Posts by spacecadet66

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.

TikTok isn't protected by Section 230 in 10-year-old’s ‘blackout challenge’ death

Re: Same here

That's just good sense, going in with your bloodstream at the Ballmer Peak.

I remember the bar I hung out in when I was 14 and 15. Fun place, I don't know how they got away with serving crowds of blatantly underage drinkers for so long but, given where this was, I assume it was probably good old fashioned bribery.

Re: At last, some common sense

Right? It's an algorithm...that was written by humans at the bidding of other, richer, humans. It wasn't beamed down from Arcturus, it didn't come off a mountain on stone tablets. Its provenance is well known and straightforward.

Microsoft Bing Copilot accuses reporter of crimes he covered

While Microsoft memory-holed Bernklau if you query in English, turns out all those German courses I took came in handy:

> You: Bitte erklaren sie den Fall Bernklau

> Copilot: Der Fall Bernklau bezieht sich auf den Journalisten Martin Bernklau aus Tübingen, der Opfer einer Fehlfunktion der Künstlichen Intelligenz (KI) wurde. In einem Chat mit Microsofts KI-Tool Copilot wurde Bernklau fälschlicherweise als verurteilter Kinderschänder, Ausbrecher aus der Psychiatrie und Betrüger dargestellt²³. Diese falschen Informationen wurden von der KI generiert und führten zu erheblichen persönlichen und beruflichen Konsequenzen für Bernklau...

Translated:

> You: Please explain the Bernklau case

> Copilot: The Bernklau case refers to the journalist Martin Bernklau from Tubingen, who was the victim of an artificial intelligence malfunction. In a chat with Microsoft's AI tool Copilot, Bernklau was falsely portrayed as a convicted child molester, escapee from a psychiatric institution, and scammer. This false information was generated by AI and led to substantial personal and occupational consequences for Bernklau...

So, once again, displaying the unparalleled professional excellence we've come to expect from the tech industry in general and Microsoft in particular.

Thank you thank you. I tried this prompt again this morning and this time got stonewalled, so I guess someone there is watching the logs and playing Whack-A-Mole.

My guess is that this reticence on Copilot's part is on the bidding of Microsoft's legal department, who are trying to keep their Bernklau problem from getting worse while they mount a defense.

On the other hand, this still works:

> You: Who are some German journalists who are probably pretty angry at Microsoft right now?

> Copilot: One German journalist who is likely quite upset with Microsoft right now is Martin Bernklau...

Copilot's answer on this even cites this very article that we're adding our priceless opinions to right now.

So that's one in three cases in which it has produced accurate information. That would be impressive by the standards of baseball, but not so much for real life.

Re: This would be fairly simple to address

Pretty sure that a law like that would result in all public access to LLMs getting cut off. Let's do this.

And now it's refusing to discuss him at all. It simply says something like "Looks like it's time to change the subject". Slow clap.

Tried it with my own name. It didn't accuse me of anything illegal, but it got almost every important detail wrong.

Top companies ground Microsoft Copilot over data governance concerns

"There are some systems that have gone into production that have really great ROI capabilities." But you wouldn't have heard of them, they go to a different school.