Posts by breakfast 1557 publicly visible posts • joined 24 May 2007
Fiery meteors landing in the deep sea? I've read The Kraken Wakes and suffice to say if this is an invasion of that kind then they're not going to be able to manage their main strategy (deliberately melting the ice caps so the land is inundated) because we're already doing it ourselves! In your face, deep-living-aliens-from-maybe-one-of-Jupiter's-moons-or-wherever!
I'd say your first duty is to report them to the organisation and get them rectified, which it sounds like he tried to do and ran into walls of apathy and incompetence. You can't get a person or an organisation to care about something they don't want to care about.
He probably should have gone to the regulator when Twitter showed they weren't prepared to try or at the very least when he left, but he was probably under enough NDAs that it didn't feel worth the risk of turning into a massive legal wrangle. The moral high ground is easier to occupy making comments on the internet than it is when you have signed 500 pages of contract saying that you'll get your ass sued to pieces if you breathe a word of anything you have ever done to anyone. I'm guessing that some mysterious benefactor (hard to guess who might have an interest here) has now made it worth his while. The fact that the motivation is transparent doesn't make the claims incorrect - at the very least they are 100% coherent with everything we know about the corporate culture at Twitter.
This is more like the gun than the car in that this is a piece of software which is designed only to be used for a specific task, and that task is money laundering. Even in America, if someone released a new kind of gun that could only be used to do crimes, there's a chance that the authorities would clamp down on it.
The error you're making here is that assuming that people will hire the best candidate for the job based entirely on impartial judgement of the person's skills and abilities. Study after study has shown that this is simply not what people do- the same CV with an Indian-sounding or European-sounding name often get quite different responses. Interviewers will ignore a more skilled candidate who doesn't look or talk like them - there's no shortage of data on this.
The reason companies are willing to invest in diversity programmes is because they tend to balance out some of that bias and mean they have a better chance of *actually* finding the best candidates. Any wider benefits to society are entirely co-incidental; a more diverse workforce is good news for shareholder value.
As a counterpoint, how many important scientific achievements started out by offering the best possible results that the technology could offer? Hyperbole aside, this seems like an interesting starting point and there may well be something of value to come from it.
So what is your solution to the problem that fossil fuels are going to kill us? It's all very well to complain that renewables are cheaper but your bills are still going up (two things that are true) but whinging that energy generation that won't kill us exists seems like it's not really helping anybody. While the price of fossil fuels keeps rising and we're partially reliant on fossil fuels for energy, the price per unit of energy will rise regardless of how it's generated. That's capitalism.
If you give up on the cheaper part of power generation so you're only generating power the expensive way, how does that lower prices?
It does mention this, but I have seen a few artists observing that by taking their work and incorporating it into the source model for the AI it's a kind of diffuse copyright-theft. Without their art, the AI would be worthless, but the outcome of the AI is likely to be losing them work and offering no benefit to them.
Also what happens as we have more AI generated art online? Do we end up with AI just recycling AI produced-images on a slowly entropic path, as we're starting to see with text generation online?
*Looks quizzically at two Apple computers on desk, neither of which has a headphone jack.*
I can see a use for a headphone jack if this is being used to do video editing, as bluetooth often adds enough latency to put the audio out of sync and although a pro at their desk is likely to have a standalone audio interface, one would hope that it would be possible to use a computer at this price and performance level without external hardware being essential.
The upside of green hydrogen is that it can be produced at the edge of the grid, close to your offshore wind farms when the weather is right for renewables but grid demand is low, and then shipped to where it is needed. It isn't tremendously efficient to produce this way, but when the energy is basically free and there's not a pressing need for it elsewhere, inefficiently producing hydrogen lets you keep a significant amount of the energy you have produced stored up for when and where it is needed.
I have worked for some companies that specialised in Sharepoint tooling and I think I can honestly say that it got slightly less bad over time. I remember being on a call with some very senior Microsoft Sharepoint people where one of them said "the Sharepoint Platform is more like an operating system" and that felt extremely bad to me, like this mediocre file-sharing tool packed with barely-working features is like an operating system? Now I don't want to use any of your operating systems either.
