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We hired a new person at work at a fairly junior level. He's about 20 years younger than me and worked for one of those body shop companies doing embedded development. We interviewed several, but this guy had a bit of a spark, was genuinely interested in what he was doing and despite being very junior, recognised this and is keen to learn.

We got a new PHB some months ago who is not an embedded developer, to free me up from PHB duties to do Other Things. Since then I have been doing all sorts of Other Things and very few of them in my job description.

I was asked to write some C code as a bit of an emergency (the company doesn't believe in proper analysis, requirements and communication) which was relatively straight-forward for me (I can churn out a few thousand lines of code in a week if I have to).

Other projects needed my assistance urgently too so the PHB gave my code to the new guy to finish off. There are "just a few bits" that need doing but they involved having a sufficient level of understanding and a measured approach to implementation to ensure that they don't end up full of terrible bugs. I wrote my code with (to me at least) nice clear, simple unit tests in a TDD fashion and with some scripted regression tests, all run automatically.

The poor young new guy has just had the entire company induction reading to go through and a bunch of training courses, is in a new industry sector with all that implies and has been given 3k lines of code written by me "to finish off" with, at least to begin with, a ludicrous deadline.

Fortunately after putting thumb screws on other PHBs and enlightening them as to various common existing command-line utilities, the deadline has vanished, which is good.

However, I'm doing the hand-holding and advising. When I was similarly young I was fortunate to be in a great team who were very helpful most of the time and quite patient. I want to be like that.

Here's my problem. This guy has worked for a very large company doing a very specific job. All of his C coding has been done in a proprietary IDE using a proprietary compiler. Now he is faced with git, gcc and GNU Make (and watching me code using vim). He's trying very hard to get stuff done but doesn't know what he doesn't know. I think this is the first time he has seen TDD. He has put all sorts of debugging code in the main source file that really isn't necessary if you understand the unit tests.

I would like to say, "Go away and read the fine manual." However, I want to do it politely without sounding too condescending or critical. I Need to introduce the gcc command line options for compiling and linking. I could just give him a URL to the gcc manual but that would be pretty tactless.

Then of course, I'm very busy with all the other nonsense going on at work so my frame of mind isn't always the right one when he asks for help and it's difficult to change modes.

It's been over two years, but I can now run xeyes on my Slackware64 15.0 desktop again.

The bug was not in Slackware, nor was it in the nouveau graphics driver, but in nVidia's proprietary driver. I was tempted to submit a bug report to nVidia, but a couple of days ago I checked whether they'd released a new driver, and I installed NVIDIA GLX Module 525.60.11 (the previous one was 515.something) and lo and behold xeyes runs!

With previous versions it was crashing the X server almost instantly.

I've been running xeyes since about 1995 on Slackware (I used OLVWM in those days in glorious 256 colours). It's so cool having curved windows. The way things are going, I figured that the young whipper-snappers might forget about these things and the day would come when they wouldn't run any more.

It seems these days are not here yet.

The time has come when I need to bite the bullet and learn how to do some web development. It's really not my cup of tea. However, I have an idea for an application that needs to have a GUI in a web browser.

There is nothing revolutionary about this. It's pretty simple. There will be some sort of database back end (I'll have to learn that too) and I will write some code to implement the business logic which will run on the server and speak to the database. It will speak to a web server on the other side and there will be a client which will exist in a web page for drawing the pictures, including the buttons and the text boxes to type things in.

The last time I went near any evil web stuff was over a decade ago. We were using Fitnesse to run a bunch of Ruby scripts on a server somewhere. I seem to remember there was a web server (written in Java) that came with it. I quite liked Ruby, but haven't touched it since.

Due to the fact that I am a bit lysdexic (I think) I find programming in dynamic languages very difficult. I also appreciate the extra layers of compile-time checks a compiler gives you. I realise this is not the way web development works, which is why I have avoided it. I prefer to write my code using TDD so I always write a failing unit test case before implementing code to make it pass, rinse and repeat.

So what I want is something simple and powerful to do the browser front end which runs in as many browsers as possible, and will not drive me mad or give me migraines when I'm trying to learn how to do it.

Suggestions please!

A couple of years back I wrote about career stuff where I was in a job that I was finding very frustrating, so I decided it was time to move on and that's what I did.

This was great for a number of reasons. It has let us relocate to Scotland and it has been a very valuable learning experience for me.

