Posts by Elongated Muskrat

Greater Manchester says its NHS analytics stack is years ahead of Palantir wares

Re: Follow the brown envelopes or funny handshakes

I'd reserve judgement on Blair as "sensible Labour", the public/private finance intiatives that he put in place to fund new hospital buildings left the NHS paying high interest rates on those buildings to give a profit to the financiers when building them with public money would have been cheaper for the tax payer, but would have shown up as borrowing on the government's books.

The Tories who came after seemingly didn't care about making the public finances look bad and simply borrowed loads of money to pay to their buddies (government borrowing went up vastly under the Tories, despite "austerity", which was simply a way to cut public services and funnel more money into private hands).

I really hate to be the one who says, "they're all the same", because this trivialises and excuses some of the truly awful stuff governments do, but Labour really haven't covered themselves in glory, and it's exceedingly disappointing that they have not taken the reins and instigated a programme of anti-corruption when they could.

Re: Follow the brown envelopes or funny handshakes

This is a very good point; creeping privatisation of the organisations that make up the NHS mean that GPs, for example, are private businesses that essentially do contract work for the NHS, and many services that used to be provided "in house" in hospitals and surgeries are "contracted out". This has, sadly, been going on for many years, at least since the Blair government.

Re: All too familiar

I can't disagree with you there; that sort of "code smell" makes me shudder, and it clearly dates from those halcyon days when people didn't even know about security considerations, let alone think bout them.

The solution to that would appear to have three stages: (1) put laws in place limiting funding of political parties, especially with overseas money; make it so that all donations must be publicly traceable to an individual and not go via shell companies, (2) put laws in place limiting the scope of the foreign-owned press (too many "news" outlets in the UK are owned by foreign billionaires with interests which conflict with those of the people of this country), and (3) a wealth tax on the super-rich, say a 2% annual tax on UK residents with over £1,000,000,000 in assets. If they leave the country, good riddance, "trickle-down" is bollocks anyway, especially when applied to the super-rich, they don't get to be super-rich through ethical behaviour, or by letting anyone else have a slice of the pie.

Re: All too familiar

system ("sleep 5");

To me, the purpose of that seems pretty obvious.

If your internally developed software runs too well, people start to think that the developers who wrote it aren't needed any more. You can counteract this by releasing a "performance upgrade" every few years, where that number is changed in a global find/replace. I bet it was originally "sleep 30"...

SET CYNIC MODE OFF

Re: Follow the brown envelopes or funny handshakes

Yeah, don't confuse "NHS England" (a Tory QUANGO created during the previous government) with "the NHS" which is the organisation that actually delivers the services.

The cynic in me thinks that the Tories deliberately named it this way for two reasons: Firstly, to confuse people about the pretty clear delineation between the NHS and this QUANGO, and secondly, so that when Labour cancelled it, they could get their buddies in the right-wing press (the usual rabble, you know, the Daily Hate, the Scum, etc.) to throw their arms in the air and decry "Labour scrapping the NHS". Unfortunately for them, Labour didn't announce they were getting rid of it any time around any elections, so they couldn't capitalise on this, although Labour have made plenty of own goals that they can capitalise on instead, like turning on the disabled, minorities and immigrants.

Judge puts two-week pause on Trump's mass government layoffs

I've come to the conclusion that you can't actually read, because I have discussed this, at length, twice, in a way which clearly states why this is wrong, for the very simple reason that there is already a problem of men accessing women's-only spaces, and there is no documented case, that I am aware of, of a trans woman in a women's-only space actually causing a problem.

Meanwhile, the security for rape crisis centres and women's refuges has to be very tight, in many cases to the extent of their location being kept secret, because men frequently do attempt to access them, and not on the pretext of needing to use the toilet.

The fact that you have repeatedly failed to grasp this demonstrates that you are indeed, very, very thick.

According to reductio ad absurdum, you are the one who is absurd.

What other people believe is utterly irrelevant, treating other human beings with basic respect is what is important here.

Believe it or not (ha!), other people hold a whole range of beliefs which, to you, may seem absurd. Feel free to fight anyone who disagrees with you, but historically, this ends badly for all involved. The working solution is something called secularism, where people let other's hold their beliefs without trying to enforce their own onto them. After all, it is supremely arrogant to assume that oneself is correct in everything, and that anyone who doesn't agree is wrong.

