Posts by Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck

Donald Trump proposes US govt acquire half of TikTok, which thanks him and restores service

How much Drumpf is "worth" depends on whether you're asking him or an honest real estate appraiser.

FCC to telcos: By law you must secure your networks from foreign spies. Get on it

Given the personalities seizing control of the US, China could well end up being "the good guy", relatively speaking.

Apple solves broken news alerts by turning off the AI

Re: "Summaries will return when Apple Intelligence has 'improved' "...

That's hoping for miracles. I think it'll be back in 20-30 years when systems actually are intelligent instead of barfing statistics based summaries with no actual understanding of what they're summarizing.

Clock ticking for TikTok as US Supreme Court upholds ban

Re: Impossible to ban?

You're also talking about teens having to make an effort; that will eliminate 95% of them before they get out of bed!

Oh those poor influencers will be forced to get real jobs at McDonald's to survive... *LOL*

CISA: Wow, that election had a lot of foreign trolling. Trump's Homeland Sec pick: And that's none of your concern

"Screw protecting your personal data! We're talking about people making fun of Mein Fuhrer Drumpf! Not on my watch!"

Microsoft eggheads say AI can never be made secure – after testing Redmond's own products

Re: There are security risks and security risks.

I'd be surprised if the Chinese government is sold on LLMs if they can't guarantee it won't talk about Tiananmen Square...

I'm more concerned that they can never be rendered accurate, because aggregate statistical summaries never reflect the details properly - they're aggregates. So regardless of whether they can be "secured", I seriously doubt the viability of the whole approach.

IT job market is still shrinking but not as quickly as last year

I wouldn't want to work for any company stupid enough to think that an LLM can replace a competent programmer; retirement is much more appealing.

In farewell speech, Biden rails against the tech industrial complex, disinfo dismantling democracy

Re: They didn't punish the wealthy.

No mention of the military industrial complex that hoovers trillions from the national budget, though... gotta keep those pork barrels going to pay for the donations we received!

EU demands a peek under the hood of X's recommendation algorithms

Sure the timing is "coincidental", just like Musk's flapping big mouth has nothing to do with the fact there is an election happening.

Apple's interoperability efforts aren't meeting spirit or letter of EU law, advocacy groups argue

Re: "open and transparent"

They also like "pay us," period as justification for not providing services. They're all about keeping customers in the "walled garden" where they can be easily fleeced.

Boeing going backwards as production’s slowing and woes keep flowing

Boeing: the disaster that wouldn't die because the US government keeps handing it fat military contracts, but which should have died years ago. A Zombie corporation...

Windows Patch Tuesday hits snag with Citrix software, workarounds published

No problems with my Ubuntu 24.04 box, other than discovering there can be graphics issues after running a 7GB VM on a 12GB video card, requiring a restart to release the buffers in the card.

Glad I jumped the Microsoft ship last month.

Enjoy having your data and screenshots harvested by the feds via subpoenas. Heck, your local doughnut-eater can probably come up with a reason to see what kind of porn you view, exactly...

Hands-on jobs to grow fastest, because AI can't touch them

Re: "administrative roles that automation can easily replace"

In Canada, corporations are required to abide by any agreements their AI enters into. Witness one Air Canada customer who got the price the AI quoted her, not the proper price. That's enough to make corporations here think twice about turning things over to AI that haven't been proven to work properly, because it can cost them money and liability under Canadian law.

Re: So, what's their record like

Hey! You finally found a use-case where AI might actually be an improvement instead of an insulting waste of everyone's time!

Court docs allege Meta trained its AI models on contentious trove of maybe-pirated content

It has to be that way or else the servers aren't legally allowed to share what you've typed in. The company doing the transmission has to be granted permission to transmit in whatever form they use for their business. They're not about to start slicing and dicing it into individual permissions as to whether Republicans are allowed to read your post, or only Democrats, or whether only Americans are allowed to view the post, or only Quebecois. No, you blanket give permission to publish what you've shared.

Yep. "Cost of doing business."

Until they start jailing the board and CEO the way they would a "commoner," there is absolutely no reason for corporations in the US to follow the law.

Tesla, Musk double down on $56B payday appeal

Re: Equine canine extravaganza

Here's hoping...

Not to worry. Now that he's buddies with Mein Fuhrer Drumpf, his blatant theft is sure to be approved by the courts.

The ultimate Pi 5 arrives carrying 16GB ... and a price to match

Re: outnumber those who need to run ChatGPT

I agree. Running some stupid LLM is definitely not what I'd consider using one for. Who wants to wait multiple seconds or even minutes to get a response?

The Pi series has a lot of uses, but LLMs are a very poor fit for the hardware.

