* Posts by Lusty

1713 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009

Forgotten Turing treasure trove rescued from attic goes under the hammer

Lusty

Suicide

Can we please stop saying suicide? There’s no evidence he committed suicide, and that conclusion was thrown out at a later inquest. It’s just as likely it was an accident but more likely he was murdered by the government due to being gay and a “threat to national security”.

It’s an insult to his memory to continue the suicide story at every opportunity.

The 'End of 10' is nigh, but don't bury your PC just yet

Lusty

Re: app Mnaagers / installation of apps

It’s funny, because what you said is and always has been the problem, not the solution.

Microsoft walking away from datacenter leases (probably) isn't a sign the AI bubble is bursting

Lusty

Re: Are you sure obtaining power is cheap?

“ (*) London's exploding footpaths are mostly overloaded distribution cables finally letting go”

Mostly that’s been a drug gang illegally splicing into the grid to run drug farms in abandoned department stores. It’s been widely reported now that the gang was caught.

Google’s broadband balloon laser comms tech floated out as independent company

Lusty

They seem to have removed the balloon element which leaves this as just another point to point wireless network option. They say light is better due to congestion but point to point radio isn’t congested at all as it’s directional. Nice that there’s another option but if a bird can block the laser I’m not sure it’s a step forward.

US Dept of Housing screens sabotaged to show deepfake of Trump sucking Elon's toes

Lusty

Re: During this time

With respect, you’re no longer welcome here. The Reg has always been a home of smart people.

SpaceX receives FAA blessing for another Starship test

Lusty

Now now, the sooner this testing is done the sooner we can pack him and his orange pet off to Mars.

Microsoft trims more CPUs from Windows 11 compatibility list

Lusty

Re: Surface

Obviously other laptops with older chips exist. Did you buy yours with Windows 11 pre installed though?

Lusty

Surface

Microsoft included some older chips originally because Surface devices used them, so the OEM at fault was them. I imagine those devices are now discontinued so they’re correcting the error and it probably affects nobody else. It will mean though that a Surface Studio won’t continue to get updates despite being a recent purchase.

The software UK techies need to protect themselves now Apple's ADP won’t

Lusty

Re: You don't need alternatives

The requirement of a warrant is universal so I don’t see the relevance here. The only difference is who hands them the keys.

Lusty

Re: You don't need alternatives

There are laws to compel suspects to provide encryption keys in the UK so iTunes wouldn’t change a thing. You’d sit in prison gloating how they don’t have access to your data. Under that provision they never have to release you.

I don’t think now is a good time for anyone in the US to be lecturing about data privacy, do you?

Lusty

Re: Commenting here on my main phone

How do you ensure the two are never on in the same location? It’s trivial to track devices which are related using various techniques including public IPs, WiFi, phone network data. It’s this sort of confidence that makes tracking criminals easy as the authorities can build up a nice bunch of evidence.

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

Lusty

Re: "There is very little incremental utility"

By assistant, do you mean the teenage boy he’s been using? For government business.

A win at last: Big blow to AI world in training data copyright scrap

Lusty

They worked in an almost identical way, assigning statistical significance weightings to things and using vector maths to find stuff.

Fun fact, Google were also sued for copyright and lost, it's why they no longer put all the content on their page, robbing others of ad revenue. They now use sources like wikipedia directly, and pay for the privelege.

Lusty

Re: "The copying of our content was not 'fair use.'"

Lawyers pay for licences for the copyright content they use in their work, actually. The books are exceptionally expensive too, I used to be the person buying the licences! The reason they are expensive is that it's a commercial licence ;)

Lusty

That said, they’re only licensing from folk with deep enough pockets to sue. :( America is fully broken.

Lusty

It’s interesting that OpenAI has started buying licences. That sets the expectation that they know they need a licence. Any and all content for which they don’t have a licence must therefore be excluded from the training set as per their own understanding of the law.

This puts everyone with a website or YouTube channel in a very good position when the class action starts.

Lusty

Re: "The copying of our content was not 'fair use.'"

Simple distinction, training your brain is personal use. Training an AI model and serving it to everyone on the planet for money is very much commercial use.

Amazon's Kuiper secures license to take on Starlink in the UK

Lusty

USD

Why quote US prices for Starlink when the article is about the UK? UK pricing is published on their website so better to use that.

Ontario responds to Trump tariff by pitching Starlink deal into the trash

Lusty

Love Canadians

They are such straightforward people, they don’t play games and they have some pretty good moral fibre. This is a great opportunity for the rest of the world to reduce reliance on the USA and hopefully everyone will grasp that opportunity and tell Trump to shove it.

AI pothole patrol to snap flaws in Britain's crumbling roads

Lusty

This is the stupidest use of technology. The costs are massively increased doing unnecessary admin.

Buy some A-Z maps and some felt tip pens. Get the people who fill potholes to drive down roads and fill every hole they find. Don’t “assess” the holes, just fill them. When a road is done, use the felt tip to mark it in the map. Eventually all roads are complete and you buy new A-Z maps.

