Posts by notyetanotherid 181 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jan 2019
> (a) What are Coca-cola doing with milk?
c.f. their "smartwater" brand, where perfectly good spring water is distilled to remove the mineral content then much the same minerals are dissolved back into the distillate, before being bottled and sold with a suitable markup for the trademark pseudo-science involved in creating something nutritionally equivalent to the original spring water.
That is it in a nutshell. The current crop of LLMs seem incapable of responding with "I don't know the answer to that" or "I need more information to do that", which would be exhibiting something closer to intelligence than just spouting plausible-looking garbage to get its reward for completing the task.
> That they didn't flag up the two missing stripes on the markings while they were at it.
To be charitable to the grifter, I wonder if their marketing team thought it would be good idea for the text "TRUMP MOBILE" to be the thirteenth stripe of the flag, as a sort of brand logo...?
It kinda does matter.
Google Messages phones home with your messaging meta data, https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2022/03/21/messages-dialer-apps-sent-text-call-info-to-google/855533. So even if the RCS implementation no longer goes via Google servers, if you use Messages they are still going to be "at the center of data graphs connecting me to every Android user I communicate with".
I don't use Google Messages for SMS/MMS for that reason and I don't want to use it for RCS either.
Or maybe the one at Hack Green in Cheshire, https://www.hackgreen.co.uk/.
> The current proposal is to ban phones from school sites
Not really, the amendment's actual wording is: "all schools in England must have a policy that prohibits the use and possession of smartphones by pupils during the school day." but it is also "to be implemented as the relevant school leader considers appropriate", so the app sign-up use case should be allowable.
Of course there is "provide for exemptions for medical devices" so any entitled little Timmy/Flossie who really wants to use their phone during the day will probably just get themselves a connected blood glucose monitor or similar...
Any such state machine should only reset to state 0 after the required number of digits in the code have been pressed otherwise you significantly reduce the number of key presses required to brute-force test every possible combination: e.g. if you reset immediately a wrong digit is entered, hitting 0123456789 tests up to 7 4-digit codes
> ... I’m not seeing in this article Anthropic’s response to El Reg’s inquiries. Nor a note that your media contact at the company (which is surely a major part of this beat) declined comment.
Did you not read all the way to the end? The penultimate paragraph of the article is : "Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment."
From legislation.gov.uk, it should only apply for anti-social behaviour within the definition in the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014:
s50(1): If a constable in uniform has reason to believe that a person has engaged, or is engaging, in anti-social behaviour. he may require that person to give his name and address to the constable.
and in Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014:
(2) In this Part “anti-social behaviour” means—
(a) conduct that has caused, or is likely to cause, harassment, alarm or distress to any person,
(b) conduct capable of causing nuisance or annoyance to a person in relation to that person's occupation of residential premises, or
(c) conduct capable of causing housing-related nuisance or annoyance to any person.
Kinda related...
Now that the Information Commissioner in the UK has basically given their blessing to the 'Pay or OK' extortion model for tracking cookie prompts, nearly every newspaper website has turned it on. So let's say a teacher asks their students to research a news story from a variety of news sources to compare the angles from which the reports were written, how are the students supposed to do so? They are not going be in a position to pay to avoid tracking cookies, but as minors they cannot give informed consent to the 'OK' to tracking option. In this case, presumably by clicking through to the story the tracking cookies will also be illegally placed?
> IDK, these days, but at least a dozen.
It is currently 13 minor faults for a fail. Examiners are supposed to use a "13th fault test" before recording any minor fault, i.e. if this was the 13th fault, was it sufficient that you would you record it and fail the learner?
. . . and in a mobile browser, now you don't even get that far. Instead you just get a message that to continue you need to install the MS 'Coprolite' app, before getting redirected to the app store's page for it. You have to use the browser's view desktop site option to be able get anywhere near the 365 homepage.
... so close: if only you had used an em dash instead of the hyphen.
For what it is worth I asked a bot to "write a short comment in praise of a contributor to an online tech forum." and it came up with (complete with the obligatory em dash):
Thank you for your insightful contributions and dedication to the community — your expertise and willingness to help make this forum a better place for everyone!
A Practical Deep Learning-Based Acoustic Side Channel Attack on Keyboards
> Well the Roman empire spanned most of Europe, the near east and parts of North Africa. Yes, a lot of the people the Romans fought were not white but the Romans WERE. It was the Romans that invadED Britian.
I suggest that you do some research on diversity in the Roman army. The significant requirement was citizenship. Roman citizens were not just from the city of Rome, or even just from Italy, but the entire empire (as you note, including Africa and the near east). Supplying men for the legions was a central part of the process of becoming part of the empire. Heck, even the emperor Septimius Severus (came to Britain in 208, died in Britain in 211) was born in what is now Libya...
The idea that the Roman army that invaded Britain was entirely what you would presumably consider white is balderdash.
> I often come back to find pages and pages of a single letter in the document I was working on.
See Brian Bilston's poem ‘On ‘;..p’[[[[[[[[[[[[[;’;////////////////////////3,’ (sorry that the link is to facetwit): https://www.facebook.com/BrianBilston/posts/1094388909395490/
> It’s got to be students.
At my uni halls back in the mists of time, the tumble drier coin-op mechanism triggered a cycle slightly before the coin dropped so you could twist it back to start position and add as many cycles as you needed with one coin. And the really tight-fisted would tape a thread to the coin to retrieve it from the slot and not pay at all...
Probably worth a couple of minutes to read this: https://www.postofficescandal.uk/post/prof-moorhead-crass-does-not-come-close/
To me, the word "numerous" is a weird qualification in that sentence, when talking about someone with 27 years of service...
"... his contribution to Apple..." would have been fine.
"... his innumerable contributions ..." would work too.
But am I wrong in thinking that "numerous" just seems to be damning with faint praise, and could be read as something along the lines of "occasionally useful"?
