Posts by Elongated Muskrat

Devs learn rival Godot engine in a week to poke fun at Unity

Re: CEO needs to go...

Populus 2 was a great game. I'm trying to think of anything good they did since then.

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

Will there be a Pi 500?

Not that I'd have any immediate use for one, but the Pi 400 I have is sat at the back of my desk merrily running Pi-Hole and acting as a file server, and an occasional workstation for doing some tinkering with the Pico.

Doom developer John Carmack thinks artificial general intelligence is doable by 2030

Re: Skynet is coming

This is the exact problem with "machine learning" - how it "learns" from a set of training data is completely opaque (when a child is learning something, you can test them and ask questions like "why do you think that"). We make assumptions that because it produces "correct" results, then it has found the pattern in the data that we would find to draw the same conclusions, but it might just as well have been counting the number of magenta pixels in an image, and that happens to correlate. When you switch from training data to another "real world" data set, the ML model then completely fails to correlate any more.

I am reminded of the object lesson here, where a ML model was trained on chest X-Rays, and medical outcomes, to determine which patients would benefit from having a chest drain fitted. The model did exceptionally well, and was then given some real patient data to play with. Why did it do so badly? Because the training data included patients where a chest drain had already been fitted (because of medical ethics), and the ML model was just correlating the presence of this on the X-Ray with the medical outcomes, and concluding that the patients that had been assessed by a consultant as being in need of having a chest drain fitted benefited from this. Hardly the kind of predictive AI medicine the modellers were hoping for...

The problem isn't making fusion self-sustaining and net positive (Edward Teller worked out how to do that), it's doing so in a controlled manner and extracting useful work from it.

"I see AGI Coming"

Says man who didn't see Half Life coming

Twitter, aka X, tops charts for misinformation, EU official says

Re: Twitter / X is a sewer

I read that twice and still have no idea what you're gibbering about.

Re: re: Though for no obvious reason.

Don't worry, so has Intractable Potsherd.

By something completely unrelated to this news story, no less.

Re: Disinformation --- or Truth

Today's "disinformation" may be tomorrow's truth

Sergei, is that you?

Re: X, the perfect tool for the job

The way he's going, he's going to have half a billion fewer of them, when the EU decides that X/Twitter/whatever is not allowed to operate in their jurisdiction because it doesn't follow the regulations about preventing disinformation and hostile Russian propaganda.

Re: And Yet

I've never noticed any of these. It might be because I avoid the gutter press, as well as avoiding Twotter

Re: Well, as long as the IPCC and their syncophants have accounts

Is it anything like a synchrophant, which is a device that accelerates a beam of elephants in a circle?

Switch to hit the fan as BT begins prep ahead of analog phone sunset

What you're describing is the lack of grid storage technologies. These can be as old-school as pumped water storage hydroelectricity (which the UK already has, where it is suitable to build it) to more modern solutions such as flow battery technologies which are actively being developed. Investment in that sort of thing arguably counts as grid investment, and we could have been doing it. Indeed we'll need to be doing more of it when the increasing demand from electric vehicles cuts in more. Personally, I think that's a better investment than continuing to breathe in particulate pollution from diesel fumes.

Re: Are these powered from the DC supply at the switch in the same way as POTS?

That's not so useful if the power outage takes out the local cell towers as well. Which it will do, unless they are somehow on their own, completely separate grid, which I somehow doubt.

Europe wants easy default browser selection screens. Mozilla is already sounding the alarm on dirty tricks

Re: Heavy lifting

The fact that we're still talking about the need for browser choice screens in 2023 demonstrates that they have managed to drag it out this long, and that "dragging out" started in the '90s.

"China do it and it works" also applies to genocide. Simplistic arguments, especially superficially appealing ones, are usually false...

The underlying problem isn't necessarily the people in charge of businesses, who are pretty much legally bound to do whatever they can to make the most money for their shareholders, it is the lack of regulation that says, "within that context, you're not allowed to do X, Y, or Z".

This is exactly the problem. The "normal user" will choose whichever is easiest, which, with market manipulation and abuse, is likely to be the one that's scooping up the most of your data for $GLOBAL_MEGACORP to do whatever they like with.

