Posts by Bebu 2075 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2022
Given that it would be nice not to have 40kg of high explosive dropped on or even gently dangled above my head I wonder whether there is a market for leaner faster [than 20m/s 72km/h 45mph 2×Vswallow*] kamikaze drones which could search in coordinated clusters that locate and disarm offensive drones?
《don the gauntlets, close the breaker (with sparks) 》
Sounds like that set up would have done Victor Frankenstein proud. ;)
"Give it more welly, Igor!"
Personally I would want more than a pair of leather gloves - more in the Darth Vader line or delegate the privilege to one of the more enthusiastic but less imaginative minions.
I believe the graveside service includes a reference to resurrection into life everlasting...
I don't think this simple minded nonsense can ever be finally put to rest. Much like the equally unwelcome vampire.
The wide availability of cryptography based tools which could easily circumvent any legislative requirement means even your average criminal, kiddie fiddler or terrorist will disappear off the radar pretty quickly.
Seems that the headline "too stupid to notice it's dead" could equally apply to the current UK govt which clearly is deceased, too unresponsive to even aspire to be a zombie and on the nose to the extent that its rotting carcass should have been interred months ago. A resting Norwegian Blue would show more initiative.
I imagine bicycle with a 2kWh battery even with a fairly porky PFY depressing the accelerator would be projected into the middle of next week. (Much more massive Tesla EVs have ~60-80kWh batteries.) I don't think the 2kWh is for range as riding from Land's End to John o'Groats could only be classed as cruel and unusual punishment.
《I suppose a more senior investigator might have been told he needed to inspect the halves of the screws that were still in the window frame.》
I imagine the original reason the insurers requiring the external windows to be secured was the unusually large death and injury claims arising from various parties taking an unintended short cut per fenestram to the cark park.
If I were the claims adjuster I would not, for all the tea in China, be leaning over the sheared screw heads beside a window which by definition was now unsecured.
We used to have TV licences in AU (until the 1970s at least) with a public (and still) non commercial broadcaster (ABC) later joined by a second, SBS which does now screen commercials. The AU federal govt funds both.
There were commercial non govt broadcasters from the outset which now struggle to survive in the digital economy and against streaming services.
So a publicly funded broadcaster without licence fees is feasible at least for nations with better than third world economies which might preclude contemporary UK and possibly the US. :)
Haven't watched anything on the small screen for years - the last being a dvd of "Good Omens" the book was still better.
Instead of this pointless LG screen why not take some books and an electric lantern and read aloud (narrate) something like "Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang" to little tikes or Roald Dahl's (unexpurgated) stories to older kids, the "Henry Sugar" stories for older again but "Switch Bitch" might embarass teenagers. ;)
《 be expected to come in or partake in in-person work for the three days.》
Not sure what this peculiar clause's intended meaning is. Is in-person work a recent HR neologism? The way I read it these poor sods can show up and nod off for three days *or* join some meeting jollies with similarly afflected souls for those three days. Myself, I would only be up for for the extended siesta.
HR missives always seem to be strewn with nonsensical hapax legomena among the general litter of banal bollocks and corporate codswallop.
This sort of nonsense always reminds me of Pratchett's wizards' reference to HR in candidates that were of no use to them viz those "who think thank you is one word and can look at a sign sayin' Human Resources Department without detecting a whiff of brimstone." (A Collegiate Casting Out.)
I also imagine the Golgafrinchans had an "early access" ark for their HR creatures and the like, which tragically detonated when launched.
I imagine any particularly old binary built with old toolchains (with intact symbols a plus, debugging info a real bonus) could be fairly easily decompiled into a reasonable replica of the original source code.
If you had the original toolchain and a (cross) environment to run it, then training AI/Ml to recognise common programming idioms and algorithms could produce pretty decent code.
