT security; I can only see the attempt to treat that as evidence that the regulations were unrealistic and unduly burdensome as either myopic or deeply cynical.
Commercial software and both commercial and institutional IT operations are much more an example of the fact that you can absolutely run on dangerous and unsustainable shortcuts so long as there are no real consequences for failure than it is a case of a competent and successful industry at risk of being stifled by burdensome regulation.
180704596
comment
byfuzzyfuzzyfungus
ary 30, 2026 @07:40PM
(#65960198)
Attached to: White House Scraps 'Burdensome' Software Security Rules
The reasoning is honestly just baffling. Apparently the old requirements "diverted agencies from developing tailored assurance requirements for software and neglected to account for threats posed by insecure hardware." by requiring that people keep track of what software they were actually using.
Aside from the...curious...idea that knowing what your attack surface looks like is a diversion from developing assurance requirements; the claim that the old policy about SBOMs is being revoked for not focusing on insecure hardware is odd both on the obvious point that basically anything with a sensible scope only focuses on certain issues and leaves other issues to be handled by other things and the only slightly less obvious issue that most 'insecure hardware', unless you've qualified for a really classy covert implant or have high sensitivity TEMPEST issues or something, is not actually hardware problems; but firmware problems; which are just software problems that aren't as visible; exactly the sort of thing that SBOMs help you keep an eye on.
Not like anyone expected better; but this is exceptionally poor work.
180690434
comment
byfuzzyfuzzyfungus
nuary 29, 2026 @03:39PM
(#65957460)
Attached to: Why Private Equity Is Suddenly Awash With Zombie Firms
The usual term with things like plumbers is "rollup". Even the most delusional excel jockey probably doesn't believe he has 'operational alpha' vs. a veteran plumber in matters of plumbing; but he(correctly) knows that local plumbing outfits are a fairly heavily fragmented industry with a lot of relatively small players; the sort of quaint folksy thing that looks like one of those competitive free markets they told you about in EC101. And, if you, purely hypothetically, can borrow money for a pittance, you don't need to improve operations when you can just buy a bunch of the small players, consolidate them, and then raise prices to match the newly reduced level of competition.
Same deal works with more or less any business with a lot of mom 'n pop operators; as well as things like rental housing. Maybe there are some marginal efficiency improvements in back office functions because it's not eleventy zillion individual copies of quickbooks; but most of the actual margins come from the higher prices you can command from customers and the lower prices you can offer to suppliers and employees once you consolidate a given sector in a given area. The effect is particularly lurid when it comes to thinks like small medical and dental practices; or care homes; since there it's about the money; but being about the money is also about pushing your employees to recommend unnecessary implant surgery and cutting patient/staff ratios as hard as you can without anyone noticing too many bedsores. Fantastic stuff, really.
180690364
comment
byfuzzyfuzzyfungus
nuary 29, 2026 @03:30PM
(#65957440)
Attached to: Why Private Equity Is Suddenly Awash With Zombie Firms
"There is existential risk for a number [of funds] because of the fundraising environment,"
I'm not sure words can adequately express the hubris and myopia of someone who blames "the fundraising environment" for the fact that their heavily leveraged buyout of a bunch of things they had no actual plan to improve value of is catching up with them.
In the strict legal sense it might not be a ponzi scheme; you can end up depending on new suckers to pay off your current creditors through incompetence as well as malice; but 'existential risk' because you've potentially run out of new suckers means that you are running a ponzi-tier business regardless of the exact motivation.
180688140
comment
byfuzzyfuzzyfungus
nuary 29, 2026 @12:21PM
(#65956970)
Attached to: Xbox Hardware Revenue Craters 32%
It's fairly hard to see why anyone would be contributing to xbox hardware revenue at this point, aside from possibly buying controllers. In pure hardware terms MS and Sony are shipping aggressively similar gear; and in software terms the list of games that are fully exclusive or 1 console + PC but not the other console is overwhelmingly tilted toward playstation(with Nintendo kind of doing its own thing, as ever, with a small but very high exclusivity lineup).
What's the case for buying the xbox under those circumstances? I guess the cheaper Xbox variant is the minimum-viable Call of Duty box; so that's something(though something MS is actively undermining by trying to pitch game streaming on basically anything with a display as the minimum-viable option); but that's a thin list of advantages.
180687942
comment
byfuzzyfuzzyfungus
nuary 29, 2026 @12:05PM
(#65956922)
Attached to: Waymo Robotaxi Hits a Child Near an Elementary School in Santa Monica
Why no focus on how Waymo prioritized their customer over some non-customer riffraff. impeding their travel experience? 8/10 randroid lunatics agree that Waymo has a duty to prioritize customers over non customers!
