Posts by Bebu

Telco CEO quits after admitting she needs to carry rivals' SIM cards to stay in touch

A bit Captain Pugwashy - the cabin boy is the brains of the outfit.

"Some poor junior who had been working at Optus for a few weeks and worried about future employment"

Autonomous systems, exterior gateway protocols ... dunno.. next chapter... probably not important.

I reckon he and a few others on the sinking Optus ship wished they had a copy of Michael W. Lucas' "Cisco Routers for the Desperate" :) The defibrillator pictured on the cover is rather apt.

The number of technically competent and experienced staff employed in most (~all) Australian organisations has fallen to such low levels that the now continuous litany of cyber breaches and other IT failures is unsurprising. Consequently technical careers aren't now particularly attractive so rather a vicious cycle.

"Fast Reliable Cheap" pick two. Telstra ain't cheap but 2/3. Optus (Cable and Wireless pre Singtel) is "cheap" in the US (nickel and diming) sense but hardly fast or reliable.

CompSci teachers panic as Replit pulls the plug on educational IDE

Gullibility

"I hand them in on paper, and pretend I'm too old to use a computer"

Manuscript on vellum? In latin?

I claimed my broadband's bandwidth was too low to do zoom/skype/teams/slack video conferencing :) so neatly avoiding all the covid induced vacuous "Roger Ramjetting" (zooming all over the shop.)

"you can get young people to believe almost anything about old people."

There is a hideous if incestuous symmetry there.

Young people believe old people believe they can get young people to believe almost anything about old people. :))

Former infosec COO pleads guilty to attacking hospitals to drum up business

Re: Wow

What a C-suite.... posterboy.

So you now know what the 'C' stands for.

Just imagine if your nearest and dearest were being treated in his targeted hospital. I suspect he would not require much further chemo.

Why have just one firewall when you can fire all the walls?

As soon as...

Windows loomed on the horizon in "antivirus/security package that included a firewall" it was pretty much an iceberg looking for a Titanic :)

In a very similar environment and possibly in the same era, faced with a similar requirement I went for a custom linux/ebtables/iptables (perhaps ipchains) screening bridge between the polloi and *the asset*.

Basically a discarded PC and two network adaptors and custom 2.4 kernel + ebtables userland. [std Python "Four Yorkshireman" sketch ... "you try and tell the young people today that"...]

Worked a treat until it wasn't needed a few years later.

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

Rather Precious

"a bustling London law firm where time was as precious as the cases they handled."

and as precious the lawyers that worked there, apparently.

I recall Rumpole's colleagues were mostly arses - even their chamber's Portia had her moments.

Use AI to accelerate adoption of central bank digital currencies, says IMF head

I feel we could achieve amazing things as a species

《I feel we could achieve amazing things as a species》

The evidence is human beings (plural) achieve SFA whereas the odd individual has made massive gains and contributed enormously but the "enshitifiers" arrive and for their own enrichment foist the now befouled contribution onto a swinish polloi.

And yes 《but we'll probably fuck it up.》 No probably about it.

AI + Cryptocurrency - what a cesspit! If the IMF thinks that is the solution... I don't even want to know what, in their more lucid moments, they think the problem is.

Amazon to staff: Come into the office – it'd be a shame if something happened to your promotion

Re: COVID changed the world

《A lot of us admired him being decisive and just deciding to cut the crap out of his life. It did him good and evidently did his career no harm.》

DEC could have done worse (and indeed did) than to appoint this chap as their CEO and board chairman.

Clearly highly developed ability for making effective decisions and excising crap which is what every enterprise desperately needs and of which is almost always utterly deficient.

en_HR?

Human Resources nothing to do with Croatia :)

《If your role is expected to work from the office 3+ days a week and you are not in compliance, your manager will be made aware and VP approval will be required,》

These nongs are incapable of expressing a straightforward active idea in plain English.

