Posts by Doctor Syntax

Waymo hits the brakes after robotaxis keep missing the signs for freeway construction zones

Re: Edge cases

A problem all German cars seem to have. I've always assumed the steering has a strong pull to the right. Maybe it's because they drive on the right back home.

Re: Guess you haven't read articles / seen pictures

It's a long while since I lived there but I don't think they have them any more. But regular Army checkpoints were one thing, UDR were something else. Like waving a green light to mean stop, for instance.

Re: put up a cone or two

Scotland has a slight variation on that.

Britain sending Ukraine an extra 30,000 drones – now 150,000 all up

I suppose it keeps some manufacturing going while HMG dithers about producing something that might be recognisable as a defence policy. A few companies seem to have died of starvation waiting.

Windows devs rerolled old code to save precious bytes

The reason for using the DOM was that XSLT was needed and it was there out of the MS box. I suppose I could have done the entire transformation in one go with SAXON but handling the product in one g would have has its own problems.

Another benefit of doing it the way I did: I validated the XML at the 3rd stage against a schema. That was preferable to validating the entire incoming document. I had no great confidence in the abilities of the other end to get their ML right but if there was an invalid order in the incoming file that one order could be bounced rather than the entire document.

Unfortunately the other end's failure mode was to periodically sending badly formed XML instead which was reject in its entirety at the first step. What I think happened was that the S/W house they used rotated their Indian coders when their visas ran out. The newly arrived recent graduates kept coming across bits of code they didn't understand and sometimes removing it - and eventually their simplified code came across a surname such as O'Neil or O'Malley....

We had to do periodic training. Unfortunately they were too far away to do this with a 2 by 4.

"why have you added a *third* XML parser"

A long time ago I did just that.

The system used an XSLT step based on the Microsoft parser which could assign memory orders of magnitude bigger than the document to construct a DOM*. As the incoming documents consisted of a string of work orders there was much to gain - including memory not consumed by feeding the transform one order at a time. The answer was a SAX parser** which hard coded the expected schema to chop the string of orders into individuals which could be fed to the Microsoft parser. That stopped the Microsoft parser from blowing up when hit with production-sized data.

But there was the possibility of reusing this code for similar purposes for orders from other customers who might well have their own schemata. To enable that I wrote the SAX parser to take a schema with its own namespace. The third parser was in the SAXON XSLT application that only required a transform to be written to convert the customer's data into one that could be fed into my SAX parser. The result was that the same core code could be reused for a number of different contracts with only a new XSL having to be written.

* I don't know if this is still the case but it wouldn't surprise me if it is.

** SAX parsers don't try to construct a DOM so are much more economical of memory. SAXON, of course, is based on SAX; the cloue's in the name.

Re: "The days when literally every byte counted"

ISTR that the Z80 had an instruction that would initialise blocks of memory. It was essentially a block copy to copy a block of memory to another bock. But if a single address, n, had the required value set then the block copy could be set to coy from the block starting at n to the block starting at n+1.

Users claimed they'd never seen a spell checker and panicked at the sight of red squiggles

It's always possible he could have spent decades editing stuff with vi.

Re: I've seen worse

It would probably have been worth their while to give it as a minor task for someone else to get the answers needed for real work and while nepo-baby's spreadsheet kept him away from doing real harm elsewhere.

Re: Simple fix

Paragraph style? You think somebody using Word for order processing knowns about paragraph style let alone apply it?

Re: Don't check that, check this

Probably went so far above his head as to have been inaudible.

"Cooper told On Call the chap who filled in the form was in his 60s, so ignorance of how Word works is plausible and perhaps understandable."

You mean as a mere 60 year old he's not been in the workplace long enough to have encountered it?

In my 80s I think I may have been using Word or alternatives for longer than Cooper has been using oxygen.

An alternative is that the user in question is old enough to have been taught well, knows how to spell and had never triggered a spill chucker with his own typing.

KDE Plasma 6.7 brings the X11 era to a close

Re: No love for an accessibility dumpster fire

I'm with you to some extent but the reason that Linux and all the other FOSS products exist is because someone found none of the alternatives satisfied them so they built their own and shared it. You'd reasonably expect them to start presenting their offering with an explanation as to why they did it.

As to the rest, there are distros such as Devuan who preserve the choice of an init that stays as just an init although at the unfortunate expense of things like some some strange systemd-ish directory tree creeping into /var which is a consequence of too many application developers sucking up the Koolade.

"If you fancy a change from the now-ubiquitous flat look, it’s available to install"

It always has been for KDE applications. I've used Oxygen for years on various versions. The trouble is getting 3rd party applications that take any notice. Very few browsers do and when you try to use the current version of one you find half the web sites have developers who, have never heard of it so, in their wisdom, tell you that it's out of date.

Enshittification rules.

