Posts by brainwrong

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.

Re: This article was timely

"I'm still hoping AGI / GAI turns out to be impossible and a big marketing hype / scam."

I believe it is impossible, but you can't prove the negative so we'll all just have to wait until the blockheads give up trying. A lot of damage may be done in the meantime.

"Now add in the fact it can make decisions faster than we can blink"

That reminds me of a 1970 documentary on the subject, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project

Microsoft just revealed that OpenAI lost more than $11.5B last quarter

Re: In other words...

"I'm lazy, and will assume as a Fermi estimate that a Yank dollar's thickness is approximately that of a UK banknote"

UK banknotes are approx 1/11th of a millimetre thick. A stack of £20 notes is £220/mm, or £220million/Km, which last time I looked was less than the cost of building HS2.

Nvidia, Oracle to build 7 supercomputers for Department of Energy, including its largest ever

2.2 sillyFLOPS

I'm glad it's not just me who can't remember which bigness prefix comes next.

"combined 2,200 exaFLOPs of AI compute performance"

Does it have any REAL compute performance?

Blinded by the light: Tesla fixes glaringly bright Cybertruck headlights

Re: FFS...

That's a lie first peddled by Clive Sinclair to explain why the LED digits on his calculator flashed (~30Hz IIRC) to a general public who at the time would not have understood multiplexing. Without a nearly linear relationship between mean light level and the eye's response then DLP video projectors won't work well.

Re: FFS...

"I only wish other manufacturers would do something about their ridiculously bright LED headlights."

The problem I have with them is that there is *NO* warm up time, or any kind of soft start, so your eyes have no time to adjust when they flash their high beam. Halogen lamps have a short but sufficient warm up time, even HID headlight lamps have a warm up.

The regulators have completely failed with vehicle lighting regulations over the last 25+ years. Turn indicators should not be allowed to use clear lenses*, and the front ones should be positioned at the front of the car and not halfway round the sides. And I'm fucked off with getting a face full of 3rd brake light in every traffic queue. And why do all LED lights have to use PWM and visibly flash? LED's are DC devices that work at any current up to their rated maximum, just use a lower current or fewer or smaller LEDs.

* Changing luminance is more noticeable than changing chrominance.

MIT boffins double precision of atomic clocks by taming quantum noise

Caesium

"Cesium, for instance, vibrates more than 10 billion times every second."

You spelt caesium wrong, and got it's frequency wrong. Whilst it probably has oscillation modes above 10GHz, the one used to define the second is 9,192,631,770 Hz.

You don't say what atom this work is based on.

Carmakers fear chip crunch as Dutch sanctions hit Nexperia

JIT

I thought the problem wasn't one of "single source", but one of using "just in time" logistics for components which take weeks or months to fabricate....

If you cancel your orders from 2 suppliers, then surely they're both gonna switch to making other things for other customers.

Larry Ellison's latest craze: Vectorizing all the customers

biomineralization

"The goal is to develop crops that can extract CO2 from the atmosphere and convert it into calcium carbonate through biomineralization, simultaneously increasing food yields while reducing carbon dioxide."

Will we have to pick bones out of the salad in the future?

Bose kills SoundTouch: Smart speakers go dumb in Feb

"Why on earth, in these days of solar heated water have they removed the hot fill connection from a lot of the washing machines?"

Combi boilers is probably why. Most people have those. The inlet hoses can't cope with hot water at mains pressure (look at one to see), internal hoses and other parts may not either, and the water hammer is likely bad for the boiler.

Starlink is burning up one or two satellites a day in Earth’s atmosphere

Sorry, but this article jumped all over the place

It literally did for me, once I scrolled down the page to the questionnaire, it suddenly started getting unstoppably longer with emptyness, the scroll bar shrinking to oblivion as my screen displayed an ever smaller proportion of the expanding page. It was like the expansion of the universe all over again.

On to the subject of the article, by the time we know burning satellites is a bad thing, our future doom is already up there waiting to come down and poison us a fuck load more. happy happy!

Big money is nervous about AI hype, but not ready to call it a bubble

upscaler or frame rate booster?

What you describe sounds more like it's increasing the frame rate by trying to predict tween frames. My friends 4K 60Hz samsung does this if I feed it a video file encoded at 24,25 or 30Hz. If I feed it a 25 or 30 frame video file encoded at twice the rate, such that each frame is duplicated, it doesn't fuck with the image and displays what was in the video file. The problem is that there is insufficient temporal resolution at 25 or 30 Hz to be able to make accurate estimation of motion, and the process is completely unable to understand movement of light and shade. It appears to be using the motion information directly from the video file, which doesn't account for occlusion, which is probably the source of these artifacts. A lot of people seem to be blind to this, but i find it rather jarring when bits of the image that my eyes are naturally drawn to drop the frame rate.

Neural radiance fields may one day solve these issues, and allow you to move the camera position too.

