Posts by Bebu sa Ware

Rights groups brand Home Office's AI age guesser for asylum-seekers as biased and inaccurate

Australia had some of that fun

A fair while ago they used wrist size to determine age for a group of Indonesians caught fishing illegally in Australian waters. The adults were subject to criminal prosecution and locked up — the minors repatriated as required by Australian and international laws/conventions..

Of course wrist sizes vary a over populations without even taking ethnic variation into account so inevitably some very young boys were also banged up much to the embarrassment of, and cost to the authorities.

In that part of the world (SE Asia) there are some very small people (think adult woman around the size of a 9 year old North European girl) but there are also some fairly robust individuals (think US footballer) so using a single metric based on averages is fraught with danger. Epiphyseal plate closure might be a better metric of age but still not particularly useful as such (it's linked to puberty so highly variable.)

If the population, the civil service, the Home Office and parliamentarians could get through their armour plated skulls that there are no simple solutions to difficult and complicated problems^† then some of world's problems might be constructively addressed.

_{† Probably was on the first tablet of the 10 commandments with the surviving 10 intended as talking points.}

Britain's privacy watchdog quits after 'poor judgment' admission

Re: it's most likely that he made a remark that was either racist, sexist or ableist.

I wouldn't be so restrictive as to the pool of those it is possible (or even likely) to cause offence. Indeed "offence" must be an extremely desirable commodity as it is far more frequently taken than it is ever intentionally given.

He might have referred to some parliamentary committee as a pack of effing retarded mental defectives but unfortunately the defence of truth doesn't mitigate the offence.

If he actually knows his onions he will soon find another berth; if a complete wally as anyone hawking his arse on LinkedIn might suggest, it might take slightly longer.

At my age I figure if I don't offend someone then they don't know me — certainly not for lack of trying on my part. Anyway they are more than welcome to dance on my grave although they might have to walk on water. ;)

2,000 retired Google Pixel phones get a second life as a private cloud

Perhaps a more practical use…

(for a dubious use of practical) might be to ship the phones mainboard^† to Ukraine as I imagine the gps and cellular functions along with the camera(s) would be ideal for embedding in an autonomous weapon or reconnaissance system (drones.)

_{† I notice that neither Kastner nor the author shrivelled up and died of shame referring to motherboard so perhaps we're done with that precious nonsense.}

Users claimed they'd never seen a spell checker and panicked at the sight of red squiggles

The green squiggly line…

(for grammar) confused her indoors — had never seen it in her employment so I suppose the grammar check was turned off in some org pollicy setting.

Mitch must have seen red underlining in his marked school essays and homework assignments but I guess he was streamed with the "special" kids.

Committed skeptic finds himself warming to new Amazon AI products that actually don't suck

Even if you were on the road to Damascus…

a blinding light might actually be just that — a light that blinds — rather than some form of enlightenment.

Major US carrier stored credit card info in the clear, employee learned on first day

It happened at a major US telco in the early 2000s

I suspect only minor editing to reuse the story: "It happened at a major US telco in the early 2000s 2020s"

UK Cabinet Office hiring AI and innovation 'influencer' to build 'AI-first culture' in civil service

"country that is equipped for an AI world"

Reopening the flint mines and teaching stone knapping ?

"AI" and "culture" — poison to each other I would have thought unless "culture" were used as a verb in the sense that a microbiologist employs.

Smartphone market to shrink 15 percent this year due to memory crisis

Re:eventually, the LTE and etc. standards will be discontinued

The 3G switchoff in AU and mandatory requirement for VoLTE sent a lot of phones to eWaste as some quite recent phones albeit low end, or obscure brands/imports, while supporting 4G/LTE didn't support VoLTE. iPhones were fine at least back to the SE (~2016.)

You can still pick up a decent refurbished ex-gov iphone for ~AUD200 (XR, SE2/3) although I notice the SE3 has increased in price 50% in the six months since I picked up one.

AWS hypes continuous agentic DevOps, puts Kiro in your pocket

"Trust is the biggest barrier to AI adoption," says AI chief

Probably the only thing we two could come anywhere close to agreeing on.

I would think in the whole history of IT no rational person has ever "trusted" an IT vendor or supplier — it's always been a case of supping with Devil.

Could be rephrased: "Hell is the biggest barrier to Satanism adoption," says Devil.

Smelly config files will make your agents waste tokens, researchers warn

Re: "code that works"

Would satisfy most of the world. An improvement on "code that seems to work" except in critical cases.

