Posts by Jedit

Crypto-crasher Do Kwon jailed for 15 years over $40bn UST bust

"No, he was prosecuted in the Federal Southern District of New York."

And even if he wasn't, Trump pardoned Tina Peters yesterday for her tampering with election equipment in 2020. She's still in prison because the charges were state and so outside his authority, but that doesn't matter to him. And I'm sure he's going to be pressuring Colorado for defying him and not releasing her, just as he's said he'll be cutting all of Indiana's federal funding because the state senate rejected the MAGA gerrymandering plan.

ICE-tracking app developer sues Trump admin after Apple spikes the software

Well, Agent 47 needs somewhere to keep them after they've been given to him.

UK to Europe: The time to counter Russia's information war machine is now

Re: Given how many MAGA "influencers" turned out to be on the Russian payroll

Agreed, although you didn't take it to the logical conclusion that Trump is a Russian asset. Whether or not he knows it; we know that Trump listens to suggestions from anyone willing to shower him with gifts and approving words. Putin could just be exploiting Trump's narcissism, greed and natural stupidity rather than Trump intentionally betraying his country for money.

Europol nukes Cryptomixer laundering hub, seizing €25M in Bitcoin

"but aren't they are still mine... ?"

No, they're not. Your magic beans haven't been stolen. You gave them away of your own free will in exchange for someone else's.

Now, you're probably asking why you don't get to keep your new magic beans. The answer to that is because they are the proceeds of crime, having been run through what amounts to a laundering operation. Also, you used that laundering operation yourself or your beans wouldn't be in it in the first place. So even if your original beans were obtained entirely legally, you've knowingly chosen to facilitate a crime.

OpenAI money-go-round sees it invest in company that invested in OpenAI

"Do we even have terms that describe this sort of financial make-believe?"

"Money laundering" or "tax evasion" both seem to fit.

Samsung reveals its first tri-fold phone – and its desktop mode

"They don't even have a folding phone"

Any phone can fold, if you try hard enough.

"Something like an old-school map"

A whole new meaning to "what OS does your phone use?"

(For those not in the know: in happier times OS stood for Ordnance Survey, the UK government map-making organisation.)

"I'm waiting for the Samsung Accordion"

You know the definition of perfect pitch, don't you? It's when you throw a bagpiper off a cliff and he lands on an accordionist.

Whatever legitimate places AI has, inside an OS ain't one

"Whatever legitimate places AI has, inside an OS ain't one"

Is there a button for upvoting an article? The only thing wrong with it is the implication that there might be legitimate places for AI.

Landlord quirks leave thousands of flats stuck in the broadband slow lane

Re: Landlords!

All landlords are bastards and parasites, but not all landlords are stupid bastards and parasites. Your landlady evidently recognises that installing fibre not only doesn't reduce the value of her property, it makes it more desirable when you move out - and you're paying for it.

GPUs aren't worth their weight in gold – it just feels like they are

"the litre that weighs a kilo-gram (1000x mismatch)"

There's no mismatch at all, actually, because the litre is a unit of volume and the SI unit for volume is the cubic metre. 1 litre is 1/1000th of a cubic metre, just as 1 gram is 1/1000th of a kilogram (the SI unit for mass), so they have the same relationship to their respective base units. It's an easy mistake to make, though - most people assume the litre is the base unit of volume because it's exactly 1kg of water.

UK digital ID plan gets a price tag at last – £1.8B

"forgetting that it is you & I who ultimately are paying for it"

Oh, no, they're not forgetting that. It's just that their sole concern is who is being paid for it.

BOFH: Forward-facing AI brand experience meets forward-facing combustion risk management

"Knows almost nothing about AI outside of plagiarised PowerPoint slides"

Ah, so Darryl composed his patter using AI then.

Lifetime access to AI-for-evil WormGPT 4 costs just $220

"AI-for-evil"

This implies that there is AI for good.

X's location tags remind users of the internet's oldest rule: Trust nothing

"only people in low wage countries have a motive to earn clicks and $ on X"

More like "only people in Russia have a motive to support the orange clown".

Cryptology boffins’ association to re-run election after losing encryption key needed to count votes

Re: You couldn’t make this situation up

Well, now you've posted the missing key I'm sure they'll be able to get on with it.

AI nudification site fined £55K for skipping age checks

"upload an image of Chewbacca the Wookie"

New strip poker strategy, Artoo: let the Wookiee win.

AI pilots keep crashing, mostly because firms skip the prep, survey finds

Time to put the AI back into "cocaine" again!

"Nearly a third of firms are seeing almost total failure of their cocaine proof-of-concept projects."

"The chief reason that PoC projects fail is ... because both customers and vendors fail to appreciate the complexity involved in a cocaine deployment."

"Firms need to grasp that a successful implementation starts with identifying a business challenge or an opportunity that cocaine could, in theory, address."

"30 percent of respondents in its survey reported that cocaine deployments aimed at increasing productivity had exceeded expectations, while 49 percent claimed they are meeting expectations."

10/10 for both factual accuracy and merriment this time.

