Posts by andrewj

AI godfather-turned-doomer shares Nobel with neural network pioneer

This is so shoe-horned into "physics" that I think I'm hallucinating.

If Dell's Qualcomm-powered Copilot+ PC is typical of the genre, other PCs are toast

Re: the hot little jets of air it quietly emits

It only hovers when you open Teams.

Microsoft cash to help reignite Three Mile Island atomic plant

It'll be the Cherenkov Blue Screen of Death

Have we stopped to think about what LLMs actually model?

If AGI is fuzzy gzip with innaccurate decompression, then they've hit the target.

NASA pushes decision on bringing crew back in Starliner to the end of August

"However, NASA is still weighing up whether it would be riskier to use it for a nominal return or simply wait for the next Crew Dragon."

What is there to weigh up? It's a decision between an established vehicle with some proven track record vs. the calamity capsule. Safety-wise, this is surely a no-brainer. Starliner can return automated (which it would even with astronauts onboard) and if it works, great. If it burns up, at least there are not two dead people.

Microsoft punches back at Delta Air Lines and its legal threats

They should modernize everything - moving from Windows to Linux would be an excellent first step in that.

Scarlett Johansson voices anger at OpenAI's unauthorized soundalike

It would certainly be interesting if the different professional actress came forwards and detailed what OpenAI asked her to do exactly.

Google is wrong to put AI search features behind paywall, says HPC leader

Re: Brilliant news.

Maybe Elon Musk could be behind a paywall too.....

Apple's GoFetch silicon security fail was down to an obsession with speed

pointer to a pointer even

Freudian slip? "requests for memory locations that contain pointers to to memory locations"

Sorry, Siri: Apple may be eyeing Google Gemini for future iPhones

Re: Generative AI

It's a way of generating profit from gullible people.

Microsoft defends barging in on Chrome with pop-up ads pushing Bing, GPT-4

Yes and it keeps the notification open on top of the document you are trying to read, constantly reminding me to never, on pain of death, allow it to install O365 on my phone.

Ahead of IPO, Reddit blends advertising into user posts

r/enshittification

72 flights later and a rotor blade short, Mars chopper loses its fight with physics

At least it was bolted on, so no Boeing involved

Alaska Airlines' door-dropping flight was missing bolts

If the flight recorder is perfectly capable of over 2 hours storage, why is it even an option to write over after 2 hours?

Missed expectations, zero guidance: Tesla's 'great year' was anything but

Re: Musk vs. the investor class

While I vicariously agree, the trouble is that when the music stops it's not the investor class who end up paying the economic costs of the subsequent bust. They get bailed out.

Amazon Ring sounds death knell for surveillance as a service

I'm tired of this whole fatuous argument that just because I am out of the house in public, I have no expectation of not being constantly surveilled and have no right of privacy.

Apple's on-device gen AI for the iPhone should surprise no-one. The way it does it might

I've been trying qwant, but it's early days.

Lukewarm reception for Microsoft's Copilot Pro amid performance, cost grumbles

It's seem currently that all tech companies are like chimps lined up to throw AI poo at users and see what sticks.

Tech billionaires ask Californians to give new utopian city their blessing

Re: Biggest problem.

Voters are still thick enough to give them what they ask for.

CLIs are simply wizard at character building. Let’s not keep them to ourselves

You mean like the dark red or dark blue text on a black background that some terminals default to? Or for that matter the idiotic color scheme on Google assistant which similarly has dark grey on a black background at times.

Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping seems quaint in comparison to modern bloat.

AstraZeneca bets $247M AI can create a cancer-fighting antibody

Re: Even if they find it

Sure. There are 10s of 1000s of scientists in on the ruse and only a plucky group of ignoramuses such as yourself know the truth.

Wayland takes the wheel as Red Hat bids farewell to X.org

Re: Wayland itself is getting old now...

systemd will probably contain linux before long.

Palantir bags £330M NHS data bonanza despite privacy fears

"People want to understand the arrangements to ensure the NHS does not find itself locked into a relationship with any specific vendor."

No. People want to ensure that the NHS is not providing their health information to invasive data slurping operations without permission.

California governor vetoes bill requiring human drivers in robo trucks

Re: Requiring drivers in autonomous vehicles should be for safety reasons only

You mean the regulatory framework that is ramming WaymoMoolah and Cruise down the throats of residents in San Francisco against their will and the demands of the elected city government? No thanks.

Artificial General Intelligence remains a distant dream despite LLM boom

TL;DR. Nobody knows what "intelligence" is or how it works. Nobody knows if the current fad in deep learning is capable of generating "intelligence" in silico.

TSA wants to expand facial recognition to hundreds of airports within next decade

"Next, it verifies the person pictured on the identification card is the same person standing at the TSA podium, while also verifying the person is, in fact, traveling in the next 24 hours, and whether they have PreCheck, regular screening status, or are on a list to receive additional screening, Langston said."

