Posts by Elongated Muskrat

First time's the charm: SpaceX catches a descending Super Heavy Booster

Re: There's a few telling things here

Please give us the benefit of your vast experience of running a rocket research and development programme.

Ah yes, the old "if you know better, do it yourself" straw man. What a worthless thing to say.

My point stands, if the people in charge of the launch were reportedly* nervous, and didn't appear to expect it to be successful, that indicates an expectation of failure. Admittedly, this was a test, where failures are expected to happen from time to time, but the expectation should be that things like smaller component tests, and modelling should give reasonable confidence of a success, not expectation of failure.

*Yes, reportedly, I'm not making concrete claims here, as you seem to think that I am. I am going on what is reported in the article.

Re: There's a few telling things here

The FAA is built for one test launch of significant test vehicle a year, not ten or one hundred and can't cope

Perhaps Elmo could fund it, then, it’s not like he's short a bob or two, it's just the concept of performing any sort of public service is anathema to him.

Re: There's a few telling things here

"Tight regulation" does not have to be the same as "bureaucratic regulation".

This is absolutely true, but I'm not inclined to take Elon's characterisation of it as "bureaucratic" at face value. Years of observation have demonstrated that removal of regulations based on their perception as bureaucracy is literally the mechanism that private equity has used to carve off massive chunks of public infrastructure and run them into the ground for profit.

Exhibits A-G: Trains, water supplies, the postal system, gas, electricity, telecommunications, healthcare...

Sometimes tight regulation is exactly what is needed to protect public goods and public safety, and the means by which it is removed is rich and greedy people characterising them as bureaucracy.

Re: To the Moon and Mars

SpaceX Raptor and Merlin engines are designed NOT to require a full rebuild or service after every launch.

This is a good goal to have. I do wonder how many uses they'll get before they do need this, though. Do we have enough launches with these engines to know the mean-launches-to-failure?

Re: To the Moon and Mars

1. That infrastructure cost is a one time investment.

This was my point, though. It's a one-time cost, if every landing is successful. Otherwise that cost (plus remediation cost) is multiplied by the failure rate, multiplied by the number of launches. If the failure rate is 1%, and you do 1000 launches, then you'd expect to be rebuilding it ten times.

All that red tape that Elon complains about is precisely because you want that failure rate to be as close to zero as possible. If you take a gung-ho attitude of ignoring safety and impact assessments, sooner or later, something goes bang loudly on your launch pad, and you need to build a new one.

Re: To the Moon and Mars

These are interesting sums, but certainly not the whole picture. There are a couple obvious additional costs with reusable boosters, beyond those of the boosters themselves:

1) The cost of the infrastructure required to "catch" the returning booster, I don't know how much this is, but could be comparable to that of the booster itself, or even more? Multiply that, plus clean-up costs, by the probability of a failed "catch" for the recurring costs. Are we expecting a 50% success rate, 9%, 99%? Succeeding first time is impressive, and it sounds like it wasn't entirely expected. If there is a failure here, what happens? The booster may not be full of fuel, as it would on launch, but will have enough in it to operate the engines for a controlled landing, so I can think of several failure modes here that would result in complete destruction of the landing tower, and the subsequent need to clean up a tangled mess of half-melted metal and toxic waste produced from an uncontrolled fire.

2) Servicing costs. Once a rocket engine is no longer disposable, and is intended for re-use, it presumably has to be designed to be stripped down and rebuilt after every use, and this servicing has to be performed. I don't know if the entire booster assembly gets disassembled and rebuilt, but if not, then I'd imagine the likelihood of failure on the next launch would rise significantly, due to uneven stresses and heating on the thing whilst it's belching flame and travelling at supersonic* speeds. After each landing, the landing tower presumably also has servicing costs, too. These costs may not be comparable to the cost of the booster itself, although I'd imagine it makes the engines more expensive than they'd otherwise be, but I'm sure they'd be significant enough.

*not having watched the launch, I'm not sure at what point the booster detaches, if it's reasonably early in the launch, it might not be going *that* fast when it detaches, but reporting suggests it was still travelling at supersonic speeds not long before landing. There's a very definite shockwave to deal with when breaking the sound barrier. It's worth noting that this was a suborbital launch, so won't have been trying to get anything to escape velocity, either which is a mite over 11 kilometres per second.

There's a few telling things here

Firstly, the clear surprise from the actual technical and engineering staff that this worked perfectly first time, which has the subtext that maybe they were pushed to try to do too much, too fast, amidst instructions "from above" to throw caution to the wind that go against sound engineering principles.

