Posts by Jedit 1952 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jul 2010
Nature didn't let us do anything. We've been defying nature since we first picked up a stick and hit something with it. Making ourselves unnatural by using technology to eliminate our shortcomings is the core of human development, it's what we do and what we are.
I have never, ever understood why a company would want to turn over all its data to an external partner for the sake of a small convenience. It's a reverse economy of scale; the more data you have, the better off you are storing it on-site and the more justifiable maintenance of your own data centre becomes. But at the other end of the scale, if you only have a small amount of data to store then storing it locally becomes much easier.
Perhaps there's a Goldilocks zone where you can't centrally store your own data economically. But that isn't how it's ever pushed, of course. Cloud storage is the WaVe Of ThE fUtUrE and apparently everyone should be doing it - leaving themselves vulnerable through audience captivity.
This reminds me of when the first talks about EVs in Formula One were going on. There were apparently comments that the atmosphere at EV races wasn't the same because the cars are so much quieter. The proposed solution was to fit all EVF1 cars with a device that simulated engine noise.
Personally I think it would be more appropriate to encourage the spectators to shout "NEEEOWW!" whenever a car went past. Or at least, more fun to watch.
Indeed. Now compare this to Lionel Fanthorpe, who in his days as a boiler room pulp author wrote 89 books averaging between 40k and 50k words in a span of three years without AI doing any of the work for him. The good reverend would be the first to admit that they were terrible, but they were at least his own work. Boucher isn't even an impressive hack.
If you can't trust the state with that power, then you cannot be in favour of the death penalty because only the state has the power of life and death. There are times when a civilian might need to kill a criminal while acting in defence of life, but the judgement of whether such a killing is justified is also in the hands of the state.
And you can let a person out of prison if they were later found to be wrongfully convicted. You can't bring them back to life if they were wrongfully executed.
I disagree. The article said "Like many businesses in the regulation-challenged industry, it eventually experienced financial difficulties and allegations of severe mismanagement", but crypto companies can be divided into two groups: those that have already experienced such difficulties and allegations, and those that haven't yet experienced them but will. There is no other path available, because crypto is not legitimate business. It is a scam in which the objective is to not be the one left holding the bag when the music stops. The longer we go, the more likely it is that anyone jumping on the bandwagon is going to be that person.
So the original assertion is true: anyone investing in crypto now is far less deserving of sympathy than the people who were scammed early on when it seemed vaguely legit, because there are so many more victims to learn from and they didn't. And the people who did get scammed early on don't deserve any sympathy to begin with, as by now they've either passed the bag and become a scammer themselves, or held onto it and compounded their victimhood through their own stupidity, folly and greed.
I have to dispute that assertion. What companies using LLMs are getting is a great deal of venture capital investment, and they absolutely don't deserve it.
And still nobody can provide an explanation of how putting a bit of existing knowledge in a box and asking it to pull out parts of the content is going to revolutionise anything. They're not even parting suckers from their money in a different way.
Not worthy of a full correction filing, but Steve Jackson was the co-creator of Fighting Fantasy, not Choose Your Own Adventure. FF was aimed at a slightly older audience, adding a very basic role playing experience to the simple branching narratives of CYOA.
Steve Jackson should also not be confused with Steve Jackson of the American company Steve Jackson Games, although he frequently is. Amusingly, when the confusion first began the English Jackson responded to it by inviting his American namesake to author a Fighting Fantasy book. And while most FF books not written by Steve Jackson or Ian Livingstone were credited as "Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone present", this one was credited solely to its author.
Indeed. You're not the first person to point out that 70 years ago SF writers imagined a utopian future where computers would take care of all the drudgery while humans were free to pursue creativity, but the future we wound up with is a the exact opposite.
I'll add my voice also to the chorus saying that Misanthropic can fuck off, along with all other "AI" companies. It's not even really AI, just a slightly more sophisticated version of Eliza. It can't create anything, it can't make logical connections based on the material it's given. All it can "learn" is how to say the same thing that a creative human has already said, but in a slightly different way. It serves no purpose other than to let companies stop paying their employees for real work, and it will only cause stagnation.
1) I presume that your "loadsamoney" comment is about things like that failed Welsh tidal energy project and the long delayed nuke plants at Hinkley Point. You're correct that the money is there, but the existence of funding doesn't mean that it's being applied for the greatest benefit of the project. The EDF nukes are a particular case in point where the public sector has asked private enterprise to do the work and the private firm has not delivered while costs spiral. (Source: I work in energy management, we deal with this crap all the time.)
2) The Dublin datacentre wasn't positioned on the grounds that the power was available. It was put there because it was cheaper to put it there and build the infrastructure than it would have been to put it where the infrastructure already existed. That's what large companies do. Again, I'll agree with you that building their own was the only option if they wanted to locate in Dublin, but that does rule out the possibility that Dublin was not the only option for where to locate.