Not all code would have been C/C++ as I imagine there could have been a fair bit of Ada and PL/1. Ada was developed to replace literally hundreds of programming languages then in use by the DOD. One ring ;) but in the end it looks like it was C that in darkness ruled them all. ;)
I am curious whether decompiling CISC binaries is easier than RISC binaries. Or harder, or the same?
I also wonder why DARPA would want to resurrect old code rather than starting from scratch with an updated design? Perhaps the programmers of yore were giants in the golden age of their craft and the lesser creatures of this bronze age are mere squabbling dwarves. ;)
《because we know what happens with inbreeding
Yeah, we get nobility, politicians, celebs, marketing/HR droids...》
Bingo! "Colonizing" Mars could be our equivalent of the Golgafrincham "B" Ark. Free tickets for Jeff, Larry, Elon &co.
Mars' lack of an atmosphere would remedy the Golgafrinchans' mistake in choosing a habitable destination.
Prophylactic gelding would also be effective countermeasure.
"Zoom only exists because managers nd leadership think talking bullshit to others is a solution.
Most meetings are a waste of time, just like watching a powerpoint presentation is a waste of time."
Only having thin wire before and during the pandemic I was able to claim any video conf technology was infeasible for me. ;) The total waste of time and space of this organisational layer was quite apparent from observing these superfluous narcissists spending their day whole zooming all over the place like a squadron of demented Roger Ramjets.
I fear that life is too short to acommodate illiterate fools over these low S/N channels. If the corresponding party is unable to render what passes for their thoughts into cogent sentences and literate paragraphs I would suggest they resume their elementary school education or consult their disability services provider but definitely not to bother me.
But I suspect we would prefer they forfeited the red fedora.
A lilac homburg might be more in keeping these changed circumstances. Or at least a trilby.
Tophats would make this outfit look like a procesion of undertakers (lp ~ funeral directors) which might indeed be prophetic.
Something incurable surely ;)
I think the acid test after a manual system has been converted into an electronic skeuomorphic system is whether it can print a faithful replica of the original records.
When I think about how I locate information, in books I own and have read, or in a filing cabinet, or from under the piles of paper on my (typical BOFH) desk, the physicality of these records seems really important for efficiently locating the records sought. The psychologists might be able to shine a light of why this might be so.
An recent example was when trying to recall the differences between ipsec's transport and tunnel modes - I knew exactly where in a text to find a coherent and cogent explanation but unfortunately my copy of the text has been in storage since covid-19 so I was reduced to trawling through the semi-illiterate drivel that infests the internet. (The text I was thinking of were the very literate Radia Perlman's "Network Security" or "Interconnections.") The RFCs are rather dry and a bit on the terse side.
I recently updated my detail at the storage facility - not a computer to be seen. An index card with the mutable details recorded in pencil. A few minutes and rubber eraser later address and contact details updated. The irony is they almost certainly would not get a cybersecurity (or ISO27K) certification.
"they just went with their gut"
Anatomically correct I guess but more like the fire exit end.
Experienced test pilots might fly by the seat of their pants and occasionally survive the ordeal but here the managers are more like high school dropouts, with as much knowledge of aviation as an earthworm, being told to take control their joystick... the aircraft crashes and burns while they have their terminal jollies.
..."he's doing his very best. Which is quoting Musk like a fucking parrot."
A fornicating Norwegian Blue I take it.
Have to wonder if the active party (parrot) is actually dead whether it is still necrophilia? Zombiephilia? Or am I confusing this with coprophagia which is forgivable in the this context?
Although I suspect a living parrot would have more respect for its own intelligence to quote that fruit loop.
《Unfortunately being a full-time remote worker (as hired, thousands of miles from HQ) has not saved me from a recent string of daily hour-long status meetings.
I need to find a more polite way to say, “I’d be meeting my milestones if it wasn’t for all of these damn meetings.”》
Perhaps this is an opportunity to usefully employ ChatGPT style AI to attend to these horrors on your behalf. A Max Headroom animated avatar skinned with your visage driven by the AI might even get you elevated to upper management :)
Later this combo could apply for a better appointments. Actually I can think of former PM and a former president who would be such poor facsimile of a Max Headroom implementation to have been credible.
