Posts by Mimsey Borogove 145 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Dec 2024
FORMAT without arguments defaulted to C
That must be what happened! I recounted my adventures trying to format a floppy in 1989 above, and that must have been what got me. I don't know if the person giving me the assignment didn't say "type in format a:" and I only remembered the "format" part or what, but it was C: that got (partially) formatted. This makes me feel slightly less guilty, although I didn't feel very guilty in the first place.
In 1989, I was working as a temp doing various office stuff. I'd barely had any experience with computers, except a couple of in-house systems, and had never used floppies. One employer gave me a floppy and asked me to format it. I didn't know how, so she impatiently explained what prompt to go to and type format. I got a prompt asking if I wanted to format [something I didn't understand], and since I'd been told to format, I clicked yes. It ground away for a really long time, and eventually the person who'd given it to me showed up to see what was taking so long. Turned out that the part of the command I hadn't understood was C: (I later learned about A:, but that was later!). Yes, I'd tried to reformat the whole drive, causing some panic when they realized what had happened. No panic for me, I was still blissfully ignorant. I learned later that the office had tried to get my temp agency to pay for it, but never heard or cared to find out beyond that.
the comments sections still retain some value
That's the main reason I come here. The articles are good, but to a non-tech person, the conversations of people who actually do this shit for a living are the most valuable. Thanks, all of you, for helping insulate me against "AI"!
Many computer viruses definitely existed in the 90s. It was most definitely 'a thing' at the time to run anti-virus software.
Back then, Apple users frequently boasted that they didn't need antivirus because Apple was so secure. It turned out, though, that there just weren't enough Apple users to bother writing viruses for, because eventually they had to come off their high horses and use antivirus like the rest of the plebs.
So he got together with Accounts and they ganged up on HR to update the company rules to put a cutoff time of 4PM
The company I worked for for over 20 years ended up with that kind of rule. My hours were 11:00 am-8:00 pm, so if I followed the rule, I'd have 4 hours of time that I could charge to anything! I didn't always take advantage of that, but sometimes when I was particularly annoyed with life, I did.
So you want self driving vehicles to passed far mor difficult tests than any human drivers have to pass to drive on our road, why?
If you've ever done any computer programming, you may have noticed how computers are very literal. If a computer isn't specifically programmed to do something, it doesn't know how to do it. With humans, you have at least some confidence that they can reason from an instruction for one situation to see how to adapt it to another situation, but you don't have that for computers. They have to be shown every single possible situation, and if you miss one which they encounter, they'll end up driving in a circle in the middle of the street or just stopping until someone can give instructions.
"fulfilled by Amazon" will also get you all sorts of fake shit
It took me 3 tries to order Amazon accessories (chargers) for Amazon devices (Fire tablets) from Amazon. First set was the wrong size, 2nd set fit but didn't work, 3rd set, ordered after about a half-hour consultation on their chat help line, finally worked. You'd think going to the manufacturer for accessories for their own kit would work, but not with Amazon.
hypothetical LLM trained on a non-copyrighted corpus
If that can be wedged into the conversation, I do usually try to mention it. There are very small, very specialized ways in which "AI" can be almost as magical as everyone claims it is. However, that's almost never what anyone means when talking about "AI." The general chat engines and graphic producers are total slop, and no one should ever try to do anything important with them.
"Absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence"
People refuse to learn this. We particularly saw it during CoViD, when the public and the scientists got new information at the same time. People would yell for explanations, but the scientific community had to take the time to evaluate the new information and draw some kind of conclusions. But by the time the conclusions had been responsibly drawn, the decisions had been made or the scientists had been cancelled (or both). People don't understand that sometimes the information does not yet exist.
The data I offer has been prepared and is undersigned by the National Institute of Health, by NOAA.
As a librarian, and a person personally and professionally convinced of the need for real science and real proof, I appreciate your hard work on this. Thank you very much for providing it, even though you probably knew what kind of reaction you'd get, and from whom.
“Forced to” were they ….
The smell of bullshit is strong here.
Well, I was forced to buy a new phone in 2022, when they told me I wouldn't be able to use 4G any more. It was doing a perfectly good job, until then. The one I bought then has never been very good, so I just bought another one - hope it's better. But they (THEY!) can force all sorts of shit if they want to.
I can highly recommend Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Thank you! I've felt like a voice in the wilderness on a lot of these discussions - everyone's so impressed, and no one seems to know that there's any information that might undermine that. I don't remember if it was here or on Ars that I discovered him, but still, I sometimes seem to be the only person reading him.
