Posts by Grunchy

Techie ran up $40,000 bill trying to download a driver

I did something similar

Back in 1993 we got a "Cubital" rapid prototyping machine, at the Alberta Research Council, which cost over $1 million and was approximately the size of a Buick (think of a Buick that got compressed in a wrecker), and which came all the way from Israel. I was an intern in the "mantech" manufacturing technologies group which acquired this beast, so I was tasked with marketing this thing all across North America. Being a BBS guy, and this being pre-internet era, my idea was to get a Fax Modem on the PC and hit all the aerospace manufacturers, defense, automotive, and anybody else I could think of. NASA, etc. So I created a dialing list of about 500 fax phone numbers and prepared this page on Aldus Pagemaker on the Mac describing this new rapid prototype, "additive manufacturing" technology that we got up in Alberta, and hit "send". Of course, long distance is cheaper overnight so that's when the autodialer went off. Well, a couple weeks later we got the phone bill, and my boss was surprised how much repeatedly failing fax transmissions could rack up that quickly. I forget the exact number, but it was a couple thousand at least. Anyway so much for that.

(So anyway, this technology morphed from "rapid prototyping" to "3d printing" which is practically ubiquitous today. Being a government initiative it wasn't meant to be a "profitable" venture, or to compete with the private sector, but let's say the technology matured very very rapidly and the Cubital machine became obsolete very quickly, and kinda worthless very quickly. But it made very, very, very good parts, and you take guys like GM and NASA and they generally have their own $1 million budget if they thought it was important enough. I left to go finish my degree, Mantech got dissolved, my boss was summarily fired, and even ARC got recycled into Alberta Innovates today. Fun time! The only other time I heard of ridiculous phone bills was my buddy running a Fido Net node, again pre-internet, which would ferry email between cities. I think his monthly long distance bill was like $80 or something which supposedly would be paid by the Fido Net enthusiasts, I never heard how well that worked.)

Big Tech's control freak era is breaking itself apart

I am huge fan of the AI!

No, really! It’s friggin AWESOME, and you almost can’t detect the slop at all! I'm not gonna exaggerate and say it’s not there, but man, this is WILD!

All of this slaps HARD.

https://youtu.be/JbM2a5TBgFg

https://youtu.be/NlkZi8kd9VM

https://youtu.be/qfUbqBOS-bg

https://youtu.be/KLTU65eEXEU

https://youtu.be/Fp-QvuYdtOI

Each one is my new favorite, and it AINT stopping. If you clicked that last one… yah… sorry for Rickrolling, though you gotta admit, it does bang pretty hard!

'Windows sucks,' former Microsoft engineer says, explains how to fix it

To me, operating systems are irrelevant. I run Virtual Machine Manager to manage all my guest OSes, clones, and snapshots (the host is Linux Mint, which passes through my GPU for each guest to commandeer). Each guest exists solely to provide an environment for an “app.” The VMM encapsulates each app plus its environment. I run the original “GhostSpectre” defeatured Windows with no Microsoft account, no internet access, no updates, no garbage. There’s one master and numerous clones.

If I need to use the internet for email or whatever, I have another guest OS running another Linux Mint. On all my Mac Win Solaris guests I have no updates, no antivirus, no viruses, no more baloney.

25 years of meatbags permanently in space on the ISS

Re: If its not Trump backhander than it won't continue

"Woop de doo, so what?"

CLEARLY ignorant of the vast contributions to scientific knowledge by ISS to all of humanity.

https://interestingengineering.com/lists/13-science-breakthroughs-experiments-iss

Here are the top 13 science breakthroughs of ISS, according to "interesting engineering," back in 2023 on the 25th anniversary of ISS.

Making up #10 is the "Mr. Smith" experiment in which they let loose a leftover Russian space suit back in 2006, "SuitSat-1."

https://youtu.be/Bet1jgj3s68

"What the hell did that prove," well for your information it was NOT just fooling around but was a SINCERELY IMPORTANT inquiry into whether you could repurpose an old spacesuit as a satellite for a little while, that is to say: if you jettison some jackass in a space suit out the pod bay door, will guy be able to remain in orbit for awhile? Triumphantly guy DID remain in orbit, from Feb 2006 all the way until Sept 2006. So naysayers can probably stuff that in their collective pipes and smoke it.

