Posts by that one in the corner

Most Londoners would quit before they give up working from home

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.

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.

Re: But why is this necessary?

> shopping trolley handles are known to have nasties like e-coli and salmonella on them.

Always have, always will do. There are those and loads of other microscopic bacteria on everything. Including me and you. Crawling up our legs, dropping from the sky.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=-kgIOWvrssA

Re: But why is this necessary?

> what's the point of the bank ?

To hold the actual funds, not just the record of them, so they can loan it out, mortgages and the like.

Re: "that's why the Big Stores have "loyalty card" schemes like Nectar"

If they already have that id number for you, may as well get their loyalty card and get the discounts. As it stands now, they are getting your info for free.

> seperate physical device

Time to bring back the Quipu

Re: The real problem with a blockchain

I stand corrected.

Blast, another brain cell occupied with blockchain info; what a waste.

Re: The real problem with a blockchain

Ah, just because the cost of running the blockchain is farmed out to everyone (want to use Britcoin? Run a miner on your electric bill! Proof of Stake!) doesn't mean you get to read it - govt spending kept under a different encryption key.

Until that gets leaked, of course.

Re: Pretty sure my pounds have been digital for decades

Ok, should have checked properly, Coiny McCoinface is old news.

Re: But why is this necessary?

> something the central banks have been salivating over for years.

Got any refs to reading material around this? It's not a system I've seen suggested, so would be good to get up to speed on the thinking.

Re: But why is this necessary?

Isn't that just basic economics & monetary theory? Nothing extraordinary, just how banks work?

Pretty sure my pounds have been digital for decades

> the way we pay for things becomes more digitalised

From the tap-to-pay token in my pocket through to the PDF monthly statements, how much more digital can it get?

> the potential for large and rapid outflows from banking deposits into digital pounds

> including the need for a central ledger to store user balances.

Ah ha - this is really just an attempt to create one single place to hold (ultimately) everyone's basic "chequing account", taking them all away from the high-street banks. That can't possibly have any down-sides.

Transaction fees, including conversions to and from BritCoin (you know it'll end up being called that, or worse - Coiny McCoinface!)? No risk of creating an effective split in who uses which (if bonk-to-pay works equally well for the customer, why would customers want to pay to convert?) so traders have to provide both services and absorb those fees as well, making for an expensive and confusing transition period.

Sorry, what was the point of this again?

> UK can't dismiss CBDCs, because its trading partners and allies are already working on their own equivalents

Well, we already pay conversion fees for cross-currency trading, so what does it matter to anyone if we're spending Sterling to buy Rupees or ERupees? We just get whichever our trading partner wants and take the conversion fees into account when deciding if the trade is effective.

How about if the two Ecurrencies were mutually convertable without any fees, that would help. They could peg them together as well, get rid of all those arbitrage costs and uncertainties as well.

One World Currency?

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"!

Biden attacks Big Tech's data addiction, wants more protection for kids

Please, stop making this about "the kids"

> The best way to protect our kids online is to protect everyone online

Absolutely. Direct and simple.

GitHub claims source code search engine is a game changer

Re: Why?

> as I can tell libcurl is a library that exposes the curl program's functionality to C code.

More like, libcurl *is* all the cURL functionality, the curl exe is little more than a honking great CLI argument parser to expose libcurl functionality to the shell - as is done with plenty of other libraries (e.g. just using a simple a REPL to drive a language implemented inside a library: Lua, SQLite etc)

> you certainly know that reading from a socket and writing to a file descriptor is no big deal

True, but that is only the simplest part of the problem

> So I'm not sure who this library is for

Anyone who doesn't want to re-invent the wheel by not only writing to and then reading from a socket but also knowing exactly *what* to read and write in order to operated the protocol required, namely HTTP to get a web page (as in the example). Or FTP if you give libcurl an ftp:// URL, or a Gopher URL, or POP3 or SMTP or any of the other protocols that cURL can handle. Not forgetting how to cope with the various error responses (e.g. "page permanently moved to") or...

You could always invoke the curl exe from your app but that is a bit of a faff, IMO, compared to calling the library function.

Google shows off upcoming AI search features, leaves Bard waiting in the wings

Going on a cruise?