But let's take a moment for another reality check/comparison.
Someone who's been doing that for several years, at excruciating length and depth, is Ed Zitron (https://www.wheresyoured.at). I hope no one on the discussion accuses me of spamming it with this information, but several comments here could appropriately be replied to with it. I think it's very important that everyone, especially people who believe that "AI" will eventually be profitable, read Ed's last year-or-so's output before making final decisions.
> Little do they know, there will be files held on them as well of all their peccadilloes. They will be used to force those people to kowtow once they've been shown what's in their file that they thought they were clever enough to not have.
What color is the sky in your world?
Do you remember when Rudy Giuliani was riding high? He was rich, and powerful, and no one could touch him. Seen him lately?
I used to teach classes and make PowerPoint decks on how to search Google on a professional level, but that's now impossible. Google has been discontinuing tools that work for professional research for many years, but as of now, it can no longer be used at all by professional researchers. If I still had students, I'd now be teaching them how to search DuckDuckGo on a professional level.
If you hook this thing up to a big red button that launches Tomahawk missiles on girls schools without checking its work first that's on you
That's exactly what I think happened. The human who was supposed to be "in the loop" was taken in by the hype and didn't check. No one will ever admit it, and it will happen again. And again. And, probably, many more times again.
Someone is going to get badly hurt.
I think someone already has been. It's my theory that the bomb dropped on the school in Iran was the fault of "AI." The Pentagon has said that they use it to "help" with targeting - I expect that, not knowing that the map showing the school building as part of the base was outdated, the "AI" pointed it out as a target. Of course, there's supposed to be a human in the loop, approving or rejecting suggestions, but I'd almost bet money that whoever was supposed to do that is so impressed with the "intelligence" of "AI" that s/he just let it go through.
I was a database searcher for many years, most of it in a building that most people considered too cold. People brought in heaters, wore coats while working, etc., and many of them got what I think of as Bob Cratchitt gloves, with just the palm and back of the hand covered and the fingers free to type. Don't know if it helped or not - I loved the temperature!
In about 1984 I was working in a hospital library. The building was very old, and, as the real hospital part where patients were seen had been moved to a newer building, didn't have central air. There was a window air conditioner in the librarian's office, but she was one of these tiny <100-lb. women who was always cold, so there was a lot of back-and-forth about it. We finally settled on a temperature of 80F, because she couldn't function under 80 and I couldn't function under it. I managed a couple of years there, largely by turning up the air when she left the office (I covered evenings).
A better situation was later when I worked in a room with 5 high-capacity printers, each of which could hold 8 reams of paper. That room had to be kept cold for the printers, so I was allowed to complain if it got above 65F. Aaaaaaahhhhhhhh!
The Israelis and Americans are using AI to 'identify' targets in Iran, Lebanon and probably elsewhere
When I read this at the time, I figured that has to be what caused the bombing of that girls' school. "AI" is terrible with anything having to do with numbers, and doesn't understand dates. The buiding the school was in was formerly, about 10 years ago, part of the base they were bombing - the "AI" almost certainly dug that up from some old site and targeted the bomb on that misinformation.
You're right that any use of "AI" has to be carefully trained on curated information, but I'm pretty sure what they were using was the original Internet training dump, maybe with a thin overlay of special bomb-targeting information.
auto-assign system
It can stop the cherry-picking, but then you have tasks assigned to staff members who know or care nothing about the area of the problem (Microsoft, Adobe, etc.), while techs who are great at these get assigned other things that they know nothing about. I suppose it would be too much trouble to have the auto-assign system (or, better, person!) check the specialties list and assign people the problems they actually know how to solve.
Not good for those on the other end of the tickets.
That's the main thing that all these time-recording and project-assigning tricks miss - the Help Desk/Assistance Portal/etc. is actually there to help the non-tech members of the staff do their jobs. And apparently management doesn't notice when requests sit for a week while others left after them are taken ahead. Managers should stop using time as the main metric, and see whether they're doing what they were hired to do.
Time had to be booked in tenths of hours. 7-digit codes for work changed at random.
Did you work at my old employer? They still had this system when I was unwillingly retired (see also: US governmental dysfunction) last spring. Anything actually done for/in 15 min. had to be put down as 12 or 18 min. It was put in as 12 min. if it was leave or as 18 min. if it was work performed. Stupid system.
