Posts by Ian Mason

Britain spends £180M to work out what time it is

Re: Is this really necessary?

You seem to be thinking about withdrawal of one GNSS satellite constellation rather than jamming or spoofing of all of them. GPS, GALILEO, and GLONASS all operate on exactly the same downlink frequency.

Re: 160 million years….

And thanks to the backlog in the courts he is still waiting for a trial date.

Maker fight! SparkFun cuts ties with Adafruit in harassment dispute

Re: FYI LadyAda

"Homage to" or stolen glory?

I'm not saying that is the case, I don't know, but I'm always a little uncomfortable with people who give themselves monikers that smack of self-aggrandisement.

Re: Soap opera

Now, based on past experience of watching Adafruit's rather fragile egoed founders get into spats with people, that has more of the ring of truth to it than how Adafruit seem to be trying to spin this.

I have no skin in this game, just my thoughts as a completely disinterested party.

An endorsement would carry a lot more weight if it wasn't posted as AC.

Why avoid attribution if all you're doing is saying "He's OK"? [the astute will be reading that in Columbia's voice as she comments on Frankie's new playmate]

GOV.UK to unleash AI chatbot on confused citizens

Put your money where your mouth is, HMG.

When they are prepared to indemnify users against any loses, including wasted time and consequential loses then it's ready for prime time. Until then it's just another fevered pipe-dream of a government who wants to be seen to be doing something, while actually treading the well worn rutted path of incompetence that they have been down a million times before.

Calls grow for inquiry into UK data watchdog after MoD leak

Didn't investigate but can brush off things as a "one-off"?

Information Commissioner John Edwards defended his stance at a DSIT-hosted hearing last month, insisting the incident was a "one-off" error rather than evidence of systemic non-compliance inside the MoD.

Erm, how does he know that it's a "one-off" without investigating it. If there is systematic non-compliance surely it takes an investigation to uncover that, or prove that such an accusation is unfounded?

AI music has finally beaten hat-act humans, but sounds nothing like victory

Not quite

"An AI-generated band called Breaking Rust has just hit the top of the Billboard Country chart"

Erm, no. It has hit the top of the Billboard Country Digital Downloads chart. Specifically it has been bought 3000 times.[source: Rick Beato's YouTube video about this incident.] So more likely than not someone paid for 3000 downloads to hype it - no different to the people who used to go around the (supposedly secret) record shops in the UK who were used in compiling the weekly charts buying multiple copies of a single. Breaking Rust's absence from any of Billboard's other charts speaks volumes.

Firefox adds AI Window, users want AI wall to keep it out

I heard a good line ...

I heard a good line today that neatly encapsulates the thinking behind this kind of act; actually behind the whole AI dog and pony show that's destined to implode a few months or a couple of years at most.

"Too many people are just looking to make a quick buck rather than think about what they put into the world.".

Substitute power/influence/regard/whatever for "quick buck" appropriately.

Some like it bot! ChatGPT promises AI-rotica is coming for verified adults

" studies suggest that their use among college students leads to less brain activity "

I suspect that's not a particularly significant finding. It's been a while since I was a college student, but I seem to remember that we could find a myriad of ways to reduce brain activity without getting a computer in the loop, many of them involved the union bar in one fashion or another.

UK government's £45B AI savings pitch built on broad-brush guesswork, MPs told

Roger Needham

With respect to the quote:

the figure was calculated on the assumption that "100 percent of routine tasks and 10 percent of non-routine tasks can be automated."

Roger Needham, the Cambridge Computing professor used to say that "If there is an algorithm for it then it is administration, if there isn't them it is management". If those "100% of routine tasks" can be automated then it just needs very ordinary algorithmic computer programming to deal with them, not fancy pants AI. If the government had ever demonstrated the ability to get a finished, fit for purpose IT project past the finishing line then that is what they need to do. However, they can't, so a much more nebulous AI strategy, with nebulous goals will must better serve the career goals of civil servants, will be what is foisted on us, along with more failures in public services and of course more spending.

