Re: But surely an ethical bot
It doesn't lie; it hallucinates. That's the term of art, now.
Posts by Graham Dawson
2678 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2007
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So much for CAPTCHA then – bots can complete them quicker than humans
Graphene foam is the future of IoT power, maybe
Official science: People do less, make more mistakes on Friday afternoons
Soft-reboot in systemd 254 sounds a lot like Windows' Fast Startup
Wednesday 2nd August 2023 20:12 GMT 
Re: And Pottering continues to screw up Linux for its primary purpose....
The only relevance systemd has is to poettering's laptop. He wrote it to make his computer boot faster, because he couldn't work out how to configure his init properly. Pulseaudio was written for similar reasons: he couldn't work out how to multiplex audio, so rather than read the farging manual, he wrote a wrapper daemon for alsa that does the same thing, but with more overhead and less transparency.
If a distro maintainers had just configured alsa properly, none of this would have happened.
Wednesday 2nd August 2023 15:56 GMT
Re: Once again
In this case, it's solving a problem that it has largely created. The requirement to reboot after most updates is due in no small part to the way that systemd has taken over so much of the OS. It used to be that you could just restart services and carry on, but now even relatively minor updates require a reboot. This is a problem that would only get worse under poettering's plan to cram update management into systemd, using read-only system images.
Tesla steering problems attract regulator eyes for second time this year
Wednesday 2nd August 2023 20:02 GMT
This is, incidentally, why I don't trust the move toward drive-by-wire that tesla has pioneered and so many others are copying. Advocates keep pointing to aircraft fly-by-wire systems as proof that there's nothing wrong with the idea, but quite apart from a number of notable issues that fly-by-wire has had in the past, there's one fundamental difference between aircraft and cars: in an aircraft, there are three computers, which constantly compare notes and reject any apparently spurious inputs. They are built to tolerances that far exceed the specifications (just don't mention the 737 max) and are robust enough to handle at least one of those computers just up and dying.
A ford or a tesla, or any other car, is built to the lowest cost to maximise profit, and these manufacturers are not above making potentially lethal design decisions if they think it'll save them more money than they'd lose in the ensuing lawsuits. All drive-by-wire does is ensure that, when a fault occurs - and it will - my car will suddenly not respond to any of my inputs, and might additionally decide that it's actually a spaceship and launch itself into a ravine.
And don't get me started on the touchscreen console fad. It's entirely cost driven and ignores more than a century of advances in ergonomics.
The choice: Pay BT megabucks, or do something a bit illegal. OK, that’s no choice
After Meta hands over DMs, mom pleads guilty to giving daughter abortion pills
Artificial General Intelligence remains a distant dream despite LLM boom
Inclusive Naming Initiative limps towards release of dangerous digital dictionary
Thursday 22nd June 2023 15:01 GMT
Re: Too Anglocentric
I once had to deal with an American who kept insisting that Africa is populated by "African Americans". He almost physically couldn't say "black" and couldn't seem to grasp the idea that there are multiple ethnic groups in every African nation, none of which (save for some Liberians) are anything remotely American.
Thursday 22nd June 2023 14:55 GMT
Re: And by "solving" a non-problem ...
Abort is a very necessary term. It isn't halt, or stop; it's a iser-induced emergency termination of the process. They only included it because the Americans are having an argument about abortion. In other words, they're including words that are currently similar to politically charged topics. What words will be offensive tomorrow? Will stop and search be deemed verboten?
UK smart meter rollout years late and less than two thirds complete
Capita wins £50M fraud reporting contract with City of London cops
Google snubbed JPEG XL so of course Apple now supports it in Safari
Oh Snap... Desktop Ubuntu Core to arrive in 2024
Wednesday 7th June 2023 21:18 GMT
Re: Swings and roundabouts
Also an it professional. I daily Linux for both work and home use. When I've been required to use osx, I've found it too restrictive and locked down for my needs. It would continually place roadblocks in my way, making me waste time to work around them, where Linux just gets out of the way and lets me do my job.
Debian 12 'Bookworm' is the excitement-free Linux you've been waiting for
Monday 5th June 2023 20:53 GMT
Re: Another devuan user here
It shouldn't be too much work for a distro, like debian, to introduce a properly functional default alsa config and some scripts to handle hotplugging. The reluctance of any distro to do this is why we ended up with pulse (a wrapper around alsa that poettering wrote because he couldn't figure out how to mix audio streams), with pipewire then being the answer to the myriad problems pulse subsequently created. I wonder if we'll get another wrapper soon, or if someone will work out how to port OSS back over from the BSDs.
