Posts by Doctor Syntax

BOFH: Cough up half a grand and we'll protect you from AI

Being ordained so as to carry out last rites would be an even better certificate.

38 percent of tech job interviews offered exclusively to men: report

"what they are willing to pay"

All too often the biggest limiting factor of all.

It depends very much on the proportion of candidates who were men and the average number interviewed.

Take an example where the candidates were 50/50. If only one candidate interviewed* then an unbiased average would be 50% of interviews to be exclusively with men. If 2 candidates were interviewed then 25% would be exclusively men - and 25% exclusively women and 50% one of each.

Depending on the mix of candidates and number of candidates interviewed 37% might be about the expected, substantially more or substantially less.

However I'll stick my neck out and suggest that the people writing PR stuff and claiming an understanding of statistics is less than the number of people writing PR stuff and claiming to have an understanding of statistics but who actually do have an understanding of statistics

* There's nothing to indicate such a practice so the possibility can't be excluded from the interpretation.

Open source licenses need to leave the 1980s and evolve to deal with AI

Maybe the burden should be shifted to require the output of CoPilot & the rest to prove it doesn't contain or depend on the OS inputs.

Licences recognised as Open Source licences don't have such exclusion clauses. Adding one to an existing OS licence would produce a non-OS licence as a result.

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

So John Smith found what was wrong. But did he ever get paid? A combination of bank & HR makes it seem unlikely.

Re: Fancy pants surname

I once knew someone called Holmes who said his father was called Sherlock. It seems his (the Sherlock to be) father called in the pub to celebrate on the way to register the birth and after a few --> couldn't resist the bet.

Re: The flip side of this is a unique name

Back when I was freelancing there was at least one freelancer wit the same name. Given that agents are the results of a cross between HR and double glazing sales it's not surprising I got the occasional copy of someone else;s contract through the post.

Re: Not even names

It probably makes shareholders think more than twice.

Re: Proof if needed

Everyone except most of the denizens of HR do the same. "Most of" because there are a few who exhibit self-awareness.

Re: Proof if needed

"would not fit the culture"

There were some missing words, probably "that we think we have".

I suspect ISO9000 and its spawn lie behind this sort of behaviour. It's likely to prescribe things like "must have at least N years experience of X" where X is minutely specified to current version and the life of versions of X is considerably less then N. It's supposed to be a quality standard but is only a standard for quality of adhering to arbitrary bureaucratic prescriptions.

Re: Unique keys

Similar sort of thing here in the past. Cases came into the forensic science lab with various names given for suspects, injusred parties etc. There'd be lists of items that might or might not become court exhibits labelled with one of these names. There was no way for the reporting officer to know whether these names were genuine or not nor whether the items were correctly labelled but that was OK providing the labels and lists matched. The magic phrase was "described as". It didn't even matter whether an item that came in as "Left shoe of Joe Bloggs" was a right shoe (or even something other than footwear); the report could simply say "Item 5, described as Left shoe of Joe Bloggs was, in fact, a right shoe. It was examined for blood stains....etc." and let the court sort things out.

Re: Unique keys

Kirklees is the prime example. The real Kirklees (supposed site of Robin Hood's grave) is next door in Calderdale.

Lawyers who cited fake cases hallucinated by ChatGPT must pay

Re: What?

What is? Please provide a better single word which is better . A catch-all word such as "error" is not better; it lacks specificity.

Re: Nice to see

Good lawyers are very smart indeed. Having spent a fair amount of time sitting in courts the best bits were when the jury (if there was one) was sent out and the lawyers set to arguing some point of law, usually about the admissibility of evidence. I always find smart people being smart is more entertaining than watching dumb people being dumb.

But the way it was done in the Belfast City Commission was that they would provide the actual books that they were citing, opened at the relevant page so the judge sat there with copies of Archbold or whatever being thrust at him. It would have avoided what happened there and explained why the judge sat behind a long bench - he needed it to lay out all the huge open books.

I really don't like the term "hallucinate" for this behaviour.

Let's just take a step back for a moment and think about how we create technical terms*.

