Posts by Androgynous Cupboard

MIT apologizes, permanently pulls offline huge dataset that taught AI systems to use racist, misogynistic slurs

Re: Just do a text search

Primates, yes. But, and I speak only for myself here, I don't have a tail.

Rental electric scooters to clutter UK street scenes after Department of Transport gives year-long trial the thumbs-up

Re: No they're not an effective means to reduce car traffic

Last time I was in Lisbon, it was actually cheaper to take a taxi than rent one of these.

One does not simply repurpose an entire internet constellation for sat-nav, but UK might have a go anyway

Re: Re assume...

Lovely juxtaposition there; you start by slating socialism, then immediately suggest our government may have spaffed £100m on satellites to use for rural broadband? Not even Jezza would have come up with that one.

Where have I seen that figure before?

"I wanna know why 27 MPs died on their arse for what looks to be $91 million worth of satellites that weren't there.". Which implies Dominic Cummings is Kaiser Soze.

Apple gives Boot Camp the boot, banishes native Windows support from Arm-compatible Macs

Re: No Future

And that is why integrating a screen with the computer is daft. Because you can't upgrade one without the other (yes yes, laptops being a special case)

Maybe there is hope for 2020: AI that 'predicts criminality' from faces with '80% accuracy, no bias' gets in the sea

Re: its easy

It's harder than it looks, apparenty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waWugm79mQo.

Re: Of course

How dare you accuse the police of using pseudo-science? Clearly we have to use our lie-detector to find out who posted this.

Faxing hell: The cops say they would very much like us to stop calling them all the time

Re: I called the cops

I had my phone linked to my motorcycle helmet headset. What I didn't know about was that the iPhone has - on, by default - a feature where you press the button on the side 5 times and it dials emergency services.

Naturally it did just this halfway down the A3, with the phone safely tucked in my bag out of reach. Explaining to the operator that I had no idea why my phone had called them was awkward, but not as awkward as saying "no, YOU hang up" when he asked me to end the call - I hadn't yet worked out the buttons on the unit. The best bit was I got to do it again 10 minutes later.

CERN puts two new atom-smashers on its shopping list. One to make Higgs Bosons, then a next-gen model six times more energetic than the LHC

Ha, very good StargateSg7 - nice use of caps in particular. Pseudo-science bit subtle though...

(... reads comment history of StargateSg7... )

I am no longer confident that was a joke.

Re: Eventually

My hoover's just packed up. Maybe if we can get the new collider funded they'll shut down the old one and I can put a bid in for their vacuum generator. Well, so long as I can get it up the stairs

The incumbent President of the United States of America ran now-banned Facebook ads loaded with Nazi references

Re: I didn't know of the triangle badges in the prison camps

Or, for that matter, that the USA is united.

Re: Spoken like a true FOX news viewer

Using a symbol used by the Nazis to indicate left-wing or anti-nazi sympathies, to attack a group that has left-wing and anti-nazi sympathies? While it's possible it's because someone just liked triangles, I think it's likely to be either deliberate, or ignorant and stupid. Both should concern you.

(edit: Rush Limbaugh? Hannity? Dearest irony, I see bob is unaware of your presence as always)

ZFS co-creator boots 'slave' out of OpenZFS codebase, says 'casual use' of term is 'unnecessary reference to a painful experience'

Wut? Google "modern slavery act". Or just click. And don't be so naive.

Frenchman scores €50k compensation for suffering 'bore-out' at work after bosses gave him 'menial' tasks

Re: Horrible flashbacks

Not that it will probably be a popular opinion around here, but while it was bad for you sitting around doing nothing, it was probably worse for your boss - as an ex-boss and old-friend observed, hosing away million quid a month on salaries with no income to back it is not sustainable for long. A few friends have set up service companies only to fold them a few years later - they expanded in the good years, then suffered some bad ones.

Huawei launches UK charm offensive: We've provided 2G, 3G and 4G for 20 years, and you're worried about 5G?

Re: Swings and roundabouts

> They only turn the donors into useful meat when they need the meat, until then they're alive. You really don't have a problem with it?

I most certainly do have a problem with capital punishment / state-sanctioned murder, but that applies to many countries - China, the US, Saudi Arabia. What they do with the corpse afterwards doesn't seem to be the important part.

> I'd really love to know how you feel about this in 20 or 30 years time. Either you're naive to the risks or you're already self censoring

America is evidentially an imperialist power; China, less so. Don't get me wrong, it's a poor choice either way, but China are already at arms length - it's easier to keep them out. America has wormed it's way into our culture, or legal system and more. The closer the ties, the more they have to gain by exploiting them.

Finally, you've again tried to bring up a moral argument. You can if you like, it's a reasonable one, but to repeat - it's not the one influencing this decision. I can promise you that Iain Duncan-Smith doesn't give a flying fuck about the Uighurs.

Re: Swings and roundabouts

Funnily enough, of all the things the Chinese government do wrong I think I have the least problem with that. Once you're dead you're just meat, you may as well be useful meat.

