Posts by Oglethorpe

It is possible to extract copies of images used to train generative AI models

Hindsight

Without a known source image, it doesn't seem possible to objectively determine whether a generated image is an actual extraction or an original synthesis. Please do correct me if I'm misunderstanding.

Re: plainly stores all of its training data

0.026% and 2.3% somehow means "all"?

User was told three times 'Do Not Reboot This PC' – then unplugged it anyway

Re: Content

I don't mean to argue against the limits of ignorance, I just disagree that 'reboot' is an insufficiently broad term to cover not pulling the power too.

Re: Content

That seems contrived. If I left a sign that read 'do not attempt to switch off lights' it would be perfectly reasonable to expect that no one capable of working in an office, no matter how "on a spectrum" would smash the bulbs to achieve their desired darkness.

Pulling out the power was simply the result of not seeking further information when encountering a problem.

Software glitch revokes copyright protection for AI-generated comic book

Re: It's simple. It is not.

You don't have to say the AI has copyright to say that the individual guiding the AI and choosing the outputted images has no copyright.

British monarchy goes after Twitter, alleges rent not paid for UK base

Small correction

Zambia, not Zaire. The former was also quite a thorn in the side of the apartheid government (as was Musk Sr).

Re: So, his "genius" is mainly..

The emerald mine was in Zambia and his father openly supported (and was an elected representative for) the anti-apartheid Progressive Party in SA.

I see the previously posted misinformation repeated so often that I'm convinced it's a plant to make legitimate criticism of Elon seem ill informed by association.

Hey, online pharmacies: Quit spreading around everyone's data already

Re: The US needs some GDPR like legislation to shake people awake

I still believe it's worth pursuing immediately (second only to starting immediately after Roe vs Wade, which was always a shaky decision) to force officials to publicly come down on whatever side they choose, rather than allowing their passive silence.

Re: The US needs some GDPR like legislation to shake people awake

Sure, in the fullness of time but could I humbly suggest that perhaps passing an amendment that unambiguously puts the right to abortion beyond the reach of SCOTUS and individual states might be a priority?

Indian official reveals 'plan' to build a national mobile OS

Re: 'build'

You forgot fill it with spyware that would make a Stasi agent blush. The Indian government, back in the day, somehow managed to threaten Blackberry into breaking their encryption; the amount of monitoring they'll do with full control will be mind-boggling.

UK Online Safety law threatens Big Tech bosses with jail

A novel approach to an old problem

There have been some great suggestions that, rather than having children be thrown into the wilds at birth, they could be looked after by specific adults. In addition to providing food (since many children lack the wherewithal to go hunting or get a job, especially infants), these adults could also be made responsible for controlling what content children are exposed to.

I believe this has actually been trialled in some more progressive countries.

Twitter 2.0 signal boosts Taliban 2.0 through Blue subscriptions

Re: Erm

You can read through the list of sanctions here:

https://home.treasury.gov/taxonomy/term/8126

I'm not certain but Twitter might run afoul of the restrictions on 'luxury services', though that may be up to a judge, since there's no clear definition that I could find.

Russians say they can grab software from Intel again

Re: Trouble

Working within that premise, is it more important that the Russian people are made to feel the effects of sanctions or that they hopefully put pressure on their government to withdraw? A computer may be a luxury item but unlike, for example, a luxury car, it has the ability to educate.

I appreciate that computers are muti use technologies, so supplying new hardware that might be used in weapons is probably a bad idea. At the same time, existing computers are probably the best way to reach ordinary Russian citizens with information beyond what their state controlled media provides.

I think it's far too simplistic to assume that the option which produces the most suffering or inconvenience for Russian citizens and the option that most quickly ends the terrorising of Ukraine is always one and the same.

Re: Profit before ethics

"I thought the point of sanctions was to have consequences?"

It seems pretty stupid for one of those consequences being to effectively turn over a large number of computers to criminals and state-sponsored cyberwarfare groups. Modern malware rarely exists simply to disrupt, it's far too profitable to turn it towards an illicit purpose; this is why bounties are paid on exploits.

