Posts by Elongated Muskrat

Elon Musk claims live Trump interview on X derailed by DDoS

Re: A request

I don't think declaring bankruptcy would wash with his creditors who backed his Twitter bid. The Saudis have allegedly chopped people up* for less.

*Allegedly**.

**Ahem, ALLEGEDLY.

Re: vampires.

This is serious stuff. Thousands of day-walkers is an indication that we are in an alternative timeline to the original ending of Blade where Deacon Frost was successful. Time to up the garlic content of my diet.

Re: Greatest cutter

Yeah, so does John Hurt, for some reason.

If you look at the original character of Adam Susan in the graphic novel, he has a resemblance to none of those people. This, of course, means absolutely nothing, because, believe it or not, real people aren't based on works of fiction. Some would do well to remember this, and not try to emulate works of fiction either.

TBH, he should have applied it to himself. He was a nasty bastard. Anyone who classes him as "Britain's greatest historical figure" or whatever, needs to stop shagging flags.

Re: Greatest cutter

Maybe he's just misremembering the film version* of V for Vendetta, and meant Sutler. People like Musk think that they are freedom fighters, but bear a closer resemblance to those who are fought against in dystopian fiction.

*Those who have read the graphic novel will know the character's name is actually Adam Susan, but was changed for the film.

Re: Shelf life

You'd have to ask the traffic wardens.

Re: Shelf life

I wouldn't know, most of the people I follow are those I either know personally, are friends of friends, or who are well known people. I tend not to follow random people on social media, and I have no interest in "influencers". When one of those accounts consisting of a picture of a scantily clad lady, with a name followed by a string of random characters follows me, I block them, as an obvious spammer/scammer.

Re: Interview?

Well, the guy is a bit of a "peninsular".

It's straight out of the far-right play-book. Accuse your opposition of exactly the things you are guilty of yourself, so that you can deflect any legitimate accusations as "tit-for-tat". The thing is, the technique is a hundred years old, and "the worst president in US history*" desperately needs to come up with something that people can't see straight through.

*One of the things he apparently said about Biden, but as which he has been described himself by historians and political analysts, according to the Independent. (note, as well, that I'd take anything in the Indie with a pinch of salt, given its ownership)

Re: "Massive attack" you say?

If any interviewer asked Musk any serious hard-hitting questions about anything he didn't want to talk about, he'd throw his toys out of the pram and storm off in an instant. Well, not quite instant, he'd probably engage in some name-calling of the interviewer and threaten them that they'll never find work again first. He's so obviously a narcissist who, through sheer luck* has found success and who believes that he is some sort of demigod-level genius, despite the evidence to the contrary.

*Luck in this case starting with being born into a very wealthy family, and "inventing" things by buying into things that other people had invented, at an early stage. He's exactly as skilful as any one of a thousand people who thought "I wonder if this bitcoin thing will go anywhere, I'll buy a dollar's worth" in 2009.

Re: Shelf life

For a man in his late '70s who subsists on a diet of McDonalds, I suspect the thing that will get rid of him will be a heart attack or a stroke. Speaking of which, some reports have mentioned a mysterious lisp he seems to have developed, the response to which, from his campaign team is a very mature and adult, "you need to get your ears tested". Speculation is rife, and is exactly that, and I am just repeating what I read, so a large heap of salt needs to be taken with it, I chose not to waste any of my life listening to two far-right bigots in an echo chamber.

As it happens, though, I'm currently seeing a lot of people going onto Threads instead of "X", and not just using both for different audiences, but closing their "X" account as well. It seems that every time that Musk opens his mouth to spew out his ill-informed opinions about "civil war", or to retweet far-right disinformation (and then deleting it a few hours later without retracting it), more people choose to move elsewhere.

DEF CON badge disagreement gets physical as firmware dev removed from event stage

Re: Hmm

It raises questions about those running DEFCON for sure. I'd say it's the age-old problem of a small organisation growing but not losing the one-man-band attitude towards management, except that DEFCON has, by all accounts, been quite a big affair for a number of years now...

Re: Hang on a sec...

