Posts by Elledan

Raven geniuses: Four-month-old corvids have similar cognitive abilities to great apes at same age, study finds

Size bias

An often made assumption by people is that the size of the brain an animal has matters more than other factors. Hence the fun made of 'walnut-sized' brains in e.g. some dinosaurs. Small brain equals dumb, basically.

Research like this shows just how far off the mark that assumption is. Many years ago, the assumption was made that because the brain of human females are on average smaller than those of human males, the latter had the superior cognitive abilities. We now know that to be completely incorrect, with there being literally nothing to distinguish the brain in a male and female body based on fMRI-based and other studies.

Similarly, just because an animal doesn't lug half a kg or more in brain matter along doesn't mean that they are dumb. With how little we know about how the brain works, it is very likely that the way the brain is interconnected determines its efficiency and thus resulting capabilities.

A humpback whale's brain case has a volume of about 8,000 cubic centimeter, whereas humans have to do with a measly 1,300 cm^3. Meanwhile dolphins have a much larger neocortex than humans, meaning that theoretically they could be a whole lot smarter than us: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/news-blog/are-whales-smarter-than-we-are/

Maybe Douglas Adams was closer to the truth than anyone of us had ever guessed. Or maybe we'll all be obliterated for that intergalactic expressway and none of this matters in a few seconds :)

SpaceX Starship blows up on landing, Elon Musk says it's the data that matters and that landed just fine

Yes, as noted by Elon Musk on Twitter shortly after the RUD, they had noticed low pressure in the header tank during descent. This resulted in the Raptors after relighting quickly running out of propellant, leading to one Raptor flaming out and the other running 'engine-rich', as Scott Manley put it.

Basically the combustion process was eating its way back into the engine's structures, assisted by the hot temperature of the engine and the supply of oxygen feeding back into this. So yes, that green flame was literally the engine burning up, including copper or copper alloy-based elements.

Quick road into retirement

The nature of prototypes is that they are essentially obsolete, at best a curiosity one stuffs into a museum once the tests have been performed on it. Watch SN5 and SN6 lounging around the build site, or StarHopper, which has been repurposed into a mounting post for cameras and weather sensors. One may hope that they make it into a 'SpaceX Museum' at some point, rather than being scrapped and turned into CyberTrucks or such. SN8 definitely carved out its space in history by going out with a bang rather than quietly into the night.

SN8 was by all conventions a booming success (sorry), as it did everything it had said on the tin and then some. It got SpaceX real-world flight data of a StarShip prototype. It got them performance metrics on the performance of the Raptor engines (including relighting) and also these header tanks.

All that was learned from SN8 can now be integrated into SN9 before its flight, and very likely it'll stick the landing without the RUD part. Before SN8 there were many questions and doubts, after its flight we know so much more. SN9's flight will be to address the few lingering questions that remain and test fixes for issues encountered during SN8's flight.

Such is the nature of iterative development and testing, of which SN8 was a smashing example :)

Seagate says it's designed two of its own RISC-V CPU cores – and they'll do more than just control storage drives

Re: Startling growth

China's focus seems to be on x86 (via VIA's license) and MIPS (Loongson). As part of their 'China 2025' initiative, both have received massive government support.

You can even buy a Loongsoon MIPS-based laptop in China, e.g.: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/chinese-laptop-featuring-new-14nm-loongsoon-3a4000-cpu-appears

Re: Apple

Apple is one of the founding members of ARM (back in the 1980s). They hold a perpetual license to the ARM ISA and related technologies as a result and do not pay license costs to ARM, as, in a sense, they are ARM.

Apple's M1: the fastest and bestest ever silicon = revolution? Nah, there's far more interesting stuff happening in tech that matters to everyone

ASARM matters

Apple Silicon (ASARM) matters a great deal. Not only does this firmly push ARM into the desktop space for the first time since the early 1990s, it also allows us to see what the cost of CISC is today. Even if modern-day x86 CPUs use a RISC architecture inside, all the transistors being used for the CISC-opcode-to-microcode decoding process do not come for free.

As a result of ASARM, developers and publishers can no longer ignore AArch64 as a target for desktop applications. Suddenly everything from browsers to productivity applications has to work on AArch64, but also smaller projects. MacOS is still a relevant target for desktop OSes, and interestingly also for smaller open source projects.

Previously the most well-known AArch64 (along with ARMv7) target were SBCs like the Raspberry Pi, which do not even remotely cover the same market as ASARM does. Now suddenly, people see that ARM is suitable for desktops and laptops, after years of laughing at Windows-on-ARM. From the looks of it, an ASARM-based laptop has the potential to be more efficient than an x86-based one, if only because of the very mature BIG.little architecture that is so common with ARM SoCs.

I'm not a betting person, but I'd wager a bet that ASARM is making a certain blue chip manufacturer feel quite nervous right about now, with AMD also looking worriedly over their shoulder.

Happy silver jubilee to JavaScript, king of the web at 25 and still hanging on to its crown, for now

JavaScript is for scripting HTML DOM and browser API stuff

I was one of those who played around with JavaScript back in the late 90s, as VBS in IE slowly died off and newfangled languages like Java figured that they could rule the Web with their Applets before people yelled loudly enough at Sun to GTFO with that nonsense.

Anyway, JavaScript. It led to things like DHTML (Dynamic HTML), which as essentially the use of JS to create animated drop-down menus and other fancy dynamic stuff on sites. You also had a few people (ab)using hidden iframes to dynamically load data from the server without having to refresh the main page before this somehow got hyped up as a 'new' thing with AJAX (XMLHttpRequest).