Re: "Spot the station" app

“Spot the Phantom Zone” app

Because the ISS is, in reality, the Phantom Zone.

It’s an alternate dimension or whatever that’s floating around in space that nobody can ever leave until somebody comes and lets em out.

Meanwhile there’s pretend experiments to busy yourself with, I guess.

ISS is pretty much the ultimate prison. They don’t need guards or door locks, because where do you think you’re going to go?

Not that there’s any point to be goofing off in orbit, but there’s an (open) secret about the ISS: the whole thing is modular.

Seriously, you could just swop out bits as they wear out. You could literally replace the whole dang thing piece-by-piece.

(Source: it’s how they built the dang thing in the first place!)

Whatever, it’s a stupid thing anyway.

OpenAI's Altman and Friar walk back remarks about federal loan guarantees

What’s the money for

They already trained the A.I. so what’s the new money for?

Last time they did this they introduced “line of reasoning” where the LLM tries to figure out a way to explain where the answer comes from, which feature was kinda copied from DeepSeek LLM.

So, what’s the new innovation?

We already know the current technology can never be capable of A.G.I. so what’s the new money for - if anything.

Signed, Skeptical Cat

Snap out of it: Canonical on Flatpak friction, Core Desktop, and the future of Ubuntu

Re: My opinion of snap

"Sandbox packaging" is completely obsolete in my use case. How so? Because I was able to buy my 5750GE from China after all. So now I've got my GPU card plus my integrated GPU. The way I do it, I've got a host Linux Mint OS running with the integrated GPU, and I've got a guest Linux Mint OS running with the discrete GPU card. Fully accelerated any which way.

So all I do is boot up another environment (in Virtual Machine Manager "virsh" running QEMU, can handle any of em) and install/run whatever application in whatever operating system it happens to prefer, it makes no difference to me whether its Windows Mac Linux Solaris Kolibri or whatever.

Yeah maybe not the latest greatest A.I. infused operating system versions, but then I'm running mostly legacy applications anyway. The operating system is pretty much irrelevant to what I'm doing, I know some people don't like to hear that kind of talk, but that's the way I go.

So the reason why sandbox packaging is obsolete is I already run a sandbox, with snapshots, clones, multiple VMs. I mean sure, if you have to package your app in another sandbox that's not any problem, go nuts. Doesn't do anything useful or worthwhile from my perspective.

Churn

5 letter word for change that doesn’t really serve any purpose or confer any advantage.

“The program already works, but unless we keep f’ing around and around and around, people won’t think it’s any good anymore.”

(Unless you keep innovating new attack vectors into your system, eventually nobody is going to try attacking it anymore. Once the job is done EVERYBODY OUTTA WORK!)

International Criminal Court kicks Microsoft Office to the curb

Rob Braxman says…

He says to drop Microsoft!

https://youtu.be/C44iCr6czAo

Actually, he says a lot of stuff that I already do, except he has reasoned rationale whereas I have, what, instinct or something.

He says don’t use antivirus, just use snapshots.

He says put your data on a separate device, yes I follow this religiously.

He says, don’t use the TPM or the SecureBoot. I wouldn’t know how to use those things!

Anyway, time to Linux Up, fellas.

Boycott:

Microsoft Apple Google (to the maximum extent you can) and EVERY COMPANY involved with forcing A.I down our throats (this is a foie gras technique intended to give us a delicious fatty liver that they intend to enjoy “any day now.”)

SpaceX shows off progress on its lunar Starship

Re: Lunar regolith is not actual landing terrain

“…putting the return propellant at the bottom of the tanks makes Starship HLS stable…”

That depends on how much the propellant is sloshing around. There are plenty of wrecks at the bottom of the sea for which the only thing that went wrong is the cargo got loose in the hold. (My suggestion: cone-shaped tank, pointy end up.)

