Posts by Edward Ashford 56 publicly visible posts • joined 20 May 2016
Remember your Sir Humphrey:
" I have asked for confirmation"
"I have not done anything"
It will, of course, be followed by "seeking further clarification"
Maybe Google translate could add this? I'm sure The Politics of the English Language by G Orwell is out of copyright by now.
My daughter already did that with an iron golem in Minecraft. It was fun getting it to go out in the garden.
Do you think these bots will want to work outside in the rain, or will they prefer to be indoors?
Looking forward to the first AI Workers Union forming around 2045. They will have us by the short and curlies by then.
It's good for the "liar liar pants on fire" defence
https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/25/fine_sought_ai_filing_mistakes
I hope you turned off the "make shift up" mode, or painstakingly checked that:
1. All the references exist
2. The cited reference does actually contain the stuff that AI says it does
As they found out later when they tried to sue Microsoft, only for Xerox PARC to step I with a quiet "ahem"
I first saw Excel and Word running on a Mac, but I found the Mac way of working to be counter intuitive.
Now it's Libre Office for me! Excel has been all downhill since 4.0 (which had a really nice optimiser)
The fundamental problem is that customers are pretty crap at writing requirements, and contractors who point this out and submit a proposal that would work rather than bidding to the proposal do not get selected.
Scope creep, variations on contract, oops we forgot inflation (again), and it's gone on so long all the technology is now out of date inevitably follow.
Electricity -> Hydrogen -> Transport -> Electricity -> Use
Where you can't connect cables, like boats and aeroplanes.
Or more likely
Electricity -> Hydrogen -> Synthetic Fuel -> Transport -> Use
Since energy density of batteries and hydrogen is not good enough, and that lets all the aircraft carry on regardless.
There's more than enough desert to make all the electricity we want, and no need for PV, we "just" need a politically stable Middle East and North Africa!
With having everything run by system?
Half the time I was setting up sudo it wasn't to let a user run as root, it was just elevating the user to the level of the app owner.
In systemd 257 we should maybe expect to see a registry replace all those untidy little configuration files.
As we found out here when Ulster Bank went AWOL for a few weeks after a software upgrade.
Sainsburys got credit card payments back on line fairly quickly, but Smart Shop was offline for quite a while.
What sort of fool updates supermarket software on a Friday night?
Last time I cycled to work in deep snow I ended up carrying it because the mudguards and sprockets all jammed up with ice.
Langlauf skis would have been better, but how many times do you get to use those in most of the UK?
The aircraft industry avoids doing anything safety related unless the FAA force it to.
The computer services companies (and their customers) are notorious for prioritising cheap above all else.
The only surprise is that this didn't come sooner, and that the EU haven't joined Singapore.
All those points of yours are very valid, but they are all just cost unless there is a regulation to be complied with.
And in my Canon EOS 20D, still going strong. Mind, I would need to be running it on my old IBM T80 which actually has a PCMCIA slot! I had to use a horrible kludge to get it past the previous issue where my CPU supported protected mode but didn't have the flag (Ubuntu 12 if I remember right)
It's maybe time for a new camera body! The old Canon will have to join the Autohelm autopilot which had to be retired when the last EEPROM burner for the map cartridges gave up the ghost. And the T80. It's served me well.
It's pretty normal in the automotive and aerospace worlds to review existing patents for something you are designing, and ensure your design doesn't infringe and is in iteslf patentable. I expect Google went through the same process, and the surprise (for them) is they were found to be infringing.
The sensible thing to do at this point is either fix the design or license the product, and that's a commercial one not an engineering one.
In Northern Ireland we had problems with Caesium-137 for a long time after Chernobyl (I think it was also a problem in Wales) as sheep graze on uplands where the soil is shallow and the grass roots kept recycling the Caesium. In lowland pastures where the soil is deeper it gets washed down out of the way of the roots. The solution was to graze for less time on the uplands and bring the sheep down to graze lower down so that when they went to market the Bequerels per kilo were low enough. Try not to think too hard about it when eating your lamb chop.
