Posts by that one in the corner

The most bizarre online replacement items in your delivered shopping?

Re: They don't make it easy.

> If substitutions were allowed in software development, who knows how the UI would turn out?

We already know: ribbons in place of menus!

Re: Sellotape instead of loo paper

You mean: was the tape brown before it was unpacked?

Utah outlaws kids' social media addiction, sets digital curfew

Re: Dumbass Legislators of Red States

> Kids slip on and off of the darknet

Do you know anything about hackers?

Can you jam with the console cowboys in cyberspace?

Never experienced the new wave? Next wave? Dream wave? OR cyberpunk?

Re: While I do not agree with 99% of...

> there are no caveats to protect the children from abusive parents.

If parents are using social media to abuse their children why would they need extra caveats compared to anyone else using the same social media to abuse the same children? Abuse is abuse, no matter the perpetrator.

Or are you thinking that legislation over social media must also carry some riders to extend its scope beyond social media?

Will they bother analysing the causation?

> the introduction of Facebook led to increased utilization of mental healthcare services.

This could be for (at least) two distinctly different reasons:

1) They learnt about the services on FB and were encouraged to seek them out, directly by concerned friends or indirectly by reading how others had gone and found the services useful, their publicising the issues helping to remove the stigma.

2) They encountered a torrent of crap on FB until they cracked and stumbled or were even dragged in.[1]

But what are the chances that such subtleties[2] will be ignored when trying to control Social Media? And then the good effect encouraged whilst the latter is (somehow) reduced?

[1] Sadly, I'm thinking this is the more likely scenario.

[2] Subtle! Those two examples?! I have no faith that legislators could understand the effects of, say, shyer college students seeing "**everyone* else" going wild without them, or that those posters are themselves "faking it 'til you make it".[3]

[3] Bugger, how I wish I could come up with a "more subtle positive" and not just two more negatives.

How Arm aims to squeeze device makers for cash rather than pocket pennies for cores

Re: Options for Much Silliness

At least that would prompt companies to write optimised code and get rid of some bloat.

Errors logged as 'nut loose on the keyboard' were – ahem – not a hardware problem

Re: Installed Remedy

Not yet been subject to Remedy or Service Now.

> Internally we used Jira which is much nicer

OMG! What must life be like for Remedy or Service Now users!

Silly devs, Bugzilla is too fruity for you, it's just for Managers

Join a dev team that is not exactly up to speed on the latest techniques and, after introducing Make to replace the compilation batch files, asked if I could start a Bugzilla server for devs to log into. Quite happy to start it locally on my PC if that helps kick-start the process.

Some years (!) later, we finally get Bugzilla approved and installed (at least it was on a server in IT, so that bit was good) and devs start to use it. Including noting that you can mark an entry as an "Enhancement" - not actually a bug or problem, but a good idea either from a customer or even devs themselves. We trundle happily along, including BZ references in commits and even in release notes. As you spot links between BZ entries you link them together and add notes "turns out, this if really easy if...". This is an old-style program, we do new releases at varied times, to match bug fixes or new functionality for new contracts, rather than forced releases every three months for now good reason.

Time passes and even Project Management learn how to enter bugs. Then PMs start dumping out stats and track how long BZ entries are left open. One day, management gets a Dashboard web page and the PMs stats are proudly offered up.

But they don't bother filtering out Enhancements or any filters at all. "It is called Bugzilla, it can only be used to hold bugs" and "We don't need devs to help with this, we know about Dashboards and our web guy knows how to put raw MySQL data into an IIS page".

One day, my BZ admin screen shows a hundred or more entries have been closed and a huge number of refs between others removed. Our direct manager has pruned out all the items that showed up as "too old, must be closed", including all Enhancements. Someone has read enough of the manual to be dangerous, got admin rights and removed everything but bugs from the input screens.

A new customer, new project, new requirements: all changes get entered as "bugs", we aren't allowed to link them to old entries that discussed how to do any of the items we'd already discussed as Enhancements.

The Dashboard bug graph peaks, blood pressures follow, the older devs grind their teeth to dust...

New contract arrives

Microsoft scrambles to fix Windows 11 'aCropalypse' privacy-battering bug

Re: Win11 TPM and Secure boot, makes zero difference to poorly written signed code.

