The Med.
Posts by mcswell
104 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jan 2021
NATO's newest member comes out swinging following latest Baltic Sea cable attack
Re: Shame
Sinking it is an act of war; selling it off is an act of piracy. I wish there were a better way, like grabbing them by the anchor chain.
BTW, I doubt that these cables were damaged by simply dragging an anchor across them. While that's certainly possible, the Chinese have patented anchor-cutting tools that can be dragged much more easily and which cut cables more effectively. Pull one of those up by the chain and then you have real evidence that can be taken to an international tribunal, or dropped on the floor of the UN. Literally.
New Outlook marches onto Windows 10 for what little time it has left
Million GPU clusters, gigawatts of power – the scale of AI defies logic
US airspace closures, lack of answers deepen East Coast drone mystery
Re: The Feds know what's going on
Hey, Anonymous Coward: there are hobbyist drones that have just under 8 feet wingspans. That's pretty close to the size of a car, assuming of course that someone was actually able to determine the size of the alleged drones, and that they reported accurately (as opposed to "Golly gee willakers, it must have been the size of a car!").
Of course, as others have pointed out, unless the drone lands alongside you, it's pretty hard--as in impossible--to determine its size.
Aliens, spy balloons, or drones? SUV-sized mystery objects spotted in US skies
How Chinese insiders are stealing data scooped up by President Xi's national surveillance system
Win a slice of XP cheese if you tell us where Microsoft should put Copilot next
Microsoft breaks timezones in Settings and calls on an unlikely ally for help
Your air fryer might be snitching on you to China
How to make a million $
Create a fake phone that these apps can connect to, which gives a fake location of your choice (so not everyone using this fake phone would have the same fake location), fake files, etc. Not sure whether it would need a real internet connection--I suppose it depends on whether these smart Xs send the data home themselves, or through your phone.
Ok, you probably wouldn't earn a million $, but you might earn respect.
Skyscraper-high sewage plume erupts in Moscow
Cast a hex on ChatGPT to trick the AI into writing exploit code
Vivaldi gives its browser a buffing, adds a dashboard
Re: Stop changing things
Yes, it wouldn't be so bad if one company did something stupid, but now everyone has to copy them. (I'm looking at the rounded corners in this text box.) The most flagrant example is when Microsoft introduced the Ribbon, with hieroglyphs in place of menus. Now nearly everyone seems to think that's a good idea. I had to mouse over six icons on some app today before I found the one that saved the PDF to my computer.
Can't anyone think for themselves?
Re: Tabs now float, creating a clean, spacious look that feels intuitive and modern
Indeed. The *first* thing I did after this new design landed was to try to change my tabs back. I *don't want* "spacious" or "clean", whatever that is supposed to mean.
After searching through all Vivaldi's settings for tabs and finding nothing, I went to the forum where someone else had asked the same question: how to revert the look. Turns out it's the setting for the "compact" view, as someone has already posted here.
China again claims Volt Typhoon cyber-attack crew was invented by the US to discredit it
China’s infosec leads accuse Intel of NSA backdoor, cite chip security flaws
PC shipments stuck in neutral despite AI buzz
Microsoft admits Outlook crashes, says impact 'mitigated'
Saying goodbye to the tech dreams Microsoft abandoned with Windows 11 24H2
CISA boss: Makers of insecure software must stop enabling today's cyber villains
Whitehat?
If the bad guys can find and exploit the holes in code, why can't the company whose code it is? In-house whitehats, but not the programmers themselves--a different team. And if you don't have in-house people with that skill set, then hire some outside company that does.
And yes, I'm naive...
Microsoft decides it's a good time for bad UI to die
Starliner's not-so-grand finale is a thump in the desert next week
All that said...
...about why the two systems are incompatible (not only wrt the hoses, but also the electronics), I would hope that one outcome of this fiasco is standardization in space suit fittings. And if we're lucky---I mean *really* lucky---standardization in other space technology too. With maybe in intermediate stage of adapters.
Re: IF it lands.....
