Posts by Adrian 4

Re: Performance isn't free...

I have an operating system to support apps.

I don't want to ship large parts of that with the app. At thatv rate I might as well just have a VM supervisor,. not an OS.

It may be that the problem is apps rely on other apps instead of OS services, and they aren't packaged definitively enough.

In that case, those apps need to migrate towards being reliable, properly supported and versioned services instead of half-assed web things.

We don't want to end up with an OS that's maintained like python, do we ?

Re: Do people really only use Facebook?

> It enables you to skim a few sources to see which is more trustable on a subject.

But then you have to trust the aggregator. Which is unlikely, for anything from Meta.

Re: Charles Ponzi born 100 year too early.

> Cryptocurrencies are imaginary entities.

All currencies are imaginary entities and have been for many years.

> This can't end well, I hope he's avoiding stairwells and windows...

He's safe while his wallet is getting refilled

Re: How many years away?

Is that a generation of people or a generation of crypto ?

Re: What a future

> The developer needs some form of unit tests, to ensure the code works, before checking it in for proper testing.

So,. LLMs are rubbish at writing code.

Can they write tests ?

Re: It's all somebody else's fault

> Will you fit cameras in all your rooms, continually broadcasting to your local police station?

Access to your communications is an early step, acceptable to people who don't think very hard.

It's frog-boiling.

Re: Why

> The correct solution to unnecessary rear fog lights is an automatic speed limiter to 40 km/h (25 mph) when the rear fog lights are on.

Could do that on the front lamps too.

There were many more. Fake towns and industrial plants - just the lights, nothing else - were set up along the Humber to waste enemy bombs (and divert them from real targets).

Re: Last Technical Update from VM. Our services are all fine this morning.

Seems like the limits of their technical knowledge even internally are 'haveyouturneditoffandonagain'.

If stuff needs randomly resetting, it's broken. Get better stuff.

Re: wait till a support person arrived

'Crack' he may have been, but could he wrangle an alligator ?

Re: YouTube Shorts

I understand that youtube is arm-twisting creators into making shorts, because they believe Tiktok is taking their audience with them. But why they keep pushing them to people who prefer the longer format and even try to disable shorts is beyond me. Surely that just reduces their audience further.

Re: Brrrreeeeeexxsshiiittt

But wasn't the point of Brexit that the rich wanted to avoid the EU idea of financial transparency, which would have destroyed their shell games ?

Re: Invention

Putting it in a 0.65mm sq chip instead of a rack-mount preselector

Re: Invention

If patenting it stops anyone except Ford from doing it, I'm all for that.

Re: Most tasks can be condensed onto 1 page of A4

> reasons processes are longer than they should be

3. Have accumulated dozens of 'improvements' over the years to handle specific failures without ever reviewing the whole.

Re: Bye bye Pi

> but the ESP32's Bluetooth stack is thoroughly tested and the Pico's is absent (hardware support but no official driver)

I believe the driver became available this month in the latest SDK release, but you're correct in that it could hardly be called thoroughly tested yet.

Re: Cost

Wouldn't a bullet or two have done the job ? Surely a missile would go right through it without noticing and not explode until it hit something else ?

Re: Fire all architects!

Perhaps it's not so much that AI is getting good, but that the work many creative professionals do is actually often mundane repetition of what they've done before.

Re: Twitter isn't really struggling

I logged out of twitter for some temporary reason which conveniently means it now prompts me to log in. That's sufficient friction to stop me idly reading it, which is a win.

However, before I did that I was finding it less and less interesting. The corporate writers were 90% of the feed instead of 10%. Most of the remainers are dual-posting on Mastodon anyway, and that functions without discarding many of their posts.

So twitter had already become, for me, just an ad channel. Ads are supposed to piggyback on real content to get read. They have no attraction in their own right.

Re: Baseline

I am reminded of 'How do you do, fellow kids ?'

Artificial Intelligence is to Intelligence what Artificial Flavouring is to Flavouring or Artificial Grass is to Grass.

It's not any sort of reputable substitute. It just tastes/looks a bit like it.

Artificial Insemnation is a bit closer. It does at least achieve the stated aim, though perhaps not to everybody's satisfaction.

Re: What's life without a little risk?

Then have hand-holding languages for under-trained engineers and let the rest of us use the tools we've developed for our own preferences.

This is what we do in every other endeavour : we have training where it's needed.

Why is programming any different ?

Someone mentioned Max. That wasn't a language failure. It was a management failure and a specification failure. It would have relied on faulty sensors whether the language was memory-safe or not.

Re: What is the effect in EU and UK?

> But in non-corrupt countries will this achieve anything for them?

Could you give an example of such a country ?

Re: Attention getting tones

There's 107 Hz between the tones, which is also in the audible range. You'll hear this too, as a beat frequency. That's why it sounds modulated.

The tones used for tone-dialling (DTMF : dual-tone-multi-frequency) are somewhat similar: pairs of tones that, heard together, trigger more combinations than the tones alone. There are 8 tones but played in pairs 16 combinations (0-9,#,*. Also A-D but those aren't oftewn encountered on keypads. In addition, the combinations are a lot less likely to be encountered than random single tones.

"This resulted in people fobbing off the person on the end of the phone with quick 'fixes' which in know way would ever resolve the problem but would get the person off the phone so they could answer more calls."

That's the intention of he policy, isnt it ?

Re: Good luck with that

" .. that's a well tried approach that's been applied to basically every technology since the motor car."

However, it's also shown that additional laws don't stop people who were planning to break laws anyway. So criminals will happily use deep fakes to perpetrate criminal acts.

The approach is justified but ineffective. It's a law that says crime is against the law.

Because that might prove it's actually worth something as opposed to being mere demos and hype.

Until it does .. it's demos and hype.

Re: Email remains the most used communication method for work

But now that gas prices have fallen again (source : https://www.voanews.com/a/european-gas-prices-fall-to-lowest-level-since-ukraine-war-/6901464.html) those energy costs will fall too, won't they ?

.. won't they ?

Re: "... they serve their makers more than they help users"

While I agree in principle that a voice assitsant needs a mic button, in practice it would be the last straw in the usability problem if you had to physically turn it on before it would respond to your voice command. This is especially obvious if you're using it to turn the lights on.

So I'm going to invoke Hanlon's Razor and say that the lack of a button isn't malicious .. but the desire for one does further worsen the argument for having the thing at all.

Re: Over selling

This seems likely the explanation. You can't really have the load that you pay for, they assume you'll use less. Like broadband provision.

Not that I think it would be a sensible thing to do, of course - but bitcoin is just a compute load. How is it any different than someone who wants to compute Pi : it's the customer's decision as to whether the service is worth the cost. If the provider is making that decision then they've underpriced on the assumption you overprovisioned and they want to hide it.

Re: MIDI Maze!

> 680x0: the CPU architecture that just will not die

Who'd want it to ?

It's difficult to call x86 an architecture. It's a dog's breakfast of a slum shack. That's the one that should die, and hasn't.

Re: Rackspace has to be finished after this

If only they'd chosen decent music-on-hold, all this angst could have been saved and their customers happy.

Another case of learning the true cost of cheap services.