Posts by Primus Secundus Tertius

Polish for Windows Spotlight and tabs for Notepad in latest Insiders build

Tabbed notes

Tabs for Notepad, the article reports.

I use OneNote extensively; it is a part of MS Office. Its tabs, and pages within a tab, make it extremely useful for assembling snippets of information before writing an article.

AI may finally cure us of our data fetish

Re: ISO Crap

In my experience, ISO9000 never found a single program bug. If the program had been signed off in accordance with ISO9000 procedures, it was therefore good to go.

Preferences

"prefers not to identify with a particular gender?"

Perhaps these forms should ask whether one is XX or XY.

OpenAI's ChatGPT is a morally corrupting influence

Trolley folly

When I was a child, in junior school, the rule among the children was, "If you touch it, it's your fault". That ethos was a wonderful force for teaching you to mind your own business.

Let me X-plane: Boeing R&D unit sheds rudder, ailerons, flaps for DARPA project

Words in wrong order?

"reducing cost and improving safety"

Should that have been: "improving cost and reducing safety"? Especially from Boeing.

UK Online Safety law threatens Big Tech bosses with jail

Re: A Start

There is a difference between commercial misjudgement and cynically causing harm to young people. The limited liability company protects directors against the worst outcome from the first, but there should be no protection from the second.

Writing tool from AI21 Labs won't do all the hard work for you

Tools and fools

All these tools, from the spell check upwards, will help a good writer become more productive. But they will not turn a poor writer into a good one.

VALL-E AI can mimic a person’s voice from a three-second snippet

Accents needed

"...There also isn't enough coverage of speakers with accents..."

English is a world language with many variants. Every nation gets restless if some different variant is forced upon them. The same applies to other languages: Spanish and Arabic especially, German and French also. And others.

First satellite to be launched from European soil leaves Cornwall tonight

aka Goonhilly

Back when the General Post Office ran the British telephone system, a GPO engineer told me they were instructed not to refer to 'Goonsville' in front of the natives.

Cybercrooks are telling ChatGPT to create malicious code

It's just a tool

Lots of wicked articles are written using MS Word. Terrorists probably use Excel databases. We must blame the people, not the tools they use.

Elon Musk's cost-cutting campaign at Twitter extended to not paying rent, claims landlord

See The Onion

The Onion is a satirical paper whose articles are thought to be fiction. One recent article had Musk hiding behind a filing cabinet while the landlord hammered on the door demanding rent. Another article had young couples getting their first home by renting an Airbnb and then changing the locks. Sometimes I wonder if The Onion is just fiction.

University students recruit AI to write essays for them. Now what?

Re: Writing Documentation

I've seen comments like that from wetware programmers - especially where it is company policy to comment each line of code.

Re: The easy way out

I once had to do a long division in octal arithmetic to solve a specific technical problem.

Re: $10 per month for 30,000 words

Grammarly is well-known software for checking writing. Its paid-for versions, but not the basic free version I use, can check the Internet for matching text. Must be jolly useful for publishers vetting submitted works, and for people making students' efforts.

Brit MPs pour cold water on hydrogen as mass replacement for fossil fuels

Re: Call me crazy, but...

The total energy from burning hydrogen should be about as much as was needed to electrolyse the original water. But then thermodynamics means only about a third of that energy is available as the output of an internal combustion engine.

ChatGPT has mastered the confidence trick, and that's a terrible look for AI

Turing test

I have been wondering whether chatGPT can tell whether it is talking to a human or to another chatbot.

Re: Feel free to foreclose on No.4

I live in a block of flats. Apartments, as some say. But not in no. 4. We once had a whore in number 4. But we don't have a no. 30 with Dirty Gertie.

Inadequate IT partly to blame for NHS doctors losing 13.5 million working hours

Re: What is the problem?

It's still a lot easier than so-called plain text, which can be ASCII, UTF-8, EBCDIC, ...

What is the problem?

