Posts by Michael Wojcik

To build a better quantum computer, look into a black hole, says professor Brian Cox

Re: Why fund this stuff

Just proves that economists have zero imagination

You know all of them, eh?

Re: Brian Cox is smart

Indeed. The point of the Scientific Literacy movement isn't to turn everyone into scientists; it's to spread some knowledge of basic scientific ideas, and spur interest in the sciences. It's not perfect, but it's better than not making science popular and accessible to casual audiences.

The same can be said for any field, really. Give people a taste. Those with the inclination and aptitude may pursue it further; others will at least get a bit of mental exercise.

Re: What goes on in black holes....

Shortly after it got too close to the black hole.

Why are PC webcams crap? Lenovo says it knows the reason

Laptop cameras are generally crap

... in part because of the War on Bezels, which has caused nitwit designers to put them at the bottom of the screen, rather than the top, giving you a horrible perspective.

Though, frankly, the premise of this article baffles me. I do a lot of videoconferencing, and picture quality has never been an issue. I don't mean that it's good; I mean that it doesn't matter. Most people don't need very high resolution to interpret others' facial expressions.

There was a time when I routinely watched 200-scan-line black&white television programming, on noisy analog broadcasts. I didn't have any trouble figuring out what the actors were expressing. When I first started using videoconferencing for working, each participant's image was 320x240 with 8-bit color. It worked just as well as anything else has since.

Musk reportedly wants to gut Twitter workforce by up to 75%

It's likely much of Twitter's energy goes into trying to mine the stream of data for something they can sell. Actually supporting the stream is a fairly minor and not particularly interesting exercise.

Bias toward office staff will cost you: Your WFH crew could walk, say execs

Re: Same ol' blame shifting

I've been doing it for years and know just how important it is to meet customers and colleagues in person on a fairly reasonable basis.

I've been working from home for a quarter-century, and I often go years between face-to-face meetings with colleagues and customers. I have colleagues I work with daily whom I've never met in person. This has never, ever been a problem.

Different people are different.

Human-replacing AI startups reach $1bn unicorn status

Re: Four things I don't need or want

The goal of a firm like Jasper isn't to create useless baubles for gullible tulip-traders. They want to automate the functions of marketers, graphic designers, and similar jobs, so their customers can get rid of relatively-expensive flesh units and replace them with social-media-drivel-on-demand services.

Stable Diffusion is already plenty good enough to generate things like advertisement background images, backgrounds for video games, and so forth. People are successfully selling SD-generated images as original art. We've had algorithmic generation of financial and sports news pieces for a while now, and we have ML systems that can generate competent, if unsurprising, genre fiction. Icon Publishing has been selling machine-written non-fiction books on demand for decades, at a healthy profit.

Jobs like marketing/communications, graphic design, and animation are in near-term peril. They won't all be wiped out immediately, but the market will shrink significantly. It will be harder for new writers to break into genre-novel publishing, which is where most of the money is for fiction writing. I don't see any barrier to automating the writing of most television and movie scripts, because 95% of them are already just "take a concept and run it through the Save the Cat! machine, with a final pass through the Joss Whedon Dialog filter".

The later 2020s are looking like a grim time for workers in the "creative" industries.

And, yeah, the same scythe is swinging for the less-demanding sort of programming jobs.

Texas sues Google over alleged nonconsensual harvesting of biometric data

Re: Mr. Meseeks

Yeah. There's a bit of the stopped clock (right twice a day) here for Paxton, but mostly it's "hey, look over there!".

I take your point, but this is historically inaccurate. Most of the accused lived in Salem Village, which was a distinct settlement; the trials and executions were mostly in Salem proper. And the accusations were organic, with townsfolk accusing one another. It snowballed from a feud between two families into a general "let's get rid of anyone unusual" and then into a mini-Reign-of-Terror situation where players in the early trials were then accused themselves.

The whole thing would have been petty foolishness if it hadn't cost people their lives.

And that said, witch-hunting in the US never came close to what went on in Europe. But we took indigenous genocide and plantation slavery to a whole other level, so that's points for both teams in the horrible acts competition.

