Posts by 96percentchimp 199 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jan 2012
Just this morning I needed to check some details on my Birmingham council tax account. Horrible experience that seems to cobble together at least two systems in an interface where everything is written by, and for, the the operators instead of the end users. Worse, even, than the horrible system employed by Southwark council, which is a significant achievement.
Economists typically consider a monopoly to be any entity that owns more than a third of the market with no competitor of a similar scale, since this typically enables the dominant player to destroy promising upstarts through tactics like undercutting them until they run out of cash, or buying them to own/bury whatever innovation made them a threat.
This is a false equivalence. Ebooks are a commodity where the price is driven by the market, and it's already as low as it can go. The high visibility of millionnaire celebrity authors drives an unrealistic perception of the economics of publishing that fails to reflect the truth for mid-list and self-published authors.
The truth is that publishing is often an act of borderline profitability where more than 90% of products fail to return a profit and less than 5% make a significant return, which is why publishing is often creatively conservative and incerasingly turns to those celebrities who have established market power. Inside the industry, the rates paid to editors, artists and other professionals continue to decline in real terms.
Neither sort by date nor random selection are editorial choices. They might even be user choices. An algorithm designed to encourage engagement based on a user profile is, without any doubt, an editorial choice which meets the First Amendment tests. If it qualifies for free speech, then it qualifies for the responsibilities that come with those rights.
"Is training your AI on copyrighted works actually illegal? Can it be argued that training is similar to a child reading a copyrighted book - learning what the book teaches but simply not allowed to duplicate it, which is plagiarism?"
No. The clue is in the term "works". It's the basis of copyright and the reason why copyright law refers to "works" and not "content". A person learning performs work - time, mental and physical effort and use of artistic resources - by ingesting the copyrighted material and practising to absorb it into their own repertoire of styles. This is as true for a child as it is for a master. An AI performs a very small amount of work ingesting and processing content, and even this is rendered negligible by the massive scale of its outputs to millions of users. It is nothing but algorithmic hijacking of artistic labour.
If copyright law is to mean anything, then it must protect the work performed by humans* in the creation of copyrighted content. Or any other conscious intelligence, non-human or non-biological, although I draw the line at techbros.
In copyright law, units of artistic production are known as "works" because that's precisely what is required to produce them: the intentional work of one or more conscious entities, including time, physical and mental effort, and resources, both physical and financial. What copyright protects is the right to derive a return on the work expended to produce art, and to assert ownership of that work because it represents your effort and intent.
Works of art also cannot be unintentional, which is why a monkey cannot own the copyright in a photograph that it produced without knowing the outcome of its actions, but the photographer can own the copyright because they engineered the conditions in which the monkey was able to take the photograph. This is not to say that a non-human primate (or a conscious AI) couldn't produce an intentional artwork, but that's an argument for another day.
Jackson Pollock's works are art because he is not merely spilling or flicking paint at random. He has spent time, effort and resources in developing a technique which creates an effect, and rejects works which don't reflect his intention. It's irrelevant whether you or I like them.
AI advocates often point to inspiration as a form of copying, and argue that statistical AI tools are no different, but the concept of work negates this argument. When another artist is inspired to create a work of art in the style of Pollock, they must still expend time, physical effort and resources to learn similar techniques and achieve their desired effect, even if their work is less original.
Midjourney, ChatGPT et al are not conscious and cannot intentionally produce art, no matter how much work they expend. What they represent is a shortcut to the work by those who have the intent but lack either the time or resources to create it. Works created through the significant use of AI tools to imitate the style of other artists should not benefit from the protection of copyright, and the creators of those tools should compensate those artists from whose intentional work they are deriving a benefit, financial or otherwise.
There might be an argument that AI tools expend effort in the form of processing power, which is passed on to the users of the tools. However, this cost is (i) not paid by the person using the tool because it’s free; (ii) it is negligible because the cost of AI tools is insignificant in comparison to the aggregate effort of the original artists on which the AI tools draw; and (iii) it is divorced from the conscious intent of the person using the tool.
Smart motorways are a great demonstration of the way politicians (and modern Conservatives in particular) can turn a good idea into a disaster that motivates reactionary voters and makes them look like they're campaigning against the eggheads with their crazy ideas, so hated by the Brexit generation.
