* Posts by T. F. M. Reader

1191 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Dec 2012

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Investment advisors pay the price for selling what looked a lot like AI fairy tales

T. F. M. Reader

In this case they peddled bullshit and they couldn't even blame AI for it.

T. F. M. Reader

Re: No "AI" involved banner

Consider "Only natural intelligence involved"?

Yes, I did just crash that critical app. And you should thank me for having done so

T. F. M. Reader

Re: telnet mailserver1.my.org 25

And in those days (or maybe before the actual moment of Y2K) it was also easy to put God@heaven.org or whatever in the From: field.

They call me 'Growler'. I don't like you. Let's discuss your pay cut

T. F. M. Reader

Defining Growler

With all the mix of definitions of Growler and military/beer stories herein I am surprised that this alternative definition hasn't been mentioned yet. It invariably generates chuckles from British military personnel, I suppose. With or without beer.

HDMI Forum 'blocks AMD open sourcing its 2.1 drivers'

T. F. M. Reader

Re: media on NAS

I am with you. I have a fairly large (and still growing) collection of CDs and at home I play them on a fairly good audio setup.

But a modern car no longer has a CD player/changer, so I have no option (no, please do not suggest Spotify as a substitute) but to rip my CDs onto a USB drive to listen in the car. I do believe it is perfectly legal in my jurisdiction since I own the CDs in the first place. IANAL though.

Stack Overflow to charge LLM developers for access to its coding content

T. F. M. Reader

Discriminant?

Does anyone know how Stack Overflow plan to distinguish an AI engine (e.g., Google's) slurping the content into its training set from a search engine (e.g., Google) crawling the same content to index it. Is there a technical way to discriminate between those? Or will it be an honours system?

Absolutely serious question.

Husqvarna ports Doom to a robot lawnmower – not, thankfully, its chainsaws

T. F. M. Reader

A useful feature

It should be easier - and maybe cheaper - to entice the neighbours' kid to mow your lawn...

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be coders, Jensen Huang warns

T. F. M. Reader

Just curious

Where will all the training sets that nVidia GPUs will pound on to train AI models come from?

Especially if one wants to do interesting new stuff. Mundane boring old stuff will have been packaged in libraries, I assume. You might imagine an AI "copilot" that will offer useful documentation to use the libraries, but that doesn't need to be super-intelligent or require too many GPUs to train, nor will it provide much more value on top of actually reading such documentation. Someone, possibly your kids, will still need to do some thinking.

And for the new stuff - some coding. Enough to make up a decent training set for AI to help with documentation after the interesting new stuff becomes mundane old libraries.

Are you ready to back up your AI chatbot's promises? You'd better be

T. F. M. Reader

Was the chatbot even wrong in the case?

There is an interesting bit in the article: "A real-live Air Canada rep confirmed" what the bot had told the customer.

An interesting bit that is not in the article: it is not clear if that was considered pertinent by the Court. I, for one, am curious.

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

T. F. M. Reader

Re: Ah, Joy

Weekly status meetings??? She was just lazy. Standard practice is daily status meetings, and the procedure you described is pure textbook. Sorry to break it to you so bluntly: you were not special, just lucky on the account of the "weekly" bit.

By the way, a spreadsheet is obsolete technology. Today, the previous day's email summary is edited on a shared Teams screen during the status meeting and is then sent to the team at the end, only to be edited again the next day.

How do I know all that without having an MBA? Can't you guess?

I think I already posted the thought here once or twice, but at the risk of being repetitive and with apologies all around: status meetings are always about the status of the manager, not the status of the project.

Europe's data protection laws cut data storage by making information-wrangling pricier

T. F. M. Reader

Handling extra costs

I don't think unlawful/unethical practices are necessarily implied. There is extra compliance-related cost even if you operate completely withing the laws of the land and the laws of ethics, and that's the point.

If you act illegally and are caught you'll be fined which is additional cost, the cost of lack of ethics is not regulatory but is real nonetheless. A related point is that shareholders' value is the number one (and ultimately the only) consideration in every matter regarding business, as long as everything is legal and ethical. Note that the above does not mean you are wrong: the difference is that you seem to assume that businesses necessarily engage in illegal and/or unethical practices and I don't, that's all. You are quite right about illegal/unethical businesses, but the good guys - still the majority hopefully - also pay extra to be compliant.

