* Posts by Tom 7

8318 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009

Roses are red, are you single, we wonder? 'Cos this moth-brain AI can read your phone number

Tom 7

Intriguing

Caught like a moth in a flame I've been reading up as much as possible about deep learning etc and this is the first non-beehive approach I've seen. Most stuff seems to be like a beehive - honeycomb layers connected together one after the other. If people find connecting things in different ways they may well breakdown seemingly difficult barriers with ease!

Blackbird shot down, patent nuked by judge in Cloudflare legal battle

Tom 7

Re: No no no no, this is just soooo much bigger than that

Oooh I hope they do and lose.

Who wants dynamic dancing animations and code in their emails? Everyone! says Google

Tom 7

Re: some people may find this appealing

@myhandler - monospace is fine for tabulating. In fact its a lot better than shit HTML, and far better than shit HTML with shit CSS,

Tom 7

"we immediately saw higher user engagement on our AMP pages"

Yup - everyone desperately trying to find out how to turn that shit off.

Wanna gobble Google's custom chips? Now you can – its Cloud TPUs at $6.50 an hour

Tom 7

Being cheeky

Does anyone know of a motherboard that is basically a GPU host - just needs a low power atom to load up the GPU and run a bit of linux for a human io?

Tom 7

Re: Shame Parrallella didnt get their 1024 core chip into production

@Charlie Clark - have a look at the Parrallella design - its all open source. I'd imagine its pretty good for NN training. Havent quite found out how the TPUs are configured yet.

Tom 7

Shame Parrallella didnt get their 1024 core chip into production

According to my cigarette packet that would have been a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper oer buck,

And having it in your 'hand' not in googles is worth another couple of orders of magnitude too.

Data scientist wanted: Must have Python, spontaneity not required

Tom 7

Re: Wow...

Better still is working for an MBA who is paid three times as much as you and has to ask you how to open a zip file.

Tom 7

Re Quite the opposite

And given the GPU acceleration that seems to be available for easy to use from python libraries is another enormous boon.

No sh*t, Sherlock! Bloke suspected of swallowing drug stash keeps colon schtum for 22 DAYS

Tom 7

I guess he's doiing his best not to be

a stool pigeon.

Winter is coming for AI. Fortunately, non-sci-fi definitions are actually doing worthwhile stuff

Tom 7

@Dave800 prolog still lives

I've just finished Bratko's 'Logic Programming for AI' and its alive and kicking. Its way way beyond family relationships. Get a copy from your local library. I'm self unemployed at the moment and ploughing through as much AI as possible and, compared with what I saw in the 80s its come a very long way down an extremely long road. In the right hands I think its capable of some remarkable things - but then software itself does too in the right hands with the right people managing it. I think we may be coming up to what will be called a winter when it is really a plateau - a bit like when you realise you need to completely re-factor something to make it go that bit further. Libraries will be consolidated and people who know what they are doing will help other people who know what they want to do in a AI ish way and, unlike the massive amount of effort spent managing paper shaped documents on computers that has seriously wasted the vast effort of some of the most intelligent outputs from out universities for the last 30 years, we will see some serious jumps forward.

Tom 7

Like much technology its still in the wrong hands.

I'm not saying I'm the right hands but I have a Pi3/Camera combination that currently recognises the difference between a chicken, a duck, a rat and a Magpie with over 90% accuracy. This is quite useful when it comes to stopping the latter two nicking the food and eggs. If I can get it to 99.9% on the rat I might just automate a trap and for the magpie a loud alarm (which would put the hens off lay). Its not much but it would pat for itself quite quickly.

A similarly trained device for insect recognition (with a laser!!!) could roam crops and do away with need for pesticides, and indeed weed recognition could also reduce the need for herbicides. Both solutions in mass production could work out cheaper than the chemicals without the likelyhood of resistant mutations cropping up (OK you do get mirrored beetles and silvered plants).

Useful solutions will continue to develop - its twats trying to sell you shit you dont want that are going to have a winter not AI.

Indiegogo to ailing ZX Spectrum reboot firm: End of May... or we call the debt collector

Tom 7

Re: Really...

But a RaspiZero in a 'fancy' case can run emulators for pretty much any 8 bit machine - and a thousand other things as well. The hard bit is stopping that.

Tom 7

This is what you get when you let advertising precede engineering.

Or just use indigogo I suppose.

Boffins crack smartphone location tracking – even if you've turned off the GPS

Tom 7

Re: Great!

I keep location switched off because I know where I am. I have yet to find an app that tells me something useful about my location that is anything other than fucking irritating.

