Thank you!
I'd not come across the Angry Brigade before now. They sound fabulous, can we have much more of them please?
Rosie
128 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2013
I was over in London yesterday and work colleagues were complaining about the rain, about the level you'd call "a nice day for a stroll" in Wales. I messaged the same colleague today when I'm back in Wales - it was raining hard enough to set off car alarms.
Welsh rain is different. It remembers when it was part of the sea and could wreck our stupid ships and drown our puny bodies; it deeply resents having that taken away from it.
Rosie
Normally I'd agree with you but the article has the quote "...driving click-through rates upward compared to manually generated content...". I feel that's the metric that counts here. Even if it were quicker and cheaper to generate the content, if it's not causing a positive effect then it's just money down the drain.
Whilst there's the usual caveats of it being the CEO saying it and the article is a bit thin on detail so it's difficult to make a proper assessment it would seem there's at least the possibility Grab have worked out how to use GenAI effectively for their use case. Which is at least interesting enough to want more information on whether it's true, if it is why is it true and whether there's anything that's been done which could be made more generally applicable.
Rosie
So long as I remain in control of who gets paid, and how much. Given that, things I'd want to see are:
1. An opt-in - similar to the exceptions in NoScript. If you're name isn't on the list you can't have any money.
2. Graded levels of permission. If you're asking 0.01p go ahead and take the money, if you're asking for 1p then I need to confirm I'm OK with that, it you're asking for £1 you're almost definitely not worth it and can sod off.
3. I get to set the levels in 2.
4. Proper, audited, maintained security controls with someone in the firing line should they fail attached to the payment mechanism.
That said, if Google/Amazon/Microsoft/$insert_web_megacompany_here are getting anything from it the answer is no.
Rosie
I've used Ardour with Ubuntu Studio for years and hadn't paid penny until I felt I wanted to; Mostly because people need to eat and partly because once I worked out the hourly cost for the fun I was having it was pennies. Granted I've run Linux on my own machines exclusively since forever so have never run acropper of the costs (in either time to compile or cold, hard, cash).
It's a great, big, capable program which takes a bit of effort to get your head around but also an absolute doddle compared to a 'real' recording studio. It takes time and effort to build something like that and, personally, I don't feel at all hard done by to contribute a little to the effort.
Rosie
That's about the most jarring bit of US English I've seen on the site so far. In the UK grafting is working your whatnots off, whereas in the US it's skimming a little something off for yourself. Same word but completely different meanings.
In a related point, does anyone know of any sites that resemble El Reg as it was? Sort of mid-2000s to mid-2010s heyday era. I'm liking the new site less and less with each passing week.
Rosie
I thought that would get me some down votes, which is a bit sad really - what's wrong with learning the language of the country you're visiting? I learned a bit of Welsh when I moved here (because I didn't want to be one of 'those' people) and it's a right giggle, more people should definitely give it a try. It's very, very different from English in all kinds of fascinating ways.
Rosie
Hmmm...I'm not sure how many legs using TLS as an example would have TBH. The sane implementations that I've seen use something like n F5 as a termination point, everything inside the termination point is plain text, only outside is encrypted. Which is sort of essential if you#ve got tp do anything based on packet payload a a Good Idea(tm) if you don't want to have key handling hell to deal with and servers wasting clock cycles decrypting when they could be doing something more useful.
Other than that, agreed. This is all going to end up under the umbrella of "aligned with Good Industry Practice" and largely ignored.
Rosie
I thought that as well but if you go a bit further down the article you get to "And of 42 deaths in people with Delta variant infections, 23 were unvaccinated and seven had received only one dose. The other 12 had received two doses more than two weeks before."
So 28.5%. A little less than 30% but not a lot.
Rosie
"know who the bastards* are and can easily avoid them"
Isn't that what Apple are doing?
*Leaving aside any judgement on whether the guy is a bastard, has only acted like a bastard, or just said a things for the lolz in circumstances where for the lolz isn't appropriate.
Rosie
Way back in the early 90s when I was developing code for a software house that specialised in recruitment software text matching was certainly a thing. There were OCR and matching modules to do exactly that - scan a CV and let the machine do the CV assessment for you. I've long since left that area but I'd be surprised if it wasn't still being used, certainly it was on lots of people 'must have' list.
Rosie
I'll admit I've not dug into the low/no code stuff so am slightly commenting from a position of ignorance but from the blurb it mostly reminds me of the MDD/round trip engineering voodoo that had a bit of a hypebubble in the late 90s. IIRC Visual Cafe did a not completely horrible implementation of it; draw your UML and it generated the code for you.
Obviously that fell to pieces when you had to do anything even moderately complicated. As soon as the logic gets a bit involved it turns out it's easier to understand code than it is to follow a diagram. I thought that had killed it off a fair while back.
