* Posts by nobody who matters

517 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jun 2021

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Diversity, equity, and inclusion is not an illusion, but it soon might be

nobody who matters Silver badge

Re: Seems to match

<........"And what color was Obama ? I seem to remember that he wasn't very white".......>

And he wasn't entirely black either ;)

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Re: Seems to match

<........."[1] Just "biology". Boys tend to be less "serious" than girls and too focused on intercourse to work reliably. Gets better with age.

[2] Violence and sexual abuse are the tools men use for that. See the convicted felon in charge in the USA"........>

Sorry, that is just feminist claptrap.

Women, particularly younger ones, are no less likely to be easily distracted and "less serious" about their study/work than young men (sometimes for similar reasons ;))

And if you don't think that women use sex to manipulate and/or abuse men, then I think you need to open your eyes and have a good look around. I would accept the argument around the use of violence, but that is principally because on the whole women tend to be physically less strong than men, and therefore physical violence not a sensible option for women, but even then there are exceptions.

Your reasoning/observation regarding the use of women in previously male dominated roles is correct, although wartime brings with it unusual circumstances which require unusual solutions. Do you think perhaps that after WW2 was over, the returning demobilised soldiers, sailors and airmen should have simply been left out of work to fend for themselves because the women had now taken over their roles? This was pretty much what the USA did to their returning demobilised conscripts when they came back from Vietnam, and I seem to recall it was a situation which came to be regarded as a matter of national disgrace.

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Re: Seems to match

<......."Equality of OUTCOME is a worthwhile goal."........>

As your post seems to be primarily concerned with college admissions, and therefore by extension, to academic achievement, it is worth pointing out that what that invariably tends to result in is that to reach the 'equal outcome' result, the standard reduces to the lowest common denominator.

I would argue that equality of outcome is not always worthwhile.

The important thing to provide is equality of opportunity, not to only offer the opportunity to 'minorities' if they are capable of significantly out-performing their contemporaries from other backgrounds.

AI summaries turn real news into nonsense, BBC finds

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Re: Ai is bloody awful

They will probably end up getting the employees they deserve ;)

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Re: I'm sorry, I'll read that again.

An odd claim to make bearing in mind that it was diplomacy led by Henry Kissinger that persuaded Yasser Arafat to negotiate a peace settlement that had succeeded in maintaining an (albeit uneasy) peace between Israel and the Palestinians since the 1990s until Hamas decided to smash it in October 2023.

Yasser Arafat was even awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace over it.

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<......."An OpenAI spokesperson said: "We support publishers and creators by helping 300 million weekly ChatGPT users discover quality content through summaries, quotes, clear links, and attribution. We've collaborated with partners to improve in-line citation accuracy and respect publisher preferences, including enabling how they appear in search by managing OAI-SearchBot in their robots.txt. We'll keep enhancing search results.""......>

Translation: An OpenAI spokesperson said a lot of bollocks and completely missed the point.

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<....."Pete Archer, Programme Director for Generative AI, wrote about the corporation's enthusiasm for the technology, detailing some of the ways in which the BBC had implemented it internally, from using it to generate subtitles for audio content to translating articles into different languages.".....>

We have had programs for speech recognition and language translation for some years.

Neither of them are artificial intelligence.

nobody who matters Silver badge

Re: AI summaries turn real news into nonsense

To be honest, from what I can see, it seems to lean heavily towards the first two ;)

Only 4 percent of jobs rely heavily on AI, with peak use in mid-wage roles

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Well they should be - the misrepresentation of their tools by the marketing con is getting them and their products a bad name, which is likely to hamper the development and uptake of more advanced versions in the future.

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Pretending to be 'AI', perhaps.

However, none of these things come anywhere near what most people would actually accept as being 'intelligent' ;)

UK government insiders say AI datacenters may be a pricey white elephant

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Big Brother

Re: AI…. To do what???

Why do so many people think that the data harvesting is only for the purposes of advertising??

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

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The man appears to be a complete berk.

He has already wasted a great deal of council money for them to deal with his court actions, and this is council tax payers money, which would be much better used for providing essential services to, you know, actual council tax payers - like mending potholes for a start!

