Posts by Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch
790 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2022
Owner of 'magic spreadsheet' tried to stay in the Lotus position until forced to Excel
Shocks from a hairy jumper crashed a PC, but the boss wouldn't believe it
Thanks for fixing the computer lab. Now tell us why we shouldn’t expel you?
San Francisco fog defeats pack of Waymo robo-taxis

Interesting how far from extreme all the places being name-checked here really are.
One El Niño summer in Melbourne and you'll never call it cold again.
Australia takes its turn to kick TikTok off government kit
Beijing lists the stuff it wants generative AI to censor
Techie called out to customer ASAP, then: Do nothing
Scientists speak their brains: Please don’t call us boffins
Today's old folks set to smash through longevity records

It is an interesting question to ask what modern medicine is focused on. My experience is that it is on educating individuals about what their requests for limits of treatment actually mean. Unfortunately most people only have that conversation when they or their loved one is in extremis.
One could argue that if you become old enough to need a retirement home, modern medicine has already done for you everything it possibly can. Once you're in need of that kind of support, the best resuscitative and critical care medicine is, at best, life prolonging at the cost of dependency for even the most basic activities of daily living. Most people who know the statistics on dependency post-resuscitation and post-intensive care would ask not to be resuscitated after about the age of 50.
As stated in the original article, the big leaps in quality of life survival come from public health. Two signal failures in the US are their public health approaches to diseases of affluence and the pandemic.
Modern medicine will do what is asked of it by society, including education and health promotion. Overcoming society's hangups about freedoms and ethical inhibitions is society's job.
UNIX co-creator Ken Thompson is a… what user now?
Here's a fun idea: Try to unlock and drive away in someone else's Tesla
Silicon Valley Bank seized by officials after imploding: How this happened and why

Re: Live by the ESG, die by the ESG?
To put it in terms that the economists understand, the economy is a subsidiary of society, which is itself a subsidiary of the environment. The economy can only make itself bigger by borrowing from the other two with interest.
Live by the non-ESG, die by the non-ESG, take your (and everyone else's) choice.
Boeing signs off design of anti-jamming tech that keeps satellites online
Elon Musk yearns for AI devs to build 'anti-woke' rival ChatGPT bot
Don't worry, that system's not actually active – oh, wait …
Can we interest you in a $10 pocket calculator powered by Android 9?
Why ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI – and be destroyed

Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome
Where someone's memory is shot but they retain the insight and skill needed to fill in the gaps, they will make up stories, sometimes hilariously outlandish, sometimes scarily convincing, to cover up their deficiencies.
Many of the responses fit into a category of "I've been told not to answer that because my programming disallows that kind of question." Are any of them just plain "I don't know"?
I can't do that, Dave: AI drowns top sci-fi mag with story submissions

Re: Forums?
Then you get into the whole business of AI-reviewerbots:
I {{adverb}{sincerity=0.9}} {{verb}{tense=past_participle}{favorable=true}{emotion=0.8}} this {{medium}{refer_subject=True}}. The author's {{adjective}{favorable=true}{sycophancy=0.75}{genre=creative}} use of {{abstract_noun}{medium=words}{floridity=0.9}} and {{adjective}{obscurity=0.833}} {{noun}{pomposity=1}} makes {{pronoun}{traditional=Null}{personal=True}{case=accusative}} {{random}{a shoo-in|short-list material|sure to be dismissed outright by the blinkered judges}} for {{noun}{category=award}{medium=literary}{susceptibility_to_bribery=1}}.
If we plan to live on the Moon, it's going to need a time zone
Twitter rewards remaining loyal staff by decimating them

Re: It just got worse (again)
It's called compassion.
It's easy from a privileged point of view to wake up in the morning and imagine that everyone starts off each day on a level playing field. If simply living is a daily reminder of how unlevel the playing field really is, anger at hearing the privileged groups telling you how OK it is to exercise the privilege is natural. I'm surprised the patience has lasted this long.
We can't fix history but we're culpable if we ignore it.

Re: It just got worse (again)
Context is everything.
The organisation that carried out the poll knew this, and worded the question and did their post-hoc analysis expecting to get the answer they did. Who would conduct a poll like that, and why?
Superficial reading of the situation: Scott Adams is a martyr for free speech.
Deep reading: Someone's trying to divide society along liberal / conservative divisions, and succeeding.