And secondly, this:

"Elon Musk also used the event to criticize regulators – commenting that getting the license "was the limiting factor" and "it will get far worse, potentially impossible, if the slow strangulation by overregulation continues!

...which tells us that Elmo simply doesn't understand the need for tight regulation with things that can explodey very quickly above other people's heads, and rain fiery death down upon them. This tells us all we need to know about Space Karen's attitude towards other human beings, which is that they are all disposable pieces of meat to be exploited for his own gains as required.

Never forget that people who would do away with regulations, especially safety regulations, and human rights legislation, are those who we most need to regulate, because otherwise they'd have us all in chains working in mines with no safety equipment.

Starlink was offered for free to those hit by Hurricane Helene. It is not entirely free

Re: UK Phone Operators often provide free calls to areas affected by disasters but you need a phone

This is the correct response to all of his acolytes. Slimy little brown-nosers who think billionaires wouldn't kill and eat them given half a chance.

Re: Free, just provide credit card info

See also: anything that requires your phone number to sign up. I had to supply one for a fucking DBS check the other day. Mandatory, unskippable field for mobile number. Why do they need that to do a periodic re-check for a job I've been in for the best part of two decades?

Re: 'SpaceX isn't just saying now ... you'll need to get a dish'

Starlink is doing a run-of-the mill "first month free when you sign up" deal, which excludes the cost of the equipment, and requires you to sign up to s $120 a month plan (probably with a minimum term).

That's what I see. Absolutely bog-standard marketing ploy, and fuck all to do with disaster-relief.

Not even the half-price-for-12-months sort of deal ISPs here in the UK throw out like free biros at a marketing convention.

Nope, I'm still getting a syntax error trying to read your question.

I'd say, "that's some nice word salad you have there, Elon. Did you overdo it on the ketamine?"

Re: UK Phone Operators often provide free calls to areas affected by disasters but you need a phone

great how do I access those access points? are they giving out free tablets and phones or do I need to purchase that?

So, when you bought your Starlink kit, you assumed that you'd just plug your face into the internet or something?

People generally want internet access because they already have kit that uses the internet, not just because they love Elon Musk so much that they want to crawl up inside his anus and tickle his prostate.

Re: Free, just provide credit card info

Yeah, anything that claims to be "free", but requires you to enter your card details.

Nope.

The corollary to this is where you can sign up easily for a subscription, online, in seconds, but if you want to cancel that subscription? Twenty minutes on hold to a cancellation line, where the "retentions team" tries to offer discounts and upsell you related products, through an unskippable script, for another ten minutes. Some of us (many, I suspect, in the business of IT, which tends to over-represent those with ASD characteristics) really hate having tot talk to people on the phone in the first place.

I don't see why it can't be law that if you can sign up for something by whatever method you choose (online, phone, email, post, in person visit to a shop, whatever), then you must be able to cancel via the same method.

Re: 'SpaceX isn't just saying now ... you'll need to get a dish'

There's more than one source of truth..and sometimes they aren't in sync

There's more than one "version" of the truth, they're all on Twitter, and none of them are actually true.

There, FTFY

Re: Misleading article

Some of us have eyes and ears, and we notice some time back that he is an obvious charlatan. Probably round about the time where he got in a huff when some cave rescuers said "no thanks" to his ill-though-out offer of a submarine, and started mouthing off and called someone "pedo guy". That was, at least, the point where we noticed he's an absolute c**t. We already had questions about his business acumen and extreme wealth. Hint: extreme wealth (and I really mean extremely, extremely, extreme, more than you could spend in a thousand lifetimes wealth here) is never acquired through fair dealing and being a decent person. At best, it is done by finding a loophole somewhere and ruthlessly exploiting it to the expense and detriment of others. I utterly fail to understand why anyone would be on the side of any billionaire, because they'd all kill you and sell your organs without even thinking about it, if they thought they could get away with it.

Re: First hit is always free.

The difference between drug dealers and corporations, is that corporations get tax write-downs on their kickbacks to governments.

BOFH: Boss's quest for AI-generated program ends where it should've begun

Re: Oh the sentiment!

Well, "AI" is currently at the point of doing things that are already easily automated (like boilerplate code), and producing code akin to that written by a junior programmer, with all the naïve implementations, poor performance, security holes, and wheel reinvention that entails, but with added random hallucination and incorrectness thrown in to boot. I think that those of us who know how to analyse and solve the problem domain properly are still safe for a while, for at least as long as it takes for the "AI" bubble to burst, and all those loss-leading massive data centres start to charge full whack for their services.

