* Posts by Jeff Smith

52 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Dec 2022

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DeepSeek's not the only Chinese LLM maker OpenAI and pals have to worry about. Right, Alibaba?

Jeff Smith

Perhaps one lesson the US might take from this is that they need to play nice globally if they want to maintain the same level of influence and dominance over the tech sector.

Everyone rolls thier eyes when the US calls out China for stealing user data.

With tech billionaires in front row seats at the recent inauguration the tech sector feels far more intwined with their government than ever, fuelling suggestion that there is no separation between the two.

All the while the new US administration is busy threatening allies with high tariffs and even annexation.

And so when choosing an AI product a purchaser might well say to themselves “These folk are all just as bad as each other, I can’t really trust any of them” at which point they’ll choose the cheapest easiest to run most open source model available to meet their requirements, regardless of its origin.

Will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Starlink gets FCC nod for space calls, but can't dial up full power

Jeff Smith

Just to clarify

Musk has a nigh on untouchable global array of satellites with the potential to interfere with ground communications?

Here's how a Trump presidency could change the tech industry

Jeff Smith

Re: A wake up call for over-reliance on US tech?

Sure, but…

What systems does your local hospital use?

Or your public transport provider?

The backend of your phone network and broadband provider?

Your bank?

Etc and so on

Jeff Smith

A wake up call for over-reliance on US tech?

It could be strongly argued (observed even) that we’ve handed far too much control of our information infrastructure to the US tech sector, and by extension the whims of thier government of the day.

We don’t know what will happen in the future, however with an eye on resilience it wouldn’t hurt to consider a hypothetical worst case scenario whereby a hostile authoritarian US government wields enormous power over us via their tech.

If we needed to stop using Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta & Amazon products in short order, what would that look like?

AI's thirst for power keeps coal fires burning bright

Jeff Smith

Lets face it

We’re doomed

Amazon, Tesla, Meta considered harmful to democracy

Jeff Smith

Re: Well...

What we need are large private companies lead by innovative individuals which generate wealth AND well paid employees spreading wealth into their communities AND well funded government providing strong public services and infrastructure (and, to your last point, investing heavily in science) to support the above.

I’d suggest that there needs to be balance between these. Perfect balance is impossible to achieve, but that’s not to say that misbalances needn’t be addressed.

Lebanon: At least nine dead, thousands hurt after Hezbollah pagers explode

Jeff Smith

In setting off thousands of exploding pagers the risk of injuring unintentional targets would have been well understood.

Jeff Smith

Re: Technology question

I’m far from an expert so this is total conjecture, but say the cpu cooked hot enough to combust the battery, there’d surely be a period of time before an explosion where the device was incredibly hot right? You’d assume most people would put it down? Seems as if they all went off very suddenly catching the users by surprise.

Elon Musk's assassination 'joke' bombs, internet calls for his deportation

Jeff Smith

Seems people can’t tell a joke anymore either.

Russia's top-secret military unit reportedly plots undersea cable 'sabotage'

Jeff Smith

Re: Russian activity damaging undersea critical infrastructure

Well… yeah should it happen it would be deeply concerning for us all. Bizarre to suggest otherwise really.

Whilst our governments are no saints I always find it strange when folk kinda loosely suggest that the Russian government are just misunderstood, having been somehow forced to commit bad deeds due to the actions of the meddling west. That notion somewhat strains credulity.

Elon Musk’s Starlink won't block Elon Musk’s X in Brazil, as required by court order

Jeff Smith

Re: careful what you wish for

“… what about…”

Jeff Smith

Re: careful what you wish for

Dunno man, I kinda feel like democratically elected governments should have more of a say on how things run than unelected egotistical billionaire far right sympathisers. Perhaps I’m woke or a sheep or something.

Twitter tells advertisers to go fsck themselves, now sues them for fscking the fsck off

Jeff Smith

A sensible advertiser will clearly try to keep thier brand as neutral they can, and would therefore place their adverts somewhere that alienates as close as possible to 0% of their market. If they are advertising somewhere that alienates 5% of their brand then they are by definition damaging the image of their product, and doing a bad job.

