Posts by Doctor Syntax

Tim Cook's Tim Cook stepping down from Apple

Re: Is there a new meaning for that ?

It's called retiring - after 40 years working life, why not? Grandchildren are worth spending time with.

Firefox is fine. The people running it are not

It seems the best process Mozilla manglement could adopt would be:

1. Decide what we think we should do.

2. Do the opposite.

Unless, of course, this is the process they've been following all these years, in which case, just stop at 1.

Trump administration announces tariffs that may make plenty of tech more expensive from August 1

Re: Not content just to TACO on the tariffs

It looks as if, in the future the main trading blocs are going to be BICKS (BRICKS from which the R has removed itself) and the EU, from which we (sensibly according to some although I don't see it myself) have removed ourselves,

Re: What does the US export?

IP protectionism from the US isn't going to go down well with everyone else when US LLM businesses are hoovering up everyone else's IP as fast as they can.

"the extraordinary Economy of the United States, the Number One Market in the World"

Extraordinary certainly. I'm reminded of Bernard explaining the meaning of "egregious" to Hacker: "outstanding in, erm, one way or another". But the Rest Of the World is a bigger market than the US. The inevitable result of the US cutting itself off from ROW, which Trump seems to be setting out to do* just means the rest of us can trade amongst ourselves and the US can make do with the crumbs.

* He thinks he's an emperor commanding his domains to bring him tribute. I don't think that's what he's achieving, largely because it's his own serfs citizens who are actually paying the tribute.

Microsoft developer ported vector database coded in SAP’s ABAP to the ZX Spectrum

Aren't her points 1 & 4 the same?

Scholars sneaking phrases into papers to fool AI reviewers

Easily passed of as an experiment.

Nuclear reactors smaller than a semi truck to be tested in Idaho

"So how do you stop miscreants nicking .... them?"

Prop them up on bricks and take the wheels off.

Financial 'stretch' for UK to join Europe's Starlink rival, says minister

Re: @Doctor Syntax

When somebody goes on about the cost of this that of other it's always wise to consider the cost of the alternative.

Re: "If"

The other week we were in an hotel in the West Midlands. It wasn't in a village. It used satellite for its internet connection. Once you get out into the countryside you have a FTTC/ FTTP or you have a miserable connection. In fact it's not even either/or; friend who actually lives about a mile close to the exchange than I do has, for some strange reason, FTTC to the same cabinet as myself and a miserable connection. The only fibre near where she lives is the back-haul of the mobile base station on top of the hill behind them.

Re: I'm baffled...

"we have an asset-rich older generation who are entirely risk-averse and won't spend"

We grew up i a world where money was short. As did out parents and grandparents. What's more, it was the same for us. I got bank statements in the middle of the month so I'd be able to work out how bad things would be by the end of the month - and they were.. We've also seen a lot of inflation over the years. Once you've had a few decades of that you don't forget it. You can't get over the idea that it will all go pear-shaped tomorrow.

Money was for essentials and anything left over was to save for the disaster waiting round the corner. Even when you've accumulated a bit you spend it carefully.

Re: There are too many lawyers in parliament

And much good has it done us.

Re: There are too many lawyers in parliament

It's not surprising. PPEs are probably unemployable outside politics (including political journalism).

Re: A price must be paid for disloyalty

Some of you lot are starting to make the Brexiteer usual suspects sound reasonable. Apart from any other aspects you do realise it was a secret ballot, don't you?

What's the cost of not joining?

Ordnance Survey digs deep to prevent costly cable strikes

Re: Cost?

The fact that a record exists doesn't mean its right. Some time ago we had problems with out electricity connection. It was found that the connection had rotted at the bottom of a pole across the road that supports a run of cables to street lighting further along the lane. The plans showed the connection being to the base of a street light on our side of the road. Simple solution there - connect us to the street light, providing a sound connection and make the GIS correct at the same time.

