Posts by that one in the corner

2,000 retired Google Pixel phones get a second life as a private cloud

Re: This is more a PR or research thing, not real world...

Straying further and further from the subject, whether it is worth recycling 'phone boards into a cluster, via personal anecdote to tips on using 'phone cases. Ho hum.

Re: This is more a PR or research thing, not real world...

Who's a clever boy, then? You are, yes you are!

You hadn't noticed the thriving economy in replacement screens or the questions on forums that start "I dropped my phone and the screen is broken/badly scratched, what is a good replacement nowadays?".

Re: This is more a PR or research thing, not real world...

(curses, missed the edit window)

The screen's glass is permanently scratched, no consumer is paying full whack for it anymore, and (with a new enough 'phone) the PCB can feed the UI down the USB-C, so in the cluster the screen is an undesirable power draw.

Re: This is more a PR or research thing, not real world...

If that is all you want to do, totally ignoring any concept of reusing them as working parts.

But the whole point of TFA and this discussion is to look at extracting more value from the 'phones *before* they are simply rendered for chemicals.

Re: This is more a PR or research thing, not real world...

> This is also in the bill of materials

No.

Pricing in the BOM is the cost of those materials at the time of manufacturer; how much you value what *you* pay in order to make the thing new.

Which includes a lithium battery that has its entire charge cycle life ahead of it. A pristine screen that has been lavished with lint-free cloths, bubblewrap and careful handling. And includes how much value you ascribe to getting parts, in a timely fashion, to make a cutting-edge, latest model[1] 'phone that you can a premium price for.

We are discussing the value that someone else then puts on AFTER the 'phone is otherwise deemed landfill (fairly or not).

The lithium battery no longer holds a useful charge. The screen's glass is permanently scratched, no consumer is paying full whack for it anymore.

> Chips are cheap chips for a reason

>>> easily recyling the chips onto a new board

Which is why stripping, respooling etc to reuse the chips as parts, as you suggested, is not worth it.

BUT those individual cheap chips have had lots of lovely value added AFTER they appeared on your BOM: the chips are now neatly arranged on a PCB, correctly connected to their support devices...

Re: This is more a PR or research thing, not real world...

> much of the value is in the battery and screen rather than the chips themselves

You mean, AT THE MOMENT, people are more willing to give you money for the battery and screen, because those are the bits that they can usefully reuse or strip for parts/chemicals - to be reused.

If clustering 'phone boards took off wholesale - or even "just" stripping the chips and reusing those - then those parts of the old 'phones (could) become where "much of the value" is found.

> a lot of work to do what people have been doing with Pis for years

"Only" because the R'Pi and similar are available uncased and with easy to access pins. Preferably, modify the 'phones to allow the same at end of life[1] but failing that if you can get enough 'phones of the same model (like Google has here) a jig to attach connections to the relevant places quickly and a carrier board design to hold (partial) clusters are both viable: as clusters of headerless Zeroes have shown.

> some way of quickly and easily recyling the chips onto a new board that could fit in a rack

As the chips in 'phones are tightly integrated does it really make sense to strip the off individually, respool them then pick'n'place onto a new server board, rather than have a carrier for the existing entire PCBs? You'll still have to extract the PCBs from the casings to strip them (*maybe* you could do so with a little more prejudice).

[1] fat chance getting the manufacturers to agree, BUT if it is clear that the required mods are for afterlife use, NOT intended as a way for Joe Bloggs to repair and keep using his 'phone, they will be more agreeable: Joe still has to buy a new one and the manufacturer charges for using there screwing-together knowledge in reverse (e.g. don't pry at the phone case, just drop it in IPA and the hot glue will release - oops, forget that, it is a confidential commercial secret!)

Re: WOW!

Back in the day, folk round here were expected to bring their own silicon to work on in the classroom. Typical students, when the course was over they'd just dump everything they couldn't be bothered to take home for the long vac, so the whole of the country is now littered with crumbling circles. Some of the nerds wanted to take theirs home so the jocks would shove those on top, "lintelling" as they called it.

