Posts by Elongated Muskrat

AI video company arouses fury by boasting about replacing creative jobs

When AI inevitably flops (nondeterministic bullshit generators don't have that many real-world applications), we may well see some job losses on various boards. Most of the boardroom parasites will take a golden parachute and go on to exploit someone else though.

Meanwhile, companies that have laid people off and replaced them with "AI" are already reaping the benefits of increased costs, and this is during the loss-leader phase of the "AI revolution". Just think how expensive it's going to be for those companies once they have to start paying through the nose for a dependency they can't free themselves from. Perhaps I should start a sweepstake for which "AI leveraged" company is going to crash and burn first.

Tech support chap invented fake fix for non-problem and watched it spread across the office

Re: Hilarious!

Well, it is solar flare season (solar maximum) at the moment, and one well-timed solar prominence could do more than just make one computer crash. All those SpaceX satellites make for a juicy target for a few billion tonnes of charged plasma.

UK justice system unplugs from ancient datacenters after five-year slog

Re: Sir Brian Leveson recommends numerous uses of AI

And also very expensive to them, both in reputation, and fines, when they are found in contempt for it.

Even then, I don't see how an LLM would be any better than a human at second-guessing whether a defendant is going to change their plea at the last minute, a witness not turn up to court, or determine how long a jury might take to deliberate.

GitHub ponders kill switch for pull requests to stop AI slop

Re: Pull Request Hell

Surely the answer to this is firstly to automatically close all PRs that aren't properly linked to an issue, and then to be pretty harsh in rejecting anything that isn't well-enough commented, and well-structured enough for the maintainer to immediately see what it intends to accomplish. Copy-paste "Pull request closed; see project documentation for correct submission process" or similar. Just because it's open-source doesn't mean it should be low quality.

Re: Wait, What?

I agree with all of this; and "agree on who is going to do the work" and "acceptance criteria" can be as little as a contributor informally asking the maintainer whether a particular feature would be useful. The easiest way to do this would usually be to create the issue for the feature and @ the maintainer. I'd suggest that if a contributor can't manage this, then their code is likely to be slap-dash too.

As for bugs, I can see two main cases; someone finds a bug and has no idea or willingness to work out how to fix it, in which case, it's a bug report for the maintainer to fix. The other case is someone finds a bug which they are competent to fix themselves, in which case it's still good manners to raise the bug report, and put the details of both the problem and the fix in it, before getting approval to proceed with the PR for it. The odds are that if it's a serious bug, the maintainer already knows about it, and if they don't, then documenting it in this way is going to be useful to them, and will make their job easier.

Re: Wait, What?

My point here, is that a pull request comes pretty close to the end of a proper change management process, not the start. If someone wants to contribute to a project, surely the first point would be to raise an issue and get agreement on the maintainer (or maintainers) on what that issue should cover and its acceptance criteria, and then agree on who is going to do the work, before writing a single line of code, let alone putting in a PR for it. GitHub should make it easy for that to be the default process, not the "anything goes, here's a hundred pull requests from random strangers" approach.

I don't maintain public repos (my personal projects are private, and my work ones are private to the organisation I work for), and I do understand that open-source projects might like to encourage contributors in a less formal and process-driven way than commercial ones. However, they should make doing things "properly" the default way of doing things, or at least offer the option when creating a repository for how pull requests should be managed.

What I have done in the past, is to raise a bug report with a publicly maintained repository, which involved clicking a link on an error message in that application, which automatically filled in the issue details in GitHub (after logging in); this shows that this is obviously possible to do, and to automate. Even though the error in question included a stack trace, and it as clearly written in a language I am familiar with, I still wouldn't have dreamed of downloading the source, finding the bit of code in question, modifying it, and submitting a change in a PR, simply because of the number of assumptions I would have had to make about the intended function of that code. As it happens, it would have been wasted time as well, as the maintainer had already fixed the bug in a nightly build.

Wait, What?

Moraes said GitHub is considering various options. These include possibly giving maintainers the option to disable pull requests entirely or to restrict pull requests to project collaborators; the ability to delete pull requests from the interface (to avoid having to look at AI slop); more granular permission settings for creating and reviewing pull requests; triage tools, possibly AI-based; and transparency/attribution mechanisms for signaling when AI tools are used.

GitHub allows pull requests from anyone, without any controls? That sounds... ungood.

I would at least expect contributions to be restricted to the repo owner by default, and for them to have to explicitly allow PRs from unknowns.

UK watchdog to rule on £142M Post Office subsidy over Horizon scandal and IR35

Re: Private company, public money?

