Posts by Doctor Syntax

Not a Genius move: Resurrecting war hero Alan Turing as your 'chief AI officer'

Re: Turing misinformation

May "not worldly wise" would be a better way of putting it.

Re: Well, yeah.

Passing the so-called "Turing Test" is fairly easy. Any idiot can do it.

Customer service teams frequently fail.

AWS customer faces staggering charges over S3 bucket misfire

Re: Use the tools that are there to protect you!

Yes, but this was just a test. After all texts are trivial. You can even test on the live system...

Re: Let's have an AWS singalong...

Well played, sir.

This is a bit puzzling in the article. How did he come to have the same bucket name as that of the unnamed tool? Alternatively how did the tool work before there was an actual bucket set up with the name it uses? It looks as if obfuscation of the original report has succeeded to the point of incomprehensibility.

Re: This is just one example

Most businesses don't have any of these things. The owner/user's PC sits on the desk, not in a server room. If the power goes off the whole business shuts down anyway, or at least reverts to whatever can be done without any powered machinery or even lighting. It seems to be an assumption in these parts that a business automatically has a server, a number of clients and an online presence.

Re: This is just one example

Once upon a time it was perfectly feasible for a small business to have someone freelance set up a server with a simple backup arrangement - put in a tape, run a script at end of day and store off-site (i,e, the business owner took the tape home). As needed for tweaks the freelancer could come in for a day or so as required to make changes.

But then, once upon a time the government of the day decided to kill as much of the IT freelance segment as it could.

Re: This is just one example

The common key element missing from your descriptions of those alternatives is planning.

You'll probably find there are two types of business, or departments within a business. Those which being IT into their project plans early because they expect IT will be helpful and efficient and those who don't because they think it's a waste of time as they don't expect IT to be able to do what they need. Oddly enough, both types find their expectations are usually met.

This applies not to IT but to a wide variety of service provision.

Dropbox dropped the ball on security, haemorrhaging customer and third-party info

Use NextCloud. There are quite a few managed hosting providers if you don't want to run it in-house.

Re: "no evidence that the attacker accessed the contents of users' accounts"

And absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

A million Australian pubgoers wake up to find personal info listed on leak site

Re: Why keep so much info?

"Because that information is valuable."

Those who thought it was are now discovering that the correct word is "toxic".

This is why Europe has customer protection protection regulations some commentard recently described as "Stalinist". This is what happens when you don't have them or don't follow them.

Bill advances to exonerate hundreds in Post Office Horizon scandal

I think it's entirely related to the fact that a TV programme has made it a matter of public concern so it cannot be regarded as a matter hidden in obscure IT media and a public enquiry that had been running for a long time without coming to public notice.

Re: Bollocks

1. The bill is for the sole purpose of making good the victims ASAP. Do you really want to delay it by loading it up with extraneous stuff?

2. There is ample provision in existing criminal law for prosecuting those responsible.

3. Determining who is responsible is a task for the courts, not for Parliament. Catch-all wording suchas "all those responsible" in a Bill would undoubtedly tie the courts up for years on points of interpretation and naming specific individuals in the Bill would require investigation that would hold it back for years (see point 1) and set a horrendous precedent for imprisonment by government fiat.

But didn't Camelot run their own network and terminals, keeping clear of the PO's network? That seems like a good qualification for the job.

Open Source world's Bruce Perens emits draft Post-Open Zero Cost License

Re: Pay who first?

"Your first responsibility as a for-profit corporation is to your stockholders"

This is not discharged byt having the corporation declared bankrupt by failing to pay its suppliers.

Re: Very interesting

For a small developer it could be a mixed blessing because it would bring their work in scope of the recent EU Cyber Resilience Act: https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/13/can_open

If it did could it raise the following situation: Developer A maintains project P as FOSS only. Developer B maintains project Q with a dual FOSS and Post-Open licence and gets payment from the latter. Developer B then contributes some code to project A. If payment for project Q makes developer B someone who becomes liable under the Act does this then taint project A with similar liability?

Re: It would be nice to fix IBM/RedHat

I agree with the general point in terms of abuse of GPL although IBM and Red Hat have also contributed a lot of FOSS material in the first place. Bearing in mind that that included a lot of pottering about it's been a mixed blessing.

