Posts by Pete 2

Paul McCartney, Elton John, other creatives demand AI comes clean on scraping

Re: Do it your way

> AI ... Please knock out 12 acousti-pop-ballads

Rather than having a "musician" producing a tonne of identical tunes to order, by hand?

Re: Don't Care

> read a fucking book.

Well, the Kama Sutra is in the public domain. So that is not a very good example

Do it your way

> More than 400 of the UK's leading media and arts professionals have written to the prime minister

If they were half as creative as their promotional material would have us believe, they would have found a more memorable and persuasive way of getting their message to those who matter, than just writing something as mundane as a letter.

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

Re: "Among Americans aged 20-64"

> the precision of the statistics you normally get from academics.

It has been said that economists include decimal points in their statistics to demonstrate that they have a sense of (ironic?) humour

Re: Yes remote working is what caused it...

> So I'm sure forcing people back into the office will kill that attitude

Was happening long before Covid.

When the location of the 2012 Olympics was announced (in 2005) one of my co-irkers essentially stopped doing their paid-for job for several weeks. Instead, while using the company offices as a base - so lax / incompetent was t'management, they spent all their days in property speculation.

It was not because they hated their job - they did so little actual work there was nothing to hate. It was simply because they could.

Spying tonite!

> an unidentified "data partner" ... infer their place of employment.

So really this is just a technique of espionage. As well as inferring a target's person's place of work, the very same process can (and therefore does) infer many other things, too.

Some of which might even be correct

So your [expletive] test failed. So [obscene participle] what?

who tests the testers?

It sounds like the failure was with whoever "productised" the test suite.

Although, blaming someone who has since left the company is always a winning strategy.

Musk’s DOGE probed by top watchdog after poking around Uncle Sam's systems

Recursion

what DOGE needs is a Department of DOGE efficiency.

And what that needs is a ...

But at what point does it become most efficient to just can the lot?

We may have already passed it.

The one interview question that will protect you from North Korean fake workers

Blame HR

> quite a few score the job and millions of dollars are being funneled back to North Korea via this route.

Which makes the employer directly in contravention of international sanctions on the country.

As ChatGPT scores B- in engineering, professors scramble to update courses

Re: Less than perfect

> Anything less is of limited to no use, depending on your situation.

Human development was held back (by an estimated 1000 years) as european dogma insisted that the Aristotelian view of the world was the only plausible / acceptable explanation.

If AIs get things wrong, then it seems pretty obvious that was because the core data they were trained on was lacking. And many, many, individuals will have used that same faulty data themselves.

The difference is that AI outputs can and are examined so the flaws in their training can be corrected. Hopefully that won't take 1000 years.

Less than perfect

> ChatGPT scores B- in engineering

There is an old joke: What do you call a student who always came last in their classes at medical school?

Ans: doctor!

A B- is not at all bad as degrees (or even just undergraduate courses) go. It seems like a false equivalence to require machines to always return perfect results. Whether AI, autonomous vehicles or any other endeavour where human performane [sic] at a lower level is deemed adequate

NTT creates a drone that triggers and catches lightning – then keeps flying

Good to go, again

> triggers lightning, is then struck by a heavenly bolt it instigated, and survives the experience

Any chance of using the energy as a form of in-flight refueling

Brit soldiers tune radio waves to fry drone swarms for pennies

A one hit wonder

So this gadget illuminates a wide area with a very high power RF beacon to fry drones.

But that same beacon inevitably tells the enemy, where the device is located. So a homing missile (that is designed to be immune) can easily knock it out. Just before the second wave of drones flies past unmolested.

IBM shareholders asked to back greater lobbying transparency

Dictionary fail

So is "lobbying" the american word for bribery?

Tech CEO: Four-day work week didn't hurt or help productivity

Slippage

> Giving people Fridays would see zero reduction in overall productivity, as no one really did any work anyway.

But then the day when "no one really did any work anyway" becomes Thursday.

Bill Gates unearths Microsoft's ancient code like a proud nerd dad

Seen worse

i++; // decrement the counter.

Writing for humans? Perhaps in future we'll write specifically for AI – and be paid for it

How to make peanuts

compensates those who produce the content [to make these AI systems work].

We already know what sort of compensation content makers will get. It will be along the same lines as music royalties or Youtube video.

I.e. a few thousand $$$s per million "uses".

And how will that money be recouped? Either through the AI inserting advertising into its responses to its users, or through subscription models.

What will be interesting is how the AI companies arrive at which piece of content was used by its various models.

To avoid disaster-recovery disasters, learn from Reg readers' experiences

Assume the worst

* Your multi-tape backup will fail to restore on the final tape

* when you do restore your data, it will include files that users had deleted _after_ the backup had finished.

* software race conditions magically appear the "wrong" way round when faster hardware in installed

* faster hardware just moves the bottleneck, it doesn't fix things permanently

* everything takes longer the greater the urgency

* reliability is inversely proportional to the size and importance of the audience

* everything works perfectly until you close up the box

Forget Signal. National Security Adviser Waltz now accused of using Gmail for work

The easy route

> after Hillary Clinton was found to be using a private email server,

A person might conclude that using the official, secure, modes of communication are a PITA, compared to the ease of firing up Google Mail or Signal.

