Posts by Catkin

Here's a list of thousands of artists Midjourney's AI is ripping off, creatives claim

Re: Piles of styles

That's a (grossly shaky) patent.

Re: I don't think copyright law can handle this...

>The next thing you need to know is that as these things are not intelligent, "training" doesn't mean what it means when you train an intelligent being.

What process do you believe is taking place when an intelligent being is trained?

How the Xbox Series X fridge chilled our holiday spirits

Re: Thermoelectric fridges

I'm not sure if this is good or bad

Thermoelectric fridges

I've been pleased by how cheaply a decent performance gain can be pulled out of these things. Having used them for travel, replacing the thermal paste/pad with something better can in itself make them capable of actually chilling a drink. Perhaps any quality increase would be difficult to advertise against the background of the rubbish ones. I also experimented with a CPU cooler which worked well but fabricating a mounting solution proved beyond my abilities and workshop equipment. I wonder if I should have another go with a 3D printer.

The other issue with them is, unlike a compressor, as soon as the power is removed, the heat sinks act to very quickly transfer energy back into the enclosure. I think the best solution is top mounting as in an electric cool box so convection at least helps.

UK government lays out plan to divert people's broken gizmos from landfill

Re: disposable vapes

You can read the UK government evaluation and statistics here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nicotine-vaping-in-england-2022-evidence-update/nicotine-vaping-in-england-2022-evidence-update-main-findings

In short, the risks appear to be significantly smaller than smoking and the majority of vapers are ex-smokers (or those still currently smoking). They're also the most successful method for smoking cessation. The 'ooh it contains chemicals' line isn't particularly scientific.

The publication also mentions that there's little evidence of harm (when measured by biomarkers) for second hand electronic cigarette vapour exposure.

Re: disposable vapes

Why make (refillable) vapes prescription-only? It doesn't make sense for a harm reduction product to have barriers to entry or put a cost on the NHS when people can do it off their own backs. They should definitely be funded as part of harm reduction as requested but it seems wasteful and onerous to put the entire burden on the health service.

Mozilla CEO pockets a packet, asks biz to pick up pace the 'Mozilla way'

Re: What Is This “Market Share” Business?

A market share can be used to describe anything where consumers have choice. Whether all, some or none of the options are paid is irrelevant.

A ship carrying 800 tonnes of Li-Ion batteries caught fire. What could possibly go wrong?

Carbon Dioxide?

Evidently it worked but I'm surprised because I'd expect the lithium to do what magnesium does and tear apart the CO2 to get at the oxygen.

People power made payroll support in putrid places prodigiously perilous

Re: Explosion proofing

Probably, assuming it offered enough support to avoid tipping. I was initially thinking of the ground vehicles on Cannikin but I doubt these were underground thermonuclear blasts.

Re: Explosion proofing

Good call on the scheduling but, unless the building is unusually bouncy, I expect the structure would shake as much as the floor. Personally, I'd hunt down some used motorcycle shocks at the junk yard and use them as splayed table legs holding up the machine.

Women in IT are on a 283-year march to parity, BCS warns

Awfully sorry, just missed the edit window. I meant to type 'single, childless individuals', not unmarried, which is fairly self evident for singles.

The nasty thing it subtly suggests is that 'success' is, in aggregate, showing exactly the same patterns of employment as men (or white men if we're talking about racial demographics). For instance, the largest source of the "gender pay gap" in unmarried single individuals comes down to working hours; I don't know if men choosing to burn up their free time in ruthless pursuit of money should be considered mark of personal achievement.

Programmable or 'purpose-bound' money is coming, probably as a feature in central bank digital currencies

Re: Permanent status quo

Political commentary of old:

-a well synthesised, accessible explanation of how current events tie into past decisions and potential future outcomes

Current political commentary:

-why it's good that the good guy is doing something the bad guy previously did (rare, since it requires acknowledgement)

-why it's bad that the bad guy is doing something the good guy previously did

-why it's bad that the bad guy is doing something we previously vigorously supported but the good guy didn't do

-puff piece on the entirely synthetic social life of the good guy

Permanent status quo

It strikes me that expiring, restricted use financial tokens would empower any oppressive government to starve out opposition. Naturally, it would be presented as a simply wonderful way to ensure no one ever goes hungry or homeless because a portion of their "money" can only be spent on approved essentials but exerting control over savings and discretionary funding hamstrings political organisation.

"Better" still, a blockchain system or any centrally controlled token system would allow the flow of money to be tracked in such detail that anyone financially associating with the politically undesirable can be swiftly identified and locked down. For example, a protest group might be identified and a trigger set if it detects attempts at travel towards any geographical centre (through geolocation of purchases) to mysteriously lock their tokens for anything that might help the protest happen. In essence, unpersoning becomes as easy as tripping an algorithm.