To call JavaScript a 'programming language' is rather generous. It supports a grand total of two types (ASCII & IEEE-754 FP) and runs in a single-threaded fashion. It is essentially a way to allow for the scripting of actions involving the DOM (adding/removing content) and calling of native browser functions which are exposed to the JS VM.

There's no 'standard library', and as a prototype-based language the default programming style is 'whatever works'. Over the years its shortcomings have been patched up in a variety of ways, first by making the JS VM more performant, then adding more and more native API functions, but as a JS codebase grows, it threatens to collapse under its own weight.

Having done a few years of professional JS development for embedded purpose (yes, it exists) a few years back, it was interesting to note how the JS ecosystem has bifurcated so many times that it has become essentially non-portable. Take just the concept of 'modules'. Just about any real language has the concept of 'modules' or 'includes', where one can reference external code files. JS only added this quite recently, but not before many different alternatives were developed (AMD, Include.js, etc.) and NodeJS is essentially its own JS dialect now as it cannot and will not support native JS modules according to the project developers.

Getting any bit of non-trivial JavaScript to run reliably across a number of browsers, headless runtimes and NodeJS was a nightmare, with the concept of unit tests clearly developed for the sake of JavaScript to have any chance of producing code that would not immediately self-destruct (quietly, JS doesn't do stacktraces) in production. We would have plenty of bug reports of issues in testing and production that would have to be reproduced using copious amounts of console.print() statements, however.

In that regard TypeScript is amazing. Sure, the typing is optional, but you can remove the prototype nature of JS and turn it into a deterministic language, with fixed structures that have required and optional fields, remove the need to check whether the right parameter types were being passed in every goddarn function (nobody likes random '<foo> is not a function' and so on) as if one is programming bleedin' Java (Null types, etc.).

Instead, you write the nicely annotated TS, pass it through the transpiler which will nicely tell you where you screwed up. It almost brings a tear to one's eyes when you see something like that after years of dealing with plain JS. Of course, then try to convince the customer and one's colleagues that switching to TS is a really, really good idea.

So yeah, long story short, JS is being abused in every sense possible for all the things it was absolutely not designed or intended for, but I fear we passed the point of no return roughly two decades ago now.

Whatever WASM will or will not do I do not know. To me it feels mostly like a way to compensate for the lack of native NPAPI plugins, but so long as every single WASM outside call has to pass through JavaScript, the real use of WASM seems to be mostly to allow for for JS frameworks to offload some sluggish processing to zippier can't-believe-it's-not-native code.

Maybe if Microsoft grew a pair and added direct support for TypeScript in its Chromed Edge browser?

Let's check in now with the new California monolith... And it's gone, torn down by a bunch of MAGA muppets

Figures

Considering that the US was founded by folk who figured that the Netherlands was too intolerant towards their beliefs and left in a tantrum towards the New World, these kind of scenes seem only par for the course.

One reaps what one sows, etc.

Robot drills hole on Moon, employs robot arm to clean up mess to bring home

Re: Is that it?

To be fair, China has only been developing its space program since the 1990s. Since that time they have done space walks, space stations, a few Moon missions including a first-time-ever mission to the far side of the Moon. At their current pace they'll have a permanent Moon colony and a manned mission to Mars before NASA can get SLS beyond LEO.

Some have said that only SpaceX is really competing with China's space program at this point in terms of ambition and speed of development.

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

Inevitable

Around 2001 NASA had already withdrawn funding for Arecibo, and the observatory got pushed off onto NSF, which had so much interest in running the site that by 2014 they were looking to decommission the place despite NASA pouring in a few million of funding a year again around 2012. Only a group led by the University of Florida putting in money saved it.

The time to save Arecibo was probably around 2001. From there it has been a slow slog into corrosion and wear on the supporting cables and other structures. As engineers who examined the structure earlier this year noted, the cables had degraded to a point where they could not take more than half of their originally rated load.

Arecibo hadn't seen a maintenance budget and only a minimal operating budget for the last two decades. There is no large infrastructure project that can survive that long without maintenance and not suffer some kind of catastrophic failure. Just ask the US what happened to the last few bridges where they skimped on maintenance.

China's Chang'e-5 lands on the Moon to scratch surface

Miniature Apollo Mission

Part of me thinks that the coolest thing about the Chang'e 5 mission is that it's essentially a step-by-step retread of the Apollo missions, only in miniature (well, a bit smaller). One major change being that they didn't have to do the weird flip of the lander with the command module before reaching lunar orbit as was the case with the Apollo missions.

It's also great to see the Chinese space agency working together with ESA on the tracking of the mission, while providing more live coverage of the launch and landing than ever before. It's a good sign of less paranoia and distrust from both sides.

AWS reveals it broke itself by exceeding OS thread limits, sysadmins weren’t familiar with some workarounds

Don't just throw more hardware at it

From the autopsy report it sounds like they A) built a really complicated structure ('shards', 'streams') with countless threads to communicate between nodes instead of a single (or pool of) comms thread(s), and B) committed the cardinal sin of not having error detection and graceful degradation.

While A) isn't an issue by itself, it made B) a lot worse. The real fix here would be to fix the issues in B), but it doesn't sound like they're doing that. Probably because writing good software and testing it under various scenarios costs time and money.

In short, they'll very likely be back at this exact same meltdown scenario in a matter of months or years.

Retired engineer confesses to role in sliding Microsoft Bob onto millions of XP install CDs

Too much hate

Having recently seen Microsoft Bob in action over at the LGR YouTube channel, I found that I had to severely adjustment my opinion of this software. Most of all that it isn't terrible. The fact that there were at least half a dozen similar solutions out there around the time showed that the concept made sense, and for a person new to PCs even today, the use of a UI that matches what they already know isn't a crazy idea.

