* Posts by Wyrdness

340 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2009

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Microsoft promises Copilot will be a 'moneymaker' in the long term

Wyrdness

Github copilot is useful for coding

I'm a Linux & Mac user, and definitely not a fan of Microsoft. But I've been using Github copilot recently with some great results. Last week I was writing a Lightningjs app for a smart TV. I've never used Lightningjs before and knew nothing at all about it (or indeed Javascript). Github copilot can be scarily good at times. Even with a language and framework that I had zero knowledge of on Monday, by Wednesday I had a basic but working home automation app running on a TV, able to control lights and other home devices. Copilot was able to guess what I was trying to do and would suggest code to do it. It wasn't always correct, but sometimes it was simply astonishing and really helped me to learn rapidly.

iFixit tears Apple's Vision Pro to pieces

Wyrdness

Re: Cnnot use with glasses so need prescription lens inserts

If you think that it's "not too difficult" to process an electronic image so that it's viewable for people with varying eye prescriptions, then I strongly suggest that you work out how it can be done, patent it and rake in the millions from your idea.

Because most of us believe that the only simple way to bend the light between screen and eyes is to use physical lenses.

Superuser mostly helped IT, until a BSOD saw him invent a farcical fix

Wyrdness

I had one who couldn't find the files that he was working on, after rebooting the computer.

"Where were they?" I asked.

"In /tmp"

NASA engineers scratch heads as Voyager 1 starts spouting cosmic gibberish

Wyrdness
Joke

Satellite repairs

I sometimes see vans with ‘Sattelite Repairs’ written on the side. Couldn’t they just send one of those to fix it?

You don't get what you don't pay for, but nobody is paid enough to be abused

Wyrdness

Process failure

It sounds as if the whole process was incorrect. Doug (or someone else) should have written a formal specification for the level of broadband service required for the company, making a good business case for proper support. This should have been signed off by management. Then whoever decided to penny-pinch, constrained by the specification, would have been unable to order a consumer product.

GNOME Foundation's new executive director sparks witch hunt

Wyrdness

Re: Probably off-topic, but ...

"She is named after a prominent woman in the history of computer programming. ;-)"

Desk Hopper?

Lightning struck: Apple switches to USB-C for iPhone 15 lineup

Wyrdness

Re: More discarded cables

I recently cleaned an entire belly-button's worth of fluff from inside the lightning connector on my phone. So it's definitely a lint-collector. I haven't had much of a problem with usb-c so far, but I don't keep my laptop in my pockets, so it's probably exposed to far less debris. I did manage to get a small splinter of wood in the usb-c socket of my laptop, which caused problems until I managed to fish it out.

What happens when What3Words gets lost in translation?

Wyrdness

Re: Four King Maps

I can just imagine how this would go with the emergency services...

"Help, I've fallen on a mountainside and I think that my leg is broken"

"OK, can you give us your Four King Maps location and we'll send out mountain rescue to assist"

"It's scrotum..."

"OK"

"cocksucker..."

"Yes"

"piersmorgan"

"Don't you use language like that with us, sonny. You can die alone on that four king mountainside for all we care"

How to get a computer get stuck in a lift? Ask an 'illegal engineer'

Wyrdness

Still in use?

Wikipedia reports that one of these 1940's behemoths was still in use by a company in Texas in 2022. I wonder if it's the same one.

Mint 21.2 is desktop Linux without the faff

Wyrdness

Re: "Pretty" Considered As Unimportant!!

I used XFCE for a few years because KDE became too bloated and Gnome 3 was, well, Gnome 3. But these days I prefer Cinnamon, for exactly the same reasons as people like XFCE. It's light on resources, familiarly old-school yet modern enough, and isn't Gnome or Unity.

Wyrdness

Re: A toast

The only reason that I have found for choosing Ubuntu with Cinnamon over Mint is that Ubuntu supports Arm, whilst Mint doesn’t. On x86, I’d choose Mint every time.

Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market

Wyrdness

Re: Yet again, Mint

As both a Mint and a Mac user, I agree with you 100% about Mint. However, I never experience Macs doing inexplicable things, which makes me wonder if this is a case of PIWNIC.

