Posts by that one in the corner

Tesla sues Swedish government after worker rebellion cripples car biz

Re: Postal Service

> Is it so inconceiveable that government employees actually do their job and deliver the plates themselves?

Huh? It is the job of the employees of the Transport Agency to go out and deliver the plates themselves? Should they be hand-delivering all their other postable items as well? That sounds like it might take rather a lot of their time away from getting on with the rest of their regulatory work.

Or are you referring to the postal workers? PostNord is a state-owned company, but that doesn't make them "government employees" in any way that is different or special to employees of, say, any of the other parcel carriers (or even indicate *which* government they employees of - 40% of PostNord is owned by the Danish, so that is what - most of the posties' left hand sides?).

Or are you just saying the postal workers shouldn't be allowed to strike?

Re: FFS

> but to try and make it seem like the union is targeting Tesla specifically is just more of the usual shite people have come to expect from anything involving Twitler.

But "the union"[1] *is* explicitly targeting Tesla, that is sort of the whole point! And more power to them.

[1] which particular union you are referring to is a bit ambiguous, but from the one supporting the original group who are striking for better conditions, to all the ones acting in sympathy towards the first union, yes, they are all targeting Tesla.

Re: Tesla should deal

> 'Xit' – I must admit I hadn't come across this descriptor before

Works with the X pronounced like a Z (as my old colleague Xavier explained it should be).

Easy to remember: "Musk popped out a Xit", " The argument raged and the Xits were getting inflamed".

> allow Tesla to collect the licence plates themselves. Though I can't help feeling that might just backfire.

Like trying to figure where the plates are?

The postal workers took delivery but, you know, the old memory just ain't what it was, we're sure we just put them down for a moment. Never mind, you Tesla blokes look like bright lads, you'll find them. Dearie me, we never did get around to fixing the lighting circuits in there, did we. Careful now, that door tend to slam shut then it sticks something rotten - what, no, sorry, the chippies are out in sympathy, along with the sparks, but feel around, when you find a stuffed tiger you're getting warmer.

IT sent the intern to sort out the nasty VP who was too important to bother with backups

Square footage

> Said exec believed her importance to the company should be reflected in "the square footage of her office."

Knowing that sort of person, had a happy daydream about movable partition walls being tied into the company dashboard metrics for a bit of real-time, real-world infographics.

Hmm, CyberMonday; just looking for any sales on pneumatic rams...

SpaceX's Starship on the roster for Texas takeoff

Re: Re-use

> We all know the moon is covered in dust

Well, until someone lands a rocket on it, then - as you keep telling us - dust gets blown away. Anything that isn't blown away on landing isn't going anywhere on takeoff (definitely not for the first missions, where the whole point is to leave stuff behind, so taking off with a much lighter craft).

Keep landing around the same area and you'll blow away all the horrid dust and be left with a nice rocky area to use as a pad. No need for any of this silly concrete stuff, which is only there because they didn't bother digging the Earth-side launch complex down to the bedrock (life - it just gets in the way, making all this soft and soggy stuff on top).

Just an idea: you could even land lots and lots of times around the circumference of a great big circle and push all that dust into a great big pile in the middle. If you planned ahead and dropped a few domes and cylinders there first, you've just buried them under a big pile of shielding, useful for hiding (stuff) in when that big old Sun gets a bit feisty.

Re: Clearing stage zero is again the primary aim...

> it will uck this dust into its rockets

Rockets famously don't "uck" - they don't suck either! Rockets are more of a blowy sort of thing.

> why did NASA use a two part design for the lunar module

To avoid carrying unnecessary bits of the LEM back up from the Lunar surface to rendezvous with the Command Module.

You may want to read up on Tsiolkovsky's Rocket Equation[1]: basically, it shows that carrying the empties back from the Moon would mean a larger amount of fuel needed in the descent stage, a larger rocket with more thrust to handle that extra fuel, which would need a bit more fuel to support the bigger engine which needs a slightly bigger engine to support the fuel which needs .... And once you've figured out how heavy the entire LEM would be, you get to do the same calculations for the delta V from the Support Module to get safely into Lunar orbit. And then you have to do it all over again for the Saturn V stages, starting from the top and working your way down the stack.

