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?
3706 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
> 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.
> 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.
> 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
> 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.
> 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
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.
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.
* 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
> 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?
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.
> 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
> 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.
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.
> 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
> 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 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.
> 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)
> 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.
> 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
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.