Companies will not (necessarily) change their processes w.r.t. data and storage, especially if they decide for one reason or another (good or bad) that the data are useful. They will notice that their operational costs are higher and will pass the costs to their customers. One may or may not consider it fair (my privacy, as protected by GDPR, comes at a cost and I am willing to pay it, etc., etc.).

Or maybe companies will cut some data - if they decide that the data are not worth it - and reduce the cost without price increases. The article seems to say that is the case at least in some cases.

Someone had to say it: Scientists propose AI apocalypse kill switches

T. F. M. Reader

Solving a wrong problem

AI running amok and exterminating humanity is not my first concern. Humanity becoming blindly subservient to AI (a.k.a. "computer says so") is a lot more worrisome.

The first (?) case of a EUR380 traffic fine issued in the Netherlands because the AI behind an intrusive camera thought the motorist was using a phone while driving, whereas he was merely scratching his head, and no human bothered to check, may be just a precursor of really serious trouble on a massive scale.

That seems to me a lot more immediate, likely, and serious problem to solve.

Drivers: We'll take that plain dumb car over a flashy data-spilling internet one, thanks

T. F. M. Reader

Re: Big brother is creeping up behind you.

Don't speed

In Wales???

Office gossips beware – chitchat could choke your career chances

T. F. M. Reader

And in Mission Control

BOFH's ambitions never included a promotion...

Biggest Linux kernel release ever welcomes bcachefs file system, jettisons Itanium

T. F. M. Reader

Re: Depends how you look at it

Obviously it would be a big selling point _for Oracle Linux_ if its distro included ZFS in place of Btrfs, and Oracle is pretty much guaranteed not to sue itself.

But they may be sued by others for using a non-GPL filesystem in the Linux kernel.

Here may != will, but it may be a reason for them not to try their luck.

New York Times sues OpenAI, Microsoft over 'millions of articles' used to train ChatGPT

T. F. M. Reader

Re: If it's free on the Internet

Access to the NYT site is restricted. It's searchable, however, and what a search engine does when you search for X is it tells you that NYT had an article about X (mentioning X, whatever) and provides you with a link to the article. If NYT demands subscription (paid or not) for you to read the article then it's your decision.

Crafty you can also ask either a friend who has a subscription or ChatGPT about the article. The friend may tell you verbally what the article says or send you a link with a code as a "gift" (NYT allows that). ChatGPT will spit something resembling the article at you (and will tell you that this is what NYT has published, hallucinations notwithstanding). Whether the output is really close to the original or warped by hallucinations there is a problem, albeit a different one.

What is the difference between your friend and ChatGPT (besides hallucinations, in which respect ChatGPT is like a friend you shouldn't trust)? At least two things. One is scale. Your friend can only do it occasionally (AFAIK "gifts" are limited, too), and NYT hope that you will be tempted to part with a few bucks yourself if you like the content and do it often enough. This looks to me as a valid marketing tactics. ChatGPT's scale is virtually unlimited in comparison. The other thing is that ChatGPT (read: OpenAI/MSFT) gets paid by (some of) its users. I can certainly understand that NYT would prefer you to pay them directly rather than another commercial entity that abuses the search engine access to give its customers access to their copyrighted material, possibly distorting it in the process.

IMHO, the case certainly has merit. The outcome is not a foregone conclusion though.

Bad eIDAS: Europe ready to intercept, spy on your encrypted HTTPS connections

T. F. M. Reader

Re: Never understood certs

You are not alone. You simply can't understand certs in terms of security or privacy. They are not about either. They are about (scalable) trust. Before you even consider the question whether amazon.co.uk are jerks or you can really trust them to deliver the goods after you paid them you want to know that they are, in fact AMZN. If you don't believe that you shouldn't give them any money even over a secure channel.

