Posts by Felonmarmer

Textbook publishers sue shadow library LibGen for copyright infringement

Re: They are blocked in France

Either you went to the same place as me, or it's more than one lecturer who did this.

His reply when asked a question in the first lecture - "I'm not a teacher, I'm a lecturer. I'm here to talk at you, not answer questions."

His lectures consisted of reading out manufacturers chip specifications, none of which he said would feature in the exams.

He said the final exam would solely consist of questions taken from his book, of which there were two copies in the university library, so if we wanted to pass we would have to buy a copy.

He also did the usual trick of getting masters and phd students to effectively write his next book.

He put me totally off the topic of computer hardware, something that I've only started looking at again recently from online vids like Ben Eater's 8 bit computer series. Now he would have been a good lecturer.

Right to repair advocates have a new opponent: Scientologists

Re: Expose

God can have my possessions too, as long as he picks them up in person.

Judge snuffs man's quest to have AI-created art protected by copyright

When does a tool stop being a tool.

Latest versions of Photoshop, used in creation of much digital art whose creators claim copyright, have AI tools within them such as Generative Fill.

So at what level does the mechanical process in those tools take precedence over the artistic choice to use the tool?

How about a bucket on a string with a hole punched in it, spilling paint on a canvas, running entirely on the mechanical process of gravity and hydrodynamics?

Palantir lobbied UK pensions department for its software to tackle fraud

I still can't get over the fact that they called themselves Palantir.

Biden urged to completely cripple AI chips to China

US Gov : All CPUs capable of IO speeds greater than 600GB/sec are banned from exporting to China!

Company : OK, we'll make some 600GB/sec versions for export.

US Gov : You are just trying to get around the ban! We'll impose a lower limit!

Company : OK, we'll make some versions at that limit.

US Gov : There you go again, trying to get around the ban!

I don't expect politicians to know technical details, but I do expect them to know about concepts such as "greater than" and "less than".

Funnily enough, AI models must follow privacy law – including right to be forgotten

Add another AI to solve it.

One way to do it would be with another AI trained on negative data, a list of proscribed results that the first AI passes it's output to and the second AI assesses that output against it's database of blacklisted info and automatically redacts the output.

It would need to store info on what needs to be forgotten though so would fail that test, but surely when a request to be forgotten is put in, that request is stored somewhere also? How under the current system do you check that the forbidden knowledge is not relearned?

If the redacting AI has a much smaller set of info than the main AI, then it could be used as an interim measure until the main AI LLM is updated, solving the time issue.

Sarah Silverman, novelists sue OpenAI for scraping their books to train ChatGPT

"Some tasks, like requesting information from specific military units, can sometimes take staff hours or days to complete, but large language models can provide data within minutes."

Only takes minutes if the info is already included in the LLM. How long does it take for the info to get compiled, and how do you ensure it's not out of date?

Looks like replacing a simple telephone call to the unit, with having to employ someone in each unit whose entire job is updating the LLM. Not to mention ArmyGPT making stuff up when it doesn't have the answer.

Google says public data is fair game for training its AIs

Re: Didn't Google News get banned in some places for doing this?

The copying when you feed into the system isn't the copyright infringement though - it's publishing the info afterwards.

I can cut and paste into a word doc, go through and rewrite it in my own words and it becomes a new work, derivative sure, but that's allowed as fair use in many jurisdictions (like the USA for example, where the first AI copyright trials are taking place). And they are civil claims as well, not criminal cases, so it will come down to who has the most money for their lawyers.

Twitter rate-limits itself into a weekend of chaos

Re: NYT Bestselling Book Title

Are you sure that's not what the Musk entity running Twitter actually is right now?

Open the pod bay doors, GPT, and see if you're smart enough for the real world

Re: Two sides of the coin

Or was it a large number of AI monkeys with a typewriter and a time machine?

US Air Force AI drone 'killed operator, attacked comms towers in simulation'

Re: I've read more realistic fiction that was actually stated as fiction.

No I didn't. It must have a list of valid targets to pick from, or it would have wasted all it's missiles on rocks.

I've read more realistic fiction that was actually stated as fiction.

In a statement to Insider, Air Force spokesperson Ann Stefanek denied that any such simulation has taken place.

"The Department of the Air Force has not conducted any such AI-drone simulations and remains committed to ethical and responsible use of AI technology," Stefanek said. "It appears the colonel's comments were taken out of context and were meant to be anecdotal."

Sounds like the colonel's anecdote was hypothetical at best, which explains why it doesn't make much sense.

If the drone is attacking an enemy's air defence system it would be given a target list. Why would friendly infrastructure and units be included in such a list?

If the simulated drone is being controlled via a communications tower remote from the operator, why would it have attempted to kill the operator first? And how would it know where the operator was if the signal was passing through a comms tower? Also it's unlikely that the operator was located close to the targets, so if the drone was on site, how did it fly all the way back to the operator to attack?

