Posts by that one in the corner 5593 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Nov 2021
I prefer my fully automatics to be more pro-active, with full vocalisations:
"Is anyone there?"
"Could you come over here?"
"Target acquired"
"Preparing to dispense product"
"Your business is appreciated"
And, of course, the ever-popular:
"Take me with you..."
Although the singing is questionable.
Because it gives me clear lines of sight to every part of the room and the solidest part of the wall to protect my back.
BTW I was taught to shoot, .22 rifle from the age of 12 and then into the CCF (bolt action .303 over the shoulder, used more for marching up and down than in the range, swizz). Got a score that rather surprised me, and the teachers, but nowadays expect me to know more about the poem than the actual naming of parts.
Haven't bothered with firearms since (two or three times with one of those laser-modified shotguns and clay pigeons): no point, really. Not a useful daily skill.
Vest, yes.
Fully automatic rifle? So you've recently passed your armed response training cert? In which case, why the worry?
Oh, you mean you've got a handgun and was allowed to try the rifle out back of the Sheriff's office, just for a laugh, and believe that makes it sensible to hand you one in amongst all those juicy targets - most of them on your side!
Dangerous macho bullshit thinking.
There are loads of genuinely sensible uses for having data displays in glasses, even including a camera and using an AR overlay.
> Way back after uni when I was working on audio electronics, it would have be a big time saver to just ask for schematics...
Trouble is, all the engineering ones are treated as premium products, not anything that can sell many headsets, and they get priced to match. There have been "Tomorrow's World" style presentations about such uses for decades and they flop.
But trying to sell to Joe Public to get the numbers up and prices down with scale - well, the techbros sure as hell don't want the latter, so the "offerings" just get worse and worse, more tie-in to the "ecosystem", subscriptions etc.
Bleugh.
Needed to get a 2FA this evening. Turns out I'd left my 'phone untouched in my backpack since last Friday and the battery was flat as a pancake. Never noticed. Hey ho, plug it in for a bit, go and have supper an a bit of telly (Freeview!) and if the code has timed out, meh, just click "resend".
> surely the easiest IF THEN statement you can create..yet they didn't.
Because nobody creating the (current) crop of self-driving cars are doing *anything* at all with IF THEN or any other sensible programming statements when it comes to actually deciding what the vehicle is going to do. *How* it does it, yes: set this line high and the (totally separate) ABS brakes subsystem will come on and try to hold k amount of braking force. *When* to set that line and in reaction to what stimuli: (shrugs) I dunno; sompting, I guess.
> $millions on training & it didn't work
Bluntly, the "training" is done on a fingers-crossed basis: it is little more than a carrot and stick, "reward" the "AI" when it takes a step closer towards your desired goal (stopping for a school bus) and hope it one day reaches the goal. Trouble is, they don't really know what the insides of the "AI" are doing, what is is *actually* reacting to. During training and demo runs, perfect scores. Let it loose on the real world and the little kiddies are being treated like skittles. Oops. Because you didn't spot that all your training sessions had the bus stopped next to a wisteria and that is what the machine learning thought you were trying to reinforce...
> The quote is deliberately referencing the Cybermen
Now there is a blast from the past: "Tomb of the Cybermen" with Patrick Troughton was their heyday for that phrase. The modern ones all about "Delete!" or "Upgrades".
Now, the Borg. The Borg are really into the futility of resistance, as well as assimilating biological and technological distinctiveness.
ONLY for outgoing emails to the public!
Otherwise email conversations are going to get even worse!
The Project Manager can't see your new estimates were also sent to the rest of the correct team members[1]. The recipient of a ticking off can't see that HR have been sent the "put them on final warning" order.
The person who insisted on ordering the boiled egg sandwich can't see that all the desks around him have been warned... actually, no, keep that as a BCC, give them a chance to arm themselves without tipping him off.
[1] "just set up mailing lists" - for every permutation of subgroups, kept up to date as people are assigned tickets from different parts of the project, or across projects...
why they are always SHOUTING ON THEIR PHONES "I'M ON THE TRAIN![1]".
