Posts by LionelB

Sysadmin summoned to explain italics – to a user with at least two degrees

Re: Stupidity plus arrogance

What makes you think that? Perhaps read my comment again.

Re: Stupidity plus arrogance

I'll settle for in and by.

Re: Fail to the Chief

A BS in everything. He has the BEST BS EVER.

A ligature would have resolved the issue…

Re: Stupidity plus arrogance

I did my postgrad (Maths Tripos Part III) at Cambridge – my money (what there was of it – I got there on a scholarship) – was neither Old nor New. Funnily enough, while there I got to know a greatⁿ grandson of Charles Darwin (his surname was Darwin). A toff, certainly, an Old Etonian IIRC, but a thoroughly nice and extremely smart guy, and not at all arrogant/entitled/ignorant – quite the opposite. I also met some appalling human beings of both the Old and New Money persuasion.

Re: Stupidity plus arrogance

Let's just say that the rich, arrogant and entitled have historically been significantly over-represented in the Tory party.

Re: Stupidity plus arrogance

But you can not understand what you don't ignore.

What don't you understand about this?

China turns up the heat with open model blitz as US model makers panic

Re: Remember: Open source = Communism

Interesting, a lot of downvotes there.

The hallmarks of a communist society are (obviously I'm not talking about the American usage – "kind of to the left" – here):

* A classless society

* Common ownership of the means of production, distribution and allocation

* Allocation of commodities/products according to need

* No private ownership of property

How many of these apply to modern-day China?

Re: Not a fan

> The difference being only one of them is … threatening to invade me, …

Sure, unless you're Taiwanese.

Re: Not a fan

Well, the US is an oligarchy/kleptocracy built around the Trump dynasty. China is a dictatorship by committee. You're allowed to despise both¹.

_{¹Modulo the obvious constraints for denizens of those countries.}

Re: Remember: Open source = Communism

Do keep up; China ceased to be "communist" under any reasonable definition of the term many years back.

If you mean China, just say "China".

Re: Europe

> … but that just drives home how hopelessly, laughably they've fallen behind.

Perhaps, just perhaps, falling behind in a race to … where? Oblivion? Financial/operational meltdown? The bottom? … is not that laughable?

Wariness about US and Chinese AI tech sounds like a pretty sound attitude to me.

Leading AI models (even Grok) are all a bunch of leftist punks

Re: Maybe not all the data came from America?

Nice summary.

Further to that, the wartime British authorities were perfectly well aware of the "Final Solution" and the death camps pretty much from the start. Of course they had spies and people on the ground in Germany and further afield in occupied Europe. They deliberately withheld this knowledge from the British population, apparently on the grounds that it might undermine the war effort; sympathy for Jews and other "others" was not exactly thick on the ground in Britain.

Having said which, the British did (up to a point) accept or aid Holocaust refugees, especially children.

Re: Maybe not all the data came from America?

See my post below.

Re: Maybe not all the data came from America?

In almost all of Europe, also probably Australia, New Zealand, Canada and beyond, the US Democrats would be considered a centre-right party, perhaps like the Tories in the UK (who would be genuinely bemused at being referred to as "socialists").

The centrist parties in these places tend to be "social democrats" – not the same thing. Social democrats espouse a mixture of state vs private ownership and production, particularly in areas such as health/social care and basic services (e.g., water, transport infrastructure, …). In practice, ideology takes second place to pragmatism.

Re: Probably not that surprising...

Well, in the context of socio-political stances, "reality" is the distribution (i.e., "frequency of patterns") of those stances in the population. The question, as the article makes clear, is the extent to which the population distribution is reflected in the input datasets…

“I’m having trouble finding any high-quality right-wing equivalent that would drive the models in the other direction,”

…especially if filtered by "quality" (which, you'd have to say, may also be in the eye of the beholder).

Okay, that's a little bit disingenuous, and not what people mean by the cliche "reality has a left-wing bias". If, for example, you are inclined to argue that the "best" global economic model is unregulated free-market capitalism, you might want to look around you, and have a hard think about what "best" means there. But of course that's just my socio-political stance talking :-)

College prof hides prompt to catch AI cheaters, finds human nature is pretty much as we thought

Re: setting tasks that require so little academic effort, that a machine can do them.

Ha, ha, point taken. But you knew what I meant.

Re: "Should you use AI for a task?"

So one incident I had with a (good) PhD student, is that I was reviewing some of her simulation code, at her request (which was fine). I came across a section of code which seemed to be doing… nothing – in a very complicated way. It didn't really impact the simulations, which in a way was almost worse. She rather sheepishly admitted that she'd been in a rush and used some LLM to generate the code. I had to explain that I didn't actually mind her using LLMs – either for coding or to help with surveying the existing literature in some area – but it was absolutely essential that she reviewed (and understood) the generated code, and always chased up references in the literature. And, of course, so long as using LLMs (in either case) was effective and efficient; i.e., useful. Which, after all the requisite reviewing, may or may not have been the case.

Re: "Should you use AI for a task?"

Sure, I was speaking about my personal experience.