Maybe the solution is to make the accepted government apps easier to use, or more responsive?

Privacy died last century, the only way to go is off-grid

The pros have it.

All this article focuses on is corporate snooping of data. Personally, if I was the worrying sort I would be far more concerned that the resources of governments have already sucked up every last byte. Having had specialists, professionals and experts with virtually unlimited resources working on this for decades.

.

Not only that, but I fully expect they have it all correlated, profiled and cross-referenced. "Oh", you might say "but there are laws against that!" which would provoke a smile, but nothing more.

Boeing's Starliner may fly again, pending fixes to literally everything

> It's utterly inconceivable to me that a next-generation fighter will be crewed.

Even more laughable is that the F35 will remain in service until the 2080s

The hardest part

>the next Starliner flight to be a crew capable post-certification mission

... will be finding volunteers to fly the mission.

Would anyone seriously want to, knowing that among the less desirable outcomes is unexpectedly losing 9 months of your life to living in a tin can?

UK govt data people not 'technical,' says ex-Downing St data science head

Yes Minister

> It also promised a new package of AI tools, which it nicknames Humphrey.

As I recall the TV series, wasn't the main role of Humphrey to oppose change, block innovation and preserve the status quo?

Credible nerd says stop using atop, doesn't say why, everyone panics

What would be great

> Kroll has a good reputation in the tech industry.

... is if there was a list somewhere of "credible nerds" whose advice we could heed. While ignoring all the fluff, ignorance, punditry, self-publicity and hysteria that emanates from so many other sources.

Jeff Bezos can now taunt Elon Musk: I'm building a moon rover for NASA, when can Tesla do that?

Far side

> another Blue Ghost is bound for the dark side of the Moon.

There is no dark side of the Moon really. As a matter of fact it's all dark

Museum digs up Digital Equipment Corporation's dusty digital equipment

Progress

> Software was loaded from an RK05 removable disk drive

With a "whopping" 2.5 megabytes (yes, mega) of storage. And it still booted up faster than my PC does today.

Though with a Raspberry Pi being faster than a Cray, we frequently forget just how much things have improved. Except software, whose main function seems to be to slow all that incredible hardware down to a manageable speed.

Datacenters near Heathrow seemingly stay up as substation fire closes airport

Re: How?

Leaving aside the boolean failure but nearby datacenters seem not to be unaffected. you have to wonder how many other airports are similarly vulnerable?

If not specifically a substation, then some other infrastructure SPoF - you know: the ones that every self-respecting disaster recovery plan had identified decades ago.

US Space Force warns Chinese satellites are 'dogfighting' in space

LEO robot wars

> Four years ago it launched a satellite with a robotic arm

Ahhh, arm wrestling in space. I'd pay to watch that (well, maybe only once)

Could the concept could be extended to satellite volleyball, or intergalactic bar billiards

This one weird trick can make online publishing faster, safer, more attractive, and richer

Re: How much?

> No comment on the Guardian, but Wikipedia is no where close to being in a precarious existential state.

The Guardian sits atop a £1.2 billion (and growing) mountain of assets in the form of The Scott Trust. Their exhortations for donations ring hollow

Get off that old Firefox by Friday or you'll be sorry, says Moz

Re: Forced obsolescence

> the root certificate is hard-coded into that version of Firefox,

Is that similar to the problems they are having with old Chromecast devices? It sounds like there are workarounds for that ...

Forced obsolescence

> an expiring root certificate.

Is "expiring" the same as Mozilla simply not bothering to renew it?

UK must pay cyber pros more than its Prime Minister, top civil servant says

Innit for the money?

> paid a salary higher than that of the Prime Minister

Specialists get paid a lot because they offer value for money. Employing one (if you can recognise a good one) is cheaper than a "do it yourself" solution.

Politicians are motivated by different rewards than cash. Any half decent Prime Minister could earn far more, if / when they wanted to, in private industry,

A Kings Counsel barrister (e.g. Starmer) can easily earn £1mn a year. Compared to the one-sixth of that paid to the P.M.

The IT world moves fast, so why are admins slow to upgrade?

Not risk free

> The question is, why?

Because experience tells us that updates, patches and upgrades are quite likely to introduce new problems. Whether that means a new set of bugs that need to be analyzed and fixed, incompatibility with older software - requiring possibly a long chain of dependencies to be upgraded (assuming they actually can be upgraded) plus the possibility that after all those forced updates, the original bugs still exist.

And as we all know,every minute of downtime, every support call, all gets counted against the IT department. No matter what the cause actually was.

Altnets told to stop digging and start stuffing fiber through abandoned pipes

Unused because ... ?

> Every year, a percentage of older utility infrastructure needs to be replaced with modern plastic piping, leaving the abandoned assets in the ground

Although it might not matter that an old water pipe was abandoned because it had a leak¹, you have to wonder how big a state of disrepair all these unused subterranean tubes are in.

