Posts by Grunchy 918 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Mar 2015
“ If a microSD card is 1/378 the size of a page of A4 and stores 32 million pages of A4 text (assuming 4000 characters per page at 8bits per character), my rough calculation suggests that a humble 128GB microSD card beats his challenge by a factor of about 0.5 million.”
8 bits per character? Depending on the zip algorithm, you might be able to compress text by a factor of 10x.
(If I was gonna archive a million books or so, why not exploit lossless compression?)
I remember when the USA deficit exceeded $350 billion: that’s when you borrow $1 billion each and every day just to keep the lights on in this joint!
Of course the deficit then quickly exceeded $1 trillion, that’s where we have to borrow $1 billion every 8 hrs.
Or, $2 trillion, where we gotta borrow $1 billion every 4 hrs.
(If it costs $6 billion a day to keep the wheels on this bus, how long can you do that before you just declare bankruptcy? Or maybe it doesn’t matter since everyone else in the world is bankrupt?? Shrug?)
https://youtu.be/6UldI1xIb0E?t=1569
"Agency heads shall ensure that DOGE Team Leads coordinate their work with USDS and advise their respective Agency Heads on implementing the President's DOGE Agenda. Sec. 4. Modernizing Federal Technology and Software to Maximize Efficiency and Productivity. (a) the USDS Administrator shall commence a Software Modernization Initiative to improve the quality and efficiency of government-wide software, network infrastructure, and information technology (IT) systems. Among other things, the USDS Administrator shall work with Agency Heads to promote inter-operability between agency networks and systems, ensure data integrity, and facilitate responsible data collection and synchronization."
Seems like Musk gets to be IT administrator for the whole US government and work on synergies and what-all.
I think all he has to do is text "resign" to the number provided and he can go away on Monday and still be paid out a full salary until Sept. 2025 without finding even a single synergy.
Good deal for Musk!
Yeah, inside Virt-Manager on my Ubuntu installation. Sure, I've got Win7 and Win10 in there, all set to run old legacy software if/when the need arises (less and less as the days go by).
I just took an "image" of my old system, then I reformatted with Ubuntu and got that all working hunky-dunky then installed Virt-Manager and then resurrected my old Win environment.
I have a motherboard that can run two GPUs so I got the nVidia one for Linux (weird eh?) and the AMD Vega one for the virtual machines. So that way, they can have their own GPU for their own full graphic acceleration, just like a real computer.
EXCEPT... NOT a real computer. No sir. This time, I have Backups and Snapshots and I installed the defeatured Ghost Spectre "light" version, and there's no virus detection (pfft who cares, if it gets infected I'll just roll back a Snapshot).
What I did was I installed a Samba share of one of my Linux folders, and I use that to transfer data to/from the Windows and the macOS and the Solaris VMs. So the actually valuable "data" all resides within Linux, and Windows/macOS are merely software applications that run inside Linux in order to facilitate old legacy software that I'm seeing less and less use of, to be frank. Oh, what the H the SSD space is pretty cheap nowadays, "why not" keep the old OS environments for old-times sake. It's not like they take up any physical room.
For $60 billion I wonder if you could invent “movie goggles,” no seriously, hear me out.
It’s a pair of glasses! But no ordinary glasses. Instead of corrective lenses, they instead feature miniature TV screens!
Why, the effect is so powerful, it’s like a gigantic movie screen… but they’re built into your spectacles!
With SIXTY BILLION we could perfect this revolutionary technology in no time flat.
I fired up ChatGPT just yesterday! Well sure. You see, I discovered my original 1979 copy of “Manual of Possibilities” (https://annas-archive.org/md5/994d1d4b39f0a8057800e272e35b3167) and read this little morsel:
“Similarly, programming can replace painting technique, at least of the nonrepresentational kind. A computer will never create a Degas dancer or a Rembrandt portrait, but computers can be the canvas of much of the nonobjective art we see today.”
Eh, what? Can’t create a Rembrandt portrait?
