Posts by Ordinary Donkey

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

Re: (larger) US pint

So what's that in olympic sized swimming pools?

What the **** did you put in that code? The client thinks it's a cyberattack

Re: ::perks up::

Got your Profanisaurus ready?

European biz calls for Euro tech for local people

UEFI

Is it true that UEFI secure boot standard means that an American company has the final say over what is allowed to boot on any PC with it enabled? And that there is a lot of pressure for hardware to prevent people from turning it off?

I'm never sure about these things but you'd think people would be discussing that right now.

BOFH: There's a fatal error in the blinkenlights

Re: As i read the passage

diaxos

Speech now streaming from brains in real-time

Those people will no doubt find that foot implants are readily available.

EU: These are scary times – let's backdoor encryption!

Remind me how long smoking has been banned in all UK workplaces except parliament?

It's bad enough we have to turn on cams for meetings, now the person staring at you may be an AI deepfake

Can we at least get personal grooming deepfakes so we can roll out of bed and look professional?

Time to make C the COBOL of this century

Re: C is the new COBOL

Oh what the hell you are so close to a hundred upvotes...

Julian Assange to go free in guilty plea deal with US

Re: Why now?

Yeah, about that...

Re: Why now?

So that Trump couldn't win votes by promising to free him. Because that was happenning.

Interesting to see if Ross Ulbricht gets the same treatment.

Campaigners claim 'Privacy Preserving Attribution' in Firefox does the opposite

Re: So how does one turn it off?

That's the one.

Re: So how does one turn it off?

Open about:config and search for 'attribution' - you'll see it.

Keir Starmer says facial recognition tech is the answer to far-right riots

Re: Only for the Far Right

Exactly. Equality under the law means laws are not only applied to the people that the politicians say they will be.

Re: Only for the Far Right

Of course it will be used on everybody else. These laws always are.

Have people forgotten that the first man arrested under anti-terror laws was the Vice President of CND?

BOFH: Well, we did tell you to keep the BitLocker keys safe

Re: do not read BofH when eating ffs :o)

Many of those were probably 8%. It's a country that teaches you to read the label.

For the record: You just ordered me to cause a very expensive outage

Re: Electrical Engineer?

Then do you take the 200 up front and tell them it's a mechanical problem?

Well they're Waeling now...

We need a volunteer to literally crawl over broken glass to fix this network

Yes, the name is Gordon.

The other big 90s role of the actor who delivered the quote "If I gave the order those guys would crawl on their bellies across broken glass with their flies unzipped."

I hereby conclude that the regomizer was born in the late 70s

Europe gives TikTok 24 hours to explain 'addictive and toxic' new app

Re: True, but...

Envision are doing a better job at things like that because they're making it their central focus.

Re: True, but...

My blind friend has just enough vision to see her smartphone 30cm in front of her which she uses to watch for obstacles further away using the camera.

Official: EU users can swerve App Store and download iOS apps from the web

Re: Not a bad start

The company producing the app. They have a web portal for some of their services but not all, let me download it from there after logging in.

Not a bad start

Now if you didn't need a google account to install android apps in a virtual android machine that would be great.

Yes, I know about f-droid but I want the company producing them to verify they're real. Things involving money.

MIT breakthrough means there's no material too weird for 3D printing

Re: I'm somewhat disappointed...

What do they use?

(To be clear I know you can 3d print soap moulds, I want to skip that bit)

Re: I'm somewhat disappointed...

I want to 3d print soap.

Tough luck, bosses, AI is coming for your job, too

An inflexible uncaring and results-obsessed manager without BO? It's a victory of sorts...

BBC exterminates AI experiments used to promote Doctor Who

R2D2 appears to have the annedroid's hair. Meanwhile the starfleet doctor seems to be a mash-up of Capaldi and Tennant with Christopher Eccleston's ears.

Yes, I did just crash that critical app. And you should thank me for having done so

This reminds me of wondering aloud what would happen on my father's old telephone switchboard if somebody set multiple phones to redirect in a loop and called one of them from another phone.

Boringly the answer was that if a phone diverted to a phone that the call had already diverted from then it rang instead of diverting.

