This is AI slop, sadly. Here's a sentence that very few humans might scribe:
"But what if one were to look at the question empirically, say in effect just by enumerating possible programs and explicitly seeing how fast they are, etc.?"
It is absolutely rammed with m dashes, which is not conclusive. For me, a bit of a clanger is that the writer might have decided to instruct the beastie to go fast and loose with grammar "norms". So, we have loads and loads of sentences starting off with a conjunction (and, but).
It just gets worse. The article is huge - it's over 17,000 words. I've skimmed it and its awful.
Nah, it’s just Wolfram being Wolfram. He was generating this scale and style of content well before LLMs were a thing. He usually has some interesting ideas buried in the massive walls of text he creates. Some people can’t get past the style and personality though (I can’t blame them…).
false; wolfram has been circling the topic of "small yet mighty" rule-based systems for decades, and this is his writing style. if you don't like the topic or the style, you are welcome to move on from it with whatever grace you can muster up.
> This is AI slop, sadly. Here's a sentence that very few humans might scribe:
> "But what if one were to look at the question empirically, say in effect just by enumerating possible programs and explicitly seeing how fast they are, etc.?"
I don't think much of Wolfram's writing, but this seems to me to be just the way that scientists write. I wouldn't blink if I encountered it in a scientific paper. (Well, I'm a mathematician, so I don't know for sure what experimental-science or even theoretical CS papers look like, but I certainly wouldn't blink if I encountered it in a math paper.)
I'm not sure the "journos" from Techradar are too familiar with how networks ... work.
IPv4 requires an inbound NAT these days to work at all globally, unless you actually have a machine with a globally routable IP. There will probably be a default deny firewall rule too. I do remember the days before NAT ...
IPv6 doesn't require NAT (but prefix translation is available and so is ULA) but again a default deny is likely in force.
You do actually have to try quite hard to expose something to the internets. I know this because I do a lot of it.
The entire article is just a load of buzz words and basically bollocks. Yes it is possible to expose a system on the internet but it is unlikely that you do it by accident. If I was Sead, I'd go easy on the AI generated cobblers and get a real job.
I look for shadows underneath stationary vehicles. I might also notice pedestrians "vanishing". I have a rather larger "context" than any robot effort.
However, I am just one example of human. My experience of never managing to run someone over is just an anecdote ... so far. The population of humans as a whole manages to run each other over rather regularly.
A pretty cheap instant human sensor might be Bluetooth/BLE noting phones/devices in near range. Pop a sensor in each wing mirror and on the top and bottom. The thing would need some processing power but probably nothing that the built in Android dash screen couldn't handle.
There are lots more sensors that car manufacturers are trying to avoid for cost reasons, that would make a car way better at understanding the context of the world around it.
I gather that Tesla insist on optical (cameras) only and won't do LIDAR. My EV has four cameras and I find it quite hard to see what is going on when it is pissing down with rain, in the same way I do if I don't clean my specs.
Please show me on the doll where ISO 9000 hurt you!
I have been an MD for 25 years. ISO 9001 reg. since 2006. Its been a bit of a pain at times but it does concentrate the mind towards doing things right. We've never used consultants, we've always just read and followed the standards.
What is your experience?
PS During our last assessment, the assessor described a few recent AI written efforts they had come across. Laughable.
PPS I've been doing this for over 25 years and I think that a quality based approach to running a company is a good idea ... you?
My father was a ISO9000 and ISO9001 certification consultant for over 10 years. He taught at Cal Poly Pamona, near the end of that era. This was my first exposure to using the familiar terms seen in RFCs like MUST MAY SHALL, etc.
Ever tried to write a quality based document describing how to create an air filled, japanese oragami balloon? (step 3 is the first big hurdle, https://www.wikihow.com/Make-an-Origami-Balloon). That was his goto starter for ISO classes.
> I've been doing this for over 25 years and I think that a quality based approach to running a company is a good idea ... you?
ISO standards don't ensure this, since certification is only based on verifying documentation format. What the ISO processes do tend to do is create a small memo indicating that every dept should justify the work they are doing by writing it down and showing it to their boss. What that does to an organization is to produce a crapload of near-useless documentation and throw a large number of people into political hell. After that, the solution is always the same. They quickly move from everyone trying to coordinate down to a very small number of people (1-3) taking charge of moving dept to dept. Either the agents or the supervisors who are articulate enough to gloss over inconsistencies and gaps to form a coherent story, write the documentation.
