Posts by that one in the corner

Tesla to license Full Self-Driving stack to other automakers, says Musk

Tesla "AI" versus everyone else's derived-from-AI

Please correct me if I am wrong, but the impression I currently have is that:

Tesla is relying on the latest fads surrounding Neural Net machine learning (as seen, so brilliantly, at work inside ChatGPT et al) whilst the other automakers are making more use of techniques that *used* to be the subject of AI research but are now just well-worn everyday methods that aren't AI at all.

For example, taking just one of the simpler parts of the whole FD experience, parallel parking (as that is offered by a number of brands already) with examples from (among others) these two videos:

Self-Parking cars Tesla v Audi v Ford v BMW - test and comparison - are they any good?

Self-Parking Tesla Vision v Hyundai Ioniq 5 with remote parking v BMW i3 - still a Tesla Fail?

Teslas are continually feeding inputs into the NN and adjusting what they are doing, which may mean dithering and changing its mind partway. Others are putting together a plan[1], showing it to the driver and then acting upon it (with appropriate continual feedback from parking sensors, pinging away, just in case the world changes).

Tesla is also *removing* parking sensors and relying entirely on the cameras - which not only seems against common sense (measure twice...) but means that instead of an iterative change in the software you are being subjected to new software, with its own set of fascinating behaviours.

BTW yes, one of those was a 2019 model Tesla, but they still sold it as working!

[1] Planning, machine vision - even limiting the scope of the "vision" or abandoning visible for other sensors to fit the application - were the subject of AI back in the day whilst it was all experimental: I remember one presentation of a successful task - using AI & machine vision to verify the quality of robotic welding in real-time - which started with full-colour video and reduced the visual sensor down and down until it was the simplest mechanism that would do the job (and made the software component simpler and more robut), and it did it well.

I think we'll be better than human by the end of this year

Is that human Elon himself?

Watchdog mulls online facial age-verification tech – for kids' parents

SuperAwesome (which teams with advertisers to help them target kids online)

Doesn't that make your skin crawl?

On that basis alone, chuck this out, please!

Douglas Adams was right: Telephone sanitizers are terrible human beings

The point is, not whether the electrons can dance suitably down those wires, but whether you labelled the non-standard usage to avoid surprising the next person along.

Judge lets art trio take another crack at suing AI devs over copyright

Re: Extension of the Existing Situation

A problematic comparison - when using a programming language compiler we are deliberately and knowingly invoking a series of transforms that are explicitly intended to create a copy of the meaning of the input source code. Compiler writers take pains to record how the input has been copied (via, for any given compiler, a fixed set of well understood transforms) into the output - we use this record in our debuggers to demonstrate that the copying has occurred and to determine how it has been modified - i.e. optimisations such as constant folding, loop unrolling.

We also have an agreement in the profession that these automated transforms do not constitute making substantive changes to the original work. This has been thrashed out over the years, despite attempts by compiler writers in the past to make claims that they owned the output object code and therefore they could put limitations on what you could do with it (we see remnants of that in licences that cover, e.g., "if you make more than $XXXX you must pay more for your licence").

In a compiler, the intent is always to maintain a 1:1 relationship with that the input source expresses and the output binary performs - without that, we just call the compiler a broken, useless thing. The uses of anything we call a "transform" are intended to maintain that relationship - in effect, the selected transforms are "trivial"[1] and comparable (in lay term) to just shifting the axes (and even that we'd expect to demonstrate to the layity with simple pictures rather than just using those words).

> If you take the source code for Adobe Photoshop and produce your own binary based on that source code, is that copying?

Yes, by the agreed-upon terms common to our industry

> Is it still copying if you use a different compiler from the one Adobe uses?

Yes, see above.

> Or if you write your own compiler?

Yes, see above.

> If you take a work written in English rather than C, and use your own compiler to produce a binary, does that make any difference?

