Posts by find users who cut cat tail

PowerPoint to start telling you that your presentation is bad and you should feel bad

Now that Microsoft have developed a thing which listens to your PowerPoint nonsense, could we finally stop? Please?

It's all in the wrist: Your fitness tracker could be as much about data warfare as your welfare

But if I want to keep myself moving – and motivated – it makes sense...

No, it doesn't.

LibreOffice 6.3 hits beta, with built-in redaction tool for sharing those █████ documents

Fourier

I love Fourier analysis and use it a lot. But when you find yourself needing it in a spreadsheet please take it as a slight nudge you are using the utterly wrong tool for the job...

Why telcos 'handed over' people's GPS coords to a bounty hunter: He just had to ask nicely

Re: Capitalism baby

> ...your ability to detect sarcasm.

Never encountered people saying exactly the same seriously? Lucky.

Wine? No, posh noshery in high spirits despite giving away £4,500 bottle of Bordeaux

Why would you care if it's Pepsi or Coke? Neither of them is beer.

Make America Infringe Again: Trump campaign video pulled over Batman copyright

Re: Let's move along

It's not Hillary Clinton vs Donald Trump.

Now somebody should explain that to Mr. Trump.

You don't need a PhD to phish a Brit university: Nonprofit claims 100% hit rate is easy peasy

Re: Wot no web filtering

do much less 'x' per hour.

In a corporation the problem may be doing less X per hour.

In a university or other research institution, it is usually ‘we need to do X, Y and Z, none of which has ever been tried before’. Doing new things is the job description. Especially in hard sciences, where people regularly build their own devices, write software and invent ways how to control them, you can bet at least one of XYZ will be IT-related and impossible in locked down environment...

That's Numberwang! Google Cloud staffer breaks record for most accurate Pi calculation

It's much more accurate. Last time I checked 3/14 ≈ 0.2142857, which is quite far from π. Or have Americans ruined fractions too?

In some countries dates are written with a dot (mine for instance), but the order is D.M, not M.D, so you can't get 3.14 anyway.

Hipster whines at tech mag for using his pic to imply hipsters look the same, discovers pic was of an entirely different hipster

Re: Plaid shirt?

I must be in the 5% then. I couldn't describe what either means. Bloody English fashion jargon...

Artificial Intelligence: You know it isn't real, yeah?

Re: the error is in call it "AI" !!!

Automated stereotyping is actually an excellent description. We should switch to it immediately.

The goal is to classify (or otherwise map) a large and variable data set as lazily and efficiently as possible. So the NNs do the same thing we do -- pick some easy to spot things (proxies) that are correlated in the cases encountered so far. Because when we state the problem like that, this is simply the solution (in our case we arrived to it by evolution). Except, unlike us, the poor NNs cannot reason about it. Not that we do it often, but anyway...

'Now is the winter of our disk contents'... Decision on Lauri Love's seized gear due next week

Re: El Reg Headlines

I've yet to see a deadline which is about ‘delivering the work you promised’. They are arbitrary dates set by someone for you -- and then changed several times.

Never mind that naked selfie scandal... Brazil lights the, er, kindling, dot-Amazon saga roars back into life

Seriously? Even my country's TLD is based on the English name, not local -- as a bunch of them are. What does it have to do with anything?

Hungover this morning? Thought 'beer before wine and you'll be fine'? Boffins prove old adage just isn't true

Re: Beer?

No, it isn't. It should be a pleonasm. You can definitely find things sold as lager that are not beer -- they are crime against humanity. But that happens to all kinds of beer...

Human StarCraft II e-athletes crushed by neural net ace – DeepMind's AlphaStar

Re: Yeah, right...

Although we can still improve the computational part (and gather better observational data), predicting weather is hard because of positive Lyapunov exponents galore. No AI will fix that.

Y'know how you might look at someone and can't help but wonder if they have a genetic disorder? We've taught AI to do the same

...the software shouldn't really be used to make a final decision

But it will be. That's how all other software is used.

