Posts by StillBill

DoorDash sued for allegedly branding customer a fraudster after delivery photo query

Wha... 3.4 million to door dash in 4 years

3.4M/4/365 = 2,328 USD a DAY in door dash - 7 days a week. What is this person doing. For that kind of money - have someone on staff that goes and gets stuff to save money and don't worry about the problem

Software innovation just isn't what it used to be, and Moxie Marlinspike blames Agile

Re: Has "Agile" become synonymous with "Development management" ?

Yes,

A bunch of consultants have showed up to director and above levels and spouted you must be agile or be a dinosaur. So these people say we must be agile and go and find a bunch of poorly self trained "scrum masters" amongst their internal ranks and say make it so. You end up with people with a poor understanding of project management running the henhouse and no good ever results.

Agile and scrum (somehow these things are always linked in very strange ways) are just interesting ways of getting management off your back long enough (usually 2 weeks) so you can actually get some work done

Intel's processor failures: A cautionary tale of business vs engineering

This has been going on for a very long time

I worked at Intel as a software engineer. I had a fun lunch game of bridge with some interesting folks - one was the qa lead for all slot one processors (remember those). Caught an article that Intel had just released the 1.13 Ghz Pentium iii processor.

I mentioned this at lunch and my friend said no we hadn't - well Intel had released it. https://www.theregister.com/2000/08/28/intel_recalls_1_13ghz_pentium/ (way way back machine)

Turns out it did not pass QA and he hadn't signed off on the release. There was an analog bug in the chip that a certain series fo instructions would not result in correct results

Sure enough, Intel recalled all of the chips and didn't get above 1Ghz for a very long time.

Yes, this was a business decision, that overturned the engineer's data that said don't do it

Watermarking AI images to fight misinfo and deepfakes may be pretty pointless

Re: A stupid idea

So, where is the line drawn. The updating features in Photoshop tend to be labelled as "AI". I can add/remove/move edit things in Photoshop through an AI interface. Does that mean it needs to be watermarked? At what point do I go from a human edit to an AI edit? What if I use an AI image creation, then a human editor to adjust it and modify it - oh change lighting levels, color balance - crop it rotate it, at what point does it become a human edit from an AI creation?

Now the fun of cryptographically signing the image. The first question is with what key and why should I trust it anyway?

TSMC says Arizona fab behind schedule, blames chip geek shortage

Let me translate

We can't find enough workers that will work for what we want to pay them. I mean seriously. Pay 100/hr and you will have employees kicking down the door trying to work there.

BOFH: The vengeance bus is coming, and everybody's jumping. An Xmas bonus hits me…

Is it just me

or the article right after this one is:

Chip manufacturing equipment vendor ASML reports fire at Berlin factory

Well, now we know where the BOFH and PFY ended up after Brexit

If you don't LARP, you'll cry: Armed fun police swoop to disarm knight-errant spotted patrolling Welsh parkland

Re: Plague Doctors?

Bring out your dead...

Re: "...society's untouchables..."

So during the peak of the anthrax scare in the USA... A friend went on a Hash House Harrier run. The rabbit left the bar as normal, marked the trail with flour as normal... a good time was had by all. Then the calls came in the next day. Piles of a white powder were found on streets at regular intervals, hazmat crews were called, huge areas were shut down.

If it isn't hurting you, don't be scared of it

UC Berkeley told to cough up $5m in compensation to comp-sci, engineering students recruited to teach classes

Re: Exploded Ironymeter...

Possibly different entities, but the same politics

Town admits 'a poor decision was made' after baseball field set on fire to 'dry' it more quickly

Missing other good government ideas

From the 70s...

Oregon Exploding Whale

So a large whale washes up on the beach... Rather than haul it away... load it with explosives and let the birds eat the bite size chunks that would be left...

You can read what really happened. Lets just say bite sized if you are an elephant sized bird and they still had to haul away 1/2 the carcass... I remember loving this video back in the early internet days

IETF moves meeting from USA to Canada to dodge Trump travel ban

Re: Sounds good to me

I wouldn't travel to Berkeley either and I live just down the street in San Jose. Berkeley isn't a safe place to visit as anyone with a controversial (to them) conservative opinion causes massive riots, destruction of property and shutting down of highways. Berkeley is just outside of Oakland that has one of the highest crime rates in the USA (your chance of being a victim of a major crime while living in Berkeley is ~ 2%/year).

Yeah San Francisco is working hard to take back those statistics from Berkeley/Oakland - but they haven't managed it yet. I would much rather travel to a nice Canadian city and worry about border control on the way back than have to deal with California

Bug in Microsoft's StorSimple arrays can kill backups

Microsoft's success in the hardware business

After all, the only time Microsoft made a product that didn't suck was when they got into the vacuum business.

(Thank you, I am here all night - don't forget to tip your waitress)

Angler hooks German's todger at nudist lake

Ouch

Kickstarter folk pay $8 MEELLION for joys of EXPLODING KITTENS

Depends on how many decks are produced

Assume there is a magic 10 dollars to produce a deck and box and get it shipped out.

They get 4M to develop a killer product

It costs 4M to ship out 400K decks of cards.

Yes, if they were only shipping 100 decks of cards to 50 backers - I'd agree with you, but with most things, physical objects scale with the size of the delivery.

Intel's LAME DUCK mobile chips gobbled by CASH COW

Re: Intel never really got the "new embedded"

Really, The Microprocessor design didn't start with Intel? -- REALLY?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_4004

Oh well