Posts by brainwrong

DARPA looking for battery that could power a laptop for months

Re: Radioactivity on your lap ?

But the article was specifically about the development of an alphavoltaic system.

Re: This is easy to do

It's worse than that, if you want 100W of electricity then you'll have to dissapate substantially more than that in heat, the thermocouples that convert heat energy to electrical power aren't very efficient (<10%).

New technology may improve things, I recently read about a company called Fourth Power who had recently demonstrated a thermophotovoltaic cell with over 40% efficiency, although they may be using temperatures somewhat higher (up to 2400 C) than you could use with radioisotopes. Would anyone fancy a white-hot can of liquid Pu-238 inside their nuclear battery?!!

None of this shit is ever going to power your everlasting gobstopperlaptop.

Icon because fire!

1K+ cloud environments infected following Trivy supply chain attack

Drivel

Trivy - KICK - liteLLM - CI/CD pipelines - API keys - GitHub tokens - GitHub Action component - trivy-action - npm ecosystem - Docker Hub - workflow files

What's all this drivel for? So people can claim to be at the forefront of IT? All I see is complexity and lots of space for holes.

I also saw this, "Trivy version 0.69.4". 'nuff said.

NASA sets 'impossible' ground rules for relocation of 'flown space vehicle'

Re: 747?

I think iran have some old 747's from before the islamic revolution.

Google unleashes Gemini AI agents on the dark web

Re: Google lying to customers

I thought that claim looked like bollocks, too. Maybe it's accessing theonion.com rather than .onion addresses.

Big moves in Linux filesystems as new bcachefs lands and KDE adds support for Apple's APFS

Re: btrfs vs bcachefs

"*An* answer. The point being it may not be true."

It appears that there isn't a single answer, because of how it works. Data and metadata typically have different write profiles (default is 1 copy of data, 2 of metadata). It'd need to know the future mix of those 2 to give a single accurate answer. It could probably do better though.

"No, that is ZFS."

I said they claim that for btrfs, I don't know that it's actually true, but I've not seen any reason to doubt it. But if writes don't happen in the correct order and are interrupted midway then there may be a problem. I've never had a problem here, but I am quite selective in which features I use. Some parts of it appear robust, other parts are by their own admission not production ready. FaceFuck apparently use btrfs extensively, and contribute code to the project, but are themselves selective in which features they use.

Re: btrfs vs bcachefs

"> I'm slightly confused (or better yet -uninformed) - what are the biggest benefits oh using bcachefs over btrfs?"

This is complex and depends on what features you want to use. The only real answer to this is to spend time reading up on them, but much of the info found by search engines is out of date. Bcachefs promises to do everything btrfs was supposed to do, and more, but I think it's still early days.

"1. It cannot reliably report free space. In other words, the `df -h` command lies to you. This means software can't check if it can safely do something without risking filling the volume."

This is annoying. btrfs own tools can tell you the answer, but may require knowledge of the filesystem architecture to interperet the results.

"2. Any attempt to write to a full Btrfs volume _will_ corrupt the volume."

I'm sure I read somewhere that's no longer the case, that it will reserve some space for key filesystem operations. Copy-on-write means that any operation (even file delete) needs free space for the writes. It is worth noting that btrfs allows you to use a greater percentage of the available space than ext4, because inodes are not allocated in advance. I have a btrfs filesystem that's currently 99.9% full, it's got a bit slow. Any filesystem will be troublesome when near full.

"3. There is no working `fsck`. The repair tools do not work. SUSE relies on Btrfs and SUSE's docs say, with a bright red WARNING heading, "do not attempt to use `btrfs-repair`.""

I think the claim is that the nature of the fs is such that it cannot become inconsistent, and therefore fsck is not needed. This does depends on writes being made in the correct order, so beware of writeback caching. I have never had a problem.

There is another nasty gotcha I've read about. If you have a 2 disk raid1, and one disk fails, you only get one opportunity to mount the degraded filesystem as read/write, so you must replace the failed device during this time because that requires writes. Future mounts of the degraded filesystem will be read only, because it is unable to satisfy the raid1 write profile with a single disk. So no using of degraded fs whilst you await delivery of a replacement disk, unlike mdadm raid.

