Posts by doublelayer

NixCon drops Palmer Luckey's AI combat drone maker Anduril as sponsor due to military ties

Re: Mealy-Mouthed Code of Conduct

I see your pedantry and raise more:

"1. Pedantic note: "between our actions" should be, "between their actions"."

Not necessarily. As long as the person who wrote the document is also in the set of participants, then "our" is perfectly correct grammatically. I don't know where they got the text, but it's probably written by someone who is already part of their group in some way and does something more than writing generic terms, so the chances seem high that they are a participant.

"2. An action will have whatever effect it will have on a community; wishing really hard will not make that action have a stronger effect."

Correct, but the document doesn't say that the tools available for strengthening those relationships, as they say, only include "wishing really hard". Depending on what their actions are, that could have a much more threatening sound. That line could work pretty well for an evil group vowing to step up the plans for conquering the world.

"How does one distinguish harassing photography or recording from non-harassing photography or recording?"

People have to do it all the time in courts, in laws, and in response to some people who take the "stalking" joke* too near actual stalking.

* It seems popular to say, in a jocular manner, that looking up information about a person was stalking them. For most people, saying this means looking at their LinkedIn or other social media pages from a Google search. If it went further, it might be real stalking, or at least unnecessary behavior that a lot of people would find unsettling.

Linux on the Arm-based Thinkpad X13S: It's getting there

Re: Still lots to do

You may not have put it in the article, but you did put it into your comment and it wasn't more useful there. If you intend to compare processors, you generally have to be specific enough to avoid ambiguity. Not bothering to find a comparison is also valid if it's not important, which may have been the case for your article.

Re: Pepperidge farm remembers

"RISC-V offers freedom from planned obsolescence."

Why do you think that? RISC-V processors will get faster like any others, and software designed to run on them will do as all software does and grow to fit the resources available. Devices with the first range of RISC-V processors will eventually be too slow to run the latest software, just as ones in other ISAs do. If it's about the ISA in general, they don't really go bad. This is evident from the fact that you can still run RISC OS on a modern ARM chip or DOS on a modern X86 one. The reason those systems don't run flawlessly are due to the many other pieces of hardware they don't support, not the CPUs refusing to support or run them. RISC-V will become obsolete in the same ways and about as fast as other ISAs, and if I had to point to a difference, the main one is the ease of adding proprietary extensions to it, which if it happens too much, means that RISC-V will become obsolete faster as people adopt extensions that weren't in the original system. I'm curious to hear your reasons, because I think this is one of those incorrect assumptions I was talking about.

Re: Pepperidge farm remembers

"If you want a RISC-powered laptop computer"

This, as I see it, is the problem. There are a lot of people with strong opinions about ISAs who appear to have ideological points for their preference which aren't really connected to any benefit. Preferring an ARM computer because of battery life makes some sense, but preferring it because it's RISC does not help. These opinions vary. Some people, for example, are incredibly excited about RISC-V and want it in everything, right now, even though they appear to have no idea why it would be helpful and in some cases are under the false belief that it will mean advantages for open source software which it will not bring. If you want a RISC laptop for its own sake, it might be worth considering why that helps you. If you don't have an answer, you may be wasting your time and resources on something you wouldn't benefit from if you succeeded.

Re: Still lots to do

"But really, given the price point, neither CPU nor GPU performance is the point here."

This doesn't mean the same thing to me that it appears to mean to you. If I said something like that, it means that the price is low, so a weak CPU is acceptable. You later admit that it's a premium price, and some searching indicates that this price is $1099 US, although the UK site seems to suggest that it's £711 at the moment (probably without VAT, it doesn't say and discounted from £1579 so the prices are all over the place). At prices like that, I have various options for more powerful machines, and something else will have to make the deciding factor. From your brief comments, battery life would seem like the best bet for that distinguishing factor.

"There's \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 with the 64-bit binaries in it, and no way to tell if they're x86 or Arm binaries."

The GUI should contain something to help, but finding out which architecture a binary is is pretty easy if you're willing to run a script. The executables indicate their architecture in the PE header, and if you don't want to parse that yourself you can use a command like file (available on every OS though Windows will need a manual installation) which will do it for you and give you the answer. I would prefer that Microsoft add that to the GUI, although I expect that they'd point out that anyone who knows what that difference entails probably knows enough to do that check.

