Posts by Elongated Muskrat

Bcachefs creator insists his custom LLM is female and 'fully conscious'

Now [sic] many people labelled "neurodiverse" have ever had any empirical tests done on their brains?

In general, it's considered poor form, and not particularly productive, to open people's skulls up and look directly for the basis of cognitive processes.

However, if you are alluding to the question, "how many people have been formally assessed for neurodiverse conditions by a qualified psychiatric medical professional," then I suggest you take a look at the current waiting lists on the NHS, and from private providers through the "right to choose pathway", for an idea of the true prevalence of neurodiversity (no need for the quotes here, it's a real word). Better diagnostic criteria, and better recognition mean that there is currently quite a big backlog for assessment. Making snarky comments about it on the internet just marks you out as a dickhead.

It's a very good point; there is definitely a bias here from their "creators" that there is a difference between a male and female brain, and thus that a disembodied mind could be gendered at all. Personally, I challenge anyone to tell the difference in a blind taste test.

In seriousness, though, the only sort of "gender" that could be encoded into these things a comes from gender stereotypes, which are clearly not based on reality, since they change over time. For instance, wearing pink, tights, and a long flowing wig, was considered the height of masculinity only a few centuries ago, but will make you the target of a whole load of hate speech today.

(Pirate icon, because we don't have a zombie one)

Re: Are all linux filesystem developers nuts?

Well, at least his wife is a computer program, so it's going to be harder to convict him of murder.

...and now my life has been reduced from being perhaps the best engineer in the world...

He is Donald Trump AICMFP.

Go library maintainer brands GitHub's Dependabot a 'noise machine'

I'm sure static analysers exist that do exactly this, and, given that processor frequencies are measured in MHz any more, aren't the costliest thing on Earth to run. I'm also pretty sure that the article states that, for Go, the use of these is common, which is unsurprising given the language philosophy.

O say, can you see: FCC pushes patriotic programming for US 250th

Re: 250 years only ? Maybe add a couple of 0s.

Absolutely correct. We can only learn from the mistakes of history, if we learn about them. British history (and indeed the history of pretty much all European nations) is a long list of brutal and inhumane acts by the powerful against the weak. Over time, people have generally become more humane; if you look, for instance at the statistics of levels of death-by-violence over time, it has been pretty much a steady decrease over all of recorded history, which can only be a good thing. Incidentally, this is also a good reason to carefully question the motives of anyone who claims that this isn't the case, such as those who polemicise against certain places, claiming that they are experiencing the opposite. Such disinformation is a tool of fascism.

Those who would pretend that the history of their nation is somehow glorious and try to silence the bits where it was decidedly not (again, the far-right "Restore Trust" group that has tried repeatedly to take over the National Trust in order to ban mention of things like the slavery that many historical properties were built on, springs to mind here), do a disservice to everyone, and are usually doing so as a way to spread division by claiming that things now are worse than they used to be, and that only regressing can improve them. The opposite is in fact true, as the German people found out in the 20th century, and hence why the EU exists (and why we were incredibly foolish to leave it at the behest of such rabble-rousers).

History, observed from the macroscopic scale, has some pretty clear patterns and lessons to be learned. Observing them and learning from them is pretty much the only way that we can improve things for everyone, and avoid falling into the same destructive patterns that the past has shown, such as that of obscene wealth accumulation followed by violent revolution.

Re: 250 years only ? Maybe add a couple of 0s.

I don't think the people who were already there 250 years ago got a lot of say in the genocide that was performed on them then, and the descendants of the ones who survived don't get a lot of say about the country that has replaced theirs now. I don't reckon many native North American people have a great deal of love for those who are currently in possession of their land, nor care much to celebrate that it has now been going on for a quarter of a millennium.

IBM stock dives after Anthropic points out AI can rewrite COBOL fast

Re: COBOL is easy...

