Posts by that one in the corner

Strap in, get ready for more Rust drivers in Linux kernel

Re: Such awful interop

>> Just the #define keyword is already problematic because its untyped and that would put a hole in the Rust type-system.

Huh?

> The argument is that the only way to do this robustly is to bundle an existing C compiler with the Rust compiler

> So C macros aren't the problem, but sort of the first worm that comes out of the can when you try to open it.

No. C macros need not be a problem at all, if you don't want them to be.[1]

And you don't need to bundle a C compiler - you just need to "bundle" a copy of the C pre-processor. The cpp is a *lot* smaller than a full compiler and can easily be provided as a separate utility (in the Good Old Days your cpp was a separate executable to the compiler proper), or even within the Rust compiler itself. Although, of course, one could reasonably assume that if you are trying to feed C headers into Rust, in order to link with C code, you already *have* a full C compiler and can just invoke that cpp[2]

In the not too distant past I had to set my Makefiles to run a standalone cpp over all the C sources before handing them over to a particular compiler because *its* cpp (which was built into the compiler exe) was crap and fell over as soon as an expanded macro went over 255 characters, so running it over C headers before processing them with Rust, or any Rust-related tool, is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

[1] which isn't to say that there aren't problems to be encountered in C headers, just that macros are a total red-herring.

[2] look for the command line options to cl (or lc); if nothing else it is useful to know how to just run the macro phase if you ever need to debug some of the weirder errors that can creep in to your C/C++ code.

> though you may have to compile a list of the header files you want to feed to it

Which is why we have makefiles.

It doesn't matter that you need one, two or ten utilities to massage a header from one format to another, so long as those transforms are reliable, accurate and can be managed by your build system (which is under source control, like everything else).

Personally, I like having interface structure definitions in yet.another.text.format and using *that* to generate the C include files as well as the files for whatever the C is talking to - and at the same time, C/whatever functions to print the structures in human readable form, pretty diagrams for the documentation (by spitting out inputs for Mermaid or other diagram drawing tools) etc.

That way, *everybody* is equally pissed off at writing "those stupid weird definition files, why can't I just use (native language format)?". To which the reply is "You can, but *you* are then responsible for keeping everything else up to date and the machines *will* email every time one of them needs to be updated (aint Make calls to blat wonderful?)".

Vodafone: Be in the office 8 days a month or lose bonuses

Absolutely.

Although they were unable to actually manage DIS admin tasks[1]: they didn't so much shut it down as never maintain it until it just - stopped.

[1] I ended up with three DIS hostnames and fixed IP, one pair active at a time, because as a major telecomms company (!) they could never figure out how to change the landline 'phone number when I moved! So had to close each account[2] and start up a new one.

[2] And to top it off, when *they* told me that they had to shut down the first account, *they* then came back to say that it could not be shut down because it was a "company account". No. No, it was always a personal account. "What if just cancel my personal credit card so it won't be paid for any more?" "We'll keep it alive and just send out the bailiffs". Did they have a contact name for this company? Yup, my name. So I can cancel? No, it must come on company letterhead! Aaaargh.

$16B health dept managed finances with single Excel spreadsheet. It hasn’t gone well

Re: Maturity

To determine the age, count the rings of spreadsheets.

Look for the Apple ][ on life support in Accounts Receivable running VisiCalc that feeds to multiple Lotus 123 boxes in Shipping and Warehousing which export CSV to one IBM XT (the one with the new HDD card) running Multiplan to format data for Access which exports to a shared folder as a data source to an IIS webpage that is scraped into Excel sheets for middle management who retype the numbers into emails for the CFO's PA to put into a PowerPoint.

The monthly finance meeting has a standard itinerary item for the Accounts Payable guy to read from his Dataday pocket ringbinder. The final answer to "what is the age of this system" is written on the reverse of the 1980s London Underground map at the back of this weathered leatherbound volume.

CTO's summary: The Requirements Spec phase of the ERP transfer is entering its third year and we remain optimistic.

eBPF. It doesn't stand for anything. But it might mean bank

Re: "expensive array copies that happen unintentionally with the 'auto' keyword"

The issue is that if you write out the entire type you start to think "hang on, this declaration has four nested containers, how big is it, shouldn't I be taking care here?".

If you just fling "auto" everywhere you don't think at all about whether you've just copied an int, a float - or a complete DOM of a gigabyte XML file.

