Posts by Elongated Muskrat

Demoralized developer's desperate hack came back to haunt him on LinkedIn

We call that Monday.

Sysadmin summoned to explain italics – to a user with at least two degrees

Re: Stupidity plus arrogance

I can safely assume that you have either never met any "rich-boy Tories," or you are one.

Re: Stupidity plus arrogance

I can find more examples of people with hereditary privilege being wrong'uns if you like, but I think I might have to charge you my hourly rate, since I'd be doing your research for you.

I have oft heard it quoted that those "old money" are more decent folk than those with "new money". I have rarely seen it backed up by any actual facts though. Like most "accepted wisdom", it shouldn't be immune to challenge. A lot of what is wrong with this country can be put down to people offering deference to those who have not earned it; for example, people are ready to blame the poorest and most underrepresented in society for the lack of housing, jobs, or opportunities, but seldom look to those who own the housing or control the jobs and opportunities. "Old money" owns 30% of the land in the UK, and this is a vanishingly small portion of the population as a whole. If they were decent people, they'd not be hoarding resources.

Re: Stupidity plus arrogance

You also used the word "usually", indicating that you believe your generalisation to hold true in most cases. It should have been pretty clear that my response was a generalisation too. Did you read the bit where I mentioned that I'm sure there are exceptions (but that I couldn't think of any)?

I'm happy to accept that my post was a generalisation, and be challenged on it, for example, with counter-examples. That would be a productive conversation, and if you were able to skilfully put forward a good argument, you might even change my mind. if you're going to make genereliased statements, though, you should be ready to be challenged on them, the fact that yor statement was a generalisation grants no immunity to question. Thatw ould be a logical fallacy, although I can't be arsed to go and look up exactly which one it is.

If you think you can wave your hands and say "but I was generalising", doesn't that just indicate that you recognise that you made a poor generalisation that you aren't willing to defend? If that's the case, then I'm afraid you have assigned to your post all the weight of someone saying "I'm just asking questions here," and I'm sorry to say, I'm not too fond of people who use weasel-words.

Re: Stupidity plus arrogance

Not over-represented in; represented by. The purpose of conservatism is to conserve wealth and power.

It's pretty much the original definition of the right wing.

I guess I'll have to weight and see.

Re: Stupidity plus arrogance

It's certainly a theory, but not one I necessarily subscribe to. You only have to find one counter-example to call it into question (and according to contemporary parodies of the Sunday Sport, he was living on a London bus on the Moon after killing the nanny and fleeing).

The idea that those with hereditary wealth are all "good eggs" and it's the nouveau riche who are the problem sounds an awful lot like an attempt to preserve hereditary privilege to me. I prefer to subscribe to the belief that those who have vastly more wealth than they can possibly spend, but who choose not to do good with it are all scum, regardless of where the money originated. I'm sure there are exceptions to the rule here and there, but I'm struggling to think of any rich people I genuinely admire.

Re: Stupidity plus arrogance

I bet I know which one would be more interesting to have a pint with as well.

Where is this leading?

Prompt injection isn't the bug, AI agent frameworks are

Re: I am confused

If I feed my dog* 100 different burgers and then ask it to produce a new type of burger, based on the ones it has consumed, it isn't going to invent a new burger, it is going to produce something warm and smelly that I have to pick up in a little bag and put in the bin.

Similarly, if you feed the work of 100 million people into an "AI", it isn't going to magically produce new intelligent work, it will produce the result of digesting all the work it has been fed. Just because people can't say how it works doesn't make it intelligent, or possessive of reasoning. I don't know (in detail) how a dog's digestive system works either.

To stretch the analogy further, it seems to me that the act of letting "agentic AI" loose on anything of value is akin to letting a Great Dane loose in a kitchen and asking it to cook you a meal. You have no real control over it, and it is going to make a horrible mess sooner or later.

"AI" has its uses as an analytical tool, in the same way a dog's nose has its uses to sniff out truffles, but analysis and synthesis are two very different things.

*I don't actually have a dog, but then again, I don't generally use LLMs for anything serious either. The metaphor stands.

NASA puts astronauts’ lives in the hands of Tesla’s flaky Cybertruck

Re: SpaceX won’t survive…

Sorry buddy, but IMHO Elmo has always been a prick, and this has been evident long before he ever made any sort of move to involve himself in politics. As it happens, I don't think anyone thought he was particularly aligned to either right-wing US political party, and in recent years he has made it apparent that he is more aligned to a 1930s German one.

