Posts by tiggity

Friendly AI chatbots will be designing bioweapons for criminals 'within years'

Depends what bioweapon you want

One of my degrees was in biological sciences & did some post graduate research work in a biochemistry lab before career switch.

Unless the quality of course content & students has dropped massively there will be an awful lot of graduates out there able to create bio weapons.

It really depends what type & amount of weapon you want as some things would depend on expertise and specialist equipment that should set alarm klaxons going, others could easily be achieved with relatively basic equipment (and skills).

Main hassles for the person creating it would be

a) Avoiding exposing yourself in the processes (it's not just creating the bioweapon of choice its refining it afterwards..).

b) A suitable delivery system for the weapon... As a decent delivery system is going way outside biosciences skill set & into the engineering realm (unless you go the suicide* approach of human delivery)

* Depends on the weapon, plenty of things you can be vaccinated against that would cause disruption (after all huge death tolls may not be the aim, casing a lot of chaos & the occasional casualty may be the aim) in a "Western" country as most of population not vaccinated against it e.g. typhoid.

On the record: Apple bags patent for iDevice to play LPs

The strobe markings reminded me of my old Dual turntable which had 78 option in addition to "33" and 45.

I did occasionally made use of that 78 setting (mainly for taping 78s owned by family members who no longer had 78 playing equipment), but it was a bit of a pain as needed to swap in 78 specific stylus unit, though when I got a better turntable (that only did "33" and 45) Dual was semi-retired and used as 78 only for doing family taping help duties.

A room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor? Take a closer look

Even if its not a superconductor

Some of the comments were sceptical in the article (rightly so as would be a huge breakthrough if true).

If it is not a superconductor BUT is a very efficient electrical conductor at room temperature then would still be an important (& potentially v. useful achievement if useable materials could be spun out of it).

Although it would not have the exciting magnetic properties of a superconductor (lots of interesting uses of superconductors relate to magnetic properties), something that was "nearly" perfect in electrical conduction at "everyday" temperatures & pressures could still be very useful for reduced energy use - less "waste" heat generated in conduction = less initial energy input required.

BT and OneWeb deliver internet to rock in Bristol Channel – population 28

surely it's a job for this RFC

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1149

Ideally using puffins (after all, that's the bird that gave Lundy its name) - though might be problematic outside of the breeding season whey they disappear off into the Atlantic somewhere.

Social media is too much for most of us to handle

Information Overload

I would never have the time to follow tens of thousands of people on social media (whether they were posting about disasters or mundane things)

If I followed 10K people who only posted once a week that would be (if evenly spread) just under 1.5K messages a day (& being realistic once a week probably a massive under estimate*) - that's why news media (be it El Reg, newspapers etc) are useful - information is curated (OK, this may be a bad thing on occasion with "groupthink" affecting reporting of some news stories & some outlets having particular biases) but does mean people can get news "efficiently" without sifting through thousands of messages to find the few nuggets of interest.

* I'm not really a social media person, about the only one I ever used much was G+ & that got the (fairly common) Google cull applied quite a few years ago, so message frequency estimates are a wild guess.

Re: American spelling

Most of the brits I know call it aluminium (bar a couple of chemists, as IUPAC declared aluminum the official spelling as they have got used to the US spelling when writing aricles, speaking at conferences).

Maybe it's down to speech style in the area where I live (in the UK) but people generally say cans (rather than tins) when referring to canned beer (though I have a couple of Aussie mates who invariably call them tinnies).

Microsoft's Surface Pro 9 requires a tedious balancing act

Re: Laptop keyboards are far better.

I have laptop raised on a stand on my desk (so screen at a sensible height instead of having to look down at the screen) and attach a separate decent keyboard & mouse - this is my standard approach if I am going to be working on a laptop for any period of time - i.e. never use the laptop keyboard or trackpad if sitting at a desk, only grudgingly use them if "out & about" & small amount of typing needed.

