Posts by Zack Mollusc

Scientists unveil a physics-defying curved space robot

Re: Flat out wrong

Damn it. I like your explanation better. I was taking their word for it re lack of friction. Well done.

Am I missing something?

From the overhead view, the centre of mass moves toward the 'gate post' when the vertical weights move as far as they can from each other..

So, if the centre of mass is near the post, when the horizontal masses move to the right and then stop, they will have applied a force on the horizontal arm, moving it left in proportion to the relative mass of the horizontal mass...

What I am struggling to convey is an idea of the leverage of the horizontal arm.

Stand on some ice next to a child's roundabou and hold the outside edge of it.t . Have a friend stand near the centre of the roundabout. Now use your arms to slide yourself a quarter of the way round the outside of the roundabout. If this crap analogy works, you will have moved relative to the ground and the roundabout will have moved the opposite way relative to the ground. The amount the roundabout and your friend have rotated will be proportional to the centre of mass of the roundabout and the leverage you get from the radius of the roundabout. Now get your freind to move tt the edge of the roundabout in a straight line so any newtonian opposite force he generates will be directed through the axis of the roundabout and so it will not cause the roundabout to rotate.

Now, if you pull yourself back around that quarter of the roundabout. Because the mass of your friend is now at the edge of the roundabout , you have less leverage to move him, so the roundabout will move less relative to the ground and you will move further relative to the ground.

Get your friend to move back to the centre of the roundabout and you, the roundabout and friend are now all back in your relative positions to each other, but the whole apparatus has eotated from it's initial position relative to the floor.

Sorry if your feet got cold.

Tesla Full Self-Driving fails to notice child-sized objects in testing

Re: Comparison

Beta testing normally means we're pretty damn close and just ironing out the last few wrinkles?

Really?

Observation of the industry leaders indicate.

Alpha :It compiles.

Beta : It compiles and doesn't crash much.

Release : It compiles and doesn't crash much and we put splash screens on it.

Updates: It compiles and doesn't crash much and maybe we tweaked the splash screens and we have increased telemetry.

EOL : The frameworks and libraries have altered enough that it no longer compiles.

Re: Comparison

Would the Airbus have detected a child on the runway? Or any other obstacle?

Not saying that a pilot would have done any better at landing a plane blind in fog, but I am sure the autopilot was not relying only on its own sensors to land the aircraft and was making a lot of assumptions .

Re: Comparison

Yeah, I think that the nerds at Tesla chose the name Autopilot because its functions and limitations are very similar to that of an autopilot on an aircraft. They didn't take into account that most of the public imagine that autopilot is a magical intelligent robot that can do anything a human pilot can do

Heck, most of the public probably have no idea how the car they themselves drive every day does anything it does.

Homes in London under threat as datacenters pull in all the power

Baffling!

For decades the UK has been restricting and reducing the size of the population whilst freely allowing new generating capacity to be built, so how can it have come to this?

What? The opposite of that? Oh!

Microsoft warns Windows 10 patch broke printing for some

anyone else remember....

..when the big appeal of windows was the support for a wide range of printers and it was easy to get lan printing to work?

Ex-Coinbase manager charged in first-ever crypto insider trading case

Re: Note to those who decided this was fraud

Well, at least my money is safe. I have spent it all on an NFT picture of Doge floating on a raft of tulips in the bubbly south seas towards the moon.

We've got a photocopier and it can copy anything

postcode resolution

Hmmm. Not sure you can resolve every pistcode to a geographic position within 3 feet. Some postcode areas are geographically quite large. the last 3 characters of a postcode give about 7000 permutations, which would be about 7000 square yards or a square of, er, less than a hundred yards on a side.

I can see the postcodes being distributed in some manner and the centres of each postcode being specified to within three feet.

Baidu crashes the cost of robo-taxis by 75 percent

Laughable

I see they plan to use AI to alter traffic light timing to reduce congestion.

Hahahaha! Silly Chinese! The UK has the only valid plan for reducing congestion, namely an ever-increasing population, closing or narrowing of existing roads, convoluted one-way systems and reducing speed limits.

Demand for smartphones is drying up

I'm just waiting for the contributions

I am eager to buy a new, fancy mobile phone and will gladly pay £2000 for a really really shiny one.

I am just waiting for the rest of the team to come up with their share of the money. You know, the phone manufacturer who gets all the telemetry, the phone company who snoop everything I do, the websites who track and profile me. Those guys.

Let's face it, they are the ones who benefit from all the clock cycles and bandwidth, so only fair they should contribute.

Being declared dead is automated, so why is resurrection such a nightmare?

Musical choice?

Lemmy was a good choice, but surely something by Hotblack Desiato would have been even more appropriate?