I don't have the exact figures to hand, but the initial smart motorway spec had refuge lay-bys at a distance of X (let's say every 250m). The initial trials were a success, meeting all the safety requirements, but the cost of converting the network was too high. The Highways Agency was instructed (by ministers looking to save money, because austerity rules) to redraw the spec at Y (let's say 500m intervals). You can see how that might reduce the safety factor, but the government can still use the trial data to justify a national rollout.
Why isn't this public knowledge? Because civil servants aren't activists (contrary to current propaganda) and contractors don't criticise their clients in public. In the end, lots of public money was spent on a dangerous project, and more can be spent on rolling it back, so the contractors will still get paid.
And Rishi Sunak looks like a level-headed chap who won't let this kind of dangerous thing happen (if you recall, Boris tried a similar trick with bendy buses and the monstrous double deckers he foisted on London commuters).
The point is not that ChatGPT or any other LLM is smart, whether that's 1% or 110% of human intelligence. The point is that too many people think it's smart. In reality, LLMs give answers which flatter the question, they're trained on an opaque data sets, they cannot cross-check their data or conclusions, and when challenged they double-down, attacking their critics and creating fake data (links to fake scientific papers and news articles).
The final ode of failure might also be LLM's legal Achilles Heel. If you assert that I wrote something which is blatantly wrong, you have accused me of lying. Those are grounds for defamation, and those behind the LLMs may be subject to punitive damages, particularly when they're used to create online content with minimal oversight.
"Reusable rockets do not convey a huge advantage, the costs of the landing infrastructure and the costs of refurbishing the parts and recertifying them are pretty close to the original build costs. Also the additional fuel needed for a controlled decent reduces the effective payload considerably."
That was true for Shuttle but it's not true for Falcon 9. Asshat extraordinaire though Musk is, SpaceX has successfully knocked at least one zero off the cost of putting a kg into orbit and - as the story notes - manages a remarkable launch cadence that's coming close to 1/week on a fleet of around 10 reusable boosters and fairings, with a reliability that's close to beating the Soyuz/proton family. Even the man-rated Dragon edition is significantly cheaper and much more successful than the rival Boeing Starliner, which has yet to fly with a crew. The landing infrastructure for Falcon 9 is a concrete pad or a barge. It's not a vast expense.
The difference is that NASA never really iterated Shuttle's design, or Congress wouldn't fund it it, which amounts to the same thing. It flew pretty much the same experimental vehicle for 30 years. SpaceX rapidly iterated Falcon 9 from a disposable launcher into a system that reuses the most expensive parts.
Musk is an odious little twat, but that's no reason to deny the revolution in launcher cost and reusability that Falcon 9 has brought to the industry.
I have a brace of Google Homes that I mostly use as smart speakers, timers, lighting controllers and occasionally for answering questions when neither I nor Mrs Chimp wants to get their phone out. They're certainly useful when your hands are full or you need to set a timer with hands too wet or dirty for a phone, but for about two years they've been getting worse, not better. Voice commands are misunderstood more frequently, with a particular case that there's a 50/50 chance of what will happen to the lights when I ask Google to turn them "out" instead of "off". They might go off, they might stay on. This is not a system that's learning my speech patterns. My partner's Irish accent fares even worse.
I thought it might just be us, until I discovered the Google Home subreddit. It's full of users complaining that the performance of their devices has declined. Reports from the Alexa camp suggest that it's more responsive, but too frequently tries to sell you things based on your queries.
As for answering questions, it's fine if you want to know basic facts, but if you try to ask any sort of nested or conditional question, the best you can hope for is instructions to look at a link on your phone. Which is exactly what I don't want to do, or can't do, when I'm asking the question.
If Google can't make money off these things, then its history suggests that it will withdraw investment, performance will decline, users will abandon the product and they'll be consigned to the great Google Skip. Perhaps that journey has already begun.
I don't use an ad-blocker because I've worked as a journalist/content monkey and I'm aware of how difficult it is for organisations like El Reg to make enough money to pay the monkeys a decent handful of nuts (trust me, you get fewer nuts/word than you did 20 years ago, and that's without accounting for inflation).
If you want free content - and most people do - then there has to be a compromise between your desire for an ad-free experience and paying the people who produce it; otherwise it's theft, and as a by-product it encourages the ad-slingers to invent ever-more pernicious ways to target you.
I've been involved at both ends of YouTube's copyright enforcement. It's effective for creatives, who frequently see their work stolen. You can pay someone to trawl for copies of your work and file for takedown.