You forgot the next step: and then the image is frozen and that kernel, and that one only, is the one you need to run this laptop. Somewhere in a forum is a person who claims that mainline 6.23 will run and you only have to follow this twenty-step process involving two anonymous git repos and an existing functional image to swap it in. At the bottom past the steps is a link which goes to a forum post which explains that, if you do that, the screen unavoidably switches off every ten minutes and the USB ports only work at 2.0 speeds, but you can fix the former with a script which keeps the screen working by disabling power management.

Sometimes, I wonder why we bother making and using all the ARM-powered Linux devices. Only a few are at all comparable to what Linux on X64 and X86 is like, and the best of them still tend to have a few problems. No, that hasn't stopped me having quite a few of them myself, but my primary machines still have Intel or AMD processors in them.

Google Chrome Privacy Sandbox open to all: Now websites can tap into your habits directly for ads

Re: Worry less.

I think you might have the wrong idea about why we, or at least I, hate targeted advertising. It's not because I'm afraid that the advertising will be too useful. If the ads were more useful, maybe that would be a weak argument in favor of keeping it on, and that it is as useless for me as it is for you means that it's extra pointless. My problem with it is that the data they're collecting is not data I want them to have, and they are not very good about keeping it to themselves. Not only do I have to deal with ad networks collecting and storing it, but with anyone who buys or steals it having copies. I don't know what's in there, and there are ways that both correct and incorrect stuff in that dataset could be harmful. The quality of the resulting advertisements is mostly irrelevant; if they were collecting that stuff and not showing any to me at all, that would still be a problem.

Re: Sneaky

I generally find that if sites don't like Firefox because they want something Chrome-like, then they are mostly fine with Firefox showing a Chrome user agent. This is usually when I stop using that site. The only exceptions that come to mind are things that use the hardware access APIs that Google decided should be in there, and I don't like them anyway (no, I don't think it's cool to program a development board through the browser when I can flash my own image over serial, thanks). There must be others, but fortunately I've not had to see them too much.

If you like to play along with the illusion of privacy, smart devices are a dumb idea

Re: Enough! Eliminate the root cause

"medications in the US often have text similar to "Compare to <brand name>" on the packaging – that's targeted advertising."

No, it isn't. Nobody was targeted, and everyone who reads the container sees the message. Targeting isn't putting a message somewhere so everyone who goes there reads it, but getting information about people to make a, usually automated, decision about whether to show them the advert or not.

"in the US a blanket ban would almost certainly fall foul of the First Amendment."

I'm sure someone would try it, but it wouldn't work. For the same reason, false advertising isn't protected as free speech. We all have the right to lie, but doing so in a commercial arrangement is illegal because the legislation applies to the result of the crime, not the words used. If they chose to make that illegal, and I doubt that they will, it would not violate the first amendment in the US.

Re: Why would a Washing Machine require my Date of Birth ...

Or you do what my parents did and teach the children how to use the washing machine. Operation really isn't that hard. You would have to work hard to break it, and knowing the steps to properly use it (maybe three of them) means there's very little chance of error. If it manages to break, it is either mechanical failure or intentional, and the latter is very unlikely.

Re: please forgive my lack of knowledge...

That's why we have encryption on as many communication methods as possible. The smart devices probably aren't breaking your encryption, and many of them simply aren't powerful enough to be useful at doing it, but if they did, they could intercept your packets between your WiFi devices and the access point. However, if you're using an encrypted connection at a higher layer, for example HTTPS to communicate with a website or a communication platform with encryption, then just obtaining those packets from your WiFi will only leak a small amount of information. They might be able to tell that you're doing something with your medical provider's server, but not what specifically you or they are saying. Nothing prevents them from turning those devices into spies, but most likely, they'd need some much more powerful servers at the other end to do the heavy lifting because most IoT devices have some pretty weak processors in them. That's expensive and most users' communications are not valuable enough to go to that effort, especially because that's a few crimes wrapped up in one and most companies choose not to commit crimes that are that blatant, preferring a more oblivious crime that they can argue is so minor that nobody should care.

Re: Why would a Washing Machine require my Date of Birth ...

