Posts by Pascal Monett 18232 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
So, we're now in the age of "publications" paying AI to create stuff to bring in readership.
Well, now that I know that, I'm not using those site ever again.
If you think I'm going to be interested in the brain farts of something that has no brain, have I got news for you.
The Board thinks it's going to create the perfect AI to "create" it's content, fire all the meatbags and profit ?
Not gonna happen.
That's not the point.
Yes, humans have been shitty at their jobs since Oglug failed to keep the campfire burning. So what ?
We're not supposed to be making pseudo-AI to make the same (or worse) mistakes we do. We should be making it to do better.
It's not better because it's not AI. It's just statistics, and a human has to program the damn things. Not to mention train them.
Of course, every agency is responsible for its budget.
But that doesn't mean that it decides the amount of budget it receives.
It's budget requires X billions to function properly. That is a known quantity. Congress allocates Y = X - too much.
You're saying that's NASA's fault ?
Especially since I said just about the same thing 7 days ago, concerning HashiCorp.
Nice to see that I'm not the only one with this opinion.
Found that kind of stuff on Amazon. You'd need a nice bit of extra trunk space to store one (or two), but apparently, if you've got the sunlight, they can do a fair job of keeping your laptop charged.
What they would do with this, I have no idea, but it's better than just leaving it to an external battery.
That is the marvel of the software industry.
You need to realize that source code used to be treated like gold. You had the rights to the final product, but if you wanted the source code, you paid extra (and I mean HEAVY extra).
And that's not too long ago either. About ten years ago I was working for a European Institution that had a business-critical Notes application for which it had paid a ungodly amount of money to have the rights to the source code (and that was accompanied by an iron-clad contract in which, if ever said source code was published anywhere, a number of first-borns would have to be sacrificed on a night of a new moon).
Even today, having the source code is not a given. Go ask some web designer to do you a website and get the quote for having the website and the source code for all of it. I'm thinking you'll be looking at a different figure compared to just the website and support.
Personally, I've always programmed in Lotus Notes. For me, it was a given that the applications I was writing for the client would not be code-locked.
I know of quite a few software houses in Luxembourg that don't do that today.
Well, first of all, it's Da Gubbermint. You are doing your patriotic duty in letting it reverse-engineer and modify binaries for which there is no code.
Second, those EULAs, apparently, all belong to defunct companies whose programmers are likely retired today (if they are still alive), and whose IP has not been bought by some company still in activity today.
Third, even if that IP had been bought, there's a fair chance that the accounting department (or internal library) has no clue that they have the rights to that code. Also, there is a non-zero chance that, even if they know, they have no desire to tell anyone because they don't want to put a finger into the update process of a software for which they might have the source code (having the IP rights doesn't mean you have the code) but don't have anyone capable of modifying it.
Because if they show up and make a fuss about IP, then they run the very real risk of being liable for the changes.
I know I wouldn't want that.
Is this another Musk-level brain fart ?
It's a datacenter. It uses ungodly amounts of power, generates equally ungodly amounts of heat, and that heat needs evacuating. Oh, and on the side, it may be somewhat useful.
It's not because you're building it with the latest in-house doo-dad that the situation changes.
Call me when you've invented a datacenter that doesn't need cooling. THAT will be first-of-its-kind.
The issue is not the failover, it's the idiot who designed a failover system with less resources than the production system.
If you design a failover, that server needs the exact same configuration than the one it is replacing.
Not doing that is stupid, and this was the result.
I would have thought that you wouldn't need a degree in computer science to understand that. Apparently, you do.
Unless we're talking about science (and even then), I do not think there is any chance that the "truth" cannot be biased by politics.
I mean, water flows downhill whether you are republican, democrat or whatever else, right ?
Pi, for example, is famously known as 3.14159 (and an infinity more). That did not stop some US legislator from attempting to pass a law to "simplify" Pi to, IIRC, 3.
God knows why, but one thing is certain : if politics cannot stay away from basic mathematical truth, then there is no truth that can remain politically neutral forever.
So, a Swiss investment bank wants to take SUSE off of public scrutiny to do a deal with some unnamed entity hosted in Luxembourg.
The fact that it is in Luxembourg practically implies it is some entity belonging to an international conglomerate. Money meets more money.
I hope this means that the people working on SUSE are safe, but once again, this deal has nothing to do with improving SUSE and everything to do with managing investor interests.
