Posts by doublelayer

Re: In that sense the cheap smartphone has already taken the role of the desktop computer.

Except that still fits my analogy. You may not be able to buy a truck because they're too expensive, but the bicycle is cheap and functional. It is similar to the phones, because they are cheap and quite capable even if they typically have specs we would be pretty unhappy with today. A retro computer would probably be analogous to an ancient vehicle which only accepted leaded fuel or something similarly uncommon and wasn't much cheaper or easier to maintain.

Re: Backwards

Installing those libraries is abstracting it out. Eventually, they'll learn what calling requests.get is really sending to the HTTP server, and they'll also eventually learn how those servers talk to each other, but for the start, they can retrieve some data from a server in their programs.

That was, however, not what I was saying. I was saying that, if you give me a ZX81 today, it won't be able to retrieve from an HTTP server no matter how much code I write. Eventually, I might want to do that. When I find that the computer I'm supposed to learn on does not let me do something I know my normal computer can do, I'm not going to be motivated to use the limited one.

There is another aspect to this as well, specifically that skills you learn writing a program on the Raspberry Pi's Linux can be easily transferred to other computers. The code a student writes on a Pi will also probably run on their university's Linux servers, and if it doesn't the change needed will be small and easily understood. If they want to run their code on Windows, they'll have some more changes to make such as running their shell scripts in Cygwin or something like it, but their Python scripts will probably be fine and most of their CLI programs will compile and run without a hitch. If they learned how to write Z80 assembly or whatever archaic basic you put on the machine, it won't run anywhere else except for an emulator running on it. The skills will not transfer, and they'll have to throw away their experience and relearn another language. While it will probably be much easier for them to learn that language than someone who didn't have any experience, it can be nice to start them out with a tool that actually works in the modern day.

Re: Backwards

Speaking of my 12-year-old self, this would not have been a problem, and a more limited computer in a world like ours would have been. With a Linux machine, the user can start at the desktop level, with a bunch of developer tools and useful programs on it, and eventually start to do more and more with it. Maybe at first the student just plays around with the included game thing that's supposed to teach developer skills*, but eventually, they want to do something else and end up running their first command in the terminal, which introduces them to more commands, which introduces them to understanding how those commands work. This is useful education.

If, instead, I was faced with a computer which did nothing unless I wrote in a program every time, I wouldn't be drawn in from the start because I already have another computer which can do a lot of interesting things, so why don't I program that one? I'd also end up getting annoyed at limitations. For example, if I have a computer which has an internet connection, I will eventually want to write a program that sends or receives some data over the internet. If I've been learning to program on a computer that doesn't have any concept of that, then I'll find it annoying and want to stop. In my opinion, the worst thing to hear while getting students interested in computers is "it can't do that". "It can do that, but it's hard" gives them motivation to learn enough to do it. "It can do it and it's easy" lets them do what they want. "It can't do that" makes them ask what the point is. Therefore, the computer on which they're learning should be able to do most common things, something the Raspberry Pi's Linux system enabled.

Had I grown up in the 1980s, this situation would have been different. Sure, the set of things I could do with a disconnected, no persistent memory machine would have been limited, but there weren't boxes that could do orders of magnitude more all over the place. As the most advanced devices available to me as a child, I'd have been interested in those computers instead. It's when I compare a ZX81 to a modern laptop that it comes up short.

* I've never used it, but I understand that the Pi's version of Minecraft actually does involve a coding area and that some children have learned by starting with it. That's a convincing education purpose, given that no organized educational programs using the Pi are generally available.

Re: Backwards

"I rather think that's his to determine."

Not really. He can determine what they do, and what their goals are now, but he can't retroactively change what the Raspberry Pi used to do, what they said their reasons were, or the goals they were using. Legacy usually refers to those past attributes. Their goals from before were not focused on retro computing, but on cheap modern computing and education. Hence using modern kernels, open source components rather than stuff that's probably not being protected by an IP law team, and modern standards such as having good networking support and using more common languages like Python and Java. A computer that's intended to focus on running old software will have to change most or all of that, which would be changing the legacy. Whether to do that is his decision. Whether it is a change in direction is not.