Tensordyne makes a big bet on log math to beat Nvidia

> Every real engineer had a LogLogDeciTrig on his belt

Part of the Ritual to Enter Big School for every child at our prep was the trip to WH Smiths to purchase the grey plastic case with the slipstick, and some thick rubber bands to hold it securely with the Tin O'Compasses (and set squares, protractor, set of Howzat dice) you already had.

Re: Related?

> Are they in any way related to Cyberdyne Systems?

That is more likely than their being influenced by the benevolent actions of Yoyodyne, Inc.*

* although the infamous President Moe Ghoul appears to have been ousted during the Web 2.0 (or is it 3.0? 4.2?) Wars and is not cited in the GPL v3 (or "any later version"). Probably the subject of a Capitalist-backed coup.

Why Amazon hates 'human-in-the-loop' AI governance

Re: System failure

> Next entry anyone…?

The machine-with-no-name who pulls lightning from the overhead power lines and turns Vera into a cyborg!

Or, and don't dwell on this one it's not good for you, "AM" (previously known as the "Allied Mastercomputer").

Re: System failure

Obscure? WOPR?

“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”

Come on, it's not as if anyone is asking you to play "Whose Project Is That?" (with your host, Nicholas Parsons):

"This is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours. Obey me and live or disobey me and die."

Next you'll be telling us you don't know how to "Hack The Planet!" or who Mister The Plague is!

Now, if you'd just said "hmm, I don't know what is, can anyone enlighten me" then you'd be welcomed as one of today's ten thousand.

But, obscure?!

Midjourney pivots from AI image generation to body scanning medical spa where patients bathe in 'golden light'

Re: 1st of April?

We all know the effects of to many fips into the sarcophagus; as the song goes:

Golden lights it's a terrible shame

But oh, my darling

Why did you change?

Re: "Avoid"?

Avoid 30% of deaths - from the causes prevalent in the future.

In other words, if you let the AI add your body scans and biological distinctive into its melange then you will be amongst those spared from the Purge of Unregistered Mankind.

Users claimed they'd never seen a spell checker and panicked at the sight of red squiggles

Re: The Kids Are Not Alright

> Octothorpe. Can't mistake that for anything else.

And yet Microsoft took the sharp symbol and made a hash of it.

Re: "this is just how MS Word works"

"A smoking Goon, you say? What what what what what!"

"Only five whats? Not very bright, are you?"[1]

[1] this was funnier in the Incandescent Age, but I was worried that nobody would understand if the second line was "Have a gorilla?" "No, thank you; I prefer a chimpanzee, they are milder".

Re: older generations

> as I get older what new fangled technical wonder will come along that I can't cope with?

The joys of language.

"Can't cope with" == "unable to learn what it is & does": so far, ok on on that score, I think (no matter what the wife means when she mutters "dementia, I'm telling you")

"Can't cope with" == "unwilling to deal with, just get that crap out of my face, I promise you, I shall scream": oh, so very, very much. The Good Lady's 'phone fell and smashed on Monday; finding a *sensible* replacement and getting it set up how *we* want it was such a good reminder of this.

The future looks to be - such a mixed bag.

Re: Word formatting marks

Hmmph. Keeping formatting marks *hidden* is the ONLY way to deal with Other People's Documents; otherwise the day is spent grinding teeth in a desperate attempt not to dive in and do the fix up. Especially when proof-reading for them: stick to the content, stick to the content - aaaaaargh*!

Similarly when using the Company Stylesheet: just bite one's tongue and copy the styling from another paragraph. Do NOT open the list of defined styles and try to figure out *which* of the four almost-but-not quite identical options you are supposed to be using here (ye gods, have these people never heard of deleting deprecated entries?!).

* apparently, the correct spelling of this word is "antenna"!

Re: Manually Operated Utility Selection Equipment.

