Posts by Bebu

Big brains divided over training AI with more AI: Is model collapse inevitable?

Brouwers Least Fixed Point Theorem?

The least fiixed point of this nonsense is a sea of codswallop stretching from horizon to horizon.

I imagine at any time AI in toto can be expressed as a higher order function which is applied to itself, its initial training set and any subsequent non-AI generated input. As the non-AI input is inevitably going to be a smaller and smaller proportion of the total input the net effect will be a very expensive, environmentally harmful, hightech navel gazer. :)

XLII - save a lot of bother just write it on the wall - its the answer fwiw. :)

Watch out for rogue DHCP servers decloaking your VPN connections

Rogue DHCP Servers

On large campuses DHCP requests were (are) often relayed by the switches back to the enterprise DHCP service(s) so there is usually enough latency for a rogue DHCP server to get in first. Saw this a few times when students (and those who should have known better) would connect a cheap wifi modem/access point to the lan for wifi access to the campus network. I used to run dhcp_probe to flush out the culprits. :)

Saw it again ten years later long after campus wide wifi had be deployed when a student (?) plugged his phone into his computer to charge and the phone started handing out dhcp leases to the lan that his computer was connected to. Never did find out the details as it was "rectified" by others to save someone further embarrassment I suspect. :)

If you can get dhcp server onto a lan segment and the clients trust its leases and options you are pretty much done. :)

I suppose you could do something with IEEE 802.1x port security but I have never been anywhere •1x has been implemented for wired ethernet. :(

Transport watchdog's patience wears thin as Tesla Autopilot remedies may not be enough

Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore

Since the Wizard never gave Elon a brain - I reckon the wiz should hand in his wand but then I recall he was actually just a cast away shonky snake oil merchant. Anyway his line in brain was probably the charcutier's rejects. As the Scarecrow, Musk must be the ultimate straw man and as such you would think he might desist from playing with fire.

he [Musk] doesn't understand how they [brains] work and why humans rely on vision primarily and can get away with it.

Musk and the legions of his betters that aren't familiar with neuro- or cognitive science are not alone in this. That includes most of the current AI circus.

The image the retina captures and sends to various parts of the brain is pretty rough - The difference between that image and what we "see" both verges on miraculous and is terrifying at the same time.

I don't know about anyone else but driving a vehicle is easily the task that for me requires the greatest concentration and thought and I have over 50 years of practice.

Is any of Musk's FSD wet dreams ever going to detect a childs ball rolling on to the road from between parked cars and then going to slow down preparing for emergency braking?

Think of what is involved here - construction of a plausible model of the immediate future based on the unconscious or intuitive understanding of the human world - in a word imagination.

Re: Me? A cynic?

Tesla drivers are the worst. They bought a Tesla because they can't/won't drive safely, Volvo drivers relegated then? "Lights are on but no one is home" said of Volvo drivers at least in AU. :)

Re: Me? A cynic?

the driver to avoid their head getting impaled on it and that from he who seemed to have a problem with the idea of being shot in the face.

Tesla devotee tests Cybertruck safety with his own finger – and fails

Re: Apple People .. Tesla Owners ..

Why do these two brands attract the functionally clueless?

They substantially lack cluons - the fundamental exchange particle that mediates the force that keeps individuals and their money tightly bound to one another. :)

I suspect dysfunctionally clueless might be slightly more accurate.

The set of Apple owners and the set of Tesla owners are very far from being disjoint.

Still made my day.

Has to rate with Rick Stein demonstrating on camera the use of a mandolin while relating, with a smirk, how his apprentices were assigned the same task early in their training to learn a valuable lesson....

All chefs cut themselves with a mandolin but you only do it the once

tempting fate, or hubris with the inevitable consequence. That's twice then, Mr Stein? :)

Rick Stein is very far from clueless so what chance Tesla owners?

One has to wonder if Musk were to market razor blades whether his customers would require a safety warning: Please refrain from sucking, licking or swallowing.

Re: WTF is a frunk

So the V.W. Beetle (Lovebug) had a frunk and didn't know it.

