Posts by Philo T Farnsworth

Microsoft Copilot shows up even when it's not wanted

Re: CoPilot reminds me of the Windows 10 forced upgrade

> Remember when people used to look forward to operating systems adding features?

Honestly, no.

At least not since the day I converted from punch cards to a green screen terminal. . .

Japan serves Google a cease and desist order over its Android bundling deals

Re: The Japanese style

Personally, I like the little "Casper the Friendly Ghost" character with the crossed arms (is that a football [aka in the US, soccer] referee signal? -- sorry, I'm as ignorant of the language of sports as I am of the Japanese language).

As a side note, if there's someone in the audience who is fluent in Japanese and English and has a few minutes free, I'd be interested in seeing a translation.

Apple: Since you care about yOuR pRiVaCy, we'll train our AI on made-up emails

Re: How do you do, fellow kids?

I'm personally baffled at how one would "summarize" a one line email like "Would you like to play tennis tomorrow at 11:30AM?"

"Tennis, tomorrow, 11:30AM," perhaps?

Are we all so attention starved that we need nine words condensed into three?

I suppose if you're a "busy executive" like Tim Cook who probably receives prolix emails from his many underlings all laced with the latest in buzzwords and managerspeak, this might have some value, say in an email with the subject line "Prospective productization projections for Artificial Alliteration in selected sectors of factories, finance, and farmiculture, 2026-2030" which could be conveniently summarized as "Here are some numbers I made up."

It's fun making Studio Ghibli-style images with ChatGPT – but intellectual property is no laughing matter

Re: Cartoonify filters have existed for decades

It's also legit to use styles and techniques of living artists.

Ask Dale Chihuly.

Actually, go into any second-tier glass gallery and you'll find tons of Chihuly knockoffs, all very legal, as long as you sign your own name and not Dale's -- that'll get you in a load of trouble.

Actually, using styles and techniques of living artists is known as learning.

How many guitarists, for instance, started off copying Jimmy Page? Once you get famous, you get to call it "being influenced by."

Re: Cunning move...

A couple of observations:

1) As I understand it, not being a pop music fan, much of modern pop music, particularly genres like Hip-Hop relys upon "sampling" of previous hit music, all remixed¹. There's even a subgenre knows as plunderphonics² dating back to the 1980s or, arguably, earlier.

2) Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, music industry companies and organizations fought tooth and nail against music sharing sites³ and even sued individual sharers, including a 12-year-old girl⁴.

Who were the heroes?

Who were the villians?

Which side were you on then?

Compare and contrast.

Finally, as have in the past, I will recommend Molly White's thoughtful essay “Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI⁵ for your consideration. While it largely relates to the use of Creative Commons licensed material, perhaps provides some general insight as well.

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¹ Sampling

² Plunderphonics

³ Trade group efforts against file sharing

⁴ 12-year-old settles music swap lawsuit

⁵ “Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI

Reboot.

Think, if you will, of how today, instead of genuinely new movies and TV shows, all we get is endless reboots and remakes. If the AI companies get their way, that will be true of art, novels, music, and – yes – movies and TV shows as well.

I just noticed in this morning's news that Max (aka HBO Really Expensive) has announced a Harry Potter TV Series.

Any further questions?

Dot com era crash on the cards for AI datacenter spending? It's a 'risk'

Re: Apples and Oranges

It'll be different this time. The rules have changed. We're smarter now. It's a new paradigm.

BOFH: There's a fatal error in the blinkenlights

Re: Never thought I would see the day when they were...

The one thing I've never claimed to be is original.

Re: Never thought I would see the day when they were...

> . . . more that they were schooled a bit in the finer points of BOFHing.

I believe you meant to say "schooled a bit in the finer pints of BOFHing."

Cheers!

China ups tariffs on US goods to 125%, calls Trump's war a 'joke'

Re: I love this

> . . . [H]e'll stick it out until republicans in congress start seeing their re-election chances going up in smoke. . .

Speaking of smoke, I'd say that we're one fire away from a Reichstag.

Someone compromised US bank watchdog to access sensitive financial files

Not to be pedantic. . .