"auto" is neat for making some templates work, but just flinging it around everywhere because you can't be fagged to find out what data structures you are playing with - worse "it just saved me typing" - is a recipe for wasted resources and potential costly disaster.

Re: Cost Savings

> who missed the optimization potential at the beginning

Everyone. And rightly so.

The order is: make it work; make it work correctly; make it work fast.

If you *think* you see an opportunity for optimisation in the first two steps, just make a note of it and carry on. As soon as it is working 'correctly enough" to be functional, run it through the profiler. Then, and only then, locate the hot spots - both time and memory consumption, often intertwined- and improve those. Re-profile to find the next hot spots.

Otherwise, without data from the profiling, you will inevitably waste time on premature optimisation: the "slow code" you think you spotted may only run once a month - or it may even be excised completely by an algorithm fix whilst "making it work correctly"!

> (and who suggested/justified/ordered the profiling?)

You should always have in your plan the expectation of profiling (although I am horrified how often I've worked with coders who are "expert" with their IDEs and do not even know if they *have* a profiler or are worried when the answer is "no". It was shocking whem Microsoft stopped providing a profiler and nobody seemed to care!). Only drop - or postpone - that once you can see the program working and somebody properly signs off as "it is demonstrated to be running well enough".

So the question should be: "Who *stopped* the profiling? What was their justification and was it valid at the time?"

Lots of times, it is really easy to see that profiling and optimisation are not necessary - because (numerically) lots of time you are involved in only a short program, a one-off tool, probably just flung together, run and forgotten about. Great. But even then, good practice is to write down "I did not do this stage, it wasn't necessary/useful, signed Burt".

> how much pressure were they under to "get it done, not get it done well"?

That is what causes the profiling to be dropped - and that fact signed off by the PM and manager of course (ha, ha).

BUT even after finding this saving of x million pounds and k servers no longer needed, saying "Why was this allowed to happen? Why didn't we find this out earlier? Ah ha, it was Fred's fault, he told them not to profile; sack him now" that is very possibly an over-reaction:

How much growth has there been in the use of the code since it was written? Is it now processing (k * 10) or more transactions compared to when it went into production? If do, and (being very, very crude) you can now shutdown k whole servers, at the beginning you could have only saved 1/10th of a server. Less easy to shut that down!

In other words, as time goes by, IF you experience growth, the balance of costs to fix versus savings made will alter.

As to "Can the same person pull off the same trick again? Was he the only one who could?" - highly likely those are pointless questions, because if your system has reached the point where one (lowly) person could ever be in the position to randomly say "I wonder what happens if I profile this?" then what you have found is a management and planning failure: you've grown but haven't bothered to think about what growth does to a system. You haven't bothered to go back and check how many profile runs were just not done etc. If you pay a bonus to the engineer - and you should - you should take it out of the manager' bonuses (yeah, I know, that'll never happen).

Reminder: the above is different from the situation that possibly more of us have been in, where everyone knows full well the program must get a speed-up, we even have all the customer complaints that it isn't keeping up. But nobody can figure out how to improve it, until Jim has his brilliant moment.

Crypto takes a dip as Trump signs Bitcoin Reserve order

Re: The most insane part is

> If the US dollar has been put on a bro chain, and gold has been replaced with the pyramid scheme that is crypto gambling

And if the crypto used are the common ones, like Bitcoin, these are relying on there being enough random systems scattered across the Internet to maintain the chain, by mining. Which leaves them open to 51% attacks. Other mechanisms than Bitcoin's "Proof of Work" are tried in other crypto, but they all rely on "no one player can ever get enough - whatever - to take control". Where "whatever" can be how much drive storage you've collected or how much of the coin you hold.

So, the second that you (functionally) tie $US to bitcoin is the second that China switches all its GPUs and NPUs and CPUs, company laptops and after-school Maths Clubs to churning out Bitcoin hashes[1]. The US then gets to watch a brand-new "trustworthy" copy of the ledger floodfill across the Internet. What do you think that new ledger will say?

[1] or all those SSDs on Ali Express are "given a soak test" for whichever coin(s) use that stoopid consensus mechanism and so on.

