Posts by munnoch 733 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jan 2023
I did a lot of serial stuff early on in my work life connecting Sun workstations to various data vendors. Encountered the full gamut of bit rates. Not to mention some of the connections were synchronous (clocked), the extra signals meaning you generally needed a DB25. We developed an intimate knowledge of which Sun models would do it properly and which were crippled in some way.
eBay has become almost completely unusable due to the prevalence of AI generated listings.
Beset with incorrect information like wrong part numbers, made up capabilities (apparently everything supports wifi...) and the descriptions padded out with vacuous non-information -- "sleek design", "dependable manufacturer", "complements your decor". The word "sleek" in particular being a 100% accurate signal that there is no point in reading the description. And which I immediately associate with the Scots word sleekit, which perfectly describes the entire endevour.
Complex use cases like "I'm going camping this weekend and I have no idea what I need(!!)", can only fail spectacularly. Simple use cases like send me 1kg of cornflakes every two weeks don't need planet incinerating fuzzy pattern matchers to solve.
When I lived in Japan I remember tying to do a transaction in the bank. I handed over the form to the teller with my signature on it, which they dutifully went off to check against the specimen signature they had collected when I opened the account some years earlier. She came back and informed me that it didn't match but then proceeded to coach me in how I should modify my current signature so that it matched the one they had on record. Once that done I registered a new specimen!
You might be describing uucp and bang paths. That was before my time, but not by much...
Its still the case with SMTP that messages can take multiple hops. You can advertise a list of servers that will store and forward messages for you (MX records) along with a preference score. If the highest preference isn't available the sender can hand-off to a lower preference server which will in turn try to work its way up the food chain to get to the destination.
Registered the family domain in 1995 and been self-hosting since. My hand-crafted sendmail config file has hardly changed over that time and I think I still understand it, just. I have a couple of cloud servers to act as slave DNS and lower priority MX but the main server lives in the garage and is neither a variant of x86 architecture nor running a variant of linux to make sure things aren't too easy! It really should also move to the cloud because the electricity usage is eye-watering, but then I would no longer have the single copy of everything on-prem (its rsynced to a couple of other places too). I see it as a bit of a badge of honour as someone who has been involved with software for virtually their whole life.
Biggest issue for me recently has been getting iOS to accept the certificate that cyrus presents. It can't be self-signed any more (you have to install your own root certificate on all devices and sign with that), but you also need some funky alternate subject thing to make it happy. Took me a long time to get openssl set up to produce that. Issuing new certificates is scripted although I think the cron isn't working so I had to go in a few months back and do it manually. Given long enough I'll get around to fixing that.
How does this actually work? I mean what's the mechanism that allows "agents to run amok" in someone else's systems? Pretend for a moment my comp sci knowledge stalled before all this cloud bollocks got going.
Is it because everything is containerised to f*ck and beyond? Is that what provides a universal execution environment? How is the payload delivered? What even is the payload?
I keep my phone and Mac languages set to Japanese to try to retain my hard won reading ability. But occasionally I'll have to google how to do something obscure in english and have to just trust that the correspondingly positioned menu item on the Japanese screen will do the same thing... Stops most people snooping around my devices too.
Bed management.
That's an optimisation problem, right? Which is a numerically hard problem to solve well never mind perfectly.
With LLM's being staggeringly bad (even relative to their usual level of performance) at anything numerate how could you have any expectation of an improved outcome?
So far as the rest, ML models need good patterns as input in order to produce good output. If the input is nothing but dysfunction then what do you suppose you get out?
The rear door of my car was slightly damaged, other party left a note taking responsibility.
[Aside, it was a post office van and he left the note on one of his "sorry we missed you" cards! The irony did not go unnoticed.]
First point of contact was a lawyer who asked for pictures. Then I was passed to a claims manager, who asked for pictures. Then I was passed to a repair company who asked for pictures. When questioned how long they'd have the car in for response was "we don't know until we see it".
