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Comment Re:Chain of thoughts (Score 2) 60

Ha ha, Paris Accord. Guess how much France, the country which lead said accord, was fined for not meeting their own commitments? Spoiler alert, it's €1.

Yeah, and whose fault is that? Right the USA which objected to one word in the entire accord: "Shall" instead of "Should". But sure, blame the French.
Anyway blame game aside the fault is your own. The court case fine had little to nothing to do with the Paris agreement as it was brought locally by a local court against the government related to an international agreement. The fine was always going to be symbolic because there was no legal mechanism to do something otherwise. Governments can't pass laws to fine themselves. Laws don't work like that.

Incidentally the French are part of the EU and the Paris Agreement was signed in such a way that the block reports emissions. The EU is ranked "Insufficient" against the Paris target. Canada is ranked "Highly Insufficient" along with China and India, and the USA "Critically Insufficient" sharing that category with what Trump would call "3rd world shitholes".

So I wouldn't go throwing shade at France in a story about Canada.

Comment You know if you're going to try to disprove me (Score 1) 49

Maybe don't quote where the guy says you should punch trans girls in the balls... I'm just saying.

There is no equivocating here. The man called for violence. The fact that he wanted cops to come and do the violence first doesn't change the fact that he said that when the cops won't come and do the violence you should do the violence yourself. This is classic stochastic terrorism.

America does this too and our police will arrest you for it. The difference is they won't charge you with a speech crime because it's tough to make those stick.

Instead they'll do a little bit of extra investigation and odds are they will find something they can charge you with conspiracy to commit such and such with.

This is becoming a major problem because the people at the FBI and other agencies in charge of finding violent lunatics and getting them arrested before they do violent lunatic things are currently spending all their time arresting illegal immigrants. Arrests for crimes unrelated to immigration have dropped from 44,000 per year to 11,000 per year. Meanwhile 3/4ths of the immigrants being arrested for deportation do not have any criminal record and the majority of the ones with the criminal record have minor things like traffic infractions...

This is important and relevant to the discussion here because we have devoted resources that would normally be catching potential shooters and cr violent crazy people and getting those guys under control to non-violent immigrants. Meanwhile if your goal is to deport immigrants Trump is doing less of that because he's incompetent. One of the dirty little things the Democrats don't like to talk about is that Joe Biden and Barack Obama deported more illegal immigrants than Trump has ever during the same time frames...

Like it or not you need to keep your crazies under control. You can do that however you want but if you don't do it you're going to get a large increase in mass shooting incidents. You can't keep letting people encourage acts of violence in countries with little or no mental health services without consequences

Comment Re:An old familiar story (Score 1) 60

"We're 100% in favour of dealing with the environmental crisis unless it costs us money in which case we'll be dead by the time it gets really bad so who cares, it won't be us who have to live with it".

The problem is one of short term thinking and lack of strategy. Those who will invest money to deal with the problem are the ones that will make the most money in the future when the rest of the world plays catchup and comes asking the experts for assistance.

The future cost money but that investment pays dividends.

Comment Re:I Don't Understand At All (Score 1) 11

Amazon has long had a DNS service, called Route 53

Yes... that is ... the problem... Literally the last few major AWS outages have been the result of a Route 53 fuckup.

In other news when there's a breakdown on the highway and you reroute traffic over local roads it will be slower.

Comment Re:Really? (Score 2) 56

automated image pattern matching has been around for decades

The problem is that the LLM only does one trick. When you start integrating other software with it, the other software's input has to be fed in the same way as your other tokens. As the last paragraph of TFS says, "every clock check consumes space in the model's context window" and that's because it's just more data being fed in. But the model doesn't actually ever know what time it is, even for a second; the current time is just mixed into the stew and cooked with everything else. It doesn't have a concept of the current time because it doesn't have a concept of anything.

You could have a traditional system interpreting the time, and checking the LLM's output to determine whether what it said made sense. But now that system has to be complicated enough to determine that, and since the LLM is capable of so much complexity of output it can never really be reliable either. You can check the LLM with another LLM, and that's better than not checking its output at all, but the output checking is subject to the same kinds of failures as the initial processing.