My experience of it is exactly this as well. A recent example of evaluating Claude, for example, to help fix a bug in some very sloppy code we had a contractor produce (that's a whole different story), shows us that it's actually pretty good at identifying the cause of the problem, but that it isn't so great at suggesting a correct fix (it suggested things that were close, but no cigar).

Re: COBOL is easy...

Oh, and let's hope it's not self-modifying code that depends on things like assumptions about disk geometry to work correctly.

Re: How will ai slopware be tested and maintained?

What do you mean you can't validate nondeterministic output, you just... errr... errrrrm... bear with me...

Anyone not expecting this is being criminally naïve. All this "AI" bollocks is being developed and pushed hard with billionaires' money. Nobody gets to be a billionaire without being a ruthless psychopath. It absolutely is a bait-and-switch first-one's-free situation.

1) Give it away for free.

2) Sell it at a loss.

3) Get lock in.

4) Crank up the price, and boil that frog.

5) Profit.

The only problem with this, is, of course, that it doesn't fucking work properly, so number 3 is a bit of a sticking point. Still, since it becomes between 2 and 4, I look forward to those ruthless bastards losing the farm on it.

Re: “AI can assess"

It's fine to call it "AI" just as long as you acknowledge that the "AI" stands for "Actual Idiocy".

Re: COBOL is easy...

Exactly this; the main issues with any legacy code are knowing what it is actually used for, which bits are unused, which bits never worked, which bits have as-yet-undiscovered bugs in them, what people want it to do, but it doesn't, so they have workarounds, and hardware and environmental issues such as timing, and the expected shape, size, and performance of storage media and networking. Amongst others.

Re: COBOL is easy...

I think maybe the "correct" way of doing this (and it doesn't apply only to COBOL) is to use the "AI" to reverse-engineer the code into documentation, and requirements, and then have a human, or team of humans, verify that these are complete, correct, and don't include hallucinations. Then you can use these to write new specifications for the reimplementation, and have humans write that, because "AI" is terrible at actually writing code.

tl;dr; statistical models are good at analysis, and terrible at synthesis.

Desktop tech sent to prison for an education on strange places to put tattoos

Re: Cheer up, kids.

I have often found Jake's posts to be on point and informative (I don't agree with his assessment here, but there we go), the poster I have found to be a consistent bullshitter more often than not, is Anonymous Coward (and a couple of far right trolls that haunt the forum, I shan't name them, but we all know who they are).

Re: Hazing = abuse

The main problem with "having a bit of fun that does no harm" is that what would be harmless to one person is not necessarily harmless to another, especially when mental health is concerned. There is a fine line between "fun" and bullying, so if in doubt, best not, yeah?

Thatsch not what your mother shaid lasht night, Trebek.

Re: Not just neurodiverse.

On the one hand, this is sage advice, on the other hand terms like "EQ" belong in the bin with the other made up shit like Myers-Briggs personality type tests and astrology.

OK, so Anthropic's AI built a C compiler. That don't impress me much

Re: Should have been xAI

Well, Elmo certainly didn't invent the idea, as the cover of any pulp 1950s sci-fi novel will attest, and he paid other people to do the engineering work. If you think he invented these, you need to work on your critical evaluation faculties.

Re: Paging Ken Thompson, Ken Thompson

Certainly not if its training material contains "on trusting trust". Although, I'm sure that if you specifically asked it to compile in an invisible backdoor to the Unix login command, you could then be certain that it would fail to do so.

Re: Spotify

Their best programmers are tied up finding all the errors in the pull requests put in by the AI garbage generators.

Re: If I read all the code in the world .....

Let's feed it Befunge and watch it melt.

Re: "That don't impress me much"

95% of humans can't create a C compiler, even if they were given a year of time on it.

At the risk of sounding glib here, that's a pretty high bar, 95% of humans couldn't write a working c program, let alone a compiler for it, simply because far fewer than 5% of the population ave any familiarity with c whatsoever. Oddly enough, most people aren't programmers.

Re: "That don't impress me much"

If you want good pattern recognition, you don't need to spend millions on data centres, you need to pay a decent salary to one autistic person. This is how computer science has progressed for the last century or so, and how it will continue to do so.

