Posts by Rich 11

Auditors tell UK government to do the math before banking on £45B AI savings

with new magic sauce flavours

And with new staff who weren't even old enough to read newspapers the last time this happened, everyone else either having quit in disillusionment or been forced out by higher-up arse-covering.

AI coding agents could soon cost more than the developers using them

"the computer can do it; we just need babysitters for the machines."

...and a dog to bite the babysitters if they try to interfere with the machines.

KPMG's AI report becomes an accidental demo of AI hallucinations

I wonder if we are already there.

Wibble.

(That's my attempt to pass the Turing Test. Am I human?)

Brit maritime agency heralds fresh global rules for crewless cargo ships

That's for v1.1 if the ship is going anywhere near the Horn of Africa. The v1.0 vessels will simply have to settle for dumping fuel oil as an anti-pirate defensive measure (with the optional upgrade of flare launchers).

ChatGPT blindly trusts browser content, turning the page into a payload

Re: Data is not code

That doesn't mean that when I picked up the novel Doctor Zhivago, I went out and began a Communist revolution.

Don't let it worry you. No-one's perfect.

Trump to UK: Stop taxing our big beautiful tech corps or face tariff tsunami

Re: If it’s stressing the orange idiot out, great.

It's a strange world we live in.

Re: If it’s stressing the orange idiot out, great.

Help the cholestorol do its job.

Re: Threatening tariffs eh?

The US was invited by the Nigerian government to bomb some of their non-Christian citizens. You're right about the other two, though.

Re: The Art of the Deal

I didn't think Musk was still welcome there.

Re: Waaah tariffs, waaah taxes,

The penguins seem to be managing ok.

The penguins are relaxed about all this because they have a better grasp of economics than the current occupant of the White House.

You too can build a nuclear battery from junk you have lying around the house

Re: Cut out the middle man...

but I haven't yet perfected my Neutrino Net (TM).

Stick with it. The payoff if you succeed would undoubtedly be well worth the effort expended.

Re: Youtuber makes clickbait video

T-Bone Walker!

Live and Let AI: Former CIA officer says human spies matter more in the LLM age

Re: "Humans won't just be necessary for intelligence work"?

Well, if anyone knows how to recognise a very weird-sounding sentence, it's you...

Folk are getting dangerously attached to AI that always tells them they're right

Re: A long standing ploy

I wouldn't even use it for choosing my best mate's birthday card. I'm not even confident that I can trust it to remind me when his birthday is.

Re: More than one use for AI

The self-styled Secretary of War seems predisposed to prefer the question "How much can we hit?".

Re: I wonder if . . . .

He'd have to learn how to spell 'AI' first.

BOFH: Are you ready to raise our expense account limits now?

Nm

What are you torquing about?

Staff too scared of the AI axe to pick it up, Forrester finds

Lawyers get caught misusing LLMs on a fairly regular basis now.

Which makes you wonder how many of them would happily make up citations of legal precedent before LLMs were available. The citations almost certainly couldn't be checked properly in any case taking less than a day or two, if the other barrister didn't have enough staff assigned and available.

Re: 41 49 20 69 73 20 67 72 65 61 74 21

There's an error in the 215th bit.

You're welcome.

Repopulate! Repopulate! Two lost Doctor Who episodes turn up in private collection

Re: Early AI warnings

Daleks were organic beings inhabiting a 'travel machine' (to use its first designation), not an AI controlling a robotic body.

Re: Statement from Donald J Trump, President of the USA

Or on Greek saucer spaceshipyards.

I bought all of the Target books up to late 1978, and while I can still remember some scenes which didn't appear in the broadcast episodes (and expansions upon scenes which did) I most definitely don't recall daleks chopping off anyone's cock.

Re: "a little more significant than Doctor Who defeating the Daleks"

If they haven't, what is the point of them?

Those who 'circle back' and 'synergize' also tend to be crap at their jobs

Re: North Star.

But... but... polar implies a bias against Cartesian!

BS meeting

It's entirely possible that I was dozing off and my tired brain mangled the words, but I swear I once heard my wafflehead boss say the sentence "360-degree DNA, 24/7" without sarcasm.

DR-DOS rises again – rebuilt from scratch, not open source

Fond memories...

...that make me feel old. Again.

Royal Navy races to arm ships against drone threat

Re: RFI?

We could probably shield half the RN surface fleet with Mone's multiple yachts.

Musk's Grok sparks outrage after chatbot makes offensive jibes about football disasters

Re: Am I bothered? Of course Grok isn't botehred.

You've curated a peculiarly bizarre made-up world yourself.

Arseholes love Grok.

You can jailbreak an F-35 just like an iPhone, says Dutch defense chief

Hopefully there's a trainer version, but perhaps they decided that modifying the airframe for an extra seat would be too expensive and they just added an intro module to the flight software.

"Congratulations on your purchase of the state-of-the-art F-35A. America, oo-yah!. Please step through the following pre-flight checks before pressing Engine Start."

Or a reboxed Clippy.

"I see you're trying to shoot down a Mig-29. Can I help send it a memo?"

Re: You'd like to think

You can't fight a war on 30 hours.

I think the current record is about 45 minutes.

BOFH: Eight pints of a lager and a management breakthrough

I have no idea what 6-Sigma refers to in this context, so I'll default to what I do know and conclude that there's only a one in a billion chance that it was worth the effort.

NASA taps Claude to conjure Mars rover's travel plan

Re: trekkies

"But, Captain, we can't go to warp in an atmosphere!"

Challenger at 40: The disaster that changed NASA

Re: Compulsory podcast plug

All I can say is thank gawd for the likes of Richard Feynman showing how the O rings reacted to cold temperatures.....

I once talked with a Scottish engineer who was working for NASA at the time of Feynman's investigation. She said he was very kind and gentle with his questioning, but absolutely laser-focused on digging right in to everything that anyone said. He was intellectually terrifying in the nicest possible way.

House of Lords votes to ban social media for Brits under 16

Re: An analogy is swimming

instead we prosecute those responsible for the pollution.

Theoretically.

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.