Posts by Shalghar

'I guess NASA doesn't need or care about my work anymore'

I gave you a possible reason for the downtake as well as my opinion of wether its indeed newsworthy or not. Mind you, we are speculatiing here why its really taken down although there is a high probability its another anti-DEI overreach.

I also gave you my opinion why the anti-DEI efforts seem so excessive currently and why i believe thjey are necessary, if not unavoideable. Theres one thing to want tolerance but its quite another thing to demand or enforce any kind of newspeak under direct threat of societal consequences up to loss of work or even legalized fines. You can speak as distorted as you like but dont expect me to try to mimic a grammatically and factually false distortion of natural language. As to any kind of outward appearance, i am working in a company that doesnt care about anything as long as you do your job. We dont need "DEI" enforced from above, we have got around 8 to 10 different nationalities, from eastern europe to albania with one tamil guy and one from senegal as well as a multitude of cultural backgrounds from the abrahamitic religions to something like pagans of all kinds as well as atheists. You do your job, you are OK to have around, thats all that matters.

As posted, if you want to misunderstand, you are free to do so. The immature statement of "vladimir" being "proud" of me clearly hints at a nonsensical correlation that DEI madness is something positive and the even more primitive hatred against russia as counterpart and permanent antagonist.

A nice way to show that you dont have arguments albeit a bit too obvious for my personal liking but you do you.

I guess its just a bit of overkill, like the articles about enola gay. Automation can be helpful but if no real brain looks into the aftermath, its quite likely going like shooting a nuclear warhead on a single cockroach.

I know that noone likes the trumpeltier ("trampeltier", not meant biologically but in the sense of elephant in a china shop) and much of the seemingly or factually erratic behaviour isnt something i would or could understand.

On the other hand, the DEI madness really overdid it, overreached and contaminated far too many aspects of life and media so filtering out as much as needed (like the firefox extension that filters gendernewspeak contaminated texts to make them readable again) to not get that destructive ideology thrown in the face with each and every text, picture, movie or whatever is not something i would oppose but is long overdue. If you dislike "right wing" parties getting stronger and elected to power, ignoring what pissed off the majority of voters so much, that they chose "the enemy" and instead insulting them wont help but keep the trend alive, kicking and expanding.

As long as the DEI removal teams keep correcting every potential filter overkill, this kind of news is non news. When something stays offline that doesnt have anything to do with the DEI trash, that should be reported and - if uncorrected - could be newsworthy.

If you intend to misunderstand, just do so. I personally am more impressed by Morgan Freemans approach to racism and fully agree with him. See the respective interview with the brilliant (although i often disagree with him) Bill Maher about black history month, i believe it was a "Club Random" episode but might misremember.

And now its "news" that an inactive (!) blog was taken down. Wow. Would it be "news" if this happened due to a cleanup effort to weed out outdated stuff that noone clicks ? Of course not. But now its the anti-DEI-Devils so its "news".

Concerning the strange comment that the evil (TM) russians would rejoice that an inactive blog from some NASA guy is down, why should they care at all ? If it was of interest, they would have copied it long ago. As would the chinese, indians or other spacefaring nations.

Your graphics card's so fat, it's got its own gravity alert

Re: Card orientation

Go for AcornRiscPC original casings. Those are not only screwless (locking bolts) but can be stacked.

If you need a decent amount of cool looking sillyness, put so many RsicPC casings over the others that you have a tower with a pizza oven.

https://www.houseofmabel.com/personal/computers/riscpc/

NIce idea. Anyone remembering those VESA local bus monsters in those "mini tower" casings remembers the second stabilizing groove on the front side of the casing. Lets go a bit further back in time and remember "filecards", RLL or MFM controllers with the full size 3,5" HDD directly mounted on the card. Those were often designed long enough to reach the casings front end, for the same mechanical stability reasons the VESA monsters later on also needed.

How about a sturdy enough metal support beam that can be clipped into the casing after installing the card, that goes over the card and connects from back to front end of the casing, effectively supporting the full upper length of the card ?

Sorry thats not "high tech", thats just mechanics.

But if you want, you can glue some RGD LED stuff on it, so it might not be too bad...