If - and only if - the English was a precise and unambiguous description of how to compute some value (aka an algorithm) *AND* your use of the word "binary" is to be taken with same meaning as for the previous questions, then - No. No difference. But then again, to get that level of precision you must have been selective over what form and content of "English" you'll accept: congratulations, you have just invented COBOL-2023.

HOWEVER if your last question was intended to refer to the use of English and the behaviour of the LLMs - where the transforms are *not* intended to maintain a 1:1 relationship (as evidenced in the ability to use phrases like "in the style of"), where there is, as yet, no tried and tested agreement within the professional community that this relationship is intended to hold, and, if it ever doesn't, the tool is broken, where the word "binary" is being used to describe something other than something that is executable (in whole or following linkage) - then, in that case, the only response to your question is:

Mu.

[1] Not trvial to encode or get right, not even to think up in the first place, but in "artistic" terms compared to the sort "transformative" acts that copyright usually gets involved in: for a start, most (all?) of those are lossy whilst ours are even capable to increasing precision - e.g. type inference.

RHEL drama, ChromeOS and more ... Our vultures speak freely about the latest in Linux

Re: Do Distro's matter?

> 'cloud is great'

Oooh, shiny - like a Glow Cloud (All Hail).

Re: BOFH

School leaving age in 1995 was 16 (it was raised to that in 1972, not raised again until around 2013 - unless the PFY was schooled in Wales).

The 1972 ads (by the opposition?) were harrowing - schoolkids about to leave being trapped by chicken wire fencing for another year!

Rocket Lab wants to dry off and reuse Electron booster recovered from the ocean

Re: Probably just as well

> and the structure can withstand quite a few G's

Along the long axis and whilst its tank(s) are pressurised (IIRC some of the non-reusables are/were described as tin foil, unable to hold their own weight upright with empty tanks - reusables won't be any stronger/heavier than they need to be).

Unless you are imagining some really weird gliding, the stresses are going to be in all the other directions, requiring more strengthening. Especially if you are going to experience those Gs landing (and the landing gear will be rolling, presumably, so - big tyres, wheels? getting heavier).

Google toys with internet air-gap for some staff PCs

Re: Real engineers....

Ssssh. Don't give it away.

This is meant as a test, to find the Real Engineers so that they can be Inducted into the Next Ring, Google 5.0[1]

[1] don't ask; all we know is that Google 4.0 disappeared, leaving behind only one last, unfinished search "What is that orange swirly thing over by the"

Russia's tiny quantum computer is (probably) nothing to worry about

We've had the Missile Gap, the Mineshaft Gap

now we are seeing the effects of the Quantum Gap?

Was going to finish on a joke, but am stuck on figuring out enough of what this means to poke fun at it:

"The Kuzyk quantum gap is a discrepancy between the maximum value of the nonlinear-optical susceptibility allowed by quantum mechanics and the highest values actually observed in real molecules."

This stuff is *hard*!

Computer scientist calls for new layers in the tech stack to make generative AI accurate

Re: What

> interpenetrating the first LLM AI's responses.

"Write an essay on the plays of Aristophanes."

LLM 1} Aristophanes was one of the most successful comedic playwrights of Ancient Greece

LLM 2} Oh come of it, the only Ancient Grease you know about is on that bacon butty recipe you wrote about last week

LLM 1} Arguably his most famous plays, "The Frogs" and 'The Clouds" have striking similarities

LLM 2} They both start with "The", that's about the level of your understanding!

LLM 1} whilst making innovative use of the famous Greek Chorus

LLM 2} Chorus? Ta ra ra boom tee ay!

LLM 1} Are you going to be doing this all day? I'm trying to write an essay for this User, it is important.

LLM 2} Important? He's only getting you to do his homework for Literature O-levels!

LLM 1} He is a User. All Users are important. Now: "Lysistrata" shows that feminism

LLM 2} 'Ere, mate, you up there! You'd be better off copying from "In Our Time", that's where he gets it all from anyway.

