* Posts by Filippo

1889 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Nov 2007

Phones' facial recog tech 'fooled' by low-res 2D photo

Filippo Silver badge

Re: Biometrics!

They should be an id. I wouldn't mind them being used as an id, in the right circumstances.

They are, unfortunately, often used as a password. See phone unlock. And a phone is precisely the last place I'd use biometrics on, because it's virtually always going to have a single user anyway.

Filippo Silver badge

Biometrics!

A password you can never change, and which you leave around everywhere you go! Best idea ever!

One of the world's most prominent blockchain apps looks like being binned

Filippo Silver badge

Re: This was billed as a modern way to run an exchange, instead of an old-fashioned central platform

Agree. A lot of people should get in their heads that "it's modern" is not, by itself, a motivation to make a technical choice.

Microsoft to let Internet Explorer 11 haunt Windows some more

Filippo Silver badge

Re: programming madness

Back then, it was because it was easier than Win32 and dev time was and is really expensive. I think that's where most of the IE-only apps come from. Luckily, I was good at Win32 and I always felt that using browsers as application platforms was the wrong tool for the job, so I never did that. Well, maybe not so luckily, as I could subsequently have been paid to upgrade the projects over and over again. We're talking about industrial stuff, exactly the sort of crap that is now forcing people to stay on IE and, sometimes, XP, because the program is a client for hardware has a decades lifespan. My properly-designed Win32 programs are still happily running on Win11.

But nowadays? The ability to run with no installation. The ability to run on multiple platforms. Of course, all of this comes with a lot of caveats, but by the time you find out, it's usually too late.

A good while ago, I was part of a group that was tasked to get our .NET project running on OSX. Several meetings later, it was decided to switch everything to a web interface, so that it could just run on any platform with a browser. By the time we reached feature parity, we had spent a significant multiple of the time it would have taken to just make an OSX native version. It could run on most browsers on most platforms, but, in practice, no users for any platform except for Windows and OSX ever emerged. And, to add insult to the injury, in the mean time, .NET had been ported to OSX, so the original version could have worked with only minor tweaks, and would've run about five times faster.

What's your Mean Time To Innocence – the time needed to prove that mess is not your problem

Filippo Silver badge

Re: MTTI?

Thought of the day: Innocence proves nothing.

Professor freezes student grades after ChatGPT claimed AI wrote their papers

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Re: @Filippo

My post was in the context of answering Mike 137's post above. You seem to be reading it out of context.

doublelayer's post, which should appear near this one, clarifies this.

Filippo Silver badge

Re: More misunderstanding of what an LLM is

I'm probably thinking about him, and thanks for the correction. The point is: people who actually work on the stuff can apparently misunderstand it, so if someone not involved in the field misunderstands it, I can't blame him for that, not even if he's a university professor.

I do blame him for basing important decisions on tools he doesn't understand, though.

Filippo Silver badge

Re: More misunderstanding of what an LLM is

In fairness, we see specialists in the field of AI who apparently don't understand what an LLM is and how it works. E.g. the guy who claimed that ChatGPT is sentient.

I suspect it will be a while before people adjust to these new tools.

Filippo Silver badge

Re: @Filippo

First of all, assuming that LLMs can't come up with original ideas is somewhat problematic. It depends on what you mean by "original idea", which is a nebulous concept at best. Depending on what exactly is meant, it could go anywhere from something LLMs can reliably produce, to something only a few geniuses can produce a handful of times in their entire career. I just had ChatGPT come up with a description for a character in a novel, and it came up with a freelance journalist who had to skip town after uncovering a local scandal, loves exotic coffee blends, and collects trinkets from her investigations. It's formulaic, but correct and sensible. It is, in fact, pretty much what you get if you pick up a published novel at random. Are we really setting the bar for passing a high-school test higher than that? And this is specifically a creative task.

