Posts by low_resolution_foxxes 607 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Nov 2016
If I was being cynical, is it not just BBC journalists acting all outraged at a technology that can replace them with an AI?
You know, "the AI took ooor joooobs!"
Frankly I find AI at least manages to write neutral articles that are mostly correct. Frankly I do not trust any journalist to write unbiased articles in these times.
Oh dear. This reminds me of an unfortunate incident involving one of our shortly hired IT engineers ~8 years ago. Very unfortunate situation. I would say it's bad to chuckle, as I did genuinely feel bad for the chap, but dear God the rumours snowballed into something of legend.
We had an IT chap who was of a larger waistband than 99% of the population. Very pleasant and hard-working IT guy. Not meaning to be judgemental, but this information is relevant to the tale.
We had some kind of late-night IT maintenance happening (I was an electronic engineer who dabbled with the servers) and there were minimal staff on site.
Some of the details are sketchy. But what appeared to happen, is that the gentleman in question required a lengthy bathroom visit. During this incident, he leaned over and fell off the toilet seat, resulting in his leg going through the plasterboard wall, and after some thrashing to free himself, managed to rip the toilet cistern off the wall (genuinely perplexed by this side of things, but fight or flight will do strange things). Alternatively, it seems plausible but unlikely, that he just smashed up the place for no obvious reason during the laying of a #2.
With one leg still in the neighbouring cubicle (he'd left a shoe in the neighbouring cubicle), he'd managed to flood the bathroom (including solids) and was caught on camera leaving the premises drenched from the waist down, without telling anyone what had happened. The maintenance team were called an hour later to find complete chaos, a flooded shipping area (these toilets are on the 1st floor) and a lengthy solid on the neighbouring kitchen floor.
He resigned shortly after bless him. Can you imagine the absolute farce in the office on Monday morning when the regular staff come back in....
Let's be fair, we don't have a clue what he has done.
To reach CTO level at a multi-billion euro company and have a PhD in Computer Science, it suggests a diligent hard-working ethos. That does not preclude some kind of God-complex for sure, but most PhDs aren't exactly drunk builders photocopying their butt on the company photocopiers.
Clearly something happened that was targeted at another person. Generally speaking, that's going to be unrequited romantic interest (of whatever kind), political rivalry (very common for a progressive left type to yell at non-progressives), yelling at incompetent/non-performing employees, a dispute with other employees or a drunken punch/rambling.
He left pretty swiftly after, so it was obviously not a minor infraction.
Fuzzy topic this one
Reading between the lines, it appears the words used are "harassment of an employee" and "allegedly approached an employee inappropriately at an event a few weeks ago".
I must say, at that point I presumed it would all be down to the usual suspects (drunk male employee harasses a female, difficult to tell whether it was a bad move or if the female was highly sensitive).
But after diving a bit more into this, I'm starting to question that line of thought.
Reasoning: 1) he does not come across as a regular alpha-male type. He is a PhD computer scientist, typically seems to be declaring his pronouns everywhere, is posting pride flags, often posting LGBT pride events and anti-racism progressive left-wing politics all across the shop.
This leads me to wonder...is it more realistic that he made a move on a male colleague, or perhaps...he had a drunken sweary rant at a Conservative-minded colleague?
I've gone controversial.
Had an awful time on the Pixel 6a (not great battery, USB-C charging only works with approved high-power chargers, slow 16W charging, 5G was persistently flaky).
I have no doubt the Pixel 8/9 are an improvement btw..
But I decided to go retro, ditch 5G completely and go for a 4G Xiaomi 'Poco M6 Pro'. £179 with a 67W charger + case included in the box.
Admittedly it does lack 5G, but in practice that only reaaaaally means added bandwidth in the most highly congested urban areas. I'm not entirely convinced 5G is worth it yet - when they start actually using the 700MHz bands then it might be worth having, but that's still 2+ years away from being used large-scale
Note: I do not live in a densely populated urban area and 5G is patchy here
Working conditions would be a lot tougher in the private/city sector. That should really be taken into account.