Edit: Moments after posting, I receive an email from my 80 year old mother, saying that her Mac is doing inexplicable things (yet again) and needs help. I know for certain that is going to turn out to be PIMNIC.

Two new Linux desktops – one with deep roots – come to Debian

Wyrdness

Re: Beautiful? Really?

Your GUI or your lower body attire, or both?

Wyrdness

Re: Beautiful? Really?

NeXTstep might have looked beautiful in the early 90's, but now it looks as dated as MC Hammer pants.

It's official: Ubuntu Cinnamon remix has been voted in

Wyrdness

Re: Linux Mint Cinnamon

Same here. Or, at least, until recently. Now I need ARM Linux (work reasons) and Mint sadly doesn't support ARM. So I'm forced to use Ubuntu with Cinnamon installed.

Ammo-maker says TikTok's datacenter site could deprive it of electricity

Wyrdness

I can't help thinking that the world might be a better place if there was less ammunition and more cat videos.

Google's AI search bot Bard makes $120b error on day one

Wyrdness

Judging from the places I've worked, it's more likely to have been:

Manglement: "Microsoft have just announced AI-based search. We need to demo the AI search prototype you're working on"

Devs: "It's not ready to be shown publicly yet. There's still a lot of issues with it"

Manglement: "Demo it anyway"

Suspect in Finnish psychotherapy center blackmail hack arrested

Wyrdness

Re: Arrested in Absentia

It's not Arrested in Absentia unless it's from the Absentia region of France. Otherwise it's just a sparkling arrest warrant.

But have you considered that this is a translation from Finnish and it may have a subtly different meaning to the English definition that you've quoted.

Another RAC staffer nabbed for storing, sharing car crash data

Wyrdness

Re: Grinding nomenclature

I don't trust anyone or any company who uses the word 'solutions' in this manner. Private Eye used to have a column dedicated to ridiculous uses of the word. Though it's fun to invent your own, such as "Posthumous subterranean interment solutions" (burials) or "horizontal storage solutions" (shelves).

OpenAI is developing software to detect text generated by ChatGPT

Wyrdness

This could make ChatGPT better

I believe that one way to train AIs is to have another AI that's designed to spot whether the output from the first is real or not. These two AIs are then put into competition with each other. The first gets better at avoiding detection, whilst the second gets better at detecting fake content. So this is likely to help ChatGPT produce content that's harder for humans to spot.

Cops chase Tesla driver 'dozing' with Autopilot on

Wyrdness

Re: Emotional Teslas?

"exhaust hoses"? You have a lot to learn about electric vehicles.

US Dept of Energy set to reveal fusion breakthrough

Wyrdness

Re: Cold Fusion PR

Nearly 300 posts since joining in June, almost all of which have been downvoted for not making sense. Methinks that Lordrobot is a ChatGPT or similar.

Twitter dismantles its Trust and Safety Council moments before meeting

Wyrdness

Re: "Fair" story about Musk? Ha!

A friend said the other day "Idolising Musk is like believing the stripper really likes you". Never a truer word...

Europe's USB-C deadline: Lightning must be struck from iPhone by December, 2024

Wyrdness

Let's say your right about this an Apple go portless for their next iPhone. I then won't be able to connect a new iPhone to my brand new car. But I will be able to connect a cheaper Android phone. So which will I buy?

Laugh all you want. There will be a year of the Linux desktop

Wyrdness

Meanwhile...

There is a company that has reportedly sold around a million Linux PC's this year. I've just ordered one for home use. Can you think who?

Lufthansa bans Apple AirTags on checked bags

Wyrdness

Re: GPS

"Missing the fact that nobody said that it was anything to do with GPS."

This sentence in the article, maybe? "This may be where Apple's GPS trackers run afoul of the rules:"

Braking news: Cops slammed for spamming Waze to slow drivers down

Wyrdness

Re: Highways Agency

Yes, there seem to be a lot of pillocks using Waze who can't tell the difference.