While this may lend well to shoring up some companies' internals, in the early 2000s, ISO certification consultancy was a lucrative gig. It was chased as a stamp to markup pricing, rather than a quality tool.
I think "concentrates the mind towards doing things right" is an accurate statement. On the other hand the parent is also correct that it is almost impossible to fail and the requirements are too broad to actually have much effect. The most helpful thing is you get the knowledge and experience of an auditor for a day. Other benefits are having someone make you write your processes down and making it easier to replace people, making sure there is a chart documenting the relationships between the people and to have some language about dealing with customer complaints and defective produce.
About 20 years ago, so yes, I might be a little out of date ;)
I've seen it happen time and again with startups, though. They have a great idea, perfect for a large business to use. They get a project manager or department manager excited about it, they even run a PoC successfully. And then they slap headfirst into the Procurement Wall and the whole project grinds to a halt. Three years between project approval and issuing a purchase order. And then 90 days between invoice and payment. Startups go bust waiting for these cogs to turn.
I started off from the press release on GOV.UK (as linked in OP and which is a paragon of virtue in web design) and followed the "Free AI foundations training" link and it all went south rather rapidly.
Its bold, brash and horrible. It does look like a set of links and its not immediately obvious where you start or what to do with it.
There are a few things that might be hyperlinks but the large weird rounded cornered sort of press me perhaps if you dare but I'm a bit flat and might kick your dog thing that might be a control or not but I'm purple and have an arrow ... ooh go on ... click me. Clicking around that area does move on to the next step which is just as obtuse.
"I have a Windows 11 workstation ... There's no lag with context menus or browsing directories with a lot of files."
You have the same Windows updates as everyone else and it will be painful. Also you should be keeping those CAD and games up to date and that will be very painful. Updates often happen at unfortunate times.
The Win 11 start menu has managed to be worse than the Win 10 effort and jumped to the middle of the task bar because ... reasons. Search on it is ever so slow. For some reason Win server 2025 has decided that I want to use a welsh keyboard (I'm english and tend to en_GB) when I RDP to one. Cymraeg (soz if I got "welsh" wrong) is alphabetically first in the en_GB list of keyboard mappings and I didn't even know there is a welsh keyboard! I suppose they must have some accents and diacritics not found in english. Its all just a bit weird that a bug like that surfaces after well over two decades of me using RDP from a Linux box to a Windows server.
You wag your finger at endpoint management in the same way that most software vendors used to do at AV back in the 90s and 00s (and 10s and 20s!) Its nothing new and basically bollocks! Modern AV is very good at being mostly asynchronous these days and besides, we have unimaginably faster machines these days and very fast CPU, gobs of RAM and SSDs. Copy a multi GB file and yes AV will take a while but at least you might be saved from nasties.
There is a good reason that corp devices have to run things like inventory agents, log shippers and the rest too - its about security. You doing your own IT security is fine and I'm sure you'll be fine.
You can get Win 11 to work on an old machine for now but as you say, you have to circumvent things. When you do that, I think you are storing up issues for later. Perhaps you will be lucky but perhaps not. My dad will soon be rocking Linux instead of blowing a grand+ on a new PC. He will get a secure booting Ubuntu based effort that looks quite similar to Win 11 that is fully supported by the vendor ... and me. I managed to "port" my wife some years ago and she is a much tougher proposition than my dad!
> Also you should be keeping those CAD and games up to date
Not OP, but why? I have a perpetual license and a 12-year-old copy of a corpo CAD package and it works fine. I see no reason to compulsively update something that's feature-complete and functional.
Updates break shit or make shit worse for me all the time. See: Windows 11, macOS Tahoe, and KDE next year when they drop my working X11 session and expect me to use busted-ass Wayland that's missing functionality I use daily.
Why do I need updates? "Security?" I'm not exactly a nation-state hacking target. I don't run random pirated software. I'm firewalled to hell, and behind CGNAT on Starlink. I'll keep my browser up to date, fine, but I'm still running -esr.
I get where you are coming from. That was my stance roughly 20 years ago too. I also note that you are quite clearly not daft!
You and I have different "jobs". I worry about thousands of systems on many sites, one of which is my home. I'm an IT consultant and am the managing director of my company. I think you are an engineer, perhaps retired ("12-year-old copy of a corpo CAD package and it works fine")
If Solidworks, Catia, AutoCAD or whatever (?) works then fine. You might like to firewall off whichever vendor's website/security systems might want to stop a 12 year old copy of a corpo CAD from working if it isn't licensed. It probably is because all of the above generally need a license service.
