Posts by abend0c4

Re: Worst case scenario

The last time I flew with BA, there were two observable benefits over the Ryanair experience: they didn't start "boarding" until the plane was ready to board, so there wasn't a prolonged period of standing in a corridor after scanning your boarding card waiting for the incoming passengers to disembark and the plane to be cleaned; and we were the lucky recipients of two small complimentary biscuits. The problem is there are only a very limited number of ways in which you can differentiate the process of sticking people in a big tube and firing them to a remote destination and they come at a cost that might be disproportionate to the added value for many people.

There are people who are prepared to pay very significantly more for a relatively more "luxurious" experience, but the premium cabins wouldn't be fully occupied without also being offered as a perk for frequent flyers (though BA has recently changed its scheme in the hope more passengers are actually paying for the privilege) and you can't fill an aircraft with them on most routes. There have long been flights that operate two different brands and fare structures on the same aircraft (e.g. Iberia/Vueling and formerly Sabena/Virgin) and you could possibly see that developing into a branded service at the front of the aircraft and white-label bus seats at the back. But that doesn't depend on AI, it's simply the economic inevitability of an increasingly perfect market.

The criticism often leveled at BA is that it is neither one thing nor another - its economy service is basic but not cheap and its premium service is expensive but inferior to its competitors. Maybe crunching all that data will at least help it decide which market it's trying to serve.

According to Google's chart, Reddit's share price was $246.50 on August 15th, 2025 and $54.92 on August 16th, 2024. That's near enough fivefold. Reddit's IPO price was $34 and reached $46 on the following day, March 22nd, 2024, and $225.23 on 7th Feb 2025 - that's 660% in the course of less than a year. The discrepancy with the year-to-date figure results from a severe slump between February and April when the value fell by a half from its then peak.

But I'm not looking at this from the perspective of an investor, more out of wonderment at the values that are attached to an operation that is, in essence, providing free storage for other people's content.

I certainly admit I wasn't. One of the consequences of being out of the loop is that you lose track of the point at which it turned another full circle. Fortunately, at my advanced age, if I make a mental note that server-side rendering is back in fashion then I'll have forgotten around the time everything is client-side again.

Our is different...

But that's the key to the whole thing.

Many European countries have, to varying extents, more centralised systems of identity and it is quite common for there to be a legal requirement to carry an official ID card. Work is in progress to establish an EU Digital Identity Wallet which will probably start off with digital driving licences, but create a framework for various forms of digital ID for both public and private use across the EU. The aim is to reduce the cost of multiple, incompatible systems and the reliance on paper documents.

On the other hand, the UK is rollling out a system allegedly for the sole purpose of proving the right to work (though it may have other, "voluntary" uses). The thing is, there is already a digital system in place to verify the right to work of most non-UK citizens (the employer gets a "share code" in the same way you can check a driving licence or a Power of Attorney) and so this is essentially a gimmick. It will also require people who already have proof of British or Irish nationality to apply for (and presumably regularly renew) right-to-work ID while still requiring the paper documentation (such as birth certificate or passport) to get the digital ID.

In the former case, the goal is to save money (of course, it ultimately may not do so, but that's the nature of IT projects...) while in the latter case the goal is to add complexity to an existing system for the sake of a few "hostile environment" headlines. Having got the headlines, the smart thing would presumably be to quietly shelve the project.

Of course, one of the problems with the current system is all the exceptions - people who are entitled to work but don't have a biometric residece card or arrived from the EU before a post-Brexit cutoff date or have the right to work in certain occupations but not others. Currently, employers have to take the risk they've correctly interpreted the rules. If they go ahead, the government is going to be stuck with the task of interpreting its own rules, which is where you can expect the costs to start to over-run.

Re: Hang on

Even if the legal tools did not presently exist, it would be possible to create them. I guess you could put protections into the MLATs to discourage this kind of end-around, but, if a jurisdiction is sufficiently motivated it will find the means to coerce one way or another.

Re: 20 million cells?!

The thing about spreadsheets is there's often one cell containing "the answer I want" and all the rest are "plausible data unrelated to the result". You're just asking for regulatory problems if you try to formalise that in a specification...

Re: Good but ...

