* Posts by Michael Wojcik

12132 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Dec 2007

US car industry leads the world in production cuts over chip shortages

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Here's an idea -

I can't speak for the quality of the horn on Burns's motor carriage, but perhaps you meant "tout suite"?

The original phrase is actually "tout de suite" (literally "all in a row", but figuratively used for "right now"), but it's been corrupted into an English idiom, so few English speakers include the "de". But it would be nice if for a while we could at least spell the remaining words as they are in French.

And while modern cars have many advantages over earlier generations, touchscreens are an abomination.

Midwest universities unite to support US chip industry revival

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Great idea and long overdue...

Other university alliances in that part of the country, such as the CIC, have had some success in achieving their stated goals. There's actually a fair bit of academic cooperation among the research universities in the Midwest (as there is elsewhere), public rivalries notwithstanding.

It's good to see the community colleges included in this one, since they're an important pipeline for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, particularly non-traditional undergrads (i.e. ones not coming directly out of high school) and under-represented populations.

How TSMC killed 450mm wafers for fear of Intel, Samsung

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: So another big fat Intel FAILURE at 450mm

Bob, this guy is EATING YOUR LUNCH. What will you do to maintain your market position?

Yeah, we'll just take that first network handshake. What could possibly go wrong?

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: The guiding principle

the definition of NULL in C is a null pointer

That's not correct. ISO 9899 requires that NULL be an object-like macro which evaluates to a null pointer constant, or a null pointer constant cast to type void*. A null pointer constant is any constant integer expression which evaluates to 0.

That means the following is a conforming definition of NULL, for example:

#define NULL '\0'

A null pointer is an r-value of object-pointer type (i.e. a pointer, but not a function pointer), containing the implementation's representation of the null-pointer value (which need not be all-bits-zero, though that's what it is for the vast majority of implementations).

So NULL and a null pointer are quite different things in the C language, even if the former evaluates to an instance of the latter in appropriate contexts.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: The guiding principle

When I taught university classes I always stressed to my students that they should turn in work, even if it was incomplete or broken. Even better, turn it in multiple times until the deadline is reached. (Generally I'd even give credit for work after the deadline, if you'd shown me you were making an honest effort before it.) Show me, in class and office visits, what you have, what works, what doesn't. Ask questions.

Show me your progress. The point is to learn, not to create toy artifacts.

GitLab versus The Zombie Repos: An old plot needs a new twist

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: TL;DR

seems the real problem is using a development platform as an archive

That is precisely the value proposition of services like GitHub and GitLab that centralize git repositories, instead of leaving them distributed.

Personally I believe that's Using Git Wrong, but it's the direction a majority of the industry seems to have decided on.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Why stop there? Cancel your subscription!

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: I don't understand the suggestion...

No need to invoke the rough and slouching beast of web3 (assuming you're talking about the Gavin Wood version, not the Semantic Web, which TBL has sometimes referred to as "Web 3.0"). There are plenty of ways to distribute storage that don't require that half-assed rubbish. IPFS is one obvious example.

In this case, you wouldn't need full decentralization, though, because GitLab would serve as a central proxy. You'd just run a server (or more likely a tunnel client, to avoid firewall, NAT, and addressing issues) and dedicate a chunk of storage, and GitLab would know what was stored on your machine.

In practice for this work GL would want a lot of redundancy, so the effective per-user storage would be significantly less. But a "give resources rather than money" tier isn't an inconceivable variation on the freemium model.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: The problem is

And some zombie projects may be of future interest even if they aren't used in production software now, such as research projects.

I have a couple of projects from my graduate-school days on Sourceforge which aren't likely to be used in any running software at the moment, but might be picked up by some future researcher. They're small – but a lot of small can add up.

Anyone who's done significant archival research can attest that sometimes your project turns out to benefit from something obscure that no one else has looked at in years. In the course of my research (not in CS, but then not everything is CS) I've read books in special collections that hadn't been requested for a century.

Now, I'm not saying GitLab should be obligated to maintain these archives (though they did rather set themselves up for that). I'm just saying it's a shame to lose even some fairly trivial projects, because you never know when those might be interesting later.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Turtles All the Way Down Scenario?

