Posts by I ain't Spartacus

AI agent seemingly tries to shame open source developer for rejected pull request

Re: 24/7/365 automated harassment and bullying

Not seen jelous before. But, if there's one thing we've learned from the internet, you can't trust those bloody KARENs.

The Americans have ruined cake! It's not just the frosting. If you talk to kids now, none of them like fruitcake. Their birthday cakes are sponge - and so are their wedding cakes! Bloody kids these days, with their long hair and their loud music... Whatever happened to proper fruitcake!?!?!

My mate married an American, 25 years ago. And they had an iced chocolate cake for her and the American family, who were all appalled by the evils of fruit cake, and a fruit one for the British lot. It wasn't a big enough wedding to need a two tier cake, but needs must. But the anti-fruitcake propaganda has now infected our younger generations. There ought to be compulsory fruit cake lessons in schools.

Re: 24/7/365 automated harassment and bullying

Do bots make typos?

That's an interesting question. The initial (human curated) training data may be perfect, and without typos. But their main training data, of harvested copyright material and random bits of the internet certainly does. Even published books have typos. And you've got certain words, like ridiculous, where you almost see it spelled "rediculous" more often than you see it correctly - so an authentic looking AI generated screed ought to have that particular mistake in it.

On the other hand, it's also got the dictionary in its training data.

30+ Chrome extensions disguised as AI chatbots steal users' API keys, emails, other sensitive data

It's all vetted by AI. The finest technology that money can buy. Never makes mistakes, works 24 hours a day, absolutely brilliant.

Re: Rats

David132,

I came to post exactly this point. But you did it far more wittily, and first. Have a great weekend. Possibly also drink beer.

Fukushima's radioactive hybrid terror pig boom was driven by amorous mothers

please tell me you are not going down the Bambi Burger route :o)

My brother used to sell Bambi burgers in his old pub. It was near a bunch of shooting estates in Berkshire, the gamekeepers drank there, and every so often he got a knock on the door and a Muntjac or two to deal with. They were very popular - and very economical at a few free beers for deer the estates were going to cull anyway. I think he said you could get about 80 burgers out of one.

Now, in his new pub, he's just made a deal with one of the London Parks and has 50 red (I think) deer on the way. So as well as burgers, there'll also be roast venison on sometimes. Or he may go for pies. He's always done good pies in his pubs. Proper ones, with lids (not a casserole with a pastry hat!). Nice, big square ones.

Posting AI-generated caricatures on social media is risky, infosec killjoys warn

Re: "create a caricature of the boss and his job based on everything you know about him"

stenography

Miss Jones! Take a letter please.

Are you sure you don't mean steganography stegosaurus?

Tech support chap invented fake fix for non-problem and watched it spread across the office

Re: Power without responsibility

I remember hearing a loud degaussing doioioioing noise one night many years ago. It sounded like a CRT degaussing, but much louder. And my PC monitor was an LCD. So I ran downstairs to see if the TV had exploded. It hadn't, so I checked everywhere to make sure we weren't on fire - couldn't see anything, so went to bed. When I checked the news the next morning, the Buncefield oil storage depot had exploded, 25 miles away. My town being in a valley presumably did funny echoey things to the bang?

VMware scores early win in Siemens software licensing dispute

Re: Who writes (and signs) these contracts ?

Even if the contract says that disputes are to be settled under German law - if the software they said they wanted to extend in the US isn't covered by that contract, then this isn't actually a contract dispute at all. It's a software piracy dispute. In which case it's the US subsidiary, so it would logically happen in the US courts.

Siemens have presumably refused to cooperate in an audit to see whether they're currently operating this software to try to get Broadcom to the negotiating table, and the response has been to call in the lawyers.

Broadcom are still in their zero tolerance, zero compromise mode. I guess because their whole strategy will fall apart if they start acting reasonably in a few cases. I guess they're going to test the theory to destruction that their software is irreplaceable.

