Posts by The Indomitable Gall

'Best tech employer of the year' threatened trainee with £15k penalty fee for quitting to look after his sick mum

Re: Matthew and Son

The cake is a lie.

Re: "top business and technology professionals"

2x ?

I though contractor rates were 3 to 5x salary.

Windows to become emulation layer atop Linux kernel, predicts Eric Raymond

Re: Edge using chromium

Puppies are better than kittens.

TCL's latest e-ink tech looks good on paper, but Chinese giant will have to back up extraordinary claims

Re: Looking forward to seeing this in action

To paraphrase:

"Cheap last gen tech is awful therefore this cutting edge future tech will be awful too."

Yes, it's highly likely they're overegging the pudding here, but you can't know for sure it will be in any way comparable to what we've seen so far.

Epic move: Judge says Apple can't revoke Unreal Engine dev tools, asks 'Where does the 30 per cent come from?'

When they first started, they expressly didn't want people doing the version number thing, and they deliberately did not build the infrastructure to facilitate purchasing of upgrades. In fact, I'm pretty sure they mandated no version numbers in app titles to begin with. What a lot of publishers ended up doing instead was using the "bundles" feature and creating a bundle of the new piece of software and the obsolete version so that you'd get a discount based on it subtracting the money you'd already spent on the old one from the cost of the new one. At the start, they did this by branding the new version as a new product rather than a version-number upgrade, and no, there was nothing Apple could do to stop them, so slowly they started letting people do the version number thing instead.

Upgrade by in-app purchase is antisocial, as you're using your customers' storage space on things they can't use. I bought the Pinnacle Lite+Pro bundle (the same price as Pinnacle Pro on its own -- one of those upgrade workarounds) precisely because I was short of space on my iPad and couldn't afford the space for the full app with its filtering etc included, so only installed it when I specifically wanted to do the fancier stuff and just kept the Lite version on for occasional casual use. (Of course, it turned out the workflow was utterly awful, so I stopped using it entirely.)

Apple actively discourage versions, and they deliberately built in no mechanism for license upgrades. It was a deliberate decision on their part.

Just because shareware authors were doing it doesn't make it standard practice -- none of the major commercial houses were doing it.

" consumers could choose when deciding to buy an Android device or an iPhone "

Ah, that hoary old chestnut. The thing is, Apple went out of their way to push app developers to adopt a free-updates-for-life model, which doesn't benefit devs in any way whatsoever... Who benefits...? Well, Apple would say the consumer, but in the end it's Apple, because all of us with iOS devices are then actively discouraged from ever switching to Apple.

I was given an iPad as a gift, bought some video and audio apps, and Pythonista, and then when I went to (finally) buy a smartphone, I bought the one I already owned the apps I wanted on... i.e. an iPhone.

Switching to Android would be an expensive proposition, as suddenly I've got to reinvest in all of that.

Microsoft sides with Epic over Apple developer ban, supports motion for temporary restraining order

They're not feigning ignorance -- they're deliberately challenging it as sharp practice and suggested that it is an unfair contract, and they wouldn't have taken that step if they didn't think they've got a very strong case. The key word here is "tying" -- they're making the point that Apple's business practices are exactly the same as car manufacturers who actively prevent 3rd-party servicing of vehicles, which is now banned in most major jurisdictions.

Re: Cynical

Apple created the situation for themselves, though.

They started out with a goal to remove versions and upgrades, and create a buy-once-for-life ecosystem. Prior to this the productivity software market relied on upgrade cycles for steady income to fund upgrades.

They encouraged low pricing with a claim that what you lost out in individual sales would be made up for in volume, and you got apps providing 90% of the functionality of desktop apps for a tenth of the price... with free upgrades for life instead of a £50 or more every year or two.

They set up this gold rush race to the bottom, which led to a massive marketplace of "ad supported" apps when they must have known that the market wouldn't support it, and devs the world over wasted innumerable person-years making software that no-one ever got properly paid for.

