* Posts by Adrian 4

2288 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jul 2009

If we plug this in without telling anyone, nobody will know we caused the outage

Adrian 4

Re: Ethernet AUI were a pita too.

Twisted pair followed in the tradition of AUI by having an easily broken retaining latch.

Rust can help make software secure – but it's no cure-all

Adrian 4

Re: Classic

"We need to rewrite it in Rust. It will solve all our problems and we will be able to hire cheaper developers because Rust doesn't allow to make any mistakes that will impact security".

Well said.

I have no doubt that the writers of Rust have the best of intentions. But they probably write good C code too and don't make rookie errors already. The worry is the fanbois manager who thinks it will solve all those memory allocation bugs he's suffered from his inexperienced C programmers.

And again, while the Rust devotees are likely careful souls who'll think about all the other issues too, someone pushed into using it because it will make them more reliable doesn't have the same attitiude - they'll use whatever hack is needed to get their code to compile.

Clue : inexperienced programmers will make mistakes in any language.

Boffins demo self-eating rocket engine in Scotland

Adrian 4

Re: prior art

Bacon lance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9dskxN10N0

Uncle Sam tells hospitals: Meet security standards or no federal dollars for you

Adrian 4

Re: They knew what they were getting into. I say let them crash!

I guess Emsisoft products aren't on the required standards list, then.

Need to plug in an EV? BT Group kicks off cabinet update pilot

Adrian 4

Re: Another of Baldrick's "Cunning Plans"

Not just The Register.

I don't get the antipathy toward EVs. There's a certain fraction of people who look for problems rather than solutions. It's clear they're largely justifying their prejudice rather than honestly analysing. ICEs have many problems too and I for one will be very glad to see the back of mine.

Sure, a significant change to EVs will present challenges. So rather than gripe and moan, why not look for solutions ? That's what proper engineers do.

OpenAI: 'Impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials'

Adrian 4

Re: Legality and Ethics

They can learn laws. Some have been shown to be capable of passing legal exams (though IMHO that says more about the exams than the AIs). But they still don't understand them and therefore can't apply them. They match words and sentences but not concepts.

Adrian 4

Re: Sounds like...

But while a child's essay, which has no publication or circulation may not acknowledge its sources, a student's essay must. In fact, the essay becomes more valuable by doing so, since attribution allows the following of references and additional detail.

An AI that produces text without references is of little value : it's just boilerplate and the wide occurrence of hallucinations devalues it.

What the LLM needs to do is tag its sources so it can show attribution and produce a more useful document. But that's hard to do, because it doesn't select arguments meaningfully, it just makes a word soup and statistically selects content from it.

I'm not very fond of the copyright industry and the abuse by companies like Elsevier. But when AI understands and implements respect of copyright, it will be a lot more valuable.

Windows boss takes on taskbar turmoil, pledges to 'make Start menu great again'

Adrian 4

Re: Honestly

And the 737 MAX debacle was because Boeing were so keen to avoid that retraining that they killed 346 people to pretend it wasn't necessary.

UK government lays out plan to divert people's broken gizmos from landfill

Adrian 4

Re: "financed by the hardware producers rather than the taxpayer"

Although that sounds unfortunate, what alternative is there ?

If government paid for it, that means taxpayers. So .. everybody, whether they frequently buy appliances or not.

The ideal solution would be to finance the collection and recycling costs using the recycled objects. I have no idea whether that's economically viable.

Google Groups ditches links to Usenet, the OG social network

Adrian 4

Re: The spam was coming from inside the house

As the mass users went to facebook and similar scumsites, it makes me wonder if Usenet is worthwhile again. Surely there's nobody to spam there any more and maybe it will become again the tech paradise it once was.

OK. But I can dream, can't I ?

It's ba-ack... UK watchdog publishes age verification proposals

Adrian 4

Re: "facial age estimation"

The bandwidth necessary to keep the video up to date with 'current' will easily defeat this scheme.

Adrian 4

Re: NSFW...

"The powers that be are sold on the idea that AI can magically solve all this."

And this is the danger of the waves of AI-like systems. Stupid politicians believing it can magically solve problems when all it can do is magically create new ones.

What we need is magical AI politicians, carefully safeguarded by giving them neither power nor platforms.

Sam Altman set to rejoin OpenAI as CEO – seemingly with Microsoft's blessing

Adrian 4

Re: Mmmmm

Yes. As usual, it's not the technology that's bad but our use of it. Banning the technology is playing whack-a-mole - we'll just find another.

Hardware hacker: Walling off China from RISC-V ain't such a great idea, Mr President

Adrian 4

Re: Disagree

It didn't work for thermal cameras.

can't speak for the military, but industry now has better, cheaper, more flexible products from China than from America.

