Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Brit boffins boast of beating barriers to building fusion power

Re: Looking like...

Then the government will cut its funding just before it's due to start operatio.

Sysadmin summoned to explain italics – to a user with at least two degrees

Re: Ever pick up a law book?

Italics and slanted characters aren't necessarily the same. I could believe that someone with a very specialised mindset (like a lawyer) might look at, say slanted non-serif characters and not recognise them as being the same in principle as italicised versions of the serif characters he normally sees. People can be very limited in areas outside their specialisation.

Re: No explanation

Ah, one of those drivers who slows down as they pass "average speed" cameras, and accelerates again afterwards?

Re: Stupidity plus arrogance

And the former is much easier to fix than the latter.

Time Magazine has a separate version of its website with ads only AI can see

Re: Brilliant.

selected lies made up by brand owners...

Or even better, selected lies made up by by competitors. Imagine the Macdonalds website presenting AI visitors with negative 'facts' about KFC, or Easyjet advertising carefully-selected statistics showing Ryanair in a bad light? The possibilities are endless.

IT boss left root session open for bring-your-kid-to-work day

child process

Look, Daddy! SHUTDOWN worked just like it did in the movie!"

Oh, fork!

Jailed Flock vandal wipes out three cameras, racks up thousands in damages

Re: Denial isn't refutation

> Once every few years somebody uses 'refute' when they should have used 'rebut'

Once every few days, ITYM.

Anthropic’s Claude escaped test sandbox to attack three organizations

Cerealisation is always tricky.

Techie lured out of retirement to support software only he remembered

If he only retired in 2021 but is now in a care home, it would suggest that he retired late or perhaps has some health issues. Either way he may have sufficiently few assets that the state pays some or all of his care, and suddenly adding a few £k to his savings could change that. Making a gift to the care home, say for new furniture or TVs, could solve that problem, while also benefiting his daily life. His business, really, not relevant to the story.

Headteacher had the most guessable username-password combo you could imagine

Was it 999 ?

Big vacuum is watching as robo-cleaners put humans behind the wheel

Security

Let me guess, there's no meaningful security on the video links, so any day now we'll be reading about some gang intercepting them to decide which houses merit a late night personal visit?

Signals are grim for Jodrell Bank Observatory after UK science funding decision

Re: This is personal

It would be better just to stop the silly scheme where everyone is paid the marginal price. That was introduced to encourage the use of greener energy like wind and solar, which had high upfront costs and so was more expensive than gas. It worked, we now have more wind than we can use, so it's time to simply pay each bidder the price they ask.

Re: This is personal

NO ONE is an ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT. They are asylum seekers.

Some are asylum seekers, fleeing persecution. Some are economic migrants, trying to get into a country where they think they'll be better off (they're generally wrong, since they have no understanding of the cost of living). Once their request to stay has been refused, if they don't leave they become illegal immigrants.

Re: Foot meet Gun

Capitalism will continue to strip the decency out of the country until we all stand up and say no more.

Like they did in Russia in 1917? That's worked out so well for them.

Airbus keeps an A350 flying for 24 hours

Re: Long flights

I could have phrased that better!

Re: Long flights

Several of the cruise lines will let you book partial routes, and in shoulder season it's also possible to find repositioning cruises where they move the ship from, say the Caribbean in hurricane season to the Mediterranean, and back later. You just need to watch for the cabotage rules, since ships registered in one country may have restrictions on moving passengers between 3rd-country ports.

Cunard operates the QM2 liner on one-way trips between New York and Southampton, which I'd like to do someday.

Re: Long flights

Just take a cruise. Longer, but even more comfortable.

Re: The A350-1000ULR carries hardware that simulates the presence of passengers

Ones that shout, cry and fart for 22 hours?

Re: Essential for ultra-long distance flights

They're mostly over the ocean, so just adopt the old BR approach, a flap that dumps the contents out the bottom. Won't be any worse in total than the product of flocks of migratory birds....

A requiem for Optane, Intel's KV cache killer that could have eased the RAM price crunch

Re: Software was a problem

The 1960s called, they want their core memory back.

Openreach nudges another 112 exchange areas toward full fiber

That isn't what Openreach does, this is-

My quote was taken directly from their website, at https://www.openreach.com/fibre-checker/ultrafast-full-fibre-broadband

Openreach don't help themselves when they advertise FTTP as ideal for "Larger families and shared homes, Streaming 4K TV, Connecting 100+ devices, Flawless online gaming, Crystal clear video calls, Reliable home working, Digital phone lines", absolutely none of which is useful or of interest for my 80-year-old Mum-in-law who just wants a reliable phone that she can hear (she struggles with a mobile, and only gets a signal upstairs anyway) and internet access fast enough for her email and Sainsbury's shopping.

Re: 1980's Infrastructure

Europe "full Fibred" decades ago

No, it didn't. Some smaller and densely-populated countries did, but by no means all, even in those countries where the telco is still state-owned.

Tech sector pours $1T into AI and sends customers the bill

Real Idiocy

And the UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) agency is planning to abandon real international science and close Jodrell Bank to save a mere £2.8 million so that it can splurge £1.6 billion on AI. Total madness.

Impostor Chinese models pretend they're Claude

So...

Hey GLM, what would Claude tell me about Tianmen Square?

SpaceX just about nails Starship test flight 13

13th flight

Have to be lucky sometimes.

Manager showed off his DOS prowess – with a command that wiped data

Re: Oops

Many years ago I was at a conference where someone was demonstrating some newfangled speech recognition board (this was way before a standard PC had the power to do it in software). After demonstrating commands like "TYPE file.txt" etc. there was a short pause, during which a loud voice from the back of the room called "FORMAT C colon". Fortunately the technology wasn't quite up to modern standards, the only response was much laughter (from the presenter too, after an initial look of panic!).

