Posts by The Indomitable Gall

Meta pauses mobile port tracking tech on Android after researchers cry foul

Re: Meta

Maybe, but it would be risky.

The thing is, if they're only doing this on Android and haven't attempted to sneak it into the iOS client, that's a tacit admission that they know they're pushing it and that it's in breach of policy. It would be politically difficult if they reintroduce it on Android without getting a similar feature into iOS. And they're not going to manage to get that past the Apple app store security, so they'b leave themselves open to pretty notable criticism if they tried to slip it back in...

Ex-Meta exec: Copyright consent obligation = end of AI biz

Re: Just for the record. . .

Nononono. All their opinions must be invalidated because of the size of their wallets. Therefore we must listen to average paid people like Clegg, Altman and Zuckerberg. Emm... Oh.

Re: Just for the record. . .

AI is fiction and self-deception rolled into a big ball. A neural network is a very poor attempt to model a human brain. A human brain is not a neural network. A neural network is mathematically just a probability model derived from the input data. It is processed data. Data protection needs to apply.

LastOS slaps neon paint on Linux Mint and dares you to run Photoshop

Re: Linux is never Windows.

Yes, but people aren't used to running any OS other than Windows, as the people who try to make a Windows-user-friendly distro since last century have repeatedly told us. And this is true because nobody has invented tablets and smartphones using fancy operating systems yet. I'm sure Steve Jobs will change that at his next keynote, though...

Bosses weren’t being paranoid: Remote workers more likely to start own biz

Re: "Among Americans aged 20-64"

Yeah, imagine telling people about the sample. Imagine being clear about who you used.

Yeah... i kind of feel it's ignoring predictable user behaviour: I am certainly less likely to use LinkedIn or other sites for job search during work hours in the office, so instead I'll just wait till I'm back home. I would personally not do it in office time if I was on a VPN either, because I'm geeky enough to understand the browsing history being visible to work IT team...

Tech support session saved files, but probably ended a marriage

Re: constant referring back to his work there

That's alright. I needed to read this post before I understood it. I've totally internalised that the $ is not a letter and was totally blanking the $ while looking for the error....

Signalgate storm intensifies as journalist releases full secret Houthi airstrike chat

Re: They're already

Let's take that as a starting point: Hamas started it.

Hamas started what?

Hamas started a fight between Hamas and Israel.

Israel didn't simply strike Hamas in response, they struck Gaza and Gazans, irrespective of whether they supported Hamas or opposed them.

I remember hearing on the radio an academic expert in terrorism telling us that there were two principles in terrorism:

(1) The principle of uncertainty -- we don't know when or where the next attack will take place, so we are always afrai

(2) The principle or reaction -- the terrorists want the group with power to overreact and oppress the wider demographic that the terrorists belong to, as this will lead polarisation, and the oppressed group will associate more strongly with the terrorists.

Have you ever heard of the Basque terrorist group ETA? Well, the word "eta" is the Basque word for "and". For a monolingual Spanish speaker in the Basque Country, that's pretty daunting stuff, because they're going to hear "... eta ... eta ... eta" all the time, and get increasing paranoid and scared. It becomes a wedge and people start getting very angry at anyone who speaks Basque. ETA were one of the terrorist groups who were hardest to get people to grass on even if they hated them, and that was how powerful the simple choice of name was.

Re: They're already

The problem is that they've already said that they didn't share classified information, and they've forked themselves. I reckon he's deliberately pushing for them to go after him, because to do him for divulging classified information, they've got to admit to sharing classified information on an explicitly banned channel. He's got guts, because he's willing to put himself in the firing line, cos if they stick their heads up to shoot him, they're exposing themselves, and the US legislature will have a stronger case to censure them.

He's putting America before his own self-interest, unlike Trump and his fair-weather "friends"...

Given the prevalence of the antivax crowd and Trump's constant denial of sensible public health precautions up until he caught covid (and still didn't really take it seriously after being released from hospital), is "avoid it like the plague" even appropriate for this crowd...?

Glitchy taxi tech blew cover on steamy dispatch dalliance

Re: Hilarious

Yeah, that's an unfortunate unintended consequence of the analogy. The cable looks like the tail, and people can be forgiven for thinking that to be able to use the mouse properly, the head had to be pointing forward....