Re: Hilarious

My suggestion here would be that if you want arbitrary levels of accuracy, don't use floating point numbers. Use an exact representation, and then, if necessary, convert to a float at the end.

Mozilla patches critical Firefox vuln that attackers are already exploiting

Re: Yada Yada

He must have the attention span of a

Oh look, a squirrel

Internet Archive user info stolen in cyberattack, succumbs to DDoS

Re: haveibeenpwned

Not quite; they got a salted hashed password, which means they have a means to start trying to work out your password for that site, offline.

Because the passwords are salted, it means that they won't be able to use a "rainbow table" attack to try to break the password encryption for multiple accounts at once. This is where they take a table of all possible passwords and hash them all using the same algorithm, and the go hunting for matching hashes. The salting prevents this.

It does mean they can use a dictionary attack to try to break individual passwords. If you have used a unique password for this site, then that's not a problem, you just need to change your password.

If you re-use passwords, as a lot of people do, it's potentially more of a problem, depending on whether you re-use passwords only for services that require you to sign up with a password, but which you don't care about, such as online retailers you'll never use again, and to which you never give your card details.

Unfortunately, if you re-use passwords, don't bother with 2FA, and use the same password for everything, like a lot of people still do, then, apart from now needing to change the same password on every single site you've used it on, you're also an idiot.

Missing Thunderbirds footage found in British garden shed

Re: Pedant Alert

Next thing, you'll be telling me that Top Cat was based on Phil Silvers.

Happy birthday, Putin – you've been pwned

Re: "Collective West"

Since this gag obviously went over your head, here's where it comes from...

The gag that got Kenny Everett fired from BBC Radio 2

Re: Msg to Chris Williams

He was the one who kept posting "stories" about how anthropogenic climate change "isn't real", right? I see he writes for the Torygraph now.

Yeah, having had a decent scientific education, I can wholeheartedly state that he isn't missed. If you want to read that sort of bollocks, there's always QAnon for you.

Re: Unprecedented

Happy birthday, Mr Precedent.

Ryanair faces GDPR turbulence over customer ID checks

Re: I never fly Ryanair

Yeah, if I book a seat on a bus, I don't expect to turn up to find someone else sitting in it, and being told to wait for the next bus.

TBH, I've heard horror stories about BA doing this as well. Overselling of seats should be illegal. If someone has bought a seat on a flight and doesn't turn up, that seat should sit empty, not have another warm body put into it (the airline has received the fare, what teh customer chooses to do with their booking is none of their business), and if everyone who has paid for a seat turns up, they should all get a seat.

Re: I never fly Ryanair

Aer Lingus fly from small airports in Ireland. Just saying...

Re: I never fly Ryanair

I could tell horror stories about my experiences with Talk Talk, but I'd just be repeating myself, and not for the first time. Needles to say, their customer service is some of the worst I have ever experienced, and I'm now with Vermin Media, so the bar is high.

Re: I never fly Ryanair

I've heard horror stories about BA, to be honest. Ryanair levels of service, at much higher prices.

I was chatting with someone from Kerry at the weekend, we both agreed that the Aer Lingus flight to Cork was vastly preferable to the Ryanair one, despite being on the "vomit comet" ATR-72, although my wife bemoaned the fact that you no longer get a biscuit the size of your head...

You only need to pay a little more to get a vastly better service.

SpaceX accuses 'meme-stock' rival of 'misinformation' over Starlink signals waiver

Re: Exemption not required

Yeah, my take-away from this particular one of Elmo's hissy-fits is that his satellites aren't designed for the job he wants them to do, and, rather than design satellites that work properly, he wants to bully regulators to allow him to trample over other people's licensed spectrum. This isn't exactly a ringing endorsement of his satellite service, his foresight, or business planning ability.

Elon Musk's X mashed by Australian court for evading child protection reporting

Re: I'd love to see the Lawyers get some sort of punishment here...

Internet denizens seem to be unsatisfied with their already being a terrible remake of that, and seem intent on creating their own, even worse, version.

Personally, I'm fine with goading self-righteous idiots into setting themselves up for a terrible fall, but even I might stop short of literally incinerating them.

Re: Corporate fines ...

Tell me that you don't know what the word "revenue" means without telling me that you don’t know what the word "revenue" means.

Re: I'd love to see the Lawyers get some sort of punishment here...

Wow, with all those straw men, you could start some sort of scarecrow festival.

