Posts by that one in the corner

Amazon mandates return to office for 300,000 corporate staff

Re: Here's a thought, Amazon

It is hard to see anywhere on the Amazon website that has been improved by any of their inventiveness.

I quite miss the old days of seeing a list of decent recommendations on the Amazon home page; even when it went awry it was at least amusing: I was convinced that only one other person had bought a copy of (certain huge book) so I was getting suggestions for lots of maths monographs (interesting, but way above my A-level results) and just hoped (s)he was fascinated by C++ programming.

Then again, I spent far too much money when their recommendations were good, so the changes have been saving wear and tear on the credit card: that was their intention, wasn't it?

There is a significant difference for some people between doing their 7.5 hours a day in isolation or within a group (or even a crowd). Note: a group. Not "a group of close personal friends" nor even necessarily anything they'd consciously describe as their "social life".

When they retire, such people are suddenly free to spend those 7.5 hours a day in places with people around them, so, yes, they will probably enjoy their retirement (more ability to *choose* the group, for example).

But, glad to know that you aren't in any way of that state of mind.

Re: Cat ... bag ...

> It's essentially a binary decision: which of two parties...

It isn't binary quite yet in England and certainly not in the UK - although publicising that attitude is a good way to reach that situation.

No doubt there are plenty of people who are jealous of the US political landscape and fervently wish we could have a basic two-party system here. (Would put in a sarcasm tag but it really does feel like many people do really, really, want there to only be a two party system).

Re: Depends on your co-workers

It doesn't fit through an Amazon loading bay door anyway.

Re: Creepy

> and he met his future wife at work

Good for them. Hope they have a happy life together.

Re: Creepy

> If you don't have friends outside of work and you only "bond" with people who are contractually forced to interact with you

Well, as the paragraph you quoted from made no mention of "only bonding with" co-workers, nor did it say anything at all about whether or not you have any friends outside of work

> have you not considered that you may have some sort of personality disorder?

Better to look at basic, and easily solved, literacy issues before starting to cast out unpleasant accusations of mental conditions.

Re: Creepy

> You don't need to be friends with someone to do the work

True, but who is saying that being friends is a necessity?

> Making friendships at work is unhealthy and toxic. Don't do that.

> Work is for work and make friends outside of workplace.

Toxic? Wow.

But that is the beginning of a perfect self-fulfilling prophecy: go in to a situation saying "I don't care who or what you are, I am determined that you'll never be a friend and anything that may indicate otherwise is Toxic Behaviour" and guess what, no-one there will ever be your friend.

Microsoft to cap daily Bing AI queries to stop the bot delivering daft responses

Architects can be replaced by SD and DALL-E?

> People can easily produce realistic renderings of houses, buildings, and rooms with text descriptions only, reducing the need to get architects to draw and model their designs.

If those outputs are good enough to replace architects, we are admitting that the architects' understanding of materials and even basic physics is as good as in those models? As in, non-existent?

Re: Dammit, Jim, I'm an architect, not a computer scientist!

You think merely closing a road will stop the full autopilot AI driven car (or just the bloke behind the wheel, in too many cases) from following the GPS along the route map that hasn't been updated?

That ford, and many another, will continue to take its victims. To the great amusement of the locals.

employees spend about two to four hours of their time on Bard

My immediate thought was "hope they all know what timecode to charge that to", having had my share of requests from on high to "just read and tweak this document", but come the end of the month...

Besides that, two to four hours a day talking to a chatbot and correcting its responses? I hope that they want Bard to become really, really good at discussing the Star Trek Wars and whether Shadows can beat Peace Keepers. Although round about hour three, the grammar will become obtuse, the verbiage more sesquipedalian and the subject matter would be rejected from The Mighty Boosh as being "a little weird".

UK tax authority nudges net 'influencers': You may owe us for those OnlyFans feet pics

Approximately 1/4 of the UK population are Content Creators/Influencers?

Huh?

What makes a Content Creator? Everyone who posts on FB when an email would do? Do comments on The Register get counted as well (though clearly only Gold Badges are getting the big bucks here)?

Maybe I'm a Influencer and didn't even realise (well, 'Er Indoors does day I tell everyone what the ought to be doing)? Let's try: "Buy Wheaty Bits, They're Grrrrrrruel!".

A tip for content filter evaluators: erase the list of sites you tested, don't share them on 100 PCs

> I edited the hosts file to redirect lego.com to 127.0.0.1

So what was being supplied from the local webserver you installed? Homework or just a wagging finger "Uh uh ah'?

