Posts by wolfetone 4904 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Aug 2011
Unfeasible?
The only thing JCB have done that is unfeasible is release an electric digger that will run for 2 hours, then spend the next 8 hours hooked up to a diesel generator on site while it charges. This hydrogen powerplant option has to work. And it will.
Go touch grass pal.
Qualifications aren't worth the paper they're written on.
Only yesterday I had to deal with a line manager who has an MBA as to the role and function of HR within a business. They didn't really appreciate that in order for IT to create a user account for a new employee that HR must direct them on that. It's not enough for the line manager to demand the user's account to be created.
There is a lot of McCarthyism v2.0 with this. 'murican AI is Freedumb and Chyna is bad m'kay. For all of the talk of China being a dictatorship and America the land of the free, I don't see China blockading ports and blowing up countries because their mate said so. I can't remember the comedian, but he compared China and America as neighbours who would hit your kids, except China are fairly clear cut on that. America pretend they wouldn't.
Anyway. For me I am a big fan of the open weight AI models compared to the closed shop ones and this is based on using them both. I have done so much more with Qwen and DeepSeek compared to Claude/ChatGPT for so much less, it's nonsensical to me to even consider using Claude/ChatGPT. They're expensive and they're not that good compared to what else is out there. And with the squeeze on everything, I have to get the biggest bang for buck. Anthropic/OpenAI are not providing that, and they know that. That's why they're resulting to fearmongering.
As an aside, and I'm surprised no one has pointed this out, remember when the USA blocked China from all of these new technologies etc? Non-Chinese companies coming out with really performant silicone while China lagged behind? Isn't it right to say that this act has helped cause this influx of open weight EFFICIENT LLMs from China because they don't have the infrastructure really to do what the American companies are doing? They're cutting their cloth accordingly, and they are (as we are) reaping the rewards of this political restriction.
Buddy, starting out in the world as an adult in 2008 when your family are losing jobs left right and centre, going out trying to find work in an economy where companies were failing let alone not hiring, is not and was not trivial. People lost their homes overnight. People lost their jobs in an afternoon.
There was nothing trivial about an event that was considered to be the worst economic downturn since the depression in the 1920s.
It only feels trivial now because we got through it. It was not a trivial matter though. It's just now we have experience.
I have lived through Black Wednesday. I have lived through Black Monday. I have lived through Y2K. I have lived through the dot com bubble. I lived through 9/11. I have lived through the various wars the USA have decided to fight for no other reason than their own personal interests. I have lived through the credit crunch. I have lived through the end of the Mayan calendar. I have lived through the rapture. I have lived through two Trump presidencies.
All of which, were disasters the like we never seen. But see them we did. And we've seen all sides of them.
It won't be great. But we'll be fine. We were fine before, we'll be fine again. Just that little bit poorer. Again.
100%.
There is absolutely no way either OpenAI or Anthropic didn't know their LLMs were running amok. The LLMs tell you what it's doing. So were they asleep at the wheel? Or did they do this on purpose and instead of saying "yeah we told it to do that" they're using this as yet another example of "oh my DAYZ man this AI is so lit that it's actually HACKING shit we told it not to touch! It's not even listening to us no more THAT'S HOW POWERFUL IT IZZZZ".
Everything to feed the stock market monster and keep that bubble from popping.
I stopped shopping at Sainsburys for a number of reasons, but the facial recognition one really fucked me off. I noticed these cameras all over the place on clip strips and there was (and still is) no signage stating what they're for or what they are doing. Where does the data go? What is it feeding? I'm there with my children and these cameras are recording them? Where is that data going? What is it being used for? To train nonce enabling AI models?
They say this shit is for shoplifters. Fuck off is it. The only thieves here are Sainsburys, Tesco etc who charge you £10 for a fucking Toblerone unless you get a loyalty card then you can get it for £3.50. You can quite clearly sell it for that, with a profit, but you choose to spy on us.
They can all get fucked.
