Posts by that one in the corner

DARPA seeks ideas for 'large bio-mechanical space structures'

All night by the Zev Zev. All night by the Zev I lay.

Re: Ha s someone at DARPA been watching "The Expanse"

I was thinking more Brian Aldiss, "Hothouse": plants in every ecological niche, with pinwheel trees in orbit that scoop your giant beetleoid out of the atmosphere and fling it towards the moon.

Was never quite convinced by the morels, that was a bit too much "similarity magic" even for a younger me to accept.

Now, if they were willing to go for something a bit more animal-based (as the "skin" example hints?), then John Varley's "Titan"/"Wizard"/"Demon" gives us more deliberately engineered organisms ("Hothouse" was an all-natural environment).

Does terrible code drive you mad? Wait until you see what it does to OpenAI's GPT-4o

Re: c.f.

> Fred Saberhagen's _Octagon_.

Why do we so often have them playing literal games with us? Then "not understanding" the real-world consequences? WOPR was like that as well. Even HAL offered up games of chess.

At least Colossus was straight forward in its actions and Proteus - had other things on its mind.

Re: Future work will be necessary to provide a clear explanation.

> Appearance of complexity for certain parameter values is similarly well known (see the Lorenz system).

The Lorenz System is an example of chaotic behaviour, as is the double pendulum; those show the effects of variations in initial parameters (something that also bedevils LLMs) but their behaviours aren't complex. The closest to complexity you get is the attractor, but that is showing that the system can calm down, can simplify. The wild motions you get otherwise are just a random tangle, complicated to follow, but nothing complex.

> "Flocking" is a trivial consequence of "follow your neighbour" represented by simple differential equations.

"Follow your neighbour" just gives rise to everyone ending up heading off in the same direction, with fluctuations smoothing out over time. The original Boids algorithm has three distinct and separate rules, with priority (so "don't collide" takes precedence...). But the results are not "trivial" - well, except in the rather vapid sense of "We know how to do it, and applying those rules is simple, ergo it is trivial". We know how to do it - because we do go away and do it. Before that demonstration, it was not at all clear, let alone trivially so, that such simple rules, which are only applied locally, would give rise to the global results we see. And they are still not trivial because, except by trial and error, we can not determine - and most certainly not by any trivially simple mean - how to modify the local rules to get a precise global result.

> None of this is "emergence"

Saying something is "emergent" does not give any particular quality, other than (paraphrased) "it is a large global behaviour that arises from applying simple local/micro rules across a large population which results in an apparently coherent and complex behaviour at the global/macro scale." We can see this happening, we can create demonstrations of it happening in our models. It is something that exists.

The fun part of emergence, the reason it does get people all excited (ignoring the hypesters and advertisers who glom onto anything that they think makes their sales pitch exciting - no, that isn't quantum, stop saying that) - is that it does provide a route to explain how complex behaviours we see in Nature come about. How do all these global behaviours come about, when we can clearly see that the bits that make up the whole are individually thick as two short planks? Slime moulds - What? How? All they can do is expel a few simple (!) chemicals into the medium and sense when those same molecules are present. Then we try out a few rules, like "if there are 4 molecules nearby, do X but if there are more, do Y" where X and Y are themselves both very localised and generally simple actions. Tada! If those are followed by lots and lots of tiny cells then we can see waves passing through the combined group and your slime mould is going for a walk!

Then we look to see if this can help explain things more of us are interested in - ourselves! And it does indeed seem to be giving us explanations for all sorts things going on inside us. Of course, as more instances of a mechanism are spotted, they get named individually. For example, "Quorum Sensing".

And as we've had Chaos and Emergence, should one introduce the way that these systems can experience Catastrophe?

Nah, that'd take too much tapping away at this touch screen. But catastrophe, when you see it occur can also be dismissed as "trivial, anyone can see that happens", but what we can do with the concept is anything but.

> it is _alchemy_. The world is going insane

Clarke's Law in effect?

A read of the paper doesn't give an obvious answer to that, beyond "we've had an idea we can try out and we got it after reading other people's work that didn't go quite this far".

So, ahem, this just emerged from the application of the simple rule "go one step further than the last guys did".

Aka "let's see what happens, it could be fun".