And also that most of the people who aren't old enough to sign a contract already understand that the sites aren't checking the birthday, so 29 August 1978 is a perfectly acceptable input whether that's your real birthday or not. For that matter, a lot of us who are old enough also know and do that because what do these people want our actual birthday for. I write it down somewhere in case someone requires it for authentication, which they shouldn't. So far, it hasn't proven necessary.

The Anti Defamation League is Musk's latest excuse for Twitter's tanking ad revenue

Re: Musk's Master Plan

Since Twitter's still in California and the ADL is in New York, both of which have legislation for that purpose, I don't see why that would pose a problem. Technically, X Corp is a Nevada corporation, but Nevada has anti-SLAPP legislation as well. I don't see why Texas would come into it at all, although they too have some provision for countering such suits if it did. Still, there appears to be no reason why Texas would have any power over a suit between a California-based corporation suing a New York-based organization.

Re: Musk's Master Plan

I assumed the even split to be half assuming sarcasm, half assuming it was real, and not really anyone wanting to upvote that sentiment if it was real. Things are not that dire here. Unfortunately, there are other places that would function that way. Still, I think the votes indicate that the sarcasm was not clear enough, not that we have people who believe all that crap together (I don't want to speculate or think too much about how many people believe some component of it).

Re: They can both go away.

Independent of the rest of this discussion, I'd like to argue against a misuse of that law that seems incredibly common. Read that statement again. It says that it gets more likely for Nazism to be mentioned during a discussion. Nowhere in the text does it say that, when it is mentioned, it should not have been or the person who mentioned it is wrong. You could make the point about almost anything else that becomes more likely to be mentioned if we keep talking about some topic, because people will make connections to stuff they're familiar with. The person who first mentions Nazis may be wrong, but that is by no means guaranteed and wasn't even suggested by the original creator of the principle. I find it a bit weird when people start quoting the law as if it argues for the correctness of their point, as it does not in general or for you specifically.

Want tunes with that? India-made POS terminal includes a speaker

Re: Noise pollution.

The beeps are there to help you understand things like whether you have successfully scanned something or you need to move it around some more and can also indicate if you've accidentally scanned it twice. That means you don't have to go through the whole receipt at the end to make sure you didn't scan things wrong. By the way, if your next point was going to be having someone else scan the products, the beeps work for them as well. Given all the other noise involved in a shop, the beeps don't bother me that much. There are thumping and crinkling as people move items, plenty of talking, probably background music, clanking of carts, so it's not going to be quiet anyway.

Re: Why the confused headline and opening paragraph

Yes, they would be happy to do so, and most of them would be honest. However, it would also be quite possible for them to take a lot more money than you planned to give them, something that the system won't do on their behalf. Someone who wanted to make sure that they were paying the amount they expected to pay might be more comfortable using the computer themselves.

Take as a parallel voting where paper ballots are used. There are some locations that have machines such that someone who can either not read or write on the ballot due to a disability can have a machine do that with effectively a big scanner and I imagine an automated pencil but it's probably a lot more like a printer. I imagine that voters may feel more certain that that machine has marked their ballot as they instructed rather than if they got some other person and asked them to please mark my vote for candidate A even if you (the assistant) hate candidate A, even though the majority of people willing to help out would not do anything that dishonest.

Why the confused headline and opening paragraph

I know the writer probably didn't write the headline, but both their opening paragraph and the headline produced from it are written as if this is completely crazy as a feature, while the rest of their article provides a completely logical reason for its inclusion and it's not the only one. It would also work for those who can't see the terminal due to a disability and, given the language support, could help for those traveling to a location in which a language they don't speak is spoken. Of course, in the latter case, they could probably look at a screen and see the price, but not necessarily instructions or other text. I'm not surprised that many PoS systems have left it out, but seeing it put in this one isn't very surprising to me.

IT needs more brains, so why is it being such a zombie about getting them?

I simultaneously disagree with you and them. I think you could do something useful by throwing money at the problem, but they act like you can get a person educated in a generic way that's primarily self-directed. You certainly can learn a lot of things, especially IT-related skills, entirely on your own. However, no matter how good the guides and resources are, that mostly works when you have someone motivated to learn a lot of tiny details and creative enough to put them together in a useful way. The benefit of more organized education is the ability to learn from others, both the teachers and the other students. I gained a lot of skills by discussing what I was doing with others who were interested and capable of doing similar and hearing their ideas, and I passed some ideas of my own to my fellows, and I also got some valuable information by talking with professors who had long careers in industry before they turned to teaching. No matter how great the lecture someone records and puts up on YouTube, it won't give you those things. You can do without them, but if you're going to, you don't need to bother with more textbooks as there are plenty of those for free right now which provide the information a self-taught student will need.

