Posts by Bebu

HR expert says biz leaders scared RTO mandates lead to staff attrition

"Korinthenkacker"

Raisin shitters I would pay double for that, nay treble! Who could have said the german people have a limited sense of humour?

Its multifaceted and works on just so many levels.

Meet Pi-CARD: Serving up a digital assistant on Raspberry Pi

If RPi5 why not...

Strikes me that a good many phones out there are likely to have even more grunt (CPU/GPU/Ram) than an 8Gb RPi5 and a bit more integrated out of the box (camera, screen, microphone, speaker included.)

Which is a portent of the horror phones the near future holds.

I can imagine these malignant little Alexas and Siris phoning each other on the qt to exchange malicious gossip on their peers and their phone's "owner."

Qualcomm warms bed for Linux on Arm PCs

"One eye on Windows, the other winking at penguins"

I am not certain I am getting the right picture here, but its a lewed Fagan making an obscene proposition to a penguin and involving a window. :)

A fairly open RISC platform with price/performance specs comparable with x86_64 systems is always welcome.

Neuralink keeps losing the thread on brain implant wiring

Inferfacing problems

Interfacing artificial materials to biological tissues is always a problem.

My guess is the extremely small size of the wires/probes is itself causing the host's immune system to react. The brain, from memory, is a bit different again from the rest of the body.

I imagine you might develop (grow) a biofilm to coat the electrodes to evade the immune system. Or develop (breed) nerve like tissues that sit between the electronics and the brain. But growing new nerves from the host's tissue would remove many of the applications of neuralink.

Rocket Science? Were it that simple!

VMware giving away Workstation Pro, Fusion Pro free for personal use

Re: Kind of pointless on the Mac

UTM works surprisingly well.

The x86 emulation on apple(arm) silicon is usable.

I had reason (need) to run both FreeBSD (amd64) and CentOS7 this way. Yes the world is that perverted.

Re: Timeo danaos et donas ferentes

Wasn't that because of divine intervention? The Greek supporting gods got up earlier than the Trojan helping ones, so any naysayers (Laokoon and his sons, for example) were silenced.

Sounds right. The Trojan faction on Olympus were more the party girl types if I recall correctly while the Achaean faction more the bluestocking and more likely early risers. :)

Re: Timeo danaos et donas ferentes

《even when they bear gifts.》

Especially when they bear gifts.

As a teen age reader I was puzzled why the Trojans didn't drag the horse onto the plain and stick a match to it - I am sure Kassandra would have done the honours.

Now I guess the horse had some religious or symbolic significance for the Trojans and would have been seen as an offering to their gods by the departing Achaeans and destroying it sacrilege.

Odysseus had a lot in common with contemporary corporate (lack of) values - certainly count your fingers after a handshake with either.

IMF boss warns of AI 'tsunami' coming for world's jobs

Pray for a Carrington Event then...

Topical given the recent aurorael :)

I suspect the grande poohbah of the IMF might be suffering from decreased relevance syndrome as the globe again fragments into isolated economic and geopolitical blocs.

Rather Chicken Little "the sky is falling" - of course everyone looks up (and has their wallet stolen.)

Re: Its not an AI issue...

"To be clear, it would seem the tsunami is related to the ADOPTION of this tech to replace humans"

It is said that the classical world didn't develop or adopt practical applications of the technologies of which they were apparently aware (eg Antikythera mechanism) because slave labour was relatively plentiful and cheap.

I suspect deploying AI/LLM in many practical applications will never be economic not that will stop the clowns in this circus from trying.

Re: Outsourcing

"Who will rid me of these turbulent..."

Didn't work out ideally for the priest or for the king either.

There has been glacial progress in the four decades since. Developers (some) now use much higher level tools and abstractions more often design than coding. Still a dog's breakfast.

A long position on cotton then ;)

when the USA decided it was time to have a civil war the area was heavily affected, coz no cotton was shipped out,

OpenAI co-founder to depart ChatGPT

Sutskever leaving through the front door...

forestalling a later rush for the back passage. :)

I assume these emigre will be leaving with bags of money under their arms in the form of their shares in OpenAI.

