* Posts by Tom 7

8318 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson moves to shut Parliament

Tom 7

Re: So, to sum up. . .

And Bloody Stupid Johnson's move to stop all debate is OK by you still?

Tom 7

Re: Benito Jonsolini

Talking the truth to brexiters is condescending and counter-productive.

The Tell-Tale Heart! Boffins build an AI that can tell your sex using just your heartbeat

Tom 7

Re: AI Black Box

If you can spare a couple of hours a week you can pop onto futurelearn and do some free courses on Weka and Moa which can give you an reasonable insight into Data Mining and AI which are quite enlightening. It's an art becoming a science and, as illustrated here, coming up with some really useful results which also makes you ask more questions. What more could the inquiring mind want?

Tom 7

Re: The black box nature of convolutional neural networks

You can set up your convolutional networks to give you a 'view' of what the various layers are getting up to in a variety of forms. However you may not get why it makes the decisions it does even if it does tell you in great detail.

Understanding the reasons it makes the decisions will be the next necessary step in AI and should provide us with an interesting tool-box of things we can use to understand how we work,

More on that monster Cerebras AI chip, Xilinx touts 'world's largest' FPGA, and more

Tom 7

Intelligence is what the next chip will do. It seems when computers do things that it takes intelligent humans to do then these things are no longer require intelligence because computers can only be stupid according to insecure humans.

Leaked EU doc plots €100bn fund to protect European firms against international tech giants

Tom 7

They obviously want as many immigrants as they can get

what else is the open border for?

Electric vehicles won't help UK meet emissions targets: Time to get out and walk, warn MPs

Tom 7

Re: Hydrogen? Seriously?

Break your petrol tank and the fuel runs under the car and warms your cockles. Hydrogen tends to rapidly go upwards once released from its container. It does burn well, but that goes upwards even more. You will get a flash burn from h2 burning but petrol will keep going.

Tom 7

Re: Hydrogen? Seriously?

But that was partly due to bad design. Had the cells had sufficient gap between and ventilation them then the hydrogen would have floated away rather than accumulating to the point it could do some damage. Now with modern detectors and cells not made from bull intestines it would be hard to make something dangerous without intending to.

My granddad was an engineer on the R33 and it they discussed all sorts of improvements and modifications that I wish I'd written down to keep. Its criminal we dont have Hydrogen filled air transport 0 you could fly the Atlantic in a day and do some carbon saving in the process.

Tom 7

Re: Alternatively,

Having said that horse poo is a very good thing to put on the soil for growing veg. Having had the pleasure of a 20'*20' by 3' deep pile of rotted horse poo I can assure you a family of 5 cant eat the stuff that that will grow fro a couple of years.

No-one can drink that much dandelion coffee even after several tons of rhubarb crumble.!

Tom 7

Re: Alternatively,

It could still ge carbon neutral as part of a horse mono-rail system.

Tom 7

Re: Self Driving

A woman I worked with swore blind she regularly woke up in the stable all nice and warm under the blanket with her boyfriend after the pony and trap had self driven the 3 miles from the pub.

I couldn't possibly tell you the computer's ID over the phone, I've been on A Course™

Tom 7

Re: Of course they do

It doesnt need many. If you can get 1% of your calls to work that's probably around 1 victim a week and that's probably a bitcoin a month or something. I could live on that, the Indian guy running an office of these people is probably going to be having a bit of a party on that.

Disgruntled bug-hunter drops Steam zero-day to get back at Valve for refusing him a bounty

Tom 7

Re: From my understanding...

It may take a while. For some reason we got a family spotify acct and I download music to annoy the kids in the car. We dont get a phone signal here so my phone is often off. If I forget to turn it on and load spotify in the house so it can call home it refuses to play stuff I've downloaded!

Dropbox would rather write code twice than try to make C++ work on both iOS and Android

Tom 7

Re: How are we equating C++ with Javascript

All I can say is in the early years of the millennium there was a thing that netscape released and they called it JavaScript2 and it had things like classes and inheritance without prototype bollox and it was easy to write good things. I hope for that day to come again.

Tom 7

Re: Beard talk

It was curtain rails for them.

Tom 7

I think this is more about 'I know how to do it in Swift, I dont know how to do it in C++' rather than one language being better than the other. Automating reference counting pops up in Boost as does URL handling. I dread to think what the internals of a language look like when things that are better provided by libraries are actually dragged into the language, Or rather I do - I've seen many languages try this over the years and to no benefit.