What the **** did you put in that code? The client thinks it's a cyberattack

Re: "Clever" machine obscenity detection...

There is a little village called "Pissen" (yes, "urinating") near Merseburg in eastern Germany.

Other more "civilized" names like AschAFFENburg (monkey) also exist.

Profanity filters should implement a cross reference list for triggering but "innocent" nonprofanities like comPUTEr (for french speaking people) or mARSCHmusik or whatever longer word seems to contain a built in profanity substring. There was a now closed down MMORPG called "forsaken world" that censored its own item "Drachenkraut" through all three languages it was published in europe due to "kraut" i believe. Its hard to guess beyond the XXXX or ****.

Naturally, the french players talked trash in circles around any filter upgrade that was implemented. Biological creativity outwitting any kind of "AI" or similar glorified sort-of-sort algorythm as usual.

Much better however would be to globally set the societal variable snowflake_mode_intensity from "excessive" down to "whocares".

Why not:

Anonymous

Developer

Helping

Someone

?

Thats a letter more and... oh, look, a squirrel !!!

Re: Be careful where you type

Things like this also happen in the military. When i was on guard duty as NCO i read backwards in the guards book of a really, really remote weapons and ammunition storage facility. The text i found a few months back is quite likely etched forever in my mind until alzheimer comes to the rescue.

"Gefreiter Nordhorn wurde beim Geschlechtsverkehr mit einem Schaf erwischt und sofort erschossen. Neue Wachstärke 1-9."

In translation: Private Nordhorn was cought shagging a sheep and was promptly shot. New Personnel count 1(NCO) / 9(Privates).

Of course this was forged in later on. I am somewhat sure due to the strict regulations concerning personal weapons and equipment. there would be a hell of a fuzz (and with the fuzz) if a weapon wasnt returned to the weapons storage after end of guard duty cycle and the ammo wasnt accounted for properly.

More on topic and much more in reality, we had a very emotional telephone conference concerning a machine installation at GKN/Airbus around 2010, especially emotional when it came to health and safety as well as the strangely non compliant higher ups (running around without helmets and high vis vests, things like that). What we did not know was that the customer had some of his higher ups on visit in our company in germany and the call was on hands free. Still glad we used below medium level of snarkiness and sarcasm which kept the aftermath tolerable.

Microsoft total recalls Recall totally to Copilot+ PCs

That worked soooo well with windows update, didnt it ?

Concerning the EUrocracy... Did you miss who was selected to go after the big data corporations ? She could only be avoided because she was not an EU citizen, much to von der Leyens anger this former employee of both google and microsoft couldnt be installed to check on the big bad data wolves.

and now for something completely not different:

https://netzpolitik.org/2024/drehtuereffekt-bei-eu-kommission-lobby-waechter-kritisieren-beamtenwechsel-zu-microsoft/

https://www.lobbycontrol.de/konzernmacht/seitenwechsel-zu-microsoft-beschwerde-bei-eu-eingereicht-117981/

https://www.dr-datenschutz.de/datenschutzwidrige-nutzung-von-ms365-durch-die-eu-kommission/

"Any? You mean that's incoming too?? Who the fuck would be stupid enough to share that ??"

Thats not incoming that will be part of it from the start. The option to create such a privacy mess by yourself might be implemented later on.

Re: I'm assuming

This could work. I did something similar when the GWX-Annoyware infected Win7/8 machines with the constant nagging for a "free upgrade" even on machines that wouldnt be accepted due to hardware requirements. Some users kept getting the GWX mess, even though they had uninstalled GWX and disabled the respective KB update so i created an additonal user account, made it the owner and sole user able to change/delete within the folder that GWX was stored, deleted everything in it and then - after setting the usual flags like write protected etc. deleted the user account. Not even an error message after that.

I believe however that such innocent and simple things wont work as intended, instead i suspect something like the system shutdown when killing the wuau*.* update task in WinXP or even bigger problems. Protecting unwanted malware through system integration is not new for microsoft.

Re: BTDTGTTS

"My phone is de-Google'd. I do have other Android devices that aren't, but they don't get used on a daily basis."

