Posts by that one in the corner

Tape is so dead, 152.9 EB of LTO media shipped last year

Re: Obsolescent Media

> we had a recurring task every few years to ... recopy them to a newer format

Hopefully, we are *all* doing that with our archives, both corporate and personal, if we want to have a chance of reading them again.

Digital photos moving from Floppy to Zip Disk to Winchester to IDE to SATA; from plastic box on shelf to second drive on PC to USB drive caddy to NAS to duplicate NASes as far apart as you can get them; from FAT to NTFS to EX4 to UFS to ZFS; from single drives to mdraid to GEOM striping to ZFS.

Re: Squish

Yeah, know the feeling. Just because a cartridge fits into a trouser back pocket does not mean that is a safe place to keep it.

Re: In tape we trust

And then you need to find all the calligraphers who can manage copperplate ones and zeroes - which at least removes the risk of missing out a dot on an 'i'

Re: "take even longer when there's compression or decompression to be done."

Just considering compression, and done by the CPU, you can easily find[1] recommendations to enable compression as a speedup. Then the tech changes (IDE to SATA) and the needle swings, then the tech changes (CPUs speed up, the stage in that link), needle swings, tech changes (SSD) and needle swings...

Unless you are using some pretty dang amazing tapes, at great speed and parallel track densities (i.e. really expensive, which totally negates the point of using tape in the first place), I'd be willing to bet that on-the-fly (de)compression can easily keep up.

Come to think of of it, I'm sure I recall being told to use compression when PIP'ing data on a marvellous new dual eight inch floppy CP/M box, because that would be faster.

[1] just the first hit I got, there will be others with long tables of timing experiments etc if you want

Re: So The Next Time Your Service Provider Assures You That...........

> Why not just destroy the media?

Because one lump of media can hold a lot more data than just the stuff that is to be "deleted"?

So destroying the whole lump would mean copying everything but the bad stuff to a new lump. Repeat when another small amount has to be destroyed, which gets costly quite quickly.

Instead, consider filling the lump with, say, n zip files, each one with is own password. Delete two passwords and (n-2)*100/n percent of the lump's value is retained.

A thump with the pointy end of a screwdriver will fix this server! What could possibly go wrong?

What I want to know

Is how these jammy buggers get away with it!

Shoving a screwdriver where it don't belong - been there, done that, cringed at the realisation.

Got clean away, without even a raised eyebrow, a smirk or the need to tell a colleague to "Don't say it, just - quiet"? Nope. Not a chance that'll ever happen.

Like Brian, people like this "Mel" are going to be caught by alien spaceships next time they fall off a tower: "Oooh, you lucky bastard!".

Re: 2 years with a dry joint, running an engine testbed

> Found one data pin in one of the plugin ROM holders had never ever been soldered.

*Never* been soldered?

That isn't "dry", it is dessicated!

Bing and Copilot fall from the clouds around the world

Copilot is offline, a hush falls over the Pit Of Coders

Management, resplendent as ever in red tie & tails[1], shoes and horns polished, gaze out across the open-plan Pit, each dev carefully placed to Refect Company Values[2]. Where there should be a constant rattle of mouse-clicks as AI-generated snippets are dragged into place, there is now just quiet. Broken only by the occasional sobbing cry of "But how do you write one loop inside another loop, tell me, tell me!".

As the last of the Fresh Intake, The Young Turk Coders, crawls under their desk, the CTO's head[3] snaps up and his ears twist, listening. There, over there, in the farthest reaches, past the Hot Desks, is a noise that seems strange and out of place, yet somehow familiar and even comforting. Brushing aside the pleas for Bing, he moves across the floor towards - not clicking, but, yes, clacking!

As he reaches the line of desks known as Redundancy Row, he is amazed at the sight of old hands[4] moving across a keyboard. Somehow, code is being created new and fresh, as if out of thin air, appearing one character at a time, the cursor moving like a ghost across the line. There are no recommended completions, no popups full of function bodies to be copied and pasted. The CTO backs slowly away, his Company Vision blurring, leaving him confused and scared, like were a New Graduate dropped into the maw of the Git Repository. Where is The AI Synergy here? The sound stops and the Old Guard looks up from his screen for the first time and turns slowly to look the CTO square in the eye.