180678540
comment
byfuzzyfuzzyfungus
anuary 28, 2026 @09:58AM
(#65954382)
Attached to: 'Clawdbot' Has AI Techies Buying Mac Minis
It's possible that people would; but this system is not that. It stores a variety of data locally to automatically generate the prompts that give a fresh session the illusion of continuity in the face of restrictive context windows, and ; but farms out the bot part the usual suspects(though the project creation sees to prefer Anthropic; so it's not Sam specifically who is getting the data).
It's 'local' in the sense that a real mail client sucks less than webmail.
180678500
comment
byfuzzyfuzzyfungus
anuary 28, 2026 @09:51AM
(#65954362)
Attached to: Amazon Inadvertently Announces Cloud Unit Layoffs In Email To Employees
It's less odd if you consider the contexts both sides are coming from: If you operate above the level of immediate consequences; the belief that how you characterize it can be as or more important than what actually happened is simply a correct empirical deduction. Just ask anyone who somehow skates blithely from one...opportunity for learnings...to another...difficult transformation period...seemingly with no impact on future employability. While if, regardless of the euphemism used, you'll be having your credentials deactivated and putting your meagre effects into a cardboard box while security watches there really isn't any euphemism that is actually going to work.
HR and PR are the ones that most genuinely puzzle me; since they are less commonly in positions where it's just plain true that how you spin it is what matters; but also often seem to be behind the curve on the fact that the euphemism treadmill means needing to regularly replace euphemisms and they absorb the meaning of what they were intended to obfuscate and eventually sound even grimmer than the plain statement.
180666072
comment
byfuzzyfuzzyfungus
uary 27, 2026 @01:07PM
(#65952720)
Attached to: OpenAI's Science Chief Says LLMs Aren't Ready For Novel Discoveries and That's Fine
I'm curious(honestly a bit morbidly) to see whether there will be organizational/emergent downsides. In principle not being able to do novelty is fine. Realistically a lot of science simply isn't going to be novel; between interesting hypotheses that ended up not being borne out by experiment(such 'negative results' being a necessary but under-published area) and things like ecology or material science where sometimes you just need to characterize all the bivalve species on a coastline even if they seem to mostly just be fairly basic clams and mussels; or pound through eleventy-zillion variations on plausible engineering ceramics looking for atypically good properties.
However, as we've had the misfortune to see in our inboxes and the powerpoint decks that get inflicted on meetings; people tend to generate more of what is easy to generate; and scientists often get rewarded(in terms of hiring/tenure track; grant funding, etc.) for apparent productivity. The most extreme exploitation of 'AI' for this has proven somewhat nontrivial to combat(the various shit-tier journals and paper mills that add noise to the literature and allow the dishonest to pad their resumes existed back when they relied on human labor; but systems that are good at high speed production of plausible-looking output have thrown them into overdrive); but even if you focus entirely on honest actors doing real science in good faith, if the bots are genuinely useful but only for non-novel work; that seems like a situation where you've just created an incentive toward focusing on low-novelty work and toward seeing the scientists doing the most bot-friendly stuff as the most productive; while those who venture beyond the scope of its abilities are putting out papers by hand and appear much less productive.
Science has often had a slightly ambivalent relationship with novelty(you probably won't end up being remembered as a rock god unless you do come up with something really cool; but initial reception can be downright chilly: look at the career trajectory of someone like Barbara McClintock and transposons. Worked out for her in the end, Nobel in 1983; but that was for work that people were actively disinterested in when she did it in the mid 40s to 50s; and not everyone gets brought in from the cold before the point is moot); but it's probably not going to help if, wholly aside from cranky old guys controlling tenure committees and grant allocation, people who hew quite closely to data that LLMs have already chewed over genuinely crank out research substantially faster than people who venture further afield.
180665598
comment
byfuzzyfuzzyfungus
uary 27, 2026 @11:48AM
(#65952480)
Attached to: Pinterest Cuts Up To 15% Jobs To Redirect Resources To AI
I'm genuinely curious if there will actually bea reallocation to 'AI-focused roles and initiatives'; or if that just sounds nicer than "business is bad and we've run out of room to pretend otherwise"(or the very similar "business is bad and we've run out of room; but we are using a transcription bot in some zoom meetings" which is an 'AI initiative' in the sort of exceptionally banal way that farming some stuff out to AWS is exciting cloud-native hyperscaling)
Aside from skepticism founded on the largely negative results reported for business 'AI initiatives'; I'd be very, very, curious whether there's something cool or profitable you can AI out with pinterest internal data(I assume that their tracking of user interaction and click-through behavior and such is more precise and detailed than 3rd party tracking); but can't with a nearly-free scrape of the parts of pinterest that are publicly exposed on the internet.
It's entirely possible that Pinterest is single-handedly responsible for most of what AI models 'know' about how mormon housewives classify conceptually related images; but even if that is value it's not something pinterest is going to capture; it's just going to get scraped out of them.
