Posts by 96percentchimp

Re: Sounds like...

"Is training your AI on copyrighted works actually illegal? Can it be argued that training is similar to a child reading a copyrighted book - learning what the book teaches but simply not allowed to duplicate it, which is plagiarism?"

No. The clue is in the term "works". It's the basis of copyright and the reason why copyright law refers to "works" and not "content". A person learning performs work - time, mental and physical effort and use of artistic resources - by ingesting the copyrighted material and practising to absorb it into their own repertoire of styles. This is as true for a child as it is for a master. An AI performs a very small amount of work ingesting and processing content, and even this is rendered negligible by the massive scale of its outputs to millions of users. It is nothing but algorithmic hijacking of artistic labour.

If copyright law is to mean anything, then it must protect the work performed by humans* in the creation of copyrighted content. Or any other conscious intelligence, non-human or non-biological, although I draw the line at techbros.

Re: What have you been smoking?

The point is not that ChatGPT or any other LLM is smart, whether that's 1% or 110% of human intelligence. The point is that too many people think it's smart. In reality, LLMs give answers which flatter the question, they're trained on an opaque data sets, they cannot cross-check their data or conclusions, and when challenged they double-down, attacking their critics and creating fake data (links to fake scientific papers and news articles).

The final ode of failure might also be LLM's legal Achilles Heel. If you assert that I wrote something which is blatantly wrong, you have accused me of lying. Those are grounds for defamation, and those behind the LLMs may be subject to punitive damages, particularly when they're used to create online content with minimal oversight.

Re: Working

"Reusable rockets do not convey a huge advantage, the costs of the landing infrastructure and the costs of refurbishing the parts and recertifying them are pretty close to the original build costs. Also the additional fuel needed for a controlled decent reduces the effective payload considerably."

That was true for Shuttle but it's not true for Falcon 9. Asshat extraordinaire though Musk is, SpaceX has successfully knocked at least one zero off the cost of putting a kg into orbit and - as the story notes - manages a remarkable launch cadence that's coming close to 1/week on a fleet of around 10 reusable boosters and fairings, with a reliability that's close to beating the Soyuz/proton family. Even the man-rated Dragon edition is significantly cheaper and much more successful than the rival Boeing Starliner, which has yet to fly with a crew. The landing infrastructure for Falcon 9 is a concrete pad or a barge. It's not a vast expense.

The difference is that NASA never really iterated Shuttle's design, or Congress wouldn't fund it it, which amounts to the same thing. It flew pretty much the same experimental vehicle for 30 years. SpaceX rapidly iterated Falcon 9 from a disposable launcher into a system that reuses the most expensive parts.

Musk is an odious little twat, but that's no reason to deny the revolution in launcher cost and reusability that Falcon 9 has brought to the industry.

Ad blockers are as immoral as tracking

I don't use an ad-blocker because I've worked as a journalist/content monkey and I'm aware of how difficult it is for organisations like El Reg to make enough money to pay the monkeys a decent handful of nuts (trust me, you get fewer nuts/word than you did 20 years ago, and that's without accounting for inflation).

If you want free content - and most people do - then there has to be a compromise between your desire for an ad-free experience and paying the people who produce it; otherwise it's theft, and as a by-product it encourages the ad-slingers to invent ever-more pernicious ways to target you.

Presumably you can tell whether something has informational value by analysing its structure, even if it's encrypted, in the same way that linguists analyse animal communications to compare their relative information density. So your junk files would have to look like something interesting to be worth decrypting (unless you started to disguise rich content as weak sauce to make it look innocuous...).

Re: These are the Beginnings

I've got Google Nest Hubs around the house, partly because I'm lazy, and partly because their stupidity has become its own entertainment.

They are fucking morons. Speech recognition is erratic with anything other than clearly-enunciated RP English, on top of which they frequently respond - unprompted - to unasked questions based on a misunderstood sentence that contained something sounding a bit like "Google". When they do answer a question, it sometimes takes several iterations to get an answer with the correct context.

I don't know if Alexa is any better, but I'm reassured almost daily that if Google can't get this right, then AI is not going to take over the world any time soon. Or it might be a feature designed to lull me into a false sense of security. Damned cunning, these AIs.

Re: Sad

As a widower, I think Open AI acted responsibly, although they should also be a lot more transparent. Joshua Barbeau's story indicates that he'd have become addicted to the Jessica bot if it hadn't been given a limited lifespan, even though it was very clearly not Jessica.

And that's the problem: grief harms your ability to think rationally. If you'd offered me this when my wife died, I'd have been tempted but I think I'd probably have said no. I've read and seen too much SF to know that it wouldn't end well, either for me, the bot or humanity.