But automated content ID systems will fail, and the appeals process is too heavily biased in favour of copyright owners, with harsh penalties if your surreal is rejected. I'm surprised it hasn't been challenged in court somewhere.
Presumably you can tell whether something has informational value by analysing its structure, even if it's encrypted, in the same way that linguists analyse animal communications to compare their relative information density. So your junk files would have to look like something interesting to be worth decrypting (unless you started to disguise rich content as weak sauce to make it look innocuous...).
There were no spacecraft with toilets on board before the Space Shuttle, and there hasn't been one since. Soyuz has never had a toilet. Arguably, this is a return to standard space plumbing, although it sounds like SpaceX has already fixed the problem for future flights.
As someone else pointed out, Boeing didn't even put a toilet in Starliner, although maybe that's because they never expected it to fly.
I've got Google Nest Hubs around the house, partly because I'm lazy, and partly because their stupidity has become its own entertainment.
They are fucking morons. Speech recognition is erratic with anything other than clearly-enunciated RP English, on top of which they frequently respond - unprompted - to unasked questions based on a misunderstood sentence that contained something sounding a bit like "Google". When they do answer a question, it sometimes takes several iterations to get an answer with the correct context.
I don't know if Alexa is any better, but I'm reassured almost daily that if Google can't get this right, then AI is not going to take over the world any time soon. Or it might be a feature designed to lull me into a false sense of security. Damned cunning, these AIs.
It's good to see some coverage of BBC R&D, a little-known bit of the Beeb that punches well above its weight and constantly delivers benefits both to consumers and the creative industries. It's also a powerful force for global collaboration in those industries, helping to create open standards that have made things like HDTV more accessible than if they'd been dominated by proprietary tech.
And that's a good thing, IMO. If pro-woke means being against libertarian ideologues who think they have a right to be an arsehole without suffering any consequences, then I'm all for it. They're a cancer on civil society and we'd all be a lot better off with less of their bad-faith contrarianism.
"we must have the ability to create an overwhelming burden of cost and complexity on our adversaries"
What worries me about this philosophy is that it's all very well to engage in a cold arms race with the new bad, Emperor Xi, who's happy to escalate, but elsewhere it encourages said adversaries to move their confrontations away from the battlefield towards softer targets - civilians and infrastructure, whether via traditional terrorism or the cyber variety. Retaliation, as we've seen in the Yemen, Palestine/Israel, and Afghanistan, is inevitably directed towards the civilian targets among whom our adversaries shelter. Tsar Putin rattles his sabre, but conducts his war online with impunity (unless Russia is also suffering unreported cyber assaults).
Warfare has become increasingly something that militaries inflict on civilians, rather than each other. This might be better for our warfighters, as they like to call themselves these days, and for above-the-line military expenditure, but is it really an improvement over confrontations limited to a traditional battlefield?
As a widower, I think Open AI acted responsibly, although they should also be a lot more transparent. Joshua Barbeau's story indicates that he'd have become addicted to the Jessica bot if it hadn't been given a limited lifespan, even though it was very clearly not Jessica.
And that's the problem: grief harms your ability to think rationally. If you'd offered me this when my wife died, I'd have been tempted but I think I'd probably have said no. I've read and seen too much SF to know that it wouldn't end well, either for me, the bot or humanity.
I suspect it's simply too tempting for people like Joshua, who are in the kind of deep, persistent grief that doesn't ease off over time. Maybe it could have a role in therapy that enables people to say goodbye to loved ones they can't let go, and that's where I think Open AI should be more transparent and engage with professionals.
As for the notions of 'soul' that the SF Chronicle reporter so uncritically embraces, I took the opposite view: if an AI with obvious flaws can convincingly simulate a soul or self-awareness, then they're either very flimsy constructs or they're a lot less than the 'hard problem' that AI critics use to insist that AI consciousness will never be achieved.
For the military, they'll be the ultimate drones - highly capable remote-guided weapons platforms with just enough autonomy to get from A to B while the operator maintains situational awareness. It's the ultimate in boots on the ground without risk to life, and even better if one operator can control the coordinated actions of an entire platoon.
For exploration, it's the ideal telepresence platform - cocoon your humans in a safe orbital station around Titan or a ground habitat on Mars and send the bots into the hazardous environment.
So that's something new to dread when we're allowed to travel again...all the iPhone users pinging their AirTagged luggage in the baggage hall. Of course, no-one will be able to tell which ping is coming from their luggage, except that being iPhone users, they'll be the ones with the overpriced designer bags.