But it's also a distraction. No one in government at any point has said this was to do with human rights or anything other than concerns over the state security apparatus. And on that argument, I find China to be considerably less of a threat than the US.

Enough of these rational arguments!

They won't work you know. This is a purely emotional response from a bunch of ra-ra-brexit backbenchers who will do whatever it takes to try and find a trade deal that's not with Europe. And "whatever it takes" currently involves dancing to the strings of the lunatics running the US (into the toilet).

Technical, financial or any other sort of rational arguments are irrelevant. The only way you'll get Huawei kit into the UK is by offering us very, very cheap chicken to go with it.

Don't panic: An asteroid larger than the Empire State Building is flying past Earth this weekend but we're just fine

Re: bigger than the empire state building...

Quite a large number of Richard Osmans? That seems to be the unit everyone's settled on

'Beyond stupid': Linus Torvalds trashes 5.8 Linux kernel patch over opt-in Intel CPU bug mitigation

Re: git broke English

No no no, unpull clearly means "push". "git push" coming up Linus, thanks for the endorsement!

Twitter ticks off Trump with new 'Get the facts' alert on pair of fact-challenged tweets

Re: Ooh, fun!

It is, but it doesn't mean what the horse is saying is true. [jeeves, insert obvious joke about neighsaying here before you post]

NASA renames dark-energy telescope after its first Chief of Astronomy and Mother of Hubble: Nancy Grace Roman

Re: Politically Astute Decision

Sweet Jesus, what a thing it would be seeing the "USS Trump" take to the seas. I imagine it leaving the dock and plowing straight into a wall, accidentally sinking the wrong boat after firing its guns backwards.

Dutch spies helped Britain's GCHQ break Argentine crypto during Falklands War

Re: Huawei

As I recall, M&S were on the verge of failing themselves at the time. It's one of the very few corporate turnarounds of that type that actually worked.

Re: Huawei

Sorry, I'm not clear: are you making an argument against Huawei, or for Huawei and against Cisco? When you're talking compromised infrastructure kit I think you need to be a bit more specific.

Huge if true... Trump explodes as he learns open source could erode China tech ban

He's got my vote

Amanfrommars for president! U S A! U S A!

Node.js creator delivers Deno 1.0, a new runtime that fixes 'design mistakes in Node'

Er, not sure where that came from. ECMAscript has Unicode baked into it's strings, and as I recall it's number types are 64-bit.

Microsoft doc formats are the bane of office suites on Linux, SoftMaker's Office 2021 beta may have a solution

Zotero

I've not used it in anger, but did have a play with their free reference manager at https://zbib.org - it's quit neat, particularly the client-side storage of your references.

Wanna be a developer? Your coworkers want to learn Go and like to watch, er, Friends and Big Bang Theory

Hmm

Er... if you know Java AND Java 8, that's two languages? And JavaScript is subtitled (Node.js)? I find myself wondering just who are HackerEarth, and do they actually know anything about programming?

Forever mothballed: In memoriam Apple Butterfly Keyboard (2015-2020)

2015 13" Macbook here. Souped to 1TB of flash and with HDMI, USB-A, it's been my 60hr/week workhorse for 5 years and is still going strong. I can't see myself upgrading for some time to be honest, even now they've fixed the keyboards.

Data centre reveals it modeled interiors on The Hunt for Red October sets

Bah

I like to think when it goes to shit at some point in the future it will look more like Das Boot!

UK IT contractors slipping back into old ways of working now IR35 tax reforms delayed

I looked into getting a business loan a while back. The bank had a non-negotiable requirement that a lawyer sit me down and go through the contract with both me and my wife, who is also a director.

The lawyer (who happened to be a mate of mine) explained this was due to a case where the husbands company (the wife was also a director) took a loan out, then later divorced. The bank chased both for repayment. She successfully argued that although she was a company director, she was not aware of her husbands loan application and had no liability for it.

So there are very real legal responsibilities for SWMBO.

Forget tabs – the new war is commas versus spaces: Web heads urged by browser devs to embrace modern CSS

RTFM. A phrase so well known in IT, you can probably manage that one without looking it up.

No matter how good the design, there will always be the kind of user that would rather spend 20 minutes writing an email (or 5 writing a comment) to complain, instead of 2 minutes to read the documentation. Some people literally can't help themselves.

Re: Sounds unnecessary to me

The spec DOES accept both.

You can use just commas, or commas surrounded by spaces. And now, if you want, you can also just use spaces.

Re: Broken Web

ACID3 was well intentioned, but doesn't reflect the standards. Have a google.

It's literally in the spec. If you can't be arsed to read it, you - wait, you don't use vi OR emacs? Ah. I think I see the problem.

Iran military manages to keep a straight face while waggling miracle widget that 'can detect coronavirus from 100m away'

Re: infrared thermometer without laser...

Replacing the laser in a laser range finder with a pointing stick leaves them surprisingly accurate, when measuring items that are the same length as the stick.

This hurts a ton-80: British darts champ knocked out of home tourney by lousy internet connection

Re: Not just 'rural' connections

Can't you switch to FTTC? We had exactly the same problem - and when I say exactly, I'm 2 miles outside the M25 and had roughly the same speed - we're 4.3km to the exchange, but with a cabinet a few hundred meters away.

