Posts by Catkin

Whistleblower raises alarm over UK Nursing and Midwifery Council's DB

"Journey of Improvement"

I'll have to keep this one in mind for when I'm caught seriously fucking up.

World's first Neuralink patient enjoying online chess, long Civ 6 sessions

Re: Still not doing anything you can't do with a headset?

I take it you haven't tried those. You can move a mouse cursor but, unless they've massively improved in the decade since I tried one, it requires you to make large voluntary changes to your brain activity (e.g. internally screaming or the same effort as tensing every muscle to the point of pain). They're also very limited for locomotion, since significant movement upsets the sensors (though this can be mitigated with skull implants).

It may be an exaggeration but if the description of the mental load required to operate this is true, it's a massive upgrade. Looking at the video, he's far more animated than any person I've seen doing much more rudimentary control with an EEG skull cap.

Filipino police free hundreds of slaves toiling in romance scam operation

Re: Modern slavery

The old deal between Russia and West of making other nations of USSR invisible is one of the causes of the current war.

This was less an attempt by the West at making the Soviets happy (as with One China) and more refusing to dance to the Soviet tune that the USSR was a voluntary association of truly independent nations.

Imagine it's the early Nineteenth Century, you're a Black individual in a Northern State. You endure everything you have just described (minus any welfare) but, every single second, you are aware that a small geographic misstep or an abduction could see you lose what few freedoms you do have. You might be beaten to death for non compliance, you'll certainly never see your friends and family again (unless you risk death to escape and, even then, the odds are massively against you), you will be owned as property until you die. Even worse, your children might be taken and you would never know if they have simply died or are owned as property somewhere you would be enslaved for simply setting foot; I imagine some Black parents at this time likely hoped their children had merely died painlessly.

This is just one way that even the proximity of slavery, let alone being in its clutches would be mentally devastating. I could continue with other examples but it's better to pick up a book and read. At the bare minimum, watch Twelve Years a Slave.

I do not criticise these comparisons to minimise the severity of what you refer to as "wage slavery", I criticise them because they minimise something that was far worse. Like the Holocaust, slavery was and is so outlandishly evil that it is important we never dilute its meaning. You describe an evil of neglect and biological reality, rather than an evil of active, systematic and devastating abuse.

Diluting the meaning is whitewashing and you keep doing it with your comparisons. If you cannot see that there is a clear difference between being "enslaved" by the need to eat and being enslaved by being owned as property, I can only conclude that you either completely lack empathy, really don't understand or have some strange sense of recognition seeking.

I passed the edit window but, to put your comparison in perspective, Forty Acres and a Mule was considered to be a good promise that never materialised. Imagine a modern government giving the vulnerable some arable land and washing their hands of them, the outrage would be unimaginable but precisely that was considered to be a massive step up over and compensation for slavery.

By all means, share your horror stories, I will agree that they are terrible and need to be fixed but please do not make space to write them by whitewashing a vastly more reprehensible part of our history.

The simple fact is that actual slaves risk their lives to escape to a life like or worse than that. It you think the two are comparable, you need to educate yourself on how unbelievably horrific actual slavery is.

Just as every attack on a population doesn't have to equal the holocaust to be considered bad, every instance of employment injustice doesn't have to be compared to slavery. It's insulting because it down plays the horrors and betrays that the person making the comparison considers that to be the threshold at which intervention should take place.

It's definitely a problem in its own right but I think it's pretty grotesque to try to equate working a shitty, low paying job with the horrors of actual slavery.

Crypto scams more costly to the US than ransomware, Feds say

Vigilantism doesn't necessarily mean law breaking, it's just a potential occurrence.

Ahead of IPO, Reddit blends advertising into user posts

Re: Blending

Some of the technical discussion subs are quite interesting but they inevitably turn into inane tech support questions from people that find reading challenging or as a platform to push political stances.

The latter is particularly devastating because, surprise, people who want to discuss technical topics want to discuss said topic so their protests at not wanting to have their discussion hijacked in support of Current Thing end up being labelled as 'hate speech'. They are forced out, leaving behind idiotic activists who eventually move on to the next technical space once the previous has no new interesting content they can hijack, like locusts but somehow even more obnoxious.