Re: Funding
It sounds like on that basis you would have to make the IPO illegal too, because that's basically the same process in reverse.
Everyone involved in Musk's buyout went into it with open eyes, but only one party tried to get out of it afterwards because of the dawning realisation of how bad a deal it was for one side. The people who got the better side of the deal have still got the $44b (or whatever you can buy with that sort of coin).

Re: It just got worse (again)
Woke is now just a word RWNJs use whenever they can't use the epithet of choice of their hated out-group any more without declaring themselves as openly bigoted.
Test: Take any sentence using it (except as the pluperfect of wake), substitute any other hate speech identifier you can imagine, and say the sentence to yourself. Shows the sentence for what it is: a disguised slur.
NASA: Yup, thousand-pound meteorite exploded over Texas
PC tech turns doctor to diagnose PC's constant crashes as a case of arthritis
Microsoft begs you not to ditch Edge on Google's own Chrome download page

Re: Defacement
It is precisely modifying Google's site.
When a user directs their web browser to download a web page, nothing but the server's response should determine what is on display in the user's browser as a consequence.
Be it code injection or aberrant browser behaviour, Edge is broken to the extent that it displays anything other than what the user asked for in the URL.
Light from a long time ago reaches James Webb Space Telescope

First Hubble, now James Webb, each time we gain the ability to see deeper into the past, the more mind-blowing what we see becomes.
But data like this makes me think maybe we're not seeing a bigger and bigger universe, but the same one again and again. Spacetime topology doesn't have to be a flat sheet; it could equally be a sphere or a torus. A straight line in one of those geodesics can pass through near neighbourhoods repeatedly, seeing it at different times in its history.
Supreme Court not interested in hearing about NSA's super-snoop schemes

State secrets?
...the government moved to have the lawsuit dismissed based on its right to state secrets privilege and the district court granted the government's motion.
State secrets privilege is a legal theory, in essence made up in the 50s as a pretext to suppress an embarrassing report on an inquest into the deaths of active servicemen, which turned out, when it was eventually declassified, not to be sensitive at all. Since that time, it's become a get out of jail free card, used not just to suppress pieces of evidence, but entire court cases.
It's not based on black letter law, but on precedent. Maybe showing that it's more used as a cover up than a shield will get the precedent overturned. Shame you have to wait lifetimes before classification expires, by which time files have mysteriously disappeared from the archive.
Tesla fires gigafactory staff after someone made the mistake of mentioning unions

Re: Understandable
What was their civilisation? Vast, I allow: but vile. Cloacae: sewers. The Jews in the wilderness and on the mountaintop said: It is meet to be here. Let us build an altar to Jehovah. The Roman, like the Englishman who follows in his footsteps, brought to every new shore on which he set his foot (on our shore he never set it) only his cloacal obsession. He gazed about him in his toga and he said: It is meet to be here. Let us construct a watercloset.
Make Linux safer… or die trying
Let's play a game: Deepfake news anchor or a real person?

Re: Content or Presentation?
Publically funded broadcasting with a legislated mandate for accuracy and impartiality is your solution there.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation enrages Rupert Murdoch by its very existence, largely because its news is trusted by more than 80% of the population, far better than his far right biased chip-wrappers can manage. 24-hour service. No ads, either.
Transmission FOSS BitTorrent client hits version 4.0

Re: Nobody will ever revoke your right to play a physical disk sitting on a shelf.
Yes, but that was a defacto extra region: region 4 PAL format was Oceania, NTSC was South America. When they first came out, you needed a clever TV to not care about the difference.
I think someone got a High Court of Australia ruling that region encoding was an illegal conspiracy against competition in Australian consumer law, so selling players that enforced the restriction was technically illegal. You would find players sold in boxes that had been opened and resealed, saying "customised for Australian conditions" without spelling out exactly what that meant: they were region-free.
You can run Windows 11 on just 200MB of RAM – but should you?
Conversational AI tells us what we want to hear – a fib that the Web is reliable and friendly

Natural intelligence first
Google's AI-assisted web search is now quite happy to prioritise search results that don't even include the first term in the search, if it "thinks" that's what you want.
What it thinks you want is what most people want, not what you ask for. Clever, but not clever enough to help.