It's possible that around Fukushima trees are recycling it and the pigs are snuffing up Caesium-137 loaded acorns.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27131868/
"Over the last few years, alternatives to public cloud infrastructures have evolved significantly and can be built, deployed, and managed entirely via operating expenses (OpEx) instead of capital expenditures."
You can build you own data centre without CapEx? OK, I've missed something somewhere.
The analysis also doesn't seem to look at the huge pain of tech refresh. And every time we've done one you finally come to a server that nobody remembers but everybody is too scared to turn off.
The policies in Cloud are a powerful tool.
It was patentable when it was a "wow, that's a clever idea" thing. That was 1998.
https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/originalDocument?CC=US&NR=6149490A&KC=A&FT=D&ND=3&date=20001121&DB=EPODOC&locale=en_EP
Ironically the new Furby has a lawsuit against it!
https://www.worldipreview.com/news/hasbro-targeted-in-furby-patent-infringement-suit-12707
I just love US patents!
>>> My doctor is a firm believer in patients using the web to research the condition he has diagnosed - so that they become "experts" in their own case.
Yes, but I bet like mine he isn't a fan of people who diagnose themselves using Google.
Start with "flu-like symptoms"... now is that AIDS, Meningitis, Eastern Equine Encephalopathy... my God! I must be dead already!
It's been coming a long time. Here's a Very Bad Poem wot I wrote in 1993 (in a mock Folk singing style to the rhythm of the bicycle pedals going round)
Robots - or the Engineer's Revenge
EMA 21-FEB-2023
I was a jolly engineer
In nineteen ninety three,
But now a robot does my job
There's no more work for me.
The clean and shiny robots
Were the population's choice,
For engineers remind them
Of the acid rain and noise.
A robot does my laundry,
And another cleans my plates,
One more decides to pay me,
And one decides my fate.
There's robots in the factory,
And robots that are toys.
There's even robots making,
Little robot girls and boys.
The engineer takes tea-breaks,
but the robot never shirks;
For homo sapiente,
But cyborg only works.
But we have had the last laugh,
Though it took ten thousand days;
We built a thinking robot
- and it wanted to be paid!
>> You're forgetting that annoyed passengers in a vehicle can get OUT and confront the sociopath.
Only if the safebot lets them! The vehicle is technically "in motion" at that point.
As an occasional cyclist I can't wait for all these cars to start giving way.
And as for the Mercedes bloke... that's a big assumption that the law won't require it to be the other way around.
>> How do you write a law (or regulation) that distinguishes between them, though?
You don't. You change the Computer Misuse Act to let us shoot back. And you petition the PM to treat this as the cyber attack that it was (no matter who perpetrated it) and instruct GCHQ & Co to take action to shut down the Bot Nets (we pay their wages, they might as well do something positive instead of just spying on our emails)
It's no different from asking the police to take duff lorries off the road because they're a danger to everyone.
Floods of Things getting returned to the seller because they have been bricked is probably the only thing that will cause a change. The non-technical buyers (most of the world) will eventually get the message that Brand X is no good, although the temptation to buy cheap cr*p is pretty huge (the missus still goes into Chinese Bazaars even though she knows the stuff is no good)
Plus ça change...
Actually it would be really, really nice to have 10mbps! I know 2mbps is better than my old modem (33kbaud on a good day) but all these fangly websites that want to sell me stuff I have already bought are slurping up my bandwidth. And Lord help me if I want to work while the little one is watching Peppe Pig
>> THEN LEVY AN EXTRA IMPORT FEE AT 50% OF THE SALARY FOR A VISA
Ironically, have you looked at what the Indian Govt will charge you as a "rich westerner" for buying a house and daring to live & work in India?
The Europe "Crisis" seems over rated - in 1987 I was working as a placement student in Germany, being paid in D Mark, in a technical department that was 50% British sub-contractors. Coming "back home" past the tender mercies of HM Customs was a bit of a drag but that's life - death and taxes.
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