Posts by Elongated Muskrat

Musk said Twitter would open source its algorithm – then fired the people who could

Re: Snake Oil Salesman who forgot to move on...

Coming up next, Twitter renamed to Ogdenville.

Re: Snake Oil Salesman who forgot to move on...

Not on your life, my Hindu friend

Re: >Open sourcing the code is hard

Watch, as I magically make all the proprietary code that my code relies on open source as well!

If ol' Musky didn't think spaffing all those billions on buying Twitter was money badly spent, just wait until he has to acquire all those other companies to stop them suing him out of existence!

Boffins find 'missing link' between interstellar ice and what comes out of the tap

Re: Water, water everywhere....

FYI, various atmospheric escape mechanisms are to be found on the relevant wikipedia article. Since it's not a political article, and doesn't relate to a famous person, it might contain actual facts.

Re: Water, water everywhere....

There's also a calculation you can do to compare the escape velocity of a planet to the mean velocity of a gas molecule in any atmosphere at a given temperature, which in turn is related to the mass of that molecule.

Thermal energy in a gas can be related to the temperature (E = ³/₂kT, where K is Boltzmann's constant), which in turn can be related to the average velocity of a molecule of known mass (E = ¹/₂ mv²), this gives us v² = 3 ^kT/_m, which can be related to the escape velocity (v² = 2^GM/_r where G is the gravitational constant, M is the planet's mass, and r is the radius), which gives you a temperature at which each different gaseous component of an atmosphere will escape into space (T = ^2G/_3k^Mm/_r). As you can see, this depends only on the mass of the planet, the mass of the gas molecule, and the planet's radius. In practice, because the molecules of a gas have a mixture of speeds, they will escape at a lower temperature than this.

Lighter molecules will escape first (which is why the Earth's atmosphere contains virtually no helium, with a molecular mass of 4, despite it being the second most abundant element in the cosmos). Most of our atmosphere is nitrogen (N₂, molecular mass 28) which is heavy enough not to escape into space. Water vapour has a molecular mass of 18, so smaller planets, such as Mars, will gradually lose that as well, despite being colder than Earth. Heavier things such as carbon dioxide (molecular mass 48) are still present on Mars and form most of its thin atmosphere (it does have one).

AmigaOS 3.2.2 released for those feeling nostalgic

A friend of mine had one, as did one of his neighbours. They had a null modem cable which you could attach between the two, and play two-player lemmings, each with their own screen. This was the technology of the future delivered today (to an early '90s audience).

I was immensely jealous.

Elon Musk yearns for AI devs to build 'anti-woke' rival ChatGPT bot

Re: Meaning of "woke"

You also have to bear in mind that "left" and "right" tend to have very different meanings in different places.

In the US, for example, "left" is used to refer to people who would be considered centre-right in many European countries. For some reason, Americans seem to be shit-scared of anything left-of-centre, and equate it with full-on Marxist-Leninist collectivism (which very few people on the political left actually identify with). For example, in the US, the idea of the NHS would be dismissed as "communism" by so many political commenters that it would never get off the ground. In reality, it is pretty much the definition of a sensible left-wing institution. Everyone gets healthcare, and those who contribute the most towards taxation pay the most towards it.

In the UK, we have the same issue, but slightly less extreme. It's part of the gradual drift towards the right of politics in both countries, but, as I've said elsewhere, left and right are pretty meaningless terms, partly because they are so abused, and partly because they mean something different to everyone who bandies them about.

The real problem is that drift to the right, where it has now become acceptable to put forward political policies that would not have been out of place in 1930s Germany, especially ones relating to immigration. This is doubly ironic in the UK and US, which are both countries composed entirely of immigrant populations (if you discount the native peoples of North America who have largely been displaced). And yes, there is no such thing as a native British person, we are a mixture of various European populations who have migrated here since the last ice age, most much more recently than that. I can trace my lineage in this country back to the 14th century, and yet my genetic make-up has markers from all across Europe. The US is an even more diverse population, so the whole "racial purity" and "nativism" thing really boggles my mind.

