Posts by that one in the corner 5493 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Nov 2021
> unless there is one who publicly executes employees.
It wasn't an execution, he was just scheduled to polish the Falcon fairing and happened to be given an unfortunate timeslot. The straps? Oh, all our window cleaners use them, H&S you know. On backwards? Oh dear, such a klutz.
Now, whilst we talk about your code, could you just grab that chamois...
> the first chip NOT based on von Neuman architecture.
Except for anything based on Harvard Architecture, like, say, the AVR family [1] - Arduino ring a bell?
How about all your current x86-64 CPUs, with their Data Flow Architecture that allows out-order-execution to take place?
[1] yes, I know, it is a modified Harvard, but can you name a more well-known example?
By the descriptions given by Musk fans that Frohnhoefer's tweets were "lashing out with emotion", rude and didn't provide any factual answers. "Bad mouthing his boss" - another one of those UK/US things, as I missed where Frohnhoefer used the word "prat" (or equivalent).
Are we getting individualised Twitter results that means those people are reading some other tweets attributed to Frohnhoefer?
Fans also saying that he should have just replied with "Yes, Sir, 100% agree with you, Sir?". So the "disruptive engineers" that Elon hires should be disruptive lickspittles!
Aaargh, no, no, this has got me clicking on the "Show this thread" links now. Can't look away. Must look away. It's too late for me, run, save yourselves.
That is true.
Which raises the question whether "enabled" times out and resets, putting any unresponded-to flaws public? As how many people (promptly) formally abandon a project rather than wandering away and forgetting about it...
Maybe I'm overthinking this.
From the article, it sounds like the default for this private reporting is "off" until each repos owner enables it. Which seems a bit odd. In fact, disabling it at all seems odd - unless it has some clear disadvantage (which would be?) why would anyone want to disable it?
The only thing that comes to mind is that this might be a route to spam a project with bogus reports in a way that isn't visible to the rest of the world (compared to creating 10,000 bogus bug reports in the public tracker). But you'd expect at least a warning in the announcement if there was a flaw that big in the system...
Can anyone with more experience than me (not hard) of being a Github project owner shed some light on this?
Leaving aside the US Army not even knowing what is in their own app (!), all the others "knew* they were "surveiling" their users (aka spying on them, data rape etc) but that was ok because they are all Good Guys.
But as soon as there is even a hint that the Russians could be getting the same data, throw their hands up in feigned shock "who could be so dastardly?"
So, are they going to give up spying on their own users or just find a good old US replacement and carry on, business as usual?
Though one bit I liked: members of the NRA don't need to feel paranoid any more, now they know who was watching them.
Also, it took me ages to learn how to say "Novosibirsk" with confidence, glad to have an excuse to trot it out again.
To be fair, these stories are up against some *really* tough opposition at the moment (we see you lurking there, Elon).
Any story sent in at the moment is going to feel like small change; fingers crossed that El Reg knows that and is holding back some good ones to use after we've regained our sense of normality. Please let be the case. Pretty please?
So many PC cases have ludicrous numbers of colourful lights in them that last time I rebuilt my home PC I couldn't even source a motherboard without weird lighting effects (thankfully disabled in BIOS).
Maybe we can convince the youngsters that, if even whitebeards have them, LEDs are totally passe (e acute that is meant to be) that they have to move onto The Next Big Thing - which is, of course, the USB-C powered Jacob's Ladder. That should be good for a few hijinks.
So how long does this ML take to train on a new user's gait? Do you spend the first 100 hours wondering if, this time, your left foot goes forwards whilst the right one puts on full braking or, like yesterday, it will be a luxurious smooth ride - backwards?
Remember, the major problem with seven league boots was the groin strain as one foot suddenly shoots out 38 kilometres past the other.
In response to a question about this in October, the Teesside principal investigator for the Novavax and Moderna COVID-19 vaccine trials said that the latest indications are that immunity from Covid variants is short lived, to the extent that they no longer expect to see "herd immunity" effects.
This is the same whether immunity comes from vaccination or acquired from infection.
Oh, and the presence of testable antibodies does *NOT* mean you are "immune" and certainly not "naturally immune", whatever that is supposed to mean.
Barrier? Will there be red flashing lights and an excited voice shouting:
"1.9 exa-flops; 1.95 exa-flops; she won't make it, we've got to shut it down; 1.99 exa-flops".
Camera flare streaks across the room; an exhaust fan shrieks, winding up past top-C, the sudden gust blowing off the young Assistant Programmer's glasses and hair scrunchy: "My God, Albert, you are beautiful".
"1.999 exa-flops." A loud cracking noise, like a whip wielded by the gods themselves; a visible shockwave passes through the room, rattling the processor cages.