《Fingers crossed for someone to buy both signs, offer the building owners rental, then - just leave them up.》
But also have the defunct birdies turned upside down a là a resting Norwegian Blue.
If nothing else I learnt from mandatory WH&S (OH&S) was the difference between hazard and risk viz hazard ~ what is going kill you; risk ~ how likely (probability) of the hazard arising.
eg Being hit by a meteorite is likely a lethal hazard but the associated risk is vanishingly small.
I imagine an objective safety measure could be defined as the sum over all hazards of the product hazard × risk.
Not quite binary. Doesn't explicitly include the environment eg risk of a lethal gunshot wound is much higher in the US or UA than in the Antarctic. Also doesn't take into account a subject weighting eg safety concerns over aviation accidents cf automobile accidents. For many aviation is perceived as a much greater safety concern than driving to work.
I hadn't considered contemporary AI/ML meeting those afflicted with mental health ailments. This was to me was patently clear that the hazards are legion all with very high risks. I suspect body image/eating disorders + ChatGPT is potentially the perfect storm.
"Mirror, mirror on the wall who is the skinniest of all?
"Not you dear, you are still here...
Dr Duck gives a wikipedia entry which indicates its derived from Ubuntu Linux with some indigenous endpoint protection (a Mandiant fireeye/xagt clone?) called Chakravyuh which in turn apparently is some ancient Indian military defensive(?) formation resembling a circular labyrinth.
If you were going the whole hog you would start with a provably secure (micro?)kernel and build out with a secure by design mandate even if it required custom hardware.
The idea that battlefield systems are running on Windows seems as unlikely as running critical civilian infrastructure control system on Windows....
《Really? This is implying that Mars' atmosphere was ever a sufficient insulator to prevent that happening anyway, which seems a bit of a stretch to me.》
Scratched my head over this one too. Naughty martian microbes initiated an run-away anti-greenhouse effect which chilled the planetary core presumably by inhibiting the radioactive elements in the core from decaying (which is said to be the source of the heat, I believe.) Conversely by our heating of the earth by increasing the insulation should make our planetary core hotter and alter the planetary magnetic field.
An alternative load of codswallop would be the Martian Ice Warriors over exploited their planet's geothermal (areothermal?) energy to the point of exhaustion.
I vaguely recall recent seismic observations from the rovers suggested the Martian core is not quite as dead as was thought - just resting? :)
I believe he was keen on lions which would make cats meat of these two clowns in the arena but unless famished felines can be fussy about what they eat.
As always with this pair Sondheim's "Send in the Clowns" from his "A Little Night Music" would be appropriate perhaps slightly modified.
"Send in the Lions.
Never mind, see how they tear."
As long its not your own neck you are wringing.
This one stop shop approach is very much like the halcyon mainframe days when IBM typically supplied everything - compute metal, storage, network, terminals, software etc. Big Red again emulating Big Blue - the customer still needs a long spoon.
Curious what the split between hardware costs and software licensing costs running say a three rack Oracle on-prem would be with a typical Oracle business software stack. I would not be surprised if the java licensing gazumped eveything :)
Paraphrasing the classic but apparently quite politically incorrect "Tropic Thunder" line: "Never go full Oracle."
《This apparently makes meetings frictionless, and who doesn't want less friction in their lives?》
Haven't heard the "frictionless" mantra much since the dot.com crash. As I remarked at that time, friction is actually is essential for a whole lot of things. Even sex doesn't generally work all that well without a modicum of friction.
This Zoom corporate shangri-la is as Marvin might have put it:
...Ghastly," continued Marvin, "it all is. Absolutely ghastly. Just don't even talk about it... (HHGTTG)
《It was international coworking day this week》
When my scraped across this my aging brain parsed it as "intentional cow orking" and wandered off thinking of some obscene viking practice (orking?) now confined to the Faeroes - the mind boggles. But reheating fishhead broth with broccoli in the office microwave is on a par for both boggling and obscenity.
