Posts by Bebu

Google all at sea over rising tide of robo-spam

A drug dealer's quandry...

he can sell a product that contains a lower proportion of toxic crap but is more expensive depleting his margins, or he can source cheaper product that is more than likely to kill the customer, reducing his market share, and potentially permanently depleting his revenue stream not mention attracting unwanted attention to his activities.

The AI generated crap that search engines now pop up swamping anything remotely relevant will eventually destroy the search engine user base and the engine owner golden goose. Some of the top search results now rank with Talkie Toaster's fixation with toast. Query the Zilog Z80,000 cpu and you get an advert pushing a Ginko biloeba supplement.

Actually faster to type zilog.com or wikipedia.org :) and take your chances with the site's search facility although some site's search facilities are completely broken - presumably their users search the site with google.

Online Yellow Pages style business directories might have a second life if carefully maintained by the owners. As an example if I wanted to install a heat pump hot water system I would expect my search of such a directory would only return local businesses that could supply and install the system - not a dodgy brothers outfit on another continent nor a redirection to an online vendor of manhood enhancing pharmaceuticals.

Probably relevant is I understand Yellow Pages didn't (originally?) have a revenue stream from the directory's referrals to the listed businesses - only for the listings (renewed annually.)

Meta comms chief handed six-year Russian prison sentence for 'justifying terrorism'

Kangaroo court....

I am sure Skippy would not be in anyway happy about his kind being associated with the travesty that passes for a judiciary in the Russian Federation.

Just waiting for la Pute to come out with “The Americans cannot build aeroplanes. They are very good at refrigerators and razor blades." Unfortunately he would be right Boeings, probably about the fridges but surely they still make razor blades in the US.

Just recently I had to explain why in our (common law) juridiction why an accused cannot be tried in absentia.

Perhaps the US could convene a special military commission to try and sentence the members of the Russian tribunal to similar terms of incarceration (in the Gitmo Hilton.:)

Zilog to end standalone sales of the legendary Z80 CPU

Coincidentally...

Coincidentally today I was looking up info on the Z8000 and Z80,000. Different directions.

Looking at the comments - is anyone reading elreg under 60 years old? Seems like God's waiting room. I half expected Victor Meldrew to chime in at some point. :)

Elon Musk's X to challenge Australian content takedown orders in court

Not America...

《However, for as long as Twitter wants to have a presence in Australia, the government can make that conditional on anything it likes, within the bounds of whatever the constitution permits.》

The AU constitution is very different creature quite unlike that of the US. Not carte blanche to slaughter your fellow citizen with the firearm of your choice, or even a bill of rights.

It largely deals with the separation of powers, relations between the various governments and structure of the federal legislature and judiciary.

It suspect it would impose very few constraints on the Commonwealth's ability to legislate in this area. Using section 92 to object would be drawing a rather long bow, nailing legs onto a dead horse.

Musk's antics are likely to lose what few remaining Australian twitter users that are still within cooee of sanity.

In any case after this Australian institutions will start closing their twitter accounts and removing their presence.

Australians are a bit odd in that unlike their american cousins they would prefer their local news footage to have as little similarity to the comparable US material which ressembles nothing so much as an endless stream of snuff movies.

I would imagine the Commonwealth already has powers to compel network providers to block traffic from any source. Many states still have Victorian era obscenity and public decency laws on their books which could be dusted off and revived.

Cisco creates architecture to improve security and sell you new switches

DPUs/SmartNICs

They run Minix too?

A remake of the Intel Management Engine(ME) fiasco?

AST would be so pleased.(Not.)

I don't know which would make me happier - shoving Cisco crap into my server's kernel (Fireeye's xagt and Crowdstrike falcon were bad enough) or messing with the networking hardware.

I can see a perfectly benign update to existing production software could change network behaviour sufficiently for this stuff to pull the plug on the whole fleet. There is enough self updating (in place) software for this to be a real problem.

