* Posts by a pressbutton

518 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Sep 2011

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Apple sets new 16,000-foot iPhone drop test after 737 fuselage fail

a pressbutton

Re: No one really needs to know that; that's OLD news...

from the first 2 paras of the earliest article i can see :

BBC

Bolts in need of "additional tightening" have been found during inspections of Boeing 737 Max 9s, United Airlines has said.

guardian

United Airlines has found loose bolts and other “installation issues” on multiple 737 Max 9 aircraft, it said on Monday, referring to the Boeing model that has been grounded after a panel blew off an Alaska Airlines-operated plane mid-flight over the weekend.

telegraph

Phones, magazines and even the shirt off a child’s back were sucked out of an Alaska Airlines service from Oregon to California on Friday, prompting concerns about the Boeing 737 Max 9 plane used by commercial airlines all over the world.

times

A section of fuselage on a nearly new Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 fell off in-flight, leaving a gaping hole in the side of the aircraft, causing a loss of cabin pressure and forcing an emergency landing.

cnn

The FAA temporarily grounded certain Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft after an Alaska Airlines plane made an emergency landing in Oregon on Friday.

so a bit confused unless you mean specifically the 3 words "designed by software"

CEO arranged his own cybersecurity, with predictable results

a pressbutton

Re: Customers are the security liability

"Various companies are now working on this"

...in my experience by simply not answering the phone.

Internet's deep-level architects slam US, UK, Europe for pushing device-side scanning

a pressbutton

Re: Workarounds?

1

Get a dumb phone

2

Stop using the Internet

Admittedly not software based. My dad was ill a couple of months ago.

Took mum shopping. She didn't understand contactless payments. Dad used to drive her to a bank and she would write a cheque for cash.

In some ways the quality of life will be improved

NASA engineers scratch heads as Voyager 1 starts spouting cosmic gibberish

a pressbutton

Re: Have they tried

I do that because it seems to reliably end with the object in a known state

England's village green hydrogen dream in tatters

a pressbutton

The naked Neanderthal

A recent book by a french paleoanthropologist called ludovic slimak

190 pages in 1 paragraph:

After 40 years of research we know Neanderthals lived all over the place including above the arctic circle across siberia and down to the Med, they did not think like humans, did not have things (tools / clothes / jewelery) in the same way as humans. We almost certainly wiped them out. Not much else.

One point he made was that humans can live in a wide range of conditions with not much artificial support.

One still, dry night I was out looking at the aurora north of kittle in shorts sandals and a t shirt for 20m before realising it was -26c and running inside, only because I saw the number - i wasnt feeling cold.

Having said that it is 15c here and in a long sleeve t shirt thats just right.

Ofcom proposes ban on UK telcos making 'inflation-linked' price hikes mid-contract

a pressbutton

Ofcom have made it clear that saying

Cost go up by cpi = bad

Cost go up by 2.50 = OK

So I expect the near future sales focus to be on low cost contracts say 20pm that increase at only 2 pm each year over the 5 year contract term.

a pressbutton

Re: Hey, there's an idea...

That's all of them.

Bad eIDAS: Europe ready to intercept, spy on your encrypted HTTPS connections

a pressbutton

I do not.

And that is why it is a surprise.

Probe reveals previously secret Israeli spyware that infects targets via ads

a pressbutton
Pint

Re: Pay the Pipers and Dance to Their Tunes Delivers No Slippery Slopes Stripped of Hope

... or an AI superintelligence that has worked out a (laboured) acronym:

Greater IntelAIgent Games Play. Now though is it a Veritable and Vital and Virulent Virtual Field of Absolutely Fabulous Fabless Dreams for Remote Proxy Realisation via Alien Intervention.

GIAGP

VVVVFAFFDRPRAI

may be a most excellent joke or pun in another language

Just like USAians often struggle with sarcasm and I (a brit) struggle with some french jokes, we may need to shuffle over and make room for superintelligent AI jokes

--> with this it all becomes clear

Washington left with chip on shoulder after Huawei exposes export loophole lapses

a pressbutton

Recommend Peter zeihan on this

If (...) he is right, china spunked a mass of money -many billions -on the bleeding edge of duv lithography to make a chip that is up with a 2017 flagship phone.

Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows

a pressbutton

Printers meh

I am sure that smart paper pads that you could display docs on and once done, blank or replace with another doc were promised

Like a multi page colour etchasketch

It was due at some point between fusion and flying cars

After fears that Europe's space scope was toast, its first images look mighty fine

a pressbutton

Re: "Here's looking at Euclid"

Not in the comments

Google's next big idea for browser security looks like another freedom grab to some

a pressbutton

Re: Too late!

Google is behind this, taking control via Governments.

There FTFY

Twitter name and blue bird logo to be 'blowtorched' off company branding

a pressbutton

A sign of Tritter's dying user engagement level

After all, you don't correspond with your X that often

Otherwise it wouldn't be your X

World's most internetty firm tries life off the net, and it's sillier than it seems

a pressbutton

I think you will find it was easier to just steal the money.

Back then it was printed on paper.

a pressbutton

Re: Try turning your computer's network off and see how far you get.

I think you meant moved it to America.

As the article indicates, not sure how that improves security.

UK government faces calls to end IR35 double tax anomaly

a pressbutton

It could have been worse.

Starmer isnt ... that great ... but the alternative is a bunch of incompetant nutjobs (*) who think

being horrid to refugee children

adding poo to the water

after 13 years of trying to kill the NHS, pointing out the NHS is not in a good state

pointing out the key 'benefits' of brexit being your children need to learn to pick fruit

is a vote winner. and they have a lot of really unsavoury friends.

(*) sunak excepted, hunt, hmmm

I think Corbyn could win against this lot.

LG to offer subscriptions for appliances and televisions

a pressbutton

Re: @StrangerHereMyself - Wrong

And for those of you smart enough to block Internet access in your firewall, it won't take more than 5min for the manufacturer to figure it out and configure a phone home mechanism that your appliance will use before each start.

There are a fair number of home that *do not have internet* - in the UK it is ~ 1.5 million.

Looking at the korean soaps, very few have a PC / Laptop at home - but they all have an enormo phone for social media - the same seems to be true of the UK yoof.

So I think may well be the future.

Man who nearly killed physical media returns with $60,000 vinyl turntable

a pressbutton

Re: Poor design in my opinion

No

John Thaw's deep disappointment in the low standards of modern cryptic crosswords

Artificial General Intelligence remains a distant dream despite LLM boom

a pressbutton

Prediction for when a human - level AGI comes into existance

As others have noticed, we do not know what intelligence is. According to Wikipedia, we are close to simulating an entire rat brain (not in real-time). My bet is we will brute-force AGI first.

The brown rat has 200 million neurons and about 4.48×10^11 connections and we are not there yet and not in real-time.

The human brain consists of 100 billion neurons and over ~10^14 trillion synaptic connections.

The ratio is ~1000. Moore's law allows for doubling every 2 years (i know - it wont go on forever) 2 ^ 10 = 1024

So call it 15 years - not least as some of the issues in getting a brain going is a timing and co-ordination issue. So 2038.

Having said that, i doubt they will think or process input as fast as us for a while after that,

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

a pressbutton

Re: COP/EOD

The Goodies did a song about string

That song provides 50% of our entire infrastructure and methods of operation

looking for a song on sellotape.

a pressbutton

Re: COP/EOD

they'll be dead sooner ;)

for the first time for a rather long time, that might not be true.

Samsung's Galaxy S23 Ultra is a worthy heir to the Note

a pressbutton

Re: Heir to the Note my ass

Note4/8/S22 Ultra user - and only got that because the note 8 is no longer supported for security updates.

Hated that there is no SD or headphone jack as well

But

got a £4.99 usb-headphone converter

not many mobile blackspots left and pay ~£1 per day when abroad

and the pen can be used to trigger the camera

So not really that bothered

I will replace it ~2027 when the security updates stop

The only thing I would like is a better DEX - 4k 60hz support (and no cable). With that and a bluetooth keyboard I wouldnt need a laptop

Of course ymmv depending on the use case

CEO sorry after telling staff to 'leave pity city' over bonuses

a pressbutton

Re: Remember folks.