And backroom deals are best done far from public scrutiny.
You decide if that is a good thing or not.
To discover that you have credits for books you never wrote must be quite a surprise.
To not sue the pants off Amazon for publishing such lies is quite a surprise to me.
I think she was quite nice to just ask for their removal from the store. This goes way beyond some unpleasant comment on a forum. If it were me, I would want to know how those "books" got into the store, who is responsible for uploading them and why nobody checked that the purported author had nothing to do with it. And I'd want a judge to back me up on that.
Apparently, either Amazon is creating drivel and happily selling it (not entirely impossible), or the publishing controls at Amazon are so laughable a six-year-old can get around them with a throwaway email account and maybe a forged ID using stock model photos.
Neither is good or Amazon's reputation, but maybe Amazon doesn't care (entirely possible).
Then why do you have a tag specifically dedicated to treatment for kids ? The fact that they are watching YouTube Kids is not enough ?
As usual, there is what a company says, and there is what a company does.
Google is clearly capable of being aware it is dealing with a child. To trust Google, the most powerful ad broker in the world, to do nothing with that data is something I fully expect the government institutions to not do.
Not without ironclad proof, and the mere words of a spokesdrone are not proof.
And the marketing continues to support the lie.
Even in this article, Tesla's Autopilot is dubbed "super-cruise-control". That, from a publication that has already posted at least one article about a Tesla plowing into a police car on the highway, under said "super" cruise control.
Everyone in the media continues to treat Tesla as if they have something special. They don't, and that fact is killing people.
So stop treating it like it is something it doesn't deserve.
At best, it is enhanced cruise control. Not super, and certainly not Autopilot.
Of course it is retaliation.
In the very arena you would expect responsible, level-headed people to operate, it's all being handled by a bunch of kindergardeners who only know how to throw the toys out of the pram.
And after that, we are the ones who have to pay, get blamed and tighten our belts.
Politics should not be left to the charming idiots who can win elections only to fuck everything up after. It's a job. There should be a proper entrance exam, ongoing evaluations and, if the candidate is not doing the job properly, a swift exit, regardless of whether or not the mandate has run its course.
We can no longer afford to wait for the next election before getting rid of the crazy nincompoop that is ruining everything for everyone else.
It's worse than that. Pre-COVID, only people who really wanted or needed a laptop purchased one.
Along came COVID and suddenly, everyone needed one.
Now the splurge is over, and hardware no longer increases performance 10% per year. You can buy the lowest cost phablet and still manage your email and watch YouTube without issue.
It's going to be at least three more years before anyone feels like they actually need a new laptop - barring hardware failures, of course. For most people, they've got one and they don't use it any more, so it'll just pick up dust until they change jobs.
Sorry, Lenovo, my crystal ball doesn't give a very favorable outlook to your future CEO bonuses.
Well done The Plod. You goofed, and now you're blaming anyone who looks at your goof.
I'm sure the terrorist charges were welcome.
I think Collection of Terrorist Information should be mirrored by a Publication of Terrorist Information.
Then we'd see how many numbskulls remained to goof like that.
Well, you're retired, so you have the time for it.
HP, on the other hand, couldn't care less. You no longer contribute to HP's reputation. The fact that your work built HP up to some heights no longer counts, HP has squandered that capital long ago.
I sympathize, but HP doesn't and DEC and Mr Hewlett are long gone.
You are now reaping the benefits of unrestrained capitalism.
Maybe vote for some social security in the years to come ?
P.S. : saying that from a country that is actively destroying its own social security and medical network, to transition everything to private offices, so maybe we'll have a beer together in the not-too-distant future.
Let them try to rake in customers thinking that they're getting 6G wifi. It's public knowledge that 6G doesn't exist yet, so the customers will become irate and demand refunds and it will be a terrible mess for that company.
They might make money out of it, but they'll sweat every cent they make.
In Benin, over twenty years ago, they were already doing that.
They were called zems, I think. They were all over the place in Cotonou. You could flag one down, give your destination, then hang on for dear life until you got there. The ride was about 25c in today's money.
Well, one point is that you're sure it isn't judging you.
Second point : with all the bull around wellness in general (soothing quartz bracelet, anyone ?), AI could indeed not be worse.