Re: Using a Cybertruck

Why would you prefer to use kerosene? Liquid hydrogen has far higher energy density per unit mass. Is this because Elon's engineers aren't good enough at plumbing to make a hydrogen burning engine not explode? I suspect the answer is a little more complex than this of course. How does "more bang per kg" equate to "less overall power"? What other metrics are in play beyond the mass of the propellant (and the mass of the propellant used to lift the propellant)?

Probably a cost-saving measure

Those proper emergency vehicles sound expensive, and it's not like anyone strapped to the top of a few thousand tonnes of exploding hydrogen/oxygen mix is getting into it anyway. Adding a lithium fire into the mix is hardly going to make much difference.

Re: Using a Cybertruck

Did you seriously just ask what rocket fuel might there be around the failed launch of a rocket?

As far as I am aware, NASA's rockets still mostly use hydrogen and oxygen as their propellant, although they apparently also have stages that use kerosene and solid propellant boosters. The space shuttle used a main stage that used an H₂/O₂ mix, and the two boosters used solid fuel, apparently the SLS is the same.

NHS England rapped over inaccurate Palantir patient data disclosure

I didn't say Labour weren't complicit here, but the Rwanda Scheme was something completely different, and even then, ISTR the Rwandan government tried to claw back money (unsuccessfully) from the treasury for the cancellation.

Do you honestly think that Palantir have no penalty clauses written into their contracts, or are you so naïve to think that such agreements can be cancelled on a whim with no associated costs? The Tory government (under the guise of NHS England, their pet QUANGO) signed contracts with Palantir, and legally these have to be honoured up until the point where they are up for renewal. Labour could have said, "fine, we'll keep paying you, but you don't have to provide anything for the contract term", but how do you think that would play out with the electorate?

Whilst it is true that no government can bind a subsequent one with political decisions (laws can always be revoked or amended), this doesn't hold true for financial or legal obligations, without fundamentally changing UK contract law to do so.

Having said that, you make some very valid points about what Starmer was up to cosying up to Palantir. The same questions could be asked about others he cosied up to as well, including Trump, Netanyahu, and Elbit systems.

I think you misspelt "the Tories" there. The Labour government may be complicit in not shutting down anything Palantir-related, but they weren't the ones who did those deals with them in 2020 and then again in 2023.

DEF CON bans Meta-style 'pervert glasses'

Re: I read it twice to be sure.

That's because it referred to the policy in place at... a comic convention. Do try to keep up.

Re: Looks like meta glass wearers will need 2 pair of specs

To be fair, I think point one was about the weight of the frames, not that of the lenses, just worded a little confusingly. I took it to mean that these things, plus lenses, would weigh more than a standard frame, plus lenses, due to the electronic components, and battery they require, not necessarily because of the weight of the lenses. I would expect prescription lenses to weigh pretty much the same as non-prescription ones, to within a few grams, although they could be a bit heavier if they are glass rather than plastic, and the prescription is strong. This additional weight would presumably make them uncomfortable to wear for long periods, unlike, for example, the glasses I wear for VDU work.

As for being punched in the face, I would have thought that wearing glasses with hidden cameras that stream video to Meta would increase the risk of this happening by a non-zero amount.

Agree with you for point three; unless they haven't realised they can get them re-glazed, nobody is keeping their old frames with their previous no-longer-correct prescription in them.

Re: Ah great

I'll be sure to tell my registered-blind-since-birth friend, who, due to a birth defect, has no lenses in her eyes. She'll be so glad to hear she should be going round with a white stick. Should I tell her to get a pair of blacked-out sunglasses and a Labrador as well?

Re: Ah great

No it isn't. Put down the crack-pipe and go and talk to real people to find out what the world is like, rather than relying on deeply biased "I can't believe we're not legally allowed to call it news" channels, bot-ridden social media, and whatever Nigel Farage says today between quivering in fear over the apparently ubiquitous threats to his life that only he can see.

Pillock.

I think the sarcasm implied in your post may have slipped by a few people. Probably best to make it more obvious.

Leading AI models (even Grok) are all a bunch of leftist punks

It's a good thing that there aren't any well-off countries that are social democracies that would provide an easy counter-point to that trite thought-terminating cliché.