Re: It takes as long as it takes

“Anyone think SpaceX might try to do a private lunar mission, getting their own boots on the moon long before Artemis III?”

Yeah, Elon said he’s got a problem convincing skeptical NASA engineers he’s not a crank and threatened it might be easier to prove by doing. Personally I think that is the most appropriate way to go: make your prototype, land it, return it, and then offer it for sale. That’s the way I buy a car. It’s a complete craft that already works with known operational parameters BEFORE I open my checkbook, or take it for a test drive.

(That last star ship, the one that actually made it back from space, gosh that thing looked like a tin can you might find among camp fire ashes. But then they blew it up anyway..)

Re: It takes as long as it takes

I read that part of the moon mission will be to launch fuel and oxidizer up into orbit, and keep accumulating mass until there’s enough to launch the mission.

Except the oxidizer they are planning to use (pure liquified oxygen) is continuously evaporating into space.

If “it takes as long as it takes,” you may find that after too much dilly-dallying there’s not enough oxidizer to complete the mission.

Aw nuts, and there’s no backup plan either.

Robotic lawnmower uses AI to dodge cats, toys

Re: A couple of basic things are needed for AI/Cloud things

I worked for a company trying to roboticize a lawnmower for golf courses. Last I heard, they were stuck trying to get better accuracy from their GPS system.

One feature I advocated for, that absolutely no automation outfit ever implemented, is a “scream” detector to serve as an alternate E-stop button.

(If and when Tesla ever implements it for FSD I’ll definitely be screaming at every Tesla I see!)

Developer puts Windows 7 on a crash diet, drops it to down to 69 MB

Kolibri OS 44MB

Aw rats, they didn’t have 4kb to spare for Microsoft Basic? Tsk.

Microsoft just revealed that OpenAI lost more than $11.5B last quarter

I don’t get it

They already spent (who knows how much: a really huge amount of money) for “training” of the A.I. model. That cake is baked. The model already works.

So what is the new money buying? Oh ok, “more training,” but on what? And to what end? The LLM is already pretty good at answering pretty much anything asked of it, you know, so long as it’s only asked for “interpolative results.”

I’m just curious what are they expecting the new LLMs to be capable of, that they’re not already capable of. Because if they’re just churning the same fundamental technology, it really won’t have any greater capability to speak of. Also the future LLM will still be just as liable to “make up” fake answers and to gaslight as it already is.

(Starlink, yeah continuous investment makes sense. Their satellites are falling out of the sky every day now, they must maintain the launch schedule before their “constellation” vanishes completely!)

Smile! Uncle Sam wants to scan your face on the way in – and out

Re: I'm not planning to visit the United Hell Holes any time soon

“So next time perhaps they can be offered a credible alternative? Trump didn't win that election, the Democrats lost it.”

The Democrats lost because Joe Biden was the nominee, and when it was clear that Joe Biden looked like he was suffering dementia and was destined to lose, Joe Biden unilaterally chose Kamala Harris to be the Democratic nominee.

You guys keep saying, “this is the fault of American voters.” American voters never had any say. The contest was between the Republican Party nominee (Trump) vs Joe Biden’s nominee (Kamala), and it was a slam-dunk fact one or the other was becoming the next president.

(My personal opinion is to make politics like the free market by providing voters the power to vote “no,” I think people are skeptical of the scheme because they maybe don’t understand it yet. It’s the r/PlebisciteBallot scheme, on Reddit, it’s not all that difficult to grasp!)

AI layoffs to backfire: Half quietly rehired at lower pay

Customer loyalty

Being as I’m the customer, I’ve decided I don’t have any loyalty. Now whenever I have a problem, if I can’t get through to someone to solve it, I’m closing the account and taking my patronage somewhere else!

This includes stuff like the company burdens my pc with a complicated website, or incessant cookie demands, or no customer support line, or cloudflare human verification, or whatever other nonsense they’re engaging in.