Final point : people listen to Gwyneth Paltrow, so I would actually prefer they listen to an AI in that case . . .
Check that, maybe they are.
That's not what I understand when I read "wireless bandwidth constraints that delayed connectivity".
To me, that means that, if the vehicle cannot connect to the mothership in a timely fashion, it's ability to continue is heavily impacted.
That, in my mind, eliminates any possibility of using that kind of vehicle outside of a well-covered city.
No trips to the countryside are possible.
Ho hoo, burn ! Is that why Azure is always falling over ? I thought it was good old fat-fingered misconfiguration.
I wonder what Intel thinks of that description, especially when selling its Xeon Platinum 8280L beasts at almost $37,000.
Or AMD, with its massive €8,700 Threadripper.
Or nVidia, with its $30K A100 supercomputing monster.
There are a lot of people making a ton of money on those error-prone machines. And I don't see that they are all that error-prone. Yes, there's the occasional unexplainable crash every now and then, and yes, Borkzilla has trained us well in the three-fingered salute to recover from Windows bluescreens, but Excel tables are generally quite reliable (when humans have written the right formulas), and CPUs don't generally fish data from the wrong memory cell.
So I think error-prone is a bit of an exaggeration.
Just a bit.
I'm sure we all remember that specific XKCD.
Kudos, I guess, to DARPA for wanting to clarify how to do what on the Moon, but it's a given that, five years after the first moonbase is up and running, the standards will have changed.
Because even on the Moon, the faucets will be obsolete after five years, and the replacements won't have the same connectors.
Because progress, right ?
What a wonderful concept - for the company web site. You can tinker with your parameters to your hearts' content and implement your rules with gay abandon.
For the users, that means that any site using this auto-moderation will be completely incapable of understanding humor, satire or double-entendres, in other words, everything that makes speech fun.
Nope, we will all be transformed into good little posters who obey the rules and have no fun at all.
Such a tool would be a disaster here. I, for one, would likely stop posting immediately.
Using pseudo-AI for auto-moderation on the website of a car maker, or other industrial application, would probably ruffle nobody's feathers. You don't go looking for support on one of your belongings with the intention of using humor, although that could still be a loss for the helpdesk who will have no other source of laughs to look forward to.
But on any site that requires human interaction to thrive, this auto-moderation would stifle humor and conversation. We'd end up chatting in emojis. Beurk.
Bad points for the break-in. Shoddy code ? That's a shame.
But A+ for handling the fallout. Full admission of the break-in, without pussy-footing about the issue. Passwords salted and hashed, miscreants aren't going to be able to do much with that. Premium subscriptions reimbursed, can't fault them there.
Promise to do better ? You betcha.
There are a lot of companies who could take notes here.
Ooh, I'm sure the generals are thrilled about that. And I'm sure the generative statistics bullshit generator is going to have no problem in taking into account prior encounters, experience it doesn't have in dealing with that target population, and a whole other set of information that nobody is going to input into the system because nobody working on the system has the data and, even if they did, they wouldn't have a clue as to how to input it.
Let's go ahead and set that up, then generate a strategic plan for beating Imperial Japan at the end of WWII. I'd like to see that generative "AI" pitted against the strategic thinking of the time, and then that of today.
As a beta run, if you will.
If it fails, back to the drawing board.
But who am I kidding ? It's a military, pie-in-the-sky plan. First they pay for it, then they implement it, then the soldiers pay for it, then they scrap it.
I've learned a few things. Now I know what East-West network traffic is, and I understand how important it is to lock that down.
Yes, apparently end-to-end encryption is extremely important, if only to ensure that a destination that a given source is not supposed to connect to is ignored.
It is obvious that East-West traffic is going to be hard to secure. This article demonstrates that it is, nonetheless, necessary.
I use NordVPN.
I use it because some of my clients, in this post-COVID world, want me to connect remotely, but only from a list of approved locations. It's easier for me to use NordVPN and connect to where I need, than rent a flat and move countries just to do a job that requires less time to do than to transit to the approved location.
I note that NordVPN does not seem to be at risk on a Windows platform. So I'm good.
I also note that NordVPN does acknowledge some risk on iOS.
Seems that iOS needs to get its ducks in a row.
It Just Works is not supposed to apply to malware, whatever the origin.
No, it is not. This is a case of a local Play Store being created, and Google saying "if you put your apps there, we will delist them here", in other words, Google is using its muscle to choke local options.
