Re: Ethernet AUI were a pita too.
Twisted pair followed in the tradition of AUI by having an easily broken retaining latch.
2288 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jul 2009
"We need to rewrite it in Rust. It will solve all our problems and we will be able to hire cheaper developers because Rust doesn't allow to make any mistakes that will impact security".
Well said.
I have no doubt that the writers of Rust have the best of intentions. But they probably write good C code too and don't make rookie errors already. The worry is the fanbois manager who thinks it will solve all those memory allocation bugs he's suffered from his inexperienced C programmers.
And again, while the Rust devotees are likely careful souls who'll think about all the other issues too, someone pushed into using it because it will make them more reliable doesn't have the same attitiude - they'll use whatever hack is needed to get their code to compile.
Clue : inexperienced programmers will make mistakes in any language.
Not just The Register.
I don't get the antipathy toward EVs. There's a certain fraction of people who look for problems rather than solutions. It's clear they're largely justifying their prejudice rather than honestly analysing. ICEs have many problems too and I for one will be very glad to see the back of mine.
Sure, a significant change to EVs will present challenges. So rather than gripe and moan, why not look for solutions ? That's what proper engineers do.
But while a child's essay, which has no publication or circulation may not acknowledge its sources, a student's essay must. In fact, the essay becomes more valuable by doing so, since attribution allows the following of references and additional detail.
An AI that produces text without references is of little value : it's just boilerplate and the wide occurrence of hallucinations devalues it.
What the LLM needs to do is tag its sources so it can show attribution and produce a more useful document. But that's hard to do, because it doesn't select arguments meaningfully, it just makes a word soup and statistically selects content from it.
I'm not very fond of the copyright industry and the abuse by companies like Elsevier. But when AI understands and implements respect of copyright, it will be a lot more valuable.
Although that sounds unfortunate, what alternative is there ?
If government paid for it, that means taxpayers. So .. everybody, whether they frequently buy appliances or not.
The ideal solution would be to finance the collection and recycling costs using the recycled objects. I have no idea whether that's economically viable.
"The powers that be are sold on the idea that AI can magically solve all this."
And this is the danger of the waves of AI-like systems. Stupid politicians believing it can magically solve problems when all it can do is magically create new ones.
What we need is magical AI politicians, carefully safeguarded by giving them neither power nor platforms.
I don't have much regard for Python but I thought it was popular because of the wide library support. Kids don't come with BBC BASIC wired in from the womb - they've still got to start by copying from somewhere else, modifying, and then writing from scratch. Maybe some pythonista here could illustrate what you'd need to type in (or, of course, save from a web page) to do something moderately interesting.
I presume there's a clone of BBC BASIC available too .. it's only a clicky link away, isn't ? Kids are used to that from their phone. And then there's stuff like Scratch.
I agree there's a lot more going on to get started but I don't think the new user sees much of it. The only difference is that there are more choices, and that's really down to the school setup.
I think administration for school computers is largely outsourced to the local authority and they'll be just as familiar with Pis as Windows, if not more. It's quite a few years since Pi appeared and it'#s only got better, while all Windows has done is eat up the resources of increasingly powerful PCs.
What's the refresh period for school PCs, anyway ? I suspect more than the 2-3 years that businesses need to keep them usable. In fact, it could be surprisingly close to the refresh period of the Pis themselves.
I haven't so far had the nag screen on Brave.
However I do have two other problems :
- Watching youtube in a Patreon window doesn't play. The cursor moves but the picture doesn't, and there's no sound.
- Following the link to watch on youtube works fine
- Watching youtube via a hackaday article gives a black screen
- Following the link from the hackaday article tells me the viseo is blocked
- Finding the video directly on youtube works fine.
I don't know whether this is a problem with Brave or youtube.
While they're at it the could do some other basic built-in verification such as a checksum on bank account numbers so that mistyped entries are detected instead of assigned to another accout,
Banks must have been one of the first organisation to use computers but they still give no indication of understanding the technology.
So, the bank guarded against future abuse by setting a trigger on payments to some account. And confused that account with a new, unrelated one. And when that trigger went off .. 3 times in 3 months .. they still didn't investigate. And it was only the failure of the payments forcing the payee to investigate that turned it up ?
Bank should be banned from trading. Clearly incompetent.
You suggest that making packages is a great deal of work for the pacvkage maintainer. And no doubt it is.
But some part of that work has to be done by the snap builder. And the cost of effectively translating a package build made for just snap instead of all the viable distributions is pad on every startup by every user. That isn't a good tradeoff.
I have an operating system to support apps.
I don't want to ship large parts of that with the app. At thatv rate I might as well just have a VM supervisor,. not an OS.
It may be that the problem is apps rely on other apps instead of OS services, and they aren't packaged definitively enough.
In that case, those apps need to migrate towards being reliable, properly supported and versioned services instead of half-assed web things.
We don't want to end up with an OS that's maintained like python, do we ?
Artificial, in the same sense as artificial flavouring or artificial grass, is what it is. Something that has the appearance of an object, but isn't it. However the term raises higher expectations than that because it's been a target for so long. The current crop isn't what we hoped for, even if it can sneakily be described like that.
A better name for the current effort would probably be Fake Intelligence.
What I think we're really looking for is Machine Intelligence. Actual intelligence that's good for something, but done by machines.