* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

When clever code kills, who pays and who does the time? A Brit expert explains to El Reg

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Re: Accountability is important.

If there is a patent, it should DEFINITELY be the patent-holder.

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Paris Hilton

Now I know nothing more

After all "AI" is definitely NOT about systems that you can fully design, test, verify and manage. It is about systems that are too complex to handle in that way and whose workinge can only be assessed approximately ("Over any 60-minute test run, the system onyl went completely nuts in about 0.2% of cases; we have 30 low-pay south asians pouring over 50 GiB of memory dumps to find out the reason why, any reason why"). Unfortunately the article apparently talks about control systems.

Sat 24 Feb 08:59:02 UTC 2018

Does my boom look big in this? New universe measurements bewilder boffins

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Black Helicopters

You will never know the horrible truth about dark oil, err... dark matter!

The Hubble Constant (how fast the universe expands with time) was predicted by the European Space Agency’s Planck observatory to be 67km per second per megaparsec (3.3 million light-years), shortly before the spacecraft was deactivated after a successful four-year mission.

As Fox Mulder would say: "A very convenient coincidence".

Who wanted a future in which AI can copy your voice and say things you never uttered? Who?!

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Windows

Crazy times

"For example, a mom can easily configure an audiobook reader with her own voice to read bedtime stories for her kids when she is not available."

Which is nice but the societal problem is that the momes should be available for kids. And fathers, too.

IBM Java CTO: Devs shouldn't have to learn Docker, K8s, 30 other things to deploy an app

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Windows

Re: Headline begs the question

Because Idris is not yet industry ready. (But then: Introducing Idris on the JVM and an Idris Android example)

But you can go for Kotlin.

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Windows

Why!!!

He said the company sees quite a bit of interest in Node.js, particularly for front-end applications

The gate to immense technical debt and technological craters ripped open by 20-somethings webmonkeys barely knolwedgeable about of what they are doing.

Plan to throw away a Node.js application. Hell, plan to throw away two.

Boffins: If AI eggheads could go ahead and try to stop their code being evil, that'd be great

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Re: phishing mails

Is this like John Kerry telling people not to read RT?

I wonder why he would do that.

Why is the networking business dozing through Meltdown/Spectre?

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Re: Grumpy bastards

Everything except the government-mandated "evil" byte. [0 = not evil, 0x20 = evil, 0xFE = iran, 0xFF = putin]

*Wakes up in Chrome's post-adblockalyptic landscape* Wow, hardly anything's changed!

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Devil

eXistenZ!

Google expressed concern at the rise of ad blockers and the existential threat these posed

An existential threat! Probably another plot by the Kremlins. Will the ynever stop!

They will probably let only those ads through that the Kremlins bought themselves to "sow discord".

Fiendish.

Oracle open-sources DTrace under the GPL

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Devil

Probably just Russian Meddling

Big Red, eh? Driving us crazy, is that the plan?

Apart from that, this sounds excellent, and I will gladly be driven crazy, even if Vladimir Ellison wins!

James Damore's labor complaint went over about as well as his trash diversity manifesto

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Re: Amused

Well, something must be bringing them in. I myself drop by for the DevOps and the occasional stories of blokes getting their appendages released by the local fire service

Frankly, I can no longer handle that level of content-providing articles; they are too dense.

Reinforcement learning woes, robot doggos, Amazon's homegrown AI chips, and more

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Windows

Hmmm.....

It’s difficult to try and coax an agent into learning a specific behavior, and in many cases hard coded rules are just better. Sometimes when it’s just trying to maximize its reward, the model learns to game the system by finding tricks to get around a problem rather than solve it.

Robots. Having a Deep Diversity Problem.

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Animoo and Mangos

Hakusensha and Hakuhodo DY digital, both Japanese publishers of internet manga comics have released titles that have been automatically colored by PaintsChainer. There is also another option for those that want to hold onto their artistic freedom, where you can broadly choose the color of the clothes or hair in your drawings, and then PaintsChainer fills in the rest.

Actually sad as AFAIK, toning and coloring-in are jobs left for less-than-weel paid drudgery workers.

Automated away?

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Re: Sorry, but Frank Herbert was right.

No, these are the PREQUELS.

Not even once.

