Posts by Bebu

Rust developers at Google are twice as productive as C++ teams

Have to wonder....

I have to wonder whether the increase in programmer productivity is in part due to much smaller Rust teams than the "huge" C++ teams. The rather obvious observation that the latest and greatest will attract the more talented whereas the older technology is more likely to attract and retain the plodders and would be careerists.

Anyone, programmer or not, who claims a chunk of code is "more correct*" probably hasn't understood. At best its likely to be less incorrect. It either satisfies its specification over its full domain☆ of application or it doesn't.

The heffalump in the room is that a lot of code is developed without anything remotely resembling a specification.

Rust looks like it would be more amenable to the application of formal methods and the last time I looked there appeared to be a fair bit of activity in this area.

Automatic memory management (garbage collection) does provide much of the memory safety of Rust and in many contexts is, I suspect, much less burden on developers to use languages like Go.

* even leaving termination aside and only considering partial correctness.

☆ restricting the domain to where specification does apply could induce an ordering on correctness - the larger the restricted domain the "more" correct I suppose.

UK skies set for cheeky upgrade with hybrid airship

R101?

Reminded me of the post WW1 Imperial Airship Scheme.

The R101 crashed in France, with the air minister aboard, on its maiden voyage.

If this new ship can hold carry 100 passengers then (over)load it up with the UK cabinet and Tory luminaries and fellow travellers and send it over France. That lot would demand hydrogen to save a bob or two. in any case the flying arse wouldn't be lacking any holes.

Re: Really???

《H2S is not *good* stuff》

Also deadly around 100ppm (good thing that we can smell it at 0.5ppm. Natural selection I guess - our ancestors who couldn't .... aren't our ancestors.:)

By comparison the level for HCN is 50ppm.

Re: Really???

《ammonia ... has about 60% of the lifting capability of hydrogen》

By my calculation the molecular weight of hydrogen (H₂) is 2(1+1) while ammonia (NH₃) is 17 (14+1+1+1) and the average (mean) molecular weight of air is roughly 29.

Assuming ideal gases viz 22.4 litres at STP contains 1 mol - a container with 22.4 litres of H2 with have (29 - 2) grams of "lift" whereas the same container with NH3 will have (29-17) grams of lift ie 27:12 H2:NH3 or 9:4 which would be 44%.

Practically at reasonable temperatures I am not sure ammonia really an ideal gas as I would be suspicious the paired electrons in the valence orbitals and the protons in adjacent molecules would interact quite strongly but just a guess as I finished chemistry 40 years ago. Keeping the water out might be a problem too.

Water has a m.wt of 18 so you could use superheated steam. ;)

Re: Really???

Jeff & Brains => Thunderbird 2. As kid in the '60s I had the TB2 model so I have a soft spot for this flying arse. ;)

The Register meets the voice of Siri Down Under

It had to be "Karen"

I am certain Ms Jacobsen is a lovely person but the talkie toaster "assistants" emanating from devices had pretty much convinced me that the various Siris and Alexas were Karens. :)

Oddly just over a year ago visitors from the UK were in the car and had their google maps navigating to their residence with a midlands accent (at least definitely not RS) which was pleasant enough but what I cannot understand was that their directions from google were much better (useful) than those from my Australian version running concurrently (which are frequently confusing or inacurate.) Perhaps Midlands girl* wanted to migrate to AU (which the visitors did) and was trying to ingratiate yourself. ;)

*Intended only as a reference to "souffle girl."

Easy-to-use make-me-root exploit lands for recent Linux kernels. Get patching

Re: If you are *already* in such a sad state ...

《If you are already in such a sad state, a vulnerable machine is the least of your problems.》

True only if all your systems, networking and security policies, implementation, monitoring and enforcement are in that state of grace that has apparently eluded the rest of us.

This vulnerability if nothing else demonstrates the unlikeliness of such a perfect state in the actual world.

I would take it as axiomatic that any system, anywhere is vulnerable to subversion as a consequence of any number of unknown defects in just about any component either by itself or in combination.

Most defects will never be discovered before the last system is turned off. I am sure Multix had such flaws but no one is ever going to bother looking now.

Do not touch that computer. Not even while wearing gloves. It is a biohazard

Bill wanted us to know that he's not exaggerating.

Reading Bill's story I was reminded of the late british author, Angela Carter who, according to a biographer, was a chain smoker who, when working, would shut herself away, but apparently the smoke would pour out the door's keyhole.