C++ creator calls for help to defend programming language from 'serious attacks'

Re: Speed of Transition

Underlying code has had a lifetime of bugs logged, investigated and fixed.

Nobody is suggesting that all C code is inherently unsafe, only that it can't be assumed to be safe. We have high confidence that long-lived legacy code is safe with good probability. The fact that we aren't ditching things that have working well for years doesn't mean we should continue to code the way it was made. We got a long way with leaded petrol, and we didn't need to scrap the cars that relied on it as soon as unleaded petrol was introduced, but we continued to use them, and then eventually they came up with a formulation that let unleaded petrol be made with the right octane rating to get it working in many of the old leaded petrol vehicles, and classic cars still run... but while we're happy to run vintage food vans for trendy hipster lunches, we don't make vans that way any more, because it's the wrong way to do it.

There are better ways to make cars and we continue to use parts that are made the old way because it's just not necessary to change. But we don't tend to invent new things that use the old manufacturing techniques, because that's silly.

Same with programming:

Keep using the old things that have been working well up to now, but making new things using old techniques is inefficient and a waste of time.

Does terrible code drive you mad? Wait until you see what it does to OpenAI's GPT-4o

Re: Alignment?

Well I don't think it's mere coincidence that AI and RPGs are linked to very geeky personality traits (which as a regular Register reader, I'm not likely to be using in a pejorative sense!)

Re: So the "intelligence" of AI is really

Indeed, and it only simulates part of intelligence, trying to identify emergent phenomena. But humans have higher-order thinking and reasoning, and the ultimate marker of human intelligence is going above and beyond the basic instinctual behaviorist response and working things out. AI doesn't do that.

Re: Gee

Well with that "random number generator as a stand-in for intelligence", you've pretty much described the share market mentality, so I guess it makes sense why they're all investing in it....

Re: Evil

That's just propaganda by the far right Speccy brigade against the Commies....

Re: Evil

This is all a plot to stop China seeing tech as lucky. All those red LEDs were making Chinese consumers buy up all the tech so there was nothing left for export...

Re: Enslave humanity?

Never mind the suckers -- never give *anyone* an even break. He's following on his policy of never pay people who've done contracted work for you and try to drive them out of business before they can sue you... and he's now doing that with millions and millions of pounds of government debt to companies involved in international aid.

Re: Not sure why misalignment happens

And yet we do demand it of natural intelligence. We train ourselves to follow procedures and leave an audit trail of our own decisions. This goes against our natural evolved brain architecture, but we do it, because we need to. We have created systems that replicate the worst flaws of biological brains but aren't sophisticated enough to do the very best of human thinking.

Hey programmers – is AI making us dumber?

Yes, but as I eluded to elsewhere on this thread, having calculators and using calculators isn't an all or nothing thing.

In my schooling, there were times we were allowed to use calculators and times we weren't. At primary school, we used calculators to specifically learn calculators.

At high school, in maths we used calculators when the arithmetic was slow and labourous and would distract us from the bit of the maths that was the point of the lesson, and we'd use them in science if the numbers were big because it wasn't a maths lesson. But we did enough mental arithmetic to learn mental arithmetic.

I was stunned when I went to university and studied computer science --a highly numerate discipline-- and my classmates would pull out calculators for simple additions and multiplications. I could work out the answer before they'd switched the calculator on....

Hmm.... not sure, really.

Computer architecture has got much, much more complicated now than it was when I studied. I reckon things have to be a lot less detailed than before. Really, I don't think they need to know about ALUs and FPUs -- at the end of the day, there isn't much need to know more than the simple fact that integer arithmetic is quicker than floating point. The ALU is misleading, because the A stands for "arithmetic", and FPUs do arithmetic too....

Re: Is AI making us dumber?

It'll taste less like glue if you crush your rocks up before adding them...

Re: It works but I don't know why

Yeah, the slow loss of formative homework in a drive to get the maximally "effecient" workrate was already moronically stupid, but in the days of LLMs... ye gads, it's super-double-ultra-moronic. But there's no money in the system to do it right...

Re: Ding Ding Ding !!!

