Posts by brainwrong

The trendline doesn’t look good for hard disk drives

Re: PCIe connectivity should be the lede, not NVMe

"Getting HDDs OFF OF SATA III (6Gbps) is the key to allowing them to be faster."

HDD's are still limited by how fast the bits go under the read/write heads. Only 1 head is used to read or write at a time, which I assume is down to tracking tolerances.

Modern HDD's are nano-precision marvels! I have some 7200rpm drives that max out at around 240MB/s on the outer tracks, that's 2MB on a track about 250mm long, so 8 bytes/micron, 64 bits/micron, so bits are about 16nm long. Inner tracks are half the length, so a mean of 1.5MB per track. 1TB per platter side suggests around 670,000 tracks, spanning a sweep of about 20mm, or 33.5 tracks/micron, or about 30nm apart. It's working at similar scales to transistors on modern chips (which aren't as small as 2 or 3 or 5 or 7 nm that process names might suggest), which require some rather expensive equipment to make.

Apple AI boffins puncture AGI hype as reasoning models flail on complex planning

People can't know about everything, they trust that people who do will be on the telly to help them think things. The modern world seems to expect us to have opinions on all sorts of things that most people know nothing about.

Re: Expert

"It took experts to realise this?"

If I, a non expert, published something similar I doubt anyone would give a rats arse, because I'm not known or have any credentials. Experts get airtime, or hypertext transfer protocol time or whatever this is.

"We evolved intelligence, and it enabled us to successfully compete with other species"

Thats wot i sed.

We evolved intelligence in order to communicate complex ideas to work together in groups, make and use tools, gain knowledge and experience, plan ahead, understand cause and effect etc. It worked for cavemen, and it still works for us today. Reading and commenting here is exercising your intelligence because you don't need to use it to plan your next crop planting or mammoth hunt, and doing nothing with it is dull.

'We don't really know what "intelligence" is'

When I first heard the hype about LLM's, I thought it would probably challenge peoples idea of what intelligence is.

My take is that intelligence has evolved over *many* generations of trial and error for the purpose of operating the creatures that possess it, such that they may feed themselves and reproduce in the face of competition for common resources. Artificial intelligence has no purpose, so what's the impetus for it to be intelligent? The fact that so many supposedly intelligent people think that LLM's are intelligent leads me to doubt the capabilities of real human intelligence, which did not evolve for the modern world.

Three ways to run Windows apps on a Linux box

Re: Hypervisors

"haven't tried out USB or disk sharing. There seem to be settings for it however in KVM VMM."

I have used disk sharing, and whilst it's simple and works, I've found it has some quirks. You will need to enable shared memory (it will tell you this).

I found that deleting files in the VM doesn't immediately reclaim space on the filesystem, that will happen when you shut the VM down. This isn't a problem for my use case, but may be for others. I haven't investigated this further.

The other problem I found is that if the shared filesystem is on a device encrypted with cryptsetup, it is possible to unmount the filesystem on the host system once the share is unmounted in the VM, but something I can't identify keeps hold of the cryptsetup block device and prevents you closing it. This is a big problem, I have to restart the whole computer to get round this. I don't share anything temporarily anymore.

Neptune OS is Debian made easy but, boy, does it need some housekeeping

Re: Psudo security

"but as long as he'd not run sudo in the past 5 minutes, the thief would be restricted to user level access."

Is password caching also part of the security?

Once I've finished with su I can log out and immediately revoke access to admin tools without a password.

If I use sudo, then access to admin tools without supplying a password is still possible for several (maybe more than 5) minutes. Does a light flash to let me know it's now safe?

Is the password caching tied to the particular terminal session, or is it possible to fire up another terminal window within the timeout and use sudo there without supplying a password? I'd test this myself, but I've locked sudo down to only run a few key commands.

Re: Psudo security

"If the machine was logged in as root when the machine was compromised, then the threat actor has access without needing to find any passwords."

Obviously if someone walks up to my computer whilst I have a terminal window open and logged in as root, then game over, that's my stupidity. I don't do that, I'm quite paranoid about my ordinary user login because it's still possible to delete terabytes of data (I have backups). Does it work the same way for the fabled russian hackers? Does having a terminal window running "su -" make it easier for them?

Re: Psudo security

"there is a temptation to do "safe stuff" in the same shell"

Really??

Psudo security

I'm no expert here, but I don't understand how allowing access to all admin tools via sudo and the users password is more secure than using a root account with a different password.

Signal shuts the blinds on Microsoft Recall with the power of DRM

Copying

If something is on a computer, then it can be copied. Telling people otherwise, however well intentioned, is misleading.