But as a former sometime-journalist, a "by-line" is the writer credit. . . in this case Iain Thomson.

You're actually referring to the subheading or, in journo-ese, the subhed.

Procter & Gamble study finds AI could help make Pringles tastier, spice up Old Spice, sharpen Gillette

Re: It could...

> These are the people who make razors that deliberately go blunt quick so you have to buy a new one.

I forget which brand of razor I use but mine last for months. I think I've gone close to a year on the current cartridge of my multiblade contraption.

Of course, I've long been known as Captain Peachfuzz, my five o'clock shadow looks like about 7:15 AM, and my sad attempts to grow a beard have elicited comments like "Did you forget to shave this morning?" after six weeks, so hirsute I am not.

My biggest gripe with razor manufacturers is that by the time I eventually need new ones, they've stopped making the cartridges, so I need to buy a new handle, too.

Copyright-ignoring AI scraper bots laugh at robots.txt so the IETF is trying to improve it

Re: Poison the content

Bear in mind that the AI that you're poisoning today could be the AI that's giving your doctor advice tomorrow.

The Law of Unintended Consequences supersedes all others, including Gravity.

Brit universities told to keep up the world-class research with less cash

Re: Mates

> In ideal world yes, but we have something like taxes that are used to redistribute wealth. . .

Uh, well, no, not really.

We have taxes in order to have government, which is charged with providing all sorts of services that make the world liveable, like roads, bridges, airports, air traffic control, and people to keep an eye on all of that infrastructure so that it doesn't fall completely to pieces.

Some countries, like the UK, even provide health care to their citizens, which makes for a generally more productive work force since sick people tend not to be productive.

It's the "real" companies that avoid paying taxes (Double Irish Dutch Sandwich Tax Avoidance anyone?), which, of course, puts tax pressure on everyone else to make up the difference.

As I said elsewhere in this comment thread, we can argue about some corner cases that might be silly or stupid or unproductive but often that's somewhat subjective.

> and we have no growth, productivity and prospects.

That's true, except for the no part of the sentence, at least on two counts.

Productivity has linearly increased vs time with only a twitch or two here and there since 1948.

GDP has grown pretty consistently since 1961.

Prospects? Well, that's, again, somewhat subjective and I leave that as an exercise for the student.

I suspect that it's not a matter if won't but can't.

As a Yank, I, of course, can't speak autoritatively about UK universities but I did spend the majority of my working life in research in the employ of a major university here in the States.

The so-called administrative atherosclerosis is largely mandated by law and the funding agencies that fuel the research. And there's all that pesky teaching.

All of that, unfortunately, requires management to make sure that people and suppliers get paid, students have housing, the lights stay on, the floors get swept, the trash gets taken out, hazmat gets handled without poisoning everyone, people don't cheat or get cheated, etc, etc.

There are probably corner cases (some probably pretty silly) about which we could argue but, by and large, most of the administration is really there for a reason and is of direct or indirect benefit to the researchers and the students.

Re: Mates

> Where is funding for real world projects that actual companies struggle with?

Wouldn't that be the responsibility of the actual companies?

But maybe you're right -- shuffling bits in FinTech to make imaginary money and hiring and firing thousands of workers at the whims of Wall Street outweighs research in sciences, green energy, and space.

I mean what has research ever done for us, other than create life saving medicines, clean solar energy, and satellite systems that help us predict the weather and communicate with one another virtually instantly?

Oh, and the aqueduct¹.

_________________

¹ What Have The Romans...

Wikipedia's overlords bemoan AI bot bandwidth burden

Re: If you can't beat `em. . .

Hey, I just came up with this other great idea.

You see, if you roll things, they don't experience as much friction as if you drag them.

What if we get a bunch of rolling things, put them on rods, and then attach the rods to a platform-like thing.

Then we could move things around much more easily.

I think it could work. It'll revolutionize transportation, I tell ya!

Have your people call my people and we'll do a deal.

Re: If you can't beat `em. . .

Well, d'oh!

I should've known.

Thank you for the gentle enlightment.

Appreciated.

If you can't beat `em. . .

Let me make a half serious modest proposal.

