StarDreamer

They were banned banned. No showing of any phones in class/hallways/dorms etc. If a teacher sees a phone anywhere they’re supposed to confiscate it and call the parents.

Granted, actually happened was that a few exam top scorers carried a phone in their bag since they “needed it in case of emergency contact from prep school”. The teachers turned a blind eye to it, and of course, the parents were also in on it. What are you gonna do, suspend the ranked No. 1 student? If anything, the only people targeted were kids with bad grades, or didn’t fit in with the “prime and proper” image the school was cultivating.

Let’s be honest, we all keep talking. The question is who put a mic in front of this bumbling idiot.

Or who knows, maybe someone put a mic there to let him self-destruct. One can hope.

This is practically impossible. We have proverbially locked the keys in the room. IP/UDP/TCP are here to stay due to the prevalence of buggy/nonstandard middleboxes (hardware firewalls, ASIC switches, NAT routers) in the Internet.

We have new protocols, new theories for networking (look at NDN, in which is physically incapable of being censored or ddosed). However, anything that doesn’t conform to existing IP/TCP/UDP will get dropped by these so-called “middleboxes”. Even things that DO conform to IP/TCP/UDP will sometimes get dropped by these middleboxes (e.g. new TCP extensions, QUIC, etc). We cannot build an Internet replacement without almost fully scrapping every piece of networking equipment deployed since the 90s.

Middleboxes were supposed to be a temporary solution until we could transition to a new protocol like IPv6. Companies went for the cheap solution and violated the end-to-end principle of networking instead. Now we’re paying the price and stuck with it.

Some instructors don’t supervise grad course exams for the following reasons:

1. Grad school grading is a joke anyways, everyone gets a B+ at minimum
2. The content is so state of the art you won’t be able to cheat. You won’t find reasonable answers online, or on your neighbors exam
3. If you’re paying full tuition for grad school and still slacking off, that’s on you personally.

Because the goal is to get people to learn/think about something. We don’t care what you use as long as you retain knowledge taught in the course. If what helps you learn is LLMs, then go for it.

Problem right now is there is a significant amount of people that are using these tools to do the thinking for them. And this is when Office Hours, Homework feedback, Email (I guarantee all students emails are responded to within 24hrs. Most are handled within 30 minutes) are all available and paid for (by tuition). I am even happy to schedule one-on-ones if privacy is a concern, but none of this is being utilized.

Let’s be honest, with their attendance rate in class, I don’t think these students actually vote…

We are allowing LLMs for all of our homeworks. As long as you can solve the problems in the indicated way with a reasonable answer.

In case you are not sure about the “indicated way”, there are practice questions with detailed step-by-step solutions for each hw problem that you just have to change the numbers/equations a bit and you’ll get points.

What we’ve noticed is that the year-after-year averages are significantly higher, especially this year. However, students are bringing in details that we explicitly didn’t go over in lecture and putting that on the homework (e.g. Delayed branching in Computer Architecture, because it’s a random quirk of MIPS that even assembly programmers don’t have to deal with). None of these details are ever mentioned in lecture or the practice homeworks (in a few cases, they are mentioned with the explicit wording “do not worry about this now”)

We can only assume people are copying the homework into LLMs and copying the results straight down. The latest exam had a question where students were asked to analyze a specific chunk of assembly code to deduce certain properties about it. Approximately 20-30% of the students didn’t know the FORMAT to answer it, despite it literally being item 1 on last week’s homework.

And when I say format, I don’t mean exactly “you must write these exact words or you lose points”. It’s literally just point out “line A and B have this property X because of attribute Y”. Just including ABXY as shown in the practice homework is enough. But apparently people are too lazy to read a 10 bullet point answer…

What descent? There is no descent. They started at bedrock since the beginning. People should have seen it back then.

1. All NICs already work off of DMA to access/copy packets into/from memory. Yes, even your $10 ones. So “would need DMA to stand a chance” doesn’t have any technical meaning other than putting a bunch of words together.

2. The bottleneck for TCP is sequence number processing, which must be done on a single core (for each flow) and cannot be parallelized. You also cannot offload sequence number processing without making major sacrifices that result in corrupted data in several edge cases (see TCP chimney offload, which cannot handle the required TCP extensions needed to run TCP at 1Gbps). So no, “more offloading” is easy to say but not feasible.

