Posts by LionelB

Microsoft really does not want Windows 11 running on ancient PCs

Re: Alternative

Acetone gets almost any stuff off any thing, but only in the sense that it doesn't really make a distinction between "thing" and "stuff". It comes down to which it dissolves faster.

Microsoft teases deepfake AI that's too powerful to release

Speaking as a scientist, that's why we have ethics committees. Also speaking as a scientist, I'll admit to feeling slightly safer in the hands of engineers* (but wait... do they have ethics committees?)

*_{Proper enginerrs, not software engineers. I also moonlight as a software engineer.}

Debian spices up APT package manager with a dash of color, squishes ancient bug

He, he. I spent a happy afternoon a few years back trying to match the rather hideous Matab default palette in Gnuplot (Gnuplot does much better-looking plots*, but a co-author on a paper insisted the colours had to match their Matlab plots). That was surprisingly non-trivial.

*_{To the point that I actually wrote a Matlab interface to Gnuplot. Second-most-useful piece of software I ever wrote.}

Of course Matlab changed the default palette in the next release. (I actually like Matlab, but they break stuff. All the time.)

I have a rather fine greeb jumper myself ;-)

Recently had cataract ops in both eyes, and have subsequently had to apologise to the missus for all those blue/green arguments. Spoiler: it was always blue.

Excellent and very accessible article here: The Causes and Consequences of Color Vision (assuming you can see that link).

Notepad++ dev slams Google-clogging notepad.plus 'parasite'

Re: Meh

Kate's okay, but I'm going to suggest Geany, which for me hits a sweet spot between editor and IDE, is extendable via plugins, rock solid, intuitive, and springs no surprises. It's been my workhorse for a decade and a half. Also available on Windows.

Re: vegans

> Telling people they're "wrong" is not a good way to make them change their minds.

You're probably correct, but what then is a good way to change people's minds, given that the fact you're motivated to do so rather implies you actually do believe that they're "wrong"?

I don't really have an answer to this. You might think that presenting people dispassionately with evidence that they're wrong might get you some leeway, but apparently this riles people up even more, and they start throwing about words like "smug", "self-satisfied" and "virtue-signalling". So do we (unlike the post which put you off) need to be dishonest and mimsy about an issue to get people onboard with seeing the error of their ways? I'd have to say that that riles me up, personally.

Re: vegans

> The issue is in the OP's post where a vegan had to proselytize their choice

They most certainly didn't have to proselytise their choice. The fact that they did so (idiotically) just makes them idiots - to which the farmer responded appropriately.

> My point being: everyone makes choices. Being a vegetarian or vegan is yet just another choice, but one that doesn't give you a soapbox to stand on.

My point too...

> The problem with these people is that, like the farmer's response shows, you end up alienating a population that grows intolerant of anyone else that shows the same characteristics.

By the sounds of it, the farmer just took them to be morons, and humoured them. How does that become "alienating a population"?

> In other words, as I said, they ruin it for everyone else (like me).

For everyone? Because you allowed yourself to be triggered by idiots?

Look - there are, always have been, and always will be morons banging on about some piffling nonsense. It's part of the human condition. Most people learn to deal with that - shrug and walk away or point, laugh and ridicule. Fair enough, social media amplifies those morons and gives them platforms with broad reach, but I think the appropriate response (or lack thereof) remains the same.

> Militant vegan, woke, white nationalist, ultra-fundamentalist ...

Whoa, hang on - those last two are hardly in the same ballpark! That's genuinely scary shit - those people may actually want to kill me or you, and/or encourage others to do so. As for "woke"... simply by using that term in the way you did, you successfully aligned yourself with just the kind of idiocy you decry (I'm just going to point and laugh).

> - can't we just keep some things to ourselves, respect that others have their choice as well, and all get along??!

That would be lovely, but fat chance. Coping mechanisms are mandatory; huffing doesn't strike me as a particularly good one.

Re: vegans

> The problem isn't being vegan. The *problem* are the nuevo-vegans who are so used to announcing their every bowel movement on their Instagram and Facebook accounts that their recent change-over to veganism has to be virtue-signaled across the entire planet just as loudly.

