Posts by theOtherJT

AI's most convincing conversations are not what they seem

Re: The real issue

Just so.

Re: The real issue

It's probably not possible to work from first principles - and there certainly aren't any examples of it happening available to us for study, since every known kind of mind is attached to the external world by some means or another*

Even "I think therefore I am" is a massive stretch. "There are thoughts" is probably as far as you can get before you hit a wall... although I'm sure there are other philosophers who would disagree with me.

*or at least appears to be - this whole topic gets stupidly ontological really fast.

Re: The real issue

“Excuse Me,” said Dorfl.

“We’re not listening to you! You’re not even really alive!” said a priest.

Dorfl nodded. “This Is Fundamentally True,” he said.

“See? He admits it!”

“I Suggest You Take Me And Smash Me And Grind The Bits Into Fragments And Pound The Fragments Into Powder And Mill Them Again To The Finest Dust There Can Be, And I Believe You Will Not Find A Single Atom Of Life–”

“True! Let’s do it!”

“However, In Order To Test This Fully, One Of You Must Volunteer To Undergo The Same Process.”

There was silence.

With the greatest respect to Sir TerryP of course.

Herein lies the real problem. We don't even have a method to determine that other humans are sentient beings. We just sort of assume they are. Consciousness is a really hard problem - quite possibly one that is literally impossible to solve from the inside.

Re: Chinese Room

Yeah, but Searle's argument was shit. It defies any purely physical description of any mental process. It reduces to saying that "Because atoms can't think brains can't."

Plot to defeat crypto meltdown: Solend votes to seize, liquidate whale account

"we've been unable to get the whale to reduce their risk, or even get in contact with them"

How can this be legal? How on earth can you have a customer with hundreds of millions invested in your platform and not even be able to communicate with them? That statement alone would convince me that this is a disaster waiting to happen - if any more convincing were required.

Not a GNOME fan, and like the look of Windows? Try KDE Plasma or Cinnamon

As long as it's not the only way of doing it that's not really a problem is it? I agree that discoverablity... if that's even a word... is really important in a UI, but shortcuts are... well... shortcuts. As long as they're well documented I'm not sure that's a problem.

I know it's the pettiest gripe ever...

...but is anyone else put off by how painfully ugly the KDE logo is? I always liked the visual style of the plasma desktop, but every time I Install it I end up spending an hour pulling the thing apart and finding all the files related to that logo and replacing it with something less hideous.

Sony responds to inflation with $3,700 gold-plated 'Walkman'

It's cute and everything...

...but given that most people with real money are on the older side I still think they'd be better off making an actual gold plated walkman.

EU lawmakers vote to ban sales of combustion engine cars from 2035

Re: In other words...

No, petrol is too expensive. The problem is that EVs are much too expensive.

Re: In other words...

Yes. I have.

And as per usual I'm well aware that this is part of the poor trap. It's boots theory in action. If I could afford 25K for an EV I'd save money, obviously, but I can't and financing one would cost me more than just paying the petrol costs since I don't have to drive all that much these days what with home working and all - but when I do have to drive I really do have to.

In other words...

...buy your used car now before you get totally priced out of the market.

I'd love an EV. I really would. But until there's a really radical change in the economics I can't have one. My absolute outside hard-limit on spending on a car is a few thousand, but car ownership is really not optional. There is no public transport where I live at the moment. None. Nada. Zero. The nearest bus stop is a 2 mile walk away along a road with neither street-lights nor pavement. In the winter when it's dark that walk would be suicidal.

I'm not sure anyone has really taken into account exactly how necessary cars are for people who don't live in cities, and consequently how much many of us rely on extremely cheap second hand vehicles. Unless they're planning on banning the sale of actual petrol and diesel, it seems far more likely to me that this is just going to create massive upward pressure on used ICE vehicles.

Activision to begin union negotiations with workers from Raven Software

The tech industry needs a union...

...and has for a long time.

Google calculates Pi to 100 trillion digits

Re: If they were proper engineers...

The New Pie

I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems all too well

Re: Do they really?

Not sure about that. We do have plenty of people using Macs after all... although a lot of those are admittedly "Because Mac" rather than any other reason, so it might be just as dogmatic.

Re: Do they really?