Surely things must be easier if they are exchanging Word documents rather than doctors' handwriting?

Linux kernel 6.1: Rusty release could be a game-changer

The programmer's fault

"Inherent weaknesses in C and C++"

No, sir. Inherent weaknesses in programmers would be nearer the truth.

Two million year old DNA samples discovered, lodged in ancient sediment

Before the ice ages

"during the Ice Age". Surely that ought to be "before the most recent series of ice ages".

'…due to global warming", Pedersen explained'. Some people would say, "due to a return to long-term geophysically normal temperatures".

RIP Fred 'Mythical Man-Month' Brooks: IBM guru of software project management

Re: 6 to 8

I had to work with DEC radix50 code. Octal 50, so decimal 40 characters available. Space, A-Z, 0-9, and a few punctuation marks. Its purpose was to allow a 3-letter code to be carried in 16 bits: 64,000 codes in a field of 65536 possibles.

The ICL 1900 series used 6-bit characters, and very contrived schemes for documents that had to handle lower case letters.

Massive energy storage system goes online in UK

Real numbers

When homes are preparing the Sunday roast on a bitter winter day with the heating full on, they are using roughly 10KW. So 196 MWh of energy for 300,000 homes will last roughly 40 minutes. I am unimpressed.

Windows 10 – a 7-year-old OS – is still having problems with the desktop and taskbar

Re: Whatever...

My system freezes about once a day for half a minute or so. But modern code is sloppy code, I guess.

Intel's top-spec Raptor Canyon NUC can double as a 700+W space heater

2KW heaters

In the 1980s I was working with specialised kit to do Fourier transforms rapidly. Those boxes used about 2 kilowatts of power. On a cold winter morning, the first thing we did was to switch them on.

All the US midterm-related lies to expect when you're electing

Hung parliament

If the midterm election returns a Republican congress, the US government is likely to be paralysed. If that happens, let them return authority to the rightful hands of the British Crown in London.

Government by Gmail catches up with UK minister... who is reappointed anyway

@Loyal Commenter

Utterly wrong! In the vast majority of cases, nobody forced these migrants to come here. They are foreigners, they are not our problem. You should be blaming the governments of their original countries.

Re: why do we accept it?

Parliament and government are supposed to represent ordinary people. This incident proves that they do. Government by supposed experts would be like government by the civil service: awful.

China is likely stockpiling and deploying vulnerabilities, says Microsoft

Re: Cut them off at source

Firstly, the days of standalone programs are long over; they all rely on subroutines which themselves rely on subroutines. Nobody is ever going to check all that. Secondly, so many rely on networking, which introduces so many interruptions to otherwise simple logic.

Finally, nobody seems to use flowcharts to assist in creating sound logic.

Reducing partisan divide alone does not boost support for democracy, study finds

Why be democratic?

The US constitution was written in 1789 by a bunch of professional politicians. I have always speculated that the reason they arranged for democratic procedures was that they knew each other well and utterly distrusted each other. It was less of a risk to trust the people rather than trust each other.

Microsoft said to be in talks to invest more in OpenAI

Is it smart?

If AI was really smart, it would run with as little power as the human brain: say 50 watts as an order of magnitude. Also, MSFT would keep it to themselves, not let other suckers into the mugs game.

How I made a Chrome extension for converting Reg articles to UK spelling

German-American pseudo-English.

There are more differences than just the spelling.

Hopefully we will not meet with too many dumb examples of bastard German-American pseudo-English.

Re: ∞↔ ∘ ∘

To neatly split an infinitive is the hallmark of a confident style.

Liz Truss ousted as UK prime minister, outlived by online lettuce

Re: Please help me here

Oh yes it can: when the cream is made to float on the black coffee beneath.

Re: Please help me here

The invasion of Iraq struck me as the folly of two religious men, Bush and Blair, against the relatively non-religious Saddam Hussein who was turning Iraq into a modern secular state give or take the torturing of his opponents.

