Posts by Rich 11

Boffins probe commercial AI models, find an entire Harry Potter book

Re: Can it improve the Harry Potter books?

oh god oh god oh god oh... I'm just glad there isn't a Hell.

Re: I can believe it

I haven't seen it for almost 30 years, because I decided I would only let myself watch it that once after the initial broadcast in 1980. Some things are just a bit too much and you never forget them.

I once met Alan Alda at a science festival and was going to ask him a question about that confessional scene, but I chickened out in case I started tearing up regardless of how he answered.

Re: I can believe it

two pre school age kids ... speaking the lines of M.A.S.H. about 15·20 seconds before the actors

Bloody hell. I hope they never saw the episode where the baby got smothered.

Re: Can it improve the Harry Potter books?

"AI fails at basic stuff. Fiction is much more complicated."

I gave one of the LLMs (I forget which one now) several plot, setting and character prompts and asked it to write a short story based upon them. After it churned that out, I asked it to write another after modifiying one of the prompts, and then a third. As storytelling, each result was miserable; as creative writing, each was appalling. The interesting thing was that in each story it re-used some terrible phrases (like "iron-handed" and "hammer-striking") in contexts that I have never seen in 50 years of reading the prompted type of fiction. Fuck knows what it was trained on to get those results.

UK to spend £23M on AI to tell benefit claimants where to go

Re: Future-proofing?

I do draw some small comfort from the timescale: this AI project will have collapsed in recriminations and legal challenges at just about the time when I will be claiming my state pension. Of course I might then be just one of a hundred thousand people trying to resolve any problem by calling the reinstated helpline that will probably only be manned by three knowledgeable personnel. But at least they won't be trying to turn me into a Nazi if I say the wrong thing. Probably.

Users prompt Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot to remove clothes in photos then 'apologize' for it

Re: Consequences

Some of the medieval punishments for forgery were quite imaginative. Even a function as basic as the authorised minting of coins was so strewn with legal consequences for error, let alone malice, that it's a surprise anyone dared take on the job.

Re: Consequences ... apparently ONLY happen to OTHER people !!!

Are we sure that that wasn't one of his NFT scam images? Or maybe he was talked out of publishing it by Stephen Miller. "Forgive me, My Leader, but although the lightning bolts truly signify your magnificence and innate potency they might be misconstrued by the little people. The glorious day has not yet come in which we can fully announce your natural suzerainty over humanity to the world."

AI datacenter boom could end badly, Goldman Sachs warns

Re: Better investment

Threelips!

Oops, sorry, I thought we were doing generative AI.

Bots, bias, and bunk: How can you tell what's real on the net?

Re: Once upon a time…

Last one to leave, please turn out the lights.

Oh no, no, no. You can be sure that they're going to turn off all the lights long before we can find a way out.

Rhyme is the key to set AIs free when verse outsmarts security

Re: Prompt:

...Who carried his bits in a bucket

Re: I am not sure that poetry is the thing…

That does sound like a possibility: structure English as if it were Latin.

AI layoffs to backfire: Half quietly rehired at lower pay

Re: The American (CEO's) Dream

I don't imagine executives and manglement generally have a clue how much damage disgruntled employees can inflict on a business in a myriad of subtle and largely imperceptable ways — death by a thousand cuts.

It would be wonderfully ironic if the most efficient way of damaging the business was for disgruntled employees to get AI to do all their work.

Elon Musk's Grokipedia launches, filled to the brim with plagiarism and AI slop

"it has lost all meaning as far as I am concerned !"

That says far more about you than it does about anyone else.

'Fax virus' panicked a manager and sparked job-killing Reply-All incident

I used to work at a university, back in the days when email was newfangled and shiny rather than the semi-torturous curse that we've since discovered it to be. I got a call from someone who had joined the faculty a couple of weeks earlier, and for whom I'd set up a new PC and given her a basic run-through just to get her going before she could book one of the introductory courses appropriate for her.

"Hi, Rich11, it's Sandra X. You remember you set me up with email a fortnight ago? Well, I've got one through today and it's telling me if I don't forward it on to everyone then I'll get seven years bad luck. Is that true?"

"Hi Sandra. Nice to hear from you. Remind me, please, but don't you teach philosophy?"

