I think there's a dyslexic on Trump's team who wants to Make America Sweat Again....
Posts by The Indomitable Gall
1703 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
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Trump lifts US supersonic flight ban, says he's 'Making Aviation Great Again'
Musk and Trump take slap fight public as bromance ends
AI can spew code, but kids should still suffer like we did, says Raspberry Pi
And that only proves that boilerplate is just moronic.
I never write
function main () :
#... blahblah
if (main):
main()
because it's effing wasting my time.
Plaintext code is an inherent waste of time. The line that you "need to understand" ignores the fact people don't actually understand the boilerplate -- they just copy and paste it.
Please tell us Reg: Why are AI PC sales slower than expected?
Meta pauses mobile port tracking tech on Android after researchers cry foul
Re: One rule for them
I would really advise against using potentially xenophobic criticism ("leprechauns"...?) when criticising the actions of a government, as it is too easily dismissed as just starting and ending with xenophobia, but there are real concerns that Ireland are letting tech companies away with things on taxes and GDPR that other countries wouldn't dream of.
Harmonisation of laws and taxes across the EU have the express purpose of trying to stop countries competing on trying to draw foreign companies in, and ending up on a race to the bottom -- the old line was "if you don't give us tax breaks, we'll go somewhere that will, so you will get more tax if you dont charge us tax, because you'll be able to charge income tax to all the people we will employ."I'm concerned that Ireland is bringing the EU back that way.
(And I really should get myself an Irish passport soon, too....)
Re: Meta
Maybe, but it would be risky.
The thing is, if they're only doing this on Android and haven't attempted to sneak it into the iOS client, that's a tacit admission that they know they're pushing it and that it's in breach of policy. It would be politically difficult if they reintroduce it on Android without getting a similar feature into iOS. And they're not going to manage to get that past the Apple app store security, so they'b leave themselves open to pretty notable criticism if they tried to slip it back in...
Ex-Meta exec: Copyright consent obligation = end of AI biz
Re: Just for the record. . .
AI is fiction and self-deception rolled into a big ball. A neural network is a very poor attempt to model a human brain. A human brain is not a neural network. A neural network is mathematically just a probability model derived from the input data. It is processed data. Data protection needs to apply.
LastOS slaps neon paint on Linux Mint and dares you to run Photoshop
Re: Linux is never Windows.
Yes, but people aren't used to running any OS other than Windows, as the people who try to make a Windows-user-friendly distro since last century have repeatedly told us. And this is true because nobody has invented tablets and smartphones using fancy operating systems yet. I'm sure Steve Jobs will change that at his next keynote, though...
Bosses weren’t being paranoid: Remote workers more likely to start own biz
Yeah... i kind of feel it's ignoring predictable user behaviour: I am certainly less likely to use LinkedIn or other sites for job search during work hours in the office, so instead I'll just wait till I'm back home. I would personally not do it in office time if I was on a VPN either, because I'm geeky enough to understand the browsing history being visible to work IT team...
Tech support session saved files, but probably ended a marriage
Signalgate storm intensifies as journalist releases full secret Houthi airstrike chat
Re: They're already
Let's take that as a starting point: Hamas started it.
Hamas started what?
Hamas started a fight between Hamas and Israel.
Israel didn't simply strike Hamas in response, they struck Gaza and Gazans, irrespective of whether they supported Hamas or opposed them.
I remember hearing on the radio an academic expert in terrorism telling us that there were two principles in terrorism:
(1) The principle of uncertainty -- we don't know when or where the next attack will take place, so we are always afrai
(2) The principle or reaction -- the terrorists want the group with power to overreact and oppress the wider demographic that the terrorists belong to, as this will lead polarisation, and the oppressed group will associate more strongly with the terrorists.
Have you ever heard of the Basque terrorist group ETA? Well, the word "eta" is the Basque word for "and". For a monolingual Spanish speaker in the Basque Country, that's pretty daunting stuff, because they're going to hear "... eta ... eta ... eta" all the time, and get increasing paranoid and scared. It becomes a wedge and people start getting very angry at anyone who speaks Basque. ETA were one of the terrorist groups who were hardest to get people to grass on even if they hated them, and that was how powerful the simple choice of name was.
Re: They're already
The problem is that they've already said that they didn't share classified information, and they've forked themselves. I reckon he's deliberately pushing for them to go after him, because to do him for divulging classified information, they've got to admit to sharing classified information on an explicitly banned channel. He's got guts, because he's willing to put himself in the firing line, cos if they stick their heads up to shoot him, they're exposing themselves, and the US legislature will have a stronger case to censure them.
He's putting America before his own self-interest, unlike Trump and his fair-weather "friends"...
