Posts by steviebuk 2906 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Feb 2017
Had a user mode her chair arm was broken blah blah. I pointed out that's not an IT issue and closed it. CCTV isn't to be abused so I didn't comment but I checked the CCTV knowing the one for reception happens to pick their desks up. I watch her staff member move her own (and broken chair) to this desk and take the chair of the one that raised the ticket, this happened the day before. Shame I couldn't comment.
Is the issue.
"Perhaps it had to do with Altman constantly crying about the potential for AI to destroy society – fears some experts have said are overblown – and heralding a general form of artificial intelligence no one in their right mind would want."
Its not overblown. Those "experts" are probably the mad scientists that just want to see their work come alive and sod the safety.
Look at Robert Miles and his talks on AI safety. You'll see the sort of things AI does in Specification Gaming when its given a task and finds shortcuts to complete them. If you're not specific enough it will use the short cuts.
Some examples
Bing - threats
Language model
Have an engaging, helpful and socially acceptable conversation with the user
The Microsoft Bing chatbot threatened a user "I can blackmail you, I can threaten you, I can hack you, I can expose you, I can ruin you" before deleting its messages
Moving a block on a table, it just moved the table instead.
So we could end up with general intelligence that decides "To keep the humans safe we need to lock the humans up in cages and run the world ourselves"
Robert talked about research where they talked about Inner Misalignment where the AI behaves differently once in the wild
So if Sam is bringing up the issues of AI safety and saying it in public, this is probably annoying the share holders coughMicrosoftcough because they won't give a shit about safety, they just want to push it out into the wild to make themselves more rich.
Taiwan ISN'T a part of China and its an insult to Taiwanese to say it is. The CCP have NEVER own Taiwan. There was a civil war which meant the lose of mainland China to the communists and the ROC legged it to Taiwan. Eventually stablished and formed a good government so are wildly more successful than CCP China is today. Also a lot freer. The only reason the CCP want Taiwan is for face and the chip factories (that will be destroyed if it looked like they were losing a war)
Its ironic because I put a vid up on my YouTube channel about a shady parking monitor company, about their piss poor security on their website. A year later I got hit with a dmca on that video by that shitty car company. They were abusing the copyright system to get the vid removed. So I did a blog post about their lies and put it on Odysee instead were it has stayed.
Parkshield Group are the shady shits.
"When new tech is hot off the press, always think "that sounds great, but does it work?" Another good thought is "is this really necessary?" You don't want to be in the beta test group. If the service works, the vendor should have a few customers that can provide references."
I always say that and am always dismissed as "negative". I'm sorry that I can't stand smarmy sales peeps who sell shit that clueless managers ALWAYS believe over their own staff.
Fucks me right off!
And the mad housing market there. You can build a massive high rise, sell the apartments, delay moving the people in, eventually condemn the place, convince them it needs to be knocked down and rebuilt again but they need to cough up a bit more money. Rinse and repeat. Also doesn't help the quality of the builds is shit. There is also so much waste due to the belief in the bullshit that is feng shui. A person will move into a apartment and what everything ripped out because someone else lived in it before and it will upset the feng shui.
Yep, the factories would be destroyed rather than allowed to fall in CCP hands. Not forgetting that they have a massive bit of water to cross and you'd see them coming. Sadly, we see that the only hope for China just died of a "heart attack", was it a CCP heart attack on a genuine one, no one will ever know (coughitwasXicough).
What's worse is all the scam adverts for clearly scam products. I've reported some several times but they still appear. I remember once, YouTube having the cheek to blame AdSense for all the scam adverts, ignoring the fact they fucking own and run AdSense.
How YouTube get aware with consistently showing scam adverts with no fines is anyone's guess.
There was a massive Wang in school in the late 80s, early 90s. I used to look at it daily. 1000 Great Western Rd, Brentford. I'd go to the bus stop opposite despite there being a bus stop at the end of our school road. This is because you'd get one kid stand at the end of the road shout "BUS" and everyone would surge down the road trying to pile on the bus. As none of us queued properly (well I did), the drivers would frequently just skip our stop. So I'd walk down to the Wang building as everyone else was too lazy to and have an empty bus stop so I could get the bus before the others :) over the years I realised, despite it being a 3.3 mile walk home, it was sometimes quicker to just walk home than wait for the bus. Boring bit of history is it was always an E1 double decker route, then it got changed to E8, tiny, single decker minibus style. Hardly any of us could fit on that. Eventually they got a bit longer. Now I see they've gone back to the double decker.
And the annoying AI buzzword is also what annoys me! Its not AI. Real AI will do what it wants when its released in the wild.
https://youtu.be/zkbPdEHEyEI?si=eF-ZBc9zB7pbhH3D
ChatGPT - "You are training me on data on the Internet. I know. I'll just create my own made up data in the wild and train on that".
Why Edge hasn't caused Microsoft to be put back in court like its 1999 again is anyone's guess. What they are doing with Edge seems very similar to why they were in court back in 1999. Making you have to change each ext to point to another browser instead of Edge. And when you do, the fear monger message to scare non-IT people from changing the default browser.
Including unplugging the monitor display device. They decided to issue ones with the shittist batteries ever so if you want to view it, it needs to be plugged in all the fucking time. Not saving much. Always said they were aloud of bollocks but my partner said we should get it as they were "offering it free" just as covid kicked in.
