Posts by Elongated Muskrat

Big AI's content problem: Take the work, keep the money

Re: Time to make Lemonade.

Why would you want to do that though.

From an information theory perspective, AI is a lossy transformation of information. Allow me to explain:

Its output, based on a large corpus of input, is a statistical model, no thinking involved (machines can't think, any belief otherwise is pure magical thinking), at the very best, any such transformation can only preserve the information content of the input, it cannot create new information. In reality, it is an imperfect transformation and introduces errors, omissions, or "hallucinations" - another word for false correlations in the statistical model.

The output of such models appears, superficially to be based on logical progression, but this simply hides the fact that the model is based on lots of actual creative input, stolen from humans, and the large scale averaging of this looks novel at first glance.

So what happens if you feed the output from something that is lossy back into itself? Pretty much thr same thing you'd get if you kept re-compressing a jpeg image from a photograph of a screenshot. You get loss of detail, false reinforcement of errors, and a degraded model. Garbage in, garbage out. Something that looks to produce accurate answers 99% of the time fed back into itself falls below 50% after just 69 iterations, and the sort of slop I've seen coming out of AI is far worse than 99% accurate. This is known as "model collapse," and, quite frankly, let the fuckers collapse.

This depends entirely on what you mean by "quote".

For example, consider the following theoretical entry on Wikipedia:

Twisting the grommets anticlockwise was shown to reduce vibration in anti-quantum widgets[1].

[1] John Q. Researcher et al, Proceedings of the Widget Society, vol 234, 1998

If you were to quote this in part by summarising, e.g. "John Q Researcher demonstrated the twisted grommet effect in 1998," and giving the source, you clearly are not violating copyright. If, however, you were to quote the entire abstract of the underlying research paper, verbatim, without permission, and without attributing it to the original author, you'd almost certainly be violating their copyright. This would be especially true if you were doing this in a commercial context, and claiming it as your own original work. The same would be the case if you reproduced the entire source, but went through it with a thesaurus changing most of the words for synonyms.

If you were atually interested in this topic, rather than using it to make disingenuous argumetns about copyright theft (which is, IMHO, what "AI" models are engaging in, wholesale), you'd already have familiarised yourself with the rules around plagiarism, fair use and copyright.

If you had any sort of higher education from a reputable estabishment, you should actually have done a course on research ethics already.

Microsoft tells nonprofits their deleted M365 data isn't coming back

Re: Simple as:

"They've taken my money so I can trust them" is a deeply flawed argument.

Simple as:

If it's on someone else's computer, you don't control it. If it's vital data that you need to retain, or have access to if your internet connection is down (or the provider's service is down), then don't put it on "the cloud," or at the very least, have backups (plural).

Uncle Sam wants in on Musk's €120M fight with Brussels

Re: Hahahahaha

The US is a declining power, they just don't seem to have realised it. They think of themselves as a much larger and more important country than they are, and have kept themselves that way through force-projection. Trump's disastrous Iran war has severely depleted their capability to do this, and pretty much everything he says or does has massively damaged their soft-power overseas, as well as their domestic economy. They are heading to the position the UK is now in, a former empire having to concede that they are not more important than everyone else, and they need to be respectful if they want cooperation from others. The last throes of this attitude can be seen here in the UK with the disaster of brexit, driven by jingoism and self-superiority, soon to be undone, watch this space.

I'll be down-voted for saying it, but it should be so blatantly self-evident that nobody is superior to anybody else simply because of the borders they happen to be born within. It seems plenty of people are still quite slow on the uptake.

Overreach?

"You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means."

If there's any overeach going on here, it's of US bodies trying to strong-arm US "rights" such as their citizens' freeze-peach rights within US borders into extraterritorial jurisdictions. The EU has rules you have to obey if you want to play in its house, if you don't like it, don't come over to play. "Mummy and Daddy let me draw on the walls at home" doesn't wash.

As it happens, Elon Musk clearly uses his wealth and his platforms to try to project his political opinions and to interfere in other countries' domestic politics all the time. This is clearly evident in how he pops up supporting far-right rallies across the continent, and pushes agitprop and disinformation. He should be considered as a hostile foreign actor and be sanctioned accordingly. If that includes sanctioning the companies he owns, then so be it. It can't come soon enough.

