Posts by Nuno trancoso

Why... even... bother...

Don't get me wrong, I love ML. But the one thing you can be sure of is that while it will do a great job for 99.5% of people and fail miserably for the rest (personal preferences et all...). And that's assuming decent training data (that they obviously didn't use...).

And why reinvent the wheel... The simple crop has been around since like forever. If post-crop you are REALLY close to the original aspect ratio, a simple resize will do, if close but not that close (yet not that far), seam carving will do the trick. If too far from the original AR, just PAD IT, nothing else you can do...

So, now they have to retrain the set again to account for this "pseudo-gan"... Ah well, just another dataset augmentation, nothing new...

Pfff...

Article forgot to mention that this version was SEVERELY handicapped in it's I/O so it would feel more like a "regular" pro-player. Anyone that saw the first version will remember the insane stalker micro that made mincemeat out of everything in seemingly "no win" scenarios. Point in case, where AI will win hand down (starcraft or anything) is at the point where it needs to juggle hundreds of I/O's simoutaneously. A fair example would be military hierarquies of unit control. You control top down on a macro level, and as you go down, it's more and more "eveyone takes care of himself". An AI WILL control every unit at the unit level AND coordinate it with every other unit's effort. On the Starcraft perspective, Alphastar is just the best micro gamemasters rolled into one but at a level no human can achieve. On a more broad perspective, it's basically a fully System 2 "brain" (read "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman) without "intuition", much less bias and much less error prone (after it's trained that is...).

Funny enough, when self-driving cars reach their "ready to market" point, they will "end" human drivers, because at that point they will be more efficient (wear and tear, fuel consuption, etc) and human drivers will be seen as a liability, as we cause more accidents per minute than AI's will cause per decade...

GDPR on the way...

Not me, I don't own any "intelligent devices", but i can see LOTS of people firing up requests to know how their chats were used, by whom and when, then wash/rinse/repeat down to any contractor and suing for shady opt-in's, etc...

Now seriously, this won't go away until legislation is enacted to make it so that every personal data collection and processing ALWAYS need explicit consent with an option to "never bother me with this question again". With steep fines, if you fail to do so. Oh, wait, that's GDPR :D So, all it needs is that EVERYTIME they want to use said data for a new purpose, they have to explicitly say what they will be doing, by whom in case of a third party, and ask for a new consent for that purpose alone.

Pretty sure that once forced to announce to world+dog (and their competitors), what they intend on doing, the data stream of personal eavesdropping runs dry quite fast...

Locks...

All this talk of locks and security gone bad... This snap was taken on my way to work back a couple years.

https://i.imgur.com/dfQcpu5.jpg

As with most security, it's pointless if you don't think it through. And I do mean seriously think it through.

Oh woe is me!

People downvoting AMFM??? This be still El Reg right, not some stuck up hipster YT tech channel?

Total bollocks

One can argue that the only thing capable of holding our universe's full state information is by definition the universe itself. No problem with that. Thus, WE can't build that simulator. But the whole shebang falls apart when you actually try to infer that what we know as "the universe" would be the "actual universe" if we were a simulation. The "reasonable" inference is that we always simulated things SMALLER than our universe, thus, if we were a simulation, the "real universe" would be quite big enough to hold "our universe"'s state information with plenty of room to spare. The Earth is quite big from an ant's perspective, but quite small from even our galaxy's perspective. Always a matter of scale.

@People that use this for windows/dos desktop/games...

How about just not using it? VMWare has a free offer for Linux too and DosBox same thing. And lo and behold, both actually manage some pretty solid RTM's unlike some craptastic projects...

The Apple sheeple taking offense are so amusing. Wonder if they realize that their but hurt retorts are precisely what marks them as sheeple, fanbois and zealots all rolled into a unsightly package...

Maybe

Maybe we should. We start the adult conversation by pointing out to the US public that:

a) only they will be subjected to this

b) only they will be vulnerable

Given a+b it will be easy to show 'merkans that what the FBI REALLY wants is to freely snoop on the US citizens, because basically ROTW doesn't give a f***ing f**k about their backdoors and will happily go about making it's own crypto even stronger.