LG to offer subscriptions for appliances and televisions

Hello Tosh

Our old dumb TV died recently & replacement was a "smart" Toshiba (good picture quality for the price, could not find a dumb TV of good picture quality anywhere near the price of it).

I have no need of the "smart" features,

On initial setup not even connected to TV aerial never mind internet, basically chose the I do not want to connect to this option for everything (including WiFi).

Later connected it to aerial so it could find channels & "finish its setup" (as though mainly be using via Humax connected to HDMI I got bored of finish setup nag every time I turned it on so tuned in channels) .

I did notice one good point (it may be a bug on Toshiba side, but I'm happy about it) - on settings it is impossible to turn on WiFi - if you try it goes straight back to off (not sure which of the many things I declined on initial setup achieved this but great that TV is not going to accidentally latch on to an open WiFi if a neighbour has one & also stops partner trying to enable WiFi to make use of the (unwanted by me) YouTube button on the remote)

Re: @StrangerHereMyself - Wrong

I "have internet" - but no ethernet cable (or WiFi signal) to the kitchen / utility area (kitchen & fridge / washing machine etc. area essentially same room, with white goods zone projecting off "main" cooking / food prep zone) .

Strangely enough when I'm in that part of the house I'm either prepping food, cooking, loading / unloading dishwasher etc - none of which are activities that need WiFi (Before anyone comments - I do NOT need to look up a recipe online in the kitchen, I have good recipe books on the shelves (the bad ones have gone to charity shops - marked as bad if a high proportion of recipes we have tried from that book have disappointing taste, texture etc. compared to expected outcome for that dish. We do actually mark a recipe (when we try it) as to how good / bad outcome was* as you don't want to use a known bad recipe again))

* Also do other assessments, we have a couple of high rated recipes but with comment to only use occasionally as although better than alternatives it's because they are less healthy (e.g. assuming you are not veggie or allergic & so can eat butter, there are few butter containing recipes where taste is not improved by using more butter & some recipes do just that )

Obscure internet boutique Amazon sues EU for calling it a Very Large Online Platform

Amazon should be on there

Given the continual stories of sellers hoodwinking people with dodgy goods, I'm aware on the "tech" items side (as those stories tend to crop up on sites I visit) of common problems people have had be such as someone selling small SD cards as being of larger size through to more potentially nasty issues such as high fire risk USB-C cables being sold.

.. I'm sure Amazon are probably OK at replacing dodgy goods, just treating it as a cost of doing business, but the point of DSA would be to make them do more to stop such things being sold.

Putting LLMs into production is a monumental task – vector databases could light the way

Specialized DB may be worthwhile

I used pinecone in a proof of concept embeddings search app & it was fine, but that was with a (relatively) small amount of vectors (all other data was held elsewhere in "main" DB, just using pinecone to store vector values and get best match vector results on vectors passed in, then would use returned vector to provide data relating to that vector from "main" DB).

To find similarities between AI embeddings / vectors you generally use cosine similarity.

The maths is not complex but its quite "expensive".

The challenge is not so much implementing the cosine similarity based search but doing it in a fast & efficient way at scale*

Because of that performance issue at scale on a "generalist" database a system specifically designed for efficient cosine similarity searches could well have a massive performance advantage once amount of data stored gets large and that performance advantage could definitely make it a worthwhile option.

* Easy maths - I could write a Cosine similarity select to run on a standard SQL Database, but I would not fancy its performance once it had to process a large number of vectors. But for completeness should reiterate that not tried Pinecone with the sort of massive dataset that would be a nightmare for a "generalist" DB, so just assuming it would perform well (as what's the point in building it otherwise!) it was just PoC, not a proper evaluation of Pinecone, mainly used Pinecone for the learning experience instead of rolling my own cos similarity search on SQL Server.

Sarah Silverman, novelists sue OpenAI for scraping their books to train ChatGPT

I would certainly see potential for infringement in terms of "art".

If you get some of the image AIs to produce an art work in the style of a particular person, occasionally it will produce something where you think, yes that really has captured the style of person X.

