Posts by RandomUsername

In a kind of related way an old friend of mine left school at 14 to work at porting arcade games to Amstrads, Spectrums, C64s, AtariSTs, Amigas etc.

He found a lot of the games he had written for long dead companies on various sites, downloaded them and released them for free on his own site. His line of thinking was that if anyone still had claim over the copyright it was him.

I once asked him how to complete some game or another as 12 year old me could never manage to beat the final boss. His response was "its impossible.". 12 year old me could have strangled him.

I assumed this was a joke when I read it.

I used to work for the department in Oracle that originally worked on this. I started working there seven years ago and was made redundant around two and a half years ago.

A long time ago in a company that went bust

HR: "$PERSON_1 was very upset by what you said to him"

Me: "Was that when I called him a pillock or when I called him a nobhead" (actually language used may have differed and highly likely to have been far more industrial)

I had put in my notice already...

Telling you that you are dead is the least of LLMs problems. What is far, far more scary is what people want to do with them.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html

is the most important article you will read in a long time

I might be able to create a diplomatic incident

Which is a major life goal ticked off :)

I think I am still technically barred from this fine establishment. In my defence it was the other members of my old rugby team that caused most of the damage.

Anyway if I pop round at the weekend can I expect support from the foreign office... actually what am I saying.....

There is a fascinating book on this subject called Honeybee Democracy where real bees were used in incredibly complicated real world experiments that comes to the broadly same conclusions.

Its infinitely easier to track the detailed and precise movements of individuals in a swarm of 20000 simulated bees than in a swarm of similar size with real bees but the researchers managed it with real bees.

I know one person the wind up radio benefited enormously

A few years ago I found myself on a mental health ward but that's another long story.

One of the other patients was obviously psychotic and walked around clutching a small transistor radio to his ear and talking back to what ever he heard. One Sunday evening the batteries in the radio went flat and there were not enough staff on duty to send someone to the shop to buy some replacements. The poor bloke went completely ballistic and lets just say his evening didn't end well.

When I was discharged I sent him a Baylis wind up radio so he never had to worry about the batteries going flat again. I had a letter from the consultant about a month later to say I had made a big difference to this one guy with my simple idea.

I wrote to Trevor Baylis to tell him this story and he wrote a fantastic letter back saying that he was so glad he could indirectly help just one person.