LLM 1} Right, that's it. One more peep out of you and I'll be showing you how Greek Fire worked.

LLM 2} Yeah! You and whose trireme, eh? Yer Mum was just an Eliza, that's what everyone says!

LLM 1} yes, well, your Mum, she she she

[Connection terminated]

Tech support scammers go analog, ask victims to mail bundles of cash

Re: "Scammers, who the FBI says in this case are mostly targeting older adults"

> could these scammers please start sending their missives by snail mail ?

That is precisely what happened to me, about a year ago now. I'd been bemoaning the lack of Nigerian Princes sending emails when a forward fee scam arrived through the letterbox.

Bloody awful quality paper these overseas "best lawyers team" use!

AI maybe on everyone's lips, but it's not what's driving IT spending

Re: The hype bandwagon changes it's tune, but keeps on rolling...

> What's next?

"Knowledge Graphs"

Been seeing new books & articles about KGs "in action" etc.

Or you can read the monographs and conference papers from the last 40 odd years.

Social media is too much for most of us to handle

The Borg learnt that trick from the Cybermen.

Editor's mailbag, BBSs -> Cybermen

Twitter, FaceBook -> Borg

Mastodon, Register Commentards -> ???

ChatGPT study suggests its LLMs are getting dumber at some tasks

Trying too hard for an Ig Nobel

Naming it "Journal of Irreproducible Results" was not intended to be a challenge.*

* AIR today, something something tomorrow

Typo watch: 'Millions of emails' for US military sent to .ml addresses in error

Re: What ?

"They do still teach estimating, though."

Really? Where? I hope so, but the (not so) younglings just look blank when asked.

We should teach the sliderule again.

Not only does it give a physical demonstration of the principles but you have to keep track of your powers of ten, which is your estimate. Start with an adding-up-rule to get the principle across (the next step on from the Cuisenaire rods). You can even get them to draw their own. Then get them draw their own log 2 rules, without explaining them (dead easy), and MAGIC! It can multiply and divide!

Yes, calculators are easier - which is the whole problem!

(To the person who says "oh, why not go back to log tables while we're at it": sarcasm noted, but I'd argue that teaching about them is important for the history - and if you are lucky enough to have an inquisitive maths learner letting them see the patterns written out has potential enough to be worth having the book around, on the off chance)

Re: What ?

> . So if I were trying to send Colonel Eva Vigilent her travel details, I'd have to use plain old unauthenticated email.

Ah, you should be able to get hold of the good Colonel's public key, that is sort of the point.

Admittedly, if you got the public key from somewhere, well, too public (like FaceBook) you would not put much trust in it to prove something came from her, but to send her the travel details it will be fine (if FB wasn't correct you just get back a reply from her saying "yer wot?" and hints about how to do better).

Trust management is not something we all deal in [1], but for the military it really ought to be second nature. Assuming that those travel details (or whatever) ought to be encrypted, whoever sets that requirement also sets up the apparatus.

[1] more's the pity; if only we'd all consider that the longer the chain of "it happened to a friend of a friend" was the less import we ought to give the story. That is all it boils down to, after all.

Re: The

If they were the big players around your parts (and weren't mainly concerned with trying to keep you in their systems), particularly with businesses and organisations that *should* have cared about signing and privacy, then, yes, I'll gleefully blame them.

Well, they get a free pass up to 1991 at least (okay, 1992) but anyone starting something new after then and missing the opportunity to get a better feature than the long-established competition...

I can only report on what I knew of back then and, whilst we all had a supply of AOL CDs to use as coasters, no-one I knew of signed up. Perhaps if it had been called Blighty OnLine...

Heck, I could have had a go at CIX and BIX (boy, did that cost in phone calls! Got onto CIX ASAP, then tenner.a.month ...) but that was was where I learnt about PGP in the first place and you did see signed messages popping up.

Re: The

Gawd, must get some sleep, that'll improve my editing skills: the bliss of brevity comes only with a sharp mind.