My apologies for the long post

This is the last 20% of https://annehelen.substack.com/p/the-wages-of-overwork

and yes, I did suffer (?) from that condition / syndrome to the point of burnout a couple of years ago and am heading that way again despite understanding the clear stupidity of what I am doing.

...Now, we see the logical conclusion of that bargain: a society in which overwork is so thoroughly normalized that anything less is interpreted as “lazy,” “lacking hustle,” or “your generation doesn’t want to work.” On Twitter, I’ve seen plenty of self-proclaimed progressives call the protests against changing the French retirement age the actions of an entitled society with no work ethic — instead of understanding that our reaction is deeply colored by the understanding that people should basically work until they die.

Overwork culture is the ideology of the “right” to work at its most perverse. It may monetarily advantage a handful at the top, but the societal damage is tremendous. Most of our acute societal ills are directly tied to poverty, and as numerous studies and pilot programs have shown, could readily be ameliorated by the very simple step of giving people money, whether through programs like the child tax credit (a tremendous success) or UBI (read a great, nuanced explainer here).

But there are second-tier problems that spiderweb around overwork — problems related to community-building, child and eldercare, community wellness, overall health outcomes and plain-out happiness and satisfaction and civic engagement. Turns out it’s incredibly hard to build community, to forge social safety-nets, to agitate for larger social change, to even give and receive care when you’re dedicated, willingly or not, to the culture of overwork.

Maybe this doesn’t sound familiar. Maybe you told overwork culture to fuck off during the pandemic or a decade ago, maybe you live elsewhere and have always considered it a sort of pathology. But maybe some it — the struggle to find the time to do anything but work and raise your kids and recover from work, the philosophical support of unions but a struggle to see the need for one in your workplace, a general inurement to overwork culture — feels comfortably real.

Maybe you feel like you’ve woken up and realized that you’re pretty bad at community, bad at leisure, bad at rest, bad at sustaining friendship….bad at most things, really, that aren’t work. At that, you’re an expert. And in that case, it’s worth asking yourself, again and again, until you can stare the answer straight in the face: at what cost, and for whose benefit?

Elon Musk actually sits down and talks to 'government-funded media' the BBC

a pressbutton

Re: to quote father jack:

I wish our BBC interviewers were as firm as Musk on this

(looking at R4 Today / Laura K and others in many interviews with leading politicians from all parties over the last few years)

The simple line

"you made an assertion, back it up with citations / facts pls"

would simplify / shorten a lot of interviews

( looking at you, Mr Johnson - and many of his friends )

or some basic maths

40,000 people arrive at Dover, It used to take 0 seconds to not check a passport, it now takes 30s, there are 12 staff, so you can only process 30,000 in a day

What is the backlog at the end of the day?

Yes, Samsung 'fakes' its smartphone Moon photos – who cares?

a pressbutton

Re: Faulty phone here!

Was it in black and white?

Tesla hits the brakes on rollout of Full Self-Driving code to new users

a pressbutton

Re: Musk's AI

I think you meant parrot?

on the same theme there are a *lot* of teslas in Norway and a lot of those are blue.

Google now won't black-hole all AI-made pages as spam

a pressbutton

So, at some point there will be an LLM (A) posting content with comments switched on and another LLM (B) will use Google to find that content and will post a comment and ...

... A and B will start to talk to each other

Warning: Microsoft Teams Free (classic) will be gone in 2 months

a pressbutton

Re: All your data belong us…

Never pay the ransomware to get your data back,

GDPR - right to data portability ?

Generally speaking the data should be free

(https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/individual-rights/right-to-data-portability/#:~:text=In%20most%20cases%20you%20cannot,is%20manifestly%20unfounded%20or%20excessive.)

Atos and Nest part company two years into 18-year £1.5bn contract

a pressbutton

nest is effectively a QUANGO

See

https://www.nestpensions.org.uk/schemeweb/nest/nestcorporation/who-runs-nest.html

This will not be paid by taxpayers, the costs of running NEST will be (a little) larger than they would have been.

It surprises me that the contract has been terminated. I recognise the continual tension between vendor / client - 'new' stuff that may or may not have ought to be in the original plan / SOW always comes up.