180663030
comment
byfuzzyfuzzyfungus
ary 26, 2026 @11:14PM
(#65951540)
Attached to: Gemini In Google Calendar Now Helps You Find the Best Meeting Time For All Attendees
I can't comment on whether it is 'desperation' or not; but this seems very much in line with how they handle the "smart features" toggle in 'workspace'/gmail. There is just the one(merrily enabled by default in the US; not in the EU) and it gates both things that fairly obviously involve their bot like "Smart Compose is personalized to your writing style" and ones that we somehow managed to implement a zillion years ago by banging floppy disks together in the dirt "spelling"; along with ones that pre-'AI' google somehow managed by other means, like regexing tracking numbers out of shipment notifications.
Hasn't quite gotten to the point of locking support for signatures behind 'smart reply'; but the structure of the consent-to-all-or-get-none checkbox is certainly quite opinionated UI design.
180662954
comment
byfuzzyfuzzyfungus
ary 26, 2026 @10:55PM
(#65951518)
Attached to: Gemini In Google Calendar Now Helps You Find the Best Meeting Time For All Attendees
Any word on whether the implementation is actually invasive, unreliable, and unbelievably computationally expensive; or is a desperately classical feature that's probably older than I am being artificially tied to a totally unrelated set of antifeatures to help goose adoption numbers?
180661330
comment
byfuzzyfuzzyfungus
ary 26, 2026 @04:51PM
(#65950972)
Attached to: GTA 6's Physical Release Could Be Delayed To 2027 Because of Leaks
Only if you are willing to accept specific drawbacks.
If you are just doing it to save bandwidth the concept of shipping encrypted data in bulk and delivering a tiny private key over the network is viable; but that does mean making the physical release literally useless without a network-connected install (potentially a full size one, depending on whether your encryption interferes with layout/seek optimization on the disk and what the console's support for partial disk/partial install setups is); which is a potential issue for some physical copy buyers. It's not news that the release version normally gets a more or less massive patch covering all the changes made while it was being mastered and duplicated; but when someone is making a partially emotional decision between physical and electronic copies the difference between 'v1.0 is scuffed' and 'disk is literally unplayable without install and internet connection' can be significant.
'timelock', specifically, also addresses a questionably useful niche: there are cases where the ability to keep a secret for an extended but defined period of time is useful; but if you are a game publisher developing a game with hundreds(probably thousands if you count various support studios and support staff) of people across multiple sites it would be an...atypical...IT situation if you were somehow buttoned up enough to avoid leaks during development; but not buttoned up enough to hang on to a single private key that needs to be used once and kept secret for less than a month. It would, presumably, work; but it's not a situation where the security assurances really line up with the threat model all that well.
180651996
comment
byfuzzyfuzzyfungus
nuary 24, 2026 @09:32PM
(#65947402)
Attached to: Anthropic Updates Claude's 'Constitution,' Just In Case Chatbot Has a Consciousness
"We believe that the moral status of AI models is a serious question worth considering."
It's honestly hilarious to watch the AI guys talk about 'sentience'; because they are in the simultaneous position of trying to talk up how smart their product is and trying not to say "slaves-as-a-service" out loud. I'd assume that, were customers to actually become confident in 'AI' tools' ability to not fuck it up without constant supervision that frequently ends in scrapping it and doing it yourself; it'd be a full court press to convince people that, obviously, brute algorithms couldn't possibly be sentient and the very idea is preposterous.
180646590
comment
byfuzzyfuzzyfungus
ary 23, 2026 @07:30PM
(#65945612)
Attached to: White House Labels Altered Photo of Arrested Minnesota Protester a 'Meme'
I suspect that they don't really care. There are ways to add a little, um, 'tilt' to actual law enforcement(perhaps the most common involving the case where the number of violations exceeds the time available to process them all; so you can do entirely legitimate prosecutions and still be selective); but it's ultimately limited by the fact that you are forced to refrain from some of the more overt and egregious unprofessionalism where the judges can see you; and people can avoid your reach by being genuinely not guilty.
This creates the temptation to simply not bother; and do as much as you can get away with to make mere contact with you the punishment. Sure, that hoses your odds of getting a proper conviction, you'll be having evidence struck and dealing with arguments about juror partiality forever; but that's the point: you don't care because you are just interested in harassing whoever it is you dislike or who doesn't kowtow properly; and nobody can beat the ride, even by the most ironclad innocence.
If you are going to be a proper goon squad; you are probably downright offended by the idea that issues with securing convictions would be a real problem: that implies that there's still a legal standard that is theoretically the highest authority; with the judiciary working from that; and you are just handling implementation, like a clerk. Simply ignoring prejudicial effects on the case allows you to make the exercise purely one of force against your enemies; which is so much more satisfying; especially if you think the leopard will never come for your face; and impunity will always remain at your back.
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