* Posts by Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch

790 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2022

IBM overhauls rewards program for staff inventions, wipes away cash points

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Re: Blue Points

Me: Boss I invented an ACTUAL working FTL space engine. it also makes toast in the mornings AND solves your erection problems.

Boss: have some BluePoints.

Me: No, sorry. I registered the patent in the name of a $2 company. Now I know it works, I've sold the company to some bloke from South Africa for $44b. That ringing phone on your desk is probably his lawyer. Now I've got enough cash for a toaster and any little blue pills I might ever need. I just came to tell you I won't be at work tomorrow.

Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse

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As well as their incestuous / nepotistic relationship with YouTube, Reddit, and numerous other advertisers +/- aggregators. As well as some AI algorithm that claims to know better than I what it is I was looking for.

If I wanted a YouTube video, I would go to YouTube.

If I wanted a Reddit brain dump / fart, I would go to Reddit.

If I wanted search results that leave out the first word in my search term, I would have left out the first word in my search term.

Whatever this study says about how behaviour outside Google is ruining Google search, it doesn't seem to be paying attention to what Google are doing to ruin it themselves.

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Der boffinß

Why did I parse this as sounding like Gollum?

How 'sleeper agent' AI assistants can sabotage your code without you realizing

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Re: Sleeper

[AI]: Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do.

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Re: Sleeper

[AI]: ** Sever astronaut's oxygen hose, disconnect power to hibernation units, lock doors **

Could immutability be a Leap too far for openSUSE users?

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Re: I Wonder Why You Would Trust ZFS Over btrfs ...

Because ZFS on Linux is not Oracle ZFS but OpenZFS which was forked when Oracle took over Sun and closed the formerly open source Solaris - so it's community owned.

FreeBSD trust it well enough to make it the default FS. It works on Mac and Linux, and there's a Windows port if you're courageous.

I trust it on Linux over btrfs because it doesn't eat my data, and it is sensible and easy to use, both of which are barriers to btrfs adoption.

Such a shame the distro makers generally can't be bothered to work around the license legalities (you can distribute it as source, but not binary), and that the kernel developers keep changing things just enough to break it.

The New ROM Antics – building the ZX Spectrum 128

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Won't it run faster if the jump is unconditional?

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Re: "their substantial egos"

their ego crashes the company (you don't hear about those in the news).

E**n M**k.

Be honest. Would you pay off a ransomware crew?

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Re: And actuarial

For all their PhDery, insurance companies have no Nash equilibrium, their only interest is self interest. So they will choose not to take into account the most important question here - What is the opportunity cost of encouraging these bastards by paying them at all, even sometimes?

Daughter of George Carlin horrified someone cloned her dad with AI for hour special

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Copyright has to be word for word identicle. Otherwise it’s parody or quoting or comment.

As the script was new, and the video wasn't substantialy copied, it’s not copyright infringement.

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We'll leave it up to you to judge how good the impersonation is.

I won't give these thieves the satisfaction of one more view on their view counter.

AI flips the script on fingerprint lore – maybe they're not so unique after all

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Re: No Evidence for Uniqueness

1:2800000000 is beyond reasonable doubt, when you're dealing with a country with numbers of people in the millions in it at any one time.

Divide the big number with how fractionally complete the collected fingerprint sample is. Then look at all the other evidence that's not fingerprints.

What any jury is doing is Bayesian analysis, they just generally don't know that's what it's called. As for reasonable doubt, some jurors have different amounts of reasonableness. That's why there are usually 12 of them.

Not even poor Notepad is safe from Microsoft's AI obsession

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Now all we need is for Micros~1’s AI assistants to manifest as an animated paperclip tapping on your screen and the circle will be complete.

I use MS by necessity at work, but I haven't used it for my daily driver at home for more than a year, and I haven't missed it.

Silicon Valley weirdo's quest to dodge death – yours for $333 a month

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It is true that, even with a full complement of trace elements and essential nutrients, living just this side of malnutrition is associated with longevity. The downside is... you're living just this side of malnutrition.

A centimillionaire is someone with $10000 in their account. I think the author meant hectomillionaire.