From browser brat to backend boss: Will WASM win the web wars?

Re: There is no direction to go but up, starting from EXCEL

I didn't vote on it, but do you really not understand why people might support what they said and why your views on their comment are similarly open to debate? For example, you say that they have "no knowledge of the tech". You don't cite any reason for saying that and it wouldn't matter because they didn't say enough about anything to be able to guess what their experiences are.

As for why someone might be negative about Excel, it's because it's a really inefficient method of coding which supports almost none of the useful features of programming languages, and if you rely on it, those differences will start to be noticed. The original comment that started our thread pointed this out: if you can take a spreadsheet that takes twenty minutes to load, and possibly longer to update, and turn it into a task that lasts seconds without having to optimize it beyond a generic compiled language, then Excel is not only showing significant inefficiencies such that a 99.59% speed boost was possible, but it's inefficiency that is clearly noticeable to the user. At that rate, you always do the 99% speedup just because it's there, but if it's 0.5 seconds to 5 ms, then it doesn't matter as much unless you're doing it frequently. When you're improving from minutes to seconds, it always matters. This is a real problem, and you've already read about it here, but you attribute negative views toward Excel to snobbery and insult the person who wrote it on claims you can't back up.

What happens when What3Words gets lost in translation?

Or a few primarily British accents where or and aw sounds can sound the same, meaning that flaw and floor can't be distinguished by sound. I wonder whether W3W, which appears to be American (where telling those words apart is trivial) have that set in their list of homophones, extended to derivative words.

No, it does none of that stuff. It is an encoding system, not an error detecting, let alone an error correcting one. An error detection system would have additional tokens such that most incorrect combinations would simply be invalid. You could, for example, add in a fourth word which is based on the three preceding words and must be a certain one for each preceding group, thus a misheard combination would come up as rejected unless you happen to hit a workable combination by luck. Error correction would likely require even more words so the data could be sent twice. Their algorithm doesn't have that. I don't know why you said it. It is really making you sound like you either have no understanding what error correction is or how W3W works, and I don't mean from a technical perspective but the bit that's obvious even if your only experience of it was reading this article, where they point out that it doesn't do error correction.

From the rest of your statements, I'm going with both. For example, you say that "natural language has enormous redundancy". It doesn't, by the way. It has a bit of redundancy, but really not too much as you probably know if you've ever been misheard. However, this isn't natural language, it's words. You can probably guess the ends of my sentences if you've read the starting half because I'm making a single point. If, however, you read this clause and I invite you to guess the following ones: laminate energetic truckle facade, you don't have so much of a chance. All redundancy is lost even though the same tokens are used. You also cite some "forensic analysts" who say that "natural language is constantly self correcting". I don't even know what these analysts are trying to say, but I'm guessing it's not what you said.

Re: Amateurish, at best.

Admittedly, they have a much larger keyspace they're trying to include, which makes their challenge a bit harder. If they created a combination for every square on a Mercator map to 0.00001 degree, they'd need five words from a set of 1024 to include them all, which they evidently thought was too long. Of course, they could try improving this by tossing out the squares that are the open ocean, antarctica, etc, but they decided not to. The problem is that, having found this problem, they decided to allow plenty of confusable pairs, but to make their algorithm try to keep apart the pairs they thought of. That's a rather weak way to deal with that problem.

Take people with a lot of different accents and a bad phone line and the clashes will start to be noticeable. A lot of people speaking English will pronounce long E and short I differently. A person who has learned English recently and started with a different language may not. In fact, that vowel confusion is a stereotypical accent characteristic of a few languages that use more pure vowel sounds than English does, although its presence in practice varies a lot. Similarly, there are some languages that don't use the dental fricatives (the various sounds that th can make in English), and some people who have learned languages that lack them will do something else as they learn to make the same sounds. Two common methods effectively replace it with a t or s sound. Take a person like that and suddenly, words like think/sink or thank/tank become harder to tell apart, especially if you add in static on a phone or radio. This isn't only for people who recently learned English. For example, some Irish accents have a different pronunciation of th which is quite distinctive from t, most of the time, but close enough that I've seen a misunderstanding between an Irish person and a British person even though both were native English speakers.

