Posts by 45RPM 1485 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Oct 2010
The remarkable part of this story isn’t that they did the wrong thing in the first place, but that they apologised for it when caught. I say kudos for that at least.
In this febrile global climate, apologising for doing the wrong thing is becoming an increasingly scarce trait - and it betrays a lack of moral fibre.
No. I dispute that. But, even if it is true, unless you have a time machine, what has happened in previous elections is largely irrelevant. You can’t vote for it. What matters is what’s happening now.
And to be clear, I want there to be a sensible right wing party to provide balance. And I genuinely feel sorry for the millions of moral, upstanding, right of centre people who’ve been disenfranchised by the modern GOP, Tories etc.
Right wing political party in making shit up shock horror. All this is is an example of the fundamental unfairness of 21st century politics. Left wing parties are expected to be moral, upstanding and honest. When they live up to this ideal, they’re accused of virtue signalling. When they fail to live up to this ideal (as, being human, they’re inevitably wont to do once in a while), they’re eviscerated for it.
Right wing parties are expected to be venal and dishonest. They trade on it, encouraging their servant media outlets to promulgate the lie that “all political parties are alike really”. And so they’re allowed to claim that Brexit is a good idea, or that they can make America great again, or that they’re morally upstanding and fiscally responsible. Or, as in this case, they’ll build a nuclear reactor every year and give everyone unicorn steak forever more.
The sad thing is that there are still plenty of people who believe this rubbish.
The sadder thing is that politics, as with many things, needs balance. And we need a credible right wing party which can provide a cogent counter argument to the policies of the left. However sensible the policies of the left are, we need sensible arguments from the right to ensure that the ramifications are fully explored. And that just isn’t happening right now.
AI, BlockChain - for any new tech we need to consider whether it can be productionised in a carbon neutral manner - and, if it can’t, refine it until it can. The time for dicking around is long gone. If it’s new and not carbon neutral then we can’t afford it. If it’s old and not carbon neutral then replace it with something carbon neutral as a soon as the technology can be developed.
The use of fossils fuels is catastrophically stupid and short sighted. The ecosystem of this planet as we know it is coming to an end, and with it the lives of many, even most, species. The majority of us may not survive.
You might have swallowed the right wing and big oil lies, and that’s a shame if you have. You really need to educate yourself on the real state of affairs. But if you’re right that renewables are massively damaging too then we have only one option - and it’s none too palatable. We need to massively reduce the population of this planet (one child per family, globally - which would be virtually impossible to achieve) and return to an agrarian society. Nope. I’m not keen on that option either. Which leaves…
Investment in renewables, geothermal and a new generation of nuclear. But fossil fuels belong in the dustbin of history.
The same can be said of fossil fuels and climate change. Who cares if the drinking water of Africa is polluted by spilled hydrocarbons? Who cares if Bangladesh and island nations are flooded?
Well, clearly not big oil.
The truth is that we should all care. And yes, mining for rare earths is polluting but…
Two points…
If you’re that concerned, don’t buy a new computer. Or phone. Definitely don’t buy a new car - even one with an internal combustion engine.
But… a lot of the rare earths that we need have already been mined, and dumped as toxic spoil by mines worldwide - many of which are now disused. And enterprising businesses have spotted this - and are now mining the spoil heaps. It’s a double benefit - the world gets rare earths, and the pollution gets cleaned up. The scarcity might also encourage us to get better at recycling too - reduce landfill, reduce pollution, put disposed of material back into circulation.
And, as has been said before, it’s relatively easy to recycle these materials. It’s much harder to trap CO2, or methane or clean up millions of barrels of spilled oil.
Every time I see one the only thought I have is how ridiculous the driver looks. Could be the most beautiful woman or most handsome chap in the world - as soon as they get into a car like that they instantly look like a bellend.
In my mind, they don’t project power - they project powerlessness. If you want to see power in motion, look at a runner or a cyclist. A car just doesn’t do it for me.
And if it’s long distance transport that you want, just about any family car - even the cheapest - can do it more practically and more comfortably - and, in the right circumstances, faster too*.
* see who can transport a family of four, with all their gear for a holiday, faster - the supercar driver or the driver of a family car.
Yes. Exactly this. And there will be those who object with some kind of nebulous argument about loss of freedom - just as some people objected to the end of the incandescent bulb on similarly spurious grounds (one wingnut even going so far as to suggest it would cost him more in heating bills). Damn, I’m sure there were those who objected to the building of the sewers on the grounds that they liked throwing their shit out of the window, and the flavour it gave to the water.
Still. Thumbs up. Point well made.
