Posts by Doctor Syntax

As Xi and Putin chase immortality, let's talk about digital presidents-for-life

Re: Assuming it's actually possible

They're good at politics. They're just not good at running countries.

For a good read with a discussion of what if relating to history and in particular the war of 1812 thrown in I suggest The Old Vengeful by Anthony Price.

He couldn't invade in 1805, agreed. By 1812 things had changed. For one thing we were also at war with the US.

Perhaps the main lesson is that having made successful choices in the past is no guarantee that the next choices will also be successful. That's why all this idea of reconstructing the mind of someone successful is so idiotic. You know what their correct choices were, You should know that your reconstruction would not be expected to continue to do so.

"for the remainder of their lives"

Living for ever is not just a matter of biotech. A small piece of lead is sufficient to change that and indefinitely frustrating the next dictators in waiting let alone the frustrations of those whom they rule is not a good means of avoiding that.

"See told me sufficient material exists to create AI-powered interactive versions of historical figures like Napoleon"

What-ifery. The trap that lies waiting for would-be historians. What if Napoleon had continued with his plan to invade England instead of switching to Russia? Ditto Hitler.

Napoleon died a couple of centuries ago. There's no way of asking him why he took such an ill-advised decision. There's no telling what his reaction would have been to any situation since then. It's just guess-work dressed up as high tech. Utter nonsense.

UK tech minister booted out in weekend cabinet reshuffle

Re: how do such imbeciles get put in charge?

It's not really that bigger pool from which to select. If you're good at the sorts of things that governments have to decide about you should be able to make a living in the private sector and possibly a better one than MPs' or even Ministers' salaries. You know that even if you go into politics, however good your intentions, you're going to be immediately bad-mouthed by multitudes who know nothing about you, can't be bothered to find out and immediately assume the worst,* and you're going to find that unless you're very lucky, most of your constituents disagree with your politics** and are against you for that reason. The consequence is that too many of those who do decide on politics are the people least suitable for office.

TL;DR If you're capable of running a whelk stall you'll probably choose doing that over politics.

* For which reason if for no other we get the politicians we deserve.

** Even amongst those who support your party will decide you're on the wrong wing of it.

Re: "cabinet reshuffle"

I think that all too often the reason is that few of them show any sign that they'll learn how to do their job properly.

Re: Meh

I rather suspect that having gone to several advisors to ask for specialist advice and been told "Here's or advice but you need to ask for specialist advice" that the reality would be that any further advisor would have much the same response and that you really weren't going to get any further.

Re: "join up public services"

Yes, because you don't know them. It introduces a little randomness into the tracking statistics.

Re: Who?

By definition only the MP's own site will be more biassed (in their favour) than their department's. Those most strongly biased against will be those with easily spotted axes to grind. For the rest multiple sources will average out.

Re: Come invest in the UK! Give us your keys too.

Much the same way as in the US. And elsewhere.

Have you considered standing for public office? If not, why not and does that go some way to answering your question?

Re: Meh

I'm not a Labour supporter. Nevertheless I see Rayner as far from the bottom of the barrel although her living arrangements do seem to have left her constituency without their MP having a pad there.

Re: Out Of The Frying Pan, Into The Fire

I agree about Liz Kendal's lack of STEM educational background. However her CV as far as one can rely on Wikipedia is a bit more reassuring. It will be interesting to see which way she steers this stuff.

Re: In other NEWS

No new deckchairs were purchased in the course of this rearrangement.

Re: Who?

Or even better, a way of searching for multiple, possibly less biassed sources of information.

So much for the paperless office: UK government inks £900M deal for printers etc.

Re: Now Print This: What a shit decision!

And the ink for the cheap device will be particularly expensive. That's why the device is cheap. The prices are probably carefully calculated that it's just a little more expensive to keep sending the devices to land fill and buy another then to buy new ink cartridges.

Re: Wet sign...

Signing every page is a protection against pages being substituted. It's no protection against a page being removed so it's as well to check that the pages are numbered. It's also as well to check that the pages say what you intend them t say.

I had a few instances where my witness statements were edited and retyped. This isn't necessarily wrong; the original may have referred to people who were suspects at the time of the original investigation but not before the court for which the statement was being retyped. I did, however, have an instance where the revised statement omitted a piece of negative evidence which could have been of significance to the defence (it was a complaint against the police* so the omission was not a case of the police looking after their own) but was assured that the originals would also be available to the defence. Taking no chances I took copies of the originals to court and found that none of the lawyers had been provided with them.