PS

Ah ha, we'll just convert everything into one of those that listens to whoever has the biggest holding of that coin. And now the US government explicitly controls that coin, all the libertarians drop it like a hot potato. Also, it becomes impossible for the feds to ever divest themselves of the coin, because then they'll lose control of it. And something that you can't divest is no longer an asset, so poof, there goes the ability to borrow against the USG. Oopsie. Would you like us to pack the USA for you? Did you bring your own bags?

Re: "making money out of a radioactive element "

Close, but no banana[1]

It was Larry Niven, not his buddy Jerry (that page also has a link to the story itself).

[1] nowhere near radioactive enough!

Hacker?

Going by the handle realDonT?

In a rare case of actually thinking ahead, if his plan for Tsarship fails and he has to leave at the end of the four years, the cryptowallet will somehow vanish into his house at Magaritaville (or whatever it is called).

Leaving behind a lot of (by then) really pissed off cryptobros[1] who have to choose between letting him get sway with the spoils or running the coin value into the floor, taking their stash along with his.

[1] everyone will be really pissed off with him, this'll be after his plans for perma-Trump have ben revealed and failed, remember

Stuff a Pi-hole in your router because your browser is about to betray you

Please go back and re-read the article.

The line you quote is clearly in the section, at the bottom, labelled "Alternatives" and, as the first paragraph says:

> For instance, it is possible to run an OS-level ad blocker

and then name-checks Privoxy as an example of a filtering proxy, which can be installed into your client PC's OS instead of expecting to be installed on a separate server, such as a Raspberry Pi or an OpenWRT router or (see above for other suggestions).

As you point out, you have determined that you can *also* run Privoxy under OpenWRT - in which case, you are using it in the same way as Pi Hole is being recommended - i.e. you are *NOT* running it as "an OS-level ad blocker" but as a LAN-wide blocker. Good. Neat. You have demonstrated that Privoxy can be run in BOTH modes. Splendid.

However, if you *had* installed Privoxy in "an OS-level ad blocker" mode - or run some other potential "OS level ad-blocker", especially one[11 which had decided not to allow connections from any non-local process, then you'd be in the situation that the article describes: needing a copy per computer.

[1] if there are any - I'd bet that some paid-for proxy works like this, if only to prevent its use LAN-wide without buying more copies

Can I sell you a Pi v1 I have spare?

Heartily endorse running on a separate Pi propped on an old christmas peanut selection tin[1] next to the router.

As much as I have fun at home, playing around with VMs[2] and running three separate LANs in the one tiny household[3], it is so much more relaxing to have a simple little appliance sitting well out of reach of that madness: no need to worry that a little oopsie will bring down the wifely wrath.

[1] ok, tin is optional, but useful for holding backup SD card, just in case; and the nuts were tasty.

[2] keep meaning to try Docker, but NAS is FreeBSD and just never got around to it; VMs sem to do the job. One day, Real Soon Now...

[3] And, by sheer luck and random cheap purchases, I now have a small box with 5 NICs available - mwaaa ha ha!

Microsoft tells abandoned Publisher fans to just use Word and hope for the best

Re: what spreadsheet functions you think ought to be *inside* a DP program?

>> What am I missing?

> Everything

> Description of a truly shit and out of control workflow - and workplace

Sorry for your situation, but no amount of bloat in the applications is going to fix that. Without a modicum of discipline, they will break anything.

The call of Moby Duck

Well, TeX does have all the extensions and helper packages that anyone could ever need. What other DP solution can give you anything like TikZducks?

(Icon: there is also TikZpingus if you that way inclined, but I mean, come on, ducks!)

Re: Moral of the tale

Looks like your're proud of that one, I can see you swanning around there.

Re: Moral of the tale

Don't forget to keep a few goats around for the parchment[1], paper just doesn't cut it for longevity.

[1] vellum is nicer, but then you probably need a bigger garden than the average suburb can provide; get together with your neighbours.

Re: Ho-hum

> Let me know when they add spreadsheet functions

I don't pretend to be much of a desktop publishing person (what little I do do, I like to do with chains of command line tools anyway) - but I can't help but be curious what spreadsheet functions you think ought to be *inside* a DP program?

Affinity (claims[1]) to be able to pull data from Excel files as well as other sources, just like many other page manglers do[2].

On the (old-fashioned) basis that the best tools (try to) do one job well, so edit spreadsheets in a spreadsheet program then export results to another program that actually does a good job at layout formatting, wanting spreadsheet functions inside the DP seems like just trying to make yet another monstrous bloated lump which isn't much of a spreadsheet and is now a painful DP app.