> Google also said it's planning to start onboarding devs...

Didn't we use to just recruit people into these test programs, now they have to offer real incentives?

/s

You can run Windows 11 on just 200MB of RAM – but should you?

After Something Horrid happened to my Amiga A1000 (sob) I got a SCSI card for the Win2k box and moved the chain of hard drives over. That gave Windows a massive boost, no longer seeming to come to a complete standstill when doing something disk intensive, compared to the IDE drives.

Plus, at the time there were so few different types of SCSI drives on the market that when one of them decided to let the magic smoke out (literally blew a hole in the its main IC) I was able to go to a Computer Faire down in Temple Meads that same weekend and easily buy a cheap second-hand one (cheap 'cos no-one else wanted SCSI, go figure) and just swap over the drives' controller boards.

Re: How did we get here?

The BBC Micro was (still is!) running a 6502 at 2 MHz.

The BBC Master Turbo pushed its 6502-compatible CPU up to 4 MHz: made you feel like King of The World, running spreadsheets in 128 MB of RAM.

> I couldn't look at that default 11 wallpaper. So, there it sits, installed and abandoned.

Dare I suggest opening an application and using that to cover up the wallpaper? How much time does anyone spend with the wallpaper visible anyway?

Okay, your 2GB won't be enough for anything that really requires some oomph, like The Modern Web Experience, but you can fire up a sensible code editor!

China's Yangtze Memory reportedly lays off staff, evicts them from company housing

Re: " in marked contrast to US tech employers"

After hearing about "at will" employment practises and the layoffs at US companies (although the likes of Twitter hardly count as "tech" so guess ignore them) this does sound rather jingoistic.

Although one could hope that instead of finding the full settlement in one go there was a conversion to rental. But would you expect any company, US or Chinese, to be able/willing to take on the switchover to being in the landlord business at a time they having to lay off the staff? Nice idea, but realistically...

> Apartments were reportedly offered to core managers and R&D employees

So, not the lowest paid peons being evicted - probably not even a majority of those laid off.

MIT Press to trial open access journals, so long as someone else pays for it

Re: I feel a research project coming on

Apparently, one of the "extra costs" faced by publishers of open-access journals is in "preservation", i.e. making sure they don't accidentally delete your paper. This is a new burden for the publishers, because they usually dump that onto all the departmental libraries that subscribe to the journal.

So a serious answer answer to your question, we do want to put some effort into spreading around lots of copies of these PDFs (hopefully with a copy of the original LaTeX source) and arranging that all the copies get indexed (even if that is just left to WWW crawlers).[1]

In comparison to Twitter's Single Source of Deletion (aka Elon's finger on the back of the neck of the peon sitting at the keyboard).

[1] and make sure we keep around enough hard-copies of the instructions on how to build PCs capable of displaying PDFs after the apocalypse.

Re: What are diamond open access journals?

Skimming Google responses:

Diamond access is just like Platinum. It is also like Gold, but not quite the same.

Gee, thanks.

Dig some more: Gold, the author pays a few extra dollars - only a couple of thousand, nothing exorbitant (/s) and readers can download for free (OR just email the author, as usual). Platinum - sorry, Diamond - the huge, huge costs of providing the free download URL is borne by donations/public funding to help out the poor downtrodden Elseviers of this world.

Trust, not tech, is holding back a safer internet

Re: Trust the government / security services / police?

> From the UK, plenty of cases...

All those cases you bring up are reprehensible, but what percentage of the whole do they actually represent? Not forgetting that if they were really the norm, they wouldn't be reported, outside of the local rag.

> So, not a fan of trusting them.

Got anything better? Anything realistic that you could trust or ate you just giving up on society and digging your bunker?

Re: "Global spending [is] a quarter of the US defense budget"

And the massed ranks of spacehopper cavalry: multi-terrain, even amphibious[1]

[1] good balance required but it does wonders for your core

It is possible to extract copies of images used to train generative AI models

> it plainly stores all of its training data

And magically increased my ADSL speed when I downloaded Stable Diffusion last week, so that it could include the copy of all the training data! Oh, and it has also glued a few extra SSDs into the PC to hold it all!

What a bargain!

Shame it didn't upgrade the GPU as well, that is probably in the next release.

/s