Tom 7

Re: Bad idea

Like its hard to tell where the loud-mouthed orange self publicist is at any moment in time.

Why is Bitcoin fscked? Here are three reasons: South Korea, India... and now China clamps down on cryptocurrencies

Tom 7

The way to make money mining bitcoin

is to get a book on Ai and use your mining rigs to learn how to work out which coin is going to be next to overvalue by a few orders of magnitude.

NASA's zombie IMAGE satellite is powered up and working quite nicely

Tom 7

Re: Will they never learn? Sumerians

But didnt it take burning down the records office to actually preserve the clay tablets?

Tom 7

Re: Flat Earth Heretic

They'd just say you'd given them the contact lens version of the plane windows that make the earth look curved.

Morrisons launches bizarre Yorkshire Pudding pizza thing

Tom 7

Satans sauceboat.

I'd happily eat this shit if I've made it at home myself - a nicely and most importantly freshly cooked yorkshire filled with a variety of savoury or sweet fillings is food of the gods. Reheated after a trip from morrisons NEVER!

Ubuntu reverting to Xorg in Bionic Beaver

Tom 7

Re: It is the video hardware driver's fault

Hardware has licenses too: https://www.ohwr.org/documents/294

NASA finds satellite, realises it has lost the software and kit that talk to it

Tom 7

Re: Need help, NASA?

They didnt help then, why would they now?

Can't login to Skype? You're not alone. Chat app's been a bit crap for five days now

Tom 7

Re: MS killed off Skype for 32-bit Linux and Windows

I think they killed off 64bit for linux too. My installations all stopped working - I couldn't log in with the same credentials any more. Apparently I would have to pay to get it working again.

Well done, UK.gov. You hit superfast broadband target (by handing almost the entire project to BT)

Tom 7

Re: 24Mbps

BT upgraded our exchange with large council monies. Most people on the exchange in the village were on 17Mb as they were quite close and only a couple of people have upgraded to higher speeds. The rest of us had our cabinets moved back to the exchange so no change for us. Money and brownie points for BT, Nothing for the customer.

Tom 7

Re: Come the Revolution

Well privatisation did kill off BTs fibre optic development. We did submarine cables and all sorts of stuff. In 1990 we could have made a 2.4Gbit FTTP over 10Km of fibre for less than £100 in terms of component cost. But hey, they didnt do that sort of thing any more apparently.

Fancy coughing up for a £2,000 'nanodegree' in flying car design?

Tom 7

Benoullis principle

Not a law - and not even correct when applied to wings!

User stepped on mouse, complained pedal wasn’t making PC go faster

Tom 7

Re: Reminds me of a story

@boltar

Careful there. I had an interesting experience with my next door neighbour. A lady with an IQ of 172 at one time. Programmer for most of her life - indeed I think she started before men decided it was a cool thing to stop women doing it. She was so bright that when the altzheimers got to the point she was shitting on her own back doorstep because she couldn't remember where her loo was she could still hold what seemed like a coherent conversation to most. She defied diagnosis until she was really bad.

And even if its not something as serious as that peoples eyesight can fail to the point you cant read the buttons on a remote (assuming the bloody lettering hasn't worn off) and the spacial memory for that sort of thing is not part of most peoples early conditioning.

Virgin Media skulks in disused public toilets

Tom 7

@wyatt

not a George Michael follower then?

GitHub shrugs off drone maker DJI's crypto key DMCA takedown effort

Tom 7

Re: one experience ...

All that effort? Takes about a minute on my Pi Zero to install a git server and get it working - but them my internet is shit.

IT 'heroes' saved Maersk from NotPetya with ten-day reinstallation blitz

Tom 7

Re: Reliance on computers

I think they didnt buy their computer - they builded it themselves. I think every IT person should be made to read 'A computer called Leo' so when they are wrestling with the formatting of some arseholes code in a spreadsheet they can ask themselves how the boys at the tea rooms had offices more automated than the 6000 PCs they are trying to manage, and did it on 6000 valves that wouldnt power the keyboard on the PC they're swearing at.

Tom 7

All IT installations should be called emergencies

so the managers can be used to sign cheques and kept out of the decision making process.

They "just did the work to keep disruptions to a minimum". So no progress meetings or getting the design dept in to argue over colours and fonts!

STOP! It's dangerous to upgrade to VMware 6.5 alone. Read this

Tom 7

I remember VMware

or rather I didnt. Had to read the manuals when it went wrong. MS networking I could recite the manual after 14 pints.