Re: Maybe not all the data came from America?

You didn't read my other post, did you? You know, the one where I said pretty much the same as this. Once again, history is written by the winners, and most of human history isn't "good guys" vs "bad guys" but different sets of bastards killing each other and subjugating the peasants while they're at it.

A few additional things to note here, though: The BUF were chased out of the East End of London, they were not liked or wanted; arguably we have more pro-fascist groups and sentiment now than we did then. As far as I can tell, far-right sentiment, and especially militarism have always been much more predominant in the US than in the UK. I won't argue that we don't have a problem here as well, but I will argue that it is a bigger problem in the US, and also that powerful US far-right groups are funding the far right here.

We had other problems with fascist sympathisers. When Edward VIII abdicated, it was ostensibly so he could marry an American divorcee, but in reality it was a lot more complicated than this, and he had some very strong leanings towards Hitler and the far right. After the war, he lived out his life in exile.

You are pretty much right, though, that it was American isolationism that largely kept the US out of the war until 1942, at which point they grudgingly decided to do the right thing, as long as the rest of the allies paid them for it. I believe we were still paying up until early this century, so we can add mercenary to the list of US characteristics, on top of isolationist and right-leaning.

Re: Probably not that surprising...

Except that in nature, leopards don't typically hunt chimps, going only for young, old, or solitary animals. They certainly don't "easily hunt the chimpanzees with their skills and genetic strength/intelligence". Attacking a group of chimps, which are highly intelligent animals, with sharp teeth and strong muscles, would be a very risky thing for any predator to do, and although leopards are one of the chimps' few predators, if they were to attack a group of adults, they would probably end up as the next meal themselves.

Groups of chimps have, however, been documented chasing leopards off their kills and stealing them to eat for themselves. Again, chalk one up for collectivism, I think.

As it happens, chimps aren't actually a very placid or pleasant lot, but even they don't typically abandon their elderly or sick to be eaten by ambush predators, making them one step up the evolutionary ladder from conservatives.

Re: Maybe not all the data came from America?

As the winners, we have been able to gloss over most of the atrocities that we committed. I think you know the appropriate quote, which, ironically, was almost certainly stolen by Churchill, who was, himself, a deeply unpleasant individual who happened to be the right man at the right time.

Re: Hun

Dreadfully sorry, honeybuns.

Re: Maybe not all the data came from America?

The treatment of Jews and "other supposed undesirables" was very much not confined to Germany, and we like to pretend that this was the main thing that we all had a problem with.

The British Empire was quite happy to round people up and put them in camps; we invented the concentration camp, after all, and I don't think our forebears cared very much whether their victims lived or died, except for when they were making sure they were dead.

Russia had its pogroms, where Jews were murdered en masse, and nobody went to war with them over it. Discrimination and violence against Jewish people was commonplace in Victorian England ("The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing" was scrawled next to Jack the Ripper's bloody apron)

The Nazis might have industrialised this kind of mass-murder, but the odds are that Britain would have turned a blind eye if they hadn't invaded Poland; the cause of the war wasn't disgust at German atrocities, it was simply because a treaty was broken.

The underlying problem with fascism isn't just its murderous nature, after all, humans have been killing each other in one way or another for centuries, it was that they broke the established rules when doing so, and invaded countries, in their quest for "lebensraum", that were our allies.

We have had the opportunity since for human society to progress, and the general trend, over all of recorded history, is for death by violence to diminish. We can learn from history, and see that far-right populism is wrong for many reasons, even if you take the holocaust out of the equation. Domination of "the weak" by "the strong" and regard of others a subhuman are recurring themes, not just in 1930s Germany, but in South African apartheid, US segregationalism, and today in the UK with the rise of the populist right and their characterisation of refugees, Muslims, disabled people, LGBTQ+ folk, and anyone non-white as lesser. The parallels to the Nazis' "untermenschen" are clear, and it is apposite to point out that the holocaust didn't start with the murder of Jews, but with that of disabled people. I have been to the holocaust memorial in Berlin, and that includes the memorials to the Roma and Sinti, and to gay people. When you start "othering" people this is where it ends.

Anyway, here endeth the history lesson, I hope at least one person didn't go "tl;dr;" and learnt something.

Re: Obviously

U OK hun?

