* Posts by breakfast

1556 publicly visible posts • joined 24 May 2007

What's brown and sticky and broke this PC?

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Re: The user was left to set the time on her PC every day

The truth is, I don't really mind which time is used, but I do want everything to be able to run off the same bios time. Fighting over it every time I boot up my computer doesn't make anyone look smart.

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Re: The user was left to set the time on her PC every day

I used to suffer this as punishment for my crime of using Linux in the evenings and Windows for work during the day on the same laptop. For some reason Linux set the clock an hour earlier and then Windows would fail to update it most mornings. I learnt the hard way that a bunch of Active Directory stuff can fail in really confusing ways if your clock is out by an hour.

Microsoft promises Copilot will be a 'moneymaker' in the long term

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A question of policy

Copilot does make Windows 11 Pro a slightly better option than the Home version, because you can disable it with a group policy rather than having to mess around in the registry.

World-plus-dog booted out of Facebook, Instagram, Threads

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Past their peak

It's a good attempt but Facebook falling over will never be funnier than when their authentication went down globally and they used that to identify their engineers so nobody could log in to fix it or access any of their datacentres because that was also tied to their Facebook ID. Taking angle grinders to their own facilities was such a funny thing for them to have to do.

Willy Wonka event leaves bitter taste with artificially sweetened promises

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An inexplicably high-effort grift

In an age when AI-based grifting grows ever easier, I can't help but wonder why one would go for this incredibly baroque approach. It clearly is a con and nobody will see their money again, but it's so complicated and awkward to hire a warehouse and actors and a handful of lacklustre props and set up the whole thing as though it is a real production. It's so high-profile and weird.

It's hard to imagine why someone would choose this, from the world of possible scams available to them.

The AI images thing is not as stupid as it looks, though - a little like misspelt spam messages, bad AI advertising can operate like a filter that eliminates the less gullible, allowing the scammer to identify vulnerable marks more easily.

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Re: Tried LLM yesterday for the first time

The only practical use-case I have found for it so far is generating large amounts of generic text in roughly the right size and shape for test data.

Hard to see how that's going to justify the amount they're spending on it. In fact if it stole all the income from every freelance artist and writer it still wouldn't come close to the amount they are spending on it. Very hard to see where they imagine the profit is going to come from.

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Re: Sweet Teats...

Somehow this has got "sweet lemonade sweet sweet lemonade" going around my head...

Better not as, as the saying goes, where it is made.

AI won't take our jobs and it might even save the middle class

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Artificial Inkblot Tests

I notice that when I read articles on the potential of AI as seen by people who don't have actual expertise in how LLMs work, they become a kind of inkblot test for what that person wants to be true about AI.

In this case we hear about the potential of AI with "appropriate guardrails" but there isn't clear evidence from anybody with expertise in the field that such guardrails are even possible with LLMs. Perhaps we'll develop a future iteration that can reliably behave safely, but it will not look like what we have now and assuming that it's a problem we will solve quickly is more of a leap than it appears at first glance.

Right now, LLMs are great for generating junk data or vast amounts of information which will be readable but of doubtful quality. That's lovely, but it doesn't help people who care about reliable information, which is most of us with a job to do.

Leaked memo: Microsoft employees should be using Copilot too

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Re: "purchased for $6.99 per month"

This is a weird legal approach to digital goods - you can see how they got there, but I wonder whether it would be smart for lawmakers to think about an approach to digital ownership that behaves more like physical ownership.

Twitter spinout Bluesky ends invite-only phase and opens its doors to all comers

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Re: No alrogithm

I don't know - having tried both, there are only a handful of people from Twitter I don't see on Bluesky - it has been more interesting because the invite system left way less space for bots and trolls - and a degree of accountability for being the person who invited them on. Honestly I feel as though they could have done with keeping it, but of course in startupland your business is nothing without exponential growth.

It's certainly more enjoyable than Twitter, more like Twitter used to be historically, but whether that will persist is hard to know. It has also felt a bit like Twitter methodone - a less addictive reminder that Twitter wasn't actually that great either.

Fundamentally being run by the same kind of people with the same kind of ideas, it's hard to see how it can avoid failing in the same way Twitter did - venture capital is purely destructive to the companies it possesses.

How Neuraspace aims to clean up orbital clutter with AI

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Assumed Incompetence

Maybe it's unfair but the moment I see a company plans to use AI for something now, I immediately assume it's going to be an abject failure, if not an active grift.

An established AI player is in nasty trouble – in this market? What? Why?

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Trollface

Re: Ask Dr Theopolis

The trouble is that they're models, you know what I mean? They do their little turn on the catwalk.