Glitchy taxi tech blew cover on steamy dispatch dalliance
C++ creator calls for help to defend programming language from 'serious attacks'
Re: Speed of Transition
Underlying code has had a lifetime of bugs logged, investigated and fixed.
Nobody is suggesting that all C code is inherently unsafe, only that it can't be assumed to be safe. We have high confidence that long-lived legacy code is safe with good probability. The fact that we aren't ditching things that have working well for years doesn't mean we should continue to code the way it was made. We got a long way with leaded petrol, and we didn't need to scrap the cars that relied on it as soon as unleaded petrol was introduced, but we continued to use them, and then eventually they came up with a formulation that let unleaded petrol be made with the right octane rating to get it working in many of the old leaded petrol vehicles, and classic cars still run... but while we're happy to run vintage food vans for trendy hipster lunches, we don't make vans that way any more, because it's the wrong way to do it.
There are better ways to make cars and we continue to use parts that are made the old way because it's just not necessary to change. But we don't tend to invent new things that use the old manufacturing techniques, because that's silly.
Same with programming:
Keep using the old things that have been working well up to now, but making new things using old techniques is inefficient and a waste of time.
Does terrible code drive you mad? Wait until you see what it does to OpenAI's GPT-4o
Re: So the "intelligence" of AI is really
Indeed, and it only simulates part of intelligence, trying to identify emergent phenomena. But humans have higher-order thinking and reasoning, and the ultimate marker of human intelligence is going above and beyond the basic instinctual behaviorist response and working things out. AI doesn't do that.
Re: Enslave humanity?
Never mind the suckers -- never give *anyone* an even break. He's following on his policy of never pay people who've done contracted work for you and try to drive them out of business before they can sue you... and he's now doing that with millions and millions of pounds of government debt to companies involved in international aid.
Re: Not sure why misalignment happens
And yet we do demand it of natural intelligence. We train ourselves to follow procedures and leave an audit trail of our own decisions. This goes against our natural evolved brain architecture, but we do it, because we need to. We have created systems that replicate the worst flaws of biological brains but aren't sophisticated enough to do the very best of human thinking.
Hey programmers – is AI making us dumber?
Yes, but as I eluded to elsewhere on this thread, having calculators and using calculators isn't an all or nothing thing.
In my schooling, there were times we were allowed to use calculators and times we weren't. At primary school, we used calculators to specifically learn calculators.
At high school, in maths we used calculators when the arithmetic was slow and labourous and would distract us from the bit of the maths that was the point of the lesson, and we'd use them in science if the numbers were big because it wasn't a maths lesson. But we did enough mental arithmetic to learn mental arithmetic.
I was stunned when I went to university and studied computer science --a highly numerate discipline-- and my classmates would pull out calculators for simple additions and multiplications. I could work out the answer before they'd switched the calculator on....
Hmm.... not sure, really.
Computer architecture has got much, much more complicated now than it was when I studied. I reckon things have to be a lot less detailed than before. Really, I don't think they need to know about ALUs and FPUs -- at the end of the day, there isn't much need to know more than the simple fact that integer arithmetic is quicker than floating point. The ALU is misleading, because the A stands for "arithmetic", and FPUs do arithmetic too....
Re: Maybe I like the misery
> Airline pilots these days, they have GPS and collision avoidance radar and autopilots bringing them everywhere. Some of them don't know how to hand prop their engine and refuse to fly with their head out in the open air.
Funny you should mention pilots, because there's a lesson there that society should have learned.
When autopilot came in, the company bigwigs said "switch on the autopilot, then only do something if the autopilot can't". The pilots (and their unions) kicked back with "if we don't pilot the plane under normal conditions, how the hell are we going to be safe to pilot them in adverse conditions that the autopilot can't handle?!?"
So now pilots fly the plane even where an autopilot would do a perfectly good job, specifically to ensure that they have the piloting skill to take over if and when an autopilot can't handle it, and so that they're confident to say "oh fuck no!" and take the controls back when the autopilot is about to do something rather stupid.
Pilots were able to push back against this sort of short-sighted thinking, but computer programmers can't really do the same.
Schools and calculators
When I was at school, we weren't allowed to use calculators most of the time. Why? Because we needed to learn how to do mental arithmetic so we would know how to do it if the calculator broke, and also that even if we did use a calculator, we'd recognise when the calculator was saying something ridiculous and stop to look for our mistake.
I was pretty stunned when studying Computer Science at university that classmates would keep going to pull out calculators and I'd end up working out the correct answer before they'd even switched it on. And for a long time they didn't trust me on it and still checked.
So then along comes the notion of an "information age" and us not needing to remember anything, because we can always just google the information, and this actually being believed in schools, so they were already training people to trust google unconditionally, and then along comes AI -- a tech designed to imitate human failings and suddenly everyone's trusting it, and because it's on the front page of google, it can do immense harm.
