Posts by Doctor Syntax 42029 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"This isn't like today when a vendor sells a product that can be found to be as liable on the day it was bought as when it subsequently went rogue."
If you chose to sell or deploy it, you're responsible. As simple as that. It was up to you as a vendor to decide whether to accept that long-term responsibility. Why should you think you should be able to shuffle that off?
"Only when AI has shown itself to be self-aware and competent to at least the level of a human equivalent, should AI be considered responsible."
Underlying criminal law is the notion of punishment; it's what happens on a conviction for breaching the law. AI should only be considered responsible if the concept of punishing it is meaningful. Until then it's whoever is responsible for deploying it who is responsible. Not programming it, deploying it. The programmer may have been working under constraints that prevent proper testing, have been overridden by management or been given a task beyond their capabilities. The buck has to stop with whoever decided that the system was fit to be deployed. It's their responsibility to provide due diligence in making that decision and their liability if it fails. Where to product in which is embedded is a consumer product that decision lies with the vendor: is the product fit to be marketed to the general public?
And, given Kingston's sensible criterion, this applies to any S/W product, not just those which have been given an AI marketing gloss.
"Until you realize your backup's shot, too. It's hard to come up with a backup backup plan."
Very true. Actually IT was sort of the backup backup. The previous job was a stop-gap until I could get into what I really wanted to do but it just went on too long - about a dozen years too long. So when I ran out of IT it was time to retire.
When they talk about working life extending into the 70s or whatever it becomes a serious problem. I suspect there's nothing I'd have been able to stick for more than 20 years.
"For some reason it seemed really cool to fish failed-test microchips out of the reject bin, saw the top off with a Stanley knife, then if you put them under the fiche reader you could actually see all the registers and gubbins in the chip just like on the hacker movies."
Stuff the movies, this was real life:
We had a new IED control board in for examination. As per normal the IDs were scratched off the ICss. Our resident electronics guy was pretty good at working out what they were from the surrounding circuitry (usually 74 series TTL plus 555s). But on this device there was also one of those ICs in a little metal can. That was a bit of an unknown. We cut the top off the can then I set up the big Zeiss microscope for incident illumination and read the part number straight off the die. I remembered seeing it advertised in WW. The complete operation if the device was analysed in about an hour.
"Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, who didn't want to pick a high-profile fight with a Silicon Valley billionaire over property rights when he himself is running for governor of California later this year."
If public opinion is in favour of access I'd have thought this would have been an excellent fight to pick.
" It's also worth noting that the UK has the least generous unemployment compensation in Western Europe, which in turn drives people into low productivity jobs."
The odd thing about this is that the low-wage strawberry pickers seem to be coming from Eastern Europe. Why is this happening if unemployment pay isn't that good? Are productivity figures ignoring a large black economy?
"The number of graduates per year has more than tripled"
This was one of Blair's departures from reality. He thought that having graduates become half the population would increase productivity without (a) thinking how to re-jig the entire economy so that half the jobs would be what had then been thought of as "graduate jobs"* and (b) coming up with any way of paying for it other than by imposing swinging debts on the graduates. The latter was all pert of the taxing the future approach which included pension funds.
*This was solved, of course, by exporting as many non-graduate jobs as possible to low wage economies. This held down inflation**.
** That's inflation as measured by pretending that housing cost rises weren't inflation.
"Employing too many people who just sit at a desk and too few who actually do / make the stuff that is sold to your lucky customers."
Some of those people sitting at desks are actually designing the next product - coding, designing H/W or whatever. Of course what they do is incomprehensible to management so isn't important and can be got rid of on the next cycle of managment stuff, i.e. cutting headcount.
"Productivity, as it is measured, has nothing what so ever to do with how much work is done, or how much of an actual product is made, only the revenue per hour. As such it is a bullshit measurement."
Quite so. If you increase the output in widgets per hour by 10% and reduce the price to sell more your measured productivity by sales may not rise at all. So have you raised productivity or not? Common sense suggests you have, the dismal science says you haven't. I don't know why you collected downvotes.
"If you pay people badly, they don’t have enough money to buy stuff, so your economy won’t grow."
It also means the market is apt to become price sensitive so prices have to be kept down. If you measure productivity by the overall income you get by selling widgets rather than by the number of widgets you produce then having to keep prices down means that productivity will appear lower. Which raises the question of whether periods of high productivity aren't at least in part, an artefact of inflation?
So many communities already forbid "dangerous" breeds like German Shepards, Pit Bulls, Chows, Rottweilers, etc
I'm not sure this has been very effective. There are still reports of dog attacks on children and even adults being seriously injured or even killed. Perhaps compulsory insurance would be the best approach. This becomes practical with compulsory micro-shipping. If you want a dog that looks like it's a breed that's associated with attacks (and the insurance companies will build up the statistics on that) then it will be up to you to pay an appropriate premium of persuade the insurers that looks can be deceptive.
"Not really. They will be happy to fill their coffers with fines from US companies"
It raises the question of what will the fines be charged on. If it's general activity in breach of the GDPR in the course of a year they stand to be fined a maximum of 4% global turnover and can just look on it as an annual turnover tax. If it's per incident then there could be multiple fines & it will start to hurt.
Meanwhile, just get rid of the privacy figleaf.
This big problem with this code of conduct is that it places too much weight on the perception of the 'listener' of the comments; a code of conduct should deal with the intent of the 'speaker'.
Careful!! The message conveyed is what's received, not what's transmitted, otherwise the spam I receive can be justified as "valuable marketing messages" by the spammer.
who use words that have different subtleties of meaning in different cultures.
Indeed. What's a back rub, virtual or real, and why would I even want one?
"It's a policy of permanent retrenchment, and it's hampering Microsoft's ability to grow or innovate, leaving them mostly just iterating yesterdays cash cows rather than pushing forward with new ideas."
A little unfair. What he's doing is moving to a subscription model. That's the future's cash cow. Yesterday's enforced re-buying of products based on lock-in and periodic introduction of changes to data formats wasn't as predictable.
"Backward binary compatibility has always been excellent, unlike some Unix where you can't run applications on a newer system unless your recompile them because binaries won't work."
Yup. It was an absolute scandal that Solaris binaries wouldn't run on HPUX.
Wasn't part of WIndows' problem that sometimes they had backwards bug compatibility because stuff like use-after-free was used in "important" applications?
"You wouldn't have had to do that if Windows wasn't so crap, would you?"
There are at least a couple of answers to that.
One is that I've been using computers, including and preferring Unix or the Unix-like, since before Windows existed so it's not so much a matter of opting out as not opting in any more than was unavoidable.
Another was a gem of Microsoft's arrogance: they had adhesive inserted between the pages of a magazine with the tag line "Don't get stuck with Microsoft". For that arrogance I've always preferred to obey that ambiguous suggestion in the way they didn't intend.
"but if you're going through the faff of stringing new anything, you might as well make it fibre"
That's the one justifiable use case. I can think of a few places so far off the beaten track that copper isn't going to be useful at all although, given that they're few in number I wonder if a point-to-point microwave link might work just as well, be cheaper and less of an eye-sore (those swags of wire between poles look fine in Ashley Jackson paintings, not so much in real landscape).
"http://www.roundtowers.org.uk"
Thanks for the link. I'd assumed the reasoning was that they're built out of flint and flint doesn't do corners very well so making them round saves having to buy bricks or masonry for the quoins. And then part way down the page is some show-off who built a round tower part way up and stuck a hexagonal or octagonal tower on top of that!
