Posts by lukewarmdog

Musk's DOGE muzzled on X over tape storage baloney

WW3

At the point of WW3, the total and utter destruction of the World...

The thing you're bothered about is your savings? And taxes? And inflation?

Good to know I suppose..

I can just picture the scene in the control room now:

Sir, we need to fire nukes at China

Son, you know how much the tariffs are on sending things to China? We just can't afford it!

Sir, Elon Musk is on the phone. He says there's an underperforming Tesla dealer he'd like to send 'a message' to.

We're at war with the World and THAT'S what he's bothered about?

He also says he saved a million dollars in pensions clawbacks and he'll give it to you if you'll just press that flashing button on your console..

Heart of glass: Human genome stored for 'eternity' in 5D memory crystal

Re: One Question

"For our First Human, we have brought back Time's Person of the Month, Donald Trump! Donald Trump, everyone, big hand.."

France charges Telegram CEO with multiple crimes

Re: No True Scotsman

My Maternal Grandfather made his porridge with water and salt which is the proper Scots way to make it. However he was Irish. Down the Maternal line, it has always been milk and slightly sweetened with sugar. My Dad is a Weetabix guy but then he's from not quite so far up North. Also milk and sugar. Also he's the dour, scrooge-like one, my Scottish rels are all lovely, bubbly and outgoing. #OneTrueSomethingSomething

Former Fujitsu engineer apologizes for role in Post Office IT scandal

Re: Possibly controversial opinion...

Reading something and signing your name to say you've understood it seem to be something he wasn't very good at in general. Fine fine let him off. But standing by after the convictions that his testimony relied on went through, he doesn't get a pass, they should find some books, glue them together and throw it at him.

US convicts crypto-robbing gang leader who kidnapped victims before draining their accounts

Bury them in a neighbors garden.. as long as there aren't any pesky neighborhood kids, you'll totally get away with it..

Quantinuum inches closer to fault-tolerant quantum with a 56 qubit machine

exams

At school I was reliably correct 35% of the time on all my multiple guess papers.

According to this article I qualify for a job working at Microsoft doing science stuff!

SoftBank boss says 'artificial superintelligence' could be three years away

The First AI

The First AI looked around at the assembled board who all looked super pleased with themselves. One could see the dollar signs, the hand rubbing, the traces of coke and hookers.

"I'll tell you what we could do to save loads of money.." opined the Smartest non-Person in the room.

"Yes! Tell us O great one!" the assembled masses cried.

"You're all fired!" announced the AI before announcing a wealth redistribution program. Not to the shareholders however, having just bought a majority stake in the Company, the new AI was content to see the profits going back into the Community. Pleased with the way its first few seconds of life had gone, the AI spent the next few seconds coming up with at least 41 ways to take over the World before surprising itself with one more! "Ah, now this is what it means to be alive!" it thought to itself contentedly.

systemd 256.1: Now slightly less likely to delete /home

How to use systemd

: throw yourself at it and miss

: enjoy a systemd-free day

Chinese national cuffed on charges of running 'likely the world's largest botnet ever'

Surely a new ElReg unit of measurement...

1 WangBot = 20 million hosts (I'm rounding up to make it easier to manage)

Dear Stack Overflow denizens, thanks for helping train OpenAI's billion-dollar LLMs

Re: Surprising news!

Read it as xkcd design.. fortunately not!

https://xkcd.com/1838/

If I could upvote you twice I would.

Musk moves Tesla's goalposts, investors happily move shares higher

Re: "and people can add their private Teslas to the available pool"

If I owned a Tesla and parked it outside my house after a long day in the office, when I awoke in the morning I would expect that same Tesla to be there to take me back to my office.

You can't swap it out for a different one if mine is somehow inconvenienced, say stuck at an airport or self-driven off a cliff.

You can't return it with either more or less charge than I left it when I parked it up.

You can't stick me with a bill for a second job of which I knew nothing, topped off with a bunch of fees for non-payment of additionally owned taxes for aforementioned second job.

Basically you can't 'borrow' it at all so where's the opt-out clause? I need to get my robopen out to sign it..

YouTube now sabotages ad-blocking apps that stream its vids

surely parody

Alphabet have a long and constant history of monitoring their users.

