Posts by Bebu 2075 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2022
It wasn't until I got to the following that I realized it was likely we weren't talking a about degrees of latitude (ie 60 nautical miles):
Meanwhile, at 2.8 degrees the team found the model was able to predict the average global temperature between 1980 and 2020
Even degrees of temperature aren't unambiguous C(K) or F/(R) or Réaumur?
2.8 degrees could with fewer characters be more clearly rendered 2.8°C.
I was wondering whether the UK editors had chosen the right beast for the image for this story.
The critters that moose and elk refer to are hopelessly confused when crossing the Atlantic and then chuck in Wapiti for good measure. :)
Apparently the moose (US) has its antlers growing out the side of its head while the elk (US) the antlers grow back over the shoulders.
So picture is actually of a moose (US) to my inexpert eyes. Big tick for el Rego attention to detail!
Seems the UK extirpated their elk (UK) centuries ago so pretty academic there.
Bullwinkle was a moose, Rocky just plain irritating.
The more important question is: why was the moose riding a bicycle?
The way the article reads it is as though the moose jumped out from behind a tree and gave the cyclist a smack rather than the speeding cyclist colliding with the unfortunate cervid.
The peeing cat being electrocuted by the macbook and the toddler sailing into the pond were pretty tough on the cat and child too. :)
For the record at one point forgetting a pen (biro) left above the function keys on a laptop/notebook before closing it was a frequent cause of broken screens. (Think mechanical advantage or nutcracker - crunch!)
if you clone an existing repository to a local machine, create another repo in github, change the remotes in the local config file to the new repo and then push your local copy this problem isn't going to arise?
I have done this a couple of times when I couldn't arsed to find out how to fork a public repo from the web interface.
Although if github were to deduplicate commits based on their hashes that might not be the case. I don't know how git actually works but if it all works by references (to prior and successor commits, and to the actual commit itself) then it gets interesting.
References might be said to the root of all programming evil? I was always a fan of value-result. :)
I imagine if each commit has an access control list (ACL) attached and when a repo is deleted the particular access control entries (ACE) it received (or inherited) from the now deleted repo were also removed this problem could be mitigated.
As I only store a piddling amount of CC-0 code that I have knocked together for past BOFH activities and a few other programming trivialities I am definitely not going to lose any sleep.
If I had serious stuff I would host locally and archive my repos, compress, encrypt and then perhaps store the result on github as a backup but even then I probably wouldn't risk it.
It seems they have drafted a theorem prover and attempting to guide the prover with a LLM trained on existing mathematical systems and proofs of theorems within those systems.
As the whole domain is highly structured with nice formal properties some actually useful software might evolve from this.
Tools like that could make formal proofs of correctness and security properties in software construction more practicable.
I would have asked the customer his phone's number and attempted to call it. :)
"See it's still working... The concrete is your problem."
The Nokia analogue (AMPS) phones even in mid 1990s were pretty robust by today's standards although I suspect some today's larger smart phones come close in weight to my old Nokia-638 with the standard battery.
Quite odd to recall these phones didn't even do text (sms) just make and receive voice calls - been pretty much downhill since. :)
(I still have the same number but with with the AMPS (016) prefix replaced with the GSM digital prefix (04xx))
The Linux world doesn't think like that
More properly the free (libre) open source software world.
Enterprises, even extremely large ones, are content to pay Microsoft zillion$ for the privilege of sucking Microsoft's donkey's balls yet baulk at paying developers mouse money to maintain that developer's FOSS components which the enterprise uses.
Change is hard. Real persistent change is incremental and slow. Any change must overcome a resource barrier or barriers (Activation energy.)
Without long term commitment and planning, without sufficient resources any such transition is doomed to fail.
Paying developers to modify and customise FOSS applications while respecting the software's licensing is never going to fly in North American corporate culture but perhaps possible elsewhere.
Something that surprises me is that when an organisation embraces an "enterprise solution" they invariably modify or replace their business processes to fit the requirements of the software but when a FOSS solution is contemplated any examination let alone modification of existing processes is an anathema.
In all honesty I think the Redmond donkey will have its testicles sucked for decades to come so it's fortunate they are a long live species - the taste of dead donkey's balls is a whole new level.
«Have people still not understood that CrowdStrike hit Linux servers in April. The only reason it did not cause meltdown is that the installed base is so low.
With this issue if you replace all the Windows severs with Linux then they will still have CrowdStrike on. »
Perhaps not.