The only people who ever benefited from this setup were Apple. They made lots of money from cheap app sales. They made lots of money from advertising. Because they were the ones who had scale -- while everyone else got a miniscule slice of the pie, they got 30%. And the reason I have an iPhone is not because I wanted an iPhone, but because I was given an iPad as a gift, and I bought apps for many thinks (mostly sound, video and programming) that I liked, and I didn't want to have to buy them again on Android, or hunt around for suitable substitutes if they weren't available. So I give money to Apple to avoid having to give money to the people who made the apps I use.

It's a messed up market, and it was never sustainable. That's why apps have moved more and more towards subscription models -- it's the only revenue stream that stays (mostly) open to them.

Yes, it's also happening in the desktop space, but as yet on a smaller scale. The death of physical media coupled with the increasing confidence that Windows 10 is going to offer the long-term stability that Microsoft promised at its launch is also probably making desktop app devs worried that for most users a license-for-life will end up being treated as such, rather than buying into an upgrade to get round backwards compatibility bugs in their OS.

So yes, the market was going that way, but Apple accelerated it, and they created a rod for their own back.

Um, almost the entire Scots Wikipedia was written by someone with no idea of the language – 10,000s of articles

Re: International Recognition

" Thus all this government-sponsored life support for languages is quite likely a waste of time. "

That is a perfectly logical argument, because we all know Wikipedia is run by the Scottish government.

You see, once you join in on a discussion about a news article and say something about government/subsidies/taxpayers, you inadvertently show that all the talk about government money is just a smokescreen to present your bigoted opinions as calm rational analysis...

Re: International Recognition

As I understand it, one of the biggest social pressures in Czechoslovakia was linguistic: "Czechoslovakian" essentially meant "Czech" and "Slovakian" was consider "Bad Czechoslovakian". Slovakian people were considered stupid, and the evidence was that they spoke "bad Czechoslovakian". Even to this day, we have the same problem in Scotland -- that speaking like yer mammy is taken as a sign you're thick, and speaking like someone from miles away is taken as a sign you're sophisticated.

It is not as much a matter of identity [i]construction[/i] as it is of "identity positivity" -- what's being called "reclaiming" these days. For people to stand up for the identity [b]they already have[/b] and defend their right to speak [b]in a way they already do[/b] is very much not "construction".

Quite the opposite, in fact. The real "constructed" identity is the one that denies variation and tries to impose a single uniform cultural identity on diverse peoples.

There are many people inside the independence movement that want nothing to do with Scots, and there are many outside the independence movement that support it. Same with Gaelic. Neither is a party-political issue.

This'll upset the Apple cart: 1,200 iOS apps downloaded 300 million times a month include 'ad fraud' code

Re: Genuinely Puzzled....

It's the stat that's used, because it's the stat that's most easily measured. If you can suggest a scaling factor that approximates the number of active users based on research, go ahead.

So... just 'Good' then? KFC pulls Finger Lickin' slogan while pandemic rumbles on

Re: Different countries, different flavours

As I was told it, most of the variety in KFC is just down to frying temperature. With all frying, if the fat isn't hot enough when the food goes in, it doesn't crisp up immediately and the batter absorbs shedloads of grease.

It was suggested to me that many UK-based KFC branches let the fryers cool too much and don't wait till they're back up to temperature when the customers come in, and reuse the fryers too quickly when busy, meaning the cold chicken hitting the fat cools things back down to "greasy sponge" point again.

50%+ of our office seats are going remote, say majority of surveyed Register readers. Hi security, bye on-prem

What's up with that graph?

Your chart of the percentages is kind of screwy. You have under 25% next to 75-100%, at the opposite end to 25%-50%, making it impossible to read as intended.

Re: Major benefits

" The disposable income people are still prepared to spend will go somewhere. "

China, as we buy more cheap tat on eBay and Amazon Marketplace.

The trend over time has always been to reduce the amount of our outgoings spent on labour costs. Sandwich shops were one of the last few labour-intensive drains on our wallets.

Re: Loss of human contact

On the other hand, recent decades have seen society degenerate further an further into siloed "tribes" that rarely mix. When we spend all our time with people "like us", we let ourselves get narrow-minded.

Socialising by geography (a.k.a. "Talking to the neighbours") means exposing yourself to more ways of thinking.

