Posts by abend0c4 1161 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Mar 2023
The bizarre reason is market segmentation. In the UK, see also giffgaff and Smarty for example. The weird thing is that people will still pay more for the "premium" brand in the same way as they'll pay for a "golden" phone in order to demonstrate their demographic niche. In that respect, Trump is a bit late to the party.
Having once had to typeset an entire book in LaTeX, I appreciate both its advantages and its faults.
However, for business documents, convoluted formatting is largely the product of IT: back in the old days, your typewriter pretty much limited you to CAPS, underlining and tabs for formatting purposes - and they were used sparingly because they slowed the typist down. Anything complicated would likely be inserted by hand. It's only because it's become practical to produce documents with justified text in multiple typefaces, sizes and weights that form has become a commonplace consideration in ephemeral correspondence. For the most part we can do without it.
Being a genuinely stiff upper lipped, emotionally suppressed Briton, I'm entirely unfamiliar with children's reading and, indeed, children. Please excuse my ignorance and take this as a passive-aggresive apology in the best British tradition.
Could that ever work without some sort of genuine understanding? The "prompt" is an almost insignificant fraction of the data ingested by a system that can recall 42 percent of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and I'm not sure what mechanisms would be available to recognise that the prompt was essentially new training data that should override the current model and modify the operation accordingly.
People seem unable to resist anthropomorphising these machines: they can't be led to the correct solution by holding their hands. They don't actually "learn" anything in the way we traditionally understand the word.
While there have been loud claims of "no public money" for the new Old Trafford football entertainment complex in Manchester, it does seem to be predicated on significant public investment to enable it. There's been surprisingly little analysis of the economics of commercial sports, but what there is, at least in the UK, seems to suggest that the big-money businesses cause a net economic outflow from their surrounding areas and provide mostly casual, low-quality jobs in the local area.
There's some evidence it's actually getting worse as it ingests its own garbage.
I think part of the problem is that at first sight the results are really quite plausible and it's easy to imagine it being a panacea. It's only when you become better acquainted that you start to suspect there may be bodies under the floorboards, by which time there's no escape.
Taking a rational perspective, one would assume that investors would be cautious when there were predictions of "500 to 1,000 percent errors of ... cost estimates" or that the datacentres would consume more power than Japan at a time when electricity demand is already increasing owing to the transition from fossil fuels.
However, we've passed the point of rationality. We're now in the broligarch stage where mountains are being hollowed out as personal fiefdoms by very rich men who despise humanity and want to replace it with machines in their own image. They seem to have captured politics, so let's hope the rest of us have the sense to reject this nonsense when it's offered.
The thing is, I get a better cup of coffee from Greggs, for a fraction of the price, or from a Costa Express in Tesco - more expensive but with a sandwich and snack thrown in for a few pence more - than I've ever experienced at a Starbucks.
People who go to Starbucks go for the theatre (or the free office space and WiFi) not for the coffee. If you want more technology go for animatronics.
The way we deal with that presently is to have laws that impose accessibility requirements on commercial products and services.
What's the appropriate mechanism in the world of open source software? It's already the case that unpaid developers will - quite naturally - spend most of their time on the part of the problem that interests them most: usability - in all its forms - is often not at the top of the list.
Is it sufficient that accessibility is only a consideration once projects are commercialised, leaving those with accessibility requirements with fewer choices and higher costs?
magnetic cards, sort of punch cards but magnetic
Possibly from the IBM Mag Card Selectric Typewriter.
There's an additional problem with LaserDiscs - they're double sided and made in two separate parts that are then glued together: any failure in the glue and the reflective layer oxidises.
I believe PDO was responsible for many of the dodgy disks, though others can fail for a variety of reasons.
It's nice to know someone is still collecting them - I have loads I would like to dispose of!
In a country where people do not routinely carry documentation to prove their nationality or immigration status, it would be quite easy to find people to detain on suspicion. Some of those who've railed against a "Papers, please!" society may be about to find out that it's not the papers but the society that they need to worry about.