A working postal service would be nice, wouldn't it? Post Offices, however, are completely separate from the actual delivery service (Royal Mail), apart from serving as a collection point for letters and parcels, and a sales point for stamps. These are both rather redundant since you can buy stamps in pretty much any supermarket or corner shop, and RM collections are being made from post boxes, now being modified to allow larger parcels, parcel collection lockers, and your own home (now for a fee).

The Royal Mail themselves are an absolute shambles. I have been, for instance, awaiting delivery of a parcel using their 48™ Service (note 48™, not 48hr) which has been with them now for eight days. They're a private company now, and the results of privatisation are all too clear to see, following the same pattern as everywhere else: a diminished service at a higher price. I think I may have already made the point, elsewhere, several times, that the root of this problem is the neoliberal economic model that was popularised under Reagan and Thatcher, characterised by private profits for the richest, deregulation, and corruption.

Re: Private company, public money?

Well, if private criminal prosecutions brought by the PO, sidestepping the DPP were good enough for them to convict innocent sub-postmasters, how about we make an exception, and allow them to be used to prosecute these snakes, and find them "guilty by default" in the same way? After all, if we get it wrong, they can fight it through the press, and an ITV drama, and finally get the government's notice to get some redress 20 years later, then we can think about the taxpayer subsidising them.

Yes, I know this is entirely unreasonable, and unlikely, but it does irk me that those in positions of power can abuse them to both cause great injustices such as this, and evade justice themselves so effectively.

Private company, public money?

Remind me again why the taxpayer should be subsidising the compensation, and not the people responsible?

X marks the raid: French cops swoop on Musk's Paris ops

Re: Enough of this charade ..

I like to maintain an air of mystique; a heady musk if you will.

Re: Enough of this charade ..

Have you considered upgrading to one of the premium versions of reality, rather than the basic one that is littered with targeted propaganda?

Re: LOL

...and it turns out (allegedly) that he couldn't even manage to get himself a party invite to Paedo island, because he was too cringe for the convicted child rapist who was happy to invite the Andrew formerly known as Prince and Mr "grab 'em by the pussy" along.

Re: Enough of this charade ..

You do know you could use a handle that doesn't identify you, rather than always posting AC, don't you, Elon?

For example, in real life, I am neither elongated, nor a muskrat. Believe it or not, I'm not even a rodent of any sort!

Re: Thanks for the French!

Twitter has ignored requests for comment, not even a poop emoji, which is surprising because they must be replete with those

They're currently needed for the Donald's (tame) press conferences.

Notepad++ update service hijacked in targeted state-linked attack

Re: ... a late comment on NP++

If the author controls the signing keys, and changes to the auto-updater require the update to be signed, with the private key, then the hosting provider can't just slip in an (unsigned) replacement.

It seems this was down to a weakness in the supply chain, where signatures were not being checked by the updater (this is my understanding, correct me if I'm wrong). Unless someone manages to get hold of the author's private key to sign a bogus executable, they can no longer implement a MITM attack.

Firefox makes AI optional, like it probably should have been all along

Wrong way round

The browser maker this week announced a new set of AI controls for Firefox, headlined by a global kill switch that lets users disable every current and future AI feature in one go.

If included in Firefox at all (and there is a strong argument that if it exists at all, then it should be an optional extension and not included in the main product, for reasons of bloat), then it should be turned off by default, and strictly opt-in.

Still, using Firefox is still a million times better than letting Chrome hoover up all your personal info and send it home to Alphabet.

Techie's one ring brought darkness by shorting a server

Re: No Capes, No Scarves, No Ties, No Necklaces, No Watches, No Bracelets, No Rings

"Motorcycle not allowed in it."

Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

Re: Teenage boys will be salivating...

If the trolley problem applied to self-driving cars, you'd have a bigger problem, that being the fact that the "trolley-car" in the trolley problem is runaway with no brakes.

The default position for a self-driving car (and for a real human driver) when presented with a potential hazard should be to slow down and / or stop. If something is about to collide with you, then usually the best course of action is not to speed up to try to avoid it, creating further hazards, but to brace for impact.

Cops put Microsoft Copilot in holding cell after controversial hallucination

The problem really is that "AI" is not a search tool, for exactly the reasons you state - it composes "likely answers" based on its training data, many of which turn out to be wild hallucinations.

Quite frankly, the fact that it is not only being used as a search tool, which is pretty harmful in terms of propagating misinformation and disinformation, but actively prompted as a search tool by the likes of Google, is the very root of the problem. It;s not only misleading, but can be actively harmful, if taken at face value.

It's like if you had a theoretical automated "smart" tool box that would hand you the tool most suitable for the job you are performing, which it gets mostly right most of the time, but it sometimes randomly offers you a hammer instead. Sure, a hammer might do the job in some cases, but if you're about to do a spot of soldering, hitting a delicate piece of electronics with a hammer instead, after being assured that this is how to fix it, may not be ideal.