Lets take a real world example, UK based people who are aware of the long running B3ta boards may well recognise the name "HappyToast". He sells artworks and has a very distinctive style (I deliberately chose him for that reason as a suitably trained AI could grok the style). I have seen AI generated works done in his style that, whilst not as good as his works, is a reasonable pastiche & there would be nothing to stop someone then trying to sell that.

I personally think that image generating AIs should not be allowed to do "in the style of" image generation when the style is for a living artist

Man who nearly killed physical media returns with $60,000 vinyl turntable

I have heard some amazing setups in "proper" hi-fi shops (most of those shops no longer exist) of stuff I could not afford.

I was always on a budget with sound kit as other things were more important in life (& still are - happy with music sound that is "good enough" - especially now I'm getting older and hearing decline is noticeable (probably not helped by attending many loud gigs, including some of the bands that have had "loudest ever" status (though that's a very arguable thing)) and differences I could easily detect decades ago would probably not register now ).

Back then if you were buying an affordable turntable the best "bang for buck" vinyl sound improvements you could get (assuming decent amplification setup, speakers & good quality speaker cable) were a decent tonearm (if turntable supported a choice of tonearm), cartridge & stylus - makes a huge difference (& can have a surprisingly big impact on the sound, especially cartridge - can be a compromise choice depending on what type of music you most listen to)

Fedora Project mulls 'privacy preserving' usage telemetry

Re: Stats please

User agent stats not to be 100% trusted, I run User Agent Switcher in FireFox as identifying as Chrome lets me access some sites that do lazy user agent checks to disallow non Chrome browsers.

Generally, most of those sites do then run OK in FF (a few have required me to fire up Chrome, but that is quite rare)

The number’s up for 999. And 911. And 000. And 111

Not sure if it works without an internet connection, but google maps (I'm on android) shows me my coordinates when I drop a pin (tend to do that if parking in an unknown location where I'm not familiar with that cities landmarks / routes so I can walk back without getting lost e.g. on holiday! (yes I do also make a note of the street name too as a backup))

Re: How about 112 and Advanced Mobile Location?

WiFi location is not much use.

Years ago, one of my friends was at a Google Event in the UK.

He connected to the available wifi network on his phone (as building was doing a good job of blocking his mobile signal and GPS).

At the time we both played Ingress on our phones (location based VR). When in a break, he fired up Ingress it showed his location as San Francisco - with no mobile or GPS signal in building it had obviously fallen back to wifi "location" & I'm guessing that either Google uses a common set of names on their network kit at events or maybe that kit had been used in the states.

I have had similar situations turning my phone on in Midlands rail stations, phone could not get GPS or mobile so WiFi location used & would often show a different train station (at that time a lot of the Midlands stations had wifi networks of the same name ) - Generally Birmingham (no surprise given that's the biggest station in the Midlands & probably had most WiFi repeaters so would be "top ranked" location for that AP name on the Google snooping databases)

UK smart meter rollout years late and less than two thirds complete

NO....NO... Never run a tumble dryer unattended.

I might be biased, I speak as someone who had their (fairly recent model) tumble dryer replaced, precisely because that model had firestarter tendencies!

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/jul/22/whirlpool-recalls-half-a-million-tumble-dryers-from-uk-homes

And in true modern day capitalism **** the consumer style, look at how long the risk was known about and how little was done initially.

Boss such a tyrant you need a job quitting agent? It works in Japan

In your imaginary team of 10 working exact hours only you omitted one real world point of relevance.

It's highly unlikely all 10 are equally skilled.

So, those 10 will all be working hard but some will achieve more than others.

Thus if you want to promote people, if you have decent metrics you will know your top 2 - but it might not be down to performance anyway, promotion may not be just on current "tech" job skills but other "soft skills" needed in new role, or if in a big corp might even be influenced by hitting targets on diversity.

UK government hands CityFibre £318M for rural broadband builds

Fibre a pipe dream

No fibre (crappy copper here (or maybe even worse Al, not ever seen it as all phone cabling underground)).