Can AI shorten PC replacement cycles? Dell seems to think so

Re: "shorten PC replacement cycles"

Absolutely, I'd add to my previous preference that I also preferred having to take a single screw out to swap a drive on a T420 over taking the entire base off. The T440P at least had a cover that screwed and slid but, with the T470S, it now has those abominable clips. Apologies for not knowing when these transitions occurred, I'm not a huge Thinkpad collector, I just have a few that, in many ways, mark a bitter decline.

Re: "shorten PC replacement cycles"

I'm probably a bit of a thickie but I'd prefer my laptop to be a mm thicker and have a socket over having to do BGA soldering.

Re: "shorten PC replacement cycles"

I believe it's the case for the X series from the X240 onwards but I'm not an expert on Thinkpads. I just went from an X230 to an X270. The only benefit I've really felt is better battery life (still not great) and being able to easily pop in nice third party IPS panels. If I could jam a modern CPU in an X230, I'd never want another laptop at that screen size.

Re: "shorten PC replacement cycles"

I'm still running xx70-series Thinkpads at home because, beyond that awaits the horrors of soldered RAM and, even on these, they're a shadow of the repairability of older Thinkpads. It's not so much getting them apart but the reliance on clips means they never go back together cleanly, no matter how careful my spudging. "upgrading" would mean ending up with a less repairable device.

It's also disgraceful that I used to be able to replace a keyboard with 4 screws but I now have to pop out the whole motherboard.

Where's the incentive?

At the current time, I'd actually consider my computer not being able to locally run AI models as an advantage. To me, it's as enticing as putting an Amazon/Google always on, always connected microphone in my home.

AI and wearables are scaring the wellbeing out of workers

Re: Who would want to wear

Just put it on the cat

Your PC can probably run inferencing just fine – so it's already an AI PC

Re: No wonder hardware vendors are on board

Work continues on the search for a round number between 21 and 23.

Attacks on UK fiber networks mount: Operators beg govt to step in

I think it's worth a scientific trial. Anyone expressing a wish to execute political opponents, simply for expressing their beliefs, could be executed and we could then see how well the idea of political executions endures. Any further proponents will also be executed.

If the idea endures, then they're probably not very effective, so we can stop executions. If it goes away, we can stop executions because no one alive supports the idea.

Gotten? American politics is a contact sport. The US Capitol alone has seen everything from journalists (1890) to Puerto Rican independence advocates (1954) demonstrating their extreme displeasure with legislators within its walls.

I'd go much simpler than that and ask any death penalty proponent: 'if I put all the senior members of your government and justice system (wherever you live) in a room, handed them each a loaded pistol and told them there would be no repercussions for their actions would you willingly walk into that room?'

Airbnb warns hosts who use indoor security cameras they may face eviction

Re: Easy fix for Register readers

I'm sure everyone around you would be perfectly happy with you screwing up their WiFi for the duration of your stay and Ofcom/local equivalent would be entirely understanding. While you're at it, buy a GPS jammer, I hear they're a good laugh.

I don't own any spy cameras but my standard IP cameras all also loop record to a flash storage card. I would be surprised if this weren't a particularly advantageous feature included in something more clandestine.

Is Russia using Starlink in Ukraine? Congress demands answers

Re: Wow

interference with planned Ukrainian attacks via Starlink service disconnects (documented FACT from a few months back

Are you aware of any more recent updates or additional sources? As far as I'm aware, the original source for that claim (Walter Isaacson) issued a correction, clarifying that Starlink was never operating in Occupied Crimea, in accordance with existing sanctions.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/09/14/musk-internet-access-crimea-ukraine/

Alternatively, did you mean that Musk interfered by obeying sanctions when he should have ignored them or fought to get them dropped?

An engine that can conjure thrust from thin air? We speak to the designer

Re: Loretta wants a word...

Visit the National Air in Space Museum. I haven't gone myself but I presume they have a decent explanation.

Copilot can't stop emitting violent, sexual images, says Microsoft whistleblower

I mean that an ethnically diverse individual in a Nazi uniform isn't ahistoric, not that the Nazis were an open, inclusive and, above all, tolerant bunch.

A picture of a car accident is "benign"?

Also, for all their racist claptrap, the Nazis did recruit some People of Colour (Free Arabian Legion, Indian Legion).

Russia plans to put a nuclear reactor on the Moon – with China's help

Re: A sample of what now?

