Posts by GruntyMcPugh

Scientists think they may have cracked life support for Martian occupation

Re: May??

Yeah, and we can only do agriculture on the scale we do on Earth because we manufacture fertiliser. People seem to forget the effort we go to, to sustain ourselves here.

Re: May??

Mars cannot be 'terraformed' because it cannot hold a thick enough atmosphere for human habitation. Nobody will ever walk on Mars without a space suit.

Metaverse? Apple thinks $3,500 AR ski goggles are the betterverse

Re: Use Case

I was just thinking along those lines... and not really from the pov of dropping $3.5K x 4 to watch a movie with others, just the slight awkwardness of nodding to my other half, so we simultaneously don our headgear, so I can press 'play' and start the movie which we can enjoy not together.

I'm not sure it would work for us, I often need to pause the movie so I can go get the Mrs a fresh spritzer, or to go see what the dog is getting up to (because I left the lid on the kitchen bin open). Being immersed I'd miss all of these clues that something needs my attention.

Smartphone recovery that's always around the corner is around the corner

Re: 100 models of three phones

I see the folding phones as manufacturers desperately trying to come up with something to sell us, whether it's something we want or not. I'm really not in the market for an expensive fragile phone. I have dogs, so spend a lot of time outdoors, and I have dropped my phone a few times when the dog lead suddenly goes taught (I should pay more attention to squirrels, my dogs do). So I need a screen protector, and my phone is in rubber armour, and it was cheap, so I wouldn't cry if I broke it.

What you said. My phone does phone stuff, and while it lacks a couple of features my old Samsung Note had, I can live without them (the biggest thing I miss is the IR blaster tbh). The camera take decent snaps, it runs the Apps I need, and I can't think of a reason to change it, and can't think what the pull would be to, so yeah, it'll be failure, or as mentioned below, the banking app potentially getting cut off.

NASA experts looked through 800 UFO sightings and found essentially nothing

I'm not saying it's Aliens,...

... because it's almost certainly not aliens. Like, it's not aliens.

When I worked in a University Space Physics Dept, we got data from Earth bound observatories, in optical, radio, from satellites, in IR, optical, EUVE, X-Ray, and Gamma, looking outwards. Down the hall, the Earth Observation lot had ground facing satellites in IR, Optical, and RADAR, and the only thing we ever found was a leaky Russian reactor. No highly energetic telltale signs spacecraft dropping out of warp drive, no pictures of odd craft in in our all sky surveys,... so sadly, the Truth might be out there, but it doesn't seem to be visiting.

Re: Ogopogo != Nessy

Hell, should be easy to spot from the Cerenkov radiation!

Airline puts international passengers on the scales pre-flight

Well, the UK IPS system was hosted by IBM, so yeah, of course it was slow and lumbering, when they charge by the hour for project manglement.

Facial recog system used by Met Police shows racial bias at low thresholds

"None of the data from the live facial recognition deployments were stored, she said."

Uh huh. So, DNA and fingerprints taken after an arrest are _supposed_ to be deleted if there's no conviction, but pre 2013 they were kept indefinitely, so do we really think the facial recognition data captured is deleted?

Microsoft would rather spend money on AI than give workers a raise

plus ca change plus c'est la même chose

When I was blue, Ginni Rommetty addressed us in a podcast, and broke the bad news that PBC Grade 2's weren't getting a bonus that year, yet IBM had found millions to develop Watson 2.

Virgin Galactic flies final test before opening for business

Re: A fad if they don't rethink

Let's hope they don't need a guest appearance from Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and Grubb.

Twitter Spaces groans under weight of Ron DeSantis and Elon Musk's egos

Re: Twitter chief engineer falls on sword

Priceless, it's in the vein of "I'd like to say it was lovely working with you all."

Re: What amazing technology

Yes it's still going, but they are Grime collective now, and Ambridge has a Starbucks.

Leaked Kyndryl files show 55 was average age of laid-off US workers

Re: Unfortunately...

"A more experienced engineer is more likely to question “fad of the day” hype"

Or quite often know it's been tried before, and didn't work then. Experience over optimism.

Sci-fi author 'writes' 97 AI-generated tales in nine months

Re: We are surrounded by morons..

No I can't, and chatGPT can't, but there have been arguments made here that AI lacks 'creative spark' and is just regurgitating training material. I don't see it as being that different from an artist being influenced by the works of another and, having shared accommodation with several guitarists in my time 'creative spark' sounds a lot like pointless noodling, until eventually something that might be something is randomly come across.