Boffins grow human brain cells to play Pong

Sentience

Some fifty years ago I read a science fiction story about sentient cells that conquered the world.

Obviously a neuron has more possibilities than a mere transistor.

AI recruitment software is 'automated pseudoscience', Cambridge study finds

Re: Blind testing

A lot of programmers I worked with wrote very poor English. Particularly the ones who were passable rather than capable.

There again, they were pretty weak at maths as well.

People are coming out of retirement due to cost-of-living crisis

Re: Not great news for youngsters

Most currencies did go down against the US dollar.

Re: Not great news for youngsters

When I have visited sick relatives in hospital, I have felt the NHS is the place where unemployables find a wage.

Re: Not great news for youngsters

Or indeed, as an Irish parliament figure famously asked, "What has posterity done for us?".

Micro molten salt reactor can fit on a truck, power 1k homes. When it's built

Scientific units please

I get so tired of promoters of power stations claiming to support so many thousands of homes. For heavens sake, can we have the real power, in watts or multiples thereof.

A fortune is spent out of my taxes on education for ordinary people. I therefore claim they should know the difference between a kilowatt, megawatt, and gigawatt; and how many homes they can support in summer (1 KW each) or winter (10KW each).

Is it time to retire C and C++ for Rust in new programs?

Real programmers

C was designed and implemented for real programmers: competent people who know what they are doing and take the trouble to do it properly. As opposed to the two disasters of modern coding: the contractor fixated on "productivity" and getting paid; and the "free software" types who rely on the "thousand eyes" of users and other programmers to fix their bugs.

Rust merely makes the latter two evils slightly less worse.

Scientists overjoyed after DART smashes into asteroid Dimorphos, contact lost

Re: There goes the prime directive... Murica Successfully Saves the world AGAIN with a bomb

A body 170 metres diameter has a volume 2.6 million cubic metres. If the density is 2.5 tonnes/cubic meter, that is a mass of 6.4 million tonnes. The impact vehicle weighed 0.57 tonnes, travelling at 6,400 metres/sec.

If that momentum is transferred to the asteroid, that change in velocity is about 0.57 millimetres/sec. On a one year journey that would amount to 18km. Not very helpful if you want to swerve past a target (Earth) of diameter 12,600 km.

Excel's comedy of errors needs a new script, not new scripting

Clueless users

I have used spreadsheets for membership lists of various voluntary groups, inheriting these lists from previous society officers. How little so many people understand how to set up data systematically! British postal addresses are particularly variable and therefore difficult.

There are people who know in detail how to use word processors even though they are not computer specialists. We need the same for spreadsheets.

Rest in peace, Queen Elizabeth II – Britain's first high-tech monarch

Re: She was a good one

There were kings of England from Alfred the Great onwards; i.e. before 1000AD. OK, the detailed arrangements now date from 1701 as you observe, but the kings and queens of England go back to Alfred.

Re: She was a good one

And earlier, also with DEC software for VAX and PDP11 machines.

Re: She was a good one

Or perhaps people just wanted to get rid of all the puritan nonsense. That was why the Restoration is remembered as a happy time.

Re: She was a good one

As an Englishman, I support the monarchy especially as most other states are republics.

But if I had lived under Oliver Cromwell, I would probably have supported the English Republic when most other states were monarchies.

Contrarian, you might say. I put it down to my part-Irish ancestry.

Re: She was a good one

I have always had a major doubt about Charles. He seems to regard science as just another debating angle, rather than the corps of knowledge that has made life so much better for people all over the world. His mother, although religious at heart, was more understanding.

But England is the thousand year reich that some other countries envied. We have had successful monarchs and failures, and I expect we shall survive Charles III.

Nancy Pelosi ties Chinese cyber-attacks to need for Taiwan visit

Re: Historical approach

@Lordrobot

I once dined at a Japanese restaurant in the USA. They brought a great joint of meat to the table and began slashing it with great gusto into individual servings.

I began to wonder what happened to customers who did not pay their bill.