Posts by Brewster's Angle Grinder

Twitter further restricts free tier with option to limit replies to verified accounts

* Although some of the bots may have their software implemented in wetware, and require to be fed "potato chips" and cola to function.

OpenAI reinstates ChatGPT's internet browsing privileges

I just had a look at the New Scientist one on this article. I could remove most of it, but the JS seemed to have deleted a little bit of the text. However it's nice clean HTML that's perfectly readable when downloaded...

On reflection, I suppose it is so search engine crawlers can read it. Now they realise there are good search crawlers and bad search crawlers...

How are these things defeating the paywalls? Can I really just run curl and get the page?

Never mind SETI and NASA, if your Ring somehow snaps ET, Amazon might give you $1M

Re: Got some footage here

Something like this?

It would seem reasonable to think a plasma ball would be charged and attracted to the ionised path of lightening. I'm sure researchers would like to see your footage. But which ones, I don't know.

US lawmakers want China export bans to include open tech like RISC-V

Re: Banning open-source exports don't work

A new set of people, though.

"This time it will be different!"

Why?

"Because we're doing it, and not those losers who tried it before."

IT networks under attack via critical Confluence zero-day. Patch now

Firefox lets you read PDFs direct in the browser. Have other browsers not caught up yet?

City council Oracle megaproject got a code red – and they went live anyway

Re: Product not suitable

That explains why they went bust. It if was renormalizable, even Oracle would have solved it by now.

Re: Product not suitable

"...it's complicated and you wouldn't understand..."

I can do Quantum Field Theory and General Relativity. Try me.

("It's complicated and you wouldn't understand" being code for, "it's complicated and I don't really understand it - certainly not well enough to explain it to you and I know I'll end up looking a fool.")

You've just spent $400 on a baby monitor. Now you need a subscription

Re: Someone else's computer

TBH, as a dev, the whole app biz has become a ponzi scheme.

It used to be, you could charge for software updates (i.e. the development work you spent a year doing), and the cost of maintaining old software was pretty much nil. I have stuff from the early 2000s that still runs fine on Windows today - or it will, if you click through all the warnings about it being an unsigned executable and so highly likely to eat your first born.

But, on mobile apps, users expect updates for free. (Indeed, there's no way to charge, except as an in app purchase.) And I'm in the middle of updating our Android apps to support the latest billing API because Google has declared the old version void. And that's after only just having finished updating them to the latest Android API. Those updates forced on us by vendors are an ongoing cost that we can't recoup. And that's before we get to any backend hosting costs, costs buying certificates to sign software or being in the vendor's store. All of that is funded by new sales. It's not sustainable.

So all new apps will have to have revenue stream: either advertising or subscription. It's not a model I like or agree with. But it's being forced on us by the markets and the hard economics.

It's time to celebrate the abysmal efforts to go paperless in the NHS

We know some of it's been digitised because 24,000 letters got lost in the system and were never sent...

ChattyG takes a college freshman C/C++ programming exam

Browsers/electron and javascript are not popular round here. But you're right, and I actually have a homebrew SVG "editor" that works like that. But my editor is nowhere near as fully functional as illustrator and nowhere near releasable, that's how I knew the request was epic.

Re the file format: I don't know it, but I suspect my editor could be hacked to handle it. (That's exactly the kind of thing it exists to do - it even has rudimentary pixel hacking functions.) Given you can embed SVG and PNG (and HTML) inside SVG, I would, sight unseen, suggest it's turned into a single SVG file with the layers embedded in it. In fact, rather than an editor, I would suggest what's needed is a filter that can do that, and reverse the process to recreate the format. Existing editors can then be used.

Asking it to produce an SVG editor alone means producing software equivalent to Illustrator or Inkscape. And you could argue the PNG editor is akin to asking it to produce Photoshop or GIMP.

Even if you restrict it to a rasteriser for the SVG, that's a fairly chunky piece of code, with complex bitmap filters, CSS, and animations. Although there do seem to be various libraries for subsets of it.

Apple blames iOS 17 bug for overheating iPhone 15 woes

Third party apps

So what Apple are saying is that third party apps (and any malware that makes it onto their phones) can now injure you via raising your iPhone to a temperature where it will scold you.

Yes, Singapore immigration plans to scan your face instead of your passport

This data will leak. Look at all the police records that have made it into the public domain. There lots of private companies involved and they all cutting corners competing on cost so sooner or later one will slip up and the crackers will notice.

PhD student guilty of 3D-printing 'kamikaze' drone for Islamic State terrorists

Re: The cops also reportedly discovered at the home an IS application form,

I know. Fucking bureaucracy gets everywhere. You can't even blow things up these days without first filling out a form.

Medium asks AI bot crawlers: Please, please don't scrape bloggers' musings

CG NAT? i.e. can one IP address legitimately generates lots of requests?

The only way is WebKit: Vivaldi's browser arrives on iOS

Re: Can anyone tell me why ...

At least on Android, you can be on the latest (and safest) browser even if the OS isn't getting updates. With Apple, once the OS goes out of support, so does the browser and you are vulnerable. Once Apple relaxes their rules, uptodate browsers will be able to run on old version of iOS.