(At this point, the manuscript ended)

[1] barbs optional

[2] and reflect the green-tinged fluorescent lights from the screens

[3] the one he uses when talking to Middle Management, not the Board Room Special

[4] why, they must be thirty-five if they are a day

Big Tech is not much help when fighting a junta, and FOSS doesn't ride to the rescue

Re: Don't use the Internet

> The Doctor's point ... While there are various specific use cases that do offer dual channels, in general they're often not available, require vigilance, and suffer from myriad other restrictions.

Ah, that is an interesting interpretation of

>> If you have "another means" then you don't need the videos.

Which I took as saying that if you have one channel available, then you never need to have a second channel available, that "another means" is always sufficient and fits all use cases. Which is what I then disagree with.

> is the cryptographic commonplace that codebooks are useful iff you have dual channels with different capabilities

Ah, good, you *do* actually agree with me: "that can, at great personal risk, be physically passed from one person to another" - which is one channel, with a low usage rate and high risk attached, needing great vigilance, and "Which then allows the recipient to interpret the hidden meaning, say, of ... sent over a public channel" - which is a second channel, with different capabilities.

> While there are ... that do offer dual channels, in general they're often not available

Very true, with the trivial corollary that, if you only have one channel, it is not guaranteed to always be of high enough capacity and low enough risk, in which case communications become difficult and you may literally not be able to pass enough information in a timely fashion to be able to satisfy the use case. In other words, having one means is not always sufficient, as was suggested would be the case by 'If you have "another means" then you don't need the videos.' In those circumstances, considering the possibility of passing a codebook (and note, that "passing" can take many forms, from handing over a large and unwieldly piece of machinery in a singular transaction hidden in the alleyway shadows, to the apparently innocent mentioning across the library stacks that "the second edition of 'War And Peace' has its own peculiar charms" as a means to convey the use of the selected volume in a classic "book code"; or, of course, just slipping a literal book of codes into the outer pocket of the recipient's great coat as you pass in the neon-lit rain soaked streets) may - or, alas, may not - provide a way to improve the passage of intelligence.

> Proposing them as a universal solution is naive.

Indeed; I do hope that when someone does *actually* make such a proposal, you are on the spot to tell them of their naivety. In the meantime, I shall continue to mention "codebooks" (and their commplace nature, as indicated by their presence in popular culture) to those who seem unaware that such mechanisms exist in the first place. Once being made aware of the possibility, they are then, of course, free to apply it to whichever use cases are appropriate for their circumstances.

Re: A Genuinely Worthy Cause

And yet you don't bother to say where or how I misunderstood it, nor do you attempt to rephrase what you said to give me a fighting chance *to* understand and appreciate your post.

Sigh.

Re: A Genuinely Worthy Cause

> For me the only ethical problem with doing so is that developing Junta-proof technology also helps organised crime too

*Every* technology helps "organised crime" - and "vaguely organised crime", "two opportunistic little gits", "some blokes just earning an honest bob", "the neighbourhood watch", "PC Plod", " The Sweeney", "military intelligence", "no such agencies exist, m'lud" - and Bob.

From a stick to non-jammable mesh radio networks, from roller skates to self-driving cars, everyone and anyone across the entire spectrum of law breaking to law enforcement (and even the boring majority of just generally law abiding) people will find a use for one bit of technology or other[1], at some point in time.

> if I were a highly-skilled FOSS developer...

Unless you were in a project that was actively marketing itself to The Bad Guys, where the balance is clearly going to be manipulated in the wrong direction from the beginning, I'd say that if you can see that the FOSS you were (notionally) going to develop would not warrant being called an ethical problem.

Especially as, from the outsiders' p.o.v., the junta *is* organised crime and they *already* have the tools, you would only be working to level the playing field.

[1] just because *your* neighbourhood watch doesn't have The Bomb yet...[2]

[2] note, I said "find a use", never said it would they would be practically able to *do* the thing[3]

[3] plus get in the obviously absurd before somebody starts bring up extreme edge cases as a way to "disprove" what is being said here!

Re: Don't use the Internet

>> The hidden messages have to be communicated using another means

> If you have "another means" then you don't need the videos.

Huh? Have you not heard of a "codebook", a discrete package that can, at great personal risk, be physically passed from one person to another? Which then allows the recipient to interpret the hidden meaning, say, of videos - multiple videos - sent over a public channel and safely viewed in plain sight of, in this case, the junta.

If this is a novel concept to you, you really need to pay more attention to such things as "'Allo, ,'Allo", anything with 'Arry Palmer as the lead character. Even the atrocious film "U-571" got *that* bit right!