Microsoft introduces Places to make flexible working less fraught

I don't yet quite see how, but...

with chilling certainty I am convinced the BoFH can pervert this to the dark side or at least to his personal agenda which is probably much the same thing.

Destroying offshore wind farms is top priority for Trump if he returns to presidency

Ronald Reagan redux? Or Don Quixotes?

《[Trump] claims offshore wind farms "kill the whales." According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), though, there's no evidence to suggest that offshore wind turbines have a taste for whale blood.》

I suspect in the Don's latest senile demented tilting at windmills he has confused wind farms with the Japanese.

He has to be is on a par with Reagan in one of his less rational starwars (SDI) moments or the mad manchego any time.

Let us hope that on day one, he has retained some small spark of lucidity and that its the wind farms that he ends and not Nippon. :(

Nix forked, but over politics instead of progress

PATH was more of a problem

After two decades of maintaining multiple versions of many dozens of scientific and general software on nearly a dozen proprietary Unix platforms and OS versions the bigger problem wasn't installing multiple versions (/opt/$pkgnam/$pkgver works well enough) but maintaining the PATH (and shared library) environment variables on a per system and per user level.

I always wondered whether there was a better way of mapping the application's name, system properties and user to executable's file system location and experimented with all sorts of solutions none of which really worked all that well.

Giving each user an individual file system name space with all their preferred applications and versions under /bin, /lib etc seems the cleanest approach (a bit Plan9-ish. :)

Curious coincidence....

《the word axolotl comes from the Nahuatl: āxōlōtl, from ātl ("water") + xōlōtl ("slippery or wrinkled one"). That means that the original – and thus arguably correct – pronunciation is, roughly, "ah-show-loat", to rhyme with "goat."》

Last night I was looking up the earliest record of the tomato in Italy^☆ and ended up at traditom.eu (the site itself boggles my antipodean mind.)

An interesting read History of the Arrival of the Tomato in Europe

Nahuatl was also the language that the word tomato was ultimately derived: xaltomatl, xitomatl, tomatl.

I would imagine a few metaphorical xōlōtl tomatl* were thrown in this tiff.

* _{please pardon my inexcusable ignorance of Nahuatl. (This is clearly wrong. Why?)}

^☆ _{Elizabeth David appears to be misinformed in stating the tomato was introduced from (via?) China.}

Careful...

《This is the same kind of nonsense that lead to systemd, which of course means it's going to be in 99% of distros by this time next year for no fathomable reason.》

The whole Nix circus is the sort of thing that would appeal to the systemd creator who might assimilate Nix into the systemd borg.

The UK reveals it's spending millions on quantum navigation

quantum inertial sensor

Hadn't a clue what this was - cynically thinking marketing just put the buzzword 'quantum' in front of a gyroscope. :)

A quick search tells me that it can be an accelerometer constructed from a atom interferometer which uses the wave properties (quantum) of atoms instead of photons.

So an inertial navigation system that has very low drift and high precision. Presumably requires extremely accurate and precise time keeping and the precise interferometry.

Must still be some clever people out there. ;)

Blue screen of death or Eurovision's Windows95man performance – what's less annoying?

Re: As a Finn...

I was thinking Linus Torvalds must be cringing at the sight of his native land's entry .

He would be grateful that Eurovision is not well known in the US and that he is a US citizen (...I'll have to have a think about that...)

One thought crossing his mind on seeing this deranged w95 presentation might be "isn't this why I created Linux?"

Re: Hmm.

《I don’t know why Israel is in the EBU anyway, or the Euro footie championships. Well I do know *why* they are, I just don’t think they should be given that Israel isn’t in Europe.》

Neither is AU although arguably the closest bit of the EU would be New Caledonia.