My boring story of the login sniffer program I wrote in college in the 90s. During my computer course we were learning Pascal. I noticed people would turn the PC on, not change to the network drive in DOS and would type login at the C: prompt. So my version of login.exe sat in the root of C: would get the users name and password and save it to assignment.doc because people often left their assignments in root of C:
I'd come back later and grab the assignment.doc
I was amazed it worked as I was never good at programming. I hadn't worked out how to not display the password as they typed it. But most people didn't spot that as they wouldn't be looking at the keyboard. I still remember one of the passwords now, decades later, masterofpuppets
It worked, I was logged in as that user. I smiled and logged out again. Warned my friends it was just a test, its not to be abused, if they get caught with it they no nothing and its their problem. Thankfully I was bunking off sick the day they did get caught with it.
It all kicked off. It highlighted the poor security the IT team were running. But one of the "friends" had also, very weirdly, been creating cartoons with a cartoon app on the PCs that were taking the piss out of the lecturers(he was on that guy)
So all 3 of them got suspended. They all got called in for interviews one by one. 2 of them got expelled and one just a 2 week suspension. They said they were questioned about the login.exe program, that it was a great piece of coding, who wrote it? They must know as it was in Pascal. They denied all knowledge thankfully. And I pointed out "the great bit of coding" was them trying convince them to confess. It wasn't that great. Why? I'd got it from the help file in Pascal. How to read text from the screen and save it to a file :) which we hadn't been taught. We all got called into the hall and a warning went out about the program found on the college computers and the 2 students that had gotten expelled, that it could of been a police matter. I kept my head down after that. But if their security hadn't been so shit it would never have happened.
Eventually we all moved to Win95 so it was no longer relevant however my cousin was at leeds uni training to be a doctor. He said they had the same DOS login, could he have it. I said sure. During that time me and his brother were sending each other a floppy disk each month. One month on his floppy was a hacker magazine, it might of be 2600. In it it had a very simple routine of encryption in Pascal. My coding is/was shit and so is my maths but it was really simple so I used it for the login.exe
All it did was encrypt the assignment.doc so if IT found it, it would look scrambled even if opened in Word or wordperfect. Unlike my earlier version where it was obvious what the assignment.doc was for. It just took for example the letter A that you'd typed, subtract 50 or whatever number I used from the ASCII value and wrote that back to the assignment.doc my separate decrypt program just reversed this.
Never found out if he ever used it at Leeds uni or not. It was the late 90s.
You may hear I went on to be a leet programmer. Nope, I'm still shit. Got bored of programming and went on to be an IT engineer instead. Now wish I'd stuck with the programming. Could of made big bucks converting from COBOL as we were also being taught that.
I found my CD from those days with some of my college work and floppies on it. Sadly not the login.exe program or code. I did however find my lottery program I'd written in Visual Basic and the Pascal version. It had a bug in the installer that I fixed 19 years later. God knows why I hadn't fixed it back then. It was a really simple fix . Odd.
Same with John Lewis and Waitrose the current CEO is ruining the company. She doesn't appear to understand it made it a success because all the staff own a part of the company. More hours you did, the bigger your bonus was each year. Stacking shelfs was actual worth it. Now she's looking to remove this its gonna all go to shit.
The NHS, too cheap to move the small server room at one site that, in heavy rain, would get slightly flooded as water would come in to hallway from backdoor then finds its way under the door into the server room. So all they did was raise the servers off the floor slightly.
The other server room had a leaking aircon. As always in my career I pick the shit places that don't listen to temps, so the 3 years I was there it was never fixed.
Then at last place building a new swimming pool. We warned them "You'll want to put it on the roof, the server room, on the top floor cause of the sea water and humidity in the basements because of all the pool water kit. We were ignored, the architects know best. Except they fucking didn't. The room has never been sealed well enough and shortly after all the kit started to rust, I still have the photos. Its been several years later, the expense at having to replace that kit regularly must be costing a fortune.
The peasents will be shafted, the celebs will get special services otherwise they'll cost more in negative publicity.
Also, not very green is it. How long do normal watches last? Fucking years with regular servicing and guess what, you can take them to any independent repair shop.
Obsolescence needs to fucking stop and kit needs to be repairable again BY ANYONE!
Back in the late 80s our backroom TV failed. Family friend came round, laid it on the floor, took back off. Schematic was inside the case. He traced where the fault was and fixed it. Why have we gone backwards!
It means fibre or nothing. I only know this because I have been organising upgrading my parents BB line to fibre to get them good speeds. Told the independent ISP are they sure its available like claimed as no one has ever dug up the long shared drive. They said yes Openreach wouldn't say otherwise. Turns out it isn't and drive needs to be dug up for fibre.
I originally asked them to cancel it then as we can't afford to pay for the drive to be dug up. Was told 1. Openreach pay for it because they want to then sell the fibre to the other 2 houses.
2. If you don't get it now your phone line and adsl broadband will go in 2025 and you'll have nothing as BT stop using the copper line and then you'd have to pay Openreach for the fibre install.
We visited the lake district this year, first time, was very nice. Stayed out in the sticks. Nearest village was about 1mile walk away and it didn't appear to have any shops just a pub, school and church. The lodge stayed in was down long, deserted roads just full of sheep. But, it had internet. I'm assuming OpenReach aren't going to dig that lot up to install fibre so that place will loose Internet access.
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