Posts by The Indomitable Gall

Japan stops measuring train crowding by ease of newspaper readership

Re: Fishy

The difference between a Pilchard and a Sardine isn't mere naming though... That would be like proposing just calling every litre a gallon and thinking that it wouldn't mess everything up....

EU accuses Microsoft of antitrust violations for bundling Teams with O365

I don't think you're being particularly fair to single the EU out for that -- this is a problem with all public sector regulation, really. No goverment body is really able to react quickly enough to deal with changes in the market, and that was all fine 40 years ago, but the speed with which markets appear, evolve and mutate into unrecognisable form is now just blisteringly fast.

Raspberry Pi unveils Hailo-powered AI Kit to make the model 5 smarter

Fair point, but then again, there's still a matter of training vs running. Training an AI is a lot more work than running one, and anything you could train on a Pi is not going to need the full power of the Pi, and that's whether or not you have this card in your Pi.

We're back to the days where the devs need a far more powerful computer than the users. To get a model that uses the Hailo to its fullest, you'll need a more powerful machine to train the model, probably with a NVidia 40 series card in it.

Re: Losing the plot

Ah, sorry. My excuse is amensia following major head trauma.

Stick to computer games, folks -- being in the real world is dangerous!

Well, with even MS Office now available as a web app, the days of the dedicated PC are numbered. The Hailo kit pushes this further, because if local beef needs to go AI, then users don't really need much at all.

However, the Pi will never be good for training AIs, so developers are going to need PCs still....

Re: Losing the plot

More that that, I was actually kind of word that the Pi Foundation were missing the very real possibility that homebrew AI was going to be a new part of the "makerspace" that Raspberry Pi shoots for. The first Pi was leading the curve for makers by putting a computer at a pricepoint where it was competitive with microcontrollers like Arduino on small scale, but not on large scale. The Pi was a useful steeping stone for embedded, because it was easy to use standard tools and just throw extra processing at it to avoid the need to optimise firmware early on.

Now that things are becoming clearer, I can see that AI is still going to need a PC... for training. I think the Foundation are really onto something here, because no-one uses the Pi as their only computer. This means we're going to get geeks using their NVidia megabeast video card for model training, and instead of only being able to use the models on that PC, they'll able to run it on a much smaller thing.

By 2030, software developers will be using AI to cut their workload 'in half'

""Considering that by 2040 other researchers have suggested most code will be written by machines,"

I already have multiple 2040s, and I haven't been able to get a machine to write a single program for one.

BBC exterminates AI experiments used to promote Doctor Who

Doctor Who in a Starfleet uniform

I see no mention of this in the Bootnote itself, but the picture ofDoctor Who in a Starfleet uniform is absolutely fascinating because what I'm seeing is an actor who appears to be a mutual cousin of Peter Capaldi and David Tenant (or maybe if Tenant had a kid with Capaldi's daughter). It's just mind-boggling that the AI could generate family resemblances that way. But logical, I suppose, other than the fact that I don't see Matt Smith or Jodie Whittaker in the mix....

Yes, I did just crash that critical app. And you should thank me for having done so

Are you suggesting Outlook is in any real sense a modern client? Seems like a dinosaur in a fur coat pretending to be a mammal...

Elon and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad legal week

Re: Odd, isn't it?

Every single one of "his" ideas is something I read about old mid-20th-century adventure comic annuals I bought in 2nd-hand fayres in the 80s. Vacuum tubes, self-driving cars, big one-piece rockets, rockets for international Earth travel... it was *all* in those books. He must have just been reading the same stuff, and he internalised it as "the future". And now he's mistaking things he saw presented as "the future" as a child as his ideas and vision for a great future.

But there's a reason those things never got beyond kids comics...

Re: Odd, isn't it?

Rumour has it he wanted to use vacuum tubes instead of conveyor belts, too, and was surprised when engineers told him why that wouldn't work....

Meta kills Facebook News in the US and Australia

Re: “You Must Carry Our Content ... And You Must Pay Us”

So if they make content at their cost, they should pay for people to read it for free? I don't think you understand how capitalism works.

Windows 3.11 trundles on as job site pleads for 'driver updates' on German trains

Re: RESPONSE IN CAPS

It does save him from having to hit the caps lock every time he writes COBOL and RS232 though...

Cutting-edge microscopy reveals bottled water has 'up to 100 times' more bits of plastic than previously feared

Re: Should have tested beer

Cloudy beer is on the increase for fashion reasons -- I think you've just predicted a big move towards this in the market.

Re: Relative purity

No, that's not relative purity, really... it seems a lot like absolute purity to me, because you're doing a one-dimensional measure of "how many impurities does it have", with no concern to what they are.

Water that's swimming with bacteria is relatively purer than water containing nano-plastics from one point of view: the consumer can just boil the bacteria-laden water before they drink it, but there is no consumer tech to remove microplastics.