Not even in a proper rural location , in the "sticks" but plenty of housing estates around (area was a mosaic of farm & industry back in the day, & when various businesses or farms folded, housing was built on the freshly "available" land (farmland often does not magically equal green belt & brown envelopes help developers to get permissions to build on it) ), just also some farms, so although housing areas are high density, there are fields before next housing zone and so houses per unit area not city / town level due to intervening fields and no internet demand from the cattle / sheep. Its a hilly area and various springs / underground streams so that's made some of the land unsuitable for housing on cost grounds, contributing to the housing being dotted about in suitable high density "affordable to build" zones.

Someone is just making a CBA on cost ground decision as although each housing estate is a juicy target, there's lots of "wasted cash" to be spent on laying fibre in the non housing areas, so cost per house relatively high.

Without govt mandating fibre installs / paying some of the cost it's going to be a long wait.

Meta's data-hungry Threads skips over EU but lands in Britain

It's also not informed consent if you cannot use the service without agreeing to those privacy shafting terms, as it becomes essentially coerced* consent.

* Plenty of people, if they want something badly enough, will trade privacy for whatever the new must have shiny thing on offer is rather than miss out.

California man's business is frustrating telemarketing scammers with chatbots

Indeed, same number concealed approach for local hospital (& have old, ill relatives who frequently are in there) so cannot ignore calls without caller id (as medical services don't leave useful messages for patient privacy reasons as multiple occupancy dwelling with shared phone & if hospital they generally call next NOK number if they fail to get a reply, but if they do leave a message it's generally uninformative for same privacy reasons). As it can take not far short of eternity to "get through" to GP or hospital by phone, then anon calls unfortunately need to be answered in case its important health stuff.

Re: When I give up stringing them along...

If you are UK based sign up to Telephone Preference Services.

Means people are not allowed to cold call you (though they still do) as legit marketeers* should check peoples preferences..

I always take as many details as I can of who is calling so I can put my report in later. In scenarios when original caller does a transfer to a "supervisor / manager" I then have fun casually mentioning the violation of TPS rules in contacting me.

* Are there legit ones? Who knows - never had a call from one.

Twitter rate-limits itself into a weekend of chaos

Re: It is utterly crap

Back in pre COVID, pre WFH days when I regularly took the train as part of work commute (train had lots of college students too) I used to be impressed at the lightning speed students scrolled and liked posts on various social media apps: I could see why any attempt to flag "bots" could easily trap people like those students (I'm a great speed reader & I could not have read stuff at the speed they did, either they had phenomenal reading speed or they were "skimming" posts & "liking" on general gist of post (or maybe just liking as a social nicety) )

Now Apple takes a bite out of encryption-bypassing 'spy clause' in UK internet law

Re: False Alarm

the old "Jam Echelon" day activities you mean?

Re: Some of broadest surveillance powers in any Western democracy

@AC

"Are you thinking of Nadine I don’t know what I’m talking about Dorries?"

I thought the commonly used term was just "Mad Nad"?

Crook who stole $23m+ in YouTube song royalties gets five years behind bars

Re: Greed is good

@tmTM

Yeah, silly greed move on their part, by the sound of it there were plenty of non monetized music works out there, so when legit creators complained their rights were being infringed the sensible move would have not been to antagonise them but to cut some kind of deal and so keep under the radar: Especially when plenty of companies out there that trade in rights to music, the crim could have easily lied & said they in good faith purchased rights from some third party who claimed to be the rights holder. Shafting the legit music authors who noticed they were being shafted was bound to eventually be their downfall.

Think of our cafes and dry cleaners, says Ohio as budget slashes WFH for govt workers

Agree, total BS.

I do more work when WFH.

