Posts by Frumious Bandersnatch

Japan relaxes privacy laws to make itself the ‘easiest country to develop AI’

Re: What was the Japanese Word? ...

I don't know the word and I can't find it in my dictionary but 袖下 (under the sleeve) might be what you're referring to? Interesting to think there might be an onomatopoeic word for it!

Even Microsoft knows Copilot shouldn't be trusted with anything important

for entertainment purposes only

So kind of like astrology/horoscopes? Wasn't there an article (possibly from here on el Reg?) comparing the effectiveness of calling MS support versus a phone-in astrology hotline? We've come full circle, it seems!

Firefox 149 adds a free VPN and finally plays nice with Linux dialogs

Re: Menus

I'll have one Halal Snack Pack, please, chilli and garlic sauce.

Anthropic struggling with Chinese competition, its own safety obsession

Re: A distillery?

IANAL either but I think that you're slightly wrong. AIUI, it's about validity of evidence: if it's gathered illegally then it can't be used against the accused.

I have heard of cases of prosecutors doing such a thing and then using a "parallel" chain of evidence that supports the claims without becoming tainted by the original evidence gathering processes... but that's a whole different kettle of fish.

Anthropic admits Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'

Re: Funny how tokens always get used up quicker...

They can go with the TiKTok model... pick a random "winner", shower them with tokens (or views, in the case of TikTok) and hope that one of those "winners" will hit the jackpot and produce some amazing "AI-"generated content that will turn them into proselytes. All those other users just weren't "AI-"ing enough, doncha know!

Turns out your coffee addiction may be doing your brain a favor

Re: Specificity

(FWIW) Japanese standard cup for measuring rice is 180ml. I've never heard of a "metric" cup---it just sounds wrong to me.

Nanny state discovers Linux, demands it check kids' IDs before booting

This is already a solved problem

1. Users set up an identity that can be used with ZK proofs (eg, a directed graph with a Hamiltonian cycle only known to the user)

2. Users authenticate this identity with a government agency (along with documentary proof of identity), which provides a "known to us" certificate

3. User requests some sort of permission/certificate linked to the presented (and authenticated) identity

4. Government (or their proxies) issues a certificate saying something like "if this user can produce an authentic "known to us" cert, they're over 18"

5. At point of use, the person anonymously (and with ZK) proves that they have the given permission to the service provider

No need for third party databases. Just PKI (like how browser certs are managed) and ZK proof mechanisms.

Or even go with something like fucking Kerberos. The technology we're talking about is ancient.

"They would rather have CSAM available for all"

And terrorism. We're all about the CSAM and terrorism here.

----> ah, that's where I left my BBOM

UK watchdog eyes Meta's smart glasses after workers say they 'see everything'

downvoted because...

nobody every said that there was such a right. Stop making up straw men.

Bcachefs creator insists his custom LLM is female and 'fully conscious'

a recent read

https://karpathy.github.io/2026/02/12/microgpt/

Covers the basic idea of how LLMs work including tokenisation, "attention" and how networks are trained to work in "chatbot"/"Eliza" style. It does assume that you know at least the basics of multi-layer neural networks, but you don't need to know much and those basics have been around practically forever so at least most people here will be able to follow it. It also covers how the largest LLMs are basically no different from the ~200 line Python code presented; the only differences being number of parameters and different optimisation strategies.

It should be clear from both the code and discussion in the linked article that talk of "consciousness" (emergent or not) or "gender" or "personality" with respect to LLMs is (and no doubt shall continue to be) a category error.

How the GNU C Compiler became the Clippy of cryptography

My reading here is that this is just one (easily-understood) example of why constant-time (aka, "isochronous") routines are important.

Re: Only one answer

on an embedded device

Cornish recycling drive sows confusion among Reg Standards Bureau

Re: we buy cheese in grammes and measure distance in miles, we drank beer in pints.

My favourite mix of measurements is making a roux with 50g butter, 50g flour and a pint of milk. Er, em, Béchamel sauce, I guess... the roux is the just fat/flour.

Linus Torvalds forgot to release Linux 6.14 for a whole day

The man is a genuine living legend.

Yawn. Wake me up when he finishes TAOCP and takes a brief diversion into creating T_EX.

(sarcasm, obviously, but in the best possible taste... legends, both)

Developer sabotaged ex-employer with kill switch activated when he was let go

Re: Speaking as a Java programmer of 30 years

:(){ :|:& };: is shorter

Hisense QLED TVs are just LED TVs, lawsuit claims

Quantum is the smallest possible measureable amount, so in that case they may well be accurate

Off the Planck with you!

How nice that state-of-the-art LLMs reveal their reasoning ... for miscreants to exploit

Re: guardrails

You and me both know that anyone who uses the word "guardrails" in anything but disparaging terms is using it as a form of self-hypnosis. Have an upvote.

Horses have an infinite number of legs

• Horses have four legs
• Four is an even number
• Horses have two fore-legs (product 8) and two hind legs (product 2)
• Therefore the total number of legs is 10 legs
• Ten legs is certainly an odd number of legs for a horse to have
• The only number that is both odd and even is infinity
• Therefore, horses have an infinite number of legs

Does this thing run on a 220 V power supply? Oh. That puff of smoke suggests not

Re: Dreamcast Economics & Limitations

(basically it's a heart-felt response to something that up with she cannot put)

Re: Dreamcast Economics & Limitations

Minor pedantry alert... the Japanese is "yurusenai"...

• Base verb "yurusu", 許す,
• potential form, "yuruseru", 許せる
• negating suffix "nai", 許せない

The English translation is close enough to "I can't forgive you", so that's cool. An alternative translation might be "intolerable!"