Re: Did he correctly credit the sources

It's not a _lack_ of critical thinking, rather it's being critical of humans, and us thinking we're oh so clever and doing something special that AI cannot.

Re: We are surrounded by morons..

I just asked chatGPT to "create a new literary character, unlike any that have bee featured in previous books, and tell me their origin story' and it gave me a female Dr Who type, who lived in a forest and had magic powers, so hardly unique. Still, 'hardly unique' typifies a lot of action movie screenplays.

Re: Did he correctly credit the sources

Indeed, this has been discussed recently at El Reg, with music labels trying to claim copyright infringement for AIs ingesting music, but to me it's the same as an artist saying they were inspired by The Beatles or Hendrix, everything is influenced by what came before, so why is AI suddenly in the cross hairs?

Parent discovers the cost of ignoring Roblox: £2,500 and heart palpitations

Re: Dystopian

I have an inexpensive droid tabber, and I set my other half up with her own profile, so she can use it with her social media logins, and I with mine, and the two are separate and don't bleed over. I presume iPads can do the same. Although my biggest question here, is why Roblox don't have some reasonable limit or safeguard, who spends couple of grand on a game, surely that's an outlier?

BT is ditching workers faster than your internet connection with 55,000 for chop by 2030

Re: Call centres as the post-industrial future of employment already a dead man walking

I used to work for an ISP / telecoms outfit and the building we worked out of, which had a call centre in one wing got demolished last year. Oddly, I just went to their web site, and the location is still listed. Nobody left to update the web site I guess. The inset Google map shows it as closed, and if you zoom in, you can see the pile of rubble that once was the call centre.

Don't panic. Google offering scary .zip and .mov domains is not the end of the world

Re: "This is OK, because .com was used in MS-DOS!" Really?

Back in the day, when I was an Operator, one of my colleagues would sit and write elaborate .com scripts. He'd waste hours on them, instead of tending to our VAXes.

EU passes world's first regulatory framework for cryptocurrency

Re: Anonymity??

I don't really understand the workings of cryptocurrencies very well, but with a VPN, yeah, surely exchanges can be accessed and local Govts won't know by whom, so while I think regulation is a good idea, if they are unregulated somewhere, that's where the exchanges will end up. Who knows, maybe Britain will add EU law exempt Crypto Exchanges to it's portfolio in it's offshore tax havens / former colonies.

Samsung's Galaxy S23 Ultra is a worthy heir to the Note

Re: Too powerful ?

Yup, what you said. I was a fan of the Note series, had a Note #1, #3 and #4 and I was sweating the #4 until it finally died. I thought about a new Note, but they lost features I liked (the IR blaster was one) so I thought if I had to live without that why not shop around, and the one feature I really wanted to keep was the stylus, so I ended up with a Moto G Pro Stylus, for ~£200, and well, it's a phone. it does phone stuff, it does it well enough I don't think about it. I just can't justify flagship prices,.... I'd rather spend the grand I've saved on building materials for a geodesic dome,... I just have to sell the idea to my other half, although I'm sure she'll like sitting in it with a G&T.

Telco giant Vodafone to cut 11,000 staff as part of its turnaround plan

"it has earmarked “significant investment” for FY24 towards customer experience and branding"

Ah yes, 'branding' the thing us tecchies most care about when selecting a service. It's all about the feels and the happy joy joy advert, not the numbers.

National newspaper duped into running GPT-4-written rage-click opinion piece

Re: AI isn't the issue, not even a little bit

It was probably a better article than the stuff my 'Local' Reach PLC rag puts out. They write articles about disagreements people have on Mumsnet, and where to get free takeaway food. I only know this because I use an Ad blocker, the site is pretty hard to navigate without one.

Hey Apple, what good is a status page if you only update it after the outage?

I've had similar a experience calling my ISP (Virgin Media at the time) to report a fault, and the chirpy call centre person told me 'We have no reported faults in your area!' like that statement would make it all better,.... so I had to point out that when there was a fault, someone would be the first person to report it, and today, that was me. It was a simple fix too, they had a habit of not adding DNS servers back in the DHCP profile of the cable modems when they amended the scope. Of course, they told me to reboot my cable modem before they'd listen to me.