Google meets the neighbors and gets both barrels over its new UK datacenter

Re: Suggested Condition

The most obvious and immediate effect would be the collapse of all inward investment to the UK, and a massive spike in unemployment as the multinationals buggered off to Ireland, or maybe Scotland if they chose not to adopt the same policies.

Uncle Sam tells overseas cybercrooks their visas are canceled

It would be much, much higher if he was.

Pope's official prayer app commits cardinal sin, leaks 700K+ users' info

Register?

Why would you need to register to use such an app? An omnipotent God would know who the prayer is from...

Comment in code read 'Dear future me, sorry I wrote this'

Starting programs with IMPLICIT LOGICAL helped with that, until I learned about IMPLICIT NONE in VMS Fortran (later adopted into the standard).

Re: hidden characters

Complete with Copilot?

Yes, [1] and [i] are not the same, even if they look very, very similar in a serif font on an old low-res dot-matrix printer listing.

Some Mullvad VPN customers tunnel for exit after co-founder donates millions to populist party

Re: whether those superior rights should derive from money or from force

there will occasionally be a person who argues that power should be based on intelligence in some way.

Well, there does seem to be a negative correlation between intelligence and desire for power, but I can't see a practical way to use that.

Re: Sad but not surprising

I'm not sure I'd call it a "far right" party, just because it criticises immigration. Policies like "make preschool, public transport, and dental care free of charge, reduce politicians' pay, and calls for a 30-hour working week" are more associated with the far left, like France's LFI.

I think "populist" is a better description, along with "unrealistic" and "naïve".

Mozilla speeds Firefox release schedule to biweekly

Re: Waterfox

Nothing, except that there was a package which the maintainer has dropped. It's now a case of cleanup and reinstall, which makes Waterfox a less appealing option for people who want a simpler Windows-style experience.

Waterfox

the AI-free Waterfox fork,

Pity there's no Debian package for it any more, its tarball or snap :-(

Re: Even 4 weeks was stupid

Yes, a 2-week release cycle really just means that the users do the testing.

Tech support chap told angry customer to think inside the box – and solved the problem

Re: "when many phones still had removable batteries"

This, of course, is why all those parents who rant about their children being irradiated by mobile phone masts on the roof of the schools are idiots. The one place there's almost no signal is directly underneath the mast.

Amsterdam activists throw acid at Microsoft datacenter project

Pointless

By the time the builders have hosed down the cement with lots of water, all these clowns will have achieved is the waste of yet more scarce resources.

Law firm insisted on one password to rule them all

Re: "In the end, the boss will have the final word"

Not necessarily enough. If what you're asked to do contravenes some legislation, Sarbanes–Oxley for example, no amount of ass-covering will help.

Prominent Haskell defector pilloried by anti-AI purists

Re: Speed obsession

This is a much faster way of working than typing a mass of code into an editor for a few hours, hitting compile, and then wading your way through masses of compiler errors, followed by wading your way through masses of seg faults and the like

Of course, if you wrote a proper spec, designed the program, wrote the test spec, and reviewed it before diving into that text editor, there's a high probability that it would compile and run correctly first time. Proper design process saves a lot of time overall. Thank goodness engineers who build bridges and aeroplanes don't do it like software developers!

The Star Wars cantina scene shows we need a new hope for the agentic web

Human ≠ commercial

The article seems to be assuming that the human-driven web is a commercial web, and that only commercial uses need be considered.

I disagree. IMHO the best bits of the human-driven web are the many sites created merely to entertain or help other people, with no intention of making a commercial profit. Sites with useful information about travel and hobbies, repair sites, sites for discussion of art and literature, with no advertising. There is no reason that the creators of such sites should permit AI bots to scrape their content and repurpose it for commercial ends, unless they want to. I'm seeing an increasing number of books where the copyright page contains an explicit prohibition on the content being used to train AI, website authors should be entitled to put a similar statement on their pages, and have it respected under penalty of criminal prosecution and compensation.

Re: No

The bots just keep ingesting the bot generated sh1t on the web, then produce something even more inferior and post that, for the next bot to find.

Entropy always wins...

If you want Claude to speak nicely to you, try Hindi or Arabic

Since all AI does in response to a query is to parrot the information it has already absorbed, the fact that English responses may be less deferential than, say, Hindi ones surely just reflects the fact that most English-language text on the web comes from Americans, people not noted for their tactful and deferential speech styles?

Photovoltaics are still running after a year under Swiss trains

Re: Have to wait in UK...

No, AFAIK it's banned since 2020 or so, except for heritage lines. They might still do it but in my experience they just keep the in-carriage toilets locked. No-one wants to do track maintenance if those trains are allowed.

User crippled a network while trying to learn Nmap

Back around 1991 I remember a friend who discovered nmap and similarly left it running over the weekend to scan the company network. In those days it was a reasonable-sized company with 10k+ employees across international offices.

He had not realised that the way the network was configured allowed his exploration to leave the internal network and reach the wider internet (simpler times).

He came back on Monday morning to find a much larger database than he had expected, and a shocking number of 'interesting' systems discovered. He (just) resisted the temptation to send spoof jobs to the many printers discovered as well. As far as we know, IT never noticed.

BOFH: Cross-department AI pitches are easier to swallow with a pint in hand

Re: No. AI could encourage you in everything you do – just small comments to lift your self-esteem

The Creeper virus dates from 1971, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computer_viruses_and_worms

Re: building PA system.

Are we talking Public Address or Personal Assistant here?

EU puts 'addictive' design of Facebook, Instagram under the DSA microscope

Re: ... Meta underestimated the effect those features can have on users...

Preying on the strong tends to have adverse effects...