Posts by Ian Bush

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

Not really on topic but I once, in a different millennium, brought down the Oxford University VAX by trying to tape archive a file for which the path was too long.

Microsoft makes Copilot harder to miss in Classic Outlook

Re: Switched back

Looks like it has a race condition and privacy issues as well

Airbus keeps an A350 flying for 24 hours

Re: Military is used to In-Flight Refuelling, but...

And pay excess baggage for it

Dev accidentally commits Copilot binary to FreeBSD ports repo

I can't say I like it, but I can cope with git. I can even appreciate at least in terms of functionality at has some advantages over earlier VCS like svn.

Cmake on the other hand ...

Australia demands AI companies must produce more energy than they consume, stop ‘theft’ of content

Why the inverted commas around theft?

As per title.

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

Nah. Ann Summers.

Vim text editor game teaches you keyboard shortcuts with ice cream delivery

VIM SUX! EMACS ROOLZ

Blue Origin's New Glenn makes a crater-sized dent in Artemis plans

Re: I wonder...

But, but, but isn't the private sector better for everything?

1 in 5 Brits think AI layoffs could trigger civil unrest

Re: It's just Bullshit, the bubble will burst soon.

"if you need bullshit quickly and cheaply" - IOW perfect for manglement

Pro-Iran crew turns DDoS into shakedown as Ubuntu.com stays down

ITYM "very bigly business cards"

Linux cryptographic code flaw offers fast route to root

Re: Ten lines?

No, in post-teaching Nirvana; I only get the good version of smells like teen spirit nowadays.

My trick was to say they would lose one mark for every warning or error issued by the compiler when warning levels were maximized and standards conformance enforced. For those who cared about what I was teaching it worked like a charm.

Re: Ten lines?

Until recently Fortran had a maximum line length of 132 characters - a bit big IMO but acceptable. However as of the 2023 standard it was increased to 10,000 chars, with the maximum statement length increased to 1 meellion (see e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44990119/why-is-maximum-single-line-length-limited-to-132-characters-in-fortran-standard). Sigh... Whoever has decided this obviously doesn't have to review students' code.

You too can build a nuclear battery from junk you have lying around the house

It can also make the Kessel Run in 12 Parsecs

"the capacitor managed to reach 2.8 volts" What is this supposed to mean? Capacitors store charge and surely the amount of stored charge, i.e. in some sense the amount of electricity, is the interesting thing here, not the potential difference between the two ends of the capacitor? Yeah, given the capacitor's speed^W, errr, capacitance you can easily get (approximately) the total charge, but we aren't given that ....

Admittedly you can estimate the charge from 1 day charging at a few nanoamps, and from that get an estimate of the capacitance of a few microfarads which doesn't sound daft. And admittedly I like articles to make me think. But not in this way!

The most durable tech is boring, old, and everywhere

Re: Old tech

Found a commit? A commit? With a comment!? Some people don't know they're born...

I probably occasionally deal with code older than me. I'm almost 59. No commits for me!

Yes, excellent point, and add Fortran to the list. Even if it doesn't go over to the dark side standardization of a language encourages multiple implementations, and multiple implementations is both an extremely useful debugging tool and a good way to increase the effective bus factor of a project, so improving sustainability. It's one of the reasons while I'll play with Julia and Rust, but have no intention to use them for anything serious.

For Fortran the folklore is a 1 to 3 times slowdown depending on the code, but I haven't measured it in a decade or so. And, given the right flags, the code aborts and gives a traceback. Which is nice.

But comparisons are hard. For example if a language has a "for I in a collection" type construct and the collection can't change a clever compiler can skip some of the checking. C and Fortran lack this, but in Julia and (I think) Rust it is the normal looping method, maybe a reflection of the increased awareness of safety since god's own language and C were devised.

Google offers 7th-gen Ironwood TPUs for AI, with AI-inspired comparisons

For my science (ab initio electronic structure) 10+ significant figures are usually required. In some cases it's debatable if 64 bits is enough. FP8 is an irrelevancy. In fact FP32 is mostly an irrelevancy...

