Posts by sarusa

Tesla reportedly faces criminal probe into self-driving hype

So you think Elon would actually learn anything from spending 5 seconds googling the topic? Because he's spent a decade selling 'Autopilot' as autonomy.

About time.

Elon's bloviating about autopilot were 100% fraudluent and completely undoable with the technology he had and even more undoable with the technology he has now since he's stripped every sensor but cameras from Tesla's cars. Tesla's 'autopilot' and 'self driving' have been sold for years by Musk as hands off, let the car do it - the term 'autopilot' entirely implies that. But his simple DNN can never deliver it.

So yes, it was entirely fraudulent and he should be prosecuted for it.

China dumps dud chips on Russia, Moscow media moans

Re: Russian SMO

Sure Elon. Go back to smoking.

WHO exactly is murdering civilians in Ukraine, including ethnic Russians? It's Pooty Poot.

Only 40% failure?

40% is a much lower failure rate than Pooty Poot's army of undertrained, underequipped war criminals has been experiencing recently. They have some serious problems achieving success unless they can just murder helpless women and children like the big strong men they are.

You can't really blame China. They're just doing what you'd expect from a shark that sees blood in the water, even if it's another shark.

Bitcoin energy consumption a feature, not a bug, says crypto-miner

Film at Eleven

Selfish arsehole argues that him being a greedy sociopath is a good thing for everyone, film at eleven.

SpaceX reportedly fed up with providing free Starlink to Ukraine

Re: He's clearly ambivalent at best about Ukraine

Like the Twitter deal, he probably decided the Ukraine free Starlink thing when he was totally stoned one night then sent out a drunken email to his employees demanding they work all night to have it working tomorrow morning. So it happened.

And then he woke up and remembered he's an ardent admirer of Pooty Poot, for obvious reasons.

FYI: Microsoft Office 365 Message Encryption relies on insecure block cipher

Luckily

Luckily, I already assumed that!

People still seem to think their fancy cars are fully self-driving

Mercedes Drivers

The stupid twats who own Mercedes autos don't even know they have turn signals, or if they do they don't know how to operate them. You expect them to know the 5 Levels of Autonomous Driving?

Block this: Using satellites to plaster ads over our skies could work, say boffins

Ah, Russia

Earth's cartoonishly evil vandals are at it again.

Google Japan goes rogue with 5.4ft long keyboard

'Don't be Evil'

Honestly this seems like one of the least evil things Google has done in a while.

And I'm surprised it doesn't come with a ruler marked on the finger rest, especially since it can be used as the stick for a bug catching net.

Tesla has a lot of work to do on its Optimus robot

Re: "Liability"?

If it's running Tesla Autopilot with only cameras I think 'liability' is the right choice of words here. This thing is also going to kill/maim people if it ever gets any faster.

Which is probably why he wants to entirely drop human employees in the factory.

Scientists overjoyed after DART smashes into asteroid Dimorphos, contact lost

There's no altered path - they hit a 'moon'

This binary 'system' of asteroids was chosen particularly because that's not an issue. Who knows what will happen in billions of years (butterfly effect) but for now it's just as likely to make it more likely to not hit Earth as to make it hit Earth (effectively zero for both).

First, Didymos and Dimorphos are on a 2.1 year orbit around the sun with minimal interactions. They come nowhere near Earth (10.6M km at the closest).

The second key here is that Dimorphos orbits Didymos with a period of about 12 hours. What they did is hit Dimorphos head on with the force of about 3-4 kilotons of TNT. This will make Dimorphos slow down slightly so it takes a few more minutes to orbit, which will cause it to orbit slightly closer to Didymos (by the rules of orbital dynamics, slower = closer). That's it! The total mass of the two is unchanged except for the negligible size of the DART probe, which may be made up for by the ejecta. Didymos will continue to orbit the sun just as before.

Understanding this is crucial to why they chose this pair as posing no danger.

Serious surfer? How to browse like a pro on Firefox

Some more fantastic mods

FF's modability is the biggest reason I can't give it up. Other fantastic add-ons:

Auto Tab Discard: Takes tabs you haven't looked at in x minutes and leaves the tab there, but flushes all the data from memory so it's not using any memory or CPU. When you finally switch to the tab it reloads the page. Totally customizable, so you can make sure your email tab or youtube music background tab stay alive. Now you really can have your cake (100 tabs open) and eat it too (low memory use).

