Posts by steelpillow 2028 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2016
Thanks again. As for the scraping, I notice that in the run-our-cross-site-scripting-or-die offers to site builders, FB appear to come second after the Big G. "Log in with [evil empire]" being a prime example. Once those active cookies are downloaded, your browser and personal data are pwned. "Anonymised, honest Guv" of course. The buyer of advertising space never gets to know who Dr. Evil just spammed, I mean targeted, for them, but that is small comfort.
Thanks, as the OP that's the first rational reply to me that I have yet seen here.
But if the bulk of their assets are in Eire, how come they feel such a burning need to send all the EU citizen data to the US? Logically, yhey would be sending all the US citizen data for storage/processing in Eire.
So if meta decide to fsck the EU, how can they be stopped? "Our assets in the EU are less than the fine. Easier to let them go and leave the EU go figure how to deprive its citizens of the freedom to stick with us."
Now, I know the "honest question" phrase draws downvotes like a rotting skunk draws maggots, but hey, an apt simile is an apt simile so let's go with it.
"to make hydrocarbon fuel from water and CO2 - just add (lots of) energy, if only we had a worldwide system of nuclear plants to provide it. "
Better to use renewables; persuade green things to make oil in vats under direct sunlight, or just use solar panels and feed the leccy into a conversion plant.
Back in 1920, the Gloster Aircraft Co introduced a luxury motor scooter called the Unibus. It had many features of the motor car - drive shaft, gearbox, metal floor pan and so on. In fact it cost nearly as much as a small car. Sales were pathetic and it did not last long.
Roll forward a century to a new generation of smart e-bikes hung about with bells and whistles and small-car price tags. That'll go down well, ri-iii-ii-i ... oh.
When most people talk of a jump in capability, they are generally referencing some system which was proudly announced as a jump in scale. They don't stop to analyse the relationships between the jumps and only the performance gets the headlines. Stanford have boxed their definitions in, in such a way as to leverage this forgetfulness and claim that incremental scaling is applicable to such popular talk. No they ain't Stanford, you are trying to logic-chop a bowl of water. These incremental improvements, so carefully detailed by Stanford, accumulate not into a denial of the jump, but into an explanation of how a jump in scale can create a jump in capabilities. The same phenomenon may be noted for example in certain areas of the mammalian brain and the owners' emergent behaviours, it is nothing new. However, denying it is.
You are wasting your time on these remoaners. They can't let the past go and move on, they all still use Windows 95 and reset the clock so it doesn't crash at the year 2000. Some are so fanatical they even drive Fiat 500s and hang portraits of General de Gaulle above the mantel piece.
"I'm sorry I can't let you stop for a piss Dave, it would jeopardise the mission"
or
"Hi Annie, we just want to take your concentration off the road for as moment to tell you about our great new drive-in prefrontal lobotomy clinic, just around the corner from you, right nooowwww!"
I am not a very technical user. Many decades ago I learned to bumble around the 'nix filesystem in whatever shell Solaris gave us at the time. When RISC OS faded away all I could get cheap was Windows, and ran 98SE well into the new millennium. Then the Linux desktop became a thing. RedHat taught me to hate KDE, SuSe YAST, Ubuntu Unity, etc. Debian+GNOME proved the first workstation since the RISC PC that "just worked" for me and, apart from odd forays into Mint and suchlike, I stuck with it until SystemD stuck in my throat and I switched to Devuan. GNOME2 was the first GUI I felt comfortable with after RISC OS, but GNOME3 was so execrable and, frankly, Unity not much better, that I switched to MATE. Being also uncomfortable with vertical taskbars, this "feature" is not a problem to me.
I bump into other Linux users now and then, almost all are in the "it just works" category and fear the shell. They don't participate in the shouting matches ("why war over vi and EMACS, surely a decent text processor is a decent text processor? I just use gedit [or whatever]" "What is SystemD?") Se we seldom see them in the geek haunts, and end up with a false idea of what is "popular" on Linux.
But I do admire Liam's courage in sticking to the subject here and coming back for more. Icon for you, Sir.
And I want to add one more argument to the mix. In Unix/Linux we have always liked our apps to do only one thing but to do it well. This does not always work well; The Hurd is slow, getting init, audio or remote desking to fly can be a pain. OTOH the all-in-one mega-pack destroys things like choice, reliability and maintainability; the user loses control. SystemD, pulseaudio and Wayland bring much heat and hate in their wake. The Linux kernel seeks a middle way, being modular in construction. There is a core functionality, which marks it out as Linux, but most of it comes in modules which can be integrated or not, in various ways according to need. Why do we not take the same approach with perceived monstrosities like SystemD, pulseaudio and Wayland? We have many forks, but each ploughs its own furrow. They should do what Linus does with his kernel; collaborate on a core service, identify the interface architecture to optional functions, and then let the ecology get on with it.