In the name of science: Boffins build fart-tracking undies

14

"commonly cited estimate of around 14 daily expulsions"

Commonly? Who the fuck's heard that before?

Apple’s MacBook Neo turns out to be its most repairable lappy in 14 years

"Screws = cheap manual labour."

Err, no. Screws have been able to be installed by machine for ages.

Digital fruit fly brain model walks and cleans its feelers

But science fiction is fiction, and this is a news website which ostensibly reports facts. Commenters here may be able to separate the two, but there are plenty of people out there without the scientific knowledge to be able to do that.

RAM is getting expensive, so squeeze the most from it

is zram backing compressed?

"So you can have some zram as well as a swap file, and it will move the least recently used stuff from zram into disk swap as needed."

I was looking at these recently, and have been unable to find out if data remains compressed when zram moves data to the disk swap. I feel that if it did, then this would be a feature worth telling people about. My understanding of the architecture of the swap system is that if the zram swap device fills up, then the existing data will remain there, and new data swapped out of memory will go (uncompressed) to the disk swap. If data were to be moved out of zram swap to disk swap, it would be de-compressed as it leaves zram.

Zswap does write compressed data to the backing swap disk, so reducing the amount of writes, which is good for ssd's.

It appears to me that zram is only good if you have no disk swap, and zswap is the better option if you do.

I always encrypt swap partition, because raw memory contents may be sat there in the open.

Britain spends £180M to work out what time it is

Re: Is this really necessary?

I think it more likely that europe can't rely on the uk.

Besides, an independent alternative is a good thing.

NASA’s asteroid defence mission slowed targets by 1.7 inches per hour

Is it actually useful?

But can we be sufficiently certain of the trajectory of the asteroid (before and after an impactor) far enough ahead of time to know we've done the right thing?

An asteroid will need to be diverted years before its potential impact, it will take years to get a mission to it, and we'll probably need several years of observations to pin down its trajectory. The principle of a small change increasing in time may allow to amplify our small shunt to a larger deviation, but this also gives rise to a larger uncertainty in its future trajectory.

We're gonna need more, larger impactors and much better observations to be able to make use of this.

China’s rubber-stamp parliament rubber stamps tech independence plan

Jensen just wants to make sales.

"Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has often said Washington must allow export of his company’s products, to ensure US tech dominates the global AI industry."

I would expect china would use the american designed chippery to try to get ahead in AI, rather than wait for their own chippery to catch up first before being able to get ahead in AI. Then once the chinese chippery does catch up, they'll shift their AI systems over to it. I'm sure they won't allow their AI models to be stuck on foreign hardware.

Once upon a time, saving your bits meant punching holes in floppies

Re: pencils

What weirdo used pencils for that? Bic Biro was the tool of choice.

Harvard boffins finally crack the mystery of squeaky sneakers

I read it as being a vertical wave motion of the rubber, individual bits of the surface lifting off the glass and re-settling in a different place, the whole moving along like an 80's bodypopper.

Hard drives already sold out for this year – AI to blame

Advancement

I just hope there isn't a breakthrough in optical computing, because all the LED's would be snapped up by big tech and we'd be back to candlelight.

30+ Chrome extensions disguised as AI chatbots steal users' API keys, emails, other sensitive data

more unexplained wierdness

What is this things? "gghdfkafnhfpaooiolhncejnlgglhkhe"

It's 32 characters, and looks like the subject line of an obfuscated usenet post by professional pirates.

How the GNU C Compiler became the Clippy of cryptography

Glass

Old methods of plate glass manufacture couldn't get the thickness very even. It makes sense to put the heavier bit at the bottom.

Glass is solid. An experiment you could try is to smash some glass, find some sharp bits, store them for a long time, taking care not to damage the edges, and see it they're still sharp years later. If it were a liquid then you would expect surface tension to blunt the edges. I haven't done this, but maybe your descendants could report back in the future.

SpaceX wants to fill Earth orbit with a million datacenter satellites

Re: Kardashev nonsense

Roddenbery knew fuck all about space or science. Watch any episode of the original 3 series to see.

