* Posts by find users who cut cat tail

368 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Mar 2016

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UK.gov awards seats on £2bn 'digital outcomes' framework to suppliers – one of which doesn't even have a website

find users who cut cat tail

Re: So..

And yet absolutely bananas.

Salesforce: Forget the ping-pong and snacks, the 9-to-5 working day is just so 2019, it's over and done with

find users who cut cat tail

Re: WFHSS

WFH = never leave work

That is what it is all about.

Location tracking report: X-Mode SDK use much more widespread than first thought

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…we do not categorize all usage of trackers as malicious…

We do.

Maybe the entity with malicious intent is the app developer, maybe not. But there is always one, somewhere.

ADT techie admits he peeked into women's home security cams thousands of times to watch them undress, have sex

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Re: impossible to access by anyone else..

> You trust the company and all of its employees to respect your privacy and protect your belongings.

Even it you happen to do, it is not enough. You also need to trust the manufacturers of all involved equipment to not put any stupid backdoors there and support it the entire lifetime and fix bugs when they are – inevitably – found. You need to trust the company to not be hacked or just acquired by another company. You need to believe the backdoors that were installed upon requests from three letter agencies to be not misused. Etc.

Once something is digital, it will leak. The only exception is precious data you did not back up – then it will become corrupted and you will find the entire multiverse does not contain another copy.

Top engineer who stole trade secrets from Google's self-driving division pardoned on Trump's last day as president

find users who cut cat tail

Not if used in ways we, as a society, mostly agree with.

No need to take it personal…

Police drone plunged 70ft into pond after operator mashed pop-up that was actually the emergency cut-out button

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Re: Won't somebody think of the ducklings?

Sledgehammers work just fine for cracking nuts, especially the smaller ones (larger ones can be unwieldy I'll give you that).

Arecibo Observatory brings forward 'controlled demolition' plans by collapsing all by itself

find users who cut cat tail

Although in special relativity space and time are [kind of] the same thing and they say “time is money”, I am not sure about the exact process which transmutes space to money…

Supreme Court mulls whether a cop looking up a license plate for cash is equivalent to watching Instagram at work

find users who cut cat tail

Declaring ‘things must/must not happen – let the courts find some such things later’ is not a reasonable legislative approach. This is exactly the statement expressed by the lawyer.

Mysterious Utah monolith mysteriously disappears without trace

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Re: Monolith?

Please also tell us about how it's insulting to do lithography with metal plates instead of stone…

Microsoft warns against SMS, voice calls for multi-factor authentication: Try something that can't be SIM swapped

find users who cut cat tail

> landlines will one day soon be a relic

Landlines are how you make a call to a specific place, and they have always been. If I call for example the grant office, the phone will ring there, will be answered by someone from the grant office, and that is the point. You are right that landlines may be someday replaced anyway – by immobile mobile phones.

What's that about Apple hardware? Pfft, says Intel as it intros magical self-healing PC

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Re: Buzzwords

Blockchain has been a buzzword for too long and is no longer catchy. They need to rename it.

Apple cracks down on iOS terminal apps because they can download code

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Re: Apparently, they've backtracked on this

Until the next time, anyway.

Google reCAPTCHA service under the microscope: Questions raised over privacy promises, cookie use

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Re: reCAPTCHA only issues

It's obviously a parasite using crowd funding to train so called self driving carsGoogle killer robots.

find users who cut cat tail

This explains why I tend to get those terrible CAPTCHAs. I can tick more or less everything on your list.

For some of them I actually have no idea what it wants from me – like ‘store fronts’ (is this one an office or a store… and this one looks like laundrette…) or ’vehicles‘ (sure, kick scooters, skateboards and wheelbarrows are all vehicles, but is this how the machine sees them?). Several times I just gave up after getting an apparently endless stream of cropped ambiguous poorly shot rubbish in poor light to identify.

