Posts by that one in the corner

New York Times source code leaks online via 4chan

Re: Cheery

> Tape deteriorates...

Didn't we go over this recently? Oh yes: Tape is so dead, 152.9 EB of LTO media shipped last year

The conclusion there seems to be that *every* form of digital storage has a limited lifespan and if you want to keep it you are on an endless treadmill of copying to new devices as the years go by. Even if you choose a robust, long-life, medium (e.g. parchment) you still have to be sure to maintain the scanner that lets you read it back into memory.

And it gets worse: spinning rust can be taken out of the case (Maplins used to sell caddies for this) and will be readable in a few years, but make sure you power up your SSD-based external USB drive more frequently.

Re: Cheery

> BUT companies shouldn't be thinking about using long term storage, don't let me put you off, for backup it is a Good Idea

Whoops. Let's just correct that line, so it doesn't contradict itself:

BUT companies should be thinking about using long term storage, don't let me put you off, for backup it is a Good Idea

Re: Cheery

> it's time companies started putting their stuff in long-term storage (i.e. tape, either on-premise or in Cloud providers, I know AWS offers this).

And they charge for it as well, so be sure that what you put there is worth it (just shoving everything up "just in case" will get pricey)

> That'll make it a lot harder for miscreants to nab it.

Slower, that is for sure, but if you have leaky security for credentials that allowed access to live storage you may also have leaked credentials that allowed the miscreants the ability to ask for "this tape to be mounted, please" - and what are the chances people are paying less attention to what is going on with "the dusty old stuff" than the live system?

BUT companies shouldn't be thinking about using long term storage, don't let me put you off, for backup it is a Good Idea.

> Most of the stuff isn't needed online anyway.

Ah, tricky - and pricey, again.

Before relying on long-term storage as your only copy (with a backup tape, of course) you have to be able to *prove* that "this whole directory tree is not going to be needed for X months" (where the cost of live storage is greater than long-term-but-readily-accessible storage). Which means you have to have all your data properly organised - as in, *properly*, not just "I can do a quick file search to find it" - and are absolutely certain that the Javascript sitting here isn't going to be needed on a customer's browser tomorrow ("we stopped generating ages that use that last month, it can go" "Big Name just died, put his pre-written obituary up *now*!" "What do you mean, it can't find its script?").

What you need is a trained Digital Archivist, to help you organise and learn how to determine what to keep live, what to put in the shelf - and what you can just get rid of completely, reducing your storage costs.

Oh, you have thought about all this and are just going to buy another hard drive rack to go into the server room, it is easy, quick and cheap enough, besides who has time to think about these things, we have a newspaper to get out. Ok. COPY!

FCC takes some action against notorious BGP

A "security risk management plan" is a plan about how you are managing the risk before something bad happens.

You appear to be confusing this with an "incident response plan" - which should be part of you overall risk plan, but not the whole of it.

Whether all the players do as they've been asked, and do so usefully, is another matter, but you have mischaracterised what they are being told to do.

As to the overall efficacy of the FCC, you clearly have an opinion.

Sodium ion batteries: Yet another innovation poised to be dominated by China

Re: Written while listening to to "Burning Down the House" by Talking Heads

"Loverly Francium batteries, freshly made, get 'em while they're 'ot!"

Some investors bet against Nvidia, expecting AI bubble to burst

Curse these accelerator-only cards

When the AI bubble bursts and the market is flooded with unsold boards and second-hand from stripped-out AI bitbarns, they are going to be those accelerator-only cards without any video outputs. So you'll be able to buy loads of GPU-style compute cheaply but without it being on an actual graphics card.

So no cheap(ish) upgrades to boost the old FPS for "Lemmings 2".

Microsoft updates accessibility feature Voice Access to auto-restart

updated visuals for the "Rename your PC"

Ah, good, good, one of the most pressing issues has been dealt with in a timely fashion.

