Posts by Doctor Syntax 42030 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
I've seen something like that happen but with a different function and language.
A good few months back I came across some early Linux program to use some LLM to generate code. I wondered if it had imbibed the Free Pascal Library so I asked for code to generate a UUID of a specific version, number (I can't remember which). It certainly hadn't. It wrote a few lines of Pascal with a UUID (not of the correct version embeded as a literal whd wrote it out.
knife was passed around the jury for inspection with a label saying "murder weapon" and not "alleged murder weapon"
Even "alleged" would be a bit much. A label should ust state where it was found. Even if the pathologist removes it from the body the officer receiving it should just label it as "Received from doctor $NAME". Whoever was responsible should have known better.
Safety disclosures. Perhaps this is the answer.
Require all public facing responses - searches, web-site customer disservice bots, emails, images, etc to carry the equivalence of a public health warning
"This material has been created by AI and may be partially or entirely untrue and cannot be safely relied on.".
That should be possible under consumer protection law for anything addressed to the general public and maybe also the likes of Copilot on Windows Home editions. If it were encountered often enough in those circumstances the general idea might seep through to users within business.
It was used to extract pollen from soils and late glacial clays. If the centrifuging worries you scares you what about the stage before that? Boiling up in platinum crucibles. SWMBO did a lot more soil pollen work than I did
Somebody before us must have been in the habit of tipping the supernatant down the sink without enough running water. It was a Belfast sink (in Belfast) and kept leaking. I tightened up the drain connections a number of times but finally realised the glaze had become porous. Apart from the immediate plastic connections the drains would have been glazed earthenware as well. I wonder what condition they were in.
Another nasty substance in the process was a mixture of acetic anhydride and conc sulphuric acid, with the mixture being heated in a boiling water bath. It explodes in contact with water so the sample had to be washed in glacial acetic before and after. The object was to destroy as much non-pollen organic material as possible. The preliminary 10% NaOH treatment was relatively mild in comparison.
The outer coat of pollen grans is a remarkably tough material.
With respect to 4 I can see this being taken up enthusiastically be companies whose customer-facing operations are already dire and are seeking to not improve them at lower cost.
They're the sort of people who would list things from 1 o 4 & then choose C & D.
There is one possible gain. An AI avatar to attend meetings. As standard it would be prompted "If they want anything from us find out what it is and say we might get back to them. Otherwise make occasional encouraging but non-committal noises but don't promise them anything". Then the meeting can go ahead without interrupting work. Eventually everyone uses an avatar, meetings are no less effective than they were before. The only ones attending were those calling the meetings because they have nothing to get on with instead; they can be culled.
Set a word limit below the expected number of words in a slop submission. Require a fee to be paid with longer submissions to be refunded if the reviewer determines that it was a valid submission and use the retained fees for a bounty scheme. At the very least any submitter who starts with AI will have to do some work to get it below the limit or they lose money. Sadly, it will probably raise very little for bounties but should bring back sanity.
Whatever the situation then (and it's taken long enough for them to offer a correction, if that's what it is) the possibility has now been realised, along with the impact of the CLOUD Act. Whatever is now offered as a sovereign solution is going to be looked at very carefull, especially as Microsoft's President and chief legal counsel said they couldn't do it.
"and to this day I don't know why Linus's experimental OS became the Linux we know today"
I think that is largely down to Linus himself and they way he was prepared to make it a communal effort.
Another factor might have been Minix which AFAICR was not so much an academic OS as an educational one. I wonder how many of the early contributors were studying that.
A final aspect must have been that they were familiar with Unix but even the SCO version was expensive. If SCO had grasped the fact that hey could have sold it at scale at a desktop OS price (there was a GUI desktop available) they could have cleaned up.
" But we all know that pretty much any marketing claim (and that is all they were) for any product - but particularly in IT - doesn't stand up to scrutiny."
I think in this case "we" doesn't include C-suite execs. To them it's all wonderful, magical even, and cannot possibly fail because marketing told them and they come from marketing themselves and hence are devoid of any cognitive dissonance.
"During his short time in office, Mr Starmer has accumulated serious threats to his credibility"
One of his problems is that he won a landslide election. A large HoC majority always encourages MPs, ministers or otherwise to daftness because they can't be booted out by losing a by-election or two so there's nothing to make governments concentrate on essentials and no party discipline to stop squabbling.
"the vast majority of people don't want them"
I have a nasty sneaky feeling that while the vast majority of el Reg readers don't there may be a vast number, if not majority, of users out there who actually think they're being provided with a wonderful personal service. It's frightening thought. Could it be true?
A good start is to use a unique ID for each service and preferably not an email address. A unique ID and password constitute two separate factors in themself. As most users only have a single email address demanding that as a user ID reduces it down to a single factor.
If you're working in an enterprise you can set up file syncing on the company intranet without extending the attack surface by outsourcing. If you outsource it you're doing so to a provider who, by their very nature, has a large target painted on them. An atacker only has to get lucky once, they have to stay lucky all the time.