In the BOFH line you don't have co-workers - possibly an apprentice (PFY) and the rest are busy earning their defenestration.
《the UK. Is that coz we is special?》
Youz is special. At least based your politics for the last decade or so :)
My rules for printers:
1. I don't need one.
2. If I must, then a mono laser, not HP. Brother and FujiXerox haven't disappointed and work with linux/cups.
3. Never buy anything multifunctional - usually ends up multi-dysfunctional - goes for printer/scanner/fax combos as much as for tv/dvd/etc combos. Of course, in this, 'smart' phones are my worst nightmare - the amount fFaffing around with an Android 11 phone just to dial a new number. Agent 86 had it a lot easier (rotary) dialing with his shoe phone, ignoring the dogshit.
4. Should the need arise for polychrome printing the local office supply chain store offers the service reasonably price via internet or from media and less reasonably priced on A3-A0. :)
Normally I would be amongst the mob with my pruning hook1 but I can understand, if the company wrote the code and marketed etc the resulting product, the fact they initially made the source code freely available (FOSS) shouldn't preclude that company from restricting the availability of future versions (here OSS) or even close their source (eg Solaris or QNX.)
The difficult part is when much of the source is from external contributions. Clearly the legal side of this question would have been long settled by the company's lawyers but the ethical/moral side as could be expected is much more difficult.
If, like me, you would only use any source code for personal study or research use and never for any commercial use these licences are infinitely better than closed source. Big commercial users should expect to "support" each other by paying each other's fair non-extortionate licencing charges ;()
With small businesses and startups not directly competing with vendor's particular offering I would prefer that more liberal licensing were offered to encourage product innovation and diversity.
Where the product is largely a compilation of non-encumbered open source external software peppered with the company's own modifications and original code, such a Linux distro vendors, I am more ambivalent with my hand very much on my pruning hook. Here I am thinking of Redhat a company that was very successfully selling support and its profitability can not have been too shabby or IBM would not have acquired it.
1. Commander Vimes had a very healthy respect for agricultural implements in the hands of those skilled in their use ;)
《UK Vegemite is very different from the Aussie version (and dissed Marmite).》
That is curious not I would anything past the manufacturer(s.)
I always imagined they had giant vats full of yeast and any old crap left over from their other equally suspect product lines which they let ferment until the colour and consistency was that of coal tar.
This black yeast poo would be shoved into jars and labelled vege-,mar-,bog-,etc mite depending on the market.
In AU its Vegemite but I remember it was Marmite in NZ but never noticed the difference after migrating as a kid.
I do remember dry Weetbix+real butter+Marmite as a NZ kid in the '60s long before AI - must be something malevolent in their water.
Vegemite and Vodka could make a great cocktail - the vegemite diluted to homeopathic proportions with vodka :)
《Some day Musk will realize all Musk's problems are rooted in Musk's behavior and flare-ups.》
If that were every likely to be the case I will have a pair of ice skates put in my coffin.
In perhaps one of the infinite Everettian Many Worlds there is a Cantaloupe that might have sufficient self awareness to experience such a Road to Damascus insignt but this world isn't that one.
《Here's why you should clean those codes out of input data before logging it.》
Strikes me if you are logging something expected ie informational use unadorned text and use text representations for non text values eg '\e' for ascii ESC or html entities or whatever.
If its something unexpected or suspicious this would be even more the case.
Just chucking the error output from an application or service at syslog (or whatever) is never going to end well.
Reminded me of nothing more inspirational the the rubbish muzak loops that "customer service" or "help" lines play while you are waiting for the next available clueless clot.
Complete waste of time as after watching the whole clip I couldn't tell what it was about. Probably wasn't preparation H but I could be wrong.
