* Posts by Neil Barnes

6209 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Apr 2007

Qualcomm unveils Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 with Eye-of-Sauron camera

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Hmm

Pictures that are made up. Cameras that are always on. Artificial Stupidity on the phone by default.

You're not selling this...

Microsoft defends barging in on Chrome with pop-up ads pushing Bing, GPT-4

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Mushroom

Cookie warning messages that require you to run a script to get rid of them...

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We can forgive those who thought this was malware at first glance.

How is it not?

Intel's $699 Core i9-14900KS turbos to 6.2GHz – assuming you can keep it cool

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Re: "...the x86 giant now has a...processor...that it says will do 6.2GHz right out of the box..."

Exactly. How many folk have applications that benefit from a 3% clock speed interest, particularly when you have to hang around for the beastie to cool down before you can do it again?

Now when I was a lad, processors ran at megahertz speeds...

Caffeine makes fuel cells more efficient, cuts cost of energy storage

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Curiously

One of my main uses for caffeine is as a photographic developer, https://www.caffenol.org/recipes/ , where it performs a similar role (in my limited understanding of the chemistry).

Rancher faces prison for trying to breed absolute unit of a sheep

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The mammoth should, of course, be bred with mice. Producing a fine range of three inch high and three inch long mimmoths!

(Thanks to the Professors Foglio for that one.)

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Re: "The .. crime we uncovered here could threaten the integrity of our wildlife species in Montana"

Round here there is a problem with wild boar. Every now and then they have a boar hunt; stick a few signs on the roads warning of hunters, dress in camo, and then man and dog are carefully arrayed in hi-vis jackets so they don't accidentally shoot the wrong thing.

US Congress goes bang, bang, on TikTok sale-or-ban plan

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Joke

Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act

PAFACAA? Who comes up with these names/acronyms? This one sounds like a crow with a cough.

Can AI shorten PC replacement cycles? Dell seems to think so

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The incentive is I am likely to be getting some newer second hand laptops... (what? They don't run AI models? What a pity never mind.)

Cisco is a fashion retailer now, with a spring collection to prove it

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Coat

Re: What's trending

I trend. Others follow, or not, just as they please.

(What's this mania for wearing other people's advertising *without being paid for it*?)

The unbranded one, thanks --->

Singapore's central bank warns AI isn't ready to handle monetary policy

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Boffin

Magic 8-ball

Reply hazy, try again later.

Filing NeMo: Nvidia's AI framework hit with copyright lawsuit

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Holmes

neural networks that meet today's needs

So we want search engines that make up the answers if they don't find them, image generators that can't count arms, writing systems with added blandness?

Amazing. I never knew.

Climate change means beer made from sewer water, says North Carolina brewery

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Re: Maybe...

Isn't 'AI' already producing sufficiently shit results?

AI models show racial bias based on written dialect, researchers find

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Re: Bias that matches society?

Just the west?

How to Netflix Oracle’s blockbuster audit model

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It's a sort of threat. I've never been terribly good at them.

An engine that can conjure thrust from thin air? We speak to the designer

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Thrust to drag ratio > 1

Seems, um, tricky. You've got to get all that air in somehow, and there's not a lot of it around, before it gets squirted out of the back...

Hey but what do I know? I just fly a paraglider, and never get anywhere near the Karman line.

Nano a nono: Pixel 8 phones too dumb for Google's smallest Gemini AI model

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Still waiting...

for the day when I will be benefited by having a statistical way to summarise audio recordings or reply to messages on my behalf.

Boeing paper trail goes cold over door plug blowout

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Re: Real information and professional insight

Juan at Blancolirio is my other goto...

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Surprising as it may seem, there are a number of youtube channels around made by serious people, knowledgeable about their subject, who have something important to say.

They are vastly outnumbered by the 'I was shocked!' brigade, and even more so by cats, but some are worth watching. Mentour is one of them.

Font security 'still a Helvetica of a problem' says Australian graphics outfit Canva

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Am I alone in not trusting web fonts

and blocking the sources thereof from browsers?

Somewhere, sometime, something went wrong between the supposed device independence of HTML and the coloured pencil brigade's desires to control the look of the screen.

Boffins propose fiber-optic network for the Moon

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They're going to need one hell of a big cable drum

to fit a couple of thousand kilometers of fibre, so they can get round to the far side...

US accuses Army vet cyber-Casanova of sharing Russia-Ukraine war secrets

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Just for curious...

What happens in the US if you're fined significantly more than your assets (I don't know how much cash the miscreant has in the bank, or what happens to his pension, but I'm guessing nothing much and nothing good respectively).