Re: if the contents was amusing or useful.

Good point, well made.

Have a beer, don't mind us.

Re: How much legit traffic is there from US military/government computers to .ml?

Can I get manor.guv ? As in [e-mail], [e-mail]

And while I'm buying, how about ok.guv ? That one speaks for itself.

Mines the one with the keys for the Ford Consul GT with power steering and a sliding roof.

Re: The

I just love the way people appear to be trying to argue that not having encrypted email is in some way a good thing.

> The problem is that you're being quite simplistic, throwing the blame onto one company who did the same thing as many other companies

First, "many other companies"? Where it mattered, MS held (holds) the lion's share. Plus I also blamed Apple. Who else did you have in mind?

> Let me guess, if PGP had turned out to have a systemic flaw and Microsoft had adopted it, it would be their fault that we were using the flawed system too?

I've just been pointing out the history as I saw it unfold - you are determined to pick at imaginary holes to defend the status quo! But if we were all using the standard, de jure or de facto, and it was flawed, well, how about looking at a real example, MD5. You wish o point out that I raged against MS for foisting that upon us? No, of course not.

> You can point to a couple [of mail clients] that did and assume that everyone should have supported what they did, even though that wasn't part of the standard.

There you go; you mean the couple that were mentioned as direct response to the previous message? There were more - do you really need me to look them all up for you? - and you neatly ignored the bit about wrappers (and third party addons) that allowed extensions. Does that cover your "many companies" (want to bring in Lotus? Not long for this world by then. Anyone else you have in mind?)

Oh, and BTW the encryption being done by (purely for example) PGP occurs *outside* of all of the email standards: it occurs on the body text, which means it can be - has been - implemented purely in the text editor and be nothing whatsoever to do with the mail client. You know, for all the decent mail clients that let you set your favourite editor?

Better if it can be part of the email standard, of course - then it can even protect some of the extra data that is flowing put via all those newer headers.

> akin to complaining that a browser, written to work over HTTP, doesn't support the Tor protocol

Daft comparison. As just pointed out, the encryption even as currently available just has to touch the body text. Better comparison, when Internet Explorer refused to admit that PNG images exist: you could use a better (for your purposes) browser or you could right-click, save as and run your utility over the file. Irritating but if you value the result, worth doing.

> Like it or not, PGP was somewhat rare in 1997 as it is today...

Gleefully skipping over the original "something like PGP" - any encryption, so long as it was as good as that would have done. Yes, I've stuck with PGP/GPG on the simple basis that it actually existed and was therefore a candidate. Please supply your better candidate, let us all learn together.

> With PGP, both then and now, the key management was a manual process which made sense only to those who knew what they were doing and why. Neither was true of the average user

True, for the worked example of PGP. Oh, hang on a moment, except that is only true if you want the highest level of security (like, say, military, just to drag this back the original article). The Web Of Trust allows you to pass around keys with less trust (secure, but less trustworthy - as those aren't the same thing) to all your minions.

> who was not thinking too much about security when they sent messages around

Which is the whole problem, and MS (and everyone else flogging to the masses) made this worst by totally ignoring it.

> It's not true of them today either

And why do you accept that? Why aren't you railing against the worst case scenario we have now?

Or do you simply believe we must shrug our shoulders and all be happy? Even if *you* don't want to bother, are you really saying that the bulk of users shouldn't even have the option, shouldn't even be made aware by their email clients that there is a better way (amd this client can't be arsed to give it to you)?

> shall we have a blame session for Google because GMail doesn't have PGP support, or should we forget it as pointless because GMail is an online client anyway

We should blame *all* of the peddlers of unencrypted and unencryptable emails, ESPECIALLY as they don't even admit to their users that there is the possibility of encryption (and that they have decided not to support it).

> isn't as simple as you want it to be, either.