"O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!" I chortled in my joy!

Rarest, strangest, form of Windows saved techie from moment of security madness

Almost alternate reality...

I had forgotten this byway of IT history

Back in the late 90s we had quite a bit of DEC Alpha hardware (being 64 bit) running DEC OSF/1 (ultimately became Tru64) - mostly low end servers but a few Alphastations (200,400,500) - one model of which would habitually boot into ARC or Alphabios (definitely not SRM) so did not boot into the installed DEC Unix.

When I had one of these on my desk to upgrade to 4.0G my curiosity got the better of my judgement and I tried to install the Alpha version of Windows 2000 - I have no idea why we had a copy of the install media* but there were crates of media for the menagerie of Sun, SGI, IBM, HP servers and workstations etc...

In any case the install went as smoothly as on a PC. At the time it seemed to me from the informational messages that the Alphabios was also emulating an x86. Once installed I had a fiddle for a few days and appeared quite fast compared to the standard windows desktops the polloi were using.

Quick install and configuration of DEC Unix and returned to the owner.

Back to reality but probably not to normality. :)

* The standard NT4 install media had non x86 architectures (eg MIPS risc) but I don't recall whether the Alpha was one.

Huawei's latest flagship smartphone contains no world-shaking silicon surprises

Cunning Plan...

Huawei, having been caught with the previous flagship phone exposing a (more) advanced fabrication technology, have purposely only used existing commodity technology (even if lots of it) in their new flagship, to conceal their actual capabilities.

Not that using older tech would matter inside the PRC once it becomes unpatriotic to be seen using Apple kit. (If we recall the days of "better dead than red" we don't really hold the moral high ground either.)

Five years ago just mentioning Sax Rohmer's character Dr Fu Manchu* would automatically lead to cancellation by the wokery and anti-imperialist historical revisionistas fellow travellers but now I recently read that someone is (re)making one of the movies.

The ever capricious winds of geopolitics have probably forced a fair amount of revision of previously immutable positions. Due to unforeseen circumstances today's cancellations have been cancelled.

* If you read the stories the Dr is a really clever bugger but unlucky, and his pommy adversaries totally gormless, winning only through unaccountable, and undeserved, good fortune.

Re: Undertone

《British SoC. Have we even made any? It seems the last fab capable of producing MCUs closed in 2001.》

The Empire version of the intel 4004? Or was it a ECL bit slice Turing machine? :)

(Can't really laugh, AU didn't fare any better. Apart from Advanced Technology's Microbee there was nothing comparable with the BBC Micro or Archimedes.)

Tesla Cybertruck turns into world's most expensive brick after car wash

5 hour boot

Someone got their nested for loops muddled on the second (diagnostic) boot path, one suspects.

A knotty problem: Boffins working on fuel-efficient trajectories for space travel

Re: heteroclinic connection*

《 So, as I understand the article, you put the spacecraft on a trajectory which links two points of equilibrium, so that when it reaches the second point it just kind of stays in that orbit.》

I checked out the wiki article - proper mathematics giving greek alphabet a decent seeing to. 40 years ago I might have had half a clue but pretty clueless now. :(

I imagine it is like throwing a ball right next to a wall on a slighty parabolic trajectory with just enough impetus that just as it reaches the top of its trajectory it is just over the top of the wall and comes to rest on top of the the wall just as it begins its descent. (Assumes the we can treat the horizontal component of the ball's velocity as neglible.)

The time varying position of all three bodies in the orbital case must make the analytic solution close to intractable.

As the first post opined - proper boffinery of the first water.

* apparently doesn't mean bonking one's spouse.

Some smart meters won't be smart at all once 2/3G networks mothballed

'future-proof'

The problem from the outset is that the future is displaying every likelihood on not being 'future-proof' itself.

Even a saucepan wouldn't be totally future proof if our imbecile decendants couldn't even make a fire.

Re: he'll be all over this then!

