Posts by Francis Boyle

Smart glasses are only smart if we train them to be good. Then they'll be fantastic

Re: How smart ?

Obviously you've not experience [redacted] on any random Saturday night.

As someone with Prosopagnosia

facial recognition is the one thing I'd want these glasses for. The thing that horrifies me is that apparently there are apps that can use the facial recognition to identify random individuals from the image alone. But that's not a glasses exclusive thing. The problem's not local – it's in the network. Maybe it is the network.

We don't serve pies, but we do like a Pi

"empowers staff to control tips"

Would be scary if it weren't marketing BS.

US auto regulators want to kill robotaxi brake pedals

Re: Am I missing the difference?

Not if they're already dead (or otherwise incapacitated). In the end the only thing that matters is which system has the lower failure rate.

NASA tests AI medic for astronauts too far from Earth to call a doctor

Re: I hope well trained AI

Unless they can be made to provide you with the missing leg that's not much in way of compensation.

The tech that could make Marvell the next trillion dollar company

I'm not much interested in networking

so I didn't bother reading the article – Jjust skipped her for the superhero jokes.

Starlink sprays debris into orbit following another satellite 'anomaly'

Given the number of sprogs

he's managed to produce, 69 is not his favourite number. Now, 420, that's more his style.

Arm rolls its own 136-core AGI CPU to chase AI hype train

Re: 300W CPU

I don't even want to think of the power demands of GPP.

NASA probe checks out years early because this solar cycle is a real drag

Re: Scary

The one in four thousand figure applies solely to the present case. Extrapolating to the general case is in no way meaningful. Satellite end-of-life management is a mature art even if things still occasionally go wrong (because space is hard)..

New hire fixed a problem so fast, their boss left to become a yoga instructor

Try

21" Trinitrons. Beautiful displays but moving one was some sort of labour of Hercules.

I had a fruit-fly infestion

and those things can literally shit on the ceiling. Cleaning a popcorn and flyshit ceiling isn't fun.

Given

the reputation of milkmaids I suspect one-legged stools might have referred to something else.

My best ideas often come to me

in the toilet. There's just something about the all sphincters loose position. I do prefer my toilet bowls don't rock though.

GitHub ponders kill switch for pull requests to stop AI slop

“talking bollocks”

If that's the British equivalent of Harry Frankfurt's bullshit, I concur. We truly live in the age of enbullshitification.

Google's Project Genie could put even more game developers out of work

With AI it's all YGWYG

You Get What You Get. And what you get is, however realistic or not, completely generic and will always be until the AI promoters get over "it must be produced on command" mindset and develop tools that artists can use to realise a human vision.

Techie banned from client site for outage he didn’t cause

Compete amateur. Everyone know that you're supposed to replace blown fuses with live rounds. The way he's going the only person he'll kill is himself and what's a Darwin Award worth these days?

The future of long-term data storage is clear and will last 14 billion years

Re: Its "just" documentation

Or you could just clone Alan Turing. Seriously, given how successful the Bletchley Park people were in recovering information that was deliberately meant not to be recovered, I wouldn't be so pessimistic about the case were the problem is mere carelessness.

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

Re: Reminds me of the time ...

I'm pretty sure a genuine cunning linguist should be entirely capable of doing it upside down and back to front.

Space-power startup claims it can beam energy to solar farms

Nah

This is Hyperloop territory (I.e. makes sense in a science fiction setting – makes absolutely no economic sense in the world we live in.)

Russia’s first autonomous humanoid robot staggers and falls on debut

A certain Mr Schwarzenegger

might be able to be persuaded.

SpaceX shows off progress on its lunar Starship

Wouldn't

the Haynes manual have been cheaper?

AI boffins teach office supplies to predict your next move

This will cause a run

on whatever supplies of hope remain in this forlorn world.*

* As per Douglas Adam's prescient observation. You know the one.**

**OK, if you insist.

Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot

Don't worry

I'm sure someone, somewhere, is working on an AI that will pretend to use AI so you can get on with your job.

No account? No Windows 11, Microsoft says as another loophole snaps shut

Yes, I use a Google account

on my phone. I also refuse to use my phone for anything remotely sensitive. I accepted long ago that my phone is effective a public space. My computer on the other hand – my entire life is there.