A hundred yards or so sown the same road there were roadworks digging for something to do with gas pipes. They found two pipes which they thought were supposed to be for gas. They weren't', they were corroded and full of water. The gas main came across under what had been fields from a parallel road. Because of the lack of good GIS there was a bit of panic as to whether it ran under someone's conservatory (it didn't - by good luck rather than good management.

Just two examples of where the documentation and reality go their separate ways.

Re: Cost?

A lot of utility companies have GIS these days. The data entry is all too often by the process known as "best guess". Perhaps the I in GIS is doing too much heavy lifting.

Re: Funding Source?

A good point but given the costs a back hoe can incur, it should save on bills. Whether we get to see the benefit of that is another matter.

TUPE or not TUPE? How AI and cloud are rewriting the rules of supplier transitions

"92 percent of companies plan to increase AI and tech investment, yet only 1 percent consider themselves to be AI-mature "

I suppose the remaining 7% is sampling error.

Yes, I wrote a very expensive bug. In my defense I was only seven years old at the time

I doubt he'd been told it existed let alone was going to be deployed.

UK puts out tender for space robot to de-orbit satellites

The notion of a robot doing this made me think of it flying round going "Exterminate. Exterminate."

Ingram Micro confirms ransomware behind multi-day outage

1st rule of handling problems: keep the those affected - internal staff or customers as appropriate - informed. A day or two later doesn't count.

AI models just don't understand what they're talking about

Re: Cited LLM test invalid?

"still not understanding"

Stopping there would be sufficient.

Re: LInk to preprint, abstract on arxiv

You didn't grasp that they weren't the commenatrd's words at all, just the link, title, authors and abstract of the paper?

It's a peculiar first post to say the least.

Re: Topical for me

"They said that if you were an expert in the subject matter under consideration and could give the LLM all the factual information needed..."

And were else is that factual information going? Is it in any way confidential company information?

Re: "they [Feynman's students] had a better chance than LLMs"

It wasn't that they were lazy, it's just that they were being taught to pass exams. They knew that when they'd learned a definition there would be a question in the exam that would ask what is so and so and they'd trot out that definition and it would be a complete and correct answer. They were given no instruction as to how what they learned connected to anything outside of that.

Not multiple choice but when I walked out of my 2nd year chemistry exam I sat on the embankment for a while looking at the Thames and felt that all the chemistry had left my recollection for good.

Perhaps you've never raised children.

The first few years of of life are spent making contact with reality and learning how to interact with it starting with suckling, being weaned, crawling about and then learning to deal with gravity by standing on their own feet. They learn that some things are hot, some are cold. Seeing is coordinated with touch - the 2d projection on the retina, which is what the brain receives as vision has to be coordinated with the discovered 3d world so that the projection is interpreted as a view of a world full of objects of different shapes and distances away. Sounds become interpreted as language which is about the only thing in common with LLMs but in the growing child's mind the symbols of words become associated with those objects seen and encountered in the solid. That understanding of words meaning something is in place before more abstract concepts are introduced.

That's the connection that the human brain has and the LLM isn't going to have.

" AI models lack the ability to understand concepts the way people do"

Does this come as any surprise?

But humans can do this too. I'm reminded of one of Feynman's stories about teaching physics in Brazil. The students were learning parrot fashion. They could reel off definitions of Brewster angles etc. but were surprised when asked to look through a polarising filter at light reflected off the sea. They didn't realise that that's what their definitions were describing. Nevertheless they had a better chance than LLMs - they existed in the physical world of reality, LLMs do not; they can't look at the sea.

'Trained monkey' from tech support saved know-it-all manager's mistake with a single keypress

Re: A nasty piece of work.

OTOH senior managers can have a go at each other. Two directors at a client had, from their titles (operations and production) overlapping fiefdoms and had at least one 3.3 on the Richter scale shouting match in the middle of the general office.

... but only when the battery runs down.

Re: Fortunate

It's possible that at a somewhat bigger level than SME being in IT brings you into contact with more parts of the business than a siloed manager gets to meet and you can sometimes be able to see a possible impact on one department that another's bright idea might have.