I don't predict this definitely will happen, it's more that it would empower any government that wants to to do it.

Internet's deep-level architects slam US, UK, Europe for pushing device-side scanning

Re: the major issue

Worse, there's no objective way to know exactly what is being scanned for. They might promise you that it's only things you shouldn't personally worry about but, unless you can generate a match, it's not possible to independently verify the contents of the hash list. It could be a photo, picking a completely hypothetical and random example, of a politician enjoying a party when they're not supposed to be. Then, by looking at the creation date, the photo could be tracked back to whoever leaked it to the press.

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

Re: Change that to "Fossil Fuel Giants and anyone who buys their products"

The big factor is how efficient your gas plant is. The UK averages around 49% thermal efficiency for its gas power plants (through heat recovery) which is rather good, compared to straight gas turbine generation (around 30%):

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/electricity-chapter-5-digest-of-united-kingdom-energy-statistics-dukes (DUKES5.10)

A report from around 2014 mentions that national transmission losses are 8%

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201415/cmselect/cmenergy/386/38607.html

Therefore, the heat pump needs to hit a CoP of 2.2 to break even with a gas boiler. This is quite achievable but does fall when the temperature drops (for air source, ground source does much better and is less subject to atmospheric temperatures).

The other factor for the end user is the cost of electricity vs gas. If you're on mains gas, you're looking at around 3.5-4.5x more for a kWh of electricity than a kWh of gas but those off the gas network suffer from a much smaller difference. Basically, at the moment, if you're have mains gas, you either don't care about paying more (before even considering the cost of installation), you are very wealthy and can afford a ground source heat pump or you're banking on that window closing over the lifespan of the heat pump.

Personally, I believe the government shouldn't have limited heat pump subsidies to heating-only systems based on water radiators. If people could get air conditioning into the deal, they'd probably have been more enticed.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars in crypto stolen after Ledger code poisoned

Re: I'm sorry, what was that?

Sounds like you have something to hide

England's village green hydrogen dream in tatters

Re: The EU...

Are you suggesting that Boris was right about hydrogen (but simply didn't pursue it properly) or that the EU are wrong to be pursuing it at all?

Science fiction writers imagine a future in which AI doesn’t abuse copyright – or their generosity

Re: Regulate the prompts?

Thank you for clarifying. That definitely sounds like a good candidate for the moron in a hurry legal test.

Re: Regulate the prompts?

It's a reasonable point, sorry for causing confusion, I wasn't questioning it in itself. I just don't think that the specific moral and legal rights of authors pertain to this point because, whether the source is an LLM or the drunken ramblings of a madman who believes they definitely read an unpublished manuscript by a given author, the issue would be with explicitly claiming it to be the work of that author; as far as I'm aware, "in the style of" isn't protected.

Re: So Lawrence Block sets their price at zero

There is a limited legal right for the author to maintain control over how that material is portrayed. If, for example, it were heavily edited without their consent, even by the legal holder of the publishing rights, it could not be presented as wholly the work of the original author.

The comment you replied to did seem to overstate this right but I may not be aware of certain specifics (and am awaiting clarification from them).

Re: Regulate the prompts?

I appreciate the analysis but I'm not sure it pertains to my question. If the AI is asked to write the aforementioned novel, it should be fairly clear to the end user that this is not an original work of Mr Block, simply based on the source. This sounds like a moron in a hurry argument (assuming you mean that the public might be fooled).

Re: Short sighted sci-fi

Perhaps not directly but it would be reasonable to extrapolate that the Bard in Asimov's Someday impacted a range of authors that include sci-fi writers. It's rather reminiscent of an LLM: feed it a range of written material and out pops an endless stream of stories. Admittedly, the Bard he describes also has predefined story formulae.

Re: So Lawrence Block sets their price at zero

Could you please explain (or link to an article, legal paragraph or judgement that you agree with, if it saves time) how you believe moral an legal rights pertain to analysis of a work in an LLM? My understanding of that legal principle is that it would only apply if an LLM or individual were presenting the new works as the output of the original author; saying that it's 'in their style' would constitute an opinion.

For example Postmodern Jukebox is a musical group that performs covers of one song in the style of another (including specific artists); that's not to argue the legalities of the cover itself, this is with regard to their use of the concept of 'in the style' when describing their songs.

You don't get what you don't pay for, but nobody is paid enough to be abused

Problematic pattern recognition

I've found myself wishing for a new boss a couple of times in my life because their pattern recognition is oddly acute when it suits them. They notice my habit of, when asked for an opinion that may save my bacon down the road, I offer to email it for ease of review. If this works out in my favour (but not theirs) a few too many times, some have sneakily offered to 'save me the trouble' of typing it out.