What am I missing here?

[1] and therefore may be really bad at it, but that is a different sort of complaint

[2] if only for that old standby, a mail merge - that inevitably fails half way and leaves you passing around flyers for [event] [date] [location-but-not-that-awful-pub-the-kings-head]

Re: Ho-hum

TempleOS?

Athena Moon lander officially FOADs – falls over and dies – in crater

Unseen by the landers dead camera eyes

The three rovers have managed to crawl from the wreckage. But alone, silent, without the Nokia base station, unable to talk to each other, let alone ask for directions from Earth - which remains unaware of their survival. They are left to drive (and jump) into the wilderness. The two wheeled rovers stay in sight of each other, for the company, until the NASA rover, in an insane fit of jealousy that the MIT machine has its colony of AstroAnts as its pets and friends, rams it and both tumble into a rill. Unable to climb out, the larger machines succumb. Leaving only the AstroAnts behind, to cannibalise the rovers' remains for spare parts and settle down into a small civilisation that worships the dream of, one Lunar Day, returning too the Holy Landing Site with its fabled Golden Foil Wrapped riches, the 4G El Doradio.

Of the rocket propelled drone's fate, no-one is certain, although the AstroAnts tell each other scary stories of a shape that appears for a moment above the lip of the rill as it travels restlessly, leaping, leaping, leaping.

'Cybertruck ownership comes with ... interesting fan mail'

Re: Unless a finger smear or a slice of cheese is enough to damage the Cybertruck

Looks like I opened up a tonneau worms!

Re: spoon-fed by media nonsense designed to make them hate Elon Musk and EVERY technology

Don't try voting on a comment when the WiFi is down, that summons her back! And doing it three times will uuuuurkkkkk

Re: Unless a finger smear or a slice of cheese is enough to damage the Cybertruck

> No it's the cover for the truck bed, most trucks have them I believe as optional extra's

Well, in the face of that, I just had to check again[1] (my French not being what it was); the word has moved across into English (and appears to be the basis for "tun" as well, much more important - see icon).

The bastion of modern knowledge, Wikipedia gives the 'ole at the back as "tonneau" and the tarp flung over the top as the "tonneau cover", which matches what these off-roaders and some detailing enthusiasts[2] are talking about. If we go into third definition territory then it is finally being used to refer to the cover.

Ok, we'll go with the third definition and accept that "usage changes" and all that. But that still leaves us with the Cybertruck owner worried that cheese will ruin his fancy replacement for a tarpaulin, which isn't any great improvement!

> The Lady ... https://da8h1v3w8q6n5.cloudfront.net/aa82/inventory/230491/R01599960_1.jpg

I am sure that your Lady looks gorgeous, but sadly that link gives the poignant message:

>> The Amazon CloudFront distribution is configured to block access from your country

[1] what, me, twiddling my thumbs waiting for The Machine to finish yet another build? Pshaw.

[2] so *that's* what "detailing a car" means! Have heard it a few times but hadn't twigged it just meant a good scrub; well, you live and learn.

Re: spoon-fed by media nonsense designed to make them hate Elon Musk and EVERY technology

(Enter The Tick, stage left) "Spoooooooooooooon!"

Uncle Sam mulls policing social media of all would-be citizens

Re: LOL, with what?

They won't let him over the bridge into Wales.

Trumpers aren't paranoid, no sirree

From the link under

> boot out pro-Hamas foreign students

>> "We found literally zero visa revocations during the Biden administration," the official said, "... which suggests a blind eye attitude toward law enforcement."

Because, of course, all these Vile Foreigners MUST be Plotting Against America And American Values, why else would they even *bother* to try to enter the US in the first place?

Re: LOL, with what?

Well, looking at doge.com[1] today, they have found 24,000 unused WinZip licences, 11,000 Acrobat licences etc, so all they have to do is demand their money back...

[1] nope, not going to hyperlink *that*!

Moonshot goes sideways as Intuitive Machines' second lunar lander seemingly falls over

Re: I know it's not easy...

> Or built systems to enable it to right itself after landing

Don't you normally use the big flipper for self-righting, or make your axe return as powerful as the downstroke? Either way, just keep away from Sir Killalot.