I suspect that government is like homelessness. If you just spend the money to put homeless people in houses in the long run it is a very cheap solution, much cheaper than all the indirect schemes to "tackle" homelessness. So spending a load of cash to pension off the 1/2 of the civil service who do nothing actively useful seems expensive, but would yield massive savings on a 5 year plus term.

Trump backpedals as Hyundai factory ICE raid enrages South Korea

Re: Work visas, really? Where are they?

> If a protest is turning into a riot, leave.

So by corollary, if a country is turning itself into a shithole, leave. Y'all might find that Hyundai do exactly that.

Huntress's 'hilarious' attacker surveillance splits infosec community

Re: Businessman attempts to throw shade on competitor's handling of a hilarious situation

Nope, if your employer installs spyware on their machine, that you use for your work for them in Germany then they are breaking the law. Not every country is as lax about what employers can do to employees as whatever country you live in and are drawing assumptions from about how the whole world works.

Long live the nub: ThinkPad designer David Hill spills secrets, designs that never made it

It nearly had a different name.

I used to work at PC Magazine with, among others, Guy Kewney. When the first Thinkpad was being made IBM invited Guy out to lunch to see a preview. When Guy got back to the office, rather the worse for wear, I happened to talk to him. He was reasonably enthusiastic about the Thinkpad, liked the TrackPoint, but at this showing the TrackPoint didn't yet have a name. Guy mooted to them that they could call it the centrally located inertialess tracker. They took this on board, and it took until the next day for IBM's relevant UK product manager to call Guy up and say "You bastard!" (in the nicest possible way obviously.) As he was writing up his notes of the lunch he did what any good IBMer would do and tried turning Guy's suggestion into an acronym.

Cold without the compressor: Boffins build better ice box

Re: Hmmm

Yes Thermoelectric Coolers (TECs) are reversible, and can heat as well as cool, just apply the electric current the other way around.

TECs efficiency however is terrible, under ideal conditions it's hard to achieve a COP (Coefficient Of Performance) of more than one, meaning you have to supply as much or more energy as heat you want to move whereas the humble domestic refrigerator has a COP in the rough region of 3, meaning that for every Joule of energy that you want to move you only have to supply about 1/3 of a Joule to do the moving.

Fresh UK postcode tool points out best mobile network in your area

Re: Didn't there used to be a link for corrections?

Clearly someone angling for a job at the Grauniad.

Meta sues 'nudify' app-maker that it claims ran 87k+ Facebook, Instagram ads

So let me get this right.

So let me get this right. Meta are so bad at running their own business that they can't manage to decide which ads to accept or not, and have to get the courts to do their job for them? If they are really that bad perhaps the courts should step in to require them to have systems in place that work, before they find themselves advertising hitmen, and child prostitution rings.

Signal chat app clone used by Signalgate's Waltz was apparently an insecure mess

No, I did too. I find the similarity a little "something", quite what that "something" is I'm not quite sure

Three Brits charged over 'active shooter threats' swattings in US, Canada

Re: sentenced to 20 months in prison, suspended for 18 months, in April 2024.

They couldn't be extradited. Our extradition treaties with other nations require that the offence being extradited for would also be an offence in the UK. As the article points out, there isn't a specific "swatting" offence in the UK. The reason that our treaties are like that is so we don't have to extradite people for offences are incompatible with our idea of the rule of law, like apostasy or lèse-majesté which are criminal offences in some countries.

Bad trip coming for AI hype as humanity tools up to fight back

Re: Patent law has been abused for decades.

You're wrong about patent law being created to reward creators, it was created so that creators could share their methods for the general good while still enjoying exclusivity on benefiting from their methods for a limited period. The deal was that rather than protect their ideas for their own exclusive use by keeping their methods secret that they would be given exclusive rights for a limited time if and only if they openly published them in a patent application. Patents were originally about promoting openness.

