Posts by David 132

WorldCoin's newest pitch: Scan your eyeballs to prove AI agents really represent you

Re: Close call

"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to sphere"?

Nvidia's DLSS 5 promises to bring you out the other side of the uncanny valley

Re: Impressive but meh

A headline from LinkedIn popped up on my phone this morning - a quote from Jensen Huang, presumably in a DTC keynote, to the effect that "Nvidia will sell $1trillion worth of GPUs between now and 2027"

I was startled enough by that dollar number, but now realise that maybe he was talking about just one DLSS rig...

Former Microsoft dev trains AI to survive the arcade's most chaotic stress test

Re: Damn I'm old!

Never encountered the original arcade machine myself, but thanks to His Hairiness, Saint Jeff Minter, I spent far too much time playing Llamatron 2112 on my Amiga.

Blustering Blackbeard's PC was all at sea, sysadmin got him shipshape in seconds

Re: Somerset

Or Edmund Blackadder.

"Come on, Blackadder, or we'll miss the first act!"

"Coming, sir, as fast as I can...

...Stick the kettle on, Baldrick."

GitHub infuriates students by removing some models from free Copilot plan

Re: Economics lesson for life

> Wouldn't it be funny if they advertised coding agents the same as viagra ...

"Our AI assistant makes the coding process much longer and harder than it would otherwise be"?

Re: Economics lesson for life

You did.

One voter, though, is apparently a slow reader, or has poor impulse control :)

Re: Economics lesson for life

>The cracks in the road to AI profitability are widening.

Their current high costs are a temporary aberration, due to their one-off hardware purchases.

Fortunately, GPUs and dedicated AI chips aren't subject to the constant development pressure and improvement treadmill that characterises the rest of the tech industry, so the AI players' huge investment in hardware can be amortised over many years, if not decades, and we can thus expect to see costs come down by orders of magnitude.

(...please note the icon before y'all angrily mash that downvote button in incoherent rage...)

'Are you freaking crazy?' Bot harasses woman, gets led away by cops

Thanks to its liquid metal poly-alloy construction, it can just re-form itself after that; the silver blobs of melted metal coalesce and run together, the G-1 unit then resuming its remorseless promotional activities without pity or fear.

Oracle tops up restructuring fund for FY26 by $500M

Re: Clusterfuck

I think that might have been the joke :)

Smart mirror shows dumb Windows in elevator

And "Floor 8.1" has overtones of the half-floor in Being John Malkovich!

Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after USB keys fail to decrypt them

Re: power grid is knocked out for a prolonged period

And if the one, highly-specialized factory that custom-builds the transformers is, itself, knocked out or devoid of power thanks to the same solar-flare event? Quis reparatores reparat?

LibreOffice learns to speak Markdown in version 26.2

*shudder*

Don't.

I once, in a former life at a very large semiconductor company, sat in a meeting to discuss a presentation that a Very Senior Executive was due to give, where an entire hour was spent discussing what color and size the heading on a powerpoint slide should be.

Icon - is it too early in the week?

Chardet dispute shows how AI will kill software licensing, argues Bruce Perens

Re: Prompts?

LLMs being non-deterministic, how shall it be proven that any given set of prompts resulted in the code that was output?

Microsoft Copilot to hijack your browser... for your own convenience

Re: You can take my Firefox

If I wanted a bolder OS, I'd switch to Rocky Linux.

Yes, that's my coat, thankyou, I think it's best for all of us if I leave quietly...

UK watchdog eyes Meta's smart glasses after workers say they 'see everything'

Re: Who would wear AI glasses during "extremely private moments" ...

Reminds me of the photos that have been released from the Epstein files. What sort of person would think, "I am standing in my room in my tighty-whities, talking to a woman who's not a family member - yes, please take a photo of us both, this is definitely a Kodak moment that I'll treasure in years to come."?

Oh, right. Peter Mandelson.

CERN sends AI-trained robot mice scurrying through LHC beam pipes

Re: You are in a maze of twisting little passages

"What are we going to do tonight, Brain?"

"Same thing we do every night, Pinky - try to take over the world inspect 27km of small pipework."

"NARF!"

Doomscrollers despair after Oracle hiccup knocks TikTok offline in US

Re: So from all this...

That's a damn slur. I won't hear a word said against NT4. It was reliable compared to what they offer now.

Or perhaps that's the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia?

AI doctor's assistant is easily swayed to change prescriptions, give bad medical advice

False sense of security

"According to Doctronic's own website, its treatment plans 'match those of board-certified clinicians 99.2% of the time,'" Mindgard noted. "With such a high level of confidence, will the SOAP be doubted?"

Which coincidentally echoes a point I made to a friend in a wide-ranging discussion about AI yesterday.

Early AIs that spouted vaguely-credible word chains half the time, and AMFM1-alike gibberish the other half, were one thing. We knew they were about as reliable as a dowsing-rod and treated their output accordingly.