The major problem with HS2 is that the work has been outsourced. And outsourced by the outsourcers. On and on and on, until the bottom outsourcer wants more money. Then the one above asks the one above for more.
Isn't the figures for this something stupid like £170 million per mile spent already? When Artemis 2 cost something like £6,000 per mile?
Actually that's how we fix it. Scrap the rail. Set up a space ship thing to go from London to Birmingham. That'll be cheaper.
Claude is a load of nonsense.
I've an issue trying to install Claude to some devices on a network. Got nowhere with it. So I thought I'd ask Claude about how I would go about installing it across the network. Claude told me it can't access it's own documentation.
DeepSeek though, well it knows full well how to install Claude and has all the access it needs to it's docs.
And I'm meant to believe Mythos or Fable are threats to national security?
AFAIK, it's down to the Droitwich antenna. That requires the use of a specific type of vacuum valve which hasn't been made for decades. They bought up the remaining stock years ago, and have essentially run out of it.
For it to be replaced with something else, apparently, costs mega money. That's why it's switched off.
Procedures have been changed so that the Chief Captain of the Boat surfaces to periscope depth and sees if anything new has been added to TikTok. If nothing is found, they will try Youtube. Then Twitter. Then Facebook.
If they have seen no new mannequins added on Facebook Marketplace then they're given orders to ship to their nearest ally. At which point they are to give the UK government 3 rings to let them know they're safe.
You can't trust any of them though, unfortunately. I mean of course it's better to see the BBC state how round the world is above some dickhead in Darlington saying how flat everything is. But people have long memories over the misreporting of certain events. For some that'll be COVID, for others that will be Hillsborough, others (rightfully) the continued genocide in Gaza.
So is it any wonder people look for alternatives when the "trusted" ones are so skewed.
Credit where credit is due, Khan stopped that.
There is a threshold after which point any services the Met need have to be put out to tender and the mayors office has oversight on it. The Met and Palantir deliberately put the deal under that threshold to avoid scrutiny. Khan's office noticed and vetoed it.
So for as much as he gets wrong or is unpopular, he's done something right there.
The funding has dried up. There are no more investors really around to pump money in to this, as they've already done that.
The massive infrastructure/bit barn buildings they've broken ground on are slowing down to a halt. Various sites have had work stop on them for various reasons.
The next avenue is IPOs but SpaceX is already sinking. So I don't think OpenAI or Anthropic are looking forward to it because, really, they have no choice other than to go public with it.
Until then they will continue this circular economy but at some point even that money is going to run out when real bills fall that need to be paid with real money to someone outside of the circular economy.
"There are consumers who will have bought older PCs and laptops and have set about expanding memory."
Me. Sort of.
I need to replace a HP Proliant N40L at home and need more RAM and storage options. Ended up with an Intel board of some description rocking DDR3 memory.
32GB for £25 off of eBay at the beginning of the year. North of £50 now currently on eBay.
"In the last ten years, the UK has gone through six prime ministers; it took 34 years to get through the previous six."
The difference?
Back then you only had Fleet Street telling you who to vote for. Now we have tech firms ran by people with vested interests in creating problems in society who would rather have their own dog in the fight.
The thing is other LLMs can do the same thing as Mythos. Maybe, possibly, the route to the solution is slightly easier with Mythos/Fable but regardless this is all just a PR stunt.
AI companies are running out of money. They're not getting the ROI. They're putting the prices up and reducing the offering to reduce the losses. They're being forced to go public when they don't want to just to keep the hype train going.
I said months ago, as did another commentator, that August will be the time this all implodes. Nothing happening recently makes this look any less likely to happen.
Hold tight!
It's horrible.
It's no bad thing limiting/banning kids from social media sites when the sites themselves have shown no effort to curb the stuff that's shown to them. The content on there is scary, seemingly in great abundance, and as everyone is operating in their own little echo chambers it just reinforces skewed views on the world around them. Can we expand the ban to all ages? No doubt it would be for the complete betterment of society if that happened. Only places you could then get your news is the Daily Fail or The S*n. Oh, yeah that's not all that great really.
