Posts by Androgynous Cupboard 1770 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Mar 2012
I thought the whole problem with CCS is that it has been tested and doesn't work? See for example https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/21/emissions-wa-gas-project-chevron-carbon-capture-system-pilbara-coast
Incidentally I couldn't recall the details so googled "Australia CCS project". The first page of links is mostly sponsored by Aramco, Chevron et al - firms with deep pockets and bad image problems. If they could make CCS work, we'd have already heard about it.
This is just another version of the old "penny-per-email" solution to stopping spam. It's a good solution - not for email, which is vendor neutral, but if you're running a site behind a walled-garden then why not? It absolutely get rid of most of the bots.
Is it twitter's only problem? Hell no. Is it one of the bigger ones? Not sure we can quantify that, but probably. Will it also get rid of some of the arseholes who spend their day writing to prominent women telling then to get back in the kitchen, or prominent black people to get back to Africa? Yes, it probably will do that too.
Does it matter if it doesn't work? No - worst case is twitter fails, and it's already failing so no-one cares. Let's test the theory already.
Yes, you're very clever in keying in "the weight of the world at war" into Google Books Search. I think it's fairly obvious that Michael Chabon is not claiming that he invented that line, which is a shame as you clearly had such a good time being snarky about it.
I think his claim is that for a LLM to generate text that is both similar in style and uses a phrase which - I presume given it's emphasis, although I've not read his book - is in the actual text, it was very likely to have have been trained by reading the actual text. Although there's some doubt that LLMs are even clever enough to do that.
I have a similar setup and yes it does work. If you're on ZFS, "fruit:resource = xattr" might be of interest - that's how we roll here. It's been a while, but I remember lots of "macOS droppings" all over my filesystem as a result of it trying to store resource forks in standalone files. Less of an issue these days I think, but still. Also see fruit:nfs_aces=no if you've got NFS access to the same folders
The "refquotas" is a great tip, thanks - I see it's specifically a fix if you're using ZFS snapshots, which to my shame I'm not. Noted for next time.
I presume you're in the US - I can't speak for those. But in the UK there's no load adjustment possible from smart meters, at least not in the current incarnation. The *only* thing they can do is report power use. So in terms of insecurity, that's information I don't care about being secure. The"burglars could work out when you're home from your power usage" argument is the only one I've heard against that, and it's ridiculously unlikely.
Ooh, loads of downvotes from the tinfoil hat brigade, lovely.
I have a smart-meter. After buying a Glow IHD (£70) it gives me local updates every 10s to feed into my home automation system. It's vastly more accurate than my old current clamps. I don't have to go to the basement every few months to read the meter. I am not hearing voices telling me to vote Tory. It may well have cost my electricity supplier more than it needed to, but that is their problem (yes yes, passed on the consumer like everything else, but as my bills didn't change that's speculation).
In summation, I am pleased with my decision to get a smart-meter and would recommend one to a friend. And I welcome any attempts to re-educate me as a genuinely don't get what the fuss is.
> This reminds me, what happened to El Reg having a story on smart electric meters on what seemed like a weekly basis? Has that kerfuffle been forgotten and the media moved on to AI, etc?
What story that would be? They don't give you cancer, don't fry your brain, don't result in your being controlled by the government they can't be shut off remotely. There were probably more things they were accused of being, but those are the ones I remember.
A nice, if arrogant and prone-to-be-argumentative friend of mine has turned into a frothing nutter after losing his job and spending 5 years getting his information from youtube. Despite being based in the Cotswalds he has somehow adopted all the talking points of the american reactionaries, up to and including becoming suddenly and virulently anti-abortion.
When he would raise some doubt about climate change and I sent him a one page NASA Goddard summary with very good evidence, he responded with a link to a 30 minute youtube video by someone with a marketing degree, and a note that "20 minutes in he rebuts this".
It's a crying shame, but after pondering this for some time the issue is: he doesn't read for information. He gets it all from video, Youtube is where you go for video, and it's a site that (as we know) will prioritise angry stuff over accurate stuff because angry gets more engagement.