Bill Gates debunks 'coronavirus vaccine is my 5G mind control microchip implant' conspiracy theory

Re: Very good skeptoid podcast recently debunking this stuff

"

"Asking somebody to explain it forces them to think about it. "

Unless they've already thought about it (or had someone think about it for them) and they already have an answer, such as "the brain--why do you think tinfoil hats exist?"

"

But if the question is repeated again and again with no malice or implication of stupidity, over time it might have an effect. Lots of us here will remember the long, slow decline of racism, sexism and homophobia... that is still going on, decades after it started. Ignorance is never dispelled overnight. Patience is required.

Re: Very good skeptoid podcast recently debunking this stuff

If you can't change their minds, don't talk to them.

Educating the ignorant is a slow process, and for those of us who try to act with patience and help people slowly move out of their cognitive traps, it is supremely frustrating when people blunder in and shout "YOU FUCKING NUTTER!" then run away proud of themselves for speaking up in the name of truth, having demolished our attempts to get the ignorant to start to understand the truth a bit better.

Trump bans Feds from contracting H-1B workers and makes telehealth the new normal

Re: Really a ban?

Has Trump not already shown himself to be extremely flexible on definitions, restrictions and limitations...?

Google extends homeworking until this time next year – as Microsoft finds WFH is terrific... for Microsoft

Re: Self Control

" The 4 hours extra of working a week, can be offset by the reduced time wasted commuting. I've worked in jobs where commuting wasted 10 hours a week, so spending 4 of those working and 6 of them relaxing is a win for both sides, and helps justify the idea to the company. "

Your company hasn't paid you for that time, and hasn't "gifted" you that time -- that's your time, and you shouldn't be giving it away for free. If you need to put in the extra time to buy yourself the ability to work from home, that's a bit shitty, but go ahead. But to rationalise doing more work for no active recompense from your employer... that's being complicit in your own exploitation.

Unshackle the proletariat, and fight for a better tomorrow, comrades!

Re: ... welcome to the machine

Yeah, a dystopian sci-fi kick in the teeth.

Re: WFH is also good

I always felt stared at and disapproved of when I took an afternoon constitutional out of the office to try to get my head back in the game. But I did it anyway, as I knew it was helping, whatever the other drones thought of it.

Re: WFH is also good

Disturbing no-one? The mere thought that there exists a plushy form of the source of all human misery disturbs me, for one!

The Edinburgh Fringe festival isn't happening this year, but that won't stop a digital sign doing its own comedy routine

The gates have been locked almost continuously since last century. I walked down those steps maybe twice. They stank of urine, or, as we say in Scotland, they reeked of pish. And that, dear reader, is why they're locked.

The self-disconnecting switch: Ghost in the machine or just a desire to save some cash?

I would do anything for an upvote...

...but I won't do that.

Virtual reality is a bonkers fad that no one takes seriously but anyway, here's someone to tell us to worry about hackers

Re: VR is a fad?

" 2) "VR" Games. They suck. I don't want an immersive VR experience, where I have to mime getting out of the car and twisting off the gas cap in order to refuel. I want to press "Y" while next to the pump and have my tank meter zip to "F" on its own. In fact, I don't want to even stand up.

3) No/crap support for non-VR games. The main reason I want 3d is for stereo 3d, not for a VR experience. I like traditional styled games, where you sit and use the keyboard or maybe (for the less cerebral games) a console style controller. "

Lots of development houses thought that way, and started trying to do traditional gaming in VR (the original Oculus dev kits didn't come with motion controllers, after all) but in the end, they all came to the same conclusion -- that the sense of presence was too much, and using a controller just felt weird.

VR security...?

VR security is a non-issue. Not because it isn't a potential problem, but because either your headset is just a fancy display controlled by an external computer/console or it's a display with an Android device built it. That means VR security is IT security, and business as usual, not a new category. VR attacks will exploit the exact same attack vectors as every other attack, but there will be far fewer of them, as it's a small target group. Furthermore, with the exception of the Quest and similar standalone units, it's going to be pretty much impossible to identify potential targets from internet metadata, as there's nothing to set a VR-equipped PC or Playstation apart from non-VR ones unless you happen to be browsing the web from a inside a headset.