[Small voice] "Oh."

Sometimes people's normal critical faculties get short-circuited when faced with unusual situations, with things completely outside their prior experience.

Shadow AI: Staffers are bringing AI tools they use at home to work, warns Microsoft

Ejection seat in a helicopter

Some military helicopters do have ejections seats. They have explosive bolts on the rotors and blow those off at the root before blowing the canopies off and launching the seats.

BOFH: Recover a database from five years ago? It's as easy as flicking a switch

nor the magic keystrokes to get you to level 25 of Rogue with masses of gold and armor

Only to level 25? That's an extended tea break. If the boss is in an all-day meeting, anyway.

Hobble your AI agents to prevent them from hurting you too badly

"Hulk mash!"

Zenity's marketing graphic for its AI Agent Security Summit inadvertently made that point by mixing Marvel and DC Comics motifs.

Sounds like their marketing department has been replaced by AI.

Brits warned as illegal robo-callers with offshored call centers fined half a million

Re: Another insignificant punishment

No, it's not, not since 1872. And anyway the pillory was more fun (but it's usage was also stopped, sometime around the beginning of the 19th century).

Trump admin says tech companies are abusing H-1B visas, slaps $100k a year to allow entry

Re: "tech companies have more money than God"

But the people preaching the prosperity gospel in his name are loaded.

BOFH: HR discovers the limits of vertical mobility

The wheelie chair.

Been there, done that. Fortunately all such instances happened in my younger days, when four flat screens wasn't the norm but a 70lb 22" CRT bought by high-ego budget holders was not uncommon. In a three-storey block unequipped with a goods lift gravity was never their friend.

The UK Online Safety Act is about censorship, not safety

My brother bought his daughters laptops when they started secondary school. He told them that he'd installed key loggers so that if he ever had any suspicon that they weren't being sensible about using the laptops, regardless of whose network they'd connected to, he'd always be able to check (they had already been taught about safe behaviour in chat rooms, etc, at school). And then he talked about security and the risk of dodgy sites with iffy content dropping spyware et al, and that if they did do something careless they risked losing all their schoolwork and photos and videos, etc, and maybe even bricking the hardware so that they'd have to go without a computer for months until he could afford to buy a replacement. That was enough to scare them into being careful -- well, at least as far as we know, but they're grown up now and haven't turned into fascists or pick-up artists or anorexics or bankrupts or anything but normal well-balanced adults.

Re: Not for the children

Given the subjective nature of theology*, whether or not something contains verifiable theology is entirely incidental.

*Yes, I am aware that objective arguments can be built in theology, but even those rely upon subjective assessments being agreed between theologists first.

Minority Report: Now with more spreadsheets and guesswork

Too late. It's already been fed into the memory hole. Now get back to work and earn your Victory Gin and increased chocolate ration.

Reckon you can put a nuclear reactor on the Moon?

Bigger bonus if it doesn't blow the moon out of orbit and send it racing through the Milky Way. Although, on the plus side, we might then get to meet Maya.

Why the UK public sector still creaks along on COBOL

Re: 'Legacy' does not = 'obsolete' or 'bad'

they have binary fixes of the compiled code

I can't tell you how pleased I am to hear that I'm not the only one who had no choice but to do that. Especially now that I'm retired and it's all SEP.

Your CV is not fit for the 21st century – time to get it up to scratch

Re: "If I were forty years younger"

Good idea. I'm changing my will!

Re: Master and the slaves

From the perspective of retirement, my main career regret is that I wasn't a better plasterer.

If I were forty years younger I'd train as a datacentre saboteur. I don't have any confidence that this AI shit is going to end well.

Re: Master and the slaves

That went down like a lead balloon.

Why blow up satellites when you can just hack them?

The more entertaining error was "obit".

Well, I chuckled anyway.

Banning VPNs to protect kids? Good luck with that

Re: Private or Work?

None of those who provided sufficient figures for analysis, but to provide context Labour were out by £1bn while Reform UK were out by £40bn.

Re: Private or Work?

Reform couldn't balance their last manifesto budget, yet in this last year it hasn't stopped Farage from announcing even more populist policies he has no way to pay for.