He acknowledges that companies like HashiCorp have backed away from open source licensing. "But I don't know that any of those have been successful,"

HashiCorp got themselves sold to IBM. I'd guess they considered that success.

Elon Musk's latest brainfart is to turn Tesla cars into AWS on wheels

Re: Theft Act applies in the UK

I doubt the privacy bit will be of concern as it seems to be ML stuff they're thinking of so obviously privacy doesn't even get consideration.

Re: Farts

And in an evacuated tube the pod had better not have Tesla-grade panel work. People don't do well in a vacuum.

Re: Theft

Is this corporate greed or just Musk Greed?

Tesla would be effectively using electricity that the car owner has paid for to run any workloads while it is idle, so would they get a cut of the money generated?

Yes, it seems. CFO Vaibhav Taneja, said "the capex is shared by the entire world. Sort of everyone owns a small chunk, and they get a small profit out of it maybe."

Note that weasel word.

More big city newspapers drag Microsoft, OpenAI hard in copyright lawsuit

"While we were not previously aware of Alden Global Capital's concerns, we are actively engaged in constructive partnerships and conversations with many news organizations around the world to explore opportunities, discuss any concerns, and provide solutions."

Translation: "If pushed we'll throw them some crumbs."

UnitedHealth CEO: 'Decision to pay ransom was mine'

Re: Odd

In the UK that would be a Select Committee of the House of Commons. Very likely that's where Congress got the idea.

Only if the company was owned by HMG, an arrangement where government really didn't want to take any blame for what it did, say the Post Office, would a Minister be involved and even then as remotely as possible. That doesn't preclude having to spend 3 days answering questions in a public enquiry with live reporting and coverage on the Beeb's web site.

Musk axes two more senior Tesla leaders, guts public policy team – report

any staff who "don't obviously pass the excellent, necessary and trustworthy test,"

Now who could fail that tst, I wonder.

NSA guy who tried and failed to spy for Russia gets 262 months in the slammer

"Dalke and Teixeira were seemingly completely incompetent in leaking info. Maybe the US government should review who gets access to classified materials"

On the whole it seems preferable that it's better to allow the incompetent to access the materials. OTOH neither we nor the US govt know about the competent ones.

OpenAI slapped with GDPR complaint: How do you correct your work?

Re: Why do they still keep treating LLMs like databases?

In this case it's not a human one. No human was involved. It's simply a pastiche of a piece biographical information made by a pastiche generator.

GDPR is the latest in a line of regulation designed to protect the individuals. It's difficult to think of anything less Stalinist in nature.

In fact it didn't so much write a fake obituary as "quote" one that didn't exist complete with a link to the alleged obituary and also threw in a few other sources, including elReg. It has been trained on source material which includes links to the Grauniad. It has probably been trained on material that quotes obituaries. As a pastiche generator it can make this look convincing to anyone who doesn't know the facts and in particular, to anyone who doesn't check all links and references.

Would it be possible to have extend such a system to check the existence of references it generates and apply feedback to correct whatever data it was holding to stop it generating the nonsense for which it invented the reference and/or train itself to stop inventing references that aren't in the training material/

Re: Katherine Jayne Rowling.

Ah. Sorted.

Re: Why do they still keep treating LLMs like databases?

There's a useful progression data > information > knowledge > wisdom

LLMs also start with data but their progressin is orthogonal to this.

So what's the point of using it? It presents no short cuts to getting information if everything in the response has to be checked and that the source information is not presented. It's just a very expensive toy masquerading as a working machine.

In this case a real researcher could have told you various pieces of information about someone, telling you the source and possibly evaluating the source and also inferred an approximate DOB based on some of that information and telling you that it is inferred, or at least that its approximate. Stating real information alongside inferred approximations without differentiating should not be acceptable to users. It wouldn't be acceptable to users who understand that that's what's happening. The worrying thing, of course, is that too many managers, HR staff, marketroids, political lobbyists, etc. won't understand.

As I said above, it's their (i.e. its owners) problem. It's a problem they created. If they created a system that falsifies personal data about people in the EU they should face the consequences.

Re: Why do they still keep treating LLMs like databases?

"The article says it: the geezer's date of birth isn't known to the LLM, so why is it a surprise when it comes back with the wrong one?"