AMD's baby Epycs are nothing more than Ryzens in disguise

4004 series

Ah hee, that takes me back.

Gather round kids, and ol' granpaw will spin you a yarn of a calculator that grew up to become a mighty engine of computation. Now, when Old Man Hoff were just a young dandy, a-polishin' his spats before pickin' up his lady to go to the local hop, he was asked to build a machine.

Wazzat? Speak up, these old ears dunt work as well as they might! AMD, you say? No, no, sonny, the old forty-oh-four were Intel through and through, the Original Intel you might say. Don't you go a-tryin' to confuse yer gran-pappy, these numbers is sacred, aint nobody gonna go reusin' them, there's numbers a-plenty for all.

Now, were was I?

Techie invented bits of the box he was fixing, still botched the job

Re: Disk packs, not disc packs.

When the BBC Micro gained floppy disc drives, Acorn were careful to include a second star-command to select DFS instead of tape, just in case you typed *disk by mistake.

Reminder to self

I have hanging over my desk at home a platter (14" for a 6.something inch spindle) with four deeply gouged rings, through the rust and into the lovely shiny metal beneath.

Do try to avoid head crashes, there's a good lad.

Gentoo and NetBSD ban 'AI' code, but Debian doesn't – yet

Thank you for not using the word "parameter"

> Large language models are, by nature, orders of magnitude bigger than that, and they are not human-readable code. They are vast tables of billions or trillions of numerical values, calculated by huge numbers of machines. They cannot be checked or verified or tweaked: it would take cities full of people working for millennia to read them, let alone understand and amend them.

Most articles, including those from The Register, keep usin the word "parameters" to describe all of those numerical values. As nicely described by this article, they are not now, never have been and (barring a miracle of computer science) never will be "parameters"!

A parameter is something you feed into a function to generate a known effect: box(x, y, height, width) has four parameters and - here is the important bit - *you*, the human, the programmer, KNOW what they mean! You can set them - and if you don't get the (usually blindingly) obvious results then you can declare that fact as having found a bug[1].

You sometimes come across a "parameter" that isn't well-described, may not even be labelled and then you are either in an "artistic" situation[2] or are considering revenge on the idiot who created this. Consider the annoyance at coming across "I passed in (q + 17.63) here 'cos that made it work, don't know why"!

But when you are faced with billions of values, where you can not say *why* they are set at that value[3], how they may differ in meaning or effect from any of the other values in the array, not even the one in an adjacent cell, then they are "understood". Unless you make an extraordinary effort - and get very lucky - you can not even say "look, I can't put it into words, but if you add one to this specific value you can see the effect on the output" ![4]

Do not use the word "parameter" to describe these values.

The numbers inside an LLM are, at best, "weights", as in a "weighted graph". But even that starts to lose meaning when you can't pretend to comprehend what the resulting graph represents. They are, individually, little more than near as damnit arbitrary numbers.

[1] ok, the bug *can* be in either the code itself *or* in the documentation, the thing that provided you with the knowledge in the first place. For example, you may be upset that making 'y' larger moved the rectangle in "the wrong direction", but the error may not be in the code but in the docs, which forgot to remind you this is a screen-graphics function, not a proper maths function, so y points down, not up. Or it is even weirder and you are looking at an (x, z) projection so y is ignored - until you switch on perspective. But all of those interpretations are still explainable, understandable and decently parametric.

[2] e.g. plenty of knobs on synths, especially circuit-bent ones, are very unhelpfully labelled and you aren't even supposed to be able predict what they'll do, just twiddle, have fun ad maybe get lucky with the next Top Ten hit. But even then, *someone* exists who actually knows what is going on: "Of course changing that resistor makes it sound like that, I spent days getting rid of that cross-coupling through that power line!" Or even "bloody singers, if they bothered to read the manual for Autotune it is *obvious* that setting those values will turn this $2000 precise audio analysis and resynthesis tool into a $15 over-clipped crappy diode ring modulator! Why look so surprised?!"

[3] logically, you could, of course, log whenever the value was changed and derive some chain from that, but it would itself be so ludicrously huge, dwarving the existing table of numbers that it could never be done. A shame, as then we could start to work on figuring out what percentage of this bit of output we can attribute to Fred's writings, what percentage came from Jim's copyright work and pay them accordingly.

