Posts by teebie

Meta offered one AI researcher at least $10,000,000 to join up

"Training frontier models is a bit like alchemy:"

It's a load of old bollocks, and it doesn't work.

Half of businesses rethink ditching humans for customer service bots

Re: Good

Is this your customer support experience when talking to an AI, or when talking to a human. Both are feasible.

BT won't budge over pay hike for manager grade employees

"AI will help it reduce headcount in the call centers"

This is a great advert for Zen Internet.

Atlassian tweaks licenses to reward those who buy more, but gets its sums wrong

Why would anybody want more of their wares?

Barclays Bank signs 100k license Copilot deal with Microsoft

"Volkswagen AG"

Ah, the mark of quality

Tech suppliers asked to support single electronic health record across England

It was last time.

See articles related to care.data, and the reasons Ben Goldacre went from a proponent to an opponent of the scheme

Data watchdog will leave British Library alone – further probes 'not worth our time'

Re: The ICO - busy not making work for itself.

"This decision allows companies to avoid sanctions, merely by behaving as they are supposed to behave."

Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, economists claim

"commitment to internal education and evangelism"

Evangelism doesn't seem like something you would need to do for a product that was non-shit.

AI training license will allow LLM builders to pay for content they consume

Re: How much would a LLM training cost?

"I don't see how an AI model is any different."

When you search for an image on google and copy it, you use the image.

The AI model trawls an image and is trained on it, it (or the company doing the training) uses the image.

Developer scored huge own goal by deleting almost every football fan in Europe

Always type the WHERE clause first when making potentially career-limiting updates

Law firm 'didn't think' data theft was a breach, says ICO. Now it's nursing a £60K fine

"DPP Law"

'DPP' in the context of law normally means Director of Public Prosecutions. Are they trying to look more important than they are?

Musk's DOGE muzzled on X over tape storage baloney

Re: 9 track tape?

They get archived to The Atlantic magazine

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

"Turner said the reasons tend to fall into one of two categories. First, there are the mission-critical applications that can never be offline for any reason. Upgrading is, therefore, highly problematic and likely to be a business risk."

The third reason: because the new version (e.g., maybe, version 8.0 does not deliver like-for-like performance compared to version 5.7) is worse may be more common than both of them but together.

"When your application database version is multiple updates behind the rest of your systems, this adds to the workload and increases the challenge."

That's not true, if you can upgrade straight from version 5 to 8 then doing it in one go rather doing upgrades from 5 to 6, 6 to 7 and 7 to 8 a year apart reduces workload.

If you can't go straight from versions 5 to 8 then you are better off if the team doing the 6->7 and 7->8 upgrades have recent experience of doing the 5->6 upgrade

Apple drags UK government to court over 'backdoor' order

Re: Put up or shut up

Maybe you can't remember the details because it has happened so often its not worth remembering specific instances

Lawyers face judge's wrath after AI cites made-up cases in fiery hoverboard lawsuit

"added a click box to our AI platform"

This is not a sufficient response to misleading the court. If the person who wrote this was a lawyer, then they should no longer be.

"With a repentant heart, I sincerely apologize to this court, to my firm, and colleagues representing defendants for this mistake"

This is more the sort of thing I would hope for

US newspaper publisher uses linguistic gymnastics to avoid saying its outage was due to ransomware

"Boyz"

I misread that as "Boz", which I misremembered as Charles Dickens' pseudonym (Bos) and thought this was a really old story of how journalism was done.

Why UK Online Safety Act may not be safe for bloggers

Re: First amendment ?

'needed'?

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

Have they considered...improving it?

DeepSeek stirs intrigue and doubt across the tech world

He said: "commoditized" "competitive differentiation" "measuring twice if not three times and cutting once." "believe very strongly" "highly committed"

Tell me a bullshit artist without telling me...anything, as far as I can tell

Canvassing apps used by UK political parties riddled with privacy, security issues

"they claimed the versions examined by the researchers were old and no longer available. Therefore, any negative findings were moot."

It's fine, we were leaking data in the past. There is no way that could possibly affect the present.

White House asks millions of govt workers if they would be so kind as to fork right off

Re: @James Hughes 1

"Austerity? I see no austerity!"

Then go and look at the state of the roads.

Tired techie botched preventative maintenance he soon learned wasn't needed

Re: Gravitational attraction

Jurassic Park?

AI agents? Yes, let's automate all sorts of things that don't actually need it

"Electric scooters are useful for certain scenarios [...] Operator is like that"

It will be seemingly only used by over-confident arsehats, and a scourge for everyone else

Re: There is nothing new under the sun...

Way too many people trust it. And it lets those people Dunning-Kruger faster.

FortiGate config leaks: Victims' email addresses published online

"If your organization has consistently adhered to routine best practices [...]," said the vendor.

Should that be

"If, unlike us, your organization has consistently adhered to routine best practices [...],"

Trump nukes 60 years of anti-discrimination rules for federal contractors

"institutions of American society … have adopted and actively use dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences "

There should be a law against that.

Apple solves broken news alerts by turning off the AI

Re: Why?