The ALSEP was much nastier. It was a plutonium-powered RTG.

Re: A sample of what now?

It get scattered over a wide area but a brand new reactor isn't too bad if the fuel is fresh enriched (from ore) uranium because it's the transuranics that are highly toxic and those will only be present in reprocessed fuel. Uranium is just a heavy metal so, while it's not great, it's actually less toxic than lead and the latter is vomited into the air by just about every piston-driven aircraft (the TEL ban for aviation still hasn't been implemented, but they're working on it).

YouTube workers laid off mid-plea at city hall meeting

Re: These were CONTRACTORS on the Day their Contracts Expired.

The difference being that a contractor has no reasonable expectation of these things more or less anywhere (please do correct me if you are aware of significant exceptions). Contractors (by choice, in contrast to gig workers forced to be classified as contractors) tend to throw a wobbly when you bring up employment rights because that tends to lead to less money in their pocket.

Re: These were CONTRACTORS on the Day their Contracts Expired.

Did they choose to be contractors (exchanging more money for less benefits) or was it their only option?

Dell exec reveals Nvidia has a 1,000-watt GPU in the works

Re: Bitcoin mining 2.0?

How do they get away with it? It seems like a fairly detectable crime but I don't know the ins and outs of power distribution.

Re: Bitcoin mining 2.0?

Wouldn't a miner, in tandem with the initial cost of the card, value efficiency more than most other customers? I understand they run them around the clock (this might be wrong) so they have the most to lose on higher consumption per calculation, assuming they're paying for their electricity.

Ahead of Super Tuesday, US elections face existential and homegrown threats

Disenfranchisement by way of exam doesn't have the rosiest history.

Use fMRI to determine who is most terrified by the idea of being handed the power of ensuring the flow of information is entirely truthful and put them in charge.

Musk joins OpenAI lawsuit queue, says there's nothing 'open' about it

Looking at the patent application, Makerbot failed to respond to a challenge in 2016 and it was considered abandoned. An interesting bit of legal history is that Makerbot was able to get going because a Stratasys patent on FDM expired in 2009. Stratasys then acquired them a few years later.

I don't imagine there's a contract stating exactly how OpenAI will conduct their business in perpetuity (or otherwise) but I expect there is some contract for the tens of millions he invested (it's a matter of debate how much, Musk claims $100M, others claim as little as $50M). I was contrasting it with the individuals who did things like publish improved extruder designs for Makerbot printers on their platform

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:42250

only for Makerbot to patent them

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20140120196A1/en

On reflection, this is probably more like Bollea vs Gawker. Peter Thiel, who is, at least, a pretty horrible person had a vendetta against Gawker for outing him (not over any specific hypocrisy on homosexual issues) and funded the lawsuit that destroyed Gawker. I have zero appreciation for Thiel but I'm happy that Gawker finally came a cropper over their own hypocrisy (decrying distribution of leaked nude content of some individuals while repeatedly publishing leaked nude content of others) and hubris (doing it repeatedly despite legal demands to stop).

Motives aside, the basis of the lawsuit seems quite reasonable. Investment was secured by touting one operating model which was abandoned for a more profitable one. I'm reminded of the big sneaky Makerbot pulled, except here there's a contract someone can point to.

You don't have to cheer the person doing the right thing for the wrong reasons but it seems silly to deny the thing they're doing is right in the first place.

White House goes to court, not Congress, to renew warrantless spy powers

Re: I thought it was just the communists & dictators who spied on their citizens & distrusted them

Checks and Balances is, like, such a drag, man.

BEAST AI needs just a minute of GPU time to make an LLM fly off the rails

Re: All that's required is an Nvidia RTX A6000 GPU with 48GB memory

I would imagine that it's also possible on GPUs with less memory, it'll just take a fair bit longer. 16GB GPUs are readily available.

It should be possible but, just to clarify, 'a fair bit longer' is orders rather than linear if the full VRAM is required to run the code. That particular card has a PCI Express 4.0 x16 interface at 31GB/s but the memory bandwidth is 768GB/s so swapping from the SDRAM to the VRAM in a card with the same specs, but less VRAM is almost 25x slower. This doesn't take into account the overhead of identifying when these swaps need to take place.