《For true gibbering, drooling incompetence, they need to find an art school dropout, or someone who pretends they're fluent in Latin.》

Boris then?

fluent < flowing as in effluent, pretend latin as in shite. Ideal match I should have thought.

The English who are capable of any sort of engineering incompetence these days.

That is how I read the penultimate poster's《English who are incapable of any sort of engineering competence these days.》

Only to be rewarded with a Baldrick of a cockup in the next post.

《So now my meter and stopcock are buried under 2ft of earth, hardcore and tarmac.》

Blackadder: "Baldrick, who are we not home to?"

Baldrick: "Mr Cockup, sir."

Sounds like open house to me.

Re: incinerator toilet (all-electric, no water, burns your waste down to sterile ash)

Exactly what I thought. Ideal for incinerating the world's shitty arseholes (as in involuntary cremation normally only extended to witches and heretics.)

Re: I like my smart meter

《Hell, I've got my eye on an incinerator toilet (all-electric, no water, burns your waste down to sterile ash) and a greywater filtration system (£1000, pumps your water butt into a loft header tank and you can keep things separate and flush with greywater, or you can build what is basically a giant pond filter / UV / osmosis system and get free water forever more. I'd honestly rather suffer that complication and expense than give Thames Water another penny.》

From what I read you would want to feed Thames Water's product into your giant pond filter as its water is said to sit between sewerage and greywater - hardly a sweet point. Water from the actual Thames river might be closer to potable. :(

Reverse osmosis can require a lot of water so distillation could be more practical.

Re: a device controlled by a third party

《Seriously, if your penny pinching ISP would supply routers with subnets then you could easily run the smart meter and similar devices in a different subnet to your PC/Laptop. My Vigor 2863 can run up to 8 different subnets.

I already run my TV in a 192.168.7.x subnet》

Actually our energy retailer acquired a national (AU) mobil phone/isp business and now offers discount broadband to its energy customers. We have a "smart" meter but doesn't have any remote comms capability and is manually read quarterly (possibly NFC?) so perhaps tinfoil hat time. :)

These TVs all come from IPv6 lands so you want to ensure your router isn't doing 6-to-4 and NATing out from the translated 4 address. :)

Re: They allow you to adjust your consumption to dynamic surge/discount pricing periods.

《can't wait to see this in supermarkets. It's coming.》

Wendy's recently tried this on - wasn't popular - their response in defence was: we weren't going to increase prices during periods of high demand but we intended decreasing prices during low demand ... You don't have to be particle physicist and renormalize this to work out that it amounts the same thing.

Our local national (AU) grocery store Woolworths this year replaced shelf price labels with electronic e-paper labels which sufficiently resembled the paper ones that I didn't notice until one went into a reboot loop in front of my eyes.

So I imagine the management could increase the prices of everything in all (~1000) of their stores by 10% (say) almost instantly. A woolly wet dream methinks.

Each and every day I am more and more convinced that the future isn't worth waiting around for. :(

Re: So, smart meter joy is continuing

《From what I can see PV’s with intelligent battery control are a good reason to get a smart meter. Size your battery and PV array correctly and you will be drawing very little from the grid, but able to sell to the grid at times financially beneficial to yourself. Trouble is firstly these systems are expensive and more difficult to install and require a level of geekiness to operate. secondly, the benefits accrue to the consumer, not the supplier, which will be why the suppliers won’t be offering these systems…. Although, a smart disruptive supplier could act as a broker between users on the same local loop, enabling one users’ surplus to be used by other users instead of them waiting until “cheap” time to draw down energy from the distribution grid. As more houses have solar panels et al, we can expect to see more instances where dumping electricity back to the grid is not an option as there are insuffiicient users for that energy.》

Quoted in full as this pretty much summarizes the situation in AU (not lacking in either sunlight or rooftop PVs)

Retailers are/were offering discounted batteries to consumers with existing rooftop PVs (and an inverter which is probably more germane) to soak up the excess solar kwHs from the grid and re-exported in the peak periods. The discount is subject to the retailer having control of the battery. (2-3 year contract.)