Bitcoin value jumps as PayPal says it will accept cryptocurrencies... once it has the kinks worked out

find users who cut cat tail

Re: Only one good thing to come from this

> I expect PayPal to not put extortionate costs on transactions

Really. Well, in such case you might be also interested in this very fine bridge…

Linux 5.10 to make Year 2038 problem the Year 2486 problem

find users who cut cat tail

The way we're screwing up the planet, we will fry everything in no time.

Microsoft builds image-to-caption AI so that your visually impaired coworkers can truly comprehend your boss's PowerPoint abominations

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Re: Meh

> don't allow blank Alt-Text…

A great way to ensure lots of crappy alt texts ranging from irrelevant to annoying.

For instance: A section title describing a program function also contains the corresponding icon. The section title already is what any screen reader needs to read. Not allowing blank alt text on the icon means it will at best contain something like ‘icon of Section-Title-Repeated-Verbatim’. How is that going to help anyone (as oppose to hinder)?

Has Apple abandoned CUPS, the Linux's world's widely used open-source printing system? Seems so

find users who cut cat tail

I print often. Proofreading and corrections suck on screen. YMMV.

Another reminder that bias, testing, diversity is needed in machine learning: Twitter's image-crop AI may favor white men, women's chests

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Re: It is a difficult task, it needs and will be addressed but it will take time.

Even if the system was developed by aliens who have never heard about human races, its performance in poor light conditions (backlight, low light, …) would deteriorate quicker for dark skin faces. That's just how optics works.

Frist you have to admit this. Then we can talk about what to do about it. Shouting racism does not help anyone.

Classy move: C++ 20 wins final approval in ISO technical ballot, formal publication expected by end of year

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Re: Object

Design of algorithms, data structures, numerical methods, … – intellectual activities.

Programming – making things that do something. This goal can coexist with others, but you are always building a thing that does something.

Google Chrome 85 to block ads that hog power, CPUs, network: Web ads giant will black-hole 0.3% of web ads

find users who cut cat tail

How can an ad need 60 seconds of CPU time? I happen to be running some image analysis on fast camera data now – and 60 seconds is enough to process 10+ GB video on a normal PC. Or almost enough to start Acrobat Reader…

Sorry for asking such a dumb question, I have not seen on-line ad for years.

What's 2 + 2? Personal info, sniffs Twitter: Anti-doxxing AI goes off the rails, bans tweets with numbers in them

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Re: The Solution is Simple

Fortunately, the nice people developing what3emojis have aleady thought of that.

I didn't know such thing existed before reading your post. But a few seconds after saying ‘now we just need a way to encode addresses using emojis’ I realised this is so silly that it must exist. And sure it does…

No Google Play, no problem: Huawei pinches global phone sales crown off Samsung

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Re: "or 30 per cent fewer phones"

If you read the entire paragraph, it's clearly:

Huawei down 5%

Samsung down 30%

It does not compare them. But I was originally a bit confused too…

Someone made an AI that predicted gender from email addresses, usernames. It went about as well as expected

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Re: The complaint seems confused

Then if you misidentify a significant proportion of users and serve them the wrong content your advertising is likely to be less effective than when you serve neutral or random ads - a lot of folk might be a bit sensitive about having their gender misidentified

Nonsense.

If you serve random ads then half of the time people will see ads for the wrong sex (gender, whatever). If the thing works then this ratio will be [considerably] lower – by definition.

Google extends homeworking until this time next year – as Microsoft finds WFH is terrific... for Microsoft

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Distraction

> the lack of distracting colleagues

Even though colleagues can be sometimes distracting, most people here – including me – prefer to work at work because there is much less distraction there than at home. The only thing the pandemic did was to accentuate the difference.

From Accompli to Microsoft to Google: G Suite chief Javier Soltero chases the 'complete collaborative experience'

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Axiom of choice

‘Survive the axiom of choice’?