No unwanted background noise so I can focus better & thus a lot more productive (I'm not one of those people who can work with headphones / music playing so general office noise / disturbance is a PITA)

Put in more hours (office drive commute is horrendous, minimum 2 hours in total on a good day, no viable public transport options), when WFH often do some work in what would otherwise be commute time so typically exceed contracted hours substantially when WFH (unlike office as with hell commute don't want to be there longer than contracted hours) so employer gets some "bonus" (unpaid) working hours beyond contracted, as with no commute its often worth chipping away at the code an extra hour or so to get a niggly issue dealt with at the end of the day instead of saving it for the morning.

More relaxed working at home & being less stressed makes people more productive.

Flexibility over my hours, I can start early & finish early or take a long lunch & make up for it etc., not dependant on office physical opening hours - as above more relaxed = more productive..

Inclusive Naming Initiative limps towards release of dangerous digital dictionary

Re: And by "solving" a non-problem ...

@Joe W

Regarding the "N word"

This was the name of Guy Gibsons dog (Gibson being a leader of the WWII dam busters "bouncing bomb" raid).

A film dramatizing the events was made of it in the 50s.

These days the dogs name is often edited to something acceptable (especially outside the UK), or in UK if broadcast unedited then usually screened with warnings about it containing racially offensive language that was "of its time*".

* Although it was definitely offensive then to anyone black, the majority of the population (mainly white) had not really grasped that was the case. The N word, coon, wog & similar racist language was used without a second thought in the UK back then.

Re: Too Anglocentric

@MrZoolook

Given Lenny Henry was from Dudley*

Could have really confused the American by calling him a Black Country Black comedian (or similar variants)

* Generally accepted to be in the West Midlands "Black country" (named for the industry side effects not ethnicity of populace, inspired Tolkien's Mordor allegedly) - though (having plenty of West Mids relatives, including some from the "Black Country") there are apparently plenty of local arguments about what areas really constitutes the Black Country - despite supposed generally agreed on boundaaries.

Google asks websites to kindly not break its shiny new targeted-advertising API

Re: This is a fig leaf for advertisers

And all predicated on the idea that "targeted" advertising is a good thing.

For me, it typically isn't.

I prefer ads relevant to the context of the page I am on - I don't want ads about things some algorithm is guessing I am interested in... Especially as most of devices in our household are shared use, so I get scenarios like ads appearing that are totally unrelated to my interests (as triggered by partners browsing - always know when she has been searching for clothes / perfume online as I (male) get a lot of stereotypical "female" oriented ads)

Mega-data platform worth half a billion will suck in info from family doctors

Data Processor

There are handy loopholes in the GDPR data processor regs.

"You can only process the personal data on instructions from a controller (unless otherwise required by law)"

So, with teh early mentioned Texan having an abortion, if the US requested medical data on that woman, then the UK may oblige (as they tend to say yes to many "law enforcement" requests from the US)

Note I am being kind and assuming the ICO quote means UK / English law (wording does not actually stipulate UK law on the ICO site!),

Also

"International transfers: the UK GDPR's prohibition on transferring personal data applies equally to processors as it does to controllers. This means you must ensure that any transfer outside the UK is authorised by the controller and complies with the UK GDPR’s transfer provisions."

Place your bets on a data controller happily allowing data transfer outside of the UK (who knows may even be slipped into the contracts by default, contracts can contain other data access stuff too e.g. granting processor access to data as part of fault finding / fixing (AKA dealing with bugs) ).

If AI drives humans to extinction, it'll be our fault

Not an "AI" problem

As the article said, "AI" is a people problem...

Just like the potential for nuclear war which (currently) still requires human intervention.

Just like climate change* & the political classes inaction implying they are gambling on a technological "fix" arriving before we start hitting some nasty tipping points where horrible positive feedback cascades get started.

Just like epidemics from dubious bioweapons research (or accidental screwups by those not trying to design a bioweapon, or the unpredictability of people interacting with wildlife causing a few zoonotic disease nasties e.g. there's a very nasty (to birds) strain of Avian Flu that's been around the last year or so, Avian Flu is rarely transmitted to humans, but it can happen, especially if a "wild" bird infects domesticated poultry where people can then come into a lot of contact)

* I know some people don't think climate change is happening, but (IMHO) that's part of it being a people problem

JP Morgan accidentally deletes evidence in multi-million record retention screwup

Would be interesting to know approx. what fines and other costs* they would have incurred IF they were at fault in those investigations where data was missing, and how that compares to 4M.

