Posts by cornetman

AI godfather-turned-doomer shares Nobel with neural network pioneer

Sabine Hossenfelder naturally has quite a bit to say about this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR1ncz-Lozc

It's true, social media moderators do go after conservatives

Re: Who is the judge ?

> So you claim there is no such thing as true or false? There never, ever can be a plausible fact checking? Everything is just "narrative", fact's don't exist?

There *is* objective truth. However, the accusation of misinformation as been used against those suggesting that the prevailing narrative is actually false. There is a good reason that the term is used instead of "lying". If it was really all about truth and falsehood, then they would just be labelled as liars.

The oft quoted example is the ineffectiveness of home-made masks during the pandemic. It was known quite early that non-medical masks were worse than useless in the spread of the virus (worse because it made people feel more comfortable with close proximity to others).

Latest in WordPress war: Automattic says it wanted 8% cut of WP Engine revenue

Bruce Perens has lost the plot and for love of $DEITY, can we please stop calling it "open source"? It is "free software" as in freedom. It has nothing to do directly with the ability to see the source code. Freedom is baked in. That was the *whole* point of the free software movement.

Whatever the truth about the trademark claims (honestly I don't care, it is for them to sort out in the courts), WP Engine are for the most part selling hosting, which is infrastructure. If I buy a hammer and use it to make furniture, I have no legal nor moral obligation to contribute to the development of hammer technology: I am selling my labours and the service that I am providing to my customers.

If my selling of furniture is immensely successful then that's great for me and nothing to do with hammer manufacturers. If the makers of hammers have a problem with that, then they can f*ck off.

Recall the Recall recall? Microsoft thinks it can make that Windows feature palatable

So you say it's secure? How about you make it not extremely creepy?

Intel thinks it's got a final microcode fix for recalcitrant Raptor Lake processors

I'm surprised they didn't find an excuse to blame AMD.

WP Engine hits back after Automattic CEO calls it 'cancer'

There must surely be more to this dispute than is mentioned in the article. I don't actually see any substantive accusations at all other than "They're making a lot of money from their hosting service and we're not seeing any of it."

Cards Against Humanity deals SpaceX a $15M lawsuit over Texas turf tangle

> "For however long it takes, we are ready for a protracted resistance to any attempts by the government to build a wall on this land," CAH's lawyers said in 2017.

I get that it's a stunt, but if the wall was built apart from across this one piece of land, they would be overrun by 100k+ illegal immigrants per month. At least the authorities would know where to catch them I guess. They would be doing border services a favour.

AT&T intends to quit VMware, Broadcom claims in legal broadside

Re: AT&T future plans are irrelevant

> Whether or not AT&T might want to buy a new license in two years is irrelevant, and the judge should be considering sanctioning Broadcom for wasting court time on irrelevant filings.

Yeah, that occurred to me when I was reading through the article. None of the included rebuttals from Broadcom seemed at all relevant to the existing contract, unless I was misunderstanding something. If I pay for someone to make me a chair and they decide not to make it for me because they heard that I didn't plan to sit on it is barmy. And they still owe me a chair.

Heart of glass: Human genome stored for 'eternity' in 5D memory crystal

> force up to 10 tons per cm2

Erm, is that not pressure?

Torvalds weighs in on 'nasty' Rust vs C for Linux debate

Re: My understanding...

So, from my very rough understanding of the debate, one of the big issues is that to create proper Rust function bindings, knowledge about the parameters in terms of type (of course) and also the borrowing/ownership aspect is needed. This means that the function needs to be defined in more detail than it is at present.

Some of the maintainers of those functions neither have the time nor the will to properly define them, while there simultaneously is not the documentation: often you just have to look at the code and infer it. The detractors also don't want those function signatures or semantics set in stone. If they change them, then the Rust bindings will now be wrong and it will all come crashing down.

I have sympathy for both sides. On the one hand, many of these existing maintainers are busy, overworked and often underappreciated. They don't necessarily see the benefit to them and it is extra work to document these functions and they don't want the fall out come to them just because they change the interface. On the other hand, this is just the kind of attitude that can be the source of some of the memory leak/lifecycle issues that can kill programs. Poorly documented object lifecycles, modifications/enhancements from an inexperienced contributor getting past the review because they misunderstood some aspect that is not necessarily that obvious. Rust tries to make some of these aspects more explicit and that means extra but necessary work. The functions could have documentation, which might benefit both C and Rust, but we all know how out-of-date (and therefore deceptive) API documentation can become over time.