However, two years is quite a long time in a very intense business, mainly in a PHB role. The last 12 months have been particularly hectic. I've had very little time to myself (or to dedicate to my family) outside of work. I've worked some weekends (unpaid) as well as many evenings. There was some critical stuff that needed doing, and I got it done.

This hasn't been without some personal cost. In addition to not having much time for exercise (and therefore getting fatter and more unfit), the garden suffered, and so did my health. I've been on all sorts of extra pills, and I've been doing strange things in my sleep.

Never the less, I got a fairly substantial pay rise this year, above the rate of inflation, and I got sent abroad to work, including to rescue some very broken embedded C code.

I went from being PHB back to being a bit technical. I'm doing all kinds of stuff. Unfortunately some very good people left the company this year. It's a real struggle.

Being a PHB is a completely different world. It's amazing all the extra issues that people have that need to be dealt with. I've had to fight hard for extra pay rises for people who really deserved one but didn't get enough the first time round. I've needed to speak truth to power several times at board level. I'm not scared any more.

I think I need to move on again but there's a midlife crisis! I've always had an eye on the future and always been learning something new in my own time with a view to my next move. This last year in particular, I've been so busy, that hasn't been possible. So I kind of feel like a bit of an anachronism and I don't know what to do about it.

Once or twice I did spend some holidays and weekends hacking out the odd shell script to do something I'd done elsewhere years ago that was cool/fun/useful and I have written a few hundred lines of C, but nothing spectacular. I'm really struggling to focus my mind on such things. I'm maybe managing ten lines of C at a sitting. Evenings and weekends of writing code result in a week of migraines.

I have all sorts of half-finished and barely started projects that I need to work on, but my brain just won't do it. I need a break, but my brain won't switch off properly to have the required break.

I have a browser window open from the other day. Here are the front page stories.

Waiting for Superbatteries
posted by hubie on Thursday December 01, @07:09PM Printer-friendly
from the waiting-for-Godot-to-make-better-batteries dept.
News

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

They are still a long way from matching the energy density of liquid fuel:

        The era of large steam-powered ocean liners began during the latter half of the 19th century, when wood was still the world’s dominant fuel. But no liners fired their boilers with wood: There would have been too little space left for passengers and cargo. Soft wood, such as spruce or pine, packs less than 10 megajoules per liter, whereas bituminous coal has 2.5 times as much energy by volume and at least twice as much by mass. By comparison, gasoline has 34 MJ/L and diesel about 38 MJ/L.

        But in a world that aspires to leave behind all fuels (except hydrogen or maybe ammonia) and to electrify everything, the preferred measure of stored energy density is watt-hours per liter. By this metric, air-dried wood contains about 3,500 Wh/L, good steam coal around 6,500, gasoline 9,600, aviation kerosene 10,300, and natural gas (methane) merely 9.7—less than 1/1,000 the density of kerosene.

        How do batteries compare with the fuels they are to displace? [...] The best energy density now commercially available in very large quantities for lithium-ion batteries is at 750 Wh/L, which is widely seen in electric cars. In 2020 Panasonic promised it would reach about 850 Wh/L by 2025 (and do so without the expensive cobalt). Eventually, the company aims to reach a 1,000-Wh/L product.

        [...] There is a long way to go before batteries rival the energy density of liquid fuels. Over the past 50 years, the highest energy density of mass-produced batteries has roughly quintupled, from less than 150 to more than 700 Wh/L. But even if that trend continues for the next 50 years, we would still see top densities of about 3,500 Wh/L, no more than a third that of kerosene. The wait for superbatteries ready to power intercontinental flight may not be over by even 2070.

Intel Linux Kernel Graphics Driver Patched for New Security Sensitive Bug
posted by janrinok on Thursday December 01, @04:21PM Printer-friendly
from the get-ready-to-patch-and-reboot dept.
Security

upstart writes:

Intel Linux Kernel Graphics Driver Patched For New Security Sensitive Bug:

        Intel Linux Kernel Graphics Driver Patched For New Security Sensitive Bug CVE-2022-4139 was made public today as an i915 kernel graphics driver security issue affecting all Gen12 graphics -- from integrated Tigerlake graphics up through the latest Raptor Lake graphics as well as the in-development Meteor Lake code plus the discrete GPUs of DG2/Alchemist and Arctic Sound.

