Posts by samzeman

After threatening to block Binance for months, Philippines does the deed

Seems like they are asleep at the wheel or under resourced/overstretched. This is my problem with global or even national companies - the service is always going to be the worst in some places and the best in others, and the disparity between best and worst becomes massive across big distances.

Cloudflare says it has automated empathy to avoid fixing flaky hardware too often

If this works flawlessly though, it is the best system I have ever worked with.

Manual versions of all of this are the second best.

Automated solutions have never been anything but more trouble to me.

Time to examine the anatomy of the British Library ransomware nightmare

> Fat chance. The best we can hope for is the recomposting of the report into endless webinars, case studies and white papers by people with something to sell. There may be decent talks at industry conferences, chapters in textbooks and Youtube videos, none of which will be seen by the top-level policymakers who are the ultimate power brokers in how an organization perceives its infrastructure responsibilities.

This did resonate.

I recommend "how complex systems fail" - a good short bit of writing about how this tends to happen. Specifically bits about this being a feature of any complex system, root cause analysis being largely futile, and systems being able to run in a degraded state.

Re: "Too old to be safe, too expensive in time and money to replace"

I wrote a long comment in response to this about how it would just be another extension of liability insurance for both companies/parties involved and then I realised having insurance decide blame is pretty harrowing in almost any big-money situation, especially thinking of healthcare, so I am inclined to agree (even though it would be unlikely either party pays out of pocket, I don't have confidence in unqualified insurers determining fault in IT failure situations)

The only way in which they could both be said to be a failure of systemic integrity is including the other sense of the word "integrity" as in moral, on PO's part.

What's brown and sticky and broke this PC?

I was in school in the 2010s and kids still do this even at all ages. All the CD drives (obsolete by the time I left school) were either glued shut or full of folded bits of paper, because during an ICT lesson apparently the best thing people could think to do was fold up paper and jam it in any hole they can find on the computer.

UN: E-waste is growing 5x faster than it can be recycled

Re: Perspective

> "I think once the device becomes obsolete (no longer sold), the manufacturers should be obliged to release all documentation so the device could be repurposed or supported by third parties."

I think this is a great idea, but I also think it would be one of those bits of legislation that would become incredibly complicated to avoid spilling trade secrets, define what a smartphone actually is (or is it all handhelds? or all chips/tech?) what counts as "no longer sold" (company can just whack the price up to a billion billion pounds or only sell to traders who have every cert under the sun) and what counts as "all documentation" (though giving the benefit of the doubt we all know what documentation means colloquially - it would still be a pain to define under law).

Not to mention, how this might affect software/firmware. If the audio driver for example is used in other devices, releasing the documentation is possible (probably already done) but releasing the actual code which would be required to modify the device for other use would mean releasing proprietary info if I'm not mistaken.

Mostly I want this kind of legislation so all the 3DS games become legal to play again instead of "no legal way to obtain and play except buying a 3DS that already has them on"

Britain enters period of mourning as Greggs unable to process payments

COVID isn't a business issue any more.

Tell that to the subcontractors who claim covid supply chain issues as the reason for their 6 week lead time on parts.

Re: A Suggestion Or Two...................... [Overly-Tight Integration]

Every (necessary) light does have its own battery backup. It's called emergency lighting and it's a statuatory requirement in non-domestic buildings under BS 5266-1.

Heating and refrigeration is sealed so it can deal with failures. Locks failsafe to mechanical operation (unless you are a fool and breaking fire code also).

The real single point of failure is the folks in charge of property maintenance/compliance with these codes. As someone that's worked in a lot of those businesses.... they are not as on top of it as you would hope.

UK awards £1.73M to AI projects to advance net zero goals

Re: "Net zero is pie in the sky as far as I can see"

> it won't be a static end state but a metastable one requiring continuous active maintenance, and that may prove very expensive and fragile.

I feel like this applies to a lot of developed society, and shouldn't stop us at least trying to do good.

Microsoft Publisher books its retirement party for 2026

Re: Superceded years ago

Most folks I know are using powerpoint, especially for anything printable.

Re: Badly managed for years

Make this law and Nintendo, amongst others, would need to create a new division for the rest of time to publish their game ISOs. And it would make their recent C&D letters seem quite foolish.