Estonia intends to recognize AI agents with digital IDs

I am not a number!

Estonia. So that's where The Village is. ;)

"Be seeing you."

Apple's WebKit performance tax leaves iOS browsers stuck in the slow lane, says Microsoft

BTW - anyone else seeing the "comment" links of this site…

"BTW - anyone else seeing the "comment" links of this site still coming and going at random? I also often get the connection dropping when trying to post comments (also happened with the previous version of the site)."

The comment icon seemed to appear about 30 minutes after the article itself but not always. I assumed it was intentional — to give the commentards the chance to read the article first. ;)

But I have noticed some flakiness in the forums too. (I mean the site not the content… well, yes, that too.)

I am not sure that iOS users…

are that keen on having Edge or any other browser on their devices. Most Apple/iOS users seem fairly content in their walled garden and I don't entirely blame them.

I am not a big Apple fan but the boring predictability of my small now obsolete iPhone is reassuring compared with some of the insanity of its Android predecessors.

If Apple were to let the AI no·ball through to the keeper they might well find themselves on the right side of history — possibly the last man standing.

Windows devs rerolled old code to save precious bytes

emulator for an unnamed processor… identify potential candidates

At a guess MIPS, Alpha, PPC — supported by NT4.

I recall one DEC Alpha workstation arrived with Win2K installed (had to switch firmware to install DEC Unix OSF1.) I suppose some of x86 driver code had to be emulated especially third party stuff.

Transcompiling from one instruction set to another has always been an interesting area — JIT is basically that with lazy rather than strict evaluation. ;)

UK.gov links up with LinkedIn for jobs market intel from 40M accounts

LinkedIn ?

I can only imagine the quality of the data trawled from that nut house.

Money for jam for Microslop — mouldy jam at that.

AI and brain-computer interface allow speechless ALS patient to work a full-time job

[Daleks and Cybermen] chasing the Doctor and his, often scantily clad, assistants

I don't think Leela ever encountered the Daleks or the Cybermen (their loss. :)

Simpler times — these days you wouldn't know on which side anyone's bread is buttered.

The Doctor's remarkable recuperative powers seem only to be exceeded by those of Davros.

Re: Intelligence agencies

> how do the mind control satellites stay aloft if the Earth is flat?

Because space is curved… bent ?

"Mind control satellites" presupposes the existence of minds to control for which the evidence is equivocal.

Re: "An actual practical use of AI"

An obvious good fit when you recall what the LM means in LLM.

The motor nerve impulses that would have been sent to the muscles involved in vocalisation are being detected in the brain and the recognition of the mapping between the patterns of those impulses into English phonemes should be right up machine learning's alley.

I don't know whether this technology could be useful for other language disorders such as aphasia but for Casey Harrell an impressive addition to his quality of life.

Re: Intelligence agencies

"Intelligence agencies are light years ahead of that. Mind reading is a reality, with directed energy and implants."

Must have been like staring into the Untempered Schism in Trump's case.

Windows update leaves third-party Office document launches in limbo

"I had no idea that was still a thing."

I remember OLE from my brief misadventure with Windows development in the '90s — I thought it had died in the bum around then like DDE before it.

Took 30+ years before MS managed to fuck that up… clearly says something about OLE or Microsoft but I have no idea what.

There's no such thing as an agentic CPU

Stripped down data moving/IO processors

Been around since before IBM were complete arseholes … well I suppose nothing is that old.

A DMA chip with delusions of grandeur. :)

The new Siri makes one of Apple's most convenient OS features a cumbersome mess

"don't believe the hype coming out of Tim Cook's final big event"

TC has a big backside then ?

Cyberattack sees crops kept in the ground

"crops kept in the ground"

FWIW sugar cane is normally harvested every year for around five years (I think) before replanting. So in that sense the crop would be kept in the ground anyway.

The harvesting is normally by contractors with massive (and massively expensive) machines that run nearly 24/7. Those contractors will be rather unhappy campers having their plant sitting idle.

They are also wedged by the weather — dry at this time if year but once the wet season starts you cannot get heavy machinery into the cane fields.

(Used to live between 100s of hectares of cane when they still burnt it before harvesting. That cane is now gone as the industry has been in a long decline.)

NASA said nyet to Roscosmos plan to cut into leaky ISS segment

Boris that looks like a Oxy set you have there?

— Да.

