Posts by doublelayer

Thanks to generative AI, catching fraud science is going to be this much harder

Re: "il est bon de tuer ... un Amiral pour encourager les autres."

"Never understood why scientific fraud has never been treated like any other fraud ie jail time"

It can be. The people who wrote the grants can press charges or talk to law enforcement. It doesn't happen mostly because fraud isn't that often handled by law enforcement. Massive frauds that steal billions does because there's a lot of public outcry. Smaller fraud that harms someone who puts in the effort to investigate it generally does. Medium-sized fraud might or might not be. Small fraud is usually below the threshold where law enforcement will go after it without being informed and assisted, and most places that pay for grants aren't putting that much effort into identifying fraudsters. Maybe they're doing it because they don't want the public label of having been defrauded. Maybe they don't because it's expensive and might not work. Either way, they don't bother doing what they would have to to get law enforcement to do anything.

Musk said Twitter would open source its algorithm – then fired the people who could

"First, it's disappointing to read such rude negativity against an individual."

Sorry to disappoint you. I don't think I've been too responsible for it, but I am kind of negative on him, so probably still disappointing you. I'm not sure why you're so disappointed by it, and I question whether you would be disappointed by similar levels of negativity directed against someone you don't like.

"Second, it's bizarre that so many people seem so well-acquainted with the insides of Twitter's engineering that they **know** that there's no engineering staff left who could open-source Twitter's "algorithm"."

Did people say that? I didn't. I said that, with the numbers of people fired, it will be harder to quickly do the work. They still have engineers and if this was the highest priority, they would be able to do the difficult parts and get it done. I don't think it will be done, not because they can't, but because it's hard and they're understaffed as it is. When there aren't enough people, a lot of things that can be done aren't done because there's a lot of prioritization. Sometimes a task slips around that if it's fast enough, but this would not be fast.

"Third, it's very strange indeed that the commentaries here are unable to distinguish between 'open sourcing the code that Twitter thinks it uses to implement its algorithm' and 'open-sourcing the algorithm'"

This is related to the facts of life as a developer. The algorithm could, in fact, be represented in many forms, but it's certainly not written in a lot of different forms. There's a chance that it exists in two forms: a specification and code that implements the specification. You could release the specification. I don't think that's what they've got. I'm basing this from years of experience writing code for companies, and you never get a specification. You get general ideas, and you figure out what's wanted. When something needs to be changed, someone makes a summary of the change they want and the code is modified to do it. Unless it's a rigorous standard (this isn't), the specification if there ever was one is not updated. This makes the code the single point of truth on what the algorithm does, and sometimes it becomes complex enough that you may not always know what it is doing at every point.

If I'm correct, they don't have any form of the algorithm other than the code. They could have someone read it and write a spec that should do the same things, but that would take a long time and be likely inaccurate. Also, that's the kind of thing that would be done if someone wanted to fake what the algorithm does because a vague spec can be nondeterministic and more difficult to compare against actual system behavior.

Re: Making source code "Open Source" is not that hard

Yes, it is hard. If you use dependencies, you have to deal with their licenses. Others have already posted the problem of what you do when the dependencies are proprietary and you don't have the rights to redistribute and relicense them from whoever you bought the rights from. There's another restriction though: if you have parts under licenses that have conditions about how they affect other licenses, you can have collisions. For example, Apache and GPL don't play too well together. This is fine if you're just using them internally (AGPL does not apply), but if you open source the lot, you may be required to make license changes that you are not allowed to make. Conservative legal departments won't let you combine such things in the first place, but since it is legal under the licenses to build the thing that combines them with the restrictions coming when you distribute the code, a company only intending to run them internally may not have been affected.

It's not just figuring out what to do with each license clash. It's also finding where all the clashes are. Not every piece of code clearly indicates its dependencies. They all should. Not all do. Even when they're pretty clear about it, it still doesn't mean that every repository uses the same, easily parsed document telling you such things. You can't send one person to just give me a tree of projects with their dependencies and license requirements, and now that you've fired most of the people who knew the projects, you can't send a message to every owning team and make them do it for their part of the project. It's a bigger task than it would seem.

Silicon Valley Bank seized by officials after imploding: How this happened and why

Re: Live by the ESG, die by the ESG?

Well, given that no attempt was made to prove the original views right, it's a bit presumptuous to expect us to prove them wrong. Whether or not ESG is related, the original view can be summarized as "I don't like ESG, and these people had some ESG investments, so I'd really like it to be the reason they crashed so I can say that ESG is bad instead of just something I dislike". The poster did not attempt to prove that point. He in fact states that he has no evidence and that it's something he wants to be true, not something he knows is true.