If fines etc. were likely to be > 4M then surely 4M fine should have been increased as if we assume data loss was accidental it has still prevented those investigations and although no guilt can be assumed, fine ought to reflect worse case of those investigations resulting in fines, otherwise we have a case of this accident potentially saving a lot of money.

* e.g. intangible costs such as loss of future business, reputational damage (though whether a company known as the vampire squid can have its reputation reduced further is arguable)

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

Re: Unique keys

@Andy A

Lots of surnames are variants on a theme in the UK - I can see why - especially factoring in several centuries ago when literacy was low (always interesting to find old family documents and see the signature just signed with an "X" or similar). Found a few cases where surnames changes by a letter (or 2 in one case) on official documents and then the "new" typo surname consistently used going forward (as presumably none of the family members involved had the literacy skills to notice the change (or alternatively maybe just didn't care?)).

Google has blocked in its in-car software rivals, claims German watchdog

Re: These hi-tech cars et al

Fully agree.

Don't want a car with a great lump of display unit (that you are stuck with, no matter how useless / unwanted it is & it will probably get no updates, ever to fix any bugs, vulnerabilities (not a fan of a car open to "hijack" via a music system because some cost cutting non security minded design muppet has not properly thought about CANbus access pitfalls - though TBF the massive car system security nasties of a few years ago are thankfully getting less common )).

Unlike the old days, when whatever factory fitted music playing system was installed you could easily replace it with a better one, with most of these things you are stuck with them (& usually dont play CDs for music - really don't want hassle of transferring music to phone to link up to car, (don't have iPod or similar) so much more hassle then just shoving a few of my hundreds (thousands?) of CDs in the car & chucking them in the music player )

I don't want to use the car company installed sat nav etc (I have my own, "old skool" stick it to your windscreen style one, & I get the ability to plug it into my laptop & I get regular data updates for free (or until sat nav maker goes out of business - though hope my device lives a while as perennial free updates are getting rare on sat navs now), whereas a lot of car co GPS systems either lack regular updates or charge an arm and a leg for them)

Not looking forward to getting a new (ish) car & all the crud it will involve when current car reaches EOL.

Now BlackCat extortionists threaten to leak stolen plastic surgery pics

Celebs?

Is this Beverley Hills clinic "high end" with a lot of rich celeb customers?

If so pic reveals might be a ploy to get the clinic to pay before they get hit by lawsuit hassle from wealthy celebs who definitely don't want their personal details revealed and have the beefy lawyers to persuade the clinic to do something about it.

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

Being from the UK I cannot comment on USA Today and how it behaves in ad delivery for a US viewer, but visiting it from UK I was pleasantly surprised that it was essentially ad free compared to some UK "news" sites (I'm thinking "Reach" sites especially), and it had a reasonable % of "proper news" .. as a UK visitor I get eu.usatoday.com though

So I was happy with it compared to Reach UK* sites which are

a) So full of ads as to be virtually unusable

b) When you do use ad control tools to make the web page actually possible to view and navigate, you then see a large % of content is clickbait rather than proper news.

So maybe the nice user friendly essentially no ads site means they get less ad revenue (but on the plus side a user such as myself would not need to deploy ad blockers - though its no defence against people who have everything blocked by default**)

* some UK sites are low / no ads for UK users (e.g. Guardian, BBC) but many are ad hell.

** I block "new / unknown" sites by default, but then if site content seems like it may be worth a revisit I then start "loosening" restrictions, if the site is not too intrusive I add it to the various "whitelists" but if its an awful experience then its back to heavy duty blocking and site added to "blacklists"

Apols for naughty words according to https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/22/inclusive_naming_initiative_word_list/

Its Friday afternoon & CBA to look up whatever the recommended alternatives are***

*** & likely to remain that way, I have looked up the alternatives in the past to various offensive tech words & then promptly forgot them about an hour later. Will have to integrate them into spell check suggestions as workaround for only long term remembering stuff I am interested in & near instantly forgetting other stuff..