Under US law, when Musk bought Twitter, it included all liabilities associated with Twitter. If Dorsey did something illegal, then Musk can report him to the relevant authorities, or, if it's some sort of civil matter, sue him. Dorsey's responsibilities for the day-to-day running of Twitter ended when he no longer worked for it, unless he did something that is clearly in breach of the terms of his employment there, in which case the company may choose to pursue him in court, just like any other employee.

Under Australian law, social media companies have clear responsibilities, and Twitter/X is as bound by these as any other social media company operating there. This makes those companies "responsable" [sic] for removing certain content, and probably also responsible for informing the authorities. It's not an either/or thing; both the user uploading illegal content, and the carrier distributing it have responsibilities.

You seem to have a very poor understanding of how various legal systems operate. I'd suggest reading some books on the subject before putting fingers-to-keyboard again and further demonstrating your copious ignorance.

Re: "X/Twitter does not need to comply with local requirements"

Apple or Google don't need to operate in China, they choose to, and by doing so, they agree to abide by Chinese laws.

Whether those laws are morally objectionable to people outside China (or, indeed, those inside China, who can't really complain about them, without being sent for "re-education") is entirely moot.

The same applies in any jurisdiction. You do business there, you follow the rules. Companies don't have some sort of inalienable right to ignore the sovereignty of nation states, even ones owned by the world's richest fuckwit.

So, it's perfectly reasonable for people to complain about the Chinese government doing things that reduce the natural human rights and freedoms of its subjects, and companies going along with this in order to chase money (as Apple and Google do) can rightly come under criticism for choosing to do business there, and play by those rules.

It's not so reasonable to try to turn this around on Australia and claim that preventing and detecting child sexual exploitation is somehow a denigration of human rights, as you seem to be trying to do. Because that is what this is about; Twitter's refusal to engage with laws put in place to prevent child pornography, sexual exploitation, and rape. Only someone who is in favour of those things would see this as a problem. Musk and his cronies really do seem to be a bit confused about what paedophilia is, and who is, and is not a paedophile, don't they? Perhaps there should be some sort of register that these people are on to protect the rest of us?

Harvard duo hacks Meta Ray-Bans to dox strangers on sight in seconds

Re: Brilliant!

I don't think the philosopher's song is that non-PC, unless you find the epithet "drunken fart" offensive.

(I didn't watch the whole clip with sound on, because I'm currently "at work", but I can't recall that skit being much more than a joke about everyone in Aus being called Bruce and a song about drinking)

Re: We'll all look like sirens...

I think a lot of the "facial recognition" actually works by determining the proportions between facial features (e.g. nose length, gap between nose and mouth, chin length, eye separation, etc. etc.). There might be a certain amount of 3D wireframing to this, because people's faces are not flat, but the cameras involved are fairly unlikely to be stereo ones (although that's a possibility), or have the sort of fine detail depth-perception to tell the difference between shadows and makeup on a moving image of a face. They still have to determine the overall shape of a human, i.e. determine what is a face, because it's on the front of a head, on top of a body, and "camouflage" that blurs or confuses boundaries as determined by computer image recognition software is definitely one approach to foiling this. T-Shirts with overlapping partial faces on them probably is reasonably accurate in reducing the confidence in these algorithmic matches, so that it doesn't always determine which part of the body is the face accurately. Masks, reflective visors, and makeup all interfere with the image recognition algorithms in different ways, and combinations of these things probably proves quite effective.

Just wait...

...until these people discover Google Lens.

This seems like a flashy but largely content-free piece of research that amounts to "we automated a google image search with an expensive wearable camera".

The only thing to really take away from this is that the data about people is freely available on the internet, and we should be more aware of the privacy implications of giving away our personal data to corporations.

Windows 11 user hurt by the KB5043145 update? Microsoft offers a way out

There's nothing wrong with Agile, as long as you have user stories for "specify unit tests", "write unit tests", and possibly ones for component-testing, grey-box tests, and integration testing too.

I wish I could be an advocate for test-driven-development, but until I've had the experience of working in an organisation that not only allows it, but encourages it, and actually devotes resources to it, that remains a pipe-dream.

The real problem is that in most places, those in charge do not have a background in development or a scientific or an engineering discipline, but rather in a typical type-A bullshit field, such as sales or marketing, and thus they don't even care that they don't understand, as long as they can bullshit their way into their next "leadership role," and leave their last set of dumpster fires behind them with no consequences.

Re: Thank goodness for Linux

Not quite yet, but possibly before the idea of desktops is totally obsolete?