No, no, no! Disco joke hit bum note in the rehab center

Re: poor taste

The Pixies - Wave of Mutilation

'Small monthly payment' only thing that stands between X and bot chaos, says Musk

People who would pay to hear their favourite "politician" hold court are not swing voters, and money spent trying to get them to change their voting patterns would very much be money down the drain.

"Undecideds", however, aren't going to pay money on the off chance that some pearls of wisdom that are held behind that paywall will give them the answer they are seeking about which voting choice to make. Undecided voters, on the whole, are undecided because they are disengaged with politics, not because they are just seeking that one last piece of information.

Re: > A friend was a local councillor

Nope, this is why accounts claiming to be associated with a person (as opposed to anonymous or pseudonymous accounts) should require identity verification.

I shouldn't be able to open a social media using my neighbour's identity, or indeed one using someone else's IP (such as claiming to be Spiderman), but there should be no barrier to having an account with just a user name that doesn't associate with a person or entity that belongs to someone else.

The onus should be on the social media companies to ensure that accounts are not used to impersonate.

Re: Digital Town Square

More like a digital Wetherspoons

Re: It just leaves you shaking your head?

He has mistaken a combination of privilege, luck, and ruthlessness for natural talent. When he runs out of road, and ends up at the proverbial coyote hanging in mid-air over a ravine, the look on his face will be priceless. At the moment, it's only his deluded followers franticly running behind him trying to chuck bits of metaphorical road in front of him to run along that is stopping gravity taking over.

It's not a catastrophic doom, it's a slow slide into oblivion, and it has been headed down the pan from the second ol' "Genius boy" bought it.

At this point, it's just a matter of seeing how far the "sunk cost fallacy" can go. Can he actually lose more money than he paid for it, from the reputational damage done to his other businesses?

Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure

Re: The day when one can't drive one's BMW because the seats are permanently heated

Don't blame the people who write the stuff, blame the people who write the requirements for it.

Or, more accurately, the people who wave their hands, go, "I want it to do X" but don't bother to stay around to write down that they actually mean by 'X'.

Developers aren't magicians, and just because the customers (rightly) don't understand how the software works, it doesn't mean that they can apply magical thinking to get software that does what they meant rather than what they said.

Now, if you actually have one of those mythical beasts called "project managers" on your project, and it turns out that the software doesn't do what the customer wanted, but the developers followed the user stories to a tee, guess whose fault it is? On the other hand, if you don't have a project manager, and the developers are having to analyse the requirements and write their own user stories, don't complain about them having to mark their own homework...

Scientists spot startlingly close black holes in Hyades star cluster

Yeah, it's definitely not a hypothesis from me, more an out-loud pondering.

I think the way to work it out would probably be to look at planetary nebulae formed from the parent star going supernova, observe the size of the "bubble", extrapolate backwards to work out a rough timescale for when the star went pop, and see if it correlates with a known mass extinction event. I think I'm probably not the first to think of this, and, to be honest, if there were any large planetary nebulae near to us, I think we'd already have worked it out. Previous mass extinction events are likely down to more mundane things like Big Rocks Falling From the Sky™, large-scale volcanic events (such as the Deccan Traps), planet-scale glaciation events (Snowball Earth), and, further back, planet-wide atmospheric oxygenation.

Re: "we'd probably already be dead"

That's kind of my point, those aren't going to have accretion disks (at least, not large scale ones), unless they come pretty damn close to something to eat (i.e. another star). In the game of cosmic billiards, getting close enough to another star in your path like that is one helluva trick shot.

OTOH, things with big old active accretion disks that throw out relativistic jets from their poles are, as you say, the supermassive ones, or at the very least, ones in a very busy neighbourhood (such as a galactic centre), where there are lots of other stars swirling around at sub light-year distances. If there was something like that going on within a few hundred ly of Sol, to be honest, the black hole wouldn't be the biggest problem.

I think the other class of stellar object that might be of interest in this sort of discussion would be close-orbiting binary system where one partner is a black hole that is slowly eating the other companion. If, instead, you have a stellar remnant such as a white dwarf with matter falling into it, that is basically what causes a type 1a supernova. Again, not something you want to be near, unless you like being periodically irradiated. You don't really want to be very close to something that periodically is 5 billion times brighter than the sun.

