Posts by David Nash

Adobe sells fake AI-generated Israel-Hamas war images – then the news ran them as real

" Hopefully that's not a sign of things to come."

Of course it's a sign of things to come. In fact things already here, obviously.

Robot mistakes man for box of peppers, kills him

Re: Failure in the humour dept.

I would say that most of the humour in these comments remains respectful in this case.

I think trying to make your point by implicitly attacking the parents of other commenters is rather low though.

New information physics theory is evidence 'we're living in a simulation,' says author

simulating consciousness is not the same as being conscious

...until we prove that we are simulated, then we change our minds and actually it is!

SoftBank boss Masayoshi Son predicts artificial general intelligence is a decade away

Re: Those who refuse to learn from webcomics...

If anyone can ask the AI and it will make them rich, then almost everyone will be rich, therefore nobody will.

Scripted shortcut caused double-click disaster of sysadmin's own making

cd /tmp && rm -rf *

Any time I have to enter rm -f * (let alone -rf) I do the cd first, then make sure I am where I think I am and that ls returns what I expect, before entering the rm.

I wouldn't have the balls to enter it all in one go as above.

Police ignored the laws of datacenter climate control

Re: Convenience

It's fine using it as a drying room. It's less fine using it as a server room!

You've just spent $400 on a baby monitor. Now you need a subscription

Re: This is why I'm missing out on a lot of stuff

I am sure a lot of customers* of this kind of thing don't have a clue about how it works, what it does or doesn't connect to, they are just buying a baby monitor.

*Not me, my kids haven't been babies for many years. And I avoid such connected/subscription/spying devices anyway.

Bermuda, your data, Google's gonna take your US data

Why they allow transatlantic communications?

No, no, no! Disco joke hit bum note in the rehab center

I saw the sheet music for that in a shop in London.

Yes, it was exactly what you expect.

Re: "If he downloaded Hallelujah, the problems would have been much worse"

So what do ya rhyme with Hallelujah?

Lawsuit claims Google Maps led dad of two over collapsed bridge to his death

Exactly, you don't expect a road to just disappear.

UK judge rates ChatGPT as 'jolly useful' after using it to help write a decision

But he said he took full responsibility for the paragraph, so essentially he did say it. I would liken it to using a thesaurus to get the right word -- a bit more than that of course but as long as he's reviewing and agreeing with what it said, he is the one that's saying it legally.

Probe reveals previously secret Israeli spyware that infects targets via ads

Re: How to pay

Currently it has only trailers for its own product. IIRC the notion of ads are for a lower-tier. I might be wrong though.

US Department of Justice claims Google bought its way to web search dominance

Re: The rest use Google

Downvoted not because I am a Google bot, or even a fan, but I disagree with the assertion that people don't use Google, they use StartPage (or similar).

I have never seem anyone using StartPage, almost every time I see someone searching it's via Google.

Ex-Twitter employees pull Musk back to money table over missing severance

Re: Who are you catering to who has been living under a rock?

Because they want to call it Twitter, which is a much better and well-known name than X, especially as it's pretty much impossible to be taken out of context (whereas "X" could be various things in different contexts), but they feel obliged to mention its real name.

Normally I see it written as "X, formerly Twitter"

NASA wants to believe ... that you can help it crack UFO mysteries

Re: It's a good thing....

The problem with those who seem convinced that they are aliens is that only the poor-quality images remain unexplained. Could it be that they are unexplained due to their poor quality, rather than because they are unexplainable by Earthly standards? Seems likely to me.

Similar to photos of Bigfoot, Nessie, etc.

Since almost everyone does have a decent-quality camera on them most of the time now, it's strange how there are NO clear and unambiguous images of such things.

GitHub alienates developers by force feeding them AI recommendations

Exactly, that comment in the article got it right:

"We are here to get work done, not engage with whatever your algorithm thinks we like"

IBM Software tells workers: Get back to the office three days a week

Most people still prefer talking face to face when that's possible

...Citation needed...

Re: Where are the facts & figures to support a return to the office ?

And not just Covid. Other viruses are available and also make you feel like crap.

Google rebrands 'android' as 'Android' to remove any doubt about its affiliations

Re: Logos

Agree with the capitalization thing but why bother with the 3D robot? What's the point?

Mozilla calls cars from 25 automakers 'data privacy nightmares on wheels'

Re: Audi was OK - maybe they still are

Agree on Mercedes. Trying to cancel the membership elicits a response along the lines of "write to us at this address".

Re: US conservative "fear" meme

" smart meters are still meters, not shutoff devices"

Exactly - in the UK this is not true. They are shutoff devices, or "move to pre-payment tariff" devices (I seem to recall hearing about this).

What happens when What3Words gets lost in translation?

Some northerners turn ERs into A so Panda and pander would both be panda.

And conversely southerners like me turn A into ER so "panda" and "pander" are exact homophones.

That's a little unfair.

Also accents, especially non-English ones, change the sound of vowels all the time. We can usually understand them from context but as pointed out, there is no context in a W3W.

Cruise self-driving taxi gets wheels stuck in wet cement

Wet concrete

Was it not coned-off? A human wouldn't necessarily know either if it was not coned. And if it was coned the issue is more serious - "AI car ignored cones"

Bank of Ireland outage sees customers queue for 'free' cash – or maybe any cash

Re: It's a bank, of course it's not free money

Surely these things use distributed transactional processing. All or nothing.

Re: It's a bank, of course it's not free money

"in certain circumstances demand the entire amount owing to me immediately."

