Posts by Doctor Syntax

Pop!_OS 22.04: New kid on the Ubuntu block starting to show real muscle

By the few good parts of W10 do you mean those where it's finally caught up with KDE?

The word "modern" appears a few times

I always take that as a warning.

They could write their own and call it Crackle.

Indian government hauls Infosys in to explain non-compete clause

Re: Indian Law...

You have to wonder at the mentality of manglements who entrust their IT to a business with staff churn at that level.

Windows 10 still growing, but Win 11 had another bad month, says AdDuplex

Re: Seconds out... round 3

MS will work to fix the problems and over time (a year or two) the new version will become usable...

at which time MS will make it EOL.

Re: So which is it?

Asking costs nothing. He can make up his mind what to buy when he sees the price.

Ex-Googlers take a stab at building 'general intelligence' that makes software do what you tell it

Re: the ambitious goal of teaching machines how to use "every software tool and API in the world."

Cottage industries were how everything was done before industrialisation. Isn't burning through VC funds major industry nowadays?

"every software tool and API in the world."

That's a problem, right there. It will spend all its time training as the rest of the software world adds new tools & APIs and makes breaking changes to existing ones.

"carry out someone's commands on its own initiative"

I'm not sure "someone's commands" and "its own initiative" aren't two separate and conflicting things.

BT starts commercial trial of quantum secured London network

Re: UK government has signalled its intent to develop the country into a "quantum-enabled economy"

As it understands none of it it can quite easily back all of it without any hint of cognitive dissonance.

Microsoft points at Linux and shouts: Look, look! Privilege-escalation flaws here, too!

Re: "most distributions don't even package"

I see it listed by synaptic which at first sight looks odd as this is Devuan but, of course, Devuan falls back to Debian (11 in this case) repositories for what it doesn't maintain itself. So although you might not be running you would be able to see it listed there.

Re: Please note.

As a Devuan user I know that very well.

from the man page: "networkd-dispatcher - Dispatcher service for systemd-networkd connection status changes"

Ah, systemd.

Algorithm can predict pancreatic cancer from CT scans well before diagnosis

"the team doesn't really know what it is analyzing when it makes its predictions."

This is a big problem and common to so much of this ML stuff. It would probably be more useful in the long run to understand exactly what the significant features are in biological terms. That way there might be scope for preventative measure.

It's not helped by the fact that the fact that the sample is small.

Study: How Amazon uses Echo smart speaker conversations to target ads

And it will still deliver ads for the wrong thing:

1. Pick out some key word and throw up anything that has the same word in the description (example, try searching for a DPDT toggle switch and count the hits that are SPDT,DPST, centre-off, i.e. triple throw or not toggle swtiches).

2. People who bought this also bought...something completely irrelevant; it was a small sample but we don't care.

Re: How far will they be willing to go?

They'll just trget ads at legislators.

Smart contract developers not really focused on security. Who knew?

Are bugs in the contract code even the main problem? The Beanstalk heist, for instance, was accomplished by gaming the system. If the code is bug-free but the system can be subverted simply by throwing a large amount of virtual money at it by way of a flash loan then the system has no security.

It's not just a matter of doing things right, you also have to do the right things.

"they may be shoddier still due to disinterest in security among smart contract developers"

Is that really disinterest or simply lack of interest?

Heresy: Hare programming language an alternative to C

Re: Can someone explain the advantages in the language please?

"is the amount of effort that goes into creating a new language significantly less than working out how to overcome the shortcoming in the original language?"

The same applies to the effort of everyone else in learning the new language.

"More than 300 programming languages have existed at one time or another. Hare aims to serve as an alternative to C"

Sometimes it seems that there have been more than 300 programming languages just in the "alternative to C" category or even in the "alternative to alternative to C" category.

Oh, look! Another!

Crooks steal NFTs worth '$3m' in Bored Ape Yacht Club heist

Assorted NFTs - $3million.

Learning by experience - priceless.

Re: 3 million?

"I'm confused by the valuation"

You're meant to be. The valuation was given by a business that makes money dealing with these [no]things and has a vested interest in giving them high valuations.

Elon Musk set to buy Twitter in $44b deal, promises stuff

"there are no serious regulatory hurdles to overcome"

Given Musk's previous history with US financial regulators over his use of Twitter I can't imagine them being enthused by this. Whether they have cause to act, other than take a long time to review it, I don't know. Apart from that, non-US countries are increasingly reacting to the behaviour of multinational online businesses, e.g.the EU's Digital Services Act. I think a good few of them are going to want to take an interest.

I'd have thought this is only the start. He'll need to get acceptance from the rest of the existing owners, the shareholders. Then he'll need to get regulatory acceptance. It could be a long-running story.

Intuit sued over alleged cryptocurrency thefts via Mailchimp intrusion

The longer the supply chain the greater the attack surface. That should be obvious to the meanest intelligence. Unfortunately Mailchimp's customers are marketing departments so they fail to clear that bar.

Flaw could have granted criminals control over Ever Surf crypto wallets

Is storing or controlling any form of currency really a good place to move fast and break things?

Google Docs' AI-powered inclusive writing auto-correct now under fire

Re: IBM: Ethics is a major roadblock to enterprises adopting AI technology

Interesting, scrolling down that article. It gets to a point of comparing States' grants to large corporations. If non-US countries take such measures they get sanctioned. Where are the ethics in that?

Re: We all work for Google now...

It is. Would you just say "to and"?

Re: Just wait

the "semi" would cause offence by implying inadequacies.

And, of course, music should not be written with notes shorter than quavers.