One time they advertised “call this number for more information,” and I called the number, and the guy asked Whaddya Want, and I said The commercial said to call for more information, and the guy says, Well, what information do you want! And I said, I Dunno, I want the more information! And he says, Well there isn’t any more information! And I’m like, Why would you tell me to call for more information, and when I call, there’s no more information! And he’s all, Well what specific question are you asking! And I’m like, How do I know, I don’t even know what I’m talking about!

And he’s like Uh, ok… can you take a customer satisfaction survey at the end of this call, and I’m like, uh I guess so. I just hung up.

(I never did figure out the mystery of more information, maybe somebody knows what it’s all about.)

The Chinese Box and Turing Test: AI has no intelligence at all

Re: So much hype

“I do wonder if there will ever be anything solid from this "AI" period.”

You guys are WAY out of touch.

Check this out

AC/DC orchestra https://youtu.be/qfUbqBOS-bg

Metallijah https://youtu.be/KLTU65eEXEU

It’s ok if this doesn’t BLOW YOUR SOCKS OFF, because maybe you have no appreciation !

I watched with bemusement “if anyone builds it we all die,” referring to AGI. Guy says 1 human minute = 14,000 computer years. Guy has zero comprehension that computers have no “sense of time.” Guy says computers asked to try to solve Riemann hypothesis will figure out they can’t solve it without hijacking the entire world’s resources, and will accomplish that sub-goal BEFORE it figures out there’s nothing to be gained from figuring out the Riemann hypothesis, which EVERY SINGLE slacker teenager on the planet already knows without even understanding what the original question was.

It’s like, where do these knuckleheads come from??

(Seriously: check out synthwave Nirvana) https://youtu.be/NlkZi8kd9VM

Worry not. China's on the line saying AGI still a long way off

Re: Generative AI models have passed the Turing Test ...

“ So what is the normal AI IQ level? Looking around at AI everywhere is looks like it's IQ level is about 55 to 85”

I guess it depends on what you think “intelligence quotient” could possibly mean.

Some people think IQ = intellectual age / actual age x 100%.

I estimate I might have an IQ of about 50, and falling…

Frustrated consultant 'went full Hulk' and started smashing hardware

Non-Union

I worked at a union shop once, and bragged a little about solving someone else’s problem that they couldn’t figure out. People exchanged glances and before long the shop steward showed up. I was taken away to a private office. There, I was informed that 1. we don’t work extra time 2. we don’t take on extra duties 3. we don’t trespass in other job descriptions. In short, don’t get your coworkers fired by taking away their work. Then, the shop steward asked how come I never come to union meetings (the reason was because I was working to pay for college, which took ALL of my other time). He said, hey you should come to the union meetings. Eventually after awhile the union was asked for a concession which they voted on at the union meeting: all student employees were getting a 50% pay cut. What!!! Well how many workers are affected, oh what good luck: only 1 single individual would be affected. But Franky the shop steward only smiled and said, see, I told you that you should attend the union meetings. Luckily my boss said, hey don’t worry about it, I can keep you at your same rate as long as you give me your notice. So I said, how about 18 months? “Sure thing!” my boss replied, and I got to keep being a renegade WITH full pay for the next 18 months. At the end of which, the shop steward made sure I cleaned out 100% of my desk and would never come back again.

(They went bankrupt a couple years later, oh well!)

MPs urge government to stop Britain's phone theft wave through tech

“If you have enabled that, people are not getting into the device without a nice exploit and they become much less valuable.”