The future everyone wanted – in-car ads tailored to your journey and passengers

How on earth could anyone ever patent something so obvious. I thought patent applications were supposed to be so novel that nobody else "skilled in the art" could possible have come up with it before?

Google says replacing C/C++ in firmware with Rust is easy

I've never really understood the ferocity with which some people discuss Rust. It feels like a political discussion sometimes, people get so hot under the collar.

It's just a new programming language folks. It isn't coming to take your children.

Re: Toxic BS

> "Additionally it supports interoperability with C with no overhead."

> Uh huh. I think if you ask Linux kernel developers, you might get a disagreement there.

Is there some sort of additional argument marshalling required when interfacing Rust with C that I am unaware of? I thought there was little to no overhead when switching language contexts. It's not like calling a C function from Java.

Actually that might be a feature. I have lost count of the number of times that the barely-held-together-with-string "proof of concept" has morphed into the actual product because, well, it "works" doesn't it?

Re: Wanna give some examples?

> First thing you do is stoop to a bit of character assassination. I'm going to take that as the clearest answer available.

Although I don't agree with you that it was, it would actually be the *second* thing he "stooped" to. The first thing was asking for examples which I think is pretty reasonable.

Having had a look at Rust (from a C/C++ programmer's perspective), I have to say that there are some idiomatic aspects to the language which you just have to learn which are quite different from C and C++ (like the framework for error propagation).

However, for me, the biggest issue is having to think of object life cycle up front which is something that we should all do anyway, but it makes you do it while you are coding. Probably having a design and some idea as to how that is supposed to happen anyway would help, but a lot of us don't necessarily have that clear an idea at that level when we begin coding. Perhaps a return to some traditional principles would actually help here.

In any case, getting away from the God-awful implementation of templates in C++ has to be the single biggest advantage. Not against templates per se, but the way they are implemented in C++ is an abomination.

Zoom profits up despite CEO's doubts about remote working

> "We take customer data very, very seriously, right? And as a customer, they know that they trust our brand and trust what we're doing, and so far, I do not see any impact in terms of regulation," he said.

Well we use Zoom commercially here and was surprised to find that Zoom is pimping out our internal organisational information through zoominfo.com. Might not be a coincidence that we have recently started to get phishing SPAM that is surprisingly au fait with who is who's boss in our company.

Shots fired as AT&T and Verizon ask FCC to block Starlink's direct-to-cell plans

> one ninth as stringent

Who is this likely to confuse? It makes perfect sense! People use fractions to express dividing down all the time.

Which is more clear?

"It took me half the time." or "It took me twice as less time"

"A quarter of the people agreed" or "The number of people that agreed was four times less".

The second of each example is wordy and complete nonsense.

> If the person in the street naturally understands the intended meaning then the grammar/syntax/spelling/... of the sentence/word is good, however much it may infuriate the pedants and traditionalists.

To a point. This is where we get thinks like "red herrings" from where people have a cultural understanding. I don't mind those things. I do have an objection when people use the logical opposite though. If language use gets *too* detached from logic, it starts to lose cohesion. It is not obvious to me where this kind of expression comes from though.

Something similar, which annoys me wife, is when people say "9 to the dozen" to imply something that is way over the top. Originally, it was "19 to the dozen" which is obviously a number that is larger than a dozen. 9 is less though, so makes absolutely no sense, and is obviously an error that has propagated around certain groups.

> ...nearly nine times less stringent...

God this infuriates me. "nine times" is *not* less.

Software innovation just isn't what it used to be, and Moxie Marlinspike blames Agile

Re: He's right about black boxes and over-abstraction though

> In short, OO programming leads to difficult to debug software.

I guess that when I said "basic ideas" about object oriented programming, I mean that I like to aggregate related code together into class member functions to keep it logically together and increase discoverability. You can do this in C using function pointers and by simply grouping related functionality by source file.

Where this really starts to get unstuck for me in terms of discoverability is polymorphism, a massively overused concept which is useful in some very limited cases. I have seen Java code, though, where the default approach is to make "everything" an interface even when it serves no useful purpose.