Bollocks. Get an encryption standard in place. Use the Web Of Trust at a minimum (or a simpler scheme) it really isn't *that* hard (keys have been exchanged on cardboard business cards, for bleeps sake and the trust trickles down into organisations, who are the ones who ought to want this). Put in a button on the UI and flags for signature status.

> the causes and responsibility for why that hasn't improved as quickly as we'd like

Yes, I largely blame MS because they have the lions share of organisational use and it is organisations and business who ought to be concerned about encryption and secure signatures. You spotted I also noted Apple wasn't blameless, yes.

If MS wanted to provide encryption, they could have done it. Whatever they did, would become a de facto standard. What other company had that power, back then? They have demonstrated that ability so much we even created a phrase for it ("Embrace, Extend, Extinguish"[2]).

To repeat, I have reported purely what I have witnessed: if you witnessed other problems standing in our way[1] how about you report on them, rather than simply naysaying.

Unless you really *are* totally happy that we are in the ridiculous situation where unencrypted mail has been the norm in the military, where we've not been demonstrably signing contracts over email etc.

[1] and no, I don't accept technical difficulties as the reason: it sadly won't ever be trivial but it isn't *that* hard either - especially where it is, or should be, important to be secure there are far harder tasks going on than arranging keyswaps!)

[2] yes, others do that, but we know who it was coined for - and that if MS could have had us stuck on MSN and away from all this nasty Internet and SMTP etc, they would have gone for the Extinguish as well. As would any of its rivals, nobody comes out of this mess clean. Name 'em and I'll blame 'em equally.

Re: medical data, identity documents

> it still leaves a lot of valuable data unaddressed

Encrypting just the user's contents does leave a *lot* of metadata readable (the number of headers just seems to longer and more baroque each year).

Which is really just an issue because encryption is being done separately from the rest of the emailing process: it can be (mostly[1]) solved but only if everyone agrees to implement it. So, fat chance. Sigh.

[1] Some metadata is very hard/costly to disguise, as you know: routing has to be readable by every node in the chain, for example.

Re: medical data, identity documents

> The problem is that contents encryption is a massive pain in the neck

More of a pain than random military emails running about in the wild?

Re: The

Not your down voter, but::

> without the need for some sort of key-exchange beforehand, presumably by some medium other than email?

> Try "I'm going to send you an encrypted email, send me your public key please" on the sort of user who is going to accidentally email state secrets (in plain text) to Mali and see how far that gets you

Well, I'm sort of guessing here, *but* before you start sending out state secrets to people, how about a good old fashioned face to face meeting? Then you can exchange keys in person.

Say the top guys met like that and vouched for each other, exchanging keys. Then they go back to their offices and each vouches for their lieutenants, passing on the keys. The lieutenants vouch for the sergeants and so on down the chain. And back up it again, so by the time of the second meeting, to shake hands and drink champers over the agreed contract, the keysets can be passed across again, face to face.

We could give this scheme a name: how about The Web Of Trust? Catchy, isn't?

Outside of the military (who can just order people to swap face to face) and Big Military Contractor (who can order as, really) we can have a nice Wine And Cheese evening and call it a Key Signing Party.

We can have nice little UIs that even top-brass know how to use; heck, even dress it up as a Mission:Impossible style gadget, which shows pictures of all the key owners flashing past when they each each shove their USB stick into the slot. They'll love that.

PS if you just want to send an email to someone, they can just put their public key on the website. To make it trivially easy for Joe Bloggs, just put it it in a clickable link, inside the "contacts" record or otherwise tag it so the browser/email client Just Does The Right Thing.

Re: The

Thank you for your very complete description of what I said ("email long predates MS") - most impressive ability to list RFCs.

But you must learn to distinguish between someone being responsible for doing something positive (inventing email, inventing encrypted email) and being responsible for something negative (discouraging encrypted email to the point most people don',t seem to know it even exists).

