Posts by T. F. M. Reader

The Register trademark

I had to double-check whether the "registered trademark" ® symbol at the end of the article referred to the whole piece or just to the last sentence: "Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment."

Getting practical

I imagine next time I shop for a dishwasher it will be impossible to buy a dumb unsociable one. Does anyone know if those things are smart enough to randomize their MAC addresses or something (damn, I am giving them ideas!) or will it be possible, e.g., to tell the WIFi router to give it an IP address (so that it doesn't get it from anyone else) and then block all incoming and outgoing traffic from it? Will it refuse to wash the dishes then?

Asking for a technically-minded friend, of course. I myself don't mind Baidu, Yandex, and Google knowing when I wash the dishes, what was for dinner from built-in forensic analysis of residue on plates and pans (information that will be passed to insurance companies if it is determined that my dinner was unhealthy more than 4 days a month), or when to call me to offer "extended warranty". Of course not - I am not that paranoid.

Naively...

I can't emphasize the "naively" bit enough, but a pub/sub system with a web (or not web?) interface that airports, meteo services, FAA, and other authorized parties would feed and pilots would be able to access even from their phones before or even during the flight seems to fit the requirements. Linking it to the (planned?) flight path seems doable, too. By now humanity has learnt how to make these things quite performant, reliable, and secure. Scalability is probably not a big factor (the article mentions 11K flights grounded when it all went down - that's 11K consumers, right?). I suppose the threat of DDoS can be addressed, too. What am I missing?

I certainly may be missing something as I have no experience in the intricacies of NOTAM requirements. If anyone can post enlightening comments i, for one, will be very grateful.

Body count

So will Icon Factory and Twitterbot (et al.?) now lay off the employees who were working on the apps and will they be counted among the people rendered jobless by His Muskiness?

Don't badmouth "conventional package managers"

Apt, like every other conventional package manager, has no "undo" function.

I'll raise you "dnf history rollback" and "dnf history undo".

I am adamant that dnf is as conventional as they come. No, it probably does not target the intended audience of Endless OS, but neither does apt.

So data centres do not consume all that much power?

Let's consider a 120hp car. In the past 120 horses looked quite powerful, but for today's cars - rather large and heavy, for convenience and, above all, safety - it doesn't see all that excessive. 120 horses equal 90kW. 840W of a computer is less than 1% of that - can we ignore it?

There are bigger problems to consider. Look at the UK. According to the government [PDF] total electricity demand - that's everything: industry, transport, military, offices, households, and data centres, too - in 2021 was 334TWh. Supply was actually a bit lower - the UK is a net importer of electricity. Total generative capacity is 76.6 GW. That's fossil, renewables, nuclear - everything.

Now, consider a 120hp=90kW car (autonomous or not) driven for 1.5-2 hours per day (daily commute, school run, supermarket, pub, visit friends/family). It won't use it's max power all the time, so reduce it to ~1h or 100kWh/day as a nice round fiducial number. If you want another number feel free to scale what follows - what's a few KWh between friends, eh? Now, the government says there were more than 40M registered vehicles in the UK in 2021 (same year as the electricity figures). Let's say we want a relatively modest, but significant, step of making 25% of those electric. That's 10M, consuming 1TWh/day or 365TWh/year - more energy than the UK consumes or produces in total today.

Now, let's say my EV consumed 100KWh on Tuesday. According to the wet dream of EV enthusiasts I will be able to replenish that by plugging the car into the grid during the night between Tuesday and Wednesday, and there will be no problem either finding a station or spreading the charge over hours. Forget that I want it to happen in 3-5 minutes I spend filling up the tank today - I am completely on board. If I have 5 hours to charge the car I will be drawing 20kW from the grid. 10M cars like mine will draw 200GW during the night - almost 3 times today's grid capacity. That's assuming 100% efficiency, etc.

It looks to me that before we can plug a significant fraction of our vehicles into the grid we'll need to increase the grid capacity at least a few times. it sounds to me like a really big project for which we'll need to pay through the nose and frankly I don't see how this can be accomplished by 2030 or whatever "the deadline" is.

