Posts by Triggerfish

Eric Schmidt: Build more AI datacenters, we aren't going to 'hit climate goals anyway'

Maybe he could be helped a long, after all he's gonna die anyway. And it seems to match his ethos.

As IBM pushes for more automation, its AI simply not up to the job of replacing staff

Re: So if we ask chatGPT....

The predictability of the average MBA, means they're probably the easiest to automate work wise TBH.

Hangover from messy Walmart tech divorce ongoing at Asda

Re: 2,500 systems?

Decent sized store.

Rack A, maybe 4 or 5 42-47 U racks that are filled. Some SAP servers (plus redundancy backups), various other servers for things like muzac, ads, loss prevention systems, CC, IOT stuff etc. Shitload of switches. Rack B checkout switches (all doubled up for redundancy), couple more racks dotted round the store mainly switch racks again (also doubled up) for other checkouts, scales, AP, stuff like that.

It adds up.

I've worked with ASDA when they were Walmart owned. Walmart's actual IT infrastructure is huge they also had some highly skilled network engineers etc there. They took their IT infrastructure very seriously as down time was measured in tens of thousands of dollars per hr at large stores. God forbid you needed to do work at a store during certain seasons - it would only have been mission critical stuff like a dead switch, the managers would be actively hostile to people trying to do the work at this period (whereas they usually were accommodating for the most part) and the change controls to do the work got bumped up several layers of management for review.

The IT overhead for a large supermarket chain is actually pretty big, LIDL have recently started selling their services as a datacentre - they probably didn't need to scale the teams, skills. or hardware up much.

Study shock! AI hinders productivity and makes working worse

I find it sort of depressing how easily the marketing and sales people full for the exact same bullshit they craft themselves.

Nvidia's next Linux driver to be… just as open

Re: Nvidia? Not for me.

Every now and again I install Linux, thats it I'm gonna learn it properly this time, move from windows etc etc.

Every time after several hrs wrestling just trying to get something as simple as tdual monitors on an nvidia set up...

OK back to windows I'm done.

Selfie-based authentication raises eyebrows among infosec experts

Re: "typically takes under 20 seconds to complete"

400 usd is an expensive takeaway in Vietnam.

It doesn't get used for transactions below this value.

Google Translate now fluent in 110 additional languages from Abkhaz to Zulu

Quality of translation may vary

Just from experience using translate with some languages like Chinese, Vietnamese and so on. It's sort of fine if a sentence is used, often fails if its more than that.

China's Big Tech companies taught Asia to pay by scanning QR codes, but made a mess along the way

Re: "The next step is biometric"

However some of us do live in and travel in cou tries that QR is used so it's useful to us to read.

I think your missing a reason why visa and so on never got traction as much over here vs QR. Because you can certainly use it in larger stores and chains.

As it mentions in the article.

You need a POS system, and many places don't have them, the average market stall, street food, corner shop, taxi driver etc just doesn't have that sort of set up in a lot of places like SEA and China, their owners do have smartphones.

A thump with the pointy end of a screwdriver will fix this server! What could possibly go wrong?

I thought they were gonna say.

'I gave up IT and pursued a happier life'.

Really? A sarcasm detector? Wow. You shouldn't have

Re: "pitch, speaking rate, and energy"

It's going to struggle with English sarcasm on energy.

My American and Canadian friends generally you can tell the sarcasm because of pitch and energy, they want you to know they are being sarcastic.

They struggle with sarcasm from Brits, Aussies and so on because we prefer to just deliver it dry, there's been many a time in a bar they didn't pick up on a comment for a good few minutes.

What's with AI boffins strapping GoPros to toddlers? We take a closer look

Inference

The human brain can infer things. That's why you could teach a child what a chair is, but when saying where can you sit they would choose things that are not just chairs, tables, low walls etc.

Is AI capable of this? Because I feel it's a big factor in things like using language, that is not just having a good vocab but also understanding nuance, idioms and so on.

AI will reduce workforce, say 41% of surveyed executives

No economist but

surely if you put everyone out of work there's going to be no one who can afford your products?

That Asian meal you eat on holidays could launder money for North Korea

I mean there is an official NK restaurant chain "Pyongang" in Vietnam, Thailand etc.

Which may or may not be selinng dodgy software as well.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/05/18/asia/hanoi-north-korea-restaurant-facial-recognition-software-intl/index.html

But as a percentage market wise I'd wonder what your odds are of actually hitting an undercover one. There is a huge amount of places to eat in these countries. Chances are low your going to hit many.

Filipino police free hundreds of slaves toiling in romance scam operation

Wage slaves don't tend to be, tortured, sexually abused, never see families or freedom again, etc.

I'd hardly add them to the numbers, shitty a situation as being on low wages is.

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

Re: Being polite is great

I mean it's just good advice in general I think even out of the workplace.

Reported $60M Reddit deal signed to train AI models with user data

Citogenisis

Are we not just automating citogenisis now? Along with the enshittification of the Web with AI driven useless content sites, it's got to be a terrible training feedback loop.

https://xkcd.com/978/

The week in weird: Check out the strangest CES tech of 2024

Mossair

£600 ffing quid for a terrarium you could make for about 40.