I mean, the axiom of choice is a strange one and can be difficult to deal with, with all the non-constructive proofs of existence of counterintuitive objects and stuff. But it does not tend to be life-threatening…

You're testing them wrong: Whiteboard coding interviews are 'anti-women psychological stress examinations'

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Re: Statistics

This all depends on how you define the baseline…

If your baseline is close to non-stress environment, then stress-free tests show results closer to true skill and stress environment shows the effect of stress. This is probably a reasonable baseline – and the conclusion would be then that even though the women were in fact more skilled they performed worse under stress. You can also choose the baseline differently. The only objective conclusion is the relative shift of performance when the amount of stress changes. In other words, women's performance was more sensitive to stress.

But unless you think stress the work environment should be as large as possible, it is kind of difficult to argue that removing stress disadvantages someone.

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Re: but this can't be true

Sure, and why you had to write in weight?

Because no one says just ‘a kilo of apples and a kilo of gravel are equal’. The reaction to that would be ‘WTF?’ – and rightfully so.

Equal without qualifies means equal in all aspects that could be considered. Equal with qualifies limits the equality to some aspects. The qualifiers can be implicit – you might not have to always add ‘under the law’ if it there is enough context to make clear you mean this kind of equal. But your kilo example is just silly.

Splunk to junk masters and slaves once a committee figures out replacements

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Re: Where will this end....

Next? They find out maths exists and demand that ‘perfect number’ must be replaced because it imposes an unrealistic standard of beauty…

SAP proves, yet again, that Excel is utterly unkillable

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Re: Excel excels

As I was recently at the receiving end of data provided in Excel, with same data each time organised differently in a dozen ways, I'd say that versatility comes at a cost…

Wanna be a developer? Your coworkers want to learn Go and like to watch, er, Friends and Big Bang Theory

find users who cut cat tail

Do you want to render the Mandelbrot set or solve Sudoku? Use SQL[ite]!

Yes, the examples are ‘outlandish’ and typical SQL usage looks a bit different. But shell is undeniably a programming language – even if most of the time we use it to run simple commands.

Nervous, Adobe? It took 16 years, but open-source vector graphics editor Inkscape now works properly on macOS

find users who cut cat tail

> Inertia is a powerful thing. People are lazy and afraid of change.

That's why you need the everyone uses Inkscape, it's the default for vector drawing approach. You will get nowhere with the inferior replacement for program X mindset. And around here it's true that basically everyone uses Inkscape. Some creative types may do some weird things on their Macs. But it has always been so (and is not going to change), so they don't matter.

As Brit cyber-spies drop 'whitelist' and 'blacklist', tech boss says: If you’re thinking about getting in touch saying this is political correctness gone mad, don’t bother

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Re: Are there no other people of colour that read this rag?

No. That would be denylist (single word like blacklist) and it would at least make some sense. There are about six ways to parse phrases like

What most deny lists then become…

I'm doing this to stop humans ripping off brilliant ideas by computers and aliens, says guy unsuccessfully filing patents 'invented' by his AI

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> What happens when a highly advanced extraterrestrial civilization visits Earth?

They may laugh, shrug or puke and leave as fast as they can…

What they will not do? Fill USPTO patent applications.

Web pages a little too style over substance? Behold the Windows 98 CSS file

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Re: The Modern UI/UX

I would say I am pretty familiar with point and click GUIs – and I am still regularly baffled by basic controls concealed in obscure places.

That awful moment when what you thought was a number 1 turned out to be a number 2

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Re: Trying to teach...

> It might be making them up.

It might be as well. Most likely the spreadsheet was created by a monkey, is mislabelled and generally confusing, has errors in formulae, requires manual steps and workarounds – and probably subtracts dates from telephone numbers too.

Delicious irony: Credit rating builder Loqbox lets customer details and card numbers slip after 'sophisticated attack'

find users who cut cat tail

The biggest loss is not the customer details. The biggest loss for society is that ‘credit rating builder’ is a valid (and possibly necessary) service.