Project leader thought his team understood the plan, ended up fixing their 'interpretation' of it

Re: YES I understand

Idioms that people assume are universal are often very different between cultures. For example the thumbs-up gesture, taken to mean "yes", "good", "okay" in English-speaking cultures, can in others be a crude and extremely offensive gesture that may get you into a fight.

ISTR that in Greece, a nod of the head means "no", and a slight shake to one side means "yes".

On the other hand, some things that you might assume are cultural are actually universal, such as raising ones eyebrows to indicate surprise.

Re: "Our plan was better"

If their plan was better, the time to address that was in the discussion phase, not the implementation phase.

If I decide to do something in a way differently to that which has been agreed, I would at the very least tell someone that I was going to do that, and expect to get argued down and told not to. If I'd agreed to a project plan and decided to go against it without telling anyone, I'd rightly expect to get bollocked for it and then have to discuss it at my next performance review.

Re: Happens all the time

This is nothing to do (directly) with money laundering, and everything to do with pushing the responsibility for policing fraud onto banks because properly funding policing is too hard (I doubt it's even that the police don't want to do it, the money to fund that isn't there). The banks, then understandably push that responsibility onto the customer. Meanwhile, those committing fraud on an industrial scale continute to do so, because, except in a few rare cases, there is very little possibility of them getting caught, and even if only one mark in 1,000 falls for it and gives them their life savings, that's still someone's life savings they've scammed.

Ther are all sorts of technical measures that could be imposed (and in some cases are), like escrow for large transfers to new payees that haven't been pre-vetted, or transfers overseas, but the underlying problem is that once the money is someone else's bank account, especially if it's on overseas one, it's gone. Without the political will to tackle it, especially across international borders, in in countries where the fraudsters may well be officially sanctioned, such as North Korea, the problem is going to continue.

Money laundering, where proceeds of crime get transferred onwards to other accounts, or overseas, often via cryptocurrency transfers, happens after the initial fraud, and is a different problem altogether.

Thoughts return to forbidden RAM upgrades as Raspberry Pi OS gets fresh lick of paint

I am curious to know why this is a scam. Are ther other hardware differences between a 2GiB model and an 8GiB model besides the memory capacity? If teh memory capacity has been increased by replacing the RAM, and that RAM is usable, then surely there is no practical difference between a board that originally had 8GiB RAM and one that has had its 2 GiB chip replaced with an 8GiB chip. I'm assuming that the replacement still has to be compatible in terms of capabilities (i.e. clock speed, etc.) or it just isn't going to work. Is there some subtlety I'm missing?

Campaigners tell Burnham not to trade away the UK's tech tax to please Trump

Re: Level Playing Field

Yes, it's actually ~5% of the global population and ~25% resource usage if you care to google it. That's actually worse; they're overconsuming their share by 400% not 300%

Re: Too late

To be fair, there was some inkling of a prospect, when "Trump" threatened to withdraw US troops from NATO countries, becuase he was labouring under the misapprehension that US troops in NATO countries help support the NATO countries and not the other way around.

As it happens if Trump did decide to do this, the result would be that the UK no longer hosts US troops, bombers, nukes, and the wives of servicemen who drive on the wrong side of the road and kill motorcyclists before fleeing the coutnry under the cover of diplomatic immunity, and the US would lose a whole swathe of its force projection across the globe, as well they should given that they don't tend to use it for the good of others, or really themselves either.

Re: Labour scrap a tax?

Yeah, except there's a certain type of person who lieks to claim that conservatives are the party of low taxes, and labour are the party of high taxes. For most people, the exact opposite is typically true, and this is why the economy typically tanks under right-wing governments and recovers under centre-left ones.

Re: Labour scrap a tax?

Remind me again which government it was that put income tax up to its highest level in living memory, and squandered a load of public money on uncontested dodgy contracts to their mates during a pandemic, whilst simultaneously raising both the national debt and budget deficit to the highest level it has ever been, thus leaving a whopping hole in the public finances that can't just be filled with wishful thinking. Still, Michelle Mone got a nice yacht and an ermine robe out of it, yeah?

Let me guess? You're one of "those" who likes to claim that Labour governments "bankrupt" the country whilst the evidence, which is a matter of public record that anyone can look up, actually points to the opposite.

Re: Sounds like this tax doesn't go nearly far enough

This is the entire point.

