To be or not to be – that is the question –
Whether 'ts nobler in the mind to suffer The sling and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them? To die; to sleep –
No more – and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
The flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die; To sleep;

What do you mean that’s not party-appropriate?

Find ich schade, dass wir uns da nicht einig werden. Wir haben eine Islandstute die auch echt süß ist. Nicht unbedingt nützlich, aber ich hab sie doch sehr lieb.

Ehrenmensch

Enough metal for a sword, but no helmet or even just textile armour?

We need more public toilets, but that’s expensive to maintain in a halfway clean state.

Also bis zum letzten Satz war ich ja voll bei dir, aber nimm das über Pferde zurück! Das muss kein entweder oder sein; beide können süß sein.

So the poor might not be able to participate in the judicial process?

As in, 28 per day of work missed? Or even less than that

Hold the fuck up. Am I getting this right?

You have to register to be able to vote. If you register, you might have to work in court, losing out on pay. You don’t get any compensation for that. The lost pay can ruin you financially.

What the fuck?

…I like probability and statistics. Complex numbers on the other hand can go take a dive for all I care.

I believe that thinking you’re immune to something makes you even more vulnerable, because it creates a cognitive blind spot. If you think you can’t make mistakes, you don’t stop to wonder if you are making one.

Not at all – get your damn balls off my compass!

Easy there, you’re making a bunch of assumptions and accusations here. For starters, I do understand how spoilers work, I read the spoilers and I don’t think it adds a lot of value to the conversation.

I’m technically from a CS background, but not in the field relevant to this post. I also don’t think people assume this topic to be basic. I happen to understand about 80% of it, but only ever have contact with about 20%, and that’s despite working in a CS-related field myself. And yes, I’ll keep using that abbreviation, because it’s convenient and I know that you understand it.

The short answer to “how does this affect me?” is “if you don’t know what npm is it, it doesn’t affect you”.

The intention of the blog article and the post sharing it is to get a specific warning out to a specific technical group. This group doesn’t want to scroll past three paragraphs of context they already know to get to the parts that matter. They can’t cater to every audience, so they prioritise the people that can do something with their understanding.

Unfortunately, that means that other people are left out of the conversation, because frankly, they have nothing to contribute. That’s neither malice nor arrogance, but simply expediency.

However, you’re welcome to ask! Chances are, someone will be happy to answer and fill you in on the background. More specifically, someone may be able to give a subject-specific explanation. Most importantly, that explanation will be more reliable if it comes from a human familiar with the topic.

Chatbots, no matter how diligently made to look like they know stuff, don’t and can’t know anything except the likelihood certain words occur together. They don’t have the required structure to understand the concepts behind the words. At best, they have memorised hundreds of generic explanations they can reconstruct, and hopefully that reconstruction will be accurate. But how would you know? You yourself don’t have the expertise to tell if they’re right.

And because they don’t understand the concepts, they also can’t reliably connect the dots the way a human can. The more dots to connect, the greater the chance something will go awry. The bot can’t tell you “I don’t know” if it doesn’t understand what it means to know. It will generate a text that looks plausible, and you can’t verify whether it’s actually true.

In the interest of actually getting a useful understanding, ask humans. The answer might look something like this:

NPM packages are boxes of highly specialised supplies and tools. NPM itself is an assistant that keeps your supplies stocked and your tools in shape. You tell it what you want for your project and it’ll make sure you have it.

The thing this post is about is a kind of evil robot that hides in these boxes. When your friendly NPM helper restocks, the robot crawls out of the box and starts exploring your workshop. It tells others what you’re building, what it looks like, shares any secret technology you’re using, creates and sends out copies of your keys – anything you’ve got lying around, it will attempt to make available for the people that built it.

The worst thing is that it’ll build copies of itself and hide them in any boxes you create and send out to other people. If one supplier ships to five others, that’s five more recipients under attack. If two of them also ship out to five other people each, that’s another ten. And it gets bigger and bigger from here.

So there we have it: An evil robot stealing your secrets and sending clones to anyone who trusts your product.

We realise we’re not mundane. We just don’t have the time to explain everything all the time. That’s a problem all sciences (and many other disciplines) face: When you’re working in a deep well, you can’t come up to the surface after every step of your work or you’ll never get anything done.

For CS, it’s probably more visible because the field is fairly young, rapidly changing, pretty large and the “basics” aren’t taught anywhere near as much as those of other, more well-established sciences.

But if you ask, there’s a chance someone is available to help you out. Be friendly, and they’re more likely to be friendly back.

I understand you care about making knowledge accessible and I applaud that. I acknowledge that CS has a long way to go still on that front. Let’s work on it together, shall we?

Kind regards, LVK

Titus Flavius Vespasian also went on to have the Flavian Amphitheatre built, which we now know as the Colosseum. I guess he learned from Nero’s mistakes and tried a different form of entertainment.

The basic rule with conservatives is that they want to control others. Their reputation is about power, not about fairness. Every law and every move has to be considered from that point of view: If they get silenced, it is bad, but if they silence others, that shows power and is good.

Assuming the first person is working through it in chronological order and hasn’t reached that realisation yet, they’ve probably just encountered the first such instance. Given that Tiberius was alleged by some to have been smothered by the head of the Pretorian Guard, I assume that’s who they’re talking about.

To expand on “a lot”:

Tiberius was the second Emperor, succeeded by Calilgula who was also killed by Pretorians four years later. The third (Claudius) died of other causes, the fourth (Nero) was merely abandoned by the guard, but the fifth (Galba) was once again murdered by Pretorian soldiers. Within the first hundred years of the Imperial period, three out of seven were actively killed by the guard and one was deserted, so I’ll score this as 3.5/7.

Vespasian and Titus died non-violently, but Domitian was once again murdered, with at least one Pretorian officer apparently aware of the plot, which I’ll mark as “deserted”; 4/10.

Six more died naturally (Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antonius Pius, Marcus Aurelius, Lucius Verus), but with the seventeenth, they bucked again: Commodus and Pertinax were killed by the guard, Didius Julianus got ghosted again. Tally: 7.5/20 so far, 6 of them direct murder.

Geta died by fratricide. His brother and murderer, Caracalla, was stabbed by a soldier, instigated by the Pretorian Prefect then finished off by Pretorian Tribunes. That same prefect and next emperor, Macrinus, actually had the loyalty of his man, so Elagabalus had to usurp the hard way. In turn, he was again killed by the guard. We’re at 9.5/24, 8 direct murders.

Severus Alexander, Maximinus I, Gordian I and II died in the “normal” infighting of the Crisis of the Third Century, Pupienus and Balbinus were each murdered by the guard again. Score is 11.5/30, 10 direct, holding the average of a third of all emperors being killed by the Guard.

I gotta go now, but so far we’re 265 years into the Imperial era, 30 Emperors deep and a solid third of them died by the hand of the Guard.

A buffet of dildos?

My part-timer gives me his schedule on Monday.

It’s project work, the “schedule” is really just “when do we do our regular check-in?” and I don’t give a rat’s ass when he does his work, as long as I can reach him whenever he said I could. My boss doesn’t give a shit either, as long as our work gets done.

Why do you tell us that?

Ooooh okay, so that’s the point where I stop clenching up and shit my pants instead? Thanks, good to know.

More seriously, thank you for sharing that knowledge. I’ll still be terribly afraid of accidentally inhaling or ingesting them, or having them get in my pants without consent (again), but it should ease my fear of them intentionally attacking me.