Posts by heyrick 6637 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Dec 2009
Of course, we're assuming it's incompetence. Lone has enough money he can quite literally be the world's biggest troll. Maybe he just decided to rename it X with a generic Unicode character because it'll freak out so many people.
I mean, tossing the globally recognised bird logo as an actual plan would be ridiculous, right? So, this has to be some grade A trolling just because he can...
Given that random people can't even see anything on Twit-uh-X these days, I wonder how many companies are going to just say "Fuck it" and stop using the service.
Funny aside: Just went to see if I could in fact see any of Twit-uh-X without an account (= no) and the login page had a close 'X' right next to the logo 'X'. Rather than exercise any brain power determining which was which given the browser resized the text to nearly match, I just swiped the tab away.
"what is to stop the studios creating entirely new faces"
Recognition.
If you can fling a fake Tom Cruise off a building where he falls and meets-cute David Duchovny, well, look, two well known actors. Essentially for free as they're not real. Plus, look, they're making out. There's the meme and the advertising opportunities right there.
On the other hand, Joe Random falling off a building into the arms of Guy Whatever? Meh, who cares.
Perhaps if serious work went into not having breaking changes, people might be more willing to keep up to date. My personal experience is PHP that I don't think I've ever actually updated that something hasn't subsequently died. In one case because a bunch of minor functions (like string to number) appeared to be renamed...? When updating causes problems, people will be reluctant to upgrade and, well, that's when the cracks appear.
Yup, just came to post https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/25/elon-musk-x-rebrand-twitter-sign-removal
This is already going well, isn't it?
Didn't downvote, but with respect to your final sentence, I can't help but feel that no product might be a better choice than integrating the product of a competitor.
Once the hype dies down and people realise that we're fairly far from having a vehicle that can completely drive itself, and that regardless of fancy names like "autopilot" and "full self driving" that imply things they aren't, the technology is more a fancy sort of driving assistance. One that not only still requires the meatsack, but said meatsack will also spend additional brain power on second guessing the assistance for when it does things like slamming on the brakes on a busy motorway because it thought it saw a puddy tat.
With that in mind, maybe being the car brand that doesn't have all this "smart" crap will become a selling point? Insurers can give you lower premiums because your car won't do dumb things. You might, but that's always been the case. One source of mishaps is better than two (especially if one of those sources is wrapped in legal mumble that disclaims liability).
I mean, catching a bit of a rocket with a helicopter sounds like something out of Mission Impossible (heh, and bloody Tom Cruise would probably pull it off too), but in reality it just seemed like a massive risk that, well, was it even necessary? Or was this just Rule of Cool because they wanted to stand out from under SpaceX's shadow?
I've given up online shopping from US sources. For two reasons.
The first is that the site will ask for your address, ask for you country, and so on all the way to the shipping stage where you can pick USPS or FedEx (etc) and it says in little letters at the bottom they they do not ship overseas.
The second is the number of places I've been that behave the same, but choke on my postal code which doesn't match the ones expected in my state (which isn't a surprise given I'm on the other side of the ocean). It would probably refuse to post international, but I don't even get that far.
Can't do that! If some oversight committee needs to check compliance, the wheels might fall off the gravy train.
The reason finance is so weakly regulated is entirely by design. There will, of course, be a few minor mishaps along the way, but as long as the money is going to where it is supposed to be going (not the poor, benefits, social services, public sector wages, etc etc) then move along please there's nothing to see here...
"personally edited and compiled a Unix Kernel"
No. I've edited and built an operating system, written in assembler, however my experience of Unix is having it run in embedded devices where it's not my problem. The reason why I'm writing this reply is that "compiling a kernel" isn't really something I would hold as a requirement of technical competence. Sure, great if (s)he can, but the vast majority of people can't, don't, and would never need to.
"installed and removed actual software and hardware"
I'm old enough to have had to deal with IRQ conflicts in the hardware, and all sorts of nonsense from the drivers. These days, installing and removing hardware could be as simple as plugging in a USB socket...
"done network diagnostics"
The DNS is misconfigured. I know this, because it's always DNS.
"and got the sodding printer to work again after numerous Microsoft OS upgrades"
I'm old enough to remember a time before that. A time when a software company would write a few drivers for the popular printers, and everything else would pretend to be one such printer. Of course, there were varying degrees of competence in this charade, which tended to mean that anything that wasn't a genuine such and such would need some driver hacks to get it working properly and outputting all the expected characters. There was a time when I used to be able to speak ESC/P and PCL.
But, personally, I'd settle for a judge that is open minded enough to find out about things (s)he doesn't fully understand.
Nah, man. You want instant gratification plus instant results and no need to create dumb accounts and such...
It's fun, it's free, it doesn't need a sign in, and it has kittens. I mean, what's not to like if you have a few minutes spare and nothing to do (or want to "look busy")?