Have to wonder whether this was her Mac? A national treasure - if not preserved for all time, well kippered. The Mac that is.;)

FTX crypto-crook Sam Bankman-Fried gets 25 years in prison

Re: And when you put it all together, there's the model of a charmless man

《Sociopaths are genetically predisposed to not LEARN responsibility; they absolutely can NOT learn responsibility. This trait is formed in the fetus, in the womb. The sociopath is born a completely amoral individual, with no conscience; and cannot be changed--via medication, human interaction, or otherwise. (and congratulations on getting the "...spoiled perma-adolescent..." part 100% correct, re the sociopathic condition/individual)》

Unfortunately much of society is built on the idea of an individual's innate capacity to make moral choices and that when they have knowingly made an immoral choice to feel guilt, accept punishment and the need for restitution before rehabilitation or redemption. Appears rather futile when dealing with sociopaths.

Sort of explains why the US on the whole isn't keen on abortion.

viz The right to [sociopathic] life - probably worried some pinko boffin might develop an antenatal test for sociopathy.

Many decades ago, I was reading the text of US Constitution and came across the ban on "bills of attainder*" which I had to lookup. I am not sure they might not be such a bad thing after all (as long as its not my blood that is considered tainted.;)

Not that my presence has or ever will disgrace any of the 50 states.

* Art.1 ss 9&10

Cloud server host Vultr rips user data licensing clause from ToS amid web 'confusion'

Re: The problem is all or nothing "agreements"

《99.9999999999999999 recurring percent》

That is actually 100% - real numbers are funny like that. ;)

But announcing a change of terms and conditions in a way that guarantees exactly no one can or will read them possibly damages their later enforcibility.

As always a long spoon...

FreeBSD Foundation hands out Beacon gongs for safer software

Re: What's CHERI?

This chap had something a bit more comprehensible

https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2023/two_stories_for_what_is_cheri.html

[The malloc(4) example won't actually trip conventional systems as malloc(4) normally returns 64 bytes or 32 bytes on 64 and 32 bit glibc/linux systems respectively.]

Capability in this context isn't really related to Linux capabilities but to something like a cryptographically signed: pointer + an a set of operations permitted on the object referenced by the pointer(capability) issued by the (security?) kernel on behalf of a task already holding other capabilities to do so.

Not new as I can vaguely recall in a mid 1970s CS class (partial?) examples taken from Multics and a Burrough's system.

I think Andrew Tanenbaum's Amoeba OS used some sort of capability system as I think Mach also used something similar.

My impression is that CHERI is distinguished by a complete implementation from the purpose built (arm) hardware up. I note the project has qemu implemention for I think an older modified MIPS based processor which would be easier to fiddle with than a fpga implemetation. ;)

I am not entirely clear whether this tech would protect against all the speculative execution flaws in modern processors.

In any case a well deserved gong.

BBC exterminates AI experiments used to promote Doctor Who

Actually....

Capaldi really does look like a Vulcan - more Spock than Spock ;) Although he might have trouble with the traditional deadpan Vulcan delivery but as an uninhibited Vulcan reprising his "In the Thick of It", Caledonian Mafia role might liven up the franchise. :)

Looks like Matt Smith messing with r2d2 and I thought it was quite clever AI grayed his hair and generally aged him until I realized it probably lifted the images from "The Time of the Doctor" during the latter part of the siege of Trenzalore.

The Doctor's two enduring adversaries, dalek and cybermen, weren't AI but basically cyborgs which demonstrates that, while machines can be really nasty, it takes biological intelligence to take it up to another level for evil. :)

Woz calls out US lawmakers for TikTok ban: 'I don’t like the hypocrisy'

'I don’t like the hypocrisy'

"I don’t like the hypocrisy" (in others.)

I might suspect Woz is guessing if tiktok were facing an imminent ban tiktok might accept quite strict regulation of its data collection, retention and redistribution practices which if that worked would inevitably flow on to US social media.

Then their (golden) goose would be cooked. :)

Beijing issues list of approved CPUs – with no Intel or AMD

Re: Those Chinese Linux distributions are still Linux, right?

