Posts by Elongated Muskrat

AI and brain-computer interface allow speechless ALS patient to work a full-time job

See also: the UK, where disabled people are expected to barely exist, and if they have the temerity to try to work to improve their lot, they get 80% of their support withdrawn, ending up both unable to work, and destitute.

Re: Intelligence agencies

But how do the mind control satellites stay aloft if the Earth is flat?

We're withdrawing your PIP, as our records show you are capable of working, despite being paralysed from the neck down, and needing machinery to remain alive.

Feds freaked over Fable 5 after simple 'fix this code' prompt, not jailbreak, says researcher

Re: Alchemy.

The only sort of prosecution that works on oligarchs is the sort that comes with a comfy neck-brace and rapidly descending blade.

I don't think I'm quite ready for the social upheaval that arrives alongside such things, but the oligarchs should make themselves aware of the existence of inflection points, because these also apply to societies as a whole, when people start becoming too rich, whether individuals desire them or not.

I was too young when I read Asimov's Foundation books to fully grasp what "psychohistory" was about, but the statistical observation of societies as a whole does tend to lead us to some foregone conclusions.

Re: It's not grudges or incompetence - it's marketing

The gold leaf is starting to flake, and the base metal underneath is definitely starting to show, the next realisation will be that it is both flimsy and hollow, and holds no real substance whatsoever.

Just as with anything else that has been wildly hyped beyond any capabilities, it will collapse. It will make Meta's billions of dollars wasted on "the metaverse" look like pocket change, and it will be interesting to see which charlatans it brings down with it. What is worrying is that some of the companies peddling AI hype are also companies that do other things which are nominally useful, and the question is whether we will lose those useful things as collateral damage when their AI investments fail catastrophically. I'm glad I upgraded my GPU when I had the opportunity, because there's a very real possibility that it will bring the likes of NVidia down, and I hope, for the sake of my employer, that github doesn't collapse into the ground. Perhaps I should be recommending to them to have some backups for all of our repositories?

Re: Stunt

Anyhow, feeding it ridiculous amounts of examples (check, they train on insanely large datasets) and trying to improve training algorythms [sic] to extract more information per chunck [sic] of data fed (check, they do that too) is going to create additional information beyond the correlation between mere facts.

Information theory states the exact opposite; you cannot create additional "information" in a data set by extrapolation, all you can do is add distortion.

Those generated papers showing structure and logic show structure and logic because there is common structure and logic in the training data; that information (in the formal sense of the word) already exists in its inputs. The fact that, by statistical chance, the output appears to be novel, does not make it so, and the very real, and obvious risk here is that it outputs something that looks superficially reasonable, but is 100% false. This may appear identical to the real output of a human author writing a paper, and without detailed fact-checking and analysis it may be indistinguishable, but it will not be based on actual facts and reasoning, it will merely hold the appearance of something this is. If, by chance, its output is actually factually true, it isn't because it has formulated a new logical argument, it is entirely through random chance, or worse still, it is just regurgitating its training data verbatim. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. What this sort of thing really does, is waste people's time, because now nothing can be taken on trust any more (whether it should have been is another matter), and peer review now means checking that sources exist, and that arguments based on them are logically sound as well as checking the methodology and results of the paper in question. All we have done here is automate academic fraud, which I think most people would agree is not a step forward in the goal of advancing human knowledge.

Re: Stunt

For example, by evaluating and scoring countless numbers of answers of the LLM against a template, output of these LLMs is neatly broken up in a similar 'logic style' as if humans would do it.

Evaluating and scoring the output from LLMs sounds like a tedious, time-consuming, and expensive bit of work, that still has to be done by a skilled human. You can't give the job of training "AI" to an "AI", because "garbage-in, garbage-out". Something without understanding cannot instil understanding in another thing without understanding, the understanding cannot be created from nothing.

In contrast, performing the same sort of coddling of another human, who is actually capable of learning, and extrapolating based on reasoning, will result in a trained human, as opposed to a marginally less inaccurate LLM.