Re: In that sense the cheap smartphone has already taken the role of the desktop computer.

It's not about being a hackable platform, but being the available platform. The comments in the article spoke of people who don't have access to computers, with the idea that giving them a 1980s-style computer will fix this. It won't, because when compared to a phone, the old computer loses every time.

Power requirement: Phone has a battery. Retro computer doesn't.

Screen requirement: Phone has full-color, video-capable screen. Retro computer didn't, the screen it's connected to now probably does, but the software can't drive it that way.

Communication: Phone has WiFi, Bluetooth, and can connect to local mobile infrastructure. And it has a USB port in case you find something to connect to that. Retro computer probably has a USB port of some kind and who knows what you can even do with that.

Peripherals: Phone has screen, camera, microphone, speaker, assorted sensors, touch input. Retro computer has: beeping thing, external keyboard, external screen.

So the retro computer has a basic interpreter which lets you write your own software, but if it's worse at everything else, people will not want to buy it when a phone which is less open but much more useful is available. A person who buys a phone can write a message, send it to someone else, and if they can get a connection, look up information online. A person who has a retro computer can write a document in an ancient text editor which probably has a limit on the size of ASCII text file it can use, then send it to a printer, which they don't have. If you could only buy one, which would you pick?

Re: Backwards

He isn't getting the reasons why people who don't have computers don't have computers. Making the computer part even cheaper won't fix it. You can buy a Raspberry Pi Zero for $5 or local equivalent (sort of). That's plenty cheap for people to buy. That computer won't have an internet connection, but none of the retro computers he's talking about had one and none of the ancient software he thinks someone might run could use it, so who cares. Take an original Zero, 32 GB SD card which are pretty cheap when bought in bulk these days, and an image that includes lots of emulators, and you have what he's talking about possibly building.

People won't buy it because of the rest of the parts. When the first Pis were released with an educational goal, they'd be pretty cheap to buy for a student by a parent: just buy the board and an SD card. The child can plug it into the existing television and there's bound to be a USB keyboard and mouse somewhere in the house, and if not come to my house because I somehow have more than I can ever use even though I don't keep them around when others ask me to get rid of them. If you've never had a computer before, though, you won't have a keyboard, and if you didn't have a computer because it was too expensive, there's quite a good chance that you don't have a television. If you didn't have a computer because electricity is limited, you won't be very happy even if you did get all these things. The computery part in the middle can be a little cheaper and much less powerful, and all those problems still exist. Phones get around this problem because they include all the peripherals you need for a basic setup in the device, including a battery so you can use them frequently.

Re: The Singer not the Song

Why shouldn't you need to? If you are using a search engine to search for a phrase including the word Wikipedia, why should another site that mentions Wikipedia be excluded from those results? It would be trivial for the search engine to add a filter that replaces that for you, but it shouldn't do it because you might be looking for information about a site rather than information on the site. It makes a lot of sense for limitations on possible search results to be an option, not a guarantee.

Re: The Singer not the Song

If you want Wikipedia search results, use site:wikipedia.org That will actually limit it to Wikipedia, not just pages that mention Wikipedia.

Re: Google should just refuse to run with an adblocker

So the technical review from a person who develops another blocker, one that Google's been trying to break for a while, didn't convince you? If lots of people identify that it's a feature of a particular piece of software, it still must be deliberate? Is there anything you could hear that would convince you that it wasn't Google doing it?

Re: it will run fine

Google are not violating your rights by inserting ads any more than we are violating their rights by running code to strip out stuff we don't want to run. The issue of data collection is a separate one, and that one does come under data protection law, but that law governs whether and when they are allowed to collect data about you, not whether they can put in advertisements or whether they can change their code to make it more likely for you to see them. Like you, I dislike Google's data collection and I think they should face penalties for what they have done and continue to do, but I also recognize that, if I get everything I asked for and they stop collecting data except if they get true informed consent, there will still be ads on YouTube and they'll still want me to and take actions to try to make me watch them. They'll have to fight with my ad blockers to do so, but it will not be illegal for them to do that.

I think it means that your app can't accept payment for in-app items without going through Apple and paying Apple's fees, but it can link to a different thing, your website most likely, which can. You still have to redirect the user outside your app to be allowed to use something else, but the restriction that formerly prevented you from doing that has been removed, until Apple finds a way to put it back that is.