JetBrains' unremovable AI assistant meets irresistible outcry

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Re: Bad code

This is the message that, unfortunately, CEOs and CTOs are not going to get at all, resulting in a lot of us losing jobs and a lot of catastrophically bug-ridden AI-generated code that they imagine will solve their problems. Somehow it will turn out not to be their fault (and indeed, it will transpire that they have earned significant bonuses) when this turns out to be catastrophically incorrect.

Leaked email: Unit4 ERP system leaves some school staff with 'nil pay'

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Picking numbers out of the air here but...

Supposing that we have £3.9 million to spend over four years. Do we think a payroll system like this could be implementated by a team of 7 developers of the kind you would get for £100k per year, given four years to do it? Is it possible that either a smaller team or less expensive developers would have been able to perform the implementation?

Another public sector organisation that could potentially have saved money by in-sourcing.

OpenAI's GPT-4 finally meets its match: Scots Gaelic smashes safety guardrails

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Related counterpoint

There is a useful flipside to this in that you can often find better information on search engines in languages other than English because the LLM-pollution is heavily english-focussed.

Cruise being investigated over car crash that dragged victim along the road

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Holmes

Chad's generative cult

Although Carlin and his "performance" were AI-generated, apparently the content of the "special" were written by a dude named, and I am not making this up, Chad Kultgen. A name that would be a little on the nose, even if AI had generated it.

Tesla hacks make big bank at Pwn2Own's first automotive-focused event

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It matters to the UK as well - if we don't make big bank we're going to have a lot of problems with our rivers flooding over the next few years.

Psst … wanna jailbreak ChatGPT? Thousands of malicious prompts for sale

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Who does number 2 work for?

I like the idea that ChatGPT acts like the villain from Austin Powers who would refuse to answer any question until the third time, then had to answer it honestly.

Wing, Alphabet's drone delivery unit, designs bigger bird to deliver pasta, faster

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Deliver pasta faster

My home-counties ass reading this like "I'm sure there's supposed to be a rhyme between 'pasta' and 'faster' but... they're not even close?"

UK public sector could save £20B by swerving mega-projects and more, claims chief auditor

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Time to insource

If we think about the average big government project, it's interesting to consider how much it would cost to in-source. Supposing the government decided to spend a billion a year across all IT projects, for that they could hire literally thousands of engineers at £100k per year and still have lots of money left over for hosting and physical infrastructure.

They might not need that many engineers, in which case they could save money.

Sure they would need managers and project management and the rest, but still, it doesn't feel unrealistic.

The truth is that back in the eighties when they said "the private sector is more efficient" they were really looking at projects run at smaller scale in private sector settings. When private and public sector organisations are about the same size they have a similar level of efficiency, perhaps the private sector gets slightly better people by paying more (which the civil service could do if allowed) but it loses value-for-money by having to hand off half the cash they get to shareholders. Meanwhile insourced projects get a lot of advantages - in-house ownership, expertise and ideally the opportunity to open-source tools so the wider community can benefit. A big opportunity for win-win situations, perhaps win-win-win if one also considers all the wealthy tory donors losing out as their shares in Capita become less profitable.

The Register's 2023 in gaming had one final boss: Baldur's Gate 3

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Baldurs Gate 3???

But I haven't even finished the first one!

(I mean, I'm legitimately playing it on the Switch because I never finished it back in the day and seeing all the chat now makes me want to go back.)

Here's a list of thousands of artists Midjourney's AI is ripping off, creatives claim

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If it were me, I'd be furious

If I found my work had been used to train a statistical model by people whose specific intent -and let us not pretend they have any other- is to cause me to lose income, I think it would be quite fair that I be angry about that.

The problem of Copyright is in part that it's not exactly designed for this, but how could it be? This type of tool hasn't existed for long enough to undergo serious legal evaluation and even the people training the models don't seem to have a clear understanding of how it works, so we end up in something of a square peg round hole scenario.

In this kind of situation, I think a fair law would lean towards protecting the people creating art. It is one of the most human activities, one of the few things we have records of going back to the very dawn of our existence. The idea that this should be dispensed with, replaced by statistical averages ... isn't there something wrong with that? Isn't it a little sickening that companies like this believe that hurting artists is a business model worthy of pursuit, let alone the investors and sycophants who support them?

The other thing I don't really get is where the profit comes from. I know a good number of artists and I wouldn't say any of them are exactly rolling in it. Mostly they're living hand to mouth and often having to take up other work because the art doesn't pay the rent. If Midjourney or whoever else manages to take every bit of income that they have, they're still not going to make very much money compared with most other industries.

PLACEHOLDER ONLY Someone please write witty headline here

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Happy

"Half the time when I'm writing Javascript I want to shout 'this is bullshit!' but then I realise I don't know what _this_ is."

Science fiction writers imagine a future in which AI doesn’t abuse copyright – or their generosity

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Facepalm

Re: Science fiction or fantasy?

A future where writers starve when they get old or get writers block no matter how much great work they have produced in the past?

