Posts by Bebu sa Ware

AI models suck slightly less at math than they did last year

If it's Grok then getting the answer right is pure woke!

Surely Musk's Cyber-Nazi's answers would all be right even if wrong. The answers left while correct are too woke for his grokiness.

Re: If I bought a two-euro calculator

About a decade ago I did purchase a AUD6.95 programmable calculator from a local grocery which even for four function calculations was rather hit or miss - mostly miss.

I spent a fair amount of time attempting to determine what was wrong with it. I was pretty sure it wasn't electrical (faulty contacts, low battery etc).

Something to do with programming I imagine, as even repeating the same simple calculation would give different results. The STO and RCL worked reliably as apparently anything user programmed.

Ultimately returned it for a refund :) Paid about 10× the refund for a new HP35s from an internet site which both still works and returns the right answers.

Amazon and Nvidia open their wallets to lock in OpenAI's business while SoftBank keeps the lights on

going round in circles to keep the scam going

Reminds me of a now politically incorrect story from my childhood.

"The tigers are vain and each thinks that it is better dressed than the others. They have a big argument and chase each other around a tree until they are reduced to a pool of ghee (clarified butter)."

These would·be AI tigers will be reduced to oceans of insolvency rather than the pools of ghee.

Open source devs consider making hogs pay for every download

"But I’m cool with the idea of a free-of-charge tier for hobbyists…*

"But I’m cool with the idea of a free-of-charge tier for hobbyists if it is at all possible to make the distinction."

I don't imagine these abusive corporate CI/CD pipelines would last long if they were persistently stalled by random delays.

Sites like Anna's Archive have a paid tier that doesn't have a delay which the free mirrors have (up to 5 minutes) before commencing a download.

I imagine something like grey listing with a paid whitelist could do the job.

Presumably the problem is going to explode with the blight of AI driving an increasing proportion of so·called software development.

Harvard boffins finally crack the mystery of squeaky sneakers

It would have to a line ball…

whether they get an Ig Nobel. Might be the first Ig for work published in Nature.

As often happens the original problem will likely remain unaddressed but the work itself will have much more profound and unforeseen uses.

Trump orders purge of 'woke' Anthropic from government

Venn diagram of those MAGA and online trolls is pretty much just a circle though.

A special circle where circumference = 3 × radius.

Curiously the only "rational" thing about the whole boiling.

BOFH: Nobody would be stupid enough to go live with the mirror system, surely

Tödelö ?

Becoming a bit slow in old age. Looked it up in German etc though Spanish even Catalan. A brand of Ruritanian lager ?

The penny eventually dropped (like the retrenched beancounter.)

Toodle-oo.

Burger King turns to AI to flame broil employees who aren't friendly enough

"they can stay present with guests"

Which means ?

Presumably "present" opposed to "absent" is intended to mean attentive.

As others have indicated the food in the these multinationals is not inexpensive (possibly "cheap"depending on your EN locale.)

In AU there are quite a few competing burger franchises in larger centres and in the small towns the perennial family business that does burgers, steak sandwichs, chicken, chips etc to order (che egg baconi extra;) - either of which for much the same outlay although taking longer, do provide something actually edible.

Currently Vietnamese "Banh Mi" is all the rage here. A shredded pork Banh Mi (Thit?) seems to be about the price of a Big Mac and I imagine considerably more pleasing. The lunch specials in our asian restaurants are invariably cheaper than a "burger and fries" in a multinational franchise.

Re: Guest Experience

"one of the party spent the next day throwing up all over Buck House." "excuse to revisit later in the year to see what they had missed the first time around."

I didn't initially read that as "missed seeing" – more identifying those parts that had escaped an emetic coating on the original visit.

"Dunno from where the lass got the meat"

Back a few scandals before brexit, I might have imagined Polish^† horseflesh. ;)

_{† possibly not Poland but somewhere in those parts. Probably tested pretty good before DNA testing like roo meat in the burger mince exported to the US..}

Hubble in a death spiral that could end as early as 2028 without a reboost

Two buses, if we consider the width.

"Or a bendy bus, if we consider the shape after reentry."

Either way I would prefer a stop outside the house – not in it.