Anterior Storage Space (ASP) sounds a little more classy in my ear.

Lightweight Dillo browser springs back to life, still doesn't care about JavaScript

Re: Posting from dillo

I'm fighting a losing battle at my current employer. I want all the core functionality on our websites to work even if JavaScript is disabled in the browser, but our front end developers believe that almost everything must depend on JS being enabled and screw any graceful fallback. The worst part is that since they do client side validation in JS, some of the "full stack developers" (AKA jack of all trades, masters of none) skip any validation on the back end.

What about legislated accessibility requirements? Some of the gratuitous JS must play havoc with screen readers.

A large proportion of web resources could be restricted to html5 and css as a lot of JS is only used to "tart up" or "pimp" the appearance of the page or worse for ancillary and often nefarious purposes.

I assume the resurrected dillo browser does some version css?

W3m, lynx and elinks still get a bit of an outing when I need a quick look at html only doco on non graphical host (no firefox etc) and/or at the end of a slow or high latency connection.

Client side input validation without backend validation or verification is an open invitation to Mr Trouble I would have thought?

America's War on Drugs and Crime will be AI powered, says Homeland Security boss

buying in some decent human intelligence.

From the same providore that vends common sense? Arguably the rarest substance in any universe closely followed by decent human intelligence in this one.

Tesla layoff circus runs into fourth week with another round of cuts

This bloke ought to have been a WW1 general

he has certainly got the bit where sending chaps over the top to be cut down by the machine guns will prepare for the big push, off pat.

The electrical and mechanical engineers (and I dare say other specialists) that have immersed themselves in the development of a contemporary EV aren't exactly an easily replaceable item. Once gone. and unlike sir Orfeo, they aren't going to look back into this Musk Hell.

IBM says these back-office, network edge Power 10 servers would be sweet for – yes, you guessed it – AI

lots of large matrix inversions and divisions

I assume the divisions are inversions of the dividing matrix followed by the multiplication of the matrix to be divided (or vice versa.)

I suspect some fairly deep numerical analysis of the inversion of your matrices especially if they have some specific structure. might pay dividends in identifying specific algorithms with the machine architectures that implement them most efficiently.

With such a table you can perform a cost/benefit analysis.

Most vendors would allow you run a testsuite of your intended workloads on their offering as part of your "presales experience."

Dell to color-code staff based on how hybrid they really are in RTO push

Colour wheel?

Blue flag indicates "consistent onsite presence"

Green flag indicates "regular onsite presence"

Yellow flag indicates "some onsite presence"

Red flag indicates "limited onsite presence"

I can see Blue + Yellow = Green - regular ~ some consistent onsite presence

so Purple = Red + Blue ~ consistent limited onsite presence (as in never :)

I suppose Orange means some limited onsite presence, or just the bloke delivering the tea room supplies* in a high vis vest.

Its a shit show here! No kidding.

Next it will be daily ink stamps on wrist and gold stars at the end of the week, and of course the naughty step. :).

*Doubtless the cheapest granulated instant instant coffee/rat droppings and teabags (resembling something even more gross) that corporate procurement could locate.

Palantir's CEO calls 'woke' a 'central risk to Palantir, America and the world'

Re: Thin pagan religion

Madonna wanted to blow up the white house, Johnny Depp anted to shoot Trump, the paedo who runs the Lincoln project wants to put a bullet in Trump's head, the list goes on.

Must be difficult to buy a gun in the US? If Johnny and Mr Paedo etc aren't all wind - or is ammunition in short supply?

Like most sensible people they understand removing one dodgy obnoxious, politician never makes a difference as there are a dozen, nay a gross, that will pop up to replace them.

The death of rational discourse and civility has been the responsibility of all sides of politics which has sown the wind of the future whirlwind which none will ever live to reap to their benefit.

