Posts by Doctor Syntax

Naïve Reg hack thinks he can beat Christmas food comas once and for all

When walking in narrow, winding lanes, remember the highway Code instruction about walking on the side to face oncoming traffic on the straight bits but cross over as necessary to stay on the outside of the bends so as to see and be seen. This last part is especially significant if the lanes are lined by high walls and hedges.

If several of you are walking together don't greet approaching traffic be splitting the group to both sides of the road.

The above are just sensible approaches to self-reservation but please remember some of us live here.

If you walk open gates to walk into fields, please close them behind you. It's not just green stuff like your local park. It's somebody's livelihood. Even those of us who aren't farmers aren't happy with finding a few cows and the bull or last year's crop of lambs in our gardens (both have happened here plus the more frequent occurrence of two or three sheep or a ewe and a couple of lambs).

If you're in fields with livestock keep any dogs on their leads.

And please take your litter home. Gaps in dry stone walls are not litter bins, neither is the other side of the wall or hedge.

Fining Big Tech isn't working. Make them give away illegally trained LLMs as public domain

"If I spend 3 years reading others’ history books, and then use that research to write a new history book, have I created a derivative work?"

If that's all you've done then maube you have. Where are those archive visits to access original sources? Or adding something extra - insight - that LLMs are not adding?

Re: Who wins?

"they may only get 10^ -9 of a cent for the fragment of their work"

So you think that, involuntarily, they should be providing all the rest of the value of their work to the public gratis?

"However, many people, including myself, have discovered that the results of our intellectual labor was created by somebody else earlier. This is why the patent office has a first-to-file rule."

If something is independently reinvented should it really have passed the originality test to receive a patent for first to file?

How, in this scheme, does payment get back to pay the original creators?

Admittedly some work is created essentially pro bone to some extent - however event OSS under GPL requires anyone adding further development to make their additions available on the same terms.

Re: Cui bono

"It is worth remembering that while many profitable companies are creating AI implementations, none of those AIs currently make a profit."

Profit is income minus expenses. Just fine them a proportion of income. Include all that investment in the income.

Re: Throwing the baby out with the bathwater

"I used to translation software a lot in 2005 and it was basic at least. Not usable but gave a quick basic understanding of the sentence. Now, the result is better than expected and is native-level."

So as a user of S/W trained on massive amounts of other people's work without their consent, how much are you proposing to pay those people for the benefit you obtained?

I've a better idea. Given the amount of energy being wasted on it simply close them down. Power down the racks. Ley them go bust.

Next up - mining cryptocurrency.

Suspected LockBit dev, facing US extradition, 'did it for the money'

I suppose in a kleptocracy nothing's illegal providing Putin gets his cut.

BOFH: Printer's festive bips herald a merry mystery for the Boss's budget

Re: Christmas party

Many years ago SWMBO, being a real botanist, got a job in the gardening department when the local B&Q was being set up. Back then it was really well managed. All the staff who helped on that set-up got their names on a beard mounted very visibly but high up. There was a little demo theatre - she actually bought manky roses from a local, then not very good, garden centre to demonstrate pruning.

B&Q management became manglement. The demo theatre went. So did the board. Taking it down would have actually cost money. OTOH I've usually found their staff to be better than they deserve.

Re: Christmas party

"It's quicker to queue up for the bored teenager on the till"

My experience of self-service checkouts is that 3 items is the limit. After that the probability of it getting confused by a barcode it doesn't have in the database or it has the wrong weight for or the like is getting too close to 1 to make it worthwhile.

They would walk right past one that didn't.

Finishing the year off in style.

UK ICO not happy with Google's plans to allow device fingerprinting

As I keep saying, the only thing Google sells is advertising. As to the marketing dweebs, I suspect a lot of them know perfectly well that it's crap. It's also their job, that budget has to be spent somewhere. The real dweebs in this situation are the boards and C-suite who are handing their marketing departments this money without paying the slightest attention to how it's spent.

Re: Traditions

Upvoted despite the NME (it's Christmas after all). I was more a Melody Maker reader until Jazz Journal came out.

Krispy Kreme bandits raise sticky fingers to take credit

Shouldn't that me "kredit"?

