* Posts by Brewster's Angle Grinder

3260 publicly visible posts • joined 23 May 2011

Sorry, Siri: Apple may be eyeing Google Gemini for future iPhones

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Re: Ok Fruity....

Presumably Apple will ensure that doesn't happen. Apple have many vices, but they understand user privacy is one of their selling points and guard that jealously. If Gemini is on your iPhone, it will be on Apple's terms and under Apple's supervision.

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Re: Generative AI

Well I saw an advert the other day for a phone that could cut your face out of one image and drop it into another. (Presumably that's "AI" - i.e. ML - behind the scenes. It might even have been the Pixel Pro.)

You probably can't use that, but a certain princess most definitely could (and would)...

Developers beware, Microsoft's domain shakeup is coming soon

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I can just about get my head round generic TLDs. But one for each big corp? Not least because corporations, even Microsoft, change their names (Google => Alphabet. Facebook => Meta) or go bust. Someone will always want a `.books` TLD. But who's go to want a `.microsoft` one when they are ashes?

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Facepalm

Am I reading this right? Someone gave Microsoft their own TLD?!

British Library pushes the cloud button, says legacy IT estate cause of hefty rebuild

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The cloud: a defence against bean counters.

"...many of its systems can't be restored due to their age. They will either no longer work on the fresh infrastructure or they simply can't get any vendor support after going end of life (EOL)."

That, however, won't be allowed to happen in the cloud. They won't be allowed to leave systems rotting ("because, funds...") and then find they can't support them when they need to restore.That problem will have to be dealt with when the vendor or cloud provider pulls support.

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

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Re: First they came for the leap seconds, then they came for the leap days...

"Solar time where the sun is at its highest above Greenwich exactly at noon every single day."

But, due to the earth's orbit not being circular, the interval between this can vary by +/-O(15 mins). That's why we had to invent a mean day and mean time for practical day-to-day applications. There are just four days in the year when local apparent solar time and mean time are about aligned at Greenwich - as governed by the "equation of time". (Which, I guess, is an example of regularising our time keeping to make computing easier.)

"Every time atomic time goes too far ahead of solar time they insert a leap seconds. So you get a mix of solar time before the decimal point and atomic time to the right of the decimal point."

Yes, UTC is kept within 1 second of UT1. But UT1 is not a measure of solar time: it's a measure of the angle of the earth (the position of the equinox) remembering it takes about 4mins less than 24 hours for the earth to rotate through 360°. Let me quote the Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Almanac:

Although it would be possible to define a system of time measurement in terms of the hour angle of the sun, such a system could never be precisely related to sidereal time and could not, therefore, be determined by star transits.

I'm suspecting your 25μs is, anyway, the error in difference between UTC and UT1 (IERS Bulletin B, 12th Feb, gives the mean formal error UT1-UTC as 0.0253ms)

A consequence of this is the mean sun used in GMT isn't even the real mean sun - it's a fictitious one. (Hence the "about aligned" in my opening para.)

I also think it means your assertion that "you get a mix of solar time before the decimal point and atomic time to the right of the decimal point." is incorrect. I get what you're saying; it's not a bad mental model. But UTC is an approximate measure of what you call "solar time" (i.e. the earth's rotation) that is advancing in SI seconds as measured on the "surface" of the earth.

And the point is, as humans, we like that angle. IIRC, the historical record shows 1hr/1000 years is plausible. If the poles disappear quickly, it could get even worse. Nobody is going to accept to sunrise at midday. (Pre-millennial projections over estimate the number of leap seconds we would have. So maybe it will sign flip and go negative; I'm sure negative leap seconds will really piss everybody off even more.) But,drop leap seconds, and we'll either introduce leap hours or time zones shifts, and end up with timezones that are 18hrs off "atomic time". So we'll be saving ourselves some some work in the short term but creating a lot of pain further down the line.

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You caught me on the isostatic rebound

It was tongue-in-cheek (notice the original icon).

But if you're happy to have sunrise at midday, and sunset at midnight, because it makes computing easier - why not have spring in July because it makes computing simpler?

We know, from countless ERM fiascos, that you fit your processes to the computers - not the other way around. Man's time keeping will have to match what the computers can manage. (Still, slightly, tongue-in-cheek)

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Trollface

First they came for the leap seconds, then they came for the leap days...

People are already campaigning to abolish leap seconds. How long before they are clamouring to abolish leap days?

OpenAI claims New York Times paid someone to 'hack' ChatGPT

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Joke

So asking the wrong question is now "hacking"?

