Posts by Elongated Muskrat

Those who 'circle back' and 'synergize' also tend to be crap at their jobs

Re: Mental health benefits of retirement

The odds are that many medical terms are actually pretty much the same in both languages, because they're actually Greek. Common and simple words like "heart" will differ, but anything your average butcher couldn't name or describe, after cutting it out of a pig, will almost certainly be a Greek word transliterated into the Roman alphabet; for example, you could make a fair guess at translating the German word "kardialer" into "cardiac", or "endometriose" into "endometriosis".

Yes, but how deep in piss?

Everything needed to make DNA and RNA found in asteroid sample

Re: So...

It's pretty much a guarantee that almost every atom inside your body that isn't hydrogen originated in an exploding star, simply because we don't tend to contain any helium, and the abundance of all the other elements after lithium, immediately after the big bang, was essentially zero. The odds are that some of the lithium atoms inside you (which only account for 24 atoms out of every billion) may have originated in the big bang, but most will also have come from stellar nucleosynthesis.

Given that hydrogen apparently accounts for about 9.5% of body mass, and your lithium content is negligible, you are therefore approximately 90.5% star-dust by mass. A bit more if, like me, you keep forgetting to drink your two litres of water a day, since most of that is accounted for by your body's water content.

Re: So life is older than Earth

No only could have, but likely would have, and although cryometeors tend to smash into lots of pieces on impact, they also tend to still be frozen when they do so, thawing later.

The odds are that a fair amount of the chemical prerequisites for life could have been delivered this way, in a frozen, abiotic state, and once thawed could have started reacting in ways that would lead to the evolution of life. The implication is that life could just as well have arisen elsewhere in the universe by the same sort of process. This isn't to say we should be looking for little green men and bug-eyed monsters all over the place, or that the bloke with the weird hair is right about alien visitations throughout history, but more that there's a fair chance that if we looked under the ice on Europa, we might expect to find some sort of organic goop there, living off the energy gradients between its volcanic core and thick layer of ice above.

Re: So life is older than Earth

Interestingly, though, evidence for the existence of life on Earth goes back about as far as we can measure, in some of the oldest bits of crust that are still about (subduction means most of the Earth's surface is much younger), so there's a strong argument that life formed very early on, in any tiny niche it could find. Whilst panspermia is still a bit of a stretch, it's also worth remembering that most meteorites, when they land, are still very cold, and that atmospheric entry, whilst it causes extreme temperatures, really only does so on the surface of meteoritic material. Anything inside a meteorite, if it survives the shock of impact, certainly doesn't tend to get cooked in the process. Whilst it's not very likely that anything could have survived on the Earth's surface during the Hadean, it's not impossible that life here could have arisen around the time of, or even a little before the late heavy bombardment, or even arisen elsewhere in the solar system, where conditions at the time were more conducive (perhaps Mars) and arrived during it. We make assumptions that the entire surface of the Earth was hostile at the time, as well, and although it's a fair assumption, it is still an assumption nonetheless. The thing is, it's really hard to actually know what was going on 4+ billion years ago, and most of what we do know with any certainty is derived from the meagre evidence that remains, most of which itself comes from bits of space rock floating around out in the depths of the Solar System, that are largely unchanged from the time.

Musk makes the Macrohard joke again

Re: BRO

Being insulated by hundreds of billions of dollars really does protect him pretty well from ever having to grow up, or engage in any meaningful self-analysis. I expect every mirror he owns has the words "you are the fairest of them all" emblazoned across it.

Re: BRO

I'm pretty sure the keyword bots would still have downvoted you. Meanwhile, I can figuratively refer to the esteemed gentleman as a sack of shit in a post above, by carefully not using his name, and they don't get triggered...

Re: BRO

Despite the joke alert icon, I think several readers have failed to detect the irony.

Still, the thing about satire is that it has to be close to plausible without actually stepping over into reality. There are several here who would actually read that, take it at face value, and agree.

