Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson

Debugging source is even harder when you can't stop laughing at it

Juju-flop and turlingdrome I can countenance, but I draw the line at Belgium

BOFH: Putting the gross in gross insubordination

Very nice indeed

Selling the car to one of the accountants as a preemptive move shows real cunning

BOFH: Gaming rig for your home office? Yeah right

Simon is on form, these days!

"... and even signed you up to host your mother's bridge club and offered to open up your garden to influencers' photo shoots."

Now that is pure evil, right there.

It's amazing what computers might do all on their own. Carl must feel so much safer with the BOFH watching over him.

BOFH: All hail the job cuts consultant

Best use of AI I have seen so far

But it is still not as smart as the devious mind behind it

Superb episode

Beware the techie who takes things literally

Re: In the manner of the BOFH....

Or he would have found a use for that old carpet and the store of quicklime

Make assistive driving safe: Eliminate pedestrians

Stay in lane features can be a menace, I have found. Overtaking a cyclist typically does not require going to the opposite lane, but I do like driving around them rather than through them (personal preference, others may feel differently), as the lane assist would have me do. It is totally unnerving when the car (a rental Volkswagen Passat) basically tries to take over control of the wheel and nearly drives you into a bike. Don't get me started on the various alarms going off when trying to back out of a parking space, because the proximity sensor detects the presence of a wall in front of the car. A wall you are clearly moving AWAY from.

I am so glad my own car has far less AI (alleged intelligence) built in

BOFH: The Geek's Countergambit – outwitted at an electronics store

Superb episode once more

Colin and co may be good, but are they as ruthless as the BOFH? I very much doubt they get through as much quicklime as Simon does.

Trio of Rust Core Team members take their leave

Interesting. We had one who loved green beans and beetroot. He also had a fixation on grapes (which he hated when offered, but tried to steal when we were eating them)

Cats are mysterious creatures

BOFH: On Wednesdays, we wear gloves

Superb episode

Simon making full use of Gary's fertile imagination.

Something 4,000 light years away emitted strange radio bursts. This is where we talk to scientists for actual info

Nop-notch boffinry!

The universe never ceases to amaze

BOFH: What a beautiful classic car. Shame if anything were to happen to it

I needed that

That was the perfect birthday gift

Re: Ever alert

Absolutely lovely detail. True craftsmanship!

Billionaires see wealth double during pandemic as tech bros lead the charge

Why does Jef Bezos want to have industry in space?

In space, he can't hear is employees scream

Snap continues to make a spectacle of itself as it tries to trademark the word spectacles

You could see that decision coming

Especially with the right prescription specs

Sorry, couldn't resist. I'd better get me coat

On Christmas night, a computer logs a call to say his user has stopped working…

Sexing goldfish using MS Office

Brilliant phrase. Might want to use that for special occasions when asked to do the impossible ...

again

BOFH: The vengeance bus is coming, and everybody's jumping. An Xmas bonus hits me…

Brilliant episode!

True BOFH Xmas spirit. Just the thing I need to steel myself for the impending visit to the parents-in-law

The Filth Filter is part of the chipset, honest. Goes between the TPM and SEP. No, really

Re: I now need to revise my 2022 goals for work...

My thoughts exactly. Absolute BOFH material, that man

BOFH: Time to put the Pretty Dumb F in PDF reader

Buggier than a bullfrog's breakfast

That had me in stitches

Might use it on some of my students (but only if they really deserve it)

BOFH: What if International Bad Actors designed the vaccine to make us watch more Steven Seagal movies?

Re: Loonies are reading this

Are they really downvoting posts, or are the nanobots making you believe that? ...