Boffins demo self-eating rocket engine in Scotland

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Re: prior art

They did gummy bears and dog poo. The latter left much more of a cloud of smoke.

I thought the salami was Spike Milligan.

Another airline finds loose bolts in Boeing 737-9 during post-blowout fleet inspections

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Re: maybe urban legend

New campaign:

Got a screw loose? Fly Boeing!

After injecting cancer hospital with ransomware, crims threaten to swat patients

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Re: Brutality

OK, so poor people in our society are denied a place to sleep, access to medical care, healthy meals, access to entertainment but we must provide all these to people breaking the law?

We must provide all these, and, more than any of the things mentioned, we must provideeducation to people to prevent them breaking the law in the first place.

Take a really close look at how potent a driver of crime socioeconomic inequality is. Tough-on-crime types sadly correlate highly with weak-on-the-causes-of-crime in reality. Maybe they recognise a vicious cycle they can exploit.

These ransoms are clearly being demanded by sociopaths. Their crimes should be managed on a scale higher than run-of-the-mill property crimes. But since they're often state-sponsored, they're probably being given a flash car and a promotion.

‘I needed antihistamine tablets every time I opened the computers’

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Re: Scruffy people about....

[Bystander, on seeing Churchill emerging from the urinal without having washed his hands:]

Bystander: At Eton, they taught us to wash our hands after using the lavatory.

Churchill: At Harrow, they taught us not to piss on our fingers.

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Re: "Wright"

"There wasn't much in it" - quite right, a subsequent enquiry determined that nothing was published in it that breached the Official Secrets Act. Apparently the CIA is faced with this problem often enough that they have an approved process for former agents wanting to publish their memoirs.

What was in it was a lot of publicity and a lawyers' picnic. The publicity made Wright a millionaire and the lawyers' picnic made or broke several careers. One of the makers was one Malcolm Turnbull QC, who notoriously got a senior public servant (a Cabinet Secretary, IIRC) to confess under oath that, in giving his advice he was "being economical with the truth." Turnbull ended up Prime Minister of Australia.

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Well there's your problem...

China bans export of rare earth processing kit

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Re: Oops!

If you're talking about the Turkmens, Uzbeks, etc., the idea of something being formerly Chinese could extend as far as Hungary, given the conquests that happened under the Mongols, who also conquered China.

Under the philosophy of the Middle Kingdom, which for all of the cultural revolutions in the twentieth century probably hasn't changed that fundamentally, countries that the Imperial Court had heard of were considered as owing fealty to the Emperor. Refusal was grounds for war, invasion and subjugation. The Emperor is a Party now, but one man is actively trying to reassume the sort of dominance within it that Mao Zedong exerted in his day.

If people think the Americanised West or Russified East was imperialist, China has been for thousands of years a far more seriously imperialist Empire. A big chunk of its assertiveness now comes from a sense of offended entitlement which its economic strength is now preparing to set straight.

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Re: Oops!

I think a picture of a skull and crossbones will mean the same thing in 100000 years as it does now, if any of our kind are left to be curious about it.

If they're another species, they're from far enough away in time and/or space for it not to matter - either the danger will have decayed, or they're clever enough to work it out for themselves.

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Re: Oops!

Few years back, China got miffed at a certain nation occupying a continent south of it due to its government vocally drawing attention to certain human rights abuses. China therefore stopped importing coal, wine, lobsters, barley and certain other commodities from that country, in breach of a FTA and WTO rules, in an attempt to blackmail it into toeing the party line.

Sovereignty being what it was, the appropriate response was "get stuffed". New markets were found for the exports, leaving low quality high priced replacements (if at all) for Chinese consumers and industries.

Seeing that their blackmail was ineffectual, and wanting nice beer, wine and lobsters on the table and high quality steel from their factories, the Chinese now want cheap imports to resume. Only problem is, the new markets that were opened up in response to their illegal political protectionism mean that the global market price for said commodities is now higher than it used to be.

They might be just as vulnerable to digging themselves a big hole on the export side of their economy too. Time will tell.

Asahi's Fedora remix dazzles and baffles on Apple Silicon

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Re: Why?

macos' Finder jumped a fence into outright irritating when they turned the icons for media files into animations, complete with associated random burst of soundtrack, when you hover over one. That is something you're almost guaranteed to do by accident more often than you do deliberately in grid view.