Re: Cotton Reel Car/Crawler

We used to run those along tracks made in the sandpit, sometimes past castles, sometimes through craters (artisanal craters, made - when adults weren't watching - by artful application of "meteorites" thrown down as hard as we could). Not in the least bit competitive, of course. But - use a warmed knife to cut slices of a candle, pull them of the wick and thread the elastic through the hole; reduces the friction. And wooden reels are better (It were all better in my day!).

After that, pullovers for goalposts...

Re: Blue Ghost is standing

How rude!

But I like a literary reference, so - how to vote, how to vote. I'll decide later, keep you on tenterhooks!

AstroAnt

Great cars have little cars upon their backs to bite 'em,

And little cars have lesser cars, and so ad infinitum.[1]

An intriguing idea; the video talks about the dust affecting the rover, but - they didn't give the AstroAnt a broom?

[1] Sorry, not up to level of the velocity/viscosity variation; looking forwards to someone else's better attempt

SpaceX's 'Days Since Starship Exploded' counter made it to 48. It's back to zero again now

Re: "Blowing up Starships can’t be cheap."

One little Executive Order later...

Re: "Blowing up Starships can’t be cheap."

He does have form for sending his cars into space

Ex-Googler Schmidt warns US: Try an AI 'Manhattan Project' and get MAIM'd

Covert operations to degrade training runs

Like suddenly opening up all the Chinese social media, accurately translated into English and cross-posting into Facebook, Reddit, 4chan etc etc. So that there is an even *larger* pile of codswallop for the training to scrape.

Hmm, if the DoD's super mega AI turns out to be as prone as its progenitors to making things up, being "jail broken" and generally useless, do you think we can get the DoD to brand Facebook as unamerican, an obvious long-term deep sleeper agent strategy to destable the US defenses by ruining all the LLMs?

UK must give more to ESA to get benefits of space industry boom, says Brian Cox

Re: Burning the Earth's Oxygen

> how much new oxygen gets added to the atmosphere,

SpaceX use kerosene and methane, both with lox, so the combustion products are nothing exotic (ignoring weird stuff due to nitrogen plus heat etc), from which Life is able to recover the oxygen. Not so much new as recycled (again).

Within error bars, the only oxygen that is actually lost from Earth is whatever ends up being literally carried outside the atmosphere by the spacecraft - discounting the volume that is carried back down again for all those stunning landings.

You can probably bump your 2.7x10^13 up a couple of factors of ten.

Re: spend more

Picture Donald dropping out of control as Muskly, hovering on his tail, laughs "Gimme, gimme, gimme".

Re: spend more

I'm confused. You can not see a single worthwhile entry in that list and yet you are spending time on a tech site instead of walking behind your ploughshare.

Trump says US should kill CHIPS Act, use the cash to cut debt

Re: As Trump said there is nothing he can do to make them happy or smile.

> Oops I guess you slept through it- (URL he can not figure out how to make clickable, never mind).

2005? You are still crowing about that figure from nearly two decades ago? Sigh, and I thought we were trying to discuss current events!

> Not only did he earn more but he paid a higher income tax percentage than Obama or even Bernie.

Yeeesss. That is how it works. There are little things called "tax brackets".

Just from the figures (that you seem unable to, you know, copy out in order to make your point coherently) from 2005, we hear that Mr. Trump paid $38 million in federal income taxes on reported income of $150 million, an effective tax rate of 25 percent, according to forms disclosed on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show. By claiming losses, Mr. Trump apparently saved millions of dollars in taxes that he would otherwise have owed..

Now that we know how far back you need to go to "make your point", let's see what Bernie reported (happy to do your job for you, looking things up) - ahh, they only go back to 2019, as this is the 10 year declaration required for release when nominated (whch is, of course, way, way more openness and honesty in releasing the tax returns than Trump was able to manage - until he was forced to and Trump’s tax returns released by House committee show he paid little in taxes). Never mind, Sanders hasn't been hiding, so we can find on OpenSecrets his 2005 disclosure filing to the House of Representatives (scroll down a bit). Earned income: $4041 pension. Plus $200 Credit Union interest and between $1000 and $5000 income from renting out a property. Let's call it $10,000. Against $150 million.