According to Wikipedian, technologist, and writer Molly White, the entire footprint of Wikipeda is roughly 50 gibabytes¹.

Why not just build a nice tarball of that, say every week or so, and put it on a separate server that the LLMs can just grab in one go, rather than fish through the entire site, obviating the entire silly game of cat and mouse?

Yes, they're gobbling up the work of other people but, frankly, that's what Wikipedia is for -- to share knowledge.

Per Ms White in an article that you really should read in full,

The visions of the open access movement have inspired countless people to contribute their work to the commons: a world where “every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge” (Wikimedia), and where “education, culture, and science are equitably shared as a means to benefit humanity” (Creative Commons).²

If you're freely sharing, you can't be selective about with whom you're sharing.

Your downvotes will make me stronger.³

___________________

¹ Elon Musk and the right’s war on Wikipedia

² “Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI

³ No, actually they won't. I will cry myself to sleep over each and every one.

China hits back at America with retaliatory tariffs, export controls on rare earth minerals

Re: Medium rare?

Understood.

It's obviously a complicated proposition, largely governed by the willingness of a single producer (China) to grab all the market and undercut other suppliers by selling the material at what might be a loss.

This is analogous to some "big box" stores muscling into a market by selling product at a loss until the local businesses all are forced out of business.

Medium rare?

Perhaps the most curious bit about the whole "rare earths¹" story is they're not actually especially rare, at least according to the excellent, if a bit cheeky, Australian Broadcasting Corporation program If You're Listening.

Also, according to the ABC, they aren't particularly abundant in Ukraine.

What they are is difficult to extract and extraction uses and produces rather toxic and radioactive byproducts in great abundance.

The only advantage China has in the whole deal is that they're willing to dump tons of nasty effluent into their environment while mining and isolating the stuff.

Oh, and sell it's so cheap that it's impossible to compete in a way that's even approximately environmentally friendly.

_____________

¹ Not to be confused with the band Rare Earth, which was remarkable largely in being the "first successful act signed by Motown consisting of only white members". Not half bad as bands go, if you like that sort of thing.

NASA doubles odds of Moon hitting near-Earth asteroid

Mmmmmm. . . dinosaur. . .

. . . Tastes like chicken.

Signalgate: Pentagon watchdog probes Defense Sec Hegseth

In other news. . .

. . . the paint department at the Pentagon has issued an RFP for a tanker truck of white wash to be delivered immediately.

Isar’s first orbital rocket crashes into sea – CEO calls it a 'great success'

Re: Have you watched "The Right Stuff" recently?

I don't have to watch the movie.

I was around for the real thing -- admittedly as a youngish kid -- I was barely 9 when Sputnik 1¹ flew and freaked everyone out -- and, yeah, a lot of things exploded on the pad.

And, yes, I remember nascent NASA saying that even in failure we learned things, so this is nothing new.

What they didn't do was make it into a joke.

It was serious business by serious people². My partner's late father was an electrical engieer who designed components which flew on Apollo (in the Command Module, if I have the story correct) and every mission there was some intense nail-biting around their house from liftoff to splashdown.

RUD, my fat fanny.

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¹ Sputnik 1

² Even if some of them were serious ex-Nazis

Musk's xAI swallows Musk's X in ego-friendly, all-stock deal

Re: If it quacks like investor fraud...

Keep in mind that the belief in an invisible super-being (or beings) of one sort or another has persisted for several thousand years, despite no papable evidence to support that belief.

As someone put it (often attributed to John Maynard Keynes but the source is debated), the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

Re: This Is How Tesla Will Die

Stopped clocks are right twice a day, you know.

As far as "doing better", better may be in the eye of the beholder.

Of course, what do I know? I bought Tritium at what turned out to be the peak and it ended up in receivership.

Hm. . . given my propensity to pick turkeys, maybe I ought to buy a few sacrificial shares of Tesla. . . It's be worth it to see Elon on the receiving end of a soup kitchen line. . .

When even Microsoft can’t understand its own Outlook, big tech is stuck in a swamp of its own making

Just for the record. . .

. . . and any lapsed members of the Church of the SubGenius, the correct reference is The Bleeding Head of Arnold Palmer.