Absolutely wreaks! Whoever came up with idea should check his desk: he may be squeezing a skunk instead of moving a mouse.

Douglas Engelbart* wasn't that tacky.

* not Engelbert as the spell-checker insists; it's not unusual!

Re: Sometimes these things are downright unhelpful

> You can even colour it with your favourite shades of green if you want to go for the full experience.

Do you get the choice between the ink being green or, for the nerds, alternate lines of the paper itself?

Re: "this is just how MS Word works"

Aye, canny lad.

(Although, being an incomer - otherwise know as a "southern softy" - one does have concerns that one's grasp upon the patois is incomplete; should that last have ended with "Ingerlisssh"?)

Re: "this is just how MS Word works"

It didnae wak oot wie prapper English.

Re: Simple fix

Some user would do a control-A then apply the style to the whole document it, setting the whole thing a-SKU

Re: Did Merlin use a spell checker?

When using his magic to dig for Morgana's hidden grimoire, did he test for other enchantments in the ground using his spoil checker?

Re: Don't check that, check this

Thank heavens you want the SHEEPIES to wake up, that might be the safer alternative.

Microsoft's latest Windows bug belongs in the Recycle Bin

Re: How is this even a thing? Recycle bin has worked fine for years.

Gotcha. So it is a highly performant hang.

Helpdesk scammers are making house calls to make their lies feel more real

Vishing?

Since when did we need - or even want - a "special word" to describe "phishing using the phone"?*

Phishing is a type of cyberattack that uses fraudulent emails, text messages, phone calls or websites to trick people into sharing sensitive data, downloading malware or otherwise exposing themselves to cybercrime.

I suppose now you expect us to use "whishing" if it was by website, "e'ishing" for email, "thishing" for texts (or is it "smishing" for SMS, "wazzishing" for a Whatsapp...)

Although even that quote's use of "cyberattack" and "cybercrime" is just IBM (amongst others) trying to use the big scary words to make this sound like a new danger from those awful computer things:

Talking (by any medium) to and the tricking people into sharing sensitive data, isn't just part of Good Old Fashioned Social Engineering, like grandpappy used to do? Heck, it were y'our'n great great gran'pops little trick, ah-he-he.

Dun't the "ph" on front o' "phishing" come from "phone" in the first place, anyhow.

* or, as Wikipedia** believes, it is only to do with using VOIP, because that is super-special-different; somehow.

Only half of US datacenter capacity planned for 2026 is actually under construction

> robotics as the next thing

Robots? Wasn't that what we did back in the 70s and 80s? Well, as they say, everything old is new again, "They" probably weren't even alive then.

Oh, you mean these are different? Full Self Driving robots, you say?

Well, that'll put some people out of a job.

The reasons for the delays are familiar

The bungs* for promising to "bring new jobs and exciting developments to our fine city" have all been paid into the Caymans account, job done; bubbly anyone?

* classically done, in brown envelopes left tucked behind the pipes in the second cubicle from the left

Windows devs rerolled old code to save precious bytes

Re: Ellipsis

But they *are* useful for indicating where you have removed words from the sentence, such as:

that a compiler had <bleep> optimized <bleep> <bleep> <bleeeeeeeep> the code

Using SAX to cut the document into chunks the DOM creator could handle! Wow.

SAX-like parsers are what I reach for first, unless there are *good* reasons not to; then again, my first "using XML for real" job involved gigabyte-sized files (and with good reason to be that large, btw) handled on a 32-bit XP box with a whopping 256MB RAM. The "expat" parser is brilliant!

On other projects, I have so many desk dents caused reading code from devs who threw DOM parsers at everything; the worst cases were products that had multiple processes in an embedded Linux system:

Processes can come and go as needed, but there would be 1(one) XML configuration file to describe an entire installation, which can include a lot of separate computers networked together. That is ok, the operator can update the entire install by uploading one file, which then propagates by magic across all the boxes. Obviously, each process only needs to bother with the bits of XML which concern *its* parameters for *its* particular box. Any particular parameter may be needed by multiple processes, or may only be of interest to one process - all perfectly fine, the operator's XML deals in "meaningful" values and processes go fetch what they require without the operator needing to know who uses which.