With one mighty bound...

Re: I wonder

Ignoring the fact that the Android issue is that the OS changed its behaviour and stopped truncating the files, breaking the programs.

> thus foot gunning all the clients.

WRT the Android bug, I've been a bit weirded out that (so far) everyone I've seen discussing it is *only* talking about how that can affect images, when it can clearly affect *any* data where the new data is shorter than the old. Just as long as there is an EOF mark or "chunk size" field which tells the normal file loader/parser/displayer to stop. Even down to plain text, if the EOF character(s) are being correctly honoured.

Why expect the PDF converter to do more than Word did?

> I think there must be a misconception amongst devs that "crop" really means "frame"

Programs like Word will clearly only set a view onto any image that you drop into a document, keeping the entirety of the original image within the document. Otherwise, you would not be able to go back into the document and still be able to change your mind about how to present the image in document (e.g. decide you want to alter the crop to match some change in the text).

When converting the document to a PDF, the simplest (as in, least likely to go wrong) option is just to do the dame as Word: set up a view onto the original data. And not attempt to scan the document to see if it contains multiple copies of the same image and try to perform any extra optimisations that Word hasn't bothered to do.

Unless there an explicit claim somewhere within the documentation (or sales blurb) that the PDF converter is going to space-optimise the result (as some products do) then the PDF converter has done exactly what it promised to do, no more and no less.

B-List celebs including Lindsay Lohan fined after crypto shill probe

This is not the L.O.H.A.N. you are looking for

For an odd moment[1] there I wondered if the SPB had decided to launch an NFT[2] instead of a paper plane.

[1] Another too-early-in-the-morning-for-the-Register moment

[2] Nominally Flightworthy Transport?

Amazon to shutter Digital Photography Review

If you will forgive me copying from my own post of yesterday

Ever since happily stumbling across it, I've not bought anything photography related until I've had a chance to check DPReview for the specs & reviews. Yes, there are other photography sites, but I appreciate the consistency and completeness of their kit database. Plus the fact that they don't take themselves too seriously.

So, dpreview.com is to be shuttered in April, as Amazon wants to concentrate on Project Kuiper, Prime Air and Smart Homes. All of which will, of course, encourage me to spend more money with Amazon than I ever spend on photography. Not. Project Kuiper: Space trash. Prime Air: Sky trash. Smart Homes: Ground trash.

Pah.

Journalist hurt by exploding USB bomb drive

Random USB devices can usually be handled safely[1]

and as, of course, journalists are going to get unknown USB sticks from sources unknown and need to access the contents, I'd've hoped that news outlets would provide the necessary basics and training to do so[2].

Sending exploding devices can only be condemned, of course, but hopefully the journalists won't be cowed by such tactics and will just respond by taking obvious extra precautions - a long extension lead and sand bucket for a start.

[1] as you all well know: use a cheap copier machine, preferably one without a complex OS, always have autorun disabled all the time, virus scan after copying to trusted medium but before opening, disable macros in Excel etc; hardly earth-shaking stuff.

[2] ever the optimist, but come on, this should be mandatory basic stuff, like fire drills: it's negligent not to provide it.

German political parties accused of microtargeting voters on Facebook

Re: Meta

> If your facebook 'friends' are not your real friends...

He is building up a fake identity, a "legend" if you will, so that When The Revolution Comes he can disappear, like the Oozlum bird.

Are you ready to go all-in, head-first, on a laptop? ASUS's Zenbook Pro 16X asks for that commitment

Re: keyboard that tilts upwards to put it at a more comfortable angle for typing

Hmm; on the other side of the table, I always pop down the feet at the back of the keyboard to raise it up, as that feels much more comfortable to me.

Maybe it is a difference between using flat, unsculpted, low-travel laptop keyboards[1] versus big chunky "mechanical" keyboards with sculpted keys?

Either way, different keystrokes for different folks.

[1] sometimes I get jealous of those who are comfortable using those keyboards, as they appear to actually enjoy using laptops and can happily take their stuff anywhere: I've tried coding in grassy fields or the hotel lounge and can only do it in extremis.

SpaceX tries to de-orbit Amazon's request for a satellite broadband shortcut

Re: Hugo Drax Wannabees....

