Posts by SparkE

Bossware booms as bots determine whether you're doing a good job

Re: Auto-micromanagement

I feel the same way, it’s so simple.

My philosophy is that a manager is there to make sure their team has all the tools and environment that they need to succeed at their jobs. And not surprisingly, my departments make a profit, have very little turnover and the employees get along.

The other department head, however, is a chronic micro-manager. His 7 person department has turned over about 100 employees in the last 10 years (Including the entire sales staff quit three times in the last 5 years.) and the department has only been in the black 3 months out of the last 13 years. He hires any warm body to fill a position that requires experience and then he doesn’t train them.

Ughh. [insert rolling eye emoji here]

AI chatbots that butter you up make you worse at conflict, study finds

I’d venture that Ai Chatbots make you worse at everything over time.

OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

“White House plan to make AI a core skill”

What will be next? “White House plans to make breathing and shoe-tying core skills”?

The whole idea of Ai seems to be to eliminate the need for people to have skills.

Skilled labor costs the almighty billionaires more of the profits they feel they are entitled to.

Humans can be tracked with unique 'fingerprint' based on how their bodies block Wi-Fi signals

I’m highly dubious of this being reliable in anything but a highly controlled environment with ideal conditions.

We are swimming in a constantly changing “soup” of RF signals that also changes, intermodulates and moves independently.

AI-driven 20-ft robots coming for construction workers' jobs

Re: Who remembers 2000AD robot revolution

I think they are already addressing that issue. ( By eliminating the fleshy ones )

Here in the US, or at least in the Pacific Northwest, most of the workers in the construction trade are immigrants that I’m sure our new overlords would love to add to their deportation quotas.

Robots don’t get injured, don’t have to be covered by workmen's compensation insurance, they don't need health insurance or retirement plans and the employers wont have to pay tax on them.

I wonder what the rich will do once the consumers can no longer earn enough money to buy any of the things their robots produce.

Microsoft Copilot shows up even when it's not wanted

Re: CoPilot reminds me of the Windows 10 forced upgrade

Well said!

Daddy of a mistake by GoDaddy took Zoom offline for about 90 minutes

In my experience, Markmonitor is a domain squatting & extortion “outfit”

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

Apples and Oranges

Although there are a lot of parallels, I wouldn’t compare Ai to the Dot Com Bubble.

During the Dot Com Bubble era, The power was in the hands of a much broader demographic of people. It was much more democratized. People were using the internet to create.

Ai tech is ruled and powered by Big Businesses and their goal is deception (machines pretending to be human) and manipulation to enable monetization. Including replacing human workers with Ai whenever possible. Also, no one was forcing people to adopt the internet or use a specific site or tech back then. Adoption was organic.

In this Ai “situation” we are finding ourselves in, much of the public is actively rejecting the use of Ai. So much so that companies like Google are seeing that not many people were willing to pay for their Ai as a stand alone product. So rather than let the product-that-no-one-wants die on the vine through free market natural selection, they force it on its Google Workspace Subscribers and raise their subscription rates. It’s also forced on the free tier so that Google can essentially use Ai to Hoover-Up more data stored in user’s Spreadsheets and stored documents. This is the way of things now. Demand isn’t coming from the consumer, it’s coming from the supplier.

I am all for using Ai trained on vetted data to use for scientific research and medical diagnosing, etc. But training Ai on garbage internet data in an effort to imitate humans and manipulate them accordingly to make a profit is a bubble that I hope pops before dividing the world into two groups; the ultra rich and the ultra poor.

Critical PostgreSQL bug tied to zero-day attack on US Treasury

Did anyone tell Elon?

I read somewhere last week that Musk mocked people who thought the US government used SQL databases. Maybe he needs to update his?

Apple plugs security hole in its iThings that's already been exploited in iOS

Curious how this Zero day is fixed by the very iOS update that a lot of Apple users are avoiding because of the opt-out Apple intelligence roll out…

US reportedly mulls TP-Link router ban over national security risk

Re: In the interests of national security...

Ugh! My company sells aerospace and industrial hardware. Pretty much ordinary nuts and bolts that are used on everything from aircraft to holding together backyard swing-sets. Nothing remotely secret, military, proprietary or ITAR or DFAR related. Many US government agencies buy hardware from us and whenever they do, we have to sign a Form 889 to say that our company does not use any networking or communications equipment made by Huawei or they can’t do business with us. Not too big a deal because I’ve never seen anything made by Huawei. However, TP-Link is EVERYWHERE. I hope they don’t start the same non-sense with TP-Link without any concrete evidence, Just because an IT guy doesn’t change the default username and password from admin/admin to something unique, I’m not going to label the manufacturer of that equipment a security risk.