* Posts by Jedit

2153 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jul 2010

Actors' union complains about Epic Games cloning Darth Vader

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Pint

"The onset audio outtakes are hilarious"

David Learner, who played and voiced Marvin the Paranoid Android in the original stage play of Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy but was dubbed over in the TV series, has a story to tell about that. He met Dave Prowse during the filming of the series - Prowse appeared as Hotblack Desiato's bodyguard - and felt that they had common ground as they'd both provided the body for a well loved part but had their voices replaced. He asked Prowse why he thought they'd dubbed him in Star Wars, to which Prowse replied in the broadest imaginable South West accent:

"Oi really couldn't say."

Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill' would create a regulation-free AI hellscape, AGs warn

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Headmaster

"I dont see why this should be enforced at a federal level."

For once I think the downvotes you're getting aren't entirely merited as there are some things about AI that probably should be handled at the state level, but you are overlooking the important point that information crosses borders. 49 states could prohibit training AI on copyrighted material without consent of the copyright holder, but if the 50th state didn't then every AI company would relocate there and bury their faces in the trough. That one state's laws would then be superseding the laws of all the others. There needs to be a consistent application of law on this, and that means federal jurisdiction.

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Flame

"Call it the : "Fark you, I'll do whatever I want" bill..."

That's literally what it is. AI regulation is just one of the many dead cats being thrown around to distract from the more nefarious things the Big Brutal Bill does: tax cuts for people earning $700k or more a year funded by increased taxation on low and middle wage earners; a stealth repeal of the Affordable Care Act; and most sinister of all, the removal of the power of federal courts to challenge presidential decrees. If it passes, Trump will no longer be a president; he will be an absolute monarch ruling by fiat.

Research reimagines LLMs as tireless tools of torture

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Terminator

"deliberate work, not a casual misstep"

Some serious Do Not Create The Torment Nexus energy here.

When LLMs get personal info they are more persuasive debaters than humans

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Headmaster

"when challenging a standpoint not really held by its opponent"

In competitive debate it's pretty much a given that you'll wind up presenting an argument that you don't believe in, and in many cases one that you personally oppose. I don't find this to be an unreasonable metric for judging ability as a debater.

Microsoft adds Grok – the most unhinged chatbot – to Azure AI buffet

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Trollface

"he was not a farmer but ran a mine until last month"

Typical Musk, doing things for himself and his family.

Anyway, I'm tired of all this talk of Grok's crazed tangents. The white genocide in South Africa is of no relevance to this discussion; it's a bore and we should kill it.

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Trollface

Re: 'rogue employee'

They should change the name of it. "Grok" is a fictional word from Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land which approximately translates as "to understand completely", but Grok (the AI) doesn't understand anything at all. A more apposite name based on its nature and properties would be DeepSeekHeil.

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

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Joke

Re: "Vincent Truck Gogh"

If you feed his work into an AI, would it be Cyber Truck Gogh?

Probably not, actually. Cybertrucks don't Gogh.

Meta's still violating GDPR rules with latest plan to train AI on EU user data, says noyb

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FAIL

"If you want 'AI' to be better for you"

To quote the Spartans: "If".

There's no possible use for AI that uses social media data to make anything better, because AI can't live anyone's life for them. We don't want AI to be "better" for us because we don't want it at all. Any other argument you may have gets crushed under that juggernaut.

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Flame

"Who came up with that fucking annoying excuse?"

It's not just an annoying excuse. They do it because they've already been forced by law in many regions to have the automatic gathering of data require opting in. "Legitimate interest" is a way to "encourage" people to allow their data to be harvested because they don't want to have to switch off ten or fifteen "optional" opt-outs every single time they visit a website, including searching out the second opt-out for the same option which is hidden on the other side of several non-interactive paragraphs like the data version of a roofie in your drink. Data rape rather than date rape, although I'm sure the techbros who came up with this one have tried both.

Qatar’s $400M jet for Trump is a gold-plated security nightmare

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Re: Musk/DOGE

Turning the refit over to SpaceX for speed and efficiency is an excellent idea.

Europe plots escape hatch from enshittification of search

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Pint

UDM14

Very useful info there, thank you. Have a beer.

