Posts by Doctor Syntax 42407 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
I was once recalled to the surgery. The GP had discovered that his shiny electronic sphygmomanometer calibration was faulty and had to recheck his patients with the mercury version. A digital display always looks so authoritative but usually there's no easy way to link it back to a physical standard. A weight on a balance or, as in this case, graduations on a glass tube make the physical reality clear.
"This time it ended relatively harmlessly"
How relative is "relatively"? I doubt those who missed hospital appointments, flights or whatever think it ended in any way harmlessly. It's not Cloudsrike and Microsoft's customers who count here, it's their customers and, no doubt, innocent bystanders as well.
This best educated bit. From what I read from the outside education in the US seems to be bi-modal. On the one hand world-class universities and, presumably, the schools needed to feed them. On the other schools teaching creationism. So what is the mean* level of education? I get the impression that the US is two countries and one of them looks very like a failed state.
* Insofar as that applies to a bi-modal distribution.
It was always my view that as the Civil Service was the largest employer of scientists in the UK, at least back in my day, a bit of over-production of graduates was enough for them to justify keeping the salaries down. They got very worried when scientists started emigrating. It would upset the market they'd constructed.
At least it didn't simply reproduce the FOSS library code which slightly surprised me.
Ultimately, training a LLM to do that sort of thing would need more than feeding it training code. It would also need to understand the RFCs and that's a completely different task. Unfortunately the library failed on that one: if you're using one of the MAC/timestamp formats and take a random or arbitrary string instead of a MAC address (frequently done for security purposes) you should set the least significant bit and last time I looked it doesn't. I suppose I should flag that up..
And if you were very lucky you didn't have to tear up what you'd written to fit it in. I had that about a fortnight before go-live. It converted a simple product list into one where the BoM had to be taken into account with some hastily written recursive code. At the end it worked but I wasn't convinced I understood it in detail once I'd finished and any changes were strictly forbidden.
"C-Suites are measured by their KPIs, which is either shareholder value, or whatever it is that contributes to that value — typically cost reduction, or revenue increase within that particular financial quarter, but usually both."
When a metric becomes a target it ceases to become a useful metric.
"whatever is needed to respond to a modulated signal."
Nothing new about that. Back in the 70s or 80s the IRA was using a circuit with a tone detection IC in quite a small package to trigger land mines. I don't know if it was ever deployed. They'd scratched the ID off the top of the can it was packaged in but once the top of the can had been sliced off it turned out that the part number was etched on the die and it was easily recognised as a part advertised in Wireless World.
I do interact with people who use Word. Documents laid out with tabs and such like nonsense. No wonder they don't render properly. There's every chance they wouldn't render properly in a different version of Word. Or on a different version of WIndows. Or with different fonts available. Or, who knows, with different video H/W?
And anyone who thinks it's acceptable to use Word as a form to be filled in is probably ... let's think of a suitable epithet ... a Windows user who doesn't know any better.
Microsoft's Cloud obsession seems to be a curse. I got an email today from someone preparing a talk for tomorrow night saying
I have the same problem putting my power point onto a memory stick - all seems to be linked to files going automatically to Cloud. This means that I will have to use my own laptop. [i.e. as opposed to the one in the meeting room].
I'm not sure what he means but the worst case scenario could be that, deprived of an internet connection, his laptop might not work either.
Simple solution: if a patent office lets through an invalid patent it should be responsible for the whole of both sides' legal costs. It's then up to the office to decide whether the best solution is to simply pay or to limit its risk by more thorough examination and also to adjust its prices in accordance. My guess would be that an equilibrium would be reached where the price would pay for examination sufficient to chuck out the most obvious, reduce trollage by making the costs more expensive and ensuring that patents that were actually granted would be worth the cost.
Unfortunately half votes don't work. I'd charge for driving home as well. Actually IME the drive home represented actual value added. Several times once the inhibition of what was on the screen was removed and the conscious mind was occupied by driving, the subconscious would suddenly pop up the solution to the current problem.
Unfortunately half votes don't work. I'd charge for driving home as well. Actually IME the drive home would have been worth paying for. Several times once the inhibition of what was on the screen was removed and the conscious mind was occupied by driving, the subconscious would suddenly pop up the solution to the current problem.
"It's suited the vocally anti-social to work from home"
Does not compute. Working from home might suit those who might be classified as anti-social because they don't want to get involved in group communications. But the vocally anti-social? How would it suit them not to have anybody to shout at?
"I'd be willing to bet Amazon are sitting on a bunch of metrics"
I''d be willing to bet that such metrics don't show the amount of unpaid time staff spend on commuting. It's very easy to show productivity when you only include part of the time that those doing the producing are actually contributing to your company.
It's easy for programmers to think that the value of IT is in the code. The real value to a business is in the data; that comprises all the work in progress, on order, accounts and information held for regularity reasons. Without it the business can't function and can't meet tax or other requirements for keeping records. Backward compatibility is about far more than running your new code on older H/W.
It's all very well having an LLM tweak code or rewrite it based on analysing the code to work out what it does. But it also needs to analyse the existing data to work out what that tells the business which might not be explicit in the code.