Re: "lies from Republican wankers"

Yes, the elephant in the room, or indeed the donkey in the room, is that the US Democratic and Republican parties are both right-wing parties. The US has no mainstream left-wing politics, because it is a right-wing militaristic state.

Re: Probably not that surprising...

I was reading about a "tribe" of chimpanzees which naturalists have studied over decades. At one point, the tribe had an "alpha male" who would terrorise and abuse the other members of the group. Eventually, they ganged together and killed and ate him.

That sounds pretty fucking well far-left socialist to me, and is a situation that could well have been avoided if only the "leader" had listened to "the people" rather than forcing his will onto all others.

So yes, it does seem like this real, genuine, documented study of nature in action does reflect the most extreme left-wing ideologies, unlike your fictitious example, which still manages somehow to illustrate collectivism.

In its essence, the core of "leftist" policies is to do what provides the greatest good for the masses, without unreasonably disadvantaging any minority groups. The main gauge of how far left one is, is where one draws the line for what is "unreasonable disadvantage".

Right-wing politics, on the other hand, are all about the greatest good for the individual, at the expense of the masses, and naturally favour those who already have an advantage, as they are able to pay to influence political discourse. Hence wide-scale poverty, and obscene wealth accumulation amongst a tiny minority.

Historically, when the pendulum reaches its apex on the right, with too few people owning too much, and everyone else struggling to survive, then it swings back quite a long way, and the people start to consider whether the disadvantage of depriving their political enemies of their heads is unreasonable.

Sensible people deem this pendulum to be unnecessary and destructive, and it far better to not allow it to swing in the first place, and to rein in the excesses of the super-rich through regulation and taxation. After all, nobody needs more money than they can spend, and nobody needs to hoard resources to the extent that it affects vast numbers of other people. It remains to be seen whether we are too far beyond the point where this is still possible, or whether the precipitous fall of the parasitic class is inevitable. Personally, I'd prefer the option of a comfortable life without armed conflict.

Re: Maybe not all the data came from America?

It's always worth remembering that in WW2, the US took three years to decide to join in, because there was real genuine debate about which side to join, and it was only the attack by Japan that forced them, reluctantly, to join the good* guys. After the war, the right-wing bias didn't magically disappear, as evidenced by Project Paperclip, and McCarthyism. The US has always been a right-wing militaristic state. Let us not forget it was founded on slavery, another thing the monorchid Austrian painter was all in favour of, and still has slavery, in the form of forced labour of prisoners. It coincidentally has the highest prison population in the world (both per-capita and absolute), and a very high racial bias in imprisonment (ISTR that if you happen to have dark skin, you are around ten times more likely to be given a custodial sentence than a white person for the same crime). Let's not even get started on the death penalty.

When people describe the US as a "liberal Western democracy," the word "liberal" really is doing a lot of heavy-lifting there, and the word "democracy" is chipping in a fair bit too, what with the FPTP system with the "electoral college", the entire purpose of which is to bias the result to the right.

*To be fair, the British Empire at the time could probably really be better described as the "less bad guys", but that's a story for another day.

Re: Probably not that surprising...

Indeed. All this tells us is that the Overton Window is so far to the right, it's on the house down the street.

Assuming AI models are "trained" on source data that is based in reality, then this just indicates that anything based on reality and logic is seen as "leftist" because politics has become such a cesspit of magical thinking and ideology, which belongs to the right of the political spectrum.

What is considered "left", such as a full-time job paying enough money to have a life beyond merely just about surviving, should be considered very much middle-of-the-road centre-ground politics, and any true leftist thinking, such as seizing the means of production, or rounding up the bourgeoisie and putting them in labour camps, is so far off in the distance as to be utterly invisible, despite characterisations to the contrary.

Cassette simulator rewinds digital audio to a more analog time in hiss-tory

Re: As Brits of a certain age…

There are still plenty of LPs in the charity shops round this way, although good luck finding many that aren't things that your grandmother would have listened to in the 1960s. We've pretty much collected the entire back catalogue of Herb Alpert at an average of 50p a pop, but I don't think we're quite ready to move onto Des O'Connor.

Occasionally, there is a gem to be found; for instance, we picked up a pristine copy of The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band's "Keynsham" at one point, for only a few quid, ironically, in a charity shop in Portishead. I'm still on the lookout for any Portishead LPs in the charity shops in Keynsham. I'm not sure if that demonstrates commutativity or not.