So I uploaded a snap of me muggins and asked ChatGPT for the “portrait in the style of Rembrandt” version, but change dirty old winter to a pastoral springtime scene.
It rendered me with 1-week facial growth!!
AI wins against the humans, again. Egad.
Yup, I got fed up with buggy Ubuntu “snaps”, plus I’m never running Microsoft or Apple again: too much AI, zero actual innovation. Let’s put it this way, my Office 2007 “pro” license is still approximately 100% compatible with current day Office 365, at least for the functions I use. What have they done in 18 years, other than nothing? Yeah they put in advertising and spyware.
I guess I’m giving up on Ubuntu too, since they are now a corporate property and will soon become filled with zero innovation except for advertising and spyware.
Just about done with Google, too.
Funny thing, Space X launched their actual moon mission 3 days ago (Jan 15/2025). Another 6 weeks until we find out whether it makes it or not.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/14/science/nasa-launch-firefly-ispace-moon-landing/index.html
This bogus "starship" project, which already spent the entire budget of two complete moon trips, would have definitely failed in bankruptcy except Trump inexplicably got elected.
So probably more money is going to get funneled to Space X to continue this farce.
(Musk is a gigantic Ponzi scam so you never know just precisely when he'll be arrested. Could be any day now, could be delayed until 2028 or beyond...)
Well, because I got the FLIR one infrared camera accessory that puts a 64-pixel sensor on it.
Got it cheap because iPhone SE is WAY out of date, nevertheless the phone and the infrared both work perfectly well.
(Also the FLIR adapter makes a decent enough bump cover).
I need two new technologies to "upgrade" from the iPhone and that's infrared and 3d scanning.
This HMD device doesn't offer that. Also, I'm not accustomed to paying "retail" for any kind of tech. In fact, I usually pay scrap prices, if that much. No deal.
I dunno how many billions of dollars was stolen based on Y2K consulting but if this all comes from one incident of one lady who was 103 years old trying to get a driving license, and being denied because nobody could figure out she wasn't 3 years old, and NOBODY HAS ANY CONFIRMATION OF THAT TALL TALE, then I guess we all learned a very valuable lesson back in year 2000.
"He has a terrible fast food based diet," that's your typical hacker! You just described me, if not most of us here.
"and has been in pretty obvious mental decline over the past few years," ahem.
I'm astounded how many people think they're the only one who hates Donald Trump: Everybody hates Donald Trump! Including Donald Trump.
He's playing up the "Heel" character in wrestling.
"It is good that there is competition between Blue Origin, United Launch Alliance, Arianespace and SpaceX" for what customers? These are not consumer services they're selling. Also, I don't see much difference between New Glenn and the old 1970s-era Saturn. Eventually, this all has to accomplish something; what?
https://archive.org/details/omnibookofcomput0000unse
"It's 2025 and they've closed down the museums. The works of the masters lie in the darkness of subterranean storage vaults. People don't need to see them anymore. Why should they? In the privacy of their homes, they can view the entire collections of the Louvre on 3-D entertainment modules or visit Michelangelo's Florence via electronic brain stimulation. No more hassles with crowds of tourists or with pompous tour guides.
"Home computer systems craft 400-page novels in hours, suited to the owner's personal taste, or duplicate the Mona Lisa from recyclable materials so that only a chemist could distinguish the copy from the original.
"In a robotic society we won't work. The robots will do most of the jobs more efficiently than we could do them. Such robots can usher in an age of super-abundant, very inexpensive goods. But there's a catch. If humans don't work, do they deserve to be paid? Where can they get the money to buy all the wonderful and inexpensive products the robots will produce?
"We can't have a society of unemployed people who can't afford the products made for them by the robots that took away their jobs. That's absurd. We must devise a scheme that will shift the manner in which we receive income without endangering either our standard of living or our self-respect.
"Robotics is the challenge of the future. The government could move us to accept it by forming a quasi-public agency to sell Victory Bonds for the Future. The money-gathering agency that issues the bonds might be called the National Mutual Fund (NMF). Here is how it might work.