'Roaring cougars' lunched on OpenAI in Super Bowl ad battle, but ai.com wins the day

Re: Superbowl ad != good business

The great thing about the AI industry is that profits aren't relevant. None of the companies make any money from AI. They're all massively loss-making, and funded by VC cash, or in the case of the big existing players - cash taken from the shareholders without them getting much choice in the matter. More importantly there's not much future prospect of profits without building out massive amounts of ludicrously expensive datacenters, and hoping they can put prices up enough without losing all their customers to some else still relying on VCs and hope.

So unlike car companies and movies, they can happily spend all they want. Either the execs believe they're the future, and every penny wasted spent now is fully worth it as an investment in the future - or the execs are just on the make and so you spend big to make yourself look more important to get more money you can trouser a percentage of as it leaks out of the company. Or possibly both.

British Army splashes $86M on AI gear to speed up the battlefield kill chain

Re: I'll be back

Most/much of It's not really AI - but algorithmic data processing, and short-range networking. However AI and big data are cool, and that's how you get funding, so shut up.

if everyone's got a tablet, then everyone can see the output of the drone(s) you're using. If everyone's microphones are networked, then you can detect, and get a good idea of the position, of incoming drones. Also incoming rounds, if you've got it set up right. Drones can also be detected with electronic warfare systems.

less exciting, but all very useful.

New hire fixed a problem so fast, their boss left to become a yoga instructor

Re: Quite a rare sight

KittenHuffer,

Try setting your password to Geoff Capes...

Otherwise I suggest Overproof Rum...

Re: Posher

My mate had one of the similar Sony Trinitron TVs, with the flat glass at the front and thick, but slightly less curved than normal glass of the monitor inside it. it was a 40-something inch widescreen. When he replaced that with a flat screen telly, he had to call me in to move it - because he was unable to lift it off the TV stand. It were a chunky beast. Getting it down the stairs was definitely a two-man job.

Re: Quite a rare sight

The most secure password is the password that cannot be entered correctly. The system remains safe from both hackers, and most importantly of all, users. Guaranteeing 100% uptime, and maximum gaming + beer & onion bhaji time for the operators.

Was your boss, by any chance, called Simon?

Re: Quite a rare sight

reading logs. It's like reading the instructions.

Who does that these days ?

But reading the instructions is cheating!

My favourite IT-related yoga position / back pain from back in the day would be called, "moving the 19" CRT monitor".

A fearsome task, to be approached with great care. Although, it's not so much a yoga position, as a whole dance. First you have to unscrew the horrible VGA cable from the back of the monitor or computer, which requires either crawling under the desk or leaning all the way to the back of it. This is a skill you need to learn to do by touch only. Then you have to move a horrible, heavy, unbalanced lump - that has 90% of its weight in the screen at the front - without dropping it.

I can still remember the relief with which I replaced one of these in my office, with a 23" LCD panel. And the way I could hold the panel in one hand, while making the connections with the other - something only the Hulk could do when removing the old one. Life is certainly easier organising desks nowadays.

Lego shrinks NASA's biggest rocket – accuracy sold separately

Re: Let's not forget..

that's after you've spent an hour undoing the 200 cable ties holding that bastard love child of a Nazi fever dream.

I'm now imagining that IGotOut has a shrine to Barbie, somewhere in the house. But not like a child's collection of favourite toys, or a collector's beautiful display. This is more the shrine that you'd see in a Hammer film about an evil cult, so you've got Barbie cable-tied to the altar - with Action Man poised above her, knife in hand, perhaps with a crowd of Lego little people cultists gathered around.

Re: Let's not forget..

Amateurs! In a world where young children can still get hold of Stickle Bricks (linky for those not in the know - Lego is only the second best floor defence system. I suppose 4-sided dice are also a more potent weapon than Lego as well?

McDonald's is not lovin' your bigmac, happymeal, and mcnuggets passwords

Re: "the idea of anyone purchasing their product anonymously."