《While Linus has indeed pulled off a great feat writing the Linux kernel from scratch, don't forget there is also the GNU tools from the free software foundation plus millions of other lines of code for other applications coded by lots of different developers from all over the world that go into making Linux distros.》

Might also help to remember that the target was a lot smaller. Back then (as I was:) you could buy a copy of Andrew Tanenbaum's Operating Systems: Design and Implementation (1987) (as I did;)) and see the listing of a complete multitasking kernel that was possible in 12k lines and for the fairly grubby pre i386 processors (8086 and later 80286.) The i386 with its flat memory model was a lot closer to a traditional Unix architecture.

AFAIK apart from an early use of the minix file system Linus used nothing else from the minix kernel. I would also guess that much of the original kernel development was using a gnu cross development toolchain on a SunOS 4.x workstation (the most common platform within Unis at the time.)

Virtually nothing in this world pops out of the void ex nihilo ad nihilum but is built on the work of and from the inspiration by those that preceeded us.

Today the incredible quantity and unimaginable variety of computing hardware means developing a reasonably useful general purpose kernel completely from scratch is probably very close to an impossible task for an individual. No accident that even in the IOT/embedded space which is a very much smaller target, Linux appears to dominate (safety critical and real time systems probably excepted.)

DBA made ten years of data disappear with one misplaced parameter

Daft?

《 the annual report ... required .... backing up the most recent two months, truncating said months, running an ad hoc job to repopulate it so a report can be generated, then finally restoring from the backup.》

The last bit is a tad confused but the gist seems to be that annual report was generated two months after end-of-year.

So I would guess that the code generating report was repurposed from a specified start-of-year to current report so that removing the last two months is to make "current" two months prior (ie end of year.)

While not a DBA I can grok enough sql to select .... from .... where rec-date between ... and ... and would wonder why database views of the required tables restricted to required period viz omitting the final two months weren't used.

Dropping views is slightly less dangerous I would have thought.

I would it would be damn sight safer to parameterize the report generating script with a period starting/ending argument.

Any data that has been collected, validated and stored (especially in a dbms) is best treated as read only. Even when amending a record to correct an error it is far more desirable to just supersede the erroneous record in order to keep an obvious audit trail. I imagine modern rdbms do this anyway.

I have been fortunate in my BOFH exertions not to have anything to do with production databases other than very short stints with Unify 4.2 and then Oracle 5 at the outset. I suspect had it had been otherwise the company carpark would have been full of ex-DBAs not so much fallen from grace as from a convenient open window.

What's brown and sticky and broke this PC?

Re: House's Law

《I elaborate, you bullshit, and they lie.》

All out of the same stable just some more "fragrant" than others and varying in organic content.

Curious even in english the number of adjective that can be applied to lies or adverbs to lying.

Naked, flagrant, outright, white, deliberate, inadvertent, convenient, (un)neccessary.....just to name a few.

The means of lying vary. Elaboration is mostly lying by camouflage, obfuscation, conflation and confusion and may well not involve a single untruth or perhaps only an unstated fallacy the audience is induced to unconsciously assume.

Lying isn't the mere statement of an untruth. The liar must knowingly state the untruth(s) with the motive of having the audience accept those untruths as facts normally for some benefit for the liar. ie Exploitative deceit. Pathlogical liars are probably not technically liars by this definition not that this would excuse Trump. :)

If the ability to lie defines part of being human the AI/LLM is very nearly there. ;)

Re: House's Law

"Rule 1: [Even] The Doctor Lies." (River Song "Big Bang" S05E13 +28')

And he had poured a bit more than a sticky mocha on the Universe.

----

Really in this game its a mistake to treat your clients as a medico might by eliciting a history and symptoms - it really is more akin to veterinary practice - jump to the physical examination and observing the signs - then use that elicit (extract) information from the owner.

You can also try bluff. After cracking open a dead PC etc you might look the owner in the eye and state: " Ah! I can see what caused the problem. [Accusingly] Why didn't you say at the outset?"

You usually get a result. ;)

If you have a PFY you can try the good cop, bad cop thing for a change.

DARPA tasks Northrop Grumman with drafting lunar train blueprints

Re: Halfway there

《What about Musk's own Hyperloop.》The Boring Company came to my mind too.

《Now all that is needed is a Fat Controller》

His Muskiness is showing signs of middle aged spread tending to decidedly porky so position already filled. (He obviously now needs a different kind of special-K. ;) Obviously wouldn't require any retraining for role.

----

I imagine cutting open trenches and laying prefabricated tunnel sections in the trenches and backfilling the trenches might be a practical approach.

