Posts by Fonant

Ghost gun legislation casts shadow over 3D printing

Hang on a minute!

I thought that Americans liked guns? They certainly seem to have a lot of them.

Is this really about protecting the profits of gun manufacturers and dealers, perhaps?

GitHub ponders kill switch for pull requests to stop AI slop

"AI" - lots of "A", absolutely zero "I".

GitHub propose, among other things:

triage tools, possibly AI-based

Yeah, because throwing "AI" at a problem that is completely "AI"-caused is really going to work well...

AI security startup CEO posts a job. Deepfake candidate applies, inner turmoil ensues.

Quite agree. An interview should not be trying to catch someone out, and it shouldn't be a rigid set of questions either. Start with a scenario and see where the conversation goes.

A good interview should discover what the candidate's thought processes are for solving some problem they haven't come across before. What experience do they have of similar problems? How deep is their understanding of the issues? Do they enjoy problem-solving of this kind? Are they willing to make mistakes and then learn from them? Can they communicate effectively in the problem domain? Would they fit in with the existing team?

This is all human judgement, something that "AI" cannot do, even if it ever does become "intelligent".

Davos discussion mulls how to keep AI agents from running wild

LLMs are not AI

LLMs are not intelligent, they're statistical pattern matching systems that generate bullshit that may or may not be correct or true.

Here's an idea to make LOTS of money: invent a complicated but impressive bullshit generator, make $$$ from building and improving it, then make more $$$ from selling add-ons that make it more accurate, more correct, or less dangerous.

In general, the best solution to a problem is the simplest solution to the problem. The rush to use AI is just making everything more and more complicated and impossible to understand.

Apple, Google pulled into Grok controversy as campaigners demand app store takedown

Re: Facilitating Access to NCII and CSAM

Grok can't do anything that a skilled artist can't already do in photoshop, it just makes it easier for people to do.

Grok makes it easy, and quick, for anyone to generate realistic abusive images of other people. That is the problem.

UK backtracks on digital ID requirement for right to work

I think the phrase was "once the IT systems are in place" not "once the IT systems are fully working"...

Re: Sometimes U-Turns are an improvement

By controlling the money.

They already do: the cost of living crisis isn't unsolvable, the ultra-rich could just pay a bit more in taxes. It's just that the ultra-rich benefit from people having to work multiple jobs for minimal pay. They like having more money than they can spend, it makes them feel important.

Until a revolution against the elites happens...

IBM's AI agent Bob easily duped to run malware, researchers show

Re: If only there was a way to run a separate process...

All based on the critical misunderstanding that LLMs have any sort of Artificial Intelligence. They don't, they're expensive pattern matching machines.

HSBC app takes a dim view of sideloaded Bitwarden installations

Re: So is anyone actually happy with their bank's digital offerings?

Starling have been good for me. Personal and free business banking, with an API that I use for reconciling with my hand-written book-keeping system.

NatWest has a terrible app, and should generally be avoided, IMHO.

Humongous 52-inch Dell monitor will make you feel like king of the internet with four screens in one

Re: Pilots

My son has just taken delivery of a VR headset for flight simulation. The big monitor on his sim rig is potentially going now...

GOV.UK to unleash AI chatbot on confused citizens

Since generative AI is essentially bullshit[*], why does the government think that providing bullshit as answers to questions is a Good Idea?

[*] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5

Electric cars no more likely to flatten you than the noisy ones, study finds

Kia e-Niro reversing sounds are illegal/illegal!

Our Kia e-Niro has sounds when it's moving slower than 20 km/h.

The nice thing is that it has a switch to turn the sounds off, really good at night or in slow-moving traffic jams.

The illegal thing is that it has a "beep beep" sound when reversing, as well as the "engine" noise. The "beep beep" is illegal in the UK for a reversing car. But if you turn the sounds off it's illegal because it doesn't have the required "engine" noise.

FWIW the "beep beep" is incredibly annoying, we can hear another Kia with the same noise several houses down the road! So we turn it off as a matter of course when reversing out of our driveway.

UK pushes ahead with facial recognition expansion despite civil liberties backlash

"FRT" is presumably pronounced "Fart" ("F", "Ar","T")?