Your bank might be run by some jerks whom you don't even know. The cert of the bank's site does not make them righteous or trustworthy. The only thing it does - or, rather, tries to do - is assure you that it is your bank you are talking to. You need to trust every single jerk in the certificate chain to believe it. In practice you trust the browser maker to do the checking for you, automatically. If you don't trust one of those jerks it is possible to revoke the corresponding certificate and your browser will warn you about anyone who presents that jerk as a character or identity reference.

As far as I understand the proposed law will break that trust completely. The cert can be used to make you believe that a jerk you are really talking to is the righteous and trustworthy person you think you are talking to. And you can't revoke the (trust in the) cert. From this point on you can't trust any communication whatsoever: you no longer can trust your browser maker to do the checking because they would be breaking the law by doing that. So you can't trust anyone's identity. The trustworthy guy you want to talk to is still trustworthy, you just don't know it's him on the other end of the line.

Security - including password security - is derivative. You can encrypt everything you send, but if you don't know whose key you are using you don't know who the man in the middle might be.

Your only solution in such a situation is to meet the guy you trust in person, verify that it's him (knowing him personally will help, checking his ID card or driver's license or whatever will help only if you are sure that the security services - or another resourceful organization - didn't send someone with a fake document), and exchange keys. Then you will be able to communicate securely and privately without any certs. I remember the times when it was done routinely, in F2F meetings. Not scalable, either for AMZN or your bank, and extremely difficult, bordering on impossible, even after the key exchange if either of you has resourceful adversaries (it's a great intellectual exercise to figure out how difficult assuming you have to deal with MI5/MI6/GCHQ or CIA/FBI/NSA or some other alphabet soup).

T. F. M. Reader
Big Brother

Documentary

That amounts to telling EU citizens that surveillance cameras must be installed in their house, are mandatory, may not be disabled and you may not get any information on their use.

I always thought 1984 would become a documentary one day.

Pope tempted by Python! Signs off on coding scheme for kids

T. F. M. Reader

Re: a Polish AI ad biz owner

Not if is done in the name of the church. Sort of like the Spanish Inquisition.

I didn't expect that!

Beethoven and Brahms move audience members to synchronization symphony

T. F. M. Reader
Coat

Skin conductance?

So play Brahms and/or Beethoven to fool lie detectors?

Big Brother is coming to a workplace near you, and the privacy regulator wants a word

T. F. M. Reader
Big Brother

Re: "or offsite [...]outside work hours.

From

wget -o /dev/null -O - https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt | sed 's/specification/law/g':

3. SHOULD This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a particular item, but the full implications must be understood and carefully weighed before choosing a different course.

[I was always slightly amused by the (quite correct) reference to "must" in the above sentence: it is an absolute requirement of the law to understand the full implications...]

[The icon is obvious.]

PhD student guilty of 3D-printing 'kamikaze' drone for Islamic State terrorists

T. F. M. Reader

An exercise in recursion

An ISIS drone builds an ISIS drone?

Red Hat bins Bugzilla for RHEL issue tracking, jumps on Jira

T. F. M. Reader

Re: Jira is the single source of suckage

I am a Red Hat user both at work and personally, and have been for many, many years. I have many years of experience with Bugzilla and JIRA. I have been through a few Bugzilla-to-JIRA transitions. I can only regard them as complete madness.

The "suckage" link above is good, but it's mostly about UI/UX (not only). JIRA was apparently created by people who don't understand SW development and failed - or never took - data structures at college. The most important (the only really important?) relationship between tickets is what blocks what - that determines a partial order. The appropriate data structure is a tree (or, more generally, a lattice). Bugzilla, with a simple plugin, allows one to view the dependencies graphically, as a tree, which is immensely useful. JIRA diesn't - I've been looking for years for the feature since it is so useful.

Bugzilla search and filtering is a lot saner, too. Usually no quasi-SQL queries are involved (not a big problem for me, but too often I've seen managers ask developers to create and save useful JIRA queries).

As the above link mentions there is no real difference between tasks, bugs, stories, etc. They are all things you need to do. The workflow is exactly the same. They can't really be treated differently by anyone. Inexperienced product managers often decide to make features to be developed "tasks" and bugs to be fixed - "bugs". They can't avoid mixing them, however. E.g., one can't prioritize them separately: for each new release there is a bunch of features and a bunch of fixes that customers are waiting for that will consume the same (human) "resources". If any need to be deferred or discarded - which?