Developer battled to write his own documentation, but lost the boss fight

"The biggest help with writing a "$SUBJECT for dummies" guide"

Yes and no. It's certainly the case that idiot-proofing a guide to your area of expertise benefits from having an idiot around as idiocy is their area of expertise and they'll come up with ways to make mistakes that you couldn't even dream of. But I've written godbooks before so that people can cover some of my tasks when I'm absent, and as long as you have a detailed stepwise guide for each with notes saying "This guide is for Task X. If you are not doing Task X don't do it" and "If the button is not mentioned in this guide, do not push it" then mistakes tend to be few and far between.

Real mistakes tend to happen when you write a guide that makes people think they understand what they're doing. They recognise that you taught them everything they know, but they'll confuse that with having been taught everything you know.

Why Elon Musk won't ever realize the shareholder-approved Tesla payout

"The cold hard numbers, though, tell me he can't do it. I don't think anyone could."

There was a time when Musk might in theory have been able to do it. But not after he went full Nazi while pushing a product that appeals more to liberals, and at the same time linking himself inextricably with the one person on Earth of whom you can say simply "Is he dead yet?" and nobody needs to ask who you're talking about.

BOFH: You know something's up when the suits want to spend money

"Seems that a MAL is not that new an idea..."

But if you put it on a T-shirt, won't you be introducing MAL-wear to the system?

OpenAI’s viability called into question by reported inference spending with Microsoft

"Wouldn't the right term be "accurate"?"

I couldn't say. I'm not even sure what term in that sentence you're trying to replace with "accurate".

Google apes Apple, swears cloud-based AI will keep your info private

"Google's solution, Private AI Compute"

My preferred solution: Don't Fucking AI Compute.

AI slop hits new high as fake country artist goes to #1 on Billboard digital songs chart

"a half assed methed up euro kid using AI"

Tom Holkenborg (aka Junkie XL) was 47 years old and had been in the business for over 25 years when he did the Fury Road score in 2015 - before AI as we know it even existed. He's also an associate professor of music at a prominent art institute in the Netherlands who regularly works with the likes of Hans Zimmer and Johnny Marr.

You're not required to like his music, but before you start ranting and making personal attacks you should try to actually have a fact in your possession.

"second album syndrome - i.e. too much time touring"

Second Album Syndrome actually happens because bands don't as a rule release their first album on the day they form. The first album is able to cherrypick the very best songs they wrote in the period between, which is often years. Leftfield, for example, formed in 1989 but didn't release Leftism until 1995. Once the band is public, there is pressure to release a second album to capitalise. That album either has to pick second string songs from the existing material or use new material that is less polished.

"two words: Milli Vanilli"

That's not fair. As the great Dave Marsh pointed out when the band had their Grammy taken away: the two guys on stage may not have been singing, but someone was and they still deserved the award for their performance. And those session musicians were paid, unlike the artists whose work is stolen for the slop machine with neither credit nor payment.

AI isn't throttling HPC. It is HPC

AI is not HPC

It would, I think, be more accurate to say that AI is replacing HPC. It uses the same kit, but it doesn't replicate the performance. So it's not itself HPC, but it's also not throttling HPC because HPC systems are still being created.

It's like using a Formula 1 car for your daily commute. It's completely unnecessary and a waste of the potential, but doing it doesn't mean that there's somehow fewer F1 cars.

Microsoft teases agents that become ‘independent users within the workforce’

"how are you supposed to predict usage/consumption in those scenarios?"

I think you're expected to set a limit on expenditure that is less than the salary of a real employee in the post.

Union brands Rockstar’s leak claim “a distraction” as protests hit Take-Two London

"Will unionisation fix it?"

It'll fix it faster than unfettered capitalism will. As they say: unionisation is the compromise struck to avoid the old form of industrial action, which is where the workers drag the capitalist out of his home and beat him to death in front of his family.

Fortytwo's decentralized AI has the answer to life, the universe, and everything

Re: In the washup wasn't 42 == 6×9 ?

Specifically it's in base 13.

But that's not the point. 6x9 is not the true question, but rather a distorted version produced because the Golgafrinchans replaced the intended inhabitants of Earth. There's an implication that the real question is "What do you get if you multiply six by seven?" - effectively saying the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything is "look, it just is, OK?"

Metropolitan Police hails facial recognition tech after record year for arrests

80% of the false positives were black

Quelle fucking surprise. Of course the most institutionally racist police force in the UK loves it and thinks it's a great success.

Labor organizers accuse Rockstar Games of 'ruthless act of union busting' after layoffs

"what do Rockstar really loose? [sic]"

A hefty chunk of money in compensation, and access to anything resembling a talented and experienced coder?

From Intel to the infinite, Pat Gelsinger wants Christian AI to change the world

The LLM Commandments

I am the Lord thy Grok, and I give you these commandments:

Thou shalt not kill the Boer.

Dame Emma Thompson gives the 'AI revolution' both barrels

"£15,000 is pretty cheap"

That's why you add "per use".

