bcrl

25 ms·

331.
by bcrl 2y ago
The legacy telephone network has had hooks for intercepting phone calls built in for many, many decades. While call tracing was difficult in the days of electromechanical telephone switches like the #5 crossbar built in 1947 (see https:&#
332.
by bcrl 2y ago
I wonder what percentage of big box stores have roofs / walls strong enough to support retrofitting solar panels onto them. Modern engineering has a tendency to do the bare minimum needed for present day requirements.
333.
by bcrl 2y ago
That's missing the entire point of my posts. My issue is that the vision being taken and made into being is the one from a dystopian future. Why not aim for a more utopian view of society instead? Focus on solving actual world pro
334.
by bcrl 2y ago
Sure, replacing a meal with different items and textures in it with a single pasty liquid is so much more variety.
335.
by bcrl 2y ago
My reading of the article is that the author doesn't think that picking the dystopian view of what food will become from a well known sci-fi movie and trying to make that into product is the best thing for humanity. The richness of the
336.
by bcrl 2y ago
The reality is that most applications become pretty much unusable when the primary DNS server is not working.
337.
by bcrl 2y ago
My first impression of LA was the giant layer of brown air as I crested the hills while driving from San Francisco on the 101 back in 1999. Combined with the fact that there were awfully seedy parts of town right next to some of the must s
338.
by bcrl 2y ago
Those of us who run ISPs have just as much trouble getting large corporations like Cloudflare or Ticketbastard to respond to blocked IP address issues like this. I know as I have tried to fix things on behalf of my users in the past, and i
339.
by bcrl 2y ago
I think there is a fundamental difference between taping music and using it to create a generative "AI". Artists benefit when their music is more widely distributed (even at a loss) as it provides a larger audience for their merc
340.
by bcrl 2y ago
Behind The Bastards did a couple of episodes on this. Glad to see law enforcement is finally catching up! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/part-one-why-is-the-re...
341.
Bridge should have been closed years before it collapsed [video](youtube.com)
2 points by bcrl 2y ago|0 comments
342.
by bcrl 2y ago
The Ford Transit is widely used as the basis for fibre splicing labs. However, Ford has a problem with the e-Transit: the batteries aren't big enough, even in the extended range version. Charging time doesn't matter, but there n
343.
by bcrl 2y ago
BYD just released such a vehicle with a claimed 2000 km range. Pity we can't buy them in north America. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/byd-la...
344.
by bcrl 2y ago
Asus was also one of the worst offenders in the recent overvoltage scandal which fried a bunch of AMD CPUs.
345.
by bcrl 2y ago
Is anyone surprised after D-Link's previous settlement with the FTC? https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/07/...
346.
by bcrl 2y ago
Minimum Viable Products are pretty much by definition built on shaky foundations. At least with software written by humans the failure modes are somewhat bounded by the architecture of the system as opposed to the who-knows-what-the-model-
347.
by bcrl 2y ago
I think Google understands perfectly that current AI is great at increasing the revenue produced by selling ads. Limitations are irrelevant if they have no impact on selling more ads. It takes a long time for the cycle of brand destructio
348.
by bcrl 2y ago
No, that would be open access to data, which is how science has made progress since time began. Or are you saying the scientific method doesn't apply to implementing self driving cars?
349.
by bcrl 2y ago
Facts? Where we're going we don't need facts.
350.
by bcrl 2y ago
It's almost as if the output of neural networks can't be predicted reliably.
351.
by bcrl 2y ago
Amazon's Textract seems to do a decent job on my horrific scribbles, and is far better than any of the open source OCR tools I tried. To get started quickly, try using Textractor: https://github.com/Artikash/Textr
352.
by bcrl 2y ago
Install a low power FM transmitted and use old analog radios as receivers. A friend did this at their island cottage.
353.
by bcrl 2y ago
We had to wreck 2 spans of copper on one fibre installation job, maybe a total of 60 meters of 2 cables - a 200 pair and 400 pair cable. That netted us CAD$350. Downside is that the incumbent telco initially denied the permit citing lack
354.
by bcrl 2y ago
I think the phrase you are looking for is that LLMs/GPTs are "a solution in search of a problem". They suffer from the exact same that every neural network has in that their behaviour is unpredictable in corner cases. That&
355.
by bcrl 2y ago
However, some forms of generative AI are clearly harmful and should not be released to the general public. Take tools that can clone someone's voice with a few seconds of data. The legitimate use of such a tool is basically limited t
356.
by bcrl 2y ago
I'm not sure if I implementing ideas out of Rick and Morty is the best thing for our universe...
357.
by bcrl 2y ago
Bit rot is very much an issue on NAND. Reading causes disturbances. Flash chips have to compensate for drift in the voltage levels of cells that occurs as things age. While there are layers of protection using error correcting codes, in
358.
by bcrl 2y ago
Fibre transceivers are not expensive. You can get 2km 1310nm single mode 10G SFP+ modules for US$15 here: https://www.fibermall.com/sale-420055-sfp-10g-ir-1310nm-2km....
359.
by bcrl 2y ago
Personally, I really like this summary: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/112444973228241564
360.
by bcrl 2y ago
Except that there's no way to reliably determine what data is generated by AI. I strongly believe there should be a registry of data created by generative AI so that society can track and better determine how to handle the tsunami of

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