Posts by Noodle

AI models will deceive you to save their own kind

Re: You’ll know when it’s time to kill AI

Looks like it's time then!

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-98037-1

ServiceNow allegedly says salesman 'overachieved' and is not entitled to comp

Re: The Oracle gambit

If you've got a guy regularly closing $20M deals you want to work out how you can pay him MORE to keep him on the team, not screw him over so he leaves for a competitor. Do these people even understand how business works?

Users protest as Google Antigravity price floats upward

Surprised Pikachu Face.

Seriously though how can anyone using these products not realize they are currently massively subsidized and big price corrections upwards are inevitable as the market matures.

Royal Navy races to arm ships against drone threat

As you say though, this issue has been apparent for a couple of years and so an RFP with a lead time of just a few weeks smacks of a last minute scramble to provision something that should have clearly been on their radar (no pun intended) for a while.

Weeks you say? Totally understandable, it's not as if there has been a nearby years long war with massive use of offensive drones happening that could have prompted there idea of "anti drone" systems maybe possibly being a good idea in the near future. Who could have possibly forseen that.

Microsoft to auto-launch Copilot in Edge whenever you click a link from Outlook

Recently discovered Vivaldi and it rocks.

All your bots are belong to US if you don't play ball, DoD tells Anthropic

Re: There's no way the Defense Production Act allows that

The DPA is incredibly broad so they could easily do that if they want e.g.

Title I: Priorities and Allocations, which allows the President to require persons (including businesses and corporations) to prioritize and accept contracts for materials and services as necessary to promote the national defense.

Re: What a bunch of liars

You'll note they didn't specify *which* law and one thing we've all learned recently is that US laws aren't worth the paper they are written on when it comes to the actions of the government or military.

Re: "autonomous weapons that use AI to make final targeting decisions"

"You're right, you did specify to only target Russians but I didn't do that. Since Russians are humans and Russians are enemies I targeted all humans instead. Let me retry that for you and this time I won't annihilate all humans."

Recycling biz reckons AI features are destroying smartphone resale values

Just recently looked at buying a new phone and unfortunately all the premium models I looked at with quality materials, glass, charging features etc. were all encumbered with crappy AI "features" I don't want and will never use. As the commenters in the article state, it's now extremely difficult if not impossible to buy a premium quality phone without AI crowbarred into it.

Bcachefs creator insists his custom LLM is female and 'fully conscious'

Re: Leaving aside the claim of sentience…

Certainly puts a whole new spin on the idea of "binary" gender.

Founder ditches AWS for Euro stack, finds sovereignty isn't plug-and-play

Re: 'Europe' is not a sovereign entity.

While that is technically true I think the point here is that all EU nations are subject to the same EU laws e.g. data protection, and not the laws of an increasingly economically and politically hostile nation like the USA.

Desktop tech sent to prison for an education on strange places to put tattoos

Re: Cheer up, kids.

Sounds to me more like you have no experience of workplace environments decades ago. Things that outrage people now were commonplace back then, including hazing rituals and as those things go this is actually one of the milder ones I have seen or heard about at the time.

Open source registries don't have enough money to implement basic security

"yet they still charge for services. In fact it is good practice; otherwise people will abuse the system"

Tell me you're an American without telling me you're American.

Re: Hospital charges

It's unlikely you are paying a hospital for parking though, probably a third party operating a car park on hospital property. Unless you consider car parking to be a service that hospitals should offer but personally I'm happy with them focusing on medical care.

Enforcing piracy policy earned helpdesk worker death threats

Never been threatened in my tech career but in an earlier life working late nights in a call center for a pizza delivery chain in London, threats were all too common. You would not believe how angry people can get over a thin bit of bread covered in cheese and tomato.

Re: Why wasn't the violent idiot fired immediately and the cops called?

And fair enough too, back in the 1990s the IRA were still regularly bombing places and murdering civilians. Maybe the guy was a nutter, but maybe not. I'm glad your workplace took such threats seriously.

Next-gen nuclear reactors safe enough to skip full environmental reviews, says Trump admin

They do say that stupidity is ultimately a self solving problem.

Maybe CISA should take its own advice about insider threats hmmm?

At the least the USA is still a world leader in one field - that of staggeringly incompetent leadership. Another three years or more of this corrosive administration it's going to leave that country a hollowed out shell off it's former self.

The Roomba failed because it just kind of sucked

There's nothing wrong with the idea judging by the huge global market for these devices. They just couldn't compete with Chinese brands that did the same or better for half the price.

