Posts by veti

Musk lashes out at Biden administration over rural broadband

Re: Just no

Where I come from, not all rural roads have street lighting.

But still, sounds like a plan. How are you promoting it?

Florida man slams 'tyranny' of central bank digital currencies in re-election bid

Re: The amount of Anonymous Trumpists in this forum...

You must have missed all the attack ads telling the gullible that Trump and 'extreme MAGA Republicans' are the greatest threat to democracy ever, and should be locked up and not allowed to vote

Yep, I've missed those. Show me one? Surely YouTube has them by now.

I mean, I believe you on the "greatest threat to [our - you seem to have elided the pronoun for some reason] democracy" bit, but I specifically want to see an ad saying that MAGA Republicans "should be locked up and not allowed to vote".

Davos made this very clear.

Some people make "Davos" sound like some sort of world conspiracy. It's just a meeting where a lot of powerful people get together and talk over lots of ideas. Some of them like some of those ideas, and go away and try to do something with them; others don't like the same ideas and may even work against them.. There's no centralised decision making going on there.

The Bbc of course loves these ideas

- he says, with a link to a reasonably balanced article about a proposal in Germany to ban a political party - something that all countries in the world have always done. (Try raising money for the Communist Party in America in the 1960s, or Islamic State today, see how far you get.) You can find such proposals in various countries at any given time. The BBC article you link to shows no signs of "loving" the idea.

the Bbc has been pointedly ignoring the much larger protests ongoing in Germany

So are you, apparently. Link to a report by some news source you do believe about these much larger protests, so we can see what you're talking about? (I mean, there must be such a source, or how would you even know about them?)

"The press" never said any of that. Just... do try to keep in some kind of touch with reality.

There's nothing wrong with reporting in most of the media. The problem is in the opinionating. Which is forced upon them because it's the only way to make money under US law (facts aren't covered by copyright, but opinion is). With the result that the media has purposely and systematically blurred the line between reporting and opinion, and by now half the population can't even see there's a difference.

Tomato, tomato... Every government action does that. The border wall, for instance, did that on a small scale, and Operation Warp Speed did it on a larger scale.

Of course, what did it on a truly biblical scale was Trump's "tax cuts for the rich" act.

Bullshit.

The super-rich are not that different from the rest of us. Some of them are evil, sure, but not all by any means.

And even those that are evil are also bright enough to know that they're not going to go on getting richer unless ordinary people have enough income to trickle some up to them. For instance, since I've been unemployed, my Starbucks (and equivalent) budget has dropped to zero - those people are no longer making anything out of me, not one cent per year. It's not in their own interests to promote that sort of thing, any more than it is in mine.

The Very Stable Genius isn't always wrong. He's always evil, but that's a whole different axis.

In this case he's grabbing headlines and votes by taking aim at a nefarious scheme that nobody is actually pushing anyway. Should be an easy victory for him. Votes for - essentially, promising to make sure the sun comes up tomorrow.

Tesla owners in deep freeze discover the cold, hard truth about EVs

If your distribution losses are 30%, I suggest you consider moving to a first-world country.

The 5% figure comes from the US Energy Information Administration. In the UK, the National Grid Company says:

The total quantity of electricity supplied in the United Kingdom during 2015 was 338TWh, but only 311TWh was consumed by customers.

- which implies a loss rate of about 8%, which is higher than I'd have guessed but still way closer to my estimate than yours. (Although come to think of it, reactive power probably accounts for that difference.)

Where are you getting your figures from?

Natural gas generators, on average, achieve a thermal efficiency of approximately 45%. Coal is closer to 35% (mostly because the owners have been skimping on maintenance for the past 30 years). Upgrading to combined cycle could add about 20% to both those figures, but nobody in the US is willing to pay for that.

The electricity distribution grid loses about 5% (in the USA - in smaller countries, it's a lot less). I know nothing about battery losses.

And let's not forget, fuel doesn't pump, refine and distribute itself. If you want to do a real apples-to-apples comparison, there's a lot more work to do.