Switched to FTTC and literally as I type, the kids are doing stupid dances to their friends on Zoom.

French pensioner ejected from fighter jet after accidentally grabbing bang seat* handle

Losing kneecaps in the airforce, losing kneecaps in northern ireland... sounds like in the 80s if you wanted to join the services and valued your knees, you'd pick the Navy.

COVID-19 is pretty nasty but maybe this is taking social distancing too far? Universe may not be expanding equally in all directions

Re: Here's a bug report for cosmology

Better than "it's an open universe, you can always fork it and fix it yourself"

As an aside, I can't get past the notion that trying to divine the shape of the universe from earth is like trying to work out the shape of Albert Hall by peering through the keyhole.

WeWork sues SoftBank over 'AWOL' $3bn shares purchase – which included millions lined up for ousted CEO Neumann

Interesting article a few months back on what Softbank may have been hoping to get out of this:

https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/then-wecame-to-the-end/

Already in final beta? That's Madagascar: Ubuntu 20.04 'Focal Fossa' gets updated desktop, ZFS support

Interesting. I would have gone for "Sin jin Ming-gis Beech-ham of Bur-tham Wooster-sher", which I suppose only helps the point I was making. I used to live near a Beauchamp road in Clapham, was told under no uncertain terms it was "Beech-ham" and staying that way.

Likewise the "th" sound in Burpham derives from a norse thorn - þ, which became a "p" in our spelling.

(I wonder how much of our differences are regional? I'm mongrel London area)

You win on Happisburgh, haven't seen that one. It's on my list.

Well done you. I'm reliably informed that spelling "Fossa" was chosen by St John Menzies-Beauchamp, late of Burpham, Worcestershire, who was well known for choosing the spell a word the way it was pronounced.

NASA's classic worm logo returns for first all-American trip to ISS in years: Are you a meatball or a squiggly fan?

Re: I'm a fan of meatball and spaghetti

Oh, to slip the surly bonds of earth and lick the face of god.

Internet Archive justifies its vast 'copyright infringing' National Emergency Library of 1.4 million books by pointing out that libraries are closed

Re: the poor authors! they'll starve!

For all the flaws of the copyright system, the IA's action is cynical bullshit. Particularly at a time when many people are short of money they are literally undercutting the income stream for a lot of living authors - the vast, vast majority of the books in their archive are published in the last 30 years.

Half the commenters on this thread seem to think that because a few - and I mean so few you can name them - companies that own rights have abused the copyright system, that somehow the whole thing should be torn down and everything be free-as-in-fuck-you.

Creative works are subject to copyright so the author can make money from it. This is fair because writing a book(*) takes time and effort. I have friends and family who try to earn a living as authors, pro-photographers, and other creative types. None of them are bathing in champagne after cashing their royalty cheques.

(*) I am not talking about the vast sea of cut-n-paste shite that pervades amazon masquerading as content.

Here's what Europeans are buying amid the COVID-19 lockdown – aside from heaps of pasta and toilet paper

Re: Thermometers too

I tried this, and after I drove the steel spike several inches into my abdomen it turned out I didn't have a fever at all. Which was nice.

Astroboffin gets magnets stuck up his schnozz trying and failing to invent anti-face-touching coronavirus gizmo

Re: Fixble in code

To be fair, bigger magnets seem to be the solution for lots of problems in high energy physics.

World's smallest violin to be played for opportunistic sellers banned from eBay and Amazon for price gouging

Re: Price Gouging: the free market libertarian perspective

The unholy hand of Ayn Rand from beyond the grave.

On an opposing and loosely related note, I find it telling that no matter how free-market-small-state your government claims to be, when faced with a crisis the response is universally - for lack of a better word - socialist. I look forward to reading the political theorising on this once it all dies down.

UK enters almost-lockdown: Brits urged to keep calm and carry on – as long as it doesn't involve leaving the house

Re: "One form of exercise a day"

> damning with faint praise!

I will never see a more perfect application of this response.

Tech won't save you from lockdown disaster: How to manage family and free time while working from home

Our local garden center today was also stripped bare - and by bare, I mean no seed left except a few weird ones or flowers,, no seedlings except a vast number of chillis (deemed too unnourishing I suppose), small herbs, and a some unloved pak choi which I snapped up, along with the last of the tumbling tomatoes - anything substantial had already gone. The chap I spoke to said they did well over £30,000 business on Saturday. Signs were everywhere saying "more vegetables are delivered between 2 and 3 each day" - presumably to answer the question "yes yes, but what TIME are they turning up?"

6 million old people expecting to stay at home for 6 months, it was kind of inevitable.

Re: You are *working* from home

Fines? 80 years ago, bulk buying loo roll and flogging on ebay for twice the price would have been called war profiteering. People got shot for it.

Mind, there are enough europeans I know querying our UK policies on the virus, if we start executing anyone with more than 500 rolls of loo paper it will just lead to more questions so maybe you're right. Fines will probably do it.