Posts by that one in the corner 5493 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Nov 2021
I don't want to be seen as whinnying too much, but there is horseplay in that post:
> neigh Jobs-esque
Nigh (on) Jobsian
> (neigh: already bloody here too soon)
Nay, already bloody here to soon
I'll rein myself in and trot along to the next story now, don't want to make you lot canterankerous (sorry, oatso sorry for that one).
> and inappropriate collection of sensitive personal information
is the MO of *all* the social media (and so many other) websites and apps. Why ban just a select few from state networks?
"Oh, the TikTok data goes to the CCP, but FB data is safe in the US". Leaving aside that *still* leaves the bulk of humanity at the mercy of both, what assurances are there that FB et al aren't sharing with the CCP (maybe via some indirect route)? After all, they have a duty to their shareholders to sell as much data for as much money to as many buyers as they can reach.
Let us not forget the FitBit story, where the yomping routes were found because of all the data showing up in those strangely empty areas of the map: no need for commie nackdoors needed.
The day I was convinced that IoS had truly arrived was when I read an article on The Register about someone who was looking for sponsors to fund him riding a Segway coast to coast across the US: he promised to make money for the sponsors by "generating content every day".
This was when it was brought home that even the people planning to write for the web considered that the fruits of their labour was nothing more than pablum. No desire to actually have his (for it was a he) own voice or even seem genuinely excited by the prospect of The Great Stand And Slightly Lean Forwards Across America; nope, just whatever guff the web wanted that day.
This being The Olden Days, El Reg was being gleefully sarcastic as well.
Are you by chance referring to the comments about 5G, where you were making claims about the high frequencies causing problems with protein folding but:
1) dissed the whole 5G system on the basis of frequencies that are not (AFAIK - corrections accepted) not actually in use
and
2) the only citation you gave on this subject was to one paper about a simulation (so, not verified in an organism) which is behind a paywall - and then muttered darkly about people only bothering the abstract (which is all that I've done)?
Hate to say it, but with that amount of effort put into trying to convince people of you bona fides and the accuracy of your claims, at the moment you do rather sound like one of the Wikipedia editors being complained about here!
As for not wanting to doxx yourself - you do know that if you posted a link to your paper here no-one would actually know which author was you unless you told us? Unless you are thinking that ravening hoards of commentards will descend upon all of the authors of any paper you do cite, on which case I have to ask: what did poor old Singh, Burada and Roy do to deserve being so exposed by you?
> Its not as if Musk it personally...
From the article:
>> "In general, we are simply not moving fast enough. It is driving me nuts!" he said in a follow-up email.
Musk is the one encouraging them to do a rush job - and it is him who is making ludicrous public statements about his goals for the project.
Company wants to plant chips in our heads, then we find out that the work was rushed, the test animals died.
When does the report come out that the sole human test subject was given a nuclear battery to power his implant?
Killing test animals by rushing the procedures to get results faster? That isn't doing science, it isn't doing engineering, it is just doing capitalism - badly. Or deliberately creating the plot for the movie and novelisation.
And slap the iPhones inside a parmo[1] - no wimpy x-ray is getting through a proper 'boro parmo
[1] that is a classic chicken parmesan with a NE England twist[2]
[2] in your stomach, best to keep the Rennies to hand, you Southern person[3]
[3] sorry, but I can't do the accent [4]
[4] actually, I can, but I won't
> computer malfunction caused the end-of-mission order to be transmitted to the spacecraft
The malfunction was fully described by Comrade Chief Programmer Hank T. Picklehammerovitch The Third, shortly before his disappearance during a tour of the local borscht factory. "His departure was a mysterious as his arrival" a colleague was reported to say.
Many a thing you know you’d like to tell him
Many a thing he ought to understand
But how do you make him stay
And listen to all you say
Can we just ship Elon over to Austria and make him sing whilst walking across the Alps into Switzerland?
At the very least, can't make things any worse - except for the jokes, of course. "The Sound of Musk", does that work? "When the car sparks, when the bore stops, when I'm tweeting bad, I simply remember my Falcon in space, then I don't seem so mad".
You have to remember that he "knows more about manufacturing than anyone else alive"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwWrOzzwWQw
so either Musk doesn't agree with you or he is in the middle of re-coding Twitter from the ground up, to be released next Monday[1].
[1] timescales may be changed without prior notice
Before you-know-what Durham ran a great series of public Saturday morning science lectures.
Chatting to the guys who created and ran these cosmos models after their lecture (we got tea and biscuits, very civilised), I asked whether they collaborated with the Computer Science guys to help optimise the code and run a few more simulated millennia per week. Their answer: nah, the hardware just gets upgraded! Then articles like this one get written - everyone wins!
Then again, they did also demo a booth built for science fairs, school tours and so forth. You have a set of knobs and levers to set basic constants (amount of dark matter, strength of the nuclear forces, little things like that) and it shows you an animated simulation of how the cosmos would develop under those conditions - would galaxies form or would all the matter just sit around as cosmic smog? And that was running on nothing more than a Raspberry Pi [1](couldn't even have been a mk 3 Pi!)! If they can do *that*...
[1] okay, *maybe* the Pi was just selecting a pre-rendered video based upon the inputs selected, but what kind of misery guts wants to look behind the curtain like that?
How can you possibly make Not-Good-Code self-commenting?
Anyone (un)lucky enough to read my code will soon come across a comment that begins /*Wibble: ... */ which then goes on to indicate how this "could be done better" if there ever was the need (or you just have too much time on your hands).