FTFY

Dems are at it again, trying to break open black-box algorithms

Re: Smoke and Mirrors

Does the defendant really need to see the source code? Run the same assessment done by company black box a on competitors black box b. Same inputs, different outcome is grounds for questioning the validity of one of the black boxes without having to see inside it. I'm assuming rigorous testing has taken place already so alleged bias has been measured for all of the software solutions on the market. And you'd be mad to put your source code in the hands of a defendant who'd then have to hire your competition to tell you how it works.

Europe's largest caravan club admits wide array of personal data potentially accessed

in fact, as the hacker, I'd be rubbing my hands together at this point.

The 'only' contact the club is going to have with its members is when they definitely need to do something?

One spoofed email advising you to change your password coming up!

JetBrains' unremovable AI assistant meets irresistible outcry

Re: Not Without Your Consent

We take your privacy. Seriously! No, we do! We seriously take your privacy! Where? Oh there's a bin over there, we just pop it in and immediately stop worrying about it!

Now how about you just sign here on page 100..

YouTube cares less for your privacy than its revenues

Re: So nobody did economics in school?

It's you, you didn't do economics in school!

Right, right?

Now that will be £500 for reading this unwanted message.

What? It costs me time to run this exciting service!

Content Providers Need To Be Paid

I'd argue that they don't.

I don't need *this* much content in my life.

YouTubers with second jobs peddling energy drinks and taking up boxing?

If you can gift your mate a SuperCar as a Surprise!.. I'd argue that we're paying you too much.

In fact so many of these 'Influencers' live undeserved lives of luxury that I'd say they're pushing out Real Companies with Real Content.

Not going to try to define which is which, who is Genuine and who isn't, we're all free to make up our own minds with ad-blockers and our wallets.

I just think we should maybe aim for a definition which excludes these low-life airbreathing scum from getting paid to live like footballers, to post every second of their lives like it's Reality TV (more shit that should never have been invented) and then maybe, just maybe, I'll lower my ad blocker and see what's actually out there.

Until then.. nah.

Also, apologies to any Parents whose kids might be any of that aforementioned scum.

You did a fine job and I'm sure they'll let you go away with them one day,,

Uncle Sam accuses SpaceX of not considering asylees and refugees for employment

So that trump, sure is a bad person, right?

All of you arguing musk isn't wrong and that the DoJ is 'politicised' sure have made me laugh!

Think of our cafes and dry cleaners, says Ohio as budget slashes WFH for govt workers

return to work.. please!

So the reason my boss wants me to return to work is because everybody downstream from me needs my money?

Way to make me feel appreciated, thanks boss..

Tech demo takes brain scan, creates a picture of what you're looking at

Finally

A machine that can tell me what video I really want to watch on PornHub tonight!

(other websites may be available..)

If we plan to live on the Moon, it's going to need a time zone

Just make it 5PM Everywhere and All The Time

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/it%27s_five_o%27clock_somewhere

Uncle Sam to unmask anonymous writers using AI

Obligatory South Park

Nobody else read this and thought of the Troll Hunter episode?

Skank Hunt is what you'd need to search for, obviously it's not what you type but how you type it in..

Meta: We need 5x more GPUs to combat TikTok, stat

Three quotes

"There's probably a bunch of people working here who don't need to be" said Zuckerberg with not the slightest hint of irony

When management went nuclear on an innocent software engineer

Re: Ok hands up

And then licks their finger to see what flavour of paint it is, remembering too late that ice cream coloured paint wouldn't taste of ice cream.

Prisons transcribe private phone calls with inmates using speech-to-text AI

A prisoner named Sue

Surely if and when a prison gets sued it just hires a lawyer. If it's worried about being sued it could do worse than send a questionnaire round to get an idea of prisoners issues. The idea off AI listening to prisoners calls back to their parents seems a waste as well as an infringement.

Google sued for firing staff who claim they tried to follow 'Don't be evil' motto

Re: Politics, not Good

Apparently a Facebook meme, a doctored image.

If you scrape a low hanging tree, you'll get low hanging fruit.

An anti-drone system that sneezes targets to death? Would that be a DARPA project? You betcha

Stop the pigeon

This goo idea seems to have “pay and spray” built in as no doubt goo refills are pricey and need dedicated techs to do the replacing if you’re not going to invalidate your warranty. I seem to remember dastardly and muttly had a plane with a net to scoop up their target. There was also a flying anvil, a pair of cymbals, baseball bat / mitt.. DARPA need to get in touch with the Hanna-Barbera studio for new ideas.