How sticky notes saved 'the single biggest digital program in the world'

Re: "assumptions don't turn out to be what humans look like when you hit them"

"has no interest (or competence) in actually helping you find work"

Whenever I've "used" the job centre, they've always been quite keen to phone the employer up on my behalf to organize a job interview. I've always declined and phoned up the employer myself, because that can't be a good look to a prospective employer that you need help to speak to them.

The only time a job centre was actually useful was the first time I ever went into one, they still had jobs written out on small cards and placed on notice boards. Much better than online search.

Marks & Spencer admits cybercrooks made off with customer info

Re: as a regular customer ...

The point is that the stock should not get to be end of life in the first place.

usable payment or card details

"We also asked what exactly it meant by "usable payment or card details." A spokesperson said: "We don't hold full card payment details on our systems, so it's masked and not usable.""

This means that they don't store the 3 digit CVV code on the back of the card, because that is a breach of contract with the payment processor. All the other details may be stored, and have been stolen by the sounds of it.

Re: as a regular customer ...

"no longer have any real understanding of what stores are selling"

Some retail businesses appear to have no real idea what they're selling anyway, or know how to manage their stock.

I've seen one convenience store retailer would re-order stock to replace sold items, but the stock control system didn't record the price the item was sold at, only that a sale occurred. They also had a policy that items close to their sell-by or best-before dates would be reduced however much necessary for them to sell, they weren't to bin any items. One store got themselves into the situation where they kept getting deliveries of an item that nobody wanted, it all had to be reduced to below cost price to sell, losing them money. More such items were then ordered and delivered to store. They were unable to stop this.

If you look in your local supermarket, you will often see with short life products that a new delivery will be put straight out on the shelves behind older stock without waiting for the older stock to sell. Shoppers then rummage through and take the newer items, leaving the older items on the shelf to get older. They should wait for the old stock to sell first (it usually still has a good life at this point) and then put out the new stock, that way you're less likely to find the only items on display have 1 day life.

Brit soldiers tune radio waves to fry drone swarms for pennies

Re: Other targets

I was more concerned about collateral damage to something *I* might own or use, rather than wanting to use one myself.

Other targets

What other electronic devices will this zap-ray fuck up?

Tesla fudged odometer to screw me out of warranty, Model Y owner claims

Re: Vehicle odometry, ..

"Vehicle mileage seems to be much less than is reported."

Detailed logs of odometer readings with each journey will soon get to the bottom of what's going on, that's what the subject of the article should have done. It's really easy to do (a pen and piece of paper), and will carry more weight in a court of law then bleating vague statements about excessive mileage.

Please sir, may we have some Moore? Doesn't look that way

Catching up

"Spintronics, graphene, pure optical, and any number of exotic silicon-based non-CMOS ideas have had their moment on the lab bench before quietly being shelved."

The problem is that we've travelled so far and fast down the silicon road that starting on a new road, however much further it may go (which is unknown), is currently a BIG step backwards, and therefore isn't going to attract the investment needed to catch up. We've spent a lot of money to travel down the silicon road, there's no reason to think alternative technologies would be much cheaper/quicker to develop.

Maybe we have rushed technologically down a dead end road in a vehicle without reverse gear.

Chrome to patch decades-old flaw that let sites peek at your history

The title is too long.

"It took about eight years for people to realize that link color inferences presented a serious privacy problem."

Then the technology of the modern web is clearly far too complex.

What was wrong with HTML that sir tim invented? Not shiny enough? Ah, that's right, it's unidirectional!

I think technology in general is now too complex for society to use it effectively.

European Gaia mapping satellite is retired but proves very tough to kill

V'Ger

"the Gaia team is rewriting sections of the hard drive with the names of more than 1,500 people who have worked on the project."

Whereas Voyager 6 returned to find it's creator, this thing's gonna return armed with names and full contact details and won't be so easily fobbed off with an expendable actor.

God didn't have a plan for Gelsinger at Intel. Maybe there is one for his new gig, Gloo

Re: 90,000 PSI stream of water which cuts through glass, stone, metal

It's the abrasive powder carried by the water that does the cutting, isn't it? I would assume different abrasives for different materials, but you never hear about that bit, just the water. I'd like to know how the nozzle doesn't get ground away instantly.

We heard you like HBM – Nvidia's Blackwell Ultra GPUs will have 288 GB of it

Re: Are these even GPUs anymore?

Shock absorbers don't absorb shocks, air fryers don't fry, and badgers don't badge, but people don't give a shit.

Google begs owners of crippled Chromecasts not to hit factory reset

Re: I chose Amazon FireTV instead...