Whether or not it's true, it's speculation based on nothing designed to substantiate a preexisting prejudice. Such theses are not really worth the effort it would take to find disproving information until some effort is put into proving them. It's possible it would be correct if you could prove it, but it's also quite likely that it is not. We have no way to tell and no reason to debate the issue with someone who decides what the conclusion will be before or instead of trying to analyze it.

The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 as a Linux laptop

Re: I'm puzzled.......

This paper is mostly read by technical people. People who are more likely to want to run Linux so they can do those things on it. That means two things about those people:

1. They already have a pretty good idea whether a 12th-gen I7 can run what they want to run (usually yes). You don't have to tell them that a high-res screen looks nice for them to understand that it would have some benefits.

2. Those who want to run Linux want to know whether they'll encounter problems doing that because it will restrict their ability to do whatever things they want to do with it.

For example, my major uses are indeed writing programs and posting here. It would be a pretty useless review if I reviewed a laptop and said "This one can definitely run an editor, a compiler, and a browser at the same time". Nobody would get anything useful out of that. Similarly, if I were to read a review that focused on editing video, it wouldn't be much use to me because I never do that. Focusing on the technology makes sense when the main variable for whether I'm going to buy it is whether the technology works at the level where that's uncertain, which in some cases is Linux driver compatibility.

I agree with you though that this machine is rather expensive for what you get. The specs are nice, but there are better machines for cheaper depending on what you're looking for.

Re: Lenovo Marketing Dept screwed up...BIG TIME

It's what everyone does and should probably do. I'm talking both Windows and Linux here. They don't remake the factory image and reimage every device in the warehouse every time Microsoft releases a Windows update. You'll also find that, if you buy a computer with Linux preinstalled, you'll still have to do a package update run when you get it running. For that matter, if you take any distro's installation image and install that when you get it, you'll still have packages to update immediately after starting.

This is a good thing, because unboxing every computer to reapply an image multiple times is a long, expensive process that can lead to damage to some computers (do it to ten thousand devices and you'll eventually get someone who doesn't want to). Since the user will both have an internet connection and have to install subsequent updates anyway, it makes sense to ship it with necessary software and allow them to update it afterward. Do you want to pay for some employee having installed update packs eight times while the computer you just bought was sitting around, or do you want to run "sudo apt upgrade" for an hour at most when you have it set up?

Re: Soldered

"That said, memory is just the one single item that post-sale, can significantly extend the lifetime of a laptop."

I disagree. I would put it third, and a rather distant third. First is the battery since heavy use can degrade it to a desktop and a fresh battery can make it a useful mobile device again. A very close second is an SSD, since those parts fail somewhat frequently and people fill them up. I have had very few RAM failures (one, and it wasn't on a computer I owned anyway). While that might happen and you might want more eventually, I still put that below the others in the value of repairing it. That said, I'd also like manufacturers to make it removable, as I strive for easy repairability for anything I'm going to use for a long time.

Re: installed on every machine

That's not what they said. Not that I agree with what they said, but they meant something else. The people who are technically aware enough to care about systemd know enough to determine that their distro didn't install and can reinstall or reimage from the backup that you always take before you install another OS with the possibility that the installer tramples your bootloader. To the extent that there are nontechnical Linux users who install it on their own, they're not the people who have passionate views on an internal component and are quite likely to be using something that has systemd since it's used in all the largest distros aimed at desktop use.

Hardware manufacturers will not support any variant of Linux with any components you might want. It might be nice if they did, but it's never going to happen. Certifying it as compatible with Linux might mean that support will be available for the variant they said, but not necessarily every other variant that exists.

BOFH: I care a lot ... about onion bhajis

Re: "I'm not going to debate you…"

At least two dictionaries I've checked have debate as a transitive verb with examples indicating that the direct object may be the person against whom you are debating (or in this case refraining from debating). The direct object may also be the subject of the debate. Maybe you'd like to contact all the dictionaries and inform them that you're recategorizing it as intransitive only? You may have to present your XKCD diploma and debate the dictionary writers about whether your deletion privileges allow you to make that change.

LLaMA drama as Meta's mega language model leaks

Re: Question?

"What I expect to see is similar to Usenet and Email filtering, where address blocks that permit such abuse are not just filtered, but are actively dropped on the floor."