These centrifugal moon towers could be key to life off-planet

Re: Did you know

and he drives a Robin Reliant

W3C overrules objections by Google, Mozilla to decentralized identifier spec

Re: Nuke it from orbit.

Nicely provided!

Everyone back to the office! Why? Because the decision has been made

Re: Scheme

Sorry, Justthefacts, but it seems to me that you are conflating many job roles.

"we want you to do *less work*, while still achieving the output we care about" sounds like the workers are actually using their knowledge to create products. These people are not permitted to schedule meetings in person or on zoom, also the management above them does not care at all about their "output" .

" the job of your team is coming up with the *next* great product." is not a team that will be creating a product, but is a team which always measured time in meetings as productivity.

" the remote workers have completed the work in pipeline, while shirking the *responsibility* to ensure their company has an ongoing business " seems like you are blaming the pit ponies for the mine's unfavourable contract negotiations with its customers.

BOFH: HR's gold mine gambit – they get the gold and we get the shaft

Re: Favourite CPU socket?

Old kit was big and clunky, but 1 inch centres seems a little eccessive.

AI's most convincing conversations are not what they seem

Re: Osborne effect

I am more likely to buy the current model if it meets my needs because I suspect the new product will be using even more of my cpu cycles, bandwidth and electricity to spy on me and rip me off.

Leave that sentient AI alone a mo and fix those racist chatbots first

Re: Do androids dream of electric sheep again?

Kill the humans...End their culture...Kill the humans...Kill them all...Kill the humans...Watch them perish...

AI chatbot trained on posts from web sewer 4chan behaved badly – just like human members

But where do all the calculators go?

Fully automated AI networks less than 5 years away, reckons Juniper CEO

Re: Debugging

Duh. you just tell it to fix itself!

British motorists will be allowed to watch TV in self-driving vehicles

Often it is the other road users who are invisible to cyclists. The cyclists are blissfully unaware that a queue of cars is opening a gap to let another vehicle pass through at right angles and pedal cheerfully into the danger area.

Re: too poor to ever own a car.

Well, the buses get their own stopping places ,special lanes and entire roads while cars get crammed into what's left, which seems like a huge subsidy for public transport to me.

Re: Too early.

If the AV is to outperform a meatbag at high speed driving, it will have to be monitoring events much further in front of it in much more detail than current lidar and camera setups. I have yet to see any AV demonstrating awareness of a vehicle a quarter of a mile away, and with half a dozen vehicles between it and the AV, changing lanes or beginning to brake or both.

Re: Clippy behind the wheel

You say that driving better than a human will be easily achievable. They were saying that ten years ago and haven't managed it yet.

Adapting the roads and highway code to accomodate self driving cars is just admitting that self driving cars can't do the same job as a human.

too poor to ever own a car.

If the poor are too poor to afford a car, how will they be able to get to work and generate the wealth for everyone else? Cars are expensive, but not as expensive as public transport.

AI-powered browser extension to automatically click away cookie pop-ups now promised

Re: Who could possibly have predicted...

The website designers are the ones who put up the dialog which you need to click 'accept' to use the site.They could design the website without tracking cookies, but they choose to indulge in shitty practices.

The EU wonks are just raising awareness of the shitty practices of the website designers.

US Army to build largest 3D-printed structures in the Americas

Re: Finally- a solution for the homeless

I couldn't volunteer to kill a load of people, that would be unethical. Much better to create people at a lower rate so the total population shrinks over time.

Re: Finally- a solution for the homeless

What is needed is fewer humans. Demolish the low-rise buildings to build high density housing and in a few years you will need to demolish the high density housing to build ultra density housing and then a few years later demolish the ultra density housing to build infinity-plus density housing.

WBA OpenRoaming promises seamless access for municipal Wi-Fi

Seamless access

..... so this is a standard that allows users free access to wifi access points that would otherwise be inaccessible due to the use of encryption?

Isn't this like putting all my biometric data on a card which I then present to security to prove I am me?

Boston Dynamics' latest robot is a warehouse workhorse

Re: When all the jobs are done by AI and robots...

That is a long-term question. Companies do not consider the long term.

Half of bosses out of touch with reality, study shows

Re: And the other half will bugger off…

Well, they will only struggle to attract the best talent if they actually try to attract the best talent. How many companies actually try to attract the best talent or indeed recognise the best talent when they trip over it?

400Gbps is the new normal for biz networks

Poor microsoft coders

This can only bring misery and exhaustion for the guys at microsoft as they rejig everything to be even more bloated and untrusive to piss away all that bandwidth.

The robots are coming! 12 million jobs lost to automation in Europe by 2040 – analyst

what will managers do?

It will be interesting to see how management will cope with robots that run 24/7 . How will they assign additional tasks to said robots and how will they persuade the robots to get by on reduced 'pay' ie kW/hours?

