Posts by Gob Smacked

Hubble science instruments still out after going down 3 times in a week

Re: No budget, however...

Such a reason never withheld SpaceX for 'just try and do it' lol. But I guess putting a newer telescope in place would be better..

SpaceX's Starship on the roster for Texas takeoff

Re: Aims for the flight ...

could be trouserlegs...

Thumbs up

for the neat references.. lol

YouTube cares less for your privacy than its revenues

Re: Chrome

I never switched. Firefox + addons all the way. Can't say I recognize the "practically unusable" thing. It has been marginally slower for a little while, but that's always the same arms race - it'll be number 1 next for a while, etc. Ad infinitum. Just give it a try. Recent Chromium based browsers even returned to the original way downloads are shown, so it's a warm, fuzzy feeling of recognition on Firefox...

Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detection scripts under EU law

"Don't be evil"

I'm a bit older. Google used to be a couple of good people.. seems wielding power definitely corrupts.

On the ad topic and back to first principles: if I need to buy something, I'll investigate and choose.

Any ad delivered is considered a bad claim on my time of life. That's the most precious resource I have. They should pay me instead when they deliver me ads.

Just saying.

Don't look at commercial TV anymore either, wasting at least 30% of my time. I'll download what I like. Most commercial TV is very low quality signal anyways, don't miss much.

Btw, just need a good plugin with the same functionality. Should not be too much of a stretch.

FreeTube on the PC, with the TakeOut subscription list. Just the vids, no ads. Should have done that way earlier, but hey, uBlock Origin worked perfectly...

China's top crypto-mining hardware-maker reportedly furloughs staff

Thanks, an informed reply.

Sorry for the ranty post, I got a bit discouraged about the knowledge level here in the past on the subject. As a long time IT guy (I'm a real boomer), I always liked the tongue-in-cheek ways of The Reg, while colleague posters (mostly... lol) showed they too knew their business. Bitcoin is one subject that never passed the grades here, it's too complex to brush off with some self-education, it really takes effort to get a bit of overview.

Crypto refers to "the other 20..40 thousand" coins that for 99+% are just setups to make money. You cannot stop people to try and make money of course. As with the early Internet, companies each tried to copy and start their own version of it. In the end, the invention that gets the network effect will survive. In the case of internet money, that's looking to become bitcoin. For me, it's about saving up for my pension in a type of money that does not inflate. For an Argentinian, it's about being able to pay - their own Peso devaluates too quickly and their grocery stall accepts bitcoin gladly. In Africa, small villages can setup a small energy grid no one is willing to pay for using the nearby waterfall and include a bitcoin miner that then pays for it using the cheap energy - effectively setting up green energy hotspots and introducing local economies.

There are so many places worldwide now, where people need a money system where they cannot have bank accounts, but stilll use a telephone (SMS is sufficient already). That's the bottom up way bitcoin introduces itself. No leaders, no central authority, just people using it for their own purposes. As any normal money should function.

And it's totally open: the "crypto" part that everyone refers too is just a normal way to ensure transactions are all correct and dependable. Just like your own bank transfers are (and this post for that matter): fully crypted to ensure correct and untampered delivery.

Nice story, but in the mean time, bitcoin hash rate continues to rise. Above 400 exahash, far above the 90 exahash dip in 2021, when China abolished mining.. (they're back with about 20% of that 400+ total now).

Bitmain lost marketshare, that's all

Oh yes, go ahead. Downvote a factual post. The Reg and most of my fellow [m/v] readers still do not really understand bitcoin is not crypto and while all the scams are failing, something is actually growing too - bottom-up, as designed.

Signal says it'll shut down in UK if Online Safety Bill approved

Brexit V2

Time to exit the rest of the world...

99 year old man says cryptocurrency is for idiots

Re: Logic?

Only time will tell, honestly. Bitcoin adoption is continually growing though, going for its 14th year, very hush hush in the shadows of the crypto circus, eaten by the media like cupcakes :)

OpenAI's ChatGPT is a morally corrupting influence

Re: So what...?

Nicely put. I'm more of an optimist. Looking through all the shit we people get ourselves into, in the long run we're progressing as a race. We may shit ourselves and fall back into stone age times, but I'd rather focus on the positives.

Time and time again, we've historically come out of the next bigger pile of shit better than before. Feels a bit like growing up. I like the positive spin better.

But you're right, "forgotten stuff" also tends to get revived. For the better most of the time I hope (lots of bad examples too of course, but I'd rather ignore these) and focus on things that make me feel well and work on something good. It gives me energy...

So what...?

You can't keep the future from happening. Humanity thinks of new things and starts using stuff that works. Stuff that fails gets forgotten.

Progress,

Deal with it.

(PS I'm a boomer, officially. Seen lots of things coming and going with all kind of comments on it. In the end it's always about positives outweighing negatives for something to catch on. My experience trained AI says this one is here to stay... Time will tell)

Haiku beta 4: BeOS rebuild / almost ready for release / A thing of beauty

Re: Great for revitalising old netbooks!