— Прощай…

SQL Server may be too lucrative for Microsoft to ditch, but too legacy to love

"all the stuff I need buggered up."

A pretty long list in Microsoft's case — the whole show deserves to be buggered up beyond all recognition… not that MS isn't giving that good old college try.

(A comma after "need" might have been intended.;)

Feds freaked over Fable 5 after simple 'fix this code' prompt, not jailbreak, says researcher

Camptown Races

When I saw the headline and graphic I thought of that old song.

• The blind horse sticken in a big mud hole, Doo-dah! doo-dah!
• Can't touch bottom with a ten foot pole, Oh, doo-dah day!

Especially the "doo-dah" given every day delivers fresh dumps of doo-dah.

Re: T-Shirt Model

> it is perfectly manufacturable

I am certain it's already available on Shein and AliBaba. :)

(Which at the very heart what this nonsense, and great deal more, is all about.)

The Y2K bug is back! Dutch dev digs up untimely flaw in old BSD build

"the ancient mahicnes"

Finally a typo I can really identify with. ;)

A Graun. special.

A modest proposal: Reformat everything to make documents more palatable to AI

"make documents more palatable to AI"

Why would I want to do that ? Really.

Anyway wasn't this stuff supposed to be what the "semantic web" was to address decades ago but with a slightly more rational justification.

Never quite clear to me how LLMs actually encode or represent semantics (meaning) or indeed whether they do to any appreciable extent.

I have a vague suspicion that LLMs largely encode syntax and perform perform their shallow party tricks by the expected limited serendipidous mapping between syntax and semantics which is I suppose is implicit in natural languages.

Given the vast majority of the training material is in English you would have to wonder to what extent that affects the final LLM compared with training exclusively on Chinese language material.

Google found liable for bad AI Overview results. Let's play Truth Or Consequences

Re: It can no more compete on quality of results...

followed rather nicely by "the first rats of legal liability have scuttled ashore." — Presumably from the wreck of "No Liability Disclaimer."

AI Google's kittle cattle

Unfortunately for the Chocolate Factory one has always been responsible for the damage or harm caused by one's cattle. Even before Roman law.

Doubtless this liability will be legislated or signed [EO] away in Trumpisstan but hopefully less surreal jurisdictions will follow this European precedent.

UK AI hiring surges as firms seek people to babysit the bots

Jobs where AI helps skilled workers automate repetitive tasks and focus on higher-value work

My Babel fish translated that into "skilled workers who are adept at automating repetitive tasks, have focus and direction knowing exactly what they are doing while convincing their gormless employer rather disingenously that AI in an inseparable part of their role" will be in demand. No shit.

I feel quite sure that the BoFH long ago convinced the board that the regular supply of black cockerels invoiced to the firm was essential for effective system administration. Dark arts mumble basement mumble…

UK Treasury hunts CTO on salary that may not compute for top tech talent

Re: Microsoft Treasury 365

Might as well immigrate to Argentina and raise beef cattle. Prospects pretty dismal in Blighty.

Britain plots digital bedtime after kicking under-16s off social media

Australia+

According to the AU e·safety commissioner 70% of under 16s still had social media accounts "why teens say social media ban isn't working for under 16s."

As political theatre this exercise in futility was a success. As a harm reduction measure — a bit of a damp squib which when I think of it, pretty much sums up Starmer's premiership.

Chinese e-tailer claimed 14-inch box stretched the size of a 9-inch tablet

Chinese e-tailer

The well known Temu transform 14 units in Market Space free reduces to 9 units anywhere else. 14" tablets would be pretty scarce on the ground I would have thought. Boox had >12" epaper devices that could double as monitors a few years ago pretty expensive but not lachrymosely so.

I must admit I have been fairly fortunate with Temu, AliExpress et al but generally the stuff was realistically priced, inexpensive and unavailable in AU. eg an IDE to SATA long after IDE was a thing. Use a prepaid card unlock for the transaction relock afterwards.

AI is code – and can't be prompted into being smarter

"this software is not intended for use outside the United States"

"this software is not intended for use outside the United States" and then sabotage the computer system if it detects being run in Europe?"

Isn't this already the case at with Microsoft ? MS even testified in a French court to this. ;)

Re: Dune

Upvote for footnote³

Re: Mixing code and data has always been considered a Bad Thing.

Curiously right back at the dawn of this stuff about when Lisp was a twinkle in McCarthy's eye there was the idea that self modifying code was likely essential for machine intelligence. Fizzled out fairly quickly I suspect.