Often the only reason an organisation has crowdstrike falcon and/or mandiant fireeye etc installed on their non windows servers (linux, unix) is this <sarc>wonderful</sarc> software was installed on all the windows boxes by a horde of security consultants and outsourcers and when they have moved on to pillage elsewhere the remaining laggards now employees want their "single plane of glass" to include the non windows systems.
One positive outcome is insurers will refuse to pay claims, or do and massively increase future premiums - either way organisations will be motivated to do a cost/benefit analysis (and hazard/risk analysis) to determine whether they are handing over their cold hard for SFA Insurance (FAI was already used in AU.)
Reminded me of a remark of Prof. Geoffrey Loftus from the "Doctor in the House" TV series (not in the books) which I cannot clearly recall and was, I think, in response to one of Stuart Clark's more bizarre diagnoses.
Something along the lines "the common is commonplace, the unusual is to be expected, the rare is as rare as rocking horse shit."
In space it would appear even rocking horse excreta have to be accounted for. :)
And Simon's boss never cottoned on to fact that all their systems were running on IBM mainframes. :)
I am pretty sure no one in their right mind or the BOFH would give the boss a list of bitlocker keys or any other cryptographic material, so I wonder what was on the sheet of paper? Three blind mice hashed and split into chunks? :)
Not having ever had to deal with Bitlocker I was wondering what a recovery key looked like - apparently eight groups of six decimal digits which seems a bit odd when the keyid is in hex. Typing 48 digits per recovery would quickly deteriorate from tedious to torture I imagine. The barcode hack clearly a real sanity saviour.
So a fixed point of the function implemented by these LLMs is nonsense*. Who would have thunk it? :)
Rather amusing to contemplate that the least fixed point of mediaeval church architecture is a hare (LP jack rabbit.)
Unfortunately not entirely ridiculous as heradic hares do appear decorating church architecture Three Hares, Padeborn Cathedral and in coats of arms that might appears in stained glass windows, or carved into the structure.
* possibly more accurately the nonsense function.
If I was going to have a bot, I'd like it to resemble that cute Asian woman in Humans
I was thinking if Musk were to cloak this mechanism in synthetic skin add some basic LLM AI using on rather specific training sets he could market a life sized sex toy employing Tesla powerwall technology for superhuman endurance.
From the video clips I see on the internet, ladies in french maid outfits don't appear to do any housework so I imagine Musk could market an automaton Tesla Trollop with FSD* with the customer understanding there was no expectation of useful work involved.
From the Optimus videos on the robot's dexterity and manual control seem good enough to not actually pull anything off.
Models tailored for every market segment (and I daresay each letter of the alphabet) might appeal to the "adult" fraction of Musk's 8 billion.
Extra roles would cost more so if you yearned to augment your Bouncy Betty base model with a user selectable Pool Boy Bob role add an extra USD50.00 pcm.
Sillyness aside I am not convinced there is any real need for humanoid robots - versatile, mobile and (semi)autonomous yes, I can see real applications. Bipedal locomotion seems like a great waste of computation just for a factory robot just to move around a large flat floor. Even in natural, irregular environments quadrapedal locomotion seems a lot cheaper computationally.
* fully satisfied desires
Having security, system administration and operations siloed invariably means the duck gets well and truly shoved.
From my own experience dealing the various concerns of each as a unified whole leads to more optimal prioritization of rectification task with some symbioses - shooting more than one duck with a single round. Also a single reporting structure limits the quantity of duck shoving possible.
The complaint about the ever increasing number of applications installed on "end points" outrunning the capability of securing and maintaing them also makes me question whether the system architecture is well matched to these objectives.
In this context "end point" seems to mean both desktop and server machines (cf OSI End System (ES) v. Intermediate System (IS)) but the desktop systems are likely the most problematic which leaves me wondering whether dumb clients that basically just do I/O over secured channels might be ready for a renaissance. Places almost all the load on servers (these days likely to be cloud/cluster anyway) but does significantly increase manageability and potentially security.
Does Google even pay as much as 15% of the revenue they generate within the US as tax to the IRS.
Seemed odd that the link to this OECD initiative is to a PWC site - a bit like having the wolves in charge of the sheep I would have thought given how much of the work of PWC and their ilk involves tax avoidance minimization (often transnational.)
Nothing here than wasn't well attested fifty years ago.
Medical sociology wasn't invented yesterday and having read a lot of tbe field's research papers in the mid 1970s just about everything here that was reported by this program which this Altman clown was part of, was clear decades before the 1970s.
Inconvenient truths that vested interests and their politicians (not just in the US) have not only chosen to ignore but actively denounce.
