Posts by theOtherJT 1334 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jun 2013
The astonishing thing is that they couldn't be less politically significant in real terms. They're vast tracts of nowhere with bugger all in them and a population of approximately five. In any sane world they'd have been told to sit down and shut up.
Unfortunately all of those five are incredibly rich and vote Tory and thus here we are...
I don't know what that says about what we're supposed to think about HS2, but what it says about "The media" is that they're a bunch of self-interested bastards who only publish stories based on how much click-through revenue they will generate rather than reporting what's actually happening at any given time and letting us make up our own minds about if it's good or not.
Isn't this a perfect microcosm of the rot that's settled in deep at Microsoft tho?
Never miss an opportunity to add "features" to something that was at best already fine, and at worse a bit broken. The new features serving simply as a distraction from how broken other things are and how they're not getting better because LOOK OVER HERE WE HAVE A NEW THING!
I don't think anyone was trying to. Under the hood windows has improved by leaps and bounds over the last 25 years.
The thing that pisses us all off is that for every improvement to the core kernel we seem to get saddled with some insane userspace GUI changes that make the objectively better new thing harder to use than the older, less good one.
Its like they went "here's your new car. It gets 80mpg and has 600 horse power. By the way, we put the windscreen wiper controls in the glove box, and you have to scroll 9 items deep in the stereo sub menus to adjust the volume. Also you're not allowed reverse gear now unless you pay another $20 a month."
A valid question. But again, as I keep saying, this makes it a matter of licencing law. Not copyright law. I don't recall seeing anything that says "You may not use any of the content herein for the training of LLM or similar systems." on any website I've visited recently - and frankly even if it did say that it's still not really been determined by any court - as far as I know - that sticking a notice up with a list of restrictions and a "click here if you don't accept" is actually legally binding.
I really don't think that's an accurate comparison.
If you had - legally - access to the source code (because they do have, legally, access to the images) and then you re-compiled that code as-was you'd rightly get sued for copyright infringement if you tried to distribute it.
But if you had access to the source code, and the source code of thousands of other products, and then produced a new product using snippets of code pulled from each of those sets of source you'd have... well, basically what every programmer has been doing sort of forever.
It's worth pointing out that people have tried to sue for "That specific function looks exactly like this specific function in our code" in the past, and that has been far from universally successful. Sometimes it's worked out based on "No, really tho, even the typos and the comments are the same, you totally lifted that from us" but even in those cases that's been because the party in question wasn't supposed to have access to the source in the first place.
Once the source is out there to be viewed by anyone we're not talking copyright any more. We're talking about the enforcement of some sort of digital licence like the GPL or others that say what you may or may not do with that code, and that's a totally different issue - and this is my point.
This isn't a question of copyright, and applying copyright law to it I just don't think is going to work.
...it's not really a copyright issue.
If the AI has been trained on a huge dataset of publicly available images - even if those images are under copyright - and then it produces an image in the style of, but not the same as, any one of those existing images I don't see how anyone can claim that copyright has been breached.
I'm not a great artist to be sure, but If I were to sit and practice painting in the style of some particular artist for months and years, to the point where I could reliably mimic their style I would be totally within my rights to do so unless at the end of it I were to copy one of their specific works and try and pass it off as actually being by them. Basically, committing forgery. The argument seems to be that what AI training does is fundamentally different to that process, but I really don't see how it is.
If they're trying to argue that the very act of "downloading" the images so that the AI could be trained on them violates the copyright, that's troublesome. We have to perform the exact same "download" so that we can display the images in our browsers. If someone wants to put in "For the purpose of..." type language somewhere and explicitly exclude AI training from the list of reasons you're permitted to download an image that's not copyright law either, that's wandering into digital licencing territory, and I'm far from convinced that such a licence would be enforceable.
