* Posts by find users who cut cat tail

367 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Mar 2016

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ML fails: Loyalty prediction? Not really. And bonus prediction? Oh dear

find users who cut cat tail

Re: Fails at basic logic...

If 5 stars are a necessity, then they carry no information. Why bother faking it the complicated way? Do not actually allow any rating and simply display five stars...

Also,

https://xkcd.com/937/

Surveillance Capitalism thinks it won, but there's still time to unplug it

find users who cut cat tail

Surveillance utopianism?

Read The Happy Breed by John Sladek (written in 1967!). And that is actually ‘optimistic’ scenario without any evil companies invovled...

'It's back to the drawing board...' Innocent axions found not guilty of dark matter crimes

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Re: Dark Matter

> Adding an extra non-inverse square law term to "gravity" doesn't seem to work well and what is the theory anyway?

Of course people have been trying [something like] this [because we really talk general relativity here], with various corrections, but not with much success -- so, pretty much like anything else that we have tried so far.

One of the main problems is that you cannot say ‘We just change this equation and that fixes it. Done.’ -- you can do this in bogus science but not in actual science. In an actual theory the equation is connected to a bazillion other laws or observations we still consider correct, either it follows from them or they follow from it, it is not used to calculate just the one thing you want to come out differently but also other things... So you have to be careful and are quite restricted in what you can change and how.

Crouching cyber Hidden Cobra: US warns Nork hackers are at it again with new software nasty

find users who cut cat tail

> For a country with low PC penetration and a pitiful internet architecture, North Korea punches above its weight when it comes to hacking, if attribution claims turn out to be correct.

Whether it turns out to be correct or not, it makes perfect sense for them to take advantage of the asymmetry. Who is going to hack their critical systems and steal their sensitive data when they do not have any?

Brace yourselves, fanboys. Winter is coming. And the iPhone X can't handle the cold

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Re: Apple looks pretty much the same: pasty, white and male...

I'm not sure at all, but I keep hope...

Alexa, please cause the cops to raid my home

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Re: Whatever happened to

"I'm sorry, Dave, I can't hear you."

Bitcoin drops SegWit2x hard fork after community objects

find users who cut cat tail

One might think that if you invent some cryptocurrency and you want it actually used for payments by lots of people, you would also design it sufficiently scalable. But of course scalability does not matter if the entire thing is just an elaborate Ponzi scheme...

A draft US law to secure election computers that isn't braindead. Well, I'm stunned! I gotta lie down

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"Our democracy hinges on protecting Americans' ability to fairly choose our own leaders."

Since no tampering was [apparently] necessary to put Mr. Trump into office, voting machine hacking prevention is currently an interesting but largely irrelevant problem. Miscreants have already moved on to hacking voters' brains...

Gotta have standards? Security boffins not API about bloated browsers

find users who cut cat tail

Even if the browser asks for confirmation and I say no and that is what happens, these APIs increase the attack surface -- for no good reason. The corresponding code should not be there at all.

It's time to rebuild the world for robots

find users who cut cat tail

We redesigned the world for automobiles...

And it was a colossal mistake. Many places are now becoming automobile-unfriendly and redesigning for humans.

What’s the real point of being a dev? It's saving management from themselves

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Re: what a load of Tosh!

Sure, OO improved a number of things. At the beginning.

Then it became a religion. If you do not transform all code to a tangle of silly NounizorFactoriers you are heretic to be burned at stake.

OO created a class [no pun necessary] of ‘programmers’ who, when implementing a procedure to sum some numbers, as a side effect produce a hierarchy of classes for numeric types, arithmetic operators, representation of cardinals, abstraction of lambda calculus and a bunch of things that you never imagined could be related to the problem. Yes, and then their implementation also forgets to add the last number...

DNA as storage? Old and boring. Boffins now chaining monomers

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Re: This is pure hype

Well said.

My thought after reading the articles: And that is why I will probably never get anything published in Nature (or even one of the many Nature FooBars). I might or might not do sufficiently excellent science -- but I am definitely incapable of such excellent bullshit.

Now German companies are beating the drum over poor patent quality

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Re: Changes

The prize is, of course, earnings of patent lawyers.