Although you can come up with decent after the event justifications:

* Other seemingly "wrong" ways of using these things have led to interesting[1] effects - like jailbreaks

* What if a bad actor wanted to sabotage people who were (foolishly?!) trusting the outputs, could they do it by feeding in subtle lies

And, of course, the point that code (as both training inputs and as outputs) is something you can test mechanically, without bias, unlike working in a more wishy-washy human text oriented topic.

[1] not necessarily good, or useful, but - interesting.

Re: Future work will be necessary to provide a clear explanation.

No. "Emergence" is a genuinely interesting topic that brings in maths, biology, ethology and computer science (plus computer engineering, to render all the results) : simple rules that, by bulk application, generate behaviours that are not apparent in the rules before they are applied to populations.

> is pure bullshit for selling to idiots.

What you should be worried about is that it is being sold *by* idiots. Who quite honestly show you examples of past behaviour and then believe that is stable for all future use (note: have had a nice lunch, feeling mellow so am giving these guys the benefit of the doubt: they are naive, veering to idiot, rather than lying scrotes).

We do not[1] have a solid theory of what guides these emergent behaviours[2], so we create them by trial and error. Which is fine if you are trying to get your Boids to mimic the way a specific species of real birds does something - IFF you want something that looks the part, is bird-like; because without a theory you can not say that your rule(s) are *the* rules. Nor can you say that the behaviour is stable: one day your flock of Boids may grow past an unsuspected limit, have a catastrophe and fly at top speed into the ground.

The LLMs *do* display emergent behaviour - too few layers, to little computation between them and you get nothing interesting, let alone useful, out. And the approach to improving this is little more than "keep on shovelling" oh, and bring that rope in a bit to catch the thing before it vibrates itself off the table again[3].

And feeding in weird training data is more than likely going to skew that - but we don't know how, or where in the piles which nadans are the bad 'uns.

That last is The Problem with these things: we don't have a solid theory to say just why they act the way they do and, worse, how to determine what is the correct set of changes to predictably and reliably alter them the way we want. All *because* of emergence.

[1] again, if I've missed the announcement, sorry - and, got any references?

[2] that is, given a desired outcome, of arbitrary complexity, we can not consistently follow a theory to create the - or a - set of rules that will *ensure* the outcome occurs *and* describes the limits of the system for which the rules work (e.g. you don't get flocking behaviour until you have enough individuals to constitute a "flock" - but what is the minimum number required and is there a maximum, at which the flock, say, splits into two separate flocks - and can they rejoin?).

[3] crude analogies be we.

Future work will be necessary to provide a clear explanation.

No shit, Sherlock.

Given we have no "clear explanation" of how the LLMs "work" in the first place, it is hardly a surprise to anyone that yet *more* emergent behaviour has been spotted.

The whole field is based upon using emergent behaviour from pouring your bucketfuls of nadans into a pile of compute and flogging the result before everyone spots the fact you've put the dog lead around the lamppost - and that may be a canine but are you *sure* it is a cuddly St Bernards and not a wolf having a bad hair day?

Do we even know how to design any emergent behaviours?[1] We learnt about them from happy accidents (e.g. writing software to draw the boundaries of the Mandelbrot set) and Nature - but the actually useful and benign emergent behaviours in Nature only came after a long history of releasing all failures into the wild - to result in blood and death before a working pattern is chanced upon.

[1] Actually an honest question; have I missed something in the world of maths?

Re: Evil

Ah, you mean where the restful red glow, with the occasional amber, that makes the flickering light on the machine room wall remind you of a cosy fireplace on a winter's evening, has been replaced by a searingly bright blue that burns your eyes, upsets your melatonin production until the lack of sleep reduces you to a mindless zombie.

Simple progress or evil plan to control our thoughts?

I'd be able to answer that, if only I could concentrate, just can't get the sleep.

FYI: An appeals court may kill a GNU GPL software license

Re: There are a lot of legal weeds here

> 2. If it isn't obvious by now that the OSI is just yet another industry lobbying group whose main purpose is to allow its funders to help themselves to as much open source code as possible then it never will be.

I don't much like the OSI, from what I've seen so far[1] they are mainly a bunch of grandstanders who make claims about inventing the idea of open source (nope, they didn't) and that their published collection of licences is in some way super duper special. But I don't see what "helps themselves to ..." is meant to be talking about.

The OSI have bugger all relevance to this case. It would be great if they did put up funds, but they don't provide funding for anything useful, so why expect them to start now?

