* Posts by JDX

6847 publicly visible posts • joined 28 May 2010

A next-gen AI protein folder that could help science? Meta's good for something

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Scientists love being able to make quick calculations which help guide them where to focus their time for the more in-depth ones.

Bumble open sources AI code to automatically blur NSFW photos

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Re: Obligatory BlackAdder reference

"Bumble has blurred this image because we think the subject is not very pretty. Click to see the unblurred image".

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Re: Art class

Even in human circles, trying to make work you can pass off as a famous artist is considered poor form, so no it isn't different in that regard.

A human who tries to create art in the specific style of another has to put in a lot of work. They must study their muse's works and learn in great detail the exact style and technique of the artist, before spending a great deal of time honing their skills. This is very different from an AI training set, so that's "reasons".

A typical human student does not however try to do that. They learn from great artists and borrow techniques which they apply to their own passions, or they blend styles from multiple artists or come up with something totally new.

To build a better quantum computer, look into a black hole, says professor Brian Cox

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Re: Brian Cox is smart

Some criticise "pop science" but that seems asinine. He has managed to bring hard physics to sell-out shows for the general public. Who knows how many kids might be inspired by that, kind of a modern equivalent of the Christmas Lectures before they were ruined.

New measurement alert: Liz Truss inspires new Register standard

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Currency units are lacking

I was hoping to calculate my daily energy use in approved Reg units but the lowest £ value that receives a non-zero conversion in any other unit is £10,000 and even now, my energy cost is not that high.

We need a currency unit which is comparable or significantly lower than the pound, or the converter needs to have a better resolution such as nanoPogbas.

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Re: Incorrect measurement

He might have made bad decisions but it's lazy humour to say he didn't make any. He didn't get so unpopular without doing things that affected people.

Next-gen Thunderbolt capable of 120Gbps for 8K displays

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10 bit colour

I'm aware this is useful at the processing level (although I thought most GPUs worked in floating point colour values these days) but why does a display need it? Even on high-end displays can you tell the difference by eye between two RGB888 values? What's the use-case?

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Re: What the fuck is a meter?

At the top of the comments page is a "send corrections" link, which is the correct way to report errata. Rather than making profane comments.

Means we don't end up with a long comment thread about something which has already been fixed.

Waxworm's spit shows promise in puncturing plastic pollution

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Re: Terms and conditions

>>Unless washed ashore they're there to stay.

Not really. There are already projects trialling which capture plastic from the ocean. It tends to congregate in certain areas which can be effectively targeted

This won't get it all and doesn't help with tiny fragments but a lot can be done even if only the easy pickings are taken. And plastic is constantly being washed up so if we can stop more getting into the system, over time things will improve.

Being more speculative, organisms which eat plastic might even be introduced into the oceans but this seems rather unlikely... ecosystem engineering could easily cause more problems.

Tesla has a lot of work to do on its Optimus robot

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Re: Show me on this doll where Elon hurt you

How many people spend 20k more on a car than they strictly need to - a nice BMW or Audi or Mercedes. How much do people invest in hobbies like cycling or in having a nice home gym/swimming pool/fully specced garden pub?

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So instead of self-driving cars we can have robot-drivers?

Did they really just dress someone as robot last time?!

Update your Tesla now before the windows put your fingers in a pinch

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Re: Typical Musk

THe obvious meaning of the word "recall" is that the product is being "recalled". Which means "officially order to return to a place" and implies physical return.

Although it DOES make you scared enough to make sure you do something which is of course the main priority. Terminology could be improved because a minor software update should not need to be as harmful to reputation as something that requires a trip to the garage and losing your car for a time. If anything, it's wonderful that you CAN fix stuff like this over the air.

iPhone 14 iFixit teardown shows Apple's learning on repairs

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"Apple's still hoping you'll drop by the Genius Bar for repairs instead of going it alone"

Well who wouldn't want to sell their own services? What manufacturer doesn't tell you "you need to use official parts and authorised dealers?"

And for the vast majority, opening your own phone is probably not a great idea. I've experience inside PCs going back a few decades and I would still be wary. Apart from anything else, I value my own time.

If they've moved in the right direction then I don't really care if it's because they're being forced to, or to make their own lives easier doing repairs, or because "They Really Care". It's a good result. In fact, companies realising that repairability can be in their own interests is surely the best result as they'll then want to do it instead of being forced to.

Rest in peace, Queen Elizabeth II – Britain's first high-tech monarch

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Re: Not my Queen

"not my queen" shows rather a lot of ignorance ant entitlement. The queen or king is your queen or king, the PM is your PM, etc - no matter whether you voted for it or approve.

The modern view is that nobody has to accept any reality they didn't choose but this is unrealistic, self-centred nonsense. Trump was president for all those "not my president" people too.

The queen didn't choose (or expect) to be your queen either but she still was.

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Re: Not my Queen

joking with your own family is not the same as joking about other people's dead mums.