Top LLMs struggle to make accurate legal arguments

Re: I put it to you

I imagine some variants on that story will probably happen, and some lawyers will do very well that way for a while, until the opposition wises up.

But it's an eternal arms race. And in the long run, my money is on the side that improves indefinitely over time, unlike the individual lawyer.

Re: "they don't understand law and can't form sound arguments"

Define "think".

What makes you "think" human cognitive processes are qualitatively any different?

What difference does it make anyway?

Re: Reason

Sure language models will fail in that way, because they've never had even the rudiments of legal instruction. They know the word "jurisdiction", but they have no inkling of why it might be relevant to their current task.

In a word, they're being given tasks they're neither trained nor designed to do.

I wonder how hard it is to give them that training. Maybe the results in six months time will be different.

Another airline finds loose bolts in Boeing 737-9 during post-blowout fleet inspections

Re: Let Me See How I Can Put This ...

More like "Our tireless quality assurance team has remedied some potential issues that have been highlighted by recent adverse press coverage. We remain proud of our safety record and encourage all our customers' passengers to remember that these planes are American, dammit, and the best you can buy."

What the AI copyright fights are truly about: Human labor versus endless machines

Re: "allowing their works to be used in AI models - as long as they get compensated for that"

No, because it would be just as wrongs if it was humans who did the same thing that computers do.

But humans do that. All the time. And have been doing it for... at least a couple of centuries, now, ever since "free press" became a thing.

Long before people even talked about "AI", let alone "LLMs", churnalists would read each other's work, make just enough modifications to file off the serial numbers and regurgitate it. And that was legal, and always has been. And it still is. Reputable newspapers at least have the decency to credit their sources, but believe me, not everyone does.

Why, exactly, is it worse when a machine does this?

SpaceX snaps back at US labor board's complaint, calling it 'unconstitutional'

"Merits" have nothing to do with it. Musk doesn't expect to win this, nor does he care. The whole point is to be seen to be fighting, regardless of the outcome. That's money in the bank to him.

Trump showed the way. The man has lost something like 95% of all the lawsuits he's ever been involved in, and yet he keeps flinging them at anyone and everything and getting richer. In Trump's case it's because (now) gullible idiots line up to send him money, but before that they were buying his books and sponsoring his TV shows and attending his "university"...

Musk's version is not quite as direct, yet. But he knows fighting the good fight - or rather, being seen to fight it - is worth money from the category of capitalist cunts that he relies on to keep his billions flowing. "Winning the case" - bah, who even cares?

Doom is 30, and so is Windows NT. How far we haven't come

Re: No imagination any more

Circa 1990, computing was still newish, and exciting. People went into it because they were keen. They had ideas, they had visions, they had love of the subject matter.

Over the next 30 years, computing became ever more mainstream. Vastly more people went into it, not because they were visionary or excited by it, but because it promised a good, steady paycheck. Those people - by now millions of them, all over the world - want someone to tell them what to do, then they'll do it, and pocket the money and go home.

When you get a large number of those sorts of people in an industry, it changes. They become customers of a sort, and the industry looks after their needs by creating busywork for them to do.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars in crypto stolen after Ledger code poisoned

Re: Next steps

Lots of people do shrug and say nothing should change. (I don't know if they do on this subject, specifically, but it happens on most topics, so it's likely.)

But the media don't publish those interviews. They're just not very interesting to watch, or to talk or speculate about. No, the published interviews - again, across every media topic - are all on the spectrum of "something must be done" to "the sky is falling".

Google Groups ditches links to Usenet, the OG social network

Re: Bait

I don't think you can use that phrase when the switch takes 20 years to execute.

To BCC or not to BCC – that is the question data watchdog wants answered

Re: Nope

No. Why would you think that?

It sends emails saying things like "Swimming lessons start next Tuesday, so make sure [kid] has their kit". Or "[Kid] will be receiving a certificate at assembly on Friday". And the only names in the To: field are self and spouse, so I assume someone knows how to mail merge.