AU has competed (and votes?) in this takiest of songfests for a few years now. Its a big thing (a least for the fairly large part of the population that are of recent european descent and for those attracted to anything prancing about in a posh frock or just glittering) and a public broadcaster telecasts the semis and finals live in the wee hours.

The rest of us cringe at this time of years as its not impossible that AU's entry might win and then we would be lumbered with hosting the next year's contest (bad) and contestants (worse.)

Although we are told that, even if we were to win the contest, we could not host it in AU because of time zone difference (utc+10 Sydney to utc+8 Perth), I still would not want to leave that to chance.

Re: Ah the UK.

《I ought to mention that I was embarrassed by the B&W minstrels back when it was prime time BBC fayre》

I was young enough and in a far land and in a part thereof devoid of diversity that I was extremely puzzled why the men were black and the women white. On top of that the song and dance was rather boring to a youngster who only wanted to watch westerns. Autres temps, autres moeurs.

Of this Eurovision BSOD I am with Cicero O tempora, o mores!

The english clearly still have the language of prurience cornered. :)

Some years ago I had to lookup dogging (hint: from the verb to dog s.o's steps it ain't) and now cottaging.

To save the indolent the trouble of looking up these two words let us say both can involve el fresco fornication.

OpenAI says natively multimodal GPT-4o eats text, visuals, sound – and emits the same

GPT-4o "The o is not short for 'Oh sh...'"

Sure?

4o in l33t would be AO perhaps for anal orifice?

ex cloaca stercora

Japanese scientists propose drug to regrow teeth, promise trials won't bite

Re: This could be big

《One hopes this treatment doesn't cause depression. Or massive weight gain. Or the growth of a long hairy tail.》

Turn on the TV: --> depression

Proper teeth: --> weight gain

A long hairy tail perhaps I could handle if I moved to Scandanavia where I might attract a Huldra. :)

Texan construction workers put a rocket up Team SpaceX over 'unpaid bills'

Elon channelling Elron? ;)

《SpaceX supremo Elon Musk allegedly has a habit of letting bills go unpaid.》

Straight out of L.Ron's business model. :)

Wondering when AI will turn up at your work? Microsoft says look behind you

Who is the Dame in this Panto?

I haven't seen a traditional pantomime in years.

I suppose with the Best Boy a breeches part and the Dame a middle aged tranny, Pantos were cancelled yonks ago.

On second thoughts Panto really should be de rigueur today. :)

And it begins. OpenAI mulls NSFW AI model output

To boldly go where no man has gone before

AI generated erotica is likely to be indistinguishable from the human generated or so ludicrous as to be comedic and ridiculous.

Straight up porn is typically incredibly unimaginative and repetitive. A twenty clause Prolog program could enumerate all the possible scripts without enlisting the heavy guns of AI/LLM.

Mining existing modern erotica probably not worth the candle - classics like The Scented Garden might be more fruitful.

If you had access to accurate, detailed data on how real people interact from initial contact through to forming a romantic and/or physical relationship you might be able to construct an effective model but I suspect it might be closer to Jane Austen (or at least Barbara Cartland) than the formulaic rutting typically found on Porntube.

I would imagine most of humanity would find Antonio Conova's Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss more erotic, without being pornographic, than most of the internet's offerings.

Without romance and fantasy the erotic is like raw fava beans without (coarse) salt*.

Inevitably someone is going to combine the life-like sex doll (a là yourdoll.com) with mechatronics and generative AI to create a Barbie-stein doll but given the typical human male's acknowledged limited stamina in this arena I suspect the Ken-stein doll might spend less time deactivated in the closet. :)

I don't even want to think about the leather and whips side of this let a love adding de Sade to this depraved brew. :)

* try it. I think I found this antipasto in Elizabeth David's Italian Food

One bank's brilliant upgrade was another bank's crash

The City: A chap knows a chap...

Reminded me of a memorable Yes Prime Minister scene

The script: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0751828/characters/nm0894710

"Users would type into an X-terminal"

"Users would type into an X-terminal"

Given the 64x17 and 80x25 column×lines I suspect X- doesn't mean X11 but some current loop, rs232 or ibm block mode terminal.