Hmm. That may be so, but it’ll be a very limited number of people. And very few people need to play games or muck about on Facebook (they might want to do these things, but that’s a separate issue)
On the other hand, communications tools are key to the workflows of most people - especially these days.
You make an excellent point - but maybe in terms of reliability more than anything else. I maintain that any computer from this century can do anything you’d want to do provided that the appropriate OS is installed - Haiku for example is hugely efficient. But… if that computer is going to be used for work then whilst it may be capable of doing what it needs to it may not be able to do it reliably. Can no one wants a failed cap to blow their work away.
That said, and this isn’t about hobbyists, some people really do have limited needs - perhaps not even a need for the internet - but they still need a computer for their work. George RR Martin springs to mind as an example.
Still, have a thumbs up. Good point.
I guess it depends what you want to do with your old computer. Perhaps more pertinently, what do you need to do with it.
For example, you might want to play games - but you probably don’t need to play them. There’s a world of IRL entertainment out there, or you can lower your expectations of what a game is. Ditto video and music. You might need to fall back on physical media.
Can we throw social media out of the window? Please say yes! Once more, we can dump a whole heap of processing out of the window - and open up the utility of old machines still further.
For my use case, I want email, online banking, research (so Google, wiki, GitHub, StackOverflow), word processing, text editing, spreadsheet, C compilers. Basically, with the right OS, pretty much any machine from this century will cut the mustard.
Ditch online banking and you open up most of the machines from the 1990s too.
It wouldn’t be fast enough would it? I accept that the expansion memory will never be as quick as on-die memory, but I’d still like that RAM to be as close to the CPU as possible.
And this is 2023 - 192GB is no longer a colossal amount of memory. Especially when it’s shared with the GPU. For a workstation, I’ll accept 128GB as an entry level amount of memory - but I’d want to be able to expand it to more than a terabyte. If my 1989 SE/30 could take 128MB RAM (a colossal amount for the time), I won’t accept the use of the word colossal in 2023 for anything less than the ability to expand to 16TB RAM.
I could be up for a Mac Pro. It looks nice. I like the design, I like the performance, I like the specification…
Whoa! Jeeezus! How much?
And no memory expansion you say?
Yes. Which is to say No. I think I’ll give this one a miss. But halve the price and give it some DDR5 slots and I’ll bite their hands off.
Arguably, the modern computer industry runs on ARM - especially if we consider mobile phones, tablets and set top boxes to be computers (and I do). That’s before we even consider the dash to ARM in the server room.
So, whilst Intel is still very relevant, it’s the legacy, backward compatibility, platform which exists to support software from the past - and (for the time being) games.
/devils-advocacy-mode
I’d argue that it isn’t just about investing in low carbon energy, it’s also about not being so profligate in our use of energy.
‘Sleeping’ devices use a surprising amount of power. Games consoles particularly so. So don’t let the device sleep. If you aren’t using it, turn it off altogether. I’ve put a switch in each room that turns off all the sockets (because I’m too lazy to do them individually!)
‘Smart’ devices are generally wasteful and don’t add significantly to quality of life. There are exceptions like smart thermostats, which can actually save energy, but in most cases think before buying. Is it really going to improve your quality of life so significantly?
Electric cars are great, but not necessarily environmentally friendly. Use a bike for short journeys, and when buying a car don’t buy an SUV when a smaller car will meet your needs.
Bitcoin is a catastrophic waste of power. Let’s ditch it.
Do all of that (and I’m sure that there are lots of other ideas which could save power too), and we won’t need as much energy generating capacity of any kind. And if we don’t need it then we can’t be held to ransom over it - whether through energy prices or through enemy states threatening to turn off the oil / gas or blowing up the generating infrastructure.
I’m still holding out for proper hardback passports with none of this new fangled biometric technology. And I want the RAF to re-equip with sopwith camels, the navy to resurrect Nelson and defend our interests with ships of the line, and the army to replace the tanks with horses.
Huzzah! We’ll show Johnny Foreigner and have the empire back in no time.
You’d have overestimated the level even if you’d grabbed a spade and started digging. Brexiteers were never ones for nuanced argument - or even being able to take a bit of a ribbing. Which is ironic given the accusations of snowflake which have been lobbed at many Remainers.
Still, you get a thumbs up from me!
My heart sings when I hear senior management from big companies trot out this old tosh. It makes applicants think twice about a career with these stuck in mud fuddy duddies - which means that the pick of the crop come to smaller, hungrier, less well known businesses. Like mine.
So keep it up chaps. The less stuffy companies will be sure to wave cheerily as they overtake you.
I love Python (except the indentation which is horrible - formatting shouldn’t be confused with syntax). As I’ve said before, it’s like modern day Basic (great for teaching software development) with the added bonus that it’s also good for developing production software. Perhaps not all production software, but it definitely has its place.
