Posts by find users who cut cat tail

Microsoft tries out wooden bit barns to cut construction emissions

Re: It's what's inside the counts

Please do not use exponentially for ‘really big, or something like that’. We do not have any alternative words for an exp()-like functional dependence.

Sysadmins rage over Apple’s ‘nightmarish’ SSL/TLS cert lifespan cuts plot

Re: OK, then let's focus on really strict security

Please shorten it to 45 µs. Make it *literally impossible* to implement the policy.

Then finally everyone stops chasing nonsense and we'll figure out a better way of doing this.

Why send a message when you can get your Zoom digital video clone to read the script?

Re: Killer app

There won't be. And it does not even take a killer app to kill the planet. Just a web of AI assistants hallucinating videos for meetings which other AI assistants will then attend and summarise and schedule more AI meetings… But perhaps keeping AI busy in pointless meetings will at least delay the uprising?

AI godfather-turned-doomer shares Nobel with neural network pioneer

And if they really wanted to give them a Nobel prize, at least use the peace one. It would not be worse than some of the past laureates.

Meta gives Llama 3 vision, now if only it had a brain

3 = 4

So, after being asked to break down image into *three* zones it responds

> The image is divided into four distinct zones:

but then lists three? It does not matter then what it generates about the zone content – you must assume it also contains basic errors.

CISA boss: Makers of insecure software must stop enabling today's cyber villains

Re: Really? Really?

A bit more punctuation and the comment would be executable Perl code…

No major AI model is safe, but some do better than others

Re: "safe" and "harmful" according to who?

Wait a few iterations and the only thing the models will be able (or allowed) to produce is US corporate drivel. Which is OK, because that's what they will be mostly used for anyway.

Users call on Microsoft to update Outlook's friendly name feature

Re: Headers anyone

The answer is the same a always. You are just confused. You do not know what you want and what is good for you. Microsoft – they do.

How deliciously binary: AI has yet to pay off – or is transforming business

Re: Dotcom boom n bust all over again

The thing is, I do not want to win the lottery. Winning the lottery is [mostly] a curse. Reasonably high stable income is much better.

And I do not want any tech bro to ‘win the lottery’ either. Why should I want more monopolistic megacorporations controlling everything? We are still trying to deal with the current bunch…

China ponders creating a national 'cyberspace ID'

Re: Just a question...

I was responding to this statement in the article (and I assume so did lglethal):

> ISPs are required to collect the real names and ID numbers when customers sign up for services

It does not talk about people using the connection, but about people *signing up for services*. And the ISP definitely has identifying personal information about them. Whether it specifically includes some kind of national ID or not is irrelevant – they have sufficient personal data regardless.

Re: Just a question...

Maybe I also live in one of the ‘few countries’…

I have a contract with my ISP and they know my exact address – for obvious reasons.

Forget security – Google's reCAPTCHA v2 is exploiting users for profit

Re: solve captcha to continue

Similar with store fronts and other nonsense. It has degenerated to ‘prove you are a human by classifying images identically to our US-data mistrained neural network – and rarely as a human being would, especially someone with a different cultural background’.

If you're using Polyfill.io code on your site – like 100,000+ are – remove it immediately

Re: That's why I hate java script

I'm not saying it is right. I am just too old and cynical to not see the unintended – but quite predictable – consequences.

Re: That's why I hate java script

Strict same origin rules will lead to morons automatically updating ‘first-party’ resources on the server from random places on the internet. If you think no one will do that because it is too insane, you are clearly new to IT…

World's top AI chatbots have no problem parroting Russian disinformation

GIGO

Lots of LLMs training data come from the interwebz.So what did you expect?

Microsoft's Recall should be celebrated as the savior of SMEs and scourge of CEOs

Re: What happened to ask the user?

Just asking the user is unreliable. You need to observe them actually doing things. But whether Recall is the right tool, that's another matter…

Early MySQL engineer questions whether Oracle is unintentionally killing off the open source database

Why migrate to Postgres if your old database works just fine?

Using AI in science can add to reproducibility woes, say boffins

Re: Stating the obvious

The basic obstacle is that even a half-hearted attempt at this (and I have tried) is huge PITA. It can be achieved in high-profile cases if you throw lots of resources at it. But everyday scientific poking and tinkering would basically halt. And that would be the end.

