Get that sky scorcher ready
When AI threatens our existence, running on solar power, it'll be Matrix time. Be ready to become a power cell.
1246 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Oct 2009
Let's remember that any halfway decent alarm system will get very annoyed and start calling in reinforcements if a door is detected as being held open for more than, say, a minute.
But of course, halfway decent is entirely too expensive for the tastes of modern management. It's a wonder they don't just put up phony alarm boxes on the outside, as I hear is now the fashion in the UK.
A now much happier redditor told of many quick fixes in his job. Unfortunately, the way he got to do those fixes was to be uprooted from his current assignment, frog-marched through the corridors, and thrown into the room where the fault occurred, whereupon he usually diagnosed the typical not-plugged-in, not-turned-on, and lens-cap-still-on faults that bedevilled the cut-rate educators working the establishment.
Since the uprooting was usually done by someone in an official uniform that tended to induce obedience, he had little choice in the matter. Also his real work was rarely acknowledged despite keeping a woefully poor setup working. He has now moved on to better things and the institution that treated him so cruelly is hopefully flailing.
Maybe Douglas Adams knew of this publisher, for he created the character Michael Wenton-Weeks, fondly nicknamed Michael Wednesday-Week, who always promised publication of his rather esoteric quarterly a week on Wednesday, but never followed through, preferring to continue using the money for lavish lunches etc.
Fittingly when the BBC did a radio serialisation of "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency", he was played by Michael Fenton-Stevens.
So there was this Golf program written in Basic back in a time when you could write anything to anywhere without it being traced back. And I took a dislike to it because reasons.
So I edited a line or two to detect when the file's "owner" was using it. Just asking for UserID, and springing the trap if it was him.
Whereupon a message appeared saying he'd been "sent down" as we artlessly put it in those days. Various shenanigans then erased all traces of the trap while sending a message that it had, indeed, hunted and caught the Snark.
Well, I got the message and observed him later staring disconsolately at a printout. Never did let on to him.
Another time during a course where we all had terminals and the ID's popped up on the trainer's screen as we logged in, we decided we didn't like the boring default names and substituted our own. However the list cut off at 6 names or so. Borrowing a tip from Ender's Game, I started prefixing my ID with a space so it would pop up at the top. The final time was when the trainer came in sporting a very loud tie. I changed my ID to " A Nice Tie, Dan"
1 MB? Luxury! Try living with 64K on RSX-11 when every page of Pascal generates 0.5k of object code. Wrangling overlays was the art of the day, but most people had no clue, especially when they coded great globs of "common" code that just sat in RAM. If I say so myself, I came up with some neat ways of dealing with that. Moving to the VAX was like sloughing off a strait-jacket.
It was one of those "white heat of technology" things in the 1960's. There was coverage in Tomorrow's World from James Twerp et al showing two pieces of metal welded perfectly after a whizz bang cleaned off all that surface stuff and brought the two pieces together. Like things such as fluidized sand reactors, it faded from view although I'm sure they're all very important somewhere.
Meanwhile British industry kept on adding go-faster stripes to everything.
So be careful what you touch.
Really, what was our brave engineer thinking? Even a perfect job leaves the window open for repercussions if anything, even something unrelated, goes wrong in the immediate vicinity. Printer on the fritz? Too bad, buy a new one.
Treat anything client related as radioactive, only touch if ordered to do so, in writing.
Sure fusion power is more or less infinite in fuel supply, even if you're restricted to deuterium, but note the following:
At the core of the Sun, energy is generated at a rate of less than 100W per cubic meter. For comparison your body does about 10 times that just sitting around. A compost heap does about the same without needing a temperature of 10 MK and a density thousands of times greater than water.
An internal combustion engine generates power in the cylinders at roughly 50 MW per cubic meter, or 50 kW/litre.
So your fusion technique needs to be 500,000 times better than the Sun to be comparable to fossil fuels. Or you could have a reaction chamber that's 100m square and 50m high.
The Polaroid SX-70 instant camera was revolutionary even by the standards of Polaroid. Apart from its much better optics, it boasted the ability to deliver a picture in 10 seconds without the need to peel off and discard icky chemical film.
It came to pass that someone was contracted to produce a certain part for the camera. However, in order to do that the person was given no access to cameras and when the time finally came to do a test installation, they were only allowed to fumble inside a black bag that contained the camera hardware. This came as quite a surprise, but fortunately the part fitted and the contract was fulfilled.
