Posts by Elongated Muskrat 2812 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Nov 2022
Elon doesn't love you, you know; it doesn't matter how hard you feign offence in his name.
I'd also not be entirely surprised if there was genuine child labour somewhere in his supply chain, a lot of it still goes on in the far East. I'm assuming that if any of this comes to light, you'll be disgusted at Elon and will be very vocal about it, right? Right? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?
If you don't know what an ORM is for, and why you need one, then you probably don't. Personally, I don't like hand-crafting SQL and having to continuously refer to the database scheme because someone 20 years ago decided on some dumb convention and then abandoned it half-way through implementing it, or got a pair of columns the wrong way round.
That assumes the cheques have their own account. I've never had a chequebook that paid out of anything other than my current account, and there's no way I'd be keeping a ledger of all of its transactions in my cheque book.
I guess these things work differently in the US, where cheques are probably still a thing. I think the last time I had to write one for something was well over a decade ago, and that was for an organisation whose options were to pay them with a cheque or postal order, or phone them up and give them your bank details over the phone to take a payment, which is even less secure than writing a cheque.
I never understood the concept of balancing one's cheque-book. You write a cheque, including the amount on the stub, and some indeterminate time later it appears on your bank statement. What's to balance? Most people aren't keeping a ledger with double-entry bookkeeping for their personal finances.
Technical terms usually are the same across multiple languages; it's a pretty good signifier that they are technical terms. The majority of people don't know what most technical terms mean, especially those in fields in which they don't work. Do most IT professionals know what a chelating ligand is, or a selectively permeable membrane, or what dolor, calor, and rubor refer to?
Are there??
Well, in the simplest sense, if you tell an employee categorically not to do something, and then they go and do it, or they attempt to access something they know they're not supposed to access, but somehow have accidentally been given rights to, such as, to take a random example, your company's payroll system, they get the sharp end of a disciplinary procedure.
If an "agent" accesses something it has accidentally been given access to, and stomps all over it, the response seems to be "my bad, the prompt was obviously wrong," rather than, "perhaps "AI" is a bad idea, let's bin it off."
There are more subtleties to it than this, of course but the basic difference here is that humans know hen they aren't supposed to something, and, on the whole, don't do it, or get in trouble when they get caught doing it. "AI" has no intelligence, and if it is possible for it to do it, no matter how stupid "it" is, sooner or later, like water flowing downhill, it will.
It just takes a bit longer. Capitalism is just a newer name for feudalism, or the divine right of kings, or any of the other names given to a small clique hoarding all the resources.
It eventually comes to an end at the hands of a rampaging mob, or blindfolded against a wall, or under the blade of a guillotine, at the end of a rope, or in any number of other violent and fatal manners.
History is a long list of repeating patterns that those involved in those patterns fail to see time and time again, until it's too late.
It's not even as if history doesn't also include people pointing out those patterns, time and time again. You only have to look in crusty old religious texts to find moneylenders getting booted out of temples, and rich people not getting into Heaven. It's almost as if greedy people are also stupid.
It can't be solved if you don't have control over that AI model. It's Microsoft's clanker, not yours. The solution is to not use it, disable it, and hope that Microsoft isn't still giving it access to your repositories anyway, which is something you have to take on trust. Needless to say, Microsoft haven't always been the trustworthiest of bedfellows. Just google the words "Microsoft" and "antitrust" together.
Hi Guys,
1) Do any of our repositories contain committed credentials for third-party services
2) Can you list these so I can, uh, correct them, that's right, correct them.
You know, why get all the files containing boring code, when the juicy exploitable-for-money stuff is right there?
There are consequences for humans when they do something they are not permitted to do. AI can do lots of things it shouldn't do, all at once, without anyone even knowing, because it has zero observability in its process, it's a "black box". Admittedly, this just uncovers weak security that a human could equally have exploited, but most humans have a fear of getting caught that stops them from trying.
Indeed, and if we follow this argument to its logical conclusion, then I am typing this on an analogue computer. I think most people will acknowledge that all modern computers are, in fact, digital ones, despite the ones and zeros often being neither exactly one nor zero (or a multiple thereof of the CPU core voltage, etc.)
The post I was replying to did mention pressed CDs, though. I think everyone knew that the writeable ones that used UV dyes were pretty short-lived and unreliable, and susceptible to erasure from sunlight or other sources of UV. The phase-change rewriteable ones, ISTR, are more durable, as long as they don't spend much time above 23°C, so, again, not much use in a car CD player!
The only thing which survies 10/20 years easily are DLT/LTO tapes (certified) and the (300MB) hard disks kept in a drawer.
I have CDs in a folder in my car that are over 30 years old, and still play fine. Sure, there were some that were pressed in the '90s that suffered from "bronzing" which ISTR was down to the plastic layer not being properly sealed onto the metal film layer.
The CD I was listening to today was pressed in 1992. I seriously doubt a DLT tape kept in the glove box of a car parked in the hot sun would fare anywhere nearly as well.
No doubt using a regular expression, but I'm willing to bet it didn't cater for every single valid format of an email address, because the regex for that would make your eyes fall out.
My advice is: don't:
I think you've found the case here that I disagree with. Arguments about the One True Brace Style aside, unless you're writing it as a lambda, that should definitely go over multiple lines.
Readability to humans is arguably more important than readability to the compiler, which will waste no time in telling you if it doesn't compile, but won't find the bug that whoever comes back to your wall of code has to correct eighteen months down the line when the client is shouting about not being able to get paid because your code went wrong.
