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Comment Re: Story doesn't add up :o (Score 1) 64

No to both questions. How retarded are you? I didn't say anything at all about the standard to convict him, except to say that I don't trust China (to give him a fair trial or in just about anything else). But most people would respond to that kind of question by saying that they didn't steer business to friends or family, or something like that. TFA just says that his people don't deny having done that kind of thing -- the lack of a stronger response is what suggests he did it.

Comment Re: Story doesn't add up :o (Score 2) 64

He is criticizing an evil regime for doing evil things, but that doesn't mean he is entirely innocent or pure in his motivations. I trust China exactly as far as I can throw it, but it is entirely possible that both (a) China is unfairly prosecuting this guy and advising him off things he didn't do and (b) he used his government position to help his family before he retired. The paragraph I quoted strongly suggests that (b) is true.

Comment Re:Story doesn't add up :o (Score 2) 64

From TFA:

Li's family prospered, investing in apartment complexes and renting out forklifts and bulldozers, raising questions over whether he used his position to enrich relatives. Li and his lawyers don't deny conflicts of interest or civil violations, but say profits were made from legal, regular business operations and deny criminal charges of embezzlement and bribery.

It sounds a lot like how US Congresscritters such as Debbie Wasserman Schultz make bank (142% return in 2024!) by trading stocks in companies that are regulated by their committees: it's obviously crooked and based on having insider information, but difficult to prove.

Comment Re:/me gets butter and salt (Score 1) 64

Which part of the article triggered you to complain about "trumpistan"? Was it this one?

In 2015, Washington complained that Chinese agents were flying to the U.S. and stalking targets without approval, including U.S. permanent residents. Agents brought night goggles from China, snapped photos and taped threatening messages on doors.

Or maybe that IBM was selling that surveillance software to China before 2017?

Comment Re:Does it matter to anyone? (Score 1) 83

AI strongly favors some phrases over others, though. I have a Google news watch on the name "Gamesurge", and for 15+ years Google has matched that against news that uses phrases like "late-game surge". This year, the frequency of those hits has gone up by about an order of magnitude. I don't think that was organic in origin.

It's like if you suddenly had a zillion people asking "doubts" about how to do the needful: you could be pretty sure which dialect of English influenced their word choices.

Comment Re:Do people wear glasses anymore? (Score 1) 44

I have a combination of prescriptions that mean that I can't use contact lenses. I see quite a lot of people wearing glasses, and Zenni, Warby Parker, and the other online companies have said they sell a decent number of frames with plano lenses (meaning no prescription), presumably for people who want the look.

Comment Re:Go back to 2012-13... (Score 1) 44

Eventually, you won't be able to tell. Someone will come in wearing glasses, and the tech is going to be too small and streamlined. There are also companies working on embedding augmented reality capabilities in contact lenses fed by tiny cameras placed just out of the field of vision. You'd be able to see them only in very specific circumstances. Power feed is a primary challenge right now, but it's probably not an unsolvable problem.

Comment Re:Is military right-to-repair unrealistic? How so (Score 1) 62

No one else is going to risk making a part that one of the big defense contractors has under copyright with an exclusivity lock even if the US government says they can. The smaller ones just can't afford the effects of a lawsuit or the risk of treble damages if they do. That's why forcing a right to repair into the contracts is so important.

Comment Re:A funny scary thing (Score 3, Informative) 75

Unless you are at the North or South Pole or on top of one of the highest mountains, you are unlikely to be getting an average of one SEU per week in one computer due to cosmic rays. I would attribute most of the errors you see to other causes: marginal timing compatibility, power glitches, an overburdened fan, a leaky microwave nearby, several of these in combination, etc. Cosmic rays sound cool, but most bit flips have more boring causes.

In my case, I saw a lot more errors when I was running compute-intensive jobs: read files, decompress them, run a domain specific compression to text, generate SHA-256, compress using a general purpose compression, in parallel on 24 cores. The location of errors was random like in your system, but the correlation with processor load convinced me it wasn't caused by cosmic rays.

Comment Re:Overthinking it... (Score 5, Interesting) 75

Their developers are supposed to be very competent and careful, but mostly because of culture and the application of development processes that consider lots of potential errors. The default assurance guidance documents (don't call them standards, for rather pedantic reasons) are ED-79 (for Europe because we're taking about Airbus, jointly published as ARP4754 in the US) for aircraft and system design, ARP4761/ED-135 for the accompanying safety analyses, DO-178/ED-12 for software development and DO-254/ED-80 for hardware development. DO-254 gets augmented by AC 20-152A to clarify a number of points. Regulators who certify the system or aircraft also have guidance about what level of involvement they should have in the development process, based on lots of factors, but with most of them boiling down to prior experience of the developers.

You can read online about the objectives in those documents, but flight control systems have potentially catastrophic failure effects, so they need to be developed to DAL A. For transport category aircraft, per AC 25.1309-1B, a catastrophic effect should occur no more often than once per billion operational hours. Catastrophic effects must not result from any single failure; there must be redundancy in the aircraft or system. Normally, the fault tree analysis can only ignore an event if it's two or three orders of magnitude less likely than the overall objective.

Cosmic rays normally cause more than one single-event upset per 10 trillion hours of operation, so normally there should be hardware and software mechanisms to avoid effects from them. In hardware, it might be ECC plus redundant processors with a voting mechanism. For software, it might be what DO-178 calls multiple version dissimilar software independence.

I don't know Airbus itself, and one always has the chance of something like the Boeing 737 MAX MCAS. But typically, companies and regulators do expect these systems to be extremely reliable because the developers are professional and honest: not necessarily super-competent, but super-careful about applying good development practices, having independence in development processes as well as the product, and checking their work with process and quality assurance teams who know what to look for and what to expect.

Comment Re:A funny scary thing (Score 2) 75

Try running a one-week memtest86 run, then?

I used to have similar problems (with 4x32 GB sticks), but they went away when I replaced my RAM. Those kinds of problems can also be caused by voltage fluctuations, either from the input power or from load (and memtest86 isn't good at increasing CPU or GPU load) -- even without overcooking. It could be cosmic rays, but it could also be much more local causes.

Comment Re: Not helpful (Score 3, Funny) 28

ClipGPT: "It looks like you're trying to manage public relations in connection with an advertising campaign. Sterling Cooper & Partners is an internationally recognized agency with a long track record of successful campaigns in this area. Can I help you navigate to Link Target?"

Comment Re:No creativity, talent or specific knowlege requ (Score 1) 18

How do you reach the conclusion that you did? From TFS:

"They may provide services and generate ideas, but they remain tools used by the human inventor who conceived the claimed invention," the office said. "When one natural person is involved in creating an invention with the assistance of AI, the inquiry is whether that person conceived the invention under the traditional conception standard."

On its face, that contradicts the idea that Whoever has the "biggest computer" can lock up all of human progress and collect rents for it into the future -- a natural person still needs to conceive of the invention, rather than patenting the output of tool that happens to be the "biggest computer".

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