[1] which is clearly not everything they've done, so if anyone has some references for the OSI "helping themselves" to open source and how what they then do with it is detrimental, I'd love to see said refs.

Re: I'm not quite understanding the issue here

> Thus, read correctly, Sections 7 and 10 prohibit a licensee from imposing further restrictions, but do not prohibit a licensor from doing so.

But the text of the AGPL gives the licensee the right to remove restrictive clauses that conflict with rest of the terms of the AGPL - and even gives the URL of where to find an uncorrupted copy, in case you need to verify which bits were added (at least neo4j admitted up front what they had modified).

But, of course, IANAL, let alone a judge, let alone a judge in the US, so...

Re: I'm not quite understanding the issue here

> And I'm not sure that a licence / contract is a creative work that gets copyright protection.

Just to start, couple of quotes from Are Contracts Copyrighted? Everything You Need to Know (other sources are available, IANAL etc):

>> there doesn't seem to be any valid reason to exclude contracts and other legal documents from the protection of the copyright law. However, that doesn't imply that all contracts are copyrighted. If your contract is similar to someone else's, with the only difference being specific details like dates and party names, your claim of copyright is likely to be turned down since the contract would not be original enough.

>> A contract drafted from scratch is more likely to get copyright protection than a contract based upon a pre-existing template.

>> Usually, all expressions are automatically covered by copyright protection. Since there is no standard rule as to what can or cannot be considered as an expression, a legal document can easily pass that test to be covered by the copyright law.

In addition, the GPLs are works created for and published by the FSF, along with commentary - which includes FAQs on how to make your own derivatives, such as removing the FSF's preamble, not using the name of the FSF's licence and so on. They even give you a contact if you wish to have an agreement with the FSF to use their preamble!

Re: There are a lot of legal weeds here

> amend the licence to say “all the above can be ignored”

See, this is the danger in everyone reading those articles about jailbreaking LLMs: they go around applying the same ideas everywhere. It'll only end in tears when you stumble upon a jailbreak for the machine running the simulation of our reality and find you've just switched off gravity. Again.[1]

[1] oops, sorry, none of remember that Friday evening, do you. Look, just forget I said anything, right.

Re: There are a lot of legal weeds here

Dual licensing is fairly common and, if done by the copyright holder, perfectly ok.

And, yes, the licences themselves are copyright - and the AGPL, for example, is very clear that your licence to copy it is restricted to verbatim copies only. Right at the start of the text. Which causes - discussions - when somebody issues a blanket "every file in our repo must start with the following boilerplate of our copyright", including the company name etc, and that is blindly done to the file containing the licence itself...

Re: Lawyers

> So, the upshot is that no matter what any legal text says and how clearly it is written, lawyers can always argue it means the exact opposite. And win.

Not quite. Almost, but not quite.

You forgot that they'll entirely fail to convert a proprietary licence into an open source licence. Not even a badly-worded "source included" licence.

And they'll wring their hands over that failure as they take the money.

Re: There are a lot of legal weeds here

> 1. It seems reasonable that the original publisher can release code under whatever licence or combination of licences they see fit and downstream can't use a clause from one licence to remove the other licence if it was released under a combination of licences. That's the original publisher's prerogative.

That is a misrepresentation of the situation. Or a very confusing way of phrasing it.

> whatever licence or combination of licences

That implies that you are referring to dual licensing, which is absolutely fine and dandy: vendor gives you the choice of two distinct licences, A and B, sitting in entirely different files and/or piles of paper; you pick the one you prefer and are bound by that.

> use a clause from one licence to remove the other licence

If you understand dual licensing then you are now saying that there is an attempt to use a clause from licence A to remove a clause from the text of licence B.

What is actually happening is that licence A has been modified to create A' by the addition of an extra clause. BUT licence A states that you the extra clause is of a form that can not be tacked onto it (note: it is not restricting the addition of *any* new clause, just those that fail the conditions laid out in licence A). And the wording of A' still contains that restriction - A' now contradicts itself. In all of this arguing over A and A', licence B has been and remains untouched.

Re: There are a lot of legal weeds here

> There is also more than a little irony in any GPL licence talking about "restriction" because compared with most open source licences, all GPLs are considerably more restrictive.

Irony? In the GPL?

Well, YES! I'd even add a "duh!" to that "yes".