"With the money it receives from public investors, along with money appropriated by Congress or gathered from other government sources, the NMF would build a significant supply of cash. The NMF can use this cash to finance companies that want to adopt robot technologies...
"Now let's look at the other side of robot economics: As the new technology expands, workers will be pushed out of jobs. We must plan to ease their discomfort and make up for their financial losses.
"One way would be to allow the workers to own the robots that replace them. As owners, they could lease the robots back to their former employers for use at their old jobs. The plan is highly speculative, of course...
“The methods used (in LLMs etc) have no chance, ever, of achieving intelligence.”
Few people even realize what means by “intelligence quotient”.
IQ = your “intellectual age” divided by your actual age, times 100 %.
It’s a measurement applicable only to kids, then. If you’re 40 and your IQ=200 what does that mean, you’re as smart as a guy who’s 80? If that’s the case you’d be better off with IQ=50 (like me!)
If I was gonna define general intelligence it would include at least two things, that is the ability to solve practical problems plus the ability to recognize something that isn’t working and dream up something better that does work.
Once A.I. can do that then it will be able to improve itself, independently, and that would be your “singularity” point I suppose.
Real-world work is INSANELY complicated. The best use case for automation is the factory, which has a tightly controlled environment and even more tightly controlled work tasks. Entire massive workstations consist of orientation machines, which do nothing but take a disordered stream as input and produce an ordered stream as output. People have been automating this kind of manufacturing work for centuries already.
In other words, a simple floor mopper still hasn’t been perfected. Something that can fill a receptacle with hot water, mix in the cleanser, find the floor, then go around and scrub every square mm. Floor cleaning robots still can’t reach the corners yet, for Pete’s sake! Let alone dealing with obstacles such as sand, feathers, spilled mucilage, engine oil, loose marbles, thumbtacks, coyote dung, ball bearings, or anything, really.
In short, these conmen are blowing smoke up backsides.
I love the article even though it is way WAY over my head. I never “grokked” any of this network stuff, and for all of the ‘90s had a simmering anger for stupid IP configs that stubbornly refused to work for no apparent reason.
Sure I tried traceroute, I got the result: big deal. I’m just an ISP customer, “where” the traffic goes is meaningless information to a layperson like me. (Actually, I always figured this might reveal some susceptible server that I could overwhelm with DDOS, if I ever had any idea how that worked or how to do it, but I never overcame the “don’t care” energy threshold necessary to get involved.)
Here’s the bee in my bonnet today: spontaneously I can no longer play YouTube content more than 60 seconds before the spinny wheel takes over. Is it cache or Adblock or router needs reboot? Eventually after trying everything I just activated the “video download helper” and watch via VLC instead. Shrug! Something broke and I have zero idea about this network business. Voodoo curse, perhaps Friday 13, or some other thing, shrug!
I liked VMWare awhile ago, they had the free version you could download and muck around with. The problem was that it ran as a Windows app, and Windows is a flaky shaky corporate environment that Microsoft owns and tends to give an almighty shake every once in awhile whenever they feel they need more money.
I moved to Ubuntu and run virt-manager instead, which is based on qemu.
I don’t miss VMWare.
I don't think I get Microsoft updates anymore: nothing. Well I installed the "ghost spectre" stripped version of Win10, and Win7 for that matter, minus updates and minus internet security.
Well, I don't care about internet security, there's nothing that can be attacked or affected. The reason is because the moment I installed Ghost Spectre I took a "snapshot" of the installation. Then I installed a couple other things, I've got my copy of Office 2007 Pro, I got the PDF producer for that, a couple other things. Then I took another snapshot, and THEN I cloned that system a couple few times.
So I've got my base install (that I never use or do anything with other than create clones of it), I've got a test VM, I've got my regular environment. I run all of these in Virt-Manager under Ubuntu, you see. For data files I share a folder from Linux via Samba, that way I never store any data within Windows, the data is always external to Windows. So I can always recover an OS snapshot and it never touches any data I've got (which gets backed up to a NAS that none of the VMs know anything about or have any way of reaching: to me this is what internet security actually means).
