Posts by tonique

3Blue1Brown copyright takedown blunder by AI biz blamed on human error

Recently I watched a video by one Freya Holmér titled "Generative AI is a parasitic cancer". She describes her Youtube channel as "I do videos on tech art, math, game dev, and whatever else I want to project to your screens". Holmér has been devastated by that for-profit companies have stolen people's text, and that it is becoming more and more difficult to find--using common search engines--things by actual people and not "AI" slop, for example when searching for information about a file format. In the end, she has resorted to self-delusion that she can ignore current "AI" stuff.

This incident concerning 3Blue1Brown is another sign of this "AI" greed.

Classic Outlook explodes when opening more than 60 emails

If Outlook had exploded 20 years ago, things might be somewhat better on the e-mail client front.

Palo Alto Networks execs apologize for 'hostesses' dressed as lamps at Black Hat booth

Re: Any publicity...

They clearly thought that it would be a bright idea.

Microsoft issues deadline for end of Windows 10 support – it's pay to play for security

I'm mostly concerned how annoying computers at $WORK will be after forced to adopt Windows 11. There the change will certainly happen somewhat slower than Microsoft's deadline but... I'm what may be considered a power user, as opposed to most collegues, and I am not looking forward having to deal with a more shittified OS.

Tech renders iconic rockers Kiss genuinely immortal

I was made for cashin' in on you, baby ♫

Greenpeace calls out tech giants for carbon footprint fumble

Re: Greenpeace is irrelevant and so is carbon dioxide

Are you okay?

Musk's X caught throttling outbound links to websites he doesn't like

I don't even want to X "X". Apologies to Massive Attack.

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

Re: Alien UFOs

At least in "Mars Attacks!" the Martians landed at Pahrump, Nevada.

Sigh. That's stupid.

Cosmic rays more likely to glitch out water-cooled computers

Even worse: The next paper will be published typeset in Cosmic Sans.

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Re: duodecimal my arse

I suggest using irrational base, perhaps the golden ratio (1.618...) or Gelfond's constant minus pi: e to the power of pi minus pi (19.999099979...).

Realizing this is getting out of hand, Coq mulls new name for programming language

Re: Vin

If you were spelling "Enacs" instead of "Emacs", you may not be able to use that editor any more, so "vin" is more desirable.

Musk's Hotel California erected at Twitter HQ, as some offices converted into bedrooms

My guess is that Musk designed the room himself with The Sims 2.

Excel @ mentions approach general availability on the desktop

My favourite small example of bloat in Excel and the surrounding Windows systems is that scrolling through the spreadsheet is not smooth but janky. It was smooth in 2006 and the Excel and Windows of that day.

Supreme Court urged to halt 'unconstitutional' Texas content-no-moderation law

Re: Tucker: Black lives don't matter

Not an American... What I've seen not-current-mainstream-Republican people claiming is that "Owning the libs is the point" and also "Cruelty is the point". It seems to me that the current Republican narrative is getting even more detached from reality and common sense. I have no solution.

Elon Musk flogs $8.4bn of Tesla shares amid Twitter offer drama

This time I am, perhaps without any particular reason, very amused by Elon Musk's antics. Part of it is that I view Tw*tter (term needs bowdlerising more than several other profanities, and it's funnier that way) as a scourge in curret social media landscape. Well, social media auto-feed is in my opinion rather insidious overall.

I know, old guy yells at the cloud.

Why the Linux desktop is the best desktop

Re: You must be using a different product...

My "favourite" feature of Word was that, in a document stored on Teams, the appearance of tables changed when two people opened it. I mean, one after another OR at the same time. Tables are very flaky in Word.

Microsoft datacenter to heat homes in Finland

Re: Baths

You're right. I was just trying to make a comparison to a place that Britons could find easily on the map.

Re: Well, it's a first

Found a supply of Pentium 4 Prescotts?

Re: Baths

Espoo is 700 km to the south from the Arctic Circle! It is not much to the north of the latitude of Lerwick, Shetland Islands!

The Human Genome Project will tell us who to support at Eurovision

I can give my alleged one percent Papuan support in Eurovision when Papua New Guinea enters the ESC.

Hello Slackware, our old friend: Veteran Linux distribution releases version 15.0 at last

Re: no systemd?

systemd may wait to shut down or reboot, generally 1.5 minutes if you're logged in from another computer on the local network. Or it may wait for some other reason (which I can't remember now but it's happened). Really, that's my main gripe with systemd now, slowing down rebooting.

Perhaps there is a setting to control this behaviour.

50 lines of Bash to bring a Wordle fan out of their shell

Re: First try

You were clearly playing with a Finnish wordlist and got a regular word that happens to mean 'laughter'.

How to get banned from social media without posting a thing

A guess

>DABBS_9571684884194295615498

Perhaps a long string of numbers looks like a stereotypical spammer account...

Then there's "88" in that string. Eigth letter of the alphabet is "H". In Neo-Nazi communications, "88" stands for "Heil Hitler".

Ad blockers altering website code is not a copyright violation, German court rules

Re: Great idea

"There are a few websites out there, where if you click their 'decline cookies' pop-up option they refuse to let you in."

I found to my dismay today that if I don't click on "accept all cookies" on the Statistics Centre of Finland site, it won't show me statistics.

Humanity has officially touched the Sun (or, at least, one of its probes has)

Re: Sorry, can't resist

Currently I'd be more concerned if the Parker probe unleashes a new coronavirus.

It's time to delete that hunter2 password from your Microsoft account, says IT giant

Re: A pain in the rear end

At $work, we are required to use a six-number pin so I have to enter that twice. No, you can't use the fingerprint reader.