For a bloody start - "roles" don't do any actual work - roles are abstract slot which a person might fill - then that person does the work (if you are lucky) not the role. As for "are not in compliance" oblique bullshit for "do not comply."

My first draft might be: "If you are required, in your current role, to work from the office for three or more days per week and do not comply with this requirement we will notify your manager. Any exemption will require you and your manager seeking the approval of the vice president of your division."

As the original stands its not entirely clear what it is the VP is to approve.

Tesla Cybertruck no-resale clause vanishes faster than a Model S in Ludicrous Mode

Cyber...

Is this only product this loon has prefixed with "cyber"?

As I have previously remarked it is as if John Lumic of Cybus Industries infamy is being channelled by Musk.

The ugly vehicle chassis combined with his neurolink devices are nastily close to Lumic's cyberconversion.

RHEL and Alma Linux 9.3 arrive – one is free, one merely free of charge

If Oracle had bought Apple they would have killed it stone dead.

《If Oracle had bought Apple they would have killed it stone dead.》

No iphones. No apple stores. No apple fan<zombie-thingies>. The list is endless....

You could almost love oracle if they had whacked all things apple. But I wrote *almost* but even then that is still a bridge too far.

Re: RHELatives

From IBM/RH's point of view Alma and fellow travellers would be taking a diabolical liberty viz HELLatives so with Redhat's offering R+HELLatives.

RHubastards - I thought this was an obscure reference to E.Ron but probably not. Although the (lack of) business ethics are likely comparable.

RHELibre?

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean AI's not after you

Re: To the glue factory with you!

Looking at contemporary UK (from a afar) one has to wonder whether the subcontinent is getting even for the couple centuries of the Raj. :)

Horses and automobiles? A rather obvious non sequitur. The introduction of mechanical looms and spinning machine with the violent opposition from those affected (Luddites) might be a more appropriate comparison.

Recent politcal deparures and this gem make one wonder in which queue they were standing when brains and common sense were being handed out.

X fails to remove hate speech over Israel-Gaza conflict

Ownership

《I do believe people have the right to say what they think with just the one caveat that they have to own what they say》

There is a lot to commend this point of view.

Also require that where another dissents from a published opinion then reasonable access to the same platform for the dissenting arguments to be published alongside the original.

Where clearly conterfactual claims are made the publisher should be obliged to clearly mark them so (with external references.) Such as much covid nonsense - link to NIH & CDCs.

In the case of Xitter I don't think it matters much. Reasonably sane normal people would have abandoned the platform ages ago leaving the extremists and other nutters to shout at each other, albeit mostly in agreement. I don't really understand why these organisations waste their time patrolling these marches of insanity just to be offended. May well be here that the difference between the dog and the wolf is not that great.

Re: The X censorship team operations room

《Lit entirely by tiki torches…and roused with loud renditions of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen.》

They must have reached Götterdämmerung by now. Despite Musk's pretensions to divinity its only "Trottelsdämmerung" lit by his burning bridges and boats of lost opportunity.

Want a Cybertruck? You're stuck with it for a year, says Tesla

Re: J. Jonah Jameson laugh.gif

《EV's are absolutely the worst option for the apocalypse》

Any tech isn't going fare too well. Personally I would stick with a donkey (indestructible and long lived if a bit gloomy.) You can not eat a cybertruck but donkey should be edible - I think donkey sausages were a specially of Arles pre WWI.

I think a decent collection of manual hand tools hammers, saws, wood planes, chisels etc an anvil, vice, files etc, rope, twine and steel wire would be more useful than any C20th tech. A wheelbarrow is of far greater use today than any of Musk's wares and much more in PostApocalypsia.

No mention of firearms. I would guess that lying low early on while the gun loonies eradicate each other and exhaust any remaining ammunition might be a better strategy. Thereafter a halberd or assegai is pretty low tech weapon. Even a compound bow isn't going to last forever.

The real secret to surviving the Apocalypse is to be part of cohesive, self sufficient community with sustainable environmental practices and employing appropriate technology. Of course if we were already then the Apocalypse would not eventuate.

