Posts by Doctor Syntax 42414 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
Google search very seldom returned a null result, it would almost always find something matching some word in the search term however irrelevant. Not returning null for something about which it doesn't have data would be an essential Google requirement. It's not surprising that a Google LLM would give fictitious results.
Did SatNav "learn" to give us directions are do they just follow some graph theory problem, the sort of things mathematicians have been working on since Euler, if not before? Intelligence would not have to be arm-wrestled away from taking a busy motorway nor would its preferred route to get to the motorway be joining a notoriously overcrowded A road via a junction with appalling sight-lines.
Actually, SatNav has to do three quite complicated things of which the routing is only one. It also has to handle voice recognition and speech synthesis. I'm not sure either of the latter is handled intelligently.
For instance I set a country house hotel as a destination without adding "Hotel". Voice recognition completely failed when I gave the command to go there with "Hotel" added. Intelligence would have recognised the likely destination and asked for confirmation. Nor would intelligence offer to navigate to the centre of the city when given then name of a a small village as a destination.
Speech synthesis seems to handle place names better than road names. For instance "Denby Dale" is pronounced sensibly as a place name. "Denby Dale Road" is pronounced "Den bid ale road". I get the impression that the phrase is being concatenated into a stream of sounds and then fixed rules being applied to split up the stream. Intelligence would not do that.
"Nobody in their right minds runs a mailserver."
Really? The people who run mine definitely seem to be. OTOH there's a good argument for saying that nobody in their right mind would let a large US corporation run their mailserver, not if they're paying attention to what's happening.
"A failure to properly anticipate the security risks has led to a dependency on scale that leaves us with all our eggs in someone else's basket."
The problems of M&S and a good many others seems to be not just a reliance on their suppliers but the suppliers' suppliers. Hence the term supply chain. It's time to reflect on the saying about the strength of chains.
The hungry forties also affected England. Two of my great grandfather's four brothers emigrated in the 1840s, a third in the early 50s and probably the last one did two as I can't find him after 1851. This was a common situation. The population of both countries had spiked to what was, for the time, an unsustainable level. (The fact that we might be in a similar global situation is worth considering.)
"Cyber resilience generally refers to reaching a point where an organization can confidently and effectively detect, neutralize, and recover quickly from any kind of cyber attack. "
It's one thing an organisation being able to do that is it's attacked but what about an attack on an nth party in the supply chain? If that party's taken out in an attack can the organisation function without it? If it can why is that in the supply chain?
Here's a slightly heretical viewpoint. If you're writing custom software for some aspect of a business's operations there shouldn't be a separate application manual. There should be a business manual for taking a sales order, terminating a tenancy or whatever. It should detail the steps taken to do that, manual, conversations with customer or whatever as well as entering the data. That is the responsibility of the department concerned but you can guarantee that if you provide a free standing application manual the department will seize on it. Offer to help them write the fill manual. Preferably starting before you write any code for what I hope will be obvious reasons.
documentation written *solely* for an audience who is new, not just to the program in question, but to computers in general
A variation on this is the manual which starts with how to install it - which might, in fact be how to compile from source and install it.
No, I do not need to know how to install it. I'm sitting in front of it. it was installed as part of the distro, or, in a business environment, as part of the build, or it's on the computer of somebody who asked me to help. I want something that tells me what it does and how to do it. If it needs installation instructions refer me to the Appendix which is where you could have put it. I don't want to lose the will to live thumbing through instructions to do something that's already been done.
TMMM starts with differentiating between the professionally produced product and two people working out of "a remodelled garage" if I remember the phrase correctly, the difference being about an order of magnitude. Nowadays, however a lot of FOSS does indeed come into his category of a product. I mentally categorise things into product or project and all too often the home page of the latter used to consist mostly of the release history or a "News" link that pointed to that. Now, of course, even if it has an address for a home page it points directly to Git(hub|lab).
4. What it doesn't do.
Eventually you get used to reading descriptions etc. & taking notice of what's not there. Remember that humongous T&C, EULA, privacy policy or whatever about Windows telemetry? It gave a few examples of what might be taken but there was no statement as to what wouldn't.
"If you're talking about the saying: "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different outcome", that's fucking terrible definition of insanity."
I believe it was Einstein who said it. I think it would be his comment on quantummechanics in general and the uncertainly principle in particular.
I have a friend who's been wheelchair-bound for a few years to who I frequently transport. One public building we visit has a long sig-zag ramp to bypass its main steps but a tiny lift. Worse than being tiny its upper floor doors are at right angles to the ground floor door so the wheelchair has to be turned round inside the lift or she wouldn't be able to get out. Fortunately her new powered chair can more or less spin on its own axis.