Personally, I think the answer here is regulation. Search sites should not be permitted to provide answers from "AI" that are incorrect, in the form of a "correct" answer. Even with heavy disclaimers (which I'm sure they already have), people will take the first answer served up to them as a correct answer, and my opinion is that these "novel uses for AI" should be turned off or hidden by default, rather than pushed into our faces as a fait accompli.

France to replace US videoconferencing wares with unfortunately named sovereign alternative

Re: Church of the SubGenius

Well, one person got your reference. Hail Bob.

I'm sure the French state has no pending anti-trust investigations up its sleeve concerning any incumbent MS monopolies.

UK digital ID goes in-house, government swears it isn't an ID card

Re: Interesting

Careful, now.

Re: It's not an ID card

This can be easily explained if, like Jeremy Bentham, she has had her head replaced with one made of wax.

Re: Reads like…

Yeah, because a bunch of the worst the Tory party had to offer, rebranded, stuffed into a "party" that is a private company, led by a man who is so obviously a charlatan, that Donald Trump himself is now embarrassed to associate with him, is definitely going to not completely shaft every single man, woman, and child in the country.

Let's not even get into the state of the local councils that they have tricked their way into leading, once you get past the in-fighting, and suspiciously large number of criminal records.

Labour are a complete bunch of useless bastards under Keir Starmer, but if your solution is to elect the absolute worst that humanity has to offer in the hope that they'll be better, then you need to stop drinking leaded petrol.

Palantir CEO claims AI will mean western economies won't need immigration

Re: Ray Kurtzweil

In my mind, he's in the same category as Avi Loeb, Uri Geller, and any other variety of snake-oil salesmen you can think of.

To be honest, that's probably being unkind to Uri Geller, at least he had a nice line in ornamental glassware.

Re: Presumably,

I mean, it did read as being a tad homophobic, even if that wasn't the intent (I wasn't the one who reported it to a mod, BTW).

To be honest, if Thiel was behind me, I'd be more concerned about having a bag put over my head and being dragged off into the back of a "bread van". He'd probably do the same to you just for having gay friends, I get the impression that he doesn't like diversity very much.

The whole "singularity" is based on so many unwritten faulty assumptions, it could only have been dreamed up by people as far removed from reality as tech billionaires.

For instance the idea that an "AI" can improve itself by designing a better "AI", whilst the evidence suggests that feeding the output of an AI into the AI as training data only leads to hallucinatory slop, and the idea that it can magically decide what is or is not an improvement on itself. The whole field of "AI" is based on magical thinking of the sort that comes about when those doing that "thinking" are comfortably insulated from reality by heaps of unearned money. History does not treat those in ivory towers kindly...

As for the guy who came up with "the singularity", Ray Kurtzweil; you only have to look at this past predictions to see how many of them turned out to be woefully wrong to see that his predictions about AI (and he predicts about true AI, an AGI, which doesn't even remotely exist) to see how much weapons-grade bollocks "the singularity" is.

Presumably,

"the only reason why someone's not goose-stepping between [him] and [me]" is that Peter Thiel is stood behind him, not in front of him?

Trump promises nuclear datacenter permits in 3 weeks, calls Greenland 'big beautiful ice'

Re: " AI, two years ago, nobody ever heard of the term"

I don't know, Brian Herbert's Dune prequels were pretty awful. I hope I don't need to read Harlan Ellison's effort to compare, but he did win multiple awards for his writing, so it can't be *that* bad, surely?

I don't know, I think Reagan often forgot what he'd just had for lunch. He was every bit as damaging to the world then, as Trump is now, and at the root of the big problem we now have called neoliberal economics.

Re: For someone who apparently doesn't like communism....

I can't say I know any Russians, but I do have one friend who is of second-generation Ukrainian descent, American friends, both those who live in the US and those who do not, amongst others of many nationalities.

People (and their nationalities) aren't the problem, it is the governments of some countries, and the "national character" formed from their history and institutions. The problem people are those who follow these leads, whichever country they come from.

There is no functional difference between a Russian despot, a North American despot, a South American despot, an African Despot, an Asian despot, etc. etc. The problem with Russia is that their resident despot likes to pursue (deniable) nonconventional warfare against other nations. This behaviour is, of course, not limited to Russia, the CIA, for example, have a long history of similar fuckaboutery. It's not right when they do it, either.

Re: Open the pod bay doors HAL

I don't think anyone refereed to any of these things as "artificial intelligence", especially not the golem, most of the stories of which concern the dangers of something that follows its given purpose exactly, with no intelligence of its own.

I mean, there was also the Mechanical Turk, which bears more than a passing resemblance to modern "AI" in the sense that it was something explicitly designed to deceive people into thinking it was something that it was not.