The point is that you don't need an address block and a bunch of machines to do this. You and I already contribute to this site somewhat frequently. All you have to do is set up a few accounts that post frequently from residential addresses, which can be your own because bots aren't illegal or an infected proxy, and simulate human response rates. If the bot sends a thousand comments to The Register in an hour, it's not going to be allowed and the address can be dropped, but sending twenty is enough to pollute the conversation without hitting that threshold and if twenty isn't enough, spin up three more sources and make it eighty.

You speak as an admin of something, but you appear to ignore how things do in fact work at the application level. There are captchas in a lot of places to deal with this problem already. I didn't assume captchas from nothing. I assumed them because they are in place on a lot of systems that have to deal with unwanted contributions from bots, regardless of scale. They may also do network filtering, but when the problem isn't bulk, or rather when there's a problem other than bulk submissions, they bring out application-layer systems to remove their application-layer problems. This does affect users of the service concerned and adds work for them and of course for the service providers.

Re: Question?

It's not really different from what already happens on the internet, but it can speed it up. Instead of finding a crazy person to manually write a comment espousing whatever view they have every time someone posts something, you can make the computer do it. Imagine automated pro-Russia arguments posted in reply to any comment mentioning Ukraine, or any other topic where the trolls are particularly annoying (if you're not annoyed by those trolls, ignore the example and substitute one that you don't like). Compare that to what we have now: there are such comments, but they're not 75% of the content in the forum.

The ship has sailed. We're not going to prevent people from using this, and we're likely to see extra measures taken against them. For example, expect more places to start adding captchas, whether the typical kind or more browser and device fingerprinting, in order to make it harder for bots to send data. This will probably have some other effects, such as the logging and tracking of anti-bot measures and their dual use to weaken privacy. This is the reason I expect these language models to have a negative impact on online communication.

South Korea warns US: The CHIPS Act leaves a sour taste

Re: And they accuse *China* of spying..

"Yes, this is exactly what China used to do to foreign companies wanting to do business in China."

You notice the difference? China: to do business in China. US: to get lots of free money. China was making everyone give up secrets, while the US only asks for information when they're going to give massive subsidies, and if you don't want the subsidies, you can still build there and get other advantages without giving up any information. Maybe they're asking for too much, although a lot of what they're asking doesn't seem all that proprietary, but it's still very different from what China has done.

Adidas grapples with $1.3B in unsold Yeezy sneakers after breaking up with Kanye West

Re: Donating them to earthquake areas

The risk is that they're sold but not by the intended recipients. If you can really sell these for amounts they were trying to (earlier $400-$2k was quoted), there is a lot of incentive not to give them to any victim who would benefit either from shoes or money. Instead, someone with a lot of power, such as whatever armed group, including the Syrian military, is strongest, would take them and manage the selling operation. If the result of the donation is that you give millions to the Syrian army, and you don't have a guarantee it's someone as nice as them (which is kind of hard to imagine, but worse people do exist), then it's a rather negative result.

WFH? Google Cloud's offices like a 'ghost town' before new policy

Re: Please sir, what town

So you're now blaming The Register for the name an American businessperson chose to put on their meeting which was covered in the article? The complaints by a few UK people are getting kind of crazy given that, in this case, they're using a name they didn't choose. Maybe we should split the paper into something that covers tech news no matter where it happens and one that only copies things about the UK so nothing foreign appears in their articles. I'll still be reading the former.

In case you're asking because you don't understand the term and not just to complain about the use of a term you don't use, it doesn't really mean anything useful here. As I understand the original meaning, it was supposed to mean that a relatively small group of people would meet so that everyone could ask unscripted questions, but then businesses started using it. Whenever a business starts using a term, it starts meaning nothing. The same way that a "stand-up meeting" changed from a meeting so short you should be able to do it standing in a hallway to the name they put on another meeting because nobody really knows but that's the word, "town hall" no longer necessarily implies anything and can be interpreted as "lecture with all format decisions made by the lecturer".

Re: Shared work spaces work if...

No, from what they've said, so many people are going to work from home that they're no longer going to have so much office space. They appear to be changing things to better handle the people who will stay working outside the office rather than changing the people to have the work done in the office as some other companies have done. Unfortunately for the people who liked the office, those changes are likely to make the office a worse experience for them.

Re: I'm confused...

It's mostly empty, so let's sell off half of it and pack people into the other half. Now, even if the same people come in, it will look less empty. What happens when two people come in who are assigned to use the same desk, I don't know, but I'm guessing that whoever came in second finds someone else's desk where neither came in and has to use that one.

It's likely to put off those who used to like coming in, because they can no longer leave things on their desks. Those who wanted WFH and wouldn't hear a word against it meanwhile won't come in anyway because they hate the idea. So probably this will just reduce the occupancy anyway.