Sometimes, it's best to put your hands up and just admit you misspoke instead of relentlessly keep digging.

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"the only person in England who never had to take a driving test" ?

I am fairly sure my late grandfather (he would be 105 or so) told me he just had to apply for a license. A bit of googling suggests nobody had to take a test prior to the mid 1930s. So many, many people never had to take a test... including many who drove.

A nice piece otherwise El Reg. The point that she was not raised expecting to become Queen is something I had never really thought about too much.

Scientists pull hydrogen from thin air in promising clean energy move

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The real worry is that Jellied Eel et al presumably work in the IT industry... it's one thing to see tremendous ignorance on Facebook but this is a community of (supposedly) educated, tech-savvy people.

CERN draws up shutdown plans to save energy

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Re: Boring

Yes if you go into Tesco or McDonalds you'll see the same person buy the same exact product over and over again.

What an absurd thing to say.

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Mushroom

Re: "the world's largest publicly known particle collider"

I wondered about this phrasing too. Are their rumours of secret colliders elsewhere? Do I need a tinfoil hat?

A refined Apple desktop debuts ahead of Wednesday’s big iThing launch

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Re: Memories

people know how to program now. You know, like the ones writing the emulator.

People back then were not better programmers. Programming was just different. Their programs were just as buggy which is why everything used to crash all the time.

Microsoft to stop accepting checks from partners

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Re: Err because MS...

You might not be aware that in the US they have a slightly different language to us. One often has a checking account.

Scientists use dead spider as gripper for robot arm, label it a 'Necrobot'

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Re: What's the point?

They pointed out pretty clearly the benefits - basically 'growing' a robot appendage far more effective and far far cheaper than anything we can make.

As far as cruelty, how is this different than than thousands/millions of fruit flies which are farmed specifically to be used in tests? For that matter, we are being told that locusts or other creepy crawlies are a great alternative to meat and that means billions of the things will be grown and killed. Nobody is going to individually euthanize them.

If it were a million spiders being killed to extract some some of chemical, nobody would care. But show us a single spider on video and the fact we're reanimating its corpse we suddenly get up in arms (the spider doesn't care what we do with its corpse).

Many of us routinely kill spiders or wasps we see in our houses and we don't analyse the ethics. Somewhat hypocritical to lambast the scientists doing it for an actual purpose.

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Using, not abusing.

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Death by exposure is considered not a terrible way to go for humans

This credit card-sized PC board can use an Intel Core i7

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Re: M2

Well @iron wins a prize for the most arrogantly ignorant post I've read today. The M1/2 chips smoke benchmarks for real-world, hugely demanding tasks such as video editing and music production. They are incredible.

That your compiler doesn't perform well on them might be down to the compiler. Has it been optimised or is it running through an x86 translator for example?

So disappointing when developers display such obvious illogical bias and fundamental technological ingorance.

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Re: Conversion

I was born a decade later and these units were in common use even then in the UK. Methinks you are being deliberately dumb like those Americans who refuse to learn Metric because "it's too complicated".

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Old fashioned and boring like common courtesy and the adage "if you've nothing nice to say..."

Cruise self-driving cars stopped and clogged up San Francisco for hours

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Re: Does it really need to be AI?

I thought all the players did wear some tech now anyway to track their heart rate, distance run, etc. A sensor sounds like a simple extension. Although humans are not a point location; perhaps they have tried both and decided this is better, perhaps it's a human factor that they couldn't get people to agree.

Mars helicopter to take a breather, recharge batteries

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Re: Thanks NASA!

Isn't everyone in a good mood today.

I didn't realise the US government was "propping up religions". Or that data showed "all religions are failing". Numerically atheists are a minority, you may be speaking morally but in that case "it's obvious" is a statement that hardly ever holds true.

If you must be an angry atheist who can't help forcing their hobby-horse into unrelated discussions, at least be a moderately informed angry atheist so you don't give atheists a bad name. Better yet maybe we should just avoid politics and religion in the comments here. Neither ever leads to anyone feeling happier and calmer so why bother.

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Do they deliberately say "oh this is only designed to last a couple of weeks" knowing full well it should have a much longer life? Is this so they never have things fail earlier than designed, or is it a scientific thing that "designed to last 2 weeks" means "designed to have a 99.99% chance it'll last two weeks?"

Smart thermostat swarms are straining the US grid

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Quite Interesting

This is the same problem as "everyone puts the kettle on at half-time" in big sports fixtures, but worse because we're effectively programming our homes to launch a coordinated attack on the grid. Obvious in hindsight I suppose.

Vendors could address with firmware updates, perhaps.

First-ever James Webb Space Telescope image revealed

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So how much of the night sky is that?

A grain of sand at arm's length... what sort of arc or whatever is that? Put another way, how many photos would JW need to take to get a complete photo of space? Is it easy to tell where to look or could the the most boring spot actually contain some incredible discovery when peered at very carefully?

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Re: Still missing?