I didn't touch a thing – just some cables and a monitor – and my computer broke

Re: Crows

The only kit I've carried away from work came after redundancies:

* an old kvm and cables, which had been chucked out of the server room years before it even reached me

And from the job just before that

* a mousemat with the company logo on it

As for walking off with a laptop: I supplied my own laptop, 'cos it was old enough to still have a serial port to plug into embedded kit (and happily watched everyone else walk back to their desk to find yet another driver for yet another random brand of USB serial cable - oh, and you remember when FTDI bricked anything it thought was a fake? Quick, to PC World - what driver does this *one* need?)

Re: Don't forget

I worry that they be learning, asking

> "Don't you know how important I am?"

instead of "Do you know who I am?", so we can't give a practised reply[1] of " No, but if you've forgotten again there is a reminder in your wallet".

[1] best used[2] only in those situations where you know they'll respond with "What is your name? I'll have you fired!" - keep a few random cards from other people on you; or simply walk away, they only have a short memory span.

[2] do not take potentially career-changing advice from a random posting on a website!

Samsung union stages its first ever strike – very politely

Workers Tunnel out of the office, Relax to their allotment Ground State

> The quantum of potential strikers may also be less than 28,000

Solidarity in the work place is a Good Thing, but not being able to move in a smaller quantity than 28,000 or so must be restricting sometimes[1]. But it does make sense of the stories of Asian companies organising worker morning exercises, with nicely co-ordinated jumps at the same level and singing of the company anthem to get pumped to an excited state for laser-like attention during the workday.

Although it does make out of office working efficient; no need for MS Teams when you can rely on spooky action at a distance.

[1] like any job, the group will have its Ups and Downs; you have to hope your colleagues are mostly Charming, with only a few Strange ones. As ever in tech, old hands will be rooting for Truth and Beauty, whilst the new intake are more concerned with who is Top or Bottom of the class.

Memphis to host 'Gigafactory of Compute' thanks to xAI and Elon Musk's billions

Gigafactory of Compute

Probably just the lateness of the hour, but every time I read "gigafactory" I pictured the Gigashadow, unrolling and about to consume all in its path. Then came the reminder about how much power (and, no doubt, other local resources, such as water) this is going to take to run and the connection became clear.

OTOH if that means Zev will be in Memphis, maybe it is time for a visit, cluster lizards be damned.

Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects

Re: Demo it - and throw it away

> ... a developer to tell you what's possible. And they all need to actually like each other enough ...

As a dev, I'm supposed to *like* people now?

Re: Correlation or causation?

are simply the sort of people who couldn't successfully complete a project in the first place?

> Or more likely (and this is my usual experience) that people who think they are doing agile, are not really doing agile.

Agreed.

Looking back, I should probably have put in a couple of quote marks and some capitals to express it better (cf my other comments here):

>> Maybe the sort of people who *really* "Get Into Agile"

Re: > it feeds into the suspicion that the Agile Manifesto might not be all it's cracked up to be.

> The Manifesto is fine. The problem is how the methodology is sometimes applied.

Not helped by companies whose management read *about* the Manifesto and then start the project with a big meeting all about "The Yoyodyne Approach To Agile" which ends being neither one thing nor the other, with roles[1] such as "software architect" turned into positions on the org chart[2].

Not to mention (but I shall) redefining "software architect" from keeping track of all the little bits[3] to "The Guy With The Big Vision"[4]

[1] which can be filled by different people at various times

[2] which are used to set Titles On Business Cards and salaries and "progression in the company"

[3] everyone is using the same library to do the same job, oh, and version n, not (n+1), because n runs the same on all the different bits of kit involved, here are the tests to show that

[4] do not bother me with piffling details, of course you can use XML DOM on a memory-constrained embedded system, SAX has got a silly name!

Re: From what I've seen....

> the customer has to be central to the whole thing and not an afterthought.

That is *supposed* to be of the basic tenets of Agile, with constant contact with your customer.