The Scot's off-peak rate for EVs could make it worthwhile to ditch the EV and just get the battery and inverter and use the battery during non off-peak periods. ;) PVs in Scotland? A bit like central heating in Darwin I would have thought.

Google laying off staff again and moving some roles to 'hubs,' freeing up cash for AI investments

Re: reported net profit of $73.8 billion in calendar 2023, up from $59.96 billion in the prior year

《Just after the one about selling your soul and conscience to the devil.》

I thought this was rather appropriate as the horned one doesn't actually want your soul and has even less use for your conscience. All he wants is for you to commit to making the infernal sale. Understanding that you realize that the devil has no need to or desire to honour or indeed conclude any agreement.

So it goes in the corporate world - the corporate theatre is fundamentally the same non-deal.

One of the reasons companies keep the fact of their imminent acquisition from their employees otherwise too many key employees would be crushed in the rush for the exit. The talentless dross always remain and are often the perfect fit for their new masters' businesss. Once the IP and client lists have been decanted from the acquisition the husk is discarded. Morally rather like Queen Xanxia's Calufrax.

Fin'ooglers

《Fin'ooglers? FFS! Who comes up with this bollocks?》

I think its a play on finagle* v. finance + google (+ -ers)

Fairly apt for corporate bean counters who in general have also earned a reputation for their biblioculinary abilities. :)

* Merriam Webster -- finagle: to use devious or dishonest methods to achieve one's ends.

NASA solar sail to be Siriusly visible in orbit from Earth

Re: 80 square meters, eh?

《That'll be 3.85 nanoWales, then.》

Or 14.68 microSarks.

Or 0.1020 Rockalls. Slightly larger than 1.0 effall.

A new boom design

Hopefully better and more robust umbrellas for we earthbound mortals.

These satellites are to be in sun synchronous orbit which I assume means if their orbit is in the plane of the ecliptic that the triangle made made by the sun, satellite and the earth is constant in its angles.

I am wondering whether I could use that property to determine my longitude with my sextant and without a chronometer.

Unintended acceleration leads to recall of every Cybertruck produced so far

Re: "press the brake pedal if the accelerator ever gets stuck"

《 "press the brake pedal if the accelerator ever gets stuck"

Wow. This actually had to be said. Is it just me, or is Humanity's IQ diminishing ?》

Another gem from one of the myriad alumni of the School of the Bleeding Bloody Obvious.

We seem to be in the middle of intellectual limbo craze - how low can they go albeit without the pleasant music.

Re: TITSUP!

《Sure, they told you that you have an ejector seat and parachute. And charged you for it. But have you tested it? 》

Even if everything was installed correctly (sans soap) and is likely to work you can safely bet the vehicle's roof is not going to remove itself from the ejection trajectory until 15 second after ejection. (Hard realtime programming error. The roof is hard.) Assuming the roof was removed correctly the parachute is likely to be deployed just before ejection.

I would trust anything associated with Musk to design and build a penny farthing let alone anything with a chain and sprocket.

Novelty flip phone strips out almost every feature possible to be as boring as possible

Re: Next up....

《I've always wondered why we couldn't marry a recharging dock with dialing keypad and physical handset ....》

I have seen in a local variety/department store a 4G/LTE handset the in the same form factor as the old telcos' POTS desktop 'dog bone' handset offerings with a digital dialer and a small mono lcd screen for texts. Probably not as simple as it looked as I guess it might permit wifi tethering, wifi calling etc etc.

Who would have imagined vinyl (LPs) and requisite scratch-o-matic turntables making a comeback*? (Thermionic valve amps have always had their [delusional?] fans.) The rotary dialer might again be de rigeur. ;)

* I would have thought modern turntables would use lasers and modern signal processing to scan the vinyl's tracks - a sort of lidar for the terrain of an LP's surface but no they persist in dragging a rusty needle along the furrows.