Doom developer John Carmack thinks artificial general intelligence is doable by 2030

Own goal

Notes found in the rubble of civilisation by little green archaeologists, "I am the last human alive. As I write this, the killer robots are cutting through the door. In retrospect, letting the inventor of Doom create an AGI may not have been the smartest move."

GitHub Copilot, Amazon Code Whisperer sometimes emit other people's API keys

When you want the things to give you links; they hallucinate.

When you want the things to hallucinate passwords, they give you real ones.

Chap blew up critical equipment on his first day – but it wasn't his volt

Re: electron volts per electron

You can get away with quite a lot when c = 1.

electron volts per electron

Electron volts are no more a measure of mass than light years are a measure time. No matter what we say, the mass unit is eV/c²

UK judge rates ChatGPT as 'jolly useful' after using it to help write a decision

"I am unclear how it managed to completely fabricate case law..."

Because it's guessing what words come next rather than actually knowing anything. So it can, and does, "hallucinate". It seemed par for what we know about AI - especially fabulating links.

Activist investor to GoDaddy: Cut costs, improve sales, or sell

Re: "activist" investor

Why do that when you can get Elon Musk to buy it and take the flak for the resulting catastrophe...?

(Joe W's was on about an LBO: whereby someone takes out a loan against a company's future earnings, uses that to buy the company, and dumps the loan and the cost of servicing it on the company's balance sheet. It's the most insane thing. Any of us could do it, if we could persuade enough bankers to trust us. Just remember to pay yourself a hefty dividend in the early days before you've sunk the company or interest rates have shot up unexpectedly.)

Bombshell biography: Fearing nuclear war, Musk blocked Starlink to stymie Ukraine attack on Russia

So musk is a gullible fool who fell for the Russians crying nuke.

Scared of flying? Good news! Software glitches keep aircraft on the ground

Your argument amounts to "This RAAC roof is intact and working. So we shouldn't replace it as doing so introduces risk that the new roof collapses."

Their system is working now (except when it doesn't...) The problem is how long can that be sustained with ever more ridiculous levels of emulation...? That it hasn't collapsed, doesn't mean it's not going to. And when it does collapse, you're left with nothing. So, they should be developing a replacement system today, because it will likely take many years; just as we should have been replacing RAAC roofs over the last decade.

(And for the record, I don't think a publicly owned service would be any more willing to spend than a private one.)

Google rebrands 'android' as 'Android' to remove any doubt about its affiliations

Re: Unfathomable

Of course, the old fashioned way is a plain space: Ann Droid.

Re: Unfathomable

You preferred snake_case to kebab-case?

Snowflake's Instacart protestations hint at challenges for poster child of the data cloud

Too busy serving their shareholders to serve their customers...

Right to repair advocates have a new opponent: Scientologists

Re: Expose

The pope seems sincere and genuinely believes his message. And this pope seems to have been a reasonably humble bloke before he got elevated to living in palaces. (Disclaimer: I'm not Catholic and I've not conducted a detailed study. I'm just relying on gleamings from news reports and the intro to his Wikipedia bio.) Is the senior leader of Scientology ("the chairman of the board", David Miscavige) as sincere? Or is he fleecing people and laughing at them behind their backs?

Most religions tend to have branches that help poor people. Sikh gurdwaras, for example, offer people food free of cost. And as I understand, the Trussel Trust, which runs a lot of food banks, is basically a Christian organisation. And if you spend any time helping out the poor, you'll run into a bunch of people of faith. Does Scientology do this?

Also, most genuine religious seem to have ascetics: people who give everything up all their possessions for a life of ritual; i.e. monks, nuns, etc... Again can you be a Scientological ascetic, living off what is provided by the church without owning anything for yourself, and still progress in the "religion"?

Re: This is srs bsnss and no time for levity or larking about.

"Yes, it's true. This man has no [TWINKIE]."

From browser brat to backend boss: Will WASM win the web wars?

It's a competitor/successor to the JVM.

Chrome's V8 engine will already compile javascript down to serializable bytecode. The only advantage (compared to just-in-time compilation) is the start up time. But the bytecode is tied to the browser because it's constantly shifting what makes a good bytecode as new optimisations are added to the engine, and new features are added to the language. So I don't think any of the browser manufacturers would want to be pinned down to an agreed bytecode; that likely would hurt their performance for little practical gain over what we have.

And if you're compiling a language, why compile javascript? It's fundamentally an untyped, dynamic language that's ill suited to compilation. The purpose of WASM is to allow other languages (like C++ and RUST) to run in the browser environment. Could you compile C++ to the JVM? And you can use that compiled code "as is" without the class infrastructure the JVM forces on you.

And when you do want an API, the WASI API is open and unencumbered by Oracle's licences.

They've also learnt from thirty years experience of the JVM. In particular, it's a simpler lower-level, thing, where language features aren't tied into the VM. Upgrading should be less necessary and cause fewer compatibility woes when it does happen. It really is a virtual CPU, not a philosophy.

What happens when What3Words gets lost in translation?

Was that sheep (singular) or sheep (plural)?