Snail mail has no intrinsic error correction for packet loss. If a human user develops a process that mitigates the packet loss, the packet loss is still evidence of downtime.

Re: Maybe I like the misery

> Airline pilots these days, they have GPS and collision avoidance radar and autopilots bringing them everywhere. Some of them don't know how to hand prop their engine and refuse to fly with their head out in the open air.

Funny you should mention pilots, because there's a lesson there that society should have learned.

When autopilot came in, the company bigwigs said "switch on the autopilot, then only do something if the autopilot can't". The pilots (and their unions) kicked back with "if we don't pilot the plane under normal conditions, how the hell are we going to be safe to pilot them in adverse conditions that the autopilot can't handle?!?"

So now pilots fly the plane even where an autopilot would do a perfectly good job, specifically to ensure that they have the piloting skill to take over if and when an autopilot can't handle it, and so that they're confident to say "oh fuck no!" and take the controls back when the autopilot is about to do something rather stupid.

Pilots were able to push back against this sort of short-sighted thinking, but computer programmers can't really do the same.

Schools and calculators

When I was at school, we weren't allowed to use calculators most of the time. Why? Because we needed to learn how to do mental arithmetic so we would know how to do it if the calculator broke, and also that even if we did use a calculator, we'd recognise when the calculator was saying something ridiculous and stop to look for our mistake.

I was pretty stunned when studying Computer Science at university that classmates would keep going to pull out calculators and I'd end up working out the correct answer before they'd even switched it on. And for a long time they didn't trust me on it and still checked.

So then along comes the notion of an "information age" and us not needing to remember anything, because we can always just google the information, and this actually being believed in schools, so they were already training people to trust google unconditionally, and then along comes AI -- a tech designed to imitate human failings and suddenly everyone's trusting it, and because it's on the front page of google, it can do immense harm.

>sigh<

Elon Musk calls for International Space Station to be deorbited by 2027

Re: Conflict of Interest

He's already 22 years older than Hitler was when he blew his own brains out. He's also on his second run as president. I'd say he's not really getting a speedrun record any time soon....

Re: Conflict of Interest

Well that's what you get for living in a democracy -- the upvotes are distributed equally. We should all be able to buy upvotes, because we should be a meritocracy. And everyone knows that rich people got rich by being better than us plebs.

Re: "There is very little incremental utility"

He doesn't need to throw his toys out of his pram -- the pram will autonomously throw his toys out for him. Not by design, but just because it will crash into the most blindingly obvious obstacles in Full Self Perambulating mode.

HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due to 'feedback'

Don't worry -- Elon wouldn't spring for the coffee. He'll try to charge employees for the coffee, and nobody is going to buy....

NASA's on-again, off-again job cuts – what's the plan?

Re: The plan...

Yes, but the plan hasn't been thought out. Trump won't always be in the Whitehouse, and conflict of interest things hang around and even if the president can pardon Musk for the conflict of interest things (not sure whether he can or not, this is a very theoretical "even if") the criminal pardon won't affect civil actions. I can totally imagine the US government nationalising SpaceX because they've profited from things that should absolutely not have ever happened.

DIMM techies weren’t allowed to leave the building until proven to not be pilferers

And that's what happens when you go in half-cocked...

Microsoft expands Copilot bug bounty targets, adds payouts for even moderate messes

Re: What does God need with a starship?

It's only going after programmers' jobs, and it's cheaper than programmers. Sure, we'll need more debuggers, but we'll need less programmers!

Dark mode might be burning more juice than you think

Re: Nowhere in the blog...

Ah, thanks for that.

However, I'd imagine that the researchers know this anyway, and if the comparison was black-on-white vs white-on-black as the article's illustration implies, that's a matter of zero occlusion vs 100% occlusion, so it should be sufficiently comparable perceptually to max and min brightness on an OLED to carry over.

And this is an initial study where they're experimenting to see if there is a statistically significant effect that would be worth investigating further. It's not bad science, just bad journalism, because it absolutely does suggest that it's worth doing the research, but until the research has been done, it's not "news".

Re: Love the aesthetic, but don't use it...

But what we see is the relative difference between colours -- one contrasting against the other. Why should white text on a black background be harder that black text on a white background?

This research really starts pointing to some very deep things about human perception.