Re: Thin pagan religion

I would have thought a thin pagan would be a whole lot rarer than christian hermits starving themselves in the syrian desert. :)

The general impression I have of the average pagan is that they did themselves proud with the pleasures of the table (and the bedroom if the murals of Pompei and the truth be told. :)

Why would the world take any notice this naff Suruman? :)

Dear Stack Overflow denizens, thanks for helping train OpenAI's billion-dollar LLMs

Probably doing it wrong?

Never had much joy whenever a query misled me to Stack Overflow.

Signal to noise extremely low for most stuff I was interested in and a fair bit of pointless argy-bargy.

The name is bit of a give-away - a stack overflow invariably corrupts data in a previous activation record and/or overwrites the return address and then you are off to the boondocks.

Some of the code I have looked at was just plain wrong and given AI's penchant for hallucination I dread to think of the future perils facing the cut and paste coder. Hint: Get some decent texts on algorithms - discrete math. for computer scientists is pretty useful as is a bit of formal logic and some exposure to formal methods in software development.

Re: i was planning to retire to a punnery but it would be too conventional.

" was planning to retire to a punnery but it would be too conventional."

When Hamlet said to Orphelia get thee to a nunnery I believe in Shakespeare's time his audience understood a nunnery to be the premises which in Terry Pratchett's words, offerred negotiable affection (at reasonable rates.)

So in today's world might not a punnery be less conventional than a berth in the Fool's Guild (Guild of Fools and Joculators and College of Clowns- founder J-P. Pune) and slightly more engaging?

Dating apps kiss'n'tell all sorts of sensitive personal info

Re: Thank christ I lied about my dick size...

"on BeNaughty. I am that elephant in the room!"

Only an ass* would attempt a porky like that. :)

*aka donkey.

Silly me...

I had always assumed that the profile data collected for matching was anonymized and encoded purely for matching purposes. Perhaps it was back in the late 1990s when the personal column in the daily newspapers were still a thing (and the papers themselves.)

Years ago when a student first showed me Tinder on his phone, I thought its like online grocery shopping. What's the saying ... you are the product?

As a grumpy old bugger, people tell me I should get out more - also salient advice for the younger, better tempered looking for... well... just about anything.

Re: Never give out your correct information

《My mother's maiden name is pD=`ro$<Q(nbQGL7;u37gE~J0/C#l5L^ - what's yours?》

I reckon she married early! :)

Undersea bit-barn biz offers 90-day trial of submerged server system

Disappointed

When I first read of datacentres under the sea I was imagining staffed underwater facilities where staff would be rotated by submersibles or tunnels or tubes from adjacent land. Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea stuff. :)

Rockall Is would be favourite - tunnel down through the midde of the island to well below sea level and hang the server rooms off the sides of the island - could host all the world's social media there. (Sorry Tim for stealing your plot. :)

More seriously - why is it cheaper or better to pump electricity to a server container underwater than to pump cold sea water through a terrestrial datacentre? (Or coolant cooled by cold seawater?)

I can see real merit in the idea of having a standardized shipping container sized datacentre module that could he forklifted in and out for tenants to populate or maintain. Standard redundant 3-phase AC, cooling or coolant, environmental monitoring, networking etc - plug and pay. :)

I was thinking something like the multistorey yacht/boat storage facilities found in large marinas which are a little like gigantic robotic tape libraries.

New meaning to Bottom of Harbour Scheme.

"Brings a new meaning to the phrase 'sunk cost' "

Australian readers might be old enough to remember this piece of notorious tax avoidance sculduggery.

Council claims database pain forced it to drop apostrophes from street names

No one ever thinks of the poor Grocer

the apostrophe has been their stock in trade from the advent of literacy. :)

Arkwright once explained to Granville that the properly misplaced (grocer's) apostrophe was certain to lure the passing pedant onto the premises and into the mercenary clutches of an experienced grocer and from whom the poor victim would only escape with a lighter purse.

First 9front release of the year is called DO NOT INSTALL

Irony...

having the battle scars from porting Unix to the Interdata machine (also the first 32 bit port I believe), he is entitled to a little wry humour.

