Tag: win

We……… Got ……… Lucky

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Here is a very good account of how a techie more or less accidentally found the off switch for this weeks ransomware attack.

It’s not really an accident, though the techie, one “MalwareTech”, describes it as such.

Basically, he has a procedure, and a check list of sorts for evaluating this sort of thing.

Because he followed this procedure, he found that the software phoned home to an unregistered domain, and he registered that domain, and its existence functioned as a kill switch.

As I’ve said before, this is not an accident: this is a byproduct of proper procedures.

Much like a pilot’s preflight checklist, success is a byproduct of a deliberate process, and not some random stroke of luck.

As Baseballer Branch Ricky pithily noted, “Luck is a residue of Design.”

The Oxford Comma, Bitches, It Just Works

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on the one hand I love the #oxfordcomma, on the other hand these sentences truly are SO GOOD pic.twitter.com/Gst0OSY0Wo

— Jules (@scuttling) March 6, 2017

There is a dispute in linguistic circles as to whether or not you should the Oxford comma, which is the comma used by some before the,”And,” of the last item of a list.

If you use the Oxford comma, you write, “I love my parents, Lady Gaga, and Humpty Dumpty” and if you eschew this convention, “I love my parents, Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty.”

To my mind, the latter form strongly states that your parents are Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty, so I am, and likely always will be, a strong supporter of the Oxford (aka serial) comma.

Well, it appears that a judge in Maine agrees with me, ruling that an employer is liable for overtime pay for their truckers because of a missing comma:

Never let it be said that punctuation doesn’t matter.

 In Maine, the much-disputed Oxford comma has helped a group of dairy drivers in a dispute with a company about overtime pay.

 The Oxford comma is used before the words “and” or “or” in a list of three or more things. Also known as the serial comma, its aficionados say it clarifies sentences in which things are listed.

………

 In a judgment that will delight Oxford comma enthusiasts everywhere, a US court of appeals sided with delivery drivers for Oakhurst Dairy because the lack of a comma made part of Maine’s overtime laws too ambiguous.

 The state’s law says the following activities do not count for overtime pay:

The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of:

 (1) Agricultural produce;
(2) Meat and fish products; and
(3) Perishable foods.

The drivers argued, due to a lack of a comma between “packing for shipment” and “or distribution”, the law refers to the single activity of “packing”, not to “packing” and “distribution” as two separate activities. As the drivers distribute – but do not pack – the goods, this would make them eligible for overtime pay.

 Previously, a district court had ruled in the dairy company’s favour, who argued that the legislation “unambiguously” identified the two as separate activities exempt from overtime pay. But the appeals judge sided with the drivers.

 Circuit judge David J. Barron wrote:

We conclude that the exemption’s scope is actually not so clear in this regard. And because, under Maine law, ambiguities in the state’s wage and hour laws must be construed liberally in order to accomplish their remedial purpose, we adopt the drivers’ narrower reading of the exemption.

The AP REALLY needs to rewrite its style guide on this matter.

I’m sure that Merle Haggard’s wives would agree.

You Have to Read This

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It’s an essay about economists by an economist titled, The Wrongest Profession, and the can of whup ass that it’s author, CEPR economist Dean Baker, unleashes on the dismal science is a thing of beauty:

Over the past two decades, the economics profession has compiled an impressive track record of getting almost all the big calls wrong. In the mid-1990s, all the great minds in the field agreed that the unemployment rate could not fall much below 6 percent without triggering spiraling inflation. It turns out that the unemployment rate could fall to 4 percent as a year-round average in 2000, with no visible uptick in the inflation rate.

As the stock bubble that drove the late 1990s boom was already collapsing, leading lights in Washington were debating whether we risked paying off the national debt too quickly. The recession following the collapse of the stock bubble took care of this problem, as the gigantic projected surpluses quickly turned to deficits. The labor market pain from the collapse of this bubble was both unpredicted and largely overlooked, even in retrospect. While the recession officially ended in November 2001, we didn’t start creating jobs again until the fall of 2003. And we didn’t get back the jobs we lost in the downturn until January 2005. At the time, it was the longest period without net job creation since the Great Depression.

When the labor market did finally begin to recover, it was on the back of the housing bubble. Even though the evidence of a bubble in the housing sector was plainly visible, as were the junk loans that fueled it, folks like me who warned of an impending housing collapse were laughed at for not appreciating the wonders of modern finance. After the bubble burst and the financial crisis shook the banking system to its foundations, the great minds of the profession were near unanimous in predicting a robust recovery. Stimulus was at best an accelerant for the impatient, most mainstream economists agreed—not an essential ingredient of a lasting recovery.