Anyone out there who knows a bit more than me (low bar to clear) care to point out why this is so very different?
Rosie
I know not an iPad but I've a Galaxy Tab 6 and whilst it wasn't useful for much more than Netflix and games without anything extra installed on it a couple of apps have helped it a lot.
Nebo is great as a replacement for a (paper) note book. I can happily scrawl away but end up with something I can search through easily. Which dead handy when someone asks me about something that came up in a meeting 4 months ago and had a like span of about weeks before fading into obscurity. Until it became urgent again.
Ibis paint is also a lot of fun. Plus it has the advantge of infinite undo for the utterly hopeless artist (raises hand and pleads guilty).
Both Nebo and Ibis come in Apple flavour as well so I think the comparison stands, provided you get an iPad with a stylus.
So far as plain consumption goes. The screen is nicer to look at and the sound quality much richer than my phone. So from that point of view, not really a must have but a nice addition if you're prepared to trawl around eBay looking for a decent second hand one.
Buy new? Don't be ridiculous!
Rosie
So this sounds like concrete proof that the ancients were correct, just thinking too small. It's not the Earth that is a flat disk but the universe. The mega-galaxies that are so far away are squishing up close in the currents on the edge of the universal disk before dropping off into...ummm...something. Probably divine. Let's call it divine because it makes the explanation easier.
Obviously the universe is supported by turtles, all the way down.
More seriously, does anyone cleverer that me know what the amazing capabilities of MeerKAT are?
Rosie
I take your point. It's Apple doing what Apple does and doing it very well. I'm not convinced that writing off architectural changes to produce something that is very fast and very efficient is a complete goer though. Energy usage by a single consumer device may be inconsequential compared to energy use by a screamingly fast 4U beast but (guessing TBH, I've not checked the numbers) there are a lot more consumer devices than there are 4U beasts. Less energy used at the consumer end is less energy used overall and that's mostly a good thing.
The other bit that doesn't seem quite fair when writing this off is that it's a different approach that has been shown to give good results. That by itself is likely to cause some thinking outside of Cupertino about similar architectural changes; if only to get up the noses of Fanbois bleating on about their phone going 15 weeks between charges (not the greatest of reason for doing anything mind). Even if it is just phones and laptops at the minute there's little historical precedent within IT for anyone respecting artificial market segment boundaries when it comes to implementing good ideas. Aforementioned 4U beast only with 1/10th of the power consumption for the same performance would be a big saving for anyone's energy bill.
Yes, I know that it's more about shunting data around as quickly as possible rather than chewing through it at the moment. That's likely to change; storage, bandwidth and compute tend to jockey around playing pass the bottleneck so it'd be surprising it at some point in th next couple of decades people weren't complaining about not having enough fast enough cores to chew through the bits they're delivering. It'd be nice to have the compute side of things going screamingly fast when questum entangled transfer interfaces (that's made up BTW) are drowning them under a tsunami of data.
Rosie
Access is entirely appropriate when there's some young clever clogs who looks as though they may be a threat in 10 years time. Manipulate them into believing that they must understand RDBMS and that Access is the most advanced RDBMS there is, and that to get ahead they should really spend the time gaining a thorough and in-depth knowledge of how Access does things.
Cackle evilly as they spend the first two decades of their career learning how to not do things the way Access does them.
Rosie
Admittedly I'm a bit biased, I hate touchscreen typing. I found myself mentally editing what I wanted to say down to the fewest possible words to vaguely get across a reasonable approximation just to avoid typing any more than I absolutely had to.
I bought the Planet Gemini and it was a nice enough device to use stand-alone. I've now got the Cosmo which is a big improvement on the Gemini and sufficiently good that I'm not tempted to get the Astro - which seems to be the same form factor as this device.I can touch type on the Cosmo at speeds fairly close to what I get on a full-sized keyboard. That's important enough to me that I don't ever want anoterh phone that doesn't have a physical keyboard.
Rosie
Speaking as someone who has been a sound engineer and reviewed a LOT of other people's code...it doesn't matter. There's the satisfaction of a job well done, whether that's listening to a piece of music you saved or seeing a piece of code romp through a scenario that would have choked it.
Rosie
I am liking the new site feature for supporting both left and right hand sides of the pond, as per your fine example 30 September 30 (though possibly a th would help?)
Could I propse non-Reg units go through a similar thing? Maybe 68 Farencius 20? 20 feetres 6.1?
I didn't have anything of any value to add, no. Why do you ask?
Rosie
I was an early back for both so have had the Gemini for a fair while now. It works well enough as standard smartphone, the main irritant being websites and apps that can't cope with landscape properly and I don't really notice the size or weight but then again it lives in my handbag when I'm not using it. The keyboard is an absolute dream to use, I'd got really fed up of constructing messages aroudn the lest number of words rather than saying what I wanted to because I find on screen keyboards an absolute PITA to work with. Touch typing means I can say what I actually want to say or witter on at superfluous length, depending on your perspective.