I don't know whether any earlier operating system had been ported between such disparate hardware. At that time most OS were substantially written in assembler which is a substantial obstacle. A fair part of Multics was coded in PL/1, I think, but I don't think it was ever ported. I understand CP/M was coded in PL/M and was extensively ported.

The number of distinct, admittedly mostly proprietary, architectures that AT&T Unix has been ported to, is probably still a record.

An alterative title might have been Unix - a Quasi Portable Operating System

Quasi sinces .portablish just doesn't look right.

Not surprising that git isn't found in the lexicon of US English - would be a synonym for US Presidential candidate (see under doddering old g.)

Windows users left to fend for themselves after BitLocker patch bungle

Re: Time to re-create recovery partition (again)

Thanks those instructions are really quite clear and make sense.

(Un)fortunately I am unlikely to ever need them. The last time I used diskpart was perhaps twelve years ago. :)

Beginning to think retreating to something like RiscOS or Plan 9 on a RPi5, or BeOS/Haiku on whatever, might make for a more tranquil senility. ;)

I can guess what "special" means here

What do you mean you don't understand it? I understand it, and I am special. I've been told that all my life. I even have the trophies to prove how special I am. You don't understand it? Just be like me and you will. I don't need to listen to you because your ideas are not special.

and its not genius or talent. More like the special where everyone gets a trophy in the solo three legged race or the current UK cabinet or the Tory party generally.

Apple confirms iPadOS will fall under its Alternative Business Terms in the EU

Pure poetry...

"irked Eurocrats," ... "brought under the gimlet gaze of"

A picture of little ratty chappies not happy...

I am surprised Apple didn't make a bigger splash in the Banking pond - CTF - charges and fees - they have that part down pat. :)

What do we make of Apple's plan B for a down quarter – that $110B buyback of shares?

Reverse Ponzi

《It almost feels like a pyramid scheme where shares are used to boot share price.》

The thought that crossed my mind was its like a ponzi scheme but sort of in reverse. :)

I guess the bet is you buy USD110billion worth of shares hoping the aggregate remaining shares increase in value by considerably more than USD110b and that is without the business doing very well in previous reporting period. I imagine it would harm the P/E ratio but does the Nasdaq even care about E (only P) these days?

Some scientists can't stop using AI to write research papers

The slippery slope...

just steepened.

The lazy performance and quality metrics adopted by institutions and granting bodies decades ago led to any number of hacks and rorts (explosion of dubious journals, high publication rates of low quality papers or downright fraud etc.)

So now its not surprising that a tool (LLM) almost designed for the mass production of what is mostly dross has been embraced by even reasonably honest researchers.

As a student in the 1970-80s I learnt fairly quickly to quickly skim the abstract, conclusion and discussion, jumping to materials, methods and actual data (usually tabular results) - (graphs were often fucked up - mislabeled, incorrectly plotted....)

In at least one instance the (sole) author completely misinterpreted his* results as his claims were inarguably contradicted by his own experimental data. (And not thinking of the cold fusion fiasco.)

I am not sure whether its the loss of the gray cells but it seems to me that the readability of papers has decreased in the last three decades. Once I could pick up the latest copy Nature and profitably read an article or two while having a coffee but now I find it difficult to make much out of the abstracts let alone the main text.

I have enormous sympathy for researchers whose first language is not English when they must face this. Perhaps latin should have remained the lingua franca of science. But then one would risk the likes of Boris Johnson bollicking on.

* more probably some poor uncredited posdoc, graduate student or professorial assistant.

Kaspersky hits back at claims its AI helped Russia develop military drone systems

The argument I think...

is not about Kaspersky's AV software but that some part of the company is developing, supporting or maintaining a military capability against and within Ukraine.

If so proven that the whole company should be subject to western sanctions.

On the face of it I am guessing the accusers are pissing in the wind. Kaspersky would be clever enough to keep any such collaboration separate and largely beyond detection.

When you think about it, there is a fair chunk of the world that, given their rathers, would prefer Moscow spying on their affairs than Washington (and that doesn't exclude residents of the US.)