As Big Tech lays off staff, TSMC swoops in to hire 6,000

Re: Cost of leaving

"Also if you thought of going on a bender to Cancun, a flight from Taiwan will cost you 2-3 times more than your friend from SF or London."

Well, if you want to go on holiday to a tropical location and you live in London or San Francisco, you will have to go somewhere else. If you live in Taiwan, you have to drive down from the mountains if you happen to be in them because you're already in a tropical place. Also, does it surprise you that flying to a specific place is more expensive from places that are far from that place? Should I praise Taiwan by saying that it's much cheaper and faster to fly from there to Australia than it would be from the UK, or were you already aware that the halfway-around-the-world principle got you there.

If you live in Taiwan, you'll have different typical holiday locations than if you live in North America or Europe. You always have the choice to go to a much farther destination if you want, but there's a reason it's easier for Europeans to take a holiday in the Mediterranean than for Americans, because it's a lot closer to them. Living in Taiwan opens up the convenient holiday destinations in Asia, and makes those in the Americas, Europe, and Africa more expensive. This ends our geography lesson for today.

SETI: How AI-boosted satellites, robots could help search for life on other planets

Limited training data means useless

"Over 7,765 images of the Salar de Pajonales collected from drone footage and 1,154 samples directly taken from the lakebed detecting microbes in the salt domes, rocks, and crystals were used to train the model. The software confirmed that these photosynthetic bacteria were concentrated in small areas that were near water sources."

So this model is now hopefully capable of detecting life that looks a lot like the life in this particular lake in one spot on our planet. It's not going to be too great at identifying microbial life in a different environment here, let alone life that could work very differently in an environment nothing like a high-altitude lake. So far, they've trained a model on one place. I haven't seen them proving that this lake is like everywhere else (we all know it's not) or that their model was able to find useful results from anywhere else.

Probably all they have right now is a model that can distinguish whether a collected sample is likely to look like life from this lake or some uninhabited different control data. That means it's likely to generate a large array of zeros when faced with other signatures of life if they haven't set it up so badly that it's frequently throwing out false positives.

Atlassian to dump 500 – by email – in the name of 'rebalancing'

Re: We continue to expect operating expense growth to decelerate in H2

It's the second order differential*, but I doubt they're celebrating it. Although they appear to expect that they'll continue making a profit and it's going to be more than last quarter, it won't be as much more than last quarter than last quarter was to the one before that. Investors always seem very surprised when that happens and they freak out quickly.

* I'm guessing what you consider the original function to be. If the original one was the graph of their profit over time, then the first derivative is whether or not it's growing (yes) and the second is how fast it's growing relative to history, which is where their problem lies. If your original graph was something else, the answer could be different.

Huge lithium discovery could end world shortages ... Oh, wait, it's in Iran

Re: Timing could be better?

The phrase meant for Iran. If the price was at a high, then it couldn't be better for Iran in the sense that they would already be getting the best price they could. The phrase basically means that, had they discovered and exploited this earlier, they could have gotten more money from it.

Can we interest you in a $10 pocket calculator powered by Android 9?

Re: it just doesn’t add up.

Neither is salary related, but you're on a good track for the 261 which is the number of weekdays in a year (close enough, anyway). The 40, however, is something completely different. Which bolsters my point that the input to a calculator isn't much use to someone who wants to know what I'm doing unless they also take in other data about what the calculation means, which this basic app doesn't appear to do.

Re: it just doesn’t add up.

"It seems that El Reg has some Chinese agents active tonight. Why else would the posts suggesting 'sending data to china' have downvotes?"

I didn't give any of the downvotes, but I have an idea. Maybe because it's ridiculous. For one thing, it's a calculator. How many people who aren't planning to hack their calculator get one, turn it on, verify that it can do calculations, then go into a completely different part of the interface and give it WiFi credentials? Unless you give it a connection, it won't be able to send any data to anybody. Also, it is going to get some numerical input, and that's it, so where is the useful data coming from? I recently typed the following digits into a calculator: 3604.59/(40*8). Anyone who can correctly explain why I wanted the result to that calculation from no other context gets a free upvote. Since it's based on an earlier calculation, it's a bit unfair. Here's another one you can try: 3*261*7.

I'm sure there's a lot of pointless code in there, and it's theoretically possible that it's designed in a malicious way, though it's not likely, given that spamming these out to anyone who wants a relatively poor calculator isn't a great targeting system. Even if it was, it's not going to focus on spying on user's calculations. It has WiFi not because there's a secret plan, but because the parts they had sitting around supported WiFi, so if they're going to try to make a calculator out of them, it's also going to have the hardware.