Hey, let's go wild. Bernie was only in the House of Representatives in 2005. By 2009 he was in the Senate. And we've got an actual tax return, not "just" the disclosure. And in 2009 his income had skyrocketed to $314,742.39, as he was now getting some wages/salary *and* we're now including social security benefits, as well as his pension and annuity. By comparison, Trump not only didn't pay a dime of tax in 2009, thanks to be a totally incompetent businessman (by his own admission, as he was the one claiming the losses) he claimed back $70.1 million plus over $2.7 million in interest as a refund of his federal income taxes paid in 2005–2007, on losses of over $700 million in 2009!

So, what are you left with to be oh so very, very happy about?

* 2005: Trump underpaid his taxes on $150 million income, versus Bernie's $10,000. And it is somehow a great win for you that the tax rates on those two sums are different! Even if you want to dispute Bernie's declaration as "not a tax form" and we have to take Sanders' 2009 income, again, you bloody well should be paying higher rates on $150 million versus $315,000!

* 2009: Trump CLAWS BACK his 2005 payment, plus interest (which is almost certainly the best ROI Trump has ever managed) bringing the total value of Trump as a taxpayer in 2005 to A NEGATIVE VALUE!

> You know your dumbass comment about me not liking to look stuff up

Yup. And I think that I've just demonstrated the value of my statement.

Thank YOU, codejunky, for the laugh. Oh, and I'd like to thank Trump as well, without whose ongoing efforts we'd have nothing to laugh at you about.

Re: As Trump said there is nothing he can do to make them happy or smile.

> Trumps tax returns which shows he pays more than that socialist Bernie

Assuming[1] he means Bernie Sanders:

Sanders net worth (which appears to be high for a socialist") is somewhere around $5 million[2]. Or is that $2 million?

Trump's is unknown, but is a little bit higher[3], shall we plump for $6.1 billion?

So, Trump pays more tax than Sanders and that is something you think is worth crowing over? Even using weird US-style numbering, the difference between 5 million and 6 billion is (take your socks off, you're going to run of fingers) - a fuckton, too bloody right Trump should be paying more taxes![4]

[1] well, in the absence of more accurate comment to refer to...

[2] Been trying to dig up the story about a US worker who lived frugally (single, no kids...) and managed to save $1 million dollars from a blue-collar job; it came up because, upon hearing that, someone who worked with him tried to steal his pay packet "because a millionaire doesn't it". Blast my eyes, I didn't save the URL to verify this - anyone? Sorry, besides the point, $5 million must mean There Is Something Going On...

[3] how far can one stretch an understatement?

[4] and if you are going whine that "net worth isn't income, you should only be counting income", oh, look, Trump's "worth" jumped up from $2.5 billion in 2024. And any other "arguments" about, say, "you only tax when the paper worth is converted into cash" etc - with that big a difference in net worth, just unearned interest on a pocket money account would be sufficient!

PS

Given the difficulty in even getting a number for Trump's net worth, I failed miserably to find anything usable about his taxable income; please feel free to provide some citations for that.

Re: How does this work

> So he wants to reduce our dependence on foreign imports, but does not want to invest in domestic manufacturing.

Not *that* kind of manfacturing. We'll have no need of this "technology" in the Republic of Gilead.

Re: Sooo

> when I come across something that I am not familiar with I find that Google can be helpful

Ooooh, careful.

He doesn't like it when you suggest looking things up on the Web.

More Voyager instruments shut down to eke out power supplies

I could only wish my work lasted that long

Currently fixing bugs in code I've had in daily use for a mere three decades - and it isn't even a twenty three second wait to see the results of the next command!

Deep respect to the guys who made them and those still keeping them going.

It begins: Pentagon to give AI agents a role in decision making, ops planning

Re: AI?

You are correct - LLMs have absolutely no way to explain their process, let alone in a "legible" (do you think he meant to say "comprehensible"?[2]) way.

So they are going to spaff huge amounts of money[1] and resources chasing something any honest researcher wil tel them isn't sane. With luck, somebody will divert funding (back) into techniques that have explanatory power at their core, not just some mirage generator hot glued onto a phantasmagoria box - but they'd be pissing into the wind coming from - well, let's just leave "FSD" as a hint.

[1] isn't there supposed to be a department cutting wasteful spending? On the tip of my tongue...

[2] what fun it'll be, when the private contractor shows up in six months[3] time, dumps a five foot printout of weightings onto the desk, all beautifully rendered in a highly-readable font[4] - "you said 'legible'".

