bitofhope

Headcanoning as futa for pun opportunities. Cocko's Basilisk. Roko's Ballsacklicks. Roko's Cockatrix.

Anyone need a new username?

You would expect some actual bayesian analysis in a stats-heavy field like psych, though.

I'm 12 years old and what is this?

Weird, naive Randian thinking seldom appeals to a geek like me. That said, I bet Ayn Rand herself would find this a tad barbaric. If for no other reason, she'd probably say buses are collectivist.

Oh but don't worry, all of the energy powering all that machine learning is clean and renewable of course, at least that's what I assert beyond evidence. Or even better, evidence in form of a link to some unsourced puff piece blog that also doesn't claim what I just said.

It's not like we could use all that energy for anything else either. If not for the bullshit spam mills soullessly averaging humanity's labors and achievements into vacuous slop to the threnodic tune of myriad gigawatts, those gigajoules would simply evaporate into the cosmic ether. We can't just build distribution networks, can we?

Have you considered the fact that artificial indifference, much like shitcoins before it, is actually driving the construction of clean energy. Because you know, clean energy means literally 100% clean with no downsides so it's good to build even if you waste all of it on stupid shit. Everyone loves getting a giant dam and reservoir where they would otherwise live for the sake of having a robot write ny email for me.

I feel a little more ambivalent than usual in this particular case. It's probably because I have little good to say about the AV vendors' side in the matter either.

It's a little different from something like the IE era browser wars, where MSFT was (more than nowadays) able to push de facto web standards, which would then affect users on all platforms. Or the chokehold they and Alphabet have on email, which directly drives people and organizations to commercial email services (namely theirs). Or the fact that approximately 100% of PC games are on their OS and oh oops now they own most of the biggest video game studios too, curious!

By comparison, antimalware is more tightly tied to the OS in the sense that commercial antimalware products for other platforms than Windows are fairly niche and exploits tend to vary a lot by platform. Since Defender is a part of Windows, it doesn't really hurt MSFT's bottom line if someone decides to install a third party antivirus, except when issues like this very outage give a bad name to the whole OS and company. Not that Microsoft's own code is somehow foolproof, but you could argue it's better to have a Defender bug every now and then than CrowdStrike bug today, F-Secure bug tomorrow, Trend Micro next week, Kaspersky soon after than, then Comodo and Check Point followed by Trend Micro again…

So if we are to accept that the plan to give Defender special treatment in the Windows kernel is not for the purpose of selling more copies of Defender (since it comes built-in with Windows anyway) and that it would reduce the occurrence of outages like this one, the main downside (if you consider it such) is that it would instantly obliterate the commercial malware blocker industry. So I guess that's pretty anticompetitive.

And tangentially, having to beg the EU to make big brother Nadella share kewnel intewface with poor widdle AV shops kinda shows the industry is already EEE'd to a terminal stage.

Now, I think all of that is being overly generous to the titan of monopolism that is Microsoft Corporation, but I can indulge in a little bit of lawnmower anthropomorphization when it's mowing a lawn I don't like anyway. Was it a good or bad thing that the 2009 agreement with European Commission required this provision for security vendors? I don't know. Microsoft sure likes to say "regulation bad" though.

Most programmers are programmers and a lot of programmers really do inexplicably find selling points like these compelling:

• Boo hoo I got canceled for being a homophobic wingnut. Mozilla has gone woke. Install this chromium fork #93726 to own the libs!
• Tired of ads (which, for all their numerous faults, usually at least fund the websites you use)? Watch our ads instead and waste a shitton of electricity to get paid in our monopoly money scrip for the privilege!

Oh absolutely, though among the others listed it doesn't particularly stand out.

What's going on with the header image? You've got Google Chrome, YouTube and Xitter in one hand, Bitcoin, Ethereum and Brave browser in the other and you're bridging the gap by fusing your index fingers together?

Were it not for the illustrator credit I'd assume it was generated. (No shade intended to Alexandra Francis, I wouldn't want to bring my A-game either if I had to work for this kind of bullshit.)

Most email providers already have this feature it's called automatic out-of-office reply.

Reading and listening to fans of AI has actually managed to convince me that machine learning algorithms really are better at reasoning than some humans.

But I don't want to cure cancer. I want to turn people into dinosaurs.