US, China agree to roll back tariffs – but only for 90 days

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"Overseas sellers load up the next three months' shipments to the USA"

And that's actually a problem which will lead to nobody in the US saving money. Shipping companies are going to be charging king's rates for those 90 days because everyone knows they have to get their goods out in the window or risk getting blocked by tariffs again.

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Headmaster

"when BTTF III was released"

Although Future Biff appeared in BTTF2. It's a minor pedant though - the two films were made back to back in 1989, so anything not known in one wasn't known in the other.

Bosses weren’t being paranoid: Remote workers more likely to start own biz

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Trollface

Re: "Among Americans aged 20-64"

Hardly surprising. Economics was invented by astrologers to make themselves look legit.

US Copyright Office found AI companies sometimes breach copyright. Next day its boss was fired

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Stop

"Has some numpty simply seen a 'woke' book on their inventory list"

The actual answer is "no". They're just so stupid and ignorant that they think the Library of Congress is a lending library with a children's section. Probably because they haven't set foot in a library since they were children themselves.

Palantir loves the smell of DOGE budget cuts in the morning

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Mushroom

"The government has started to resemble a finely marbled wagyu"

"The government has started to resemble a high quality product that is held in great esteem the world around. Clearly this is a problem."

Amazing. What will they think of next? "The government has started to resemble a beautiful woman removing all her clothes and begging you to make mad, passionate love to her all night long. We urgently need DOGE - not to do anything, but one sight of Elon Musk would murder any woman's libido."

EU tells US scientists to dump Trump for a lab in Europe

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Holmes

"do you mean that having someone contradict you in public is "suppression"?"

Yes, that's exactly what they mean. If you say that a liar is lying, people might not believe those lies. And if people don't believe the lies, the liar's point of view is being suppressed. We must have a balanced debate where harmful lies are given the same weight and consideration as the truth; otherwise, how will people be able to decide what to believe?

(My apologies for depleting the Register's strategic sarcasm reserves, but this is the kind of occasion that we save it up for.)

X marks the drop for European users

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Boffin

"Whatsa Stonetoss, is that somebody?"

Stonetoss is a cartoonist who uses a meme style so people who share memes will share his cartoons. Some of his cartoons are perfectly innocent and can even be funny from time to time, but the intent of them is as a gateway to get people looking for more of his work. If you do, you'll find that most of his output is full on Nazi.

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Headmaster

"This may also be because Tesla's vehicle lineup looks a little stale"

More than that - Musk has been focusing Tesla on the Cybertruck. That's been a millstone round the company's neck in Europe and the UK because due to various factors of the design, it's illegal to have one on the road in those regions.

Open source AI hiring bots favor men, leave women hanging by the phone

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"have the same name as a bad people from history 'Charles Manson'"

Until a few years ago we actually had a Charles Manson working in our department. People didn't make jokes about it, mostly because he'd heard them all already.

AI models routinely lie when honesty conflicts with their goals

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Stop

"Can we please stop using words like "lie""

I don't think we should. If companies want to bill their data regurgitators as Artificial Intelligence, then they must also accept the consequence that intelligences act with intent. If we just say "It's not reliable" then they can come back with "We're working to improve it". If we say that it is lying, then they either accept that the falsehood was intentional - and as coders, their responsibility - or they admit that their product is not AI and they've advertised it falsely. In either case, both the AI-maker and their product are proven to be deceitful and untrustworthy.

Is it accurate to call erroneous AI output a lie? Not really. But it correctly frames the situation in terms that the layman can understand.

FBI steps in amid rash of politically charged swattings

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Mushroom

Re: Are you having a laugh ?

Patel said it on the day that his Fuhrer signed an EO that directly ordered the provision of military equipment and personnel to law enforcement agencies.

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Happy

Why would we think it was racist? Is Mr Kadogo by any chance a Black gentleman? Or did you not notice, as you were too busy being offended by his wife?

AI software development: Productivity revolution or fraught with risk?

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"AI has both proven its value and also introduced new risks"

This is true, if you come from the position that "x<0" constitutes proof of value. Bad enough that El Reg is taking AI shekels for advertorials without buying into the fiction themselves.

