Posts by Arthur the cat 3378 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2009
When I heard on the radio the phrase "if some vegetables are unavailable, turnips can make a good substitute", I immediately assumed Rishi Sunak was preparing us for a cabinet reshuffle...
The Spitting Image sketch of Thatcher and her cabinet at a restaurant has definitely entered the nation's psyche.
sharpshooters temporarily tune the frequency of their "anal stylus" to the frequency of their pee droplets
For some reason I'm now thinking of Stylophones.
Given the way Amazon tries to sell me alternate versions of the book I just bought and vaguely related books …
You've just had a kidney removed. Have you considered having another kidney removed? Have you considered having a kidney removed by a French surgeon? Have you considered having your liver removed? Your spleen?
People who had a kidney removed also bought: a lawn mower, a novelty door mat, a year's supply of cat food.
Maybe try solving your supply chain issues first
It's Pico based. There's been no supply chain issues for that chip.
By definition a supply chain issue isn't the fault of the entity on the end of the chain. What do you expect the Raspberry Pi Foundation to do, set up a fab of their own?
I think that was Uber (or Uber-alike). I believe the key fact was that they had to take the jobs that the company gave them at the price the company set. My local taxi firm doesn't set prices (the council does that) and they just put jobs out for drivers to say yes or no to as they wish.
Imagine I create a platform - a cupcake factory, where people can come and make cupcakes if they like and then other people may buy cupcakes off of them and I would take a cut of each sale.
I am pretty sure something like this would be illegal, but somehow it is allowed when it is on the internet.
Sounds pretty close to what just about every taxi firm in the country does. They're not illegal.
Long before it was called arxiv.org the electronic preprint server was on xxx.lanl.gov. It had been called that simply because www.lanl.gov already existed and x is the next letter after w(*). One day I went to fetch a work related paper and found the site was blocked. It turned out the sysadmins had recently installed an access filter without telling anybody, which I found out through a conversation along the lines of "why can't I get to …" – "why are you going to a porn site?" – "It's not a porn site, I need access for work" – "Pull the other one" – "RANT! I need this for work!".
(*) There may well have been a wind-up factor as well.
Money is indeed nothing more than a promise to exchange something now for something of equivalent value later. Typically with the value backed by the continued existence of a nation state; so as long as the nation state exists then most of the value will still exist.
Money doesn't need a nation state in the modern sense to back it, it merely needs the people using it to agree that it has value. It's worth reading about shell money and Rai stones.
That's quite apart from the generally bad idea of letting a computer autonomously control highly dangerous weapons
For SF fans, I'd recommend Peter Watt's short story Malak [Warning: PDF]. Whether giving the AI a nuke in the story is a good or bad idea depends on your ethical stance.
Unfollowing @elonmusk or failing to like every @elonmusk tweet is a violation of Twitter T&Cs.
Looks like we're getting there.
TL;DR: After Biden's tweets about the Super Bowl got more engagement than Musk's he demanded Twitter engineers fix it:
By Monday afternoon, “the problem” had been “fixed.” Twitter deployed code to automatically “greenlight” all of Musk’s tweets, meaning his tweets will bypass Twitter’s filters designed to show people the best content possible. The algorithm now artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000 – a constant score that ensured his tweets rank higher than anyone else’s in the feed.
his latest tweet at the time of writing indicates more work is happening, probably to help him maintain his spot as one of the world's most popular, and therefore coolest, people
"You have automatically followed @elonmusk. Unfollowing @elonmusk or failing to like every @elonmusk tweet is a violation of Twitter T&Cs. A first offence will mean you will only see @elonmusk posts for 24 hours. Subsequent offences will lead to longer restrictions. Failing to open the Twitter app or trying to close your account will lead to all @elonmusk tweets being posted through your letterbox as hard copies. This may be halted by emigrating to Mars, where a paid and correctly used Twitter subscription will be necessary to obtain your daily supply of MuskOxygen™."
As far as I can tell it's more about the geolocation of the IP address you use.
Even that can be a bit variable. I have fixed IP addresses from Zen and various services over the years have geolocated me in Rochdale (Zen's HQ), Bolton, London or occasionally Bristol or Nottingham. I'm actually in Cambridge.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
