Speak for yourself. I’m going to migrate all of my 22-bit RSA keys to a longer key length. And not 24 bits, either, given that they’re probably working on a bigger quantum computer already. I gotta go so long that no computer can ever crack it.

64-bit RSA will surely be secure for the foreseeable future, cost be damned.

Pretty much business as usual. Those things pop up every once in a while, which is why Germany has no shortage of experienced bomb disposal experts.

And yes, the fact that this is perfectly mundane is chilling if you think about it. That’s how intensely bombed areas work for decades. Battlefields don’t turn back to normal when the war is over. And we casually do this all over the world for a large number of usually stupid reasons.

They did PR campaigns against Linux and OpenOffice for quite some time – until cloud computing took off and it turned out they could earn more money by supporting Linux than by fighting it.

In fact, Microsoft weren’t happy about FOSS in general. I can still remember when they tried to make “shared source” a thing: They made their own ersatz OSI with its own set of licenses, some of which didn’t grant proper reuse rights – like only allowing you to use the source code to write Windows applications.

True, although that has happened with F/OSS as well (like with xz or the couple times people put Bitcoin miners into npm packages). In either case it’s a lot less likely than the software simply ceasing to be supported, becoming gradually incompatible with newer systems, and rotting away.

Except, of course, that I can pick up the decade-old corpse of an open source project and try to make it work on modern systems, despite how painful it is to try to get a JavaFX application written for Java 7 and an ancient version of Gradle to even compile with a recent JDK. (And then finally give up and just run the last Windows release with its bundled JRE in Wine. But in theory I could’ve made it work!)

Note that this specifically talks about proprietary platforms. Locally-run proprietary freeware has entirely different potential issues, mostly centered around the developer stopping to maintain it. Locally-run F/OSS has similar issues, actually, but lessened by the fact that someone might later pick up the project and continue it.

Admittedly, platforms are very common these days because the web is an easily accessible cross-platform GUI toolkit SaaS is more easily monetized.

I work at a daughter company of a bank that develops said bank’s internal software. Torn jeans are A-OK and might only get commented on when visiting the parent company. My team’s architect is virtually never seen without a Chaos Computer Club hoodie.

Earlier in my career I worked for a well-established company in the medical sector. The only person in the company who dressed up was the boss – and only when meeting someone external.

I am 35+ and I’m both companies we had older team members.

Nope, they just become less predictable. Which is why in some parts of Germany you can’t build as much as a garden shed without having EOD check the land first. In the more heavily-bombed areas it’s not unusual to hear on the radio that you’re to avoid downtown today between 10 and 12 because they’re disarming a 500-pound bomb they found during roadwork.

And yes, the fact that an unstable bomb capable of trashing a city block is mundane nicely illustrates war’s potential to fuck things up for generations.

Japan might want to get that land under and around the airport checked. There might be some other surprises hidden down there.

The main issue was that Vista asked for admin rights all the time. One of the first things they addressed with SP1 was to require admin privileges for fewer operations, cutting down on the number of UAC prompts.

It comes across as trying to dissuade people from using their legally guaranteed sick time, though, which makes things iffy.

Yeah. That kind of behavior is super inappropriate and doesn’t sound legal in Germany.

And I wouldn’t know where to start using it. My problems are often of the “integrate two badly documented company-internal APIs” variety. LLMs can’t do shit about that; they weren’t trained for it.

They’re nice for basic rote work but that’s often not what you deal with in a mature codebase.

Like every time there’s an AI bubble. And like every time changes are that in a few years public interest will wane and current generative AI will fade into the background as a technology that everyone uses but nobody cares about, just like machine translation, speech recognition, fuzzy logic, expert systems…

Even when these technologies get better with time (and machine translation certainly got a lot better since the sixties) they fail to recapture their previous levels of excitement and funding.

We currently overcome what popped the last AI bubbles by throwing an absurd amount of resources at the problem. But at some point we’ll have to admit that doubling the USA’s energy consumption for a year to train the next generation of LLMs in hopes of actually turning a profit this time isn’t sustainable.

Depends. On Linux or older macOS where light mode typically means a comfortable light gray? Light mode is the way to go. On Windows where light mode means an eye-searing onslaught of #FFFFFF? Dark mode is the only sensible choice.

And that’s why copyright infringement is a crime, just not the same crime as theft.

Most of our plants were already fairly old and major overhauls would’ve been necessary.

In 2000 we had plans for a nuclear exit already, intending to phase them out until 2015. In 2010 the government decided to keep some running. IIRC they did that in part so they could shut down coal plants instead.

Then Fukushima happened and we went full panic mode, deciding to shut all of them down ASAP. Then the Ukraine war got reignited and the timeline got slightly stretched out a little again for practical reasons.

The last three reactors got shut down last April, about eight years later than the 2000 plan intended.

It’s a bit more complicated. We were already planning to get out of nuclear because our plants were aging and new ones weren’t economical. Then the government decided to freeze those plans for the time being. (IIRC one reason was that they wanted to close some of our terrible coal power plants first.) Then Fukushima happened and the Greens got everyone to panic.

We could’ve gone with a measured response but a combination of the Greens believing that nuclear power is infinitely bad and plenty of old people still having vivid memories of fallout-related health warnings from Chernobyl was enough to drive most of the country into an antinuclear frenzy. It’s almost a miracle they didn’t force all of the plants to scram immediately.

Why not 2.022k?

It happens on Linux – after your package manager has updated Firefox. Which typically means that you told it to. So it’s not really a surprise.

And even if the warheads aren’t functional anymore, nobody wants to get a dirty bomb dropped on their heads. The best nuclear weapon is one that’s not launched.

Still doesn’t mean Russia gets to do what it wants.

I just use the Europass CV Builder. Works fine for me, has been for well over a decade now.

Definitely one of the more subtle benefits of the EU: They made a perfectly serviceable resume builder.

(But yeah, a LaTeX template would also just work forever. This stuff is what TeX and its derivatives are great at.)