And it what may be the biggest (or at least most annoying) workflow problem of all (if it was mentioned in the UI/UX link I missed it): both Bugzilla and JIRA notify you of changes/comments/etc. by email. So you get an email and see someone's comment - what do you do? With Bugzilla you can just reply to the rmail you've just got, keeping the necessary context, and your response will appear as a comment in the ticket. If you send a mail to someone or a group of people, even customers, that is related to a ticket you can just Bcc Bugzilla and add the ticket number in the subject you mail will appear as a comment, etc.

With JIRA you need to switch the interface (between mail and web), possibly more than once, just to react to a comment. In my case, since I work mostly on Linux (yes, mostly Red Hat), but for reasons of "organizational compatibility" (compatibility done backwards, of course) I do mail and some other administrative tasks on a Windows VM I need to switch VMs, virtual desktops, etc. Terrible waste. To be fair, you can email JIRA and make some garbage appear as a comment, but it will be malformed garbage. I have tried using JIRA's markdown to improve formatting - it didn't work.

In short, while it is possible that Red Hat can make it work with a tonne of customizations, etc., I think they are still mad to make this move. Or maybe just not forceful or effective enough to LART some sense into their IBM-minded bosses. Disclaimer: I am a former IBMer as well, and I did run undeclared team/department git and Bugzilla servers there. Well, before JIRA was a thing you could use. Besides, maybe it was just easier in Research.

Moscow makes a mess on the Moon as Luna 25 probe misses orbit, lands with a thud

T. F. M. Reader
Boffin

If a spacecraft crash-lands on the moon, does it make a sound?

Yes, it does. Not through the non-existent atmosphere though, but nothing prevents acoustic waves from propagating through the moon itself.

Can you raise $100M+ from AI investors with no product? SEC says yes

T. F. M. Reader

Remaining question

So we are looking at defrauding gullible investors to the tune of >$100M via selling them unregistered securities, pocketing some of the proceeds and investing the rest in crypto...

Will the guy share a cell with SBF?

Zoom's new London hub – where 'remote work' meets 'we need you back in the office'

T. F. M. Reader
WTF?

I must be out of touch from all the remote work... [*]

What the hell is an "agile table"???

[*] Disclaimer: I work at the office (including all the way through Covid) and I don't do "agile". I do work at a table (a.k.a. "desk").

Pope goes fire and brimstone on the dangers of AI

T. F. M. Reader

Re: AI is EVIL….

head of one of the most abhorrent organisations that has ever existed

The organization that promised not to do EVIL in not so distant past, you mean?

Official science: People do less, make more mistakes on Friday afternoons

T. F. M. Reader
Coat

"people made significantly more typos"

Or maybe they do more important stuff and are more alert in the afternoons and fix more autocorrect f...wittage?

Oh, well - coat...

Arc: A radical fresh take on the web browser

T. F. M. Reader

"Presumably, the idea is that users will run it full-screen."

Good luck with that on a Mac.

Especially on a Mac with a couple (or more) external monitors. Bring any application - say, a browser - to full screen on one of the displays and the others will go totally black. Used to annoy the hell out of me when I had to do stuff on a Mac - I wanted my VMs in full screen in Mission Control (Apple's lousy - unless you come from Windows - implementation of virtual desktops) and it was very frustrating.

'Weird numerological coincidence' found during work on Linux kernel 6.5

T. F. M. Reader

Re: The what?

predict the future of X.com

Predict the future of X.com? Or the past?

Sysadmins are being left out of AI implementation

T. F. M. Reader

AI for log analysis? Wrong tool for the job

What does AI have to do with log analysis? Any half decent logs will be structured enough to be analyzed - with software, yes - without any need for AI, LLM, or whetever. The manglement and marketing bods who push AI for the purpose don't seem to say anything but "the logs are lousy and really all over the place, but rather than (invest a moderate effort in|push clueless vendors towards) improving them we should better deploy a hugely expensive and not very good or precise AI to try to figure them out".

