Posts by Elongated Muskrat

Trump stomps feet, pulls out 't-word' again over China rare earths ban

Re: Whats actually the best deal?

This from a man whose business "genius" consists of not paying his bills, staff, or contractors, and declaring bankruptcy.

Re: "They have to give us magnets,"

Yeah, they do, if Trump just makes one really BIG magnet and points it at them (cue loud humming noise and flying magnets)

Re: Nice

You could maybe set up an organisation with a goal to do this, and make trade easier across the world. You could call it, oh I don't know, the "World Trade Organisation" or something.

Re: We have tremendous power over them, and they have some power over us

Past US policy was to share limited IP and technical capability with China in return for them recognising US intellectual property rights. Prior to this, they just copied anything they liked. As it is, it's pretty hard to stop this from still happening, unless you happen to be a large company that is lawyered up, although that problem isn't limited to China or other nations such as India. It's rife in so-called developed countries as well, just ask any small business owner who sells online. It's even worse for artists, for some of whom it may take up a significant portion of their time chasing down infringing sellers on US-owned tat-bazaars like eBay and Etsy.

One long sentence is all it takes to make LLMs misbehave

Re: Here's a suggestion

Here's the thing though, the stuff being fed into these things isn't being curated at all, by the looks of it. In a race to be the first to get a "functioning" chatbot LLM, being first-to-market is the important thing. The person who manages to slurp up the most training material as fast as possible wins, and here we are, with LLMs that have been trained on anything their makers could get their hands on, which it seems is basically anything on the internet, slurped up by crawlers.

Now, there's an argument to be made that if you could carefully curate and fact check all of your source material, and add decent context and categorisation, then the LLM you create from feeding it that might actually contain some vestige of intelligence, simply because the "secret sauce" you have added to the source material by curating it is intelligence. The odds are it would still hallucinate to fuck though, as it would still have no concept of objective reality, or the ability to check its working against objective reality, so if you did by chance end up with something that displayed real intelligence, it would also be delusional to the point of schizophrenia.

Re: Here's a suggestion

it could still likely explain an ignition mechanism too

This, it could only do, if fed data on ignition mechanisms.

You could feed a LLM all sorts of data on chemicals and their properties (such as the CRC rubber handbook, the MSDS for various chemicals, etc.), and it would have no actual knowledge of the principles of chemistry of physics that make one substance explosive, and another not. For it to "know" how to make a bomb, it needs to be fed information on how to make a bomb. LLMs have no power of reasoning; they can only synthesise likely-looking explanations based on the probabilities of the choice and placement of words based on their training data.

The whole concept of a prompt to an LLM is one of "executing data as code". It's evaluating user input, feeding it into a model and spitting out an output based on that. The thing is, because it looks, superficially, like actual reasoning, simple-minded fools (which includes a large portion of the populace) can be led into thinking it is actually performing some kind of reasoning.

Hey, do you want to buy some tulips?

China cut itself off from the global internet for an hour on Wednesday

Re: "Chinese netizens couldn’t reach most websites hosted outside China, which is inconvenient"

Yes, and the full and "correct" name of North Korea is the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea", but is in effect a monarchic dictatorship. It's almost as if calling yourself something isn't quite the same thing as being that thing.

My point, is that although China claims to be communist (or as, you state, actually claims to be a socialist state; the clue here is that if it's a different word, it probably means a different thing), its power structures are very hierarchical and authoritarian. It really isn't well described as either socialism or communism, in a dictionary-definition sense, in much the same way that the rigged voting system in the US, with its combination of first-past-the-post, no limits on funding from vested interests, and electoral college, makes it not really a representative democracy, despite claiming to be one, and the UK being a constitutional monarchy is somewhat stymied by having a constitution that is largely conventional, and not written down in one place, and its claim to be a representative democracy is, again, limited by FPTP.

It's very well to make a justified criticism of political systems, such as communism, but it's probably best to make sure that your examples actually represent the thing you are arguing against, lest you make yourself look uneducated.

