Posts by Neil Barnes

Re: "...AI could turn writing from a serious craft into a cheap commodity"

Analog was one of the original pulp magazines (though with several titles: Astounding Stories of Super-Science to begin with) and it's still going reasonably strong. It also accepts unsolicited submissions and to be honest I'd expect them to be an obvious target for this statistical vomit. Though I wonder about the chat-gpt training: if it is informed by the quality of freely available material, it won't be too hard for the editors to tell the difference. And noting that many of the early SF stories _are_ available, it's likely that the output will show the same cultural mores as the authors of the time presented. That should work well!

I think it was Analog who published a story in which a computer took over writing for an author, getting better and better until every book published was by this 'author'... book event horizon?

The same way you got it in - through the plate glass.

Don't you remember all those robberies back in the day?

Re: Someone is being optimistic

The source I found - first hit - was Statista, which claimed three billion active account users.

Re: Dammit, Jim, I'm an architect, not a computer scientist!

But no more, it seems; hasn't the local council closed the road recently?

Re: Avalanche

But in Germany, the estate agents charge so much from both the buyer and seller that they only need to sell one or two houses a year to keep them in shiny new BMWs...

We've had agents insist on seeing bank account details before they'd make a viewing appointment, and we've told them where to shove it. They give a very definite impression that actually being an agent and selling something is really disturbing their peace of mind.

Re: Baseline

According to a paper published by a couple of Google engineers that I found while writing a thesis on such things, there are over a million words still considered in use in English.

And to quote Humpty Dumpty, when I use a word it means what I mean it to mean...

Re: German engineering

Aye well, they've got a month to get it sorted before I'm flying :)

Re: No menu bars?

Yes, a thousand times yes! I want two things from a music player: either play a complete album all the way through and then stop, or play randomly from the whole collection. Possibly excluding classical music; that should always be in the right order.

My rips are carefully organised by band or composer, then by album title. But ripping programs tend to decide that artists are the definitive descriptor so if I'm not careful I can find one album rips into two or more directories because some tracks have more than one artist...

Colin Chapman would have loved this for designing lightness in!

Re: Upgraded interface

And while the interface is being upgraded, perhaps they could get the spell checker sorted out so that it actually uses English English when that's selected; it appears to choose US 'English' for everything (along with its parent, Firefox). I've given up trying to persuade it to do the right thing.

Re: Are we heading toward a converged Unix?

With or without a coconut?

"practically anyone can send a balloon into the air"

As El Reg should well know!

Re: State of Russia's space program

I did wonder about the relative numbers of Starlink satellites and Russia's ASAT capabilities. Anything ground launched is both heavy and expensive and probably designed more for something like a governmental surveillance satellite present in relatively few numbers, no?

Re: Top of hype reached, I'd say...

Are the developers of these models aware of the old saying 'garbage in, garbage out'?

It takes ten or more years to train a human to be even vaguely critical of what it is being taught - and even then, some of them never make it... why would one expect statistics to do any better?

Re: Grumpy old man icon needed…

It's what I would normally have tried anyway... I only used the verbose form to investigate the artifical stupidity.

p.s. it looks as if the only compatible replacement for an ENC424J600-I/ML is another ENC424J600-I/ML, which is a shame.

Re: I'm a huge teams fan...

But surely you *wanted* to see the text in italics, or bold? Replacing pre and post underscores or asterisks with emphasised text *which is barely visibly different* is merely one of a number of 'helpful' services Teams provides!

<\sarcasm, again>

The value of your investment may go down as well as up. Your house is at risk if you do not continue to make mortgage payments. Consult your doctor or pharmacist for information regarding side effects...

Am I misunderstanding completely? These professional gamblers investors believed Musk's tweet, and instead of holding their shares for the four hundred buck payout, they sold because the price suddenly dropped? And now they want compensation for *their* decisions? Imagine my sympathy!