In other words I'm all for it.

Re: "have a go at importing .pub files"

I still remember being taught how to use publisher in primary school alongside powerpoint and word. Unfortunately it was ubiquitous for a time there as "if you want to print something off and have it look nice, use publisher".

Can AI shorten PC replacement cycles? Dell seems to think so

Re: Where's the incentive?

AI models[1] are now optimized enough to run on almost any computer with more than 1GB of RAM. The companies just know people don't update their firmware enough to bother making an AI patch (And it would actually slow things down very noticeably on older systems).

[1] specifically Stable Diffusion models as an example.

Microsoft defends barging in on Chrome with pop-up ads pushing Bing, GPT-4

Re: We didn’t ask for them, we haven’t got time to deal with them and...

But imagine a world without cookies! Even the google ads bubble might not have become a thing!

What a sick and twisted world that would be.

Virgin Media sets up 'smart poles' next to cabinets to boost mobile network capacity

Following the recent trend of data infrastructure being vandalised, we have decided to place more data infrastructure right next to the cabinet, but this time in the open with no lock, and at street level so it can be abused more easily.

In my experience in property/asset maintenance - Every hierarchical step of the council is either treading water and barely managing to keep the posts from falling over, or too executive to know where their nose is on their face.

Actually manifesting progress in these large institutions is borderline impossible. Your best bet is to go to an impressionable high up person and convince them it was their idea (It's who you know)

UK minister tells telcos to share telegraph poles if they can't lay cable underground

Re: They do.

They also need to send a van round to check the poles regularly - but remedials are a different division and on a 6 month lead time.

Bank's struggle to replace Atos threw system back to dark ages

Re: Given those large numbers...

I often say at my company most of the good work is done by spreadsheets and email. Then the rest of the work is maintaining the painfully designed other systems that are a contractual requirement.

Filipino police free hundreds of slaves toiling in romance scam operation

Re: Criminal organisations

I think the recommended course of action is going completely John Wick and freeing all 875 workers yourself.

I'm just as far left as you are - I live in the UK after all where the median income is was £27k last time I checked. So more than half of all people earn less than that and median rent is apparently £1.2k pcm. I am definitely all for UBI and consider minimum wage to be mostly unliveable, causing people to live under conditions that nobody in a developed country should live in - think mold, cold, other dangerous features of crap housing.

However: the difference between this and actual slavery is that there is a pretense of human rights, that sometimes is significant, even though yes people live in horrible conditions in the UK. The difference being that if you are in the UK and you can keep yourself clean of drugs (addiction being a disease and social issue is a whole other conversation) you can get a shitty job fairly easily and if you don't like it you can probably get another one. Domino's I know for example will take anyone who is willing to show up to work on time and clean themselves twice a week. Checkouts at supermarkets, all those lovely 'unskilled' jobs that people constantly try to automate, and you can pick from any one of them. In my experience there is always an opening at one of those places. Especially if you pretend you'd be willing to be a manager there one day (high turnover in the manager ranks because it's a horrible job and underpaid).

As a slave you have no ability to choose where you work (which is important in a maslows-heirarchy way for mental health) and how much you work, not to mention being property and not a person means your bodily autonomy and personal space can be violated freely, you can be starved and beaten, and you have no legal protection from mistreatment. There are labour laws in the UK even for wage slaves - and again, I do realise foreigners especially and others get taken advantage of for not knowing the law - but that's not the same as not having any institutional protection whatsoever.

There are definitely sections of the workforce that experience conditions as bad as slavery, but that is due to other factors like addiction and being shot in the foot metaphorically in many other ways. The default 5'10 80kg Common Worker Person With No Skills lives in conditions far better than slavery, even if they are unsure of their shift pattern next week, or their manager is a dick. If you don't advocate for yourselves as a group of employees it is on you. This is why when I was a deliveroo biker we had a groupchat and we agreed to stop delivering from certain restaurants if they mistreated us. When I was at Domino's, we agreed a common code of conduct and when the managers inevitably tried to exploit us a bit too much we all pushed back at the same time. If you do that as slaves, the law (the ultimate last resort for an employment dispute) says the slaveowner can do whatever they want. If you do that as workers, the law says you have a right to do so, and you cannot be killed for it, and you can leave as a group, which gives you much bargaining power against bosses.

