Posts by Bebu 2075 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2022
《without bums on seats》
In en_US "bum" would in en_UK/AU/NZ translate to loafer, lounger, piker or dodger which suggests hiring more management to occupy the vacant space. Ironically also translates to tramp in en_UK which on the left side of the Atlantic possibly brings us back to the enthusiastic employee from accounts :)
>>aka Heisenberg workers!
《Surely Schrödinger workers? Both working and not working at the same time until you observe them?
The trouble with Heisenberg workers is that if you know where they are you can't know what they are doing, and if you know what they are doing you can't know where they are....》
Not certain Schrödinger went along with wave functions collapsing or mucking about with cats as most studies omitted the obligatory factor of 9.0.
As a consolation to managers Everett's many worlds interpretation of QM would have your minions slaving away in an uncountable number of possible worlds.
( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Everett_III - no executive summary.)
Superdeterminism would probably mean your workers were predestined never to work any harder anyway. :) Or your being happy with that. :))
Thinking of working/not working as spin makes the Stern-Gerlach experiment is bit of a wheeze and entanglement of those states, mostly in the office supplies closet I would imagine, borders on the prurient.
《Incompetent management is incompetent management will always find a way to screw up.》
Finding something, even a method of screwing up, implies a competence - of a miserable sort I concede - whereas not finding something doesn't require a single particle of competence.
I would perhaps rephrase as:
"Incompetent management is incompetent management [which] will *never find* a way *not to* screw up."
Redolent of Wilde's definition of fox hunting to my mind.
《WFH represents a massive potential threat to the establishment, because it could result in a massive shift in wealth. Wages for minions going up, returns on commercial properties etc plummeting.》
Pretty much sums it up two sentences.
《As for the dinner ladies etc losing their jobs...if they are fit and healthy, they can retrain...》 Could, I suspect retrain as rather effective managers. Could easily put a bit more welly in to wielding the cluestick.
《my own bread and it's very cathartic. It also makes the house smell really wonderful.》
The wonderful odour I take it, is from the bread, not the catharsis?
《...makes me want to barf.》 All options are on, err..., the table here :)
Not sure the housemaids and the butler would be so delighted with the young master's not toddling off to his sinecure in th City, Whitehall or seat-warming in the House, or whatever the contemporary Bertie Woosters do nowadays :)
《...workers in specialty occupations or as fashion models of distinguished merit and ability," .... "A specialty occupation is one that requires the application of a body of highly specialized knowledge and the attainment of at least a bachelor’s degree or its equivalent."》
The picture of a fashion model holding a PhD in Quantum Computing who can throw the the kets (|0>) around as she might her bras (<1|) is worth a smile and I suspect a giggle from the likes of our Elle.
I hasten to add I rather think modelling takes a lot of hard work and dedication and doubtless requiring a fair bit of intelligence and common sense which in my experience are normally worth more than a doctorate.
The US is a bit like Monty Python's Holy Grail's Camelot:
"ARTHUR: Well, on second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place."
Coincidentally I was wondering last night, whether signing system calls and verifying the return values would make much sense. Comes down to "what is trusted"- here the kernel, "what is doing the trusting (and why)" - here some process, and what are the attacks that might be thwarted?
A typical bit of skulduggery, I have occasionally engaged in, has been to intercept syscalls retrieving the hosts mac address and redact it to something, er.., more convenient. Signing syscalls could hinder such shenanigans but I suspect it ultimately would reduce to a spy.v.spy cycle of measure and counter-measure.
Without formal models and formal verification I wouldn't think any enclave technology would be worth a rat's or tinker's.
《owning the machine it is running on
Apart from the gentlemen from the slightly more dodgy parts of the world kindly administering (pwning) your servers, Intel's management engine (ME), DELL iDRACs, iLO, iKVM and their ilk leaves me wondering who does actually own my servers.
《In French, a language that uses many áccènts (these are for effect)》only?
I read this as accusing 'nos amis' on the other side of 'la manche' of sprinkling linguistic confetti over their beloved language purely for the effect of tricking out the boring looking words and tarting up the language generally.
Quelle horreur!
Before Mme Dabbsé and readers of Le Registre start calling for my head, I hasten to admit the sanity of french spelling in relation to its pronounciation (with accent marks), makes learning their language much easier than the historical linguistic guessing game that is English.
I suggest a futhark keyboard would piss off pretty much everyone equally except perhaps Icelanders, Tolkien's dwarves and the usual assortment of nutters (not mutually exclusive.)
《Whereas if you want 10th January 2008 at 10:20 the path was 10/01/2008/10/20/file》
As soon as I saw this my, for want of a better word, brain was constructing a cron job script to hard link each file into a more sane arrangement of directories and folders.