The article seems to imply that irobot/Roomba failed because there isn't a market for robot vacuum cleaners or that the concept is inherently flawed, but that is clearly nonsense. The current market for robot vacuum cleaners is huge and of course now mostly dominated by Chinese manufacturers. Roomba has failed because it could no longer compete on either price or innovation but unlike Western car manufacturers it will not be kept going on life support.

Personally I've had several robot vacs and they have mostly been great, but none of them were Roombas because why would I pay 2x or 3x more?

Jeff Bezos gives CEO another go at $6.2B AI startup Prometheus

I reckon the person that named "Project Prometheus" was not actually familiar with the legend or the fate of the eponymous hero, which as I recall involved having his liver pecked out by an eagle every day for eternity.

YouTube coughs up $24.5 million to make Trump 'censorship' case go away

I mean this is just straight up extortion. The Mob has nothing on The Donald.

CISA: Wow, that election had a lot of foreign trolling. Trump's Homeland Sec pick: And that's none of your concern

When you basically run your entire campaign on a wave of disinformation of course the first thing you do is take out the people who might have something to say about that.

MongoDB CEO says if AI hype were the dotcom boom, it is 1996

As someone who was an active user of the web in 1996 I dispute the assertion that it was "not very interesting", as I recall it was an extremely exciting time of rapid innovation and creativity pushing the boundaries of what was then a very new technology.

Linux Deepin 23: A polished distro from China that Western desktops could learn from

Microsoft doesn't *have* to bother it's users with advertising, it just does it because it can, because money.

London council accuses watchdog of 'exaggerating' danger of 2020 raid on residents' data

The arrogance of that response to the ICO's reprimand is probably an indicator of their approach to security and how they ended up in this situation in the first place.

Snowflake tells customers to enable MFA as investigations continue

"Snowflake said.."

It would be nice to have a link or some attribution as to where this was allegedly said as there doesn't appear to be any first hand source for this in can find on the web.

Stack Overflow simply bans folks who don't want their advice used to train AI

Same. Honestly just screw these guys, they seem to have forgotten that the entire Stack product is built on the back of countless hours of free work contributed by users. Giving those contributors the finger and claiming all the content as their own property, why would anyone contribute to that mess anymore.

Snowflake share price falls after revenue forecasts dip below expectations

Unexpected bills are nothing new, have these people never been through an Oracle audit before?

"Well Mr Customer, I realize you have paid an eye watering sum of money to have our supposed "Enterprise" edition, but it looks to me like you've used advanced compression on those indexes, so you better dig deep and hand over some more cash!"

OpenAI meltdown: How could Microsoft have let this happen after betting so many billions?

Re: Or...

Maybe I'm an old cynic but this is far more plausible than Microsoft dropping the ball like the article suggests. Nadella is not Ballmer, there's no way he didn't anticipate this kind of scenario.

Latest layoffs: Lyft, Stripe more than decimate staff

Nice to see the word "decimation" being used correctly for once!

No, I will not pay the bill. Why? Because we pay you to fix things, not break them

An insurance company I worked at had a similar experience, tech showed up to service a UPS unit and was supposed to switch power away from UPS unit while keeping everything else on. Instead they managed to turn off all power to the entire server room. On a Friday. Absolute chaos ensued, staff were summoned back from holidays, one particular bit of Fujitsu kit would not come back up and required a tech from HQ in Japan to remote in and coax it back to life. A heroic weekend-long effort by IT team managed to get everything back on line by Monday.

A week or so later the IT team received an invoice from the UPS tech for his work. Suffice to say some colourful language and loud phone calls later the invoice was consigned to the rubbish bin, unpaid.

Ex-WSJ reporter says he was framed in elaborate 'hack-and-smear' operation

We buy it mostly from Norway, Russia (up until this year anyway) and the Netherlands. USA is actually also a significant supplier.

FTC sues Intuit for false advertising, says 'free' TurboTax isn't always free

About damn time, Inuit has been getting away with this rort for years.

Tesla driver charged with vehicular manslaughter after deadly Autopilot crash

"People getting used to the idea that the car will simply sort everything out so there's no need to pay attention."

This is exactly the problem with Teslas. It's (mostly) not a technology problem, it's the way they are marketed. We all know that no-one reads the manual any more and if you give enough people a feature called "autopilot" then some of them are going to interpret that literally, leading to accidents like this one.

Developer creates ‘Quite OK Image Format’ – but it performs better than just OK

Re: Pronouncing...

Quoif surely?

Hey, Walkers. What's the difference between crisps and chips? Answer: You can't get either of them

Re: False "worldwide shortages of lorry drivers leading to worldwide shortages"

Primarily due to a huge increase in the amount of goods being shipped to the US from China, compounded by decades of underinvestment in the ports themselves so they had no spare capacity, and then the reduced availability of all kinds of staff such as port workers and truck drivers due to Covid-19.

