* Posts by mcswell

104 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jan 2021

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NATO's newest member comes out swinging following latest Baltic Sea cable attack

mcswell

The Med.

mcswell

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.

mcswell

Re: US Navy

I don't know zilch about Hersch, but I am a linguist who respects Chomsky as a linguist--but not beyond. In other words, I agree with your description of him.

New Outlook marches onto Windows 10 for what little time it has left

mcswell

Re: Why?

Even better, it has round corners. And it's fresh.

Million GPU clusters, gigawatts of power – the scale of AI defies logic

mcswell

Flux capacitor

With that much energy, you could run a flux capacitor. Wouldn't that be likely to produce at least as useful results as AI?

US airspace closures, lack of answers deepen East Coast drone mystery

mcswell

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

mcswell

that's the brakes

IIRC, when you turn off the engine, you still get one use of the power assistance on the brakes, because there's a one-way valve in the line to the brake vacuum assist. After that, you're on your own.

How Chinese insiders are stealing data scooped up by President Xi's national surveillance system

mcswell

Passwords?

"A couple of SGK queries uncovered his email addresses and multiple passwords..." Passwords? Encrypted, or not? Enquiring minds want to know!

Win a slice of XP cheese if you tell us where Microsoft should put Copilot next

mcswell

Re: The Recycle Bin.

Nuts, you beat me to it. Oh, well, I don't have a UK address.

Microsoft breaks timezones in Settings and calls on an unlikely ally for help

mcswell

Ask Microsoft's AI

"El Reg asked Microsoft for an explanation..." I wonder what CoPilot would say?

Your air fryer might be snitching on you to China

mcswell

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

mcswell

Ukrainian involvement?

"We've contacted multiple Ukrainian government offices... but haven't heard back." That's because they can't stop laughing.

Cast a hex on ChatGPT to trick the AI into writing exploit code

mcswell

Would writing the command in UTF-16 work? Big-endian or little-endian...

Vivaldi gives its browser a buffing, adds a dashboard

mcswell

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?

mcswell

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

mcswell

"We know with certainty that the US engage in cyber attacks on a massive scale (including on supposed 'allies')" You know that how?

China’s infosec leads accuse Intel of NSA backdoor, cite chip security flaws

mcswell

In hardware?

If there's a hardware back door, then find it and disable it for crying out loud. Or use it yourself, China.

PC shipments stuck in neutral despite AI buzz

mcswell

"Heave a sigh of relief that the damn thing isn't going to get yet another upgrade that ties it in knots and/or removes something that was depended upon." What makes you think that?

Microsoft admits Outlook crashes, says impact 'mitigated'

mcswell

Re: Intternationalisation!

It's well known that some *people* are more verbose.

Saying goodbye to the tech dreams Microsoft abandoned with Windows 11 24H2

mcswell

Notepad

For me, Notepad is so slow that it's unusable. I have a key remapper that does things like emit seven cursor down-arrows from a single keypress. Notepad takes several seconds to process those seven virtual keystrokes, and sometimes misses some of them.

Anyone else think Notepad is slow?

CISA boss: Makers of insecure software must stop enabling today's cyber villains

mcswell

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

mcswell

Re: "the more evolved Settings"

Tapeworms are likely more evolved than their ancestors. And I don't like tapeworms.

mcswell

Re: Drivel

I wouldn't be surprised if this *was* AI generated.

Starliner's not-so-grand finale is a thump in the desert next week

mcswell

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.

mcswell

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.

mcswell

brain surgeon

Jethro Bodine, is that you?

The future of AI/ML depends on the reality of today – and it's not pretty

mcswell

"military drone thinks you are the enemy"

I posted this link to _Into the Shop_ in response on another thread, but here I go again:

https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v026n04_1964-04_PDF/page/n91/mode/2up

Microsoft Bing Copilot accuses reporter of crimes he covered

mcswell

Into the Shop

"The lawagon turned and started rolling toward him. 'No you don't, Kloog,' it said."

From _Into the Shop_, by Ron Goulart. Read it here:

https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v026n04_1964-04_PDF/page/n91/mode/2up

Choose Your Own Adventure with Microsoft 365

mcswell

Back in the days of the Commodor Vic-20 ("With user-friendly BASIC!"), I used to go into department stores where they were sitting out, and program a loop that endlessly printed out "Help, I'm trapped in here!"

Gartner mages: Payback from office AI expected in around two years

mcswell

Moving at 99.9% of the speed of light

Two years for a passenger moving at 0.999c would be the equivalent of about 45 years on Earth (not counting acceleration and deceleration). That might be long enough for AI to become something useful.

NASA mulls using SpaceX in 2025 to rescue Starliner pilots stuck on space station

mcswell

Re: Momentary Lapse of Reason.

No, but my gast is definitely flabbered.

Is AI going to pay its way? Wall Street wants tech world to show it the money

mcswell

"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

mcswell

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.

mcswell

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

mcswell

There's an obvious solution: start writing in Chinese characters, which don't require any spaces. (Spaces are generally used between sentences.)

Compared to other distros, Vanilla OS 2 'Orchid' is rewriting how Linux works

mcswell

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

mcswell

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...'."

mcswell

Re: Prediction

As was Columbus. Or in the old song from Paint Your Wagon:

Where am I goin'? I don't know. Where am I headin'? I ain't certain. All I know Is I am on my way.

When will I be there? I don't know. When will I get there? I ain't certain. All that I know Is I am on my way.

mcswell

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

mcswell

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

mcswell

Re: Another layer, another source of trouble

How do you know how many problems it solved?

How many Microsoft missteps were forks that were just a bit of fun?

mcswell

Re: Now we know why

Wacky wabbit...

Microsoft Research chief scientist has no issue with Windows Recall

mcswell

App or OS

I suspect that if Recall had been announced as a separate application program that you could download from the Windows Store if you wanted it, there would not have been so much push-back. The decision to put it out as an integral part of the OS made it ten times worse.

Can AI models trained on human speech help us understand dogs?

mcswell

Re: bird language

It means that if you're a female bird. If you're a male bird, the same song means "Get off my lawn!"

Analysts join the call for Microsoft to recall Recall

mcswell

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.

More layoffs at Microsoft: What's really going on here?

mcswell

Re: Numbers on a spreadsheet.

#DIV/0!

Do you divide by zero and then take the factorial, or first do zero factorial and then divide? It matters, because 0 factorial is 1, in which case you're just dividing a number by one. But if you first divide by zero...

Boeing's Starliner makes it into orbit at long last – with human crew aboard

mcswell

Why do they wait so long (it felt like 15 seconds) between solid fuel booster burnout and separation? Seems like they're dragging excess weight along.

Boeing's Starliner finds yet another way to not reach space

mcswell

Re: "The redundant power supply did not activate"

The manual called for them to operate the ON-OFF control to the ON detent.

Endless OS 6: How desktop Linux may look, one day

mcswell

Re: Wayland?

...and the cat got your mouse.

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