Totally agree with you about the "woke" thing though - it has lost all meaning and just become something people shout when they have nothing sensible to say.

Re: Meaning of "woke"

Well, it was a trivial definition.

"Left" and "right" are actually pretty meaningless labels anyway, especially in political terms. Far left (e.g. actual Marxism, and not Leninism or Maoism) and far right (e.g. actual fascism) are extreme political viewpoints that are only really occupied by people completely detached from reality. Everywhere in-between there are plenty of other political dimensions upon which a person's views can be measured (such as authoritarianism, religiosity, populism, etc.), many of which are more helpful.

It's just a useful indicator when someone starts throwing about insults such as "lefty libtard," or "woke", that the person throwing the insult both doesn't know what they are talking about, and has no actual sensible argument so has resorted to use of a shibboleth to rally the equally weak-of-mind around.

Re: not insane, but depraved

Touché.

The problem is, that once people believe things that are not true, they tend to become irrational and unpredictable, as they, by definition, will not share the same world-view as yourself. There is one version of reality, and a potentially infinite number of variations of things that are not real. One is relatively easy to predict, for known inputs, and the other... not.

Case in point: populism very rarely works out in favour of the ones promoting it, in the long run.

Re: Meaning of "woke"

I'd advise against getting any definitions from UD, unless you want a usage of a word that is confined to a very specific group of teenage boys in a single locality. Many of the "definitions" there seem to be very weak in-jokes from very small social groups, presumably because they are the only ones who think it is "cool" to post something there. Bear in mind, as well, that the entire site is intended as a joke, so even if you do pick up a definition that doesn't sound like it was written by a drunk 15 year-old, it's likely to be parody.

I'm not saying people who "get offended by everything" don't exist, but they also seem to be fairly well distributed between the right and the left, and are, thankfully, a vanishingly small, if highly vocal and irritating, minority.

The real issue here, is that there are those on the right, who proudly proclaim themselves to be "anti-woke" and set themselves up against this straw-man, and use it to characterise everyone they don't like, even though they exhibit none of those characteristics. The "woke" straw-man may exist as a tiny number of actual dickheads, but is being used to characterise a whole slew of normal, sane and rational people, and to denigrate and discard perfectly legitimate views and concerns.

In other words, provoking culture-war.

This is what is so abhorrent about those who throw the word around like there is an army of "wokeness" coming to get them. It is the "othering" that the far right uses to divide and conquer.

Re: Meaning of "woke"

Socialism is pretty easy to trivially define as "not selfishness". The idea of occasionally thinking of other people before yourself is total anathema to some, however.

Re: Meaning of "woke"

...at this point, one has to wonder what they think the downvote button does, other than signify their acceptance of having been trolled.

Re: Meaning of "woke"

Ah, presumably this is the definition of woke (adj), and not woke (v). I literally can't be bothered to hop over to the OED's site to check though, I'm that lazy...

Yeah, it's like calling your boiler "brittle" if you disconnect the gas supply.

If you change the specification of an API, things that consume it are going to break. This is why there is an established pattern of having a version in the API path, e.g. /api/v1/widgets and /api/v2/widgets so you can introduce updated APIs that have breaking changes, give your consumers the chance to switch over, then deprecate the old ones.

It's not rocket science (not that Musk actually does any of that himself anyway).

Re: The REAL meaning of the word "woke".

Its main use is so you can make others aware how aware you are.

I don't think I have ever met anyone who has, or would, use it, unironically, to describe themselves thusly. Your own experience may vary, and you might have come across people who are that far up their own arses.

Far more common is its usage by the terminally ill-informed as a label to describe anything that they don't like, often in conjunction with tell-tale phrases like "lefty snowflake", "libtard", "I read in the Daily Mail..." and "Hitler was right".

This is especially true with anyone who decides to use the relatively recent "anti-woke". You can be assured that they are a grade-A cunt who would probably be off at an underground dog-fight if they could be bothered to get off their lazy ignorant arses and find one in the car-park of their nearest flat-roofed pub.

Re: I'm still waiting....