Amazon sues 10,000 Facebook Group admins for offering fake reviews

Wyrdness

Amazon's sorting algorithm

Amazon's own algorithms don't help here. You can sort by 'average customer review' to see the highest rated products. However, Amazon seems to sort by a simple mean average, so a product with just a handful of (possibly fake) 5 star reviews is placed higher than one that has gained thousands of genuine positive reviews. They really need some kind of weighted average that takes into account the number of reviews.

Apple's latest security feature could literally save lives

Wyrdness

Re: WebKit, anyone?

It sounds as if you're suggesting that the people who care enough about their security and privacy to enable this lockdown mode are also likely to install 'any old browser engine that the user cares to install from some random place on the internet'.

I don't think that this is going to be the problem that you seem to think it is.

openSUSE Leap 15.4: The best desktop on the RPM side of the Linux world

Wyrdness

Re: OpenSuse is a good distro, with a few bugs

I sometimes really hope that the inventor of autocorrect spends an enternity in Hull. I actually corrected autocorrects 'correction' of distro, only to have it have the final laugh.

Wyrdness

Re: OpenSuse is a good distro, with a few bugs

I tried OpenSUSE a couple of years ago and really wanted to like it. Installation was really straightforward and YaST seemed really good (if somewhat hard to type). But I ended up abandoning because of the bugs. One particularly nasty one is that it wouldn't talk to my printer. After hours of searching, I found that its default firewall rules were blocking printing. I've never seen any other Linux distro that does this. There were also many other minor but annoying bugs. I ended up switching to Mint, which also installs nicely and didn't have all of the minor annoyances of SuSE. It's a pity because SuSE looked like it could be a really great Linux bistro if these issues were sorted.

Apple offers improved Linux support in macOS Ventura

Wyrdness

Re: Docker already runs x86_64 images on mac

True, but Rosetta is almost certain to be able to run x86 binaries much faster than Docker (which I believe uses QEMU for this).

Brute force and whiskey: The solution to all life's problems

Wyrdness

Feck!

There are a couple of things to note here. First is that it's described as 'a European test site' (so probably not UK) and, secondly, the spelling of whiskey.

Now read the story again, this time with Father Ted in mind. It all makes sense now.

Meta materials: Facebook using AI to design green concrete

Wyrdness

Farcebook's AI?

I wouldn't trust Farcebook's AI to get even the simplest thing right.

For example, I'm in my mid-50's and haven't cycled since I was a teenager. Yet Arsebook kept showing me ads for cycling clothing, cycle saddles, bells and much other pedalling paraphernalia.

Despite me marking these ads as irrelevant, I was continually bombarded with these. So I clicked on 'why I am seeing this ad'. The answer 'because you are interested in cycling'. No idea how FB's artificial intelligence got that idea. So I removed cycling from my list of ai-generated supposed 'interests' (which also included music and movies that I'd never even heard of).

So the cycling ads stopped briefly and then started again. Off to check 'why am I seeing this ad' once more. 'Because', Fartbook tells me, 'you are interested in British Cycling'. No idea where Facebook's artificial stupidity got that idea from. So I removed that from my 'interests' (again finding that I'm apparently interested music, movies, books etc. that I've never heard of).

No more cycling ads for a while then....

You guessed it... Buy saddles! Buy yellow Lycra jerseys! Buy cycle phone mounts!

I check my ai-generated 'interests' again and this time...

"You are interested in cycle commuting"

No Fuck-You-Book, I am not. I'd die on the North Circular if I was dumb enough to ever try that.

Anyway, no more cycling ads for a couple of years. Then they start again. Check my 'interests' again (more crap I've never heard of) and....

"You are seeing this ad because you are interested in cycling".

So we start the whole cycle (pun intended) again.

The point of this whole rant being, if FB's 'artificial insanity' is given the task of creating Green Concrete, I wouldn't be surprised (based on my experience) if it devised a recipe containing Green Cheese, Green Tea, Green Marahishi's and Blue Jeans.

Help, my IT team has no admin access to their own systems

Wyrdness

Re: Miracle workers

We gave up on scrolls when Apple invented the book.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1IdJDscYHk

We take Asahi Linux alpha for a spin on an M1 Mac Mini

Wyrdness

Re: It works until it is blocked

If Apple is really against this sort of thing, why have they recently added an unlocked boot loader to the M1 Macs?