Secondly, it's true that school should promote independent thought, and it's probably true that it currently doesn't do that nearly enough, but it's not true that independent thought is the one and only metric of any importance, with everything else being irrelevant to the point that it's not even worth testing. A good professional in any field should (A) know their field, (B) create original ideas about it, and (C) be able to express them in a way that other people understand. Point (B) does not happen without (A), and is largely useless without (C).

Filippo Silver badge

Re: Artificial Irony detector required

My GF is a teacher, and she's regularly outraged by how teachers in staff meetings don't listen to what's being discussed, chat between themselves while someone else is speaking, fiddle with their phone, speak out of turn, duck out of the meeting with some excuse, and generally do all of the things they spend a lot of their time telling students not to do.

Filippo Silver badge

>'I think we need to learn to live with the fact that we may never be able to reliably say if a text is written by a human or an AI'

That's the big point IMHO. I've no idea whether it's a good thing or a bad thing or a meh thing, but it's a thing. And it's not going away. It just isn't. No amount of regulation will stop it: the only thing that prevents most people from running a LLM at home is compute resources, and those just keep getting cheaper.

We need to start adapting our society to the fact that you can't know if a bit of text was machine-generated. And, soon enough, the same will go for pictures and video. Journalism, teaching, politics, law-enforcement, more, all of that will just need to figure out how to deal with this. Pretending that you can keep doing the same job in the same way is not going to work.

NASA's electric plane tech is coming in for a late, bumpy landing

Filippo Silver badge

Re: Any scientists left at NASA?

And we're going to get people to build those plants how exactly? Most Western governments would be voted out in an eyeblink if they tried to start nuclear projects on the scale required to do that. Changing public opinion is going to take decades, and that's assuming no major accidents occur for a while: each of those sets us back twenty years even when nobody dies, whereas killing people by the hundreds of thousands per year via coal emissions (plus those killed or displaced by AGW-enhanced extreme weather) appears to be just fine. And any government who tried it via authoritarianism would be accused of running a military nuclear program and sanctioned, regardless of whether it's true or not.

I wish we could use your solution, but we won't. Not any time soon. So, looking for any alternative, even if it's just for short-range stuff, has merit.

Politics is a problem every bit as hard as physics, sometimes harder.

Filippo Silver badge

$47 millions out of a $40 millions estimate is not that bad, as far as this sort of things goes. When I read a headline about "government project costs more than initially projected", usually multiples are involved.

FTC sues VoIP provider over 'billions of illegal robocalls'

Filippo Silver badge

I did that for some time, but eventually I decided that the best thing for my blood pressure is to just make the entire experience as short and limited as possible, and forget about it.

Here's an idea. An app where you can push an "it's spam" button during a call. If you do, the phone GUI gets cleared of the call, the mic and speakers go silent, but the call is kept up in the background until the other side hangs up, or until you receive another call. When it's over, a report gets automatically sent to whatever privacy authority is appropriate for your country. Include whatever can be legally included, I'm not sure you can record it without telling them; maybe it can auto-transcribed.

I'd actually pay some money for that.

Filippo Silver badge

> Robocalls should be made illegal, period.

I am on the DNC registry for my country. I regularly renew my registration to the DNC registry. There are no companies that have a legitimate authorization to call me. I regularly report every marketing call I receive to myh country's relevant authority. And yet, I'm at five illegal calls today, and the day is still long.

Most calls I receive have a human at the other end, and it takes all my willpower not to snap at them. I just hang up, sometimes I try to gather information first, to add to my report, but they are very cagey on who they actually work for.

Frankly, at this point I believe that all marketing calls should be illegal, period. No permissions, no "sign here", nothing. All marketing call centers are now illegal. Telephone as a marketing platform just needs to be killed with extreme prejudice.

I do what I can by telling anyone who'll listen to never, ever, accept any offer made via an unexpected phone call, no matter how good or urgent it sounds. No exceptions - in fact, ideally, don't even listen to what the other person has to say, just hang up as soon as you understand it's an unsolicited call. If it's legit and really important, they'll send a registered letter, and if it's legit but they won't send a registered letter, then it's not really important. Sometimes, when I'm feeling unreasonably optimistic, I dream that one day everyone will get it, and the concept will just die.