The industry is currently in a tizzy over this very question, thanks to various powerful organizations (such as the US Federal government) moving toward requiring SBOMs (Software Bills of Materials).

I've been involved in a number of discussions and research spikes into the SBOM process. In the general case, and in many specific instances, it is not easy to solve – even if you already have robust tracking of your first-order dependencies, and even for projects which are not a horrible Lovecraftian agglomeration of third-party components (see basically all "modern" web UIs).

Remember the humanoid Tesla robot? It's ready for September reveal, says Musk

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Gigafactory?

Gag-a-factory.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Yeah right

They CAN and WILL replace all human in almost all jobs in the future!

Good thing I work in the present.

Props on some quality kookery, though. I was getting a bit tired of Geller's "I invented AI, fools!" posts, so a little variety is appreciated. Sorry, I mean a little VARIETY is APPRECIATED, THANKS!

Apple tells suppliers to use 'Taiwan, China' or 'Chinese Taipei' to appease Beijing

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: CHINA IS NOT GOING TO GO AWAY...

The US has building codes that ensure the soundness and safety of construction

Well, building codes and Diane Hartley.

We don't always get the buildings right. Codes help, certainly, but it's not a foolproof process, particularly when architects get ambitious.

See also: the windows of the John Hancock building in Boston; Skyline Plaza in Bailey's Crossroads, Virginia; and so on. There was a partial collapse of an apartment complex under construction in Michigan about ten years ago.

Of course, if the software industry could reach this level of catastrophic failure it'd be a huge improvement, so who am I to throw stones? (Particularly if I'm in the Hancock building.)

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Slave labour

Really. "Reintroduction" of slavery? It never went away; we just nationalized it.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Red-line

Eh, you know the old saying: Don't ascribe to shilling what can adequately be explained by fanboyism.

DuckDuckGo says Hell, Hell, No to those Microsoft trackers after web revolt

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Batbing

crosby.bing.com

chandler.bing.com

maraschino.bing.com

bong.bing.com

web.bing.com

absor.bing.com

grab.bing.com

bri.bing.com

Really they had so many better options.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Terminology

Yes, and it's a term of art in IT security.

Shall we complain about, say, the use of "facial recognition" rather than "guessing"? We could be here all day.

Too little, too late: Intel's legacy is eroding

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Ambitious?

Intel's Sapphire Rapids Xeon Scalable processors are without a doubt its most ambitious chips ever

Oh, I think there's some doubt. How is Yet Another x86 Chip more ambitious than, say, Itanium? I'm not claiming Itanium was good, but it was more ambitious than just another generation of the same damn architecture. And the iAPX 432 was significantly more ambitious than Itanium. Even the i860 was probably more ambitious than Sapphire Rapids.

I take your point that Sapphire Rapids is trying to cram a lot of improvements into this x86 generation, but it's still the same old ISA and the new features are known quantities. Sapphire Rapids is Intel playing catch-up, not taking a chance on something new.

UK wants criminal migrants to scan their faces up to five times a day using a watch

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: What has immigration status got to do with criminal punishment?

not sure about that they already made an idiot actor president back in the 80's

Bullshit.

I'm not a fan of Reagan or his policies, but he had been governor of California, among other jobs, before he became president; and his papers provide a huge amount of evidence to show that he was a well-informed policy wonk with a great deal of insight into the functions of government when he was first elected POTUS.

There's little question that he suffered severe cognitive decline over the following eight years, but he was much more than an actor and far from an idiot. The US has had its share of terrible and mediocre presidents. Reagan, whether you like his policies or not, and despite his decline while in office, was not one of them.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: What has immigration status got to do with criminal punishment?

At least you guys would never make an idiot president because he was funny on a TV show

Damned calumny. Trump was never funny.

Claims of AI sentience branded 'pure clickbait'

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

I don't believe "trick" implies sapience or even agency, much less sentience (which would appear to be utterly irrelevant to tricking). Care to support that claim?

Common usage includes constructions such as optical illusions "tricking" viewers. I don't think anyone's claiming sentience for optical illusions.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Monkey See, Monkey Do...