Look, my daily has been Debian for the last 3 years now and that's great. It suits me perfectly. My work machine has been Ubuntu for the last 10.

Now you tell me how I can sell that to the finance team, the HR team, the marketing team, the FOH team... I can't. I can hardly sell it to the couple of dozen engineering teams I have because they all spent their budget on MacBooks because they wanted something with a native posix style shell but a nice familiar GUI.

It doesn't matter how much I like it because it is simply impossible to get the business to replace Windows end to end. The users won't have it. Believe me, I've tried.

My last employer had over a thousand desktops in their office, and being an educational institution largely revolving around academic computing 90% of those were Ubuntu desktops - which was a joy to administer for me. Regular release cycles. Simple upgrade path. Ability to patch up anything I didn't like... but even there we had over 100 Windows machines for administrative staff who's life entirely revolves around Windows and simply cannot be persuaded otherwise, no matter how much we tried.

Unless there is a single Linux desktop release that can kill Windows stone dead in every possible metric people won't change. It's too scary and they're too resistant.

Re: Do they really?

It's what I want.

Not because I want Windows dead. Because I want it fixed. Microsoft have broken Windows. It's become an awful Frankenstein's monster of a thing with bizarre UI inconsistencies, sudden unexpected behavior, forced reboots, forced upgrades, and worst of all someone then went and slapped adverts all over it.

It is - frankly - a fucking mess. Compare Win11 with NT4 and the user experience has gone backwards. Hard.

But there's not really any competition to Windows as a desktop OS in the business space. Macs are simply too expensive for most companies to issue one to every employee in the same way that they can buy a thousand Dell desktops at £400 a piece, and Linux... well... Linux's issues are well documented right here.

I want to see a Linux desktop hurt Microsoft in the only way they care about - in the sales. Until it does they've no motivation to get their shit together and I and people like me are stuck trying to manage something that's getting damn close to unfit for purpose.

Google says it would release its photorealistic DALL-E 2 rival – but this AI is too prejudiced for you to use

Re: Not the usual tropes again...

In other words "Damn computer, seeing what's there rather than what we wish was there!"

That's the uncomfortable thing with AI. It really doesn't care who it upsets. It doesn't have the concept of upsetting. Or who, if it comes to it.

You get the hard cold facts of your dataset.

The Return of Gopher: Pre-web hypertext service is still around

Re: Gopher never dies

"I'm not"

Repairability champ Framework's modular laptop gets a speed boost

Re: Framework owner

Given that they're still limiting the number of units per customer I don't think people like me not trying to order in bulk is the kind of problem they have right now.

Re: Framework owner

I think you might be right. They've not been in business long enough for me to feel comfortable adding them to my approved suppliers list right now, but in a couple of years I would be very in favour of buying something like this to issue to people in my company who want an ultra-portable laptop. I can even see myself keeping a stock of spares for them in the office - problem with your laptop? No worries, bring it in and one of our guys can do a motherboard swap right there in the office in 10 minutes.

That is a very attractive proposition as an IT manager.

Florida's content-moderation law kept on ice, likely unconstitutional, court says

Hard to believe they'd be so stupid...

...as to remove the only protection they have from the "liberal media elite" posting hundreds of thousands of social media articles a day telling the world that they - that is the Texas and Florida legislature - are closeted, gay, paedophiles who scream constantly about family values in order to throw up a smokescreen that covers their participation in illegal drug fueled orgies.

Which isn't the sort of thing that I would ever say, because that would be defamation and provably false, of course. But you know, if the social media companies are just "common carriers" then they can't possibly be expected to remove such obviously false and damaging lies, or prevent them from trending to the top of every news feed in the world.

...but then I remember who we're talking about. Yeah. They'd definitely be that stupid. Go for it lads. I'll get the popcorn ready.

Bing! Microsoft tests search box in the middle of Windows 11 desktop

Re: "while Microsoft plays with the concept"

Well, that's the problem, isn't it? If it was all of those things you'd never notice it, and if you don't notice it, how can it sell you things?

MS have worked out that Windows isn't going to make them any money. Not in that nice steady-stream drip-drip-drip that big companies like these days. The idea of just paying a hundred dollars or so for something and then you - horror of horrors - don't pay for it ever again must keep their financials people awake at night in terror.