Anyone who thinks that if he gets into power he will abandon the economic and regulatroy policies which benefit his wealthy backers rather than the ones which benefit the poorer sectors of society needs to stop outsourcing their brain to LLMs and GBeebies.

Re: Private or Work?

The opposite of 'Christian moral code' is 'non-Christian moral code', not no moral code. At least try to make a sensible argument.

You might also try reading this year's World Happiness Report before claiming that any particular religious moral code is the primary driver of a happy society.

Re: Private or Work?

attack two of them and ignore the other

And why is it that you ignore the other five or six extant Abrahamic religions? Although I wouldn't be surprised if someone had resurrected worship of the two extinct ones either, just to be different.

BOFH: Deepfake or just an idiot? We'll need an audit to confirm

Re: Very interesting.

My password has been 1password for the last 29 years.

xAI's Grok lurches into right-wing insanity, offers tips on assaulting man

Re: Grok Transcript

his DOGE brownshirt wankers gang of racist cyberhooligans

Don't hold back, HuBO. Tell us what you really think.

Re: Grok 4 is great!

Maybe Stormfront have got more money stashed away than anyone thought, and will want to spend it on Grok. Then again, that transaction might be circular.

AI agents get office tasks wrong around 70% of the time, and a lot of them aren't AI at all

Re: "Well, I poured half the concrete. Good enough?"

Turn him upside down and it'll come up to his nostrils.

‘AI is not doing its job and should leave us alone’ says Gartner’s top analyst

Re: You can't replace people

Nr35: Peace is good for business.

Nationwide power outages knock Spain, Portugal offline

Re: Anybody know?

ÉlRon?

Hubbard? Another dodgy organisation.

Brit soldiers tune radio waves to fry drone swarms for pennies

Re: But it has no lasers!

That wasn't sweat.

Re: Countermeasures?

Someone once tried to convince me that the action of stripping electrons from a cathode was actually a form of atomic energy so should be banned.

If you're walking around with a bunch of unlicenced particle accelarators, try not to cross the streams.

Boffins turn Moon dirt into glass for solar panels, eye future lunar base power

Or for the nuclear waste dump to go critical and send the moon racing out of the solar system.

One of the last of Bletchley Park's quiet heroes, Betty Webb, dies at 101

Re: The silent ones

R V Jones wrote 'Most Secret War', which to me is by far the best description of the scientific and technological arms race that took place in the first half of the Second World War. It's not just an outline of technical events, but also a record of the battles the scientists fought with British politicians, bureaucrats and high-ranking military officers. On top of that, the combat risks that some of those people took, even those usually dismissed as boffins or back-room boys, are stomach-churning. I cannot recommend the book highly enough.

Re: Heroes, all of them

"She threatened to shoot me, and I was smitten. It was love at first shot."

Worry not. China's on the line saying AGI still a long way off

Re: Vacuum

Notice any species notably missing off that list?

Tardigrades.

Please fasten your seatbelts. A third of US air traffic control systems are 'unsustainable'

Re: I have an easy solution...

According to official figures, US GDP per capita is double that of Europe.

Some of that GDP comes from the artifically inflated cost of internal trade, such as the high prices American clinics and hospitals have to pay for pharmaceuticals patented and manufactured by American corporations, or the excessively convoluted requirements made for the maintenance of defence materiel by Lockheed and Boeing, such as the F-35 fighters or the Minuteman-3 ICBMs.

Re: "Eminense grease"???

Most of that set pronounce "difficult" words incorrectly.

In all fairness to them, they're just emulating their Orange God.

Re: Get it Effin' Done

I would not be surprised to learn airport X has a Compaq 8088-based luggable PC sitting in a corner, running MS-DOS and some Kermit scripts to send and fetch files via modem.

And if Airport X needs a replacement for that fixer system, I have a spare they can borrow.

Does terrible code drive you mad? Wait until you see what it does to OpenAI's GPT-4o

Re: Not sure why misalignment happens

Toastie Toaster refuses to toast my tea cakes, and Hinton can't get him to shut up.

Oxford researchers pull off quantum first with distributed gate teleportation

However many black cockerels I sacrificed to Lucifer, my grasp of quantum mechanics still wouldn't advance by very much.