Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: Speed Limits

Auto-dip? Oh FFS! It's bad enough we have to suffer people driving with headlights on because it's a bit cloudy, or nearing dusk, where sidelights are all you need. I've seen car auto headlights come on because the sun is low in the evening and the road goes between embankments. Coming out the other end, the sun is still shining, I still need my singlasses on, but all those "clever" cars don't quite see enough light to turn of the fscking headlights.

Worst case was dealing with a driver who was in a hire car without auto headlights and didn't know where the light switch was so driving up a motorway in the dark without lights. Stupid driver was old enough that auto-on headlights were not around when he passed his test but still thought it ok that if he didn't know how to switch the lights on it was still ok to drive. Allowing drivers to think they can switch to full beam always and let the car worry about when to dip them is just asking for trouble when we have people like that on the roads.

Re: Eh?

Advertisers? According to the article half of the company's top 100 advertisers, who collectively spent over $750 million in ads last year,

So even if all those top 100 advertisers were still there and paying their bills, that annual income is still only 2 months worth of loan payments. So if we assume an even spread and that losing half the top 100 advertises only loses half the spend, that's only one month loan payments from a year of advertisers fees. The question that leads to is how many smaller advertisers are still there and what does that add up to? I suppose we can infer something from the last set up Twitter accounts when they were still publicly traded. I can't be arsed to go look :-)

Re: Funding

Yes, they are reallerer than Waitrose, who also think there are dragons beyond J14 of the M40 and therefore seem mythical to Yorkshiremen :-)

Re: Funding

Not all that much reduced. He's also personally on the hook for billions. It's "only" the bank loans that are leveraged against Twitter, ie the value of Twitter is the security the banks accepted as security against the loans. Not to mention the reputation damage caused if and when he needs investors or bank loans for future ventures.

Re: Formatting DVDs?

Maybe they were DVD+R discs? Also, ISTR some methods of "formatting" or preparing write-once optical disks such that you could still add to them later and/or "overwrite" files. I would guess that the backup process in the article may have used a proprietary backup solution that required something special on the discs before being used as part of a backup set. The caddy bit seems to date it a good while back in optical disc terms unless they were not actually DVDs as stated in the article. There were various more specialised optical discs in caddies that didn't go mainstream. In fact, I don't remember any standard DVDs using caddies. They pretty much disappeared right at the very early days when CDs were still running at single or double speed. I still have an old IBM SCIS 5.25" CD-ROM single speed drive that uses a caddy left over from my Amiga days. It was obsolete when I acquired it :-)

Re: Don't get me started...

I give you Armley Gyratory, Leeds, W. Yorkshire.

Re: A bit off a tool

Has anyone here tried any of these "AI" image generators? Can you replicate a result by giving it the same inputs or does the "AI" inject randomness? Or is the "AI" changing as new data is input such that giving it exactly the same input tomorrow as you did today will generate a different result?

Re: Good!

"For example, if we all held copyright to different pieces (I own the soundtrack for the first hour, person A owns the second hour, person B owns most of the screenplay, person C owns the part of the screenplay where the scientists are describing the situation because Person B got the technobabble all wrong, and person D owns the footage for the background), then things break down if person D needs to leave but we still want to set my introductory piece to their scenery, because they can't give us their copyrights even if they want to."

Actually, that is exactly how it works in much of the media industry, TV and film in particular. There will be many different rights holders involved in some productions. I'm not in the industry, but have seen and heard how, in at least some instances, getting all the various rights needed for a production can take time and negotiations. The one that sticks in my mind is Terry Nation (well, his estate) owns the rights to the Daleks, The BBC has to licence any use of the Daleks in Dr Who from the estate. Likewise if you need to set a mood or time period in a TV or film production, you need music that the audience will immediately associate with the moment and in many case that will mean licence one or more music tracks, which could mean negotiating rights with lyrics authors, music arrangers and performers or, if your lucky, just with a single entity like a record label.

Re: Good!

