Posts by David 132 5506 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2010
Remember the B-52s references that abounded on the PCBs? "Rock Lobster", "Planet Claire" and so on.
Ah, good old days.
And then Microsoft's devs had to go and push it just that bit too far with the infamous "flight simulator hidden in Excel" thing, and Easter Eggs were promptly banned industry-wide by managers who feared lawyers more than they loved whimsy.
Exactly. Exhibit A, that clown who went on a destructive rampage in Missouri, and according to the Register's coverage of him last week:
Schaefer asserted that he "was being chull ab it," which we believe translates to a claim he was being nonchalant during the commission of his alleged crimes. "It felt rrlly nice to fucktheir dhit up," Schaefer added before going on to explain that "it was me" and "i did thatz""Native English speaker" is a meaningless concept these days, it would seem.
…is it 10^26 operations, or (10^2)^6?
Common sense suggests the former, but the way the article’s written, or quotes it:
“it still targets developers of 'frontier models' trained with more than 10²⁶ operations”
…is puzzling to say the least. Did someone get carried away with superscript tags?
“Dave, everybody’s dead. Everybody, Dave, is dead…
…Gordon Bennett. I should have left him in stasis.”
But seriously. If people have left this hardware in-place, publicly exposed, and unpatched after this length of time - surely that’s a lot of cyber risk insurance policies that will be void or at least seriously reduced in payout?
And free backup of key corporate data to Pyongyang. What's not to like?
Seriously, though, I am startled at how lax some companies' hiring practices must be. When I recently found myself "resting between engagements" as actors would phrase it, I had to jump through hoops with every job interview. In my own new role, we've hired several new colleagues since I joined, and in the process interviewed a dozen times as many; every one involved various steps that I won't detail, to ensure that the people we were interviewing & hiring were who they claimed to be.
What sort of company hires for mid-range roles on the strength of a couple of easily-spoofed Teams video calls?
And what these studies always seem to overlook is that human drivers can also be led astray by a few dollars' worth of deception. Putting up a fake "STOP" sign, or a fake speed-limit sign (higher or lower than reality), covering up a "bus lane only" sign, or changing a STOP sign to the local equivalent of "you have priority"... etc.
We don't see many attacks of this nature because humans aren't, by and large, complete sociopaths [*citation needed].
Not that I'm a fan of so-called self-driving technology, but to suggest that these systems are uniquely vulnerable to misleading visual cues is a weak argument.
"Don't worry Mr B... I have a cunning plan! We rebuild the printer, right, then take the photos, then dismantle it back to where it is now, and we'll have the photos to guide us to rebuild it."
"Yessss. I think I am on the verge of spotting the flaw in your plan, Baldrick. Still, my hopes weren't high."
Over three decades ago my younger brother was given for his birthday one of those water-rocket kits - you know, a valve assembly with Dan Dare rocket-style fins, that you screw onto a plastic 1 litre Coke bottle, half-fill with water, stand upright, and inflate with a bicyle pump - once the pressure exceeds the valve's limit, the water is rapidly forced out and the bottle ascends skywards.
Well, enamoured of this toy, I took it into school a day or two later and was demonstrating it to my friends when Mr Fisher, our Physics teacher, promptly confiscated it.
And for all the rest of the day, as I sat through History/Latin/Biology lessons, I could see Mr Fisher out on the playing fields, repeatedly launching the rocket, scampering after it to retrieve it and giggling like a small child. He got way more fun from it than we had chance to!
"And let that be a lesson to you, boy!"
> 12) Call Derek for some Mandy
For some reason all I can think of now is the Shamen’s Ebeneezer Goode with the lines “Got any salmon?” and “got any veras? sorted.”
Yes, everything I know about drug culture, I learned from early 90s dance music and repeated watchings of Trainspotting.
“And you want to call your mother, and say Mother, I can never come home again, ‘cause I seem to have left an important part of my brain somewhere, somewhere in a field in Hampshire, all right…”
Ugh. Worse than that, a Slashdot story today has this quote regarding new Google Chrome AI features (emphasis mine):
The company plans to add agentic capabilities in coming months that would allow Gemini to perform tasks like adding items to online shopping carts by controlling the browser cursor.
I should have kept my big mouth shut, shouldn't I?
They haven't added AI to the mouse cursor yet. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have the mouse divert to where CoPilot thinks you want to point, rather than where you actually did point? Or click on things because it hallucinates that you intended to, or even because a "trusted" "carefully selected" "Microsoft partner" has paid for their app/link to be clicked on? Every traversal across the screen would be an exciting voyage of surprise.
Truly, what a wonderful world of magic and whimsy awaits us all.
The icon is me getting my coat hastily before the mob reaches me with their flaming torches and pitchforks!
"AI actually forces us to rediscover our humanity..." he said. As he rediscovered his humanity by plunging 250 families into the blackest and most gut-wrenching economic uncertainty and stress, destroying their futures and possibly a few lives.
But hey, the stock price went up, so it's all good.
I suppose that technically Stalin, Mao Tse Tung and that Austrian 1930s A-H were "humanity" so he's not wrong.
Scientist: "Fine, you can spend your existence passing the butter instead. *belch*"
...is why a damn disposable cigarette is using a general-purpose programmable IC with ROM and RAM in the first place?
I swear, if you asked many engineers these days to design a simple lightbulb + switch + cell circuit, their solution would involve an Arduino, a full Java virtual machine, cloud dependencies...
> Just about everything that set out to be big and professional, failed. GNU HURD. Microsoft OS/2. Apple Copland. IBM Workplace OS. Apple and IBM's Taligent.
> Whereas CP/M and DOS and Windows, even Unix itself, all started out as fun little proof-of-concept things that barely did anything, but were fun to play around with.
Echoing that - a couple of years ago, I had to sort out a booking problem with some British Airways tickets. The BA helpdesk, when I eventually got through to it, was terrible; a crackly line, an agent whose first language clearly wasn't mine (note to the professionally offended: that is not a criticism, just a fact) and a general "computer says no" attitude. The agent eventually informed me that although this was a BA booking with a BA flight number, it was actually operated by American Airlines - so I'd need to call them.
So I did, and got through to a lovely lady in - I think? - Atlanta GA, who couldn't have been more friendly and helpful. Everything was "No problem, honey, we'll get y'all sorted out" and 10 minutes later, the problem had ceased to exist.
I remember that, and ever since, haven't given any business to BA, and lots to AA.
"Hmm, what's this bottle? 'Sodium Hydroxide Solution'? Well, Sodium is in salt so it must be good, and "hydro" means water which is also good, and "oxide" is just the scientific way of saying "contains oxygen", which is what the atmosphere's made of... three good things in one easy convenient bottle! It even says it's the solution for the problem of me being thirsty! I'm a genius!"
*chug* *chug* *chug*
