Posts by Doctor Syntax

China's EV champ BYD reveals super-fast charging that leaves Tesla eating dust

Re: Aaaarrghh

That's certainly better than expecting the grid to handle the instantaneous charging loads. My local supermarket filling station has 8 pumps and a motorway filling station has many more.

Show top LLMs some code and they'll merrily add in the bugs they saw in training

Re: Gosh!

these articles will continue until nobody tried to defend it any more the tech-bros run out of money.

FTFY

Boffins 3D-print artificial iris muscle that flexes both ways

A mechanical actuator has a wide temperature range and only requires one of the usual mechanical forms of power: electrical, hydraulic or compressed air. Biological tissues require blood or a blood substitute to provide oxygen, glucose and other nutriments, and to remove CO2. They also require the temperature to be kept within a tolerable range and need recovery time after a period of continuous work. Why would they make good robot actuators?

Dell discloses monster 20-petaFLOPS desktop built on Nvidia's GB300 Superchip

Re: What about …

"I'm awaiting figures for noise levels and power consumption."

And whether it needsa 3-phase supply.

Extortion crew threatened to inform Edward Snowden (?!) if victim didn't pay up

Re: Edward Snowden?

So far there's been insufficient consequences for businesses to care or for it to affect their share prices. In the event of cases being raised in respect of an infraction payments are made to make it go away without admitting fault. If there were actual convictions thenit might be easier for civil suits to follow.

Perhaps reply to them saying "We know who you are. We're about to send a few heavies round to break legs unless you confirm you've deleted it all."

UK wants dirt on data brokers before criminals get there first

It's too easy to make the blame diffuse. Make the data collector for anything that it collects. If it becomes too risky to sell data on to a brokerage in the first place then the whole system will dry up.

"whatever your preferred term for these types of orgs" scum.

Curious tale of two HR tech unicorns, alleged espionage, and claims of a spy hiding in a bathroom

"Slack logs of D.S.'s activity establish that he secretly viewed and downloaded information "

For some values of secretly.

Google’s broadband balloon laser comms tech floated out as independent company

"spectrum that lies between infrared and visible light"

A good trick if you can manage it.

Court filing: DOGE aide broke Treasury policy by emailing unencrypted database

If I read TFA correctly the "database" was a spreadsheet.

Sigh.

Microsoft wouldn't look at a bug report without a video. Researcher maliciously complied

Re: Just confirms what we all know

And objectively illiterate.

Wonderful world of Microsoft

I just updated a laptop to Devuan Excalibre - the testing release, to see how it's going (short answer, fine with daily downpours of updates as might be expected). I realised I didn't have Pinta on there and the options being Flatpak or tarball I downloaded the tarball to compile. It's basically a dotnet app so a prerequisite is dotnet runtime. OK, go to the dotnet download site and install the latest dotnet version which is 9.0. After all the latest is sure to be correct, isn't it? Having found the runtime configure lets me compile. Try to run it and what happens? It will only run against runtime 8.0.

No wonder the W10 partition on that particular laptop seems to update several versions of dotnet each month. And no wonder the target area for vulnerabilities is so large if an installation has to support so many versions of the same thing.

Re: Microsoft?

Indeed. One of the prominent ones is the requirement for support.

Re: They want a video?

I might be inclined to make the video with a hideously strobing background,

Re: Not just MS

Tell the salesman why they've lost the sale. It's the only way things will ever get through to manglement that quality of support matters.

"But yes, ultimately, Microsoft is to blame for outsourcing all this and not hiring good people themselves."

This may seem like victim blaming but the ultimate blame should rest with those who not only continue putting up with it but continue buying from Microsoft and other enshittified suppliers. As long as it's a profitable way of doing business it will continue to happen.

Re: Microsoft?

And the reason so many people give for not doing is that manglement insists on having support. You do realise, don't you, that there are a number of people who will sell Linux and other FOSS support services. The reason they continue to trade is that they give customer satisfaction. If they didn't they'd be out of business because they don't have a monopoly to prop them up.

You think that the suggestion was funny? Then why is this thread full of people pointing to Microsoft support and not quite managing to laugh?

Re: May I recommend...

Upvoted but the last line doesn't scan. Go back & listen to the song again.

Los Alamos boffins whip up a speedometer for satellites

Bug splats in Spaaaace.

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

I wonder how they'd name compilers for F*, Forth or Foxbase.

France offers US scientists a safe haven from Trump's war on woke

Re: Brain drain

You think so? We'll just have to wait and see, won't we.

Re: Brain drain

"And I'm pretty sure Canada folded on the electricity threat "

Ford did enogh to get Trump's attention. Leaving it there for the present is undoubtedly the sensible approach. It would have been a big mistake to have left the tariff in place for Trump to shift the blame to when the inflationary effects of his own tariffs become impossible to deny. Meanwhile I'm sure there are people responsible for overseeing the grid working like mad to work out how to avoid a widespread collapse if the Canadian supply were actually turned off - at least they will be doing if Mush hasn't already fired them.

Re: Trump's Tomás de Torquemada

It was very much appreciated here.

Re: Wow...

"You do remember a few years back when you were likely calling for the unvaccinated to be locked in their houses or dragged off to camps and forced to take the shot?"

Spot the weasel word.

Re: Brain drain

All of which demonstrates that supply chains are international and that disrupting them with trade wars is idiocy of the highest order, idiocy that will inevitably come back and bite the idiot in the arse.