Azure networking snafu enters day 2, some services still limping

Incompetence 'R Us.

Haiku Beta 5 / In tests it's (Fire)foxier / It pleases us well

"Runs" Windows apps but has no hardware graphics accelerator support.

Big deal.

I'm not out to run Notepad. Without hardware acceleration and game support, it's irrelevant to me.

Trump China tariffs to 'overshadow' the 'progress' of AI PCs

Here's the thing. Under Drumpf, Americans are going to pay more for everything this greedy psycho slaps a tarrif on. In the meantime, America has become a major threat to global stability with these threats of military and economic action.

Congratulations, Morons. You electedHitler.

Apple shrugs off BBC complaint with promise to 'further clarify' AI content

Re: Is this Apple Intelligence (AI), or should it be renamed

Call it what it is "Absolute Idiocy."

It's an American company. Under their legal system, all you have to do is slap on a warning and say "Buyer Beware/User Is Responsible" and you're off the hook for all the bullshit, lies, and slander the world can come up with. Just ask any of the "free speech" nutbars over there.

Quantum? No solace: Nvidia CEO sinks QC stocks with '20 years off' forecast

The same is true of NVidia's current AI bubble.

Real artificial intelligence instead of aggregate averaged statistical summaries is still 20-30 years away, the same as it has been any time you asked anyone with real knowledge of the subject ever since my 4th year classes in 1986-7, including what passed for a 400-series "Artificial Intelligence" course back then - Expert Systems.

Zuck takes a page from Musk: Meta dumps fact-checkers, loosens speech restrictions

Re: Trump isn't president of the rest of the world

Yeah, just look at how Zuckerborg and Meta pay their fair share for Canadian media.

Oh, yeah, they just blocked our entire nation's people from commenting on or sharing any news articles from anywhere in the world instead.

American corporations can be expected to engage in even more abusive behavior than that on the world stage with Mein Fuhrer Drumpf in charge.

Yeah, lets turn the whole planet into shithole because Drumpf stole an election despite being a convicted traitor...

We did warn you – 2025 may be the year AI bots take over Meta's 'verse

Looks to me like it has already happened.

Yet for all their so-called "intelligent" systems, they can't seem to do anything about the pornographic ads that pop up for seriously questionable "products", the romance scammers that keep trying to get people to hook up with "[StarName] Private Page", nor the proliferation of AI spam sites whose sole purpose is to mislead people into clicking on ad-laden links and worse.

Yep. Real intelligent systems you've got there, Zuckerborg!

AI hype led to an enterprise datacenter spending binge in 2024 that won't last

The cracks are starting to show and it is obvious the AI Emperors are wearing no clothes. They've been overselling the product so much for so long, but now you're getting major fiasco's with treating aggregate statistics as being magically "intelligent" and pretending that hallucinations aren't the very real issue that they clearly are.

I've learned to ignore the likes of Google's AI summaries on their search results because they're so extremely unreliable and so very often completely wrong.

Once the class actions for damages from the fallout of such nonsense start getting filed, the bubble will burst and the bankruptcies will ensue and the red ink shall flow like the red sea...

Chinese RISC-V project teases 2025 debut of freely licensed advanced chip design

A lot of these articles strike me as the authors being in a state of denial about where RISC-V is headed, constantly peppering their articles with "ifs" and "maybes" instead of "eventually."

People denied open source would ever be the success it has become, too, once upon a time...

3Blue1Brown copyright takedown blunder by AI biz blamed on human error

"It was human error! (Please don't sue us over our faulty AI!) Honestly, the new systems weren't responsible. (Dear Universe please let them not sue us!)"

Intel debuts laptop silicon that doesn't qualify for Microsoft's 'Copilot+ PC' badge

Yeah, Intel enjoys so much "leadership" that the CEO had to quit and the company is breaking up into pieces...

Now Trump's import tariffs could raise the cost of a laptop for Americans by 68%

Did anyone expect different results from this round of Drumpf tariffs than the last one? The only thing he accomplished last time was to increase prices for American consumers so American corporations could increase their profits.

Because in the end, that is all Drumpf cares about or understands: corporate profits.

Can AWS really fix AI hallucination? We talk to head of Automated Reasoning Byron Cook

There is no way to magically make an aggregate summary statistic accurate about the details.

It is a mathematical impossibility.

How the OS/2 flop went on to shape modern software

*shrug* Not my use case; I'm on a desktop with a UPS. Don't give a rat's patoot about toy laptops with trackpads and other bullshit.