We asked 100 Authoritarian dictatorships whether asking the wrong question should count as hacking? And 1012% said yes!

Starting over: Rebooting the OS stack for fun and profit

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"Was Wirth's Pascal ever garbage-collected,"

No, and I've just checked with google.

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There's lots I could write, but my question is Why?

What, as a user, does it give me that I don't already have?

If it doesn't, then where, as a manufacturer/developer, is the competitive edge or productivity gain that will allow me to trounce my rivals in doing what they are already doing?

AI comes for jobs at studio of American filmmaker Tyler Perry

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Re: He's kidding

"Compassion is somebody else's problem - not mine."

Are you ready to back up your AI chatbot's promises? You'd better be

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We need an icon for cynicism.

"... your company "will end up spending more on legal fees and fines than they earn from productivity gains.""

Yes, but that's spending money on the right kind of people (rich lawyers) rather than the wrong kind of people (poor people*). And, besides, the legal costs are mid term - long after the person who's fired the support staff has moved on; whereas the savings are in the short term and directly effect their bonus.

(* I was going to say "unqualified" people. But chances are, they've got a degree. It's just there degree isn't in law...)

City council megaproject mulls ditching Oracle after budget balloons to £131M

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Re: So whose bright idea was it in the first place?

You can understand why businesses might not what to share processes with competitors - believing their process gives them a competitive edge. But that barrier doesn't exist for councils. They should have the same process.

ChatGPT starts spouting nonsense in 'unexpected responses' shocker

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Joke

A person who once had a massive row with it (a bot) would say that...

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Re: Rose-tinted spectacles

Very elegantly put.

We do most things because we feel like it - i.e. some combination of "experience" (training or habit) and mood. If pushed, we can give a post-hoc rationalisation with varying degrees of plausibility. But, if we are honest with ourselves, we realise we never reasoned it out like that; we just reacted. And we simply don't have access to our internal state in a way that can explain those reactions.

Clearly these LLMs are not intelligent. And architecturally we are very different to us. But I think we are much closer to them in outline approach than many people are comfortable admitting. We are, often, gloried predictors of what will happen next. (See humour: one of the things that make something funny is our prediction goes awry.)

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A human being fails every one of those cases. We are frequently more opaque, less interpretable, less maintainable and less debuggable.

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Coat

Did somebody switch ChatGPT with aManFromMars1...?

My coat's the spacesuit, thanks.

Trident missile test a damp squib after rocket goes 'plop,' fails to ignite

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Re: What the hell?

Yeah, my first thought was "will it even last till it's replaced (given the likely delays)?"

Cutting kids off from the dark web – the solution can only ever be social

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Re: Chilling Effects

My thought was a flag in the SIM that Android/iOS will pass on to apps. Asking for a restricted SIM to be replaced with an adult one, should demand stringent checks. Buying another SIM will mean changing the phone number. And constantly flipping between SIMs (in a single SIM phone) is likely to break the phone fairly quickly.

So, as parent, you just have to make sure your child has a single SIM phone with a restricted SIM. It's the job of the regulators to make sure Facebook et al honour the SIM.

Space nukes: The unbelievably bad idea that's exactly that ... unbelievable

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Re: nuclear power in earth orbit

When I heard the headlines, I expected something like that (or a heavy duty RTG). Possibly to a power a maser (or space laser) because that solves the beam forming problem.

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Coat

Can I argue the effects cancel - that shorter aerials and more sensitive electronics balance each other out...?

(In reality, I haven't a clue. But qualitative analysis had demonstrated all three cases are plausible. We need a quantitive analysis.)

Judge crosses out some claims by writers against OpenAI, lets them have another crack at it

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"The creators claimed that ChatGPT produced accurate summaries of their books and offered that as evidence that their writing had been ripped off."

Could it be that it was trained on summaries other people have written and posted to the internet rather than the works themselves?

Meta says risk of account theft after phone number recycling isn't its problem to solve

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Re: My guess

You've got sidetracked into an argument about hard limits. The request is not that we set aside numbers forever, but that we maximise the delay before they are re-used. (With reuse measured in years, not days.)

This has the advantage that it reduces risk for all sites. I don't know how hard it is in practice, but these are changes that apply to a handful of large companies which operate in our legal jurisdiction, instead of world+dog. Even if what you say in other comments pans out, it seems a reasonable "defence in depth" strategy to do it anyway.

(Aside: I haven't used an TOTP app: If my only device is a phone, what happens if my phone gets stolen? My mum recently convinced her provider to issue her a new SIM using the existing number? Then what?)