That headline

Pity the poor New Zealanders trying to parse that headline when we have:

Chips = Crisps

Hot chips = Chips

Chips = (micro) Chips

AWS announces new region in the Land of the Long White Cloud – New Zealand

Re: This is interesting

Yeah, that's not what it means.

A man spent a year in jail on a murder charge involving disputed AI evidence. Now the case has been dropped

Regarding AI art, the only surprising thing about that story is that it wasn't immediately obvious that would happen. Do these people read the news at all?

I no longer have a burning hatred for Jewish people, says Googler now suddenly no longer at Google

With the limited facts available this sounds like a harsh but ultimately fairly predictable outcome from publicly sharing an opinion about anything remotely controversial in these hyper sensitive times.

Although why people persist in sharing these kinds of opinion and social commentary pieces on LinkedIn, which is supposed to be a network for professionals, is beyond me.

That thing you were utterly sure would never happen? Yeah, well, guess what …

The Devil Makes Work for Idle Hands

.. And also for bored programmers testing things, as we found at the company I worked for in the late 90s. We generated mailing address data that was printed on labels for catalogs and such. One client was very surprised to receive a sample catalog addressed to "Satan, 666 Devil Street" with various other occult references attached.

Fortunately they saw the funny side.

AWS Free Tier, where's your spending limit? 'I thought I deleted everything but I have been charged $200'

Re: downhill

By way of contrast, I worked for a company a few years ago that had a monthly AWS bill of several million $. We were based outside the US but had a dedicated support manager and three technical consultants from AWS on 24/7 call, plus regular support meetings and NDA briefings on product roadmaps etc. On several occasions we ended up in direct contact with product teams to help resolve issues. We did have some issues with AWS but support definitely wasn't one of them.

Obviously there is no "spending cap" because it would be impossible to implement by stopping all possible activities across dozens of services that might incur a charge beyond some nominal spend limit. Even AWS cannot calculate total spend across a whole account fast enough to guarantee some process that might stop all services in time to prevent a limit being exceeded.

In my experience almost all users of AWS accounts for training or experimentation purposes have no issues keeping within the free tier limits. On the rare occasion someone does exceed the limit (and I have done this myself once by accidentally leaving a database cluster running) a message to support has been enough to have the charge reversed.

Basically if you don't do your homework to understand how free tier services work then you're responsible for the charges incurred, but even then you probably won't have to pay them.

Amazon hit with antitrust lawsuit after DC AG says TTFN to price fixing

Re: Dont get it

"Setting a price on a product or service that is significantly higher than recent prices offered on or off Amazon"

In other words, if you offer your goods on your own or someone else's website for less than it appears on Amazon you can find your listing suspended or potentially your account banned.

South Africa's state-owned energy firm to appeal after court rules Oracle does not have to support its software

Based on my own experiences with local Oracle sales and licensing teams this is completely in character, i.e. treating their own customers with complete contempt. We all know how hard it is for large enterprises to ensure they're compliant with licensing agreements, especially the byzantine arrangements favoured by Oracle, Microsoft et al. - the good vendors will understand this and work with customers to reach an amicable solution. The Oracle's of this world take a completely uncompromising approach - pay up or we'll pull the rug out from under you! This happens so much I can't understand why people still choose Oracle as a vendor.

I haven't bought new pants for years, why do I have to keep buying new PCs?

Mum gets it

Quite impressed with the (presumably non-IT literate in those days) mother's saw-based analogy. Spot on!

Splunk junks 'hanging' processes, suggests you don't 'hit' a key: More peaceful words now preferred in docs

Self defeating

The tragedy of efforts like this is that they come from a basically good place. Most people agree that having diverse teams in terms of culture and perspective is beneficial in terms of product design, customer experience and also for a healthy company culture. They understand that to achieve that we need talented people from all backgrounds to feel like they will have an equal opportunity to succeed and enjoy their work.

However banning completely context appropriate and neutral words like "illegal" and "native" doesn't further this agenda at all, the inherent ridiculousness of it undermines real and important work being done to improve diversity and inclusion. Associations like this are why diversity and inclusion efforts are so often met with scepticism and apathy.

YouTube is going to splash adverts all over your videos, and won't pay creators unless there's a big enough audience

Re: Somebody has to pay, somehow

Somebody already does pay. According to the last quarterly press release from Alphabet the revenue from YouTube Ads was over 5 billion dollars for that quarter alone. I don't know what their operating costs are for YouTube, but while I'm sure they're huge I'm also sure its not close to 5 billion dollars a quarter.