I've got a new idea for a false name to use. Or I could possibly even use it as a password.... Came across it in a history podcast (David Crowther's excellent History of England). He's a property developer of dubious morals, who helped rebuild London after the great fire. Rejoicing in the name of If-Jesus-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned Barebone. Sometime spelled Barbon - and he seems to have gone by Nicholas, as his baptismal name was a teensy bit of a mouthful...

His father was Praise-God Barebone (whom the Barebones Parliament was named after).

Re: Complex passwords are only relevant if the database or hashes get dumped

nugget2nugget is an online dating app for junior officers in the US Navy?

British military to get legal OK to swat drones near bases

Re: The Jet-Propelled Guided NAAFI flies again

You rotten swine, you!

Help! Does anyone on the bus know Linux?

Re: Sorry, Not In Service!

I disagree. Problem isn't the bus. It's a driver issue.

AI security startup CEO posts a job. Deepfake candidate applies, inner turmoil ensues.

Re: Test

Q1. Show us your shoes.

Q2. Now take them off and show us your feet.

Are we trying to catch AI's here? Or foot fetishists?

Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

Re: Dodging AI bullets

What if the AI doesn't read the "Don't", and just obeys the "shoot"?

I suggest a t-shirt with "Robot Pleasuring Services Ltd" on it instead.

Mechanical mutts make it official: Now full-time at Sellafield's hot zones

Re: The cover up

Casca,

I didn't know blind chickens could tell the time. Actually, I didn't even know that sighted chickens could tell the time either.

Are you sure you're not thinking of cuckoos?

Re: The cover up

But I don’t like cats…

Re: The cover up

Red Ted,

Calder Hall. Now there's another cover-up!

The Queen went to officially open the plant for the TV cameras. She pressed a big button to switch the reactor on, and then a big dial moved to show all the lovely electricity that was being fed to the grid. Of course, reactors don't start up quite like that, you have to run around shouting things, filling out health&safety forms and make the appropriate sacrifices to Vulcan before hitting the real big-red-button... So instead, a fake button was installed for Her Maj, and a fake dial, operated by string, was installed to show the leccy being generated.

Re: The cover up

The public were not told about the release of nuclear material.

And that's why they publicly banned sales of local milk and promised ongoing monitoring of the area (which they actually did) in order to detect any future contamination. Presumably because of pixies?

Gaspode the wonder dog has the ultimate power to deal with any Boston Dynamics robot, however evil it might become. He knows The Word, you see. And deep in its soul, every doggie knows that, even a robot one.

Re: The cover up

The Windscale fire was publicly acknowledged. Lots of testing was done, and monitoring put in place thereafter. Local milk production was halted for a while - again all publicly.

Admittedly one of the things they discovered from the monitoring was that the fire hadn't actually released a huge amount of contamination, and much of the nuclear contamination they were finding around the site was actually from previous operations. The two reactors were directly air cooled, and had very rudimentary filters on the air blown out of them. If I recall the documentaries I've watched on this (back in the days when the Beeb did good science documentaries), this was covered up, and everything was blamed on the fire. But monitoring was put in place so they could catch new sources of contamination.

Dow Chemical says AI is the element behind 4,500 job cuts

Re: "The jury is still out when it comes to determining how much job loss AI is causing."

This announcement doesn't tell us how many jobs AI is replacing. Or if it's even directly replaced any jobs yet. It just tells us they plan to restructure and spend loads on AI to help them do it. Presumably they've actually had some success in pilot projects, rather than this just being hope-and-pray-as-a-strategy. But HaPaaS does seem to sum up quite a lot of AI announcements. Could I get away with founding an AI company and calling it that? Quick! Before the bubble bursts.

Musk distracts from struggling car biz with fantastical promise to make 1 million humanoid robots a year

Re: Realistically ...