"TWO exa-flops! 2.1! 2.2!" The noise recedes, the room stops shaking, the emergency lighting switches back to white. "Holding steady at 2.2 exa-flops, Sir".
Close up on the main console, as a shaking hand approaches a large button then, decisively, punches it: "Press release away and running. We've done, by Heaven, we've done it!".
> then lift the pen and wander off to another corner apparently unconnected
I spent many hours trying to stop the plotter doing that, starting with code that worked fine drawing on the screen but was sub-optimal when the same commands were sent to the plotter: did you know that changing the pen colour on the screen is faster than on the plotter? Bloke who first wrote this code didn't! [1]
Great fun was had with scaling for various paper sizes, providing trim marks with overlaps so that you could sticky tape multiple plots together without leaving gaps. These were Gantt charts and the like for some rather large projects. In order to try and avoid customers managing to hit untested edges cases, the program was written to cope with pages from approximately A-3 to A12. The latter tested by sending the HP-GL code into a little formatter that printed lots of them on A4 via the laserwriter, then cutting out the postage stamps and sticking them all together. Then handing the results over to our Project Manager as a copy of our own latest progress (he took it well).
All done pre-Windows in TurboPascal, of course. None of your nancy-boy loadable printer drivers here, t'were all done with overlays.
[1] yes, that was also me.
It would be non-trivial to store all those labels on each node as its weighting was changed during the training. And then to sensibly track through what nodes were involved, and how much, in generating this bit of the output, gathering the labels and finally generate some useful results from the whole lot (hey, we can train an ML system to do that).
The real question is, how much extra computation & storage would that require and is it worth it to MS to pay that cost? Given that they could fling those machine resources at building up the main Copilot model.
Or they could take the money needed to pay for that extra processing for X months and buy their way to some legal ruling that says Copilot is totally fine to do what it is doing. And for months X+1, X+2 etc the legal team who managed it get 1/k of the saved costs in their paypacket (k being whatever they can screw out of MS - but those will be expert screwers, so may even end up with 1 > k > 0).
I spy, with my little eye, someone who has absolutely no idea what the concepts of "copyright" and "licensing" mean!
Firstly, except for a few outlier cases (unless you want to bring them up), *all* of the source code you are ever going to interact with is copyrighted.
Secondly, *all* licensing *requires* that the material be copyrighted, otherwise there is nothing that *can* be licensed.
Thirdly, (ignoring courtesy, academic requirements and plain common sense) it is the licence provisions that say under what conditions the code can be copied and whether attribution is required.
Unless they state otherwise (because they can put into their books code from other people, so long as they obey the relevant licence - and that code can include code from yet other people, so long as ...) then all the code in the book is (c) O'Reilly. Your use of that code is controlled by their licence, which itself is included inside the book (and is also included, verbatim, in the online provided-for-your-convenience copy which I linked to and which Richard 12 was kind enough to copy from the book as confirmation).
Finally, at the risk of breaking your brain, even if O'Reilly decided to publish a book that contained nothing more than 200 suitable source code examples - and clearly stated which bits were copyrighted by whom - with nothing more than a contents page and a blurb on the back saying "this is a collection of other people's copyrighted source code, used under the terms of the the MIT licence, arranged so that you can learn by working your way through from start to finish" they would STILL clearly mark that book as "Copyright O'Reilly and Associates". And be totally correct in doing so.
Hmm, good choice of example, the Perl Cookbook. Assuming you mean the O'Reilly one, you do know that the licence doesn't require any attribution, so in that case those coders are acting completely within the letter of the law:
https://resources.oreilly.com/examples/9780596003135/
The same, or effectively the same, licencing is given at the start of all the other "cookbooks" in my collection (mostly because any cookbook *without* such a clause is a pain to use).
Books with large examples (complete programs and/or libraries) these days expect you to download the material, complete with notices and licences, which therefore ought to be "self attributing" (and if colleagues are failing to commit licences along with source into the repo, or are leaving gaps in the compliance document, well, that is a larger problem).
Having said that, anyone who copies a tricksy bit of cookbook code and doesn't attribute it is an idiot: they'll not understand "their own" code next month. Have you considered getting yourself a better class of colleague?
Racism?
I just re-read the article and didn't spot a single reference to any characteristic of any individual at all. Did you perhaps misread "Qatar snoops" as "Qatari snoops"?
No, wait, spotted it: you think that "regime" is an ethnicity and all the members of that group are being labelled as authoritarian!
It was called just "Star Wars" - all the contemporary posters called it that, the magazine articles, TV reviews etc. The UK ones as well as the US imports and "from our Hollywood correspondent".