Correcting the output of "AI" doesn't teach it anything, instil it with skills, or gift it understanding, it just places new constraints on the random garbage generator, so that one particular inaccuracy is dealt with. It cannot grasp general cases in the way a human infant can, as, once again, it has no reasoning ability.

The problem here, is that "training" an AI doesn't scale in the way that learning in conscious animals does, and each instance requires input from a human, without any self-learning taking place. You can even train a cat with more ease.

Re: Stunt

...I'll add to this, to say that the Hard Problem of Consciousness exists, which is that we don't know what consciousness is, or how to define it, how it works, or why. Philosophically, it may actually be impossible to define consciousness at all. If we can't define it, we can't specify what a machine needs to do to meet the criteria, and we can only specify tests for "appears to be conscious", for example the Turing Test, which doesn't test for intelligence at all, but merely for the ability to trick a human, and, let's face it, if you take a second to look at the state of the world, you'll see that really isn't that hard.

"AI" models, however, run on computer systems that are finite state systems. It's all ones and zeros, and strictly defined behaviour. Mathematically speaking, the software on such a system cannot do anything that the system itself cannot do, no matter how complicated it is, and we can 100% define the extent of its capabilities. Since we can absolutely define what a computer can do, and we cannot define consciousness, there is, logically, no overlap, and computers cannot achieve consciousness. They can never have intelligence.

LLMs are hugely complicated bits of software, and designed and written in such a way that it is practically impossible to trace what they are doing in the general case (it may be theoretically possible, but the exponential complexity manes it cannot be done). Not knowing how it works is not the same thing as consciousness though, and the essence of any argument that it has real intelligence is, "I don't understand it so it must be magic."

We have a $2.5 trillion industry built entirely on magical thinking, and if you want to see what happens when an entire society puts all its effort into a belief system that has no basis in reality, take a look at Easter Island.

Re: Stunt

You got downvoted a lot for this, but in essence you are correct. "AI" is actually quite good for analysing code; it won't find anything novel, and it might hallucinate some vulnerabilities that aren't there, and it shouldn't be used as a replacement for a human properly analysing the code, but it can find, with reasonable reliability, examples of known vulnerabilities, that a thinking human can then take a look at and analyse properly. It can also throw up false positives, and "write" inefficient and inelegant "fixes". So; it's fine for analytical work within known limitations that requires no novelty, but don't use it for anything beyond that, unless you are very well aware that it is going to come and bite you in the arse in short order.

Re: Stunt

But despite what they say, it has no actual intelligence, reasoning or logic.

I'm getting tired of saying this, and watching people still treat what is effectively a fancy statistical model as if it has reasoning. If you "ask" it to perform specific steps, it doesn't go through the routine of performing those steps following any sort of formal logic, it looks up what the most likely response to being asked to perform those steps is, based on its training data. Sometimes these things coincide, and if they do this often enough, people start to believe it is actually thinking, but it isn't, and it can't, and fooling yourself into thinking it can and does is nothing more than delusion.

There's no such thing as an agentic CPU

Re: Er, missing the point ?

...but can your Turing complete ticker-tape universal machine play Crysis on full?

Palantir's NHS data deal called in for a second opinion

See that shimmering cloud over there rapidly disappearing over the horizon; that's your exfiltrated medical data; nice knowin' ya.

Re: Condemned by their own arguments

We can also ask whether they know the difference between causation and correlation? The changes in those figures could very well be entirely down to hospitals not having a sudden influx of life-threatening respiratory virus cases to deal with. The idea that clinical staff would otherwise be idle is questionable at best, as you'd know if you'd ever set foot inside a hospital, and I can't see how a "data platform" would increase physical capacity in any way. They could only be claiming some sort of efficiency gain, which there could be, although headline figures like this don't prove it at all.