Sorry, couldn't resist. I'll get me coat

BOFH: You drive me crazy... and I can't help myself

Re: Genius

All that's missing is some quicklime

BOFH: So you want to have your computer switched out for something faster? It's time to learn from the master

My thoughts exactly. It might have been the fact that the user in question wasn't blatantly lying that may have exempted him from a database normalisation warning

I would drive 100 miles and I would drive 100 more just to be the man that drove 200 miles to... hit the enter key

Re: "So my urgent 200-mile round trip ended, …

Reminds me of the "IMPOSSIBLE ERROR" message I got from the wonderfully named D02BAE routine from the NAG Fortran Library Mark 14 on the Cray J932 way back when. I was running multiple instances of this ODE solver in parallel, and it turned out library had not been compiled for parallel execution properly (brilliant, on a 32 CPU shared-memory parallel machine). This meant only one instance of the the named common block used by the routine was created, so the 10 instances I was using were happily overwriting each others data, causing such confusion that an IMPOSSIBLE ERROR was generated.

Not a hardware fault, but it took some hunting down

AI caramba, those neural networks are power-hungry: Counting the environmental cost of artificial intelligence

They don't even do statistical analysis. If they did, they would be able to put confidence limits on their classifications at least.

The power issue is a serious one. Last year we published a "hand-crafted" method for stereo vision for a gardening robot that was perhaps not quite as accurate as some deep learning methods, but ran happily on a Raspberry Pi, as opposed to a powerful laptop with GPU. The accuracy was good enough for the purpose of the robot not running into trees.

Volkswagen to stop making its best-selling product for Wolfsburg workers: VW-branded sausages

They must prepare for the wurst!

Sorry, couldn't resist. I'd better be going.

Mine's the one with the book of bad dad jokes in the pocket

BOFH: 'What's an NFT?' the Boss asks. In this case, 'not financially thoughtful'

Some NFTs are just too hot to handle

Someone was bound to get burnt, and it wasn't going to be Simon

Great episode again

Come fly with me. But first we need to find a boot device

Sentient Urinals?

I stood and wondered why the urinal in the motorway service station in Germany needed to reboot Android.

More cryptically, another such urinal had the message "Slave cannot connect to master ... Retrying"

Next up, urinals with the GPP feature, or defocused temporal perception, causing them to start sulking in basements

Without a trace: Baroness Dido Harding to step down as chair of NHS Improvement

Re: Not a career move I'd fancy

I nominate Baldrick. He should have a cunning plan

BOFH: They say you either love it or you hate it. We can confirm you're going to hate it

I suppose...

the marmite contain a high concentration of quicklime

BOFH: But soft! What light through yonder filing cabinet breaks?

Superb episode!

"In my peripheral vision I can see the PFY reaching for the workplace accident report form, but I shake my head slightly and take the Boss into the server room."

Priceless. I must say I was mentally reaching the same conclusion as the PFY

Here boy! Making the Sample Fetch Rover that'll collect soil from the Red Planet

Amazing boffinry

Very complicated mission indeed. Ten years is a long time to keep your fingers crossed

BOFH: Where there is darkness, let there be a light

Like they say

Mondays I have Friday on my mind.

Now doubly so

Re: Definitely pick which battles you want to fight...

"Mice, keyboards, headphones, cables - all consumables."

Absolutely, and all are readily consumed by fire

BOFH: Here in my car I feel safest of all. I can listen to you ... It keeps me stable for days

Brilliant, just briliant

Simon is on form these days!

DARPA nails cash to project 'FENCE' — a smart camera that only sends pics when pixels change

Potential problems: trees, leaves, wind and sunshine (or clouds)

This bears a striking similarity to a traffic camera system produced by a local IT company I visited a decade or so ago at least. The aim was to let traffic cameras only record the passing cars, and stay shtum when there was no traffic. So a simple image differencing method was implemented, and if the sum of absolute differences between consecutive frames was sufficient, the system started sending a burst of frames, until the situation became static again.

Some traffic cameras, happily transmitted continuously from sunrise to sunset, especially on windy, sunny days, when the pattern of the shadow and light caused by the sun shining through the trees along the road caused loads of pixels to change, without any actual vehicle or person passing by the camera. Rushing clouds could trigger similar problems, as could snowflakes, hail, or rain. In the end they had to do far more advanced object recognition, in particular recognizing license plates to make the system robust (pedestrians and cyclists were not of interest in this system).