Re: Copyright is not IP

You are going to have to spend a long time living down the manifestly stupid claim that copyright law and intellectual property law have nothing to do with each other. Your claim is on the close order to claiming that red paint and paint have nothing to do with each other.

GCC 15 is close: COBOL and Itanium are in, but ALGOL is out

The characterisation is unfair

The characterisation of algol 68 as "over-complex" is both unfair and untrue. Any competent programmer could pick up Woodward & Bond's 99 page "ALGOL 68-R User's Guide" and learn and use 99% of the language in a single day. In fact it's gloriously simple and regular, or "orthogonal" as the algol 68 designers liked to describe it.

I challenge anybody to learn 99% of C++, Swift, Go, or Python in the same timescale.

Unloved, probably true, but that just demonstrates how rare good taste is.

Re: ALGOL-68 is out

Boroughs algol was always a direct algol 60 descendent. Not a hint of '68 to it.

'Cybertruck ownership comes with ... interesting fan mail'

Re: Unless a finger smear or a slice of cheese is enough to damage the Cybertruck

They got the very last of the brains, just after the ginger cats.

There is a theory that there is only one labrador braincell and that they all have to share it in a fashion similar to the single electron shared by the whole universe as mooted by Pauli (Man, I want some of what Pauli was smoking that day).

Nvidia shovels $500M into Israeli boffinry supercomputer

Clipy

Looks like you're trying to build a supercomputer to test atomic bomb designs. Do you need help with that?

UK government tech procurement lacks understanding, says watchdog

Rinse, repeat.

Every few years the NAO goes through this exercise, every few years they come to the same conclusion. It's like a perennial driving test failer going for their 16th test and failing yet again. Perhaps it's time hire a chauffeur and be done with it.

Tongue-zapping spoons, tea-cooling catbots, lazy vacuums and more from CES

Re: Fire, retrain, redeploy

Hey Treez, is that you? Got fired again?

A vision of the robot vacuum cleaner rushing into the living room when mum or the vicar is visiting, proudly holding aloft some sex toy left abandoned on the bedroom floor, immediate comes to mind.

Tesla, Musk double down on $56B payday appeal

Re: Doesn't make sense

In a word, yes. Track what institutional investors are doing with Tesla shares - quietly dumping them to minimise their exposure to risk.

Re: Doesn't make sense

I would dispute that panel and styling changes are unusual for a mid-life refresh. Instead I would say that panel and styling changes are the principal changes wrought in most auto maker's mid-life model refreshes.

The latest language in the GNU Compiler Collection: Algol-68

The stated reason for the RS compiler and language variant was to support modular programming as the ALGOL 68 view of the world was all monolithic programs. The RS extensions introduced ways of compiling chunks of ALGOL 68 as modules and then compositing them into a complete program, it wasn't pretty. The modular extensions aside, the RS compiler was a pleasant enough implementation to use. There was, of all things, a Multics port of it which I got to use.

Re: Lead to a bunch of stuff at what was RSRE Malvern

Wirth's moans were just because his proposal for ALGOL X was rejected. He later went on to release it anyway as ALGOL W, which sank without trace.

Fear of Foxconn reportedly driving possible Nissan, Honda and Mitsubishi merger

Re: Foxconn's iPhone experience isn't relevant here

Yeah, that struck me as a pretty facile statement too. Smacks a bit of "Only 1000 words to Christmas, who cares if what i write makes no sense."

Judge hands WP Engine a win in legal fight with Automattic

Re: Shitstorm

Well, you've just answered your own question - it's unlawful anticompetitive behaviour.

The US government wants developers to stop using C and C++

Re: Stop with the useless A better than B crap

As any engineer will tell any manager "Products can be had good, cheaply, safe, or soon. Now pick which two out of those four that you want because it is not possible to have all four."

Re: Which language do you think is used to implement all those memory-safe languages?

C was bootstrapped using its predecessor B, which itself was bootstraped via TMG (TransMoGrifiers - a compiler generator). C was not bootstrapped in machine code, or even assembler.

