Posts by veti

Musk, Yaccarino contradict each other on status of X's election integrity team

Re: Kneejerk canned response

The "something we take very seriously" line is, as you say, meaningless in itself, but in context it does have value. It's a license to journalists to follow up the issue and ask more questions another day.

Most public figures are happy to give out such licenses, because they know (a) journalists are lazy and there's a good chance they won't bother, and relatedly (b) the public attention span will have forgotten all about it by tomorrow, so any attempt to follow up will have to start with a recap, meaning most readers will have switched off before they get to the new bit.

Yelp sues Texas for right to publish actual accurate abortion info

Pure performative politics

At this point it doesn't matter to the politicians what the courts decide. The point is to be seen to be fighting, nothing more.

If the courts support the state, then fine, but if they don't, it's just further evidence of the liberal deep state that still needs rooting out. Either way, thank you for your donation.

Volkswagen stuck in neutral after 'IT disruption'

Re: Toyota

They're a car maker that's still in business, so I presume so, yeah.

Unions claim win as Hollywood studios agree generative AI isn't an author

Re: 'The Writers Guild of America has ended its 148-day strike"? Eh?

If you're not seeing new content, that's on you. There's plenty being produced.

Doom developer John Carmack thinks artificial general intelligence is doable by 2030

Re: This news isn't new, he talked about it years ago.

Why would an AGI solve aging or disease? It has no reason to care about either one.

Can you define "knowledge"?

Or "intelligence"?

Heck, at some point even the word "model" starts to look a bit arbitrary.

How TCP's congestion control saved the internet

Re: Ah, ATM

The only people who do use TCP are the ones who don't really care about how bad TCP is, and simply want plug and play compatibility.

Which is to say, about 98% of everybody.

Authors Guild sues OpenAI for using Game of Thrones and other novels to train ChatGPT

And this last points to the real crux, which is that copyright law (i.e. Title 17) in the US, and the courts adjudicating upon it, are unlikely to care much about what is "stored" by an LLM and how it is represented. They're going to care about actual and plausible effects.

Those courts will of course make their own decisions based on their priorities, but if Title 17 becomes too restrictive, OpenAI can and will simply up sticks to somewhere beyond its jurisdiction. So what really matters is what can be agreed as covered by the Berne Convention.

And I think you'll find the mechanics and definitions of "storage" and "retrieval" will be very important in some of those alternative jurisdictions.

Re: Only the living can sue.

My point exactly. If the argument is "an inferior work will damage the author's reputation", then it seems to me that this particular author - or, arguably, the publisher who encouraged him to publish those works without heavy revision by someone more compos mentis - has already done that damage. Because those two books are bad.

Re: Ah yes...

Note also that I don't object to authors refusing permission to train models on their work, if they so wish.

(raises hand)

I do. I very much do object to that. Authors have no right to restrict who can and can't read their books.

Copyright gives them the right to control a very specific range of functions, including copying, selling, translating, adapting and performing their work. It does not give them the right to say that it should only be read by people of a certain species, or only on certain platforms. I view the current action as a stealth attempt to extend the scope of copyright yet again, and one that should be resisted with, if necessary, torches and pitchforks.

Re: Only the living can sue.

I'm pretty sure ChatGPT could write a better Discworld book than "Snuff" or "The Shepherd's Crown", both of which are published under Pratchett's own name.

Yes, well, I had to learn that poem by heart at school. I also read a number of books that I could summarise on demand but not regurgitate whole.

Re: It doesn't store the original, just 'interesting' features of the original

That would hinge on your definition of "stored". And "retrieval system".

Given that it is very specifically designed not to allow the text to be retrieved - even if it is stored - I think you'd have a hard time making that description stick.

The only kind of legal test that makes sense is, would it be illegal for a human to do this? As long as it's just quoting from the book or imitating the style or characters (pastiching), it's not doing anything wrong. Not until it quotes extended (at least page-long) extracts verbatim.

95% of NFTs now totally worthless, say researchers

Re: Totally

Yep. Even now, the authors of this study are probably offering pennies for worthless NFTs, which they can then turn around and sell to the next generation of suckers. I can practically smell the opportunisim from here. "We bought this collection for $0.01 apiece in 2023, we're selling them today for $20 apiece, just imagine what they'll be worth next year!"