Exactly this. ADB command line witchcraft surely helps to get rid of some of the pestware like google assistant, "digital wellbeing" and annoying bloatware like livewallpaper that still sends notification although officially disabled and not having any permissions. Well its down the drain of pm uninstall --user 0 com.android.annoyingcrapware.... Digital wellbeing is a special case, you need to activate the adb command right after officially disabling it or it will covertly restart and block the uninstall command. And dont bother giving it the command to delete its stolen data and cache after you disabled notifications. Doing so will reenable notifications for this suspicious stuff.

This is no longer a game if it ever was. Everything is compromised and the amount of annoying hoops and loopholes you have to endure to make "your" devices at least mostly behave like you want is growing with every day and every orwellian atrocities the EUrocracy or the protofascist german government mess are spouting on a near daily basis.

Re: BTDTGTTS

That would be munich and they did suspiciously discover their special designed breed of *ixish stuff "didnt work" after microsoft made some decision for an investment in said city. Currently the federal state of schleswig-holstein claims to try anew, athoug i cannot discern if its genuine incompetence or malicious intent to show that Linux wont work.

At least i managed to give my wife a linux based desktop for her small business. All the stuff she needs simply works and the insecurities of unwanted, potentially destructive updates, warnings that the OS will "no longer be supported" as well as the strange phenomena Edge and microsofts unwanted insistance on bing and other crapware randomly generated are gone.

Re: Alleged Use Case

Non functional opt-out selectors along with reassuring fake messages are nothing new. You would need to have sysinternals file monitor or something similar running for a while to see if its really no longer recording. Or just take a look on the remaining disc capacity before and after coffee/lunch break.

Re: The promise of A.I.

If you can sell it to someone who believes that "AI" can do $whatevermagic, noone cares if it can to anything at all.

Re: Recall does not share snapshots or associated data with Microsoft or third parties

Well maybe its the "interest based ADnoyance" scam, this time from redmond instead one of the other data thieves.

If thats one of the far too many (ab)usecases i might be interested in seeing how that works. As far as i can tell from my android devices, the "interest based" Adnoyance might indeed be based on someones interests but usually not mine.

"Locally" can be such a misleading word. Locally stored somewhere on the third planet is still "locally" in a galactic way...

" Record the maximum and probably store it forever and a day"....

I suspect you overlooked the "AI" part, which means everything spied and stolen will constantly and forever be processed, correlated and mutilated.And of course phoned home in one way or another no matter what they claim. (Office 365 spell checker anyone ?)

Have fun trying to prove that anything digital has not been tampered with or that you are not in cahoots with any terrorist, criminal or people with the wrong opinion when "the AI" says that you might be.

Thats independant from the current overlord

While i can somewhat understand the aversion against the trumpeltier (german:Trampeltier=Dromedar), the mumbling mummy and his cackling witch of the word salad were and are no better. Without wanting to defend any head(less) of state, i wouldnt blame a new inaugurated puppet for things that began under his predecessor(s).

On topic: Win7 was the last redmondish spyware i used and Win2K was the last windows where the administrator was actually an administrator, even able to delete the wuau*.* "i will ignore anything you forbid and do as i please anyway"-"update". Since WinXP you cannot even disable the wuau*.* tasks, the system will shut down immediately without any chance to avoid this. this means that since WinXP, i am doing everything important and privacy relevant on other OSes and abuse Redmond stuff only for irrelevant things like gaming.

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

A bit more recent

Windows 7 and 8 suddenly developed internet connection issues when the router was changed from telekom standard hardware to fritzbox.

Only in IPv4 mode, though, and ipconfig/flushdns could resolve the issue sometimes.

Pulling the ethernet connector out, waiting a few seconds and pushing it back in or going to network settings, disabling ipv4, then reenabling again would also work.

Turns out win 7/8 really likes to preserve its first router setting on 192.168.2.1 instead of the fritzboxens 192.178.2.1 address and would revert whenever it had one of its many mysterious user annoyance feature activations. Other symptoms included DNS on *.168.*.* while DHCP correctly on *.178.*.* and every imaginable mess up of the 168 and 178 bits until it finally settled temporarily on all three options 178.