Current scientific understanding hinges on about 80-90% of the universe being invisible and undetectable (for now, I can't remember if dark matter is one of the things JW hopes to understand?) Quite a large gap :)

But the 'god of the gaps' argument is and always been a bad one. Neither theologians nor physicists like it. You don't ascribe everything you can't understand "well that's God". Physics - as us physicists well be the first to tell you - is a study of what and how and when, not why. A complete unified theory of everything wouldn't remove that.

Teslasuit demo: Taking a crack at force feedback with the 'Glove'

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Well this is going to make child abuse in the metaverse far more realistic.

It actually sounds really cool tech but we all know that the moment any sort of haptic VR is added to metaverse chat-rooms, this is the first thing it's going to be used for.

GitHub drops Atom bomb: Open-source text editor mothballed by end of year

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Re: S. Sharwood in 2018

Except it's FOSS in the cloud for anyone to fork and maintain, not some closed source project they can remove.

Seems the FOSS community likes FOSS projects where they don't have to actually have to contribute.

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Um, it's open-source.

MS pulling out from supporting it is not extinguishing anything. The community is free to take over.

"MS is killing FOSS projects by not doing everything for us"

Google says it would release its photorealistic DALL-E 2 rival – but this AI is too prejudiced for you to use

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Re: If you look for racism and sexism, you'll find it.

Sorry, are you asking for proof racism and sexism are real?

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Pretty impressive

How can I have a go on it?

The end of the iPod – last model available 'while supplies last'

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I still have one of those unibody aluminium nanos that I won. It's of little practical use but I still think it's about the most perfectly designed gadget I've owned. Just beautiful.

John Deere tractors 'bricked' after Russia steals machinery from Ukraine

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Re: If the manufacturer can remotely brick something you bought, then you don't own it.

I know it's cool to say things like this, and "you're the product" but it's not actually true. You might not like it being the case but legally, yes you do own it. It's important to separate fact from idealism.

You can buy cars which are forced by GPS to have speed limiters in place based on where you are located, and the ability to call some sort of AAA company and get them to lock down your stolen vehicle has been around for years.

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Re: If I owned a piece of equipment?

>>Unilateral action by the manufacturer is quite another thing. There I'm with you at the barricades/repair shop.

How is it unilateral for them to brick things stolen from their own dealer?

US Army may be about to 'waste' up to $22b on Microsoft HoloLens

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Re: Just what a grunt in a muddy trench, in the rain needs ...

Have you ever seen a modern soldier? They are already wearing/using lots of electronics. From the armchair in which you commentate, I perhaps wonder if you are thinking of the WW2 dramas you watch when viewing the modern armed forces.

Why you think this would be a flimsy plastic thing covered in loose wires I am not sure. Even consumer versions are somewhat sleek and these custom military versions will obviously be tough.

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Misleading

All we have is a story that users give "mixed responses" to a brand new piece of technology.

And to my eye, if they spend $22bn on something that isn't much good, that's 22bn less on guns and bombs. Great.

Twitter faces existential threat from world's richest techbro

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Does he care about making money?

I'm not keen on Elon acquiring Twitter as his personal plaything/mouthpiece (sees at odds with the free speech mantra).

BUT it's entirely possible he doesn't care about making money from Twitter. He is rich enough to buy it for idealogical reasons (good or bad as they may be) and not need it to turn a profit. As El Reg points out, happy shareholders and happy users are somewhat antagonistic and going private eliminates the former.

Just as a counter-point really. Elon does genuinely care about doing some things for their own sake.

Elon Musk won't join Twitter's board after all

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Loose cannon

Anyone else see a bit of a contradiction in someone buying a communication platform in order to bend it to their own uses and interests, to promote free speech?

Elon's disciples (good god they're tiresome on Twitter) will claim he acts only out of altruism of course.

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"to act in the best interests of the company and all our shareholders."

On that basis he shouldn't be on the board of his own companies half the time :)

Happy birthday Windows 3.1, aka 'the one that Visual Basic kept crashing on'

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I quite liked 3.1...

And 3.11 was pretty great at the time (if you could get the networking to actually work).

I never realised 3.1 was such a change from 3.0, since I was fortunate not to use earlier versions.

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

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53GB

I thought Linux was meant to be slick and efficient... I'm sure my Windows install is less than that!

i assume you can also run it in a VM using Parallels or similar which for many might be the preferable option?

Boys outnumber girls 6 to 1 in UK compsci classes

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Why is it so important to chase parity?

Seems like a mindset to pressure women into wanting to do IT... maybe they're smart for not wanting to get into the industry and the lads are the foolish ones thinking it's a lucrative career.

There should be no barriers to entry but equally let people do what they want.

Microsoft claims breakthrough in quantum computer system

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the tech uses quasiparticles called non-Abelian anyons, which at the time existed only in theory

So the ultimate vapourware... building a system on physics you don't even know exists?!

Pretty fascinating stuff in seriousness.