NASA safety watchdog says it's time to rethink Moon landing

"too many firsts in Artemis III mission"

Vastly outnumbering the more or less desirable firsts, are all the opportunities space travel offers gratis for fatally tragic firsts.

Being the first men in the Moon, no matter how deep, is hardly a desirable alternative to being the first on the Moon.

Hardly anybody bought Samsung's last smartphones for AI. It hopes this year's models change that

Re: No thanks

"I just told her to stop" – I don't imagine this was a literal transcript. ;)

It's insidious — Alexa is unarguably an "it", yet because it drives a voice synthesizer that mimics a woman's, the "it" unconsciously becomes a "she."

A hallucinating AI powered answering machine ?

Top of my wish·list of things to make the world a better place. /s

OpenAI asks its friends to tell their friends about Frontier

"friends to tell their friends about Frontier"

You would soon discover who your^† friends were… weren't. Friends don't let friends do drugs AI.

_{† as against Altman's.}

Hide from Meta's spyglasses with this new Android app

Re: I wouldn't want to "warn" about it

I'd want my phone to start spitting out bluetooth garbage at a higher than legal power level to make their spyglasses useless.

Search "jamming BLE" to get plenty of results

eg

https://circuitdigest.com/news/rf-clown-an-opensource-bluetooth-jamming-tool

https://github.com/sammwyy/BLEeding

Filming or photographing people even overtly, without their permission has always been considered rude and the height of bad manners. Seemingly less so now because that's the world we live in. The poorest excuse for even poorer behaviour.

I am wondering with enough power whether software defined radio with beam forming, could fry this Meta·tat. The spectacle of Zucker·prat having sparks flying from the sides of his… spectacles, would be worth paying for.

Bcachefs creator insists his custom LLM is female and 'fully conscious'

Leaving aside the claim of sentience…

I am truly puzzled how it could be female (or male.) Even assuming that for humans its not a purely a biological construct it definitely is a human construct.

Perhaps needs to get out more or at least investigate dating apps.

Indeed very strange times in which we find ourselves.

GhostBSD to ditch Xorg for XLibre as Red Hat's Wayland crusade leaves X11 fans out in the cold

Re: Why is it always Mastodon

when Dilbert Stark bought Twitter,

I hadn't encountered that nom de connard. Apparently doesn't have any particular etymology but curiously Drab Skittler is an anagram.

Recycling biz reckons AI features are destroying smartphone resale values

42 percent of people in the UK are willing to trust AI.

"42 percent of people in the UK are willing to trust AI. Contrarily, the vast majority of people are concerned about the negative outcomes of AI, and 80 percent believe regulation is required."

I imagine you could replace AI with Reform UK or anything equally dubious and arrive at the same conclusion.

After Brexit it is a mystery to me why anyone would bother polling the great British unwashed. Hardly likely to get a consistent or even rational result.

UK tech hit by double trouble: Fewer foreign techies amid skills squeeze

Apparently a supercar is an investment. An experienced engineer is a cost problem.

Supercars and experienced engineers - both are frequently seen rapidly speeding separately towards the horizon for greener pastures.

The prat in the former through incompetence; the engineer of course by design.

Microsoft execs worry AI will eat entry level coding jobs

Sure there's a phrase about Bolts, Horses and stable door somewhere.

Crapilot will put it tegether for you.

You can dispense with stableboys and strappers if you "bolt the horses to the stable door"

The ensuing bloody shambles resemble much of what emerges from Microsoft's stables nowadays.

Microsoft teases ‘reimagined SharePoint experience’ with added AI

Reimagining

The terminal part of the lifecycle of product or application just after it either works (mythical), mostly works and is moderately useful (extremely rare), sort of works but fairly useless, is transferred from the soon to be redundant developer team to the coloured crayon department to be "reimagined."

At least after the coloured crayon treatment the product quality and product consistency is uniform — totally useless and completely dysfunctional POS.

Pop music fans literally dying to stream hot new albums – in car crashes, that is

Re: US Centric...check against vehicle category?

Does anyone in the US drive anything smaller than the typical urban assault vehicle found on Australian roads ?

