Posts by that one in the corner 5494 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Nov 2021
> So the smart thing to do is charge your vehicle at night.
So you *do* agree with the article then:
>> asked not to charge their electric vehicles during "flex alerts" designed to reduce stress on the grid
...
>> Load on the electrical grid peaks between 4-9 pm, during which time CAISO said it may issue flex alerts urging Californians to reduce their electricity consumption.
The linked patent describes something gloriously undesirable: a food container with a Koch Snowflake shape! Only an "AI" could claim that shape had advantages due to the increased surface area (and ignore all the obvious problems like material costs, ability to retain its shape from pressure of contents, difficulty of cleaning etc) and I'm pretty sure that you don't really want to interlock containers like that on a supermarket shelf!
Then the addition of attention-grabbing lights (including "neural flames" - I like my neurons non-inflamed, thank you) and fractal beeps!
If this is the quality[1] of invention expected, we don't have that much to fear from the AI Uprising.
> invent technologies that could tackle "a range of economic, ecological, and sociological challenges."
Yet this the example of its work Thaler decided to use?
[1] I know that a lot of other patents are low-quality, but a that is because they are just trivial changes or otherwise stating the blindingly obvious about a device that actually works, and has been working for some time. Like corners. This patent is for something you'd never want to see working!
svn commit: WebKit migrates to GitHub
Next time I'm in the US, I shall indeed take care not to talk to the Police.
In the UK, I shall continue my normal behaviour of smiling at the Police, saying "Good Morning/Afternoon", waving a Thank You to the damp plod controlling traffic around an RTA in the drizzle and not pulling back out immediately after the flashing lights have passed.
> imposing controls over every adult
This is reaching quite glorious levels of paranoia!
Imposing *what* controls on every adult?
The article puts it quite clearly that the desire (however wildly optimistic that may be) is to aim for protecting your privacy, as adults, by applying by default the protections that children should always be afforded.
Sorry, what am I saying?
Clearly, you all want to protect your rights to be tracked, your rights to give up all your privacy and your deeply held rights to have sites use every trick and engagement mechanism that prolongs use.
And you are volunteering to help all the non-tech-capable patents to run their childrens' ISP?
Nope, once again, it'll all be about how the Gummint aint got the right to tell you what to do and anyone without your skills ate just irrelevant.
Helping protect other people's children? Damn Commies!
How about because you are repeating "Pornhub" instead of "AgeId" and, presumably, trying to make some clever statement.
We all *know* that porn sites are major clients of age verification services, that isn't anything startling or new.
Many here may know that PornHub et al are the largest in that sector (or not - I'll take your word for it, never felt the need to look into their numbers).
So the largest client of a service provider owns that provider - quite sensible, if it is cheaper than paying monthly.
So, what was your point supposed to be? That PornHub know how to run a business?
> It is asks for increased privacy and data protection for a subset of internet users, children
Ah, that is clearly where I've been missing the subtlety.
The UK has had the presumption that children's privacy is protected well before the Internet came about.
You are telling me that the US doesn't have that blanket protection for its children, which I'd been assuming was a constant in civilised societies. My mistake.
It works to the extent that, of you are not being asked to age verify, then you have the assumption that the site is avoiding the sort of privacy invasion that is illegal to apply to a child.
If you find the site isn't behaving, it can be reported (then we get into how effective reporting is, but that is another discussion).
> Access to the internet is not something that I want my children to have. I am not saying I am against it, just it is not a want.
Absolutely fine, in which case this whole discussion is pretty much moot for you.
> The easy way to solve that problem would have been to apply the privacy requirements to everyone not just children. Are adults second class citizens not deserving the same level of privacy as children?
Which, as I've been trying to point out, is exactly what the Californian bill says!
The whole age restriction thing is for those sites which can't manage to be that civilised.
So, this bill would cause mandatory age checks (and look up to see how well that idea is received) would it?
This means that we are all agreed that no company with a website is capable of applying the part where it says "or apply the privacy and data protections afforded to children to all consumers"?
> The bill ALLOWS the collection of such data, by law! It makes things worse, not better.
You mean the collection that is already going on? How does this make that any worse?
So now you are arguing against *all* age restrictions? Where are stopping that line of thinking?
And you are claiming that because *you* are the superhumanly-perfect parent there must be no protections to aid the offspring of any less parents with less judgement than you? Or less than your godlike ability to ensure that you children never access anything you have not sanctioned? Nah, screw the rest of them, why should you give a shit about those mugs?
You claim to be the uber-computer geek, and you can not see a way around this, to give your own children access to everything you want them to have?