Then I realized the BOFH's tried and true solution would be permanent, effective and I dare say more professional.
Hand grenades (Mills bombs) at 20 paces?
Put this pair of lunatics in a deepish muddy hole with 600mm (2') water and mud and let them lay into each other with entrenching tools.
Something with which the survivor to can bore his guest ever after much as Mitford's Montadore if recall correctly. With a bit of luck we might be blessed by both fools drowning in their own stupidity and a quantum of filthy water.
I couldn't make much sense of ML models being "written" by persons of north european heritage and male.
AFAI understand models are trained and of course the results would be dependendant on the training sets.
Bias in the sourcing, selection and weighting of these sets could well reflect the biases of the persons responsible for these choices which may well include those predjudices implicitly inherited from their backgrounds.
Having seen some of the output from chatgpt and its ilk I wouldn't imagine any but the most brain dead white supremacist would want to own such shite.
Makes as much sense to me as claiming gravity affects equatorial african peoples unequally because the law of gravitation was written a white englishman (Isaac Newton) [See equatorial bulge.]
"Correlation is not causation" obvious to those not fully retarded.
The title: a nod to Dorothy Parker whose wit extended well beyond her demonstrating the use of the word "horticulture" which today would, I suspect to her great delight, have her instantly cancelled.
The death of the sysadmin appears to be the new version of "this will be the year of Linux on the desktop"
When there are no sysadmin roles left then a Linux desktop might be the thing might still work.
The BOFH strikes me as being in the honey-badger class of indestructable. It would appear he has assisted a few to their highly deserved eternel rest with the judicious application of therapeutic defenestration.
I imagine most SAs would have embedded sharpened nails into their occupational cluesticks.
Like Twain, the BOFH might remark "The report of my death was an exaggeration’ doubtlessly adding "those responsible..."
《A Victor Meldrew reference!》
When I recall Victor's ultimate demise and realize now I could pass for a pretty fair replica, its scary.
When you scrape away the (bull)shit(ters), sysadmins are the only ones that have any idea at all how any/most of the technology works and how it breaks and hopefully how to fix it when it does.
Whatever flavour de jour, model or whatever is in use to manage complex systems, out in the real world, I cannot say the litany of failures reported el Rego's columns or more mainstream media, fills me with much confidence.
RHEL6 had a rebuild of the Chromum browser after Google dropped RHEL6 support for their Chrome.
I could never find the SRPM for the chromium package or even a patch set.
Sun/Oracle java was also packaged until Larry changed the licensing.
Illumos (OpenSolaris) is looking good to me :) but the BSDs and Debian derived distros are real options.
What would be ironic is that we all end up running a Microsoft Linux distro.
《being shot with a 50 cal round then falling onto a box of landmines?"
That doesn't sound the like sort of incident that requires first aid. Unless the landmines are unarmed or you send them in with a bucket and a rake (brooms not much use outdoors).》
Learning things today: 50 cal ~ 0.50 inches. Apparently a .50_BMG can really ruin your day. Alone a rake and bucket might be overkill but being in the middle of a crate of exploding land mines would spray the poor sod into a meaty hologram pasted over the surrounding vegetation and the landscape generally. I suspect a descent ladder would also be needed for the bits in the trees.
Recently attended a minimalist first aid course - its all changed - out with the ABC, in with (I've forgotten) but I did learn how to use the Packer Whacker (AED) - bloody talkie toaster again. It seems you cannot use these on an unwilling victim or the BOFH would have so used one in contravention of several international treaties.
Actually in these parts WH&S laws do appear to require nominated, accredited workplace first aid officers so BOFH's AI is apparently pretty much on the money unlike the ChatGPT's chocolate fireplaces.
I had no idea what these 'three words' were about - I imagined the casualty had a particularly choice selection of especially fruity language as one might having fallen from a moving motorcycle.
England is so small you wouldn't think you would need this nonsense. AU on the other hand a lat/long might be required (or rescue beacon.) Actually I thought emergency services could determine the caller's location from cross referencing (triangulate) the signals from the surrounding cell towers.
I can see the superfluous corduroy ashtrays burning in a chocolate fireplace. Stoked with magnesium a poker?
The horse and...
Ulysses' "odyssey" - the journey home to Ithaca was a doddle by comparison - unlike Prime prisoners, while he went to hell, he did come back.
Remember the fate of the suitors (and the maids.).
Penny: "Wait until my hubby comes home - he will be furious. You cannot hide under our bed." ;)
《Proper automation would involve your valet opening the door and offering tea to your guest.》
New horrors! The Amazon "Autovalet"(tm) - ChatGPT meets Talkie Toaster; a sociopathic misanthropic version of Jeeves.
