Posts by Doctor Syntax

Why do younger coders struggle to break through the FOSS graybeard barrier?

Re: Also ...

With the costs of universities today the need for dosh is not a negligible factor.

Re: "As most contributors report, working in FOSS can often lead to a terrible life/work balace."

You could have just said "Not in my experience"

I suspect that might have been a difficult thing to have said.

But backing up to your reluctance to VAT registration - I find that surprising. When I was freelance my clients were VAT registered businesses so would be setting my VAT against their own VAT; in fact thay might have been expecting it and possibly reluctant to deal with somebody who wasn't. The VAT accounting was the simplest bit of the book-keeping (which I just handed over to an accountant anyway) and it meant being able to claim back VAT on any business purchases.

Re: What are the actual demographics?

"it's bringing any developers at all into a mature project."

Maybe mature projects don't really need much input. Fiddling with them just for the sake of it is more likely to annoy users than please them unless there a re a lot of open issues.

Our world faces 'unprecedented' spike in electricity demand

Re: The problem, like Soylent Green...

Nobody gets out of here alive. There are no special cases. I hope this doesn't come as too much of a surprise to you.

Lawyers face judge's wrath after AI cites made-up cases in fiery hoverboard lawsuit

Re: Here we go again

The other side will pick it up as will the judge. If they're presented with a citation they don't recognise they'll look it up. They have to because they'll be expected to comment.

Re: Onwards for AI to greater things

"Given that the quality of people sitting in legislatures"

You don't think that lot are trusted with writing legislation do you? There are professionals who do that job.

Re: Hoo boi...

I very much doubt that there's a company template for such documents other than getting a few recitals in at the start.

Re: Another query made was 'Add a paragraph...'

"Why do lawyers keep all this shelves full of books on the wall behind their desks? Do they never read them?"

They were, at least in my time, wielded in court in the sort of legal argument described although it was usually relatively few - Archbold being the most frequently used as far as I could see. However I'd guess that those few most used books would then send someone off on a long trail through the less frequently used reports.

Re: motion in limine

I tended to find these the most interesting parts of the trial when observed from the body of the court. The lawyers including the judge could be seen doing what I'd class as real intellectual work producing and discussing huge, bookmarked tomes. It seemed unfair to the jurors to be excluded. I never heard of such episodes being given a title of their own but I suppose it sould be necessary to have one to refer by later.

Re: what are you paying for

"can a lawyer sanctioned by the court for citing ficticious cases turn around and sue his or her AI provider for damages?"

Only if they can cite appropriate cases.

Re: what are you paying for

"add a filter in to verify that the cases it comes up with actually exist"

It's one thing to add a filter to pick out stuff that shouldn't be in there but what about the possibility that stuff that should be in there and isn't? If it can make one set of errors it can also make others.

Re: what are you paying for

In this particular case to whom should they say they use AI? The clients? The court? The other side?

There are all sorts of ramifications. It's one thing accepting the consequences for presenting obviously incorrect references in the pleadings. But if the AI conjures up non-existent reference is it going to miss references that should have been found? And if so how will this be discovered - if it's discovered at all. Their clients might lose the case because the AI doesn't find a reference a competent attorney would have known about.

Unless the AI assistant can be relied on to make no errors of omission or commission then it would be wiser not to use it at all.

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

Re: Holy fucking stupid idiot

It was probably necessary to fudge the problem as far s the client was concerned on behalf of the employer - contract at risk. Escalating to the manager would be separate matter.

Re: So many questions…..

Induction and training are no use if they're ignored along with the criminal law.

LibreOffice still kicking at 40, now with browser tricks and real-time collab

Re: All you need

"If VLC can be back, why not Thunderbird?"

You'd need to ask Apple. At a guess Apple aren't content with a 30% cut of free. But as you can download and install LO and TB for Macs for free it's a little extreme to claim they're not available just because you can't pay Apple for them and to then somehow blame it on the projects that developed them.

But with age comes wisdom.