Re: Next up....

Agent 86's shoe phone would be favourite.

Although irresponsibly discarded dog crap could make calls rather unpleasant.

The cone-of-silence still top of my list. :)

Re: Surely ideal for children

《My father-in-law had 5 daughters, and the neighbours on all sides had knocked up daughters with spawn sired by wastrels. He was as relaxed as a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Props to him: all 5 got decent husbands.》

And how many unmarked graves? :)

The neighbours weren't aware of birth control or were of a religious persuasion that precluded it?

You can't do anything now without a smartphone and getting to the point that this evening it was a real PITA to order and pay for a meal in the local tavern without installing and using the establishment's app. A high quality piece of software that, I am sure. (Not!) Lunacy. Cash might be king but more like a raving Lear every day.

While assuming the elderly are not capable of mastering smartphone technology isn't based on any real evidence - more a case of wisdom concluding why complicate simple but neccessary tasks and why bother at all with the unneccessary?

One aspect of this is the adverse effects on the visually impaired - as we age vision does degrade through cataracts, glaucoma, macula degeneration etc etc. I already have my cheap simple phone on high contrast but as I have eschewed using it for anything more than calls and texts I am not too worried if one day I cannot used it. I wonder do they have braille phones?

October 2025 will be a support massacre for a bunch of Microsoft products

Remind me. What changes?

"Using [Microsoft] products [...] leaves your organization vulnerable to potential security threats, productivity losses, and compliance issues."

As Agent Muller observed "the truth is out there" but Scully's rejoinder "so are the lies" equally applicable.

The X Files were hardly weirder than the current antics of X formerly Twitter and its owner. (Although I always preferred Carl Kolchak in the earlier Night Stalker.;)

Meta lets Llama 3 LLM out to graze, claims it can give Google and Anthropic a kicking

Llama3 giving google and anthropic a good kicking... AI meets Clockwork Orange

The image that links to this article looks like one of a flock of demented, cyber converted sheep with which John Lumic was going to conquer the world.*

The fictional Lumic is arguably a lot saner than most of the loonies in charge of some of largest enterprises on the planet.

Another Aggravated Insanity Large Lying Machine is all we need as though we don't already have an excess of the natural sort.

* sheep are dangerous and, arguably worse, that llamas are just camels hiding in sheeps' clothing.

Feds hit coding boot camp with big fine for allegedly conning students

Anywhere else...

the CEO would have the cell in the same block as Elizabeth Holmes for what looks like outright fraud.

I would have required all such loan contracts unconditionally voided and past repayments refunded to discourage others with similar plans.

Rather close to indentured labour which, in the past, was in practice was just shy of actual slavery.

Your trainee just took down our business and has no idea how or why

I thought it was just me...

Having shutdown, reboot etc options on the same menu as logout always seemed brain dead to me as the two do two differents classes of thing - the first takes the machine down losing all volatile state whereas the second just ends a user's session.

Having been caught out on my own systems and from pre GUI days I always perform shutdowns and reboots from the command line (even Windows always had that option.)

Remote graphical sessions like RDP or Nomachine are an easy trap to fall into.

If the trainee was from a service provider it might have made more sense for her to get some experience on something less formidable than an enterprise production mainframe.

Unix/Linux workstations might be a good place to start and learn judgement and the names of things outside the mainframe bubble.

If you went to your local PC hardware / parts supplier and asked for a DASD for your PC it would be poetic justice if you were sold a magnetic drum but you would likely also get a couple of K of core in a suitcase thrown in. ;)

I have a lot of sympathy for trainees in general. In most organisations they seem to be assigned to the least competent or useful staff member who is often more clueless than the trainee. In this way I think a lot of talent is wasted and frequently lost. Some understandably turn to the dark side of the conveniently open window school of system administration.

Singapore infosec boss warns China/West tech split will be bad for interoperability

Probably inevitable...