Linux rolls out the welcome mat for Microsoft's Copilot key

oh, it's in there now, isn't it?

talk if you can

Microsoft declares 2025 'the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh'

I was gonna post a comment here

that was so withering it would put certain private horse fetishist email groups to shame.... but it's like shooting fish in a barrel, innit?

Million GPU clusters, gigawatts of power – the scale of AI defies logic

Re: "the entire industry is chasing the AI dragon"

Nope, it's getting high on its own supplAI

Data broker amasses 100M+ records on people – then someone snatches, sells it

This is just the age we're passing through

We've had the long-ish period from that guy from Sun (I think it was) saying that privacy is basically dead to the current time where breaches like this have especially become criminals stealing from other criminals. William Gibson nailed it... the future is here, but it's just not evenly distributed.

I wish I could give a cheery outlook and say that everything is going to be all right, but I'm sort of equivocal on that. At least I can offer some wisdom from Leonard Cohen: "There's a crack in everything... that's how the light gets in." ("light" is kind of cheery, no?)

Stay safe, be well, y'all.

Japan to allow limited rideshare services starting April 2024

Re: Good luck with that!

It's not only that. If you want to be a "scofflaw" (as per the article) in Japan, you either strike out on your own (high risk, high reward, particularly attractive to western immigrants) or roll in with the existing local grey/black economy. (or do some other lower-level shit like promoting bitcoin or selling pornography). And if you're a non-western immigrant, you just keep your nose down and do your regular (healthcare, restaurant, combini, etc.) job so that you can eventually gain citizenship (and besides, you're not going to be able to change jobs without putting your visa at risk).

This foreign attempt at setting up a new grey economy is destined to fail.

Japanese brewery using generative AI to dream up new beverages

bucky + soda stream

as title

'Return to Office' declared dead

Re: Loud minority

THE UNIONS FOREVER! DE-FEND-ING OUR RIGHTS. POWER TO THE FACT-RIES! THE WORRRKERS UNITE!

"Down with the blackleg," surely? (I can't believe I had to apply the strike tag and all)

(Yes, "There is power in a factory, power in the land, power in the hands of a worker" but you are misquoting)

AI threatens to automate away the clergy

Re: Surprised....

THX

I checked it to make sure I was right, but for a while there I couldn't decide which order was correct. Letter blindness set in.

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

web4 succeeds!

... but before we can enjoy it we all die a femtosecond later, smeared into the lambo event horizon

Revival of Medley/Interlisp: Elegant weapon for a more civilized age sharpened up again

LISP never really grabbed me

Prolog, on the other hand... Paraphrasing Alice, it's a poor sort of predicate that only works with call by (already-instantiated) value.

BOFH: Groundbreaking discovery or patently obvious trolling?

Re: Ideal platform

It sounds like the ideal platform for performing fuzzy logic.

Yeah, but on a mobile device in bed

(someone should patent that, quick)

------>

Setun up for us, will you?

X looks back at year of so-called 'engineering excellence' under Musk

Re: So pay to play

At least Hercules cleaned out the Augean stables. I don't see any shit being cleaned out on Twitter.

Re: Move on already

*Weyland-Yutani (FTFY)

BOFH: WELCOME TO COLOSSAL SERVER ROOM ADVENTURE!!

It is pitch black.

You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Elon Musk launches his own xAI biz 'to understand reality'

Re: There’s that term again

gotta get up,

gotta get out

gotta get home

before the morning comes

what if I'm late

got a big day

gotta get home

before the sun comes up

...

Free Wednesday gift for you lucky lot: Extra mouse button!

Re: shift-insert for paste

Unfortunately, not all apps implement shift-insert in the same way. I would love it if all apps pasted what you have just highlighted (ie, do the same as mouse middle click), but Firefox, for one, pastes the contents of the main copy/paste buffer.

At least shift-insert works the way I want in terminal programs. It's particularly handy for mouse-free copy and paste between an emacs buffer and a terminal. Still very useful if I have to use mouse to select text in other source apps.

Boss such a tyrant you need a job quitting agent? It works in Japan

Re: taishoku daiko - the actual mechanics?

I am rather curious as how the taishoku daiko perform their task. In person? Can imagine it would be excruciatingly formal.

Not only in terms of business etiquette, there's also a higher level of language formality to deal with. Sounds like a difficult job all right.

Apologies JP speakers if I have commited a "the hoi polloi" on "the taishoku daiko."

No, it's not a "the hoi polloi" error on your part ("hoi" literally translating to "the?"). Japanese has no definite or indefinite articles, so when translating from Japanese to English it's OK to add one or some other surrogate word ("these", "such") as appropriate.

Creator of Linux virtual assistant blames 'patent troll' for project's death

I guess you mean s/invidious/vexatious/?

The Twitpocalypse may have begun, as datacenter migration reportedly founders

Re: Unrelated to this story,

I think there's been more than just two stories recycled over the last few weeks...

Twitch bans AI-generated Seinfeld show for making transphobic jokes

Re: Is the intelligence really artificial?

like "The Puerto Rico Day" or whatever they called it?

(obviously not trans- or homo- phobic, but extremely dismissive of Puerto Ricans)

No more free API access, says Twitter: You pay for that data

Re: They just did this in the wrong order

Yeah, and Travis Bickle was organasized.

(I don't know what kind of point I'm trying to make here, tbh)

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Re: Learn both?

"you had to guess if it looked new enough to be km."

You mean you didn't notice that the new signs were a different colour?

"forced to glide the aircraft, containing 69 souls"

While we're on the subject of archaic units of measurement ...