Curse of AI to push up PC prices as memory and CPU shortages bite

Re: So when the AI bubble bursts ...

No, we get cheaper power-guzzling data-centre hardware. Which will be more difficult for us to plug in and power than the data centre operators.

It'll take time to re-direct production to consumer hardware, assuming the manufacturers are still in business.

Nitrogen ransomware is so broken even the crooks can't unlock your files

No, you still have to search the entire private key space to find the private key corresponding with the incorrect public key. I think it may even be possible that there isn't a corresponding private key.

Voyager 2's close encounter with Uranus wasn't in the original plan

Re: yur-a-nus

Fart jokes originate from your brain, not your anus.

The two are easily confused.

Re: yur-a-nus

I recall it being pronounced "you-rain-us" until the flyby, and television started fretting about the mis-pronounciation and gave us "yur-a-nus", this being the trigger for the spitting image sketch.

I always thought "yur-a-nus" was stupid, and anyone saying "your-anus" was an idiot. I've never understood why anus's are funny.

Ready for a newbie-friendly Linux? Mint team officially releases v 22.3, 'Zena'

'or "i18n" for short'

What's this? Are you going to start writing articles in C, rather than a human readable language?

Micron breaks ground on humungous NY DRAM fab after beating bats and tree huggers

What was moved to make way for the bats?

Do the bats prefer their artificial habitat over the natural one?

How do they intend to communicate to the bats where they should move to?

Wine 11 runs Windows apps in Linux and macOS better than ever

What?

microsoft, and maybe your clients, are the problem here, not linux or its fanboys.

"The post to which the one above was responding even specifically pointed this out but was clearly ignored."

It wasn't ignored, the reply stated that you're stuck on the ms hamster wheel.

The free software people aren't going to all this trouble to create ms compatibility, then stopping 1 inch short of the end just to be cunts. That last 1 inch is clearly very difficult / impossible. Whose fault do you think that is?

How much have you paid for linux? I have my frustrations with linux, but I've paid nothing for any of it, so I just have to live with it as it is, and occasionally let off a bit of steam here.

AI industry insiders launch site to poison the data that feeds them

What the fuck are humans for?

"The more I listen to the anti-AI people, the more I'm convinced that they are offended that software plus data shows humans are not unique or special in anyway."

I don't disagree with that. I always thought this would bring into question what intelligence really is, and that maybe people won't like the answer.

"Like it or not, AI has become the repository of cultural and technical memory."

My objection to all this nonsense can be summed up with one very simple question, namely "What the fuck are humans for?"

Culture has meaning because of the shared experience of humanity. How does culture (and technology) made by machines fit into this? Will we all become mind-slaves? What are humans going to do in the future that won't also be done by a machine? Pay for it?

Luggable datacenter: startup straps handles to server with 4 H200 GPUs

Light

"Neither of those weighed anything close to 77 pounds, despite containing a CRT screen"

Cathode Ray Tubes shouldn't be heavy, most of their interior is lighter than air....

UK regulators swarm X after Grok generated nudes from photos

Re: Not having Elon's ear

"I thought I'd ask grok .."

Don't anthropomorphise this shit. It's not admitting to anything, it's generating some text to try to make you happy, just as it generates pictures to try to make others happy.

Logitech macOS mouse mayhem traced to expired dev certificate

ms-dos never allocated drivers to the correct sized UMB slot. They allocated to the largest sized one available, which was plain stupid. They should have allocated to the smallest one it would fit in. It was possible to direct it manually to a specific available slot, although sometimes there may be another reason why it wouldn't work. It wasn't difficult to look at the memory map and figure out a better way of arranging things to fit more into the UMB. Mem-maker (whatever it was called) that shipped with dos6 tried to do this, but was crap at it.

Earlier Horizon rollout could widen net for quashed Post Office convictions

Re: Anecdotal evidence

I hope the calculations were all done using integer arithmetic, and not floating point. Financial calculations should only be done using integer arithmetic.

Sam Altman is willing to pay somebody $555,000 a year to keep ChatGPT in line

Re: Are we really supposed to take this seriously as something useful?

My understanding is that fiction isn't a good basis for policy.