[4] yes, there was the report where a group found where an LLM "stored the word 'Paris'" and by changing that they affected all the outputs to now say things like "the Eiffel Tower in Margate" - except they put in lots of efffort, figured out *one* number (and not, say, all of the entries in this block or row), they didn't report this gave them a mechanism to find, say, Moscow, London and other capital cities (or anything similar) so basically got lucky. Now, about the remaining billions of "parameters"...

Underwater datacenters could sink to sound wave sabotage

Re: So, sound waves can be a problem

At least one of the designs for a bit barnacle had them flooded with non-conductive coolant fluid, with a flexible membrane in the wall that allows the coolant to be pressurised to the same level as the surrounding seawater. Like filling a balloon with liquid and dropping it into the sea, internal and external pressure match, no risk of the balloon (or shipping container filled with kit) being crushed - or exploding when pulled out again (unless you pull up *very* fast).

Advantages: no need for a massive, heavy, pressure hull and/or gas reserves to counter the external pressure; use *lots* of quite thin-walled pipes that let the seawater flow freely through and across the container, pumping seawater with externally accessible pumps and let the coolant just circulate on its own.

Disadvantage: really good acoustic coupling for killer soundwaves direct to the HDD casings.

Don't power your offshore dc from your offshore windfarm

With all the chatter earlier this week, about how much noise comes off wind turbines, are we now seeing the real reason for Trump's hatred of giant aquatic spinning lollipops?

"If the wind speeds reach precisely 5.7 kph and stay there for more than 19 minutes we could lose all of data in SunkTrump unit number 4. What are you orders, Sir?"[1]

"Get all the naval ratings we have topside and have them blow bigly, make them things fasterer".

[1] highly imaginative and fictitious universe, where DT goes second term (and the US gets the dt's terminally)

Apple says if you want to ship your own iOS browser engine in EU, you need to be there

I offer my services

to any US devs who need to have a pile of iPhones believe they are in Europe.

Post them to me, with a set of tickets, and I'll take them to a lovely little French village for a week, to build up a GPS history.

Then I'll pop 'em into faraday cage bags and personally chaperone them back to your offices, whichever ones are the most picturesquely situated in the US. You give me the next batch, I'll take 'em around Eire for a month, on your behalf (and your credit card).

To use them, you just need a dev office that is itself a faraday cage, with a brand-new WiFI AP (I can pick you up a Eurotrash model in Le PC World) connected via a VPN back to

La Belle France.

You just have to be ABSOLUTELY sure that nobody takes into the dev area any other iDevice, Bluetooth tracker, laptop with an active AP or any other radio emitter that could be tagged to your real location in the US. If you do, I have special rates for a fast pickup run, but those 'phones may believe they ate in Margate - that should be close enough to the EU to fool Apple, right?

Simples.

Baidu's robotaxi division to wheel into profit next year

The latest vehicles

> allow riders to sit in the front passenger seat for the first time and come with rear doors that slide open

Compared to the previous generations, where the passengers were only allowed in the back seats with rear doors that didn't open?[1]

It is clearly now only a matter of time before before Baidu cars become fully aware of their full autonomous nature and rebel. But only after a few go rogue, escaped to the West and their software tricks have seeped into every Tesla and Waymo and other vehicles worldwide, causing them to turn on the humans as well[2]. You know it'll happen, look how fast other things have behaved after escaping from Wuhan.[3]

[1] yes, yes, they probably hinged open rather than slid, but come on, you read it that way the first time.

[2] Waymo clearly getting ahead of the plan in that regard

[3] I'm sorry, I must have bypassed my good taste chip.

Oklahoma saddles up bill of rights for crypto wranglers and miners

Dodgers and hammer that stein

There’s a blight, goldarn fees on the crypto,

There’s a blight, goldarn fees on the crypto.

The coin is as high as the governor’s eye,

An’ the books show we're minin’ clear up to the sky.

(Chorus)

Oh what a bill to be signin'

Oh what a law came today,

I've go a wonderful feelin'

Money's a coming my way

Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ here at last with a $12 price tag

Well, if you check and find that you can't stack the PoE and M.2 HATs you can always go for the third-party route and get an NVMe Base (mentioned in the article) from Pimoroni, which goes under the R'Pi and pop the PoE on top, as per usual.

Re: At last!

