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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • frezik@midwest.socialtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    24 hours ago

    Large corporations are allergic to capital expenditures. That is, they don’t like investing in new things to make the business run. They want their previous investment to run as long as possible. On occasion, the workers will arrange big projects to be covered as “maintenance” rather than capital expenditures.

    Oil companies have invested in oil pumps and refineries. They could invest in all sorts of other things, but that’s less money in the hands of shareholders. That’s all there is to it. Money spent on new investments isn’t making them richer right now.








  • On the contrary, this is pretty close to what we have right now. Companies don’t like to spend much on R&D once they’re out of the startup phase. A good chunk of that startup phase R&D was actually taking place at a university with public funds. This is especially true of pharmaceuticals. So the answer to the question of “when does it get handed off to private industry?” is to just look at what’s happening already.

    The exception is big monopolies. AT&T’s Bell Labs is a legendary R&D department. IBM, Microsoft, and Google all likewise have significant pure R&D going on, and even engineers who don’t like those companies salivate at the opportunity to work in that capacity for them.

    But then you’ve got big monopolies on your hands, and that’s a whole other problem.



  • I understand the motivated reasoning of upper management thinking programmers are done for. I understand the reasoning of other people far less. Do they see programmers as one of the few professions where you can afford a house and save money, and instead of looking for ways to make that happen for everyone, decide that programmers need to be taken down a notch?


  • That might be the underlying problem. Software project management around small projects is easy. Anything that has a basic text editor and a Python interpreter will do. We have all these fancy tools because shit gets complicated. Hell, I don’t even like writing 100 lines without git.

    A bunch of non-programmers make a few basic apps with ChatGPT and think we’re all cooked.


  • I know it because I’ve actually implemented RSA as an exercise and know how it works.

    What you’re talking about with hashes is an implementation detail. It’s an important one, because using exactly the same algorithm for signing and encryption has some security pitfalls, and it will usually be slower. However, the function you call is exactly the same. The hash is encrypted with the private key. It can be verified by generating the same hash, decrypting with the public key, and matching the two hashes.

    See also: https://cryptobook.nakov.com/digital-signatures/rsa-signatures

    Signing a message msg with the private key exponent d:

    • Calculate the message hash: h = hash(msg)
    • Encrypt h to calculate the signature: s = hd (mod n)

    The operation “hd (mod n)” is just RSA encryption, but with the private key.