Posts by jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid

France offers US scientists a safe haven from Trump's war on woke

Re: les queer studies?

"Queer canine becomings: Lesbian feminist cyborg politics and interspecies intimacies in ecologies of love and violence.

It is real. Biden was funding it."

I just had to look that up and it is real - brilliant! Can't read the whole thing though as I don't have the right subscription.

But as for "Biden was funding it", the Disclosure Statement says "The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.". So no, Biden wasn't funding it, nobody was.

Judge says Meta must defend claim it stripped copyright info from Llama's training fodder

Re: What if ...

It depends ... Based on my understanding of the UK copyright law, I think the answers would be:

a: plagiarism: yes if the student claimed the work as their own and didn't acknowledge the use of an AI. (Probably breaching the college/school/uni's terms even if they did acknowledge it.)

b: breach of copyright: depends how much copyrighted material is used and how it is presented. "Fair dealing" for example allows duplication of limited amounts of copyrighted work for criticism or review, but not to reproduce and claim as your own.

c: cheating: probably, for the same as a above.

In my opinion, LLMs that use copyrighted material (without a license) in their training sets are guilty of all the above.

Microsoft tells abandoned Publisher fans to just use Word and hope for the best

Re: Just use Serif Publisher

Just do it in Excel.

So … Russia no longer a cyber threat to America?

Re: New World Order

"For too long too many European countries relied on the US. This was such a mistake"

I don't think the Europe/US alliance was ever a mistake. True, it is probably facing it's strongest test right now and might even fall apart, but that doesn't mean it was ever a mistake in the past.

The threat to the US/Europe alliance is really only coming from one person (and the lackeys he has surrounded himself with). They are the mistake.

"And don't forget 'West Russia', formerly known as USA."

Given that bits of Alaska are only a few 10s of miles east of Russia, could USA become "East Russia"?

Feds: Army soldier suspected of AT&T heist Googled ‘can hacking be treason,’ ‘defecting to Russia’

Re: just curious

"or does google (or the ISP) log every search...?"

Oh course they log everything, that's their job, it's part of their operating model. The only question is could law enforcement get hold of it, to which the answer is "how lucky do you feel?"

Re: Woolworths' Maths Test

Reminds me of when I gave someone a similar questionnaire set at work, for "fun". I Knew what I expected the outcome to be and they knew what I was expecting. So they deliberately gamed the answers and the results came back full hard against the stops but in the opposite direction. Which told me everything I expected, just not in the way I expected.

Hisense QLED TVs are just LED TVs, lawsuit claims

Re: Consequences will never be the same.

"Well, they probably can. If a manufacturer claims that their TV is 4K resolution then that’s an objectively verifiable claim, and if it turns out it’s got a boring old 1920x1080 panel in it then they can be nailed to the wall"

It's "HD ready" all over again. Although arguably that was more honest, as it was defined as capable of receiving an HD signal but only able to downsample and display in less than HD. By definition (no pun intended) honest, but in principle an outright con.

Maps of terrestrial fibre networks aren’t great. The Internet Society wants to fix that

I presume the maps still exist (and are used by infrastructure organisations), but just aren't publicly available?

Southern Water takes the fifth over alleged $750K Black Basta ransom offer

It's the latter. I presume it refers to the US fifth amendment which is something about the right to avoid self incrimination. I think UK law also has the same right embedded in it somewhere.

Rather than add a backdoor, Apple decides to kill iCloud encryption for UK peeps

Re: Without an understanding

I agree, full kudos to Apple for being open about it and why.

I really am undecided on the whole issue of privacy vs law enforcement. I want privacy in comms and I don't think any government should be able to snoop on private conversations. But I also want law enforcement to be able to do exactly that when chasing the baddies.

Man who binned 7,500 Bitcoin drive now wants to buy entire landfill to dig it up

Re: 82 million hard drives per year, for the whole UK

82 million hard disks per year? That's more than 1 per person (baby, adults etc.) in the whole UK per year.

Re: 82 million hard drives per year, for the whole UK

100,000 tonnes of rubbish. If you could thoroughly (and you'd want to be thorough, not slap dash and risk missing it after all this effort to even get your hands on the years-old festering pile of rubbish) search 1 tonne per day, that would still take 274 years. Even if you could search 10 tonnes per day, that's still nearly 30 years.