Doomed to repeat the mistakes of history I suppose.

I remember as a student writing a machine code program a simple processor that evaluated a polynomial (Horner's rule) that toggled the imult opcode with the add opcode on each pass through the loop. Worked but I reckoned I would quit while I was ahead. ;)

Scientists pour cold water on claims phones are rewiring kids' brains

One decent bit of common sense

"Children learn self-regulation through conversation, play, sport, and social interaction," she [Dusana Dorjee] said, "which can be crowded out by excessive screen use."

Which distills down to claiming any activity the monopolises a child's time, thus limiting the diversity their experinces, might cause developmental harm. No argument there.

The same brain damage nonsense was flung about by the same usual suspects when television arrived and especially when daytime television became the norm. I imagine the same reasoned responses were forthcoming from the scientists.

I suppose the onus is on parents to encourage and participate with, their offspring in a diverse range of activities from an early age.

Unfortunately for most parents living in the modern world just making a living, to support themselves and their children, leaves very little time for much else.

The fatigue and time poverty (and in many case just plain material poverty) of parents can explain any failing in child development without recourse to the arbitrary excuse of the overuse of some technology which is almost certainly a symptom rather than a root cause.

Neural plasticity isn't only a property of immature brains — it persists into adulthood and probably lifelong. Adolescence is unique in that it would be the time a child starts to integrate the various possibly conflicting aspects of their personality into that of a healthy adult. It is that process that is being disrupted which is a rather dismal prospect — the world already has a surfeit of man·child chimera and other monsters.

EU sovereignty push gives tech buyers a new alphabet soup to swallow

Re: limitations to freedom and justice that operate on American soil.

I am not sure there are any limitation. Pretty much a "free market" — you can get as much freedom and justice as can afford to pay for.

World Cup AI predictor now lets users ask daft what-ifs

What would happen to FIFA and the World Cup…

if no more brown paper bags were manufactured ?

Met Police boss threatens to cut 700 frontline jobs after Palantir deal blocked

Re: The Chronicles of Riddance.

I thought Mistress Goode Riddance was an associate Agnes Nutter pehaps of her decendent Anathema Device.

Presumably you called upon Granny Riddance to expedite an ailing and inconvenient relative on their way to Bad Rubbish.^†

_{† a popular Spa Resort in Überwald.}

Fired IT worker jailed for 21 months after sabotaging old school district

Re: What a wanker

The chaotic stupidity of the complete idiot. He certainly didn't benefit, the school district's students didn't and not even clear what he was trying to achieve if anything.

As for the title I doubt he would have the comprehension or attention span to pull it off.

Re: U wot?

prosection - is a word too just a tad more drastic than mere prosecution.

Amazon owns up to using 2.5bn gallons of H₂O in its bit barns last year

Re: metric

> converting gallons to liters

US or Imperial gallons? ;)

2.5 bn gal (US) = 9,463,529 m³ (also roughly tonnes) or a cube roughly 210 metres per side.

(Imperial gal. = 11,365,248)

Possibly a bit disinguenuous in claiming the the water is, or will be returned to the environment.Where else is it going to go ? Even as steam it is still water. Unless Amazon were to convert it into hydrogen and oxygen presumably for Bezos' rocketry and even then ends up as water.

The required diversion of water to datacentres will likely severely limit their growth in Australia as fresh water is a very limited resource and if the predicted el Niño eventuates AU might also be facing a period of severe drought. Best place for the whole circus is the bottom of the harbour. ;)

BOFH: For one ambitious security type, chaos is a ladder

Re: At a previous orkplace..

> You are expected to take it with you every night.

Bill your company for overnight safe custody services.

Individual lockers inside a secure area would make more sense.

Elon Musk is now worth more than $1,000,000,000,000

Elon Musk is now worth more than $1,000,000,000,000

His sorry carcass potentially valued at USD 10¹², worth ? — SFA.

Interestingy only during probate does the world discover the true value and worth of an individual.

Getting in on the ground floor…

No guarantee that the lift [elevator] isn't heading for the (sub-)basement… with the doors permanently jammed.

KPMG's AI report becomes an accidental demo of AI hallucinations

"Total Experience: Redefining Excellence in the Age of Agentic AI"

Précis in three words: Universal Terminal Enshittification.

(The totally excellent experience of drowning in shit — everyone everywhere.)

Fairy Tales and Bedtime Stories…

just not as interesting as the real thing.