My reason for surprise is that

- these things usually get passed up the chain and then negotiated as a long term contract gives a _lot_ of space to make money back

- the job that NEST does has not changed much (as far as I understand it manages pensions - esp. auto-enroled ones - and the regs have not changed much)

So it tells me

- ATOS did not supply a 'good enough' product / service

and / or

- NEST were completely unreasonable.

I look forward to seeing what any anons out there have to say.

Cops chase Tesla driver 'dozing' with Autopilot on

a pressbutton

Re: Some clarifications to comments below

So basically switch from the 'average' non tesla to a tesla on autopilot and you decimate your chance of being in an accident. These are publicly available numbers.

No. Bad stats.

Teslas with autopilot are more often used on freeways & other 'wide' roads - fairly controlled environments (I do not think they are legal in the UK)

Manually driven cars are driven in city centres - an uncontrolled environment.

There is a much greater chance per mile of an accident in an uncontrolled environment.

Apples / Oranges.

You need to compare tesla without autopilot with other car that has a similar safety braking feature etc.

I think you will probably find they are about the same.

Computing's big question for 2023: How many more questions can we endure?

a pressbutton

Re: Yep, American LOOOOOVE Officiousness

What capt v said.

I have been repeatedly asked when handing over some small bit of functionality for some docco

Young people ask for a video.

Two years later they ask for a document.

You cannot search a video and good luck in capturing fields on a form.

Old people ask for a document

Two years later they ask for a document.

Which is fine.

LastPass admits attackers have a copy of customers’ password vaults

a pressbutton

Re: Private Equity Twats

there is someone now trying "casserole in that case" on that vault archive

What's in Santa's sack? New Linux Mint, EndeavourOS and postmarketOS updates

a pressbutton

Re: EndeavourOS looks good to me.

special feature - you log in by completing a crossword

Carmack quits Meta, brands it inefficient and unprepared for competition

a pressbutton

Re: Where has all the money gone??

because below the metaverse there are a _lot_ of hungry turtles

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

a pressbutton

Most of these hospital based systems were written for US - based hospitals - or ones that charge, where _every_thing_is_chargeable_ and so needs to be recorded.

... and by the way hold patient records.

these systems are installed by consultants of varying abilities in hospitals of varying purpose and age and IT infrastructure.

Sometimes successfully, sometimes otherwise. This can lead to utter failure ( google cerner bristol failure )

There are a number of key reqs that do not really happen anywhere else in the world

- every hospital is different and so is often managed differently

- hospitals do different things (some are overgrown GP practices, some specialise in war injuries, some in eyes)

- your data is supposed to be available to all of them, very quickly

- it is supposed to be updated in a way that makes sense to all

and

- it is the NHS - the prime need is to record what happened to the patients, not how much to bill them.

(disclaimer - things may have changed in the last 10 y or so, but it does not sound like it)

Programming error created billion-dollar mistake that made the coder ... a hero?

a pressbutton

Re: Welcome Back!

It is called recurseion because if you get it right the first time, your time was wasted

US Air Force reveals B-21 Raider stealth bomber that'll fly the unfriendly skies

a pressbutton

Re: What a waste of resources

You never know, it may do something to challenge "rock lobster" one day.

Intel reveals pay-to-play Xeon features with software-defined silicon

a pressbutton

Re: Risky

or maybe they send you a free replacement if it doesnt work? - that way you pay for the testing

NSA urges orgs to use memory-safe programming languages

a pressbutton

Re: Spy org says...

The NSA, Microsft and _you_ walk into a bar....

They buy you a beer

"How did you know what I want""

"We know..."

I'm happy paying Twitter eight bucks a month because price isn't the same as value

a pressbutton

Re: Oh, we know the value.

Perhaps he should charge more for guaranteed anonymous accounts

Nvidia admits mistake, 'unlaunches' 12GB RTX 4080

a pressbutton

Re: I don't believe it

A meta unlaunch button

It is all getting a bit self referential

The Metaverse is the internet no one wants

a pressbutton

Re: Is there a problem with VR?

I can think of 2

- the chance to look around a new building / car before it is built (sensible but pretty niche)

and

- porn (mainstream but not sensible)

Florida asks Supreme Court if it's OK to ban content moderation it doesn't like

a pressbutton

Re: You can either have Free Speech

To many in the US Twitter and FaceBook have attained the status of being a "Public Space"- on this side of the pond "Speakers Corner".

