Posts by holmegm

Oracle finally responds to wage discrimination claims… by suing US Department of Labor

Re: Your objection is irrelevant

"If this were a “pool of hired labour” problem, pay would be equal within each bracket, but there just wouldn’t be very many minority / female engineers."

You forgot the scenario of "pressure to hire lots of (certain) minorities and female".

If the pool of talent is smaller, but you *have* to recruit the same number of people (in this case, proportionately), you get a weaker team. It's the same reason that small schools play sports against other small schools, not large schools.

No fan of Oracle in general, but I need to suspend judgment on this until I hear some real evidence.

Outside of union shops, "same job title" does *not* always mean same pay.

Disparities between various groups when it comes to average pay *could* be due to racial discrimination. Or it could be due to any number of other factors. It would take more than an Excel sheet to justly establish this.

Go champion retires after losing to AI, Richard Nixon deepfake gives a different kind of Moon-landing speech...

Re: AI Go.

"But seriously, why is he giving up because an 'entity' can beat him? The fastest female sprinter doesn't stop competing just because she will never beat the fastest male, who himself will never beat the fastest greyhound. You compete like for like, to be the best in your field. In Go, this man is the best HUMAN Go player."

Yeah, it's odd.

Nobody spells better than a dictionary, but we still have spelling bees.

We're so, so, sorry you're not able to get PC chips, says Intel to everyone who hasn't gone with AMD yet

Re: Wordpress?

"Its just sloppy work to let someone else do the work for you."

If you use anything more abstracted than machine language, you already do that.

"Drupal, Joomla, Magento, Wordpress, they are all full of holes, if you compare the cve count, its roughly relative to the popularity (i.e. how much efort is being put into breaking it)"

Fallacy of the false alternative. The alternative of you writing hole free code by yourself actually isn't available to you. You just think that it is.

Re: Wordpress?

Yeah, I used to say that ... until Drupalgeddon ... and a couple weeks later Drupalgeddon II ...

Re: Wordpress?

"Intel uses Wordpress? Wow!"

Over a quarter of the web uses WordPress. It ceased to be "just for blogs" many years ago.

(Not that most websites are much more than glorified blogs anyway.)

No wonder Bezos wants to move industry into orbit: In space, no one can hear you* scream

Re: What to do with all of last-year's iPhone 50s?

"Or will the earth become an ever-growing pile of junk?"

Like Deponia?

RISC-V business: Tech foundation moving to Switzerland because of geopolitical concerns

"Trump impeached equals Hillary Clinton getting in?? Someone has been watching Fox News to much"

Um ... huh? Is blurting out "Fox News" some kind of Tourette's syndrome thing?

Has anyone at Fox News ever made such an outlandish claim about presidential succession?

Re: Swiss Miss Incorporation

"I suggest people look into the deep financial benefits of incorporating in Switzerland. While the USA and U.K. have corporate tax rates of 35% and 28% respectively, Swiss land is 7.8%. Personal income taxes are very low. There are also significant privacy advantages."

Low taxes? Oh dear. They must be eeeevil racists? (That's usually what a low tax position gets you called elsewhere.)

Googlers fired after tracking colleagues working on US border cop projects. Now, if they had monetized that stalking...

Re: I find the argument bizarre

"because if we allow that, we have essentially abolished the law and we'll just have those in power making judgements based on their personal sense of justice and we'll have a system that's wide open for abuse."

You've literally just described the miscreants here. They used their access to Google systems to creepily spy on their coworkers, all in service of enforcing ideological conformity to their ideology. But it's OK to them, because their personal sense of justice is better than those they were spying on.

Which is it?

"They argued on Monday that a section of the corporation's code of conduct that says Google employees should “speak up if you see something that you think isn’t right” provided ample justification for tracking and scrutinizing their colleagues."

Wait, so they deny all wrongdoing, but they *also* say that their wrong doing is right doing because stuff?

You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: A quirky investigation into why AI does not always work

I see

"Simply removing gender information was insufficient as the AI used other clues to prefer male applicants – because they were preferred in the data on which it was trained."

Does that roughly translate to "because they were more likely to have the relevant experience and qualifications"?

Close the windows, it's coming through the walls: Copper Cthulu invades Dabbsy's living room

The problem with that is that people in the aggregate either can't or won't do it (it hardly matters which).

So designing systems that rely upon them all doing so, is like designing software that depends on perfect input being supplied. It's a systems engineering failure.

Re: ME?

I'm thinking a monitor with HDMI port? What reason is there to even have a tuner in the TV anymore, to say nothing of "smarts'?

Re: Also, wifi is all very well, but....

"If you want speed, use wires. (or fibre, although never seen that inside a house. Yet)."

I have a sort of theoretical fiber port in my home. They came round two or three years ago and installed it (for use by the people of the future), then put a piece of tape with a logo over it.

