Posts by a pressbutton

Future of UK's multibillion Ajax armored vehicle program looks shaky

I can see the pope visiting the Whitehouse and handing over his Camauro / Fanon / Falda so DJT can claim popeship.

Coming soon: We interrupt this ChatGPT session with a very special message from our sponsors

Re: SNORKEL

Would like to know what happened when they walked in a bar.

Gemini says

An Aussie machinist, a former Apple employee, and a Norwegian airport employee walk in to a bar.

The bartender places a pint of beer in front of each of them.

The Aussie machinist immediately pulls a set of calipers out of his pocket, measures the thickness of the glass, and shakes his head. "Strewth, mate. The tolerance on this rim is off by nearly a millimeter. If I put this on the lathe, I could fix it up for you in a jiffy."

The former Apple employee looks at his drink with disdain. "I can't drink from this," he says. "It has a handle. It's ugly and non-intuitive. I’m waiting for the iPint Pro. It’s made of brushed titanium, holds 15% less liquid, has no ports for a straw, and the coaster is sold separately for $99."

The bartender sighs and looks at the Norwegian. "And let me guess, you have a problem with the design too?"

The Norwegian airport employee puts on a pair of blue latex gloves, picks up the Aussie's beer and the Apple guy's beer, and dumps them both into the sink.

"The glasses are fine," the Norwegian says. "But I’m afraid the liquid exceeds the 100ml limit."

Re: Preserve trust?

you are accessing the free version - that is updated once a month.

My first draft for a prompt:

You are a gifted advertising copywriter, you have access to $users conversation history . The $user has just entered a query "$prompt" the response is "$response"

1. get a list of products related to this query and response and the user's conversation history

2. order the list by the value bid by the manufacturers

3. Pick the top two

4.

If the $user responds well to video, embed a video advert in the $response

If the $user responds well to text, embed a text advert in the $response

If the $user responds badly to adverts, embed an advert for the option to remove adverts in the $response

pass the modified response to the $user

(I know - needs improvement)

Boffins probe commercial AI models, find an entire Harry Potter book

Re: Should be able to blaspheme on command

...but that means all that blasphemy is in the model - so the model is a blasphemer?

OpenAI GPT-5: great taste, less filling, now with 30% less bias

GPT5 now has 30% less bias

In other news updated tests that evaluate AI bias are now 30% more biased.

...because more is better...

No more Blocktoberfest? German court throws book at ad blockers

Re: How would they enforce this?

You think you dont see the ads

But your subconscious cannot escape the fnords.

Barclays Bank signs 100k license Copilot deal with Microsoft

Scene from the FD of barclay's office

FD: How do i boost the shareprice

Anon Management consultants: Give us lots of money we will recommend you get rid of all your staff and then install a new banking system

FD: I wont fall for that again - begone

...

<opens laptop>

<stares into space just a bit too long>

FD: Clippy - I mean Copilot, how do I boost our profits

Copilot : Well......

Official abuse of state security has always been bad, now it's horrifying

Re: @Doctor Syntax

From memory, the root cause of the mp expenses scandal was that the receipts were secret

Whilst the scandal was ongoing, it turned out that mps were more likely to be in trouble with their claims than benefit claimants.

Windows 2000 Server named peak Microsoft. Readers say it's all been downhill since Clippy

Re: From a home-user perspective, Windows 7 remains the best overall OS

XP SP3 is fondly remembered as long as no-one wrote ie specific extensions

Brit universities told to keep up the world-class research with less cash

Re: @VicMortimer

Some good songs tho - "Taxman" by the beatles

Let me tell you how it will be

There's one for you, nineteen for me

'Cause I'm the taxman

And you were right - at a ***96%*** marginal rate not many left.

England is not a restaurant you dine at, complain about the bill, and then piss off into the night.

Re: @VicMortimer

How do they hoard it?

Well, the money is in all those empty new flats in London, land, houses, shares, just about anything.

The assets are held in an overseas trust, or the owner is tax resident abroad.

Tax is minimised in ways that are not open to uk taxpaying residents.

Even if someone v.v. rich is uk tax resident, the rate of tax paid on income is bigger than the rate of tax paid on capital gains / dividends.

Naturally - like water - no moral comment - money flows to things that tend to be taxed less.

Things will not change until the tax rate levied on wealth >= tax rate on earned income.

Now Windows Longhorn is long gone, witness reflects on Microsoft's OS belly-flop

Re: WinFS = Document Management System not invented here…

Hmmm.

Sharepoint....

... information in things that are not files

files that are in a site ... but if you dont know where that site is (or dont have access) you wont find it.

WinFS did get implemented in this alternate future, a bit like Skynet.

Apple has locked me in the same monopolistic cage Microsoft's built for Windows 10 users

or even better give him a dog.

GNUs are not easy to keep in built up areas.

Microsoft's Euro-mandated File Explorer surgery shows 'less is more' is still a thing

Re: "fixing humans is hard. Fortunately, tech is more malleable"

Is a copper hide hammer a bit like a chelsea cosh?

