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.

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

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?

If true, that’s an intent I can get behind. But even if it isn’t, given my own inclination towards contrived shenanigans to scratch some weird itch in my brain, I’ve come to accept such things as harmless quirks and treat them with the same patience I’d want others to treat my own with.

And every now and ðen, I try someþhing myself and realise what fun it can be ;-)

Something about the density of innocent and helpless prey really appeals to people who like to prey on the helpless and innocent.

Nerds doing something unnecessarily complicatedly for the fun of it? I’m not particularly surprised.

I hope your weekend is as awesome as you are

Rough estimate using 30 days as average month would be ~35 months (1050 = 35×30). The average month is a tad longer than 30 days, but I don’t know exactly how much. Without a calculator, I’d guess the total result is closer to 34.5. Just using my own brain, this is as far as I get.

Now, adding a calculator to my toolset, the average month is 365.2425 d / 12 m = 30.4377 d/m. The total result comes out to about 34.2, so I overestimated a little.

Also, the total time is 1041.66… which would be more correctly rounded to 1042, but has negligible impact on the redult.

Edit: I saw someone else went even harder on this, but for early morning performance, I’m satisfied with my work

if you have nothing worth bragging about, resorting to basic functions of sapient life for clout is the best you can do. I’m a thinker too. I’m also a breather, an eater and plenty moee things that aren’t special.

I’ve got some actual achievements too, such as being a former piece of shit, so I’ve actually got a leg up on him!

I never had one of my wired earbuds fall off the platform at the train station and disappear in the gravel, nor did I ever have isues with forgetting to charge them, let alone their case being brolen and not charging at all. And if I want to switch my favourite headphones over from my PC to my phone, I’m really glad my old phone still has a jack.

Money in my bank account I can spend on just about anything. If I realise “shit, I’m out of toilet paper”, I can go to the grocery store and pay by EC, with the money in my bank account. The money that I keep in there, just in case there’s something I want or need to spend money on literally anywhere.

Besides, my bank is subject to my local jurisdiction and my own country’s laws and regulations. If my money is with some US company, I can’t be sure whether they’ll suddenly go “sorry, pal, your money has been confiscated on some bullshit pretense you have no way of actually fighting back against”.

Valve could extend a limited credit for the first two hours of play time. If after downloading and playing for two hours there’s still no confirmation from the bank, they’d then block your access to the game.

You’re just being a reminder that we shouldn’t want those things and give up.

No, I’m being a reminder that you should be strategic in how you go about it. Don’t just dream – work towards it. Gather support, particularly in smaller, local elections, where the consequences for spoiling aren’t quite as bad. Talk to people. Get people on board. Once you have enough backing, try to swing bigger elections around.

I’m not a centrist, nor a neoliberal, nor whatever else you may associate with the Democrats. I don’t even live in the US, and where I do live, I vote left. But that only works because we have a representative democracy, where my vote counts even if it’s not a plurality vote.

So please spare me your moral grandstanding and deflection and consider what I’m actually talking about instead.

Aye, if you can rally enough voters behind a united, third option, that would be the way to break out. I’m cautioning that you need to be sure you can knock out the hammers, otherwise you risk the Spoiler Effect fucking things up. If you take the shot and miss, you might just hit your own foot instead.

Don’t ignore the ugly realities of strategic voting just because they don’t fit your dream. If you’re confident you can break the cycle, by all means, go for it.

That’s not what I was asking. Would Cool Water prefer Warm Pepsi or Hammers to have the plurality?

Because the whole point of my explanation of the Spoiler Effect is this: If the Cool Water party wins over more Warm Pepsi voters than Hammer voters (which it probably would), it may end up splitting the Pepsi vote to the point that the Hammers win.

Unless you can be sure that Cool Water would take the plurality, you’d risk smashing your own face to spite Pepsi.

By all means, do the work to make Cool Water popular and gain support, but don’t ignore the reality of strategic voting. It’s fucked up, it’s ideologically unpalatable, but it’s pragmatic.

And as far as Cool Water is concerned?

No, it’s predicated on the belief that Warm Pepsi is still preferable to Hammers and that attempting to supplant either of them with Cool Water in one fell swoop isn’t realistic. Under those premises, Cool Water may act as a spoiler party to undermine Warm Pepsi.

Nobody wins by voting third party in a plurality system, unless that third party can overtake one of the two first parties.

Like I said, I get being fed up with compromise. I’m fed up too. But plurality voting sucks, so let’s do some math:

Hammer Party has 45% of the votes. Pepsi Party has 50%. 5% go to some other, minor parties.

Now suppose a Cool Water party appears, clearly better than Warm Pepsi. They start drawing voters, some from the Pepsi, some maybe from non-voters, but the Hammer Party adherents don’t relent. They make it to 10%, with the Pepsi Party now standing at, say, 45%. Hammer are down to 43% thanks to higher turnout. Other parties down to 2%.

Next election, more Pepsi compromise voters are encouraged to vote Water. Water is up to 25%! Hammer is at 38% now – we’re making progress! Except that the Pepsi party now has a maximum of 37%, if there are no non-voters. Hammer party now has the most votes. That’s called the spoiler effect.

Obviously, the Pepsi fraction might see that shift coming and try to avoid it. For that, they’d either have to pull some of the Hammer voters, or accede to the Water voters in hopes of retaining them. Do you think they’ll compromise with Water? And do you think the Water voters are willing to trust that compromise?

Unless you somehow manage to rapidly turn a party up to 50% or win a significant amount of voters from both camps, odds are you’re going to make things worse. Hopefully, they’ll get better after that, unless Hammer Party manages to rig the system in their favour or even get rid of it. Is that a risk worth taking?

For a different example, suppose Water and Pepsi teamed up. Let’s take the initial 5% other voters, manage to push Hammer down to 31% and put the Pepsi party at a solid 64%.

For the next election, hammer and other voters remain the same, but the Water party has split off and immediately pulled a solid 25% of voters. Pepsi is still at 39%, still wins. Not ideal, but better than Hammer, right?

The following election sees even more Water voters, maybe higher turnout too. Hammer down to 30%, other voters 2%. Water and Pepsi are a close race, but turn out 33% to 35% in favour of Water.

That’s what I mean with compromise: strategically creating a statistical base on which change can be built without risking shooting your own foot.

Of course, the best option would be an actually fair voting system, like Ranked Choice (which is probably easiest to explain), but with how things are now, it’d take a lot of prep work and publicity work to get enough people on board so it doesn’t go sideways.