Don't trust amazon gadgets, they chat quietly with each other (and some other manufacturers gadgets) and share wi-fi passwords around. I was trying a VPN router at a friends house so she could watch american netfux, i entered the new wifi password into the firestick, and it mostly worked. After removing the VPN router, the samsung telly lost network connection, despite never changing the wifi on that. And it can only remember 1 wifi password at a time, awesome job samsung.

I don't buy this shit but nobody else really gives a fuck, which is why the world is screwed.

People thought globalisation would make goods cheaper, what it has done is to devalue them.

Cheap 'n' simple sign trickery will bamboozle self-driving cars, fresh research claims

"Where I live some traffic lights are always at red during dead of night, unless a sensor detects a vehicle waiting for the light to change and then, eventually, goes green"

I used to drive early morning southbound on the A38 toward Bristol, through a set of lights that would be set happily on green whilst nobody was about, then quickly change to red when it sensed me approaching. They got ignored because visibility was good.

Another set of lights on a pedestrian crossing in Weymouth would reliably turn red if you approached them above the speed limit, but not if you didn't.

Governments can't seem to stop asking for secret backdoors

Err, in communicating between you and the bank, you are one end, the bank is the other, and the untrustworthy internet in-between is unable to view the message contents. Sounds like end-to-end encryption to me.

OpenZFS 2.3 is here, with RAID expansion and faster dedup

Still no

The lack of raid expansion is the one thing that keeps me away from ZFS. However, what they've added here is half arsed and inflexible, and doesn't meet my needs. I'm still waiting for BcacheFS with erasure coding, which would be perfect for my needs, but who knows when that will be ready * . BTRFS promised to do what I want, but has been a big let-down thanks to being badly designed (raid56 breaks copy-on-write, looks unfixable without adding journaling to btrfs). It seems the only way to get flexible erasure coding with self healing bitrot detection is mdadm on top of dm-integrity, which is dog-shit slow, and comes with a big write-amplification penalty on ssd's. May just as well have several independant mdadm arrays with btrfs single disk fs on top, and manually fix any read errors from another good copy.

* My understanding is that BcacheFS existed and worked before the current effort to integrate it into the Linux kernel, so I don't understand why it seems to be being re-written from scratch

Amazon worker – struck and shot in New Orleans terror attack – initially denied time off

Re: Amazon: The employer of last resort

Not hiring somebody you've previously fired seems not unreasonable to me. I once worked at a company that had a policy of never re-employing *any* ex-employee. I saw one guy told to leave on his first day after someone realised he'd worked there before, which was unnecessarily shit.

Apple auto-opts everyone into having their photos analyzed by AI for landmarks

"Fine the PEOPLE who are making these decisions:"

Nope, the only thing that will stop this is for people to stop using their services in sufficient numbers. Which won't happen, because most people don't know or care.

One third of adults can't delete device data

Re: Workstations, laptops.....

Why 3 holes? Any particular location on the drive? Would the average user know to ensure all the platters are broken?

Surely it's better to encrypt the drive from the start, then I don't have to worry about how to wipe or irrevocably damage a non-functioning drive. It also protects my data in the event of theft of said drive.

Humanoid robots coming soon, initially under remote control

Re: Bus Tables

I thought it must be something to do with the middle class, that why i not know.

At least my post showed up this time.

Bus Tables

"fold laundry, bus tables, and assemble boxes."

What is "bus tables"????

Letting chatbots run robots ends as badly as you'd expect

Sex

"it doesn't require much of a leap of the imagination to suppose that robots controlled by LLMs also might be vulnerable to jailbreaking."

Does that mean I'll be able to get it to wank me off? Awesome!!

Microsoft tries out wooden bit barns to cut construction emissions

Fire Resistance

Are we really supposed to believe fire resistance claims made by the building industry after Grenfell?

The linked website doesn't give me any confidence. They don't claim it won't burn, just that it'll last long enough to evacuate a building, assuming you over-specify the thickness correctly (go careful how you calculate bending loads). Even if it were extinguished, the building would probably need to be rebuilt.

The horror that is VHS revived for horror movie release

Re: VHS could be "ok"

The problem with VHS was that people didn't generally give a shit about quality. They used cheap tapes in cheap machines, then used the abomination that was Long Play, which doubled the recording time and shat all over the picture and sound. The author claims DVD's were better, they were shit too (lower vertical resolution, terrible banding). S-VHS was the dogs bollocks, though.

Hi-Fi audio on VHS offered better quality sound than compact cassette, and much longer record times. Panasonic machines were able to record audio only, with no video input signal. I used to record John Peel's show off the radio onto VHS, and scan through all the crap to find the gems to put on cassette.