So yeah, we can do that, but it won't eliminate the [class of] problem.

Comment Re:Big, BIG companies should know better (Score 1) 48

(Shuffles off and mutters something about how does a greybeard get Vulture Capitalist funding to setup cross continental niche cloud for people that value stability over shiny, with Open Source ... Open Stack ... Cloudified LibreOffice, Ceph, my lawn)

Every tech company needs at least three things to start with: The business guy, the brain, and the lawyer. Ideally there should also be a marketing guy, but you can add them in later. Also, none of them have to be male, I just like saying "guy", buddy.

Comment Re:Excel is a platform. (Score 1) 48

Untrained? Excel is a spreadsheet tool within the MS Office suite with 27,000 features. It requires a tad more training than handing a moron a hammer

Yes and no, depending. If you are building an application in Excel, yes, all you said is true. If you are using one, no, none of it is. Spreadsheets can be set up such that the user just stuffs data into them where they are supposed to, then clicks a button to get results. Or maybe they don't even have to hit a button.

For the simplest useful example I can think of, I put together a spreadsheet which produces a table we use for asset valuation. This spreadsheet changes every year. If you load my spreadsheet, it will be correct for the current year. No user has to think about that at all, they just load it and get a correct table. You can extrapolate this to basically any level of complexity because Excel has VBA and you can script everything. The user just follows instructions, and they aren't even allowed to edit any cells which could break anything.

Comment Re: Alibaba (Score 1) 32

In case anyone is going this far down the hole, it turned out great. Even though the item was shipped from the US, because the seller didn't respond I got a refund without having to return it.

So far Aliexpress has been responsive to 100% of my issues and I only have needed to be a little patient and not expect everything to be solved immediately or arrive immediately.

Comment Re:Google? wtf (Score 2) 48

20 million cells? That seems ridiculous. Why aren't they using a database for something that huge?

I agree that a database-backed application is the right way to go for that much data. However, Finance used Excel because they could. We all like to talk about how bad an idea it is to do that, but Excel brought financial computations on large data sets to people who can't write any code. It has enabled thousands upon thousands of businesses to do things they couldn't do before without paying a programmer to develop a solution they cannot maintain. The fact that other spreadsheets regularly crater when handed data that Excel has no trouble with is exactly why we have so much Excel.

I like to use Drupal to rapidly create database applications which can handle a lot of data without writing code. But I wouldn't expect someone in accounting to be able to do that at all, and that just shifts the problem domain. Instead of getting stuck with Excel, now I'm getting stuck with Drupal. All of the logic just winds up in a different system that you can't trivially transfer it out of, so you have the same exact maintainability problem, except more people know how to work with Excel.

Comment Re:Sigh. (Score 2) 48

"Dumb company runs its finances on 20-million-cell spreadsheets" is my takeaway from that.

You just called every company dumb. Either that or you just pointed out you have no idea how financial departments work. Massive excel spreadsheets are the mainstay of all large companies and even wall street. In many cases replacing a spreadsheet will require a myriad of interlinked tools, databases, calculation engines, scripts, all suddenly opaque to the end user who ultimately needs a data in a row that is able to be analysed. Most of the best data analytics tools are also designed around the ability to quickly ingest large spreadsheets and export them again.

You're just clueless as to how the world around you works.

Comment Re: restore old site? (Score 1) 68

When you ask people to vote for change vs no change they will vote for the latter regardless of how good the former. The problem there is that you will perpetually maintain two systems.

People hate change. All change. Even if the new website was perfect people will vote for what they know.

Comment Re:So they took a working website (Score 1) 68

So they took a website that was working just fine

Found the guy who doesn't own a mobile phone. No there's nothing fine about the BOM website. It flat out doesn't work on the device most people use to get weather information. Forget mobile site, it doesn't even format existing text to make it readable on a small screen.

The BOM website is truly a national embarrassment, especially in a country that is so often hit by floods, fires, and tropical storms.

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