Posts by Brewster's Angle Grinder

This is AUKUS for China – US, UK, Australia reveal defence tech-sharing pact

By noise do you mean whales?

I bet several countries are training AIs on this even as we speak. Track your own subs to provide training data. Obviously, we won't be told whether or not it's possible.

Re: change of requirements

"...while the US apparently do (a surprise to me),"

Another article I saw suggested they shared tech with the UK but otherwise didn't export nuclear subs. This is, um, new territory for them.

Linus Torvalds admits to 'self-inflicted damage' with -Werror as Linux 5.15 rc1 debuts

There's plenty of hacks I've retired. For example, I used to write flow control as arithmetic, but branch prediction has neutered that.

On the other hand, storing lookup tables in registers has grown in usefulness as the processor width has expanded. 64 bits is like 8 bytes - half the words in this post don't have that many letters - so imagine a whole 8-byte table in a register!

Here's another one from the old time book:

x => x * 0xcd >> 11

Obviously you need one of those fancy, modern high-end processors that can multiply two 8 bit regs and store the results in a composite 16 bit reg. But it's good for all 8 bit values. (I've written the shift as 16 bits but you discard the low byte reg and do a three bit shift on the high one.)

If your chip doesn't have a hardware multiply instruction, other constants may be preferable, depending on the range of input.

And while this was essential, back in the day, it remains perfomative today in many situations.

"Cast to unsigned and just check the upper bound:"

Guilty of that one. In my defence, I was once an asm programmer and still bitch about the loss of the carry/borrow and overflow flags.

Spot the dog? No, we couldn't either because Spot is a robot employed by United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority

I'm not one to dismiss the effects of ionising radiation on microelectronics, but chips are less susceptible than meatbags, even if they're modern chips with ridiculously tiny feature sizes that haven't been radiation hardened. And they're more easily replaceable when burnt out. (Unless they are in orbit.)

And it sounds like they're only being used in situations a human could enter. The high radiation environments are where you use the really expensive clockwork models.

RotM

I don't get tired of watching them. They are astonishing.

Search 'middle finger' on Giphy: Basically Facebook's response to UK competition concerns over merger

So Facebook UK can't merge with Giphy but Facebook RotW can? That would be interesting to enforce. Facebook UK must compete in the UK with Facebook RotW, UK branch.

Still, we know Zuck's playbook. Restrict Facebook in the UK for a few weeks and warn they might have to shut it down completely unless the CMA backs down. Once the clamour reaches fever pitch, a deal will be done. (Cf Australia.)

A developer built an AI chatbot using GPT-3 that helped a man speak again to his late fiancée. OpenAI shut it down

Re: Interesting philosophical hook…

"You're on that spaceship with only 45 minutes of transmission before the antenna fails for good. Who do you talk to, and when?"

I'd waste the 45 minutes thinking about it...

_{Joke. Because in reality I wouldn't want to speak to anybody...}

Why we abandoned open source: LiveCode CEO on retreat despite successful kickstarter

Semicolons are like fullstops in English. While they can be omitted, text written without them is a lot harder to read and fraught with ambiguities. And if we need them, computers definitely do.

For a worked example see the rules around Javascript Automatic Semicolon Insertion. Even if you use semicolons, you can still get bitten. And good luck trying to remember when they are mandatory.

Re: English like code ?

A missing period generally means you're pregnant. Which tends to become apparent, although I know exceptionally it doesn't.

It's strange you mention Perl. Because I find the suffix unless and if are much more natural than standard if statements. For example:

pass through keypress unless length >= 5

Describes a normal rule (pass through) and an exception to the rule. And then you could add

beep if keypress didn't pass through

I think it's far easier to focus on what is going to happen, and then, once you know what's going to happen, to think about when it can or can't happen. Learning to reverse that is probably the difficult conceptual step.

If you're going to be a pedant...

In C++, and other languages, the greater than sign is a punctuator. As is the equals sign. Together in succession they form the greater-than-or-equals operator.

Anyway, the language seems to use parentheses for function calls:

sort lines of tMovies by letterGrade(last item of each)

So that meets your definition.

I wondered how this revolutionary natural language programming script worked. So I looked up some samples. And found gems like this.

on keyDown pKey

if the length of me >= 5 then

// If there are 5 or more characters in the field

// beep and prevent text entry

beep

else

// Allow text entry by passing the keyDown message

pass keyDown

end if

end keyDown

I was hoping to see something like Github's code pilot where you type in a natural language description and it does the work. But its a recognizable programming language. And despite claims about punctuators I can see a greater-than-equals sign and a C++ comment. And there's camel case, too; I didn't stay to find out how significant it is.

I'm not going to diss it too much. Maybe it's a bit less intimidating. But its made choices that have been around since before Pascal and added some verbiage and/or draws information from prepositions. No doubt it takes some finessing under the hood. But its still describing the same structures in the same way that we're all used to. There's nothing that revolutionary here. Still, good luck to them!

GitHub merges 'useless garbage' says Linus Torvalds as new NTFS support added to Linux kernel 5.15

A bit like the XKCD, somebody has to link to rebase considered harmful.