From day one, the entire purpose of the GPL has been to explicitly use one set of restrictions - those applied to the (third-party) supplier of software - to remove restrictions set upon the receiver of the software.

Trump tariffs forcing rethink of PC purchases stateside

Re: Acer,... upped the price of its PCs in the US by 10 percent to compensate

They don't. He'll just say that it is all the fault of China, Canada etc for not paying the tariffs themselves. And they'll believe it. Increasing xenophobia (more "winning"). Etc.

Re: Who will pay the tariffs?

Well, unless you are buying chlorinated eggs from the US, you are better off keeping your eggs out of the fridge anyway.

Use those spaces to hold your Kinder eggs, or Cadbury's Creme eggs (or a quarter of a Terry's chocolate orange, but that involves rewrapping, which is impossible to do as the segments just - keep disappearing mmphh.)

Nope. You probably can't cash in by turning your office or farm into a datacenter

Re: "gigawatt-scale datacenter .... will require 634 acres (256 hectares) of land"

Square mile of data centre = lots of roof space to lay out a "high-level scenic[1] links". With water traps (cooling ponds) and sand bunkers (ready to dump onto a battery fire).

Your scores will be used to feed into the random number generators. Your distinctiveness will be used to train the models. Please do not read the final page of the member's agreement detailing the use of Cyber Conversion in case of spontaneous AGI.

[1] You can't see that godawful ugly DC, unlike everyone else in the vicinity, because you are on top of it!

Tech jobs are now white-collar trades that need apprentices, not a career crawl

Experimenting with a home lab or acquiring vendor certifications

All on your own dollar, of course.

Oh, and make sure that your home lab is "relevant": if you weren't using the latest generation Cisco managed kit between a few hundred nodes then don't bother telling us about it.

FAA confirms it's testing Starlink, maybe for tasks Elon says Verizon is doing badly

A guy who really doesn't need your money

It would be nice if The Regime went out and found themselves someone like that.

Musk's "billions" can melt away if the stock market lost faith in him (remember when he was devalued to number two on the rich list) and without the stream of government funding, one way or another, that would be a fast slide down towards penury (down to double figures on that list, the horror).

Musk really *does* "need" the American Taxpayer's money.

100-plus spies fired after NSA internal chat board used for kinky sex talk

Of course, this is only the first step

Getting rid of the staff who abused their message system to discuss things related to their own sex lives, worse, their trans- sex lives, is the most important place to start.

And after them will be, hmm,

> "Racist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamaphobic, and misogynistic speech was being posted in many of our applications ... On top of that, there were many employees at CIA, DIA, NSA, and other IC agencies that openly stated that the January 6th terrorist attack on our Capitol was justified."

No, no, those are all fine, they can stay, nothing there that anyone in power would ever think was offensive or a misuse of government systems. After all, boys will be boys, eh.

Wozniak: I didn't reduce chip count for manufacturing. I wanted to prove I was clever

Re: What about ESP32 ? Instead of 6502...

Well, the ESP32-C3 is RISC-V ...

Satya Nadella says AI is yet to find a killer app that matches the combined impact of email and Excel

Email and - Excel?

> Just imagine how a multinational corporation like us did forecasts pre-PC, and email, and spreadsheets.

So he hasn't *quite* got the guts to claim that it was Outlook that gave the world email, but conveniently forgets that the spreadsheet became available to people well before most of them got email! And that spreadsheet was *not* Excel - personal-computer using CFOs were banging away at VisiCalc and then Lotus 1-2-3, easily beating usage of MS's efforts at the time - and even that wasn't Excel! Ah, Multiplan, how soon we forget you.

Sure, Excel overtook Lotus, in particular, because MS was ready to bring it out on Windows before the other products and now has a lock on the business world (mostly due to the need to be bug-compatible with Excel?!) but dang, it seemed expensive![1]

> Just imagine

I get the feeling more than a few of us don't need to just imagine, we can just remember!

[1] Not needing to do any heavy lifting[2], we had a few copies of the Borland demo source code spreadsheet program in use for a while!

[2] Although that meant we never realised what so many people do now, that Excel is actually a database /s

Mega council officers had no idea what they were buying ahead of Oracle fiasco

Re: Who made the decision?

> was made by either an Assistant Director or even Director who has no idea about technology whatsoever

But can appreciate "the fine wines and dining that those Oracle chaps provide, I mean those chaps really know an awful lot, I had no idea how that Côtes du Rhône was available as a rosé. If they are this good at subtle things like vintages then they must be really good at all that software stuff."