Anyway, you have singularly failed to address my original point, via a number of argument-switching manoeuvres (don't think nobody has noticed), which is very real problem, which actually exists, of men (not trans women) attacking women, and of idiots like you trying to make out that it's trans women who are the problem. Making rules that trans men have to use women's toilets means that those same men can walk into those toilets unchallenged, beyond simply having to claim that they are a trans man. This is vastly more likely to happen than any trans woman ever attacking a cis woman in a toilet. Incidentally, despite that fact that this whole straw-man argument about toilets has been going on for a couple of years now, I've yet to hear of one single example of this ever happening. Ever. This would seem to indicate that actually, it doesn't happen, and that it is a scenario dreamed up by people with a prejudice against trans people who want everyone else to assume that they are sex pests of some kind. You, good sir, are one of those bigoted fuckwits, with the arrogance to think that you speak for women, of any variant. I'm pretty sure my wife would give you some choice words to make your idiotic ears burn as well, as would pretty much any other woman I happen to know. One day, you might find a woman who is willing to talk to you, rather than crossing the road to avoid you, and you might find out for yourself.

An idiot with a down-vote button, no less.

And here we have the blindingly stupid assumption that every cis woman's lived experience is identical, and categorically different to that of a trans woman's.

I don't presume to speak for women; you (an obviously white, male, right-wing AC), do. Your comment does, however, sound like that which comes from someone who never interacts with women. Is there a court order that stops this, perhaps? You certainly sound like someone who has never met any trans people, or observed any real-world interaction between women, trans or otherwise.

The main problem with JKR is that she does indeed try to sound like she doesn't hate trans people, and she dresses her arguments up in all sorts of nuanced euphemism, like "gender critical". She's bright enough to know the consequences of both her words and her actions, and their effect on an increasingly marginalised group. Incidentally, the only person I know who has ever been attacked in a toilet, is a trans man. From what I hear, trans people being attacked is far, far, far more common than trans people doing the attacking, but the sort of "othering" language put forward by people like JKR couches them as the threat. That, there, is the problem, because, without realising it, you have probably subconsciously swallowed the idea that trans people are a threat, but conveniently forgotten that we live in a very patriarchal society where men sexually assault women on a daily basis, and usually get away with it. If Rowling genuinely had a concern about women's safety, she'd be campaigning against rape culture, but she isn't, because guess what? She's a transphobic bigot.

Simply put, bollocks.

Please cite me one genuine case where a man "has put on a dress" to get into women-only spaces in order to assault women, because I really think you can't do so. Even if you were able to, it would be far outweighed by the cases of men just going into women only spaces and assaulting women, and this line of argument makes this vastly more likely, not less likely, because, and I'll state this again, and this time spell this out in block capitals so it can grab the attention of your rather dim mind: REQUIRING PEOPLE TO USE THE TOILET OF THEIR "BIRTH GENDER" AFTER TRANSITIONING MEANS THAT CIS-GENDERED MEN (THE ONES MOST LIKELY TO ASSAULT CIS-GENDERED WOMEN) CAN SAY "I AM A TRANS MAN, SO I HAVE TO USE THIS TOILET" AND WALK INTO A WOMEN'S TOILET IN ORDER TO ASSAULT A WOMAN.

Now, the whole argument around toilets in regard to "protecting women" is utterly specious, because not only do men already attack women in women's toilets (there isn't some sort of magical force-field that stops them going in there), men also attack women in lots of places that aren't toilets. At work, at home, on public transport, OUTSIDE TOILETS, in bars, in restaurants, pretty much everywhere, and turning the eye of scrutiny on the already marginalised trans community does absolutely fuck all to address the real, and ever-present problem of toxic masculinity and "rape culture". The argument boils down to "if only it wasn't allowed, it wouldn't happen," which is obvious bollocks as evidenced by the existence of murder trials. The deceptive language of dressing up trans people as "part of the problem" is transphobic, whether or not you have been pulled into the argument through ignorance, or have wilfully gone down that line of reasoning with full knowledge of the implications, like JK Rowling has. It is faulty logic, based on biased reasoning, which has "trans people are a threat" as its ab initio condition. "Fear those people because they are different to you, and therefore should have fewer rights". That, my good sir, is fascism.

FWIW, I have friends in the trans community, both trans men and trans women. None of them corresponds to the sort of crude caricature of "sex offender by default" that "gender critical activists" like to implicitly portray.

Re: Preventing an economic Chernobyl

Probably the same person, and probably a paid troll / propagandist.

Re: Preventing an economic Chernobyl

Why is everything you post done as AC? We can tell it's all the same poster, because it's always exactly the same cowardly far-right rhetoric. Why don't you just post it under your handle? Are you scared that we'll see that you're a lone nut-job?