You get thermal stability and the tunnel could be be dust (regolith) free (a very slight gas pressure could keep the dust from leaking in through small imperfections.)

Obviously such a tunnel as on earth would carry more than rail traffic (comms, power, water, effluent [for recycling], air etc.)

I imagine some sort of lunar cement/concrete could be used to make the tunnel sections.

Not sure an actual rail is required - in a tunnel a trolley bus type vehicle with solid tyres might be adequate.

In a tunnel you could even use a canal if you were producing and transporting enough water and kept it just above 0°C so the vapour press is low (600-800Pa.) Lunar barges. ;)

-----

I always imagined a trebuchet style devices flinging stuff over the moon's surface - the 1/3g gravity and reduced curvature would give you a fair range and the lack of an atmosphere should mean greater precision and accuracy but with no parachutes which is ok for robust payloads but a bit hard on passengers. ;)

-----

Moving skyhooks might be another option. A fairly massive satellite in a low circumlunar orbit trailng a cable reaching to near the surface would rapidly pass over the lunar terrain(sic) but could be contrived to pick up cargo in much the same way moving railway trains used to pick up mail bags.

----

Ask a silly question I guess.

BOFH: So you want more boardroom tech that no one knows how to use

Exploding brain implants,...

or substitutes for the innate vacuum in the case of the board brain space, naturely brings you back to Neuralink and another notorious cranial void.

I can imagine a custom Semtex/C-4 enabled Neuralink device for those of the Muskite faith that monitors their doctrinal adherence and terminates any heresy... heretic.

I imagine our BOFH could enlist his the assistance of PFY to add a bit of LLM/AI to one of these neuralink devices customised for the board members to "activate" in specific situations.

Keeping the quantity of Semtex low (we don't want exploding watermelons* as their occurrences become increasingly difficult to explain) the unfortunate demises can be passed off as strokes (CVAs) which were the consequence of a lavish over-renumerated, expense account life style.

* We actually do. We don't want the explanations.

Britain enters period of mourning as Greggs unable to process payments

Re: It was CMOT Dibbler (Sausages Inna Bun)

《the special section of his tray, the high-class one that contained sausages whose contents were 1) meat, 2) from a known four-footed creature, 3) probably land-dwelling. 》

《He liked anyone who had money, regardless of the colour and shape of the hand that was proffering it.》

Same problem here (AU) when the payments systems went down.

I have always wondered by an autonomous micropayment system hasn't been implemented - rather like the bus etc electronic ticketing except you can use it for any small purchase and reload at atm or 7/11 stores. I think Bruce Schnier in one of his earlier books mentions a trial by AT&T of such a system in a small town about (now) fifty years ago.

A stored value card if you like. The payment terminals could be truly standalone - the merchant could take the terminal (or part of) to the bank to retrieve the funds stored from payments. :)

Garlic chicken without garlic? Critics think Amazon recipe book was cooked up by AI

Garlic chicken sans garlic

Next toad in the hole without toad, spotted dick without the... spots?

LLM taking on natural language frequently comes a cropper and I suspect with quality food writing which is more literature than just a collection of recipes, will often crash out completely.

Modern human writers are often left floundering trying to reconstruct recipes not much more than century old.

Real classics of culinary literature generally only dedicate a small part to the actual recipes. Understanding what the recipe is attempting to achieve with the ingredients and how the procedure might achieve that, is the interesting part - otherwise its little more than a boring shopping list. The provenance of the recipe - when and where it was collected - is also of interest not just to the social historian.

Anyway another piece of civililization being shat on.

I don't understand why anyone would buy a cookbook from amazon etc when second hand book stores and charity shops have shelves of them at throw-away prices and public libraries generally a large sections too. While there is fashion in food trying some of the recipes from the 50s and 60s is interesting and in a time of increasing austerity might again become fashionable. Offal dishes might make a welcome return.

Catch Java 22, available from Oracle for a limited time

An extraneous 'K'?

《"Prior to the macOS 14.4 update, in certain circumstances, the macOS kernel would respond to these protected memory accesses by sending a signal, SIGBUS or SIGSEGV, to the process," explained Aurelio Garcia-Ribeyro, senior director of product management at Oracle.

"The process could then choose to handle the signal and continue execution. With macOS 14.4, when a thread is operating in the write mode, if a memory access to a protected memory region is attempted, macOS will send the signal SIGKILL instead."》

In general I would have thought you wouldn't send SIGKILL to a thread or process because of the mess its likely to leave behind.

