Posts by Pascal Monett

"train separate models for each type of task"

Yes. Because whatever marketing says, it is not AI.

Thieves knifing thieves

Obviously there will be consequences when an army of miscreants have refined their techniques and turn back to attack on-prem servers, but I'm always happy when criminals take out each other.

It saves work for the police.

"This is sort of the future of rendering as you know"

Of course, Intel.

Nvidia and AMD have been slugging it out over video performance for 3 decades, but you are the future.

Yeah, sure.

Meanwhile, Nvidia's RTX 3080 draws 320 W of power, has 8704 "stream processors" (damned if I know what that is), and can display any game on a 3840 x 2160 screen without trouble.

I'm left wondering if your piddly little 150W part is good enough to play Minecraft on.

But hey, competition is a Good Thing^TM, so you go for it. Who knows, maybe 32 ray-tracing units is the future ?

"You have no privacy, get over it"

Sorry, we're not getting over it.

It's not because you have the means, that you have the right.

And if you can't understand that, let me come over with a cluebat and I will make you understand.

"it's critical for the US not to be left behind"

And take no notice of the countries that are actively banning it, or why.

You wouldn't want to actually have to think of any consequences, now would you ?

"more cash through subscriptions [than] through one-time hardware shipments"

Best of luck, Nvidia.

I don't rent my hardware (or my software, for that matter).

There can be only one BOFH

The PFY will have to leave the coop and fly on his own elsewhere.

Or he can decide to be assistant for the rest of his life. His position is rather comfy, after all.

As long as he doesn't cross the BOFH, that is.

"We're going to try to stop him from going on computers"

Buddy, you can do better than try.

Take his kit and sell it. Be done with it.

Not blaming the parents for not knowing what was cooking. I spent a whole lot of time on my PC way back when I was in school, and my mother wouldn't have had a clue what I was doing. It was in the days before the Internet, so no hacking involved, I was learning how to program.

But now that you know, you should act. No pussy-footing around.

"the rarest users are the C-suite"

And you do not cut them off, even if they are surfing dodgy porn sites during work hours, because if you do, you'll be the one getting the chop.

iFrames

Is it time to remove that from the browser toolbox, or do iframes have a legitimate use that we can't do without ?

Because there's a lot of miscreants using iframes for their nefarious purposes.

"Of course the US itself has form"

Yeah, and the NSA being abysmally stupid enough to get itself hacked means that said Russian hackers are probably gloating that they're using US tools against US targets.

Well done, NSA, you have single-handedly upped the ante worldwide with your stupidity.

Counterfeit chips

It beggars belief that someone would actually try this. I mean, sure, a counterfeit luxury purse is still a purse, but a counterfeit processor ? How do you justify that ?

You can't just go sell an 8086 and brand it a Pentium. A counterfeit luxury purse can look as good as the original, but a counterfeit chip is going to be found out real quick.

These guys must be happy to sell just once to each customer, because I'd never buy from them twice.

What this really means

It means that, from now on, it's going to be a lot harder to find excuses to work with China and not seem lika a hypocrite.

Oh, silly me, I forgot the main excuse : China makes 90% of what we buy.

"Google has revealed a shift of policy" . .

that means that it has finally understood that if it didn't allow 3rd-party payment systems it was in for global blizzard of lawsuits.

Good.

Too bad that it probably won't be bringing its sale share down to the 5% where it belongs. Yet.

"sources finger Capita-run system"

Honestly, with so many failures on its CV, how the Hell is it that Capita continues to get contracts ?

Who's is whose cousin in the upper spheres ? Or is it somebody's wife's son ?

Because there is absolutely no financial, professional or reputational reason to choose Capita. With its history of delays, overcost and underdelivering, it simply boggles the mind that it keeps getting new contracts - that it regularly fails at.

"due to the cryptocurrency's current price fluctuations"

Current ?

I don't know if you're aware, but BitCoin's price has never stopped fluctuating (wildly).

It's only because it is the funny money granddaddy that it has attained such heights. As usual, the first into the pyramid scheme reapes the most rewards.

Adopting BitCoin as legal tender. I don't think that will last all that long. Then again, it's El Salvador, so they can go ruin what's left of their economy, it won't be a big problem on the world scale.

It will be a problem for the poor in El Salvador, though.

Even though I disagree on his pronounciation

I will gladly salute his achievement.

Let us not let his mistaken opinion be a reason to not acknowledge that he did indeed bring a lot of good things into this world.

"you can still have that overarching governance and control"

Of course you can have proper project management, just like you can design an Access database correctly.

The only problem is that, when you put design tools in the hands of Joe Anybody, you get a project coded by anybody. From my experience, that mostly means a collection of Excel spreadsheets with buttons calling VBA code that nobody knows what it does because the guy who coded it left the company, there is no documentation, cryptic information popups and basically everyone is praying every day that the whole hairball keeps working.

So you go ahead and put process design tools in the hands of people who don't know how to code. I will be chortling quietly when reading about how your customers are frustrated because they can't make anything work properly.

Yeah, well when you'll stop paying them ransom money, they'll stop attacking you for money.

Of course, that doesn't mean that they'll stop attacking you.

"Beijing simply will not tolerate substantial COVID-19 outbreaks"

And what is Beijing's policy on the flu ?

Enough of this madness already. Omicron is very contagious, but not dangerous. Let everybody get it and get over it.

Hang on a minute

"Online services like fraud analysis or threat intelligence are some of the areas that are expected to become increasingly powered by AI, and these capabilities were already previously handled by software"

And they will continue to be. Just slapping AI on the process doesn't make it AI. Fraud analysis is not entirely easy, but if you think that a statistical analysis machine is going to erase fraud I have a bridge to sell you.

I have had a training course in detecting fraudulent activity, mandated by one of the clients I work for. It is . . . complicated. I'm not convinced that an "AI" is going to do any better than what is in place at the moment.

But hey, banks have money. If they want to waste it on this, good for anyone who gets the deal.

Nothing new here

It's been a while that CPUs have been designed by programs.

The only difference is that now, said program is being called "AI", so it's newsworthy.