Transport for London keeps Capita behind wheel of road charging ops in £912M extension

Perhaps the downvoters would care to explain their view a little better - or perhaps they think it should be blocked sold? I expected better than that - at least some sort of argument.

London's situation is the inevitable consequence of an economic model that concentrates all commerce in limited areas. It draws in people from thousands of square miles to work there - I used to be one of them. It means intolerable journeys by public transport for all except the relative few who live and work in places convenient to the same rail line or bus route.

A better solution would be to disperse work-places closer to were people live - including working at home - and convert some of the redundant office space into homes* for the rest of the staff of the remaining workplaces. I don't see that much scope for adding more tube lines - fitting it into the foundations, sewers and all the other underground services seems to have been a nightmare for the construction of the Elizabeth Line. However for those managing big cities attracting more and more businesses to them is a form of willy-waving so rational decisions are reisted and never associated with the resulting transport problems.

* I see from a recent report that Belfast has started recycling some redundant office space into hotels and a nursing home. Belfast was never as bad as London, largely because it's a fraction of the size.

Like so many organisations TfL is s business with a huge IT component. And like so many it still fails to realise that IT should be a core competence and that it should run things itself. For the sake of not looking utterly stupid by not doing so it decides it has to re-let the outsourcing contract every several decades. In doing so it means throwing away all the work that went into developing the systems - for which it has, of course paid - in order to pay again to have them redeveloped by somebody else.

The payoff is in avoiding London being blocked solid.

2,000 retired Google Pixel phones get a second life as a private cloud

"using 2,000 Pixel Fold smartphones courtesy of Google"

Is this telling us they weren't selling without telling us they weren't selling?

UK Cabinet Office hiring AI and innovation 'influencer' to build 'AI-first culture' in civil service

"A capable SEO or grade 7 can earn half again as much walking across the road to a consultancy or a bank"

But aren't you always telling us how wonderful the pension schemes are?

I had and backronym for "hubris" that met the case for these sorts of statements (BoJo was particularly liberal with them) but I can't remember all of it. I suppose it must be age. Bowl of Petunias covers them and much more.

Re: "country that is equipped for an AI world"

AI and culture have a great deal in common. That's the sort of culture one grows on an agar plate in a Petri dish.

"My ambition is for the civil service to be a global leader in ... "

Usually it's the UK rather then the CS but - "Oh no, not again"

Google told researcher 'Nice catch!' Then denied bug bounty for flaw it still hasn't fixed

If there's no flaw then if he were to publish some code it couldn't possibly be an exploit so they couldn't blame him because he wouldn't have done anything that he could be blamed for and they wouldn't be having a Nightmare such as Microsoft have.

Committed skeptic finds himself warming to new Amazon AI products that actually don't suck

"Amazon has spent the last three years breathlessly telling us that they're a leader"

The leader in totally hopeless search of their own products.

Search for a books by an author and at least a third of the hits are sponsored from authors whose name in no way resemble that searched for and a good few others with partial name matches -same surname plus or minus a few spelling variations and different initials.

Search for a 17" screen laptop just using the search terms and all screen sizes are mixed up. Go to the side bar to tick on a screen size box and you get 16" as the only option.

Try storage drives and you find a 5 3/4 hard drive has been slipped into the selection when you looked for laptop drives.

A bit of feedback and they could, maybe, use AI to improve things, say tick boxes for This it eh sort of thing I was looking for, This doesn't match and Do you really want me to quit and got to eBay?

Estonia intends to recognize AI agents with digital IDs

Interesting philosophical question

The Estonian Prime Minister has an Estonian digital ID. If Estonian AI agents have Estonian digital IDs ould the Estonian Prima Minister be replaced by an Estonian AI agent?

Microsoft faces down sueball, capacity problems in series of challenges

"Disgruntled investors have flung a sueball at the company"

As investors they are part of the company. Quite literally. "Company" means the company of people who are the joint owners, the shareholders. So once again we see the spectacle of shareholders looking for a payout which must come from their own funds - it has to be their own funds because they own everything in the company, including the money in the bank - less, of course, all the money they'll directly and indirectly* spaffed on lawyers.

* Indirectly because they'll also spend the money they own from the company's bank account to defend themselves, as shareholders, from the claim they're making as shareholders.

SQL Server may be too lucrative for Microsoft to ditch, but too legacy to love

"it's not that I'm angry at Microsoft for what they've done to SQL Server, I'm just disappointed,"

But this is the view of someone who makes his living commenting on what's new. Given MS's devs' propensity to breaking stuff when they add features no news is good news from users' PoV.

DARPA seeks swappable satellites to help with future star wars

Once enough satellites have been blown up in orbit there'll be no point in launching more, at least not into the same orbit and even trying for something a bit higher will have risks.

A modest proposal: Reformat everything to make documents more palatable to AI

"The doclang will be the output from a non AI tool that translates any input into token-saving AI format before it is presented to an LLM."