This is obvious idiot stuff. Why are they even using plurals? As for errors, you could add a "check digit" to ensure people have given you a valid answer.

Of course, they're stuck with it now.

UK air traffic woes caused by 'invalid flight plan data'

Re: Resiliency – we've heard of it

Thanks for that. That's the sort of thing I was expecting.

Given how many flights run everyday without problem, it had to be something ridiculously obscure that nobody had managed to provoke before and where the most sensible thing to do was back out and ask for help. I'm surprised people are not more forgiving. If you find your invariants are broken, what else can code do but sound the alarm and wait for help?

Re: Expertise

tr -d \4\26

(Or sed, or awk, or perl, or any of the others...)

Perhaps AI is going to take away coding jobs – of those who trust this tech too much

Isn't that the reason for AI? You train your AI on Cobol and have your scant* and expensive programmers deal with the fall out.

_{* We had this discussion the other day. Cobol was designed as an easy language. There's no reason experienced programmers of any modern language couldn't get and up and running fairly quickly. It would not be like the major conceptual challenges of asking a Cobol programmer to manage codebase in C.}

I can see the job increasingly becoming code reviewing AI code. At the moment, it might be quicker to write it yourself. It's not going to stay that way forever.

Eventually, they'll get good enough it will become writing high level specs and little more than diving into bugs the AI can't solve. We learnt to trust compilers generating the machine code, instead of doing it ourselves. Eventually, we'll trust them to generate the nuts and bolts code, too.

Space junk targeted for cleanup mission was hit by different space junk, making more space junk

The single most devestating thing to have ever happened to life on this planet...

In fairness, the waste excreted by a bunch of cyanobacteria about 2 billion years ago is so long-lived that it can be detected in our atmosphere today. And it was so toxic it produced an 80% reduction in the mass of the biosphere. The particular noxious chemical in question is called oxygen.

IBM says GenAI can convert that old COBOL code to Java for you

Re: Programming is independent from language

One of the problems is firms insisting that 30 years experience programming counts for nothing when you switch to a new language. All understanding of programming somehow wiped from y our memory and you must start from scratch with every new system.

But most of us hitting fifty must have direct experiences of those arcane contraptions you describe. While decimal arithmetic is now coming into fashion, because binary floats should be nuked from orbit.

High severity vuln in WinRAR could allow code to run when files are opened

Re: Also available for Linux... if you're no CLI hater :-)

Zip allows files to be extracted individually. There's a directory at the end that points to the files. You can use that directory to extract individual files without decompressing earlier files. (.tgz has that problem, though.)

Microsoft wants Activision so badly, it's handing streaming rights over to ... Ubisoft?

Re: I think the CMA should hold out for...

And a sequel to Prey?

What DARPA wants, DARPA gets: A non-hacky way to fix bugs in legacy binaries

Self modifying code

Storing variables in the argument to an instruction. So `lda #5` the `5` literal is actually a variable that's adjusted by other parts of the code...

O, the joys of not having caches to worry about

So much for CAPTCHA then – bots can complete them quicker than humans

Anything you can do, I compute better.

I also used to deliberately try and pollute their dataset. These days, even when trying to get them right, I still need multiple rounds. (FFS, if you don't want me to click 20 out of 25 squares, don't show me a picture with a bicycle that covers 20 out of the 25 squares.)

UK voter data within reach of miscreants who hacked Electoral Commission

Re: Doubtful. Evidence?

"...the number of voters disenfranchised was pretty low..."

We don't really know. One, there was a lot of publicity to stop people voting. Two, people on the door were turning people away rather than telling them they could go in and have their inability to vote recorded. I had to push my way through and they had to look up the procedure.

Re: How was this made possible?

And each laptop protected by the top secret password: Password1, Password2, etc...

Hide and seek in outer space highlights a battle here on Earth

"...they are designed to do a periodic realignment of their orientation by means of the Sun and the star Canopus [PDF] – neither of which is going to randomly throw out dodgy instructions..."

Two days later: KABOOM!!! Canopus goes supernova.

(I looked it up. It's in the blue loop and at 10 M_☉ probably not heavy enough to go supernova once it's exited it.)

One weekend's TwitX chaos brings threats from Japan; indemnity promises for users; prominent account seizures

Re: If you were unfairly treated by your employer, we will fund your legal bill. No limit.

Insert 5a. "Convince Zuckerberg (and other Musk haters) to donate to legal fund to sue Musk".

Twitter sues Brit non-profit, claims hate-speech reports scared off advertisers

" It does not identify any supposed competitor that is apparently funding CCDH, rather X Corp intends to supply those names if any such parties exist and can be identified through discovery."

That's pretty much the definition of a fishing expedition, isn't it? We don't have any evidence. But if we sue, we think we can find it.

Re: CCDH: a front for the alphabet people?

They wish they were that coherent...

Arc: A radical fresh take on the web browser

Re: Off topic

What that cartoon misses is that I'm a dev and I like writing code, debugging it, and continuing to improve it. If I have time to do it, you are not utilising me to my full. Speaking of which....

Re: Tree Style Tab FTW!

Works fine for me!