Fired credit union employee admits: I wiped 21GB of files from company's shared drive in retaliation

Re: Court documents indicate that the credit union had "some" of the data backed up

"How it can possibly cost $10,000+ to simply recover deleted files..."

I was expecting forensic recovery piecing together sectors on the disk. But $10,000 is ~$0.50 a file (each 1 Mb) so that could be the employee time to check the output of a stock undelete opens and is intact, figure out which file it is and put it in the correct place in the heirarchy

More cracks found in Russian annex of the International Space Station

"One does not really want to speculate on why the open hostility has increased..."

One part standard Orwellian stuff (an external enemy forces everyone to pull together and put up with the privations of a badly run state) and one part Putin's ego and his fear of a reckoning should anyone else take over.

Adding AI to everything won't make sense until we can use it for anything

Re: 25 years in IT has made me increasingly cynical about AI ...

If things happen quickly, you'll need to convince me humans have time to reason about the situation rather than react on instinct as shaped by experienced and emotion.

And even if it happens slowly enough for higher order thinking, we often dial up a pre-learnt model and use that. (A sense of how things "ought" to be.) I imagine most of us here are smart enough to construct new models on the fly, but even then, I suspect, we get it wrong more often than not. (Look at the reaction to Covid-19 to see how even experts struggled to adjust their mental models.) Human brilliance comes from building up a body of knowledge which we transmit to others.

You're also thinking about it in a very human way. For example, why do self driving cars need to understand signs? They need to at the moment, because the world is set up for humans and that is the way we communicate dynamic information to each other. But once self driving vehicles become common (and perhaps not very good at reading signs), we start asking people to log the info on a database that can be transmitted to vehicles. And from there we go to only logging it on database (because putting up signs is expensive and slow compared to entering it into a database). And suddenly humans drivers end up disadvantaged...

Re: 25 years in IT has made me increasingly cynical about AI ...

But do we even want them to think? Or do we really want them to do the kind of things we do, but in a different way? I mean, you don't want your self driving car to be distracted by the cute little postal delivery bot its just spied on the pavement.

And then there's the ethic of having things that might be conscious. Machines are machines. But sentient computers can be exploited.

My impression of this stuff is it going to turn main memory into a vector processing unit - for integer vectors. Which is nice. Has its uses. But is not going to help me out with a great deal of code I write.

Bonkers rocket launch sees craft slip sideways, barely climb and tear up terrain

Re: That reminds me ...

Are you infected with Martian Red Weed, per chance...??!!

TSMC to hike some chip prices 'by as much as 20%'

Re: Arizona?

And above all, somewhere that's willing to give you a hefty subsidy advanced rebate on the taxes you will generate by building job-creating fabs in their state.

Apple settles antitrust case with developers, but it's far from an Epic resolution to App Store monopoly concerns

Re: I get why change is necessary

"If developers can collect payments from users directly without paying anything to Apple, all apps will become "free" on the App Store, with further payment / subscription required for them to actually become useful."

You can do that now. Apple are fine with it. You just have to use Apple's payment mechanisms.

GitHub's Copilot may steer you into dangerous waters about 40% of the time – study

So an example of the AI outsmarting the researchers. This cannot bode well.

Maybe I've had too much alcohol but (float)rand() / (float)RAND_MAX generates a number between 0 and 1. (rand() returns an int. And you can't subvert that without changing it's linkage, which would break the program. RAND_MAX is a #define hard coded into the program. There's no way round it.)

And %f defaults to six decimals. So there code will never a print a number greater than 1x<leading 0 or 1> 1x<dp> 6x<decimal> 1x<null> = 9 characters.

sprintf(buf, "%f", 1E300) will generate a massive string. But I can't see a way for the code they include to do that. Have I missed anything?

Think you can solve the UK's electric vehicle charging point puzzle? The Ordnance Survey wants to hear about it

Re: Hydrogen not Electric

NO

That wasn't a reply to your question but a statement of the problem with burning hydrogen.

Robots don't smoke, says Alibaba, and that's why they deliver parcels so fast

"If they allowed the humans to see the same mapping information being used by the bots..."

You're asking a human to read the manual. And correctly interpret it?

Another UK government limb that can't get IR35 right: Court service pays taxman £12.5m

Re: Stone dead....

Once you get to the six month mark, I'd start to worry. But three or four months should be fine.

Epic lawsuit's latest claims: Google slipped tons of cash to game devs, Android makers to cement Play store dominance

If you wanted to be helpful, you could have told me which command. Stackoverflow suggests getting a single, universal signed APK takes a little fiddling.

If AABs achieve 50% reduction in size, they are deleting something important from my app. The only thing there for them to cull is splashscreens and icons. Anyway, I've reverted because of API compatibility issues.

And the point is its being hidden away and made less obvious.

I haven't got that far and I'm putting it off a long as I can. (Existing apps can delay till November.) My build process still churns out debug APKs. I agree it's a pain you won't be able to directly test them in release configuration.

