Posts by James Anderson 1304 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Apr 2007
Except AI seems to be like one of those cheap screw drivers they used to sell at petrol stations. They looked like proper tools until you tried using them, the handle would come loose, the stem would bend the head would flatten.
Ask any proper professional they are obsessed with the quality of their tools, and, none of the AI tools seem up to scratch.
Oh god that brings back awful memories.
Trying to set install an application in CDE on an underpowered HP workstation. I could not believe how complex and fiddly this committee devolved desk top was. So a machine that cost three times as much as a windows box took an entire day to get the application up and running via CDE (a process that took 10 minutes on windows ) and ran slower when eventually started. And people wander how windows got its monopoly.
Take the 80% of food counter workers.
Most of these could be replaced by simple automation. E.g. those touch screens in hamburger joints. There are machines that can deliver a decent cup of coffee within seconds with minimal human intervention yet people go to Costa lot coffee and watch a human faff around for five minutes using the most inefficient technology and pay 6 quid for the privilege.
Point 1. The main players in the dot.com bubble had potentially very profitable services. Amazon had a very obvious and useful business model selling books I couldn’t get in the local bookshop over the internet.
Point 2. AI does not really exist. The successful applications are really just better pattern recognition or search plus cut and paste. I would be more interested if they labelled the products correctly.
Point 3. When in a few years time they get this stuff to work there will be some “good enough” open source software so profits will be non existent.
As far as I can work out from the garbled messaging what they are proposing is a couple of phone apps whereby an employer can verify your national insurance number via some digital certificate wizardry.
Much like the apps that confirmed your Covid vaccination status ( in the civilised world or the EU as it’s known ).
Just another example of the sheer incompetence and complete lack of political skill of he who is not Jeremy Corbin.
When I worked on a SWIFT interface many years ago the maximum level of service for a transfer was set at 3 minutes in practice it was about 5 seconds from the sending bank to the receiving bank. All the rest of the time was taken up with the various banks in the chain playing with you money.
Imagine a shopkeeper asking you to take the days takings to the bank but it took you two hours because you stopped off at the bookies on the way.
Incidentally they now a sane message format, when I worked on it the message formats were designed so they could be entered into the system manually via a TELEX machine.
Any effective law to block hate speech, libel, plagiarism and just plain lies would destroy social media’s business model. If they were legally responsible for the nonsense the proliferate they could not afford the manpower to vet all of the posts .. they would go bust.
So expect ruthless pushback on any attempt to make the internet safe.
This is not censorship this is about stopping harmful illegal content that is ruining young lives.
Social media just would not be a profitable business if they were forced to moderate properly and refuse dangerous, libellous lying content. So of course there will be a push back on any attempt to civilise the internet.
Big tobacco wrote the playbook, big oil enhanced it and now its big techs turn.
English is a great language for poetry and jokes. This is because of its lack of precision and multiple ambiguity’s. Also it will be years before a machine learned program will be able to recognise the subtle nuances behind the choice of words; say between “comfort station”, bathroom, toilet, jakes, bog or shithouse.
Oh the snobbery. It reminds me of the old school motorcycle aficionados who preferred an unreliable badly constructed British heap to a reliable Japanese machine because they liked fixing things.
The fact that Java allowed you to focus on the business logic rather than the quirks of an unsuitable programming language is a good thing too good to be true so they came up with J2EE so you could spend 90 % of your time dealing with the quirks of a bloated framework.
Good point about bits based on decision trees being better cheaper and more reliable tha fake intelligence.
Especially given that in real world call centres genuinely intelligent people are reduced to working there way through a pre programmed set of scripted questions and responses.
The problem is the amazingly complex things ordinary users do with EXCEL because asking the IT department to do it is a pain in the proverbial. Many of these just die or render unreadably when run in Libre. It just needs one or two of these “applications” in an organisation to veto any move of windows.
They will show the actual cost of a beer.
Currently if it's 5 dollars on the menu it gets to be about 12 on the bill after they add tourist, city, state and service charges ... Then aggressively ask for a tip.
Maybe Amazon should advertise stuff minus the tarrifs and add them in at the checkout. It seems to be the American way.
I don’t get this obsession with ditching perfectly well performing systems just because they are more than 10 years old.
In the analogue world we leave things as they are if they work well enough. E.g. Brunnelss bridge over th Menie straight. A couple of hundred years old built using materials and technology that no one would dream of using today but hey it works and trains travel over/in it every day.
So Social Security has not changed significantly in the last 40 years save the replacement of forms and snail mail with telephone and web sites to communicate with citizens. So I doubt there is any real requirement to upgrade the system.