US and Europe try to tame surveillance capitalism

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Stop

How many times?

"a unique and persistent device identifier" with its Jumpshot analytics business to track internet users' activities – including "each webpage visited, precise timestamp, the type of device and browser, and the city, state, and country."

It's none of your fuckin' business.

And websites wonder why people use advert blockers and script blockers...

Tiny Core Linux 15 stuffs modern computing in a nutshell

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There is a certain charm in using a system which contains all that you need it to - and nothing more, though. This was (is?) the premis of Gentoo.

And yes, I know I can go through and remove all the unneeded modules, but it's a bit too much like hard work. I'm tempted to try this and see what happens... though there will be automatic bloat, I feel, as soon as I install the first program that requires Java, for example.

HDMI Forum 'blocks AMD open sourcing its 2.1 drivers'

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Re: Does AMD

Yes. I suspect that AMD very much wants to be able to write HDMI on the side of the box.

But I also suspect that if e.g. they made a displayport output which just happened to go through a HDMI-style connector and claimed 'compatibility' they'd probably be fine: isn't this what the Raspberry Pi does?

(I am not an expert at video at those sorts of resolutions - and how that applies to the higher resolutions I don't have the faintest idea.)

Lenovo to offer certified refurbished PCs and servers

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Happy

Exactly my philosophy for years:

1) Somewhere, someone has to have a new shiny shiny

2) Two-year old shinys get evicted

3) See ebay

4) I get a new shiny, usually ridiculously overspecced for the original owner

UK tax agency's digital services not good enough to take strain off phone lines

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Indeed. I'm still awaiting an urgent return call from June... 2021. They're much faster when I sic my accountant on them, and the website was, um, strange, but I managed to pay some excess tax. But I haven't yet received any notification that they're changing next year's tax code in consequence...

Oddly enough, replacing my expiring passport as a foreign residence was a piece of cake: posted it about a fortnight ago and the replacement back this morning. The website is single-minded, asks straight-forward questions, one to a page and with mostly yes/no answers... designed for idiots and so suited to me.

The Who’s Who of AI just chipped in to fund humanoid robot startup Figure

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Terminator

nor any roles that require inflicting harm on humans

Like making them unemployed?

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

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Re: Owners of Fastrack FS1 smartwatches have reported the clocks being stuck

None of my watches have sufficient complications to have more than a date ring with the numbers 1-31 marked on it. So they're all quite happily showing the 29th. Of course, tomorrow is the 30th.

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: Oh, come on - this is elementary

Well, possibly not. But Clickspring's reconstruction of it, now *that's* shiny enough :)

OpenAI sued, again, for scraping and replicating news stories

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Headmaster

Re: So how do you stop this?

Google translate recently changed 'half-finished' to 'finished' in an English-German translation for me.

Neil Barnes Silver badge
Childcatcher

So how do you stop this?

Other than the obvious approach of taking a large axe to the memory banks...

Is it necessary to retrain the entire model again, without the (potentially) offending material? Or are the designers hedging around with tests to say 'if the output looks like this: <> then don't do it/apply credits'? I know too little about these statistical models, but what I have seen recently suggests that for the average bloke on the Clapham Omnibus, they're not holding any great benefits.

ALPHV/BlackCat claims responsibility for Change Healthcare attack

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Holmes

'claims responsibility'

= 'admits guilt'

Should make it easy in court.

New solvent might end winter charging blues for EV owners

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Alert

Re: Fluoroacetonitrile

* DIspose of battery responsibly

* Do not cut into or otherwise damage battery cells

* Do not short circuit battery or cells

* Do not eat

Willy Wonka event leaves bitter taste with artificially sweetened promises

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Coat

exarserdray lollipops

I don't know how I've lived so far without them! Is it too late to apply for one?

Uncle Sam tells nosy nations to keep their hands off Americans' personal data

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Re: My irony meter just broke

As the owner of a handful of ancient shares part of which appear to generate minimal returns in the states - I've just had to fill out a US infernal revenue form to account for automated withholding. It delights me to realise that the costs of posting the form to me significantly outweigh any tax due on a 40c dividend...

Neil Barnes Silver badge
Holmes

Stop banning the sale of data.

Start banning the collection of data.

Starting over: Rebooting the OS stack for fun and profit

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Re: In the absence of files...

