Posts by Doctor Syntax

AI companies lick their chops as FCC proposes forcing call center onshoring

Re: The only thing worse than an offshore call centre is a chatbot. And that is what we will get.

The other week I phoned the car dealer to book a service. I got through to a speech activated chatbot which was about as bad as might be expected. I got a text confirmation. Afterwards I realised I'd chosen a bad day and rung again and the call was answered by a human. The chatbot's booking wasn't on the system.

Perhaps this is explained by the fact that the dealership had been taken over by another. The lot who took over was, unfortunately, one I'd decided never to deal with again - once was enough. I'm sure they consider themselves very progressive which means aggressive sales spam. If I'd known that was on the cards I'd not even have bought that make of car.

"Waitrose offer a better service proposition, but at a higher average price, that gains them 4-5% market share"

To get market share it helps to have shops. Their store locator returns a blank screen on my preferred browser with javascript enabled by default - not exactly a good way to gain customers. The nearest one is at a motorway service station, far enough away already, and the rest miles further than that. I wonder why they have a poor market share.

So not, you're not going to get improved customer service through this. Not until some bright spark realises it would be a USP.

UK government admits Capita pension portal was crapita at launch

Re: Crapita has a crysal ball apparently

It certainly has balls. Less sure bout the crystal bit.

"in conjunction with the Cabinet Office, it had agreed to split the functionality between December 1 and the end of March before go-live"

When exactly did this agreement happen? November 30th? 2 minutes before go-live?

BOFH: Are you ready to raise our expense account limits now?

"Why does X need to be repaired?"

"It's about to be broken."

"How?"

I'm going to beat you over the head with it."

Re: Tip yourself - on a Friday

No, the tip is for extra incrimination. It's just the nail stuck through the end of the stick.

Re: obviously

Nah, power is useless if spread to thinly.

Engineer sabotaged hardware then complained when it didn't work

That depends on what components got cooked.

That's not cool.

HP stuffs OpenAI LLM into new laptops in bid for small biz

Re: can we find another name?

Should add that the router is not that supplied by the ISP.

Re: A solution in search of a problem

Oops. Civic.

Re: can we find another name?

The laptop on which I'm typing this was purchased with no OS, abd runs Devuan (no systemd). A good deal of its contents, including my calendar, is synced to my own NextCloud server running on a Pi. My personal email Is hosted on my own domain by a service provider of my own choice (not the ISP) as is the charity's email service I also use.

In what way is that not a Personal Computer?

Re: A solution in search of a problem

Thanks for the reminder to print out the last Covic Soc committee notes in time for tomorrows meeting.

Re: Just another bloatware

|Find someone who sells kit with no installed OS.

"In a demo, an HP rep uploaded a sensitive document to a PC and then asked the IQ bot, which is based on OpenAI’s gpt-oss-20b, to analyze it. He then asked it to help him write an overview of a board meeting he was planning. It did both of these tasks quickly and with great detail.

The rep then showed off..." He hadn't been hustled of the door by this time?

Brit lawmaker targeted by AI deepfake fails to get answers from US Big Tech

I suppose they might well think "If Starmer can get away without answering at PMQs so can we".

Staff too scared of the AI axe to pick it up, Forrester finds

I wonder if here's a third reason, somewhat allied to the first. Staff are a fraid of being personally blamed for all the hallucinations and mistakes.

Digital euro goes full sovereignty mode, US cloud giants not on guest list

Re: Presumably..

Add in some really stiff penalty clauses that are really poison pills.

"The supplier's beneficial ownership must reside within the EU or EEA"

"In the event of the supplier's beneficial ownership becoming resident outside of the EU or EEA the company will, at its own expense, facilitate, within 24 hours, the transfer of the contract, all data, operational facilities and, if appropriate, premises to another company whose beneficial ownership is within the EU or EEA and TUPE the staff to that company for the nominal sum of 1 Euro" (AKA the cheapest and fastest management buyout in history.)

The issue isn't a digital settlement system. Those have existed for years. This isn't, AFAICS, pushing it any further, it's just an attempt to wrest back control from the US for EU settlements and good for them. But why AI?

"However, the AI boat is still in the harbor and this may be a step towards building an AI-enabled payment system based on European technology complying with EU rules and regulations."

Why? Just Why?

Welsh government used Copilot for review to justify closing organization

"The use of Copilot during the review of Industry Wales was limited to producing full, accurate and unbiased transcripts of interviews, analyzing and grouping comments into common themes,"

And did amybody actually check its performance in that? Check in person, that is, and not simply get some other LLM to do it.

GitHub hits CTRL-Z, decides it will train its AI with user data after all

Somewhere, down on the 37th page of the small print you'll find a clause saying that they promise nothing.

Re: Smell that?

"That's desperation."

That's somebody else's computer.

Re: Smell that?

it'll likely be arbitrarily reset to "Opted In"

This is US privacy standards. That should be "Not opted out".

Age checks creep into Linux as systemd gets a DOB field

Re: “ditch it”

Glad you noticed.

Re: systemd-free distros

Which law? It's not just whatever law you're thinking of. It's all the other laws going through various legislatures at the minute and all the ones that bandwagon jumpers are going to come up with in the future. Every eejit legislator who thinks ToTC will get him a few votes is coming up with a fresh one, all different and ALL failing to tackle the underlying problems. They'll do that because it's easier that doing the hard work of actually prosecuting real offences against children.

In my career I've been a small part of the investigation into what turned out to have been long running offences by the staff in a children's' home.

Much later, but still a couple of decades ago, I was involved in the IT side of the implementation of a system which was supposed to ensure that the sort of offenders in the Kincora case couldn't get to work with children.