Maybe there's a market for robots as nannies, cleaners and tennis coaches? Sure, they're not likeable, unlike the human ones. But then the human ones can also be just a bit too likeable sometimes. More specifically when they stray into the territory of loveable...

On the other hand, someone will make a humanoid robot with a mode for that as well. And if not, well people are imaginative, and sometimes downright kinky. They'll find some way to have sex with them, however they're designed.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

I've long had doubts about the utility of humanoid form factors for automation of most mechanical tasks. Top heavy, unstable, and too few appendages?

My plans for the Squidbot 2000 are advancing daily! Soon these puny fleshlings will cower before my unstoppable army of DOOM!

...Also, they'll be very popular in the sex industry...

Challenger at 40: The disaster that changed NASA

Compulsory podcast plug

There's a good episode on Challenger on the BBC World Service 13 Minutes to the Moon podcast. A good description of the meetings at Morton Thiokol from one of the engineers. It's from the 3rd series, on the Shuttle, which sadly isn't quite as good as the first two series (on Apollos 11 and 13). Sadly Kevin Fong had gone off to make 16 Sunsets, also a podcast about the Shuttle, and I think if the team had stayed together they could have made as fine a series on the Shuttle as the other two. But both Shuttle series are still worth your time, because of the good interviews both got.

You can sort of see NASA management's point of view. In that they had a contractor changing the agreed launch minimums on them at the last minute, but hadn't yet finished their research into previous o-ring erosion. But on the other hand, when your contractor comes to you and says they're worried, it's pretty obvious that they've got a reason to be worried. And to bully their management to bully their engineers into silence is a pretty bloody big risk. And a bloody stupid one too.

There was a lot of risk built into the Shuttle design though. It's very easy to get into bad habits, when you're forced to ignore some risks in order to be able to fly at all. On the other hand, it could do stuff that nothing we've got now can do - even though we've got really impressive reusable rockets.

Cops put Microsoft Copilot in holding cell after controversial hallucination

I suspect the use of AI was tangential. Stuff I've read about this suggests, they simply wanted a report to justify a position they'd already taken. Because "community groups" would object to the fans being allowed to come to the match. So in order to have an easy life, they had to come out with reasons to ban them. Hence there's a dispute about what Dutch police said to them in a meeting that they appear to have "lost the minutes of", and the report with the fake AI results.

AI makes a terrible search tool, because if you ask it to find stuff it will try to find that stuff, and if there isn't any/enough, it'll helpfully invent it for you. Whereas it's much better at summarising text you give it, which I guess makes it a better research tool.

Seeing as the AI tools seem to have taken on some of the hidden assumptions of the language, I also wonder if you might need to phrase your prompts carefully so that you do not bias the results. Ask it to find examples of something, I suspect it's more likely to do so - even if it has to invent those examples.

France to replace US videoconferencing wares with unfortunately named sovereign alternative

Don't be silly. They'll just call it "le Windows" - and then go off for a 4 hour lunch.

Re: Enough of the name, its the interface

Schrodinger will turn in his grave.

You can't tell if Schroedinger is in his coffin, unless you open the lid...

CountCadaver,

The French government may not be able to change the law at all. I think everything trademark comes under European law, due to the Single Market.

Watchdog says US weather alerts are getting lost in translation

Re: Perhaps there is no need for 'AI'

You forgot the weather scales. So, for cold we have: Chilly, brisk, brass monkeys, bloody freezing and finally, people in Newcastle are wearing coats the new ice age has begun.

NASA begins formal anomaly review after MAVEN probe lost in space

"Deespatch Var Rocket Ajax to bring back it's body!"

Tech employees demand their leaders take a stand against ICE

no employee demanding action of their management to SIDE WITH SEDITION/TREASON/CRIIMINALS is worth warm spit. Good riddance

disk iops,

Such an ironically perfect comment. In support of the President whose supporters actually stormed the Capitol building. And were pardoned by him for doing so.