I can't help but think greater gains could be made elsewhere by simply modernising the systems in use by various NHS trusts. For example, my partner recently had a letter for a routine MRI appointment. This letter had a pre-assessment form to fill in and post back to the hospital (printed on the reverse of the appointment letter, requiring her to make a copy of the details before sending it back, but that's another issue). There was no way for her to giver them the information through a web form of some sort, even though this would no doubt be the most effective and efficient way for the clinical staff to see the information immediately, and would also have saved her the now extortionate price of a stamp (thanks to the privatisation of Royal Mail). I'm sure the local trust, and many other NHS trusts are replete with many such examples of poor information governance, and it's pretty clear that this is down to the lack of anybody going round and seeing what processes are in place and analysing them to see where the savings can be made: slow, costly, inefficient paper-based systems that rely on the rapidly lessening reliability of a third-party postal operator.

Re: Not Enough

It's worth remembering that NHS England is not the same organisation as the NHS. NHSE is a QUANGO set up by the former Conservative government; its creation and mandate were entirely down to government ministers, and there's some very familiar "the market is king" names involved who haven't been shy about their desire to privatise and thus asset-strip the NHS. (The asset-stripping is the quiet part, but this is always the goal of privatisation; deliver less for more money and sell off the profitable bits).

I'd go so far as to say that the failure is that of NHSE, but of those who created this body, and that failure is only a matter of perspective; it's a failure from the perspective of openness, transparency, democracy, and public service, it's a massive success from the perspective of private interests, and, no doubt, the political goals and the bank balances of those involved.

In terms of failing to properly oversee the provision of contracts and services, I'm sure that failure was entirely designed-in, and, behind closed doors, encouraged.

Trump phone has HTC guts. Tremendous guts. The best guts

Re: seconds or thirds?

HTC have quality control now?

It probably isn't seconds, it's probably either stock that was produced, but demand for HTC phones never met the supply, so it was dumped, or the production line was still set up (or has been set up cheaply in mainland China) and someone has bought the rights to manufacture the boards from HTC.

I was in an "international supermarket" near me the other day. They had bags of rice from Iran; I'm willing to bet they were easier to import (and more in demand) than rice from the US, although I do note that some of the expensive "Japanese" sushi rice that is available round here is actually grown in the US.

HTC phones

HTC used to make relatively decent phones (around the time of the first Android phones), and they used to be my go-to brand, but their quality declined sharply. The last ones I had would probably have been almost ten years ago, and they had serious problems with both battery life, and in once case, a corrupted OS that failed updates, even those pushed to it via ADB. Their customer service consisted of "post it to China for repairs". I'm hardly surprised that the Grifter in Chief has gone for what is probably the cheapest and nastiest hardware on the market and coated it in some gold-coloured material that 100% isn't going to actually contain any gold.

GitHub nukes 70+ Microsoft repos, breaks CI/CD pipelines, following suspected worm infections

Re: Ugh

Agreed, there hasn't been a redesign this bad since Windows 8.

Palantir wins £9M contract to run UK firearms licensing: CIA-backed biz to hold gun, bomb, and poison records

Re: If Only...

It just helps the police to improve their clean-up rate, *after* the crime has already been committed. And sadly, in the case of a firearms offense[sic], that could mean after someone has been murdered or injured.

...and only then, in the cases where the firearm used was a registered one which hadn't been stolen. Somehow I doubt that organised crime gangs are diligently getting their firearms licences and registering their "straps" before spraying bullets towards rival gang members and catching unsuspecting members of the public in the crossfire.

Re: Hypocrisy on Steriods

Not to take Palantir's side here for one second, but I assume those costs are not just to design the database to hold this information, which I'm sure most people on here could do a decent job of in only a couple of days, but also the hosting of this in data centres (plural, because there are almost certainly DR requirements), and the access control and management tasks that go with that.

So, the question is; is this £9M p/a, or £9M for the initial software, and then the police have to provide or pay for their own hosting?

Re: Hypocrisy on Steriods

I'd happily take the job on for £8.5M, although I suspect a fair whack of that would go on infrastructure costs and not into my pocket, since national databases need at least two data centres for even basic redundancy.

Re: Hypocrisy on Steriods

Like, how many times involved with police for any reason, mental health reports, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_regulation_in_the_United_Kingdom#Licensing

If only the po-po had something else that did this already, like, oh I don't know, the PNC.

It's amazing that some people will choose to blather on as if they know what they're talking about, whilst clearly having no clue whatsoever.