Do you call Eastenders, Coronation Street etc "TV novels"...? No, you call them soap operas. I would call most comics "soapy paper", personally.

Something like Watchmen might deserve the label "graphic novel", but it still started life as a serial before the trade paperback was published, so I still say it doesn't count.

Shocker! They know that. They are talking about the turning up of brightness counteracting the saving of switching the bright pixels off, and that means that they have to be talking about OLEDs, precisely because LCDs are only switched on to block light, and so dark colours can't save energy by definition.

Time to make C the COBOL of this century

Re: C is the new COBOL

And the reason that C++ is far from perfect is that it was designed to be backwards compatible with C.

This is where we hit a problem: you can't move programming on without getting programmers on-side, but having programmers on-side means not making the improvements that are badly needed.

Re: C is the new COBOL

C was written for single-processor architectures. I know you can multithread in C, but I've never actually done it, and I imagine it's a bit hacky. You certainly can't write for a SIMD architecture in C, and I suspect that it's C and its successors who have stopped the move away from x86 and ARM to SIMD processors for most tasks. I can imagine a world where CPU development stopped and only had to concern itself with GUIs and all the big stuff was data processing....

You begged Microsoft to be reasonable. Instead it made Copilot reason-able with OpenAI GPT-o1

Yes, I heard about the classic version through Louis Rossman's channel on YouTube. He was saying it was exactly the same price as what Office365 was before the addition of the "free" AI services.

The question is whether Microsoft have dropped the price because they want to claim it is genuinely sub-par, or if it's just a matter that the UK pricing was recalculated after changes in the exchange rate...

Re: I'm Free!

Nonono. I'll work for free, but you've got to pay me £1000 per week to supply a morning coffee for one of your unpaid workforce.

AI facial recognition could sink this murder probe

This kind of harks back to the overreliance on finger-prints that led to some pretty serious legal bothers a while back.

Fingerprinting was never as accurate as claimed in the early days, and its apparent accuracy was a result of high rates of recidivism: if your fingerprint looked like a match in the database, it probably was a match, because that person was likely to commit a repeat offence.

But then we started keeping fingerprints of people who were innocent on file, including witnesses who only gave their fingerprints to rule them out if their fingerprint came up in the current crime investigation.

Then when you look in the national database for a match, there was a much greater chance that the fingerprint that looked similar was not a career criminal, but someone who was once an innocent bystander, or worse: the victim of a crime. Imagine that: you've been beaten up by a drug dealer for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and just as you're getting over that, the police start questioning you about a burglary because there was a print found that looked sort of similar to yours....

Raspberry Pi 500 and monitor arrive in time for Christmas

Entitlement?

That's hardly fair.

He is thinking different priorities from the Raspberry folks, that's all.

Raspberry Pis have been cheap because they're looking to served the widest base market, and that's the SD card crowd.

However, many hardcore Pi users are now are now the sort of people who add NVME. An NVME adapter is always an added aftermarket cost, and fitting it in the base model would be cheaper as it would leverage economies of scale. But it would make it more expensive for the core market, even if only marginally. Raspberry don't want to do this.

They have three audience groups now:

The kids' toy crowd

The maker crowd

The not-really-maker crowd who want to have a device that they can do interesting stuff on without fighting with either hardware or software.

I suspect that last one isn't particularly profitable....

GitHub's boast that Copilot produces high-quality code challenged

Re: What will it mean to be a....

But this is kind of similar to the massive off-shoring of entry-level jobs a decade or two ago (I was working in IT in the UK).

The talk then was that only the "low value" jobs were being off-shored, and all the high value, highly skilled work was still here, managing and supervising.

But didn't everyone in a high-value job start in an entry-level job...? Where do the next generation of high-value jobs come from if we off-shore the entry-level jobs that are a vital part of staff development? In the case of off-shoring, the IT and service industries are getting more and more high-value jobs offshored, because now there's more offshore staff looking to climb the career ladder than onshore, but with AI, you can't just expect GitHub Copilot to get so good at it's job that it can review the next generation of AIs to get them through their low experience.

People need to be really good programmers to perform code reviews, and as programming gets shifted to AI, how are we going to be able to get people doing enough programming to learn to do reviews?