Google dragged to UK watchdog over Chrome's upcoming IP address cloaking

Surprised none of these clown and other usual suspects haven't suggested...

mandatory client side certificates. If you wanted to access anything on the internet you would need to register and verify your identity in order to be issued with one or more certificates which would permit you to access your isp, google/bing etc, web sites and almost any other resource.

Unlawfully obtaining, possessing, supplying or using such a certificate would be a serious offence and might get you sent Rwanda or someother ghastly place - not that contemporary England isn't a serious contender in the godawful places' league table.

Fortunately I am pretty sure it would a) achieve anything or b) actually work but recent legislative history suggests neither failing would be a serious obstacle.

Bright spark techie knew the drill and used it to install a power line, but couldn't outsmart an odd electrician

Re: Ouch! don't trust anything.

"including a yellow/green wire carrying 220 V AC" (240V hereabouts)

Not too keen on the the non-contact mains A/C detectors - seen too many false negatives. I've kept my very old inherited neon indicator screwdriver. What's the NRA's unofficial motto? - I suppose if I tried testing 110KV might be more apt than I would like (certainly missing a thumb :) Double check with a cat iv meter - (on ac volts range :)

Two switches for one light appears to be the logical limit of average sparky (at least of yore.) They appear to have found more possible arrangements than logic alone would allow :(. One nasty one seen in old houses, (really nasty with ES) has the bulb off but both connections to the bulb are active - half the time.

I am not entirely sure colour (red-green) blind electricians are purely apochryphal as I have lived in two separate regions each with its own notorious representative of this urban legend. And have experienced the work of one.

CEOs of crashed tech upstart Bitwise accused of swindling $100M from investors

Re: Pro Tip for all you millionaires out there.

Warren Buffet's Rule 8: Invest in What You Understand.

Get someone to quiz you so as to distinguish between what you actually understand as against think you understand. Just about everyone involved in the crypto mania believed they belong in the former but recent history rather suggests the latter.

This pair apprear to have used Bernie Madoff's "Dummy's Guide to Your Ponzi Scheme" as their playbook without reading the final act.

Google, Amazon among big names in tech axing jobs this week

I'm Sorry. I'll read that again.

"We're constantly evolving our teams to meet shifty business priorities"

Customer, user and employee all more shafted than Vlad III's house guests.

I suppose one day none of these firms will attract anyone other than green card aspirants.

Actually I think that must have been "shitty."

Canonical shows how to use Snaps without the Snap Store

All pretty horrid...

Quite a calm write up even if Canonical paid the airfare to Latvia - I imagine a really nice place especially at this time of year.

All been down hill from Autotools' configure, make, make install :)

One tip if you really really must extract executables and libraries from snaps, flatpaks etc and have to put them under /opt or /usr/local or whatever your peculiar poison -- patchelf can really be your friend - LD_LIBRARY_PATH and LD_PRELOAD will always eventually disappoint :)

With this nifty utility you can modify the interpreter (run time loader ld.so), the search path rpath/runpath, needed libraries and more besides in elf executables and shared libraries. ($ORIGIN is a godsend.) Always script the modifications so updates or repackaging can be automated.

If the application uses the dlopen() with absolute paths that might scuttle your efforts unless you descend into even more skulduggery. :)

I once had to do this with a binary only flatpak(?) app and repackage it as an rpm. :(

Feels a bit like Thomas de Qincey "Confessions of..."

Child psychiatrist jailed after making pornographic AI deep-fakes of kids

Re: At what point do artificial images become "wrong"?

"The trial evidence cited by the government includes a secretly-made recording of a minor (a cousin) undressing and showering, and other videos of children participating in sex acts."

In this case the AI generated material was incidental and arguably could have been omitted with the court still bringing in the same verdict and applying the same sentence.

The question of how far does a liberal society wish to go in censoring and criminalizing purely privately generated images is a reasonable one. What general principles and rationales should apply?