Re: Trouble

Be realistic. The Russian government can almost certainly afford at least one VPN, while the average citizen likely finds it quite challenging to purchase access from a foreign provider. Where is the benefit to not patching security flaws in privately owned Russian computers, with zero impact on the government ones?

This can’t be a real bomb threat: You've called a modem, not a phone

Re: Work bomb scare

I think it's rather dangerous to excuse all actions of someone just because of what they publicly stood for. For example, was Abu Asvat's execution not terrorism? His 'crime' being that he had provided an objective account of the fatal beating of a teenager and refused to fabricate an account of rape by a political rival.

Apple aims to replace Broadcom, Qualcomm wireless chips with its own

Still usable. If the activation servers went permanently offline, you'd be nagged and unable to change wallpaper but, otherwise, have a functional system.

Re: Don't make many products?

I'd say if your new product is a clear replacement for the old, it doesn't constitute multiple, parallel products. Lenovo have become sloppy with their naming as of late but, going back, the X series Thinkpads weren't twice as diverse in their offerings when the X280 came out but the X270 was still available.

On that note, I think you counting configuration options really shows just how locked in you are with Apple products, especially the new CPU models, with their soldered storage. By the same measure, Lenovo makes 1536 'flavours' of the gen 9 X1 Carbon (ignoring software configurations) and it would be a heck of a lot more if they hadn't embraced the devilry of soldered RAM and integrated batteries.

Re: Don't make many products?

16 'flavours' of phone? Really?

Mixing an invisible laser and a fire alarm made for a disastrous demo

Re: Dunno if I terrified him, but he about crapped himself ...

One of our lab techs still uses xylene to clean optical equipment, we think the fumes are responsible for his somewhat pickled mannerisms.

CES Worst in Show slams gummi gouging, money-wasting mugs, and other dubious kit

JBL clarification

How are those particular wireless earphones any worse than any others? The display seems almost irrelevant in their indictment.

With Mastodon, decentralization strikes back

Re: Standards

If it ends up being regulated like one, it would severely curtail their ability to ban people saying harmful but not illegal things (such as all the people who had their bans on twitter recently reversed). Is this desirable?

Re: Standards

Wouldn't transport/network layers be more analogous online standards? It doesn't seem necessary or desirable to go too far up the standards tree when the general Internet standards are ensuring everyone is broadly able to access and choose their social media provider(s), as far as authoritarian governments will allow.

Miniature nuclear reactors could be the answer to sustainable datacenter growth

Re: rumors have it

It's not a rumour, it absolutely happened:

https://webharvest.gov/peth04/20041017121453/www.inel.gov/proving-the-principle/

A fascinating read overall but the chapter you're looking for is 15 & 16.

Meet the merry pranksters who keep the workplace interesting, if not productive

One unpleasant Christmas, I was the on site technician for a shut down facility. My job was essentially to know which buttons to press if things caught or threatened to catch fire and, while I waited, eat food on the expense account and lament not seeing my family.

Because the manager's office had a TV console, a chair that would embarrass an 80s CEO and I a few movies on tape, I elected to forward the phones to that office. In addition to instant forwarding, the system had a feature that triggered forwarding after a set number of rings. This was great, because it meant I could catch the emergency line on both sides of the operations building.

Christmas ended without incident and I handed over. A few months later, I heard that the new site manager had nearly lost his mind over emergency calls going instead to his desk. It tuned out that the new digital telephones could, and had been muted so the actual emergency telephone didn't make a peep during the calls (nothing dangerous, just things that needed to be addressed quickly). Unfortunately, the muting meant the main phone would silently ring 10 times, then pass through to the manager. Until then, it hadn't been noticed because everyone understood that, no matter who you are, you answer the emergency phone.

Fortunately, it was ascribed to gremlins in the new telephones and no searching questions were asked.

Lawyer mom barred from Rockettes show by facial recognition tech

Re: Copyright & data protection

That does seem like a stretch. MSG are not distributing the image itself and the image can be obtained for free without any sort of explicit agreement being made. I'd also say that their use is transformative, in that data is being generated from the image that is distinct from any commercial value of the original image. Google's use of thumbnails in their image search was found to be transformative and, in my view, the values that are used for facial recognition are much more abstract.

