* Posts by Jonathan Richards 1

1444 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

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AI models show racial bias based on written dialect, researchers find

Jonathan Richards 1
FAIL

Thank you for asking

I have just caught up with the writings of the recently deceased Harry Frankfurt, specifically his book "On Bullshit"1. AIUI, Prof. Frankfurt identified up to eight different forms of lies, one of which is Bullshit, defined as the output of a person who pays no attention to the truth or falsity of what is uttered, but simply utters that which suits the person at the time. We can all think of individuals that we know, or know of, of whom this is true sometimes. Frankfurt says that this is the worst sort of lying because of how dangerous it can be.

I submit that the output of LLMs of every sort is incontrovertibly bullshit, all the time. The model doesn't know or care whether its output is true, or verifiable, or grounded in fact. If I'm right, then nobody should be using the output of a prompt like "Should I hire $PERSON who's application reads $TEXT", much less "Should I put this person to death" because the answer is certain to be bullshit.

1On Bullshit; Frankfurt, Harry G. ISBN 9780691122946

The S in IoT stands for security. You'll never secure all the Things

Jonathan Richards 1
Alert

Asteroid? was Re: IoT ? Not for me

60 orbits of our star counts as a metaphorical asteroid now? That one flew by more than a decade ago for some of us! I quite agree, I'm not going to insist on a security audit for the beeping hospital gear should I ever need it, but it's still depressing that the manufacturers never consider that anyone but angels of mercy will ever have access to the devices they make. Also agree about 'home automation'; the smartest wireless thing around here (excl. mobile phone, I guess), is the mouse I'll now use on the SUBMIT button.

Boeing paper trail goes cold over door plug blowout

Jonathan Richards 1

That one weird trick...

... to avoid tedious paperwork... Well, maybe not quite. There's a procedure for opening and closing a plug, but no procedure for opening and closing a door. Doors open, it's what they do.[1]

It is possible that the team that needed to get at the bungled rivets in the door frame didn't consider that they were doing anything other than opening a door - the interior trim was already stripped out for the rivet job. However, somewhere along the line the bolts were removed, and possibly they're still in a parts box in Renton: four bloody great bolts, castellated nuts and cotter pins that someone put away and forgot about.

I'm violently agreeing with everyone who thinks that the procedure was insufficiently monitored and quality assured, and guessing that time pressure is what forced out good practice.

[1] And close again, with a sense of satisfaction with a job well done. Couldn't resist, sorry.

Legal eagles demand $6B in Tesla stock after overturning Musk's mega pay package

Jonathan Richards 1
Joke

Signature move

When did E.M. start signing his Xcretions "Criminal"?

Tiny Core Linux 15 stuffs modern computing in a nutshell

Jonathan Richards 1
Happy

Re: investigating whether it can turn some geriatric laptops into useful tools once again.

> a point where all things are past their useful lives

That depends on the answer to "useful to whom?" If the answer is "no-one" then yes, the e-waste skip beckons, but if not, well, make the thing useful to the person who can use it. That's non-trivial in itself, because you have to get $THING into the hands of $NOT_USER_YET.

Palo Alto investor sues over 28% share tumble

Jonathan Richards 1
Joke

Re: Perhaps customers don't think PA is offering value any more

> flogging a dead golden goose

after the horse has bolted the barn door at fifty paces, and so letting the cat out of a whole nother kettle of worms.

Ubuntu, Kubuntu, openSUSE to get better installation

Jonathan Richards 1

Re: Not mentioned....but should be......

True dat; most of us would avoid a bare-metal reinstall if it was humanly possible. Liam did say in TFA though, that an easier/more-intuitive installer might be a benefit for people looking to continue using Windows <11 spec. hardware (whose numbers are expected to be rising) by switching to Ubuntu. That's forced to be a bare-metal installation the first time, even if sudo apt full-upgrade suffices after that.

Insider steals 79,000 email addresses at work to promote own business

Jonathan Richards 1
Go

Re: Safety

processed cod, what's more. Fish fingers, prolly.

OK, I'm off. I know my plaice.

Alaska Airlines' door-dropping flight was missing bolts

Jonathan Richards 1

Eavesdroppers from the FAA

As I understand it, there is a "WIPE ME NOW" button in a cockpit for the CVR, which it is standard operating procedure to press just as soon as the plane has come to a halt at its arrival gate.

Jonathan Richards 1

Unplanned deplaning

By some stroke of good fortune, there was nobody sitting in the seat row next to the plug. It will have been terrifying for the people in the row in front and the row behind, but nobody actually was in danger of being sucked out or beaten to death in their seat by being next to a gaping hole.

Nobody seems to have discussed the possibility of the door (a bloody great piece of hardware) striking the elevators or tailplane, rendering the aircraft unflyable. At least it was aft of the wings and engines.