While this was the end of OS/2, it is proving to be a vital winning point for Linux with Wine and/or Proton installed. Wine and Proton have proven to be fully capable of running virtually anything I've required of them on Linux, with the caveat that games take a much longer time to initialize under Linux because Wine/Proton needs to map all that Windows code and data to Linux data structures before it can actually run it. Slick "not an emulator" approach, but it isn't the fastest startup times!

That startup time issue is the sole reason Ubuntu can't just "take over" for Windows in the real world yet. You're stuck with web interfaces for so much, but then again, so are a lot of other users out there, especially those on tablets or Chromebooks and cell phones. (Face it: most cell phone "apps" are just a pre-downloaded web UI skin that "runs" on Android but does all the work on the server, not the client.) Most users aren't willing to wait as long as I do for a program to load; they think it means their computer is "broken" and start clicking and re-clicking things, making the situation much worse. I know what a sweathouse job Wine and Proton are actually having to do, so I wait. And wait. And wait. But it runs in 90% of cases (only "Ori - Will of the Wisps" and "Assassin's Creed Unity" have proven incompatible, and I suspect the issues with the latter could be resolved by investing in a Playstation-compatible controller, as X-Box controllers are only "partially supported" by that game, and it is the controller giving me grief no matter what I do.) 12 mouse and keyboard games and 11 controller games are installed and work fine - big name titles like Witcher 3, Baldur's Gate 3, Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5+2.5, Marvel's Midnight Suns, The Outer Worlds, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Starfield. I have another 20 games in my "A-LINUX-PLAY-LATER" folder that have also been tested and verified as working, ready to be reinstalled and played in the future.

Nope. You do NOT need Windows for Steam gaming anymore; 100% happy with my Ubuntu 24.04.1 installation as a replacement for Windows 11 Pro. Bye, Bill. Bye, Satya. Have fun hoovering user's data; you'll not have mine any more.

Don't forget: I've lived in *nix land since the mid-80s when BSD4.2 on a VAX was a thing.... Windows has always been "foreign" to me and what I used to play games and run business software that work required. It isn't even that to me any more. I am free!

Microsoft declares 2025 'the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh'

Re: It's like this

"...and 20% AppleTax comes to $3,985.67, Sir. How would you like to pay?"

Re: When is Microsoft going to realise?

The gay rat community is deeply offended by your comparison... :}

Re: Too pushy

"But it'll be better with Microsoft AI!(tm) People won't only need to upgrade to Windows 11, they need to upgrade to AI-capable Windows 11 machines now. Please reach for your wallet and open it now..."

This was the year I abandoned Windows 11 Pro in favour of Ubuntu 24.04.1 and updates because of Microsoft's insistence on shoveling this AI crapfest into anything and everything on the system and then having the gall to set up a screen history snapshotting tool tailor made for answering to law enforcement inquiries and snooping managers.

"1984" ring a bell?

The book is a warning, not a guide!

Pornhub pulls out of Florida, VPN demand 'surges 1150%'

American in Florida:

"No, man, you ain't takin' muh Porn! I got rights!"

*LOL*

A New Year's gift from Microsoft: Surprise, your scanners don't work

Re: Find That Wire

Historically, I used the Windows USB port to update my printer's firmware. Guess it goes without updates now, unless I can do that via menu option on the printer itself.

Re: Canon, the new bastards emulating HP

And the internet continues to be infested with the mindset of the "X" patrons as they flee Musk's grasp, spewing vitriol, bile, and curses wherever they go... *sigh*

Hint: In civilized society, cursing stopped being "cool" around the time you started working and paying your own way in life. It does happen... under extreme circumstances. But you hardly needed to capitalize your brilliantly creative spellings to highlight the curses in case anyone out there "didn't get it."

My Canon works fine under Ubuntu 24.04...

Amazon worker – struck and shot in New Orleans terror attack – initially denied time off

Re: Unable to analyze

"But our Amazon AI(tm) says it's a great form. The greatest form. It particularly appreciates the use of Bigly fonts, as it has a hard time reading fine print."

Re: Silly plebs...

Interesting turn of phrase for "you don't matter unless you're pulling in 5 mill a year..."

Doesn't change the fact that the request was initially denied.

Boffins carve up C so code can be converted to Rust

I just realized I could actually read the article in question without registering for anything other than registering my existence and information. That is all I've ever wanted to do, as well as to cite links to the articles I read. Can't have a good argument without citations now, can we?

Despite what John Cleese insists.

I think it is important to note that their inputs were verified C code bases. That likely means they were stricter and more consistent about their use and abuse of data structures, following known patterns of behaviour instead of getting too creative (like the C++ internals used to in the preprocessor days.) I'm not sure how relevant their research is going to prove in practice to common code base standards out there.