Ukraine claims Russian military is using Starlink

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Joke

But I'm not sure Elon's going to deactivate all the Starlink terminals he sold to the Chinese government...

(Joking aside, you make a reasonable point: it's worth following that thread.)

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"If some terminals are being used, passing on their details to Starlink should trigger an investigation and possible deactivation. "

By the time the Ukrainians have the details, I suspect the terminals are either non-functional or safely out of Russia's hands.

Chrome engine devs experiment with automatic browser micropayments

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Re: I see a serious issue with the idea

"Secondly - and more worryingly - what happens when (not if) a site gets hacked"

You set the payment level. You chose how much to interact with the site. The hackers can't control any of that: so if it's hacked, your payment doesn't change; it's the site owner who loses their money. This might incentivise them to focus on security.

ANZ Bank test drives GitHub Copilot – and finds AI does give a helping hand

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Re: More helpful for expert programmers

So your definition of an expert is "knowing to call the sort method, rather than implementing a shell sort from scratch"?

Harsh, but fair. (Because, we've all known those "programmers".)

SAP hits brakes on Tesla company car deal

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Re: Tesla warp erp

I'd go read the comments on latest update on the Birmingham Council story. And that's just one of many ERP fiascos that have graced these pages. And those are the ones we know about.

Anyway, building your own was advocated by some people as a solution.

Alaska Airlines' door-dropping flight was missing bolts

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Re: "poorly drilled rivet holes"

Something similar has worked for AMD and Global Foundries. (And could we argue Intel's failure to do so has cost them?) So it's not a complete no brainer.

But obviously they are very different industries - who else were Boeing going to buy from? Who else would buy from the spin off?

EU repair rights bill tells manufacturers to fix up or ship out

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Re: I haven't read

"...for instance if 3 hours of your time cost more than the whole new motherboard"

You may have nailed it. In the good ol' days, the stuff was much dearer than our labour, so it was worth a lot of effort to fix it up. But the balance has shifted towards our labour, even at minimum wage, being dearer.

AI models just love escalating conflict to all-out nuclear war

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Joke

Re: Dumbf*cks!

Did we learn from the last one's mistakes...?

Still no love for JPEG XL: Browser maker love-in snubs next-gen image format

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0. The routine to do the actual conversion has to be WASM.

1a. Do the conversion, on the fly, in a service worker. So the page requests `./image.jxl?convert=jpg` and the service worker hooks this and converts it into jpeg. This is the best solution, modulo service workers not being well fitted for this kind of filtering.

1b. Fetch the binary data on the UI thread, convert it into a format recognised by the browser, then put it in a `Blob` and use `URL.createObjectURL()`. You can still use ordinary `img` - you just have to update the `src` based on some agreed strategy. (We put canvas rendered stuff into images in a similar way.) If you want it in CSS, it's possible to enumerate the style sheets and find the URLs and replace them.

In my opinion, the performance hit is probably not worth it. And the more images you have (i.e. the closer you are to a setup where bandwidth/storage gains are significant) the bigger the performance hits become. But it can be layered in to existing setups.

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Can you guarantee that if it becomes a big, juicy target, and Micros~1 find themselves repeatedly missing revenue targets? It looks a long shot, but I'd be cagey about it, if I had pockets cagey enough to be picked.

Web devs fear Apple's iOS shakeup for Europe will be a nightmare for support

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Re: Safari Is An Albatross Around The Necks Of Web Developers

It's nowhere near as bad as they used to be*. And becoming harder and harder to find gaps. Speculation is the EU's decision has driven the sudden burst of conformance.

The bigger annoyance is that old phones are stranded on old versions of Safari. But, I guess, you'll soon be able to recommend people with outdated iOS switch to Chrome. (Yay, who doesn't want Browser recommendations?)

* Of the cases you list: they now actually support WebGL 2. `EventTarget` `passive` is all that seems to be missing and is a performance hack - if they think their platform doesn't need it, fair enough. I'm genuinely uncertain about whether `requestIdle` is a worthwhile API; better to use a separate thread?

ICANN proposes creating .INTERNAL domain to do the same job as 192.168.x.x

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Re: "DNS, however, can't prevent internal use of ad hoc TLDs"

Fair enough, I was being sloppy with my terminology. The point I was trying to make is that the DNS systems will be set up to treat it as special and stop it at the edge of an organisation in the way they won't for other domains.

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Re: "DNS, however, can't prevent internal use of ad hoc TLDs"

At the moment, a request for somewhere.internal could end up at the root servers. Once this proposal goes through, AIUI, that will stop being the case and resolver libraries will stop forwarding it.