When you move away from this obviously extremely sensitive context to asking apparently stupid questions like "should privately generated animations of Max Headroom 'doing' Shrek's donkey", leaving aside copyright issues, be a criminal act? (AFAIK bestiality is generally illegal.)

Obviously ridiculous and I imagine most would see this portrayal Max's activities as a relatively harmless, if tasteless, waste of time. This poses the question of why this situation is apparently trivial and others would draw the ire of the full force of the state. Hypotheses non fingo.

As an example I would not use the Simpsons as the internet has apparently generated everything the depraved mind might have conceived.

Just about everything that could potentially contribute so much to our world has been perverted and befouling our lives. Someone has apparently coined a very apt word for this process of degradation viz "enshitification"

1 in 5 VMware customers plan to jump off its stack next year

How many supported enterprise level virtualization systems ...

I would add SmartOS which is based on sysv.4 (OpenSolaris/Illumos) and supports KVM and Bhyve VMs.

There are SmartOS based commercial offerings from Triton.

Spoilt for choice ;)

WeBroke WeWork, WePromise WeFix it: How subleasing giant hopes to survive bankruptcy

Neumann was plausibly a couple of desks short on the top floor

Alfred E Neuman is one 'N' short of being more than just a metaphorical progenitor.

WeeWork might have been more accurate as in LittleWork, or given the beer, wine and tequila involved... PissWork.

I don't imagine the world has ever seen so much sillyness as it has in the last 30 years at least any not involving tulips or railroads.

Hardware hacker: Walling off China from RISC-V ain't such a great idea, Mr President

Re: Dementia

《Flag_Protection_Act_of_2005》

I you were so arsed to defile the US flag you probably would want to use one of the old ones with 48 stars which I suspect wouldn't be covered :)

I find it amusing that the 50th state still has the union flag embedded in its state flag.

Given the recent leadership of South Caledonia (nice one - or is that North Sark or Rockall* West?) and the trans MX-CA desert nothing however foolish from either would now surprise me.

*"There can be no place more desolate, despairing and awful." - Lord Kennet 1971 ... Surprise! he wasn't speaking of England 2023.

Woo-hoo, UK ahead of Europe in this at least – enterprise IT automation

Re: Of course BOFHs want to do their own thing

《there are plenty of alternatives for enterprises eager to automate IT processes》

An enterprise grade automatic, AI enhanced, robotic defenestrator would be top of many lists from the trenches.

Given enough welly such a robot wouldn't actually require an existing window as it could "improvise" one in a convenient exterior wall using what it currently had in hand - usually a candidate defenestree.

(Thinking HHGTTU - a psychopath Marvin on methamphetamines :)

Failing that a retrenched Dalek or Cyberperson with retraining might serve.

New orientation assistant to help prevent astronauts getting lost in space

Who'd'thunk it?

《space dietitians discovered that increasing fruits, vegetables, and fish in the diets of astronauts can provide multiple health and performance outcomes.》

How many billions did that cost I wonder?

What constitutes the preferred direction for an astronaut in free fall in a particular context is a good question.

For an untethered spacewalk the direction of the parent spacecraft is favourite (the way home:)

Woman jailed after RentaHitman.com assassin turned out to be – surprise – FBI

Re: I hate to say this, but it's sad that there are homo sapiens so f'in stupid

《stupid people are well distributed on Earth》

Probably a bit lower in arctic regions. The polar bears (and climate) see to that :)

I recommend an enhanced breeding program for these animal and urbanize them so that every large city has several dozen roaming the streets. The prospect of being devoured by a feral urban polar bear should rapidly smarten up the polloi. :)

Shock horror – and there goes the network neighborhood

Re: When checking voltages...

《it always helps if you make sure that the meter is set to measure voltage, not current.》

With very few exceptions I wouldn't let anyone "detained" within a University near a screwdriver let alone a multimeter.