Thankfully, all those sorts of "interesting" stellar objects are safely some distance from us, although it will be a good light show when Betelgeuse blows up in a standard supernova.

Re: "we'd probably already be dead"

Isn't it the case that accretion from the disc is what drives the relativistic jets, or have I misunderstood it? Isn't it a case that matter falling into the black hole from the accretion disc is accelerated due to conservation of angular momentum, and the radiation from its "spaghettification" is channelled by the vast rotating magnetic field of the black hole into the polar jets.

As I understand it, the orientation of that magnetic field is not aligned with the galactic plane, so anything producing relativistic jets "nearby" to us in a cosmic sense, had better not be oriented such that those jets are oriented near to the path of our solar system (which "wobbles" up and down through the galactic plane on a long timescale).

It is also my understanding that such "active" black holes tend to be large mass ones, and that there aren't any nearby to us; the nearest I know of is Sag A*, and that's way up there on the mass index. You certainly wound't be happy to be within several hundred ly of that.

I'm not sure why my post above garnered so may downvotes. Again, it's my understanding that you don't want to be in the path of a relativistic jet from a black hole, and that they tend to be tightly focussed enough that one crossing your path would really ruin your day even from 100ly away (well, ruin your day 100 years + a tiny bit into the future). Perhaps I worded it badly, or have my facts wildly wrong - an explanatory comment would be nice though (well, from those who aren't just habitual downvoters; you know who you are).

Re: "we'd probably already be dead"

If it was one with an active accretion disk, we'd be done for from a lot further away than a couple of ly - IIRC, we'd be talking hundreds, if not thousands, of light years, and still hoping that it's pointing roughly perpendicular to the plane of the galaxy, so that we don't get blasted by the jets precessing.

Re: Mass (not size) matters

Presumably, these are not "small" black holes, though, or the observations of their effect on the movement of stars in the Hyades wouldn't have been made. The "smallest" black hole yet observed apparently has a mass of 3.8 solar masses.

I believe that something that size would basically have to pass right by, or through, the Oort cloud to have any noticeable effect on the solar system, and that effect would probably be to throw some comets at Jupiter, which pretty much acts a rubbish sweeper for the solar system due to its mass and orbit.

Given that black holes typically form when a massive star dies, and that process involves a supernova, and these things are, relatively speaking, on our cosmic doorstep, I'm left wondering if their formation coincides with previous mass extinction events?

These days you can teach old tech a bunch of new tricks

Windows ME

Or to give it its full proper name, Windows Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

Dutch consumer groups sue Google over its entire business model

Re: Attack the advertisers to get results

This doesn't work in all cases:

- Ads that come from the same domain as the content, so can't be blocked by pi-hole

- TV and Radio ads (if you watch/listen to these, or are exposed to anyone who does)

- Magazine ads (if you read magazines)

- Billboard ads (if you ever go outside in a built-up area)

- Any other form of insidious ad that ad-spaffers might find a way of pushing into your eyes/ears.

80% of execs regret calling employees back to the office

Re: We have expensive real estate.

You're confusing the "leadership" (usually the C-levels, or one bloke lording it over everyone) with "management". In many organisations, decision-making is so remote from the people implementing it, that the middle managers have no input whatsoever. this is coupled with decision-making that is completely removed from any feedback or measurement that half the decisions are invariably counterproductive.

UK government awards chunk of mega-billions tech framework

UK government has named the winning suppliers on the first tranche of a tech deal which could be worth a total of £4.2 billion ($5.24 billion) £5.6Bn $11.2Bn [[Project Cancelled]] for application software services supporting the nation's tax collector.

There, FTFY

Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows

Re: WIA

My money is on them both having the same hardware ID - probably something like 00000000-0000-000-000-000000000000, and the poor USB controller getting confused.

Since a few years back, HP took over doing the drivers for Samsung laser printers, so you're probably in the perverse position of the same HP driver being usable for both of your printers.