Sometimes its the hardware settings, sometimes the registry or other software issues, sometimes DHCP takes too long for wins liking,sometimes all of the above.

Really easy to "quick fix" but can be a PITA to find out which issues little win actually has.

UK sleep experts say it's time to kill daylight saving for good

Well the dictatorship of the council has more important things to do than commit to one of the few things that seemed to be a bit democratic. Cant have the serfs getting ideas above their stations, can we ?

And please dont give that propaganda that the EU lets members decide for themselves, just take a look at the multitude of sanctions that are conjured whenever some member dares to step a nanometer out of line.

Its a major pass the buck. Want to do something your voters really dislike ? Give a call to your accomplices in brussels and see it coming back "from the EU, sorry no can do".

Congress to Commerce: Sanction more Chinese chip firms to stop Huawei's evasion

Re: Trumplestiltskin"s dream

Well if that materialises as fast as the promised "bestest trade agreement" for brexitland, it might take longer than the trump-ET lives.

I cannot speak for the USA as i have no first hand experience but when it comes to germany, especially now that the EUrocracy runs Amok with the silliest of regulations, i can understand why international competitors benefit from death by beaurocracy.

Lets start with ticking all those climate preachers off (People like the COP xx hypocrites who do their "climate conference" in person, with tons of cronies and tons of kerosin because every useless climate preacher needs to fly there with the biggest private jet possible.) CO2 taxation ups the cost for everything that needs energy to be produced, which means everything.

EU regulations, that keep mutating and must be mutated into local laws include interesting things like the correct angle for cucumbers, a law for machine builders to create documents concerning the possible deforestation index for every friggin part thats manufactured externally, excessive "data protection" that - if done by the letter - will force each company that makes prototypes for others to delete any and all information after a maximum of 10 years. Add the convoluted german tax laws and you might see and experience why international competitors have less issues.

Of course, there are similarities to the US (as said, i have no first hand experience so im going by what information i got in the last decades). Outright corruption on all levels, including tax avoidance schemes like chancellor Olaf Scholzs "Cum-Ex/Cum" which his pals in the Warburg bank do since the late 1980ies, albeit under the name of "Dividendenstripping" back when it first came into the news.

Taxes and other forms of legalized wage theft are currently surpassing the 50% mark which leads to less customers in the nation and thus the need to export (==compete internationally).

Add the destruction of any kind of useable education (Bologna/Master/bachelor) and the massive increase of cost for the worsening education and i believe germany can be compared to the US.

Then theres the second part of the widespread destruction. Apart from the economic war that the falling USA wages against so called "allies", german managers tend to make more and more suicidally bad decisions, from electroimmobility over trading quality for cheap blinkenthingens and other useless decorations to actively discouraging educating their workforce and also actively discouraging any kind of incentive to develop and share ideas. The "idea" part is also not helped by changing the work law by andrea nahles ("social-democratic" party), effectively giving your employer anything you invent for free.

TL,DR:

Both managers/corporations and governments are to blame for each and every economic issues the so called "free west" is currently experiencing. Both are adverse to long term thinking and planning, something that china is traditionally good at, both only operate on greed, incompetence and ideology and both dont give a flying dolphins droppings about the destruction they cause or the people they murder (directly or indirectly) as long as their pockets fill up. The main issue seems to be a system thats optimised to put the most detestable and deranged psychos in the positions where they can do a maximum of damage.

Game not over: Epic brings Fortnite back to iOS in Europe, using its own app store

Maniac Minsion in Day of the tentacle isnt new, also SCUMM in SCUMM. ;)

AI stole my job and my work, and the boss didn't know – or care

Re: A cynic's sarcasm might help

But where is the earth-shattering KABOOM ?

Twitter must pay over half a million to unfairly dismissed Irish exec

Re: Not a US company, but similar behaviour from the Irish subsidiary of Wix...

Nice name. Is this some platform for masturbation issues ?

The verb "wixen" is german slang for male masturbation (not to be confused with "wichsen" which may have the same meaning but normally is the action of applying shoeshine and polish it in.).

If any internet platform thats called out for "hate speech" (by whatever nutjob of whatever ideology/voluntary mental disorder) got cancelled, deleted or ignored, the internet would be silent.