> The bill says online businesses must: "Estimate the age of child users with a reasonable level of certainty appropriate to the risks that arise from the data management practices of the business or apply the privacy and data protections afforded to children to all consumers."
You are using emotive arguments *against* a bill that asks for increased privacy and data protection?
Lessons learnt - well, we wrote them down and put that into the Document Store (cue choir of angels)
Then, TRADITION!
Each time a New Project to build The Next Generation of our product has started, the New Team has chucked away all of the preceding versions' work, including any tooling that may have been created to get the job done: "Everything important is in the new deliverables spec". Which, once again, only tells us what the customer will see, not how we got there.
Cross-platform Makefiles with features to fit our procedures (and extra builtin help)? Nah, we want to just start small, no need for all that. Put this guy on it; ignore that he has just googled all the basic how-to's and manuals that are already in this directory on the server.
Collection of OSS libraries that we've built on all the platforms already and have sorted by licence, collected in one tree and shared from there? Nah, to Github we shall go again; ooh, look, Fred's branch has a copy of the same library I'm just downloading, that makes the fourth different version of it in our new repo. Didn't the author change the licence from MIT to GPL at some point? What fun!
Compact scripting language? Nah, this one is all the fashion - see, yours doesn't even have has half as many books written about it!
You have a tested Over-The-Air firmware updating tool? Cool, always wanted to write one of those! Don't understand that the cryptographic signing though, but XOR is good enough.
Tool to generate Open Source compliance document? Doesn't work with our new build but don't worry, we can just do it manually in Word as we go along. So, did we use Fred's branch in the end?
Copy to go into escrow? Easy peasy, our build just gets all these libraries fresh from Github, no need to put *them* onto CD/USB, they'll always be there. Don't be so old-fashioned.
(At this point, I may be getting a bit ranty, so shall stop and lie down for a bit)
Maybe they have a plan to take it apart, turning it into a set of more manageable pieces to deorbit cleanly and, at the same time, train up more astronauts on space (de)construction techniques. Transferable skills for the Lunar Gateway station?
Maybe. You never know, it could happen.
(Or they could clear everything off the main truss and see how well the kinetic harpoon idea works?)
I upvoted your comment, but:
can someone please explain to me what the bleep you are plotting on your "learning curve" graphs that can make
> "steep curve" would be just a small ramp
a meaningful statement in the way it is used here?!
(It sure aint "amount learnt" on the y-axis against time on the x, or "ability to do task" against time)
When asked why the Intelligence Agencies were unable to locate such a well-known suspect, the spokesman replied, and I quote, "We wuzz all mellow, the joint wuzz jumping, the sounds wuzz pumping" before blowing a whistle loudly in my ear. Later, a Ministry Aide threw shapes during PM's Question Time.
Also worked for a SCSI disk that let the magic smoke out (blowing a neat little hole in the controller IC). Luckily, that was back in the dim and distant days of 1994 (approximately), when local Computer Faires were a thing and there were so few drive types available to home users that it was actually a practical idea to go and hope to find a matching second-hand drive to be a board donor.
> As for "economic value", that argument only holds water if you considere your own time as of no value whatsoever. If you do, Apple gear isn't that expensive anymore
The commenter you are replying to is using their time to help their friends/relatives to get better economic value - the value *they* get from investing the time is in friendship and social terms.
> If it was not for Capitalism one would have no redress via courts at all
Are you trying to imply that Capitalists created consumer protection laws? The ones that irritate them so much?
Or are you trying to say that Capitalism invented Courts of Law? There are a few dead monarchs who would like a word with you.
For a few years now the DVDs we've bought *have* had a big "Thank you" message instead of the "anti-piracy" videos, which does work on us (oh, we are so easily manipulated): we feel lot more positively towards the DVD producer after being thanked and keep on buying DVDs.
(Intrigued that none of the above comments mentioned this change to a "Thank you" message - maybe we are part of an experimental group?)
> asking where all the buttons have gone, and tell you to put all them all back
At which point we find out if the dev is the sort who will only go by the literal word of the demand and therefore deleted all the old button code, and will now (almost, but not exactly) recreate it from scratch to comply with the new demand. Taking who knows how long to do so.
Or was the sort of dev who left the old button code as it was, just adding in a new boolean flag to disable it; and also used a separate boolean to enable the weird menu behaviour, just in case. He just flicks the boolean, gets the buttons back in minutes.
The big question being: which of those two actually did the better job? In whose eyes?
Was it the one who is being yelled at by Testing because "now they have to check it all works with the flag both both ways"?
