Posts by Persona

LegoGPT is here to make your blocky dreams come true

infinite monkey

2^(20*20*20) = 2^80000 or ~ 10^24083

is quite a lot of combinations to brute force. Checking all the "results" to see what they resemble could be quite time consuming.

A new Lazarus arises – for the fourth time – for Pascal programming fans

Not fun

I was forced to use Pascal on a project from 1990 to 1994 after using C and later C++ for close to 10 years. It felt like a horrible step in the wrong direction.

Nvidia boss gets 45% pay bump, but is the billionaire happy?

Co- founder

He is the co-founder, CEO and president of Nvidia. A firm that last year took in $130 billion of sales revenue. Nvidia and the position it commands is very largely down to his direction and selection of the right people to employ. Being paid $50 million dollars for the year equates to less than 0.04% of sales revenue, so not unreasonable. If you think it's an unreasonable reward perhaps you are suffering from "invidia" which was the inspiration for the company name.

You'll never guess which mobile browser is the worst for data collection

Evil

On the plus side it dropped it's “Don’t be evil” motto about 7 years ago, so this activity is not contrary to it's culture.

Computacenter IT guy let girlfriend into Deutsche Bank server rooms, says fired whistleblower

One side of the story

If successful the lawyer will probably get about $8 million and their client $12 million. Possibly a little more each as the total value of the claim is $23 million. All we know about this case so far is what the lawyer is claiming in the law suit filing, so I'm inclined to take it with a grain of salt. The true events are likely to be somewhat different.

EU tells US scientists to dump Trump for a lab in Europe

Over than 3 orders of magnitude

In 2022, the United States is estimated to have spent nearly $900 billion on research and development. EUR 500 million is less than the rounding error in that estimate.

Windows isn't an OS, it's a bad habit that wants to become an addiction

Works for me

I play games, browse the web, file away email, do some financial stuff on excel, occasionally draw some stuff on Visio (2007), rarely write a letter on Word, sometimes check WhatsApp if I can't be bothered to pick up the phone. A little bit of Arduino dev too.

I put a new motherboard/processor/memory in my PC a few months back as it was over 6 years old. Moved Windows 10 to Windows 11 probably about a year ago. Both of those were easy taking perhaps 30 mins of my time each. My files are stored on a NAS which I do a cold copy backup on every 3 months. It always seems to want to install a new software version so I probably spend more time looking after the NAS than the PC.

With PC related maintenance taking me 30 minutes a year and Windows costing me nothing I have no compelling need to move off Windows. To me the O/S is almost an irrelevance. I've had Linux machines in the past, and before that used dozens of different flavors of Unix. They are all the same: just something needed to support the things you want/need to do, not something you should be devoting time to.

As ChatGPT scores B- in engineering, professors scramble to update courses

Re: Yes, kill multiple choice tests!

The first electronics lab session of my electrical engineering degree course involved a valve amplifier running at a painful but current limited and non-lethal high voltage. That lab had precisely nothing todo with the course syllabus. The perverse design of the apparatus seemed to have the sole purpose of luring fingers in the wrong place.

It was years later that I realized that lab was survival training, before moving onto the really dangerous stuff in the heavy electrics lab where fingers in the wrong place could be lethal. That lab had open knife switches, despite them being obsolete, switching hundreds of volts at hundreds of amps. In retrospect I suspect they were survival training too as they dispelled complacency.

Re: But when deeper thought was required, ChatGPT fared poorly.

It's little different from those many many software engineers who pull bits of the code off the internet and mash them together with no real understanding of what's going on. Sometimes it works.

Robot runs marathon in South Korea, apparently the first time this has happened

Be very afraid. China's Black Panther 2.0 robot dog can run 100 meters in under 10 seconds

On the issue of AI copyright, Blair Institute favors tech bros over Cool Britannia

Re: The spectre at the feast.

Whenever Tony Blair pops back up I like to share the most appropriate comment made by the cartoonist "Mac" back in 2017

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4874748/MAC-Tony-Blair-speaking-again.html

NASA doubles odds of Moon hitting near-Earth asteroid

A near miss on the moon is more likely than an actual impact and a near miss could do something very exotic to the asteroids impact. The moon's escape velocity isn't high enough to capture it so the moon won't get a moon. I'm also pretty sure it's not enough to send it back towards the Earth, but where it went could be exciting.