As someone who has had to guide many a family member and family of friends (etc. etc.) through software installations, basic computer usage and driver installations (insert hatred for WinModems here), I'd rather give them something along the lines of MSFT Bob rather than spend another untold hours explaining to people what the heck a 'taskbar', 'start button' and 'mouse cursor' are, or what these 'programs' are and what this 'window' is in that they open.

Yeah, I like Bob well enough :)

China prepares for launch of Chang'e 5 mission to Moon, which would make it third nation to return lunar sample

Great launch

Just saw the launch over at CGTN's live stream, with commentary by two specialists involved in the Chang'e project.

Launch of the Long March 5 rocket went off without a hitch, all through Max-Q, MECO, stage separation, SECO-1, coast phase, restart, SECO-2 and finally the deployment of the Chang'e 5 payload.

Seeing the Earth in its full glory on the camera pointing back from the second stage was very touching. That would have been a similar view as the Apollo mission crews would have seen on their way to LTO and the Moon. The Big Blue Marble, indeed.

So happy to see what feels like a revival of space exploration after the last Apollo missions got scrapped along with their Saturn Vs. Here's to science and humankind's future.

Bloated middle age beckons: Windows 1.0 turns 35 and is dealing with its mid-life crisis, just about

MS DOS Life

Growing up, I was vaguely aware of this 'Windows 3.x' thing, yet we used MS DOS (5.x) at home, though I have vague memories of playing games on a C64 as well. I never knew there was this 'Windows 1.0' thing as well, even if it made sense in hindsight considering the 'Windows 3.x' thing. MS DOS was what I used the most, and was what ran on the IBM PS/2 386 SX system (with Model-M keyboard) that my father got me as my first PC when his work was selling off old systems in the 90s.

At the primary school everything was MSX machines, and the high school was using NT 3.51 or 4 (on ancient Pentium 1 machines). I have used Windows 95 (SR2) some, but I mostly got started with Windows 98 (SE, of course) on account of being apparently a whippersnapper when it comes to Windows.

Doesn't keep me from being completely grumpy about 'modern Windows' (i.e. anything past Windows 7) and pining for the wonderful days of running Windows 2000 on a Celeron 400 with 64 MB RAM with zero issues. An experience which made me decide against continuing my self-flagellation with SuSE 6.3 in '98 (First Year of the Linux Desktop, IIRC) when I figured Win98SE had pushed me too far. Those were the days.

Not sure if I'm pining more for MS DOS or Windows 2000, though. Maybe a bit of both :)

Linux Foundation, IBM, Cisco and others back ‘Inclusive Naming Initiative’ to change nasty tech terms

Re: So... looking at their alternative names...

I think out of those I'd probably go with 'Vampyr/Thrall' for accuracy's sake :)

Re: Who are these peopel?..

I'd say you're right. I do not recall any signs or demands during the BLM demonstrations this year for having words erased from the English language. Lots of demand for equal treatment of non-Caucasians, though, as well as the removal of statues glorifying the losing side of the US Civil War.

How out of touch with reality does one have to be to think that changing technical jargon will affect the way US police treats non-Caucasians? What peer-reviewed studies are they referencing that they feel that it's so important?

Slavering over mastering offence

Mastering the slavering over being perpetually offended by perceived slights, even when the most common use of 'slave', 'master' and 'blacklist' are not slights at all is truly a dark blight on humanity. When there will always be devices and services that will slavishly follow the instructions provided to them, and students will continue to slave over their homework assignments the day before it's due lest the teacher deems that their efforts are insufficient for mastering the course.

Language is meant to convey meaning, not to engender its own meaning from thin air, or have individuals with a simplistic agenda determine what it is that they feel you meant to say.

Or in the words of everyone's most beloved feminist: everything is misogynistic, even when you don't realise it is.

HTTPS-only mode arrives in Firefox 83 as Mozilla finds new home for Rust-y Servo engine

I do not have a certificate for my personal website. Do I need one? It doesn't have any online shopping or exchanging of sensitive information. What motivation do I have to set up an SSL certificate and maintain it?

To me it just seems like an unnecessary bother, but maybe someone can convince me otherwise.

Mozilla's MDN web standards reference platform makes move to GitHub, now in beta

Authorative reference for HTML is W3C.

Ever since I dipped into web design in the late 90s, I have used the HTML standards published by W3C as reference. They got the HTML 5.2 standard ready for referencing as well: https://www.w3.org/TR/html52/

The same is true for CSS: https://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/specs.en.html

While I'll give that MDN is sometimes more accessible and offers (along with w3schools) the service of summarising which browsers actually support a specific feature, its main use is probably for JavaScript and related things which are (as mentioned) poorly covered elsewhere.

H₂? Oh! New water-splitting technique pushes progress of green hydrogen

Storing hydrogen is an absolute pain

There are three ways to store hydrogen: compressed, liquefied or bound to e.g. nickel. Each of these methods suck in its own special ways.

The problems with liquefying hydrogen are that it takes a lot of energy to get it this cold, keeping it cold and finding a safe place where it can reliably remain cold. Not ideal for most situations.

Binding hydrogen to usually some metal molecule has the advantage that this is very stable and thus quite safe. The major disadvantage is that since it's a stable connection, it's hard and thus very slow to get the hydrogen to become unbound again. The other major disadvantage is that this storage method is very bulky and heavy, making it only suitable for situations where you need stationary storage and aren't too worried about how fast you can get hydrogen back out.