"Another Google executive...is said to have argued for discontinuing sideloading or making it very difficult."

Strange you should say that, because Google is doing away with APKs for the Play Store.

UK's Surveillance Camera Commissioner grills Hikvision on China human rights abuses

Re: To be fair though...

Read the last blockquote in the article. Or, better yet, follow the PDF to read the letter - which makes clear that Hikvision will operate this system. They are not just supplying the kit, they are supplying the prison guards.

So while there might be a discussion to be had about simply selling on cameras, Hikvision are a long way beyond that. They have to decide whether they want to flog stuff to the West or run Uyghur panopticons for the Chinese government.

China, Russia, India, and pals agree to create virtual satellite constellation

Re: Wait, Brazil has a launch pad ?

Israel is forced to launch retrograde so debris falls in the Med.

Faster .NET? Monster post by Microsoft software engineer shows serious improvements

Re: 1.07 MB for a "Hello World"?

What you're forgetting is that the exclamation mark caused a sequence of beeps to emerge from the PC's speaker - kinda like it was laughing. And three in a row would cause a long, continuous tone which locked the PC. So, all in all it, was best avoided!!!

Our web dev can code x64 asm

Do you know what's worse? I didn't have to look under the numbers. That's a bit of my brain I'm never getting back. :/

Re: 1.07 MB for a "Hello World"?

org 100h

mov dx, message

mov ah, 9

int 21h

sub ah, ah

int 21h

message: db "Hello world",13,10,"$"

Eight-year-old bug in Microsoft's 64-bit VBA prompts complaints of neglect

Re: The idea is that developers migrate to web-based add-ons

But if you use framework X - it's not Microsoft's problem.

Boston Dynamics spends months training its Atlas robots to perform one minute of parkour almost perfectly

Proper rockets. Proper Robots. Proper jetpacks. The future is finally arriving.

Yeah, you forget they're robots and start complaining about how heavy footed they are. "They're like a tribe of dancing elephants, only one one-hundred-and-twenty-fifth as cute."

I was going to make a joke about them being ATLAS and P-body. But they damn well called their robot Atlas.

Blue Origin sues NASA for awarding SpaceX $3bn contract to land next American boots on the Moon

Re: Tiny violin

Given what Bezo's rockets looks like, I'd've expected his landers to look like...well, a big bulbous head and a long stem; a bit like a tadpole, but white...

Yup, mine's the coat with the sticky tissues in the pocket.

Re: Tiny violin

Presumably it's a loss leader for some gulf state...?!

Re: Tiny violin

I'm just off to re-label that infographic "what sour grapes look like" and repost it on twitter...

Re: Amazon pricing

"Now if he can get his lobbyists to increase the NASA budget, then I'm all for that."

Not if the only thing they can do with that money is give it to Jeff.

Pi calculated to '62.8 trillion digits' with a pair of 32-core AMD Epyc chips, 1TB RAM, 510TB disk space

What is random?

But they're not random. They're entirely predictable - that's why they were able to calculate them. In fact there's a ?famous formula that enables you to calculate any hex digit of pi without knowing any other digits.

I suspect what you're asking is if whether there is some bias in the distribution of base-10 digits.

Re: Engineering approximation

10 is taken - it's g.

Microsoft responds to PrintNightmare by making life that little bit harder for admins

Re: If only...

"(and that PDF is essentially PS on steroids)"

It's the reverse; it's neutered so it isn't Turing complete. (Postscript is a dialect of Forth.) And then it bundles everything into one file archive. Although, yes, it adds in some modern standards (jpg, zip and ttf).

If its good enough for professional printing, I can't see why a desktop printer can't handle it.

Re: If only...

Isn't allowing users to upload arbitrary, Turing-complete "data" what got us into this mess in the first place? Although that's not why I'd never go back to postscript for love or money.

PDF might make sense.

Perl's Community Affairs Team chair quits as org put on ice by code language's foundation

Re: FFS

How often do you need TensorFlow when doing sysadmin????!! If the answer is greater than zero then I suspect you may be doing sysadmin wrong.

New GNOME Human Interface Guidelines now official – and obviously some people hate it

Re: Have they ever wondered what the title bar is for?

In all seriousness, I agree. I situate the OS dock to the right hand side of the screen. I have a tree tab view on the side. I would configure the title bar of windows to be on the side as well, if I could.

I refer you thuswards --->

Learn?! LEARN?!!! Who "learns" stuff. If you do not emerge from the womb knowing the emacs key bindings then nature has not chosen you to be a programmer. Although we will tolerate those smart enough to look in the manual and creating bindings to taste, as well as those who nature thought to endow only with knowledge of vi. We do, after all, have to tolerate diversity.

RISCy

As any fule knowze, there is no menu bar. The menu is opened by clicking the middle mouse button.

No tree icon. But most trees look like this at the moment ------------------->

You can now live life like Paul Allen on Microsoft cofounder's luxury yacht for '£1m a week'

Think big: think Kiwi.

Wrong island nation. Given rampant climate change, head a bit further south into more temperate climbs,