Posts by Doctor Syntax

Beta driver turned heads in the hospital

It depends entirely on what you're using. Plain vi - maybe portrait is OK providing it doesn't sacrifice line length. IDE's I've seen tend to have various panels, toolboxes or whatever lined up side-by-side for which landscape is ideal, otherwise you might end up with a line length of about 30 chars for your code. But even it you're just using plain vi you may well want some sort of reference material in view so that's either a second monitor or two portrait windows side-by-side on a landscape display.

For almost anything I do landscape works out best to cope with several windows open at any one time.

Former IBM services outfit Kyndryl said to be mulling China split

ARM's experience with it's Chinese - errm - arm night be a hint to go carefully here.

More and more LLMs in biz products, but who'll take responsibility for their output?

Re: "There is no liability to the model"

Other jurisdictions might not be quite so prescriptive. It's interesting in that some vendors, e.g. MS & Alamy are saying they'll indemnify against copyright violations*. It's going to become very messy for a while. It could be a question of deciding who's best to sue, balancing depth of pockets for paying compensation vs depth of pockets for defending the case.

* I wonder if that's to discourage whoever called up the material that's being challenged turning witness for the plaintiff against them.

"The simple answer is no,"

The definitive answer is the one the judge gives if the issue ever goes to court.

Zuck dives deeper into the metaverse, dragging Snoop Dogg along for ride

"make judgements about them based on it."

Or make judgements based on judgements of their parents based on what the parents chose to post.

Volkswagen stuck in neutral after 'IT disruption'

TITSUP

Teutonic Industry Totters - Stops, Ultimately - Production

"Some of Volkswagen’s operations have screeched to a halt"

It could be worse. A handbrake turn might have set the lines to run the other way.

NTT will take those SAP licenses off your hands if it helps ease cloud migration

Re: Really?

And because migration out will be even harder.

The alternative to stopping climate change is untested carbon capture tech

Re: Carbon sinks

Forests will achieve a steady state. The standing crop represents carbon not floating about as CO2 but long term it's going to be a fixed quantity.

Re: Carbon sinks

I haven't looked at figures but I've noted in passing comments that simply planting trees isn't going to be adequate. One factor is going to be that it takes some years for a newly planted tree to develop much of a canopy for photosynthesis and mature forest is going to be in more or less steady state with respiration and decay matching photosynthesis. The standing crop represents the CO2 captured in the long time it took to get there. If you look at a substantial tree and take into account the time it took to get to that size it will be a disappointingly small amount of CO2 per year. Less woody materials such as bamboo will be quicker then trees starting from cleared ground although you'd need to harvest them and store them.

It's also worth noting that carbon stored in roots and humus in pasture represents a greater standing crop than arable crops and grazed grassland is a natural ecosystem with which the planet has lived for a long time. That's worth bearing in mind when deciding whether vegetarianism is helpful dealing with climate change* and also remembering that pasture is more floristically diverse than arable, especially if it's not intensively conducted.

* I've never been convinced that it represents anything more than switching methane production from the livestock to the vegetarians.

Re: Carbon sinks

"In absence of oxygen" is the key here. Waterlogged soils, e.e.g peat bogs, can halt decay (but see below) but over the last few centuries these have been drained leading to carbon dioxide being liberated as they decay. Most places you'd bury anything would not be sufficiently waterlogged.

Even in waterlogged soils preservation can vary. Bog oak and pine is pretty solid. On the other hand any sub-fossil birch I came across in my days as a palaeoecologist was usually in a pretty miserable condition so most of the carbon would have been returned to the atmosphere. I have encountered a fairly solid lump of hazel in a core - just where it wasn't wanted.

But on the whole, if you want to bury wood and prevent it being oxidised in any reasonable time frame it needs to be reduced to charcoal.

Re: Carbon capture at home?

If the lithium hydroxide was made from lithium carbonate you only get back to where you started apart from any extra CO2 from the extraction of the carbonate and the generation of the enrgy to convert it to the hydroxide.

Re: Carbon sinks

I wonder how much charcoal the fires leave behind. Unless someone comes along and gathers that for burning it will stay out of circulation for longer than it would have done as timber although obviously it's a small part of what had been the standing crop.

Re: Carbon sinks

Food and fodder gets returned really quickly, textiles less so. Structural stuff should last a good while. There are limits to the rate at which photosynthesis will remove carbon, however. it would be trying to replicate a process which took millions of years to create the fossil fuel in a few decades. That's not going to happen.

Re: Carbon sinks

The carbon fossilised at any one time was a small proportion of the total amount in circulation. You're looking at deposits which formed over periods of millions of years.

If you want to quickly remove a small amount of carbon but ensure it stays out of circulation for a long period you could cultivate some quick-growing woody plant, say willow of bamboo, harvest it, char it thoroughly and bury the charcoal. As any archaeologist will tell you elemental carbon in the form of charcoal is extremely persistent in the ground. You still won't take out much that way and everyone will complain about the smoke from the charring process.

