Posts by jmch

Re: It would have to be a fucktonne of a sweetner

" WFH/flexible working is for most employees a pay rise"

...and companies who understand this are able to attract and retain the best talent!

"your files aren't as valuable to them as they are to you"

Your files are only as valuable to them as how much you are paying them to store those files (which for a large chunk of users is $0, and for almost every other user is less than the value the user would put on the data)

"Ternary logic is the most efficient base because 3 is the closest integer to e"

Also to pi, but not sure what the relevance is of either??

Re: Kind of see his point.

"No employer of mine would ever come out and share with the broader community/competitors a "Hey we fucked up, this is what you guys can do to make sure it wont happen to you later". They'd say bugger all and find someone to shitcan."

The reason the aviation industry does it that way is that it's past failures have resulted in hundreds of very-high profile deaths per incident. That brings with it a far higher governmental and public pressure, and consequent regulatory scrutiny. The detailed accident reports are conditions of operation imposed on airlines by the regulators.

Datacenters, network infrastructure providers etc will never have that level of public incident investigation because there is no regulator to force them to, and there will continue to be none unless (until?) the *political* cost of an outage is 'hundreds of people dying' high

Re: Or...

"MS gets all the key people from OpenAI, effectively getting OpenAI in its entirety without needing to 'buy' the company"

Except that it's already spend $11bn to buy half the company

"there are many many examples of roads and trains and buildings collapsing that simply doesnt happen in the west. I mean when was the last time you heard of not one but dozens of road holes just opening up in the west"

"The west" varies a lot there. There are for example, many examples of crumbling Infrastructure in the US (granted, for much older infrastructure). When you're building shit at 10 X the speed everyone else is doing, the quality will not always be great. I've also seen plenty of scandals in Italy and France, and presumably elsewhere in the west, where unscrupulous contractors or organised crime charged full whack for building with high-quality materials and then substituted or diluted them with crap.

If China can build 10X faster at 1/3 of the quality thats not a big problem for them, they will rebuild whatever breaks to a higher standard (and not give a shit about personal damage / loss of life to their citizens, who are simply pawns*).

*not that 'western' citizens aren't also, though to a lesser extent

Re: Be evil

That's the way our brains are wired - we focus on things not their negation. Saying 'Don't be evil' is putting the focus on evil. If that's not what you want, you motto should be 'do good'.

Re: who it is that doesn't trust us – and why

All of the above, absolutely. A bit more detail into the government part, because that's the context for which the final comment seemed mostly directed at....

...for a large part of the development of liberal democracy, there were a lot of 'gentlemen's rules', and while a lot of principles about seperation of power, avoiding conflict of interest etc did eventually get codified into constitutions and laws, there are still a large number of practices that evolved based on an understanding that the people in politics would operate from a basic code of honour. There have always been shysters in politics, but representative democracy opened the door to them in volume, since large populations give rise to both larger democratic institutions as well as a higher ratio of voters to representatives (making it easier for shysters to get elected from among a large voter pool who do not know them personally, only from propaganda). And now, many of these gentlemen's rules are no longer observed, and those observing them are taken advantage of.

As more and more shysters entered politics for their own benefit, the potential grew for more collusion and corruption between legislative bodies, administrative bodies and large business interests. Again, corrupt businessmen, politicians and administrators are nothing new, they just became supercharged by the "economies of scale" provided by population and industrial growth. What was already correctly identified 50+ years ago as the 'military-industrial complex' is now a supercharged cancerous growth that also includes tech companies (which are, first and foremost, data-gathering/processing aka spying companies).

All of this has been built on asymmetric information - in spite of the liberal mantra of transparent government and private personal life, the reality is that everyone's private life is available to those in power with a few clicks of a button (what's a warrant requirement after all, when judges are politically appointed??), and Freedom of Information legislation barely scratches the surface of the inner workings of government. (In addition to which, all the entities tasked with oversight and enforcement of the laughably weak rules in place are, themselves, branches of government).

So saying "Governments don't trust their electors - they might vote for the wrong party next time" is also itself only scratching the surface... every government employee is beholden in some way to political will to keep or advance in their job, and every politician is beholden to the lobbyists who pay for their election campaign (and yes there are many honest exceptions but far less than the actively corrupt or those simply keeping out of the line of fire). If people really knew what was going on behind the scenes, they wouldn't be voting for a different party, they would be storming the Bastille.

Re: We're talking about space junk, right ?

"If we're talking about space junk, I would hope that this Detumbler is supposed to fix on existing junk. A satellite that is still functional has attitude control, and thus doesn't need a Detumbler."

A satellite that is still functional only has attitude control as long as it is still functional, so better have a detumbler built in on all satellites if it works as advertised. Besides, if you could do a degree of attitude control using only the earth's magnetic field as impulse rather than expensive thruster fuel, that could significantly increase a satellite's useful life.

