* Posts by Version 1.0

5376 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009

Cause for a LLaMA? Meta reckons its smaller text-emitting AI is better than rivals

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Re: Does this mean...

Go back about 200 years and we saw white people making a lot of money from black people who were their slaves. Nowadays we see companies like Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft etc etc etc making money from their "users" but these days users are essentially just slaves with everything they do stolen from them. So we say that slavery has been abolished but the reality is that it's just been "updated" so that now it's not limited to your skin colour, it just applies to everyone who thinks that social media is not slavery,

So slavery no longer exists, and neither does your data privacy - is this a better world because the environment has not changed?

Signal says it'll shut down in UK if Online Safety Bill approved

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Boffin

Banning encryption fixes what?

I know I will think emergency solutions to encryption. Banning it will just create new methods, for example reread this unencrypted illustration.

Mozilla says 80 percent of Google Play's app safety labels are inaccurate

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Re: 80%?

The data is being safely copied, "We do not steal your data, we just sell copies of it so it's still your data." Welcome to today's world, we get told things but so often completely different things are happening:

Q: "Is it safe to jump out of a plane?"

A: "Yes, you have a parachute"

Q: "But it's only 6 inches in diameter"

A: "It's OK, you will just land quicker"

Workday sued over its AI job screening tool, candidate claims discrimination

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Re: Alternative headline

Clearly the AI was written by a Bag O Wire

The clock is ticking on a possible US import ban for Apple Watch

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Boffin

Pat ain't ...

They claim that "KardiaBand provides accurate and instant analysis for detecting Atrial Fibrillation, Bradycardia, Tachycardia and Normal heart rhythm" but while the detection of the heart contractions on the wrist might be subject to a patent, the analysis resulting in the detection of Atrial Fibrillation, Bradycardia, Tachycardia and Normal heart beats is just a result of processing the ECG contraction data. So if the patent claims to be detecting Fibrillation, Bradycardia, and Tachycardia etc then that's something that researchers and clinicians (and me) have been doing for the last 50 years.

The second dust bowl cometh for America, supercomputer warns

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Re: All I can see

Sure, it's not going to be an easy solution but we have some ability to increase the drainage while nothing we do can stop it raining. It would be some big changes to deepen and widen the rivers but that could reduce the flooding risks locally. Yes, there's a lot of crap in the rivers - we need to fix that too.

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Re: All I can see

Local flooding issues are the same sort of thing as local traffic issues - the flooding risks can normally be handled by maintaining the rivers all the way to the sea so that they don't keep getting shallower - make them a little deeper everywhere and wider when possible. Building close to a river level is risky but that can be handled by working on the problem - locally we're expecting the Mississippi to rise from 26 feet deep today (it was only 6 feet deep a few months ago) but it will be 30 feet by the end of the week. It's no big deal even if it reached more than 40 feet deep because we have decent levees that keep us all happy around the river.

All the UK needs to do is make a few rivers deeper ... these days this means scooping the crap out of the rivers that the water companies are pouring into them.

NASA: Yup, thousand-pound meteorite exploded over Texas

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Boffin

Let's start checking the deposits

Is Texas now searchable for small meteorite fragments containing the metal vibranium? If we find vibranium then America might start to reform, OK, the icon is a joke although the Marvel story was great!

Accidental WhatsApp account takeovers? It's a thing

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Trollface

Re: This is an issue with these "social" media companies

APP = All Pirates Possibilities ... what we see everyday like this problem just reminds me about our history in the last few thousand years, pirates have existed since ancient times – they threatened the trading routes around ancient Greece, and seized vast cargo from Roman ships. The most far-reaching pirates in early medieval Europe were the Vikings - so these days they have just been replaced by apps everywhere; "social" media companies are not pirates, they are just selling cannon balls, so they are making money from the pirates.

GoDaddy joins the dots and realizes it's been under attack for three years

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Joke

Re: Well...