A former boss of mine was at Windscale (as it was then) during the 1957 fire and his first-hand account was sobering. I did a tour of Sellafield much later and was struck by apparently casual references to bits of the former plant that were walled up owing to previous leaks. We've seen in repeated, serious, incidents around the world that the technology has not so far been terribly forgiving and the cost of dealing with them undermines the economic case.

That's not to say technology hasn't improved and that the huge investment formerly required to build necessarily massive nuclear plants couldn't be obviated by small-scale reactors. But maybe we first need to seriously re-think who and what the electrical grid is for. We've taken it for granted that it was as necessary for supplying high energy-dependent industry as much as for keeping homes warm during the winter. Are we getting to a stage where it would actually be better for large-scale users to generate power locally themselves rather than transport it across the country?

Re: Let's take what Dijkstra said with a pinch of salt

There's a bit of a gulf between computation theory and practice - if there weren't we'd all still be patiently waiting for the Turing Corporation to deliver our order of infinitely-long paper tapes.

Practical computers have turned out mostly to be electronic and to be programmable in arcane ways that are largely related to convenient arrangement of boolean logic gates - and were originally programmed with that in mind. It was painfully slow and error prone, though, even given the implementation constraints that severely limited the size of programs that could reasonably be written.

Programming languages came about as a way of making software development more efficient - by allowing the programmer to concentrate on the problem rather than the hardware, by introducing concepts that reduced the potential to make common errors and by reducing the amount of re-implementation that was required when new (and different) hardware came along.

Unlike the Turing Machine, programming languages are not truly universal. It's not that they're Turing incomplete, but that generally speaking they're designed with a particular problem domain in mind, even if only implicitly. They also coerce programmers into particular ways of thinking about a problem - ways often favoured by the creator of the language and about which second thoughts may later occur. But that's not necessarily a bad thing if it increases the chance of a solution being found with reasonable efficiency and accuracy. But they only exist for the benefit of people.

Computers, at least in principle, wouldn't need human-designed programming languages to create programs. Unfortunately, an entirely correct program produced entirely in machine code would be of no use to us: it would be pretty much impossible to know if met the spec or to incrementally modify. So we feed AI with the code that's already been written by us and ask it - not to come up with a better programming language or a more useful way of describing problems - but to cut and paste some code based on its search parameters that reflects the errors, preferences and conceits of the authors of the input.

This doesn't seem to me to be the huge leap forward that's claimed and is simply a recipe - almost literally a recipe in the case of the "prompt" - for turning today's bloated codebases into even more bloated replicas - probably both iteratively and recursively.

Re: Wasting my taxes

Evidence-based medicine is still a relatively novel concept, but it's statistics that prevent your taxes being wasted on the routine removal of tonsils and adenoids and a whole bunch of other procedures that doctors, left to their own devices, would have continued to favour.

Why not?

States make different decisions about sales tax and privacy and age verification and a myriad other things that affect business. Even if you abolished their rights to regulate, there's still four times that number of individual countries in the world who are still free to make their own policies. It's entirely a matter of routine that companies have to ensure their products conform to the requirements of manifold local jurisdictions.

If they don't like it, they're free not to do business. If that negatively affects the jurisdiction concerned, they might decide to change their rules.

The justification for coercing States seems to be so the regime-friendly oligarchs can continue to profit handsomely regardless of local wishes. That's a hard sell in a supposed free union of supposedly democratic States - but money not only talks, it knows who to talk to.

I recently snapped a huge display outside the Metrocentre in Gateshead displaying a UEFI error, so there will still be opportunities, if of a slightly different genre. Not even Microsoft can defeat the eternal conspiracy between humanity and entropy.

Re: What?

People who want to develop cross-platform applications (which is mostly people who used to develop traditional Winforms business applications but don't want necessarily to be dependent on Windows).

Avalonia has actually proved to be reasonably popular while Microsoft has been flailing around, unable to get a grip on its future UI strategy. Given their tardiness and the bitter taste left by the imposition of Windows 11, a more pertinent question might be "what's the point of MAUI?".

Re: Feeling smug...

I've just withdrawn a post after failing to fact check it!

The OP could well be correct. XGS-PON is significantly more widespread in Spain and a lot of operators seems to offer symmetrical speeds up to 1Gbps - though higher speeds may be asymmetrical.

G-PON seems to be the default case for the mass market in the UK. As far as I'm aware, the majority of the Openreach FTTP network is G-PON with the gradual introduction of XGS-PON. Again, as far as I'm aware, Hyperoptic is similar. Corrections welcome.