It should be matter of more surprise that much of the contemporary technical world is interoperable.

Its not that long ago there were a few incompatible proprietary networking technologies (physical to presentation layers.)

Television PAL/SECAM/NTSC and even POTS telephone system. Not forgetting the 240/120VAC/50-60Hz mess.

If the PRC and its BRICS mates want to take their bat and ball and go home the EU, US, CA, UK/AU/NZ etc will have to arrange to manufacture their kit somewhere else. The remainder will have to choose.

The likelihood of two such adversarial blocks sitting in good faith on ISO etc standards committees to ensure interoperability is almost certainly nil.

I can understand this outcome could be financially disastrous for entrepôt nations like Singapore. Not forgetting that many global TW, KR and JP tech corporations have considerable investment in manufacturing and markets in the PRC who will suffer considerable loss of assets and sales (as will many US companies.)

One point the pandemic made clear was that tightly coupled, mostly irredundant, systems are extremely vulnerable to disruption. After decades of dismissing the globalization sceptics' arguments the hasty, disorganized, uncoordinated rush to national, or nation block, self sufficiency (or technical sovereignty etc) with equally little thought of the consequences is likely to result in tears and the return of extensive trade restrictions.

Tesla asks shareholders to reinstate Musk's voided $56B pay package

Re: Perhaps adding a Flux Capacitor...

Yes. Preconfigured to shoot off the very distant future (in time for lights out for our sun. :) and no way to recharge the capacitor (with "fluxes"? :) hoping of course Musk test drives it first (with the Orange Floridan and most of the US SC in the back for the triffecta.)

Re: An example of a cognitive misfire :o

《So all Porsche drivers have one for their daily commute around the Nurbergring?

......

It's like VW deciding to cash in on the hippie popularity of the Beatle by producing a commemorative 1930s edition with Swastikas》

Beginning and ending with Ferdinand Porche :) who apart from being a rather naughty chap in Hitler's Germany was much earlier involved in the first electric hybrids and EVs Lohner-Porche

Perhaps given his apparent politcal leanings, Musk is aspiring to the same two oak leaves.

AlmaLinux 9.4 beta prepares to tread where RHEL dares not

Supported hardware.

I am glad Alma have renabled support for RH unsupported LSI SAS HBAs in mpt3sas as it save grabbing the driver from elrepo.

Alma doesn't have to certify hardware for support so including drivers for obsolete hardware shouldn't incur incremental costs.

RH could equally have provided a legacy stream for unsupported hardware which, if installed on a system, removes the host from RH support coverage (except where covered by a $pecial extended "legacy" contract like the ELS for EOL products.)

Rocky's claim that the stable kernel-userland interface is possibly a little disingenuous as normally glibc would need to be rebuilt if only to include any changes to the syscall interface. The kernel-userland stability is possibly more of an artifact of the stable glibc interface acting as a kind of shim.

A particular example that comes to mind is RH's back porting ambient capabilities from the 4.3 kernel series to RHEL7's 3.10 kernels and the required userland support.

Still could be interesting and/or useful having more recent kernels available for *EL9 systems without having to roll your own. I think other rolling/non-LTS distros (ubuntu?) have done this for years.

Torvalds intentionally complicates his use of indentation in Linux Kconfig

Re: If your chosen editor cannot convert tabs to spaces automatically

《I don't think the VT52 (1974) had tab support at all.》

There are no terminfo entries for vt52 for hts or st (termcap.)

I use tabs as field separators and use a program (detab) to convert the tabs to required number of spaces to move the fields to the arbitrary specified columns.

Displaying texts in proportional typefaces containing tabs is never going to be pretty.

You can display text containing tabs nicely by setting (pseudo)terminal's tab stops normally by using the tabs program (part of ncurses) (which is faulty on RHEL7, fixed in RHEL8.)