Jonathan Richards 1

was Re: "poorly drilled rivet holes"

CVR disk??? This device is designed to survive a fscking plane crash! [1] It's almost certainly solid state, and could trivially be made to store many more than two hours without compatibility issues.

[1] First time ever that the euphemism is close to on-topic

Jonathan Richards 1
Boffin

Re: So by failing ....

Quite funny, and I upvoted, but it's not anything to do with under-tightening the bolts. They were not installed, and if they had been they wouldn't have been very tight. They're there to stop the door from moving in exactly the way that it's meant to move if it was operating as a door, i.e. up and out. The bolts are long affairs with a castellated nut and cotter pin, simply in place to prevent movement by being strong in shear. Nothing to do with tension. </pedant>

Cheers!

Raspberry Pi Pico cracks BitLocker in under a minute

Jonathan Richards 1

Re: A brilliant testament to analysis

What is TPM? Typically, it's a separate chip on the motherboard... [emphasis added]

Source: What is TPM [microsoft.com]

Jonathan Richards 1
Joke

Tunneling

Tunnelled the cheque through the wall, shurely

Cory Doctorow has a plan to wipe away the enshittification of tech

Jonathan Richards 1
Unhappy

Re: Can somebody explain to me…

Probably because the management is beholden to investors in the form of shareholders or institutional lenders who see the ten-figure annual profit, and wish for more. Greed, in a word.

Linus Torvalds flames Google kernel contributor over filesystem suggestion

Jonathan Richards 1
Pirate

Re: Here’s a bigger issue….

Ummm... I think you'll find that Linux is Linus' project. It belongs to him in a very special way. Feel free to fork it if you think you can do a better job.

40 years since Elite became the most fun you could have with 22 kilobytes

Jonathan Richards 1
Go

Tribbles

You only bought tribbles one time. Spoiler for new players follows:

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

Tribbles have a lower temperature tolerance than you do. Fly dangerously close to a star, keeping ship temperature below lethal for you, but high enough to kill the tribbles, which decline slowly but inexorably. When disinfected, never buy any again!

Jonathan Richards 1
Thumb Up

Re: docking

> I still dread the thought

I learned (by trial and error) to execute something that I internalized as a Galactic Standard Approach: Orient your ship with the planet on the port bow, and the space station on the starboard, and proceed to the nav buoy. Using that fantastic 3-D radar plotter, get stopped exactly between the buoy and the station, then pitch+roll to be facing the station. This puts you on the docking vector - all you have to do then is manage your speed and roll rate to dock successfully (while dodging random ships undocking, of course). Good times.

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

Jonathan Richards 1

Re: The rumored traditional IBM script for that...

vi traditional_script

s/eraser./eraser. Now clean *inside* the power socket with a nail file./

:wq

Want a Cybertruck? You're stuck with it for a year, says Tesla

Jonathan Richards 1
Go

Re: J. Jonah Jameson laugh.gif

External combustion Stirling engines would be great, but they're really hard to come by.

Imagine a small engine for your bicycle, canoe, or campside generator that is as quiet as a sewing machine. Its exhaust flue gases are nonpoisonous, nonpolluting and practically odorless. It starts easily, and should run without repair for many hundreds of hours, burning less than one-half liter of kerosene per hour.

Such an engine was developed 40 years ago and incorporated into a small generator set by the Philips company of Holland; it is the modern stirling air engine.

Unfortunately, only about 100 of these units were made before Philips suspended production, having concluded the 200 watt output was inadequate for commercial success in the world market at that time.

Source: MakingStirlingEngines.pdf, by Andy Ross, download link here

Jonathan Richards 1
Thumb Up

Re: J. Jonah Jameson laugh.gif

Needles! I can look at a packet of steel sewing needles and ponder how hard it would be to make something that good from scratch. Consequently I have just such a packet in my emergency bag.

Tesla swerves liability in Autopilot death lawsuit

Jonathan Richards 1

Re: Self Drive

> dropping from 70 to 30 mph for no apparent reason

I believe that the speed limit detection is a mixture of "reading" speed limit signs [Captcha: Tick all pictures with a 30 mph sign] and a GPS database. If the "reading" output is below some reliability threshold, I guess the GPS takes priority, and then where the (motor|free)way takes a flyover crossing a lower speed limit, maybe it momentarily switches down? In the UK, at least, there are probably many more motorways going *under* slower roads.

It is 20 years since the last commercial flight of Concorde

Jonathan Richards 1
Meh

Ain't got time for that

> Just wait until {SF pipe dream}

How long shall we have to wait, d'ye think?

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

Jonathan Richards 1
Go

Re: Lost the plot

> anyone here remember netbooks?

You must be new. Around here we remember bare boards that you programmed in machine code with switches.

I have a working Samsung N210 running Linux Mint/XFCE very effectively, with Win10 as a dual boot.

