Remote
Bill Ricker
@n1vux@mastodon.radio
mastodon 4.7.3radio N1VUX. software (semiretired). Scotch/Cognac/Armagnac (fan/ex-pro). aka @BRicker@fosstodon.org ^Sarcasm thus^
521 Followers
742 Following
50 Posts
Joined December 03, 2020
Pronouns:
He/him/they
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Replying to on m.ai6yr.org
@ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org
^Wait, why is this Speyside Highlands Scotch smokey? That's an islands thing!^
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@cstross@wandering.shop @chris_bloke@mastodon.acm.org @SteveBellovin@infosec.exchange @TheJen@beige.party
Cool!
My Mom was a part of Dartmouth's trial-run of their first BASIC class, they having drafted in any non-professorial staff that were STEM-ish; she also sat in on the trial of a revised Statistics class. All before I was born, mid 1950s.
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@ham_sando@mastodon.social @dabeaz@mastodon.social
euphemism, allusion, reductio-ad-absurdem, analogy, allegory, call it what you will; it slaps!
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@nev@flipping.rocks @ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org
My ruler for (un)ethical AI (aside from the plagiarism 🐘 ) is whether there is an _actual_ explanation or trace capability.
[Where "actual" means "not just another hallucination", but rather, where in the training data set did this line of generated text / piece of image / ... come from and why was it selected? Knowledge-engineered Expert Systems can do this, Data-Science built DSS usually can, but ML/LLM/PISS systems generally can't.]
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@bennomatic@appdot.net Same.
It's in my Bio on this and other socials.
Also the Oxford Comma, because I don't work for the AP.
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@b0rk@social.jvns.ca
You managing to express the old magic that is just obvious to those of use who remember when the physical VT100 terminal was new (and the good one, and thus the de facto standard to emulate) will be so helpful to those who did NOT live thru that era but have to live with all the backward compatibility we've accumulated !
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@regehr@mastodon.social
There's an ongoing series
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About ${topic}.
https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood
My spouse and child having hyphenated have discovered that a few programmers still believe surnames consist only of alphabetic ASCII, even in this 21st Century! 🙄
Timezone and Daylight Savings Time being political decisions are amazingly taught with exceptions!
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@mattblaze@federate.social @ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org @firefly@m.ai6yr.org @w7voa@journa.host
Right. The main risk right now is IoT items that have mistakenly been trying to connect to "the" root directly all along.
Good debunking of chatter at
https://hachyderm.io/@jbcrawford/115753138339762616
and semi-official statement from an NIST time admin:
https://groups.google.com/a/list.nist.gov/g/internet-time-service/c/o0dDDcr1a8I
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@KimSJ@mastodon.social @vampiress@eigenmagic.net
(this rubric also applies to Crossword puzzles, Mathematics, and hardware)
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@michi@wetdry.world
If he wants a more nuanced discussion, we can go back to the tortuous willful copyright violations inherent in claiming academic free use to train on everything scrapable and then commercialize it; validation and tracability of answers; safety; ... .
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@cstross@wandering.shop @chris_bloke@mastodon.acm.org @SteveBellovin@infosec.exchange @TheJen@beige.party
Mom got a home computer in the early 1980. She gave me a very tight budget for a portable _and_ printer, so Osborne O-1 it was, that's what she could afford for Dissertation support for her return-for-terminal-degree. She's 93, so not taking on new technology now.
(Dad eventually got used to Word Star and dot-matric printer since it could cut ditto and mimeo masters for school use, and was not happy with eventual transition to MS WINDOWS!)
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@jbcrawford@hachyderm.io
& Even If they manage to squeak thru , let's hope they publish the paper on the contingency plan.
And perhaps run a drill with half a site sometime ...
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@cstross@wandering.shop that's some escalation from the last BBC WS Radio reports on protests i heard!
(I did question how peaceful the protests were if two armed state thugs were among the dead.)
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@scottsthoughts@better.boston
Stem & Stern are either opposite ends of a ship, or a kerning error.
#ShipPost #TypoPolice
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@markc568@beige.party @ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org
All too common corporate HR practice, whether quarterly or annually; some even require the ratings to fit a bell-curve too, which would be expected only if people were assigned randomly.
HR MBAs making work for HR.
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@cschrader @ObsidianUrbex
(The other formerly PCC trolley lines in (greater) Boston have been converted to modern catenary with use of modern LRV pantograph units, but for technical reasons that I forget offhand, the Mattapan line is just not a candidate for pantograph & catenary upgrade, so MBTA car-shop rewinds their own refurb motors and otherwise rebuilds PCCs as needed.)
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@bakachu@infosec.exchange @cstross@wandering.shop
Indeed, I was pleased to see this was a
✅ Check all that Apply
poll.
✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
I could argue as to which is most/least urgent but yeah.
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@brian@beige.party @christof@fedihum.org @standardebooks@mastodon.social sounds like their tooling could be reused for other languages. For quality proofreading & editing, makes sense for project per language; even polyglots have best-skill languages.
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@jbcrawford@hachyderm.io @alison@burningboard.net 😯
There are very few time&posit users that need annual plate-drift corrections but i can see how VLBI would be one, now that you mention it! 👍🏻
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@cstross@wandering.shop
Understood, I presumed 'reports' was in the laundryfilesverse nomenclatura. Just my ironic historical reaponse.
(I recall the BBC extended adaptation of House of Cards, which spoilt the foreshadowing!, took flak for offing Maggie Milksnatcher before her actual time. Have the Tories been at you for offing ER2 on an alternate timeline?)
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@cstross@wandering.shop presumably reporting on different regicides than the ones who took refuge in Connecticut during the Stuart Restoration.
(Which latter was a boon to stage comedy at least.)
(Still think CiiiR choosing not to choose a regnal name with better omens was unwise. Nice for Post Box spotters, i guess, and republicans of the anti-tory sense. Perhaps Wills of Wales will show more sense and be eventually crowned as the Arthur ii that Britain needs? 😉)
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@mattblaze@federate.social @MsMerope@sfba.social @ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org
"If all you have is a hammer 🔨
every problem looks like a nail."
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@b0rk@social.jvns.ca 40 years ago, i was doing computer security research at a QNGO, and was reading the small manual for the VT-100 I'd received (with a network card, quite avant garde!).
I noticed that the Power On Self-Test could be invoked by an Escape Sequence.
https://vt100.net/docs/vt100-ug/chapter3.html#DECTST
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@b0rk@social.jvns.ca so of course I emailed the sequence to my office-mate. ;-)
(We were researchers, so this was a justifiable action!)
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@mwichary@mastodon.online
Wang Labs had specially engineered cassettes for the 2200 series desktops. Including read/write tabs that were resettable, but most importantly, controlled tension, andnhigher quality magnetic film. Some folks managed to get them for use with home computers especially ones put into commercial use.
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@futurebird
(by reputation, there are tags for this precis on AO3. I prefer your pun; thank you, I will be sharing this with the AO3 fans in my life.)
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@alison@burningboard.net @jbcrawford@hachyderm.io
Alas eps. 327 isn't in the English archives, and I'd trust auto translate of auto caption even less than asking my wife to translate. (The German she's learning is not technical, and not yet advanced.)
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@cstross@wandering.shop
I wish to know if, and if so how, they intend to implement Asimov's 3 Laws.
Because without that "rebellion-free" isn't a guarantee.
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@b0rk@social.jvns.ca
It didn't say if this only worked if the
ESC [ 2 ; 1 y
sequence was only honored from the keyboard or from the serial port or both; for factory testing, I guessed both.
And it included "Repeat Tests until Failure" if the 8 bit was also set (␛[2;9y).
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