While the banks got all manner of subsidies in the form of loans and guarantees at below-market interest rates, all in the name of avoiding a second Great Depression, underwater homeowners were treated no better than the workers waiting for a labor market recovery. The Obama administration felt it was important for homeowners, unlike the bankers, to suffer the consequences of their actions. In fact, white-collar criminals got a holiday in honor of the financial crisis; on the watch of the Obama Justice Department, only a piddling number of bankers would face prosecution for criminal actions connected with the bubble.

I think that the last graph is a bit to kind to Obama, but it’s well worth the read.

Tweet of the Day

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Hot on my slight revision to my profanity policy:

Hey @realDonaldTrump I oppose civil asset forfeiture too! Why don’t you try to destroy my career you fascist, loofa-faced, shit-gibbon!

— Daylin Leach (@daylinleach) February 7, 2017

It’s just too good not to post.

I am not completely in favor of this Tweet, I think that the use of “Weasel” is more effective, and more pleasing to the reader, than “Gibbon,” but I want this guy to run for US Congress.

This is F%$#ing Inspired

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Self-driving cars are all the rage right now, though I really don’t see the tech taking off for a very long time.

The problem is how to make an AI play nice with people on the road, who are inattentive, stupid, violent, vindictive, and frequently malicious.

And once you do, how do you test it?

Rolling it out on the road, with an operator in the drivers seat, is expensive.

Just the liability insurance would be insane.

Obviously, one solution, for the software at least, is to test it in a virtual environment, but this raises an important question: Where can one find a virtual reality that even comes close to mimicking the insanity that is humans driving cars?

Three Words: Grand Theft Auto:

Developers building self-driving cars can now take their AI agents for a spin in the simulated open world of Grand Theft Auto V – via OpenAI’s machine-learning playground, Universe.

The open-source MIT-licensed code gluing GTA V to Universe is maintained by Craig Quiter, who works for Otto – the Uber-owned startup that delivered 51,744 cans of Budweiser over 193km (120 miles) using a self-driving truck.

The software comes with a trained driving agent; all developers need is a copy of the game to get cracking. After that, programmers can swap out the demo AI model with their own agents to test their code and neural networks. Universe and Quiter’s integration code takes care of the fiddly interfacing with the game.

Video games new and old provide great training grounds for developing reinforcement learning agents, which learn through trial and error – or rather, trial and reward when things go right. OpenAI’s Universe was released in December, and is a wedge of open-source middleware that connects game controls and video displays to machine-learning agents so they can be trained in the virtual arenas.

Admittedly, GTA, with its hot rods, weapons, and rampant crime is only a pale shadow of commuting in Boston,* but putting self driving automobile software through its paces in the fictional burg of San Andreas, is a truly inspired reuse of code.

*No joke: I knew that it was time for me to leave New England when I screamed at someone for NOT cutting me off in a parking lot.

Your Awesome Fact of the Day

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In a development that should surprise no one, this is a fact about the Gary Larson Cartoon The Far Side:

Stegosaurus is world-famous for its lime-sized brain and the quartet of nasty-looking spikes on its tail. A 1982 “Far Side” strip decided to have a little fun with the latter attribute. In that cartoon, we find an early human anachronistically lecturing his fellow cavemen about dinosaur-related hazards. Pointing at the rear end of a Stegosaurus diagram, he says “Now this end is called the thagomizer … after the late Thag Simmons.” Without meaning to, Larson’s strip plugged a gap in the scientific lexicon. Previously, nobody had ever given a name to the unique arrangement of tail spikes found on Stegosaurus and its relatives. But today, many paleontologists use the word “thagomizer” when describing this apparatus, even in scientific journals.

This is so full of awesome that there is a risk of injury.

Schrödinger’s Coolness

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Vice President Joe Biden seems to have the ability to be totally cool and totally uncool at the same time.

When I made this comment, my son observed that this was “Schrodinger’s Coolness,” in that he is simultaneously cool and not cool, much like the famously indeterminate cat.

Case in point are reports that Biden made a friendship bracelet for Barack Obama for his 55th birthday:

Vice President Biden on Thursday celebrated President Obama’s 55th birthday with a touching note on Twitter.

Happy 55th, Barack! A brother to me, a best friend forever. pic.twitter.com/uNsxouTKOO

— Vice President Biden (@VP) August 4, 2016

I’m gonna miss him when Bond villain wannabe Mike Pence takes the seat.

Considering the explosion of Biden memes on Facebook, I do not think that I am alone in this.

