MilStdJunkie (u/MilStdJunkie)

MilStdJunkie commented on Texas woman gets 15 years for stealing $109M from Army to buy mansions, cars usatoday.com/story/news/n... · Posted by u/paulpauper

MilStdJunkie · 2 years ago

Is it evil of me to say that 7.2m a year (109000000/15) is not really doing that bad?

Honestly, I think a pretty good pyramid scheme a la the Mikkelson Twins would be to start up a wholly imaginary "MIL-SPEC SCAMMER SCHOOL" that tells you all about people like this lady, and offers a course on HOW TO NOT DO SUCH BAD THINGS, while winking with every muscle in your body.

Or, even better, advise you on how to be a big time MIL-SPEC guru who can lead SIGMA or whatever other nonsense the management of the day is huffing. This advise is your key to landing BIG WORK in the Defense Industry! Everyone knows it's all nonsense, but we can teach you how to turn that nonsense into passive income.

Of course such a fabulous class would cost beaucoup buxxx....

Ah, this sounds heartbreaking. I'll leave it to those salesmen with mental sickness.

MilStdJunkie commented on Was Penrose right? New evidence for quantum effects in the brain [video] youtube.com/watch?v=xa2Kp... · Posted by u/smallerfish

sdwr · 2 years ago

Going to eat my own foot here, but, as I see it, there are two different meanings of quantum in the brain.

1. Cells in the brain function quantum-ly. Honestly, most people shouldn't care about this, in the same way most people shouldn't care about the refractory period of neurons.

2. The brain simulates quantum calculations in situations of uncertainty, by bonding to/mirroring other people and the environment. This one everyone should care about.

How a group picks a leader, how people pick partners, important social decisions feel very quantum:

- uncertainty until they are suddenly resolved

- the "inside" view is different from the "outside" one

- spooky entanglement

MilStdJunkie · 2 years ago

I guess it makes a sort of sense. Eyes sense photons, touch detects physical force, tongue and nose give useful attributes of chemical properties, and neuron clusters adjudicate probability, the navigation of all the possible paths for the organism. "This happens when you go there, go here instead"

MilStdJunkie commented on The CrowdStrike file that broke everything was full of null characters? twitter.com/jeremyphoward... · Posted by u/behnamoh

hawski · 2 years ago

Binary files are full of null bytes it is one of the main criteria of binary file recognition. Also large swaths of null bytes are also common, common enough we have sparse files - files with holes in them. Those holes are all zeroes, but are not allocated in the file system. For an easy example think about a disk image.

MilStdJunkie · 2 years ago

Ah, I'm a dummy. Of course these would be binaries getting chucked around.

MilStdJunkie commented on The CrowdStrike file that broke everything was full of null characters? twitter.com/jeremyphoward... · Posted by u/behnamoh

toast0 · 2 years ago

> Furthermore, old-timey PDFs are chock full of the things, for God knows what reason, and a huge amount of data I work with are old-timey PDF.

Probably UCS-2/UTF-16 encoding with ascii data.

MilStdJunkie · 2 years ago

It's hard to localize. Early Postscript - PDF software was the wild west, particularly when it comes to the text streams. Something I've noticed is that they're used a LOT in things like randlists (bullet lists), tab leaders, other "space that isn't a space".

I'm reminded of how you have to use `{empty}` character refs in lightweight markup like Asciidoc to "hold your place" in a list, in case you need the first element in the list to be an admonition or block. Like so:

  . {empty}
  +
  WARNING: Don't catch yourself on fire!
  +
  Pour the gasoline.

And the equivalent XML which would be something like

  <procedure>
    <step>
      <warning> Don't catch yourself on fire!</warning>
      <para>Pour the gasoline.</para>
    </step>
  </procedure>

This is one of those rare cases where the XML is more elegant than the lightweight markup. That hack with `{empty}` bugs me.

Anyways, I'm spitballing that these old-timey nulls I'm seeing are being employed in an equivalent way, some sort of internal bespoke workaround to a format restriction.

MilStdJunkie commented on The CrowdStrike file that broke everything was full of null characters? twitter.com/jeremyphoward... · Posted by u/behnamoh

bloopernova · 2 years ago

Note to self: on Monday, add a null character check to pre-commit hooks, and add the same check to pipelines.

MilStdJunkie · 2 years ago

I mentioned it in a separate parent, but null purge is - for the stuff I work with - completely non-negotiable. Nulls seem to break virtually everything, just by existing. Furthermore, old-timey PDFs are chock full of the things, for God knows what reason, and a huge amount of data I work with are old-timey PDF.