My Portuguese connection is also G-PON and marketed as "1Gbps", but it's nominally 1Gbps down and 500Mbps up. The actual speeds are actually pretty close - around 920Mbps down and 520Mbps up.

Which isn't bad for an even smugger 15 euros a month.

Re: US had previously played a role in critical infrastructure build-outs

maybe even the railways

I guess the OP was probably more tongue-in-cheek than the downvoters allowed for - efficient, available and affordable public transport not being a characteristic of the US landscape - but it is worth giving the railways a little thought.

The US rail network (at least to the extent that it opened up the west) was initially financed by massive federal land grants (around 500,000 square kilometres) and government loans. The railway companies in turn sold the land on easy terms to immigrant farmers who would in their turn create demand for freight transport.

The difference in that case is that the government was gifting something that belonged to no-one (or no-one they were prepared to acknowledge) and was of no value (to them) in its present condition.The prize, of course, was a huge increase in economic activity through immigration (remember when that was a goal?) as well as a means by which the government in the east could cement its authority in the west.

Had it not been for the panic of the civil war and the risk of either Britain or France cutting off the Californian gold supplies which financed the Union forces and travelled by sea, the measures would perhaps not have been so urgent or so generous and the government might have given a little more thought to retaining some stake in the operations it had so lavishly financed and which led to the accumulation of significant wealth by the tech bros of the era.

Turning to today, the government doesn't really have any "valueless" assets to turn over: it's money that would have to come directly out of taxpayers pockets. There's also no obvious economic benefit to the country as a whole: all that AI is claiming to offer at present is essentially more unemployment and higher corporate profit margins. That's not to say there may not be more productive applications, but we've yet to see them. It's also not to say that the US government wouldn't shovel taxpayers money in the direction of large corporations in any event. But whereas you could perhaps have made a case in the 1850s for economic development or in the 1860s for military exigency, it's difficult to make an argument in the 2020s on the basis of anything other than satisfying corporate greed.

Re: More to come

The period of history in which artists could - with a following wind - make a living from their art seems to have been relatively short-lived. Thin pickings these days for writers and actors despite, or perhaps because of, an increasing volume of output - much of which is also carefully targeted at specific marketing niches.

And while art survived in the more distant past on the back, largely, of wealthy patrons, it's difficult to imagine today's broligarchs forking out for even a string quartet let alone a Sistine Chapel.

Re: Is nothing sacred

Back in the old days your private storage would perhaps amount to a diary and a photograph album. And then, when your financial life became more complicated, you might have added a filing cabinet to contain the contracts and statements and invoices that burgeoned with the arrival of credit cards, direct debits and personal pensions. With the advent of solid-state storage, you could easily put all that stuff on a USB stick - and you still can.

The problem is that we've decided to document every minute detail of our digitally-enhanced, social media existence, retaining all the fictitious evidence of a life considerably more attractive than the one we actually experienced. We can only do that because of all the free storage. And the free storage is only there because of the free personal data. There will come a point, however, when the AI no longer needs your data - it will have sufficient to create entire populations of happier and more perfect people, more authentically consuming carefully placed products that you can acquire in order to be - almost, but not quite - like them. And the freebies will stop.

So, maybe hang onto those USB sticks - at least while there's a socket to plug them into.

The stock price ... goes up fabulously

That may be about to change.

Re: CGNAT is also used

For cellular data providers in the UK, too (and likely elsewhere).

I only have mobile internet access when I'm in the UK and I constantly suffer the staircase/hydrant/bicycle challenge. It's fascinating how we've managed to continuously evolve protocols above layer 3 (to the extent of HTTP/3 using QUIC instead of TCP) while the network layer refuses to ditch the sideburns and flares.

Re: Bring out the comfy chair!

The heresy begins at the point of deciding that the "almighty" is shirking his responsibility to spread the word of his acolytes and needs help. Given the ridiculous interpretations generations of Christians have made of the random collection of texts in their bible, it's hard to see how even AI could do worse.

One of the interesting takeaways from the recent Iberian power failure was that even shops that only took cash were mostly unable to operate because their PoS equipment wasn't working so we've already passed the tipping point when it comes to operational resilience. Banking costs of all kinds have traditionally been high in Portugal and there are a lot of informal barriers to external competition, but the EU is keen to see that change. Portugal is in a reasonably good position (e.g. with MultiBanco/SIBS) to offer low-cost digital transactions and if it doesn't it's going to be steamrollered.