Re: The real question

As others have pointed out, the girlfriend seems to have taken it to the dump, rather than putting it out for collection by a lorry. Even then, it would probably have gotten compacted at some point, whether by static machine or a vehicle at the final dumping location.

"What are the chances of a laptop hard drive surviving that?" Maybe better than you would think.

Rubbish compactors don't crush, it's more like squash (as you say). As a student, I worked for the local council on the bin wagons and from my experience, domestic refuse is quite springy. It certainly bounces back when the lorry is emptied at the tip. Unless you get unlucky and a thing like a hard disk gets caught directly in the jaws of the press, there a good chance the hard disk just got heavily squashed between a lot of nice soft cushioning, stinky rubbish.

My bin lorry job was in the days before widespread recycling, when pretty much anything you put out at the kerbside would be collected and dumped in the ground. Certain items would warrant some special attention as they went in the back of the lorry. We would clear the back hopper by fully cycling the compactor hydraulics, then put the special item in the rear hopper all by itself. Cycling the compactor once more would indeed crush the item between hard metal plates. Flourescent tubes were fun when they went pop but nothing could beat a big CRT going boom and you could feel it in the cab.

"the casing has a small hole for pressure equalisation"

Years ago, we had some devices with hard disks in them that would be sealed up, sent off to do their job, then returned a few days later. For reasons not worth going into, the devices were filled with helium. The drives suffered a high rate of failures. When we spoke to the manufacturers, it turned out to be the helium being lighter per molecule than air, messing up head/platter clearance and causing the heads to crash.

"any idea how big the pile of rubbish is that would need to be dug out"

Apparently a former worker at the tip reckons it would have been dumped in a particular area of the tip that was in operation at the time, an area containing "only" 15,000 tonnes of rubbish.

Two arrested after pensioner scammed out of six-figure crypto nest egg

"This is a fairly skilled crime"

I think most scammers, con artists, fraudsters etc are quite skilled at what they do, probably very skilled at catching the target off guard.

At a friend's wedding once, they had a sleight of hand magician wandering around doing tricks for guests' entertainment. A group of us were watching him do his act, all of us trying to catch him out, knowing exactly what he was doing and trying to spot the moment he did it. He somehow got my watch off my wrist, onto his own and even got the fiddly buckle done up perfectly and tucked in. None of us spotted him do it. I asked him after what he could do if he applied his skills out in public for bad, he said he could make a fortune and be confident of never being caught.

Thinking that no-one could be that gullible is one of the first lines of defence broken.

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

Re: circularize

"Is "circularize" really a word?"

In astrodynamics, very much yes it's a word. It literally means to turn an elliptical orbit into a circular one. Whether it's spelt with z or s is a discussion I'm going to quietly back away from.

(Strictly, all orbits are elliptical, but some are close enough to a circle to call them circular)

Why AI benchmarks suck

Re: puzzles...that AI models try to solve as a measure of intelligence

I'd be equally impressed by AI seeing, by chance, the Times crossword on a researcher's desk, and saying "nah, can't be bothered with that".

Lawyers face judge's wrath after AI cites made-up cases in fiery hoverboard lawsuit

Re: what are you paying for

"to whom should they say they use AI? The clients? The court? The other side?"

Where I work, it's company policy to include that in the information you are delivering, so the declaration that an LLM was used is there upfront for everyone to see. I prefer to go one step further and include something about how the LLM was used, what the balance of LLM/human input was etc.

"Unless the AI assistant can be relied on to make no errors of omission or commission then it would be wiser not to use it at all." Why? It's not like humans always meet that standard.

Re: Here we go again

Makes me wonder how often made up stuff like this is being presented and not getting picked up. Hence, how often the course of justice is being perverted.

Re: what are you paying for

Exactly. If you say it, you own the consequences.

Whether you use AI or not, you should always accept any consequences relating to inaccuracies.

AI summaries turn real news into nonsense, BBC finds

Re: LLMs cannot summarise

"Serious question - if you have to review things in that depth anyway, and it's only 100 words, is it actually more efficient?"

That's the key question! There are times when the process just doesn't work and I say to myself "forget it, I'll do it myself". But most of the time (way more than 50%) it does save time. The main thing is that I'm getting better (and quicker) and writing the right prompts rather than having to refine lots of prompts over and over. Also, the output comes back in seconds so I'm still in the right mindset to do the final edit rather than having task switched onto something else, that's where the big time saver is.