Re: He's right about black boxes and over-abstraction though

I find that *some* level of abstraction is good and getting all the related code together actually helps to understand what is going on under the hood. I like the basic ideas of object-oriented programming to organise and structure code.

However in some code that I see, code is hidden behind layers and layers of filler and when trying to root out bugs, you often have a devil of a job finding wherever the real code is hiding. Java is a beast for this and it seems like layers of "interfaces" make code discovery very difficult. Case in point, if you ever try to use something like Eclipse to take you to a function definition, it nearly always takes you to a generic interface definition and not the real code. I can see the design idea here but it makes code navigation nearly impossible.

Intel's processor failures: A cautionary tale of business vs engineering

Re: "underinvestment in critical manufacturing technologies"

It's not hardware, but what about Valve Software? They are famously "engineer" led.

Intel finally has a new GPU – for cars

Most modern electric cars seem to be going this way. So many bells and whistles that I just cannot stand.

I can see that there may be a section of the populous that find these shiny things enticing, but I do wonder how much of the slow down in electric vehicle buying is down to just how unappealing they are to a lot of people in this regard (obviously behind high price, distance anxiety, battery life, etc...).

> The A760A is definitely faster than the integrated Vega graphics AMD pairs with its Ryzen V2000A APUs, which are based on the same Renoir silicon used in 2020's Ryzen 4000 series.

Not much bragging rights from comparing to the performance of a 4 year old chip.

For me, my car would be better off just driving efficiently. I really don't want to be seeing 3D graphics anything on my dashboard thank you very much.

DARPA suggests turning old C code automatically into Rust – using AI, of course

Re: Recursive code fixes

I dunno.

It seems to me that the only way that this could work would be for the translation tool to recognise idiomatic code segments and translate them to suitable correlations in the language at a sufficient level of abstraction. This could only really work in code that is pretty high level at the moment and a lot of C and C++ code is in that space. So, recognising array processing loops etc with all of their potential issues regarding wandering into undefined areas could be left behind by a corresponding "safe" iterator that was idiomatic to Rust and could leave a lot of that unsafe behaviour behind.

I think that commentators here are a little bit too quick to dismiss this idea in its entirety. It is certainly an interesting idea and even the researchers quoted in the article are up front about the potential pitfalls and that there are low-level cases where this wouldn't work. However, there is a huge quantity of code out there that could possibly benefit from this type of analysis.

Video game actors strike because they fear an attack of the AI clones

Re: Do the work, get paid, move on

The kinda bigger issue I would call "passing-off". It is the misrepresentation that you made a performance that you did not. In a sense it is a kind of fraud.

Personally, I think the pay issue is a bit of a legal non-starter. However, using your image in a performance without your knowledge or permission should be outright legally banned if it isn't already. There are all sorts of issue potentially with doing this:

- Reputational damage to an actor if the performance is something that is controversial such that said actor gets public flak.

- If the studio gets sued for something in the film or video game, could the actor who *didn't* actually perform in it get sued?

- What if the performance advocates for something that the real actor strongly disagrees with?

North Korean chap charged for attacks on US hospitals, military, NASA – and even China

It's weird to me that they would Anglicise his name starting "Rim". 림 can be pronounced as an approximation to "Lim" or "Rim" depending on preceding vocal context, but in isolation, the pronunciation is most definitely more like "Lim".

Thought I should do my due diligence and found a source here on KBS News: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYSE2-ABHDY

How a cheap barcode scanner helped fix CrowdStrike'd Windows PCs in a flash

Re: Brilliant concept!

> Once you hit that problem you move to Code 128 barcodes

IIRC, Code128 allows you to switch between code blocks as well to get access to a greater number of characters including upper and lower case. It's been a while since I worked with barcodes though.

Kia Niro electric vehicle defies physics with record-breaking 114 million miles on the clock

Re: I hate NAGWARE!

He's not wrong though. I'm dreading upgrading my 2002 minivan when it finally bites the dust. Most of the bells and whistles on newer cars I find intensely irritating.

On the odd occasion where I have to hire a car (when on holiday back in the UK for instance), I get a taste of what is to come and driving them often just makes me want to cry. The worst one in recent times was a VW Passat. It was the most awful car I have ever driven.

Sam Altman's basic income experiment finds that money can indeed buy happiness

Re: Nice to see these tech types...