Maybe he was wasting money that could have been better spent on making shareholders wealthier, but I bet the 100 people who this manager kept employed didn't see his intervention as wasteful. They might not even have been aware that he was all that stood between them and being "streamlined".
About a year after the Brexit vote, my partner, who's Irish, attempted to help an elderly white woman in our local tube station who was having trouble with her Oyster card. The response was a volley of ingratitude which ended in "bloody foreigners" and "go home".
I'm white, I was brought up in the Midlands and I've lived in South London, places where people of all ethnic backgrounds rub along to get through life, but in the past decade, other white English people have become a hostile foreign culture that I no longer understand or want to be a part of.
OneWeb has all the makings of another Boris white elephant, not least the massive cost of using one-shot Russian launchers to build and maintain the constellation, instead of owning a fleet of reusable launchers like SpaceX. On top of that, the need for cooperation with the Russians means that OneWeb will only be able to play where Putin says it can, and probably do whatever Russia's new Chinese best mates want as well.
The news organisations' argument is that Google & Facebook place advertising around your search, so they make money from it that doesn't go to the news publishers. Google also controls the market for on-page advertising (arguably because the publishers allowed it because they lacked foresight a decade ago, but that's another story) so they get paid again when readers follow the link. FB gets is where people will stay to comment on a story, so they build community (and make money) off the publishers' content.
"How are you marketing your product to the legions of people like me who don't see your ads?"
What legions? You don't watch telly and you have a couple of layers of shields to prevent ads reaching you. In all likelihood, you represent such a tiny fraction of any market (except for anti-ad shields) that it's not worth trying to reach you, despite your wealth. On top of that, you're media-savvy, so it's probably not worth marketing at you because you're highly resistant to most kinds of marketing.
Is it too much to hope that Google will calm down the fashion for over-aggressive battery optimisation? It's becoming a major PITA for fitness apps which need to track location, but can't access the function even when it's been enabled by the user. I accept that there's a balance between maintaining function and zapping greedy apps, but IMO it's swung too far away from functionality, towards manufacturers claiming long battery life by killing anything that needs to use background functions. And strangely enough, it doesn't affect the bloat that the big brands still stuff into their devices.
"Sadly the majority of the users simply don't care about this."
I don't think that's true. Most users aren't Regtards and even if they know that Google et al are evil, they don't know how to disentangle themselves from their tentacles and they consider them to be ubiquitous and/or necessary parts of living in modern society. They probably also have more pressing issues to deal with, and Google et al's evils are sufficiently remote that they're all hoping someone else will do something about them.
I suspect that the British app they're referring to is the Covid-19 Symptom Tracker, produced by health science company ZOE to support research led by Professor Tim Spector at King's College London. It was instrumental in tracking the early spread of the pandemic in the UK (I don't know about its USA usage) and lead to the identification of several unusual symptoms as well as the emergence of 'Long Covid'.
OTOH, the company behind Coronavirus Reporter sounds extremely shady. Apple might indeed be capricious in the way they enforce their App Store rules, but I don't think this was a bad call.
Artemis is a white elephant, a pointless flag-waving exercise in wasting money that would never deliver a permanent presence beyond LEO.
It looked increasingly like Bridenstine was keeping it on life support because of its political value, while new space developed the capability to do everything the SLS is supposed to do but for a fraction of the cost, with reusable hardware. It's just a shame that Blue Origin didn't step up as well as SpaceX and create a robust commercial space ecosystem that Boeing/ULA's pork barrel oligopoly couldn't crush. I think Bezos might regret dragging his heels.
The big risk is that Biden will use manned spaceflight as a trading chip in the House and Senate, and waste the progress towards making manned spaceflight a commercially-sustainable and affordable reality.
IMO, Bridenstine is the only Trump appointee that Trump-haters like myself will miss.
https://www.truthorfiction.com/trashingthewhitehouse/
I like the idea of Bill Clinton wandering the Whitehouse, personally removing W keys from the keyboard (while playing saxophone and smoking a cigar), although it sounds more like something that Trump would do (but I am biased). Most likely it was Clinton's staff, but it also sounds like a tradition that goes back several administrations.
Bush Jr, to his credit, seems to have put a stop to it for the Obama handover.
The ICO needs 3. Sufficient staff to conduct these investigations.