Good tip... will try that one too, must have some tiny Asus eee buried somewhere, finally a reason to start digging

Riding in Sidecar: How to get a Psion online in 2023

Re: Oh memories

I once needed my Psion IR to Nokia GSM connection during the holidays in the woods in Sweden to work with a terminal link, then VPN, on a UNIX system of a client to manage some Samba connection in their office in the Netherlands. Cost a pretty sum working over that low baud rate telephone connection, but it did the job. The happy customer payed gladly... :)

Yeah, memories...

Crypto craziness craps out – and about time too

Re: Bitcoin is DEAD!

LOL, TL;DR... and posted same idea :)

Bitcoin obituary

Think this article may count as another of the earlier 467 (and counting) Bitcoin obituaries...

ref: https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/

Re: False arguments

Won't help discussing this here - The Reg and most of it's readers are full anti. Bitcoin uses the grassroots approach, like the Internet in the early nineties. I'm still a "normal" poor regular citizen even after being with bitcoin for about 11 years now (did not believe it would really catch up to its promise...) and 1 thing I learned: you cannot start explaining, it has to be asked to let others see.

LastPass admits attackers have a copy of customers’ password vaults

Not your vault,

not your passwords...

Anti-money laundering bill targeting cryptocurrency introduced in US Senate

Who are thelaunderers...?

Banks, governments and the rich... And they get slapped with a smallish fine *if* it becomes public.

So we want to make open source a crime too now?

Square Kilometre Array Observatory construction commences

Re: You can run but you can't hide

Yeah, I give up. Those are indeed very convincing arguments...

Re: You can run but you can't hide

All true, I was a bit generic. There are lots more interference issues, but the design of the facilities over great distances and hundreds resp. 10s of thousands of independent sensors mean that most will be integrated back to (close to) zero, leaving the real signal available for science.

The same technological advancements that enable rolling out large setups in space, work here on earth to deal with that. I don't say it's not an added problem to deal with, but science dealing with new problems is just what delivers us more progress. It's not a zero sum deal. Science is great...

Re: You can run but you can't hide

> So, once again, some selfish, self-opinionated, rich guy thinks only of himself

> and doesn't do his homework to understand the impact his business(es) will have

> on specific communities, in this case the scientific "world".

True, but you will probably at one time be a happy, maybe unknowing, user of the selfishly created Starlink...

It always cuts more ways

Re: You can run but you can't hide

I certainly does not help to have the close heavens full of emitters, but the EM spectrum can be easily filtered to get rid of most of the littered bands. Would be nice to not have these gaps in the spectrum, but the full spectrum is luckily orders of magnitude wider than our human based sh*t beaming down

Re: What, no technical data?

Have a look at the LOFAR project, one of the precursors of this

Stack Overflow bans ChatGPT as 'substantially harmful' for coding issues

Re: ChatGPT appears to getting glowing reviews

I can pretty much confirm this. Spell out a specific task and it delivers a nice sample to get acquainted.

Just started to dig into Rust programming and even while that is just another language for me (started with 6502 assembly back in the days...), even with extensive C experience, it's a bit of a brain-mode switcheroo to get dialed in. The sample code from the chat helped a lot. Though I'd never trust it to do the actual work for me, I see it as a good learning tool added to the box.

Block Fi seeks bankruptcy protection as 'shocking' FTX contagion spreads

Next Ponzi going down

..and counting. Still some left to tick off.

Musk: Twitter will have 1 billion monthly users inside 18 months

Track record..

as an entrepreneur not afraid to reconfigure and come out on top.

Musk could be the last one laughing, or maybe not. I don't think the 44 B$ is something for him to lose sleep over if it fails. More something as a life lesson... - next!

Two arrested in massive $575m cryptocurrency 'Ponzi scheme'

Don't trust, verify

How difficult can it be...

Throw away your money at Johnny Random Storyteller Inc.

Yeah

Nitwits.

FTX collapse prompts other cryptocurrency firms to suspend withdrawals

Re: My definition of bitcoin

You basically described regular money here... lol

The shakeout begins...

Finally.

FTX disarray declared 'unprecedented' by exec who cleaned up after Enron

No one that sees there is *no* bitcoin mentioned here

This is all about "crypto" - the casino clown world that copied the code of a good thing and ran with it.

The good thing is still 99.99% up for 13 years now and counting, silently growing and hardening in the background.

Swiss bankers warn: Three quarters of retail Bitcoin investors are in the red

Re: Not there to get rich quick..

Just a small follow up: as early bitcoiners have already claimed most, it's not them that are "investing". It's the smart money right now, scrambling to get a position in what's left on the table and still to be mined the upcoming 100 years.

Don't even know why I'm explaining; whispering when the world is burning won't help much. Maybe someone without banking access but with a smartphone picks it up and help themselves to a commercial foothold...

Re: Not there to get rich quick..

> They're not 'in the plus' until they come to sell.