You may actually be allowed to work a 9-5 job at the government. That could easily balloon to 7am to 7pm at one of the big consulting firms.
Some of my best friends became ghosts when they started working for Deloitte/KPMG/PwC in their mid-20s. Literally didn't see them for a decade until they had families and decided the long hours were no longer worth the stress and impact on their families.
My favourite experience of this was having one semi-intoxicated friend out for a gig night and beer, interrupting our evening by taking a video call at 1am in the morning to finalise the details on a pensions Powerpoint presentation with a colleague.
It is a sad reflection of all government parties in our time.
We pay MPs and Civil Servants increasing high salaries, to duck the difficult decisions and outsource the complicated stuff to consultants, many of whom just happen to be Oxbridge graduates well known in the political scene.
I find myself asking, why are we paying Civil servants extremely high salaries to outsource their work to even more expensive consultants?
And thus the chain has begun. The consultants are advising the consultants and now the budget has exploded. Who could have foreseen this?
My preference is to put a technical expert in relevant domain (be it cloud, health, HR, whatever) in a room with an MBA to thrash out the policies and strategy.
I browse the newspapers just this morning to find KPMG have been provided with a 14 month £223m (!!!) deal to provide the following services (to government staff who are allegedly so talented they are paid surprisingly high salaries:
"Under the 14-month deal with the Cabinet Office, which commenced this month, the consulting firm will manage learning and development services across Whitehall, including overseeing courses on policymaking, communications and career development."
It's the classic scenario where those in charge are fundamentally responsible for commercial profit, so expenditure has a lever to reduce money spent. But if there are no repercussions for poor IT/safety records you are relying on someone who is inherently busy monitoring highly technical tasks they do not really understand (the obvious solution is to hire an appropriate expert).
If the CEO faces no consequences, then you can expect minimal attention to these things. That works for both corporations and governments.
I once had to 'down tools' because my supervisor was a keen cyclist who has been involved in a cycling accident and rang me to say he was nearby and had broken his arm in an accident
I suspect he was trying to break the land-speed record in Richmond park (London). But the offender was a flock of geese crossing his path and scoring a direct hit to his head.
The poor lad had jokes about it for years. When we got to the hospital, the A&E doctor chuckled when he was explaining what happened. Something about "you got goosed while cycling? Well done!"
I might be slightly wrong, but I believe it actually had a 2nd backup sensor you could switch to.
Problem was, if you don't inform the pilots of its existence then even if you have RTFM you will struggle to diagnose and fix the problem.
If I recall correctly, during the 1st crash, they actually managed to disable the MCAS accidentally in the correct manner - but not knowing what they had done, they simply reactivated it minutes later without enough ground clearance to repeat the effort.
I've even seen a Boeing exec claim that the PILOT is the backup MCAS system.......which is a wild claim for something they were never told about.
The sad factor on the Max design is that it what fitted with both a) a redundant MCAS sensor, and b) a safety light to inform the pilot of a sensor malfunction
One is the more hilarious (darkly so) problems is that the Boeing team did not inform the pilots that MCAS existed (nor how to switch to the 2nd sensor) and that the safety light to inform them of an MCAS failure was a PAID FOR and optional safety light.
How does one recognise a new problem, that is not documented as a change, nor informed how to react to such changes?
I can see the issue in hindsight. Your competitor has a new shiny thing that is dominating you in the market. You rush something to market in an aircraft design that does not fundamentally work within the constraints you have (pilot re-training, airport use, larger engine changing the plane dynamics etc.).
Airbus have their own issues. But fundamentally the NEO engine was a new plane design and it worked. It wasn't strapped together with sellotape and they didn't omit the warning lights to say the plane was about to enter 'kamikaze drone' mode without warning.
Yeah I was trying to figure out if that was an in-joke!
After living in Ealing for ten years it seemed an odd route choice
Always more fun getting on the wrong Piccadilly line train West..