In that instance, yes. Because the AI will only be finding what it's been programmed to find, ie one of the needles in the vast array of haystacks. What it found may be useless in terms of practical use since it may also kill the patient. That extra work to find if the "cure" is usable.non-lethal and safe for use on patients takes a lot more human work.

Re: Good!

There are al;l sorts of situations where murdering a business competitor could be justified by "good business practice", but other than in criminal enterprises, it's actually quite rare for many reasons. Mainly that most people are not murderers and the likelihood of being caught. Changing copyright such that it expires when the holder expires is very unlikely to noticeably affect the murder rates.

Re: Presumably this means that ...

I wonder how this affects that blokie who used to throw paint into the exhaust stream of a parked jet aircraft and "blow" paint onto the canvas? At best, all he was choosing was the selection and order of colours. I'd like to see him prove that he can replicate his results using skill as an "artist".

Re: Learning through movement

"Seems to me like they're seeing this problem as a nail because the only too they have is a (chat) hammer"

“We'll be saying a big hello to all intelligent lifeforms everywhere and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.”

― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Re: "a person conversing with ChatGPT can bug test robot directives until they work properly"

Pretty much every time I've had to deal with a "chatbot" of that type, I've almost always ended the conversation with "clearly you are not able to help. Please report this conversation in full to your masters". Whether they do or not, I don't know. Who they consider their masters to be is something else.

Re: Customers

Even when the 486 was pervasive in the industry, I'd not describe home computers as pervasive in general. Not by a large margin. Even when the Pentium CPU first came out, less than 20% of households had a computer. And by computer, that could be any make or model including Spectrums, Amigas etc. In 1993 when a 486DX2-66 was top of the range, you could still go out and buy a new budget PC of XT grade with a piddly little 20MB HDD or even a dual floppy, no HDD model. It wasn't until this century that computer ownership reach 50% of households.

Re: Fresh versus hot

"A quick test on an unlocked PC showed that the filters were indeed doing their job, and she actually wanted to go to moneyworld.co.uk. She was most embarrassed when I explained this to her."

Yes, one of the unintended consequences of both the publicity .com got in the media (and still does) thanks to the "dot com boom" and the desperation so many "local" companies have for wanting .com URIs. Many, many users sort of expect a web address to end in .com. Possibly less of an issue these days with so many people just searching for sites rather than manually typing in an address. Even now, some people look at you funny if you give them a URI with .co.uk or anything other than .com unless they deal regularly with, eg. .gov.uk or .edu.uk.

Re: No shit, really?

It's interesting research though. If true, then someone needs to be asking hard questions of NASA what testing they did on the instruments before sending them to Mars.

Re: Cost of Offices

I suspect that would be more likely since otherwise you'd have some companies operating, eg Mon-Thurs, some operating Tues-Fri and other Mon-Fri. Companies need to interact with other companies so without a national decision for everyone to go Mon-Thurs confusion will likely abound. Likewise, with this international interconnected world, there would still be problems dealing with the rest of the world. Time zones already cause enough confusion without wondering whether a particular company will be operating on a particular day.

Re: Nope

Our max holiday entitlement went up from 25 to 30 days recently. Plus all the statutory and bank holidays too of course. I could probably switch to 4 day week with careful planning, but no long holidays, so probably not :-)

"I found the article strange to say 4 days and no hours change, I'm sure everyone would be pleased if they are paid for a 37.5 hour work week (5 days) but only did 30 hours (4 days) of actual work. Seems a good deal."

From the article "The crucial point of the pilot, in which 3,000 UK-based employees participated, was that no one's salaries changed, nor were they required to work extended hours, the so-called "4×10 schedule" (four 10-hour shifts) tested by Atlassian and others."

I think there may be different trials being referred to here or different companies trialled different ways of achieving a 4 day week.

Back in the day, when I was late teens and working at the local swimming pool, we switched to a 4 day week with 2x10 + 2x9.5 (39 hour week was standard then). It was great. Closed on Sundays and about about every 6 weeks, the shift pattern meant days off were Fri, Sat & Sun followed the next weeks pattern of Mon, Tues, Sun so almost a week off every 6 weeks :-)