Posts by Ken Hagan

Re: Fair, but probably irrelevant

If you want your patent on walking to stand up in court, you'll first have to demonstrate that Nature didn't beat you to it by millions of years.

At least, that would be how any sane country dealt with this. Sigh...

Re: The Hospital versions..

"Correcting a factual error is not insubordination."

Indeed. Why did Musk think this person was on the payroll if it wasn't because they had expertise that the company owner didn't? Correcting factual errors is literally his frigging job.

Update: ...until it isn't. Truly Musk is a grade A plonker, Twitter is doomed and I'd start to worry about his other companies too becaue he seems to be getting unhinged. (Probably the 168-hour weeks he's putting in.)

Still, at least when Musk goes bankrupt I'll have the ultimate rejoinder to "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?".

"I wonder if having auto-moderation through posting rate limits might be an interesting experiment to try."

You'll have to think carefully about the algorithm that determines the rate limit. Otherwise when several dozen people gang up to troll, their victim will have to choose which one(s) they can afford to rebut without going over their quota.

Re: Some functions are very simple

"After all, it's just a database and walking through the relational links is just another SQL query. "

I don't think that's true for the machine learning methods used by Copilot.

Re: Time to go back to the drawing board ?

"How hard would it be to generate different training datasets based on license, and then fully track attribution during the training process."

Very, I would have thought. Determining what licences apply to particular bits of code in a mixed project might require natural intelligence. You might end up having to limit the system to code that has been opted-in by its owner (as someone suggested a few million comments ago) and that opens up the possibility of "hostile" training data.

There may simply be no way for Copilot to be both legal and worth using. Too bad, Microsoft. The world does not owe you a business model.

Re: Ending WFH

Probably not saving you the cost of a constructive dismissal suit, though. (OK, that might depend on what country they were hired in, but it's certainly true for any staff Twitter might have in the EU.)

Re: Daft

There's no way they can give a green light to HS2, to knock a few minutes off the journey time to Brum (and then stop), at the same time as giving a red light to our chances of having enough power to heat and light our homes. That would be certifiable idiocy.

Except, of course, none of these decisions are being made rationally. They are all being made politically.

Re: The Front Fell Off

Thanks!

Accprding to the OED, it is a legitimate spelling of "axe", common in North America and etymologically and phonologically superior to the alternative.

Re: Home office

What you really need to move between home and office is a few hundred GB of data. A portable SSD might suffice, particularly if it is an SSD with USB3 connectivity and a VM image on it.

Re: > I use it to follow people/services to keep up to date with topics, but I never post anything

Interesting and it appears that there are several Firefox extensions that will do this for you.

Anyone here willing to share experience with one or more of them?

Re: Learning while earning

Ah, but tools like CoPilot literally don't know where they got the code from and no-one really knows how they work. In that sense, I suppose they are like an experienced programmer.

But e-readers are basically just HTML. That's why they can reflow when you change the font size. The difference between them and web pages is all the ad-related, script-infested bollocks that they don't include.

The web could be as pleasant as your e-reader, but the UX experts keep right-royally-fucking-it-up.

Re: Bad design

"If you're paying attention, it's pretty obvious that it only fits properly one way around on the horse, but I'd give the average person only a 50% chance of putting it the right way around first time."

Sounds like a USB cable. :(

Re: WSA or ASW?

Why would I want to do that when I can just run my "legacy stuff" directly on the machine hosting the Windows 11 VM? :)

Re: Cookies are not a security risk

You write potential.

I read possible future.

Not trying to be blasé, but I think it is worth distinguishing between things that are a risk already and things that might lead to a risk in future.

Re: Judge on results, not appearances

And half way through that project you find that you haven't started yet but have only 6 months to deliver.

What's your next move, Einstein?

Re: Liability has already been defined

While true, I don't think that is relevant. El Reg is posted publically and available to share and analyse, but it remains copyright.

Re: Ha! Read about that in the early 1970s

The article said as much. Perhaps the title should have said "confirms" rather than "reveals".

Re: It's just words

Putin might fall, but I can't see anyone partitioning a country with thousands of nukes.

Re: Oh look, it's a Narcissist acting like a Narcissist

"the worlds second biggest narcissist"

I guess it would be needlessly inflammatory for you to clarify, but with so many contenders to choose from I'm a little curious to know who you place below him.

Re: is this safer or less safe?

It reads the same to me: a proposition that may or may not be true followed by a request for evidence.

...which you didn't provide.

Re: Meh

Not only that. The picture would suggest that the stylus is not part of the magnetically levitated frame and so presumably the evil vibrations can come through there instead.

Re: I wonder...

But if they drive people to other OSes, they'll never get any subscription revenue. They will have turned customers of Windows (and, let's not forget, Windows applications, of which MS sell quite a few) into users of other OSes.

And for what? The OS is supposed to abstract away hardware details. Why can't Win11 cope with older hardware by not offering certain features?

Re: Too high risk

There's no risk of getting caught if you don't break the rules.

Admittedly, living without USB2 support in your VM can be annoying, but it isn't risky.

Re: GPS

...except for the ones being used by baggage handlers to find all the AirTags, obviously. :)

Re: many forums

True, and a fair point. Of course, an answer might even have been a least-awful work-around when it was posted but have been superseded by later changes.

I suppose it's another way that many Q&A sites seem to be designed to favour low quality answers.

UK speaker here: I'm aware of the usage and certainly use it myself, but it's a weaselly euphemism for "problem". We like euphemisms over here but we shouldn't forget that they are euphemisms and are therefore just a socially acceptable form of dishonesty.

The resolution isn't good enough.

But someone *will* hack these. They'll probably just use the manoevering rockets to create a short firework/meteor display.

Re: Impressive

"You can have have a minimal desktop and terminal in < 40 MB RAM"

I should hope so! Windows managed that back in the 90s and a minimal OS shouldn't be doing any more than NT did back then. (Come to think of it, a maximal OS shouldn't either.)