Angry devs vow to flee GitHub Copilot as metered billing takes hold

Re: Who could have predicted this would be a bait and switch?

Well, you're hardly going to get gender asymmetry on sites where the users are matching with people of the same gender, although I would imagine there are other forms of stereotypical asymmetry at play here (top/bottom, butch/femme, etc.), it's just that they're not going to be so immediately and obviously derived from the generalised gender imbalance that comes from "the patriarchy".

Sure the code may not be great, but it works

This. This here is the problem.

AI generates naïve implementations, or inefficient code, or code that works in the specific case but not the general one.

To write functional, maintainable code, you have to understand the requirements the code is implementing. That means not just the golden-path "it works" case, but handling error conditions, exploits, and bad actors, as well as considering performance, where it is appropriate to do so (and yes, not considering it when it isn't, Donald Knuth).

A fancy pattern-matching algorithm doesn't do any of that, it generates code based on a set of training data, that passes its immediate requirements, without employing any thought whatsoever, and until AI actually has genuine intelligence (which is arguably impossible in a finite state machine), it won't be able to do anything other than appear to be doing this on a superficial level.

Re: Who could have predicted this would be a bait and switch?

Sadly that asymmetry comes from the asymmetry that exists outside the world of online dating apps, which has been summed up before as men fear that the woman will reject them, while women fear that the man will kill them. To a lesser degree, men are far more likely to be perpetrators in abusive or manipulative relationships than women (although some women are by no means incapable of these things, and abuse can exist in all sorts of relationships, not just heterosexual romantic ones).

Dating apps do nothing to help address the underlying problems here, all they do is automate the process for profit.

Re: The well-known name ranking

My personal favourite is the current heavily advertised product that is a double-sized washing "tablet" (I use quotes, because these things seem to have evolved into some sort of jelly-filled pouch) marketed as being able to deal with "tougher" washes. It seems that the people who buy this sort of thing are so thick that they couldn't otherwise count to two, and, you know, just use two normal ones.

Re: The first one is free...

There's another option that isn't "use your own local model". It's to learn and develop the skills required for proper software development yourself, so you can design, code, and maintain your own software yourself, without having to pay obeisance at the temple of "AI".

Re: The first one is free...

I could probably be persuaded to pay a subscription so I didn't have to use Excel, if they could guarantee it.

Re: When someone has a youtube channel with over a million subscribers

AC is for when you have something business sensitive to post, have a valid reason for hiding your handle or are replying to another AC

And these are rules that are written down, yes? That can be verified to be accurate and complete? Or, perhaps, are just your personal set of rules for posting AC.

I can think of any number of reasons why someone might post AC other than the ones you have listed, for example, if someone wants to hide that they are posting on a forum when they should be working, but otherwise usually post with a recognisable handle - just to pull a completely random example from the ether.

I don't see why you'd need to be posting as AC to respond to another AC, either. What is the logic in this? If I have something to add to what another poster has said, whether they posted as AC is usually completely irrelevant to what I have to say.

As a rule, I post as AC where my post might identify me, my employer, or someone else whose privacy should be protected. Sometimes I might post as AC for other reasons, such as where the person I am replying to has known beef with me (hello various RW nut-job trolls), and I would like my post to be read by others without being immediately swarmed with downvotes, etc. I can anticipate that other people might have their own reasons for posting anonymously, to which I am not privy. This isn't to say that posting anonymously shouldn't arouse a certain amount of suspicion where motives are concerned.

In any case, it's pretty bold for anyone to dictate to others what the ability to post anonymously is or is not for. That is what Sir Humphrey Appleby might describe as a "courageous decision".

Remote work – not AI – is killing job prospects for the youth

I'd suggest that maybe the reason that the quality of work from new entrants to the world of work is falling, isn't because they are working remotely and therefore not getting as much training or mentoring, but because they are being encouraged to use AI slop-generators for everything and don't yet have the knowledge and experience to realise that it is outputting garbage.

I say this, because I suspect the amount of genuine mentoring and training they would have got in an office setting is also zero, going from decades of experience of working in an office environment.

