Posts by Pascal Monett

"she would be happy to split royalties 50-50"

Careful what you wish for, there. You might end up with an AI version that is more successful than you.

"more crimes while on release after posting bond"

Well, you can't fault her for not being persistent.

What got her caught ? Too much, too quick, or someboy slipped ?

We know what she and her conspirators were doing, but nothing on how the law got whiff of the affair. Did the beancounters at Amazon do some sleuthing after asking a question, or was there something illogical that led to the discovery ?

$10 million in two years seems a lot, but it is Amazon. Plus or minus $10 million a month must be a blip on the balance sheet there.

Living on lies and drug money

What a waste of a country.

"whether or not [Google] would scrape public copyrighted or licensed data or social media posts"

It's Google.

It will.

"wonder what they've been paying for"

They've been paying for megacorp's quarterly profits.

Why the tip-toe ?

Just make them sign a banking charter. Job done.

They want to deal in finance ? They obey the rules of finance.

Once again

Yet another company providing a service that countless people used is going down without anything to hold the service up.

All of that because people love linking to something on someone else's server.

Yeah, well someone else's server never lasts.

Iddo Drori

Apparently, he's at Columbia, but also at Boston.

His blurb on the Columbia page states :

"Iddo Drori is an Associate Professor of the Practice of Computer Science at Boston University, a Visiting Associate Professor at MIT, and an Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University. He was a lecturer at MIT in EECS, a Visiting Associate Professor at Cornell University in Operations Research and Information Engineering and a research scientist and adjunct professor at NYU Center for Data Science, Courant Institute, and NYU Tandon."

I don't know how that works out in the US, but I find it very curious that he has so many activities in so many places.

Does he have any time left to do actual research, not to mention teaching ?

BTW, Columbia needs to update the page if he is no longer visiting at MIT.

So, landmark year and, for thanks, pay freeze

The logic escapes me. But that's probably why I am not CEO of a multi-trillion dollar company.

Borkzilla is swimming in billions of cash. Revenue is up. Profits may be down, but when you're making more than $50 billion a year, is that really a big problem ? Something to keep an eye on, to be sure, but hey, $50 billion. You can reward your employees and directly improve their morale and work attitude. Giving them a raise can make them feel privileged, and they don't even have a golden parachute.

Okay, so the shareholders might have had to content themselves with a quarterly dividend of $0.67 per share. Gosh, what a sacrifice to ensure that your workforce is happy to be at the coalface.

Oh, I forgot, they're shareholders. They don't give a damn about the workforce, all they want is the highest possible dividend.

Did anyone ever analyse the selfishness inherent to capitalism ?

"the final word in bag miniaturization"

Nonsense.

I created a Vuitton replica that was smaller than the dot at the end of this line.

Unfortunately, just when I finished, the cat jumped on the desk and the resultant air flow blew it away . . .

"The goals of any kernel update are simple: [..] no changes in behaviour"

Somebody needs to brief Borkzilla on that.

Is it technically possible ?

Of course it is. We already have movement detectors and infrared detectors. All you need is to couple one or both with a machine gun, tell it where to point and fire.

I'm pretty sure that's technically feasible.

Is it the right thing to do is altogether a different question.

Just keep saying "AI" a lot and people will love it

Spot on.

Besides, using pseudo-AI on a carrier network, to do what ? Encumber the pipes with useless stat-gathering commands and answers ?

I say useless because that stuff should not be in the pipes. I don't know how the carriers gather the data they need to ensure everything is working properly, but I'm hoping that that analysis data is kept to a minimum as is. Slap today's marketing AI on it and the data usage will likely explode, maybe even resulting in loss of performance and/or bandwidth.

"quit Facebook and said he may block the service in Cambodia"

So, ragequit followed by petty revenge.

What charming qualities for a political leader.

"still has plans to remain in the music business"

But you never were in the music business. You were in the fraud business, music was just the vehicle.

And I won't be surprised to learn, in a bit more than 6 years from now, that you got caught for fraud again (music business or otherwise). Easy money is an addiction. Once you get a taste of it, that taste is acquired.

