Posts by Doctor Syntax

Research finds electric cars are silent but violent for pedestrians

Have you realised how few collisions there are between cyclists and pedestrians on motorways?

Re: I call BS²

More like the sound of running on a flat tyre.

There's also the noise of the tyres thumping into the pot-holes.

OK, let's make that "built-up areas outside Wales".

In this rural setting we have winding lanes with tall walls which make the bends blind. Nowadays it's quite frequent to have a car arrive unheralded round the corner a few yards from my gate. In fact, as I've just changed to a hybrid I've just realised it would be a good idea to ensure the ICE doesn't close down as I approach it.

Re: Just a thought

Here it's the locals that use the street to bypass a particularly annoying set of traffic lights (when the lights fail the traffic always flows more freely). We've had to fight off some of the council's more ridiculous schemes that would have closed it off. Fortunately the council is more or less broke so we probably have a few years' grace.

Re: Just a thought

"screeching breaks"

Dammit - brakes. But breaks might also fit where bones are concerned.

Re: Just a thought

One local street is apt to have tourists wandering on it as if it was pedestrianised which it certainly isn't. I think the council should put up loudspeakers playing the sound of car horns at intervals interspersed with the sound of screeching breaks and a crash.

Quite so. There'd only be the sound of the screaming to alert him.

EV or hybrid? It depends on the type of hybrid but for some the car will be driven with ICE over about 20mph so even in urban environments they'll be providing engine noise some of the time.

Re: Just a thought

Ernie!!!

Unless the helicopter engine had stalled I can't imagine any level of headphone output that would mask the sound of one approaching form overhead. And if the main rotor doesn't get you the tail rotor will.

Bing and Copilot fall from the clouds around the world

Re: Where are EU?

Thanks for the heads up Colin. But what I'd really like to see would be a search engine which, when presented with a specific phrase (which means that word-order matters), didn't return word shrapnel unrelated to the phrase as a consequence of ignoring word order.

Re: Massive fines?

H/W unusable is likely to get a refund but why would it get a fine? Unsafe, yes, it should get a fine.

For a search engine - you pay nothing to use it. Why would you expect the operator to be fined if it became unavailable? The consequence would be that as provision would have to be made to cover the fine, it would cease to be free or it might be withdrawn entirely.

Be careful what you wish for.

Re: Good riddance...

"One can always use Goozle for very specific queries."

And still get rubbish results.

VBScript nudged nearer to the grave with next big Windows 11 update

Re: Pinned to taskbar

You have your own taskbar as well as Microsoft's?

UK PM Sunak calls election, leaving Brits cringing over memory of his Musk love-in

Re: Wessex

And Northumbria. I suppose by default that means we'd have to bring back Mercia as well.

Re: Disappointing

"any party that suggested closer ties with Europe risks a wipeout in enough constituencies to lose them the election"

Is that really so? I wonder what proportion of the population still thinks it was a good idea. The reality is that Labour was too timid to challenge it and for the current Conservative party it would be a massive mea culpa.

Re: Disappointing

"With no one addressing the elephant in the room, what's the point?"

Labour won't because they didn't challenge it.

The saner wing of the Conservative party won't. Sunak didn't list it as one of the challenges alongside Covid and Unkraine nor as an achievement alongside the furlough arrangement and possibly something else. What's going to be interesting is whether any of the Dunning-Kruger wing mentions it.

Re: Disappointing

"making importing foreign luxury goods more expensive than the domestically produced equivalents"

That would include food as we've been unable to feed ourselves for a very long time.

Re: Disappointing

"Are they really our allies?"

They're members of a club from which, thanks to a shade over half those who voted at the time, we as a nation withdrew. If you voted Leave and don't like the consequences I suggest you keep your complaints to yourself. You will get no sympathy from those of us who voted Remain.

Re: Disappointing

I think there's a distinct possibility of the party splitting after the election. For an old-school one nation Tory they existing party might be seen as beyond salvage.

Re: Disappointing

I think for some of then Brexit was always just the first step for getting rid of the ECHR.

Re: Disappointing

Voting in a democratic election doesn't make the voter any more or less racist or xenophobic than they were before they voted. Look up the meaning of non sequitur.

Re: Disappointing

"BREXIT was 8 years ago"

Is it 2028 already?

Would you buy Pegasus spyware from this scammer?

I can't help thinking that the fraudsters were actually performing a public service here and that CloudSEK should have kept stumm.

FCC boss wants political ads to admit when they were made using AI

If the objective is to identify deliberately malicious ads - deep-fakes etc - then nobody putting out such ads is going to admit it.

In those cases the best way of dealing with them is going to be to set up a rapid response team to take complaints from the victims, investigate and take whatever action is possible. Otherwise an organisation or candidate has to take responsibility for anything they say irrespective of whether it's bollocks written by human idiocy or an artificial idiocy.