The sweetest slice of Pi: Raspberry Pi 500+ sports mechanical keys, 16GB, and built-in SSD

I'd call myself

a " free speech absolutist". I don't have a problem with people calling for other people to be killed*. What I do have a problem with is them doing that where there is a practical possibility of that someone will be influenced to do what they are suggesting**.

*Just to be clear, I mean I don't think the utterance itself should be illegal.

**Merely suggesting something, even in a "nudge, nudge, wink, wink" kind of way counts as incitement in my book.

Playing ball games in the datacenter was obviously stupid, but we had to win the league

Actually,

they prefer to be called the Knight's Tippler.

Total recall: Mistral AI's Le Chat can now remember your conversations

Well, this will certainly make AI better

and therefore worse.

RefreshOS 2.5: The Debian remix that borrows from every desk in the house

I was thinking

about just such a thing while reading the article. Yes have a ultra minimalist distro. That the easy part. The possibly difficult part would be a mechanism to reliably reinstall all the user software (complete with history) after an upgrade.

Re: nice of them

I like the traditional menu bar but I don't think it should be enforced purely for the sake of consistency. It probably not needed on something like a calculator app, for example. I really don't mind if the programs I use have a personality of their own as long as the chosen UI style is well thought out (which means putting the user's needs first).

Google takes Photoshop to the woodshed with new image AI

So it's actually AE

Artificial Eccles.

Unlike most of Musk's other ventures, Starship keeps it together for Flight Test 10

I've been watching old episodes of Mythbusters

and can confirm that exploding as expected can be very satisfying.

Microsoft continues Control Panel farewell tour

Ah, the play store

Having the search field at the top where people expect it but putting the search button at the bottom was a genius move.

Make Redmond angry by setting up Windows 11 with a local account

Because I'm simply not masochistic enough to submit myself to the Gimp

Until Linux gets a genuinely powerful and usable photo editor I'm stuck in an abusive relationship with MS.

Rufus

really is ridiculously useful.

How to train your robot: Wear a tiny one in a baby carrier

Daleks

are more you're demolition workers.

Mars says hello as NASA's Europa Clipper warms up radar

In other news

Nasa announces Europa to be renamed "America-a".

Large Hadron Collider data hints at explanation for why everything exists

Re: Solipsism 101

I'm also here all the time but know you mention it I do feel a bit flickery.

Please

treat this subject with the gravity it deserves.

Double-detonation supernova could explain why the universe is full of candles

"Type LA supernova"

are more typically fuelled by cocaine.

Japan set to join the re-usable rocket club after Honda sticks a landing

I also

frequently fart when I sit down.

Waymo problems in La La Land as robotaxis set aflame

Easy

you just need to be a stable genius.

Ship abandoned off Alaska after electric cars on board catch fire

Re: That's the fault of car companies

Probably a good thing, then, that the only time you'll find yourself driving up or downhill in the Netherlands is when a cow has dropped an unusually large turd on the motorway.

Since the Felicity Ace

currently resides at the bottom of the Atlantic any "allegations" that its fire was started by an EV are pure speculation. It was also alleged that the Fremantle Highway and Luton Airport fires were caused by EVs and those allegations turned out to be baseless. So maybe a little less speculation and a little more scepticism is called for.

Astroboffins analyzed old data and found a candidate dwarf planet in the Oort cloud

I'm not sure

objecting to an order of magnitude error counts as pedantry.

Trump tariffs ruled illegal within minutes of Musk announcing end of government role

Nah

Paul had already done that several centuries before. Constantine just made the Pauline doctrines official.

Re: Both are true

No point in asking for clarification. As with anything drafted by committee being fundamentally unclear is the actual intention.

China finds a previously unknown microbe on its space station

So it likes a nice jelly but

I doubt it can cope with Vegemite.

Top sci-fi convention gets an earful from authors after using AI to screen panelists

Trouble is

"actual harm" is too low a bar. Musk thinks it's "evil" to harm him by not buying his cars and by urging others to follow suit. Most sane people would think that's batshit crazy but he is indeed being harmed not just offended. In a robust democracy we actually have to tolerate actions that harm others. Otherwise no change could ever be possible.