> They haven’t lived in a context where they need to care.
You might believe you don't need opsec, and then new laws are passed, or your national supreme court overturns the case that gave you your rights, or someone invades; and now suddenly you're wanted for anything from overstaying a visa, outright murder, or simply existing.
USA, right now, peoples lives are being destroyed because the wrong people got their data. Lethal consequences exist in Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran.
Certain professions per definition: Journalists, Lawyers, Intelligence, Military.
Certain Ethnicities. (Jewish, Somali) ; Faiths...
It doesn't need to be quite this dramatic though. But you might accidentally have broken some laws and don't even know about it yet. Caught a fish? Released a fish? Give the wrong child a bowl of soup [1]. Open the door, refuse to open the door. Signed a register; didn't sign a register. The list of actual examples is endless. The less people know about you, the less they can prosecute.
[1] A flaw in the Dutch Asylum Emergency Measures Act (2025) that would have criminalized offering even a bowl of soup to an undocumented person. The Council of State confirmed this reading. A follow-up bill was needed to fix it.
There is no world where a totalitarian government’s law enforcement ambitions on some object-level question are thwarted by the same government’s enforcement of privacy law. Countries with GDPR that are thinking of rounding up and kicking out the refugees know perfectly well who and where the refugees are.
We could set some sort of standard, eg using the <meta> tags on web pages to set an age bracket? (or better, include actual fine grained content warnings like PEGI provides?) , now the parents can control what the kid sees; or even the kids themselves at times, which is probably much closer to what is desirable.
There are numerous alternative operating systems and variants out there that should get more of our attention now. There's a mobile ubuntu, e/os , and more.
More than accurate enough to put an ASM in the right ballpark.
Modern militaries face some interesting challenges.
Possibly mobile apps should be designed to be somewhat secure for military use by defaul, backed by law.
Alternately, phones should have a military safe OS with vetted app store. Something like F-droid, or more on toto phone ubuntu, but tailored.
Obviously, you still need to be security conscious. But a system that is easy to reason about for mortals would not be a bad idea.
Rules like secure by default, and no telemetry or data exfiltration, (and no popups etc), wouldn't be the worst. Add in that you then have a market for people to actually engage with to make more secure apps, and
A) Military can then at least have something like a phone on them, sometimes. Which can be good for morale.
B) it improves civilian infrastructure reliability and resiliance as well.
Of course, wanting to be technically correct: Iranians are Aryan (Iran is a variant spelling), and literally Caucasian (they live near the Caucasus on the Asian continent).
In other words, they're the prototype "White People", at least by claims - over and back. Not that that stops anyone anyway. Certainly doesn't stop people who merely claim to be Aryan :-P
So far I've only been able to get coding assistants to do things I actually understand (or slightly beyond). Either something I learned long ago, or these days things I learn online .... with the help of the LLM.
Either way, if you want to talk with an LLM on the same level, you're going to need to train on the same dataset.
I'm going to assume that maybe he's getting a bit too caught up in his own rhetoric, and this doesn't mean that he's actually going to give that order.
Hopefully?
But he should at very least know better if he's the secdef. If anything, the civilian leadership should be more restrained than the military.
And it does signal that no one is briefing him beforehand on things you really should or shouldn't say.
Why would you assume that? This administration has trumpeted their intents continuously from the rooftop and delivered on their promises every time. Why do people continuously assume that this time, finally, reason and restraint will prevail?
Rule 46. Ordering that no quarter will be given, threatening an adversary therewith or conducting hostilities on this basis is prohibited (Crimes Against International Humanitarian Law, Genocide and Other Crimes Against Humanity)
Looks like the US is trying to join the club of Countries Whose Leaders are War Criminals, Russia and Israel being other notable members.
>Looks like the US is trying to join the club of Countries Whose Leaders are War Criminals
"Trying to join?"
The US has had a platinum membership in that club for nearly a century. Usually American leaders are at least smart enough not to say the quiet part out loud.
>But he should at very least know better if he's the secdef.
He wasn't selected to know better. He's an ex Fox News commentator and far-right Christian nationalist. He has Nazi tattoos. The right has been salivating for a hardcore military of Spartan chads running "with the safety off" ever since Vietnam and he's giving them exactly the performance they want to see.
Oh, my impression is that there's many iterative approaches to writing code (and doing other things besides). All of them work for a while, and then either someone "simplifies" out the iteration part, or in some way they render the iterative part toothless.
Basically you end up with something resembling a cargo cult, with all the rituals still there, but the tightly coupled feedback loop is missing.
Quick question: There's some sort of minor UAT ~once a week (or per whatever your cycle is), RIGHT? And then you find out umpteen things wrong (with the software and with the specs) , and you fix them; RIGHT?