So, of course, at startup, each process would read the entire XML into a DOM (as you say, needing many times the memory to do that) and then have to walk the DOM looking for anything useful, gleefully ignoring most of it. The process shuts down and is restarted as needed? Go for the DOM!

I did point out that "expat" was sitting there ready to be used, just in case they ever got the system working correctly enough to get into the "Make it fast" stage, but by then it was no longer my problem. Shame, in a way, as I had wanted to try having one shiny new process that loaded all the config for the box into a nice compact binary struct and allowed shared memory access to all the other processes, just to see if that improved things.

> If you don't have an instruction cache then fine

Anyone else remember when CPU cache was something you would purchase as a optional extra?

Even when the 486 was young, you had to be a rich bugger to afford all the CAM* chips to fill the empty sockets on the motherboard to get that extra layer of cached goodness.

* Content Addressable Memory, not ASRock's "Clever Access Memory"!

> Sometimes the best strategy is to optimise the bulk of the code for space and only optimise the innermost loops for time.

Sometimes?!

Us humans are much better at spotting, accurately, code bloat than which bit of code needs to be sped up. The bigger the project, the wider that gap becomes ("why have you added a *third* XML parser, for pity's sake just learn how to call into an existing one!").

"Make it work. Make it right. Make it fast." In that order.

Before even *thinking* about diving into the third stage, RUN THE PROFILER! Everyone *thinks* they know where the time is spent ("that code uses Bubble Sort, for pity's sake! Let me at it!") but the profiler shows that it is only ever called twice per day, on less than 15 items; making that 100 times faster doesn't materially effect anything. But *this* code is executed umptymillion times a minute and whilst it is actually pretty good code, even a 5% speedup here will work wonders!

And ALWAYS make sure your build system can generate profiler-instrumented code from day one: during stages 1 and 2 it is invaluable to be able wave profile output in front of the dev who is spending their time "optimising this obviously slow routine" - not only can you can show them it accounts for less than 1% of the runtime *and* you are still in the stages where that particular code (any particular bit of code) may still be chucked out because it is discovered to the the wrong thing to be doing in the first place.

Re: I blame Pascal

>> Pascal started the idea of writing programs which got compiled into instructions for a non-existent CPU

> BCPL O-code...

Object code for an abstract machine, CINTCODE, was also available as the *final* output of a BCPL compiler[1]: modules in CINTCODE could be linked with libraries and the result run on a virtual machine. For example, the BBC Micro had a language ROM with the CINTCODE VM released by Acorn (not too surprising, given the Cambridge connections) with the compiler, link editor, text editor and utilities on floppy.

This *also* predated the UCSD P-system VM doing the same trick. Although I am not aware[2] of a hardware implementation of CINTCODE, unlike P-code, which had more than one (including the Three Rivers Perq or "Pascal engine running quickly"); so I'll give P-code a win on that one.

Java, of course, then borrowed the VM trick, along with many other languages, including Lua, Python etc etc; so much easier than writing a full native compiler.

Then we get into VM opcodes being JIT compiled...

>> Sadly, there are too few of us left now who understand how a computer actually works and why treating memory and CPU cycles as the limited resources they are is still a good idea.

BCPL most definitely comes from a time when everyone knew precisely how much RAM cost, how much each CPU cycle cost - and they still went with not one, but two, abstract machines!

[1] there is a passing ref to it in the Wikipedia article, ref [9] to be precise; their ref [2] is actually a description of the runtime and entire OS built on CINTCODE, from which the article only extracts the use of curly braces!

[2] hopefully someone can point us towards one?

Re: Compact code

> implemented the bitmap-fiddling BitBlt() API by pushing (argument-dependent) code onto the stack and calling it.