Because the louder you shout the more electricity goes into the data packet and further from the train it can get; that is how all this works, isn't it?
[1] always want to hear the other end reply "WHAT?! You are supposed to be on the ferry!"
> then why are they using a fork of the language
Anyone using Zig - or any other open source language at that point in its lifecycle - is using a fork. That is how open software development works: it allows you to create decent feedback and create Pull Requests. If the project is for a large and rich company, with a big dev team (waves at Anthropic) they will even run from a fork of something as mature as GCC, for the same reasons.
> moving away because the changes they make won't be merged back into Zig proper?
The reasons why their PRs are rejected are well explained and their attempts to submit them just demonstrated Sumner et als inability to abide with anyone else's submission rules.
The move away is little more than Sumner throwing a hissy fit - if, as you so fervently believe, Anthropic's system is so marvelous, that move is a trivial act. Next month he may well have pissed off the Rust dev team as much as he frustrates the Zig devs, floolowed by a grand announcement that he has had the whole lot translated into TurboPascal.
> Anthropic hardly need advertising
Ah, someone with as little knowledge or experience with sales and marketing as they have of software development. Every product needs to be able to list more, new, uses to add to the PowerPoint deck.
> Their product is incredible
See? Even YOU are insisting on advertising for them.
> in 10 years time...
And if your predictions come true, you be sure to come back and regale us with your tales of working on the breadline. Oh, you think YOU are amongst the Glorious Few who won't be AI'ed out of a job! Hilarious. Zealotry won't be a sufficient skill.
> the Bun team is sick of Zig
You try to make it sound as though the entire Bun team have some problems using Zig, the programming language, and that this conversion somehow makes Rust a superior programming language and *that* is the reason the change was made.
But let's have a look at the story: Anthropic’s Bun Rust rewrite merged at speed of AI.
>> Sumner was formerly a strong Zig advocate, but Zig’s no-AI policy is at odds with the Bun team’s way of working, and recent versions of Bun use a Zig fork with contributions that cannot be merged upstream, and which Zig’s maintainers said would not be welcome regardless of the AI aspect.
Sounds like Sumner, the person who ordered AI to make the conversion, was more than happy with Zig, the programming language, but he wasn't working with the Zig team, wasn't willing to follow the rules for the Zig project.
> back in the real world AI is used...
The "real world"? Anthropic? You can't see that Anthropic might have a different and rather specific attitude to using their own AI in a project?
Does the word "advertising" ring any bells with you?
> Hardlinks are not a directory entry pointing to the actual file in some other directory. It is the same file having two directory entries. You must read into it to see the difference.
Yes.
And that is exactly what I said:
>> the result of using "ln" without any special options to simply create another directory entry (in the same filesystem) that points to the same file, what Windows calls a hardlink being just what Unix calls, well, normal
When you do "ln fred jim" under Linux the file data that is pointed[1] to by "fred" is now also pointed to by "jim". You can delete "fred" but the data still exists and can be accessed via "jim".
[1] the basic semantics of a directory entry is that it points at the file data; "small file optimisations" do put data into the inode but that should not be visible outside of the filesystem driver code.
> You wrote alot and still only gave 1 example: a phone book
FOUR examples - a towns & villages directory, the phone book, a company directory and a university directory.
That should have still left you with a thumb free on your counting hand.
> So a phone book can be put inside another phone book? Groovy.
Inside? No, one references the other... and references are the life blood of data processing... hang on...
You didn't actually understand any of it at all, did you? You don't have the faintest clue about data, why we organise it and shove it into files and directories and databases and...
There I am, carefully explaining each and every step, and the whole thing just goes - whoosh, right over your head.
The discussions in this forum page about what Unix "ln" does must have you curling up and mewling in despair.
> Junction and link are like the unix variants, however a hardlink is deeper since two filesystem entries point to the same file instead of one linking to another.