Cruise's valuation halved after its driverless car hit and dragged a woman

Re: A tall order

How do you define woke?

Lawsuit claims gift card fraud is the gift that keeps on giving, to Google

Re: To sum up ...

Honestly it plays into the bigger issue of faking digital evidence.

If sources disagree (e.g I have no texts on my phone, you have your faked texts) the only 'reliable' source is the network provider, perhaps, which is a problem when you're trying to sue Google, the (payment) network provider, and it's in their interest to tamper with evidence. Not that they would dare probably, but laws aren't meant to leave things to "they surely wouldn't dare....".

If texts can be faked, and the only person who can verify texts in most trials is the one actually being accused, you basically need multiple sources agreeing on the texts (so the scammer's phone and your phone?) to lend some credibility to it.

There also doesn't seem to be an incentive for the gov to make this legislation yet. The pressure seems to be on banks to remind you that scams are a possibility. Our modern lawmaking seems to have a libertarian bent where if you're deceived into making a mistake with your money it's your own fault.

Whizkids jimmy OpenAI, Google's closed models

I am fairly sure there's no way to prevent access to the training data considering that's the whole point of an AI.

It uses info from the model to generate an answer. Given enough queries you can always find the shape of the model.

It's like if you had a huge database, one sentence per line, but you could only access random words from random lines, one at a time. Eventually you could reconstruct the database pretty accurately if not perfectly, especially if (like AI training data) it was guaranteed to follow certain rules and make sense to humans.

Microsoft promises Copilot will be a 'moneymaker' in the long term

Re: Apparently....

I think the endgame is co-pilot as a form of talking therapy for people that like the sound of their own voice.

They boot up the weekly meeting and have a captive audience of 11 co-pilots to present to for as long as they like, with no questions or disagreements.

Re: Copilot Tattles

This "No generating real people" thing is definitely going to become dated and unfashionable. You can download Stable Diffusion and generate pictures of real people easily. The models are out there and almost entirely believable, especially for laypeople not looking out for AI images. The genie is out of the bottle, but they just want to cover themselves in case someone says they used Copilot to generate a pic of Princess Kate trying to leave the country.

India celebrates rapid adoption of its internet of livestock

What's the incentive to use this?

Just because I know some technophobes in my personal life who would dig in their heels at the prospect of digitising anything.

Yes, I did just crash that critical app. And you should thank me for having done so

"If it's always been like that leave it as it is"

Welcome to the property maintenance industry....

If we've not done an asbestos survey on this building, there must be a reason. Don't pay for one now when we didn't pay for one last year.

How to run an LLM on your PC, not in the cloud, in less than 10 minutes

Stable Diffusion

Note you can also install Stable Diffusion locally to do txt2img generation (most fun) and img2img (with prompt to guide) and then also with an addon img2txt (which provides some strange prompts, but if you put them back into a txt2img generator, it makes good images).

Then you can get your own checkpoints, models etc on civitai or huggingface.

Honestly it's a little scary - the local Stable Diffusion you can get, on a home PC, can convincingly generate pictures of people's faces, without restrictions on the type of content, so the genie is definitely out of the bottle.

AI models show racial bias based on written dialect, researchers find

Re: Broadcaster Presentation / Linguistic Standards

Out of curiosity because I see this line about linguistic degradation around quite a bit - Do you have any evidence that this actually does destroy effective communication, or that it has ever done so?

Not trying to argue - I just want the knowledge. AAVE and other shortforms and accents currently don't meet the criteria for unintelligible to the Queen's English speaker, unless we're talking Welsh, Scots etc.

I'm talking more - Is there a time in history when two or more dialects have split severely enough from each other in an area to divide the population into sections that don't understand each other?

We know there are a lot of, er, distractions right now but NASA's got some sweet video of its asteroid rubble raiser

I take issue with this! This assumes a pathogen would be viral or bacterial, but a strong fungus or algae could just as easily cause problems - Like in the Expanse book series, later on. Many lifeforms like to live anywhere that is very moist (inside us) and very dark (inside us) and they can cause us problems despite us never having pruned them into immunoresistant things, since they're not sculpted to /not/ instantly overwhelm the body and kill the host, like most pathogens are, because they need the host alive to transmit further.