Copyright might come into play if you're dealing with specific details, for example the much publicised case of Micky Mouse. (Now out of copyright, at least in some forms.) I could release a cartoon of some character that's in copyright and potentially get sued, but I've seen nothing in current law that says a style can be subject to copyright - although of course I'm not a lawyer, so I'm open to correction on that if anyone knows differently.
CEO's do a lot of important things that need doing, and while I'm sure there are management models that can function without a single voice at the top, this way is certainly a valid one. The bit where everyone went wrong was to start treating them like they're irreplaceable geniuses without whom the entire business would collapse. They're basically just the top of the tree of support staff. They can be - and regularly are! - replaced without a business even slowing down. These people need to be treated more like civil servants than celebrities, and paid accordingly.
To a certain extent I'd agree with that. That being said, I'm much more comfortable being advertised at and being aware that the OS is the lure that's meant to hook me onto the metaphorical fishing line of profitable additional services if I don't have to pay for the OS in the first place. Something that makes me personally get really angry about Windows is that it's not free, and I do mean as in "Beer".
I was quite happy to pay for it when I paid once, got a CD with some software on it, and that was the end of the matter. Having to pay up front and still be bombarded with advertisements and "Hey, if you'd paid more you could have the super-duper-extra-special-delux version, and then you'd be allowed to turn this setting off, but you didn't so you can't... nope. I'm not having that.
I'd upvote you twice if I could. Microsoft just don't seem to know what they're doing with Windows. They're so determined to foist things that interest themselves on their users that they don't want or care about that they have completely forgotten that there are things the users do want and do care about that they're completely ignoring. Windows is a mess, and an increasing mess with each version it seems. More adverts. More accounts. More "always online". More intrusions. More getting in the fucking way.
A wise man once said that it's impossible to get someone to understand something as long as their job depends on them not understanding it.
This appears to be very much the case at Microsoft right now, which seems to be being run entirely by a sales and marketing team determined to push constant changes so they have something to market beyond "This is an operating system. You need one. You should use this one." which is basically all that 99% of people actually want. Just run my applications please and get out of my face.
They just can't grasp that we don't want all this shit because if Windows was allowed to just fall quietly into the background and get on with being an OS they'd all be out of a job.
I've been using Linux as my primary work machine for well over a decade and always had a few Linux boxes floating around at home over the course of the last 20 years. I'm well aware of what the user experience is like, both for better and worse.
What is insane is that Microsoft, which is one of the largest corporations in the world, somehow can't do a better job than a foss ecosystem which provides dozens of different competing user interfaces - it's inconsistent by design and it's still better. Not least because you can actually pull out and replace entire components that aren't fit for purpose.
Over the last decade Linux desktop environments have gotten better and better, where as Windows has gotten worse and worse.
It kept adding things I didn't ask for and didn't want (and in a really half-assed way that sort of worked, sometimes) while at the same time repeatedly failing to fix long standing problems.
The end result was an OS where sometimes the setting you wanted was in one place, sometimes it was in another, sometimes it was just gone and there was no way of getting it back.
Occasionally GPOs would simply stop working for no obvious reason, and then you find out that as if the latest point release they took that feature away.
Sometimes the only way to achieve the desired result was through powershell, but the same shell commands wouldn't have the same result on different windows versions.
It was a mess.
If they can't sort out that, then there's simply no way I'm ever going back.
They made MacOS - dear god they even made Linux - the less frustrating user experience.
So. Microsoft, I don't want AI. I don't want subscriptions. I want a CONSISTENT USER EXPERIENCE! That's all I want from you, and if 12 can't give that you'll just keep losing more and more customers like me who are just trying to get things done and want their OS to get out of the bloody way.
...I always make a point to buy any book I intend to read more than once in dead tree form. Not only do they ensure that I still have them should Amazon decide to do something to stiff me out of reading things I paid for in the future, but they do a lovely job of making my living room look nice and feel loved in.
I leave it as a exercise to the reader how I fill the kindle.