Death to one-time text codes: Passkeys are the new hotness in MFA

Plus-addressing sometimes works for this:

[e-mail] (commonly delivers to [e-mail])

Re: One dot login

True.

I happen to be a Director of two separate limited companies. Companies House now require their accounts to be linked to "One Login", using email address as the unique key. Since I use a different email address for each company, I now have two "One Login" accounts, both verified with the same passport. So for me it's more like "Two Logins".

Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold

Re: declaring DDoS to be a terrorist activity

Terrorism is bad except when it isn't.

One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter (it's usually men).

See: Nelson Mandela, The Suffragettes (OK, they weren't men), etc.

Firefox adds AI Window, users want AI wall to keep it out

Vivaldi.

Made by the people who originally built Opera.

De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now

Tried for HP/Sun/IBM/SiliconGraphics

I remember the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) for early unix workstations, an attempt at a standard windowing environment for workstations from HP, Sun, IBM and Silicon Graphics. It was "OK".

Nerdy people like customising their UIs, which is why some like me love Vivaldi as a browser. So nerdy people will always result in a proliferation of desktop UIs.

Help desk boss fell for ‘Internet Cleaning Day’ prank - then swore he got the joke

Vague memory: 1986, working with a network (I think coaxial ethernet) of HP workstations running X windows. Where windows would gain focus just by moving the cursor over them. Used to write little scripts to send X commands to the next-door terminal to move a colleague's mouse cursor down by a pixel a second, and see how long it took them to notice.

Amazon complains that Perplexity's agentic shopping bot is a terrible customer

Re: Random money maker for idiots !!!

Or, perhaps even shop at a specialist store (online or IRL) and actually ask a human for advice if you need it.

I will use Amazon as a search engine for "what products are usually available" and "what are they called?", and then will always buy from a different shop. Amazon's near-monopoly does not need to be encouraged. I'm old enough to remember when they only sold books!

Tesla board wants to grant Musk $1T in stock, Norway wealth fund says nope

There can be no practical reason why Elon Musk (or anyone else, for that matter) NEEDS this amount of money for living and pleasure.

We have a growing problem in the world: the vast majority of monetary wealth is held by just a few ultra-rich people. This causes two major problems:

1) These people have more financial power than whole countries. So they can easily undermine democracy. Then they can change laws so that they can become even richer. This positive feedback loop is very difficult to break.

2) The money the ultra-rich are hoarding is not available to keep countries' economies working. Whole populations are starved of cash that could otherwise be used to pay for public services, and support for those in need. This is why countries are imposing tax rises on populations who have seen living standards fall.

AI's trillion dollar deal wheel bubbling around Nvidia, OpenAI

Hybrid Warfare?

I expect Putin is quietly smirking as Russia's only serious enemy destroys itself from within. Helped enormously by Trump and his love of orange and gold.

The return on that money is going to be fantastic.

Quite literally. As in, "only exists in fantasy".

The sooner this bubble bursts, the better.

O2 cranks prices mid-contract, essentially telling customers to like it or lump it

Cancel and keep the phone?

Perhaps the rules should be that if the contract price increases, the customer should be able to cancel the contract without exit fees, and without needing to finish paying for any phone that was included in the deal.

That would focus the minds of the mobile companies suddenly hiking bills beyond reason.

Smile! Uncle Sam wants to scan your face on the way in – and out

Re: Face for Radio

The issue is the false positives (and false negatives).

AI browsers face a security flaw as inevitable as death and taxes

Vivaldi FTW

I use Vivaldi.

A browser written by people who know what they're doing (the ones who originally wrote Opera), and who value privacy.

It doesn't have any LLM bullshit in it, but is heavily customisable to make it efficient for anyone's needs :)

Digital ID is now less about illegal working, more about rummaging through drawers

Re: All we need now...

Zack Polanski is pretty impressive. The Green Party are progressive, tolerant, and socialist. Their membership is booming, so there is hope.

BBC probe finds AI chatbots mangle nearly half of news summaries

"When people don't know what to trust, they end up trusting nothing at all, and that can deter democratic participation."