We take some existing word or expression from one context and use it in another where the general sense of the term succinctly describes some concept in that new context so that it can take on a new meaning quite detached from the original. A well-established example would be master/slave to describe hydraulic brakes and many other engineering situations**.

This seems to me to be just another instance of this extension of a term into another context where it expresses what needs to be expressed. Just because the context isn't the original one doesn't mean that the hallucinate and hallucination aren't appropriate words to apply to something which we can't otherwise label without using extremely long descriptive phrases. The long descriptive phrases are fine as dictionary definitions of the words in their new meaning but too unwieldy to substitute for them.

* And other terms because this is how language grows.

**We then (rightfully in my view) complain when (probably) well-meaning people object to this new sense because they (rightfully in my view) decry the original context.

The best analogy I can think of is that you take a huge stack of documents, some fact, some fiction, and shred them. Not too fine but into strips that hold a few words each. You then randomly grab the shreddings and paste them together to make new documents.

Mark Zuckerberg would kick Elon Musk's ass, experts say

Re: I really hope...

It doesn't even matter if they're in the same cage.

Inclusive Naming Initiative limps towards release of dangerous digital dictionary

I've no idea what tribe might mean in an engineering context. However, as to the rest, anyone who doesn't have a clear understanding of what they mean in an appropriate context is clearly unfit to make a judgement on them. Hence those responsible for this "initiative" must be deemed incapable of conducting it and their list of terms declared invalid.

Re: Sheer Lunacy

They want you to blacklist those terms.

'We hate what you’ve done with the place – especially the hate' Australia tells Twitter

Re: Yeah, right

Do Oz & the US have an extradition agreement?

"It seems to me that it's much easier for governments to make unaccountable bodies decide"

If you make them decide you make them accountable.

The alternative to making the platforms accountable is for the government to use tax-payers' money to do that. How much extra tax would you be prepared to pay to let Elon & the rest off the hook? Or should the hate victims have to pay to defend themselves?

Re: What type of "hate speech"?

The usual test standard is the reasonable man.

Amazon Prime too easy to join, too hard to quit, says FTC lawsuit

Re: The cost of doing business

"The fines have to be proportional to the global revenues so that the impact is real."

This is why dismemberment has to be considered as an alternative. If you abuse one wing of your business to favour another in this way you get ordered to separate the businesses into two separate corporations.

What's really needed is someone to actually do it. Investigations, e.g. Microsoft many years back, prompts changes at the time but in the end they drift back to their old ways.

Re: This is in the past I assume?

Maybe this is another dark pattern. Make cancellation easy for a few to generate an impression that it's easy for everyone.

Re: It is not just Amazon

"A suitable penalty (when found guilty) would be to refund prime membership fees for the last 5 years"

Too timid. A suitable penalty would be to force them to split Prime off as a separate corporation.

As with all forms of advertising the feedback is only one way, the way that confirms what marketing wish to be the truth. There's no way that they can tell that the reason I recently emptied the basket and left is that their Prime traps were thoroughly pissing me off, nor could they tell that I'd gone elsewhere to make the purchase I abandoned there. If they realised that this could be costing them sales elsewhere they might reconsider.

Right now it needs somebody with a lot more clout that the ASA to discourage them. The CMA perhaps.

Re: Poetic Justice?

You just did.

SSD missing from SAP datacenter turns up on eBay, sparking security investigation

"a SAP spokesperson said the disks contained no personally identifiable information"

Given that the drive bought on eBay contained data on 100 SAP employees either SAP employees don't count as persons or the spokesperson is pushing things even further than the standard script for this situation.

Another redesign on the cards for iPhone as EU rules call for removable batteries

Re: You mean, like phones used to be designed by default?

Nokia as a business is an independent company. MS's ownership of the phone business didn't last long. so that Nokia as a phone brand is now owned by a Finnish/Chinese company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMD_Global so it's not really bizarre at all

"I buy iPhones because they work. No fuss, no hassle. I don’t want a replaceable battery..."

If your iPhone had a non-replaceable worn-out battery I think you'd find it was not working adequately and giving you a lot of fuss and hassle. Unless, of course, you replace it at sufficiently frequent intervals in which case maybe it should be classed as a fashion accessory instead of a phone and allowed to escape the legislation altogether.

