Posts by mostly average

NASA pushes decision on bringing crew back in Starliner to the end of August

Re: It's a political decision, not tech/safety

They do have the Canada arm to move an immobile capsule. But the key word being immobile, not tumbling or drifting. As a worst case, they can probably survive long enough to climb to a hatch in their pressurized flight suits, assuming the capsule is moving/tumbling slow enough for them to aim and push off and grab hold of the station. Of course, all that would probably be moot if the thing really screwed up and collided with the station. That capsule inspires such happy thoughts!

Re: Why the delay?

Nature can't be fooled, but bureaucracy is far from natural. NASA and Boeing are both desperate to save face, plus NASA is hopelessly blinded by sunk cost.

Re: It's a political decision, not tech/safety

A rapid unscheduled disassembly would also kill starliner, plus two astronauts. Hopefully the decision can be made untainted by politics. The priority must be avoiding the rapid disassembly of astronauts. Icon because Boeing QA.

Google is a monopoly. The fix isn't obvious

Meta store

"Imagine a Meta operating Google Play, and what the privacy disclosures would look like then."

They do operate an app store, with an expectedly long and incomprehensible privacy policy. It's just for VR apps, which are technically Android apps, since their OS is forked from it. They don't have a monopoly, so they behave, mostly. Icon because it's what we all are these days.

Palo Alto Networks execs apologize for 'hostesses' dressed as lamps at Black Hat booth

Re: Any publicity...

A pint for Dad.

Any publicity...

Since everyone's talking about it, it seems the gimmick worked. Any publicity is good publicity they say.

Icon because BDSM. There's a kink for everything, even indoor lighting, I guess.

Ransomware groups are better at web app security than you, says researcher

The difference is Bureaucracies

Namely the gangs don't have them. If they find a problem, they don't have to file paperwork or ask permission to fix it. They aren't forced to use whatever buggy software snake oil management got sold, or attend wacky seminars about the next big thing in devops taught by some middle manager's son in law. And above all, there's inescapable accountability. Be it getting caught and going to jail, or a painful death, depending on who discovers the mistake first.

All y'all love AI, right? Get ready for Gemini in Nest cameras, Google Assistant

So more cloudy with a chance of outage?

Great idea! Take the server dependant hardware and make the servers even more expensive to run. That'll keep the product (service actually) out of the Google graveyard!

Punkt MC02: As private, and pricey, as a Swiss bank account

Sadly

That's just not (entirely) possible. Wireless modem manufacturers absolutely not allow you to see their firmware or drivers without ironclad NDAs. Pinephone tries really really hard to be open source, but the modem drivers are not and they can't do anything about it. And there doesn't seem to exist any modem manufacturer that is any different. It makes ones tin foil hat itch.

Re: Not secure enough

Pinephone from pine64 does that, mostly. Unfortunately you have to take the battery cover off to get to the switches, and they're the tiny DIP switches you probably need tweezers to manipulate. It's cheap too, mostly because the hardware makes it basically an older raspberry pi that can (ostensibly) make phone calls. But it's open source, mostly. (Wireless modem manufacturers are adamantly secretive about their software. For reasons... *Adjusts tinfoil hat ostentatiously*)

Boeing's Starliner proves better at torching cash than reaching orbit

Re: You are so polite...

Depends on your definition of stuck, what's doing the sticking, and the level of pedantry you wish to employ. Sure it can undock, even with humans on board, so in that regard, neither the capsule nor the crew are stuck. But if your chances of survival leaving in the craft are unacceptably lower, or unacceptably less certain than just staying put, I'd say that's as good as stuck.

Video game actors strike because they fear an attack of the AI clones

You wouldn't download a performer...

I think they would. Why bother with human performers when you can just create an entirely new digital one from scratch? One who's likeness and voice are fully and unconditionally owned by the studio. Who doesn't threaten release schedules with strikes, unions or negotiations, or demand royalties or even wages, who doesn't mouth off on controversial topics on social media. Video game actors are in even more danger of extinction than screen actors. I'm not for it or against it, just reading the writing on the wall. Bean counters gonna count. (Until they're replaced, too.)

Sam Altman's basic income experiment finds that money can indeed buy happiness

Holding a college degree and being an idiot are not mutually exclusive. For some degrees, there's even a correlation.

Release the hounds! Securing datacenters may soon need sniffer dogs

Re: Huh?