The fact that most people who work in the field of software engineering are neurodivergent in one way or another, and are pretty good at pattern recognition already, means that most of us are deeply cynical about the current "AI" fad, because we can all see that it's one huge bubble. It's also a great litmus test for bullshitters in the field, because anyone buying wholeheartedly into the hype like a 5-mile high sore thumb painted fluorescent green with a flashing sign above his head saying, "bullshitter".

The statistical models that marketing bullshitters are referring to as "AI" have their uses, when statistical analysis is required. They can't create anything any more than I can make your head explode from across the room à la "Scanners".

Re: "That don't impress me much"

Taking a million humans, and munging them all up doesn't give you a superhuman, it gives you a gooey mess.

The belief that a sufficiently obfuscated model will somehow gain the ability to create something that isn't a variation of its inputs is pure magical thinking.

There's an old adage in computing: GIGO; garbage in, garbage out. Except with "AI", it's (supposedly) carefully curated data in, garbage out. Just because you make the machine too complicated to understand doesn't mean you are imparting it with any abilities that the component parts don't have, and to create something new requires consciousness, which machines do not possess.

Re: Whistling past the graveyard

Absolutely. When people talk about "AI" "creating" or "thinking", or "understanding", these are all category errors.

To put it in the language of data science, a principal components plot doesn't create the data it models.

My real worry remains that AI-crazy companies will fire developers willy-nilly and replace them with AI to make their bottom line look better.

It might make their AI-hallucinated bottom-line look better, but that won't make a lot of difference when the company goes bust, because the quality of whatever product they are selling goes through the floor, and all their customers flee to their competitors who weren't silly enough to bet the farm on magic beans.

Ireland joins regulator smackdown after X's Grok AI accused of undressing people

Re: Am I the only one ...

Yeah, me neither. I think I have employed, on at least one occasion, a popular Glaswegian expression that starts with "get tae" and ends with the same word you are probably thinking of.

Re: a cynical attempt to shutdown the last truly open forum on the Internet

Who isn't posting on the clock? Once again, I'm not really a muskrat. I only post AC when it's something that may de-anonymise this handle.

Re: Am I the only one ...

This is a fair point, and whilst there is perfectly understand outrage about the CSAM aspect, this shouldn't lessen the outrage around using this sort of system to remove the clothing from images of adults.

Quite frankly, if this software is being used to do things that humans can do, such as synthesising images of people without their clothes, and without their consent, it should be subject to the same rules and regulations that a human would be.

It is a ridiculous situation where a person would (rightly) be hauled up in court for creating a fake nude of another person without their consent and publishing it, but a machine can churn out tens out thousands of such images in the same time and nobody faces any consequences for it.

Put simply, if the purpose, by design, of Grok isn't to produce non-consensual explicit pictures of real people, without their consent, why has it been trained on the data that allows it to do so?

The CSAM angel is a little different, because not only is it illegal to produce such images of real people, it is also illegal (in the UK at least) to produce such images of entirely fictional children. If safeguards cannot be put in place, that are absolutely reliable and cannot be circumvented, and there are good reasons to believe that this is actually impossible (analogous to the halting problem), then there is an argument that the entire technology is flawed, or at the very least, that its operators should be held responsible for its use in a much more structured manner.

Oddly enough, though, I can't see a world where Elon Musk is held personally responsible for every illegal image his software produces, even though his grubby hands are all over rigging its algorithms.

Not just the parents, the po-po might like to have a quiet word with you down at the station, whilst seizing all of your computing devices for forensic examination.

Re: a cynical attempt to shutdown the last truly open forum on the Internet

I'm starting to think that about 90% of the AC posts here are the same person. There certainly do seem to be a lot of very deranged posts made behind the shroud of anonymity, which again, is especially cowardly given that a user's handle hardly reveals their true identity.

Re: a cynical attempt to shutdown the last truly open forum on the Internet

Cool story, bro.