I hate when various ‘innovation’ rankings of countries and regions include the numbers of patents granted [per capita] as a clearly good thing. Higher numbers can mean more innovation -- or that the patent system is bonkers and anything goes.

Has Git ever driven you so mad you wanted to bomb it? Well, now you can with this tiny repo

find users who cut cat tail

Re: tricky but powerful source control tool

Unfortunately, in reality

https://xkcd.com/1597/

is only a slight hyperbole. Things can definitely go awry with any SCM, but for truly bewildering situations you need git.

Dropbox thinks outside the … we can't go there, not when a box becomes a 'collection of surfaces'

find users who cut cat tail

The logo looks like a ransom note with letters cut from two different sources (probably could not afford third newspaper...). Some glyphs look borrowed from a font with constant stroke width, some have very dynamic strokes.

Forget the 'simulated universe', say boffins, no simulator could hit the required scale

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Re: Simluator

It seems the Universe can be on the fundamental level described using mathematics, with a relatively few simple laws (for some values of ‘few’ and ‘simple’ anyway). If it is a simulation, that is exactly the thing to expect. If it is not, well, it can still work this way, but it is rather surprising that it does. Why should it?

Apple Mac fans told: Something smells EFI in your firmware

find users who cut cat tail

> A Mac is: ... durable

Not according to my experience. These things break as often as anything else.

'Dear diversity hire...' Amazon's weapons-grade fail in recruitment email to woman techie

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Re: Betokened

Wanting more women working in IT is like wanting more women imprisoned. Yes, there is a large gender inequality. The IT companies would like more workers. The prisons would like more inmates. And in both cases the question is: Do we really want to send so many more people there?

Don’t fear the software shopkeeper: T&Cs banning bad reviews aren’t legal in America

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Re: Still better to smack down the idiots for trying it

> In the U.S. it may be better to avoid agreeing to anything you aren't willing to have enforced.

It is *always* better to avoid agreeing to anything you aren't willing to have enforced.

But nowadays there are essentially only two ways of doing it consistently: (a) living in a cave far from civilisation (b) being a billionaire or dictator, ideally both.

Google to kill Chrome autoplay madness

find users who cut cat tail

> much like you can whitelist video capture, geolocation data or myriad other features

I can, but I'd be happier if I could not. It's better if the browser doesn't implement them at all because then no mistakes, bugs, upgrades & configuration changes, ... can enable these antifeatures.

P≠NP proof fails, Bonn boffin admits

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Re: Respect to Prof Blum ...

I may look so, but without JS it is just an blank page. So it's still one of those modern ‘we absolutely cannot make a text entry and a button without JS’ sites...

Dems fightin' words! FCC's net neutrality murder plot torn apart

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Re: Not for profit

> Name one where private, profit-driven enterprise can't do any better.

Enjoy your expensive yet still shitty profit-driven enterprise-whatever health care.

Don't make Aug 21 a blind date: Beware crap solar eclipse specs

find users who cut cat tail

When something is too bright to look at, then bloody don't! When it is not then you can keep looking. This stuff should not be that hard to figure out.

If you are a moron that keeps looking directly into the sun despite it hurts because of magic glasses or something, you get what you deserve. And could you also jump from the root of the nearest building while you are at it? I installed magical air around the walls that will slow you down.

Petition calls for Adobe Flash to survive as open source zombie

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Re: It's Legacy Tech

> If you wanna play with it, fire up a Windows 98 VM

How long before you need an emulator to run the VM that can run Windows 98?

> Nothing stopping you building an oldskool machine with 1995/1998/2001 era technology and software.

Yes, nothing, except possibly the enormous effort required.

Tired: Java. Desired: Node.js. Retired: The suggestion a JavaScript runtime is bonkers

find users who cut cat tail

While code that will be still in use 30 years from now is being patiently written in something like FORTRAN -- as it was 30 years ago...

Blighty's Department for Culture, Media & Sport gets 'digital' rebrand

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Re: Well, I'm still not much the wiser

It is probably just a single Digit anyway. And it is not a thumb up...