Finally, the most common method of storage and what is generally used for transport applications is to compress the gas and storing it in super-thick walled (composite) tanks. This has to occur at very high pressures as hydrogen has a stupidly unreasonable power-to-volume ratio. These hydrogen tanks have a very limited lifespan and need to be regularly inspected for safety reasons.

In industrial applications, the preferred method is to produce needed hydrogen on the spot, in limited quantities for immediate use. See the issues with storage for why.

As far as general safety goes, hydrogen is a fairly unique gas in that it is highly inflammable, more than anything else. If mixed with an oxygen ratio between almost nothing and close to saturation, it'll happily and violently detonate. Over the past years there have been multiple explosions at hydrogen refueling stations and production facilities, including an accident last year in California that show just how much of a liability H2 is in general use: https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/hydrogen-fuel-cell-car-california-explosion/

As mentioned by others, the amazing thing about hydrocarbons is that they are very stable, very dense and easy to store. Hydrogen without the carbon is essentially the opposite. Hydrogen reacts with everything (which causes the metal embrittlement and violent reaction with oxygen), is the exact opposite of dense and is very hard to store (see above).

Current suggestions for hydrogen in the fuel mix is to add hydrogen to the natural gas pipelines, but as we'll one day want to stop using natural gas, we'll lose the one easy(-ish) way to transport hydrogen that way. Maybe a methane-based economy makes more sense than a hydrogen-based one? Can still use steam-reformation with the methane to get hydrogen where it's needed, but avoid the headaches of storing and transporting of hydrogen.

Finding remote working a bit of a grind? Microsoft staffers feel your pain

Open plan offices are worse than cubicle farms

While working for a company that moved from a single-room-per-team approach to an open plan office for everyone, it was quite noticeable to see the difference. Instead of each team having some walls to put stuff up on, to hold discussions in place and basically everything in that room being relevant to everyone in the team, suddenly every moved to sitting in the open plan office room with headphones on.

Discussions required people to move into a meeting room, as did people popping off for phone calls, getting a drink or visiting the toilet. Basically unless you happened to be one of those people who can work without missing a beat while a hurricane is bearing down on the place and is in the process of ripping off the roof, you were SOL. The constant chattering, walking, movement, coughing and so on made for a pretty solid drop in productivity and overall happiness.

Oh, and people got sick a lot more often. Usually in waves, oddly enough.

Somehow I do not mind working in a home office at all. Not missing the commute, rigid schedule, tedious meetings in poorly ventilated rooms and lack of privacy.

Maybe we can have after-hour meetups for people where they can get this 'I must absolutely share a physical space with colleagues for 8+ hours a day' thing out of their system?

Intel offloads NAND business to South Korea's SK Hynix for a cool $9bn

Future of Optane?

Notable is that Intel is still keeping their 3D XPoint technology and assets. Supposedly Intel is close to releasing a new generation of Optane drives and (presumably) caching tech. Maybe they're banking on the proceeds from that, along with the sale of their NAND division, to keep their flagging CPU side going until they can fix the issues at the Intel semiconductor fabs.

That said, this feels somewhat like Samsung selling their LCD factories and refocusing on QLED. While there was a lot of shock and fuss about that, the truth of the matter is that regular LCD tech is highly competitive and on its way out (cue OLED, QLED & MicroLED), making for razor-thin profit margins. With how competitive the NAND Flash market is, and how it's painting itself into a corner by having each generation (SLC, MLC, TLC, QLC, etc.) significantly reduce durability, speed and so on, I can imagine that shedding this division makes a lot of sense for Intel.

2020 hasn't been all bad – a new Raspberry Pi Compute Module is here

Still needs cooling

Although the use of Mezzanine connectors instead of the SODIMM form factor is great for a tighter inter-board connection, it is fairly fragile. Admittedly the CM isn't really meant to be fondled with constantly, but it's something to keep in mind during development.

Beyond that it's a shame that the cooling issue isn't addressed yet, unless I missed something. On the RPi 4 it's pretty much a requirement to install active cooling to ensure that the SoC doesn't thermally throttle when put under load. It would be great if the CM (and the RPi 4, for that matter) had some provision for an HSF installation that doesn't involve thermal glue.

We bought a knockoff Lego launchpad kit from China for our Saturn V rocket so you don't have to

Maybe in Meccano?

For some reason when I look at the Saturn V launch pad, I feel it should be constructed out of Meccano parts. Not the dinky plastic version we got today, but the full-steel version, with fiddly bolts, large metal plates and some metal work to bend the prospective beams in just the right format before installation.

It'd be glorious, not require any glue and weigh only a bit under 50 kg :)

Your web browser running remotely in Cloudflare's cloud. That's it. That's the story

Who needs client-side rendering, anyway?

Even before XMLHttpRequest (AJAX) became a thing around 2000, people had been using techniques like hidden iframes and the like to shovel stuff between the client and server without the hassle of full-page reloads. Naturally, this evolved into 'everything runs client-side' over time. And this naturally evolved into 'all exploits also run client-side' over time.

When JavaScript can be used to spy on what happens in other tabs, or even in the CPU's caches, one has to realise that the 'JavaScript sandbox' is so leaky that there's not a single grain of sand left in it any more.

So what's the solution? Render it server-side, of course!

At least it creates more jobs, I guess?

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

Postscript

Anyone remember when a Postscript driver was all one needed to print to a (network) printer? Whatever happened to that? Why is there a need for Yet Another Standard?