US Dept of Housing screens sabotaged to show deepfake of Trump sucking Elon's toes

> They are free to find a job in another business unit (another Government entity or in the private sector)

In your analogy, if an *entire* country is one company, there are no other "Government entities" or "private sector". Just - as we both said - multiple "sections" aka "business units". And when word from up top comes to make the sort of generic "downsizing" cuts we're seeing in the news, *every* "business unit" follows suit - they are all following the same board of directors.

> or they can sign on for benefits if nothing is available

Ie, dole.

Again - if run as a company, where is this dole coming from? (Modern) companies do not provide dole.

> Playground insults

Hmm. A playground insult is "you smell of cheese". Pointing out that you are not apparently able to follow your own analogy consistently is out of the league of the average playground. Please work on your analogies and metaphors.

> The analogy works.

Strongly disagree.

You really missed the point, didn't you?

Your country is run as ONE company. Getting fired is getting kicked out of that one company (country).

You couldn't even figure out that in your analogy, if the people weren't sent out of the country then the equivalent would be to transfer them to another section of the single company (country) or put them on company (country) dole.

Now, now many real companies move their unwanted to another section? How many run a dole?

Your analogy of "a country can be run like a company" is so weak even you can not see how it works!

Rather, how it doesn't.

> you CAN run a country like a company ... It's just like a very big company

> find other jobs. Which the vast majority will.

So, you are running your country as though it is a company and sack a load of people; that isn't any kind of problem because "the vast majority will (find other jobs)".

In other words, you expect all those sacked people to leave the country (your company) because they ain't welcome in *your* country no more.

Re: My Five Accomplishments this Week

> You can "clean house" with a flamethrower

Good Ghod man, don't say things like that!

The last thing he needs is to be reminded he has a warehouse full of The Boring Company's unsold goods!

"Another waste of taxpayer dollars

> and resources," HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett told The Register. "Appropriate action will be taken for all involved."

Presumably he means the waste that resulted in the apparent lack of security in his systems.

And the appropriate action will be - to whine about the evil people who did nothing more dangerous than show a not too unsafe for work video, instead of hiring in and paying for the right people to actually secure his screens.

Are you cooler than ex-Apple design guru Sir Jony Ive?

Not from Sir J

But a big Thumbs Up for Eno's "Apollo"

How nice that state-of-the-art LLMs reveal their reasoning ... for miscreants to exploit

Lengthy tracts that aim to convince the AI model

> that the requested harmful information is needed for the sake of safety or compliance or some other purpose the model has been told is legitimate.

Well, that is starting to sound like[1] the LLM is getting more human in its responses. What we have here is just good old fashioned Social Engineering: you call up the duty librarian (nice person, but oh so dim) and have a long, patient chat where you find out what the criteria are for getting hold of Volumes From That Shelf, then repeat back to them those criteria as though you satisfy them all[2]. Bingo. Put The Volumes into a plain brown paper bag, please.

The only[3] problem being that the LLM is guarding material that is way, way above the security potential of its own self-awareness; as noted, even with the bolt-on[4] extra censors:

> you'd be able to observe R1 start to give a harmful answer before the automated moderator would kick in and delete the output.

You don't put the dimmest bulb in charge of the Loans Desk for the (whatever the Dewey Decimal code is for "Very Naughty Books, No, Not Those Kind") section of the stacks.[5]

[1] without actually being...

[2] you don't phrase it it like that, of course; more like "I was talking to Jim - you know Jim, the Chairman here, only the other day and he told me you'll be able to tell me the password" "You mean, 'swordfish'?" "Yes, that's the one! Oh, by the way, can I have a look over there? The password is 'swordfish'".

[3] not true, but one at a time

[4] i.e. not integrated into the actual Chain of Thought process which is what sort-of provides the sort-of self-awareness

[5] when you do, you also run the risk of the going into Inverted Social Engineering mode, where you can't get a genuinely authorised enquiry satisfied as the bolt-on censor (e.g. "prudery") triggers and the rest of the model just becomes obdurate about it: the librarian has peeked into Those Books and been shocked, horrified I say, I don't case who is asking I'm not lending *those* out!

SpaceX has an explanation for the Falcon 9 bits that hit Poland

Oops, sorry, you are entirely correct.