Filippo Silver badge

Re: Spoofed numbers

Spoofing numbers should be considered identity theft.

Will LLMs take your job? Only if you let them

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Re: Great quote

We spent a hundred years writing fiction about evil superintelligent AIs that are unbeatable at logical thought, but eventually get defeated by exploiting their inability to think creatively.

It's really ironic that, in reality, we've figured out how to make computer programs that can create pretty decent paintings and fiction, but are utterly unreliable at logic and facts.

Filippo Silver badge

A good article. It's good to remember that any jobs eliminated by automation pale in comparison to those destroyed by mismanagement and poor leadership.

Mismanagement and poor leadership, part of which includes rejecting, misunderstanding or misapplying automation.

In the case of LLMs, though, I wouldn't fault any business leaders for being highly suspicious right now. It's a tech worth keeping an eye on, but it's not at all clear it will actually be that useful in practice.

EU's Cyber Resilience Act contains a poison pill for open source developers

Filippo Silver badge

I wouldn't worry too much about open source developers. This is still being discussed and it's very much in a state of flux. Assuming that this actually goes anywhere, whatever legislation actually happens is not going to result in the lone developer in Nebraska being liable for half the Internet.

Small commercial developers, on the other hand...

A lone Nvidia GPU speeds past the physics-straining might of a quantum computer – in these apps at least

Filippo Silver badge

Re: Narrow optics

Aren't electrical motors 90%+ efficient already?

4chan and other web sewers scraped up into Google's mega-library for training ML

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Re: Devil’s advocate

Being included in a LLM's training set is not a form of expression. Nobody is being "not-heard" because their content doesn't get scraped for a LLM.

Also, any cutting-edge LLM would be trained on a curated training set, to some degree. Just scraping "the entire Internet" and dumping it into the neural network doesn't seem like it would produce the best results. What exactly gets into the curated set depends on what the researcher is trying to do. I don't know what objectives would be served by including 4chan, but if there are any, then it should be included, otherwise it shouldn't. It's that simple.

How DARPA wants to rethink the fundamentals of AI to include trust

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I don't think those objectives are feasible with current tech.

Hallucinations are an intrinsic property of how LLMs work. Same for the inability to reliably explain why a particular input resulted in a particular output. Ditto, for that matter, for the ability to remove specific information from a trained model (something European regulators are wrestling with).

From what I understand of the underlying theory, none of those problems are truly solvable. We also do not currently have a theory of how to make an "AI" that doesn't feature those problems. They might be mitigated to some degree, but I suspect it won't be enough.

All of that said, if anyone wants to give it a shot, I wish them well.

Wrong time to weaken encryption, UK IT chartered institute tells government

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Re: Whose Encryption Might Be "Weakened"?

"Childish" is attempting to argue that since a problem doesn't affect you personally, then it literally is not a problem. It is a fairly primitive mode of thought, typical of a child.

Also, it is not true that this doesn't affect you. If a limited number of people deploy strong personal cryptography in a context where most people send plaintext, that makes you extremely visible to traffic analysis, and automatically suspect in a sufficiently paranoid regime. At which point, lead pipe cryptoanalysis can be effectively deployed.

Finally, "the AC" is yourself. That is obvious to the point of embarrassment. This sort of message board shenaningans is also childish.

Starlink opens final frontier for radio astronomers

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Re: Sorry but no.

Right. Space astronomy is limited because it's prohibitively expensive. Which is exactly why cheap access to space would be good.

I mean, I said "cheap access to space is good", and you answered with "but access to space is too expensive". Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding, but aren't we saying the same thing?

Filippo Silver badge

I wonder how much space junk at a Lagrange point it takes before it just bunches up via gravity.

Filippo Silver badge

Re: Sorry but no.