Musk grumbles about 'overpaying' for Twitter but says he's excited

Some organizations seem to have made the "no time tracking" approach work, according to a couple of pieces I've read. You do need to continue to evaluate employees based on productivity – and we all know measuring that is difficult, though it can be done with the right sort of structure and managers who actually do the job – and you have to be willing to tell under-performers to shape up or ship out (or verify they're under-performing for a good reason and they're worth investing in).

But certainly if you're going to let people work when they feel like it, you have to give them a reason to feel like it.

Hong Kong hopes to trawl the world for tech talent to build IT city

For very small values of 2

The chief executive declared that "The more firmly the 'One Country' principle is upheld, the greater strength the 'Two Systems' will be unleashed."

Rather a long-winded way to say "Shut up and work, peasants".

It's a bizarre metric anyway. Does Lee really believe that salary reflects talent? And that salaries are directly comparable worldwide in that regard? Even within an organization, salaries are often adjusted based on local cost of living, which does not correlate to ability in any way.

I mean, the "100 top universities" metric is clearly rubbish, but at least it might sound reasonable to the hard-of-thinking. The salary thing doesn't make any sense at all.

AI programming assistants mean rethinking computer science education

Re: The boffins say AI tools can help students in various ways

Pedagogy will have to adapt, just as grade-school mathematics classes had to adapt to successive generations of calculators.

For example, we're going to need to shift from "write a program" assignments to "explain a program" ones. This is the programming equivalent of "show your work". Literate programming¹ is one possible approach: students turn in a combination program and essay, with interwoven text and code, explaining what they've done and why.

"Flipped class" approaches – where students read or watch lecture material for homework, and work on assignments in class, individually or in groups – can also help reduce cheating, particularly if the instructor/student ratio is reasonable so instructors can spend time with each student on a regular basis.

Frankly, pretty much every academic discipline is going to need to address this. When I was last in academia doing digital rhetoric, I presented some research on machine essay generation, and pointed out that soon traditional essay assignments would be completely useless. (They already more or less are, for students with the resources to make use of "paper mills" or benefiting from the collections of papers maintained by various student organizations.) Composition long ago largely switched to a show-your-work model with students turning in multiple drafts and revising them based on peer-group and instructor feedback, and will have to continue in that direction. So will every other course of study that involves most sorts of unsupervised intellectual labor.

¹Though using something less arcane and cumbersome than Knuth's WEB system. Love the guy, but he has a fondness for eye-bleeding syntax.

Re: "In other contexts, we use spell-checkers...

Well, and this is one of the major problems with grammar/usage/mechanics/style "checkers": even when they analyze text correctly, they're applying an extremely coarse and dubious set of heuristics. They can help some writers in some circumstances, but returns diminish rapidly for authors who are well-trained or attentive to matters of usage and style, or for writing situations with conventions that don't match the assumptions of the team that built the checker.

Even style guides written by human experts are problematic. Richard Ohmann's classic "Use Definite, Specific, Concrete Language" punched a hole in the style-guide concept in 1979, and most people have yet to get the memo.

Re: "In other contexts, we use spell-checkers...

Computer science degree programs are going to differ among institutions, and the current accreditation guidelines here in the US are somewhat outdated and not really suitable for ensuring program quality or results – they're more about providing a baseline and providing a bit of credibility to distinguish between real and junk degrees.

And students vary widely, and the courses of study they choose, within their degree programs, vary widely.

Baccalaureate CS degrees (in the US) don't claim to denote any particular ability to understand complex algorithms. It's a general degree in the area of computing theory, computer technology, and programming. I've known people with CS bachelor's degrees who were not computer scientists in any way but excellent software developers, and I've known others who couldn't write code worth a damn but were off to a good start in theory.

Now, it would be reasonable to hope that a CS PhD would have some facility with algorithms; but even at that level there will be considerable range, and there are plenty of research fields in CS which are not oriented to understanding algorithms.