It's not like the US public doesn't distrust the government already, shouldn't be too hard to convince them about this one, it sounds... like truth.

Isn't this the kind of shenanigans that usually land people on the "not so good" side of the SEC?

So, they have a hash A that can be split into B+C. Using a block of data that is a lookup table of B+pointertodata you can read another block of data that is a lookup table consisting of C+pointertodata+usecount. How non trivial...

Next patent, you use a hash function big enough to be split into 4 pieces, so that yaddayaddayadda.

It's crap like this that gives software patents a bad name through and through.

The weird thing is that in previous fails, Millenium and Vista, they backtracked in a single generation, XP and 7. Now we have 8,8.1,8.2,10, and no sign of them giving up.

Maybe just me, but i'd say this points to someone's ego just plain not being able to accept their "new shiny" was actually a turd from the go.

Given that business is about profit, maybe it's time said person is shown the door... For shareholders good et all.

Re: Reward

You're thinking "sustained" and not "world record". Which is always a misleading thing about records of any kind. If you're going for wr, you go for broke, pushing it to the near edge of failure. If you go for sustained, you sometimes even push it DOWN just in case.

Not sure about current GPU trends as i quit that long ago, but on the CPU front, atm you're basically limited by mobo and psu build quality. Sadly, wifi and flashy neons are a much easier sell to punters than decent quality power.... There's a small niche market there,but no takers i guess.

While i do stand with Apple on this issue, can't help but think they brought it upon themselves. 4 digits?

Just give the FBI what they want then push an update next day that turns that into "variable length (of user's choosing) full alphanumeric (with special chars)" unlock code. And "enlighten" the users about the "why". Cue TLA's shitting a brick. And add a TrueCrypt like layer of plausible deniability. Watch another brick come out.

Until encryption is taken seriously and becomes a "done deal" ie, there's nothing anyone can do to "help" third parties, it will always be open to these kind of shenanigans. This will only stop once it becomes a de facto that you can't break it unless the user cooperates, and make it so you can't really tell if he has or has not.

The means and tech have been around since like forever, it's only the will that's been lacking.

Given that that particular business is "insecure by design", this isn't really news. As long as they can write it off as losses and it still costs less than proper security, this will keep happening.

It will hold true if they keep locked in the "bragging rights" mentality. If they push past through that, you'll see them come up as a "community" writing actual frameworks and not "personal tools". Security did it, VX'ers are doing it, reverser's are the next logical step.

Moment you can rely on a framework to "auto-unwrap" anything known and that can be expanded as unknown comes into play, "protection" is a moot point.

p.s. i don't support piracy, it's just that i support DRM and anti-cheat|hack|crack shitty rootkit like software even less.

The Gimp<>PS/RawTherapee<>AdobeCameraRaw views pretty much says all that's needs to be said about the state of FOSS graphics apps in particular, and UX in general.

They fail because while (some are) technically on par (or even superior), they're coded by tech minded people that reply to the rest with the usual "don't like it, fork it". Because while they wrote it, they don't make a living USING it for REAL WORK. Or they'd know how bad it sucked.

Commercial endeavors can't afford to pull stunts like that because, who would have thought, they make a living out of it, not a hobby. No customers, no money.

Hope lies in the Firefox/Thunderbird/OpenOffice/Natron/etc camp, that figured that it was 10000x better to just copy a proven UX/paradigm than trying to come up with some half-assed innovation. And given M$ is losing it's grip on "usability", now it's as good a time as ever for FOSS to stop it's knee-jerk attitude and start "stealing" people away just by being "more usable".

As for the headline, nah. While PS7 has (lot less) "hot features", it works lot faster from a usability viewpoint. And starts up WAY faster than GIMP or CS6 ever will.

Meh...

All it shows is that people (even IT) still don't grep that ANYTHING sent over a public network, be it the Internet or good old Snailmail, is open to eavesdropping. Thus, logic would say that if it's to be kept private, it must be made private BEFORE transmission.