3. Who needs it: data centers trying to scale legacy software, or dealing with multi region data replication (rocev2 is terrible for long distance links). But no, no home user would need it

Networking researcher here. Your bottleneck wouldn’t be the NIC, but memory bandwidth, CPU compute (for TCP), PCIe bandwidth, and Storage bandwidth, also the bandwidth of the server you’re connecting to. You’ll also need some sort of fiber SFP connection for your entire house, and those have firmware that usually makes them vendor locked. Most networking issues are also latency related, so increasing your throughput to 25Gbps wouldn’t help.

So yeah, not a good time for home use.

So you’re saying there’s a chance I can have cheese if I go to college?

Sign me up! Where’s the cheddar?

is definitely on every normal user’s mind at all times.

That was the context. The problem wa connecting to Wireshark, which more and more people are doing thanks to general awareness of VPNs.

and last but not least people like you going ‘hmm yes but akshually’ in sort-of-defense-but-not-really of the deliberately malicious and billion-dollar company.

Huh? Where in my post did I defend MS? I was there when Balmer and crew decided to sue anyone with a pulse for using Linux. I was there when the Cathedral acquired the Bazaar (and I deleted my account for it), and I am still here using Linux and BSD for every single machine I own with the exception of one. I still hold a grudge against Mr. Bill “Jump on a roller to show how fit you are” Gates, and I refuse to purchase anything from their game catalog since 2011. Hopefully with this context, you would no longer misconstrue my point as “defending Microsoft”.

Alas, normal users care about neither. The computer is just a tool that allows them to do work which allows them to put food on the table. If your assistance is just “boo hoo use Linux”. That’s not productive to them nor us. Joe Shmoe isn’t gonna care that you should save your documents as ODT instead of DOCX. They need that document working with no hassle NOW.

Look at it this way: A normal dude with bad hair and questionable social intelligence isn’t getting up in the morning and deciding to fuck with a million or more users by making their computers unbootable. There is only good intentions.

Case in video game modding: 1. GShade, where the developer deliberately made people’s game segfault if compiled on their own after an update 2. MultiMC, where the developer personally threatened to sue for trademark violation after packaging the application for a Linux distro 3. Bukkit, where one dev decided to DMCA and take down all instances of the project.

Outside of video games: the entire university of Maryland, which attempt to inject backdoors into the Linux kernel that was not caught until they published a paper.

Also, for the “good dudes part”: regardless of intentions, if the damage is done, the harm is done. If a suitcase falls from an airplane and kills me tomorrow, I wouldn’t care whether it was intentional or not. I would be dead.

Going back to the original blog post: there is both a user problem and a technical problem here. The technical problem “could” be fixed by switching to Linux (assuming systemd or gnome doesn’t get to it first), but the user problem can’t. Calling out anyone who points out the user problem as “corpo drone” isn’t going to make it go away.

Grab your shovel, time to lucky 10000 some bash.org content!

Devil’s advocate here: switching to Linux wouldn’t help.

I recently had to set up a public web server for a org that I belonged to. The idea was that I would set everything up in the most secure and unbreakable way I can think of, write documentation on how to do everything, transfer ownership of all the “break glass” credentials and lock my own account once I’m done.

This turned out to be a huge mistake. What was supposed to be some free work for a hobby group turned into a massive pain every day at 3-4am (due to time zone differences)

The person in charge of managing access control couldn’t figure out how wg-easy works. She managed to give her own credentials to EVERYONE who needed access, which obviously didn’t work due to IP conflicts. When pointed out, she modified the IP in every config file, which of course, still didn’t work. It took forever to tell her NOT to share credentials and create new peers for each user.

The biggest problem is some how NOT windows or mac users. There is a single Linux user that is causing the most headaches. When I set up wireguard, I tested on both Linux and Windows, with Linux being what I used. I ran into some minor hiccups with getting split dns to work correctly, but it was relatively easy to fix in Network Manager. I assumed if there are other Linux users they would be able to fix it themselves. Obviously I was wrong.

Said person had DoH enabled in their browser that they didn’t know how to disable, running varieties of “I don’t know” for their network stack, DNS resolver, etc. almost every question for dig, cat /etc/resolv.conf descended into “what’s that?” or completely incorrect commands (e.g. resolving a http url in dig). I could not figure out what the person was running, the person themselves had no idea what was running (I think it was systemd-resolvd, but I still don’t know as of now). Eventually, after 3 workdays of trying to help fix this at 3-4am, I gave up. I can’t help with a personal device belonging to somebody that has no idea what they’re doing.