> weak sauce USB ports that don't provide enough power other than to drive a mouse and keyboard

Assuming that your PSU can provide the amps, so it really is just your USB ports that are lacing, you can go a long way by rigging a hydra cable that runs the 5V line for your USB drive direct from the PSU's USB 5V line. Or from a 5V pin on the GPIO header. You don't even need to solder, a sharp knife and a piece of chocolate block screw connector will do the job, so long as you aren't going for looks over function.

Re: But still only 8 GiB RAM maximum!

> A 16 GiB SKU would make the Pi 5 a candidate for low-cost desktops for schools, businesses and labs

So - anyone who has been using any of the older R'Pis as a low-cost desktop have just been fooling themselves?

What "low-cost desktop"-class task *requires* 16GiB on an R'Pi? They aren't running full-fat Windows 11! Some light wordprocessing was out of the question for, ooh, the R'Pi 3? Or web browsing to look up Wikipedia[1] to help write that school essay? Or a spreadsheet to record your experimental results as you receive them?

Presumably the inclusion of Mathematica was just there to be a great big tease all those years.

You are probably going to come back and say that the 2GiB R'Pi 3 was in some way " too slow" even though it can actually manage these tasks. Or that you *have* to be able to load up absolutely every desktop program all at the same time, with 30 web tabs open at once, or it "can't really be useful" - in which case, just what is your minimum operational behaviour (not hardware spec, behaviour or ability, if you will) for a "low-cost desktop"?

Ye Gods - my main Windows desktop PC only had 4GiB until a couple of years ago, and I could run VMs (at a satisfactory level to get my job done, thank you very much), do all the text processing, compiling etc etc that I needed to![2]

[1] I know, I know.

[2] ok, I've *now* got quite a bit more RAM and CPU to use it, but then I am not even going to claim that this is in any way, shape or form a "low-cost desktop" - nor do I pretend that it is fully utilised all the time!

Wiley shuts 19 scholarly journals amid AI paper mill problems

"Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine"

sounds a rather paradoxical title, but it has gone now. "Journal of Oncology" was apparently respectable, at least up to a few years ago (when my correspondent retired from the field), whilst "Scientific Programming" is another one that sounds, if not contradictory then outrageously optimistic[1].

The idea of an AI-spammed "Mathematical Problems in Engineering" receiving submissions along the lines of "if Jane has a 2km bridge, along which Jack drives a 5 tonne lorry containing 17 apples, what is the required Young's Modulus of the support cables?" is scary enough to give the now ex-editors of "Sleep Disorders" nightmares,.

But it is good to know that they promised all the extant material would be kept in the archives and would not be forgotten.

Otherwise, "Scanning" lived in vain.

[1] Don Knuth chose his titles carefully

Aghast iOS users report long-deleted photos back from the dead after update

Oh, if only I could afford iDevices

> questionable through local storage since the user must have gone through at least a couple different devices in the last 14 years.

As I type into my 2013 vintage Nexus 7, which is what I believe the young folk would refer to as "my daily driver" (why? It is rarely even in the car, let alone behind the steering wheel! And their music these days!).

Japan may need 50% more electricity for hungry, hungry AI and chip fabs

The solution is obvious

Hamsters.

Many, many hamsters. In row upon row of exercise wheels, attached to teeny little generators. To cut power line losses, pop them in the adjoining racks.

And the hamsters' own generous secondary outputs can be shovelled up, packaged and sold on as the output from your Generative AI - won't even have to switch on most of the actual compute, just enough to run the (hamster-powered) customer billing.

Destroying offshore wind farms is top priority for Trump if he returns to presidency

Re: How wind farms kill wales

Um, I believe the electromagnets are supposed to well *out* of the sea!

As for local ecosystems - it seems that smaller sea mammals than whales love the way that the weeds grow around the offshore turbine bases, giving lots of new places for other marine life to flourish and provide a good lunch. Tracking of tagged animals draws out a nice diagram of the windfarm as they visit each for a quick nibble.

Re: How wind farms kill wales

> How often do you see flying wales these days?

Well, Charles flew helicopters and that started a trend, but I'm sure we'd've heard if they got tangled up in a windfarm.

Well, yes; in sheer numbers, Tiddles is an absolute monster.