On the topic of CUPS and Apple, I always found the bug they had/have in OS X/MacOS with their print spool that caused some PDFs to fail to print correctly quite amusing. In the entire office, certain PDFs would fail to print with any Mac-based system on any of the network printers, merely producing pages upon pages of raw Postscript.

Whenever this happened, the person in question (including myself, as an unlucky person with a work MacBook) would have to hunt down a colleague with a Windows or Linux laptop and bother them about printing the PDF.

On the bright side, this meant that I always had a lot of scrap A4 pages to doodle and sketch on :)

Microsoft: After we said we'll try to promote more Black people, the US govt accused us of discrimination

Do you want to be discriminated in favour of?

Thing is that nobody picks to be part of a group in society. It basically just kind of happens. Ditto with being part of some minority. In the end, however, we should all still be human beings, and we should all be judged equally.

Wealth, ethnicity, physical impairments, eye, hair or skin colour, sexual orientation and abstract concepts like 'race' are not things which do not change the fact that we are all a human being at our core.That's exactly why anti-discrimination laws (law #1 of e.g. The Netherlands' and Germany's constitutions) forbid the discrimination based upon any of those properties. Because doing so would be unfair, ergo it's illegal.

Affirmative action is still discrimination, ergo it's illegal in many nations.

And even if it wasn't, would you want to be picked for a position just because of any of those superfluous properties? In between all of the clamouring for male/female quotas I have often joked about there having to be a 4% representation of intersex people in between there as well. As an intersex person (chimaeric, AKA 'true hermaphrodite'), I could make this a point, and probably get people on my side.

But I don't think it's relevant. Despite having a body and life experiences unlike those of most people, or perhaps specifically because of those, I wish only to be judged and appreciated for me as a person. Not because of properties of my body, or because I'm a minority, or because intersex people are under-represented in lots of parts of society.

Because to be judged and appreciated equal to other people, to me that is the most precious thing. And why any form of discrimination is a horrible thing, no matter how well-intended.

Wind and quite a bit of fog shroud Boris Johnson's energy vision for the UK

Re: Or

If you're talking about the EPRs EDF is building in the UK, you're not looking far enough. While the US and French nuclear supply chains have atrophied due to not building new reactors in any quantities since the 1980s, nations like Russia (e.g. VVER), South Korea (four reactors in the UAE) and China have and keep showing how to build reactors on-time and on-budget.

To rub it in, China licensed EDF's first-generation EPR design, built two reactors (at Taishan) and put them in operation a few years ago. They offered EDF a list of design improvements and solutions to issues they encountered while building the two currently operational reactors, which EDF used to create the second-generation EPR design.

Russia, South Korea and China are among the world's largest exporters of nuclear power technology, with the Chinese Hualong One and its successor reactor becoming a popular choice for both Asian and African nations, with Pakistan building a few Hualong Ones. Russia's VVER reactors are common in Eastern Europe. Poland has just committed to six reactors, with the Netherlands also looking at building multiple plants, with a choice from Russian, Chinese, Canadian, US, South Korean and Japanese designs.

Admittedly the UK letting its nuclear industry wither and die was a bit of a silly move.

Re: The big problem however...

As a preview of what that kind of infrastructure upgrade that'd mean, one can look at Germany, where the Energiewende has practically fallen flat due to the need to build many thousands of kilometers of HV transmission lines, but nowhere to build them: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/dossiers/energy-transition-and-germanys-power-grid

The problem is that the only good spots for wind in Germany are in the north, but most industry is in the south, which means that most wind power on good, windy days is thrown away because there's no way to transport it (not even to neighbouring nations).

And Germany isn't even close to decarbonising heating or transport. Virtually all heating in Germany is done with mineral oil and gas, and EVs along with accompanying chargers are exceedingly rare. This isn't helped by the fact that just about everyone in German lives in shared rental housing.

Looking across the border in France, I feel a lot more optimistic about just building out nuclear power in-situ, skip the massive HV transmission line build-out and the environmental destruction that'd cause, switch homes to electric heating and somehow figure out how to make EVs work with cramped rental homes.

Twitter: Our image-cropping AI seems to give certain peeps preferential treatment. Solution: Use less AI

It's usually incompetence

To paraphrase House, MD: It's never Evil, unless it is.

In all the fury of the past weeks about this issue, there have been countless accusations hurled at Twitter, about how this was a willful choice by White Dudes or something over at Twitter HQ, done in full knowledge of the consequences of this algorithm. None of that really adds up, though.

First of all, Twitter's red-headed stepchild (TweetDeck) doesn't have any of these issues, it uses a simple centering algorithm. In the case of all the 'damning evidence' tweets people have been sending around lately, all I could see on those was the white area in the center of those images. In the few cases that I am forced to use the burning trash fire that is the UI at twitter.com or the toxic waste spill that's the Android Twitter app, I'm always impressed by how much 'fancy' stuff they try to cram into both.

The sorting, filtering and tenderising of one's timeline (even when supposedly disabling this behaviour), the countless sponsored tweets and the countless UI and UX glitches that were the primary reason why I only use TweetDeck. In its barren, neglected simplicity, TweetDeck only does the bare minimum.

That all leads me to believe that the problem with Twitter is that as a company that's barely scraping by as a money-losing enterprise is not a beacon of technical elegance or competence, but more one of 'look at the shinies' while praying that they can draw in enough advertising revenue that month to keep the lights on at Twitter HQ. I doubt Twitter even has the budget to invest in Evil Schemes at this point.