If the LLM can do 90% of the job and I have to do the 10%, I find that is still often (not always) quicker than me doing 100% of it. YMMV.

Re: LLMs cannot summarise

I disagree, they can summarise extremely well, if treated properly. You have to take care telling it what you want it to do.

I often use LLMs to summarise input that I give it. For instance, I will feed it say, a 1000 word long piece of text and ask it to summarise it in say, 100 words. It usually does a good job in rewriting the content more concisely and clearly than the input was. Often it will drop something in the summary that I look at and decide "no, that bit is important, I really want that in" and I put it back in. It's also very good if I want it to rewrite something in a different way for a different type of audience.

The usual reasons for it doing a bad job is when I don't tell it to just use the import source. Then it hallucinates at worst, or uses unreferenced sources at best. So long as I tell it to stick to the input I give it, it does something helpful. I suspect Apple aren't feeding their AI carefully proof read inputs but instead are telling it to "go find what you can about this...".

Ireland's AI minister has never used ChatGPT but swears she'll learn fast

Re: Normal

I now think that milliband is 1/1000 of an octave!

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

I wish the taskbar on windows 10 would obey the "hide taskbar" option even when a needy and emotionally insecure app has a notification and shouts "look at me, look at me, me me me!". If any app is in full screen mode, then the taskbar covers the app's controls. And where are the controls for word, excel etc? All round every edge so there's nowhere to put the taskbar out of the way.

And before anyone suggests not using Microsoft Office, this is my corporate kit that I have no control over.

"When Windows 10 dies"

Nothing to stop one bringing forward that happy event. What wait?

I did that myself ages ago, simply because I didn't want to wait until Windows 10 was unavailable and I was forced into a Linux learning curve not on my timescales. My computer is still dual boot, but I haven't booted it into Windows ever since. There is one task I keep meaning to use Windows for, but it's been months and I still haven't done it so I guess it's not that important.

Humans brought the heat. Earth says we pay the price

Re: Global warming is predicted by the laws of thermodynamics

"Plant a trillion trees over the next few decades"

That's impossible.

Land area of the earth is 150 million square kilometres. 1 trillion trees is about 7000 trees per square kilometre, or about 81 trees per linear kilometre, or one tree every 12m.

12m spacing between each tree doesn't feel wrong but still feels quite dense for mature trees (that need to be self sustaining and not managed as cash crops). And that's assuming we cover every bit of land with a tree every 12m - every desert, every Antarctic ice field, every mountain peak, every exposed piece of rock. Remove all habitations to make room for the trillion trees. If only 10% of land can support trees, then the density is a tree every 4 cm. Impossible.

The trillion trees isn't too far off though. Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels are at about 35bn tonnes per year. A fully grown tree absorbs about 25kg of carbon dioxide per year (very variable according to species, location etc). That works out to about 0.14 trillion mature trees.

Carbon capture by tree planting is not a long term solution by itself. Eventually the carbon comes back out as the trees die and decompose. In fact it may make things worse as a tree absorbs carbon dioxide as it grows but emits methane as it dies - methane being about 21 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. And this happens every year as trees grow leaves which then fall and rot.

It's got me wondering how much of that 25kg of carbon dioxide absorbed by a mature tree every year comes straight back out as leaves decay and rot. Even if only about 1kg of methane is emitted by rotting leaves, then it achieves nothing in terms of carbon reduction.

Re: Global warming is predicted by the laws of thermodynamics

"You are cooled, but the net heat in the environment goes up."

You're right, but it misses the main cause of climate change. Climate change due to global temperature increases is not due to us turning energy into heat at the earth's surface. It's due to the solar radiation hitting the earth's surface, warming that up, but then that heat not being able to radiate back out into space (the short wavelength radiation from the sun passes through the atmosphere, but the long wavelength radiation from the warming ground does not). The earth has always had this greenhouse effect but the increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that we have pumped out the last few hundred years has increased that greenhouse effect to the point that the earth is now noticeably getting warmer.

Painting a house white will radiate some of that short wavelength solar radiation back before it can warm up the house and turn that energy into the long wavelengths that get trapped, but the effect on global temperature by doing that is negligible and not the solution to climate change. White global ice caps do the same, but they are getting smaller due to the warming earth, creating a horrible positive feedback loop (more heat means less ice means more solar radiation absorbed means more heat means ...). It's still a good thing to do as it reduces your air-conditioning demand though and in turn your energy demand. And while our energy demands are still met by burning fossil fuels, climate change will keep on happening.

