Posts by Doctor Syntax

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.

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

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?

'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..

Is the within 18 months clause to ensure it doesn't happen, to make it happen before the half-term elections or something as elastic as the time limit to sell TikTok?

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.

Re: Subscription only

"If a subscription means the code is rolled back to a previous versions, and no updates are available, you start to be in trouble."

Or does it mean no service in which case you're in more trouble.

Re: Subscription only

"You cannot exist without email these days."

I suppose it depends on what the subscription rates are. Outside of the freebie* gmail/$WhateverMicrosoftCurrentlyCallsIt/ISP service it's reasonable to pay for a email - it costs the MSP to provide it - and the ISP provided service isn't really free anyway.

A bare service using POP3, delete on download isn't going to cost that much per seat but it means individual clients will be storing the emails otherwise you can always run Roundcube etc locally.

* As in -->

You're really paying in kind.

'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.

Re: Heathrow not blameless

Page 95? How about page 1?

Re: LHR suing National Grid

They have multiple feeds but only used one. If they were sharing power from all three and had a plan to use them to pick up the slack failry quickly backup power would only need to cover 1/3rd of the demand for a relatively short period.

"in short there's plenty of blame to go around"

Another way of looking at it is that there's always someone ont which to whuffle one's own blame. So nobody takes responsibility.

US imposes sanctions on second Russian bulletproof hosting vehicle this year

imposes

That's better.

NASA tests shrinking metals to help it find more exoplanets

Re: A new way to solve an old problem?

"aunching in a finely carved teak longcase, with mahogany and walnut details."

No problem with those being launched. Just leave antique oak, walnut or mahogany clocks alone.

Coming to PostgreSQL: On-disk database encryption

Re: why?

Two alternative answers.

1. Without seeing the exact details I suspect this encryption includes everything between the client and the storage medium. If that's the case it provided protection over and above what the network may already provide (on-prem that might well be nothing) so that it can't be observed by an eavesdropper or queried by anyone without an encryption key.

2. The cynical answer: it ticks another box on the ISO9000 inspired checklist.

Impact of Microsoft taking over Enterprise Account renewals starts to 'bite'

Re: Haven't read the full article,

Six of one, half a dozen of the other. The middlemen will have done whatever work was needed to set up the deal. Once that's in place Microsoft doesn't need them. It's hard to differentiate between the two who's the parasite and who's being parasitised.

Of course we know who's really being parasitised - the users.

Folks aren’t buying the PCs that US vendors stockpiled to dodge tariffs

Re: AI PCs…

That is the industry standard - slug it out and the last man standing wins.

Re: Upgrade? Why?

"if there was a window manager that was a perfect clone of Windows 10's UI, including the file manager for saving stuff and the printer dialog for printing stuff."

There seems to be a cottage industry in W10-type styling for KDE: https://store.kde.org but I'm not sure anyone would want to emulate the Windows file manager that closely. For some reason it seems to display two similar - but not quite - lists of places for reasons I've never quite understood. However if she could accept something simpler KDE Dolphin might do. AFAICS print dialogs are not consistent between applications.

Re: This isn't like Windows XP

"the larger screen can be solved without using Windows"

Of course it can. 17" laptop and Devuan works just fine.

However, you've just set me wondering. Your iPhone Mini idea works well in an hotel room where there's a TV. I'm thinking of a super-portable to take into archives where there wouldn't be that luxury but I need something to drive the USB document camera. I don't think my 15" laptop is much lighter than the 17" although that's what I used last week. But a lightweight monitor and a Pi might be a good combo... Where as that Aldi where somebody snagged a cheap monitor recently?

Interesting. AIUI ATMs have used Windows in the past and various PoS terminals also do. So what's the future software platform for those? Android? Linux? BSD?

"Microsoft appear to have gone terminally insane."

That's a bit rich, considering your handle.

Re: 2%?

They probably intended to sell most of them to business users but I suppose they also have no money now.

Cl0p cybercrime gang's data exfiltration tool found vulnerable to RCE attacks

"It added that 44 percent of the 682 unique IPs executing scans within the past 90 days (as of June 25) came from Tencent Cloud, with the others coming from Amazon, Cloudflare, and Google."

I suppose the sort of people we're dealing with here will pay with cryptocurrency assuming the cloud providers will accept it. It might be a smart regulatory move to make the providers require verified banking details which would enable seizure of at least some assets and a starting point for attempts to trace the perpetrators.

Linus Torvalds hints Bcachefs may get dropped from the Linux kernel

Apple or raspberry pi?

Mitch Kapor finally completes MIT master's degree after 45-year detour

Re: Except he doesn't have an MBA

He probably doesn't need it for his CV.