Posts by Loyal Commenter

Re: Open source closed devs

The problem you are describing, and pretty well I have to say, is the curse of too many choices.

For each of those things, there are a choice of alternatives, yes, but amongst those alternatives, the user is left to do their own research (or guesswork) about which are suitable, which have incompatibilities or dependencies on other things about which the user has choices, which are even maintained, which are malicious, and so on.

In short, it is really, really hard to see the wood for the trees, and Linux is a great example of how daunting this is for a novice user. Anyone can download a distro and install it. The odds are that they will be given, at some point in this installation process, a choice of which packages to install for this and that. Even that list of choices is going to be dictated by which distro they have, probably more or less randomly, chosen.

Before you know it, you're stuck with something or other that doesn't quite work; a graphics card, or printer perhaps, and find yourself having to recompile the kernel. Do you seriously expect someone who isn't a C/C++ dev to even know what a makefile is?

Re: Reminds me of a message I once got.

Where I used to work, we had an account manager who would, after sending an email to a client, go into "sent items", open it up, print it out, and fax it to them, to make sure it got there.

I can't imagine why that place went out of business after I left..

Re: Unicode was created to prevent this thing from occurring:

Indeed, the Greek letter that looks like capital "H" in the Roman alphabet is actually the capital letter eta (the lower case eta looks like the letter 'n' with a tail, 'η'). Similarly, the capital letter rho looks like a 'P', and lower case rho is similar to the lower case 'p', 'ρ'). If one were to start using the same unicode encoding for these letters, it would cause no end of confusion to have an encoding for lower case eta, but not for uppercase (use H instead), an maybe have a separate encoding for lower case rho, depending on how it is represented in the font you are using.

Pretty obviously these are all separate letters, and are, quite sensibly, encoded as such in unicode. How they are represented is a concern for the font in which they are rendered, not the encoding. After all, long gone are the days of typewriters with no key for the number 1, because a lower-case 'l' is perfectly good.

Re: Unpopular opinion

The fact that it took you 4 decent-length paragraphs to explain the .NET versions actually highlights the issue pretty well.

I can explain the history of other extant programming frameworks over the same amount of time in comparable numbers of paragraphs. Java perhaps? That has had a bit of a torturous history. Python maybe? How about the various Android environments and ATKs? My point is that .NET is nothing special in this regard. It is in the nature of something that is under current development, and is moving with the times, to change.

The ongoing history of VB, on the other hand, can be summed up with one word; "dead".

Re: Unpopular opinion

And that's different than previous programming challenges exactly how?

Well, let's start with the fact that VB6 comes from an era when "security" meant locking the case of the beige box, in the computer room, so nobody could steal the sticks of RAM? Yes, it’s still loops and conditions under the hood, but the tech stacks and environment are vastly different.

If you're talking about "thinner layers of cruft", I don't see anyone writing embedded code in VB. It's C/C++, or Python if you want the toy language. VB never was, and never will be, a serious language, for serious use. You know the "B" stands for "Beginner's", right?

As for referring to me as "modern", well, I've been crafting code, in one form or another, since the mid '80s. I learned to code using BASIC. As a child.

Re: WTF YouTube

The thing more likely to make people jump ship is the recent trend on YT to show more and more ads, not only before, but in the middle of videos, and to try and tout their ad-free paid-for version.

Along with a group of friends, since the beginning of the pandemic, we have been regularly watching bad films together on YT (there are a lot of films that are either too bad to bother with copyright, or which are out of copyright on there), using discord to chat along. It has become more and more frustrating to keep everyone in synch with the number of ads that YT is now spouting. Some films are worse than others for this.

Re: Hardly surprising...

...and once they have all those encrypted transmissions, all they have to do is store them until they can crack them, to find out which one was the one they were interested in? I wonder if CERN have any spare capacity in their ultra-high bandwidth storage?

If you have something that is encrypted, and you know there is something of interest in there, it might be worth spending the time trying to crack it using a lot of computing power. It may take you months, or even years to do so.

If you have a stream of data that might contain something of interest, you aren't going to throw away those resources to decrypt every part of it "on the off chance", unless the encryption mechanism is so broken that it's trivial to do so (hint: it's not). If you're collecting data in bulk (and if you are, where are you going to store it?), you're not going to be able to decrypt it at anywhere near the rate at which you collect it. Even for the most paranoid-minded, the sums don't add up. I'd go so far as to say that the basic laws of thermodynamics are probably against you on this one.

For most people's concerns, the fact that something that is encrypted now might be decrypted 20 years in the future, if a flaw is found in the cipher, or if computers advance enough, or might be decrypted a month from now if they throw enough supercomputers at it, is not an issue.