Im in the wrong game.

Zuckerberg accused of OK'ing Insta plastic surgery filters despite fears of harm to kids

Re: Video Filter Effects

They're very good. This is from a few years back and I am sure it's improved.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/globalnews.ca/news/7730617/gender-swap-influencer-japan-woman-man/amp/

Aerial cable tangles are still being strung up, but carriers are slowly burying the problem

No room to dig.

The thing is there isn't room to dig for a lot of the suburbs in places Thailand and Vietnam.

The areas people live behind the main roads are a maze of alleys ranging from just big enough to fit a car to just about wide enough for a scooter.

You start digging up that to lay cable and you could end up shutting offf access to the homes of hundreds of people, some of these alleys as well have loads of front yard shops, markets and so on. The disruption caused is impractical.

Underground there's probably just enough room for standard sewage and water pipes only before you hit building foundations.

In top of that. I've never had fibre in the UK, but copper was just a swtich over at a junction box. There doesn't seem to be any main faculty that oversees that sort of handover here. Change isp, new cable gets laid and it's such a tangle of cables that removing the old is probably like a game of jenga except you take out everyone's Internet when the whole tangle falls down.

Also Google maps just falls over in some of these places I'm not sure if there are adequate maps in general.

AIs can produce 'dangerous' content about eating disorders when prompted

Re: Terminal success

I see you shop at pak'n'save

https://gizmodo.com/paknsave-ai-savey-recipe-bot-chlorine-gas-1850725057

From cage fight to page fight: Twitter threatens to sue Meta after Threads app launch

Re: Poacher

I seem to remember he sent out tweets mocking them being fired, something about their genius being useful elsewhere...

Think of our cafes and dry cleaners, says Ohio as budget slashes WFH for govt workers

Re: Think of...

Ah yeah maybe it's where we see factories being placed. Where I have been living there are a lot of old

factories that are smack bang in the middle of a small town. Different suburban environment to the USA so bit if adapting needed to each place.

So I think from your comments we may be on the same page (we don't really have small local malls in the UK in these little dying towns).

I think there is still use for a co-working space for these places because not everyone working from home can always work at home, so a local co-working type space using these local empty large buildings may have a place as a temp peaceful office with a five min walk commute.

Think of...

The dead end town centres that will be re-invigorated, the enironment becoming cleaner due to less cars, think of the little independent cafes, coffee shops and reseteraunts who will actually pay taxes, think of people having more free time to spend in them rather than commuting, think of the old factory buildings that can become local co-working type spaces, think of cities becoming more places to visit for enterainment and being able to afford some green spaces instead of car parks...

Microsoft would rather spend money on AI than give workers a raise

Let's hire a load of people, that will look like growth and our stock will go up, let's fire a lot of people that will look like savings our stock will go up.

Ads for lucrative jobs in Asia fail to mention chance of slavery as crypto-scammer

Yeah it's actually bit of a problem out here, and frankly being made to work for scam calls is the lighter side of what can happen.

DEF CON to set thousands of hackers loose on LLMs

Re: Better than hackers for red teaming an LLM

Namshub of Enki.

Handwritten Einstein essay on theory of relativity goes under the hammer

Hmmn racism from the outset, weird colour schemes, random USE OF CAPS.

Seems legit.

Phở no! Vietnam's last working submarine cable glitches out

Re: Connection issues started after new year.

I have no idea why you dragged QAnon and MTG into this, But I can assure you the connection has not been that bad in Vietnam in the past few years. In fact a lot better than my connection was in the UK in both mobile and househol It has however downgraded severly in the past few week, juist after new year as it were.

Connection issues started after new year.

It was after new year that the connection really started to be a problem, was closer to Tet in Feb. As it is mobile seems to get a better connection than cable. But using an apartments WiFi when everyone comes home is a nightmare because they tend to share one line between the apartments.

Microsoft begs you not to ditch Edge on Google's own Chrome download page

Re: This isn't that new, if they want me to use it.

Stop making it such a sodding pain in the arse. Please sign in to edge with your work account etc. Just give me a sodding browser.

Warning: Microsoft Teams Free (classic) will be gone in 2 months

Re: Dealer

You beat me to it, I was just thinking their street crack model of software sales was working again.

Beijing grants permit to 'flying car' that can handle 'roads and low altitude'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6o3GNoU-vw

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Re: Learn both? It's all in the mind @AC

I think your proving my point really it's just the scale you're used to that let's you perceive what is hot or cold.

I would have had no clue what 63 was if you hadn't put it in C, also by my experience I doubt many people notice the granularity of a half degree C difference that much when it come to too hot or too cold for temp settings.

Re: Learn both? It's all in the mind

Born in '72. It's weird, depending on what I am thinking off I can only visualise certain things one way easily. Like people's height, my wife is 149.8 cm but I don't know how short that is until I go oh four foot eleven. Meanwhile if wanting to measure a doorway I need metres to get the idea.

