Posts by I am David Jones

Lawmakers urge FTC to probe Trump Mobile over 'deceptive' marketing

Re: Grifters gonna grift

People aren’t buying these things. They are showing their fielty. And getting some freebie tat as a “thank you”

Moon hotel startup hopes you get lunar lunacy, drop $1M deposit for 2032 stay

Is a commercial enterprise building a moon hotel a ‘’national space activity”? I don’t think so. National space activities are things done by or at the behest of a nation.

To me it seems pretty churlish to shoot down ideas about establishing a presence on the moon, which by definition they must be somewhat far fetched. And please, “doesn’t have ownership rights”? Maybe you want to expand on that bald assertion, starting with explaining who has, and who hasn’t, “ownership rights” on the moon. And the basis for that claim.

Google rekindles relationship with jilted JPEG XL image format

Re: Good thing! You won't have to worry about any new Dilbert comics!

Wtf i came here and learnt he died yesterday. RIP, dear fellow

Trump says Americans shouldn't 'pick up the tab' for AI datacenter grid upgrades

Re: Meanwhile here in poor Blighty

How about getting our government to manage the basics, like oh how about water supply, before they worry about other stuff

Birmingham pauses Oracle relaunch to get staff on board

I don’t know, it seems you need a fucking PhD in “how not to be screwed by IT vendor” and those are hard to come by.

IT vendors who want a mutually beneficial business relationship rather than screwing clients with small print…. where are they?

A comedy of errors. At least there is comfort in knowing that others will learn from these mistakes /s

Techie banned from client site for outage he didn’t cause

Re: Don't blame me - they virtually banned me

Next time try rephrasing: “Don’t do xyz UNLESS blah blah blah”

Re: Sop?

With hindsight, maybe matchsticks were not the best choice of legs….

Apple hopes to save Siri from laughingstock status with infusion of Google Gemini

Heads up: not a good day to be advocating for Grok

Re: weather alerts, call screening, autocorrect, voice assistants, et. al

And now you’re the bad guy for not recognising that they have become AI features. A pint for your woes

Re: Clippy wins

Actually I’ve figured it out. It’s lowering the brightness to compensate for the AI battery drain

Re: Clippy wins

Not to mention auto brightness. That’s like three lines of code for a swanky version, wtf is AI doing?

Brussels plots open source push to pry Europe off Big Tech

1. It is an established messenger service.

2. It’s European

3. It has a non-trivial user base (10 million).

What more should we be looking for, if the aim is help the move away from US dependency?

Whether or not if technically falls in the scope of any particular project, that’s just details.

Except right now it seems they’re not funding/promoting any European projects.

Back right at you: why is supporting Threema a bad idea? Are there better candidates?

NASA decides to bring Crew-11 home early after astronaut health scare

Re: Dental?

I’m no expert but I think “alien impregnation” is where we should be looking. Good luck to him.

Is this going too far in trying to protect privacy?

Where’s Bob? Oh he’s sick.

Technically this is private medical info but pragmatically, in my experience it has always been totally acceptable to explain a worker’s absence as sick leave. So why is it different for astronauts?

Help desk read irrelevant script, so techies found and fixed their own problem

Dogbert does tech support best:

“Hello, I …”

“Shut up and reboot”

“Hey, it work …”

“Shut up and hang up”

Dogbert checks watch, “My average call time is improving”

Why colos are city slickers and hyperscalers are country bumpkins

Is this a fair analogy? High-street stores tend to be found in towns and out-of-town malls tend to be found out of town.

UK regulators swarm X after Grok generated nudes from photos

Re: I don't approve of xAI allowing this to happen

The question is whether it *depicts* a minor. And it’s not hard to ask a member of public / a jury / an expert / a judge “how old do you think that character is”.

Re: I don't approve of xAI allowing this to happen

Too simplistic. I think the scientific jury is out on whether fake CSAM increases or decreases the risk to real children.

The two extremes of thought are

1. Fake CASM can be created without harming children and is therefore an acceptable way for paedophiles to feed their desires without resorting to real CASM.

2. Fake CSAM harms children because it encourages/enables paedophiles to progress to real CSAM.

But the law is clear, all CSAM is illegal.

ISS spacewalk postponed over mystery astronaut malady

It must really suck to get morning sickness every 90 minutes!

Re: Sympathy

Maybe NASA don’t even know - in space no-one can hear you barf

Earlier Horizon rollout could widen net for quashed Post Office convictions

Re: Anecdotal evidence

Well that’s me buggered as my financial wealth requires imaginary numbers

Ultimate camouflage tech mimics octopus in scientific first

Re: A secret cloaking device made out of gold?

Own up now… who gave the 8th like? Tsk

A video would have been nice

Or even a picture or two.

AMD threatens to go medieval on Nvidia with Epyc and Instinct: What we know so far

Re: What has CES become?

To replace your old multi-million dollar neural compute node rack?

UK to spend £23M on AI to tell benefit claimants where to go

"This should enhance the citizen experience”

Yeeeesssss…

Your smart TV is watching you and nobody's stopping it

Re: Look at the bigger picture

It would take me “a few minutes” to _begin_ looking up how to configure my router to block certain addresses.

Another few minutes to dig out the router admin password.

Figuring out the IP addresses of all my network devices will cost me a multiple of “a few minutes”. Or am I blocking/permitting wrt MAC addresses? More multiples.