The deep malaise that has long afflicted the US is never going to be remedied by the screaming ma-ga-ga-ga lunatics nor, unfortunately, by the nominally more rational side of US politics.
Thank you.
Answered a lot of questions for me (not being a windows person ;)
Having observed crowdstrike software under linux I was quite sure MS wasn't the main culprit in this fiasco (for a change.)
Crowdstrike appear to be claiming the offending .sys file(s) were data and not executables which is a little disingenuous. If the data didn't alter the execution of their code then why load it? Possibly more accurate to think of their kernel module as an interpretor running in a kernel context whose code are these .sys files. A bit like a third rate version of eBPF I imagine.
The U.S. is FUBAR'd.
I suppose the rest of us should look up Medize although things aren't looking too clever behind our bamboo curtained Media.
Everything everywhere seems to be in rather a mess, somewhat I imagine a Boris Johnson☆ attempt at rôti sans pareil* would look like, if anyone were daft enough to let him near an actual kitchen.
☆ a talent that could arguably stuff up stuffing things up
* a Turducken on steroids as it were.
...as accessing resources inside China requires sending an image of an identity document that carries a user’s address
A little AI assisted graphical creation and your passport could have your being John Watson, residing at 221b Baker Street, Marylebone, London, NW1 6XE. ;)
Icon for obvious reasons.
about the "immortality" of FOSS code.
Looking at the C code in Lions Unix (v6) commentary the code is pretty rough by any standard and certainly when compared with contemporary Linux and BSD code. I imagine in 50 years time that code will look peculiar too.
Long ago having ported quite a lot of open source code between System V and BSD systems (and from VAX/VMS) I can say a lot of it was pretty ghastly and could only be immortal in the sense of a vampire or zombie.
Scientific and Engineering Fortran code, mostly numerical analysis or numerical algorithms does seem immortal. I have had to deal with 40+ year old fortran source which with a bit of compiler tweaking and a couple of (automated) edits compiled cleanly and passed its test suite.
Whether Rust, Go etc etc are still in extended use in 20 years time is probably 10:1 against.
PL/1, Simula67, and even Ada while not gone aren't exactly in common use.
Human perversity will probably ensure people are still hacking away in ISO C42 and using -std=c89 to retain K&R function definitions.
I suppose I could reimplement coreutils in SPARK (Ada). ;)
Looks aside, I don't think this chap is the type who would miss.
I imagine his bullet would be a micro autonomous target seeking projectile that could "linger" until a bee line to the target was available.
But why would he, or any sane person, bother as there is a conga line of comparably obscene arseholes ready to take up Trump's dismal mantle.
I installed my RPi5 and USB SSD drive into a AUD5.00 clear plastic sandwich box*. The SSD is attached to the lid and the RPi is held off by 4 cut down plastic masonary plugs screwed to bottom of the box.
The box being plastic, creating cutouts for the cables and ports is pretty simple.
Nearly worthy of Heath Robinson (L.P. ~Rube Goldberg.)
* manufactured in NZ for a change. :)
I nabbed a couple of refurbished Acer Veriton minis N4640G (I think) which were very small, light and are basically a notebook without battery, keyboard and screen but use a Acer notebook power supply.
When travelling, if you know there are a decent keyboard and screen at the destination, just the unit fits in the glove box.
I was considering a (battery powered) portable monitor and a 20V battery pack for the verition when the need vanished.
With a spare mechanical keyboard or two I habitually plug one into any notebook I am messing with (and mouse, and 60cm (24") monitor.) Likewise with RPi. Used far too many crappy keyboards. :(
If one were bothered one could grep the Biggles stories - The Faded Page have 95 Biggles titles listed.
The good captain was nothing if not prolific (second only to Enid Blyton apparently.)
Considering just those stories set during WW1 might narrow down the search.
Just the feel of the quote seems more in Fleming's or perhaps John Buchan's line.
Richard Hannay's Boer mate Peter Pienaar might have said something like this, or the American Blenkiron (Greenmantle.)
From September 1, 1939 until June 10, 1940 Fascist Italy wasn't a combatant and afterwards changed sides at half time.
So it is conceivable that the UK did have extant orders for aircraft (seaplanes?) with Italian firms during those nearly nine months. No idea whether that was so.
In any case I imagine it might be a fairly obscure bit of generally quite horrid history.
《"especially that others are now sporting bandages on their right ears."
Yeah... that is... bizarre. I'm rather lost for words.》
Ditto.
