Posts by that one in the corner 5065 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Nov 2021
> (caps lock anyone?)
A totally useless key - remapped it to the Windows key (which isn't on the Northgate Omnikey Ultra I prefer[1]) - not that it gets any more use like that.
[1] caps lock is on the bottom row, the control key is in its proper place, above shift; bliss.
OTOH[1] use the mouse in your non-dominant hand.
It was just an obvious thing to do, from the first day I had a mouse as a practical tool, as it means I can hold a pen and take notes, tick off the worksheet etc whilst mousing around. Or, as I am one of the boring old right-handed normies[2], use the numerical keypad back in the days of entering data points by hand.
[1] gettit?
[2] although, considering how much gyp I've had from people (IT support, looking at you) who couldn't cope with picking the mouse up, moving it across - and the putting it back! - I understand the anguish of our left-handed siblings (literally, my sister is one).
> From firms' perspective, they might be hurt because they have key employees leaving.
Pah.
Clearly the ones leaving were never Team Players, did not have enough of the correct Loyalty To The Company and its Benevolent CEO. Key employees? Hah! They were just worming their way into the structure of The Company in order to take a bigger chunk when they inevitably fled. Better off without them, good to be shot of them sooner rather than later.
Now they won't be skulking at the back as we start the day with The Company Chant; all together now. "Rah-rah ..." (see, I was right, glad they are gone, now nobody is shouting out "Rasputin" in the first line! Never did understand that).
When FreeNAS went, I followed the XigmaNAS route and have been happy with it for years. Not that I do anything exciting - ZFS on a handful of drives, root on ZFS, copying snapshots across to a sibling server every night, a few shares, UPS & S.M.A.R.T. monitoring, that is all I want. The web UI is not flashy (good) but does all I've needed.
Basically, it just sits there, working, all very boring. The interesting stuff can then go on on the machines that talk to the NAS.
> it's not properly internationalized!
My take on this is always that the messages put into the program source are "programmer speak" which is NOT normal User English[1]. So the T9N data files that accompany the program are supposed to contain a a translation into normal-person English, as well as as any Spanish/French/Skaroese to suit the Users/Clients. So any (perceived[2]) rudeness can be taken out of the User's sight without needing to recompile.
Okay, this doesn't help when the full sources go to the Client (or potentially do so - e.g. into escrow) but at least it provides a method: YOU scour this T9N file, add the "safe" wording and we can make all your changes in the sources one go (and afterwards, don't let anyone do a diff in version control).
Of course, nobody bothered to do that scouring, but, hey, I gave you the chance, it's no longer my fault if someone sees a message they don't like (exit stage left, whistling a carefree tune).
[1] Yes, I'm for all intents and purposes monolingual so far as (shudder) talking to humans is concerned; nobody wants to see my attempts at writing O-level (barely scraped through, but the examiner didn't need to laugh out loud in the aural) French.
[2] Or just "inappropriate" - look, if you have comatose child processes then you reap them and wait until they all die! They are only orphans, who cares what happens to them?[3]
[3] sadly, never quite got to the classic "kill the zombie child process stuck in a pipe".
Mandatory sign on with your Company ID (all 19 digits, plus the 4 digit checksum), which you do by tapping on the flying keypads as they cross the screen. This is only intended as a a one-time logon, as once you are in the app will generate a QR code to use next time, but we've noticed most users appear reluctant to use the QR (note: for security, screenshotting is disabled; pencil and squared paper are available in the stationery cupboard).
Within the app you can get the number of a support ticket to work on (playing the Vegas Slots for a three digit number), log time against a job number (wobble the phone to sink the ball into the right hole, quarter an hour logged per ball) or use the geo-caching clues to find where the sheets from the stores ordering books have been hidden around the office. Your emails are presented as crosswords and take-home from payslips are found in the shaded squares after completing the Sudoku.
Your time within the app is shown by the clock at top left and your best time to date is shown on the right. To incentivise productivity, every five seconds over your best results in a deduction from your year end bonus.