Bookings open for first all-electric flights around Scandinavia … in 2028
Friday 2nd June 2023 10:22 GMT
Battery tech still has quite a bit of potential to get better.
It really doesn't, though. Barring some unexpected new physics discovery, we're pretty much bumping along the top end of what's possible with battery technology. To make commercial electrical-powered flight viable, we would need several orders of magnitude increase in energy density and a similar reduction in weight, but we're not likely to see even a single order of magnitude increase. This is before accounting for the amount of time required to charge those batteries, which would be far longer than the normal turn-around time for a commercial jet.
Energy density is the killer issue. Batteries don't have it, and without that fundamental, unanticipated discovery, will never have it. We could discuss how efficient EVs are until we're all green in the face, but that ignores the fact that EVs have to be efficient in order to extract every last useful amp from those batteries and still don't match the performance of conventional engines. The moment you go add any extra weight or drag, range goes flying out of the window.
Predicating this entire process of transformation on a hypothetical future advance, when all of the currently hyped or anticipated "next big things" are adding a meagre few percentage points of improvement at best, is idiocy. The entire process of "decarbonisation" is economic suicide.
Watchdog calls for automatic braking to be standard in cars
Thursday 1st June 2023 22:02 GMT
Re: Cars kill about the same number as guns
UK gun deaths are somewhat higher now, per capita, than when the last major ban was enacted. The fact of the matter is, UK gun crime had always been low and has little correlation to the various gun control measures enacted here. The issue is clearly cultural.
Feds, you'll need a warrant for that cellphone border search
UK tech industry pushing up salaries – but UI devs out of luck
Google Photos AI still can't label gorillas after racist errors
Tuesday 30th May 2023 09:11 GMT
Re: Racist?
There are lots of examples of machine learning algorithms that appeared to be very accurate, but whichwere eventually discovered to be making their "judgements" based on things that were entirely tangential to the expectations of the developers and trainers. They don't analyse an image and understand what it is, they just determine statistical similarities. Based on the fact that both a picture of a gorilla and a picture of an african have a large, dark area roughly where the face is, it's not at all surprising that "AI" decides they're both the same. The most famous example was the "AI" that determined that any picture with snow and trees in it was a picture of a wolf.
Why you might want an email client in the era of webmail
Privacy Sandbox, Google's answer to third-party cookies, promised within months
Asahi Linux developer warns the one true way is Wayland
When you try to hire a freelancer to write SQL and all you get is incorrect AI garbage
Wednesday 10th May 2023 08:39 GMT
Especially the ones that claim to have read your CV, but then call when it asks for initial connect by email, don't give any details of the position until you call back, and then turn out to be offering permie jobs when the first line on your CV makes very clear that you're after short-term contract roles.
Yes, I am bitter.
How Arm aims to squeeze device makers for cash rather than pocket pennies for cores
Europe's right-to-repair law asks hardware makers for fixes for up to 10 years
Alarming: Tesla lawsuit claims collision monitoring system is faulty
Monday 20th March 2023 03:12 GMT
Re: New car?
Nearly all new cars have all these driver "assistance" features as standard, which I find immensely frustrating. They're distracting at the best of times, but at worst they generate a false sense of security, by conning the driver into believing that the computer will warn them - or even save them - if bad things are going to happen. Lane-keeping assist means they don't have to pay attention to the wheel, proximity and blind-spot sensors mean they don't have to pay attention to what's around them, collision-avoidance sensors mean they don't have to pay attention to what's in front of them. You end up with a driver who spends more time staring at the enormous touchscreen than paying attention to the road ahead. It's not something that can be easily resolved with education, either, because the features are still there. It's inevitable that drivers will lapse into relying on them.
You might be limited to the Dacia Sandero in future.
The UK's bad encryption law can't withstand global contempt
Saturday 18th March 2023 00:51 GMT
Re: Yet again the Tories come along with this bullshit.
No, I did not support Farage at any point. He didn't form UKIP. He took it over. Before he came along, the party's goal was to transform our relationship with the EU into something more akin to Norway, retaining membership of the EEA and cooperating on issues that facilitate free trade, but without the unnecessary trappings of statehood that the EU was assigning to itself. After his takeover, it was a Farage Is Amazing party.
Your assumptions are wildly off the mark, and yes they are prejudiced, because you're assigning beliefs to me that are simply not evident from anything I've said.
Thursday 16th March 2023 16:06 GMT
Re: Yet again the Tories come along with this bullshit.