'Driverless' lorry platoons will soon be on a motorway near you

To solve the problem of the distances between the lorries, just put the one with the worst brakes at the front, and the one with the best at the back. Then they break formation when they brake from automation.

Bombastic boss gave insane instructions to sensible sysadmin, with client on speakerphone

Re: One side is not enough

Hmm, I disagree. You shouldn't be saying anything to a colleague you wouldn't say to a customer, unless it's company secrets.

DreamHost smashed in DDoS attack: Who's to blame? Take a guess...

Re: ?

I was talking to an American friend about this, and what surprised me was their lack of anti-hate-speech laws. I was arguing the point that there are already laws stopping Nazis telling whole races to die, but apparently there aren't over there. There certainly are here. Germany definitely has some, and the UK does too.

Node.js forks again – this time it's a war of words over anti-sex-pest codes of conduct

The article he tweeted in support of isn't very good, is the thing.

Neurodiversity in the workplace is good, sure. But having a mental illness doesn't exempt you from following the social guidelines that are there for a reason. I myself have borderline personality, so sometimes I get manipulative or distant. I recognise this and do everything I can to try and solve it, and if it hurts someone, I apologise and treat it like I was just a neurotypical guy. Dysfunctional mental flaws can be treated like a NT's mental flaws (pobody's nurrfect) but extrapolated a whole bunch. You aren't a horrible person, but you still have to face up to the horrible things that you might do. It's a part of the disorder, arguably the worst part, that you have to fit into social codes that, as I said, exist for a reason.

In universities, the places the article talks about, it's not like you'd get taken out for having tourette's. Some things are unavoidable and understandable. In fact most of them are. The key point is understandable. Rules in any institution should be flexible and a little context should always be applied. But if you're creating a hostile environment around you, and it's due to being neurodivergent somehow, then you should at least be told, although I agree not punished. Stealing to fund an addiction is frowned upon and little help is given, so the writer should focus on that area instead. Disobeying codes of conduct because you are compelled to or don't know not to should still be noted, and the person told, because everyone wants to be able to trust that the average person will be logical and reasonable. Improve understanding of neurodivergence in the people around you and let them know that sometimes you could lash out or be an unreliable person, or otherwise be difficult, and if they're your real friends, or reasonable people, they'll accept that and give you leeway.

IT worker used access privs to steal £1m from Scottish city council

Possible unpopular opinion

Important to note he did it to fund a gambling addiction. He needs rehab, and then he can go back into the world and pay off his debts slowly. Like a mortgage, I guess. Also, some sort of internet and real world house arrest so that he's kept away from places with gambling regardless.

I'm not saying he's not to blame, but he needs help as well as being punished.

Airbus issues patch to prevent A350 airliner fuel tanks exploding

Re: Do you drive a car?

I don't drive except in emergencies, it's bad for the environment. I cycle or use public transport. I realise there are bigger risks I take all the time, but I can't do anything about them, and they're not necessarily as severe. For example, escalators have a low risk (except at peak hours or in china, but even still) but the severity of being ground up by the internals? I'm terrified. It's irrational, I know, I have something like traumataphobia. But I can avoid that. Travelling is necessary, living in the possible path of yellowstone, gamma ray bursts, meteorites is necessary.

I try to get over it. I just don't feel right on an escalator is all. Also, blah blah environment.

Good that it's fixed, but also terrifying. This is why I try not to use planes (or lifts or escalators)

Fewer than half GCSE computing students got a B or higher this year

I wish I had the willpower to do a proper rant about the new GCSE grading system. It's complete BS. Terrible idea. I don't even really know why, I just really, really don't like it. My main problem with it is that it seems entirely unnecessary. Every new Education Secretary thinks they know a new /revolutionary idea/ that I know first hand just makes it harder for students to know what the fuck is going on, and honestly? Students are pretty disorientated as it is, even without the system changing like pan's labyrinth.

Apparently I did have the willpower.