Prior to this current tsunami of tedious infantile culture war nonsense the lack of advertising on a platform from certain groups might have gone entirely unnoticed.

These days however advertisers face a new phenomenon of bullies with massive social media microphones attempting to damage these brands for having the temerity to try and keep themselves neutral. Said bullies have zero interest in free speech, they just want to force others to bend to thier will and represent their side in a culture war that the vast majority of people couldn’t care less about.

Musk implying that advertisers not supporting his site are ‘leftists’ is beyond nonsense. They’re the biggest capitalists out there.

Is AI going to pay its way? Wall Street wants tech world to show it the money

Jeff Smith

It was very noticeable on youtube how the grift switched from crypto to AI almost overnight after ChatGPT launched. An awful lot of people who really should have known better got caught up in the hype. To be fair it was quite hard not to.

Machine Learning clearly has tremendous potential (as it has done for years) but so many of the capabilities that were being suggested as the immediate future of computing only last year were clearly overstated. As you say, for the most part it’s merely quite useful.

If the bubble bursting contributes to a market crash and recession there’s gonna be all sorts of repercussions for big tech you’d imagine.

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

Jeff Smith

Haven’t seen comments this feisty since that article suggesting it might be a good idea to discourage cake consumption in the office.

Norway's sovereign wealth fund aims to zap Musk's monster Tesla pay deal

Jeff Smith

Re: Norway better prepare itself.....

Pretty sure that Norway couldn’t care less tbh.

UK PM Sunak calls election, leaving Brits cringing over memory of his Musk love-in

Jeff Smith

Re: Disappointing

sure

Jeff Smith

Re: Disappointing

Super. I would like to build a better trading relationship with our closest and largest market, slashing the piles of red tape and unnecessary border fees that are impacting our businesses. Hopefully before long some grownups will be in a position to arrange this obviously beneficial state of affairs.

Palantir's CEO calls 'woke' a 'central risk to Palantir, America and the world'

Jeff Smith

Re: Thin pagan religion

Deep down nobody really knows what woke means.

Apple's had it with Epic's app store shenanigans, terminates dev account

Jeff Smith

They must be nervous to act so brazenly.

US and Europe try to tame surveillance capitalism

Jeff Smith

Re: Just ban tracking/targeting

Exactly. Baffles me that anyone considers targeted advertising to be even the slightest bit necessary, as if no one ever bought anything before 2005.

Dumping us into ad tier of Prime Video when we paid for ad-free is 'unfair' – lawsuit

Jeff Smith

That’s not all

They’ve taken dolby vision and dolby atmos away from the standard tier too without telling anyone. For the most part this only really affects the content they’ve produced themselves, so they’re enshittifying their own work.

You can see why the likes of Christopher Nolan are so concerned about the loss of ownership. Easy to imagine a future where it’s impossible to watch movies without ads shoved into them.

In its tantrum with Europe, Apple broke web apps in iOS 17 beta, still hasn't fixed them

Jeff Smith

Re: I love Apple...

Just like 99% of CEOs. They don’t get to the top by being nice, they get there by being ruthless and driven. Appearing to be ‘nice’ is a means to an end.

When it comes to working from home, Register readers are bucking national trends

Jeff Smith

Re: It's the commute

Not quite. I could choose to go into the office 5 days a week if I wanted to. I choose not to, because it saves me money, time, and improves the quality of life for myself and my family. The choice is entirely my own. These are undoubtedly better terms than being obliged to travel into the office every day, as I was until 2020. Of course having the company also pay my power bill would be even better still, but why stop there! They should really be paying me twice my salary. And they should double my annual leave whilst they’re at it. I must be very brainwashed indeed.

As a polite note starting your argument with a patronising insult only ever serves to make you look silly, particularly when you go on to make a daft nonsensical point. Next time maybe leave that bit off. Unless of course you’re paying £50 a day for electric at your house, in which case I take it all back.

Jeff Smith

Re: It's the commute

Saving a fortune on transport and childcare is a huge blessing also.