You're entirely right, but that's not going to stop a bunch of corporate lawyers insisting that this case is somehow special and therefore releases them from liability. They've got a decent chance of winning that argument too, because the people making the laws have never exactly shown themselves to be entirely to grips with the latest technology - be that technology AI or those newfangled horseless carriages.
...I worked in a medium sized college. It was of the kind where undergraduate students actually lived on site, and The "IT Department" such as it was was located in what had once been a professors apartment on the ground floor of one of the accommodation blocks.
The server room was located in what had originally been the shower block for that floor when the building was put up back in the 60s before it was re-fitted so that each student room had their own toilet/shower room somewhere in the late 90s. This was actually a remarkably good idea, because it meant that the floor contained a high capacity drain, and the room had huge amounts of ventilation that was perfect for putting a nice big AC unit up to, and any run-off could simply go down the hole in the middle of the floor. It also meant that should the fire suppression system ever actually go off, it wouldn't flood.
This setup all worked out very nicely until one day the accumulation of hair and other... waste products... produced by showering students blocked up the drainage pipes and it was discovered that the retro-fit job hadn't been of the highest quality.
Everything drained in series, and once one blocked up, everything "up stream" of that would block up too. This wasn't immediately obvious to the students in question, because the shower drainage pipes ran through the drop ceiling of the floor below and snaked back and forth so they could cover all the rooms. This meant that there was actually a pretty large storage capacity in all the pipework.
I think you can see where this is going. Over the course of a weekend all the students upstairs were happily showering away and that large pipe was filling up with water as the blockage at the far end prevented it from draining. Eventually water started coming back up through the floor and into the shower cubicles - but we're dealing with undergraduate students here, and they're used to living in crappy accommodation where that sort of thing happens, so most of them just ignored it.
Then the pipe burst.
Directly over the server room.
...and about three days worth of accumulated filthy waste water got dumped out straight onto the top of a rack full of hardware that all immediately went "Bang"
...humanity shocked to find itself awful.
Honestly there's no way that anyone should be surprized by this. You train an AI - which lets remember is just a massive statistical inference model - on a huge sample of noisy data to see what falls out. Inevitably what will eventually fall out is a bunch of stuff you don't like. For me this has been the hilarious aspect of the whole rise of large language models and other statistical AI type things. Everyone keeps acting all shocked that they produce horrible content because they don't want to grapple with the idea that viewed totally objectively humanity is regularly really fucking horrible.
"Our AI should accurately respond to it's training data!" "Our AI has been trained on the largest dataset we could get our hands on!"
shortly followed by
"Our AI should never represent children in this way!"
Really? Shouldn't it? Because you seem to have forgotten how it works. The AI has no conscience. It has no moral filter. It doesn't have the concept of "not saying the quiet part out loud." If it's horribly sexist, or racist, or abusive then perhaps - just fucking perhaps - that's because humans often are and our collected works, on which this thing was trained, reflect that?
If it produces sexually explicit imagery maybe that's because utterly - unimaginably - vast quantities of the imagery on the internet is sexually explicit. If it does things - as it has done here - that are actually straight up illegal then that's because those things happen and are recorded as happening!
It doesn't know that this is bad. It doesn't have a concept of good or bad. It's just returning to us what was put in in all it's brutal, ugly, reality.
People getting all upset about AI doing things they don't like need to take a good hard look at the world and maybe do something about that. It's only showing us what we showed it.
The way I see it that's being asked to buy a new version (because I've not seen anything on subscription that's stable enough not to get weekly point releases since no one bothers to actually test that things work before releasing them any more) every month. It's the same thing just turned up to 11.
Nobody wants to pay for software that they already had again I think you'll find.
We resent being asked to buy a new version of something every couple of years (minimum!) because that's what companies want us to do, when the one we have already works just fine, thank you. That's doubly true when the "new" software is actually measurably worse than the thing it replaces - being either stuffed full of adverts, stuffed full of spyware, running slower on the same hardware, demanding an internet connection for something it has no need to have an internet connection for, and in increasingly regular cases all of the above!
