Posts by Doctor Syntax

Rollable laptop displays to roll off the production line from April, says Samsung

Re: Hmm

At one time I had a square X terminal. That was OK but only a mega-pixel. These days I'd want more pixels. And bigger, my eyes not being as young as they were.

Re: Hmm

Different use cases.

These days I spend a good deal of time dealing with maps but also a little working on panoramas. Currently working on a book - in fact I should be doing that rather than being here - where I'm planning on splitting maps with a wide E/W spread or panoramas across the double spread. Width is what counts for that.

Apart from the material being edited most graphics applications have palettes, toolbars & whatnot to the sides* so again, width is important although with a tall screen it would simply be a matter of re-jigging the layout.

I also find it useful to have the document being written and source material side-by-side and again a wide screen is best there; vertical stacking would be OK but probably suboptimal.

* Back in the day that also applied to a lot of IDEs I used.

Re: My ears!

You watched a promotional video with the sound on? Why?

Is that a bird’s nest, a wireless broadband base station, or both?

Re: They're employing birds to do the work too?

Do they have enough cranes in stork?

Scammers exploit UK's digital landline switch to swipe cash

"According to some estimates, about 16 percent of UK consumers fell victim to phone scams back in 2023"

And is that surprising? Following the online crumb trail to report a scam call leads to a page which gives advice about bot being scammed with an otpion to report that you have been scammed. There is no option to report what might well be new scams to let them chase up scammers.

Then there are alternatives for reporting nuisance calls, calls to TPS-registered lines and marketing calls. The latter, rather like advertising standards, seems to be run by the weasel marketing industry who, AIUI, allow themselves to overlook TPS if they're conducting "surveys". There needs to be a single reporting channel, run by OFCOM with action taken. Either that or my oft-mentioned idea of transfer charging nuisance callers of all stripes to pay the callees.

Court docs allege Meta trained its AI models on contentious trove of maybe-pirated content

"Training large LLM's requires so much data that I believe it will be impossible to adhere to all of the licensing of the materials that have been used for training"

Let's make a similar argument about money:

"I want so much money that it's impossible for me to get enough without adhering to the laws about theft."

Is that OK?

And let's address the bit about writing books. If you read and understand several advanced text books you might very usefully write a book aimed at explaining the subject to an audience that needs an easier to understand or shorter version. But that book needs to come from your understanding. Understanding is very different from being able to produce a word salad derived from the books.

Hands-on jobs to grow fastest, because AI can't touch them

As with any survey, one of the first steps in evaluating its results is to find out who was surveyed. in the case of WEF it's likely to be those levels of management most detached from reality.

Trump China tariffs to 'overshadow' the 'progress' of AI PCs

"It seemingly is going to be impossible to avoid an AI PC by 2027"

It would be quite easy. Don't buy anything, just use whatever you have for another year.

Microsoft trims jobs as new year begins

Getting in position to circle the drain.

What happens when someone subpoenas Cloudflare to unmask a blogger? This...

Re: First Amendment

AFAIK it applies to Congress' ability to legislate against free speech.

But would SLAPP ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation ) not be the more relevant defence here?

NASA's lunar Roomba set to suck up Moon dirt for study

It can do a bit of mapping at the same time.

We did warn you – 2025 may be the year AI bots take over Meta's 'verse

What if the advertising bubble bursts?

Re: Anyone who advertises on metà is an Idiot

Make that "anyone" "any marketing department" and it becomes clear. Their jobs depend on having an advertising budget and spending it.

DNA sequencers found running ancient BIOS, posing risk to clinical research

Re: Security 'research'

"It's not like most attackers are going to aim to target something like this"

Biomedical businesses are increasingly targeted these days.

Quantum? No solace: Nvidia CEO sinks QC stocks with '20 years off' forecast

Wow. Doubled the usual only a decade away.

The channel stands corrected: Hardware is a refresh cycle business now

Re: Pardon my ignorance. . .