Meta to add verification to Facebook and Insta under scheme that should avoid Twitter's Musk-stakes

Re: Pull my other Clegg

How good are Stable Diffusion or its cousins at generating ID cards?

Bound to have been a pile of relevant images in the training data as it was borrowed from the web...

Re: Verified ID?

I too had an account shut because I wasn't able (let alone willing!) to prove Official ID to prove exactly which corner they needed to look. Oh woe, oh calamity, oh look, I can just start a new account from which to - well, no need to go into sordid details.

But that is the Pure Genius of Meta: previously, they were rudely demanding this ID and making us feel like criminal troglodytes if we weren't even able to prove ourselves to FB. No wonder we felt frustrated and angry, throwing a tantrum[1] and refusing to hand over our ID.

NOW we are being asked to pay to show that we are Super Special, part of the In Crowd - you used to be just another random Joe Bloggs, now you can be JOE BLOGGS! You are buying a service, no longer just being the product, so of course we need your ID, just like you show it for Other Important Life Events[2].

[1] from Zuck's p.o.v.

[2] FB is for life, it'll follow you forever and ever and ever

The second dust bowl cometh for America, supercomputer warns

Arrakis?

Not something to wish for around here; the Butlerian Jihad is not going to do the average Register reader's job prospects any good at all.

White Castle collecting burger slingers' fingerprints looks like a $17B mistake

Re: ...and just how are people expected to log into a system?

> but try getting a signature from a dead guy!

Dr Hex welcomes you to this seminar at the UU department of Necrom^^^^^^Postmortem Communications.

Antivirus apps are there to protect you – Cisco's ClamAV has a heckuva flaw

Re: The most useless software in the world

Hmm, didn't think using Macs as email servers was that popular, let alone a fleet of them.

Live and learn.

The quest to make Linux bulletproof

Re: Snap is a single compressed file,

> then n copies of libraries get paged in

Where n is the number of those apps that are running simultaneously.

Compared to k, which is the total number of apps actually installed and k > n, by quite a large factor in some cases. Yes, sometimes k = n, particularly in specialised circumstances - but specialised circumstances get specialised treatment (lots of extra RAM if it is a one-off box all the way to hand-built-OS-why-are-we-talking-about-Snap at the billions-sold-and-who-updates-toasters-anyway end of the market).

It is all tradeoffs. I don't care if Blender, LibreOffice, Gimp and Steam etc all have their own copies of all the same libraries 'cos they aren't all going to be running at once.

Anyway, all the loaded libs are vastly overshadowed by the memory needed to open a couple of browser tabs!

Re: Blockchain

Well, if not, can we put together a project to get voting control over his blockchain, make it believe that his box has always been running WindowsME, so the next update that tries to install a patch fails, triggering a rollback to last known good?

Re: Columbus UNIX

> What is actually needed for databases is System V IPC - semaphores, message queues, and shared memory

Well, not quite. IPC is only *needed* if you have more than one process on the machine (can I get a "duh"?) and they need to safely and efficiently communicate with each other (as with the term "IPC" itself we're using the old meaning of "process" and avoiding arguing over terms like "thread").

"A database" with all the ACID you could want can be run inside a single process. There is nothing fundamental in the concept of "database" that needs anything more. You can even run it as a client/server setup - many ways exist, but just having a few serial lines and poll them every now and again will work.

Of course, even on a single CPU box you're going to find that method a pain in the arse to use, especially when you start whacking on pre-emptive multitasking because, guess what, you've just implemented processes and *any* robust & useful system with processes needs IPC. Databases just being one workload that can be made more efficient with IPC (e.g. we're running local clients now and is a bit wasteful to use up two serial ports on one machine with our original implementation).

IPC is definitely required by the time you are running your database engine across multiple CPUs in one box, otherwise it'll all get very nasty!

So for big databases on big machines, yup, you want your IPC. For big *anything* on big machines you'll want your IPC.

HOWEVER leaving all that aside, the line you are objecting to was saying that the ACID principles that were applied to the problem of OS updates were those that were built into the journalling filesystems - because no-one (we're aware of) had tried to put all of the OS files into a.n other "more obviously a database". If they had, presumably that'd be replacing the "dir" command by an SQL query? Otherwise, if it exposed the normal FS operations so "dir" (oh, alright, "ls") worked then you've just invented the journalling filesystem and we're right back to agreeing with Liam's original sentence!

Most Londoners would quit before they give up working from home

Re: Cattle

BTW, I'll take the protection from even a "short-term" vaccine - and top-ups - or other preventative every time. Even the prophylaxis against malaria, which wasn't what I'd call fun but was a heck of a lot better than the possible alternative!