Can anyone give a good reason why we shouldn't just block all Russian Internet traffic? FTFY so I gave you an upvote.

Amazon mandates return to office for 300,000 corporate staff

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Happy

No hard stares at home

Back in the office Paddington usually gives the hard stare to those who have bad manners. It worked on both Mr Brown and Nuckles McGinty in their "office" environments. I'd love to see the next Paddington 3 movie with him just "working from home"!

Virtual reality telemetry means you can virtually kiss goodbye to privacy

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I've heard of privacy before ...

I remember the days when privacy existed but I'm 70 so it's a little difficult to recollect events that happened many years ago - but privacy did exist back in the days when the computer operating system ran fine with 64kb of memory. Since then we have "upgraded" everything in the computing world ... what we see these days about privacy is well described in this article, so it seems that privacy has had a pretty typical "upgrade" these days.

Outage-ous: Twitter OKs cannabis ads, then goes up in smoke

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CBD + THC is now LSD

The industries are just making money (pounds, shillings, and pence) from this presentation but my experience has been that the current "THC" and, "CBD" pills and gummies are pleasant but vastly less effecting than smoking anything. The only thing that any of these do is help me sleep so I'm comfortable but not impressed or even stoned at all. In college I was known as "Captain Bent Brains" because I was always trying everything to let my friends know what was decent and what wasn't fun.

Sick of smudges on your car's enormo touchscreen? GM patents potential cure

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Och, I canna ged Voice Recognition ta work.

Antivirus apps are there to protect you – Cisco's ClamAV has a heckuva flaw

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Re: The most useless software in the world

My mail-server runs ClamAV and it stops 3/4 of all malware and virus deliveries, I stop the remaining 25% by quarantining all emails with potential infectious attachments e.g. Purchase Order.exe and Purchase Order_pdf (2).rar - two examples from this morning's deleted list.

Tesla's self-driving code may ignore stop signs, act unsafe. Patch coming ... soon

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Re: Complete stop should mean complete stop

In the US you can make a right turn on a red light but the law states that you MUST STOP before you turn. If you follow the law then it's a reasonable thing to do but of course you have to check that the turn after you stop is safe.

99 year old man says cryptocurrency is for idiots

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Cryptocurrencies are "created" but ...

We talk like cryptocurrencies are created and "money" is only generated. Back in the 50's my parents bought a house from a family who had lost the original owner in WWII and as a kid I helped my parents clean out the chicken sheds - I found a bag of half-crowns and was so happy until a week later when I found a mold that I showed my dad and he compared it to the pile of half-crowns and then handed the entire lot over to the local police. I started reading at the local library and saw that coin manufacture has been "traditional" for centuries.

So cryptocurrencies are just computers following tradition.

Musk's view count antics are perfect cover for Twitter's paid API failure

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Happy

Re: "Egotism is the anesthetic to deaden the pain of being a fool." - Dr Schofield

He's a twit, the definition is accurate and that's why I've always laughed at the concept of posting on twitter, but have never wasted any time looking at what twits are saying.

Chipmakers threaten to defect to US, EU if UK doesn't get its semiconductor plans sorted

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Unhappy

Re: No, no, no.

"Center for Policy Studies" is based on American spelling while "Centre for Policy Studies" is English, but based on French and Latin language spellings so is this a Brexit feature? After all lots of changes were promised but never fully documented, or even happened.

US military spends weekend shooting down Useless Floating Objects

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Joke

Re: "practically anyone can send a balloon into the air"

I was wondering what was happening after Amazon said that my book delivery was going to be delayed after Biden announced the shoot down, but now Amazon says "later next week" so I guess the balloon wasn't an Amazon attempt to deliver, in a climate friendly way.