Huge ransomware outbreak spreads in Ukraine and beyond

find users who cut cat tail

Re: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"

Pirated Windows and lazy admins may be factors. Still, Ukraine is not exactly a wealthy country and $300 is lots of money there. If your goal is to make money from the ransomware, wouldn't you rather target a country where $1000/month is considered the poverty threshold? This looks more like the ransom part is a nice benefit but not the goal.

Is your research hot or not? US boffins create ‘Tinder for preprints’

find users who cut cat tail

Makes sense it is connected to BioRxiv. In physics you can stare at a paper for years and still not be sure what to make of it...

Hotheaded Brussels civil servants issued with cool warning: Leak

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Re: That's not hot. This is hot.

Anything above 20 C is hot.

Up to 25 C: Hot, but kind of acceptable.

Above 25 C: When will the bloody summer end?

Above 30 C: Please, God, just kill me!

Above 35 C: Lying on the floor unconscious.

Some people are just not built for hot weather...

Zuckerberg's absolutely mental: Brain sensors that read YOUR MIND at 100 words a minute

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Re: Re Charles 9: No escape

> customers don't have to wait at table

What do you mean by that?

The point of going to a restaurant is not to stuff yourself with food as fast as you can. You can always do that faster and cheaper than in a restaurant. Have some beer/wine/whatever you like, talk, meanwhile order meal, drink and talk more... If you do not enjoy the time there what the hell are you doing there?

Wait... are you from some place where McDonald's is called restaurant?

> More turnover = more profits = you get to kill the competition.

Your competition, yes. Actual restaurants, no.

Graffiti 'dying out' as kids dump spray cans for Instagram, Twitter etc

find users who cut cat tail

Re: Short attention span

Not here, we have also lots of art-like graffiti, some of it quite good -- but the best ones tend to be legal (at least AFAICT). It probably helps if you can take more time and don't have to prepared to run away all the time...

I wish social media somehow killed the idiots that scratch windows in trams and buses though.

It's happening! It's happening! W3C erects DRM as web standard

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Re: fair use

With DRM, fair use is exactly what we do not have. More precisely, we may have it in theory, but they are trying hard to prevent us from exercising it -- both by technical and legal means.

Force employees to take DNA tests for bosses? We've got a new law to make that happen, beam House Republicans

find users who cut cat tail

> If they want company health insurance.

What? Why would anyone need (or even want) that? The more I learn about the US healthcare system, the less I understand.

'Nigerian princes' snatch billions from Western biz via fake email – Interpol

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Coat

Religion

Since the scams are a local religious practice, it must be protected at all costs. Obviously, it is an important part of their culture and identity -- and one that white men actively seek to eradicate. At least that is what I expect to hear from the confused regressive left warriors...

Scammers hired hundreds of 'staff' to defraud TalkTalk customers

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This is most likely a misquote and she said ‘we fake our responsibility...’.

Stop the press: Journos not happy losing jobs to journo bots, say journos

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Re: > and actually increases the need for the very human skills that good journalists embody...

Missed the "the funniest bit" part?

Eh, why I am arguing with a bot...

Awkward. Investigatory Powers Act could prove hurdle to UK-EU Privacy Shield following Brexit

find users who cut cat tail

No need to reading up on how things were on this side of the iron curtain. The dangers were more direct and physical -- as was the surveillance. Media were state-controlled, and propaganda and other bullshit pervasive. Generally, the powers were owners of ‘the truth’ (remember when the truth mattered?) and quite openly tried to recast everything to conform to it.

This is not going to happen in the UK -- not because of UK, but because we are half a century later now. The means of control over the society do not matter, what matters is the level of control.

COP BLOCKED: Uber app thwarted arrests of its drivers by fooling police with 'ghost cars'

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Devil

> No, this is deliberately giving false information to a police officer with an arrest warrant.

Must play the devil advocate here. Do Uber *know* they are giving false information to a police officer with an arrest warrant? Were they shown the warrant? It's not like their app has an ‘if you are a police officer upload your warrant here’ button. AFAICT they hide based on a guess, trying to avoid the officers (like many would do in the physical world).

BTW ‘car not showing up’ may be actually improvement of their services...

Symbolic IO reveals tech bound to give server old guard the willies

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Re: WTF? Why can't something new actually come along that actually works!!!