The judgement by the UK Supreme Court was strictly limited to the definition of a woman under the UK Equalities Act, and applies only to the provisions of that act. The fact that JK Rowling took this as tacit confirmation of her opinion in crusade against trans people only illustrates that she doesn't understand what the ruling was about (and neither do you), and that she is desperately grasping for anything that she can use to amplify her hate speech. If you think that any of her "gender critical" bollocks that she spouts is anything other than bollocks, then you are exactly as stupid and bigoted as she is.

It's probably worth reminding people that the modus operandi of the far right is to find a minority group which can't defend itself, and demonise them. If you genuinely think trans people are the problem, then you are suckling on the teat of fascism and should hang your head in shame.

It's also worth pointing out that on the grounds of "making women safer", this judgement has led to our idiotic government saying that trans people should use the toilet that matches their "birth gender" (ignoring for the moment the fact that intersex people exist, as do people whose primary sexual characteristics at birth do not match their sex chromosomes). What this means in practice that trans men (people born female but who have transitioned to male and appear outwardly male) now have to use women's toilets. The consequences of this are twofold: either you get "genital inspectors" in public toilets which would be a horrendous invasion of everyone's privacy (including yours) and is obviously unworkable, or you run the very real risk of men going into women's toilets, stating they are trans men, and attacking women, which is statistically much more likely than a trans person committing a sexual assault. A quick reminder: the vast majority of all sex crimes are committed by cis-gendered men against women, followed by those committed by cis-gendered men against other men, and against children. Trans people don't even show up meaningfully in the statistics.

So, in summary, and the tl;dr; for lazy readers: there are a number of ways in which you, personally, can be shown to be a fucking idiot.

Exactly this. Sentencing isn't up to the whim judges. In the UK, every offence carries sentencing guidelines, which must be adhered to. Failure for the judge to do so is grounds for an appeal. It would be a serious matter for judges to ignore sentencing guidelines, and, I suspect, one which would cost them their jobs.

Meta's still violating GDPR rules with latest plan to train AI on EU user data, says noyb

"Noyb's copycat actions are part of an attempt by a vocal minority of activist groups to delay AI innovation in the EU, which is ultimately harming consumers and businesses who could benefit from these cutting-edge technologies," Meta told us.

Nah mate, if I want some waffling bullshit, that is designed to sound feasible, but has zero basis in actual factual content, I'll use the old-fashioned method of listening to some bloke in the pub.

I'm getting very bored of everyone and their dog trying to push "AI" on me right now, and I'm looking forward to the day it goes the same way as the last gimmick ("the metaverse") and the one before that ("3D televisions"), or the one before that (the .COM bubble). I'd say it's going the way of Betamax, but at least Betamax was technically accomplished and only failed due to competition. The only competition for "AI" is other "AI" that is equally unuseful.

US Copyright Office found AI companies sometimes breach copyright. Next day its boss was fired

"You keep using that word, somehow I don't think it means what you think it means."

I can find very few citations for the word "prolimitive," but it would appear to relate to setting a future (pro-) temporal limit (-limitive) on an activity.

The problem with using big words to try to make yourself look clever is that, if you use them wrongly, you don't.

The rest of your post was bollocks as well.

The underlying problem here is obvious. The president (executive branch) picking the members of the Supreme Court (judicial branch) in the first place. This breaks the separation of the three branches of government, especially when the executive branch has tendrils into the legislative branch (congress).

Ideally, the President should have no influence over either the Supreme Court or Congress, because without separation of powers, what you have there is a dictatorship.

I'd suggest that senior members of the legal profession should be responsible for appointing members of the Supreme Court, with minimum requirements of experience and track record, and that measures are put in place to remove judges if their decisions can be demonstrated to be consistently incorrect, or if they suffer mental decline. I'd go so far as to say that there should be maximum term lengths as well, not this weird "in power for the rest of your life" bullshit.

Re: Reform isn't winning, its the rest that are losing

This big problem now is that the longer the Tories take to get the message, and return to the more traditional moderate-right values that have won them elections in the past, the more chance there is that they'll fade away and Reform will be the only right-wing (or just non left/centre) game in town.

The bigger problem is that Labour have moved over to fill that centre-right position, with their right-wing policies on benefits, taxation, the disabled, and immigration. We have no centre-left party either, and the main problem with the left-wing vote is that it represents a plurailty of non-right-wing opinions, and thus is split. Historically, at any time the Tories have been in power, you only have to add up the vote share that labour, the liberals, and the greens get together to see that this is typically the majority, and that the FPTP system artificially amplifies the political position that can maintain only a single party.