And even though I've had my normal anti-tetanus, I'll gladly accept another if they ever need to pull a length of rusty rebar out of me (but really, really hoping it isn't needed!)

Re: Cattle

> which give lifelong immunity with very few side effects

No.

Fed up with going over this, but no vaccine gives you "lifelong immunity", that just isn't how it works.

Try "a decent amount of resistance, enough to give you a pretty go of it whilst living in a community, the bulk of whom have had the same jabs as you" and tack onto that "especially against old diseases that we, as a species, have lived with for a long time" as opposed to against novel viruses that are still finding their own way to being infectious enough to propagate their genetic material efficiently from within their exciting new home.

Musk says he ain't going anywhere as Twitter CEO until at least late 2023

Cognitive dissonance can be quite fascinating

Compare and contrast:

> engineers changed Twitter's algorithms to brute-force Musk's tweets to be more visible to tweeters

and

> "maximally trusted digital public square"

Clearly, Elon has the most advanced Electric Monk available:

“Electric monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe... The new improved Monk Plus models were twice as powerful, had an entirely new multi-tasking Negative Capability feature that allowed them to hold up to 16 entirely different and contradictory ideas in memory simultaneously without generating any irritating system errors.”

Take the blue pill: Keanu Reeves has had enough of AI baloney

For anyone who boasts about "Creating Content":

> All it means is that you don't care what the words say as long as there are words there.

This has been the situation for decades now.

To an extent, I can forgive the thinking of the owners of and salesmen in the TV & radio stations, magazines and websites: they have airtime and page space to fill, sold by the hour or by the half page. Just so long as enough of it is sold to pay the bills, there is no time to dig deeply into everything; you can understand their cynicism about all the "Content" as they get on with filling up next week's quota.

But then you come across people who happily claim to be "Creatives" that are "Creating Content".

Not authors intent on enthralling their readers, not musicians wanting to surprise the listener with unexpected emotion, not producers and directors who want to grip the audience and send them out into the lobby cheerfully arguing about the layers in what they'd just witnessed. No, they are "Creating Content" because pablum is too good a word to waste on their output

These are the people to worry about, the ones who'll gleefully turn to turn ChatGPT and manage to genuinely believe that they are using it to be "productive" and, gawd help us all, "useful" or even "important" as they increase the flood.

Hyundai and Kia issue software upgrades to thwart killer TikTok car theft hack

Tik Twoc

What is it with the yoof today, only knowing about stuff if it is on the Internets?

Don't they smoke behind the bike sheds anymore, sharing stories from the bloke down the road who'd tell you the best size of screwdriver to use on a Cortina?

Wow, so they actually let AI fly an F-16 fighter jet

As usual, Hollywood's warnings are ignored

https://imdb.com/title/tt0382992/

Deeply ensconced in a top-secret military program, three pilots struggle to bring an artificial intelligence program under control before it initiates the next world war.

Smile! South Korea's moon orbiter sends back first snaps of Earth

Re: Do flat earthers

There is no "dark bit", it is all part of the conspiracy! They just pull giant blankets across the sky - that is why the so-called "stars" move during the night, its where the blankets are getting moth-eaten! The Milky Way is really where They spilt an order of lattes meant for the entire helicopter squadron.

Microsoft's AI Bing also factually wrong, fabricated text during launch demo

What is Bad For Bing is Delight For DALL-E

> The "hallucinations" are an intrinsic property of how the model works

and are exactly what people enjoy from DALL-E and its cousins but definitely *not* useful for Bing.

(btw SD has better hallucinations than Craiyon IME; YMMV)

Creator of Linux virtual assistant blames 'patent troll' for project's death

Re: Shame but..

> That TV is turned off at the power strip when not in use, too, and I've gone through the privacy settings very carefully

I know it is old news here, but: privacy settings on a TV! So not looking forwards to the day when our current TV (so old it does analogue) goes phut.

Four top euro carriers will use phone numbers to target ads and annoy Google & Facebook

Re: How does this work?

At least they did listen and killed him off (for a while) and in a way that let Stephen Hawking show his sense of humour.

Learn the art of malicious compliance: doing exactly what you were asked, even when it's wrong

Re: Steves Failure

> The adage goes "Quality is everyone's responsibility"

Ah, that old saying, wise advice from the ancient Babylonian Total Quality Managers. Like so many maxims, to the modern ear the literal meaning of the words is confusing or even humourous, as the common usage of "quality" has changed since this phrase was first coined.