He's also shown himself to be very creative in his interpretation of US law and hostile to court challenges. If he can get around habeas corpus, I don't think the law is much of an obstacle. So far, every "surely he wouldn't" has been proved wrong.
It's right to be concerned, but - like NATO - it's going to take some considerable time and cost to construct an adequate alternative.
It seems the US is lining up to impose "revenge" taxes on foreign individuals and corporations who are tax residents of a "discriminatory foreign country". There are signs that "stealth" disinvestment from the US has already begun by those who don't want to find their US asset holdings subject to random taxation on the same whimsical basis as the TACO tariffs. That would be bad news for an economy that is just about to add a couple of trillion dollars to its debt.
These attempts to demonstrate America's strength in the face of nasty exploitative foreigners have, unfortunately, simply demonstrated how dependent the US is on other countries - China, in particular - making the stuff it needs and lending it the money to support its profligacy. The failure to recognise (or to acknowledge) this is going to cost US citizens dearly.
It seems that the clash of rhetoric and reality is leading inexorably towards a North Korean scenario in which client media and military parades will simply assert that America is now Great Again while closed borders and closed universities will eliminate the main sources of contradictory messages.
We're only at day 130.
This, presumably, being the same Sergey Brin that wanted his AI developers to work a sixty hour week.
I wouldn't be surprised if they'd tailored the system to respond to his management style.
The more significant question is what would be the point?
The US economy is not going to benefit by people trading down to lower-value assembly jobs. And while there may be an argument for doing more high-tech component manufacturing in the US, it's actually very hard to do that without all the supporting lower-tech manufacturing processes being available on your doorstep and economically pointless if you then have to export those components again for final assembly before reimporting them.
It's the same as the issue with the US automotive industry - the price of making cars in the US is that a lot of the components are made in Canada and Mexico which are cheaper but sufficiently "nearby" for logistics. The alternative really isn't to do the whole job in the US - the alternative is to import entire cars because there's too little of the value chain left.
I believe it is not uncommon in the US for table-service staff to pay the management for the privilege of working: their remuneration (and the gig fee) coming entirely from the tips they make.
But it's a weird concept. You don't tip your plumber or your doctor. What is it about driving or carrying a tray that changes the economic model?
This does seem similar in broad principle to the Log4j debacle - in that case it was a misconfiguration of JNDI allowing arbitrary code to be executed by default and in this case it seems to be a misconfiguration of Spring having the same effect. I can't help feeling that the default for all such frameworks - in the absence of explicit configuration to the contrary possibly involving the provision of a doctor's certificate - is that the silent execution of arbitrary code should perhaps be disabled? There are aspects of the Java ecosystem that seem to err on the side of recklessness. Not that it's the only culprit.
I also understand that the Log4j problem keeps coming back as patched systems are subsequently reverted unintentionally. Hopefully that's less of a problem for a commercial product with a single origin.
The countdown has begun to the moment when Microsoft is bemoaning its inability to recruit the talent it needs to meet its growth targets.
The big tech companies have arguably been over-recruiting for years in a weird game of beggar-my-neighbour They've had plenty of time to wind that down in an orderly and more humane fashion but chose not to. I think they'll find their AI resources rather more of a burden than they imagine: disposing of them means writing off large capital sums, they're not worried about maintaining their visas and they're not going to accept a real-terms reduction in their power input in the upcoming spike in electricity price inflattion. And that's before you have to worry about the inappropriate workplace behaviour.
But as highly paid business executives, I'm sure the managers have a detailed transformational plan and not merely an infographic showing a small dollar sign on one side, employees being fed to alligators in the middle and a larger dollar sign on the other side.
Perhaps they should have read it themselves.
These types of incident are becoming increasingly inevitable and of course it's in our own interests to mitigate the potential fallout as far as possible, but it's not a good look to be pushing this message out to your customers after an event over which they have no control and in lieu of any meaningful explanation. Though I suppose arse-covering is M&S's fundamental business.
Cars have far too many features for me, these days, making them not only expensive to purchase but also to maintain. I think the problem is that the average consumer can only buy what manufacturers decide to build - and the present trend is to concentrate on maximising margin, loading cars with short-lived electronic bling whose main function is to generate monetizable data.