Who here doesn't love the arguments between multiple competing LINTers, that result in you having to add an additional file to your work to tell them all to shut up about whether or not you should be putting comments on all the getters and setters on generated boilerplate code. Nobody cares if the model class for your database ORM has some hinky names in it because somebody 25 years ago made a mistake following their own convention for naming database fields, and you can't change any of it now. It's all a distraction from writing the business logic in a completely different file, that's probably going to work out as ten lines of pretty obvious code anyway.
The question then has to be, why would people so determinedly decide that offices must be in use, and must be occupied. This question can be answered by observing those who are issuing these mandates.
In addition to the question of whether they are simply common-or-garden narcissists, do they have an interest in commercial property letting, or in privatised public transport? Are they putting their own financial interests ahead of the business? Quite often, it becomes immediate apparent what their real interests are; case in point: Why is Alan Sugar so vehemently against WFH? Because Sralan has a whole load of investments in commercial property.
Narcissists aren't necessarily after self aggrandisement; in their minds they are already the only person who matters, and the opinions of others don't count.
As anyone who has been unfortunate enough to be in the orbit of a real narcissist will tell you, the thing they actually want is absolute control, and unquestioning obedience. The narcissist can't cope with anything being outside of their control, even if they are not qualified or able to properly control it. This especially includes other people. It should come as no surprise that narcissism and domestic abuse, whether it be physical, financial, or coercive, almost always go hand-in-hand.
When such people are put into positions where they have power over other people in a work environment, it serves nobody other than themselves, both their subordinates and the organisation will suffer.
I've yet to hear a real, tangible benefit to any business, where physical presence isn't a prerequisite, such as hospitality or factory work, for a RTO mandate.
To observe that management, especially of the senior variety has an over-representation of narcissists is like observing that the sun is hot.
It's hardly a great leap to observe that narcissistic supply is dependent on the ability to coerce people, which is so much easier to do in person.
The UN is a transnational body, not the arbiter of who or what is, or is not, a nation.
It's a pretty solid indictment on the whole concept of nationalism that there's no solid, universal, agreement on what nations actually exist at any one time either. One might even go so far as to say that drawing lines on maps is done in order to divide people, rather than being for any genuine difference between the people on one side or the other of those lines.
Ah yes, the good old "land of the free" with the world's highest absolute and per-capita prison population, where the main freedom you have, is the one to die in poverty. How's that unregulated free-market capitalism working out for you? Seems you're getting ever closer to one person having all the money.
To the down-voters, please enlighten me, is it trans people you hate, autistic people, or the disabled? Perhaps you're just a dumb racist and feel it's your right to blame immigrants, despite the fact that all English-speaking countries have populations ultimately descended from immigrants?
Pray, do tell.
So, business as usual, then? My wages haven't kept pace with inflation for years, and I doubt many other people's have, either. All the money is being soaked up by private capital, becoming ever more concentrated in fewer hands, and to be honest, if those with all the capital take a hit, so be it; it's their turn
I'm not American either. Here in the UK, it depends largely on your pension provider, but mine offers various "funds" you can put your money into, which in turn invest into different things. They're generally pretty broad categories, and generally arranged by risk level, or investment type, and you don't control where the money actually goes, just its general direction.
Historically, when corrupt governments get too close to big corporate interests, at the expense of everyone else, and then try to tax their way out of a crash, there is a way out of it for the general population, and it makes a "schlingggg" sound followed by a thud, or a "rattattat", or possibly, the sound of a clank followed by creaking rope. History is quite good at repeating this particular pattern.
I suppose the most sensible suggestion would be to split your pension pot into multiple funds, trying to pick those that are least exposed to AI, including an amount in areas which might do well in the aftermath, if you can predict what that might be. For example, if AI topples, it'll probably hit various hardware manufacturers that have heavily invested in it hard. People will still need hardware for other uses though, so look at the companies that have overinvested in AI, and find the smaller players who provide the non-AI bits that they do, who are ready to jump into the market once it becomes vacated when the big company falls. Business will still need "compute" and storage, and people will still want to buy graphics cards (although in a recession the demand is likely to drop off). Companies which can steal the dinner from NVidia, AMD, and Intel will probably do quite well, so it could be worth putting a percentage of your pot into those.
...and if they can't blame the immigrants, I'm sure they can blame it all on trans, neurodivergent, and disabled folk. You know, anyone who can't fight back, and certainly not the sociopaths on the top of the pile bleeding everyone else dry.
Well, the changing climate means that in the UK, I am now able to grow sweet potatoes outside, and get a crop from them, just think about how much water will become available to grow crops once the data centres aren't drinking* it all.
*Yes I know they don't literally drink it, but pumping it out of aquifers and heating it up before dumping it into watercourses amounts to the same thing
...when it doesn't know the answer, it admits it instead of blending buzzwords for twenty minutes.
Anecdotally, I've heard plenty of cases of the exact opposite. These things have been written to always produce output (I hesitate to use the words "know" or "answer" because those are category errors). What "AI" chatbots don't do is say "I don't know". They also never say "you are wrong", although they are quick to offer a grovelling apology from a fake persona (the word "I" has no meaning for software either, sorry) whenever the user points out inaccuracies or falsehoods.
This is very dangerous from a psychological point of view; if a user has a psychiatric disorder and is delusional (a sadly not too uncommon malady), they can believe that they are interacting with a conscious thinking entity. When that "entity" agrees with, and reinforces the users delusional thought, this can do, and has, ended in tragedy. Even for people who don't have such issues, it is too easy to ascribe genuine thought to software which does not, and cannot, possess it. When this is marketed as artificial intelligence, despite having no intelligence, lay-people might reasonably believe it does possess such a thing, despite it being impossible. It would be like going to see the latest Star Wars film and believing that everything you see on screen is real, because you know no better, despite there being many things shown on screen that break the established laws of physics.