Tl;dr: Shiny feature, not really tested, backfires nicely. Just another corporate day at Incompetence'R'Us :)

Cross-platform app toolkit Flutter lead Tim Sneath aims Dart at an ambient computing future

Dart off

Image if WxWidgets or Qt had you learn an entirely new language just to be able to use their fancy framework?

Qt offers QML in addition to the native libraries for the folk who feel that everything should be in JavaScript, but there's no QtScript or similar.

I am guessing that this is another case of Google's Not-Invented-Here syndrome?

I love my electricity company's app – but the FBI says the nuclear industry bribed politicians $60m to kill it

Old tech

Since when is nuclear power 'old tech'?

Isn't NuScale's SMR cool and hip? What about the dozens of other SMR designs in various stages of development and certification?

Just because a company which also owns two nuclear plants gets caught up in this bribery scandal seems like a weird reason to go off on a tangent about nuclear power like this. Especially when it's the fastest growing source of low-carbon power in Asia, Arabic world, Africa and Europe.

None of this bribery scandal should reflect on the nuclear power industry as a whole.

It's 2020 so not only is your mouse config tool a Node.JS Electron app, it's also pwnable by an evil webpage

Welcome to the cd Electron app

And here I was thinking that the nightmare scenario of cd, ls, ln and other CLI tools was just an exaggeration and could never happen.

After config tools and utilities switching to Electron/JS, might we soon see the successor to systemd: NodeD? Or maybe NodeOS will suddenly become the dominant Linux distribution.

Is this modern software development now?

Happy Hacking Professional Hybrid mechanical keyboard: Weird, powerful, comfortable ... and did we mention weird?

Hard sell

Over the years I have migrated from a Model-M (part of an IBM PS/2 system) to a generic full-sized keyboard, to the whole range of Microsoft's 'Comfort Curve' series while seeking more ergonomics. Ultimately I ended up with the Microsoft Natural 4000. Costs 25-50 Euro new, has been manufactured since 2005, is the most comfortable keyboard to type articles and novels on, while being large and clunky enough that it'll never, ever shift a millimeter on your keyboard without you explicitly dragging out the forklift to do so.

Having the keys angled so that you have to twist your wrists awkwardly in front of your torso so that you cramp up your shoulders now feels incredibly unnatural and even painful to me. With the Natural 4000 split keyboard I can type comfortably with my shoulders relaxed, my elbows supported by the armrests of my (ergonomic) chair and zero pressure on my wrists.

Since I do a lot of typing every day, preventing RSI isn't just a nice thought, but highly essential. While I accept a non-ergonomic straight keyboard like the one in the article on a laptop (for obvious space reasons), I'd never want one again for a daily driver, let alone spend 500 clams on it. I'd rather buy another dozen Natural 4000s for that money, just in case they ever stop being manufactured.

Not Particularly Mortifying: IEEE eggheads probe npm registry, say JavaScript libs not as insecure as feared

Chain of trust

When writing code for a business environment or anywhere else where reliability matters, it's good to keep the chain of trust as short as possible. Every library, every build system, every dependency and 'convenient' script that you add is another chain that risks being compromised, broken or suddenly unavailable for whatever reason.

While involved in the development and maintenance of a big manufacturer's infotainment system, I found myself in a mixed NPM and native (C, C++) environment. With my direct responsibility being with the native side, I endeavored to keep said chain of trust there as short as possible. All used code in the mixed C & C++ project was integrated into the source tree (including chunks of *urgh* Boost) with vetting and full removal of the existing build system so that the number of 'unknowns' in the build process got reduced as much as possible.

In addition to being able to carry the entire project around on a USB stick to compile it on an air-gapped system if need be, it also made the subsequent security audit of my code and the rest of that in the infotainment system a snap. For my code at least. Having gone through the code repeatedly with a fine-toothed comb and knowing my way around it, the only issues the audit found were in the bits of the legacy C code which I was gifted by my predecessors, as well as in some external library code. Nothing serious was found, however, as I had run over the entire codebase with Valgrind and other tools.

The thought of doing something similar for a project where 90% or so of the codebase is whatever the heck is floating around in the NPM storage pile at that point in time gives me nightmares. It's not just the JavaScript snippets in NPM, but also the countless native modules, that want to be compiled and run on production systems.

Oh, but NPM is what is used for those infotainment systems nowadays. I hope that whoever are working on those systems today are having a blast with the fall-out from security audits :)

Epic, Spotify, ProtonMail and pals rise up as one against Apple's 30% cut, call for end to Cupertino-style markets

Unreal policies

It's interesting how many of the same arguments used by the Apple Defence Force (costs for providing SDKs, tools, infrastructure, etc.) also apply to Epic's Unreal Engine and related software. Epic's model there is that anyone can freely use it at zero charge and no strings attached, until one's game or software developed using Unreal Engine generates a certain amount of revenue (recently upped to about $1M, I believe).

This way independent, small-time developers can do whatever with zero risk or costs, and by the time Epic comes around with the first invoice if one's game turns out to be a sleeper hit, one would presumably be raking in enough dough that the whopping 5% royalties Epic asks at that point would barely register.

In that regard, Apple's 30% fee for even the smallest developer seems somewhat greedy, especially when one realises that it's not a flat 30% fee, but it are often the bigger parties on the App Store (like Amazon) who are paying significantly less.

Essentially it appears that in the case of Epic, it are the big players who are funding the party for the smaller players, whereas Apple seems to be more into flogging the smaller developers for cash, to entice bigger players to please not avoid publishing for iOS. Which feels rather... shady.

Personally, I see smartphones as more or less closed & locked-down platforms (even Android), and the Google & Apple stores as pointless treadmills if one's goal is to make money, but that still doesn't give either Google or Apple to act like greedy leeches.