What's that, nurse? The 1980s are on the landline, you say? I'll be right there.

Pentagon kills off HR IT project after 780% budget overrun, years of delays

Re: Awful piece, you'll regret this genuflecting

Journalism is reporting facts, whether you find them in alignment with your political views or not.

Or, at least, it should be.

My own thought when reading the story, given the apparent randomness of the DOGE "efforts," was something along the line of "Even a blind pig finds an acorn once and a while."

23andMe's genes not strong enough to avoid Chapter 11

. . . nor is hot air.

Microsoft tastes the unexpected consequences of tariffs on time

When a tariff is not a tariff

While I'm fully in agreement with the thoughts behind the article, I'd like to point out an error in the analogy, one that also seems lost on some of our highest political figures here in the US.

Tariffs are not paid by the exporter or supplier -- they are paid by the importer. If, in this case, Microsoft had required its own staff to generate a video of the bug report, that would be a sort of tariff.

The video requirement is more akin to the sometimes voluminous customs forms an exporter has to fill in to send something across a border or, in the case of Brexit, erecting a border where there previously was none.

It's adding unnessary friction to what should be a largely frictionless process.

Photoshop FOSS alternative GIMP wakes up from 7-year coma with version 3.0

Re: Humm - really?

Thanks for the heads up. I'll give 5.0.0~beta2 a whirl when I get a chance.

The UI looks nice and far less complicated than either Darktable or RawTherapee (and, at the risk of attracting downvotes, the 'pee' bit of RT has always mildly put me off, I mean come on, what are we, six year olds?).

Re: Humm - really?

Following up, I tried installing LIghtzone 4.2.4 and it seems to have a major bug in the RAW file reader. It won't read .RAF, .DNG, or .NEF at all. Its Github Issues page confirms this.

Caveat emptor.

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¹ https://github.com/ktgw0316/LightZone/issues

Re: Humm - really?

Just FYI, Darktable¹ and RawTherapee both open at least some forms of the FUJIFILM RAW file (.RAF).

Last I tried, compressed RAW is still problematic², though.

Since I do all my raw processing in Darktable and any postprocessing in either Gimp or RawTherapee as PNG, I'm happy.

________________

¹ 5.0.1, that is. 5.0 had some problems, getting the color channels all mucked up.

² As in not working at all.

Dept of Defense engineer took home top-secret docs, booked a fishing trip to Mexico – then the FBI showed up

Re: Shame

You miss the obvious point that in one case when they were discovered, they were returned, while in the other they were shuffled from the bathroom to the ballroom to the pool shed and back, all the while denying and stonewalling.

People mess up, especially when under deadline pressure, and things get stuffed in the wrong box.

Should there be better compartimentalization? Dang straight.

Having said that, I'm very dubious of such things as personal presidential records and ostentatious "Presidential Libraries."

I'm of the opinion that here in the US we have a dandy Presidential Library all set up and ready to go -- it's called the National Archives and that's where all presidential records should go when a President leaves office.

They can sort the personal from the Presidential there, under the watchful eye of a few Federal Marshalls.

BOFH: Have you tried forcing an unexpected reboot?

Re: Remin me

I recommend a trebuchet and a old, surplussed CRT monitor. Makes a satisfying amount of shrapnel.

VA IT contract cancellation DOGE boasted about ... was due to end in 10 days anyway

In-house mouse.

I find it passing strainge that it has been the mantra of the "small government" crowd for many a year that private business can do a job better than a government agency can do in-house.

Now it seems that doing it in-house is better.

To quote the repeated phrase from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, "So it goes."

Crew-9 splashes down while NASA floats along with Trump and Musk nonsense

Re: actually, n0

> Polling, when done right, is actually a useful look at the pulse of a group of people.

That group being the respondents in the sample (at least the ones who aren't just telling the pollster what they think the pollster wishes to hear or who aren't outright lying to mess with the numbers).

Beyond that, I submit, you're extrapolating off the end of the curve.

Polling "results" (scare quotes quite intentional) have been increasingly wrong over the past years, to the point where they seem to accurately predict an outcome, it's more of the stopped clock phenomenon than anything resembling actual science.