Have to wonder whether it was SIGILL (illegal instruction) that was intended - not that makes a lot of sense either.

Its not clear whether the java vm and/or runtime and class libraries are responsible for accessing the MacOS protected memory or the application developer.

If its the former then Oracle's problem.

The latter then java etc could be changed to preventively detect such accesses and translate them into SEGV etc which the developer's code could handle (or not.)

Reading between the lines...

《C++ .... one of my ... students ... said that was the best class* to prepare him for the real world.》

The real world being what it is I am not entirely sure it amounts to an accolade. ;)

The STL pretty much did it for me. The C++ standards remind me more of Gormenghast than Byzantium.

Decades ago at uni I had a programming/SE course that included Simula67, a language for which I recently retrieved the language reference and guide - it wasn't a half bad language if you were familar with Algol. (I was trying to recall how Simula handled references.)

*A potential pun there. ;)

When life gives you Lemon, sack him

Re: Lemon didn't kiss Musk's ass

《will lap up even the most outlandish noises from Musk's mouth like a malnourished kitten,》

My only query whether the writer specified correct orifice which was providing this sustenance (or tucker:)?

Although in this case probably equivocal as these chaps talk great deal of the brown stuff.

In AU there is a crude, deprecatory phrase describing overt synchophants: "brown tongue lizard."

I supposed a wedge of sliced lemon inserted between throbbing haemorrhoids would infame the most composed, let alone Musk.

His answer concerning his (ab)use of "special K" might be concerning but for the fact that a fatal seizure would benefit most of his enterprises.

《...what matters is execution ... For investors, if there's something I'm taking, I should keep taking it."》

I can think if a few single dose formulations...

Linux kernel 4.14 gets a life extension, thanks to OpenELA

Really not a bad idea at all...

if the various EL providers/vendors agreed on a single LTS kernel and libc version for each of their comparable major releases.

Maintenance and back porting efforts would be incentivised by having a much larger target population.

Realistically the vast majority of commercial software is binary only. Probably cannot count the number of times a user has obtained such software only to find that it was built for a distro with kernel and glibc version slightly higher that those of the systems the user has available. There are a few ways around this but none are particularly elegant.

Australian techie jailed for accessing museum's accounting system and buying himself stuff

Re: ABA files are fun

"Hello, ABC Corp, Accounting, Jennifer speaking."

Funnily enough our public broadcaster ( ~ BBC or PBS) is ABC Corp. [Australian Broadcasting Corporation]

Given the current cultural drift of that broadcaster the manner of XYZ co.'s Gerald's inquiry addressed to Jennifer is likely to stir up a veritable hornets nest. :)

The last mile's at risk in our hostile environment. Let’s go the extra mile to fix it

5G Vandal

A fifth generation vandal tickled me.

"Me dad were a vandal, his dad, his gramps, his gramps' dad were vandals - man and boy."

A fine vocation for a young man called to the delinquents life. ;)

Or were the chaps that sacked Rome in 455AD the 1G Vandals?

I assume this lunacy is driven by the 5G causes covid etc etc conspiracy theory Trumpery?

In these parts the same nonsense had some currency even though there was SFA 5G deployed at the time and basically none in the nutjob homelands. The cops' radar speed guns ought to give you Ebola by their deranged logic.

Investment advisors pay the price for selling what looked a lot like AI fairy tales

Re: No "AI" involved banner

《Consider "Only natural intelligence involved"?》

Consider "Only Organic intelligence involved."

You can then be certified organic and definitely compostsble ;)

What strange beauty is this? Microsoft commits to two more non-subscription Office editions

Only thing about libreoffice...

is that it always seems to me it ought to be office libre.

Some schoolroom scars never fully heal. :)

I purchased a full copy of Office 2017 for her indoors but in the event preferred openoffice, then libreoffice as they were closer to the Office versions she was using a decade before.

Don't have much use for Word or Excel etc and the when the infrequent need for formatted text arises I just knock some troff output as ps or pdf.

A good while ago I used the mom macro package to produce decent pdf documentation - not as painful as might be imagined.

A bit too old school for most but in a similar vein contemporary students in the physical and mathematical sciences eschew Word etc and use latex extensively. (Mostly tex live on ubuntu.)