The *problem*, it seems to me, is little you over there getting yourself all riled up by Instagram and Facebook nonsense from a mildly ridiculous minority. Which then twists your perspective on vegans and vegetarians.

> These recently-vegan loudmouths just ruin it for the billions of people throughout the world who practice vegetarianism or veganism quietly, respectfully and without guile.

No they don't, unless those fine folk take any notice whatsoever of Instagram and Facebook nonsense from a mildly ridiculous minority. And why would they do that?

Re: Typical Google

Pah. There you go foisting your anti-idealism ideals on us and virtue-signalling your impeccable anti-virtue signalling credentials.

Microsoft warns that China is using AI to stir the pot ahead of US election

Re: Won't be hard

Aye, the Devil's in the detail.

German state ditches Windows, Microsoft Office for Linux and LibreOffice

Re: Desktop OSs are so passé

You're not wrong... we tend to use it only for internal admin, and not to share code/papers/data.

Re: Disappointing

> My latest problem is that I've spent the last 2 years on an utterly useless Ubuntu GNOME desktop before giving up and switching to GNOME Classic.

Why did it take you so long? If you didn't like it, you could have switched any time.

> If I can't be persuaded to use a default Ubuntu desktop, then god help anyone trying to convert an entire govt department.

There'd be no obligation for a gov. department to foist the (execrable) default Ubuntu desktop on anyone. They could roll out with any desktop they want - which, to cause the least pain to Windows-familiar users might well be, say, Xfce, Cinnamon or Mate.

> Karen in accounting can't get spotify on the machine.

Well, someone should have a word with her. There's a perfectly good Spotify client for Linux. It's even in the repositories for the major distributions.

Re: Desktop OSs are so passé

There are other options: I work in an academic environment, where sharing and collaboration is paramount. We work collaboratively on WP and other docs via Google Drive (sufficient for our needs), calendars via Google Calendar, code via GitHub and LaTeX papers/publications via Overleaf. All platform-agnostic - we have people on Windows, Mac and Linux.

I do, however, acknowledge that Google Drive (and its associated WP, spreadsheet and presentation suite) may not be sufficient for some business needs. I believe LibreOffice sharing/collaboration is under development.

> Typically such builds are produced to bake in validated SSO/smartcard/VPN setup for the users to use out of the box.

Could tools such as Puppet not be engaged to automate customised deployment of, e.g., a Red Hat, Canonical or SUSE distribution?

Hillary Clinton: 2024 will be 'ground zero' for AI election manipulation

Re: The burden of proof

"I have to disagree with that since it would put the outcome in the hands of a judge who may be a political appointee."

Just to be clear, my comment applies to democracies which implement Separation of Powers. Your mileage may vary.

Re: The burden of proof

That is completely and utterly bonkers. For democracy to function you need an independent judiciary; if any party disputes an election result, it it then decided by the courts.

Bon Jovi, Billy Eilish, other musicians implore AI devs to think of humanity

Re: The pot calling the kettle black

Sure, I was talking specifically about covers.

Now if the humans use AI for inspiration I have no problem with that at all. (From what I've heard so far, AI generated music is both uninspired and uninspiring, but I don't believe it need be so - that failure rests with the dreary motivations and imagination deficit of the humans' deployment of AI as a creative tool.)

Re: The pot calling the kettle black

Sorry, that argument doesn't work. If you cover another artist's music, either in recording or performance, you (are supposed to) pay for that privilege. If an AI rips off an artist's voice and/or style, this would not count as a cover, so they don't get paid for their creativity.

Re: Hmm

Ironically, in my (very) limited experience of ChatGPT, it tends to spew rather impressively grammatical, articulate and correctly punctuated nonsense.

(According to an acquaintance who lectures in law, this is a common reveal of student cheating - the grammar is simply too good. Well, that and the hallucinated references.)

X's Grok AI is great – if you want to know how to hot wire a car, make drugs, or worse

Re: Guardrails my ass

Well, at least with X/Grok you get the full package - unsavoury, legally dubious and morally repugnant responses, and downright factually incorrect nonsense (due to being infused with the narcissistic, ultra-libertarian, free-speech absolutist and right-wing biases of its overlord).