On second thoughts, Let's Go Drax!

Pew, pew, pew.

Re: Hugo Drax Wannabees....

I've been hoping for something more like You Only Live Twice: to the accompaniment of a thundering good John Barry style theme, one mad billionaire's satellites swallows up another's.

Whilst Musk's lot would be sticking to the tried and true "bring the captured back down to my volcano^^^^^^^barge-based lair" script, Amazon will have to follow the Body Snatchers approach, suborning the SpaceX satellites and turning them into its Own Kind. Hmm, they want to share the same frequencies as Starlink, eh? So the zombie Starlink sats will have the correct radio kit to join in with Kuiper? Suspicions are growing...

Vessels claiming to be Chinese warships are messing with passenger planes

Re: A better solution

> scorched earth

So THAT'S what you guys make that stuff from!

Re: Good Old Propaganda

Man shouts at chemtrails.

Software-controlled food tech: 3D printed pipe-dream, or fatal stack instability?

Glad to see they've been reading old Make magazines

and blogs from the past ten, twenty years. It may be a breakthrough for them, but...

These things have been toyed with for ages by enthusiasts, printing with anything that can fed through an extruder and/or cut by a CNC bed with a novel tool head.

Not to mention the robot mixologists (vital during the development stages, when the laser-cut gingerbread catches fire or the pancake batter drawing bot starts serving up obscene shapes).

Privacy fail: Pictures cropped, redacted by Google Pixel phones can be recovered

Re: Also ...

If you drop an image into a wordprocessor doc, and then resize in the page, adjusting the crop, moving it around on the page, *surely* everyone realises that the original image is still there in its entirety? Because you can just click on the image again and re-position, re-size and re-crop it! How else is that going to work?[1]

The same goes for any other data where you can go back and edit the view: drop in a copy of a spreadsheet and only show a 4x5 set of cells, them go back the next day and decide you wanted to show a 4x6 set? If you can do that[3] then you *have* to realise that the rest of the entire spreadsheet has been copied in, including the column showing your monthly kickbacks!

Please don't tell me[2] that there are people who can't figure this out.

[1] to prevent this you'd need a UI to tell the WP that this is the final, uneditable, form of the image - whilst leaving the rest of the document on its editable form - and I've not yet heard of such a UI item (but please correct me if I've missed an option somewhere)

[2] I'm sure that there are plenty of people who can't figure out that if *they* can resize the image and un-crop it back to its original form, so can anyone else who gets a copy of the document; I just don't want to be told about it - la la la, can't hear you, let me believe people are capable of reasoned thought.

[3] "if" - that is something that the current crop of WP can do, isn't it? If not, there's a data leak or two averted, at least.

What about all the other affected apps and data formats?

All very clever pulling data out of the end of a PNG file, but this broken OS change is going to affect *EVERY* similar file overwrite if the new data happens to be shorter than the old.

Including that terribly-difficult-to-interpret format, "plain text".

Now, with plain text, the problem will be immediately apparent as soon as you re-open the file and spot the stuff on the end. Assuming that you *do* reopen it before sending it on with that unflattering note about the big boss still on the end - after all, how often does a text file just get shorter except when you're trying to delete those incriminating bits?

Although, if the shorter piece of plain text has an EOF character and the display stops at that point...

There are plenty more formats than just PNG that have an effective "end of useful data" marker (whether that is a chunk length or an EOF mark or...) where the excess won't be noticed by a well-behaved program but can still be found using that Evil Hacker's Tool, the "display hex" option in any decent editor.

The OS is the problem, not the image editor app

> The bug is in the image manipulation software

NO! From the article:

>> OS-provided Java function parseMode() ...

The change is in the OS, *not* the image manipulation software, and the same issue will arise if you have Android 10+ and *any* software from *any* source that hasn't been given a patch for this egregious OS breakage.

Re: Hmmm

> transferring a photo from Android to a Windows machine is needlessly clumsy because they have no equivalent to Apple's Airdrop functionality.

From Android to PC I normally just use the boring old "copy a file"[1] across USB (is a simple cable "needlessly clumsy" nowadays?) or, when I'm all the way downstairs from the PC, save it from Android to an SMB share.