Google's ex-CEO U-turns after saying staff 'going home early' killed winning

Re: I misspoke about Google and their work hours. I regret my error

"I doubt few offices are equipped for that."

Behold, my CAT6 of 8 tails.... Or my 10 knotted extension cords mace. Or whatever corded weapon any mess of USB cables transforms to after one day in a dark drawer...

"t never hurts to be seen putting in extra effort, to make management think you're more valuable "

No need for effort, most of "management" hasnt enough competence and understanding to actually be able to value real worth. Just make sure to put on a show of what they think they understand and youre better off than anyone doing real work.

One of the far too many examples was me and a colleague "standing around" (as a certain manager decided to believe and voiced to everyone and his dogs fleas behind our backs) in front of a prototype. What he wasnt able to see/hear because he kept his distance and had no intent of asking what we did, was our conversation about technical difficulties, how to get cabling from the feed through all the moving parts to the target, how much space had to be allocated for pneumatics..... All the fiddly little stuff that "somehow" always comes up with prototypes.

When it came to the next performance review, this nice opinion was put on the table and cost both of us our share of the bonus for early completion.

Compensating the shortcomings of the construction and implementing some "minor" changes, with excessive overtime, destroyed weekends, delayed vacancy, all for nothing.

You might guess what happened at the next machine. Spoiler: somehow this thing was completed late. Too late. Expensively late (Oops, had to be on the container ship to overseas ? Really ? My, how shocking. Isnt it too bad ? If only someone had had some ideas in the early stages of completion....).

Re: Yep yep, the priviledged attitude

Just be "green", replace each useless CEO with a pottet plant.

For "CO2" reasons, etc.

Biden tries to cut through fog of confusion caused by deliberately deceptive customer service tricks

Re: The golden rule, ignored

Which equals to never fix anything at all.

Well as nice as it SOUNDS....

"Talks", "discussions" and "efforts" that are taking years, decades, until the sun burns out yet fail to show even the smallest result of whats allegedly intended ?

If any of the allegedly intended, any of the oh so worthy intents, efforts, whateverblabbernothinghappenings actually transform into something real that actually does whats allegedly intended, i might applaud.

As far as my cynicism infused sarcasm-a-tron is involved, big words, nothing done. Seen too much of this in germany, experiencing it every time another scammer pollutes my phone or my letterbox. Helping those in uncancellable subscriptions and similar evil stuff as best as i can, succeeding sometimes directly, sometimes sadly have to convince the victims to get a lawyer, as none of the "consumer protection agencies" or whatevers do anything useful.

IF any government REALLY wants this kind of scammery to end, why dont they put into law what they allege to intend ? Maybe because as long as its in discussion limbo, nothing happens but at least all are looking good and the scammers keep on scamming and the $currency keeps on rolling.

Re: Old US Benchmark/Example

Seems a lot like "Bertelsmann Club" but the "Club" not only had a very long mandatory membership, you HAD to buy something ito fill a spending quote or else would have sent trash of their choice for premium prices to you and wether you liked that or not was your problem. Also, the "discounted only for club members" items in their shops pretty much matched the "noone likes this trash, have it for some cents" aisles in discounters. Cancelling the membership also was a real hassle, my sister needed three tries and finally a lawyer to get rid of them.

Apple is coming to take 30% cut of new Patreon subs on iOS

While this seems like the obvious thing to do, wasnt this "redirecting to different payment methods" already forbidden in the TOS(s em out) when epic started to get angry with apples Iprotection racket ?

I have an inherited mac mini with os 10.whatever in working condition but never read any apple ToS so i am rememberguessing from what i read here.

Please correct me if im (quite likely) remembering wrong.

Try the RedMi scourge, if you feel masochistic tendencies.

Android as a disadvantegaous advantage of being highly customizeable, sadly also in a "we tell you what you cant delete" way thats somewhat Ihateyou compatible with apple.

On the other hand, there are many, many manufacturers that just deliver a plain as possible OS (with only "child mode", "digital wellness" and similar uninstalleable bloatware thats sadly deeply encrusted in the OS now) with the occasional customer contact, system optimizer and phone mirroring app included.

