Posts by Doctor Syntax

Whizkids jimmy OpenAI, Google's closed models

"You know that the audience of this journal is in Tech right?"

And you know that they, like el Reg, take the piss out the likes of the Wail. A good part of the house style is devoted to that. You fell foul of Poe's law.

Re: My, what drama

"If I pushed you for an answer, you would probably make up an answer based upon probabilities."

I think I've enough experience in having been pushed for answers to silly questions in cross-examination* to not make up an answer. I'd tell you that it was a silly question. Out of the constraints of court, I might even comment about what it told me about the questioner.

"I don't know" and "I can't say" are valid answers if that is the situation. Given search engines reluctance to give such answers I fully expect LLMs owned by search engine providers to hallucinate. It will not somehow make them more useful. Quite the contrary.

* and one time in direct examination by a barrister who wanted me to exceed what the evidence would bear in terms of interpretation. Same result.

Re: Isn't it ironic

It's called "Getting rid of the difficult bit in the title".

Telegram eyes IPO as user numbers close in on 1 billion

1 Billion? 1 in 8 of the world's population including infants? Is that credible? If not either there are a lot of people with more than one account or a lot of bots.

Microsoft calls AI privacy complaint 'doomsday hyperbole'

I don't say they're wrong to bring the action but it would be a good idea to do a bit of prompt engineering to prove that the data can be regurgitated. Courts like evidence.

Kremlin accuses America of plotting cyberattack on Russian voting systems

It's just window dressing to pretend that they have an actual electoral mechanism to interfere with.

Re: Attacking Russian voting systems ?

The turnout will be whatever he wants it to be.

"They won't do any harm. We've already reported the result."

AI models show racial bias based on written dialect, researchers find

Re: Aksing questions about bias

"aks" was the typical pronunciation in the south and Midlands

I never did think those southerners spoke proper.

And what would happen if that long 'a' was written as pronounced as in "taking a barth"?

One problem with written dialect is that it can be quite difficult to read, even for a speaker of the dialect. Growing up, when there were a lot of broad* Yorkshire speakers about, the local paper would run stories written in dialect which were were pretty hard to read because pronunciation was all spelled out but any local reading an ordinary story out loud would do so with Yorkshire pronunciation anyway. By contrast the James Heriot stories were written with a minimum of cues (secon person singular, for example) and the inner ear had no difficulty hearing what was intended.

Looking at the example in the article: "cus they be feelin too real": why spell cus like that? 'cause would be equivalent but a little less eye-rattling and would undoubtedly have been in the training material from a wide variety of vernacular English dialogue, assuming that fiction was included. Likewise feelin should really have had an apostrophe at the end, would also turn up in a lot of dialogue in mainstream English literature and, returning to Yorkshire dialect, feeling would be read out loud by a dialect speaker with the 'g' dropped.

* Broader than now. TV has a lot to answer for in weakening dialects.

Surely the US has a variety of regional dialects. Were these tested and if not, why not? If they weren't it sounds as if the "experiment" was designed to show racial bias rather than investigate the response to samples that diverge from the mean of the training material. I wonder what the effect would be if promoted with standard British English and regional UK dialects.

British Library pushes the cloud button, says legacy IT estate cause of hefty rebuild

Re: where are they going to get the money

"seems like they were/are very short of funds"

There's never enough funds to do things properly the first time. There's always funds to pick up the pieces. The first is "nice to have" (translates as "you're not having it"), the second is "have to have" (translates as "get it ASAP").

It may well be the case but there's something seriously wrong with a vendor that lets malware overwrite the firmware but doesn't enable the owner to fix it, whether by failure to provide good images or any other reason.

Re: Legacy is here to stay... Live with it...

projects currently in delivery are 'legacy' by definition

The legacy stuff is that which is running the business that brings in the money that pays for all the new shiny being developed which might or might not get delivered.