Apple drops a bomb on long-life HTTPS certificates: Safari to snub new security certs valid for more than 13 months

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Re: It's optional

Depending on your target audience, that may be a good thing.

From WordPad to WordAds: Microsoft caught sneaking nagging Office promos into venerable text editor beta

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Re: To be fair...

> question whether content is worth anything to anyone other than the website owners

But that's perfectly OK because the website owners can pay for hosting if they want people to see their content. It used to be normal and many still do that. Web went to hell exactly the moment when everyone decided to not pay and instead [try to] make many through ads.

Top Euro court advised: Cops, spies yelling 'national security' isn’t enough to force ISPs to hand over massive piles of people's private data

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Re: "hovering up of data"

Please take your pills.

Globo PC sales up for first time in 7 straight years – but market still 25% down on 2011

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Re: Globo?

It was a shield the poor ‘a’ held against what was coming next – and now look what happened to it…

Y2K quick-fix crick? 1920s come roaring back after mystery blip at UK's vehicle licensing agency

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Re: 2038

time_t is not meant for storing historical dates. If you do that you have much bigger problems than Y2038. You cannot use negative time_t values (they might work, but it is not guaranteed).

So, what are you talking about?

What if everyone just said 'Nah' to tracking?

find users who cut cat tail

Day-in, day-out, people and algorithms work to remove non-responsive target audiences from who they advertise to.

Perhaps, but if it is so they then add those audiences right back. Otherwise everyone would have stopped advertising to me long time ago.

Flying taxis? That'll be AFTER you've launched light sabres and anti-gravity skateboards

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Re: "Lightsaber"

So do you travel to Wien, Venezia, Praha, Москва, etc.? Or Vienna, Venice, Prague and Moscow?

If Americans misname places everywhere in the world then we can reciprocally (mis)name places in the US.

Fuming French monopoly watchdog is so incensed by Google's 'random' web ad rules, it's fining the US giant, er, <1% annual profit

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Re: no smoke without fire

Exactly. There is only a single reason for saying ‘have never been convicted of doing’. They did it and cannot even deny it because there is no doubt about it and such blatant lying could itself get them into trouble.

Tracking President Trump with cellphone location data, Greta-Thunberg-themed malware, SharePoint patch, and more

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Black Helicopters

Re: "Everyone is trackable, traceable, discoverable to some degree.”

I agree with the sentiment. On the other hand, getting robbed and killed is rarely a necessary part of something people want. Whereas tracking…

Even discounting the idiots who cannot find a store across the street without GPS, lots of services can only really work by identifying you, getting your location and cross-referencing it with some big database (i.e. sending it somewhere ‘to the cloud’). Often even not keeping history of locations would break them, to varying degree.

I do not use any such service (in fact do not even carry any phone most of the time), but many people do and do like them. Trying to forbid the tracking part of tracking may prove rather unpopular (read: impossible). You can forbid by law the data selling part – and it should be forbidden. But will it be enough?

We are absolutely, definitively, completely and utterly out of IPv4 addresses, warns RIPE

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Re: This is probably a dumb question...

> This is probably a dumb question...

Yes.

Without any apparent irony, Google marks Chrome's 'small' role in web ecosystem

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Re: One task done properly

Bank websites are generally terrible... But with uMatrix you can at least allow things like 3rd party cookies selectively with precise control.

I cannae do it, captain, I'm giving it all she's got, but she just cannae take another dose of bullsh!t

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The entire microspectroscopy thing is a scam. Yes, it will measure some spectra and report some composition of the food. It will make happy people who do not know enough about chemistry and IR spectroscopy (and statistics) to question the results – and that's the entire point.

Are you who you say you are, sir? You are? That's all fine then

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Headmaster

Re: Really?

> 'Fucked' means 'really' in Slovak...

It would sound the same only if English had final-obstruent devoicing and the final ‘d’ was pronounced as ‘t’. But few people notice...

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