Re: Options?

"Why haven't HP / TI done this about a decade ago?"

Which part? They didn't build an Android-powered calculator because their calculators turn on instantly and last a long time on batteries, which this one isn't going to do. Use generic software for calculations? There's not a great answer to that other than wanting to keep charging more for the ones with the buttons and software for more complicated calculations to sell to students that are required to have a specific one for tests and people who got attached to a specific layout and do not want any buttons to change function ever. Either way, their incentive is to change as little as possible until they can no longer sell their calculator, and a calculator you can't easily buy which doesn't natively support many functions isn't going to make them stop.

Re: Point of order.

"You might have got a $12 phone then, but you probably can't now, this side of the Great Trade Wall."

You can, but you shouldn't. You can find phones for very cheap, but they'll conveniently omit certain important information like what frequencies they support. This means that they can sell you a 2G/3G device they didn't manage to sell in 2010 and you got what you asked for, or in the slightly better case that you have one that only supports LTE bands from a country you're not in (usually China but sometimes it's one designed for somewhere else and could be entirely unpredictable). Either way, you can put your SIM in it and the chances are very high that nothing will work.

As for Android devices, you can have those cheap as well, as long as you don't mind getting one from 2014 running Android 4.2 on 4 GB of flash stuffed with bloatware some of which doesn't run anymore, and some of which still does work which is a bad sign. Nothing about the device will be good, but you can load FDroid on it and most of the apps there will run on it. If you're willing to increase your asking price, there are various other gradations of slightly better but still generally bad on offer until you get to the level where the phone is actually good and the price is similar to what another budget phone brand would be charging. You can have anything you want at any price you want as long as you're willing to get something crap if you pay too little.

Re: Ok... I have to ask

Clearly, it doesn't. It also doesn't need Android, but it has that too. My guess: either they had an engineer who was bored and tried putting together some hardware to see what would happen, or they had a bunch of spare parts they wanted to get rid of.

I say that, but some Chinese companies appear to make a business out of combining things that don't really need combining and selling them. I don't know how often this works for them, but I've seen enough examples where I say "Why would anyone need that", and then sometimes later "You know, that could be more useful than it sounded". I try to avoid buying too much cheap junk, so I tend not to buy them anyway, but there are times where I come to the conclusion that some amalgamation of features isn't as daft as it sounded at first.

Havana Syndrome definitely (maybe) not caused by brain-scrambling energy weapons

Re: What a relief

"it's not logical to believe in extrasolar aliens. That's why the whole idea has become the domain of cranks."

I think the domain was already inhabited mostly by cranks before, even without some of the data we have today. After all, there's still a reasonable chance that there's life of some form on a planet somewhere, which doesn't have to be as habitable as ours is. What's much harder to believe is that the life that might exist is constantly coming to visit us in the form of whatever the science fiction portrayal of aliens has recently been, leaving no evidence except the clear memories of someone who changes their tune from time to time when media attention is lacking.

Re: Nothing to see here, move along please

The detainees you think are connected aren't there. The embassy is in Havana. The detainees are in Guantánamo Bay naval base. A very basic knowledge of Cuban geography would inform you that these places are far apart.

The report is vague because people don't like to hear that their symptoms are psychosomatic. Nobody wants to hear that and many will reject it if it's said, but it happens and many attempts to prove what happened has suggested it as a predominant cause. Individual problems that affect one person can spread to people nearby if they can convince themselves that they're under attack, and being in a country with the loosest of diplomatic ties while charged with somehow improving that can bring on the stress that makes that easy.

At Citrix, 'perpetual licenses' means 'we'd rather move you to a subscription'

I agree with you. While I haven't used the software, the changes you describe sound like they're intended as lock-in methods and quite reprehensible. My post was directed at the first reply to yours which took the predictable approach and blamed Microsoft for doing the same thing, which they didn't (or at least not in the cited example) and I'm tired of hearing that example trotted out by people who demonstrate they don't understand what happened.

It's almost as if you don't understand that the .docx format is not the same or even built on the same base as the .doc file format, that it has an open specification, which while unclear is supported by a variety of open source software, and has remained open, supported by other software, and without being superseded since its introduction in 2007. And possibly you're also unaware that, when the .docx format was introduced, Microsoft released a compatibility module for earlier Office versions so they could also open and write them. I've just created a document in the latest Office365 version of Word on my work machine, copied it to an old computer that has Office XP from 2002 and the compatibility module installed, and it was able to open and edit the document without problems. Whether you're using open source editors or a much older version of Office, the .docx and similar modifications to Excel and PowerPoint file formats do not in any way match the description that was made above.

