MangoCats

joined 1 year ago
[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 2 points 1 hour ago

Yeah, 0.5% was what I was offered as Director of 50% of new startups... 0.005% is more realistic - and could range from 0 to outrageous.

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 2 points 1 hour ago (3 children)

More reasonable: roll back to before the datacenter was permitted for construction, find substantially equivalent houses in the general area - 20% more square footage, 20% higher value per square foot, and track their values over time until the present, and whatever the peak was, offer 20% more than that plus moving expenses... effectively 175% of "fair" value + maybe $20K.

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 3 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

There's the thing: what's a woodpecker's property rights on his dead tree? I mean, you can offer him any amount of money and he isn't likely to just give up the nest he carved in it and move on to try to find another. Ask a colony of bats what they want to move to a new roost?

Same for people's homes, there's a price they could get for them if they tried to sell on the open market because they want to leave, but there's a very different and often much higher price that would be required to compensate them for the downsides of moving.

When a corporation wants to entice a new hire to move to a new city, they will buy the home at high-end market value, pay the real-estate commissions on both sale of the old home and purchase of the new home, pay for professional movers, and bulk up all of these benefits to cover increased income taxes where applicable. And that's for a new hire who wants to move.

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 1 points 5 hours ago

If China manages to scale their hardware production, this could finally be "their day in the sun" where they clearly surpass the West in the way the West has outshone them for 100 years. MoE has its place, but a MoDE where each E is itself a dense model would be more powerful still, mostly you need the silicon gates and power to drive them.

Three Gorges makes hydro-power, right? 22MW -> 100 TWh per year, just from that one structure, I bet that will run at least one AGI... https://www.fredgao.com/p/deepseeks-liang-wenfeng-breaks-his

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 1 points 18 hours ago

Back in the day, I was getting a new "99% compatible" DOS version every 6 months (until we transitioned to the PharLap 32 bit extender, got more memory to work with AND stopped the perpetual upgrade treadmill.)

That "99% compatible" thing means: in a 10,000 LOC codebase, you've got 100 things to fix before it works on the new DOS.

I really liked working with Qt from 2006-2024 or so, the only major break was 4-5 (must admit, I never migrated to 6, and nobody forced me to...) and the migration from 4-5 was less painful than a DOS version bump. Also, Qt fully insulated our code from garbage changes happening at lower layers.

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 3 points 1 day ago

I have definitely seen MS Office and Visual Studio stall at a level and stay there until after they're clearly surpassed by open source competition, then they fund another round of development and ... change, some might say improve, but often it looks like change for the sake of change, especially in Office.

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

particularly in Europe, where there is a growing desire to break free from the US SaaS stranglehold, using open source software.

I'm sorry, but it took EXTREME provocation to get Europe to start to talk about moving, again. Previous starts to move to open source software across Europe have mostly faltered and reverted to the comfort of handing cash to foreign companies.

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

racing toward free once it becomes good enough.

I don't know... I was using Open(now Libre)Office over 20 years ago, it wasn't just good enough, it was better than MS Office at the time, and yet... even though LibreOffice has been free and far more than "good enough" for long over a decade, my corporate decision makers insist that we all use Office365 subscriptions, complete with their service outages and other issues.

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

I see a business model where "we're done, this one is (finally) good enough and now we'll stop bleeding cash on the training and turn up the screws on the customers we've hooked on loss leader pricing." Open weight models will never stop training for improvement, the costs for training seem to be inexorably falling, and any business model built on the idea that they can kick back and roll in the profits after their initial "hard work" is going to lose all their customers to better products.

This isn't some captive market like US automobile customers who have no choice but the limited selection of crap, crap and more crap that is put in front of them. At least not as long as the internet remains relatively open.

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

My perception is one of a treadmill. My fellow developers in C# are much more frequently analyzing migration from one incarnation to the next, updating and installing their license files, evaluating compatibility between versions, and generally spinning their wheels on things not required for getting work done on other platforms.

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I come from a background of porting code between architectures, like 16 to 32 bit. The int type in C was (is) ambiguous in that case, 16 bit signed int on the 16 bit system, 32 bits on the 32 bit system. First thing I had to do to make the 500,000 LOC package start to run properly when ported from 16 bits to 32 bits was find and replace all " int "with " int16 ", "(int)" with "(int16)" etc. It was only going wrong "quite rarely" - but "quite rarely" doesn't cut it, they ALL needed to behave predictably the same as they did before the move. I believe that effort took 3 solid work days, 24 hours of my life, because "int" was "good enough" for the previous team.

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

People share sensitive information all the time in places and ways they shouldn't - they think noone is looking, noone is listening, noone is recording - the problem is: when it goes on the web, it's recorded, replayable, visible, for all to see.

 

What is this recurring connection between big missiles sending men to the moon and the military industrial complex sending expeditionary forces overseas?

 

996: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., 6 days a week

Sure, they're burnt out, sluggish, surly, but... they're present. And when they're present, they're not out in the world spending their income. They don't need an expensive apartment or house, all they do there is sleep. Why have a fancy car when all you do is drive to/from your shitty job in it? Family? Who would have children with somebody who works such a schedule?