I used to have a Samsung colour laser (a CLP-365W) - well, I say "used to have", I still have it, but after the best part of ten years' use, it needs stripping down and rebuilding so that it starts recognising that it has toner cartridges installed again. Samsung tried to pull the same shit that HP do with putting chips in the cartridges to prove they are "genuine" (yes, I know not all toner is equal, but it's my choice, not theirs which I choose to use), and putting artificial lifespans on things like the imaging drum (which have to be circumvented by wire-wrapping a resistor of a specific resistance around pins in the cover, power cycling, and removing it, to fool it into thinking a new one has been installed).

Putting HP in charge of their drivers and trying to fill my PC with bloatware was the final straw, and it got replaced with a nice shiny Brother HL-L3230CDW last year. The "starter" cartridges it came with have just started running out now, so I'll reserve judgement on how much of a pain in the arse getting replacements is; the third-party cheap ones I bought seem to work with a bit of jiggling and swearing, but the one thing I'll say is that the printer's build quality is MUCH higher than that of the Sammy one, and it has a proper paper tray, not the horrible bit of plastic the Samsung has.

Back on topic, the Brother printer works with the built-in Android driver, and although Android tries to suggest installing Brother's own print service, perversely, this doesn't seem to find the printer at all.

Re: by 2027 – except for security-related fixes – no printer driver updates will be allowed

Can't you just send PostScript directly to those?

Elon Musk has beef with Bill Gates because he shorted Tesla stock, says biographer

Re: Tesla, the company doing the most to solve climate change

The problem here, is that whilst you posted that sarcastically, nobody could tell whether it was sarcasm, or one of the ubiquitous "Acolytes of Musk" who genuinely believe such things.

Re: Tesla, the company doing the most to solve climate change

Not only do they maximise the efficient use of stored energy, they are known to occasionally maximise its efficient release as well, through the emission of heat, light, and smoke.

Re: Musk is such a crybaby

It's because people who are total bullshitters themselves see someone who is a total bullshitter who has done well, and elude themselves into thinking that they can be just as "successful".

Musk has succeeded due to a combination of starting off with money, being in the right place at the right time, being ruthless, and being a good liar. None of these are really things anyone can, or should aspire to. I mean, I'd love to start off with money, or completely luck out, but "aspiring to" it ain't going to make it happen.

Get ready to say hello to new Windows and goodbye to an old friend

Re: They work?

They usually:

• Take ages to do nothing
• Fail to diagnose the problem
• Redirect you to a Microsoft "Knowledgebase" article which is either a web page with a header, footer, and one sentence in the middle that says something along the lines of "An error occurred", or a similar page telling you that the "article" is no longer available, or a redirect to try to sell you Office 365

Bombshell biography: Fearing nuclear war, Musk blocked Starlink to stymie Ukraine attack on Russia

Re: "If Ukraine wants to fight a war with Russia"

Especially since Zelenskiy himself is a "Russian-speaking national." I'm pretty sure he doesn't identify as Russian, in the same way that French-speaking Canadians don't typically identify as French, and English-speaking ones don't identify as USans.

Re: "If Ukraine wants to fight a war with Russia"

I missed the bit where the US claimed that Iraq and Afghanistan were historically part of the US, and therefore they were fine to annex them.

Geopolitical reasons for the invasions aside (along with arguments about their legitimacy), you are making an obviously false comparison.

Not everyone who lives in the West agrees with those actions, by the way, but in the same breath, I'm pretty sure none of us would like to live under the regimes of Saddam Hussein, or the Taliban. It's also worth noting that those particular governments were in position prior to those wards due to the previous "foreign policy" of the US. We don't have to agree with those actions, either. How far back do you want to go? Because all of human history is pretty much one of one group of people displacing another in a violent manner, and these days we have internation agreements in order to try to stop that sort of thing.

Re: "If Ukraine wants to fight a war with Russia"

It's worth adding that Putin only really started to get uppity when the actual democratic system in Ukraine meant that his puppet candidate didn't get elected as president, and some upstart who wanted to root out corruption get elected instead. Compare with Belarus, where Lukashenko has Putin's hand so far up his arse, you can see his fingertips when he speaks.

