Posts by Brewster's Angle Grinder

Re: if you are a small, text-based forum,

That's eminently sensible. It will just take a while for those things to emerge. Software could ship with it.

Re: Mobsters did very well out of Prohibition

A bit like Musk vs Bannon on H-1Bs. I don't know about Trump, but Johnson used to like to play each side off against the other; keep them both their fighting.

Re: Done it

Shift looks like sprint. I couldn't get away fast enough without it.

The most annoying thing is I've developed a habit of panning the view with the mouse. I kept finding myself with my hand on the mouse wondering why the camera wasn't moving...

Re: Down vote?

I didn't down vote, but the assertion low level code has to be written in C is false. I've written the kind of code described in ASM, Forth and C++. I presume you can write it in "unsafe" Rust. So C is not the only game in town.

And how does JSON or XML get transferred to the host? Is it an "unsafe" DMA or PIO? (Yes, I've written PIO code.) Whereas port based IO just looks like a function that takes or returns a value so that is intrinsically safe.

I'd've also thought a DMA could be made to appear safe - if we trust a kernel function which does the low level stuff so the device driver just makes a DMA() call in, presumably, the same way memory-mapped IO is made appear to be safe. But I don't know enough about modern IO or Rust to be sure on either case.

Re: Having seen Star Trek IV…

The way relativity works, all FTL machines are de facto time machines. It's easy to see it the other way round: with a time machine I could travel to wherever at subluminal speeds and then travels backwards in time to make it appear I had travelled faster than light.

The faster they can get everybody using it, the less of a problem this becomes. 1) Because there are probably cross licensing opportunities - you're using company X's IP but they're using yours.

But 2) because nobody is going to let the economy collapse under an epic sue ball (and the courts couldn't cope with all the cases). So if (1) doesn't cover it, rules will be changed and a accommodation arrived at. (Think about music sharing. How many individuals were unlucky enough to got threatened, let alone prosecuted, compared to those who shared?)

But that all hinges on getting lots of people using it quickly.

"[T]here's no good reason learning rate or training batch size would be derivable from a deployed model via any trickery."

That was my thought. 1) I can't see how you could derive them and 2) what good would knowing them do you?!

Re: What an enigma

You missed the historical precedent in my subject line. Enigma was cracked by the British Government and we kept quiet about it and encouraged poorer nations to use reconditioned machines.

And by doing nothing you are betting the farm on it being impossible to crack when we have quantum-proof algorithms we could start using now.

It's not very small, it's just very far away...

"The drones in question were the size of a car."

You have no way to estimate it's size. Once something is above the trees there is nothing to compare it with. Worse, consistency of scaling breaks down at these distances. So, for example, your brain should tell you the moon is about the size of a football soccer ball or a dinner plate. If you see a plane in the sky (as I regularly do living under a flight path) you are relying on knowing how big that plane ought to be to understand its size. But absent an accurate measurement of it's distance, the size of these things is pure speculation; all you know is the angle it subtends.

Re: WPEngine 'likely to prevail'...

And if they say "no", the type of client goes and finds a lawyer that will say "yes".

Re: hmmm

In fairness, I could have gone, "But they didn't bank on Putin invading Ukraine!" But I felt genocide didn't have quite the same lightness of touch as a dig at the lettuce wrangler.

Re: CWE-66

No "Queexty". As in "queexty, fix the damn thing!"

Re: Shifting ever more production to TMSC

I've done a quick google. And he doesn't seem to have said anything other than what is prevailing wisdom now and then.I guess that's the downside of putting engineers in charge: they call it as they see it.

Re: Enjoy BlueSky while we can.

Like one of those quaint, picturesque towns before all the other tourists discover it.

Re: in a move intended to restore investor confidence

TBH, I've been at that point several times in my life. "If this company is going to survive, we're going have to fire you and several dozen other people. Sorry."

Re: Bah!

The trouble with Orca is they have to come up for air. Could we equip them with some diving helmets, maybe...?

Re: Collateral damage?

No. The main problem is that a solution which looks odd in 2024 will be all-but-irrelevant by 2032, or whenever the case is finally settled and all appeals exhausted.

Tort-uous

I have sympathy with this. But, equally, this is being used a staging post to spew malware. That has a cost for everybody else - one which the owner is not paying and which, in total, may outweigh the costs to the owner's business.

The way we decide these problems is via the courts. If a judge can be persuaded that a device is being used to infect others and that the owners have not respond in a timely fashion, and then issues an order for the patch to be applied, then it's tough for the owner. Whatever the consequences, they had their chance. I don't know if this case meets that threshold, but we should certainly consider it.

They just want the stickers for their collection

FOMO? Higher ups think everybody else is doing it and so they don't want to be left out?

"Yes, of course we're doing AI. Look around, we're all using 'AI PC's!"

Re: "Carr wants to revisit Section 230

"More to the point, does The Register want to be come legally liable for everything posted by users on this site?"

IANAL, but isn't that the position in the UK? That why we have moderators.