Posts by ParlezVousFranglais 287 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Oct 2022
Indeed - about 60 "warships", but about 350+ officers at Captain rank and above - also worth noting that the C/O of HMS Dragon (when it eventually gets going) has a rank of Commander (below Captain)
So 350+ penpushers and seemingly very little clue about what the Navy is there to do - either that or no backbone to stand up to successive governments of both persuasions - either way they should collectively hang their heads in absolute shame...
Given that the MoD has just demonstrated it has no serviceable warships, submarines or even a remotely workable plan to respond to events that the whole of the rest of the world knew weeks ago were just about to happen, I'm not sure that the release of a few pages of processes detailing how inept the security services are at finding an errant drone represents any kind of significant threat to national security.
Please just release the docs, accept the ministerial resignation, do the obligatory u-turn, and get on with life...
This is one of those times where I marvel at how certain aspects of technology have progressed so little, and at how much hype gets attached to things that by now should be pretty meh...
I remember going to a computer show at Olympia in 1981 very well as it was my very first encounter with a live ZX81 - it literally kickstarted a lifelong passion of computers - by the Sinclair stand there was a huge maze, a few meters square, where university teams were competing to see who's "mouse" could autonomously find its way out of the maze most quickly, a test of both the construction and use of sensors on the mouse, and coding on the attached computers that the mice were attached to by ribbon cables.
So sure, we have miniaturisation of the sensors and you can now get that level of computing into something smaller than a pinhead, but is this really something for one of the world's most advanced tech projects to be shouting about 45 years later?... Maybe I'm just an old cynic having a bad day!...
Any digital currency issued by a central bank will be all about control: there will be tracking designed in, so that central government can see where and how people are spending their money, and at some point there will be limits put on spending your money in the way that you wish to - for example benefits payments only being able to be spent on what the government defines as necessities, social and behavioural controls, expiration dates on money to force economic stimulus etc etc
While none of this will be implemented immediately, once you've opened Pandora's box, there's no going back...
Easy to talk about unit costs with a bunch of if's / but's / likely's / maybe's, and easy to spend other people's money - no mention of sinking the up front capital costs to get production in volume actually rolling, which won't happen unless those businesses get a guarantee on their investment, and of course no mention of the fact that neither China nor the US would take any onshoring attempt lying down, they would react and support their own businesses further if necessary.
Nice idea, never going to happen...
Wow, it's lucky then that that the UK Ministry of Defence, NHS, Cabinet Office, GCHQ, Home Office, Met Police, DEFRA, and Crown Commercial Service, can easily afford to foot that bill for him, and it must be ever such good value for them given that half of those contracts were signed without even needing competitive tenders, and ignoring any implications about data privacy...
I did a similar "random" experiment a while back, asking the Google Search "AI" to "roll" a six-sided dice and tell me the hypothetical answer - I then asked it to "re-roll" another 5 times - in the first six rolls, it gave me each number exactly once, and after a further 6 "re-rolls" it had given me each number exactly twice.
So it's supposed "intelligence" simply understood that a six-sided dice has six numbers, and if I asked six times, it saw nothing wrong with allowing the history of its previous answers to affect what number came up next to ensure that I saw all six numbers
It seems to be a fundamental problem with models like this - there is no understanding of the concept of randomness, so anything that requires a degree of entropy completely fails
That right there hits the nail on the head - there is an incentive to do their accounts properly, due to the penalties of screwing up - the taxman always wants his pound of flesh (if you'll forgive both the choice of pronouns, and the catachresis of the original Shakespeare)
There is no such incentive to get Cybersecurity right, and there needs to be...
Most small business have no internal resources for Cyber security - the full UK.GOV article mentions "checking the locks", but frankly most small business owners don't even know where the "doors" are, let alone how to check the locks, so anything to raise awareness about how to start figuring these things out for a small business owner is a good start.
However, I'd go a step further, and try to think of sensible ways to incentivise proper certification - for instance, if the government started advertising to the masses to check that any business taking their personal info or credit card details had a minimum level of security, then that would go a long way, eventually maybe even making it mandatory in the same way as the "GasSafe" scheme.
I agree in isolation, not much use, but if it can be used as a foundation to be built upon, then it's not a bad place to start
Surely if you are angling for being a pedant, better check the spelling of "Caesar" first...
Interestingly of course, since the Romans had no "C" (and incidentally no J or U either), the guy we all know as Julius Caesar, would probably have been pronounced Yoo-Li-Us Ky-ser by the Romans - the German "Kaiser" is derived from exactly the same root, and is more or less exactly how the Romans would have pronounced it (damned German pedantry!...)
How we got to where we are now, while interesting as a topic in itself, doesn't change the fact that the current government according to all it's current data, believes that a huge percentage of the UK public still gets it's government-related news from X
As I stated right at the start, there is already, quite rightly, an organic shift away from X (and Tesla) by the UK public, but there is still not yet an obvious replacement that the huge base of current X users would naturally look to find official government messaging if posting on X was immediately stopped
According to the government's latest figures, from a parliamentary conversation in January 2026, again from the Hansard link above:
"Not only are 19.2 million British citizens registered with X, but 10.8 million families use X as their main news source; that is more than any other social platform, which I find genuinely extraordinary. We would be doing a disservice by removing government communications from X when that is where people are actually accessing them; we are making sure that facts are available."