Personally I find hybrid suits me best, a couple of office days breaks the week up nicely and also helps to add structure. Having loads of meetings in the office on Tuesdays and Wednesdays leaves Mondays and Thursdays free for actually getting things done whilst sat at home in peace. Fridays are still Fridays :)

What I like best about it is finally feeling like I’m being treated like an adult and not a naughty school boy. I no longer need to be seen in the office to be trusted to do a good job, fantastic. I reward that by working harder and more productively than ever. As such I have very little time for those who bang on about returning to the office full time.

Cory Doctorow has a plan to wipe away the enshittification of tech

Jeff Smith

Can somebody explain to me…

Why do these companies need to chase constant growth? Why is it not enough to make a very good thing that lots of people really like, and then keep that thing as good as you can whilst bringing in a steady ten figure annual profit?

If you use AI to teach you how to code, remember you still need to think for yourself

Jeff Smith

Recently needed to use Vue at work, used ChatGPT to teach me and I don’t think I’ve ever picked up a new framework quicker. Admittedly it’s not all that hard to learn if you know a little javascript, but still. Being able to query it about specifics and have it explain with examples is great. It might be the most patient and least patronising teacher I’ve ever had.

Apple's on-device gen AI for the iPhone should surprise no-one. The way it does it might

Jeff Smith

Achieving a fully conversational voice assistant is surely the catalyst to mainstream adoption of AI. Being able to have a natural and detailed back and forth conversation with your computer to help it understand your requirements for complex tasks will be completely transformative, perhaps even more so than the adoption of the GUI.

AI political disinformation is a huge problem – but harder to fight than ever

Jeff Smith

Perhaps rather than being the final nail in the coffin of shared truth the oncoming wave of AI bullshit will force people to get their news only from a small handful of sources that the majority feel they can trust. Everyone will quickly learn that you can’t believe anything you see on the internet anymore, and that in itself will defang a lot of the propagandists and fakers.

Of course the question is how will people know what the handful of trustworthy sources are, and therein lies a big can of tedious conspiracy worms. But the point remains that people will always want to know the truth and so they’ll have no choice but to believe something, and it’s not going to be random sources on the internet any more. So traditional news media will continue to do well I think. Of course whether they’re telling you the truth or not is another conversation.

COVID-19 infection surge detected in wastewater, signals potential new wave

Jeff Smith

Re: "the only figure that really matters is hospitalisations"

Respectfully, choosing not to be wracked with anxiety every time there's a wave of covid is most certainly not stupid. If anything it's pragmatic. This will be far from the last covid wave, and we'll all catch it numerous times over the course of our lives. Unfortunately with that will come a small chance of developing long covid (and the figures show it's a far smaller chance now than in the original wave). It's for each of us to decide our own balance of risk with regard to that, with the other side of said balance being the restrictions you're willing to place on your daily life in order to slightly reduce that risk.

I encountered anxiety in a big way in 2020 which was partly due to fear of catching the disease, but mainly due to fear of my way of life being gone forever. It's taken a good while to be free of that anxiety and I'm not going to let back in. I appreciate that many will never be free of it their covid anxieties and I emphasise hugely, however I have one life and I intend to live it. If you think that makes me stupid then so be it, and I've got nothing for you but to wish you well.

Jeff Smith

Re: Why did everyone get vaccinated?

You might not have immunity to any of those things, their vaccines are not 100% perfect. What you do have is herd immunity, as the vaccines are effective in enough people to prevent the diseases from spreading given thier r0 (provided enough people take the vaccine).

The covid vaccines originally had the potential to achieve similar with a high enough uptake, however the virus quite quickly evolved to become far more infectious and spoiled the party for everyone. Certainly the figures on the efficacy early doors looked very promising indeed, and you could see the real world effects in countries with a head start (things in the UK were looking quite rosy at one point).

Despite the lack of herd immunity what the covid vaccine certainly provided many people with is a layer of protection against serious illness, and enough people took it to keep the hospital admissions low enough to be manageable, thus freeing us from a longer period of lockdowns and countless more deaths.