.

Microsoft Azure OpenAI lets enterprises feed corporate secrets to ChatGPT

Expensive

That option of storing your (siloed) data for OpenAI use is also staggeringly expensive compared to their usual AI offerings.

If you want to keep your data safer (who knows how secure the data silo approach is) but still use OpenAI could generate embeddings values for your text items (embedding and text values stored locally in some DB system, just use OpenAI* to generate embeddings) and then use embeddings best matches for scenarios such as "AI" driven help bot... Results wont be as good as the "chat" driven solution on your siloed data but will keep your data safe (text you request an embedding for is not saved / used in model training).

*.Or go one step further and just use some other locally running software to calculate the embeddings

OpenAI embeddings stuff here

https://openai.com/blog/introducing-text-and-code-embeddings

AI is going to eat itself: Experiment shows people training bots are using bots

Re: The workers were paid $1 for each text summary

Indeed - even without "cheating" I would be wary of untrained people summarizing medical documents correctly - the sort of thing where accuracy and subject knowledge is quite important!

If they do stop copy & paste etc expect a market in software that reads your "AI" chat generated data and "types" it into mechanical Turk (or whatever gig economy tool used) - obviously using varying delays between key strokes, occasional pauses (maybe even have ability to train the software on that individuals typing style - would certainly need some randomization so the typing cheat was not detected as being used )

Music bosses go after Twitter's unlicensed soundtrack to the tune of $250M

Re: FB, YT just delete copyrighted material

I'm guessing it was not traditional hymns in the service?

Most of the "traditional hymns" in UK services are long out of copyright so no performance rights issues with those.

I'm a firm believer that false copyright takedowns should give big compensation to those whose content is unfairly removed, that will stop all the dubious automated takedown stuff if Google, FB or the big music companies (depending who is at fault for the takedown) got some hefty fines.

My favourite crap takedown story is still this one re white noise

https://www.eff.org/takedowns/ten-hours-static-gets-five-copyright-notices

Decision to hold women-in-cyber events in abortion-banning states sparks outcry

Tennessee

Mentioning Tennessee criminalizing abortions is a relevant argument as to why WiCyS in Tennessee may not be the greatest idea.

However commenting on banning drag shows & preventing puberty blockers, irreversible gender reassignment surgery in children is not anti women in the slightest*.

* One of my degrees & some of my research work was in biological sciences (with a strong emphasis on human biology) so when I say woman I mean biological woman (yes I'm aware of rare chromosomal

/ hormonal conditions that can introduce a bit of ambiguity, however very few self identified trans people are actually suffering from those conditions ).

Most of my female friends are "lefties" (I'm in the UK & a socialist so unsurprising, in USA those women would probably be called pinko commies or similar), however the majority of them are strongly opposed to "trans women" (i.e. males identifying as females) using female spaces - especially where nudity involved (e.g. sports changing rooms). Ironic that so many of these socialist / Marxist women get called Nazis, generally by men (generally also abused as "TERF", when they are just feminists fighting to retain hard won women's rights).

Capita wins £50M fraud reporting contract with City of London cops

Mmmm

My copy of "Private Eye" dropped through the letter box today, will read it soon, but doubt it will contain satire to match this story.

It’s official: Vodafone and Three to tie the knot in the UK

Competitiveness reduction?

All as bad as each other (over the years tried most of them, all dismal).

If one of them makes a mistake and actually gives an offer that is a lot more competitive than their rivals, it won't last long (when you come to renew find that previous option no longer exists)*

Although I'm obviously not saying they act like a cartel, don't want to worry el reg legal team.