And the power goes off (OK, in the last few months I've started getting a bit obsessive about this for reasons) taking out the router, modemand wifi but the laptop battery keeps going.

Re: LibreOffice was nothing to do with Sun?

It's always a good working assumption.

Ribbon in LO

It's kept decently hidden on account of the Document Foundation being people of good taste.

Re: All you need

"Outlook stinks, but it's cross-platform."

Not really. It's only available on Linux by having an Electron wrapper.

OTOH see https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/installing-thunderbird-on-mac and https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/install-howto/macos/

Re: All you need

A good while back when Mozilla in their infinite wisdom were pushing TBird adrift and there was at least one well argued proposition that the Document Foundation should give it a home. They turned it down on the basis that users should be free to choose their own email client. I thought then, and you have just confirmed it, that they should have done this on the basis that there are users who don't see an office suite as being complete without it.

I doubt they could have been integrated (the various LO applications are all the same executable called with the application name as a parameter). Nevertheless it wouldn't be a bad idea for the two projects to get together and draw up a combined installation bundle.

As for availability on Apple platforms, I wonder how much of that might be due to Apple's sense of amour propre.

Re: All you need

Of the three tools you mention Outlook deserves particular condemnation by defaulting to top-posting.

the flow.

breaks up

Top-posting

Re: All you need

IME Office was not able to display documents produced by Office in a consistent way.

Indeed successive earlier versions of Office produced documents which couldn't be opened, let alone displayed, by even earlier versions so that users were forced onto the upgrade path as soon as they received a document from a user of a later version. The only Word document I've encountered which LO couldn't open could only be opened by the specific version of Word that created it - any other, including later versions, would hang Windows completely.

Any inability of LO to display them correctly is not due to the inability of LO developers but to the deliberate customer abuse by Microsoft. Whether Office users care very much about document appearance let alone consistency is an open question; PDF should produce a frozen version of a document's appearance when the PDF was generated and many published PDFs show a complete indifference to good layout.

US lawmakers press Trump admin to oppose UK's order for Apple iCloud backdoor

"US intelligence sharing with the UK"

The reality is likely to be US intelligence will be delighted to get a share of the product.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion is not an illusion, but it soon might be

Re: Seems to match

"We select the one that looks like me."

Do you?

Re: Seems to match

"Techbros hiring techbros"

Be fair. They deserve each other.

Insurance giant finds claims rep that gives a damn (it's AI)

A new technology. Empathetic weasels.

IBM return-to-office order hits finance, ops teams amid push to dump staff for AI

"We're looking for consultancy about our remote working employees. What experience does IBM have in that area?"

....

"Well, thank you for coming but I don't think your offering will be a good fit with our requirements."

What was that about nobody got fired for buying IBM?

Trump’s cyber chief pick has little experience in The Cyber

New approach: appoint a lawyer and sue hackers.

Arizona laptop farmer pleads guilty for funneling $17M to Kim Jong Un

At least no GM crops, hormones or non-repairable tractors were involved.

UK government insiders say AI datacenters may be a pricey white elephant

Re: EI-AI-OH?

"In what world are even 20 people employed on a server farm, far less an AI farm?"

Security?

Naming competition

When the deserted sites have lost their grid connection, the security post is empty, the signboard is dangling because some of the fixing blots have rusted and more rust is trickling down the walls of the building what are we going to call these site? Starmers, Reeves or Rayners?

AI summaries turn real news into nonsense, BBC finds

Re: "The price of AI's extraordinary benefits"

They must be extraordinary because I don't se any ordinary ones.

Re: I'm sorry, I'll read that again.

You wouldn't like the tinnitus.

On reflection I wonder if the models' input filtering - should there be such a thing - suffers from the Scunthorpe effect.

Re: I'm sorry, I'll read that again.

100% of republicans have a smile on their face today

"Today they are ringing their bells. Tomorrow they will be wringing their hands."

That was my first reaction but the mileage is wrong. IIRC Cotswold Way is >100 miles. The mileage given is 26 which is a bit longer than the road mileage so about right for a walking route.