Microsoft throws in the towel on HoloLens 2

You are Brian Bilston AICMFP

Re: "we have signaled a last time to buy"

Say you design an AR escape room and use HoloLens as your platform.

Yeah, you'd also have to factor in how long the "escape room" bubble is likely to last, how long before the novelty of it being "AR" wears off for the people who are likely to find that fun, and also find an investor who wants to get rid of money for tax purposes, and wants to have the amusing spectacle of watching a business fail thrown in.

(I'm suggesting that this doesn't sound like a money-maker)

Re: Still missing the big picture

one for each eye, and you have true 3d

Not quite, because the focal depth is the same all the time. You can still work out whether things are in front of other things with one eye shut, because the focal distances are different.

What this would provide would be closer to a "magic eye" image. It would give your visual cortex information about perspective, but nothing about depth, which would probably also trigger migraines in a good number of people, and whilst visual migraines can be funky, and interesting, they're not fun after the initial novelty (of having your brain gradually refuse to process images in one hemisphere) wears off.

Why pursue "the Metaverse"...

...when there's a whole new buzzword with no discernable use cases...

"AI"

I look forward to watching how this one plays out on my 3D TV.

^{_{oh, wait, I didn't fall for that one, either}}

AI agent promotes itself to sysadmin, trashes boot sequence

don't get AI to perform any decisions

FTFY.

Don't ask something with no decision-making capacity to make decisions, because you won't get a decision, you'll get a stochastic result based on training input that might, under some circumstances, look like a decision, but isn't.

" If I had given better instructions to my agent, e.g. telling it 'when you've finished the task you were assigned, stop taking actions,' I wouldn't have had this problem."

While you're at it, it's probably best to append "and don't destroy all humans," to all instructions given to your AI bot, too.

AI code helpers just can't stop inventing package names

Re: I really wish "hallucination" hadn't stuck.

To put it in plain language, the bullshit generator is working a little too well.

Given that humans have serious difficulties in agreeing, writing down, and verifying requirements, and it is the human intelligence of human developers that can unravel the mess and (sometimes) produce software that does what a client wants, which usually involves some degree of domain knowledge, and common sense, the odds of any sort of LLM that has been "trained" to produce human-like output, but lacks the fundamental essence of actual humanity, actually producing such useful work, beyond the task of producing boilerplate code (which can usually be automated anyway, if it's a tedious enough of a job to make it worth doing so), approaches zero.

(tl; dr; - AI has no useful use case)

it was the great Larry Wall who coined the three tenets of programming - laziness, impatience, and hubris:

Laziness: If we can't be bothered to do those repetitive tasks (such as producing boilerplate code), then we write a tool to do it for us. Asking "AI" to do it leaves us with the job of checking and verifying it, which is even duller a job than writing the boilerplate in the first place, so the correct solution (not "AI") is to specify and write a tool that does it deterministically.

Impatience: If the code takes too long to run, then the programmer will find a way of making it run faster. Sure, you could get AI to do it for you, or to optimise your algorithms, but again, you then need to verify the results. You'd be better off reading Knuth, and doing it properly. It's not like efficient algorithms have only just been discovered, and ones that AI invents are likely to either not be faster, or to cut corners, and produce incorrect or approximate results. I'd be astounded if "AI" can ever come up with any new categories of algorithm that are improvements on existing ones, based upon the inputs of existing algorithms, because that would imply a category of mathematical proofs that humans have somehow missed. Doubtful. Again, if, as a developer, you are unable to optimise your code, you need to go and learn how to. "Get gud, scrub".

Hubris: Excessive pride, achieved by writing well organised, readable, maintainable, well-commented code. Yeah, "AI" ain't doing that. "ChatGPT, write me some gibberish to comment how and why this code does what it does and how it solves the domain problem". Yarp, narp.

Re: LLM is still much more capable than most junior developers.

I'm not sure that this particular commenter isn't posting the output of some LLM, presumably trained on Twitter. Let's not even start with apparently defining an IQ of 80-100 as "just above average", when most definitions of a quantitative "IQ" specify it as a normal distribution with the average at 100 (actual intelligence is not, of course, a normal distribution, and is more akin to the sort of long-tail distribution you'd get as the product of a power distribution with a normal one).

Still, these posts bear all the hallmarks of the sort of word salad waffle that "AI" produces.

Brazilian court sprays Musk's X with more fines for returning after ban

Looks like they must both have laryngitis or something, all they can manage is the downvote button.

Freeze your peach, madam?

OS/2 expert channeled a higher power to dispel digital doom vortex

Re: In the days before t’interweb…

ew