Australia to build six 'cyber shields' to defend its shores

The sharks are backed up by 80 squadrons of saltwater crocodiles. And if the enemy makes it to land, there's more than a hundred regiments of spiders to meet them.

Australia is plenty safe.

Re: Everybody wants to lead the world …

I'm pretty sure "competent adequacy" would be world-leading.

Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Chabon and others sue OpenAI

Re: IP land grab

Sure, but we can agree that the copy used should have been lawfully acquired, yes? So in most cases, the copy used will have been bought, for money, at least once in its life.

IP land grab

Reading is not copying. Even if the model was trained on works still in copyright (and I'm sure it was), unless you can show that it actually copies from those works - and no, a single seven-word phrase that wasn't even original when you used it does not cut it - you got nothing.

I understand their panic, but we mustn't allow copyright holders to use "AI" as an excuse to extend their grip on the intellectual domain even further. Gods know, they've gained enough in the past 50 years.

Apple-backed California right-to-repair bill just a bite away from governor's signature

Why the exemptions?

What, exactly, is the rationale for not covering alarm systems and game consoles?

Lawyer's Microsoft email snafu goes from $1.75M lawsuit to Ctrl+Alt+Settle

A backup email address is of limited help if it doesn't give access to all the correspondence that's waiting in your primary inbox.

When does tackling pandemic misinfo become censorship? US courts argue it out

Re: Was listening to a Radio interview about "people buying into cryptoscams"

Scammers gonna scam. But that doesn't mean everyone else should just shrug and let them get on with it.

Local governments aren't businesses – so why are they force-fed business software?

Architecture

All IT systems I've ever seen are basically transactional. "A" sends a message to "B", and then has a very clearly defined expectation of what "B" will do with it, and what sort of response it can expect.

That's an incredibly poor match for how most human beings work. Organisations are composed of people, connected by an intricate and ever-changing web of relationships, dependencies and obligations. One person may react quite differently to two identical messages from different people, even if both the senders are theoretically in the same role.

The solution isn't to rebuild Oracle or SAP from the ground up. A new system built on the same lines is going to have the same drawbacks. You need a more flexible structure entirely.

If you like to play along with the illusion of privacy, smart devices are a dumb idea

Re: Why would a Washing Machine require my Date of Birth ...

Oh, come now. Speaking as a former tester, it's trivial to break a washing machine.

Overload it. Put non-porous plastic in it. Put any kind of plastic in it on a tumble-drying cycle. Put several handfuls of sand or mud in it. And that's just off the top of my head, I'm sure I could come up with more if I really sat down and thought about it.

Note that all these are things that could well be done by honest mistake, by kids. No malice required.

Power grids tremble as electric vehicle growth set to accelerate 19% next year

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

Soon the government will want it's revenue stream back from the EV chargers as well - that's only fair.

Yes, it will. But not until the share of battery EVs on the road has plateaued, and old-fashioned petrol pumps are getting harder to find. They don't want to do anything to inhibit the takeup, so they'll wait until a critical mass of people - in this case, probably something like 75% or more of the population - are committed or at least resigned to the change.

Microsoft, recently busted by Beijing, thinks it's across China's ever-changing cyber-offensive

Re: The Internet enables everything

Is it? By what metrics?

Unnatural deaths per capita? Down, in virtually every country over both those timeframes. Mortality from disease? Down. Homicide? Down. Acts of God? Down.

Look at some graphs of life expectancy by country. You won't find many with a downward trend line.

Bombshell biography: Fearing nuclear war, Musk blocked Starlink to stymie Ukraine attack on Russia

Re: So Musk has NOW entered the Ukranian war.......

The borders of the former Ukraine SSR are what, in 1994, Russia pledged to respect and uphold. That was the price for them taking possession of the Soviet nuclear weapons previously stationed in Ukraine.

Incidentally, as part of the same settlement, Russia also pledged in very specific terms, that it would never use or threaten to use those or any other nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

Re: WTF?

