Posts by Haku

Fucking with the 'robots'.

I read a comment recently about drivers who have been screwing with the autopilot feature of Teslas; whilst on freeways people purposely swerving into the lane of a Tesla driver so their car has to react, ie automatically braking or changing lanes.

I did try and find video evidence of this happening, but all I could really find was YouTube videos of how the autopilot has avoided crashes due to the incumbency of other drivers (often rather reasurring evidence of how computers will spot something a human driver misses) but also the occasional piece of footage of the car screwing up and swerving into oncominrg traffic, causing the driver to take back control of the steering wheel, indicating the technology still has a long way to go before full automation on the roads can be completely trusted.

It leaves me wondering what the future of driving will be like when the ratio of computer to human drivers gets close to 1:1.

In the case of human drivers 'trolling' the computer drivers, swerving into the path of them etc., at least those computer driven vehicles will have dashcam evidence of the himan drivers acting like arseholes, because who would design a computer driven vehicle without cameras recording everything that's going on for in the event of something going wrong.

The future will be a paperless office they said.

But you don't need electricity or any knowledge of computers to use a pen & paper.

Upgrading your pen won't render your paper useless.

Your pen & paper can't get infected by ransomware.

Downsides? Reading people''s handwriting and other numerous things you can only do with digitial information (ease of copy/backup/instant distribution to other people etc.)

Gambling is like playing against the WOPR

"the only winning move is not to play"

Someone's making one hell of a payday out of these devices that are being touted as money savers for their users.

Bringing facts to an argument BALPA et al is clearly dodging:

From the Clear Vision Security article about the drone collision study:

Non-Certified Windscreens

One of the proven threats involved the testing of non-birdstrike certified helicopter windscreens. These were shown to fail when hit by drones, which is no great surprise since they also fail when struck by birds, as their name would suggest.

In general aviation (GA), windscreens don’t need to be certified to withstand birdstrikes, so the findings of this study are applicable to a wide variety of aircraft within the GA field. In short they found that if your windscreen won’t withstand a birdstrike it won’t withstand a drone strike either.

To put this within context there were 1835 confirmed birdstrikes reported to the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) in 2016. To date there has never been a single confirmed drone strike reported to the CAA.

I think I'm getting latent Dyslexia.

Everytime I see words that start with "tr" my mind automatically replaces them with "ch".

It's especially bad when I'm reading anything about current US politics.

They wouldn't like my old beat-up tablet.

There's a suspicious looking wire sticking out the side with a JST connector.

I had to modify the tablet to charge its battery directly with a small USB lipo charging module because it won't charge through the USB port anymore.

Rearrange your furniture every day so the floor plan spells out the letters

F

C

you can see where I'm going with this :)

"It's not as if Star Trek versus Star Wars is under discussion."

About that, they should just put aside their differences and get along...

http://www.haku.co.uk/b3ta/StarTrekWars.jpg

Could be interesting, but I'd watch the crap out of this mashup:

http://www.haku.co.uk/b3ta/StarDwarf.jpg

Not accepting USB sticks? I don't blame 'em.

This USB stick can destroy most computers in seconds - usbkill.com (url purposely non-clickable)

There are several YouTube videos if you want to see how deadly those things are - https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=usb+killer

Idenitifying a drone thousands of meters up, hundreds of meters away - bullshit!

I've flown my 380 size quadcopter, about 1.2kg with the camera & gimbal attached, straight up 100 meters to get some scenic view footage.

At that distance away it can be near impossible to spot it when you're looking at wide open sky, even though you know where it's supposed to be and can hear it, and see its camera view from the ground.

If it's so difficult to spot a stationary drone from a stationary spot, that's only 100 meters away, how the hell do those pilots, flying at hundreds of miles an hour, can say with absolute certainty that tiny speck in the distance is a drone?

I call bullshit on that.

Anyone else remember this?

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/01/19/microsoft_lawyers_threaten_mike_rowe/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_vs._MikeRoweSoft

I bet it can't do something my wallet I bought from a Glastonbury festival 30+ years ago can:

Drop it in water without anything getting damaged.

Ransomware & victim's feelings?

I bet that shit would make a vegan want to kill.

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."

Sci-fi films/tv have had people talking to computers since the start but my interaction with computers began with almost unresponsive flat keyboards (ZX81) which progressed to rubber ones (Spectrum) then 'proper' keyboards (BBC Micros), then mice, then touchpads & touchscreens (not forgetting joysticks/joypads for gaming), which could explain why it always feels weird talking to my phone unless I'm actually making a call.

Are those futurists still predicting everyone interacting with computers through speech? Because for many uses it's far simpler/quicker/easier to press buttons/screens than to talk to the device.

50TB! I'll take twelvety.

How would I like to pay?

Would sir be interested in some magic beans?