I occasionally for fun call up and ask when it might be used for something, and am always assured that it will be really soon now (tm).

Bad news: 'Unblockable' web trackers emerge. Good news: Firefox with uBlock Origin can stop it. Chrome, not so much

Re: Ad Spend

It's strange that you think those things aren't measured.

So say that 33% get no upsells at all, 33% get upsell set 'A', and 34% get upsell set 'B'.

For a large enough audience, yes, they do very well know whether the upsells pissed off enough people to make it not worth it.

Re: Ad Spend

Not if "A" *is* your current content and functionality. Then you are literally testing new stuff against current stuff.

Re: I'm forced to wonder

We need a "your idea will not work because" checklist for this, like we used to have for anti spam solutions.

Re: Ad Spend

"Where's the actual evidence?"

For web based ads? It's abundant. You can run A/B tests (or A/B/C/D/whatever tests) in highly sophisticated ways and see what works.

Re: screw Google for deliberately helping advertisers

#3 is the key there ... it's not as though subdomains pointing outward are new. They are used for all sorts of things. E.g. events.whatever.com points to some cloudy event registration service.

This is going to end with some star chamber deciding "what is an ad"?

That code that could never run? Well, guess what. Now Windows thinks it's Batman

I've written plenty of *comments* which say "this should never happen ..."

Welcome to cultured meat – not pigs reading Proust but a viable alternative to slaughter

Re: I'm going to need some long-term studies before I eat cultured meat.

Literally the entire food chain involves converting disgusting or even inedible stuff into tasty edible stuff.

The good veggie burgers taste better than meat to me, actually. It would be a loss to make them taste more like meat burgers.

Re: Artificial Protein-Based Meat

That makes little sense ... we already have incentives to make food cheap, there's no reason that food would suddenly become poisonous on some mass scale simply because of new production methods.

I could throttle you right about now: US Navy to ditch touchscreens after kit blamed for collision

Re: 255 comments so far

I have. Touch screens would have been a very bad idea.

In fact, much of the tech was *quite* outdated (even for the time, which was quite some time ago), but that was because it was tried and tested and worked well. Stuff had to be certified to actually work and be safe.

That was in engineering though, things were indeed fancier up forward. Apparently that's not a good thing ...

Re: Touch screens

I use GPS on the phone for virtually all trips. It has way more information about current traffic conditions than I do. The odd edge cases where it is wrong are *far* outweighed by the benefit of being steered around a pileup before I am in it.

I'm still not that Gary, says US email mixup bloke who hasn't even seen Dartford Crossing

Re: firstname.lastname at gmail

That is correct; either the person himself gives the incorrect email address, or the shopman typed it in wrong, or friends and family typed it wrong, simply assuming that their loved one has the good email address instead of the joe.smith546 that they actually had to settle for.

It is not Gmail's fault; they are simply so large that it happens with them more often.

This is eerily familiar. Right down to the early adopter, first.surname gmail.

I am regularly astonished by not only the namesakes of myself who do not know their own email addresses, but also by the thickness of the organizations and people to whom they have supplied my email address.

No, I am not your family member.

I do not owe your foreign government any taxes.

The vehicle to which you refer is not mine, and mine has never driven in your land, though I'm glad you want my repeat custom.

I'm glad you found someone with my name fetching, but I do not want your rather-too-personal photo which you have sent me (yes, this has happened, and it turns out the randy bloke had actually had business cards made up with my email address. I tracked him down from sheer curiosity, and he found it hilarious.)

They terrrk err jerrrbs! Vodafone replaces 2,600 roles with '600 bots' in bid to shrink €48bn debt

"jerbs" = "someone else's job, which I shall chortle at them losing". Classy.

Kudos to the headline writer for consistency, I guess, for at least staying snarky when the "jerb" isn't blue collar. Most techies aren't quite so consistent.

Section 230 supporters turn on it, its critics rely on it. Up is down, black is white in the crazy world of US law

"You mean that in a newspaper it's not the newspaper saying it, but only the "contributor" (journalist) writing it? Sure, sometimes it happens (i.e. op-eds) and the reader is usually explicitly warned. AFAIK, the newspaper is still responsible for what it publish."

The journalist is employed by the newspaper, one way or another.

If a "newspaper" existed whose whole shtick was that pretty much anybody could put a piece in it, blog style, I doubt the newspaper itself could be held responsible.

Re: The law of Unintended Consequences applies....

"Changing your mind on things when the situation changes or new facts come to light is exactly what everyone, not just politicians, should do."

Well, except when it isn't. There's a fine line between being properly adaptable, and on the other hand just getting swept along with mass hysteria.

A principle is literally something you don't change just because the fashions around you changed.