Apple called on to ditch AI headline summaries after BBC debacle

Re: "APPL shares tank after researchers confirm Chinese backdoor in all products since 2013"

That's what comes of trying to look clever by using an encoding instead of the name.

Re: It's garbage

They demonstrably don't work in some situations. In that case how do you determine the boundary between those areas where they do work and those where they don't? If you have a hundred or a thousand instances of a system working correctly how can you be certain the next one - or hundred or thousand will still be OK?

The Automattic vs WP Engine WordPress wars are getting really annoying

"This suggests that, whatever his problem really is, it's something different."

It sounds like a touch of CEO disease.

Techie fluked a fix and found himself the abusive boss's best friend

Re: Cobol...

Perhaps "Where could that have come from?" would be the better way of expressing it.

Re: Apple II

I had a similar experience. In this case it was a client-written report for a commercial ERP system. I think whenever they'd tried to run it they ended up knocking on the head after a couple of days. For reasons* we weren't allowed to set the optimiser statistics. I was asked to look at it during my first week on the gig.

The report queried a mix of big and small tables. I turned on the query explanation mechanism to get the query plan and found that it had chosen to do the initial selection out of a small table and then join it to a big table on an un-indexed column. And then another. I rewrote it query in a sensible order into temp tables. By the end of the morning I had it down to a run time of about 10 minutes.

*I suspect because the package had been written by someone familiar with the older version of the RDBMS who was used to hand optimising selections and didn't trust the new-fangled optimiser. I'd also been used to the older version so I knew such tricks existed. But I'd enough experience to trust the optimiser.

Re: "Fortunately, I was moved overseas on a different project before my limitations could be tested"

"being the go-to guy should mostly be considered harmful"

Only if you're not freelance. Being the go-to guy gets you the gigs without having to use the pimps agencies. Because you're only there for the length of the contract you automatically duck out before it's too late.

Re: Cobol...

The more general form is "Where did that come from?". Works beyond programming.

Microsoft coughs up yet more Windows 11 24H2 headaches

Re: MICROSOFT FAIL

Try Devuan and be systemd-free as well. You know where its maintainer works, don't you?

Humanoid robots coming soon, initially under remote control

Re: Sounds Interesting

Minimum built-in function, not requiring external connection should be to take itself off to land-fill. It's the one function you can guarantee will be useful.

Re: "Put the eggplant in the pot"

"PCs were in businesses for (call it) 20 years before they became prevalent in the home. The wrinkles were ironed out to a great degree by then (honest!). Those preceding live tests were undertaken by [orgs] with the capacity to support/fix/develop/mitigate any glitches. They paved the way for domestic/public utility."

And then what happened? Because all the wrinkles had been ironed out it was decided that new stuff could now continue to be rolled out without further testing

"The path to widespread adoption in society for robotics is going to be through the home, because you need that data."

At last - honesty.

Fear of Foxconn reportedly driving possible Nissan, Honda and Mitsubishi merger

Re: computers on wheels

"turn on the demister ... I want to use a simple switch on the dashboard that I can access easily from my muscle memory of where the switch is."

My demister is a simple push-button - flush with the electronics screen so it's a matter of faffing about trying to feel the edge. Ditto the aircon temperature buttons - did you just turn it up or down?

Re: Consumers Want.. An Excellent Digital Rxperience

Imagine you have a small digital device which is the passkey to just about everything in your life.

Now think what SPoF means.

Re: computers on wheels

Is the digital experience actually delivered excellent?

Re: Lets shut British factories

When Nissan's CEO (or whatever) suggested a merger he ended up being arrested and smuggled out of the country.

Stranded in space: Starliner crew to remain in orbit even longer as SpaceX faces delays

Whose tab is it on?

Watchdog deep-sixes job ad that was actually pay-to-play training course

ISTR we had this sort of thing years ago. Wasn't it made - or found already to be - illegal at the time?

Supreme Court to hear TikTok's appeal against law that would force it to shut, or sell

So exactly what is the issue?

1. Are they claiming the content is a national security issue? Have they any examples of this?

2. Is the ability of operators in one country can see personal data of users in another? If so, then why, as a matter of principle, does the US not forbid its own companies to see personal data of users in other countries?

3. Is this in competition with US companies offering similar services?

There is only one word to describe issues 2 and 3: hypocrisy.