If I need a widget, and I go into a widget shop and widgets cost £1, which makes the shop 5p profit after costs, I will buy a widget at £1.

If megaglobalhypercorp.com starts selling widgets at 95p, because they have eliminated the costs that the widget shop has, people are going to buy them there instead. The widget shop can't compete at 95p, and we lose the widget shop from the high street. The next time you need a widget in an emergency, or want to browse widgets and pick them up and have a look, you're bang out of luck.

megaglobalhypercorp.com can then raise their widget price to £1.50, or whatever price the market will bear, and since there are no widget shops any more, you have to pay this price if you want a widget. Businesses that depend on widgets see their costs go up by 50%, driving inflation.

If, however, you say that megaglobalhypercorp.com pays a 5% tax on every widget, the price of their widgets goes up to 99.75p. People then still have the choice of the convenience of buying a widget online and having it delivered to them, or of going into a shop and picking one out and taking it home themselves.

The customer is never paying more money for their widgets, and even though that tax is being passed onto them, it is only bringing the price up to what they would be paying anyway, and has the effect of levelling the playing field such that physical shops can continue to compete. Those shops continue to pay employees, whose taxes go into the treasury, the money stays in the local economy and doesn't end up on the balance sheet of a global company headquartered in a tax haven and run by people with very large yachts.

Re: Sounds like this tax doesn't go nearly far enough

Your list of shop costs is also strangely one-sided. A shop has staff for replenishment and sales. A warehouse has pickers, packers and dispatch staff, and then pays a courier to finish the job. In a shop, the customer does the picking and carries the goods home for free. That is the most efficient unpaid workforce in British retail, and you left it off the balance sheet.

Goods don't magically transport themselves from a warehouse into a shopper's basket. A physical shop still has pretty much the same logistics costs for warehousing as an e-tailer. Large shoips liek supermarkets do the warehousing and logistics themselves, others pay someone else to do it for them, which goes into their supplier costs. A greengrocer still has to go to a fruit market and pick and load goods into a van, then come and put them onto shelves, a corner shop still has to take regular deliveries and stack them, the van that brings them and the warehouse it comes from add costs; I omitted these costs, because they are similar between the two types of business, even if not paid diretly.

The Treasury consulted on exactly this in 2022 and dropped it in 2023, partly because it could not answer those questions fairly.

Was that under Johnson, Truss, or Sunak? I think this probably points to a dysfunctional treasury run by ministers who can't tie their own shoelaces.

Amazon has no fiduciary duty to raise prices to whatever level it likes. Directors must promote the success of the company. Amazon has spent twenty-five years doing that with low prices and fat fees charged to the sellers who depend on it.

Amazon has spent 25 years undercutting other retailers to reduce market variety, so that they can do exactly this. Prices are creeping up. In places where they have cornerd the market, or are near to doing so, prices have risen sharply, to the extent that it is often cheapest to go and find the prodcut you want on Amazon's site and then find the original retailer and buy it from them. It used to be the case that Amazon were usually cheaper, but they have taken advantage of their position, and their ubiquity to change this as much as they can get away with.

If you think de-facto monopolies can't and don't manipulate prices in order to maximise profit margins, then you just haven't been paying attention to how capitalism works.

Re: Sounds like this tax doesn't go nearly far enough

Even if business only does online sales, they still need premises and these kind of taxes are always paid by customers anyway.

Whilst this is true, warehousing is much cheaper and more space-efficient than a shop. A shop has many additional costs, not just limited to rent, but staff for stock replenishment, sales, and security, additional cleaning costs, and much less space efficiency, because customers come onto the premises. Over a certain size, or for shops that incorporate cafes and restaurants, toilet faciliteis (and cleaning) are required as well. high-street commercial rents are also much higher than those for a warehouse on an industrial estate. For all these reasonsa, and probably others on top, online-only or predominantly-online businesses havea clear advantage.

Businesses that want to keep heads above water these days need to support online sales.

Whilst this is also no doubt true, there are plenty of goods that are just better bought in person; heavy or bulky goods, perishable items, clothes or shoes you need to try on. Some shops aren't going to dsiappear any time soon; I can't foresee a huge boom in online greengrocers, especially when the state of courier companies in the UK seems to be a rapid race to the bottom. Many businesses provide online sales not because they find it more convenient or profitable, but because they need to do so to compete with the likes of Amazon.