I still think Linus is right in requiring parsers to parse white space when such white space has no syntactic role other than separating tokens. (Postel's law. ;)

I never warmed to languages that use indentation to delineate block structure but it does go back to 1966 (Peter Landin.)

Judge refuses to Ctrl-Z divorce order made by a misclick

Re: Doesn't this seem like....

《....Schrödinger's marriage?》

Given that involves a cat probably not the most politic. ;)

All a bit silly. The parties were to divorce in any case, its just a case of premature ejection from the marital state. It would be more worrying if reflexivity of the relation wasn't preserved viz he wasn't married to her but she was still married to him. (Gendered pronouns did make that easier to state than the usual legal circumlocutions.)

In AU the grounds for divorce are basically irretrievable breakdown of the marriage, after 12 months the divorce will be granted. Financial arrangements and those for dependents are separate matters. If you are seeking a divorce and the other party is uncontactable, the divorce will still be granted which means the other party could be also be unaware of their single status which is not too different from this story.

Tencent Cloud to revisit design after circular dependencies slowed emergency API fix

"There's a hole in my bucket."*

《Tencent Cloud would usually roll back this sort of change. But to do so, it needed the very same API it had just broken.》

Have to wonder how much of any organisation's services and infrastructure has a cyclic graph of dependencies. Trees are good but dags (directed acyclic graphs) will do. ;)

Possibly not a triumph of devops but perhaps not. :)

* a childhood memory.

Indian PM's 25-year roadmap laid out with help from AI

AI is so good at drawing pictures and driving cars, why not let it govern a country?

Can not be more hallucinatory than any number of the world's leaders. Why not give it a whirl?

The fly in the ointment must be the training sets - an LLM trained on the antics of contemporary politicians would have be more gaga than they. Plato's Republic?

How to coax ChatGPT into making better predictions: Get it to tell tales from the future

I have a headache and my urine has blood in it. What do you think I have?

Pity AI doesn't have a sense of humour.

"I have a headache and my urine has blood in it. What do you think I have?"

The answer* could have been: "Poor judgement. If you must, wear a johnnie next time."

* Note. I suspect not a particularly likely diagnosis.

OpenAI launches Asian operations in Tokyo to avoid being lost in translation

Re: どうもありがとうミスターロボット

Very good ;)

Thank you Mr Roboto.

Tesla decimates staff amid ongoing performance woe

Re: Missing information in article

《One is a muppet that helps teach children valuable life lessons. The other is a drug abusing narcissist.》

I suspect the average 5 year old could easily learn a few life lessons from the failings of the second - a facility of which quite clearly numerous adults are lacking.

A drug abusing, narcissistic muppet, with his own little submarine, hopefully isn't likely to appear on Sesame Street.

Its a shame Spitting Image (UK) or Rubbery Figures (AU) aren't still running as the contemporary world would provide them with an embarrassment of riches (embarras des richesses. :)

There's a new brand of fool out there

Cybertruck owners?

I always imagined your basic fool was pretty much a ground state of human folly but the likes of Trump and Musk have excavated new caverns of idiocy for your more than basic troglodyte fool to inhabit.

Why making pretend people with AGI is a waste of energy

Re: "Then they go to school to get all the creativity beaten out of them with a big stick"

《Exercising creativity is disruptive as it's an individual behaviour that necessarily distracts from the planned action of stuffing facts into the mass, so it's disapproved of. I remember being reprimanded by the tutor on a degree level 'experiment' session for asking how and why the experiment would work -- we were supposed to just follow the instructions and have it work without caring why. So the marks were for no more than 'following instructions'.》

Brought back a memory of a biochemistry experiment (late 1970s) to measure the P/O ratio (phosphorylation:oxygen used) which was thought to be stoichiometric (the two P and O were believed to be linked mechanistically.) No one ever got the magic ratio and the tutors/demonstrators had a myriad of excuses/explanations of "why", other than the possibility that the assumptions were wrong. Of course a few years later a UK researcher demonstrated the metabolism of O2 created an accumulating pH gradient which drove the phosphorylation - so rather loosely coupled.