Besides does anyone want all the talent in Kaspersky reassigned to the Kremlin's cyberwarfare capability?

RHEL stays fresh with 9.4 while CentOS 7 gets a Rocky retirement plan

Have a look at AL8.9

I've got a CentOS 7 server, and it's pretty much EOL now. So I've got to move to a new server in the next few months. I'm thinking that I'll get Rocky Linux, I like what I'm hearing about the way they are going to be managing their kernels, using upstream instead of 87 million patch levels. That vendor approach of patching the Hell out of old kernels isn't ideal either, it can have bugs and run like shit when they keep sewing arms onto that old octopus.

I moved my collection of Centos 7, RHEL7 &c machines (& VMs) to Almalinux 8.8 (now 8.9) a while ago and the migration was fairly painless. Apart from recently unsupported devices (LSI SAS HBAs mp3sas) which was fairly easily remedied, rather unremarkable.

My guess is that Alma might start offering more recent stable kernels as an optional stream.

The kernel shipped with aarch64 AL8.9 is 6.1.x which works an RPI 4 (not 5), but also works with the 6.6.x kernel (and modules etc) from Raspberry Pi OS on a RPi 5 - a Frankenkernel Debian bookworm/EL8 Chimera.

So I would imagine that within reason substituting later kernels isn't that problematic - as long as the glibc and runtime loader is compatible with the kernel, I suspect the worst you might get is an ENOSYS.

The main loss is that the hardware that RH has certified their kernel against won't be certified with a newer kernel.

Not that very different from running a EL8 application in a Podman container on an EL9 host.

Springdale (formerly Princeton) Linux offers EL8 and EL9 network install ISOs and pxe images but its not obvious to me what their upstream distro is.

Their repositories of EL compatible scientific software can be a real timesaver for the overworked BOFH. :)

AI Catholic 'priest' defrocked after recommending Gatorade baptism

ChatGPT/LLM and Religion what could go wrong?

I would have been tempted to ask the unfortunate Justin to give a self consistent explanation of the mystery of the trinity. :)

Fr Justin would have a hard act to follow after the Francis, who from the linked article's images might be suspected of a foot fetish, basically calling a group of incarcerated (and by definition randy) teenagers a mob of wankers if they entertained masturbation.

I actually have more time for this pontiff than most of his predecessors but having to deal with the accumulated institutional dross of two millennia which would make Gormanghast seen revolutionary by comparison, is always going to be impossible for a one man.

As long as any religion maintains a prescriptive stance on moral and ethical matters (very few bother much about theology and their flocks even less) I can see even more ridiculous nonsense in the future.

At the core of most if not all religions there are universal (to humans anyway) principles that a thinking person might profitably consider and adopt at least in part, to improve themselves and their world.

Another exile to the parochial house on Craggy Island?

Fr Justin should fit in just fine with Fr Dougal, Fr Jack and Fr Ted.

At least Mrs Doyle won't have to clean up after Fr Justin.

I can fix this PC, boss, but I’ll need to play games for hours to do it

Bit of a worry...

this story and last weeks seem to have unleashed an epidemic of decent bosses and managers. :)

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when the manager offered the whole overworked team a treat at the local horizontal relaxation facilty - except I would have fallen off the wall laughing.

I suppose its the thought that counts. Working in Eire might have hidden benefits. :)

Must have been a while ago as teams now tend to be bit more diverse in that department. :)

At Uni I remember a bloke, on his 18th birthday was dropped by his classmates, with a handful of cash at such a facility. Much later he told us he waited inside for 30 minutes, split the cash with the lady and left slightly wealthier with virtue intact. Innocent yes. Naive not. ;)

Chinese government website security is often worryingly bad, say Chinese researchers

The only surprise ...

was that any of the zones behind the GFW were (dnssec) signed.

Puzzled what use zones without NS records would be. No delegation from parent zone for a start. Internal root servers or opennic arrangement?

Sounds like the same dog's breakfast as found on this side of the GFW. :)

Throwflame launches fire-spitting robo-dog from Hell

Helicoil thread

I can only imagine they thought you were going use it as a diy IUD in some dark corner of the US where such things are banned.