But a system that is "correct" (for a domain-specific definition of the word) 99.2% of the time? Simple human nature dictates that those using it will grow increasingly complacent and remiss about double-checking it. No-one likes doing work that 99.2% of the time is completely unnecessary, right?

And then one-time-in-a-hundred, this system will confidently recommend ivermectin or bleach as a COVID remedy, and the clinicians, lulled into trusting it, will rubber-stamp its output as they did the previous 99 times.

My point is that these LLM systems become more dangerous the more "competent" they become; not because of the cliché "they will overthrow humanity", but because we'll increasingly rely on them, and like a Takata airbag or an AliExpress stepladder, everything will be hunky-dory... until it isn't.

BunsenLabs Carbon keeps the CrunchBang flame alive with Debian 13

Re: An alpine-based version of CB++ sounds very interesting

Your article's inspired me to try these on the Intel Compute Sticks I'm currently rescuing from Windows 8 & 10 (see my comment elsewhere of a couple of days ago).

Do you know if the ISOs for BunsenLabs Carbon, or CB++, play nicely with Ventoy? Not a deal-breaker, but it does make them easier to play around with.

Microsoft reportedly eyes E7 tier to make AI agents pay their way – like the humans they'll replace

Re: Unionise....

Or indeed, Fred Kite.

NUC, NUC! Who’s there? ASUS with a client device for Microsoft’s cloudy PCs

Re: NUKE Windows

I've been having great fun for the last couple of days playing around with different software stacks on old Intel Compute Stick devices that I found in a drawer… complete PCs in the form factor of a disposable vape pen, just plug them into the HDMI port of a monitor & some USB power. Their original Windows 8/10 builds could charitably be described as "ambitious". OK, an Atom processor with 32GB of flash and 2GB of RAM isn't going to win any speed awards, but they run Linux Mint quite happily. Alas, Puppy Linux didn't seem too happy with my Ventoy USB drive… I may have to create dedicated boot media for that one.

Burger King turns to AI to flame broil employees who aren't friendly enough

Re: How good is this voice recognition gimmick?

"Do you like peas? Do you like cheese? Well here's new CHEESY PEAS!"

Aaaand another Fast Show punchline now stuck in my head.

Of course, at the time, I was very very drunk.

Re: Guest Experience

Fast food restaurants in England take the American idea of, well, food that's fast and apply it to all the worst elements of British cuisine.

"The Burger Lord pathfinder salesman had been shot within minutes of setting foot in France."

Icon: Crowley!

Re: God, this is dystopian.

Ah, the HHGTTG/Terminator crossover we never knew we wanted.

"Hasta la vista. Not that anyone cares what I think. Ghastly, isn't it."

A "Falling Down" reference, I presume? Well played.

Re: Hi There!!!

*"Fun™, Happy™, Joy™, and Human Dignity™ are registered trademarks of Mom's Friendly Robot Company, a registered B Corporation."

God, this is dystopian.

When it comes to "near-future scenarios where malevolent AI rules", I'm hard-pressed to decide which would be worse: this, or having T-1000 Terminator units striding over mountains of skulls where our cities once stood.

Still, it makes lots of money for Altman and Huang and Nadella & their ilk, so it's all good, right?

Harvard boffins finally crack the mystery of squeaky sneakers

The researcher's idea to use the glass's property of toe-tal internal reflection was inspired; heel go far.

Say goodbye to budget PCs and smartphones – memory is too expensive now

Re: here's an idea

>My XP machine runs happy with 1Meg

Do you perhaps mean 1 Gig?

I remember running the Chicago (Windows 95) beta release on a 486 with a whole 4MB back in '94, and it wasn't pleasant.

Have an upvote anyway.

Re: here's an idea

That drawer-full of 30-pin EDO SIMMs I have here might soon be worth something!

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

Re: Edge can be uninstalled

Is that a true uninstallation, or just a superficial-to-placate-the-regulators game of "hide the icon from the desktop and start menu"?

Re: Linux version of Edge.

Don't worry, its functionality will be included in a future Systemd release.

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

Re: Monkeys

Sticking with the theme of "revered and beloved authors who spoke truth in jest", I've always liked Pterry's lines, concerning Dorfl the baked-clay golem when he discusses consciousness with the city's priests:

...“We’re not listening to you! You’re not even really alive!” said a priest.

Dorfl nodded. “This Is Fundamentally True,” he said.

“See? He admits it!”

“I Suggest You Take Me And Smash Me And Grind The Bits Into Fragments And Pound The Fragments Into Powder And Mill Them Again To The Finest Dust There Can Be, And I Believe You Will Not Find A Single Atom Of Life—”

“True! Let’s do it!”

“However, In Order To Test This Fully, One Of You Must Volunteer To Undergo The Same Process.”

There was silence.

“That’s not fair,” said a priest, after a while. “All anyone has to do is bake up your dust again and you’ll be alive…”

There was more silence.

Ridcully said, “Is it only me, or are we on tricky theological ground here?”...