TrueNAS CORE 13 is the end of the FreeBSD version

Re: Doesn't TrueNAS Scale work just as well on the HP Microservers?

《One of the problems with ZFS on Linux is that because it's not part of the kernel, its cache must remain separate from the Linux kernel's own cache,》

That is curious.

Once the zfs kernel modules are loaded they are part of the kernel which is pretty much the same as other file systems eg xfs I would think, unless mainline file systems get special per file system hooks in the cache code.

My suspicion is that the caching services zfs requires is congruent with those provides by the freebsd kernel (not a surprise ;) but not a good match for those provided by the linux kernel (equally unsurprising) and consequently zfs on linux then requires a separate caching service or at least an extra layer or two built atop standard linux kernel services (possibly a slight oxymoron.)

If bhyve based VMs were important and kvm were the future Joyent's SmartOS is another option. Could be a interesting project porting freenas to illumos. ;)

Uber Australia to pay $178M to settle cabbies' class action

《They also increased the supply of unsafe vehicles carrying paying passengers, increased the number of unvetted drivers, and increased the number of rapes and murders.

But that's OK, because if you weren't raped or murdered, you saved a few quid.》

A fair bit of truth in that.

Personally stuck with taxis, when bus or train services weren't suitable, simply because the whole Uberattitude was abnoxious and still is.

To be fair the whole taxi industry (in every state) was a racket that the Mafia would have been proud. :) Every party from the state governments, cab license owners, the cabcharge monopoly, down to the drivers were extracting their bit of graft ultimately from the hirer's pocket.

The disruption caused by the Uberarseholes has fixed a lot of these problems and its now time for them to sod off back to septica (or wherever.)

From my jaundiced viewpoint - the whole gig economy nonsense is fundamentally the unalloyed exploitation that reformers in civilized states tried to eliminate during the late C19th and early C20th - so the whole uber-gig monstrosity can bugger off back to the looney tunes lands where C19th laissez-faire captalism still rules.

Only the non-banning of e-cigarettes (vapes) at the time of their introduction (I think about the time of the advent of Uber) riles me more.

Trump 'tried to sell Truth Social to Musk' as SPAC deal stalled

Not Federal Agents

《alien lizard people dressed as Federal Agents!》

I have seen the footage of best insurrection ever, the maga numpties were patently the alien lizard people and not taking the least precaution to conceal their reptilian natures.

In most civilized nations that outrage would have rapidly invoked martial law and the expeditious judicial use of convenient walls.

Re: Hey Buddy... can you spare a dime (or a billion or two)

《Then in the sequel the same character changes sides to be the good guy that ultimately sacrifices himself for mankind》

The gnostics and the especially the cathars had a different take in the "the same character."

Unfortunately you are unlikely to find a cathar congregation today as the bad cop version saw to that.

I find it completely unbelievable that it escapes the comprehension of those afflicted that religion is primarily about how human beings ought to relate to other human beings and the world they inhabit. But it does. By its very nature religion must be a work-in-progress not a dangerously haphazard collection of loony ideas chisseled into stone.

In america the veneer of religion has supplanted patriotism as the last resort of the soundrel.

We talk to W3C board vice-chair Robin Berjon about the InterPlanetary File System

Re: Clueless

《what IPFS actually is or does!》

I am guessing exactly what IPFS is, was dealt with in the first few paras. and rest was about technologies that would use IPFS (and sibling technologies) and the protocols to communicate between these components along with a chunk of philosophy - epistemology and ontology? A bit of a dog's breakfast I suppose.

My take was that IPFS is a distributed content addressable storage system where cryptographic hashes of the content are used to construct the addresses. I imagine a bit like library genesis content.

How you locate and navigate to the content are the concern of other components. My very simplistic analogy might be a book's index. The key words permit the location of the content, the page numbers the navigation although probably a library card catalog might be a better analogy.

Keeping addresses distinct from navigation is probably a good start. :) I can see the need for something like a distributed directory service or routing database in there.

The whole thing, as stated, sounds incredibly complex perhaps too much so and might only ever be implemented in a restricted subset (a bit like ldap cf X.500.)

Rather moot whether any content on the internet will be worth accessing after the forces of enshitification have finished.

Then a full set of the 2012 encyclopaedia britannica might be useful for more than changing light bulbs. :)

Rancher faces prison for trying to breed absolute unit of a sheep

Re: absolute unit

Thanks. New one on me. I assumed it translated into en_UK as total prat which didn't work in this context.