        Intel has disclosed CVE-2022-4139 as a incorrect GPU TLB flushing issue within their Linux kernel graphics driver. In some cases the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) is not flushed at all. At the very least there could be random memory corruption or data leaks while it's not yet been determined if specific memory could be targeted on affected Linux kernel versions up to this point. All versions from Linux 5.4 up through today's latest kernel versions are believed to be impacted when using Intel Gen12 integrated/discrete graphics. This though amounts to an Intel driver issue and not a hardware problem itself.

        [...] Linus Torvalds just merged this five lines of code for mitigating the TLB invalidation on Intel Gen12 graphics for the video and compute engines.

Evolution of Tree Roots May Have Driven Mass Extinctions
posted by janrinok on Thursday December 01, @01:37PM Printer-friendly
from the determining-root-cause dept.
Science

hubie writes:

Geologists in the U.S. and U.K. find parallels between ancient, global-scale extinction events and modern threats to Earth's oceans:

        The evolution of tree roots may have triggered a series of mass extinctions that rocked the Earth's oceans during the Devonian Period over 300 million years ago, according to a study led by scientists at IUPUI, along with colleagues in the United Kingdom.

        [...] "Our analysis shows that the evolution of tree roots likely flooded past oceans with excess nutrients, causing massive algae growth," Filippelli said. "These rapid and destructive algae blooms would have depleted most of the oceans' oxygen, triggering catastrophic mass extinction events."

        The Devonian Period, which occurred 419 million to 358 million years ago, before the evolution of life on land, is known for mass extinction events, during which it's estimated nearly 70 percent of all life on Earth perished.

        The process outlined in the study — known scientifically as eutrophication — is remarkably similar to modern, albeit smaller-scale, phenomenon currently fueling broad "dead zones" in the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, as excess nutrients from fertilizers and other agricultural runoff trigger massive algae blooms that consume all of the water's oxygen.

        [...] "These new insights into the catastrophic results of natural events in the ancient world may serve as a warning about the consequences of similar conditions arising from human activity today," Fillipelli said.

Journal Reference:
Matthew S. Smart et al., Enhanced terrestrial nutrient release during the Devonian emergence and expansion of forests: Evidence from lacustrine phosphorus and geochemical records [open], GSA Bull. (2022). DOI: 10.1130/B36384.1

It Took Nearly 500 Years for Researchers to Crack Emperor Charles V's Secret Code
posted by janrinok on Thursday December 01, @10:51AM Printer-friendly
/dev/random

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1900355

        In 1547, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V penned a letter to his ambassador, Jean de Saint-Mauris, part of which was written in the ruler's secret code. Nearly five centuries later, researchers have finally cracked that code, revealing Charles V's fear of a secret assassination plot and continued tensions with France, despite having signed a peace treaty with the French king a few years earlier.

        Charles V's three-page letter to his ambassador was written against the backdrop of a fierce struggle against the rising Protestant religion—the emperor was a devout Catholic who denounced Martin Luther as an outlaw at the Diet of Worms in 1521—and continued tensions with Francis I of France. Cecile Pierrot, a cryptographer with the Loria laboratory in France, first heard of the letter's existence at a dinner in 2019 and finally managed to track it down two years later, where it was languishing in the basement of the historic library in Nancy. Pierrot promptly tried to crack the coded portions of that letter by categorizing the various symbols and hunting for telltale patterns.

        [...] The task proved rather daunting since the approximately 120 encrypted symbols didn't employ a simple symbol-to-letter representation. Granted, most represented letters or combinations of letters, per Pierrot, but others represented entire words—for instance, a needle to represent the English King Henry VIII. Vowels that came after consonants were replaced by diacritical marks, except for the letter 'e' (the most commonly used letter), which the code makers cleverly avoided using as much as possible. And a few symbols didn't seem to serve any function at all. "Simply putting it into a computer and telling the computer to work it out would have literally taken longer than the history of the universe," Pierrot told BBC News.

[Continues...]