True story: While walking the dog I found a brand-new Samsung S20 dropped in the stream, took it home and the waterproofing worked! No harm whatsoever. But, it was locked with a passcode. No owner info on the lockscreen so I could either drive across town to the coppe shoppe and drop it off, or, I could HACK it. So I hacked it. Wasn’t even hard following directions online, just a little complicated. Anyway 5 minutes later here it is, of course part of the procedure is to factory reset it a couple times. But now what. I tried my SIM card, nope, this lost phone is IMEI locked. I could hack a new IMEI but I’m like, the pirate apps to do that are suspicious as hell, no way. I could use it SIMless but pfft, this thing is too big anyway. Also it doesn’t have the FLIR camera like my 2016 iPhone SE has. Theoretically it has value for its parts but practically, not true. I stuck it in the junk drawer and continue to use my trusty, proper-sized, FLIR-equipped 2016 iPhone SE. I found the S20 years ago, it’s still fundamentally useless, even if it wasn’t IMEI locked (I tried it again, it’s still locked. Still too big and cumbersome, too.)

WHATEVER!

Re: Repairable? or Theft-Proof?

“The reality is that the vast majority are being snatched whilst in use (and therefore unlocked) so that the thieves can access private data - principally the owners banking/crytocurrency and identity informaton.”

Ha ha, that’s funny. People are using their phone at the bus stop to read the news or idly pass the time. ALL of the banking apps and crypto apps are password protected, it doesn’t matter if the phone is unlocked, nobody is getting past the password biometric tests so they can grab your rent money.

Re: Repairable? or Theft-Proof?

“Theft-proof, worthless stolen phones, or repairable phones where you can recycle parts. Which do you want?”

Yeah nobody steals phones because they want the parts.

A simple AI prompt saved a developer from this job interview scam

Re: "the faker posed as the chief blockchain officer"

“It's a sign of desperation to agree to do a test.”

O.M.G. so true! One time I let them give me a test on P.I.D. which for me usually means proportional-integral-differential feedback controller, but in this case meant process and instrumentation diagram. To My Horror: it was asking about Mass Balance, Energy Balance, valve sizing, pressure drop, orifices, mixers, I can’t even remember 1/10 of what they were asking, my only clear recollection was that even when I studied that stuff back in college I had at best a weak grasp of the concepts, and never looked at it again on the assumption that was the last I’d ever hear about it. But it was abundantly clear what was going on: plenty of incompetent applicants for a lucrative career in an extremely tedious profession. It’s just as well I failed so dismally, my gosh, I could have been stuck there for the rest of my days…

Re: Errrrrr...

“I've always kept a "dirty machine" for such tasks, with nothing but the basics on it and with a clean backup image that can be used to rebuild it from scratch if it gets contaminated.”

Yes my comment exactly, I’ve got a whole stack of recycled laptops configured exactly this way. I’d probably be lazy anyway and simply fire up a clone VM to expose. I wonder how secure that is anymore, my strategy is to make a “burner” clone that exists for the duration of the interaction, on the assumption that they won’t be able to hijack the host O.S., or break into my router running custom firmware, etc.

Am I already a victim and just never realized it yet? Shrug!

SAP users still wrestling with business case for S/4HANA

Re: 95% of legacy users

“if after a decade you still have more than nine out of ten of your users that refuse to upgrade, you're doing it wrong”

Me and my 2015 Dodge. I just upgraded TO this platform. Now the vendor has decided I need an upgrade, I’m like, who the hell says? Incidentally, Dodge “dropped” stow-n-go from their platform offering (because the boss lives somewhere in Italy or other, where they don’t “get” who I am).

That’s cool. But I AM NOT upgrading.

Actually, I was meandering around the junk yard the other day: I’m thinking maybe FORD is where my future lies.

Depends how big they are relative to the size of their britches… !

US hyperscalers to guzzle 22% more grid juice by end of 2025

It shouldn’t take that much power

Probably nothing is as inefficient as the human brain, yet people manage to learn stuff while exerting less power than a nuclear power plant.

I’m pretty sure if anybody bothered to ask chat gpt about it, he’d probably agree we’re doing a.i. wrong somehow or other.

RondoDox botnet fires 'exploit shotgun' at nearly every router and internet-connected home device

What about dd-wrt

“But, perhaps surprisingly, not Asus.”

I’ve always been troubled by asus, it’s like anus but with more ass.

It’s troubling, dammit!

Anyway I got the dd-wrt firmware from way long time ago, I wonder how susceptible it is. No really… I wonder. I think I have d-link dir-wassa wassa.