Preventing MITM attacks on banking transmissions is a real concern. Unless those packets can be decrypted in near real-time, as the intended recipient can do using their private key, decrypting them is almost invariably a useless act.

We might get to the point where quantum computers can be made that will factor out huge prime numbers really fast, and break the protection offered by current ciphering mechanisms. I wouldn't hold your breath, I predict that practical nuclear fusion power generation will be here first. I've heard it's only ten years away now. As it has been for at least the last five decades.

Re: There are only four

Yes, the distinction between the event horizon and singularity is an important one, the event horizon just being the point at which you can't accelerate hard enough to get away (in layman's terms).

The singularity in the middle is the properly mind-boggling bit, especially the idea that it has fewer dimensions than the space it inhabits - basically only having mass, spin and charge IIRC* and all the other properties that everything else in the universe has, such as size don't apply.

*Does a black hole have position and velocity? Can these be known precisely, or does the Uncertainty Principle apply? Does a black hole behave like a quantum particle, just a really massive, and potentially charge and spin-heavy one?

Re: There are only four

Nice explanation. Especially the discussion of the "strong" force being an emergent property of the "colour" force, which I wasn't previously aware of, and the clearest yet explanation of the Higgs boson.

One question, though: if the Higgs boson is responsible for inertial mass, is this also the same as gravitational mass? Apologies if this is a trick question; I suspect the answer is "maybe"...

The "spacey-timey" effects of general relativity describe effects on the latter, but I was under the impression that GR is difficult to reconcile with QM, especially when talking about "very big" and "very small", i.e. things like black holes, and their annoying lack of dimensionality, things moving at close to c, and so on. I know Hawking predicted some interesting things as a result of the interaction between these (i.e. Hawking radiation being caused by virtual particles having one fall within the Schwartzschild radius, and one escape), but I thought problems still remained, largely with equations that try to marry the two fields inconveniently running into infinities. Is this correct, or am I talking bollocks here?

Re: "Gaia Theory" basically postulates that the entire planet is conscious

To be fair, I was a first year undergraduate when I read that particular book, and that was *mumblemumble* years ago.

My recall isn't perfect from that far back, but I think the general gist of it was, that complex systems are chaotic in nature, and whilst may reach apparently stable configurations, kept in check largely by negative feedback loops, small perturbations can have large effects, due to positive feedback loops. Those things are hardly revelatory, and have been known about mathematically for a fair time; Lorenz was doing work on this sort of thing in the '60s.

Lovelock's "big idea" was that the Earth is a big sack full of interconnected systems, so could be looked at as a whole, of lots of individual feedbacks creating metastable configurations. Again, this might be revelatory to "steady-state" believers, but they're the same lot who didn't accept continental drift, or mass extinctions.

To anyone who thinks about it, it's obvious that there is no such thing as a system in isolation, and, to some degree, everything has some impact on everything else. The wave-function for every single particle in the universe is unbounded, after all. There's some miniscule probability that one of "your" electrons is located in Alpha-Centauri right now. Admittedly, the number of zeroes between the decimal point and the other digits in that probability would probably stretch just as far.

Considering the Earth as a "meta-system" in this way is itself somewhat limited in its scope. The entire observable universe is pretty much one open system, right up to the point where you start considering light cones and all that stuff that Stephen Hawking made his money from writing popular science books about. (You have read that copy of A Brief History of Time that is gathering dust on your bookshelf, right?)

Lovelock's stuff is good to get you thinking about interconnectedness of systems. Of course, in practice most things are not connected in a meaningful, predictable, or significant way. Putting a slice of bread into your toaster won't cause your car's engine to start, unless you've taken some concrete measures to make that happen, of course. Man-made systems do tend to either be closed for all practical purposes, or we treat the external effects as externalities (i.e. we don't worry about them).

Of course, externalities have effects - when designing something that runs off an internal combustion engine, you'll be far more interested in how that engine works, how power is transferred, efficiency, torque, and all those sorts of things, than you will be about what happens to the exhaust gases. They do, however, have a small effect in the wider atmospheric system, and those effects accumulate, hence climate change. Lovelock was right that we should consider whole systems in this way, and not just the bits we care about.

I think he's probably talking bollocks about robots taking over though.

Lovelock writes an engaging book, but some of his ideas are a bit whacky. "Gaia Theory" basically postulates that the entire planet is conscious.

Let's take, for example, the assertion, "They will also evolve exceedingly quickly due to self selection". Evolution, as any fule kno, is directionless, and, most importantly, the selection pressures are external (when you're filling an evolutionary niche, it's the niche that dictates what shape you need to be to fill it). "Self-selection" is meaningless in the context of adaptive evolution, as you have basically pre-specified the shape of the niche, without any regard to what the rest of the universe is doing. As for "evolving exceedingly quickly", it's worth noting that the organisms with the shortest life cycle evolve the quickest, as evolution is driven by mutation, which occurs, or is manifested, during reproduction. If we are worried about things that evolve fast enslaving humanity, I, for one, welcome our new bacterial and fungal overlords.

