Posts by cyberdemon 3466 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2010
Dilettante
Someone who knows a little about a lot, and at the extreme end, believes themselves to be an expert in anything/everything.
These people (or bots) can sometimes accelerate a project in its early stages, but the further the project progresses, the more their suggestions serve only to derail it.
> Is it easy to switch back to routing requests directly to your service when Cloudflare is glitching or unavailable?
Well, El Reg was up and down synchronously with some other sites for an hour or two; but now seems it is consistently up, while the other sites are still down. So maybe they did exactly that?
> I swear if the job comes up to do the IT for the Chinese embassy in london, I'll take it & if ever approached by a couple of guys called John with regulation haircuts asking me to do them a "patriotic favour" , I'll tell them openly to fuck off! And then put it online
I wouldn't touch a job like that with a barge pole, personally. I'd rather keep myself away from the "room 101" torture chamber.
No no no, you fool! Once they have connected all the multi-Gigawatt datacentres across the globe, the super-duper-intelligent AGI singularity will surely have been achieved! Because something that burns more energy than all life on earth must be more intelligent, right.
Then, the AGI will invent a new pathogen/bomb/terminator to destroy all humans, except for the squillionaire-class in their bunkers, and thus the world will be Reborn! Yeats has foretold it! And Girard has explained it!
Just like in Deus Ex, or James Bond, or 1984, etc etc.
They literally believe they are "righteous supervillains". Where's JC Denton when we need him?
Or, more hopefully: They are simply deluded; There will be nothing more than accelerated stupidity and waste to come out of all these interconnected AI superhubs, and good old economics will come along to burst their cult bubble sooner rather than later.
I commend the CTO's response, but nevertheless it sounds as if their system was a leaky "Bucket" of insecurity...
The manufacturer of buckets may be at least partially culpable for selling buckets which were leaky by default
It's pretty simple to measure the internal resistance of the battery (which is all that matters for stop/start). Temporarily pause the charging circuit, measure voltage and current, correlate large increases in current with drops in voltage and divide voltage by current
Well, with MS Office, the Wine/Proton devs face an uphill battle, since MS can (and apparently already has) bork(ed) it deliberately under Wine.
But personally, I prefer Libre even if MS Office was available - nothing pestering me to save to OneDrive (with several clicks on semi-hidden UI elements needed to avoid it), no telemetry, no AI crap, and I always hated that Ribbon anyway.
No, it's not prejudice, I say it for good reason, which is that Windows cannot be stripped back to only the bare minimum components. The first rule of anything safety-critical is that there should not be any features of the software which are not mandated by the requirements of the application.
Windows cannot run without a writable filesystem (even the oxy-moronic "windows embedded" needs to feign fs writes in RAM). It can't run without a VGA device, it can't run without a network stack or USB stack, it can't even run without a web browser.
Whereas Linux (or better yet, an RTOS such as Zephyr) can be compiled with the bare minimum of features. This is not just to save on resources, but to remove the possibility of failure modes hidden in unused (and therefore untested) parts of the system.
Why would an embedded, single-purpose application such as an MRI or OCT scanner, or any medical diagnostic machine, be running Windows in the first place??
It's as daft as running Windows on an oscilloscope (and yes, many "high end" oscilloscopes, perversely, run Windows)
The only reason I can think of, is to guarantee more expensive service call-outs for the manufacturer.
You wouldn't put Windows in a car, you certainly wouldn't put it in avionics, and I wouldnt want it involved in anything where a BSOD really means death
To be fair, the dev has deliberately left out the bit that encodes a custom image for the masks. So anyone casually downloading and running this will only be able to display the standard fox face on some unsuspecting trick-or-treater.
Never mind V2G. The obvious thing I think should happen is that renewable generators should be forced to include a minimum amount of storage in their bids, and we should stop paying curtailment when there is an oversupply
We need to stop pretending that renewables are simply 'free energy'.. Stop paying them for excess of that 'free energy' that we can't use, and perhaps charge them when they can't supply what they have contracted to supply.
I.e. make them behave like grown-up power plants that supply electricity as and when it is needed, not paid for imaginary/unneeded energy.