What worries me, and I can see this in the offing, is that it's going to be used as yet another example of great British law being made a fool of from encryption in the form of VPNs. Plenty of people seem to think you can't ban VPNs from use in the UK. And I think there is a reason to believe that. But I also believe we're heading to a situation where you'll have to have a license for it's use. The license then allows corporations to use it, but it makes it harder for the country + their dog to get on them. ISPs can then, fairly easily, note encrypted traffic on their network and where it comes from, see if that residence have a license, and flat out block the traffic. You're not banning the VPN, you're putting it behind a lock and key.
That is the worry for me, and I think it'll be realised fairly soon.
I need to take a look at MX Linux. I did about 12 months ago on a spare laptop but life got in the way and I never bothered trying it out.
But the words coming from Canonical regarding an ingestion of AI in to Ubuntu is a worry. My daily driver is Linux Mint and while they've been good previously in picking and choosing what they get from Ubuntu for LM, it's always in the back of your mind as to whether they're on the AI KoolAid themselves.
"So why are you being forced to spell things the American way? If not a change of ownership, it certainly looks like there's been a change of focus to the left side of the pond."
Maybe they're just trying to get rid of u.
In a previous life I had to build something similar for a "volunteer" organisation, made up of people who think they know better.
Had so many run ins with people who refused to use it. I'd have parents complain to me that it's happened, and I'd go and tell the branch owner about the complaint and they couldn't give two shits about it. "It's just an email" was the usual reply. Absolutely no idea or understanding about it, and worse still absolutely no inclination to understand the problem either.
I've sat here wondering how to answer this, as in 18 years here I've never had to justify or explain a comment outside of an obscure pop culture reference.
All I can say is: Why not?
It's one thing to say that knowingly using the word woke out of context annoys people. But it's different to say that I knowingly used it to annoy people. It's a subtle difference. And I guess really the term came to mind because of the comment lock out for an hour and how it brought to mind Sean Dyche's comments on VAR in football. In that respect it is the antithesis of what has gone before. The moment the article goes up the comments section is open for business as per a wonderful and beautiful open internet. Now though, one can't help but feel that it's possible that the comments section is locked like that for fear of some random reason. Fear of the comments going down a certain tonal route for example. When an explanation isn't forthcoming you just create a vacuum really to be filled. It just feels a bit like it's a reaction to an increasingly intense sensibilities and tighter pearl clutching. It doesn't feel so long ago the editor put an article about the comments section and reminding everyone to tone it down. Which brought Sean Dyche to mind which, I guess, was in response to something that could be parallel to this.
So really I am probably wrong in thinking I used it out of context. I think it's used in context, and I think it's correct.
As for being an equal opportunities annoyance, it is what it is and I'm alright with that. I think plenty here (if not all) get really arsey and cuntish with each other if they read something by a total random stranger and spend hours of their time arguing the toss, forgetting the other person on the other end won't have their viewpoint or mind changed the same way as they themselves won't be told. I am pretty certain there are people who will have been pissed off with me for referencing the Fairey Swordfish plane sinking the Bismark as the Sopwith Swordfish and the fact it sunk the Bismark. I didn't make that statement to piss anyone off. I got my plane manufacturers wrong, and at a top level view yeah the Swordfish sunk the boat but really it disabled it allowing the Royal Navy to sink it.
Now the fact remains for me is that you can only please some of the people some of the time. I've been here long enough I've not gone out of my way to fuck anyone off, but I also know genuine mistakes aren't seen as such or I'm misunderstood in a view and that in turn pisses people off. The whole idea of "This is my truth tell me yours" annoys people because it's not in their own echo chamber so you're immediately wrong. There are people who are out and out wrong here who should be called out on it, and thankfully are (looking at you MAGA lickers).
But to answer your question, as succinctly as I can - When the seagulls follow the trawler, it's because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea,
Fin.