Search for phone signal caused oil spill, say Japanese investigators

Jonathan Richards 1

Re: Wow

> Which one?

Costa Concordia, I guess.

There is a technical report linked from this page [gov.it].

Free software pioneer Richard Stallman is battling cancer

Jonathan Richards 1
WTF?

+1

What is it with the downvotes? Can't be personal animus, because: AC. The post consists of a personal anecdote, a statement of personal feeling, and a well-phrased expression of hope for the future. I fail to see the reason, or purpose, of downvoting without the downvoter expressing itself more clearly.

Ukraine accuses Russian spies of hunting for war-crime info on its servers

Jonathan Richards 1

Re: Court procedures

Sure, defence teams should be given access to prosecution information. That occurs at the point that an accused person is brought before a court, and the defendant and their lawyer are passed the evidence bundle. It isn't proper for a possible future defendant to go hacking into other people's databases in order to find out what they might know, and then perhaps take the opportunity to obscure that evidence, or even to interfere with witnesses.

I'll note that any court dealing with war crimes in the current context is unlikely to be in Ukraine - it's much more likely to be the International Criminal Court.

Mastodon makes a major move amid Musk's multiple messes

Jonathan Richards 1
Boffin

Re: Still need a copy editor...

>> we've added progress indicators to guide people through the multi-step sign-up process and rewrote copy and labels to be more intuitive

> It's two separate clauses separated by the "and"

In which case the grammatical dissonance comes from the change of tense between the clauses, "we have added" is past perfect, and "[we] rewrote" is past tense. Replacing "rewrote" with "rewritten" would allow the second clause to benefit from the unspoken elision, so it would read as "we have added {noun phrase} and we have rewritten {different noun phrase}".

No joke: Cloudflare takes aim at Google Fonts with ROFL

Jonathan Richards 1

Witty names

ROFL! Hahaha... but of course if I want to search for more information *about* the technology, what do you think the raw hit count for "ROFL" is? A.: 19.2 million. Alright, "ROFL" "font delivery" cuts that down to 5 with a 100% precision, but still.

PEBCAK problem transformed young techie into grizzled cynical sysadmin

Jonathan Richards 1
Go

Traditional etiquette, or new-fangled poor etiquette?

> Email etiquette says to include the logo at the bottom of your external emails adding a few kb to the size

No, proper email etiquette is to send Plain Text.

OK, OK, let's not start that again.

Jonathan Richards 1
Joke

Re: Tools for end users

Can we have a part number for that Extra-Sensory Perception chip?

Polishing off a printer with a flourish revealed not to be best practice

Jonathan Richards 1

Re: Stories from Grandad

Explaining a joke causes it to collapse into, er, a non-joke. Pedants will point out that it should then have been twenty-odd hyphenated women (digits in written language being frowned upon), and then we would have laughed. Maybe, but probably not.

Token prison sentence for first convicted NFT insider trader

Jonathan Richards 1
Thumb Up

Re: Too bad. . .

Philo jests; they awfy nice Scots willnae take offence (sp) at scot-free, because scot is a sort of tax. See also scot and lot

BOFH: Zen and the art of battery replacement

Jonathan Richards 1
Unhappy

Post-pub fry-up

>where did that section go el-reg?

Sadly, very sadly, I think that it went the way of the late lamented Lester of this parish, whose enthusiasm for such may have proved unsustainable.

Curiosity finds evidence of wet and dry seasons on ancient Mars

Jonathan Richards 1
FAIL

Re: Nobody is visiting anybody

@ergot

Having been alerted to a joke, I looked in vain for it. You want to lay off the moldy rye.

Northern Ireland police may have endangered its own officers by posting details online in error

Jonathan Richards 1
Megaphone

Re: A modest proposal

Without any evidence whatsoever, I'm going to assume that there was a spreadsheet page with some sort of analysis (?pivot table) which was responsive to the FoI request, and another with all the source data, which the releasing officer didn't see, look at or understand (perm. any two from three).

The moral of this sorry tale is not (as Arthur proposes) to make Excel™ users into putative terrorists (though I upvoted!) but NOT TO USE EXCEL TO RESPOND TO FOI REQUESTS!1! What is wrong with looking at that responsive analysis, approving it and sending it to a printer. Then you can send the printout in the post, job done. Oh, someone needs to check that the printer was loaded with blank paper, it seems.

Author discovers fake, likely AI-generated books written under her name

Jonathan Richards 1
Stop

Re: Your dystopia preview is ready

School board drone: Which of the books in our catalog have sexual content and stuff?

Alleged Intelligence: 'Genesis, Unknown author, no date' looks like it should go, I mean, just look at Chapter 38.