AKA box shifters. (Careful with spelling)

Re: Money dear boy

For many of us a bottom of the line MacBook would present visibility problems.

Going slightly, but not very far, OT is there any way that elReg's Post Comment window can have the same font size as the posted comments?

As Tom says above, an RPi400 or the like would be suitable for most situations an might well fit the lower income home family budget but PC box-shifters* aren't going to demean themselves. It wouldn't give them the margins. It will probably take them (and Microsoft) a good while to realise that their market is now saturated.

* Yes, I know they like to dignify themselves as The Channel nowadays but that what they always were.

Growth always looks exponential and it never is. Whatever space something is growing into is finite. Whatever resources are needed is finite. In the early stages these are not limiting factors so growth looks exponential but it's really the start of sigmoidal growth which flattens out when those factors do become limiting. Any ecologist can tell you that and I'd hope an economist would as well.

What's more, for a longish lived product that applies to the total number of units sold. Monthly/annual sales are just the first differential of that.

TL:DR You're lucky to have replacement sales.

Just when you thought terminal emulators couldn't get any better, Ghostty ships

Re: Wrote one myself once

Ah, Kermit. Used that on a luggable as my regular terminal for what seems like years but probably wasn't. It did get me used to working with small TE windows for years. Nowadays they need to be a bit bigger but at the time several xterms open at once or several of some other TE working in Windows.

Re: Emulators?

"elvis ... try it, you might like it"

Thanks, but I'll stick to nvi.

It might be very fast but by the time comms got to 9600 terminals one could only more or less read a scrolling file if one needed to make head or tail of it.

US watchdog sticks probe into 2.6M Teslas over so-called Smart Summon crash reports

Meanwhile...

... elsewhere in the world of self-driving cars https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/c70e2g09ng9o

UK digital markets watchdog expects to launch investigations within the month using new powers

Re: "a huge imbalance in resources"

I'd also like to see the regulators' costs taken out of the fines with only the residue handed on to the Treasury. Even better, add the costs onto the fine. Also there should be no option to pre-empt matters by paying a fine without admitting guilt. The regulator decides a breach has taken place and then issues a fine. That decision can then be used as evidence in civil claims.

Uncle Sam now targets six landlord giants in war on alleged algorithmic rent fixing

I don't suppose we'd see this pursuit of innocent property developers happening if there was an innocent property developer as POTUS.

Re: Oh fuck off

But doesn't the US have elections for Congress 2 years offset from the Presidential elections? I'd expect there must be a lot of Republicans there already feeling nervous if they can't delay some of the consequences for a couple of years.

FCC boss urges speedy spectrum auction to fund 'Rip'n'Replace' of Chinese kit

Re: Carriers winning

"So what happens when the gear they use ends up with security issues in a few years?"

A few years? How about now?

Elon Musk's galactic ego sows chaos in European politics

Re: God I hate him

Who? There are far too many who fit that description.

Re: "the seventh-largest political party in terms of seats in the House of Commons"

Plans, pledges, budget explanations - no plan survives first contact with reality. Macmillan's comment needs to be remembered by any politician in opposition and any voter reading their manifestos: "Events, dear boy, events".

What you really need to know is how they'll approach the first unexpected event and until you've seen them do that you won't know.

Re: "the seventh-largest political party in terms of seats in the House of Commons"

"The press used the word 'economy' over and over again."

Close enough for quite a lot of the press.

Re: Musk and Farage

It's odd that most of the posts that might be seen as attacking Mush (typo but I'll leave it in) are only attracting a single downvote today. Are all the usual suspects on extended winter break?

Re: "the seventh-largest political party in terms of seats in the House of Commons"

She tanked the market very quickly. Markets don't have as much inertia as the economy. I rather think there's still hangover from Brown as well as Boris dragging the economy.

Re: Chaos is it's own reward

"If he can prevent EU (and EU adjacent) governments from working together to regulate his industries then his profit forecast, share value and bonuses go up."