Can we have ft and lbs in m and kg for the tiny minority that are lumbered with the SI/metric system?

300lbs ~ 135kg 5ft ~ 1.5m

I could imagine a seriously agro Kyrgyzstan ram could cause dire damage to a gormless gun crazy.

These baa-lambs are in wild pig (in AU) class for size.

The whole story runs as though it were lifted from the cartoons - it only lacks Roger Ramjet, Felix the Cat as this fellow would be a contender up against Prof. Nutty Nut Meg in the Mad Scientist Oscars, and he would fit into Rocky and Bullwinkle below their more credible villains. :)

The bloke is 80 years old. I would have thought his appointment with his maker is close enough that he might be a little more reticent about expediting these creatures appointment with theirs for purely mercenary reasons.

But silly me! This is the US, where I understand CDOs in grandmothers are a thing, of which we speak.

Re: "The .. crime we uncovered here could threaten the integrity of our wildlife species in Montana"

《you *will* be fined/prosecuted for endangering the biodiversity of the country you're visiting》

And a good chance of having your capacity to threaten the integrity of the wikdlife species detached.

Google brains plumb depths of the uncanny valley with latest image-to-video tool

Re: Very small web presence.

You might be reconstructible from the shadow your absence from the miasma of the web, casts. :)

I think River Song made a similar observation to the Doctor some time after Souffle Girl had excised all records of him from the shared Dalek consciousness.

Jests aside, given enough computing resources to analyse every social media post and conversations, emails, blogs, public records and all the rest of the muck on the web I suspect a pretty fair reconstruction of a person who has never had any access to the internet could, in theory, be made.

Bernie Sanders clocks in with 4-day workweek bill thanks to AI and productivity tech

《a HUGE amount of money has been put into commercial real estate and a crash of that market would be horrific》

An economics commentor here (AU) stated that the extremely high levels of debt held in commercial real estate by banks, pension funds, private equity, etc etc dwarfs that of the subprime mortgages before the GFC (2008.)

The vacancy rates which were quite high before the pandemic have soared to levels that make the asset as a class pretty much on a par with subprime mortgages - so the writer claimed.

This with other problems could precipitate a financial crisis of GFC+ magnitude.

If this were the case I can understand the sometimes incomprehensible deprecation of WFH and the unsubtle coercion of employees back to the office. Pure fear.

MAGA GA GA....

《Given how beneficial the lifetime unpaid internships allegedly were we must reintroduce the system to make American 1850 again》

Repeal the reconstruction amendments?

The US electorate are just about foolish enough to do that.

Raspberry Pi OS 5.2 is here, with pleasant tweaks to Wayland-based desktop

Vertically integrated?

"But Linux offers filesystems specifically designed for use on Flash storage, that build the wear levelling directly into their block allocation algorithms. Running these would make so much more sense, leaving out the complicated intermediate controller layers."

Years ago when cheap conventional disks became a bit more clever I had a similar idea that for file/storage systems that manage from blocks to file system (like ZFS) could benefit from seeing right down to the physical media level (cyl.,track,sect.) and any errors from the media read/write system. I suspected in large disk arrays this information could be used to more quickly and reliably predict failure and through the proactive reassignment of disk resources avoid performance degradation.

NAS grade disks seem to some of this by not (endlessly?) retrying failed operations.

I guess you could experiment with commodity disks replacing the logic boards with a microcontrollers and some analog chips to read & write media and position the heads.

Ad agency boss owned two Ferraris but wouldn't buy a real server

Why two?

Puzzled why even cocaine addled ad agency exec would want two Ferrari? A Ferrari and a Lamborghini I can grok but a pair of, what for me are purely, A-2-B devices whose main advantages are that their emissions don't require shovels?

Given the traffic in Sydney and the mere 8km (5mi) involved the (m)adman could likely have hoofed it a lot faster along pedestrian/bicycleways or on an electric scooter.

In Sydney(AU), which has surprising number of Ferrari etc, I have only seen red Ferrari (rosso) but apparently you can have them configured in other colours although hot pink might be pushing it.

Even in academia the groups that have extremely large recurrent research funding tend to want beer priced champagne (=cheap&nasty&unreliable) solutions whereas those with more meagre resources will often invest more in longer term solutions with solid hardware and supportable software.