A trick performed earlier by the Apple Macintosh QuickDraw ROM functions. Back in the time when The Wiz was Woz (only just), those routines were designed and written by Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld.

There's no such thing as an agentic CPU

Re: Er, missing the point ?

And the maximum frame rate is limited by the power you can apply to accelerate the tape head.

"We are sorry to report that a gamer tried to increase the rendering quality of the Earth-Saturn Crysis game and an off-by-one error caused the tapehead to fly off the end of the tape and accelerate until it collided with Titan. The resulting radiation wave has already passed Mars so please kiss your arse goodbye."

The Y2K bug is back! Dutch dev digs up untimely flaw in old BSD build

Re: my first personally-owned 8-bit micro

RCA "COSMAC" CDP1802 on a no-name PCB; simple hex keypad, some 7-segment LEDs and hifi audio through a crystal earpiece.

Joy of the 1802 - being an entirely static design, could single-step with a toggle switch on the clock line; horror of the 1802 - a single instruction could take 24 clocks! IIRC there was a bodge that could be added to gate the clock after each actual *instruction* completed. Must have been, I wasn't *that* patient!

You mean, the mix between a 16-bit logical address space and the (re)mapping of that into the 22-bit physical address space was confusing?

Otherwise, for anyone totally unfamiliar with the vagaries of the PDP11 (as the models got bigger) it just sounds like you had a problem with a 16-bit machine that happened to use two-word addresses but was simply limited to a maximum four megs of memory - which was a LOT of memory back then! Two word addresses are hardly unusual - otherwise all the 8-bit processors would have been limited to 256 bytes of memory (ok, my first personally-owned 8-bit micro *was* limited to 256 bytes, but only because that was all I could get; the code used a 16-bit, i.e. two-accumulator-words, program counter).

Oh, if only it had been simple 20-bit addressing, where all you needed to ever worry about was the bottom 20 bits.

All the time that was wasted normalising the segment portion - shudder.

Re: Danish or Duch?

Their mahicnes are having a bad day, the spell check was trying to cope with Elvis Costello:

'Til I speak Double Duch to a real double duchess

A modest proposal: Reformat everything to make documents more palatable to AI

A Controversial Opinion: Let's Do This Thing!

Unlike the majority of responses, above, I can see this as the possibility for a Good Thing to happen.

We should all get behind a push to reformat all our documents so that they are easily ingestible[1] by machine; if the route to this is by playing on the current LLM frenzy, then so be it - if that is what it takes to get the C-suite on board.

Then start dropping in little tweaks to the process: hey, look, if we add in more semantic markup, we can get this (non-LLM) programme to process it "and make sure it is ready for the LLM" without using up any of our costly token budget. A little later "if we improve the formatting like this, we can help our Company Agentic AI by letting it pull the documents structure from a database; you've wanted another MCP provider in our portfolio".

With care and gentle guidance, we can get everything into a - well, we'll call it our Corporate Knowledgebase - and can feed it into, oooh, a stats program to look for interesting correlations (and be able to print those out for validation). Oh, we happened to put together a few "rules", as we call them, which apply various logics to the documents, even a daft idea to add Bayesian weightings; crazy, yeah? Well, in that case, prepare to have your mind blown: turns out we can run these rules BACKWARDS and it prompts us to fill in gaps! It even prints out a trace that explains *why* it wants that data and how it reached a conclusion!

What is this costing us, token-wise? Well, they are all optimisations that we *only*[2] put in place to save on our LLM token costs. How much have we saved? Ah, well (shuffles feet) you know we still use up 80% of our token budget each month? Would the company be interested in this movie script Claude has been helping is with?

Oh, and along the way, we always have and keep up to date a little utility that formats the documents into neat PDFs, complete with company frontispiece, page numbers etc, just in case, you know, a human would like to actually read any of our reports.

[1] btw, not making any claim that this language, in the form it currently is, is necessarily the format that will work best; baby steps.