I guess it refers to individually flashing them via USB (or similar) rather than having the images pre-burned onto them. Probably nothing to do with not having the ability to bulk-program them at manufacturing time, but more that the images were not ready at that point in the process, so it had to be done after they were assembled?

Twitter's former chairman sues X over unpaid options

Re: No time limit?

I suspect the bit where it has come to filing a case doesn't come out of the blue, but at the end of a series of attempts to be paid and delaying techniques. Most people, when they are owed money, don't go straight to lawyers (not least because that's an expense you won't get back), but first attempt, through reasonable means, to get in contact with the person or entity that owes them money and open a dialogue about getting paid. If nothing else, if you can't show that you've done so, your court case is unlikely to succeed. I'd assume that this process has been undergone in this case, and has been met with avoidance and delaying tactics by Space Karen, as is his modus operandi.

Tesla recalls over 1.6M electric cars in China for faulty hood lock

Re: It could have been so much worse...

I'm pretty sure elemental lithium and water are not a good mix. It will react in a redox reaction to produce lithium hydroxide and hydrogen. Being on fire at the time will only make this happen quicker, and the availability of oxygen is moot. You'll have turned a nasty fire into a nasty fire combined with an explosion hazard and a highly corrosive base. See also: aluminium fires, once you get one of those going, you're not putting it out.

BOFH: The true gravity of the Boss and the 3-coffee problem

Re: Erdős Pál

Not to mention his pretty serious amphetamine habit.

Re: #Futurama

One Art please! Wubwubwubwubwub.

Re: caffeine intolerance is a real thing

This is pretty much the same reason caffeine (and theobromine in chocolate) is lethal to dogs. They lack the liver enzymes to process it.

Most people's livers can take a lot more punishment than you might think, which is why I am always pleasantly surprised when my liver function tests come back normal.

You have to drink a hell of a lot to give yourself cirrhosis, but there are plenty of other things that can cause damage to it, such as being very overweight, being a smoker, having type 2 diabetes, or infections such as hepatitis A/B/C. Obviously drinking heavily in conjunction with those things isn't going to help, so if you're a 20 stone diabetic heavy smoker with a lot of back-street tattoos, well... you're probably fucked anyway.

Re: Cafeine overdose incoming!

Sadly, my contract of employment explicitly forbids me from drinking* during work hours, so there's little chance of me reaching the Ballmer Peak.

*as in alcohol, not as in "any fluids" at all.

Re: Cafeine overdose incoming!

I wouldn't get much done with the proper application of programming fluid.

I find it more effective to make the coffee triple-strength though, to reduce the effective spin-up time.

Under-fire Elon Musk urged to get a grip on X and reality – or resign

Re: I’m just glad I’m getting old

So here we have it, the Seymour Skinner "Am I wrong, no it's everybody else" meme made manifest.

I won't argue; some of their methods are downright moronic. I suppose their argument would be that people are talking about them, and thus they are raising awareness. Where this falls down, is that they need to not only raise awareness, but garner public support.

Rioting, however, is a completely different kind of stupid.

One type of stupid is a kind that does damage to yourself.

The other kind is one that hurts other people, and yourself, when you get "the knock". Anyone who thinks they can attack the police and not get a 4am call from the Plod a few days later is taking a very big chance, and they'd probably have better chances if they bought a lottery ticket.

Re: I’m just glad I’m getting old

I'd question those numbers, to be fair. You have many pages of comments against your user ID, and I only counted up the up/down votes on the first page, but those came to 60 for, and 1058 against. I reckon you've probably dropped a digit from that "downvoted" tally, since you have 123 pages of comments against your name, or completely made up those figures. The thing is, others can't see your totals, and nobody in their right mind is going to go through 124 pages of comments adding up that tally, so we can only take your word for it. The thing is, your word appears to be pretty untrustworthy.

