Whilst not quite debt collector level, we once had a TV Licensing demand turn up at our office. We're a major UK television broadcaster (with 3 letters in our name). A manager sent it on to our legal department to deal with. I'd have just ignored it to see what happened next.
Posts by Wyrdness
349 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2009
Developers feared large chaps carrying baseball bats could come to kneecap their ... test account?
UK ICO not happy with Google's plans to allow device fingerprinting
We know what Musk will probably dress up as this year: A victim
Opening up the WinAmp source to all goes badly as owners delete entire repo
Magnetic personalities at Tokamak Energy form separate division
A last look at the Living Computers museum before collection heads to auction
US 'laptop farm' man accused of outsourcing his IT jobs to North Korea to fund weapons programs
The graying open source community needs fresh blood
We never agreed to only buy HP ink, say printer owners
Microsoft promises Copilot will be a 'moneymaker' in the long term
Github copilot is useful for coding
I'm a Linux & Mac user, and definitely not a fan of Microsoft. But I've been using Github copilot recently with some great results. Last week I was writing a Lightningjs app for a smart TV. I've never used Lightningjs before and knew nothing at all about it (or indeed Javascript). Github copilot can be scarily good at times. Even with a language and framework that I had zero knowledge of on Monday, by Wednesday I had a basic but working home automation app running on a TV, able to control lights and other home devices. Copilot was able to guess what I was trying to do and would suggest code to do it. It wasn't always correct, but sometimes it was simply astonishing and really helped me to learn rapidly.
iFixit tears Apple's Vision Pro to pieces
Re: Cnnot use with glasses so need prescription lens inserts
If you think that it's "not too difficult" to process an electronic image so that it's viewable for people with varying eye prescriptions, then I strongly suggest that you work out how it can be done, patent it and rake in the millions from your idea.
Because most of us believe that the only simple way to bend the light between screen and eyes is to use physical lenses.
Superuser mostly helped IT, until a BSOD saw him invent a farcical fix
NASA engineers scratch heads as Voyager 1 starts spouting cosmic gibberish
You don't get what you don't pay for, but nobody is paid enough to be abused
Process failure
It sounds as if the whole process was incorrect. Doug (or someone else) should have written a formal specification for the level of broadband service required for the company, making a good business case for proper support. This should have been signed off by management. Then whoever decided to penny-pinch, constrained by the specification, would have been unable to order a consumer product.
GNOME Foundation's new executive director sparks witch hunt
Lightning struck: Apple switches to USB-C for iPhone 15 lineup
Re: More discarded cables
I recently cleaned an entire belly-button's worth of fluff from inside the lightning connector on my phone. So it's definitely a lint-collector. I haven't had much of a problem with usb-c so far, but I don't keep my laptop in my pockets, so it's probably exposed to far less debris. I did manage to get a small splinter of wood in the usb-c socket of my laptop, which caused problems until I managed to fish it out.
What happens when What3Words gets lost in translation?
Re: Four King Maps
I can just imagine how this would go with the emergency services...
"Help, I've fallen on a mountainside and I think that my leg is broken"
"OK, can you give us your Four King Maps location and we'll send out mountain rescue to assist"
"It's scrotum..."
"OK"
"cocksucker..."
"Yes"
"piersmorgan"
"Don't you use language like that with us, sonny. You can die alone on that four king mountainside for all we care"
How to get a computer get stuck in a lift? Ask an 'illegal engineer'
Mint 21.2 is desktop Linux without the faff
Re: "Pretty" Considered As Unimportant!!
I used XFCE for a few years because KDE became too bloated and Gnome 3 was, well, Gnome 3. But these days I prefer Cinnamon, for exactly the same reasons as people like XFCE. It's light on resources, familiarly old-school yet modern enough, and isn't Gnome or Unity.
Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market
Re: Yet again, Mint
As both a Mint and a Mac user, I agree with you 100% about Mint. However, I never experience Macs doing inexplicable things, which makes me wonder if this is a case of PIWNIC.
Edit: Moments after posting, I receive an email from my 80 year old mother, saying that her Mac is doing inexplicable things (yet again) and needs help. I know for certain that is going to turn out to be PIMNIC.
Two new Linux desktops – one with deep roots – come to Debian
It's official: Ubuntu Cinnamon remix has been voted in
Ammo-maker says TikTok's datacenter site could deprive it of electricity
Google's AI search bot Bard makes $120b error on day one
Judging from the places I've worked, it's more likely to have been:
Manglement: "Microsoft have just announced AI-based search. We need to demo the AI search prototype you're working on"
Devs: "It's not ready to be shown publicly yet. There's still a lot of issues with it"
Manglement: "Demo it anyway"
Suspect in Finnish psychotherapy center blackmail hack arrested
Re: Arrested in Absentia
It's not Arrested in Absentia unless it's from the Absentia region of France. Otherwise it's just a sparkling arrest warrant.