Re: "telling customers to leave if they don't like it"

O2 also do 30-day rolling contracts both directly and, at a modestly reduced cost, via giffgaff. However, their 24 month contracts are significantly cheaper on a monthly basis than either: of course they'll recoup some of that from people who fail to act promptly at the end of the contract when the prices jump.

I'm not, in principle, against the idea of fixed-term contracts, but it seems to me that the permitted maximum contract period is far too long: a lot can happen to prices in 24 months. I suspect if the maximum contract period were 12 months people would feel a lot less aggrieved.

I'm sure I've mentioned before that recent aggressive competition in Portugal (where 24 month contracts were the norm) has brought typical contracts down to 3 months as well as significantly lowering costs. This has largely been delivered through no-frills operations (often subsidiaries of the traditional operators) that have largely eliminated the highly-incentivised sales staff and "free" TVs and tablets that were previously required to get people to sign up to long, expensive contracts against their better judgment. I've been surprised at how long phone shops have persisted in the high street when we no longer expect to find an Electricity or Gas Board selling cookers and fridges. It might be useful if Ofcom were to separate the network operators from their other commercial activities.

Re: What a great idea

The counter argument, that you get a bunch of highly-skilled operations staff working 24/7, a service you could not individually afford, unsurprisingly doesn't seem to have got much of an airing over the last few hours.

The biggest problem, it seems to me, is not the outsourcing per se (there will be a significant body of customers for whom it makes economic sense in principle if the implementation is right), but the small number of providers. The potential international economic effect of such a huge chunk of infrastructure going out simultaneously is a risk that transcends any one particular customer's interests.

These vast enterprises must be broken down into smaller units. Not only for resilience, but to encourage competition, necessitate the development of standards that allow services and data to be migrated and to restore the balance of power between consumer and provider - indeed, between nation state and provider. This is a warning that requires an urgent response.

Re: "Is Office an artistic work"

Copyright is a legal creation in which artistic merit plays no part and I don't imagine judges or the rest of us would relish courts being called upon to decide which works of alleged art deserved protection and which did not.

The legal response should presumably be to claim that the "artistic" material is incidental and covered by "fair use" (to the extent that argument can be made in English law) or that, as the material is inseparable from the software itself and not covered by a separate licence, there is an implicit licence of copyright within the software licence itself.

However, the important thing about the law is that it can be changed. The law is clearly due an overhaul in respect of digital "property" - stuff you've "bought" but you don't control - and this is only one of many instances where corporate power needs to be curbed, Whether politicians, starry-eyed at the vast sums of "investment" planned in covering the countryside with energy-guzzling, employment-destroying, truth-mangling and ultimately untaxable AI bit barns, will decide they want to fight on the side of their constituents is a question left to the reader.

23" (or even sometimes 24")

Maybe we should settle on some nice round number like 23.622?

Not that I want to suggest there's some sort of coordination - other than fiscal gravity - but son-of-Larry is CEO of Paramount Skydance which owns CBS and is attempting to acquire Warner Brothers. So it's not just your corporate data that's potentially in scope for the Ellison dynasty.

We seem to be entering a new era of Rockefellers and Hearsts.

Equality of Opportunity

People make the same mistake about aptitude as they do about the money supply: it's not a fixed quantity.

Probably the best illustration of the various facets of Equality of Opportunity was during the Second World War. Women were called up en masse to do jobs for which men were suddenly unavailable (noting, initially, that women did not have the equality of opportunity to engage in combat). Many of them had no previous experience - necessarily so as they would have been denied the opportunity to do many of these jobs - and were often thrust into them with the minimum of evaluation, yet many of them demonstrated an aptitude and with experience became equally adept as the men they replaced across a whole range of manual, technical and professional roles.

And then at the end of the war those opportunities largely disappeared because the prevailing view was those jobs were "needed" by men. But we find today, despite a much greater population and higher retirement ages, most men and most women are now employed and there are still unfilled vacancies. Having the opportunity to work and earn results in a larger economy with more opportunities for everyone.