There are those that don't know the difference between EMF(Voltage) and current, those that think they do and a very few that do. I am not sure that it ultimately makes much difference :)

There are individuals in those institutions whose very proximity to any piece of equipment more sophisticated than a slide projector can rapidly cause said device's mysterious failure.

Elsewhere never let a developer anywhere near critical equipment - lock up your gear if you cannot lock them up.

My long deceased but probably sectionable granny didn't often make much sense but "the devil finds work for idle hands" was one the few.

That cat again...

《I have learnt over many years to leave things well enough alone. Merely the act of checking on something can cause a system that had been working perfectly to break.》

Not peeking inside the box lets Schroedinger's cat have a happy or at least longer half life ;) ie don't go about recklessly collapsing wave functions.

Scarlett Johansson sics lawyers on AI biz that cloned her for an ad

Already were muddied waters

The use of look alike actors in advertising has a long history. I remember some years ago there was a french woman who resembled the late queen and who appeared in some advertisement which at the time caused some consternation one one side of la Manche and shrugs on the other side. ;)

I would think the use of AI or human double or any image which is clearly and recklessly defamatory of a living person can be dealt with by existing law. Where such use is claimed to deprive that person of some benefit that can be attributed to their identity then the lawyers start raking it in.

I suspect in the long term people will accept the images purveyed to them are unreliable in all respects.

An advert with Trump vehemently advocating stringent gun control is not going to fool anyone other than the terminally deluded.

For a prize winning can of worms "a small matter of the ethics of bringing dead people back to life" has to be a contender.

"Mr C., Ethics Squad, we would like to talk to you concerning a Mr Lazarus."

Android VPNs to get audit badges in Google Play Store if they aren't comically crap

There is no "safe" VPN

Probably the same applies to any software. Unless you can, and have the ability to, audit the source code and build the application in a known secure environment you are pretty left to assign some level trust to any particular application.

Even if you were happy with the source and the build environment there are no guarantees and you haven't yet considered the run time environment. Also with VPN software there is trustworthyness of the peer network to consider and that of any intermediate systems.

About the best I might be able to achieve is when I have UDP connectivity between two systems I control and run wireguard between those two. Pretty much anything else for me is a compromise. These days I don't think I would bother with anything other than wireguard based services - I quite liked OpenVPN but it is a very much larger chunk of code.

As I understand both the Tailscale and Cloudflare VPN offerings are Wireguard based and from my limited experience appear to work reliably (Cloudflare doesn't do ping (icmp echo request/reply) which is initially a bit confusing.)

'Corrupt' cop jailed for tipping off pal to EncroChat dragnet

I suspect the one word answer is "idiot"

The overall impression I have is that none of the culprits were the sharpest tools.

3.75 years less remission/probabation doesn't seem like a lot but for a 25 year old woman its probably harsher than it first appears especially for what seems to be acts of idiocy.

Don't the NCA etc do continual background checks of staff in sensitive roles? I would imagine her association with the other two idiots would have raised the alarm earlier. Trust but check.

As already commented there is possibly a lot more to this story?

FTX crypto-villain Sam Bankman-Fried convicted on all charges

Re: Whats wrong with crypto

Lesson: don't bother with arguing with these loose wingnuts just fast forward to...

"You can buy the first round, Mister Future Rich Guy."

Make mine a pint of Old Peculier :)

OpenELA flips Red Hat the bird with public release of Enterprise Linux source

Re: Mean while Alma

AL 9.2 aarch64 image installs on RPI4/8G and seems to run fine. There isn't (now?) an arm version of RHEL9.

SUSE were referring to an add-on to OpenSuSE that provided compatibility with RHEL - I guess a bit like the lsb packages in RHEL.

I imagine OpenELA will ultimately specify what constitutes an "EL" system ie for version N of EL specifying the required linux kernel version and required kmods, glibc version, base software and libraries, services etc.

Just by reading /etc/openela-release (say) your software (installer) would be able to rapidly determine what EL features are available.