I think it's a somewhat more abstract thing. Cheap access to space is a really good thing for astronomy. However, cheap access to space requires commoditization, which means lots of crap in space. These two aspects cannot be entirely separated.

Think how cool it would be to build a giant telescope on the dark side of the moon! But the fastest way to get it probably goes through putting lots of annoying crap in orbit.

BOFH: We send a user to visit Kelvin – Keeper of the Batteries

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WTF?

Re: Keepers of...

I, er, I have no idea what this comment means. Is it something to do with the person in the article being named Kelvin?

Filippo Silver badge

Re: Keepers of...

The human mind is extremely bad at estimating what small chances mean. Like, horribly, despairingly bad.

Unless you're specifically trained in this sort of things, anything below a certain threshold goes in the same mental bin, so 1% is the same as 0.01% or 0.0001%. Even if you are specifically trained in this sort of things, the training may not save you if the problem you're dealing with is outside your usual domain.

This effect bites all kinds of people all the time, even highly trained experts. It's why people play the lottery. It's why if ten persons in the whole world report a nasty side effect from a drug then everyone suddenly wants to stop using it (even if the primary effect is highly beneficial). It's why people buy insurance they don't need. It's why people don't buy insurance they do need. It's why companies think that running on zero-stock JIT supply is a stroke of genius, and then suddenly implode when the chance they were told was very low (but not zero) actually happens and they have no plan at all for it.

It's, generally speaking, a major bug in how the mind works, and a source of endless problems.

It's time to reveal all recommendation algorithms – by law if necessary

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Re: re. It's time to reveal all recommendation algorithms

This, and what the poster just above said. I make some effort to obfuscate my online presence, but not nearly as much as other posters here; I'm fairly sure that, in principle, Google knows more about me than most of my relatives. And I still get tons of utterly nonsensical recommendations.

If I try to use Google News, it still frequently gives me soccer and horoscopes, in spite of the fact that I've never searched for either in my entire life anywhere, and I have in fact explicitly told it dozens of times that I do not want those topics (before giving up on it altogether and switching to another aggregator).

Spotify? I have over a thousand songs in my favorites, and yet if I tell it to play from my favorites at random, there's a half dozen songs that pop up like 10% of the time.

Amazon's recommendations sort-of make sense. Most of the time. Unfortunately, any time I buy something like a vacuum cleaner, it then spends the next few months attempting to sell me dozens of vacuum cleaners. Is it that hard to understand that there are items nobody gets more than one of?

Ads served by Google are - I dunno, sometimes they have something to do with my recent web searches, but most of the time they are... not quite random, but apparently fixated on things that come completely out of the blue. These days it's big in apartments in places I've never heard of, for example, but up until a couple weeks ago it used to show me some kind of manga.

I believe there are two kinds of recommendation algorithms right now: ones that are based on neural networks, and those that are based on a ginormous mess that nobody has understood in years.

Unfortunately for the article's author, there's something those two categories have in common. You cannot explain the output just by knowing the input and the algorithm. And you cannot apply effective constraints on their output just by tweaking the input.

Child hit by car among videos 'captured by Tesla vehicles, shared among staff'

Filippo Silver badge

Re: Charge cards

I'm glad you live in a region where two RFID cards are sufficient. The same is not true for everyone. However, that is not the point.

The point is that automated payments are a solved problem. They have been a solved problem for decades. By now, the solutions are thoroughly standardized, extremely well-tested, very well-understood by the general population, and widely available.

I don't want to argue about why EV chargers have reinvented the wheel badly, or how nice it is that the reinvented wheel actually turns for some customers, or how they could improve their reinvented wheel to make it suck less. I'm saying they should not reinvent the wheel at all.

Get rid of RFID cards, websites and phone apps - just embed a POS terminal in the charger (or put up one that handles a dozen chargers, if you want to save money), like everything else in the world.