What they're not getting when working from home, is their line manager standing behind them watching everything they do, and offering advice about how to do it better, even though, as a manager, they don't actually know how to do the job, a smattering of workplace bullying from other colleagues that they can't avoid, and, if they are young and female, unwanted sexual attention.

'Resistance is futile,' says Qualcomm CEO. AI agents will be become invisible, inescapable, follow you across devices

“If you have smart glasses, they see what you see, so the connectivity needs to enable a very fast uplink,” he said.

“6G is going to make all of us into walking cameras in this world.”

Yeah, no. Why would I inflict that shite on myself, and make myself a walking target for both ridicule, and muggers?

4 in 10 AI agents headed for demotion or the rubbish bin

Re: Ishkabibble?

I think there's an additional subtlety with "AI" and user permissions.

In an ideal world, users are only given the permissions they need to do stuff, for as long as they need them, and to the scope they need to do their job. There's a fair amount of admin overhead involved in this, so in the real world, people often end up with slightly higher permission levels than they actually need, but are trusted not to abuse them.

Ai agents, on the other hand, are black boxes, and because they can't actually think, they can't really make a case for what permissions they need, what for, and why. Because what they are actually doing behind the scenes is completely opaque, so often can't be reviewed in any meaningful manner, people shrug, and give them higher permissions than they really need. They already do this for human users, albeit for different reasons, so *shrug*, what's the harm?

The answer to this, of course, is that most human users know when they are doing something wrong, which they are liable to get into trouble for, even if they technically have permissions to do so; for instance, moving a load of files about on a file-share, so nobody knows where they are any more, or deleting things others need. "AI", however, is remarkably stupid, and will probably go ahead and hallucinate the need to do these things at some point, royally screwing up your business continuity in the process. Like an ideal gas, stupidity expands to fill the available scope.

The root cause of this, is of course, making the category error of confusing the marketing term, "AI" with artificial intelligence, because when it comes to intelligence, "AI" has none; it is merely software that performs the actions that are statistically the most likely to match the patterns in their training data. Whilst these might look like they have reasoning behind them when they match what you actually wanted (because that is statistically likely), there is no reasoning, only fancy averages.

Microsoft wants safer C# without turning it into Rust

I can confidently say that if you don't need or use unsafe, then there's absolutely no need to know how to use it, either. If you do need to use it, this change might make it marginally easier to establish the scope of and assess the risks of using it.

Re: Unsafe code allows the use of pointer types, which are not tracked by the .NET garbage collector

Okay, maybe device drivers were a poor example, but any high-level language needs to, at some point, be able to do low-level stuff. The advantages of working with a language that abstracts away memory management are clear - yes, there might be a whole load of buggy .NET code out there, but those bugs aren't going to be down to yet another buffer overflow. The idea that anyone who is marking a block of code as unsafe knows what they are doing is a bit of an assumption, but to be fair, it's a reasonable one.

In many years of development in C# (amongst other languages), I've never had to use the unsafe keyword, but I can think of cases where I might; device drivers may be a bad example, but some things, such as some Windows APIs, require a pointer as an argument, and that pointer is expected to point to a block of memory that has been properly allocated. There are almost certainly .NET-friendly versions of these APIs, but how do you think those are going to work? How about accessing third-party APIs where all you have is a DLL from a supplier and API documentation? If those require you to give them a pointer, and you want to use them from some C# code, guess what? It's pointer arithmetic time.

Most device drivers for common hardware, such as graphics cards, or storage devices are, of course, going to be written in C, and provide the right APIs to integrate with the operating system, but what about industrial control systems, or scientific monitoring systems? What about that ancient bit of hardware that runs the lab systems, but which is no longer actively supported by its manufacturer, but which does still have an API written in C? Yes, you could write your control software in C++, or Delphi, or COBOL, but there's a reason modern languages exist, and sometimes they need to be able to do ugly things.

Re: Plea to Microsoft

For the purposes of this analogy, this is the sort of truck driven by smart-arses with three separate gear boxes linked in the most complicated way imaginable.

