Posts by Bebu sa Ware 2773 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Nov 2024
After they have hurled Intel Capital into the outer darkness I wonder if the now leaner Intel might drag their trebuchet over to Vermont to compete against the other trebuchet teams?
The record for a pumpkin over 2.67kg (5 lbs) is 268m (879ft) but I imagine with the dead weight of a venture capital vehicle and the desired distancing the Intel Trebuchet could better that record.
Trebuchets apparently have names bestowed on them by their constructors. Theirs might have been baptized Itanium. ;)
I suspect this necessity is significantly reducing the pool of talent available for the vast and diverse FOSS ecosystem.
The number of IT jobs is shrinking as is the renumeration which limits the time and resources an individual can contribute.
The graying of contributors is also likely a reflection of this. (In 2020 the median age of maintainers was between 35-44.)
Public institutions, such as Universities, through endless rounds of attritional restructuring have largely been stripped of the talent that traditionally added innovation and inspiration to the open software community.
One system I vaguely recall possibly from Linkers and Loaders involved the executable being built (or rebuilt) from the compiled objects at run time.
The executable was basically a text file that listed the components and versions constraints (like a Makefile or spec file) which the loader used to invoke the linker to produce the run time image (which I imagined was also cached.) I think libraries were just directories of object files. Given this was the 1950-60s the architecture was probably segmented which might have kept relocation to a minimum and increase sharing (of code segments.)
I was recently amused reading the final conclusion of Roscoe and Hellerstein in Lecture 7: The Multics Virtual Memory in that, for me, echoes Ecclesiastes 1:9. ;)
"Eventually: UNIX link-loading now posesses all the complexity of Multics, except that segments are emulated by allocating ranges of virtual addresses."
I asked them at the first stage of interview to write about their journey to the interview. I gave then a pencil and paper and left them in the room for 5 minutes.
Any bonus marks for starting the narrative in medias res?
You would be lucky to receive a cogent paragraph giving the instructions for boiling an egg (or in some cases water) from most of the population.
I thought of something similar namely a reading comprehension task drawn from a relevant technical domain followed by the production of a written précis of the material. (Writing effective targetted summaries is hard and mostly a lost art.)
There are a good many people with whom I have worked that I would not risk leaving unsupervised with a sharp pencil.
If I were the Newport council I would have allowed Howells to dig (by himself) with a standard (council provided) shovel during the usual dump opening hours, subject to his agreeing to and signing a comprehensive disclaimer. Can't get fairer than that.
Either the bloke is a complete looloo or more likely he convinced a number of slightly more deluded souls to "invest" in this hopeless project.
"I mean, if you want Artificial General Intelligence it's just a matter of software."
Implicitly "how hard can that be?"
"If you want a multitasking operating system with a graphical user interface it's just a matter of software.".
After nearly four decades Windows we wouldn't be too confident in emphasizing the "just" when it comes to software.
Software is hard. Hard to get right - correct and complete without even considering resilience.
Unfortunately as a society we have been for decades degrading the roles that were assigned the tasks which are now slated for AI/LLM system. From phone menu systems, outsourcing the roles to godforsakenparts and scripted responses, the declining service standards (or lack of) have now been accepted as the norm so any AI replacements have been set a very low bar.
Was it perversity that the first vocation that popped into my mind on seeing the headline was that of a fluffer the existence of, Wikipedia assures me, is rapidly becoming apocryphal* due to the advances in technology.
I unconsciously discounted tosser as an occupation which for the "hands on" aspect would have to be first cab off the rank although the C-suite and WEF† participants strongly suggest I was premature in my unconsciously discarding this calling.
Actually the "adult entertainment" is one of the few industries that easily benefits from contemporary AI/LLM - characters with distorted anatomy, magically acquiring and discarding extra appendages and limbs, should keep the audience experience fresh for years to come.
* in that those in the industry (fluffees?) disclaim their ever existing.
† sinister tossers.
I assume someone has already used a Raspberry Pi micontroller ( Pico? 2020?) to cover the gamut of effects in software. The gpio and ADC should be more than enough to crappify the signal to any desired end, The pedal could use wifi or bt connect to the effects box (depending on the hardware.)
The idea of building a CPU from 555 chips is really inspired eccentricity. I recall from a logic design course 40+ years ago* that nand and nor gates can each be used to realise all Boolean functions. So I guess you could use (a lot more) 741 chips to build the same CPU.
* Karnaugh maps cause that sort of trauma. ;)
Yeah. RTFM. All of it. And understand it.
With LDAP? All and Understand is at best a tall order either separately or together. Complex, convoluted and in places just plain daft.
But in this case I guess it was the ticketing system that was at fault as it would appear to support only one authentication service at a time (clearly didn't use pam and nss.)