Despite the unexplained downvotes, it's a genuine enquiry. There's a difference between wide-area national airspace control and airport systems. UK NATS provides both national control and airport services for some UK airports, but not, it seems, for all of them. It also provides airport services for some airports in Spain. Given the infrastructural (and, indeed, security) implications of national air traffic control I can imagine that there is some pressure for them to remain bespoke, but there's a great deal of commonality between the requirements of airport control systems. There's going to be a challenge migrating from one system to another while keeping the airport operating, but that's going to be true whatever system you adopt, and would presumably be more tractable if the systems were more familiar.
ATC systems are exotic stuff
But every airport has one, or access to one. I take it there's some obvious reason I've missed why there isn't at least the framework of a standard solution waiting in the wings to be customized. Is it simply that you'd only get to sell one a decade owing to the reluctance to replace them?
Whereas it may well be advisable to avoid wrangling with Oracle's lawyers under any circumstance - and IANAL - there's an interesting legal principle here.
Courts can bind a company to a contract made without the company's authority by one of its employees acting as its agent, but the contracting party has to have a reasonable belief that the employee was acting with the authority required. That reasonable belief depends on, for example, the employee's job title, the nature of the order and how the order was placed. If a catering supervisor signs a contract for an executive jet, the aircraft company is probably not going to be able to rely on their apparent authority. If someone claiming to be the managing director of Google calls from a withheld number and orders the same jet without any other form of corroboration, it would be difficult to hold Google to the contract. If someone calls up a stationery supplier and places an order for 2 years worth of copier paper using a company credit card, the company could probably be made to take delivery and pay because the simple possession of the card implies authority.
Oracle might have a good argument that an individual downloading a software package that was clearly labelled as being chargeable could result in their employer being liable for the individual's use of the software. It's a much harder argument to make that a random individual is likely to have the power to bind the company to a licence calculated on the company's total number of employees. That's something you would reasonably expect to be reserved to a senior executive so the threshold for "apparent authority" would presumably be higher. There's a bit of UK case law that's relevant:
If a person dealing with an agent knows or has reason to believe that the transaction is contrary to the commercial interests of the agent’s principal, it is likely to be very difficult for that person to assert with any credibility that he believed that the agent had apparent authority, and lack of such a belief would be fatal to a claim that he did.
Not that I expect to see it ever come to court...
My experience of HE is that the actual cost of your DC will be a small fraction of the booked cost once the institution has added its overheads. The accounting will make it look like the cloud is cheaper even though the institutional overheads are likely unrelated to either. Universities seem to specialise in a form of obtuse accounting that maximises their expenditure on everything but salaries.
If you're considering the possibility of fat-fingered staff not doing their jobs properly, Google tells me that AWS S3 misconfigurations account for 16% of cloud security breaches.
Cloud is not a panacea, nor does it relieve you of the responsibility of basic housekeeping. Although you can punt the responsibility for a great many operational tasks (like backup), the convenience comes at a considerable cost and significant dependency - the final part of this project has had to wait on an Amazon decision to waive $250k in egress fees. VMware customers have seen what can happen when that dependency is exploited.
Too often, people are simply resorting to cloud vendors in order to pass the buck or because it makes their accounts look tidier. With the amount 37signals claim they will save, they have the opportunity to employ the right people in the right numbers to make it work. It's also a rather curious view of the IT industry that you can trust a company to develop complex software, but somehow it will simultaneously be incapable of managing its own backups. If they're not, at least they'll only have themselves to blame.
I think it's marginally more nuanced in that browsers are more complex than they need be for their declared purpose and insecure by design largely at the behest of advertising interests in general - and that includes those content-providers who've been persuaded that getting tiny fractions of someone else's advertising revenue is the only way to get paid. The advertisers need someone with both the technical clout and the market presence to persuade legislators that the sky will fall if the trade in personal data is somehow impeded - and that someone is Alphabet.