We shouldn’t celebrate people making these solutions, we should fire them.

IT job market is still shrinking but not as quickly as last year

Lusty

Re: As a developer...

Sorry but it’s obvious you’ve not used the product, go and try it before commenting.

The absolutely do understand what the code is trying to do and anyone who has used it knows that.

Lusty

Re: Less Windows support needed

Really? Most folk struggle with taking a screenshot on Mac so I don’t think that’s true at all. If Apple ever work out what the GUI is for they might get parity with Windows, but from what I can see they’re still a graphical keyboard driven OS. For the average user Linux is and always will be problematic.

Lusty

Re: As a developer...

“The only thing an LLM can do code wise is spit out example code of the sort you might find in a stack overflow answer”

So either you’ve not tried GitHub copilot or you’re not asking it for the right help. Try asking it to write your unit tests for you, you’ll be surprised how useful it then seems.

Battery electric vehicles lose their spark in Europe as hybrids steal the show

Lusty

“The average British driver drives 18 miles per day”

Indeed. Electric scooters would solve the problem for the majority of the population but evidently we’re not looking at solutions where vast sums of money can’t be made so instead we banned them and got the police to steal them from kids as a deterrent to this outrageous planet friendly behaviour.

Microsoft's new Surface Laptop 7 has arrived. The recovery images have not

Lusty

Re: Naïve question

You can just load a driver during install. Has everyone forgotten how to install Windows or something? No need to slipstream, no need for network, just load the driver and off you go. You’ll need to load it from a disk, but that’s not that hard

Lusty

Re: Naïve question

yes you can. no headline then though

Brit publishers beg Apple not to hurt online ad revenue

Lusty
Facepalm

Ad free

I just don't know why all these sites can't be more like the Register. I don't think I've ever seen an advert here...

AWS must pay $525M to cloud storage patent holder, says jury

Lusty

In the case of Amazon DNS does form a large part of it, it used to be in their docs and was the reason for backwards file naming with most unique parts first.

Cloud vendor lock-in is shocking, but there's a get out of jail card

Lusty

Re: Terraform

Well if that’s your job you should be aware that there are no logic apps on AWS so you’re doomed to fail. Probably worth looking into if you want to use the word expert at some point.

Lusty

Re: Terraform

Scripting the install doesn’t help with vendor lock in at all, it just wastes a bunch of time pretending to “DevOps”.

You can’t Teraform a Logic App on AWS.

Ahead of Super Tuesday, US elections face existential and homegrown threats

Lusty

Re: The two biggest threats...

Nobody would vote for someone who tells the truth, especially in the USA.

Imagine being told "our problems are actually our own fault" and "when we fix it, you'll be slightly worse off"

Now compare to "it's everyone else's fault, and we're going to war to fix it" and "we'll make you richer, once we sort out these <insert enemy here>"

GPS interference now a major flight safety concern for airline industry

Lusty

Re: Is it naive to suggest ...

Occams razor would suggest it might be easier to just use celestial navigation which is pretty simple alongside modern compute devices with built in tables.

ICBMs have been doing it this way for decades

COVID-19 infection surge detected in wastewater, signals potential new wave

Lusty

Re: "the only figure that really matters is hospitalisations"

"BTW the unhealthy lifestyle was personal choice."

No it wasn't, it was government mandated lockdown for a very large part of it. Working in an office and commuting isn't healthy but it's a huge step up from being locked indoors for months on end without exercise.

Lusty

Re: "the only figure that really matters is hospitalisations"

"Long term incapacitation can result from the after effects ('long covid') of sub-critical covid infection"

The data would seem to suggest the same of lock down measures. Excess deaths without Covid are higher than usual and it's expected this will continue into the future as three years of extremely unhealthy lifestyle takes its toll.

Meanwhile, yes, some people are still getting a grade three/four* cold.

*There is some debate as to the grading system and whether "man flu" is a real grade or just due to men being better at handling real flu or worse at handling the sniffles. Either way, Covid is top grade cold right now and calling in sick is probably usually required.

Grade 1 - A case of the sniffles

Grade 2 - man flu

Grade 3 - actual flu

Grade 4 - Covid

OpenAI: 'Impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials'

Lusty

Re: Sounds like...

I certainly do disapprove, and have certainly considered the outcomes. I think the opposite is also true though, a lot of people are abandoning reasonable and fair IP protections because they think AI is cool. I agree it's cool, but that doesn't make it acceptable to steal all of the IP in the world and use it for your own commercial gain.

Even ignoring the IP issue - this has cost real money to organisations like Reddit, whose API was hit so hard and so often they had to cripple the platform and charge for the API as a result. Even if you agreed with the IP theft you'd have to acknowledge that the compute costs racked up as a direct result of pillaging the Internet ought to be paid for out of the many billions of profit from the models?

Lusty

Re: Sounds like...

"For reference, the Wikipedia payments are not for appearing in the search results but in the summarising block of text that appears to the right of some searches."