When i compare my blackview pack with the "mi" whatevers that my wife and kids pretend to like, i have literally zero problems apart from my usual preferences like replacing gboard with hackers keyboard, installing several apps that playstore doesnt like and fiddling some stuff around with ADB becaus i somewhat dislike certain things.

The "mi" things however are somewhat loaded with bloatware and manufacturer made sillystuff, and thats exactly whats triggering issues quite regularly. Sadly, most of this cannot be uninstalled, only disabled or overridden with replacement apps.

Anyway the dokeOS android in blackviews really "just works" from first start, the sillystuff thats clinging into whatever "mi" android is called "just works" for a few weeks, then triggers a multitude of mysterious issues along several other apps.

TL,DR: Android also "just works" but sadly, some manufacturers do interfere with this in a quite unpleasant way. That might be why things like Lineage and KaiOS exist. ;)

German state ditches Windows, Microsoft Office for Linux and LibreOffice

Re: Outlook/Exchange ?

Thats interesting but in our company, the basic OS on each and every CNC is some sort of Linuxish abomination, be it the spanish machines from FANUC, the bigger one with a Heidenhein PLC or the medium one from some noname manufacturer in the US of A.

I do know of some machines, especially with siemens PLC inside that seem to use Microsoftish things, Spinner (yes indeed their name) CNC for example.

But as time goes by, manufacturers of time critical equipment tend to dislike windows exxcentric opinion of "real time", "stability", uptime as well as some stutters and hiccups generally not happening in anything Ixish. The more microsoft bloats up, the less attractive they are, not due to storage issues but due to the unhealthy effects on speed, reliability and precision. Mutating data standards for files of any kind also dont help people, who need to have their stuff ready for longer than two versions.

The more aggressive microsoft acts against the userbase, the more pressure will build up to look for any alternative.

Give it time, do your best to convince people who really do not need windows that they dont need windows. So far, Mint seems good enough for those who only need a browser, Email access and some sort of Office suite.

Re: Windows VW or WINE

Let me remind you of hells incarnate sadistic "programming environment" called Siemens TIA portal.("Totally Integrated Automation", my flaming backside after tons of chili).

Depending on the hardware you need to program, all those still suffering from "Turbo"PASCAL traumata (command you need is in THIS version of the library AKA "unit" but this unit is incompatible /overlapping but lacking with another unit that has another command you need in it....) will have a creepy feeling that they experienced something in the dark past thats quite like TIA nowadays.

Most of those who have to cope with different "compatible" hardware modules or even siemens own hellspawns from other times and versions, especially safety modules in DP (decentralized peripherals, basically I/O modules not directly built in the PLC but connected via Profibus or profinet) have similar issues with the databases for hardware modules of different time and manufacturer (officially "compatible") so the usual approach is to set up several VM with TIA portal under the respective windows version and each VM for special cases has a specific, project oriented combination of hardware databases in it that would conflict with each other when trying to install them all as well as with the "standard" config siemens alleges should work for everything.

Then throw in a mix of feldbus,profibus and profinet along with a DP/DP coupler to really mess up the addressing... "organically" grown over time, most here will shudder as they know and have experienced what suchlike might mutate to...

Anyway, there would not be much difference wether your Desktop is KDE,gnome or whatever, you would still need different VM. And there we are again with special hardware needs.

CrowdStrike hires outside security outfits to review troubled Falcon code

Re: This parameter count mismatch evaded multiple layers of build validation and testing

And neither input sanitizing nor proper input mismatch diagnosis/error handling or fail to safe. Instead, run around out of bounds in memory areas youre not supposed to be. Glorious.

That begs the question if they at least have some kind of live bit or similar monitoring or if they just sit around and wait for customers to grab the traditional pitchforks and torches.

At least a nice reminiscence. Back, back in the days, when you tried to read more data than defined, the good old C64 responded with a cheery "?out of data error". Didnt crash the system, though.

So nice to see that "high tech" and high cost "security" software cant even pop up such a simple message nor get their "testing" to actually test everything they changed.