Quite apart from the question of whether or not the data would turn out to be retrievable from the drive, has he any idea how big the pile of rubbish is that would need to be dug out, and the time and painstaking sifting through that would be necessary to have any chance of finding the drive to start with. It wouldn't have been that easy to find in the original bin lorry.

London has 400 GW of grid requests holding up datacenter builds

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Re: The new OFGEM rules *should* start to make a difference.

<...."Digestors are a thing to deal with 'waste' and convert that to gas for heating."....>

Not really, whilst there are a number of anaerobic digesters that use waste (primarily chicken litter or vegetable/food waste) there are a failry large (and expanding) number of AD plants for which a specific feedstock is grown - mostly maize or rye which is made into silage before being fed into the digestor. They produce methane gas which is then captured and used as the fuel for a gas turbine generator to produce electricity which is fed into the grid - as they can be started and stopped quickly they are brought online to provide power during high demand periods of the day.

There are a few AD plants which also utilise the excess heat to warm greenhouses built next to them - British Sugar have one such plant at Wissington (running mainly on the waste pulp from refining of sugar beet) producing power for the beet factory and the grid, and the heat for warming about 40 ares of greenhouses alongside which were initially used for producing tomatoes, but now produce a crop for use in the pharmaceutical industry. Dyson Farming have a similar set-up at Carrington fed by maize and rye silage which produces electricity (principally to feed into the grid) and heats a 26 acre greenhouse which produce strawberries (https://dysonfarming.com/strawberries/).

nobody who matters Silver badge

Re: The new OFGEM rules *should* start to make a difference.

<......"For example there are 1200 livestock and poultry farms in the UK that meet the US "Mega farm" criteria. IOW every one of them will have at least a hectare of roof that could be covered with a PV array,...."....>

There are two potential problems there:

Firstly, most chicken sheds are of fairly lightweight construction, and the roof will not bear the combined weight of being covered in panels. To build chicken sheds with stronger roof and walls to take the weight would be costly, and would probably make such a project unviable.

Secondly, there is a fairly significant number of chicken sheds which are designed to be moved on skids - when one batch of chickens has been fattened and sent to slaughter, the shed is towed/winched from over the accumulated excrement and shavings mixture of the previous batch of birds, then pressure washed and thoroughly disinfected before being winched further across the field to a fresh, uncontaminated pice of ground before the next batch of birds is put into it. This is to minimise any disease carry-over, and obviously these sheds are built particularly light weight to make them easier to move, and obviously they would need to be stronger and heavier to carry solar panels, and moving them about every 6 or 8 weeks is going to present problems for the connection to the grid.

Apart from being a valuable agricultural fertiliser, a considerable amount of chicken dung is already used for power generation - power stations at Eye, Ely and Westfield all burn chicken litter to produce electricity, and there are several AD plants in operation or planned which use chicken litter to produce methane to drive a gas turbine powered generator.

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Re: net 0 is not extreme

<......."Just because something works technically doesn't mean it is sensible or viable. Green hydrogen is an especially good example of that."......>

On the subject of hydrogen power, I think Lord Bamford, Mercedes-Benz Trucks and Manitou may not agree with you ;)

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I was under the impression that most of the former steelworks sites in and around Corby had already been redeveloped, or are currently in the process of being so ?

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Re: Who could have seen this coming....

.The infrastructure was already 'crumbling' as you put it well before privatisation, and investment in upgrading and improving the state of the grid transmission equipment has been considerably greater and more effective than it was under the CEGB prior to 1990, when they basically sat on their hands and did little beyond very basic maintenance and emergency repairs.

UK government using AI tools to check up on roadworthy testing centers

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The MOT Test operates primarily as a test of function rather than condition. If the component or system being tested functions within the parameters layed down in the MOT Testing Manual, it will pass unless it is assessed as being in a seriously enough deteriorated or damaged condition as to be dangerous. If the tester notes that the part that has passed the test has nonetheless some minor damage, or is becoming worn (eg brake pads becoming worn), he may add a 'Minor' (formerly an advisory) to that effect to the the test comments on the certificate, but this is principally at the discretion of the tester. In this case the specific limits for that wear before the pad is considered defective and in danger of failing to function correctly is set at 1.5mm minimum pad thickness or worn down to the wear indicator, and such a pad will result in a 'Major - dangerous' as a reason for rejection.