Was sitting in a hospital waiting room in AU with the Trump convention on the TV screen. The whole shemozzle seems completely demented.
The drongos with bandaged ears clearly a few sheep short...
Really a case of me too but I doubt there is enough of the 'I' for there to be any 'me.'
When the southern border was mentioned I had to wonder that with each crossing whether the average IQ of the US was being measurably increased. Can a whole nation go full retard?
I very much doubt many home windows machines other than possibly employer provided ones would have been running this train wreck.
Pretty much a corporate or institutional problem that typically and habitually retains the requisite legal heavy artillery to ensure restitution or in this case possibly destitution. ;)
The other potential benefit is that CTOs, CIOs, CISOs and the other C*s might conclude that employing full time competent (expensive) security staff who can intelligently advise of the use of this class of software might be a career preserving move. As against employing a procession of thespian security consultants who after a lot of inconvenience and pissing about, just install software of this ilk (often incorrectly) and depart.
I have encountered systems labouring under the parasitic load of five such packages. In-bloody-sanity!
The well known Saint-Exupéry quote concerning aircraft design could equally apply to computing security.
Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher. Terre des hommes.
Unfortunately, Crowdstrike offers a version of their software on Linux.
For quite a while I think.
I had encountered it on RHEL7 VMs (not under my care :) running in Amazon's cloud. For whatever reason it appeared from the logs to attempt to load a kernel module (and fail) and I think likewise for some BPF code both of which gave me the heebee jeebees - I think RHEL7's kernel was too old or RH had fiddled with the upstream kernel incompatibly or their SeLinux rules didn't permit the loading.
I wouldn't have this software running on any linux boxen under my care and wasn't too happy about Mandiant's fireeye either. For me they were cures far worse than the purported ailments and a introduced massive valnerabilities themselves. Reminiscent of the nursery rhyme of an old lady who swallowed a fly.
As Marcus J Ranum once commented in the source to the TIS fwtk's smap.c you can be right, or you can work.
Fortunately I had reached the point in my life's journey* of having the luxury of choosing the former. :)
* verso la fine del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per nella terra desolata, / ché la diritta via era smarrita. :)
there's just one mention of "Malin"
He is one of the defendants - it's in the PDF of the lawsuit linked in the article.
Eight Forty One LLC ("EIGHT FORTY ONE) was a limited liability company organized under the laws of the State of California and doing business in the County of San Francisco. OWNER is informed and believes that the Manager and/or Member of EIGHT FORTY ONE is Defendant of Troon Pacific, Inc., and the Chief Executive Officer of EIGHT FORTY ONE is Defendant Gregory R. Malin
I really appreciated the greek although it always evoked an image of a chap staggering under the influence of an excess of the surplus alcohol collected by the waiters after a function and placed willy-nilly in empty flagons whose contents possessing an embarrasslng name that approximately rhymed with legomen.
If you were allergic to high velocity lead poisoning (ie not a US citizen) and would like a choice of congenial climates both the western and eastern coasts of Australia offer a bewildering array of choices sans gun toting crazies (mostly.)
The climate(s) of the west coast with a cold current flowing towards the equator I suspect would be closest to that of California etc.
For more cosmopolitan tastes Sydney and Melbourne have rather pleasant summer weather and the food and entertainment isn't too shabby either.
Brisbane, as Tegan Jovanka once opined*, was only fit for a regenerating Gallifreyan at least in regards to entertainment - although the climate isn't too bad if a bit bland.
* Nyssa - I suppose it’s some sort of neutral environment, an isolated space, cut off from the rest of the universe.
Tegan - He should’ve told me that’s what he wanted, I could’ve shown him Brisbane. Castrovalva ca. 1982
So 'bathroom' in this context means 'toilet'
Euphemisms for the facilities that handle human excreta are myriad at least in english. Each dialect, region, class, generation etc have their own which can lead, in cases of ambiguity. to acute embarrassment for the unsuspecting traveller.
I think we can safely imagine six bedrooms with ensuite (or better) plus a further two porcelain pedestals possibly on two floors for visitors (guests or more likely in this case tradesmen.)
I cannot but feel a quantum of Schadenfreude at the misfortunes of this peddler of generative AI Scheiße.
What dodgy design and workmen have done to his Schloss, his company and fellow travellers are doing to the internet and the world generally.
Quod inferius est sicut quod est superius.
assuming we weren't talking N°2's, a jug, a pen cup or two behind a desk, failing a convenient potted Aspidistra* can provide relief at a pinch. Even a sheet of 80gm A4 paper with a little origami can provide an ad hoc recepticle.