Re: What will it mean to be a....

If generative AI LLMs will not repeat grammatical "rules" invented by pedants in the 18th century and will actually accept real common English as correct, then maybe I can live with AI after all...

AI hiring bias? Men with Anglo-Saxon names score lower in tech interviews

Re: You can't add arbitrary data to remove bias.

Utter semantics. I mean... you can think I'm wrong on a technicality, but that doesn't make my whole argument "bollocks".

Re: You can't add arbitrary data to remove bias.

Positive discriminationis simply correcting for normal human bias. People trust people who "look right" for the job they're hiring for. People who "look right" are people the most similar to the people you've seen doing the job before. The people you've seen doing the job before are probably white males. This automatically biases people to hire white males.

There are two philosophies in positive discrimination.

The first is just about visibility -- the more people who aren't white men that do a job, the more people who aren't white men will be hired to do the same job in the future. Over time the exposure to people who aren't white men will undermine the unconscious bias that white men are better at the job. This philosophy says that it's OK to sacrifice short term productivity in order to guarantee better productivity in the long term.

The second is about pure statistics -- we know that people are x% more likely to hire a white male than anyone else, so we correct for that by making it harder to hire a white man and easier to hire someone who's not a white man. This not only has the long term effective of reducing the long-term bias towards white men, but it actually means you're more likely to get the most talented individual now, so it's long-term and short-term productivity gains.

Re: You can't add arbitrary data to remove bias.

> If you're looking at what somebody is called, you're doing it wrong (and in some places there are laws about that sort of thing).

Yes, and the unspoken problem is that what's happening here is that the AI has found a way to intuit the bias from hidden patterns so that it can still be racist/xenophobic/misogynist/generally bigotted by spotting patterns that humans wouldn't, and the people pulling the levers that the AI is working on are in a panic that it's acting like a bigot so they're actively seeking to stop it preferential treating the people who traditionally always get preferential treatment, and the only way they can do that is by getting the AI to be biased against them, and if they're doing that, they absolutely cannot claim to be acting fairly and objectively. Equal opportunities has always meant needing to act preferentially on the traditionally disadvantaged demographics, but that usually involves quotas and other such explicit policies -- this is just opaque beyond belief.

Hardware barn denies that .004 seconds of facial recognition violated privacy

Most likely you have never heard the phrase "computer says no".

Here, the Hammerbarn are trying to identify people who have been banned from their shops. Even if it's not an issue now, there will absolutely come a time when the security are confident enough in it that they'll assume it correct by default.

Now, note that I said "Even if it's not an issue now", because... well why did the authorities start investigating? There is nothing in the story to tell us why, but presumably someone complained, but simply hadn't tweeted about it or spoken to local papers.

We can only speculate about what happened, but I personally think it's a reasonable assumption that a customer was stopped by a security guard and would have been expected to provide proof that he wasn't the person the computer thought he was. i.e. he would have had to provide sensitive personal information to even just go in and buy a roll of masking tape, which doesn't really seem particularly fair, because no-one else does. If I have to prove I'm not someone who bears a passing resemblance to me, that's basically presumed guilty until proven innocent.

People may talk harsh about public bodies sticking their noses in where it's not necessary, but public bodies generally don't do anything until and unless asked to. We don't know what the complaint was, and I think my speculation probably describes a likely scenario that is definitely far from the worst case scenario. The fact that the authorities didn't give out details shows that they consider the complainant's data protection rights to be important -- more so than the retailer does!

But on a tangent... we are, as a culture, too quick to judge people who make decisions we do not immediately agree with. As a result, we're developing a situation where people are more and more having to justify their stance, and while that sounds good in theory, when we start having to publish the public complaints that started it off, we're only going to start discouraging the complaints in the first place.

Re: Alexa, please explain...

Which is all well and good, but it's not about whether capturing the personal data (your image) using a security camera is reasonable, but rather the processing of that data. In the UK, we have the GDPR that talks about processing of personal data, and I'm not personally sure where this sits in regards to that.

If a security camera captures someone committing a crime, processing the images to identify the person is fair game, but is analysing everyone to verify they're not a known trouble-maker legitimate here...? This is stuff testing the borders of laws....