And the same question can be asked of all the other ones, too.

[1] Though if that allows an ingress of water it could still make the pipe unusable.(Especially if the fibres carry floating point data)

Windows 7 lives! How to keep your favorite fossil running

If it works ...

> There are valid reasons: hardware that lacks drivers for newer versions, or a need for some software that won't run on later versions.

The most valid reason (and why my two W7 instances live on as VMs) is that it runs all the software I needed it to, and it was the last version of windows a person who bought it, actually owned.

Plus it remains the least sucky of Microsoft's offerings.

As security or bug fixes. I don't care. My VMs are well hidden, have backups and have no need for an external connection outside of some carefully curated remote mounts.

SpaceX says bad vibes most likely cause of Starship 7 flop

Bouncy

> a "harmonic response" several times stronger in flight than had been seen in previous testing

And we all thought it was only the Space Launch System that went boeing boing

> I'm surprised he has the time

I suspect that somewhere deep in the bowels (where else?) of xAI is at least one Musk avatar. Which allows him to be performing multiple acts of development / destruction / dickishness all at the same time

IBM Consulting workers told management wants to 'more closely align pay, performance'

Dead weight

> a "closer alignment between pay and performance."

I was one of those consultants briefly, around the time of birth of the Internet. During a brief period of "downtime" I discovered just how much IBM was charging for my time and the rates of internal cross-charge between departments. From that I calculated I was carrying six non-productive employees: IBMers who had never in their (sometimes long) careers brought in a penny in external fees.

Now I appreciate there are additional forms of value that some of those individuals' skills brought to the company. But there were also others who did not exhibit even the most basic work-abilities that any employer could use.

I suspect many of the people advocating this sort of closer alignment fall into that latter category.

SpaceX has an explanation for the Falcon 9 bits that hit Poland

Blame Issac Newton

> SpaceX has published an explanation for the debris from the Falcon 9 second stage that fell over Poland last week

Gravity?

Microsoft's Euro-mandated File Explorer surgery shows 'less is more' is still a thing

Lead the way

> strip away all the system cruft that interrupts

Yes, what we want is more less.

As Amazon takes over the Bond franchise, we submit our scripts for the next flick

remakes

Doctor No stars

From Bezos with Love

For your account only

Tomorrow Never Delivers

and the sequel: Wait Another Day

A Review to a Kill

and Bezos' biogaphy: The World is Not Enough

There's a slight chance Asteroid 2024 YR4 could hit Moon in 2032

Re: Splashback

> I'd like to think that it (debris from hitting the Moon) would burn up in the earth's atmosphere

Yes. But to get to Earth's atmosphere it has to pass through all the usual orbits inhabited by satellites. Whether geostationary or LEO.

And we know how worried satellite owners get about the effect of hyper velocity tiny specks hitting their hardware.

Although we don't know much about this asteroid, a low estimate of its size is 50m diameter. That gives it a volume of 65,000 m³ impacting the Moon at 17km/s.

That can throw up a lot of dust.

Splashback

> asteroid 2024 YR4 could hit the Moon

And where will the ejecta go?

Might not be a good time to be in Earth orbit

Murena boss says customers about to wake up from its cloud storage nightmare

WAG

>the outfit had approximately 120,000 open accounts, with 50,000 active in the last 30 days. All accounts have been affected by the storage outage.

> He acknowledged users' frustration and said, "You always have some angry people,

As a wild-assed guess, about 70,000 of them!

Boeing warns SLS staff that job cuts could be on the way

Theory or practice?

> the only way to send astronauts to the Moon for now

Although it is a long, long way from meeting that goal.

And even then, given the huge cost of each launch, it's effect on potential lunar colonisation will be negligible.

Does this thing run on a 220 V power supply? Oh. That puff of smoke suggests not

Whats in a name?

> one of the first HP/UX machines

A company that could have had a very different operating system if it had been called Packard Hewlett

Sniff

> reassembling the machine and returning it to the chap who'd been given custody of it

... who then asked why it smelled of washing powder

Does DOGE have what it takes to actually tackle billions in US govt IT spending?

I spent it my way!

> If DOGE really wants to get a hold of US government tech spending, it needs to think bigger.

But is that its goal?

I would not be at all surprised to learn that Musk's real plan is to divert that spending to Tesla and SpaceX.

Robocallers who phoned the FCC pretending to be from the FCC land telco in trouble

Daisy

It sounds like the FCC could use an AI that keeps them occupied, so they can't bother other people

UK govt must learn fast and let failing projects die young

Know what you're aiming for

> Another feature of successful innovators is their ability to learn quickly what works and what doesn't, so that failed experiments can be stopped promptly

A better approach is to have experienced people veto the obvious turkeys before they even hatch. But that would require decision makers (ministers) to have sufficient technical skills to understand the problems that a project advocate might "forget" to mention. As well as having some realistic view of the total cost and benefits.