They're just desperate to find some way to make Windows "Relevant"(tm) - you know - get it all up in people's faces so it can extract some more money from them.

The sad state of Linux desktop diversity: 21 environments, just 2 designs

Re: The curse of overchoice

That's actually a really good analogy, and here's why:

Faced with booking a trip in an unfamiliar town you find that there are over a hundred hotels, and you don't know which one to chose.

No one sane in this situation blames the concept of hotels for this problem. Hotels, in general terms are a good thing to have. You want one, in fact. You don't know which one to chose because there are so many available, and people have such differing opinions about them - but none of that is either the fault of any specific hotel, or of hotels in general.

This brings us back to the question of "Well, how much do I care, really?"

If it's a weekend away for business and all you really give a shit about is that you can expense it, you do the absolute bare minimum of research, spending about half an hour to find something within a reasonable distance of the conference centre that doesn't have a bunch of 1* reviews on trip advisor.

If you're planning your honeymoon, chances are you're going to put rather more effort.

So it is with all choices.

Somone mentioned buying a car - well, it depends how much you like cars. Do you have strong feelings about front vs rear wheel drive, the importance of naturally aspirated engine response vs low down torque, why it is that a V engine will always sound better than an I engine... Well, if you do you're going to spend a bunch more time reading reviews and going on test drives than someone who's entire requirement is "I need to get to work and I don't want to spend too much money."

If you really care about your operating system, then invest some time in it. If you don't care just find whatever has the largest brand name recognition and go with that because it's probably not that bad.

And yes, that might be Windows. Windows is a perfectly fine choice if you simply don't care what operating system you're running.

Any choice will always reflect the amount you actually care about the choice, and simply not caring about Linux is a totally reasonable position, bu it's not Linux's fault that there are a lot of choices.

Re: The curse of overchoice

I mean, yes, but the problem is there *are* dozens of different answers, so what else did they expect?

"What do you want to eat today?"

...well, I could go out, or get something delivered, or I could cook, and if I go out do I want to walk or drive because there are these 6 places in walking distance, or I could drive to a couple of dozen more, and if I'm getting something delivered then there's yet another dozen that will deliver to me... and all of that of course is before I start looking at individual menus and deciding what it is that's on that menu that I actually want.

"That's too much choice!"

...it's the amount of choice there is. It's like that because people want those choices. It's the way things are. The alternative is "You're having meatloaf because it's meatloaf day." which I guess is fine for small children, but once you're a grown up that's the sort of thing that happens to prisoners, not free agents.

"I don't care! Just give me one."

Ok. Fine. Pizza then.

"Why that?"

I thought you didn't care? Why not? Because. If you don't care, just pick one at random. If you *do* care, then make a decision yourself. Do the amount of research based on how much you actually care. It's entirely up to you.

Only Microsoft can give open source the gift of NTFS. Only Microsoft needs to

Re: Microsoft should move beyond NTFS

Much as I love ZFS I'm not sure it's a great choice for the standard use case "One disk - one filesystem" setup. Been a while since I did those benchmarks mind - SSDs were rare and expensive last time I did. Maybe the fairly shocking performance hit you got on a single spinning disk zvol compared to the same disk on XFS don't apply any more... If that's then case then yeah, camp ZFS. Sign me up.

re: which is most likely a Linux box running ext4 with a samba share.

...you're not thinking about this at scale. Full Windows shop it's probably ReFS. Under Linux I'd expect it to be something like ZFS or if we're really talking scale: gluster, or ceph, or ocfs2, or gpfs or one of the other hundreds of network distributed filesystems. I've seen far too many very ugly things happen to ext4 on LVM when people thought that was sufficient for heavily used network share.

Google Docs' AI-powered inclusive writing auto-correct now under fire

Re: say the unsayable

Or go one step further and cut the end user out completely. We can go back to talking to actual humans and using whatever language we see fit, and Google can sit in it's own little play pen talking to itself. We could even check back in on it in a few years and see if it's still capable of forming sentences.

Linguistics don't have a solution...

"We're currently in a crisis period, where we lack the ethical capacity to solve this problem."

No, you have asserted the existence of a problem that doesn't exist, this is why you are unable to "solve" it.