And so get v. upset if that cant say what they want on FB/TWTR.

I may not agree with their politics but recognise it is a milestone in the development of the internet that a good number of people now see some private platforms (that have spent years trying to become universally used and ubiquitous) as public spaces.

No-one is thinks that of 4chan, which never strove to be used by the entire world and their dogs/cats.

I do think that there is a case to be made that FB/TWTR should be viewed as a "town square" and so cannot moderate speech. However the USAians are v. keen on copyright control...

As the current Supreme court are aparrently quite inventive,

suggest we all order Popcorn.

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

a pressbutton

I was waiting for someone to say "Agile" and "Prototyping"

a pressbutton

Re: Excel is already the single most dangerous tool to give to civilians.

No you cant. google "company destroyed by excel". provide the top 10 names pls.

Excel cocks up

and user accepted the results without thinking and peer reviewer accepted the results without thinking and managers unquestioningly accepted the results without thinking and the chief accountant accepted the results without thinking.

Now, you may be able to seriously damage a financial firm but I do not think the trading algorithms are in VBA.

Some may point to the VAR projections used by LTCM but again dont think they were in VBA and anyway, where was the human judgement.

As noted above "The managers are supposed to check..."

Having said that, plenty of lives ruined by mailmerge as noted below...

a pressbutton

More seriously

Business processes are continually evolving.

One of the first mistakes IT people make is that they (I) expect people to come to them with a nicely documented petition pleading for something to be different and this is considered once a year and if they feel merciful, it might appear a year after that implemented in a way that solves the documented issue but not what they (I) wanted/needed.

That "beautiful" planned, tested, trained, maintained ERP-DB system may be 100% as far as the tests the group IT have in place, but in many cases the product is less useful than the hokey old macro enabled sheet that intern did last summer.

Yes, spreadsheets do have lots of errors, but if you compared the utility of a spreadsheet and all its issues with the utility of an enterprise solution and all its issues, well it is pretty obvs that if the spreadsheet was not about as bad or slightly less bad, it would not be used.

After a few years there is a string vest (I would have said 'web' or network' but...) of linked hokey solutions that sort of work enough of the time (there is a survivorship bias here - if it failed, the sheets would be gone or the company or both) to keep the business going.

The core issue is in the gap between "Proper solution" and what a business wants. Wants change. People do not know what they want. It is usually what they are offered but with a number of 'alterations'. Once they get those alterations, there are more alterations wanted.

This is dynamic and iterative.

If IT cannot provide the service, and there is a low up-front cost (a helpful young thing who learned excel in college) the business will do it themselves with the tools they have. Most businesses work off numbers. Excel happens to be the dominant tool.

Thus the article.

I put it to you that the issue is not primarily Excel.

It is the IT team's ability to provide the service quickly and at about the same (up front) price as the business.

There are a number of solutions

- take Excel away (you will taken away first)

- teach everyone to program (but there are programmers and ... programmers)

- do something else

Like google sheets where the macro language is a bit trickier and so discourage fledgling foot gunners

Or a *really good* db / reporting tool

a pressbutton
Coat

Excel is already the single most dangerous tool to give to civilians.

Hm.

I put it to all that in the UK, a car is rather more dangerous.

In the US, semiautomatic weapons

In France, the literary fiction.

Don't want to get run over by a Ford car? There's a Bluetooth app for that

a pressbutton

stop horsing around

Appeals court already under fire for upholding Texas no-content-moderation law

a pressbutton

Re: USA Today

Indeed

What happened to the British dream? I commend an article in the FT Friday 16 Sep 22 by John Burn-Murdoch.

"Britain is a poor society with some very rich people"

The article is summarised here : https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1570832839318605824.html

Basically the way things are going:

The average Slovenian household will be better off than the average British household by 2024.

By 2030 the average British person will benefit from working in Poland as they will be better off doing that. Except as we are not in the EU, they cant.

What is the point of a govt that (at best) ignores the living conditions of half its populace?

This is not a rant at the cons - they just happen to be in power at the moment - this applies to lab too.

There is evidence that the average growth rate of a country is higher when incomes are more evenly distributed. Our country is becoming less equal and the growth rate is dropping.

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