It probably won't work that easily. They will be required to keep accounting data, saying where money came from so they can report it to the tax authorities. That is enough to indicate that money was paid in return for their applications. They could try messing with their accounting so that it theoretically could have come from anything connected to the applications, then try to claim that it was only from Android users, but that's a lot of work to set up and requires that everything have some alternative pathway that could have avoided IOS.

Even then, Apple's lawyers can ask employees of the company in court to demonstrate where the funds came from, and unless they're being very careful, they can end up committing perjury if they say that it was from Android users, or even if they say that they don't know if they know that some data still exists to prove it. This is the kind of thing that makes lawyers very nervous, not that that necessarily prevents companies doing it anyway.

Apple: You signed a contract saying you would. We are suing you for that, and then we get to look at your files. We will prove it for you.

That's what they would try, anyway. I don't think they should be permitted to do that, and there's some chance that, if they try it like that, a judge will recognize what they're doing there.

Re: private investigators and a hitman

You can't just confiscate a wallet. You know the identifier that it's going to, but the only thing you can really do without the private key is to shout loudly that whoever has this is evil and you shouldn't exchange with them. If people listen to you, then they'll be less able to exchange their funds for money they can actually use. If people don't, you're mostly out of luck.

Re: Hilarious episode, once more!

True, but you never go down or up. If you enter on the ground floor, you must stay there. You probably can't enter on the other floors, so those are out. If you need to use the stairs or the lifts to exit the building, then there's a guaranteed path for an injury. The BOFH will still get to you on the ground floor, but he'll have to use something other than the old standbys and that would at least make it entertaining for us to watch.

Re: Hilarious episode, once more!

If you're working in the BOFH's company, you must have an office on the ground floor and everyone should come to you for meetings. Vertical movement just isn't acceptable.

Re: Tea and coffee

I'm guessing you have enough knowledge to put something in the line to replace the IDs of your adapter with the ID of a keyboard it already likes. Just plug in some USB keyboards you have in your house or office until you find one it accepts, then use the same IDs as that one.

Re: Building software is hard...

If functionality of browsers had stuck at Mosaic level then somebody would have come along with a way of making internet resources that could do more things and that would have taken over because people don't want to deal with exclusively static documents. I don't like JavaScript much, but a JavaScript that's a mostly open standard is a lot better than Microsoft-brand language that only works in one browser and a lot of sites use it, which is what you would have gotten in the 1990s. What you got in the 1990s, in turn, would have carried over to the 2000s, just like JS did, because that worked in old and new browsers. You can't prevent people wanting new features just because you don't need them, and if you refuse to implement them, you'll just end up with someone else's version.

Re: Building software is hard...

It might, however, be related to the issue under discussion, namely why they can do them so quickly. Failing to follow safety standards might be another reason for completing it faster, and that works for code as well.

For example, I've just finished writing some code to do a job. It's a smallish script that handles a file in a certain format. I've done the interesting bit where I implemented the logic needed to process the file as expected. It comes to about 150 lines. I am not done, because I need to write the probably about 400 lines of stuff that never touches the file's contents nor the structures I built, but is necessary for this code to be worthy of sending to others. For example, if the file isn't write, it is not sufficient for it to print "Unexpected value in header at 158: 0x16" and exit, but that's what it will do right now. I need to catch classes of errors and report them to a user with a message they understand. I need a method for them to tell it to ignore those errors that aren't fatal and try anyway and documentation telling them not to use it because it's likely to get something wrong eventually. I might even need a way for them to send me the file that broke it so I can improve the code. If all you need is a piece of code to do a job, I can write one quickly. The same is true if you just want a building up quickly. If you want that code to be solid and easy to use or that building to last a long time through whatever typical nature will do to it, you need to spend more time. If standards are different, you can't compare the processes accurately.

Re: Congratulations

The battery life and the ability to run Mac OS and Linux on the same machine would be pretty convincing reasons for someone who uses some Mac OS stuff but prefers Linux to buy one. That is if they didn't still have bugs. What this project has accomplished is impressive, but unfortunately I'd be pretty worried about stuff breaking or simply not being available for years to rely on it for something important.