Oh dear, "quaver" sounds a bit inadequate as well. And "crotchet" sounds altogether to much like "crotchety" (other offences are available to be taken). "Minim" sounds inadequate as well and "semi-breve" brings up the original problem. Non-offensive music is going to be a bit slow and rhythmically dull.

Re: Not a good suggestion

I wonder what it would do with "pregnant pause".

Re: Orwellian nightmare

I hear the older generation say it but then some people can't change keep up with the diktats of when yesterday's approved language suddenly becomes disapproved.

Let's be blunt about this. There are professional offence takers and if they didn't keep doing this they'd run short of offence to take.

Re: Orwellian nightmare

Maybe "offensive language" just means speaking in an English accent.

Re: know the unknowable

You only need to understand the receiver. A fundamental rule about communication is that what is communicated is that which is received, not that which is transmitted. The living proof of this is those in sales and marketing who are unable to grasp that what they transmit as meaningful marketing messages is received as spam.

Now you've pushed me into an area familiar from long ago - composing formal witness statements based on scientific evidence. About 40 years ago a colleague and I fantasised about a system into which we could feed data and get out terms ranging from "Could not be..." via "Not entirely inconsistent with..", "Consistent with.." etc to "Is...".

Shortly after that I went for a job interview including a psychological assessment which consisted of a tick-box questionnaire. As far as I could make out the processes was as follows. The questions, which were not as context free as the systems devisers probably thought, were weighted for various traits. The system carried out a multidimensional analysis based on this and then attempted to fit a further set of axes such as creativity on this space. Finally it spat out a series of (in my case complementary) phrases based on the scores on those axes.

My colleague and I were very impressed by this. But I still didn't get the job.

Re: say the unsayable

The PR industry has, of course, used such a system for years. Tell it what has befallen your company and it will select appropriate meaningless phrases from its stock of "Only a few users/customers were/are affected", "We take your security very seriously" etc.

Of course hindsight says 10 years. It's always been 10 years.

"AI-powered system designed to help people write punchier documents more quickly."

A system which provides the writer with anodyne words & phrases might succeed with "more quickly" but will certainly fail with "punchier".

"We are only probably 10 per cent of the journey in [artificial intelligence]"

But we'll get there in 10 years.

Re: Not a good suggestion

In fact "landlords" are not necessarily property owners. We still refer to pub tenants as landlords.

Also, where property is sublet the occupant's landlord won't be the owner.

Your AI can't tell you it's lying if it thinks it's telling the truth. That's a problem

Re: It's not the AI that needs fixed

"I had to get my birth certificate to demonstrate the incorrectness."

And the birth certificate isn't proof of identity of its bearer. The bank was selecting the wrong source of data.

I take it this was some time ago as (a) finding a bank branch is hard enough now and (b) finding that the bank staff are sufficiently empowered to fix their mistakes is virtually unknown.

Where does rejecting the evidence that you're wrong fit into that?

"programmatic fraudsters intent on deceiving the advertising industry"

There's something inescapably self-referential about that clause.

"This problem isn't unique to ML. It plagues chip design, bathroom scales, and prime ministers."

With Prime Ministers it's easy to tell when they're lying. Their lips move.

EU eyes tech giant revenues as Digital Services Act clears hurdles

Hopefully the outcome won't be revenues in fines but more honest services for EU citizens, the lucky so-and-sos.

Not to dis your diskette, but there are some unexpected sector holes

"thanks Panasonic for the worm drive that you couldn't actually use to write video DVDs"

Thanks also for the DVD player that wrote in a proprietary format until "finalised" - and that then died leaving an unusable disk with an unreadable several minutes of video of my new granddaughter.

Re: Love "Duh!" moments! It's the techie life that chose me!

"I was wrong."

Oops. "It was wrong."

Point proven.

Microsoft exposes glue-free guts of the Surface Laptop Studio

"Ravenscroft did not reassemble the device once stripped,"

The old Haynes manual rule applies. Reassembly is the opposite of disassembly. <Waves hand vigorously>

Debian faces firmware furore from FOSS freedom fighters

"On the one hand, it saves a few cents in the BOM, on the other it means you have to trust and distribute foreign, closed-source, unfree (which is more of an issue for some) code."

Look at it in another way. Your alternative is a few more cents on the BOM and having to trust that the firmware that's now immutable is also immaculate.

Re: I like Debian, but it has its own share of a*holes too.

You do know, don't you, that Debian resolved the trademark issues with Mozilla years ago and that IceWeasel and relatives are no longer a thing?

Or maybe you don't.

Re: It's a curious distinction to make

You also have to trust the microcode in the CPU. And long ago if you trusted the microcode that came in the chip but didn't trust OS-downloaded microcode you had a Pentium that couldn't divide correctly.

"The problem is that these days, if you don't need that software present the moment the computer is powered on, you can save a few cents per unit by omitting the ROM chips, and having the OS load the devices' firmware when they're initialized. It's still firmware, but now the OS on a different processor reads it from a file and uploads it into the device's onboard RAM."

The more significant benefit to the H/W user, if not to the vendor, is that by loading the firmware into onboard RAM it can be upgraded without having to replace the ROM or go through the always slightly risky process of flashing an EPROM. The same applies to microcode.

Except for extremely simple peripherals* the choice isn't going to be between firmware and no firmware, it's going to be between firmware that can be upgraded in that fashion and firmware that can't, but even if you choose the latter you're still going to have to trust the vendor.

* If such things are still available you could choose a motherboard with just old-style serial and parallel interfaces. It would at least remove the dilemma because you're not going to have anything on which to load your OS.