Sorry misheard you sir, an IED then? Yes we have a fine selection.

Not a Genius move: Resurrecting war hero Alan Turing as your 'chief AI officer'

Alan Turing

As tasteless as this mob of geniuses (genii, djinii* - dodgy buggers best left in the bottle) were in expropriating Turing's image and reputation the outcry might make Turing better known to a wider community.

To be honest I knew very little of the man while studying - apart from the name in Turing machine and Church-Turing thesis and was glad to later learn something of his unfortunate life.

Just about any activity when the usual suspects start trying to make money out of that activity, rapidly descends into the depths of tastelessness, depravity and not uncommonly felony, more so for anything related to IT and doubly that for AI.

* yes I know that its actually singular.

Re: What does the "C" stand for . . .

Something in Berkshire surely?

Re: In my experience...

《No there isn't. Arseholes are arseholes, wherever you find them.》

Unfortunately generally behind you.

Japan will use AI to find out what bears do in the woods

Not realizing...

that the Japanese archipelago had native ursines (bears) I thought the headline was a tad euphemistic.

The Japanese reputation for fastidiousness in "bathroom" matters led me to imagine the ultimate horror - the "talking dunny" - Smegging Hell as Dave Lister might have put it.*

The recent Japanese movie "Perfect Days" which I recommend, spends a fair bit of time in public conveniences. :)

* from Toaster to Toilet might enter the urban dictionary as an alternative to A.... to Breakfast to express pervasiveness (of AI in particular.)

Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, literally, something else

Don't tell me...

The UK nuclear weapons capability is run off a collection of "Arthurs" (being the UK of the "Daley" variety?)

Would explain the unlikely survival of Risc0S from the 1980s. :)

Not an unusual situation. An australian bank used OS/2 for their teller systems until not very long ago. An australian telco's engineering branch used hundreds of SunOS 3 systems possibly into the noughties I believe. NeWS (display postscript) and SunView - does it get any better? :)

Evolution is good for you

"Evolution is good for you"

The odd denisovian or neanderthal might beg to differ. :)

Perhaps more correctly might be good for your species, or a least your descendants.:)

Natural selection being "natural" is neither good nor evil, and hardly "kind."

Florida man gets 6 years behind bars for flogging fake Cisco kit to US military

If only...

When I saw this story's headline I though he was buying "whitebox" Huawei gear and stenciling a Cisco logo on it.

If thd gear was destined for the US govt and military he would probably have got it from the PRC for $0. :)

Not that clever apparently - just any old tat packed into old boxes with a quick buff and out the door.

I am guessing the lack of performance or functionality alerted his unfortunate customers which would not have been a problem with huawei gear I would have thought.

Still the acceptance testing for gear going into operational use by the military would appeared to have been MIA.

NSA guy who tried and failed to spy for Russia gets 262 months in the slammer

Need to Know?

Even if someone has the highest clearance, the material to which they could have access, should be completely restricted to only that needed by their assigned role(s), one would have thought.

A very basic security fail.

Even the US President should be not be entitled to automatic access to classified material.

Given the failings over recent years Maxwell Smart (86) and Control appear rather professional and the Men from Uncle quite aspirational. :)

Perhaps the Brits can lend them Johnny English to give them a few tips.

Musk axes two more senior Tesla leaders, guts public policy team – report

Excellent, necessary and trustworthy test.

《any staff who "don't obviously pass the excellent, necessary and trustworthy test"

Now who could fail that t[e]st, I wonder?》

Apart from our John Lumic clone, anyone still on the payroll, sane enough not to take up the offer of a new metal suit. ;)

So probably not as many as you might have thought or hoped.

Actually as it is a conjunctive test quite generally very few would pass as being all of excellent and necessary and trustworthy - certainly no legislature on this planet, few of whose members, like Musk, would get a tick even if it were a disjunctive form.

Re: Shooting messengers

《Kinda reminds me of Scientology...》

You wouldn't be the first to remark on the similarity between Elron and Elon and their respective cults. :)

Transmigration of (damned) souls perhaps?