Anal retentive? I believe they would call that a rectal concealment.

Dear Stack Overflow denizens, thanks for helping train OpenAI's billion-dollar LLMs

Last night

I was tinkering with a LLM last night, asked it to write a function to find the nth digit of pi. It wrote a function that converted the built in pi constant to a string and returned the nth character. It then proceeded to have a stack overflow comments section argument with itself about how wrong the solution was and proceeded to start arguing about the question. It was most entertaining. It was clearly trained on stack overflow. I believe it was a codellama derivative.

Verizon hit with whopping $847M verdict for infringing 5G and hotspot patents

non-practicing entity

You mean patent troll. If they're buying patents and not doing anything with them except litigating, then that's a troll. Don't get me wrong, I hate Verizon. I also hate patent trolls.

Beijing says state owns China's rare earth metals

That's redundant

If there is a thing that exists (or may exist) the CCP claims ownership of it. Any law claiming CCP ownership of a specific thing only creates the false hope that there exists some other thing that isn't owned by the CCP.

FCC wants telcos to carrier unlock cellphones 60 days after activation

Ban the locks entirely.

With all the fees and contracts, they don't need the carrier locks to keep their customers prisoner. Though, even after unlocking, the nonremoveable carrier bloatware make them practically useless on other carriers anyway, likely by design.

Starliner to remain docked to the ISS into July – with no new departure date

It's integration testing, a normal part of Agile Development (TM). All the cool kids are doing it.

Data

"We are letting the data drive our decision-making..." Which data, budget or schedule? Icon because Boeing QA.

Uncle Sam sanctions Kaspersky's top bosses – but not Mr K himself

I miss John McAfee

Antivirus software is so boring without the blackjack and hookers.

Nigerian faces up to 102 years in the slammer for $1.5M phishing scam

Re: One way traffic

Nah, there's plenty of crap humans this side of the pond. But like the Nigerian royal family, they too prefer to target Americans.

New York Times source code leaks online via 4chan

It's 4chan

There's just as much chance it's just a huge archive of Shrek erotic fan fiction. But you'll have to download all 69 RAR chunks to decrypt it and find out.

Meta faces multiple complaints in Europe over plans to train AI on user data

Meta respects your right...

...to have questions and concerns about this policy.

To solve AI's energy crisis, 'rethink the entire stack from electrons to algorithms,' says Stanford prof

He's right, though.

Numerical (digital) linear algebra in massively parallel GPUs are an incredibly inefficient way to simulate a system that is inherently analog. I imagine the ideal neural processor chip to be mostly analog. Perhaps transistor amplifiers for the neurons, with digital potentiometers set at load time for the synapses. DAC in, big mess of amps and resistors, then ADC out. You keep the digital representation of the weights, with the speed and efficiency of analog computation. Dunno about training, but it'll speed up inferencing. Icon because obviously.

Analysts join the call for Microsoft to recall Recall

Microsoft has the solution!

Just need to find a suitable or at least plausible problem for it to solve.

Two big computer vision papers boost prospect of safer self-driving vehicles

There's an easier way

Just remove all humans. Remove motorcycles, bicycles, rickshaws, unicycles, pedestrians, anything that's controlled by a human. Computers can't handle deviations from protocol, and humans just can't reliably follow protocols, so just eliminate the uncontrolled variable.

Manjaro 24 is Arch Linux for the rest of us

Re: I like it....

I had the same experience. Every other time KDE updates, it throws it into dependency hell. And the community prides itself with being insufferably pretentious. I switched to Endeavour and haven't looked back. It uses the Arch repos and updates don't break things. I haven't had to restore a snapshot since I installed. Plus the community members seem to possess actual human empathy.

John Deere now considers VMs to be legacy tech, Ethernet and Wi-Fi on the brink

Re: What they actually mean is...

I believe you mean, "Oh Deere, tractor won't start..."

Blue screen of death or Eurovision's Windows95man performance – what's less annoying?

"Not available in your country..."

Oh, good. We're safe on our side of the pond.

Now all Windows 11 users are getting adverts to 'make the Start menu great again'

Like a Hydra

Turn off one ad setting, two more will take it's place. And default to opt in.

This is why...

I ditched Ubuntu in 2012 and swore off all things Canonical. Since I already don't use Windows (at home), I'm gonna not use it harder.

What can be done to protect open source devs from next xz backdoor drama?