Anyway, as any fule kno, the height of incisive wit is to make jokes about people's names.

Re: In Principle,

Why bother building a virtual bag of shit, when real bags of shit are available at a low, low cost from your local stables?

Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after USB keys fail to decrypt them

One suggestion is a hybrid system. You may use a voting machine to vote electronically, but it also produces a physical record of the vote, which you can view, and which is countable in the event of a need to validate the vote count. This way, the votes can be counted quickly, and a result returned, and can be verified later.

This does, of course, rely on a chain of custody of the physical votes, as in any paper ballot system.

The production of a receipt, with a unique identifier might allow a voter to later verify their own ballot, against both the electronic and physical ballot, although this could also be abused, so the mechanism to verify this would also require safeguards, such as an intermediary with access to the checking mechanism, which could only verify that the vote had been recorded and counted, and not which way the voter had voted. The whole thing comes down to a conflict between the requirements for a secret ballot, and verifiability, and confidence that this can be carried out on paper ballots without any possibility of fraud or vote tampering can never be completely assured.

Re: Should we raise one or two digits to Digital Cash?

Don't be silly, there's plenty of eating on the rich, and the security systems on gated compounds rely on that same electricity.

Smart mirror shows dumb Windows in elevator

Floor ten is the very last floor that is ever going to be built, so that's the top floor it will go to.

I'm sorry, floor ten is no longer supported, I'm going to force you onto floor eleven instead.

Lloyds Banking Group apps play mix-and-match with customer transactions

Re: So what part of 2018

The knowledge that other banking providers are likely to be no better? If anything, they just haven't plugged the same holes yet.

Re: Who would you bank with instead?

This is exactly why I have both a "traditional" bank account, and a Monzo account; initially opened as they don't charge commission on foreign-currency transactions (at least not Euro denominated ones) or charge a wonky exchange rate on them, so useful when travelling, but also handy as a way of keeping an eye on day-to-day spending. It's trivially easy to keep both, and set up a standing order to transfer regular funds between them, and there's no resilience like completely redundant systems.

Re: Lloyds shifts skilled IT jobs from UK to India

Got a non-paywalled version of that?

Ig Nobel Prize flees US for Switzerland after 35 years over safety concerns

Re: The Idiocracy!

Oh, the irony of referencing Idiocracy and not realising it's about you.

Although Mike Judge, wisely, doesn't air his political opinions, he is clearly very much not a Trump supporter.

From the Wikipedia page about him:

In June 2016, before the presidential election in November, Etan Cohen told BuzzFeed that he and Judge would produce Idiocracy-themed campaign advertisements mocking Donald Trump's presidential campaign if given permission from 20th Century Fox to do so.

Yes, the article also states that this didn't go ahead, and they were planning to mock all of the political candidates, but I think that probably tells us more about their attitude towards your broken political system, and low regard for all of your politicians, rather than support for your particular viewpoint, which they may paraphrase as "ow, my balls."

Basic Reality? Basic down-vote collector, more like.

Re: Zurich, Switzerland

And not forgetting New York, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, and of course, Trump and his sons.

And without patronage from all the worst people in the US? At least some of them only follow the orange bawbag because of the cult of personality, and Vance doesn't have one

UK watchdog eyes Meta's smart glasses after workers say they 'see everything'

Re: From Orwell's '2027'

Careful now, you're not supposed to paraphrase from 1984 in a way that makes it apparent you have actually read the book.

You do have a right for your image to not be sent to an extraterritorial jurisdiction for data processing though, since it falls under the remit of personally identifying information and is protected by data protection regulations both in the UK and EU.

Re: describing the allegations as "concerning."

A lot of people using these are blind - sounds an awful lot like an unevidenced statement to me.

If I were blind, and needed an assistive device, I'd not buy it from Met and Rayban, and I'd not buy an assistive device that films everything around me and streams the data to the US for processing.