Turning EL into an open specification might be too rich for Larry. :) RH/IBM probably wouldn't care as I think they see the dollars in selling support and might even encourage an openspec initiative.

Atlassian predicts its on-prem products will grow faster than cloud

Re: No!? Yes! Ohhh!

"On average, how much I trust a computer is proportional to how quickly I can unplug it."

There has to be the germ of an el Rego unit of "Trust" in this. :)

US Commerce Dept pinky swears it won't push American spyware on world-plus-dog

World plus dog...

To paraphrase the late Robert Morely in his Heinz Tomato "Big Red" soup advert - "World plus dog" ... Really! Señor Reg?

What was wrong with the stock "every man and his dog" or indeed "Tom, Dick and Harry?"

I cannot see that half the population jostling to be included with these undistinguished, uncritical polloi.

Don't fear the Thread Reaper, a Windows ghost of bugs past

Re: It should never happen, hence the bug check

Would be interesting to know what the thread reaper was checking just so you could provoke the error on an NT4 kernel and watch the fireworks. :)

I have a NT4 SP6 CD somewhere - for many years I had to run a NT4 system with a hardware dongle on a centronics port to support(license) some some irreplaceable software for some equally irreplaceable hardware (instrument) from a long gone vendor. I remember the NT4 CD also had a MIPS version (and Alpha?)

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

"supposed expert who turned out to be anything but"

My experience in similar environments is that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing."

The easiest to support were the totally clueless (about computers, IT etc) and usually used a (classic) mac so macwrite and eudora were about the limit. The really clever you either never encountered, or when you did, the trick was to extract what the problem actually was, rather what they thought was causing the problem (signs and symptoms not diagnoses.)

Those with just enough knowledge were forged in IT hell - inveterate fiddlers every one. Where the two former classes of user would leave things well enough alone the fiddlers would change things like BIOS settings (and forget to mention this or just plain forgot), edit boot configuration files, remove large files (/vmunix), change network configuration - setting their workstation address to the default router or local (recursive) DNS server were favourites - the diabolical ingenuity of these self inflicted breakages were breathtaking. [Unfortunately there were never any unsealed exterior windows :( ]

Asahi Linux goes from Apple Silicon port project to macOS bug hunters

Re: Yup.

《Because we have a bunch of dickhead devs who insist that they know what they're doing, that they have to be allowed to manage their own machines or it's impossible for them to work, and a bunch of spineles managers who equally insist that we let them. 》

I would guess these same devs aren't actually coding for an OSX target - Windows if there is any justice. ;)

I suspect a decent DELL laptop with Ubuntu installed would probably be more appropriate and a lot cheaper.

Alien rock remains found not on but deep inside the Earth

Where these blobs are now :)

Nice animated gif showing the continents overlaying these structures https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/LLSVP.gif (apparently mostly under africa and the mid pacific.)

Embedded in this wikiP page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_low-shear-velocity_provinces/

I have always found this stuff (geosciences) fascinating.

Florida man jailed after draining $1M from victims in crypto SIM swap attacks

Who need poor personal cyber-hygene when...

《I they logged credit card information. Enough that when I had to redo a transaction, I pulled everything from the logs.》

Isn't logging the CC number, card holder's name, expiry date and CVE a complete breach of the card provider's merchant terms of service? In some jurisdictions seriously illegal, I suspect.

Glad I use a prepaid debit card with sod all on it, if this is typical of the shenanigans in which online merchants engage.

UK policing minister urges doubling down on face-scanning tech

Re: Welcome ...

《To China.》

But the PRC in all its repression is arguably better run than the than the UK (although where isn't.)

Must be a market for bionic stick-on faces than can dynamically mimic different skin tones (a la chamelion), hair colour and underlying skeletal structures such jaw lines, cheek bones and brow ridge?