I suspect it's simply too tempting for people like Joshua, who are in the kind of deep, persistent grief that doesn't ease off over time. Maybe it could have a role in therapy that enables people to say goodbye to loved ones they can't let go, and that's where I think Open AI should be more transparent and engage with professionals.

As for the notions of 'soul' that the SF Chronicle reporter so uncritically embraces, I took the opposite view: if an AI with obvious flaws can convincingly simulate a soul or self-awareness, then they're either very flimsy constructs or they're a lot less than the 'hard problem' that AI critics use to insist that AI consciousness will never be achieved.

Re: It's difficult to overstate their ability to balance

For the military, they'll be the ultimate drones - highly capable remote-guided weapons platforms with just enough autonomy to get from A to B while the operator maintains situational awareness. It's the ultimate in boots on the ground without risk to life, and even better if one operator can control the coordinated actions of an entire platoon.

For exploration, it's the ideal telepresence platform - cocoon your humans in a safe orbital station around Titan or a ground habitat on Mars and send the bots into the hazardous environment.

Re: It doesn't actually get dark here.

That's all very well for you, but no help to the professional astronomers located as far as possible from terrestrial light pollution, or indeed, for amateurs who have travelled to a dark sky location (Britain has at least two).

Re: Management featherbedding

Maybe he was wasting money that could have been better spent on making shareholders wealthier, but I bet the 100 people who this manager kept employed didn't see his intervention as wasteful. They might not even have been aware that he was all that stood between them and being "streamlined".

Re: hostile environment

About a year after the Brexit vote, my partner, who's Irish, attempted to help an elderly white woman in our local tube station who was having trouble with her Oyster card. The response was a volley of ingratitude which ended in "bloody foreigners" and "go home".

I'm white, I was brought up in the Midlands and I've lived in South London, places where people of all ethnic backgrounds rub along to get through life, but in the past decade, other white English people have become a hostile foreign culture that I no longer understand or want to be a part of.

Re: This is why Oneweb gives UK leverage

OneWeb has all the makings of another Boris white elephant, not least the massive cost of using one-shot Russian launchers to build and maintain the constellation, instead of owning a fleet of reusable launchers like SpaceX. On top of that, the need for cooperation with the Russians means that OneWeb will only be able to play where Putin says it can, and probably do whatever Russia's new Chinese best mates want as well.

Obligatory reminder that even Reg hacks don't work for the glory

https://www.theonion.com/report-we-don-t-make-any-money-if-you-don-t-click-the-1823460398

Re: Interesting take on this

The news organisations' argument is that Google & Facebook place advertising around your search, so they make money from it that doesn't go to the news publishers. Google also controls the market for on-page advertising (arguably because the publishers allowed it because they lacked foresight a decade ago, but that's another story) so they get paid again when readers follow the link. FB gets is where people will stay to comment on a story, so they build community (and make money) off the publishers' content.

Re: No advertising

"How are you marketing your product to the legions of people like me who don't see your ads?"

What legions? You don't watch telly and you have a couple of layers of shields to prevent ads reaching you. In all likelihood, you represent such a tiny fraction of any market (except for anti-ad shields) that it's not worth trying to reach you, despite your wealth. On top of that, you're media-savvy, so it's probably not worth marketing at you because you're highly resistant to most kinds of marketing.

Re: The State of Play

"Sadly the majority of the users simply don't care about this."

I don't think that's true. Most users aren't Regtards and even if they know that Google et al are evil, they don't know how to disentangle themselves from their tentacles and they consider them to be ubiquitous and/or necessary parts of living in modern society. They probably also have more pressing issues to deal with, and Google et al's evils are sufficiently remote that they're all hoping someone else will do something about them.

Re: There are 2 things to take into account

I suspect that the British app they're referring to is the Covid-19 Symptom Tracker, produced by health science company ZOE to support research led by Professor Tim Spector at King's College London. It was instrumental in tracking the early spread of the pandemic in the UK (I don't know about its USA usage) and lead to the identification of several unusual symptoms as well as the emergence of 'Long Covid'.

OTOH, the company behind Coronavirus Reporter sounds extremely shady. Apple might indeed be capricious in the way they enforce their App Store rules, but I don't think this was a bad call.

Re: Lost leadership

Artemis is a white elephant, a pointless flag-waving exercise in wasting money that would never deliver a permanent presence beyond LEO.

It looked increasingly like Bridenstine was keeping it on life support because of its political value, while new space developed the capability to do everything the SLS is supposed to do but for a fraction of the cost, with reusable hardware. It's just a shame that Blue Origin didn't step up as well as SpaceX and create a robust commercial space ecosystem that Boeing/ULA's pork barrel oligopoly couldn't crush. I think Bezos might regret dragging his heels.