There was a well-known case of someone being scapegoated for an omission. Nobody raised the issue at trial, not even the defending barrister who subsequently raised the case years later. That part of the evidence was so insignificant that it wasn't even included in the judge's summing up. The guy eventually lost his job. The case was heard in a different jurisdiction from where it was investigated so I suspect the evidence had been retyped in different form and he hadn't noticed the omission when he signed the new document.

* The complainant didn't turn up at court so the hearing didn't actually happen.

Red Hat back-office team to be Big and Blue whether they like it or not

For some value == price. By definition cheap Suse and Ubuntu can't be as good as much as RHEL. Debian is obviously out of the question.

"We have now micromanagement, decision making from middle management that clearly have no idea of what we do and how and trying to implement ideas that they read somewhere, with no context, data and not giving answer or addressing feedback."

Nevertheless the product remains reassuringly expensive for those manglements who need to tick the "Is product supported?" box or want somebody to sue if it all anything goes wrong.

Pre-owned software trial kicks off in UK as Microsoft pushes resale ban

I've seen batches of laptops on offer as refurbished with a note that some might have W11 installed and some might not but with instructions as to how to install it (possibly they may have had W10 and the instructions would be how to upgrade although I'd have thought the need for instructions would have been more relevant for those who wished to avoid an upgrade). Of course if I'd bought one neither version of Windows would have been my upgrade.

AIUI an OEM licence is keyed to the machine and not separable from it so you'd have nothing to pass on. Back in the day there used to be licence stickers for sale on eBay. Maybe there still are.

Are they claiming this extends to 2nd hand PCs & laptops which originally came with Windows pre-installed?

Ubuntu users left waiting after Canonical's servers take weekend off

It looks like they reported down time on the main server but not on the mirrors which would have been more realistic. It also looks as if some (?all) the mirrors were mid-sync. Maybe they needed to completely re-sync to ensure consistency. It's something the .deb world needs to look at in case it's a problem that affects other server/mirror systems.

French datacenter biz signs 12-year nuclear pact with EDF

EDF puts a given amount of energy into the grid. Data4 take a given amount of energy out. Even if it were in some way possible to identify 40MW of the energy they take out as having been put in by EDF it would simply mean that that 40MW was unavailable for other users whose energy might then have to me supplied by burning fossil fuel.

And yet people have been paid to draw up such agreements and publicise them.

It's AI all the way down as Google's AI cites web pages written by AI

Re: A few points.

Your examples are based on a particular jurisdiction which raises a further interesting problem: so are correct responses. Unless the model is provided with information about the circumstances in which each item i=of training data is applicable and those which are relevant to the prompter then the output, while correct in some cases, may not be for the person to whom it's given.

VMware's in court again. Customer relationships rarely go this wrong

Re: £100million ?

Nobody to sue. If you have that outlook you get what you deserve.

Re: "At some point, this has to stop"

"their bonus shares vest"

In order for that to be worthwhile the shares need to have value.

After nearly half a century in deep space, every ping from Voyager 1 is a bonus

"We knew that if you filled up to brimming point the spacecraft with all the fuel it ever needed, it'd be OK," recalled Hunt. "We did. But we never told anybody."

The power of the fair accompi and a gift to future decades of science.

If Broadcom is helping OpenAI build AI chips, here's what they might look like

FREE THE UNJUSTLY IMPRISONED PRODUCTION ORDERS!!!

"one of these prospects released production orders to Broadcom"

Released production orders? Does this mean that they have many other production orders trying to get out? What if some of them escape in a mass breakout? Or refuse to leave if they're released?

Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

Re: I'm not in any way a developer...

"The thing that made Github great (and will likely keep it going for a while) was the network effect "

The network effect is positive feedback. It accelerates ravel in the current direction. That works both ways. Once the movement elsewhere starts it becomes unstoppable.

Re: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

Vocabularies are determined by usage.. Enshittification is the established usage. I'm not sure if it's made its way into the OED but if it hasn't its time can't be far off.

US cuffs 475 at Hyundai–LG battery plant – feds tout largest single-site raid

Re: Hmmmm, what day is Kristallnacht this year?