That "might not" bit is worth reflecting on. The legacy was put together by folk who were able to make it work. Not all projects achieve that. Will the new shiny work out well enough to become legacy?

HMG prefers OpEx. CapEx means a big number that appears in public borrowing figures, gets looked at by the PAC and features in headlines in the Daily Wail. OpEx goes under the radar. The fact that it ends up costing more doesn't really matter to them because most of it it falls on the next government and the one after that and the one after that... They'll not all be the same party and the ministers who set it up will have moved on anyway. See also PFI.

European Commission broke its own data privacy law with Microsoft 365 use

Oops. Yes. Must remember. Age & all that...

"Our customers in Europe can continue to use Microsoft 365 in full compliance with the GDPR and can count on our continued support and guidance."

Rees-Davies applies.

Filing NeMo: Nvidia's AI framework hit with copyright lawsuit

"We respect the rights of all content creators and believe we created NeMo in full compliance with copyright law."

Believe? On what grounds?

How do you lot feel about Pay or say OK to ads model, asks ICO

Re: Never

Before Twitter and the rest there was Usenet. There still is. In fact I use it and, indirectly, pay for it in that my ISP bundles as art of my subscription. t with previous ISPs that didn't do that I've used paid for servers.

I suspect that if the likes of X or Facebook wanted to run subscriptions it would be much more expensive but that would be between them and their subscribers. It might well give people reason to restrict the number of services they use.

The most effective tracking would be the non-advertising content of the page or the search terms taken to get to it. If I wish to buy a washing machine I might research washing machines and their prices online. If I stop doing that it's because I've made my choice - which includes deciding not to buy one and there's no point in showing me ads for them. Showing ads in those circumstances is fraud against those paying to have them shown.

Re: Never

Nevertheless I reserve the right to take umbrage against unwanted adverts being shoved in my face and to discriminate against the offenders when making buying choices.

Re: Never

"Everybody in the chain knows that the majority of adverts are ignored"

Knows? Believes, or hopes might be appropriate.

What they don't want to acknowledge is adverts might provoke a negative reaction. The advertising industry will hope the advertisers don't catch on to this. The advertisers are largely professional narcissists and probably unable to believe that this could happen to them, even if it's their reaction to other company's adverts.

"The do realise and they don't care for two reasons. Firstly the hit rate can be very very low for them to be able to appear successful. Secondly, and more importantly, their customers don't really know how successful their ads are."

When I write advertisers I mean advertisers, not the advertising industry. The advertising industry behaves in the way you say. The advertisers are those you refer to as their customers.

The advertising industry only sells advertising (and add-on services) to advertisers. The tracking exists solely to be charged for as one of those add-on extras.

Re: "It's hard to give consent freely"

It means the employer gets the employees they deserve.

Advertisers should realise that the "targeting" information is coming from people who might be pissed off by their ads but are unwilling to pay not to get them. That should make them wonder whether what they're getting for their money is worth it.

How to Netflix Oracle’s blockbuster audit model

Nice idea but it would take a monumental effort to keep up with the rule changes. Much easier to push FOSS a bit further up the food-chain. Maybe use it as a the database?

UK and US lack regulation to protect space tourists from cosmic ray dangers

A lead-lined coffin capsule should be able to offer enough protection.

Trump, who tried kicking TikTok out of the US, says boo to latest ban effort

Re: why people aren't entirely convinced of this whole democracy experiment

Choose variables you want to score. Choose your scoring system. Choose you weightings. Add them up to produce a meaningless figure. Repeat for multiple instances of whatever you're looking at. Pretend you're objective. Democratic evaluation of countries, dogs at a dog show, it makes no difference.

Re: No Bipartisan Deals

The opposition are well aware that the only things governments are in control of are their own mistakes. Reality takes care of the rest.

Chinese kids won't be voting for a US president any time soon.

Re: Biden may be in trouble.

There's a difference between selling on Amazon Marketplace and selling on a social media site that doesn't itself sell stuff.

