Posts by Tom 7 8318 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
Having spent 5 days off line talking to script monkeys, 3 sims and two new routers we now had OpenWrt connection working on our BT/EE 4g BB I'm guessing BT finally managed to get into EE management and any similar approach with Sellafield has me getting a plane to an Australian beach looking for Rachel Ward.
Sometime it takes asking the right questions to discover if something is sentient. I dont think we are there yet but as Lemoine found out you can fool yourself into believing that it is by asking the wrong questions. I believe one Google employee thought a precursor to LaMDa was showing signs of sentience until it was asked 'How do you like being a squirrel' at which point it became obvious it was just spewing things.
3 or 4 years ago I returned to my Alma Mater (my mother never fed me that kind of shit!) with a few of my fellow students and we found where the current student radio was based along with a few bits of equipment we had fought tooth and nail for. Of course all of it was redundant and run from on a Raspberry Pi 3 or similar.
I went to a little music festival in someone's field recently where the whole stage was powered by two 3kw generators! I'm not sure if its the legal sound limits* or the LED lighting but you get a lot more bang for your buck these days!
* I miss reggae sound systems where the you can camp on top of the mid range units.
I once spent 7 hours driving to the west country. A night in an expensive hotel, An hour having a fine full english. 7 hours on a dive boat with some very close friends and others. An hour and a half under water during which I had a moment where I worked out a a solution to a long term work problem which would have saved the company about 35 man hours a week for eternity. None of which I could have done without the expense of the weekend away - and following days diving with company etc and the long journey home all on my own time.
Do I tell you about my idea and ask for payment which, since you have my idea wont be forthcoming or do I keep working for you until I get another job and keep my mouth shut?
Which looks very promising - heats to 300C and loses a degree in 6 months. Great for heating water/air from PV/cheap electricity. Have another one and run it the other way - ie cool it down in winter to provide coos in summer. Basically a large thermal blob.
I tried similar in my polytunnel with got very hot in summer so I used a solar panel/battery to drive a pump which blew air from up top through a pile of rubble in large plastic tube down the middle of the tunnel and it reduced the temperature significantly and kept the tunnel warm at night when it would normally drop to near outside temp. Should be easy to implement similar for houses, though something with a phase change at around 25C could be made a lot smaller.
Also the lack of knowledge how they change shape in the presence of others. Not saying what they have done is not bloody amazing because it is but I'm getting the impression around 200 million proteins need xray diffraction (with AI help) and then we need to mix those 200 million proteins with every other one to see how they interact. So there is a bit of work left to do.
Me - I'd then run it on the LUCA proteins to see if we can get back to LUCAs ancestors - I think it likely there were many proto-life forms and two or more merged to make LUCA that went and ate all the others or just left them no room to evolve.
Might be nice to have an AI on bio-security so we can ensure some of the stuff NATTtrash alludes to dont get out. It would obviously have to be a completely separate AI wtih no knowledge of Deep Blue etc to prevent it getting any ideas above its station which would need an AI to ensure complete information AI separation which obviously wouldnt work...
Let me drink about this some more..
I cant build Ikea furniture - but that's because I have some strength in my forearms and seem to over-tighten those things the screws fit into. It may be down to subconscious anger at the sexism implicit in the she buys it I put it up in this house but I think we've spent more on wood hardener and glue to fix the wood foam these things are made from than we have on the 'furniture' kits themselves.
The maths thing means the number of layers is irrelevant - the chance of particle contamination will be a function of the area of 'work' done. The only real problem multiple layers will give is for heat dissipation but the plastic packaging is going to be more of a problem than a few hundred layers of silicon and oxide of.
I can remember sticking a 3u high 1.6G drive which was the first device I'd seen where it was less than £1 a meg - just. I think it sat on top of my tower for about 5 years. Now I've got something 20 times the disk space in something the size of my little fingernail and about as thick! I've still got the rust drive - some of my backups on ssd have managed to fall through gaps in the filing cabinet but then they are so small you have to put them in an envelop with a description of their contents to avoid several hours of feeding them in one at a time while forgetting what it was you were looking for in the first place!
ISTR the chips I worked on were specced to 50,000G - and that was mainly down to the wires that connected the chip to its carrier. Modern chips have far better methods of connection and I would imagine they have far higher immunity to bangs and vibration. However in an vacuum environment I would imagine static could reach extremely high levels!