Tip: if someone is offering to 'save you the trouble' of putting things in writing by deflecting to a quick chat, a quick written summary ("in case you forgot to mention" something) can neuter their gambit.

Boffins fool AI chatbot into revealing harmful content – with 98 percent success rate

Re: Is it really a problem?

I'm not sure this is directly comparable. To be more analogous, there would have to be systems which prevent someone grabbing the control yoke from deliberately slamming a plane into a mountain and cope with adversarial attacks.

Is it really a problem?

If an individual takes specific, deliberate steps to make an LLM output nasty things, it seems like the fault (if there is one) lies with the aforementioned individual.

NASA pushes back timing of ISS deorbit vehicle contract

Re: Silly question

It would take a lot more energy to get it to that higher orbit than to re-enter, it would put a large amount of mass into a position where a single impact would generate debris over a huge orbital range* and, with a controlled re-entry, it's reasonably easy to ensure that anything large enough to reach the ground goes into the ocean; the issues come when effective control is lost.

*in a low orbit, almost all impacts result in at least half the debris re-entering faster than on an undisturbed orbit while, in a graveyard orbit, that could potentially mess up the extremely valuable GEO patch and put debris deep down into low orbit with a much higher velocity. In both cases, re-circularising at lower/higher orbits than the impact altitude is impossible from a single impact but they cross over more readily. With the ISS where it is, debris from an impact will still always suffer from some appreciable drag and, with smaller particles, the drag/mass ratio becomes much higher than the original station.

Uncle Sam plows $42M into nurturing fusion breakthrough

Re: What if they use heavy oil instead?

The target is fuel contained within a hohlraum. During ICF, the inner walls of the hohlraum are hit with the laser, which then generates X-rays that crush the fuel itself. Potentially, laminar flow could be used to encapsulate the fuel within the driving material but it doesn't seem like it would be terribly easy to then form it into a hollow tube which doesn't collapse (unless a third liquid could be injected to hold the shape, though this would have to not interact with any of the involved radiation).

Fairphone 5 scores a perfect 10 from iFixit for repairability

Re: If only an official Qi backcover would be available.

Is the inefficiency such a problem if the total energy consumed (and, therefore, wasted) over the lifetime of the product is so small?

Apple and some Linux distros are open to Bluetooth attack

If your device can be compromised through an analogue audio socket, it's a problem that's probably not best solved at the end of the Bluetooth adapter.

Half a century ago, NASA's Pioneer 10 visited Jupiter, then just kept going

Re: I remember watching the Pioneer images of Jupiter in awe (in the National Geographic Magazine)

>to allow me to see Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon live

Many parents today are afraid to let their children play outside, much less travel to the Moon to watch a landing take place.

Getty's image-scraping sueball against Stability AI will go to trial in the UK

Re: Having trouble getting my head around what exactly is at issue here

Sorry, by 'blind spot' I meant one that hadn't been tested, rather than a loophole. IANAL either but cases like this worry me because of the broad powers they might grant to companies with a long history of abusing those powers. I only lean slightly towards the model trainers on the basis that, if copyright holders get additional (excessive) rights, it will be almost impossible to roll those back, while a 'no comment' from the judicial system leaves room in the future for some clearer thinking.

Re: Having trouble getting my head around what exactly is at issue here

I recommend reading the CDPA 1988. The work has been made available to the public, regardless of watermarks. Therefore, it comes down to whether the output (the trained model) is infringing. There is a blind spot in the act, wherein decompilation of computer programs is permitted (providing it is to a lower level language) but no provision either way is made for the output of analysis. That's not to say it's necessarily in the clear, more that a legal precedent or relevant legislative addendum has not been made at this time.

WRT payment, that is immaterial unless there is a dispute as to the existence of a contract (hence the use of token sums in some cases) in the first place. What matters is the contents of any contract and whether it is enforceable under the law. Your basic legal rights cannot be waived by any contract you're signing. In your example, you're free to take a private copy of the material you're criticising for the purposes of personal reference, provided that, as you said, you're not reproducing it in your final work.

I understand that it seems simple common sense but the legal nuances are as important as the broad strokes. I'm not sure if you remember but it wasn't that long ago that copyright robber barons tried their level best (and, in some areas, succeeded for a time) at preventing individuals from recording live broadcasts for personal use.

Re: Having trouble getting my head around what exactly is at issue here

Wouldn't that be a legal dispute between Getty and the school, independent of the output of any given art student? That is, the infringement that might occur would be down to how the school presented images owned by Getty to their students.