Nvidia paid $1M for Mar-a-Lago meal, US later scrapped AI chip export crackdown

Re: The Swamp

Yup, now is not the time for spin

Re: Updated Speech

Problem is that he is already a convicted crook:

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ny-v-trump-jury-verdict-former-presidents-historic-criminal-trial

https://apnews.com/article/trump-trial-deliberations-jury-testimony-verdict-85558c6d08efb434d05b694364470aa0

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cd9x99p2ek8t

https://www.reuters.com/legal/jurors-begin-second-day-deliberations-trump-hush-money-trial-2024-05-30/

Only a completely brazen liar with no concern for the truth would ... Oh ...

Weeks with a BBC Micro? Good enough to fix a mainframe, apparently

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

Roy Trenneman would be proud ...

Flang-tastic! LLVM's Fortran compiler finally drops the training wheels

Good progress, but ...

Cloned the repo and after a couple of tries managed to build it. The good news is that it is a **massive** step forward on the earlier flang that I tried a couple of years back, in that it can actually compile modern Fortran and produce executables that work. But it appears to lack a number of basic features without which I won't consider it as a development tool at least - so far flags to enforce array bounds checking and standards conformance have eluded me. But this might be because any decent documentation has also eluded me, flang --help being about the only thing I can find so far.

So … Russia no longer a cyber threat to America?

Re: Neville Chamberlain

Modernish irregular verbs:

Zelensky fights

Chamberlain appeases

Trump capitulates

It's just shameful

Microsoft warns Trump: Where the US won't sell AI tech, China will

And if you think the US is taking the lead in that select group think again. The Siberian candidate failed last time around, so he's been told to get a move on.

A good kind of disorder: Boffins boost capacitor tech by disturbing dipoles

Re: Breakdown?

Of course they are! But the question should not be "will the magic smoke escape" but "how long before we expect the magic smoke to escape"

Elon Musk's galactic ego sows chaos in European politics

Re: A week is a long time in politics…

Probably one reason he likes it ...

With Gelsinger gone, to fab or not to fab is the $7B question

Re: Well that explains it

Assuming there is somebody there to make the things

Google DeepMind touts AI model for 'better' global weather forecasting

I remember in a previous life attending a talk on financial modelling, stochastic differential equations and all that stuff. Not my thing at all, but I do remember one interesting observation which was along the lines of financial modelling is unlike climate modelling and weather forecasting because the outputs of the model can directly and measurably affect the thing that is being modelled. Looks like that's no longer true.

Win a slice of XP cheese if you tell us where Microsoft should put Copilot next

No, it only finds "elbow"

Academic papers yanked after authors found to have used unlicensed software

Hmmmm. I didn't actually say whether I think the paper should or should not be retracted. I said that the article IMO is a strange juxtaposition of disparate points.

This is a very strange article. The offence is abuse of a software licence - in particular not obtaining one to use the software. This is an important issue, and IMO the world in general and academia in particular has got to learn that software doesn't just come out of thin air, if you want high quality and especially if you want maintenance you will have to pay for or contribute to it in some way. But then the article goes off talking about access to academic publications, a totally separate issue. It's of definite importance but I fail to see how retracting a paper due to breaking the law connects with it.

Judge decides not to block Musk's $1M election giveaway

Some years back I was visiting a sub-Saharan country in Africa and got talking with one of the locals over a coffee about how corruption affects their democracy. I can 't remember exactly how he put it, but the essence was that if some local bigwig comes by and says to a villager "I will give you a cow if you promise to vote for me" the villager will take it and vote for the bigwig, because the central government is totally divorced from his existence, while a cow will make a real difference to his family. Then the local finished off by saying something like " but of course that wouldn't happen in a developed world democracy." For some reason I've been thinking about that little encounter more often recently.

Wanted. Top infosec pros willing to defend Britain on shabby salaries

Possibly not if you pay the local kids a few quid to look after them

BOFH: Boss's quest for AI-generated program ends where it should've begun

Re: Hilarious

A genuine laugh out loud moment that one ...

The doubly worrying thing is that a *good* sum() function is non-trivial, especially if dealing with floating point. So much so that I will roll my own if I really need accuracy, who knows who wrote the library functions for all the compilers I need to support?

Bending the rules with flexible non-silicon 32-bit RISC-V chip

All the molecules in the host's undergarments leap simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance with the theory of indeterminacy.