Last time I worked with a Sharepoint-based platform, we found ourselves step-by-step moving the product off Sharepoint and every time we did, it got a little better. By the time it was a standalone product that could access Sharepoint for some things it was endlessly faster, tidier, and more reliable.
NPM is the Visual Basic of our time - it gives you a huge amount of tools and components that allow you to pull together something that looks impressive and works well in a minimal amount of time. Unfortunately the ecosystem does lean shonky and a lot of the packages end up needlessly fat because they incorporate a huge number of small modules that do relatively simple things. That's the trade-off, and whether it matters to you or not is very much down to what you value as a developer. Often quick results that work consistently are worth more than a slimmed down and efficient library, even though the latter is far more satisfying as a developer and less wasteful.
The Javascript security model is far more effective than ActiveX ever was and running code in a working sandbox rather than the "can basically do what it wants on your PC" model of ActiveX is a very different degree of access, but it can absolutely use your system resources to do whatever it feels like within that sandbox and keeping users safe from that is part of our duty as developers. NPM does not make that easy.
Not specific to Twitter, but any organisation that has green checks on the dashboard while their service is not working should have to pay me, personally, a significant fine. It's just super-irritating. You're not deceiving anyone, you're just showing that your dashboard is shit. Make it better.
I think a consequence of ubiquitous AI will be lots of tools like this that do an alright but not amazing job. Programming will become more about designing a specification that can be turned into code by AI system. Like many automated systems the average will be passable, normalised - we will lose both the worst and the best, leaving a sort of programmatic stodge that works fine for most people.
Maybe that is alright, maybe it frees up those of us who are really interested in the craft of programming to work on more interesting projects.
With a lot of these AI systems what this is really doing is treating an existing resource (in this case GitHub user contributions) as a free source of data to effectively crowdsource code from without credit, in the same way the art tools everyone's going crazy for are crowdsourcing art without giving the original artists any credit, arguably a form of deniable mass copyright theft. I'm interested in what happens as the outputs of these tools end up becoming part of their source corpus- are they going to generate ever more generic code or start synthesising techniques based on the system's own work? Is it -and its usefulness- going to flatten out as the proportion of human-generated content declines until it is effectively almost entirely recycling its own content?
Happy recollections of our Acorn A3000 from my teenage years only slightly tempered by the recollection that in spite of being a better computer by any technical metric, all the good games were on the Amiga and Atari ST. Everyone else talking about R-Type or Shadow Of The beast and we were stuck with the 4th Dimension knock-off - and fair play to the 4th Dimension, I think they were the only reason we had any games on the Arc at all.
We did get the best version of Elite in the end, though. That was a win.
As statistical text-analysis type AI gets better at chaining words together in statistically plausible orders we need to move away from the Turing Test as having any significant indicator of interacting with an intelligence. All we learn from the Turing Test is that our testers are bad at recognising a human under very specific conditions.
Interesting, though, that Google suspend an employee for raising concerns.
From what I can gather the other reason the Tesla autopilot is showing up as safer appears to be that it switches itself off if it realises an impact is unavoidable, so it is not *technically* driving the car when the collision takes place. If you realise there's a problem and try to correct but fail, you took over so as far as Tesla are concerned you're still responsible.
Just feels a tad shady.
Either quite a few people would be excited to don Exoskeletons for their jobs or the entire history of mech anime has been a massive lie.
I already have to hamper myself with glasses to do my job (although it's not so hampery as I do also wear them the rest of the time) so I think I could get by. Likewise a lot of people have to wear gloves to do their jobs - gardeners, builders and the like often have to wear a whole lot of specific gear and they don't seem to mind too much, so I guess those of us who work at a computer could manage it at a pinch. They would have to offer clear value, though, and I have yet to see anything convincing on that front.
I feel for whoever has this - we had an Archimedes when I was at secondary school so I understand how knowing your computer was built on a RISC based architecture and technologically superior does very little to compensate when your friends are all talking about the cool games they can play on their Atari STs and Amigas, none of which ever came out on the Arc.