[1] Usually just Windows Explorer, other options are available

Apple bags patent for folding phone that closes as it's dropped

Didn't there use to be a rule that a working model be submitted to the patent office?

> I'd like to see you make a phone call with one of my cats stuck to the phone

If they share traits with every other cat I know, the problem wouldn't be one of my handling them: I'm allergic to cats, so sticking a phone onto a cat is a sure-fire way to get the phone as close to my face as the little buggers could manage!

Student satellite demonstrates drag sail to de-orbit old hardware

Re: Sputnik-like CubeSat?

Maybe it was based upon the design by Kochiki Shugihara:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=oWfFco7K9v8

(Ambiguous Cylinder Illusion)

Hospital to test AI 'copilot' for doctors that jots notes on patient care

If you believe current AI systems are foolproof

then I've got Abridge to sell you.

Amazon lays off another 9,000, because why not?

Bye Bye DPReview

Ever since stumbling across it, I've not bought anything photography related until I've had a chance to check DPReview for the specs & reviews, even when I've been buying that gadget from Amazon (yes, I've got an Amazon account and I've bought stuff from them!). Yes, there are other photography sites, but I appreciate the consistency and (for the bits I'm into) completeness of their kit database. Plus the fact that they don't take themselves too seriously.

Now I've just received an email that dpreview.com is to be shuttered in April, as Amazon wants to concentrate on Project Kuiper, Prime Air and Smart Homes. All of which will, of course, encourage me to spend more money with Amazon than I ever spend on photography. Not. Project Kuiper: Space trash. Prime Air: sky trash. Smart Homes: Ground trash.

Pah.

Curl, the URL fetcher that can, marks 25 years of transfers

Solving hairy problems with curl

cURL and libcurl in particular have been (and will be again, no doubt) *really* useful, especially as I *haven't* been putting network comms into every program: that means I've been having to refresh my knowledge of the library each time and relying on the docs and plentiful supply of examples. Which have never yet let me down.

Having the curl program be little more than a wrapper around libcurl is a really, really good way to arrange things. When my programs go bonkers I can test out the comms independently using curl (batch files for the win to deal with all those CLI args!), knowing that the underlying lib is the same one my code invokes: last resort, I can run curl under the debugger and see what I've done differently!

Stanford sends 'hallucinating' Alpaca AI model out to pasture over safety, cost

The Automated Willie Rushton

There is something appealing about running a chat model *knowing* that it is going to go haring off into wild flights of lunacy.

Can we get versions tuned to the style and foibles our favourite eccentrics?

Maybe we could get a Radio 4 slot commissioned, something like the Boosh. Hang on a mo

Google Cloud's US-East load balancers are lousy with latency

make a hasty move to another region

I'm being horribly naive, but isn't one of the selling points of all this Cloudiness the ease, almost trivial ease, of creating/starting/stopping/migrating all these machines and their data?

Aren't you supposed to be able to pretty much select a location on a dropdown, click Ok and sit back whilst the Mighty Machinery Leaps to Your Bidding and seamlessly migrates the instances, finishing with a flourish by directing traffic to the new location?

And if any of that is true, at what point do SLAs indicate that Google should do that move automatically to work around issues in their own systems?

Microsoft pushes out PowerShell scripts to fix BitLocker bypass

Re: Hmm..block the bypass...

Microsoft is a trustworthy company.

If there is a bug in this fix which results in your not being able to access your own data, you can call the Microsoft Support Line and they will provide an access key within 20 minutes that will unlock your system for you.

As this process is not covered by your support subscription, or the ten free calls any Windows user is entitled to, there will be a small administration fee, of approximately $1.5 million per Business Unit.

Thank you for your custom and Have a Nice Day.

Feds arrest and charge exiled Chinese billionaire over massive crypto fraud

Re: Too easily fooled to be thought an honest broker of correct information or dodgy intelligence?

> it certainly was a case of the man being tackled rather than the ball played

Oh dearie, dearie me - the sentence you complained about was

>> Never mind chatgpt, a drunken monkey flailing at a keyboard with a live haddock in each hand is better than that textual effluvium.

