Posts by GrumpenKraut

Boffins warn that AI paper mills are swamping science with garbage studies

Re: Shit "research"

Currently papers appearing in junk journals are often not peer-reviewed at all. One paper had the sentence "Take me off you fucking mailing list." repeated a few hundred time and nothing else. Yes, it got published.

Torvalds weighs in on 'nasty' Rust vs C for Linux debate

Re: Hard truths

No, Emacs is better!

Wiley shuts 19 scholarly journals amid AI paper mill problems

Re: When I published a paper on ArXiv

That's why my email address is *not* anymore on the first page with arxiv articles. Zero such offers since then.

Re: a right mess

Rather the journal.

Stack Overflow simply bans folks who don't want their advice used to train AI

Re: There are people who do it for money

Thanks.

Microsoft to use Windows 11 Start menu as a billboard with app ads for Insiders

That one was about systemd:

https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2023/02/17/systemd_253/#c_4621389

...and admittedly lifted from some image.

Palantir boss says outfit's software the only reason the 'goose step' has not returned to Europe

yarp.

Some Intel Core chips keep crashing, game devs complain

Re: Disable Turbo Boost

You get like 15% more CPU performance for like 50% more energy. And 15% CPU power does not usually translate into 15% overall performance. On top of that, benchmarking becomes close to impossible. I have yet to see a compute cluster where any of this boost crap is enabled.

And don't get me started on that hyperthreading dreck.

Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

Re: Only Wayland?

> Do those parameters exist somewhere on the filesystem when running an Xorg server?

Long ago it was possible to mmap /dev/fb0 for a very direct way of drawing on X11. Colleague saw my code an instantly decapitated me. Luckily I recovered.

Think about it: writing a bloody *book* about how and why you dislike something, instead of doing something you like.

Thinking about it, would there be a market for 1400 page tome about systemd? Any suggestions for a title?

For me the only good thing in this book is the "Anti-Foreword" by Dennis Ritchie.

Microsoft says it'll throw €3.2B at AI ops in Germany

"the MS-DOS giant"

LOL =--->

Robots with a 'Berliner Schnauze' may appear more trustworthy to locals

Re: High or low?

Ick wees jarnüscht!

Linus Torvalds flames Google kernel contributor over filesystem suggestion

Re: Inode #s are unique within a filesystem

inode numbers are unique within one partition. They cannot practically be made unique on the whole system, that would require all inodes of a newly mounted partition to be checked/changed. That is why hardlinks only work within one partition.

One person's shortcut was another's long road to panic

Heuristics, heuristics, and more heuristics.

I tend to use heuristics: Is the thing running on the right host? Does $(pwd) match the prefix it should? Is $USER what it should be? etc. etc.

Bail out with an informative message with anything dubious. Stuff like that has saved my arse so often!

Admittedly, scripts have to be modified sometimes. But that little bit of dull work is preferable to data loss or corruption.

Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse

SEO: Search Engine Optimization

SERP: Search Engine Result(s) Page <--= I had to guess that

Memtest86+, the little RAM tester, flexes FOSS muscles with v7.0

It also does a speed test

Giving memory transfer rate for cache levels L1 and L2, and for out of cache.

Serenity OS turns five and emits first offspring, Ladybird

Article appreciation pint

There you go =---->

Tesla goons will buy anything – including these $150 beers

"Cybertruck, Tesla's pickup model that looks like it hasn't rendered properly"

Musk looks like he hasn't rendered properly as well.

PEBCAK problem transformed young techie into grizzled cynical sysadmin

"descriptions were far from technically rigorous"

Customer: My internet is broken!

Me: Mine is working fine.

A colleague was in the room and told me after the call "Maybe you should not be saying this". Seconds later he says "Heck, just keep doing it." I did, but only with a very small number of high maintenance customers that were particularly annoying.

Germany's wild boars still too radioactive to eat largely due to Cold War nuke tests

Re: Meanwhile, in Japan...

Wind from the east is not rare in Germany: in summer it typically means sunny dry hot weather, in winter it typically means sunny dry cold weather.

Re: Meanwhile, in Japan...

> What could account for it being concentrated in Bavaria?

Having been there I can give you one reason.

Air moved from the disaster area over parts of southern Germany. There was localized rain at the parts most affected. The rain was just enough to bring down the radioactive stuff, but *not* nearly enough to wash that shit down the drains.

Therefore some places where the rain water collected (but, again, didn't go further) were quite radioactive. At the Uni where I studied we had a small amount of such dirt/sand in the spectrum analyzer (term? I mean the one for radioactivity; that thing needed to be cooled all times). Over time you could watch the half life of several elements you normal never encounter in nature.

P.S.: I'd not be worried about radioactivity unless eating fucktons of that meat (or mushrooms), even in the 'hot' regions.

Western Digital sued over claims of data-trashing SanDisk, My Passport SSDs

Re: I lost 3 years worth of music and photography

Certainly a bot. Reported.

AVX10: The benefits of AVX-512 without all the baggage

Re: flags

There is a problem that the x86 SIMD instructions seemingly are coming from some sort of insane random generator. The linked pdf (titled "Intel Advanced Vector Extensions 10") has 1310 pages.

Playing instruments, musical talent? Psh, this is the 2020s – Meta has models for that now

Your handle equals 3 * 79 * 34741859 * 108970193390406341511991996777364618571790157695783210212070651472997691291195028786487349. You are welcome.