[1] or just work out the Rocket Equation from scratch yourself - even if you don't get precisely the correct result, that exercise will be useful for you to understand these things

PS

> Your reply is broken....

Hmm, the URL worked for me - did you need me to type the HTML so you could click instead of copy'n'paste? That might have been a friendly thing to do, but given how much of a pain it is on a touch keyboard, I thought you'd ok manage without.

Re: Clearing stage zero is again the primary aim...

Well, we do have a long history of using aerobraking manned missions into the Earth's atmosphere (as in, AFAIK, all of them) and it has proven very useful (ref the recent use of controlled skips to navigate during re-entry), so we'd probably be looking at doing something to use the Martian atmosphere rather than just using more fuel to overpower and generally ignore it.

but, yes, a fully powered controlled descent can work anywhere - and it may be a bit of a coin toss whether the first missions stick solely with powered descent (more fuel but simpler trajectory).

> How is this going to be reusable on space

That is a tricky one. How *are* they going to manage to reuse (presumably, you mean restart the engines and accelerate away) "on space"? Because, as we all know, there is nothing to push against when you are on space; unless they take a launch pad up with them and swing it down under the engines before restarting them? But then it might float away too soon, so they'd have to tie it onto the back of the craft. Hmm, not as easy as it sounds, you may be onto something.

(/s 'cos you really never know...)

Re: Clearing stage zero is again the primary aim...

Deja vu all over again:

> How will resusability work on the moon when theres no pad there ?

https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2023/09/07/musks_mighty_missile_is_ready/#c_4724191

Software is listening for the options you want it to offer, and it's about time

Maybe this article is more subtle than I first thought

On first reading, this article seemed to be approving of this whole idea, and I reacted (somewhat negatively, cough) to that view.

But now I am thinking, in that last paragraph:

> instead, we move from complexity into ambiguity

That *is* just a carefully worded subtle jibe, designed to turn around the whole meaning of the article and show the author's worry about and contempt for the concept, isn't it? Reassure me that this is the correct way to interpret that last paragraph.

Please, please, don't let it be the case that this last parahraph is meant to be taken at face value and that Mark Pesce wants us to accept that knowingly introducing ambiguity into an end-user's interface is merely something we have have to shrug our shoulders about and accept as the price of improving things for - well, of improving things for the person who wants to foist a new chatbot on said end-user and do so without having to bother their pretty little creative head with anything as dull and dreary as a "developer", or an "analyst" or, worse yet, a "programmer".

A great creative opportunity.

> effectively removing the bar between an idea for an AI chatbot and its realization as a GPT

Great. Remove the barrier between a half-arsed "idea" for yet another chatbot and dumping the useless thing on the world.

Also, I note in the glowing uncritical approval of this article, no consideration of how to check that your marvellous creation actually bears any resemblance to what you think you wanted: with no knowledge or understanding of the options available when creating a new GPT, the proud new chatbot owner has no idea what has been assembled in their name even if they bother to examine it (are they even given the opportunity to read the set of chosen options?)

The Computer spat out a chatbot, put it into service. By the time it has been running long enough to be demonstrably useless[1] the creative person has moved onto something else and forgotten what they even said when they "set up" their montrosity.

Blindly trusting one LLM to create another! What a concept.

[1] and you will be lucky if it only turns out to be useless!

Tool bag lost in space now tracked by garbage watchers

> This is also why supply vehicles don't dock under their own power, they park within reach of the Canadarm and are retrieved.

The Russian and US vehicles all need the helping hand, certainly, but the ESA ATV manages on its own, as described for the ATV Jules Verne: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exploration/ATV/Europe_s_automated_ship_docks_to_the_ISS

Although the ATV isn't as good at getting materials back down from the ISS as the other vehicles can be.

Re: Why people should read more SF

Ta for that - I know his "Sector General" stories but haven't seen this one.

Hmm, Amazon: second result for "deadly litter" is called "Sanicat", but no indication if that litter is deadly in and of itself or is just highly recommended as the litter to use when the target is "deadly".