I stumbled upon LLM Kryptonite – and no one wants to fix this model-breaking bug

On a very limited understanding of how any of this works...

The models are sets of statistics on associations between words. If the prompt is asking it do deal with a set of words - particularly a small set - which have few if any associations in the training data then you're going to be down in the statistical noise.

Ideally such a system should recognise that and respond that it doesn't have anything useful. As the mentality of the designers of these things seems to be similar to those who design search engines (in some cases they're likely to be the same people) coming up with a null response is going to be anathema so what you get instead will be random words.

Re: for "prompt engineering"

It seems to have trouble with other, unrelated queries at the moment.

Go after UnitedHealth, not us, 100+ medical groups urge Uncle Sam

I think the govt has a point here. The public dealt with the health care providers and entrusted them with their data. It was the providers who chose to offload work to a third party. It should be those providers who are directly responsible to their customers. I regard that as an important point of principle*.

The providers certainly have a complain against their agent who let them down and may well be entitled to demand the agent do the work on their behalf and do it for free as it was their failure.

* It may be of less significance here but its disregard in the way transatlantic GDPR responsibilities are hidden is a real problem.

If an EU data subject is failed by the US service provider for the EU company with whom the subject is dealing they're expected to take it up in a US court with the service provider which is going to raise a substantial barrier compared with taking a court action in the jurisdiction, probably their own, in which the original transaction was made.

NYSE parent gets $10M wrist tap for failing to report 2021 systems break-in

If there's no admission of guilt make it a full year's turnover or a trip to court to take their chance there.

It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

It looks like their aim was pretty good - at their feet.

Giving Windows total recall of everything a user does is a privacy minefield

Re: "On your knees bitches!"

I use Linux. It's Windows I haven't the patience for. Using that is like wading through treacle except for updates which are like wading through concrete.

Re: How come this is GDPR "compliant" at all ?

Look at it from the other direction. You discover that somebody has some information about you that you don't want them to have, something that might be quite damaging to you,in fact. Assuming GDPR applies where you are (EU plus, for now UK) you can demand that they delete that information unless they have legitimate reason to hold it. Job done, GDPR has protected you

Now imagine that there are screenshots of that information they don't know about. They've unwittingly retained that information. Take it further - they do consider that possibility and manage to find such a screenshot and delete it (assuming Microsoft allow that). But unknown to them, while they've pulled up that screenshot to delete it the system takes a screenshot of the screenshot.

IOW It's going to make GDPR compliance a lot more work.

Microsoft: "What makes you think it's your computer?"

Re: Remote work

"If it ever happens then trust me, I'll be first out the door"

There are, of course, a lot of places where he doesn't work.

Re: How much data stored?

If the screen is displaying text or images of text that can be OCRed is that stored instead/

"governments try to require you to have scanning"

It's going to be their favourite wet dream.

Re: "At present, Windows Recall feels like it was put together with insufficient thought"

"They just need to get through the sunk cost fallacy stage first."

That's what their customers need to do.

Re: "At present, Windows Recall feels like it was put together with insufficient thought"

I fear they've been entirely cleansed of any trace of ethics.

Re: It begs the obvious question...

Sunk cost fallacy.

Re: It begs the obvious question...

"people who don't grasp that loan-words from Greek, such as "phenomena" are plural"

OTOH There's a book XML Schema written by someone convinced that "schema" is a plural noun.

Re: It begs the obvious question...

"present myself for punishment to the Headmaster."

Here ---->

Re: It begs the obvious question...

For a monent I read that as "Language be a chagrin"

Re: "At present, Windows Recall feels like it was put together with insufficient thought"

You can imagine some techy getting excited with his idea that "We can already take screenshots when the user asks. Why not do it automatically and just save the results?" Or maybe just doing it and showing the higher ups. The question is why there weren't any grown-ups in the room to realise it was a Really Bad Idea?

According to the Beeb the ICO is already taking an interest.

Boeing's Calamity Capsule launch date slides into the future

The crew will probably be hoping it's posponed past their retirement dates.

Microsoft Build 2024 looks like it's more about AI fluff than developer stuff

Re: I am so glad ...

I wonder what my friends who are Windows users will make of it all. They want a browser, email, maybe Word and a few of them Excel. How will they react to the rising ide of Copilot trying to force its way in everywhere.

Google offers DoJ cash to eliminate jury in web ad monopoly abuse trial

Re: Legalized Bribery

The nature of the offer seems to be compensation so it appears to be a civil case. A guilty verdict would only apply in a criminal case. Even if a guilty verdict were an option then, as they're wanting it to be tried by a judge as opposed to not tried at all it wouldn't make a difference. Very likely the motivation is that by offering to concede the case before a judge they can avoid having the details of the case aired in public.

Starlink offers 'unusually hostile environment' to TCP

Re: We love it.

AIUI what he's saying is that these are the problems the developers of your protocol stack have to overcome/hide from you for you to get this service.