Presumably the fix was to export the user accounts from the Oracle RDBMS, massage into ldif files and import into ldap or alternatively knock up a gateway from ldap to the existing Oracle system
Australians piqued? Outside inner city, cafe sociey poseurs the Australian is unlikey to be piqued but certainly is going to be pissed off and not being too particular, followed by a string of invective much of which is unprintable.
99% of Aussies wouldn't know a pique if one bit them on the arse (but it would have queue with the native wildlife for the opportunity.)
Corporate Australia will as always just accede to Microsoft's extortion but the rest might give them the middle finger.
Among the other problems would be.....NIST (!), the NSA (!), GCHQ, Five Eyes, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Cisco, the NSO (you know...Israeli spies)....and so on.....
Might be safer ignore the labelled products and buy unlabelled Huawei then only have deal with Chinese (PRC) state surveillance.
But just for the record, the last time the US invaded Canada, the british turned up in Washington and burned down the white house
A fairly decent wiki article on the Burning of Washington points out that this was in retaliation for the US burning York and Port Dover in Upper Canada but unlike the American actions, mostly sparing private property at the behest of Robert Ross.
Musk said Trump didn't have "the sort of character that reflects well on the United States,"
Trump called Musk a "bullshit artist."
While Space Karen was right about Trump I suspect the Orange Floridan does have "the sort of character that reflects the United States."
"Now I have to do is convince my boss to build an underground car park."
As I recently learnt from a 1930s John Bude crime novel, carbon monoxide can be manufactured from oxalic acid and conc. sulphuric (battery) acid which might obviate the need to build a carpark but not the carpet rolls.
CO (12+16) is "lighter" than air [78% N2(14+14), 21% O2(16+16)] which is probably why the requirement for a basement cf rooftop carpark.
Couldn't see the connection until I discovered BMS is building not business management system. Although restricting (curtailing) the oxygen to the coloured pencilarati offices might be just as effective especially if you can also scrub the carbon dioxide from their air.
While not necessarily a leg up in the fields of biology or civil engineering I suspect "the ability to have a shit and flush your WC makes you an expert" on "social meeja."
Being north of the "dumb useless elderly" line I can understand how this cohort is vulnerable to these scams. I am astonished by the number of erstwhile legitimate requests by government departments a all levels, utilities, banks etc etc demanding this sort of information with an implicit threat that if you don't comply fully "bad things" will happen. Just refusing point blank with a counter-request to put everything in writing either produces a more reasonable document or vanishes as after encountering a boojum. (I admit I'm snarky but....)
"tea made at 66 degrees?"
The recommended brewing temperatures in °C for the varieties: Black Tea: 93-100,Green and White Teas: 71-82, Oolong Tea: 82-93.
Electric kettles(jugs) with selectable temperature are available which make using the recommended temperature easier.
This assumes you aren't indulging in the barbarity of adding milk. Might as well add milk ice blocks and boil the buggery out of the hopefully cheap substandard tea leaves. Instant powdered black tea (shudder) was once a thing which I imagine you could add easily tepid water or heated milk without compromising the taste. ("brown fluid that is everything but drinkable tea!")
I cannot imagine the Japanese tea ceremony with a tiny robot puffing over the tea although I can imagine their producing an AI enhanced robot geisha but I suspect tea making wouldn't be high on the list of its functions.
Like most of the "also rans" at this show the product is an overelaborate example of poor engineering and design. If you wanted to cool tea etc more rapidly you might use an aluminium mug with a heatsink or include a usb-c powered peltier refrigeration in the wall and base of the mug.
Or just be patient and dunk your biscuit while waiting. Tipping your hot tea into the saucer to cool it and drinking from the saucer is apparently rather frowned upon. (Apart from Hyacinth Bucket (Bouquet) who uses a tea cup and saucer?)
Getting a bit slow - I was wondering what sort of boxes do cats come in these days.
In my younger days cats usually came as kitten, gratis, from someone with a surfeit of the blighters. Kittens would normally fit in and were carried in your hand(s) without the need of any packing. Kitty in a Box (best before?)
Realizing the box in which this hitech cat bed would have been shipped if you were so daft/gullible to purchase the bed, was meant, I admit cats do seem to prefer any old tatty cardboard box over even a "no tech" cat bed although baskets of clean laundry seem to be a favourite.
which we identify and terminate at the earliest opportunity, apparently. Those extremely gifted in the art of the real cockup are excepted especially in cloudy roles.
"When people are not performing, we take the appropriate action" - appoint them to senior management?
"how did they know that the manager didn't also put the message into Google Translate?"