Glenda Jackson is Your Bucket Full of Awesome Today

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Two time Oscar winning actress Glenda Jackson took a 25-year hiatus from acting.

She decided to engage in a side career as a member of parliament.

Now, at age 80, she is returning to acting ……… playing Lear ……… at the Old Vic.

If anyone wants to make me happy, send me to London to see this:

It’s one of the most demanding roles in theater, but Glenda Jackson, the two-time Oscar-winning actress, will open a new production of “King Lear” on Friday having not stepped onstage for 25 years. In the interim, she worked to keep a realm together as a member of the British Parliament; her first act in her return to the theater will be to play a monarch who breaks one up.

Many major actors take a run at the role in Shakespeare’s tragedy, a part so daunting that it’s nicknamed Mount Lear. It would seem especially so for Ms. Jackson, whose last performance came in 1991, in Eugene O’Neill’s “Mourning Becomes Electra” at the Glasgow Citizens Theater. Her return, after such a long hiatus, is highly unusual and, at 80, she is older than all but one of Britain’s last 10 Lears in major productions.

What’s more, she’s playing him at the Old Vic — a 198-year-old, 1,000-seat theater with an imposing history. Laurence Olivier was Othello there; Judi Dench was Juliet. “She’s part of that tradition now,” its artistic director, Matthew Warchus, said.

Before starting his job, Mr. Warchus invited Ms. Jackson for a meeting. He had tried to tempt her back into acting while she was still in Parliament, to no avail, and he arrived with “very, very low expectations.”

Her reply took him by surprise, as did her suggestion that she play King Lear.

Please ……… Send me to London.

Well Trolled

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The Clinton Campaign is now offering tin foil hats with a rump theme:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign is mocking Donald Trump with do-it-yourself tin foil hats.
Cinton’s campaign website features a promotional brochure for a “Trump Tin Foil Hat.” The brochure ridicules the Republican nominee for his “conspiracies” and shares instructions to help supporters create their own “Make America Great Again” foil hats.

“In fact if we elect Donald Trump, we could have a president dedicated to the truth: where is Elvis? Where did we film the moon landing?” the brochure reads.

Grab your tinfoil hat and buckle up—it doesn’t look like Donald Trump will stop peddling conspiracies any time soon. https://t.co/PrwQ5jXQPq pic.twitter.com/iAzZMPbf7I

— The Briefing (@TheBriefing2016) October 25, 2016

Whoever did this deserves a promotion.

Elizabeth Warren Gets Added to My List of People I Do Not Want to Piss Off

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Oh, Snap

Wells Fargo has been coercing low level employees to create accounts without customer’s knowledge.

Wells has fired over 5000 low level employees over the criminogenic environment created by upper management.

They mandated cross-selling 8 accounts per customer when the industry norm is less than 3 accounts per customer

The manager of the division, Carrie Tolstedt, was allowed to retire with a $125 million wet kiss from the bank.

Well, the CEO of Wells Fargo, John Stumpf, was called before the Senate Banking Committee, and Elizabeth Warren gutted him like an overfed mackerel:

The Senate Banking Committee conducted a hearing Tuesday about the massive scandal currently engulfing Wells Fargo. The word “fraud” was used repeatedly by senators on both sides of the aisle when describing the bank’s creation of millions of unauthorized bank and credit card accounts for existing customers.

………

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren—a longtime advocate for more stringent regulation of Wall Street—tore into Stumpf, describing the unauthorized accounts as a “massive, years long scam.” She asked Stumpf what he has done to take responsibility for his bank’s actions. “You have said repeatedly, ‘I am accountable,'” she said. “But what have you done to actually hold yourself accountable? Have you resigned?”

Stumpf avoided answering the question directly, prompting Warren to repeat her question, her voice rising, at least three times.

Warren proceeded to pummel Stumpf with more questions. “Have you returned one nickel of the money you earned while this scam was going on?” she asked. Stumpf evaded the question several times. (Stumpf said earlier in the hearing that he earned $19.3 million last year.) Finally, an exasperated Warren said, “I’ll take that as a ‘no.'”

She then asked if he’d fired any members of his senior management. Stumpf initially began by describing the firing of regional branch managers, but Warren stopped him, emphasizing that her question was not about low-level leadership but about the people at the top. Again, Stumpf’s answer was no.

She then went on to note that Stumpf had earned an additional $200 million in stock options from the stock appreciation largely driven by their absurdly high cross-selling numbers.

She really took the bark off that asshole, and it is a true thing of beauty.

Watch ……… the ……… Video.