Re: No, of course I've no idea if this remotely resembles the actual syntax used...

It might just be a bit easier to:

#pragma pretend-to-be-rust=on

int main ()

....

return 0;

#pragma pretend-to-be-rust=off

That position you just applied for might be a 'ghost job' that'll never be filled

Re: USA

Illegal under the Fraud Act 2006 section 2. No doubt about it.

Definitely illegal in the UK.

This falls squarely under Section 2 of the Fraud Act 2006. "... dishonestly makes a false representation ... cause loss to another or to expose another to a risk of loss [i.e to an applicant]".

If anyone from HR or an employment agency is watching, that's worth up to 10 years in prison plus a fine.

Linus Torvalds affirms expulsion of Russian maintainers

Re: Approach? What approach?

I doubt they are. Typically it is only selected institutions and people that are sanctioned. It's unlikely, but not impossible, that the individual contributors are on the sanctions list. This smacks more of ignorance or laziness in understanding the sanctions regime and regulations.

I note that in insulting people's lack of historical memory he doesn't also educate them that Finland was on the wrong side in WWII.

Missing scissors cause 36 flight cancellations in Japan

Re: Meanwhile in Zürich...

CS spray? A section five prohibited weapon (Firearms Act 1968), unlawful possession of which carries a mandatory 5 year prison sentence. Not a good mistake to make.

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

Moaners

I'll have a bet that all the people moaning about this think they are better than average drivers. So too do most drivers, and I hope I don't have to explain to reg readers that "Averages don't work like that".

British Airways blames T5 luggage chaos on fault 'outside of our control'

The vague "Vodafone Platform"

Hmm. Vodafone don't do IT, just connectivity, so I wonder if 'interacting with the Vodafone Platform' just really means "our data sims have stopped working".

Vodafone are phasing out some of their data only sim plans; I got an email telling me that a Vodafone data only service I use is ceasing soon (1st August in case of the particular service that I use). What are the chances that someone at BA got a similar email, failed to act on it and the deadline to find an alternative to a Vodafone data only mobile service just came and went? Is this just a variant on the "forgot to renew a certificate" classic fail?

Microsoft bigwig says the Feds catching Chinese spies in Exchange Online is the cloud working as intended

You trusted the email accounts of high value targets to Microsoft's Exchange Online? There's your mistake, all the rest is a consequence of that decision.

Research finds electric cars are silent but violent for pedestrians

Re: GOOD

Don't worry, in six months the self same authors will be penning a paper on how noise pollution kills. Obviously in between writing articles for the Daily Fail on what new thing it is that cause cancer this month.

Texan construction workers put a rocket up Team SpaceX over 'unpaid bills'

Re: I predict a major scramble by creditors soon

My advice is to buy popcorn futures.

How to run an LLM on your PC, not in the cloud, in less than 10 minutes

Re: 0/10 for current affairs

Intelligent creatures learn from experience and adapt, LLMs don't. Ergo intelligence is qualitatively different.

If you correct an LLM it doesn't incorporate that into its world model. Playing with the llama2 model (prompted by this article) it conflated race and ethnicity. I pointed this out, it apologised and issued a 'correction' without the mistake, except that all it did was substitute the word "ethnicity" for "race" in its first appearance and then continued to say "race" for the rest of the paragraph.

How to Netflix Oracle’s blockbuster audit model

The late?

Given it's about auditing I'd have gone with the late Arthur Anderson.

They call me 'Growler'. I don't like you. Let's discuss your pay cut

Re: Depends on your definition of growler I guess.

> I never drank it myself, but watching the effect on others was very amusing, until I had to take them to A&E!

Why A&E? Oh lordy, they weren't stupid enough to spill any in their laps were they?

That's not the web you're browsing, Microsoft. That's our data

Anyone who needs to ask the question "is Microsoft Windows a trustworthy operating system?" clearly hasn't been paying attention. That question was answered in the negative a long time ago.