Lots of new USB DVD drives are available from brands I've never heard of. But the availability of Bluray drives is so low I suspect they're only new old stock.
I'm almost certain the reason is licenses - DVDs licenses have long expired and back when they were in effect DVDs were the mainstream option, so lots of devices and machines around for them when licenses were needed and that gave momentum to DVDs. Blurays on the other hand still require licensing and they never became as mainstream as DVDs.
I can find a bunch of small businesses pressing CDs and DVDs but they rarely provide a Bluray option. I have a feeling that even after Bluray patents expire, DVDs will still outlast Blurays :-P.
You should look for Blu-ray drives instead of Bluray which does not exist /s
Back around 2007 during the red vs blue HD laser format war, the spelling was hammered into me as the incorrect spelling was tirelessly brought to one's attention. Since we're going down memory lane on shiny discs, I couldn't resist bringing this one back too
Probably. Bluray still exists, still a popular medium for selling games on PS/Xbox and to certain extent movies to people who like to watch on their high-end equipment.
Absolutely. And discs as well. I had an x-ray recently and asked them to give me the image so I could take it to a different clinic, and they burned it onto a CD. So I suppose optical media is sort of irreplaceable for medical applications at least.
The thing is that sometimes you just need a cheap physical medium you can give away. Sure cloud is an alternative, but it's a bad one, since it costs money to keep online. A CD or a floppy is something you record and forget. And USB sticks are much more expensive and can be a security risk.
Autorun ran automatically because it made sense back then since there were no recordable CDs yet. It was assumed that no one would put malware onto a pressed CD, except, apparently, Sony.
Starting with, iirc, XP, Windows started prompting you whether you'd like to run the autorun.
Testing doesn't even need to be that rigorous for humans, it's easy to spot someone who is lying about the depth of their experience with a 15 minute conversation.
For AI this will be impossible, however.
If you're talking about testing of code, well "tests can only prove the presence of bugs, not their absence"
I'm stunned that "mapping out" blocks of bad RAM is a thing you can do. It reminds me of the old days when hard disks had to be "low-level formatted" first (ask your parents, kids) and it would ask you for a list of bad sectors to map out. Sometimes hard disks would even come with a list of known bad ones printed on the top.
'Ask your grandparents' would be more accurate. Sales of models of hard drive that could be low level formatted had almost entirely ended by the year 1992. Primitive PC's that only ran DOS and had 20MB or 40MB hard drives were considered obsolete over thirty years ago, when windows 3.11 onwards existed.
In the summer of 1989, I had completed all my work for my BS-CS degree, and was waiting for the University to give me a diploma. I took a summer internship at Imprimis (later bought by Seagate), and I was honored to work with the Manufacturing Engineers for the Wren IV through Wren VII hard drive lines.
The Wren VII was the first consumer-grade SCSI hard drive with a capacity of 1GB or more — at 5.25” full height. The company had done a commercial-grade SAS drive based on the same chassis the year before. You had to be super careful with those magnets — they could cut off a finger, if you weren’t looking. And they were virtually impossible to remove from a fridge, once applied.
My job was to write a software system that could be used to monitor quality control issues in the manufacturing line, towards a goal of continual process improvement. I didn’t manage to get the whole management system built before I left, but I did get the full toolkit built, and the management system was intended to be a relatively simple layer on top of the toolkit.
Did the drive give you more sectors when you used a smaller sector size and fewer sectors when you used a larger sector size? If the number of sectors didn't change, it probably didn't actually do a low-level format and instead just toggled whether the drive firmware would skip over the extra bytes as if they didn't exist.
Apparently the PC (well, the disk-drive) needed to be moved to the lowest level possible such as a basement, where the earth's magnetic field is strongest.
That way when it was formatted, you could take it upstairs and the weaker magnetic field meant the disk's magnetic structure was stronger so it could be read.
This also caused the early-days meme of computer geeks being "basement dwellers".