Once had the nightmare of being, well, drunk. No cash. Rang Mrs to say I was on route home, wrong Piccadilly train, phone died, walked for three hours to Acton by mistake. Efff me did I get a row when I got home
I worked in wind turbine controls/designs for 10 years. While I applaud the development and research of this technology, I really struggle to see how you could have grid-level (GW class) power supplies using these things as the researcher suggests ("$76bn by 2050"). At 25kW that could possibly be useful on a remote windy island without too much birdlife migration (to pass the environmental impact studies) and what happens when the wind stops blowing, does it crash down? Does it need manual interaction to get it back in the air?
If these things are going to be MW class then we're really talking about a 50+ metre wide device. So basically a plane without an operator.
That would get tedious if you had to send a technician out to reset 100+ drone turbines at 3am in the morning during a snowstorm to prevent a power grid blackout, having some quite serious operational and safety challenges (do they collide in mid air?).
My guess if there is going to be a wind rival to the traditional 3-blade horizontal wind turbines, the most likely design candidates would be VAWTS (vIertically rotating devices, that can theoretically be scaled up to MW sizes, I think 1MW is the largest current design, but I suspect you could improve this by several multiples in future generations).
https://reneweconomy.com.au/vertical-axis-floating-wind-turbine-gears-up-for-1mw-trial-in-norway/
Oooooph. I read a bit deeper, it says something when the majority of protestors were wearing masks to avoid their employer IDing them. Some of the banners may have good intentions, but some of them accuse Google of genocide (it is never a good thing to accuse your employer of genocide while earning $100,000+ pa....).
https://nypost.com/2024/04/23/business/google-protest-group-says-over-50-staffers-were-fired-after-anti-israel-sit-ins/
Sample banners: "no more genocide for profit" "GOOGLERS AGAINST GENOCIDE"
"Some of the employees – many of whom covered their faces with masks while wearing traditional Arab headdress – brazenly barged into the offices of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian in Sunnyvale and livestreamed the protest on Twitch. Others occupied the 10th floor of the company’s offices in Chelsea."
"Last month, a Google software engineer was fired after he was filmed publicly berating one of the company’s Israel-based executives during a tech conference in Manhattan."
Doesn't sound like they were quietly holding up signs in the car park does it? What kind of idiot livestreams themself barging into the CEOs office??!??!?
edit: AHAHAHA - Here is a video (ok it is FOX, but it's just video footage of the actual protest) https://youtu.be/_RpmqzqQGG0?si=PQvKjT2oNZqXlCbo
I've Googled (lol) a few of her other comments and I'm starting to think it's justified. It wasn't just a protest at a specific thing. It seems she objects to even the government using the Google cloud for any purpose. She organized a "die in" protest that physically blocked employees entering the building and blocked passing traffic (until they had to be arrested carrying banners that are essentially anti-Israel, rather than simply "I object quietly and passively against this specific action". Broadly claimed that any use was bad and protested even Google's presence at a local and general tech conference. It's not quiiet and peaceful protest when you prevent your colleagues from going to work. You're making a nuisance to others
"Israel apartheid" and "liberate Palestine" banners are arguably drifting into bad territory.
The protestor quoted (Zelda) is perhaps what you'd expect. In their words "I'm a first-generation, non-binary Latinx software engineer. They/them."
I'm all for their right to protest. But unfortunately when you protest against major contracts for your employer you put them in a difficult position and make a nuisance of yourself. You literally put them in the position of asking if it's worth keeping you.
I see no issues providing civilian support, the military side is debatable, I guess it all boils down to whether these are 'professional protestors' that have a specific point, or if they are simply blindly anti-Israel, which is a bad look
Interesting, so in an era of AI bubbles and land grab market share efforts, Microsoft are adding an "AI assistant button" onto their keyboards (no conflict of interest there huh, since the button will push user to MS).
I'm dubious about the Edge Trojan install? Is it just a non-functioning placeholder? 8kb will not an AI compute.
