Posts by Bebu sa Ware 2773 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Nov 2024
Looking at contemporary US society I suspect that horse had already long ago bolted.
The good people at Brown U. have finally bothered to look and discovered the stable door not ajar but lying in the dirt, wrenched off its hinges
Sounds like the not quite qualified UU wizard Rincewind on a good day when he wasn't fleeing imminent death or otherwise having a chat with the bony chap.
Windows and most other microslop could easily have crawled out of the dungeon dimensions.
> The **really** tricky part is getting the proposal beyond the ethics committee. The Trump administration would have a huge advantage there.
You could send the current head of H&HS ahead to pioneer the feasibility and evaluate the ethics. (And strike off one item from the top of your little list.)
Actually you could pack off the whole dismal administration in a team lunar kamakaze effort and tick all the boxes.
If you discount the "listening" as no more than "not talking" the interaction is pretty close to most human conversations.
How often has the futile exasperation of "Shut the fuck up and actually bloody really listen for once !" been heard on this planet ?
The answer, my friend, is pissing into the wind." (Sorry Bob.)
"Sure. I^H we will never regret it."
One assumes Temasek has done extensive financial, economic and other modelling before betting the farm… nasty suspicion they haven't but in the spirit of the times it is "vibe investing" which in the same spirit is equally enshittifying.
According to a Telsra media release the cause was the failure of its its time keeping services (from GPS ?)
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jul/08/telstra-outage-down-network-mobile-outages-today
This was from the CFO so season with copious sprinkling of salt.
I would have assumed the giant telco would have had an autonomous time source (atomic clock) but in our enshitified times the network probably depends on dodgy chinese knock offs of U·blox USB GPS dongles hanging off the back of obsolete whitebox PCs running Windows Vista.
Had this sort of thing using ipxe and using a small recovery partition or dhcp, years ago.
I assume the WinRE also uses a disk partition — if it were embedded in the firmware that might an additional feature and useful after a (system) disk failure. I suppose WinRE could also be netbooted using dhcp/pxe. Still nothing particular novel there.
Never had to dirty my hands with seriously dealing with Windows so a bit vague† about netbooting Windows.
† read as "complete ignorance of."
An honest handle. Commendable. Although really just wildly eccentric in the best English tradition, although Matthias Balwierz doesn't doesn't appear to be English — of course if he were, he would likely be chucked into Broadmoor or Dartmoor† for his efforts.
† Yes I know he would be chucked into a museum but you know what I mean and a typically British cockup in any case.
Dancing at the edge of the precipice.
I think Catastrophe Theory† tells us that as a system edges towards the precipice it becomes increasingly chaotic.
Choose a set of parameters that broadly describes the system you are interested in and look for increasely wilder fluctuations in those parameters.
After a while you will be convinced that a catastrophe is inevitable and use your judgment to decide when to bail if you have any skin in the AI game although if you did that argues a certain lack of judgment in the first place
† I am but vague about this as René Thom's work was from the 1970s and enjoyed a certain popularity like Lotfi Zadeh's Fuzzy Logic earlier.
Your phone's camera is quite good at picking up the IR from your TV remote (try it.)
If the cameras used for facial recognition were as sensitive, wearing headgear etc decorated with high power IR LEDs might saturate the camera's sensors (CCD?)
An idea for an urban anarchist's maker·thon.
(Personally I would go for concealing a high powered UV laser under my hat controlled by a system that locates any surveillance cameras and zaps their optics.)
> None of the downvoters care to provide a counter-argument?
I didn't push the down arrow because I don't reside in the UK and this is just one tiny part of the general fuckedness of that realm.
The reason I suspect no counter arguments were provided was they were manifold and obvious.
Take the statement "hey, I think that guy shoplifted last time" which is inarguably defamatory if incorrect which would retard even the most retarded counter jumper and would almost certainly afford more discretion to the security staff to exercise his or her judgment simply because the responsibilty is ultimately theirs.
The evil† implicit in this technology is that the security staff must act on the instruction issued by the system thereby abrogating the individual's responsibility to act with discretion and apply personal judgment to the particular circumstances.
† I use the word "evil" in its fullest sense. I am now convinced that the evil is not in the use of the technology but is implicit in the technology itself.
If that were true, Space Karen must read Adam's corpus with an entirely different interpretation from the rest of us.
Dogeboy is angling to be the terrestrial version of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation and/or the Magrathean bespoke planet construction biz. with a side hustle as emperor of Mars.
He would have to be Zaphod's "other" head. (The quieter one.)
> the US still relies on English Common Law
I think California and some of the south western state might be based on Spanish law (inheriting some of the Napoleonic code?) Florida was also originally a Spanish possession and the Lousiana purchase from France during Bonaparte's reign might mean some of the states there have some aspects of the French legal system.
I would have thought CIIIR might be better advise to pursue treason and rebellion cases against the illicit and seditious administrations in the US. Let Harry and Meghan rule over that rabble.
"Your (l)users can read?!"
Actually works the other way around.
The complete drongos just text or email a picture from their phones of the error screen.
The purportedly clever ones (post docs and up) confabulate incredible cock and bull stories around what they imagine the error messages mean.
Yes. They can read but whether actually understand anything they have read is arguable.
and out their arses.