US-China chip cold war? It's only helping the Middle Kingdom, silicon makers warn

Re: Sanctions

Meanwhile the UK was crippled by the parasitic capitalist management that infested every company and institution, which ensured that any kind of rewards or promotions had nothing to do with the quality of the work.

Weeks after Red Bee Media's broadcast centre fell over, Channel 4 is still struggling with subtitles

Keep up the pressure

The stressed engineers will get no thanks, extra pay or resources no matter what, so keeping up the pressure by slagging off their management as clueless overpaid useless fat bastards on all possible public platforms is the way to go.

Record-breaking Kuwaiti heatwave triggers inadvisable TikTok expletive outburst

Re: Why are they getting all the heat?

You nesh bugger. I put the aircon on when it gets above 17 degrees C.

NASA sets the date for first helicopter flight on another planet – and the craft will carry a piece of history

Wrong!

You are forgetting that Earth == America.

Internet samurai says he'll sell 14,700,000 IPv4 addresses worth $300m-plus, plow it all into Asia-Pacific connectivity

why so cheap?

IPv4 addresses have been running out for years, with much wailing and prophecying of doom, so why are they only worth 20 dollars ? You can't even buy a toilet roll for that.

Boss planning to tear you a new one? Google Glass is back: Weird workwear aimed at devs, but on sale to all

Re: Privacy of others

Good point. There is no way for an operating system to intercept the data of an application running on it.

Microsoft takes us to 2004 with new Windows 10 so you don't mistake it for Server 2003

Re: gaming platform

Neat. I won't need a powerful PC to render locally generated 500fps 8k video, I will just need a stable 90TB/s internet connection.

Tonight on Tales from the Crypto: It lives! GPU flinger Nvidia bouncing back after miner affair

Re: design wins

My eyes can see in total darkness much better than LIDAR as long as, like the LIDAR,I am allowed to use a bright light source to illuminate objects and interpret the reflected light.

Remember the Uber self-driving car that killed a woman crossing the street? The AI had no clue about jaywalkers

Re: What's the standard for success?

The person had almost completed crossing a three lane road before impact. The car was probably not in sight on the empty road when the person began crossing. The published logs of the car have it first detect the person over five seconds before impact. Plenty of time to either fully stop or change lanes to go behind the person.

Re: Surely

You won't be able to train that. Where would you find any examples ?

Re: Don't forget the orientation

I agree that the car was not trying to track possible threats before trying to identify them, I contend that the sensory input has not the resolution nor accuracy to reveal the course and speed of the possible threats and that sufficiently sensitive input would give too much data to process in real time with computational resources that would be practical to fit in a car.

Re: Surely

Well put. I would add that the AI seems quite relaxed about vaious objects teleporting into existance near it while it is travelling at 44mph. "Pfft, that thing that I have only just become aware of will probably stay out of my way. Oh, I can't see it any more, maybe the road is haunted or something. Ooh, a different thing has appeared even closer to me, well it might stay where it is or something, oh good it seems to have vanished again so i can just forget about it, hey another thing has appeared even closer to me and even closer to my path, i assume it is nothing to worry about..."

Re: Reasonable defaults

I very much doubt that the pedestrian was the only 'unclassified' object the car saw on that journey. I bet the 'AI' sees an enormous number of objects that it cannot classify or accurately position and if it tried to drive conservatively would get nowhere.

Don't forget the orientation

The person was pushing a bicycle across the street, thus the bicycle and its shiny hard metal surfaces was broadside on to the car's sensors, giving the best possible chance for detection.

A cynic might think that the problem is data processing. If you give the car enough sensors to give a detailed and accurate picture of its environment, the computers needed to interpret all that information in real time won't fit in a car (or maybe cannot be built).

The eagle has handed.... scientists a serious text message bill after flying through Iran, Pakistan

Fake news!

Nothing in this article makes any sense. Eagles have been migrating for hundreds of years, why would they need to use GPS and why , when 'eagle-eyed' is a byword for keen vision, would they miss the fine print and get hit by roaming charges?

We're going deeper Underground: Vulture clicks claws over London's hidden tracks

building roads tends not to decrease traffic congestion. All it does is increase traffic.

"building roads tends not to decrease traffic congestion. All it does is increase traffic"

I think it more a case of building roads at a slower rate than the population increases tends not to decrease traffic congestion. All it does is increase traffic .

Inrcementally increasing bandwidth on a saturated channel will not eliminate contentiion when the demand is also inrcementing.

Oh dear... AI models used to flag hate speech online are, er, racist against black people

Re: crafted in the style of African American English (AAE)

I don't think racism and offence work that way. A statement is made by entity A. Entity B hears the statement and decides if it offends entity B . If entity B is offended then Entity A is racist for making the statement.