AWS customer faces staggering charges over S3 bucket misfire

" to alleviate this risk by avoiding short or common names for S3 buckets"

"attempt to alleviate this risk by avoiding short or common names for S3 "

Hash your human friendly name with a pinch of salt to get a random string of valid S3 Bucket name characters and of the S3 max bucket name length. Or an equally long but random string and use a directory service to publish the friendly name to the random actual name mapping.

As for giving Bezos my CC details ...

BMC's $1.6B victory over IBM is TKO on appeal

All in the Family

I was wondering where BMC was from (thinking EU/DE) and that par for the course another non-US entity had been shafted by the best legal system that money can buy.

But it appears that, like incest, it's all in the family - IBM, BMC and AT&T are all US corporations happily screwing each other in the US courts.

The US judicial system appears to be a version of the board game Monopoly™ where instead of houses etc you accumulate judges and presumably a hotel corresponds to securing a SC appointee

The only people that go to gaol the those who haven't collected enough cash or have sufficiently pissed off those that own the hotels.

Elon Musk's latest brainfart is to turn Tesla cars into AWS on wheels

Re: WTF? This is meant to be a tech site - why is nobody saying...

《This was my thought exactly when i first read this, glad to see you voiced it. I thought computer power on this proposed scale would be measured in giga flops or similar, not wattage》

I was biving musk prat the benefit of the doubt (silly me) as his envisaged workload was AI/LLM which probably has it own lexicon of bullshit and assorted twaddle.

LLM workloads probably don't come down to convenient FLOPS, MIP etc - I believe parallel ops on vectors of rather short floats are more the thing.

So it would not surprise me if a member LLM fraternity afflicted with moment of lucidity developed an equally dubious measure from information theory, statistical thermodynamics that fiddles with entropy and free energy that give a magic number with the units of joules/second.

As an aside I guess you could assign the same measure to the human brain. :) A fair number of pico-watt brains out there and now I can see why the quecto prefix was required.

Open Source world's Bruce Perens emits draft Post-Open Zero Cost License

Terminology

One problem I have is that the description Open Source implicitly covers a multitude of sometimes conflicting sins.

At face value it ought to refer to any software for which the source code is freely available for inspection by anyone desiring to do so. The actual code might, like a patent*, be proprietary and subject to licencing and payment for use.

The use of "free" in english has the "beer" (gratis) versus "freedom" (libertas) dichotomy with the second resulting in the fairly unambiguous term "Libre."

The availability of the source is really the only commonality with a wide spectrum of constraints or restrictions of who can use what, for what purposes and a variety of quid pro quos ranging from acknowlegement, donation requests, smalk one time license payment from "for profits" through to full commercial licensing.

In isolation none of this is much of a problem but modern software is a melange of open source (and other) components with often conflicting constraints from the hundreds of licences that might be applicable.

It would be like designing with digital logic components like TTL, with hundreds of different voltage levels and unit loads.

Ideally a license template with an orthogonal set of sections into which a clause may be chosen from a predefined set with the hope that any software component's licencing could be encoded unambiguously and compared with the licensing requirements of any other components used. As there is a ordering induced I guess it might be a lattice. Anyway the idea is that open source software component selection could largely be mechanical in terms of licensing (and function.)

I have always thought the pachyderm in the room is software patents or more specifically the idea that algorithms or formulae can be "owned" in any sense.

*which also mean "open."

Musk schmoozes Chinese premier as Tesla Full Self-Driving remains parked

Curious?

From where do the Tesla software updates for the vehicles in the PRC originate?

I am thinking that they are potentially an excellent vehicle (sic) for espionage enabled with a single "update."

(With a Starlink phone home capability exfiltration would be difficult to detect or prevent.)

I have to wonder why the CCP leadership bother giving Musk the time of day as I cannot see what is in it for them. Its not as though they need more fawning sychophants and if its not actually butt he is kissing I am sure Ms Daniels does it better. :)