Govt suggests Brits should hand passports to social media companies

Wyrdness

I don't even trust Farcebook with my real name. I certainly wouldn't trust them with a copy of my passport. If this became mandatory, then Arsebook would probably lose most of their UK users. Not that would be a bad thing at all.

Joint European Torus more than doubles fusion record with 59 megajoules

Wyrdness

Re: More megajoules

Sky News says "enough to power around 10,000 homes". I'm not sure how they're going to manage with only 60 kettles between them. I can imagine the headlines now: "Fusion Power Causes National Tea Crisis".

Infosec chap: I found a way to hijack your web accounts, turn on your webcam from Safari – and Apple gave me $100k

Wyrdness

Re: Apple: It just works

Not unique to Apple. There's also a story on El Reg today about a Linux bug that can grant root access.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/26/pwnkit_vulnerability_linuix/

One-size-fits-all chargers? What a great idea! Of course Apple would hate it

Wyrdness

Re: Spec?

Macbooks and iPads already use usb-c for charging. Since they haven't crippled that in any way, why would you think that they might do so for phones?

Macmillan best-biscuit list unexpectedly promotes breakfast cereal to treat status

Wyrdness

I've never tried Tim Tams, but Anzacs are amazingly good.

Electron-to-joule conversion formulae? Cute. Welcome to the school of hard knocks

Wyrdness

Re: Ask the dog - it has an 80% success rate

I heard of a company that had two developers who always pair programmed. One seemed to do all of the actual development and the other just sat and listened. The company considered sacking the developer who appeared to be doing nothing. But then they realised that these two were achieving far more than any other two developers were able achieve individually.

Apple's M1 MacBook screens are stunning – stunningly fragile and defective, that is, lawsuits allege

Wyrdness

Re: Not bought a Macbook

They're not shoddy at all. If Apple sell millions of a product and half a dozen fail, then some greedy knobs will start a class action suit to try to extract $$$$$$$ from Apple.

Woman sues McDonald's for $14 after cheeseburger ad did exactly what it's designed to

Wyrdness

The Sin of Gluttony

She was supposed to be fasting for Lent, and instead committed the sin of gluttony by eating McDonalds. If she'd been smarter, she'd have eaten some pie instead, since the sin of pi is always zero.

84-year-old fined €250,000 for keeping Nazi war machines – including tank – in basement

Wyrdness

Re: Did I miss something?

I'm left wondering how large is his basement?

IPv6 still 5-10 years away from mainstream use, but K8s networking and multi-cloud are now real

Wyrdness

Re: Is this the most sensible Gardner report ever?

"I bet the vast majority of that is mobile phones." - I'm not so sure. My home broadband and mobile phone are with Sky (who have millions of customers in the UK). The home broadband uses ipv6, whilst mobile uses ipv4.

New mystery AWS product 'Infinidash' goes viral — despite being entirely fictional

Wyrdness

Re: Here at Signal

My assumption what it was either tongue-in-cheek or a clever way to spot candidates who are lying about heir experience. Or maybe a bit of both.

The M in M1 is for moans: How do you turn a new MacBook Pro into a desktop workhorse?

Wyrdness

Re: Why only M1? Also applies to Intel Macbook's

I plug my Macbook into my Dell monitor using a USB-C cable and the monitor charges the Macbook. So I'm only using a single port for both video and charging.

I can also plug in a cheap (£12 off fleabay) USB-C hub and have monitor, charging, ethernet and USB-3 ports whilst only using a single laptop USB-C port. I don't find the lack of ports disturbing.

Roger Waters tells Facebook CEO to Zuck off after 'huge' song rights request

Wyrdness

Re: Worth ?

"...never interact with the rest of humanity again"

Surely you mean "never interact with humanity again"

Debian's Cinnamon desktop maintainer quits because he thinks KDE is better now

Wyrdness

I used XFCE (on Fedora) for years as KDE seemed too bloated and as for Gnome 3...

I moved to Cinnamon on Mint last year and it's pretty good. Cinnamon did seem very buggy and I was having to restart it at least once a day. It's become a lot more stable recently and restarts are a thing of the past.

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