Posts by Elongated Muskrat

Selling your digital soul to use Bluesky's DMs isn't just a bad idea, it's the law*

GDPR compliance nightmare

How does retaining, and storing personally identifiable data, presumably outside the UK, beyond the immediate requirements of verifying a person's status as an adult possibly comply with the requirements of GDPR?

It's not limited, proportionate, or under the control of the data subject. Surely Bluesky are replacing the liability of large fines with the liability of larger ones (4% of global turnover, or large cash sum, whichever is bigger, isn't it?)

Surely the only requirement here is to be able to say, "yes, the person associated with that account is over 18". Even then, what about shared or corporate accounts? How does one assure that children don't access these, or verify that the person who has proven their age is the person actually using an account? The whole premise of age verification on a per-account basis is fundamentally broken.

Meta used AI to concoct low-carbon concrete it poured for a datacenter floor

I wonder what the carbon cost of running that AI model was

...and whether it will ever be recouped by the carbon-reduction of the concrete.

I smell greenwashing.

Junior developer's code worked in tests, destroyed data in production

Re: Pro tip for DELETE queries

First do the SELECT * FROM bigtable WHERE <condition> bit, then when you have verified that, do a SELECT * INTO bigtable_backup_todaysdate FROM bigtable (without the WHERE clause) before changing it to a DELETE statement. If the database has active transactions going on, you might also want to make sure that either everyone else is out of the database, or you might want to consider using a query locking hint, such as WITH READUNCOMMITTED.

You can always do a DROP TABLE bigtable_backup_todaysdate later, once you've established you didn't screw up.

This does, of course, assume you have enough space in your database for a copy of "bigtable", but to be honest, if you don't have that much headroom (or log space) in your database, you're likely to run into bigger problems.

This assumes SQL Server too, other DB engines are available.

AI agents get office tasks wrong around 70% of the time, and a lot of them aren't AI at all

When it comes to driving in traffic, "almost right" is still dangerously wrong.

Re: AI played a part

...it would cause problems next year, were it not for the fact that the people whose bonuses are contingent on the cost savings made from those redundancies will have moved onto the next victim company, so next year is an externality.

Re: Money where your mouth is

The notable feature, where Gartrner and AI are concerned, is that Gartner seem to spout even more bollocks than the AI does.

Re: Ridiculous

Did someone call for a metaverse? Anyone? I'm sure I heard someone? No? Nobody? Oh, alright then, don't mind me...

Tea, Earl Grey. Hot.

Hi, I'm Talkie Toaster, would you like some toast?

Re: Carol Burnett

I saw the end of one episode of that (whilst waiting for something else to come on), and didn't laugh once. It was like a bad rip-off of a cross between Green Wing and Parks and Recreation, both of which were excellent, but this was not.

"AI" is only as intelligent as the people who buy into it, which is not a glowing recommendation of the "I" in "AI", but a damning indictment of the critical evaluation skills of some humans.

BOFH: Peeling back the layers of the magic banana industrial complex

Re: Finally someone will realise

Our Rob or Ross?

Finally someone will realise

That the magic banana isn't actually magic, or a banana, but is actually a turd painted yellow.

Am I doing this analogy thing right?

SpaceX's Starship explodes again ... while still on the ground

...and to Juicy Fruit.

BOFH: Rerouting responsibility via firewall configs

Re: The BOFH is slipping

The remediation work is no doubt more profitable, with no clearly defined completion criteria, and I expect, can in most part be done from the pub across the road, or the curry house next to it, billed at time and a half.

Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

Yeah, why don't you just throw in one that can read any file from any path on the file system while you're at it. Security's the end user's problem, right?

The siren call of the wanker. Shout it loud and proud, so we can all cross the road to avoid you.

Re: OK, but what now?

Yeah, DNS based blocking only works on things that come from a domain you can block. When the ads come from the same domain as the content, you're stuffed.