"Best practice" covers a multitude of sins but almost never is the "best" in any sense whatsoever — fortunately most firms only practise them in the letter and not in the spirit… until the next best practice† turns up.
† ambiguity intentional
A purely rhetorical question I take it.
The answer is patently clear to all except the companies themselves although a case might be made for the likes of Altman knowing exactly what they are doing which is a far older practice than that of AI. I imagine Bernie Madoff might be glad to have a few new faces on his block.
Somewhere between "daily companionship" and "premium domestic services", I suppose.
Surprised that Bonkatronics isn't a major cross-discplinary area yet- no I am not thinking of S&M… well not particularly. Could make soft matter physics sexy again. :)
The prior art is a bit rough-and-ready. Seeing a young miss on u-tube screwing the head on to the body of her new (female) sex doll was one of the funniest thing I had seen for years. I suppose these new chinese ones - out of the box - will be able screw their own heads on like Worzel Gummidge.
When these type of tools (eg Satan/Santa) first appeared and our networks were scanned by the ITsec team we were bombarded with vulnerability reports for the Red Hat (RHEL) servers.
The omninesciences in ITsec could not internalise the reality that Red Hat froze a particular version of the kernel, libraries and application for a particular release and backported security and other fixes to those versions for updates. Seem to think (perhaps not), believe everyone should be running the latest bleeding edge distro in the weird belief that it would be more secure.
Fortunately at that time we could basically say "thank you for your valuable feedback" and (sotto voce) "now fuck off."
Until a few years ago running some of the big name vulnerability detection software on Linux servers happily chucked wobblies about suid binaries but completely ignored Linux capabilities on binaries like CAP_SETUID. Hopefully not the case now.
WikiP states 2036 as the earliest passenger carrying service.
Ten years, two five year parliamentary terms by which time the Screaming Raving Loony Party will have turfed the Slightly Quieter Raving Loony Party (aka Reform) out of government. Plus ça change…
Not that Australia's high speed rail project is shaping up much better but to be fair the distances are orders of magnitude greater.
an old school expert system could guide a solicitor or para-legal by ensuring all the bases had been covered.
Altman school hallucinations not needed.
I would have shit myself laughing if the AI drafted will hadn't revoked all prior wills.
In Queensland (AU) wills might not be that formal. A case a few years ago the court found that the intention of the deceased communicated by SMS could constitute a valid will (and was.) Although to avoid all the solicitors' delight of the lucretive legal argy-bargy a formal document would always be advisable.
The hacker might be a typical buff, 6-pack ab-toting geriatric el'reg reader.
More gruesome than the original grub was repellent. ;)
To be honest I suspect the average professional black hat could be anyone including a stunning young woman albeit with a Russian accent, on whom a bikini would be lethal.
Not think… mostly.
C and most languages of its vintage had (only) statically (compile time) sized arrays for various reasons but memory at the time was a precious resource which probably necessitated manual memory management for dynamic allocation (malloc/free.)
A lot of code allocated a fixed array of maximum expected size, had a pointer reference to it, tested the size so far and if it was going to overflow malloced a larger allocation and copied the original array to it and updated the pointer. A lot more code didn't, or tried and buggered it up.
Even pre C89 (K&R) it would have been smarter to construct a dynamic array abstract data type and get it right once and for all. Stdio and FILE* was sort of in that vein but not quite.
I think even pre systemd if you were logged into the console you could run any of the shutdown family as a normal user if the system was so configured.
Running reboot is isn't normally catastrophic as it's (usually) equivalent to shutdown -r now.
Mass deletey things are best done as a move first. ;)
mkdir .deleteme
mv mv file1 * .deleteme
ls # Oh dear !
ls .deleteme # At least I have a backup
As I postulated the whole C-suite (and direct reports) were incredibly sub-par in their gray matter allocation.
The current best·practice (sic) might go:
Although more realistically at this point:
Google will give you some results but the North Carolina cops published A Practical Total Synthesis of Cocaine's Enantiomers back in 1986.
Not that any rational person would want to put that crap up their nose but you would have to be completely doolally to place the efforts of a backyard would be synthetic chemist using this recipe anywhere near your person.
AI in this guise promises rich crop future Darwin Award nominees.
an expert system which is one of the few useful outcomes from the last AI wanka·thon over thirty years ago.
I imagine a number of the crew could be crossed trained in basic medical and emergency resuscitation procedures at least to be able to drive an expert system.
Every crew member would presumably have first aid training.
Pretty obvious if you were off to Mars you would want to leave your appendix behind unless you wanted "Mr Scott" trying his hand at abdominal surgery on yours. (There's a bit more to an appendectomy than keeping dilithium crystals happy, captain.)
I guess a list of possible medical conditions might be compiled (presumably you could omit obstetrics, pediatrics and geriatrics) but the unknowns of the effects of prolonged microgravity and higher radiation levels await the pioneers.
Trump is so toxic that he has even persuaded scientists that the government cannot be trusted. Period.
His US judiciary is not faring much better the trust stakes either.
To top off the complete insanity of this nonsense the US (at least the lower 48) are going to be as adversely affected as Europe and actually more so. Anyone with half a brain and who has the use of their eyes can already see the early signs of the disaster awaiting the US.