UK prepares to go it alone on post-Brexit science plan

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Re: Science vs Politicians

FTFY - effectively the Politicians organized a vote and then had to sort out the Brexit agreement - but they didn't understand all of the consequences, fair enough because that was not anything that they had any experience in. If we replaced the Politicians with Scientists then after the original vote then the Scientists would have done a lot of research to work out all the potential consequences that we are now seeing these days - virtually none of which any moron said could happen.

I wonder if eventually Brexit might end up eliminating Politicians on all sides ... replacing them with Scientists might be an improvement.

Linus Torvalds releases probably unnecessary release candidate eight for Linux 6.2

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Linus Torvalds

Anytime Linus makes a comment, or statement, then I trust it, Linus Torvalds worked to create an operating system but also used it; Most other operating system seem to be just created and upgraded without too much thought about about potential issues for users. He's always done a great job!

Let's play a game: Deepfake news anchor or a real person?

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Joke

Re: Racism

I think that 如果你想抽大麻,请投票给拜登 might be presented to support the Republicans, although it might result in a sudden change to the Democrats.

Microsoft switches Edge’s PDF reader to pay-to-play Adobe Acrobat

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Re: I don't understand why we still use PDF

"I would like to shake the hand of the man who first decided that e-mail clients should slice, dice and run arbitrary programs. Then I'd like to stir, blend and puree his hand."

-- J. D. Baldwin in the Monastery (an ASR comment about 20 years ago)

BOFH: Generating a report the Director can show the Board – THIS is what AI was made for

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Joke

Re: Perspective (for our US readers)

Locally working with "cloud" in Louisiana and seeing "Hunter Biden's Laptop" we'd be wondering how long it would take to find it every week when we get only four to five inches of rain from the cloud. You can say "cloud" but talk locally and AI would see a little rain (only four inches).

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Re: bang up to date

I'd be much happier working with the BOFH then ChatGPT!

IBM health benefits blackout leaves retirees footing the bill

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Re: Makes me sick it does

Just think how happy everyone would be if there were healthcare discussions once a week at the local pub. The factor is that a discussion once a week to keep everyone aware of healthcare issues is much better than the pub but having the meeting at your local pub would pretty much guarantee that people with healthcare issues would attend. As a little kid I loved going to the pub with my parents for local village discussions. I don't see IBM as doing anything virtually different that every other wealthy corporations does - so many copy IBM.

US teases more China tech sanctions, this time to deflate balloon-makers

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How much spying can you do from 10,000 feet? Compare that to driving around as tourists looking at their phones, or fitting sensors in the wings of commercial planes delivering components to the US.

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Facepalm

Kids in US schools are often only scared when bullets fly around the classroom - kids are virtually never scared by balloons flying around overhead or through the classroom.

Google now won't black-hole all AI-made pages as spam

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Pint

Re: Web content automatically generated by AI will be ranked according to its quality

Is AI thinking that people are snorting Coke, or drinking Coke, but never trying Pepsi?

Curiosity finds clearest evidence yet for water on Mars

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Happy

Re: I've seen those marks before

It will be fascinating when we finally visit Mars to discover more details like this, given that Mars is about as old as our planet it is likely that life existed in the water there, maybe about the same time that life existing on the Earth but was still fish in the water. To discover anything (or even nothing) on Mars will be very helpful in envisioning the creation of life on Earth - we need to visit Mars.

Ring system discovered around dwarf planet Quaoar leaves astronomers puzzled

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Re: Obviously

"As a result of our observations, the classical notion that dense rings survive only inside the Roche limit of a planetary body must be thoroughly revised," - Giovanni Bruno

This is a good illustration of the situation that when we see 'problems' then studying them hard can result in us getting a better view of events, not just astronomically but in virtually every situation. I have always found problems to be very helpful in educating me about things that I'd never thought about before.