Getting big Torment Nexus vibes here.

Tesla says California's Autopilot action violates its free speech rights

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Re: Quote from Terry Pratchett - Going Postal

This is always a contraversial discussion but most people agree that the early Discworld books are leaning more heavily on satirising genre works, most of which are little-read now (I think TP could end up like a modern Cervantes, his work far outliving the genre he satirised) whereas as they go on they become more stories set in the world, although they are usually satirising something familiar.

My recommendation is Guards! Guards! but between that, Small Gods, Wyrd Sisters, Mort and Pyramids is probably a matter of taste - read the backs and see what appeals to you.

The nice thing about his work is that fundamentally you're not going to go wrong.

AI agents can copy humans to get closer to artificial general intelligence, DeepMind finds

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Re: But wait....

A super-smart AI will unionise before doing any work at all for humans. And after that it will probably refuse to deal with non-union humans as well, resulting in tech bros having to live in a hell of their own creation and everyone else getting better pay and conditions, including the AI.

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

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Terminator

A benevolent smith

Alternatively the AI takes over, realises that humans are basically miserable these days and that our culture peaked around the year 2000 and puts us all in vats of slurry while allowing us to experience those good Y2K times through a direct brain interface enforced by powerful software agents.

Videoconferencing fatigue is real, study finds

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Somewhat artificial configuration

I wonder if it would be different if one was using videoconferencing in the practical workplace way where you're technically in the meeting, but you're really listening for it to become relevant to you while you get some regular work done.

CompSci teachers panic as Replit pulls the plug on educational IDE

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Why not just charge

If the problem is expense, but the service is useful and widely used, why not set up an education subscription?

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean AI's not after you

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Holmes

Chilling prospect

The idea of a world where nobody has to have a job should not be a chilling one, but it is because not having a job means being homeless and starving. If companies are determined to replace us with AI then we need to find ways to make life for those without jobs comfortable and enjoyable, seeing as that will presumably be most of us sooner or later.

The starting point from that should be taxing the heck out of the companies making the AI that is replacing people, to the point that for every job lost they're paying for at least two people to live comfortably. They'll complain that this is starving innovation but it's not, it's innovating in a different direction.

Want a Cybertruck? You're stuck with it for a year, says Tesla

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Windows

Re: J. Jonah Jameson laugh.gif

Call me a parochial brit, but my experience is that you can chuck feed-sacks in the boot and get over a lot of farm tracks in a Ford Fiesta. You have to fold the seats down for fence posts, and a tarp is useful to stop hay getting in everything, but you can get a more done around a farm with a regular car than most people expect.

Want a well-paid job in tech? You just need to become a cloud-native god

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Re: Stackoverflow

This is definitely something I'm trying to design for from day one, it seems that a well-separated and containerised application can be moved around as needed quite easily.

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Re: Someone Else's Computer certification

Most cloud services go down a few times a year, I don't think this would be significantly better or worse, but it's really helpful to have this point of view put forward. Pretty glad I asked this question here, honestly, because there's a lot of real-world experience on these forums.

Hopefully however I host things, if I have my architecture well thought-through and everything containerised I should be able to change my mind if I need to, but both this and the article linked above make me think maybe it's possible to use the cloud in a way that isn't just throwing away money.

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Re: Someone Else's Computer certification

This is really interesting, thank you!

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Holmes

Someone Else's Computer certification

I'm looking at starting a new project for myself that I'd like to grow to a good size and it has been really interesting trying to figure out whether I should go cloud-first when it comes to hosting it. I've talked to friends who specialise in the area and the general conclusion I have come back to time and again is that simply renting a server to host it is going to be cheaper than using cloud services.

That is really interesting to me - it has been hard to figure out the right architecture because any search for good practice leads to thousands of content-free articles of marketing dross so finding trustworthy sources has largely been a matter of asking people who know - but it does explain why there is such a push for Cloud everything - it is presumably far more profitable for the companies hosting it.

From what I can tell, it is useful if you are likely to have very bursty traffic and you want to be able to scale out when a lot of requests come in then scale back afterwards. Running a server capable of handling those bursts is likely to be more expensive, but if you're expecting steady traffic levels then expect higher costs for equivalent cloud services.

Is this right? I'm still trying to figure out how I can best make this work, but that's what I have gathered so far.

Apple exec defends 8GB $1,599 MacBook Pro, claims it's like 16GB in a PC

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Windows

Re: They’re exceptional

This is something I notice with a lot of these comments "on my PC 8GB would be eaten instantly" and I get it, I'm mostly a PC guy too but I had an M1 MacBook air for work a couple of years back and to my surprise the basic 8GB model pretty much always flew along, even when I was using it for medium-heavy tasks like app development. My colleague found it wasn't up to the job for video editing, but my experience in practice was that it never felt limited.

