Posts by Is AC used?

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

Bloody Microsoft!!!

There, that should sum up everyone's feelings nicely.

Forget toilet roll, bandwidth is the new ration: Amazon, YouTube also degrade video in Europe to keep 'net running amid coronavirus crunch

Lets get real. Please.

I am not a techy although I have followed El Reg for about 20 years even passing info about Phorm from the Blueyonder usenet setup. This Covid-19 is a very real thing. I have just tried to order food from Sainsburys just moments after midnight since a new day will appear on their calendar. Yet there are no new spaces for three weeks hence. Am I worried? Of course I am, I have limited mobility, poor health and since the government advice is to hibernate for twelve weeks for people in my category, no way to access food.

Oh just tried to reply to the postmaster at Sainsbury and it bounced!

Tech, yeah not always the best thing.

Microsoft picks a side, aims to make the business 'carbon-negative' by 2030

Re: I call marketing bullshit

you can have CO2 concentrations as high as 2% without serious side effects. FYI.

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Except you can't in the wider world. The current level of CO2 is causing serious problems for our oceans right now. Ocean acidification is a genuine concern not just for the creatures that live there but for the one billion that rely upon it for food.

Den Automation raised millions to 'reinvent' the light switch. Now it's lights out for startup

Re: There ought to be a law

This.

As someone less able and getting worse the very idea that basic devices could fail outside of a hardware fault or be open such that a scum sucking service company could get in there (Paypal, Just Eat et al) is a scary thought. Oh and tax free wouldn't hurt either.

CES flicks the off switch on massager award… and causes a buzz

Underpants!

Well, because somebody had to. We all sang it that way.

Underpass - The main single lifted from the seminal (ooer) album Metamatic by John Foxx.

Is this a hotdog? What it takes for an AI to answer that might surprise you

The problem with AI is we don't understand enough to make it.

I'm no expert, just a plain old user with an interest in computing & science, however the AI situation has always been intriguing.

My three year old grandchild would say the pic was a hotdog, her younger sister would identify it as food. If I were to show them and name Sprocket Y, and then showed them the similar Sprocket Z, they would say it was Sprocket Y. The difference between Sprocket Y and Z is unimportant, the difference is acquired further knowledge. The important question is how did they understand there was a similarity in the first place? Show a child a metal boomerang and then a wooden one rotated, and they would say it was the same object, so colour and orientation (to a certain extent) alone is not the answer.

Exposure to thousands of images seems like the wrong way to go as they might all be irrelevant in the first place, providing no useful data to work on. Somehow my two year old grandchild already worked out the picture was food and just needed a label.

OK, you could argue that she had seen enough bread products, enough processed meat products, and ketchup to assume it was food. But together, for all of the billions of combinations of light, colour and orientation in her just two years?

And that, in a nutshell, is a hard one to swallow AI speaking.