What does this mean for the right-wing vote in this country? It's going to be interesting if the Tories do manage to find even a semi-competent leader, because the right-wing vote is rapidly being split in the way the left-wing vote has been historically.

Of course, any truly representative system of PR would sort all of this out, but expecting the party that wins under FPTP to change the system to favour them less is very much akin to the proverbial turkeys voting for Christmas.

I wonder if they have actually committed an offence by doing so, and as such are personally liable for the costs incurred in holding new by-elections. I certainly hope so, but I won't be holding my breath.

Exactly this. Whether what he was saying about De-Pfeffel Johnson was true or not, his credibility was fatally injured by his "eye test during Covid" shenanigans, which made it all look an awful lot like sour grapes, and thus easier to dismiss.

As it happens, the whole lot of 'em would appear to be as corrupt as each other, and any rational person never trusted them to begin with. An awful lot of people don't bother to actually look at what politicians are up to, and vote with their guts anyway, which is why we've got all this stuff with scapegoating immigrants for the decades-long failings of neoliberal economics and end-stage capitalism. It's much easier for the exceedingly well-funded to point the blame at the have-nots than it is for anyone to point out that those well-funded people living in what amount to palaces might be to blame for the massive wealth inequality that this system breeds.

So which is it?

"Freeze peach" or "inappropriate books", because those two things are contradictory...

So your [expletive] test failed. So [obscene participle] what?

Re: Good to keep a sense of humour

You absolutely right.

What can I say, I hadn't had enough sleep when I wrote that.

Re: Good to keep a sense of humour

640KB of memory ought to enough for anybody.

Re: Good to keep a sense of humour

Quite, it should at the very least be printf(ErrorMessages.FuckMeNoMemoryLeft);

For the avoidance of this very situation, I have long since perfected the art of highly sarcastic euphemisms in comments, usually in response to the naïveté of one of my predecessors. Every now and then, I see one of the other devs chuckling away to themselves when they read one of these amongst the thousands of lines of long-forgotten code.

BOFH: The Prints of Darkness pays a visit

Re: Sheer genius!!

Microwaves will heat most effectively at whatever point they are focused (the reason why there are turntables in the things). This will most likely be in the middle of something, unless that thing's surface is reflective to microwaves, or electrically conductive, in which case it may act as an antenna.

This is why you can microwave a measuring jug of custard with a metal tablespoon still in it (the water content of the custard absorbs the microwaves), but if you put the spoon in on its own, it's a really, really, really bad idea.

Tech tariff turmoil continues as Trump admin exempts some electronics, then promises to bring taxes back

Re: US companies did this to us

To be fair, those people still using Twitter for anything other than following very specific communities, are unlikely to understand the concept of irony even after it has been carefully and patiently explained to them. After all, these are the same people who think adding tariffs makes prices go down.

TSMC blew whistle on suspected verboten exports to Huawei – that may cost it $1B+

Re: Oh.

The US's actions not making sense are indeed the problem; sadly they are neither surprising nor confusing, given that the US administration, if viewed as some sort of anthropomorphic entity*, appears to be very confused itself.

*I suggest visualising a space hopper, but one with saggy neck folds.

Musk's DOGE muzzled on X over tape storage baloney

Re: Only $1M?

AFAIK, we've always referred to them as disks here as well, along with saying "program" rather than "programme," at least as far back as I can recall (the early '80s)

Re: Only $1M?

Well, I've got a couple of digital signals for the people doing this. It's a pair of signals given by the middle digit of each hand.

Procter & Gamble study finds AI could help make Pringles tastier, spice up Old Spice, sharpen Gillette

Re: It could...

Not to mention foodlike substances that are designed specifically to be as addictive, and thus profitable, as possible, with no regard to nutritional value.

Dev loudly complained about older colleague, who retired not long after

Re: Inverse problem, kinda ...

In a past job, my nominal task was to set print layout for bulk printing using a custom "programming language" (I use quotes there, because this "language" had conditional statements that couldn't handle more than two or three chained conditions, such as "if this AND that OR the other", and other such very poor design decisions). However, a significant part of the actual work involved having to walk down the other end of the corridor from our nice clean office to the print room to run off proofs. This meant operating a continuous reel-fed printer that runs at 440 feet of paper per minute. In a shirt and tie. Management's advice? "Tuck your tie in". I'm still astounded that there were no nasty accidents at that place.

