Posts by RLWatkins 260 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Feb 2013
"OpenAI wants to bend copyright rules"
Needs some work. How about:
"OpenAI violates copyright laws on an awe-inspiring scale as a matter of routine, and have stated publicly that they're entitled to"
There. Headlines are more believable when they're in accord with common knowledge.
... mostly because it's people arguing based on ideology, i.e. what we imagine the world should be like, rather than what it really is.
**Nuclear power is not clean energy.**
Yes, the spent fuel can be recycled. We've had nuclear reactors for 3/4 of a century now, and in all that time no one has ever recycled the spent fuel on any meaningful scale save for the French, where it is required by law, and they're constantly having to catch violators and make them pay up and clean up.
Let's all say it together:
**Nuclear power is not clean energy.**
It produces some of the most dangerous waste products conceivable. Stop pretending that it is. It makes you sound like a lobbyist from Westinghouse or Mitsubishi.
Not only did Nokia not go extinct, when they sold their mobile phone division to Microsoft, they kept their towers and they kept their entire portfolio of basic patents.
I thought it kind of ironic: they hired a Microsoft exec, he wrecked their mobile phone division, so they sold its corpse to Microsoft for a lot of money. Not just ironic, not just poetic justice, but down right hilarious.
Nokia is doing just fine.
I heard a US Army colonel talking about autonomous weapons: "It doesn't get bored, it doesn't get tired, it doesn't need sleep or food. It just hangs around waiting for you, then when it sees you it kills you."
This was in the 1990s.
Can we turn beating dead horses into its own profession? Whatever we wind up calling its practitioners, Hell is full and they're walking the Earth. Maybe we should build an annex for Hell, increase its capacity.
One of the hotels used to have an indoor pond where every few hours they'd stage a mock naval battle, complete with the sinking of one of the fake ships in said pond. Afterward it would rise up, the water would drain out of it, and a few hours later they'd stage a mock naval battle in the pond, complete with the sinking of one of the fake ships....
Yes, search services, and later language models, violate others' intellectual property rights right and left, with absolute impunity. And even though congress here in the US has made copyright violation a criminal matter, y' know, for the benefit of record labels and movie distributors, when someone like Microsoft or Open AI rack up millions of copyright violations your typical US Attorney just shrugs and sends out for latte.
Nothing new. Tech companies such as IBM, Microsoft and Oracle presided over the absolute gutting of US product liability laws simply because that cost less than making a reliable product. Same crap, new day.
Watching justice being administered, especially with US tech companies, is a lot like watching one of those mock naval battles in that Vegas hotel.
[yawn]
Does anyone remember General Electric's online service, accessible principally through the Terminet terminal, from back in the late 1960s? It would store files, store data in the database which Bachman invented for GE, and it would run application software.
I remember it pretty clearly, and I remember it being years old when I first started coding for money in 1973.
Then again, that's what the tech "industry" does.
Remember when Amazon filed a "business method patent" on the use of cookies to keep track of the logged-in user, so they could implement an on-line charge account? When charge accounts have been around for over a hundred years. When cookies were devised for exactly that sort of use.
So Sonos and Google have patented... attaching more than one speaker to a system, attaching more than one microphone to a system, and what else?
If you can't patent the screwdriver, patent *the use of the screwdriver to drive screws*.
I guess business these days is more about getting money than about earning money by adding value.
Hell is full, and both the dead, and lawyers, are walking the Earth. We ought to do something about that.
I love the performance, but....
Firing up a VM, even a lightweight one, to execute a single function or to run a sub-second process the sort of thing that impresses gee-whiz kids, not experienced designers of actual systems. Don't ever do this. There are better ways.
Yet in the real world we *do* see systems designed this way, and with nobody's name on them there's no way for us to know who never to hire.
Like the man said, Hell is full and gee-whiz kids are walking the Earth.
What on earth are you talking about?
Power plant capacity is measured in watts, not watt-hours. The former is a rate of energy delivery, similar say to a horsepower, the latter a total amount of energy, similar say to the capacity of a gas tank.
And 32 trillion, even if it is watts, and not watt-hours?
Er, OK.
This is the lesson of Facebook: start the cheating out on a small scale, and ramp it up as you accumulate capital.
Homes got greedy, ramped up the cheating more quickly than she could build defenses against the victims.
Hate thieves, but we've let the US turn into a haven for them. The big ones are never called to account.
Whole problem with the new types of chatbots is that their training sets include those very sources.
Kind of a vicious circle, that.
Have you ever seen video feedback, from pointing a video camera at its monitor? It's pretty cool. Not so sure how cool this sort of semiotic feedback will be, though. Cryptic, yeah, but still garbage.
I've seen strings of words which are syntactic nonsense.
I've seen strings of words that make syntactically correct sentences, but semantically are nonsense.
I've seen strings of words that make sense semantically, but in reference to the real world are nonsense.