When disaster strikes, proper preparation prevents poor performance

Title

As titles go it's taking the piss

Privacy died last century, the only way to go is off-grid

Re: RE: the reality

"Privacy is not a priority for current American corporatism 99.9% of people".

FIFY

Jeff Bezos can now taunt Elon Musk: I'm building a moon rover for NASA, when can Tesla do that?

I barely remember it. Just the theme tune and Robbie the Robot, and the ski jump launch. I can't recall any of the episodes. I was more of an age for Stingray.

UK satellite smartphone services could get green light this year

Re: "Still, that's progress, eh"

Electric cars are very quiet. The noise you are complaining about is probably the legally required audible warning system that operates at low speeds to warn pedestrians. This turns off as the car goes faster when the tyre and wind noise is enough for pedestrians to notice.

UK must pay cyber pros more than its Prime Minister, top civil servant says

Re: Typical of the Mentality

It was a long time ago but I recall salary within a grade stepped up year by year but there was a limit (perhaps 5) to the number of salary steps in the grade. Grade increases were tough with a ceiling on the maximum grade that some people could attain within their path. I remember having a beer with one chap in his early 30's celebrating reaching the highest grade possible for his civil service career path. It was more of a wake as his career could go no further.

Some fast track career paths did have automatic promotion up to a certain level and there were even very very rare ones that could skip a grade.

Many many years back I worked for the MOD for a few years. Some time after I left I was surprised to receive a cheque for the refund of my non-contributory pension payments. It was very welcome, particularly as I did not know that non-contributory pension contributions could be "refunded". The concept still bemuses me.

A few weeks later another cheque arrived. This one was for a grade related pay increase that was backdated to April in the year I left.

The icing on the cake came a week or so later when I received yet another cheque. This one was for the refund of the non contributory pension that applied to the back dated pay increase.

Apple has locked me in the same monopolistic cage Microsoft's built for Windows 10 users

Horses for courses

Tablets are for consuming things produced by others. If you want to produce things that require cognitive effort you need a keyboard and mouse to be productive.

Yes there are exceptions, but this holds true for most.

UK must give more to ESA to get benefits of space industry boom, says Brian Cox

Re: Um....

Unfortunately ESA lacks scale too. Last year they accounted for less than 5% of orbital launches.

Scotland now home to Europe's biggest battery as windy storage site fires up

Gravity batteries are pumped hydo like Dinorwig Power Station in Wales. Very few locations are practical and they never have the capacity for long term storage.

Re: try Vanadium etc flow batteries

Vandium flow batteries look good at first glance because more long term storage just means bigger tanks. On second glance you see how expensive the vanadium electrolyte is. This means that they are only considered for short term storage and hence compete with lithium batteries.

Re: It's a bit small

It might work for Australia with only 5hours of storage, but not for the UK or north Europe where from time to time thanks to a dunkelflaute we get insignificant wind and solar generation for a couple of days.

Besides dunkelflautes we also get periods with negligible wind for a couple of weeks. These result in the wholesale cost of gas shooting up following demand.

The biggest difference however is solar. Solar is terrible in winter thanks to the high latitude. London is 51.5 north, so far higher than Australia were even Tasmania is only 42 south. A search using AI (hence untrustworthy) shows that 18% of Australia is above the Tropic of Capricorn!

Re: It's a bit small

400MWh is huge for a battery and whilst it sounds big, in the context utility scale power it's not. Sizewell B for example puts out on average >25,000MWh per day.

Developer sabotaged ex-employer with kill switch activated when he was let go

Re: other options

It's better to check for someone who is on their notice period rather than yourself. Just before they go you change it to test for someone else who is serving their notice period. The day your access is revoked the final countdown begins.

TSMC promises $100B US expansion that Trump hails without clarifying chip tariff threat

Strategic need

The US defence industry needs TMSC chips. China does not have "easy" access to them so is rapidly advancing its own industry. Consequently the US has a strategic dependance on those fabs in Taiwan and China does not have that same dependance. The solution is taxation i.e. tariff to make building and running those fabs in the US economic.

AMD looks to undercut Nvidia, win gamers' hearts with RX 9070 series

Re: Reality

It's can't be that good a game. You seem to be doing OK but after what seems to be only a short time you get old and die. Nobody ever plays it a second time.

Data is very valuable, just don't ask us to measure it, leaders say

Would they make any other investment on that basis?