Re: Nope

But CC should be used much more often than BCC. It's only courtesy to let people know who else is privy to your communication.

For instance, my kids' school keeps emailing me and spouse about whatever they think we need to know. I am glad to see both our addresses in the To: field, it saves a whole layer of extra communication and confirmation.

The only time BCC is appropriate is - actually, when exactly? All the use cases I can think of would be better handled by a mail merge.

Re: Oh FFS !

Outlook had precisely that feature when I was last using it.

Didn't help, noticeably.

Trust us, says EU, our AI Act will make AI trustworthy by banning the nasty ones

manipulation of human behavior to circumvent free will

Seriously? You want to give lawyers a reason to argue about "free will"?

A problem that has beaten the finest philosophical minds of the past three centuries, and you're giving freaking lawyers a licence to debate it at $500 an hour?

Can't think who drafted that bit.

Re: Well see first...

Why?

The regs are clearly meant to apply to the sorts of learning systems we have today. If you think you'll escape regulation by bleating "but it's not real intelligence", prepare for a very rude awakening.

That call center tech scammer could be a human trafficking victim

I had my first ever spam call from an AI, this week. It said its name was "Chrissy" and it was doing some kind of survey, but it was definitely a robot, so I didn't feel bad about hanging up on it.

Human trafficking is moderately risky and fairly expensive - at least, compared with robots. This is one problem that AI should be able to take care of, probably quicker than law enforcement could do it.

Boffins devise 'universal backdoor' for image models to cause AI hallucinations

Re: The Big Pot of Gold

We should also stop selling petrol and buying chocolate, but where's the incentive?

Atlassian security advisory reveals four fresh critical flaws – in mail with dead links

In other news, Atlassian announces it will no longer use ChatGPT to spam its customers write its user notifications.

You can't deepfake diversity, and that's a good thing

It's not about "helping solve a difficult problem". It's about not making unnecessary assumptions, or at least being aware when you are making them so you can think about their effects and test for them.

This, incidentally, is why I worry when I see and hear about "activist" workforces putting pressure on their employers to take sides on (this or that). Because that's a tell for lack of diversity in the workforce. The assumption that all "right-thinking" people see things the way you do is the root of about half the evil in our world.

Elon is the bakery owner swearing in the street about Yelp critics canceling him

Re: No Twitter

The problems with social media are all human, not technological.

You could say the same of nerve gas, or domestic abuse. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do something about them.

Videoconferencing fatigue is real, study finds

Re: Duh.

They controlled for that. The study shows that it's more stressful to sit through the same presentation onscreen than in person.

Of course that's not the whole story. There's still a lot to be said for telepresence. But it's a part that hasn't been objectively measured before, which is interesting.

Leader of pro-Russia DDoS crew Killnet 'unmasked' by Russian state media

Acronym

Am I the only one who thinks that "Cyber Rapid Assistance for Pacific Incidents and Disasters" should be abbreviated as CRAPID?

Tesla sues Swedish government after worker rebellion cripples car biz

Re: Postal Service

I'm reasonably sure they offer choices for how you want your plates delivered. Does Volvo get them through the post as well? I suspect there's an option for Tesla to send a truck to pick them up directly, if it could be bothered...

Re: Tesla should deal

Yep, Musk opposing unionisation is like Putin opposing expansion of NATO...

If he were even slightly sincere in what he says, we wouldn't be in this position.

Sweden is a country of laws. If the law says the government must do something, then it... probably should do it, or pay penalties and/or compensation for not doing it.

The purpose of a court case is to get an authoritative ruling as to what the law requires.

Author hopes to throw the book at OpenAI, Microsoft with copyright class action

Re: Darn Right

There is no "training model". Well, there may be, but it will be just a list of URLs and titles and possibly search terms. The full corpus of text fed into the model - is not a thing that exists.

Re: Zzzzzzzzzz

What makes you think this is any different from what people do?