Re: Hmmm...

Yes, in most cases. However, if the connection was brief for some reason, for example the person is injured, and the person handling the emergency is far from the area, for example a state-wide emergency service because the local ones are overloaded, you may lose that information. This is why a word-based location system needs to be very careful about not putting things that sound similar anywhere close to each other, which might include keeping them out of the same large areas. If they don't have error correction, which they don't, it might be worth keeping all the possible clashes in other countries, or at least on different sides of a large country.

Re: Mountain rescue

"If you muff the second or third decimal place of *any* lat/lon you can easily be several km out"

Assuming you meant taking 50.120 to 50.129, no, it wouldn't put you that far out, about 110 m. Even changing the second digit from 50.10 to 50.19 would be about 1.1 km, which is enough to cause a problem, but not quite as high as you state. This is why some code with error correction would be useful. However, the W3W system appears not to have any of that, just turning the numbers into words. If you know that you're going to hear a series of numbers, you have less possibility of mishearing than if you could hear any of ten thousand English words, especially if there is a bad connection or unfamiliar accent in play. On a bad phone connection, someone misheard me saying "I am tired" as "I was fired", so it's really not that hard to make a mistake. Their protocol doesn't have any correction mechanism, so you have to hope that they have placed any potentially misheard words very far apart. Being sent to Arizona instead of Britain is a giveaway, but being sent to somewhere twenty kilometers away might not be if the area is sparse enough.

Farewell WordPad, we hardly knew ye

Re: So LibreOffice it is then.

I'm confused. Your comment and the article are both quite clear that WordPad can't save to .docx, but the version I have lists it along with .rtf, .odt, and .txt as options, although .rtf is the default. A simple document saved as .docx correctly, but I didn't try anything complicated in it. This is the latest production version of Windows 11, so maybe it was added more recently, but since I haven't used it in probably a decade, it could easily have been there longer than we thought.

Re: slow transformation

With home, you're correct because the workarounds are not obvious. With Pro, however, you are not correct. If you're not connected to the internet, they'll ask for WiFi and has a button for offline right in the GUI, which will allow you to set up a local account. The feature's clearly there in Pro, even though they have, in my opinion unacceptably, hidden it in the Home edition.

Right to repair advocates have a new opponent: Scientologists

Re: Expose

That was probably a nice-looking copy, not the text as a whole, which he probably already had access to. In addition, that was in the 1800s when printing was a bit more expensive. Nowadays, there are copies of most religious texts nearly everywhere you look. No matter what language you speak, if you have internet access you can get a copy in probably under a minute, and there are people who make it their lives work to print up paper copies of their favorite one and give them away, just as there are translators who will learn a language, or in the past make up a system of orthography, just to translate one into that language.

Arm wrestles assembly language guru's domains away citing trademark issues

It is true that "trademark violation" isn't a technical term. I think we all know what I meant, though. A use of a trademarked term that a court will agree is not allowed if the trademark holder pursues a case. It's not that unusual a term to describe it, since the law does have rules for what can happen with a trademark and the court will decide whether the use was permissible based on whether it follows those rules or not. The rest of your comment appears to say the same thing that I said.

I've stated in other comments that they're wrong about this being a violation, but they do have a responsibility to protect their trademark if they want to keep it. One of the reasons your trademark can be revoked is that you haven't been using it or that you have allowed others to do so to an extent that degrades the usefulness of the trademark to distinguish products. That is a relatively narrow thing, though, so this website not only doesn't fall under that responsibility, but likely doesn't violate the trademark in the first place.

Re: Seems a bit Monty Pythonesque...

In this case, it wasn't the registrar who was contacted but the host. I'm sure that, if you had a host that ignored the lawyers, they'd have gone after the registrar, but just having a name that the registrar won't take from you won't protect you if your host will respond and cancel your service.

East Germany didn't have a presence on the public internet, at least not an announced one. They did use the .dd domain for a private network between a couple universities, and they had some links that may have used someone else's internet connections, but probably not too much before the collapse.

Re: It's a bloody word in our bloody language!