SpaceX Set to Launch Private Moon Lander, Along with NASA 'Flashlight' Probe at 08:37 GMT
posted by hubie on Thursday December 01, @08:07AM Printer-friendly
from the fly-me-to-the-moon dept.
News

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

If it lands safely, ispace's Hakuto-R M1 will be the first privately led lander to operate on the Moon:

[Launch delayed with 'unspecified rocket problems' - will update when new date is announced. janrinok]

        The launch itself is not a big deal, but it carries historic consequences. Hakuto-R, a product of Tokyo-based ispace, will attempt to deploy the company’s Mission 1 (M1) lander to the lunar surface. Should Hakuto-R M1 land safely and soundly, ispace will become the first private company to accomplish this feat. A successful mission would kickstart a new era, one in which commercial providers routinely deliver goods to the Moon. Indeed, ispace’s Hakuto-R Mission 1 is the first of what the company hopes will be many low-cost deliveries to the lunar surface.

        The Hakuto-R M1 lander will perform exploratory duties as a stationary probe, but it will also attempt to deliver several payloads to the surface, including the 22-pound (10-kilogram) Rashid rover built by the United Arab Emirates and a transformable ball-like robot, named SORA-Q, developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the TOMY toy company.

        Other Hakuto-R payloads include an AI-powered flight computer from the Canadian Space Agency, a lunar camera developed by Canadian company Canadensys, a solid-state battery, a CD containing the song “SORATO” performed by Japanese band Sakanaction, and panel engraved with the names of crowdfunding supporters. The Hakuto-R M1 lander is expected to land within the Moon’s Atlas crater in April 2023.

[Continues...]

Half Century of Pong
posted by janrinok on Thursday December 01, @05:22AM Printer-friendly
from the blipp-blipp-blopp dept.
News

looorg writes:

Half a century of Pong. 50 years old. What started out as a tech demo (that sure has changed) became a gaming juggernaut. Time to share Pong memories? Personally it would be many years later on some home console or one of the many many clones or developments such as Breakout or Arkanoid. I think they did more for me then the two little paddles and the dot being directed from side to side.

https://www.engadget.com/pong-turns-50-214422370.html

        Exactly 50 years ago today, Atari released Pong. It wasn't the first video game ever created, nor the original take on virtual table tennis – a fact that would eventually lead to two decades of lawsuits. But in Pong, the early video game industry was born. Released in 1972, Atari sold more than 8,000 Pong arcade cabinets. A few years later, the home version of Pong would become an instant success, with Sears selling about 150,000 units of the console you needed to play the game.

https://www.theage.com.au/technology/video-games/allan-created-pong-as-a-demo-for-his-boss-it-sparked-a-296-billion-supernova-20221125-p5c1cr.html

        Alcorn thought the first assignment he was given by the fledgling video game company Atari would simply be practice for engineering the next big thing. That assignment – a simple ball and paddle game – turned out to be the next big thing.

        "This is insane. I'll go along with the gag, but we'll see how long it takes to blow up and I'll go back and work at Ampex," he said. Alcorn would soon become chief engineer at Atari, where he recruited several notable employees, including an 18-year-old tech called Steve Jobs. But that's another story.

Patent Detects in-Game “Collusion” by Tracking “External Connections”
posted by hubie on Thursday December 01, @02:36AM Printer-friendly
from the dystopia dept.
News

Freeman writes:

Algorithm also analyzes in-game data to find opponents secretly working together:

        EA's simply titled "Detecting Collusion in Online Games" patent, published earlier this month, defines collusion as when two or more players/groups that are "intended to be opponents" instead "contribute to a common cause" to "gain an unfair advantage" over others. In a battle royale shooter, for instance, a small group of players communicating outside the game could stay together and gain a decided firepower advantage against their single opponents.

        Many of the patent's potential methods for discovering this kind of collusion use simple and obvious in-game data. If two or more ostensibly opposed players or teams show abnormal amounts of "time spent in proximity... without engagement," for instance, there's a good chance they're working together. Even if those players show some cursory opposition at points, metrics like damage per second can be compared with the average to see if this is just opposition "for appearance's sake."
        [...]
        Beyond easy-to-detect in-game data, though, EA's patent details other signs of collusion that can be gleaned from things like "social relationships and communications" and "third-party system connections and interactions" outside the game. That kind of data ranges from simple relationships like a "friends list" provided by the gaming platform to completely external relationships like "social media connection data."