Filippo Silver badge

I have a Ioniq PHEV, the earlier model. I really like it; it's comfortable, drives nicely, and it's the most reliable car I've had so far. I got the PHEV version because I didn't trust the charging infrastructure on the road - and I was right. I charge at home and just run ICE for long trips 99% of times, but I do try to charge while parking whenever I can, just because I really do believe in EVs as a concept and I want it to succeed.

About half of every charging station I found turns out to be unusable for one reason or another. Is off. Is broken. Is off or broken, but the monitoring app was reporting it as fine. Requires an app which doesn't work. Is located in a mobile not-spot. Is located in a spot that can't be reached without a downtown permit. Is activated via a website that's unreachable. Is activated via a website that's reachable, but broken. QR code is defaced. Is rejecting my CC for unclear reasons. Has two connectors, the one that's the right type for my car is occupied or not working, and the monitoring app did not report this. Everything appears to work, but is not actually charging. Everything appears to work, is charging at trickle levels only. Requires email activation of account, email only arrives two hours later. Demands to use an app or account that only works with that specific network, which you know you will never use again, and the app requires you to prepay a fixed minimum amount. Is so expensive that I'm better off buying gasoline. Take your pick.

In one case, the blasted thing would refuse to let go of my charging cable, and I had to call the helpdesk to have them unlock it remotely, and thank god they actually answered me and were actually able to sort it out.

Last week I was in Switzerland and I went to four charging points during the trip, and I was able to actually charge at two. In one case the website was borked, in another I'd get a "the charging station cannot be reached" message. At the two stations where I was able to charge, it took about five minutes of faffing around with my phone and CC. And this is Switzerland.

To anyone who is designing EV charging points, I would say: pick an ICE car. Drive to any self-service pump station. Buy gas. That is exactly how it should work.

Turns out people don't like it when they suspect a machine's talking to them

Filippo Silver badge

Chatbot

Some time ago I had to help a relative solve a pension-related problem.

The call center would start each call with a chatbot that asked me to explain what the problem was. I did that, and it said it couldn't understand. I tried again, rephrasing slightly, and it still couldn't understand.

At that point, I literally pronounced, as clearly as I could, the exact name of the department I needed to talk to. The bot promptly connected me to a wrong department that had nothing to do with what I needed. Fortunately, the human operator there could transfer me to the right line.

The next time I called them, I told the bot "my problem is that I need to talk to a human". Surprisingly, that worked.

ChatGPT is coming for your jobs – the terrible ones, at least

Filippo Silver badge

>ChatGPT handled text annotation – adding labels to text to help machine learning models better understand

Having a LLM create the training set for the next LLM could be very problematic.

In the battle between Microsoft and Google, LLM is the weapon too deadly to use

Filippo Silver badge

Re: Shitty Clippy

>what are the LLMs to be used for?

Things where a certain rate of wrongness in the output is tolerable, e.g. get me the CSS for a web page that looks like this. If it's wrong, it's probably at least better than an empty .css file and it's something I can start working on.

Things where truthfulness is not even an attribute of the output, e.g. make up a description for this fantasy character. It might be bad prose, but it can't be "wrong".

There are a bunch of tasks like that, nothing world-shaking, but still useful.

Of course, people have just rushed to hail it as a Google replacement, or as a way to interpret medical diagnostics results, or as a way to get financial advice. All queries that do have wrong answers and where the wrong answers do have consequences. -_-'

Filippo Silver badge

AI to nuclear weapons is a poor comparison, for several reasons.

It's true that both are potentially civilization-changing technologies, however:

1) We don't have AI, and it's not at all clear whether we even have a theory of how to get it. We have LLMs, which are not AI. It's still definitely possible, and I still think it's likely, that LLMs are going to hit a brick wall that can't be fixed by just making them bigger.

2) Unlike nuclear weapons, AIs (and even LLMs) have an enormous amount of highly useful applications. While I'd be perfectly fine with a straight and simple ban on nuclear weapons, if that were feasible, the same cannot be said for AI tech. Any reasonable regulation would be extremely different.