That said, people who work in CS education and care about it – Mark Guzman, for example – are certainly in agreement that CS pedagogy needs a lot of work, and that most departments and teachers aren't paying a lot of attention to the extant research and curriculum development. Some academic fields are relatively sensitive to pedagogical concerns (in the US, at the university level, composition and ESL are examples); others are less so, prioritizing other kinds of work.

Re: "Programming Is Hard – Or at Least It Used to Be"

what we generally refer to as logic (e.g. propositional calculus)

I don't think that propositional logic is what most people refer to as "logic". It might be what some specialists have in mind, but the majority of the population seem to use "logic" to mean something like "conscious reasoning" but following certain patterns which include informal versions of conjunction, disjunction, and implication; and for some people other aspects of informal logic such as logical fallacies and rhetorical theory.

And propositional logic is only the tip of the logic iceberg. After that there are existential predicates (first-order logic), second- and higher-order logics, doxastic logic, modal logic (of which doxastic can be considered a particular case, though doxastic is of special interest because in itself it's a complete formal system), and so on.

is a branch of mathematics

Yes, formal logics are very definitely part of mathematics. That is, they are formal abstract systems for expressing and manipulating sentences which are tautologically equivalent.

Re: An unmentioned (or unmentionable) issue

The article did raise that possibility, though it didn't discuss it at length. I don't know if it comes up in the paper by Berger et al. (haven't read it).

This was already a problem with, for example, the simplified code fragments used for illustration in programming textbooks, which often omitted input sanitization and error checking for clarity; with open source, from which a certain type of developer would habitually crib; and with resources such as StackOverflow.

I agree, though, that more automation exacerbates the problem. The easier it is to find a solution, the less likely some developers¹ are to search for a good solution.

¹As always, this is a question of economics. With any sort of labor, if you want quality, you have to provide an incentive for it. That includes, on the one hand, rewarding it – often by inculcating a culture of quality so the reward is at least partly intangible – and on the other not penalizing it, for example by over-rewarding short time to completion or other naive measures of productivity.

CEO told to die in a car crash after firing engineers who had two full-time jobs

Re: Judge on results, not appearances

Also having a camera on means you at least need to shower, comb your hair and have a shave, that puts you in a bit of more a working mood.

Perhaps that's what it means to you. I'm in meetings every day where most participants have the camera on (though if someone leaves it off, no one hassles them), and none of us are concerned about shaving and the like beforehand.

It's a cultural thing, and cultures differ among organizations. Here camera use is casual, and when we have them on, it's generally because we all know one another (even when we've never been in the same place physically) and are collegial. I wouldn't particularly mind getting polished for videoconferences myself, but due to time differences my meetings are often 7AM or earlier local time, and I prefer not to disturb my wife's sleep.

Re: Judge on results, not appearances

never make a phone call

What, and starve? Around here, that's the only way to order takeaway, if you want it to be ready in a decent amount of time after you arrive to pick it up.

(Some area restaurants have some ancient website built by one of those "we create websites for restaurants!" companies that features the menu in a barely-readable form, a phone number for the restaurant, and information about open hours which probably wasn't correct even when the site was created 15 years ago. I don't believe any of them have online ordering, and I wouldn't trust it if they did.)

Next-gen Thunderbolt capable of 120Gbps for 8K displays

Re: 10 bit colour

Eh, well, that's my feeling about 8K and even 4K. Actually, even HD, for television; for computing these days I exclusively use laptops with their built-in screens. (I lost interest in multiple displays long ago.) But apparently I'm in the minority.

USB 4 v2 unnecessariness?

India to lead drive for global crypto regulations to bust money laundering

Re: Regulate it?

By regulating it at the interfaces to systems they do have control over.

Governments can restrict the conversion of cryptocurrencies to government-backed currency. They can require transaction histories where such conversion is allowed. They can require reporting cryptocurrency holdings and transactions (the US already requires reporting cryptocurrency transactions in income-tax returns), and penalize those found violating those requirements.

All of these things raise the cost of using cryptocurrencies, so they reduce the pool of potential cryptocurrency users (because they'll remove the most risk-averse tier who would otherwise be willing to use them), and increase the friction of using cryptocurrencies, which will discourage their use for some transactions.