Elon Musk starts poll with one question: Should I step down as head of Twitter?

Stay and Musk wins

Even if Elon completely bends the knee, leaving for new haunts would have sent the message that no social media site owner is more powerful than the users collectively. Now, users with problems are saying it's better to associate with Musk as long as concessions are made than to be ready to move on. The fallout from this will reach every social media site with ill intentioned management.

BBC is still struggling with the digital switch, says watchdog

Re: Too many "heads in the sand" technophobes run the BBC

Thank you for that interesting perspective.

Re: Too many "heads in the sand" technophobes run the BBC

"the BBC FAILED to recognise the fact that they could then have implemented a subscriber based service (instead of a paper TV licence) for the required external Digital TV receivers, using a "conditional access module"."

I suspect they prefer a scenario where everyone who watches anything live is forced to pay. That way, they're not beholden to the whims of the subscribing public.

Airbnb hosts less likely to accept bookings from Black people than Whites

Re: Active, passive or no racism?

I'm just commenting on the results of the study, not society in general. If you have statistics that support your claim, please link to them.

Re: Active, passive or no racism?

The vast majority are in all cases.

Re: and it's just that Black people are more likely

It's an American term, used because African American was felt to be inadequately representative. Specifically, I'm mirroring the wording used in the report to avoid ambiguity.

Re: Active, passive or no racism?

Apologies for the awful typos.

Active, passive or no racism?

If photos make only the tiniest difference and for only one race then, it seems like this means that the majority of supposed discrimination is passive and it's just that Black people are more likely to currently meet (or fail to meet) criteria that makes them more attractive to providers. In other words, this will resolve itself if they use Airbnb more. It see this as being akin to looking at a gym where the majority of long term members are race x, the majority of new joiners are race y and concluding that race x is better at working out than race y (or that the gym doesn't cater to the fitness needs of race y).

Server installer fails to spot STOP button – because he wasn't an archaeologist

Re: No shut-off valve at the outlet?

It was against the wall so while it was probably possible, you'd have had to reach around the flame, rather than just getting it from the other side of the bench.

At university, we were able to do an unrelated STEM module in the first year, leading to quite a few issues in the lab. The most entertaining afternoon came from a microbiology practical where someone had somehow never used a Bunsen before. This led to the gas being ignited at the outlet.

When they tried to turn the gas off for the lab, they discovered the fresh new fitted benches had been installed over the shutoff valve for the room (the outburst from the crusty technician was awe inspiring). This led to several frantic minutes of locating a screwdriver and dismantling the bench before the ceiling went from medium to well done.

UK lawmakers look to enforce blocking tools for legal but harmful content

Re: hyperbolic nonsense

>Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law

Could you please quote the part that you believe is harmful? I'm assuming you mean House Bill 1557 (2022). Reading the bill, the points I could parse from it relate to:

-notifying parents about all mental and physical care provided by the school, with the exception being notifications that risk parental abuse

-requiring sexual/gender identity education to be 'age appropriate' for those under 12

-empowering parents to take legal actions against a school when the bill is violated

If possible, could you please also give an example of something that you feel would be beneficial for a child but which this law would prohibit?

Look like Bane, spend like Batman with Dyson's $949 headphones

It's not shit, that's pretty much the upper necessary limit. Listen to some BA-packed chifi IEMs if you want to hear something that goes into ultrasound but is still terrible. How tightly the headphones reproduce the target curve will play a much greater role in how good they sound than their ability to reproduce ultrasonics.

Raspberry Pi hires former spy gadget-maker who baked devices into surveillance ops

Re: I was on Mastodon as it ahppened

Maybe I'm reading this wrong but it sounds more like he was a Q-type figure than an operative.

Neuralink reportedly under investigation by Uncle Sam for 'animal welfare violations'

Re: In memoriam, Michael Crichton

The key difference I see between communist masters and capitalist masters is that, depending on the implementation of the former, you're very unlikely to be able to do anything in your chosen field if you don't please the former. Worse, if you really displease them, you're running the risk of being killed. Compare Bourlaug who upped and took his genius to different employers several times during his illustrious career to Vavilov who was forced to make humiliating concessions to Lysenko before ultimately being executed by the state when his denouncing reality proved insufficient.