'Weird numerological coincidence' found during work on Linux kernel 6.5

I looked at that numerology web site

and now I want to run over a kitten with a lawn mower. Why is that?

What does Twitter's new logo really represent?

LOL, how/why do you know this? Virtual pint for random facts =------>

Mint 21.2 is desktop Linux without the faff

Re: What's not to like?

I boot into /boot/vmemacs and write my kernel drivers in elisp. Sadly, my system is somewhat slow.

Turning a computer off, then on again, never goes wrong. Right?

The web server that wasn't

Mid 1990s: customer had his own bow with Linux and a web server running on it. Few month later, after a power outage, customer calls us "The web server is gone!", me: "So it did not restart, right?", "No, the *server* is gone!", "OK, I'll have a look". Upon inspection there was nothing at all on the disk. Customer had installed everything in the installation system in RAM, nothing had every been written to disk. Took me quite a while to figure that one out. After new install I made the customer reboot the box to make sure he did not repeat the error.

Free Wednesday gift for you lucky lot: Extra mouse button!

Re: mouse that has a non-wheel middle key

Nice to know such things do exist, will keep looking. Thanks =---->

Re: shift-insert for paste

MrXonTR faster by 2 minutes, dammit.

shift-insert for paste

For Linux users: As clicking the wheel tends to rotate it a bit (which messes things up) you can use shift-insert to paste. Apparently very few people know this.

I have long looked for a mouse that has a non-wheel middle key, found zilch. Why the heck does nobody build one?

The bonkers water-cooled shoe PC, hexagonal pink workstations, and IKEA-style cases of Computex 2023

Re: Squirrel!

> Does it drive in a circle when the driver spends all their time looking at their dash-mounted phone?

That actually sounds like a good idea.

Windows XP's adventures in the afterlife shows copyright's copywrongs

Re: Coppyright length

Curious spelling of "decades" there.

Amazon finds something else AI can supposedly do well: Spotting damaged goods

Re: "it's 3x more likely to spot damaged goods"

> Three times not much is not much better.

Really?

Cunningly camouflaged cable routed around WAN-sized hole in project budget

Re: Weather?

> Clipping it neat and tight with no expansion loops...

That's *exactly* what they did. I looked at the cable going round the corner and was surprised it didn't just snap. Bending radius was below specs even when it was warm.

Re: Weather?

> ...network would come to a shuddering stop whenever the weather froze...

Because the cold makes the cable shrink and the bends around corner get to sharp, bad with coax. Seen that a one place: -12 degrees or lower simply meant "no network today".

About lightning hitting outdoors cable, seen it once and it was spectacular. All computers in one building toast, network cards had scattered those little electronicy parts, motherboards and RAM were fried as well. Some computers in the other building somehow survived, no idea how. All in all pretty expensive.

Experimental brain-spine computer interface helped a paralyzed man walk

Re: Regenerative medicine

From the article: "The brain-spine interface (BSI) implant used in this case seems to be helping him to grow new nerve connections."

Also read up on "Nirvana fallacy".

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

Re: Clothing corallary

Ha, I do this. As a student I got two pairs of excellent leather gloves for about nothing. Turned out the are of *very* good quality, I am nearing sixty now and the spare pair is sitting in the drawer, still new.

Boffins claim to create the world's first wooden transistor

The instruction sheet on how to build a 64-bit CPU will be ... interesting.

Baidu sues Apple and anyone else in sight over ERNIE chatbot fakes

Yet another Ilya Geller acount? Would be number five at least.

systemd 253: You're looking at the future of enterprise Linux boot processes

Re: I do wish systemd would just fuck off

Dear systemd

Fuck off.

Then keep fucking off.

Fuck off until you come up to a gate with a sign saying "You Can't Fuck Off Past Here".

Climb over the gate, dream the impossible dream, and keep fucking off forever.

Techies try to bypass damaged UPS, send 380V into air traffic system

Once had a water heater that maxed out at 16KW. During winter that was just enough power to make the water decently warm. "Deep fried in seconds" is off by about three orders of magnitude. You can do the calculation if you really care.

> 19,000 WATTS of power which can deep-fry ANY human body in mere seconds.

Dear Mr. pants-on-fire: 19kW is what a typical electrical shower heater is rated. Still I have never been deep fried within seconds of showering.

Should open source sniff the geopolitical wind and ban itself in China and Russia?

Re: Here is an example of FOSS for SDR that vanished due to ITAR

Thanks for the link. =---->

Re: Here is an example of FOSS for SDR that vanished due to ITAR

WOW. Could you (or somebody reading this) send a story suggestion to El Reg? My email may be black-holed as it is within the Hetzner network (I once send a suggestion to On Call and never received any reply).

Meet the merry pranksters who keep the workplace interesting, if not productive

"MULTIPLE incoming lines of 400,000 Volts at 1000 Amps"

Yeah, right. In excess of 400 MegaWatt to power CPUs at that time, totally believable.

Google's Dart language soon won't take null for an answer

Re: Go Multithreading Issues

Your language will certainly conquer the world really soon. I see that your youtube channel has already one follower.

Z-Library operators arrested, charged with criminal copyright infringement

Re: Textbooks...

Wow, that makes my blood boil. Cars have been smashed for less than that.