The way it works at my (UK) higher-education institution, and probably quite generally in the UK (although not necessarily in Europe or other parts of the world) is that an undergraduate degree course teaches familiarity with a field of study up to a certain (sub-research) level. I don't personally teach at undergraduate level.

The idea of a Masters degree is to take you up to research level in the subject, and in particular to teach how to research. There will usually be some kind of final-term dissertation or project where you get to demonstrate your level of familiarity with the field, and that you have taken on board what research involves; this will not necessarily (or even generally) be expected to involve original research.

For a PhD you are expected to delve deeply into your chosen field and perform original research, under the guidance of your supervisor.

Getting accepted for a place on a Masters course will require an undergraduate degree with a high enough grade (e.g., a First). There may well also be an interview process; places will be limited, and competition strong. And Masters courses ain't cheap! Now if you cheated with AI to gain the requisite grade for a Masters, you will likely be found wanting and rejected in the interview process, or, if you make it onto the course you will simply flounder and fail. You will not get away with cheating with AI on your Masters; the degree of oversight is higher. Apart from hand-in coursework, you will at various stages be required to actually demonstrate your knowledge, be it in supervisions, study groups, or whatever. As a supervisor, I will spot it immediately (this has happened on some very rare occasions).

To be accepted for a PhD, you will require a very high standard Masters degree. You will be interviewed, possibly several times. Competition will be fierce – very fierce (you'll be competing against the best of the best internationally). You will need funding, which itself may well require demonstrating your suitability for research. You will not get away with cheating. No chance.

Re: "Should you use AI for a task?"

As a Research Fellow in academia, I supervise MSc and PhD students. I can assure you that fake research ("fake" as in not valid, that is) is not at all hard to detect if you're familiar with the field. "Fake" as in plagiarised research may be harder—well, at least more work—to detect. At that level of study, however, it really isn't in the student's interest to produce fake work in either sense; and if they're stupid enough not to realise that, chances are they wouldn't have made it to the MSc/PhD level in the first place.

Re: setting tasks that require so little academic effort, that a machine can do them.

It's obviously not the same as the student actually doing them.

However, the end product may well be virtually indistinguishable from that produced by an averagely-competent student. That's a problem for teachers (but see my later posts).

Telltale signs

An acquaintance lectures in law at a well-known UK university. She says the easiest way to spot AI-generated essays tends to be that the grammar, spelling and language construction are simply too good, given her knowledge of the linguistic skills, or rather lack thereof, of the student. (Many of her students are not native English-speakers, although, depressingly, this applies too to many who are.) That, plus the bland, generic style, as well as the odd hallucinated reference (although this seems to be becoming less prevalent).

If there are sufficient grounds for suspicion, the student may be called in for a live examination; most own up at this point.

Re: "Madgacascar floats sideways / through the afternoon"

Are you sure it was whisky?

Re: Continuing the tradition

Sure. Nonetheless it is the study of the past, as best we can parse it through whatever records do exist, and (with best practice) taking into account the perspectives, agendas and biases inherent in those records.

A thoroughly honourable and worthwhile enterprise to be sure, but not, of course, to be confused with science.

Re: Continuing the tradition

"[history] is the study of something that doesn't exist"

Of course. It's the study of something which existed.

Re: "Madgacascar floats sideways / through the afternoon"

I like to move it*

Madagascar floats sideways

Through the afternoon.

_{*Would work better as a last line, but hey :-)}

"Madgacascar floats sideways / through the afternoon"

Very beautiful. Could be the last two lines of a haiku. Any takers for the first line (5 syllables)?

Open source project fools AI scrapers with poisoned font

I think there's enough worry to go round.

My argument was precisely that this is not what will happen. That this will, rather, just nudge us further towards idiocracy.

(And no, I don't give a stuff about damage to LLM providers either.)

> I don't have concerns about misleading users because LLMs are already unreliable and likely always will be.

More of a Bad Thing is not just a Bad Thing – it's a Worse Thing.

Okay, I think I meant the same… but what exactly does "poisoning" actually mean here? My argument was that it would simply increase the incidence of nonsensical (and potentially misinformational) responses.

Isn't a concern here that the LLM doesn't "know" it's ingesting garbage, and will happily tokenise away, increasing the probability that regurgitation generates nonsense.

Hooray, you may say, this will make people more cautious about trusting LLM output, and they will be more inclined to cross-check sources or reject the technology altogether. Except I sincerely doubt that'll be what actually happens. Do we really want more idiots filling their heads with plausible- (or even implausible-)sounding nonsense? Some of these people may even have a vote.

War machines can run amok with AI in control

Re: No fucking shit, Sherlock!

> … a genocide machine, one that picks targets based on heuristics such as skin colour, facial appearance, object classification (what is that this human is carrying? 30% TV camera, 40% bazooka)

Don't we already have humans to do that?

Sovereign AI is 'nonsense,' says Doctorow

Re: I'm with Doctorow on this

> Local (relatively speaking) LLMs specialised for a certain use-case (e.g. aiding medical research) …

In the longer run, valid and actually useful applications of AI (ML if you're easily triggered) in scientific/medical domains are, IMHO unlikely to be LLMs at all – recall what that second 'L' stands for.