I also don't think the concept of 'getting to market' differs in the practicalities between financial systems, other than the concept of a market. Look at Chelyabinsk, where the pressures to produce a product quickly led to an environmental disaster that makes Hanford seem squeaky clean. At Hanford, though spooky things could go on behind the fences, the public could eventually protest over contamination; the captive villagers (look up the Soviet internal passport system) around Chelyabinsk were forced to endure unthinkable levels of radiation before being disappeared when the symptoms became too severe to hide.

The danger in letting the state have total control over science is that, when it gets it wrong, the people who are right will be, at best, ignored and, at worst, executed for spreading the truth. The alternative allows quackery but, fortunately, those quacks aren't able to imprison you for disagreeing with them.

That said, some good did come out of Soviet totalitarianism: their utter sabotage of their native genetics programmes hampered their bioweapons programmes when they made the insane decision to whip up novel pathogens.

Re: In memoriam, Michael Crichton

"Killing test animals by rushing the procedures to get results faster? That isn't doing science, it isn't doing engineering, it is just doing capitalism."

It's not even capitalism, Vladimir Demikhov famously left hordes of dogs disabled and dead because he wanted to generate impressive results for his communist masters. Even that pales when compared to the King of Soviet junk science: Trofim Lysenko, who's fraudulent work led to millions dying in famine (not just in the USSR, in the PRC too), legitimate scientists being locked up and killed (Nikolai Vavilov would likely have been the East's Norman Bourlaug) because they disagreed with the party line and the entire field of genetics (a bourgeois concept, according to Lysenko, because it suggested that individuals could be born with advantages which couldn't be developed through hard work) entirely dead in the USSR.

It makes the whole Scopes trial look like a boring triviality.

Gunfire at electrical grid kills power for 45,000 in North Carolina

Re: Intentional & Wilful

It's still a valid question

Re: Intentional & Wilful

I believe the distinction in legal terms is that an intentional act is one where the outcome is understood but wilful is where the outcome is both understood and understood to be illegal. This still makes the intentional part superfluous but there is a difference.

Very different to Metcalf

Unless the reports so far published are filling in the blanks with their imagination, this was aggressive vandalism: the attackers caused severe damage that resulted in immediate disruption. At Metcalf, communications lines were first cut and transformers damaged from a greater distance in a way that led to delayed failure.

It could be reasonably argued that perhaps the purpose of this attack is to probe response and repair times. Against that, if it's a test of capability, the attackers took much greater risks being in the vicinity of the facilties during the power loss.

How do you solve the problem that is Twitter?

Ultimately, regardless of exactly what happened, everyone of any decency had a moral imperative to ensure Trump and everything he stood for lost power. He was a danger to democracy and humanity and no measure that helped ensure his downfall should be judged too harshly.

Twitter tries to lure brands back with spend-matching scheme

At the end of the day, even if everything you allege is true (not that I accept it is) why should any decent person be concerned if the FBI tips the scales away from Trump or someone like him?

In the moment they had no way of knowing for certain. One course could risk another 4 years of someone who goes to Russia for help in an election, the other definitely works against Russian interests. That's not some dangerously political decision, it's just being sane and pragmatic when both decisions actively alter the outcome.

It's not interfering, it's trying to prevent interference. Even if elements were later found to be true, the whole laptop story looked a lot like Russian disinformation so it's quite reasonable that they would remove evidence of it until it's verified (which it was, after the election). Yes, this may have been effectively interference but it was done in good faith and for the greater good.

It also wasn't an uninformed decision. The FBI contacted Twitter and warned them that the story was false (a sensible guess at the time) and Twitter agreed to block the story.

AMD says transistor tech will keep Moore’s law alive for 6 to 8 years

I don't think Moore ever mentioned clock speeds, just transistor counts.

Intel offers Irish staff a three-month break from being paid

Surely, the Irish government has some say over this, given the taxpayer funding they've generously allocated through the years? It seems like that should come with attached conditions.