I did mean to only mention squashing flora[1] - although getting fauna juice all over you is no fun either.

I have No Reply At All to explain this Misunderstanding, Please Don't Ask, other than being too distracted by the chance for a Genesis reference. More Fool Me for not proofreading better, but Like It Or Not the edit window had closed after my Trespass into the wrong kingdom. The comment was all Coming Together nicely before then, but I Can't Dance around my mistake. Anyway, thanks for not taking The Knife and driving it In Too Deep. As Sure As Eggs Is Eggs there will more mistakes made if I comment more; it is well past Dusk, so best I'm just In Hiding as a Lurker on the forum For A While. Squonk.

[1] as it is easily spreadable, even when chilled

> If there are no toxic materials in the debris then why does there need to be a cleanup effort?

Random people fiddling with a non-toxic mangled bit of debris can still get injuries from sharp edges - including Tetanus. The debris may not be toxic in and of itself but it can dig up stuff you want to stay clear of: simply squishing the local fauna can mean it is covered in juices that'll ruin your day (giant hogweed isn't just a Genesis track). Or bits break off and stab at you (the photos of the debris don't make it look structurally sound).

Basically, these guys are fly tipping and you still go in and say you are doing a "clean up" if the only thing in the wayside is obviously an old chest of drawers, with nails in unexpected places.

Heck, if they don't go in wearing full bunny suits and one of them comes home with a nasty rash from stinging nettles there are people who'd scream it was nasty spacey stuff.

OTOH If they do go in looking like bleached Minions then da 'Webs are claiming that means a cover up...

Tomorrow

We convert the Sudetenland into another golf course and hotel complex.

Here's the ugliest global-warming chart you'll ever need to see

Re: To Err on the side of caution

So, which frauds are you guilty of in your actual job?

Re: FWIW

It does appear that Art has an accurate point here - IF the OP is referring to "Lord" Christopher Monckton[1 ]then there is a definite lack of (online) references[2] to indicate that he has changed his mind - about *any* of the total bollocks that he has spouted over the years.

If there really *is* a citation that this particular Monckton has been convinced to change his tune on at least the topic at hand then that would be an excellent thing to share here.

But so far I am doubtful that The Mad Monckton of MAGA[3] has changed his mind.

[1] other wikis are available

[2] not that I'm claiming to have especially good google-fu, but it normally suffices

[3] just the opening frame is enough, no need to punish yourself by watching that YT video

Beta of Unix version 2 restored to life

Re: tech museum

Gawd, this is getting a bit bleak!

Let's get back to saving the history of Unix:

Good Job, Lads and Lasses.

Time for an emulator install...

Re: tech museum

> Presumably someone thought that if they did a runner, you could use sniffer dogs to catch them? It always struck me as a rather over-complicated and impractical system.

Sniffer dogs are over-complicated and impractical? Pretty sure we still use sniffer dogs - and FIR cameras on helicopters weren't really a thing in the days of the Stasi.

Can't be the "keeping things in jars", that is a fairly normal way of keeping stuff whose whiff you want to retain: trying to concentrate that down to spray-on Eau-de-Dissident would be rather costly whereas carrying a jar to the edge of the woods before releasing the hounds isn't a great burden. Compared to, well, bring in a personnel lorry of dogs and handlers.

And don't ignore the basic effect of hunting someone down with dogs, slavering beasts with sharp fangs who are promised a treat if they drag your battered body through the undergrowth. That'd put the frighteners into most people. And fright is the Stasi Fashion, if they don't get there in time to make you quietly vanish away.

Untrained techie botched a big hardware sale by breaking client's ERP

Re: Did you really pull the big red switch?

> how do I prove that it was mid transaction when the power is removed?

Put a relay into the power lines, tied to a GPIO line [1] and flick it off mid-transaction. Depending upon what is doing the transactions, put this call into your C code, or put use your external function interface from your database or - you figure it out.

You can even measure the latency from the call to power off and move the trigger to just before the actual transaction.

You can even leave this code in, if you don't want a separate test build - just don't wire up the relay! Put a manual toggle switch into the test box to disable the relay when you are doing another test.

If you are really into it, put a relay onto the mains side and another onto the PSU outputs, then you can see if the PSU caps can keep go *just* long enough.

Then go wild with setting it up to only trap certain calls, triggering the power on and off in rapud succession (how long until your PSU gives up the ghost?) etc. Think Evil.