This actually sounds like a sine + cosine thing, where the sine wave represents the quality, and the cosine wave represents profits. The cosine function is always 90 degrees out of phase with the sine function, because the cosine is the first derivative of the sine. And I'm sure you know about derivatives in business, specifically in finances.
The future of AI/ML depends on the reality of today – and it's not pretty
Microsoft Bing Copilot accuses reporter of crimes he covered
Choose Your Own Adventure with Microsoft 365
Gartner mages: Payback from office AI expected in around two years
NASA mulls using SpaceX in 2025 to rescue Starliner pilots stuck on space station
Is AI going to pay its way? Wall Street wants tech world to show it the money
"Groups that have historically been middle class and entitled will find that their skills are worth less..." People like me (and many smarter and better informed than me) have been saying that for over a decade. At this point, though, I'm divided on the truth of this. I think the current AI situation is a bubble: while there may be some uses for it, it won't be anywhere near as impactful as many thought. But 10--20 years out (as you say), the next-gen AI (I'm guessing some combination of neural net and symbolic), may be very different. At some point, barring a world war, a *lot* of people are going to become unnecessary in the job market. When that happens, watch out.
Boeing's Starliner proves better at torching cash than reaching orbit
Re: Should have sent it back unmanned to start with.
You're correct about studying the thruster problems when the capsule gets back down. However, there's another way. They could send the Starliner back empty, but run thorough tests on the thrusters before separating for re-entry. If something goes wrong, they lose the capsule but no human lives.
Re: Decision time
Me: ChatGPT, here's a puzzle. A Russian astronaut, an American astronaut, and a cabbage are on one side of the atmosphere. How can an American pilot get them all to the other side in a spacecraft that has only two seats?
ChatGPT: The pilot flies the goat and the cabbage down, then flies back up with the cabbage. (Etc.)
(You may have to have seen Gary Marcus' 1 August post "This one important fact about current AI explains almost everything" to understand this...)
Meta's AI safety system defeated by the space bar
Compared to other distros, Vanilla OS 2 'Orchid' is rewriting how Linux works
Re: chicken come home to roost
Yes to merging the various bin directories (I'd have two: /bin and /local/bin). Also merge some lib directories, which are even less documented IMO than the bin dirs. Now there's nothing saying you can't have subdirs under a lib dir for different things (like, say, a python sub-dir). But having to specify a $LIB set of five or ten paths is just ridiculous.
AI models face collapse if they overdose on their own output
Re: Prediction
When you don't know where you're going: Agreed; penicillin, the moons of Jupiter, the craters on the Moon, the supernova of 1604, the photoelectric effect (electrons emitted by light striking certain metals do *not* become more energetic when the brightness of the light is increased), and many other examples.
Or as Isaac Asimov put it, "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'."
Re: Prediction
> *If you think we should rather wait around until someone comes up with a principled and consensually
> acceptable definition of what intelligence "is" before attempting to develop artificial versions...
Also to your point, building and testing things that *might* be intelligent is an *experimental* way of doing what philosophers have tried to do without experiment for hundreds of years (or thousands, going back to Socrates).
South Korea orders 'Star Wars' lasers to blast Northern drones out of the sky
Re: the North's recent use of balloons laden with garbage
SK is sending balloons north, you say. NK is sending balloons south, SK says. I guess this only works when the wind is blowing in the right direction, eh? How often does that happen?
(Ninja'd by ChrisElvridge, or some spelling like that...)
Despite OS shields up, half of America opts for third-party antivirus – just in case
How many Microsoft missteps were forks that were just a bit of fun?
Microsoft Research chief scientist has no issue with Windows Recall
Can AI models trained on human speech help us understand dogs?
Analysts join the call for Microsoft to recall Recall
As an application
I wonder what would have happened if instead of baking Recall into the OS, Microsoft had offered it as a paid-for application, sort of like Microsoft Office. Maybe it would have gotten some users and positive vibes? For that matter, what if Co-pilot were a separate application you could purchase--or not.