Having said that I've yet to find a use for Dropbox that doesnt set alarms ringing and would never ever use it in a business unless a gun was pointed at my pay-check.

Tom 7

Re: Or maybe

Python is just a front end for C/C++ libraries.

Four more years! Four more years! Svelte Linux desktop Xfce gets first big update since 2015

Tom 7

Re: My XFCE story

I'd be interested in your Pale-Moon problem. I use xubuntu and from time to time when after a screensaver I cannot type into the url bar or search engine. I have found that if I switch to another desktop and back then it works again.

Data cops order Ireland to delete 3.2m records after ID card wheeze ruled to be 'unlawful'

Tom 7

However in 2391 St Patricks day falls on Easter Sunday

So no Leprechaun liquid!

Police costs for Gatwick drone fiasco double to nearly £900k – and still no one's been charged

Tom 7

Re: No no no

I thought he wanted to buy it so he could close down the weather stations and exploit all the mineral wealth being exposed by then non-existent global warming,

Tom 7

Re: Not just people with smartphones.

Last time I went on a viewing roof at an airport the plane spotters had cameras that could have read the papers on the moon,

Astroboffins have spied the largest star that has gone supernova and it's breaking all the rules

Tom 7

Re: Rinse and repeat?

Nickel-62 has the highest mean nuclear binding energy per nucleon of any nuclide

Tom 7

Re: First I've heard

Pair-instability supernovas require low metalicity but this seems to have a lot of calcium in it. Though I'm wondering if that is a product of the instability?

Tom 7

Re: Soup

It depends what makes you stop breathing! You may be underwater for long enough to learn not to do that again for what its worth.

Cisco axes hundreds, shares tumble amid China cut-off – but we're winning the trade war, right? So much winning

Tom 7

Re: Eh, we'll just put the former Cisco workers to work on the wall that Mexico is paying for...

And then write the root password on the side.

Tom 7

Re: How can this be?

Once a type escapes into the WWW its lost for ever.

We're whining, a trade war...!

Poor old Jupiter has had a rough childhood after getting a massive hit from a mega-Earth

Tom 7

I did some simulations many years ago and you could get some interesting results in a couple of days of 200MHz Pentiums. I imagine now with GPUs and the like you could get some rather spectacular simulations done, The one thing I thought I learned at the time was you really have to assume a relatively uniform disk at the start or all bets are off.

Anyone know of any current modelling software for this?

Yet another reminder: When a tech giant says its AI listens to you, it means humans listen to you. Right, Facebook?

Tom 7

So AI is outsourcing to meat these days.

Enjoy it while you can.

Researchers peer into crystal ball to see future where everyone's ID is tied to their smartphone

Tom 7

So I wont exist at home!

To me a smartphone is something that bursts into life halfway down the drive informing me I have 17 missed messages from people I dont know.

Tom 7

Re: "mobile versions will be easy to scale quickly"

I did warn you.

Tom 7

Re: "mobile versions will be easy to scale quickly"

Can you imagine the fun of waiting 7 hours for your blockchain to verify your transaction!

Donald Trump blinks in his one-man trade war with China: US govt stalls import tariff hike on Chinese phones, laptops, electronics

Tom 7

Is he getting commision ?

The very thought of a scarcity is one of the best sales techniques known.

It's a God-awful smell affair.... is there life on Mars? Rocks ruled out as source of mystery methane on Red Planet

Tom 7

Re: Where are the trees.

Mars lost its field 4.2 billion years ago. Given the volume of the habitable places on the planer and some statistics (given earth is the only data point) its highly unlikely life got started on Mars.

Tom 7

Re: "we know natural methane is odorless"

Natural methane exists in harmony with the world and is good for you.??? Wait and see how this Arctic tundra meltdown goes.

Tom 7

Re: I think its probably more likely to be geological

He was particularly good in Father Ted ISTR.

Tom 7

I think its probably more likely to be geological

and the burps are when accumulated methane geysers past some underground water. That is assuming the 46 tonnes reported is the total release. There are many processes that could generate methane at depth and , while I'd squeal with delight to find life on Mars, Occam says rocks.

Mysterious 'glitch' in neutron stars may be down to an itch under the body's surface

Tom 7

Do you get sunspots on neutron stars?

This sounds similar to the magnetic field in the sun winding itself up until is snaps during the sunspot cycle.