In Oz we might make it someone else's problem: "Choose a wall mate."
Believe me nothing in this world is worth suffering an avoidable kidney or urinary tract infection.
* of the multitude of species alternativa, elation or bogneri could be most à propos.
"<Lie to me/>: A secret Disinformation Campaign targeting...
Definitely not one myself but I am pretty sure <lie to me/> is a closing tag or at best a self closing tag. The tag's embedded spaces don't seem kosher either. :)
<"Lie to me">: A secret Disinformation Campaign targeting.....<"Lie to me"/>
is about as much sense as I would make of the mark up and would be baldly asserting their whole paper is a concoction of untruth. Pure Trumpery.
local media reported it might be a related to problems with Crowdstrike services.
That would be interesting and not entirely unforeseen by this cynical old sod. :)
I thought it might be the internet's Zeitgeist rebelling at the guff currently coming out of Milwaukee. Their invoking the Almighty so casually and so frequently borders on blasphemy to my mind. Although I take comfort in the observation: quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat.
I was wondering what you were doing these days. I guess you managed to get your late husband's wealth out of Nigeria with the kind assistance of all those nice internet people. :)
I see that you are unselfishly assisting some typically absent minded math dons to recover their crypto wallets and with your assistance endower benevolent causes globally. You sainted lady!
bonitas non est bonitas, quae commodum quaerit Carmen Flumenis
Now, there's an argument that people who hold assets worth vast amounts of money should pay a wealth tax on them, but such a thing doesn't (yet) exist, and capital continues to accumulate capital.
Death duties in the UK, AU and NZ (and elsewhere?) to extent once tried to serve this purpose but at have vanished in AU and I suspect are easily circumvented by the very wealthy elsewhere.
Perhaps deeming persons (natural* or otherwise) with vast wealth to have earned income as a designated percentage return each financial year and tax that might make more sense (and definitely no deductions.)
If a clever chap buys a social media flagship for a few tens of billions of dollars and cannot make at least 15% pa on his investment I think it is a fair surmise that said chappy isn't propably too clever after all and deserves to pay a dunce tax of 15% on the billions he has pissed against the wall. Emptying the chaps financial bladder so to speak.
* many obscenely wealthy natural persons are a total disgrace to humanity and an affront to nature herself.
How is going up to a scanner and waving your cloned card in front of it different from waving your cloned implanted hand in front it?
I would have thought before deploying beagles, or whatever breed, to detect an implant which would be contingent on scenting a chemical normally used in the construction such devices, other options might be considered. Would pacemakers or insulin pumps attract these hounds?
E-Passports have some basic biometrics recorded in their electronics which with the cameras at airport gates are used to automatically more or less verify the passport holder's identity. Seems like a far more reasonable approach.
Even requiring the card to be placed in a tray which takes the card inside the machine (like a CD) to be be verified would defeat these self chipping nutters.
Actually employing a dozen anal retentive security guards and having them constantly man the front desk requiring everyone entering or leaving the building sign in or out, as well as being identified and vetted by these guards in complete compliance with the organisation's (physical) security policy is likely to be much more effective.
As a young chap seeing a vice chancellor who, one evening, insisted on entering the institution's server room only to be threatened with his physical removal from the site, taught me a lot about security. The policy was only persons explicitly authorized the IT director was permitted access and then only for the specified purposes the permission was granted and by default only during business hours.
I think my english teacher would have insisted on: May we launch our rockets (or might at a pinch), arguing the we were requesting permission to, rather than the feasibility of, or our capability to, launch a rocket.
Although I imagine anything involving Space Karen can might be the correct choice. ;)
I feel I might perhaps like to keep my procivities to myself. ;) Certainly not have them shared with the malignant spawn of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
Sounds like Oxford Semantic Technologies is using something along the lines of John Sowa's conceptual graphs/schema (Conceptual Structures was mid-80s so not particularly new tech ;)
Semantic graphs presumably annotate syntactic graphs with meaning (semantics). As far as I can see explicit "meaning" is notably missing from LLMs - seems to me they are mostly a syntactic representation.
Linguistics gets rather deep very quickly once you start thinking about the relationships between structure (syntax) and meaning (semantics.)
Even applying mathematical meaning to simple (procedural) programming language statements (denotational semantics) is pretty heavy going.
--
Living in a world in which every appliance and device panders to and anticipates the owner's every wish or desire cannot be healthy. Like letting a djinni out of its bottle and ultimately pure hell I should think.
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