Hell hath GNOME fury: Linux desktop org swings ax at patent troll's infringement claim

Re: A money-grubbing Rothschild?

" both financing its operation and financing its abolition. "

Well, there is the question of morality vs pragmatism. If the world's run by slaves, conscientious object costs money that might render you uncompetitive. Then eventually you get the chance to do something about it.

Or maybe it's just that families are made up of different people with different views.

First Python feature release under new governance model is here, complete with walrus operator (:=)

If you look at the PEP, one of Guido's justifications was that reviewing existing Python code, he was finding plenty of examples of people duplicating work (eg [ f(x) for x in x_list if f(x)>0 ]) or doing redundant work to avoid nested ifs, and he saw this as a solution for real-world problems.

The other advantage is removing what the linguist part of me would call "long-range dependencies". The closer the assignment is to its use, the easier it is to reason through the code. Particularly, mathematicians and scientists are used to reasoning through things in semantically dense formulas, and less used to the step-by-step imperative style.

When you remove the possibility of =/== substitution bugs, the main danger of C-style assignment is gone.

The main reason I see the walrus as a good thing is in list comprehensions.

Consider :

newlist = [ f(x) for x in oldlist if f(x) > 0 ]

Now imagine the that f(x) is O(^n) or O(n!) -- you've either got to take the performance hit of running it twice or expand the code out. For a scientist or mathematician (and academia is a major target audience for Python), this one line, pseudo-mathematical, pseudo-functional approach is much more readable.

My personal preference would have been for local variable declarations, eg:

newlist = [ result for x in oldlist if result > 0 where result = f(x) ]

but that's not the way they chose to go. Instead we have:

newlist = [ result for x in oldlist if (result:= f(x)) > 0 ]

...which is less restrictive than my way, and Guido set out good reasons for it. But when you look back at the examples, I think it boils down to this: a great many users of Python aren't immersed in the imperative programming style the way most pro software devs are, and the reliance on branching blocks and lines is more confusing to them as it renders code logic implicit. I'm surprised it took Guido as long as it did (v2.4) to introduce conditional expressions, actually, as that's really useful for bringing a single mathematical function into a single line.

YouTube thinkfluencer Siraj Raval admits he plagiarized boffins' neural qubit papers – as ESA axes his workshop

Re: My relentless workload...

On the other hand, it is now getting more and more widely recognised that the YouTube algorithm is a slave-driver, and if you don't work yourself beyond the point of being able to produce decent content, you will be punished by being made irrelevant in the listings.

Whole multi-person production teams spend months to create a couple of hours of television, and YouTube is pushing solo producers to knock out around an hour of video per week to get a basic income. Of course corners get cut.

I'm not defending Raval here, though -- he chose how to react to the pressure. If he'd exited YouTube with his reputation at a high point, he could probably have got himself a fairly decent job. Instead he tried to continue in an unsustainable market.

The safest place to save your files is somewhere nobody will ever look

" It seems such a counter-intuitive thing to do and yet is so widespread. The only explanation I can think of is that users learn it from each other. "

The most underestimated force in UI design is the path of least resistance. Deleting is one of our quickest actions (thanks to having a dedicated key) and if deletion is (initially) non-destructive, the apparent continued availability makes it seem like the most efficient means of archiving.

If we also had an "archive" key on our keyboards, more people would archive properly.

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

Re: 6% toxic

It is not 6% toxic. they shouldn't have used percent to describe it, because it's not really a percentage or a proportion. Most machine learning algorithms score everything in the range (0,1], never scoring zero, because there's lots of multiplication.

Re: “I saw his ass yesterday”

I think Shakespeare, Chaucer et al. would dispute your use of the term "the original".

Thy coarse neologisms cause great pain upon mine ear. Get thee to a nunnery!

YouTuber charged loads of fans $199 for shoddy machine-learning course that copy-pasted other people's GitHub code

Re: why do people go for online tutorials?

All very much true.

However, the good course designer starts with a particular demographic in mind as his/her target audience, and builds the course around them. A good teacher will adapt the course on the fly if students are finding it too hard or too easy.