That way, some like-minded geek somewhere will put together a distro which "just works" for you.
LOL
1. Sleep - offline or lost connection. No ontological distinction there, buddy.
2. Nope, most human bullshitters haven't a clue either. There are also a few, both human and AI, who are trained on cohesive specialist data sets and don't bullshit.
3. Most AIs are trained on BD which is not so much Big Data as Bullshit Data: BS in, BS out. Like most human bullshitters I know.
P.S. I have actually studied Wittgenstein. He made his name from cutting through BS, not from spouting it per se. He was also able to realise his mistakes and rethink them, cutting equally through his own BS, hence the wide contrasts between his earlier and later works. OTOH ChatGPT just comes up with lame excuses and can't update itself. Like most human bullshitters.
So AI is turning out to be just like news media, bookshops and strange people shouting on street corners. You need to be a bit discerning or you will come away with all sorts of shit peddled by vested interests. Well, slap me round the face with a wet fish!
So tell me, Ghost of Wittgenstein, what is the difference between a human bullshitter and an AI bullshitter?
So now I am going to find some stupid AI telling me how to manage my cloud backups and hiding the stuff I am looking for because it thinks their filenames are boring.
Until AI gets smart enough to know when it is not wanted, it looks like I'll be back to external HD and an encrypted USB stick in the car's glove compartment. But maybe I'll give WebDAV/OwnCloud type stuff a revisit first, just in case they don't suck as much as they used to.
"I would be confused were the Everest to be used for altitude because firstly, the summit of Everest is, by definition 'ground level'
Altitude is internationally defined above sea level, not ground level. Units of height are another thing altogether, IMHO better measured in flea-jumps or lions rampant or similar.
"33.5 kilometers (20.8 miles" is, to 3 decimal places, 110,000 ft. No prizes for guessing how aeronauts measure altitude. But the universal unit adopted for aerial navigation is clearly not good enough for us vultures. May I suggests Everests, for example 4.39 Everests is a very obvious choice of altitude for an astronomical balloon.
Hooray for genuine artistic discrimination and honesty [air high-five]. icon is the best I can deliver, free cigar also included.
"force-fed a poor computer Liam Gallagher's insipid drawl" - the bastards, I trust it is not sentient.
"The result is fairly convincing, but we only made it a minute and a half in" - yeah, derivative jangle-pop and insipid delivery is pretty much Oasis. But I never managed that long with Oasis, so I can't really comment on the likeness.
No, all AIs will be trained on data sets which persistently refuse to recognise any request for cancelling a subscription. They will all have learned to do the same. Moreover, they will have learned the same shitty endless loops to trap you in. The only way out is to change your name and put up an AI as your old persona; they can then enjoy the loops together.
"PLUS Japanese PM grilled by ChatGPT; Singapore slams bank outage; WeChat adds paid tier; and more"
What is this lot doing here? The article is tagged for SCIENCE but not for the rest of this stuff.
I know, let's just put each day's posts as a a single web page and rely on ChatBotGPT to do the tagging.
You miss the point. This is about the plateau. The Buddhist nations have long had a higher plateau than the West, and I believe that also applies to Taoist monks and certain Hindu traditions.
Yes most folks die in poverty far below, but that is not what the plateau is about.
This study is all very well, but it is heavily focused on the developed nations. The US statistics suggest that this is not representative of humanity at large.
So here's the elephant in the room; what about indigenous populations of South America, India, China and Africa? These include the two largest nations on Earth, and - the elephant int he room whispers in my ear - might just alter the species statistics a tiny bit, no? And given that elephants themselves are notoriusly long-lived, I credit it with some experience of these things.
Back in the 1970s, straw-slab insulation was all the rage for tower blocks, I kid you not: thick boarding made from packed lengths of straw given a fine coating of cement. Great insulation. Unfortunately, also great cockroach food. What do you do when you are thirty floors up and get an ineradicable infestation of roaches, with black mould promptly colonising the cold spots in the corners? You demolish the tower blocks before their time. Gospel truth, as an architecture student I studied these things while they were being built.
Black mould and its friends-and-relations are also one of the limiting factors in the lives of every space station we have yet built.
Why do I get the feeling that condensation will collect in cold corners of potatoland and black mould will become the moon's first permanent inhabitant?
