Posts by tonique

Microsoft says 8 GB of RAM should be enough for anyone running Windows 11

Re: Linux: electricity (optional)

If some people can run Linux on a potato, so why not an abacus...

US auto regulators want to kill robotaxi brake pedals

My pessimism about self-driving cars is also reflected in a video by the Youtube channel Not Just Bikes, called "How self-driving cars will destroy cities (and what to do about it)". In it, he details why he thinks current self-driving car approaches are going to be seriously detrimental to city life other than self-driving cars.

Both Fedora and Ubuntu will get AI support – soon

I laughed when I saw "bing driven", which could just be a typo for "being" but it's much more hilarious and concerning if it is a typo for "Bing".

Ig Nobel Prize flees US for Switzerland after 35 years over safety concerns

Re: "South West German clocks”

Offtopic but I have to!

Kienzle! I'm still using a Kienzle alarm clock I bought in 1993 in Kassel, when I was 18. It still works fine.

Chatbots parrot Putin's propaganda about the illegal invasion of Ukraine

Re: Malicous query you say?

At least the source is The Sun.

ICE plans to scour Facebook, TikTok, X, and even defunct Google+ for illegal immigration leads

My guess on the methodology: Incredibly pernicious hack job by ICE, probably conducted using some sort of AI slop generator or search. Certainly not going to cause any false positives... Or now that I think about it: false positives and arbitrary deportations are a feature, and a desired one at that.

As Xi and Putin chase immortality, let's talk about digital presidents-for-life

Where would they get the organs from?

How are the organs for the transplants supposed to be produced? I think cloning organs is not that advanced. From unwanted people? It really seems like a start to a body horror manga.

No more Blocktoberfest? German court throws book at ad blockers

What the fuck?

Copilot Vision on Windows 11 sends data to Microsoft servers

Re: get off the internet

Duh, their handle is "Omnipresent" after all!

Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

Re: Other browsers

I used Palemoon more. My issue with it with the plugins, in deed the devs specifically blocked NoScript so that it is disabled; at that point you could still use older Firefox add-ons. (Ok, I haven't checked that in a while.) You can try to block scripts with the ublock Origin equivalent but I liked it better when I could select which scripts to allow.

Tinfoil hat wearers can thank AI for declassification of JFK docs

"AI" sloppified

How to release documents without releasing the documents -- by sloppifying them with "AI".

Schneier tries to rip the rose-colored AI glasses from the eyes of Congress

Re: What to say?

Certainly that was the expected outcome. Schneier spoke the way he did because of his integrity, which is often lacking in the US congress.

Elon Musk pukes over pork-filled budget bill with Tesla subsidies on the line

Re: Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right

A new version MTV's olden Celebrity Deathmatch: Egotist Deathmatch! Where could we show it?

Odd homage to '2001: A Space Odyssey' sees 'Blue Danube' waltz beamed at Voyager 1

Re: "it is likely We Are Not Alone"

Fun fact: If the proability of winning the lottery were, say, 1/15,000,000 and if you bought 15,000,000 _random_ tickets, the chances of _not_ winning the jackpot would be very close to 1/e, or about 0.37.

Tesla FSD ignores school bus lights and hits 'child' dummy in staged demo

Deadline, literally

I fear "deadline" literally will mean "line of dead people" w.r.t. self-driving cars, with their current iteration and especially with Teslas.

Elon Musk bragged this group had been 'deleted' when DOGE shut it down - now they're appealing

I think it's probably both.

(Posted this to the wrong comment originally, that's why there's a deleted post below.

US tech titans rejoice in $600B Saudi shopping spree

"Authoritarian regimes love rising authoritarian regime" was my first thought. Certainly, the USA makes such things they want but the timing and amount is suspicious.

Trump admin freaks out over mere suggestion Amazon was going to show tariff impact on prices

Re: Only a Trade war?

I like "Trumpolini".

There's a slight chance Asteroid 2024 YR4 could hit Moon in 2032

The probability of 2024 YR4 hitting the Earth is larger than for the Moon. Wikipedia lists (and links to the source), that the current probability of 2024 YR4 hitting the Earth is 2.6 %, i.e. 1:38. The ESA lists as of now the probability as 2.41 % (1:41). IF the asteroid hits the Earth and the shown possible impact line holds, it could destroy the ESA space centre in Kourou, French Guiana, or it could go to central Africa or India or the Atlantic or Indian Oceans.

Does DOGE have what it takes to actually tackle billions in US govt IT spending?

There is no reason to think that this "doge" is even trying to "tackle tech spending". It's just cruelty and destruction for cruelty's and destruction's sake.

I'm overwhelmingly, destructively, hopelessly, indelibly pessimistic about the situation. I don't see there could be anything to be able to stop Musk and his henchmen using courts or other "proper" means to stop the destruction. Possibly ego clashes could prevent something but I cannot have any hope for the world as a whole.

Musk's move fast and break things mantra won't work in US.gov

Musk is perhaps the embodiment of Dunning–Kruger syndrome. Has heard of things but has no skill.

Well I haven't got much else to comment but it would be brill if people with so little skill just watched Wheel of Fortune.

Trump 'waved a white flag to Chinese hackers' as Homeland Security axed cyber advisory boards

Re: Daily Trump

Ah, Con Air. The Orange Idiot had also a failed airline, "*rump Shuttle". "Con Air" would have been a much more accurate name.

Trump hits undo on Biden AI safety order, EV mandate, emissions standards, and more

Re: Yes...but no.

True, but it does not matter to Trump and the gang. Who is going to stand in front of the madness?

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.