Posts by David Hicklin 1187 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Sep 2007
> Leave deaf children from different backgrounds together with no formal instruction and they will develop a common sign language quite quickly.
Happens between people all the time, my daughter and her closest friend even had a language all of their own for the time they were at school
There are a few flaws to your optimism
The days of big power efficiency gains in semiconductor hardware are long gone, if anything over that last few years it has effectively flatlined with any gains to the "feature size" costing untold billions to develop.
optimise code? Who are you kidding! it just keeps on getting more bloated and inefficient, and will only get worse if people start using AI to write it
The only possible reason for "peak power soon" is when the AI bubble finally bursts and the demand for all these DC's collapses and they get shut down.
> When my employer went from XP to Win7
To be fair when mine went from XP to 7 it was an improvement but it has been downhill all the way from there, managed to retire before w11 got foisted on me unlike my poor daughter at her place, she was here earlier and complaining bitterly how everything had changed/moved and even simple things like copying a file were a pain.
According to the article any non-matching scan is immediately deleted, so that answers one of your points.
Also as I read it they are using it to find people who are either already wanted (and are avoiding arrest) or considered a threat to others aka think of the children approach as given in an example on the article.
As for which offences I would expect that once you have either done your time as His Majesties pleasure and/or paid the fine, has points on your licence then the offence is "spent" as far as in being wanted for arrest and there is no need to be looking for you.
So this does have some positive uses but as always mission creep can set in and before you know it we are in 1984, so yes there has to be some laws laid down soon that limit how the scans are stored (should always be never unless a positive) along with some means of erasing false positives and ensuring that it is really only used for the examples given above.
Oh and as for tracking you around, if you have a mobile phone that is already doing it and the national ANPR camera's keep track of where vehicles are, so we are already part of the way there.
> shoddy coding practices means that computer savvy hackers are having a field day.
Don't forget the "get it out now, I don't care if it is not finished we can patch later..." and it is so easy to shove a web site together these days usually without any thought of security. Plus a lot of these are your supplier websites that get hacked.
> While there may be a file on you, you don't want it to keep expanding
It has been suggested that there are enough large data sets out there that it is possible to construct a lot of information on you already, it has been shown that anonymous data can be reconstructed so I think it is a little late for closing that door now.
> Better guardrails, or contextual awareness, or whatever you want to call the concept today, might mitigate the problem a bit
The number of times that a crash barrier (guard rail in this context) gets flattened and fails to do its job on the roads is a good analogy that LLM guard rails are just sticking plasters
Well considering that you must have looked at all the evidence to reach your conclusion why don't you post it here so that we can all see it instead of cowering behind an AC posting?
Oh you haven't, you are just parroting what our other conspiracy theorists are spouting.
So yes, in the absence of the data to back up your assertion I am ridiculing you.
> An overseas long-distance call required a cardiologist when your bill arrived.
This is UK to Germany but we are in the 1970's, my mum worked as the switchboard operator at a hotel so made all her calls to her brother back in Germany whilst at work after somehow working out a way of hiding the cost
> but how'd that brexit thing work out?
Unlike the AC I'll openly answer that - badly, the biggest mistake we ever made but hey that is what a tiny majority (2%) of the country voted for so we are stuck with it And despite whatever arguments you want to make the extremists of either camp are so deeply entrenched in their beliefs that nothing will budge them and the country remains deeply divided by it.
For the record I voted remain.
> Are “consent or pay” business models compliant with data protection law?
No issue to pay to not see ANY adverts as that is the business model but I should not have to pay anything for the business model to be compliant with data protection law as that is a legal requirement.
> You can't keep producing more than you deliver... as you aren't paid for cars sitting on lots outside the factory.
The 1970's and 80's from the UK called and want a chat, well remember fields full of unsold cars all quietly rusting away...and boy did they rust in those days!!
And it will always be 15-20 years away until someone makes a massive breakthrough.
On the other hand we already have a fusion power source, its 93 million miles away - we just need to use it better. Imaging if the investment into fusion had been spent on better solar systems (systems in this case including storing and distributing that energy)
> Now whether you’d like to live under China’s political system is another matter, but when you look at any recent major UK infrastructure project, it’s hard to argue against his point.
I suspect a lack of public enquires and if you object they just build the motorway either side of your house (not sure if that is still there now). NIMBY's also probably don't stand a chance and we need to go back to the Victorian era of building the railways where they just demolished anything in the way
> This is "especially irritating" when, as I had with a previous work laptop, when waking from display sleep
Ye Gods I hated that - along with a 2 minute screen lock that thankfully I had a registry hack (and use of Symantec AV's monitors and scripts) to disable it but still a pain after locking it to leave the desk
> Starship will never be successful to the Moon or Mars.
One of its problems is too many rocket engines, same as the Russians had with the N1 moon rocket - there are too many things to go wrong. They got it better with Soyuz of course but still the N1 had 20 rockets and StarShip has 33....time to dust off the Saturn V rockets engines!
> losing ad blockers will mean I laregly stop using the internet. You forget what a useless mess it is without blockers,
Wish I could upvote you more than once, I use metcheck weather site and over the weekend had to use it on mobile and ye gads it was hard going with ads obscuring large chunks of the phone screen, even my pi-hole stops that on wifi at home.
But they just have to keep on fiddling with it to add new shiny features that few people want or need just because....well because of what? In the early days most new features were welcomed and probably increased the sales...but now?
I wish they would just leave things alone and fix the bugs ...a forlorn hope it seems.
> live next to the East Coast Main Line in Newcastle
Where I live there are parallel train lines one street over in either direction and the only time we really notice them after 30 years is when a really heavy train gets the house shaking and rattling.
Could have been worse I guess, HS2 on a viaduct was going to be build alongside one almost at the bottom of our garden!
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