Proposed US fix for Boeing 737 Max software woes does not address Ethiopian crash scenario, UK pilot union warns

Re: Making bricks fly

"[..] if the pilot for whatever reason manoeuvres the aircraft hard, generating an angle of attack close to the stall angle of around 14°, the previously neutral engine nacelle generates lift. A lift which is felt by the aircraft as a pitch up moment (as its ahead of the CG line), now stronger than on the 737NG. This destabilizes the MAX in pitch at higher Angles Of Attack (AOA). The most difficult situation is when the manoeuvre has a high pitch ratio. The aircraft’s inertia can then provoke an over-swing into stall AOA."

From: https://leehamnews.com/2018/11/14/boeings-automatic-trim-for-the-737-max-was-not-disclosed-to-the-pilots/

This is why I mentioned the Sopwith Camel comparison, as it too had the tendency to fly its pilot into the ground when pushed towards certain points. Imagine a pilot pulling a bit more than usual on the yoke during take-off, causing the AoA to hit the pre-programmed limit, or turbulent weather destabilising the plane and causing lift or downdraft events on the nacelles. And that's all with MCAS working 'as designed'.

I did not need to 'invent' anything here. We have all seen the two fatal cases and the dozens of near-misses. The 737-MAX has wildly different aerodynamics (the way the airplane behaves under different conditions), which disrupt the stable platform of the previous 737 generations.

Making bricks fly

The crux of the issue is basically that Boeing is doing something unspeakable (in an aerodynamic sense) to the 737 airframe and refuses to spend the time and money to properly deal with the consequences of these actions. MCAS is about the laziest, most brute-force way to overcome the fact that they ruined everything that made the 737 such an easy to fly plane to begin with.

Fact of the matter remains that the 737 is among the lowest (in terms of ground-belly distance) airplanes, and that this by definition precludes it from fitting larger engines that can physically fit underneath the wings without hitting the ground. Boeing ignored this by hanging larger engines off the front of the wings instead, changed the entire aerodynamics (and center of gravity) of the airplane, slapped on a half-hearted fly-by-wire 'fix' that turned out to make things worse and called it a day until the reality of this horror show caused hundreds of people to needlessly lose their lives.

When the US Air Force was flying the F-117 'Flying Piano', its aerodynamic profile was about the worst possible for something pretending to be an airplane, but fly it did, courtesy of a solid, well-designed and tested fly-by-wire computer system. The 737-MAX is roughly the opposite approach there, taking a solid airframe that even a beginner pilot could fly without fly-by-wire tricks, to then worsen its aerodynamic properties by adding a single-point-of-failure (one of the mechanical and fairly error-prone AoA sensors) and slinging overly heavy engines to the front of the wings so that the plane will want to dive either into the ground or towards the sky at the merest glance at the controls.

For all the flak that Airbus receives (AF447 comes to mind), the fact of the matter remains that a solidly built system that is defeated by idiocy, a poorly trained crew, or both is something that is relatively easy to forgive. Building an airplane that's as intuitive to control as a Sopwith Camel backed up with avionics that will gladly stab you in the back when you least expect it is at best criminal.

The 737-MAX, whatever name it is given, should never fly again. I know I'll endeavor to never fly in one, and I hope everyone from pilot associations to passengers will speak out against this abomination.

Swift tailored for Windows no longer folklore: Apple's programming language available for Microsoft OS

If code safety is one's goal, then using Ada seems to offer both the more mature, tested, certified and compatible option out there. It also means using a language whose existence doesn't hang in the balance.

*Regretfully considers years spent using Objective-C*

Nvidia says regulators will be 'very supportive' of $40bn Arm buy despite concerns about chip designer's independence

OpenPOWER, not RISC-V

I'm frankly somewhat amazed at how many commentators keep dragging RISC-V into the limelight as an alternative to ARM. Fact of the matter remains that at this point in time, RISC-V's stable ISA makes it attractive as a freely usable MIPS clone, but most of the planned ISA (vector processing & floating point support among many others) is still in the 'design' or 'prototyping' phases. This makes RISC-V okay for simple tasks where before one'd just stick an 8-bit controller in and call it a day, but not as something that could compete with even Cortex-M MCUs.

Meanwhile, IBM opened the Power ISA years ago, allowing anyone to freely use it in designs. They even published a few cores using it, like the MicroWatt core. Using Power nets one a mature ISA (developed since it was called POWER, in the 1970s), mature tools, and more stable ISA features than one could shake an IDE at.

Oh, and there's also OpenRISC, which - too - is more mature and more open than RISC-V to boot. And yes, I'm still grumpy about those nice RISC-V people basically shafting the OpenRISC people.

Family wrongly accused of uploading pedo material to Facebook – after US-EU date confusion in IP address log

Different date formats are a liability and risk to life and health

We have all seen the joys that converting between metric and Imperial system brings (even if the latter is defined in the former). Wherever such different notations touch and interact there is the potential for confusion, loss of property, injury and life.

In this case as well, it's probably good that nobody lost their life and things should get sorted out over time as presumably red-faced officials are forced into admitting the mistake. Yet it could have been so much worse.

Imagine a US-trained nurse, misinterpreting a date given on medical equipment or files in a Spanish or Korean hospital? Decades of learning to interpret date strings as MM/DD/YY(YY) when the rest of the world does not use that format is just begging for serious mistakes to be made. Like with medication or examination intervals.