Dark Reader: Makes any web page dark mode. A real eye-saver! Of course real websites are complicated, so there are four different methods you can set per site for best results. Or you can disable it for any given site.

Download Manager (S3): This is not for bulk download assistance, this is so your normal downloads just show up in bars at the bottom of your browser, then optionally disappear when finished (or not). So much nicer than having a separate downloads tab/window.

NoScript: Javascript control. Everything off by default. No hidden cross scripting. This makes the entire web much faster and safer. Warning: this is for hardcore people only. Many sites are broken to start with with JS entirely off, and it takes some experience to know which ones you should allow (cloudfront) and which to leave banned (facebook - okay, that one was easy) when the site wants to run JS from 20 different domains. But the fact that the site wants to pull in spying crap from 20 different domains is one of the primary reasons you should be using NoScript! You could also use uMatrix for this.

Re: And this is so relevant to browser development.

It's relevant to how trustworthy (or not) the people making your browser are. Since Brave browser has engaged in shady practices in the past and is run by sh@theel (this is hardly the only thing he's done) I'm not going to trust it. It's like trusting Elon Musk to drive your car.

Linux luminaries discuss efforts to bring Rust to the kernel

It's not an insult

> 'There are possibly some well-designed and written parts which have not suffered a memory safety issue in many years. It's insulting to present this as an improvement over what was achieved by those doing all this hard work.'

This is just silly. Yes, most of the kernel has been painstakingly scrubbed of memory safety issues, but there have been tons of them and there are many more lurking. I used to write in assembly language - I don't any more (once a year or so) because I can use C#, Rust, or Python and get literally 100x times as much work done in the same amount of time without worrying if my JMPing is idempotent. It's not an 'insult' to my past self to admit that assembly language programming is a touchy, dangerous, pain in the ass. Good for me for having been able to do that, but thankfully it's rarely necessary any more.

Similarly, it will be great to know that future kernel drivers, and maybe more significant parts, written by other people who are not as awesome as me (tongue -> cheek) can be guaranteed free of memory safety issues. This is indeed a giant improvement. So kudos to the guys who did it in C (including me!) while keeping memory safe, but they're not going to be 'insulted' by making it possible to go from banging two rocks together to hammers.

Google says there's no Waze forward, carpool app axed

Re: Oh phew

Unfortunately there's no alternative to what Waze does (realtime user sourced reporting of where the police are parked for 'revenue enhancement', and new accidents) that actually works, so I just have to live with the Sword of Googlecles over my head.

Oh phew

Don't scare me with the title like that! Waze is actually a useful app, and it's owned by Google, so of course I live in fear the whole thing could get axed any second.

The carpool bit of it I'll be happy to have no longer pop up whenever I accidentally swipe sideways.

LastPass source code, blueprints stolen by intruder

Here come the exploits

Of course if LastPass security and design is perfect then it doesn't matter if the source code is stolen.

But if there are any bugs at all (and there always are, and LastPass doesn't have a perfect record) then the attackers now have holes to drive through.

China's tech juggernauts form metaverse research institute

China's ideal realized

A place where every single thing you see is created or at least pre-vetted by the totalitarian state's algorithms and everything you say or do is obsessively recorded forever.

Of course that applies to Facebook's garbage as well, but they're only interested in more venal matters.

Huawei dangles developer incentives to sell Harmony OS around the world

'created'

> Huawei last week unveiled initiatives to encourage developers to work on its Harmony OS – the platform it created

Yeah, 'created', like China 'created' a space program. China's space program is using the best tech stolen from NASA and ESA over four decades, and Harmony OS is Android forked with a global s/Android/Harmony/g.

They're excellent manufacturing engineers and doing great things with quantum communications and material science, but terrible at basic research - Xi Jinping Thought does not tolerate creative thinking. And what they're very best at is industrial espionage.

Russian cosmonauts abort ISS spacewalk after suit power fluctuates

The real culprit

Obviously this was caused by aggressive Ukranian terrorists invading Baikonur and deliberately massacring civilians and shutting off power to the ISS spacesuits because they're governed by a kleptocratic evil undead lich who cares about nothing but restoring the Soviet Empire. It's all very credible, and this has nothing to do with accusing everyone else of doing what you're actually doing like Johnsonite Brexiteers or MAGA asshats.