Sometimes file formats are changed to actually improve them. The way that Vorbis, while you can still use it to encode your audio, is mostly replaced by Opus. I'll note that both of these are open formats.

Re: "the vendor will stop maintaining products sold [..] under that scheme"

You really like subscriptions and want every company to use that model, don't you? No? Your suggestions would make that certain.

"If a company sells any product with a perpetual license, the company is obliged to support said product in perpetuity - and if said company folds and its remains are bought by another company, that new company will have to respect that legacy."

Since it has never meant that, companies will make it clear that their support requirements aren't going to last forever. Since you've now made it so that holding a license means they have to support it, they'll have to implement that by making your license time-limited as well. The only way for a company to indicate that they're not going to support something until the death of the planet is to make sure your license will expire as soon as you stop paying. Even if there was a company that didn't want to, if they bought any libraries from someone else, that someone else would also be covered by your new law and would require the company to keep paying for that license, and they'd have to pass that ongoing cost to you. Say goodbye to any chance of buying a piece of software and being allowed to run it later, even if the company no longer exists.

Service desk tech saved consultancy Capita from VPN meltdown, got a smack for it

Re: Wrong Visa

"Sometimes, I've included bcc'ing emails to my personal account"

Which is dangerous. If they have the desire to go into the system and selectively delete your email, they have enough technical knowledge to notice that BCCing, which is almost certainly an explicit breech of contract and it doesn't have to be for it to become a sackable offense. I get why you want to do it, but the last thing you need is to shoot yourself in the foot while keeping the evidence. You could save a copy onto your work computer where they wouldn't look for it, or if necessary keep notes or copies on paper, but sending it onto a non-approved system makes it much easier for them to penalize you whether or not they could for the original problem.

Re: The old truth

In my experience, half of them are exactly as you describe and the other half will complain if a desktop icon moves slightly. If you say an update is needed, they'll do lots of things to prevent you from installing it and making them learn anything different, no matter how many warnings you give them (correct or not) about things breaking catastrophically if they stay with the old version.

This is independent of the platform they use. The people who say they must use Windows [specific version] and no other version of Windows (mention Linux and they will not understand you, but once you explain yourself they'll have none of it), and the people who would never consider that anything not made by Apple could ever function may be different people, but they act the same. I imagine they're the same kind of people who refused to adopt computers when they were new, but fortunately I'm too young to have seen most of that.

SpaceX lobs second-gen Starlink satellites into orbit

Re: Oh the irony

While that's correct, you could put the satellites somewhere where they don't have to be replaced so often. Your latency numbers suffer a little, but fewer satellites can provide a service for much longer if they're in a higher orbit, and this doesn't necessarily mean they have to jump to geosynchronous orbit from LEO.

Biden wants chipmakers to provide childcare if they want billions in free money

That's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is that the employer is paying whatever they were going to and also now for childcare (to some degree) which they weren't doing earlier. Since this is the U.S., they're also likely to be paying for health insurance, which means more money goes to people who have high medical bills than to the generally healthy. That's usually not considered a subsidy for the sick at the cost of the healthy, but you could think of it that way if you wanted to.

The other problem with the statement is the "can't afford" bit. The affordability limit of 7% of income leaves a lot of room where people clearly could afford it, but it would be a large part of their budget. If it was 25%, they could still afford it (housing and food wouldn't generally be 75% of an Intel employee's income). It's not really about complete inability of the employee to afford childcare, but of the relative pain of buying it and the size of the dent it makes in the rest of the budget. It's not a binary issue, and treating it like one can lead to unwarranted assumptions of injustice.

Bringing the IBM Thinkpad 'Butterfly' back to life

Re: Low bar

I'm starting to wonder if you're bothering to read posts before replying to them with a generic negative or hostile comment. I didn't say that making this commercially was too risky and you should fear doing it. I said the risks didn't justify the likely reward.

Making a custom motherboard costs time and money, and a lot of both. Trying to sell it to people costs orders of magnitude more than that. Not everything I put together on a whim justifies that level of expense, because I have a limited supply of both time and money and don't tend to waste it on something that's unlikely either to bring me a return or cause me happiness. You've been posting here for some time now, and while I'm still not sure what you do, I think you already know how expensive a custom design would be to make commercially and understand the feasibility problems with your course of action, the reason you're not trying to do it yourself.