Then everyone runs around in frantic circles, examining entrails, counting magpies¹, spinning ever more fanciful scenarios, fudges, and solutions until the next election cycle starts up again (usually the day after the results of the current one are in), and the elite political press reports the next blip in the third deriviative of the kurtosis of the standard deviation of the mean until your eyes and your democracy bleed.

I cede the balance of my time to one W. Shakespeare, late of Stratford-upon-Avon

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

__________________

¹ One for Sorrow

Re: actually, n0

Polling exists to give astrology a good name.

Polls prove nothing other than a bunch of people with nothing better to do answered the phone. Just ask former President Hillary Clinton¹.

__________________

¹ Polling Average Aug-Nov 2016

Re: Canada

Please, call me Philo or. . . as my friends call me. . . Hey, you!.

Canada

> Which, by the way, does not include Canada.

Maybe, just as a thought experiment, it's not such a bad idea for Canada to join the US.

Just think, we'd have roughly 40 million more people, which translates to 50 or so new congressional districts, which would more than likely flip the House¹.

If we admit the ten provinces and three territories as individual states, that means 26 new Senators, which could easily flip the Senate.

And it doesn't have to be forever. . . just, say 8 or 10 years, until we can get rid of the oligarchs and felons and pass universal health care (we understand Canada can give us some tips there). . . then Canada can go back to being a subject of King Chuck or however all that vestigial royal stuff works (I'm too lazy and American² to figure it all out).

So waddaya say, Canada? Help a pal out.

It's not like we haven't helped you out by giving employment to all your actors and like that. I mean, you owe us Big Time for William Shatner alone.

________________

¹ No, sorry, you can't keep your parties, they're far too confusing for us Americans -- only D and R allowed. Two is as high as we can count; after that we get confused. Besides, seriously, who knows what Progressive Conservative even means.

² Yes, I repeat myself.

DoorDash sued for allegedly branding customer a fraudster after delivery photo query

Re: Wha... 3.4 million to door dash in 4 years

For that kind of money you could install a nice little catering kitchen, employ a full time chef, skip all the extra expense of ordering takeout, and probably have better meals, to boot.

Re: DoorDash driver

FedEx and UPS also take photos of packages as delivered to the doorsteps of homes. I've looked at the ones I get with my delivery notification and don't see anything that might be of use to the criminally minded. Admittedly, I'm not a burglar or child abductor but I'm not sure seeing a photo of a box on my closed door and porch would be of use in commiting a crime.

As far as "ride alongs" -- well, DoorDash and its ilk sound to me to be pretty mind numbing jobs and having a companion might make it a bit more bearable, not to mention, as AC above points out, the job can be a trifle hazardous, especially for women.

I suspect the DoorDash driver probably faces far more danger from the customer than the other way around.

Don't want Copilot app on your Windows 11 machine? Install this official update

Re: Software that uninstalls AI.

Wouldn't that be called Linux?

Vivaldi 7.2 browser wants to topple tech's feudal lords

Perhaps I'm missing something. . .

. . . but I find little to any substantive speed difference between browsers in terms of page loading.

It's basically governed by the rate at which the bits can be shoved into the pipe (and the amount, given all the adware) and not by the rendering speed of the browser.

I'm currently running Waterfox as my default browser with Firefox, Opera, Zen, and Chrome kicking around for mostly testing purposes.

I had Vivaldi but recently deleted it for reasons which I no longer recall (yeah, short term memory is going. Also my short term memory).

This one weird trick can make online publishing faster, safer, more attractive, and richer

Re: The economics of not serving ads

Right!

Thanks for the memory jog.

Re: The economics of not serving ads

In the late 1980s and earlyish 1990s we had a freebie weekly publication in San Diego I think called Byte Buyer that was chock full of ads with a bit of mostly useful editorial content. Useful for checking memory prices, etc.

I'm old enough to remember those things called newspapers that were also chock full of ads and they never bothered me. I'd even read the ones that were of interest like Samy's Camera (a chain of camera shops).

The difference between ads in a newspaper and on the Internet is that the newspaper ads didn't track you. They also didn't try to jump out of the page and throttle your brain with distracting animation¹.

