Posts by Doctor Syntax

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

Now you've pushed me into an area familiar from long ago - composing formal witness statements based on scientific evidence. About 40 years ago a colleague and I fantasised about a system into which we could feed data and get out terms ranging from "Could not be..." via "Not entirely inconsistent with..", "Consistent with.." etc to "Is...".

Shortly after that I went for a job interview including a psychological assessment which consisted of a tick-box questionnaire. As far as I could make out the processes was as follows. The questions, which were not as context free as the systems devisers probably thought, were weighted for various traits. The system carried out a multidimensional analysis based on this and then attempted to fit a further set of axes such as creativity on this space. Finally it spat out a series of (in my case complementary) phrases based on the scores on those axes.

My colleague and I were very impressed by this. But I still didn't get the job.

Re: say the unsayable

The PR industry has, of course, used such a system for years. Tell it what has befallen your company and it will select appropriate meaningless phrases from its stock of "Only a few users/customers were/are affected", "We take your security very seriously" etc.

Of course hindsight says 10 years. It's always been 10 years.

"AI-powered system designed to help people write punchier documents more quickly."

A system which provides the writer with anodyne words & phrases might succeed with "more quickly" but will certainly fail with "punchier".

"We are only probably 10 per cent of the journey in [artificial intelligence]"

But we'll get there in 10 years.

Re: Not a good suggestion

In fact "landlords" are not necessarily property owners. We still refer to pub tenants as landlords.

Also, where property is sublet the occupant's landlord won't be the owner.

"Our technology is always improving, and we don't yet (and may never) have a complete solution to identifying and mitigating all unwanted word associations and biases."

Not adding unwanted words and phrases would be a good start.

Your AI can't tell you it's lying if it thinks it's telling the truth. That's a problem

"programmatic fraudsters intent on deceiving the advertising industry"

There's something inescapably self-referential about that clause.

"This problem isn't unique to ML. It plagues chip design, bathroom scales, and prime ministers."

With Prime Ministers it's easy to tell when they're lying. Their lips move.

In IT, no good deed ever goes unpunished

The company could have been Regonomised to Won't.

SoftBank aims to keep control of Arm after IPO – report

So you'd buy shares in ARM when SoftBank remain in complete control?

If they didn't reckon on getting as much as they wanted by floating it properly what are they going to get by this attempt at having their cake and eating it?

Not to dis your diskette, but there are some unexpected sector holes

Re: Love "Duh!" moments! It's the techie life that chose me!

"If it's important to you, get a trusted non-brown-nosing friend or three to proof read it for you."

One of the first jobs I was given as a research assistant was checking the proofs - page proofs - of a paper for the Irish equivalent of Proc. Roy Soc. This was in the days if physical type so if it got to page proofs corrections were almost forbidden because of the risk of changing the pagination.

The paper was about sea level changes so it contained a god number of elevations which had been surveyed in imperial measure with the metric equivalents in brackets. I checked a conversion. I was wrong. I checked another. That was wrong. The whole lot were wrong.

This was from one of the authors' PhD thesis. To get to that stage it had got past his supervisor (my new boss and the co-author), his external examiner, the rewriting as a paper, the journal editors, the journal's referees and the proof-reading of the galleys.

Re: Love "Duh!" moments! It's the techie life that chose me!

When I was starting out QUB had a couple of support staff (PhD students probably) who provided a couple of hours support a day. Several time I'd solved a problem by explaining it them. That was a more useful lesson to learn than solving the actual problems.

I doubt c50 years of print-through will have done it any good. Because QUB computing access was card-based in those days* I got the tape transferred to boxes of cards as a special job. It eventually got transferred onto floppies via VAX and Kermit.

*There was an individual HD allocation of 100k ICL 24bit words available.

Re: You were lucky

Colossus and its predecessor, the [Heath] Robinson kept the tape in continuous motion, read it optically and used the impulses from reading the sprocket holes as what we'd now call the clock.

Yes, that's a classic that ranks alongside Etch-A-Sketch. And look at the date! It's over quarter of a century old!

