Posts by spacecadet66

Shiny object syndrome spells doom for many AI projects, warns EPA CIO

> where do we buy one?

The usual places: Gartner, McKinsey, etc.

AI agents get office tasks wrong around 70% of the time, and a lot of them aren't AI at all

Re: > "Open the pod bay doors, HAL," that's agentic AI too.

> No need for anything new and exciting by way of "agentic AI"

...but then how do you get fad-chasing executives and investors to fund your stuff?

Kaseya CEO: Why AI adoption is below industry expectations

Re: so another

Then they'd be silent basically all the time. Which sounds great to me, a guy who, unlike them, works for a living.

Re: So basically...

"No. No. It's the children who are wrong."

2 in 5 techies quit over inflexible workplace policies

Re: curious to see how they arrange it so that WFH boosts "a sense of community"

I wish I had a nickel for every colleague who ever saw me in the office with headphones on and a death stare into the monitor, and rather than interpreting this to mean "fuck off", interpreted it to mean "please come talk to me about college football, cars, your vacation, or another subject in which I have no interest and which does not bear on our work."

Not to mention everyone who ever came up to my desk to tell me they just sent me an email. Thanks, I had no other way of knowing!

Credible nerd says stop using atop, doesn't say why, everyone panics

Re: "You might want to stop running atop."

Not how the real world works, but thanks for stopping by.

Re: "You might want to stop running atop."

Not the same situation at all: Kroll is a serious security professional who knows what she's talking about as a rule.

Ex-Googler Schmidt warns US: Try an AI 'Manhattan Project' and get MAIM'd

My own estimation is that, in the remaining two to four decades I might reasonably have left, the USA and China are both about equally likely to develop AGI, and in turn are both about as likely to do so as Westeros or the Shire.

Are you cooler than ex-Apple design guru Sir Jony Ive?

Re: Metal

"War Pigs" though has that moment where Ozzy rhymes "masses" with "masses" which feels like biting on aluminum foil.

Hey programmers – is AI making us dumber?

Re: Is AI making us dumber?

Bit like glue for some reason.

Microsoft boffins promise entire game worlds made from AI slop

Re: WTF is that even?

I'm gonna guess a careless copypasta of the original article, which being an academic paper would have had footnotes in it, something like "music [59] or video [60]."

Techie cleaned up criminally bad tech support that was probably also an actual crime

I was expecting this to end "...one day, he came in and the computer was gone. So was the desk."

IT job market is still shrinking but not as quickly as last year

As a developer I know a lot of developers, including myself, who would prefer not to have a jumped-up autocorrect foisted onto them.

Re: Don't worry....

> she complained that turning up for work was interfering with her social life.

I mean, that's probably accurate.

Shove your office mandates, people still prefer working from home

Bully for you, and for the rest of the 0.001% of employed people who love their job. For most people, work is a way to make a living, to be made as tolerable as possible. You're welcome to go in the office if it makes you happy, but don't try and tell us that makes it right for everyone.

Apple auto-opts everyone into having their photos analyzed by AI for landmarks

...you doing OK, buddy?

> If it all works as claimed, and there are no side-channels or other leaks

Two mighty big "if"s there.

Are you better value for money than AI?

> Are you better value for money than AI?

Yes. Next question.

> why recruit somebody if an AI can assist lawyers as a virtual paralegal, help academics with their work, or do something as mundane as booking travel?

Maybe if you aren't a complete schmuck and want the job done right?

Apple Intelligence summary botches a headline, causing jitters in BBC newsroom

> everyone knows it's wrong and not our fault

It's absolutely your fault. Did someone else put slop on the air without verifying it first?

Astroscale orbital janitor gets within 15 meters of space junk

Ah, KSP, the game that disabused me of the notion that I was smart.

Altman to Musk: Don't go full supervillain – that's so un-American

> It would be profoundly un-American to use political power to hurt your competitors and advantage your own businesses.

I guess that depends: are we talking about the imaginary America that we were taught about in school, or the one that actually exists between Canada and Mexico?

Brits think AI in the workplace is all chat, no bot for now

Does anyone else think it's ironic that OP dismisses the survey on the grounds that (a) the sample size is too small and also (b) the results don't agree with the handful of businesses they've personally worked with?

Win a slice of XP cheese if you tell us where Microsoft should put Copilot next

Re: I'm hoping they will put it in the design offices of clothing manufacturers

A corollary of Rule 34 states that, for all X, there exists a person Y such that X is Y's fetish.

Re: I think it would wonderful if...

MS might be interested, but you'd have to explain certain concepts to them like "shovel" and "physical labor".

US Army should ditch tanks for AI drones, says Eric Schmidt

Did Schmidt just somehow make it to this point without ever once watching a Terminator movie? And were there no eight-year-olds around him to explain why this is a bad idea? Why are these people obsessed with creating the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus?

FBI created a cryptocurrency so it could watch it being abused

Re: "long since proven to be American comedian and provocateur Andy Kaufman"

Yeah, that's what Kaufman/Nakamoto wants you to believe.

Re: “false promises of profits in the crypto markets”

If I had to pick an alphabet-soup agency behind Bitcoin, I might guess the IRS sooner than the CIA. "Please, do all your money laundering through this total non-honeypot."