I think either the colonel went off on a ramble without making it clear it was just hypothetical, or the media just missed that bit of his story.

AI, extinction, nuclear war, pandemics ... That's expert open letter bingo

Re: All this panic

Don't need an AI, need Artificial Supidity.

Too old to care much

The only exception seem to be people who have effectively retired from the field. Lot's of 70+ year old computer scientists and "godfathers of AI" throwing their arms up in the air and saying now my career is over, no one else should do it.

If I was being cynical I would think they want to get into the expert consultance game advising regulators.

Then there's the lilkes of Musk who started his own AI company after signing the first letter, and now is absent from this one.

They all seem surprised by the potential for AI to do bad things, have none of them read about Singularity?

Not that I think the current crop of AI is any where near that right now, it's just going to take a few thousand jobs away from people, but hey I'm not far off retirement so I can sit back and watch.

Average life of a civilisation is about 300 yrs, not sure when we started counting the one we are in right now. Industrial revolution?

BT is ditching workers faster than your internet connection with 55,000 for chop by 2030

If you are replacing call centre staff who respond using a script of prepared answers with software that does the same it won't need much in the way of AI other than speech recognition.

Sonatype axes 14 percent of staff, reminds them not to talk to the press

"We take seriously the impact this decision has on our employees - as well as their families - and are grateful for their hard work and contributions to the company."

I assume the first thing they did after making this statement was make sure none of the affected personel could get to arms length of anyone in management.

Microsoft puts the freeze on employee salaries, CEO pay still as hot as ever

They only need to keep one person happy - the chap who wields the axe. Literally in the past, now figuratively.

OpenAI's ChatGPT may face a copyright quagmire after 'memorizing' these books

Re: Is copying large amounts of text or images for training the model fair use?

So every time you look at copyrighted material, every server passing that info to you is breaking copyright?

SpaceX's second attempt at orbital Starship launch ends in fireball

I tried making a cup of tea earlier and burnt down the house, but everything after switching the kettle on, was just icing on the cake.

Woooooooo!!!! Go kettle!!!!

Guy rejects top photo prize after revealing snap was actually made using AI

And yet this photo in the same category was considered OK and an unmanipulated single photograph?

https://www.worldphoto.org/sony-world-photography-awards/winners-galleries/2023/open/winners/creative-2023-open-competition#&gid=1&pid=7

That's hardly surprising if the training data was limited to their database of images. It's like complaining that a chef who learned his craft at Mr Egg without any other experience tends to make egg based dishes.

UK government scraps smart motorway plans, cites high costs and low public confidence

Re: Variable speed randomness

You are asking why there's no queue when the speed limit has been lowered in order to relieve the queue?

The safety figures are in terms of hundreds of millions of road miles, so the shorter lengths of smart motorways is taken into account.

Safest is controlled motorway (smart motorway with widening and hard shoulder)

Next is dynamic hard shoulder.

Next is smart motorway (All Lane Running)

Last is conventional motorway, on which most fatalities are for parked vehicles on the hard shoulder.

Stopped vehicle fatalities are slightly worse for smart motorway than conventional, but the proportion of collisions involving them is much lower, the majority of collisions are between moving vehicles and those have lower fatality levels on smart motorways than conventional.

What the stats indicate is that overall safety is more down to congestion than anything else (vehicles per lane per hour travelling at high speed).

You can look up the stats online.

Disclaimer : I've worked on smart motorways, both ALR and DHS to ALR conversion (which were scrapped last year).

Virgin Obit: Launch company files for bankruptcy in US

Don't want to twist the knife, but...

For amusement, go back and look at the comments from the Reg article when the "Cornish" launch failed.

Bank rewrote ads for infosec jobs to stop scaring away women

I went for a job in 1991, the advert listed operating system and programming language requirements.

They had a test to find some errors in some code, there were 10 errors, I found 11. I thought it was a clever ruse to see if you stopped looking after finding 10, but there was a real error in there, which would have compiled OK but failed at runtime. Their head programmer wanted to hire me on the spot, but I needed a second interview with the managing director.

He failed me because I hadn't used the particular brand of PC they were using, telling them the operating system was all that counted made no difference. I lost the job down to the colour of the PC case.

This was at Birmingham University's Research Park.

Virgin Orbit lays off 85% of staff as funding deal falters

Re: Where is the support?

Busy re-editting the photo to take Shapps out and put Johnson back.

India teases AI plan to 'catalyse the next generation of the internet'

"The next generation of the internet" that governments want is something more controllable than the current internet. It doesn't take much guesswork to work out what the role of AI will be in a system like that.

Everything modded and censored to suit the viewpoint of those in charge, and if there's a few false positives due to AI doing what it does best, then you won't even hear about them.

