* Posts by Arthur the cat

3364 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2009

Databricks claims its open source foundational LLM outsmarts GPT-3.5

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They'll be just fine for political manifestos in the many upcoming elections.

UK skies set for cheeky upgrade with hybrid airship

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Happy

Re: Really???

The advertising campaign to not discard litter out of your car window while driving, had me laughing so much I almost crashed.

"Don't be a Tosser!"

Good advice, whichever way you take it.

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WTF?

Re: Really???

depending on the source, it has about 60% of the lifting capability of hydrogen

Blink‽‽‽ The density of ammonia depends on its source? Has reality changed since I did my physics degree?

If you'd said "purity" I might have agreed. Or can you get ammonia guaranteed to be ¹⁵N and tritium?

FreeBSD Foundation hands out Beacon gongs for safer software

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Re: CHERI Discussion On Usenet

Probably plus the fact that FreeBSD has the Capsicum capability framework as part of the kernel and as "man capsicum" says

Capsicum first appeared in FreeBSD 9.0, and was developed at the University of Cambridge.
so it's a no-brainer for Cambridge researchers to use it.

Garlic chicken without garlic? Critics think Amazon recipe book was cooked up by AI

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Re: Recipes that stretch out over 2,000 days

Rabbit pie (feeds 15)

First, breed your rabbits.

There's a recent Nature article on python farming as an efficient(*) source of food. 101 Python recipes could be a best seller, capturing two markets.

(*) Being cold blooded(**) they convert food to meat far better than mammals and lose little weight when temporarily starved.

(**) Pedants: don't start.

Euclid space telescope needs de-icing

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Joke

But …

I thought everything came packed with those little bags of silica gel?

The last mile's at risk in our hostile environment. Let’s go the extra mile to fix it

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Re: "Stop putting cabling in easy to reach, easy to breach ducting"

No it's more subtle than that. … Typically you would then only be responsible for the stretch after the point which branches off to serve only you, even if the remainder is on your property.

Well aware of it (shared sewer that's frequently been blocked by rental accommodation neighbour's actions), but didn't want to get into the details.

Used to work in home insurance claims, knowing this kind of stuff was essential to the job.

Useful if you're a householder as well. :-)

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: "Stop putting cabling in easy to reach, easy to breach ducting"

It's not on my premises until it hits the demarc. That's why it's called the "demarc" because the demarcation point determines if the customer or the telecommunications provider is responsible for maintenance, and that's not at the street corner, that's the box there on my wall with the FCC stamps on it.

Regular reminder: The US has <5% of the world's population, the other 95+% do things differently.

In this case I was specifically talking about fibre in the UK, and CityFibre at least say that with fibre in the ground their responsibility ends at the boundary of the house's grounds(*). You want ducts, you supply the ducts for them. The same applies to water supplies – I'm responsible for the pipes after the water meter in the pavement outside my house.

(*) No idea for lines from posts like mine.

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: "Stop putting cabling in easy to reach, easy to breach ducting"

Seems to me it would have been so easy to bury a conduit and feed the fibre through it.

"Cabling on the consumer premises is the responsibility of the consumer." I know various people who've ended up with the cable draped across their front lawn.

Ad agency boss owned two Ferraris but wouldn't buy a real server

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Happy

Re: "They have that kind of money"

Given the choice, what would you buy? A grey box with blinkenlights or a Ferrari?

Blinkenlights every time. Yes, I'm a nerd. So?

Voyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble

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Re: Real Time

Not real-time communication in computing terms

This means a 45-hour wait to see what a given command might have done.

That's a lot faster than getting an appointment with a GP these days.

Exchange Online blocked from sending email to AOL and Yahoo

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Facepalm

Re: Alternatively, perhaps just pick up the phone and have a chat

I told them I would buy them lunch if they could identify it's use without looking it up.

As remarked elsewhere, once upon a time you had to explain what a video cassette was to old people, now you have to explain them to young people.

'Chemical cat' on the loose in Japanese city

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Re: Catzilla

Well, I suppose at least they will end up with something to go against Godzilla

Yes, but after the cat wins it'll push all the skyscrapers off into the bay.

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Trollface

Re: Looks like Curiosity did it again

Have you tried retaliating in the cat owner's garden?

Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway

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On the other hand, an AI evolved from sendmail cfg is just going to sit in a corner hugging itself and occasionally screaming

Personally I'd expect it to be more like AM in I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. Vengeance would be its only priority.

Chrome users – get an alert when extensions are in danger of falling into wrong hands

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Re: Money Money Money

All Google cares about is Money, nothing else matters to them.

But companies that don't make money don't last lo…

[Looks at AI companies and others kept afloat without profits for years by vast VC input.]

No, forget I said that.

World-plus-dog booted out of Facebook, Instagram, Threads

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Trollface

Re: Food for thought

There's a risk that people will starve to death without the motivation to put a picture of their food on Instagram.

It's a well known scientific fact that food has no calories unless photographed and put on social media.

Chinese 'connected' cars are a national security threat, says Biden

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Re: Who Is Listening In To Cars Phoning Home???......

Thank goodness for my lovely Morris 1000 Traveller!!!

Or as Edna Everage so wonderfully described it, a half-timbered car.

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

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Joke

After 2038, assuming the human race is still around, we'll need to cope with the fact 2100 ISN'T a leap year...

I would hope by then we have the technology to ensure that it will be. What else is the International Earth Rotation Service for? (Get pedalling!)

New solvent might end winter charging blues for EV owners

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Re: A new solvent.

As a quondam chemist, I wouldn't go near it with a very long barge pole, in a hazmat suit. But maybe I'm just a bit paranoid.

Paranoid? Maybe, but your life insurance should be a lot cheaper.

Willy Wonka event leaves bitter taste with artificially sweetened promises

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Re: Tried LLM yesterday for the first time

The only practical use-case I have found for it so far is generating large amounts of generic text in roughly the right size and shape for test data.

Ipsum lorem generators probably take less energy.

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Re: And so it begins????

Or for us old farts: The End

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Re: FANTASY

I think that should have been DON'T Google it!

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Catgacating

Isn't that a film about a society where all cats are genetically graded?

Odysseus probe moonwalking on the edge of battery life after landing on its side

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Re: Time to call Sigourney?

Weaponized tardigrades anybody?

Varda capsule proves you don't need astronauts for gravity-defying science

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Re-entry licence?

The eight-month mission duration was twice that initially planned due to problems with the license needed for re-entry.

What? You need separate licences for going up and coming down? If you're intending to return your spacecraft to Earth I'd have thought a return ticketlicence would have made sense.

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

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There are the managers who's profession ( I use the word very loosely) is managing. They often believe that, as one management consultant said to me "You don't need to know anything about the business to be a manager of it". And they often have MBAs and no or little or no experience of the front line roles.

That's a bit verbose. "They have MBAs" is probably sufficient. I've literally never met a manager who tells(*) you he's(**) got an MBA who is anything other than negative capacity.

(*) It could be I've had decent managers with MBAs, but if so they've kept it quiet. If they tell you the first time you meet that they've got an MBA, they're an arsehole and will be an awful manager and totally ignorant of anything technical.

(**) It's always a bloke who insists you must know about his MBA. (And his Rolex. And his BMW.)

Crowning glory of GOV.UK websites updated, sparking frontend upgrades

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Royal Cypher

That's a phrase that can be interpreted in several different ways:

noun: Cypher

2 dated

a person of no importance, especially one who does the bidding of others and seems to have no will of their own.

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If you don't like the way society is going, it's all on github - you can just fork it.

Yes please.

ChatGPT starts spouting nonsense in 'unexpected responses' shocker

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Re: Just as far away as before

"Mark I humans" get PTSD and even sometimes defect, when ask to do unspeakably evil things like massacre innocent children.

Looks at current world events.

Raises eyebrows.

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Re: He went on to state that...

Never mind AI, that's the state of our entire fucking industry in one sentence right there.

Never mind AI, that's the state of our entire fucking reality in one sentence right there.

T,FTFY.

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Just as far away as before

Automated genocide-machines with guns that automatically hunt and shoot at whoever are classified as the wrong sort of human, have been worryingly feasible for several years now.

Call me cynical if you like, but why would anybody fork out good money for such hardware when Mark I humans produced by unskilled labour have been doing that very effectively for centuries?

Space nukes: The unbelievably bad idea that's exactly that ... unbelievable

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Re: That was my thought, too.

Next on the agenda: Be sure to check under your beds for reds.