I can't really see how supposed 'AI' is going to achieve much if anything that the DVSA inspectors are not already seeing themselves from the test data that they recieve, and I suspect they are already using queries to the database to look for anomalous results.

Since the MOT Test data logging went completely online a few years ago, there is less scope for cheating the test than there used to be, although I do know there are still 'dodgy' MOTs available from equally dodgy people, it is less easy to issue a false pass certificate now that a vehicle has to be logged in to the system and the data electronically recorded during the course of the test. It is also (because of this) no longer possible to take a vehicle which has failed a test to another testing station and have it pass, as the earlier fail will immediately show up to the tester as soon as he logs it onto the system.

Tesla sales crash in Europe, UK. We can only wonder why

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Trollface

Re: No new car models is the problem

<......"Apparently there will be a new model released later this year - the Tesla 88"....>

I would have thought that 69 would be a suitable number?

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<......."It is clear nobody has been paying attention to the industry. If you check SMMT (Society of Motor Manurfactures and Traders) Tesla sales have been going down for over 18 months."....>

Much as I dislike Musk, and much as I dislike Tesla, and much as I dislike the type of people who typically drive them, I have to say that it really is not possible to draw any firm conclusion from one months Tesla sales figures for the European market (including the UK). I seem to think that all European market Teslas come from China, and do so in large and fairly well spaced out shipments, which leads to some very erratic monthly sales figures for the Tesla brand.

If you do actually look at the UK sales figures published by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), you will find that their monthly sales since March 2024 have been thus:

March = 6995

April = 1352

May = 3152

June = 6757

July = 2462

August = 3013

September = can't find the exact figure, but was certainly in excess of 7000

October = 971

November = 4558

December = 8645

Sales are high in the month that a shipment arrives in the UK, and the following month is much lower because stocks are becoming depleted. Where there is a fresh arrival of cars and there is a particularly high volume sold (through delivery of cars ordered but not available in the weeks since the previous shipment, there are almost always low sales of Tesla the following month - there were 8645 Teslas registered/sold in December 2024 (a very high month for Tesla) so it fits the usual pattern for January to see a significant drop, in much the same way as October saw only 971 Teslas sold/registered following a large showing in the September figures.

This has pretty much always been the pattern for sales of Tesla in the UK (and Europe as a whole).

When you see Teslas sales figures being consistantly below 1500 (and falling) for several months in a row, that will be the time for rejoicing :)

nobody who matters Silver badge

Re: "Cybertrucks in the UK and EU are almost impossible to certify"

The weight restriction relates to what the vehicle is rated as legally capable of carrying, not what it actually weighs at the time.

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Re: "Cybertrucks in the UK and EU are almost impossible to certify"

The insurance wasn't valid in the UK - that is the principal reason the Police stopped it. As it is not road legal in the UK, it will not be possible to get it insured for UK roads. The standard penalty for no insurance in the UK is a short visit to Mr Crusher ;)

DeepSeek or DeepFake? Our vultures circle China's hottest AI

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Re: Anthropomorphizing AI

<......."We are attributing human characteristics to AI. This is probably not wise"........>

Probably because it <isn't> AI ;)

DeepSeek's R1 curiously tells El Reg reader: 'My guidelines are set by OpenAI'

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<........".......but its erratic responses raise more questions about how these models were trained .....">

As others have already suggested; it is what China has done for decades - copy someone elses product and then market an almost (but not quite) identical version rebadged as their own.

Hyperoptic customers left in dark as power outage takes down systems

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Re: UPSes are a common feature of...

<....."El Reg should know that customer services in Brexit Britain only share information on a need to know basis to respect privacy and national security"........>

In my experience, they had the same attitude before Brexit too.

'Bro delete the chat': Feel the panic shortly before cops bust major online fraud ring

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Hornchurch only became part of the London Borough of Havering in 1965. Prior to that it was indeed situated in the county of Essex, and quite a few people still regard it as such.

