Posts by The Indomitable Gall

Trump lifts US supersonic flight ban, says he's 'Making Aviation Great Again'

I think there's a dyslexic on Trump's team who wants to Make America Sweat Again....

Musk and Trump take slap fight public as bromance ends

Re: "Mercurial Billionaires"

Perhaps this is because certain figures are acting like they may have Mad Hatter Syndrome...?

Re: No room for two

I believe you meant to say that there were enough toys in the White House pram for two children to throw out. Although that hasn't stopped them trying....

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?

Yes, but it will be significantly less powerful than ChatGPT, and the average punter will be totally turned off by that despite the security benefit.

It's not the crypto you've got to worry about.

rm -r /root/SkyNet

"I'm sorry, I can't let you do that, Dave..."

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. . .

Nononono. All their opinions must be invalidated because of the size of their wallets. Therefore we must listen to average paid people like Clegg, Altman and Zuckerberg. Emm... Oh.

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

Re: "Among Americans aged 20-64"

Yeah, imagine telling people about the sample. Imagine being clear about who you used.

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

Re: constant referring back to his work there

That's alright. I needed to read this post before I understood it. I've totally internalised that the $ is not a letter and was totally blanking the $ while looking for the error....

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"...

Given the prevalence of the antivax crowd and Trump's constant denial of sensible public health precautions up until he caught covid (and still didn't really take it seriously after being released from hospital), is "avoid it like the plague" even appropriate for this crowd...?

Glitchy taxi tech blew cover on steamy dispatch dalliance

Re: Hilarious

Yeah, that's an unfortunate unintended consequence of the analogy. The cable looks like the tail, and people can be forgiven for thinking that to be able to use the mouse properly, the head had to be pointing forward....

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: Alignment?

Well I don't think it's mere coincidence that AI and RPGs are linked to very geeky personality traits (which as a regular Register reader, I'm not likely to be using in a pejorative sense!)

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: Gee

Well with that "random number generator as a stand-in for intelligence", you've pretty much described the share market mentality, so I guess it makes sense why they're all investing in it....

Re: Evil

That's just propaganda by the far right Speccy brigade against the Commies....

Re: Evil

This is all a plot to stop China seeing tech as lucky. All those red LEDs were making Chinese consumers buy up all the tech so there was nothing left for export...

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: Is AI making us dumber?

It'll taste less like glue if you crush your rocks up before adding them...

Re: It works but I don't know why

Yeah, the slow loss of formative homework in a drive to get the maximally "effecient" workrate was already moronically stupid, but in the days of LLMs... ye gads, it's super-double-ultra-moronic. But there's no money in the system to do it right...

Re: Ding Ding Ding !!!

Snail mail has no intrinsic error correction for packet loss. If a human user develops a process that mitigates the packet loss, the packet loss is still evidence of downtime.

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

Re: Conflict of Interest

He's already 22 years older than Hitler was when he blew his own brains out. He's also on his second run as president. I'd say he's not really getting a speedrun record any time soon....

Re: Conflict of Interest

Well that's what you get for living in a democracy -- the upvotes are distributed equally. We should all be able to buy upvotes, because we should be a meritocracy. And everyone knows that rich people got rich by being better than us plebs.

Re: "There is very little incremental utility"

He doesn't need to throw his toys out of his pram -- the pram will autonomously throw his toys out for him. Not by design, but just because it will crash into the most blindingly obvious obstacles in Full Self Perambulating mode.

HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due to 'feedback'

Don't worry -- Elon wouldn't spring for the coffee. He'll try to charge employees for the coffee, and nobody is going to buy....

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

And that's what happens when you go in half-cocked...

Microsoft expands Copilot bug bounty targets, adds payouts for even moderate messes

Re: What does God need with a starship?

It's only going after programmers' jobs, and it's cheaper than programmers. Sure, we'll need more debuggers, but we'll need less programmers!

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...

Re: I'm Free!

Nonono. I'll work for free, but you've got to pay me £1000 per week to supply a morning coffee for one of your unpaid workforce.

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....