This is how I escape the entire run-around baloney show that is Agile software development. I've got mature Windows, mature Office, and a couple other programs (depending which VM I'm considering). They don't need any updates to work, they already work. This way nothing ever changes and I'm never surprised or disappointed when some joker at Microsoft decides to "improve" something that I don't want changed.
As far as I'm concerned, Windows is a legacy software that really has no future. Same as my macOS Ventura VM. They don't need any updates, if Microsoft or Apple somehow sneak 'em in (because they want to sabotage their customers for some stupid reason -- well, they're just f'ing around aren't they), I can easily recover the snapshot in a moment's notice. Besides.. I only allow a couple of these clones to ever access the internet anyway. Ubuntu is the internet machine. It is the master of the show. All these other operating systems, they're nothing but Linux apps now. Fully subservient to Linux.
“if the garage where you took your car for maintenance forgot to screw the wheels on, and they fall while you drive, it's still 100% your responsibility because you're the driver ?”
This happened to a coworker, last week. He went to commute to work, but the front right tire broke off the car on the driveway in the middle of the night. It seems 3 of the 5 lug nuts had disappeared since the tires last got installed, and the remaining 2 fastened studs had fatigued and fractured.
The “test” of whether your work role is a supervisor or not is if you are able to impose any kind of discipline or punishment upon a subordinate.
So the Americans voters are proud that they are the “boss” of the government, but of course that’s not true: there is absolutely zero recourse against any politician, except to vote support for some alternative.
And the nature of democracy is to divide into two main opposing groups, left vs right, which increasingly become dominated by extremist fringe elements pushing radical agendas.
Meanwhile, almost all of the voting public are merely consumers just trying to make the best choice out of a radicalized extremist selection.
Hey, did you know there’s another form of democracy? One that forms the backbone of Robert’s rules of order?
Yes it’s known as “plebiscite” in which voters are provided fully symmetric voting options: support, opposition, or abstain from the vote. The full numeric range: +1, -1, or 0.
Hey did you ever realize that, when you go to cast a vote in general election, there’s one of those options missing? Like, you can vote support or you can abstain, so you get the +1 and 0 options. What happened to the -1 option?
I wonder what would become of rich and famous candidates if all of a sudden voters were equally capable of voting -1 as they are of voting +1, I wonder if being rich and famous might become equally a political liability as it is a political advantage.
Maybe unqualified and discredited candidates might face a bit more headwind in that circumstance. You know, if “no such thing as bad publicity” becomes less of a truism, somehow.
Hey, what if voters were able to reject ALL the unqualified fringe extremist candidates, and force a new election, and allow some better-qualified candidates to run in place of the rejected ones?
What if voters were provided the power to discipline or to punish political candidates, for once? You know, as if voters were “actually” in charge of the government, as like a supervisory arrangement, in which government acts for the benefit of the voters for once in history.
I call this radical fringe extremist idea “r/PlebisciteBallot” it’s on Reddit, I even described it one time on YouTube, but I can’t seem to get any traction.
Hey, do you have an issue with arrogant unqualified discredited politicians, and can’t think of anything to do to solve it?
I have the humble suggestion that maybe one time we might trying this fully-symmetric version of democracy that they enjoy in parliament and other places of power.
Who knows, maybe something worthwhile?!
“What's windows again? I could not find it in apt.”
https://linuxconfig.org/setting-up-virtual-machines-with-qemu-kvm-and-virt-manager-on-debian-ubuntu
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt upgrade
$ sudo apt install qemu-kvm libvirt-daemon-system libvirt-clients bridge-utils virt-manager
$ sudo adduser $USER libvirt
$ sudo adduser $USER kvm
$ sudo systemctl status libvirtd
$ sudo systemctl start libvirtd
$ sudo systemctl enable libvirtd
$ virt-manager
After all that you can run Windows, macOS, Solaris, Kolibri, etc as Linux apps.