Oddly, it's not a crime to be shot in the head by the police, just after they've disarmed you of your legally carried weapon (although it was a crime for those police to have shot you). Interestingly the Iranian regime have a nice trick of making the relatives pay to get the bodies of their loved-ones back after they've killed them at demonstrations. I'm sure this is just lower-level guys getting a bit of extra cash, though it may actually be done out of policy (as part of keeping the population intimidated). Or a bit of both. Some people even get a nice receipt, where they're charged for the bullet - as a nice extra kick in the teeth.

I suppose ICE could start accusing the people they kill of theft of bullets...?

Voyager 2's close encounter with Uranus wasn't in the original plan

This brings up the awkward question of when the next mission might be launched, and who would do it.

Eric M,

If China have a plan for space, they've not shown much interest in the outer solar system. They're going for manned activities and a run to the Moon at the moment. Whereas both the Soviet and US space programs were sending out a lot of probes at the same time as doing both. Now it seems only NASA and the ESA are interested in that. And NASA's budget, even with some protection from Congress, is not going to stretch far under the current administration.

Oracle AI sailed the world on Royal Navy flagship via cloud-at-the-edge kit

Which one to choose?

Does it matter? When you're a poor, lost navigator, like loveable Leslie, any port in a storm will do. And even if you're at the wrong port, at least you're at some port and can ask where you are. And, bonus, there might be some nice ladies to chat to.

Rather along the lines of Dirk Gently's holistic detection and navigation technique. If you're lost, pick a car that looks like it knows where it's going - and follow it. You may not arrive where you were trying to get to, but life might arrange things so that you arrive where you need to get to.

Course, it might cause some consternation if an innocent merchant ship is toodling along at 15 knots and suddenly notices it's being followed by an aircraft carrier and all it's escorts...

If you get lost, you just follow the Isle of Wight ferry.

Trump says he got a deal for rare earths in Greenland, but they won't come easy

To be fair to Trump, even the so-called sensible politicians and journalists seem to have no idea about rare earths. So why should Trump do any better? As far as I understand it, there aren't (m)any rare earth mines. You mine other stuff and then process the rare earths out of your ores if they're at high enough concentrations to be worth it. Since that's environmentally damaging it's expensive. So we need to subsidise production somewhere to stop China playing silly buggers every few years. I would imagine it's going to be cheaper to subsidise a plant somewhere where most of the infrastructure already exists, even if the ore is lower in concentration of rare earths, than it would be to build mines and processing plants from scratch in the middle of nowhere, with no electricity and in the Arctic.

Trump's already done a rare earths deal with Ukraine, which presumably is to extract it from their existing coal mining sector. Most of which is in the Donbas, which is the area he wants to force Ukraine to cede to Russia. I can well believe Trump is that stupid, but he's also good at aping other politicians when they talk about serious stuff, in which case it's equally possible he's just after looking like he's doing important stuff, so the deal matters not the outcome.

I guess it's even possible he believes what he's saying. In an infinite universe, anything is possible.

Re: A deal with NATO

That's OK. There's no deal with NATO.

What I imagine has happened is that Trump has met up with Mark Rutte and been told that if the US wants more basing on Greenland, they can already do it. And that they already have the treaties they need to get mining done. So he's said it's fine.

In about two weeks he'll play golf with someone that tells him about all the riches of Greenland that he needs to exploit. He'll then make threats and we'll go through the whole merry-go-round again. Unless he's busy doing something else at that time, at which point he'll do nothing until after his next round of golf with that person.

Finally, it is possible that he's decided to drop this whole Greenland charade because it's so unpopular with his own base. In which case he just needs to quickly declare a deal done / glorious victory and move on to something else - and we'll never hear of this again.

British Army's drone degree program set to take flight

Re: Simple

That's already happening. And not just that, but Ukraine has an input into NATO (plus the Aussies and Kiwis) training their troops - i.e. you don't want just the British army designing the basic training for how to survive against drones on the battlefield. You want to learn that from Ukraine. There's also higher level training going on in France, and some other NATO countries, and again, we're getting input from Ukraine on drone stuff. So while helping to train Ukrainian troops and junior officers, we're getting them to train us.