LLMs are not the only game in town.

Zuck's AI ambitions put Meta on course to become America's next big cloud provider

Who actually is getting fleeced by all this spamvertising, though? I asked some friends, but they said it wasn't them.

Memory makers are slaves to the boom-bust rollercoaster, and the AI boom is the wildest ride of all

Re: Hey, TheRegister!

It's been flaky for the past week or longer.

Slothful summer app lets you scroll simply by tilting your head

Re: Lip reading?

NSFW?

Unklessh jjlyou'rhe actjualljy heditingk thke dolclumenkt.

Re: RSI

Not a problem, there's a dedicated head gesture for ordering 600kg of Red Leicester (although admittedly it is uncomfortably close to the one for posting naked selfies to your local Freecycle group).

The real problem is when humming along to 90s R&B where all the female singers do that weird lateral head-slide thing. Anything could happen…

AI-driven datacenter builds drive Microsoft's emissions up a quarter in one year

> "The ends justify the means"

Doesn't that tacitly assume that the "ends" are not themselves sinful?

New tool gives CLIs a warm and GUI feeling instead

Re: Why an AI?

Nice, but to be honest most of that sailed over my head (too American). Growing up in South Africa in the 60s/70s, National Lampoon didn't impinge on my radar (although I was an avid fan of Mad Magazine – an adjacent/precursive cultural reference perhaps?)

Re: Why an AI?

To expand a little, I think what those marketing people are handing down are not "design specifications" at all – they are desiderata, and unrealistic and unrealisable ones at that.

If some tech-bro droid orders his team to design and implement a cold-fusion reactor, then sorry, I'm not going to blame their failure to do so on the poor sods who found themselves landed in that crock.

Re: Why an AI?

Sorry, I've literally lost the thread here. Which post were you replying to?

Re: Why an AI?

I think that's a very fair assessment.

Having myself been a developer with mouths to feed (okay, mainly my own at the time), and having faced comparable pressures to deliver "something saleable", I know where I'm going to point the finger.

Re: Why an AI?

> Thanks for that, but I don't think it's making the case that I should shut up …

Not you personally; I was just having a pop at what to me comes across as a circle-jerk of angry old men¹ competing to see who can be the angriest, and adding nothing of interest to the discussion.

> I will treat the advertising as the spec and hold the designers accountable if they are complicit with that advertising.

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on who to blame for the mis-selling; personally, I'm not inclined to conflate design and advertising.

_{¹I am by all accounts an old man myself, although not a particularly angry one in real life. I do enjoy a robust debate, but a bunch of people endlessly, repetitively and loudly agreeing with each other doth not a debate make.}

Tool promises to make lazy academics' AI-written papers sound more human

Unfortunately, that genie has long left the bottle, and is aided and abetted by publish-or-perish science culture, and the junk/predatory/parasitic journals that it engenders.

Speaking as a research scientist myself, the grim truth is that it places a heavy burden on those of us who take science seriously. There are no easy solutions that I am aware of.

Having said which, there are still reputable journals out there who take peer review seriously, as well as some interesting moves to challenge the current academic publishing/review model.

> The issue with AI is that it can easily be used to write what are effectively "junk" papers which look plausible at first viewing.

Most certainly, and it is a plague in many disciplines.

However, as I mention in a previous comment, the article seems ambivalent about whether it is talking about AI-created research, or just the writing-up (no, those are not the same thing!) The latter, I argued, is more nuanced.

Lazy, certainly (and probably highly error-prone), but to be fair it doesn't necessarily follow that the research was performed/assisted by AI.^*

And to be honest, given the quantity of horrendously badly-written and incoherent papers I have to plough through, or even <shudder> review, this may not always be entirely a bad thing, especially for non-native language speakers. Provided, of course, that the actual research is by humans, and that due diligence is exercised to ensure that the AI write-up accurately reflects the research (hardly a given¹).

_{¹You might well ask how the reader can tell. But this goes as much for humans as for AI. If an author misrepresents their work (and some will), ultimately you have no way of knowing short of you or someone else replicating their study. This is endemic to science, a feature not a bug. But dishonesty (deliberate or inadvertent through AI) is a career-stopper – the proof tends to come out in the wash…}

[I fully expect the usual torrent of downvotes here for failing to express the Reg-standard sneering contempt for anything and everything under the banner of AI, but before jerking that knee, consider that there is a valid point here: AI may turn out turgid and inaccurate prose, but at least—in comparison to a depressing number of humans—those prose tend to be grammatically correct, correctly spelled and, in contrast to the linguistic horrors I am forced to endure, actually comprehensible. Every academic, lecturer and teacher knows this all too well.]

^*EDIT: Having re-read the article, I am honestly not sure whether they are talking about research conducted by AI, or just the write-up. Just to be clear, my comment refers strictly to writing-up, not actual research.

I was going to say … "verbose, with … inflated phrasing, and over-long sentences" – that's my papers on a stick.

Do "humanizers" work for real humans?

Avoid AI atrophy – new tool promises to reverse vibe coding skills decay

Re: I Never Memorised it All

Okay, sorry, it wasn't clear to me you were joking.

Damn social media…