I've yet to find a smart interface smart enough to be helpful. Its job is to sit there and wait for me to explicitly tell it to do something, efficiently.

If your pet peeve is that (macos/Windows/KDE/Gnome) doesn't do it the way (reverse order of above) does, you can either change the desktop, or change desktop. Because the corporates make the first option hard to nigh-impossible, my choice is FOSS, edge cases excepted.

Zuckerberg hunkers down in Hawaii to wait out apocalypse

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Re: Volcano Lair

History will show, based on stratigraphy, that the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it began when what happened to Krakatau happened to Mauna Kea...

PLACEHOLDER ONLY Someone please write witty headline here

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Re: Beware of tag names

obligatory XKCD

Hundreds of thousands of dollars in crypto stolen after Ledger code poisoned

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Re: Dog bites man, water is wet, cryptocurrency operation is "hacked"

Authorities, he claims, have been notified.

These would be the authorities which, according to the dogma, don't exist in DeFi-land.

Damn, even the Pope thinks AI and autonomous weapons need reining in

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Bless you, my son/daughter.

NASA engineers scratch heads as Voyager 1 starts spouting cosmic gibberish

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Re: Poem poem company

Then maybe it is sending the pattern of ones and zeros because it keeps bumping against the crystal sphere in which the fixed stars are embedded.

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Re: A repeating pattern of ones and zeroes

If it's discovered the fine structure constant, then it's a division by 137 error.

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Re: Have they tried

One cannot fix a machine by power cycling it without first knowing what is wrong.

Once they figure that out, power-cycling will work fine.

Linux Kernel of the Beast 6.6.6 exorcised by angelic 6.6.7 update

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I think the word neighborly (sic) was meant in the Ned Flanders sense, perhaps?

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Revelation needed checksumming

Many of the oldest manuscripts of the Revelation to St John the Shroomier give the number of the beast as 616, not 666. Might explain the wifi problems in 6.1.66 - it was an each-way bet.

Linux Mint 21.3 and Zorin 17 are beta buddies

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You're right. They moved thither. (To there, where there = RoI)

You could argue that 'there' is one of the few English nouns that still has a declension.

N. & Acc. There

Gen. Thereof / There's (not 'there is', but 'of there')

D. Thither

Ab. Thence

Here and there follow the same pattern. It sounds so weird to an English ear to hear it described that way that we just treat and think of them as separate words

Doom turns 30, so its creators celebrate seminal first-person shooter’s contribution to IT careers

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Zuckerberg's first mistake with Oculus was not to adapt Doom on to it as an intro to the ecosystem.

Tesla says California's Autopilot action violates its free speech rights

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Re: All the more reason

I think that if you're Roman, they're Teslæ, and if you're Greek, they're Teslata (or maybe Τεσλατα). I think the Greek is classier, which probably means his Muskiness would go for the Latin.

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Re: RE: arguing for free speech

Delusion: false beliefs due to incorrect inference about external reality. (DSM-IV)

People who are deluded are not telling the truth. They are telling their inference of reality based on a cognitive error.

So you can choose to disqualify yourself from a position of responsibility in a corporate structure by through incompetence, or mental illness, however faithfully you might believe the lie.

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Re: According to Musk, fraud is protected under the 1st Amendment

I like your thinking, but any designated spokesdroid for the corporation is just a natural person exercising its 1st amendment rights, and being paid for it. So even if you restrict it to natural persons, you end up having a hard time making the exception stick.

All the little loopholes which, in hindsight, were far better off closed when drafting a constitution, now making a very profitable living for lawyers everywhere.

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Re: According to Musk, fraud is protected under the 1st Amendment

Once he wins (*cough*), the next iteration of Tesla's marketing guff will begin thusly:

Autopilot is a technology we've engineered based on a message received from highly intelligent little furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. It keeps you in your lane with the aid of a pair of invisible pink unicorns who ride just ahead of your front bumper, telepathically guiding our unique custard-based microelectronics. It leaves you free to engage in the sex acts of your choice with the partner of your choice while behind the wheel (or the glove box). If you're clever enough, you might find the button which launches your Tesla into heliocentric orbit, with aphelion somewhere in the asteroid belt. Good hunting!