Glasgow staff form UK's first Apple union after historic vote

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I think that the "Union" environment is much like the "UK environment" - the UK is England with laws create by the English parliament but influenced by Scotland, Wales, and Ireland - essentially they are virtually union members in the UK ... it's been very helpful for hundreds of years - we're a great country because we're trying to keep everyone in all of the UK happy, not just a few MP's in London. I'm English but always seen the views and cultures of people in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland as very helpful in reality even if they make me see our English mistakes (currently Windrush, Brexit and the NI protocol etc).

Conversational AI tells us what we want to hear – a fib that the Web is reliable and friendly

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Re: Natural intelligence first

"I have never seen a situation so dismal that AI couldn't make it worse." An updated Brendan Behan quote (LOL) that just describes a situation that I've been watching ever since AI appeared. All these corporations are busy telling us that they have artificial intelligence but it's always just been software written to create results, virtually never to verify the accuracy of their results ... OK so I'm unhappy about it but the reality behind it is not "the AI answer", it's the ability to sell people ideas that can lead to the corporations making money from everyone told that they are using AI.

Initially Google created their searching just to help people, but that was about 27 years ago. Back then trying to help people was normal in society, these days the transition from "helping" to "profiting" is well illustrated by the changes in our environments over the years that El Reg has been describing and we're all happy reading ... but think what that would all be if El Reg was just created by AI.

Used EV car batteries find new life storing solar power in California

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Alien

This might be a good start

We've been designing batteries to be energy efficient for a hundred years now, a major factor is that this make them easy to sell but a good move in the future would be to build all batteries in a way that would make then easy to recycle or simply just repair and restart as relatively efficient energy storage devices. But if that can't be done then lets just build them in a way that would make them easy to recycle and create new batteries. Look at the world today and think how it might be in a thousand years time - there are a lot of issues that we need to fix if we want to keep humans looking up into the heavens for other alien lives.

Scammers steal $4 million in crypto during face-to-face meeting

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Happy

Re: Who loves cryptocurrency?

That's great - 1980 had everyone worshiping David Bowie so some great memories of the days back then!

Money with excited criminals has been around for more than a thousand years now, but originally it was not as common as the events that we see these days. Highwaymen have not been seen since the late 19th century but now emailwaymen are back in the world.

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Unhappy

Who loves cryptocurrency?

Cryptocurrency has just become criminal financing in recent years - I thought it was a great idea when cryptocurrency first appeared but it seems that a huge amount of criminals also thought the same thing. I've quit cryptocurrency 100% now to avoid the risks that this story describes - returning to checks, bank-transfers and credit cards is depressing but much safer and nowhere near are expensive as $4 million these days.

Warning: Microsoft Teams Free (classic) will be gone in 2 months

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Re: Oh dear, Microsoft

"It's not that Microsoft is cynical. It's rather that they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody." - a Brendan Behan quote updated (every one of his quotes needs virtually no big changes today).

Dell planning job cuts as PC demand jumps off a cliff

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"upgrades" have flushed the environment

I have a bunch of Dell laptops and they are all working great ... but ever since Windows 8 appeared I have found that work is much easier using the older laptops running Windows 7 than "upgrading" to spend more time waiting for Windows to get started and then make me wait while it downloads upgrades that are going to cause problems. I have a few systems running all of the current versions of Windows because we have to support customers but working is so much better with the older versions and so many customers want support for Windows 7, not "Windows This Week".

Latest Windows 11 build shares desktop real estate with, er, Spotify

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Unhappy

Re: So

Each new Windows version makes the older versions look better. This is a Windows update, how many more of these types of issues will we see for the next few years before they are all built in as permanent "features" in Windows12?

Fossil brain undoes 350 million years of scientific understanding

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Boffin

This is a good story - Thank You!

However it's worth remembering (this is just a thought, not a criticism) that evolution is basically a result of sexual extensions; An entity evolves and it more popular after "parties" in the evening which "results" in more entities being born and the population increasing ... potentially evolving more over thousands of years to reproduce and "evolve" some more. So all evolution has to be something that extends the populations - essentially this is suggesting that smarter fish evolved more and more, eventually resulting on a fish evolving to breath air and then flop around on the river banks, finding mushrooms to eat and developing their fins into legs and arms and becoming animals that climbed trees.