Companies have not necessarily reduced overall risk -- they have eliminated known problems that have had known solutions for generations, and they've introduced new problems with no known solution.

Re: Nanoparticles in water for the past 5 billion years

Yes, but you're glossing over the important part difference between things we have been consuming for multiple generations and things that haven't been used longer than living memory. I think plastic bottles were introduced to the market after WWII.

Re: Sales argument

You're ignoring the fact that science is kind of saying "well, you know how we said they were biologically inert and therefore safe...?"

OpenAI: 'Impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials'

Re: The American way !!!

Nononono.

You're only allowed to rob banks if your dad was filthy rich.

And even then, you need to dress your bank robbery up as a sophisticated economic model that says that robbing people will make them richer.

That's the real law of the markets!

Ah, but don't you see...? If Elon Musk had been allowed to copy ecisting cars, Tesla would have never had problems with the brakes. Copyright kills!!!

Re: Sounds like...

The implied consent related to selling you a book is that you will use the information within for uses that are common for many people. Finding a new use for it and then saying that it's not infringing because you bought a copy... well that's just rubbish.

Here's a counterpoint:

if I was to build a university programming course leaning heavily on (eg) Kernighan and Ritchie's text, I would be expected to list it as a set text in order that students might buy it. The students might then go on to teach themselves, and it is accepted that there will be similarities been how they were taught and how they go on to teach, but this is an expected result. Crucially, they will forget details of how K&R's Book on C was, and will instead be passing on information based on their internal model of concepts. AI does not, at present, have any model of concepts -- the second L in LLM is for "language".

LLMs create language based on language; humans creat language based on [i]ideas[/i].

I believe that "ideas" are key to the notion of a "creative step".

Doom is 30, and so is Windows NT. How far we haven't come

Re: No imagination any more

I suspect that's deliberate, as people were probably changing Team names for their own reference without realising they were changing something on the SharePoint configuration for all team members. I can imagine a few self-defined "clever" wags renaming teams to "*snore*" or "timewasting corporate comms" and getting hauled up for it in the before-times.

Native Americans urge Apache Software Foundation to ditch name

Re: Bit ridiculous

Maybe it took them a while to believe they might be taken seriously...?

Q: How many members of the Apache identity groups are involved in producing the software "Apache"?

Re: Bit ridiculous

Seems to me that Germans don't have a problem with Nazis being portrayed as homocidal, myth-believig luantics. Because THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT THEY WERE. Notice that the Indiana Jones films have lunatics at the top of a very rigid hierarchy.

Re: Bit ridiculous

Yes, but I'm going to ask a question: what nationality/ethnicity are you?

Would you be OK with a product taking on the name of your own identity group even though it contained no workers of the given group?

Who would think it OK for a group of Scots to make "English mustard" in a facility in Scotland? Or for a group of English people living in England to open a farm rearing purported "Scotch beef"?

Realizing this is getting out of hand, Coq mulls new name for programming language

Re: There are two hard problems in Computer Science

I would agree, but then again the language is called "Calculus of constructions" and not "Calculus des constructions". If the name is basically English, you really have to consider the other things about Anglophone culture.

Et oui: mon français est superbe ; ainsi j’ai bien sûr le droit de dire ce que je viens d‘écrire.

Data loss prevention emergency tactic: keep your finger on the power button for the foreseeable future

Re: Another sign of the migration of El Reg Westwards?

The good news is that the early indications that the tumour was back have proven to be a false alarm.

The bad news is that we;ve instead ended up with acute appendicitis, and they're refusing to take us to general surgery to get it sorted.

Block this: Using satellites to plaster ads over our skies could work, say boffins

Re: UK will be OK then

Yeah, but how is summoning a hereditary millionaire playing dress-up as a flying mammal going to help us here...?

Musk says Starlink will keep providing free service to Ukraine

Thunderf00t is a wazzock...

Thunderf00t may be an irritating blowhard, but he's good with numbers.

Here, he discusses Musk's figures:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qGg6wiXoSc&t=620s

Summary: Musk's alleged "costs" seem to be ticket price rather than cost price. Thunderf00t speculates that this is creative accounting aimed at turning it into a massive tax write-down that will be net profit for SpaceX. He also speculates that SpaceX may be in the financial trouble that Musk himself predicted not too long ago...

Brexit dividend? 'Newly independent' UK will be world's 'data hub', claims digital minister

Re: I guess that's the main aim?

Hmmm....

" References in this Regulation to the processing of personal data for the

purposes of scientific research (including references to processing for

“scientific research purposes”) are references to processing for the purposes of

any research that can reasonably be described as scientific, whether publicly or

privately funded, including processing for the purposes of technological

development or demonstration, fundamental research or applied research. "

I reckon "technological development or demonstration" gives a very broad definition of "scientific research". Like... writing a website on the origami might even qualify.

