Posts by Innominate Chicken

Life lesson: Don't delete millions of accounts on the same day you go to the dentist

Re: "It was just another sentence"

Everyone has a test environment. Some are lucky enough to have a separate production environment.

Opening up the WinAmp source to all goes badly as owners delete entire repo

Re: Simplest solution

I think you can make a caveat for your own code, at least while its new. Once you look at someone else's code, or your own a few months later, yes.

My theory is that we aren't computers, we don't naturally read code and know exactly what it does. We have to translate text on a screen into a mental model of what it's doing before we can understand it. With code you just wrote you already have that model in your head so it's easy, but once you've moved on or with someone else's work it has to be reconstructed before you can do anything useful.

Elon Musk to destroy the International Space Station – with NASA's approval, for a fee

Re: Can't help wondering

The problem is turning ex-ISS parts into anything useful up in space.

Unless you want to send a recycling centre and the factories needed to then manufacture new spacecraft parts, it would have to come down then go back up anyway.

Creating that capability means sending up so much more material than is in the ISS that it would be more economical just to ship a single ISS worth up anyway.

Student's flimsy bin bags blamed for latest NHS data breach

Re: Inexcusable

It's not complicated even for a day zero not even a trainee yet.

If you have a shredder, the cost of using it is negligible so if in any doubt at all shred it.

If you don't have a shredder, go buy one because you're a walking data breach.

UK lays down fresh legislation banning crummy default device passwords

Re: Actually, could do better

Not as hard as it sounds, randomly generate a password and set it as part of initialising the data/firmware on the device. Log the serial number and PW pairs, pass them to the packaging line and print them somewhere on the paperwork that comes with the device.

All this needs is to be able to individually identify the devices at both stages, which one would hope is already tracked for traceability and QA purposes.

OpenAI's GPT-4 finally meets its match: Scots Gaelic smashes safety guardrails

Re: Back in the day

Yes, while the choice of propellant may have slightly affected the risk of a magazine detonation, leaving the anti-flash doors open to speed up shell handling was the critical failure.

Steam client drops support on macOS, but adds it on Linux

That won't help, 32 bit games won't be usable either, unless the developer releases 64 bit binaries.

Valve can't permanently maintain an outdated version of the client for a small fraction of MacOS users who haven't updated their OS two years after it went out of support, eventually the plug has to be pulled.

Sure, give the new kid and his MCSE power over the AS/400. What could possibly go wrong?

Re: A bit unusual

Good catch, I hadn't noticed that part. Even worse now, the boss wasn't upset about everyone else's hours of work at the other site, just his own.

Re: A bit unusual

The offender did get away with it, this just isn't written from the point of view of the offender.

The technician surely wouldn't reappear out of thin air unannounced to replace the drive, why did Fred's boss arrange for him, a freshly hired rookie, to seemingly be the most senior IT person on site during maintenance on a business critical system?

If for some reason the boss really did need to leave him alone, it's not unforeseeable that servers need maintenance occasionally, so why was there seemingly no established procedure for safely shutting it down?

Reads to me like Fred's firing was done to protect the boss from his lack of planning.

The price of freedom turned out to be an afternoon of tech panic

A small business too small to have a legal department vs a fresh new graduate who might not have the experience to know better? You absolutely can if nobody's going to report you for it.

How prompt injection attacks hijack today's top-end AI – and it's tough to fix

Re: This should not be that hard.

Wouldn't that agent also be vulnerable to prompt injection though?

Automation is great. Until it breaks and nobody gets paid

Re: This is why we need code review

Is it really QA when they only run the exact tests they were told by the original programmer?

Am I being excessive if I say that the only things the QA team are given are the code, its documentation, and the original specification? No contact with the programming team to minimise the risk of them picking up on the "proper" way to test it from the programmers.

Icon: QA waved everything through based on the test the programmers already wrote and left early to have a few of them.

Plagiarism-sniffing Turnitin tries to find AI writing by students – with mixed grades

Re: Doesn't add up!

As someone who's submitted work using Turnitin, I can confirm that it's an extremely rudimentary program. It appears to simply compare text with no consideration of context.

Turnitin usually gives you a report showing exactly what text it's flagged, and I've seen it take issue with things like standard equations (which have a generally accepted way of writing them), quotes (which are obviously copied because it's a quote) and citations (other people cited the same work this is clearly a match.)

I can forgive the quotes since that's less obvious to detect, but typed maths is very good obvious, and citations are usually in a format that should be able to be picked up and ignored.

Techie fired for inventing an acronym – and accidentally applying it to the boss

Re: Well that was unfortunate.

El Reg (UK) is now The Register (USA), in many parts of the land of freedom (for them, not you) you can be fired at any time for any reason with no recourse.

US Supreme Court asked if cops can plant spy cams around homes

Re: Solution....

The FCC would be coming to have a word about that

Scientists, why not simply invent a working fusion plant using $50m from Uncle Sam

The neutrons are escaping

In the case of the Deuterium-Tritium fusion reaction the products of each fusion are a helium nuclear and a neutron, along with the energy released in the process. The majority of that energy is in the kinetic energy of the lone neutron. As the neutron has no charge it has no interest in the magnetic confinement keeping the plasma in the stellar doughnut and continues on its way out of the reactor vessel.

Inside the vessel walls (Made of a large quantity of dense material) the neutron collides with atoms in the wall, transferring kinetic energy to them. At the macroscopic scale, the kinetic energy of atoms becomes heat, so for a large enough quantity of produced neutrons the vessel walls heat up. The last step is to run a coolant through the walls to remove the heat, and from there it can be used to boil water and drive a steam turbine in the same way as any thermal power station.