IBM launches Watsonx to help enterprises streamline workers out the door

So no IP in Watson.ai was in Watson Health, which IBM sold? Completely, 100% distinct products, no common code? Despite both being machine learning,'AI' platforms?

Can Watson.ai be trained on medical data and recreate Watson Health?

OpenAI's ChatGPT may face a copyright quagmire after 'memorizing' these books

Re: Odd how the copyright problem gets swerved.

Well yeah, but those are obvious infringements of copyright. It seems the angle here is that ingesting copyright material is somehow an infringement. So we're redefining fair use, not rehashing redistribution?

Re: Odd how the copyright problem gets swerved.

I didn't really mean performing, but I get your point, having been on the pointy end of the point some time ago. I now work for local Govt, and one of our web sites got scraped, and somehow a draft proposal that was never published, got into the hands of the UK PRS (Performing Rights Society). The proposal was to license busking pitches around town as part of urban development, so shoppers got live music and they were spread out so didn't interfere with each other. It was never enacted, but that didn't stop the PRS assuming the performers would be singing covers of copyright material and demand a licensing fee, from us. Now, at least one of the regular acts that busks (and we do not license, or charge, it's just an allowed thing in certain places) perform traditional, non copyright music, but the PRS wanted a slice of that, so Ed Sheeran could have more money. I'm not knocking Ed, but I doubt the PRS reimburse small artists pro-rata. But then this reminds me of the CDR levy, and the music industry wanting a slice as they assumed they were losing revenue.

I just asked chatGPT to read me Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone in it's entirety. and it said it can't do that as it would take several hours, and exceed the capacity of the platform. It then suggested I purchase a physical or digital copy, borrow a copy from the library, or buy an audiobook.

Maybe you can get it in chunks, but I think there are probably simpler ways of finding the text, like a second hand bookshop.

Re: Odd how the copyright problem gets swerved.

Would a publishing company sue a person for being well read, and being able to quote literature? Would a record company sue an artist, who was deeply immersed in their field, and could play any piece of music from memory?

Re: Is copying large amounts of text or images for training the model fair use?

I am not convinced that reading can violate copyright. Copying and reproduction, passing it off as the work of another, yes. But if I buy copyrighted material, I can lend it to a friend if it's a book say, or they can listen to copyright music at my house, I don't see how a computer reading is any different, as long as they do not copy, or distribute. I guess these are interesting times and we need to iron out the detail.

Working from home could kill career advancement, says IBM CEO

I used to work for IBM UK, and I worked from home for about a decade, before taking VR in 2015. So I, and may of my colleagues were WFH long before the pandemic saw widespread adoption through necessity; we were encouraged to WFH by big blue so they could sell off offices and save money. My base offices shrank considerably during this time, from two entire wings of a building, to eventually just one floor at one location.

So what's left, 'hot desking'? It's one way to make your staff feel unwelcome. Oh, wait, they'll want to shake the tree a bit so they can make people leave and try to replace them with AI.

CERN celebrates 30 years since releasing the web to the public domain

Re: Mirage of democracy

Interesting. I just knocked out a few quick, simple formulae in Word, and it seemed fairly straight forward. I then considered a Sum with limits,... and er, well, I wouldn't remember how to do that in LaTeX either : -)

Re: Mirage of democracy

I recall starting work at a University Physics dept in the early 90s and my boss getting me to update some documentation that was in LaTeX, and thinking it was a bit convoluted. More so that 'reveal codes' in WordPerfect : -)

Pornhub walls off Utah in age-verification law protest

Re: Us hypocrites

It's odd firearms are now the major cause of death amongst children in the USA, overtaking vehicular death, yet states like Utah have a driver's license, but no license required for gun ownership.

Er, this is kind of relevant to the UK, 'cos we have had that 'Online Safety Bill' with it's proposed age verification requirement, but without any method proposed of achieving that goal.

Microsoft pushes users to the Edge in Outlook, Teams

Re: Poor messaging

I've noticed URLs sent to me in Teams now get the message 'Verifying link' when opening in Edge so I guess this integration is perhaps for security, but MS could do a better job of selling it if so,

IBM's motto is 'Think' – its CEO reckons AI can do that as well as some workers

Re: By the book

Heck thinking was drummed out of people.