I was discussing this with a friend in the building trade the other day, and their take was that due to the wildly different regulations that cover office space and residential buildings, it would actually be cheaper in most cases to pull down unused office towers and build a whole new building than retrofit them to meet all the regulations required for them to be used as houses - or if not actually cheaper, then at least so bloody expensive and time consuming that no one wants to take the job on because there would be so little profit in it.
...if this bug has been kicking around unnoticed for that long. If the changes to cp just made it more common for the bug to be triggered but it was always there, there are possibly god knows how many much rarer cases that have been silently corrupting files for years and no one ever noticed.
...and sees Musk run the gamut from flippant to sincere, grandiose to utterly deluded.
Honestly, I defy anyone to watch that and tell me that Musk is ok. I'm not a psychologist, but seriously, that comes across as the sort of incoherent sudden personality shifts - sometimes in basically the same sentence - that I've seen several times from over-stressed friends. While it's a lot easier to take a much needed mental health day when you're worth hundreds of billions of dollars and don't need to worry about getting fired if you don't show up to work the next day, for normal people every time I've seen this it has been shortly before they ended up having a big flaming burnout and end up on long-term sick leave and having to go therapy.
Dude does not look like he's alright.
Yes it does, but unless they've massively altered their implementation since I last tried enabling it some 4 years ago it consumes so much memory that it's generally not a good idea to turn it on in a general use case. Back then it was a bit of a nightmare and the savings you made on relatively cheap disk were massively eaten by the costs of much more expensive RAM - at least when used in a "This is a general purpose file system containing we-know-not-what". There were always some workloads where you new it was going to make sense, but I never encountered one that was worth running an entirely separate zpool with dedupe turned on just for it... which isn't to say that no such thing exists, but if you're talking about a general purpose system based on snap, and are just using dedupe to make snap more efficient I think the same problems will probably recur.
I actually looked into creating something not dissimilar to this specifically to meet requirements for managed laptops at work so that we could issue developers with linux machines that we had the same kind of management capabilities over as we do our macs. In the end the scale of it just wasn't plausible for us to achieve given the limited resources of our sysadmin and platform teams, and things were allowed to stay pretty much in the hands of individuals.
I can definitely see businesses that will be very interested in getting this from a known-brand supplier that they can buy support from along with it.
echo "U2FsdGVkX185WSn42PIqjIEiRYpf8M2qpeb+tnTPaat3hikN4Z//LAEyF8A5hPAznOnRyYMitPmbUizJFqrnVWizwS7yDqr4M2dmWzu0Gyqn4wVR50xKHINzabgz+xJ2" | openssl aes-256-cbc -a -d -salt
And I'm going keep posting this every time this bloody stupid topic comes up.
It'll just endanger legitimate users and do precisely nothing to prevent people with genuinely nefarious intent from encrypting their comms.
...and the remaining 60% just straight up didn't trust it.
The vast majority of IT managers in the survey – 92 percent – said their teams would be or were reluctant to embrace change.
That's because we've learned the hard way that the latest and greatest "new thing" is probably broken in a couple of dozen edge cases that the documentation doesn't cover, or the people who wrote it simply don't know about, or worse that they do know about but were hoping you wouldn't notice.
The old aphorism about never adopting a .0 release of anything remains very true, but what with the "continuous release" approach so many people are taking with their software these days every release has become a .0 release and it's generally safer to remain a good distance behind the cutting edge because the next update absolutely will break something, and the new replacement product will be in some way feature incomplete compared to the old one until at least the 5th or 6th major update cycle.
...to not use data collected from their marketplaces to unfairly benefit themselves
"Agreed". Have they...
And exactly how will this "Agreement" be enforced? Because I'm gonna go out on a limb here and predict that this "independent trustee" will be neither independent nor trustworthy, and that's before we get to the point of what exactly happens should said "trustee" decide they're not actually complying.