I expect any nefarious instructions will be about as credible as the Anarchist Cookbook, which was dangerous but only to the person dumb enough to follow the "recipes". It's still my pet theory that it was a cunning attempt to deprive anyone of that mindset of their fingers before they got their (abridged) hands on useful information.

OpenAI claims New York Times paid someone to 'hack' ChatGPT

Re: Yeah, no

As I said initially, I don't think the case hinges on it, I just wanted to discuss the relative merits of the use of the word 'hacking'. But, while we're discussing this.

They then claimed it didn't matter because ML models were either "fair use" or some new category because even though they jacked some else's IP without paying/asking, it was transformed into something new that didn't contain the original material.

The word you're looking for is "transformative" and I don't think you fully understand how it applies in copyright. I'm not claiming ChatGPT is or isn't transformative, that's precisely why there is a legal case but your explanation doesn't match the legal definition. Here, I do think the NYT legal team has it right, because their main argument is that it's non-transformative so, if they can prove it, they will have a case.

Re: Strange

Ah the ol' Stalin vs Trotsky schism.

Re: In summary....

I think it excessively focuses the scope and leaves a window for OpenAI to turn around, add in a few guardrails (ironically, by directly storing NYT articles) and say "see? we fixed it". In early January, OpenAI described regurgitation as a "rare bug" but please do cite where they repeatedly denied it could happen at all.

In my view, a better strategy would be to use data on referrals from search engines to compare and contrast their articles against the output of ChatGPT to show how it might dis-incentivise visiting the NYT, since the primary and recurring complaint is unfair competition without compensation. Another component of their initial legal complaint was that their content was given "particular emphasis" so it wouldn't be hard for the defendants to point out that the URLs had to be included (I don't imagine their legal team would have done this if it weren't necessary).

Then again, I'm not a highly paid (or in any way paid/qualified/registered) lawyer.

Re: Strange

No problem if that's your actual opinion but could you perhaps be thinking of the New York Post?

If you do mean the Times, could I ask why they're so objectionable to you?

Re: In summary....

I think you're restricting yourself to the pop culture definition of hacking, rather than the broader tech understanding of the word. The NYT exhibit could be regarded as something of a hack because an individual who has not accessed the NYT's site is unlikely to have access to the URLs or opening paragraph.

Therefore, if the legal argument for the NYT rests on regurgitation, they'll have a difficult time demonstrating that anything approaching a typical user would be exposed to a copy of a given article. I don't think Open AI have ever denied ingesting articles but I also don't think the whole NYT case hinges on regurgitation; it seems more like overly expensive lawyer showmanship on both sides of this particular exhibit/counterargument.

New solvent might end winter charging blues for EV owners

Re: Fluoroacetonitrile

The debate on whether its sibling chloroacetonitrile is carcinogenic is an interesting one. It can certainly do unpleasant things to DNA but it's unclear how this plays out. Unfortunately, because it's a small contaminant in drinking water, most of the studies are of very low concentrations.

BOFH: In the event of a conference, the ninja clause always applies

Re: You have to know the obscure rules ....

That sounds expensive. Connect them to the kid on work experience and pay said kid a small fee for each hour they can keep baiting them.

Japanese Yakuza boss charged with nuclear trafficking by the US

Re: "weapons-grade plutonium"

That's definitely a worry but I don't place it as appreciably worse than the same bad guy doing it with radiotherapy sources, which can have orders less security and accounting. Even worse, there's still likely ex-Soviet RTGs sitting around (in and outside of Russia) that have no extant records for them. The 'refining' and 'research' bit makes me think they meant something else.

Re: "weapons-grade plutonium"

Could you please expand on your concerns for "refining and research"? It's a bit of a rabbit hole, since we don't explicitly know it's spent fuel but, personally and not as someone who works in that field, I don't view bad people acquiring nuclear waste as significantly worse than them acquiring, for example, a similar quantity of radiotherapy sources. However, I'm still very interested to hear another perspective on this.

I would be more concerned by them acquiring yellowcake because, based on my understanding, it's easier to start from scratch with a pile than it is to recover isotopes. This is why fuel reprocessing is controversial - it takes a large amount of investment and sophistication to recover 239 from spent fuel because it's such an appalling mix of isotopes with much more complex recovery chemistries than fuel which has been bred specifically for the purpose of Pu-239 production.