Re: If you have nothing to hide....

The better STASI analogy is surely that time* when they steamed open everyone's post.

*"that time" being approximately 1953-1989

Re: Mos Eisley

Or maybe Richesse? Because they're not quite as good at making machines as Ix.

Re: Barad-dûr

Are they going to merge with Palantír? I mean they're basically in the same "data-slurping" business anyway, and the name would fit...

Re: If it's located in Hell...

Nah, I'm sure Satan has put Scumspawn in charge of FB.

Re: No way to get solar energy by then...

Or maybe spacecraft will be sent to Jupiter on "Hydrogen farming" trips, bringing back lots of H (as it makes up about 90% of the Jovian atmosphere) to use to produce water and energy?

Not to be a party pooper, but the amount of energy needed to bring that hydrogen back to Earth from Jupiter is a fair bit more than you'd be getting from burning it to get water. Unless, you meant using it to make water for a Jovian colony, in which case, where's the oxygen coming from? Are you bringing that for Earth? Since it's 89% of the mass of the water you'd get from using it to burn that hydrogen, it'd probably just be more efficient to bring water. Or indeed using any of the plentiful water that there is on Jovian moons to start with, some of which are pretty much entirely ice. Just not Europa, right, attempt no landing there, etc.

Re: Other options

I thought it was 20 years away? Has it gone down to ten in the last 30?

Re: Surely they have to go shopping?

There are specific exceptions to GDPR/DP for policing, so what you wrote doesn't quite hold true, if, for example, you supplied that recording to the police as evidence towards an investigation.

If you pass those recordings onto a third party who is not exempt, such as Joe Public, or posted them on your social media site of choice, then this is probably a better example of unlawful use.

Re: Surely they have to go shopping?

To be fair, if I was photographing a fountain and people wandered into the foreground, it would be a ruined shot. If at all possible, I'd be trying to take the picture without people in the background as well.

Re: Surely they have to go shopping?

I think the principle is that, in public, it is legal to film people doing public things. It is not legal to film in private property without the consent of those involved. What constitutes "public" and "private" is probably a bit of a grey area. For example, try filming in a public toilet, and see how long before you, rightfully, get into some serious trouble.

The right to photograph, and film in public includes filming the police, although they'll probably get shirty with you and try to stop you, despite having no legal grounds to do so.

The principle, as I understand it, really is that if you can legally see it, you can legally film it.

Audio, on the other hand is another matter. If you stand next to a couple having a conversation in public and eavesdrop on them, they will most likely become aware of it, and move away, or give you some choice words. If you use a long-range microphone to do the same, it's pretty clearly listening in on something that is private.

There is a reasonable expectation that if you are talking to someone and there is nobody else in the immediate vicinity, then that conversation is private.

IANAL, of course, but I think the principles here are pretty clear.

FWIW, I don't think most CCTV cameras record audio. Image the poor bastard in the control room for a town centre's public CCTV trying to make sense of the Friday night cacophony if they did. They're there to provide evidence of who hit whom with a glass bottle in which kebab queue.

Re: TFTFY

The number of people actually using Lynx to browse the web must be miniscule. The numbers attempting to use it to do business over the internet must be a miniscule subset of that miniscule number. The number of business who care about that will be approximately zero.

As for outdated browsers - if you're using it to browse the internet, you are going to get updates. I can't remember the last time I had to actually upgrade a browser manually, and most people are using devices that have a lifespan of a couple of years, maybe five at most. You and I may be sat at a desktop PC, or well specced laptop, but most people are either on their phones, with an 18-24 month upgrade cycle, or using tablets or laptops whose batteries will be dead within three.

Tell me honestly, how many people do you know using a machine that is older than 5 years? Admittedly, parts of my desktop machine are older than that, but I'm hardly going to be a typical user. Not a lot of people build their own PCs, and even then, I have a box full of bits and bobs that are obsolete. The only bits that I am likely to retain for many years are things like power supplies and case fans.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that you are typical of the customers that most sites want to attract. They couldn't care less if you are running an ancient version of X-Mosaic on a Linux distro from 1998, or IE 6, or a minority browser that was created as a fork of the old Firefox code base. I can guarantee you that you aren't their target customer.

Re: Oh dear

It's alright, now I know what it is, I can see it perfectly well in my head without the help of youtube...

Dooo, dooby doo dooby doo dooby dooo...