"I don’t want a replaceable battery or other software stores."

Having a replaceable battery and other software stores doesn't mean you have to take advantage of them. Your choice but don't deny others theirs.

In general you're right but the HDMI port with its DRM issues might not be the best example.

"We can look forward to software updates being legally required for at least 6 years from launch"

Make that from end of sale. You don't want to buy a long-lived model & then find it obsoleted next year.

And those levels are needed these days.

Re: Just learned to break open our family phones ...

"doesn't look modern"

A plus point in its own right.

Very strange indeed, given that Google use a Linux kernel. You'd almost think they were doing it deliberately.

A small suggestion

When searching for a new phone or laptop include easily replaceable battery in your search terms. Given the average selling site it won't make too much difference to the hits so step two is to weed out the rest and choose one that really does have an easily replaceable battery. I'm pretty sure the search terms will get analysed and, if everyone does it, some marketing departments might catch on and the sales figures would speak for themselves. Every laptop and every phone I've bough has had replaceable batteries. If you want the shiniest examples you might not agree with my choice but then I might not agree with yours.

Re: standardization of removable batteries would be a great follow up

It's not a matter of getting into the pack, it's the lack of interchangeability of packs and of the chargers.

Re: standardization of removable batteries would be a great follow up

Trade buyers have clout. That's why consumer protection legislation is important.

The EU is run by people who thing consumers are more important than the wishes of big companies. As I'm a consumer, not a big company that's why I think the EU is doing the right thing and that that lying twerp and his puppeteers sold the British public down the river.

Re: I'm not sure what problem they are solving

1. The EU is a pretty big market.

2. Non-EU residents are going to get pissed off when they realise other markets have models of phones that don't let Apple screw them when the battery wears out.

Microsoft rethinks death sentence for Windows Mail and Calendar apps

What you describe goes right back to Netscape and still lives on in Thunderbird and Seamonkey. But this is MS and MS in the C21st is just going to do everything they can to drag you into their servers so I doubt it's going to be their version of Tbird.

I have that on my desktop right now but it's not a web app. It's SeaMonkey mail & news client - multiple email accounts, RSS & Usenet all on one tab, calendar on another although I preferred it when the calendar was a plugin with a separate window.

Re: Think of the users, and not just corporates

I wouldn't know. I haven't used it for nearly 20 years & then it was at a client site.

Re: Think of the users, and not just corporates

Einstein's dictum: everything should be as simple as possible but no simpler.

The problem arises when your nice simple interface suddenly fails you when you want it to do something outside its simple features. The "just reads your mail and sends photos to your relatives" might then not be up to it when you're suddenly trying to organise a family wedding, a house move and a holiday all at the same time. At that point you realise that multiple folders with nesting, proper threading of messages and maybe a search function would actually be easier to use than the nice simple interface.

"One user argued that for security reasons, they didn't want an app like Mail in the cloud. That said, another user noted that web apps are the future of the industry."

The two are far from being mutually exclusive.

Over 100,000 compromised ChatGPT accounts found for sale on dark web

Re: Is this worse that other products?

"the problem, sorry, challenge."

Opportunity.

Oreo cookie maker says crooks gobbled up staff info

"Please know that this incident did not occur on or affect Mondelez systems or networks in any way."

It didn't need to have occurred there. The data had already left the network and been waved goodbye as it went.

Where's my money?! Now USA Today publisher sues Google over online advertising

Obvious solution - roll your own.

Remind advertisers of the way they used to do things. They didn't profile readers, they profiled pages and doing that was a no-brainer: you wanted to advertise, say gardening products, you bought space on the gardening pages.

Remind them as well that the user "targetting" they're spending money on is very often wasted from the advertiser's PoV by repeatedly showing ads to people who already bought that type of product weeks or months ago.

Remind them that Google sells advertising. Nothing else, advertising. It doesn't sell their goods or services except possibly as a by-product. It just sells advertising and it sells it to them, not their customers.

Elon Musk's Twitter moves were 'reaffirming' says Reddit boss amid API changes

Check with your ISP, some of them resell Giganews. My current ISP is one of those. Prior to that I used Individual.net