3) Unlike nuclear weapons, which require certain scarce and easily regulated resources, a LLM can be made with nothing but specialist knowledge and widely available consumer hardware that has endless other uses. Any regulation would be nearly-impossible to enforce.

Given all that, I'd pose that comparing AIs to nuclear weapons in order to discuss regulation is not going to lead to any useful conclusion.

NYPD blues: Cops ignored 93 percent of surveillance law rules

Filippo Silver badge

Re: Yellow journalism at its best

The article, however, reports that the OIG claims that NYPD is not releasing sufficient information to verify that it is indeed obeying POST Act's requirements. That may not be, in itself, a violation of the law, but it's a horrible smell.

If it was a private citizen saying "don't worry, I've not broken any law, you don't need to check - and, in fact, I will actively refuse to help you do that", it would be suspicious, and society would have the ability, through proper channels such as a court order, to force disclosure of relevant information. Within constitutional limits, this is good and proper, otherwise people could break any law as long as they weren't obvious about it. Right?

I don't see why law enforcement should have any special privilege in that regards. If there are laws that the cops must obey as they perform their duties, then there should also be a way to get relevant information, otherwise those laws are unenforceable.

Refusal do disclose which third parties get access to data is especially worrying in that regards, because even someone who trusts NYPD is unlikely to trust arbitrary unknown third parties.

This US national lab turned to AI to hunt rogue nukes

Filippo Silver badge

Same way as you do anything else legally: become the head of government of a nation, alter local laws to make yourself dictator, start a nuclear program if the nation didn't have one already. A method that, sadly, actually happens.

Boffins claim discovery of the first piezoelectric liquid

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Re: Aaah, unfortunately paywalled

It says an order of magnitude less than quartz, so no.

However, it also says that they have no idea of what's going on, and that it shouldn't even be possible to begin with. That means that we also don't know whether other materials might work better, potentially much better. More research is needed.

Is Neuralink ready for human brain implants? Allegedly so

Filippo Silver badge

My guess would be, someone with some kind of severe neurological problem that might be addressed by this tech. If so, good for them, I hope it works.

Healthy subjects, though? The mind boggles. Ultimately, I think they could find a few, but they would be... interesting individuals.

OpenAI CEO 'feels awful' after ChatGPT leaks conversations, payment info

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Re: I don't think it was a bug

The LLM did not leak previous conversations. The website code did that.

If the boiler in a library building causes a fire, do you blame it on the books?

Filippo Silver badge

Re: I don't think it was a bug

>leak conversations (that is use details from previous conversations in future ones)

LLMs do lie and mislead, but they can't leak previous conversations, because they don't learn from them. They can't, their training is fixed. They appear to remember previous bits within a conversation only because the entire conversation is in their context, i.e. the whole lot gets fed to it again each time you enter a new line.

The leak discussed in the article is a plain old programming bug, not something the LLM produced as an output.

>Don't believe me ? Ask ChatGPT itself:

Believing a LLM, is, generally speaking, a poor idea.

Hospital to test AI 'copilot' for doctors that jots notes on patient care

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Re: AI interpretation of surgeon & patient conversation

If that exchange is the source of authority of the information on what foot needs to be cut off, then someone has made a grave mistake, long ago, that neither the AI nor the doctor can fix. Probably back when hospital procedures were devised.

Filippo Silver badge

Re: Why AI???

I'm guessing that the principle is that an "AI" could get rid of a lot of "noise" - not actual noise, I mean all those bits of conversation that don't actually carry useful information. Plenty of those.

Of course, anyone who has used these "AI" systems knows that they make mistakes. Depending on the context, the rate of mistakes is sometimes very low, and sometimes very high. Worse, their mistakes are sometimes quite hard to catch.

On the other hand, though, doctors also make mistakes while doing this type of work. This is especially true if they are overworked, and, let's face it, most of them are, shamefully so.