Yes, advertising. This is demonstrated by the John Wanamaker quote “I am convinced that about one-half the money I spend for advertising is wasted, but I have never been able to decide which half.”

A lot of staff hires won't have a positive ROI either based on the the number of employees who seem to do nothing of value.

Elon Musk calls for International Space Station to be deorbited by 2027

He may have a point

NASA's latest risk assessment (September 2024) for keeping the ISS in operation beyond 2028 doesn't look pretty. https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/ig-24-020.pdf?emrc=67b9d4c2ce4da

Cracking and increasing air loss, lack of supply chain spare parts for 30 year old equipment, material degradation due to high energy particles, structural recertification work required as the current certification is about to expire etc.

On top of this the "Russian Orbital Segment" of the ISS handles Guidance, Navigation, and Control for the entire Station, but Russia has not yet committed to operations beyond 2028.

As Amazon takes over the Bond franchise, we submit our scripts for the next flick

I was confused too. For a moment I thought Dabbsy was back.

Nearly 10 years after Data and Goliath, Bruce Schneier says: Privacy’s still screwed

If we had access to everyone's purchasing records, we could advertise even more efficiently.

To which the skeptic at board level replies "but the car took 12 weeks to be built from me putting in my order. What do you mean you need access to all my purchasing data. You already have access to our car orders database. The problem is that you have handed over our advertising budget to a third party that doesn't care if the customer buys a car or not as they already have our money."

London has 400 GW of grid requests holding up datacenter builds

Re: 400GW?

No. The 400GW number is in the referenced report and probably correct. The fact that this potential 400GW demand is holding up new bit barns is also correct. People's interpretation on the title assuming this 400GW of power is for new bit barns is incorrect. The consequential leap which many people make assuming this must be for AI is consequently also incorrect.

It's a headline that leads a lot of people to wrong conclusions. Perhaps it's clickbait, or perhaps it's Hanlon's razor.

I was told to make backups, not test them. Why does that make you look so worried?

Re: The only verified backup is one that you have restored from

No. Just because you have restored from a backup doesn't mean that it's really there.

Back in the early 90's our new SA implemented tape backup and we knew it "worked". When we asked him to restore a recently deleted file he would load the previous days tape and have it back in seconds. Oddly there was no evidence of it working with files that had been deleted or modified further back in time. Eventually I got suspicious and took a look at his backup/restore script. This in turn led me to look in /dev and see that one of the devices there was not a device but a very large file. What he had done was to make a typo with the tape device name so instead of backing up to the tape drive through /dev/rmt0 he was backing up to and restoring from the regular file /dev/rmtO

All the backup tapes he had been cycling through for months were blank. Our sole project backup was a snapshot from the previous day and stored on the same disk drive as our live project data.

Privacy Commissioner warns the ‘John Smiths’ of the world can acquire ‘digital doppelgangers’

Re: Tough Problem

I use the phrase "girls night out" or "boys night out" even when those involved are pensioners, That said, if this instance had involved two boys I would probably have said "two chaps". If it was a girl and a boy that would be tricky, though in that instance, and being some 20+ years ago, it's even less likely for them to have the same name.

Tough Problem

We had this issue many years ago at work. Two girls with the same full name started work on the same day. All their ids for multiple system were getting mixed up or being flagged as duplicates and generating alerts. I phoned them to establish who had which primary id only to discover they had the same date of birth too! In the end I used their postcodes to disambiguate them.

BT fiber rollout passes 17 million homes, altnet challenge grows

A good part of the lack of uptake will be inertia with people locked into existing 2 year contracts so they will wait till their current deal expires before moving to fiber. On top of that there will be plenty who will not even have realized that the contract they were on has already expired so the are paying more for less.

Guess who left a database wide open, exposing chat logs, API keys, and more? Yup, DeepSeek

DROP

I've always considered it rude to go looking in someone else's tables. My inclination is to DROP any I come across so no one can.

Intel pitches modular PC designs to make repairs less painful

Re: perspective

Here you go: the horrific process of reclaiming precious metals from e-waste in a third world slum.

https://youtu.be/zmJrxyk1ZpY

Yes it works and is economic for them, but ........

My desktop PC is nearly 30 years old

Ok, every part has been replaced at least twice, but only one part at a time so its always been the same PC. PC's are modular: applications, O/S, case, PSU, storage, monitor, keyboard/mouse, GPU and motherboard/CPU/memory.