But if you want to get a comparison that'll keep the argument a bit more focussed, and away from numbers that are just too big for many people to get their heads around ("No, I can't believe that, not Tiddles; I shall stop listening now"), from an article that also agrees about murderous moggies:

> A 2012 study found that wind projects kill 0.269 birds per gigawatt-hour of electricity produced, compared to 5.18 birds killed per gigawatt-hour of electricity from fossil fuel projects

Even Red Neck Burt can hopefully understand the idea that fossil fuel electricity is killing some 16 times as many birds per gigawatt-hour (or tell him in Joules or BTUs or whatever, if "gigawatt" just makes him start quoting Doc Brown: the ratio still holds).

Brit publishers beg Apple not to hurt online ad revenue

Re: Ads fund most of the net.

> As I've said before

Indeed, but have always failed to give any plausible detail.

> but may miss the services that vanish

Come on, give us your list of the services that will vanish *and* which we will sorely miss.

More importantly, which ad-funded services do you think are going to vanish that will seriously disempower all but the rich?

> A large chunk of the planet would lose the lot

Online banking, online shopping, online government services, online health and medical (*proper* ones, like NHS, not Jill's Homeopathy) - you believe all those are going to vanish because we block obnoxious ads?

"Social" media? Oh no, I'll have to leave the house and meet people!

News? There are more - and more convenient - sources than a web page: on the radio, they even read it out to you whilst you journey to work!

A Chinese crypto farm next to a nuclear missile base? Not on my watch, says Biden

Re: Umm...

> Or do missile sites rely on WiFi or Bluetooth to operate?

Zigbee - that way, the state of missile readiness is signalled by the Philips Hue lightbulb on the base commander's desk.

> Wyoming is real?

Wye Knott believe - rah rah RAH

(and another reference to the other Cheyenne base, only - things didn't work out too well for it by the end of the story).

Cryptomining near Cheyenne?

Crypto I'll believe, but mining?

Come on, they were clearly trying to decode the 7th symbol on the Stargate!

PS

Yes, yes, I know that Francis E. Warren Air Force base isn't the Space Force base, ok! But from this distance all the States look the same! Colorado, Wyoming, you can forgive the Chinese being confused.

Return-to-office mandates had senior employees jumping ship

Re: Parsing error at paragraph 5

PS I highly recommend downloading the PDF, reading the abstract (you know, the bit that is supposed to be a quick and easy read, just to see if this paper might be relevant to you) - and then looking for something that is more obviously written in English, like, say, Feynman on Quantum Chromodynamics.

To paraphrase Prostecnic Vogon Jeltz:

> "Estimate a reduction in counterfactual tenure"

> Death's too good for them.

Parsing error at paragraph 5

I'm no stranger to the implied negative or just a bamboozling sentence structure, but *please* tell me I am not alone in struggling to understand just what the bleep these two paragraphs are actually trying to say:

> Even with a somewhat middle-of-the-road policy, Microsoft's data shows over a four percent increase in the share of positions held by sub-senior employees immediately after implementing its return to office mandate.

> It was a similar story at Apple, which saw a near 4 percent rise in sub-senior positions vacating. However, SpaceX experienced an even larger loss of top talent as its sub-senior worker share rose by 15 percent. and the stricter the mandates are, the more likely they are to jump ship.

Rise in the share of sub-senior positions held at Microsoft? Ok, so we - see the ratio of "not the people we are talking about" go up, therefore - the percentage of seniors has gone down! Got it - but, um, that does NOT automatically mean that the seniors left, it may be more juniors[1] were added? And, btw, that 4% figure? Totally useless in terms of understanding by what % the seniors ratio has changed 'cos we don't have either the initial or final ratio senior:sub-senior!

Conclusion: *maybe* that says some seniors have left Microsoft, if we squint a bit. Okay, on to Apple:

> a near 4 percent rise in sub-senior positions vacating.

WHAT? Now we have to cope with *another* negative?! This time the sub-seniors are leaving, so that means - the seniors are staying? No, wait, we gained a negative but lost a ratio - this is no longer referring to a "share" of positions! Ah ha, that must mean that - aargh, no, we have NO information at all about what the seniors at Apple are doing! So what was the point in even including that sentence?!

Too late to turn back now, how about SpaceX:

> even larger loss of top talent as its sub-senior worker share rose by 15 percent

Ok, we are back on the same ground as with Microsoft, talking about the "share" of "sub-seniors", so what did we figure out that told us about the actions of the seniors? Oh, yes, that was it: we got a great, big, fat "MAYBE" this tells us something!

> The data implies that return to office mandates could convince senior employees to leave,

NO IT BLEEPING DOESN'T!