Without further context provided, what dates would 01-02-03 or 01-02-2006 be? Former (sadly still common) format could be anything from the first of February, 2003 to the second of January, 2003, to the third of February, 2001. Latter could be the first of February, or the second of January.

Why do we accept such an obvious liability?

Is today's AI yesterday's software routines with better PR? We argued over it, you voted on it. And the winner is...

I concur. When an ANN (or the common convoluted NNs and RNNs) consists basically out of a successive series of filters which filter the incoming data using either static weights or dynamically adjusted ones, that's not intelligence. It's just a really fancy filter which may at times produce the result you were expecting.

You don't ask a CNN for its reasoning after it's spit out its conclusion that the image of a loaf of bread is totally a cat. Instead you sigh, grab your debugging tools and training set and get back to tinkering until it has an above 90% recognition rate for whatever it's supposed to be recognising in whatever environment it should recognise things in.

Even a fumbling student during a driver's lesson would be able to give some explanation for why they figured that they had to dodge out of the way of a bit of cardboard tumbling across the road.

Worried about the Andromeda galaxy crashing into our Milky Way in four billion years? Too bad, it's quite possibly already happening

Job interview question

Where do you see yourself in four billion years?

Um, almost the entire Scots Wikipedia was written by someone with no idea of the language – 10,000s of articles

Some languages are preserved, some aren't

In the region of the Netherlands where I grew up, the local language used to be West Frisian, which to someone schooled in regular Dutch would only seen tangentially related to that language. In many ways it was similar to the Frisian language which is spoken across the water that splits the Netherlands in half.

I was 'was' and 'used to be' because while growing up, I never learned it, nor did any anyone else around me. Only my grandparents and those of a similar age still spoke it. For my parents and myself it remained limited to a few West Frisian words that slipped into daily usage. This quite unlike Frisian, which not only has an official status, is being actively protected from vanishing and may even have its own Wikipedia language section.

Part of me regrets never learning West Frisian and never being able to read the books in West Frisian that my grandparents had lying around, but another part of me accepts that this is the way of things. So many languages and dialects have vanished over the years (or are being actively discouraged like Bokmål in Norway in favour of Nynorsk), that a line has to be drawn somewhere.

Preserving an entire language's vocabulary and grammar in books and other references? Yes, please. Having fun 'learn to speak in <language> classes for anyone who wants it? Heck yes. I mean, we're doing it for Klingon and Elvish as well.

Duplicating the entirety of Wikipedia's content in that language? Not when there's no real interest and thus no large number of volunteers. I'd rather see the English side of Wikipedia get spruced up more instead. Still plenty of stub articles in there as well as those that are in bad need of updating :)

Of course, it's a free encyclopedia, so it'd be wrong for me to tell others what they should do with their time. Just don't make a dog's breakfast out of it like this bloke did.

C++ still rules the Chromium roost though Rust has caught our eye, say browser devs

Re: Why Rust is hyped

Fair points. I have had the displeasure of dealing with Mozilla's codebase around the time of Firefox 3.7, and it basically displayed every mistake one can make with a build system (60,000 line configuration file), code organisation (no significant hierarchy), code formatting (2-space indent, massive source files, no inline commentary) and documentation (zilch). Oh, and the kicker was having to ensure that at no point you named a new header file the same as another header file somewhere else in the build tree, as they got tossed together in the same flat namespace for reasons I cannot possibly comprehend to this day.

Based on those experiences I'd definitely call Mozilla 'clueless' when it comes to software development and their blaming of C++ therefore invalid. It also makes me question why with such a background they felt called to design the 'One True Language' and why it'd be any good.

Re: Kinda sad.

A language which defaults to type inference is by definition not strongly typed. This is the same reason why I am vehemently against the use of 'auto' in C++ outside of templates.

You're also wrong about the most common types of errors. But don't take my word for it.

You may also have missed the part where I have actually looked at Rust in depth, otherwise I would not have made any of those statements.

Honestly, Go has a lot more going for it than Rust.

Re: Kinda sad.

Explicit typing in Rust is punished by being more verbose than in Java. Your description fits Python's type system equally well.

Kinda sad.

On one hand it always saddens me to see more projects use Rust as it means that I won't be able to contribute to them as I won't learn that language.

On the other hand I also do not get why Rust is hyped. Not that I'm a big C++ fan, I'm more of an Ada kind of person, which is exactly why I don't get why Rust is supposed to be 'better'.

Rust doesn't have super strong typing of Ada, it follows by default more the dynamic typing of Python, its syntax is symbol-based and thus offers a severe learning curve over languages that use plain English (like Ada), it doesn't offer contract-based programming, access types for heap memory and on top of all that it doesn't follow a single one of the Steelman requirements, in particular the restricting of how many ways one can write the same code.

C++ is 'safe' enough that it has been certified by the DoD to be used to program the avionics of the F-35 jet. As someone who has plenty of professional experience in C and C++ as well, I can see how modern C++ (i.e. C++11 with standardised memory model) can totally work in safety-first applications. It's mostly about pushing the C baggage to the side, instead using the bits of C++ that do not allow you to easily shoot yourself in the foot.

Yet neither C, nor C++ nor Rust do much to prevent the most common kind of error that makes stuff catch fire in production: logic errors and faulty assumptions. Those incidentally happen to be the reasons why Ada requires explicit termination of blocks with a named end statement, why contract-based programming is part of the core language since Ada 2012 and why nothing is done implicitly. The compiler will bludgeon you over the head with 'are you really sure?' errors until you have addressed every single point.

So yeah, unless an open source project happens to be written in C, C++ or Ada, it might as well be closed source to me. And that makes me somewhat sad.