(I'd refrain, but the ISS cosmonauts have been gleefully supportive of the Ukranian massacres)

Janet Jackson music video declared a cybersecurity exploit

Re: Am I safe?

I wouldn't worry too much about attacks like this (nobody cares about you unless you're working in critical infrastructure), but everything you have is running 10x slower than it could be. Spinning rust drives really are the bottleneck on anything they're in.

We had a 5 year old computer at work that had a 1 TB HD - it would take 5 minutes to boot chunka chunka chunka chunka. This week we replaced it with a cheapass 870 EVO SATA SSD (nowhere near the fastest drive you can get) and now it boots in 15 seconds. Compiles that took 10 minutes take 30 seconds.

Not everything about the past was good.

Elon Musk 'buying Manchester United' football club

No, it will entirely be how f@#$ing stoned he is at the time. He's not smart enough to parse how funny it is. It will be 'how funny is this after I've done 20 bonghits?' - and almost anything is funny at that point.

Yeah good luck with that mate

Then he'll back out because it's a crap deal and spend months whinging in bad faith about how MU's spam levels aren't what he though they were even though it has nothing to do with what he signed while bodaciously stoned.

He is such a f#$ing twit.

Microsoft: Outlook desktop app crashing due to missing identity setting

It's not surprising

With a sprawling monstrosity that's accreted over decades like Outlook there is so much crap going on during the startup sequence (and I bet they don't fully understand what order everything is happening in) that it's no surprise at all that something is stepping on something else's toes.

The crash is easy enough - it expects something in that registry directory, and it's not error checking that it found something before trying to read it, so boom *null reference error*.

Now why is there nothing there? Somebody probably added some new cleanup / sanity checking code elsewhere that ends up wiping it, then It Works On My Machine (TM) so let's push it worldwide.

Google tells Apple to 'fix text messaging' in bid to promote RCS protocol

Re: RCS

Yes, it's technically not Google's standard, but if you want to use RCS without insane amounts of effort you are using Jibe, which is Google.

The whinings of a sad loser

Google's messaging sucking is entirely Google's fault, and now they want to blame it on Apple and get them to use Google's own 'standard'?

As a reminder, while Apple has kept on message and on strategy with iMessage, here's a partial list of Google's messaging apps, which they inevitably abandon to spawn a new half-assed monstrosity:

- Google Talk

- Google Voice

- Google Wave

- Google Buzz

- Google Chat

- Google+ Messenger

- Google+ Hangouts

- Google+ Huddle

- Gmail Chat

- Google Docs Chat

- Google Hangouts

- Google Spaces

- Google Allo

- Google Meet

- YouTube Messages

- Google Chat (again)

- Google Maps Messages

- Google Photos Messages

- Google Stadia Messages

- Google Pay Messages

- Google Assistant Messages

- Google Phone Messages

- Google Chat (AGAIN)

I'm sure I'm missing some, some might be dups (who can keep track of them all) and it might not be fair to include some of them like Google Stadia Messages. But the point is that Apple has management and Google has no management - just a series of competing fiefdoms that want to kill off existing products so they can replace them with their hot new worse version of what was previously working (Google Wallet being the most egregious of these, but messaging surely wins for most self-inflicted wounds).

Also, RCS is just plain bad. Apple's response to this is probably just going to be to point and laugh and go 'see, this is why you suck', if they even bother acknowledging it.

Report slams UK plan to become 'science superpower' by 2030

Have to actually ditch Boris first

Johnson has been a complete disaster for UK science. Getting rid of him won't guarantee a fix, but there will certainly be no improvement until the door hits him in the ass.

But still, you can't just declare you'll be a 'superpower' in anything in 7 years and make it happen. It takes decades of foundation building. Even China's been very hit or miss on targeted industries, and they have a far, FAR more coherent and competent approach than Westminister ever could.

Russia fines Google $374 million for letting the truth about Ukraine be told

Re: "letting the truth about Ukraine be told"

I just said the smell of piss is *relatively* tolerable compared to the smell of Surströmming. Shouldn't be controversial at all. It would be easier to ask what, if anything, the Russian government has not lied about in the last several years. Though I guess if you're from Corbynville that's all lies by the Jews.