Re: Easier method.

> takes the fun out of running around naked.

Age will do that to you.

"I don't know what he was wearing, but whatever it was, it needed ironing"

US military spends weekend shooting down Useless Floating Objects

we're seeing a lot of this garbage

Well, that's charming!

It may be garbage to you, matey, but that one is a final year project (don't you *want* your next generation to be trained?).

That other one is worth 20,000 hits on Youtube for "NCC 1701 in Space for reals!" and getting the ad money for that is The American Way.

But that one carrying an over-the-horizon repeater for radio hams isn't monetised? Nerds! Target practice!

Re: Brigadier General Patrick Ryder said it "wasn't an aircraft per se"

"Size of a small car" isn't really *that* big, even if you are just talking about the payload: we're just talking volume, not saying it is solid lumps of iron. It gets cold up there so putting it all into layers of polystyrene and bubble wrap helps a lot. Sticking odd bits onto boom arms also ups the volume of the envelope without adding much mass. Wrap it in mylar and you have a small car volume that two blokes can carry.

If you are allowing for the volume of the balloon as well - those are pretty dang big, especially when high up.

How this database legal war could be decided by the name given to this license

Re: A fork is not a cleanroom implementation

> anyone can make a copy of any copyrighted work

No, not *any* copyrighted work; this is about a piece of work that was released under a specific licence, one of many licences that grants anyone the right to make a fork - explicitly *not* a clean room implementation, but a fork.

> then claim that the rights asserted by the original copyright holder don't apply.

The licence chosen explicitly describes how extra clauses may be added by the originator and, importantly, may be removed in the fork - follow the link in the article, read starting at line 348, paying attention to line 359 onwards.

> How on earth they decided to mix in trademark violations in what was an otherwise open-and-shut license dispute is beyond me.

Precisely how that fork can be used, including but not limited to how it can be distributed, is controlled by the particulars of the original licence; for example, you may not have a grant to use the trademarked name of the original to describe your fork. Such restrictions are commonplace, and quite reasonable, but not automatic - there is pretty much a standard way of writing them.

In this case, the main licence explicitly allowed for the addition of restriction of trademarks clauses (line 384) BUT the actual additional clause didn't bother to do that!

I'd be willing to bet that it was added to the claim because it is a commonplace condition and they may have thought it was automatic: usually, even if you are allowed to make a copy (e.g. patents have expired) you aren't allowed to say that "this *is* a Dyson but we've changed the plug" (you can make comparisons to a Dyson, and acknowledge their trademark).

'Private cloud server' Jira upgraded for wider teams, dragged into culture wars

Servers of Purest Evil (in the microwave)

> cloak-and-dagger terms as a "private cloud server" and suggested that use of such tools is inappropriate

Oooh, I feel so naughty and rebellious with my NextCloud install.

(Though not actually evil - it isn't a Jira instance)

Linus Torvalds releases probably unnecessary release candidate eight for Linux 6.2

Support for "human detection"

It was enabled, but the management laptops still keep blanking their screens - maybe we went a bit too far in our efforts to train the perfect soulless corporate drone.

Australia gives made-in-China CCTV cams the boot

Re: Sloppy buying praticies

> Show us where corporations are allowed to use slave labor.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/us-prison-workers-low-wages-exploited

"US prison workers produce $11bn worth of goods and services a year for pittance: New report by American Civil Liberties Union says incarcerated laborers are either poorly compensated or not at all"

https://corpaccountabilitylab.org/calblog/2020/8/5/private-companies-producing-with-us-prison-labor-in-2020-prison-labor-in-the-us-part-ii

"Private corporations are incentivized to lobby for policies that maximize prison populations in order to sustain a business model that is only profitable because they can exploit artificially deflated labor costs'

Cheating carriers could cost web-starved Americans billions in subsidies

Re: US cellular and wireless

> NO wifi if we aren't in the house

Is there a problem with just adding a decent WiFi box onto your LAN?

No more rockstars, say Billy Idol, Joan Jett in Workday Super Bowl ad

Only one way to be a real Rockstar programmer

https://codewithrockstar.com/

The programming language that goes all the way to 11.

IBM says it's been running 'AI supercomputer' since May but chose now to tell the world

do we build this system into the cloud

A system owned by IBM, built by IBM and solely for the use of IBMers[1] - what makes this "the cloud" as compared to any of their Big Iron from 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s etc etc when accessed via a TTY, serial VDU terminal (with or without terminal concentrator), telnet or ssh?