I’ve taught kids how to write code in Python - and most agree that it’s no harder than Scratch once you’re used to a keyboard, and it’s a good deal less infantile.
So yes. Python FTW. Along with Java, Scala, Kotlin, Swift and whatever else you prefer. Pick the tool that works for you and your workplace.
Me? I’m going back to C.
If they aren’t going to sell it, I can’t see the point of this work. Surely investors will see through any transparent ploy to pump the price?
It can’t merely be a device to demonstrate the flexibility of the architecture can it? After all, the flexibility and power efficiency is well known, covering everything from the 8c (yes! Cents!) PY32F002 through to the mighty M1 Ultra and everything in between. It can’t be to demonstrate the efficiency of the process either because pff! 10nm!? Even Intel can manage that - and some arm chips are now sub 3nm.
So why? Seems like a waste of money.
Exactly this. Data science products, including AIs, are only as good as the data sets that they’re trained on. Clean data set? Good output. Dirty dataset? Bad output.
If our AIs are going to be truly useful then they need to be trained on scientific principles. They need to learn based on evidence and accept that they might be wrong. Therefore, they need to be trained from the best materials available. Reputable and peer reviewed scientific journals, historical documents, literature - all of it taken from around the world, not just one specific region, and they need to be retrained regularly.
What they shouldn’t be trained with is data scraped from the whole of the internet. Do that and you end up with an argumentative, prejudiced, partisan AI. Not actually something which is of particular use to humanity as a whole.
"I will be accused of 'cherry picking', 'quoting out of context', using unreliable sources" - That's a risk, true. I certainly will accuse you of that if you do.
"you will victim blame saying that the person should not have been there" - I believe that's what's known as projection. You might do that. I won't.
"You've convinced yourself that you are the arbiter of the truth" - Nope. If I'm wrong, I'll admit it. If I claim something then I'll be prepared to back it up with verifiable sources. I'm not always right but, in this conversation, the evidence (which I have provided) suggests that my side of the argument is more trustworthy than yours. So prove me wrong.
"you are morally and intellectually superior" - I don't know about that. But if you've ever thought that immigrants are all 'illegal', 'criminal', 'should be kept out', or that different sexualities are somehow morally abhorrent, or that different genders / races to yours are inferior (note the if at the beginning of the sentence by the way), etc., etc., then yes I probably am. Similarly, if you make up facts to support your argument, then that probably supports your suggestion that I am morally and intellectually superior too.
I am a very good party member aren't I? The trouble is that I'm a member of three different parties, sometimes with opposing views, because I want to be able to influence their decision making process. I'd quite like them to be able to work together as well, and drop all this 'poor me' partisan bullshit.
My apologies - and my fault. I took Wikipedia at its word "It's a movement", but you're right on this. It is an organisation too, albeit a decentralised one. But…
So what? It's not a terrorist organisation. They've raised money for outreach. And their stated aims are "to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes. By combating and countering acts of violence, creating space for Black imagination and innovation, and centering Black joy, we are winning immediate improvements in our lives."
Which seems fair enough to me. Unless you're going cherry pick words like 'combating' and claim some spurious link to violence, when (as a verb) it means 'take action to reduce or prevent (something bad or undesirable)'.
But thank you for the heads up about this organisation. I think I'll make a donation, because they seem alright to me.
You aren’t joking are you? You actually believe that. You might just as well wear a t-shirt saying “I’m with Stupid” and have the arrow pointing at your own face.
Antifa just means “Anti-Facist” and if you have a problem with that view point then you are quite literally a facist. Anti-facist is something we should all be. BLM isn’t an organisation either - it may be a movement, but a movement and an organisation are two separate things. And Black Lives do Matter - and please don’t be thick enough to come back with any of that all lives matter crap. White lives are already valued very highly - check the average response times by the police to a white caller, for example. Check the reference materials that doctors are usually trained with. Witness the models that AIs are trained with for the archetypal human. Usually white, with all the biases that that entails. We know white lives matter. Societally, we need a reminder that Black Lives Matter too.
That having been said, shall we take a little look at the actual facts? You might want to read these articles…
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2122593119
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35858413/
https://www.adl.org/resources/report/murder-and-extremism-united-states-2022
Attacked is a strong word, and incorrect. If you mean “told that you’re wrong” then yes, I agree - and not just by the extreme left. If you hold racist views, if you think that women are in some way inferior, if you think that you should be able to dictate what sexuality individuals have, if you think that it’s acceptable for private individuals to own semi-automatic weapons, then you are wrong. I haven’t attacked you for holding that opinion, I’ve just stated what I believe to be true - and no one should have a problem with that.