More immediate problem in many countries: check in your bed for bugs (the bloodsucking kind).

Self-taught-techie slept on the datacenter floor, survived communism, ended a marriage

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Angel

Re: Daily!?! RFC begs to differ

Every day I wish for the sweet release of death to come and cover me whenever I have to deal with some dickhead user

Might I suggest wishing for the sweet release of death to cover the user?

Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

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Re: One thing that has/should change is...

Files and folders are how computers work

Files and directories are how computers work

T,FTFY.

Dumping us into ad tier of Prime Video when we paid for ad-free is 'unfair' – lawsuit

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Re: Idiots

Is there another form of Enshittification you're trying to differentiate it from?

Cory Doctorow talks specifically about enshittification of companies' offerings to customers. There's also the enshittification of governments and public discourse and food (hybrid rice/meat with added fish gelatin anybody?) and …

I wonder which university will be the first to open a Department of Enshittification Studies?

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Idiots

to quote Cory Doctorow "The 'Enshittification' of the service as a rule!

I suggest from now on we simply speak of Doctorovian Enshittification as a standard recognised phenomenon.

NASA solar sail tech is ready – now who's up to use it in a mission?

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Re: Next up….

NASA announce their first spindizzy drive.

And then people near where Elon Musk is living feel the ground shaking.

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Re: Nuclear

I personally think nuclear propulsion would be much more suitable for missions (especially manned ones) in the Solar System. Solar sails are only suitable for long duration missions which aren't time sensitive.

For most missions the target will still be there in 10 or 100 or a million years. Apart from Pluto crossing the line where its atmosphere condenses/sublimes and the obvious "oh shit, it's going to hit us, better move it" events I can't think of stuff that's seriously time sensitive. So long as some results come back within a researcher's lifetime so there's motivation, a few extra years don't really matter.

Arthur the cat Silver badge

Re: Do Electric Sheep Dream of Androids?

Do Light Sails work in the dark?

Don't be silly, you'd need a Dark Sail.

Microsoft might have just pulled support for very old PCs in Windows 11 24H2

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Trollface

Re: POPCNT

I like the idea of a signed pop count. The sign bit counts as -1 so all ones popcnts as 30 or 62.

HPE seeks $4B in damages from Autonomy boss Mike Lynch and his ex-CFO

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Mandy Rice-Davies Applies

Mandy Rice Davies always applies.

Drowning in code: The ever-growing problem of ever-growing codebases

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Re: Remember 'The Last One'?

I strongly disagree with his take.

Ditto. I learnt to program 52 years ago. For most of those 52 years there's been someone, somewhere predicting the end of programming "because it will all be done by machines, you'll just tell them what you want done". I suspect this will still be happening long after I've been recycled.

Google silences Bard, restrings it as Gemini with optional $20-a-month upgrade

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Image generation

Many tech news outlets a few days ago: Bard can now generate images!

Small print in Google announcement: Except in the EEA, Switzerland and UK.

Europe's deepest mine to become Europe's deepest battery

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Trollface

Re: Stick a pipe full of water down the shaft and GENERATE electricity

Betteridge was an optimist.

CERN is training robot dogs to spot radiation hazards at Large Hadron Collider

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Fetch!

It would be so much easier if you could just train these to fetch the Higgs boson, or whatever they wanted that day.

Good boy! Drop! Drop!! Oh for heaven's sake, it's just buried the top quark in the flower bed!

CERN seeks €20B to build a bigger, faster, particle accelerator

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the grand total is less than the impact to the UK of having Liz Truss do a single budget...

Yep. The LHC has been working for 14 years and never produced a black hole but Truss punched one in the British economy in only 7 weeks.

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Re: Collide at insane speeds

what are we going to call it once it's built? It won't be the Future Collider...

The Fucking Colossal Collider. It keeps the acronym that will be blazoned on everything.

Google throws $1M at Rust Foundation to build C++ bridges

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There is a shit load of legacy code

Rust will need to integrate and interface with this existing code

I known it's not what you meant, but I got a mental image of making Rust work with COBOL.

[Shudder]

Space exploitation vs space exploration: Humanity has much to learn from the Voyager probes

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The word 'Electricity' was coined by a contemporary of Shakespeare.

And the word electricity comes from ἤλεκτρον, the Greek for amber. The Greeks knew about static electricity and played around with its effects over 2 millennia ago.