"Ooops, yes, look like we still were profiling to our advantage. Terribly sorry. Total accident. Someone... uh... made a mistake in the config. Yeah. That's what happened."
...we're a "disruptive ride sharing business!"
Fuck. Off.
You're a taxi company. The more they're forced to actually start obeying the law as it applies to taxis the better it will be for everyone. Since they started they have just been trying to claim that just because they look like a duck, walk like a duck, quack like a duck, that they're actually a small, off duty, czechoslovakian traffic warden. It's bullshit. You're a taxi firm. Start obeying the law as it applies to god damn taxis - and treat your employees as such!
Also, I'd like to expand that not all of our devs are dickheads. Many of them are consummate professionals who are not only very good at their jobs, but also understand the importance of corporate security and doing their bit to help us meet our legal compliance requirements and have gone above and beyond to help us understand their needs and get them the tools they need to do their jobs in a way that makes everyone happy.
...but we do also have quite a few extremely vocal dickheads.
Because we have a bunch of dickhead devs who insist that they know what they're doing, that they have to be allowed to manage their own machines or it's impossible for them to work, and a bunch of spineles managers who equally insist that we let them. Funnily enough these two circles overlap remarkably well on the venn diagram of "people who demand mac laptops" and with the circle of "will complain bitterly if we don't fix their broken machine for them even tho it was them that broke it."
Can I have that without the laptop please? Or the folding?
It's so weird to me that we're seeing more and more portable devices with what's basically a 4:3 screen resolution but it's still damn close to impossible to buy a regular desktop monitor like that.
...when it worked.
I've had half a dozen machines with them now - and for anyone thinking "that's a lot of macs to have in the short space of time since it was introduced" - you're right. Every. Single. One. Developed some sort of keyboard, touchpad, or touchbar related fault and had to be replaced within a year.
When it was working tho, l did like it. Not enough to buy a machine with it, after the experience I've had with the ones work issued me mind you.
...if they weren't 1: So stupid and 2: So invasive.
As for 1: A quick look through my subscribed channels shows half a dozen for automotive, a couple for firearms, a handfull of retro-technology related things, a bunch of eSports, a ton of science and technology type channels, two or three film/television reviewers, and a stack of music.
From this they have deduced, apparently, that I'm a middle aged woman who travels a lot, because I constantly get adverts about menopause related products and holidays to places I have no interest in going. I'm struggling to see the correlation.
Advertise me cars. Advertise me video games and movies. Advertise me the touring schedule and new releases from any of the dozens of musical artists I'm subscribed to. Isn't that what all this "targeted" advertising was supposed to do? Show me things I actually care about? Clearly not.
Now I could live with it if the adverts were pointless but easy to ignore, but that brings us to 2:
If they put a silent static ad on the web page that I can completely ignore? Fine. No problem. Cycle every minute or so. Why not. Or put an unskippable 30 second ad slot at the beginning of every video? I can live with that. But no, It's 30 seconds or so of ads every five minutes that's totally unacceptable - doubly so because being injected automatically as opposed to on TV where the show will be edited by the broadcaster to ensure that the advert doesn't play right in the middle of a sentence they regularly completely destroy the flow of whatever I'm trying to watch.
I mean, sure, they're both about big enough to put 3 people in each, but they've got real character.
I've been drinking in this place for over 20 years. Was a big part of my life while my ex worked there. I really miss it. Please don't spoil it. Please.
I even bought one. Two, if you count the one that my company at the time bought me for use when I was off site. Both were really good, I think massively better than the android equivalent of the day, but like so many things Microsoft they couldn't leave well enough alone. Rather than iterate cautiously on a good product until it becomes a great one they kept making random sweeping changes (remember the way winpho8 was *completely Incompatible* with winpho7) pissing off users who didn't ask for them, while ignoring minor irritations that everyone was complaining about.
