Posts by Ken Hagan

Re: On every level: no

"Bezos is the one talking about millions of people living and working in space."

Trying to think of a task that is easier to do in space than on Earth that would not also be far better performed by a robot rather than a ham-fisted monkey.

...

Nah. Can't think of one. Not for the first time I'm left thinking that these "tech billionaires" are actualy just billionaires and haven't a clue about the tech. They're businessmen who got lucky early and haven't regressed to the mean yet. (Though Elon is having a damn good go. I wish him luck.)

Re: Irrelevant

Even if the gouging is between consenting adults, it needs to be legal gouging.

Programs are just config files for the hardware. Turing completeness isn't a bad thing per se just easy to abuse.

"I'm waiting for some really compromising Ai videos of Trump."

Far more damaging than the scenes you suggest would be footage of golden showers in a Moscow hotel room, since some people believe that genuine footage of that nature is out there waiting to be leaked.

...except that it is, but don't tell the Pope.

Re: It'll get a LOT worse

If it is reading your window and sending some of the contents off to a US server (coz I assume CoPilot isn't running locally) then there had better be a way of turning it off that doesn't involve 5% of annual turnover.

Not at all. It is simply naive not to assume that all companies are subject to the whims of the spooks in their home country. It is literally (part of) their job.

Re: BBC article

She's lucky. Non-leaplings don't discover the company is clueless until after they've signed up.

Re: up to me, the user, to do the hard work of readjusting some developer's tool

The code *should* write itself, in the sense that anyone writing a new window manager should (1) suspect that there might be a standard for thus, since the concept is older than they are, (2) bother to look for it, and (3) offer it as the default behaviour.

I'd offer a car analogy but you ought to be able to supply that for yourself.

Re: I don't see this working...

Oh, and for added brownie points, the instructions for a factory reset should include a clear description of how to change the router access password away from the default and a warning of the dire consequences for the owner's bank account if they fail to do so.

"Unless big strides are made for localhost LLMs"

Well that would be useful. The training (using public data) might still happen elsewhere, but using the model could run (using private data) on-prem. You'd still only need a few such machines though, since there's this amazing new tech called a LAN. Perhaps Dell have heard of it?

NVidia will be fine since their products do a decent enough job. OTOH, anyone who has bet their life savings on the share price never falling ... ... tulips.

Re: Well, at least this reminded me to have a play

At least in python, the "semantic white space" is merely an insistence that you indentation must agree with your scoping. As far as I'm aware, it is universally agreed that a failure to agree in this way is a horrible thing to do, so what's the objection to taking advantage of it?

Re: Yawn

By the time it arrives, flash storage will be cheaper per TB, orders of magnitude faster, smaller, longer lasting, and physically more robust.

Re: "In a few years, it will be a different story."

You could start by only using accurate training data, but that's much more extensive than simply hoovering up the easily accessible chunks of the internet.

In fairness, the bit about aliens is half true.

Your microwave demo needs to turn the microwave off after the first pulse to be realistic.

The 'M' of EMP probably is much less of a problem now. Back in the day you could wipe a floppy disc with a magnet but modern HD and SSD media can withstand far more abuse.

Re: So the moral of the story...

It's worse than that. MS have outsourced testing to a group of people who are willing to work for free and who don't care if their stuff breaks. Unsurprisingly then, recent builds of Windows are worthless and break easily.

Re: We need a new Unix

There is no moral difference between a service provided by DLL and one provided by a separate process. In both cases you have the benefit of being able to patch all clients simultaneously and the risk of breaking them all if you are careless about defining your interface.

Re: Geesajobe...

Knowing how Academia works, my guess is that they get paid the square root of fuck all but are expected to do the job as part of their "duties".

Re: CAP theorem

Perhaps India has the same exemption from the laws of logic that Australia does?

Re: Microsoft’s filing doesn’t state the intended purpose of its invention

Point 2 means that we don't even need to assume point 1.

Microsoft are a big enough target that any and every troll knows where to go to fill tbeir trousers with undeserved "royalties". Microsoft know this. Therefore they have to defend themselves by being an even bigger troll.

Re: Black hole time!!!

"a joint venture with the Canton of Geneva to finally have a road tunnel under the lake"

I doubt they'd be able to share the tunnel. The road users would produce a lot of vibration, at least until they were killed off by the synchrotron radiation.

Re: Remind me again

Where does the OS come into it? The article claims that one instance of Chromium (branded Edge) is trawling the open tabs (each of which is a separate process) in another instance of Chromium (branded Chrome).

I wouldn't be at all surprised if there was a Chromium mechanism for trawling "all open tabs" and not terribly surprised if it can't distinguish between Edge and Chrome. That would make this a legitimate trawl implemented carelessly.

Re: Being remote is career limiting

The best people also like being with the other best people. If you scare half away, the others may follow.

Who the fuck isn't dual stack? Windows, Mac and Linux have been dual stack for about 20 years. What are they running?

Re: Hold up!

I doubt you'll find too many relativistic electrons in a CPU. Not for long, anyway.

Re: The latest isn't always the greatest

30 years on, the platform is part of the product. Being able to change that (even if only from W3.1 on metal to W3.1 in a VM) allows you to preserve your investment in the rest of the software.

Perhaps because AI isn't good enough to actually understand its own output?

It needs a human being. Happily there is one handy, in the form of the end user. Sadly, some end-users are horrible. Happily we have a (legal) system for that. Sadly, we actually have several, which provides for an escape route even in the comparitively few cases where the end-user can be identified.

Re: 'third parties'

If the translation happens locally then that is "first party".

Re: We disagree with the findings..

Well of course they are! Would you be happier if they said "We disagree and so we're going to ignore the court, contempt or not."?

Re: Loophole

Given the sound quality of the average phone line, why would you need to use AI? Even a half decent human impersonator should suffice.

Re: Find a new joke

This! is! The! Register!

We! still! talk! about! mobes! here!

Also, the Earth's orbit is elliptical and so the input varies by as much as 20% over a year. This is unrelated to whatever season it might be at a particular point on Earth's surface. The 30% or so that is reflected will vary in proportion. The 70% that is absorbed to be re-radiated later serves to dampen out the annual variation.