Posts by Sparsely the Lion

Avis alerts nearly 300K car renters that crooks stole their info

Avis

> Avis Rent A Car System has alerted 299,006 customers across multiple US states that their personal information was stolen in an August data breach.

That's gotta Hertz.

SpaceX grounded after fumbling Falcon 9 landing for first time in years

> It's funny that the agency that controls people flying small drones is also the one that controls potentially interplanetary spacecraft.

Not so strange - those drones get more and more capable every year!

EV sales hit speed bump as drivers unplug from the electric dream

Re: I was considering an electric car but...

> Manufacturers follow a standardised regimen for calculating range. The problem is that the test sucks.

It only sucks because the final "divide by 2" step is left for the buyer to do. :-)

Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project

> My other half finds it annoying that I use a sharpie to write on the back of all the mains plugs to identify what's connected to the other end.

See, another reason why the UK 3-pin plug is so much better - plenty of space for a label!

https://www.fastcompany.com/3032807/why-england-has-the-best-wall-sockets-on-earth

Study shock! AI hinders productivity and makes working worse

Re: Ah, the old one...

> I nearly always use prime numbers for number of mins past the hour or since boot or whatever, when scheduling tasks. It helps avoid collisions.

> Two jobs: one at five and one at 10 periods. They will run at exactly the same time, every 10 periods. Change one to seven and the other to 11. Now they will only collide once per 7x11=77 periods. Handy.

It's a good point that I don't wish to distract from but the pedant in me feels obliged to point out that 5 is a prime number. :-)

School gets an F for using facial recognition on kids in canteen

Re: What's the problem?

> Plus there's a big difference between "oh, that's what's-her-face, the girl that's obsessed with sharks" and having an actual record

Her name was Maria - there was a bit of a song and dance about her a few years back.

Forget security – Google's reCAPTCHA v2 is exploiting users for profit

Re: solve captcha to continue

> our US-data mistrained neural network

But it's okay - everything you're asked to identify has appeared in at least one episode of "Columbo" and/or "The A-Team" so the whole world should be au fait.

Agile Manifesto co-author blasts failure rates report, talks up 'reimagining' project

Re: Exemplars

I've got some good examples I could send him - but I'd have to wait until Talk Like a Pirate day before I could send him exemplarrrs.

Xen Project in a pickle as colo provider housing test platform closes

The jokes write themselves

I went to the Synoptek homepage to see who they are and in big letters it says "The Last Technology Partner You'II Ever Need."

No ambiguity there, then.

Backscatter brainwave could make IoT comms even more energy efficient

Can't see how it brings much benefit to IoT

Can't see how it brings much benefit for IoT applications as this just harvests energy for the data transmission. You still need, for an IoT device, a power supply to enable it to monitor whatever it is supposed to be monitoring and record those measurements until it is next 'pinged' for a data upload.

(There may be some cases where the measurement can be taken immediately at the time of the ping but even then that assumes there is sufficient energy to power the sensor and the RF comms.)

America's new Sentinel nukes mushroom 81% in cost. Pentagon says it's all good

America's new Sentinel nukes balloon

Am I the only one who scanned the headline and thought that the program was to produce balloon-launched nukes?

Yes? Okay -> icon.

Algorithmic wage discrimination: Not just for gig workers

TITSUP?

> Algorithmic wage discrimination, as described in an academic paper last year by UC Irvine law professor Veena Dubal, involves "the use of granular data to produce unpredictable, variable, and personalized hourly pay."

Totally Intended To Set Unfair Pay

Outback shocker left Aussie techie with a secret not worth sharing

Re: Mick...

Shirley, Mick "crocodile lead" Dundee?

If you're using Polyfill.io code on your site – like 100,000+ are – remove it immediately

LLM's

> If you're using Polyfill.io code on your site – like 100,000+ are – remove it immediately

Will the purveyor's of LLMs ensure that content from Polyfill.io is removed from their models or is the damage now done and Copilot et al will generate code that has the backdoor to China already built in?

[ I apologise for breaking GodwAIn's law - sooner or later in a thread a post is either written by or references AI ]

Julian Assange to go free in guilty plea deal with US

> Is this one of those party games? "Which historical figure would you like to meet in a dark alley at midnight?"

Florence Nightingale?

---> nearest icon

Bake an LLM with custom prompts into your app? Sure! Here's how to get started

Baking an LLM into your app is so old hat...

Why bake an LLM into your app when you can install it into the font you use instead?

https://fuglede.github.io/llama.ttf/

Britain's Ministry of Defence accused of wasting £174M on 'external advice'

Re: Impossible to get fired

> Impossible to get fired

That was the SA80 rifle which needed assistance from Heckler & Koch to make it work reliably. :-)

Humanity's satellite habit could end up choking Earth's ozone layer

Bamboo anyone?

The Japanese are experimenting with satellites made with bamboo instead of aluminium. Whether it just means soot in the upper atmosphere instead of aluminium oxide causing different but just as bad problems I've no idea.

After 13 years, Atlassian delivers custom domain names for Jira

Quit yer complainin

It's clearly a plus.plus.good.com solution

Asda IT staff shuffled off to TCS amid messy tech divorce from Walmart

Re: Run away!

> It will be up to affected staff whether they accept the offer of employment with TCS or opt for a redundancy package from Asda.

A redundancy package is very generous*. Normally declining a TUPE is treated like a resignation.

[*] generous in HR terms