Wednesday, February 24

Geek

Daily News Stuff 24 February 2021

Beck, Tig Beck Edition

Tech News

  • Big Tech Detective is a Chrome extension that block requests to Google.  (The Verge)

    Unsurprisingly, you have to install it manually.

    It's configurable to block requests to Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and/or Amazon, and to block the page that made the request.


  • Console architecture from the NES to the Wii.  (Copetti)

    Each console gets its own page with a lot of detail; even so, some of the features need entire pages of their own.  Mode 7 on the SNES springs immediately to mind.


  • Betteridge's Law of Quantum Headlines: If your headline uses the word "quantum" the answer is no.  (ZDNet)

    In this case:
    Could quantum computers fix political polls?
    And they give the answer right there in the subhed, so they are at least nominally aware.


  • The trouble with Cassandra.  (Min.io)

    Specifically the trouble with using Apache Cassandra as a metadata store for object storage platforms like Amazon S3.  If that seems awfully specific, that's because MinIO is a storage platform like Amazon S3.

    It's open-source.  I didn't realise it was AGPL, but that shouldn't matter for 99% of applications where you just want to use it, rather than sell it as a product.

    If you want to sell it as a product, and can't work with AGPL, though, forget it.  Their Enterprise license is capacity based and costs four times as much as simply using Backblaze B2.  That is, the license alone costs more than outsourcing the whole thing.

    I suspect their audience is companies that want to use S3 APIs (why?) but need to control their own data.  A thousand bucks a month for long-term support on a 50TB storage pool is a lot less than even a potential privacy lawsuit.

    Oh yeah, the problem: Cassandra is not ACID.  It's not even eventually consistent, not by itself.  It's highly available, continuing to work even if parts of your network or multiple servers are down.  MongoDB by comparison will only work if a majority of nodes are available and you are connecting to that majority.

    It can also, by default, lose confirmed writes.

    So an object can be written to the datastore, be confirmed as available, and then if a problem occurs with the database - not the storage - be lost from the index and unfindable.

    Also, last time I checked - and admittedly it's been a while - MinIO didn't support user authentication or any other form of multi-tenant support; everything was owned by one user.  Now it does.  That makes it a lot more useful.


Disclaimer: It's all gone quantum.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:49 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 433 words, total size 4 kb.

1 Quantum polling article is several types of error.

One, republic, not democracy.

Two, the utility of a political poll is in the public thinking that a statistic has meaning. A decline in trust for statistics or for machine learning makes the exercise pointless.

Part of the 'error' in 2016 is an artifact of a non-uniform decline in trust for information collection. 

In hindsight, 2016, 2012, and 2008 also had voting fraud in favor of the Democrats.  They decided to 'repair' things because they were angry about 2000 and 2004. 

The major issue with the polls is a more obvious degree to which they are an aspect of electoral fraud.  That they could not present a more plausible illusion is an artifact of rightwing success in buggering information collection.

QC for a statistical model of politics is fixing GIGO with a better computer.  "Pray, Mr. Babbage..."

Machine Learning on QC is two technologies that the public does not have information enough about that they should trust.  To the extent that they have prestige as being a measure of truth, that prestige is mostly founded on magical thinking.  Investing more in that trust with risky exciting claims tends to ensure that the trust bubble will collapse. 

The article is probably an aspect of the general level of Baghdad Bobism.

Sad to say, Americans probably ought to be putting pollsters on the 'To Be Murdered' lists. 

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, February 25 2021 12:59 AM (6y7dz)

2 "I suspect their audience is companies that want to use S3 APIs (why?)"
Desire to migrate away from Amazon without shutting down your site while you rewrite the whole thing to remove all the S3 API usage?

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, February 25 2021 03:11 AM (eqaFC)

3 That is certainly valid.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, February 25 2021 09:18 AM (PiXy!)

4 I keep my google/youtube/blogspot/gmail bookmarks on my Chrome browser.
And use a different brand browser for everything else.
Since Alphabet Inc already knows when I hit those links, they can have Chrome spy on them again as much as they want.

Posted by: Kristophr at Thursday, February 25 2021 06:08 PM (DvtjP)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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