>sigh<
Elon Musk calls for International Space Station to be deorbited by 2027
HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due to 'feedback'
NASA's on-again, off-again job cuts – what's the plan?
Re: The plan...
Yes, but the plan hasn't been thought out. Trump won't always be in the Whitehouse, and conflict of interest things hang around and even if the president can pardon Musk for the conflict of interest things (not sure whether he can or not, this is a very theoretical "even if") the criminal pardon won't affect civil actions. I can totally imagine the US government nationalising SpaceX because they've profited from things that should absolutely not have ever happened.
DIMM techies weren’t allowed to leave the building until proven to not be pilferers
Microsoft expands Copilot bug bounty targets, adds payouts for even moderate messes
Dark mode might be burning more juice than you think
Re: Nowhere in the blog...
Ah, thanks for that.
However, I'd imagine that the researchers know this anyway, and if the comparison was black-on-white vs white-on-black as the article's illustration implies, that's a matter of zero occlusion vs 100% occlusion, so it should be sufficiently comparable perceptually to max and min brightness on an OLED to carry over.
And this is an initial study where they're experimenting to see if there is a statistically significant effect that would be worth investigating further. It's not bad science, just bad journalism, because it absolutely does suggest that it's worth doing the research, but until the research has been done, it's not "news".
Re: Love the aesthetic, but don't use it...
But what we see is the relative difference between colours -- one contrasting against the other. Why should white text on a black background be harder that black text on a white background?
This research really starts pointing to some very deep things about human perception.
Do you call Eastenders, Coronation Street etc "TV novels"...? No, you call them soap operas. I would call most comics "soapy paper", personally.
Something like Watchmen might deserve the label "graphic novel", but it still started life as a serial before the trade paperback was published, so I still say it doesn't count.
Shocker! They know that. They are talking about the turning up of brightness counteracting the saving of switching the bright pixels off, and that means that they have to be talking about OLEDs, precisely because LCDs are only switched on to block light, and so dark colours can't save energy by definition.
Time to make C the COBOL of this century
Re: C is the new COBOL
And the reason that C++ is far from perfect is that it was designed to be backwards compatible with C.
This is where we hit a problem: you can't move programming on without getting programmers on-side, but having programmers on-side means not making the improvements that are badly needed.
Re: C is the new COBOL
C was written for single-processor architectures. I know you can multithread in C, but I've never actually done it, and I imagine it's a bit hacky. You certainly can't write for a SIMD architecture in C, and I suspect that it's C and its successors who have stopped the move away from x86 and ARM to SIMD processors for most tasks. I can imagine a world where CPU development stopped and only had to concern itself with GUIs and all the big stuff was data processing....
You begged Microsoft to be reasonable. Instead it made Copilot reason-able with OpenAI GPT-o1
Yes, I heard about the classic version through Louis Rossman's channel on YouTube. He was saying it was exactly the same price as what Office365 was before the addition of the "free" AI services.
The question is whether Microsoft have dropped the price because they want to claim it is genuinely sub-par, or if it's just a matter that the UK pricing was recalculated after changes in the exchange rate...
AI facial recognition could sink this murder probe
This kind of harks back to the overreliance on finger-prints that led to some pretty serious legal bothers a while back.
Fingerprinting was never as accurate as claimed in the early days, and its apparent accuracy was a result of high rates of recidivism: if your fingerprint looked like a match in the database, it probably was a match, because that person was likely to commit a repeat offence.
But then we started keeping fingerprints of people who were innocent on file, including witnesses who only gave their fingerprints to rule them out if their fingerprint came up in the current crime investigation.
Then when you look in the national database for a match, there was a much greater chance that the fingerprint that looked similar was not a career criminal, but someone who was once an innocent bystander, or worse: the victim of a crime. Imagine that: you've been beaten up by a drug dealer for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and just as you're getting over that, the police start questioning you about a burglary because there was a print found that looked sort of similar to yours....
Raspberry Pi 500 and monitor arrive in time for Christmas
Entitlement?
That's hardly fair.
He is thinking different priorities from the Raspberry folks, that's all.
Raspberry Pis have been cheap because they're looking to served the widest base market, and that's the SD card crowd.
However, many hardcore Pi users are now are now the sort of people who add NVME. An NVME adapter is always an added aftermarket cost, and fitting it in the base model would be cheaper as it would leverage economies of scale. But it would make it more expensive for the core market, even if only marginally. Raspberry don't want to do this.
They have three audience groups now:
The kids' toy crowd
The maker crowd
The not-really-maker crowd who want to have a device that they can do interesting stuff on without fighting with either hardware or software.
I suspect that last one isn't particularly profitable....