The non-AI tool can, of course, be easily vibe-coded.

Re: PDF and AI

AI to consider energy cost? There's novelty!

France's digital sovereignty push is struggling to escape the Microsoft gravity well

"So we have some problems sometimes, and people are saying that it is not working, and we say, 'Yeah, so you just use different software'…"

Run an exercise to "test" what would happen if Trump were to sanction France and tell Microsoft to suspend service; block all Microsoft domains at the firewall for 24 hours.

"It's not working."

"Yeah, so you just use different software."

It's what would have to happen if push came to shove.

UK AI hiring surges as firms seek people to babysit the bots

Re: I think it goes something like this.

"If Mike is sensible" after training the AI he'll require his new wage to by at least 50% higher. After all, he knows where all the bodies are buried in the training he gave it.

Re: Recruit for luck, not talent

"Sadly, in my experience, people who know what they are doing are hard to come by."

Which makes laying them off extremely stupid.

"the hiring surge appears to be concentrated in a surprisingly old-fashioned category: people who know what they're doing."

I can't escape the feeling that it would be simpler to hire people who know what they're doing to do the work rather than hire them to fix the mess made by the LLM that doesn't know what it's doing but has been used to do the work.

US clampdown on Anthropic models sends EU sovereignty surge into overdrive

Re: BritAIn without AI

Don't worry. I doubt Palantir will be turned off. What would the US do without its Whitehall insider?

Palantir's NHS data deal called in for a second opinion

Condemned by their own arguments

"Palantir said the results of its technology in the NHS were already evident as 110,078 additional patients have undergone procedures in hospital theatres since the FDP product was implemented. Nearly 7 percent more patients with referrals for suspected cancer were now receiving answers within 28 days compared to the 12 months before FDP, it said."

If they were simply running a platform for the NHS they wouldn't know this. This is an admission that they're looking at the data for their own purposes.

Britain plots digital bedtime after kicking under-16s off social media

"UK loves their oppression and erosion of freedoms."

Do you think the comments in this thread (assuming most of them are from the UK) support that thesis?

If you'd said the main UK political parties and added the words "of the populace" you might have been right.

You might also spend some useful time thinking about how one person's freedom might impact on another's, how to mediate that and whether freedom must necessarily come with responsibility for society to thrive.

Re: When we label all politicians as bad we enable bad politicians

"I don't know how we fix that"

A start would be for all the people like the OP to stand for election so that we will have someone of their obvious principled outlook to vote for. I appreciate it's much harder work than being onlookers decrying the motives of everyone in politics but it's the obvious step that they would take if they felt so strongly about it.

Re: Papers Please!

"They could ban kids owning smartphones,"

Apart from making pone calls (do any of them do that?) you can do anything a smartphone can do on a POC (Plain Old Computer).

Re: No problem...

Also, don't forget the ongoing damage of the actual NuLabour scum. The unaffordable student loans, the stupidly high house prices, the end of final salary pensions, government at the mercy of bond markets ...

Re: Australia+

Given the more generalised harm that comes from mindless tinkering with the medium on which so much of our daily business is conducted I don't think "damp squib" is quite right. More like the grenade that explodes before you've time to throw it.

Re: A few minor points

16 year olds are to be given the vote, but cannot be trusted when to stop viewing "social media"?

It's going to make canvassing votes from those new voters - interesting.

Re: Papers Please!

"Please" won't be needed.

"The government said it intends to follow Australia's model by targeting user-to-user platforms whose primary purpose is social interaction and user-generated content. That would include services such as Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X."

That definition also includes email. Is he targetting that?

Also, banishing disappearing messages isn't going to go down well with all the other politicians. How would they be able to plot against each other if that happened?

Flatpak-NG sounds like bad news for systemd refuseniks

Re: Yes, please!

"Could you do better?"

First define "better". The view of those of use disliking systemd, and the rest is that things have already been done better, weren't broken and didn't need to be fixed.

"six other init systems besides systemd, and we've seen little sign of them cooperating to create an alternative to systemd that provides even a subset of its wider functionality"

I'd guess it's because those six and their users all see the absence of that wider functionality as a feature.

UK Treasury hunts CTO on salary that may not compute for top tech talent

Re: Microsoft Treasury 365

"The job is to administer it and look accountable."

The job title they were looking for is "scapegoat".

AI is code – and can't be prompted into being smarter

Re: In support of Plain English

It would have been safer for him to have specifically said what it would do in the event of use by an AI and/or said "you must back up your work before using this".

Nevertheless, it's deeply satisfying.

Re: Hilarious article leads to question

It's called the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Mixing code and data has always been considered a Bad Thing. Nice to see a demonstration.

BOFH: For one ambitious security type, chaos is a ladder

The lead candidate might think he's got a couple of allies but if he's any sense he'll be lining up his next job.