The on-screen text crawl at the beginning described it, as it still does, as "Episode IV", titled "A New Hope", before giving what is basically a "previously on the mind of Mr Lucas" recap of the story so far. Which gave it the feel of one of the old serialised story shows and the sense that there was a great big galaxy we were about to jump into.
From interviews and articles at the time, Star Wars was meant to stand alone as a single film, with a happy ending (except for Chewie being left out of the medals).
Then it all became a tad more successful than anyone really expected, definitely more than the studio did, and a sequel came about. But still without a clear plan - Leia kissing Luke was just a bit cheeky at that point (and for those of us who'd read the officially-sanctioned tie-in novel "Splinter of the Mind's Eye" surprisingly restrained - had they gone off each other?) - other than that there were going to be two sequels. So we get an unresolved story, far more than just a simple sequel hook.
By the time "Return of the Jedi" came out - and you could go to an all-day triple play, still starting with just plain old "Star Wars", Lucasian interviews were including the "I think of it as three trilogies" blurb and the comment that Vader and Kenobi had last met in a fight on a volcano (which I recall at the time was taken with a pinch of salt, another call back to the worst excesses of the old swashbuckling fantasy stories, fisticuffs on the crater's edge).
Even for the 20th Anniversary CGI-fest special edition releases, the posters still called the first film just "Star Wars". It was only with the release of the prequels, 1999 onwards, that the retcon rot really started to set in and saying "Episode IV" or "A New Hope" was heard outside of the pretentious set: "Phantom Menace" was very explicitly referred to as "Episode I" on the posters and advertising.
Next week:
In episode eleven of "When Nerds Collide" we will be explaining away the discrepancies in the Y-wing fighter/bombers; good night.
In this corner, at least.
I've never read so many tweets before - this whole saga has me hooked now!
What will the next parody be? Who should I follow to get the best round up of the day's juicy "I quit!" tweets? What advertisers will still be here tomorrow? Will Elon continue to tweet as though he really is doing tech support for celebs? How long until Elon is the only one left and really is doing the tech support?
All these questions, and more, will be answered on this episode of - Musk!
The one that asked him to complete the Managing at Twitter 101 course.
He thought that tweet and the course work had been set up as a prank for the new boy; how else could you explain such ludicrous chapters as "Respecting your colleagues", "How to earn the respect of your team", " Peon - and other banned phrases".
Which particular machines is he good at?
Tunnel diggers?
Vacuum tunnel transit?
Automated car battery changers?
Trucks?
Semi-trucks?
Dancing robots?
Cave rescue?
Brain implants?
Robot taxis?
New models of an existing car - ok. Hiring lots of people to design a rocket system for him - ok. Almost forgot - the flame thrower.
A bit of a blunt instrument?
Like the sentiment, but in this case isn't the *actual* problem the regurgitation of the inputs by the ML, more specifically, without attribution?
Because it is possible to feed code into an ML whose results pass does something other than just fling out chunky bits of predigested sources.
Better ideas for such an ML system exist, but the immediate thought is: how about one that looks for code that is suspiciously close to your copyright material appearing elsewhere, as though it had been spat out by Copilot?
Looking at the picture of the current interior of the Toyota BZ4X in that article, my first thought was "that looks cramped". Our current car is the widest we've had, but with a solid central console and mini-consoles on the doors, there is no side room left for legs. Doesn't matter if passenger or driver. No, we are not over 6 foot tall[1]
Whatever happened to just having a simple gear lever and the handbrake tucked between the seats? Made it a damn sight easier to clamber over and get out the "wrong" side when necessary or simply safer to do so.
Bah. Progress my backside.
[1] sorry, everything else is metric but too stuck in ways to do body size in anything other than Imperial.
Didn't get the full tank experience, but a company day out had us gathered in a tracked personnel carrier, taking turns to bounce everyone around a very bumpy field. Made all the more fun because I was a recent hire and my colleagues hadn't realised I'd never driven anything before, so really had absolutely no idea what I was doing!
We can all play at Minority Report or that deadly game of battleships (World Domination) from Never Say Never Again.
Or just use it in the living room window: switch it on at twilight and let the neighbours see your lively cocktail party, instead of the old pizza boxes as you slump in front of Sweeney reruns.
OTOH, if you watched the video for the display, just imagine how much fun could be had hacking into all those video walls in the shopping mall: if you thought that an Imax could make you dizzy or believe you're falling, what about when you are really walking one way but the scenery isn't *quite* keeping up with you...
> Transparent & tiny high capacity battery. - No Tick
Wireless power, radiated from a watch-like device. With a bone conduction effector on the end of your index finger, you take a phone call by sticking your index finger into your ear and simultaneously powering up the display on your contact lens.
Whilst you pretend to be a secret agent or bodyguard from a Hollywood film.