Distinguishing mechanical interlocutors from human ones is how the Turing Test is defined.

Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" is not a long or difficult piece.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Turning tests

The Imitation Game (which is more than simply "talk to the computer") wasn't proposed as a test of sentience. It was proposed as a test of mechanical thinking, which is a different cognitive category.

And its force is not as a practical decision procedure anyway, but as a shot across the bows from the good ship Pragmatism. The question Turing's essay examines is "on what grounds, if any, can we argue that the external attributes of cognition are not sufficient to conclude cognition?".

That said, I agree that people serious about AGI don't think the Imitation Game is a good practical decision procedure. Robert French cataloged a number of objections to that project in a CACM piece years ago, for example.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Definition

It's likely there's no "universally accepted definition" of any concept. With billions of human beings with vastly different sets of life experiences, probably all of whom hold at least some perverse opinions, universal agreement just isn't possible.

It's also not how language use and the interplay of ideas among humans work. In the best case we converge on functionally constructive intersections of understandings.

So your "universally accepted definition" bar is useless, I'm afraid.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: generally agree...

machines are machines

Sure. Now show that human beings aren't machines, and that human cognition isn't mechanical.

I believe we're still a long way from AGI, based on my own experience with ML, my readings in AGI research, and my experience in other fields (particularly the study of writing and the philosophy of mind). And I think "sentience" is very much the wrong metric, and largely uninteresting, and I wish the media would stop bandying the term about as if it's some sort of gold standard.

But I've yet to see a persuasive dualist argument that human cognition is somehow special and can't be mechanized. (And, yes, I've read Penrose's.) I don't even think the QECTT needs to be invoked; I think cognition is most likely conventionally computable.

Solana, Phantom blame Slope after millions in crypto-coins stolen from 8,000 wallets

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Bad week for Solana

... since it's just been revealed that most of the Solana ecosystem was a house of cards created by one developer through a network of sockpuppets.

https://web3isgoinggreat.com/web1#ian-macalinao-pseudonyms

And yet the continual parade of fraud, theft, and failure among cryptocurrencies and DeFi seems to have no effect on the cryptocurrency fans – most of whom appear to know essentially nothing about the underlying technology.1 Sigh.

1And, honestly, a lot of the CS and economics research around cryptocurrencies, "smart contracts", DeFi, etc is really quite interesting. Just search Colyer's old Morning Paper archives and skim a few; you'll see what I mean. It's just unfit for use in practice.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: There is a name for this....

Yes, and at first glance it looks like it was an attack against a wallet implementation, not against the cryptocurrency itself. Not that it matters much, particularly to the people who lost (notional) money. (How much of that could be converted into hard currency or goods & services is always a question.)

Financial exchange's efforts to replace core systems with blockchain founder – again

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: doomed, doomed I say

Combining an ancient language, a decrepit processor and a useless blockchain

That's not what ASX are trying to do. They're taking a COBOL-on-Itanium application, which does not use blockchain, and trying to replace it with a new application that uses neither COBOL nor Itanium but does use a blockchain.

It may be a daft plan,1 but it's not what you described.

1Frankly, it's hard to see how a half-assed toy implementation of an append-only ledger is an improvement on the techniques that exchanges have been using for decades. Migrating the existing CHESS application off Itanium would be a good idea. Porting it to another language is a questionable one. Reimplementing it entirely using blockchain and DAML seems ludicrous.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Interesting

There are plenty of good applications of Merkle trees already, like zfs and git. We really don't need good applications of blockchain, which is just a toy Merkle tree.

As Bruce Schneier has pointed out, we already have plenty of algorithms for append-only ledgers. Blockchain isn't novel and isn't particularly interesting.

HPE says $30m Solaris verdict against it didn't provide 'evidence' of copyright

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: "originally" written by Sun?

Solaris switched to an SVR4 base with Solaris 2, aka SunOS 5, in 1992.

SVR4 itself combined AT&T SysV with a bunch of BSD 4. There's a lot of cross-pollination. Could you find matching source lines in OpenSolaris and, say, the listings in John Lions' Commentary? Seems not implausible.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

I routinely support software that's more than ten years old, and not infrequently over twenty years old.