Even if you got more productivity from the same workers on a 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., 4 days a week schedule, you'd have to pay them more, not just per hour but overall, because they'd be out spending money on those afternoons / evenings and 3 days a week they have off. Organizing, demanding better healthcare, dental, more paid time off for vacations, and higher total wages to support all these "needs" they invent for themselves on their time off.

Keep 'em locked down, keep 'em tasked with ... anything, doesn't matter if it's productive or not, as long as it keeps them on-the-job and not spending their pay.

Edit: apparently this isn't clear: 996 is a horrible idea from all perspectives, it's bad for the workers and bad for their employers overall. But, in certain twisted views, it would be a bit like military service where the (bulk of the) workers get a pitifully small paycheck, but they don't have any real expenses so they have the option to save it all. 996 would turn that more into a wage-slave implementation where the pitifully small paycheck is just enough to meet their pitifully small expenses. In the China tech sector where they have implemented this (it is now illegal, but still practiced) they also do things like install anti-suicide nets in the stairwells of the highrises the workers work and sleep in.

 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/31879711

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20187958

A prominent computer scientist who has spent 20 years publishing academic papers on cryptography, privacy, and cybersecurity has gone incommunicado, had his professor profile, email account, and phone number removed by his employer Indiana University, and had his homes raided by the FBI. No one knows why.

Xiaofeng Wang has a long list of prestigious titles. He was the associate dean for research at Indiana University's Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, a fellow at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a tenured professor at Indiana University at Bloomington. According to his employer, he has served as principal investigator on research projects totaling nearly $23 million over his 21 years there.

He has also co-authored scores of academic papers on a diverse range of research fields, including cryptography, systems security, and data privacy, including the protection of human genomic data. I have personally spoken to him on three occasions for articles herehere, and here.

"None of this is in any way normal"

In recent weeks, Wang's email account, phone number, and profile page at the Luddy School were quietly erased by his employer. Over the same time, Indiana University also removed a profile for his wife, Nianli Ma, who was listed as a Lead Systems Analyst and Programmer at the university's Library Technologies division.

According to the Herald-Times in Bloomington, a small fleet of unmarked cars driven by government agents descended on the Bloomington home of Wang and Ma on Friday. They spent most of the day going in and out of the house and occasionally transferred boxes from their vehicles. TV station WTHR, meanwhile, reported that a second home owned by Wang and Ma and located in Carmel, Indiana, was also searched. The station said that both a resident and an attorney for the resident were on scene during at least part of the search.

Attempts to locate Wang and Ma have so far been unsuccessful. An Indiana University spokesman didn't answer emailed questions asking if the couple was still employed by the university and why their profile pages, email addresses and phone numbers had been removed. The spokesman provided the contact information for a spokeswoman at the FBI's field office in Indianapolis. In an email, the spokeswoman wrote: "The FBI conducted court authorized law enforcement activity at homes in Bloomington and Carmel Friday. We have no further comment at this time."

Searches of federal court dockets turned up no documents related to Wang, Ma, or any searches of their residences. The FBI spokeswoman didn't answer questions seeking which US district court issued the warrant and when, and whether either Wang or Ma is being detained by authorities. Justice Department representatives didn't return an email seeking the same information. An email sent to a personal email address belonging to Wang went unanswered at the time this post went live. Their resident status (e.g. US citizens or green card holders) is currently unknown.

Fellow researchers took to social media over the weekend to register their concern over the series of events.

"None of this is in any way normal," Matthew Green, a professor specializing in cryptography at Johns Hopkins University, wrote on Mastodon. He continued: "Has anyone been in contact? I hear he’s been missing for two weeks and his students can’t reach him. How does this not get noticed for two weeks???"

In the same thread, Matt Blaze, a McDevitt Professor of Computer Science and Law at Georgetown University said: "It's hard to imagine what reason there could be for the university to scrub its website as if he never worked there. And while there's a process for removing tenured faculty, it takes more than an afternoon to do it."

Local news outlets reported the agents spent several hours moving boxes in an out of the residences. WTHR provided the following details about the raid on the Carmel home:

Neighbors say the agents announced "FBI, come out!" over a megaphone.

A woman came out of the house holding a phone. A video from a neighbor shows an agent taking that phone from her. She was then questioned in the driveway before agents began searching the home, collecting evidence and taking photos.

A car was pulled out of the garage slightly to allow investigators to access the attic.

The woman left the house before 13News arrived. She returned just after noon accompanied by a lawyer. The group of ten or so investigators left a few minutes later.

The FBI would not say what they were looking for or who is under investigation. A bureau spokesperson issued a statement: “I can confirm we conducted court-authorized activity at the address in Carmel today. We have no further comment at this time.”

Investigators were at the house for about four hours before leaving with several boxes of evidence. 13News rang the doorbell when the agents were gone. A lawyer representing the family who answered the door told us they're not sure yet what the investigation is about.

This post will be updated if new details become available. Anyone with first-hand knowledge of events involving Wang, Ma, or the investigation into either is encouraged to contact me, preferably over Signal at DanArs.82. The email address is: dan.goodin@arstechnica.com.

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