So that’s nice.

But oh no wait maybe it’s all a conspiracy in order to somethingsomething

Jeff Smith

Re: "the only figure that really matters is hospitalisations"

Of course, but we the public needn’t lose any sleep about it until it’s confirmed to definitely be A Problem.

Jeff Smith

Re: Why did everyone get vaccinated?

Perhaps you just misunderstood.

Jeff Smith

Re: "the only figure that really matters is hospitalisations"

I’m very sorry to hear that and it’s awful, however for the majority of people it is counterproductive to live in a constant state of anxiety about the latest covid variant.

Jeff Smith

Given that Covid isn’t ever going away the only figure that really matters is hospitalisations. So long as these aren’t getting dangerously high there’s absolutely no point spending energy worrying about it for most people.

Amazon already has a colossal ads business and will extend it to Prime Video in January

Jeff Smith

Meanwhile…

Search results on Amazon are increasingly full of sponsored entries, more often than not making said results far less useful.

I know I’m preaching to the choir, but a company having such a dominant market position that they have no qualms about making the customer experience notably worse in pursuit of maximising profit is exactly why monopolies are (were?) considered a Bad Thing.

Expect the service to get increasingly worse over the years, the work of maximising profit is never done. Betchya the generous returns policy will start to be eroded at some point soon, the PR team will market it as concern for the environment or some such.

Meanwhile many people can no longer afford NOT to use Amazon, or at least are faced with a choice of buying less stuff for more (which might not be such a bad thing, but isn’t something most will do willingly).

Didn’t monopolies used to get broken up? Or is that just something we tell ourselves?

Shame about those wildfires. We'll just let the fossil fuel giants off the hook, then?

Jeff Smith

The dictionary definition of equitable is 'fair and impartial'. You're defining the equitability of wealth possession by the effort that an individual has put in to acquire said wealth. If that were really the case then quite clearly something has gone awry.

As an extreme example take Jeff Bezos, who in 2018 earned 315 times the annual pay of his average worker every hour. Clearly Jeff has never worked that much harder than his employees. Further, Jeff could sit back and do absolutely nothing for the rest of his life and he would still earn that much due to his position. Jeff has so much wealth that his children, and his grandchildren, and many generations of the Bezos family after them will never have to lift a finger. This is the reality of the system.

Meanwhile there are hundreds of millions of people around the world working long hours doing backbreaking work for peanuts. Their circumstance its more often than not an accident of birth, and how hard they work has very little bearing on what wealth they might accrue. Their children will be lucky not to inherit debt.

So I put it to you that your definition is hugely naive of how the world actually works. The reality is that people in positions of power take as much for themselves as they possibly can. It has always been this way.

If we're to apply notions of equitability to the debate around climate science as seen throughout these comments then one has to be mindful that a large number of incredibly wealthy individuals, the richest people in the world no less, have an awful lot to lose from a transition away from fossil fuels. The power and influence they posses is many orders of magnitude greater than that of any group of scientists.

So ask yourself, whose side are you really on?

IBM pauses advertising on X after ads show up next to antisemitic content

Jeff Smith

Re: Hamas

Strikes me that since 2008 many folk have become incredibly thin skinned regarding any criticism of their chosen idol. So much so that they’ll jump straight into the comments to hop up and down bemoaning bias in an article that merely reports some things that have happened that they don’t like or that don’t meet with their preconceived notions.

The credo of such individuals seems to be: If someone doesn’t agree with you they are bias and are pushing an agenda. If you don’t like the facts presented to you then dismiss them as part of a conspiracy, or feel safe to dismiss them out of hand because of something someone else did once. Believe whatever you want to believe, get mad with people who disagree, be sure to ignore anything they have to say. If someone persists in challenging your beliefs then threaten them.

I find it concerning that so many are completely incapable of stepping back and impassionately applying critical thinking. These are important skills that need to be taught every day from a young age, the world would be far better for it. Instead we seem to be up to our necks in bullshit and sinking deeper.