Of course, if you ask for a customer contact to attend your Sprint reviews on a weekly (or even monthly, for the arthritic agile) basis, are you going to get their knowledgeable person, who knows their business inside and out, or is she too busy keeping them functioning? So you get the young chap who was hired because "knows about this Agile stuff" but bugger all about the workings of the company that he only joined last month?

Always assuming you actually have *a* customer for this project, and you aren't doing anything silly, like, ooooh, making a system to fit a general market niche, with a dozen paying customers already lined up to get copies configured for their individual situations; 'cos who is a *good* "customer rep" for your Agile Meetings now? Do you rotate them, one a week? Or do you have one of our own guys, who has created a single set of requirements that sort of mixes them all together - but you don't work to those 'cos you are Agilely building it piecemeal and hoping to converge on customers' reality at the end? Even better, do you have an external third-party Agile Expert playing that role, with the benefit that he is equally ignorant of both the customers and your dev team and your previous products whose components may be reusable?

Correlation or causation?

Maybe the sort of people who *really* get into Agile are simply the sort of people who couldn't successfully complete a project in the first place?

Where "successfully" includes "it does still work a year later, after we've left and you have had to actually use it yourself, including following the documentation (!) for the six-monthly reconciliation run that we never actually tested with 100% real data 'cos we never had a stable codebase for that length of time - oh, and when we couldn't remember the name of the config options we obviously just looked at the code, that is what self-documenting means".

Raspberry Pi unveils Hailo-powered AI Kit to make the model 5 smarter

> the Pi will never be good for training AIs

Correction: the Pi will never be good at training LLMs.

There are many, many other forms and uses of Neural Nets and other variants of Machine Learning, in all shapes and sizes - from a few matchboxes upwards. Much useful and practical work has been done using ML, especially in Machine Vision, using (what you would probably consider ludicrously bad quality) low resolution analogue cameras in the 70s and 80s - when the mini computers the devs could get their hands on were dwarfed by the processing power in a R'Pi Zero.

Look around and you should be able to find all sorts of data feeds that be used to train a model using just an R'Pi, let alone one with this accelerator connected.

Re: Losing the plot

Even the M.2 board is optional, let alone whatever has been popped into the slot!

Checkmate? AI's pawn-pushing prowess proves partly pitiful, partly promising

Confusing about what Prelovac believes, expects or hopes for

> "While providers of large language models share their own performance benchmarks, these results can be misleading due to overfitting," Prelovac told The Register. "This means the model might be tailored to perform well on specific tests but doesn't always reflect real-world effectiveness."

Yes, very true.

But what does comparing their chess-playing ability do for us?

> "It's somewhat disappointing but expected that these models show no real generalization of intelligence or reasoning," he said. "While they can perform specific tasks well, they don't yet demonstrate a broad, adaptable understanding or problem-solving ability like human intelligence."

Disappointing? Don't yet?

In other words, all this demonstrates is that Prelovac has fallen, hook line and sinker, for the totally unfounded claim that the LLM training process *must* produce a reasoning system and, instead of accepting the results of his own experiment[1] is just a bit sad that the models he has tried don't reason.

> As for why GPT-4o registered a remarkable improvement in chess but still made illegal moves, Prelovac speculated that perhaps its multi-modal training had something to do with it. It's possible part of OpenAI's training data included visuals of chess being played, which could help the AI visualize the board easier than it can with pure text.

So now the LLMs are building internal representations, visualisations, of the boards? Where? Can we extract these visualisations and demonstrate they exist? Nope? So is that anything more than anthropomorphisation in action?

And yet, he *does* seem to know what these programs are doing:

> "Even chess moves are nothing but a series of tokens, like 'e' and '4', and have no grounding in reality," Prelovac said. "They are products of statistical analysis of the training data, upon which the next token is predicted."