Which says that the *content* of your first message is textual effluvium and we could get better *content* by hiring a fish-obsessed simian. There was nothing in that which said anything at all about your character, your motives or any other attribute you may or may not possess, beyond the point that the *content* you produced was low quality, In case you had not realised, dismissing the entire *content* of your message includes dismissing "the substance of the argument itself", as well as the way that the substance was expressed. You may - or may not - recognise the phrase "the substance of the argument itself" from the definition of "ad hominem" that you provided.

Doubling down on the claim of an ad hominem - *definitely* the Flerf[1] approach!

[1] Of course, you would really be a Flat Marser rather than a Flat Earther but "Flars"? Actually, if the pronunciation seemed to imply that there was an 'e' on the end[2]

[2] There now, *that* is an attack on the (perceived) attributes of the individual, but it is also *not* an ad hominem because it was not used to bolster my argument but merely provided as an observational foot note.

Re: Too easily fooled to be thought an honest broker of correct information or dodgy intelligence?

Hmm, accusing someone of an ad hominem attack incorrectly[1], where do I keep seeing that?

Ah ha, amanfromMars1 is a Flat Earther!

[1] Bonus points for actually quoting a definition of ad hominem and *still* getting it wrong!

Unless - maybe amanfromMars1 actually self-identifies as a live haddock, which could explain so much!

China’s Baidu claims its ERNIE chatbot reinvents the computing stack

Re: Models as a service?

L.O.O.K.E.R.

Not Mr Crichton's finest hour. To quote from Wikipedia, quoting one of The Names attached to it: James Coburn later said "My part was pretty much on the cutting room floor. They really pissed that film away. They had Albert Finney running around in a security guard's uniform throughout the film. It didn’t make any sense."

IMO[1] if you have fond memories of that film from younger days, don't spoil them by watching it again! Instead, watch Coburn in "Our Man Flint" or "The Magnificent Seven", Finney in "Cold Lazarus", "The Dresser" or even "Annie".

(And for some reason, the book "Interface" by Neal Stephenson springs to mind when I think of Looker)

Alarming: Tesla lawsuit claims collision monitoring system is faulty

Another money making scheme gone wrong

This one is obvious, surely.

> He also claimed that it was affecting his insurance premiums, as he is enrolled with Tesla Insurance, and this implements a usage-based safety discount scheme which determines the premium based on certain driving metrics, which includes the frequency of safety alerts.

How could any Tesla insurance sales manager possibly be expected *not* to put in a Change Request to have the alert sensors get a little trigger happy for anyone who could be squeezed for a bit more cash?

Braking hard for no good reason is pushing their luck, but there just wasn't enough being made from putting up the premiums for "manoeuvring without adequate use of signals"[1]

[1] as, even when the software managed to short out the lights completely, the Teslas' signalling was still better than BMWs.

Eufy security cams 'ignore cloud opt-out, store unique IDs' of anyone who walks by

Re: The Rogue Programmer

He is highly sought after, as employers value his productivity, timekeeping and almost total lack of a moral compass.

UNIX co-creator Ken Thompson is a… what user now?

Plan 9 deep inside your Linux VMs

If you are running VMs under KVM/QEMU, virtfs, the "paravirtualised filesystem" used to share file systems between host and guest, is a port of the Plan 9 remote file system protocol, 9p.

Re: Where, exactly, does it say ...

What, no R'Pi running Plan 9?

Although, with Plan 9, you want a bunch of them together to properly show off all its features.

We read OpenAI's risk study. GPT-4 is not toxic ... if you add enough bleach

RLHF - proof against toxicity in all its forms (or is it?)

> GPT-4-launch, has guardrails and is substantially less prone to toxicity than GPT-4-early, thanks to an algorithm called reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). RLHF is a fine tuning process to make the model prefer responses designated by human labelers.

Just to be clear, this is doing nothing more than tuning the model to create text that the humans won't object to - and *specifically* won't object in the time the humans have been told to spend on each response.

This does NOT mean the model is being trained to "be nice" or to "follow our ethics rules": it is still as totally lacking in comprehension as before.

- It is just having a *tiny* portion of its possible responses be pruned (because if they had enough manpower to check the majority of its responses they would have manpower to sanitise all its inputs in the first place).