If everyone dialed up the Boris J. face before going about their nefarious purposes it would be a bit like the Thomas Crown Affair (1999.) [I preferred the '68 version ;)]

Re: How to use statistics

《install Live Facial Recognition in the Houses of Parliament》

100% accuracy there - all miscreants and malefactors.

Trademark fight: Brit biz Threads has a teeny tiny problem with Meta's Threads

Rebranding...

In line with the "meta" (re)branding perhaps Z&co could go for something latinate.

Threads could give you "Fila" but the you might invite such witicisms as "Fila shite."

Hope the UK firm gets a decent pot of lucre if they end up parting with their trademark but quite happy if they stick it to Z&co.

The meta Threads icon still looks like (twisted) bowels to me (and obviously fila...)

X looks back at year of so-called 'engineering excellence' under Musk

Re: I'll give the engineers a pat

《people beating their bloody heads against the wall till the wall breaks.》

Perversely this reminded me of the prequel to "Hell Bent" namely "Heaven Sent" where the Capaldi Doctor spent something like three quarters of the age of the Universe escaping a demented clockwork castle by chipping away at a wall of Azbantium with his bare fist.

I imagine working in the Castle X engine room is pretty much the same but with no hope of escape.

Meta's ad-free scheme dares you to buy your privacy back, one euro at a time

Re: I thought this was an Onion article

《Does "The Register" not count as social media ?》

I shouldn't think the random opinions from a collection of defederated grumpy old wrinklies that "do not go gentle into that good night" could be counted as social media. :))

Microsoft calls time on Windows Insider MVP program

Re: a distinct lack of exciting features to test during the Windows 11 era

Sounds like "Classic Shell" :) - if its still a thing.

《My suggestion would be: Under Control Panel -> Themes -> Desktop UI -> a list that comprises of:

Windows 2000 (Classic)

Windows XP

Windows Vista

Windows 7

Windows 8*

Windows 8.1*

*Requires reboot and touchscreen》

Boffins find AI stumbles when quizzed on the tough stuff

Re: How many holes in a crumpet?

《How many holes in a crumpet? 》

Actually not a bad question for humans. If you can visualize or draw a crumpet you can guestimate its diameter and roughly the size of the holes and roughly what fraction of the crumpet is take up by the holes. I would suspect a numerate school leaver could get an answer within 20% of the median value for actual crumpet.

When you used a slide rule and log tables for calculation you had to master the noble art of estimation. And then there's vernier scales...

I do prefer scones :) an order of magnitude easier to prepare too.

Re: Soak and Spurt

"Estimate the mass of a soap bubble"

How accurately? Its obviously greater than 0.0 ug and less than the mass of the atmosphere. For that matter does one include the mass of air and water vapour inside the bubble or indeed the loss of mass with time as water evaporates from the bubble's surface and gas moves out of the bubble across the surface (the pressure inside will be slightly higher inside due to the surface tension.) The question is a PhD level headache.

The Gordian knot answer is to use a pre-weighed piece of extremely fine blotting paper and absorb (blot) the bubble and weigh the wet paper. The difference is the bubble's weight (from which we determine its mass) less the enclosed gases..

Re: the example

《I'm thinking that the answer is 400ml for a scientist and 600ml for an engineer?》

I don't think the least imaginative engineer is going to fill a 600ml beaker with conc. sulphuric acid if she intended to pour it out in the next step.

The graduations on a measuring cylinder are pretty accurate but not to the top - the variation in the pouring spouts alone would see to that.

As previously commented you could measure any amount of liquid in quanta of 100ml eg 900ml = 400+400+100 mls (or 300+300+300) but with ever decreasing precision and accuracy. If each measurement with the 600ml beaker had a +/-1% error the 900mls would already be +/- 3%

I would be impressed if AI could provide the answer to the four equilateral triangles from six matchsticks problem from its "knowledge" of geometry and logic alone - no peeking at old Brymay's "Redheads" matchboxes ;) not to be confused with these these produced by AU's answer to UK's Clive Sinclair (Dick Smith.)