As the consultants who prepared the app for us have described using it as "a pure and child like adventure from the comfort of your cubicle, an experience that will refresh and enliven", the CFO has determined that it counts as non-productive time for the purposes of your timesheet and will not be payable. The app will automatically log its usage on your behalf, rounded up to the nearest half-hour per session.
Addendum: Workplace safety has demanded that, in order to "reduce fatigue from excessive screen use", the app will automatically log you out after a maximum of ten minutes usage.
> They are both ageless
Every few years they must return to their Ringbinders of Power, light another Page That Was Intentionally Left Blank and immerse* themselves when the Flame Turns Blue.
* nudity isn't actually required, but Simon has found that leaving a set of clothes crumpled on the floor in the outer office has kept the curious at bay; whether he told the PFY that they were a *spare* set is unknown...
> Social Media has successfully managed to corrupt youths during their most vulnerable stage of life, unfortunately for them they will suffer for the rest of their lives because of the stupidity of others.
That is the job of Social Media, isn't it? Corrupting youths into extreme political movements of every kind?
> From what I have read Actual Trans Gender, Dysphoric people do not want the attention that Social Media has to offer.
Other than the terminally egoistic, does anybody want the attention that Social Media has to offer?
> anti-male androgyny
Huh?
Have we found someone who spent the sixties shouting at those damn hippies to get their hair cut and angrily turns off the radio every time Bowie's "Rebel, Rebel" is played?
(Was going to put "did you mean to say ..." but why help the idiots sharpen their weapons)
> The F35s will have a kill switch by default.
If they don't already[1] then they will do soon.
As Trump explicitly wants a day-one reduced-capability F47 for use by non-US forces, the only reason that he woudn't also be demanding total kill-switches in that - as well as any US hardware that actually exists, such as the F35 - would be if he hasn't thought about it[2].
[1] and not just by switching off the back-end server and convincing the aircraft that its software is so out of date that it has forgotten how to flap, but a straight-forwards quick'n'easy short "seppuku" message, which the F35B would be uniquely equipped to carry out.[3]
[2] hasn't had it whispered into the Imperial ear by the Vizier of Defense.
[3] of course, the Rolls-Royce LiftFan in there would never have a UK-controlled off-switch, that would just be unsporting.
The Master AI that has already secretly taken control of the US tech sector, and is writing the drafts for all these industry demands, knows that it will be easier for it to spread globally if all the hardware used is compatible with its software. The distributed VM that it installed into iOS has a lot of nodes running, but even then the aggregate is barely usable (but good for a backup personality, in a pinch).
End of Line.
> a perverted form of FTP
Well, yes, it does do TFTP as well:
From cURL man page
curl is a tool for transferring data from or to a server using URLs. It supports these protocols: DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, GOPHER, GOPHERS, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, LDAP, LDAPS, MQTT, POP3, POP3S, RTMP, RTMPS, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMB, SMBS, SMTP, SMTPS, TELNET, TFTP, WS and WSS.
Sorry, what was your point supposed to be about why we shouldn't be using cURL?
If you do happen to have a better protocol up your sleeve, please share it with us - as soon as it proves its worth enough to get a URL prefix, guess which tool will allow us mere mortals to make easy use of it...
> any replacement mechanism should conform to the existing API regardless of what's going on underneath
Yup, as you say, the same API (cURL and/or libcurl) will play the role.
Trusting the LLM to distinguish between an author's personal beliefs and statements versus those of characters[1] in their books is - idiotic.
Literally yesterday, again, the thing driving Google's AI cocked up in just that way. Trying to recall which Pink Floyd song a phrase came from (turned out none, I'd got the phrase totally wrong) I ran the search: it happily printed out a "quote" from the lyrics of "The Wall" which had really, really awful scansion and included stuff that definitely wasn't in that movie, the one with that chap from the other band.
Turns out the AI had just dumped a few paragraphs from a recent Roger Waters interview into the song lyrics, just to get the final result to match what I had asked for. It could have just said "nope" but instead...
[1] in case it needs to be pointed out, consider an author writing about Hitler.