Re: Low bar

"I personally would quite like to see one of these working with its original operating system and typical software (Windows 3.11 and Lotus mail/organiser according to the Wikipedia page)."

That shouldn't be too hard, as if you can get a working hard drive to put in it, all of that software can be easily found online and loaded on board. I'm not sure how interesting it would be to see obsolete software running on obsolete hardware when you can always run the same software in a VM whenever you want, but I suppose a history of office computers exhibit should have one.

Re: Low bar

"What's up with this thinking that someone wouldn't turn their little pet project into a business?"

Maybe what's up with it is that any company could have made a keyboard like that in a laptop form factor and they haven't, which means it's a risky business to A) start making laptops when you didn't before and B) pursue a design that no other company has bothered to do. There's a lot of work between "my prototype works" and "I have a profitable business selling mass-produced hardware", and you can fail badly between the two. I'll also note that this person is using an existing keyboard, not building one from scratch. I don't know how difficult they are to make, but it's more difficult than getting a screen and motherboard to talk to the keyboard and each other, and consequently more ways to find out that the keyboards you make and are hoping to sell aren't the same as what you liked from IBM.

"This is the problem with our culture - just give up and forget about doing something ambitious."

We do ambitious things sometimes, but not every project I take on to see what happens is a good business plan. Sometimes, that's not why I do them. Since you're convinced of its commercial potential, why don't you design the board and try to sell the units. I promise you you won't have competition.

Re: Low bar

As I stated in my list, this version is likely to be better than what you would get otherwise. In other words, using Framework's motherboard is a way to avoid mediocrity. Not to mention that any project that starts with "Let's see if I can put something together from these old pieces in my closet" is likely to not be a saleable product when it's completed, so spending a bunch of cash getting a polished device that will never be sold and might not be heavily used is pointless. I'm not sure why you object so vociferously to this DIY project.

Re: Low bar

It would also be a lot more expensive, probably a worse motherboard than one that's been more thoroughly tested, less modular than something designed for expansion, and much harder for someone else to reproduce. The screen being weird in the case I'll grant you, but there's no advantage to making a custom motherboard for the build.

Shareholders accuse Tesla of overegging Autopilot, Full Self-Driving capabilities

Re: possibility

"Could it be that no one really wants cars driving themselves?"

I want one. I don't think I'm going to get one any time soon, and possibly not ever, but I would like one if they existed. There are times where I need to go somewhere which isn't adequately served by public transportation, and if I had a car that could drive itself, I could do something else while it got me there. I could work, read a book, or take a nap without the need to spend the time manually driving, and that's worth something. This would also allow me to send the car somewhere without anyone in it, so it could be sent to pick me or someone else up when I needed it.

Whether this is worth it to you, I don't know. Although I've expressed my approval, the chances are high that, if they get one, I won't be buying version 1.0. Still, there are advantages.

Bitcoin mining rig found stashed in school crawlspace

Re: Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

"Anyway, most motorcycles have lockable storage more than sufficient for even the most insane number of keys someone is carrying around."

Maybe that's true, but there are plenty of circumstances where that isn't the case. What if I walked to the courthouse? Walk home and put the keys there then walk back? What if I cycled there, and thus I need not only my home key but also one for the bicycle, which does not come equipped with lockable storage for others? What if I took a bus there and it's now prohibitive for me to take it back home and back to drop off some keys. If there is a reason why I can't take the keys with me, and I have yet to hear anybody explain why this makes any sense, then it is the responsibility of the person who has the rule to accommodate it. I don't think anyone should accept that ridiculous restriction and, as I've said in a different comment, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the guard made it up on the spot and no such rule exists.

Linux app depot Flathub may offer paid-for software

Re: Who pays for software for use on a personal Linux PC?

"Who pays for software for use on a personal Linux PC?"

Me, although not all that often. It was proprietary, it was better than the open source alternative. It was something I couldn't just make on my own over a couple weekends. It was cheap. I bought it. It still runs today.

"If one must resort to using proprietary software, there's usually means for obtaining it free of charge."

And you can try that if you like, but I usually value not committing copyright violations and not having to worry about the random site I just downloaded a binary from more than the purchase price. Of course there are some products that would be so expensive that I'd balk at paying for them, which is why I use so many pieces of open source software which have fewer features than the commercial alternatives but still work fine for my use cases. You don't have to use proprietary software if you don't want to, but if you find it's worth having, then you could always pay the creators what they're asking for if it's a fair price.