I often see the arguement Celsius doesn't make sense as a temp measurement from Americans because they know that 32F is cold whereas 0 degrees makes no sense they don't know if they need a coat.

The mind is an odd thing.

Microsoft is checking everyone's bags for unsupported Office installs

Re: Death to subscriptions

Let's be honest we've all dealt with those changes, no encouragement is going to be needed.

Probably the opposite....

Re: Death to subscriptions

I really think the best things to do would be to have the UI developers sit next to a busy PA or similar.

The PA has a mallet, and everytime one of these groovy changes fucks their work flow they are allowed to hit the UI dev.

Games Workshop once again battles scariest monster of all: ERP gone wrong

Re: They would have been better off designing something in-house from scratch...

IMO ERP systems are terribly complicated, it may look like a bunch of different databases stuck together with connectors, some predictive analytics and so on that make changes in other databases e.g stock is down, lead time is x, manufacturing needs y amount to meet demand, therefore order z now, but sales is expecting maybe a, from predictions b, .

But in reality it's likely that each of those sperate modules is going to have to be designed not just by software engineers but someone that understands the type of work and process that go into each space as a SME, i.e your manufacturing guy is not just going to need to know your processes, but everything about manufacturing engineering thgeories including edge case scenarios and how to work with software devs and architects. Decent size companies will balk at manufacturing their own CRM because of how tricky it becomes, thats just one module working alone, not slotted into a ERP system.

By the time you have done that your probably more a massive software house than an actual manufacturer of plastic monsters.

Re: Well this makes me feel great

Stakeholders and ERP salespeople are a good place to start, you may as well start now because before the end you'll want to kill them anyway.

ERP implementation is an amazing way to show how siloed and bad the processes you thought worked smoothly really are.

US think tank says China would probably lose if it tries to invade Taiwan

Re: Ukraine: Korea-Style Settlement

Except they do have NATO support and training, and NATO will quite likely happily play the great game. Getting rid of their old end of life we needed to destroy it soon anyway stocks, cherfully assesing their weapons againts the scenarios they built them for, and chewing up the very threat they pretty much came together for in the first place.Why stop bankrolling that?

You didnt mention what part of your country you'd give up.

Re: Ukraine: Korea-Style Settlement

What part of your country would you be willing to give up? Especially when it looks like your side has the best toys and long term chances of winning.

Mercedes-Benz thinks Nvidia's Omniverse can help with manufacturing

Aside from actual engineering accuracy of physical objects, they also tend to be pretty handy in bringing a lot of sensor data such as equipment usage, wear, movement around the environment and so on Into a more cohesive visual interface which seems to work better with people than a endless series of seperate dashboards and data streams.

India partners with private company to sell ads to commuters via railway Wi-Fi

Re: more than 1.1 million unique users...

Even if you don't connect for long it's still analytics, you know who rides the train, you have last mile data analytics you can build on.

Crap data protection means you can dig into all sorts of stuff.

An IT emergency during a festive visit to the in-laws? So sorry, everyone, I need to step out for a while

Re: A very long time ago

"To believe in one's backups is one thing. To have to use them is another."

http://www.taobackup.com/testing.html

It's time to retire 'edge' from our IT vocabulary

Re: What exactly is the edge?

I disagree, I see a lot of edge processing IOT sensors and there are practical uses for the data being processed on the device to do with latency but also privacy.

Twitter will lose 32 million users by end of 2024, Insider Intelligence predicts

Re: RE: lefty twitter users

You can criticise Isreal the goverments policies and not be anti-semetic.

The IT decision-maker that really matters? Your pet

Some people will buy tat and extra stuff they don't need. I often see products in fishkeeping that pretty much have a premium for not having nuch more than a certain label and because its cool to own it versus the perfectly normal priced version. There's always someone with cash to burn.

Just 22% of techies in UK aged 50 or older, says Chartered Institute for IT

Re: Blame the management

They underestimate the skills and experience needed or don't value it.

I have been asked about development of a robust commercial grade IOT data storage, platforms, digital twins, and the like and a often asked question after hearing typical wages costs goes along the lines of, "can't we just get someone fresh from university to do it"?

It's like that 5yrs of experience you don't want to pay for? That wasn't them sitting on their bum it's not a static job skill, they were actually learning and improving.

Low code is no replacement for software development, say German-speaking SAP users

Re: Still Generic

I agree here, I like using power automate TBH, its very useful for some things and it slots in nicely with office and so on, and its the same with things like connectors. Some of them are really useful, some of them are great for the average user.

But they are blocks of code that do a very specific thing, yes you can tweak them and play around a bit. But you can almost end up having to spend as much time figuring out something as it would to actually have someone write some code, and anyone diving that deeply into tweaking it is probably not the average office user low code is aimed at anyway.

Once you start to go past a certain point of complexity, it's either not possible to build it with these blocks or it becomes a monstrosity of hacks cobbled together just waiting to fall over.