None of which require facial recognition technology.

Forget these apps and AI, where's my flying car? Ah, here's one with an FAA license

Given that a significant proportion of drivers can't handle 2 dimensions, this doesn't seem like it will end well.

Google accused of ripping off advertisers with video ads no one saw. Now, the expert view

Re: Facebook cutting off news

I have no idea how I achieved it, or perhaps it's just uBlock; but I never see news on Facebook anyway. All I get is the feed with posts from friends, interspersed with ads that I ignore.

Red Hat strikes a crushing blow against RHEL downstreams

Re: GPL violation

Agree. The TL;DR is "get stuffed Redhat".

NASA to tear the wings off plane in the name of sustainability

Somewhat of a kwasi-wing then.

US Senators take Meta to task for releasing LLaMA AI model after token safety checks

I'm confused. Zuckerberg was released into the wild years ago.

Microsoft's big bet on helium-3 fusion explained

Well, Windows is well beyond iteration 7 and...

Move over, Google Earth. Caltech's here with a fresh 3D tour of Mars

Re: VR Version?

I was thinking the same. The only use I can think of that I would have for VR is to be able to zoom around landscapes, the solar system, galaxies, inside the cell etc. Not stupid made-up "worlds".

Bing AI feels like ChatGPT stuffed into a suit – not the future

I'd like to play around with ChatGPT a bit, but refuse to give them my mobile phone number. Oh well.

SpaceX cuts off Ukraine's 'offensive' Starlink use

For free? Funny hos Musk has forgotten the billions in corporate welfare lavished on him by the government over the year.

IBM says it's been running 'AI supercomputer' since May but chose now to tell the world

By the time the dust settles I suspect the overall contribution will be similar to Watson, namely a rounding error in spacetime.

Twitter dismantles its Trust and Safety Council moments before meeting

Getting more like Chief Twat by the hour.

Washington DC drags Amazon to court for 'yoinking' driver tips

This type of behaviour will never stop until they start charging and imprisoning the CEOs of these companies who commit theft. Guarantee there'll be a quick change in tunes then.

Windows 11 still not winning the OS popularity contest

I'll wager that most of these gains and losses are sampling fluctuations, not meaningful changes. Much the same as the hapless ventilating over miniscule changes in polls over political campaigns.

Do they really expect this sort of rollout babble to convince my mother to upgrade?

"On November 30, 2022, an out-of-band update was released to improve the Windows 10, version 2004, 20H2, 21H1, 21H2, and 22H2 out-of-box experience (OOBE). It provides eligible devices with the option to upgrade to Windows 11 as part of the OOBE process. This update will be available only when an OOBE update is installed."

Mythic bet big on analog AI but has run out of cash

Re: 10 years old?

Because some things are hard and take more than 10 years to get to work? Just a thought.

Gelsinger takes ax to Intel after chip sales slump, profit nosedives

Re: Did Born Again Pat take a cut?

I think the poster is on a lot of RX.

Shareholders slam Zuckerberg's 'terrifying' $100b+ Metaverse experiment

Regardless of what you think of Meta (and I don't think highly) all this smacks of is short-sighted investor greed. They present no alternative vision other than to milk the cash cow.

Post-Brexit 'science superpower' UK still hasn't appointed a science minister

Think how bad it's already going to get when they have to slash the research budget to finance eliminating the top income tax rate for their rich buddies.

California to phase out gas furnaces, water heaters by 2030

Re: Nukin' it J-Style

Try doing some of the research to answer these things instead of lazily and hysterically throwing out innuendo and supposition?

Re: Are they mandating the replacement tech?

Macbook Pro when Microsoft Teams is running.

Document Foundation starts charging €8.99 for 'free' LibreOffice

Re: Does that mean there's will be a version with proper accent entry?

Had no idea that was there on my Mac. Cheers for saving me an occasional frustrated fumble around Word menus.

New Outlook feature: It freezes up when dealing with tables in emails

Re: ...and on Mac, don't dare to use emojis

Thankfully it was possible to roll back the "upgrade" to new Outlook for Mac, but I suspect that will be shortlived.

Google calculates Pi to 100 trillion digits

Re: They'd get a shock...

Finding the first occurrence within pi of N repetitions of digit X in a row sounds like a really interesting problem in number theory!

Google helps develop AI-driven lab machine to diagnose Parkinson's

The description here, which is straight out of the press release, does a poor job representing the study. What they did is to take skin-derived fibroblasts from Parkinson patients with one of two very specific gene mutations. They then grew them up in a dish and trained a neural net to tell the difference from microscopy images. So the take away is that a) it's detecting influence/presence of a mutation not Parkinsons - in skin cells, it's not even in brain cells; b) while interesting it will never be used clinically - 79% accuracy is not useful for screening given the false positives. Also, with only 91 samples using internal cross-validation (no external validation data) the model is likely overfit.