Mueller bombshell: 13 Russian 'troll factory' staffers charged with allegedly meddling in US presidential election

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Re: Icredible

So for paltry 1 milion per month Ruskies were able to undermine Hilary campaign with 1,2 billion?

The indictmement of the Poor Sods indicates "no effect".

Apple to devs: Code for the iPhone X or nothing from April onwards

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Re: Have Apple learnt nothing from the Microsoft's Metro/Tile Interface forced rollout?

People whine that Apple doesn't innovate, but when they do something new some people are screaming "I don't want that!"

"Innovation" does not mean "change for change's sake that needs to be forced on people".

Astro-boffinry world rocked to its very core: Shock as Andromeda found to be not much bigger than Milky Way

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Thumb Down

Re: We're absolutely right. Until we're wrong.

I wonder how much scoffing of the calculations for Andromeda's size is already happening, and how many are trying desperately to refute the proof?

Proofs exist only in completely made-up structures like mathematics and IT.

The world: not a video game where you can just query the mass of your opponent.

If you don't like what IBM is pitching, blame Watson: It's generating sales 'solutions' now

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Headmaster

Re: It can't be worse than

The usual sad story of company skill loss, company tradition loss, and nonfunctional dirty-but-quick "green" teams, then?

You know what happened to Aperture Science, now.

Hua-no-wei! NSA, FBI, CIA bosses put Chinese mobe makers on blast

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Holmes

Blah Blah Blah, Muh Values, Blah!

Of course the biggest info hooverer, a country that Is "El", isn't even being mentioned, at least officially. Of course it's being talked about but only when the door has been firmly shut.

And they have fat fingers up many companies' and representatives infrastructure and sphincters.

Crypto-gurus: Which idiots told the FBI that Feds-only backdoors in encryption are possible?

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Holmes

In a german accent: "You wanted a miracle. I give you Eff. Bee. Eye."

"He asked Wray to produce a list of the eggheads the FBI was talking to about designing such a system"

Agent Keystone and Special Agent Keystone, I presume?

Who wants dynamic dancing animations and code in their emails? Everyone! says Google

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Windows

Re: Yet ANOTHER reason!

HTML is just HTML.

It's a page description language.

Now, embedded Javascript, you don't want for sure.

Just use a minimal HTML viewer that hasn't been written by bling addicts and that checks conformance of the input to standards. Because Langsec, you know.

UK Home Sec Amber Rudd unveils extremism blocking tool

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Big Brother

Why do ControllerPeople™ always look half-decayed and suffering?

A vision of the future:

Amber Rudd's face beaming from large Telescreens all over London with the text "Amber Alert!" in scrolling letters underneath as Immigrant/Muslim/Pakistani/Nigerian/Whatever mobs protected by Antifa goons ransack shops and burn down cars as Whitey cowers in fear in his bathub in darkened bathrooms while being scolded by The Press in 20-page editorials for his white supremacism, vigilantism and deplorable Anglo-Saxonism by writers bearing frankly $ethnic names while only Asians armed with shotguns and baseball bats defend their families and livelihoods. As the Commitee against Anti-Semitism delivers the latest on the increasing HateThreat one can, by resolutely drilling down into the newstream, find out that Israel is ripping apart Syria, Lebanon and Jordan for incorporation into a Largish Chosen Land. At the same time limited nuclear war is being fought over Ukraine's right to be the Latest Democracy run by NonDemocrats and it's all Putin's fault. All of this is being calmly observed via Augmented Reality by smirking Oligarchs tended by Tensorflow Robobutlers as they take a morning dump into solid gold seats.

Wanna gobble Google's custom chips? Now you can – its Cloud TPUs at $6.50 an hour

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Paris Hilton

"the advertising giant's internal deep-earning research team"

It's like a Mars Bar deliciously melting in boiling money?

(Okay Google, so how do I train the network to drive a Japanese-Scientists-designed sexbot that looks like a well-endowed 16-year old in a school uniform?)

5G won't just be fast, it'll do the ML-fuelled self-optimisation thing

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Trollface

Machine Learning!

Is there anything it cannot do? Make sure your data is Clean In The Warehouse℠ and apply Dr. Trendy Z. Fuggtutti's Patent Machine Learning Rectifying Precompiler to your data streams! Also comes in wax form for the pointy hairs!