Elon Musk calls for International Space Station to be deorbited by 2027

Re: Conflict of Interest

no redeeming characteristics - surely he likes dogs?

Pornhub lockdown and fact-free Zuckbots – welcome to 2025

deliberate irony? the quote

"... it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or parliament or a communist dictatorship. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country. Hermann Goering, International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (1946)

Turns out to be a fake :). There is no record of Goering saying that in the Nuremberg trial. There is hearsay he said something on the same theme, but not the reported words.

Google's 10-year Chromebook lifeline leaves old laptops headed for silicon cemetery

Re: Pick one, Google.

Aplhabet...

... redefining evil one year at a time (*)

(*) limited to 10 years

Trump's pick to run the FCC has told us what he plans: TikTok ban, space broadband, and Section 230 reform

Afuera!

Am I the only one who thinks he is a bit cheesy?

Russian court fines Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

mars?

maybe elon has discovered a new high value market.

Have we stopped to think about what LLMs actually model?

an image of our souls

...no

An image of the things we have written down, possibly. as the training set probably includes Twitter, the abyss you see looking back at you will not provide much comfort.

A quick guide to tool-calling in large language models

worse

it means that in the training set, some humans (well who knows for sure) said the answer is 2

Disney claims agreeing to Disney+ terms waives man's right to sue over wife's death

Re: Eternal T&Cs? - Ahem

So, you have an old Oracle licence.

(I am told the newer ones have an NDA :)

Tesla that killed motorcyclist was in Full Self-Driving mode

Re: "Musk" is now a verb

or in an alternative future.

I just watched the fallout series.

The cure-all in that did work.

How deliciously binary: AI has yet to pay off – or is transforming business

Someone much cleverer than me said:

"The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed"

My sister in law is a chiropodist. She keeps paper receipts and her accounts are handwritten.

It works for her.

I have used the MS llm at work and it's... ok but just a novelty really.

Other divisions of $job are starting to use llms on live help desk webchats.

Meta claims ‘world’s largest' open AI model with Llama 3.1 405B debut

more than just a bag o shite

In fb i see many adverts from dropshippers for things that may well be a bag of shite.

I welcome FBs advances in advertising accuracy.

Tesla self-driving claims parked in court

Re: Not even autopilot

Indeed. One could say FSD only really works under NDA (*)

(*) No Driver Automation

Apple sets new 16,000-foot iPhone drop test after 737 fuselage fail

Re: No one really needs to know that; that's OLD news...

from the first 2 paras of the earliest article i can see :

BBC

Bolts in need of "additional tightening" have been found during inspections of Boeing 737 Max 9s, United Airlines has said.

guardian

United Airlines has found loose bolts and other “installation issues” on multiple 737 Max 9 aircraft, it said on Monday, referring to the Boeing model that has been grounded after a panel blew off an Alaska Airlines-operated plane mid-flight over the weekend.

telegraph

Phones, magazines and even the shirt off a child’s back were sucked out of an Alaska Airlines service from Oregon to California on Friday, prompting concerns about the Boeing 737 Max 9 plane used by commercial airlines all over the world.

times

A section of fuselage on a nearly new Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 fell off in-flight, leaving a gaping hole in the side of the aircraft, causing a loss of cabin pressure and forcing an emergency landing.

cnn

The FAA temporarily grounded certain Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft after an Alaska Airlines plane made an emergency landing in Oregon on Friday.

so a bit confused unless you mean specifically the 3 words "designed by software"

CEO arranged his own cybersecurity, with predictable results

Re: Customers are the security liability

"Various companies are now working on this"

...in my experience by simply not answering the phone.

Internet's deep-level architects slam US, UK, Europe for pushing device-side scanning

Re: Workarounds?

1

Get a dumb phone

2

Stop using the Internet

Admittedly not software based. My dad was ill a couple of months ago.

Took mum shopping. She didn't understand contactless payments. Dad used to drive her to a bank and she would write a cheque for cash.

In some ways the quality of life will be improved

NASA engineers scratch heads as Voyager 1 starts spouting cosmic gibberish

Re: Have they tried

I do that because it seems to reliably end with the object in a known state

England's village green hydrogen dream in tatters

The naked Neanderthal

A recent book by a french paleoanthropologist called ludovic slimak

190 pages in 1 paragraph:

After 40 years of research we know Neanderthals lived all over the place including above the arctic circle across siberia and down to the Med, they did not think like humans, did not have things (tools / clothes / jewelery) in the same way as humans. We almost certainly wiped them out. Not much else.

One point he made was that humans can live in a wide range of conditions with not much artificial support.

One still, dry night I was out looking at the aurora north of kittle in shorts sandals and a t shirt for 20m before realising it was -26c and running inside, only because I saw the number - i wasnt feeling cold.

Having said that it is 15c here and in a long sleeve t shirt thats just right.

Ofcom proposes ban on UK telcos making 'inflation-linked' price hikes mid-contract

Ofcom have made it clear that saying

Cost go up by cpi = bad

Cost go up by 2.50 = OK

So I expect the near future sales focus to be on low cost contracts say 20pm that increase at only 2 pm each year over the 5 year contract term.