Re: Are we really supposed to take this seriously as something useful?

Loving these anonymous comments and their upvotes, you pricks.

Re: How about improving what we have already first?

The purple pint-sized popster Prince owned an A-Z, that's how he was able to go down to Alphabet Street!

Are we really supposed to take this seriously as something useful?

"Isaac Asimov created the famous Three Laws of Robotics as ethical guidelines for fictional robots."

But that's all fiction. Reality is more difficult.

Asimov wrote lots of stuff. I don't know what cos I find reading books to be mind-numbingly dull. But wikipedia has the following sentence:

In a 1971 satirical piece, The Sensuous Dirty Old Man, Asimov wrote: "The question then is not whether or not a girl should be touched. The question is merely where, when, and how she should be touched."

Satellite radio transmissions are jamming telescopes and driving astronomers batty

You think we shouldn't observe the natural world around us? How dull.

Re: Fuck Humanity

"Furthermore, our population is about 4x to 5x what the planet can sustain."

I'm no expert, but that sounds a bit low to me. Might be feasable whilst we can still dig stored energy out of the ground, but that won't last forever.

Users prompt Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot to remove clothes in photos then 'apologize' for it

Re: Consequences

"The big players aren't the root problem."

People are the root problem. Ordinary people. They use these things for their own selfish reasons without any thought as to the consequences to the greater good. The big players are simply catering to the market that they see.

I don't expect that to be a popular opinion.

NASA tries Curiosity rover's Mastcam to work out where MAVEN might be

"The probe's orbit will, in the absence of thruster firings, eventually deteriorate, and the spacecraft will burn up in Mars' atmosphere. Some components are expected to survive all the way to the surface."

What's the time scale for this? Just after Elon's arrival?

Windows is testing a new, wider Run dialog box. Here’s how to try it

News?

Why is this news?

"vivetool /enable /id:57156807,57259990,58527096,58381341"

Did someone start at 1 and try over 58 million options to find this?

Are they still going? You must update us with whatever else they find that's of no interest.

UK prepares to wave goodbye to 3G telecoms as tri-hard tech retires

Re: End Of An Era?? Really??

That's because no alternative arrangements were made to guide people. Junctions without lights give priority to some vehicles, maybe not efficiently. Junctions with broken lights have no structure to guide people, and they're too selfish and arrogant on the whole to work together.

What's been turned off?

I don't quite understand what's been turned off. I have an old 3G phone in the uk and it's still working just fine.

I thought 2G had been turned off in some areas, years ago when I had a 2G phone i had no service whatsoever in central bristol, the home of my network. Made getting a puncture sorted rather difficult.

CEO spills the Tea about massive token farming campaigns

Oh dear :(

How could this terribleness happen to such innovative flannelwank?

As humanoid robots enter the mainstream, security pros flag the risk of botnets on legs

Re: My Optimus is gonna

There'll be a new man of the house providing for them, whilst the old one lounges around being fat and lazy.

We'll beat China to the Moon, NASA nominee declares

Re: and returning them safely to earth?

"No mention of them coming back"

Be a bummer if the kessler thing happens whilst they're up there.

Re: RAH

"Moon could be turned into a penal colony."

Nah, that's one of the uses china will have for england when they buy it.

Mozilla's Firefox 145 is heeeeeere: Buffs up privacy, bloats AI

Re: One thing about Firefox

What does centre click do, other than being the first part of the mouse to fail?

It's often said here that doing the same thing again and expecting a different outcome is foolish, but that doesn't stop me. It's sometimes wrong.

Re: One thing about Firefox

running waterfox (derived from firefox) on cinnamon desktop, the first right-click brings up the application's menu, a second right click replaces it with the system's menu, so I can move it to another workspace.

Big Tech's control freak era is breaking itself apart

fuck off

Are you real or fake? I can't tell if you're joking. That's a future I don't want to live in. I don't get people at all, or understand how to interact with them, but seeing them being taken away and replaced with automation just leaves me hollow. Technology designed for use by non-techies is even more baffling than the non-techies. I don't see any reason currently to bother with the future. It'll be a little bit interesting to watch (until the means to see it breaks), and staggeringly depressing.