Furthermore, I would think it is far more difficult to attach one to existing space junk, one would have to match trajectory to start with, and then find the appropriate place to stick this on to a spinning object, and actually sticking it on (is it welded? could it stick on magnetically without losing the properties that make it work? does it need to be stuck on in a very specific place?). It would take quite a high level of skill, effort and cost to do that (meaning for a vast majority of existing space debris would not be feasible)

Re: Support for a federal law? Eh? It already exists.

"Google and Apple need to be fined repeatedly until they come up with a built-in non bypassable parent mode..."

There are plenty of good apps that do that and much much more, they don't need to be inbuilt. Too many parents simply can't be bothered

Re: Firewall updates

" is like buying a Lamborghini, but "saving money" by not changing the oil on the manufacturer's recommended schedule."

Actually it's like buying *any vehicle*, but "saving money" by not changing the oil on the manufacturer's recommended schedule.

Re: Whats wrong with crypto

"wandering up to someone in the street and asking them to buy some money you have just invented"

Yes, except that the value of any currency comes from the willingness of other people to accept that value. It's ridiculous to claim for example that Bitcoin has no value simply because *you* see no value in it. It's value comes from the fact that hundreds of millions of people see value in it.

"Crypto, supposedly valued by the cost of creating it, but in reality it appears to be valued like property."

Because of the way eg Bitcoin is structured (particularly with high transaction fees) it is more suitable as a value store than as a transactional currency. Other cryptos have different characteristics

Re: Even if Apple lose

"I can't see every phone owner getting any money. I bet the lawyers do though."

That's the way it usually seems to work, although the article notes that in the US, class members are expected to receive $65 each (which sounds reasonable for a relatively minor defect in a $600 device). I would say that generally speaking the larger the per-user amount the more chance that some effort is made to actually get them the money rather than the US cheap copout of simply donating whatever the lawyers didn't take to the judge's favourite charity

Re: Real stats

">Wray has previously said that 97 percent of the FBI's technical intelligence on malicious "cyber actors" in the first half of this year was obtained via Section 702 searches.<"

And yet, that stat is meaningless unless we also know how many of that technical intelligence could also have been obtained by other means, how many could have been obtained if they had asked for a warrant first, etc. If their only way of getting " technical intelligence on malicious "cyber actors" " was being able to spy on everyone in the US, their "intelligence" must be really crappy

Re: And nothing was lost

That 'maths' only works if people only ever buy anything if they are shown an ad for it, which is obvious nonsense. And it only works if you ignore the fact that there was tons of targeted advertising before individual user profiling and micro-targeting.

"But that world doesn’t exist any more. This is your world."

Well I (and by a quick look around these comments quite a large %age of other people) would rather live in a world where people don't have their every online move tracked and their personal information traded in order to receive a gigantic bunch of mostly useless 'targeted' ads instead of a gigantic bunch of mostly useless 'untargeted' ads. This is an important point that many seem to be missing - even putting aside for a moment the privacy issues that by themselves make the micro-targeting a no-no, the targeting doesn't really work very well. Not substantially any better than having fishing rod ads in fishing magazines (websites) and car / accessory ads in car magazines (websites) etc etc.

And the awfully skewed incentives of the ad market mean that websites no longer need to provide quality material to attract eyeballs and ad revenue, it's just become a numbers game, where for whatever topic you care to mention there are a half dozen good, serious sites, and half a million crappy sites put together with scrapers and autogenerated content that don't care anything about content, they are just click-farms

Re: Self Drive

"Mostly correct but sometimes a dangerous thing - dropping from 70 to 30 mph for no apparent reason"

My car doesn't link cruise control to what it thinks the speed limit is, but it *does* display what it thinks the speed limit is. It seems to work on a combination of GPS data and image detection of signs, and both have issues - GPS data not always correct, and for the signs it sometimes misses signs and sometimes detects off-ramp (slower) signs as applying to the main highway, which as you say can be very dangerous. Much better to have a 'normal' cruise control that keeps to whatever speed the driver sets, and additionally disengaging if it detects a car too close in front / slowing down

Re: Not hard to see why Apple aren't fans of TheReg with a wildly biased article like this.

I said it was 'the norm' because that's what the laptop I got then had. It wasn't anything super, maybe a bit above average. Back then the choice at the same price point was a 1TB HDD or 256GB SSD.

Re: $9.99/$12.99 a month?

Yes but what they make from advertising or what they would make from subscriptions is revenue not profit (income only, not income-expenses). Meta's 2022 revenue was $116bn, and you can be sure that the 3bn active users figure is an inflated one for some weird definition of 'active'. They're making probably north of 50 bucks/user, possibly way more. Either way though, $10/mth is excessive and insulting, it's deliberately setting the subscription price so high that the current model looks far more attractive, because that's the model they know and love (ugh!).

Re: exec order

If I understood the article correctly, model makers will themselves run their own 'red team' risk assessments, therefore none of them will ever be considered a security risk.

After all, how likely is it that the oversight at NIST will be well-resourced enough to properly investigate the models (or even allowed to access the 'in-development' ones??)