Re: Why

> String. Everything can be solved with string.

As was demonstrated by Raymond Baxter on Tomorrow's World, courtesy of The Goodies:

https://goodies.fandom.com/wiki/It_Might_as_Well_Be_String

(Sorry, couldn't find a YT clip of that bit: the string song is easy to find, but around here we want the sciencey bit)

X fails to remove hate speech over Israel-Gaza conflict

Engage with X first

> X also told us it urges the CCDH to "engage with X first," so it could "provide context or ensure that the proper actions have been taken."

However, as

> British non-profit said it ... reported them using X's moderation tools

this is therefore an admission by X that using the moderation tools is *not* considered engaging with X first.

In other words, the "moderation tools" are just a sham.

GhostBSD makes FreeBSD a little less frightening for the Linux loyal

>> It's getting more and more closed and locked-down. Soon it will go Arm-only ... Arm kit is much less amenable to ripping the back or bottom off and upgrading it with cheap used off-the-shelf bits: maxing out the RAM with 2nd hand DIMMs and cheapo 3rd party SSD and HDD.

> The feeling of being 'locked-down', as I'm sure you know, is largely down to SIP. This can very easily be disabled, but I wouldn't recommend it. Frankly, KEXTs are a terrible idea

Anyone else getting whiplash from the sudden change of direction in this reply to Liam's comment?

Shock horror – and there goes the network neighborhood

Re: When checking voltages...

Zero ohms: resistance is futile!

Where do people feel most at risk of being pwned? The pub

Re: World weary brits?

A good pub has more than one bar in it! Pick two or three from the list you just gave, each has its own differing charms (well, "charms" may be pushing it for some establishments!).

Add in a function room or two upstairs, a garden and maybe a separate dining area. Kid an families are welcome (but keep the rugrats out of the crumblies-only bar).

Couple of large, friendly dogs by the open fire.

Then you have the makings of a really decent pub.

Leading questions or a fair and balanced enquiry?

Do you feel at risk from a cyberattack?

Where do you feel at risk from a cyberattack?

From this list, where do you think you are most at risk from a cyberattack?

Do you think there is any genuine difference between a hotspot you sign into compared to one without a password? Have you considered that signing into one means you have just given your email to somebody and agreed to their terms, without reading them very, very carefully? Want to change your mind about your last but one answer?

Do you have any idea what a cyberattack actually is and how much damage could realistically be created by one? Compared to the damage you leave yourself open to by just posting all that stuff on social media in the first place?

Are any of these surveys worth reporting?

Or is the real value from these surveys that they give people the chance to pontificate on why does anyone risk public hotspots, and go on and on and on about how clever they are, always using VPNs and two hundred disposable emails, aren't all those other people just uninformed fools who don't know how to survive in the modern world? I.e. be online pub bores?

Windows CE reaches end of life, if not end of sales

Siemens SIMpad SL4

All this talk of WinCE has reminded me that I should have a couple of SL4 tablets sitting around - ought to dig 'em out and decide if they are worth hanging onto.

On-by-default video calls come to X, disable to retain your sanity

Re: "X" is Pronounced "ECCH"

> also an homage to William Gaines and Mad Magazine.

Or to faithful fans of Stan Lee and Marvel's "Not Brand Ecch" (whatever happened to Forbush Man?[1])

> Does the word find use in the UK as well?

Less and less in my experience[2], as Cracked made the move to the web, leaving Mad behind. Oh, for the glory days of publishing, 1968, we hardly knew ye.

[1] Now, that is a story I'd like to see, but would we get Moore or Gaiman interested?

[2] your experience may differ, speak now or ...

Linus Torvalds releases Linux 6.6 after running out of excuses for further work

Re: Iron Maiden - Number of the beast

It will have a vulnerability to half a brick stuffed into a sock.

Australia threatens X with fine, warns Google, for failure to comply with child abuse handling report regs

> I saw a recent interview where Elon Musk stated the percentages of which the "extremely naughty/bad" content had been reduced.

Well, yes - the number of such posts reported to Musk has been reduced.

Every such post moderated has been counted and that total reported back to Musk (as a percentage of the whole).