Here in PAL land we got 576 picture lines, because that's what the signal contained. No scalers.

Eric Schmidt: Build more AI datacenters, we aren't going to 'hit climate goals anyway'

Efficiency

"as AI would enable everyone to use less energy by making technology and electricity grids more efficient"

If you make things more efficient, then you make it cheaper to use. If something is cheaper to use, then more people will use more of it.

I think the climate is fucked either way, it's the fundamental nature of technological civilisation.

I just watched a (bad) documentary about north korea, I was curious what their carbon footprint is.

Earth's new mini-moon swings by, then ghosts us by late November

Not a moon

People have been taking QI too seriously if they think this is a moon. It's just experiencing a minor gravitational slingshot as it passes nearby.

UPS supplier's password policy flip-flops from unlimited, to 32, then 64 characters

Do they know of what they speak?

My guess is that the password is hashed in some form using SHA256, which produces a 32 byte output. My guess is that someone therefore thinks that inputting more than 32 characters results in a reduction of entropy, and should be avoided. This is wrong because the input characters don't have 8 bits of entropy each, 2 bits would be typical for english words, 3 or 4 if you make an effort with funny characters and random upper/lower case. Hashing a 48 character password will very likely increase the entropy, despite the apparent reduction in length.

I think 256 characters would be a sensible maximum.

Heart of glass: Human genome stored for 'eternity' in 5D memory crystal

Hey, I got one like that I found in a quarry....

So what if we found a 300 million year old one of those created by a long lost intelligent species?

What would we do with it? Re-create what would be to us an alien, along with some of their technology?

Happy happy happy, Joy joy joy!

Has anyone made that film yet? There's too much sci-fi now for me to attempt to follow any of it, so I honestly don't know.

Tor insists its network is safe after German cops convict CSAM dark-web admin

Surely you use a VPN to connect to the TOR entry node. That way TOR cannot see your IP address, the VPN cannot see what you're connecting to, and neither tunnel stretches the whole link.

Trump taps Musk to lead 'government efficiency' task force

Re: All a question of spin...

The coriolis effect acts in a clockwise direction in the northern hemisphere, but at less than 0.7 milli-rpm (depending on lattitude) is unlikely ever the dominant influence on plugholes.

Cutting tomatoes does blunt knives, humans can't avoid sideways forces on the blade, and your chopping board is harder than a tomato.

OpenAI allegedly wants TSMC 1.6nm for in-house AI chip debut

Degree

"And it claims that 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies are using OpenAI's products to some degree."

To what degree? Evaluation, development, production?

Hopefully it'll soon be 180 degrees.

Alibaba Cloud boosts failure prediction with logfile timestamps

What?!

"Therefore, effective failure prediction must adequately make use of the exception timestamp information"

Err, that obvious, innit.

The news here should be that they're a bunch of idiots who weren't doing that in the first place.

These are the people who are building our future, seemingly no better than than the Nigerians are building Lagos-

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2ed9y3049o

Big Tech got its 'next billion' – but there's three billion people still offline

"You Will be Assimilated"

I've never understood the logic of declaring that people who live off land, livestock etc., and have no need of money, must be poor.

Introducing money into their lives will make them poor, but they're gullible enough to join us because we monkeys like shiny shiny things.

Is there a point to modern technological civilisation beyond just trashing our house by holding a big party?

Sam Altman's basic income experiment finds that money can indeed buy happiness

I was at university with people who couldn't understand how castor wheels work! You know, those wheels on your shopping trolley that can go in any direction.

But they had the gift of the gab, so I'm sure most of them are in nice jobs now and all is good.

Re: How would this affect the wider economy?

Those needs will change.

How many people needed a mobile phone 25 years ago? How many now? Should people owning smartphones be claiming benefits / going to food banks?

How would this affect the wider economy?

If UBI were to be rolled out nationally anywhere, then wouldn't that result in fundamental changes in the economy that render the current studies useless?

Markets will surely adjust, and effectively take the money back off of people. For example, they'll still all be in competition with each other for the same limited supply of housing.

The money for UBI will have to be taken out of the economy from somewhere via taxes, this won't be without consequence either.

It all sounds good, but I can't see it making things much better long term.

ESA's meteorite bricks hit Lego stores, but don't get your wallet out just yet

Only One?!?

What's the point of a single brick?

Maybe they're building the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness with the rest.

Google unleashes fightback against ChatGPT, a Bard by any other name

Future models

As the internet begins to fill up with crap generated by current AI systems, how difficult will it be to curate good quality training data for future AI systems?

Crap in, crap out.