No doubt the boffins and DARPA will have thought of this

Radioactive hybrid terror pigs have made themselves a home in Fukushima's exclusion zone

Re: If Marvel taught us anything

So we can order a bucket of BBQed piglet wings shortly?

Study finds crayfish treated with antidepressants become more outgoing, adventurous

I wonder ...

Would this work on elevators sulking in basements?

Surely these researchers are gunning for an Ig Nobel Prize. If they aren't shortlisted already, I might nominate them

Hubble’s cosmic science is mind-blowing, but its soul celebrates something surprising about us

best of the best bodgerissimae

A phrase to cherish. Fingers crossed someone has an uber-smart idea to fix Hubble one more time

BOFH: Oh for Pete’s sake. Don’t make a spectacle of yourself

Stupidity Cancelling Headset

I want that!!

BOFH: When the Sun rises in the West and sets in the East, only then will the UPS cease to supply uninterrupted voltage

Re: Poor cyclist

Depends on which size catapult you use

Poor cyclist

"The year Richard was born I set a company record for how fast a VAX 11/780 would roll down the road from our building. I could've got a world record if it hadn't been for that cyclist."

I did my MSc thesis work on a VAX 11/780. Big hulking beast, and everyone complained their vi or emacs editors slowed to a crawl whenever I was running thermal simulation software on it. I actually found my shiny new 80386 at 25 MHz with a Cyrix 387 co-processor and a whole 8 MB of RAM outpaced the big hulking beast by quite a margin.

Lovely episode. It was inevitable Dick was going to go for the practical exam

BOFH: Despite the extremely hazardous staircase, our IT insurance agreement is at an all-time low. Can't think why

That's a nice insurance policy you have there

it would be such a shame if something happened to it

Simon can really make you an offer you should not refuse

BOFH: I'm so pleased to be on the call, Boss. No, of course this isn't a recording

Brilliant!

Excellent ideas for surviving zoom meetings there. Must start recording some footage, and learn to play guitar

BOFH: But we think the UK tax authorities would be VERY interested in how we used COVID support packages

Stairwell or Elevator

it could only end one way

Yep, the 'Who owns Linux?' case is back from the dead

Re: The question of who?

Note to self: Don't read commentards' comments with a mouth full of tea.

On the plus side, it does rinse the nasal passages

Turns out humans are leading AI systems astray because we can't agree on labeling

I don't like saying i told you so, but ...

I frequently rail against claims made in AI papers that if the ground truth contains a percentage of errors, any AI system trained on them is likely to end up with a similar actual error rate. I have seen people claim an increase in performance from 97.6% to 98.1% (error bars not included) on data sets where there are two ground truths, drawn up by to medics, which are at odds with each other. In our own earlier work, we managed to get a sort of pareto optimum of 92.5 ± 0.6% on both ground truths, but were in places penalised for finding blood vessels the doctors had missed. It turns out, somehow ground truth 1 has been elevated to The Ground Truth, and the other demoted to "a human observer". And now AIs are better than the poor "human observer" simply because they have been taught to copy all the mistakes the other human has made.

If ImageNet contains up to 6% error, I will continue to take all claims of 99% or better performance with a considerable pinch of salt. Furthermore, if error bars ar not included, how can they claim to be better than an earlier method if the differences are sub 1%.

I am not saying deep learning and CNNs are useless, it is just that sloppy science does them a disservice.

Yes, there's nothing quite like braving the M4 into London on the eve of a bank holiday just to eject a non-bootable floppy

Must have been Fourecks, if it was clearly so terrifying

BOFH: Bullying? Not on my watch! (It's a Rolex)

"Not without write access to the HR archive they can't!"

Brilliant, I needed that

BOFH: 7 jars of Marmite, a laptop and a good time

Bloody briliant episode again

The marmite is a very nice touch indeed

You would expect a qualified electrician to wire a building to spec, right? Trust... but verify

Re: You would expect a qualified electrician to wire a building to spec, right?

Ever since I found a green and yellow wire carrying mains current, I have very little faith in wiring installed anywhere. I ALWAYS check everything myself