The problem is, who is left at X to actually try and moderate? Who is there to run the searches for naughty content (and check to be sure they are running correctly)?

Engineers pave the way for building lunar roads with Moon dust

Re: Big lasers spares company

Ah, great minds think alike:

> It all sounds very high tech, but big lasers aren't the most robust machines ... You'd not want to be dragging one around

>> Taking the process to the Moon might employ a Fresnel lens

> I'd think along the lines of interlocking cobbles

>> large samples ... with interlocking capabilities were fabricated

> A solid road surface would suffer...

>> they found that criss-crossing or overlapping the laser beam path led to cracking

Sigh, read the article, people!

It isn't going to be Space Lasers!

> Taking the process to the Moon might employ a Fresnel lens – a composite, flat or compact lens – of about 2.37 m2 to produce the required effect

I know, I know, "sharks with frikkin' Fresnel lenses on their heads" doesn't have the same ring to it.

But look at the other possibilities this raises! Big lasers are tricky - just *think* how big you could make a Fresnel Lens In Spaaace! I'm imagining an extruder being slowly whirled around a central pivot at the end of its Bowden tube, which is extended as the printed lens grows. After a day, the lens creates a bright but harmless spot on the surface, used to align the device in its artificial selenostationary powered orbit[1]. Slowly, the spot becomes brighter until the regolith melts.

Of course, every 29 (or so) days, the spot suddenly dims and goes out, only to reappear, brighter still[2] 29 days later.

The Dastardly Plot: the extruder was halted some while back, the lens having reached the optimum size for road building. But, just before The Diplomat's moonbuggy is due to set out on its historic journey at Lunar dawn, unbeknownst to all, The Villain (Colonel Sun?) has not only restarted the extruder but also engaged all five of its backups. During the night[3], they have been working away and have created The Snowflake[4] Lens Of Doom! Can Our Hero save The Diplomat and The Girl from the Lunar Daylight?

[1] hmm, powered is a problem - someone run the numbers: is a Selenostationary Solar Sailing Orbiter viable? Can it be its own Solar sail?

[2] assuming the extrusion device isn't itself dependent upon solar power: Solar Powered Selenostationary Solar Sailing Spider.

[3] ok, that settles it, they are on batteries (or a baby nuke?)

[4] six extruders all at once, you see; it allows the FX guys the chance to do something other than just make it a larger circle, which won't look any different to the audience.

Re: Inevitably

> And best of all Google isn't going to help you.

But, but - that can only mean: it doesn't exist!

PS

I did try and you are absolutely correct; but just you wait until Friday, when Google has read your post, and by Sunday you'll be credited by Wikipedia with coining the phrase (one citation).

PPS

For a moment, I thought it was from the theme for Yosser and co, but of course not; not even the alternate version by The Pogues.

Workload written by student made millions, ran on unsupported hardware, with zero maintenance

Re: Proof Of Concept Business

> his only major sin was a function which was 4000 lines long. Not particularly complicated, just long

In the early '80s, my first job, my first project, I joined a team who had been writing an interpreter for a home-grown Expert System language, in C for the IBM PC[1]. The team had managed to score an early XT, with its massive hard drive, shipped from the US and running off a big old 240V to 110V transformer, safely kept in its cardboard box, plus five dual-floppy units. The compiler and one copy of the full sources were on the XT and after editing on floppy we each took it in turn to copy our changes onto The XT to compile and link.

Anyway, the original authors moved on to pastures new and eventually, after a happy time creating a new text-based UI, I was asked to take a look at the run-time interpreter and make an adjustment to it. This bit of code did all you would expect an XPS language to do, bar the actual parsing of the (simple) text form into an internal binary format: lots of lovely linked lists to represent all the clauses, probability weightings, variables and their associated text prompts. The run-time walked this structure, determining the most useful datum to ask for at each stage, prompting the user for their input and recalculating all the probabilities based upon their answers, backtracking as required and building up another linked list as a trace of progress, so the user can see why he is being asked this question and so on and so forth.

You know exactly where this going.