Arm grabs a slice of Raspberry Pi to sweeten relationship with IoT devs

Adrian 4

Re: I remember when

I don't have much regard for Python but I thought it was popular because of the wide library support. Kids don't come with BBC BASIC wired in from the womb - they've still got to start by copying from somewhere else, modifying, and then writing from scratch. Maybe some pythonista here could illustrate what you'd need to type in (or, of course, save from a web page) to do something moderately interesting.

I presume there's a clone of BBC BASIC available too .. it's only a clicky link away, isn't ? Kids are used to that from their phone. And then there's stuff like Scratch.

I agree there's a lot more going on to get started but I don't think the new user sees much of it. The only difference is that there are more choices, and that's really down to the school setup.

Adrian 4

Re: I remember when

I think administration for school computers is largely outsourced to the local authority and they'll be just as familiar with Pis as Windows, if not more. It's quite a few years since Pi appeared and it'#s only got better, while all Windows has done is eat up the resources of increasingly powerful PCs.

What's the refresh period for school PCs, anyway ? I suspect more than the 2-3 years that businesses need to keep them usable. In fact, it could be surprisingly close to the refresh period of the Pis themselves.

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

Adrian 4

Re: EMACS

A mere Eight Megs and Constantly Swapping shows VSCode up for the bloated dog it is

Sorry Pat, but it's looking like Arm PCs are inevitable

Adrian 4

@Yet Another Anonymous coward

So, they're essentially a windows Chromebook ?

Why are you still on x86 with all that legacy baggage ?

Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detection scripts under EU law

Adrian 4

I might search and watch Youtube vidos intensively for a day on one subject, but then want to return to an 'ordinary' mix because that research is done. The algorithm knows nothing of this. It is unstoppably stupid.

Adrian 4

Some would say they already have

Adrian 4

Re: Good.

I haven't so far had the nag screen on Brave.

However I do have two other problems :

- Watching youtube in a Patreon window doesn't play. The cursor moves but the picture doesn't, and there's no sound.

- Following the link to watch on youtube works fine

- Watching youtube via a hackaday article gives a black screen

- Following the link from the hackaday article tells me the viseo is blocked

- Finding the video directly on youtube works fine.

I don't know whether this is a problem with Brave or youtube.

Windows 11: The number you have dialed has been disconnected

Adrian 4

Re: Built to last

Windows

Windows 3

Windows 3.11

Windows 95

Windows 98

Windows NT

Windows Vista

Windows XP

Windows 7

Windows 8

Windows 10

Windows 11

Windows 12

(apologies if I got some wrong)

Yes, it must be about time for another meaningless renumbering.

How 'AI watermarking' system pushed by Microsoft and Adobe will and won't work

Adrian 4

opt-out

Why not put a visible watermark on the image and include an encrypted 'patch' to remove it. Then it's there in any non-conforming application but can be optionally displayed without in a conforming application.

Lawsuit claims Google Maps led dad of two over collapsed bridge to his death

Adrian 4

> most importantly the fact that the condition had existed for years, I'm inclined to think Google does deserve some portion of the blame in this case.

And had been notified for 2 years that it was unsafe

Data breach reveals distressing info: People who order pineapple on pizza

Adrian 4

You don't need blackhats to do this, you can just improve the reporting policy.

" .. details on 190,000 customers, including an estimated 2,000 politicians and law makers."

Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure

Adrian 4

So, your car needs a keel ?

Portable Large Language Models – not the iPhone 15 – are the future of the smartphone

Adrian 4

I imagine it would be like that google thing that keeps popping up unasked and trying to push their services. Unwanted, always wrong, but won't go away.

Watt's the worst thing you can do to a datacenter? Failing to RTFM, electrically

Adrian 4

Re: Doubling the amps?

They're journalists.

They're never going to understand the relationship between voltage and current however many times you try.

Don't expect rational explanations until they start employing engineers.

Adrian 4

Re: Check the power supply

Fuses blow when currents are too large. Sometimes this is caused by high voltage but it depends on the circuit parameters.

The usual rule is that semiconductors fail to protect expensive fuses.

Google Chrome Privacy Sandbox open to all: Now websites can tap into your habits directly for ads

Adrian 4

Re: Sneaky

I use Brave most of the tinme but it does fail, probably when the website demands a popup. I prefer to just forget about such websites. Coercion is no way to make friends.

UK admits 'spy clause' can't be used for scanning encrypted chat – it's not 'feasible'

Adrian 4

Re: Dead

No, they're frightened of having to stop using them themselves, instead having to use a proper verified email system that's open to their party whips and future investigations.

I'll see your data loss and raise you a security policy violation

Adrian 4

Re: Outlook...