New Sky thinking: Media giant makes dish-swerving move on Netflix territory

Tom 7

Re: "So you will legally be able to buy a UK Sky subscription from any EU country"

And everything will be advert ridden pay per view once NowTV is geoblocked by some magic hand.

Biker nerfed by robo Chevy in San Francisco now lobs sueball at GM

Tom 7

Re: I think the cyclist is at fault#2

Actually "objects in the rear view mirror are closer than they appear" is a pretty valid warning, it isn't so obvious - NO! I couldn't see the object because of the fucking warning!

Microsoft whips out tool so you can measure Windows 10's data-slurping creepiness

Tom 7

Re: Reporting ...

I do wonder if this reporting tool will just download everything on your PC to MSHQ so they can compare it with what they've got already. Its the only way to be sure!

Trans-Pacific Partnership returns, without Trump but more 'comprehensive'

Tom 7

RE thames

There's a higher than equally good chance something even more evil has been slipped in. They dont go to all these efforts to keep these things quiet so they can make 'normal trade treaties' which could be cut and pasted from successful current ones and be negotiated in public. With a committee you can guarantee they will become blind seeing nearly the same shit month after month - the damn public reading this shit might just spot the changes.

Tom 7

Re: Ask Liam Fox

Ha ha ha! He would have to read it - those people dont do that sort of thing apparently.

PACK YOUR BAGS! Two Trappist-1 planets have watery oceans, most likely to be inhabitable

Tom 7

Monk Parents?

Advanced enough for IV then. ISTR Trappist beer was responsible for many contraceptive effects.

Tom 7

Should be easy to looks for signs of life now

just look for the signature of long-chain carbon based polymers washed up on the beaches,.

Death notice: Moore's Law. 19 April 1965 – 2 January 2018

Tom 7

Poor Moore's Law

Every two years the number of articles about the death of Moore's Law doubles.

'WHAT THE F*CK IS GOING ON?' Linus Torvalds explodes at Intel spinning Spectre fix as a security feature

Tom 7

Re: The bug is better than the buggy fix !!!

@werdsmith with that attitude you may well find there is something interesting on your home PC before too long.

Unlocked: The hidden love note on the grave of America's first crypto power-couple

Tom 7

Bacon Cipher all wrong

mMmMM mMmMM mMmMM! shirley!

Court throws out BT's plans to reduce pension rates

Tom 7

Re: RPI not reliable

Seriously more reliable than BT - the only reason the fund is in deficit is because the took a pension holiday where they stopped paying into the pension fund 'because it didnt need the money' and gave the money to shareholders instead.

Heads they win, tails you loose.

Who's using 2FA? Sweet FA. Less than 10% of Gmail users enable two-factor authentication

Tom 7

Havent tried lately but it wouldnt let me last time I tried

to use my home phone number. No point in using a cell phone for 2fa when you dont get a fucking signal.

'No evidence' UK.gov has done much to break up IT outsourcing

Tom 7

"A Cabinet Office spokeswoman said: A Cabinet Office spokesperson said"

Obviously making a business case for outsourcing the Chinese whispers.

Tom 7

Re: Why outsource

One of the most efficient public bodies I've worked for was efficient because it had avoided outsourcing. Everything was still in-house and the people their knew how the organisation worked and how to provide software for its needs. There were 7 of us doing the work of about 30 in similar sized outsourced organisations of the same size. And where there were 30 people on the ground there were several floating consultants who each earned more than the 7 of us put together.

Things got done in the time other organisations needed to organise the meetings to discuss what needed to be done.

I got made redundant from one organisation that decided it would save money outsourcing, along with 5 others, and when I talked to one of my mates who was still there a couple of years later there were 11 consultants in there getting nothing done.

For small organisations the inside knowledge of how the organisation works and where the staircase with the hidden server is can be more valuable than some twat with a shiny suit and an MBA.

Amount of pixels needed to make VR less crap may set your PC on fire

Tom 7

The best way to make VR less crap

would be to take it away from the idiots who think it's a good idea.

Junk food meets junk money: KFC starts selling Bitcoin Bucket

Tom 7

Re: Anonymous Fried Chicken

And keeping your fat arse indoors too!

Next; tech; meltdown..? Mandatory; semicolons; in; JavaScript; mulled;

Tom 7

Re: Anyone seen a single line C program ?

Proper C programmers use this as a style guide: https://www.ioccc.org/

If you look hard enough there is code that looks exactly like the output it produces - this has to be the ultimate commenting!