On the plus side, I am not terribly worried about the carbon footprint of data centres in this context.

Clearly a major adjustment

But did Cook and/or AAPL respond to El Reg's follow-up queries?

What a disappointment!

But Simon said... And he's got a government contract...

The paper begins

"AI code assistants, like Github Copilot, have emerged as programming tools with the potential to lower the barrier of entry for programming..."

Ouch!

I've skimmed the paper, mostly in search of a possible bias that would make the experimental group (that was allowed to use AI) less experienced (or otherwise handicapped) compared to the control group. To the authors' credit, not only they assigned participants randomly to the control and experimental groups, but they also provided handy comparison tables of the two demographics. At first blush, I don't see an obvious bias. Actually, the average experience of the experimental group is somewhat higher than of the control group. And both groups were allowed to browse the Internet, so StackOverflow and friends were available to both groups.

OMG! Not only does AI exhibit Dunning-Kruger traits but it also amplifies them in humans, eh?

taken on as a programmer

Any interesting tales of what his code looked like?

Nice article, I like the angle a lot, but I am still struggling a bit to wrap my head around the math...

It looks to me that the author assumes a steady state where each IoS article produces $0.03 of revenue for a year and the business started a long time ago so that there is already a body of revenue-generating content at t=0. That's how one gets $0.03/day*(365days)*(20articles/day/writer)*(365days)*(100*writers) = $8M. I am kinda dubious that a typical IoS article will really generate clicks-through for a whole year, and the "you only need to run this business for a year" bit is not quite aligned with the implicit steady state assumption.

It seems to me more realistic to measure click-through revenue of IoS in weeks rather than years. If each article generates revenue, on average, for X weeks and the business runs for 1 year (this is a lot closer to the steady state assumption) then you'll have a grand total of ~$150K*X of revenue after a little bit more than a year. At $10/day/writer you'll break even if your IoS output remains relevant in searches for something like 2.5 weeks. Does anyone have any idea what is realistic for IoS "relevance duration"?

One word:

scriptkiddies

Not impressed by pace, reserving judgement on anything else

So The Reg counts 3 years between 0.5 and 0.8 and Redox is not quite there yet. If memory serves, Linus Torvalds started his "student project" in 1991. By 1994 Linux was my major platform in the academia. It was not just usable - it had the same UI as the most advanced Sun workstations of the time (and was vastly superior to Windows of the period that I tried and abandoned in disgust) and ran on cheaper hardware (no VMs on COTS HW at that time). You had your personal resource rather than an X Terminal to share a departmental Sun. You could compile the kernel and everything else on it, too - something Redox can't do yet, according to the article.

By 1995 it was difficult to find anything but Linux at 2 US universities I was then affiliated with. In 1996 - and ever since - it was ubiquitous in at least some industries.

Yes, I suppose the distance to cover was shorter then and the requirements today are different. E.g., Internet was simpler. But maybe the overall architecture of GUI on top on Open Look on top of X on top of kernel, with shells and tools thrown in, helped making it all usable fast? I am pretty sure that keeping those old system calls (I've given the "Why Redox?" page linked in the article a superficial glance) that allowed other stuff to run helped a lot. And therefore I am curious: does Redox have a version of libc (and maybe sockets and some other stuff) that sits atop its new syscalls? That has been done, too, e.g., for InfiniBand to bypass the kernel without re-writing applications. Would such a "distraction" help running "legacy" (FOSS) stuff for usability's sake without hindering the interesting OS R&D?

In any case, somehow (less than) 3 years from inception to being perfectly adequate for everything I needed for my thesis, later academic research, and still later industry work (none in computer science, though computer-heavy) seems to me a bit more impressive - in terms of pace of development only, mind you - than what this article presents about Redox.

More importantly...