If required, use: User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Copilot > Turn off Windows Copilot policy
It's primary function appears to be preparing shortcut use/integration/default apps when the AI products are released (I'm thinking somewhat like selecting a default program to open PDFs). My cynical nature noticed that the feature is rumoured to be configurable shutdown in EU, but not elsewhere, so I wonder if that is preparing the PC to default AI applications to Microsoft's offering? (EU anti competitive rules)
I find it hard to believe large groups of Dr Who fans would carpetbomb the BBC over an AI language model that wrote draft marketing script for their PR campaigns.
Most Dr Who fans of the nerdier variety stopped watching it when Capaldi left.
My assumption, reading between the lines, is that this is more likely to be a concerted effort by journalists/writers/unions to prevent the BBC from spreading the use of AI generative models in their industry. As it directly affects their careers.
While I am ... disheartened to see anyone lose their careers, IMO 'modern journalism' has degraded so far that I find it a truly embarrassing sector. We're torn between awful social media clickbait content, awful politicisation/social campaigning with minimal regard for truth, a horrendous problem with PR/bias degrading the trust between reader and writer, cheesy predictable advertising that everybody hates except marketing droids, all combined with what has become a highly formulaic and predictable writing structure. This all creates a situation where in the absence of people saying something interesting - if you had a choice between an AI that can get the job 95% complete in 1 second for basically £0.01, or an expensive human...I would choose AI.
It's a sad state of affairs when I routinely have to assume journalists are writing deceptively (is it PR? is it an ad? is it a campaign?) - on virtually any topic I have to verify the story against multiple website to understand what is happening (there's usually some weird kind of social engineering bias messing with the core facts).
PS of course I love the register journalists ;) It's why I keep coming back for mooaaaar!
I don't know
If I was paid millions of dollars by my company and I deliberately set out to savage the CEO, and bring a bad faith interview like this, I would personally expect consequences (regardless of your opinion on Musk).
Don Lemon...I find him a generic NPC who merely parrots the corporate lefty opinions de jour that he has been told to champion. I don't dislike the chap, he just rarely says anything inspiring
Mastercard and VISA provide the security hardware, banking interfacing controls, APIs, fraud detection and security, chip card and terminals. It's not wholly dissimilar.
Now sure, perhaps Apple provide the ecosystem in a broader sense, but the customer is already paying for the phone and the ecosystem. If these are payments for processing a fee - which is what they are defending, it is not dissimilar.
If they charged 5-15% it would not be such a major problem. The problem is that I have a Spotify account paid for online. Spotify developed the app and I have an account. I am blocked from using that by an ecosystem that inherently thinks $100 billion a year is a suitable surcharge revenue to manage an ecosystem that could be managed for less than $10bn
There is an inherent national interest / protectionism argument here that the EU and the US stock markets (and governments). The EU is obviously looking after its own interests in a field where American technical behemoths dominate. Apple's annual revenue is higher than the GDP of 2/3rds of EU nations.
Personally, I think it's illegally extortionate. Where say Spotify would need to pay 30% of its annual revenue from Apple users, probably in the region of $3bn per year directly to Apple.
It did not help Apple's case when Google dropped the revenue charge to 15% (albeit with a lot of nudging). At this point, I think it's just how long Apple executives can justify holding onto their model, I personally do not think Apple's ecosystem is fundamentally better than any other 'game ecosystem download' system.
For reference, Epic games provides an almost identical service and ecosystem for PC gamers taking just 12%, and I would say PC gaming and security is a lot more complicated than the Apple infrastructure, if for no other reason that it supports a vastly wider array of hardware and security considerations.
According to a brief Google search, the Apple software services department has a gross margin of ~ 73%, including the 30% 'skimming off the top of all payments' fee that cannot be worked around (even if you already have a Spotify account, paid for on the regular Spotify website, where you could simply login to your account or connect it to Apple).
By comparison, a brief search on Visa/Mastercard suggests the typical surcharge fee for using your debit card is 1 to 3%.
That's quite a difference for effectively a similar function.
Thinking out loud - if Microsoft had secrets why would they share them with major customers?
Are they indirectly saying they were talking to an intelligence agency and informing them about a backdoor?