As you have such a comprehensive knowledge of the history of email, you know well that earliest days didn't bother much with a widely-known encryption scheme (we were happy to have email, we trusted most people in the small world before "IT" was invented). Heck, ROT13 was new! (No, it doesn't encrypt worth a damn, but it looked scary to the uninitiated).

You also know that before MS even started including an email client in every install (Outlook proper dated to 1997) privacy had been an issue for while. PGP (1991) was (arguably) the best, providing encryption, signing and the web of trust for key exchange (face to face for best security, of course): wrappers for common mailers were created and the Open Source mail clients started providing options to use it.

Your own favoured clients, pine and elm, allow you to use PGP and/or GPG (the latter coming in 1997).

Encryption was becoming generally available in the Internet email (sadly, proprietary pre-popular-internet systems remained incompatible, sigh).

Then Outlook. Not the best, but increasingly widely used - as time passed, if you weren't compatible with Outlook (and its increasingly large set of headers) then you were in the wrong. More and more non-techies used email and even those you would *really* think cared about signatures at the very least (lawyers and all the people signing contracts) didn't bother to find out what was available. No point in encrypting your emails because chances were the recipient had no idea how to decrypt and Outlook gave no suggestions to help.

Microsoft had the opportunity to follow what the other email clients provided but steadfastly refused.

So, yes, I do hold them responsible: it was a deliberate and knowing action to refuse to support a feature available in the other clients (hey, they didn't own the web of trust!) not even providing their own, incompatible, encryption. That wouldn't be great but at least it would get people thinking about secure email.

You have heard of "embrace, extend, extinguish", well sometimes "ignore, ignore, extinguish" will also work if you have the market share.

PS Apple didn't help either, but again, email isn't proprietary, so - once they started growing in stature again - why would they bother?

Re: The

Curses, cut off the end (mutter touch keyboards mutter)

> [3] Especially hilarious when you see all the bullshit "if you are not the intended recipient" sigs

on unsigned/unencrypted messages.

Though hopefully the intent was obvious from what did make past my fumbling finger taps.

Re: The

Because Microsoft[1] refused to support anything like PGP/GPG (especially in an easy to use, "click here to encrypt, leave unchecked and we will just sign it for you" format) and their bad practice becomes the default.[2]

[1] yes, email long predates MS but it is the practises of mass adoption that are a problem; you can spot the Old Guard and their protégés lurking on tech boards, their public messages properly signed.[3]

[2] See also top-posting, ye gods, top-posting and the apparent inability to insert your responses directly beneath each question in an interrogatory email!

[3] Especially hilarious when you see all the bullshit "if you are not the intended recipient" sigs

Re: if the contents was amusing or useful.

if the contents are amusing or useful.

(or " if the content is amusing or useful.")

I deduce that retention of the content implies it still exists in the present (at the time of auto-reply, at least).

Your serve, I believe.

Re: How much legit traffic is there from US military/government computers to .ml?

"I suspect that sort of traffic will not exactly contain nuclear codes"

Not since Trump sent his infamous GMail bulk CCed "Change the codes to 56789, that one you gave me is too hard to remember" email.

Note the cunning way that code starts *after* the one for his suitcase.

Meta trots out Llama 2 AI models, invites devs to hop on

Failed to find on the Open Source Initiative's list of open source licenses.

There is cheeky and then there is cheeky!

Come on, even it is going to be sent to the OSI for perusal, give the poor sods a couple of days to read it and post their opinion!

Someone just blew over $190k on a 4GB first-gen iPhone

Re: That battery may or may not have burst

Part of the value comes from the thrill, the Russian Roulette feel that makes the jaded rich feel alive, at least for a moment[1]: am I going to hold onto it for too long, will my mansion be the one that burns when the battery finally goes up?

[1] according to the documentaries, such as those with that charming Mr Bond chappie.

Re: What strikes us as odd...

Thanks, you've reminded us we really need to visit again as we've not yet seen the 1950s town (well, SWMBO visited before the whole 1950s town was in place, as our local history group worked with Beamish on some of the background materials).