Any rewrite would probably ditch an over inflated bill from IBM for an overinflated bill from AWS.
Er. You must be new here I suppose. Obviously not been following the news ( Fox does not count).
Just to enlighten you the South African racist claimed to save millions by ending a VA outsourcing contract. Turns out that it was an email service administered by disabled veterans that cost very little and the contract was due to end anyway.
How to run a successful project. Talk to the sponsor and nail down the problem area. Present your solution to their problem. Don't cry when they laugh at your proposal. Try again with an acceptable solution. Develop a detailed set of requirements and agree a definition of success. Then do it.
How to run s failed project. Listen to the salesman with the shiny brochure and enormous entertainment budget. Pick an unfortunate manager and force your solution on them. Develop some garbage that the users have no interest in. Go over budget developing more garbage. Label yourself an expert on shiny knew tech and go and fail another project at another company leaving the mess behind.
The scene is the executive suite if Big pharma Inc.
CFO: The African project did not go so well.
Head of Research: we did manage to develop drugs to cure conditions common in Africa.
CFO: There's no money in curing Africans.
Head Of Research: (jokingly) maybe we should test it drugs in a country that has the same medical problems as the USA. Maybe with a government we can control. (Luaghs).
CEO: We just got such a country. They speak pretty good English. I hope your guys like rain.
Apologies to the late great John LeCarre.
I have just finished reading “Careless People” apart from anything else it’s a really good read more like a physiological thriller than a business book.
I never thought these guys were particularly good, but the greed, lies and arrogance build with every chapter. The best Zuck could manage legally was a “cease and desist” on the author promoting the book. As she is not being sued for liable you have to assume most of what she claims is provably true.
Just plain avoid these US tech giants.
C is here forever. It was designed as a “portable assembler” and in that role it is pure dead brilliant as a general purpose language not so much… but the compiler was free or already paid for.
C++ on the other hand has always been my most hated language. The number of “improvements” that come with each new version just shows how wrong Soustrup got it first time round.
Mainframe hard ware (basically IBM Z series as it's the only one still standing ) is usually refreshed every five years or so. The operating and related software systems although descended from 1970s MVS are actively supported and constantly updated. As are the probably COBOL based core banking systems (still some CICS assembly code out there though).
For the most part these systems just work and almost every large bank has at some point made a failed attempt to replace them with a more "modern" technology.
The current trend is to preserve the COBOL code and port it to a fake mainframe environment in the cloud.
For ERP projects to go overbudget, late or just plain fail is the rule rather than the exception.
The private sector has the luxury of hiding these failures unless they are really really bad, the public service is under more scrutiny and have to fess up on failures.
If you think the private sector does thing better have a butchers at this https://www.cio.com/article/278677/enterprise-resource-planning-10-famous-erp-disasters-dustups-and-disappointments.html .
After all the council had previously spaffed millions on an SAP ERP system which SAP then declined to support any further and did not provide an upgrade path to thier latest shiny products. Its no wonder that the council went looking for an alternative. Sad that the alternative was rubbish sold by an even worse supplier.
If you license an ERP system you are effectively buying the sample application for a really crap programming language.
VA authored an open source system based on the venerable MUMPS database which ran for years and was used by several other organisations.
Before anyone shouts “legacy” it’s worth noting that there are two well supported current versions of MUMPs out there and while the default language is probably one of the worst ever the actual database is blindingly fast and incredibly flexible think a a nested Python Dictionary as persistent storage.
Given India's long history of warrior culture the USA would almost certainly suffer an embarrassing defeat in a war with India. Pakistan and China were both easily seen off in the twentieth century.
The good old British empire took control of India by subterfuge and exploiting divisions between the various small kingdoms. They were quick to appreciate the military prowess and promptly coopted the various Indian forces into the British army.
The petro dollar was a convent unit for trading oil. When it became less convenient and it was easier to trade in the recipients currency then they did so. Also it was an accounting fiction no actual dollars changed hands.
Are you saying that the USA has the right to designate the currency other countries trade in?
I have said this before , but here we go again.
Councils are not in a position where they can easily change the way they work to suit an unsuitable software product. Most of what they do is subject to complex regulations set by central government and which they have no control over most of the rest are legal obligations; either they must do it that way or that must NOT do it that way.
Or many inventions were intended to benefit mankind but did immense harm instead.
Sometimes with no malicious intent e.g. Heroin, LSD, asbestos insulation.
Sometimes with negligent or plain malicious intent e.g. Oxycotin, Vapes, flammable insulation.
It looks to me like AI falls into the latter category. The investors/creators seeing only dollar signs and ignoring any downside.
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