Florida Man and associates indicted for conspiracy to steal data, software

Jonathan Richards 1
Unhappy

Whataboutism↓

+1, I wanted to say the same thing. "Yabbut, what about..." is a pervasive tactic in all sorts of political debate everywhere these days, the participants seeming never to have grown out of the phase in their lives where it sort of worked, i.e. the primary school playground. The grown-ups would usually say "Two wrongs don't make a right".

Can you raise $100M+ from AI investors with no product? SEC says yes

Jonathan Richards 1
WTF?

What's the difference...?

I thought "multi-level marketing plan" and "pyramid scheme" were synonymous...

RIP Bram Moolenaar: Coding world mourns Vim creator

Jonathan Richards 1

Re: Curious

It doesn't seem to be a rotation. On this machine, a derivative of Ubuntu 22.04, I think, /usr/bin/vim is a symbolic link:

/usr/bin/vim -> /etc/alternatives/vim

Then that is a further symbolic link to vim.basic which is the executable:

/etc/alternatives/vim -> /usr/bin/vim.basic

vim.basic is also at the end of a similar two-link chain from usr/bin/vi. In checking that out, I find that there is also a vim.tiny, which is less than half the size of vim.basic.

RIP Bram Moolenaar

Google Street View car careens into creek after 100mph cop chase

Jonathan Richards 1
Stop

afraid to stop

If you're any colo(u)r at all, and you've just barrelled past a school and a police officer, doing a hundred mph, then you're going to be afraid that it's turning out to be a bad day. Doubling down and trying to run is pretty dumb. See icon =>

Jonathan Richards 1
Joke

Re: For readers outside the US

>from cops attending my church

What sort of church has to call the cops?

Brave cuts ties with Bing to offer its own image and video search results

Jonathan Richards 1

Mojeek operators

Now with properly formatted HTML...

A Guide to Mojeek Operators

Jonathan Richards 1
Unhappy

Re: In short yes, there are reasons

I'm not sure that I'm following your logic here. Is the strategy that you're suggesting along the lines of pointing searchers towards specialized repositories, a bit like a librarian pointing you towards the History of Medicine shelves if you're interested in penicillin? Because although you could then browse the [books | resources] there, you wouldn't be that much closer to whatever particular aspect of penicillin you were curious about. A really good librarian will help you find the right index term in the Universal Decimal Classification, or Dewey (depending on the library, of course).

What I hope you're NOT suggesting is that a significant majority of what any particular search is about is to be found in a handful of web sites. That cannot be the case, and goes against every concept of distributed knowledge and the World Wide Web, which even in its entirety is not the Sum of Human Knowledge.

If you're looking only to index [1] a sub-set of the Web, how do you identify that sub-set? Seems to me that you'd have to index the whole thing to find out.

[1] Indexing used to be a skilled job, where someone with subject matter expertise would assign index terms from a controlled vocabulary to a document, so that it could be retrieved with precision later on. Sometimes the terms were filed on index cards, and then we started using computers. I know, I know, I'm old. Nowadays, Google et. al. don't have an index in that sense, at all. They have a searchable concordance, and the precision of the search results depends directly on whether the set of words in the document tell you what the document is about. Generally, it does not, and then there is all the SEO and "algorithm" finagling on top of that.

Jonathan Richards 1
Thumb Up

Re: Google search

> technical or advanced search options

Yes, this. If one learned searching long enough ago then a search term like "(BOFH OR PHY) AND (QUICKLIME OR SHALLOW)" comes naturally. The Fine Article gets a +1 from me for the mention of Mojeek, which had flown under my radar until now. It *does* offer a number of useful search operators, see <a href="https://blog.mojeek.com/2023/08/mojeek-operators-a-guide.html>A Guide to Mojeek Operators</a>

Two US Navy sailors charged with giving Chinese spies secret military info

Jonathan Richards 1
Stop

Re: Security clearance and pay grade

> anything unlocked in the office and the contents of the bin

Which is why last officer leaving the room signs to say that everything is locked, and the bin contains only shreddings. Interview without coffee follows swiftly if those things turn out not to be the case during nightly rounds - please refrain from asking me how I know.

Aliens crash landed on Earth – and Uncle Sam is covering it up, this guy tells Congress

Jonathan Richards 1

Re: Don't tell me, show me.

14:50

Stands the clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?

Jonathan Richards 1

Re: Millions of Parsecs

Critically, you also need a strong source of Brownian motion... like a really nice hot cup of tea.

Anyone using M-DISC to archive snaps?

Jonathan Richards 1
Go

Re: Solves only the easy problem

Hurrah, a reply seven years later! Just a note to update the new home for dvdisaster, which now (25-Jul-2023) resides at this developer site. DVDs may rot, but El Reg he laughs at link-rot.

Douglas Adams was right: Telephone sanitizers are terrible human beings

Jonathan Richards 1
Thumb Up

Re: Real Sanitizers

I clicked on Upvote, but as I did so I saw that you had 42 upvotes already. Can't break that total, sorry.

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