The big risk is that Biden will use manned spaceflight as a trading chip in the House and Senate, and waste the progress towards making manned spaceflight a commercially-sustainable and affordable reality.

IMO, Bridenstine is the only Trump appointee that Trump-haters like myself will miss.

Re: "The National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office"?

https://www.truthorfiction.com/trashingthewhitehouse/

I like the idea of Bill Clinton wandering the Whitehouse, personally removing W keys from the keyboard (while playing saxophone and smoking a cigar), although it sounds more like something that Trump would do (but I am biased). Most likely it was Clinton's staff, but it also sounds like a tradition that goes back several administrations.

Bush Jr, to his credit, seems to have put a stop to it for the Obama handover.

The ICO needs 3. Sufficient staff to conduct these investigations.

If they're like any other regulator or ombudsman I've known, they never have the resources to keep up with the number of complaints, and your case could tie them up with endless searches for enough data to identify the company at fault, let alone the individual if it's a leak like the one in the original story.

You get what you deserve

Given that your posting history displays a rabid streak of right-whingery, I'd say that you're getting exactly what you deserve in your low-regulation neo-liberal kleptocratic wonderland. Suck it up!

Re: White Oil

Or did Dabsy copy-and-paste when he saw his deadline screeching towards him?

Merkin news only knows how to do "Woo hah!" and "Boo sucks!". In Britain we have a thing called nuance, you should give it a try.

Re: Bore-out compensation

It's not entirely clear, but if you were so depressed you couldn't talk, then you would probably be in line for sick leave, urgent attention from your GP and a bit of counselling/therapy to help you manage it (mental health issues never really go away, do they?).

Your employer's response strikes me as a fundamental lack of care, but it sounds like there's a lot more going on if there are lawsuits etc involved.

I hope the chainmail bashing helped you through it!

Re: Logistical Challenges

I don't think this is intended for commuter rail or metros - it's intended for medium range travel between urban centres that's not practical or economic for short haul air transport, such as Boston-New York. On a European scale, it might cover TGV-style distances like Paris-Amsterdam or even a next-gen Channel Tunnel.

Re: Lost opportunity

The Beeb is a great innovator, but its resources are tiny in comparison to the likes of Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc, and heavily scrutinised because it's funded by the public, so it has to be selective about where it spends the R&D pennies (and they are pennies, in comparison to total budget and the commercial sector).

Some of it's right at the cutting edge (HD/4K/8K) and often in collaboration with other forward-thinking state broadcasters like NHK or through the EBU; developing the technology to support what the viewers/listeners/readers see, like DVB-S2 or DVB-T2 for HD broadcasting. Some of it's supporting the production sector or creatives (take a look at the experimental writing tools at https://www.bbc.co.uk/makerbox).

The BBC's remit obliges it to make most of its R&D freely available, so commercial providers like Sky can gobble up all the groundwork, launch a service like Sky HD, and crow about being the technology leaders. (I'm not saying Sky doesn't innovate, but they build the house; they don't make the bricks or lay the foundations.)

Sandwiches were in every convenience store I visited on my last trip to Tokyo. None of them had crusts. What happens to those? And do the Japanese have a chronic fear of their hair going curly?

Re: Class action in the US

It feels like a very long time since that golden age.

Not only would you need a government willing to prosecute its chums at the dinner party table/in the private sector, you would also need government or its regulatory agencies to be large enough and sufficiently well-funded to take on the corporate offenders - and such big government is very much against the neoliberal spirit of the past 20+ years (both New Labour and Conservatives).

Throw in the revolving door between regulators/industry and parliament/industry, and you end up with a state which is unwilling, incapable and fundamentally compromised in its ability to regulate or punish the excesses of the private sector.

Re: Tactics

Hasn't it always been thus? Today it's corporations, before them it was the monarchs and aristocrats. I'm sure someone once said something apposite about power corrupting and absolute power...etc etc

A timely reminder of why we need independent press, regulators, judiciary, separation of powers, etc. And for every watchman, someone to watch them.

Re: How on earth is this prohibitively expensive?

"using some part of the nice profits from getting hundreds of subscriptions from one fibre laid into a London suburb to subsidize the laying of fiber into the Glenn".

That sounds like filthy socialism, and the UK voted firmly against any of that Corbynite nonsense (apart from London and Scotland, that is...). So it's the shires' own fault if they can't get decent broadband, and Scotland's for rejecting independence.

Re: Morals and values?

@ShadowDragon8685 Would you include the USA's genocide of Native Americans within this amendment?

Brit here, so hands obviously filthy with our own moral failures (which continue today under the baleful gaze of Priti Patel).

Re: Masthead

Yes, but if you use uBlock (or any ad-blocker), the Reg loses income and the lovely Reg hacks won't get their beer tokens.