Re: I look forward to . . .

"because all they're doing is earning their crust"

I think that's highly dismissive of scientists and science generally. Nobody pursues a career in science for the money. People become scientists because of the intellectual challenge and the thrill of learning and working stuff out.

And that's why the world should pay more attention to science - it's a discipline that isn't driven by anything other than the pursuit of understanding.

Microsoft vet laments a world where even toothbrushes need reboots

The computers have taken over our machines.

So many of our simple machines these days need rebooting, or just work a bit rubbish because computing has become so cheap that computers run everything. And I don't mean a simple microcontroller, I mean an entire (albeit small) OS on a general purpose processor to do simple mechanised tasks.

In our office we have new paper shredders. They have one task to do. When they are switched on, nothing happens for a long enough time, to make you crawl behind it to check the power lead, then the full colour screen (on a shredder!) lights up to tell you the shredder is "starting up". It takes longer from power on to starting work than it does to do the job. Same goes for my "simple" inkjet printer at home. I get that it needs some software to make everything work together, but it takes an age to not only turn on, but off as well. And since when did turning off a printer require a user message saying "ending, please wait a moment"?

Light bulbs, door bells, light switches, watches, car heating controls (my other half's car won't allow you to use any of the ventilation controls until about 10s after switch on because "booting up"). Grrr.

WFH with privacy? 85% of Brit bosses snoop on staff

Re: Confusing activity with productivity again

We have similar issues with an in-house IM/chatroom system that pulls data from outlook calendars to determine the free/busy icon. You can manually override it but the flaw is that it shows "busy" if there is anything in your calendar at that moment. So an all day entry like "in office" , "WFH", "Sarah, John and Felix on leave" or "forecasts due today" shows you up as "busy".

Like penisland.net and many other variations using the name "penisland". At least one of them was a few years a bona fide website specialising in writing implements, especially expensive and exotic fountain pens. But now they all seem to be parodies of that, full of obvious double entendres.

Re: "get away with a bit of Netflix"

"as people often use their own devices, and/or use the public internet to access work-related resources. And again, those both carry significant security risks"

Using the public internet for work stuff is fine so long as you do it from your work devices. Never, ever, ever use your personal device for work or vice versa. It night seem convenient in the moment but can always come back and bite you later.

Memories fade. Archives burn. All signal eventually becomes noise

Re: MS Fnd in a Lbry

Bit of fun number crunching:

That Wikipedia page mentions a challenge set by Richard Feynman to squeeze a page of A4 down by a factor of 25,000, highlighting the explosion in data storage that the new computing paradigm of the time would require.

Just messing around with some numbers and assuming Feynman meant a page of A4 text. If a microSD card is 1/378 the size of a page of A4 and stores 32 million pages of A4 text (assuming 4000 characters per page at 8bits per character), my rough calculation suggests that a humble 128GB microSD card beats his challenge by a factor of about 0.5 million.

This corresponds to a data shrinkage of a factor of about 200million over 65 years. Or to put it another way, a factor of about 2.4 every year. Not too far off from Moore's Law.

There's an environmental cost too. Given that most of society's digital creations aren't stored on inert devices but instead in data centres, those storage media stay switched on consuming power, creating pollution.

Re: Make copies...

"I've also seen channels go "I want to do X instead of Y" and then privatize/delete all their old Y content"

So long as it's their own content, then I have no problem with that, they can do what they want with it and if they choose to take it down, that's fine.

"Normally I delete them, but if I do find it really interesting, I keep it."

I get why you would do that, but at the risk of being a legal pedant, that might be illegal. I don't know where you are in the world but in the UK, the law on copyright permits making a copy for time shifting or format shifting but in relation to "broadcasts", making a copy for long term retention is probably illegal. Whether a YouTube video counts as a broadcast, I have no idea.

Europe, UK weigh up how to respond to Trump's proposed tariffs. One WTF or two?

Re: And

"The only increases in NHS funding have been either Covid related or inflationary."

Not so. That graph over time shows year on year increases in NHS funding (except 22/23 -23/24 which I suspect is a covid related return to the norm). The graph is labelled "real terms", ie inflation corrected.

