snarbles (u/snarbles)

snarbles commented on Insurance companies aren't the main villain of the U.S. health system noahpinion.blog/p/insuran... · Posted by u/paulpauper

snarbles · 9 months ago

> In general, I think it’s a very bad look to endorse murder.

Stopped reading right there. You don't need to endorse it to recognize that all other means of redress have been corrupted or hijacked. If you leave someone only one option, don't be surprised when they take that course of action.

snarbles commented on Why Stack Overflow Is Dying sethops1.net/post/why-sta... · Posted by u/sethops1

snarbles · 9 months ago

StackOverflow has been in trouble for a while. That became obvious to me when the moderators went on strike. The site was being spammed with AI-generated questions and answers to farm reputation, and the site ownership forbade moderators from enforcing rules against AI-generated content via a secret dictate they weren't allowed to publicly reveal. The site's activity has been declining, and apparently allowing the highly problematic AI-generated content is the only available avenue for further "growth". It's like google degrading search results to artificially inflate the number of queries to create the appearance of growth. It's short-sighted, to say the least.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389811/moderation-s...

The linked question isn't really a programming question. Maybe a better fit on SuperUser. But IMO it's tangential, close enough that it could be allowed. If you want real growth, relax the rules for humans, not for AI spam.

snarbles commented on Defining All Undefined Behavior and Leveraging Compiler Transformation APIs sbaziotis.com/compilers/d... · Posted by u/baziotis

snarbles · 9 months ago

The author seems to be offering a false dichotomy. His strawman argument is to offer platform-specific specified behavior for UB, but then concludes that that would make optimization impossible, operating on a presumption that that behavior must be specified in terms of assembler instructions.

Why not specify behavior in terms that are abstract but simple and sensible for the specific platform, at which point you can continue to optimize on the basis of the as-if principle?

snarbles commented on An update on Google's compliance with the DMA blog.google/around-the-gl... · Posted by u/evilsaloon

mattlondon · 9 months ago

But there already are many search engines?

I recently got a couple of new windows laptops and Edge defaulted to Bing, but after changing away from Bing it is relentlessly trying to make me set Bing as the default search engine every few days.

Note that I am using Edge here, not Chrome. Last time I installed Chrome I think it forced me to pick a default search engine, and didn't endlessly harass me to pick Google as its default (I use duck duck go)

I don't see how they could break up Google without forcing MS and Apple to also be broken up too since they're doing the same things with forcing Edge/Bing and Safari on everyone.

snarbles · 9 months ago

Edge, Bing, and Safari do not have majority market share. It would still please me to see these companies broken up. They have their own obnoxious and/or harmful practices that are the result or of attempts to be monopolistic.

snarbles commented on An update on Google's compliance with the DMA blog.google/around-the-gl... · Posted by u/evilsaloon

IncreasePosts · 9 months ago

Your unspoken premise is that the law in question is reasonable.

snarbles · 9 months ago

I'll speak it. The law in question is reasonable.

snarbles commented on Top NATO official calls on business leaders to prepare for 'wartime scenario' reuters.com/world/top-nat... · Posted by u/Teever

Vox_Leone · 9 months ago

Once institutions, especially powerful ones like NATO, urge businesses and economic agents to prepare for war, they are signaling a shift in the geopolitical and economic landscape that increases the likelihood of conflict. The mobilization of economic forces is a double-edged sword: while it may be intended to bolster resilience and deter aggression, it also makes war increasingly difficult to avoid. As economic forces and preparations for conflict are set in motion, they create a momentum that increases the costs of demobilization and makes peace harder to maintain, leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy of war.

snarbles · 9 months ago

We can control what we do, but not what other parties do. Anyone who has been following along is well aware that the other side has already been doing. We can choose to be prepared, or to be unprepared. We are watching the consequences of being unprepared play out on social media, in politics, and economically. In reality, there is no choice and we've already been far, far too willing to defer preparation to "avoid escalation", and yet the escalation has occurred all the same. The hesitancy has been interpreted as validation that we will not respond to escalation. This is history rhyming.

snarbles commented on Google's response to DOJ's breakup proposal blog.google/outreach-init... · Posted by u/ra7

snarbles · 9 months ago

Weird how every pro-consumer measure is always met with THIS WILL SPELL DOOM FOR CONSUMERS. That's generally a sign you're on the right track.

snarbles commented on Google Selling Chrome Won't Be Enough to End Its Search Monopoly wired.com/story/doj-googl... · Posted by u/elsewhen

snarbles · 9 months ago

> “No matter how much you level the playing field, people are going to go to the best product for the job”

How you know folks at google aren't eating their own dog food.

snarbles commented on Costco’s butter recall, explained forbes.com/sites/stephani... · Posted by u/michaelbarton

michaelbarton · 10 months ago

I thought this noteworthy because butter is made from milk as the sole ingredient

snarbles · 10 months ago

Not all recalls involve disposing of a product. Apparently in this case it does. I'd have thought they could just send out some correction stickers to slap on there, but I suppose food labeling laws could be too rigid to allow for this, or else concerns about stickers being misapplied.

snarbles commented on How computer scientists got password policies so wrong stuartschechter.org/posts... · Posted by u/throw0101b

snarbles · 10 months ago

The conclusion of the article seems to be that passwords should be encrypted with asymmetric encryption instead of being hashed. I really couldn't disagree more. We see how competently companies manage their security. It's very easy to imagine a scenario like a company using the same key to encrypt every password. They accidentally push it to github or otherwise get it compromised and now a dumped database becomes a table of plaintext passwords, no rainbow tables needed.

What we really got wrong about passwords is using them in the first place. I don't know know anything about how passkeys are implemented. I would hope they aren't tied into any OAuth nonsense (IMO OAuth is a cure worse than the disease), but even if the implementation were flawed, passkeys are the right kind of solution: cryptographic authentication that plays to the computer's strength instead of depending on something humans aren't good at.