14-hour+ global blackout at Ingram Micro halts customer orders

It sounds like that. But whatever the explanation there's a cautionary tale in there about dependence on tightly integrated supply chains.

Wikidata: Attempting to bridge FOSS ideals and direct democracy

"this vulture has seen more dinsinformation from anti-vaxxers than in the year so far"

Liam, just tell them that antivax is a Deep State conspiracy to eliminate the more gullible from the gene pool - it's too late to deal with parents but by getting them not to vaccinate the F1 generation there's a good chance of their not being an F2. Tell them the MMR rumour was particularly clever because be concentrating on the first M, measles it totally distracted from the second M, mumps. If their sons catch that by not being vaccinated they'll be firing blanks - no grandchildren to look forward to.

It should chime with their way of thinking. If it gets seeded well enough it could spread to eat the anti-vax conspiracy.

Musk's antics and distractions are backfiring as Tesla's car business stalls

"Elon may get more subsidy than any human being in history..." Trump said

That's just sour grapes talking.

Tariffs and trade turmoil driving up cost and build times for datacenters

Re: It's a bubble, act accordingly.

Reform are going to have their own problems with the councils they won. I read of one of the newly installed council leaders stepping down due to "personal problems" soon after taking office and leaving it to his 18 yr old deputy.

23andMe's new owner says your DNA is safe this time

If by credentials they mean an email address and password then 23&Me do carry some responsibility. Most people have a single email address. If they insisted on a non-email address - even better, assigned a unique one - then a harvested set of credentials from another site would have been useless.

Re: TTAM Research Institute: #1 red flag

Some years ago there was a paper in Nature which based on cluster analysis of DNA profiles plotted geographically. The criterion was grand parents (or possibly GGparents. I don't recall exactly) all being born within a given radius. Highland Britain and Ireland showed quite a number of regional variations. Lowland England was more or less a single cluster. That included Norfolk - indistinguishable from the rest. Fun facts included Ireland clearly showed up the four provinces and N & S Wales were distinct from each other.

"Customer privacy is at the core of TTAM's mission of helping individuals gain insight into, and benefit from, their genetic information. TTAM is committed to adhering to 23andMe's existing privacy policies of always honoring customers with choice and transparency."

Don't say you weren't warned.

Gone in 40 days: US drops ban on export of chip design tools to China

Articles matter. If the previous headline had been "drops a ban on ...." that might well have been read as "imposes". In this case it's "drops the ban on ...".

ChatGPT creates phisher’s paradise by recommending the wrong URLs for major companies

Absolute Ineptitude

"does that make AI more or less reliable than the current state of Google Search?"

There's a difference?

Let's Encrypt rolls out free security certs for IP addresses

Re: why are we using dns?!!

Give tham an isolated bit of network to play with. Then add a second DHCP server to it and let them figure it out.

Re: "which has the potential to negatively impact [..] search engine optimization"

Can I have one for 127.0.0.1

I definitely own it.

Trump's budget bill bankrolls $85M Space Shuttle shuffle

Scale

But the US is big. The biggest.

Re: One thing’s for sure

"gormless MAGAt"

...but you repeat yourself..

CISA warns the Signal clone used by natsec staffers is being attacked, so patch now

Re: Sci-Fi already has the solution

"None of this should have happened had the government idiots in charge and their drones used proper, secure, government channels of communication."

Idiot is as idiot does.

Microsoft's on-prem Exchange and Skype for Business Server go subscription-only

Re: Seriously

"If businesses like to become slave to MS, they can do what they want."

As the shaftings arrive more and more frequently, is it possible that the frogs will finally notice they're being boiled? (I do like mixed metaphors.)

"Microsoft never HAD quality."

The CP/M Fortran compiler was fine.

'Elevated' moisture reading ignored before Heathrow-closing conflagration, says NESO

Re: Oh the irony...

"I'd sue back."

You'd lose. What would be the losses you'd incurred? Lack of preparation would be a defence and mitigation.