Fresh version of Windows user-friendly Zorin OS arrives to tempt the Linux-wary

Re: I bet in spite of the usability angle, there is little to no fingerprint support

See fprint - as implemented in Gnome, apparently.

I do find it a little far-fetched that you find this a "usability issue" show-stopper for the desktop (sure, I get it for mobile phones and tablets), especially as you remark that the hardware support isn't great anyway. I mean, a usability revolution on the desktop!? How many times a day does the average desktop user actually need to log out and/or lock their screen? I can only imagine you have some unusual work scenario.

Apart from that, I don't really see any great usability advantages for Windows over Linux.

And desktop environments as we know them may indeed be on the way out for many usage scenarios, but for very different reasons (e.g., the move to cloudy services).

Re: Coincidence...

"I suspect that my difficulty is not with any distro but with Linux itself. Specifically, the installation of programs. Packages where I can click and install are great, but I grew increasingly frustrated by the regular prompts to use the console with half a dozen "get this/get that" commands. ... but I don't understand why Linux, knowing what it needs to install, demands that I spend time typing abstruse commands to get the job done."

But does it? I guess you are talking about applications which are not available in your distro's repositories. Out of genuine interest, which applications are we talking about here? Reason I ask is I use Linux (Mint, mostly, as it happens) at home and at work, and for many years I have hardly ever had to install software from external sources. Even then, that has generally been a case of downloading a supported package (e.g., a .deb) and installing via the supplied (GUI) tools; no command-line required. The odd exceptions have been work-related (e.g., Matlab, as I do scientific analysis and programming), and that has generally been the same on any platform, including Windows: download installer, run installer. Again, no command-line required.

So what kind of software are we talking about here? Genuine question.

_{I fully acknowledge that there is some software where Linux equivalents may be unsatisfactory or unavailable, in areas such gaming, graphics and audio - but we're not actually talking about that here.}

AI models show racial bias based on written dialect, researchers find

Re: Aksing questions about bias

> And what would happen if that long 'a' was written as pronounced as in "taking a barth"?

Nothing much; it actually is pronounced that way in Jamaican dialect (and by extension by many British with Caribbean heritage).

Re: Why would people write in dialect anyway.

Of course it depends on who you're trying to communicate with, and the context.

If I'm in the USA, for instance, in some everyday contexts I have to moderate my accent/pronunciation, even vocabulary, just to be understood (I still cringe internally asking for a glass of "wahdr", but damn it, I was thirsty... sorry, "thrrsty").

> Why would I write with an accent?

Dunno [sic], perhaps you're a playwright or scriptwriter?

Re: Why would people write in dialect anyway.

Well, presumably you wouldn't if you were aware that they were writing in dialect.

Of course it is not that uncommon at all for books, plays or film to be written/spoken in dialect.

What is this "proper" English you speak of? It rather sounds to me like you've taken a snapshot of English as spoken/written at some particular location (no doubt your own) and some particular point in history (no doubt your own), designated that as "proper", and relegated all other forms of the language to second-class status. That's the very definition of parochial bullshit. Language -- in common with any aspect of human culture you can name -- is, always has been, and always will be both geographically diverse and continually evolving. Over historical time scales globalisation and mass media have altered the dynamics of diversification and evolution of language, but not the fact. You can rail against that all you like, but I honestly don't know why you would want to.

> Slang, dialects etc are generally less comprehensive and less accurate.

How would you know? Has it not occurred to you that perhaps they just seem that way to you because you are not familiar with them? Or that your "proper English" does not represent some pinnacle of comprehensiveness and accuracy of expression - that slang/dialects may even, on occasion, lead to more comprehensive, accurate, nuanced and expressive forms?

Re: Broadcaster Presentation / Linguistic Standards

You're not French, by any chance?

Re: @LionelB - Reasoning

Nicely put. (I made no attempt, of course, to try to pin down what "bias" might even mean in the context of LLMs.)

> And if we do, qui bono?

I'm going to assume that, at this stage at least, qui refers to (some) humans. (In practice, the answer to the question is usually wealthy humans.)

Re: Not at all surprising really

I took it as a an (I suspect statistically broadly accurate) observation. As for the argument based on that observation, well it's a truism that we reinforce our own prejudices by, amongst other things, what we choose to read (by/for whoever it was written).