The surprise is that it invents one AND that this is considered an appropriate response by its fans.

WHo is KJ Rowling?

Re: Good luck with that

"All the money being poured into AI will happen in places that can actually deploy it without fear of massive fines."

You keep saying that as if it's a bad thing. It's not.

Many of us have based our careers on trying to do as good a job as possible. Getting things right is something on which we place value. This is a means of doing some semblance of a job irrespective of whether it's good or not. If you don't value getting things right it makes us wonder ... do you, by any chance, work in marketing?

In either case the better alternative is not to mix it in the first place.

"The way they work makes it effectively impossible to correct them without retraining."

Their problem. They made it, they can sort it.

Razer made to pay $1.2M over 'N95' face mask that wasn't

Re: No jail time?

And where are the actual damages if someone was harmed by relying on the masks to be what they claimed? A mere refund wouldn't be enough.

Software support chap survived breaking his customer

Re: Procedures

"no one thinks to cover these basics [in training]"

But everyone knows Windows. At least that's that you'll be told if you suggest changing OS.

Re: so many times

"I tried to get them to understand that shutting down the computer from the start?menu was a good thing, dumb looks ensued."

Properly explained it should eb obvious. Shutdown is just a process like any other. It has to be started. Where would expect to see the command to start it?

Meanwhile Northern Powergrid has been a big help in arranging shutdown on devices on my home network,

Re: Saved by the cloud?

I found a place where the over-night backup to the hot standby hadn't worked (because the data had grown to big to be copied in the time available) for who knows how long and nobody'd noticed.

The 9 gig was already sitting there. It wouldn't require additional space providing, of course, that the move command just moves the references to it to a different directory. Directories/folders are logical constructs, not physical ones. It' shouldn't require the actual data to be shunted around. As I said, it's been a long time but I don't remember the Microsoft approach being any different to the Unix way in this respect.

Re: Don't anybody move!

"Don't know if remote control of a DOS box was possible at the time, but doubt it was common."

Percy was using remote access.

Re: Picking the data to delete

"his filing system for emails was to hit delete on any email he didn't immediately require"

Something that a "Pending" option would deal with very neatly. Even better if it could be configured to put a task in the task list.

Re: Picking the data to delete

If it's in Tbird today it'll be in SM soon. it's just following the same path of ill-thought out UI. Calendar, for instance, used to have an icon on the status bar; one click brought it up. Now it's part of the tabbed email client interface whether you want it like that or not. But surely that means you'll be able to configure it so that he tab will be there as soon as the client launches? No, it isn't. You click on the Events and Tasks select Calendar from the drop-down box to create the tab - but AFAICS there's no way to configure it so that you don't have to do that each time. A slight thing but it's just one little part of the UI getting clunkier as time goes on.

Re: Picking the data to delete

Yes it's easy to create folders. Wouldn't it be great if the email client was able to automate the use of them. Say you have a folder for financial stuff. What if you were able to flag an email domain in the address book such as mybank.com as financial so that every email you sent to an address in the domain would be stored there and, after you'd read it, every email received from the domain would automatically be filed there, not as some sort of filter that you have to specify but something you could set up by, say, clicking on a list of the folders because the email client designer realised that that would make life a lot easier for the sort of users who don't go round specifying filters to do it?

Re: Picking the data to delete

Seamonkey also makes provision for this and I use it like that. It's a faff to set up so the average punter will not do it. That's why so many system admins report users storing previously read mail in either the inbox or in the bin. It's been commonly observed user behaviour for years.

It's also possible to ensure that Sent mail and incoming mail end up in the same folder so that they get properly threaded. It just doesn't happen out of the box. Of course suggest that it does and some Stockholm Syndrome sufferer will be along to tell you that that's not how they work because they've been used to having something so useless that they regard it as normal.

Is it not beyond email client developers to produce something a bit more joe-public-user friendly?

Oracle Fusion rollout costs 15 times council's estimates in SAP rip-'n-replace

Re: Quite right too

You'd then have to compete against Oracle's marketing budget.

You don't think they got to where they are on technical merit, do you?

UK government faces £17.5M shortfall from UKCloud liquidation

It's probably similar to the way military planners are said to plan to fight the last war.