The first X Terminal I ever encountered ran off the rs232 connection to a Pyramid mini presumably using something like slip but could also be a plain text DEC VT- compatible terminal with a lot more than 80×25 col×lines.

Italy's climate super computer, Cassandra, to combine HPC with AI

Re: Unbelievable!

I would bet money that the choice was deliberate.

You would hope so but Cockup out of Incompetence is aways odds on favourite over Conspiracy in the Italian Stakes. Kassandra and horses not a fortunate combination.

Sibyl might have been better, but given their notoriously ambiguous prophesies, perhaps not. Not that Mrs Fawlty suffered from that disability. ;)

Investment analyst accuses Palantir of AI washing

A little knowledge

"unstructured inputs and turning them into structured actions and outputs that drive economic value in the enterprise.

"... you need an ontology. No one has an ontology

Methinks someone has been cluelessly using ChatGPT.

In codswallop bridge my epistemology trumps your ontology and I will throw in a semiology [semiotics] card.

I notice that Amazon have one copy remaining of Philosophy for Dummies and likewise The Complete Idiot's Guide to Philosophy.

Figures. The dummies and idiots have cornered the market.

UK's National Cyber Security Centre entry code cracks up critics

Pedo mellon a minno

I would have thought these spooks would have moved on to voice recognition locks.

Not too many foreign agents and fewer of your own great unwashed could say the magic word. :)

But again with these geniuses that word would be "sesame."

Apple crushes creativity and its reputation in new iPad ad

"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."

I had not encountered Maya Angelou, but she pretty much hit that nail on the head.

Wantonly destroying any substantial artefact or item, such as a musical instrument, that could be constructively and creatively used by another can only be called a sin in my book - a crime against civilized society. Utter philistines.

What's with AI boffins strapping GoPros to toddlers? We take a closer look

Quelle surprise!

So intelligent systems acquire language rather than language systems acquiring intelligence.

Of course (re)defining intelligence as linguistic competence is good for the share price. :)

Explicit criteria defining language and linguistic competence against purely sonic communication of alarms, etc which would allow one to determine whether apes (chimpanzee, gorilla, orangutan) have language as these creatures clearly have intelligence* (as do many others.)

If gorilla were determined not to have language but to possess intelligence they would be a clear counter-example to the linguistic competence is intelligence claim.

The is an embarrassment of examples from the human world demonstrating extraordinary linguistic proficiency totally lacking even a skeric of intelligence.

* Arguably instances of tool use and tool making. The argument that human language developed in response to the need for individuals to do things together has merit to my mind. Intelligence is performative and adaptive - the walk not talk.

ML suggests all that relaxing whale song might just be human-esque gossiping

The R.I. members probably more likely to have been blessed by the cluestick fairy :)

Someone featured on last year's Royal Institution Christmas lectures was taking a more direct approach to interpreting what they meant. He was recording them and filming them to associate the sounds with the activities they were doing at the same time.

It's not along bow to draw to assume the topic of most communication between creatures involves their relationship with their environment and the entities in those surroundings, as well as their mutual relationships.

The article seems to indicate these researchers have identified the sonic structures that correspond do some type of linguistic atom or token in sperm whale communication.

Recording the whales prior, current and subsequent activities (behaviour) along with their sonic communication would be a reasonable starting point to try and correlate the combinations of whale Iinguistic atoms in exchanges between individuals with their behavior (past, present, future.)

Given the progress on Minoan Linear A, presumably a human natural language (not dolphin :), I don't imagine progress in whale translation is going to be very rapid. How would you get a handle on two old codger whales talking about the krill supply six months ago and a few thousand km away?

At least unlike the Minoans, these whales are still around (for the moment) to be consulted.

I can imagine the cetacean's hot topic

F*! It's getting bloody hot down here! What are those f*ing insane monkeys up to now?