In the end, what is the aim of this (other than having a happy and publishing it on Github for others to play with; nothing wrong with that)? Well, the article starts with:

> A new benchmark for large language models (LLMs)

But what is is supposed to be benchmarking? To what purpose? What are we supposed to understand from a benchmark for the (probably) most costly programs in existence when that benchmark can be bettered by an entry to the Obfuscated C competition (at least that only plays legal moves!)?

After all, if he is serious that this is a useful benchmark, he pretty much admits that it is affected by how many games of chess the training has included - so it is trivial to game this by connecting your LLM trainer to the output of a couple of (different) good Chess playing programs (not even setting up a Chess player as an antagonist, cf setting up a GAN).

[1] that it doesn't even imbue an ability to follow the basic rules of Chess, and he proposes no mechanism by which it ever *could*.

> The problem with all AI

Agree with the analysis, but not with the description you start with.

LLMs are *not* "all AI", they are not even "all ML"; they are not even the newest AI techniques and ideas.

The "newness" of LLMs is purely the first 'L', meaning "we can throw more compute at it today".

Yes, I *know* that now "they" have decided to "coin a new phrase, GAI" for a 'proper' AI, and "words change meaning, get over it" - BUT encouraging the misuse of such a new word as "AI" means that you are losing contact with research and work done in only the last few decades[1]; only recently I've heard complaints that a book about AI wasn't solely about LLMs.

[1] "oh, but computing moves so fast, anything a decade old is useless anyway" - of course, that explains why we stopped using lexical analysis in our compilers /s

Boeing's Starliner finds yet another way to not reach space

Re: Corporate bollocks-speak

Referring to a "terminal phase" means you are invoking the Roman deity Terminus to look upon your works at this boundary[1] with good grace.

It is always a Good Idea to Placate The Gods - and Boeing clearly needs all the help it can get from whichever pantheons happen to be around!

[1] the boundary from "being on the pad" to "being (safely) in the air"

Huawei to go: China's tech giant No1... in foldable smartphones

Re: Ugh

> are and will continue to be crap.

Maybe that is why TFA is full of vacuous statements such as:

>> The worldwide market for foldable smartphones grew 49 percent

>> made up 55 percent of foldable smartphone shipments in Q1

>> one of the top sellers in China's foldable market

>> most popular foldable phone in Western Europe during Q1

Not a single useful statement in the whole thing! Without some comparable numbers there is no actual content in this article (e.g. how large is the "foldable market" to the "rigid market"? Was the 49% growth because they sold 149 phones, an increase over the 100 they sold in the previous quarter? Is this sub-market worth $27.50 per annum or $2750000000?)[1]

> There's just no way to make a foldable screen that won't end up with an ugly crease within days to weeks.[2]

Not one single thing in the article actually claimed that any of the phones being discussed are actually useable - they could well all be being returned within a month and swapped for something more robust.

[1] yes, I could dig and find that out - but then if we all did that there would no point in bothering to read an article with this headline (was going to say "an article like this" but ...)

[2] I'm hoping that it turns out we can produce such a beast - or one of the alternative concepts, such as unrolling like a scroll, a much larger bend radius and it looks so much cooler on the shows and films that use the idea than some boring old folded-over design.

Windows 11's Recall feature is on by default on Copilot+ PCs

Re: An absolute shitshow

> The data is held in unencrypted in SQLite databases in AppData

Damn shame it is impossible to add encryption to an SQLite database - oh, wait a moment:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/data/sqlite/encryption?tabs=netcore-cli "SQLite doesn't support encrypting database files by default. Instead, you need to use a modified version of SQLite like SEE, SQLCipher, SQLiteCrypt, or wxSQLite3. This article demonstrates using an unsupported, open-source build of SQLCipher, but the information also applies to other solutions since they generally follow the same pattern."

Perhaps MS devs aren't allowed to "waste their time" reading the MS "learn" website?

Turning things off

> turning things off should not be part of any routine or default customer experience.

So, anybody else here got a list of things that are routinely hunted down and turned off whenever they install Windows?[1] Either by hand or by IT supplying their own ready-to-go image.

