Posts by Rafael #872397

‘Humans will be a rounding error on the internet’ says Cloudflare exec

Re: As long there is porn

Damn right! Let's fight back creating more content and demand for both.

Ex-NASA boss points out small flaw in Moon landing plan: No lander

Re: Buying stuff that can blow up other stuff is so much more fun for governments, apparently ...

Obligatory SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2009-05-20

Brazil probes emergency warning system after nationwide rogue alert

Emergency alert system

These are the alerts that show the message with a very audible sound. I got several related to severe weather alerts.

But the phone companies also often abuse the SMS level 0 system with "very important alerts" about offers and promotions -- without a sound, but the kind of message that bloicks whatever you're doing o the phone. Bastards.

California passes bill declaring death-by-algorithm to 3D-printed ghost guns

Re: ridiculous

It is clearly a slippery slope.

About this.. they can have my 3-D printed dildo when they take it from my cold, sticky hands.

A Russian speaker and jailbroken Gemini went on a hacking spree and emptied at least one MAGA victim's crypto wallets

Re: The campaign targeted the QAnon and MAGA communities

Oh no!

Where is the Darwin icon when we need one?

Deus ex machina: Half of US Christians trust AI's spiritual advice

Re: What AI did next

AI will never reach the pinnacle of showbiz that was Tammy Faye Bakker.

Brits are falling out of love with posting every thought online

Agreed! Have an upvote...

.. now get off my lawn.

Gmail celebrates 22 years by finally letting users change their addresses

Re: Interflora order confirmations..

...and divorce paperwork? So I guess the flowers didn't work..

YouTuber lands on Moon using a ZX Spectrum. Conditions apply

Re: Real fun

[hand raised]

Did mine in Turbo Pascal 4.0, if I recall -- late 1980s?

Gartner suggests Friday afternoon Copilot ban because tired users may be too lazy to check its mistakes

Re: Obvious Solution

But then "Friday Morning" becomes the new "Friday Afternoon". Ban work on it then "Thursday Afternoon" becomes the new "Friday Morning" and so on.

No, I am not complaining.

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

from just four to as many as 59

I was looking for the link too. This challenge will not go unanswered!

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

Re: how many Windows installation disks were repurposed

I repurposed mine by 3D-printing some corners and a stand and making a nice desk decor item.

I did the same for the Macintosh 7 and for some generic 5.25 disks.

Old fart icon self-explanatory.

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

Re: I still use HDDs.

I have two full "just in case" boxes of old tech*, but still have the nagging feeling that someday I will need something I had and didn't save.

*Including Apple's USB-to-30-pin, USB-to-thunderbold, USB-C-to-thunderbolt, variants of USB-A to other stuff, all tangled together. I hope they reproduce and give birth to marvelous, monstrous new variations.

(where is the "I personally used punch cards" icon?)

Stash or splash? Lawmakers ask NASA to find alternatives for International Space Station

Re: everything eventually ends up in a landfill (or burns up in a de-orbit maneuver)

Wasn't this the plot of one of the non-Tim Burton Planet of the Apes movies?

Everybody is WinRAR phishing, dropping RATs as fast as lightning

Damn you for the earworm!

That is all.

Trump promises nuclear datacenter permits in 3 weeks, calls Greenland 'big beautiful ice'

Re: " AI, two years ago, nobody ever heard of the term"

Except Kubrick and then Spielberg and some researchers since 1950?

Trump wants big tech to pay for big beautiful power plants

Re: Suggestion

The BEST wind turbines, people keep telling me that. Trust me, I am a very stable genius.

Fake Windows BSODs check in at Europe's hotels to con staff into running malware

Other approach

I made some reservations on booking.com for my old in-laws, and yesterday I got a WhatsApp message from a phone in India, with an ID of a clothing company, with a link to "confirm my data". The "confirmation" website was a cheap rip-off of booking.com, with the correct reservation information, asking for confirmation of paymen,t but with a pop-up saying that I had only one chance to enter the credit card data, and could not go back or reload the page, and had only five minutes to comply before they cancelled the reservation (read that with an ED-209 voice). Of course, I didn't, but I am quite sure my in-laws could fall for this trick.