Also, if you're blind, you really don't need to be wearing glasses with a camera on them, the camera alone would suffice, wouldn't it? It's not like a blind person is likely to benefit from corrective lenses.

As it happens, I do know people who are registered blind, and I seriously doubt they'd use these. Yes, typically "blind" people do have some vision, but it's rarely something that corrective lenses is going to fix, for example, my friend who has no lenses in her eyes, after childhood surgery, doesn't wear glasses for some reason...

Re: describing the allegations as "concerning."

It should just be mandated that these things periodically emit a very loud shrill tone, followed by the words, "this device is recording".

In this case, I think "periodically" should be every ten seconds or so, and the speakers emitting the loud tone should point downwards at the wearer's ears.

The problem will mostly solve itself, although I'm willing to bet that there are still individuals out there who would be antisocial enough to wear them in public.

Critical Microsoft Excel bug weaponizes Copilot Agent for zero-click information disclosure attack

Lack of security updates in 3... 2... 1...

/Linux, if you have the option to work with something that isn't Win11, which most of us don't.

Re: Frankenstein

Pedant's pedant point, Frankenstein (not a doctor) was the real monster; "the modern Prometheus" stealing fire from the gods and, in his hubris, reaping the consequences. I mean, it’s right there, in the title of the book...

The thing is, Excel is no more a password manager than it is a database engine, or a diagramming tool, scheduling tool, calculator, or any of the other things people misuse it for. For example, ISTR that the password protection in an Excel spreadsheet certainly used to be woefully insecure, and I suspect it still is. If you are including it as part of your security chain, it's worth remembering that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and you'd probably be more secure writing those passwords on a post-it note and sticking it to the back of your monitor. At least Copilot isn't reading that and sending it all off to "the cloud" for storage.

My hatred for Excel comes mostly not from the product itself being crappy (although there is an argument for that), but that it is universally misused by people everywhere who think "I know Excel, so I'll do it in that", for various values of "it", almost all of which are much better done anywhere other than in Excel.

Why do any fuckers still use Excel? Because management by spreadsheet is still a thing, given that we haven't fired all the culprits into the sun yet.

AI Shite That Nobody Wanted Has Serious Flaws

Film at 11.

Supposedly big-brained execs are outsourcing decisionmaking to AI

Re: Why would it be bad

It says something about ruthless bastards that they expect everyone else to think like ruthless bastards.

It's exactly this "type A" thinking that reminds me that everyone who works in sales, marketing, and upper management, is just so much wasted fertiliser, when pretty much all human achievements are built on cooperation and not competition.

Even if you're riding a motorbike, and find yourself needed to make a quick decision, you have fucked up, by failing to read the road. You should already have assessed all the risks between where you are and where you are going to be in several seconds time (what is between me and the next bend that wants to kill me?), and if you haven't, then you should have slowed down.

As the adage says, "there are old bikers, and there are bold bikers, but there are no old, bold bikers".

I think there's probably a reason you don't see many c-level execs riding motorbikes, and that probably has to do with critical evaluation skills.

Re: 62 percent of bosses rely on LLMs

Right then, how do we influence the training data so that it recommends above inflation salary increases for technical staff, and layoffs in sales and marketing?

Generic methods arrive in Golang, but they weren't the top dev demand

Re: And draw us from evil

Taking the following: (C# because the syntax is clear*)

public int FindHigherInt(int i1, int i2) => ( i1 < i2 ? i2 : i1 );

public T FindHigherComparable<T>(T p1, T p2) where T : IComparable => ( p1.CompareTo(p2) < 0 ? p2 : p1 );

The second, using a generic, is more abstract that the first, using a concrete type, because the type itself has been abstracted, in this case to any type that implements IComparable.

It's the same way that an interface is an abstraction from the implementation.

*may not compile, no warranties are provided, code is for demonstration purposes only, doesn't deal with equality, etc. etc.