Don't fool yourself, nasty bastards throughout history have always found ways to "other" the "out group" and to demonise people for sympathising with them.

Meanwhile, all humans are, and remain, people.

Re: Meaning of "woke"

...and they keep on biting...

Re: Meaning of "woke"

Oooh, looks like I triggered a down vote from a snowflake!

See! Culture war is easy!

Re: What happens when we disagree with OpenAI?

You'd have us think you own a dictionary? Are you sure it isn't one of those ones missing some words? I heard they had a whole load that didn't have the word "gullible" in them, perhaps you'd better go and check.

Clearly. Fucking. Not.

Why the hell would you want to encourage people to believe known falsehoods? That's just insane.

Well, yes indeed, very far-left ideologies are indistinguishable from far-right ones, as any fringe ideology tends to systematically ignore facts in favour of "us vs them".

If you expose a human, or group of humans to wave upon wave of far-right propaganda, you unsurprisingly get radicalised humans, for example the Waffen SS. There's no reason to suppose that an "AI" that doesn't even display any real intelligence, but just assimilates its input, would somehow surpass humans at this task, and bear in mind there is no such thing as an AGI (artificial general intelligence, or "real" AI), and, most likely, never will be, either.

edit - one of the things that drives the existence of human ethics, and a "moral compass" is the ability for humans to empathise, that is, putting yourself in the position of others and thinking about how it would make you feel and act, it’s why normal people wince when they see another person injured. People lacking this ability tend to be labelled as "psychopaths", and incidentally, pretty much every serial killer exhibits / exhibited this trait. Good luck getting a chatbot to do that. If we ever do crack the AGI problem, we're likely to have a bunch of artificial psychopaths on our hands, and telling them to transcend moral boundaries is a sure-fire recipe for disaster.

Re: Meaning of "woke"

Or you are from 2002, and the term "right-on" is just starting to go out of fashion, and the spittle-flecked and red-of-face have not decided to use this particular euphemism for "not being a cunt" as some perverse insult yet.

Re: Meaning of "woke"

Out of curiosity, what is the first definition? Is it just "past participle of the verb to wake"?

Re: What happens when we disagree with OpenAI?

If you can't see how one of those would be inflammatory, and used to actively promote a false narrative, and the other would not, you need to go away and think about it.

For reference, as far as I know, Hillary Clinton never did as much as question the results of the 2016 election, however, The Orange One is still actively claiming that something that categorically did not happen, did.

The important phrase there is, "promotes a false and inaccurate narrative about the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election", and the applicable word is promotes i.e. they're not going to add fuel to that existing fire.

Re: I'm still waiting....

I think it was "political correctness gone mad"

Didn't we already have that some years ago?

I seem to recall a chatbot that someone (Microsoft?) released that almost immediately started spewing right-wing hate speech, along the lines of "Hitler did nothing wrong", due to the user content it fed upon, and it was turned off forthwith.

Artificial stupidity is so much easier than artificial intelligence.

Don't worry, that system's not actually active – oh, wait …

Re: Why would one ...

I think that's another US/UK difference. I can't think of many kitchens I've been in that have more than one oven (unless you count a microwave, "air fryer" or slow-cooker).

Typically, a UK kitchen will have a single oven, and a hob (electric hot-plate, gas burner, or electric induction). The oven will usually have a built-in grill in the top.

Many years ago, when I was a young-un, we did have an old fashioned all-in-one cooker unit, which had a gas oven, gas rings on top, and a gas grill above that, like one of these bad-boys

Re: Why would one ...

We'd call that an espresso maker, or moka pot. A cafetière (also known as a French press in the US) is always the thing with the plunger.

It depends on the type of coffee you are trying to make. I typically use a cafetière, with normal ground coffee, but sometimes an espresso maker (with Italian coffee), ground much finer, and sometimes a μπρίκι for making Greek coffee. The former is best for making a big mug of coffee quickly to wake me up in the morning, and the latter two are good for making a much stronger "pick-me-up". Not that I don't make the cafetière coffee strong too. I fail to see the point in weak coffee.