Germans force Microsoft to scrap future pushy Windows 10 upgrades

I honestly can't think of anything win10 has done for me that a new design theme (if it had ever worked on my win7) couldn't. I don't use Cortana or the store (who does?) and it really doesn't seem like there's any actual upgrade happening in this upgrade.

AccuWeather: Our app slurped your phone's location via Wi-Fi but we like totally didn't use it

Re: Bollocks

I've always campaigned for percentage fines even for individuals. It's not a valid punishment to bankrupt one person for not picking up litter, then mildly inconvenience a rich person for crashing their yacht into my house or whatever.

For companies the same applies. If google does something terrible, they shouldn't be able to shrug it off, and if a minor tech startup does something questionable, they shouldn't instantly be harpooned for it.

Sorry, I think I have boats on the mind or something.

Headless body found near topless beach: Missing private sub journalist identified

Impounded submarine?

Does the local police have a section of dock they specifically own to impound rogue submarines, or did they have to hire a space? Do emergency services get it free, in the same style as comandeering a vehicle?

"Sir, I'm comandeering this dry-dock"

Pssst... wanna participate in a Google DeepMind AI pilot? Be careful

Exculpate

Am I the only one that learned a new word today?

Spotify cleared of exposing kids to self-love innuendo in TV spot

Take a leaf out of Germany's book and stop sheltering the damn kids. They start teaching early, and do it comprehensively. I was on the internet since I was eight, reading things well beyond my actual sex ed level, and it did me more harm than if I'd just been taught about it alongside every other fact of life.

Don't throw away those eclipse glasses! Send 'em to South America

Re: GLASSES ... GLASSES ... We Don't Need No Steenking __GLASSES__!

Sure, that's safer... but so is watching it on a livestream. There's something unique about looking directly at the eclipse. It's not affected by the brown of cardboard, or dust on the surface you're projecting onto, or the mangled shape of the hole you hacked hurredly into the box.

Maybe that's just my experience though.

Can North Korean nukes hit US mainland? Maybe. But EMP blast threat is 'highly credible'

Re: Never understood the obsession with ICBMs

Hold on a sec; If bombs emitted a lot of gamma, even while they were armed, then the submarine pilots that carry and live around nuclear bombs would all have quickly gotten radiation poisoning, right?

The bombs are probably radioactive, sure, but not fissioning like crazy, and not warm to the touch... They don't have control rods in or anything. They fission like crazy when they explode. That's the point.

Nuclear armaments are made of Pu-239 and Pu-240. The Pu-240 is the very, very radioactive part, but the 239 has a half life of 24,000 years, so it's not too bad. Supergrade weapons, used in subs because of their prolonged exposure to the crew, have >95% Pu-239 and so are relatively safe to be around (when not exploding).

Although, I doubt NK could make supergrade bombs, to be fair. So far they're only proven to have weapons grade, which is safe to be in the same plane as for a short flight. I grudgingly have to agree you may not have been entirely wrong, but most modern plutonium bombs aren't "fissioning like crazy"

US Navy suffers third ship collision this year

Re: Worth a read

I didn't know the sea was so, well, not exactly lawless, but wild. Surely there's some kind of penalty for the merchant ship for not responding / not turning right? Road laws work, and the average person I'd assume is a lot less experienced / qualified than a sea captain.

If there's a hole in your S3 bucket, data thieves will be sprayed by Macie

Crazy. Hacking gets more and more like actual real life infiltration every day; now you have to act natural and blend in to avoid detection. It's not enough to just get into the system anymore.

Uh oh, scientists know how those diamonds got in Uranus, and they're telling everyone!

Re: 'high pressure can bond hydrogen and carbon atoms'?

The wording is unclear. Hydrocarbons are involved in the process of creating diamonds from gas, but since diamond is a pure carbon thing.... Obviously no hydrogen persists in it.

https://www.gia.edu/news-research-CVD-grown-part1

Google's Android 8.0 Oreo has been served

Re: So still can't do what Microsoft could do?

If I'm reading this right, that's what versions Oreo and above will start to do, upgrade regardless of carrier/producer.

Removing bloatware however, I could really go for some of that. It's the reason I'm a Motorola fanboy, they have barely any and it can all be uninstalled I think. Either way I don't know it's there and I only remembered there was some when I thought about it just now.