As it happens, I have also been commenting here since 2008 (although I've changed my handle since then, so you won't see my whole post history). Out of 8,081 posts, I have had mine up-voted 50355 times and downvoted 5673 times. Given that some people are always going to disagree, and I sometimes like to amuse myself by baiting idiots, so I'm always going to get rage-downvoted, I think a roughly 9:1 ratio is probably a bit more like the sort of figure you should be aiming for. Instead, your ratio over the last three days (the first page of your posts) is more like 1:17 (actually worse than that, but I rounded mine to the nearest whole number, so that's only fair, actually if I rounded yours fairly, it'd be 1:18)

So, what can we learn? Firstly, boasting about your posting history isn't the flex you think it is. Secondly, having a roughly equal number of up/down votes isn't some sort of balance; you should aspire to be both right in what you say, and to convince others through the power of reasoned argument. Some people will always disagree, and some will always down-vote you, especially if they simply don't like you. That, however, isn't half of all people. It's probably close to one person in ten, if that.

Show me on the doll where the "Just Stop Oil Riot" touched you.

Agree with their methods, or otherwise (as it happens I think glueing yourself to a road is deeply counterproductive), this false equivalence between (mostly) peaceful protest, and rioting is both false and tiresome. We all know you have a long history of trolling here with right-wing talking points, but you'll really have to try harder than this obvious disinformation.

So, I'll spell this out clearly:

Legitimate protest involves some element of disruption and inconvenience, but is non-violent. If the protesters are smart, they'll disrupt the people who have some possibility of effecting the change they want, and they'll do it in a way which garners public support. Just Stop Oil have pretty much spectacularly failed in this regard, and instead, have inconvenienced the general public instead. As a result, they have only managed to be counter-productive to their cause, which, on the whole, is actually a valid protest. A small number has supposedly crossed a line, and been imprisoned for it. I believe they were imprisoned for having a Zoom call, and not for rioting.

Rioting, on the other hand, is characterised by violent disorder, and is clearly distinct from legitimate protest.

Anyone trying to conflate the two is being deeply disingenuous, and, if not careful, could themselves be crossing the line into incitement, which is a criminal offence, and can carry the same penalties as the rioting it incites.

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon is going to fall foul of this when he returns to the UK and is immediately arrested. He was going to be arrested anyway, by the way, because he fled the country when on bail and missed a court appearance for a contempt of court hearing, and thus has a warrant out for his arrest. I'd be very cautious about parroting some of the things he has been saying, such as the "two-tier policing" lie, especially if there is a prospect that repeating those inciteful lies reaches a wide audience. It’s probably best not to keep virtual company with a man with a string of convictions behind his name, as well, including football violence and mortgage fraud.

Re: followed by counter-protests, some peaceful and some not.

But, but but, there were two teenagers on scooters beign scrotes in Birmingham who happened to be Muslims. It's a civil war I tell you! **wails in gammon**

It was deeply stupid, and an illegal incitement to violence, which is why he has also been arrested. This doesn't fit with the "two-tier policing" bullshit, though.

Before someone jumps onto this "but the left" bandwagon, I'll also express the observation that there are idiots in all sections of society, but it is a false equivalence (and whataboutery) to equate one absolute fuckwit in one section of society with another section of society which is composed entirely of absolute fuckwits. One does not excuse the other, and the correct response is to tackle all fuckwits equally.

The failings of Labour being to immediately expel him from the party? Indeed, the Tories would have kept him in, until it appeared to be politically impossible to not temporarily suspend him, with the deepest regret for doing so.

Re: "Far right"

Here's the thing; when you are an extremist at either end of any spectrum (be it left/right, authoritarian/libertarian, or whatever), everything else looks like far-opposite to you.

This doesn't mean the far right and the far left don't exist, it just makes those terms pretty meaningless when spouted by people in either group.

For everyone else, it is pretty obvious who is who. Here in Bristol, we had "far left" riots a few years back with violent disorder occurring after a peaceful "kill the bill" march. Again, this was a small number of people (a few hundred) throwing things at the police and setting fire to things. When people are rioting, their political motivation is absolutely moot. A rioter is a rioter, and there is no two-tier policing here; the rioters were tracked down, and they all got "the knock". Some of them are still serving their prison sentences several years later. A few nights ago, we had far right rioters, the difference of course, being that there was no peaceful mass protest that preceded it, just a group of a few hundred thugs trying to besiege a hotel and attacking the police. They will be dealt with in exactly the same way. Arrest, trial, and then imprisonment.