《Hail Earendel, brightest of angels.》
The morning star ... and I suppose Lucifer :)
I was also thinking Earendel (and Elwing) from the Tolkien mythos as he sailed Vingilot into the starless void.
These images are from so far back into the dawn of creation that they might as well be the morning of the universe and this is a morning star (or bringer of light.)
Just getting my head around what these observations really mean - this is science answering questions that were until very recently the sole preserve of creation myths. Anyone whose mind is even slightly larger than a quantum fluctuation in the void must be in awe of these serendipitous images and their implications.
《...prepared to work night and day? I can imagine fewer women than men putting up with this stuff.》
In the real world I would have thought the evidence might suggest more "women than men putting up with this stuff" arguably compelled by their asymmetric circumstances.
I wouldn't put it past X/Twitter's proprietor petitioning congress to rescind the 13th and 14th amendments - nothing is inconceivable from this nutjob.
low mileage, immaculate condition
Is it just me or does his holiness here remind anyone of Arthur Daley trying to flog a dodgy motor or this case a very dodgy robot?
Vocabulary += dicastery (thankfully nothing to do with pederastery.)
《To get a ball of malleable clay to roll down a simple path, you can force it down a specific path once, squashing it as you go. Take it to the top again, restart it from the initial starting point on the ball's surface, and it will roll down the same path.》
Not having access to the paper I would guess that the definition of "simple path" is pretty critical here. I can imagine for some paths the deformed ball reaches a point where any deformation that could move it along the desired trajectory will be evenly balanced with an alternate trajectory.
Sensitivity to initial conditions (position, velocity, ball mass) would also be a consideration I imagine.
Really "outside of the box" thinking which is refreshing.
Somehow reminds me of the white blob, "Rover" that guarded the Village in the original 1960s series "The Prisioner."
Reading this article I am thinking this is completely bonkers. The stuff the researchers unlocked I would never want in a vehicle and likewise for most that is included in the standard model.
Personally an electric vehicle that inserts the minimum electrical enginering between the batteries (and/or generator) and the electric motors on the wheels is infinitely preferable. ie go faster / go slower pedals (accelerator / (regenerative) braking) and leave the mechanical/hydraulic bits alone. The large computer screens in the driver compartment are an unwanted distraction - I would rather attend, using low-tech mirrors, to the homocidal lunatics in front, behind and one or other side (or both) of me who are presumably learning to drive from their Tesla's computer screens. Which is really the nub of the matter - these high tech vehicles are making already crap drivers crappier.
There has to be a market for a basic vehicle that really only substitutes a battery and electric motors for the internal combustion engine retaining the tried and true reliable technology - I should think and hope even Teslas have haudraulic disc brakes but I guess typically if the battery died then there would be no power assist (I would hope, vainly I suspect, the regenerative current from the wheel motors could then be redirected to power the brakes' haudraulic pumps.)
《Redirect such requests to pages and pages of nonsense. 》
I was thinking redirect to Gutenberg (or even libgenesis) as it might then "learn" something useful. There are a large number of bible sites in a multitude of languages with various versions and translations from which it might make some sense and for good measure I wouldn't exclude the ravings of various cults, sects and conspiracy theorists.
After trawling through all that human excreta any machine learning model is going to be, if not already, completely gaga.
IBM big iron + AI ... just needs the red camera/eye and I won't be riding in the lifts (elevators) as I would rather take my chances with the stairs hoping that the BOFH is having a good day.
"...capable of delivering 36GB/s of bandwidth.
It's not exactly clear how Micron has managed to do this as a PCIe 5.0 x8 interface is only good for around 32GB/s."
I imagine a bit of light compression (RLE?) at each end of the PCI bottleneck could add the extra 4GB/s.
I could see this being useful for zram/zswap style swap (or any type of caching I suppose.) Although the multiple mortgages would be another consideration. ;)
Ths 32/36 GB/s could be Micron marketing droids playing the usual storage vendor GB v GiB games and getting it arse about.