Properly securing the endpoints and payload data would always ensure the TLA's could at best say "we know x sent A to y, but we have no clue what A is", but as usual, in good ol' human fashion, we go about wasting time "fixing" the symptoms instead of dealing with the "disease" at the core.

Oh wow...

Just some two weeks ago i was having a chat with my c# teacher musing on how even M$ was "getting in bed" with Android while Apple was still pathetically trying to leverage the "developer tax". Seems they woke up.

Too bad the horses have long bolted and world+dog has moved on. iThings had their moment, but like their predecessor overpriced underspec'ed boxes, they're now a bling niche turf too.

Only this time there's no St. Jobs to come back and point towards the light (no pun...).*

*not sure Job's would have helped here given he'd probably be against this move. But without his vision to "get the next big thing DONE RIGHT" Apple is doomed to go back into the slow death of the PowerPC era.

Sigh...

And poor me thinking they actually wanted to get rid of the whole miserable thing and come up with a decent new one.

The problem, deep down, is that this wretched combo has become an ungodly mess of a hack on a kludge on a workaround on a tech that wasn't meant to do any of it.

Quite honestly, it's time to put it to rest and come up with something that's designed from the ground up to do what it's doing now.

@ Ivan 4

Quite likely. My own bill which includes a fair mix of day/night hours "only" shows 52% from wind sources. "Only". But we're kinda blessed with a place where sun shines through the day and wind runs all night, other places might fare less well.

Despite that, it doesn't give you the right to bury head into sand. Especially since the less you do now, the more you pay later to hop on the moving train, assuming you still can and don't just end up buying all your supply. We sucked up the costs not because it was efficient, but just because in the long end it would leave us stuck with "no option" as the only option.

Bit of common sense does need to apply though. Production is only 1/2 the equation. Consumption is the other 1/2. If your consumption keeps increasing as it has, there won't be enough power to fuel it in the long term. OTOH, if you lessen your consumption, you already saved. But most savings come from stamping out bad habits we've acquired during the "cheap fuel" part of history, so people are quite reluctant on that. Think "better insulation instead of heating/cooling" and you get the idea of change/reluctance.

Wasn't this expected?

I mean, if security isn't taken seriously in the "right" circles, is it sane to expect it to be taken seriously when it comes to "consumer stuff"?

Anyway, to reduce exposure to the problems of IoT is simple. Reduce the T part you own. Amazing how much space, physical and mental, is taken up by crap you don't really need but just happen to have...

hmmm...

I'm not even sure what the smartwatch thing is all about. I stopped using a (dumb)watch since i started having to lug a mobile around and that's some 15y back...

Given that said "smart" watches need a "smart" phone to do more than basics that would NOT require such a hefty price tag, you now have to lug and care for two pieces of junk instead of one.

Guess one for hipsters where form will beat function all the time.

Guess it's a "other side of the pond" thing. Back here nobody does it till somebody does it. And somebody does it to steal market share from, erhmmm, other somebody.

Thus, when 56k was the norm, everyone was providing 56k and nobody cared about anything else. Then somebody did cable and everyone was rushing to do cable. Then ADSL. Now fiber.

Guess that a "universal" roll out on a big place like the USA is harder to achieve, but smaller local ones might just be within reach for the likes of Google, and that's enough to give a nice one finger salute to the likes of AT&T.

I'd say this one has a bright future till the fix. Most idi.. people i know suffer from a supernatural attraction to open every piece of junk .pps they get sent.

Ah well, haven't had a really good work week since Nimda/CodeRed, was due...

Replace politicians with engineers under a strong leadership and you'll be done in a weekend.

Decisions by committee, the best way to never get anything (properly) done.

While i'm no fan of BigCorp's, i'm even less of morons like this and legal systems that actually support them.

Any decent place and the moron would have been sent to mental care given he espoused the belief that he could get wings by drinking red bull. Only to be released if/when he proved capable of making the distinction between reality and fairy tales. And his legal counsel would be disbared for actually taking up the case and (eventually) wasting the court's time.