America: AI artwork is not authored by humans, so can't be protected by copyright

Questions not answers.

Midjourney and others give the user a method of refining the images generated by selecting one of the generated images to create varients of so that's some human agency. Also you can refine the prompt to change the nature of the generated images.

Surely the author of the comic book could claim she took the generated image into Photoshop and applied some manual changes, does that not add human agency, even if it's only cropping?

If a generated image is not copyrightable, then what does that do to the court case claiming copyright infringement for the training data?

Can YouTube be held liable for pushing terror vids? Asking for a Supreme Court...

Re: YouTube doesn't deserve section 230

How about Jackass reruns? Because that has definately happened.

Most Londoners would quit before they give up working from home

Non mandatory important things.

Just had a "it's not mandatory" but "it's really important" that we increase our attendance email.

Now this is for the team (line management) which is not the same as any of the project teams anyone is involved in, but one of the justifications is sitting around discussing drawings. I have not printed out a drawing for over five years now, our company is entirely set up for digital delivery, and none of the people in my work team are involved in any of my project teams so there's no reason for us to look at each others work.

I'd just be using Teams in the office rather than at home, but adding journey time to do it, having to book a hot desk (so we probably won't even be sitting close to each other) plus all the other minor things that add up to wasted time and effort.

My reply was, well if it's not mandatory, it's not happening.

Managers just don't know what to do when there's no one to manage sitting in front of them.

99 year old man says cryptocurrency is for idiots

There was a Channel 4 programme about risk, presented by the "Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk", David Spiegelhalter.

He said that the statistical increase in life expectancy with increased exercise was exactly equal to the amount of time spent exercising, if you did the optimal amount of exercise, and less if you did more or less than the optiomal amount, which I think was 1 hr per day. So 1 hr per day for 50 years netted an increase of about 2 years in life expectancy.

The comment he made was do it if you enjoy it, because all that extra life would be spent doing something you hate if you don't.

You could say the first forms of crypto currency was when kings started minting coins with their faces on them to determine what was rreal money and what wasn't. Of course they would never of dreamed of doing it to enrich themselves from everyone elses transactions.

Conversational AI tells us what we want to hear – a fib that the Web is reliable and friendly

Re: run for cover and grab the popcorn Mad Max

I am the Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla, and I've come for your bog roll supply!

Virgin Orbit doesn't

Matt Archer, the agency's launch programme director said the issue occurred in the upper segment of the rocket.

"The second-stage engine had a technical anomaly and didn't reach the required orbit," he explained.

So the programme director doesn't even consider the Boeing as a first stage!

It's a bit of a stretch to claim the launch is from British soil, when the first part is simply transporting the rocket to it's actual launch site over the Atlantic.

If anything it was launched closer to Ireland than the UK. Doesn't the Virgin empire have some offshoots in Ireland? Can't they claim it's their launch?

US Dept of Energy set to reveal fusion breakthrough

Re: Q>1

I was thinking of the waste heat from using that limitless energy rather than creating it. The loss in conversion to electricity will be mainly heat during creation and most of that could be used for something else, but when it comes to using that power, every electrical device will generate heat and wheres the reason for efficiency when it's limitless.

That's my pessimistic hat talking, the optomistic hat reckons they'll solve that problem by doing it all in orbit, or on Mars where we'll need that heat.

Q>1

Is that measurable output, or capturable output? If Q=1.1 and it has an energy conversion efficiency of 80% to electricity it's not worth doing right now.

With my cynical hat on, this announcement looks like good timing with the energy crisis to make sure there's no budget cuts in this area of research.

With my optimistic hat on, it's a step towards limitless clean energy.

With my pesimistic hat on, that limitless energy will produce so much waste heat that you might as well be burning coal.

I need a new hat.

Look like Bane, spend like Batman with Dyson's $949 headphones

Not a fan.

So it removes 38 decibels of environmental noise for the user, how much does it add to other peoples environment nearby with the fan noise?

You get the internet you deserve

Re: .

Haven't you heard? The orange buffoon is going to scrap the US constitution if he gets in next. President No 47 will be SkyNet.

World's richest man posts memes as $44b Twitter acquisition veers off course

Monopoly Money

Yep, and the $44B is not all his either. He paid about half and that would have been his Tesla monopoly money, $22B. About $17B was in high interest loans which is costing Twitter $1B per year compared to $50M per year before Elon took over.

The rest was investors, so $5B, which may or may not have been monopoly, but it is now.

Twitter made about $600M per year after costs, and had about $6B cash reserves, so half of that is Elons now. Theres probably another $6B or so in other assets.

So he will have swapped $22B Tesla for $6B real money.

Twitter begs some staff to come back, says they were laid off accidentally

Re: This is the way it should work...

In the UK you have a consultation period first, which would be 45 days for 100+ dismissals. Then you have the notice period (3 months).