Is Google purposefully breaking Microsoft, Apple browsers on its websites? Some insiders are confident it is

Re: Brittle software?

Someone, somewhere, will do the same to Google one day.

That is reassuring, but what is the chance this next company will not be even nastier than Google?

Who's watching you from an unmarked van while you shop in London? Cops with facial recog tech

False positives

Close to 100% false positive rate is exactly what one should expect -- the watch lists do not contain a substantial fraction of the population (so far) and the people on them are more likely to take precautions.

See base rate fallacy/false positive paradox (if any el Reg reader needs reminding). Even detection methods we actually consider working have high false positive rates when the thing they detect is rare.

US Homeland Security installs AI cameras at the White House, Google tries to make translation less sexist

Re: I'm not sure what the fuss is about

Your examples are unnecessarily too complicated to illustrate why Google is failing. They involve knowledge of which name is used for which gender, general knowledge of gender in grammar (BTW that's the only gender -- do not confuse it with sex), the often confusing conventions for animal gender, etc. AFAIK the basic problem is that it just translates sentence by sentence, with no context whatsoever.

So in

Two girls arrived. They brought apples.

and

Two boys arrived. They brought apples.

the second sentence is Google-translated the same -- to all languages I know where there should be a difference. There is no knowledge of things like names necessary and the gender matches the sex. There may be even enough similar fragments in the corpus for both sexes. But the translation still fails.

A little phishing knowledge may be a dangerous thing

Re: Don't click the link !

> If you click the link, you've failed to protect yourself and others on your network.

I assume -- at least for all people commenting here -- ‘clicking the link’ means copying the linked URL and opening it in a sandbox which exists for this purpose, not actually just clicking on the thing.

AI can predict the structure of chemical compounds thousands of times faster than quantum chemistry

AI Machine learning can predict kind of guess the structure of chemical compounds thousands of times faster than after being extensively trained on results calculated using actual quantum chemistry.

TIFIFY

What always annoys me is that if they did not have a large database of results obtained by the oh-so-slow real DFT calculations, their ‘AI’ would be utterly worthless. People had to do all the DFT calculation -- and still have to do them for anything unusual the thing has not been trained for.

Excuse me, but have you heard the teachings of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Chr-AI-st?

text could be re-written to allow a layperson to better understand the meaning of something highly technical

No, it couldn't. If a technical text isn't crap (and then AI rewriting would not fix that) problems with understanding always originate in inability to think in the respective problem domain. Essentially, a lack of context.

You can replace the name of a chemical compound with any other name, drawing or biblical story. It will not magically make the reader able to think about its functional groups, how it might react, ... You still need chemistry background for that. Sure, the text has to explain things interesting/important in the particular case, but if you don't get the basic concepts and can't think about them correctly, there is no substitute for that.

SQLite creator crucified after code of conduct warns devs to love God, and not kill, commit adultery, steal, curse...

Re: Not the first piece of absurd preaching to come from the SQLite team

Threads are certainly useful. However, that does not make them any less evil.

Russian 'troll factory' firebombed – but still fit to fiddle with our minds

Re: Separated by a common language...

Not just in the UK. Until I read you comment I was wondering why and how he targeted a window so high above the ground...

Fortnite 'fesses up: New female character's jiggly bits 'unintended' and 'embarrassing'

Re: There's something very weird looking about that

> Breast jiggle is modelled using the same algorithms as hair jiggle

Hair physics is actually hell -- just ask anyone trying to model long hair realistically in games or animated films. Much more difficult than breasts.

Why are sat-nav walking directions always so hopeless?

Re: Too many apps

A map app is a map. Why would anyone not blind need verbal instructions when he has a perfectly good map piece of modern art Google or Apple hallucinated up, rendered on a tiny screen? Anyway. It's not like you are moving at speed 130 km/h and when you miss an exit you get another chance in 30 km. You are bloody walking. Just look at the map occasionally.

Linux kernel 'give me root, now' security hole sighted, dubbed 'Mutagen Astronomy'

Re: Thanks for clarifying.