[Disclaimer: I have developed (3rd party) log analysis SW a few times in my career, but only for internal use and generating detailed reports for customers, so I am not all that much of an expert.]

T. F. M. Reader
Coat

Re: IMHO...

[Taking a baseball bat to] nopt only the machine that runs the LLM but the printer that prints the all-important TPS reports as well.

A room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor? Take a closer look

T. F. M. Reader

Re: Apatite

Superconducting teeth!

The horror.

Or a new Bond movie?

What does Twitter's new logo really represent?

T. F. M. Reader

If Meta owns a trademark on X in the context of Social networks, surely then Twitter rebanding to X is going to infringe their trademark?

What's another lawsuit between friends?

Cerebras's Condor Galaxy AI supercomputer takes flight carrying 36 exaFLOPS

T. F. M. Reader
Black Helicopters

The potential...

... to become Skynet is definitely there...

Google toys with internet air-gap for some staff PCs

T. F. M. Reader
Coat

Might work for Google

Doesn't Google have most of the Internet stored and indexed on its own computers? Cutting off "the Internet" while keeping access to internal networks might just work for them then.

The one with the dog-eared printout of the page-ranking algorithm specification, please ----->

You're too dumb to use click-to-cancel, Big Biz says with straight face

T. F. M. Reader

Those big businesses certainly know what they are talking about.

Some time ago I bought something from amazon.it, giving them credit card details and billing and shipping addresses in the process. As a thank you they enrolled me in Amazon Prime, the first month free - no clicks needed! Out of curiosity I tried to find a movie or a TV series to stream - nothing worked. I figured there was one Prime, so I tried amazon.co.uk, amazon.com, etc, directly and over VPN with presence points in the right countries - still no dice.

I had lived happily without Prime until then, so I figured I'd find the Cancel button before the free month runs out and forget about it. I succeeded, eventually, but OMG was it confusing! In fact, everything that involved me clicking on buttons, either trying to make the service work or cancelling it, was confusing in the extreme. The automatic no-click enrollment was the only exception. Conclusion: the problem lies in clicking buttons. Another possibility: I am too dumb.

See title.

OpenAI is still banging on about defeating rogue superhuman intelligence

T. F. M. Reader

Re: "The San Francisco AI startup"

I think "startup" usually refers to a company that still burns early investors' (typically VCs') money rather than lives off sale revenues. A startup may have products and generate revenue, but is not self-sufficient. While there may be a reasonable time limit on the term I don't think 8 years is all that long, especially in an entirely new and unproven field (not "AI" but this particular niche of it, I mean).

T. F. M. Reader

Reading comprehension

I am failing at it, miserably.

"Superintelligence will be the most impactful technology humanity has ever invented"

What's the technology? This is the first time I've heard of it. Intelligence is not technology, but "superintelligence" will be?

Eh... They can't really mean stochastic parrots, can they?

Microsoft can't stop injecting Copilot AI into every corner of its app empire

T. F. M. Reader

MSFT are hallucinating

Judging from their use of the word "productivity".

YouTube's 'Ad blockers not allowed' pop-up scares the bejesus out of netizens

T. F. M. Reader

I also don't allow popups

What will happen?

The world of work is broken and it's Microsoft's fault

T. F. M. Reader

Re: Quelle surprise

Status meetings are never about the status of the project. They are about the status of the manager.

Cisco: Don't use 'blind spot' – and do use 'feed two birds with one scone'

T. F. M. Reader
Coat

Way too complicated

Can't they suggest a rule of thumb?

LinkedIn links out of China with 716 roles for the chop

T. F. M. Reader

When LinkedIn RIFs...

... do they also delete the redundant employee's LI accounts? Do they downgrade the accounts if there were any corporate perks attached? Do they offer free "premium" upgrades to help the newly redundant with their search for the next position?

Not necessarily in PRC where rules may be special. Just curiousity-driven.

Microsoft may charge different prices for Office with or without Teams

T. F. M. Reader

Re: Deja vu all over again

Deja vu = all over again

Not for any of the teams Yogi berra played for.

