TechNom (nobody)

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • He didn’t just wash off his hands. When asked in an interview about a moderator who edited a trans user’s profile to intentionally misgendering them (yup, even that’s not off limits for their mods), he justified it saying that ‘It’s not like using the N-word or something’. (For context, the n-word itself was innocuous. It gained notoriety due to its misuse by bigots like this).

    There are several such examples - repeatedly even after being called out. I don’t belong to any diversity groups. But I don’t care if they make the world’s best operating system. I will stay well away from it if only to avoid any interaction with such a group. They’re a bit too happy about harassing people (not just transgenders either).














  • The hack is still not fully understood and is being analyzed. It doesn’t help that Github suspended everything, including the original maintainer’s account (who is believed to be a victim of social engineering).

    Anyway, you will eventually see a post mortem. I’m willing to bet that it’s going to be as phenomenal as the hack itself. The case and its investigation is going to be a classic case study for all security researchers and security-minded users. Anyway, I doubt that the attackers will ever be found. Jia Tan, Jigar Kumar and others are going to remain as ghosts like Satoshi Nakamoto.



  • Peter Thiel is insolent enough to say out loud what these companies practice - ‘competition is for losers’. These quasi-monopolies aren’t here to provide the best value - quite the opposite. They want to kill all competition by any dirty tactic and then use the diminished choice to wring the customers of every penny they have. They want to extract maximum revenue by making sure that their inferior solution is the only option customers have.

    This problem isn’t solvable by market regulation alone. The world has enough a*****es around who will climb to the top of successful companies and find ways around the regulations. They’re being as bad as they can, while skirting the limits of what’s illegal. My main gripe is with the engineers, programmers, technicians and all technical creators who enable these scumbags. It’s not hard to see that supporting a proprietary solution amounts to yielding the consumers’ bargaining power to a monopoly. Despite that, they keep making these choices. For example, it’s not uncommon to hear senior engineering managers or technical-lead level employees saying, “I know that Chrome is spyware and I want to quit it. But this <stupid-webservice-at-office> works only on Chrome”. I feel like screaming at them that if they’re too incompetent to demand a change at the level they’re at, they’re in the wrong profession.

    If you’re a technical creator, your choices matter. It affects a lot more people than you alone. But more often than not, I see such creators surrendering principles in exchange for convenience. They hold as much responsibility as the market-abusers in making the world the way it is now.



  • CUDA is an API to run high performance compute code on Nvidia GPUs. CUDA is proprietary. So CUDA programs run only on Nvidia GPUs. Open alternatives like vulkan compute and opencl aren’t as popular as CUDA.

    Translation layers are interface software that allow CUDA programs to run on non-Nvidia GPUs. But creating such layers require a bit of reverse engineering of CUDA programs. But they are prohibiting this now. They want to ensure that all the CUDA programs in the world are limited to using Nvidia GPUs alone - classic vendor lock-in by using EULA.