I've reported this attempt to booking.com and asked how the scammers were able to get my name, cell phone number, and reservation code. No replies so far.

Welcome to America - now show us your last five years of social media posts

Re: Well thats

To decide whether to downvote you, please let me know if you're a square earthist or a cube earthist. The right number of corners is 8!!

AI music has finally beaten hat-act humans, but sounds nothing like victory

Re: Stock, Aitkin and Waterman

Am I blessed since I have no idea who they are? If so, please keep me that way.

Anthropic's Claude is learning Excel so you don't have to

Re: Guaranteed Fail

Are Enron and Arthur Andersen still around? They would love this.

The Chinese Box and Turing Test: AI has no intelligence at all

Re: So much hype

Ha! People said the same about blockchain and NFTs, and look, they are as useful and exciting as ever!

How do you solve a problem like Discovery?

Re: Ducks do not require sealing.

Have an upvote, while I can still type this on my coffee-soaked keyboard.

Some like it bot! ChatGPT promises AI-rotica is coming for verified adults

Re: helps the depopulation agenda.

We're doomed. DOOOOOMEEED!

The Simpsons Futurama predicted it: https://vimeo.com/12915013

Microsoft hypes PCs with NPUs, still can't offer a good reason to buy one

Re: Make people *want* to get a PC with an NPU

It is a marketing issue. Maybe they should market it with "NPUs has what users crave. It's got electrolytes!"

Brits sitting on £1.6B gold mine of Windows 10 junk as support ends

Thumbs up for you, sir!

But the sentence "generally give 'em away to starving students" reminds me of a scene from "The Incredible Burt Wonderstone," where the magician gives away a rabbit so a starving kid can learn magic tricks...

Lowercase leaving you cold? Introducing Retrocide

Re: Cute

I know taste should be subjective, but this bit:

console.log(`Color:

turned me off. The ( and C are very similar!

Many employees are using AI to create 'workslop,' Stanford study says

Re: So, 95% of firms see no ROI

Beat me by 54 minutes... have an upvote.

Dell enters the earbud market with kit you can control from the cloud

Re: Yeah, sure

Can it be used to broadcast reminders ("It is time for the Two Minutes Hate") to all meatpods in our office?

Japanese city passes two-hours-a-day smartphone usage ordinance

Re: The entire council should resign and acknowledge that they far exceeded their remit.Overreach

Whoa, good thing you know what they should do in response to that heinous crime. And thanks for not straight suggesting collective seppuku.

Re: Phone Zombies

THIS!

Where I live, we have long speed bumps with crosswalks on them that were designed to make cars stop and let pedestrians cross. Often, we see zombies stop at the beginning of the crosswalk and wait, eyes glued to their smartphones. When I am driving, I honk a bit to make them wake up, just to avoid them crossing when I start to pass.

The worst culprits are those who stop in the corners or crosswalks because they called an Uber and are just waiting for it. I had some people waiting for Ubers in front of the parking gate of my building. Honk honk.

ChatGPT joins human league, now solves CAPTCHAs for the right prompt

CAPTCHAs are a form of security test that websites use to stop bots

$DEITY bless the happy, lucky souls who need a description of what a CAPTCHA is! I envy you!

Sky-high budget gap: FAA launches air traffic overhaul, lacks cash to finish it

John Oliver can explain it.

AI spies questionable science journals, with some human help

Re: Sadly

Unfortunately, in several cases, it is not about the publication of results, but the prestige of appearing in journals...

And with the lack of control of some publishers, as soon as a truly open paper is published by an institution's library, someone is going to change the authors' names and republish it somewhere else.

As soon as institutions stop counting the number of papers as a metric of quality, "Publish or Perish" will perish (except for vanity publishing, that is an unkillable monster).

Re: Sadly

I was an academic (and later promoted to department manager), but I still publish as a co-author with students, primarily at national conferences.