You are correct that the prescription does not explicitly prohibit washing down the pills with kool-aid. But, sir, please do not forget to actually take the pills next time.

Bruce Schneier: The US government is coming for YOUR code, techies

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Re: Well, maybe we should not put software in everything

> You think there is something unique about the US government that makes it a threat to liberty beyond all others?

Yes, raw power and world influence combined with awareness of them.

Governments of small countries may be equally evil. But their ability to influence global developments (such as IoT) is pretty limited and they rarely think and act on world scale. And yes, the US is not even really *unique* in this regard, but still a member of a very small select group.

Global IPv4 address drought: Seriously, we're done now. We're done

find users who cut cat tail

Everyone would have understood it but since it would break everything anyway, the implementation would progress only slightly faster. Low-level networking code would definitely not need to change as much, but higher level stuff would need to change pretty much the same: there the main burden stems from having to support two different address types at all.

And finally, most people whining here about IPv6 would whine here about such solution equally loudly and call it a stupid half-measure. I welcome your downvotes, bloody hypocrites.

Pwnd Android conference phone exposes risk of spies in the boardroom

find users who cut cat tail
Joke

listen in on board meetings

Good when you cannot get to sleep?

Roses are reddish, exam-takers more so: Cisco's test price hike's a smack to the torso

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Roses

Roses are... aargh! It hurts! Please stop with these headlines! I will do anything, even agree with Andrew Orlowski's article...

Roses are red, you're over the moon, 'cos you work in infosec, and you're retiring soon

find users who cut cat tail

Scarce talented resources

What the hell is a talented resource? A pile of iron ore than can play flute really well? Never seen any of those so I suppose they must be indeed scarce...

Streetmap loses appeal against Google Maps dominance judgement

find users who cut cat tail

Nice to see the downvotes coming... I understood you are enraged if you realised your map options are all crap compared to what people in a puny East European country enjoy. It is hardly my fault but... Whatever. Be enraged if it helps. You cannot take our superior map service from me.

find users who cut cat tail

> GM are clearly quite good by objective standards for most use-cases.

I doubt you have ever seen a good map.

A typical non-city-centre area:

GM -- some rough grey and green polygons, streams, a couple of roads. Useless.

OSM -- more or less the same as GM plus vegetation type, protected localities, much more roads and paths, some points of interest. Possibly usable, but it depends.

mapy.cz (our national competitor) -- more or less the same as OSM plus contour lines, marked tourist and cycling paths, nature trails, spot heights, rocks, dozens of points of interests, many more small paths, local names, springs, shelters, caves, monuments, every bloody cross beside the road, ... So people actually use it as an outdoor map.

In city centres GM is better, but then again OSM becomes much better there. For example, GM does not bother to show paths in parks, except the largest ones.

Also, GM is slow as hell. Objectively.

Trump signs 'no privacy for non-Americans' order – what does that mean for rest of us?

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Re: Trump has become more deranged

> How exactly does one 'prepare' for a third world war?

By accepting your mortality and making peace with yourself. Or building an underground bunker in New Zealand. Kind of depends on your social class...

Machine-learning boffins 'summon demons' in AI to find exploitable bugs

find users who cut cat tail

> If it gets stuff wrong occasionally it doesn't matter, because humans make mistakes and physical parts fail.

It matters unless ‘the machine said so’ ceases to be universal excuse for not only arbitrarily stupid decisions, but also their strict enforcement with no possibility to appeal or negotiate.

Humans make lots of mistakes so they are aware they can make mistakes (with some notable exceptions). Someday the AI that does not exist yet (TAITDNEY) may be advanced far enough so that you can explain it its mistake when it makes one. But currently those trying to replace humans with AIs seem to be doing *because* they can avoid this possibility.

Penguins force-fed root: Cruel security flaw found in systemd v228

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Linux

Re: systemd v228

I suppose less must be more than twice as wrong I suppose -- because it uses the same versioning scheme (just do +1) and currently is at v487 (oh, the horror!).

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Re: Surprise

> Why the hell is a "touch" command...

Which "touch" command?

Got confused the command and a function called touch() inside systemd?

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