@[email protected] Well, it's not inherently extremely difficult to learn how to program. You could learn all the essential stuff from a YouTube video that is 10-hours long or a book that is 400-pages long. The difficulty comes from learning what is feasible and practical to do with computer logic. You have to get the requirements really right and knowing if the generated code is doing what is supposed to do. Syntax is relatively easy. What is difficult is to learn how to solve problems. This requires thinking like a computer scientist. Ultimately, it all depends on the level of complexity of your project.
remixtures
joined 2 years ago
@[email protected] Tell me about. I'm not a professional developer but more of a technical writer. As someone who has been in charge of reviewing and editing documentation explaining the functional requirements of a moderately complex project, I found it extremely difficult to get both the product and development sides in agreement.
"Unknown hackers last month targeted leaders of the exiled Uyghur community in a campaign involving Windows spyware, researchers revealed Monday.
Citizen Lab, a digital rights research group based at the University of Toronto, detailed an espionage campaign against members of the World Uyghur Congress (WUC), an organization that represents the Muslim-minority group, which has for years faced repression, discrimination, surveillance, and hacking from China’s government."
"The company, in other words, is "careless." Warned of imminent harms to its users, to democracy, to its own employees, the top executives simply do not care. They ignore the warnings and the consequences, or pay lip service to them. They don't care.
(...)
But there's another meaning to "careless" that lurks just below the surface of this excellent memoir: "careless" in the sense of "arrogant" – in the sense of not caring about the consequences of their actions.
To me, this was the most important – but least-developed – lesson of Careless People. When Wynn-Williams lands at Facebook, she finds herself surrounded by oafs and sociopaths, cartoonishly selfish and shitty people, who, nevertheless, have built a service that she loves and values, along with hundreds of millions of other people.
She's not wrong to be excited about Facebook, or its potential. The company may be run by careless people, but they are still prudent, behaving as though the consequences of screwing up matter."
"So yeah, it looks like "ultrathink" is a Claude Code feature - presumably that 31999 is a number that affects the token thinking budget, especially since "megathink" maps to 1e4 tokens (10,000) and just plain "think" maps to 4,000."
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/19/claude-code-best-practices/
"The DOGE employees, who are effectively led by White House adviser and billionaire tech CEO Elon Musk, appeared to have their sights set on accessing the NLRB's internal systems. They've said their unit's overall mission is to review agency data for compliance with the new administration's policies and to cut costs and maximize efficiency.
But according to an official whistleblower disclosure shared with Congress and other federal overseers that was obtained by NPR, subsequent interviews with the whistleblower and records of internal communications, technical staff members were alarmed about what DOGE engineers did when they were granted access, particularly when those staffers noticed a spike in data leaving the agency. It's possible that the data included sensitive information on unions, ongoing legal cases and corporate secrets — data that four labor law experts tell NPR should almost never leave the NLRB and that has nothing to do with making the government more efficient or cutting spending.
Meanwhile, according to the disclosure and records of internal communications, members of the DOGE team asked that their activities not be logged on the system and then appeared to try to cover their tracks behind them, turning off monitoring tools and manually deleting records of their access — evasive behavior that several cybersecurity experts interviewed by NPR compared to what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do."
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-musk-spacex-security
@grober_Unfug Try Gemini-2.5 Pro Preview. It's the best LLM. Alternatively, you can always try o3, OpenAI's latest LLM: https://lmarena.ai/.
BTW: I'm not the author of the post above :)
@kvadd Yes, but data brokers can buy that information for ad targeting and marketing purposes. These usages should be specifically outlawed, according to the GDPR.
"Browsers keep track of the pages that a user has visited, and they use this information to style anchor elements on a page differently if a user has visited that link before. Most browsers give visited links a different color by default; some web developers rely on the :visited CSS selector to style visited links according to their own preferences.
It is well-known that styling visited links differently from unvisited links opens the door to side-channel attacks that leak the user’s browsing history. One notable attack used window.getComputedStyle and the methods that return a NodeList of HTMLCollection of anchor elements (e.g. document.querySelectorAll, document.getElementsByTagName, etc.) to inspect the styles of each link that was rendered on the page. Once attackers had the style of each link, it was possible to determine whether each link had been visited, leaking sensitive information that should have only been known to the user.
In 2010, browsers implemented a mitigation for this attack: (1) when sites queried link styling, the browser always returned the “unvisited” style, and (2) developers were now limited in what styles could be applied to links. However, these mitigations were complicated for both browsers to implement and web developers to adjust to, and there are proponents of removing these mitigations altogether." https://github.com/explainers-by-googlers/Partitioning-visited-links-history
@Alabaster_[email protected] OK, smart ass. Here's a little conversation I had with Gemini 2.5 LLM from Google about this topic. It's backed up with official sources: https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts?state=%7B%22ids%22:%5B%221B0JecBTkQJ9wVjOnhM81piNPjrq3QbzU%22%5D,%22action%22:%22open%22,%22userId%22:%22113653798100742351191%22,%22resourceKeys%22:%7B%7D%7D&usp=sharing. Are you satisfied?
@Alabaster_[email protected] I just quoted an article that was authored by Robert Delwood. I don't have to justify anything. I don't own you a detailed empirical study of my position, sorry.
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"Israel’s tech world is small, and Israel leads the world in exports of spyware and digital forensics tools. Former Israeli Defense Forces intelligence officials have gone on to found tech companies, especially in the field of spyware and surveillance. Companies like NSO Group, maker of the controversial Pegasus spyware, were founded and staffed by Israeli officials. The company was sanctioned by the Biden Administration. Israeli spyware firms have become known for selling their products to oppressive regimes around the world, where the tech is often used to target human rights advocates, journalists, and dissidents.
TeleMessage was founded in 1999, the same year its founder left his Israeli military intelligence job. The company found early success in the burgeoning world of text message technology. The company grew and eventually pivoted to focusing on extracting messages from common communication platforms for the purposes of archiving, often to meet record keeping regulations.
Tech professionals have moved between companies like TeleMessage and some of the leading Israeli spyware firms. For example, Alon Falah, a technical support manager at TeleMessage until 2021, left the company to join NSO Group, according to his LinkedIn profile. Another employee, Itzhak Demoza, joined Telemessage last year after a stint at Cellebrite, maker of hardware and software widely used by law enforcement to extract data from smartphones."
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/mikewaltz-tech-israel-nationalsecurity-signal