Posts by Doctor Syntax 42665 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"This is known because US spies found that china documented secret military bases due to geo tracking by the app on service members phones.... but yes the app is abused by spies"
Whose spies?
All those kids posting videos giving away US secrets. Must be a security risk.
TP-Link has about 65 percent of the US router market for homes and small businesses.
In late October, Microsoft warned that Chinese government-backed threat actors had compromised thousands of internet-connected devices for password-spray attacks against its customers, and noted "routers manufactured by TP-Link make up most of this network."
So what would constitute "most"? About 65%?
"that there is a belief that the computer is never wrong, journalist Nick Wallis, on his site postofficescandal.uk, reports that this is currently a legal presumption in the law of England & Wales"
ISTR that this was specifically introduced in the Police & Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) or an amendment and that the prosecutions post-date that.
"and then presenting evidence that they DID know all along"
The shameful thing is, they're not presenting it in evidence, they're presenting it in a closing statement. If they had this evidence the correct time to come out with it would have been while the enquiry was taking evidence.
Also, are they saying they didn't know the prosecutions were going on? If they did - and it seems overwhelmingly likely that they did - then why didn't they intervene? Public responsibility should have taken precedence over responsibility to a client, otherwise they're risking charges of conspiracy to perverting the course of justice.
I think I recognise bits of the introductions to the published rolls in that. It doesn't say very much beyond what perplexity says except in telling me how to find the rolls on archive .org although the qualification of published rolls should be a clue to the questioner's is well aware of the situation around publication and availability.
However it's not that difficult to distinguish between a text that simply says "dig", one that says "dig" and "sell" and one that just says "sell". The most complex one really is the case of the guy who dug coal, burnt some himself and sold some. It took me an hour or so to go through and tally about 7 different categories all told and decide that the impression I'd got on casual browsing wasn't there in the numbers. Lack of built-in number handling is likely a likely to be a handicap in all this AI stuff.
I tried it with a query more to its strengths, current thinking on the significance of "waste" in Domesday for the West Riding. It came back with a non-committal (as expected) summary although it wasn't difficult to see where it had been taken from in its main sources which didn't include one I've seen refereed to a number of times but haven't got my hands on. But it then went on to list several points and I asked it to expend on one of them which it did. On the whole the outcome was useful, especially as one of its sources was a downloadable recent PhD thesis.
"The problem with monopolies is their competition is so far behind, it's easy to become complacent, and with that you lose momentum, and face stagnation."
Stagnation would have been OK. It's the enshittification that comes with prioritising vendors' self-interest over customers' requirements that's the problem.
OK, a quick test: "coal pits mentioned in wakefield manorial rolls"
Yes, it comes back with a short summary and a few snippets. At first sight the snippets look as if it's been at work summarising things until I look at the sources.
What would you expect the sources to be for that prompt? A good selection of WMRs are on archive.org so there's no problem getting that answers is there? Except the sources are just secondary publications, True at least one of them involves material not on archive.org (AFAIK 1402 isn't a published roll) but clearly the snippets are either just bits of human summaries or, even worse, AI summarised bits of human summaries.
Maybe I'll go back and try a prompt that can only be answered from real sources.
I did that:
Prompt: "how many fines were issued in published wakefield manorial court rolls for digging coal but not selling it, digging and selling it and just selling it"
Answer: "Based on the available search results, it is not possible to provide a precise count of fines issued in the published Wakefield Manorial Court Rolls for the specific categories of digging coal but not selling it, digging and selling it, and just selling it. However, the search results do provide some relevant information about coal-related fines in the Wakefield "
It's perfectly possible. It's just a matter of going through and keeping 3 tallies.
Oh, it will give me what it "thinks" is the answer I'm looking for and - very kind of it - it's sources. Nope. When I search I'm not looking for an AI double-guessing engine. Search has already become a welter of double-guessing engines. It's not a summary I'm looking for, just the sources. Judging something like that to be better than Google would only be "better" in respect of added enshittification.
This may be a novel idea (spoiler alert, it isn't) but how about a search engine that just takes search terms with the usual operators of and, or and not, and gives the results that fit including the null result if nothing fits. Just like Altavista used to AFAICR.
In order to be able to apply a term to something you've both got to know the term and what it refers to. Victims become victims because they don't recognise the latter until it's too late. If they don't recognise that they're unlikely to know the name, whatever alternative gets substituted.
However having PR people onboard to complain to the media is probably easier than recruiting and training more investigating officers to try to get a few scum into court. A good clearing-up ratio and the possibility of redress and getting money back is likely to be the more effective at getting reporting up.
"Our military knows where they took off from, where it came from and where it went, and for some reason they don't want to comment," Trump opined. "Our military knows and our president [Biden] knows, and for some reason, they want to keep people in suspense.
So when he becomes POTUS in a month's time and can be told what Biden's been told will he share that with us? Even if he's told it was a load of hysterical bollox? Or will he accuse the Deep State of keeping things from him?
How many automated industrial processes would require a humanoid machine. We've been mechanising processes formerly undertaken by humans for a long time. Fulling mills (replacing treading of cloth by human feet) were in existence in my neck of the woods in Elizabeth I's time. Since then other textile processes - carding, spinning, winding (hands) and weaving (hands and feet) - were all mechanised in the industrial revolution. So were forging metal and stamping ore. These were not only not remotely humanoid in form, they were much larger in scale than could be managed by a humanoid.
Even the picking operation they seem to be plugging as a humanoid function is already provided in non-humanoid form and not limited to the reach of a human arm.
Manual operations are adapted to the human form and scale. Mechanical operations are adapted to the nature of the work allowing them to be scaled up - or down - to best suit requirements.
"Every important decision lands on their shoulders, any exotic holiday has a near certainty of being hounded by the office, their diary is forever full, and rarely much under their control."
That can happen much further down the food chain as well. As can the crash and burn out.
The significant thing in this case, however, is that there is wide-spread belief that Gelsinger as CEO was Intel's best chance of sorting problems that had accumulated under (presumably) much the same board of directors. Problems accumulated over the long term are not likely to be turned round in the short term. If the directors weren't prepared to stick with what looked like being a long haul job it was up to them to step down. S&P's reaction should tell them that if they don't know it.
If you depend on keeping information on somebody else's computer then remember that:
1. its continued existence depends on the whim of that somebody else unless
2. you have a contract with them to preserve it - and maybe not even then*. A contract is a legal arrangement to provide a good or service in return for a consideration or, as we non-lawyers put it, payment.
You may think somebody else has better skills than you in looking after your stuff. This may be true but they don't have your motivation.
* If somebody else goes bust, gets taken over or suffers form force majeure your contract isn't going to help.
"I was a Devuan user, I have reverted back to Debian because nowadays anything that's not part of the standard Devuan repo NEEDS systemd, so no way to install third party software made for Debian/ubuntu on Devuan."
This is not my experience. Possibly the list of non-standard stuff we've tried to install differs.
A slight variation on that would be OpenOffice to LibreOffice. In that case the owner of the original OO had more or less lost interest in it. A more recent development in the ....Office world is to provide a ribbon interface for those severely bran-damaged by exposure to Microsoft products, the latter, of course, being a prime example of a dubious re-write although, I've always suspected, for quite nefarious reasons.