Do I white list or black list?. Which is better? How much am I willing to make life awkward for ourselves and future visitors who want our WiFi? More multiples.

And that’s just the beginning. Now I need to troubleshoot everything that doesn’t work. And you can be goddam sure that some problems will crop up that are entirely unrelated to messing around with the router, because that is inevitable in my house.

So no, “a few minutes” is merely long enough to trash a functioning home network, nothing more.

Re: Look at the bigger picture

“Whilst painful to setup and high maintenance“

“this approach can break a lot of things”

And that’s where you lose 99.999% of the population (me included).

Re: Not here

ACR means that the TV knows what you’re watching, whatever the source (live TV, HDMI, whatever). The crucial aspect is whether the TV is connected to the Internet; if it is it can report on your viewing habits.

Windows is testing a new, wider Run dialog box. Here’s how to try it

Among other things it’s the quickest way I have found to shutdown / hibernate / restart a computer.

Pizza restaurant signage caught serving raw Windows

Actually I think it is a great demonstrator of AI technology to create a digital menu capable of monitoring its users and flipping to the next screen precisely 500 ms too soon.

Conman and wannabe MI6 agent must repay £125k to romance scam victim

To date, I haven’t been scammed and I like to think I’m fairly savvy about this sort of thing. But I’m under no illusion that I’m impervious, and I remain grateful that I haven’t yet encountered the scam that pushes my buttons. There but for the grace of God I go …

Europe gets serious about cutting digital umbilical cord with Uncle Sam's big tech

Re: To buy is to own

Take my wife! Take my children! Just please don’t take my monkey!!!

NIST contemplated pulling the pin on NTP servers after blackout caused atomic clock drift

My point was that a sophisticated time system, working as it does by “composing a special statistical average of many clocks”, ought to know if something is wrong and ought to be taking itself offline.

Maybe I just needed a headline along the lines of “atomic clock drift caused by blackout did not get flagged by the reams of systems that are in place to interpret the outputs of these very big and very complex physical systems”. Not so catchy, I’ll grant you.

Re: What I think is missing

Off by *up to* 4.8us was the status. Not a useable offset.

Feel free to call me hard of understanding, but have I got it right? A provider of super accurate time information, when their clocks go a bit out of whack, is relying on some of their servers losing power in order to not provide incorrect time information?

And those servers have back-up power?

Purdue makes 'AI working competency' a graduation requirement

Re: “his BS degree”

I’d like to be clarify that my comment referred only to the fact that the abbreviation you used for your son’s degree unfortunately also corresponds to bovine excrement (my instantaneous interpretation). Maybe I should have used the joke icon instead.

And tbf I’m still unclear if you meant business studies (my second interpretation) or, now I think about it, batchelor of science (more commonly shortened to BSc in the UK).

No offence intended. Definitely not against practitioners of CAD. And some of my best parents are into EE (I hope you were referring to electrical engineering!).

Peace unto all.

“his BS degree”

It really pains me to see you be so dismissive and insulting about your son’s degree! Would you say that to his face?

Sydney Uni data goes walkabout after criminals raid code repo

To avoid oversight from pesky data protection officers?

Cornish recycling drive sows confusion among Reg Standards Bureau

Re: Proper Pasty

A big hairy patch covering a big hairy patch? Yup, that’s just how I like my nipple covers!

Denmark takes a Viking swing at VPN-enabled piracy

Re: Vimes' Law

*You’re* missing the point! The introduction of such a law is founded entirely on the main uses of VPNs (and the alleged moral/commercial harms of such uses).

If VPNs were only used for work or for accessing home servers then no-one would give a poop.

This makes a chsnge

It’s a pleasant surprise to see that a country is apparently capable of having a discussion on a computer legislation without relying on the twin evils of terrorism and child porn.

Salesforce willing to lose money on AI agent licenses when customers are locked in

Help

Can someone remind me when we weren’t in an era of monetisation?

New Jolla phone and Sailfish 5 offer a break from iOS-Android monotony

This was probably ~15 years ago but I’ve also had problems with a banking app on a de-flashed phone. And that ended my foray into flashing phones.

What particularly pissed me off was the fact that online banking with any browser on any system was deemed A-OK.

The best sat-nav device is the one you have in your pocket

Japan just sent origami to space to unfurl possibilities for outsized antennas

Re: A haiku

Haikus are easy

Just refer to a season

And count the sylla

Parachutists told to check software after jumper dangled from a plane

Re: ye gods

You call it comparing apples and oranges but it really isn’t.

The first one is a simple question of, if I drive to a drop zone and skydive am I more likely to be injured/killed from the journey or from the skydive? Statistically that can be answered (e.g for the avg distance driven, the avg nr skydives per visit etc).

For the second, your stat only selectively compares events in which there is injury/death. You’d need to also consider the numbers and types of safe outcomes. In any case, back then the implied context was a non-emergency decision for a prospective skydiver: “do you want to jump out or land with the plane’.

Truth lies and statistics…. I certainly don’t claim that the stats I heard were in any way rigourous. And much statistical fun can be had with apparently simple questions, e.g. whether carrying a parachute (or a bomb!) on a flight increases or decreases your chances of survival. What is 1000% sure is that your passage through security will not be smooth :)