MilStdJunkie commented on The CrowdStrike file that broke everything was full of null characters? twitter.com/jeremyphoward... · Posted by u/behnamoh

MilStdJunkie · 2 years ago

Holy smokes. I'm no programmer, but I've built out bazillions of publishing/conversion/analysis systems, and null purge is pretty much the first thing that happens, every time. x00 breaks virtually everything just by existing - like, seriously, markup with one of these damn things will make the rest of the system choke and die as soon as it looks at it. Numpy? Pytorch? XSL? Doesn't matter. cough cough cough GACK

And my systems are all halfass, and I don't really know what I'm doing. I can't imagine actual real professionals letting that moulder its way downstream. Maybe their stuff is just way more complex and amazing than I can possibly imagine.

MilStdJunkie commented on He created Oculus headsets as a teenager, now he makes AI weapons for Ukraine npr.org/2024/07/09/nx-s1-... · Posted by u/tosh

fwip · 2 years ago

Google does do work for the military.

Here is one source of many that came up from a quick Google search: https://techinquiry.org/?article=google-aerial

MilStdJunkie · 2 years ago

Yeah, that's via an OTA, which is basically - comparatively - free money. It's not a PoR (Program of Record). PoRs are where (many naive people think) all the money is. All those people are incorrect. It is, however, the PoR which will ruin your goddamn business when you sign it. Congratulations, that is now all you do.

MilStdJunkie commented on He created Oculus headsets as a teenager, now he makes AI weapons for Ukraine npr.org/2024/07/09/nx-s1-... · Posted by u/tosh

ahmeneeroe-v2 · 2 years ago

One more comment:

>"And the companies that did have expertise, like Google, like Facebook, like Apple, were refusing to work with the U.S. national security community."

Idk if this is true. I suspect they--at a minimum--cooperate with the "soft" side of the defense industry (e.g. NSA). However, if they don't, I think there will come a time when we will have to bring them to heel. The world won't have the luxury of supporting fat corps who aren't aligned with respective hegemons (e.g. US, China, Russia). They will find themselves supporting the effort or cut off from resources and unable to continue operating.

MilStdJunkie · 2 years ago

A company like Google (or Apple for that matter), with their own freewheeling project systems, would rather jump into an olympic pool filled with razor blades and used condoms before taking any amount of money from the hellish morass that is the defense procurement system. The instant you enter the MIC, kiss goodbye to any of your internal business systems - you will be re-writing the way you work every second of every day. And not for the better, I might add. I think Google looked at the costs of that, looked at the contract, and said, nah, thanks, I'm good. Then went back to feeding NSA/NRO for black money delivered by men in coats.

Of course, now, post-ZIRP, things are a wee bit different.

MilStdJunkie commented on Gitlab Explores Sale reuters.com/markets/deals... · Posted by u/gostsamo

altdataseller · 2 years ago

Can anyone tell me why someone would pay nosebleed prices for Gitlab when they could simply use Github? Like do they have some special use case that github doesn’t support? Do Gitlab customers just love giving away lots of money? Do they want to pay a premium just to feel “special”?

Like what am I missing?

MilStdJunkie · 2 years ago

GitLab on-prem is way, way, way more elegant than trying to get GitHub on-prem working. One of the things that makes me go, "Gah?" is that, well, Atlassian is more or less abandoning on-prem Bitbucket going forward. Perforce is, well, Perforce. Niche VCSs like SVN are rapidly getting impossible to keep running on modern platforms. All this really does seem to leave the field of "small to midsize companies who can't cloud" entirely to GitLab.

Which, I guess, says something about how expensive it is to run support for on-prem enterprise software. But that doesn't feel like an unsolvable problem, not with a customer field this rich. On-prem focused orgs tend to have wads of cash stuck up in them.

MilStdJunkie commented on Evan Wright, 'Generation Kill' Author and Rolling Stone Contributor, Dead at 59 rollingstone.com/culture/... · Posted by u/jyunwai

MilStdJunkie · 2 years ago

What a loss. Killer Elite was one of my favorite modern pieces of war reporting. Wright didn't let the hilariously dystopic "embedded" rules muzzle him or intimidate him - no, he went to play bullet dodger with Marine Recon. A lot of other press, the embedding worked like it was supposed to and kept them well to the rear.

His true crime is a similar round of WTFs, like when you learn about weird CIA crap for the first time, but over and over again.

Mental note to watch the TV series - that somehow passed me by.