Category Archives: News

Article note: It sounds like they're using the LLM trained on assembly not to optimize the assembly, but to select and order passes in LLVM to optimize the assembly. ...And it still regularly produces code with different semantics than the input. And optimization was measured by number of instructions, not runtime on a target. Nifty, but one of those hype>>reality things, like everything around LLMs.

Article note: End-user programming has been a hard problem for as long as accessible computers have existed. There is generally a lack of respect for spreadsheets as the people's programming tool when folks go to write about the idea. They're old and unglamorous and often used outside the target domain...but it's also probably the most common and accessible. In general, I think the environments that closely tie the usual interaction mode and the automation have the best shot, so the same reasoning and primitives continue to work, but they always make somewhat awkward programming languages. ...and, I suspect, there is the issue a rather small portion of the population have developed the necessary procedural thinking, and most of the ones that have will use a srs bsns programming language.

Article note: Fuck those rent-seeking middlemen, libgen has done more for human knowledge in the last 15 years that the whole rent-seeking textbook publishing industry.

Enlarge (credit: Maryna Terletska | Moment)

Yesterday, some of the biggest textbook publishers sued Library Genesis, an illegal shadow library that publishers accused of "extensive violations of federal copyright law."

Publishers suing include Cengage Learning, Macmillan Learning, McGraw Hill, and Pearson Education. They claimed that Library Genesis (aka Libgen) is operated by unknown individuals based outside the United States, who know that the shadow library is "one of the largest, most notorious, and far-reaching infringement operations in the world" and intentionally violate copyright laws with "absolutely no legal justification for what they do."

According to publishers, Libgen offers free downloads for over 20,000 books that the publishers never authorized Libgen to distribute. They claimed that Libgen is "a massive piracy effort" and noted that their complaint may be updated if more infringed works are found. This vast infringement is causing publishers and authors serious financial and creative harm, publishers alleged.

Article note: This is my favorite kind of history piece. ...And I'm still bewildered by the persistence of one of a series of throwaway addons to make ed less nasty and arcane, whose awkward design only makes sense in the context of painfully slow connections and particularly shitty early glass terminals.

Article note: Very cool. That's a support window that actually corresponds to the rate of hardware changes, and makes sense for the kind of institutional and/or nontechnical customers the ChromeOS ecosystem targets. They even backdated a number of models into the new windows.

Article note: No surprises here, it's long been suspected that Phenylephrine was basically a placebo which was pushed on to the market because (politically) there needed to be an alternative to Pseudoephedrine, so that could be restricted/tracked/made inconvenient over concerns of it being used as an easy Methamphetamine precursor. Now we find out what the FDA will do now that it has been firmly established that was wishful thinking and/or a lie.

Article note: The long term plan for CUPS is also to drop specific printer driver support and rely on IPP or PAPPL (Printer Application Framework) software shims that make printers that need special handling to work like an IPP printer (and this was announced like 5 years ago). It's probably even more compelling on Windows because the vendor bullshit is more egregious.

Article note: Having an articulating arm with a decent camera is great. I don't know that their $3-400 unit adds much over the medicore $50ish arm I currently have.

Article note: They got caught lying about their "Free" offering being free, which is only a viable business because they've successfully lobbied to keep the tax code complicated and opaque enough to support their rentseeking. Taxes and Healthcare in the US both need a gigantic public interest knife to the middlemen.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Sasirin Pamai)

The Federal Trade Commission's chief administrative law judge ruled that Intuit violated US law with deceptive advertising and should be forced to stop promoting TurboTax as "free" unless all conditions imposed on the free offer are immediately and conspicuously displayed to consumers.

The initial decision by Administrative Law Judge D. Michael Chappell was released today and is subject to an automatic review by the full commission. The FTC commissioners will likely rule against Intuit, which issued a statement indicating that it will take the matter to federal court. The order would be in effect for 20 years if it survives appeal.

The response from Intuit noted that the administrative law judge is "an employee of the FTC" and "ruled in favor of the FTC in the agency's own lawsuit." The FTC filed an administrative complaint against Intuit in March 2022.

Article note: Rolling out a new tracking mechanism controlled by the largest advertising incumbent, planned to replace the (admittedly awful and invasive, but fairly easily user-controlled) current solution, in the browser they also control. In response to the other browser vendors giving users more control (and default-deny) on third party cookies, thus harming googles' cash cow advertising business. Hidden behind a misleading popup in an automatic upgrade. Definitely not shady. I am curious what subverting it will look like, since it's running on the local machine it should be easy enough to make it always return a blank list or a list of injection attack strings or something to fuck with advertisers.

Enlarge / Google's not looking as good as it used to. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Don't let Chrome's big redesign distract you from the fact that Chrome's invasive new ad platform, ridiculously branded the "Privacy Sandbox," is also getting a widespread rollout in Chrome today. If you haven't been following this, this feature will track the web pages you visit and generate a list of advertising topics that it will share with web pages whenever they ask, and it's built directly into the Chrome browser. It's been in the news previously as "FLoC" and then the "Topics API," and despite widespread opposition from just about every non-advertiser in the world, Google owns Chrome and is one of the world's biggest advertising companies, so this is being railroaded into the production builds.

Google seemingly knows this won't be popular. Unlike the glitzy front-page Google blog post that the redesign got, the big ad platform launch announcement is tucked away on the privacysandbox.com page. The blog post says the ad platform is hitting "general availability" today, meaning it has rolled out to most Chrome users. This has been a long time coming, with the APIs rolling out about a month ago and a million incremental steps in the beta and dev builds, but now the deed is finally done.

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  Chrome users will see this pop-up, telling them the ad platform has rolled out to them. [credit: Aurich Lawson ]

Users should see a pop-up when they start up Chrome soon, informing them that an "ad privacy" feature has been rolled out to them and enabled. The new pop-up has been hitting users all week. As you can see in the pop-up, all of Google's documentation about this feature feels like it was written on opposite day, with Google calling the browser-based advertising platform "a significant step on the path towards a fundamentally more private web."