Yesterday's experiment in LLMs:

DDG has added a "Chat" facility with access to several chatbots. I asked the the question "What is the Maythorn Way" (the correct answer, the only one which both Google & Bing find, is that it's the name given to a pre-turnpike era route between Marsden in West Yorkshire and Penistone in South Yorkshire originally proposed to have existed without any particular name being attached to it.)

GPT-4 hallucinates (really the only word for it) some woo which varies with asking - today's offering is "The Maythorn Way is a concept or term that may refer to various things depending on the context, but it is not widely recognized in popular culture or literature. It could potentially relate to a specific philosophy, a method of living, or a particular approach to a subject. If you have a specific context in mind, such as a book, a philosophy, or a community practice, please provide more details, and I would be happy to help clarify!" Yesterday's was similar but, from memory not quite the same. Note the request for more information.

Llama 3.3 confidently describes, in glowing tourist office terms, a walking route in the Cotswolds from Cirencester to Stowe-on-the-Wold. That's an interesting one.. It's not what a search engine would have given and a quick search doesn't give such a walking route that I could find under a different name. Is it hallucination or has it picked it up from some discussion group of Facebook? Possibly some commentard from that area could elucidate.

The others admit to ignorance and ask for more information although maybe adding some general remarks about Taoism. I think I'd be more inclined to trust their responses to questions where they did provide direct answers.

The request for more details may contradict DDG's note that chats are never used to train AI models.

Ignorance really is bliss when you’re drowning in information

Re: Agree

"Bring on Salome, I am not particular which one ends up on the salver."

Does it have to be just one?

Re: Big problem requiring serveral partial solutions

"A quick scan of the linked Grauniad article in the post to which you are replying"

Check the comment nesting again. That isn't the post I replied to.

If you're drowning in it is it really information? It's more like data with a strong addition of line noise. Information is what gets distilled from data.

Re: Big problem requiring serveral partial solutions

"I think one piece of the solution is to teach lying, deception and fraud in schools."

Rather better would be to teach writing that stands up to tests: "Can you prove that?" "Have you checked that?" "Where did you get that information?"

Spending time doing that and testing fellow pupils is likely to be more effective at putting others' work through the critical thinking mill.

Why SAP may be mulling 2030 end of maintenance for legacy ERP

It's time to end the support life of the term "legacy". Let's replace it with something more appropriate. I suggest "production".

You wand to end support of a production system? Why would you not expect your customers to review the market with particular emphasis on seeking suppliers with a better committent to their customer?

After Copilot trial, government staff rated Microsoft's AI less useful than expected

Re: So, it's a glorified, menial administrative organizer

As Sir Humphrey and Bernard would remind you it's important that the right bits and only the right bits get minuted.

Re: Treasury Security

It will be more a case of insecurity by obscurity. Nobody can work out what exactly its doing so it can't be shown o be secure.

Re: was not appropriate for more complex tasks, mostly due to the limitations of the product itself

"But when you check the output it is not capable of creating accurate summaries of large and complex documents."

If a document needs to be large and complex to include what it has to say then a summary doesn't stand much chance of being accurate. OTOH is the document is large and complex because it consists of rambling lists of managerial aspirations an accurate summary might be completely empty.

"If you search for "Gulf of America" it gives you a location in Russia!"

I'd have expected in Mar a Lago. Oops, sorry, that's the Gulp of America.

Does this thing run on a 220 V power supply? Oh. That puff of smoke suggests not

Re: Refrigerator's Freezer Door

Early 60s, fine. 70s was obsolescence engineering.

Google confirms Gulf of Mexico renamed to appease Trump – but only in the US

America is well named. From Wikipedia:

"Amerigo Vespucci was the third son of Nastagio Vespucci, a Florentine notary [i.e. a lawyer] for the Money-Changers [i.e. bankers] Guild"

His role on the voyages seems over-inflated and his biggest contribution was PR.

UK, US, Oz blast holes in LockBit's bulletproof hosting provider Zservers

If I read this correctly no servers were harmed in the course of this operation and nobody was arrested.