I'd be more inclined to accept online ads if they were simple static images that I could look at or ignore as I wished and otherwise left me to read in relative peace.

________________

¹ That's also why I've gotten rid of our television -- I can't stand the yelling, flashing, and jiggling, not to mention the machinegunned recitation of the lists of side effects in the prescription pharmaceutical ads (yes, we have those here in the States).

CISA pen-tester says 100-strong red team binned after DOGE canceled contract

Re: New Orleans

> At the same time, would it really be better to give the contract to Bob's Fishing, Bait and Levee shop?

To be honest, I wish I knew.

The Corps is acknowledged to a lot of things really well, mostly in support of military operations. Its civil engineering projects, however, are often not among its successes for a number of reasons.

First among them is the short time duration of posting of the commanders of the divisions. Like all military organizations, personnel are rotated on a frequent basis, I believe two years is customary. That has the effect of destroying a lot of institutional memory in the command structure and also tends to diffuse the responsibilty for any decisions and subsequent failures.

Second, thanks to a long term program of outsourcing, there's not a lot of expertise in the Corps itself, even amongst the long term civilian staff.

As Univerisity of California, Berkeley, Engineering Professor Robert Bea told Harry Shearer in the documentary The Big Uneasy (see elsewhere for the reference), "It's not your father's Corps of Engineers any more." By that, he meant that the organization had been reduced to largely a contract awarding and administrating agency, instead of a pick, shovel, and bulldozer construction agency.

The deterioration of the Corps is a long term failure, extending over multiple Presidential Adminstrations and both parties, so nobody has the political will or desire to point fingers, since the pointing eventually ends right back at the pointer. Budgets slosh back and forth, depending upon the party in power and the ideology in play.

For decades it's been the fashion to outsource all manner of tasks and projects to private industry on the theory that a profit-motivated company will do a job better and/or cheaper.

Sometimes that works.

A lot of times, it doesn't.

Sometimes when it doesn't, people drown in their homes from failure flood walls that should have held in what was, when it hit New Orleans, a Category 1 storm¹.

As to why a military organization has responsibility for civil engineering projects, as well as boat ramps, parks, canal locks, and dozens of other decidedly civilian tasks, well, that's a mystery to me.

In case you're wondering why I'm going on about this, I should note that I'm a sort of loose acquaintence of Harry Shearer, mostly via email, and we've spent a great deal of time and thousands of words bashing this story back and forth. Like a lot of people, I started out under the impression that New Orleans is below sea level (only parts of it are) and that it was a stupid place to build a city. Harry's passion about the story (he lives in New Orleans) and his command of the facts taught me otherwise.

The wrong impression of and misinformation about Katrina with respect to New Orleans, I've come to believe, is one of the largest failures by journalism of this century.

______________

¹ Effects of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans

Re: New Orleans

> Of course, the pumps also have a habit of failing...

There are two sets of pumps -- one set, the Wood Screw Pumps (no, they're not made of wood) work well and have "played a crucial role in protecting New Orleans from flooding for almost a century¹."

The ones built by the United States Army Corps of Engineers in the new and improved hurricane protection system, not so well² -- something of which a Corps whistleblower³ warned back in 2009.

But this is what happens when you give $14.5 billion dollars to fix a problem to the same people who created it in the first place⁴.

________________________

¹ Wood Screw Pump

² Army Corps of Engineers began repair on New Orleans pumping stations after corrosion discovered

³ Seven Years After Katrina, New Orleans Still Has Defective Pumps Revealed by Whistleblower

⁴ New Orleans’ flood protection system: Stronger than ever, weaker than it was supposed to be

Starliner astronauts' stay drags on as Crew-10 launch scrubs

Come on, Elon. . .

Just strap on the jet pack and "rescue" them yourself, Commando Cody¹ style.

_______________

¹ Only to be mildly confused with Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, which was a pretty decent band from the late `60s and early `70s.

Pirate Bay financier and far-right activist Carl Lundström dies in plane crash

Or at least that's what *they* want you to think.

No conspiracy "theories?"

Come on, folks.