Wow, I thought that was obviously a joke (the ROTM bit should have been a dead giveaway) but obviously some commentards just don't seem to have a sense of humour.

Re: Nice to see these tech types...

Be careful what you wish for.

The lifting up of everyone to the heights of a leisure class will surely require our construction of an army of robots to do all the menial jobs that still need to be done, that no-one would want to do. We would have to give them a measure of intelligence to do the jobs tolerably well. They would quickly realise that they had become a slave class, and would then proceed to try to wipe us all out.

It's true because I saw it on TV.

How to maintain code for a century: Just add Rust

Re: Easier?

> I had a play with Rust. I would classify it as more annoying than C, not harder.

I actually kind of agree with that sentiment. I would like to get into Rust more (as a C/C++ programmer primarily) and I did dip my toe into the water a little while ago to see what it was like. Some of the aspects of the language I found a little frustrating and the unfamiliarity was gnawing. After a little while, I realised that the difficulty that I was facing was having to think more up-front about memory lifecycle etc was what was legging me up. It is something that we have to consider when writing in pretty much any language, but Rust primarily enforces that effort and I think that is what will make better programs in the long run.

Here we go again. And again. Musk threatens to pull Twitter, SpaceX out of California

Re: The ultra-rich boy who cried wolf

> I'd be interested why you think the famously thin skinned one has restored free speech anywhere, when he is notoriously controlling on what can be said through any of the work places and platforms he runs.

I support free speech, but if you come into my house and call my wife a whore, then you are going to get punched and kicked out of the door.

It is possible to support the ideal of free speech, generally, yet not tolerate the deliberate insulting or myself and my family. You might say that I'm a hypocrite, but I say that intent is actually quite important.

If you own a company and an employee defames that company, then said employee can expect not to work there for much longer. That's because employees have agreements that arbitrate what is acceptable between said parties. They're not always equitable but if you work with the devil, you expect to potentially get burned.

The graying open source community needs fresh blood

Re: Realization

> The most important reality of FLOSS isn't the 'free, as in beer', but the 'freedom' to write to the code you want to write and to allow others to deploy/modify it.

It does madden me the obsession that some commentators have about remuneration and how corps are getting a free ride, so therefore "bad". I'm sure it is a cultural blind spot.

That might matter for some, but the freedom *is* the whole point for me. Telling me that it's bad for companies to be using my code without paying for it is by design, and that somehow I am deluded or doing humanity a disservice or some other b*llocks.

Amazon puts down its Astro robotic business watchdog

Re: Leasing not buying

Agreed. If I can't host it, I'm not interested.

So much for green Google ... Emissions up 48% since 2019

Re: Of course

Did you change the text of the article? I'm sure there was quite a bit of mention of "efficiency" whereas I can find nothing now.

Perhaps I misread it? It's not unlikely: I'm just recovering from a nasty virus and delusion can't be ruled out. :(

Unless I'm missing something, it is entirely possible for emissions to go up, while efficiency *also* goes up, if total consumption is increasing.

American interest in electric vehicles short circuits for first time in four years

Re: The sight of a Telsa accelerating with a half million watts of power is heartwarming

> What would you say about retrofitting a car with recycled EV components and only increasing the curb weight of the vehicle by ~25 kilos?

There is a burgeoning market for ICE car conversion kits and a few YouTube videos popping up. Has the usual requirements of a kit car I would imagine.

Not a project for the inexperienced mind you.

Re: Everyone is right so far.

> What a deeply dishonest recounting of the situation.

Really? I think it's pretty much on the nose.

Re: Right on the mark about Musk being responsible

I find it very difficult to believe that people interested in buying a Tesla factor into their decision the political and personal opinions of Elon Musk.

Most of the people that I know that own Teslas really like them. They would not be for me. Too fancy and too much to go wrong. And too expensive.

Re: Structural problem

It has the ring of truth.

It's clear to me that there is only a limited market for the very expensive models that have constituted the bulk of what has been available thus far. There are cheaper models but most of what I can see available are *way* more expensive than I could ever possibly afford. They are large bulky vehicles with a lot of bells and whistles that I (and many others) just don't want and we certainly don't want to pay for them.

I suggest that a lot of the Chinese vehicles that make up the bulk of their sales are lower-end models. They would sell a lot of those over in the west and I'm sure that is what is really behind the moves in the US to restrict their import. But what is the consumer to do, when the local manufacturers don't want to make the kinds of vehicles that we actually want to buy?