It's an interesting proposition. Have they not realised they're going to be upsetting a lot of voters? As a bipartisan bill I suppose they can all support it. If one side votes against it I wonder how long it will take for the rest to deny they ever supported it.

When all the jibes about "Chinese foot-soldiers" are done the realisation that these are voters is going to dawn and there'd be a big head of steam built up over six months.

You got legal trouble? Better call SauLM-7B

Given different legal systems in different countries (let alone language differences*) this would require a model trained on different data in different jurisdictions.

* And how would it cope with bilingual countries?

Grab a helmet because retired ISS batteries are hurtling back to Earth

"the probability of debris hitting Germany is considered to be very low."

The probability of it hitting any particular place is very low. That doesn't make any difference to the fact that the probability of it hitting somewhere is one.

What's the equivalent in Boeing 737 door plugs which must surely be the Register unit of falling objects?

Re: From the heavens above

How did they check? When Whitby Abbey did their vampire stunt a year or two back they had one invigilator (and one really was far from enough to stop it sliding into chaos) checking outfits and counting. Maybe they counted all the receipts and boxes but how do they know they were all his?

The S in IoT stands for security. You'll never secure all the Things

But you do have to admire the way they hang in the air for a full second before falling when you go over a cliff edge.

Possible China link to Change Healthcare ransomware attack

If these two outfits are parts of their respective countries' kleptocracies this could get interesting.

Broadcom says VMware to grow revenue by double-digit percentages all year

What about next year when the victims have their exit strategy in place?

Apple may have made itself a target before the EU's Digital Markets Act comes into force

It would probably be better to go after at least two of them at the same time to block alleged victimisation as a defence.

Boeing paper trail goes cold over door plug blowout

Re: What is going on?

Ultimately it should be recognised that the regulators are working to save boeing from itself as much as they are saving the public from Boeing. If trust is lost in the company then airlines find it more difficult to sell journeys on its products and then Boeing finds itself unable to sell planes to airlines. That's a slow process and probably beyond the horizon of its directors.

Re: Too Big To Fail

This is the sort of thinking that ignores the market value of trust. Punishing Boeing hard enough might be essential to retoring enough trust to make it competitive again.

Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway

But did Colin get to find out who changed the code? The CTO himslef trying to "fix" other bugs?

Re: Hypothetical Example

"Surprisingly, I didn't get the job"

Of course you didn't get the job. You missed the correct answer. Tell the director to reboot his PC on the basis that it might fix the problem anyway but if it didn't you might have time to fix the first user's problem or for you phone's battery to suddenly go flat.

Re: Assumptions

I'm not sure. CTO is a manglement position so he seems ideally fitted for it.

Windows 10 failing to patch properly? You are most definitely not alone

And don't overlook malice applied stupidly.

JetBrains TeamCity under attack by ransomware thugs after disclosure mess

"The situation has divided the cybersecurity community given that both parties have valid arguments for their respective policies."

Reality seems to have decided the issue.

HP print rental service seeks more users to become subscription addicts

Re: A fool and his money

" If the numbers work out for you then why shouldn't you have that option."

And those who don't will be reviewing the market if they haven't already done so.

Re: A fool and his money

"printers don't live forever."

There's reason to think that older HP lasers do live forever. What's more they don't check for who made or refiled the cartridge. They built HP's reputation for making printers which they've been trading on ever since. That reputation has been circling the drain for some time and now seems to be getting pretty close to going down it.

"But I have no emotional attachment to my printer."

It's not so much the printer that received the emotional attachment as the cash and the sense that customers are being ripped off.

Bank's struggle to replace Atos threw system back to dark ages

The core functions are probably considered to be served by Powerpoints and spreadsheets. That's what the important people do. Everything else is done by little people if it can't be outsourced.

Venturing beyond the default OS on Raspberry Pi 5

There are also the specialist distributions such as OSMC for media servers.

When it comes to copying onto a card from Linux dd works just fine.