Posts by Doctor Syntax 42030 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
“Culture” is a retention tactic.
Hmmm.
The culture manglement try to promulgate may well be. Beside that there's inevitably a real work-place culture that, like all human cultures, is the product of the behaviour people who work there (including to a major extent the actual behaviour of the manglement). It might be benevolent, it might be toxic, it might be something in between.
"I would seriously like for journalists of all stripes to understand this. It's disappointing that this includes those writing for el Reg."
Why is it disappointing that you should seriously like journalists writing for el Reg to understand [LLMs are not intelligent]? OK, it's probably not what you mean.
I'm sure the author of TFA harbours no such misunderstandings. OTOH if I were using a tool which specifies that a directive will be obeyed I'd expect that that would be hard-coded into its behaviour, even if the tool's results were otherwise based on guesswork. In fact I'd expect that the providers of the tool had tested for it. In this case, however, the first "if" of that sentence is doing some heavy lifting.
The best way to deal with "nothing to hide" is to tell them to look through the T&Cs of their online accounts: banking, trading, work logins, social media, etc. and check for the clauses forbidding disclosure. If they still don't get it ask them if they'd like to share all those user IDs and passwords with you or, even better, publish them for the world to see.
"we have the County Council controlled by Reform"
They'll soon fall out with each other. Farage seems to have been collecting a leader-challenging awkward squad. I'm looking forward to the whole thing disintegrating.
I'm not sure they're repairing the damage of BoJo's dumping of anyone who looked like a One-Nation Tory but I think the desertions are the beginning of a move back to the centre where the votes are most reliably found.
WFH pre-COVID my daughter had an employer provided HP all-in-one which looked fairly like my old, pre-enshitified-HP version until you touched it and felt how flimsy it was. Some minor problem and neither of us could even get the paper tray back into it, partly for fear of breaking it. She had to get it swapped out. That old HP stuff is almost indestructible by conventional weapons.
Not exactly your trailer park situation but anyone growing up in the household of a skilled craftsman will probably be familiar with the notion of not buying something you can make yourself. Even today I have to steel myself to buy anything other than basic supplies irrespective of not being able to make it myself.
" Now living on the US East of Coast, ... dating many of the oldest buildings in the country with pinpoint accuracy."
"Oldest buildings" or, as we say, "recent".
The Belfast dendro project was inspired by piles of bog oak drag-lines out of bogs when the NI M1 was built. Bog-hardened and sun-dried they were no fun to cut with a blunt Bushman saw. A chainsaw was an early acquisition.
We were offered the chance to whack the end off a floor joist that had been exposed when some work was done in Trinity College Dublin Library. Sadly, you can't use a chainsaw in a library so it was back to the Bushman.
In retrospect starting a project like that and expecting to get back from modern to those bog oaks was sheer bravado but Mike Baillie made it work. RIP, Mike.
"should stop tracking the complainant ... within four weeks."
What's the penalty if they don't? I see a mention of 50 Euros in the PDF but without knowing German I'm not sure of the significance. Is that 50 each day of failure? If so they might not bother. 50 per day per affected pupil in Austria might get their attention. 50 per day per pupil across the whole EU might get something done.
As I kept reading I wondered who, at least in a corporate environment, lets developers deploy wherever they choose (or, as it now seems, let their tool choose for them). I suppose they must just be the knock-up-a-website-for-your-small-business types. As Carney's "Middle Powers" speech sinks in corporate boards outside the US will finally be asking questions about what's happened to all the IT stuff they shoved out of sight over the last few decades.