I suspect "I enjoy the fact that my brown is eaten" might answer that question. ;)
I might imagine that mucking about with British English to Mandarin and back the two underlings could decode the mistranslations eg my brown = my tea (evening meal cf chá) and I enjoy the fact = I like .. the sum of such mistranslations could constitute a peculiar* English dialect. With enough practice they could possibly omit google translate and use their novel dialect directly.
"I enjoy the fact that [my] hops is drunk." -> I like to drink [my] beer.
"I enjoy the fact that the slave driver's totty is serviced." -> (exercise for the reader)
* arguably no where as peculiar as many extinct and extant dialects found in the British Isles.
Not straying too far from the truth but with stories like an Australian woman infested with a brain eating intestinal worm from snake poo, penned by Ars Technica's Beth Mole, we have hopefully deterred most septics from considering Oz as a great place to live or to annex.
The blind mitre dovetail joints are very neat (both senses.) I had to zoom in to see how they worked - more cabinet making than (bush) carpentry.
The bevel along the outer edges where they meet a very nice touch.
Also nice that the pencil marks across the base of the tenons indicating the depth of the mortise were left for the photograph.
I can only envy the craftsmanship.
How many knots is escape velocity?
40,320 km/h ~ 21771 knots (nœuds?)
I remember seeing a doco about an abandoned space gun in a US desert (Project HARP?) which projected payloads into I think suborbital flight but I recall my amusement at the artillery using wooden sabots to cocoon the metal payload. That the sabots could survive being shot up a 16" (~400mm) cannon speak to the toughness of dead trees.
Plywoods and other laminates incorporating very thin metal foils might be a viable construction material for space.
This is news to absolutely nobody working in this area. Labs are chock full of equipment that needs exceptions to IT rules to be allowed to be continued to be used.
The odder the instrument, the older it often is and the software even more peculiar. An ESR* machine running OS9 on M68000 probably not the worst but the upside is they rarely have any networking or at "best" an AUI or 10base2port which might be a challenge these days. A fair number running NT4 or OS/2 v2? not always on standard 286/386 PC hardware.
Cannot begin to imagine why anyone sane or otherwise would want to hack this stuff as the data stored on the computer attached to the instrument is ephemeral and often in closed formats only decipherable by the instrument vendor's software usually running on a separate more modern Windows PC.
Lab instruments are usually pretty immovable which makes securing their network access a little easier.
Generally institutional IT just pretends this stuff doesn't exist and completely ignores it but certainly excludes any kit in a "lab", even vanilla Windows desktops, from any support whatsoever.
* electron spin resonance not erythrocyte sedimentation rate
consequences for public fellatio of a politician.
I guess unless you swallow long and deep you are left with mud on your face (or something.)
But we had already guessed these tech billionaires were a handful of tossers and felatores so seeing them line up to teabag Trump should not come as a great surprise.
MAGA is likely the sound a sychophant make while choking on Trump although I never imagined that he could bring enough to the party to choke a gnat.
"12:00 midnight, January 1, 0001 A.D. (C.E.) in the Gregorian calendar."
Presumably 0001-01-01 00:00:00.000 is proleptic here as Pope Gregory's boss would have been born then - presumably on 0001-12-25 evening.
As previously noted times, dates and calendars are hard. Calendrical Calculations is highly recommended.
Consulting that text the date format above appears to be based on the rata die system.
Tariffs on imports were the rule pretty much globally until near the end of the 20th century when "free trade" and globalisation were spruiked notably by the US which lead to the US signing a number of free trade agreements with the world from which I doubt any party other than the US actually substantially benefited. You don't hear so much about GATT nowadays.
If the legislature permits Trump and fellow travellers to go down this path the serious economic consequences are going to be felt by all Americans.
Unconstrained protectionism is as bad if not worse than laissez faire free trade.
Leaving aside the "no shit Sherlock" I recall from formal logic, truth was satisfiabilty in all models which probably excludes any intuitive natural language notions of truth.
Even in the mathematical realm there are statements whose truth cannot be decided.
Formal verification and automated theorem proving are real, incredibly hard and light years away from the LLM nonsense to which this chap seems to be prostituting the former.
Just to formally model (3D) solid geometry in a simplified block world without adding a simplified physics is a non trivial undertaking.
I can see that adding successive layers of formal reasoning to fix LLMs' failings might be like stone soup with the stone (LLM) eventually being discarded along with the deceit that the resulting system possesses intelligence in any meaningful sense.
Legitimate scam? Not a contradiction in terms?
One ought to be licensed to employ a decent lump hammer in dealing with these cretins although I imagined nothing less than a thermal lance could penetrate their skulls.