Re: It wouldn't be an exact simulation

Indeed. "Dynamic range" isn't just a matter of "how loud can it go," after all, if you want louder, just turn your amp up to 11. No, it's also "how quiet can it go," and "really quiet, but drowned out by cacophonous hiss" doesn't count.

Re: This "sounds" like a great antidote for nostalgia!

Read error b

Rewind tape

BOFH: This printer engineer knows every trick in the book

Re: Sounds familiar

Having had to do the drive between Bristol and Norwich a number of times, the very shortest time I've ever managed to do that in was about 4:15, and if the traffic is bad, it can be a LOT longer. Swansea is at least another hour-and-a-half on top of that. With reasonable stops, meal breaks, etc. you're probably looking at 7h+

Re: I remember those monsters

You'd be surprised at how cheap colour laser printers are these days (although they now use LEDs not lasers), and the one I have (a Brother HL-3230CDW) does duplex as well. That particular model is discontinued, because it's from 2019, but similar ones are typically in the £200-300 range. If you're printing any amount of stuff, the initial higher cost than an ink-jet is quickly offset by not having to open a vein to pay for the ink.

Tesla burns through a billion as Musk bets the farm on chips and bots

Re: will anything ever get done

The best place would probably be the polar lunar craters that are perpetually in shadow. The far side of the Moon gets day and night just as much as the side facing the Earth, and the daytime temperature gets up to 120°C, what with there being no atmosphere to convect heat away. Obviously, space-based is worse, unless you plan an orbit that is perpetually in the Earth's shadow, i.e. an equatorial one with a period of 23h56m, or 24h4m depending on whether it's prograde or retrograde. Such orbits are pretty high compared to Elmo's other satellites.

Re: will anything ever get done

Even a stopped clock gives the right time twice a day. He also comes up with a vast number of absolutely fucking awful ideas, like space-based data centres that defy the laws of thermodynamics.

LG monitors are using Windows 11 feature to serve adware

Re: Total C-Suite fail

Last year's model is always almost the same as this year's model, but half the price.

Re: Other monitor manufacturers exist.

Other monitor sellers exist, but you might be surprised to learn that the second biggest* manufacturer of the panels they use is LG.

*after a Chinese company called BOE apparently

Re: Logi Download Assistant

Sadly, they own the manufacturing rights to the X-56 Rhino; I'd not buy anything else from them though.

Re: Total C-Suite fail

"I will be using it _only_ with an HDMI input"

What you are after there is not a TV, it is a monitor, which is like a TV but doesn't contain the tuner, "on demand" apps, or any of the "smart" shite they bundle with it.

Re: Total C-Suite fail

Not for nothing is it known as "McCrappy," just as Norton is known as "Notrun" because it makes your computer not run.

Latest Musk merch drop runs entirely on child labor

Re: "increased chance of serious injury to a child"

I'm thinking greenstick fracture, of ulna and radius is the most likely outcome here.

$50 jacket? I'm willing to bet the manufacturing costs are less than $10, in China, where the possibility of forced labour is non-zero, child or otherwise.

Re: Not what I expect

Where do I find that "syndrome" in the medical texts, eh? Is it in the DSM-5? Are you medially trained in a specialism competent to diagnose such a fictitious syndrome? Are the diagnostic criteria that you read something someone said on the internet? Do you actually know what the word "syndrome" means at all? (hint: it has a clear and specific technical meaning in the field of medicine)

On this evidence I diagnose you with "absolute pillock syndrome". Of course no such syndrome exists, but this is tongue-in-cheek. In reality, based on the evidence of your very clear stupidity, you are simply an oaf.

Re: Not what I expect

Elon doesn't love you, you know; it doesn't matter how hard you feign offence in his name.

I'd also not be entirely surprised if there was genuine child labour somewhere in his supply chain, a lot of it still goes on in the far East. I'm assuming that if any of this comes to light, you'll be disgusted at Elon and will be very vocal about it, right? Right? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?

Comment in code read 'Dear future me, sorry I wrote this'

Re: "Entity Framework" .. why ?

If you don't know what an ORM is for, and why you need one, then you probably don't. Personally, I don't like hand-crafting SQL and having to continuously refer to the database scheme because someone 20 years ago decided on some dumb convention and then abandoned it half-way through implementing it, or got a pair of columns the wrong way round.