And this is the key point: you don't get to be good at something without having the opportunity to do it in the first place. We have a societal tendency to prefer to have people who are like us around us, particularly if we feel insecure about our own place in that society. When wealth is largely concentrated in one part of that society that a real problem, not only sociologically, but it's denying society as a whole the economic growth that would accompany wider participation.

A job that goes to a candidate who has aptitude but little experience does not permanently deny employment to someone with both any more than an increase in the minimum wage means a decrease in the maximum wage: skills circulate in the economy like money. The number of jobs is no more fixed than the money supply.

I think this is why the particular vitriol against "DEI" is correlated with the beggar-my-neighbour view of social welfare: people see the economy as a zero-sum game in which a benefit to someone else is an immediate loss to themselves. It's not how things work, despite what those with a vested interest in keeping the plebs warring amongst themselves might tell you.

Re: "introduced in 2013, and things have since moved on"

My LS3/5As are over 40 years old now and even allowing for inflation are worth more now than when I bought them. There are places that will still repair or refurb them if needed.

On the other hand, I no longer have the top-loading CD player that was very much new technology at the time of purchase: subsequent iterations were better. I also no longer have the Quad 33/303 because, despite being perfectly functional, it generated more heat than sound. I think we have to accept that technology will move on - we no longer have analogue TV and mechanically-propelled recording media are disappearing. The actual problem is either inadvisable integration - where technologies of very different durability are brought together in the same box so that the expiry of one means the expiry of all - or proprietary interfaces which mean that components that are otherwise individually functional cannot be used together if any one of them becomes obsolete.

I think it's now long overdue that it should be a requirement that the interfaces of all products that depend on external connections to operate should be documented publicly.

It's mostly a sign of management failure

If there are jobs that can genuinely be done by AI, they're probably related to business processes that can be simplified or eliminated. However that would require an in-depth understanding of how the business actually operates - which management might be expected to have but often lacks in reality.

AI often seems to be simply a cheaper sticking plaster covering up the irretrievably broken. Unfortunately, the knowledge of what's broken and how to fix it is very iften confined to those people the AI will be replacing.

Re: I know this is serious but

This is not a new phenomenon. It is rare for entertainers - and still less for the entertainment industry - to speak out against either popular sentiment or political power, especially if it might cost them their jobs. Don't expect them to be any more likely defend their professional colleagues than anyone else - and they're as likely as anyone else to actually believe the nonsense du jour.

The evidence is that not only did Hollywood collaborate in the oppression of those considered "Un-American" at the height of McCarthyism, but that some of those affected were still struggling to get work, or to get credit for their pseudonymous work, many decades later. These "temporary" aberrations can have lifelong consequences. Of course, back in the 50s, people weren't being threatened with deportation, but many were obliged to leave the country in any case to find work.

When you're one of the few people left on the planet, in your New Zealand lair, you're going to need some sort of aerial vehicle to hunt down the feral sheep to supply your automated pie-making production line. Might as well test it all first on unimportant stuff.

Re: "... many users prefer talking to their bot instead of typing ..."

AI will slways be talking out of its bot.

Just get these things chatting to each other and fill the worplace air with the sound of RTO productivity and sneak back home to get your work done in peace and quiet.

Re: Trapped

change bank and tell them why

It's touching you think they might care. They really don't.

My UK bank recently channeled customers to make credit card applications via their app. It doesn't work, the applications get stuck in some internal workflow and customer service staff can see only that they're stuck but not why and are powerless to intervene, though a credit card application appears on applicants' credit history. There seems to be no internal process where this can be made visible to management.

If major business processes can fail without anyone in a position of responsibility being aware, I'm afraid the loss of individual customers is not going to be on anyone's radar. It's cheaper to lose customers than address their problems. Cost is all that counts now.

When Cable TV first came to the area, the local ne'er-do-wells amused theselves by pouring petrol into the man holes, followed by a lighted match, so they could watch the cables being pulled to the surface and the pavement disintegrating around them.

It's not just the externally facing infrastructure that's surprisingly vulnerable. See also airports and drones, anti-5G mast saboteurs, lineside fires on the railways, etc. In the old days, you poisoned the local well and salted the fields.

Clearly some infrastructure is more critical than others but the possible attack surface is enormous.

A few strategic social media posts and there'd be disorderly queues of enthusiastic volunteers forming within hours. That's why this zombie policy has returned.