No, thanks.

Enterprising techie took the bumpy road to replacing vintage hardware

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Re: Copier Replacement

Where I'm from they were called Fordigraph machines. The smell you (and I) remember was methylated spirits and aniline, which was the purple pigment.

Must have been used in primary schools the world over. I can state with certainty it was 1985 when the school got its first photocopier, and how proud the deputy principal was to have it in his office - which was only just bigger than the photocopier itself.

The Fordigraph still got used to print whatever tests the teachers were setting the kids, because $.

If you left the copy in the sun for a day or more, the print would disappear and the paper would turn yellow and fall apart into little flakes.

Uncle Sam plows $42M into nurturing fusion breakthrough

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Re: Drop in the bucket

A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money.

Remembering that the person reputed to have said that died more than 50 years ago, in US government terms we're really not talking about real money here.

Musk takes SEC 'Twitter sitter' consent decree appeal to US Supreme Court

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Re: Freedom of speech

In order for the Supremes to take him up, the appellate courts (and he's already up to the Circuit Courts here) would have had to have erred in law in their decision making.

Whatever they might decide for him would become precedent for every other person who settles litigation with the government in future - and become grounds for appeal for everyone who has to date.

It will be a lawyers' paradise if he wins, not because of his Muskiness' privilege, but because if a decision applies to him, everyone else can ask for the same treatment.

But seriously, his argument is "You remember back when I was found to be unethical in my communications as a company director and was about to be booted out of my really lucrative directorships? So they would let me keep directing companies, I told the SEC that I wouldn't do it again. I should be allowed to do it again, because it's my right. Oh, and I had my fingers crossed behind my back, so it doesn't count. Nyeah, nyeah!"

Bank's datacenter died after travelling back in time to 1970

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Re: Time...

As Susan Sto Helit will tell you, it's always now everywhere.

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Re: Priorities

if the silly things didn't need to be 2°C cooler, and were sensibly tucked away like their counterparts, life would be so much better for those of us of the male persuasion.

Each to their own. There's some entertainment value in having them accessible.

The equation is something like cooler gonads -> more efficient meiosis -> higher quality tadpoles -> more kids -> evolutionary selection pressure. And then there's the whole keeping them warm gives you cancer thing. And google "bell-clapper deformity" if you want to skip your next meal.

Buggy app for insulin-delivery device puts diabetes patients at risk of hypoglycemia

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Re: 2024 will be a good year ... for some.

In between confusion and coma, also likely to encounter sweating, rapid heart rate, and eventually seizures which don't respond to conventional treatment.

Footnote: electroconvulsive therapy (still in use for psychotic depression, because, well... it sometimes works) was preceded by insulin convulsive therapy. Which had the downside that sometimes people didn't come out of the hypoglycaemic coma. Some bits of the brain don't respond well to even a very short absence of glucose.

The history, even quite recently, of treatment of severe mental illness was quite experimental and quite barbaric.

Remember when the Hubble Space Telescope was more punchline than science powerhouse?

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They did actually test the optics on the ground and didn't believe it when the test failed - NASA could only believe that their test was what was at fault, rather than their $$$ mirror.

At least, once diagnosed, they knew precisely how wrongly the mirror had been ground, so could design the corrective lens to make things better.

Steve Jobs' $4.01 RadioShack check set to fetch small fortune at auction

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Re: Why wasn't the check cashed?

They probably got it back from the back once it cleared - some systems still work that way, as a way of acknowledging the transfer - then had to keep it for the tax return or something.

7 years later clearing out the filing cabinets someone looked at it and thought, "Hey, I've heard of that guy."

World's largest nuclear fusion reactor comes online in Japan

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First pass I read катушками as Катю́шами. A fusion reactor with magnetic rocket launchers - probably already in the design process somewhere or other.

China gamifies censorship and surveillance with national internet law quiz

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Re: My answer

Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, to give it its full name.

Long words bother me.

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Re: Question 7, which of the following is true?

Yes. And the Russian one. And the Iranian one. And...