Maybe need to brush up on your reading skills.

Re: anti-EV

"Not sure I would trust the contemporary merkan brains trust with live steam or high pressure boilers."

On second thoughts it might be just what's needed.

UK government dragged for incomplete security reforms after Afghan leak fallout

What a difference a week makes. He's move on. His replacement an an historian.

"Senior minister Pat McFadden"

He's pushing for digital ID for the UK population. Guess how what his IT qualifications are - that's right, an MA in Politics.

I suppose he'll be able to leak everyone's information at one go if he gets his way.

Release of sensitive data needs a proper release process to restrict it to trained individuals, proper sign-off etc.

FCC plans to kill Wi-Fi on school buses, hotspots for library patrons

Re: Control flow of ideas

"My options for doing that are to drop all addresses in the .uk namespace or to not. I do not get to pick and choose."

And if you're a whimsical US president who decides on a whim to drop all country domain addresses in a country that's upset him today, then that would suit you fine. You just pick and choose that country domain.

"spent scarce taxpayer dollars,"

But surely they're not going to be scarce because the tariffs are going to being in bigly big dollars paid for, in some not yet explained way, by all those other countries who have been taking advantage, in some also not yet explained way, of the US.

Trump tells Big Tech: Your power woes? Totally fixable

It sounds like a terrible dinner. The main item on the menu was arse-licking.

What do you propose should happen when we, or our children run out of non-renewables? You realise, don't you, that that's what non-renewable means? Wouldn't it be a kindness to leave a little for them, not necessarily as an energy source, but as feedstock for manufacturing?

Living within our means is a requirement for humanity to continue to have a future on this little blue blob.

No chips for you! Senator wants Americans to get first dibs on GPUs, restrict sales to others

"Guaranteeing Access and Innovation for National Artificial Intelligence"

I suppose national artificial intelligence is needed when there's a shortage of the real thing.

Techie ended vendor/client blame game by treating managers like toddlers

Next time there's an error ask them to please find no fault again.

Frostbyte10 bugs put thousands of refrigerators at major grocery chains at risk

"The reason Copeland created this default admin user "ONEDAY" with a predictable, daily password was due to customer demand, Weaver explained, because it made it easier for refrigeration contractors to remotely access and control the systems. "

Ah, yes. Convenience. It will be so convenient for service to remotely access the systems to fix them after they've been so inconveniently shut down by miscreant who found it so convenient to log in remotely to break them.

Convenience beats security every time.

Norway's £10B UK frigate deal could delay Royal Navy ships

Re: diverted to the new customer

"maybe Norway are paying more for getting theirs early"

The T&Cs, including delivery times, are also part of the product, whether it's frigates or anything else.

"Perhaps making things like the right to vote dependent on service to the nation"

Define "service to the nation".

"most people who actually did it will tell you that it was an utterly pointless waste of their life "

I'm just young enough to have missed it and was quite happy it turned out that way. OTOH I have some cousins who were caught up. One had a couple of years in, I think, the merchant navy and one in the RAF (non-flying) The both enjoyed it, the RAF one was involved with the reserves running the local air cadets for most of the rest of his life. Another was in the army and a bit younger. He ended up in the Korean war and was, I think, affected by it for the rest of his life. It doesn't pay to generalise.

"he majority of young people of today aren't actually willing to fight for their country."

Except in exceptional circumstances the majority of young people aren't needed to fight for their country. In exceptional circumstances attitudes can change.

I was a part-time DBA. After this failover foul-up, they hired a full-time DBA

"Yes, Derek should have RTFM. Has failing to do so led you into trouble?"

The real trouble starts when the manglement read the sales lies blurb and believe it.

No, take a step back - when the vendor reads their specification and believes it. Works in test is not the same as works in production. Works in production on original platform and works in test on ported platform is not the same as works in production on ported platform.

Programmers: you have to watch your weight, too

Re: With all due respect. . .

We're dealing with an essentially chaotic system. The really worrying thing is that sufficient change makes prediction unreliable which the even more frightening aspect. If the northern landmasses get colder does longer snow-lie reduce the Earth's albedo sufficiently to push us into a new ice age*? Or does it stabilise a new, intermediate state? Or oscillate between various states over a period of a few decades?

* AKA ending the current inter-glacial.

If you're freelance the good solution is the key to winning the next gig.