He didn't "refuse to provide" access. He provided it, he accepted - whatever payment he demanded for it, then - without notice - withdrew it at a strategically chosen moment. That is interfering in no small way.

Re: So Musk has blood on his hands

A third party unilaterally taking action that sabotages an attack by one side in a war? How is that not "taking sides"?

The war will not be over until Russia is willing to admit defeat. Not that it ever will actually "admit defeat", but it needs to get its collective head and spirit into a space where it can admit that as a possibility. Then it might be possible to offer the Ukrainians some terms that they'll accept.

Really, this story is about the risks of anchoring your national defence on a third-party system. And the sheer absurdity of random industrialists being able to conduct their own foreign policy without reference to their own government.

India warns ecommerce 'basket sneaks' and 'confirm shamers' their days are numbered

I would assume, both.

Texas cryptomining outfit earns more from idling rigs than digging Bitcoin

Big electricity buyers sign contracts covering their demand patterns, hour by hour, for months or even years in advance.

The sellers are fine with it because it makes a large part of the market way more predictable than it could be. And the buyers benefit from being insulated from sudden price fluctuations, which can be extreme. (Of course it means the fluctuations are greatly exaggerated, for people who don't have such contracts, because now the full brunt of the unpredictability is being carried by a relatively small slice of the total traded volume. But no-one forces them to pay spot price, that's what retailers are for. Unless the customers insist on paying spot prices, but frankly there's no helping some people.)

So they've bought the electricity fair and square, having paid for it, and if they want to sell it back to the grid that's up to them.

AI to replace 2.4 million jobs in the US by 2030, many fewer than other forms of automation

Exactly how much "intelligent reasoning" (whatever that means) does the average white collar job call for, anyway?

If "the ability to string together a coherent argument" is a metric we care about, I think ChatGPT is already about on par with the average college graduate. (Better than an engineer or statistician, probably not as good as a mathematician or historian.)

What it lacks is the kind of experience that comes with having a body and living in reality. I don't know how to make good that deficiency, but there are people cleverer than me working on it, so I figure it'll probably be pretty soon now.

It seems to me that practically everything the brain does can be reduced to pattern matching. I'm not convinced there is anything more to what we call "intelligence" than that.

Microsoft tells partners unbundling Teams is a 'compromise' with the EU

Re: A little homily comparing two basketball players?

Zoom wants - not unreasonably - to make money.

Unfortunately, the only way anyone has yet figured out to make money in the software platform space is to enshittify their product.

Sooner or later, either Zoom will fail and become bankrupt, or it will succeed, in which case it will slowly become unusable. There's really no middle ground.

US AGs: We need law to purge the web of AI-drawn child sex abuse material

Re: It's easier to regulate and mandate...

I googled "the MAP" but all I got was maps. What are you talking about?

AI coding is 'inescapable' and here to stay, says GitLab

Re: What measure is over-confidence?

Exactly. They're doing *some* testing, *some* documentation, which is probably more than they were doing before. That's how (they think) they can be sure it's an improvement.

The Anti Defamation League is Musk's latest excuse for Twitter's tanking ad revenue

Does this mean the CCDH is now off the hook?

If it was the ADL causing him to lose all that money, that means the CCDH can't have had that big an effect.

That's Sums, that is. Can't argue with Sums.

X may train its AI models on your social media posts

Re: its still Twitter

See what happens if you enter "x.com" into your browser address bar.

No wonder people still call it Twitter, that's the name they see every time they go there.

Attackers accessed UK military data through high-security fencing firm's Windows 7 rig

Re: "We do not believe that any classified documents were stored ... "

If you were responsible, you probably know this - shouldn't they know where classified documents were stored?

Re: "the UK's Ministry of Defence [..] does not comment on security matters"

Yep, I'm sure you can rebuild an entire system from the ground up and not leave any kind of security loopholes whatever. That's easy, isn't it? - I mean, whoever heard of anyone failing at that?

Your post advocates, basically, security by obscurity. Even if it lasts so long, it'll be broken the minute an employee starts to feel less than completely gruntled.

Right to repair advocates have a new opponent: Scientologists

Re: Expose

The Book of Mormon is so free, you sometimes have to hide quietly behind the sofa to avoid being given one.