AI facial recognition could sink this murder probe

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Re: Detective Inspector Artie Ficial reporting for duty.

<......"The problem as always is not the tools, it's the fools using them".......>

In this case it IS the tool that is the problem. Even the supplier as good as admits that it is of no use, so why do they make it available? (OK, I do know why - money,as usual!)

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

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Re: Maybe do some actual research!

<......"If the UK and the EU would open their markets to US products, primarily US agricultural products..."....>

This is rubbish!

The UK and EU import a huge amount of agricultural products from the USA - soya, wheat, and maize in particular are imported in considerable quantities.

The commodities that we don't allow to be imported are animal products which your authorities permit to be produced using husbandry practices and prophylactic chemical treatment/use of medicinal products and hormonal growth promoters which farmers in the UK and Europe are banned from using (for very good reasons of both public health and animal welfare). That isn't going to change unless US farmers produce their livestock to similar standards.

For many other things, it isn't so much that the UK and EU are restricting access to their markets, but rather that the US produced goods have limited appeal (all too often because they are of inferior quality or manufactured to a poorer standard than UK/EU produced equivalents. To be quite brutally honest, a lot of American manufactured goods seem to have a manufacturing quality and reliability we would have associated with our UK manufactured goods back in the 1960s and 1970s).

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Happy

Re: Just ignore Trump and carry on.

<........"Does El Reg allow to call someone an idiot?.....".......>

Only if they are percieved to be right wing, anti-EU, pro Trump or pro-Musk :)

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Re: " small majority of their compatriots turned out to be as thick as mince and voted for Brexit, "

<......."And the Guardian noted Vote Leave did use AggregateIQ based in Canada, who had links to CA, for their actual dirty work."....>

Specifically it referred to historical links ie. these had no relevance to the Brexit referendum.

It's people like you with their distortion of the facts, and more damagingly continual rudeness and name calling that antagonised so many leavers. Calling people that you are trying to persuade to your point of view "swivel-eyed loons" or "thick as mince" isn't ever going to win anyone over.

Name calling is almost exclusively the preserve of those who either have lost the argument, or are unable articulate a coherent presentation of their case.

QED

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Take a trawl through Companies House; there are a very large number of British listed companies (some of them quite significant) which are either wholly or partly-owned by US interests.

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Re: This sounds like wishful thinking

It might have helped if they had been in a position to actually negotiate, instead of being sent into the talks with their hands tied behind their back by a group of vociferous people insisting that we must have a deal at any price. That is what we ended up with, and the reason why two chief negotiators resigned.

How to make a bad situation even worse in one easy lesson!

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Re: " small majority of their compatriots turned out to be as thick as mince and voted for Brexit, "

<........" and ignores the very significant part that Cambridge Analytics ....... played in feeding a lot of voters targetted ads.......".....>

This is another of those myths that gets repeatedly parroted by some people with an axe to grind.

However, it simply isn't true:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/oct/07/cambridge-analytica-did-not-misuse-data-in-eu-referendum-says-watchdog

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-54457407

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Re: And

<........."It's possible to have a sensible discussion about the EU".........>

I'm not sure that it is around these parts tbh :(

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Re: Prisoner's Dilemma!

His Majesty's ;)

British Museum says ex-contractor 'shut down' IT systems, wreaked havoc

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You surely have to be a special breed of stupid to carry out such a blatant act, even if severely depressed?

Strikes me that if he was prepared and stupid enough to carry this out, they were probably right to dispense with his services in the first place.

AI pothole patrol to snap flaws in Britain's crumbling roads

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Re: Roads are designed to handle a predicted combination of vehicles.

I think you will find that they are 44 tonnes ;)

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Re: Its fun around here

44 tonnes even ;)

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Headmaster

Re: Ah. This probably isn't a good idea.

<....."Trunk roads are legally different to Class A roads.".....>

And grammatically, trunk roads are legally different from A roads ;)

Sorry, the pedant got the better of me.

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Re: AI Wooo

They would do if they had the money. Most local Councils don't have enough to cover all their obligations, the Government keeps wanting to restrict their grant, and also limits the amount by which they can increase Council Tax.