He's more likely to encourage them than prevent them.

Re: "the seventh-largest political party in terms of seats in the House of Commons"

"If Reform (and Farage) ever did win a majority of seats then it is likely that we would see Liz Truss levels of chaos but going on for 5 years."

About 5 weeks, more likely.

Apple shrugs off BBC complaint with promise to 'further clarify' AI content

It's a multinational, exposed to a lot of different jurisdictions.

Re: Bah!

They'd need to be able to point out how the headline faithfully summarises what was being aggregated. I don't think a selecting words from the source material and disregarding the result of parsing as English the selection as presented is going to be good enough.

"You're reading it wrong."

Now Trump's import tariffs could raise the cost of a laptop for Americans by 68%

I take it this will make the mid-term elections ---- interesting.

Zuck takes a page from Musk: Meta dumps fact-checkers, loosens speech restrictions

This worked out so well with advertising on Twitter.

Dude, you got a Dell, period! RIP XPS, Inspiron, Latitude, Precision

I wouldn't regard anything less than 17 1/2 inch screen as a mobile workstation and that's only because I can't find anything bigger.

Maybe they should have a model called Best One Yet.

Re: Dude! You're getting bloat!

One thing that does matter to those with ageing eyes or those with eye problems at a younger age is screen size. It's not an aspect of the sort of work being done, it's an aspect of being able to use the thing at all. As the biggest is 16" it's not going to be 2nd class to some of us regardless of the tier.

DEF CON's hacker-in-chief faces fortune in medical bills after paralyzing neck injury

I'd have thought that if his condition was aggravated by the insurance company's delay it's they who are going to be out a lot of dollars. But I suppose it works differently in the US.

3Blue1Brown copyright takedown blunder by AI biz blamed on human error

How about:

YouTube requires take-down requests to put up money in escrow, enough to cover the costs of fighting a wrongful request and compensate for the consequences

If the request is implemented and then found to be erroneous the payment goes to the victim

Otherwise, after a due period, the requester gets their money back?

If someone makes requests without due care they're essentially gambling on the outcome and as the outcomes are either stake returned or lose then this could get very expensive very quickly if they do it carelessly at scale.

YouTube get to keep the interest on the money in escrow to make it worth their while.

US adds web and gaming giant Tencent to list of Chinese military companies

"Chinese authorities have told the BBC the listing is a violation of international norms"

It looks as if we're in for four years of the US violating international norms. In fact it's going to become the new normal.

Intel debuts laptop silicon that doesn't qualify for Microsoft's 'Copilot+ PC' badge

Intel has nonetheless proclaimed it enjoys “leadership” in AI PCs.

Does the market really care about such PCs let alone leadership in them?

Windows 11 24H2 can run – sort of – in 184MB

Not good enough to provide the core functionality - pushing adverts.

Can AWS really fix AI hallucination? We talk to head of Automated Reasoning Byron Cook

We ask Cook to comment on a well-known case of AI hallucination, a lawyer who cited cases invented by Open AI's Chat GPT. Cook says it was not quite the kind of hallucination the automated reasoning tool could solve. "We could build a database of all known [legal case] results and formalize them," he says. "I'm not sure if that would be the best application."

If you're going to provide cases to cite in a legal argument I'd have thought that it would be an essential application. Or is he saying that the citation provider isn't the best application?

"What developers do when they don't have that capability is quite conservative, call it defensive coding if you like."

Maybe somebody developing, let's say an HR system, might decide it defensive to check whether getting struck by a motor vehicle and shot in the foot is something that might require sick leave. It might also include things like checking that a driver has delivered all the packages that should have been delivered at a delivery point, checking that everything that went into a warehouse can be found when it's time to despatch and a whole lot of other things that Amazon coding doesn't do.

After China's Salt Typhoon, the reconstruction starts now

"that would clean things up in a hurry, no?"

In a hurry but not immediately. A few successful prosecutions would be needed to get too many business's attention.