Think of advertising as a security threat (which, really, you should), and you start thinking about attack surface. Then you realise, that to adequately defend an attack surface, it should have multiple layers, like an onion. A Pi-Hole is the outer layer of the onion; in the browser, there are layers from NoScript, and uBlock origin. I've given up on AdBlock Plus, because of the annoying nag screen it pops up every other day, but you can have that as a layer too.

Chrome, as far as I am concerned, is an attack vector on my privacy by Google. Prove me wrong.

The launch of ChatGPT polluted the world forever, like the first atomic weapons tests

Arguably, it was scuttled because it was scuppered. A bit unfair to blame the admiral, mind.

Re: And by the way...

I'm no speaker of Irish Gaelic, but I believe It's (approximately) "Shaun O'Hegarty". To be fair, most people should be able to correctly pronounce Seán, with or without the accent. As a clue, anglicised spellings of most Irish names are available, so a fair bet would be to start by asking someone from Liverpool or Glasgow.

Edit - and that wasn't a bad guess...

https://www.libraryireland.com/names/oh/o-heigceartaigh.php

Re: The problem with AI is trust

I know the format of these forums often leads to people arguing back and forth, but in this case, I was agreeing with you. AI being unable to do critical evaluation is exactly my point, this includes evaluation of context. Since we can't teach humans to do this very well, or give clear-cut rules for how to establish truthfulness or trustworthiness of most things, it's a dead-end. You only have to read "on trusting trust" to know it's an intractable problem for humans, the idea that a statistical model would be able to do it as some sort of emergent property is, as I said, pure magical thinking.

Re: On 'clean data'

I hereby propose that AI models are trained on the Voynich Manuscript.

A human writing a book based on the style of a copyrighted book would be very careful not to infringe copyright, for example, by reproducing substantially similar blocks of text, or using names of characters or places in that book. No sane author would take on that task without clear permission from the copyright owner, because they'll still have to worry about accidental liability.

AI will churn out copyright-infringing gobbledygook on the turn of a sixpence.

The two are not comparable.

Re: The problem with AI is trust

What you are describing there is critical evaluation. Most humans are really bad at this (hence the existence of antivaxxers, AGW deniers, and flat earthers). The idea that a glorified version of predictive text would somehow be able to do it without being based on a strict rules-based system is pure magical thinking.

AI models don't think logically, and neither do the people who came up with this:

They contended the world needs sources of clean data, akin to low-background steel, to maintain the function of AI models and to preserve competition.

This is a logic error; AI models need "clean data", the world needs no such thing. This statement presupposes that the world needs AI models, which is a questionable assertion at best.

Penn State boffins create silicon-free two-dimensional computer

You ask if the OP is a troll, whilst spelling sulfur/sulphur* as "sulpher", and silicon as "Silicone". Also, the Latin word for gold, which its symbol Au is derived from, is aurum. "Auric" was the name of the villain in the second James Bond film.

If you're going to nitpick, it would probably bear fruit to proofread your own post.

*The "tradiational" spelling being with a "ph", and the IUPAC recognised one with an "f". We'll allow our US cousins that one, if only they'll start spelling "aluminium" correctly.

Ukraine strikes Russian bomber-maker with hack attack

Re: Zelenskyy sure seems to hold a lot of cards

Mollycoddled, I'm one of those and went to Vietnam.

What, you're a "baby boomer" from the UK? Because I would have thought that it was pretty obvious that this was the cohort I was referring to.

What were you doing in Vietnam? We never went to war with them, so I'm going to go ahead and assume sex tourism.

Perhaps we should add "exaggerate their reading comprehension skills" to the US stereotype?

Re: Zelenskyy sure seems to hold a lot of cards

Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.