Of course, all of this money ultimately comes from taxation, and whilst some is paid by corporations, in the end the entire cost comes down on ordinary individuals like you and I and a large part of the population start screaming if anyone suggests increasing the tax thery have to pay.

It's another of those vicious circles.

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Re: citizens are expected to pop their postcode into a website

There will still be a postcode, regardless of whether there are any buildings nearby. However, the drawback is that where there are few properties, the postcode area could be quite large.

It would be much better if they would utilise the OS grid reference, or failing that use whatthreewords.

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Re: And then there's kent roads

<......"Every time I've had to change car tyres in the last mmmfty mmf years it's been due to a pot hole".....>

Assuming that you haven't done so already, it might be worth considering fitting XL (Extra Load) rated tyres if they are available in your tyre size. The sidewalls are better reinforced and although they do give a marginally harder ride, it is not particularly noticeable and they do tend to be a lot more resistant to pothole damage. I've been using such tyres for the last 20 years, and have never had any pothole damage, despite a good number of quite severe pothole impacts.

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Re: Not a myth

Slower speeds can actually put greater stress on the road surface.

I recall a workmate of mine who had once worked on a road planing gang telling me about a section of the M25 they had to plane in readiness for a major resurfacing. This was only a few months after that section had originally been built. When he asked the site foreman why they were planing it off again so soon, the reply was "It wasn't engineered to be a car park!" It had started to subside because it was spending a large part of the day with slow moving or stationary traffic on it when the road had been constructed to a standard to cope with traffic moving at 50mph+ and the base construction wasn't designed to take the static loading.

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Re: Potholes that don't need immediate attention

<......."Except some councils have a stupid prioritising approach which is stupid."....>

Stupid, yes; but nonetheless very necessary when the Council concerned doesn't have enough money to repair all of them, largely because the Government keeps restricting the Treasury Grant, and restricts the amount they are allowed to increase Council Tax by.

Lincolnshire in particular has difficulty because there is a large area with a considerable road network, but because the population density is fairly low, it recieves a disproportionately small grant in relation the amount of road it has to maintain.

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Re: SEP

<......."AFAICR, however, it was called something like a road fund licence....."......>

That's right, the Government set up what was entitled The Road Fund to pay for the building and maintenance of road under The Roads Act 1920, and was principally paid for from Vehicle Exice Duty, which was commonly (and officially) referred to as The Road Fund Licence until 1936 when VED ceased to be 'hypothecated' for The Road Fund under The Finance Act 1936.

Why is Big Tech hellbent on making AI opt-out?

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None of it is Artificial Intelligence. Please stop referring to it as such!

They are just very advanced and very sophisticated analysis programs or word/language analysers/processors.

They do not think.

They are not intelligent.

They are just computer programs.

Actual 'Artificial Intelligence' is still a long way off. We are still a long way from fully understanding how human intelligence and our brains actually work. It is unlikely that we can produce real AI until we fully understand how our own intelligence works.

The current use of the term 'AI' is nothing more than a marketing con.

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Happy

Re: Copilot toasters

If I want toast, I will ask Toastie for it, so shut up!

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Re: Samsung

<...."Stay away from Whirlpool."....>

Probably stay away from Beko, Hotpoint and Indesit too -they are all owned or partly owned by Whirlpool.

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Re: Time waster

Avaricious Imbeciles in the case of those pushing it hardest.

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"........."I haven't noticed any fall off for eBay listings with ChatGPT-written descriptions v human written of similar length and content."......>

Lots of posts on the ebay discussion boards from members saying they dislike the LLM written descriptions, and many saying they will avoid buying from sellers who use that feature.

Listing descriptions written using the ebay LLM feature are always blatently obvious - mainly because it actually tells you very little of any use about what is being offered for sale, and partly because it is often barely intelligible. The inaccurate and misleading nature of many of those descriptions can sometimes even lead to the seller being open to a claim for 'Item Not As Described'.

A lot of buyers won't notice it of course, because a significant proportion of buyers don't seem to read the item description anyway and buy solely on the basis of the pics - possibly can't read?

Intrusion of supposed AI into the ebay search has meant that the search has become even more vague and now returns huge numbers of listing which have no connection whatever to the search terms used.

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