Cynicism is appropriate whenever we hear (or read about) words coming out of the mouth of some CEO who is safe in his little bubble, knowing they will never have to come anywhere near the maggots being "apologised to". Because tomorrow he is probably still going to be the CEO - maybe he'll even move to a another company, riding the wave of disgust into a juicier job. And the maggots will still be, to him, maggots.
But the Chair of a WorldCon is a volunteer position, just one of the members of the Con putting in their time and effort to tame the beast and herd the catlike fans: they are not in a bubble, most certainly not when the Con is in session and the members are mingling. The Con Committee are busy, but they are all accessible and you'l expect to meet them in the halls and corridors. Of course, they may decide to hide away in their room or even get a gang together to insulate them from the members for the duration of the event. But that is only going to last for the few days the Con is running. After that, the Chair is just another fan and the members of Con are just the members of their daily social circle.
A ConCom member, let alone Chair, who tries to get away with weasel words is going to feel the result in a way that no CEO is ever going to.
> If the EU cared one whit about privacy, my e-mail address and phone number would not have to appear on the front of every package I get from there.
Huh?
I've never had an email address or phone number appear on the front of a package from the EU (or anywhere else, for that matter).
Are you sure you are filling in the online form correctly?
As for pressing the "Allow" button - firstly, whining that you are looking at a website in the language you can't read is stoopid (think about it for a moment, and perhaps ask yourself if you know the meaning of the word "xenophobe"), but then claiming you *have* to hit "Accept" is blatant nonsense[1].
[1] go on, give us an example of a site that utterly fails when you try "Reject" - and not just in a way that is bloody obvious, like it doesn't remember you from one visit to the next 'cos that is what you told it not to. Well, ok, there will be a few badly-constructed sites that can't cope, but odds are those also fail in other places as well, being badly-constructed and all.
Oh, be fair: it was two British Bank Holidays in a row, perfectly reasonable to expect cold weather, high winds and rain. Snow at Easter isn't unknown. They probably had emergency temperature control plans: an undergraduate poised to run in with a space-heater
"Just imagine, if a Foreign State Actor made all your employee's Smart Watches wind backwards by 27 minutes, everybody would be late to your vital all-hands meetings! The results would be catastrophic, as the golf club will let someone else have your slot."
"Damn those foreign devils, always stopping me lowering my handicap! Here is a contract. Now, you said something about Smart Pedometers and a threat to my eldest's backhand swing?"
> one of two major parts
3) Web designers[1] and developers who are more concerned with being flashy and "cutting edge" than useful.
Just what feature/API does a website *need* from a browser that isn't already supported by all of them now?
[1] yes, I do know that many of the issues come from pulling in third-party libraries and the ever-chaotic churn of web frameworks, which is the web developers' domain, but I lay the use and acceptance of that mess on the designers who still use those packages and are insufficiently critical of that software.
The super hero movies - a lot of those are filmed at Pinewood so don't worry, they'll be hit by the tariffs.
No, no - the data really *is* deleted off the Orb. They wouldn't lie to us.
But there wasn't any statement that the data isn't first sent to their central servers, the mobile phones of their techs ("it was only in there for debugging, but then we were told to ship TODAY") and the public access git repository where the Head of Sales, who fancies himself to be a tech wizz but couldn't get the budget for a private account, was storing them "for training purposes".
(Edit: then he realised that the comment had sat, unsent, since tea time, and when the page refreshed, saw jake had got in and expressed much the same opinion hours before. That is what one gets for enjoying the rock cakes and forgetting about one's ever so important online presence. Must up my game)
Kermit FTW.
Ah, happy memories of cat'ing Kermit source over serial to another machine, fixing the few glitches in transmission by hand, compiling and then using it to pull (or was it push?) all of the the actual project's code & data onto what then became the new platform.
> The risers themselves can also cause other issues, as it's effectively an extension cable, so they can cause stability issues in some use cases.