Re: "Why had it taken management so long"

In my experience, it is because managers of developers are often not developers themselves.

Writing code is quite difficult to "measure," because by its definition it is always breaking new ground, and you can only measure in comparison to what you know. Unless you already intimately know the code in the wider context, determining whether a developer is performing well or not is difficult. If you don't know how to do the development job itself, you can only go on the person's ability to "talk the talk".

Even when a manager does come from a development background, if they have sought that job out, they are likely to be the sort of person who is more interested in telling others what to do than doing it themselves.

Other developers are often in the much better position to determine which of their peers is not pulling their weight. However, nobody really wants to put their head above the parapet. Snitches get stitches.

UK's attempt to keep details of Apple 'backdoor' case secret… denied

Re: yeh right

Web sight? Is that one of Spider-man's superpowers?

BOFH: Have you tried forcing an unexpected reboot?

Re: The spinning wheel lies.

(I don't deny that you've seen situations where somebody put the progress indicator in a separate thread. I'm just saying that they did something pointless and stupid.)

I'd suggest that in high-level language (something like C#), which is inherently multi-threaded, you'd make a progress-bar event-driven, which means that by default, it wouldn't be on the same thread as the one doing the stuff that needs to display its progress, which is quite likely to be CPU-bound, or disk-bound, or network-bound at some point, thus becoming unresponsive if it was running on the main UI thread. You'd not be explicitly putting that progress bar into its own thread, but the language's own thread management would be doing it for you.

For something low-level, like a BIOS update, the question is whether you'd know enough about the system it's running on, or its state, to make the assumption that more than one thread was even available. it depends entirely on what language you'd written that flashing process in. Arguably, you'd want to make sure the thread doing the actual work isn't interrupted in any way, so it might make sense to farm the progress indicator off to another thread, if you could assure yourself of doing so without it causing timing issues.

Re: Schrödinger's firmware situation

The first 90% of the task takes 90% of the time. The other 90% also takes 90% of the time. I thought this was a well-known principle?

Re: Schrödinger's firmware situation

This is actually a perfect example of how general relativity and quantum mechanics can be reconciled. If the sign says "1 min", it will simultaneously be both 5 minutes for those waiting there, and 30 seconds ago for anyone arriving at the bus stop.

Microsoft's many Outlooks are confusing users – including its own employees

Re: What about Outlook (less shitty)?

They should take the easier route of renaming it Lookout, and making the icon a big red warning triangle.

Court filing: DOGE aide broke Treasury policy by emailing unencrypted database

The only ACID that applies to an Excel spreadsheet is the stuff that should be poured over it.

Re: "You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity"

The "lion" bit is a false flag to divert your attention away from their being 7-foot lizards, or so I'm "reliably informed"...

(Black helicopter icon because we don't have a tinfoil hat one)

...and that is a funny way to spell, "I am also ignorant".

That's a funny way to spell, "I am stupid"

Oh Brother. Printer giant denies dirty toner tricks as users cry foul

Exactly this. Plus there are some right whack-jobs here in the comments section who I really don't want to have any personally identifying information about me, so if I'm including something like that in a post, it's AC.

Does anyone know the domain / path that Brother's printers check for firmware updates, so I can add it to my Pi-hole?

How Google tracks Android device users before they've even opened an app

Yeah, Hargreaves Lansdown. I'd not be surprised if they'd trademarked the word "ethical" in order to prevent other banks from using it. They're about as ethical as Elon Musk's dad's emerald mine as far as I can tell. Remind me again how much money Mr Lansdown (the Guernsey-born billionaire and country's 150th richest person) donated to the pro-leave agitprop campaign in 2016?

Re: Can be uninstalled on Samsung S23

This shitware has been removed from my Xiaomi device as well. I'll have to check if it gets surreptitiously reinstalled again later.

So … Russia no longer a cyber threat to America?

Re: Really?

I know "half intelligent" is your reference point, but I'm afraid I'm not willing to diminish myself to that level.

Re: Really?

It's amazing that the US thinks its military might is so great, but I'm willing to bet that nobody who speaks up for them can name one single conflict that the US has won, since the end of WW2. Let's see, the Korean war, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, the list is very long of their failures.

NATO, on the other hand, did a pretty good job with the Balkan war and stopping the genocide that was going on there in the '90s. On the whole, though, the threat of US military might isn't what it once was. The US seems to forget that the EU is much larger, in population terms, than their comparatively sparsely-populated country (not only in terms of population, but also in culture and history).