At a recent contract, and one might say, a career ending one because I finally retired, many TLA's were being thrown around and black/red was definitely in play. In order to get up to speed with the technobabble going by in meetings, I asked if perhaps there was a glossary being maintained somewhere.
The answer was, appropriately, a TLA. That is to say, TIO - There Isn't One.
Seriously, this is one of a set of standard stories that surface from time to time. Along with "something pressing on the keyboard", "wireless keyboard in cupboard going nuts", "part of anatomy resting on keyboard", "wireless mouse swap", "magnetic jewelry" and that old, possibly obsolete one, "water dripping from pot plants onto monitor" (modern flat screens having much smaller impact cross-section for falling water)
When cloud computing came along, all these companies signed up, not counting on the fact that a few large suppliers were going to control access to all their data.
Now AI is going to be supported by a few large companies, and everyone who signs up will eventually face the choice of paying through the nose or trying to implement AI themselves without having anyone on board who can actually do it.
All these deployment delays have nothing to do with the suits outsourcing everything, so that they have at best skeleton crews on site. Or worse, perhaps, the dress shirt and designer jeans crowd are staring at stacks of boxes while their minions desperately phone around for any kind of help.
Did the writer of this article take account of the likelihood that all those scrapped Chromebooks would not be quite, what is the expression, fit for purpose because of not being gently handled? Cracked screens, abused and contaminated keyboards, broken hinges, destroyed data ports and other motherboard issues, and of course the horrors of old batteries.
People and electronics are a bad mixture. It's no coincidence that in the days of photocopiers, having the copier in a locked room with a designated operator, however inconvenient it was for the "got to have it right away" brigade, improved the MTBF immensely. Now we have the same problems with printers ("How was I to know it needed special transparency sheets?").
I never did find out what the Beehive was, but it was somewhere and we had to write code as if it were going to run on the Beehive. Or at least take account of the Beehive's data protocols. You see, it was the 80s and a world famous chemical company had been in the process control automation business for decades. So many decades, in fact, that there was a machine colloquially known as the Beehive that dated from the 60s.
Never mind that there were systems that could run whole sections of chemical plants autonomously. There was still the Beehive, and there was Fortran IV, which was the language in vogue when the Beehive went into service. And which therefore was the language in which all work had to be done. Just for good measure, the programming rules said that each statement had to have its own label number whether it was the target of the dreaded GOTO or not. Earlier writers had helpfully left gaps in the numbering to allow statements to be inserted between, but of course those gaps were usually filled up by the time I fetched up there for the worst year of my career.
Did I mention that the developers there were among the least talented I have ever encountered? There were two gurus who weren't going to let new ideas get in the way of their retirement.
Oh well, they want editing, I'll give them editing. Delete 100 statements and replace them with the originals plus whatever I needed to add, all nicely renumbered. Make that 200 when necessary. This all had to be submitted as a "job" rather than done on the fly with an editor, as I was used to by then. That's their problem.
Turn the wheel the way it goes, only more so.
Who knows what mysterious parameter was being monitored?
I'm reminded of one of Asimov's Multivac stories. The three controllers get together after Multivac "won the war" to compare notes. One admits that the incoming data was so bad he fudged it a lot, even adding random numbers sometimes. The second says that he had his suspicions about the programming, so he would adjust the output to fix it according to his thoughts. The third, being the top guy, admits that he himself had many doubts about the whole thing and occasionally resorted to the most ancient of computers.
"Heads or tails, gentlemen?"
That's not how you modernise an old solution running on ancient hardware. As an intern?
You find somebody who can do it outside the company. You agree on a price, get them to submit for the job, split the proceeds, then both of you disappear so there are no comebacks.
You might have to change your name.
My feelings exactly. Granted some people have no ability to put things into words, but that's what L1 and L2 people are for. If only they would do their jobs instead of just "the needful".
How many times have I sat there steaming while some bozo Ummed and Erred their way through what should have been a simple speech? I want to grab them by the throat and say "Talk as if it was important for people to understand you!".
Once I overheard a cubicle drone trying to contact somebody in Mexico without knowing Spanish. I offered the services of a bilingual friend, who got him through to his contact who actually spoke English. The drone then proceeded to talk in circles, wasting the effort and everybody's time.
Florida Man, in addition to his other mistakes, has "sold" his Fortress of Floritude to a company "controlled" by none other that Florida Man Junior. With the expressed agreement, no doubt, that he be allowed to reside and continue all his activities, legitimate or otherwise, in that place. This is evidently to prevent said Fortress from being breached by the Evil Empire of the Law. As a bonus, he gets funds which will aid him in "campaigning" (no doubt against his imminent incarceration).