Isn't a web browser a thin client by a different name ?

Judge snuffs man's quest to have AI-created art protected by copyright

Adrian 4

Re: Different Place, Different Rules

> Though that clause was meant to benefit those using PaintDeluxe, or OctaMed to create images or music.

Which is analogous. Both those and the "AI" (as urged by the prompt) are merely tools.

Bad software destroyed my doctor's memory

Adrian 4

Re: Sometimes the inverse works

No, you won't.

Government procedure would be to take that working application and have it reimplemented by their favourite vendor. The result will be completely useless, if it works at all.

rinse and repeat.

If you're Russian to the Moon, expect traffic: Moscow's Putin a lander into orbit

Adrian 4

https://xkcd.com/713/

The choice: Pay BT megabucks, or do something a bit illegal. OK, that’s no choice

Adrian 4

Re: What is a parking garage?

Luton parkway is the nearest railway station to the airport. It does have a car park, though.

Jury orders Google to pay $340M patent-infringement damages over Chromecast

Adrian 4

So it's like a remote control then, except that it goes via an intermediary. Maybe like a remote control with networked room repeaters - they were a thing, weren't they ?

And that's patentable ?

I do hate patents that just implement the same idea using different technologies.

Linux lover consumed a quarter of the network

Adrian 4

Re: CDs ?

We people on the fringes didn't have the luxury of direct tcp connections :)

Collect 40 or 50 postings, trim,cut,paste them together (there might have been a tool for this), uudecode, patch, fix the errors, rebuild ..

Adrian 4

CDs ?

Debian CDs ?

DIdn't anyone else glue together KILOBYTES of uuencoded Minix patches from Usenet ?

Douglas Adams was right: Telephone sanitizers are terrible human beings

Adrian 4

> So I walked back down the hill and confiscated the Openreach ladder still leaning against the pole.

Extra points if he's still up the pole

Indian developer fired 90 percent of tech support team, outsourced the job to AI

Adrian 4

> Meanwhile, about the story - very suspect, probably just a self-promotional publicity play.

Shortly to be followed by the announcement of an automated support-desk product.

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

Adrian 4

While they're at it the could do some other basic built-in verification such as a checksum on bank account numbers so that mistyped entries are detected instead of assigned to another accout,

Banks must have been one of the first organisation to use computers but they still give no indication of understanding the technology.

Adrian 4

logging ?

So, the bank guarded against future abuse by setting a trigger on payments to some account. And confused that account with a new, unrelated one. And when that trigger went off .. 3 times in 3 months .. they still didn't investigate. And it was only the failure of the payments forcing the payee to investigate that turned it up ?

Bank should be banned from trading. Clearly incompetent.

Will Flatpak and Snap replace desktop Linux native apps?

Adrian 4

Re: Lucky you.

There's also a difference bewtween resources required once, for packaging, and resources required every boot or application start.

The idea that you should repackage every day is also absurd, and if it is done it's done by machine as in a nightly or well-named unstable build

Adrian 4

making packages

You suggest that making packages is a great deal of work for the pacvkage maintainer. And no doubt it is.

But some part of that work has to be done by the snap builder. And the cost of effectively translating a package build made for just snap instead of all the viable distributions is pad on every startup by every user. That isn't a good tradeoff.

Adrian 4

Re: Performance isn't free...

I have an operating system to support apps.

I don't want to ship large parts of that with the app. At thatv rate I might as well just have a VM supervisor,. not an OS.

It may be that the problem is apps rely on other apps instead of OS services, and they aren't packaged definitively enough.

In that case, those apps need to migrate towards being reliable, properly supported and versioned services instead of half-assed web things.

We don't want to end up with an OS that's maintained like python, do we ?

Another redesign on the cards for iPhone as EU rules call for removable batteries

Adrian 4

Re: UK specific model?er

> but my club has both a hand held gps and marine radio with batteries I can swap (while at sea).errproof

That sounds great ! and useful; if you're unexpectedly attacked by a baby seal too !

Amazon confirms it locked Microsoft engineer out of his Echo gear over false claim

Adrian 4

Re: Deserved

> As a M$ engineer he should have been more savvy.

You'll have noticed that neither primary nor backup strategy included a dependency on microsoft.

AI needs a regulatory ecoystem like your car, not a Czar

Adrian 4

Artificial

Artificial, in the same sense as artificial flavouring or artificial grass, is what it is. Something that has the appearance of an object, but isn't it. However the term raises higher expectations than that because it's been a target for so long. The current crop isn't what we hoped for, even if it can sneakily be described like that.

A better name for the current effort would probably be Fake Intelligence.

What I think we're really looking for is Machine Intelligence. Actual intelligence that's good for something, but done by machines.