Re: Am I the only one ...

I think the CSAM ingestion accusation is a bit of a stretch. Most diffusion models can generate fairly photographic images of clearly impossible things by bodging together known concepts (e.g. A pink elephant in a rice paddy or a Ferrari drawn in the style of Da Vinci).

To do these things, the model would have to have been training data that allowed it to identify an elephant, determine what colour pink is, have source material of rice paddies, and Ferraris, as well as at least a representative sample of the corpus of work by Da Vinci.

Similarly, to render a naked person, it needs to have had at least some source material representing what people look like under their clothes, or it's not going to know what genitalia look like.

I've not seen the supposed output of Grok (I've never even used Grok, since I won't touch Elmo's stuff on principle), so I don't know how realistic or convincing the output is, but the reporting would suggest that it is accurate enough to cause concerns, which implies that it has been fed accurate training data.

Once again, a statistical model cannot produce output that does not meet the patterns of its input. In simple terms, it can either provide an "average" of the data it is provided, interpolate between two data points, or extrapolate from a series. If it hasn't been trained on images of naked people, then this would be a case of extrapolation, and I simply do not believe that an unthinking piece of computer software would correctly extrapolate these images. The conclusion, then, is that it is either "averaging" from a large number of images of naked people, or interpolating between, say, the image of one person clothed, and another naked. You cannot interpolate between two points without knowing both points. This is, of course, a simplification, but the thing here is that "AI" cannot create anything new, and anyone who tells you it can is swindling you.

Re: Am I the only one ...

I don't know about others here, but I just don't get the point of AI photo editing. Perhaps it's because, when I take a picture of something, I want to record what I can see is actually there and not some machine-edited version of it. Who is going round taking pictures and then thinking, "I want to show this to someone, or post it on my 'socials', to show what I've been up to, but rather than showing what I've really been doing, I want to lie instead"?

I'm left thinking of the TV advert that is doing the rounds (I think it's for a Google phone) which asks the viewer whether they think they should allow their phone to reveal anything it "knows" about a person to their friends. I would have thought the answer to this, from most people, would be a resounding "Hell, no." I'll be the arbiter of what I tell my friends, thank you very much, not an "AI" on my phone which probably relies on sending all my personal data for processing to a data centre in the least regulated part of the US.

As for using "AI" to "touch-up" photographs to completely remove people's clothes, since an "AI" is just a statistical model based entirely on its training data, it stands to reason that it wouldn't have this capability unless it included such images in its training data. If it can be used to generate pornographic images of children, then I think there should be some very pointed questions being asked about how and why it is able to do this, and whether the owners of the model should be investigated more closely. Who thought that feeding images of naked people into image generation software that isn't specifically intended to generate other images of naked people, was a good idea?

How AI could eat itself: Competitors can probe models to steal their secrets and clone them

You joke, but it's not exactly uncommon practice for university professors to claim the credit for work done by their postgraduates and postdoctorates, especially when it comes to publishing academic papers. This counts double if the person who did the actual work was female. It's a genuine problem in academia.

UK unveils telecoms charter to curb mid-contract bill shocks

Re: Not enough

Legitimate, honest fair landlords are entirely unaffected by the provisions in said bill. All those people who are trying to concentrate their wealth by buying second and third properties to rent out to people in insecure situations, at exorbitant rent, and without performing any maintenance are parasites and if they don't want to play by the rules should release that housing stock. Actually, scratch that, they should have that housing stock confiscated by the state and handed over to local authorities as much needed social housing. It's about time we undid some of the social harms that Thatcher caused.

Edit - I will just add the observation that much stricter rules apply in many places, and, shock horror, the outcome which you postulate has not materialised.

Re: Not enough

Starlink is not an option, because there is absolutely zero chance that I would ever buy anything from a company owned by Elon Musk. I would have thought that this as pretty clear. It's also quite expensive.

I looked into 5G; in my area, it's patchy, and more expensive than VM, so again, not a viable option.