If melting an Amazon snowflake delivery driver silences Alexa the calories (joules) were well spent.
The late Douglas Adams gave fair warning through his writing of the excesses of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation but the last thirty years have demonstrated that this dystopian vision has been embraced by the polloi and their betters as something utopian.
Years ago I was truely irritated on discovering my CD/FM Radio microsystem wasn't fully functional without the remote. If pissing off one of Bezos' PFY drivers rendered my home dysfunctional - ballistic wouldn't decribe it.
《Injunctions are not what they used to be, now everyone can hop on the web and read the news from outside the jurisdiction.
Isn't Australia contemplating a Great Firewall? Might be handy for preventing their citizens from finding out what the rest of the planet knows :(》
I don't think the majority of Australians would bother or care. Certainly not so much as to look outside the local fishwrapping media or Rupert's codswallop. Those that would or did, could circumvent any such firewall.
That being said, the majority of younger Australians seem to get their "news" from a variety of social media which are largely beyond the reach of such injunctions but whether these youths take much notice of these matters is another question.
After roughly a decade of having to endure endless "Security Theatre" my opinion of the whole schemozzle appear to be confirmed - to quote Ted Bullpit "[a] Bloody shambles, of course!"
TSR - terminate & stay resident under msdos? Like Sidekick?
Hardly the good old days :)
I assume the serial port and timer interrupts were being hooked with mutexs to protect the non-reentrant bios and msdos.
Obligatory reference to the Python's "Four Yorkshiremen Script."
"...you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe you'.
I stumbled across the Irix OS source on a dodgy abandonware site a few years ago while looking for the boot floppy image for my legitimate Solaris 2.4 x86_64 - I had the original 3.5" floppy but no floppy disk drive. With the Irix source there was an odd collection of pirated old Unix OS source code. Notably missing was QNX which was sort of open source for a short time.
Only of interest to a historian I would imagine. OpenSolaris/IllumOS would be a better choice for studying a modern (Sys V.4 derived) Unix and comparing it with the contemporary BSD and Linux kernels.
Oroborus?
I would punt for "Autofellatio" and leave the real snake out of it if one were sufficiently endowed and bendable in the midriff. Apparently there are instructional videos on U-tube. (What doesn't have?)
Or you could ask ChatGPT - if it had any wit it would tell you to go F... yourself.
You do salads a disservice I feel.
A salad is a confection selected from of a variety of (technically) mostly fruit, a few vegetables and nuts, variously dressed, layered for their contribution to the overall texture and flavour. Done well it is a gastronomic art!
In simpler, more honest days this might have resulted in pistols at twenty paces with the likes of Carême!
If you are you are concerned that you might find a gauntlet at your feet - yes I am taking the piss.
Politicians can barely achieve the standard of post vindaloo vomit.
《I predict that the biggest issue with the skilled labour shortage hitting for real is going to be plumbers and other jobs where you need to get your hands dirty and not us IT guys.》
I am guessing you have the likes of Berlusconia in mind but this is already the case in Oz.
We will be soon pilfering your few remain tradespeople after having abducted most of your nurses and other health professionals.
If its the $ or £ you are after then you are "quids in" pursuing a trade like that of a plumber or sparky - no student debt - pretty much immediate high income. Like undertakers there is always an unavoidable need for plumbers.
Of course you might have difficulty discussing the epistemological foundations of ML(ChatGPT) with your colleagues - not that you would get more joy from your IT colleagues any more than asking a QC "practitioner" about the quantum mechanical foundations of their dark art nor a cryptocurrency jock about the mathematical basis of their legerdemainery.
《- Then you should say what you mean - the March Hare went on.
- I do, - Alice hastily replied; - at least — at least I mean what I say — that's the same thing, you know. -
- Not the same thing a bit! - said the Hatter. -You might just as well say that "I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat what I see"!》
(Sir?) Humpty appears to have had the last word:
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
Indeed.
Ye gads. I was just telling my 1k-ial and Gz colleagues about this 90s series and how there was an isomorphism (or is it homomorphism?) between the characters from Global News (?) and our environment although our "Joy" had recently left.
Had to explain the phrase "drop the dead donkey" too - what do they teach them these days?
Episodes are still lurking on the internet but the then current affairs might require a bit of explaining. John Major alone took a bit of explaining even then having replaced that Bodicea, Thatcher. Cannot imagine septics would make much sense of the series today or even back then.
As for the jargon its best to remember the management GI tract works in reverse - quite literally arse about.
Mostly I remember having the "hots" for Susannah Doyle :) No joy there.