Modern digital courseware wants to sell to as wide an audience as possible, which means all notions of prerequisite learning go out the window. Then there's the tendency for everything to be live coding instead of lectures, which means everything's paced by lines of code rather than complexity of concepts.

I've been watching a LinkedIn Learning course on Vue.js today. and it's exclusively live coding. The presenter keeps going off on tangents just in case you don't know particular features of JavaScript as and when they pop up in a line of code he's writing.

I'd be more generous and say that he's fallen into the greatest cognitive trap of the crowdfunding era -- the idea that money comes first, then everything else falls into place.

Kickstarter was so swapped with this sort of thinking (for example all the non-engineers who said "give me some money and I'll hire an engineer to create my technologically impossible and/or financially infeasible games console) that they insisted on prototypes first (and now they all head to Indiegogo instead).

The notion of building a course around freely-available information is so much the mainstream that the notion on its own is valueless (how many of your uni lecturers invented and/or discovered the stuff they taught you) -- it's the execution that matters.

What I note as missing from the article is any discussion of quality assurance. If you're delivering a course to that many people, there should be several layers of oversight, and ideally also a fairly rigorous testing process involving teaching beginners... I doubt there was any of that.

It's the thing that bugged me most about Coursera and Udacity when they first came out -- 1000s of people taking courses that had never been run before, and many of which (on Coursera and EdX, anyway) were only ever run once. No beta testing, no refinement or improvement... all people ever saw was the first draft. In that situation, at least these courses were based heavily on tried and tested university modules, but even then, the change of medium really called for a lot more in terms of adaptation and testing.

Lucas Pope: Indie games visionary makes pen-pushing feel like an exciting career choice

That's an odd comparison on several levels.

First of all, the 80s were full on one-man dev teams, like Mike Smith (the Miner Willy games), Andrew Braybrook (although he was part of a software house, most of his genius games were solo coded) or Jeff Minter. With 16, 48 or 64k to play with, it was pretty easy for one person to fill all the memory in a few weeks' work.

But Mike Singleton... well, he did some clever maths-based programming to make games that most people wouldn't have thought possible -- even now part of me wants to believe that Lords of Midnight on a 48k spectrum is just a Mandela effect.

We're now living in an era where technological marvels are beyond the reach of the sole coder, and what indies like Pope are doing is finding ways to use what's already there efficiently to build compelling story-driven games without having to worry about the tech.

OK, so Pope did have to write a custom shader to get the "dithering" effect for monochrome shading, so it was far from a totally non-technical project, but the comparison just seems weird to me.

Reach out and touch fake: Hand tracking in VR? How about your own, personal, haptics?

Oculus Quest hand tracking

" Unlike the wizardry used by the HoloLens 2 to calculate the position of the user's extremities, the Quest will employ its monochrome cameras and "AI magic".

Good luck with that – the Quest is hardly the processing powerhouse. "

Processing not required, allegedly. Oculus seem to be saying (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2zLneGGbk8) that this is all done on the devices DSP hardware, and that the DSP hardware was specced up deliberately to leave enough capacity after implementing the basic inside-out tracking for later hand-tracking to be included.

I haven't looked into developer specs in any depth (if I play with VR dev, it's always with the dev kits in Unity or UE) but I'm not aware of any API to allow developers to access the DSP for custom functionality, so I don't believe it's going to have any real impact on device performance. Yes, there's reportedly currently noticeable latency in it, but that's likely to be down to the DSP itself.

MPs call for 'immediate' stop to facial recog in UK as report underlines bias risks in 'pre-crime' algos used by coppers

An overlooked problem

"Algorithms have to crunch through tons of data in order to make accurate predictions. Relying on a single individual's data is probably not enough to get it to work. Even if a tool is effective for groups of people, it doesn't mean it'll necessarily be accurate for a single person."

It's even worse than that, though. Setting negative expectations regarding an individual is likely to increase that person's alienation, making the negative prediction a self-fulfilling prophecy. A famous education experiment in Switzerland told teachers that a set of kids were going to be "late bloomers" and highly intelligent. The teachers treated them differently, and the prediction game true. There was nothing particularly special about these kids, other than teachers' expectations.