Hacked Ford screens put anti-RTO slogan above CEO’s face

Re: When you work for the man, you work for the man

"If you don't like the rules, you can leave. Nobody is forcing you to stay there."

Exactly this. If more people were prepared to stand up for themselves at work, then work wouldn't be the shitbox it is now. That involves risking your current employment. But that means not stretching yourself so far that your life becomes critically dependent on a continuous income. It seems people would rather buy shiny things.

Amazon grounds drone deliveries in Arizona after two crashed into a crane

Re: How to parse this?

"So…er… it was the crane’s fault?"

The company that owned or operated the crane are so unimportant that they aren't even named in the article, but amazon are a very important company, so it's obvious that the big lumbering crane is expected to give way to the agile drones with their very important AA batteries.

UK to roll out mandatory digital ID for right to work by 2029

Re: No thanks, fishing is not securing borders

They work for the people who pay them. Whilst on the face of it we pay them, actually they TAKE a wage, we do not choose to pay them. Their donors choose to pay them, so that's who they work for, because the donors can choose to not pay them.

The only power we have over politicians is to vote in superior alternatives when we are given the chance....

Solar flair: Logitech's K980 Signature Slim keyboard runs on rays

Re: "the omission of foldable legs"

That'll be the first thing to break. My logitech keyboard is propped up on an old AA battery. Modern plastics are shite.

The first rule of liquid cooling is 'Don't wet the chip.' Microsoft disagrees

Re: Similar in size to a human hair you say?

I can't see how the flow rate will be enough to have any real effect. Viscosity has a greater relative effect at small scales. Are they using liquid helium?

Turns out Hayabusa2's next asteroid target isn't much bigger than the probe itself

Images

Will the pictures be out of focus due to proximity to the object, or suffer from motion blur, or both?

Interested to see what it looks like, can't be any regolith on it. The spacecraft's ion engine doesn't have enough thrust to remain on it's equatorial surface, by a factor of 11 or so..

Microsoft veteran's worst Windows bug was Pinball running at 5,000 FPS

Re: Limit based monitor Hz instead

Surely the latency is due to the display frame rate, not the rendering frame rate, so there is no benefit to rendering excess frames as pinball was doing.

If the rendering is a non-integer multiple of the display frame rate, then motion will become juddery, something that I find distracting. A large excess will reduce the judder.

Speaking of frame rates, do these new fangled variable frame rate systems work for video playback yet?

No more waiting for lines: New Windows keyboard shortcuts output em and en dashes with ease

Re: ?????

"Maybe you don’t read many novels?"

I don't read any. I personally find them extremely dull.

Re: ?????

i aint got no style. whats it for?

?????

"Writers rely on the humble em dash (—) and en dash (–) to add flavor and function to their sentences."

What the fuck are you talking about?

UK tech minister booted out in weekend cabinet reshuffle

Re: "join up public services"

"Also, don't usurp Yes Minister."

Unfortunately they did that themselves on 20 January 1984 when they wrote and performed a scene with the real mrs thatcher, destroying their own credibility.

Apple iOS 26 set to dump 75M iPhones on the e-waste pile

Re: generating more than 1.2 million kilograms of e-waste

I'm sure that if modern electronics used more palladium than copper, that we would have heard about this by now.

That number looks wrong to me. I'd guess it should be 30,144 Kg of palladium.

China turns on giant neutrino detector that took a decade to build

Re: Similar to

I bet you didn't know that the name Super-Kamiokande is Japanese for Fandabidozi!

Good morning, Brit Xbox fans – ready to prove your age?

Re: "it's blaming the UK Online Safety Act."

Early 2026 doesn't look like a moments notice to me. Maybe microsoft themselves have identified the risk that it may be deemed to fall under the act in the future, and are implementing the changes at their own pace hoping it won't happen in the meantime.

"it's blaming the UK Online Safety Act."

If this were true then shouldn't they already have implemented the age checks? There was a big fuss recently when the act came into force and lots of other sites introduced age checks.

Linux is about to lose a feature – over a personality clash

Re: Not properly, it doesn't re-stripe the existing data

I can't find anywhere on the page that says it re-stripes the data. It's deliberately cagey on this issue. The only relevant sentence I can find is "The process works by redistributing existing data across the new disk configuration, creating a contiguous block of free space at the end of the logical RAID-Z group."

An example is given where a 4 disk raid5 (file backed disks, 10G size) is expanded to 5 disks. 4.77G of data is written to the 4 disk filesystem, consuming 6.38G, leaving 33.1G of 39.5G free. After adding a the fifth disk, usage is now 6.38G with 43.1G free. 4.77 *4/3 = 6.36G, that's consistent with 6.38G reported usage for 4 disk raid5. 4.77 *5/4 = 5.96G, which is not consistent with 5 disk raid5 usage reported by the ZFS tools. It has *not* re-striped any data in the given example.

Re: Justice for bcachefs!

Not properly, it doesn't re-stripe the existing data like mdadm or btrfs, it just evens out the disk usage.