Re: "letting the truth about Ukraine be told"

Well it's all relative. YouTube is a mix of truth, lies, irrelevant, and crazy because that's when you get when anyone can post things on YouTube. On the other hand, Russian media like RT is nothing but Pravda, near 100% written or dictated by the KGB (now calling itself the FSB) for political or international events. We can see all those insane fantasies from here (RT is allowed out, though real news is not allowed in) - it's like watching the ultimate evolution of Fox News.

So yes, compared to the Russian government Google has always been upfront and honest, and relatively tolerant of people posting videos showing what's actually going on in Ukraine.

This is a common troll/five ruble army tactic of arguing that whatever you're doing is okay because everyone else is just as bad - 'We're murdering babies? Well you pick your nose!'. You don't even have to know if it's true, in fact the counter accusation is usually something you're doing as well (go with what you know!). You can see this with Putin's tool, Trump, and the way every accusation is a confession for the US's Republican party.

Indiference to the lives of children

> Google also stands convicted an "indifferent attitude to the life and health of minors"

I guess they want Google to be actively targeting and murdering minors instead, like good Russians do when they deliberately shell schools and hospitals and execute captured civilians?

Financial exchange's efforts to replace core systems with blockchain founder – again

Not suited for task

All these people trying to cram a round peg in a cthulhu shaped hole because it's the hot new thing and the market is flooded with scammy consultants.

Like NFTs being a terrible solution for in-game problems that have been long solved better with other means, there are very few things a blockchain is actually needed for other than getting money thrown at you during funding rounds (this might not be the case any more).

Anti-piracy messaging may just encourage more piracy

Yeah, no sympathy

It doesn't help that I hate the people and corporations crying their crocodile tears about it and feel just great about not giving them any money. Sony Music (and Pictures), Universal, Warner, Disney - these are all the rich bastards filing false takedown claims on youtube videos with zero consequences, and re-partitioning off TV so you can no longer just watch a show. Then they give the artists fractions of a penny on the pound. Why yes, I sure would download a copy of a car if I could.

Note - where things are available at a fair price and I can (mostly) make sure a decent amount of the money goes to the artist I do so - I love Bandcamp for music, and GOG, itch.io, Steam, or Epic work fine for games even though the last two still take too big a cut. So I haven't pirated a game in decades (except I guess, my ROM collections for old consoles - that's convenience again).

After config error takes down Rogers, it promises to spend billions on reliability

Spoiler...

Spoiler... it's going to happen again.

Samsung teases 11 Texas fabs as $50 billion CHIPS Act vote nears

Sure, as long as you don't need power

Modern chips can take months to make. A single power interruption can destroy a whole quarter year of your output. We've seen this repeatedly in Japan and other places in Asia.

Do you really want to build your fabs in a place which is completely YOLO [shurg] about the power grid and since they've given it over to racketeers can't even guarantee basic power and when they do it might be 10x civilized nation price?

As Pascal said above they don't have any water - but Samsung doesn't care about environmental damage. But they should at least care about their chip production being destroyed by Texas's MAGA levels of incompetence.

That emoji may not mean what you think it means

Re: Eggplant

Emoji primer for old people normies:

Eggplant = penis

Taco = fanny

Peach = ass

Skull = funny

Movie film strip = send me nudes

Movie camera = x-rated video

Normal Smiley = being insincere

Grinning with smiling eyes = constipated or I'm ready to fight you

And of course this is highly variable depending on the country or your specific ingroup. In Japan the poop emoji can mean 'lucky'.

But that's the whole point. Having your in-group slang be incomprehensible to outsiders (especially your parents) is the goal.

Re: It's often just the facade of politeness

And there's an EXTREMELY useful use case for emoji replies even of the perfunctory insincere type: If I reply with actual text then a normie feels obligated to reply with actual text and then I have to etc. etc. even though we're both already long done saying anything useful.

Acknowledging a comment with an emoji doesn't require a response from the other person and enables us both to break out of the tyranny of endless vapid responses.

It's often just the facade of politeness

I use emojis on the work slack and discord to indicate I've seen your post and 'reacted' (so you don't pout) but I have nothing to say. It's basically just an ACK or Japanese Aizuchi ('yes I heard it').