Correct. And that's just it. They don't even want to. It's a mindset that you have not reached and maybe never arrive at, considering the amount of misinformation that's going around.Understandable also, with all these crypto gamblers failing using their favorite cloned currency of the day.

In the mean time, banks, large companies and big established investors and even governments are trying to get more and more bitcoin on their balance, silently as they don't want to push up the price. You can follow the money literally on the blockchain and tie it to their official reports.

Developing countries have never been able to tag along financially and most of their currencies get debased quickly. It's not their governments that step into bitcoin, but their population does. It's a groundswell you will not find in the western financial press or hear about from trendy youtubers.

I don't mind the downvotes either. It's ignorance playing out. Let's see where we are in 10 years' time.

Not there to get rich quick..

Bitcoiners are not investors; they don't mind the volatility. Just sayin'

Price is only relevant if you sell back into your homeland's currency. Or use it to pay for goods or services.

But as bitcoiners are not investors, they don't like getting rid of their "better" money and just sit on their stashes.

As 90% is in circulation and about half of that hasn't moved for years: most wallets are in the plus in relation to the current price. Why should they care?

Bitcoin is not a way to get rich quick. You need the casino cryptos for that (and accept your losses that come with that circus)

Musk sells $3.95 billion in Tesla shares, paid eleven times more for Twitter

Re: I don't see the problem...

Yeah. It's all happening in the same time frame. It's probably correlated, but there are lots of reasons why he wants or needs to get some liquidity. Could be money for another upstart venture, reserve to pay future fines.., who knows. A lot happening there

Bitcoin worse for the climate than beef, say economists

Re: Lying with numbers

"Not sure why you're downvoted"

I do... lol. The Reg is self-confessed anti crypto platform. I like their stance against all things somewhat incorrect in the tech sphere, but I guess they need to educate themselves a bit regarding bitcoin. Everyone needs their good time to find out that bitcoin is not "crypto", but something entirely different. Let's give them a few years to find out. Just like most everyone else I guess...

Re: Lying with numbers

Utter waste of energy: Las Vegas comes to mind. Computer gaming. Flying for holidays. It's just what one defines as useless. Most here would rather win in Vegas than put their good money into crypto I guess.. - just pick your poison, I don't mind either way. It's just the hostility that surprises me.

Re: So they have a beef with cryptomining?

Another one for you: https://beefinitiative.com/

Re: Lying with numbers

"Well, I console myself with the fact that rising energy prices have put a stake through that massively ecologically irresponsible idea too."

Fact check - the actual mining hash rate is at an all time high and climbing... seems that bitcoin mining is actually using alternative and even free energy sources ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Merge shifts Ethereum to full proof-of-stake, price slumps

The code will take care of dismissing (part of) the ETH of the staked value. The "owner" will just be unable to unstake the previous total value, as if it does not exist anymore.

As if someone at your bank found a way to edit your account to make it show you a few digits less then before, without moving that to another account. It's "burned", stolen without a third party taking it you might say.

Where did the 99% energy expense go...? (spoiler: still there)

As if the miners want to just throw away all their expensive GPUs....

So what happens:

1) they sell the stuff and many happy gamers or hobby miners now take that load for fun times

2) they start working on other coins - yes, it pays less, but they need to foot the bills

3) when 2), after a good while, they sell the hardware: see 1) or bin them to e-waste (another nice environment issue)

You need to observe the entire system, zooming in on 1 particular part does not tell the story.

Re: and Proof of Randomness?

(from a non ETH person): you could just check the code... it's open source and pretty solid

Intel's stock Raptor Lake chip will do 6GHz and overclock another 25%, if it keeps cool

Re: Using the right tools

I'm no apple fanboy at all - more a hater...

But as a techie, I can only admit they have made big strides to performance on ARM. And using that experience, it would be not much of a problem to scale down to CPU only designs and start expanding in the ARM performance market.

I'd really hate to see that, but it could very well be coming...

This tiny Intel Xeon-toting PC board can take your Raspberry Pi any day

So, I've got lots of money to burn...

"...and fancy specifications to go with that"

Guess this person is not the typical Pi user. Just saying...

LOL, don't need to thumb rate this remark - just funny on its own...

GitHub courts controversy by suspending Tornado Cash developers and reneging on cookie commitments

Re: Remember?

Decentralizing low bandwidth stuff hosted on Internet is most always a good idea and Open Source just plainly needs that. Sounds nice this yes... :)

Remember?

No one seems to remember it was a bad thing MS taking over Github anymore. Think again then... lol

It will harm incidental accounts first, then progress into full restrictive use over time.

It's just nice to know there are a lot of alternatives to host open source projects: these will just starting to move over from now on...

Re: DNT

A auto delete cookies plugins solves that - it's just that people are lazy about their privacy

US car industry leads the world in production cuts over chip shortages

Re: Here's an idea -

How about just pressing 1 button instead without thinking... take's just miiliseconds and you keep the attention where it needs to be

Really, voice controls in a car are only taking away road attendance - in all cases as far as I can see (does it work this time...?). Worst decision ever...