Interesting how far they can push this design. Its a MIPS ISA plus extensions but the basic design of MIPS is pretty ancient by any standard (all the Silicon Graphics (SGI) workstations had MIPS processors.)
I would have thought a more recent design (which is just about any: Arm, Alpha, Sparc, Power, PA-Risc) might have been a better starting point - even Risc-V. Revisiting the transputer might too be worthwhile.
May well be a case of its good enough for general computing needs - even Windows appears to have exhausted its reservoir of crap ideas with which to squander cpu cycles but AI/ML can help out there ;)
Vim has been a major part my daily work for more than twenty years (since the advent of Linux) and probably not a day goes by without seeing his name and charity appeal on startup.
His early passing was a shock but it seems that the succession arrangements for vim's maintenance were in place which iI feel is a further testament to his humility.
Having just recently absconded from my first stint (and I guarantee the last) in an open plan office there are two thing I would observe: firstly its an optimal petri dish for culturing the current viruses (influenza B, RSV) and secondly its pretty much like a teacherless school class room full of distracted teenagers in terms of clarity and focus of thought and productive activity.
I wonder if AT&T's Bell Labs had embraced such lunacy in the 1960s we would have had anything like the innovation which has formed the foundations of much of our contemporary world.
The strategy then appears to have been lure clever people into the organisation, give them reasonable offices and facilities then give them a selection of "hard" problems to choose to work on (sneaking in a few practical problems:). Bugger off and leave them to it. Bit like growing mushrooms. ;)
There really nowhere like that now. Academia is casualized, distracted by the fog and flak of the culture wars, overloaded with vacuous administrative tasks as well as having to meet insane performance monitoring metrics - miracle that anything useful is done at all. Big Tech isn't much better if the inside of a Google building (ca 2016) is any guide - looked like a cross between a pre-school (~kindergarten) and an institution for the intellectually deficient. To be honest I am not sure this impression was inaccurate. For the colossal resources available to global tech corporations their useful and original contributions to modern world appear rather puny and derivative. So much of their output is little more than a slight reworking of independent public domain or "free to use" contributions of private individuals.
It is an inconvenient truth that most of open source world (FOSS) is essentially WFH where for W = Work and unfortunately for most W != Work$. Taken as a whole the sheer scale of the contribution of this de facto WFH cohort dwarfs that of the "batteries" of the largest enterprises.
The wet dream of the C-suite appears to be an enterprise without actual employees but the X-Twitmeister has pretty much demonstrated how that is likely to play out.
Pretty obvious that the blight of AI/ML is going to insinuate itself into just about everything.
I imagine chatgpt and its ilk are already phone apps but I can see a market for phones that could store self contained models for particular problem domains requiring the sort of AI accelerator hardware that qualcomm would make.
I think I saw something not unlike this with a samsung phone fiddling with the photographs that it takes.
The growth of the refurbished / second hand market for handsets is better news for the planet but the lack of critical updates for EOLed hardware is an unfortunate hinderance to even further growth.
《That blurry/misty view is characteristic of parts of the USA》
Same could be said of the US body politic.
It is true that there is something special about the light in AU. Even in a cosmopolitan city like Sydney. The late afternoon sunlight on the sandstone masonry of the colonial era buildings in Sydney's CBD can be utterly enchanting.
Alas... we return to normal programming.
Anyone else thinking this might of been a revenant of one the less memorable Dukes of Hazzard tv series?
The pursuing officer could have been Sheriff Coltrane with Boss Hogg somewhere in the background and not looking too clever if he were in the rear seat of the pursuit vehicle.
..."demonstrate our execution excellence"... "technology-oriented verticals"... "facing near term headwinds"... "pronounced macroeconomic pressures"
Could be a bloody guillotine manufacturer complaining about operating their kit in foul weather and the fact the commitee for public safety isn't fronting up with the readies.
Is everyone on being propelled into management awarded a lifetime supply of codswallop? Or is it the only selection criterion?
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