Chocks Away was good, though, fair play.
Looking at Bot Sentinel's numbers here ( https://botsentinel.com/stats/platform-stats ) they classify around 24% of users as 'Disruptive' or 'Problematic' - obviously this is very finger-in-the-air, I've seen some plausible accounts in the 'Disruptive' category (but also many probable bots in 'Satisfactory') - but if we imagine that there's some bias towards Bot behaviour in the accounts it is asked to analyse and it still seems plausible that we're looking at something closer to ~20% of users being bots.
A 2017 study -more rigorous than my guesswork but less current - suggested it was in the region of 15% at that point. ( https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.03107.pdf )
Whatever the source, it seems everyone outside Twitter is estimating significantly more bot users than Twitter are, which may explain a lot about why the hellsite is so full of goddamn bots.
It's very unfair to say these projects are all Ponzi Schemes. The ecosystem is far more diverse than that, incorporating Pyramid Schemes, Rug-Pulls, classic Pump-And-Dump scams and traditional fraud. Pretty much any trick a nineteenth century swindler might have tried before financial regulations were put into place to protect people is likely to be alive and well in the Wild West of Web3.
Counterpoint, I have never got news so quickly as happens on Twitter. For events happening in real time, nothing else matches up. For more detailed reporting you need something long-form, but that's always been the case. Most breaking stories are really a tweet's worth of information wrapped in a few paragraphs of speculation and goodness knows you can get the latter on Twitter fairly easily.
I keep my laptop dual-boot (Ubuntu rather than Mint these days) and when I was running Mint as my main desktop OS it worked fine when it worked but trying to get anything new working on it was always a matter of days tracking through every forum and linux related stack exchange site trying to figure out which information was still relevant. It felt like walking on the ice of a deep lake- smooth and easy, but if you fell through a hole of wanting to get your video card working (maybe it's better now but when I was using it routinely the drivers for laptop 3D accelerators were really hard to configure) or wanting to use an ASIO soundcard you ended up in deep water very quickly. After a routine grub update somehow overwrote my boot sector and made it impossible to do my job for a couple of days I realised that the benefits of feeling vaguely morally superior as a Linux user weren't worth it compared to the sheer amount of time it took to configure things that work automatically on Windows.
Now Windows is my main OS again, although the operating system is nowhere near as good, the sheer amount of tools I can run on it more than compensates. I can run games without having to spend hours figuring out how to get the OpenGL driver to work and having weird random crashes! I can write music and use the many thousands of VST synths available! VSTs sometimes work on WINE but with the complexities of Linux audio you can spend a lot of time not even knowing whether they're working or not and good music tools are expensive - I can't afford to invest in something I can't use. I like Linux and I would love for it to be a practical day-to-day OS but I simply cannot do the same things with it that I can on Windows and for me having a computer is about the things I can do with it.
What you're saying here is that you wouldn't trust any developer under 50, which is your prerogative but it's going to make it hard for you to work with younger colleagues as you constantly sideeye them.
Having to bit-shift unsigned integers is an old-people thing now (and embedded systems, but that's quite an old-people field) and honestly that's fine. Interpreted languages are productive and developer cycles are more expensive than processor cycles, so let's use the approaches that allow us to do the important work and allow our compilers and runtimes to handle the bitwise arithmetic for us.
Don't get me wrong, I'm old and can remember when we had to build our own compilers out of plywood uphill both ways in the winter, but our field has changed, as all things must. The truth is a younger dev getting their head down and writing a few lines of javascript will get more done than an old man spending the same amount of time yelling at a cloud.
I got a notification that BT were now offering FTTP here, which should be great but after years of 2 down and 0.8 up on our copper line (unless it was raining) we have moved to a radio system which is way faster but also quite unreliable and we're on a contract for that for a while. Maybe if they'd indicated that they were ever going to do anything to improve matters here, we might have waited a little longer but the first clue anything was going on was an Openreach van parked in the drive for a few days and even then it was ages before BT actually told us they were adding a more brisk connection.
Unless that was an MI5 surveillance van, of course, in which case their job would have been even more boring than usual.
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