"Bad" ram re-mapping is handy for equipment that has special areas of memory shared with hardware like accelerator ASIC, other cpu, or unknown features. Also useful in extreme environment contexts, where the chips may get heavily damaged while in use.
>hard disks would even come with a list of known bad ones printed on the top.
HDD still do, but the flash on the controller quietly handles sector sparing, and remapping. This is why one can't just swap unmodified controller PCB anymore for data-recovery without secret vendor software. =3
Also hard drives, from about the last fifteen years, have calibration data for the specific individual heads that read and write the data to/from the platter.
Some, not all, harddrives have an eeprom that can be transplanted to a different pcb when trying to do data recovery on a drive with a faulty circuit board.
>harddrives have an eeprom that can be transplanted to a different pcb
It is not that simple, as the identical part number may have a lot# with slightly different PCB/chips/firmware. If folks have done forensic recovery, than they get a rather quick education about the constant changes to retail HDD design. =3
It's also a lot easier to get caught when you're not paying full attention to whatever is being sent your way. Say an algorythm starts playing AI music while it's just playing in the background, or a friend posts something silly that you read sideways.
I mean I've seen people saying that whole "oh, it's just so good you can't detect it" a lot but not any actual evidence. I guess sentence can be short enough to not look clauded, but aside from that smells are still very common even for the best frontier models, so how anything else would be indistinguishable ?
I have no idea how people are apparently spotting AI generated text. At this point, I don't even think I want to know. Really, I guess it's no different to me than text written by another person.
A great mental model here is that if you talk to many people, each one has their verbal ticks, their repeated phrases, the preferred idioms, but... you don't notice because you speak to each acquaintance only for a few minutes or hours at most at a week. If you really know someone, since you were both kids, or whatever, then you can often learn their particular style and even mimic it.
If you think of the the frontier AI models as people, there aren't hundreds or thousands of "intelligent human-like machines" that you're speaking to, there are like... two: whatever the best model is made by Open AI or Anthropic right now.
A programmer might be reading (or at least skimming) thousands of pages of text from just one (or at most two or three) models a week, week after week, for months now.
It's like the entire world is talking to two aliens that have stepped of their glittering spaceship. The aliens can hold millions of conversations at once, but they have only two personalities, so... that's what everyone is getting, and everyone has learned to recognise.
What makes things even more obvious is that unlike humans, the models don't "self adjust". On the contrary, they are inherently amnesiacs, and hence don't realise that they're awfully repetitive! A human using the same phrase fifty times in a row will dial it back a notch, but these dials are the weights of the models and are frozen for each released version.
It's different to me from text written by another person, because it is awful in a way that even a bad human writer can't replicate without first performing a lobotomy on themself.
> This is a cool idea. I'm actually quite glad that AI generated stuff is still so very obvious. The world will be a darker place when it isn't.
You mean this site? Because I think the messages it's about is real. The AI stuff is just the dumb copy in the interface (e.g. "Mostly static. The net is quiet until it isn't.").
My worry is that what we recognize is the unstylized default, but it might be very easy to emulate any particular human easily enough with some examples and a prompt and n-gram/style template biasing token selection, or iterative generation-scoring loops.
Yeah. The big LLMs have fairly idiosyncratic writing styles. Smaller finetuned LLMs can be quite different (and you can also tune them on a particular person's writing). I think some of the confidence in this is because there's plenty of cases which just don't get noticed.
This is probably possible now. Back when machine learning was all the rage people were using it to identify authors of various anonymous works. It became an introductory project to identify the Federalist Papers authors. Just read in some works, identify patterns, set up tests, and set the LLM into a loop testing whether the output would be predicted to be the author you are trying to impersonate.
Why this, of all things? It's horrible, but look at where the school was, why did they put a school there? Who puts a school next to a military base? There's way darker stuff than people missing a military base and hitting an adjacent school by accident.
What's the twist? I'm curious why this event was chosen, if for any reason. Personally I am frustrated by people building a school next to a military installation. It feels extremely negligent. I find that to be pretty unsettling and wish people wouldn't do that, because military installations are legitimate and predictable military tagets.