Also, I've seen jealous comments from US security think tankers and journalists, that Britain has got a few boots on the ground in Ukraine. Not in actual combat, but embedded around the place as liaison and observers, possibly also some technical advisors? From what I know, and what the German government have said, I don't think targetting for Storm Shadow is possible without a lot of NATO intel, databases and software. It's 20 years old, so the software could be 30 years old, and I suspect we've not handed all that over, but have an embedded team programming the missiles with all the digital infrared images it needs to match its flightpath to the terrain and hit the target.

Finally we've got lots of industrial partnerships going on. We're joint leads on the Ukrainian Navy and short range air defence. Which means we've had guys on the ground learning, and Ukrainians here as part of specifying the kit. We've built or designed some of the anti-ship drones Ukraine has used, and have worked on some Franken-SAMs (bodging Western air-to-air missiles and SAMs into ex-Soviet launchers - and shed-engineering new launchers too), as well as anti-drone drones and anti-drone cannons.

I quite like this as a cheap initiative. Start small and try to get it right, before scaling up. We're unlikely to have a huge drone building industry, but could get ourselves a good design industry - and then subsidise some building capacity with military orders.

Trump promises nuclear datacenter permits in 3 weeks, calls Greenland 'big beautiful ice'

Re: Trump has the mind of a steel trap

Nice. But not sure he's cold. I think the orange one runs hot. He's always angry and/or feeling slighted. He needs the cooling balm of some top quality arse-licking and grovelling to keep him happy.

Concorde at 50: Twice the speed of sound, twice the economic trouble

Re: BA were asshats about it

I suspect (from memory of events), Branson’s very public approach forced all parties to review their decision and hence why so much was released to the public.

Roland6,

I don't think Virgin and Branson were relevant to anything. Airbus were going to stop supporting the aircraft. That meant it could no longer be safely run in passenger service.

I've seen a conspiracy theory, which I at least suspect might have a grain of truth. Which is that Air France had never got back to profitability on Concorde after the accident, which BA had. However for them to retire the type would be embarrassing, when BA were doing fine. So they conspired within the tight-knit French establishment with the government and Airbus management and got them to stop support - so BA couldn't have it either.

Air France were flying fewer of theirs, and BA tried to buy one of their old ones to cannibalise for spare parts. Which was refused. This could have been prestige, not to have equal numbers of aircraft. Although again, that might just be people who love it whining, and actually Air France wanted to use it for spares themselves.

Concorde has some vocal fans, what with it having been so amazing. So this could be a combination of bitterness and wishful thinking. Another way to look at it, is Air France telling Airbus that they're about to retire the aircraft, and Airbus deciding there's not enough profit in manufacturing only half the number of spares - or enough work to justify a department to operate a handful of BA aircraft. It's not just aircraft that have lifespans. So does the tooling you use to make the parts, and the software you. So they may have had bits that were about to go end-of-life that they simply couldn't be bothered to replace - or would have required them to triple the price of parts - making Concorde uneconomic for everyone. Or all the staff with the knowledge were close to retirement and they didn't want to train any more.

S Twatter: When text-to-speech goes down the drain

Re: for all those who say "it shouldn't be this difficult". apparently it is.

that one in the corner,

Very good! Plus, thank you very much for introducing me to that song. And in fact the singer in question. I had a very good laugh. Including this, slightly less salubrious, song Reginald Pikedevant's organ recital on YouTube.

Royal Navy's helicopter drone makes its first autonomous flight

Re: Blimey!

I thought it was easy. On the grounds that rotary aviation is so unnatural, and helicopters to ugly, that the ground rejects them - and that's how they stay up. So you just need a computer to keep reminding the ground that it's there, and just how fugly it is, and the thing should stay up forever.