Of course, like most taxes, a floor for when the tax applies is sensible; a 2.5% tax on all online sales over £1M (or some other arbitrary fine-tuning constant) would easily be applied, in the same way you don't pay income tax on earnings below the tax threshold, and the existing tax beign discussed only applies on turnover over a specific threshold. Even Liz Truss's economists could work this one out.

If the main logic for this being "unworkable" is that it might apply to small businesses (it can easily be made not to), or that "governments are corrupt" then I can only assume that you are an anarchist who believes in 0% taxation and no public services, policing, emergency services, or military.

I would add that, of course this sort of tax ends up being paid by the consumer. The idea is that the consumer has the choice between buying from a shop that hasn't gone out of business, or from an online retailer, for roughly the same amount of money, without one or the other having an unfair advantage. The alternative is that all the physical shops go out of business, the online behemoths drive all their competition out of business through economies of scale, and you have no choice but to buy from Amazon, who can (and will) put prices up to whatever level they feel like, because they have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to do so. That's capitalism, baby! (and also why capitalism needs regulation to avoid becoming autocracy)

Sounds like this tax doesn't go nearly far enough

The move of the sales of many goods and services to the internet has left bricks-and-mortar shops in a position where they often have higher overheads and can no longer effectively compete. In theory, anyone can start an online retailer and compete in "the marketplace", but in practice what happens is that economies of scale kick in and we end up with was online retailers and less consumer choice.

I reckon we should have an online sales tax that compensates for the overheads that physical establishments face; say 2.5% of sales, and then adjust it up or down when we see how it's going. On top of this, a "large retailer tax" for comapnies with a turnover over a certain level, and then we might see both a proliferation of new online retailers, with increased choice, and at least a slow-down to the closure of those well-established independent shops that you can go into and actually browse the things for sale.

This would be good for the economy, not only in increased tax revenue, but would also protect jobs and commercial rents, and thus the taxable income from those, and the associated advantages of footfall in shopping districts (low footfall leading to more vandalism and crime because nobody is watching). needless to say, the economy also needs money to be in peoples pockets so that they can spend it too. The mroe money moves about, the more becomes available to the exchequer. Conversely, the more money stagnates in the pockets of hoarding billionaires, the more the economy is starved, which serves nobody, not even the Smaugs.

Treasury chief says AI bosses, not their bots, will carry the can for criminal acts

Re: There is nothing new in computing

Absolutely, and if they are told that the software they are given to use will do one thing, and it goes and does another, the vendor is liable.

For example, if I were to supply someone with some payroll software, and it overpaid all their staff by 10%, apart from the staff being delighted, I would absolutely be liable for the fuck-up. This would still be the case even if my marketing weasels had slapped an "AI" sticker on it.

If all this "AI" bollocks can't provide deterministic outcomes, then it absolutely should be required to state that. This is the last thing the weasels will do, as this would require them to admit their lies.

There is nothing new in computing

This quote is 45 years old now:

"A computer can never be held accountable, and therefore a computer must never make a management decision"

BOFH: Oh no! The CMS ate 500 pages of corporate documentation

I have a feeling I know this CMS

A notion, if you will.

UK's Online Safety Act has made 'absolutely no difference,' kids say

Re: Impossible to enforce

Exactly this, except of course when it comes to folks like Donny the Orange and their gunboat diplomacy.

Re: Impossible to enforce

If I have a website that hosts something that is, for example, controlled information in North Korea, do I need to abide by North Korean laws? Perhaps I should make sure that my website won't serve content to any IP address that appears to be in North Korea? Hold on while I just redesign the internet for you, should be done in just a minute...

Re: Yup..."We are doing something".....and 80% of kids worldwide saw no difference

i think you might need to clean your keyboard, the '.' key appears to be stuck, rendering your comment night on unreadable.

Terminated employee cost company hundreds of thousands of dollars because nobody revoked access

The message fromt his article:

Anyone who uses the term "offboarding" should be "offboarded" from a short plank into shark-infested waters. The same goes for "onboarding". We should have zero tolerance for the corporate-speak mangling of the English language; if you're sacking someone call it that, don't sugar-coat it in weasel-word euphemisms.

Microsoft devs rejoice: Union types coming to C# in November

Re: Not mentioned here...