Alberta Researchers Discover 2 Minerals in a Meteorite Never Before Seen on Earth
posted by hubie on Wednesday November 30, @11:54PM Printer-friendly
from the catch-a-falling-star-and-put-it-in-your-pocket dept.
Science

fliptop writes:

A meteorite expert from the University of Alberta was part of a team of researchers that discovered at least two new minerals never before seen on Earth:

        Chris Herd, a professor in the department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and curator of the University of Alberta's meteorite collection, was contacted a couple years ago about trying to classify a 15-tonne meteorite found in Somalia, the ninth-largest meteorite ever found.

        "In the course of doing the classification — describing this new rock for science — I came across some inclusions, some potential different, interesting minerals inside the meteorite. What we've now discovered is there are at least two new minerals in this meteorite from Somalia that have never been discovered before.

        [...] The two minerals came from a 70-gram piece that was sent to the U of A for classification. A potential third mineral is also being looked at.

        [...] The new minerals have been named elaliite and elkinstantonite. They were identified by Locock, head of the U of A's electron microprobe laboratory, because each had been synthetically created before.

        "These minerals have been synthesized in a lab by a group in France in the 1980s, so they were known to science in that regard," Herd explained, "but it doesn't get to be a called a new mineral until it's found in nature."

Also at University of Alberta's website.

Attackers Keep Phishing Victims Under Stress
posted by hubie on Wednesday November 30, @09:09PM Printer-friendly
from the html-marquee-tag-still-works dept.
Security

fab23 writes:

https://isc.sans.edu/diary/Attackers+Keep+Phishing+Victims+Under+Stress/29270

        Phishing campaigns are very common today, we receive many phishing attempts per day. Why attackers are still flooding our mailboxes with such emails? Because it still works, and the "return on investment" of sending millions is reached even if only a few victims are lured. However, attackers are always looking for new techniques to make people confident that the message is legit. Many phishing campaigns are pretty well prepared, and the fake mail you receive looks exactly like an official one. Multiple times, I was pretty close to click on a link... Yes, we are all poor humans!

        Another technique used by attackers is to try to make the victim scared and increase stress. When we are under stress, we are prone to make wrong decisions! That's the technique used by a phishing campaign that I spotted yesterday.

        If the victim follows the provided link, a message will ask the user to update his/her email account within 24h (a counter is running), but the funny fact is that the page displays a fake real-time list of disabled accounts.

        [...] If you are located in the United States, Happy Thanksgiving! But keep an eye on your systems because the long weekend (tomorrow is also Black Friday!) is a good opportunity for bad guys to launch waves of attacks...

[Ed.: Obviously not out before Black Friday, but a good thing to warn any of your tech-stressed friends and family about. --hubie]

Scientists Reexamine Why Zebra Stripes Mysteriously Repel Flies
posted by hubie on Wednesday November 30, @06:22PM Printer-friendly
from the shoo-fly-don't-bother-me dept.
Science

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.wired.com/story/scientists-reexamine-why-zebra-stripes-mysteriously-repel-flies/

        Biting flies slurp their meals from the blood of Savannah animals. At best, the flies are annoying. At worst, they transmit disease. Scientists have known since the 1980s that zebra stripes repel flies, and many believe that zebras evolved their distinctive stripes because of this advantage. But researchers still don't actually know why the stripes work. Most theories suggest some visual illusion. Perhaps, up close, the stripes affect how biting flies perceive a zebra's motion. Or from afar, stripes may scramble the outline of the animal's body. For Tombak's team, this raised an irresistible question about how a parasite, rather than food or mating strategies, could drive evolution.

        Writing in Scientific Reports this month, they describe how their experiment in Kenya led to two discoveries that buck some previous theories. Tombak's team agrees there is an illusion—but since they restricted the flies to a 4-foot-wide box, they argue that the mechanism happens up close, not from afar. They also found that narrow zebra stripes don't repel flies any better than wider ones. "That was a surprise because previous studies had indicated that there might be a difference," says Tombak, who is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Hunter College.

        [...] For the current study, Tombak, then a PhD candidate at Princeton, and her team wanted to test stripe width to see if narrower ones might be even more repulsive to flies—a potential evolutionary advantage that would explain the difference between zebra species. They also restricted their experiment to close-range encounters to rule out the theory that the repulsion required an illusion that could only happen at a distance. Hence the plexiglass box.

[Continues...]