The only killer-app for AI is: FRAUD
OK there are two more "killer apps".. with appropriate icons. I needn't bother enumerating them
All we need is one more, and we'll have the Horsemen
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/10/11/0238213/microsofts-onedrive-begins-testing-face-recognizing-ai-for-photos-for-some-preview-users#microsoft_spokesperson
Slashdot: What's the reason OneDrive tells users this setting can only be turned off 3 times a year? (And are those any three times — or does that mean three specific days, like Christmas, New Year's Day, etc.)
[Microsoft's publicist chose not to answer this question.]
... Which if MS management hadn't redacted it, probably would have said:
"Yes, we hear you've called this sort of thing a 'Dark Pattern'. How cute. Yes, we just don't want you turning it off, really. The more of you who do, the less dosh we get from Mr. Ellison et al."
That's interesting.. I was looking at the list of "all petitions" here: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions?state=all
You are right, the brexit one and many others are mysteriously absent from that list. Apparently "All petitions" only shows those submitted to the current government, and there is no single list of all petitions ever, sorted by number of signatures.
But yes, a right stitch-up. Had the "non-binding referendum" been 48/52 the other way, you bet your arse there would've been a second referendum.
Is that a real company name, or are you trolling us?
Surely anyone who buys a Brickcom should expect it to be subsumed into a botnet of some sort..
Frankly I despise the concept of the IP camera. CCTV cameras until about 2010 used to be either analogue or HD-SDI which sent a digital video stream directly to where it needed to go and nowhere else.
> This is calculators all over again...
I am assuming sarcasm there.. or maybe something more poignant
While calculators could be abused for cheating trivial arithmetic tests at 10yo level, they are a perfectly valid tool later on, and no, a stochastic bullshit machine is no extension of this argument
I remember one fellow student in my MSc course who had come to rely on his calculator rather too much though, and would write down each step of his workings to 14 significant figures. His manuscripts were a mess of pages of numbers. If he had made a mistake, it took so much rework that he would run out of time.. We convinced him to write down intermediate steps to no more than 5sf and he passed with flying colours.
AI is like trying to mark a manuscript that contains 100GB of completely irrelevant intermediate workings, and trying to work out how it came to the wrong answer. There is no point in trying to read it, it belongs in the bin.
Enshittification of the Human Race
> Remarkably, only half of students say they use AI for schoolwork, while even more report personal use (73 percent).
Or rather, only half admit to using it for schoolwork..
And of course all the teachers are using it to mark the work too.. So ChatGPT is literally marking its own homework.. A billion times over, meanwhile no child on the planet learns anything.
But it's fine because Microsoft, Google, Oracle et al will have built up enough surveillance data on all of them that they will decide everyone's futures by age 12 and there will be no need for exams...
I assume even the underwater bit barnacle would not put seawater anywhere near its chips, so they would instead have a clean coolant loop between the chips and a heat exchanger on the outside of the sunken datacentre
Couldn't they make those pipes a bit longer and have the servers on land, where they are more easily accessible for maintenance?
If it's a Yubikey then you can do that on Linux. Other hardware tokens may vary of course
As for your MD's "special software", I find that most crusty old software e.g. that released for WinXP etc, runs far better on Wine than it ever did on Windows.. Exceptions being anything that requires its own special kernel-mode rootkitdriver, which may well be the case for "government" apps .. This is why so many governments have a crusty airgapped XP box lurking somewhere.. It might be appropriate to stick it in a virtualbox VM, without network access of course
It's not a case of Linux not "having" your applications, but a case of your applications not "having" Linux (support or workarounds)
Complain to your application vendors
Also out of curiosity: What applications? Many of us here may be able to suggest workarounds (e.g. Wine, Proton) or alternatives that you haven't tried
I know how much you hate customisability and configuration options.. You're obviously a Mac user who wants Jesus to tell you how to use your computer..
Well, KDE was built for those of us who already know how we want to use a computer.. And we don't always agree with eachother!
It's also built for those of us who don't know how we want to use a computer, but wish to find out on our own which way is best