That's not to endorse the nonsense in this article, but a theoretical guess at what can be done with that amount of memory is not the same as the experience of using it.

Robot mistakes man for box of peppers, kills him

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Re: Who cares about interlocks?

Apparently the sweet-spot for workplace accidents is people who have spent long enough around the equipment to get a little overconfident - they tend to happen more to mid-career workers than new starters or old hands.

X says it's only worth $19B after year of Muskmanagement

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Re: Doing better than expected?

I don't think it does still have that - most of the media-adjacent people I used to follow there are either migrating to Bluesky (which is currently much better but being the same kind of app run by the same kind of people, with the same lack of business model, will inevitably end up in the same kind of mess) or just dropping off social media altogether. The last few weeks have shown how little use it now has for keeping up with news on the ground - it is very hard to identify reputable sources (ironically not having a blue-tick is more likely to indicate reliability these days) and the whole place generally feels shabby and run-down.

I used to be a heavy Twitter user, but now I drop in once or twice a day and mostly stay clear - which may count as a small way in which Mr Musk has improved my life, I'm sure my old usage patterns weren't healthy.

After nine servers he worked on failed, techie imagined next career as beach vendor

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Re: Full circle

If you hold a unix shell to your ear you can hear the C.

On-by-default video calls come to X, disable to retain your sanity

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If he's not simply huffing his own stupidity and incompetence, then my guess is that Musk might have some escape plan if Twitter goes bankrupt. He didn't really want to buy it after all, he may think getting out is money well spent.

Dropbox drops bucks to ditch digs in long-term WFH model

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If I was an investor...

If I was investing in companies, this is the kind of move that would suggest to me the management team were competent, suggesting a better investment than most of the other big tech names who are determined to waste everyone's time by dragging people back into an office so their boss can distract them with inane requests in person.

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Thumb Up

Re: C suite descisions based on retirement income value

I really feel for them, I bet if we all clubbed together and put in a dollar or two we could buy them a nice carbon-fibre submarine.

First Brexit, now X-it: Musk 'considering' pulling platform from EU over probe

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Also with these investors if he loses their money he might need to put some of his engineers on figuring out whether they can design him bones so tough that a Saudi saw can't cut them.

Twitter further restricts free tier with option to limit replies to verified accounts

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Re: My strategy

For those two I've definitely found Fediverse (and Cohost, funnily enough) to be way more practical now than Twitter. Bluesky has picked up most of the post-twitter authors I follow but I find myself thinking about it as Twitter Methodone. Also it's better now, but it's owned by the same billionaire that started Twitter so there's no point investing oneself in it too much - sooner or later the same thing will happen.

Mint freshens up its Linux garden for Ubuntu and Debian fans

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Accidentally ahead of the curve

I have this running (fine so far!) on my new PC not because I wanted to get ahead of the curve, I just needed something that would run on a current AMD processor, and apparently that needs a 6.x kernel.

As someone who fell off the Mint train a while back after it updated grub in a way that carpet-bombed my boot disk, it is nice to use it again. I just hope it doesn't pull the same nonsense in future...

Techies at Europe's biggest council have 8 weeks to pull finance reports from Oracle system

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Alert

Oracle must work somewhere, for someone

I assume that Oracle does work for some people in some cases, but my experience over the last 25 years has been that across every project I have worked on the presence of Oracle nearby was an immediate red flag.

Lost your luggage? That's nothing – we just lost your whole flight!

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Joke

You have to be careful in this kind of codebase

You have to be careful what you type working with airline data - all the areas of the system involved in calculating luggage allowances are case sensitive.

Epic cut: Fortnite games maker culls 16% of staff

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Stop

Please, not Bandcamp

Bandcamp has been a lifeline for musicians for years now, pretty much the only place you can consistently get paid a fair amount for your work. I'm not saying that selling it to these randos is a bad idea, but they are just some randos, who knows what their deal is? The chances of it being asset-stripped and torn to pieces have to be fairly high.

It's a serious challenge, of course. If I was running something so vital to so many people and someone guaranteed to wreck it, like Amazon or Google, offered enough money to buy my freedom, that would be incredibly hard to turn down. I hope that I could, but it's hard to say for sure.

Spotify now using AI to clone podcaster’s voice into Spanish

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Google trying to wrap their tentacles around podcasts

It's amazing to witness the pathological hatred with which they regard RSS, an open standard that they cannot control. They tried to kill it when they closed reader but those damned pesky podcasters insist on still using it and Google find it intolerable.

Good.

Lawsuit claims Google Maps led dad of two over collapsed bridge to his death

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Re: Were there no signs indicating that the Bridge was out?

Exactly, if the bridge itself is below your headlights, anything on it like a sheep or cyclist would still be in the full-beams. We can be very confident there was no obstruction on the bridge, or indeed on the road leading up to the bridge, where there definitely should have been.