" References in this Regulation to the processing of personal data for the

purposes of historical research (including references to processing for

“historical research purposes”) include processing for the purposes of

genealogical research. "

So Ancestry.com is now to be considered on a par with the National Archives/...?

Re: I guess that's the main aim?

In other words, they're only cutting the red tape in order to splice it with some white and blue tape and make it ever longer.

Musk says Starlink will ask for exemption to US sanctions on Iran

Re: ha ha ha

Don't know.

Are they still carrying out drone strikes in Yemen?

Re: Request denied!

What, like how all the privately held arms in Afghanistan prevented the rise of the Taliban, twice...?

Someone's at last helping AI models understand those with speech disabilities

Re: Welsh, on the other hand, there's no tech that can help with that

Very disappointed myself.

I'd assumed good faith and thought there was going to be something in the article referring to some reason why the outputs of the project were not going to transfer across languages, but... nothing.

Just a lazy joke.

I thought the Reg was better than that.

OpenAI opens doors to DALL-E after the horse has bolted to Midjourney and others

Re: Art history class

This is fundamentally different.

A human looking at a coffee-table book of a particular artist's pieces doesn't automagically gain the ability to produce works that are nearly indistinguishable from the artist's own work

Removing an obsolete AMD fix makes Linux kernel 6 quicker

Re: The older the OS...

That was what an OS was.

Re: The older the OS...

Pretty sure it's attested in Middle English literature.

I saw the claim once that scribes were paid by the letter at some point in the Middle Ages, and therefore started adding in silent Es and unnecessary double letters. I wasn't convinced, but it's not beyond the realms of possibility...

Datacenter migration plan missed one vital detail: The leaky roof

Re: Assuming facilities wasn't contacted

Was on a training course at a newly-opened college building. We were sat in a computer room when the ceiling turned into a waterfall. Nobody moved until I shouted something like "electricity... water... GET OUT"

Turns out the boiler room was directly above the computer rooms. Rather stupid (and expensive) mistake.

Rust is eating into our systems, and it's a good thing

Re: Something C++ can do that Rust can't

If you're properly modularising your code, then you should be able to spin off any existing code to runtime-linked libraries, so that's nowhere near as big an issue as it would have been 25 years ago.

AI won't take coders' jobs. Humans still rule for now

Re: Move along, nothing to see

Or look at it a different way -- all we're talking about is the long overdue shift from plain-text procedural code to a hacky version of declarative programming.

The next generation will hopefully move to true declarative programming with AI procedural code generation in the back end.

One man's battle to get patent rights for AI inventors in America may be over

Re: What a Tool...

Assigning them to a machine makes them absolutely useless, because how can you get a computer to sign off on a licensing agreement?

Terminal downgrade saves the day after a client/server heist

Re: The Cloud vs Mainframe+Terminal

Well the point of the term "cloud" was always that the internet is the part of the network you can never know the shape of, hence so it was shown on the network diagrams as a cloud symbol.

When cloud computing started to gain traction, I could not understand why so many companies would use unauditable services.

I was in an IT company that refused to offer cloud services because we insisted our client do due diligence. Vindication came in the form of companies being sued for data loss and being found negligent for failing to do due diligence.

Then the industry decided that maybe cloud computing was bad and just went back to hosted datacentres... but we now called them "clouds".

LG makes a TV roughly the size of a queen-sized bed

Re: What I find amusing...

I think all they're saying is "not quite a millimetre each"

What I find amusing...

What I find amusing is that they're selling a device that simple geometry suggests has bigger pixels than any screen I've owned since the GameBoy Colour and trying to bamboozle people with talk of "micrometer scale pixels"

PanWriter: Cross-platform writing tool runs on anything and outputs to anything

Re: I see.

You wouldn't have if you'd written it using VimNanoNext 2.3.132!

My spin on that is that the existence of the likes of PanWriter in the form it's in is a failure in software development as a whole. (And therefore not any reflection on or misunderstanding of what you wrote!)

Why isn't it now a straightforward matter to take a full-fat code editor and rebuild it with a few clicks to do only a single one of the million and one tasks it does, and with that, all the now-unnecessary chrome?

I find it baffling how we still struggle with the basics of software development.

Yup, and at that point, surely a more sensible project would be to pluck everything out of VSCodium that isn't needed and rejig its UI...?

Meet the CrowPi-L – a clever, slightly rustic, Raspberry Pi laptop chassis

Re: Conflicted

Power management you say?

Well surely the solution is a radical new type of computer -- a grid network of 16 RP2040 chips backing a low power SoC "host". Full chips spin up and down to manage USB devices or specific apps.

If I want to revive mine (for camping trips) how can I get a replacement battery?

Hate to break it to you, but your b got flipped there.