Some people might be more predisposed than others.

"tarnish US credibility"

Sorry, but Republicans are doing the top job there.

"lower corporate real estate prices seen at the tail end of COVID"

Interesting. So, basically, corporations sent everyone home because pandemic, then noticed that office space rent was dropping like lead weights, snapped up a bunch because some beancounter was still in the "buy low, sell high" mindset, and now they've got all this office space and the pandemic is last year's news so let's fill up the desks, shall we ?

I'm pretty sure that that is only part of the explanation. The other part is the severe peon-withdrawal that many managers are experiencing. Not being able to call one of your underlings to your office at a whim to lord over her/him and make 'em know who's boss must be an incredibly painful experience. Teams is just not adequate for that.

Maybe Meta and whimpering dog avatars could help ?

The right question

"whether to change business processes to fit the new software or modify the software to fit business processes"

If you have to ask yourself the question, it's the wrong software.

Software is supposed to help you, not force you into an existential crisis.

And Oracle is going to be in big trouble if an ad-hoc band-aid can do better than its software.

I know who I'm rooting for . . .

What a coincidence

"there just isn't enough time to build everything using a traditional iterative process of designing and then testing all the subsystems"

We've just had a striking example of what happens when you don't design then test all subsystems. I wonder what that forbodes for this ?

2nm

And 1.4nm to come. Alledgedly.

How large is an atom already ? Because there will be a point where we have to stop this, right ?

To think that I started in computing with the 3 µm process. Nobody even thought about TDP ! Now chips are engraved a thousand times smaller, but they still consume anywhere from 50 to 200W.

It's a miracle we can cool them down enough.

"Brewer moved to Montana under a new identity"

And bam!, just like that it is now a Federal crime and the FBI gets involved.

Bad move.

"social networking service Formspring"

Never heard of it. So I go looking.

It says here that "Formspring was an anonymous Q&A forum. [..] It allowed people to anonymously ask questions and send messages to other users without having to sign up."

The article states Kislitsin is accused of : "stealing usernames, email addresses, and passwords". How is that possible if users didn't need to sign up ?

Or is it that users had to give a username and email when they posted, being able to change anytime they wanted ? That's just like signing up, then.

I don't get it.

"claims it broke its promises over the location of US data"

That's interesting. So I understand that some people are complaining that data concerning US citizens is not held in the US.

But it doesn't bother any US citizen that data concerning European citizens is not held in Europe.

Funny, that.

"a tool for parental and employee control"

Parental control ?

If you're a parent and you use this "tool", you fail at parenting.

"need to have access to their target's voice"

With all the audio data available from all sorts of sources on the Internet, that doesn't seem to be much of a barrier if you're seeking to spoof the voice of anyone who is known. Celebrities, politicians, major CEOs, all of them have their voice on publicly-available sources somewhere.

Now, if you're targetting someone for specific reasons that is not a social media aficionado, it makes things a lot more complicated, especially if you do not know the person socially. You're going to have to find a way to meet the person, get the person talking and put your mobile phone down to record the conversation. That will mean cleaning up the recording afterwards, which is never an easy task.

So, the basic question really is just how well recorded does the target's voice need to be ? Will a few dozen seconds in the street suffice, or do you need a few minutes of sound booth recording ?

If they were serious about recoving all those resources, the solution is obvious : offer money for the unused phones.

But yeah, that costs money.

"The EU competition authorities said they would allow the deal, subject to certain guarantees"

The only guarantee they have is that Borkzilla will, in the end, do whatever it damn well pleases and it will see them in Court if they have the gall to disagree.

Also, some Borkzillasuit declares no idea for mobile gaming and the decision is to buy Activision ? Does Activision have an extensive mobile gale catalogue ?

How about making games for mobiles ? Is that not an idea ?

Oh, right, that's work. You're not too good at that.

"the notoriously foggy San Francisco Bay area"

Fog. Millions upon millions of tiny droplets of water floating in the air.

Does that mean that heavy rain can also potentially cut, or severely diminish, performance of the laser beam ? Because if so, then any place that has a monsoon season is going to need a backup plan, as in a fiber link.