“It feels like a move to be more like Apple where you don't really control your own device any more.”
I got Granny an M2 Mac mini, well, why not, she likes that system.
It’s funny how you have the same computer with the same software, and after a few years it becomes so hobbled you’re forced to upgrade (even though nothing went wrong with the old one other than “updates”, hmm).
Apple gets you though, for an affordable price they give you a tiny storage device that is practically impossible to update!
But for $20 I got an old Drobo 5N, loaded it with 20TB of HDD (plus a decent power supply), established the network link, all of the sudden she has WAY more space than Apple dreamed possible.
They will have to put on their thinking caps to sabotage that system…
"Why don't they just ask the AI what to do?"
Grunchy: what's the funniest place for microsoft to put copilot next?
ChatGPT said:
Microsoft could definitely have some fun with Copilot by putting it in some delightfully absurd or unexpected places! Here are a few comical ideas:
1. Microsoft Minesweeper Copilot
Suggests which square to click next—but is only "right" 50% of the time. It also offers philosophical musings on the futility of the game as you inevitably lose.
2. Microsoft Clippy Resurrection
Copilot becomes Clippy's sidekick. "It looks like you're trying to write a ransom note. Want some tips on proper formatting?"
3. Microsoft Solitaire Copilot
Pops up to suggest your next move and enthusiastically cheers, "Amazing! You're a Solitaire genius!"—even when you're clearly losing.
4. Microsoft Paint Copilot
"It looks like you're trying to draw a dog. Shall I turn it into a Picasso-inspired masterpiece instead?"
5. Xbox Copilot
Provides in-game tips in a hilariously condescending way:
"Did you know you could aim for the head in this FPS?"
"Careful! That lava isn't a friendly NPC."
6. Notepad Copilot
Autocompletes mundane notes with excessive flair:
"Buy milk" becomes "Procure a carton of Grade-A bovine nectar, ideally 2% fat content."
7. Microsoft Calculator Copilot
Suggests philosophical answers instead of numerical ones:
User: 2+2
Copilot: "How about... inner peace instead?"
8. Cortana-Copilot Buddy Comedy
Cortana and Copilot team up for a constant stream of unhelpful suggestions, like a digital Abbott and Costello.
9. PowerPoint Karaoke Copilot
Automatically generates ridiculous slide content for impromptu office presentations. "Here's a 15-slide deck about why pineapples should be on pizza. You're welcome."
10. Microsoft To-Do Copilot
Every task is auto-assigned deadlines like "When pigs fly" or "Just before the sun engulfs the Earth."
“I asked what are we talking here - Megabytes or Megabits ? To which he replied in all seriousness 'Why, they are the same aren't they ?'”
This was me, trying to figure out “baud”.
Because 300 baud is “approximately” 30 cps (characters per second), yet each character is 8 bits (or maybe 7 bits, or maybe 5 bits).
It’s due to this peculiar thing they called “8b/10b encoding,” in which telecommunication requires 10 bits to transmit 8 bits of data. Well there might be other overhead such as parity bits, stop bits, etc. But anyway lets suppose 1 is distinguished by “a change,” and 0 by “no change.” How many consecutive zeroes can you telecommunicate before you lose track of the number, or suspect the line has gone dead? And yet computer science LOVES to transmit megs and megs of sequential zeroes. So if your telecommunication can, at best, only (reliably) distinguish between 1 zero and 2 zeroes, then the only way to telecommunicate arbitrary digital data is with this intermediary encoding such as “8b/10b”. This is what the UART chip does.
(I had a similar issue figuring out GCR encoding on a Commodore 1541 disk surface. I never did figure out tape drive storage, which is supposedly like the modem, except the Commodore never actually had a UART? As I said: I have only a “partial understanding” of what means “baud”.)
I remember “self-teaching” C++ and I got up to the object destructor and that’s when I threw in the towel.