Commercial software for Linux isn't new. There are several companies who make commercial software that can run on Linux, sometimes it's open source software which you could build yourself for free*, and sometimes it's closed-source. Both are fine, with the proviso that you're entirely free not to install it if you don't like it. A lot of good software is free in cost and in licensing, but software can be commercial and good as well.

* I'm thinking of programs like Ardour, which is often not in the repositories at all and they have Linux builds designed for portability which you pay to get. You can clone the source and build as you like, and I did it when I was testing it out, but if I had a nontechnical user who wanted to run Linux, I'd suggest they buy that license instead because we can't reasonably expect the nontechnical user to know how to compile everything from source.

Twitter rewards remaining loyal staff by decimating them

That's an expensive way to do that, because not all the money used to purchase Twitter was loaned by stupid banks. Unless he thinks he can eventually get Twitter back to a better level where he can borrow against it, he's just throwing away money instead of paying it in tax. There's not much difference (assuming you don't care about the things that taxes pay for), because either way you end up with a lot less money to spend on whatever still seems expensive when you have billions of dollars around.

We're all trying to think of some reason that this situation emerged logically. It makes sense for us to do it, and I've been considering options for a while. We may have to admit that there may not be an answer that satisfies our instincts that says there must be a master plan somewhere. It may be that he just doesn't know what he's doing and can stand to lose the cash, so he does it.

Seeing as GPT-3 is great at faking info, you should lean into that, says Microsoft

We're going to need to pound that message in time after time before people start to get it. I had a programming problem where I couldn't figure out how to make it do something that looked quite simple, so a colleague of mine asked ChatGPT for help and sent me the answer. The response was clear, easy to understand, well-structured, and gave an example connected to what I wanted. The only tiny problem was that the code it suggested was syntactically incorrect and wouldn't have produced a correct result even if I put the punctuation in the right places for it. It was able to quickly produce misleading, useless information, and that's what it will do frequently even when no malicious person is there to ask it to.

Signal says it'll shut down in UK if Online Safety Bill approved

Re: So how does that work then ?

Signal does retain the phone number used for registrations. They do get the complete, unhashed number at account registration because they need it to send a verification message to confirm that it is your number. They keep it afterward to serve as an account recovery mechanism. The hashing comes in when they scan contacts lists for Signal users, with the hashes serving as a method of maintaining the privacy of any person who doesn't use Signal and making it harder to associate a user with the numbers they looked up. They don't need to retain the numbers if they reject the ones they wanted to at registration time. Still, I don't think they will end up using that method. It would be possible if they chose to.

America: AI artwork is not authored by humans, so can't be protected by copyright

Re: As a slight aside.

I don't mean to suggest that every literary person thinks that Shakespeare alone is the best writer that has ever existed. I'm aware that some will hold views similar to those I've expressed and many others will have him sharing the top ranks with a variety of other authors. And yet ...

"The existence of the occasional specialist does not define the field.": The existence of specialists in rates unparalleled with others does define the field. This is independent of language, so for instance, I have a feeling you find a lot more people in Italian literature who study Dante than other writers, of that time or later. When there are many more specialists on one author than there are for any other author, they start to indicate the focus of the field. The same way that, if a computer science department had twenty programming language theorists and one algorithms specialist, you could still call that department a languages-focused group. I don't have statistics on specialists, but there are a lot of writers who wrote in English, and I doubt there are so many people specializing in them. In addition, I also refer to the public statements in favor of a particular writer. Shakespeare is more often given praise as one of the best writers in English, whereas others are often complimented less grandiosely. This is certainly the case of the comment I replied to, which expresses the belief that nobody is as good as Shakespeare and doesn't leave room for exceptions.

Backup tech felt the need – the need for speed. And pastries and Tomb Raider

Re: He, who has never cut a corner...

I might have tried something like this as well, although I'd have asked for permission to test it rather than doing it in production. I can get annoyed by unnecessarily slow procedures and attempt to improve them, but the most important thing is verifying that my improvement didn't break anything and actually improved the situation before that comes to replace the old procedure. Our paths separate when it was tried in production and not verified, because this doesn't confirm that it's safe to do next time so it's useless.

HMD offers Nokia phone with novel concept: Designed to be repaired by its owner

Re: Web site access denied ??

I cannot reproduce that. Is your network unusual in some way that could set them off?

The supported device list doesn't include many Nokia devices, and the two models listed are both older generations (2018) and higher-end models (the cheaper devices appear to get less attention from ports). I wouldn't count on getting support unless you're good at building it yourself, in which case please post it when you're done because I would like it but don't plan to buy the device in the hopes that I can get it working.