It would be nice to be able to debate this sort of thing rationally, and for people to gradually become more educated on such things, but the adversarial nature of social media, and the way some people treat these message boards as an adversarial forum sadly limits that possibility.

Re: There's a possibility this wasn't intentional

Given how integrated China is with world trade, a lot of people would notice if all of the Internet connections through port 443 were suddenly not working.

My understanding is that this was connections from China to third countries, not connections from third countries into China. You might notice if you couldn't access a Chinese website, but would you notice if Chinese people couldn't access your website for an hour?

In any case, I'm not suggesting you aren't correct, I'm just saying there are plausible reasons why this hasn't been widely reported. I'm sure the journalists at El Reg are competent enough to check their sources, and aren't the sort to embarrass themselves by publishing any old unsubstantiated bollocks.

Re: "Chinese netizens couldn’t reach most websites hosted outside China, which is inconvenient"

...also. I like how you think the government of China is communist. I expect you think National Socialists were socialist as well. That level of naïveté is adorable.

Re: "Chinese netizens couldn’t reach most websites hosted outside China, which is inconvenient"

Yes, because one thing being wrong completely negates the possibility of something else being wrong as well.

$deity help us if this drivel is representative of the cognitive function of the populace as a whole.

Re: There's a possibility this wasn't intentional

I don't think it's particularly surprising that things happening within China that concern censorship aren't being widely reported within China. Outside of China, it would have to be newsworthy to be reported, and Chinese censorship is pretty much a given. For something of a technical nature to be reported in the mainstream media, it would have to be "dumb-downable" enough to be explicable in small words. Does your average Heil Online "reader" know what port 443 is or does? They're more likely to think it's a bottle of fortified wine.

There's a possibility this wasn't intentional

Whilst there are the obvious explanations of a test of capabilities, a screw-up, or genuine censorship of something (seemingly successfully so), there's also the possibility that this was a demonstration of disruptive capability from another power acting against China, a "we can cut you off from the internet via a DoS attack" kind of thing from a Western power, e.g. the US or Israel. If I wanted to send a warning shot to another nation in a way that says, "I can do this at any time," but maintain plausible deniability, then this might be one way to go about it.

Censorship working as designed. We're just used to the hopelessly useless domestic "won't somebody think of the children using VPNs" variety.

Re: "Chinese netizens couldn’t reach most websites hosted outside China, which is inconvenient"

In the city where I live, which is a university city, around 80% of students are now overseas students (basically because universities are forced to run as businesses, and foreign students bring in more money). Of those, from observation, a large portion are Chinese. I'm sure these people are both speaking Putonghua (that's the actual name of the language you were looking for) outside of China, and also fall under the category of "the billion-plus population under Beijing's iron rule", but somehow seem to manage to speak pretty good English too. It's almost as if Chinese people are actually taught other languages.

Don't fall into the trap of confusing your own inability or lack of desire to learn another language with that of others. Many people across the world are fluent polyglots, and this definitely includes many Chinese people, and people outside of China, who speak Chinese languages.

Two wrongs don’t make a copyright

Re: Ad Blocking?

I wonder how far one can go with the argument that, under the Computer Misuse Act, a website publisher's attempts to run code in your browser without your permission (under the pretence that they need to do so in order to deliver the content) constitutes unauthorised access to a computer system. I'd certainly like to see things like tracking cookies (or other tokens) that serve only to profile the user without their explicit permission, to be considered to be such.

We are quickly moving from the point where some advertising may contain malware to one where all advertising that is anything other than a static image served without "targeting" could be considered malware.

Re: Such as?

If they are not noticed, they will not work.

Subliminal? That is banned in the UK.

"Subliminal cuts" are banned, however, the way all advertising works is on a subliminal level. They make you subconsciously aware of a product's existence. Nobody ever said, on a conscious level, "I love this advert, I'm going to go and buy the product. I especially love the way I've already seen the same advert inserted five times in this short Youtube video, three of which such insertions were in the middle of a sentence."

Re: entertaining advertisement could be part of a narrative left hanging

Yeah, he was much better in Buffy.

Re: Modification without distribution

The logic in the decision is that the adblocker makes such a change and distributes the result to the user.