I had to buy one of those click of death type drives to retrieve my daughter's Hons. thesis. It was the only time it was ever used.

Doubly correct - probably 7. And if it was a reel of paper tape big enough to fit that much FORTRAN source I wouldn't be wondering where it was, it would be impossible to miss.

Re: Closest I've seen...

Avoid type I.

Re: Closest I've seen...

"and the cleaners couldn't use any of the other sockets even if they did unplug something."

That wouldn't stop them unplugging something to find out.

Re: You were lucky

Most tape equipment drove the tape via the sprocket holes. Colossus didn't, it drove it via a roller mechanism & just used the sprocket holes for timing.

Probably one of the engineers had told him that.

I wonder - if that's not a Dilbert Scott Adams has missed a trick.

Somewhere I probably still have a 5*-track ICL tape with the source code of CLUSTAN on it. I wonder if that could be read somewhere. Actually, I probably have the same on floppies somewhere; same thing applies.

* IIRC

Re: Such memories...

You could have cut notches into the other sides to give yourself more opportunities.

Re: Such memories...

"There are eight ways of inserting a diskette into a drive. Only one is interesting."

Ancient proverb.

Hive ransomware affiliate zeros in on Exchange servers

Re: Its The Open Group Who Dunnit

"It is sad to note that Exchange was originally developed by The Open Group - the holders of the UNIX trademark."

Could you elaborate on that a little.

AIUI Microsoft started out developing their own Unix port, Xenix and initially used its email system internally. It's a long time since I used Xenix but I think that server would have been sendmail. They then developed Exchange as their own server and migrated away from Xenix. https://web.archive.org/web/20050507010335/http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/itsolutions/intranet/build/exchgdep.mspx

They migrated away from Xenix in more senses than one. Once they started developing their own Windows-based server they sold Xenix to its major distributor, the Santa Cruz Operation which became SCO and continued to develop it. Xenix and SCO were both good Unix implementations but started to run into competition from Linux. My experience of the SCO OpenServer and early Linux suggested to me that if SCO were to price Openserver competitively the difference in quality would have blown Linux out of the water.

It's an interesting thought as to what that would also have done to Microsoft Server as well. Certainly SCO, particularly with Informix or similar RDBMS based products was a the basis of some good small business systems in the '90s, SCO on PC hardware having largely displaced the likes of NCR Towers and the like.

SCO were eventually taken over by a business that thought it had a golden opportunity to sue IBM and maybe Linux users over IBM's contribution to Linux. It didn't go well. I don't remember the exact corporate history; ISTR Caldera, a Linux distributor, AttachMate and the remnants of Netware were all involved. Novell had acquired Unix IP but transferred the trademarks to X/Open, one of the forerunners of The Open Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX#History

It appears to me that it is an extreme stretch of the imagination to allege that The Open Group had any responsibility for Excahange. Did any code from Sendmail even make its way into Exchange?

US Space Force unit to monitor region beyond Earth's geosynchronous orbit

Re: For those wondering "Why?"

"Please explain the advantages of the new organisation."

It got a political announcement, a name, a new (or nearly new) logo, job titles and press conferences. Isn't that enough?

Elon Musk says he can get $46.5bn to buy Twitter

Re: The remaining $25.5 billion will be financed by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays...

You missed out a word from the first sentence: "yet".

Re: The remaining $25.5 billion will be financed by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays...

"From the point of view of the banks, it's a good deal."

That would depend on how much they're invested in Tesla & Space X. If he sld bit of that their share price would go down.

SAP to take €130m hit on withdrawing tech support from Russia

"SAP has reaffirmed its 2022 outlook for revenue, despite seeing a €130 million ($141 million) reduction resulting from its decision to withdraw cloud services and on-prem software support from Russian customers. etc."

£?

Re: Hang on.

And send Oracle & Microsoft in to do licence audits.

Engineers up the torque to get Lucy's solar array latched

"It will have its first Earth flyby and gravity assist in October"

Send Elon up with a spanner to fix it.