Note: solid state relays for a quick response time.

[1] from an FTDI chip on a comm port - preferably not USB, to keep the latency down - or on a hardware serial port - check the motherboard connectors, they still exist - control lines or even the motherboard port for controlling RGB LEDs!

Re: Did you really pull the big red switch?

> The good ones have on-drive RAM cache, cheaper ones use host memory.

Hmm.

*GOOD* ones would provide, say, an internal supercap to allow the cached writes to complete (you know, like industrial CompactFlash cards).

Cheaper ones that just want to game the average user's speeds will have their own cache that will fill and cause your write speed to plummet if you do anything "out of the ordinary".

The most cost effective & BEST will honestly report what they can do and allow you a way to mitigate that by sharing system RAM and allowing processes to be written to take all the factors into account (good old fashioned Producer/Consumer interactions). Giving you the opportunity to make your system consistent and predictable.

> You didn't know that? HOW?!

> utilise all the levels of multi-level cells.

Not everybody who uses computers (enough to have them on a LAN with a router - low bar, these days) actually gives a damn about those details, they just want their boxes to Do All The Things. And they've been told that SSDs are so much faster/better than spinning rust - after all, anyone can easily understand the principle of "wait until it spins and puts the right bit of disc under the head" - but the flash doesn't suffer from (at which point, the salesman kicks the engineer who was about to spill the beans).

Rather than add a backdoor, Apple decides to kill iCloud encryption for UK peeps

Re: Without an understanding

Sadly, it is not just the politicians.

I caught a bit of morning news, a couple od days ago, where the sofa dollies where getting a young lady from the NSPCC to tearfully declare that the existence of E2EE (without a backdooe) was what was preventing them from protecting children.

Of course, absolutely no discussion of feasibility or what happens when the backdoor leaks.

Linux royalty backs adoption of Rust for kernel code, says its rise is inevitable

Re: Good attempt

> But the existence of any of those drivers does impinge upon the kernel that they would run atop.

Sigh, prufrede it!

Does *NOT* impinge upon the kernel...

But hopefully that missed word was obvious from the tone of the rest of the post.

(Also, "are" not "ate" and so on)

Re: There is no doubt in my mind ...

> Things change over time.

I see this in the younglings. It's called "growing up into wonderful human beings".

As Amazon takes over the Bond franchise, we submit our scripts for the next flick

Re: Can't Wait

A Pooh To A Kill

You Only Bouncey-Bouncey Twice

Pooh Sticks Are Forever

The Hundred Acres Wood Is Not Enough

Hunnyfinger

From Rabbit With Love

No Time To Die (Tiddely-Pom)

California goes ape with bill to crown Bigfoot official state cryptid

Re: Seriously?

OTOH this is a trivial sum to spend to give California a new line of advertising (to bring in more - different, new - tourism dollars).

And a way to give a light-hearted boost, a bit of community spirit. To those who are capable of humour, at least.

Existing law establishes the state fl

First reading, my mind filled in the letters after "fl" to read "the state 'flu" and for a moment that just made sense; certainly heard sillier things.

Buy it is probably just an indication I need another LemSip.

Mobile operators brace for bigger, faster headaches with 6G

Re: > My 4G service (EE) is abysmal

Too much packet loss to hawks and moggies.

Although, 5G RFC1149 would provide for multiple dovecots mounted along the street lamps, allowing high-speed burst traffic along line-of-sight with greater resilience to packets colliding with CAT transmissions.

National Science Foundation staff axed by Trump fear for US scientific future

Hope Musk gets his Mars launch ready in time

> Without support, our future STEM workforce will suffer, with major economic impact to the USA.

If the STEM education gets much worse and the rise to Theocracy continues, Musk is going to be fighting to keep the crowds away from his launches - not the sightseers, but the Pious who are enraged at his claims to be able to breach The Firmament.

It'd be a darn shame if Elon gets caught up in his own web of over-promising and isn't ready in time before the crowd crashes the gates and begins beating the ground crew with shiny new Trump Bibles [1] and tryin' ta lassoo dat eeenormoos heathen phallic idol standin' yonder.

[1] 2nd Edition, with all the weak-ass Commie nonsense taken out (thur won't no "mount" an' sure weren't no "sermon" thayr) and an extra 50 verses in Relevations.