(Overuse of Machine Learning may expose you to technical debt and other hazards)

The Register Lecture: AI turning on us? Let's talk existential risk

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Looks at watch

I think it's way too early to talk existential risks from robots. We don't even have a Philip-K-Dickian underground "Autofac" self-repairing and spitting out new robots per fas et nefas, even after nuclear exchanges, limited or otherwise.

Let's talk Europe being unable to handle refugees. And war.

Talk down to Siri like it's a mere servant – your safety demands it

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Paris Hilton

Re: That story about the 83-year-old

And if not, was that a DeepFaked voice?

The old woman hung up, but the phone rang again, and the policeman said she could speak to her grandson: he came on the line, pleading with his grandmother for bail money.

Please El Reg don't pull such stupid stunts.

Also reminds me of a Greg Egan story where an extortionist builds a full simulation-AI of someone's wife in software. While the real wife is not in danger, will the husband pay up to have the simulation-AI, girevously suffering, shut down?

Due to Oracle being Oracle, Eclipse holds poll to rename Java EE (No, it won't be Java McJava Face)

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Paris Hilton

I know this is complete clickbait but..

.... why is El Reg using a pink coffee mug pic from Shutterstock with the face of Nancy Pelosi forming in the broth?

Also "Should Have Used Go".

Well no. Though a nice language, go is not a step up and it's not about the language anyway as "EE" refers to "Enterprisy" libraries, add-ons, principles, application servers and large books "fleshing out" the Java Standard Edition. I'm partial to Spring Framework myself btw.

Does such a thing even exist in Go?

NSA code backported, crims cuffed, leaky AWS S3 buckets, and more

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Crime and unniceness: Totally mainstream

But why are Shutterstock images so bad?

Why aren't you being arbiters of truth? MPs scream at Facebook, YouTube, Twitter

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Big Brother

"Social media titans take heat over kremlebots and fake news"

This bullshit is going to run and run.

Also, Trump has Russian Ties, the US is totally legally in Syria, in order to impose regime-changing zones, Ukraine is dying for democracy and it's only a matter of time before the budget is balanced.

Apple's top-secret iBoot firmware source code spills onto GitHub for some insane reason

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Linux

Nobody cares.

"this document is the property of Apple Inc."

My Preciousssss!

(Also completely worthless unless you have the Apple Hardware underneath)

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Re: For now, don't panic.

Explain or step out of the airlock.

Winter is coming for AI. Fortunately, non-sci-fi definitions are actually doing worthwhile stuff

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A downwards-shifted Bell Curve is fact, better deal with it.

AI potentially being unintentionally discriminatory by design.

Reality is Racist, especially if unconvered by non-affirmatively-actioned statistics.

Will "open" be a way forward? Can anyone understand what a neural network does?

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Welp!

See you at RuleML+RR 2018, then!

What did we say about Tesla's self-driving tech? SpaceX Roadster skips Mars, steers to asteroids

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Big Brother

"It was kind of silly and fun, but silly things are important"

Ah, the advantages of not having to do tech in massive "state industries" where everyone needs to cover his/her arse, all the time, because humorless bureaucrats fighting the wrong kind of publicity and vote-chasing parliamentarians ready to whip up outrage WILL ruin your day stalinistically

Can't wait to get to Mars on a SpaceX ship? It's a cold, dead rock – boffins

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Re: Start of a retraction

monetary potential

Economic potential.

Central banks have "monetary potential".

MY GOD, IT'S FULL OF CARS: SpaceX parks a Tesla in orbit (just don't mention the barge)

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Re: Kudos on the headline

But I still don't have a wheel spacestation and an Orbital Hilton Hotel. With Russians waiting in the lobby.

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Coffee/keyboard

Awesome.

I blew coffee all over the keyboard at that synchrolanding.

Then it became hilarious when they had to quickly bring in the fixer guy who could, at the same time, walk, chew gum and generate a zesty announcement that lawyers cannot glom onto when it became clear that the core was gone and the two designated announcers were about to mismanage the situation.

The many-faced god of operational excellence, DevOps and now 'site reliability engineering'

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Gimp

What in Tarnation?

Quick, a BOFSecDevOpsH adaptation

Women beat men to jobs due to guys' bad social skills. Whoa – you mad, fellas? Maybe these eggheads have a point...