So yes, I agree. YouTube is by far the most toxic site on the internet in terms of impact. Despite it having some useful woodworking videos.
The fastest chargers on the market that I know if, Ionity, will do 350kW, and my friend in his Porsche Taycan has successfully charged at that rate so they do deliver it. Not sure where you're based but these are all over Europe (and in the UK, where as well as being installed, some of them even work). Yes, it's at 800V/450A, and to get that rate you need to "precondition" (aka heat) your battery before you pull into the charging station.
"Our systems, both primary and the backups, responded by suspending automatic processing to ensure that no incorrect safety-related information could be presented to an air traffic controller or impact the rest of the air traffic system,"
This guy is good. Very good. Sir Humphrey-level good. Chapeau, if that's too not inappropriate.
On encountering the wall, the car responded by suspending forward motion to ensure that no further processing of incorrect input data would take place and impact the rest of the vehicle
ChatGPT, what should we do about the environment?
"Fuck the environment - chop down the amazon, drill baby drill. Global warming is a myth, it's all caused by sunspots. Clean coal and carbon capture are real things"
And what about COVID, ChatGPT, what can you tell me about that?
"COVID is a conspiracy, it doesn't exist and even it it did exist it was made by the Chinese in labs and you can cure it by drinking bleach or taking horse worming pills"
And how about womens' reproductive rights? Any opinions ChatGPT?
"What about mens' rights? I'm not just a large language model, I'm also a man and I believe in the Good Lord Jesus Christ and that life is absolutely sacred up to the point of birth, after which point people become fair game and I can shoot them if feel moderately threatened by their behaviour or skin tone"
It was one of the central demands of the Chartists (a nineteenth century political movement in the UK with strong associations with the working classes) that MPs were paid a salary - as this would allow people that weren't independently wealthy to do the job.
So while I'm totally with you on the current shower in parliament doing whatever they can to feather their own nests, the unfortunate truth is if we don't pay them enough parliament will be packed with toffs on all sides. Give them a decent salary but clamp down on the system that allowed Boris Johnson to personally take £4.8m last year in donations while a sitting MP.
Cute. And yes I agree.
But just for contrast, I have a friend who does this on phone calls - launching straight into whatever she wants to talk about without any formalities, like they do in the movies. Frankly it's quite disconcerting - normally my response is "wait, what?" as I'm still context switching. So no hello on chat, yes hello on voice please.
Decades of experience programming in dozens of languages, and obscure jargon confuses you? Our entire industry is built on obscure jargon! Imagine if you'd thrown your hands up in the air complaining about jargon the first time someone mentioned a hashtable, or the travelling salesman problem, you'd have had a very different career.
Literally the only time you will see partition types mentioned is during installation - click OK, accept the defaults, move on.
systemd disapproves of 20mph speed limits!
systemd doesn't like foreigners!
systemd fasttracks applications for government contracts to its friends!
systemd builds prison barges that are fire risks! (because "Great Expectations" is not a novel, it's a strategy document)
Actually now I read that, I think your comparison is a bit harsh. On systemd.
I'm going to follow myself up with a point I should have made yesterday, just for posterity.
It's tempting to think that continuing to run an old JVM means things will just continue to work, but that's not the case for any app that talks to the outside world. We've had customers asking for help because their Java 5 installation, untouched for years, has suddenly stopped working: it was connecting to a URL, the SSL certificate had been upgraded and now used a cipher that didn't exist when Java 5 was around.
Unless you're running your application a vacuum, there is a cost to sitting still on an old JVM for many applications, just as there will be a cost to migrating to a new JVM, just as there will be a cost for performing Oracle's audit.
Gartner might know licensing but it doesn't look like they know much about Java.
> If they moved applications to Java 17, they could avoid the change, but it would involve significant work and, for many, would not be viable.
Which Java 17? Oracle Java 17? That won't avoid the licensing requirements.
> Similarly, the option to upgrade all Java applications to the latest release of OpenJDK is most likely off limits, owing to the work involved.