As it turns out, there has been a gradual drift further to the right of UK politics over the last few decades. There are two things that feed into this: Firstly, from the conservative party trying to solve their perennial problem of their own far-right faction, which they did firstly by calling the brexit referendum, and then, when that went catastrophically wrong for David Cameron, electing leaders who were progressively more right-wing. Secondly, the Labour Party, after having elected a pretty left-of-centre (but by no means far-left) leader in Jeremy Corbyn, and suffering electoral defeat, themselves tacking back towards the centre ground, and having a pogrom of sorts against far-left members. This, in itself, is not necessarily a bad thing, although many consider that Kier Starmer has moved too far and has crossed the centre ground into being centre-right, rather than centre-left, particularly with some of the rhetoric towards immigration, and the party's current economic policy.

So, where does this leave us? We currently have a centrist government, that those on the far right characterise as far-left, and those on the far-left characterise as right-wing. It seems to be an improvement on the musical-chars government of the Conservative party, who still haven't sorted out their extremism problem, and will quite possibly cease to exist if they try to move any further to the right, where the ground is occupied by Reform PLC. Meanwhile, this has also opened up some ground for a true far-left party to sit to the left of the Labour party. The fact that nobody seems to be itching to occupy this space probably tells you that the thinking on the left is a bit more measured and less reactionary than that on the right (which is borne out if you look at any research comparing average IQs and political leanings), and that nobody sees any benefit of actually attempting communism, because of its obvious flaws. I wish we could say the same about fascism, but it seems that the people willing to become the footsoldiers there are a bit dense, and those that would lead them are not shy of lying and manipulating people to achieve their goals.

Above all, the important thing to remember, is that extremism, of any nature, is generally not a good thing, be it far right, (as in Nazi Germany), far left (as in Communist Russia before Stalinism took hold), authoritarian (as in north Korea, or China), or libertarian (I guess that would be some sort of anarchist state, I'm not sure it has been tried in recent history).

Re: Gullible, misinformed, or just plain thick?

It's a very obvious far-right troll farm. They're everywhere on social media at the moment, but oddly enough, far more vocal about "their" views than the population at large. This is demonstrated amply by the fact that the idiot rioters in the UK were small groups of violent knobheads, and as soon as peaceful* counter-protesters turned up in their thousands, they mysteriously disappeared. Most people, quite rightly, don't want to go round rioting, looting, throwing bits of torn-up gravestone at the police, and committing acts of arson.

Obvious throwaway accounts are obvious, as are the regular right-wing trolls here on El Reg.

*Yes, I know, some counter-protesters are violent knobheads too, but the difference here is one or two in a thousand vs an entire group of rioters. Anyone equivocating peaceful protest with violent disorder is also a knobhead. Before anyone comes along with "but the left blah blah blah", far left rioters go to prison too, like the idiot "kill the bill" rioters in Bristol a few years back. There is no two-tier policing, and the sentencing for violent disorder is the same whatever your political beliefs.

Re: Pedo Guy to the rescue!

I mean, he's welcome to have a return trip. Six years travelling through deep space outside of the Earth's magnetosphere isn't going to do him more good than three, in terms of exposure to hard radiation.

Re: Pedo Guy to the rescue!

Ignorant, or just on the wrong side of history? His actions seem to be made in favour of authoritarian and aggressor states such as Russia and China. Russia, in particular, has strong interests in (and a long history of) attempting to destabilise European nations.

I'm not suggesting that Elon is in the pay of Vladimir Putin, or even that he is in cahoots with dictators, but he certainly seems to share their mindset. Perhaps now is the time to tax billionaires out of existence, as it seems that accumulating that much wealth only encourages them to play god.

Users call on Microsoft to update Outlook's friendly name feature

Re: arbitrary conventions

In the same vein, a British author wouldn't generally be as pedantic as to put [sic] after an obvious Americanism, as if to draw attention to it, and say "my version of English is correct".