As for why I’m mentioning this story: switching to Linux wouldn’t help this lady with her problem. There are similar issues on linux that would prevent a login or a graphical session (there was an old work machine that ran VLC, where VLC threw GBs worth of QT errors, eventually causing systemd to crash on reboot when the drive was full). The problem here isn’t just the system, it’s the user. A lot of people seem to be allergic to providing more details than “it’s not working”, “I don’t know” and “I didn’t try anything”. If the general mindset is “I don’t know what’s wrong with no details”, there’s no savings the user from technical problems.

On a side note for “why the hell did I knowingly volunteer to set up a web server for someone else”: the whole project was already 5 months overdue. It was beneficial for everyone for the server to be up asap. Said person in charge didn’t think of anything (dns, hosting, software stack) other than ask a bunch of CS college students to design a Web app for her. Needless to say the students bailed on her (which is probably the best scenario? In terms of maintainability and security concerns). It also only took me 2 weeks to set everything up (lamp stack, K3S, crowdsec, openappsec, wireguard, etc)

What’s your emergency “break glass” policy?

Is it a bottle of whiskey?

I agree that matrix is a slow and buggy hot mess, but its issues mainly lie with scaling. As long as your instance is small it works well enough. Imo this is architectural and will never be fixed with synapse.

As for no alternatives for discord. I think the problem is that people have come to expect a certain level of QoS with hosted services that are expensive to maintain for hobbyists (cdn, load balancing, nat traversal, ddos protection, etc). I think this is fundamental to how we’re abusing IP when it’s way past its prime and on life support using middle boxes. If we want to reclaim this space, the best way forward would be something like NDN, but the transition would be astronomical that nobody wants to do it.

Our minds like to process entities/companies like Google as human beings, which allows us to assign emotions to these things. But the truth is, they are nothing but a glorified Chinese room experiment.

People made the largest browser engine and operating system, not Google. Without people, the company is nothing. A company like Google is nothing but a set of self operating rules.

I love/loathe Google just as much as I love/loathe my weekly /tmp cleaning cron job. Even if it accidentally nukes my files, it’s just doing as it’s designed to do.

You design a system to maximize shareholder value, it will do exactly that without caring a single thing about human ethics.

1. They were ALREADY scanning your data using AI… And banning people for simply discussing certain topics.
2. How do people even notice these things? I honestly couldn’t tell. (Edit: okay, I forgot about the domain)

Anyways, I’m trying to get people in specific vulnerable communities to switch to matrix. But the amount of people refusing to do so out of convenience (and even refusing to setup MFA or using different passwords for their online accounts, including discord) is staggering.

I may be biased (PhD student here) but I don’t fault them for being as such. Ethics is something that 1) requires formal training 2) requires oversight 3) contains to are different to every person. Quite frankly, it’s not part of their training, never been emphasized as part of their training, and subjective based on cultural experiences.

What is considered unreasonable risk of harm is going to be different to everybody. To me, if the entire design runs locally and does not collect data for Google’s use then it’s perfectly ethical. That being said, this does not prevent someone else from adding the data collection features. I think the original design of such a system should put in a reasonable amount of effort in stopping that. But if that is done then there’s nothing else to blame them about. The moral responsibility lies with the one who pulled the trigger.

Should the original designer have anticipated this issue thus never took the first step? Maybe. But that depends on a lot of circumstance that we don’t know so it’s hard to predict anything meaningful.

As for the more “harm than good” analysis, I absolutely detest that sort of reasoning since it attempts to quantify social utility in a pure mathematical sense. If this reasoning holds, an extreme example would be justifying harm to any minority group as long as it maximizes benefit for society. Basically Omelas. I believe a good quantitative reasoning would be checking if harm is introduced to ANY group of people, as long as that’s the case the whole is considered unethical.

This is common for companies that like to hire PhDs.

PhDs like to work on interesting and challenging projects.

With nobody to reign them in, they do all kinds of cool stuff that makes no money (e.g. Intel Optane and transactional memory).

Designing a realtime scam analysis tool with resource constraints is interesting enough to be greenlit but makes no money.

Once released, they’ll move on to the next big challenge, and when nobody is there to maintain their work, it will be silently dropped by Google.

I’m willing to bet more than 70% of the Google graveyard comes from projects like these.