'What's the Point of Me Being in My Office, Just Because They Want to See Me in the Office?'
posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday November 30, @03:33PM Printer-friendly
Career & Education

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/29/wfh_report/

        Workers are now simply ignoring executive mandates to return to the office, according to a recent report that suggested employers should focus on "reducing ill-being" rather than "improving wellbeing" among staff.

        The study comes as Snap employees are reportedly being told by CEO Evan Spiegel that they are expected to be in the social media company's offices in person 80 percent of the time starting in February.

        Echoing Salesforce's Marc Benioff, who said in June that back-to-office mandates would "never work", the report's author, Dr Grace Lordan of the London School of Economics (LSE), claimed: "Firms that demand their employees are in the office for no reason will lose out on diverse talent pools."

        She added: "These demands are also ego driven rather than having the best interests of the business in mind."

        The workers interviewed for the "qualitative research" included 100 staff across financial services including fintechers and brands such as Bank of America, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, NatWest, Schroders, and UBS.

        According to the LSE research, while C-suite level executives in many large businesses are asking for workers to come into the office a specific number of days per week, "in practice they are being ignored, with managers often favouring a remote first approach that satisfies local operational needs."

AI Experts Are Increasingly Afraid of What They're Creating
posted by janrinok on Wednesday November 30, @12:48PM Printer-friendly
from the as-they-should-be dept.
/dev/random

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23447596/artificial-intelligence-agi-openai-gpt3-existential-risk-human-extinction

        In 2018 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai had something to say: "AI is probably the most important thing humanity has ever worked on. I think of it as something more profound than electricity or fire." Pichai's comment was met with a healthy dose of skepticism. But nearly five years later, it's looking more and more prescient.

        AI translation is now so advanced that it's on the brink of obviating language barriers on the internet among the most widely spoken languages. College professors are tearing their hair out because AI text generators can now write essays as well as your typical undergraduate — making it easy to cheat in a way no plagiarism detector can catch. AI-generated artwork is even winning state fairs. A new tool called Copilot uses machine learning to predict and complete lines of computer code, bringing the possibility of an AI system that could write itself one step closer. DeepMind's AlphaFold system, which uses AI to predict the 3D structure of just about every protein in existence, was so impressive that the journal Science named it 2021's Breakthrough of the Year.

        You can even see it in the first paragraph of this story, which was largely generated for me by the OpenAI language model GPT-3.

        While innovation in other technological fields can feel sluggish — as anyone waiting for the metaverse would know — AI is full steam ahead. The rapid pace of progress is feeding on itself, with more companies pouring more resources into AI development and computing power.

        Of course, handing over huge sectors of our society to black-box algorithms that we barely understand creates a lot of problems, which has already begun to help spark a regulatory response around the current challenges of AI discrimination and bias. But given the speed of development in the field, it's long past time to move beyond a reactive mode, one where we only address AI's downsides once they're clear and present. We can't only think about today's systems, but where the entire enterprise is headed.

[Continues...]

Rejuvenating the Hackerboards Database of SBCs
posted by janrinok on Wednesday November 30, @10:03AM Printer-friendly
from the javascript-?-nee-bedankt dept.
Hardware

canopic jug writes:

Programmer Martijn Braam has breathed new life into the SBC database website, Board-DB, together with the former maintainer. The Single-Board Computer (SBC) and System-on-Module (SoM) database runs using Python's Flask with an SQLite database underneath. He has even implement faceted searching. The world of SBCs and SoMs extends far beyond the excellent and highly visible, but hard to get, Raspberry Pi series.

        The website is a Python Flask webapplication that uses SQLite as storage backend. SQLite is perfect in this case since it's mostly a read-heavy website. The website is designed from the start to run behind a caching reverse proxy like Varnish and makes sure that all the URLs in the site generate the exact same content unless boards are changed.

        The site is also designed to work without having javascript enabled but does use javascript to improve the experience. It even works in text-mode browsers. Due to it not using any javascript or css frameworks the website is also very light.

See also various previous stories here about Single-Board Computers over the years.

International Cops Arrest Hundreds of Fraudsters, Money Launderers and Cocaine Kingpins
posted by janrinok on Wednesday November 30, @07:20AM Printer-friendly
News

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/29/europol_fraud_drug_arrests/

        Europol has arrested hundreds of fraudsters, money launderers and cocaine kingpins, and shut down thousands of websites selling pirated and counterfeit products in a series of raids over the past month.