Look, I know I long wore a "Release Potatoland" badge, but they did release it on Earth in the end, and it wasn't very good anyway. There is no point in a lunar re-release, none at all.
I take this whole mashup (sic) in the spirit of my title ingredient. So should any budding lunarnaut.
Well, it's the Great Experiment coming to a head, isn't it? Can a brutal dictatorship sustain competitive advanced technology to challenge the high-tech forces of a free-thinking capitalist democracy? Or are its internal tensions too destructive of creative thinking?
Ronald Reagan used Star Wars to break the USSR and win the "Great Game" (as historians call the centuries-old conflict with Russia), but can Biden do the same to China? Has he left it too late? Have the Chinese outsmarted the West by playing Mr Nice Guy until they could undermine its technical superiority and economic independence too deeply? There's only one way to find out. The Higgs boson's got nothing on this ride....
I do wonder about these radar systems. Back in WWII, radar antenna tended to have significant sidelobes and the return signals of some were so messy that few operators could make sense of them. Until they learned better, ground-based stations often sent out alerts for spurious interceptions because friendly planes behind the radar were causing ghost "enemy" images in front. Only one British night-fighter operator, Jimmy Rawnsley, really got the hang of it and his pilot, the famous "Cat's Eyes" Cunningham, scored almost all of the confirmed kills.
Roll forward to the 2020s and you can't help but wonder whether the sidelobe suppression is up to scratch. Who knows, a rogue signal might even create a ghost UFO sighting in an F/A18's box of digital tricks. Tesla's cheap mass-produced transducers would be a pushover.
On the other hand, who'd want to rule out software bugs, glitches and half-baked AI, eh, Elon?
So the rockets delivered more thrust than intended and panels cracked.
Funny how nobody is mentioning G force.
I can't help wondering whether an obscure but ingenious little gadget known as a throttle could have saved those panels, at the expense of taking a little longer for the ride and hence burning up the magic saving in fuel.
Not sure I'd be happy to ride an "improved" one of these without another unmanned test first. There are heroes and there are the foolhardy.
Sadly - and stupidly - there are too many men who will be throwing it around for real in recruitment meetings.
Back in the 1970's it was thought funny to wear a tie bearing a pig logo and the initials MCP (To mansplain, that stands for Male Chauvinist Pig). Today's pig is too chicken to be so bullish. Some kind of progress, I suppose.
The original question was imprecise. I wonder if there might have been more than one Alexander Hanff, and the question doers not specify which one. Perhaps a namesake did die in 2019. The AI was not asked to tell the difference.
A similar example exists with the name JW Dunne. The Army aero pioneer at Farnborough and subsequent philosopher of time is fairly well known. His namesake who joined the Army's Royal Ordnance and made a career there is less well known. Hunting through the pages of the London Gazette, you will find various promotions of JW Dunne to higher rank. Many a historian has reported one of these men's promotion as applying to the other. Even during their lifetime, their friends and colleagues frequently addressed them by the wrong rank.
Many other garbled myths about the aviation pioneer exist, all forged over the decades by one lax historian or another. You can pick up a respected history book and read a lot of total crap about his aeroplanes (Yes, I studied the 20,000 documents in his recently unearthed professional archive in order to discover the reality). Today, ChatGPT has automated that wooden spoon.
I am sure there could be other logical flaws which led to the AI's mistake. As a historian my immediate response would be to ask it to cite its sources, and preferably link to them. Either the sources will reveal the evidence behind the mistake, or the lack of any will highlight a bug in the AI.
Ultimately, it's not the AI that is the problem but the easy reliance and utter lack of the I bit in sourcing via unfiltered data, be it artificial or human.
But what worries me more is the black hats who build things like ChatGPT, train them on black propaganda, and unleash them through apparently innocent outlets.
I hate to pour could water on some of the grumpy parades here, but it is as well to bear in mind that these technologies took hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years to mature and move around the globe. The idea that medieval-style guilds could prevent the technology from leaking out over such timescales is perfectly ridiculous. Of course the stuff came to be made wherever the raw materials were handy.
Case in point: the Graeco-Roman lifelike style of statuary appeared in China some short while after Alexander the Great passed away, not because they reinvented lifelike style but because they hired Graeco-Roman masons to come over and carve stuff for them. And that migration took only a few decades at most.
Some folks here need to fsck their ideas for data corruption.
Indeed. And given the global transport infrastructure steadily being revealed by such finds, with its origins dating back right back into the mesolithic, if not the palaeolothic - even Neanderthals owned traded goods from cultures hundreds of miles away - the idea that iron and steel were independently discovered over and over again is absurdly untenable.
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