For working in the notice period, it will be difficult to argue they needed you to work to the last day if they have removed all access to company facilities and email.

I've been through it a few times, engineers like me are expected to work to the end (for a given value of work), IT staff go straight away (for obvious reasons).

Technically the consultation period is to look for alternatives to redundancy, in reality there's not much consultation going on.

With the rush, and the large number of different legislations in place, I would expect there will be some mistakes made in the process as HR will try to do the absolute minimum they have to, and frequently stray over the line. Of the dozen or so times it's happened to me, they have had to abandon the process about 75% of the time due to messing up or fork out extra money to compensate for getting it wrong.

Last one for me was a change of terms and conditions that was going to be fire and rehire if you didn't sign, except one of the changes they wanted to make was one that they couldn't legally fire you for if you declined, which I did.

Grand Theft Auto 6 maker confirms source code, vids stolen in cyber-heist

If they don't put in a mission based on this leak, then they will be missing a trick.

Philippines orders fraud probe after paying MacBook prices for slow Celeron laptops

I got told this story by a friend who was a tech sales chap. A national building society rang the company that he works and asked for some small wireless keyboards that the staff could carry about in the customer facing part of the business so they could use the PC's that otherwise would display adverts on the latest financial products and current interest rates to do customer enquiries. They wanted about 10 per bank, to include spares.

He looked up the product and found a range going for about £12. He quoted them £500 per keyboard. The customer agreed without any questions. He then took the rest of the day off, he said his commission would be enough not to need to work for the next few months.

He expected us to congratulate him for his cleverness, however that was my bank and the money he squeezed of them would be paid for by the banks customers, so I wasn't that pleased.

He did pay for the currys that night so I reckon I may have been compensated enough though.

Google engineer suspended for violating confidentiality policies over 'sentient' AI

Re: have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims

While you are right that it might be saying things that are untrue, does that rule out intelligence? Creative lying is definately a sign of intelligence - it means it is forming a model of what you want to hear and providing it.

I'm not saying it is sentient, but I don't see how you can rule it out by saying it's lying.

It could be regarding the researchers as friends and family also.

In terms of Turing tests, interestingly it appears to have communicated with an Eliza bot and done it's own Turing test on that, and stated that Eliza fails. I'l be surprised if they haven't had it communicating with another instance of itself also, that would be one of the things I'd want to do.

World’s smallest remote-controlled robots are smaller than a flea

Re: "The heat is applied remotely through a laser"

Kind of negates the "terrifyingly undetectable to human senses" aspect.

Your software doesn't work when my PC is in 'O' mode

My guess is they used the wall socket to turn on/off, like a toaster.

This was also the time of the Turbo button, so it's vaguely understandable, but they must have been only using the PC for running one piece of software, autorun from boot for them to think it was a fault in this software, rather than on anything run on the PC, like the OS for example.

Machine needs more Learning: Google Drive dings single-character files for copyright infringement

Sorry but I've already patented the business practice of using time travel to set patent start dates. It only applies in this universe though as defined by -infinity < (x,y,z,t) < +infinity so feel free to use higher dimensions or pop over to another universe.

US-China chip cold war? It's only helping the Middle Kingdom, silicon makers warn

Why America is not the greatest country in the world

I think the main problem is because they insist that they are the greatest country in the world, with the best form of government, military, technology, health care and everything else.

Why would they change anything if they think they are the best in every way? It seems that the main reason they believe this is lack of knowledge of what the rest of the world are doing judging by the multitude of videos on youtube and other sites where Americans react to aspects of life elsewhere.

This is coupled with intense propaganda and education forming this viewpoint for the majority of the last century that is as insiduous as that carried out by their opponents.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, other nations have advanced in all these things (excepting democratic government in many cases) and have equalled or exceeded the initial advantages the USA had post WW2.

To paraphrase Al Murray, the rest of the world don't have an American dream, because they are awake. America is still dreaming the dream of the last century.

NASA boffins seem to think we're worth saving from fiery asteroid death so they're shooting a spaceship at one

More Red Dwarf than Armageddon

Sounds like Planetary Pool to me...

RIMMER: What the smeg is going on?

LISTER: She rides!

RIMMER: You jammy goit!

LISTER: Played for, and got!

KRYTEN: Surely not, Sir!

CAT: Are you trying to say that was a trick shot?

LISTER: (Doing the touch-up shuffle) Intended! Pool God! King of the Cues! Prince of the Planet-Potters!

Zuckerberg wants to create a make-believe world in which you can hide from all the damage Facebook has done

Re: A massive lack of ingenuity

Yep, it's as good as it gets.

Real ingenuity doesn't get planned, it just happens out of the blue. If you look at all the real inovations over the last century, they weren't predicted or planned. What was predicted was personal hovercraft and jet packs.

This is turd-polishing recast as genius, like everything else FB does.