If convicted criminals are treated with constant suspicion by beat cops, they'll be convinced that rehabilitation isn't possible and bam! -- self-fulfilling recidivism prophecy.

GIMP open source image editor forked to fix 'problematic' name

Re: Eh?

Self-deprecating is different from insulting towards a minority.

It's like MongoDB -- how did they ever think that was OK?

Re: Eh?

An insult used by able people against disabled people.

I think "gimp" is only used in that sense in the US, but that's surely enough. Still don't get how MongoDB didn't get that their name is pretty f*cking insulting too.

DeepNude's makers tried to deep-six their pervy AI app. Web creeps have other ideas: Cracked copies shared online as code decompiled

Re: I'm impressed and worried

The problem here is that the problem solved here is one which has a known solution: what does a naked body look like?

The cure for a new virus is now a known problem, so needs a different type of AI from one that can be trained to draw cats, nipples or beards.

These boffins' deepfake AI vids are next-gen. But don't take our word for it. Why not ask Zuck or Kim Kardashian...

" Which make me wonder where all the "deepfake" audio development is happening. "

Baidu and Adobe, I believe.

Deepmind, Google and Microsoft have been working towards it too, but I think Baidu and Adobe are the only ones who've demonstrated actual computer-faked spoken speech so far.

Please be aliens, please be aliens, please be aliens... Boffins discover mystery mass beneath Moon's biggest crater

Please tell me...

Please tell me that the Aitken crater is named after Aiken Drum.

(There was a man lived in the moon, in the moon, in the moon,

There was a man lived in the moon and his name was Aiken Drum.)

We listened to more than 3 hours of US Congress testimony on facial recognition so you didn't have to go through it

Re: File under: No Sh1t Einstein

Said like that it's obvious, but the limited public understanding of AI and machine learning means it's crucially important that it is said.

if developer_docs == bad then app_quality = bad; Coders slam Apple for subpar API manuals

Re: This is a serious problem

I haven't really been able to examine Eiffel closely, because as soon as I look at it, I see yet another impenetrable jumble of fixed-width letters.

Why are we so obsessed with fixed width? It is hard to read, making it easy to make mistakes.

Why are we so obsessed with plaintext? It's so inconvenient that we spend our lives hacking IDEs to try to present layers of visual meaning on top of the text through colouring and font weight. And still it lets us type illegal code -- syntax errors.

Creating a truly smart language integrated with the IDE would be simpler than hacking the editor to highlight errors.

Just look at the STRIDE language, invented as a teaching language. Almost all the flexibility of Java with practically no scope for syntax errors.

iPhone gyroscopes, of all things, can uniquely ID handsets on anything earlier than iOS 12.2

Are we going to see a market form for vibrating phone cases now?

OpenAI retires its Dota-2 playing bots after crushing e-sport pros one last time

" OpenAI can also see the whole map, something humans can’t do. "

That is not the goal of gameplaying AI. OpenAI have just gone for a cheap headline-grabber rather than doing their homework.

Prince Harry takes a stand against poverty, injustice, inequality? Er, no, Fortnite

Re: He's only a royal

I always thought that was a bit of a moot point, but then I realised that we're paying him for being a royal. The public should have a right to a DNA test for anyone on the Civil List.

Re: Thanks Harry

" I take it that you hadn't heard that this process was completed in 1760 under George III? The Monarch's assets were separated off and paid to the Treasury, "

Which is why anything since taken from the people would be accurately described as stolen in a legal sense. Under previous monarchs, many state assets have gone mysteriously missing from high-security locations and no charges have been brought, including several generations of crown jewels. The crown jewels were quite certainly stolen. Who by, we can't say, but the lack of any action suggests someone who is above the law. Some of these disappearances are said to line up quite coincidentally with cashflow problems in the households of the then-reigning (now dead) monarchs.

" and in return the government ran a Civil List returning a set figure "

Ah, so we got back what they stole from us... by buying it? You think having to buy back what was stolen is justice. If so, I'll sell you your own car next Sunday.

Oh, and then you mention the Crown Estate. How did they get the Crown Estate? Now I'm not saying they stole it, but I think the previous poster would. Why did they have rights to own the land in the first place?