The emails that were attacked included "a legacy non-production test tenant account" - read of that what you will...for whatever reason they have a 'test account' that happens to hold the live emails of executives (and presumably...other peoples email?). Possibly an offline listening post type account?
What on earth this means for live emails...I do not know "We will act immediately to apply our current security standards to Microsoft-owned legacy systems and internal business processes".
Remind me, now that 3rd party ad cookies will effectively be banned, replaced with a google managed "user interest" category (instead of 5000 random companies stalking you across the whole internet).
What will be interesting, will be if Google are planning to include an opt-out for the ad categories scheme. They historically have
Starlink terminals are basically large 4G mobile WiFi devices, in the sense they are extremely portable devices that are trivial to obtain for less than £1000.
They literally do not work in Russia. Although it may be a grey area where the border ends and coverage starts.
Curiously, there is a Wikipedia map of Starlink coverage in Ukraine which claims that only areas under clear Ukrainian control are covered, even showing a map of the exact coverage provided. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War
Perhaps it is possible the Russians have claimed some units from fallen Ukrainian positions - and are using Starlink within Ukraine? It seems the most plausible scenario.
A better question perhaps is what could such a mystical device be performing on a train?
I'm thinking about the Red Dwarf vending machine or a toaster.
But sadly, having a look around, it does seem that these trains have a Windows console with redundancy built into the drivers UI system...
Presumably it's air gapped, so that's probably fine.
Mad that a bare bones RaspPi would be a literal alien technology in comparison
I am open-minded on cases like this as they are usually promoted with a one sided bias. In this case the story is mainly being told through the legal/PR firm representing the suspect.
If the lawyer had provided a specific confirmation on how they could confirm he was 100% in California at the time of the robbery, I would be inclined to believe it 100%. However, if this is a notional "my alibi was I was living in California at the time" that's a bit vague for my liking (preparing an alibi could be easy enough when preparing a violent robbery with guns). If his residency/tenancy/bank records confirm it was impossible for him to be there..then yes sure I can see that alibi holding firm.
Browsing a few other articles on this topic. These articles appear to be promoted by the PR firm employed by his legal team, where the court agreed his alibi was credible enough, but the PR firm are glossing over the suspects long 20 year criminal record (mostly burglary) that put him in the initial crosshairs. With the plaintiff growing up in the area but having moved away in recent years. It's curious that all parties on the opposing side agreed with the match (the company that was robbed, the security staff and AI recognition company, the police, and store staff who identified him in a police line-up, but that is remotely explainable as errors can occur in these circumstances. At that point if the police have agreed with the match and put a warrant out for his arrest - that is tough to blame the AI firm directly.
I am slightly suspicious that the majority of these articles focus on how AI cannot replace a $1000 per hour lawyer. There are relatively few articles about how engineers or doctors can be replaced. The legal industry has not always proved to be exceptional value.
I have personally surmised that lawyers are terrified that their services will become 'free' and this is part of a backlash PR effort to minimise this.
Where I have a vague understanding of law/compliance, I have personally found that openAI brings up perfectly reasonable responses to most basic queries (and many complicated ones) that I have tested it with. You have to take that with a pinch of salt and understand the limitations, but TBH they are a perfectly good starting point.
I occasionally have to dabble with compliance topics, and while I haven't trusted it with a full response, it has essentially agreed with every opinion that has taken me 8+ hours of Google searching to determine the wider picture, but it does it within seconds.
Wait now - are you accusing them of doing work?
Saying an AI can hallucinate is a bit obvious. We ourselves are artificial intelligences constructed from our lived experiences, some of us regularly quote absolute nonsense and many of us lie intentionally.
Do we have an AI that can intentionally lie yet? If we reached that advanced state we would no longer require politicians.
I ended up going down the rabbit hole on this topic and found an interesting example of this feature being used well
https://www.conveniencestore.co.uk/your-stories/how-i-used-ai-technology-to-stop-15-shoplifters-in-two-weeks/664383.article
I thought this was a great way to manage it, i.e. waiting at the tills by the exit until you stop the shoplifter
At the risk of sounding like a pedant, the 'brownshirts' officially belonged to a party called 'The National Socialists' who fundamentally wanted to destroy capitalism and the Western banking systems.