First Brexit, now X-it: Musk 'considering' pulling platform from EU over probe

Jeff Smith

Re: Hmm

Whilst there is and always has been a degree of bias to the traditional news outlets (indeed it is impossible to be perfectly unbiased), a big part of the trust issue to my mind is that many people are no longer satisfied unless they’re being told exactly what they want to hear. It’s very easy to head off into the internet and have your biases confirmed. Cynical politicians exploit this.

So this one time, at Bandcamp, half the staff were laid off

Jeff Smith

Sick and tired of websites that foster good community and culture being handed to the wrong people and stripped for shareholder profit. Something has to give.

Last rites for the UK's Online Safety Bill, an idea too stupid to notice it's dead

Jeff Smith

Re: faulty by design

This is exactly it. It's just the latest part of the never ending campaign cycle we now live in, like absolutely everything else that they do. Their only concern is about being able to position themselves such that they can accuse the opposition of taking the side of nonces. Actually preventing child abuse is neither here nor there for them, all that matters is that they look as if they want to do it and the other side don't. They'll have a ready baked 3 word slogan lined up that they'll all start using in unison, and the right wing press campaign will have been carefully planned and coordinated. It's completely transparent at this point. A lot of people will continue to fall for it though sadly.

Musk's X tries to win advertisers back with discounts

Jeff Smith

Dunno about you, but…

Nothing makes me want to spend my money more than idle threats to remove meaningless status symbols if I don’t.

I would also feel highly encouraged to allow my brand to participate on a platform which engages in such behaviour.

Sign me up.

Brit broadband subscribers caught between crappy connections and price hikes

Jeff Smith

Genuine question

Is there anything at all in our country that isn’t standing still or getting worse?

I’m not looking for an argument about politics by the way, I’d just like to check. What if anything has gotten better over the past 10 years?

Think of our cafes and dry cleaners, says Ohio as budget slashes WFH for govt workers

Jeff Smith

Re: It's such a North American viewpoint...

For many the savings on transport and childcare coupled with the the quality of life improvement of removing a commute far outweigh a little extra cost on the heating and electric bill.

Dyson moans about state of UK science and tech, forgets to suck up his own mess

Jeff Smith

Ahhh this comments section is a throwback to the heady days of 2019. Gonna chuck in my 2p then run away.

Dyson is only interested in his own personal wealth, and when he chats about competitiveness he’s referring to his ability to make himself as much money as possible vs other billionaires. There’s nothing patriotic about saying “hey if you don’t allow me to pay less tax and treat my staff worse I’ll take even more of my business overseas”, this is what he wanted from Brexit though. He does not care about this country or its people, only himself.

Ok bye x

CEO sorry after telling staff to 'leave pity city' over bonuses

Jeff Smith

I've heard similar from a friend who works for a large multinational where staff bonuses were drastically cut for not quite hitting a target, and everyone was made to feel like shit about it. This cut was implemented across all employees, regardless of their individual contributions.

"That's just how it goes" you might say, however my friend works in the finance department and she can see only too clearly that the company made huge profits anyway and the top people were still rewarded handsomely. The money the company saved reducing bonuses went directly into the pocket of the billionaire owner instead. Why do we accept this?

Musk tells Twitter advertisers: You're welcome back, but don't make demands

Jeff Smith

It does rather feel that one indulging in 'copium' might convince themselves that the actions of an obscenely wealthy idol must always be absolutely correct, despite glaring evidence to the contrary.

In the battle between Microsoft and Google, LLM is the weapon too deadly to use

Jeff Smith

Setting aside overblown fears of an imminent AI Armageddon, what concerns me the most is how this tech will be wielded in this era of unchecked capitalism, greed and inequality. Any benefit to mankind as a whole is going to come a firm second to the accumulation of wealth and power by the very small group of individuals who control it. How can we trust these people to look beyond their own self interests?

Twitter rewards remaining loyal staff by decimating them

Jeff Smith

Re: The guy is an asshole. End of

For the rest of his life, and far beyond. People that rich can afford not to go broke. The rules are entirely different for them.

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Jeff Smith

Whilst you're at it could you have a word about your date format too please. Thank you.

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