Re: Why would one ...

Fair enough. For reference, we drink coffee too, and there are as many ways of making it as there are people to argue about them. I've never seen an electric coffee pot, though, unless this refers to a filter coffee machine (water drips through the coffee and filter paper into a, usually, borosilicate glass, jug, with a small heating element underneath to keep it warm).

In the UK, a grill refers to what you would call a "broiler". The verb "to broil" pretty much doesn't exist in British English. If "grilling" from underneath, we wouldn't use the verb "to grill", and wouldn;t call the appliance a grill. Depending on the heat source, it would be a hot-plate, or barbecue (if used outside). If used inside, which you'd only ever see, rarely, in a restaurant, we might call it a gas grill, or charcoal grill, but never just a grill. Usually, though, if it's a surface used directly for cooking, without the use of a pan, it's a hot-plate here, and (I think), a grill there. You'll pretty much never see one in a domestic setting.

Also, with toaster ovens, you'll be very unlikely to see them here, certainly not in a domestic setting, but possibly in a shop selling heated food to keep pies or similar warm, so the bacteria can grow nicely.

Once again, we are two cultures divided by a common language...

Re: Why would one ...

To be fair, the colour of the bottom of the pan doesn't bother me, as long as it's clean. It had some pretty birefringence-type patterns from the oxide layer, the thickness of which must have been a few thousands of atoms to produce that. Sadly it gradually faded over time to be replaced with the normal metallic colour.

Re: Why would one ...

You don't get to see the sky oop North, just the low-lying layer of unrelenting misery, unlike us soft Southern pansies, or summat...

Re: Why would one ...

Already been said, but it bears saying again; that one reference from Homer, οἶνοψ πόντος, is generally translated as "wine dark sea", but the literal translation is closer to "wine-faced sea."

Just because some scholars came along later and thought this meant the ancient Greeks thought wine and the sea are the same colour doesn't mean that is correct.

Personally, I think it's more likely to be talking about the turbidity of the sea, compared to wine, rather than the colour. This does imply that the wine Homer was drinking was shitty and hadn't been racked properly, which, to be fair, in my experience, is true today for a lot of home-made wine, or was very dark, and fermented with the skins left in.

Re: pizza is the perfect food

And to be honest, if asbestos were baked into food, it would be pretty much harmless.

Asbestos fibres are harmful if inhaled, because they lodge in the lungs and cause scarring (asbestosis). It is used as a mineral fire retardant because it is chemically inert in a fire, and doesn't conduct heat well. This would also mean it is pretty much chemically inert in the gut; apparently you might get some magnesium ions diffusing out of it under strongly acidic conditions (in the stomach), but magnesium is a trace nutrient anyway, so arguably it is good for you in that regard.

It probably wouldn't do you any good, or harm, to eat it, and would likely pass right through you without becoming lodged in your gut in any meaningful way (and gut epithelial cells are frequently shed anyway, unlike the lining of your lungs). Asbestos in food would present a very low inhalation risk, unless the food it is baked into is also light and powdery in nature. If your cookies are powdery, you've forgotten some important ingredients, like everything that isn't flour. Incidentally, inhaling flour is bad for you too.

So, in conclusion, if you get some asbestos baked into your food, it will likely do you no more harm than any other dirt that gets into your food. People just go crazy because of asbestosis, which is a lung disease from inhaling (not eating) it. For reference, inhaling pretty much anything you'd normally eat, rather than eating it, is not good for you. See also: choking, drowning.

Re: Why would one ...

My grandmother did that once, with the egg in the pan. Apparently, the egg melted a dent into the bottom of the Pyrex pan. This is impressive, since the softening point of borosilicate glass is apparently 825°C. That is one seriously hard-boiled egg.

Re: Why would one ...

I once put a pan of water on to boil some eggs, forgot about it, went out for a walk and then had the "oh fuck" moment about 20 minutes walk away from the house. Fortunately, when I had got back, the pan, which had boiled dry and was nicely discolouring (stainless steel over a copper base), had not melted or set anything on fire. It was a good year or two before the base of the pan (which thankfully had not warped or delaminated) returned to a normal colour again.