No one believes governments can completely wipe out cryptocurrencies at reasonable cost. What they can do is make them less popular, reducing the size of the problem.

Millennials, Gen Z actually suck at workplace security

Re: Cookies are not a security risk

Any information you give away is a potential security risk

Or more formally, for any action which leaks information from the system under consideration, there's a threat model under which that action increases risk.

Claiming that something "isn't a security risk" without specifying the threat model means that either you (i.e. the original poster) is not interested in being rigorous, or doesn't know much about security. In either case we can probably ignore that claim and its supporting argument.

Re: Being confident...

Indeed, there have been studies which show (for some value of "show") that IT workers are more likely to fall for certain classes of attacks because they're more likely to overrate their own security skills and practices.

Confidence in your own vigilance is not a good sign.

Cory Doctorow's story of how he got phished is a useful example of how security awareness only goes so far, and perfect vigilance is impossible. Humans aren't great at vigilance, and the systems we use aren't great at proving their authenticity.

Re: EY did not define ranges for the four generations included in the report.

And the generational-cohort terms were invented initially to describe economic trends in the US (the "Baby Boom", aka "Boomer", cohort was initially important because of its effects on things like school-system capacity), and then later to describe certain mainstream cultural trends, again in the US.¹

Using those terms outside those contexts is already suspect, and far more suspect when used for people outside US mainstream culture.

It's pop-sociology bullshit, a pseudoscientific excuse to generalize with no real empirical basis.

¹Most of the generational-cohort terms were coined by Howe & Strauss in 13th Gen, which was very much pop sociology and not any sort of attempt to be rigorous demographic or economic analysis. And I suspect the vast majority of people who like to throw around terms like "Boomer" and "Millennial" have never read 13th Gen (which is a pity, because it's pretty interesting if you don't take it as rigorous). Meanwhile, "Generation X" was coined by Copeland for a story collection, and he intended it to describe a considerably smaller group than what "Gen X" is now usually applied to. And H&S's "13er" was a better term anyway.

Re: "something only 15 percent of boomers and 31 percent of Gen X admitted to"

Yes. The problem is that OSes like Windows have simple password-complexity switches that admins can turn on, but not decent passphrase-entropy estimators that are similarly easy to enable. And there's no option in Group Policy for "multiple character sets OR at least N characters".

OS manufacturers (Microsoft and Apple in particular) and other big players (notably Google and Amazon, for AWS) decided passphrases weren't interesting, and jumped on the TOTP and/or biometrics 2FA bandwagon instead, conveniently ignoring the failure modes of TOTP devices and biometrics.

Re: Meh

Always a problem with self-reporting – it's very difficult or impossible to control for factors that significantly affect the quality of the reporting itself.

I do think, though, that there's no reason (empirical or theoretical) to believe "digital natives" are more likely to have a security mindset toward IT. And there are some reasons – vigilance fatigue, for example – to believe the converse.

Re: Bunch of whiners.

And for application updates, MSI is astonishingly slow. (The same applies to VSIX and other MS installers.) I can't figure out how Microsoft managed to create an installer technology that can take close to an hour to remove one version of a product and install another. I can create a VM and install an entire Linux distribution in the time it takes some Windows products to install a new version.

How GitHub Copilot could steer Microsoft into a copyright storm

When coding for a certain task, how many ways are there to display "Hello world"?

Theoretically it's unbounded – countably infinite.¹ In practice, it's limited by the size of the machine.

You can always take a working program and produce a longer equivalent program.

Now, if you'd specified sensible ways to display "Hello world"...

¹With a quantum computer uncountably infinite, I think, because then you're dealing with a probabilistic TM and that gives you access to the continuum. Haven't tried to prove that, though.

From my understanding of how ML works, that actually sounds like a very hard problem. These algorithms typically offer very few clues for why they chose a particular solution.

It's certainly difficult for transformer-based LLMs, or other stacked CNN architectures. There's a fair bit of research into explicable/interpretable machine learning, but it requires quite different architectures. While some attempts have been made to create explanation mechanisms for some aspects of machine learning (such as binary classifiers), there are strong arguments that this isn't going to be a useful approach for large models build using deep ANN stacks and we need to create interpretable models from the start.