Tools like ChatGPT have reached that third level. But because they're constructing text from things people have already said, without regard to whether those people *knew what they were talking about*, a careful reader can still tell.
But remember that park ranger who said, "There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the dumbest tourists and the smartest bears"? The same thing is true about the dumbest humans and the smartest chatbots.
This is ridiculous. If they are able to do that, anyone can make a copy of any copyrighted work, change some part of it, then claim that the rights asserted by the original copyright holder don't apply.
How on earth they decided to mix in trademark violations in what was an otherwise open-and-shut license dispute is beyond me. That seems to be confusing the issue for no good reason.
That's hilarious.
My Win10 box is a constant source of update-borne grief. A colleague observed, "I never had any problems. You must be doing something wrong." Then he discovered why: his company had never sent any patch updates to his computer.
What I did wrong? Allowing patch updates.
Makes sense, sort of.
They did indeed.
They sold lanthanides for less than cost for long enough to kill lanthanide mining in the US and Australia, which have large deposits. Then they announced that they would not export raw lanthanides but would sell finished products containing the metals to one and all.
US lanthanide mining continued to languish, last I checked, but the Australians said, "No, no, we'll start mining again."
This all played out years and years ago, so the US may have resumed lanthanide mining also. In any event, it backfired on them.
Same will happen with nickel and cobalt. Plenty of nickel and cobalt elsewhere. And manganese can be found lying all over the ocean floor in MnO nodules.
Tesla's engineers work in AutoCAD and the MCC Materials Handbook. Tesla's programmers work -- We'll agree to refer to repeated failure due to forced and unrealistic released dates as working -- in C / C++.
Given that most of Twitter's back-end data processing is also written in those languages, and that it uses some "AI", those Tesla programmers might have an inkling what they're looking at.
Not sure why they'd want to change it, though. I've no use for Twitter, but it works as well as something like that can. It isn't broken, merely useless.
Mentally read the post title in the Beavis and Butthead voice.
Now, that said, Fujitsu has "launched" computing-as-a-service, the very thing which service bureaus have been doing since the 1960s -- Anyone remember GE's Genie? -- and on it they run a linear programming solver to which they refer as a "non-quantum annealer".
Well, if it walks like a hey-look-at-me press release, and quacks like a hey-look-at-me press release, and smells like a hey-look-at-me press release, then it must be a hey-look-at-me press release.
Instead of spending the first eight or nine paragraphs saying the same things over and over, how about actually describing the thing?
"The command line includes an auto-complete feature.
"Each command launches a small shell window within the main window in which that command executes, allowing the user to compose another command, launching another small shell window within the main window, while the one above it continues execution."
It would have taken a few seconds to read that, as opposed to wading through a few hundred words of "It's new! It's different!" and watching a video.
(I hate videos. They save the presenter a small amount of effort, while wasting a lot of the audience's time.)
People are constantly discovering new minerals. So what?
*Everything* on the surface of the Moon has a tiny bit of 3He in it. So what?
3He is a terrible fusion fuel; it's difficult to fuse. Sure, fusing doesn't make your reactor parts radioactive like Tritium does, but if you can't get it to fuse then so what?
Don't get me wrong: it's neat that they brought samples back from the Moon. But this is a tempest in a teapot, a transparent effort to get a headline.
Yawn.
Great headline, but "crypto haven"?
Wasn't the whole point of cryptocurrencies that they were utterly decentralized, not reliant on specific computing hosts, and not subject to any central authority or geographic boundaries?
So now we have companies which endeavor to control crypto transactions, and places like "crypto havens", and my irony meter has burned out again.
This is typical of organizations which can afford to keep a flying wedge of lawyers on perpetual retainer: If the case goes their way they continue with it so it will become established precedent, i.e. case law, but if it looks as if they'll lose they settle out of court to prevent the loss becoming established case law.
How to prevent this? Record an out-of-court settlement as a loss for the defendant. That would level the playing-field just a bit.
Meanwhile, and yes, I know, I repeat myself, Hell is full and zombies in suits are walking the Earth. How's that working out for us, eh?
If this is what I think it is, an optical version of a neural net built from a block of glass fibres, it has to be hard-wired.
That means that it has to be hard-wired for a specific purpose. At low levels this isn't all that bad: we have hardwired edge and area detection for our own eyes, providing additional information derived from a field of pixels which is useful for recognizing what we see.
Scaling that up won't be one of those square-of-the-number-of-pixels things since that sort of recognition depends on nearby pixels rather than correlating information from distant parts of the visual field.
So far, so good.
The problem comes with hard-wiring the higher levels of recognition.
You want to recognize numbers and letters? Roman letters? Cyrillic? Arabic? Telugu?
You want to recognize faces? Whose faces? Maybe worth hard-wiring to recognize specific features, but beyond that not so much.
So at some point someone has either to create a *programmable* optical neural net to sit atop this device, or to use the device to enhance the input to more conventional software.