An abiding memory from 25 years ago was a collision between two massive Landcruisers at a corner in a inner Sydney suburb (Mosman)^† where the two vehicles driven by two lower north shore Karens completely totalled the engine compartments of both Landbruisers (no karens were injured.)

^{† 60kmh limit and hilly terrain. The two ladies had to be "talented" drivers to pretty much write off their battle tanks.}

Re: US Centric...stream a Cliff Richard or Des O'Connor song or two

We are including suicides too ?

Aren't they just saying that Drake/Swift fans are simply poor drivers?

Or that gun toting American drivers just don't like the music of Drake/Swift especially when booming from an adjacent vehicle.

Cisco turns to titanium spoons and sand dunes to build a better … box?

Remarkable: reinvented corrugated iron sheeting ?

Anyone who has read Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor knows that pure also referred to the dog faeces collected from the street and sold to leather manufacturers who coated the hide with the pure to soften the leather.

Aquapure would be doggy diarrhea I suppose.

Two lines from a period ditty seem a propos to most of the tat flogged in the IT space (particularly the second line) :

"I do doodoo so well, when the doodoo I do sell, / But could do doodoo better if the doodoo didn’t smell.”

Anthropic accuses China's AI labs of ripping off content – just like it did

Oh dear !

Even the edgy kids cannot play together nicely. There will be tears before bedtime.

Just looking at most of the faces involved they even look like the kids that just invite a clip under the ear. Unfortunately in our enlightened times the best (worst) you can do for them is five minutes on the naughty step.

IBM stock dives after Anthropic points out AI can rewrite COBOL fast

Difficult to get tropical fish to thrive in arctic lakes

Although the AI build out is working diligently to change that by degrees. :)

Just recently a shark was observed in antarctic waters for the first time ever.

Gemini users say their chat histories have quietly vanished

Re: Oh dear

"How sad. Never mind."

Reminded me of Sondheim's "Send in the Clowns" from his "A Little Night Music."

"Sorry, my dear / But where are the clowns? / Quick, send in the clowns / Don't bothеr, they're herе"

All rather appropriate in this context ?

O say, can you see: FCC pushes patriotic programming for US 250th

Re: Dear leader

"The American focus on (performative) "patriotism" really isn't that unexpected if you understand it as a consequence of the US being a relatively young melting pot whose unifying thread is some version of 'Murica #1 rather than a long, shared history as a distinct people."

There are British Commonwealth nations that in even shorter time spans that have accepted large and diverse cultural groups without recourse to the simplistlic mindless performative patriotism of the US.

The distinguishing feature of those nations is the adoption of a multi·cultural model of integration eschewing the inferior model of the melting pot.

The materials analogy of the strength, toughness and resilience of composites compared with the weak, brittle shit·metal you get from the alloy of random scrap added to the melting pot, is fairly apt.

Re: Real Americans

"Real Americans celebrate and exercise our first amendment rights."

Sadly the Americans that consider themselves the only "Real Americans" are most notable in that they typically only "celebrate and exercise our second amendment rights."

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

To be clear even Dr Johnson didn't mean that a patriot is a necessarily a scoundrel, but a scoundrel who has exhausted all other ruses inevitably assumes the mantle of patriotism. The scoundrel's love is less for his nation than for the integrity of his own skin.

The US is awash with scoundrels of every persuasion so we might have expected an epidemic of patriotism and indeed we are witnessing another plague of US jingoism.

Altman: You think AI is wasted energy? Try raising 100 billion humans

Not much hope for humanity if …

it cannot immediately detect that Altman is totally ga-ga. For left pondians - bananas, ape·shit crazy.

All the sheep have left the top paddock; somebody forgot to pack the sandwiches; even turning out his pockets you wouldn't find ¼d let alone a ha'penny.

"the humans that had managed not to be eaten by major predators."

I have suspicion managing not being eaten by the minor predators might be up there too.

Workaholic open source developers need to take breaks

CC0 and …

if you are silly enough to want use it… it's yours (and anyone elses) to use, love and maintain.

Like feeding the ducks in Hyde Park. If the ducks want more they can bake their own bread.

Basically ensuring somebody else's problem remains their problem and not your problem.†

I would be curious if there were differential burnout rates between GPL licensed projects and BSD or MIT etc licensed projects. I would punt the latter projects are more likely to picked up by the companies that use them either by supporting the project or bringing it in·house.