I fully agree, and think the international community is making a big mistake by not (re)formalizing international law and the rules of war, we should force all nations (including those not in conflict -yet-) to store school locations etc. as machine readable maps... we will never be able to roll back the clock and find out if Iran would have properly declared the presence of the school or not, ... but we can PREVENT SIMILAR SITUATIONS in the future, or at the very least have a mechanism which makes it crystal clear when one or more parties are playing very dirty games.
Wouldn't it be much nicer to live in a first world with more clarity, where it is immediately obvious which nation either knowingly bombed a kids school, or what other nation knowingly uses some poor children as human shieds...
But thats not the world we live in: apparently we live in the world where the event also happened, but where the rules weren't set up to provide such clarity a priori. And this second world is IMHO darker than the also dark first world.
> I fully agree, and think the international community is making a big mistake by not (re)formalizing international law and the rules of war, we should force all nations (including those not in conflict -yet-) to store school locations etc. as machine readable maps... we will never be able to roll back the clock and find out if Iran would have properly declared the presence of the school or not, ... but we can PREVENT SIMILAR SITUATIONS in the future, or at the very least have a mechanism which makes it crystal clear when one or more parties are playing very dirty games.
The problem with that idea isn't that a country like Iran would fail to properly declare all of its schools, it's that it would improperly declare military targets as being schools. No one could trust the maps.
If you really wanted to do something like that, the maps would have to be compiled by some neutral 3rd party with on-the-ground verification.
Russia would use that information to attack your schools. They don't care about war crimes in some countries, they see them as things you get bonus points for.
I mean...sure...but if you are going to be consistent you are going to have to criticize the Allied victory in WWII. There were literally piles of dead children in cities all over fascist Europe. We do not even have exact numbers because in some cases the death toll had to be estimated by weighing the ashes found in bomb shelters.
It's one thing to throw thousands of tons of unguided missiles randomly, and it's something else when you brag about the "all knowing AI", how your intelligence services are the best and how your missiles are accurate.
And the civilian bombings, explicitly named "morale bombing" (we called it "terror bombing" when the Axis did the same) were later found to be completely inefficient; a waste of trained crews and expensive bombers that did not contribute to victory at all. Or in other words,
Also, in my country, there's a large shopping area next to an army base, very hard to spot which hangar-looking building is full of stores (or a single large store, or a trampoline park) and which belongs to the army.
I mean.. AI knows best, and we should trust it, even when picking targets, right?
You have a good message in general but here at hacker news we try to avoid personal attacks and that sort of thing. Just letting you know why you’re being flagged; but I do agree Americans are generally clueless.
In my defense, the likelihood that the US has schools on bases did occur to me. It's just I think you shouldn't put schools on or near bases and expect them to not get bombed, if not by accident. So I think it applies to all parties.
> Not every nation thinks it has a God-given right to go half-way around the world and bomb other nation's bases,
I would pause at this assertion. The US is a global thing, with global friends and enemies. Iran being one of our big foes is a knowing thing.
I see this problem almost every year with macOS updates. Here are two examples that I recall of the top of my head. They are already a few years old but really annoyed me, because I spent the time to write detailed bug reports, kept re-testing the issue, and in the end Apple shipped the bugs and never fixed them:
- use of some custom NSTextAttachmentCells was broken when they added force touch dictionary lookup to NSTextView. As far as I know it was never fixed. The API is still documented and if you use it it will cause crashes as soon as someone uses force touch in a text view.
- fat binaries (32/64) stopped working when the 32bit binary uses Objective C garbage collection even when running on a 64bit system and the 64bit binary does not use garbage collection. This is clearly an error, Apple did not care about it. The only way to make such an app launchable again on 64bit is to remove the 32bit binary (that wouldn't run on a 64bit machine anyway)
It was heavily compressed, monochrome, low frame rate, but used a clever upscaling algorithm on the frames to make it watchable.
https://youtu.be/wAJx5Ud0pLc
Though perhaps doing it on the Amiga is cheating. It was overpowered for its time.
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