They're unamerican, which is the worst thing you can possibly be.

But what if they work for the USG?

It's not a real car unless the CIA can remotely drive me into a concrete wall at 90 mph.

A Caltrans spokesperson says the sign was put out as part of the Pioneer Bridge Project. The sign doesn’t appear to have been broken into; Caltrans is investigating how the sign was changed.

Caltrans says their signs are locked with a S E C R E T P A S S W O R D, so they are looking into how their signs were changed.

I greatly look forward to cantankerous old men who cuss at me for taking my right of way being replaced with autopilots

Which hackers we're talking about? The overhyped Russians who didn't even hack the popular vote properly, thus taking away my Four-Year Christmas?

Yeah, of all things to put on the sign, that was sorta innocuous, given how widespread it is, how harmless it is, and also of course that most kids get it smack on the kisser at some point.

"Donald Trump has late-stage syphilis" packs a bit more punch

Anyway, the enemy comes from the east!

The upshot here is that slight alterations to an image that are invisible to humans can result in wildly different (and sometimes bizarre) interpretations from a machine learning algorithm. These "adversarial images" have generally required relatively complex analysis and image manipulation, but a group of researchers from the University of Washington, the University of Michigan, Stony Brook University, and the University of California Berkeley have just published a paper showing that it's also possible to trick visual classification algorithms by making slight alterations in the physical world. A little bit of spray paint or some stickers on a stop sign were able to fool a deep neural network-based classifier into thinking it was looking at a speed limit sign 100 percent of the time.

You can put lipstick on a herpes

A woman at work yesterday told me she wants an IoT garage door opener. That is possibly the second to last thing I would suggest for internet connectivity, just behind the actual locks on my house.

The difference between agile and Agile is the difference between a democratic republic and a Democratic Republic.

A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

Quality happens only when someone is responsible for it.


Poul-Henning Kamp


Thirteen years ago, Eric Raymond's book The Cathedral and the Bazaar (O'Reilly Media, 2001) redefined our vocabulary and all but promised an end to the waterfall model and big software companies, thanks to the new grass-roots open source software development movement. I found the book thought provoking, but it did not convince me. On the other hand, being deeply involved in open source, I couldn't help but think that it would be nice if he was right.

The book I brought to the beach house this summer is also thought provoking, much more so than Raymond's (which it even mentions rather positively): Frederick P. Brooks's The Design of Design (Addison-Wesley Professional, 2010). As much as I find myself nodding in agreement and as much as I enjoy Brooks's command of language and subject matter, the book also makes me sad and disappointed

[...]

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libtool's configure probes no fewer than 26 different names for the Fortran compiler my system does not have, and then spends another 26 tests to find out if each of these nonexistent Fortran compilers supports the -g option.

That is the sorry reality of the bazaar Raymond praised in his book: a pile of old festering hacks, endlessly copied and pasted by a clueless generation of IT "professionals" who wouldn't recognize sound IT architecture if you hit them over the head with it. It is hard to believe today, but under this embarrassing mess lies the ruins of the beautiful cathedral of Unix, deservedly famous for its simplicity of design, its economy of features, and its elegance of execution. (Sic transit gloria mundi, etc.)

One of Brooks's many excellent points is that quality happens only if somebody has the responsibility for it, and that "somebody" can be no more than one single person—with an exception for a dynamic duo. I am surprised that Brooks does not cite Unix as an example of this claim, since we can pinpoint with almost surgical precision the moment that Unix started to fragment: in the early 1990s when AT&T spun off Unix to commercialize it, thereby robbing it of its architects.

More than once in recent years, others have reached the same conclusion as Brooks. Some have tried to impose a kind of sanity, or even to lay down the law formally in the form of technical standards, hoping to bring order and structure to the bazaar. So far they have all failed spectacularly, because the generation of lost dot-com wunderkinder in the bazaar has never seen a cathedral and therefore cannot even imagine why you would want one in the first place, much less what it should look like. It is a sad irony, indeed, that those who most need to read it may find The Design of Design entirely incomprehensible. But to anyone who has ever wondered whether using m4 macros to configure autoconf to write a shell script to look for 26 Fortran compilers in order to build a Web browser was a bit of a detour, Brooks offers well-reasoned hope that there can be a better way.