Posts by ThatOne

Re: Where's the incentive?

> I'd actually consider my computer not being able to locally run AI models as an advantage.

You're looking at it from the wrong perspective. The incentive is by and for Dell marketing, and don't forget marketing is always totally disconnected from human reality (they are probably another species anyway).

For the average user there is indeed absolutely no point in having AI capacities: Even if your company or lab does use AI somewhere, it will be a limited team of specific people who use specific hardware for a very specific task. But that isn't important, what is important is that "AI" is something new the suckers deciders don't know very well (except that it is something new and supposedly magic which will help you lose weight, fix your thinning hair (and so on)).

Marketing always likes to find a (actually totally ridiculous) supposedly magic thingamabob and celebrate it loudly and repeatedly until weak-willed people are suckered into buying. Unfortunately it works as well for bogus nutritional supplements as for high-end tech, people like to be told what to think, it's so much easier.

Re: The Master of understatement

> the maximum fine

£401?

> Google's custom silicon on their Pixel phone makes the GCam app faster

Well, the Pixel's "Google Tensor" chips are indeed specialized in AI. They are actually rather mediocre in everything except AI, so the more AI Android has, the better the Pixel phones look...

> I cannot imagine ever outgrowing this thing

You maybe not, but Windows 12 (or similar) will find that it lacks the [newest fad] and thus needs to be replaced. To "improve your experience", of course.

_{(Assuming you run Windows, since Linux doesn't need that much to run correctly...)}

Re: Pot, meet kettle...

"Do as I say, not as I do"...

Re: Maybe it's useful?

> It would be handy to be able to have an on-hand cracker (on a separated LAN, in a VM) that could be run against one's website test build

Initially I thought so too, but then I realized that there still is no way (in time and money) you might afford to prepare against relevant (i.e. recent or somewhat sophisticated) exploits, if only because those exploits haven't been found/made public yet. Nothing changes.

To put it simply, you'll only be able to check against yesteryear's exploits, and that's about all.

_{Last but not least, AFAIK 99% of all breaches are due to people being too lazy to patch known issues. AI won't change that...}

Which is why they axed it. You can't go around providing a real service now can you.

Re: Good luck

> as your customer base grows you could drop the price

Nah. As your customer base grows, your profits grow, that's all there is.

I always go for the ad-free, paid option, which always will end up becoming a paid-with-ads one. Mobile apps are the worst offenders.

Re: Release Preview Channel

> The virus definitions update themselves 3-4 times/day in the background

They did, indeed, initially Windows 11 always checked for updates first thing just after booting. I didn't even need to log in.

But this is Microsoft we're talking about, so somewhere around the last milestone Win11 update (can't check right now which one that was), this stopped, since then Microsoft's Antivirus solution (name?) eventually starts complaining that its definitions are outdated. When opening the System/Update tab, it just says "You're up to date, last checked x days ago". Go figure how it knows I'm still up to date...

And there are also the various firmware and driver updates which come the same way, and which now won't appear anymore unless I actively check for updates. So I'm forced to manually check for updates every couple days, at least till the next Microsoft previews appear and just sit there waiting for me to look away so they can slip in...

_{I guess it's yet another bug, my Win11 is full of them. And yet I don't use it, it's only there for firmware updates and the occasional (old, XP-era) game. It's pretty much the vanilla Dell Windows 11 Home installation the laptop came with, just regularly updated.}

Three hours is not even enough time to inform the decision makers, so they can quit whatever they were doing right then and start wondering if/what they should/could do about the incoming meteorite.

That was my point.

I agree technology progresses, and that was a tiny, hard to spot meteorite, not some big life-threatening boulder, but I still think the panegyrics are a little undeserved yet. We can start congratulating ourselves when we start being able to pinpoint impact times and locations many days* in advance. Not before.

_{* Consider 1 day at least for the information to make it to the decision makers, and for them to pull out their fingers and figure they need to do something. And then they will start forming committees, make phone calls, querying their legal advisors and any hastily found "experts" (and so on), for this isn't an event governments have standard procedures for. Count at least another day lost wondering the pros and cons of doing/not doing something, emitting sound bites and making sure whatever happens won't affect them. And even after a decision to evacuate has been taken, recent hurricanes in the USA are a good example of how much time it takes to actually evacuate any bigger population, even in a supposedly rich and well-organized country.}

Re: If it's free on the Internet

> or contemplate the coming zombie apocalypse, right?

Coming? It's already here, just look around.

Re: Murthy and UK family friends

> the dude keeps talking about how lazy people are these days

People saying "people are lazy" actually mean "people don't work enough for my profit". It's always turtles greed all the way down.

Re: My way or the highway

> Microsoft needs to lose the attitude that they alone know what is best for their users.

I wholeheartedly agree, but actually they don't give a damn about their users customers: What is important to them is their bottom line, nothing else.

Marketing lives on buzz-words. Remember a couple years ago when everything was "tablet"? (The new computing paradigm, it's the end of desk/laptops, they will go the way of the Dodo!) Couple years later tablets have found their real use, watching cat videos and reading stuff in your couch, and people still use desk/laptops to do serious work.

Nowadays it's "AI": AI will replace everything, do everything, you need AI, lots of AI! Cue forward a couple years and AI will have found its place (writing homework for the terminally clueless/lazy?). In the meantime, they will try to make you buy things you neither need nor want, by repeating long enough that "that's how the cool kids do it", and that you desperately need their stuff, even (especially) if you didn't realize it yet. They'll repeat this until the more weak-willed cave in and start believing (buying) it.

> making the world safe from predators

That's the excuse. What they really want is to be able to keep tabs on the Great Unwashed, just in case.

Re: Brace yourself...

Like an SD card?...

Re: Which is worse?

> then anything after that is profit

Sure, but you know what's better than profit?

More profit! *evil laughter*

_{There is no such thing as "too much profit".}

Re: SAG-AFTRA Wins!

- Fast forward 10 years - Performers (but also common people) need to copyright their likeness before studios sue them for infringement.

_{Plastic surgeon profession booming.}

> "new tools to collaborate and create"

That's just the standard marketing speech for "we have something we'd like to sell you".

> And now I feel older than ever.

You are older than ever, every second...

Re: Perhaps ...

> That might make it more difficult to try and sneak political chicanery

Just hide your cheating in the training data - even if your adversaries have a strong suspicion, it's impossible to prove.

Anyway, what is the point of using ChatGPT here? Just formulate the law in proper language for the terminally illiterate? In this case it's no better than a oversized grammar/spelling checker and pretty harmless (assuming somebody proofreads). Only if you ask it to come up with a law according specific criteria, that is utterly dangerous, because all will depend on the training data: For instance train it with colonial era documents and it will create some surprising law propositions...

Rust in the kernel is a humidity problem. Windows has never been waterproof.

Send it into high orbit and I can guarantee it won't nag you anymore...