Posts by Rob Fisher 69 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Oct 2008
By this logic 1000 software developers are driving 100 million cars simultaneously. If those cars cause 1 death, would you jail all the software developers?
Or divide the sentence by a billion?
Or give them a reward for saving so many lives compared to the bad old days when humans used to drive?
I wanted to do SIM racing but was getting motion sickness. It turns out you can train yourself out of it: drive slowly in a car with a roof around an oval. As soon as you feel the first hint of a symptom stop. Do it again the next night - you can go for longer. After a week I was doing 20 lap races around proper circuits.
It's still a niche hobby, though, I'm not suggesting the mainstream are going to bother with all that.
Between this and the Online Safety Bill, It bothers me that a lot of things won't get done because of fears of falling foul of regulations. Big incumbent companies can afford the lawyers. Anyone trying anything new is going to need more lawyers than engineers, and is more likely to not bother. We'll never get to see the things they might otherwise have done.
"flood countries with a product and so force a de facto acceptance of a product"
Or, to rephrase, offer people the chance to buy a product even if they are foreigners.
Anyway, if only it were so. "the company still does not have a license to operate in many areas of the world"
So don't worry, the Chinese government won't allow Starlink to force uncensored internet on people living in rural China.
"the company still does not have a license to operate in many areas"
What stops them from simply not stopping their satellites from working when over a given territory?
International treaties? Threat of sanctions?
The failure of the internet to open national borders is disappointing. See e.g. geographical restrictions on video streaming. Starlink has the potential to improve the world with ubiquitous uncensored global internet. So lack of service due to "licensing" is just more disappointment.
I'm not convinced pinging random servers is giving away much information. I suppose if you knew of a specific vulnerability in a specific device, and it happened to ping at a known interval, that fingerprint would enable you to find IP addresses to attack.
But you would still need to get past the NAT firewall. So it's more likely an attacker would start by scanning all IPs to find NAT firewalls with known vulnerabilities and then see what devices are behind each one.
I was reading an article about the new Sony Walkmans recently on some mainstream tech site. Lots of praise of all the lovely features, including Android 12. But no discussion of software support promises. This is typical.
To the extent that the tech press is meant to help consumers make purchasing decisions, lack of discussion of this is a failure. Things have improved with phones, with many manufacturers making explicit promises up front.
Well done to the Reg for writing about it. Please tell your friends:)
I've been experimenting for a few days. It's good at some things and bad at others, so what we're seeing is people learning about that. There's also a knack to getting it to do what you want. As has been mentioned before, one approach is to discuss the setup and concepts with it first rather than launch into the question.
One thing I am working with is customer support request data. It's quite good at reading comprehension so if you give it text and then ask questions about the text (what problem did this customer have?) it can tell you. There are probably cheaper ways to do this, though.
I also had it talk me through diagnosing an internet connection problem. It suggested rebooting my router when I told it I saw DNS errors in my browser (and gave an explanation of DNS).
If you give it a good explanation of how something works it does seem able to reason. See the article "Building an interpreter for my own programming language in ChatGPT".
It's just a tech demo. The natural language processing is remarkable enough. Tuned versions of this for specific purposes are going to have their uses.
A good coder will not make those mistakes? I suspect there isn't a human alive who can write anything beyond a trivial C program without making some of those mistakes.
I have done C programming (including a lot of finding other people's bugs like one thread freeing memory that another thread is still using) and now I am doing Rust programming and the degree of control, precision, knowledge and certainty it gives you is liberating.
We need Rust because then a lot less human effort will go into fixing such hard to find bugs and a lot more into improving software in other ways. More efficient tools make us richer.
We've spent 40 years learning that there are classes of mistakes that people make over and over again not because they're shit coders but because they're people.
Rust makes you do a bit of extra work up-front so the compiler can prove mathematically that you haven't made certain classes of mistakes.
