Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: All that is happening

"The real story should be why such a course of action is so unpalatable to the UK."

It's unpalatable to half of the UK because we told the other half and they didn't want to listen or didn't believe it so we're lumbered with it. It's unpalatable to the other half because they were told and didn't want to listen, didn't believe it and probably in many cases still don't so they've lumbered themselves and us with it.

Re: I'm confused....

If it wasn't minimising the effect of Brexit the tariff would be a whole lot more.

Re: Nationalism or a Green Transition.

"because there won't be enough EVs in the continent of Europe for decades"

And if there were there wouldn't be the public charging infrastructure to support them.

Re: I'll be sticking with petrol (or diesel) for my next car.

No but it evens out the load.

Re: I'll be sticking with petrol (or diesel) for my next car.

That could be supply and demand but hydrogen is certainly tricky stuff to handle. But I've no doubt supply and demand is operating between EV sales and public charging infrastructure is holding back EVs. It's not just range concerns, it's the huge percentage of properties with no private car parking where home chargers an be located and to a lesser extent charging times. I can always find a choice of petrol pumps with minimal queuing and only occupy one of them for a few minutes at a time. I can point to rows of houses near home with no chance of installing private charging facilities with numbers of vehicles parked outside far in excess of the capacity of the few local chargers. If government is serious about getting a move to EVs they need to take action to ensure that is remedied. The only effect of banning sales of ICE vehicles will be to grossly extend the working lives of the existing fleet and/or create an underclass who have no means of transport, bus services being a fraction of what they were 60 years ago. It's no use passing legislation that is little more than a pius hope greenwashing.

Not too much point building EVs if they can't put an adequate public charging infrastructure in place. But don't worry. HMG has assured us building EVs is one of the many things for which the UK is the best place in the world.

Re: So the system didn't cut the ringtone when the phone was picked up

"because, obviously, who would configure a 90-second ringtone ?"

They made an assumption. Any assumption quickly becomes a limitation if not a bug. Assume as little as possible, Even so it should be a requirement of ringing a phone that the ring tone ill be cut off as soon as it's answered.

Re: Interest, expertise and time

"sadly still on FTTC"

Not sadly at all as far as I'm concerned. C is only a few hundred metres away so fast enough. Why pay more?

Just go back to using a router of my own. Had to buy another because the older ones had died or probably full of unaddressed CVEs. One of the advantages of that is thet a more modern one combines the FTTC modem whereas the old setup had a separate emodem.

Re: Whoops !!!

"Cloning the MAC Address of the original ISP router can be useful to avoid 'simple' detection if you replace the router"

Didn't bother, just stuck a TP-Link in as was. Only issue with that, several generations of router have been quite happy to live with the name I chose to give the router in my hosts file. This one doesn't like it so I just use the IP address to connect to it.

Re: Dirt

It depends on whether you're in Glasgow.

Re: A 1980s minicomputer at the bottom of a mine ?

Primitive? A VT220 was luxurious when all you have was a VT100.

Re: Ah, the 80's...

"No-one suspects that something with four wheels contains something deadly until it goes KABOOM."

No-one?

Suspecting exactly that was SOP in Northern Ireland. It became law that an unoccupied car should be locked because of the increased risk of it being stolen and used as a bomb (which puzzled me why it seems to have been so easy to lift documents from a PSNI Super's car). There were substantial areas where it was illegal to park an unoccupied car (they may not have been aware of it but my children were sometimes car-sitters on weekends when I needed to run a quick errand into one of the zones).

Even so, my lab was bombed. Someone the IRA wrongly though worked there was targetted. They loaded his car, told him to drive there and held his family hostage. As he didn't work there the car never got beyond the double gate trap. Everyone was evacuated to the back of the site until it went off

I was down town in court at the time and got told about it by a couple of Peelers (even writing about it brings back the terminology of the time and place) while the defence had asked for a recess whilst they considered what I'd just said. Windows were blown in but not much real damage. I was greeted by a strong smell of clove oil as I entered the door. I used it as a dehydrating agent for preparing wood sections and had a 100 ml bottle near one of the windows that blown in. The spilled oil must have got trodden right down to the door.

"Installing Code Red / NIMDA patches on windows 2000 machines"

Not Code Tangerine?

Re: A cave, rather than a mine, and a laboratory, rather than a computer

They may well have their own source of radon without the radium. https://www.ukradon.org/information/ukmaps

"Experience is a dear teacher but some will learn by no other."

Re: Dickensian

And probably causes byssinosis as well.

Re: Dirt

But what about the rest of the desk?

Re: Dirt

Or they hated it so much they didn't want another. In fact i have a cheap keyboard like that which is years old - I got it to set up stuff which would mostly run headless so it's had hardly any use.

Re: Ah, the 80's...

An over-seas allowance? I'd have appreciated that. Instead I was up against the Civil Service/HMG mentality which says "We rate people who are qualified for their jobs by their education well below those who aren't, promotion comes with responsibility measured by direct reports, not by what the actual job is, and if we want a national pay policy the easiest place to start is with the public sector."

Re: Ah, the 80's...

Jake may well have been free-lance.

Re: tendency to generate false information – a phenomenon known as "hallucination."

Right now AI is the term being used to push these things onto the world in general. Yes' it's an oxymoron but that's the way marketing works.

Re: tendency to generate false information – a phenomenon known as "hallucination."

A statement based on reports that somebody reported a crime or was a witness at a trial and mangles them to say that that person was convicted of the crime is simply not true. Which epithet you choose to apply to the untruth is your personal choice and frankly doesn't matter very much. What matters is that people are trusting the system that creates such a statement.

"How much of a world model or theory of the world does a newly conceived human have?"

The newly conceived born human acquires a world model by being a physical entity and encountering the other physical entities around it. It starts to do so before starting to acquire language. Our non-human relatives do the same without ever acquiring language. Language - words - is/are the means by which we apply symbolic labels to the real world in order to build and manipulate ideas about them. They are not intrinsic to an internal model of the external world. But words are al LLMs have. They do not have the physicality to react with the physical world.

Re: "Who's responsible for the hallucinations?"

Hence Pascal's point. If you use AI to generate a file and use it in some way which causes problems it's your fault and those problems are down to you.

Re: "that limit protects its customers"

One book every three days would be too much.