Re: For someone who apparently doesn't like communism....

Ohai regular downvoter; did I impugn one of your funders?

Re: Trump has the mind of a steel trap

The springs are clearly broken

Re: Every accusation is a confession

I was about to comment with "every accusation ins a confession" then I saw the title of the post; d'oh!

All he can do with any sort of reliability is project his own misdeeds onto others.

You missed paedophile (self-admitted walking into chaning rooms and perving over children at child beauty pageants, which themselves are pretty icky) and rapist (convicted in a civil case) from that list.

This doesn't even start to address the as-yet-unproven allegations about what he was getting up to with his buddy Jeffrey, who he "never met" but appeared next to in an awful lot of photographs.

Re: For someone who apparently doesn't like communism....

I don't think anyone has a choice about whether Russia is their enemy; for instance poisoning dissidents on foreign soil with radioactive polonium in one instance, and a cold-war era nerve toxin in another is not an act of friendship, especially when there are bystanders "caught in the crossfire". Beware of Bulgarians bearing umbrellas as well...

Re: Open the pod bay doors HAL

The term "AI" predates me, and I'm getting older every day. I believe AI "research" started in the 1950s, and people have been banging on about "the singularity" for a couple of decades now at least, without it becoming any less a load of bollocks than crystal energy and chakras.

Re: Dropped

Well, every time he goes up in Air Force 1, the pressure changes are giving those blood clots a little jiggle.

Re: Pity the poor journalists who have to listen to this demented ranting

Somewhere, there are a cohort of blood clots, all vying to be the next recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Tech support detective solved PC crime by looking in the carpark

Well, there you go, it was nigh on 20 years ago, to be fair.

Yeah, if my memory serves me correctly, you could just press the Esc key to bypass the login on XP. IT certainly wasn't secure by design, if you wanted "secure" Windows at the time, you'd have been using NT.

UK gambling regulator accuses Meta of lying about its struggle to spot illegal ads

I have, in the past, reported Facebook Ads that were clearly advertising controlled drugs, which is illegal in the UK, for any classification of drug. The fact that they were advertising cannabis, which is a class B scheduled controlled substance, and something that looked for all the world like hallucinogenic mushrooms, which are class A, makes it only more illegal. Did they remove the ad? Did they, fuck.

Opting out

...the UK’s “Gamstop” service that allows people to self-exclude from use of gambling sites.

How about a way to self-exclude from all their fucking adverts, everywhere, all the fucking time?

"Take some time out from X Casino if you think it's getting too much, buddy. That's X Casino now with more VEGAS. Spins, spins, spins. Take some time out. Be safer. X CASINO. Have fun, but be safe, Vegas Vegas, spins spins spins X CASINOOOOOOO."

Just. Fuck. Off.

Gamblecunts.

Re: Duh!

Musk is the one who does the N*zi salutes, Zuckerberg is the one who hides in the bunker; I know it's probably hard to tell them apart.

Micron finds a way to make more DRAM with $1.8bn chip plant purchase

Re: $9.5 billion sold for less than $2 billion

I'm willing to bet that Nvidia have pre-paid for the memory they use in the GPUs, or at the very least, have contractually agreed a price for that memory, along with a pre-booked delivery amount and timescale, and will be required to pony up the cash when it comes due, whether the price has fallen or not. From an accounting point of view, it's already on the books of the memory manufacturers as deferred income. I'm also willing to bet that if Nvidia turn around in six months' time and decide to cancel their contracted deliveries for the rest of the year, the there are some hefty penalty terms written into those contracts too.

Nvidia might not be charging for their kit in advance, but they will have solid agreements to pay for the components used to make it, and given the reputational damage (and damage to their share price) if they didn't honour such agreements, it's as good as paid-up-front. As noted in the article, memory production for the upcoming year has already all been sold for "AI", and Nvidia's "GPU" business is now mostly better described as "AI coprocessors" rather than consumer-grade GPUs.

Re: $9.5 billion sold for less than $2 billion

Presumably they have done some calculations and decided that they can make much more hopping on board that AI bandwagon, that absolutely does not feel like a massive bubble that is about to burst horrendously.

Micron have probably got a very good deal here, providing China doesn't take a cue from Donald Trump and invade Taiwan, PSMC have probably decided that this is a gamble they can afford to take, and the odds are it will pay off more than $7.5bn, because memory prices are up something like 300% year-on-year, and producing high-margin stuff with booked-in orders, and money-up-front is much lower risk than the consumer market. Even if the price crashes between now and delivery, if they have pre-orders worth that much, they have that money in the bank. Furthermore, if those AI companies all go out of business, after having paid PSMC, then PSMC have the money, but no need to actually deliver.

Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue

Re: BS

I'd like to keep my nose intact as well, though.