Of course there is still opportunity for shit-ness but it'll be the same kind of logic bugs or bad design you can get in any language. At least there won't be dangling pointers, buffer-overruns and memory leaks too.
At its best it is quite astonishingly immersive. You get a sense of scale you can't get on a screen. Objects do look like they really exist in space, despite the limitations of current displays.
One of my most surprising experiences was trying a WWII fighter in DCS World for the first time. The cramped, enclosed cockpit and the sense of there being very little between you and 2000 feet of fresh air then ground (not to mention bullets) is very palpable.
I get this article, but for its niches VR is great.
If you want to keep your phone for a few years, then to get something less than GBP600, reasonable SoC, three years of security patches, preferably wireless charging (because it's useful when using the phone for car navigation)... there aren't really a lot of options. This could be it. The camera gubbins is a bonus, although I want to see what it's like in real life. And the lack of OIS for videos might be a problem. But this looks promising.
It looks like there are a lot of fields around Gatwick. I'm not saying it's not a consideration, but population density is not that high everywhere, and I doubt that the risk of damaging a building, a grounded plane, or getting some debris on the runway ought to be serious considerations as the article suggests.
Indeed the police are there with firearms, so they're probably having a go. And helicopters *are* flying, even though this article suggests that would be too dangerous.
It could just be that spotting it is hard, especially when it only shows up once every few hours and disappears quickly.
A lot of these objections amount to a lack of gumption. Nothing is without risk. You have a problem. You go out and solve it, even if it involves a little risk. And you jolly well get on with it, instead of dithering about. Shooting it from a helicopter or flying a net into it (with a helicopter or another drone) seem somewhat plausible. Yes, it might land on something, but that bill will probably be cheaper than the bill already faced.
Is the constant snark helpful in these kinds of article? Seems to me the autopilot is quite impressive in a lot of situations. Have a look a some of the dashcam YouTube footage of it avoiding various collisions. Not perfect, but nothing is. What is the accident rate per mile driven compared to other cars?
I guess sarcasm is easier than finding stuff out.
Just Google up the origin Bitcoin white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto. You'll find it is a complete description of the system, dry and hype and jargon free.
It is easy to understand and once you do, it will be clear that the idea of "blockchain" separate from digital cash doesn't make all that much sense, because the database is only as distributed as people are motivated and able to run nodes.
Seems a strange sort of conservative who wants to invent new taxes to punish successful businesses. Perhaps he thinks Corbyn supporters are suddenly going to vote for him now. I would like someone to vote for who is in favour of lower taxes and fewer regulations.
Not everyone is serious. At one point I was looking at a controller that controlled the Djay app, because it works with Spotify. There is a whole class of such cobtrollers. Audio comes from the iPad and the controller talks to the iPad via USB. Not sure how this affects it.
There are no hard and fast rules of thumb that apply. Simply measure accidents of various severity per miles driven. Ensure that these numbers improve with each software release, and that in any case it is better than human drivers in similar environments.
If this can be done then automation is a benefit. If not then it isn't.
Debates about capabilities of hardware and software, user interface design and marketing are all secondary to that.
Emoji is just not scalable. It's take until now to get a hippo emoji and there are still thousands of missing animals. Every new emoji takes hundreds of person-hours of proposal writing, committee meetings, graphic design and software updates. I wanted a sprout emoji the other day, when might that appear? And I haven't even got started on minerals...
It would make a lot more sense to abandon pre-set unicode-indexed graphics and agree on a way to embed small SVG pictures into text, or some other text representation of graphics so that the sender could send any emoji without the receiver having to prepare for it in advance.
"I don't care"... "VR gives me nothing"... "same graphics quality we had twenty years ago"
It's true it's a bit over-hyped and early days. But for certain games VR is a game-changer. Having played Elite Dangerous in VR there is no turning back for me (and with a good card the graphics are dialed down one notch at most).
I hope it can stick around despite a lack of mass-market appeal for long enough to get there.