As it happens, here in England, is where English is spoken. Having some upstart colonials trying to dictate "correct" usage of our native tongue does jar somewhat. It positively makes one drop one's tiffin, don't you know?

Re: Grammar

I thought the same; Microsoft is a company, but at the same time, Microsoft are the group of people who make up that company.

Re: The Olden Days

Pine Is Not Elm

Re: Headers anyone

You say that, but I'm pretty sure Thunderbird allows me to save a raw email. Googling it suggests that you can even drag an email to the desktop and that will create a raw file for it there, not that the idea of saving things directly to the desktop doesn't make me twitch. Conflating the OS background window with the file system is one of the many things Windows has to answer for.

Re: Headers anyone

^^This, 100 times over. Why doesn't Outlook provide the means to save the source email as a plain text file? After all, that's what an email is. Microsoft only allows you to save an email in a proprietary format (.msg) or as text, but only the body. As a developer, it is sometimes extremely useful to be able to save an email message so you can pull it apart, especially since a message may contain different plain text and HTML portions which will render differently on different email clients. It is actually simpler to open a telnet client, connect to your SMTP server on port 25 and speak SMTP to it...

Keir Starmer says facial recognition tech is the answer to far-right riots

Re: Hmm

They caused death by blocking the roads needed by ambulances.

We've all seen this claim, repeatedly. It's just weird that nobody parroting it has seemingly bothered to fact-check it.

Yes, the "glue yourself to things" brigade need to learn a thing or two about effective methods of protest, and yes, disrupting the lives of people you need on your side is pretty fucking counterproductive, but there's no evidence of anyone dying because an ambulance couldn't bet to them as a result of these protests. Claims of such look an awful lot like targeted misinformation put about by those with vested interests, and swallowed whole and regurgitated by useful idiots.

For instance, doing a simple google search on fact-checking of this claim turns up this: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/just-stop-oil-dartford-ambulance-not-delayed-m20-accident/.

Fact-checking sites are readily available all across the internet, and I'd suggest taking a quorum of them to be absolutely sure of validity. I'd also suggest not trusting claims in the Sun or Daily Mail, the outlets which appear to have originated this particular urban myth. As it happens, the Daily Mail was the very first source to be treated as an untrustworthy source by Wikipedia, due to its repeated dissemination of misinformation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources. The Sun is also on that list of unreliable sources.

No, the problem is a failure of intelligence and organisation on the part of the police.

Is the failure on the part of the police, or is it political? We have had, until very recently, a fairly hard-right government that wasn't shy of using anti-immigrant rhetoric, and demonising any vaguely left-wing protests, whilst almost actively courting the far-right. Equivocation between large peaceful protests, and small, violent ones is part of this. The police can only do as directed by their senior leadership, and when they figuratively say "come down hard on those climate protesters who have glued themselves to a road, but let Billy Thugman over there smash up a Greggs, he's just letting off steam," the hands of the police are tied. Note here that I am not advocating the methods of certain climate protesters, I think glueing yourself to roads is pretty dumb, but it's also peaceful compared to rioting.

There's also the added factor that people who join the police to become officers tend to have a bias towards type-A personalities, especially riot officers, even more so armed officers, and, seemingly, top of the officers of questionable morals heap are the political protection officers. Let's face it, such people aren't going to want to go into a career as a nursery nurse. Either way, officers act as directed by their superiors, and should be applying the law equally. If a bunch of bad and heavily biased laws have been passed, this is a political issue, and the coppers who are sworn to uphold the law of the land have no option but to apply them, or resign as a matter of conscience. Given that the average copper's salary is pretty poor, the odds are that the second option is not a practicable choice.

"Pour encourager les autres" is best left in works of satire; an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.

Re: Completely useless

Funny, there seemed to be no shortage of police when the miners were on strike, or for stopping raves in the 90s, or a hundred other cases.