Which is EXACTLY WHY the ultra-rich are sooooo keen on forcing us all to use AI for everything. "AI" is not only bullshit, it's DELIBERATELY bullshit.

Clippy rises from the dead in major update to Copilot and its voice interface

Re: "the AI making so many decisions"

I suspect it isn't the "AI" making the decisions, but the websites and services simply applying defaults.

Otherwise, it's all just highly plausible bullshit. I wouldn't trust it to plan an expensive holiday!

China's CR450 bullet train clocks 453 km/h in pre-service tests

Serious acceleration!

"China's maglev train recently reached a speed in testing of 650 km/h in seven seconds"

That's 2.6 G - make sure all passengers are sitting down and facing the direction of travel before attempting this!

"China's maglev train recently reached a speed in testing of 650 km/h in seven seconds"

That's 2.6 G!

Make sure all passengers are seated and facing the direction of travel before attempting this.

Serious acceleration!

650 km/h in seven seconds

That's 2.6 G - make sure all the passengers are sitting down and facing the direction of travel before attempting this!

A simple AI prompt saved a developer from this job interview scam

Re: "the faker posed as the chief blockchain officer"

Thank you for introducing me to Jenny and F.O.C.U.S.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9O0G00pdoYk

Boris Johnson confesses: He's fallen for ChatGPT

In Other News

Bullshit Merchant loves Bullshit Generating Machine!

Britain's AI gold rush hits a wall – not enough electricity

A benefit of AI, at last!

While the bullshit-generation is exciting and impressive, it's of very limited use. But the hype has forced politicians to think seriously about how the UK needs to power itself in the next few decades: a Very Good Thing because otherwise these long-term issues are mostly ignored by 5-years-max Parliaments.

Hopefully it'll go:

1. AI hype.

2. Build power capacity for AI.

3. AI bubble bursts.

4. Lots of cheap power available for other things!

X to combat bot problem by showing more info about users

In an effort to help human readers figure out whether they can trust the source of information (or opinion) posted on X

Talk about shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. Is Musk going to ban LLM-generated slop, too?

Q: "Can I trust information posted on X?"

A: "No, of course not!"

Ofcom fines 4chan £20K and counting for pretending UK's Online Safety Act doesn't exist

Yeah, I'm quite surprised that Ofcom is still making a noise about this. Surely they realise they haven't a hope of extracting any money from 4chan? Would be much better for Ofcom to quietly let this "investigation" get forgotten, and focus on investigations where they do have some legal power.

Former UK prime minister Sunak becomes human Clippy for Microsoft, Anthropic

Major was terrible at media appearances, but actually generated some good policies. That was back in the day when politics was still steered by logic and evidence. Brown also had some good ideas.

The waste-of-space Johnson killed off the use of logic, truth, and consistency, and so killed off the Tory party too. There were still sensible Tories around, but Johnson made sure they all left or got kicked out.

Labour seem to think that it's a Good Idea to pander to noisy idiots, tabloid newspapers, and the ultra-rich. So they've forgotten when they're for. They needed to pump big investments into public services, ASAP, but they're apparently happy to let services crash and burn. Schools, hospitals, GPs, prisons, the legal system, transport, water, power, all struggling to survive. We once were a civilised nation.

I'm sure Farage and his xenophobic fascists will sort it all out! /s

I'm hoping that Zack and the Greens can pull off an election win. He's certainly not afraid of Farage and the right.

US PC shipments hit the buffers as Trump’s tariffs take their toll

Re: "fueled by Windows 11 transition and the need to replace an ageing installed base"

Anecdotally, quite a large number of people are already thinking of switching to Linux. Well, certainly more than zero: I have regular requests now for assistance and advice with going Windows 10 to Linux.

My initial advice is to make a bootable USB stick with Linux Mint, and try it out before installing it. The next steps are more tricky, though. Installing involves dual boot, or careful work with disks and partitions, and that gets fiddly to explain. People tend not to have backups of their documents.

So this could be a Good Thing, as people start to take Linux seriously, and discover that it's at least as workable as Microsoft Windows. Even a shift of 10% of home PCs to Linux would provide some much-needed competition in the market.