As for Nazis, well, yes, apparently there is a problem with the far right and antisemitism in a lot of Eastern European countries. That doesn't mean that they are running the government, especially not when the guy actually in charge is Jewish. It did look like these problems were being tackled, but it seems Putin (and his far right cronies) didn't like this, as it basically meant neutralising Russian state antagonists in the East of the country. The invasion was largely an attempt to "blitzkrieg" Kyiv, and topple, or drive out the legitimate government, so a puppet government could be installed in its place. This failed spectacularly, leading to images of traffic jams of tanks being picked off as they sat outside the city, and quickly turned into a land grab of what Putin could take, and a refusal to admit he'd made a massive tactical blunder, followed by a situation where he is throwing more and more of his citizens into a meat grinder just to maintain the "gains" he has made. Russia probably has the resources to maintain this situation for a long time, but they clearly don't have the resources to advance, and it will be becoming harder and harder to replace well trained and experienced soldiers by widening the conscription net.

Russia is going to, at some point, have to confront a demographic emergency, once all the young men in the country have been killed in a fruitless and utterly pointless war started as a vanity project by a dictator who probably wanted to have one last "glorious victory" before the cancer gets him. (He also was probably hoping to take Kyiv because it is the "birthplace" of Russian Orthodox Christianity, and he wants to have himself buried there as a "saint")

Re: So Musk has blood on his hands

Thankfully, satellite internet is pretty useless without ground stations. You can send radio waves around above the planet all you like, if someone wants to google something using it, it still needs to have a route to google's servers.

Ground stations can be commandeered. I don't know where Musk has these, and I suspect there may be multiple ones in multiple jurisdictions, but I'm willing to bet that the majority, if not all, of them are in Western countries, or countries "friendly" to the west, because as far as I know, Starlink is a US based company.

edit - Looks like the majority are in the US and Europe, with some in Aus, various South American countries, SE Asia and a couple in Nigeria. Certainly the infrastructure in the US could be seized by US companies, and the others commandeered by friendly governments, or, presumably, cut off centrally

Re: The report is not completely accurate

The subtlety here is that GPS "jammers" which broadcast noise on the same frequency to swamp the true signal, would be ineffective, in reality, they would use spoofers (tell the drone it's 500m away from where it really is, for example, plenty of room to miss). A false signal is pretty hard to tell apart from a true one in these circumstances.

Starlink isn't a positioning system, so swamping the signal is the only real option; spoofing wouldn't work because the content is encrypted anyway, unlike a GPS signal*. If you broadcast noise on the same frequency that starlink is using, you are literally target-painting yourself. Now, you could broadcast that from another nearby source, or multiple sources, but those are going to be sacrificial, because they're asking to get a bomb drone dropped on them. They're also a pretty good hint that there is something worth blowing up nearby.

*Technically the high-accuracy one is encrypted, I believe, but the keys are known, or something like that.

Re: Musk for President !

Ouch! My balls!

Re: The report is not completely accurate

It's easy to hit a bridge using GPS coordinates. Not so easy to hit a well defended bridge with GPS blockers or spoofers on it. Given that the bridge in question is a Russian propaganda symbol, I reckon it's not so simple as flying an off-the-shelf DJI drone into it without expecting some sort of countermeasures.

UK admits 'spy clause' can't be used for scanning encrypted chat – it's not 'feasible'

You can have a virus scanner on your phone to protect you from "bad guys".

You can have a "CSE" scanner on your phone to "protect" you from yourself. If this wasn't government-owned, we'd call it "spyware" and that virus scanner would remove it.

Your averagely intelligent paedophile with any tech savvy will find ways to neuter such software or not have it installed in the first place. As would anyone else with any tech savvy.

It would also breach articles 8, 9, and 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Of course, the same people pushing for this nonsense are the same people pushing for our human rights to be removed, so we can be more like Russia and Belarus.

I think he either doesn't understand what leftism (i.e. socialism) is, what fascism (which is inherently far-right) is, or both. One of the first things H_____r did when he rose to power was to round up the socialists, alongside all the communists, trade-unionists, rival nationalist groups, and anyone vaguely non-aryan. This wasn't done in order to give them all an ice cream and a job.

Re: Logical fallacy of cracking encryption

Except that this "day in court" will be in a star chamber type court for "terrorists" due to "national security".