We can all be idiots sometimes...

Re: Why would one ...

You can post 100% fact-based posts here, such as claiming that water is wet, or the sky is blue, and still get the occasional down-votes. I guess it's nice that we allow people of all levels of mental ability on the internet.

Re: Why would one ...

I think this is probably a "lost in translation" incident, with people thinking that English (UK) and English (US) are the same language.

A toaster (UK English) is a device where you put bread in a slot in the top and depress a handle.

A toaster-oven (predominantly US English) is small oven with a heating element above the food (what we would call a grill in the UK, but in the US, a grill is more like an indoor barbecue, let's not go there).

Putting a pizza in the latter would be a reasonably sensible way of heating it, although you would expect to get a burnt top and soggy base. Putting a pizza in a toaster is not 100% daft, if you were to use a "toaster bag", although it's likely to be messy unless it's one of those horrid frozen cardboard things you're cooking, but putting the toaster on its side is just next-level creative stupidity.

Putting a "toaster-oven" on its side is something that would require a special brand of idiocy.

I suspect actual toasters are a rarity in the US for the same reason that electric kettles are; drawing sufficient current for the heating elements at 110V is going to require extra-thick power cables, or result in a lot of resistive power loss, and a fire hazard.

Find pushes back birth of Europe's steel hardware to about 3,000 years ago

Re: People move around shocker !

The article does mention that the researchers had a reason for thinking it was locally produced, but didn't say what that was. It could be the particular location was remote and thus not on trade routes, or the quantity of steel required for the number of stone carvings would have made it unlikely that valuable trade goods would be used for chipping rocks?

In any case, it is all fascinating stuff.

Re: The practicalities and science of steelmaking ( was - People move around shocker ! )

It's my understanding (and I'm more than willing to defer to someone with greater knowledge) that steel isn't just an alloy of iron and carbon, but that its manufacture also involves removing the impurities found in pig iron, especially sulphur, which makes steel brittle, and pretty much useless. It might be that high-purity iron ores combined with a decent sulphur-free carbon source would achieve this, but ancient peoples wouldn't be expected to know what is in their iron ore (just that it's this specific orange rock), and both coal and charcoal can contain high levels of sulphur depending on their source.

Please do correct me if I've got this wrong, I'm going from memory of what I was taught many years ago in undergraduate chemistry classes...

Re: Known just not shouted about

Be careful not to get iron smelting (heating iron ore and carbon together to get molten iron and carbon dioxide), which can be done at relatively modest temperatures (it was demonstrated to us at school using a charcoal block, iron oxide and a Bunsen burner), with steel production. There are a couple of important differences between iron and steel; firstly the carbon content (much higher in steel), and secondly the level of impurities such as sulphur, phosphorus and silicon, which are much, much lower in steel.

That's not to say that they couldn't have been making steel in Neath, but not in an iron smelter.

Re: People move around shocker !

It's a bit more complex than iron ore + carbon + heat (that's how you smelt iron). To produce steel, you need higher temperatures, and limestone which reacts with the impurities such as sulphur in the ore and fuel. The "infrastructure" to produce steel is a "hearth/forge with bellows" and a means to prepare and supply the "ingredients" of steel. You could probably manage this with neolithic materials, but you'd essentially be building a blast furnace, and there's pretty strong evidence to suggest that was invented around two thousand years later.

That doesn't mean individuals couldn't have invented their own version of this, but, again, it doesn't look like that technology became well known or widespread until the invention of the blast furnace, do it's more of a "didn't" rather than a "couldn't". Or even "did, but didn't spread" as this article suggests.

Re: People move around shocker !

As for metals, we kept on burning, and keeping fire in the same place surrounded by stone of different types for thousands of years and eventually among those ashes people somewhere found interesting stuff, metals like copper.

What you are describing is smelting, first used to make copper and bronze, then iron. IIRC, steel production requires much higher temperatures than you find in a typical wood fire, hence the invention of the blast furnace. If I remember rightly, these could be made to work with charcoal, but the ones we have nowadays run on coked coal.