If you have an actual commissioning or final UAT at the end of your project, it's just a formality with cake RIGHT?
I yeah, I’m holding it wrong that’s the problem. Agile suffers from the “no true Scotsman” fallacy to a massive extent. If the methodology was any good nobody would be arguing whether they were doing it wrong or not.
My contention is not “holding it wrong”, my contention is that it’s irredeemably flawed because the nature of it puts 99% of the actual (not fabricated) work and responsibility solely on developers, making the project manages and BA useless noise you have to fight just to get anything finished.
Heh, you are probably not wrong? It's not that you're holding it wrong. It's just you're more likely to have gotten a cargo cult version of it by now, so there's no way to hold it right in the first place. Agile isn't the first and isn't the last iteration of this particular pattern.
Extreme Programming, RUP, Spiral Model, RAD, DSDM, probably some variants of CMMI, ISO 9001 , we can continue this list for a while or even get into other disciplines. Each time you start out with a real feedback loop doing real work, and in the end everyone has cargo culted it. Mostly because a lot of people don't grok what feedback loops are, and think they can leave 'em out. I'm not even sure the project managers and BAs are the only ones to blame here. The whole organization conspires to replace scary feedback (and it really is scary!) with comfortable processes. Users don't want to talk to devs. Devs don't want to ship half-baked things. Managers need predictability for their spreadsheets. Everyone gets the cargo cult they deserve. "We mostly just took the good parts" := We left out the active ingredient.
After a while someone comes along with this radical new invention: "let's ACTUALLY apply a feedback loop", and here we go again.
To be fair, it DOES work for a while. you can start out dressing in drag and doing the hula[1] for all I care, so long as you iterate and run a feedback loop! At some point you'll actually successfully build a million dollar product anyway. .... Of course people will then copy you and dress in leaf skirts and dance all night long, and THEIR projects all fail.
This has been "Kim's overly oversimplified history of innovation in development methodologies". You're welcome, I'm sure.
> lot of people don't grok what feedback loops are
or they grok it very well, esp. the scary part..
Very few people want/enjoy negative feedback. On ANY level, bottom to top, the higher, the less probable to like/take it, esp. from underlings. Because that needs understanding of common goal at very different level, and incentives aren't aligned that way. Maybe in tiny companies / teams-left-on-their-own , corrective feedback works. for a while. But scaling it?
> We left out the active ingredient.
yea, thrown out the baby with the dirty water. In most cases last decade, i am only seeing rituals without essence, "monkey-policy" style. But i have not seen much dedication either, people want to get-on-with-their lifes, and doing work is just a vehicle
Sure personal feedback is scary, but to be frank it's only a small part of it, and doesn't need to get personal at all. And the machines participating in systems don't have feelings. (mostly at least ;-) )
Just to be sure, I'm talking closed loop control, right?
Observe current state, compare to desired state, figure the difference, act to reduce the difference, repeat until current state is close enough to desired state within tolerance. How else do you close the gap reliably?
Very important concept in tech (lots of control theory), biology (neural closed loop control), business (pdca), and military (ooda, guided weapons) . Some places it does work, FAA has Just Culture with blameless post-mortems; that works. Boyd had to fight for it, but military do have OODA in a lot of their theory now. Demming's PDCA is of course famous because of the japanese companies applying it (and then people started copying the idea and it didn't always work :-P) . But... people do keep missing the secret of tightly monitored closed loops and instead use ritualized open loops.
Agile started out the same way: plan on a short horizon, check how well you're adhering to it, improve both the planning process and the process under control, wash rinse repeat until you're on target.
You might believe you don't need opsec, and then new laws are passed, or your national supreme court overturns the case that gave you your rights, or someone invades; and now suddenly you're wanted for anything from overstaying a visa, outright murder, or simply existing.
USA, right now, peoples lives are being destroyed because the wrong people got their data. Lethal consequences exist in Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran.
Certain professions per definition: Journalists, Lawyers, Intelligence, Military.
Certain Ethnicities. (Jewish, Somali) ; Faiths...
It doesn't need to be quite this dramatic though. But you might accidentally have broken some laws and don't even know about it yet. Caught a fish? Released a fish? Give the wrong child a bowl of soup [1]. Open the door, refuse to open the door. Signed a register; didn't sign a register. The list of actual examples is endless. The less people know about you, the less they can prosecute.
[1] A flaw in the Dutch Asylum Emergency Measures Act (2025) that would have criminalized offering even a bowl of soup to an undocumented person. The Council of State confirmed this reading. A follow-up bill was needed to fix it.
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