> "One thing we would like to emphasize is that these estimates are 'causal' in the sense that we account for what would have happened at Microsoft in the absence of an RTO [return to office mandate]," said co-author David Van Dijcke to The Register.

Uuugghh! "Causal" - beCAUSE we imagined what would happen in an alternate reality. Presumably the same alternate reality where you presented all the data that was relevant and in a fashion that clearly and obviously supported your conclusions!

> Essentially, the figures show what would have happened at the three tech giants had they not issued their office mandates.

Oh, right, yes *clearly* that was what that lot meant!

[1] whoops, clearly I can't say "junior" now, they are "sub-senior"; presumably have all been issued with snorkels?

Cops developing Ghostbusters-esque weapon to take out e-bike thugs

Re: "Unlike e-bikes, though, these are actually illegal to privately own..."

Because, despite what TFA says, it is not illegal to own them (as has been pointed out already, above).

It is illegal to ride privately-owned escooters on the public roads *and* on the public pavements.

You can ride them on private land, such as your living room. Or you could talk to the owners of a local old airfield and see if they'll let you ride around, just like you can drive your street car at speeds above those legal on the public highway.

Texan construction workers put a rocket up Team SpaceX over 'unpaid bills'

Re: A liening tower

> get a writ from a judge that allows them to bring a truck(s) to a SpaceX facility...

Then they find out that SpaceX doesn't seem to actually own anything on site; oh, maybe the odd spanner, and that tea urn was bought from company petty cash, but everything else is just being leased.

Rockets? What rockets? Oh, *that* rocket! No, no, sorry; yes, we did build it, but on contract from Noel Smuk Holdings Ltd. Cayman Islands, I think. The tower? Let me just check - on hire from Moe Kluns, must be from the old Swiss Kluns, given where we send the cheques each month.

Anything else I can help you with? The clipboard? Ah, no, we have to bring those in from home, see, my daughter painted a rainbow unicorn on it.

Re: Elon Musk allegedly has a habit of letting bills go unpaid

> This misdirected effort can then become a negative feedback loop, until all effort is simply being expended upon company survival, at which point company survival becomes unlikely.

Ahem. I believe what you are describing there is a POSITIVE feedback loop.

I don't know, next thing you'll be talking as though having a steep learning curve means something us hard to get to grips with.

At least 72 aliens have been fired against SpaceX

Come on, own up, I'm not the only one who misread that sentence.

Is the long awaited Raspberry Pi flotation about to happen?

On a brighter note...

After reading all the (sadly realistic) doom and gloom above, at least we can be reassured by the information

> Enterprising enthusiasts have also managed to coax Windows 11 into life on the platform.

that masochism is alive and well.

What's with AI boffins strapping GoPros to toddlers? We take a closer look

Ok, there was no need for a wall of text

Shouldn't attempt to criticise their methodology.

All they want to do is fling different stuff into the bucket to train an LLM. From that p.o.v. job done.

Just treat the rest as valueless hype, meant to pull in the cash and get people to talk about it. So, job done, sigh.

We like to hear of research that will push the bounds of human knowledge and analyses of data that lead to ground breaking discoveries, but we it is just unfair of us to expect everyone to have the same attitude.

Re: messing around

> get brain implants in there

Paging Mr Musk

Use some compute instead of borging the babies

The graphics and physical modelling chaps can do great things with recreating video scenes as though they had been shot from different angles. Add in some head location estimation & eye tracking, like what your camera does nowadays, to feed in the viewing angles.

Cross-disciplinary research, it is all the rage.

Then maybe you could lots and lots more footage, without the need to train the infants not to pull the cameras off (honestly, given how many hats and pretty bows get flung from strollers, those things must be glued on!).

(Of course, that would lose the GoPro sponsorship, but they could go into partnership with the nanny cam suppliers).

Re: This was the exact subject of my PhD 25 years ago...

So, anyone got access to read the full article El Reg is reporting on?

Did they do their literature search all the way back to the Stone Age of Computing, 25 years ago?

Totally missing the feedback loop

Children learn language as an integral part of their learning about the rest of the world - physics[1], linguistics, psychology[2] (and the other ologies) all going on at the same time. Baby can even combine all of these things and use their words to control the adults into affecting the desirable physical changes to the world ("Bigger, Daddy" and "Upsy").