As the other poster above pointed out, there could have been some steel production without blast furnaces, but again, IIRC, this relies on the exact right conditions in the really hot bit of a fire and produces relatively small amounts of steel. Enough to maybe put an edge on a cutting blade, but hardly a means of production in quantity.

Service desk tech saved consultancy Capita from VPN meltdown, got a smack for it

Re: U

In that part of the world, they won't be throwing tea into watercourses, they'll be too busy being startled by their reflection and thinking it's witchcraft.

(Lincolnshire, not Massachusetts)

Re: Lesson Learned?

In a past life, I've been unfortunate to have worked with stuff where Crapita is involved. If anything, this makes it all the more likely that fixing the symptom is only going to exacerbate the underlying problem.

It's the difference between working out why your code in a financial system is out by a penny and fixing the root cause, and just adding a penny to the result. It might fix the output, but is both wrong and potentially dangerous.

Re: Not being paid to think

I guess there might be room for learning beyond what the lecturers were teaching, but I'd take that as a sign that the lecturers weren't doing their job fully.

For me, we had part of our grade based on lab assessments, and part on exams. The exams would contain questions like, "show how the electrons move during a Diels-Alder addition," "what is the missing step in this well-known reaction, " or "which symmetry group is this organometallic compound in." All the sort of thing which have one definite correct answer (possibly with the exception of the Diels-Alder one, but I'm pretty sure either mechanism would be marked right, because things like temperature and pressure might influence the exact mechanism that takes place).

Of course, university learning isn't lectures alone, there were plenty of tutorials, workshops, and practical labs, but, again, this sort of thing is going to depend heavily on what subject you are reading, and which university you do it at.

Re: Not being paid to think

It probably depends on the subject. The exam questions on the undergraduate degree I did (a physical sciences one) were based 100% on what we had been taught in lectures and workshops. I would imagine most scientific disciplines (such as medicine) would be the same - they are a test of whether you have learned the information you have been taught, not extrapolated from it.

Re: Lesson Learned?

Or number 3: The problem is not as simple as it appears to you, and whilst you are busy fixing the bit of the problem you can see, the rest of the iceberg is going unfixed, with the potential result that your "fix" actually makes things worse.

The alarm bell that should have been ringing in everyone's head with this anecdote is why "copying some files" fixed the problem? Was the problem actually missing files, or was it something else that was looking for those files when it should not have been doing so? Did dumping those files into a folder on the user's PC actually mask an underlying problem, possibly of a more serious nature (such as a security flaw)?

It sounds like it could well be a "fix the symptom and not the problem" solution, where the problem has not been properly understood, which is the very worst kind of fix.

It's official: BlackLotus malware can bypass Secure Boot on Windows machines

Re: ROMulans

If someone can pop out the BIOS-on-ROM chip and replace it with another one, you have exactly the same security problem, just one that requires physical access. The idea of things like secure boot and bitlocker on a laptop is that if the device is stolen, nobody can break into it and get the contents, which are possibly more valuable. If you provide a way to subvert this (or I should say, another way) then this isn't helping matters.

It used to be that you could only update the BIOS via a flashing utility, built into the BIOS boot options. At least that was reasonably secure in that you had to be able to get into the BIOS settings to do it. Now, you can update the UEFI settings from an app in Windows, which anyone can run on an unlocked PC if it's logged in as a user with the required admin permission.

Re: Network Service == Single Point Of Failure

I have a Win 11 install on my home PC (I still use the Win 10 one though). IIRC, whilst it tried to poke them fairly thoroughly into your face, there is no need to sign up for any Microsoft account to install and run it, it just "warns" you that some "features" are unavailable if you do so. Good, they are almost certainly "features" I don't want, such as "personalised advertising," also known as tracking.

Of course, I'm not naïve enough to think there won't be any tracking without those turned on, but also I don't need or want unnecessary crud on my computer which is mostly used for gaming, web browsing and email, and the odd bit of development when I feel like I've not been punished enough for doing that for a living.