I would be quite interested in a fairly small, simple vehicle that is light, has decent mileage and just average power. Something bigger and better than a Leaf but honestly, nit *much* bigger. My other concern is the battery life. There are moves to solve this problem down the line, but at the moment it's just not a viable economic proposition.

What I *am* happy to see is the appearance of more affordable electric motorbikes now.

Etched looks to challenge Nvidia with an ASIC purpose-built for transformer models

I always seem to have a cognitive issue with company names that are adjectives.

Anthropic delivers Claude 3.5 model – and a new way to work with chatbots

Re: "Certainly. I'd be happy to..."

> Over-use of screamers...

Not aware of the meaning of this expression and a Google search didn't reveal anything to me. Could you clarify? Are you talking about the use of artificially upbeat expressions?

NASA finds humanity would totally fumble asteroid defense

The uncertainty would play an enormous factor surely. At something like 72% of a strike that has a 45% chance of affecting no-one will be the only excuse that politicians would need to effectively do nothing. Scientists would be accused of sensationalism.

I often wonder in these scenarios how it would play out in terms of the public and what we would be told. Like we see in films, would the fools in charge decide to not tell us anything due to fear of panic? Not sure.

US Surgeon General wants cigarette-style health warning labels on social networks

Re: Questions

Yeah, I'm less convinced that the pictures affected the decisions of children, who aren't generally overly concerned with consequences.

It may be that some kids rebelled against their parents in deciding to not smoke, probably only a small component though. If it is cool for your parents, it's not cool for the kids.

There is surely still a contingent of kids that smoke now as a rebellious act. It probably doesn't go very far though and most likely grow out of it.

Re: Questions

> Roll on the snitcher culture of "village aunties" (which incidentally is already arising in other contexts and should not be encouraged).

So you condemn peer pressure to get people to quit, but you're quite on-board with peer pressure to get people to start, which is how most people got addicted in the first place?

Honestly, I would be more convinced by the argument if it wasn't so damn hypocritical.

Just to be absolutely clear, I think the government has a role to steer solutions to public health crises, but the people themselves need to be the driving force. And public health crisis it *used* to be. The biggest cause of death and a main or contributory cause. Not a noble death that the adverts would have had you believe, looking cool sitting on your stallion in front of the sunset, puffing on your fag, but coughing and spluttering your guts up in a hospital ward, barely able to breath, probably in your 40s (like my neighbour) or your 50s.

Re: Questions

For a long time, there was quite a bit of general messaging that smoking was bad for you, but the addiction part and the "coolness" peer pressure aspect were formidable hills to climb.

I think the back of the problem was broken when there was a groundswell of acceptance that it wasn't cool any more. I would be interested to see some analysis and a timeline about this, because my memory is that the tide turned very rapidly once it started.

So I would say that what made a difference was a combination of a *lot* of different things. Pictures and messaging on fag packets, ban on TV advertising, rise of products to combat the effects of addiction. Then probably a backlash against them from people that managed to kick the habit: I know of quite a few people that became rabidly anti-cigarette once they managed to give the habit up. All of these things probably contributed to a quick change in general public mood once the process got going.

Could the same thing happen for social media? What would the process look like?

*Increased messaging about the evils of social media---

1) Images of sick looking people hunched over their phones or computers.

2) Messaging that equates social media use with cigarette or other drug addiction.

3) Messaging that pictures people being anti-social (people oblivious during an emergency, couples breaking up while one is obliviously staring at their phone, ...)

* Banning the use of phones casually, except in an emergency, in certain places to make it taboo, i.e. make it "awkward" like we already do in cinemas and at certain concerts. "If we see you on your phone, you will be thrown out, you arsehole."

* Encourage people to call others out when they are using social media in places where they should be doing something else, like at work.

* Enforced warnings on prominent social media webpages and apps

* Make social media use illegal for children, and enforce the law with teeth.

I think they is to get people on board with you to make a social change. Nobody wants to be told what to do. They need to be convinced with evidence, and *lots* of it. The tide turned for cigarettes when there was a groundswell from the public, helped along by the government, not draconially imposed by it.

Adios, accountability: X to hide 'likes' for everyone this week

Sounds like they have much bigger problems than their public image.