Not all software is Windows.

Linux may soon lose support for the DECnet protocol

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

By 1999 or 2000, nobody was deploying anything but TCP/IP, and maybe AppleTalk if you had a marketing department in the building.

SNA is still holding on in some IBM shops.

Yes, it's true: Hard drive failures creep up as disks age

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: I'm shocked

It's a suspect conclusion anyway. None of the billions of people alive at the moment have died, so there doesn't seem to be any correlation between being alive now and dying.

Ex-T-Mobile US store owner phished staff, raked in $25m from unlocking phones

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

So do I, but I think people have a right to buy subsidized phones if they don't mind putting themselves under contract to a carrier. I might think that's a dumb decision, but it's theirs to make. And if they do that, they're agreeing to a locked phone.

More importantly, perhaps, note in this case the miscreants were also unlocking stolen phones.

How a crypto bridge bug led to a $200m 'decentralized crowd looting'

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Heh

To be fair, X.509 and PKIX (and related standards like the CA/BF BR) are nearly as fraught with poor design decisions and implementation problems as smart contracts are. Unfortunately there's nothing better that's also standardized and widely used.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

the big thing about "smart contracts" is they are supposed to be code that has the full force of a legal contract

"Supposed" by whom? I don't believe I've ever seen that claim even by smart-contract enthusiasts. It's hard for something to have the full force of law when it's not recognized by the law.

Smart contracts aren't contracts under any sensible definition of the term.

But that said, I agree that it's not immediately obvious what law or contractual arrangement might have been broken here, so it's not clear to me what criminal or civil action would be available, even if the perpetrators could be identified. Maybe something under the rather sweeping and arbitrary computer-misuse statutes that legislatures have pumped out, since violations of those are pretty subjective. Maybe a terms-of-license violation, if there's also a license agreement that attaches somehow. Eventually there's likely to be some tax-code violation, unless the perps report the income properly in their jurisdictions.

Bot army risk as 3,000+ apps found spilling Twitter API keys

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Obvious fix

What can be done? The answer is

... don't use Twitter. There, problem solved.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: I wonder how much blame can be attributed to poor code examples

Code samples? Who has time to read code samples?

I assume the developers of these apps just copy and paste from StackOverflow.

AI-friendly patent law needed 'as a matter of national security', ex-USPTO boss says

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

if all you have done is build a neural network and trained it, then I'm afraid it isn't novel. We already know how to do that

This is flat-out wrong.

There are infinitely many ANN architectures, and even if we confine ourselves to those that are both practical to implement and useful, it's a vast space. There are a similarly huge number of training processes, objective functions, rectification functions, and so on.

Moving from GANs to Diffusion networks was most definitely a novel innovation, for example.

And none of the interesting models are just a single ANN. They're complex stacks of ANN layers with complex interconnects. Even with a single layer, it's not just a question of "a neural network" – you haven't even specified recurrent or convolutional or whatever.

Your argument is absurd, frankly. It's like claiming we know how to write software, it's "old and obvious", and so nothing new can ever be done with software.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Greedy bastards blatantly milking a broken system

USPTO rejects about half of all applications. That's hardly "rubber-stamping".

New Outlook feature: It freezes up when dealing with tables in emails

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

One of the first things I do when I get a new work machine is go through Every Single Option in Outlook, disabling previews and automatic image display and a zillion other chunks of the attack surface. And also misfeatures like "replace as I type".

There are, alas, many stupidities which cannot be disabled, but this helps.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: ...and on Mac, don't dare to use emojis

How about "don't use emoji", full stop?

("emoji" is a Japanese word, and as such both the singular and plural are "emoji". "emojis" is a barbarism.)

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Screen Reader support

Screen readers don't have a problem with plain text, in my experience. Perhaps someone who uses them more extensively can explain why complex tables would be better. (My guess is that they wouldn't.)

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Writing well is in part a design process, for any useful definition of "design". That follows clearly from both composition research and from rhetorical theory. You could also support it based on, say, linguistic pragmatics.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Seems the Magic 8 Ball was right then...

Outlook (aka Lookout!) has always been a mess. Mine averages two synchronization errors a day; it especially has difficulty with the concept of deleting a message.