If you want to bash the Tory/ coalition governments since 2010, you can point out the year on year increase in funding that has somehow ended up with the NHS still getting worse.

Re: And

"Moving that money out of the magical EU budget and into the NHS budget, like we were promised"

The £350M per week Boris Johnson said we would take from EU membership and put into the NHS* (I don't think he ever actually said that in a way that you could hold him to it, only in that cunning non-legally binding way politicians tend to say things, and it was fact checked to be more like £250M maximum - still a lot but not the £350M claimed). That's £18bn per year. NHS funding certainly has gone up over time and between 2020 and 2023 excluding COVID related cash injections it rose by more than £18bn per year. But, I don't you can say in all honesty that it was a result of leaving the EU and having that £18bn per year as extra cash. The annual increase in NHS funding is just following a rough trend going back to at least 2010 (as far back as the graph linked to below goes). Leaving the EU resulted in no additional funding for the NHS that wasn't already going to happen or had already been happening. (I hope I got that tense right, my copy of Streetmentioner wioll haven not been to hand)

https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/data-and-charts/nhs-budget-nutshell

*Using "NHS" to mean the Department of Health or the Department of Health and Social Care

Re: And

"Part of Russia is in Europe"

Well, what is Europe anyway? There's the continent itself, which is loosely based on where the interesting rocks currently are, the UK-centric "Europe" which means everyone across the English Channel (and that bit to the West that we forgot about so then tried to ignore until the problem went away), Europe-centric "Europe" which is pretty relaxed but most certainly does not include Russia right now, the European Union which is a political grouping of most of "Europe", the European Economic Area which includes the EU and a few places not in the EU, the "Eurozone" which is different again and where you can spend the same money without having to bother with tedious exchange rates, the European Space Agency (which includes Canada as part of) but most importantly of all, "Europe" also includes Israel and Australia (and Russia but they aren't welcome at the moment) in the Eurovision Song Contest.

40 years ago, classified Shuttle mission foreshadowed Challenger's fatal flaw

Re: Most significant

The two o rings aren't meant to be a backup for each other. Two o rings spreads the joint load and helps make it more stable against be doing forces.

At the time, NASA management knew of the o ring erosion problem but since no o ring had ever eroded completely through, they considered it an engineering margin that was more than sufficient. The actual engineers saw it differently and viewed any o ring erosion as a failure and knew that there was a fundamental flaw that wouldn't have been solved with more o rings.

Why does the UK keep getting beaten up by IT suppliers?

government is not making the most of the limited expertise it has

Too true.

At the government department I worked at, part of it was chock full of IT expertise, whose job it was to to design, build and deliver bespoke IT systems to parts of HMG. But when it came to our department procuring (externally) a large HR system, our own in house experts were locked out of that process essentially being told they weren't required. Result was a delayed system that didn't meet user demand and many years later was still subject to internal ridicule and get well programmes.

Same story beyond IT as well. When the admin departments need to do some stuff that involves technical skills, which a team of professional mathematicians just down the corridor is chock a block full of, not welcome.

UK council selling the farm (and the fire station) to fund ballooning Oracle project

Re: Burning the furniture to keep warm

Why can't the council just go back to Oracle and say "too late, not what you said it would cost, give us our taxoayers' money back" and retender?

I suspect Oracle are the only bidder, leaving the council stuck in a single source trap.

Linux rolls out the welcome mat for Microsoft's Copilot key

"when pressed it should cause all windows machines to explode"

I was thinking it should just uninstall Windows, leaving the hardware still usable.

Re: I have already prepared my black tape that says "Ctrl"

I don't think I've ever used the windows key - despite years of using Windows at work, except those odd occasions when curious just to see what happens. In those instances it's more like a big red button just taunting you.

I sometimes used the menu key that seemed fashionable 25 years ago, but now I think about it, that might have been on Linux systems to bring up some menu, probably an old version of kde.

China claims major fusion advance and record after 17-minute Tokamak run

"There is no point in generating vast amounts of power if up to 10% of it is lost just moving around the country"

I disagree. I think there is no point inventing room temperature superconductivity to reclaim that last 10% when fusion derived electricity is so plentiful in the first place. As someone else here has pointed out, that distribution loss is not the biggest loss in the whole system.

Just don't be anywhere near it at midnight on 28th February, 2028.