"it rejected just 2.4 per cent of requests made in January to June and 3.4 per cent in July to December."
Big whoop. Looks like using zero knowledge services is the only way to get any hope of privacy*. Though I wonder if it is possible to offer such services without eventually falling foul of some law.
* If your threat model includes a determined state you're probably not going to hide for long, one way or another. Would be useful to know how naughty you have to be before governments make requests about you to Microsoft.
Government should just butt out entirely. If there is a demand for faster Internet then there's a profit to be made. If you live in the sticks then the cables will have to be longer and it will cost more. You can't expect other people to pay that cost, any more than they can expect to get a share of the bigger house you can afford because it's in the sticks.
So it's bad economics and it makes people resentful to boot. As soon as government subsidises something everyone starts arguing over the fairness of the subsidy. It's unbecoming.
They still sell 2x4 bricks and boxes of basic bricks. Expensive? They last forever at least.
I suppose Lego could have stuck to just that, but they'd have 200 employees and one factory.
We quite enjoy the tie-in sets, the TV series and the computer games (and the theme parks and even the hotel). What we have now is a lot of choice. Too diverse a product range might be a problem for Lego but it's hard to see how it's a problem for its customers.
"Too many custom parts" isn't quite true either. Having bought sets from many themes there are hardly any brick-types that aren't seen used in different ways across multiple sets. There are a lot of different pieces, though, and this does make it harder to build creatively with bits from disassembled themed sets. The solution is to buy boxes of basic bricks.
I don't particularly agree with increasing taxes for certain groups. I want a smaller state in general: less tax and less spending. I suppose that makes me something of a right winger. But there is a way both you and me can get what we want:
Flat tax. You pay income (above some minimum tax-free amount) multiplied by some percentage. No schemes, no loopholes, no vote buying, no social engineering, simpler forms, cheaper administration, less human brain capacity wasted with trying to understand the intricacies of the tax code and probably less avoidance, evasion and lower headline rates and more revenue.
I wonder if a sufficiently large group of otherwise opposed people could join forces in campaigning for that.
This sounds like a good argument against over-reliance on the state. What if we consider the article as advice to parents instead of a call to teach coding in schools? Parents: help your kids learn to code and here's why. There are lots of books and resources for self-teaching coding, and computers are cheap.
Spreading arguments like the ones in this article might also inspire people to set up local groups or even large philanthropic organisations to help people learn to code.
I think limiting this to a call for the state to teach coding in schools (which we all know they will do badly) is thinking too small.
It's not so much that having the source code solves all problems. It's that hiding the source code solves no problems and creates new ones.
If no-one can see the source code then it is very easy to make programs do things other than their advertised purpose. If anyone can see the source code, then you can try putting malware in your program, but you might get caught, so you are less likely to try. You might think that no-one will look at the code, but you can't be sure.
I think you're right that most code is not looked at, or not looked at in the right places by the right people. But exploits *are* found and fixed in widely used open source programs, so at least we can see something is working.
There are no certainties, only tradeoffs. A malware writer trades effort needed to make malware against expected value of information stolen. An end user trades effort spent attempting to prevent or detect malware against value of the information that needs protecting. Open source definitely increases the effort a malware writer needs to make to hide their work. Whether it reduces the effort you need to spend on prevention and detection probably depends on what you are doing.
@keithpeter "I have no idea where we are going to get jobs that pay reasonable rates for the next few generations either"
We differentiate. There are still things that are better done locally, or that local people are better skilled at. Not every kind of job suits outsourcing.
Also consider that places exporting their surplus supply of engineering talent will quicky get rich and start demanding that talent for themselves. Ultimately the more skilled people there are the more work gets done; skilled people do not go un-used, long term, given sensible economic policies.
"cutting wages or employment protection does not strike me as a good road to go down" -- such things might be unpleasant, but fighting the laws of economics (mathematics? nature?) won't work. Silly polices (e.g. you must employ only local people) will just make things worse.
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