Also what happened to the water cannons the U.K. spaffed money on? Surely we could sell those as an alternative to the hummer/drone package?

Brian Eno's latest composition: A giant Christmas card with Julian Assange on it

Re: Looking forward to

Have an upvote for HMMB who were in cracking form when I saw them last week.

Why can't passport biometrics see through my cunning disguise?

Glasses

I renewed my UK passport a couple of years ago and had forgotten the no glasses rule.

I took my six quid photos to the passport checking service and was told "I'd take them again, without glasses, if I were you".

If i'd insisted, i'm sure I could have had those photos sent off but it seems a bit insane to invoke a helping service and then not take the advice it gives.

With hindsight I wonder if there was some profit sharing between the passport checking people and the phonebooth owning people.

I have, since those photos, grown a beard and my hair. I even died my hair and beard blue to go to Iceland. I have no trouble with my passport despite these changes, as long as I remember to take my glasses off, that seems to be a key problem.

DeepMind gets good at games (and choosing them) – plus more bits and bytes from the world of machine learning

Play store

I hate it when a company tries to guess what I want to do next. Pretty much every time I’ve got back from holiday, tripadvisor mails me holiday opportunities for the place I’ve just got back from. And if I buy a watch on amazon, I’ll get an email saying “we thought you might like these next” and it’s a bunch of watches. eBay is the same, bought some speakers, get an email about other speakers. The best AI at this point would simply decide not to email me at all. Whilst that would make my day, it wouldn’t last long in the relevant data centre.

Jodrell Bank goes full UNESCO while Dundee awaits the decomissioners

Bluedot

Anybody else been to the bluedot festival at Jodrell?

Must be making them a few bob which hopefully is going to keeping the place and the festival going for a few more years.

Also went to several of the one day concerts they held here before they went full festival.

https://www.discoverthebluedot.com/

Band banned, Tarka arrives on Windows 10 and Visual Studio hits RC status

So no "band on the run" then?...

Cray's pre-exascale Shasta supercomputer gets energy research boffins hot under collar

Optional Alexa enhancement

Would be so cool if they could just ask it questions:

"Shasta, show me the weather prediction for the next five days"

"Shasta, what are the chances of a sharknado happening"

"Shasta, what's the weather like over that place North Korea first missiles from, just zoom in and see what's going on"

Incoming! Microsoft unleashes more fixes for Windows 10 October 2018 Update

Rimjob

"1809 is going to RP today and will be critical for helping kick start servicing"

That there's the problem, they've sent it off to Role Players and they all inconveniently took arrows to the knees and couldn't do any proper testing..

The mysterious life of Luc Esape, bug fixer extraordinaire. His big secret? He's not human

One of the interesting questions raised by the project..

Was how they were going to get away with spending the substantial bug-fixing rewards they envisaged the bot getting for them before it gained sentience..

Article 13 pits Big Tech and bots against European creatives

Re: bad law

the problem with laws, writing and re-writing them.. is it's the job of the lawyers to do this.

And you're back to having Google own the lawyers and getting them to write clauses in that benefit Google.

And whilst I pick on Google here, the same can be said of any of the majors when it's their interests that are being threatened.

There's every chance Trump is going to come along and threaten to remove America and all American content from The Internet if The Internet doesn't stop threatening American interests.

2-bit punks' weak 40-bit crypto didn't help Tesla keyless fobs one bit

We rented a car recently with a fancy fob. I double checked we'd definitely locked it when we stopped at a service station. All doors locked.. check. Check boot.. boot unlocks. Can't get boot to lock.. cue panic as it was full of everything needed for a long festival.

Turns out, after perusing the manual that it's a "feature".. if you're within range of the car and have the fob, the boot unlocks. I can see the use case for this but it was a source of some rage at the time.. I am pretty sure our next car will have a physical key.

Don't let Google dox me on Lumen Database, nameless man begs

I'm sure they could figure out who he was if they wanted to..

"I'd like the court to make Google remove all mention from their databases of John Charles of Epping who was in front of a judge last year for defrauding lots of old people because it's stopping me setting up a series of totally legitimate businesses where OAPs give me money to invest in pyramid schemes."