Wash your mouth out with soap and water and go to your room right now!

In seriousness, I understand where you're coming from, and this seems like a more controlled version of goto, so you don't have to use that. I think the last time I actually had to use a goto statement was some time in the 1980s, on a CPC464.

If this leads to safer and more mainatianble code, then I'm all for it. Next up: methods that are only allowed a single return statement, right at the end...

Not mentioned here...

...is the new feature that is most likely to get used:

The ability to break out of a loop at a particular level, by labelling the loop and using that loop on your break statement. Previsouly this sort of thing would ahve to be done by setting a flag in an inner loop before breaking, testing for it in the outer loop and breaking again, possibly through multiple levels. You end up with an awful lot of boilerplate; for example (apologies for lack of indentation, blame El Reg's formatting for this):

var escaped = false;

for (i = 0; i < 10; i++)

{

for (j = 0; j < 100; j++)

{

for (k = 0; k < 1000; k++)

{

if (i == 5 && j == 6 && k == 7)

{

escaped = true;

break;

}

}

if (escaped)

{

break;

}

}

if (escaped)

{

break;

}

}

becomes:

outer: for (i = 0; i < 10; i++)

{

for (j = 0; j < 100; j++)

{

for (k = 0; k < 1000; k++)

{

if (i == 5 && j == 6 && k == 7)

{

break outer;

}

}

}

}

On a side note, will El Reg ever get HTML code tags to work properly, retain formatting of code blocks and stop putting in loads of spurious line breaks?

I think the point is that you are forced to add the code to handle your new type, or it won't compile. Better that than a run-time exception six months down the line because you forgot to implement an edge case.

UK digital ID may be dead, but its legacy IT problem lives on

Re: Use cases

Ok, whatever you say, товарищ.

Working as an IT professional, and having known many other such professionals in my long career, I can assure you that if youy take the number of such professionals, n, then the number of ways fo representing that data will be n + 1.

Re: Use cases

Yes, pretty sure I know which "they" it is too. Well, it's their own resources they're wasting I guess, but it does make you wonder what their agenda is, beyond sheer pettiness, to make it worthwhile. It's not like the vote counts atually do anything. I don't really care enough to make it worth trying to find out though, I just amuse myself by letting them know they're seen every now and then.

We live in a world now where well-funded minority interest parties are constantly in campaigning mode, which left unchecked can bring down a government through drip-fed negative public opinions. Funnily enough, those parties really dislike scrutiny, especially scrutiny along the lines of "where is all your money coming from?" and "cui bono?"

Re: Use cases

Yet those making the down-votes never seem to actually respond with any sort of counter-point, just with snarky AC drivel.

I know the modern internet is entireyl geared towards farming engagement from conflict, but really, do try harder.

Re: Use cases

I see the downvote-bot has found me again; I wear it as a badge of honour that someone sees me as such a threat that they have to come and systematically put a single down-vote on every one of my posts. I must be doing something right. I can be pretty sure that this is the case, as well, since I don't tend to get that single down-vote when I post AC.

I would have thought that imploring people to pay attention to history and to consider unintended consequences would be a relatively uncontroversial opinion, but here we are. I might add that the threat this poses is greater than the one that the last attempt under Tony Blair posed, given that fascism seems to be having a real renaissance at the moment.

Use cases

There may be use cases where a digital ID is beneficial to Joe Public, for example if it can prove someone's age without revealing their identity, or any identifier, pseudononymous or otherwise.

The risk is that these things can be used to track individuals, and that tracking can be done not just by the government department that issues the "identify", but anyone who can access it.

ANPR can already be used to track vehicles, and whilst this might be touted as a way for the Plod to track criminals, it also provides a way for stalkers or abusers to track their victims, and you'd be naïve to think that no coppers are bad actors.

Inventing a new system to identify and track individuals poses a real risk to privacy, and even if not being criminally abused, erodes Article 8 of the HRA (the right to a private life).

The technical challenge here, if ti is even possible to meet, is to produce something that allows people to identify themselves, or prove an aspect of their identity, in a verifiable manner, but without leaking any other information to anyone, either the person to whom you are idnetifying, or the state-run (or more likely privatised) identity provider. In an ideal world, there's nothing wrong with being able to provide a short one-time "unique" random code to a web site to prove you are over 18, that reveals nothing about you, and is not logged in any way by the provider, but in practice there are so many loopholes an possiblities for this to be exploited.