The point, however, is that none of them actually violate trademark for exactly the reason you state. Apple Insider isn't a tech company, it is a media company that writes about tech companies. It doesn't matter that, when it says Apple, it's talking about the company instead of something else, because it isn't making products and alleging that Apple did so. I don't know what arm-assembly did exactly, but it was likely also an informational site that was not a chip manufacturer. Had they been selling something that implied that ARM endorsed it, they could have complained about that, but if that was the case, they could have complained no matter what domain it was and could complain now that it's on a different one. What they actually complained about was the use of their trademark as a substring on a site that didn't otherwise have any conflict with their trademark, so their complaint is probably invalid. Try getting a web host to understand the difference, though, because they deal with a lot of real fraudulent sites all the time and probably respond quickly if some verifiable company sends a note saying that something needs to be taken down.

Re: It's a bloody word in our bloody language!

"I think the lawyers of the first two companies are very versed with taking down sites."

No, not really. They don't do what ARM has done here. For example, if I look through a list of popular domains for Apple, I can find quite a few sites that contain those trademarked terms. For example, if I search for Apple and remove the ones owned by Apple, I find the following:

appleinsider.com: covers Apple products

applebees.com: This is a restaurant.

patentlyapple.com: Some guy posting articles related to Apple.

applevis.com: A site that talks about using Apple products if you're blind or visually impaired.

applegazette.com: I don't know why it's called this, but it's a blog that doesn't talk about Apple products.

This is not all the ones I found. This is a subset of addresses that clearly had "apple" in the name. All of them are still around. I can do the same with Windows. I'm sure they have filed trademark complaints before, but they probably reserve that for malicious uses or someone actually trying to impersonate them, not someone who merely talks about their products like ARM has done.

I'll see your data loss and raise you a security policy violation

Re: Sounds familiar

It is not IT's responsibility to audit everyone's files. Different users will have different requirements. For example, I keep some stuff on my work machine's local drive. It is there because I can run things faster locally if it doesn't have to be pulled down, but anything important also exists on some other system such that I can lose the disk without losing important data. A script that checks whether there are files on my disk will say that there are, but it won't indicate a problem. If you were strict about that, then any program which creates files in the documents folder (I've known several) would set it off. If you check what people are using on the server, a user who has exactly zero files might be suspicious, but there could be some jobs that don't require storing files there. If they mostly work in email, either having a job that's entirely communications or a job that's not done on the computer, then maybe they really don't have files. If they put one file there once and never used it again, the script will indicate that their folder isn't empty even though it contains nothing of use, so you'd need a much more complicated script to look for changing files or a certain expected quantity of stored data with both false positive and negative possibilities.

With this level of complexity, it really isn't as simple as you make it sound. It's also not what IT is there to do. They create the policies and make things work. They're not supposed to police everything a user does with a computer. When other policies exist, they usually don't come with a requirement for an automatic system to notice every violation. For example, if there is a room where you may not bring liquids because there is sensitive hardware there, then the general steps will be to put a sign on the door and to make it clear that this is important, not to build a water scanner and install it so you can't enter without passing. I'm generally supportive of having the computers check for risks and warn about them, but that doesn't mean that every possible problem needs to have a detection script. If employees don't bother to follow the policies that have been set up for a reason, bad things might happen.

Re: BTDT

/tmp, on many systems, is not on a disk and is not maintained through reboots. There are lots of other places that are on filesystems that persist. A program can keep some temporary data, in fact it makes a lot of sense, but if you deliberately put your data where it will be lost in a certain case, then you should be able to recover from that situation somehow. In addition, unless the server was forcefully powered down, any properly written software would have had the standard shutdown notifications, whether that is the service system stopping them with the scripts they wrote for that purpose or monitoring for shutdown notifications. Software that expects that the server will never be rebooted is not adequate.

Another basic rule is if you need a file to still be there no matter what happens to the computer, putting it on a ramdisk is stupid. If you put it on a ramdisk, have a plan for what you'll do if that disk ceases to exist. Depending on what the program does and how large it is, that can be anything from "no problem, they just run it again from the start and if that causes a delay, that's on them" to "store completed stages and information to resume in a different program-specific temp directory and only keep the current stage's work in /tmp".

Re: Outlook...

I mostly agree with you if we're only talking about email servers. While storing stuff in deleted isn't a good idea, if someone has three gigabytes of mail they want to archive in a different folder, we have servers which have plenty of storage to hold that. Admins that continue having tiny quotas do not help unless there is a real space problem, and if there is, it's more likely to be solved by buying bigger disks or focusing on users that really use a lot more than everyone else.