We're still seeing prosecutions which, in one way is good because it means that it's sometimes being taken seriously but not often enough. One recent report of a case told how it wasn't prosecuted earlier because when the police caught escaped victims their reports weren't taken seriously and they were sent back to more abuse.

That angers me. It's a problem that's been recognised for decades, is allowed to continue but in the meantime we have those who should be ensuring that effective action is taken faffing around applying their patent nostrums to the fundamental framework of our economy.

Re: systemd-free distros

We are not dealing with one law, we are dealing with several, all drawn up by different legislatures. You won't be able to pick and choose which one you meet, you'll need to meet all, including the most draconian if only because the least will be too ineffective to achieve the proponents' aims. The consequence will be everyone using a computer, whether or not they're in these jurisdictions will be expected to hand over PII to identify themselves (whatever that may mean - I leave it as an exercise for yourself to work out what it means and how it might be accomplished) to some outfit with no ability to withstand the attention they'll get due to the data the'll be hoarding. That will happen because the OS will implement it universally to avoid getting sued by these tinpot dictators.

I recognise the problem* but this is not the way to solve it. All too often the response to something which is already illegal is to introduce new legislation instead of enforcing that which exists. In this particular instance it looks rather like introducing a technical offence that's easily defined and prosecuted rather than taking the hard route of prosecuting the actual offence, whatever that might be. That's laziness and useless because it fails to tackle the real issues.

The personal computer and the internet are too fundamental to the modern economy to have this sort of nonsense imposed by the technically ignorant to get us itno that situation.

* I spent about a third of my working life as a forensic biologist. It's a branch for FS that deals largely with assaults both physical and sexual. One of the Lab's cases in my time was the Kincora House boys home - look i up. If it had been my office mate who was in court the morning that case arrived rather than the other way about it might have been myself who became the reporting officer. I did help with the scene work as did all the other biologists.

Re: systemd-free distros

You seem to think there is an existing concept of "child account". There isn't. Just user account. If the concept is to be introduced how do you ensure that children only use a child account? How do you ensure that an administrator creates the appropriate account type?

Ah - a solution. All accounts become child accounts, then there's no way round that.

Don't you see this is where it's all going?

That word "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

"All this does is add a data field...."

And if you believe that's where it will stop it's you who doesn't know anything about the real world and, specifically, salami tactics.

Sleepwalkers!

Re: Well that didn't take long.

No thinks, I'll just stick with Sysv and let services be implemented in shell script as befits an Unix-lookalike.

Re: This is purely performative.

And gender, pronouns, species (on the internet evryone should know if you're a dog).

Re: This is purely performative.

The two explanations are not mutually exclusive.

Re: this is what I don't get

"How does that DOB get to the end point internet based services, there is no standardized API like HTML within these laws."

The requirement would for the OS to provide a standard API.

As fro Devuan, the answer there is simple. As a Devuan user I primarily use the Devuan repository. For anything alse, do you think the FOSS community is going to go along with implementing this on any other download mirrors? Really????

Re: It is *not* required

Yet.

Re: Yup....This root user was born on 1-Jan-1906!!!!

How do They know you're not a child when you use it? And to forestall a possible answer, how do they know you're not lying?

Re: Yup....This root user was born on 1-Jan-1906!!!!

Feb 30th

Re: Yup....This root user was born on 1-Jan-1906!!!!

I'm quite sure there'd be a library that would implement the age/DoB API by returning a credible but random value on each call. Track tha.

Jen Easterly, cybersecurity's 'relentless optimist,' hopes feds come back to RSAC next year

"we're now at a point where you cannot meaningfully have and deploy cyber capabilities without integrating AI"

Id' have thought keeping it out would have been more to the point. If an insider presents the greatest threat, even by carelessness, as we're often told, what about an insider actually inside the system?

Chemists concoct nail polish that lets clawed humans use touch screens

Re: Solving a long-solved problem

Also repair of damaged PCB traces.

Solving a long-solved problem

Conductive paint is still on the market.

Re: Knuckles unknown?

If they really need force several knuckles migh be OK but a hammer is better.

Enterprise PCs are unreliable, unpatched, and unloved compared to Macs

Re: Edge

HSBC? Not surprised. Things have clearly not got better since I ditched them about 20 years ago. I wouldn't have expected them to.

Re: Edge

Ironically - or maybe not - another Chromium patch arrives while I was on this thread. There's a reason why it's one of my last choices for picky web sites.

LiteLLM loses game of Trivy pursuit, gets compromised

Re: Pick your poison

"an apt metaphor"

Apt, OTOH, will remain trusted.

Remote or not, workers are drifting back toward the city

I hope so too but these little reminders are useful. City-based commuting simply isn't a sustainable way to run an economy no, indeed, a planet.

Re: Doesn't surprise me

Being of a geriatric persuasion myself I'd hate to be commuting into big cities these days. As it happens I was driven to the far side of Manchester the other day. Mancunian Way far worse than I remembered and all those multi-story hives which serve as homes! OTOH we were on the way to an opera and you can't get more metropolitan than that (Glyndebourne and the like excepted) so village living isn't really isolation.

Our driver, BTW, was our daughter who, as I've said before, works at home for a non-UK company which is, it seems, entirely WFH-based - that way they can and do recruit high quality staff world-wide.

I wonder if the sudden increase in petrol prices have already made this report look a bit dated.

Nothing screams casual career pivot like joining the UK Ministry of Defence for a cool £162K

Re: Only for the pension?

Things seem to have changed since my day. It was 1.25% of final salary (as average of last 2 years of service) but taken at 60. Shit salaries, no perks, no bonuses, but shit pensions.