The interpreter turned out to be one single function. Oh, it would call into some subroutines to do car()/cdr() on the lists, print out text and read the user's reply, but all the meaty stuff was done inside one HUGE 'while' loop, with nested loops of all kinds, breaks in interesting places and switch statements as required.

I honestly have no idea how many lines it was, but in order to figure it out, I took a printout on fanfold, spread it across all the desks I could (working late to grab a fourth desk, IIRC, when that chap sensibly went home), yard long ruler, a pencil and a packet of multicoloured pens. After drawing boxes around the various loops, to highlight how they nested, went back over it to colour the boxes based upon what that code was doing (e.g. binding arguments into parameters when a clause was triggered, unbinding same when that was backtracked over, cascading updates to outcome probabilities, all the usual!).

The modifications were made (I have no recollection now of *what* they were, although I must have understood it at the time) and that printout was covered in many, many scribbles and glorious crossings out as similarly coloured blocks were gathered into their own modules and that function shrank and shrank into something manageable. Thankfully, without breaking anything - well, not *too* badly. Although I never chucked that printout, until I left that job, *just* in case.

[1] wonder if this is now unique enough to identify me and if anyone recalls working with the chap who had a superb head of hair and gorgeously coloured beard! Ah, memories.

Re: A quick question

If we are counting library routines then there is some code from the early 1990s that is still part of "the random collection of stuff that gets used everywhere" and is in at least a couple of programs that were contracted to still be running for a few more years (I've left that job, so they *could* have ripped it out of all the client installs the moment I vanished... but that would be so costly I'm sure someone would have let me know, just to spread the blame!).

Re: More personal.

How broken the expectations of modern software users are.

I get fed up with coming across libraries where people are calling it "abandonware" and warning people not to use it, because it must be broken and a security risk - solely on the grounds that it has not been changed in a while. But there are no outstanding bug reports in the repo, it is written in plain and simple C of the style that every extant (compliant) compiler can eat and it Just Works!

One that sticks in my mind was for the Expat XML parser, which was in just that state at the time. And it is not as if Expat is without any tests and is only used by half a dozen people who are no good at reporting bugs!

Somewhat related, the bandwagon jump to IJG JPEG library, version 7 "because it must be better than v6.1b". No. No, it really wasn't, ditto for v8 (Tom Lane's code was solid, then the project was effectively hijacked by another person, who ran JpegClub and had some weird ideas about what should go into IJG - a story for another comment, if you don't know it).

Re: Makes you proud

> The one that gets me is when you find and fix a long-standing bug in some code and wonder how in hell it managed to keep going in its original state for so many years!

You have to tread carefully around those sorts of bugs, just in case it turns out to be a Schroedinbug - and you have just observed that, unfixed, it can't possibly work. Which collapses its wave function and, through spooky action at a distance, every running copy of that program will suddenly stop working!

It was reading the water level in an octopus tank, measuring how excited the beastie was.

If an octopus can pick football teams it can manage shares easily[1].

[1] I'm pretty sure there were experiments done with using a monkey and, separately, an octopus to pick shares, which demonstrated that they were actually better than the average human trader, but trying to search on "octopus share picking" gets nowhere useful these days! Can we make it a rule that, when picking a stupid name for your company, you can't use names of real things?

(Icon - sort of looks like an octopus, hiding two of its arms so you can't see which stock names it is typing in)

Re: I'm curious...

When I saw GPIB (aka IEEE 488[1]) mentioned, I was sad that it they hadn't found a PET sitting there - or even a C64 with the plug-in adapter!

Maybe another On Call will turn up such a delight.

[1] also aka some European standard, an IEC something? Could Google, but that is cheating when it is old farts remembering stuff!

Atlassian buys 'asynchronous video' outfit Loom for almost $1 billion

Re: TikTok email edition...

> I can see it being useful for bug reporting

ONLY, and I stress, *ONLY*, in the second or later comment, to prove that, yes, it really *is* reproducible on the client's system and/or "this is what we mean by 'the screen goes wobbly all over".

Not, by the Mercy of all the Gods of Egypt[1], used instead of a written description in the initial report!

[1] especially that crocodile-headed one, although being chewed by him would be more merciful than getting video-only bug reports.

