Posts by veti

That actually makes reasonable sense. It's a rather impolite way of communicating, but the burden of it is: "This feature was considered unimportant to our core functionality and has been discontinued, as of a recent change which we might be able to work out if we could be bothered but frankly it sounds like too much work".

Re: Other issue

Only if you copy great paragraphs of the stuff wholesale. Nobody claims words and phrases are copyright protected. The exact amount you have to copy to get in trouble is - not very well defined, but I never heard of anyone suing over even a whole sentence.

(Except when the target was insanely rich and high profile, and the suit was basically about publicity for the more obscure plaintiff. Legally such suits are non starters, but who cares if it means millions more people have now heard of you?)

Take the word "badass", for instance. Sometime during my lifetime, someone somewhere coined that word. Now it's common currency, but nobody ever even attributes it, much less talks about royalties.

Well, that's the problem really. It's like us, but not. Because it has no empathy - no understanding of us. It doesn't know what we feel, what we experience, it doesn't know things we all do - like what it feels like to be cold, or hungry, or sick, or lonely. It doesn't know whether the person who asks it a question is being playful, or drunk, or deadly earnest.

We could try to make it more like us by giving it "needs" and "drives" of its own. But that sounds like an even worse terrible idea than unleashing it in its present state.

Re: But physical keys can be hacked

"Determined crooks" can get around, or through, anything. That's the basis of many tedious movies.

But only a tiny handful of crooks are "determined". The vast majority are looking for a soft target, they're not going to spend hours of time on planning or training or researching how to steal your car when your neighbour has made theirs that much easier, by leaving the keys in.

Re: Big surprise...

Next up, robo bartenders...

Could make a lucrative sideline in selling records of their conversations back to employers' HR departments. Thanks for the idea.

Burma Shave.

Re: Federal Spending > Inflation > Rising Interest Rates

Why do you single out "the last two years"? The federal govt has been running up the deficit much longer than that.

No administration in my lifetime has made the slightest effort to cut federal spending. The big difference between the parties is that Dems generally think taxes should be higher, whereas Repubs generally think they should just pass the debt on to their kids.

Like Trump - just because he's evil, that doesn't mean he's stupid. I'm sure Kanye has interesting ideas sometimes.

Re: "an AI supercomputer called the Good Machine"

You may serve it with greens, And it's handy for striking a light.

Re: Will anyone notice?

That's not just news websites, though. That's pretty much endemic to the internet as a whole.

The reasons for which were laid way back when "HTTP" was first developed, and the idealists at the time decided the internet should be free to use. Seemed like a great idea at the time. Now we can see the downside.

Re: I'm just asking...

Oh, I think they know it all right. But as long as the paychecks keep coming, they'll keep pretending.

And the paychecks won't stop until Mr Musk feels he can declare victory, in some dimension or direction anyway. Which he clearly can't at this point.

Re: Complexity

Structured data is far easier to work with than unstructured. Both JSON and XML are familiar to just about everyone and very widely supported by a huge variety of tools.

Re: Rote Learners

Yeah, GP's characterisation was exaggerated to the point of caricature. If someone is that clueless, they wouldn't be able to stick with MS Office for more than about six months anyway.

That's not why Linux and Libre haven't swept the market.

Re: Hey Moon - your time is, like, totally dilated

Well, that happens on Earth too, but we seem to manage somehow.

Re: I don't understand.

"Inherent" in these arguments is a tell for magical thinking - specifically, the belief that nothing made or modelled in mere silicon can ever match the mysterious working of the human mind. Because - why, exactly?

If you really understand how the human mind works, then what's to stop someone, somewhere, from encoding that understanding?

If, as seems more likely, you would admit that your understanding of the mind is imperfect and incomplete, then how do you know that hardware and software can't (ever) replicate it?

Bonus points if you can define either "understanding" or "consciousness" in a generalised and non-circular form.

Re: Customer?

You could move to a country without taxes.

The only one I know of is the Vatican City, and I believe their immigration rules are pretty tough, but maybe you can find a softer touch somewhere else.

Re: Did you not get the NEUKlearer HyperRadioProACTive ParaMilitary AIMemo?

No worries, we'll just hand over our military command responsibilities to someone who can't be intimidated.

Like... an AI, perhaps.

Re: Defence?

No, all he needs to do is show that the evidence against the perp doesn't meet the standard of proof "beyond reasonable doubt". That is to say, it is "reasonable" to doubt that the evidence has been faithfully preserved and accurately documented.

Then it's up to the prosecutors to show that the evidence is clean.

We're talking about the US military here. It would cost $27 billion over a 15-year program for them to develop and test a big enough "stick with a pin on the end".

Re: we have little choice but to trust whatever ChatGPT or LaMDA say to us

We've been reading (and writing) mashups of meaningless empty verbiage for - as long as I've been alive, at least - and show no signs of either getting tired of it or realising what we're doing.

The internet, and Google specifically, made it much easier to find factoids and talking points to support whatever argument you wanted to make. I remember using it that way, circa 2000. I eventually grew out of it, but I foresee no early shortage of "people who are ~20 years younger than me".

Re: The "weather" balloon

What did the GP say that was "wrong"?

Re: Black is white and white is black

There are dozens of lobbies that present various cases on energy sources. For over a hundred years the industry was overwhelmingly dominated by the coal lobby. Nuclear had a moment in the 1950s, and continued to hold quite a decent mindshare until Chernobyl, from which it never really recovered.

In the 1980s coal began to yield to gas, and solar and wind have been beating on the door since about the turn of the century. The most frustrating thing in Britain, specifically, is that wave and tidal power have never captured any significant share of the debate. Probably because Britain lacks the capability to do the hard work of commercialising them, and no other major country is interested enough. Although maybe the Japanese could be, now that they're falling out with nuclear...

Re: Mismanagement

Well, that is exactly what the findings imply. They are, explicitly, allowed to keep data on identified subjects of interest. The fact that that's apparently not enough for them - implies that no one has made the effort to identify and tag which data actually fall into this category.

That's what I meant by "shockingly negligent". They've got all this data, but they haven't actually done the most basic level of analysis to it. They're just keeping it around in case they want to go fishing one day.

Re: How is this man in charge of anything?

I would. I'd like to see how he handles the duck.

Re: Interesting at least

That would depend very much on whether the citizen in question supports Modi. If they have doubts about the dear leader, then they're at substantially more risk from their own government (harassment, legal or illegal abduction and imprisonment) than from Google (serving targeted ads).

Re: Prosthetic imagination

I'm - not too stressed about losing the skill to pad two sentences of meaningful content out to fill a 20-page document. I mean - imagination, sure, but what a drag. GPT is welcome to that job as far as I'm concerned.

Re: You just can't have it both ways

Or both. That's also an option.

The Twitter files were the most overblown story since... well, since the Trump-Alfa bank nonsense, which I'm ashamed to admit I bought into for a week or so. So far all the documents released by Musk have shown the opposite of what he said they did. He is relying, of course, on vanishingly few people reading the actual source, as opposed to the misrepresentations posted on Twitter by his approved churnalists.