Posts by Doctor Syntax 40471 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
" We all know that, when competing, you have to add value...and one of the big values you can have is in-house skills relating to your products or services."
In manglement thinking adding value has been replaced by cutting costs. There really ought to be scope for businesses who opt to add value to prosper.
Now might be a good time for el Reg to follow up on the Danish govt. dept. switching from Microsoft and a similar recent stories. I'm sure Denmark is treating this very seriously indeed. The way things are going they might be looking for the rest of the EU and NATO to stand up with them unless Trump's attention span runs out over Greenland and he heads off in some other direction.
The biggest risk of Agentization is: it can't do the job, perfectly. You're stuck with the agents, they're part of the process. You're stuck with the skilled labor: you need people to check it and correct it. On top of that, you're *also* stuck training and developing all the people you had to train and develop before - so that you can ensure the agentic output continues to be correct and get fixed. Agentization is double-cost. Ouch.
This is where the smart beancounter might spot an opportunity for cost cutting. But will they cut the right cost?
"This effectively transforms workers into managers of AI systems – a role not everyone is suited for."
If the rationale for adopting Dunning-Kruger machines is to lay off the workers then it will be the managers who are now the managers of AI systems, also a role they're probably not suited for.
"the units used by 95% of the world?"
I'm old enough to be comfortable with imperial and metric units. I suppose it helped in that my father was a joiner trained when imperial was the only alternative and I took up science. I'm reassured that my 20 yr-old granddaughter is equally comfortable with both.
In between these age scales I was once surprised that a night-school instructor in furniture restoration only seemed happy with metric despite the furniture having been made to imperial measure. I suppose she trained post-metrication when the mere mention on an imperial measurement would be punished by little less than being burnt at the stake as a heretic.
Also surprising: the RS catalogue taking to specifying IC pinouts with the 1/10th inch standard converted to metric implying a precision down to about the size of a hazel pollen grain - another measurement units that's been with me for about the last 6 decades always useful as a sanity check in such circumstances.
"to improve risk identification"
Right not risk identification shouldn't be too much of a problem. The main risk, right there in plain sight, is utter dependence on commercial entities subject to the whims of an increasingly erratic foreign head of state.
The big issues are not identifying the risk but the speed at which mitigating action can be taken and the will to do that.
I suppose procurement were also scheme members. It will be a learning experience for them but, as I keep saying, experience is a dear teacher but there are those who will learn by no other.
Maybe other government procurement departments are also staffed by scheme members....
Fortunately I'm in the NICSP scheme.
Having its own domain does not necessarily mean that it runs it. The difference between that and using the likes of gmail is that the domain owner is able to choose to outsource it to a company that treats customers as customers instead of some faceless near monopolist whose idea of "service" more closely matches the dictionary deffinition of "exploit".
One means of stopping things going wrong was to record the decisions in the Patent Rolls or Close Rolls. Archive.org will provide you with digitised copies of some of the publications of these made in the late C19th/early C20th (search for calendars and the name and regnal number of the king).
If you produced a forged charter with a forged seal on it something very nasty would happen to you. That's what could go wrong.
"continuing a product that costs more to maintain than the revenue it creates is unsustainable"
This is true, but this seems to have been done in a dog in a manger way. There are better alternatives.
There could, as another commentard has said, have been a final update that remove checking. That would have cost very little effort and given those who've paid over the years something permanent for their money. AIUI if they need to replace hardware - which they will at some point in time - they can't take it with them.
Source could have been placed in the public domain.
At the very least there could have been an apology to customers who have been dumped.
I can't help feeling that after Trump what's left of the US is going to have to do a lot of work on its constitution to ensure that checks and balances really work. It could also do with paying attention to its spelling system so that "checks and balances" isn't ambiguous.
First, we must develop a "theory of mind" that treats AI as a tool that amplifies humans and products should be designed around this belief.
If that's the first thing to do why didn't he do that first?
It's a clear admission he has a solution (in the most generous interpretation of the word) looking for a problem.
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