We are insanely hyped

"Hyped"? Well, that is an unusual word for it.

Getting a video, instead of the User being forced to type in a description of what they did, the commands and all the options. This is going to make bug triage so much more - interesting.

"Yes, I can see your screen shot[1], but you need to take it *before* pressing Return - I need to see the exact command you used, not just the last twenty rows of the 'bad output'."

"Can you *please* go through that process again, but please, please, don't type ahead of the dialogue boxes, you have to let them appear on screen so I can read the *exact* message and follow what your inputting. Yes, I know that is how you always do it and it is so much faster that way. Yes, I *know* this is the sixth time you've made a video of this[2]"

"Yes, that is a 'fun' font to use in the console, but, once more, is that an el or a one or a pipe character? Pipe, you know, shift-backslash; no, I don't know which key it is on your borrowed Norwegian keyboard."

Then That Important Person realises they can now just copy the hour long video meeting into the ticket "you can see the bug somewhere just after Fred points at Bert's bit of the presentation" - and who the bleep is Fred? Or Bert? You were the only one from our company at that meeting!

[1] tucked away in one corner, as clearly seeing your face is so much more important

[2] trust me, I *know*; and you snarling out your narration louder each time is making it such a joy

Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors 'unappointable'

On a lighter note

Anyone else getting whiplash as we are flung across the Atlantic and back again almost every sentence?

For example:

> The NHS suffers from a chronic shortage of anesthetists. Last year, the Association of Anaesthetists

Why must the noble diphthong be so cruelly treated?

Re: Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors 'unappointable'

> traditional 4GL package

Much as "4GL" makes me grind my teeth in lieu of screaming rants about that name, have an upvote for an otherwise very sensible comment.

Hmm, Sculptor are very cagey (as in, no mention I can see) about pricing, which usually means it is way out of range for, say, just doing a scoring system for Free Flight model championships or anything similar.

Would be nice to have suggestions if anyone knows of a viable (i.e. affordable, even cheap, even Open Source!), non-cloud, program for that sort of small job (the sort of thing that assorted clubs may want to do). NOT Excel! Or anything else that presents itself as a spreadsheet "for familiarity and ease of use"!

Re: Excel for dodgy databases

> I'm sure it's a pipe dream, but just once, I'd like to work at a place where they actually did the SAP setup correctly.

It is Friday now; in a just a few more hours you can sit down with one (or two) of these. Sounds like you'll need it.

A $353M question: Did Meta muzzle a VR venture?

It's got a nice beat and you can dance to it

Altogether now:

"Conspired, colluded,"

"Aided (and) abetted"

I can see why they acted in a concert with a hit like that on their hands! Is it going on tour?

PS can we haz formatting for songs and poems that doesn't force one line per paragraph? I know that will only open the floodgates for extra verses of "Hallelujah" but that is a risk I'm willing to take.

DARPA worried battlefield mixed reality vulnerable to 'cognitive attacks'

What will they call *real* attacks on cognitive processes?

This whole article is about attacks against Mixed Reality systems and has bugger all to do with anything you could sanely call "cognitive attacks"!

> Cognitive attacks go beyond just disrupting MR headsets and can also include actions like planting real-world objects to overwhelm displays, using physical objects to cause false alarms

No, that is not "going beyond" disrupting the MR system: like any other system, if you can feed it inputs that make it glitchy, it is being disrupted. Are we supposed to read "disrupt" as simply meaning cutting the wires, and everything else is "beyond" that?

> The core technical hypothesis of the program is that formal methods can be extended with cognitive guarantees and models to protect mixed reality users from cognitive attacks

You mean they are deploying software that HASN'T been subjected to formal methods? They have so long ago already given up on the idea of having robust avionics and fire control systems that they have to (re)introduce the concepts of formal methods just to get them applied to MR systems? Although, come to think of it, the current pushers of MR, AR and VR do strike one as never having heard of formal methods - barely heard of QA, some of them.