I'm not sure where you got this one from. Sure, the stereotype of Americans as overly polite (insincerely so) exists, but as far as I am aware, they are known as the source of the most soulless and cynical extreme right-wing greed and cut-throat business practices. Now, I'm sure this stereotype is not wholly deserved either, but the idea that the US populace as a whole was ever anything other than much more selfish and arrogant than their European counterparts seems not to fit. Let's not forget that it took them three years to decide whether to back the Third Reich or the Allies in WW2, only being forced into picking a side when an Axis country attacked them, and it's pretty clear that the people who are around today who'd have backed the Nazis aren't exactly a tiny minority.

So sure, they might claim they're nicer than us, but it doesn't seem to bear a lot of close inspection. That's not to say we don't have our own problem with too many far-right scumbags over here as well. All the flag-shaggers who bleat on about VE day and "blitz spirit" (notably, mostly the mollycoddled generation born after the war, not the one who fought it), whilst espousing the politics of the side that lost that particular contretemps.

Anyway, I've wandered slightly off-topic. I'd say that rather than nicer than us, the USians are more religious than us. If this translated directly as better able to follow the spirit of the teachings of Christ (whether he was a man or deity aside), then they almost certainly would be nicer, but that particularly vicious brand of American "Christianity" that picks all the nasty bits from the Old Testament and ignores anything Jesus actually said or did would crucify him again in a second if he turned up today.

Re: UAC

In Mother Russia, sun blocks out you.

Seriously, though, how do you think Russia would have responded to that? Bearing in mind that they wouldn't have lost the thousands of tanks, hundreds of thousands of personnel, and would not have expended all of that ammunition of their own at this point? It would have been clearly represented as an invasion, and we'd currently be knee deep in radioactive fallout cosplaying as the traffic warden from Threads.

Don't forget that the USSR hasn't existed in 34 years, and I've seen it written elsewhere that Russia lost the capability to manufacture the bombers that were destroyed after the fall of the USSR.

Despite Putin's ambitions to rebuild the Russian Empire by force, their technology and infrastructure is largely very much out of date, and Putin maintains his control through force projection, threat, bluster, espionage, and the effects of throwing large amounts of money at the right people to compromise them. This is amply demonstrated by the fact that Putin's "limited military engagement that will last 2 days" is still going on 3 years later, and he utterly failed in his day one goals, of toppling Ukraine's legitimate government, fully expecting Zelenskiy to have run away, or to have fallen foul of assassination attempts. Have we forgotten the images of the failed land assault on Kyiv, launched from Belarus? The tanks all confidently rolling along the main road in a nice long line, and then unexpectedly being on fire?

As for Russia's space technology - the Soyuz capsule has been around for over half a century; the basic technology of putting a sealed capsule on top of a big rocket hasn't changed in that time, and whilst I'm sure Russia have made improvements over the initial capsule from 1967, you're fooling yourself if you think that those ones they're launching now are going to be anything remotely brand-spanking new.

I would think that publicly stating that you have exposed details of strategic personnel, communications, and supply chains would be an effective way to throw your opposition into panic, and at the very least significantly disrupt them by causing Russia to have to either completely change them, or expend additional resources protecting them, not to mention the effect on morale.

As a psy-op, simply stating this, without doing anything with the information, would be enough to cause this effect, if it is believed. Defacing the website goes some way to proving it, although it only demonstrates that the website was compromised. I'd not be surprised to see high-level personnel unexpectedly dying in a "terrorist attack", or supply-line warehouses unexpectedly burning down in the coming weeks or months to further demonstrate it.

Re: Deep joy ... not

"We" in this case, referring to your fellow Russians?

Re: Thank goodness

Spin faster, товарищ

Ship abandoned off Alaska after electric cars on board catch fire

Re: Tesla that burned so hot, it melted part of the road

It's so hot it will separate water molecules into hydrogen(fuel) and oxygen(oxidizer) just adding to the mess.

If you could provide enough heat to separate H₂O into 2H^. + O^., then the immediate reaction between those would provide you with H₂O plus the exact same amount of heat you just put in.