After failing at privacy, again, Google is working to keep Bard chats out of Search

Re: "We're working on blocking them from being indexed now"

It requires forethought, that's why.

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

Re: Pi on the moon

"a cross between a Wagon Wheel and..."

Does that mean it keeps shrinking?

PS If Jamie from The Pi Hut is reading this: 1. It gets thoroughly annoying having everyone who sells something following up with an email touting for feedback/reviews 2. Try looking at your email in plain text and decide if that's the impression you really want to give 3. Opt-out on emails that were never requested is BAD. 5. Spamming from No-reply addresses is WORSE. 6. Note to self - never order from Pi-Hut again.

"anyone else remember their original Morgan Camera Company shop on Tottenham Court Road?"

Yes. Got various Exakta bits from them. And a Star dot-matix printer.

Yes, ironically I've finally got my hands on a Pi 4 - not the one I ordered back when the world was young and was never delivered. As for power supply - I'm still waiting for that, thanks to Amazon's complete inability to deliver and order and a correct locker code at the same time. (Yet more business Amazon lost to eBay.)

Bids for ISS demolition rights are now open, NASA declares

The entire operation is to be run from a hollowed-out volcano.

Re: I know it's old, and I know it's wearing out...

I wonder how many of us had this as our first thought.

Switch to hit the fan as BT begins prep ahead of analog phone sunset

Re: Fibre Network? Don't make me laugh

It was alll hopelessly optimistic any Huawei.

"Yep, it's the grid's fault that sometimes the wind doesn't blow"

The point at issue is not providing communities with redundant connections. Without that one HV line failure and a couple of thousand households go dark.

Actually our longest outage wasn't HV. It was one of the three faults in the couple of hundred metres or so of underground cable between us and the transformer. A fun one. Not only did the power go out but I used the trusty POTS to report both that and the smell of gas. The two mains were side-by-side and the underground shorting (we could feel acoustic shocks under our feet when standing in the road) had damaged the gas main and gas got into the drains and emerged a hundred or so metres away. The gas wasn't cut off (and no >>>>) but the length of electricity outage was delayed by the gas main had to be repaired first and that was delayed due to their insistence that temporary traffic lights had to be installed, manual traffic controls not being acceptable and that was delayed due the first vehicle delivering them breaking down so the whole operation didn't start until after dark although the fault happened at about 10am.

I should have added that I also remember the changeover and the fact it was long delayed in NI because the system was so leaky thatHMG didn't want to waste their North Sea Gas that way.

But back in the days of town gas a school-mate & I had a device for inflating balloons from the gas supply which was lighter than air. Add a fuse made out of paper soaked in sodium chlorate (we were great fans of sodium chlorate) and a few match heads taped on for good measure. The balloon would rise a useful amount, go off with a bang that echoed nicely in the valley and fire burning match heads over the sky. Oh for those days back again!

Re: Waiting game...

"had to pay an Openreach *disconnection fee*"

What happened if you didn't? They reconnected you?

I detect BT manglement thinking at its finest.

Re: Plug into back of broadband hub

Thanks, good to know.

Re: Re:power cuts

And do you make further savings on providing a battery backup?

Round here it's supplied by storage reservoirs set high up. A bit bigger than water towers and only needing pumps to top them up.

"gas holders are not how gas pressure is retained nowadays alas"

Nevertheless we have run gas fires and hob in outages. It's a big network and rather more resilient than the electricity supply.

No. Stratigraphically we're well below where the coal measures. But back in the 1950s there were these people who periodically arrived with wagons selling a few hundredweight of coal at a time.

The majority maybe only last for a few moments and present no threat (except for the one a couple of weeks ago that took out my ancient NAS ago the real killer was the 3 hour one a few days later when I'd got the firmware restored & was running a disk scan). It's the longer ones in winter when hypothermia sets in in the all electric households and nobody can call an ambulance.

There's a difference between pushing us into a brave new world of unreliable power supplies and requiring the electricity supply people to look up the word "resilience" in their dictionaries.

As things go we at least have a gas hob and a couple of gas fires so a power cut still leaves us with heat and limited cooking. Decarbonise utilities entirely and we would be pushed back way beyond the experience of >60 years ago when I grew up in a house without any electricity at all - but had gas and coal fires.

Re: Plug into back of broadband hub

From what I can make out a number of more recent routers have VOIP outlets and there are adapters. The bigger worry is if DV only works with BT lines what are the rest going to do. Last time I spoke to PlusNet I got an airy I'm sure they'll do something. If, as someone up thread mentioned, something is going to be nothing I'll count that as a termination of contract as the contract is for broadband and phone. Zen seem to be offering both and their FritzBox sounds rather snazzy with their reputation even more so.