Re: @LionelB - Reasoning

Well, that would be an example of reinforcement learning. I'm not sure if that features (at least not explicitly) in the current crop of transformer-based LLMs - I suspect not.

"Google generative AI has shown us that if you manage to correct bias entirely then your solution is worthless."

... while failure to correct bias at all unleashes a bilious torrent of human bigotry, stupidity and hatefulness. Maybe, just maybe, there's an acceptable middle ground...

Re: Reasoning

A better analogy is probably that it's a component of the driver's cognitive facilities. ("I just pattern-matched that peripheral shadow in the wing mirror with some idiot about to undertake... I just pattern-matched the appropriate response with the learned behaviour of taking evasive action... etc.")

Re: Reasoning

Well, perhaps the best we can say about what IQ tests measure is that it is the ability to do IQ tests. Since there does not appear to be a particularly compelling consensus on what intelligence is supposed to mean*, measuring it is bound to be an exercise in futility.

Having said which, I suspect most would concur that pattern-matching is at the very least a component of whatever we think we mean by intelligence.

But this is a distraction from potato_chips' pertinent point: "Every decision that we make, as intelligent or stupid beings, will exhibit a bias based on the data we've trained on. The only question is whether we, morally, accept any given bias."

And are LLMs any different in that respect? Should they be?

_{*Pre-emptive note: no amount of wittering about "understanding" cuts it - that just shifts the burden of explanation to something equally indefinable, before circling back up its own fundamental orifice. Metaphorically speaking.}

Fedora 41's GNOME to go Wayland-only, says goodbye to X.org

That depends really on whether you want a minimal "desktop" (with task bars, launchers, desktop icons, applets, etc.) or just a window manager. Although the lines are blurred; Fluxbox, for instance (my personal favourite), implements a taskbar and application menus, but no launchers or other desktop paraphernalia. Of course there's nothing stopping you from rolling your own desktop if you want, but if you were going to do that you'd probably save yourself a lot of trouble (or fun, depending on your point of view) for a comparable result by going with, say Xfce, LXDE or LXQT.

Year of Linux on the desktop creeps closer as market share rises a little

Re: Outdated phraseology

My understanding would be that "desktop" here includes laptops - it refers to the UI style.

> Or, possibly, when will there be a decent desktop for Linux?

There are plenty of good ones to choose from (of course, being Linux, unlike e.g., Windows or Mac OS you have a choice). To my mind Xfce, Cinnamon and Mate, to name a few, are pretty decent - and rather Windows-y, if that floats your boat. (Personally not a big KDE or Gnome fan -- I favour minimalist Window Managers like black/flux/openbox and no "desktpop" at all -- but there you go... choice.)

Re: "Repeat after me" guy here ...

> most commentards already kow that it's MS Office - in particular Outlook - that is missing

In the business sector that's probably true, because of historical lock-in. For home users... well, there are already perfectly viable (some would say better) FOSS alternatives to MS Office - apart from Outlook, which is an abomination I can't imagine any self-respecting home user actually wants/needs.

> and will forever condemn a Linux Desktop to an oddity.

Oddity? Nothing particularly odd about it I can think of - in my own field, HPC and scientific computing, for instance, it has been de facto standard on the desktop for decades.

> It is beyond comprehension how - over 19 years - there hasn't been a single outfit that has taken the idea of Linux desktop and produced an integrated setup that can be swapped over a standard Windows desktop setup. ... Mint isn't a bad example

Notwithstanding the whiff of self-contradiction there, and much as I do like Mint, you make the unwarranted assumption that to gain significant market share an OS needs to be in the image of Windows. As Liam pointed out in a previous thread, it has already been The Year of Linux on the Desktop for many years - that'll be ChromeOS.

Re: Here we go again...

> They do. They're called ChromeBooks.

Sure, I take your point - which, as the most commercially successful desktop manifestation of Linux (no, I'm not going to get into nitpicking about Android, which to my mind doesn't cut it as "desktop" anyway) I think rather bolsters my general contention about OSes.

> It doesn't *matter* what takes over the desktop when a different computing model has overtaken and replaced "the desktop."