I worked in one place where they had a Baarbaaadian lady who had a voice that was tuned to the rotational frequency of testicles and was not allowed on the tannoy because things would be dropped and forklifts would crash and men would just walk into things when caught off guard. You had to write things down when going to ask her for something as her saying "Cean I help you" spun them fast enough to homogenise your brain.
I get the: Secure Connection Failed
An error occurred during a connection to archive.org. PR_CONNECT_RESET_ERROR
The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
Please contact the web site owners to inform them of this problem.
on that link - how the fuck can I contact the owners if you wont let me access the site?
Its fun when you're in a coastal pub in summer and you talk to second home owners who complain that they cant get repairs done because no-one who does that sort of work can afford to live nearby. They actually have to let people live in their holiday homes while they repair them!
My heart bleeds for them - oh no sorry that just beer being laughed out of my nose running down my shirt!
An old boss of mine fiddled the company out of some considerable wonga. Some of the money was spent on plastic surgery for his wife and a swimming pool was involved too. As I understand it as she wasn't directly involved in the theft they couldn't kick her out of the house so (if she hadn't divorced him while he was locked up) he could in theory have returned from the clink to spend the rest of his life with some silicon tits by a nice pool. So in theory crime can be made to pay.
Obviously shifting the wonga offshore (or NI limited company) means you can easily hide it - but then they can in theory follow you later and grab it back. But I was intrigued by the idea that he could have legally spent the rest of his life enjoying some of his ill gotten gains.
So, other than claiming covid support for companies you own and then crashing and folding them before you have to pay it back any other ways people know of keeping hold of stuff - as a purely intellectual exercise of course.
Last machine I had with windows on it shrank the partition and left it for a couple of years. Accidentally booted into it one day it decided to update itself. Killed that and went over to linux. Needed to update a tomtom so went to windows and it was completely screwed.
Iron is only about 5 times the resistivity of copper. For many applications we could easily use iron instead and still make cheaper electricity. One of the problems with renewable is the effort spent in making things too efficient where less efficient option will make cheaper electricity.
Market forces will always be used against you - have you not noticed the smart meters they've forced on everyone. You have to be at home to enjoy the cheap electricity that would be available only when you were at work! This is why it costs £500 or so for £15 worth of electronics to charge your car from your PV.
My local library is a couple of garden sheds sized. Not a huge amount in there but I can browse the counties stuff online but I tend to follow friends recommendations for books and order them online. Having said that a visit to the young'un at uni led us to staying in a AirBnB and I found a couple of good authors there to add to the tree.
Its fun debugging the library software - still waiting for a book I first ordered 7 years ago now but the same person still has it on loan - ie its been nicked or lost but the best they can do is keep extending the request.
Alas they seem to be unable to extend searched to other library systems. There's a few things out there I'd love to get hold of but the ebay algorithm makes them cost more than the whole of our local library!
You've missed my point completely. If you work for a company you get educated in what they do. IF what they do is no longer marketable you end up with unwanted talents while still tenured to the company. Or if the company is bought up then they may not need you at all. Businesses are too uncertain these days to tie yourself to them. It takes a long time to get good at something in electronics/IT and the chances of transferring those skills to another field I found no-one wanted to pay me anywhere near my worth to take the risk in the UK and I didnt want to work abroad which was the only place my skills could have been used at the time. I've seem people with incredible skills fought for over years left unemployed for long periods when their company has switched tack. Its OK if you're like me and dont mind serving pints waiting for the market to change but most people cant do that if beholden to companies for high level expensive training they no longer wish to employ. The forces can do a good job of this, public companies can do it but the private sector should be avoided at all costs.
I looked into making my own PCBs and was surprised to discover the cost of the bare necessities meant I could not make my own more cheaply than I could buy in from abroad. Lead times would have been months rather than days in house but there is something seriously wrong with the supply chains in this country.
In 1970 my dad was teaching summer school in Oregon and we went to Portland to a place that served 57 (IIRC) flavours of ice cream. They did a thing called the Pigs Trough which you got for free if you finished it. A couple of my dads grad students managed it - I've seen smaller planters in city centres!
I like to play with these things from time to time. Some of them are actually more complicated than Linux itself and have cultures that extend across thousands of people and millions of boffin-hours. I do worry that some of these things may just curl up and die due to a core component being non-upgradeable due to some quirk that current and future generations cant grok. Some of these things are really good but you need two or three years of hand holding as an undergrad to get into them to any degree(sic).
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