Study backer: Catastrophic takes on Agile overemphasize new features

At least "move fast and break things" would make a nice sticker on a wrecking ball.

Not sure if you can call a pendulum "agile" but once it moves....

Re: ...adults would much rather software worked properly than was chock full of new features

Theres a little difference in being considered adult in the field of biology, jurisdiction and lastly and most importantly behaviour...

Seen a 12 year old in an MMO acting a lot more mature than his 60+ year old guild leader. Non internet-afflicted experiences also give this impression. It would be bearable if this issue was limiteed to games and marketing but weve got quite a lot biological and juristical adults in the bundestag who are even less mature than a kindergarten brat that throws a fit every three seconds.

All y'all love AI, right? Get ready for Gemini in Nest cameras, Google Assistant

Gemini ? In control ?

So is gemini finally shedding its racist/wokist behaviour pattern or will that continue to be an issue with anything its doing or spitting out ?

An "AI" thats showing only non white people when asked about pictures of the pope and only white caucasian people when asked to draw a random image of a villain might have even more issues than the other glorified sort-of sort algorythms that are currently misleadingly called "AI".

So how far will geminis "tendency" to racial bias still go ? Will it accept commands from old white men ? Can any surveillance thats pre filtered by gemini still be trusted or are suddenly all porch pirates old white males, no matter who really stole the package ? Can i ask for music from Beethoven or other old white men or will i be "informed" ,like with the family photos, that its not very nice to listen to old white music and wouldnt i like some african congo drums instead ?

Just take its dentures out. "im sorry dave, i cannot chew that"

San Francisco set to ban rent-hiking algorithms used by landlords

Re: Two Issues

To prohibit "the algorythm" might be the better way in any case. "the algorythm" needs to get its data from somewhere and i really would prefer a meatbag with actual knowledge wether a housing unit in area X can really be made more expensive or if there are non numerical aspects to be considered like reliability of current tenant, state of said housing unit (new, old, rats in the walls), comparision to the neighboring units while implementing more data than only $rent, additional factors like access to necessities (grocery stores, tube, whatever) or detrimental factors like being near to gangland territory, a landfill or whatever makes the house a lot less attractive.

Let "the free market" run loose with an "algorythm" thats only optimised for price gouging and you can do a lot more damage than only reducing profits when the whole death spiral finally goes bust.

Wasnt there a small real estate connected incident in 2007/2008 ?

Re: I suppose...

Isnt it more like "no matter if needed, marketing will find anyone dumb enough to invest with an allegation that it might sell ?

There have been ponzi schemes to "invest" in rental homes with alleged high rents that never came in.

And what about a change in situations when once profitable real estate suddenly looses renters/customers and the landlords as well as investors are getting in trouble ?

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/commercial-real-estate-crisis-empty-offices/674310/

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20230817-major-cities-are-now-with-filled-with-empty-office-buildings-what-happens-next

Re: I suppose...

Already proven false by the so called "Sozialwohnungen" in germany.

Housebuilders get a state subsidy but have to rent the flats out to agreed low prices for up to 30 years. There was once a company that actually made profits like this, the so called "neue Heimat", practically union owned. Worked reliably until some of the main managers decided to line their pockets and destroy the whole thing in doing so. Pretty much the same with other union owned/controlled things like CO-OP (grocery chain) and "Bank für Gemeinwirtschaft" (bank).

The dirty details are quite a frustrating read and i would like to recommend two books by Günther Ogger from the early 1990ies "Nieten in Nadelstreifen"ISBN 3-426-77136-5 and "Das Kartell der Kassierer" ISBN 3-426-77206-x, both books describing managerial and corporation misconduct as well as the damages coming from those.

Mr. Ogger is definitely NOT "leftist", proven by his career as chief editor from "Capital" and consultant as well as CEO.

Re: I suppose...

"The problem here is that existing owners don't want that as it will lower the housing market prices, add to that fact they are the people most likely to be governing."

Thats ONE of the self made problems but the current main issue in germany, apart from "gemeinnützige Wohngesellschaften" like "Neue Heimat" (A former "sozialer Wohnungsbau" with intentionally cheap flats that was practically union controlled but guess what, a selected few ruined it to line their pockets and nothing like it has been rebuilt.) practically dont exist anymore is the climate ideology and the tons of ever mutating regulations.