By the same logic, when I open Microsoft Word and type on my keyboard so that words appear in a document, it is actually MS Word that is creating the document, and not me, and it is Microsoft who own it. I'm sure they'd love this, but nope. Reduction ad absurdum.

The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

Re: The horror ...

Nice to see I'm getting the homophobic downvotes there (the real reason why Sorbo can't find work)

Re: 2nd hand NPU anyone?

become?

Re: #4 is what I've been saying

It did stay with its core functionality: advertising. Remember: if you're not paying for it, you're the product.

Re: grammar

If you're having dinner with FLATUS, I hope you like heart disease.

Re: The AI Hindenburg is Joining the Itanic

A significant issue with AI systems today is that having run out of "training" materials they are starting to digest their own waste.

It's not only this, but it doesn't "know" how to determine which training data is relevant, and which is not, when asked to provide a specific output. It doesn't "know" because it literally has no understanding of the data, whereas the human mind is built upon a consistent* internal model of the universe with everything we have learned, and the relationships between data categorised in some way.

*consistency may vary, especially when the quality of the training data is poor; see also: politics, religion.

Re: Re ... "AI is now as good as it's going to get, .." .... Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

The economy is self correcting.

Sometimes, though, that correction takes the form of the guillotine. It seems our current generation of ultra-capitalists are failing to respect that particular repeating pattern throughout history. I think the lesson here, is that it's greed that is self-correcting.

Re: "AI is now as good as it's going to get, and that's neither as good nor bad"

I don't know where you live, but round here, we've had no appreciable sustained rainfall since some time in March. That's not normal, but sustained blocking weather patters caused by deviations in the jet-stream are becoming more common. These are caused by increased warming of the atmosphere, which in turn is largely caused by the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide being over 420 ppm, compared to pre-industrial levels of 280 ppm. The warming effect of this is down to simple physics, where sunlight heats the ground, which re-emits the heat as infrared due to the black-body effect. Some of the wavelengths that are emitted happen to correspond to a strong absorption peak of carbon dioxide in the infrared spectrum. This causes the heat energy which would otherwise be radiated into space to instead partially heat the atmosphere. This effect was first known about in 1824.

None of this is "narrative", it is pure science that can be demonstrated through experiment, and measurable effects that can, and are, shown to be occurring. What is "narrative" is the anti-science bullshit pumped out by people with vested interests in the fossil fuel industry and their useful idiots. Which are you? Shill, or idiot?

Re: Replace 'AI' with 'LLM' in your editorial

I would expect the latter to only be an improvement in the sense that it might produce some justification for its "reasoning" that sounds more technical, although is still likely to be hallucinatory waffle, just couched in technical jargon.

Re: Replace 'AI' with 'LLM' in your editorial

I'm reminded of the supposedly excellent results from the "AI" trained to analyse chest X-rays and determine which patients would benefit from a chest drain to alleviate pneumothorax. It did very well on the test run, where it was fed images of patients who had needed a chest drain and ones who had not. Unfortunately, when presented with real-world data, it did no better than random chance.

Why was this? Well, in the training data, those patients who had needed a chest drain had, of course, been given one before the X-ray was taken. It would be unethical not to have done this, and probably would have counted as medical malpractice. All the trainers of the "AI" had managed to do was train it to identify the shadow of a chest drain on an X-ray.

This is also a cautionary tale about making assumptions about how "AI"s work. There is no intelligence there.

Re: pedant squared

Don't confuse "artificial intelligence," a science-fiction concept which doesn't exist, with "AI" as used by a marketing department. Also, to be extra pedantic, "intelligence" as an abstract noun, isn't countable, but "an intelligence" as a concrete noun to describe a thinking being, is. A room full of clever people could be described as a collection of intelligences, although that would be a very wanky and pretentious thing to do.

Re: Replace 'AI' with 'LLM' in your editorial

making an LLM not hallucinate is equivalent to the halting problem

I think you've hit the nail on the head there.

Re: The horror ...

Ah yes, the same Kevin Sorbet Sorbo who has apparently decided to refuse to work in California, which has nothing to do whatsoever with everyone in Hollywood telling him in unison to piss off.