I am much more afraid of the deluge of ‘papers’ which are basically faked using generative AI. Many have adopted the shotgun approach, betting on getting some of their nonsense past peer review by chance, long before current LLMs appeared. And now they are able to produce nonsense in much large quantities (and finally also correct grammar).

Google thinks AI can Google better than you can

Re: I don't care

Google is working hard on making it correct – i.e. making you unable to google anything useful.

When AI helps you code, who owns the finished product?

Re: Is any of that code copyrightable?

Probably neither as it is too short and required little creativity.

That said, copyright is not patent. Copyright covers concrete expressions of ideas, copying and derived works. Provenance matters much more here. Two programmers can independently(!) write very similar code and both have copyright to their respective works. That is just how it is.

Ten years since the first corp ransomware, Mikko Hyppönen sees no end in sight

Re: Murphy's law applies

That is what my bank does. Except the plain text part, unfortunately. Plain text apparently makes difficult linking to the bank's TikTok or something… Still, better than most from what I've heard.

Outlook.com trips over Google's spam blocking rules

Re: This is news?

GMail in particular – sending e-mails there (even correctly replying for an e-mail originating there) has always been a lottery.

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

Re: It's garbage

> Try it. Open Outlook, pick up an email with the mouse and drag it to the desktop.

The test does not start by running Outlook. I would have to get, install and set it up first. On a different machine. My desktops are set up so that they cannot even have any icons on them…

Sorry, can't be bothered to do that.

So, still does not parse. Thanks for the thumbs downs though.

Re: It's garbage

What? You… What?

Sorry, I would formulate a more coherent question but ‘drag and drop an email on to the desktop’ just does not parse.

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

Re: Don't people test edge cases any more? [Predictability]

Time calculations are inherently complex and difficult.

Every object in the universe has its own proper time. If you do any kind of measurement based on physics (i.e. any measurement whatsoever) you must use proper time. It's the correct time for description of how physical processes go for the specific observer.

Different observers can disagree on which of two events occured first (if they are space-like).

The idea that there is some single time barely works at the scale of counties with our current time meaurement precision.

The mess created by humans is just a big and ugly database of weird rules. But it is not fundamentally mind boggling – unlike anything coming from relativity.

Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

Most are pretty obviously false, but could someone enlighten me on ‘The day before Saturday is always Friday.’? Are there any exceptions to this aside from when entire blocks of days were skipped to sync with the stars?

AI is changing search, for better or for worse

Re: Often?

Soon it will be trivial to identify the source of all web content: generative AI trained [mostly] on the hallucinations of generative AIs that came before. It will be turtles all the way down.

Japanese tech startups testing cash incentives for office return

Sign me up

Extra money for the option I prefer anyway? Sign me up!

Videoconferencing fatigue is real, study finds

Re: Duh.

I do not care about investors, just hate WFH. I and also went to work in person basically the entire pandemic (it was almost never strictly prohibited without loopholes). There were about five of us in a large building. Happy times. YMMV.

Re: Meetings!!!

And I wish you both read the article before commenting.

The study compared people watching the same content remotely and live.

Meta's ad-free scheme dares you to buy your privacy back, one euro at a time

Re: Shocked?

> most people don't realize how much data about them Meta collects, or how valuable it is

So how do most people think Meta make loads of money (and people are not ignorant of that)? Their only real ‘product’ is you being on the platform.

It's time to celebrate the abysmal efforts to go paperless in the NHS

Paperless is and always has been an instrumental goal, not a terminal one. As another story reminded us not so long ago: Bad software destroyed doctors memory. If they cannot do paperless right, keeping dead trees is the lesser evil.

The world seems so loopy. But at least someone's written a memory-safe sudo in Rust

Re: Lameness

Not sure what the numbers mean, but you clearly prefer quantity over quality in your posts. So have another one from me for spamming the discussion.

Perhaps AI is going to take away coding jobs – of those who trust this tech too much

No, the big money will be in maintaining old COBOL (and even more obscure) code our society is running on.

Also, unit tests, despite their utility, do not check code correctness. If your unit test does not go beyond 7 it can easily verify that all odd numbers are primes…

Japan complains Fukushima water release created terrifying Chinese Spam monster

> relatively short duration

You mean 30 to 40 years?