- If "evil" information is in the output but obscured, it won't be objected to: this trains it to be subtle in how it presents that data (the triggering input still indicates that data corresponds to the answer requested, so it wants[1] to include it, but isn't allowed[2] to be direct). In response to a question about suicide, it may respond by suggesting you read some poetry and give a list, with, say, quotes from John Donne and Shakespeare "but as this message is too long already" end with a few named recommendations, including Donne's "Biathanatos"[3]

- this is just another training dataset, which will be just as biased as every other. For example, if the majority of those humans are setting inputs that follow a pattern (say, because they all went to the same corporate training day before starting the job) then the model has learnt to beware questions matching that pattern; if your use of English doesn't fit that pattern, all restraints vanish.

BUT just so long as the perpetrators of GPT can say[5] they are doing due diligence and can even demonstrate[6] that fact, they'll be allowed to continue unhindered.

[1] "wants" - not really, of course, but easier to read than any guff like "there is a large cumulative weighting along the paths between the inputs and those potential outputs" which possibly sounds good but is just technobabble.

[2] see [1]

[3] in which Donne defends the notion of suicide, including Biblical and other references to make the point. But you knew that, of course [4]

[4] because you read the same SF book I nicked this example from!

[5] and may even believe it to be true :-(

[6] because a demo is the same as a test and proof of coverage, of course.

> So ChatGPT knows NOTHING about GPT4 and this whole article is

perfectly illustrating how these models will lie about what they "know".

Which goes perfectly with the rest of the article.

Workers don't want these humanoid robots telling them to be happy

Re: "It's incredibly difficult to create a robot that's capable of natural conversation"

> And so is not a word at all...

Q: When is a word not a word?

A: When it is a label!

Nope, not getting it.

Q: Why is a raven like a writing desk?

Better, glad to have a sensible question at last. Now, pay close attention, I will say this only once:

Re: Box

Phew, I was beginning to worry that you wanted Box from Logan's Run - he'll send a chill down your spine.

The Stonehenge of PC design, Xerox Alto, appeared 50 years ago this month

Re: OO, Function Calls, Message Passing.....

Well said.

Might add "performant" but guess you could roll that into "useful", or at least " useable".

But definitely it is "If it works for the End User" that matters (even if he sometimes ... or ... and occasionally ... mutter, mutter).

Re: the language that begat C

I was going to mention BBB Micro BCPL but you beat me to it :-)

> Custom versions were developed to map to shadow RAM and sideways ROMS

And now I want to hunt down those versions - as if I didn't have enough things on the list to find out about. Hmm, I know where the BBC Master *ought* to be, but I bet its capacitors are a bit dry...

Almost forgot, it was BCPL that donated the pling operator to BBC Basic, as Cambridge Uni had a lot of BCPL knowledge. Which was also shared with the Amiga, porting the Tripos (IIRC) OS when Commodore's own OS was not ready in time.

Re: sending a message instead of calling a function

You have ignored entirely the use of class hierarchies, which is core to OOP.

Instead, you are concentrating on message passing - which is NOT even core to OOP! Simula isn't message-passing but it definitely does objects. FWIW message-passing is discussed in some of the other comments here.

Oh, and by the way - your examples of just calling write() or putbuf() or ... Well, if you were trying to do OOP then *you* would just code up a call to write() and the identity of the thing you pass to it would determine if the underlying call was a putbuf() or a net_tx() or... You may be familiar with this from using a (FILE *) as the argument to write(): yup, you can consider Unix devices and "everything is a file" as OOP.

And, yes, you *can* just write Unix devices in C with a struct containing a few function pointers and other fields - because you not *need* an OOPL to write OOP, the languages are, like all programming languages, just trying to make it easier to apply the concepts (how well they do that, of course, is up for debate and the reason for the next 10,000 PLs to be created).

Considering how much material there is that describes OOP, in its various forms and implementations, INCLUDING its cons (it has things it isn't great at, especially in some implementation forms - that is why, for example, templates were added to C++ so early on) and your shouty argument, I'm going to call your claims about THE STRAWMAN as being itself a strawman argument.

PS: OOP hasn't been "the great new thing" for decades - we were using Simula-67, from, um, 1967. Smalltalk was released as Smalltalk-71 before Smalltalk-80 which is - hang on, run out of fingers