TAKE IT DOWN Act? Yes, take the act down before it's too late for online speech

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Headmaster

"What was that about "Congress shall make no law...."?"

It's a bit of a minefield. I think the best way to think about it is that you're free to express yourself how you wish but not to get anyone else involved. For example: if I post a picture of my head pasted onto a nude bodybuilder then that's one thing; if I post the same picture but with your head pasted on then that's another. You may find it flattering, but equally you may not want to be seen as a nude bodybuilder (or even a clothed one). By adding your face to the picture without permission, I'm violating your right to express yourself how you wish by imposing my own wishes upon you.

America's cyber defenses are being dismantled from the inside

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IT Angle

"What have I missed?"

The last 70 years at least? A recent survey showed that around 9% of Americans have favourable views of the Black Death. Presumably they took the name literally. But that's the kind of intellectual titans we're dealing with here.

(The IT angle? [w/2].)

America's National Science Foundation tells DEI, misinfo studies: You're fired

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Joke

"What? No, I won't get on that airplane"

Well, if anyone accused you of having done 9/11 you now have an al-ibi.

ChatGPT burns tens of millions of Softbank dollars listening to you thanking it

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Trollface

"Sam says it's Son's money well spent"

So ChatGPT is paid for by the Son of Sam?

Downward DOGE: Elon Musk keeps revising cost-trimming goals in a familiar pattern

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Headmaster

"keep the £ and then join the EU"

Not quite. To join the EU requires joining the Euro - the UK had an exemption - and to join the Euro requires having a stable currency to establish an exchange rate. So Scotland would need to have its own currency to use in the transition period where it was independent from the UK and not yet an EU member. As I recall the option of choice was a Scottish pound pegged to the UK pound.

The thing with membership not being guaranteed was that any of the bigger nations can veto new members and they don't even need a good reason. As the other poster said, Spain was having edgier than normal times with the Catalans at the time and stated that they would veto any new nation that didn't gain independence through an official referendum authorised by their parent country - having no intention of ever giving one to Catalonia, of course. This prevented Scotland unilaterally declaring independence if the UK refused to give it. If Spain had vetoed after a successful referendum it would only have been to make a point to the Catalans and they would have been lightly negotiated into relenting by the rest of the bloc.

And yes, the EU did say that Scotland wouldn't be automatically grandfathered in. However, there isn't really a queue to join as such; there's just a set of requirements that you have to meet, which takes time. The most important of these is alignment of laws, which wouldn't have been an obstacle since as they were part of an existing EU member Scottish laws were already fully aligned. The process of gaining EU membership would therefore be quite swift. But Scotland would still have had to go through it, and that meant it would leave the EU when it left the UK. Hence the transition period I mentioned above.

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Re: "Not too bright, huh?"

The Scottish social blackmail was more to do with the 2014 independence referendum, where Westminster's line was to threaten blocking Scotland's EU access if they left the UK. It's widely believed now that had the EU referendum taken place first with the same result, Scotland would have voted for independence.

Still, I'm not saying you're wrong.

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Big Brother

"only worried about kompromats"

Given the things Skum does in public without a trace of shame, I can't imagine Moscow has anything that might concern him.

Bad trip coming for AI hype as humanity tools up to fight back

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Flame

"Elon Musk's claim to be a "free speech absolutist"."

There may be a case where "I am a free speech absolutist" didn't mean "I want to say slurs without any pushback", but I've never seen it. The only people who care about being able to say anything are the people who want to say things that nobody decent would say.

Dems fret over DOGE feeding sensitive data into random AI

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Trollface

"if he drives a Tesla and you are good at reverse engineering"

If he drives a Tesla I don't need to be good at reverse engineering.

EU gives staff 'burner phones, laptops' for US visits

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Re: "the very important modifier word 'illegal"

Actually more than 90% of the people shipped to El Salvador were not El Salvadorean. Kilmar Abrego Garcia was, but he was also in the US legally, protected by an order that forbade him being deported to El Salvador due to the risk of harm. The most likely reason Trump and Bukele are refusing to return him is because he has already been murdered.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9vedkm7w2do

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"tattoos that resemble those of Venezuelan gang members"

Tren de Aragua doesn't use tattoos to identify its members, according to the Venezuelan government. They say it's an American fabrication, which if true means it's probably taken from the movies.