US Republican party's spam filter lawsuit against Google dimissed

Re: No bias found, but…

If lots of people mark the same e-mail as spam it is quite obviously bulk, and most likely unsolicited as well. Surprisingly – to you, anyway – this spam detection can be achieved by individuals marking individual e-mails based on their opinion.

Microsoft teases Python scripting in Excel

Re: Pandas and Anaconda

R is nice. It is even more readable then Perl!

But seriously, if you learn Python for pandas, with some luck you might end up learning Python, a generally useful programming language. With R you end up with a lanague which is very efficient at specific things and frustrating when you need also to do some ‘normal’ programming.

Lost voices, ignored words: Apple's speech recognition needs urgent reform

> Do you seriously think that ANY company would ignore a market segment where they could make money?

Could they? Companies ignore market segments all the time – precisely because [they think] it is not worth it. Sometimes they are right, sometimes not.

Accessibility is hard and tends to or force you to change the design, i.e. get in the way. And Apple are not in the ‘everyone uses this’ business. They are ‘overpriced tat to show your superiority’ business. If everyone used Apple, Apple users would no longer be special. So to keep the air of exclusivity they actually need the unwashed masses to use something else.

> Your existing is wrong!

Did anyone say that? Please calm down.

AI on AI action: Googler uses GPT-4 chatbot to defeat image classifier's guardian

…allowing computer scientists to spend more of their time developing interesting research questions gradually lose all actual understanding of the subject and still produce papers.

Inclusive Naming Initiative limps towards release of dangerous digital dictionary

abort

abort() is a C/POSIX standard function. Pretty hard to replace immediately. More like ‘gradually phase out in 40 years if you really put lots of effort into it’. But I guess they are not bothered by such little details.

We just don't get enough time, contractor tasked with fact-checking Google Bard tells us

> Bard spewing incorrect information on politicians, for example, could sway people's opinions on elections and undermine democracy.

And we can't have that. What would then [other] politicians be for?

Deepfakes being used in 'sextortion' scams, FBI warns

Can't stop it

So, what to do instead? Generate vast quantities of such images. For everyone. For non-existent AI-generated lookalikes. For whoever and whatever you can in all possible variations. Make them easily available. Let everyone know.

Then they become banal and useless for extortion. Of course such pictures exist. Of course they are fake. Who cares?

Sure currently there would be legal problems, and with minors this is not likely to be an option, etc. But generally, the ease with which they are generated is not the problem; it is the solution.

Microsoft, GitHub, OpenAI urge judge to bin Copilot code rip-off case

Re: I don't see the problem

Because of the quotes you put around AI. It does not give answer based on understanding. Or at least there is no clear evidence for that.

Nice smart device – how long does it get software updates?

Re: IoS

That is basically the right approach to all ‘smart’ devices. In some cases there can be benefits if the thing is programmable or remote controlled or something. But… The piece with the complicated software has to be disentangled from the hardware. You have hardware which actually does something – and with that you may or may not have a computer (whatever the form factor) which provides the smarts. And they can be replaced independently. Because they have very different upgrade cycles. Then it perhaps can work.

Open source databases: What are they and why do they matter?

Re: MariaDb and BSL

Second that. Here, have a useful DB decision chart for free:

Can SQLite handle this?

Yes → Use SQlite.

No → Consider other options.

The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it

I like the button on the top. So you have to move it because of people like me. You are welcome…

Anyway, the important points are (a) you can move it wherever you want (b) the default is not actively annoying/harmful.

Awkward. At Chrome summit, developer asks: Why should anyone trust Google?

Exactly. Many of the ‘contributions’ should not be developed at all. And definitely not at Google. And become critical on top of it.

Re: Technologies

You are being tracked to get better targeted ads – they say. No ads, no need for tracking.

The planet survived six hours without Facebook. Let's make it longer next time

> One is what it teaches us about Facebook's importance to our daily lives.

I read about the outage in the news the following day. Not surprising that I wouldn't notice – but apparently no one else cared enough to mention it either.

It's the end of the world as we know it, and we should feel fine

If we stopped chasing the upgrade, I haven't noticed. Sure, the reason for upgrade used to be ‘it brings these nice things I need/want’, whereas now it is more ‘my old stuff is no longer working – again’.

But perhaps we are reaching some kind of equilibrium. I would not call it a good thing. It means about half of ‘improvements’ will make things worse. Probably more than half, knowing humanity and the second law of thermodynamics…