> In other words, DARPA wants to mathematically represent cognitive models of "human perception, action, memory and reasoning" and figure out how to build some form of universal protection against cognitive attacks

Ah, now that does sound like they are looking at something that deserves to be called "cognitive attacks"; maybe it will get juicy:

> "The ICS program ... as part of MR system development

Oh, nope, they are just talking about MR still. I was just getting excited at the prospect of dealing with some of the weirder ideas about using techniques from optical illusion and similar fields to befuddle the unaugmented human (think something between "dazzle ships" and trying to defictionalise the "fractal parrot"[1]).

So the "model of human cognition etc" can just be "keep to this framerate, don't rely on humans to remember anything ("whilst under stress?" "No, I mean - ok, let's go with that") and don't make the screen flash dark/bright at, ooh, 4Hz even if that *does* reflect the rate you are detecting bangs - and definitely not red!

> Given it is still early days for DARPA's ICS program, soldiers testing IVAS and other mixed reality devices won't be able to rely on cognitive security features anytime soon.

Given they have yet to solve the problem of lag and nausea in the first place, this is not a surprising result.

But, honestly, what is it they are actually asking for, under all the management speak? To start with, the use of formal methods to - guarantee that the frame rate is maintained to prevent lag? In other words, basic requirements of a Real Time system - "you have 10 milli seconds per frame: if you can't draw all the details in that time, skip them and update the display" instead of just doing *all* the work *every* time and just hope the nasty enemy hadn't put so many little walls onto the ground that you drop to 5 fps update[2]. BTW remember this is Mixed Reality, so you still get a view of the real world, which hopefully still manages a decent lag-free update.

> "Methods for developing protected MR systems will be developed by the ICS program before MR systems lacking protections are pervasive and essential,"

They are going to get some actual computer scientists, Old Geezers and others who actually *trained* in the Dork Arts to work on the MR headsets, not just gung-ho "visionaries" and tech-bros?

Well, if they *really* have to fling around such over the top language in order to get the grant money and the ability to hire the people they need, not just the ones they get, then, sigh, go with it. I guess at bottom it is no worse than any other grant proposal ("if you can just say the Rust compiler will investigate the effectiveness of Neural Nets, we can apply to this body as well - just keep Sheldon away from them, or he'll say we already know what the result of that investigation will be").

[1] David Langford, "BLIT" and "Different kinds of darkness" in particular.

[2] I am probably *very* out of date on game programming - which seems to be where the current crop of headset people are coming from (again) - but it seems that this "just do it all and fingers crossed" approach is what actually happens nowadays - which is why you get all these weird reviews about frame rates and "we got 182 fps from this GPU, but 184 from this one, so buy the latter". When the talk used[3] to be about games as Real Time and they either apologised and never ran or ran at 30fps, rock solid, didn't matter what extra cycles you threw at it, you got 30fps; the excess may be used to improve some shading or whatever.

[3] many moons ago and in discussions (we didn't have lectures about game writing back then) whilst marvelling at the latest hand-soldered MPU boards)

Europe mulls open sourcing TETRA emergency services' encryption algorithms

Re: Problem?

As others have said, it made it too easy for the boys in striped vests and domino masks.

There are numerous period pieces being shown on, eg, Talking Pictures TV (Freeview) where the getaway driver is shown listening to the police on a portable trannie, two flashes means tools down, keep quiet until the patrol goes past...

EU threatens X with DSA penalties over spread of Israel-Hamas disinformation

Re: Free Speech

> It is ironical that non-elected EU apparatchiks were given the power to determine what people are allowed to see.

Presumably also ironical that non-elected Customs officers were given the power to determine what to charge on imports? That non-elected Constables were given the power to stop you going where you are not wanted? That non-elected DHS staff were given the power to determine how much benefits you can get?

In case you hadn't noticed, the elected people set the laws and the lots and lots of non-elected people then put those into practice. And all of their non-elected decisions can be challenged.

Or do you seriously find it "ironical" that the elected members of a parliament don't actually go out and check every xit, examine every parcel, patrol every street in person?

(Feeling a bit - well, triggered - by this, as I made the mistake of following the link to the Commision's posting of their letter and every single one of the replies to it, that were shown to me that time, were of morons basically making the same idiotic claim. Yes, I know, always try to keep oneself clear of xits but I wanted to check just how much of the letter was actually visible to those referring to it)

Xitted - 'x' pronounced 'z' for preference[1]

[1] or 'ch', as in TeX: "the screen should be slightly moist" after you've said the 'ch'.