As to “women being punched, shops looted, cars set on fire, buildings burnt down, people dragged from their cars and beaten close to death, people executed in the street”, you’re just making stuff up. Just because you’ve read about it on Parler or Truth Social, or heard about it on Fox News, doesn’t mean that it happened. In fact, it probably means that it didn’t happen.
Haters gonna hate.
Perhaps the problem is the normalisation of hatred. It seems that hatred - misogyny, racism, creedism (by that I mean religious hatred) and political hatred - is on the rise. Twenty years ago it wasn’t as prevalent, and it was on the decline. Now it seems to be a growth industry.
Why? Iconoclasts like Farage, Trump, Johnson, Mogg, MTG, and their ilk have been given a platform by the likes of Rupert Murdoch, Rothermere, The Barclays et al. And they’re using using it to be utterly toxic. Suddenly it’s socially acceptable to be prejudiced, not to think critically, to lie and to cheat and to be utterly partisan about everything that you do.
So if these firebrands are allowed to do it, why not everyone else? And suddenly the crackpot prejudices and nastinesses that had lain dormant or were limited to small pockets of the internet are now oozing out and infecting everyday life.
Unless we tackle the traditional media, TV, Newspapers etc we can’t hope to get a handle on social media. And it seems to me that the traditional media is the easiest to control - not headquartered and paying taxes in the country that you publish in? Then you may not publish. And if you’re headquartered in that country then it’s easier to take legal action if you lie.
And if you think that I’m picking on the ‘right’ wing then yes, to a certain extent you’re right. This is largely a right wing problem - hatred is still only a minority problem for left and centrist political groupings whose woolly, woke, ideology is more interested in helping people than suppressing them.
So this is only to be used to catch criminals? Won’t work.
Sure, you might get a few technologically inept petty criminals - but you won’t get the big guys. The terrorists. The kingpins of drugs, trafficking, pornography etc. Those guys are already on the dark web, those guys are already using messaging systems rolled for the purpose, built using open-source encryption algorithms - algorithms which will continue to exist outside of this legislation, and hence still inaccessible to law enforcement.
The only thing you can absolutely guarantee will happen from this legislation is that you will make the lives of the criminals easier, and I’m not just talking about governments. Those backdoors won’t stay secret for long, and then organised crime will have a field day mining the data that we all thought was private.
That wasn’t my point. Developers shouldn’t ever write unprincipled code. But it is a defence of using languages like Java rather than languages like C (although I must admit that my personal presence is to use C - but that’s because I’m old, and stuck in my ways. Which is not a great mindset when working in technology!)
Kids today with your Java and your Scala and your Kotlin. Get coding in C and Assembler and you’ll see file sizes plummet. In desktop computing terms, 20MB is ample space to install an OS (with GUI), spreadsheet, word processor, database, paint programs and a few games - and still leave space over for your documents.
So why don’t modern computers work so efficiently? Well, there are many reasons - but I suspect that the number one reason is cost.
Developer time is expensive. And C, Assembly language (and even Pascal) et al aren’t as fast to write for as those aforementioned modern languages. Those modern languages which bring with them other benefits such as vastly improved security (which the older languages don’t provide and require the developer to implement themselves), and a virtual machine which means the software you write is more portable. But the trade off is that the modern languages are a bit bloaty - and when you start adding in other cool stuff like machine learning, they’re vastly bloated.
And since memory, CPU and storage are cheap on earth, and security is kind of important, I think this probably means that those kids today are right. Better to have a fatter program which is secure and delivered quickly than an insecure program which is slender - and hard to port to multiple architectures
Consider this though, if you throw away pretty graphics and pare the UI down to the bare minimum, it’s quite possible to write Tetris in 6K of memory. I’ve done it. But I’m a tiny grasshopper when compared with the person who wrote a full game of chess, with simple AI, excluding only castling, in 850bytes. Bytes!
And I suspect that a) NASA can afford the very best and most efficient developers and b) it probably uses boring, old, programming languages.
There may be merits to this bill, but I wouldn’t know because I’m not prepared to read it.
If Russia wants something then Russia needs to behave itself first. Act as a responsible and upstanding member of the global community first, then the rest of the world listens to what it has to say.
My boys understand that the best way to get me to consider their wishes is not by first starting a fight.
I doubt I can remember many VMS commands now, well not beyond SET DEF and EVE anyway, but VMS used to be my bread and butter. Mainly Pascal programming, but some Whitesmiths C too. And DCL scripts of course. Happy days.
I also remember writing a Tetris clone for the command line (the only GUI as far as I remember was CDE, and that was horrible) and hiding it on a few of the test systems. It’s not all work work work y’know.
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