Clearly nothing much ever changes (for the better.)

Cars don't have legs...

I don't think that was for want of trying.

Legged vehicles are potentially the ultimate all terrain vehicle and I do remember seeing footage of research efforts in that line which were rather pathetic - along the lines of a stunned cockroach.

With the massive compact computing resources now available and potentially with narrowly targeted LLMs practical walking vehicle might be feasible.

Such a vehicle that could efficiently climb stairs could be of enormous value to firefighters battling a tower block inferno (I vaguely recall getting stuff up or down the stairwells of the Twin Towers was a real problem.)

Anyway I am sure the military keep revisiting the idea.

Re: Two men say they are Jesus. One of them must be wrong.

Both Jesuses are both almost certainly not the messiah other than perhaps in name only and therefore are likely both wrong.

《The test of truth is an experiment.》

A single experiment can establish a hypothetical "truth" is not in fact true (satisfied in all models) but any number of experiments can not establish "truth" in other than perhaps a probabilistic or an otherwise restricted sense.

I would be interested in Daniel Dennett's take on contemporary AI/LLM (and Douglas Hofstadter's) as I remember the "great future" of AI back in the mid 1970s when reading some of their popular writing. (EGB I still recommend.)

Australian operation of web host BlueVPS laid low by storage failure

Power tools...

《At a time when many software developers have turned their attention to AI products, India's SaaS giant Zoho has decided to diversify into power tools.》

And I was thinking an overhyped productivity software suite but something a whole lot more useful like an angle grinder.

Feline firewall woke developer to declaw DDoS disaster

Vardøgr

《"You might guess that the AWS alert caused my phone to vibrate or make a sound, waking my cat up first," he wrote.

If that's your guess, you're wrong. Guo keeps his phone in do not disturb mode during the night.》

Years ago when used to have a FM radio/wireless on my desk and cell phone next to it, I noticed that a good 10 to 15 seconds before the phone actually rang (same for sms/text) the radio would experience a distinct sort of background static or interference (even if it was on silent or vibrate.) Same static could be heard on the POTS landline if I was using it at the time.

I never could work out what was actually happening there. Was pre 4G so possiblly 3G or GSM/2G and I also subsequently upgraded to a DAB+ digital radio which never exhibited this effect.

More than once I have had some bemused users in my office when I have reached for the phone well before it rang. :)

A BOFH with apparent omniscience inspires best behaviour all round. :)

So I wonder if the cat heard this vardøgr signal from some high (audio) frequency from the phone or from a nearby clock radio etc. I also notice the screen normally activates even when on silent. Of course moggies are evil buggers on their own account at the best of times...

Open source versus Microsoft: The new rebellion begins

Re: I predict.......

If a german state really wants this it will happen. The german people are nothing if not methodical and persistent and a considerable proportion of quality open source originates from german developers so the skills and motivation are there.

Recall the progenitor of LibreOffice and OpenOffice, StarOffice was developed there (albeit not open source.)

Whatever skulduggery Microsoft might attempt it is constrained by the certain knowledge the (IT) world is watching.

75% of enterprise coders will use AI helpers by 2028. We didn't say productively

Amdahl's Law

«Even if you're getting 50 percent faster task completion [on coding], that's only going to be 50 percent of 20 percent. So that means only 10 percent greater improvement in overall cycle time »

Unknown to manglement types Amdahl's Law pretty much says this. Although long before my time "Time and Motion Studies" were a management tool to identify and quantify resource usage and potential bottlenecks and inefficiencies but those managers were probably made of sterner stuff - managing the logistics of the 1944 D Day Normandy landings probably slightly more demanding than a software development team. :)

I imagine any vocation that is in imminent risk of befoulment by AI/LLM is not likely to attract stellar talent. The hard part is deciding what activities would be exempt since at present its AI secret sauce with everything.