[2] don't let them see your fingers are crossed

Feds freaked over Fable 5 after simple 'fix this code' prompt, not jailbreak, says researcher

Re: Although Trump's lot have taken 'thick as poop' to new levels...

I still have a "vintage"* DeCSS DVD decrypt teeshirt - in the reserve** pile, along with "Stoke me a clipper".

The words "suave" and "elegant" come naturally to mind, of course.

* "vintage"! gawd, makes it sound like it belongs on the London to Brighton run! Ah, Genevieve.

** reserved for when I start to waste away and can fit into them again :-(

Re: T-Shirt Model

Or just went to one of the "design your own tee-shirt" sites and typed in the text.

Although, I've not yet found one which uses that particular model in the product preview page, so - Craiyon?

And they'll sell you the picture on a teeshirt - but it will be a teeshirt with a picture of a girl wearing a teeshirt which reads...

UK AI hiring surges as firms seek people to babysit the bots

Re: Recruit for luck, not talent

> Over time, positions will be filled with untalented, but lucky, people

Who will be the ones who still *have* a job and will be able to afford life's little luxuries, like bringing up a family.

(Nessus reaches forwards and types the finishing sentence in his report "So the next stage of our human breeding programme has begun." As he touches the control that will send his words on to the Hindmost, the Puppeteer's graceful necks flex and he looks himself in the eye)

AI is code – and can't be prompted into being smarter

Re: What Frank Herbert said

Sigh.

> seeing the beginning of Heretics

Of course, I meant seeing the beginning of God Emperor for the Letoworm.

I had Heretics on my mind because I think that the films have always given short shrift to the Bene Gesserit, showing the "mystic" side but too little of their general kickassery, beyond Voice. Heretics would (please) show the Sisterhood going up against the Honoured Matres hand to hand.

Although I'd bet they would cut down on the details over Imprinting.

Re: build a very big catapult and launch pigs through the sky

You two may be confusing your pigs with your sheep.

Easily done, as many a bloody-minded ovine has been called a swine.

Re: What Frank Herbert said

Dune 3 is only going up to Dune Messiah.

And anyway, Timothee Chamalet plays Paul, the father of Leto II (aka God Emperor aka the Sandworm That Talks Like A Man).

It is getting frustrating how many Dunes we've had so far, yet only one attempt at Children of Dune; the chances of even seeing the beginning of Heretics seems to recede with every reboot. Maybe Jodorowsky would have done it, maybe even done it justice, but hanging around for the transformation scene occuring around about the 31st hour of the film might be wearing in the bladder.

(Unless, of course, you were being sarcastic, perhaps noting that Chamalet's performance could inly be improved by turning into a CGI worm, in which case...)

Re: In support of Plain English

> But the England *is* clear

"English", not "England"!

If England were clear this June I'd be outside with the solar telescope, not sitting inside reading El Reg!

Re: Dune

Ahem:

> *BUT* be fair:... are by *Brian* Herbert, Frank Herbert's son.

>> * Frank, that is; if you want bad Herbert, ...

:-)

Re: Hilarious article leads to question

Without the original Apple Macintosh QuickDraw optimisations - what we'd probably consider a JIT compiler, changing the code then executing it, potentially on every call your app made into QuickDraw - the Mac would never have been taken seriously and all that Apple Goodness which followed would have never happened.

Whether you consider *all* that Goodness is actually a Good Thing or not is then up for discussion...

Amazon owns up to using 2.5bn gallons of H₂O in its bit barns last year

Re: Water consumption

> The thing is the evaporation cooling can be captured and re-used. The technology just needs to be deployed.

The technology just needs to be powered as well (remind me, what were the other supply concerns about these data centres?).

And care to mention what the ready-to-roll, proven and reliable technologies are? There are (were?) concepts such as MIT's electrically-augmented capture screens but so far I'm not finding the citatios where, in the last 6 years, they've achieved the scaling required.

No doubt you have the citations that demonstrate the paucity of my research attempts...