Um, isn't the result of using "ln" without any special options to simply create another directory entry (in the same filesystem) that points to the same file, what Windows calls a hardlink being just what Unix calls, well, normal?
Then Unix added symlinks, one directory entry pointing at another directory entry which then points at the actual file.*
* All nice and easy to understand, no need to add terminology like "reparse points" into the mix, although I'm sure the Windows system has its good points.
PS
In case that last paragraph doesn't make sense to you, when I were a lad and we wanted to change what the cow was saying, we 'ad to find it in t'archive document of doodles we'd half-inched from email sigs (and 'oo knows where they'd blagged it from) then paste it into own file. Copy'n'paste we did, aye, columns as well, to make speech bubble fit what we thought was witty that day. 'appy we were, whiling away the cold winter evenings, 'uddled around only machine big enough to 'old compiler, warming 'ands by glow o' disc activity light, making ASCII art in t'traditional way.
Now t'is all done wit' yon program, every cow perfect, none o' wee nicks, t'imperfections that show you're readin' creation of person willin' to put in time for craft.
Ok, I have to admit that I g**gle'd the name (clearly my Linux-foo has a few holes and must be downgraded to merely Linux-bar status).
But if I hadn't then I'd've missed the joy of being told of the website that offers to tell me all about "Using Cowsay Linux Command Like a Pro"!
Type two commands into the cli? Now I don't need to copy AND paste anymore, I can just cowsay and go!
Possibly because it is the easiest way to get all of those commands with a licence that Microsoft is happy to use (and in the funky language that all the cool kids are using these days)?
The single-binary is then just an oddball side-effect. And somewhere inside Microsoft QA there is an unhappy person who can't figure out why installing so many programs doesn't require over a gigabyte of disk space ("but this goes against company policy!").
> In the physical world a directory would be represented by a
Directory.
Like, you know, a University directory, a book with a chapter full of the names of staff, directing you to the department they belong to. And a chapter with a list of all departments, directing you to a page which describes the department, including the building(s) they are housed in. And a chapter with a list of all the buildings, directing you to the square on the map where you find the building represented.
Or a company directory, with a chapter listing all the members of staff, directing you to which desk they sit at.
You get the idea? A "directory" is something that directs you to where (or how) to find something (or someone) if you know what the name is.
Or, and bear with me on this, you may find this a bit complicated, a telephone directory, aka the Phone Book: a big fat book full of the names of people in a city/region, in alphabetical order, with their phone numbers. Or the Yellow Pages directory: a big fat book full of the names of companies in a city/region, in alphabetical order, with their phone numbers. Or the towns and villages directory: a big (but not very fat) book of the names of all the (small) towns and villages in alphabetical order, with the name of the city or region whose phone book/Yellow Pages included that town or village.
Gosh, you could almost say that those directories are "nested" or perhaps "multi-level".
Let's go back to the University directory: the page for a department also lists the number for the departmental secretary's phone. If you can remember the secretary's name, you can look them up in the Phone Book for the town/city the University is in OR if you only remember they are the Maths Dept. secretary you can look them up in the University directory, following the path described above.
Tada! You have two distinct and separate sets of directories, maintained by two completely different groups (the GPO for all the national Phone Books, the University for their directory) AND THEY BOTH LEAD YOU TO THE SAME THING, they both end with a pointer/address/unique identifier/phone number which, if you invoke/dereference/dial will get to access to all the data contained within (via a nice conversation with the secretary, maybe over a cup of coffee after a nice dinner out, followed by a show and a moonlit walk along the river).
You might be winding yourself up to say that, in the digital world, you would do all that using a database, not directories. Tell you what, you go off and read up on how file systems work, the big complicated ones we use on terabyte drives, the sorts of data structures they use to store the directories. Then try looking up those same data structures, but this time in the Boys Big Book Of Databases. Guess what you'll discover!
> There is evidence that before the existence of a directory|folder|thing-to-put-things-in that only the word "directory" existed for analog storage.
Yer wot?