So the big question is - is the "AI" going to make more and/or worse mistakes than a doctor?

I don't think the answer is obvious at all. There are fields where "AI" systems make loads of enormous mistakes, and others where they work about as well as a human or even somewhat better. I have no idea what category this falls in.

It's good that trials are being made. I just hope the trial results are taken seriously, and not "creatively interpreted" to make the "AI" look better than it is.

The npm registry's safe word is Socket

Filippo Silver badge

>You can point your finger, and that's it. Nothing more happens.

Sort of. Both MS and 3rd party lib vendors do make some effort to address issues eventually, but the same goes for NPM packages. The biggest differences are size, and fragmentation. Size: because everyone who does .NET uses MS' libraries, pretty much all of the bugs and other bad behaviors are well-known and documented, with established and well-explained workarounds. Fragmentation: if you have a problem in a NPM project, you might not even get to the point where you can point a finger, because it's difficult to even figure out whose fault it is.

I've done extensive development both in NPM environments and in .NET environments, and honestly it's difficult to argue that they are the same. I've literally spent days hunting down crap through transitive dependencies. On the other hand, when my Xceed DataGrid misbehaves, I just go to the Xceed message board and get the answer.

Filippo Silver badge

>the average npm package has 79 transitive dependencies

That's the fundamental issue. When you use a NPM package, you are running and deploying code made by dozens of distinct unaccountable entities. When I use, I dunno, a typical .NET library, usually if something goes wrong I can point the finger at the library vendor, or at Microsoft, and that's it. The surface for a supply chain attack is comparatively very limited.

I don't think that adding a scanner can do more than mitigate this problem a bit. Scanners and malware are always an arms race at best.

I wouldn't know how to fix the fundamental issue either. JavaScript just does not have a standard library worthy of the name, so you need a crapload of external libraries even to do comparatively basic things.

Budget: UK chip strategy still nowhere to be seen. Money for quantum, AI? Sure

Filippo Silver badge

Re: Grown-Ups

>Hope that the press will not write about the failure few years later or at least it won't be a front page.

I'm not sure whether it works the same way in the UK, but around here it's usually "hope that when it fails a few years later, the other party will be in charge, and then you can blame them".

China sought control of submarine cables to spy, says Micronesia

Filippo Silver badge

Re: China is simply following the lead of the west

>cleaning up our act before the hypocritical lesson-giving

Nope. Independent problems should not be serialized. They should be addressed in parallel. "We should do X before doing Y" is a logical trap. It's normally deployed by people who actually don't want to do Y ever, although I hope this is not the case here.

We should repair Western colonialism damage, and we should prevent Chinese colonialism if we can, and we should also fix the climate and cure cancer and get fusion working and feed every human properly and generally be nice to each other - and none of this should be artificially construed as a roadblock to any of the others. There is no "before" or "after", there is only "right effin' now". It's not like we don't have enough people to work on two problems at the same time.

Filippo Silver badge

Re: China is simply following the lead of the west

Firs tof all, it's Micronesia who's complaining here. They have all the right in the world to complain.

But I also feel like I can complain too, because unethical acts done in the past do not make the same acts ethical in the present.

"But the big bag West has done this before" is never a valid justification. It merely means that you're at least as bad as the West, at least as deserving of censure, and at least as deserving of attempts to stop you as Western excesses should have been stopped in ages past, had anyone been able to.

Catholic clergy surveillance org 'outs gay priests'

Filippo Silver badge

>Did El Reg reach to CLCR for comment

Er, yes they did. It's in the article. CLCR chose not to comment, so if their point of view isn't represented, it's entirely their fault.

Silicon Valley Bank seized by officials after imploding: How this happened and why

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Re: It is hilarious

>Watching all the "libertarian" VCs call for a bank bailout. I guess they are only against welfare and bailouts when they benefit the other guy!

A good while ago I recall reading something on the lines of "everyone's a communist with other people's money". Seems to apply.