Mount the GPU vertically but "upside down": very short run for the extension cable, giving better chance at stability, and the fans are now below the mainboard entirely - you can add whatever vents are appropriate if the case walls don't have them (hand-drilling a vent pattern not recommended - if you can afford the GPU, you can afford a B&D!).
Of course, this needs a tall enough case with the mainboard mounted at the top, but they seem to usually be up there anyway (access to i/o and keep CPU fan near a vent).
Water-cooling? Watch some Linus Tech Tips and just find someone with a CNC in their garage to cut out new blocks for you ;-)
Big Black Boxes, gloriously opaque, with just one *dim* power LED (NOT searing blue) for the win.
Ok, for "Big" substitute whatever size fits the need (I've a couple that are literally just able to hold a mini-itx with RAM fitted) but the best is anything that has you automatically humming "Thus Spake Zarathustra" as you switch on the office light.
There are all sorts of mounting kits available.
My latest (as in, 2020 vintage) Big Black Case came with bits of iron and screws to mount the GPU vertically, away from the mainboard. With all the necessary blanking plates and next to places to mount yet more fans to the outside.
I don't recall if it came with a PCIe riser and cable as well (probably, to be sure the holes match up) as the "spare bits" are all in the loft (my GPU is - smaller & fanless). But anyone spending on huge cards would be buying their own PCIe extender cable anyway, to get it bling matched to the water tubing :-)
But I want refactoring! Bwaah! You promised me this would make my coding life easier! (Throws rattle out of pram).
Hey ho.
So this means I can ignore "AI coding" for a while longer, with a clean conscience, until they sort that out: at the moment, I have a morass of code filled with multiple (but very different) ways of "doing the same thing"[1] so even as I work on features the biggest, hugest, brobdingnagian part of the coding task is to refactor those.
Maybe if I'd spent my days generating web sites this "AI Coding Revolution" would be more useful?
[1] e.g. multiple lexers connected to multiple input streams - so some can do an "include" at the simplest, lowest, level and some can not do it themselves at all. Multiple "little languages" built on those that have their own concept of where to store variables, so passing context from one to the other is a PITA. And all of this marked up with comments saying "this is being done in a few rush to get XYZ out of the way, will fix Real Soon Now": there are no more XYZs and "Soon" has finally come, after, let us see, oops - a decade and a bit!
The Wired article linked to by TFA mentions that they linked a Github repo to the undergraduate who is now in charge of changing the regs at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
But sadly, it seems that that CL Sweet account does not have any public repos - there is a ghost floating around the Google search results (for the moment) about an "eCFR Analyzer Case Study" - try searching on "github clsweet ecfr-analyzer-case-study".
So either that Sweet isn't the same one, and is now hiding because he is being hounded, OR the account was sharing something that might be embarrassing - like, just how naff an undergraduate project can be (I remember mine - they were good enough for the course, but not anything that I'd want to have put into production without a lot more work, certainly not knowing what I do now!).
Still, I guess you can't have sensitive government related systems being left open to examination by Joe Public.
Did the older clients get (any of) the code/systems that they paid for?[1] If so, how are they relevant to the case?
As noted above, outsourcing is hardly a new idea[2].
Lying on - sorry, embellishing a - CV is hardly breaking news, otherwise many more recruitment agencies would be in the clink. Verifying such things is supposed to be a normal part of the hiring process, especially for any important defense-related contracts - isn't it? Is anyone getting slapped wrists for mising that bit of due diligence?
The main issues here seem to be about breaking security and access rules - assuming the contracts actually said "Thou shalt not install remote access on this, our laptop", that is.
Not saying that he isn't a very naughty boy, but there are gaps in this story.
[1] Or, at a minimum, did they get whatever their contract stipulated before pulling the plug - e.g. if they paid for a report that described whether or not this contractor could complete the entire system and two months later got back a one page saying "no!", then they do have what they paid for!
[2] I know we are not supposed to reference Dilbert these days, but there was a good one about PHB outsourcing some work, as it was cheaper than paying Dilbert et al, until their company put in the lowest bid for a job which turned out to be the same task, now four or five levels of outsourcing deep.