A more effective way to deal with this might be to ratchet up the privacy rules so that, instead of various established corporate entities playing ownership musical chairs, they're forced to consider a different game. I somehow can't see it happening, though.
if anyone cares to look at the evidence there are a lot of unanswered questions about that election regarding mail in ballots and duplication
The desperately-contrived "evidence" was comprehensively reviewed, including in multiple court cases. The "questions" were answered conclusively. Trump even went on to be elected for a second term - which seems to be going pretty much as predicted. I can see how that may explain your reluctance to let go of the Biden administration.
Are they also going to produce another station where you report for destruction if rejected, or is that capability already built in?
I know I should get with the times, but it seems a tad dystopian for the protection of relatively inconsequential services such as "gaming, online dating, and social media", but I guess it's really for revenue protection rather than identify verification per se and they're certainly activities whose participants can be monetized effectively. I've no doubt, however, that people will be queuing around the block for their "exclusive access". I hope, though, that the unrecognized will be permitted to post a final selfie of their "whatevvuh" face to their profiles just before they're turned to dust by high-intensity lasers and that their entire previous unverified existence is not simply erased.
He's already saved two thirds of the US population from death by "fentanol", I gather. Can't the guy have a day off?
I think it's the original plan to spend $65B that's the bigger issue.
As the US talks about a shortage of Christmas toys, the $7B alone amounts to roughly $100 per child in the US. And while such kids' toys as are available will likely end up in the back of a cupboard come January, Zuck's not only buying toys in abundance, but actively building the storage in which to abandon them. It's a wacky world.
The principle of having a range of stock in store seems to have been abandoned. I've had trouble for years buying items of clothing in specific sizes for elderly relatives. The message seems always be to go online. This presumably must generate a lot of unnecessary returns as a result of not being able to see or try garments in store. There seems to be space - there are even stores where the floor space has been actively reduced - but perhaps there is less wastage overall if the majority of stock is kept centrally.
Having done some work with a clothing retailer there is a genuine problem in matching the size variations in manufacturing orders to the eventual demand. In the old days, when most of the manufacturing was done in the UK, they could place an initial order and top it up depending on how the season went. Now, you're stuck with what came on the boat.
The failure of the electricity grids in Spain and Portugal has amply demonstrated our dependence on a whole variety of technologies and our lack of preparedness for their inevitable failures. Although failures are relatively rare, their effects can be very pervasive and prolonged.
Although there are technology weaknesses that need to be fixed, it seems like much more work needs to be done to ensure business processes can continue when things go wrong. That might come at some cost and inconvenience by deliberately introducing barriers between system components that have previously been integrated for operational efficiency to reduce contagion and offer more points of human intervention for remediation. However, considering the increasing number of incidents and the increasing dependence on a relatively small number of platforms, there's a growing risk of sudden economic damage equivalent to that of a major natural disaster.
It's certainly interesting the extent to which you can say that LLMs "communicate" or whether they merely offer a facsimile of communication - and whether there is a meaningful distinction between the two.
We are certainly predisposed to interact with machines that appear to communicate and our programming seems to cause us to infer that the machines must have similar characteristics to ourselves.
The issue with concepts such as "cheating" is that they're based on getting a benefit for an individual (or small subset of a wider group) at the expense of another and you could imagine it occurring in any system with replication and feedback. For something similar to occur in LLMs there would first have to be individuals in sufficient numbers (and that could occur if each client instance accumulates enough information specific to each client to be distinct from other instances) and there would have to be a "benefit" to the LLM instance. It's the possible benefit that's hard to imagine. An LLM that was routinely coming up with erroneous responses would presumably be turned off and replaced.
The issue of "nature" I think will come down partly to our own willingness or desire to anthropomorphize these systems and, in the end, whether we're willing to treat them as machines that can be turned off or become dependent on them as extensions of ourselves. Can these machines somehow acquire a state of "nature" through symbiosis? We're not at that point yet and I hope the answer is no, but I'm certainly open to the possibility.
When they do have leverage the administration still seems to get a free pass.
But if you're old and wealthy, I suppose there's no real incentive unless, like Trump, you have messianic self-belief.
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