《hire some people with degrees in philosophy》
Actually pretty good advice even leaving questions of ethics and morality aside, which I don't, as this discipline considers the nature of knowledge, belief, truth etc etc as well as formal logic in its many forms. As an example, I very much doubt many STEM students are ever exposed to modal logics or any formal logic.
I would have thought AI / ML would be seeking firmer foundation on models of knowledge, belief etc and apply reasoning techniques from various logics. To my mind, a formal model and associated logic(s) of time would be essential for reliable, consistent reasoning. eg that cause precedes effect ie a model of causality.
OpenAI's explanation of its recycled joke "Why did the tomato turn red? It saw the salad dressing." speaks volumes.
Like a four year old's confabulated explanations after seeing "adult" behavour or other farm yard antics. The layers of socialization built on top of the foundations of human biology appear to be completely absent.
《Or it’s “Kinder”, like the eggs. Once you’ve bought the product there’s a (nasty in this case) surprise inside.》
Yep. This sounds more like Larry's style:
"Spring Surprise" - chocolate wrapped around two stainless steel bolts that "spring out and plunge straight through both cheeks". [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crunchy_Frog]
Really scary to think that "Crunchy Frogs" as per the link are probably a thing somewhere in the 48 contiguous.
We can donate Tasmania's Hare-Clark system of preferential voting - that should stress a few brain cells.
What might make a much larger difference is Australia's peculiar practice of compulsory voting and the statutory authority entrusted (Australian Electorial Commission) to stage the elections and enforce voter enrolment and attendance at a polling place.
So AU doesn't really have voter suppression or hanging chads or any other floridan nonsense.
Not that our politician aren't also rubbish its just that we can only blame ourselves for the clowns we elect.
《1st rule of outage: DNS. It is always DNS.》
Surely DNS = does nothing special
I suspect DNS in some obscure long dead language means 99% probability of being misconfigured with 100% chance of contingently working with just those misconfigurations - change anything ... disaster.
A bit like Homer Simpson's boss - the perfect balance of terminal diseases or Queen Xanxia (Pirate Planet.)
Given the late PM and now ex-MP Boris piffle Johnson hadn't earnt the "(failed)" distinction with his Oxbridge BA and has so convincingly achieved that honour in his subsequent career I would imagine the analogy would be more appropriately "not tested, not passed."
A 5U racked servers is probably more accurately described as movable or mobile than portable. An unracked 2U server sans disks would do my back in so I imagine you would need a couple GIs of Minnesota Swede heritage rather than Chelsea Manning physique to carry this box of goodies.
Something like "Mary Pops-in, the network drops out and the culprit pops up?" (With apologies to P L Travers.)
With Nellie reganonymized (regomized) as Mary instead.
Also wondering how to get a soft 'g' for regomized etc with English orthography - regiomized/regianonymized? Wm Cobbett who also published a (Political) Register would have had an opinion (didn't he always) and was the author of at least one English grammar text.
I imagine document creation might come down knocking up one's more lucid ideas in a text editor and passing it to ChatGPT with a request to make it pretty for the boss, punters or the fish wrapping media.
In reverse throw the somewhat less lucid ravings of said boss, punters and media to ChatGPT with the request 'what does this tripe boil down to?"
ChatGPT has got manglement-speak shite down to a T. Just ask it to construct (or is that concoct?) an business case for your enterprise's procurement of the new Apple Vision Pro. I can see a few corporate job descriptions disappearing. Manglement will have to dream up new sinecures for their totties or just replace them with the newly acquired corporate Vision Pros :)
'Because British Telecom are a bunch of arseholes.'
"Arsehole" should have more appropriate collective noun than "bunch" which is more suited to flowers and their ilk and even then flowers also have "bouquet."
Spoilt for choice:
A rectum of arseholes?
An effluvium of arseholes?
A stench of arseholes?
A cloaca of arseholes?
etc
《gigaspandrels》new el Rego unit?
1 spandrel - unit of exactly what? Codswallop? Bollocks? Skulduggery? Chicanery?
Wordnik already has "The triangular space comprehended between the outer curve or extrados of an arch, a horizontal line drawn through its apex, and a vertical line through its springing; also, the wall-space between the outer moldings of two arches and a horizontal line or string-course above them, or between these outer moldings and the intrados of another arch rising above and inclosing the two." Sorry I asked.
Clearly the spandrel must be the self defining unit of bloody minded "opacity."
Have to wonder what Mu-Ram is? Some quantum computing delusion?
All the world now needs is ChatGPT+Quantum Computing frankenmonsters - the whole abomination composed a superposition of delusional states entangled with similar monstrosities.
A bit like social media I suppose :)
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