I worry about many 1000s of PCs and I think updates, patches etc are a good idea. If you are an engineer, then you will have to do your own "deploy, fix issues" cycle. IT is just the same.
"stress" (in engineering terms) has a particular meaning and is not a generic term. It is not really a synonym for "forces" or "what makes other stuff break"!
Let's look at just the downward forces:
I need some quick figures 1 - an early Boeing 747: 330 tonnes (metric) fully loaded and 160 tonnes empty. A tonne is 1000 Kg.
According to 2: 240 feet per minute vertical is a hard landing which about 1.2m/s. 60 - 180 is considered ideal, so let's go for about 150fpm which is about 0.7m/s.
We have to estimate the maximum downward force on take off. At the point of just before lift off, the plane has rotated to say, let's say 45 degrees, and its engines are delivering enough force and its wings are delivering enough force to push it into the air. Surely at take off, that vertical force is simply the weight of the aircraft, which has remained the same all the time. It doesn't suddenly push down harder than its weight, that's just what it feels like for a passenger.
So let's allow our jet to be empty on landing and also let the acceleration due to gravity be 10m/s/s
So what is the instantaneous downward force of a mass of 160 tonnes dropping at 0.7 m/s compared to a dead weight load of 330 tonnes. Both are in a gravitational field of 10 m/s/s (or m^s-2).
Now this is where I get a bit lost because force = mass x acceleration and the landing plane is descending at a constant velocity of 0.7 m/s. Mind you, the ascending plane is also ... ascending, or will do but it does not have an instantaneous upward velocity so at wheels off it has a vertical acceleration of zero.
1) when an airliner lands, the undercarriage legs, which are telescopic sprung and damped struts, spread the vertical deceleration over a finite period (I cannot say how long it lasts, but I would say of the order of a second or so.)
2) At the point of touchdown, the wings are generating lift about equal to the aircraft’s weight. This decreases quite rapidly, largely on account of the decease in angle of attack as the nosewheel comes down and from the deployment of spoilers, but it would be mistaken to think that the runway is immediately supporting the full weight of the airliner after touchdown.
3) On takeoff, until the nosewheel is lifted to initiate rotation, a significant fraction of an airliner’s weight is being supported by the runway. During rotation, as the angle of attack increases, the lift increases [1] until it exceeds the weight, at which point the airliner lifts off.
4) If we ignore the fact that the undercarriage is sprung, then the airliner has no vertical velocity until it lifts off. Right at that point, however, when the lift exceeds the weight, it gains a vertical acceleration.
I hope this helps!
[1] Plus a vertical component of the engine thrust, but no airliner rotates to anything like 45 degrees - in fact, if it has not left the ground at a rotation angle equal to the angle of maximum lift coefficient (~10 - 15 degrees), it is not going to do so without going faster.
OK so let's look at a second. I think I can get away with this analysis:
On take off f = 330 x 10 = 3300 (units etc)
On landing f = 160 x 10.7 = 1712
So, if you are gentle enough on landing and the aircraft is nearly half the weight it was on take off then the downward force on landing is very much less than that on take off.
That 160 tonnes empty also implies I've thrown the passengers, crew and luggage out too, which is a bit rough. Let's try total fuel at "about 180 to 213 tonnes" and allow that we need a factor of safety, so let's say 40 tonnes of fuel left over on landing.
On landing f = 200 x 10.7 = 2140
So, I'm still going to need some convincing about landing aircraft causing more damage than those taking off.
I was only waffling about rotation angles whilst trying to get to grips with what is going on. I now don't think the engines have anything to do with this analysis. Mind you I am just about old enough to remember watching Lightnings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Electric_Lightning) taking off. Imagine a large silver firework ...
IF the velocity would change from 0.7m/s to 0m/s over one second, the acceleration would be 0.7m/s/s. But if the time span over which that velocity change is (much) shorter, the acceleration would be (much) higher.
Not typically. An airliner can and often does stall just above the runway and then falls the very small distance that remains. So the formula would be more like the airplane falling from a few feet up. The tail is still generating downforce (the opposite of lift) which is why the nose is in the air.
"But what if one were to look at the question empirically, say in effect just by enumerating possible programs and explicitly seeing how fast they are, etc.?"
It is absolutely rammed with m dashes, which is not conclusive. For me, a bit of a clanger is that the writer might have decided to instruct the beastie to go fast and loose with grammar "norms". So, we have loads and loads of sentences starting off with a conjunction (and, but).
It just gets worse. The article is huge - it's over 17,000 words. I've skimmed it and its awful.
Please don't do this.
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