They picked up and dropped off my car on a flat bed, and I got a hire car for the duration equivalent to mine rather than a tiny little courtesy car. How nice being the injured party. The hire car was dropped off and picked up at my home, with a van from the hire company making the same journey to collect/drop off their driver. All of these journeys were 30 to 40 miles each way.
It gets better (worse). They cocked up the repair leaving a very obvious pattern in the paint where it had been filled. When I raised it they, guess what, asked for pictures. Chased them about it, no mention of the pictures but, can you bring it in so we can have a look? Round trip an hour each way plus an hour sitting in their reception hearing what all the girls on the phones had for tea last night whilst the workshop tried to magic the defect away. Without success. Maybe if they'd looked at the pictures...
Its now booked in for "correction" so presumably the same sequence of drop offs and pick ups.
With the number of people involved all apparently clueless or unable to make decisions perhaps having an assessor involved would be an improvement. This was an incredibly minor repair that didn't require any over-priced manufacturer parts, yet the bill to the insured will be many thousands. I'd be worrying far more about inefficiency and stupidity in the industry as a whole than fraudulent claims as a source of high costs.
Or maybe this is the much vaunted increase in economic activity we've been promised....
I saw "E" as the network technology for quite a lot of the last few days whilst traveling around remote bits of Scotland.
Which is kind of ironic as the ferry operator are pushing use of QR codes instead of paper tickets. Wife had bought the tickets but her's was one way (banished to a small island for the summer...). We did eventually persuade airdrop to transfer my return ticket from her to me.
Problem is that the metrics for coverage are based on reaching numbers of premises or covering major transport corridors. Not saying I need to stream in 4k from the top of a mountain but always on emergency coverage would be nice to have. Mobile from space is probably the solution to that.
"(*) They can call this service "Rabbit"."
Japan had a similar thing called PHS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Handy-phone_System).
The handset worked at home as a cordless extension to your landline and could also be set up on your office network to respond to your extension number. There were a relatively small number of fixed "base stations", boxes about the size of a briefcase, fixed around the city for mobile use. They did allow incoming calls but didn't hand off between base stations so you had to stop walking when you were on a call.
The best thing about it was the data rate was 32kbps at a time when cellular didn't really offer data or if it did it was something like 9.6kbps. Later upgraded to 64k. Better voice quality too as the codecs being used to squeeze cellular voice channels into 4.8 or 9.6k were pretty rubbish then. The handsets were also tiny and the battery lasted all week.
I loved my Pee-Chee.
TfL's budget projection for 25/26 has operating costs at 8.8B and capital expenditure at 2.5B, with passenger revenue of 5.7B. Isn't that a 50% subsidy?
In this case "government" is the Greater London Authority, who are funded much like central government by sequestering a cut of the tax take on London residents and businesses as well as a transfer from central govt (specifically for policing I believe).
TfL will no doubt trot out the usual excuse of how everything is more difficult in the UK (crumbling Victorian infrastructure, densely populated) to justify why their fares are more expensive than other comparable cities.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes on the highway..."
When my mates and I were doing 8 bit gaming stuff in the 80's the fastest way to get a new version down to the corporates in the Big Smoke was to send a cassette tape on a train with BR's Red Star parcel system.
"can we please drop all this imperial stuff"
Its possible to be conversant with more than one system of units.
Imperial lengths, feet, inches and fractions of an inch, work very well for human scale stuff. The numbers are neither ridiculously big nor small. Most measurements you encounter in everyday life are 1 or 2 significant figures.
I do a lot of work on my Victorian era house and imperial measurements occur throughout. Wall studs are spaced 12" apart, decorative woodwork is often 5/8" thick, doorways are 7'6" high. Measuring to within 1/8" of an inch is nearly always "good enough".
If I'm hanging something on the wall then I could measure out multiples of 304.8mm but its easier to work in the system that it was built with.
Not suggesting it would be suitable for spaceflight. As per above someone tried that and it didn't go well...