Seriously, though, applying Occam's Razor, I think it's most likely that Nakamoto was a single person acting for ideological (libertarian and/or cypherpunk) reasons, not part of an organized operation. But if you want to spread the story that he was actually Andy Kaufman, I would be very happy about that.

Re: “false promises of profits in the crypto markets”

Satoshi Nakamoto (long since proven to be American comedian and provocateur Andy Kaufman) posted the first block of the Bitcoin chain on January 3, 2009. I haven't been able to find out what exact time, at least not within the confines of the amount of work I'm willing to put into this bit. So let's just round to the nearest day and call it 5,760 days even since then.

There are 8,294,400 minutes in 5,760 days. Applying Barnum's Constant (one sucker born/minute), there are likewise 8,294,400 new suckers who came of age in that time. 8.3 million marks might not be a lot compared to the peak of blockchain frenzy, but it's still enough to support a sizeable ecosystem of grifters.

Eric Schmidt: Build more AI datacenters, we aren't going to 'hit climate goals anyway'

> i dont waste 10 - 20 hours a week in traffic or trains or buses, ... looking at tictoc...

And neither do I. That's one thing you and I have in common. The difference between us is, I can read a sentence written in my native language and understand what it means.

I'm bailing out of this argument now, though, you can tell yourself you won if you want. Gold star for you.

> Are you going to retract this statement ?

Nope! Are you going to work on your reading comprehension and logical reasoning? (Rhetorical question.)

I haven't owned a car since 2000. I do have a Zipcar account, I think I last used that three or four years ago.

I also didn't say that everyone needs to spend their time driving.

But please keep congratulating yourself on how clever you are: you must be, you can read things in posts that people didn't even write.

What you've described here isn't "big city" life. It's suburban and country life that involves driving everywhere.

Re: Drinking the Kool-Aid

If you get to this level of wealth and power, you tend to be surrounded with people who aren't willing to say things like "bad idea" or "actually you're wrong".

Incumbent congressman not turning up to debates? Train an AI on his press releases

> A spokesperson for the Hensel for Congress campaign told The Register that the chatbot was "designed to provide straightforward, factual responses based solely on publicly available data from Beyer's official sources."

The question is, did they know this was a lie when they said it or not? Hensel doesn't know how to create an LLM that guarantees "straightforward, factual responses". Nobody does.

Cops love facial recognition, and withholding info on its use from the courts

Well. nobody could have seen this coming.

Apart from anyone with a passing familiarity with American police, anyway.

FBI claims corrupt LA cops helped crypto CEO's cash grab

Re: Los Angeles

They did. "Training Day" (2001), starring Ethan Hawke as the idealistic fresh-faced rookie LAPD cop, and Denzel Washington as the veteran who corrupts him. Of course, that movie came out 23 years ago, so no doubt the LAPD has cleaned house since then. /s

Re: Los Angeles

I have said for a long time that, if a cop is convicted of a crime, they should be sentenced more harshly than a non-cop who committed the same crime. If the crime had any hint of abuse of their official authority, lose the keys.

It's never going to happen, though.

Now Dell salespeople must be onsite five days a week

Re: AI will solve it

> AI will solve it

Sometimes all you have to read is the title of a post to realize someone doesn't know what they're talking about.

Re: Back to the old ways

Won't work, anyone seeing a suit jacket will assume the chair can't be mine.

Re: Start your downvotes!

These people are actually rife with achievements: walking around with a serious facial expression and a piece of paper, scheduling meetings without agendas "to touch base" or "just to sync up", and ensuring everyone knows how busy they are.

Re: Start your downvotes!

> It is up to the company to decide the work rules based on what they think is best OVERALL for the company, and up to employees to decide if they wish to earn money by working under those rules.

Or, if they have a tiny little trace of initiative, they can push back on a policy they don't like, such as say by trying to publicize something the company would rather hush up. You don't actually have to take whatever your employer gives you just because they're your employer.

FTC sues five AI outfits – and one case in particular raises questions

If lying about your product's capabilities is illegal, then there goes the entire gen AI sector and about half of the rest of the tech industry, and good riddance.

AI bills can blow out by 1000 percent: Gartner

Re: "It is really easy to waste money on generative AI"

To quote a great sage of our time, "It takes two to lie, Marge, one to lie and one to believe it."

Re: Plus ca change...

The difference is that ISDN, databases, and The Cloud (TM) are all fit for the purpose for which they were invented.

> Organizations adopting AI need to learn how to manage the emotional and monetary costs the tech creates, while also worrying about capturing productivity benefits, according to analyst firm Gartner.

This has inspired me to come up with the following marketing slogan for Gen AI: "GEN AI: It's expensive and people hate it, but at least you'll get bad results!"

To patch this server, we need to get someone drunk

Re: 'Exit interview'

The best approach I've ever heard to exit interviews is to wait until five or ten minutes before it starts, then regretfully cancel. Something's come up. And of course tomorrow I won't be working here anymore, so darn, guess we missed our chance.

Have we stopped to think about what LLMs actually model?

Re: How high dimensional is your vector space?

Someone call the editorial board of Nature, I don't care that it's Saturday evening, this guy cracked the secret of human intelligence. /s

But also, GMGO: Garbage Method, Garbage Out.

I've been waiting a couple of years to say this so it is with some glee that I finally write the following:

What do you mean, "we"? Some of us said it was vastly overblown since day one.