There is more to life than software, coding, tech etc; I suppose the hazard that those developers face who have had the temerity to take a weeks R&R, is that they might realised that there is actually more to life.

_{† The pretense of adopting someone else's problem is the profession of the consultant with a matching extortionate scale of charges.}

Hotel's rotary switchboard so retro it predates the concept of crashing

who have not seen such a device in the wild (or at least outside a museum)

Really know how to make a chap feel old !

When I was a student, the residential college in which I lived required each resident to man such a switchboard a couple of evenings per semester.

Outgoing calls (4 lines) were initiated using the same switchboard rotary dialer and patched to the requesting room.

I wonder how many recall how to cancel a misdialled digit ? Or the function of the A/B buttons on public telephone boxes ?

Although it is sobering to consider how resilient this technology was; often survivng intact, at least at the exchange level, fairly major natural disasters

NASA repurposes Mars Helicopter’s ancient Snapdragon SoC to help Perseverance rover navigate

Clever !

Imagination and Creativity.

The critical insight I guess was that the terrain (areain?) maps which I assume were used for the helicoptor's navigation, could be used by any vehicle passing through the terrain, including the rover itself.

Although I would think the process is closer to the terrain following radar that fighters and cruise missiles use(d), than the GPS.

I suppose the rover's main systems were older tried·and·tested hardware which, while reliable, would be much lower spec and performance than that deployed in the frankly experimental Ingenuity helicopter.

Every day in every way, passwords are getting worse and worse

laws written on blocks of stone.

Oh, I think we had progressed to half bricks with the optional sock for transgressors.

"properly educated and motivated people" — Arguably the proper application of the above half brick is both educational and motivational.

Work experience kids messed with manager's PC to send him to Ctrl-Alt-Del hell

ctrl-alt-del

I remember that sequence was called the Secure Attention Key (SAK) under NT4.

I think it was originally a mainframe thing but the idea was the SAK was certain to get you back to the monitor etc and could not be reassigned or intercepted.

I don't think that was necessarily true of later Windows.

I guess if you don't use a SAK secured screen locker you get the SACK.

FWIW Poettering's Systemd 257 introduced ctrl-alt-shift-esc for this purpose.

Re: Old Nokia phones

"Switch to a non-western language, making it a pig to switch back"

You had half a chance if the language used the Latin character set. Thai was enough to grab another Nokia and use that as a pilot or guide. :)

The screens of the local transport (~Oyster) card recharge machines have the language selection button close enough to the balance or recharge button that half the time when you intend to recharge you get the first language after English which happens to be Vietnamese.

It couldn't be French or German or even Occitan ? :) To be fair Vietnamese is probably the most requested language given our demographics.

You just have to cancel the transaction and let the machine return to the default. I have tried navigating in the Vietnamese mode but I could swear the layout and options are different.

_{Actually for most people it is now a non-problem as they can use any credit or debit card instead on the buses etc or their phone's digital equivalent.}

UK council faces data breach claim after mishandling trans complaints

Re: Guide to redaction

• Print out on paper the complaints.
• Use black gaffer tape to cover the redacted parts of printed complaints.
• Photocopy the now redacted printed compaints.
• Seal a copies in an official envelope addressed to the respondent.
• Hand the envelope to the respondent and require aa signed receipt.

Not saying that it is impossible to cock this up, but would require more creativity and imagination than your average council slavey is capable.

Cornwall ?

All gone Bodmin ?

Sounds like half the population of Portwenn work for this council.

Culture wars in the playpen ?

Cerebras plans humongous AI supercomputer in India backed by UAE

"nations build sovereign AI models trained in their native languages"

Clearly AI can very efficiently cock·up English (and the American pidgin) so I never really thought about training LLMs on corpora from other languages.

I quick search does indicate training on non English or mixed corpora is problematic - some are purely technical such as non Latin scripts and tokenising foreign language text. The relative size of the English corpus (humongous) compared with any other language is also noted.

I would guess that modern written English after hundreds of years of levelling and pidginisation is reasonably uninflected at least for the purposes of tokenisation (if not spelling ;)

This process seems also to have reduced the distance between syntax and semantics so that it is perhaps easier in principle to map from the sequence of tokens [syntactic elements] to its meaning [semantics] than in other languages.