Re: "their right to free speech"

That's for the court to rule on.

Re: Big Tech Lobbying at its Finest

"This is known because US spies found that china documented secret military bases due to geo tracking by the app on service members phones.... but yes the app is abused by spies"

Whose spies?

All those kids posting videos giving away US secrets. Must be a security risk.

US reportedly mulls TP-Link router ban over national security risk

TP-Link has about 65 percent of the US router market for homes and small businesses.

In late October, Microsoft warned that Chinese government-backed threat actors had compromised thousands of internet-connected devices for password-spray attacks against its customers, and noted "routers manufactured by TP-Link make up most of this network."

So what would constitute "most"? About 65%?

Microsoft won't let customers opt out of passkey push

Re: Putting all your eggs

And yet...a friend who doesn't use MS Office decided that signing up for a subscription was an acceptable cost to get rid of the ads. There seem to be no limits to the amount of abuse their customers will accept.

We told Post Office about system problems at the highest level, Fujitsu tells Horizon Inquiry

Re: Banking Software Quality

I think it very likely that those at the top will find they were responsible. Not taking some of them to court will not go down well with the public.

Re: Lessons ?

"that there is a belief that the computer is never wrong, journalist Nick Wallis, on his site postofficescandal.uk, reports that this is currently a legal presumption in the law of England & Wales"

ISTR that this was specifically introduced in the Police & Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) or an amendment and that the prosecutions post-date that.

Re: Time to produce the audit trail

Absolutely.

Re: How much bigger does Liar's Gate need to be?

Justice delayed is justice denied.

Re: Time to produce the audit trail

"and then presenting evidence that they DID know all along"

The shameful thing is, they're not presenting it in evidence, they're presenting it in a closing statement. If they had this evidence the correct time to come out with it would have been while the enquiry was taking evidence.

Also, are they saying they didn't know the prosecutions were going on? If they did - and it seems overwhelmingly likely that they did - then why didn't they intervene? Public responsibility should have taken precedence over responsibility to a client, otherwise they're risking charges of conspiracy to perverting the course of justice.

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine

I think I recognise bits of the introductions to the published rolls in that. It doesn't say very much beyond what perplexity says except in telling me how to find the rolls on archive .org although the qualification of published rolls should be a clue to the questioner's is well aware of the situation around publication and availability.

However it's not that difficult to distinguish between a text that simply says "dig", one that says "dig" and "sell" and one that just says "sell". The most complex one really is the case of the guy who dug coal, burnt some himself and sold some. It took me an hour or so to go through and tally about 7 different categories all told and decide that the impression I'd got on casual browsing wasn't there in the numbers. Lack of built-in number handling is likely a likely to be a handicap in all this AI stuff.

I tried it with a query more to its strengths, current thinking on the significance of "waste" in Domesday for the West Riding. It came back with a non-committal (as expected) summary although it wasn't difficult to see where it had been taken from in its main sources which didn't include one I've seen refereed to a number of times but haven't got my hands on. But it then went on to list several points and I asked it to expend on one of them which it did. On the whole the outcome was useful, especially as one of its sources was a downloadable recent PhD thesis.

Keyword stuffing should be easily dealt with. Just look at the ratio of search terms to non-search terms. We were doing that sort of thing in cluster analysis in the late 60s-early 70s. Those who do not learn their history, etc.

Even Netflix struggles to identify and understand the cost of its AWS estate

"A Foundational Platform Data "

Let's try translating that into English: "A foundational platform things given". Nope. Still makes no sense, does not even parse.

Understanding the scale is no problem - just look at the bill. Understanding how you got there - priceless.

Interpol wants everyone to stop saying 'pig butchering'

Re: Honestly, it's fine.

In order to be able to apply a term to something you've both got to know the term and what it refers to. Victims become victims because they don't recognise the latter until it's too late. If they don't recognise that they're unlikely to know the name, whatever alternative gets substituted.

However having PR people onboard to complain to the media is probably easier than recruiting and training more investigating officers to try to get a few scum into court. A good clearing-up ratio and the possibility of redress and getting money back is likely to be the more effective at getting reporting up.

Apple Intelligence summary botches a headline, causing jitters in BBC newsroom

Re: apathy to AI services

Is the AI bubble going to burst or just deflate like a shrivelled balloon?