Re: Dot Dumb

There are several players who have obviously thrown a lot of money at it, through building data centres specced entirely to serve up "AI" mush. It's obvious because they try to shove the "AI" nonsense in your face at every opportunity, and it's also already obvious that people don't actually want it, or they wouldn't have to try to sell it so hard. The ones that spring to mind most are Meta, Microsoft, and Google, and to be fair, those are all companies that could do with having their wings clipped. At the very least, it might mean that Meta AI, Gemini and Copilot aren't turned on by default and in a way which is hard to disable or otherwise get rid of.

The UK Online Safety Act is about censorship, not safety

Re: "adult content providers"

I don't bet often, but the last time I did sign up for a betting site, they did require that I send them copies of identity documents before depositing any money. Now, it may be the case that there are sites that offer free bets to new users without verifying their identity (which seems stupid as such an offer could be easily and obviously gamed), but I would suggest that a site that allows you to give them money, but which puts restrictions on withdrawing it again, is quite likely to not be operating within the law.

Re: Calling it censorship is partisan bullshit

Bollocks.

_{I don't think a more nuanced rebuttal is needed here; the evils or merits of pornography aside, that really is not what this is about.}

Re: "adult content providers"

It's almost as if an industry which has as its sole purpose taking money from people, might have money put aside to influence political decisions. We can blame Blair for loosening the rules about allowing advertising of gambling for the proliferation of adverts for what I like to refer to as "gamblecunts".

Re: "adult content providers"

I'm pretty sure that, in order to create an account on a betting site, and engage in actual betting, you need to prove your identity; ISTR there are already anti money-laundering rules in place that, reasonably, require this.

End well, this won't: UK commissioner suggests govt stops kids from using VPNs

Re: Yes they are that stupid

Wouldnt that be called a dumb phone?

I see that you only read every other word of my post as usual. Par for the course, I guess.

What I'm getting at is that, rather than mandating age verification, on all websites that may host some form of "age restricted content", which is obvious unworkable nonsense, as borne out by the evidence, and wholly predictable consequences of trying to enforce it, they *could* have mandated that, for instance, all websites in the UK that provide certain categories of "adult" content provide metadata in those sites to identify and categorise it, and then, alongside this, mandate that all UK ISPs provide tools to their users, which *can* be turned on, and can filter content based on that metadata, on a per-user, per-category basis. That metadata could be as broad or as fine-grained as you like.

It's down to parents to control what their little darlings see, not the state, but if ISPs and websites aren't providing the means to do so, it's not entirely unreasonable for the government to step in and require them to do a better job, as a condition of being available in the UK. Personally, I think there is a sensible balance to be struck between censorship of things TPTB don't like à la Mary Whitehouse, and exposing children to sexual material at an inappropriate age. The thing is, it should be down to the parents to decide where that line lies (within the law) not the Home Secretary of the day, or a committee in the House of Lords, or you, or me.

This is by no means a perfect solution, but it would be better than the one we have been forced into using, whether any minors have access to our devices or not. It would do nothing to tackle the many and myriad ways the kids will have of finding ways around it, such as passing around a USB stick in the schoolyard, but it does at least make it much less likley that young children will stumble across things that they are not yet equipped to deal with. I'd suggest that social media providers need to do a much better job of not only controlling what children see, in terms of adult material, and material promoting things like suicide and self harm, but regulating hate speech too.

Re: Yes they are that stupid

I'm not quite as old as you (yet), but I, too, can recall the first time I saw pornography; it would have been at around the same age, and it occurred in the common room at school during break time, when another child removed a pornographic magazine from his bag and showed it around.

We do, however, have to acknowledge that there is a bit of a difference between a copy of a relatively soft-core porn mag (I think it was Penthouse) showing nothing more than a bit of bush, and the graphic and extreme porn that is on the internet.

It's not the state's job to parent people's kids for them though. On the flip side, it may be appropriate for the state to provide, or mandate the provision or availability of, adequate tools for parents to do that parenting themselves.