"the quality of your existing tests clearly matters hugely"
The existing test suite will be influenced enormously by the kinds of stuff that went wrong developing the product up to the current point including stuff specific to the current implementation language. There is no guarantee at all that they will catch errors made by the translation tool or that are specific to the new implementation language. After any sort of significant change you should be looking for greatly increased test coverage not just sitting back and going, awesome, the tests still pass.
You've also just torched your code history. It will no longer be possible to do a blame or annotate on a line of code to try to get an inkling of why its as f'd up as it is. But maybe in this brave new world no one cares about that sort of stuff. By stuff I mean code...
Sooooo glad I got out before the lunatics completely took over the asylum.
Actually there is a link to the RFC on the top left of the landing page. Written like its 1985 with ascii art diagrams for packet headers. Sorry but in the 21 1/4 C and in my 6th decade on this planet I'm going to need pretty pictures and short words to engage with your proposal...
What I did spot was a list of "magic" network prefixes that do all sorts of weird and wonderful things. One of which is marked "public internet". So I'm going to guess that existing v4 hosts can still talk to other existing v4 hosts no matter where they live because the gateways up-convert 4 to 8 on the way out and down-convert 8 to 4 on the way in. But if you ever want to talk to the cohort of v8 addressable hosts you are sh*t out of luck until you also upgrade to v8. Which is pretty much inevitable with any backwards compatible approach.
So, yeah, no flag day, until one of the big boys says you know what, we're done with v4 and only going to support v8 because "reasons".
Also worth a read -- "The Road Not Taken: A World Where IPv4 Evolved" -- https://owl.billpg.com/ipv4x/
Having had a quick scan of their website I'm not sure I like the feel of it. The first thing you see is a "give me money" button. Tone is very KickStart-ery and there doesn't seem to be any links to the deeper technical details.
For example how do v4 devices inside one ASN reach v8 devices on another ASN? As I understand it you can do v4 to v4 routing by setting the ASN prefix to all zeroes but how does my bog-standard v4 device unlock all of those v8 addresses hosted on a foreign ASN?
Definitely don't like the idea of the zone manager bundling a whole bunch of services into one "thing" (a single daemon?). DNS, DHCP, NTP etc. don't overlap in terms of functionality or use case so I see no advantage to running them out of some monolithic lump. I wish Bind could also do ntp is not something anyone has ever said...
If an ISP has already deployed CGNAT then it would still cost them (time, money, cock-ups) to remove it and the vast majority of their customers aren't bothered by it so not much to gain.
I have a connection with Hyperoptic who do CGNAT but they have a 5 quid a month option for a proper public static IP. Its that or 100x slower ADSL from OR so they have me by the curlies.
I do like the idea of an IPvX that is backwards compatible with v4. I don't think its nearly as simple as this article makes out though.
I'd agree with you except the TM backups on my WD NAS suddenly came back to life a few days ago after failing for over a year...
Somewhere we have an old TC. It was packed away for a house move and hasn't resurfaced since. My Mac keeps reminding me that its been 1400-and-something days since the last backup to it. It has a relatively large and new disk in it so I'd quite like to spark it up as a redundant backup for when the WD next shits itself.
"given that the input is plentiful and renewable"
Except that the giant solar repeater Death Star is neither plentiful nor renewable. For every kW on the ground it needs to beam at least 3kW from space. Assuming it all hits the target, which it won't. Pitiful starts to look generous...
Whats the efficiency of PV panels in converting solar irradiation into electricity. Pretty pitiful iirc. And they're doing this twice. Once in space and again on the ground.
And how narrow a beam would you need from geostationary orbit to get most of your energy into something the size of a field at ground level? That's some Death Star level shit right there.
The panels on the ground won't be contiguous so more losses there.
Its a cute idea but seems like the usable output will be tiny.
I don't doubt outside contractors are used but local? Your local man and van probably isn't going to get the gig for dropping off new servers, nor is your local sole trader sparky going to be wiring in the PDU's.
There may well be enough of a concentration effect for the specialists to set up a local outpost and they *might* hire some local people to populate that outpost. If that's happening then lets see those numbers.