I had no problem with anything in basic, fortran, machine language. C itself I considered as much more approachable than a pure assembler.
Funny thing, I had an opportunity to participate in a “full stack” class a few years back for C#, we breezed right through objects, constructors, destructors… and that was it!
It wasn’t such a big deal, after all.
I have the LinkedIn presence, sort of the shame of the unemployed. They have this peculiar feed of notifications that arises from all these people that seem to frequent the site: this unending stream of consciousness that demands attention without providing anything “actionable,” I guess I would describe it. What’s interesting are some of the individuals, who I know to be real people, who are participating in it.
“Why,” well one such individual has stated there, on the LinkedIn, that he is on a mission to stamp out “why”.
(I know what he’s talking about, there is a current trend of “idea bankruptcy” in which you can’t think of anything worthwhile to say, so you take old, vapid, formerly-trendy ideas and now you disclaim them as discredited or disproven, for example the “Five Whys” junk philosophy of yesteryear. It has a real strong “feasting on your own feces” musk about it.)
None of us know what the motive was, could have been money, ideology, lulz, affections of Chinese lady spies, blackmail, boredom, stupidity, extortion.
This one time a pastor “stole his community’s church” (sold it, bought a bmw convertible and ran away from the money). What for?
None of us know what the motive was: money, ideology, lulz, affections of Chinese lady spies, etc.
I can’t find the original story from 20 years ago but here’s another.
https://www.businessinsider.com/new-orleans-pastor-stole-900k-from-church-debts-car-doj-2022-10
Back when I ran Windows and WSL came out, I thought: sure, I’ll give it a try. I’m curious what you can do with Linux.
It never worked. Sure, it downloaded all sorts of stuff, and a gigantic installation story went whooshing past, but whatever it was supposed to do, it didn’t do. It sure gave me a lot of inscrutable error excuses or whatever. Used up a whole huge part of the hard disk, too. But whatever mistake it had made was seemingly irreversible. I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of the WSL quagmire, it just became this thing on there you never ever touch because it looks like it’ll never work right. It might even scramble the Windows itself.
Ultimately, the solution was to get a PCIe x1 port extension (to fit in my last x1 slot between the video cards), plus a M.2 NVME PCIe adapter, to mount the legacy windows repository, and meanwhile install a new NVME device for A New Hope: Ubuntu.
(Well, I said I didn’t know a dang thing about Linux, after all!)
So anyway, I don’t know if Windows WSL ever became anything useful. But I did go down the Virsh pathway and have happily set up all sorts of weird VMs to run as Linux Apps. I’ve got Win10 in there, Win7, plus honest-to-goodness Solaris. Also macOS Ventura with a synthetic serial number so I can play with x-code. Kolibri OS, naturally. I have Ubuntu Server set up on some Proxmox clusters I put together elsewhere. Is there anything at all compelling about WSL? Well for me I doubt it. I run Microsoft and Apple as legacy things, they’re really dead ends as far as I’m concerned.
(The absolute NICEST thing about Virsh: I can clone one of my Win10 VMs and try out WSL again, and whether it works or not, it makes no difference! I can always recover a snapshot or scrap the clone, and absolutely no harm done, ever. I have literally zero susceptibility to being disadvantaged whatsoever, no matter how badly Microsoft messes up.)
One of API’s rules is that load path components be designed to last “minimum” of 20 years. So I’m accustomed to be looking at drawings and technical documentation sometimes even on good old blueprint copies, and many rigs predating the 1980s.
Going back to my internship at a roofing manufacturer, one responsibility they gave me was to sort out some file cabinets of technical documentation. I learned that while the paperboard rolling mills were well over 100 years old, the mechanical alignment governor (one of those real primitive “whirlygig” type) was nearing 150 years old! Absolutely stunning. And of course the original manufacturers were still in business and still had support parts, etc.
I dunno what the big deal is. I scored a pair of HP Z800s not long ago, granted they only date back to 2009, so that’s just 15 years old. Both work like a humdinger, well, what’s going to kill them now?
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