Updates are plenty but fans are few in Windows 11 land

Here's an idea

how about no unnecessary features whatsoever?

Things which require windows features to run can request to enable them. If I want to spend three hours bashing my head against the wall trying to get something I never asked for to stop fucking up in the most idiotic way possible then insert joke about taking to $family_member here.

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

Re: I regret ....

I gave him mine for you.

Reported $60M Reddit deal signed to train AI models with user data

Re: Citogenisis

Yes, that's what they're doing.

Raspberry Pi Pico cracks BitLocker in under a minute

Re: Hmm ...

It was the stated reason at the time, but it sounded like an excuse even then. For whatever reason I think that some of the original TrueCrypt devs wanted out.

Cory Doctorow has a plan to wipe away the enshittification of tech

The soccerer's apprentice?

COVID-19 infection surge detected in wastewater, signals potential new wave

Had it

The notable thing in this wave is everyone I know who got it got pretty bad brain fog. So if coworkers are being particularly stupid you now have a medical reason to shun them.

Meta's ad-free scheme dares you to buy your privacy back, one euro at a time

Re: How will tracking be stopped?

"And if you visit a pharmacy website we'll totally tell all your friends that someone around them was shopping for pile cream."

Nice data you've got here, shame if somebody was to slurp it?

Boffins find AI stumbles when quizzed on the tough stuff

Re: the example

I'm thinking that the answer is 400ml for a scientist and 600ml for an engineer?

BOFH: Adventures in overenthusiastic automation

Re: Absolutely hilarious episode

I had assumed it was the dog turd command, but you might be right.

Twitter, aka X, tops charts for misinformation, EU official says

Narrowly beating out the Canadian parliament at this rate...

UK Online Safety Bill to become law – and encryption busting clause is still there

Re: Blighty seems determined to cut itself off from the rest of the world

Just to clarify, does calling the new law an unworkable mess violate the new law? What about calling ofcom underfunded?

It sounds a lot like this law is intended to impose hefty prison sentences for claiming to have seen the emperor's hairy arse cheeks.

Scientists suggest possible solution to space-induced bone loss

Now they've managed to make it 'cool' by giving it a space flight angle, maybe someone will get around to it at last.

Last rites for the UK's Online Safety Bill, an idea too stupid to notice it's dead

Re: faulty by design

Or else it's all just rich men west of lambeth who want to have total control.

MIT boffins build battery alternative out of cement, carbon black, water

Re: Perhaps I missed something

Those were the days.

Re: Perhaps I missed something

It's in the MIT link.

The material is then soaked in a standard electrolyte material, such as potassium chloride, a kind of salt, which provides the charged particles that accumulate on the carbon structures. Two electrodes made of this material, separated by a thin space or an insulating layer, form a very powerful supercapacitor, the researchers found.

Re: Perhaps I missed something

As I understand it, each concrete block's carbon is one electrode, with huge surface area because it spreads through the concrete in tiny rivulets as it's formed. Then they place the two concrete blocks into some sort of container with electrolyte and an insulator.

The breakthrough here is the huge surface area, because capacitance is a function of electrode surface area.

Aliens crash landed on Earth – and Uncle Sam is covering it up, this guy tells Congress

Almost like it's a distraction.

Is there a Hunter Biden story people need distracting from or something?

Amazon, Bing, Wikipedia make EU's list of 'Very Large' platforms

Re: A challenge?

Amazon Terms and Conditions, by ChatGPT*

• You owe us your soul,
• your daughter and son,
• we'll send you tat late.

(Wasn't intending it to come out as a haiku, but why not?)

*not really

Nobody does DR tests to survive lightning striking twice

In the future all lightning must be cloud based.

Elon Musk's Twitter moves were 'reaffirming' says Reddit boss amid API changes

Dirty Protest

Just to warn people, a lot of subreddits have been forced to re-open and have opted for a minimal moderation approach, citing a lack of third party moderation tools.

If a subreddit is now tagged NSFW and wasn't before then you'll probably see something you don't want to if you look in there.

Just figured people should know.

Elon's own tweet said that the goal was:

1. Do lots of dumb stuff

2. Keep what works

3. Profit.

Reddit does indeed seem to have some confusion about what point 2 was.