I believe in the UK this is almost any circumstances. Provided the credit balance is in excess of what's needed (or estimated) to cover the expected usage, they have to give it back to you.

So much for CAPTCHA then – bots can complete them quicker than humans

Re: Task failed successfully.

Which of course they will be.

Re: But surely an ethical bot

In any case, the CAPTCHA doesn't give the option so say "I am a robot", so no need to lie, just do the task presented and let the server infer rightly or wrongly whether you are human or bot.

Amazon's latest directive: Report to the office 'cos we're watching you

Translation please.

"In the US, on the other hand, employee monitoring is totally legal – even in the federal law the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, one of the charges you'll often see brought against criminals who break into systems."

What is the second part of this sentence trying to say? That Criminals are charged with monitoring employees?

The price of freedom turned out to be an afternoon of tech panic

Re: I'll assume this was America

How can it make any sense that the waiter/ess would be responsible? Are they buying the food and selling it on to the customers? That's the business stealing from the employee, irrespective of whether a customer stole from the business.

We need to be first on the Moon, uh, again, says NASA

Re: Stupid

Yay, let's have a space arms race.

"We'll have to evict them by force"? That'll really help.

Re: Stupid

Are China claiming it?

The story is Bill Nelson fearmongering that he doesn't want China to claim it. I haven't heard that China have actually made any such claim or stated an intention to do so.

Lock-in to legacy code is a thing. Being locked in by legacy code is another thing entirely

I thought it was going to turn out that his software update had somehow caused the security systems to lock him in, especially as the title said "being locked in by legacy code".

Disappointed!

Re: I've been locked out ...

Good point, didn't the OP have a fire exit he could have used?

Have you ever suspected your colleague doesn't hope this email finds you well?*

Guilty as charged

of pressing Return between thoughts and thereby sending multiple Teams messages.

Another one is editing a message I sent a few moments ago, after it's been read. I wonder if they'll notice!

Pope goes fire and brimstone on the dangers of AI

Bit harsh on Ed

He summed it up nicely with "have you not seen the movies?"

Re: Could be worse

It's not that they are liars...more that they don't have any concept of truth vs. untruth, so are unable to discriminate.

Two US Navy sailors charged with giving Chinese spies secret military info

Re: the US are such hypocrites

Are you suggesting that because a country spies, they should not prosecute foreign spies they find working against them?

We all know every country spies. They are not prosecuting them because "spying is bad", they are prosecuting them because they are spying against the USA, which, if you are the USA, is bad.

Twitter sues Brit non-profit, claims hate-speech reports scared off advertisers

Re: Do we really believe the CCDH are the good guys here?

past and future UK Labour Party advisors?

How do you know which are Future advisors?

Nobody would ever work on the live server, right? Not intentionally, anyway

The backup (DR) and the test server were the same? That sounds like a bad decision.

Aliens crash landed on Earth – and Uncle Sam is covering it up, this guy tells Congress

Re: Psyops

How is it that spy satellite technology that allegedly can read car licence plates and recognise the faces of someone looking up hasn't translated to US Navy aircraft cameras that seem to generate footage of UFO's that's worse than that from WW2 fighter gun camera footage?

Same as the pictures of Bigfoot. All the decent pictures show what the picture is really of. It's only the fuzzy unclear ones that remain so those are the ones the nuts jump on as so-called evidence.

A fuzzy picture of a bear is still a bear, not Bigfoot, even if it's hard to tell. Same with poor pictures of weather baloons etc

Re: warning

Too many people use the argument of personal incredulity. "I can't figure it out so it must be aliens" (or God, depending on context)

Cigna sued for using software to deny healthcare insurance claims

Unchecked algorithm?

Not according to this quote: "If there is not a match, the claim goes to one of our board-certified medical directors for review"

That doesn't sound "unchecked" at all, in fact doesn't "for review" explicitly state that the claim is being checked?

A room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor? Take a closer look

Re: Fake News!

The news is "fake"?

Which part?

Was a paper published?

Did they do what they said in the paper?

Did they achieve something which looks like superconductivity?

Was the temperature not what they said?

Was the pressure not what they said?

If mistakes have been made with the science, this is not "fake" news. It's real news of something, whether or not that turns out to be what it was initially thought to be.

By the way, if indeed "the laws of atomic physics do not support any form of superconductor at room temperature" then why are various teams attempting to do this?

I am not a physicist, don't downvote me for asking questions please.

Ultra-rare Apple sneakers from the 1990s on sale for $50,000

Re: What is it with people collecting modern. plastic shoes, anyway?

Upvoted for "what I insist on calling trainers (for that is what they are)"

Douglas Adams was right: Telephone sanitizers are terrible human beings

Re: Agree but...

and every socket in the world is yours for the taking? what kind of stupid entitled attitude is that?

That's pretty standard though, if you have anything outside of "plug in our equipment here" you have to prove it's not your fault if something is broken.

Like my "home emergency" insurance that refused to pay out after my oil water-boiler failed. Their engineer was going to take a week to arrive (some "emergency" cover), therefore I spoke to the manufacturer, obtained a part and easily fitted it. But since I had touched it, all bets were off.

Norway bans Meta's behavioral advertising with threats of wrist-slap fines

Exactly - the 100K is not a fee to allow this behaviour, it's a fine for behaviour which is not allowed. They are supposed to pay the fine for the times they did it AND STOP DOING IT.

If they don't stop, further action should be taken (I don't know if the law in question enables this).