Re: Here we "go" again...

What aspect is in the process of being rewritten? The compiler that turns it into JavaScript that a browser can execute? A server-side execution environment of some kind?

TypeScript itself is just a language specification; it's written in English. Surely the whole point of scripting languages is portability, so an execution environment written in Go (amongst others) should be no great surprise.

Re: Here we "go" again...

Yeah, well-written TypeScript is better than well-written JavaScript, but because it's so trivial to circumvent its type safety, and developers* who are familiar with JavaScript or who are working with legacy JavaScript code are likely to be under pressure to "just make it work", what you often end up with is hastily-written JavaScript peppered with :any, hence TypeScript being colloquially known as AnyScript.

*if you can call most JavaScript programmers developers; many are closer to script kiddie.

Re: Here we "go" again...

TypeScript as a replacement for JavaScript is another big example ("types are not needed", yeah, until your project grows.

TypeScript, also known colloquially as AnyScript for obvious reasons (reasons: any)

Gamers furious as indie studio Cloud Imperium quietly admits to data breach

[citation needed]

Re: Vapourware

Depends on whether that's 5,000 ISK (worth about 25 rounds of standard small ammo), or 5,000 ISK (worth about £30).

See, Star Citizen isn't Vapourware...

...it has a real user database that can be compromised.

Bcachefs creator insists his custom LLM is female and 'fully conscious'

Neurodivergence doesn't cover neurotypical; neurodiversity does. As I said, in the same way that ethnicity includes white people, while "ethnic minority" doesn't, in the UK and US at least.

To be fair, it's not a massively useful term, largely because people argue over what it means, rather than getting the point that everyone's brain works differently to anyone else's, even if only in small and subtle ways. It's like "allistic", which some people take to mean neurodivergent people who are non-autistic, whilst others understand it as "everyone who is not autistic". This largely stems from a lack of education and understanding of neurodiverse conditions, and the paucity of well-used language around them.

"Everyone is a little bit on the spectrum" is a horrible phrase, because it completely misrepresents what the autistic spectrum is - it's not a scale from "not autistic", to "very autistic", but a collection of traits that are associated with autism, and which autistic people may have one, some, or all of.

I hate to rely on the garbage-spewer that is AI, but, when asked the question, it gives the following:

Yes, the term "neurodiversity" encompasses all variations of brain function, including both neurodivergent individuals and neurotypical people, recognizing that all brains are different. It emphasizes that these differences are natural variations rather than deficits.

So I'm sorry, but you're not correct in your assertion in this instance. One of the important points of the term "neurodiversity" is that it is inclusive, and defining a term essentially as "all the different ways human brains can work, except you" is both horrible and unuseful.

Re: Scary, truly scary

In humans, the response to a conflict between visual and balance senses is to empty one's stomach. This is an evolutionary response, because we haven't evolved to be in an environment which is moving in varying different directions, such as the swaying of a boat, whilst our eyes are telling us that we are not moving. The most likely cause for this is that we've been poisoned by something, so out the stomach contents go.

How should a robot react, if its sensors give conflicting information, but it needs to rely on that data for real-time processing? Should it use a quorum, and ignore the outliers (see also: Minority Report for why you might need more than three), should it shut down and await repair? Attempt some sort of self-diagnosis?

I would imagine that this is very much a real-world problem in robotics.

Re: our bally language and we invented it 1000 years before

Eala! Ic wearþ gecoren niþer.

Well, firstly, being neurotypical comes under neurodiversity, in the same way that being white falls under ethnic diversity.

Those ones that are generally known as "neurodivergence" (ASD, ADHD, OCD, etc.) are called that because it is divergence from the "norm", so if you're trying to make a funny about neurodivergent people, then no, and you're a dickhead for doing so.

If you're pointing out that neurotypical people, considered "normal" also fall under the umbrella of neurodiversity, then well done, you're awake.