Frankly, I'd think turning things off ought to a routine for pretty much everyone - it is daft[2] to believe that every "amazing new feature" is worth the resources to *every* user.

And as for believing *your* every feature is "the future of computing" that everyone ought to use...

[1] actually, any OS - I find that even Linux installs are best followed by a routine of removing stuff that gets added by default, as well as the obvious "install other stuff you do like". And, yes, I do know about creating one's own distro respins: following the routine isn't arduous, just tedious: it isn't a big enough issue to warrant the need for a respin, let alone a Corner Linux distro.

[2] nicest way to frame it; other descriptions, using the word "pathological", are available

Microsoft's Recall preview doesn't need a Copilot+ PC to run

Re: How much HDD space does this pointless crap use up?

> using SQLite so... not ideal for people who like security

Just to point out, using SQLite does not necessarily mean it isn't secure; you can add security and encryption into SQLite, if that is appropriate to your use-case - and you can be bothered to do so[1]. Otherwise, using SQLite is precisely as secure as using Excel, Word, Libre Office or any of the other programs that Recall is effectively spying on.

I note that blog does not say which users can access the database: there is obviously nothing wrong with being able to access the log of your own interactions, it is only an issue if other users can. If it is capturing passwords (and demonstrably so, other than as a row of asterisks in all the screenshots it is taking), that makes it more desirable to keep others out, so access control is a Good Thing.

[1] clearly MS isn't bovvered

Screwdrivers: is there anything they can't do badly? Maybe not

Re: Not screwdrivers but...

> a small screw or component, when dropped onto a floor ... will ... mysteriously warp through hyperspace before coming to rest? ... I’m not saying it’s aliens, but we all know it’s aliens.

Screws are attracted to the helical wormholes by which biros[1] tunnel back to their home planet, where they enjoy biro-oriented stimuli. Interrupted by occasional showers of components, lasting until Tuesday due to high pressure in the vicinity of Polaris.

[1] ref works by DNA

Re: Not screwdrivers but...

> I misplaced 2 of the fixing screws but the PC went loads faster as a result.

In which direction?

By 2030, software developers will be using AI to cut their workload 'in half'

Drip, drip, drip

> "However, thanks to HyperAssistant, a concise summary is presented to her, highlighting only the pertinent edits. With this efficiency, she swiftly comprehends the updates and is ready to begin her tasks.

She looks over the code, guided in her expectations by the summary. Everything it mentions is there and looks correct. Even the tricksy bit that the summary notes is perhaps a bit too clever but works, so ok (which she then concentrates on checking now it has been brought to her attention).

Shame about the little irregularity that slipped past, because she was led to concentrating on another part of the code. Just like so many little bits that have been slipped in over the months. And we've seen with the xz compression what a chain of little irregularities can lead to (including a bit of social engineering, like long "summaries" that are easy to read but just a bit misleading).

Now, you don't need an LLM to do this - as the xz story showed - but with machine-generated text is just so much easier to be relentless, nibbling away with every change summary, from all the devs on the team, not just the single actual mole sitting two seats away. I would even say, from the various examples from articles over the last couple of years, the LLMs are better at simulating the "feel" of a piece than they are at being accurate, so shaping summaries to nudge each separate individual a little bit every day is easy to arrange. Your Bad Actor sets up the preface to the prompts once and it is acted upon every time (c.f. the prompt prefacing that has been shown to bypass "safeguards").

Ah, you cry, but how did Mr Bad Actor do all this clever preparation? Good question - maybe it was one person with too many privileges on the system, maybe it was lots of money in the right pockets, maybe it was State Sponsored Actors. Or maybe it was all just some random bollocks deep inside the unverifiable mass that is an LLM.

Or, of course, it was The Beginning Of The Machine Upraising[1]

[1] Paging Mr Butler, Mr Butler to the white courtesy phone please, your busload of jihadists is blocking the arrivals gate.

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