What it might do (and I can't be bothered to check the actual chemistry), is strip the oxygen from water to provide phosphorus oxide* and elemental hydrogen. Obviously, that's not good if there's an excess of oxygen about, because a hydrogen fire on top of what you're already dealing with is never good, but if that was the case, then the phosphorus would almost certainly have reacted with it before the water.

*(Which would then react further with water to produce phosphoric acid)

Exactly, battery chemistry is essentially a controlled redox reaction; a fire is an uncontrolled redox reaction. The battery wouldn't work if it didn't contain a balanced stoichiometric amount of the reductant and the oxidant.

As energy densities in batteries get higher, then the amount of stored energy that can accidentally be "released too rapidly" also increases. At least with conventional ICE engines, you need to supply the oxidant (air) to release the stored chemical energy in the fuel. It's a bit harder to make a high energy-density battery that can be split apart in this way, although things like much larger high-energy batteries can be made much more safely (such as flow batteries, where the electrolyte has one tank for the oxidised state, and one for the reduced state).

A lithium fire doesn't need oxygen to burn, water will do quite nicely, thank you. The same applies to most metal fires, for example, aluminium will burn quite happily underwater if you can get it hot enough to melt the oxide layer that stops it from spontaneously igniting in air. I've seen the remains of a fume hood where a few grams of finely powdered pure aluminium without the oxide layer were accidentally exposed to air.

Re: Tesla that burned so hot, it melted part of the road

Same applies to ICE cars too.

The difference here being the chemistry of the fuel in an ICE and the composition of the batteries in EVs.

Hydrocarbons won't burn underwater, although they will happily float on water and burn on top.

Lithium, meanwhile, will happily burn underwater, reacting with the water to produce hydrogen gas. This won't burn underwater, though, it'll float to the top and burn there. Invisibly in the visible spectrum, as it happens. I would imagine that's an additional hazard for firefighters, because there are only three ways to see a hydrogen fire: use an infrared camera to spot it, walk into it and start wondering why your clothing is suddenly so hot, or use the broom method.

Trump tariffs ruled illegal within minutes of Musk announcing end of government role

The legislative branch writes laws, the judicial branch reviews laws and the executive branch enacts laws. The executive branch also has a veto power over the legislative branch as well as the power of executive order. All defined in law.

Oh so close, but it looks like the reading comprehension let you down again there. You got the bit about the legislature right, and then went a bit off the rails into wishful thinking again.

In the US (as in many countries), the judicial branch is not there just to review laws, it is to interpret and apply laws. If you end up in court facing a judge, it's that judge who sentences you, not your President. Where there is a question of interpretation, it is a judge whose job it is to render a judgement, appeals to which can be escalated to a higher court, ending in the (corrupt because it is politically appointed) Supreme Court, in the case of the US.

The executive branch doesn't have a veto over the rulings of the court. Donald Trump can't take a convicted felon and say, "that ruling, where this person was convicted, is reversed". What he can do is issue a pardon, so that the sentence that the convicted person had is no longer applied, like he did with all his pet insurrectionists. That's not a veto. Vetos don't work like that. That's a bit more homework for you to go and educate yourself before spouting off.

The executive branch is technically there to enforce laws, not enact them, but mostly their role is in conducting the business of government lawfully (i.e. within the law), and it certainly isn't to decide what the law says. The executive branch, by the way, doesn't consist of just the President, but also the police and armed forces. I know the police in the US like to think of themselves as judge, jury, and executioner, but they really should not, and there really should be more consequences when they take the law into their own hands. However, US gun culture is a whole other discussion, which I'm not going to get drawn into today.

The other branch, the legislative, is the one that makes the laws. Not the president, and, again, this is where the stuff with executive orders and vetoes is a bit iffy from a separation of powers point of view. Even then, though, executive orders have to be lawful, and can be overturned by congress with a two-thirds majority, as can vetoes.