So: a list of headlines, but broken

Devs sent into security panic by 'feature that was helpful … until it wasn't'

Re: Excel can also be unhelpfully helpful...

This is both helpful information, and saying "just do more work something that in more inconvenient, for no good reason"

Can AWS really fix AI hallucination? We talk to head of Automated Reasoning Byron Cook

This seems to be an example of Betteridge's law of headlines - Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.

"These are big claims. What lies behind them?"

"behind them?" could be replaced be a full stop.

"domain experts arguing about what the right answer should be"

The main issues aren't disagreements between experts, it's AI spurting out absolute horseshit.

Apple shrugs off BBC complaint with promise to 'further clarify' AI content

"While putting control over receiving the summaries into the hands of users is helpful, it would be better for Apple to make this an opt in feature until the issues have been ironed out."

The summaries are so egregiously wrong it would be better for Apple to completely disable the feature until it can guarantee a reasonable level of accuracy.

I suspect the time that they can make that guarantee is 'never'.

Are you better value for money than AI?

We tried that at work, it gave a 4 step process that was

1 wrong, from the view that following them wouldn't work

2 wrong, in the sense that they were not even internally consistent

Eight things that should not have happened last year, but did

Re: We all know that 'AI' is not really artificial intelligence.

summarizing, editing, building upon, and fictionalising already existing content.

Open source maintainers are drowning in junk bug reports written by AI

Re: Wetware filters are usually sufficient.

Well that was rendered meaningless by a typo.

I meant "to encourage confirmation bias"

Re: Wetware filters are usually sufficient.

" free/cheap models have no control over "temperature", and it's never zero. I have no idea why"

To encourage confirmation answers. If you run a generative AI 10 times, then its more likely one is accidentally right, and that is the one that lodges in the brain.

Microsoft hijacks keyboard shortcut to bring Copilot to your attention

Dirty, evil bastards.

Why Google's Chrome monopoly won't crack anytime soon

"This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine"

Does it? It shouldn't do.

Whomp-whomp: AI PCs make users less productive

"misconceptions," [...] AI PCs are a gimmick or futuristic [...] concerned about the privacy and security of their data when using an AI PC [...] AI PCs are not secure or regulated.

Should these be called 'conceptions' or is that not a strong enough word?

Re: Generative AI produces Bullshit

Surely generative AI is spotting patterns contained in mass datasets, and that's where the bullshit comes from.

Re: Not really news

I recently had a case where the AI summary gave (what turned out to be) the right answer when there was a typo in my query, which it corrected to the wrong answer when I fixed the typo.

Unfortunately, we're no closer to rightly apprehending Babbage's confusion of ideas, because the AI is a black box.

Want advice from UK government website about tax 'n' stuff? Talk to the chatbot

"HMRC directed us to the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) for comment. DSIT has yet to respond."

Why? It's HMRC's chatbot

Linus Torvalds: 90% of AI marketing is hype

Re: I agree

Possibly the same case, possibly a different one

They thought the AI was detecting cancer, but it was actually detecting the little rulers that are often found in images of cancer

You have issues with 'Issues' always being called 'Issues' in Jira, so Atlassian now allows them to be called ‘Tasks’

Re: There are already tasks in Jira

"Then maybe Atlassian could start fixing the huge pile of bugs issues shite that is Jira.

TFTFY

Embattled users worn down by privacy options? Let them eat code

Re: Irony

"ask yourself would your job exist without it?"

Yes, I work for a real company that provides users with a service they want, not a pack of bandits using underhand tricks to try to exploit their users.

Imagine a government that told Big Tech to improve resilience – then punished failures

Re: Why?

"Bad businesses will go bankrupt at some point"

If you want evidence to the contrary then <waves generally at everything>

Extracting vendor promises won't fix cybersecurity. Extracting teeth might

"If insurers refused to cover not just business losses from wonky security, but also didn't extend cover at all if standards could not be shown to be in place."

If a couple of the larger insurers did this, then companies would insure themselves with the others.

Offering cheaper insurance to companies with standards in place could work. Or offer cheap insurance, with the option to add an expensive schedule for covering terrible security practices.

Feel free to ignore GenAI for now – a new kind of software developer is being born

" Developers won't need decades of experience to draw an input box. "

Major 'man in an advert who cannot open an umbrella' vibes.

Post-CrowdStrike catastrophe, Microsoft figures moving antivirus out of Windows kernel mode is a good idea

Re: Do we bounce between mirror universes?

Please don't hold your breath when installing Microsoft patches. Asphyxiation is almost inevitable.

HPE to pursue $4B claim against estate of Mike Lynch over Autonomy acquisition

Re: What the Feds wanted

I imagine he took more of an interest in US Federal criminal prosecution than a person picked at random

Gartner mages: Payback from office AI expected in around two years

"Mainstream adoption of AI in the office and among employees remains around two years off, according to analysis from consultancy Gartner."

The missed the "and will remain, in perpetuity" after "remains"

Trump campaign cites Iran election phish claim as evidence leaked docs were stolen

Re: The research dossier was a 271-page document

A lot of the pages came from the DFS catalogue.