One person's harmless japery can be another's night of LaserJet Lego

Tom 7

Re: Radiation Leak

A nuclear plane is an interesting technical challenge. This, however is essentially throwing a nuclear reactor at the enemy.

Tom 7

Re: Radiation Leak

My apologies - its just such a hideously dirty weapon I didnt think anyone would be insane enough to actually build one - I forgot about Putin.

Tom 7

Re: Radiation Leak

A nuclear powered ramjet just sounds fucking insane whichever way I try and look at it. I can imagine a nuclear battery powered ion drive but to use a nuclear reactor as a power source for a ramjet????

Tom 7

Re: Radiation Leak

I'm still trying to work out how that Russian static missile test that went pop last week bumped up radiation levels.

Tom 7

We had a machine in the pub toilet for that!

But seriously the number of machines that used to 'go yank' and refuse to function after a power outage until threatened with percussive maintenance because we couldn't find the manual to set it to A4 or, in later years with LCD menus the A4 selection method was modelled on the claw machine at the seaside.

Tom 7

Re: Heavy...

I did help install an office in a 15th century half timbered jobie. Grade 1 listed so one had to dismantle the equipment to get it up the stairs and through doors I'd have trouble getting through these days.

The printer was about to be returned to sender when someone spotted a hoist sticking out of the eaves on the 2nd floor, The printer was hoisted up to the window there and then returned to the ground where another couple of ropes were attached so it could be tipped on its side to get it through the window. Once we'd installed everything and got it working we wandered off for a pint and I realised that half the buildings on the old streets in the town I'd lived in for 8 years had hoists sticking out.

So they knew their shit 600 years ago - I doubt a modern architect would like something useful upsetting their clean corrugated lines.

And as a note on 2+2=5's comment. You dont use wheely chairs on 600 yr old oak floors. You either find yourself slowly sliding under or away from the desk or flipped on the back of your head when you hit the myriad of kerbs bumps and gaps or rucked carpets working in a place of great beauty offers,

SELECT code_execution FROM * USING SQLite: Eggheads lift the lid on DB security hijinks

Tom 7

Re: Mmmmmm

But if SQLite has been updated and the library hasn't then surely the code is linked to the older version?

Not got into Python details properly - too many versions to know where to start.

Tom 7

Mmmmmm

given that most access to SQLite is through code via a lot of different libraries I'm guessing pretty much all the stuff is vulnerable, A quick glance at Python3 suggests the code for the library hasn't been updated for 5 years.

Ohm my God: If you let anyone other than Apple replace your recent iPhone's battery, expect to be nagged by iOS

Tom 7

In the 1900s the London Tram Company could replace the battery in their electric tram in a couple of minutes.

Perhaps someone can just come up with some international standards.

Who will save us from deepfakes? Other AIs? Humans? What about vastly hyperintelligent pandimensional beings?

Tom 7

Re: Cut out the middlemen?

TBF Computer Neural Networks were inspired by the biological ones. They are similar at a very simple level - which may be all that is necessary. They have copied models of Nematode NNs with 'interesting' results. At the moment we are playing with basically layers of nodes feeding layers of nodes whereas nature has more convoluted nets, the functions of which we currently dont know. We have wired up NNs in the convoluted form found in nematodes but we have a way to go to work out which keyboards to plug in and where and how to initialise the net before we can simulate a nematode, I think we are circa 1950 digital computer stage with NNs but we have the equivalent interactions of the IOT to evaluate and experiment with. Oh and fucking contrary organic NNs wandering around kicking over the chess sets to deal with too,

Tom 7

Will we be saved by vastly hyperintelligent pandimensional beings?

What makes you think you are worth it?

Y'know how everyone hated it when tuition fees went up? Cutting them now could harm science, say UK Lords

Tom 7

Re: Bah!

I returned to Uni a year or so after I graduated. I bumped into my old tutor in the bar and the look on his face when he discovered I was already earning more than he was was a sight to behold. Which was a fucking tragedy as he was damn good at teaching. He could lecture to 60 kids 3 times a week and three years later generate more tax in a month than he was paid in a year.

Tom 7

Re: Bah!

I did quite a bit of semiconductor work which required some silly maths, Mostly above and beyond the three years I did in my Electrical and Electronics degree. I find now researching AI and big data I get to use some of that and more, And, to be fair, its all fucking matrices now. Probably always has been.