We clearly need more of that, not less.

I am always confused by mentions of servers in articles not about restaurants, wonder why would people keep data in aerosol formations kilometres high in the sky and never understood how rodents are supposed to connect to computers. And who is General Failure and why is he reading my disk?

Check out this link! It's not like it'll crash your iPhone or anything (Hint: Of course it will)

Re: Probably snobbish, but...

> Programming is not coding anyway...

No, this is coding.

What's Big and Blue – and makes its veteran staff sue? Yep, it's IBM

> in another 15 years telling us how out of touch Millenials are

Don't need 15 years for that...

Boffins bash Google Translate for sexism

Re: What's the problem here?

> I'm astonished people are still hold onto their he things

As a native speaker of language where nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, and even numbers all have gender, I do not understand the fuss about the handful of English pronouns. Just get over it.

Sextortion scum armed with leaked credentials are persistent pests

Re: Why me?

> put your email address in here: https://haveibeenpwned.com/

Tried it. It found my e-mail address in source code of a Unix tool I contributed to -- and presented it as a big red scary warning trying to sell me their password manager. Not sure about the utility of all that.

Apple web design violates law, claims blind person

As if it was not enough that many sites do not render reasonably to text -- what you get if you can see? Tiny grey text on a bit lighter background. After you scroll through pages of pointless huge images.

After writing this I checked Apple's website (didn't know what it looks like). And guess what I found there?

Google keeps tracking you even when you specifically tell it not to: Maps, Search won't take no for an answer

Re: Apple far worse

> there is no personally identifiable data, as you are totally anonymous, so who cares what's sent.

Do you know what is sent? Data that will personally identify you, even if Google did not originally know who you are.

Top Euro court: No, you can't steal images from other websites (too bad a school had to be sued to confirm this little fact)

There is only way to fix copyright on photographs is to abolish it, with a few (rare!) exceptions. And it needs to happen soon.

...

Did you finish screaming murder? OK, we can continue now. Photographing is no longer art. It is an automated process. We are quickly getting to the point when everything worth photographing (and most of things not worth it) will be photographed. It will be photographed from all possible angles, with all possible settings and processing, also filmed many times -- and large part of this likely not even deliberately by humans. It will happen in some just-capture-stuff mode.

Of all the the photos I have made, I consider maybe a dozen worth copyright protection. And the number may actually decrease over time as technology progresses, making previously difficult or special shots easy.

Cases like the red bus should not even exist. My bloody camera has a filter which automatically creates this effect! And the bus is an obvious target for. Each year, thousands of people leisurely create images the court would find infringing if the defendant made them...

Reckon you deserve a Wikipedia entry? Try getting this bot's notice

Web of knowledge is practically useless for that if you have a common name -- unless you get a researcherid and claim your stuff manually. I even suspect they keep it that way to ‘encourage’ people to get researcherid...

Oracle's JEDI mine trick: IT giant sticks a bomb under Pentagon's $10bn single-vendor cloud plan

Re: too funny...

I feel sorry for you. In civilised country you would not have to buy health insurance, people participate in a universal health care system.

The American dilemma: Competition, or fast broadband? Pick one

Re: meanwhile

DeeCee: Don't brag, we are not comparing sizes here, do we? This would still not be a good deal where I live -- and I'm sure there are people who pay even less for higher speed than I do...

Labour MP pushing to slip 6-hour limit to kill illegal online content into counter-terror bill

Re: Who decides what is illegal?

Since you made a complaint about it you obviously saw the illegal video so please just turn yourself in...

EU court: No, expat Frenchman can't trademark France.com

Amazon

Well, that's nice, but when will Amazon-not-the-world's-largest-river get its comeuppance?

I also wish fruits, openings in walls and sets of letters could sue corporations...

Why aren't startups working? They're not great at creating jobs... or disrupting big biz

Re: Well progress is not creating new work

Kind of agree with you, except the ‘make everyone feel needed while dealing with a potentially ever decreasing total amount of work’ part. You put ‘potentially’ there, though. So, maybe.