Maybe you'd better *stop* taking the dried-frog pills; I don't think you are really Bursar-level material.
> The phone systems have to know the real number as how else can it even make the call possible
The phone system doesn't need to store the phone numbers at all for the call to be possible; don't get hung up on, for example, the way that TCP/IP or even Ethernet work (where the endpoint addresses are present in each and every packet). A digital phone system can[1] set up circuits between the two endpoints, exactly parallel in concept to the way that literal electrical circuits were set up by the operator's plug boards. One endpoint can have at most one active circuit at a time[2]. Each data packet is then labelled only with the circuit number that it belongs to[3] so once the circuit is set up the endpoint identifiers are simply forgotten, they just are not needed.
In fact, the originating number never *was* needed in the first place[4]: your usage hours were clocked up by a literal, mechanical clock in the exchange, at the end of the wire that came from your handset; that had an id written on it which might be the same as the number on your handset or could be the location of the folder that contains your account details and billing address. Whichever is easier/cheaper to run (or, more likely, whichever got done on day one and ossified as "normal").
> I feel that they can display whatever number they like, but the real number should also be displayed.
That is certainly a feature that *could* have be added, but who was going to pay? Now that phone systems are being replaced by Internet protocols there is more flexibility for change - and with the increases in both miscreant usage and naive trust, it should be.
[1] note: not stating that this is how any given phone system is nowadays, as they keep on changing; witness the current slow death of the phone system, being replaced by VOIP and all the additional delays, glitches and horrors of passing real-time data over the Internet. Sigh.
[2] unless you pay for another line, literally or digitally; then come the joys of party lines in one direction and conference calls at the other.
[3] and that circuit number can be expressed in a way that includes its routing, balancing route lookup costs (route caching etc) against interlink traffic volumes - and done so internally, within one company's portion of the international phone network, so they could select the balance that works best for them. If doing so made more money than just letting it run unaltered.
[4] until the phone company realised they could make more money by storing the destination against the originating and charging you more money in order to receive an itemised phone bill; which later became standard and just rolled into everyone's increasing line rental costs. Then law enforcement started demanding to see those records, once they became commonly enough available, now it is all just an accepted feature of how phones work.
Nothing to do with Ofcom.
When Caller Id was made available in the UK, way back when, it was - and still is - considered a basic part of the service to be able to decide *what* number to send. Because it was companies that were using Caller Id and wanted to be able to set it to their main company number or customer support (if they had a separate customer support number). And they were probably charged a pretty penny for it as well.
Not that it mattered much then, as it took a fair old time for the displays to appear in normal people's houses, especially as the separate units ate up one of your RENs and meant to had to unplug the bedroom extension. And they weren't free. We didn't bother getting one.
From my p.o.v., having seen it introduced and having watched the telly programs that explained this new black magic to the fearful folk of the UK, I have NEVER trusted the displayed Caller Id to be accurate and simply find it odd that anyone does: selecting the number to be displayed was a part of the system from Day One and we were told that!
But, no, now everyone is calling this "spoofing" and it is all terribly evil and confusing - even though I'm willing to bet that the PSNI (and every other force) are using the function everyday when they ring out.
> How else will they claw back the insane amounts of money bet on this AI bubble?
By demanding government bailouts, just like the last time? Yeah, it is still the same "everyone" who is footing the bill, but the marketing costs are lower for bungs than ads.
Especially as
> the glut of video, memory or storage devices that will flood the market afterwards
won't work in your $3,000 PC. Best plan to get yourself an empty 19" rack before the price on those skyrockets (or Ikea sells out of LACK tables).
Pro < Pro+ < Max ? Max?
Oh, that wasn't the important point about the story? You mean that stuff about Microsoft putting up the price? Or everyone threatening to walk away from the service? A service that is so useful that it delivers “It gave some pretty mediocre suggestions. Didn't really solve the problem, I still had to do most of the work myself"? How is that the important part, nobody can be even slightly surprised about any of that!