You may not care about local options, but Google is not a South Korean company, which means, in my mind, there are things it does not understand. A local option should be a good thing to have, and I do not see that Google has the moral right to throw the toys out of the pram on this.
This is about Google wanting every single cent that can be made, when Google already has its own money printing machine.
It's about greed, and how to curtail it.
I say bravo to South Korea.
"any cryptocurrency where the user can appeal to a central authority to rectify errors doesn't offer that user total control over their tokens"
I don't see where users had total control over their tokens in the various funny money "exchange" crashes we've seen recently.
But hey, if you want to play with fire, go right ahead. Just don't come crying when you get burned.
I'm happy that Dragon still has a life somewhere, and that people who really need it can still use it. I've always heard good things about Dragon. Nice to see the fire is still alive.
That said, there are some issues which, I think, could be easily solved. The proper noun issue would go away if, when recording a new one, you had the option to Always Capitalize. That should be rather simple to implement.
The issue with Will, or The Sun, is simple to comprehend : the product is not aware of the contect in which it is working. It "hears" something, and code happily goes to the nearest match and, bingo, you've got Will, a person, when you're talking about your will to do something. Maybe, before using the match, the product could detect that more than one possibility exists, and popup its proposal to which you could just say no ? I have no idea how practical that would be, and it would certainly complicate things in all the other cases that work fine.
But before proposing The Sun, the product could have a basic notion of how many times the user has already wrote about newspapers. If it's never, then maybe don't do that automatically ?
Or better : allow the user to invalidate a match. No, I never talk about The Sun, stop using that match.
That shouldn't be too difficult to implement, should it ?
And there is the problem. You do not design an interface without spending some time with the people who are supposed to use it and learning about how they work.
Designing a product without ever talking to its users is a high sign of arrogance, these days. That only works when you are creating something that never existed before.
The word processor is a perfect example. When the first word processors came out, nobody had ever even dreamt of it. There was no one to talk to, because it was an entirely new product.
Today, if you embark on making a new word processor, you hardly need to talk to anybody because if it doesn't work like Word, you're up the proverbial creek without a paddle.
So you're designing a product to "help" doctors ? Go talk to a doctor. Find out what they need and how they work, and then go back to the office and wrack your brain to find out how you can replicate that in your UI.
Not doing that just makes your product useless, and at the mercy of anybody who understands the issue and gives two hoots about it.
They don't need to say it.
It's obvious that any money withdrawn will be money debited from the account and, if you don't actuallw have that money, you'll have to give it back when your account sees the extra money removed.
It's disheartening to realize that people can still believe that, just because there's a bank error, it's party time.
No people. There was a bank error. It WILL be corrected.
If I do ever see some unexpected sum on my bank account, I will wait a few days to be contacted by whomever it was that sent the money. If days, then weeks go by without any contact, then I will cautiously start believing that maybe, just maybe, I can actually keep it.
But I'm not going to rush the same day or the next to an ATM to extract some of that. It's not mine until I'm sure. And even then, the possibility that someone will come a-knocking to get it back will always loom over that money.
I note that they did not include psychopath or sociopath in the selection list.
We may have screening tools available that can weed out sociopaths, but I doubt that a truly determined psychopath can be detected before its too late.
I'm sure a true psychopath would learn what it is a screening process looks for and adapt his behavior to avoid detection. Then, when on Mars, it would be game time and he could set up dozens of different "experiments" to drive everyone crazy before starting to kill.
And beware sending any psychiatrist over there. It's the golden ticket for a psychopath.
"for some of them, enabling UEFI boot is either still in beta or remains an extra-cost option"
Okay, to have an option that is in beta is perfectly normal, no issues there (although you might want to get something done to push it into full relase one day).
But to have something that works and is apparently sorely needed (those UEFI motherboards are already out there) and you don't bake it into your release ?
This is Linux, not Windows or Apple. Get that into your codebase and tout it loud and clear. Isn't that supposed to be a technical advantage over your rivals ?
I guess it wasn't a bad idea (since it worked), but if you come to me asking for an investment, I expect to be putting a lot more money than that.
When the guy I knew asked me to become his business partner, the entry ticket was €5000.
You sing the praises of your business plan and then ask me for not even a hundred bucks and I'm going to laugh all the way to the door.
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