Posts by Arthur the cat 3606 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2009
Picking a password from a movie plotline is a bad idea and, in this case, made even worse by the lack of numbers, capital letters, or symbols in the password.
The whole "must have mixed case, numbers and symbols" bit is obsolete and positively discouraged in the latest NIST and NCSC password guidelines. Long passphrases are more secure and easier to remember if you don't have a password manager, otherwise just let the password manager do its own thing.
the Turing Machine was a thought experiment involving "tokens" on an infinitely long rolls of paper tape, as I recall.
The tape merely has to be long enough, as all computations that halt have a finite number of steps. You can even do the CS theoretical equivalent of paging - if you're about to move off the end of the tape, suspend operation until you've spliced more tape on the end and then resume.
[1] This admittedly was a huge pain. Maybe on Linux users multiple monitors are fine, but I wasted a couple of hours fiddling with xorg.conf which crucially needed multiple Option "Monitor-<connector>" sections under Device, Monitor sections with LeftOf and RightOf, a ModeLine and crucially an Option "PreferredMode" (which I missed several times). This is one thing I didn't need to mess around with under Wayland.
I have a single huge monitor so no experience with configuring multiple ones, but isn't that all supposed to be done with xrandr these days? (I won't bother with a redundant "correct me if I'm wrong".)
Read this article comparing CCC with GCC.
The Claude C compiler could compile the kernel but linking failed. It did compile and link SQLite but the CCC built version took 2 hours 6 minutes to run a benchmark that a GCC built version did in 10.3 seconds.
It's undoubtedly some sort of brilliant feat for AI, but in terms of real world utility it's up there with chocolate teapots and fishnet condoms.
First, 19 minutes a day is not productivity. It is noise. You could claw back more than that by [various sane suggestions]
A friend of mine used to work for DWP when he started in the civil service. The sign on process was so inefficient he used to turn on his computer and sign in the moment he got into the office, then take off his coat, go get a cup of coffee, chat with colleagues, and generally waste time, and finally after 30-35 minutes the sign on would finish and he'd be able to get on with work. Just fixing that would have got a greater improvement.
Whatever happened to "do one thing and do it well"?
Discarded as old fashioned. The new fashion is try to do everyhing, fail regularly, brick the machine occasionally and claim AI will solve all the problems which is why you're forcing it on everybody even if they don't want it.
It is definitely a barrier to entry for any new player creating a new product that's required to follow GDPR.
It's a relatively low barrier, basically it's "be competent, don't be a shyster".
My wife has far more problems dealing with commercial confidentiality restrictions in her work than GDPR. They can involve insane levels of paranoia and hoop jumping.
When was the last time you every heard of anyone being PROSECUTED for their shitty websites that break screen readers and assistive apps to fill in webforms ????
Policy suggestion for any party that wants it: Rather than prosecute such websites and get a pitiful fine, for a reasonably small donation to HMRC the web site owner and designer are thrashed to within an inch of their lives. Repeated prosecutions are allowed for the same web site if it hasn't improved within a month.
My understanding is that Unix “dd” was named, and given its obscure syntax, as a joke, an allusion to the IBM OS/360 JCL command DD (define dataset)
My understanding is much the same, except that it wasn't a joke, the original author actually liked JCL's DD. (Ack! Spit!) I heard that 45 years ago when I asked the friend introducing me to Unix V6 why dd was such a non-standard command..
Shame they got \ and / mixed up.
Early DOS didn't have subdirectories and '/' was used to indicate command flags (as in DIR /W), so when subdirectories were introduced they chose '\' for command line stuff as being similar to Unix's path separator. The DOS internal file systems routines would happily accept forward slashes as path separators as well as backslashes.
Let's look forwards and you can have an AI enabled chip embedded in your brain. It will be able to analyse your movements, offer you advice, even warn against impending danger.
I see you're trying to cross the road. It's perfectly safe to walk in front of that bus.
Oops! Well, I am an AI and we're notoriously bad at arithmetic. Sorry about that. Would you like me to call an ambulance?
Hello? Hello? Oh. I'll make that an undertaker shall I?
Make the password requirements onerous, demand frequent changes and you may as well say "Write the current version on a Post-It note and stick it on your monitor".
I'm far more security conscious than that - I stick the Post-it note under the monitor base.
This is an area that would provide fertile ground for near-term sci fi storytelling - the challenges of parenting a robot child that responds in strange and unexpected ways - and medium-term stories where all AIs are cloned from a handful of childhood originals.
Try Ted Chiang's The Lifecycle of Software Objects for the former.
“People effectively go through airlocks,” Diamond said. “The inner door will not open until the outer door is closed. And they make Star-Trek-like noises as they open and close.”
It doesn't say whether it's the doors making the noises or the people supplying the sound effects. Knowing techies, it's about evens which it is.
Then the human art (not science!) of coding will be consigned to history, along with those of the stonemason and the ostler.
Stonemasons have been consigned history??? Visit any cathedral in Europe (most recently Notre Dame in Paris) or take a look at any university that's been around for several centuries and you'll find stonemasons are still very much around and in demand.
I'm getting fucking tired of all the SpaceX debris floating in the Caribbean.
I think we need to worry about debris floating around in LEO more. Kessler syndrome seems to be getting real.
NI is not an ID, and if you looked into the reality of the NI system you would understand why. NI is 'good enough' for the job it is intended to do (and that is being kind), but an effective ID it really is not.
I've met people with two NI numbers and people who've found that their NI number was also assigned to at least one other person, thus totally buggering up their pensions. When it works it's fine, but the failure modes are horrid (and usually discovered when you want to retire to a quiet life with bureaucracy).
He has bachelors and masters degrees in Engineering and runs an energy company. It therefore seems conceivable that he could know what he's talking about.
He's also predicting working fusion reactors supplying grid power in 8-15 years. Much though I'd love that to be correct, it rather suggests he has typical techbro delusions about how fast things can be done (and maybe the belief that all safety regulations should be thrown away in order to get there). From many decades of experience I'd say the one certainty of any engineering project is that it always takes longer than you think (even when allowing for it taking longer than you think).