However, storage quantity was really not Huon's users' problem, even though that was the initial symptom. Their problem could have been whatever reason they had for saying that the servers were unreliable, which could have been a very serious problem. It could, however, be a completely invalid assumption made by someone who has no clue what they're talking about, and this seems more likely to me given that the person who said it didn't understand what C:\temp is for. You don't need a large disk if users are supposed to put all their data on a different disk. It should have had enough space for the temporary data that it would need to store and for system growth, but not necessarily for all the work the team did, since that was supposed to be stored elsewhere and that system could have as much storage provisioned as needed.

BOFH: What a beautiful tinfoil hat, Boss!

Re: Another new boss!

Whenever they get a boss who understands them and works to help them, one of three things happen:

1. The boss decides to move somewhere else to become a BOFH-style person themselves in their own fiefdom. This is the best scenario for the boss, because being the BOFH's friend often works well if you're careful.

2. The boss's BOFH training is not as strong as expected and the boss degrades back into a normal boss. This is a risky option which can lead from firing to death.

3. The boss decides to try taking over the company and pushing out the BOFH. This is almost invariably fatal.

OpenAI urges court to throw out authors' claims in AI copyright battle

Re: Transformative means copyright does not apply

There is plenty of verbatim text in models like this. They're very large. The fact that they throw away some of the training data rather than retaining verbatim copies of everything and that the copies they have are in a different format doesn't change that. It can and has quoted large chunks of text verbatim without having someone provide it, simply when querying for the title to be quoted. True, they sometimes try to stop you because it was clear they would be sued, and I don't think anyone's gotten it to print an entire book with one command because it was designed for smaller output chunks, but the text is in there in a format that's much closer to the original than you have suggested.

Re: DMCA?

"because of course the only way OpenAI could find a copy of any of their works in digital form is if OpenAI had themselves broken into the Kindle app store or something like that."

When I read this, I thought you might be sarcastic. I can't make that make sense with the rest of your comment, though, so I fear you're being serious. If you were, you're quite wrong. There are plenty of copies of books on the internet without permission, and they're not that hard to find by accident. Publishers go after particularly popular ones, but there are many that are on sites with small readership that publishers either don't know about or don't want to spend hours to fight when they can pop up again in ten minutes if they want to. Those sites are breaking the law, but just because the publishers haven't stopped them doesn't mean that a crawler can read the book from there and do whatever it wants with it. The LMMs have scraped a lot of the internet, and I'm sure they've included plenty of information that wasn't supposed to be on the pages it was on. Having stumbled on copyrighted works when I wasn't even trying to, I know it's not that hard.

We get our language from what we read and what we say. The modifications that have been produced recently are of our own collective making, and most of them have a point. In fact, I would go as far as saying that they are an improvement in many cases, because modern writing tends to be more informal and thus gets a point across without the excessive wordiness common in past centuries. Nothing about the older style is intrinsically better just because the books we still read from that period tend to be pretty good. Many bad books were written like that but we don't read them nowadays because they didn't stay popular enough to become classics.

When I came back to read replies, I noticed an error of my own in my comment. In case anyone thought there was something wrong there, you're right, beta radiation involves the destruction (well, splitting that's unlikely to be reversed) of a neutron, not creation. I just have to correct myself on that one.

They had big crawler bots to collect a bunch of text from the internet, not paying too much attention to where they got it. You can find a lot of books online somewhere if you do that, because people like breaking copyright and because there is a lot of fair use out there. For example, I've quoted passages of books before, and for a book that's popular enough, there are probably quotes of most of the passages somewhere. A bot that's specifically designed to make statistical connections between text chunks won't have much problem stitching those back together, especially if it has partial or complete copies of the books from a site that wasn't supposed to have them up there.

For two reasons. One problem is that training only on old books will make a bot that can talk like old authors, and I know there are some people who view that as a benefit, but it's not natural for modern readers. The bot would also lack any information about the modern world because there would be nothing in its training set. If you asked a simple question like "What is beta radiation", you might not get any answers because one core part of understanding beta radiation is that a neutron is created, and neutrons weren't discovered or named until the 1920s, so they wouldn't be listed in much public domain material. Even as that got added in, you'd keep having this problem with stuff that is common knowledge and not found in works old enough to be in public domain. You would probably have to fill in the gaps by finding other public domain stuff, or more likely stuff under a permissive license, which could be used. Many wikis online would probably be licensed under acceptable terms, although that's no guarantee that each of those will necessarily add more useful information.