Of course, Junior, being a chip off the old block, may have ideas of his own. Including, possibly, deciding that Florida Man needs a dose of what King Lear got, sent off on his wanderings, perhaps with New York Mayor Emeritus as Fool (a part he appears to have rehearsed for in recent years).
Looking forward to Florida Man and Fool braving the blasted heath in a storm. In orange, of course.
Anybody care to speculate about the exact location of the company hired to do the archiving? Perhaps one located in a country famed for bait-and-switch staffing, exaggeration of capabilities and certifications etc.? Oh the physical archives may have stayed in the USA, but it's rupees to bhajis that the staff were located elsewhere.
When Richard Feynman went to teach in Brazil, he encountered a system of education that produced people who could spout answers to questions on demand, providing the answers were those they had learned by rote. So asking about "Brewster's Angle" (relating to the polarization of light reflected from the surface of a transparent medium) he could get chapter and verse from students who actually had no idea what polarization or refractive index meant, and couldn't say why light reflected off water might be polarized.
I include this because it's exactly the kind of "learning" we can expect from AI as related to medicine or science.
Every time this sort of debacle happens I'm reminded of the cartoon where the owners of a company are looking at, on the one side, huge computer stacks tended by white-coated acolytes, and on the other, an old guy hunched over a desk.
Caption: "You mean we need all that just to replace Fred?"
Similar story from Reddit: Severely incompetent client of industrial equipment installer orders and signs for an ISDN line without checking to see if it actually was installed. It was not, at least not at the client. The clueless telecom tech inexplicably did the job at a random building somewhere else in town. Inquiries by the equipment installer were stonewalled. Which building got the line? Sorry, client confidential. Well disconnect it! Nope, against company policy to enter a building without a contract.
Second line was correctly installed, leaving incompetent client on the hook for both lines. But installer was happy, at least as happy as you can be with such a client.
It's not just idiocy. When actual evil is at work you stay away, regardless of the opportunity cost. The company could quite easily have hired the dev and then stiffed them at the end, or claimed that the work was not done to spec. At worst, the dev could have been sued for some trumped-up reason.
Marketers, influencers, and a host of “leadership” coaches, copy writers, and content creators are all over social media telling everyone how much time and money they can save using ChatGPT and similar models to do their work for them
Who will break the news to them? What little relevance they had in the world will disappear, and them with it.
Elephant in the room: what was Cellmark doing with Social Security Numbers in the first place? There is no legitimate need for them outside of employment and banking. Unless Cellmark were coordinating with govt. databases, they should not have been requiring clients to submit them.
The techno-kludges of the fanfold era were quite monumental. I remember pictures of large cabinets in which the paper hung as if to let the ink dry, there being some reason to not have it sitting in a stack.
And then - a miracle. Somebody realized that printing miles of paper for people to inspect for problems was a Really Bad Idea.
What was to be done? Answer: print out only the items that looked off. Yes! Exception processing!
Of course, competent programmers are more expensive than old fogies with reading glasses and those funny appliances to keep their shirt sleeves from getting ink on them. But once a problem gets big enough, even the most resistant corporate drone will shell out.
The problem is how big it has to get before the shelling out occurs.
The company has extended automation from Jira to Confluence to make that sort of thing easier: finishing the new version would auto-create the new branch, see the release notes posted for approval, and marketing alerted it’s time to publish that blog post.
What? The idea of marketing being ready to do anything other than insist on last-minute changes is mind-boggling. Certainly if Atlassian are keen on bringing marketing closer to developers, many developers will be updating their CV's. Not to mention the project managers who won't enjoy being bypassed.
As for Confluence, if it's any better than a plain old Wiki I have yet to see it. My recent experience tells me that it's only as good as the people using it. Garbage in, garbage piled everywhere.
Ah yes, the days of mysterious beams flashing from one end of campus to the other. We never did get the lowdown on who was doing what, but there were plenty of candidates in Chem, Physics etc. Green was probably Argon-Ion, Red the HeNe. The only laser I ever worked with produced a 1 microsecond pulse at 1.06 microns, so no showing off with that one. Neodymium YAG glass, if anyone cares. Part of the rig was a delay line consisting of 100m of coax still wound on its reel, artlessly placed on the floor. Simple but effective.
You know, you could have quite a lot of fun setting up websites for these nutjobs, and then having "technical issues" just as their plans were about to come to fruition. Of course, letting the PTB and the PIC listen in on a side channel is a temptation to which you should not succumb.