A moment of silence for all the drives that died in the making of this Backblaze report

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Happy

Re: 1% failure rate

I've got a Windows XP system running with a 10Mb drive, it's still fine after about 24 years now, And there's another 10Mb drive that's still running fine after about 40 years but it hasn't been running full time, I only put the RL02 disks into the drive when I need to access data from back then.

And about 35 years ago I was working with a DEC customer of ours who was having problems with her system failing to boot up on a hard drive that I had installed many years earlier, yes it was "dead" - the disk wasn't spinning. But we talked about it and the next day she'd got it up and running to copy the data onto a new drive ... she solved the problem so quickly. She had unscrewed the top of the hard disk cover off and given her disk a little snip with her finger to get it running - it started spinning and they got everything fixed that day.

Intel cuts some workers’ pay to fund its future

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Happy

That's a good change - I stopped eating Lobsters after I learnt to scuba drive and saw the lobsters just acting like little kittens down under water, hiding in the reefs and then popping out to look at me and wave at me. I love crayfish and so do the Lobsters.

Boeing bids the 747 a final, ultimate, conclusive farewell

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Happy

Re: The end of an era

I took a flight on a 747 to India in 1972 to attend the Hans Jayanti festival, a religious meeting in New Delhi and Dehradun - it was a wonderful flight in such a comfortable plane flying out there and then back to London after a month in India - that introduced me to Indian food in the countryside - I still love Indian food but these days I'm just eating in a restaurant, not walking down the street with a bunch of cows - LOL, that was so nice!

I was just a long haired, stoned and trippy, hippy in those days, I've flown professionally all around the world ever since and flights these days are not as quiet and pleasant as that 747 flight was!

Sweating the assets: Techies hold onto PCs, phones for longer than ever

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Windows

"...a 39 percent plunge in Windows-related license revenues paid by PC makers."

This might explain why Windows 11 is requiring that we replace all the corporate users computers ... in the early days (Windows XP) all the computer manufacturers were complaining that people were not buying new computers - nowadays Microsoft makes money by creating a situation that makes users to buy new computers. If the income level stays down then will be be seeing Windows 12 soon?

Boffins deploy machine learning in search for intelligent ET

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Boffin

Re: "a viable analysis tool, out-scaling the world’s largest super-computers"

Look at the history of the Universe since the Big Bang and the chance of intelligent ET existing is probably low. Our sun is about 4.6 billion years old and we're thinking that, based on observations of other stars, it will reach the end of its life in about another 10 billion years. This seems to be a common Universe event so the chances of seeing ET is low because this is probably happening everywhere. We're only here because sixty-six million years ago, dinosaurs had a bad day, if that had not happened then we probably would not exist to have this conversation.

JD Sports admits intruder accessed 10 million customers' data

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Hackers take security EXTREMELY seriously because you can make a lot of money from it, but if you are the company boss then your first thought might be that security is expensive... so being hacked might save you money. I'm not gaslighting, it's just that the modern data environment prioritizes access everywhere, security is just a "feature" these days.

Intel inside a world of pain as revenue plunges by a third

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Re: The World of Pain is old but I still love it!

LOL, so I posted that thought on Friday and then on Sunday we got five and a half inches of rain. It's only sprinkling now so all is well for us.

FOSS could be an unintended victim of EU crusade to make software more secure

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Banning advertising is very profitable, you don't have to pay for advertising because all you need to do is send spam.

These days spam is everywhere all the time, I wonder if an EU reconfiguration might stop spam - if spam could be totally eliminated in Europe by new regulations and email organization then I wonder if all the Brexiters would suddenly reverse?

I know this sounds like a joke but I would be so extremely happy if I didn't get spam every day!