The number of "offers" I receive by e-mail is mind-boggling, mostly using this template:

<tt>We were deeply impressed by your paper Title of a paper in a specific field such as remote sensing and our editors want to publish it in our journal Title of a journal on a totally unrelated field such as Latin American Sociology. The publishing fee is around 90 USD dollars.</tt>.

Usually, they scan the conference pages and obtain the names of the papers and the authors' contact information, and then it is Happy SPAM Time.

Sometimes I get bored and scan the journal's editors' lists and e-mail them asking if they are comfortable knowing that they are the editors of a predatory journal without any criteria for the invitations. Only once did I get a reply from an irate editor telling me that "it is the industry's practice" and the journal is "top quality".

Checking the CVs of the editors and associate editors of those journals is also revealing. I found one "researcher" who is editor of three journals of similar quality, and has dozens of articles published in the same journals..

Solid-gold nav bars? Trump plans redesign of government websites

Make Flash Great Again!

That is all.

xAI fires legal rocket at Apple and OpenAI claiming they're locking out Grok

C'mon already!

Show us the picture of Elon saying "I've had it up to here with unfair competition!"

Hanging up: AOL to pull the plug on its dial-up service after 36 years

MOM GET OUT OF THE PHONE, I'm on the Internet... too late! :-(

The post is required, and must contain letters.

Re: Coasters, wind chimes, frisbees, toy vehicle wheels.

You never played "10 seconds in the microwave"? :-)

Forget the Space Force! Trump needs to create a Cyber Force, says think tank

Re: Clear and pressing threat revealed exclusively on El Reg.

Nah, the Patriotic Graboids will protect the USA!

New Google AI model maps world in 10-meter squares for machines to read

...an error rate 24 percent lower than other models...

We need an El Reg standard for approximate comparisons between vague amounts of something or else. The Tukey? The So-So?

Bitter fight over 2020 Microsoft quantum paper both resolved and unresolved

I disagree and agree with you.

What the heck does "social" media have to do with peer review ? - not peer review, but basic facts confirmation. Unfortunately, more and more "journalists" are either getting their "facts" from Instagram or calling scientists to ask for confirmation or denial of something inane that was posted in social media. Or even worse, when searching for someone for an authoritative opinion, their first criterion is popularity on social networks.

On the other hand, science is going down the drain. Trump and associates are just accelerating the process.

Microsoft bolts Copilot Mode onto Edge to chase AI-browser crowd

Re: what you MIGHT want to do next

That happened to me when I bought a new refrigerator, and got many, many ads from an online seller a short time later about... refrigerators.

And once, when I bought a new car. I went to the dealership to explain the sheer idiocy of offering to sell me another car after a few days. They didn't understand why I was annoyed, so I just asked them to remove me from their mailing list.

Now get off my lawn.

'It looks sexy but it's wrong' – the problem with AI in biology and medicine

Re: "woahhh you wrote that without claude/grok? woawwwwww."

That would be preferable to what we have now in some circles: "No way you produced that yourself without using AI!". To the highly suspicious and inefficient "AI detectors"!

Stop flooding us with AI-based grant applications, begs Health Institute

Re: Hopeful of bagging a MAGA science grant.

Don't forget hydroxychloroquine, bleach, rectal ozone therapy. Brainworms too.

Trump tariffs turn techies topsy-turvy as US braces for PC tax

Re: Not "reciprocal"!

Reciprocal Obrigatory XKCD

Microsoft pushes $4B at AI education for the masses

Hey, teacher, leave those kids to AI

Funnier (and rhymes better!) when we sing this as "Hey, teacher, leave those kids to A1" as some "educators" did!

Kawasaki and Foxconn build robot nursing assistant to tackle hospital scutwork

Re: enormous, bulky things going quickly down the hallways

Do they have a setting for a red tint in the screen with angry eyes? If so I could think about some usage scenarios.

Musk's antics and distractions are backfiring as Tesla's car business stalls

And where is...

...the Musk Salute Obligatory Image?

There's no international protocol on what to do if an asteroid strikes Earth

Re: Didn't we solve this in 1979?

As in the movie The Last Starfighter (a few years later: 1984)?