I backed the Cosmo mainly for the backlit keyboard and because they're a small company doing something a bit different. THe external screen and camera aren't tht important to me, at least until the thing arrives then they'll probably become an invaluable feature that I'll wonder how I ever coped without. Or something.
Do we get a proper Reg demolishes review on this one?
Rosie
I've made a chocolate stout (from grain with all the hassle and mess that implies) and no chocolate was used in the mix. It's due to the roating of the malt, a bit more than amber (that gives you your 'biscuit' flavours') and a bit less than black malt (_really_ astringent, too much makes your mouth hurt).
I don't know what the real brewers get up to but cocoa is much more expensive that chocolate malt and you'd need a LOT of it to get a reasonable flavour (I know, I've tried). I'd be surprised if they did this but am probably as wrong about that as I am about so many things.
Rosie
Wouldn't surprise me if I were wrong, I'm good at being wrong.
I was thinking PKI type stuff.
Keypair 1 is used to allow encryption between the two people who are having the conversation (sender's private, receivers public).
Keypair 2 for the comms data, (sender's private, $somewhere[comms_data_store] public)
Keypar 3 for the stream containing the same as keypair 1, (sender's private, $somewhere[warrant_required_data_store] public).
Access to the private key for 2 and 3 would be the bit that's subject to controls, far moreso for 3 than 2. That's also the reason I said a bit over double the traffic as I was starting from the point that there's already one encrypted stream, not one unencrypted stream.
You'd encrypt only the data, forward it $somewhere for safe storage until someone turns up with the appropriate bit of paper saying they're allowed to look at it. No need to wrap encryption in encryption in encryption, just three different sets of encrypted information each using a different key pair. Traffic goes up by a bit over 2 (two copies of the actual content plus a tiny bit for the comms data) and no need to be diddling down at the TCP layer.
I never said it was a good idea, just tht it could be done.
And you don't catch people by keyword search, at least not unless you're really stupid and believe that would work. You catch people by working out who you'd like to know more about and then set about knowing more about them and the people they talk to. Old school like.
Rosie
At the risk of getting flamed to oblivion and with caveats that I don't necessarily think it's a good idea and that it being technically do-able doesn't consider a lot of other factors...
It is do-able using something akin to RBAC with crypto protection on various layers of access. Broad brush (without thinking about it too deeply), you'd want three sets of (PKI) credentials:
Keypair1: User keypair, what is in place in pretty much any of the secure end-to-end products already
Keypair2: Communications records keypair. Who said something to whom and when but not what was said
Keypair3: Wrong'uns keypair. Access to everything, communications. Used for reading what clowns, mime artists and other undesirables are saying to one another.
Information accessable to one key pair isn't accessible to any other key pair with KeyPair2 and 3 being subject to legal/regulatory/whatever controls.
Yeah, I know. Those controls are a right whatnot to get right.
Rosie
Thank you for noticing the bold, almost child-like palette used in the new logo. It is indeed meant to remind us of our younger days, when everything was new, fresh and exciting. Like Google's new ads service!
The use of two converging lines suggests the many seemingly divergent streams that your customers follow across the web will coalesce to bring you Bigger Unexpected Google Generated Exceptional Retailing Ascendancy Lifted Levels. The use of gentle curves expresses that the subtle art of persuasion as opposed to the sharp forcefulness of compulsion will drive your business to the next level.
And after all that, erm, fertile language; I think I need a shower. Several before I even begin to feel clean.
Rosie
I've been making beer without hops for years. There's a fair few recipes here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sacred-Herbal-Healing-Beers-Fermentation/dp/0937381667 (which is every bit as woo-woo as the title suggests but the recipes are fun). I've also made a really good summer beer (light and refreshing) using Mugwort and lemon for flavouring. Hops were approved of because some of the other ingredients used for flavouring had some interesting* effects on the drinker whereas hops tended to calm them down. Not sure about that last bit mind (even if I have read it from multiple sources), Friday nights in most towns suggest that people will still get rowdy despite the hops.
* For a given definition of interesting
Last time I bothered to check I was paying £10/month (somewhere around $14/month). That gives me 1GB of data (I mostly use WiFi so that's plenty), unlimited texts and 600 minutes talk time a month (I'm an unsociable moo so rarely get anywhere near that).
It looks as though those figures compare at least reasonably with the ones you quoted.
Rosie
I'm not going to get involved in a 'my language is better than your language' discussion; I've got the battle scars from too many of those already.
What did strike me as a bit strange was characterising a professional institute with a royal charter as "a technical advocacy organization". I wonder if that doesn't sell them a little short. Mad Bob the technology yogi is a technical advocacy organisation, albeit not for any technology that exists, and I'm not sure that's really comparable.
Rosie