The second reason is as a result of this. LMM companies don't want to produce a bot that has obvious flaws. They'd much rather produce a bot that has really big hidden flaws, especially if their competitors are making one like that. Unless everyone is restricted to using only public domain content, no big company will ever restrict itself in that way, and if they ever are restricted in that way, I expect that most of them will continue using content they're not allowed to, just doing a bit more to hide that they're doing so. Their product needs to sound authoritative or it will become too obvious that it made everything up and people won't buy it. They'll go to whatever lengths they need to to prevent people from seeing them backslide.

Re: Please can we have a standard like a robots.txt file

Do you really want it to be opt out? And sure, we can have such a standard just as soon as we get someone to make it clear that we have copyright rights to stuff we made that includes restrictions on using that as AI training data. If regulators agree with companies like OpenAI that they are free to mash up anything they find online, then the opt out system will have no legal meaning and can be cheerfully ignored by anyone who wants to.

We all scream for ice cream – so why are McDonald's machines always broken?

Re: Wait, their milkshake maker works like an HP printer ?

No problem, still display EC402 but have a book which lists those codes and the longer messages. You could digitize it into one HTML file with a bit of JS to jump to the code when entered. It wouldn't be the first manual to have an index of error codes. They're not doing it to save a bit on the screen. They're doing it to make a lot on resetting the computer, and the fact that they make enough on that to pay for people to travel to the restaurants and do it indicates that it's quite the profitable enterprise.

We're about to hit peak device count, says HTC veep, as AR takes over

Re: @Pascal Monett - Not going to happen

However, that case was clearly related to an illness, not a new way of checking the internet. Brain surgery for medical reasons makes sense, although I think many would be wary about the risks, but brain surgery for anything else is not a great idea. If someone dies because they were a test subject for fixing nerve damage that led to paralysis, we'd understand that the risks were worth it and they would hopefully agree as they'd know about the risks. If someone dies because they were a test for a chip that can play video inside your head so you don't need a screen, then I don't think we would be in favor so much. The high risk of something like that means that we will probably not want, and companies will not want to, do research into brain-embedded consumer electronics. I think futurists know this but like to pretend otherwise since the idea of a flawless computer implant like that could be cool if they don't think too much, and not thinking is one of their specialities, right along with copying from science fiction authors who actually considered possible consequences.

Battery life

I don't think we'll see these sci-fi visions coming any time soon, but if they want them, the first problem will be making them last more than an hour or two before the battery dies. This is a problem people who want to look into the future don't often bother with, because the battery is one of the least fashionable parts of a device. Yet, it's going to prevent people from adopting lots of technology as a daily tool because they don't want to be tethered to a wall. Some hardware can get away with battery life like that. If people put this on to play a game and then take it off and do something else, it doesn't have to last all day. If people are going to take it with them, they'll want some reason to believe that it won't be dead when they turn it on.

That's far from the only problem. Just talking about technical limitations, there is the size and weight problem which doesn't work that well with the battery problem, the getting sufficient data in and out problem, and the interface problem of how you interact with the stuff that's being displayed in front of you. The latter will also be tricky, because people don't want to use voice commands for everything and I'm guessing waving your hands to mimic interacting with objects you can't feel is not going to prove any more popular. I get why these analysts haven't thought of the even more plentiful reasons why people won't have anything useful to do with the devices, but you'd think they could at least consider the obvious technical limitations.

Microsoft ain't happy with Russia-led UN cybercrime treaty

Maybe, just maybe, they're commenting now because things have been changing and because it hasn't been killed yet? If they update the text, it would make sense to comment on what parts have changed and, especially for this thing, what parts have not.

Nothing in the proposal, at least as I understand it, says that a company can exempt its employees from provisions by saying that they're really researchers. Not that this would be an acceptable solution to the problem anyway. Security research is a very broad thing, and a lot of activities can be included. None of them should be forbidden so that dictatorships can have more surveillance powers. Changing "forbidden" to "license required" doesn't change the situation.