Oh, really? I'm about to be rich. Someone get me the top hundred best selling books and a thesaurus. I'll find an adjective in a boring part, change it to a synonym, and redistribute. Who wants in?

You need to learn how copyright works.

That would be nice, but I don't think you'll get it. Some people suffer when an incorrect rumor comes out. It doesn't matter how much they deny it if people are still spreading it around, and having a video, real or generated, will just enhance that.

Re: It's going to be an interesting set of lawsuits.

They both store and retrieve data, just badly. It doesn't matter whether it comes back mangled a bit when we all know what you put in and what you got out. By that logic, I can record music onto a cassette, read that into a file, and it's a completely new work because listen, you can hear some static and annoying degradation, so it's not the same as what was put in.

"The ability for a site to opt out, and have their data deleted from the AI's training data within a set, but short, timeframe (say 48 hours) must be included in this,"

It wouldn't work. Once they start training their model, the content is baked in there if the software chooses to retain it. You can't strip it out afterward. Nor am I comfortable making this opt out. Here is my suggestion.

When you want to train an AI model, you get an explicit license for everything you throw in. If you want this book, you find out who owns the rights to that book and ask them for a license to train your AI on it. If it's in the public domain, you're good and can use it. If it's under a license that permits you to use it for your commercial purposes, you're also good. If they give it to you for free, great for you. If they want money, negotiate with them for how much. If you find it's too expensive to negotiate with individual authors for individual books, feel free to try to negotiate with a group of them en masse. Some authors might not agree to that. Too bad for you, you can't use those books until those authors die and the copyright period after death has lapsed, or you can always come back and try to negotiate some more. Find someone else's book. Replace book with site, song, or any other thing that can be copyrighted.

Re: Yeah?

I'm looking forward to OpenAI's code leaking so I can perform these changes and make as much money as I want from it without paying them anything. Do you think they'll be happy when that happens?

"And having to download twenty megabytes of data to send a ten character patch gets old really fast"

First, that's just git, not any particular frontend. Don't conflate them. Second, have you used the various partial or shallow clone options? You can use them to download less stuff and still get what you need. Git was designed to be decentralized and give you all the data up front, but you don't have to use it that way.

Re: Resend, resend, resend, ...

I understand that, but it has to wake the phone up before that window to alert the user. If the user has sought cover, they will need enough time to leave their location for somewhere where the satellite has a good chance of connecting. If it tells them too late, they will either miss the window or end up trying to rush to a good location, which could have safety risks. They need to know that is happening unless this system is capable of broadcasting from an enclosed area, inside a bag.

Re: Resend, resend, resend, ...

They don't last very long, and several of them have already been decommissioned because something broke them. For example, there appear to currently be 32 broken satellites, out of approximately 4500, still in orbit. As they get more of them up, they will also have older units which need to deorbit (with the first generation alone, this is expected to be on average 2000 kg of satellites or about 7.5 deorbiting every day) and a higher likelihood of damage. So yes, they will be coming down and thus unavailable for use, though how long it will take to get there depends on which models support it and how long they've been up at the time we're discussing.

Re: Resend, resend, resend, ...

You could do that with two major problems. First, they send satellites up and down all the time since they're in LEO and they're in the building mode. You can put the satellites that exist today in an almanac, but not the ones launching next week. If it's not updated, you'll miss most of them and if it's not updated for long enough, the one they recommend won't be working anymore. They sometimes have to move those satellites as well, which will not be reflected in the almanac.

The second problem is with the workflow. If the user is supposed to wait until the time to broadcast, they will have to be very careful to hit the right time to transmit. The phone could wake up and remind them, and that would probably be required because I don't think it can transmit from any location, so they would need some time to get into a position where the phone and satellite can communicate better. Depending on the nature of the emergency, this may not be as easy as it sounds. If you're sending a message because your car stopped working in the wilderness, then you can probably just wait in the nonfunctional car while you wait. If someone is hurt or there's any growing risk, waiting for hours in the hope that it will work then is not great. If you have no other option, try it, but if you're going into such a situation, have another option.