Existing housing is also affected with the notorious "Heizungsgesetz" by the "green" destruction squad which has triggered a lot of insecurity what kind of heating may or may not be built in and used, how expensive it will get due to the intentionally ever increasing "CO2" protection money and how long it may be used at all. Heatpumps also implementing the so called "smart grid" which is able to throttle down the electric power under 4kW without the house owner/user having any means to circumvent this.

Building a new house as well as trying to use an already existing one is also made hard by german beaurocracy as well as implementing silly EU regulations concerning mandatory insulation. All from some misguided morons that allege to have fear of CO2 and "global warming" yet see no issue in the continuous destruction of the earths main CO2-scrubber and temperature regulation unit called (sub)tropical rainforests or the auxilliary co2 scrubber systems called "trees".

TL:DR regulation insanity is running amok and doing a lot of expensive damage, both in existing housing as well as in housing intended to be built someday.

Uber and China's BYD agree deal to roll out 100,000 EV fleet

https://en.byd.com/news/press-release-first-electric-class-8-rear-loader-in-the-us-to-service-seattle/

https://en.byd.com/news/byd-receives-largest-battery-electric-bus-order-in-u-s-history/

Theres more to be found but im lazy.

The lifecycle of the degraded storage gives a hint on how much data was logged, and if you actually had read the article provided,or any other full article on this mess, all of this was transferred back home.

And concerning governments and "trust": if they are so in fear that they cannot do a man in the middle attack or that their "hackers" are unable to not only thwart phone home to china but also redirecting it to the usual TLA, that says a lot about the "governments" trust in the (in)competence of their own cyber warfare squads.

Its not like those cars have satellite connection (yet?) so as long as they need to go over any network thats controlled by "the government" in alleged fear, its quite unlikely that the phonecalls to china have a chance of going through undetected and unstolen.

And if it were like you assume, where exactly is the big difference to other EV ?

And, by the way, when it comes to unwanted data hoarding:

"The main issue is that this excessive log file writing causes eMMC flash wear. Flash memory is generally only rated for some tens of thousands of write cycles. What happens is that the flash memory starts to fail when writings can no longer be completed. When one block fails, parts of the firmware may also become unreadable, leading to poor operation or failure of the MCU completely.”

https://insideevs.com/news/376037/tesla-mcu-emmc-memory-issue/

The chosen battery tech on BYD, the so called "blade" cells in rectangular shape are way more stable than the bunch of parallel welded 18650 liquid cooled mess in teslas. The "super cell" will add to the danger of thermal buildup and the battery connectors for each cell are a lot bigger in BYD, giving them a lot more reliability when it comes to high current charging and discharging so battery wise, BYD has a clear advantage. Considering avoideable flaws and design issues in teslas, BYD doesnt look too bad at all.

Concerning your statement about chinese customers favouring teslas, thats not due to quality but for status. Run around with the most expensive crap you can show off - it seems chinese people are not too different from spoiled western rich brats.

All in all, i dont believe they differ too much. Teslas flaws and BYD flaws somewhat cancel each other out. I still see BYD a better alternative or at least a long needed competitor because of the much better battery concept and - also battery wise - teslas unexcuseable failure to develop their battery packs beyond prototype stage. Using 18650 was okay for the first one or two models, using readily available resources but the "super cell" bullshyte ignores so many literally life threatening conceptual issues that i consider this a real threat to safety.

Intel to shed at least 15% of staff, will outsource more to TSMC, slash $10B in costs

So the subsidies...

Nice going. First, get subsidies from any government dumb, desperate and/or corrupt enough to eat up your lies "to create jobs", then cut away the staff.

So hows it going ? If they rehire the thrown out people, does this count towards the "jobs created" number thats the official reason for these subsidies ?

Germany names China as source of attack on government geospatial agency

Re: Attack of the Chinese cyber attackers :o

Of course they can. Just imagine, instead of a meager 256 bit key you use a collection of the longest laws possible.

Or leave it plaintext to induce nausea whenever a "hacker" tries to read in.