Re: The UK should be paying attention

I see your research into exactly what disciplines hasn't progressed very far. Unless you consider the sort of epidemics vaccination helps control, environment and even astrophysics* as "gender studies".

* Maybe you're thinking about on-binary stars?

Re: les queer studies?

And the US would certainly not be put out be losing experts in epidemiology, infectious diseases and immunology, not even with a measles epidemic at large. Not when cod-ler oil is such an effective treatment.

Re: les queer studies?

The interests of those interested in moving are elaborated in another place as “health (LGBT+ medicine, epidemiology, infectious diseases, inequalities, immunology, etc.), environment and climate change (natural disaster management, greenhouse gases, social impact, artificial intelligence), humanities and social sciences (communication, psychology, history, cultural heritage), astrophysics.”

Possibly one of those might fit in with your epithet but a good deal of it is straightforward science. However given the fact that the US govt's health secretary is suggesting cod-liver oil as the way to deal with a serious measles outbreak in Texas maybe it stretches to cover epidemiology, infectious diseases and immunology out of that list.

Re: les queer studies?

Obv. Russian troll.

Re: The UK should be paying attention

UK universities are already cutting posts and in some cases entire departments.

This one weird trick can make online publishing faster, safer, more attractive, and richer

I've run a local history website for some time. Originally we used the BT community obligation service and since that ended a friend of the group who has budget has hosted it for us on WordPress along with his own huge site. We don't need advertising and probably wouldn't if that help discontinued.

The other day I got a message through the contact page offering some service to use adsense. I was most upset when my snottygram reply bounced because his email address didn't exist - either that or Gmail closed it for spamming. Interestingly he gave one name as contact name on the website and another as a sig, neither Indian which I suspect is his real name. It looks as if the leads generation lark has extended as far as selling ads these days.

FCC stands up Council on National Security to fight China in ways that CISA used to

"Reduce the American technology and telecommunications sectors’ trade and supply chain dependencies on foreign adversaries;"

I think other countries with the US in their supply chains will now start to think of them as foreign adversaries.

BOFH: HR's AI hiring tool is perfectly unbiased – as long as you're us

Re: New Employees....

Don't give pimps agencies the benefit of the doubt. Advertise for CVs to be submitted direct from the applicants. As an extra safeguard specify what you want in terms of a CV with specific subheadings. The pimps are unlikely to be prepared to redo a stack of CVs from their prepared format (into which they will already have disorganised the candidates own carefully prepared CVs and may stand a good chance of defeating generative AI. Applicants who are really interested in the job will self-select by being prepared to rewrite to the specification and also demonstrate that they can follow a spec. It will be rough on those who don't get the job to have put in the extra work for nothing but at least they'll know they were considered and not buried in the blizzard of agency submissions.

"OK. So ... I'll be in my office if you need me," the Boss says, wandering off quickly.

I think he's starting to realise the explanations aren't always kosher. His days must be numbered.

Judge orders Feds rehire workers falsely fired for lousy performance

That seems to be the Supreme Court. Even so they need to have some legal knowledge. Political appointments are certainly a weakness but at least they're not directly elected which obviously requires no knowledge or competence beyond fooling most enough of the people for some of the time.

Re: Hmm

"What's the judge going to do? Arrest him?"

Assuming you mean Charles Ezell then possibly, or maybe someone else lower in the food chain. Failure to rehire them would be contempt of court and the judge has means to deal with that. I can see why Ezell didn't want to appear - he has to either take the blame or drop DOGE in it. It's a tough position but then it's what he's paid for.

Re: Hmm

"No chance, they won’t rehire them until the Supreme Court confirms the decision."

Unless and until a higher court reverses it Alsup's ruling is the one that stands. Failing to follow it would be contempt of court so he could indeed order the arrest of whoever he feels is responsible.

Re: Hmm

"then I expect more will need to be done. For those fired inappropriately."

And what should be done to those firing inappropriately? Should they be fired themselves for incompetence?

I wonder to what extent those coming up for re-election might be starting to wonder what state the economy will be in by then and starting to think that blind support might not make them re-electable.

It raises the question of whether an act carried out by him, allegedly as President, which isn't actually within presidential power is really carried out carried out as President in which case the immunity couldn't apply.

"In addition, SCOTUS gave the president almost infinite leverage to break the law, which he may well interpret as allowing him to ignore court judgements."

In fact, it appears that the US has a constitutional crisis.

Just as well he's not elected because AFAICS having all officials elected is a weakness of the US situation. Judges are appointed on their basis of knowledge of the law and competence, not mass appeal. There need to be a few competent people around.

If you like you could wander into his court and tell him what you think of him. You'd discover something else about a judge's powers.

It goes a step further. In effect Trump is admitting his henchmen told the OPM to fire them which is very likely a further constitutional breach.

User complained his mouse wasn’t working. But he wasn’t using a mouse

Re: Pies aren't mice either

That puts the lid on it.

Re: Bright and warm days

This always puzzles me. Given that hands are opaque how are they not shielding the mice from stray sunlight? I suppose they're holding them wrong.

Re: A case of mistaken identity

Are you sure that's your coat?

Apple's alleged UK encryption battle sparks political and privacy backlash

"a behind-closed-doors High Court hearing"

You know what they keep saying: "If you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear."

SUSE doubles down on AI and Multi-Linux Support to prove it's still in the game

Doubling down on AI makes me wonder whether it still is in the game.

AI running out of juice despite Microsoft's hard squeezing

"Yes, it can be helpful when used carefully as a tool"

Exactly what is that use for which it could be a helpful tool?