I was curious about the name 3blue1brown as the dominant brown eye colour will give you 3brown1blue proportions in offspring from heterozygous parents. Warm but a miss. According to the Wiki page the name refers to Sanderson's right eye's sectoral heterochromia.
that this latter day Metternich, as doubtlessly Space Karen imagines himself, recklessly treads on such sensitive political bunions as say the Saudi regime that the repercussions put this popinjay back in box although the Saudis are unlikely to leave enough of the imbecile to put in a shoebox let alone a casket.
The new naming as as the elison of DELL with a subset of the Cartesian product of PRO, PRO MAX with BASE, PLUS, PREMIUM speaks more to the tiny minds of the bean counting fraternity than of any imagination or originality.
Redolent of the bastardization typified by the Orwellian "double plus ungood."
Starting with DELL PRO MAX PREMIUM and working down the range DELL'S branding geniuses might have just assigned an integer say 300 or 12 (US version) counting down in decrements of 25 (1) reflecting a physical attribute of the target market. Of course we might have some sympathy for the poor chap purchasing a plain DELL advertising a 100mm (4") endowment.
Always wondered what the 'P' in XPS meant but X could be excessive and A size I suppose.
at USD614.40 initially + USD50.12 per month thereafter for one terabyte a LTO-9 tape archive system might be a bit cheaper.
I suspect that the real problem is no one in the organisation wants to manage the organisation's data that is the hands of its employees (aka the users) over the life of that data and user's employment. Most of the bytes sitting under a user's (or employee's) home directory is at best ephemeral but more likely humourous kitten pictures and other assorted crap.
In many cases there isn't anyone specifically tasked to manage backup and archives (no Virginia they aren't the same thing) and everything is stored indiscriminately in the predictably vain hope that down the track records that are required might be retrieved.
Ideally everything an employee does within the corporate information systems should reside at all times only within that system.
"Personal" computers were perhaps the worst of many mistakes in corporate IT if only for the curse of Microsoft that they inflected on the rest of the world. That mistake compounded with cesspool that the "internet" became has brought us the shit everywhere, all at once and forever world we now must endure.
"Algol 68 was so damm complex it used what looks like 2 level BNF, which I think was too much for anyone but hard-core theoretical language specialists."
As noted elsewhere one language specialist was not entirely impressed -
Niklaus Wirth in 1968 speaking of the idea of algol68 being a "universal" language (probably meaning exhaustively multipurpose):
..."invariably lead towards a monster language, a species of which there already exists a sample hardly worth nor possible to compete with.”
I imagine he was thinking of IBM's PL/1 but could prophetically apply to C++ and few others I suspect.
Wirth was on the algol X working group ~1966?
The Bourne shell and successors preserve a trace of algol68 in the if..fi, case...esac constructs but not do...od as od was (is) a program to display binary files in octal, hex etc.
At least on android devices enabling a vpn service might be as easy as toggling a switch in your browser eg Opera.
The standalone ProtonVPN is almost as easy to use.
Even the floridan deficients should be able to figure that out, otherwise I suspect they would be find the content exhibited on porntube et al. incomprehensible.
I am curious as to how the age verification jurisdictions intend to enforce their legislation with when a resident accesses foreign (say Hungarian) sites. Some foreign sites do have an 18+ button which is highlighted and is no more than a continue button.
Being a BOFH in an organisation that had a no video download/streaming policy, and using a squid proxy one got to know from the traffic logs all the "naughty" sites. Curiously the org didn't have a policy that covered legal but NSFW (explicit) material until many years later - to limit traffic costs ie more concerned about the bits and bytes than the tits and boobs.
One thought on age verification could be for the site to display an image of a vulva and require the client to click on the clitoris to continue. :) Could exclude far more mature males than young teens (who in any case could locate the comprehensive and explicit Wiki article.)
《you just need to gamify[1] the process:》
I assume not gāmeify to avoid comparision with gāmey (of wild [hunted] game) of which one connoisseur opined:
"the taste of gamey meat very much comparable to rotting meat or meat that has started to rot."
which to my mind wouldn't be entirely inapplicable to the idea of gāmification.
I suppose your gămmon could a whiffy leg from a feral pig that is past its best before date and definitely gamey.
Also applies to both current and former Cabinet Ministers.
And the also rans of the aristocracy (and their spouses) Earls, Viscounts and Barons augmented by a ragtag of others including such luminaries as the serving lord mayor of Brisbane AU.
By no means a rabid republican, I am still appalled that in the 21st century we still countenance this nonsense of an aristocracy and feudal titles.
Perhaps Sir Keir and co might elevate Sir Nick to the Lords to keep Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton company. Baron Clegg of Rockall?
Considering the nonsense of British politics Gormenghast is hardly a satire.