Hacked Ford screens put anti-RTO slogan above CEO’s face

Re: When you work for the man, you work for the man

This is why advertising is SO important to Capitalism. Without the indoctrination that we all have to keep buying shiny things, we could all relax a bit, work a bit, and enjoy life.

Stop watching and reading adverts, cut right down on the "news", and life becomes much nicer.

UK government says digital ID won't be compulsory – honest

Government's "One Login" isn't one login

I'm a director of two small limited companies. Companies House now require directors to register with a Government One Login account to be linked to their directorship record. Which is done by email address.

The problem is that a Government One Login account can't have more than one email address. So I have had to register TWO "One Login" accounts, validating my identity using exactly the same passport details, so that I could connect them to the two email addresses I use for the two companies I'm a director of.

I wonder whether, should this "Digital ID" system come into effect, I could end up with TWO official IDs?

JetBrains wants to train AI models on your code snippets

JetBrains think that people will PAY MONEY to have an LLM come up with some code that looks plausible, but is based on statistical analysis of an invisible mass of code from unknown third parties?

Please can the "AI" bubble burst sooner rather than later?

Jaguar Land Rover gets £1.5B government jump-start after cyber breakdown

Re: I expect to see a commensurate growth in JLR's profits

Perhaps "once world-leading automotive sector" would be fair?

We do still have Aston Martin, Morgan, Ariel, Briggs, Caterham, McClaren, Ginetta, Noble and Wrightbus with headquarters in the UK.

JLR messed up, yet are being rewarded?

Surely the loans and support should be given to the JLR suppliers, who are suffering through no fault of their own, and not the JLR who (a) messed up and (b) are not about to go bankrupt?

How will JLR use this money? Will they pay their suppliers to supply nothing? Will they order Just-in-Time parts in advance, when they have nowhere to store them?

UK to roll out mandatory digital ID for right to work by 2029

And a number. Eeeek.

"It will make it tougher to work illegally in this country

No it won't - there will still be a thriving supply of "off the record, cash-in-hand" jobs available.

In fact it may well INCREASE the black market for jobs if "on the record" jobs become harder to get.

Brits warned as illegal robo-callers with offshored call centers fined half a million

Ongoing. Bastards.

Had several calls yesterday from a "free loft insulation" company, with oddly Indian-sounding accents and mannerisms. Since they used my fake identity (Fred Smith) and address (a multi-million house in Sandbanks, Poole) I went along with them.

Then a few hours later, a call from an English person from a mobile number, arranging the visit. He insisted that BOTH I and my wife ("joint owners of the house") HAD to be present when the inspector came for the survey. I queried this quite hard, his only explanation was "in case she has any questions". He got my number "from the database" apparently (so not an Indian scam call centre?).

Clearly they wanted to "inspect" and say that essential changes to the insulation needed to be made: then, with both home owners present, they could get signatures to make the work appear completely consensual and legal. It wouldn't surprise me if the "repairs" included lots of spray foam, this instantly ruining the roof and devaluing the property.

I hope they enjoy trying to visit "my" mansion in Dorset!

EU starting registration of fingerprints and faces for short-stay foreigners

Re: Not enough

Holiday Maker != Asylum Seeker

There are different rules if you're fleeing for your life. Thankfully.

Politicos: 'There is a good strong case for government intervention' on JLR cyberattack

There's a difference between:

Government propping up a private profit-making company because they made a Really Bad Decision, just so that employees don't get laid off: this could well lead to other private companies expecting to be bailed out too, if they're "too big to fail".

Government supporting people laid off from a private profit-making company that made a Really Bad Decision. This is a normal, everyday thing: society's safety net for when capitalism goes wrong.

Government nationalising said profit-making company, and investing in it to retain the company's services and employment. Unlikely for the case of JLR, but quite likely for things like those water companies that have (deliberately) got themselves into serious financial trouble.

UK agency makes arrest in airport cyberattack investigation

Re: What I would like to know ...

Probably for the money and the lolz. Could get some nice infamy if he's publicly named.

Perhaps more interesting is HOW he did it. So airports can plug the security holes to stop this happening again.