Around 2000 I pointed out on VULN-DEV that even if you disabled pretty much everything you could disable, Outlook would still insist on rendering Windows metafile graphics embedded in messages. Because there could never be an exploitable vulnerability in the complex metafile rendering engine, yeah? So stupid.

Of course, the fundamental problem is MIME, which was a terrible idea and we're all still paying the price for it.

US regulators set the stage for small, local nuclear power stations

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: @Dr Syntax - "more radioactive"

Where I live a huge portion of the power is wind based

Where I live, we're at 100% daytime solar on average. But that's because we have low population density, not a lot of manufacturing, a lot of sunlight and a lot of space for PV farms, and the sunlight is predictable – rain almost always comes in the late afternoon, which makes planning for the battery installations and switchover easier.

I don't expect that to work everywhere.

There are places where solar works well for supplying a lot of the domestic power requirements. There are places where wind works well. It's conceivable that we could build really big solar-thermal plants in desert areas and ship power around using HVDC, or even reform carbon-rich waste into hydrocarbons (propane would be my choice – good existing infrastructure and easy to convert some ICEs to run on it – but whatever).

But today renewables aren't a drop-in replacement for other sources. If we want to cut down on fossil fuel consumption for electricity generation, I don't see how we'll do it without nuclear, at least in the short term.

Data brokers amass profiles of pregnant women – and, of course, it's all up for sale

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Human trafficking

As with so many things, it's profitable and so someone will do it, until externalities are converted into direct costs. And the only way to do that in a case like this is regulation. We need to regulate these data brokers out of existence.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: "One of these was Boris Johnson, but he paid the price,"

This is Alito. It's far from the worst thing he's ever said.

We're talking about the SCOTUS justice who thinks it's fine if the police murder anyone they think might be guilty of a crime, using whatever means might come to hand. He's a lousy jurist, a lousy thinker, and a lousy human being.

Thomas is arguably worse – arguing in favor of allowing corporal punishment in schools, for example – but he's not such a loudmouth.

Weirdly, so far the Trump appointees have managed to be not as bad as those two, Dobbs v. Jackson aside. Gorsuch was on the reasonable side of cases involving compelled speech and LGBTQ+ employment rights, for example; he's also been decent on tribal rights. Kavanaugh was on the right side in Garza and Trump v. Vance. Barrett doesn't have much of a record yet, but she hasn't been as stalwart a friend of business and authoritarianism as Alito and Thomas (see e.g. Hollyfrontier). We'll see what happens in coming years.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: I used to be nice to christians, not any more

there are even those who don't have any all-powerful boss you have to blindly obey

Sure. Sikhism, though it's technically monotheistic, rejects the idea of a monopoly on absolute truth, for example. Hinduism and Shinto give you a whole catalog of gods to pick from.

On the other hand, while Sikhism historically hasn't been used to motivate religious oppression (rather the opposite in fact), Hinduism and Shinto have. Neither monotheism nor the concept of a single supreme authority are necessary for abusing religious beliefs as an endorsement of violence.

Personally, I don't invest in untestable hypotheses (which is what, by definition, any belief in the supernatural is). But I think the vitriol directed against religion is a bit misplaced, because what history shows is that ideologies can be grounded in many sorts of beliefs, and can be harnessed to oppress regardless of the ontological status of those beliefs. Take for example the eugenics and scientific racism movements, neither of which were yoked to religion.

I do think there is something to be said for programs in rationalist thinking, even though we know humans will never be very good at it; and I even agree with Richard Rorty (against, for example, Stanley Fish) that non-substantive commitments to certain philosophical ideas can help people be better. But on the whole it's really easy for people to justify being shitty to one another, and getting rid of religion wouldn't change that.

Why the end of Optane is bad news for all IT

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Insane

Shrug. Most of my test suites are network-bound. And when I'm writing software, I'm thinking-bound. If compiling is taking up a significant amount of my productive time, I'm Doing It Wrong.

My point, of course, is that even this use case is limited. Some development might be sufficient I/O-bound that it becomes a killer app for Optane, but apparently it wasn't enough of development to matter to the people making the purchasing decisions.