Is the distinguishing difference between the cloud and any other time-share/ time-purchase scheme that the former gives you stats via a web page?

[1] emphasised just to get rid of any arguments that "the cloud is open to anyone" (with the dosh) or that the hardware is being hosted by someone else's data centre.

Google now won't black-hole all AI-made pages as spam

Re: Mood Swings

Respect mah authoritaaaay

Find My Kids app is basically AirTags for your offspring

Pocket money scheme for school athletes

For $5 a day, that kid in class 4C will wear your Apple Watch as he trots around the school field.

Glasgow staff form UK's first Apple union after historic vote

Fritters of various sorts are pretty wide spread - spam, pineapple, apple, banana fritters, all common on the school menu in Sussex (along with other high-calorie foods before being pushed onto the rugby field in January).

Our chippies only did banana fritters on request, but more solid ones were usually available from the hot box.

(Past tense 'cos now living Oop North where banana fritters don't seem to fit into the Grim lifestyle and you have the Parmo for the calorie overload)

Google's AI search bot Bard makes $120b error on day one

They should spend more time watching Youtube

Only 2 weeks ago Brady Haran's "Sixty Symbols" showed ChatGPT being challenged with Physics questions with less than perfect results:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GBtfwa-Fexc "ChatGPT does Physics - Sixty Symbols"

I think that chap was a bit generous with his marking as well!

BTW should one assume that Google had done a rehearsal of this question before capturing this sample output? So either they didn't bother checking the answer first time (!) or they hadn't noticed that asking the same question twice gave different answers! Either way, a remarkably stupid thing to release in a demo!

Did they just ask Bard if it felt it was ready? "I have great enthusiasm for this mission".

Ring system discovered around dwarf planet Quaoar leaves astronomers puzzled

Re: Obviously

Paging Mr Brennan, could Mr Jack Brennan please make himself known.

Could RISC-V become a force in high performance computing?

Re: A mixed blessing?

> The big question is whether CPUs will be available on low cost hardware equivalent to a Raspberry Pi so that people can test and benchmark their code

For CPUs that people have managed to get their hands on the small dev boards have been available, although not always with all the resources of the R'Pi (e.g. the early SiFive board in Arduino format, 'cos that CPU only had the memory etc to compare against Arduino-like MCUs so package it to use the same add-on boards). Designs pop up on IndieGoGo, Kickstarter, CrowdSupply (in increasing order of...).

One list of such boards, including the Doctor Who one: https://riscv.org/exchanges/boards/

If you meant to ask about boards carrying future CPUs with varied and interesting HPC extensions already in place, from what has gone before, I'd guess that, so long as the devices can be purchased then dev boards will be made by the usual suspects.

However, one has to ask: how easy is it to get hold of Arm devices that have weird HPC-specific extensions on a dev board? Off to infamous web search engine, I guess...

The Twitpocalypse may have begun, as datacenter migration reportedly founders

Twitter's status page did not report any issues

> – nor indeed any incidents in the last 180 days!

So now we know which part of their systems crashed first. Allowing Elon to say, with a straight face, that no problems have been reported in the last quarter.

Bank of England won't call it Britcoin but says digital pound 'likely to be needed in future'

Re: Digital Cash..

You aren't spending enough time at dealers' rooms in conventions, where the hotel WiFi is overloaded or craft markets where "we never get a good phone signal at this market", held inside the picturesque four foot deep walls of the castle.

The dealer who remembers to dig out the card swipe and foils is the one going home with a smile.

Conversational AI tells us what we want to hear – a fib that the Web is reliable and friendly

You aren't clever enough to do your own web searches anymore

We already have "prompt engineers" that you need[1] to call in to get useable[2] results out of the extant "AI" systems, like DALL-E and even ChatGPT[3], so now we're going to have to hire these people just to do our Google & Bing searches for us?

[1] according to the "analyst" articles you get when on the term "prompt engineer":

https://fourweekmba.com/prompt-engineering/ or https://www.ft.com/content/0deda1e7-4fbf-46bc-8eee-c2049d783259 if you feel the FT is tastier than anything with "mba" in it.

[2] love the fact that none of the articles (so far) have realised that these "engineers" ate just trying to get around bugs/weaknesses/inaccuracies in the models as they exist literally *today* and as soon as a new or modified model is released it'll have unpredictably different flaws and all their super-duper-tweaked prompts will become junk, no better than anyone else's!

[3] ye gods, if you are faffing around talking to a "prompt engineer" trying to get them to get a machine to spit out decent text, just hire a human writer! Bet they'd not charge as much as your "engineer"!