        As of Cyber Monday, law enforcement agencies had taken down 12,526 websites, disconnected 32 servers used to distribute and host illegal content for 2,294 television channels, and shut down 15 online shops selling counterfeit products on social media sites. Additionally, cops across several continents seized 127,365 fake designer watches, shoes, accessories, clothes, perfumes, electronics, phone cases and other counterfeit products worth more than Є3.8 million ($3.9 million).

        This was part of a recurring Europol-led operation dubbed "In Our Sites" targeting intellectual property infringement on trademarks and pirated streaming content.

        "Key findings of the operation that took place from May 1 to November 14 also show that more counterfeit products are being assembled within the European Union's borders and that intellectual property crime is closely intertwined with serious and organized crime," the European cops said.

        In one action, Spanish police arrested four individuals and charged one for their roles in a cyber crime ring dedicated to large-scale marketing and distribution of pirated audio-visual content. They also disconnected 32 servers and seized cash, documents and two luxury vehicles, according to Europol.

        [...] In addition to Operation In Our Sites, law enforcement across Europe and the United Arab Emirates earlier this month carried out raids targeting the command-and-control center and drug trafficking infrastructure belonging to a "super cartel" that controlled about one third of the cocaine trade in Europe.

        Law enforcement seized more than 30 tonnes of drugs and arrested 35 suspects in Dubai, Spain, France and Belgium, according to Europol. The arrests were the result of parallel investigations run in Spain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and the UAE, and Dutch police arrested 14 suspects last year as part of this same global operation.

Moral Behaviour Pays Off
posted by janrinok on Wednesday November 30, @04:34AM Printer-friendly
/dev/random

hubie writes:

Coupling two approaches of game theory can shed light on how moral norms evolve:

        One of the most fundamental questions facing humanity is: why do we behave morally? Because it is by no means self-evident that under certain circumstances we set our self-interest aside and put ourselves in the service of a group – sometimes to the point of self-sacrifice. Many theories have been developed to get to the bottom of this moral conundrum. There are two well-known proposed solutions: that individuals help their relatives so that the common genes survive (kin selection), and that the principle of "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" applies. If people help each other, everyone benefits in the end (principle of reciprocity).

        Mathematician Mohammad Salahshour of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, has used the tools of game theory to explain the emergence of moral norms – because game theory studies how people make rational decisions in conflict situations. For Salahshour, the question at the outset was: why do moral norms exist in the first place? And why do we have different, or even contrasting moral norms? For example, while some norms such as "help others", promote self-sacrificing behaviour, others, such as dress codes, appear not to have much to do with curbing selfishness. To answer these questions, Salahshour coupled two games: first, the classic prisoner's dilemma, in which two players must decide whether to cooperate for a small reward or betray themselves for a much larger reward (social dilemma). This game can be a typical example of a social dilemma, where success of a group as a whole requires individuals to behave selflessly. [...] Second, a game that focuses on typical decisions within groups, such as a coordination task, distribution of resources, choice of a leader, or conflict resolution. Many of these problems can be ultimately categorized as coordination or anticoordination problems.

In the idealized Prisoner's Dilemma, the optimal "rational" behavior is for every participant to act in their own self interest, but problems that require some sort of moral norm to achieve coordination and cooperation can't be addressed if too many individuals are acting selfishly. Salahshour found that if you apply both games at the same time, that not only cooperative behavior emerges, but also a social order. Acting morally pays off for the group because all individuals benefit from it.

        [...] "In my evolutionary model, there were no selfless behaviours at the beginning, but more and more moral norms emerged as a result of the coupling of the two games," Salahshour reports. "Then I observed a sudden transition to a system where there is a lot of cooperation." In this "moral state", a set of norms of coordination evolve which help individuals to better coordinate their activity, and it is precisely through this that social norms and moral standards can emerge. However, coordination norms favour cooperation: cooperation turns out to be a rewarding behaviour for the individual as well.

Journal Reference:
Mohammad Salahshour, Interaction between games give rise to the evolution of moral norms of cooperation, Plos Comp Bio, 2022. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010429

I've been very busy but I collected some tree seeds and got around to planting some of them in pots today. Earlier this year I planted over 100 saplings that I bought plus some that I transplanted from other places. Today I planted some juniper, holly and larch in pots, using berries a cones from nearby trees. I'm not sure how many larch seeds I managed to get out of the cones, but the juniper was prolific. Hopefully there will be something to look forward to in the spring.