Do I have to start writing detailed specifications for analogies now?

For clarity: not knowing how to do something complicated doesn't preclude anyone from doing something simple.

Re: Am I missing something here?

I guess you could check one pointer against another to see if they both reference the same address?

Re: Unsafe code allows the use of pointer types, which are not tracked by the .NET garbage collector

Yeah, sure, someone writing stuff in C# is totally not going to just use a C# library that implements the low-level stuff, using unsafe.

/s

Re: Unsafe code allows the use of pointer types, which are not tracked by the .NET garbage collector

As stated in the article, those have been in there from day one. How do you think low-level stuff, like device drivers work?

Re: Plea to Microsoft

If you're using unsafe, you're already fiddling with stuff that's "too complex"; if the newer language features confuse you too much (and AFAIK, most are geared towards making stuff simpler to do, without taking away the older ways of doing them), then you almost certainly have no business larking about with pointer arithmetic.

It would be like learning to drive in an automatic but complaining that you don't understand the gearbox in a truck.

London cops post £300M tech shopping list after Palantir contract blocked

Re: Maybe AI does have one good use case

It's worse than that, their dirty secrets won't be exposed, they'll be used by those tech companies to blackmail them. It's a reasonable hypothesis that this is already happening.

Re: Whoops

Up-vote for listing High-Rise first, and not going straight for the Orwell reference. I also would have accepted Fahrenheit 451.

Re: "the MoD, the NHS, and other police forces"

The NHS and MoD contracts are most likely hangovers from the Boris Johnson administration; no Mandelson involved in these cases, but the links with Epstein and his "friends" are probably still there under the surface.

There was a wholesale selling-out of the UK's government services to private US-based interests during the pandemic years, whilst most people were being distracted by three-word slogans printed in bold type on the front of lecterns, or being encouraged to spread the infection by cramming into restaurants for two-for-one deals. Some of us have learned to watch what the other hand is doing, especially where politics is involved, and to ask cui bono?

GitHub Actions outage told devs 'your account is suspended'

Re: [CxOs] have one tool in their toolkit… instigating a "restructuring"

We have a clue, and we also know not to get trapped in the orbit of massively dense objects.

Re: Unfortunately for us, GitHub is mandated by corporate policy

The people who mandated GitHub have probably already done their damage and moved on, through the revolving-door network of Chief-Whatever-Officers. Trying to influence that juggernaut is, in any case, a Sisyphean task. "Corporate types", in any case, only have one tool in their toolkit when it comes to costs they don't like, and it involves making the situation worse for everyone by instigating a "restructuring".

Unfortunately for us, GitHub is mandated by corporate policy

This outage hit yesterday when I was right in the middle of setting up and testing some CI pipelines, and this was more than a little bit annoying.

Today, when trying to merge a PR in another repository, I started getting an error saying the branch couldn't be rebased, followed by a more generic failure and "try again" error. The first one was not only misleading, but actively counterproductive, as I went off to try to find out why it thought a single commit to a recently created branch wouldn't do a rebase merge to the base branch, even though that hadn't moved on (in this house, we keep our git history linear); but, oh no, it's just Microsoft screwing up what was previously a stable service, yet again.

Have Microsoft never heard of QA testing, or checking that stuff still works in a UAT environment before integrating whatever badly thought-out AI hallucination they have come up with today? People's businesses, jobs, and livelihoods depend on basic things like their git repositories behaving as expected.

America's top cyber-defense agency left a GitHub repo open with passwords, keys, tokens – and incredibly obvious filenames

Re: Yahoo?

To be fair, I still have a yahoo email address, and it works just fine; it's probably one of the few free email providers of the time that is still going.

Given that they have stood the test of time, are you suggesting I switch to another provider? Yes I have a Google email address, but the interface to Google mail is god-awful, and they rate-limit POP3 and IMAP access.

As with all things, you get what you pay for, and for zero pounds and zero pence, their offering is both long-lived and pretty reliable. I think maybe snootiness is playing a part here, I wonder how many email providers of today will still be about in 20 years' time?