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Mushroom

"the very important modifier word 'illegal"

Except many of the immigrants sent to the death camp in El Salvador were legal. But we all know that when you said "illegal", you actually meant to say "non-white".

Users hated a new app – maybe so much they filed a fake support call

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Trollface

"MS typically have only ever got each alternate version right"

It's unfortunate, then, that they switched Windows to SAAS with one of the bad versions. Now there'll never be a follow-up.

Tech CEO: Four-day work week didn't hurt or help productivity

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Angel

Re: I think I speak for us all when I say:

I keep the big guns in reserve.

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Mushroom

I think I speak for us all when I say:

Fuck Sergey Brin.

Nvidia paid $1M for Mar-a-Lago meal, US later scrapped AI chip export crackdown

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Stop

"Problem is that he is already a convicted crook"

He's also a serial liar, though. He'd claim not to be a crook if he was caught in the act.

Trump doubles down, vows to make Chinese imports even more expensive for Americans

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Stop

"try to explain [to] his red hat wearers"

They won't be able to afford red hats to wear. MAGA hats are made in China.

Trump fires NSA boss, deputy

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Stop

"There's no "kompromat". He doesn't need it."

Trump's links to Russia go back to 1989, when he went to the Soviet Union as a bankrupt and came back with his pockets jingling to post adverts about how great Russia is. He wasn't pathetically eager to please a wealthy Putin then; he was bought and sold like the traitor he is.

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Headmaster

"Sadly we have Vance then"

Vance doesn't have the same ability to carry the vote. Like every fascist regime, MAGA is a cult of personality. They all proclaim themselves as a thousand year empire then collapse when their founder dies. It's why Republicans are talking about a third term, either doing an end run on the Constitution to make it happen or bemoaning that it can't.

Forget Signal. National Security Adviser Waltz now accused of using Gmail for work

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Trollface

"Gmail stands for "Government mail""

More likely they think Gmail must be the most secure e-mail system on the planet. I mean, they can't find the G-spot, so Gmail must be equally impossible to locate, right?

Generative AI app goes dark after child-like deepfakes found in open S3 bucket

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Holmes

"why doesn't Amazon prevent people from leaving S3 buckets wide open?"

Well, in this case it led to a bunch of nonces being exposed so I won't complain.

Revenge of the nerds: Teachers, professors sue to undo Trump science funding cuts

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"I'm not disputing it. I'm just following the rule"

Perfectly reasonable. The source for the number of rape-induced pregnancies in Texas is an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on 24th January 2024 and quoted by Scientific American the following day. The number of pregnancies is extrapolated from the Texas state health board's own statistics for 2022 and 2023.

UK's first permanent facial recognition cameras installed in South London

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Stop

"It says 1% elsewhere so I guess it was 2 people detained by mistake"

The Met claim a 1 in 6000 rate of false positives - that is, one in 6000 people who passes a camera will be incorrectly flagged as a suspect - but that's a somewhat misleading statistic. Of the people who are flagged as suspects, 85% of them are not suspects. The Met's explanation is that if 6000 people pass a camera, six are flagged and one of them is on a watch list, an officer will only have to look at six people to find their man instead of 6000. Which is fair enough, but doesn't account for the fact that there are 5994 people who weren't flagged and for each of them that actually was a suspect, there must also be an 85% chance that the camera didn't recognise them. This begs the question of how useful the system actually is, when it means officers will have their attention directed away from suspects in the great majority of cases.

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Headmaster

"Isn't this tech notorious for false positives?"

Yes, especially among Black Caribbeans. And by a strange coincidence, Croydon has the largest Black Caribbean population in London.

Judge halts DOGE's union personal data grab at OPM, Treasury, Education

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Headmaster

"Coup or coop? Wondering if using the homophone was deliberate"

"Coup" and "coop" are not homophones. Coup is pronounced "coo".

(Oddly, though, "couped" and "cooped" are homophones. This is what happens when your entire language is an exercise in pickpocketing every other language that passes by.)