There are hundreds of little rowan saplings all over the place. I think I will commandeer some which are in awkward places and put them in my wind break. They look particularly good in the autumn with all their bright red berries.

There's a crooked old Japanese larch with branches missing which has a lot of cones on it. Last year I tried to grow some but I think the pots became water logged and the seeds rotted. I might try again another day.

I bought plastic protective spirals for the saplings I planted, which prevented wildlife and sheep trying to eat them. My home-grown oaks are doing surprisingly well. I thought they didn't have enough roots to survive when I transplanted them, and deer had eaten them from the top, but they have grown back vigorously! I think I must have over twenty of them! I'm very pleased.

What do you do for fun when your brain is tired?

By that I mean when you are mentally exhausted from having to work hard plus deal with all sorts of incoming things, and your brain just wants a rest?

Hobbies and stuff are great, but when your brain is tired, even they can seem like a chore, or you end up just sitting and staring or unable to focus. What do you do to switch off completely and let your brain recharge?

From an article in the Guardian:

A senior member of a far-right Italian political party tipped to win general elections this month has appealed to state broadcaster Rai not to screen an episode of the globally popular children’s cartoon series Peppa Pig over the inclusion of a same-sex couple in its cast of characters.

Apparently a recent episode shown on UK TV for the first time shows co-parenting lesbian polar bears.

A character called Penny announces: “I live with my mummy and my other mummy. One mummy is a doctor and one mummy cooks spaghetti.” The family then sit down for a meal together.

The popular TV series is aimed at pre-schoolers and it should be noted that nowhere does it include any sexually-explicit material.

Still, the old misery-gutses get all in a tizzy about it. Stupid fascists.

I have three days to learn enough about the Rust programming language to head off the C++ guys at the pass. There's a meeting coming up.

Note that we don't have enough people who know C++ either, other than "everyone else uses it for everything so we should too." That's about the limit of their knowledge. This is PHB-level stuff.

I'm not planning on living out the rest of my career writing and debugging and maintaining C++. No way. Where do I start? I have already said, "I offers memory safety and it's good enough that Linus is letting it in the kernel now."

Help!

When you plant seeds, sometimes one or two don't grow. Another few may sprout but be deformed in some way such that they don't survive. Random mutations and random environmental factors will do that sort of thing.

We humans are products of the natural world. We are surrounded by life competing to survive. Fortunately we have evolved big brains and the intelligence to be able to plan ahead and work together. We can support each other and work to ensure that we are all provided for and to at least attempt to relieve suffering.

A large proportion of us go in to caring professions and study medicine. In the last 150 years or so we've learned about germs, discovered antibiotics and anaesthetics. We don't have to endure operations conscious and aware of pain any more, in general.

Philosophical advances have also been made. I don't claim to be a philosopher and have not read much philosophy, but the simplistic archaic religious beliefs of millennia past have gradually given way to more enlightened thought.

Then Trumpism/the Alt Wrong took hold and Roe vs. Wade was overturned in the USA. There have been a number of journal entries on this site regarding this attack on women's bodily autonomy and the resulting suffering. I saw another story this evening that I though I should share.

The Guardian has a story entitled "Louisiana woman faces 'horrifically cruel' abortion choices over fetus missing skull".

Nature has randomly produced for this woman a foetus without a skull and it will not survive more than a few hours, should it be born. However, the state does not include this condition (acrania) on its list of conditions justifying exceptions from its abortion ban.

Nancy Davis has retained lawyer Ben Crump as she becomes the latest to embody the gut-wrenching decisions some women are being forced to make after the US supreme court’s decision in June to strip away nationwide abortion rights, according to a statement from the attorney’s office.

There are some other horror stories in that article too, like the 16-year-old girl prevented from having an abortion by the state of Florida for being too young to make the decision, but being forced to carry the baby to term. Go figure.

I think the thing that takes the biscuit is the report about the 10-year-old Ohio girl who got pregnant as the result of being raped and had to travel to Indiana for the abortion. From the article

Though some media outlets and rightwing politicians baselessly questioned whether the girl existed or was instead a liberal hoax to stoke support for abortion rights, authorities have since charged a man in connection with the girl’s rape, a crime to which he has purportedly confessed.

Rightwing? Wrongwing, surely?