For instance where you said 'we'd argue a written message or possibly a chat might go a bit further than a trite picture of a broken heart', yes if a family member died I might leave a sincere message, but most of the time what people are bitching about does not even warrant an actual response, for instance 'I told the barista I wanted a 2-up 3-down frosted whip 5-shot caramel machiatto with rainbow sprinkles and she gave me a 2-up 3-down frosted whip 5-shot caramel machiatto with pink sprinkles, this is literally worse than hitler [sad] [sad] [sad]'. Or 'I haven't paid my rent for 6 months because of covid, it was great spending all that money on Genshin Impact instead and now they're asking me to pay up!11!' So I'll tag it with a :sadblob: and that's all it deserves.

You might think these are exaggerated, but I swear most of the whining is just this petty. So it's just me not leaving you on read but not actually caring.

These centrifugal moon towers could be key to life off-planet

And then the bearings lock up, or the generator fails

And everyone falls to their deaths. Maybe they land in the water only slightly stunned. And then a boat lands on them.

Billion-record stolen Chinese database for sale on breach forum

So that's about $10?

Chinese lives are worth nothing according to the CCP. Like everyone inside or outside of Putin's Russia, anyone who's not a stupid uneducated white piece of crap for American republicans, anyone who likes foliage for Brazil's Bolsinaro, etc. etc. China's citizens are just fodder for the meat grinder for panda boy.

There's little anyone could to do a Chinese mainland citizen that's worse that what their dictatorship is already doing to them.

Zendesk sold to private investors two weeks after saying it would stay public

It's just corporate ethics

All you really need to know is that any corporation, despite all their platitudes about giving back or ethical guidance or blah blah blah, would happily grind live puppies, kittens, ducklings, and baby bunnies into blood meal as painfully as possible if they could make a profit doing that. They are all amoral monsters.

When it was fashionable to hate gay they hated gay people, when it became fashionable to be gay they were rah rah gay people, but they all would turn again in an instant and have wacky heartwarming commercials about sending GLBT people (or racial minorities, or whatever) to the gas chambers if it started delivering stockholder value again.

To get back to TFA, everything they say is a calculated lie that's only true when it meets up with profitable realities.

Microsoft delays next Exchange Server release to 2025

Well thank Satan for that.

So you're telling me my next colonoscopy and all the various new misfeatures associated with the new version of this astonishingly corporate balls slapping in my face piece of shite have been delayed till at least 3 years from now.

Hell yeah. Thank you for taking longer to inevitably make this so much worse.

China offering ten nations help to run their cyber-defenses and networks

'helping'

> China has begun talking to ten nations in the South Pacific with an offer to help them improve^h^h^h^h^h^h^hcompletely own their network infrastructure,

Original killer PC spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3 now runs on Linux natively

Finally a decent word processor for linux! /jk

I see lots of people talking about old word processors here, but I knew a hell of a lot of people who just did their word processing in 1-2-3. And their notes. And their calendar...

Because when you have a very expensive and complicated hammer, you might as well hit everything with it.

Microsoft fixes Point of Sale bug that delayed Windows 11 startup for 40 minutes

Re: unbelievable that ANYONE thought that W11 was remotely needed for a till!

I'd much rather do that than try to get printing working on linux when it doesn't just work.

More pertinently, the hideousness of Windows Home has very little to do with Windows POS, where things really do mostly just work.

I say this as someone with near equal numbers of Windows and Linux machines and who's dealt with how shitty they can both be for 20 years. It's good to be honest about the plusses and minuses of each. For instance, all my servers are Linux, Windows servers are a f@#$ing nightmare. And similarly, Windows POS is so much better than Linux. It's just the facts.

Jeffrey Snover claims Microsoft demoted him for inventing PowerShell

Re: Serious question

Nope. If it had been a cross between bourne shell and anything it would have been much better than the mess it actually is.

China’s GitHub clone makes all repos private pending mysterious ‘review’

That's too complicated

No, it's just that people have been sharing how things actually are on github repositories, and Panda Boy and the rest of his totalitarian dictatoriship don't want anyone to know how things actually are. That defeats the entire point of having millions of censors.