Space factories edge closer after experimental capsule survives hypersonic landing

Speaking from experience, this sort of error is more likely to have originated in the editing process, where someone has reworded a sentence to improve the flow, but got distracted by a squirrel half way through.

Re: How hot is it when it lands?

The thermal mass of the capsule, coupled with the heat-resistant ceramic tiles *should* mean that the vast majority of the heat from atmospheric re-entry stays outside the capsule, and its temperature doesn't get raised by very much at all. By the time something like this lands, it will have slowed to subsonic speeds and deployed 'chutes (you can see them in the picture), so when it lands, its surface will be at ambient temperature; the inside will likely be below that, because it has been in space, which is cold, but it all depends largely on what temperature it started at, because if you didn't want the contents to be frozen solid, it would probably have some heating inside.

The misunderstanding here is understandable, because common parlance doesn't really distinguish between heat and temperature; heat is the thermal energy used to raise the temperature of a material, and this depends on the heat capacity of that material (for example, it requires 4.2 KJ of heat energy to raise the temperature of a kilo of water by one kelvin). When something re-enters the atmosphere, the air in front of it gets compressed and heated, but since gases are diffuse, their heat capacity is relatively low (a cubic metre of air at sea level has a heat capacity of about 1.2 KJ per kelvin, and the air density at reentry altitude is much lower). There is a lot of heat produced by re-entry, and the air in front of the capsule gets very hot as a result; however, the job of the tiles on the leading face of the capsule is to not conduct this heat energy (they are typically very low-density, and have very low thermal conductivity). As a result, the front of the capsule will get very hot indeed, but that heat will mostly go into the surface of a material with low heat capacity, and since heat travels from hot to cold at a rate proportional to the temperature difference, and the air at altitude is very cold (-60°C or thereabouts), once the capsule has slowed, that heat energy gets transferred to the atmosphere quite rapidly.

Windows boot partition runs out of space for Microsoft's May security update

Re: It makes me realise...

I don't know, was Winamp available in Apple's walled garden?

ISTR it not being a major job to rip a CD to mp3 under Windows at the time (I'm thinking around the early 2000s), or to copy the files onto the phones of the time (via USB, or bluetooth), which would happily play them, through a standard phono socket into a pair of earphones. Organising a library of music was (and still is) as simple as putting files in a folder on your PC, which doesn't lock you into using any particular piece of software.

Microsoft may have had their own proprietary software for this (Windows Media Player springs to mind), and Sony may too, but use of these wasn't necessary; however, if you're an Apple user, with an Apple phone, you only had one choice.

Mozilla warns UK: Breaking VPNs will not magically fix Britain's age-check mess

Re: Impossible?

Student visas are time-limited; it's hardly a "visa mill" if you have to leave after three years, and have conditions imposed on your visa, such as not being allowed to seek work whilst here, so I agree with you here.

However (and this is for anyone reading this, rather than as a response to your post), the majority of undocumented immigration, isn't, as the hysterical right-wing doom-screamers would have you believe, arrivals via small boat; that's actually a vanishingly small portion of immigration, legal or otherwise, and once someone is granted asylum, it is legal. In fact, visa overstays, form study, work, or visitor visas are estimated to far outweigh these, and since most of these people disappear into the population without entering the asylum system, there is no focus on removing them to their country of origin. Conveniently for them, the government doesn't collect figures on these, although they easily could, because all legal entries and exits to the UK could easily be recorded.

You can see the *actual* immigration figures (from 2024) here, which are far more enlightening than listening to some disingenuous frog-faced demagogue blithering on:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/immigration-system-statistics-year-ending-december-2024/summary-of-latest-statistics

Note that even the asylum claims are mostly not from small boat crossings, and the returns number almost as much as the arrivals; it is in fact through what the government calls "safe and legal routes", which are, in fact, very limited; for most asylum seekers, there is no "safe and legal route" despite the UK's obligations to provide asylum to legitimate asylum seekers, which, let's not forget, stem from treaties made after the second world war, which were in large part written by Britain, because of the horrors of the holocaust. People don't risk their lives in dangerous sea-crossings in small boats if they have a safe and legal alternative.