Re: Having trouble getting my head around what exactly is at issue here

>I don't think they need to claim that, simply that the images were used without paying or permission to use those images, and that the usage was for commercial gain.

If a judgement in their favour were secured on that basis (I don't think this is the case) it would be, in my view, disastrous. For example, that would be the end of any appraisal of copyrighted materials* and any artist would have to be very careful to never mention viewing a copyrighted piece of work.

*or, worse, the rights holder only granting permission to individuals guaranteed to generate a positive review and/or making the production of a positive review a condition of viewing for the purposes of review

Then again, this is the same Getty that sued a photographer for using her own images, which she had released for free use (Carol Highsmith).

Buggy app for insulin-delivery device puts diabetes patients at risk of hypoglycemia

Therac-25 did lead to an ISO for medical software. Evidently, there was either non-compliance or it needs updating.

Bitcoin's thirst for water is just as troubling as its energy appetite

I think you might misunderstand. I wasn't suggesting that the comparison (as in, presenting a rundown of the difference between applications) between other types of data centre is needed but, rather, that the data is potentially inaccurate because it is derived from general information on data centre water consumption, with the assumption that there is no difference. This seems like quite a sizeable assumption to make and, while the data is probably somewhere in the right ballpark, it could still be off by quite a bit.

It's a combination of the water consumption for the generation of the power consumed and the water consumed per kWh for cooling the data centre. They don't actually know the specifics for the latter for mining facilities but treated them like any other data centre, adjusting for geographic variations in water consumptions (e.g. making use of evaporative cooling where the climate permits) based on the location distribution.

As far as the paper goes, there doesn't appear to be anything specific to cryptocurrency mining that would result in higher water consumption than any other data centre operation of similar power consumption. That said, whether this is because there really is no difference, because the authors lacked the capacity to investigate fully or because they didn't consider this question is unclear.

Virgin Atlantic flies 'world's first fossil-fuel free' transatlantic commercial flight

Re: Price support mechanisms

"The same perverse incentives could equally arise from "price support" and any mechanism found to deal with one would also apply equally to the other."

I agree but, looking more broadly, if they're extra emissions from low net carbon (lest someone jumps down my throat for calling them carbon neutral) fuels, even due to tankering, then that has less impact. Further, if that perverse incentive results in extra SAF being produced, that could help lower the price through efficiencies of scale.

Re: Price support mechanisms

There are potential adverse incentives to this if taxation isn't imposed universally. Planes may be flown with brimmed tanks if entering a country with a higher tax rate and may perform detours to fill up in cheaper locations. Both of these would drastically increase emissions.

Not to dismiss the idea out of hand, just to help you understand the complications.

Tiny11 shrinks Windows 11 23H2 down to pocket size

Re: Icon =======>

It's not a terrible concept but, like so many things in life, compromises of convinience do happen.

Re: runs on old kit

I was very pleased with Cinnamon but do dual boot for certain software. I honestly wish Lenovo had just kept making the X230 with updated internals; mine has endured significantly more abuse than a modern X series could stand up to.

Re: Icon =======>

Perhaps someone wants to run Windows-only software on a system that's Internet facing and wants to receive security updates* without the bloat.

*and is happier with a system that may be pre-compromised by a third party over one without updates. That said, there is safety in numbers; the more people using it, the more looking for surreptitious nasties.

I would also like to read your source on "fleeing".

Foxconn founder Terry Gou quits Taiwan presidential race

CBDCs

It's notable that South Korea is going down the route of internally restricted tokens right out of the gate. Depending on how much you trust a government implementing their use, CBDCs with per-token restrictions and/or expiry dates (though I couldn't find whether this CBDC features the latter at this stage) are either a fine tool to make welfare payments all the more efficient at serving the people or a highly effective tool for precisely controlling dissent; though these aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.

Greenpeace calls out tech giants for carbon footprint fumble

Re: Greenpeace is irrelevant and so is carbon dioxide

That's rather Let Them Eat Cakey. It's better to be honest about the impact of necessary regulations because poorer people will notice the impact on their lives (like not being able to afford EVs with the same range as their previous IC vehicles) and statements like yours leave them ripe for picking by populists.

User read the manual, followed instructions, still couldn't make 'Excel' work

There's a wonderful font out there called Cocksure (NSFW) if you ever want to see whether someone is paying attention to fonts.

How to give Windows Hello the finger and login as someone on their stolen laptop

Re: fingerprint works <25% of time

It works nicely on my older Thinkpads. I use it in office scenarios where it's unlikely that my laptop would be stolen but very likely that a tasteless email would be sent from an unlocked machine. By having fingerprint sign in, I'm much more tolerant of a shorter lock time than if I had to enter a password.