Regulators should shoulder some blames for lack of competitiveness - e.g. address the rules that let the mobile companies automagically increase your costs (on "contracts") to reflect "inflation" (yet though the CEOs do nicely I don't see them increasing the pay of the coal face wage slaves by an inflation equivalent amount). Amounts vary but most of them raise it by inflation plus an extra 4% or so, Even worse the T&Cs of most (not all) of them do not let you jump out of teh contract when these big [price hikes are added.

Especially notable recently when inflation is high & so mobile costs have increased a lot. Rather makes a mockery of the idea of contracts allowing you to "budget ahead" when you are slammed with hefty increases.

* Had a couple of "too good to be true" contracts that were unavailable to renew & only options were usual typically dismal deals, or they changed the T&Cs e.g. stopped you sharing your data with other devices (years ago partner & I deliberately used different networks as when away on holiday doubled chance of a signal between us & if only 1 of us got a signal used to be able to share data with the other by setting phone as wifi hotspot so they could use their phone, they long since stopped that & now means often 1 of us just has a useless phone on holiday as neither of us trust public wifi much)

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

Jargon?

"There's no need to feel ashamed if you use jargon in the workplace"

I would not call that jargon* but management BS like that is shameful.

Still, on the bright side the article did not use my most hated phrase "slide deck" - just call it a ******* PowerPoint or similar. Its not like this phrase was used years ago when presentations involved actual physical photographic slides** as that would be an acceptable historic reason (in the same way a "save" icon is a (essentially defunct) floppy but there's nice history to it ) - its a recent phrase (& very much an American one at that, being UK based it reeks of UK management slavishly acquiring & using "trendy" US phrases)

*IT is full of "jargon" - i.e. technical terms specific to that area: Which can be confusing to the non IT person (even everyday words such as switch can have a subtly different meaning in IT land). Jargon <> management speak.

** One of my friends used to be in charge of the "slide library" at a university, which staff could borrow for lecture use, to demonstrate how important photographic slides were a (relatively long) while ago.

WFH mandates bad for staff morale and stunt innovation

@werdsmith

I used to think Atlassian tools were bad ...until I had to use Azure dev ops tools

This AI hype is enough to drive you to drink, lose sleep

Some of us thrive on little interaction with colleagues

People "on the spectrum" are probably over represented in IT compared to many other professions.

Its the meetings, interactions with others, interruptions, changing goalposts that cause me a lot more stress than quietly getting on with some work on my own does

BOFH: Good news, everyone – we're in the sausage business

Re: AI Infused

I have used "AI" API calls to do reasonable translations to output language (& unlike the stand-alone language translation APIs that required me to specify to / from languages*, AI would "recognise" input language and translate to output language.

So that was quite useful.

Except that sometimes it failed to manage a translation as it could not identify input language (though, TBF, this was only when text was a relatively small snippet, with more words it was fine).

So, for that odd, flexibility on handling "unspecified" input language, use case, "AI" was good... But not exactly a compelling use case, as generally when you get enquiries in a "different" language to the one you use, there are normally "metadata clues" to what the input language is (be it address, country code in email address or phone number) and always chance of recognising enough vocab yourself to "guess" the language and so normally typical translation tool APIs can be used, without needing "AI" APIs. Only use case when the "text" missing any metadata & a hard to ID language for the person who receives it (e.g. I can ID French, German, Spanish, Italian reasonably accurately from received text (& so know the translation call to make) but beyond that I struggle on language ID wthout "metadata hints")

* There may be non "AI" language APIs that auto identify source language - I just have not seen / used any.

Re: The _real_ AI

Housing estate I live on used to be a farm.

Previous owners had various climbing plant wires on the house for their plats to use, often decorated with metal detector "finds" from the garden.

When we looked round (in the potential house buyer viewing stage) I decided not to tell them that some viewers might be a bit queasy at some of those as teh owners were obviously oblivious to the purposes of some of the rusty old "tools" they had on display.

Cunningly camouflaged cable routed around WAN-sized hole in project budget

Re: In days gone past

405 line TV - another feel old reference!