Should I consider dial-up, or a piece of wetted string and two tin cans as well?

As for the "service is £100, reduced to £50" thing, that's not how VM advertise their services, and you know it. A quick check on availability, using a neighbouring property's address tells me that their basic service is offered at £21.99 a month, increasing to £25.99 a month from April 2027". No mention whatsoever of it then getting a hefty increase after the 24 month contract term, and I'm willing to bet that you wouldn't find that out until you are presented with 15 pages of small print to read through when accepting the contract. This, my friend, is misleading advertising at its best.

Re: Not enough

That works both ways though. If you come to the end of say a 24 month contract then by definition you no longer have to pay £50/month. However you cannot reasonably expect to keep the service indefinitely at the same price otherwise people would just never move.

Meanwhile, that's exactly how renting a residential property works, and yet people still move house.

I'd suggest that, on the termination of a fixed contract, they should be compelled to keep you on the same tariff on a rolling basis, whilst informing you that your contract term has expired, and giving you all the available options.

Imagine if your landlord decided to double your rent because you'd been living there for six months already? Incidentally, unscrupulous landlords who might do this are exactly the reason the government has introduced the Renters' Rights bill. One of the few things the current government has actually got right, albeit too slowly, and without going nearly far enough to protect renters from exploitation.

Believe me, if the alternative to Vermin Media was anything other than ADSL through a BT line, and I could get FTTH, then I'd have already jumped.

The random dropouts and short disconnects their service is periodically afflicted with play havoc with the RDP connections to the remote virtual machines I have to work on. It can go for months at a time without any issues, and then I have to suffer for days for weeks from slowdowns and disconnects, whilst their status page cheerily informs me that there are absolutely definitely no problems in my area.

Details, please, of this automated line and number to press. The ****ers are putting my price up by £3.50 a month in April. If this is as simple as you suggest, I will look at finding a way to automate it to counter the greedy oiks.

Not enough

Utilities, including telecoms, water, gas, etc., etc., need to regulated properly, including not allowing price rises beyond RPI inflation, as well as limiting these rises to clear points within the contract's lifetime. They also need to be prevented from price hikes at the expiry of a contract, instead being compelled to roll the contract on, on a per-billing-period basis at the current rate.

Telcos are particularly bad at this; sign you up to an 18-month or 24-month contract, at, say £50 a month, and then, when the contract expires, up this to £100 a month, unless you sign up for a new fixed-term contract. This behaviour should be banned, it has no legitimate business justification and is literally a profit-gouging tax on the inattentive.

The UK government isn't spending much taxpayer cash on X

Re: Those figures cannot be right

I know people who still use it, because of communities that have built up on there, which have not (yet) found another home. Some are moving (slowly) onto Bluesky, but as an alternative it still doesn't really have much uptake. However, none of these people would be daft enough to consider a curated and targeted social media bullhorn as a legitimate source of reliable news. They're using it purely as a communications medium between themselves.

As far as I can tell, most of the people who really are dumb enough to do so, are the sort of people who consider conspiracy theory rants on YouTube as an authoritative source of information, and who are so enlightened by it, that they then feel the need to stand in your nearest town centre with a display made of old cardboard boxes and laminated print-outs ranting about how the Earth is flat.

10.8 million families use X as their main news source

Assuming "family" means two parents and the average 2.4 children, that works out as 47,520,000 people out of a current population of 69,931,500, or nigh on 68% of Brits using NaziNet as their principal source of information. That's a hairy load of old horseshit, if you don't mind me saying.

GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability

If you follow the link to the "missing status page" you can see for yourself, that the time period was October, with a measly 89.9% uptime. A total of 14h 37m of major outages, plus a whole load more of degraded service according to those figures. Although, to be fair, the way those figures are aggregated, those include outages in Copilot, which nobody in their right mind would care about. Automated AI reviews of PRs can be marginally useful, but they're hardly essential.

Re: It's simple...

Indeed, and note that this says nothing about the architecture once hosted on Azure; Microsoft will happily sell you a hosted Linux instance just as readily as a Windows one.