For example "this does a linear scan through an array of strings 'cos it is one function call to do so and only gets called once per week; if this ever shows up over 1% of execution time in a profile run then the best thing is to use this search tree module that is already being linked into the app from over there."
I.e. I know it isn't perfect, today it doesn't need to be, it just needs to work - and, yes, I did consider the alternatives.
(The sub-optimal code is also self-commenting to the how and commented to the why as well, of course. Cough.)
> If you are sure it is not necessary, no need to find them just to blame them for having it
Not finding them to blame them, but more than once, having spotted something that doesn't belong, it was worth discussing it because we found that a misunderstanding had led to multiple occurrences, which the perp (!) was able to quickly correct (he knew where the bodies were) and the commits went under their name, showing that they'd taken responsibility.
> I could reached the power switch and just flipped it off...
Something is just not quite right about that sentence.
Do we read it as "I could (and did) reach the power switch" OR "I could have reached the power switch (but was having too much fun laughing)".
Given the general attitudes of El Reg commentards, do we think John 110 was more likely to have been a gentlemanly hero or...?
Apparently[1], you could learn the history of experimental hardware, particularly the centrifuges, by reading the scars in the walls of the university basement lab: note how the 4 cm deep gash bisects that strange chemical stain...
[1] "apparently" 'cos I never went down to look - mad science is scarey!
> This is what version control should absolutely not be used for
Uh, can't agree with that "absolutely" - you find an apparent problem with a recent code change and want some more info about it, going for a chat with the person who made the change is the best approach. You can check the issue tracker (linked to from the commit comment, wasn't it - if not, go for a chat...) and then back to the requirements first, of course...
Note that, despite the name of the Subversion command "blame" (which I also believed was chosen as a short command name when devs were capable of talking tongue in cheek), "going for a chat" does *not* mean "chucking blame around" (well, not until they prove themselves to be total &£@+%&).
Get your sword, Coding Style Heretic!
Always have your braces lining up vertically, indent one space (tabs are for barbarians!) inside the braces. Then use your editor's "mark column" and "jump to matching brace" actions to give you a nice vertical highlight when everything matches properly.
Macros, baby, macros.
For anyone lucky enough to have missed it, there was a craze in the 80s to write C that looked "readable", from all the coders who knew BASIC/Pascal/ALGOL/SIMULA and were suddenly presented with a C compiler on the IBM PC (Amiga programmers knew better!). Cue hundreds of headers starting
#define BEGIN {
Even using "FOR" instead of "for"!
The best fun was had with the slight changes in preprocessor behaviour - it seems that some would strip out comments whilst others just did the macro & include expansions, leaving comments in the output. So cue people writing
#define FOREACH(i,n) int i; for(i=0; i<n;++n) // C is weird, starts count at zero
FOREACH (j, k) BEGIN printf(" %d", j); END
Would the numbers appear on stdout? Maybe?
> Calling Australia circa 1993, from Swindon circa 2010
If you still want to make that call, by 2023 Swindon should have just caught up with 1993, so only a few weeks left to wait. Can't do much about the long-distance, but if you like I'm sure we can find enough volunteers to carry the town over to Oz for you.
Indeed, you can do pre-emptive multi-tasking on pretty much any processor with a timer interrupt (so long as you have the RAM for the stacks and process control list - and there aren't any weird bits of state you can't read and/or write in the switcher). Fun factor goes up if you want IPC and can't find any atomic instructions...
Having an MMU makes it robust(er).
I would agree, except that there is no evidence to validate that assumption in any of the reports on this story that I've found so far.
In particular, please refer to the earlier Register article at https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/20/medibank_data_breach_worsens/ and the PDF it links to where Medibank describe the state of affairs: there is no mention in that of any loss or encryption of data.
> there is only a limited chance paying a ransom would ensure the return of our customers' data ...
What? What does "returning" it mean?
Was the data deleted from MediBank's system and they hope restore it (corruption-free, of course!)? Haven't spotted where that was claimed.
Maybe their data is like the EMH - apparently the Doctor's data can only exist on one host at a time...
> And then also ask yourself which and/ or which user NEEDS that metadata...
That much metadata is intended not for the Users.
Now, be a good boy and just put the picture from your 'phone straight, they'll know what to do with it.
Remember, render unto Meta that which is meta.
> looks like a spectacularly inappropriate use of AI.
That seems like a bit of an over reaction. Google haven't enslaved a General Systems Vehicle's Mind, forcing it to look at FaceBook image posts all day.
They are just running a lump of code to do a job: a trained tensorflow-lite model which decides which bit of the image to put out in full detail next. Really, it is doing little more than the existing progressive scan does, except instead of having a "top to bottom (skipping k rows), left to right (skipping j columns), repeat with offsets until the whole image is done" co-ordinate generator it has a "pick an interesting bit, pick another until the hole image is done" generator.
So, do you object to using that many CPU cycles "just to compress an image"? Many cycles are used just to generate stuff that someone hopes is pleasing to the eye.
Or do you find the idea of training a ML model to this task inappropriate? It probably kept someone gainfully employed for awhile and one can think of other uses for this or a similar model - how about setting camera focus? Always worth at least trying an idea...
Satisfy my curiosity - what is so 'inappropriate" here?
X := my past performance at judging the desirability of a fashion item, taking into account its practical application, apparent cost of materials, durability etc.
Y := apparent similarity between myself and other El Reg commenter, based on vaguely remembered posts
f(a) := likelihood person of class 'a' follows a comment written like this to the end
Z := ratio(f(fashionable young person), f(commentard))
Combining X*Y with Z and weighting for "how many sleeps before Christmas" implies: Huawei are going to sell lots more of these than any of us can believe.