If you read up on the history of the miners' strikes in particular, there is strong evidence that a lot of those turning up in police uniforms with riot shields and batons may well have not been actual officers, but people who were co-opted to put down the (largely peaceful) protests. Not to mention that a picket line at a coal-pit is pretty much a static target, whereas small groups of violent thugs moving around the country attacking multiple targets, whilst indicating their intentions to attack others, as basic misdirection, are much harder to pin down effectively.

These days, neighbouring forces quite often lend each other their riot officers when trouble is afoot, and they still struggle to quell larger disorders. What happens when there are multiple "flashpoints" at the same time in neighbouring towns and cities?

Re: Completely useless

I think the "masks and balaclavas" part is a bit of a red herring. This isn't necessarily about identifying people whilst they are rioting (it's easy enough to kettle them with riot police and arrest them without knowing their identities when they start throwing bricks at the police and setting fire to things). This is more about preventing known thugs from travelling to their riots, and finding out where they are in the transport system. They're presumably not wearing those face masks when they're getting on a train or queueing for a bus, so if they breach their court orders by travelling to an area where there is a planned "protest" (and I use that term in inverted commas, because violent disorder is neither legitimate nor effective protest), they can be picked up in their ones-and-twos, rather than the police having to fight another running battle with 200 coked-up knobheads.

Personally, I question the usefulness, effectiveness, and proportionality of using live facial recognition on the population as a whole, for a number of reasons, not least of which is, if they know they're going to get photographed going through a station concourse, or at certain city-centre locations, they'll probably just cover their faces at those points.

*I'm more for making these vermin wear tags at all times, and severely restricting their freedom to travel beyond their home, the local Wetherspoons, and the dole office.

*This sentence is hyperbole, I don't actually think this is a sensible solution, but it's not much dumber than LFR.

Online Incitement Offences

I can only assume these will be levelled at fugitive bail-jumper "Tommy Robinson," and far-right agitator Elon Musk who not only let this disgusting specimen back onto Xitter, but himself shared videos of the rioting with incitement to "civil war".

Meta's AI safety system defeated by the space bar

The underlying problem is that "AI" is actually closer to "Artificial Vagueness," in that the whole point of these things is that people don't have to tell them exactly what to do, and the poor (or so complicated it can't be understood, take your pick) definition of them means that any constraints put on them can only also be poorly defined. Strict rules, and "fuzzy" processing are as immiscible as oil and water.

Re: Crookedness considered harmful

Yeah, she'll stop asking...

Yeah, it's almost like the approach of treating the symptom rather than the disease isn't the right approach.

The disease, in this case, being that snake oil salesmen have fooled people into thinking that LLMs are a useful tool for the job they have, when they are effectively both more expensive, and less reliable, than a minimum wage school-leaver employed to google the answer for you.

Re: Crookedness considered harmful

"No, take it off and make love to me right now"

After a couple of times replying with that, she'll stop asking.

Re: Crookedness considered harmful

Al as in Albert Steptoe? Just as likely to give random hallucinated or devious answers.

AI models face collapse if they overdose on their own output

Re: Prediction

Probably because blindly trusting the outputs of statistical models as if they gives some scientific insight, with no defined parameters, experimentation, controls, or even working hypothesis, is not science, it's magical thinking.

Re: Prediction

In the case of LLMs, that would be something along the lines of: categorise the input data on the basis of plausibly human-like responses to a given query, which reflect the semantic associations in the input data which are pertinent to that query. That's clearly highly non-trivial, and I actually find LLMs rather remarkable in their capacity to get anywhere near achieving that.

It would be remarkable, indeed, if LLMs did manage that. I don't think they're even capable of several of those things; defining a "plausibly human-like response", defining "semantic associations", or even "pertinence". My understanding of what they do, is that they give a response that has been statistically generated from their input data set; a bit like "guess the most likely next word in this sentence". Those statistical models may or may not involve stochastic categorisation, but any "categories" would either need to be human-defined, or would be statistical artefacts, with no inherent meaning. We've all seen how "AI" can be encouraged to "hallucinate" wildly given the right prompts, producing the sort of word salad that would earn a human author a psych evaluation.