Curse you, you naughty person - I now have this Monty Python earworm :)

Re: Scary, truly scary

To be fair to my near-namesake above, he said our reality, which I interpret as "our perceived reality".

If I, for example, see a four-legged creature with udders standing in a field, my brain automatically flags it as "a cow", where "cow" is shorthand in my mental filing system for the combination of shape, sound, smell and mass that constitutes that creature.

A passing Frenchman perceives "une vache", his mental shorthand for... etc.

Same reality, different perception.

At which point we're into qualia and other metaphysics, and <gumby>my brain hurts</gumby>!

Microsoft 'cooperating' with Japanese antitrust probe

Kawaii!

Japan’s Fair Trade Commission has a cute mascot called “Dokkin”...

The mind boggles. Japanese culture never ceases to amaze this gaikokujin.

So the question arises, should regulatory agencies in Western countries do similar? "Flippy, The US Federal Trade Commission Dolphin"? "Janice, the Monopolies and Mergers Commission Pushmi-pullyu"?

And the less said about the physical appearance of "Mr Ploppy, the UK Ofwat Mascot", the better...

Microsoft boss on AI content: 'Nobody wants anything that is sloppy'

I suppose that after implementing DOOM in Excel, surely the logical next step is to make a spreadsheet file that is Turing-complete, and from there implement CoPilot itself within the spreadsheet?

Oh, obligatory XKCD.

(I leave the matter of whether CP would be implemented directly, or nested within Emacs within Systemd within the spreadsheet, to the reader - note icon --->)

Orbital datacenters are a pie-in-the-sky idea: Gartner

Re: "Degrees Kelvin"?

If you're replying to me... Kelvin is a scale that is written without the unit qualifier "degree". Quoting from Wikipedia (for what that's worth):

Orthography: According to SI convention, the kelvin is never referred to nor written as a degree.

That the Gartner author made such a schoolboy howler doesn't inspire confidence in the rigour of the rest of the report, even if (as others here have pointed out) its conclusion is correct.

"Degrees Kelvin"?

Ray noted that orbital datacenters must be able to survive “extraordinary swings in temperature, from 100 degrees kelvin to 400 degrees kelvin”

Degrees Kelvin?

*shudder*

Microsoft teases ‘reimagined SharePoint experience’ with added AI

Re: Eldritch Horror!!!!!!!!!!!!!

"Buggrit, millennium hand & shrimp, stand it up and pull the end orf, I told 'em, I told 'em, buggrit, buggrit..."

West Midlands Police earn red card over Copilot's imaginary football match

You can't spell FAIL without...

"And Excel confined to the cells."

Pop music fans literally dying to stream hot new albums – in car crashes, that is

Re: Touchscreens...

Mention of the Moggy Minor brings unbidden to mind images of Nurse Gladys Emmanuel.

G-g-g-g-Granville!

Re: Streaming eh?

It was a factory option - Buick? Oldsmobile? - briefly, back in the 50s, I seem to recall.

ObRelated: I did some cursory searching for details of the in-car product; didn't find it before my get-up-and-go got-up-and-went, but I did find this rather interesting take on the record player concept: https://hackaday.com/2021/11/24/bluetooth-record-player-puts-a-new-spin-on-vinyl/.

Re: Maybe the music

I recently discovered Lemmy's cover version of Ben E. King's "Stand By Me" - not sure what genre that combination counts as!

Re: US Centric...

And what, pray, have you got against Cliff Richard, the total-and-utter King of Rock & Roll?

"Look everyone, he's coming through the doors..."

"BRILLIANT! He didn't even open them!"

"Hey kids, stop snogging and pay attention to me! Cos if you're a wild-eyed loner standing at the gates of Oblivion then hitch a ride with us, cos we're on the last freedom moped out of Nowhere City! And we haven't even told our parents what time we'll be back!"

KDE Plasma 6.6 isn't forcing systemd but the arguments rage on

You upstart!

Hotel's rotary switchboard so retro it predates the concept of crashing

Re: I actually ran a switchboard

True, and better than the modern "press 1 to be jerked around..."

What infuriates me there is the systems that prompt you for input, with multiple options, but don't allow you to make a selection until all the options have been read to you.

"Press 1 for Sales, press 2 for Supp.." 2 "Press 1 for Sales, press 2 for Support, press 3 for Billing, press 4 for Administrative Affairs..." 2 "Press 1 for Sales..."

Aaargh!

A special mention for those systems that do that, and have pauses in the stream of options, thus tricking you into entering a choice prematurely.

I rarely use this icon, but today... --->

Enternal. From "enteric (adj.) - relating to or occurring in the intestines."

When you have a gut feeling that you need to make a call.

Hard drives already sold out for this year – AI to blame

Re: I still use HDDs.

"Not sure how operational the Sinclair microdrives will be though"

No more operational than those Heath-Robinson things were when they were new.

8-year-old me still lusted after them from the adverts in Sinclair User, though!