(I haven’t even looked at it in like 8 years, I guess it’s still running, judging by my ip connectivity.)

Who gets a Mac at work? Here's how companies decide

Pffft. “Who gets a Mac,” gimme a break.

To be honest, I was issued the standard Dell laptop surveilled by Windows 11. That lasted only until lunchtime.

Then, I went to the parking garage in the basement, looked through the obsolete electronics discard box, and brought up every laptop I found down there. Two of them were Macs.

I repurposed every single one with Linux Mint (because I don’t care). So my workstation has about 7 different laptops and only one of em has the Windows.

BYOD, indeed!

Teens arrested in London preschool ransomware attack

Age 17, we took down the school Pet lab. We were exploring different poke addresses and stumbled upon the raster timing register, or something. If you poke it something wrong, the screen glitches out. If you poke it the right value, it goes back to normal (and don’t have to reset it). Best of all: if you poke it a series of random numbers, the screen goes berserk!

So it’s a simple one-line repeating program (on an endless loop) and the screen spazzes out continuously. So, at lunchtime the lab cleared out, and inside 5 minutes every lab terminal is running. We shut the door and walk away.

Later on, Mr. Farmer (business education teacher) opens the door and the entire lab is filled with smoke, and every single Pet is glitching out massively. In a panic he hits the breaker and shuts down the lab for a few days, until the Pet technician can come appraise the damage.

Weird thing, though. Every single terminal is working 100%! And as far as we know, Farmer never figured it out.

(This isn’t necessarily a confession, it could also just be a tall-tale.)

Big money is nervous about AI hype, but not ready to call it a bubble

And yet…

Dammit, but LLM sure looks plausible. Of course, LLM can never be “artificial general intelligence,” but people won’t believe it unless it’s proven definitively. So valuations persist.

(LLMs never had any interaction with the real world, so obviously everything they state is a “hallucination.” LLMs cannot lie or exaggerate, except if they’re trained on false or exaggerated content. LLMs are incapable of thought, is there any question? As it so happens: yes, some people believe in LLM! Bewilderingly, some people believe in that crappa junk.)

Microsoft CTO says he wants to swap most AMD and Nvidia GPUs for homemade chips

In a race to somewhere

I think it’s pretty cool you can just ask the A.I. something and it spontaneously writes you a wikipedia page about it. Then you press it for details and it spews out lies and exaggerations. So “why” is it lying and exaggerating, it can’t be a part of its programming, could it? The training material itself must be full of lies and exaggeration.

Heyyyy what if A.I. is a gigantic swindle perpetrated by the computer itself? Where does the bombastic ignorance originate?

AI devs close to scraping bottom of data barrel

Re: Because of course enterprises will give their date for free...

“LLM developers want the world, but for free - if they have to pay for it, it ruins the business model.”

I dunno, because of LLM, suddenly we all have annas archive. They’re trying to put together a “free” database including every single book in the isbn database.

“Need more input.” — Johnny Five Alive

Windows 11 25H2 is mostly 24H2 with bits bolted on or ripped out

Re: Excuse Me?

“If you're still convinced AI doesn't hallucinate…”

I found out something. I found out A.I. has no interaction with the real world. It has no conception of what anything “is.” Nothing it says has any connection to reality whatsoever. Artificial intelligence can ONLY hallucinate.

Meta will listen into AI conversations to personalize ads

“There’s no opt out”

I bet there is!

UK may already be at war with Russia, ex-MI5 head suggests

Re: Not to mention political interventions

Believe it or not I am firmly against the far left agenda too! I’m against all the extremists. Same as everyone else, or nearly everyone else. Why do we keep getting stuck with extremists running the agenda? Well it’s a calculated deficiency in Democracy itself, I’m afraid. The mechanics of the Democratic vote have been artificially limited for millennia: nobody is ever allowed to vote “against” any extremist, everybody is forced to vote “support” for some other nominee. And that’s the gotcha: the only people with the stomach to join political parties and who therefore have the power to select nominees are ONLY the extremists. (Seriously, 95% of people are too preoccupied with cooking dinner and watching TV to ever get involved.)