If the designers of X Windows built cars you'd have one cockpit remotely controlling several cars. Yes, with multiple steering wheels. If you wanted one steering wheel to control them all you need the designers of KVM switches for that.
It's an odd fact of life that different use cases need different solutions.
I don' think C was intended for the circumstances in which you're condemning its use. Because the server provides realisation of the UI as a service its relationship with the computers* doing the heavy lifting is the opposite to what one might expect. What you need is something more suited to the use case - even a dumb terminal on a serial line.
Horses for courses.
* Yes, in the plural. The whole point is that a user at one terminal can access several different providers of computation services at once. That's an inherently insecure requirement as the user can easily bridge them with no more than cut and paste.
Always assuming the A/C you just replied to was the OP of the thread. That's the trouble with A/Cs.
Perhaps el Reg could look at a scheme whereby A/Cs get numbered as they join in the commentary of an article. That way they could maintain their anonymity if they need it but maintain the integrity of a discussion thread.
"I don't know what advantages I'm getting over the Xorg server I had been using for years but I do know it is much more actively developed."
Xorg has been around for a long time. Experience is that it Just Works. There's good reason to keep it like that. Do we need something that's being actively developed? "Actively developed" can mean "still needs work" or "frequently broken" but not exclusively.
If I follow the Rasterman explanation correctly it boils down to not allowing some frequently used requirements to be implemented because in use cases where they would be irrelevant (e.e. tiling managers or wrapping a window round a 3D VR bunny) they'd be impossible to implement. Or have I missed something?
It's a lot cheaper for them to let the courts decide at the opposing parties' expense.
Make USPTO responsible for those costs and compensation for their management time and other losses and you'll find they're suddenly falling over themselves to do their job properly and not depending on freebies. It would also raise the cost of patent applications but that might drive out all the ....using a computer, ....using a mobile phone and nowadays, no doubt ....using AI applications, and rightly so.
"My only comms is now exclusively by smartphone, and one of the first things you realise is that, once you have a smartphone, ironically you no longer need to make or receive actual phone calls, because you now have 100 more effective ways to communicate with people."
Yes. You can receive texts from the NHS with links that, given the way my phone and fingers interact, are unusable. It's a crap way to communicate. I got one the other day to book my annual checkup with the GP. I'll ring them.
Before that there was the situation where my mobile number was given as my wife's next of kin contact number so they then assumed that that was her number.
IME mobile is about the lest reliable communication system available.
I got fed up with their spam ages ago. Simple remedy. I already operated a policy of individual email addresses for different organisations. I kept reporting their spams as potential phishing. I then told them if they couldn't confirm this as genuine I'd block the email address. They never replied so I set it to bounce. It was years before I needed it for a password reset so I just re-enabled it. It's the easiest way to deal with marketing departments who don't realise how phishy they look.
It took a long time to figure out the problem with Northern Powergrid's ACD front end. My house name, when spoke, sounds to have a number in it so it tried and failed to find it as a street number and name. It would inform me that it wasn't an address in their region. At least it would drop me into a queue for a real person to answer.
"Oh, and never answer any questions in the affirmative until you are generally sure that the caller is who they purport to be."
Ask them to prove who they are.
It never failed to catch out HSBC's marketing department making spam calls. They asked me to prove who I was by asking for details of a recent transaction. They couldn't understand why I wouldn't just answer. I then told them they couldn't possibly be my bank because I'd made it clear to my bank that I'd need them to be able to identify themselves properly and I wouldn't even tell them whether or not they'd guessed right. It was always followed up by a peevish letter a few days later saying that they hadn't been able to contact me - the in order to try to flog me some service I didn't need was omitted. This was repeated about once a quarter. They never learned. It's worrying that their expectations were justified that just about everyone else would give details of financial transactions a random caller who introduced themselves as their bank without proving it.
"the crook's ASR system attempts to convert their vocal response to text, so the back-end model can decipher what was said, devise a response"
I want one of those for when we finally lose POTS in favour of VOIP. As a compensation for the loss of resilience against local power failure it would be great to dump unwanted calls - especially about smart meters - into an automated maze of twisty little passages.
"My own, possibly unkind, response is to ask whether there was enough consideration of the brain capacity (aka intelligence) of those who choose to use AI, cf those who are choose to work without."
Assuming this was a properly conducted experiment they wouldn't have chosen, they'd have been chosen, at random, by the investigators.