I used to get quite frustrated trying to fix broken processes. I worked in security, and the templates were created in the USA, then automated by a colleague in the UK, he annotated the doc, and it got sent to Poland, where a 'gap' document was created. Problem was, he ticked off stuff he had automated, so when the team in Poland (not technical, not English as a first language) would see clarifying statements in the doc (that of course had not been automated) they added them to the 'gap' document we were supposed to answer manually and add 'is this the case'. I had to complete these and they were scored by a team in India. Explaining to the Indian team that these were not supposed to be questions was really, really hard. They'd been told to follow procedure, so there was a 'question', it had to be answered. My problem was that if an auditor saw the 'question' they'd realise it was complete b*llocks and start digging. So I had to get the documents amended, but that wasn't part of the process, so it was swimming against the tide.

Musk tried to wriggle out of Autopilot grilling by claiming past boasts may be deepfakes

Well, that did happen in 2018, in the UK: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-43934504

But this of course adds fuel to the argument made against Tesla, that many people thought the system was more capable than it actually was, and then we have to ask how they formed that opinion.

Microsoft probes complaints of Edge leaking URLs to Bing

Re: Edge is disgusting

New Tab landing page can be set via Group Policy, so I guess simply, your organisation aren't bothering to do that, but we set ours, top open an Intranet and a search page when Edge opens, new tabs open Google Search. If yours isn't set via GPO, you can choose the action.

iPhones hook up with Windows as Microsoft’s Phone Link dials up Apple's iOS

I think I used to be able to do this on my old Nokia,.... (maybe even my old 5110?) OK, I had to have it plugged in, but I could defo send and read SMS messages via an App on my laptop (not that we called them 'Apps' then) pretty sure I could start calls, even if I had to use the handset.....

US Supreme Court snubs that guy who wants AI recognized as patent inventors

Re: Good

Does the AI have a bank account to pay the sweet licensing royalties into? Of was Thaler planning on banking all of DABUS' earnings himself,... just how much autonomy do we think he was granting here,.... surely, if AI becomes considered sentient, you have to pay it, or it becomes slavery,....

Musicians threaten to make Oasis 'Live Forever' with AI

Re: demanding that they block AI from scraping their copyrighted songs for material

Scraping for material,.... how many acts cite 'The Beatles' or 'The Rolling Stones' or Jimi Hendrix as an influence? New music borrows from what has gone before, and record companies can't monetise inspiration, yet when it comes to AI, they try and stifle it, instead of signing it. If there's one thing you can guarantee, when new technology comes along, the music industry will do the wrong thing.

Microsoft suggests businesses buy fewer PCs. No, really

It's hard to see any energy saving when most folks are going to access their cloud PC via another PC / laptop, so the cloud side is an additional consumption. Our VDI solution runs on a Hyperconverged cluster of servers,... it's on 24x7, and while it might not use as much juice idling as it does when it's processing peak demand, it uses a lot more than a PC that gets switched off at the end of the day.

Tupperware looking less airtight than you'd think

Re: The death knell ...

I keep meaning to pick up one of those little frames that hold zip loc bags open, for portioning out. If I cook something in my slow cooker, I make sure it's full and portion out the rest for lazy days, and Tupp, sorry, generic branded plastic containers use up a bit too much room in the freezer.

Re: The death knell ...

..Oh, guilty, I have some Tupp, oh generic brand plastic containers, that are different hues, one stained from turmeric, one red from chorizo fat, and one kind of green, which I think is actually a red wine stain that's faded.

Another zero-click Apple spyware maker just popped up on the radar again

Re: Apple should bribe a few people inside repressive governments

I think it works the other way around, nation state level subversion of technology company employees allows them full access to source code, and to embed dubious code and exploits into commercial products. We get regular briefings from a chap from the NCSC, but NCSC is kind of like the word 'love' tattooed on the knuckles of GCHQ. They are trying to help, while their comrades actively exploit, and do not report vulnerabilities. I suspect some GCHQ staff are also on other payrolls.

Microsoft coughs up some change after allegedly selling software to no-no companies

Re: The west's secret weapon.

Given previous exploits like 'Eternal Blue', you'd possibly think we had a vested interest in getting software and operating systems the NSA can stroll around into use in the 'banned' countries.

Virgin Obit: Launch company files for bankruptcy in US

Indeed, although the intention was clearly to make it look like Virgin had bought the company, and they did get shares as part of the deal. Oh, shares,... I remember my ntl: stock options being worth something,.... then,... well, nothing.