There is a genuine problem here of kids accessing the sort of material that might make you or I, as worldly adults wince, and it certainly isn't a healthy or realistic introduction to sex. The solution that the government has forced onto the population clearly isn't fit-for-purpose, but, by all accounts, the parent controls and filtering that ISPs provide isn't up to the job either. There needs to be a sensible middle ground, where parents can easily filter their children's internet access to limit their exposure to unsuitable material. It needs to be in the hands of the parents to decide what is or isn't suitable (as long as it's legal), and if little Johnny is finding ways around such restrictions without his parents knowing, then this is a problem of parenting and not one of state interference.

It is indeed, but the problem is that most people have absolutely no foresight and act genuinely surprised when the inevitable conflict starts. The "it couldn't happen here" mentality.

I guess someone doesn't like the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band...

It's very easy to say "they are all the same," or to fall into the trap this creates of attempting to forcing you to defend the indefensible actions of one person before you are allowed to criticise another. Thought-terminating clichés like this are not helpful at all in a rational discussion.

Yes, the problem with politics is that it is dominated by politicians, but some of them are way more dangerous than others, and attempting to point this out, and tackle the very real problem it creates should not be met with dismissal. If anything, it should be met instead with the response of "yes, this person is corrupt, and so is this other person, I'll tackle that problem, while you tackle this one". It is possible for there to be more than one problem, and for them to be dealt with independently and simultaneously.

Farage is a huge problem in terms of the basic fundamental rights enjoyed by you and me, his rhetoric (and those of the many like him) is straight out of the German 1930s playbook. We should be closely examine who is funding this, as well as countering the spittle-flecked hate-filled rhetoric with actual facts. This isn't to say that Starmer isn't also hopelessly pandering to the same interests, in a different way. Guess what? We should tackle that as well, but we should never use the existence of one problem to dismiss another. That is just pure abdication of responsibility as a human being.

The last time Farage was honest, was when he was at school, when he purportedly delighted at the fact that his initials were the same as those of the National Front.

His entire political career has been one of half-truths, dog whistles, and rabble-rousing, peppered with dodgy money.

It doesn't matter who you vote for, the government always gets in...

Fascism and capitalism (the type where a tiny minority use their wealth to get everyone else's wealth) are two sides of the same coin. One of the defining features of the Third Reich was the integration of corporatism and government, the slave labour camps were used to provide unwilling labour to big industries, the best-known examples being I.G. Farben, Krupp, Siemens, Daimler-Benz, and Volkswagen (according to a very quick internet search). Don't be fooled by the name, neoliberalism is "liberal" only in the lack of regulation of its exploitation, as an economic model, it is entirely fascistic.

The lesson from history, is that, eventually, in such situations, those in charge end up being the ones dying.

Age verification is obviously unworkable though. Am I going to be required to prove my age every time I connect to my work VPN? And presumably periodically to ensure nobody else is using it? Show my passport or driving license to the department of government inspection? If not, then all a child needs to do is get the adult to install the VPN for them. Given that a lot of VPN software works "silently", does this mean that UK.gov is going to make vendors of operating systems force "updates" onto everyone in the UK? That's mote than a little Orwellian.

Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't want – here's what we actually need

Re: OS/2 had application spaces....

Windows audio would really deserve a managing app that should bring together input/output control and the mixer app.

Windows sound management, as it is, is rubbish. Say I have two monitors attached, each with its own speakers. Why can't I configure Windows so that the left channel comes out of the left monitor and the right channel comes out of the right monitor?

As it is, this is currently moot, as the monitors I am currently using have no speakers built into them, only audio outputs (via HDMI/DispalyPort), so Windows sees them as audio output devices, but unless I plug a speaker into each, which would seem pointless (I could do the same with the outputs on the motherboard), I won't hear anything anyway.

The ability, however, to set multiple devices for simultaneous audio output, or assign different channels to each, or even different applications to different outputs, is, if available at all, so deeply hidden and obfuscated as to be practically absent.

Re: Windows continues to evolve..

Just as every invertebrate tends to evolve into a crab, all software tends to evolve into advertising. It's like some sort of cancer.