Oracle users fail to get that moving apps to cloud means business transformation – Gartner

Re: Customization

"often the custom code is what gives the business an advantage"

Sometimes it's actually essential to the business.

Re: Incredible

How is it that nobody among those CEOs called up Larry and said "Are you done fucking with my business ? I've got money to make and markets to corner, I don't have time to waste lining your wallet" ?

If they were going to do that wouldn't they have done a long time ago?

Former NHS AI leader joins US spy-tech firm Palantir

Re: The silence of the MPs

Have you actually drawn your MP's attention to this? Unless they understand the issues this will look just like BAU for the revolving door.

British motorists will be allowed to watch TV in self-driving vehicles

Re: Too early.

Some people deal well with edge cases and some not at. That doesn't alter the fact that evolution has brought basic ability to a higher standard than you believe.

Re: Clippy behind the wheel

OK, try the opposite. When is it not safe to drive at the speed limit? That's one that calls the whole issue of speed limits into question. "We" set speed limits on the assumption that we can do better than the driver on the spot and yet in adverse conditions "we" expect the driver on the spot to set a safe speed that's lower than the speed limit. So what's the basis for that assumption?

In any difficult situation relating to driving it seems that it's the driver, on the spot, seeing the situation, feeling how the car responds to steering and breaking input, that is to be relied on to make the best decision.

"a quantum leap forward both for Safety and Climate change."

If by "quantum leap" you mean a step change and not a small one, then the best option is to rejig the way we work to reduce communing, We've just demonstrated that that is possible so why not make it permanent?

Re: Clippy behind the wheel

When you get a long convoy occupying a lane how does another vehicle get to change lane into it or through it, e.g. to get to an exit?

I've lived through quite a number of governments now. I'll concede that Gordon Brown's policy of buying elections and charging the cost to the future (tax on dividends of shares held in pension funds, pretending house prices didn't affect cost of living when setting interest rates, student loans, etc) were dire but not even Blair's* government wasn't as badly stricken with hubris as this one.

*Smirk-on-a-stick's smartest move was stepping aside just as the Browns stuff was about to hit the fan.

Re: Too early.

There are probably some situations that are so out of the ordinary that the only reasonable action to to pull over and try to get a human to help take the blame.

FTFY

Re: Too early.

Drive to the motorway - tell the car what junction you want to get to and relax go to sleep. Not a good way to arrive at your junction.

Re: Too early.

One thing the human brain has evolved to do is calculate intercepts between objects in relative motion. In fact that seems to be a widespread ability in mammalian brains - hunting and prey animals rely on it.

Re: Clippy behind the wheel

if AI reduces those numbers even by a fraction

"If". That's a heavy load for a small word to carry. Consider the number of vehicle miles travelled during that time. When you work miles travelled per accident you're setting the AI a tough challenge.

"If". Aye, there's the rub.

Re: It's a paradigm shift

"Autonomous cars will cope very well with a regular environment. So city centres, motorways. Less so leafy country lanes."

I live in an area of leafy country lanes. Well, not vary leafy; most are bounded by dry stone walls.

Google tests battery backups, aims to ditch emergency datacenter diesel

Re: Can someone do the math for me please?

But lead/acid is so last century.

Re: Can someone do the math for me please?

There's no visible CO2 production when running from a battery.

But batteries are already used in UPSes so all this does is make a longer-lasting UPS. The point of a diesel generator is to back up the UPS when the power-cut lasts longer than the UPS will provide for. In the event of a really lasting power outage the diesel tank can be topped up. How do you pour a few gallons of electricity into a battery?

Putin reaches for nuclear option: Zuckerberg banned

The same expressionless stare.

Re: Well, damn

"Putin hasn't stooped that low yet."

Yes he has. Novichok.

So, what happened with GitHub, Heroku, and those raided private repos?

Re: Bit by bit, we will learn

In ten years time there'll be fresh categories of lessons to learn and that will be in addition to the existing lessons, still unlearned by those who will learn by no teacher other than experience.