Re: Absolute chaos

"so if 30 mins after your call, an ambulance is drifting around your village trying to find your address"

Or some other village if you tried What 3 Words & was misheard.

As I read it they're just installing a version of the Digital Voice whatnot back at what's left of the exchange and then running it over the copper as before. Or, cynically, given that the back-haul for the switch is already digital, they're just leaving everything as it is instead of disconnecting it with the rest.

"I have used DECT phones on the landline for probably 25 years."

I've also had DECT on the landline. I also have a POTS phone on it. It works when the power's out on account of a big bank of batteries about 2 miles away at the switch. I call up the electrickery people on it when the power goes off and the mobile signal's playing up.

Re: “Roads? Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Roads” (Doc Brown)

IOW "Works for me"?

I'm wondering how effective battery backup in the home will be if the power in the FTTC footway box isn't backed up. Are these powered from the DC supply at the switch in the same way as POTS?

We seem to have increasing numbers of power cuts recently and mobile signal can't be fully relied on. Longest outage in c 20 or 21 was 17 hours.

CERN experiment proves gravity pulls antimatter the way Einstein predicted

Ah, but as hydrogen balloons rise the fact that antihydrogen falls proves that it does do the opposite.

Mine's the lab-coat hanging upside down.

Linux interop is maturing fast… thanks to a games console

Re: interesting Until....

"If you care about packaging systems then this is not the distro for you."

I have to admit that my initial encounter with Flatpak long ago wasn't very encouraging. The framework thingy which was supposed to sit on top of the distro and provide the libraries or whatever for all the little Flat things to sit on, although allegedly the correct one, wouldn't install, whingeing that something or other it needed wasn't there and wasn't available to install. If the solution that's going to solve installation problems had installation problems it was obviously too broken to consider further so I haven't considered it further. Add to that the fact there were several of these schemes all competing to be the solution for installation problems and it looked as if the solutions were collectively more like a problem in themselves.

So it's not so much that I care about packaging systems, rather than caring not to use any such system above what Debian/Devuan provide out of the box.

AFAICS for something over and above the distro provided packages it's simply a matter of parking a directory in /opt* and that can be done by simply unzipping or untarring it there (e.g. Seamonkey) using the distro-native format but installing in /opt rather than /user (e.g. LibreOffice) or some sort of contraption of its own (e.g. Informix which has a Java installer). Anything more just complicates what should be simple.

* With an entry for the launcher in the desktop manager's menu if needed.

Re: Kvetching

Sodding the "k" sounds like some sort of sex thing.

Doom developer John Carmack thinks artificial general intelligence is doable by 2030

Re: But first...

A simulacrum of 'AI' or 'AGI' may be possible, if the knowledge space it works in is suitably restricted, but true 'AI' / 'AGI' will never be possible until we are able to define what 'Intelligence' means

Before that we need to understand what knowledge is, not in terms of collections of words but in terms of our understanding of the external world at the same level of understanding of species which don't have vocabulary, language or speech.

I think there are multiple ways to fail so you need a more varied vocabulary to specify the particular failure. Pressing existing words into service is a well accepted way of doing this. Do you also complain that motor vehicles are being anthropomorphised by referring to a human gesture (clutch) or piece of anatomy (steering arm)?

One thing we do know about the brain is that it is massively parallel and very much unlike a Turing machine.

Re: Bard says...

They're really mashing up text that they've been given their material is words which only connect with other words. By the time you were capable of saying "Mama" and "Dada" and standing on two feet you were already building an internal model of the real world by virtue of being a physical entity and encountering other physical entities that constitute that external world. Other animal species also do this. Where words enter things is that you then learned to use them as symbols for those external entities and use them to better manipulate and extend that internal model. You associate words with objects in [your model of] the real world. That's what gives them and the ways in which you use them meaning. Those LLM gimmicks only associate words with other words. They have no other model with which to connect them. By drawing on the associations between words they can appear to be indistinguishable from real thought when things fall that way spew garbage otherwise. They have no meanings for the words outside the statistical associations..

That's because the Bar Exam is a series of questions which have been answered many times in the past. Train up on that and there is existing material to answer Bar Exam questions available to be mashed together and regurgitated. Require the preparation of documents for a new case and there is no material which has been prepared for the case so it has to provide a pastiche of the sort of papers it has been asked to prepare without any real guidance of what should be said.

In the Turing test that the prescribed thinking is that if you can't tell after 20 questions if the respondent is human or not, then its' a win for the "AI".

There are help desk agents who could fail the Turing test.

MOVEit breach delivers bundle of 3.4 million baby records

It's as if FTP never existed - nor SCP, SFTP...

Long-term support for Linux kernels is about to get a lot shorter

It's about the age of a lot of Debian by the time it's released!

Currently the two previous versions are still maintained as Old Stable and the two previous to that have LTS which I believe is commercial rather than community. The oldest was released in 2015. Current Stable was released in June this year running kernel 6.1.