Posts by captain veg 2315 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009
AI isn't bad, per se.
Half the human population is of below average intelligence. Why shouldn't the artificial variety be the same?
In fact, were it to reach that rarefied median level we should probably think it an achievement.
AI seems to me to be an attempt to emulate the infinite number of monkeys, equipped with typewriters, and given enough time, inevitably producing the works of Shakespeare. We haven't got an infinfinite number of monkeys available. Will cloud computing do?
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The first thing I do after setting up a new machine or upgrading software is *turn off* all the spill chucking and -- especially -- checking grammar features. Just STFU about me using the passive voice, I'm writing technical report, not a novel.
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> When coding for a certain task, how many ways are there to display "Hello world"?
Did that certain task involve displaying the words "Hello world"? (With or without comma after 'Hello', according to taste.) On a limited sample of those tasks I've been assigned over the years, I'd say none at all.
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Were I to put my code into the public domain, which has been known to happen, it would be for one of two reasons.
1. I think someone might be able to learn something from it.
2. I think that someone might be able to make a useful criticism of it.
There is no number 3. "so that someone can just use it as-is without understanding how it works."
It seems to me that the non-existent reason number 3 is exactly what Copilot promotes. Some might describe it as theft.
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A GIF is a file in a particular format, viz the Graphics Interchange Format, a lossless image representation.
It supports limited animation.
Giphy, so far as I can tell, flogs short video clips. I dare say that they are mostly MPEG encoded. Nothing at all to do with GIF, in fact.
Am I wrong?
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>> I wonder how much extra range..."
> None (or more), it's electric.
What does that have to do with it? Acceleration requires force, whatever the motive power. If you think increasing force doesn't consume more energy then I have a design for a perpetual motion machine that might interest you.
> it's probable that it takes more energy to accelerate slower, as seen as in a basic cordless drill.
Electric motors produce maximum potential torque at rest. If you make use of that potential then you maximally consume energy. Using less of that potential results in less acceleration and less energy expended. Your screwdriver might not have any means of regulation, I suppose.
> None (or more), it's electric.
I suspect that you meant "or less", but it's still bollocks either way.
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It is *a* metric.
I would say that 40-60mph in top gear is more meaningful for most drivers, except (of course) that EVs don't have (or need) gears.
Top speed can be important. I fairly regularly drive across north eastern Spain down into Alicante province. The "obvious" route, which is generally the one recommended by sat-navs and online route planners involves getting across to the A(P)7 motorway by the Mediterranean coast as quickly as possible, then sitting at the 120kph limit (which is wise; there are plenty of radars).
Experience tells me that going cross-country on two-lane blacktop through Aragon is *much* faster. Providing you are more interested in making progress than observing the niceties of the posted speed limits. It's almost entirely empty, and you can see for miles. The safe maximum speed is quite often as much as your vehicle can manage. The radars are few.
When driving in town, though, I'm often astonished how many drivers seem to think that accelerating maximally to the next traffic lights is some kind of proxy for actually going (on average) any faster. All it does is turn money into noise, and pollution.
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> I wonder how much extra range would be possible if the acceleration were a more practical 0-62 in 10 seconds?
You can find out, thanks to a special device operated by a pedal conveniently placed under the right foot.
Using the same gizmo you can also determine how much energy can be saved by accelerating slower still. (Hint: it's a lot.)
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At the height of the psychometric testing fad our Chief Exec decided to have it done to all the directors. Including my then boss. She was so dispirited by the result that she basically gave up on her career and started a family instead. Which is a shame (for me), because she was by some distance the best manager I ever had.
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Well, it could be.
If you'd bought Bitcoin when they were a few dollars each (maybe less, they were a couple of hundred when I first looked) then even at the currently depressed price of approximately $20,000 you are in a position to pay your energy bills. For the next couple of years, at least.
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Hmm.
I like KDE.
I don't use it habitually. I use Cinnamon, because that's the line of least resistance on the distro of least resistance*.
It's a bit brown, but otherwise just a graphical desktop much like any other. That's kind of the point.
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* I last changed distro back in 2017. From openSuSE to Mint, if you must know, I'd been using Lubuntu in parallel, which is where I realised that DEB packages just work better than RPMs.