Not that it ever mattered to me personally anyway, but broadly agreed on the demise -- or at least re-imagining -- of desktop computing. (Perhaps the gaming sector is an exception to this trend, but I've never been a gamer, so can't really comment sensibly.)

Are you sure that wasn't Windows XP?

Here we go again...

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, history tells us that the fabled Year of Linux on the Desktop will never arrive (for personal as opposed to business computing) until such time as Linux is commercially promoted and mass-marketed by the big vendors pre-installed on the hardware. Like, y'know, Windows, Mac OS, Android, or iOS. This has precisely nought to do with the qualities of the OS itself and all to do with marketing. Quite simply, no non-tech user is ever going to be arsed to install an alternative OS (even if they knew that were an option, which they probably don't), because, well, why should they? What came pre-installed works - at least to their (arguably low) expectations.

Whether and when this will ever happen I'm not so sure. Perhaps MS will crawl so far up their cloudy/AI/subscriptions arse that some major vendor considers it worth their while to take a punt on a Linux machine, perhaps with a Windows-y bespoke distro that is tailored to work seamlessly out of the box with the hardware. (Dell made some half-hearted moves in that direction some years ago, IIRC; as far as I can make out, nowadays they offer a few OS-less machines, and some Ubuntu or Red Hat workstations, but they hardly shout about those.)

The business market is another issue - more about legacy software and historical lock-in (and again nought to do with the qualities of the OS).

Personally, I'm not particularly invested in the issue; I can't seem to find reasons to care much about who uses which OS (except, of course, in my capacity as de facto family tech support). Just here for the banter, most of which seems to miss the point entirely (see above).

Trump supporters forge AI deepfakes to woo Black voters

Funny, I always read that as "(Trump derangement) syndrome". It seems to make a lot more sense that way.

But I guess you were probably talking about taxation systems.

Tragically, those idiots can even vote themselves and the rest of us out of a democracy. This is not hypothetical.

Re: Except

> Not everything is about Trump.

>

> Someone could just as easily generate a fake video of Biden making a speech and sounding cogent, cognisant and wide-awake.

Or someone could just as easily generate a fake video of Trump himself making a speech and sounding coherent, veracious and sane.

Self-taught-techie slept on the datacenter floor, survived communism, ended a marriage

Re: Ironically

> Email usually does arrive within moments.

Not so much from (or to) Cuba.

> ... on that fabled isle ...

No, really, it's not; I've been there.

> "Communists love Linux over there,"

Don't know about that, but Cubans surely do love stuff that is (a) free, and (b) not American-owned.

Nginx web server forked as Freenginx to escape corporate overlords

Re: West Good, Russia Bad

> At what point does the Populace become responsible for the actions of the State?

At the point when they have a say in the composition of the state.

> The people have the ability ... to rise up and remove the government at a certain point.

See above.

> If they don't, do they implicitly agree that the State is doing their will?

I don't know... maybe ask Alexei Navalny's widow.

The spyware business is booming despite government crackdowns

Re: "can only be sold to governments and used to fight terrorism"

And indeed, what about cage fighters?

AI models just love escalating conflict to all-out nuclear war

Re: uis

"... they're supposed to be a component in a symbolic language parser"

Are they? Supposed by whom?

To be honest, while I have a fair idea how they work, I'm indeed unclear on what LLMs are "for".

Re: Artificial Intelligence: Worm Intelligence

Not to mention the billions of years of evolutionary "design", plus the "training" involving millennia of accumulated culture and lifetimes of human learning, which underpin human brain function (oh, and executed at energy efficiencies orders of magnitude higher than computing technologies).

Re: the LLM is not really "reasoning,"

Is that necessarily so? If you perform statistical analysis on logical propositions, for example, you are de facto doing "statistical reasoning".

This is not so far-fetched. There are already plausible (and in-principle testable) theories of cognition, including the human variety, which are based on Bayesian statistics; see, e.g., predictive processing. Such ideas are not a million miles away from the statistical models underpinning modern LLMs (which, contrary to popular misconception, are not simply mix'n'matching random chunks of text based on naive statistical frequencies or some such - see, e.g., the transformer architecture).