If they're like any other regulator or ombudsman I've known, they never have the resources to keep up with the number of complaints, and your case could tie them up with endless searches for enough data to identify the company at fault, let alone the individual if it's a leak like the one in the original story.
We're reaching the limit of what you can do with robots. NASA just spent a year trying to get a robotic drill to go more than few cm into Martian soil. The combined NASA/ESA Mars sample return mission will take almost a decade to deliver a few kg. SpaceX (and currently it's the only player on the pitch) will very likely have people in situ by then, able to do more science than every rover humans have ever sent.
I'm not wild about the idea of full-scale colonisation before the scientists have had a good look around, but if we're going to do more than take pretty pictures, we need to start sending people to the Moon, Mars and beyond.
It's not entirely clear, but if you were so depressed you couldn't talk, then you would probably be in line for sick leave, urgent attention from your GP and a bit of counselling/therapy to help you manage it (mental health issues never really go away, do they?).
Your employer's response strikes me as a fundamental lack of care, but it sounds like there's a lot more going on if there are lawsuits etc involved.
I hope the chainmail bashing helped you through it!
Unmanned probes are wonderful for surveying the solar system, taking incredible pictures and making remote measurements, but the failure of Mars Insight's mole tool has shown the harsh limitations of robot exploration. The mole had barely penetrated the Martian surface when it started to bounce out, and NASA's very smart engineers have spent the rest of the mission trying to make it dig.
More than 600 days later, they've succeeded, but it's hard not to think that astronauts equipped with a variety of equipment and 3D printers could have rapidly worked through a range of solutions and got to work much faster. The same thing is going to happen with further robotic exploration on the Moon and ambitious plans for Europa, Titan and Enceladus. The Mars Sample Return mission could absolutely be crippled by a similar unforseen problem.
Manned spaceflight will always be risky and more expensive than robots, but people can do science that robots can't, and if you want to see real geology or xenobiology, humans will need to be living on site in a well-equipped facility. Access to space is already getting cheaper, and that trend is going to accelerate, making the cost argument against human spaceflight increasingly irrelevant. The rest of it is an engineering challenge, and the only way to overcome that is to get out there and see what works.
I don't think this is intended for commuter rail or metros - it's intended for medium range travel between urban centres that's not practical or economic for short haul air transport, such as Boston-New York. On a European scale, it might cover TGV-style distances like Paris-Amsterdam or even a next-gen Channel Tunnel.
The Beeb is a great innovator, but its resources are tiny in comparison to the likes of Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc, and heavily scrutinised because it's funded by the public, so it has to be selective about where it spends the R&D pennies (and they are pennies, in comparison to total budget and the commercial sector).
Some of it's right at the cutting edge (HD/4K/8K) and often in collaboration with other forward-thinking state broadcasters like NHK or through the EBU; developing the technology to support what the viewers/listeners/readers see, like DVB-S2 or DVB-T2 for HD broadcasting. Some of it's supporting the production sector or creatives (take a look at the experimental writing tools at https://www.bbc.co.uk/makerbox).
The BBC's remit obliges it to make most of its R&D freely available, so commercial providers like Sky can gobble up all the groundwork, launch a service like Sky HD, and crow about being the technology leaders. (I'm not saying Sky doesn't innovate, but they build the house; they don't make the bricks or lay the foundations.)
I'm not sure the BBC's charter would allow it do that, even if it wanted to. Then you have the (intentional) Balkanization of the BBC's divisions, most notably the commercial/public service content, JV's like BBC America, and the difficulty of securing global rights to content which is often produced by third parties for the BBC, with their own distribution deals for different territories/media.
And even if the BBC managed to wrangle all of that into a global content platform, they've got existing commercial agreements with existing commercial platforms, they'd have to charge for content consumed outside the UK or by non Licence Fee-payers (but not all of it, e.g. news and radio), and be very careful not to rouse the ire of the commercial sector at home, which would immediately run bawling to its tame Conservative MPs and media barons to complain that "Auntie Beeb is being nasty again".
It feels like a very long time since that golden age.
Not only would you need a government willing to prosecute its chums at the dinner party table/in the private sector, you would also need government or its regulatory agencies to be large enough and sufficiently well-funded to take on the corporate offenders - and such big government is very much against the neoliberal spirit of the past 20+ years (both New Labour and Conservatives).
Throw in the revolving door between regulators/industry and parliament/industry, and you end up with a state which is unwilling, incapable and fundamentally compromised in its ability to regulate or punish the excesses of the private sector.
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