My own brother, I recently discovered, depends on Apple Pay for ordinary shopping. To the extent that he was worried, while we were in Spain, whether it would be accepted there. It was, of course, but the point is that he had no backup plan if it did not.
Frankly I despair, but I'm afraid that this is the new normal.
Once you've got the public used to the likes of Apple taking monthly variable payments directly out of their bank accounts it's a small step to start charging an initially insignificant levy to make that convenience work. To encourage sign-up this token payment "buys" you software that you used to have to pay fairly serious money for. Windows, for example. Or Office.
Once quasi-universal, jack up the monthly charge!
I'm afraid that this is clearly the intention. Put everything online and charge for access, In that world it matters not a jot which O/S, free or not, you're running locally.
I doesn't need to be like this. FOSS on the desktop is an admirable objective. FOSS mediating online transactions, whether or not there's money involved, is absolutely crucial. We desperately need a federated micropayment system.
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I remember my late '90s supermarket special beige PC had a generic 14" CRT that just wouldn't play with X.
I emailed the "manufacturer" (i.e. the importer) to ask if they could give me a set of X parameters that would, you know, actually put an image on the screen.
To their credit, they promptly replied, stating that they had attached a device driver file for it.
Sadly it was a Windows (95/98) .INF file. Chocolate spanner territory.
I never did get it to work. In the end I bought an LCD panel. Cost a fair amount and could only display 4096 colours, at 1024x768, but it worked straight out of the box. Never had a CRT since.
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Irrespective of it's (lack of) FLOSS credentials, VirtualBox always worked best for me.
For the first attempt, it simply worked on hardware that had no special VM capabilities. Like older Pentium 4 chips.
Then just for the fact that it virtualises the display. In many ways that's enough on it's own.
Things might well have changed since, but I last tried VMWare at a time when they changed their free offering to require you to access the guest desktop via a browser Java plugin. Slightly later I observed that Hyper-V only supported a GUI via RDP. I never got KVM to work with a GUI. VirtualBox always did the right thing, i.e. render it in a window on the host OS, whilst also offering full-screen AND the (rather astonishing) seamless mode.
So, if you want a free Virtual Machine manager that serves you the guest OS's GUI in a window (if that's what you want), well it works pretty well. I've stuck with it with very few regrets. I can't tell you if competitors do it better now, but I shall definitely be trying V7.
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This (the title) was literally the subject of an email that I received from corporate IT.
I tried explaining that I had clicked on nothing, but downloaded (with wget) into a secure virtual machine the content of a page linked to in a deeply suspicious email.
Having analysed the download it was clearly bogus. So I reported it to local IT and the providers of the email sender and the linked web site.
The corporate security nazis insisted that I take "remedial" security training. When I refused they withdrew all access to network resources, so I couldn't work. Which was fine for me, but annoyed my colleagues somewhat. I "watched" (i.e. ignored until it had finished) the "mandatory" training (i.e. I could correctly answer all the questions without the slightest hesitation having spent precisely no time at all absorbing the "training"), which was (surprise!) entirely pointless.
I complained. They threatened me with disciplinary action.
I work for an American company. I don't get why we spend vast amounts on employing these B-Ark parasites.
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Windows 2000 was the first Windows that brought together the NT kernel, the Win95 start menu*, and USB support.
Everything you need, in fact. Peak Windows.
XP started up a lot faster, which was welcome, but didn't otherwise add anything useful. Worryingly but presciently you had to configure away the stupid Teletubbies UI in favour of the (well-named) Classic scheme.
It's been downhill ever since. There really hasn't been any kind of compelling reason to upgrade other than running out of support.
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* Yes, yes, NT4 had the Win95 UI. But not USB support. No SATA either.
> the AI code assistants need to be trained in the process of debugging
Something like this?
"It looks like you are writing a linked list.
"Would you like help?
" - Let me bugger it all up for you
" - Just fuck off and leave you alone"
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I was pretty astonished recently to discover that there exists a version of Symantec Endpoint Perversion for Linux. My employers expected me to install it before connecting to the corporate VPN.
It wouldn't install. It required a kernel version four revisions out of date.
This is supposed to be security?
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