To be be fair both have trouble attracting and retaining suitable IT staff - low salaries, year to year contracts and perceived limited portability of scientific and high performance computing skill sets, are probably the main reasons.

The best example of cheap, nasty but reliable I have seen was a linux mail spool mirrored on two pata drives hanging a particularly repungnant raid card. The two disks were from the same batch probably sequential but after nearly ten years service they both reliably failed with major media errors, within hours of each other.

As the original sysadmin who had put the system together had left a year or so after setting this up and wasn't replaced, there were no backups etc etc. Fortunately pop3 then was still de rigeur so most users had copies of their past email stored on their desktops.

Caffeine makes fuel cells more efficient, cuts cost of energy storage

QWERTY and [censored] AZERTY.

I wouldn't curse too loudly as they might give you a Dvorak keyboard. :)

I guess you have hardware or software that must be connected to a French keyboard.

Otherwise a qwerty keyboard could be just as good for text entry - just the accents/diacritics which I recall even with MS-DOS you could enter with an ALT+octal code (now altGr?)

For natural language French text automatically replacing a character with the required accented character wouldn't require AI.

With the exception of the Académie most humans can grok French text without the accents. :)

Even with two decent but different mechanical keyboards moving between them is a pita. Switching between two national language keyboards be must like have the PFY/BOFH frequently messing with your workstations.

Re: Caffeine makes fuel cells more efficient

I originally misread that as 'Cocaine makes fuel cell more efficient....'

That would pose even more interesting questions. :)

A visiting tech trillionaire probably sneezed over the fuel cell.

I would also try ketamine in cell on that basis.

Forget TikTok – Chinese spies want to steal IP by backdooring digital locks

Too much tech?

You have to wonder whether the old mechanical locks were better at least in this respect. (No default reset code.) And no batteries to go flat.

Digital locks seem to reduce to some processing/electronic component (for the code(s)) and a electro-mechanical actuator (for the locking mechanism.)

I imagine you could replace the electronics with RPi and program it to accept longer codes or one time codes (totp,hotp.)

Not all that secure as I can imagine any number of attacks against the electronics or the actuator. But having to haul the equipment to the safe itself might make it harder to covertly open the safe without detection.

A subpoena is the nicer version of lead pipe cryptanalysis.

What would modern organisations be storing in safes? Documents and plans would be stored encrypted on secured electronic systems and backup encrypted media kept in a safe?

Developers beware, Microsoft's domain shakeup is coming soon

"What fresh hell can this be?"

Dorothy Parker had the good fortune of never having to deal with MS cruft. If she had, her question would be less rhetorical.

A 1906 Montana (US) newspaper's

"...when there is no fresh hell to serve, it does the next best thing and dishes up some warmed-over hell."

is even more applicable.

Voyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble

Re: Voyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble

《Can someone ask NASA to take a look at Elon Musk next? Or is he now a totally lost cause?

Long beyond the Kuiper belt, head well and truly lost in the Oort cloud.

Hard reset required.

Whizkids jimmy OpenAI, Google's closed models

Re: The model is not the moat, the moat is the cost of training.

Interesting if Mistral AI were restricted to French language training sets would it develop peculiarly gallic hallucinations?

If French movies are any indication they might be incomprehensible to mere Anglo-Saxon minds. "La Cité des enfants perdus" is 9/10ths there.

Boffins

I vaguely recall roughly sixty years ago in a particularly backward backwoods a vulgar verb "to boff" which had no connection with scientific practice. A quick check of the Mirriam-Webster I see it retains that sense in equally backward parts.

"Whizkids jimmy OpenAI" a variant of jemmy? (Burglary tool - small crowbar or wrecking bar.)

In some parts "jimmy" means "urination."

Neatly eliding jimmy with open from OpenAI.

Dirty data shocks Indian taxpayers with huge bills

Re: Advanced Tax No Job

"The US way is to spend more on not providing universal healthcare etc than universal healthcare would cost, because fucking the poor is worth spending money on, apparently."

Done to a treat.

So well done they cannot get enough cannon fodder partly because of the high levels of illiteracy among potential recruits. The large number of felony convictions probably precludes the rest.

Re: It's coming

"Don't worry at some point it will come to us!

Automate tax computation with machine learning

It's so great that we are also blessed with Infosys helping our struggling public sector."

O frumptious joy! Robodebt with lashings of ChatGPT/LLM.

That's likely to end well. (Not §.)