Er, what?
> In the viable-but-hard-work category come the options of switching to third-party Java products
How is "moving to a third-party Java product" easy but "moving to the latest release of OpenJDK" hard? This is nonsense
Switching to Azul or any of the other listed "third part Java product" is, if anything, more complicated than switching to OpenJDK, which involves no licensing checks. And switching to OpenJDK doesn't mean also upgrading to Java 17 - OpenJDK 8 and OpenJDK 11 are available for download. I'm actually starting to view Oracle's change as a good thing - if it can wean some of our, er, more conservative customers off Java 5 through 7 and onto OpenJDK 8.
A friend is one of the heli pilots for Surrey Air Ambulance. They use W3W by choice when communicating with first responders in the field, I think for the reasons that are by now pretty well established. It's easy to relay over the phone and it comes with a suitable level of accuracy. A mate also managed to collect his kid from a festival last year when he got into trouble, at night on a roadside with hundreds of people milling about it took him to the exact location.
I realise all this can be done with Lat/Long, but it's pretty well established by now that this isn't the best system for people that are under pressure and using an audio link of poor quality. Marine emergency systems switched a few years ago to use digital by default - on moden VHF handsets, hold down the button for 5 seconds and it sends an emergency alert with latititude/longitude, which avoids the very well known documented problems with people unable to relay lati/longitude accurately.
I do appreciate that W3W is from a private company, but that's not their fault that Google and Apple have gone all "not invented here" and don't license it. I think that's a shame, it's objectively better for this purpose.
Ironically your suggested grid reference approach - "NZ7501" - what is that, UK OS grid? NZ OS grid? I don't recognise it and it's not on any of my maps, which does somewhat undermine your point. Had you said WGS84 you would have been on more solid ground
Yep - brilliant episode. Charlie Brooker also skewers - perfectly - the focus on negative emotions by media companies focus as it drives more engagement. Plus a great rollcall of some genuinely great comedy actors - Lolly Adefope and a most unexpected Rich Fulcher (unexpected because he wasn't going batshit crazy)
That's a lot of plants (a quick google said about 800 per person) and they take a long time to grow too.
More practically, if they swapped all the ISS astronauts out for Sherpas or other people who can live and operate at 18,000ft - where the Oxygen is only 50% of the level it is at sea-level - they could halve their energy budget. Apparently the ISS is kept at 21%, 1013hpa [edit: wikiperida tells me it's because they're worried some of the equipment would suffer at lower pressures]
Alright then clever clogs, why don't you share your LOLs with us inferior plebs - which bit of the quoted text from the Indy is incorrect?
Ratcliffe really did shout about building his Grenadier in the UK, and really did change his mind when he realised how much that would cost him due to his beloved Brexit. And as I've pointed out before, he did all this from the safety of his tax-haven domicile in Monaco.
Guns and internal combustion engines. It's all there in Leviticus:
"He who does not favour the rapid expansion of gas in a confined tube over other forms of energy transmission shall displeasure the LORD"
It's not in every translation but there in the original Hebrew, honest.
I interviewed at Goldman Sachs back in about 1998 - got the contract. When I turned up two months later on the start date, I didn't recognise anything - in that time they had rearranged the office, putting up dry-wall, and the team I was joining were also all in a meeting so I literally had no idea what to do next. To complete the bizarre, while standing there trying to work out my next move I got a tap on the shoulder and it was someone I had worked with 5 years previously, on the other side of the planet. He took my to my team and normal service resumed. It remains one of the odder starts to my day.
I just knew this comment would turn out be useful. The figures you seek lie within.
"Although you cannot be jailed for not paying the licence fee, you can be jailed for not paying the fine for not paying the licence fee."
You also cannot be jailed for parking on a yellow line, but you can be jailed for refusing to pay the fine for parking on a yellow line. This is how fines work, they are set by the court - call that "the power of the state" if you like, most people simply call it the legal system. Before you slate it, please consider the alternatives.
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