[3] it takes time to squirrel away the DoD payments offshore

[4] comic sans

"I see you are trying to

Invade Greenland; would you like some help with that?"

Select:

1) Wth is Greenland anyway?

2) Why? Just - why?

Apple drags UK government to court over 'backdoor' order

Re: Hmm

> Book bans in US.

Thanks for the reminder to look up the state of play - I knew of many attempts to ban books in the US across the years, but amongst all the other goings on I'd managed to miss when the Trump Administration Dismisses Book Ban Complaints by dismissing "this false narrative" (aka "this is false news, false news"); such falsity as Utah banning students bringing their own copies to read at school ("I don’t care if it’s shredded, burned, it has to be destroyed one way or another.”).

The wider Banned Books List – 2025 has a load of books that were *required* reading in my schools ("Fahrenheit 451", "1984", "To Kill A Mockingbird", "Catcher In The Rye", "Brave New World", "Huckleberry Finn" and more) plus modern classics like "The Handmaid's Tale". Of course, the book by that horrid little Anne Frank must go. Curiously, some of these warn of (theocratic) dystopias or living under fascism...

The reasons given are as you'd expect: don't earn the young about possible dangers by allowing them to experience them vicariously, in a book they can put down and discuss, where the protagonists can show ways to deal with the dangers, just let them all come as a surprise IRL.

Of course, we can all probably name a book, renowned for encouraging gang rape, violence to children and slavery, which never appears on these lists...

Ok, back to how *our* government is buggering about.

Scotland now home to Europe's biggest battery as windy storage site fires up

Re: average houses at average times

Does "well lubricated" count?

(Icon - because there isn't one for a wee dram o' the Scottish gold)

Raspberry Pi launches CM4 variant that laughs in the face of frostbite

Re: Negative 40 of course

We should donate to their poverty fund every time we write "naive".

C++ creator calls for help to defend programming language from 'serious attacks'

> Lets be honest here - C was intended to be a bridging language from the days of Fortran to the 'new' languages that were coming

Citation?

> But C and it's fanatical adherents went out of their way to destroy any language that threatened it.

So, there must be lots of citations you can provide for that, in half a century of C. What is the lust of languages "they" have "destroyed"?

> C or C++ or JAVA or Rust - they are all just derivatives of C.

C++ is a derivative of C? Good grief! Has anybody told Bjarne? Java and Rust just share a similarity in simple syntax - use of braces instead of begin/end, semicolon as a terminator rather than a separator, infix operators and a basic function declaration style.

> That it has taken this long to evolve type safe just demonstrates the fact

Hang on, hang on. The Big Discussion now is MEMORY safety, not TYPE safety! You are complaining about a lack of type safety and you diss C++, Java and Rust? Whoop, whoop, whoop!

> other, much denigrated languages

Presumably, these are the languages that were "destroyed"? Hmm, what languages have been denigrated? There is that famous comment by Dijkstra - ah ha! Got it!

You want us all to use BASIC, don't you! No curly braces, type set by the variable name, that all makes sense.

Maybe cancel that ChatGPT therapy session – doesn't respond well to tales of trauma

Re: Go to bullshit factor 10

> To address your other point

My other point? What, the one that if you actually gave a shit about LLMs - good, bad, bollocks, whatever your stance - you might want to remember something like this as an argument when someone IRL tries to tell you how amazing LLMs are?

> this entire thread will be consigned to history in a couple of days

Yes, of course. What else did you think was going to happen to it?

> the world is not a "debating society" ...

Which is why you, yes, YOU, was being urged to actually listen to what the article was talking about and take that away to use elsewhere.

> and crafty point-scoring is not ultimately going to lead to any kind of "victory".

Glad you realise that, as you are introducing the idea of being in some kind of "debating society".

(BTW, "debating societies" are something that you could call "bollocks" and I'd agree - nothing good comes out of the practices they espouse)

Cybercrims now licking stamps and sending extortion demands in snail mail

Re: Wouldn't work round here...

TIL that there is an eBay category for letterboxes.

A mere £265.00 for an "ex display" (ho, ho) box - claims to be a "reproduction" but you can get those for a ton less.

So unless they lucked upon a lot of grannies sending fivers out to their little darlings then they probably did bin the contents, not worth the trouble.

"Extortion demands contained within are illegitimate"

As opposed to all the thoroughly law-abiding extortion claims?

(and none of your second-definition usages either!)