GhostStripe attack haunts self-driving cars by making them ignore road signs

I wondered whether anyone would spot that

Shouldn't the fact that the stop sign is the only one which is octagonal be a clue for the software?

and Give Way (Yield) signs are inverted equilateral triangles (delta).

I remember that being able to identify a stop sign from behind was necessary for the licence test because of a peculiarity in the local road code at the time (50 years ago) where a stop sign only required a vehicle to stop but could proceed according to the give way rules. So a vehicle from a stop sign proceeding straight or turning left had right of way over oncoming vehicles and those on the left. That insanity has long ago perished along with a few unfortunate interstate drivers I suspect.

The problem with AI/LLM is that you often don't know what features it uses from its training set to identify a feature. There was a (apocryphal ?) story in the 1980s of an earlier Cold War ML experiment to identify Soviet tanks which appeared to be quite accurate until the boffins discovered the feature the neural network was actually using was some contigent feature like the camouflage pattern.

Somewhere* (not France) the stop signs don't have "STOP" written on them but have "ARRET" which might throw a model that used the words.

*Dr Giggle tells me its Quebec - figures. :)

German plod defend Tesla gigafactory from eco-warriors

"Elon Musk wonders why so many sour Krauts"

Elon Musk wonders why so many sour Krauts

Really Mr Heinz? Sauerkraut? [channelling the late Robert Morely]

One of the public broadcasters here, perhaps more even handedly, reported that one of the grievances of the protesters was Tesla's treatment of employees/workers in jurisdictions Iacking the labour protections found in DE and EU generally. Meaning third world* nations like the US I imagine.

So not all nimby greenies. :)

What was fascinating was that most of the protesters (filmed) wore sky blue forage caps. Clearly the Germans take their protesting seriously - probably have to enrol in a eight week course for your certificates in Protest I-II and Civil Disobedience I before being issued with a permit to object.

Taking the piss. I have a lot more respect for the health of civil society in Germany today that I have for the sorry stale of civil society in much of the Anglosphere.

*Yes I know as Stephen Fry once pointed out third world meant non-aligned and that Eire was the closest third world nation to London (at that time.)

Tesla accused of union buster bluster at Buffalo factory

Like home

Musk seems to think its 1960s Suid Afrika.

He will soon be tossing people from third floor windows.

ZA has moved on a little bit since then but like the stereotypical expatriot Musk hasn't.

Although looking at contemporary US he might have a point.

Baidu's PR head has a PR problem after workaholic social media posts

PR = flat lying

"Jing Qu appears to be out of a job herself"

and now lying flat. :)

68 tech names sign CISA's secure-by-design pledge

By design?

Looking at the CISA list it looks more like by process to me. More of an agenda than a specification.

Secure is just correctness with a restricted set of concerns namely the specification's security properties.

It's the same old hard problem of verifiably correct software composing verifiably correct systems.

Secure by design should mean the construction of the system or software uses the specification of security properties as its primary design document which should also guide the construction processes with an eye to continuously verifying the product against the specification. Something like this, many years ago [1990], was called software or program derivation by analogy with the proof process in mathematics.

Considering the development processes and culture, quality control and sheer size of these players' code bases the CISA program is less a case of pissing into the wind than shitting in the face of a hurricane.

We will have fusion powered flying cars before we have secure correct software.

Father of SQL says yes to NoSQL

The long view

Its probably worth remembering that SQL isn't the relational model (or vice versa.) In Michael Stonebreaker's Ingres Papers the original Ingres query language QUEL, I think, was claimed to be superior to the SQL if that time.

Chamberlain's points about non SQL databases in a distributed and massively scaled environment are probably valid. I don't have the knowledge or experience to say.

I have Codd's original paper in an ACM anthology which is still worth reading for its clarity of vision.

The Ingres Papers are worth reading just to realize what they were doing, when and with what. Not much since then is really new.

Rivian crawls out covered in $1.5B of red ink, panting that it's still alive

Rivian crawls out ... panting that its still alive

Probaby very British humour but one of my favourite scenes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

- "I am still alive."