This, one hundred percent. And add to that, a player in the car which will accept an external music store - either bluetooth from a phone, or from a USB memory stick - but which offers a very tedious way of moving between directories, starting at the top of the tree every time, and will only play the contents of one directory in serial order. Or random order, if that's your choice (which on a long journey it often is; I like to be surprised) but only of one directory. Neither parent nor child directories are included.

I finally located a phone application which will allow both playing a complete album and playing tracks at random and can stream music from their to the car bluetooth. It would still prefer me to make a playlist... sigh, life's too short.

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: In the absence of files...

What happens to a 'file' which has no owner? You've deleted the Olympus application, and the Sony program, and Irfanview, and Lightroom; nothing remains on your computer that owns those pictures. So now what?

Or building a new system, which you might like to have things similar to your existing system. So you copy your data across, but how do you associate it with any new applications? File types? Magic numbers? Other metatdata?

In answer to The Spectactularly Refined Chap upthread, I'm not trying to dismiss out of hand the new and unfamiliar. I'm trying to understand how it might work for me... but I am reminded of the observation that 'if you can't open your data with something other than the original application that created it, you don't own it. You are hostage to the original software'. We all know how well a 'standard' format for word processors worked out... requiring a file type to be owned by a particular mediating program, and that all access to that data be through that program, well, that worries me. It's too similar.

Neil Barnes Silver badge

In the absence of files...

How do you differentiate between the zillions of pages of deathless prose you have composed, and scratch notes that can be deleted? How can one generate a file with one program and open it with another? (Something I do very regularly). Perhaps I'm missing something obvious?

(as a side note, I observe that a number of music applications seem to have given up on the idea of, for example, selecting a music album and playing it from start to finish. Instead, there is just one big pool of tracks, which one curates with playlists. I find this a pain - surely, the producer of the album has already curated it for you? (And I ignore the extension of this to not owning any music/not having any on your local storage))

Boffins caution against allowing robots to run on AI models

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Headmaster

Place the letter R with green and blue stripes into the...

See, that's the problem right there: it's having a grammar error!

One puts things into or in, but one places in or on (or under or alongside or... other prepositions are available)

ESA's ERS-2 satellite began to come apart earlier than predicted

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Why no pictures?

Just a 'said...' link, with no hint that there might be pictures there.

Still, I suppose it's better than linking to twitter images.

Microsoft trying to stop Copilot generating fake Putin comments on Navalny's death

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Re: Autonomous cars and other road users

Um, no, the requirement is (at present) that the brake lights are illuminated when the brake pedal is used. Operating at the start of brake pedal movement is a good idea; it provides a few tenths of seconds advance notice that something is likely to slow down.

The proposal is that that be changed to use actual deceleration values, which has advantages in that it will respond both to engine braking and pedal braking, but doesn't do anything until the car begins to slow. So I would suggest that both methods are used. I have no idea what's being discussed in the automotive legislation at present.

Man admits to paying magician $150 to create anti-Biden robocall

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Re: For my next trick...

I like it in Germany: the governing group is the Traffic Lights - red, green, and yellow - with outliers from the far right (we're not nazis, honest!) and left (Communists? Us?).

I much prefer a system where no one party has an absolute mandate and discussion and other points of view have to find their way into state decisions.

Intuitive Machines' lunar lander tripped and fell

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I believe the Japanese one just sprung back to life with the coming of daylight.

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Pint

from Apollo days there wasn't one mission that went absolutely perfectly

True, but I don't remember any that landed on their side... obviously getting a human in the control loop has certain advantages!

Nonetheless, kudos and one of these for the team --->

Of course, 'pictures or it didn't happen' is all a bit passé now. But I'm still looking forward to seeing them.

Greener, cheaper, what's not to love about a secondhand smartphone?

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Foldable AI

IDC believes that on-device AI, and to a lesser extent, foldable models, could entice more consumers to purchase new phones.

Not this one, for either. But then, I'm not in the market for top end phones. I'd settle for one that could just make network phone calls...

Multiple billions up for grabs as UK government launches cloud services tenders

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Happy

Re: This is almost bibilical

Do you suggest that the fine language of the King James Version is not suitable for tender ears?

(My father used to add the suffix 'and well he might', usually when complaining about something I had done...)

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Re: This is almost bibilical

John 11:35

Lenovo debuts AI PCs that have specs a lot like vanilla PCs with this year's accelerated CPUs

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Re: Transparent display on laptops

After all that effort to provide high contrast displays with black backgrounds, I know, let's replace them with something of much lower contrast with the added disadvantage of your view being cluttered by whatever is behind the screen (as well as Aleph0's observation).

Hell, I won't even have semi-transparent windows on screen.