Robots are creepy. Why trust AIs that are even creepier?

Re: Robot Barman

It can make something almost, but not entirely unlike tea.

Microsoft plans to drop SMB1 binaries from Windows 11

Re: Very old.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Message_Block

According to wikipedia it was an MS protocol they implemented in LAN Manager in 1987... but wiki has been known to be wrong.

When the expert speaker at an NFT tech panel goes rogue

Re: "investing in NFTs"

You can certainly be the first to say it on this thread...

AI hardware, PC gaming rig maker partner on powerful AI/ML laptop

Tell me you don't have good workflow without telling me you don't have good workflow...

"When you're stuck SSHing into a remote server, you don't have any of your local data or code and even have a hard time demoing your model to colleagues. The Razer x Lambda Tensorbook solves this," he said. "It's pre-installed with PyTorch and TensorFlow and lets you quickly train and demo your models: all from a local GUI interface. No more SSH!"

GNOME 42's inconsistent themes are causing drama

512x342

Apple System 1.0

And perfectly usable. Clear. Concise. For the capabilities of a literal 2 colour black and white screen, I would even argue quite attractive. I would be pretty much fine with a desktop that looked like that today - although yes, I'd definitely want a bigger screen - but stylistically it's an improvement over a _lot_ of modern desktops. At least it would be easy to get work done on.

Yes, they are, but look how much _better_ the "Old" GEdit is than the "modern" text editor. They've removed a bunch of information from the new one that's right there in the old one - and that's still _shit_ compared to basically any app of the "pre modern ui" era where there would still be a "File Edit View Help" menubar at the top with _all_ the controls in rather than hiding them in a little burger button where it now takes 6 clicks drilling through sub-menus to find anything.

I hate "modern" UIs.

It's like people went out of the way to deliberately waste screen real-estate while simultaneously making it harder and harder each iteration to determine what is and is not a button. Everyone needs to stop with this shit and actually provide a theming engine that works properly.

Sure, you should provide a good default theme, and a good default theme will be a selling point, but if your plan for "enforcing style guidelines" is all about preventing people from doing anything else you should probably ask yourself why people *want* to do something else and if your style guidelines are - in fact - complete bullshit.

Germany advises citizens to uninstall Kaspersky antivirus

Re: both Britain and the US did likewise

Hey now, there's no need for that. Here in Britain we don't discriminate. We'll take orders from anyone who's prepared to bribe us contribute to our economy!

Microsoft slides ads into Windows Insiders' File Explorer

This is exactly the sort of thing...

...that led me to stop using Microsoft products wherever possible. I bought the operating system, Microsoft. I already paid you. Having someone else pay you so you can advertise their shit at me is called "double dipping" and it's bullshit of the highest order.

I don't mind google advertising at me. I don't pay for their services. I get that that's the deal. Windows, however, you expect me to pay for. ...and since I already have a perfectly good operating system that I don't have to pay for, you're on a bit of a hiding to nothing.

Plans for UK rival to Silicon Valley ditched

They've been talking about the varsity line since before I was born...

...and it never actually seems any closer to opening again.

A quick google informs me that Oxford and Cambridge are more or less 65 miles apart as the crow flies, but the fastest actual route to get there involves driving 96 miles and includes going around part of the M25 which will take nearly 2 hours. If you want to take public transport it's even more dire taking 2 and a half hours and involving actually getting a train into London, getting the tube across the city, and then back out again from a different station.

Intel reveals GPU roadmap with hybrid integrated discrete graphics

You want to stop me buying something....

...this right here is how you do it:

It would appear forthcoming processors with SDSi may be arbitrarily restricting some features until obtaining a ‘license’ after the fact.

Look, we all know when we're getting screwed. Payment is a social contract just as much as a legal one. You did work, and you deserve to get paid for that work. That's fair. Making me pay for something I already have breaks the contract. I'm clearly not paying for all your hard work, because it's very obvious that it doesn't actually cost you more to give it to me or not - seeing as you have in fact done that, you just expect me to pay again despite having already bought the thing, and despite the hardware in question being right fucking there already.

Car companies keep trying this and it is pissing consumers off. Everyone needs to cut this shit out.