Re: Fine, no Crysis

Ahhh, so it can do AI

LibreOffice 7.6 arrives: Open source stalwart is showing its maturity

Re: LO 7.6 - Outline View

Indeed - give me EDLIN every time

Ian (emacs user)

Errors logged as 'nut loose on the keyboard' were – ahem – not a hardware problem

Re: Aaaaargh!

Please see the British education system

Arm co-founder: Britain's chip strat 'couldn’t be any worse'

Re: oxbridge

Note both Oxford and Cambridge give BAs for all their first degrees - I hold a BA (Oxon) in Chemistry

But a large part of the problem is successive ministers have seen the science and technology budget as there to fund their own pet projects, rather than supporting any coherent national plan. IMO millions have been hived away and wanted that way. Boris Johnson and George Osborne are especially at fault here.

British government torched over lack of chips strategy

Re: No tar and feathers please! I'll go peacefully

No. Some MPs form the government, but not all. Quoting https://www.parliament.uk/about/how/role/relations-with-other-institutions/parliament-government/

"Parliament and the Government are different. They have different roles and do different things."

"HM Government consists of the Prime Minister, their Cabinet and junior ministers, supported by the teams of non-political civil servants that work in government departments."

And

"Parliament is there to represent our interests and make sure they are taken into account by the Government. The Government cannot make new laws or raise new taxes without Parliament's agreement.

Parliament is made up of people we have elected and people who have been appointed. They sit in two separate Houses:

The House of Commons, where all the people we have elected at the General Election work, as MPs, for the next five years. This includes people in other political parties, as well as those in the winning party who were not chosen to be ministers."

Thus all MPs are members of the House of Commons, but not all MPs are members of the Government

Japan tests probe to land on Martian moon Phobos, bring a chunk of it back to Earth

Re: Oh shit..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leather_Goddesses_of_Phobos

?

City-killing asteroid won't hit Earth in 2052 after all

Genius! Have one of these

Chinese Go Association suspends player 'for using AI'

More than that, it's quite possible that the games are analysed afterwards by some software to find indicators as to whether it is a human playing, or if there is computer "assistance". I can't tell you about the Go world, but this certainly happens in Chess - any rated online tournament will likely be sent for analysis, and yes, people have been disqualified and/or banned for use of a computer having been detected by this method. Ken Regan (https://www.buffalo.edu/news/experts/ken-regan-faculty-expert-chess.html) is probably the best known researcher in this area.

Virgin Media fined £50,000 after spamming 451,000 who didn't want marketing emails

Re: Wow!

At least a factor of 10 too small

Cisco requires COVID-19 shots for all US staff – even remote workers

Re: how to prove it

"We know now that the antibodies created thanks to those shots tend to be pretty much gone after two months already"

Link to peer-reviewed research, please

Sir Clive Sinclair: Personal computing pioneer missed out on being Britain's Steve Jobs

First computer a (home made) ZX81. 1k of memory, in practice nearer 800 bytes IIRC due to the system variables, taught you a lot about programming. Wouldn't be where I am today without it. Recquiescat in pace Clive.

England's controversial extraction of personal medical histories from GP systems is delayed for a second time

Yes, Priti Patel is evil She wants to kill people (https://www.indy100.com/news/priti-patel-resurfaced-clip-death-penalty-ian-hislop-question-time-video-home-secretary-9020006) unlike mini-Trump who merely colludes in trying to get them beaten up (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jul/14/black-eyes-boris-johnson-plot-attack-reporter-darius-guppy). Both liars though. And these are the people wanting to hand over our personal data ...

Tiananmen Square Tank Man vanishes from Microsoft Bing, DuckDuckGo, other search engines – even in America

I remember that day. I remember as a student sitting in the common room watching the television footage. Crying. Crying for the people of China. Crying for a people being told lies. Crying for all of us whenever we unquestioningly forgo freedom for security. World, don't forget this. This is what the Chinese government is all about. Every time you have dealings with the Chinese government remember Tiananmen Square.

Intel throws sand in the face of 'musclebooks' with 10nm Tiger Lake tech

Well to convert the archaic units to something I understand that's 0.38Jb (https://www.theregister.com/2007/10/28/additional_reg_standards/). Nope, not going to put my back out.

Explained: The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32

"temporary solution becoming de-facto permanent"

Like the increasingly common but incorrect hyphen in de facto, ab initio and similar?