Re: Zzzzzzzzzz

If you sell a book, you have no right to specify who can or can't read it, or how, or why. That's *not* one of the rights copyright gives you.

And I for one will fight any attempt to create such a right. It may happen, through some sort of backdoor licensing step as you suggest, but if it tries to come to my jurisdiction, I'm prepared to travel down to parliament and camp in the lobby to make them put a stop to it.

Re: Zzzzzzzzzz

OpenAI did not purchase the book or borrow a purchased book. Their training data contains an unauthorized copy, a pirate copy.

Why do you say that? How do you know?

Re: Darn Right

Well, one thing that's hard to understand is your jump from "the datasets contain copyrighted work" to "OpenAI is commercializing copyrighted material". And then you go on to claim that, apparently because of this, it's "violating copyright law", which is a whole other step that doesn't follow logically from the previous one.

If you sell copies you make of a book or other work (that you don't have the right to), it's copyright violation, sure. But OpenAI isn't doing that. It's selling access to a system that has (probably) been trained on this book, among many others. But unless it actually regurgitates significant chunks of text, it's not clear how that's a copyright violation.

Copyright law creates certain very specific, clearly defined "rights" around 1) reproduction, 2) adaptation, 3) publication, 4) performance and 5) display (the "five pillars of copyright"). To make a case against OpenAI, you'd have to demonstrate to a court how it's doing at least one of these things with your work.

Greenpeace calls out tech giants for carbon footprint fumble

The "emerging economies" point out, not unreasonably, that it's the developed countries that have produced nearly all the CO2 to date, and them talking about emissions in the developing world smacks more than a little of (a) pulling the ladder up after them and (b) rampant hypocrisy. If America and Europe and Asia, with all their wealth and infrastructure and knowhow, still can't bring themselves to cut carbon emissions, then what gives any of them the right to demand that Africans do it?

Yes, sure, providing clean energy to the developing world would be great. But unless you can suggest a way to provide it at the same (or lower) cost as coal-fired power stations and in unlimited quantities, you can't blame them for taking as much as they can get and also building more fossil-fuel-powered capacity to top it up.

That's why it's the west that needs to clean up its act. It has all the advantages, it needs to develop the technologies and methods to provide a decent lifestyle for everyone with net-zero, or something close to it, emissions. Once we've shown it's possible, then developing countries can adopt (or improve upon) those innovations. But until then, it's not reasonable to ask them to bear the burden of cleaning up our mess.

Yep, they're back.

It's sad. Back in 2016 this happened. This forum had usually been a reasonably balanced, sensible place, but suddenly you couldn't say anything disparaging about Trump without people jumping down your throat. People who would have been (were) completely silent if you'd said equally (or more) rude things about him a year or two earlier, mind you.

In 2020, for whatever reason, it didn't happen. Sure there were some Trumpists around, but not many, certainly not enough to compete with an overwhelmingly anti-Trumpist consensus.

But now, they're back. Climate denialism is one of the big fronts on this particular forum, so every story that touches on it will draw them out. And I assume it's only going to get worse for approximately the next 12 months. Oh well, we've had about seven years of near-normality; now hunker down, they'll mostly be gone by December 2025.

US nuke reactor lab hit by 'gay furry hackers' demanding cat-human mutants

Re: Wait, What? ...

You're assuming they want the hybrids as sex objects.

Maybe not. Maybe they just think catgirls would be cute. Maybe they haven't thought it through very far.

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

Re: Regomized

I'm just concerned that the Regonomizer seems to be outputting Lady Gaga titles now. I'm sure there used to be names.

Re: Seems to me that ...

Its official designation now is "dwarf planet".

A green car is still a car. A giant crab is still a crab. A dwarf planet is still a planet. That's how English works.

QED.

Re: Are you sure, this isn't the plot of an IT Crowd epsiode?

Aristotle was a great thinker and in some ways the most scientifically minded of the Greek philosophers. (In the sense that he believed the truth should be inferred by observing reality, rather than by making it up in your head like the Platonists.)