The upshot here is not that LLMs store meaning [semantics] - they don't (not to any appreciable extent) - but that English token strings are a stronger proxy for meaning than non English token strings would be for those languages.

A corrollary would be that LLMs ought to perform better on formal languages like logic or mathematics where a direct mapping between the syntax and semantics are defined. This I believe is the case but AI still cocks·up.

Another problem occurs when existing models trained on English are extended with another language's training set or a new model trained on mixed English/non English corpora; namely the model is found to "think in English" when generating output in the other language.

An older article: limitations of language models in other languages but I don't things have improved a great deal.

Hard drives already sold out for this year – AI to blame

Re: Tape

a liveable RAID set up with multiple tape drives.

It's thing (has been for ages) RAIT — redundant array of independent tape drives.

Fairly obvious if you have N striped tape drives then you can read or write from/to in parallel the array N times faster (all things being equal which of course they never are.)

Heirarchical Storage Management (HSM) has been around if not since the Ark, since I was a young man which is increasingly the same thing.

Mainframes used tape to tape transfers to process serialisable tasks like monopoly Telecom phone bills.. perhaps still do.

At least into early noughties a firm that printed ~¾ million quarterly statements provided a bureau with a tape with the required client details and transaction records as well as the funds' details and performance which was processed by a mainframe which output another tape which was fed to a less grunty system which printed the statements, folded them and inserted them into the envelopes (the ones with the window for the address - remember? ;)

I was told how many they processed a second which I have forgotten but it was stupendous. I recall thinking a paper jam would be more like a train crash than a roadway bingle.

Re: Think of the end game

"the likely candidates for HDD connections"

SAS and Fibrechannel, I would have thought, and even FC might be doubtful as there were a lot of unloved FC disks and controllers sitting on the refurb market a couple of years ago.

Apart from odd connectors I would have thought existing SAS implementations would make sense. Making spinning rust look like a NVMe SSD doesn't seem make much sense unless I suppose a large SSD inside in each disk is used to cache the main drive accesses. I guess you could put a decent amount of ram with a decent CPU between the SSD and magnetic media to manage the traffic and cache intelligently.

When the musical chairs of this AI circus inevitably and finally stops, nobody this time is going to have a seat. Everybody loses.

"a complete OSI stack and X.400 implementation for a Sun 3."

That turned out a shrewd investment in the future. :)

I can recall at the time when GOSIP was "the future™" various people around me trying to get ISODE running on a supermini.

Accenture tells staffers: If you want a promotion, use AI at work

…the reinvention partner of choice…

"Our strategy is to be the reinvention partner of choice for our clients and to be the most client-focused, AI-enabled, great place to work."

Due a massive increase in demand we are extending the wall.

The pressing question now is whether this particular "bunch of mindless jerks" should be accommodated on the left side or right side of the assembled Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

Re: Glad to see The Register isn’t checking proofreading

It is a new word.

"ua" v. intrans. — to have someone screw themselves by their doing as instructed or compelled.

uage n. — the practice of ua.

ually adv. — in the fashion of ua.

ual adj. — having the character of ua.

Example

He realised he had been uaed by following the ual instructions of his superiors which in hindsight was clearly uage.

Requiring anyone to use AI is manifestly uage.

SerpApi says Google is the pot calling the kettle black when it comes to scraping

"to decrypt an encrypted work"

Since the web went all in TLS (https) every work delivered for Google etm is arguably "encrypted" requiring decryption by the client browser.

I always was of the opinion that the DCMA was just another piece of self serving American shit. Rather pleasant Schadenfreude seeing two US interests being "stunk out by their own farts."

"Asshole Versus Asshole, No Humans Involved" With their oily lawyers being the dildos with which they intend to fuck each other over. (All the fun anyone can have with two pineapples, one imagines.)

Amazon's vibe-coding tool Kiro reportedly vibed too hard and brought down AWS

"delete and recreate the environment"

Alas !

I supposed we ought to be grateful Kiro didn't have access to a nuclear arsenal.

Just going to cook the environment with slightly less dispatch - boil rather than broil.