Anyway, I was hoping after "Pro+" (isn't that something to do with Ibuprofen?) they'd do a subscription plan where, for the extra fee, they let the monthly limits be lapsed for a rollover period and call this (you are way ahead of me now, aren't you!) "Copilot Prolapsed".
> . In your link, it says 220 people in a poll would secede...
In point of fact, in a link contained *within* his link, it says that 220 out of 500 people polled would secede, which is the 44% that the first link reported.
> Please learn to think critically
Please learn to think about how polls work, what statistics are, how *every* measure of public opinion is garnered, short of running an actual vote on the question and polling everyone (well, everyone eligible, which is fewer people than your quoting the entire population count). Oh, and how to accurately cite your sources.
And remember, this works for *every* claim about public opinion, even those claims you feel you agree with.
> Stupid legislation gets drafted all the times by both sides
Now, that is something I have no argument with. Tick.
Did TFA ever say it thought "these algorithms" would ever be able to detect guns themselves?
One way "these algorithms" might end up looking could very well be "ship the model from the printer to a human for review". Perfectly implementable algorithm, easily coded, you could probably do it yourself. And you can't claim that there isn't precedence for that sort of algorithm when manufacturers can't get the job done in actual code.
There may be drawbacks, especially as the number of printers sold increases, but so what? The printer is one of the few, perhaps even the only, model on the California list and the showroom demoes are going well. Get it home - ha ha, you didn't check the fine-print did you! 48 hours "processing" time to check your 3D model is ok is within the specs. No refunds, what else are you going to buy?
KA-CHING the algorithm is working perfectly (from the shareholders' p.o.v. and they are all that matters) and keeping you safe within the law. You're welcome.
> Unless you think they're going to try banning books as well.
Banning books is a long-standing American Tradition. Mainly restricted now to schools, colleges and similar libraries, of course. Because who can be bothered to read books if they're not being made to!
Find instructions in books? Ha!
And as Google likes to crow, actually reading online information sources is getting to be too much effort for some poor weary souls, so even if They don't figure out how to get proper web searches working again, so They can issue takedowns, soon enough the information won't ever be disturbed again anyway.
> The truth does not require guard rails
And where would this "truth" come from and how did it get inside the LLMs?
You know, those things that are famously trained on scraping all the drivel from the interwebs along with piles of fiction from (possibly/probably illegal copies, the cases are still pending, of) in-copyright books and lashings of out-dated "knowledge" from "we can admit to using these" legally accessed out-of-copyright books.
All of this given equal weight by the training process, no matter how loony the authors were (on a scale of 1 to 10...).
Topped off by continued access to whatever has been scraped in for recent re-training.
Whoops, you are using the LLM at home, which means you aren't doing any serious update training, you are just running the inference/generation phase on whatever increasingly old, increasingly out of touch with the state of the World, model you happened to download - whichever copy of that happened to fit your local compute resources. A model that you initially choose to download based upon - what? Your reading user reviews of how "woke" a model is, or is not?
Hoping to get any form of "truth" from even the best LLM is a mug's game in the first place; your route to your "truth" is an inspiral of doom worthy of the Oozlum bird.
> Make of that what you will, but it's clear that a lot of the opinions being expressed in this thread are soundly based on ignorance, hearsay, and prejudice, rather than any serious getting to grips with the actual teaching of Jesus, let alone what the Biblical scriptures are all about.
We are only reporting what you can easily hear coming out of the mouths of US self-proclaimed Christians, all over social media, Youtube, TV shows...
So, yes, you are quite right, their opinions are based upon ignorance, loads and loads of prejudice, and so little from the teachings of Jesus that one can believe they've ripped whole sections out of the middle of the book (they are always careful to keep Revelations).
> The reason we don't get forty thousand words from philosophers
Is that the philosophy of AI has been done to death since the 1950s and your actual working philosopher, a proper one who has bothered to check the literature, knows that. Anyone genuinely trying to come up with something new to say on the subject has their work cut out for them.