The last 3 not always but normally get upgraded together as whilst I have upgraded just the CPU it is seldom cost effective. Similarly I have only once or twice added extra RAM. Normally memory technology advances mean its also time to change the motherboard and CPU.

My last upgrade of almost a year ago was the GPU and it will get a CPU/motherboard/memory upgrade by the end of summer. The case is the oldest bit: its my second since 2001 and I see no need to change it anytime soon.

If this doesn't demonstrate that PC's are modular I don't know what would.

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

Re: Linux was built securely.

All software development has a looming wafer thin trust problem. An awful lot of software currently gets written by cut and pasting code found on the internet. The same bits of code get used time and again and is subjected to lots of scrutiny. As time goes on this will be replaced more and more by people asking their favorite AI to write the code which the "author" then admits as having been written by AI or passes it off as his own code. The author becomes prolific and pushes out lots of code. Everything is fine but now we have to trust the AI as it's very hard to tell if the code written by the AI for one user/purpose would be the same for all. An AI trained by a suitably malevolent group could insert backdoor code for a specific developer and inferred application which would not only be hard to detect by eye but also be crafted to be invisible to code analysis tools.

Not always forever

One day later the Reg gives us this:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/29/nvidia_gpu_ubuntu_downgrade/

Were this to happen during a Windows upgrade (as it does) there would be headlines here and people saying it's time for Linux desktops for all, because Linux is forever. Except it's not.

In a perfect world were the legacy drivers to be maintained forever this wouldn't happen but it's not a perfect world. Old Linux distros die and disappear too, with Absolute Linux being "possibly" the latest.

China claims major fusion advance and record after 17-minute Tokamak run

Plasma is tricky stuff. AI is looking good as a control mechanism for dynamically keeping plasma stable.

Tool touted as 'first AI software engineer' is bad at its job, testers claim

Tasks that seemed straightforward often took days rather than hours, with Devin getting stuck in technical dead-ends or producing overly complex, unusable solutions

Sounds like a good fit for large Government IT projects. Perhaps Devin should be renamed Capita.

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

Re: Define

From what I have heard you allegedly get paid a lot more for real plumbing work than being a male porn actor.

BTW- I hate referring to actors and actresses in the adult film industry as porn stars. Rarely are they "stars".

Gov.uk app

I'm cynical enough to suspect that at least part of reason for this is to make the upcoming Government digital driving license and identity initiative more popular.

Re: Bonkers

Completely untrue. There are many many Daily Mail readers who wish to retain their anonymity whilst viewing porn.

CAPTCHAs now run Doom – on nightmare mode

Re: CAPTCHA's days are numbered? PROMISE???

The same one had me clicking on traffic lights. Some in the foreground covered multiple squares, do you click on the squares with just the coloured lenses, or the boxes as well. What about the supporting poles and gantries. Do humans considered those bits as "part" of the traffic lights?

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

Re: Basic will rise again!

I learnt BASIC at school and typed my first program onto a Model 33 teleprinter at the local technical college. Don't knock it: UPPERCASE was all we had back then. The teletype had a paper tape punch.

I took my rolled up paper tape from the terminal room to the computer room and gave it to the white coat wearing "all mighty operator". Without uttering a word he took my tape and fed it into the reader on the mainframe, then wound it up on a winding machine and handed it back to me. All the time I was expecting him to press some button to run my program and the line printer to burst to life. Instead he said "Parity Error", turned his back and I was dismissed. Being a teenager with no computer education I had no idea what those two words meant. It's amazing I persisted and went on to work with computers. I can only attribute it to the technical collage also having a "glass terminal" with 300baud modem link to the Open University computer that had a lunar lander game.

Will 2025 be the year satellite-to-smartphone services truly take off?

I abandoned those expensive plans long ago and pay $395 a year for unlimited everything

Which illustrates a problem Starlink has outside the US. In the UK I'm paying £60 a year for unlimited UK calls and texts plus 5GB of data and 100 international call minutes each month. What appears cheap to US users can be eye wateringly expensive to the rest of the world.

Boffins ponder paltry brain data rate of 10 bits per second

Yes its a hugely parallel process. Human brains can take in a complex visual scene and identify features and faces in an instant. I could believe a frame rate of 10 frames a second maxes this out but it's processing huge amounts of data in parallel to achieve this.