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Windows

Related: Microaggressions in Job Ads

http://jobs.ieee.org/jobs/content/Certain-Wording-in-Job-Advertisements-May-Keep-Wom-2018-01-26

According to the findings, female job seekers weren’t generally likely to apply for jobs where advertisements mentioned personality requirements in a trait-like way versus a task-directed way. For instance, women felt that sentences such as "You are calm/not nervous" were less encouraging than the task-directed "You always remain calm under pressure" — the distinction being that the former statement dealt in common female stereotypes.

"Job-seeking women might fear that they too will be judged stereotypically if they apply," explains researcher Lien Wille. "This underlines that the way job ads are written may have a discriminatory effect even when there is no discriminatory intent."

They might! Ah ... ladies, so emotional ... wait! It's practically as if someone is actually trying to reinforce stereotypes in a particularly underhanded way?

The study is published in the research journal "Sex Roles."

I'm subscribed to a few of those.

deplorable.jpg

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FAIL

Yet more contentless studies by academic hot air balloons?

The paper took as granted "that women have a comparative advantage at tasks that involve 'brains' as opposed to 'brawn,'" with the authors citing various academic papers to that effect.

What does that even mean?

The real world shows that engineering and abstract thinking is an occupation best left to the male brain. Other "brain-involving" occupations may show balanced or reversed ratios, it completely depends. I don't know how LGBTUIOP brains would work, and I don't particulary care.

As for brawn - yeah, the real world also shows things about that, in spite of gurrrll power propagandists telling whoever is ready to listen that women are excellent for firefighting, policing in diverse neighborhoods or military frontline duty (the last one is utterly retarded in more ways in one; also - want children? stay out of toxic industrial environments, lady!)

Cops find ATM spewing cash, car with dodgy plates, stack of $20 bills and hacking kit inside

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Paris Hilton

Where are the USB ports?

Or can you load a chip card into them with a special "upload this!" chip on it?

Also

> all that ingenuity and lust for free money

> not becoming bankers

Insurance companies now telling you what tech to buy with um-missable price signals

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Windows

Good!

This is exactly how it should work.

Let the moans begin.

They will be completely at odds with the usual cries of "hit the security-unaware ones in the wallet", some people just want to live in a quantum superposition dreamland.

Russian-monitoring Shetlands radar station was nearly sold off

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Megaphone

BY GOLLY!

That Putler chap is a right PITA.

Gentlemen, we must sink the Bismarkoff! The Prime Minister demands it!

Accused Brit hacker Lauri Love will NOT be extradited to America

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Paris Hilton

Stoë Orkeo!

Why does Lori look like someone out of a Moebius comic strip on that photo?

Exoplanets from another galaxy spotted – take that, Kepler fatigue!

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Re: Incoming pendant

> the observable universe is 93 billion light years across

That's the unobservable universe, actually.

Epic spacewalk, epic FAIL: Cosmonauts point new antenna in the wrong direction

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the cosmonauts gave it a shove in the direction of Earth, in the expectation it will burn up in the planet's atmosphere

Actually they throw if antispinwards of the ISS, which is sane:

"East (spinward) takes you out, out takes you west, west (antispinward) takes you in, in takes you east, port and starboard bring you back."

I don't know whether that little push was enough to make the package drop sufficiently low. Maybe one should have crossbow catapults.

Nunes FBI memo: Yep, it's every bit as terrible as you imagined

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Re: Opinion poll proxy vote!

I don't see what role FDR plays in this discussion?

You can find me in da club, database full of faces… but this ain't privacy watchers' jam

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Could be used to check those migrants

Who claim to be under 18 but suspiciously look like 30 or so.

Not that there is anything wrong with that.

No Windows 10, no Office 2019, says Microsoft

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Facepalm

The pace of change accelerates => the fourth derivative of the state is positive

“As the pace of change accelerates, it has become imperative to move our software to a more modern cadence.”

It's like we are really in a monetary bubble and the consumer is being hunted like fox by a pack of dogs who want to "accelerate" his cadence.

Is there no "barf" icon? Oh well.

Supermassive black holes scoff just one star per year, say space weight watchers

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Paris Hilton

That's weird

It is not likely that a dwarf galaxy brings a supermassive black hole to the table. But the Andromeda doesn't look like the result of a larg-ish merger. It is not elliptical, has not whispy hang-ons or stuff in ex-centric orbits.