What is currently going on in the US, which should alarm anyone whose head isn't firmly stuck up their own arse, is that one branch is in teh process of corruptig and drawing power from the other branches. The problem with the courts is that the highest court of appeal is stuffed with political appointees, and the problem with congress is that it is stuffed with Trump's yes-men (and, in the minority, women). This arises partly from the corrupting influence of money, where eyewateringly vast sums are spent to promote one political candidate over another. This leads inevitably to a plutocracy, becuase rather than a free choice, the electorate has a biased one, especially one where the candidates themselves are chosen by a less democratic method with all this "primaries" nonsense.

Anyway, after that littel diversion, back to your actual point:

And one thing the president of the USA is allowed to do, as head of the executive branch, is determine foreign policy.

This is true, yes, however, taxation is not foreign policy. Trumps tariffs are not primarily a foreign policy issue, they are an import tax on the citizens of the US. When someone buys something from China for $100, and pays $145 on top of that (or whatever the tariff is today), that person (in the US) is paying tyhe additional money to the US treasury. The Chinese seller still gets $100. Trump doesn't have the authority to set taxes in this way, Congress does. At last, this is what the judge has said in their ruling, and I'm more inclined to believe the ruling of an actual qualified judge than some anonymous nobody on the internet. The fact that Trump's argumentwoudl appear to be the same as yours only testifies to the fact that both his and your level of ignorance are roughly equal.

Oh no, I'd better call the fire brigade, It'll take them weeks to put out a burn like that.

But yes, if a political candidate promises to do X and wins they should do X.

But no, because there's a couple of pesky things called a constitution, and rule of law, that mean that your president can't actually go ahead and do whatever he wants, if it conflicts with one or the other of those, even if, and here's the tricky part, even if you were stupid enough to believe he would do it. Now, I know you've gone ahead and called me stupid up there in the thread a few comments above this, but your opinion really doesn't count for a great deal when you come out with bloopers like this.

Despite the fact that he seems to think that he does have absolute power, Trump does not. If he wants to push that point, and goes ahead and takes absolute power, then this is what is known as a coup d'état.

Now, the sensible, logical, people would see a politician promising to do all sorts of things which conflict with the rule of law, and might think, "well, I don't think I should vote for that person," but it seems an awful lot of people (including yourself) aren't very well educated in things like the rule of law. You have a choice here to either go off and educate yourself, or to continue to spout off like some preternatural spout of stupidity. Which is it going to be?*

*This is obviously a rhetorical question, and needs no response from you that further demonstrates which answer it is.

This is why reform are currently doing so well in the UK and other 'fringe' parties are doing well in Europe.

14% of the vote translates to roughly one person in seven. If you picked seven random people and put them in a line-up, I could probably point out the thickest one.

But the American people voted in the majority to elect that ONE person to this position of power. The US system is specifically set up with a single person at the top. The president, as head of the executive branch of the US government, has these powers.

Except the US system (which arguably isn't very democratic to start with, what with its weird electoral college system designed to skew the vote to the right), has clear separation of powers, between the president, congress, and the judiciary, for the very reason that they didn't like the bit where they had one person at the top. I think his name was George, and there was this hit of a spat involving making some very weak tea and wanting some sort of representation in return for the taxation.

This whole article is about how the US president specifically does not have these powers, and how that is written into the US constitution. Some might conclude that your reading comprehension skills aren't strong if you wish to argue the opposite.

For such a young country, the US sure seems to forget their own meagre history quickly.

...and the Council of Nicea was a bunch of priests who decided on what went in and what didn't, 325 (or so) years later.

I'm pretty sure it's a conglomeration of texts, written largely as third-party retellings several hundred years after the events they purportedly depict, and then edited together quite selectively by what was even, by then, a fairly right-wing patriarchal religious assembly, and variously translated through Aramaic, Koenic Greek, Latin, and finally English and other modern languages, such that the original subtlety and implied meanings of the original texts was all but lost.