You're not exactly disproving my point. Without knowing anything about my voting habits, you've already begun to assume a great deal about me, based on your own prejudices and a few keywords.
But to answer your question: My views on Farage were formed when he transformed UKIP from a narrowly-focused, non-partisan, single-issue party, into his personal publicity vehicle, and have not changed since. I would vote for the devil himself before voting for any political party he endorses or is part of.
Tuesday 14th March 2023 13:13 GMT
Re: Yet again the Tories come along with this bullshit.
Almost all the other parties are just minor versions of the big two, so not worth voting for as they'd only implement the same policies, which all stem from a consensus position on so many topics that they might as well all be the same party anyway. Anyone who admits voting for any other parties, the ones that actually differ from the consensus position enough to matter, is pilloried as a transcendental crackpot, possibly racist, and whatever other epithets fit the party's core platform.
Tuesday 14th March 2023 13:13 GMT
Re: Yet again the Tories come along with this bullshit.
ID cards were "european thinking". The overarching justification for them was to harmonise with EU requirements for a single identity document, which the Home Office gleefully ran with, because it would give them the opportunity to impose a bureaucratic and authoritarian yoke on the populace. There are no "innocents" at any level of this, only degrees of evil, with the EU being relatively benign in this instance - they are, after all, simply attempting to harmonise the existing state of play in most EU member states, where ID cards are not seen as an intrusion by the state in the same way as they are here.
The implementation of ID cards hadn't become an EU competence (and I believe it still isn't) and remained something that member states had prime legislative power over, so we weren't required to implement them at the time. The home office wanted them anyway and simply ran ahead of the slow moves toward harmonisation.
It is worth noting that the original topic of the article - breaking encryption so we can all think of the children - is also something the EU is also pursuing, so even that isn't a "tory" policy, or some unique policy of this country's government in opposition to "european thinking". If we were still in the EU, the government would support it at the supranational level, while playing the "nothing we can do guv" game at home. The situation now, as with the ID card debacle, is that the government has to actually argue in support of the policy, rather than pretending it's simply a passive receiver of EU diktats. We, at least now, have the opportunity to oppose it directly, rather than trying to somehow organise a pan-eu opposition.
Monday 13th March 2023 15:42 GMT
Re: Yet again the Tories come along with this bullshit.
This isn't the tories; it's the Home Office. They've been banging this drum consistently for the last thirty years, or whenever they realised computers were a thing, regardless of which party was in power. The Home Office civil service is extremely good at assimilating whoever ends up as Secretary of State for the department and turning them into just another statist, authoritarian, ID-carding ban-everything-camers-up-the-toilet-tube nutcase, who thinks it's not only possible, but necessary to monitor every moment of every citizen's life, just in case they think about maybe doing something unapproved.
Financial red tape blamed for London losing Arm IPO
Monday 6th March 2023 19:42 GMT
Re: The bind
Brexit wasn't supposed to happen. We were supposed to vote remain, so our government could continue implementing pointless, complicated regulations while blaming it all on the EU. Leaving scuppered them, because now they have no excuse and have to actually justify all their regulatory bullshit rather than passing the blame. That is the Brexit dividend: The real source of our problems has stepped squarely under the lamppost and revealed itself, meaning we can start applying practical solutions, rather than flailing at shadows. A bright light is the cure of many things.
Don't worry, that system's not actually active – oh, wait …
Huge lithium discovery could end world shortages ... Oh, wait, it's in Iran
SpaceX lobs second-gen Starlink satellites into orbit
If we plan to live on the Moon, it's going to need a time zone
HMD offers Nokia phone with novel concept: Designed to be repaired by its owner
Monday 27th February 2023 18:28 GMT
Re: Lasts 3 years
Three years is better than most. HMD have gone from being just another reference design mill to having some pretty decent offerings, with no bloat outside the stock google spywareapps. Can't currently get a replacement ROM for the X20 (my current phone), but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.
It's getting crowded on the ISS: SpaceX Crew-6 to launch Monday
Signal says it'll shut down in UK if Online Safety Bill approved
By order of Canonical: Official Ubuntu flavors must stop including Flatpak by default
Bank of England won't call it Britcoin but says digital pound 'likely to be needed in future'
Wednesday 8th February 2023 22:39 GMT
Re: But why is this necessary?
Not personally, no. In aggregate, yes. It's one of the touted "benefits" of the smart meter, that it can be used as part of a more responsive load-shedding regime by managing demand at the meter level. All the power company/government/crazy rich island guy has to do is set upper limits on consumption and have the meter manage demand automatically. This already happens.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