UK air traffic woes caused by 'invalid flight plan data'

Re: My new favourite euphamism

Yes it was a fuckup, but give them some credit. Just think about what other contexts the word "impact" might have occurred in, in this story.

That's the problem there. You can't "just reject" safety critical data. It's telling you something , and you can't afford not to know what that is. Else there'll soon be a mystery plane weaving through your crowded sky with nobody knowing what it is or where it wants to go.

US Air Force wants $6B to build 2,000 AI-powered drones

Re: Years ago you served my father in the Drone Wars

Sadly, that's not how it will work.

With the invention of the machine gun, one soldier could fire more bullets, faster, than a 20 man platoon previously. Did that mean armies shrank by a factor of 20 and the rest of the guys got to stay home?... No. No, it didn't.

Drones are the same. A force multiplier is no reason to field a smaller force.

Re: $5.8 billion

I'd just like to point out that the whole idea screams "scope creep".

Notice how vague is the description of the drone's combat role. I get the impression they haven't even tried mounting weapons on it yet, so presumably that's R&D still to be done. And how exactly are they planning to reconcile "AI control" with "human decision making"?

The amount of work still to be done is boggling. I shall confess myself astonished if they have even one of these things ready for deployment within five years, never mind a fleet of thousands. That's just applesauce intended to get the money out of Congress.

Dropbox limits ‘all the storage you need’ unlimited plan, blames abusive users

Re: the company saw more of this abusive behavior

TFA lists several examples where customers store silly amounts by grossly violating Dropbox's T&Cs, e.g. by subletting their storage to other users. I don't think it's unreasonable to call such conduct "abusive".

And you'll note, Dropbox isn't trying to take any kind of action against those people. It's just announcing - with plenty of advance notice - a change to its pricing structure.

So why the hate?

Hold the Moon – NASA's buildings are crumbling amid 200-year upgrade cycles

Re: NASA is responsible for it's budgets

Nearly all of NASA's budget is "ring-fenced for specific projects and specific items".

NASA is a high-profile agency, which politicians love to use for grandstanding, headline-grabbing projects. Trump, for instance, raided its budget twice - with his "pledge" to put Americans back on the Moon, and his announcement of a new "Space Force", both of which spelled significant holes in NASA's budget.

Interpol arrests 14 who allegedly scammed $40m from victims in 'cyber surge'

Re: What's old is new again ..

That only works in countries where the investors are sufficiently removed from the management of the business that the latter thinks there's a reasonable chance of not being murdered if they do it. In other words, in countries where "mom and pop" investors and self-managed pension funds are a thing.

Moscow makes a mess on the Moon as Luna 25 probe misses orbit, lands with a thud

Don't be ridiculous, there's no sharks on the Moon.

It's trebuchets.

A license to trust: Can you rely on 'open source' companies?

Munich is indeed a great example. Their first attempt, to go all OS, was a slow-rolling disaster that was duly rolled back.

Their second (current) effort was a bit more reasonable: "Where it is technologically and financially possible, the city will put emphasis on open standards and free open-source licensed software". Leaving a huge space (where it is not "technologically and financially possible") for closed-source to remain in use.

OS is fine as far as it goes, but people who claim it can do everything? - they simply have no idea what "everything" is.

Google 'wiretapped' tax websites with visitor traffic trackers, lawsuit claims

Re: why sue Google?

If you want to get $SHEDLOAD_OF_MONEY, step 1 is to identify where it's going to come from.

Step 2 is to find a way of moving it from that place to your pocket.

Re: Sue You, Jimmy!

Google does not "sell" our data. For the same reason as the army doesn't sell its guns.

Re: The Register uses Google Analytics among other tools to keep track of readership size

The article mentions El Reg's position.

And the story isn't "critical of Google Analytics", it's a factual report of a legal proceeding, the likes of which happen all the time.

Personally, I think the plaintiffs will find themselves completely unable to demonstrate that Google is holding any data about their tax information, beyond possibly a record of the times and dates they visited these sites (and I wouldn't bet on even that much), and the case will go nowhere, like so many others before it.