Re: Major privacy issues

For that matter, if you really, really, really want GitHub, and don't want to use public GitHub, you can pay for GitHub Enterprise.

I think that's a daft thing to do, but then I think GitHub in any form is a horrible idea.

Founder of zero-emissions truck venture Nikola found guilty of $1b fraud

Re: Ummm, correction ?

To be fair, defense counsel really isn't doing their job after an adverse verdict if they don't file an appeal, and when asked by the media, they're similarly obligated to support their client. That's all part of providing adequate representation in the adversarial US system.

It may well be that the appeal is groundless (they often are, but a lawyer who didn't file an appeal motion would likely be accused of inadequate representation) and that in private the recommendation to the client will be to accept the verdict. But you have to go through the motions (literally, in this case).

What's more likely to be successfully appealed are the penalties, and for that Milton will definitely want his lawyer.

Self-driving tech startup values crash 81% in 2 years

Re: A VC and their cash are soon parted.....

Exactly. The VC calculation for a startup isn't "will this company be successful?", but "will this company have a profitable IPO?". (Or, alternatively, "will I be able to hand this hot potato off to the next guy who figures he's not at the end of the chain?".)

Firefox 106 will let you type directly into browser PDFs

Re: Nice!

Nah. The mouse gave me power of attorney.

Re: Nice!

I tried Sumatra some years ago and had problems with it (I no longer recall the details). But perhaps it's better now.

I agree that FoxIt, which used to be decent, now requires a hearty beating with the Settings stick after installation. Their PDF editor is similarly usable but immediately after installation the UI is like 70% toolbars and needs massive surgery to be looked at without suffering Lovecraftian breakdown, never mind actually using the thing.

Re: Keep up the good work

I supposed "flatten the layers" is good defense-in-depth, but honestly, the businesses and government agencies I deal with can barely manage to create a PDF in the first place. I greatly doubt they'd be able to figure out I hadn't scanned a signed copy.

The whole thing is stupid where I live anyway, since digital signatures have Been A Thing in most US states since the UETA in 1999, and the ESIGN Act in 2000 made electronic signatures valid under Federal jurisdiction. Asking for a handwritten signature is unnecessary under US law, and an indication that the entity you're doing business with is incompetent.

Boffins propose Slinky-like robot that can build stuff in space

walking compass?

Well, it improves on Donne's version of the technology, if not on the description thereof.

Re: Tech like this is going to be v.important sooner than you think

I haven't read the novel, but if the "Christmas Bush" is a conventional "bush robot", then the idea goes back to Moravec's 1988 book.

China-linked Budworm crew burrows hole in US state legislature systems

Re: Another Day, but the same threat profile

I refer you to the entire body of software security research.

Loathsome eighties ladder-climber levelled by a custom DOS prompt

Re: Suspected of playing games?

I wonder how easily one could obstruct an attempt to run an executable from elsewhere to mess with this guy

It's been, well, a while, but I think you could use the ASSIGN command to redirect a drive letter to a different device. So if he had been running games off A:, assigning that drive letter to C: instead would have blocked that activity until the assignment was removed (using ASSIGN again, or rebooting, etc).

Re: point of order

Yup. There was also IBM's internal MS-DOS editor E, from which the EDIT.EXE of later MS-DOS versions evolved. E supported multiple files with fast hotkey alternation of which was displayed, which was useful for visual comparison of changes. It also had a pretty powerful macro language.

Plenty of people used Wordstar or other word processors capable of plain-ASCII editing as programming editors. I used Volkswriter for some of my early MS-DOS code editing.

Al Stevens published source for a pretty nice programmer's editor over the course of a few issues of DDJ, and I expect it had its fans.

My father mostly worked on IBM mainframes, so he bought a copy of ISPF/PC, which was quite capable, if very ... well, IBM. I mean, you can't call it "ISPF" if it's not ISPF-like, yeah? But it did the ISPF sorts of things, and once you get used to that family of editors they're quite powerful, particularly for block operations and if you like folded views.