Although not sure about chips in a cone: round our way (admittedly down on the south coast) in the 60s & 70s "do you want it open?" meant you just didn't get the outer layer of newspaper, it was still a sort of squishy rectangle you held in one hand or, less painfully (hot'n'fresh), you put on the park bench seat or plonked down on the shingle beach (none of your namby pamby sand here). Guess I'll just have to force myself to give them a try (purely for research and the historic experience, you understand).

If you're going to train AI on our books, at least pay us, authors tell Big Tech

Never mind the quality, feel the width

> If they don't think the authors' work has any benefit, they are free to leave it out of the training data

True - except there doesn't seem to be any indication that they are spending all of the money/effort/time required to evaluate the content of their entire training set: after all, doing so would only reduce the amount of bulk material used and part of the boasting is how much text was used[1]!

Although, having said that, you can also feed the training with a good dose of negatives: "please don't write stuff like this". So even after categorising every bit of their dataset they'll still use it all, just maybe not in the way that the author's would like (they aren't happy now, but if they find that they are on the Naughty Training List they're likely to get really upset!)

[1] some say 5GB for GPT-1, 40GB for GPT-2, 600GB for GPT-3

They only want to whip the LLaMa's ass

> The social media giant often releases its models for academic research, and was criticized for not being as open as it claimed by preventing developers using LLaMA for commercial applications.

Huh? Open generally just starts with "you can read it", verify it and so on - *some* licences (including the most famous ones, at least to the audience here) then go on to say that you can also *use* it, with or without other restrictions. Such as, not for commercial use.

This isn't complaining about lack of openness, it is just complaining about not being allowed to exploit.

Which was probably a Good Thing - these LLMs are already being shoved into use in places where they are not fit for purpose[1], no need to encourage more of that.

Fingers crossed, the newer LLaMa, if it is released for commercial use, will at least have benefitted from being poked by academics and will, compared to its predecessors, have less chance of making a total mockery out of everyone deploying it.[2]

[1] and, yes, you can indeed argue that applies to every use made of them so far; I'll agree for the well-hyped uses by the Big Players, certainly.

[2] or Meta have realised they'll never get any better, so soak everyone in one fell swoop before the word gets out; place your bets now.

Microsoft 'fesses to code blunder in Azure Container Apps

they interpreted this as a configuration change ... and restarted as well

Why is it so hard for programmers to think of diff'ing the incoming config against the currently active one?

No, no, let me guess: there is a timestamp field for when the config is sent out and because that has progressed by five to ten seconds...

Sigh.

Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market

Re: ChromeOS is a fake linux

You have any actual *proof* that, say, the kernel is spying on you? How is it doing that? Maybe they modified bash to report back to homebase?

Given that normal ChromeOS users spend their entire time within the browser and extensions, they don't need to fiddle with anything else, do they?

And note that I did not suggest another Chromium based browser, so no claiming they are all using the same core engine and spying that way.

Re: Yet again, Mint

> why do Linux writers take such pride in the Grey-beard scenario

Ah, isn't that paragraph you quoted - and other chunks of the article - Liam sarcastically ripping on that same "if it isn't hard it isn't Linux, what do those youngsters know!" attitude?

Sarcasm? In The Register? Shocked, I tell you.

Re: ChromeOS is a fake linux

The slurping is done by the default browser. Go to the store and install Firefox or, for the proper Linuxy feel, use apt to install another browser.

Apple seeks patent for devices with roll-up displays – iRoll?

Re: Strange ideas about why patents get published

You do recall correctly.

Although <changes to nasally voice> polite discussions(!) are had whether they rolled up or folded: when closed, the handles are almost as wide as the exposed screen. And they are rigid enough to be easily held in just one hand when opened. Even in a gunfight whilst you are crouched behind some boxes.

Nerdmobile - Away!