Again - just because "IT people" wised up long ago, doesn't mean that that is true of the general population
Sure, but you will see above my comment regarding this being a welcome case where the reality trumps the idealogy (for once)
In a world where UK government departments are handing hundreds of millions to Palantir including all our health records and large quantities of our defence data, dropping £25k on X to try to ensure that government messaging reaches as much of the population as it can, is frankly utterly irrelevant
If you are at all interested in the political debate on this exact topic going on within parliament right now - you could do worse than read Hansard here:
The comments from Ruth Anderson are most telling:
"It is incredibly important, in an age of misinformation and disinformation, that facts are available on the platforms people are using, as opposed to the platforms *WE WISH* people were using, which is why the Government will continue to post organic content on X"
A rare and welcome case these days of politicians (of all flavours) dealing with reality rather than idealogy
I don't disagree, but if a cost-benefit analysis demonstrates that local and central government agencies would have to spend far more money to reach the same level of messaging as a few posts/adverts on X, then I'm all for that while the population becomes slowly re-educated regarding other messaging channels
It's easy to denounce the use of X, but far more difficult to come up with an instant replacement that your audience, potentially of hundreds of thousands of people (maybe even more in some circumstances), many of whom would not be IT literate, would instinctively turn to en masse.
Life isn't that easy
I'm sure it also "saved" West Midlands Police time in creating their evidence against Maccabi Tel Aviv ...right up to point it hallucinated about the West Ham match that had never happened.
Nothing in this "research" actually checked the integrity of any work that was produced, the users were selected based on volunteers, not on a random sample of workers, and the "results" were self-assessed by the users.
Rubbish in, rubbish out...
There may be a push for homegrown tech, but last I looked, both the UK and EU still happily allow the brightest and best such companies to be bought out by overseas competitors, and there is very little in place to prevent that from happening.
Further, if such preventative blocks were put in place, then it could quite easily have the unintended consequence of pushing new investment outside of the region, as entrepreneurs started discovering that potential paydays were then much reduced.
So while I agree with the overall direction, I'm not sure that the path is quite as clear cut as some people believe
I think any changes are purely subjective based on the entities using the language.
When a command gets added or a syntax changes in a programming language, often you get the same arguments about whether it's an improvement or not, but I'm not sure you could ever say that a language "deteriorates".
Even if you could, if that was relevant to the masses, then we'd likely all be speaking Sanskrit, Mandarin or Latin as some of the most "precise" languages to have existed, but here we are happily communicating in (technically far inferior) English... ツ
I'm not suggesting that you can - I'm suggesting that with the right training, either Claude (with hooks), or a Claude-like equivalent can start to generate code that follows "good" coding practices, that gives a reliable (and where necessary repeatable) output, and can iterate through huge numbers of solutions looking for one which gives the required output, far faster than a developer could do the same, and that eventually such iterations could ensure that said code is both highly secure, highly efficient and fully commented
As for the link above for the Reg article yesterday, there is also nothing to stop that solution being checked and ranked separately by a completely different automated agent to ensure an independent test of the outcome.
It's early days yet, but these potential outcomes shouldn't be treated with the scorn and contempt that they are currently receiving - is this kind of evolution so different from the industrial revolution, or Henry Ford creating the moving assembly line? Probably not, but I guess only time will tell...
I agree - it IS sad - I was commenting only the other day about it being great that a bunch of students rebuilt a replica ENIAC out of not much more than cereal boxes - that kind of thing is needed if future developers are going to truly understand their subjects from the bottom up
Unfortunately, while it is sad, it's the same journey as taken by many other crafts - try finding a blacksmith at his forge, or a master carpenter who hand makes absolutely everything - they still exist, but they aren't needed by society any more as anything more than a curio
There's no right or wrong, it's just another step on the journey.
Now - yes, 100% - I agree we aren't there.
But models like this WILL evolve and improve - remember for starters of course that LLM's being non-deterministic isn't strictly true - they have been seeded that way to give the illusion of creativity, but there's no particular reason that a model couldn't be trained on only "good" programming practices - in fact I'd fall off my chair if there weren't a hundred different organisations already trying exactly that.
Given that the vast majority of code that's still out there at the moment has been crafted to the best of our collective ability, and given that daily news stories prove that much of it is as full of holes as the proverbial Swiss cheese, a tool that could iteratively figure out the best way to achieve a result, whilst avoiding all known pitfalls, and adding to "collective" knowledge as it goes, sounds at least as good a way forward to me as the path we would be on without it.
And for sure - "ask Ai to fix it", you say with scorn, I say why not? Take this code, figure out where it's broken, and come up with a solution - rinse, repeat, until it's not broken anymore. Even then take it a stage further: "do this without using these dependancies", "make this run more efficiently" etc etc
For a real-world example, just look back at El Reg only yesterday
So why not give it a try a see where it leads?
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