And of course Turbo Pascal came out in 1983(!) for $50 (not insignificant in those days, but cheap compared to the competition) with an IDE and an editor that was good enough (with both Wordstar key bindings and PC-like ones) that I knew several people who used just the editor for code in other languages. And Borland's "like a book" license and refusal to use copy protection meant many programmers were exposed to Turbo Pascal.

So, yeah, if you were using edlin, you were either working in a really restricted environment, or you weren't trying hard enough.

Re: point of order

COBOL is case-insensitive, for keywords and identifiers (latter possibly modulo linkage due to platform ABI).

US Dept of Energy injects more particles of cash into tokamak fusion reactors

Re: Topology

Hell, for that matter, so are all known experts in topology.

Re: Sperling messteak

Using the wrong homophone appears to be a common error among people who touch-type in English. (I don't have any rigorous research to cite offhand, but anecdotal confirmation is easy to find.) When your typing speed is fast enough, your conscious process is running word-by-word rather than letter-by-letter, so it's not hard for the cerebrum to trigger the cerebellum to whack out the wrong approximate match.

Boffins grow human brain cells to play Pong

"sentient" is fine

The etymological, technical meaning of "sentient" is "experiencing sensation". Inasmuch as this puddle of neurons apparently responds to changes in its environment, the term is fine.

It's primarily the less rigorous sort of SF which has used "sentient" as a synonym for "sapient", a rather different attribute.

99% of discussions of sentience are irrelevant and misguided. It's not the interesting question.

SpaceX reportedly fed up with providing free Starlink to Ukraine

Re: missed the point

Some people have other things they want to do than simply make money.

I have a friend who's quite wealthy, in the "owns vehicles he's never seen in person, much less used, because they were delivered to his various vacation homes" sense of wealthy. Lives in a multi-million-dollar luxury apartment in Manhattan, that sort of thing. He runs a couple of hedge funds and an executive placement service; he used to do some import/export and might still be. I don't know; he has his fingers in various pies.

I could easily be doing what he does. We have similar backgrounds and perform similarly in the areas necessary to get into that position. I'm not, because that wasn't what I wanted to do.

My wife could be making millions doing ... well, that's her story, so I won't tell it, but she could. Again, not what she wants to do.

(And, technically speaking, we have made millions, though our net worth is down a bit at the moment thanks to the vagaries of the economy. Making millions in the US these days is pretty standard for the professional classes. It doesn't go all that far.)

Any person of reasonable intelligence and organization starting from a sufficient class and social position in the US ought to be able to make millions, if that's the goal. For a lot of us, it isn't.

Weird robot breaks down in middle of House of Lords hearing on AI art

Well, that's that, then

Goodbye, Eternal September. Eternal April 1^st is here.

Re: I'm waiting for the AI fad to be over ...

4GLs!

In all seriousness, the original "Deep Learning" stacked-CNN architectures, while not (to my thinking) particularly interesting in theory or results, did lead to some veins of research which have produced noteworthy results. GANs, transformer architectures, the family that led to EfficientZero – these are legitimate advances in machine learning.

But that said "AI" remains an essentially empty and useless term, and having looked at a fair bit of the research I think we're still very far from human-like AGI, and probably any recognizable form of AGI. There are, of course, those who disagree.

Just $10 to create an AI chatbot of a dead loved one

Re: Business opportunities

Well, yeah. I'm kind of tempted to create a chatbot of "my dead self"¹ and set it up on a server to periodically spam my descendants after I fuck off this mortal coil. "Ha, I bet you wish I were still here instead of this thing!"

Or create one to do my Reg forum posts, to save some time. I have enough posting history to build a fairly good model.

¹Of course it is no such thing, but mistaking the map for the territory is one of our most cherished fallacies.

India set to extend deadline for absurd infosec reporting requirements

Re: REPORTING is an "essential national defence mechanism"?

That doesn't mean reporting isn't valuable, or indeed essential.

It's impossible to prevent all incidents. Perfect security is not achievable. For a system of moderate or greater complexity, it often can't even be defined in a rigorous manner.