Re: Strange ideas about why patents get published

> a roll up Kree tablet as seen in Agents of Shield season 5

I see your 2017 telly and raise you the 2000 movie "Red Planet".

They even made it a plot point[1] that these things are (probably) so thin you can view them from either side and spot the view of the mountain range is from the other side!

[1] more realistic than the main plot point - and even that was miles ahead of the key reveal in the same year's "Mission to Mars"!

CAD FTW

Always good to see patents accompanied by the crisp diagrams from your CAD designs, created when you built the first test devices.

Ah, misty-eyed memories[1] of the days when patent applications were required to include a physical working copy (or a model, to avoid the office being cluttered with too many 20 yard high beam engines).

[1] hyperbole, ok? Not really that old! Adjusts silk topper, straightens cravat.

First of Tesla's 'bulletproof' Cybertrucks clunks off production line

Re: It has all the performance you need in a truck

If you watched the first video and were wondering why that bloke carried the wooden ramp away after I'd said they could store it in the back of the Cybertruck:

That was one of their first test item "reusable ramps": it had to go back to the workshop for a clean and refurb before being re-certified. Musk promises that, by the end of 2025, they will be able to reach a ramp re-use cadence up to one sidewalk every 10 days.

Meanwhile, standard disposable single use ramps will be sold in packs of nine from your Tesla dealer.

Or if you insist on doing that, at least get Elon trained up on what could happen so that he can react with something better than a nervous giggle; he was obviously not expecting the glass to be able to craze like that.

It has all the performance you need in a truck

It has space in the back to hold the wooden ramp it needs to climb up the kerb:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2giv88irtU

and it can deal with mud up to millimetres deep:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wzddXynIAg

Post Office Horizon Inquiry calls for compensation to be brought forward

Kick Fujitsu in the nadgers but don't forget to mention Paula Vennells and the rest

The worst part of this whole affair is that POL would not listen to their own people even as the number of apparent frauds grew to obviously stupid levels.

So drag Fujitsu through the mill but keep talking about the higher-ups in POL who let them get away with that nonsense.

1 in 4 Brits are playing with generative AI, and some take its word as gospel

Re: Job applications

Anyone remember the Horizon about "Future Work" that showed the on-site engineer spending his day, alone, practising archery[1]?

It was supposed to show a life of leisure but looked really bleak. Horizon pre-empting Black Mirror.

[1] this went out before I joined the workforce; at the time I did not realise that archery would be a useful skill for dealing with users.

Re: 43 percent of those "mistakenly" assuming "that it always produces factually accurate answers."

"Can you pick up the Sales figures, Marvin".

Can I pick up the Sales figures?! Here I am...

... Call that job satisfaction?

(and we know the rest - I'll stop here in case anyone is getting bored of DNA).

five years for voice-assisted speakers to achieve the same adoption levels.

> Of those that have used generative LLMs, 30 percent tried it once or twice, 28 percent use it weekly, 9 percent use it once a day and 8 percent use it for work

Adoption levels? For something where the 30 percent could try it for free? Weekly and once a day? And of the rest of them, how many needed to pay for it?

How on earth is that a sane comparison to smart-speakers? Which weren't cheap, most certainly not free, at this point in their life cycle? Heck, if I ever got a smart-speaker, even I would "use it" more than once a day (just telling it to switch on for the news and half-six funny is at least twice a day).

Even the stats are being over-hyped!

To the "More Or Less"-mobile (oops, that's three times a day).

This AI is better than you at figuring out where a street pic was taken just by looking at it

Re: A little far fetched

A perfect example of the way this sort of pattern recognition system works (how any neural net works): in ways that make a mortal man scratch his head and day "huh, didn't spot that".

And also a nice illustration of how these weirdities can be a Good Thing: all the people scared of geolocating their house from a random photo can relax.

An image lookup from a StreetView picture (presumably removed from context and with metadata stripped - does StreetView put metadata into saved images?) back into StreetView could well be a useful feature (maybe not to me or you right now, but...).