Re: Hey, there's an idea...

That's all of them.

Bad eIDAS: Europe ready to intercept, spy on your encrypted HTTPS connections

I do not.

And that is why it is a surprise.

Probe reveals previously secret Israeli spyware that infects targets via ads

Re: Pay the Pipers and Dance to Their Tunes Delivers No Slippery Slopes Stripped of Hope

... or an AI superintelligence that has worked out a (laboured) acronym:

Greater IntelAIgent Games Play. Now though is it a Veritable and Vital and Virulent Virtual Field of Absolutely Fabulous Fabless Dreams for Remote Proxy Realisation via Alien Intervention.

GIAGP

VVVVFAFFDRPRAI

may be a most excellent joke or pun in another language

Just like USAians often struggle with sarcasm and I (a brit) struggle with some french jokes, we may need to shuffle over and make room for superintelligent AI jokes

--> with this it all becomes clear

Washington left with chip on shoulder after Huawei exposes export loophole lapses

Recommend Peter zeihan on this

If (...) he is right, china spunked a mass of money -many billions -on the bleeding edge of duv lithography to make a chip that is up with a 2017 flagship phone.

Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows

Printers meh

I am sure that smart paper pads that you could display docs on and once done, blank or replace with another doc were promised

Like a multi page colour etchasketch

It was due at some point between fusion and flying cars

After fears that Europe's space scope was toast, its first images look mighty fine

Re: "Here's looking at Euclid"

Not in the comments

Google's next big idea for browser security looks like another freedom grab to some

Re: Too late!

Google is behind this, taking control via Governments.

There FTFY

Twitter name and blue bird logo to be 'blowtorched' off company branding

A sign of Tritter's dying user engagement level

After all, you don't correspond with your X that often

Otherwise it wouldn't be your X

World's most internetty firm tries life off the net, and it's sillier than it seems

I think you will find it was easier to just steal the money.

Back then it was printed on paper.

Re: Try turning your computer's network off and see how far you get.

I think you meant moved it to America.

As the article indicates, not sure how that improves security.

UK government faces calls to end IR35 double tax anomaly

It could have been worse.

Starmer isnt ... that great ... but the alternative is a bunch of incompetant nutjobs (*) who think

being horrid to refugee children

adding poo to the water

after 13 years of trying to kill the NHS, pointing out the NHS is not in a good state

pointing out the key 'benefits' of brexit being your children need to learn to pick fruit

is a vote winner. and they have a lot of really unsavoury friends.

(*) sunak excepted, hunt, hmmm

I think Corbyn could win against this lot.

LG to offer subscriptions for appliances and televisions

Re: @StrangerHereMyself - Wrong

And for those of you smart enough to block Internet access in your firewall, it won't take more than 5min for the manufacturer to figure it out and configure a phone home mechanism that your appliance will use before each start.

There are a fair number of home that *do not have internet* - in the UK it is ~ 1.5 million.

Looking at the korean soaps, very few have a PC / Laptop at home - but they all have an enormo phone for social media - the same seems to be true of the UK yoof.

So I think may well be the future.

Man who nearly killed physical media returns with $60,000 vinyl turntable

Re: Poor design in my opinion

No

John Thaw's deep disappointment in the low standards of modern cryptic crosswords

Artificial General Intelligence remains a distant dream despite LLM boom

Prediction for when a human - level AGI comes into existance

As others have noticed, we do not know what intelligence is. According to Wikipedia, we are close to simulating an entire rat brain (not in real-time). My bet is we will brute-force AGI first.

The brown rat has 200 million neurons and about 4.48×10^11 connections and we are not there yet and not in real-time.

The human brain consists of 100 billion neurons and over ~10^14 trillion synaptic connections.

The ratio is ~1000. Moore's law allows for doubling every 2 years (i know - it wont go on forever) 2 ^ 10 = 1024

So call it 15 years - not least as some of the issues in getting a brain going is a timing and co-ordination issue. So 2038.

Having said that, i doubt they will think or process input as fast as us for a while after that,

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

Re: COP/EOD

The Goodies did a song about string

That song provides 50% of our entire infrastructure and methods of operation

looking for a song on sellotape.

Re: COP/EOD

they'll be dead sooner ;)

for the first time for a rather long time, that might not be true.

Samsung's Galaxy S23 Ultra is a worthy heir to the Note

Re: Heir to the Note my ass

Note4/8/S22 Ultra user - and only got that because the note 8 is no longer supported for security updates.

Hated that there is no SD or headphone jack as well

But

got a £4.99 usb-headphone converter

not many mobile blackspots left and pay ~£1 per day when abroad

and the pen can be used to trigger the camera

So not really that bothered

I will replace it ~2027 when the security updates stop

The only thing I would like is a better DEX - 4k 60hz support (and no cable). With that and a bluetooth keyboard I wouldnt need a laptop

Of course ymmv depending on the use case