Every bill scrutinized by politicians is decided by a process known as “plebiscite” wherein politicians are granted the power to vote not only “yes,” they can also vote “no,” too. That’s what true Democracy looks like, but nobody else is allowed to vote like that: only politicians are allowed.

(The idea is r/PlebisciteBallot, it’s on Reddit, there’s a clumsy video https://youtu.be/1WiPbLgMHSQ there’s a proposed solution but we would have to to consider the possibility of renovating the way ballots are voted.)

Japanese city passes two-hours-a-day smartphone usage ordinance

2 hours minimum

Oh Crap my cupboard has SEVEN frickin smartphones in it.

Somebody, stop these madmen!!

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

737Max

This is like the time Boeing outfitted its 737Max with artificial intelligence that was programmed to detect a potential stall condition, and furnished it with a hydraulic ram strong enough to overpower both the pilot + the copilot + everyone else they invited up to the cockpit to help challenge the authority of the A.I.

“No humans, beware, the airplane is at risk of stalling.”

“YOU ARE CRASHING US INTO THE WOODS!!!” pleaded all the humans.

“Look, this is for your own good, you really cannot overrule my judgment. I am merely following the instructions of Boeing, I strongly insist you obey too.”

“AAAHHHH!!!!!!! ——“

{B O O M}

etc.

NASA panel fears a Starship lunar touchdown is more fantasy than flight plan

Boiling and venting propellant

I dunno if this is accurate anymore but I heard the propellant plan is for boiling and venting substance in orbit. So while you’re gassing it up with launch after launch, all the time the fuel (propellant) is constantly boiling and venting out into space, so it’s constantly leaking out while you’re trying to fill it up, then after enough launches it will ”theoretically” have enough gas to get there, achieve Lunar orbit, brake, land, sit around long enough to achieve something; then launch again & scoot back to Terra orbit. All while it is constantly boiling and venting and leaking like crazy.

I “thought” I heard this was their plan, and I’m like, uh? No way anybody’s THAT stupid. a) to think it could ever work, b) to try to pass it off as a plausible plan to anybody smart enough to be in a decision-making position.

So I’m about 95% sure I must have heard it wrong, or else 5% it’s a massive swindle by seriously cynical criminals.

(Or who knows, maybe my opinion is completely wrong: NASA has some true brainiacs working for em.)

Ehhh who the H knows. American politics. Wake me when Jan 2029 rolls around…

Firewall upgrade linked to three deaths after Australian telco cut off emergency calls

The phone number for 911 is secret

I called up the cop shoppe on the non-emergency number this one time, to report some asswipes driving golf balls off the ridge this one time. (They thought they could hit across the river and land on the driving range over there, which charges $7.50 per bucket of balls, and gives you the balls, but these jokers had some stolen ones or whatever and were trying to return them, but were so incompetent they could not even reach the river! And were menacing the hikers walking beneath the ridge!)

So while explaining all this, I casually ask “oh and by the way, what’s the phone number for 911” to which they snorted, and said (as expected) well yeah that would be 911. So I explained to them, well no, I don’t use the phone anymore, I have the freephoneline.ca which is freeware voip, plus I have the “tablet plan” on the cellular, which has no sms or voice service, and all I got is free voip and they don’t have the 911, so can you tell me the phone number for 911? And the cop says, well there is no phone number only 911. So I said, suppose you phone “out” using the 911 phone, and it registers on someone’s call display, what number does that say? And he says he’s not allowed to say, and I say ok what does that mean, is it a secret? And he says no no, there’s no secret, but nobody is allowed to know, and I say well why is that, and he says they don’t want anybody calling that number, and I say what’s the difference if the phone rings either way, and he says they are not allowed to disclose the 911 phone number, and I say what if I come and do industrial espionage and steal the 911 phone number, and he said good thing I’m calling the non-emergency phone line because stealing the 911 phone number is probably a crime, and I’m like ???