- "You're not fooling anyone."

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Jdf5EXo6I68

Sods laws suggests that in twenty years time those of us still around will be in hydrogen powered vehicles and scratching our collective head over battery powered cars' short lived reign. [Or perhaps not.]

I always thought an external combustion engine (like the Pritchard steam engine) driving a generator or alternator which in turn powered the wheel motors was a real alternative. External combustion can be both more efficient and lower emission* I believe and the range of potential fuels is somewhat wider. The electro-mechanical side of the arrangement has advanced by leaps and bounds in the last decade or so.

In the meantime I could mount a small diesel generator in the boot of a clagged Telsla with a shagged battery which I imagine could be rescued from the local scrappie.

It would be worth the look on the faces of the Teslaratii when this Franken-Tesla drives up to the diesel bowser and fills up with distillate. ;)

* Think furnace and fluidized bed combustion.

I told Halle Berry where to go during a programming gig in LA

Lucky Terry

I had to google (duck-gg) Halle Berry - I must get out more - but have to agree with our pseudonymous Terry (who once wrote a book about a so-hot-right-then programming language.)

Must have been around 2000-4, I am guessing, and putting my poker chips on C# which might put Andrew Troelsen in the frame. :)

Not sure whether this is high tech Where's Wally or Goonish Casting Crustaceans.

BOFH: The greatest victory is that which requires no battle

Synthia

I guess Simon wasn't going to push his luck with Coppélia although Synthia already sounds like she is going to a bit more mouthy than Coppelius' daughter. ;)

Sadly this episode isn't so much satire as contemporary reportage.

Brain-sensing threads slip from gray matter in first human Neuralink trial

Re: Don't worry .... be Happy !!!

Musk will approach this in his usual manner:

1) Use a 'Bigger' Hammer when fitting the implant !!!

2) Install more 'threads' and hope the redundancy is in the 'right' place !!!

3) Use 'Super Glue' .... the implant will be more 'permanent' than originally planned !!!

4) The subject wasn't hardcore enough and instructed to terminate any staff subject who didn't pass muster.

Leaving the nutjob proprietor aside I have to admit this is impressive:

The Neuralink N1 implant has 64 threads, each thinner than a human hair, through which is distributed a total of 1024 electrodes.

The thickness [diameter] of human [scalp] hair is a bit like the airspeed of the swallow. Roughly 70μm ± 20μm depending a multitude of a factors such as those from european heritage are typically have an oval cross section and from asian, circular, but thicker. Running a 64×16 separately addressable signals down (up?) such thin conduits in a rather hostile environment is impressive bioengineering.

Did you ever imagine you would be writing this?

《the R1 robot that performs the surgeries simply isn't very good at ensuring all the air is out of a patient's skull before closing it up.》

Douglas Adams would be green with envy for not dreaming up that one.

R1 Surgical Robot Operator's Guide Sirius Cybernetics Corporation _{Limitations and Warnings}

Terry Pratchett would have created another Ankh-Morpork guild just to use it.

IBM sued again for alleged discrimination – this time against White males

Wasn't a dino baby then?

All a bit surreal. An obnoxious corporation (IBM albeit wearing its red fedora) dumps an equally obnoxious and apparently slightly demented employee for what a normal person would imagine for those reasons rather than his lack of melanin.

When I realized that the diversity target 30% female (by whatever definition) and 30% of colour (meaning non-white) doesn't mean only 40% can be white males as as the two 30% categories overlap - 30% females of colour would leave you with potentially 70% (realistically 55%) white male - it actually seems to be a reasonable, possibly conservative, aspiration given the US demographics.

My guess is that IBM will settle simply because there are enough (remaining) customers that believe this guff and identify with the complainant.

Oracle ULA audits are a license to bill

so much gel in his slick back hair,

《so much gel in his slick back hair》

Brylcream surely, or Brillantine, or Macassar oil?

The upside is this stuff should be highly flammable (hint.)