Sounds useful, but this isn't the be-all and end-all of image recognition. Recognize it for what it is, to wit a useful step forward, but let's don't get all dizzy over it.
We laughed at Trump, or more accurately winced, because he "created" a name, and then did *nothing else* save for applying it to existing and on-going activities which were not under his purview, and then showed no further interest in the matter, which has been typical of him in the 40-odd years he's been on my radar.
Nothing wrong with having a "Space Force". Lots wrong with giving Trump credit for it.
Gartner conflating "cloud" with "AI" and saying that "it will write our code in the future" is typical.
And it's ignorant. And it's sad.
But their principal market consists of businessmen, who want to commoditize programming, just as they've tried to commoditize engineering, medicine, etc. They love to hear this stuff, even when the results have always been disastrous.
If they'd told businessmen, "You'll have to actually pay people to do critical and intellectually demanding professional work, and learn to live with that," they'd have lost most of their audience.
... several times over in fact. US telcos have been collecting a "broadband tax" for a couple of decades, amounting to over a half-trillion dollars, to fulfil their commitment to "bring broadband to all Americans". They convinced the head of the FCC, an AT&T lobbyist, that GSM was "broadband" and that they therefore had finished the job, without actually doing it at all.
So... we're going to pay for that all over again? How many times, I wonder, before we actually get it?
... brought to me by a neighbor who asked, "Why has the screen detached itself from the tablet? Can you fix it?"
Mind you, the screen is still attached, but it is hovering about 6mm above the rest of the unit. Why? The battery blew up like a balloon. And no, I can't fix it. It is held together entirely by glue.
The only reason the screen didn't crack is that the battery heated up so much while failing, or inflating, that it melted some of that glue. Now that it's cooled off? The glue has solidified again so there is no way to get the thing apart to fix it.
Do you suppose they'll replace all these units? Not on your life.
You know the saying: Hell is full, and guilt-ridden engineers are walking the Earth.
... and note that the center of lift is way, waaay behind the center of mass. Good thing Honda has much better engineers than they do artists.
All that said, they do have damn' good engineers. I expect them to take away a good chunk of other commercial lift companies' business.
And you know? That probably isn't a bad thing.
(1) The process using "linear algebra probabilities" is quantum annealing. That isn't the only way quantum computers are built, although it is a very useful one. Quantum computer programs for, say, factoring use entirely different techniques.
(2) A quantum bit cannot store multiple arbitrary classical bits of information. Saying, "Oooh, ahh, we can store much more information here because it's quantum bits" represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology.
We may have made a mistake by calling these things "computers". It's as if we still called modern computers "difference engines". It limits our thinking so severely as to cause many people to completely miss the point.
... ha ha, ha ha, haha!
I'm so very sorry, but this is one of the stupidest and most blatant "Hey, let's all pay attention to ME!" press releases I've seen this year.
Not only do we not have the technology to do this, we don't even have the technology to design and manufacture any technology which might even remotely approach the necessary capability. Not even close.
How on earth can anyone take this seriously?
... but rather a HOSTS file which routes hundreds of ad servers to 0.0.0.0.
Works great. About to translate the thing to use on Linux and Android. I have to wonder how much of the OS that's going to kill, but I do have a couple of sacrificial devices to try it out on.
Happy days.
Oh, and by the way, Hell is full and ad executives are walking the earth.
Sure, one can attach a vice-grip to the steering wheel stem to steer it. One can memorize the colors of the wires so one will know which ones to short out to start the car or turn on the windshield wipers. Without pedals one can operate the throttle by pulling a string. (More difficult to operate the brakes that way, but that's why dashless, pedalless cars have hand brakes.)
Sure, one can do all these things.
When we're all old we can tell our grandchildren, "When I was young, we didn't just have to walk to and from school uphill in the snow both ways while fighting off rabid bears, we also had to use git for source control, and we liked it." Bah!
To those who voted this comment down:
An OS consists of a kernel (or executive), a shell, and a collection of system utilities.
This is the original definition of the term, which hasn't lost validity just because marketroids are unable to grasp the details of technology.
Linux-based OSs consist of a Linux kernel, one (or more) of a variety of shells, and a bunch of utilities mostly from GNU.
... and demands calendar and contact access to change the background image on the home screen. The litany of such offences grows with each passing month. It's so sad; I used to be a staunch proponent of their gear. Lately? It would have to be free... and even then I'd install a 3rd-party ROM before I used the damn' thing.
Been writing software for fifty years, getting paid for it for about 45; I don't see a single flaw in this narrative. Needless to say, I'll be reading this one. Always did enjoy a freewheeling and humorous account of current history.
BTW, 'AI would be the "most profound technology" that humanity will ever develop' is a great prediction for the far future, about on par with predictions of reversing ageing, or of tapping vacuum potential for free energy. How very prescient. [yawn]
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