DEF CON to set thousands of hackers loose on LLMs

T. F. M. Reader

Re: Oh, the humanity!

Bravo Bing!

Not bad at all. To sound more human-like I'd say "sono Bing"[*] ("I am Bing") is marginally preferable to "questo è Bing" ("This is Bing") that sounds a bit like Google Translate from American - oh, what am I saying?!?!? Come to think of it, "Posso capire" has a similar smell - sounds fluent in English but, to my ear, not the most natural in Italian. I may be wrong, or biased, or hallucinating...

But seriously - not bad.

@katrinab: I guess it can indeed understand Italian - I suppose it can recognize Italian and apply the same "stochastic parrot" algorithm on whatever Italian sample it ingested during training.

[*] Can Bing be configured or trained to sound as Inspector Montalbano: "Bing sono..." ? I think it would be cool... ;-)

Modular finds its Mojo, a Python superset with C-level speed

T. F. M. Reader

stick to what you do well

Certainly python can use a new core implementation allowing parallelism and improving performance (by a lot).

Hooking the backend to MLIR/LLVM or similar sounds a good idea.

Strong typing may certainly be useful and will be welcome as an option (to keep the original python working).

If the above can facilitate static analysis - great.

Doing all that and sticking to a language that many people use is a very reasonable approach, too.

But for heaven's sake make Lattner stick to what he does well (like compiler backends) and keep his paws from changing or extending the language syntax! He is, after all, responsible for the abomination called Swift, the only language I know in which 2+2 may not even compile, let alone return 4 (hint: it does type promotion on assignment, but not for arithmetic ops). Also the only language I know where there is a difference between the function argument's name used by the caller and the same argument's name used in the function's body. And where you need to decide once and for all, for all the client applications, whether you want your data structure to be passed by value (struct) or by reference (class). It looks like there is a difference between class (python) and struct (mojo) here, as well, as well as between def (python) and fn (mojo), and at least in the latter case you need to decide once and for all the arguments what you want to do from the start. Not a good start, IMHO.

Judjing from the docs on Modular site it does look like (half-baked?) explicit splicing of python with a subset of C++, or maybe the C subset of the latter ++ some additional features like a bit of metaprogramming.

All in all, it has potential. The backend has a good chance of being good. I am not so sure of the frontend so far - needs more work, I'd say.

Pixies keep switching off my morning alarm, says Google Pixel owner

T. F. M. Reader

I don't use any voice commands...

... do no first hand experience, but I still don't buy it. Shouldn't the phone (and the various Alexas, Siris, and the rest) only react to the owner's voice? And if the story is true the bug seems to be quite generic: at the very least the phone should subtract whatever is coming out of its own speakers, otherwise it becomes possible to control it, to a degree at least, by sending a voice message...

Insurers can't use 'act of war' excuse to avoid Merck's $1.4B NotPetya payout

T. F. M. Reader

I think that's the main driver of compliance business, from companies like CyberArk selling you a lot of words and a checkbox to scorecards and certifications from the likes of MITRE.

The actual value of those things is somewhat limited. E.g. CyberArk will say a lot about preventing another Snowden but in practice their methodology would be unworkable in any organization and what they really sell is a checkbox (I got this admission from a pushed-to-a-corner employee, who shall remain anonymous, at one of their customer conferences). MITRE will gladly take your money (for their non-profit purposes, of course, a.k.a. drive compensation up enough and you won't have any profits) for testing you, but they generally tell you in advance what they will test. Etc., etc.

However, to qualify for cyber insurance you need some acceptable - to insurance companies who are not cyber experts themselves - and independent benchmarks that will let you qualify for sane premium rates, and this is where compliance companies and organizations like MITRE come handy. You will pay through the nose to the former and you will demand the latter's scores from security vendors (who will pass their MITRE costs to you) to get lower insurance rates and mitigate risks if something bad happens. Just cost of doing business.

With this decision, consider buying compliance stock?

Online Safety Bill age checks? We won't do 'em, says Wikipedia

T. F. M. Reader

Dog years

If something on the Internet gives its age in dog years the whole internet will know it's a dog. And we can't have that, can we?

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