KDE Community releases Plasma 5.24: It's eccentric, just like many old-timers

s/modernised/made worse/

When will UI people get it into their heads that were not all using a mobile phone? Stop. Hiding. Menus.

This is going well: Meta adds anti-grope buffer zone around metaverse VR avatars

Re: My first though...

Honestly my first thought here was "And how long before a bunch of professional griefers start deliberately standing in every open doorway?"

Re: There goes the business case

It says to me that the purpose of a virtual environment is to do things that aren't possible in reality, and that's no different in VR than it was in good old 2D.

It's escapism. There's a reason video games tend to be about fantastical life and death scenarios. They are a chance to drive fast cars, shoot huge guns, fly planes, jump around at terrifying height and speeds... all things that if you fuck them up in real life, they get you killed. We get to press the little adrenaline triggers but in a safe way.

Even slow paced non-action games are usually about doing things you *can't* do in real life. Your city building sim, your theme park sim - it's about doing something interesting without the massive financial barriers or the potentially devastating consequences if you do badly.

And then we have Meta. I mean, what *is* this thing for? Meet for dinner? Nice social experience in reality, but a bit pointles without the meal, might as well have a zoom call over a takeaway - and 2 years of on and off covid lockdown has taught me that *that* isn't really very fun. Go to the gym? Again, can be pleasantly social, but there's not a lot of point exercising an avatar. It's never going to be as good at racing cars, or flying planes, or riding bikes as a dedicated simulation title. If I want to do safe, low stakes things, then I should be *getting* something out of that - like genuine social contact with actual humans. We have pubs for that, *and* they have beer in them.

Someone mentioned gambling, but again, I don't need VR for that, been playing poker quite happily via tabletop simulator and zoom during lockdown, and since that does involve trying to read people a bit, hiding behind an avatar would make the game *less* engaging.

The whole metaverse thing has always been a solution in search of a problem.

OpenShell has been working on a classic replacement for Windows 11's Start menu

Re: Craig 2

I'm starting to wonder if the same people who manage superstore layouts are working on the Windows desktop these days. Gotta keep moving things around every year or so to encourage shoppers to wander around your store and therefore maybe picking up an extra item or two, rather than just going straight to the section they want and grabbing the one thing they came in here for. Maybe they think the same approach will get us to try all those new "features" we didn't ask for.

LG promises to make home appliance software upgradeable to take on new tasks

Re: A clothes drier that adapts itself to prevailing conditions

Does come in handy when you live in basically two rooms mind. I've definitely had apartments where the only possibility to dry clothes was in a combined washer/dryer because there's literally nowhere you could hang them indoors that wouldn't be massively in the way and there was no outside space.

IBM forges entanglement to double quantum simulations by 'cutting up a larger circuit into smaller circuits'

Those are some odd numbers...

Can someone more educated than me explain why they've picked what appear to be totally arbitrary qubit counts?

Mozilla founder blasts browser maker for accepting 'planet incinerating' cryptocurrency donations

Re: Expanding horizons and equations

Who on earth messes that up? That's about the most common form corporate email address format in existence. [e-mail] is almost the archetypal email address!

Re: Expanding horizons and equations

"The pony. He comes."

Samsung adds non fungible token trading app to its tellies

Re: Whaat??

Remember that con fad back in the 80s where you could "Buy a star" and they'd send you a little certificate with a picture of the night sky and "your" star highlighted in it?

This is that.

Thank you, FAQ chatbot, but if I want your help I'll ask for it

Re: How about Toast?

My question is this: Given that God is infinite, and that the universe is also infinite...... would you like a toasted teacake?"

MPs charged with analysing Online Safety Bill say end-to-end encryption should be called out as 'specific risk factor'

openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -iter 10000 -e -k STOPWITHTHISSHIT

Presented for your consideration in base64:

U2FsdGVkX1+152L+bUv0ngnLq4Uw+GJZqjEOGO4IOgFTmpG2W4EQF3kA4Nyvo+K6CBlgo0TVsQ4jssGPUFSa9vKNkUHyIyi8HqjUQKdgTbB0iky+oTMdlcrJkdzlpfxPBMftvD/FJOX81YBVfYSREA==

Just stop. Stop now. Stop.