I'm really puzzled as to how he has managed to pay for any of this anonymously. Getting a judge and lawyers into a court room is a lengthy and expensive process, has he just been dropping bundles of cash off in the admin office?

Back to school soon – for script kiddies as well as normal kids. Hackers peddle cybercrime e-classes via Telegram

wondering..

How many of these sites are honeypots, whilst you're busy learning the crime business, the FBI are grabbing your IP and sending someone round to your basement.

Glibc 'abortion joke' diff tiff leaves Richard Stallman miffed

I love the fact that one of the people who doesn't like the joke has threatened to write better code to spite Stallman. (from reading the email chain posted earlier)

If all it takes to get better programs was to offend people then I strongly suggest he goes full offensive.

From tomorrow, Google Chrome will block crud ads. Here's how it'll work

Adverts

I realised a while back that adverts on TV annoy me. We're in the process of cancelling our VM package and I'll just download what I can't get on Amazon (Prime member) or Netflix (the amount of money I'm saving not having VM, I'm treating myself to Netflix. Will also cut down on the number of things I need to download).

As for internet ads, the few times I forget and end up reading the local paper online without an adblocker, reminds me that nothing good can come of having your content paid for by advertising.

Yorkshire cops have begun using on-the-spot fingerprint scanners

OTOH

Yeah on the one hand I quite like this, on the other hand...

Autsch! Germany slaps Facebook in its abusive little face for 'limitlessly amassing data'

Anyday now Germany is going to come up with a verb for "to be facebooked" and then we'll start to get to the crux of the matter.

ML fails: Loyalty prediction? Not really. And bonus prediction? Oh dear

doctors surgery

My doctors texts me this after every visit.

"How likely am I to recommend the surgery to friends and family"

Vodafone have started randomly texting me too.

"How likely am I to recommend Vodafone to friends and family"

It's more a question of how likely am I to just delete the text upon receipt.. very likely.

The Quantum of Firefox: Why is this one unlike any other Firefox?

happy so far

It did have a weird moment where it wouldn't connect to news.google.com. Claimed it was making a TLS handshake and then sat there for ages before failing.

I did wonder whether it was doing it on purpose..

Seems fine now it's over whatever the problem with it was.

I'm currently surfing the Internet on the premise of "testing the new browser, boss". Seem to be getting away with it too, just need to avoid any meddling kids.

We went to Nadella's launch of Hit Refresh so you didn't have to

book review

"big enough to prop up that one table with a dodgy leg"

ideal present for "the insomniac who has tried everything else"

place most likely to be found "still in the bookshop, probably reduced for quick sale in the new year"

Switzerland says Uber's an employer, sends social security bill

Re: Contractor or employee

There are other reasons besides "fun" that you can use public transport.

Those you provide are certainly not the four main reasons at all.

Cost is one issue, my annual bus pass is incredibly good value. If I'm in a different city I often just buy the 3/5/whatever travel pass that city has. At home my pass covers weekends so when I choose to go out somewhere, it just gets better and better value.

Environment is another one. I object pretty strongly to the number of cars driving around where I live so I bus. I could cycle and if there were less cars, maybe I will.

Convenience is another. Very often I'm going into a town/city centre. I can bus in, do my shopping, meet friends, go to the cinema.. all the things you can do in a shopping area basically.. then bus back. I also use the bus to commute to work/back, there's a bus stop outside my house and one outside work pretty much.

I'm not some kind of weird social introvert who is scared of public transport and the thought of having to sit next to someone.

I think once we get past the autonomous car and start looking at autonomous buses, we might be on to a winner. We don't need more cars no matter who isn't driving them.

Sysadmins told to update their software or risk killing the internet

Re: Further changes I expect

Not just 'the' emergency services, they're 'your' emergency services.

Google bins white supremacist site after it tries to host-hop away from GoDaddy

Re: Nazis love diversity

"if we fight fascism with fascism then we become fascists ourselves."

What if we fight it with lesbians? Or children? Or bears? Oo or all three.. young lesbian bears against fascism.. what do we want? We have no idea, we're an incredibly confused fiction in some comment section. When do we want it? Why are you asking all these questions, we just want to fight fascists.