The point is, they have to pay to provide someone else's IP. Doesn't matter if it's in the results or on a bumber sticker, you pay for what you use and how you use it and importantly it's the IP owner that decides the terms.

Lusty

Re: Sounds like...

sorry but you've misunderstood what it's doing. Hallucinations in this stuff is when it comes up with a statistically reasonable load of bullshit. Take the example where it quoted some laws in a US case and it took months for everyone to realise those cases don't exist, they just sound plausible. That's not imagination, it's pure statistics.

Lusty

Re: Sounds like...

"There is absolutely no way that any original drafters of copyright law had AI in mind"

They didn't need to, it's generic enough as it is to cover the situation.

If I have an image and put it online you can assume the right to view that photo since I placed it in a public platform to be consumed. That does not give you a licence to redistribute that photo, nor to use that photo in any of your own commercial offerings.

If I write some text and put it online you can assume the right to read that text since I placed it in a public platform to be consumed. That does not give you a licence to redistribute that text, nor to use that text in any of your own commercial offerings.

If you wish to create a textbook, that would be a commercial undertaking and you will need to seek licenses from me to include my work, whether wholly or in part. The AI organisations have such a "text book" in their possession as an offline copy of the Internet and its history, and are using it for commercial purposes right now.

If you wish to use my IP in a commercial product such as a statistical model, then again you'll need to seek a licence.

If you don't have a licence for the type of commercial usage you are carrying out then you are outside of the law and will either need to buy a licence or accept any and all legal consequences.

Pretty much all of the above was covered by the Windows 3.1 EULA back in the '90s. What's good for the goose...

Lusty

Re: Sounds like...

Google were hit hard a while ago (probably 20 years) for essentially providing the results in their pages riddled with ads, robbing the actual source of the opportunity to monetise. Any actual information Google returns now, such as Wikipedia data, is licenced and they pay a fee. I believe the newspapers were the ones with the beef originally.

Lusty

Re: Sounds like...

Sorry but it isn't learning, it literally uses vector maths to predict the best fit for the next word based on statistical analysis of lots of words. Image based systems are similar but not quite the same.

Lusty

Re: Sounds like...

The child isn’t being commercialised as a product. In this instance they are creating a commercial product based on copyright work, and no it’s not learning it’s a statistical model much like a search engine, and we have case law for search engines providing copyright material instead of linking back to source.

And all that is also ignoring the enormous costs to platforms they have pillaged to get the data. Reddit famously crippled their platform to stop it as they couldn’t afford to supply the API access to feed these beasts.

Microsoft introduces AI meddling to your files with Copilot in OneDrive

Lusty

"They might work, but what big corporation is going to take a punt?"

Apple did. In doing so, they proved that having an effective monopoly and giving away a free quality alternative isn't sufficient to gain traction against MS Office. To me that suggests MS Office might not be winning due to antics so much as it's the best option for most people.

RIP Kevin Mitnick: Former most-wanted hacker dies at 59

Lusty

Takedown

Great movie, can't seem to find it anywhere to watch though. Anyone know where it can be found?

Microsoft admits unauthorized access to Exchange Online, blames Chinese gang

Lusty

Re: I blame Microsoft

"Before cloud criminals needed to search for individual exchange servers"

No they didn't, email servers have always had DNS records pointing at them. All people need or ever needed was a mail domain, it's literally how email works!

Australia to phase out checks by 2030

Lusty

Re: They still exist?

HMRC only send you a cheque if you don't accept their now default electronic payment so that's on you.

FBI boss says COVID-19 'most likely' escaped from lab

Lusty

this again?

It must be time to stop with the propaganda by now. From what I can see there is plenty of evidence showing Wuhan wasn't even where it originated, they just spotted it faster because there were experts there. Many reported cases of identical symptoms globally in late 2018, many predating Wuhan.

If the FBI want to save lives, take a look at gun crime and stop trying to start a global war just because the USD is collapsing.

Punch-drunk Apple Watch called 15 cops to a boxing workout when it heard 'shots'

Lusty

Re: Swatted

Don’t worry I’m sure our US cousins found someone else to shoot that day. Statistically speaking they probably found quite a few.

Nice smart device – how long does it get software updates?

Lusty

Re: Nobody

Your machine still uses a basic timer? I've not had one like that for 20 years. The time is based on the load on any halfway modern machine to save energy and water.

Lusty

Re: Nobody

Smart washing machines tell you when they’re done through your phone. If you have an office the other end of the house this can be the difference of finishing the washing in a day or not as you’ll know when the dryer is ready for the next load.

Not a huge advantage but I do find this handy.

University students recruit AI to write essays for them. Now what?

Lusty

Re: AI is the new pocket calculator

I mean, it was pretty cool when SpaceX landed that rocket on the ship for reuse, don't you think?

The breakthroughs in the last 20-30 years kind of speak for themselves, not sure why you'd need a list, unless you're unable to think for yourself?