3) "Replace the PSU" was what I was pushing at, but the point is that the old PSU didn't stop working - you had to replace it because you were asking too much of it. We are not actually in disagreement about how Microsoft should go about handling their energy needs. The point of contention is that you're blaming EirGrid for not doing enough to accommodate MS while I'm blaming MS for building their datacentre in the wrong place so they could save a few bucks.
Energy in the UK has become more expensive and less reliable since privatisation as prices are jacked up to fill shareholders' wallets at the expense of maintaining infrastructure.
And Microsoft don't want to build the Dublin plant to "protect themselves" from EirGrid, it's the other way round. They want to build the plant because they're wanting to draw more power than the constrained regional grid can support. That grid isn't unreliable, it's just not designed for massive bloody datacentres in addition to its usual load. You wouldn't say your computer's PSU was unreliable if you slapped a massive GPU in the system, would you?
It isn't really cognitive dissonance. It's along the lines of saying "if you want to read a book go to the library; if you want to own a book, buy it from a bookstore instead of stealing it from the library". Although in this case it's a library of stolen books and the librarian is complaining that you're just stealing from him all the things that he put in a lot more work to steal from the original owners - proponents of AI typically thinking that "ethics" is where you live if you're a British blonde with a lisp.
Don't get me started on Roger Hallam. His entire goal appears to be to get as many potential left wing protesters as possible onto government watch lists. I know many people who strongly suspect that he's running an op, like the plod were with CND in the 1980s. One of the few things I agree with you on is that he's an idiot.
But for all that, if you're going to make me choose between idiots making people late for hospital appointments and rioters putting people in the hospital then that's not a choice. They are not comparable.
The JSO protesters weren't hurting anyone. They weren't throwing rocks through the windows of people's houses, or at police. They weren't burning out libraries or businesses or hotels. In fact they weren't doing anything, because they were arrested at the planning stage. So don't prate to me about mischaracterisation of their actions when I say they did less than the actual fucking Nazis who were out doing all of these things, and more.
This is reasonable enough, but the issue is that laws are often applied to people that they should not be. Witness the JSO protesters jailed for five years for merely talking about annoying people under newly minted conspiracy laws. Do we seriously believe that the fascist scum burning out shops owned by non-whites and beating up anyone who looks foreign are going to get a penalty proportionate to that? Of course not - and I would actually hope not, as while I have no sympathy for the fash I do support equality under the law and I don't want anyone receiving draconian sentences.
Facial recognition is a particularly touchy topic in this area, as there is plenty of evidence to show that the systems can't accurately identify black people. It's very easy to repurpose such laws to discriminate, and I have no reason to believe the sitting government won't do so after they've been sitting there talking about "pro-British protestors with legitimate concerns". The Labour MP for Tamworth, Sarah Edwards, tweeted just the other day supporting the people in her constituency who "want their Holiday Inn back". I very much doubt that the people of Tamworth actually do want a cheap chain hotel that they don't need to stay in themselves as they already live in Tamworth, but there are certainly a lot of asylum seekers being housed there and right now every dog in town is covering its ears and whining.
Just a note here: hypochondriacs abusing free health care is about as big a problem as benefit fraud and voter fraud. That is to say, it's a problem that is almost entirely non-existent but is massively overinflated by right wing ideologues to justify attacks on the system.
Yes, just a few weeks ago. I called the Not Quite An Emergency line at 1am on a Saturday morning after breaking my toe (on topic - it was on a spare computer case). I was given advice on how to protect it overnight and brought in the following morning for foot X-rays and treatment.
The NHS is badly overstretched due to starvation of funding and concomitant failure to keep recruitment levels up, but they still work miracles despite being ideologically attacked at every turn by scum who want it to fail so they can justify privatisation of healthcare. People like you, basically - someone who will break someone's legs then call them lazy because they can't run.
We've already seen any number of cases where using non-recursively generated AI datasets produces gibberish. Why did anyone think the output would improve if the next generation of models were trained on the ones that were already crap.
I'm not sure I've ever met a closeted furry. While that may appear to be a tautology, in my experience they're all way too happy to tell you that they're furries.
(Penguin because it's the only animal in the icons, but a lot of them were actually Linux users. Not that I think all Linux users are furries, or vice versa. I'll stop digging now, shall I?)
If someone can't work for a competitor if they quit, what can they do? Unless people completely change career every time they change jobs, they can effectively be compelled to remain in their present employ. It's true that isn't slavery in the letter of the law, but it's bordering on indenture and it definitely creates a massive imbalance of power between employer and employee.
That's because you haven't bothered looking; CNN published the fact check three days ago. It took a while, though, since as one pundit put it, Trump lied with almost every word that came out of his mouth. Biden did make nine false claims, let's not gloss over that, but Trump made over 30.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/06/27/politics/fact-checking-the-cnn-presidential-debate/index.html
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