A 3 disk raid5 expanded to 5 will inherit the same 50% parity overhead for existing data, new data written will have 25% overhead. If it was full before expanding, then you only gain the capacity of 1.6 disks.

It cannot shrink. Less likely to need this, but I might.

Re: Justice for bcachefs!

The BcacheFS feature I'm looking for is raid5/6 with built-in checksumming / correction on error, with the ability to add/remove disks from the filesystem.

MDADM on top of DM-integrity (with any FS on top) can do this, but it's a bit complex and using journaling for resiliency in case of power loss leads to a large write-amplification on SSD's, or slow performance on HDD's.

BTRFS can do this, but if a disk fails then it's not guaranteed to work, and it's not resilient against power loss while writing. BTRFS was designed before they understood raid5/6, it's supposed to be a copy-on write filesystem but their implementation of raid5/6 breaks this.

ZFS is inflexible, it's designed for server use, I'm a home user with an above average amount of data. I can't just create a bigger filesystem on new disks and copy all the data over when I need to expand.

BcacheFS can do copy-on-write and raid5/6 at the same time. However, I don't think much of the erasure coding functionality has been implemented yet. But it's achitecture looks much more sensible than btrfs.

Asmi Linux 13 Debian Edition debuts: Xfce desktop never looked so good

Re: Yet aNoThEr Linux distribution?

"Make one Linux desktop distro."

who's gonna do that? The nebulous "they" that my friend who doesn't understand how the world works keeps complaining about, or someone else? how much should it cost? who's gonna stop anyone else making a distro?

"Nor is the latest version of gedit of interest to somebody who escapes the boredom of their daily grind by reading some red top in the bog."

i don't think a computer is the right product for such a person, any more than an xl bully would be the right product for me. i mean, as long as i just feed it it'll work out what to do for itself, won't it?

computers are not yet a mature product ready for non-technical people. i'm not expecting any upvotes, i'm just angry with the world now, all of it.

OpenAI's GPT-5 looks less like AI evolution and more like cost cutting

Consistency

"For now, OpenAI restored GPT-4o for paying users, but we have no doubt that, once OpenAI figures out what makes the model so endearing and how they can apply it to GPT-5, they'll do just that."

I would imagine it's simply that if people are now using these models to actually do real work (as they'd like people to do), they don't want the models behaviour to change every 5 fucking minutes.

News from a possible future: ‘Rampant jellyfish cause AI outage by taking datacenter offline'

What's in the picture

The picture you used isn't of jellyfish, but of portugese man-o-war, which are something else. I don't fancy meeting either of them.

LG ordered to pay £150k after phone defect caused Scotland house fire

Re: Important lession here

That's not victim blaming, it's easy to follow advice to reduce the risk of something bad happening. You may think the manufacturers should make more reliable products, but they won't because their customers don't insist on it.

I have never watched a film with wesley snipes in it, and have no intention of ever doing so. Sounds dreadful.

"one of the three pouch cells inside the Acer's lithium-ion battery was missing"

This needs an explanation. Was it never fitted? Was the battery damaged in an earlier incident? How did the did the device ever work? Did it shrivel up in the fire? Was it stolen by a fireman? Are they sure there was supposed to be three cells?

Security pros are drowning in threat-intel data and it's making everything more dangerous

Re: What talent shortage?

"My mates suspects a lot of fake jobs just advertised to gather CVs"

I don't work in IT, but this has been a thing for years. That's one reason I try to avoid employment agencies. The other reason is tax scams dressed as "a new government initiative" exploiting naive employees.

First release candidate of systemd 258 is here

Re: hold on there

I was under the impression that ventoy needed to "know" about each ISO it can boot, but maybe that's incorrect.

I've just had a quick search, it looks like whatever the problem is it's not getting fixed.

Re: hold on there

Works here too, but I'm not a power user by any means.

The trouble is that if I need to search the net for how to do something, increasingly the answer involves systemd commands, most commonly to restart a service.

Most of the internet seems to ignore Devuan, even ventoy won't run it's installation ISO image (last time I tried). Looks like we're going to be left out in the cold.

Intel to throw networking biz over the side of its rapidly shrinking ship

Re: Does any part of Intel actually make money?

Maybe the vending machine?

UK tech minister negotiated nothing with Google. He may get even less than that

Re: just shite

Do you have anything to say?

Or did you just come here to be offended?

UK Online Safety Act 'not up to scratch' on misinformation, warn MPs

Re: Misdirection

So what's your posting history, anonymous coward?

Re: Legal but harmful

Have an up-vote, that doesn't deserve down-votes. The fact it has 3 so far tells me there really is no hope for the future.

Microsoft developer ported vector database coded in SAP’s ABAP to the ZX Spectrum

Z80: One cycle vs four for random access

That's not true, not for the original 40pin Z80 used in the ZX81 etc. It may be true for the later Z800000000.

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.