If it's criminal to say something, then it's the person saying it who's the criminal, not the owner of the phone lines. Or of the glorified blog whose whole shtick is that pretty much anybody can sign up and post stuff.

Re: "This will also lead to an angry mob trying to lynch you"

I suspect it was metaphorical. He's describing a democratic society. If large numbers of people are upset about something, the government tends to listen to them. That's a good thing (usually).

NSA to Congress: Our spy programs don’t work, aren’t used, or have gone wrong – now can you permanently reauthorize them?

And the democrats control the House.

That's not long division, Timmy! China school experimented on pupils with mind-reading tech

"Jeez, 1984 wasn't a manual, guys!"

I don't think the "guys" in China, a communist dictatorship, really care about that kind of snark.

Bet you can't guess what I'm wearing, or where I'm wearing it

"before social media was discovered by ultra-right-wing snowflakes whose fragile masculinity is threatened by 15-year-old schoolgirls."

I personally don't find that using a 15 year old girl as a human shield for one's politics speaks much of masculinity either, but hey, to each their own.

Police confirm interview with UKFast boss Lawrence Jones

Unfortunately, there is so much "crying wolf" in today's environment that a lot of skepticism is called for.

You'e yping i wong: macOS Catalina stops Twitter desktop app from accepting B, L, M, R, and T in passwords

Why does a deliberately crippled blog have a desktop application?

Time to check who left their database open and leaked 7.5m customer records: Hi there, Adobe Creative Cloud!

Why??

Why is it so easy to do this? Why would you *ever* want a database to be world readable?

Surely wanting the database to be world readable is such an edge case that it should be at the very least *difficult* to do ... so why is it so dang easy? (As it clearly must be, with all these examples?)

Now the US DoJ has charged Apple's insider trading lawyer with, er... well, it's embarrassing

Re: Tying your own noose...

Have you ever been near a real courtroom? There *is* a revolving door, but it ain't for the rich white guys ...

Republican senators shoot down a triple whammy of proposed election security laws

I've been hearing the "dying out" thing for more decades than I'd care to say. It seems to be taking an awfully long time.

Or ... perhaps things aren't as simple as presented, and young people get older and gain experience and some wisdom.

I see your blue passport and raise you a green number plate: UK mulls rewards scheme for zero-emission vehicles

Re: Wealthy

They want the social worker to use public transport. If that limits her employment options, oh well; not their problem.

Help! I bought a domain and ended up with a stranger's PayPal! And I can't give it back

Yes, perhaps I have been lucky, but I can't say I've had worse service from PayPal than from any bank. Fallacy of the false alternative and all that.

I discovered the world's last video rental kiosk and it would make a great spaceship

Re: DVD rental

Yes, VHS tapes can be had for essentially nothing now.

As an environmental apostate, I very occasionally pick one up as an (in practice) "rental".

We're going deeper Underground: Vulture clicks claws over London's hidden tracks

Only since you asked ... I suppose personally it varies by the thing counted.

I tend to think of decades in relation to a human life. That doesn't leave much room between "few" and "many".

"Mail Rail's original 1920s trains ran for several decades, only being replaced in the 1980s;"

obNitpick: 60 years is "several decades"?

But kidding aside, fascinating article!

Blood money is fine with us, says GitLab: Vetting non-evil customers is 'time consuming, potentially distracting'

If only we lived in democracies and there were some political movement that disgruntled tech employees could pragmatically support that had issues with China too, for the very same reasons that they do. I'm sure they'd get right on board?

No ghosts but the Holy one as vicar exorcises spooky tour from UK's most haunted village

Re: Sweet Kicks

"The State could have used the avoided tax to help fund necessary services for people in need."

Or could have used the avoided tax to fund a sinecure or contracts for someone's brother in law.

I suspect your odds are better with the church ...

Oh dear... AI models used to flag hate speech online are, er, racist against black people

Re: Racist AI or offensive and crude slang? You decide...

"Offense is taken, not given"

The problem with that is you could apply it to any words at all. *All* words are just arbitrary sounds (or strings) with shared meaning. And the shared meaning of offensive words is that they are offensive.

We *do* run into problems where words mean different things in different groups and contexts, but it's not an insoluble problem; courts for example solve it all the time.

Remember the FBI's promise it wasn’t abusing the NSA’s data on US peeps? Well, guess what…

Re: Makes sense

"More fundamentally, what if the FBI use it to get Krompromat on judges, maybe even Supreme Court justices - what future does the Republic have then?"

What if they already did? There was a rather significant Supreme Court case you might recall in recent memory, where the chief justice voted very surprisingly.

'We go back to the Moon to stay': Apollo vets not too chuffed with NASA's new rush to the regolith

Re: "To simply go and come back and say that we've been there again is highly unsatisfactory,"

Wow, we don't? We can just stay on our first return flight? Cool.