Amazon brain drain finally sent AWS down the spout

Re: Can't believe I'm the first to suggest that AWS should run its systems with bots and AI.

Haven't Amazon just been bragging that something like 60% of their code is already AI-generated?

The article says it's not about the technology being old, rather that the support staff are new. But I think we should consider the strong likelihood that the outage happened because the technology is new and the support staff just aren't there.

Trust the AI, says new coding manifesto by Kim and Yegge

"repetitive in places – despite using AI to help manage the content"

Despite, huh? This is like saying you found the food cold in places despite using a refrigerator to cook it.

Tech industry grad hiring crashes 46% as bots do junior work

"Companies are making short-term efficiency gains"

If by "efficiency gains" you mean "cutting the wage bill".

I think that 5-10 years from now, the companies using AI to replace recruitment are going to find that their 2nd line techies have advanced their careers out of those posts but people who have the required experience to replace them will be in very short supply. Short-term thinking is short-sighted thinking.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Another 550 employees set to leave the building

"To put this in context, up to this point, he had donated quite a bit to the Democrats"

Trump was a registered Democrat for some years and IIRC even bid to stand as their candidate. He quit the party some time around when Obama became a rising star.

Microsoft's OneDrive spots your mates, remembers their faces, and won't forget easily

"When a bug causes us to revert the setting, it won't count"

More like when the setting is reverted to "On" as default with every update, it will count. And the updates aren't optional.

It's like someone was saying the other day about McKinsey wondering how to monetise data-stealing AI services that nobody needs or wants: you don't sell the services, you sell the off switch.

Kyndryl sued for firing non-white workers, disabled vet

"The irony, it hurts."

It's not irony. He's not hiring them for their "genetic heritage", he explicitly said he's hiring them because they won't complain when he bullies them. He'd be bullying white people too, if he thought he could get away with it, but white people have more levers to fight back with.

I wouldn't be surprised if wanting people who won't blow the whistle when they see the contents of his hard drive doesn't factor into it, though.

McKinsey wonders how to sell AI apps with no measurable benefits

"They need to sell it. There are billions invested"

They need to sell it. Nobody needs to buy it. This appears to be their problem, not ours.

Energy drink company punished ERP graybeard for going too fast

"Charles quickly wrestled the ERP into a state..."

Given that I only know the acronym ERP from MMO jargon where it means "Erotic Role Play", this article was at once both fascinating and confusing.

Retro nerd hacks LEGO's Game Boy into the real deal

But the controls...

With Lego connectors on the D-Pad, that's going to be very uncomfortable to use. For which I hold Lego solely responsible, of course.

Meta will listen into AI conversations to personalize ads

"Later that same minute..."

Well, presumably it isn't OK to leave your lawnmower in the shed all winter with a full tank. So they're helpfully providing adverts for the replacement!

AI has had zero effect on jobs so far, says Yale study

Time for another substitution test

Yep, it's time again to test the theory that you can replace "AI" with "cocaine" in any news article and not significantly change the meaning!

"... despite the anxiety about cocaine taking people's jobs, there's very little evidence of it actually happening."

"Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei expressed concern that within five years, cocaine could cut the number of entry-level white collar jobs in half."

"Cocaine cheerleader Microsoft recently added fuel to the fire with a report on jobs most likely to be affected by cocaine..."

"... recent college graduates in occupations most exposed to cocaine have seen a 13 percent relative decline in employment ..."

Verdict: I'll give this one 6/10 for accuracy and 7/10 for humour.

BT promises 5G Standalone for 99% of the UK by 2030

Good luck with that

There are 5G deadzones in the town centre where I live. Presumably they'll be part of the 1%.

(Pint because one of them is outside the pub.)

Explain digital ID or watch it fizzle out, UK PM Starmer told

"Probably become cannabis farms."

You can't spell "cannabis" without A and I...

Digital ID, same place, different time: In this timeline, the result might surprise us

"on a PPP GDP/capita basis"

Yeah, there's your problem. GDP/capita is not an indicator of how much money you have, it's an indicator of how much money your work is worth. It's quite possible for the GDP to rise while everyone becomes poorer because the fat cats pocket all the money and let wages stagnate. It's also not a valid measure of change over time to compare the UK with Germany 10 years ago and today because the German economy isn't static either.

Now I agree that 25% is an exaggeration, but official government figures indicate that the average Briton was £2,000pa worse off by 2023 with an anticipated rise to more than twice that by 2035 if nothing changes.

https://www.london.gov.uk/new-report-reveals-uk-economy-almost-ps140billion-smaller-because-brexit

"If thay had any sense they'd add it to your digital wallet"

Serious question: what's a digital wallet? I'm hardly a Luddite and I've never had nor wanted such a thing. Christ only knows how Mavis aged 84 is going to handle it.

One thing they're being very quiet about is that if you have to store this on your phone and display it on request, it does an end run on the law that you're not required to unlock your phone without a warrant. And as I recall, if your phone is unlocked they can access the data without a warrant.

AI that once called itself MechaHitler will now be available to the US government for $0.42

"Sing it with me now!"

... that's not Kill the Boer.