"carefully failed to make clear"

Task failed successfully.

Grok-1 chatbot model released – open source or open Pandora's box?

No, it isn't fine tuned.

It is the raw checkpoint. The release clearly states it is not fine tuned for any purpose. I know you all hate Musk, but at least read the first paragraph!

Ahead of IPO, Reddit blends advertising into user posts

I don't use Reddit,

But now, I'm gonna not use it harder.

HDMI Forum 'blocks AMD open sourcing its 2.1 drivers'

Re: This is the result of DRM

Yep. The AMD drivers probably don't even support HDCP anyway. Besides, pirating media via HDMI capture is too much work and too slow.

IonQ opens first US quantum factory amid VC cash crunch

Re: Progress

Schrodinger's breath. Apropos for an article about Quantum Marketing.

Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

Re: One thing that has/should change is...

That's Silly Con Valley. And I'm pretty sure lightbulbs are illegal there.

Aircraft rivet hole issues cause delays to Boeing 737 Max deliveries

Boeing should

Make the engineers, software developers, QA, their supervisors and executives ride a pre-delivery test flight of every aircraft they make. No parachutes allowed. It'd be good PR to show confidence in the product, inspire better attention to getting it right, and if any of them screwed up, natural selection would eliminate the problems. Icon because Boeing.

DeepMind AI helps cook up 'novel' compounds – with sides of controversy

Seems Google's AI solution has failed to produce a viable problem.

Japanese space lasers aim to clean up orbital junk

This one sparks joy.

Space lasers spark joy.

It's true, LLMs are better than people – at creating convincing misinformation

Better?

They're just stupid faster. So they're better if you take faster to be better.

It took Taylor Swift deepfake nudes to focus Uncle Sam, Microsoft on AI safety

Re: Just AI?

I recall a similar moral panic a few years ago involving celebrities and manually photoshopped pornography. That and there's plenty of humans capable of creating very realistic images on canvas and practically every other medium. But when a human paints Taylor Swift in compromising poses with Ronald McDonald, it's art and a commentary on capitalism or something. Not that I condone either practice. I'm just pointing out there's no stopping the dirty mind, and there never was. I also think it's pretty hypocritical they only care now that the rapid princess is involved.

Nokia walks the walk about its RAN to play on Uncle Sam’s China fears

There is no Nokia.

There is only HMD Global. They may wear Nokia's face, but they're not Nokia. Their handsets are made in china out of short half-life chinesium. Real Nokia phones were made with the finest Finnish witchcraft and are presumably immortal.

Drivers: We'll take that plain dumb car over a flashy data-spilling internet one, thanks

Re: ransomware

I would imagine a situation more akin to the plot of Speed. Except instead of a bomb on a bus, it's a self driving car holding the passengers hostage. 5 BTC to make the car stop before the cliff ahead. Icon because Keanu Reeves film.

SpaceX accused of firing employees critical of free speech fan Elon Musk

Important detail missing...

Was the open letter sent from company email? (Or other company owned channel) Was it sent to the entire company? If so, they deserve to be fired. At a minimum for their stupidity alone. Company email (or other services) is private property and they can remove you from their metaphorical (or literal) lawn if they want. At every org I've ever worked for, use of mass email, or reply all, is verboten except for explicitly authorized official use. I think it'd be far more newsworthy if they didn't get fired for pulling a stunt like this.

Driverless cars swerve traffic tickets in California even if they break the law

Split the bill

As long as these cars are still effectively in beta, fine both whoever's in the car and the manufacturer. This early in development, the passenger should always remain alert enough to intervene.

Bricking it: Do you actually own anything digital?

If it can be viewed/heard

It can be copied, It's just a matter of at what quality. Worst case, someone can just set up a camera in front of the telly. There's obviously more sophisticated ways of doing this, some that operate entirely in the digital domain. Now where did I put that Betamax of the Star Wars Holiday special?

HP TV ads claim its printers are 'made to be less hated'

Less hated...

More loathed.

Avoid.

OpenAI makes it official: Sam Altman is back as CEO

Re: They’re all white men”

Any consideration of race in personnel decisions is by definition racist. Ditto for sex, religion, national origin, etc. Those things have no business being included in personnel files. If they must be included, they must be redacted (including names) wherever possible when an individual is being assessed for any personnel decisions. It's impossible to be racist if it's impossible to know the race.