We put salt in our tea so you don't have to

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Down South: even the water's hard.

Last time I checked, you could get your entire RDA of calcium from 7.5l of tap water. Which, I guess, is why people bottle it up and sell it as mineral water.

Asda's delayed SAP migration forces extension to Walmart's backend support contract

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Joke

Re: SAP rollout delayed

I think you've missed the third "80%"s in there, and possibly the fourth....

White goods giant fires legal threats to unplug open source plugin

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I hope they can stand up those claims with numbers and it's not that AWS is costing more than they thought and somebody's gone, "Shit, what do we do?! Lets tell management it's this little guy and his handful of users!"

IT consultant fined for daring to expose shoddy security

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In English courts, that wouldn't be double-jeopardy but the normal appeals process. The superior will have told the junior court in made "an error in law", and sent the case back to reevaluate the facts using the "correct law" as determined by the superior court.

Working from home never looked better: Leopard stalks around Infosys and TCS campuses

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Re: any fashion house

A chance to revisit one of the all time great cartoons: 'Fortunately, I was wearing my armour.'

Musk claims that venting liquid oxygen caused Starship explosion

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Joke

Re: Its a Test

Yeah, but they saved 2mm (and 100g) on the exhaust pipe...

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Re: Its a Test

In fairness, I've done that plenty of times myself - albeit on a smaller scale. "Ahhh, so that's why it's done like that."

In my defence, the reasons weren't always explained to me. (Or I hadn't understood the situation properly.) And figuring out the reasons for this "common knowledge" has proved valuable; as has discovering the times "common knowledge" was completely wrong.

How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu

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Re: Corruption

"Any large website has to cope with "thousands of terminals", all different, all configured by someone else..."

Realistically, they're running Chrome (or a derivative which for all intents and purposes behaves like Chrome) or Safari or Firefox. Apple can't keep Safari users on the same version, but the other two keep their users current. So you're looking at a handful of configurations - not thousands. The browser does all the work sorting out the user's configuration.

SpaceX snaps back at US labor board's complaint, calling it 'unconstitutional'

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Stare decisis went out the window when Roe vs Wade was overturned. These judges are now unelected legislators.

Why do IT projects like the UK's scandal-hit Post Office Horizon end in disaster?

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Here's the current executive chair of HS2 talking to the Transport Select Committee this week:

There are four reasons why the cost is more than what has been budgeted for. The first is that the cost estimate in the first place and the budget that was set in the first place were too low, in my opinion....Secondly, there have been some changes to scope. Thirdly, there definitely has been some poor delivery on our point. And fourthly there’s inflation,...

....It is worth remembering that between 2010, when the then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, initially launched HS2, and 2019, when the current budget was set, the scope of HS2 was changed significantly by a whole series of Ministers. Much more of it was put through tunnels, which cost a lot more than putting it through cuttings, for example. There have been a whole series of scope changes. Yes, it is true we have not delivered in the way we said we would do.

...The Government and the company decided to let cost-plus contracts, where 99% of the financial risk is with the Government and only 1% is with the contractor, which is extraordinary. That was well before my time, but my understanding is that it was done in order to get these contracts away because they were so huge. This is the civil engineering contracts, not the station contracts.

If you're interested in researching the anatomy of a government cock up, it's well worth reading (or hearing) all of it.

OpenAI: 'Impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials'

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Re: Inspiring

I think we call that fan fiction. Okay, it take more than a few days to appear. But, given sufficient time, the position stands.

We already have a culture that values authenticity. NFTs took this to an absurd level. But what makes the Mona Lisa valuable is not the image itself, but that it was painted by Da Vinci. (Witness the recent shenanigans over Salvator Mundi. It's value is tied to it being authentic rather than being one of the many copies of the lost original.)

So do you want to read the completion of Games Of Thrones by an AI, or wait for George R.R. Martin - even if (as a time traveller) I tell you the AI one is better than what will finally emerge?

Road to Removal: A blueprint for yanking billions of tons of CO2 out of our atmosphere

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Re: Rik, you're just trolling us now

If trees can do CCS as a side-effect of living, you'd think humanity could match or improve on it when we put our collective heads together. Plants, for example, need water and are vulnerable to pests. If we can do solar-powered CCS without water, then we do it in the desert.

Tesla's latest Autopilot safety patch hits 1.6M Chinese vehicles

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The constant Tesla software updates make sense now we've seen how Musk handles Twitter.