Wasn't able to get the individual issues in the UK, but *did* get hold of the first three collected volumes, from a bookshop in Brighton, just before my Acorn Atom kit arrived. Obviously nothing that could be directly copied across, but that was the point: you could see what *was* possible on a huge 12K RAM computer and have a go at something similar. Certainly a lot more fun than the Fortran had been (at least, until I could a few pennies tutoring in a Fortran course for a couple of terms).
The early volumes are still fun to read, the whole attitude towards getting the little machines to do something was different back then.
> Only you can decide if the (usually minimal) CPU overhead is worth the experience
Do it in hardware!
The signals* are still there, Maplins may be gone but you can harvest LEDs from Poundland lights.
* SSD in m.2 you say? Just look how small this drill bit is, now, you have a steadier hand than me...
We should all get behind any campaign to urge Trump to declare 'American' the official US language ahead of 250th anniversary.
Then at least The Register could make a definite statement one way or the other.
ONE downside?
On my Android tablet, the text on the archive page is either HUGE (can't even manage to show two stories) - Chrome and Firefox - or, Firefox only, I can get sort-of sensible sized text *but* apparently centred in a HUGELY wide page, so the RHS of the text is missing! The stories are all presented the same way as well. Still, both are still better than the home page: huge text *and* multi-column makes for many, many broken words. Will nobody think of the hyphens?
(At the risk of letting Them know, and prompting it to be knackered as well, the only bit that is still working properly everywhere I happen to use it, are the forum pages; that is, when the link to them finally shows up under the headline).
Or, you know, just - robots. Good old fashioned robots, trundling around, bugger all "AI"[1] involved, let alone some imaginary "general purpose AI". I believe we have a name for such robots, let's think, oh yes, "successful[4] planetary exploration missions and space telescopes", the former including orbiters as well as landers
[1] by which I mean the current unfortunate trend of using "AI" to solely mean those ghastly chat-thingies[2]. I am well aware that there is lots of Crazy Mixed-Up Stuff That Came From The AI Lab Into Outer Space involved in these missions, including such things as Planners and image/data recognition boxes created by use of Machine Learning etc etc.
[2] like the Google search "AI" that yesterday told me a company in Carmarthen is suitable for a day trip because it is so close to home; best we can figure out is that the blasted thing thinks[3] that Cymru is the same as Cumbria!
[3] I know, I know.
[4] and also some unsuccessful ones were also robotic in nature, but let us not dwell.
> It isn’t intended or rated to carry people
What do you base that on?
All the current planned missions (all going well) are cargo, of one form or another. Yes. Because they *have* to be! Before there is any chance of New Glenn even being suggested for a manned mission (that is, one undertaken by a sensible, let alone publicly funded, customer, such as NASA[1]) BO have to demonstrate that it can be operated consistently and safely with non-human contents[2].
And if/when they do show that level of reliability, it is not the New Glenn that will be human-rated, it will be the New Glenn PLUS all the kit and caboodle they stick on top as a payload, the entire mission package, that will become human-rated. Including such little niceties as a launch escape mechanism (i.e. that bit which is furthest away from the New Glenn, right on the tippy-top of the entire stack[3]).
Sure, after at least one mission has been human-rated everyone, especially the BO marketing division, will start saying that "New Glenn is human-rated" but you will always have to remember that it will be "human-rated" ONLY as a part of this balanced nutritious breakfast, sorry, as part of a balanced human-rated entire mission profile.
[1] idiots with cash may try to convince BO to send them up in little more than a barrel strapped inside the standard payload fairing, but unless BO are really, really up against the wall they'd be prudent to refuse - solely on the grounds that, no matter the outcome, being involved in anything as daft as the first ever Ottery St Mary barrel run started in spaaaaace would damage their credibility with later customers, such as NASA, ESA etc
[2] Falcon-9 took what, ten years of operations, before it was allowed to be used for a human-rated NASA mission.
[3] other launch escape mechanisms are possible, but that long lattice-work spike is the classic format.