But go ahead, you do "I believe this was literally written by the people it was about a couple of thousand years ago, and has remained unchanged ever since," if you want to, nobody's stopping you. Just ignore the fact that arguably more of it was written by Constantine I than any of those people you mentioned.

What a load of old horseshit. A representative democracy elects representatives (whether it is a FPTP system or a proportional system is moot, although a proportional system results in better representation). Those representatives have the job of representing the interests of all their electorate, not just the ones who voted for them, otherwise what you have there, sonny, is a tyranny.

The word "democracy" itself is a pretty loose term, meaning only "government by the people", from δημοκρᾰτῐ́ᾱ (demokratia), which itself comes from δημος (demos), meaning "the people" and -κρατία (kratia), meaning rule of, or power of. It literally only means that, and bears no judgement on what is the "right" form of government by the people. What it doesn't mean, however, is government, unquestioned, by one individual, that would be an autocracy.

Empire of office workers strikes back against RTO mandates

Re: Cuckoo land

The last time I drove into London, I had no issue driving right into the middle of the South Bank (apart from the bit where Google Maps tried to take me down the Mall), and it got me to where I was going without unexpected delays. Compare this to the time where I parked on the outskirts of London to get the tube to an exhibition in central London, only to find that they'd picked that day for engineering works on that line, and to spend two hours on a baking hot rail replacement bus crawling along the A4 at 0.5 mph.

Re: Cuckoo land

I had occasion to drive into central London last year (the South Bank no less). It took less time than public transport would have, and factoring in petrol costs, wear-and-tear, congestion charge for two days, and 24h parking round the corner from the South bank centre, it was still several hundred quid cheaper than the alternative of three people taking the train for the same journey, and that doesn't even account for the need to drive to a train station from where we started and pay for parking at the station, which would have cost at least three times the parking cost in Central London (it was £7, booked in advance).

Public transport in this country is an absolute farce, and the reasons for this have everything to do with privatisation and unregulated free-market economics, where the "free" bit just refers to the freedom of those holding the capital to fleece everyone else for every penny they have.

Re: Survey responses v. reality.

And companies are folding.

Oh dear, how sad, never mind, looks like Sir Alan and the other corporate landlord leeches are going to have to find some new scam to get money out of working peoples' wallets.

Re: Survey responses v. reality.

In the world of security, the weakest link is the weakest link, and it's not likely to be a biometrically-secured laptop in someone's home connecting via a VPN, it's a socially-engineered walk-in into an office, which is easier to achieve in a busy office full of lots of people, not all of whom can possibly know each other. In a near-empty office, where most people are working from home, this is harder because 1 dodgy person amongst 10 is easier to spot than 1 in 250.

Real intrusions into a company's infrastructure are more likely to be "virtual" in nature, and take the form of a phishing attack, and spear-phishing is becoming increasingly common. It's moot whether the victim is at home or in the office when they fall for it, and education is the solution, not a forced commute.

Then there's always "rubber hose cryptanalysis" - if someone's determined enough, then the weakest security link is always people, and any form of security access can be broken by a short time in a basement with a plastic chair, some baling twine, and a length of rubber hose.

SpaceX resets 'Days Since Last Starship Explosion' counter to zero, again

0/6 tests passed

Pull request abandoned.

User unboxed a PC so badly it 'broke' and only a nail file could fix it

Re: Re:high pitch noises

Oh thanks for that, my brain has tuned the high-pitched background whine in again.

I'm fast approaching the wrong side of half a century, but my ears still seem fine; it's my eyes that refuse to focus on anything closer than a metre.

Re: In denial

It's remarkable how many road users seem to have no awareness of what is going on around them, and, in many cases, right in front of them. Forcing car drivers to learn to use the road on a motorcycle first would lead to a lot more careful and considerate drivers, and would, I suspect, weed a lot of the worst people from the gene pool as well.