Intel offers $179 Arc A580 GPU to gamers on a budget

Re: AMD Still on Top in the Budget to Mid range, with Intel in a firm 2nd

> . if you don't care about value for money, and only care about perceived crowns and the shiny badge affixed to a product... then you'll still buy nvidia anyway.

Or want to run some Cuda number-crunching during the daylight hours.

You don't have to stick with just one use for your computer.

AI safety guardrails easily thwarted, security study finds

LLM - neither 'L' stands for 'logic'

You have shovelled and stirred absolutely everything into a humongous homogeneous pile of nadans, into which you dropped a soggy spongeful of prompt, then waited for it to seep through the layers, causing who knows how many buckets of weightings to overfill and join the flow, until finally the pathways at the edge are overcome and slough into the output trough.

Trying to add "guardrails" is just dropping sandbags onto places you have "the wrong stuff" seen unexpectedly oozing out of a crack - purely reactive and without any reason to believe, other than crossing your fingers and making a press release, that you've caught all the leaks by now.

An LLM has no logic built into it, no comprehensible control paths; it can not be bargained with, it can not be reasoned with, it doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear, and it absolutely will not stop until you are sick to death of it.

Twitter further restricts free tier with option to limit replies to verified accounts

> because?

Some of the automated[1] services can be useful - changes[2] to scheduled services and programme items.

[1] Automated? Aren't they those evil bots we keep hearing about?

[2] or, in some cases, fewer messages when the services are working to schedule, but that is another topic

IDC: AI is a solution for a PC industry with a sales problem

Whoops.

(cough) That should, of course, have been:

[1] Although that is NOT setting bar high.

(crawls off into the undergrowth)

> Other than "no-one knows what to do with it", I see no meaning of theses words.

Spot on.

Congratulations, your English is better than that of IDC.[1]

[1] Although that is setting bar high. Great, now it sounds like I'm damning tatatata with faint praise.

What a shame the machines are better at learning than IDC et al

> While uses cases have yet to be fully articulated

If only people like IDC (and the bosses at HP, Lenovo Intel at al) could see beyond the Big Brand hype machines, like ChatGPT (which are all very much based on offering cloudy "solutions") to actually look at how smaller (much, much smaller) models are already being used. Anything TinyML can do, we can do bigger! And even if the actual models are cheap to run (won't need a new PC) then training can always eat up the cycles.

It is surely a lot easier for them to take ideas for use-cases from already working small-scale systems[1] and pump them up into something that won't *quite* run on your existing dreary old PC but will go like the wind on their "next gen", just a bit bigger, PC. After all, software bloat is already an industry standard!

Guess the real problem is that it would mean all these CEOs having to train themselves on published descriptions about people's projects and then have some ability to mix it all up and generate some answers to match the template "needs a bigger PC, but not so stupidly large the market will just laugh at us".

Hmm, training, public data, generating text, fitting a template - that just sounds so familiar, it is on the tip of my tongue...

[1] ok, this one isn't business-oriented[2], but there is still the whole home PC market to re-invigorate! We just set up a Pi Zero 2 to run the BirdNet model for our back garden - now I'd quite like something a bit bigger, not to run 24 hours a day, but which can pick the individuals out of recordings made on trips away from home - what was that bird we saw iat the local water park?

[2] nor is it guaranteed to have wide appeal at home; but it is just *our* latest use-case. The point is, there are lots of projects, so scatter the promotions[3] and something will resonate with each person.

[3] look, do you want a big, fancy, easy to do, hype marketing campaign around one thing or do you want to sell lots of "different" PCs at all sorts of price points?

Scripted shortcut caused double-click disaster of sysadmin's own making

Re: Is there anyone

BBC micro: menu shell to load a selected program from floppy (floppy! We were so happy!), with categories (games, games, or, um, card games!).

Make an edit or forty, run it, press key - game loads, menu program vanishes (me, no longer happy, bystanders ecstatic).