But have you considered that this is a translation from Finnish and it may have a subtly different meaning to the English definition that you've quoted.
Another RAC staffer nabbed for storing, sharing car crash data
Re: Grinding nomenclature
I don't trust anyone or any company who uses the word 'solutions' in this manner. Private Eye used to have a column dedicated to ridiculous uses of the word. Though it's fun to invent your own, such as "Posthumous subterranean interment solutions" (burials) or "horizontal storage solutions" (shelves).
OpenAI is developing software to detect text generated by ChatGPT
This could make ChatGPT better
I believe that one way to train AIs is to have another AI that's designed to spot whether the output from the first is real or not. These two AIs are then put into competition with each other. The first gets better at avoiding detection, whilst the second gets better at detecting fake content. So this is likely to help ChatGPT produce content that's harder for humans to spot.
Cops chase Tesla driver 'dozing' with Autopilot on
US Dept of Energy set to reveal fusion breakthrough
Twitter dismantles its Trust and Safety Council moments before meeting
Europe's USB-C deadline: Lightning must be struck from iPhone by December, 2024
Laugh all you want. There will be a year of the Linux desktop
Lufthansa bans Apple AirTags on checked bags
Braking news: Cops slammed for spamming Waze to slow drivers down
Amazon sues 10,000 Facebook Group admins for offering fake reviews
Amazon's sorting algorithm
Amazon's own algorithms don't help here. You can sort by 'average customer review' to see the highest rated products. However, Amazon seems to sort by a simple mean average, so a product with just a handful of (possibly fake) 5 star reviews is placed higher than one that has gained thousands of genuine positive reviews. They really need some kind of weighted average that takes into account the number of reviews.
Apple's latest security feature could literally save lives
Re: WebKit, anyone?
It sounds as if you're suggesting that the people who care enough about their security and privacy to enable this lockdown mode are also likely to install 'any old browser engine that the user cares to install from some random place on the internet'.
I don't think that this is going to be the problem that you seem to think it is.
openSUSE Leap 15.4: The best desktop on the RPM side of the Linux world
Re: OpenSuse is a good distro, with a few bugs
I tried OpenSUSE a couple of years ago and really wanted to like it. Installation was really straightforward and YaST seemed really good (if somewhat hard to type). But I ended up abandoning because of the bugs. One particularly nasty one is that it wouldn't talk to my printer. After hours of searching, I found that its default firewall rules were blocking printing. I've never seen any other Linux distro that does this. There were also many other minor but annoying bugs. I ended up switching to Mint, which also installs nicely and didn't have all of the minor annoyances of SuSE. It's a pity because SuSE looked like it could be a really great Linux bistro if these issues were sorted.
Apple offers improved Linux support in macOS Ventura
Brute force and whiskey: The solution to all life's problems
Meta materials: Facebook using AI to design green concrete
Farcebook's AI?
I wouldn't trust Farcebook's AI to get even the simplest thing right.
For example, I'm in my mid-50's and haven't cycled since I was a teenager. Yet Arsebook kept showing me ads for cycling clothing, cycle saddles, bells and much other pedalling paraphernalia.
Despite me marking these ads as irrelevant, I was continually bombarded with these. So I clicked on 'why I am seeing this ad'. The answer 'because you are interested in cycling'. No idea how FB's artificial intelligence got that idea. So I removed cycling from my list of ai-generated supposed 'interests' (which also included music and movies that I'd never even heard of).
So the cycling ads stopped briefly and then started again. Off to check 'why am I seeing this ad' once more. 'Because', Fartbook tells me, 'you are interested in British Cycling'. No idea where Facebook's artificial stupidity got that idea from. So I removed that from my 'interests' (again finding that I'm apparently interested music, movies, books etc. that I've never heard of).
No more cycling ads for a while then....
You guessed it... Buy saddles! Buy yellow Lycra jerseys! Buy cycle phone mounts!
I check my ai-generated 'interests' again and this time...
"You are interested in cycle commuting"
No Fuck-You-Book, I am not. I'd die on the North Circular if I was dumb enough to ever try that.
Anyway, no more cycling ads for a couple of years. Then they start again. Check my 'interests' again (more crap I've never heard of) and....
"You are seeing this ad because you are interested in cycling".
So we start the whole cycle (pun intended) again.
The point of this whole rant being, if FB's 'artificial insanity' is given the task of creating Green Concrete, I wouldn't be surprised (based on my experience) if it devised a recipe containing Green Cheese, Green Tea, Green Marahishi's and Blue Jeans.