Your quarrel is with the medieval scholastics who took him as an authority rather than a foundation. The forerunners of modern Biblical literalists. In other words, people who missed the point so widely, they had to pretend they were aiming for a whole different target.

When it comes to personal data, we're on a highway to hell

Re: Woe Be The Professional That Loses Control of Confedential Patient/Client Data In A Rental

Downvoted for asking for specifics. Typical.

Look, we can sit around here moaning all we like about how iniquitous it is and should be stopped, but to stop it we would need to persuade a court, or a government, to do something. And for that we need specifics.

If you can say "$CAR downloads $DATA from $PHONE_APP", where $DATA is legally protected, then you've got an argument we can make to a court. Then we can take it to the next step, which is demanding accountability from car manufacturers and phone users. But as long as you're just wringing your hands saying "they could be taking anything, we don't know", you've got the square root of sweet fuck all.

(Note that the specific items of data that qualify for protection will vary by jurisdiction. A single phone number, for instance, probably doesn't qualify, but a list of them might. A number plus an accompanying name might. That's why we need to be very clear and specific about what data is being taken.)

Re: Woe Be The Professional That Loses Control of Confedential Patient/Client Data In A Rental

Can you show how such data might leak?

Asking because phones in my experience have ways of classifying data and controlling what leaks how. Can you show that a car is likely to have access to (data that would be considered illegal to leak, however that's defined in your jurisdiction)?

Russia's Sandworm – not just missile strikes – to blame for Ukrainian power blackouts

Re: Like I've said before

Austria prefers not to join NATO, that's their decision to make and nobody (in NATO, at least) is going to force them or threaten them over that. The security landscape of Europe looked very different in the 1980s to today.

Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia both broke up - one amicably, the other violently - on their own terms. Sure there was outside interference (particularly in Yugoslavia, which became another proxy war between Europe and Russia), but nobody invaded or tried to conquer either one of them. Their governments simply came to the conclusion that their old structures weren't working and needed to change. That's something independent countries can do. See also "Union, Soviet".

Re: Like I've said before

Brexit proved that the UK was independent even when it was a member of the EU. And it's still a member of NATO, so according to your own logic Brexit made no difference to "independence" anyway.

This is the second time in as many days I've seen somebody using common English words in a very, very eccentric way on this site. I can only conclude the Russian trolls are back in force, and they're putting trainees on us.

Re: Why were their SCADA units on the Internet?

To "deliberately" turn a war into a quagmire, you'd have to be controlling both sides.

Now, perhaps you think the Russians are deliberately playing along in order to allow their enemies to learn about their cyber warfare tactics, possibly so that they can develop their tactics as they go... But otherwise, you'd have to believe that the Ukrainians, with their barely-coordinated American and European supporters, can fine-control the pressure they put on their enemy to ensure it's always just enough to keep the conflict going, without the risk of ending it.

I don't think anyone has that much control.

Microsoft: Iran's cybercrews got stuck into Israel days after Hamas attacked – not in tandem

Re: they didn't appear to be acting with prior knowledge of Hamas's actions

Netanyahu fostered Hamas to be the most visible face of the Palestinian cause, because it lets him off the hook from having to deal with them. You can't be expected to negotiate with someone who says up front that they want nothing more than to kill you.

Netanyahu can't afford to negotiate with any Palestinians, because it would destabilise his political alliances. But he's under constant Western pressure to deal with the PLO and Fatah. Fostering Hamas was a way of deflecting that.

Re: WHY NOW? WHY SUCH A SUICIDAL ATTACK ON ISRAEL?

Hamas has built very little international support. That (for whatever it's worth) goes to Fatah and the PLO.

And that is one thing Hamas hopes to reverse with this war. They'll make the Palestinian cause so toxic in the west, that the PLO's support will dry up completely, leaving Hamas as the undisputed champions of all Palestinians.

Because sure, Hamas hates the west and it hates the Israelis, but what it hates most of all is Fatah.