There is no shortage of work. We, the human race, are messing up things at an ever accelerating rate -- and although we are also fixing them faster, the gap does not decrease. We accumulating problems and creating more work as we go. That's not the issue with progress.

It's the incentive structure. For every stupid job killed by automation, the replacements are invariably even more bullshit. We have failing infrastructure, and none of the people who moved from dog hairstylists to live-streaming opening pizza boxes delivered to them will fix it. They might even feel needed if they were doing something useful, but the incentives against are too strong. I just hope Hari Seldon is out there somewhere, already working...

Why the 'feudal' tech monopolies run rings around competition watchdogs

Re: What a surprise

> Might he be a bit biased

I would classify 70% of his writings as ramblings of a raving lunatic. Depends on the topic a bit. Anyway, even though he often approaches intellectual ’property’ stuff from a starting point somewhere between devil's advocate and absurdly reductionistic, at least he argues his position well enough to make you think and figure out where exactly where he parted with reality. And he does bring up interesting issues, even though you can only roll your eyes reading his conclusions...

Facebook sends lowly minions to placate Euro law makers over data-slurp scandal

Re: Bullshit? Bingo!

Does it? Buffer overflow protection prevented me from parsing it further after half a dozen of tos and ofs....

Schneier warns of 'perfect storm': Tech is becoming autonomous, and security is garbage

Re: One day, ...

The thing that worries me is that I can extrapolate -- without too much effort -- the current technology and society to a state in which ‘ban computers’ would be a reasonable proposition.

Sure, it would break lots of things. Awful lots of things.. One big problem is the inability to re-create intermediate technologies. We might go back to middle ages, or Renaissance, but 70s technologies are much harder. They require too many resources that need other technologies and too many other things working to be re-created from scratch.

So, in essence, once we might never [for some value of never] be able to get back to the current technological level after a global disaster/breakdown/war/ban/... And yet, I can imagine banning computers being the lesser evil. Barely, but still.

Donald Trump trumped as US Senate votes to reinstate ZTE ban

I never thought he and ‘first term’ would appear in the same sentence, and yet...

Meet the Frenchman masterminding a Google-free Android

> Maps is one that comes to mind where Google is far ahead of anyone else

Sorry, but if you think this, you have never seen a good map -- or at least one that's not utter shit. I often see people first trying to find something using Google's Maps, which is of course prominent on the phone, realising after while that it is useless and switching to a proper map app.

UN's freedom of expression top dog slams European copyright plans

> With the much harder job being for the "ones who write checksum catchers" in this example.

They can make their jobs easier by aggressively marking anything and everything as copyright violation if at least a remote possibility exists it might be one. And by ‘can’ I mean they are already doing it. There is no penalty for false positive copyright harassment, so why not. And few are able or care to challenge ‘computers says no’...

Plans for half of Europeans to get 100Mbps by 2020 ain't gonna happen – report

Re: one really needs Gigabyte speed to get a 100 MB advantage.

Probably depends on where you live... I have 100Mbps (symmetrical) because that's simply the cheapest option my ISP offers (14 €/month) and really see 90+ every time I measure it or transfer huge data from/to the uni (anecdotal evidence this one).

But most of the time I would hardly notice half or even slower speed. Do really half of people need 100Mbps? For what?

You have suffered without red-headed emoji for too long. That changes Tuesday

Re: I demand moustaches and beards!

U+1F9D4 ?

Obligatory XKCD

xkcd 1953

Africa's internet body in full-blown meltdown: 'None of the above' wins board protest vote

Re: Mismanaged Africa

Is anything anywhere?

Make masses carry their mobes, suggests wig in not-at-all-creepy speech

Re: ID Cards and enforced bio-metrics

Ken Hagan: You think no here one can imagine ID cards can stolen, faked, ...? And that all other means of proving your identity do not share the same problem? Well, all except pervasive biometrics. So is that what you would like to see?