Posts by munnoch 697 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jan 2023
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.
"they could magically replace much of the management culture"
Not sure if this is what you mean but in my experience in India everyone wants to be a manager. They're only interested in the technical stuff as a means to an end, the end being becoming the big boss. This culture may have some bearing on the quality of the engineering output.
When you call a guy in to do it for you, you're not paying for his competence, you're paying for the third party liability insurance he gets from being a member of a trade organisation. If it all goes titsup then you have that to fall back on. Joining the cllub is not nearly as easy as signing up for the 3 hour long PAT testing course, otherwise I would have done it by now.
Like I've said before agents don't take on a life of their own. They act on behalf of someone and that someone is liable for their actions.
I spent most of my career writing software to automate processes. It made thousands of decisions per second. Of course we surrounded it with checks and balances that tried to independently spot bad behaviour based on various sources of feedback. All pre-AI but sounds like the same sorts of arguments being floated.
There was a desk of people whose job it was to deal with those exceptions. They were also the people whose names went on the legal documentation and were answerable to customers and regulators for undesirable outcomes. This did happen from time to time with various degrees of sanction.
There really is nothing new here. Its a tool. It can do enormous damage very quickly if used incorrectly. It may even have flaws that make it inevitable it will do enormous damage. Get your liability insurance lined up before a) marketing the tool and b) deploying the tool.
Lack of support for virtual functions makes this much less useful than if could be. Yeah, I know, I'm old fashioned and like my polymorphism.
I was (2 years retired) a very enthusiastic user of the assert macro with pretty much the same intent as this extension. Pre/post and inline predicates that should always hold. Absolutely invaluable in making your assumptions explicit and executable. "Don't call this function unless you can provide parameters in this shape". "After you call me I promise the following will hold".
Co-workers hated me for rubbing their noses in their laziness and stupidity. The number of times I've had a an email begging to be allowed to remove an assertion so that their code can "work". Some would just go ahead and remove an assertion as part of a PR without even bothering to ask. The entire concept of correctness seems to be lost on many programmers.
Problem of course is when the assertion turns out to be wrong or too strict and a case is discovered that brings everything to a screeching halt. The standard does seem to have considered that with ability to handle failures or ignore evaluation. Devil is in the details...
I wondered the same but it could be because its going to be trained to mimic a human operator. Motion capture the guy who currently does the assembly task and hey presto he's out of a job....
It wouldn't need to look exactly like a human but it would need the same range of articulation and probably the same viewpoint, so arms and a "head".
The company I worked for when 9/11 occurred that was headquartered next door to WTC. The building was severely damaged but the business kept running. The DR plan doesn't need to say what hits the building just that it has been hit and hence no longer available.
I'd gone on a business trip a couple of days before and my wife and kids had gone back to the UK. I was asked to stay away and ended up working in London for the next 3 months. The door man on our apartment in NYC looked like he'd seen a ghost when we finally returned as they were convinced we were amongst the missing.
I don't think anyone could accuse Honda of making bad cars. Their stuff is generally a bit better engineered than their traditional competitors. But people don't buy things because they are good, they buy because they are cheap and Honda has always been a little bit more pricey. The CCP have made taking over the global car market a stated aim and have the means to undercut everyone else to wipe out the competition. In the UK we are literally holding the door open for them.
Well that's alright then. Specifically esigned to mislead and confuse, no societal benefit possible, but still goes in front of 10 - 20% of the number of users it would if it were accurate.
How well would a newspaper get on if it flat out made shit up and put it into 1 in 10 print impressions? Yeah ok, I'll get my coat...
I hate this version of the future.
Agents act on behalf of other entities but the legal liability for their actions stays with the entity on whose behalf they act. Its a pretty standard and well accepted definition.
For example, if the agent managing my rental property gets it wrong then I'm still the one legally liable to the tenant (this has happened). I can sue the agent for failing to meet their contractual obligations and maybe their liability insurance will kick in but that doesn't cancel out my liability to the tenant.
So yes absolutely the enterprise is on the hook. There should be no "it was a third party" excuses. Except that's precisely what they will trot out when it all goes wrong. Look a squirrel!
Code review isn't about reading the code to try to divine whether its right or wrong. That's what tests are for. But you should be reviewing the approach to solving the problem. Is it consistent with the house style, is it maintainable, does the test coverage look reasonable and robust etc.. That qualitative stuff that probably an AI isn't going to be all that effective at.
And the Sounds App is a terrible replacement for a dedicated radio. At least as presented on CarPlay. f you go to list of live stations you have to scroll down to find the one you want past the 75 different versions of Radio's 1 through 4. How many hard-wired radios "forget" which station you were on last time you used it?
Rule #1 of getting people on board with Shiny New Thing, make it backwards compatible with Crappy Old Thing.
The argument against address translation is that it breaks protocols that need to open up arbitrary additional channels. SIP being a prime offender. It negotiates the data stream then says to the other end, send the data to that guy over there. That misses the point you need a protocol that allows you to encode "that guy over there" in a way that translating gateways can identify and deal with. You don't need a whole new way of doing stuff.
In some jurisdictions, US included I believe, registration/license plates are issued by the government office responsible. You can't just rock up to your local Halfrauds and have them run off a couple of "show" plates. You've heard of convicts making license plates?
The system in Japan is modelled after the US system. Same plate dimensions. One of the screws holding the plate on is covered with a tamper evident collar so swapping plates would be obvious without a black market supply of the collars. Not sure if the US goes to that extreme.
On unix like OS's you get a SEGV signal. Which you can install a handler for and throw an exception from there with the use of some rather hairy compiler options.
I set up our test runners like this so that the current test could be marked failed if it tripped over a null and the runner would carry on to the next test rather than the whole run crapping out.
Then someone had the bright idea why don't we do the same for production instances as well? If a unit of work within a process sh*ts itself we can catch that and communicate to the outside world that unit is now suspended whilst carrying on with the rest of the work load. That change was still considered experimental at the time I left...
Shouldn't that be a RETURN instruction?
I had a final year module mid 80's on formal methods the textbook for which was CSP. The book is still on my bookshelf, probably in close to pristine condition, it didn't see a lot of action then and none since. That module was hard work. All I remember is it heavily featured the dining philosophers problem which we may or may not have proved a solution to...
Didn't realise he also had a hand in Pascal. That was the teaching language at uni and knowledge of it helped me get a couple of commercial gigs, one nearly 20 years later! I've probably relied on quicksort (or a close relative thereof) via std::sort on more than a few occasions. Thank you Tony!
A lot of people are going to be thinking twice in the future about transiting through an airport hub in that part of the world. That part of their economic diversification plan has just been set back by years or decades. If we're going down we take you all with us...
Fun fact. The one and only time I've flown Emirates via Dubai, the second leg towards the UK flew over Iran and I tuned off flight mode to take a picture to record the event (hence it was geotagged). My iPhotos world map still has that single dot in the middle of no where.
Back when I was involved in this sort of thing (only very tangentially), losing an entire DC was very definitely part of the playbook. We salt and peppered active and passive instances across both regional DC's. We might lose some capacity but no functionality if one went out. This was in a part of the world prone to natural disasters. The two DC's were fairly well geographically separated but of course a big enough shake could well have affected both. Personally I'd rather do it like that with all the extra complexity than try to black start from backups at a recovery site.