Is the famously "big picture" investor optimistic regarding China's designs for Taiwan? "Optimistic" from where I stand, that is - Xi is watching Putin's failures, talking to POTUS and others in Indonesia, getting less than keen to stir things up against Taiwan - good for TSMC prospects, at least for a while?

AI training

A properly trained AI could have offered Germans something tasty to commemorate - and celebrate! - the fall of the Berlin wall on the 9th of November 1989.

Limit access before MFA

If you have an internal resource valuable enough to warrant MFA then allow access to it only via the company's VPN in the first place.

Your employees need access to work, right? So connect to the VPN first. There will be no MFA bombing then unless the criminal is inside the VPN already, in which case you'd have a bigger problem.

Contractual obligations

I admit I have not read through all the comments, only through a significant portion of them. If I am repeating what someone else said apologies for missing it.

All the arguments about delivering vs. not delivering and so on are perfectly fine, but it struck me that another, very real issue, seems completely missing from the discourse. Assume you are an employee (not freelancer or contractor or consultant). In my experience, unless you manage to negotiate something else at the time you are hired, there will be a clause in your employment contract that contractually obligates you to work exclusively for your employer. This is not just about time, issues like intellectual property rights, etc., are involved to (typically you assign those rights to your employer as "work for hire" or whatever the terminology is in your jurisdiction). More often than not on paper it is phrased restrictively enough to require a written agreement from the employee to engage in any other activity, whether or not for monetary consideration.

It is rarely (barring a**sehole cases) about preventing you from having hobbies or playing for your neighbourhood rugby team or taking an art class once a week. Rather, the employer will be (legitimately, IMHO) interested in preventing potential conflicts of interest of all kinds, including, e.g., reputation and, significantly, you not getting burnt out by a night job or involvement in an election campaign or whatever it may be. The last bit is, in the end, about "delivering", of course, and it's long term thinking in most cases.

Over time I've held second jobs quite a few times (usually teaching or consulting) and I've been on advisory boards of companies and non-profits other than my main employer. That was invariably under an exclusivity clause in my "day job" contract, and permission was invariably given, after questions about conflicts of interest in both competition ("Is there a clash with the company's business interests?") and scope ("How much time will it take per week/month?") had been resolved in a conversation. Actually, I always take additional care to avoid creating an impression that my employer sponsors or supports or endorses, say, the non-profit's activities. That takes conversations (and attention and vigilance on occasion) on the other end, and it's something I insist on, without explicit stipulation from my employer.

The point is, you main employer has a legitimate say, and you are typically (your mileage may vary) contractually obligated to inform them. Breaking that contract is, normally and understandably, a firing offence and being above board is a matter of integrity and decency (IMHO). This looks conspicuously absent in these two cases as described. I guess I should say "four cases", what with 2 employees and 2 employers for each. And that, in my mind, is the essential issue whether or not the results were, in fact, delivered. And in at least 2 of the 4 cases they were not, apparently.

Disclaimer: I have no idea if those two guys actually had exclusivity clauses in their contracts. If not I'd say the former employer should also fire their lawyers. Ha!

Now, I would guess Musk and Bezos and Dorsey and their ilk do have their conflicts of interest declared, including both competition and scope (being CEOs of more than one company). As TSLA, AMZN, and TWTR are all publicly traded I suppose all that gets properly reported to SEC, etc. So the "above board" part is OK then, and apparently whoever pays their salaries (investors, shareholders through the respective Boards, etc.) are satisfied with the "delivery" aspect. If the satisfaction goes away I expect this to be reflected in either board meetings or share prices or, probably, both.

No company time was stolen in creating this post.

Bias?

[Disclaimer: the paper seems to be behind a paywall, so I have not read it.]

Wouldn't close friends, I dunno, call or email or whatsapp each other to ask for an introduction to an interesting company or a suitable prospective hire? As opposed to exchanging information on LinkedIn?

This would be less probable with weaker connections, and the weakest ones would tail off as observed.

Sounds to me that this is a possible explanation for the observed effect.

El Reg at its most subtle

I really think the effing URL of the article makes the most important point. Well done.