When everyone else is on vacation, it's time to whip out the tiny screwdrivers

Re: Why does Dune dress women?

"Both UI's are poor. Also why is the model plugged into the mains?"

I'm trying to make a clever comment but perhaps she's just illustrating the question "Are 'Friends' Electric?"

'No peeing towards Russia' sign appears on country's Arctic border with Norway

You could go to Sarah Palin's house and try there.

Russia: Forget about the Nauka incident. Who punched the hole in the Soyuz, hmm?

Re: Obviously

They could've blamed Syldavian hackers.

Tech spec experts seek allies to tear down ISO standards paywall

I hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate <three pages removed> hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate standards bodies. The current method of accessing standards (read: as expensive as possible, as inconvenient as conceivable) makes my and other people's work just too fucking complicated.

Is it broken yet? Is it? Is it? Ooh that means I can buy a sparkly, new but otherwise hard-to-justify replacement!

Re: Right to repair?

Where I grew up still has its original fridge from 1974. It's normally unused, though, we've got a new one but when there are many people it's turned on. The small freezer compartment isn't really working but otherwise it's fine for occasional use.

eBay cyberstalking victims sue internet tat bazaar over former staff members' campaign of harassment

The article at Ars Technica goes into more detail. They say that the Ebay security official blamed corporate drinking culture and a personal drinking problem. We are told that Ebay had a bar that opens at 3 p.m and that some people take shots already in the morning. Not very convincing if you ask me, and also very classy on Ebay's side.

Radioactive hybrid terror pigs have made themselves a home in Fukushima's exclusion zone

Re: “maths” instead of “math”

I think it implies it's a long vowel, more like modern "ee" pronounced really long. Lines over vowels, called macrons, are also used to indicate long vowels: rīmcræft.

Facebook granted patent for 'artificial reality' baseball cap. Repeat, an 'artificial reality' baseball cap

Re: The next step

Maybe not. But perhaps a spin-off site called Codbook? (Also usable for fish dishes.)

Re: The next step

The next step? Could be an AR codpiece.

Roger Waters tells Facebook CEO to Zuck off after 'huge' song rights request

Most powerful ...

I think "one of the most powerful cunts" would be slightly more decriptive of Zuck but I can settle with Waters's version.

Apple to summon staff back to the office in September

Re: Alternate uses for a large shiny glass building

Some other suggestions:

Add some mirrors and lenses (not smoke!) and use it as a solar concentrator and convert the heat into electricity. Apple can afford that. Also, green energy!

Turn the doughnut into a rather large washing machine.

Use the it to make a support structure for a radio telescope... okay the location would initally be rather bad because there's plenty of interference nearby. Maybe create a 20-kilometre radius radio silent zone around it?

The Audacity: Audio tool finds new and exciting ways to annoy contributors with a Contributor License Agreement

Re: Forking Hell

The Audacity logo says "Audacity ®", does this mean the logo is a registered trademark or the name? I can't find whether the latter is true.

Perhaps an Audacity fork could be called Community or Empathy.

Perl changes dev's permaban for 'unacceptable' behaviour to a year-long lockout after community response

Re: Very.Big.Sigh

In my rather narrow experience, handling largish (30,000 rows) xlsx files is somewhat slower in Perl using Spreadsheet::Read (which uses Spreadsheet::ParseXLSX) than in Python using Pandas. I really haven't done many small files though.

Canonical releases Ubuntu on Windows Preview with early builds, new tools for the brave

Re: Hirsute Hippo?

The recent favourite name of a Ubuntu release has been Bionic Beaver.

New systemd 248 feature 'extension images' updates immutable file systems without really updating them

Re: Errr but...

When did you last see an OS/2 machine?

Sadly, the catastrophic impact with Apophis asteroid isn't going to happen in 2068

Re: Wish upon a star

A probe orbiting a body changes its orbit. It's a small effect, certainly. For small asteroids the change might notable after enough time has passed. I'm trying to say that it should be calculated precisely how the probe will change the location of Apophis in centuries so that the orbiting probe doesn't make a collision with Earth more likely...

Okay, I certainly don't know any specifics but an orbiting probe is one of the means a hazardous small body could be directed not to hit Earth, given we have enough time to do that. Just be sure that you don't make the situation worse.

Out of this world: Listen to Perseverance rover fire its laser at Mars rocks as the wind whips around it

Re: Quote of the week....

If aliens have discovered Raman spectrocsopy, they wouldn't call it Raman spectroscopy but whatever the name of the inventor is on their planet.

Biden administration pauses pursuit of TikTok and WeChat

Extra funny if Larry Ellison posted some dance TikToks.

Cats: Not a fan favourite when the critters are draped around an office packed with tech

Re: Dead mouse

Triffids? Supersized sundews? Bladderworts of unusual size? Flytraps the size of Venus? Pitcher plants from hell? Or bunker-sized butterworts?

America's democracy on the brink, Brexit looming, climate crashing... when better to get the first fast radio burst from our own galaxy?

Re: Backup server

Yes it is. I had to do a resync and transferred more data than anticipated.

I'm sorry. I just restarted my backup server.

Now that's a Finnish-ing move: Finland offers free 90-day tryout of Helsinki tech scene with childcare thrown in

Lerwick vs. Helsinki

With regard to the sun being above the horizon, Helsinki is at the same latitude as Lerwick in Shetland Islands. But, in Helsinki, you get half the precipitation and more sunlight hours! And also colder temperatures, especially when a suitable high pressure zone comes from the east.