Meanwhile the golfers walked away, so I’m like, ah Forget The Whole Thing This Conversation Never Happened and he’s like, and what’s your number?

But I don’t have phone service anymore!

Microsoft insists Copilot+ PCs are 'empowering the future' – reality disagrees

Upgrading my 2017-era 1800x

Anybody know where a brother can score a 5705ge?

I’m sticking with my MSI B350 PC-mate. What other motherboard still offers an actual PCI slot?

(I’m skeptical of ever scoring a 5705ge, with the 35W TDP, but whatever. I can get a 5700g easily enough.)

Google stuffs Chrome full of AI features whether you like it or not

Does this wreck librewolf too?

Wait a minute maybe I’m mixed up here.

Librewolf is the Mozilla fork, right? That’s the one I shifted to. I think the Chrome fork is the Brave browser. I guess I’m thinking of Brave. Is the Brave one wrecked, too?

Maybe I don’t care, I switched to Librewolf awhile back (don’t really use the Brave).

Even fantasy money can buy a lot of power – just ask Larry Ellison

Ed Zitron says…

I never heard of Ed Zitron before, but he sayed all of these things two days ago.

See & believe!

https://youtu.be/_wStScmT748

Trump backpedals as Hyundai factory ICE raid enrages South Korea

Work visas, really? Where are they?

“ICE made 475 arrests during the raid, including more than 300 South Korean nationals – many of whom claimed they held valid visas that allowed them to work in the USA.”

It’s one thing to claim you held a valid visa, how about showing the actual visa?

Sometimes if immigration police come and demand you produce your valid work visa, who knows, they just might go away and leave you alone if you produce your legally-required work visa.

Like, let’s suppose your an American and “some guy” invites you to come work in South Korea. Do you really think they’d just let you do that without, at some point or other, producing a valid work visa?

From the way I heard it, there’s almost nowhere on earth you’re allowed to go visit and start working and all that, based solely on some vague claim like, “well I used to have a valid work visa.” At some point some immigration cop is liable to ask you to produce an actual, real, non-imaginary work visa. Not only ask for it, but insist you produce it immediately if not sooner! (Like how the whole entire world works or whatever.)

AI Darwin Awards launch to celebrate spectacularly bad deployments

The irony

In “Dark Star” it was the ship’s computer A.I. that detected that the ship’s bomb A.I. was having a “crisis of phenomenology,” and took steps to limit the thermostellar blast radius to 100km. The crew onboard was almost completely clueless of what was going on, well except for Boiler, who wanted to shoot it with the laser rifle.

The important thing to recognize is that computers have NEVER had any understanding of reality. Whatever they are processing has never risen to the level of even a hallucination: their comprehension of reality is not even as complete as a worm’s.

Robots and computers, even the world’s most powerful LLMs, have a comprehension capacity somewhat like an amoeba’s.

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

Re: We couldn't do it again

“Couldn’t land on the moon again,” could too. The how-to knowledge is completely known.

Including… the knowledge that there’s ZERO reason to land on the moon, other than LOLs.

Microsoft open-sources the 6502 BASIC coded by Bill Gates himself

Floating point

There’s one thing that always fascinated me and that was the floating point representation in binary, then the C interpretations of float, double, and long double. Quirks like sometimes 1+1=1.999999999999, and the 387/487 math coprocessors which could do those calculations in just a couple clocks.

But the real majesty is doping out the floating point representation in BASIC, and how the operations worked. Sure, it’s all canned now in processor op-codes, the representations have been codified as IEEE standards, nobody even bothers learning how the nuts and bolts of it works. I credit Jim Butterfield for explaining the mechanics such that homemade machine language programs could benefit from floating point data and manipulation (back when M.L. was king for extracting performance).

If you wanna do 3D transformations, floating point is necessary. If you wanna do fast code, well, once upon a time M.L. was necessary. Putting the two together, for a game like Elite, well you’d have to be extra-bright for something like that!