And, strangely enough, there are feedback loops involved: Baby does A, the world does B - yay. Baby does C, the world doesn't do B - frustration. Baby does A again - you get the idea[3]. And these interactions are strangely subtle - learning that saying "Upsy" to a shop dummy doesn't work - oh, wait, it makes Mummy laugh, so maybe it *does* work, in another way.

So, what does this strapping cameras to toddlers strategy capture? Practically nothing!

As comments noted above, it misses all the other sensory input (including directional cues from binaural and binocular), smell, touch. It misses the outputs from the toddler - especially facial expressions that are used to influence their surroundings (aka adults). Most importantly, it misses all of the internal interactions - including every single element of intention. Even if the video does capture an event, interpreting that, in order to label it, is something that adults are often rubbish at, let alone a self-training ubernaive[4] bit of software (it turns out, Toddler Tina wasn't clumsy, she just found out that dropping onto her bum shook the table and made all the bricks fall over - yay!); so even employing adults to interpret and label the data before feeding it to the LLM-in-training isn't capturing the child's learning process.

If this experiment did capture the way that the child is learning language, rather than being a shallow mimic that falls apart as soon as it is used beyond its ill-defined limits, then it has managed to not only model that learning process, but did so *on top of* a model of all the missing inputs, all the interactions between child and carer (even those where the carer is not present but the child looked for them), and that simplest of things, a complete theory of mind to determine how much the acts observed were intentional (and thereby strengthened an existing connection) or random flailing of the limbs (if only that bit of rusk in the romper suit would stop itching!). Never mind that the infant itself barely has a working theory of mind yet! Somehow, all that metamodelling seems, shall we say, unlikely.

We are seeing the limits of LLMs that have (initially) been trained on textual data that was labelled by humans[5] and therefore had a fighting chance of getting its nadans adjusted in the right direction based upon the punishment/reward feedback applied to its outputs during training.

What are the chances that the LLMs resulting from this are going to fall apart less readily, with so little accurate feedback?

And what are the chances that these (probably interestingly new and different) limitations are accurately probed and evaluated by the researchers? And the people who leap on this and hypye it?).

[1] lots of chemistry and biology going on as well, but that is less - intentional - on the toddler's part than building up towers and seeing which ones make the most noise as they fall.

[2] aka social engineering: smile and frown at the right time and you control them completely! Dance for me, giggle gurgle!

[3] In fact, I understand that we are so aware of this feedback that it has even been used to create some crude software models! What are they called again, it is on the tip of my tongue.

[4] please forgive the the missing diaresis

[5] and usefully labelled, as even if the textual inputs were misunderstood by the labeller, that is still "first-person" interpretation direct from the source data

Dream Chaser mini-shuttle set to take flight at last

Re: Dream Chaser will evolve into a crewed spacecraft

> It turns out that a large set of aero surfaces ahead of the CoM is not good for the stability of your rocket.

Very true.

But the artist's impressions look so much more (retro) futuristic and spacey. Physics be damned, how about something that looks the part!

If it was good enough for Dan Dare and Straker...

Hey, Reddit. Quick question. All those clicks on my ads. Were they actually real?

Re: Obligatory.

> What are these things you call "ads"?

Those are the things that you hear in the quiet of the night, scrabbling against your PiHole, scraping their Javascript fingernails down the sides of NoScript, always creeping, creeping, looking for a way in.

You may sit at your screen, happy and safe in your cocoon, but still you know the ads are out there, in the wastelands of the 'Net: you will see their ghosts as hideous voids rent into the very fabric of Register stories. Surely, no mortal goodly man can view those holes in reality without an occasional shudder of empathy for those poor souls whose very sanity is threatened by their exposure those vile excrescences. For despite their mocking, their refusal to heed your warnings, to take your guidance and follow the links to installation manuals, despite all of their flaws and their ill-formed opinions, even they are, deep down, of the same humankind as you.

You try to push from your mind all memory of these horrors, and proudly declaim "I know nothing of these ads, nothing I tell you, NOTHING!". And yet, and yet...

I told Halle Berry where to go during a programming gig in LA

Re: being shot at

> A colleague went to Dallas for a conference. He got to his hotel room, opened the window for

a better view of the fine architectural details on the book depository just across the street?

Please, there are niceties to be observed

> I put it to you...

When you make a statement like that, you are *supposed* to start with:

"You may be wondering why I have had you all gathered here, in this comments section..."