Let me guess, you're also the sort of person who complains that white middle class middle-aged men are being discriminated against everywhere in the UK and US, despite the copious evidence that this is the group predominantly doing the discriminatory stuff?

Re: Almost 25 years ago, I graduated from university with a degree in AI

AGI requires intelligence. Intelligence requires reason. Reason requires consciousness. We can't even define consciousness, ergo it is not possible to create AGI mechanistically.

It's not at all like nuclear fusion, which is something that is theoretically possible, and just a matter of engineering; we don't even have the theory for AGI.

You can't put, what is for all intents and purposes, a "soul", into a machine, any more than you can put a lemon into the number five. It's a category error.

Re: Monkeys

I agree, the amount of thinking seems to have dropped off, whilst the amount of actually building AI systems has remained at zero.

To be fair, atoms exist as emergent phenomena independent of thought, based on measurable fundamental properties of the universe, such as the fine structure constant, so they'd still exist if you didn't make a ship out of them. That argument doesn't go all the way down.

The "thorny problem" of consciousness is an interesting one, though. We can't define consciousness (I think the argument is something along the lines of not being able to define something unless you are separate from it and can entirely parameterise it), so we can't even define what isn't conscious. I could argue that a rock has consciousness, but cannot communicate it (essentially the basis of animism). You can come up with all sorts of unprovable closures.

However, if you can't define consciousness, you can't define the steps needed to create consciousness. What purveyors of "AI" seem to be trying to claim, is that if you make something that superficially looks enough like it can emulate human behaviour, it is conscious. Computers work in an entirely mechanistic way though. Even LLMs have fixed behaviours defined by their inputs, it's just that they have been made to grow so complex that it's not practically possible to trace all inputs through to outputs. Complexity doesn't equal consciousness, though, this is pure magical thinking.

Our computers are constructed to be entirely mechanistic and predictable, and unless you believe in animism, this precludes the possibility of them ever being conscious. It's the same reason we can't make a computer come up with a genuine random number, without giving it a source of entropy.

A massive data centre trained on vast amounts of data (hopefully curated, but it seems like they are being fed any old shite), consuming amounts of power equivalent to a small town, isn't really comparable to a human infant in any way, especially when you take into consideration that humans are born not-fully developed due to constraints in the birth canal, and take a good few years to catch up to the level of other mammalian infants, many of which can stand and walk shortly after birth.

Re: Scary, truly scary

Only if you can show that local minimums* model reality, in the general case. AI slop contains enough "hallucinations" to show that this is not true.

*In this case, "local minimum" means the point in the "probability space" being modelled that has the most "likely" score assigned to it. It might be better to refer to that as a "maximum", but when visualising probability fields, it's also useful to view them as a ball rolling on a 3-dimensional surface and settling in a "minimum", although in such things (e.g. principal components analysis) there are usually far more than three dimensions being modelled, which is why this language is used.

Re: Scary, truly scary

No robot can be sea-sick

If you were to make a robot with balance sensors (similar to the inner ear) and they were to be given input, in conjunction with vision sensors, similar to that which causes sea-sickness in humans, and feed those inputs into a processing system such as an LLM, it's entirely possible that the results of the synthesis of those contradictory inputs would emulate something very much like sea-sickness (which is basically imbalance due to disorientation).

That's a nice little research problem for someone; make a robot that can emulate sea-sickness.

Re: our bally language and we invented it 1000 years before

Hwæt wæron hīe þenceande?

UK copper fired after faking keyboard taps using photo frame

Re: Nothing to see here.

Oddly enough, that was exactly the stated purpose of the Metropolitan Police (the world's first professional police force) when it was founded; to prevent crime. They were actually forbidden from detecting crime for a number of years, because it was thought to be a violation of personal privacy. Nowadays, we take it for granted that the job of the police is to detect crime, and there's not a whole load of crime prevention going on any more.