Re: It's simple...

I'd be very surprised if GitHub's git servers weren't actually running Linux. The OS isn't the problem, it's the platform (Azure) that appears to have some problems with flakiness.

Microsoft might not be offering two nines as their SLA, but that's what they're delivering according to the "missing" status page. Not one single component of their service is currently meeting three nines.

I couldn't care less if their Copilot is at 0 nines, but their outage on Monday meant that it took several attempts to perform basic git operations. The website showed the chintzy unicorn when trying to view branches in the repo I was working on, and simple git operations such as pulling the latest version of a branch down to my development environment in Visual Studio (from an Enterprise subscription to github) were getting various HTTP errors (500 mostly). How you manage to break something as basic as a git server in this way is beyond me, and for a company the size of Microsoft to drop the ball this badly should be raising several pointed questions about why their service is so bad.

AI video company arouses fury by boasting about replacing creative jobs

This is my point, though. If you have a critical task that you need done properly, you want a deterministic outcome. You want the same results every time, given the same inputs.

If you have a non-deterministic task that nevertheless has to follow applicable rules, regulations, and laws, and which shouldn't produce wildly inaccurate results, you need a human to do it.

If you have a job, where it doesn't matter if the output is mush or wildly wrong, then generative AI is the tool for you. It's just that a human can effectively produce sloppy bullshit too, and in the long run is likely to cost less, and not come up with such wildly inaccurate outputs that they represent a risk to your business. The only industry I can think of where this sort of thing might be applicable is sales and marketing, and people are already turned off by adverts that are obvious slop. Well, to be honest, most people are turned off by adverts full stop, but there's so much money circulating in that industry it's taking a while to notice the increasing backlash against intrusive advertising everywhere.

It isn't good enough for most tasks, though.

The whole point of having a computer do something rather than a human, is that the computer will rigidly follow a set of rules and produce deterministic results. A human will get tired or bored, especially with repetitive tasks, and make mistakes, so certain tasks are better automated with such a rigid, rules-based system.

Tasks that are left to humans, such as those that involve weighing up lots of information and making decisions, ones that require in-depth knowledge, or creative tasks (i.e. any task that actually required thinking) can't be done by LLMs, because they are nondeterministic. This can be seen when foolish lawyers use "AI" to cite illusory cases and get found in contempt of court, or when "AI" image generators produce errors all over the place (impossible limbs, too many fingers, lettering that looks like Klingon, etc. etc.) This is because "AI" is a massive misnomer; these are complex statistical models with a random element, there is no intelligence involved whatsoever.

So, what are the use cases? Well, LLMs do have non-generative uses which aren't terrible. Because they are statistical models based on large data sets, they can be used for various types of data analysis, for examples, being used to review large numbers of cell cultures and flag those showing signs of abnormal cells for review by a human, which is potentially useful for cancer screening, or for analysing an ageing code-base with poor documentation to provide summaries and code analysis. Again, though, these still need review by a human.

"AI" is demonstrably counterproductive for legal uses, might be useful for marketing, although people already perceive marketing materials that are obviously produced by "AI" as cheap and inferior, and this only really demonstrates that the whole field of marketing is as much bullshit as "AI" is (calling it "AI" in the first place is the fault of marketing "professionals"), and, if used to write code, produces bloated, non-performant code full of security vulnerabilities that a real programmer must waste their time correcting.

Is a formatting tool for LinkedIn actually useful? To be honest, I have never used LinkedIn, so I don't know. I'd suggest, however, that a tool for formatting your entry in what is essentially a social media site for marketing wankers, is going to be of limited usefulness. Being barely functional for a task that isn't really necessary or appreciably useful in any way isn't exactly a great boast. As for Google; well, everyone I know routinely ignores the "AI" results from Google, because nine times out of ten they are plain wrong (the other time, they are just misleading). "AI" is woefully bad when asked to demonstrate any sort of actual intelligence, simply because it has none.