For example, even if the provider only returns a "yes or no" answer, they could log that "Joe Bloggs" visited "hairymilfs.com" at 01:15 on Sunday morning and then use this to build a profile of Joe's sexual preferences. A future authoritarian government could then decide to round up and exterminate anyone who has shown an interest in hirsute mothers (for example). It's worth remembering that the Nazis had an easy job of identifying and rounding up their target victims in the Netherlands exactly because the record keeping on their citizens was so good, and this is exactly the threat that this poses; the "it'll never happen here" argument failed then, and it will fail again.

Then you have the issues of criminal infiltration of the system, corruption amonst those meant to maintain it and controls on unauthorised access. A parallel here is the unauthorised acces of police systems; people semi-routinely lose their jobs in policing for looking people up on PNC when they should not. Yes, there are consequences, but they are post-facto, the information has already been accessed.

Meta's proposed $18B settlement in teen harm case throws YouTube and TikTok under the bus, too

Re: How about parents actually parent?

It's like the browser wars, and Microsoft's big slapped wrists over that never happened.

Re: How about parents actually parent?

It's difficult when tehse things come pre-installed on devices, and then there are frequent updates and ads on the app stores that try to force them onto you if you haven't given in yet.

Children are notoriously bad at resisting popular pressure, both from peers, and from businesses deliberately targeting them.

Re: How can Meta impose conditions on a fine?

It's a settlement to try to make the underlying issue go away. US justice: the finest money can buy.

Throws TikTok and Alphabet under the bus?

We're going to need a bigger bus.

Nitter might be no more, but Twitter is back (sort of)

Re: "Twitter.now is not an attempt to recreate the old platform."

The problem has never been that there is no alternative to Twitter after its enshittification (and arguably it was always enshittified to a degree), it is that there are several "alternatives" none of which have critical mass. This is the same category of problem as "there are too many standards, lets have another standard to unify them".

Ukraine unveils native jet-powered drone interceptor

A burning oil refinery says what?

It's his alter-ego Zalivnaya Riba

Oh look, It's Jeel come to spout some agitprop for his daddy Vladimir Putin.

Casio decides it's about time the simple digital watch got a little smarter

Re: astoundingly primitive that he still thinks digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

I can still remember seeing my dad's electronic calculator that would have dated from the early '70s, where not only did you have to press a button to light up the display, but you had to do it while looking at it from a very specific angle to see the tiny 7-segment LED displays through the lenses.

Then it feel like someone else is doing the 10,000 steps for you?

Musk fumbles the timetable for first Starship catch

Re: "someone who is on the spectrum in such a profound way, it's damn scary."

If he is indeed "on the spectrum," which is a rather inelegant way of describing autism, and, as far as I am aware, only a rumour, then it's a good example of what the autism spectrum actually is; a collection of diagnostic traits, of which an individual with autism possesses a diagnostic number. In other words, all autistic people are different, and have struggles, strengths, and personalities, thank fuck. Elmo is an example of how those traits (if indeed they are actually there) can land on top of an underlying personality that is already a piece of shit.

YouTuber's backyard fab ambitions expand from RAM to homebrew LEDs

Re: Love it

That's deeply scary. That HF will eat through pretty much anything is bad enough, but fluorination products, especailly organofluorines are pretty nasty things in their own right.

Flock surveillance backlash mounts as fiendish Halloween plans circulate

Re: They should have set up in the UK

Even before GDPR, we had the DPA which basically said*, "you can't sell people's personal information for profit," thus already putting us lightyears ahead of the US.

*with a very heavy dose of paraphrasing, admittedly.

Be a hater all you want, AI's here to stay

I'm sure the people who paid a fortune for a picture of a monkey thought it was a sound investment and made financial sense as well.

I'm struggling to see the real concrete benefits of a gloried predictive text engine that gets the answer disastrously wrong at an unknowable rate, and at a real cost that is higher than getting a human to do it, both financially and environmentally, but which is currently heavily subsidised so those costs are hidden.

More than half of Americans now view AI negatively

Louis XVI had enough wealth to live in a gold-plated palace. It didn't help him much when the revolutionaries captured him and wheeled out the choppy-choppy-schling-schling machine.