I was wandering around the place where I grew up on street view over the weekend. Some of the blurring must be automatic as I came across a weird one where a tree was blurred on one side of a little village green, but perfectly visible on the other side. Perhaps the AI decided that a tree looked too much like an advert for a competitor when seen from that angle?
I think if people were worried, they'd have already applied for their properties to be obscured.
Of course, you can still be located as the geography, terrain, flora, and your neighbour's house probably have enough similarities that anybody looking will be three hundred metres out rather than two hundred...
"AI won't eventually begin to learn"
Because fancy pattern matching isn't "learning".
"how to manipulate things to its advantage"
It's a machine. It follows instructions. There's no independent thought process. The AI apocalypse will be entirely our own fault as we as a species never quite understood that the computer isn't right and can be manipulated by others. Integrating into ever more things, and blindly trusting what it says, will be our downfall.
You should send that to your local paper. Your MP is supposed to represent you in Westminster in addition to doing local stuff, not treat being an MP as an easy gravy train. I mean, FFS, that's what the 'P' in MP stands for!
The government's own page on "What do MPs do?" says The UK public elects Members of Parliament (MPs) to represent their interests and concerns in the House of Commons so it seems to me that if she isn't interested in doing that, she's essentially failing at her task.
My quoted tariff in France on a 9kW supply (it changes depending on how much power you want) with no off-peak or anything from EdF (the generic regulated tariff bleu) is about €0,13/kWh.
However the price I actually pay is around €0,36/kWh. That's partly because I use very little electricity, my bills are usually around €30/month and over half of that is the standing charges and taxes (and since France is France, it appears that the tax is taxed!).
Yup - some people read the holy book (of whatever religion) and try to live by the examples of all of the good things within.
Others, however, pick out all the bad things and use that as their life guidance.
And when people are able to pick and repeat specific phrases to quote entirely out of any context, and then pass it off as the word of a supreme being, well, that can lead to all sorts of nasty stuff.
For instance, the one line "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live". Even more galling, it's highly likely that it was a mistranslation and what was intended was "poisoner". But, hey, then pious jumped on that and terrorised women on two continents.
I do that these days. Thankfully a modernisation programme means that I no longer have four bare wires coming to the house as before (it's a twisted bundle of insulated wires), but then I'm only a half kilometre of wire from a transformer mounted to a pole fed by an overhead 11kV line.
I've lost a router, which I think was due to induced current from where the phone line ran just below a length of medium voltage line, and in the past have had tungsten bulbs burst. Lightning here bites. I do wonder if the fancy smart meter would survive such a thing. The old mechanical one did (and quite a smell of ozone from it afterwards!).
For that reason, everything is WiFi, no wired network, and everything electronic gets unplugged if there's a storm nearby. Taking no risks.
I don't trust Google, but I'm using Chrome on my phone because, well, I'm at work (on break) and I'm reading El Reg. I also read XKCD and a nerdy forum and The Guardian [1], and, well, that's about it. I habitually nuke cookies every so often, but I'm not going to lose sleep over irrelevant things. After all, I've just told all of you what I look at, it's not a great secret. I'll take precautions where justified, like online banking [2] and such.
1 - I'm not "woke", I'm just not an arsehole. And I don't care for tofu...
2 - Aren't a lot of bank apps wrappers for their website? If so, won't Chrome be implicated in displaying content within the app? It seems that Android is moving to use Chrome more and the generic webview less, so, yeah, when the bank forces the use of their app: screwed if you do, screwed if you don't!
...as Britain's energy infrastructure is, for want of a better word, fucked.
However, any approval is contingent upon the understanding that not a single penny of public money will be used to bail it out down the line when it's been mismanaged into oblivion (re. Twitter). It is really galling that energy suppliers can crash and burn and the public purse is expected to pick up the shortfall rather than holding the board personally liable for their failures.
Oh, and make sure Chief Twit understands that American law does not apply.
I wash up (industrial baking trays and such) for a living. I'd love to see AI replace my job, especially given that the non-smart automation that we do have frequently bothers the maintenance guys...
Heat? Water? Steam? Funky chemicals? It's a harsh environment. I have exactly zero expectations that some AI gizmo will be any use at all, but here's the thing, will the AI be smart enough to know it's one power surge away from exploding, or will it merrily hallucinate as smoke pours out the back?
"there is little detail provided to guide them to understand its meaning and how to comply with this ambiguous requirement"
You know, could say exactly the same thing about click-to-subscribe, especially things that are relentlessly forced and difficult to avoid (like a certain tat bazaar's gold plated service).
"Data Protection Review Court (DPRC) in the US to which EU citizens would have access."
It's no secret that the US is protectionist and has a very bizarre (and expensive) legal system. So let's start by having the review court in the EU, where it's just a little harder for the three-letters to lean on it to get the result they want.
Then let's start by asking is all this data transfer necessary? Either everybody has been breaking the law over the past few months or it's actually possible to get on fine without chucking loads of PII to another continent...
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