Trump may be many things, he may destroy many other things, but he is not advertising himself with similar goals.
It is surprising how many people fail to recognise the official political philosophy of this party.
Good luck
In my experience, at this point it's hard to know how the market will react to the news. The market would usually spot a hype train from a mile away and put an increasingly absurd speculative price on the stock. You could try and ride this train and see if the momentum continues - or it could fall back to a more sensible dividend-based yield valuation.
Depends how you look at them really.
FTTP requires less infrastructure and premises, it is also far more reliable than copper - resulting in cheaper O&M/repair works after storms
I'm not sure they're firing many from the other departments. It's a traditional sign of "more efficient process needs fewer workers". Although they did joke about bringing in AI in the software coding teams and customer service departments.
It's a fucking hilarious excuse really
It makes me reconsider every time I hear a CEO mention cyber criminals and hacking.
"Hackers cracked our software and updated it so that it only stops working if the customer gets their maintenance tasks performed in our commercial rivals garage".
Hackers can be a strange breed, but hacking a PLC to provide such a specific feature, that also happens to have a direct and major commercial benefit to the OEM?
Oh please!
I usually justify it on the old "I was never in a million years, ever going to pay for this software or do anything commercial or personal with it"
Usually I would play with it for a few days, decide I couldn't be arsed with it and deleted it. Was quite nice having an array of design, video editing, music editing and music synths to play around with. Am I likely to pay a few hundred/thousand pounds to tinker with something? No.
Your point is factual, but boils down to:
Part time office workers earning less than outdoors full-time workers working overtime - who on earth could have foreseen this disparity?
Because from what I recall, most of the bigger bonuses were for working significant overtime shifts (road workers, bin collectors, grave diggers etc.), which wasn't particularly available to office cleaners.
I'll grant that they could possibly have run things in a more fair manner. But focussing on annual salaries, when comparing part-time vs full-time overtime shift workers, is just unethically stupid to compare.
Sometimes I feel people misrepresent what actually happened in those equal pay claims.
There were some trades that involved an element of danger and/or night work/overtime, where workers who were technically on the same pay-grade could earn substantially more if they were working longer hours in dangerous situations. A bonus scheme was in place.
From recollection, the two main complaints were that binmen and road maintenance workers qualified for bonuses that were not available to traditionally female roles, like dinner ladies and office cleaners. Arguably the core job is of a similar pay grade, but frankly I would have to sympathise with the council for a variety of reasons.
Namely, people who are routinely expected to work outside during heat/cold/winter/snow in an environment where the majority of workplace accidents/deaths occur should reasonably expect to be paid more, plus they were routinely offered early morning and evening work, within a controlled and hazardous safety environment.
I do cringe somewhat that the default mindset among legal claims lawyers is that because women traditionally do not choose dangerous workplaces, that office jobs should be paid the same as a hazardous location simply because they are populated by women.
Ha, I don't know, I'm not exactly pro or anti American, but I sometimes question what the trigger point and desired outcome of these things are.
Are China a threat to US dominance in the tech markets? It's hard to believe that the US politicians are not wary that TSMC and Apple combined have a market cap/value of ~ $3 trillion dollars. Funnily enough the US power brokers keep finding odd little excuses to block Chinese tech.
When Huawei started looking like it was threatening Apple / Samsung back in 2020 (gaining 5 out 20 of the top selling phones that year), lo and behold a military connection was determined and pressure applied.
That said though, I'm quite willing to accept there may be shenanigans in the background that result in these export restrictions. Would be interesting to see how the Chinese have developed their 7nm technology, cause it appears that Intel are struggling to release 7nm processors, so it doesn't look good if the Chinse have released the 7nm chips already.
It appears China is using deep ultraviolet lithography (DUV) which does involve issues with low yield and complications. I presume that is what this US politician is referring to - but if it works, it works!
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