Posts by doublelayer

Amazon confirms it locked Microsoft engineer out of his Echo gear over false claim

Re: no backup strategy, SMH stupidity

Do you have backups for everything you've ever bought for personal use, no matter how inconsequential the purchase was and how minor an inconvenience a failure would be? I seriously doubt it. This was not a person who set up this system to provide life-critical services to a client who required extreme fault tolerance; it was a person setting up some conveniences in his own house.

Answer this question: where is your email handled? All your accounts, every one of them. Is it all on your own mail server? Congratulations. Now that server, it's on hardware you control, right? Nobody else is running it? And that server is in a building you control, and by control I mean that you own it so nobody can lock you out, right? And that server has a backup which you also own, in a different building in case the first one burns down, and you control that building too? And the email address that owns the domain for those private servers is also controlled entirely by you in the same way, so you can't be locked out through that channel either? My guess is that your personal email does not have this level of backup, and it probably falls far short of that ideal. I have taken a couple steps in this direction, but I don't have that level of control or certainty. Yet, our email is far more important to our lives than smart lights, if we decide to buy them.

By the way, if you actually have this level of control over your email, consider other services that you also rely on. Can you honestly claim to have redundant backups for everything you rely on, not just the most important ones? If you do not, then your criticism of this guy applies to you as well. Fortunately, it's unwarranted, and I don't think there's anything wrong with you or that you should spend the next few years overcoming that humiliation.

He clearly understands how it happened, but didn't expect that a misheard phrase would lead to Amazon turning off everything. That's not a strange assumption to come to, because disabling purchased products for an unrelated event, whether it happened or not, is the kind of stupid thing that can lead to lawsuits and Amazon should know that.

North Korea created very phishy evil twin of Naver, South Korea's top portal

Re: Does NK not have something better to do

Most of their tiny civilian budget is focused on feeding its people, having turned basically every plot of land that isn't occupied by a military base or factory into a farm, even those plots that are not very good at being farms (a policy that has resulted in widespread crop destruction before after significant ecological damage). As for letting their citizens have peace, that's a bad idea for a dictatorship that has chosen the full Stalinism leadership style option, one they seem very gleeful to continue using.

Re: "shut down the now inaccessible phishing site"

It is not hosted in North Korea. North Korea has a very small address block, and I wouldn't be surprised that that block is firewalled in a lot of places anyway. It's far too obvious if you're running a phishing site. The actual address appears to be hosted by Cloudzy, formerly Router Hosting, a company in the United States.

South Korea could attempt to get that company to stop hosting it. They could also try to get the domain name revoked. Both would not prevent North Korea from setting up a new phishing site using a different name and address, but it could interfere with it at least a little.

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

Re: COP/EOD

Of course it's easy to translate that into human: "Let's do some work as soon as I'm done talking". If you want to translate each part, though, not so easy. For example, what does "synergize cross-functionally" mean? It's very clear that we're supposed to be doing it, but not clear on how we do that. The good news is that anyone can basically skim over it and assume that it means "work with each other", or more likely ignore it entirely and work the way they were already going to, but that is not what the words entirely mean. Someone who has worked for a few weeks will know what the key performance indicators are, but that doesn't automatically mean that they know what they're supposed to do to "align" them, although their assumption of "keep them looking positive, like you were already planning to" is likely to be close enough. People can learn the "low hanging fruit" analogy easy enough, but what does "provide visibility" on that mean? That you should work on it? That you should tell someone about it (who)? That you should write it down? That you should avoid focusing on that alone, which is probably a good idea but not implied by the words?

If it's just about understanding that the person talking wants you to work well, it's very easy to understand. If anybody says this stuff with a more specific plan of action in mind, they are not actually succeeding at communicating that plan to anybody. It's like the announcement for a new tech product where the release describes it as advanced, flexible, stable, smaller and lighter, faster processing, more memory, and after reading it all you know for sure is that they have a new product out there, but you can't tell any important details about what it will be like until they release the spec sheet.

Re: This is not even as close to as bad as acronyms are

"If you've never heard the phrase "Blue Sky Thinking" (lucky you), from the context of a sentence, you could probably work it out."

Time for an interesting experiment for me. I have heard the phrase, but so far my brain has always just skimmed over it thinking that I don't really need to know what they're trying to say. So I'm going to try to guess what it could mean and see if I get it right. Here are the options I came up with:

1. It refers to people thinking only for the ideal situation, I.E. for nice weather, without considering the likely problems, hence why it's just blue skies.

2. It's someone thinking of the situation from before they started the project, and it's an airplane metaphor.

3. It's referring to someone who lets their ideas grow too big, as if they're focusing on the sky instead of the ground.

Now I'll look it up...

Nope, I didn't get it. Also, I note that there's a perfectly good word for that concept, just one single verb which people will recognize already. I'm not posting the actual definition (well, first result from a search that had a definition on the page) in case anyone else who hasn't understood the phrase wants to try the experiment too. If you don't know and want to, here you go.

Re: Most misused list - where is "steep learning curve"?

"Plot "% learnt" or "ability to do useful work" against time and it becomes blindingly obvious that a steep learning curve is good - everyone is finding it easy to learn, or there isn't much to learn in the first place."

Only if they plotted it the same way you just suggested. It's pretty easy to see that there are other ways. Here's a simple one: reverse the axes from the way you did it. Now it's the amount of time taken to reach a certain level of learning. If the curve is steep, then it takes a lot of time to make a small amount of progress. Or you could take the derivative of your equation. In this case a steep downward curve indicates that the subject matter is taking longer and longer as a student advances through it, common in disciplines where the introductory material is generally applicable but advanced material is often theoretical and intertwined. If we're just referring to steepness of a line drawn on a graph, we can make a graph where steep means whatever we want it to mean. The idiom isn't necessarily directly connected to any particular graph that was used elsewhere.

That is if the person who first said that was thinking of graphs at all. They might have been making an analogy to physically steep things, which are difficult to climb, and it's been mutated with usage.

In his defense, he admitted this:

Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against.

I agree with you, however, that his complaints about others weren't contrasted with a better writing style from him. Part of my difficulty agreeing with the essay might be that most of the stuff he's complaining about isn't common in typical speech anymore, because it was most often focused on overly formal text. While there's certainly plenty of text which makes a point of being excessively formal to show off, I think it's much less common to see it nowadays than it was in his time, based on books, papers, speeches, and many other sources of language from the time.

UN boss recommends nuclear option for AI regulation

I have similar objections, and another one about the "certain threshold". I wonder how they plan to specify that. It's not as if AI systems have a numerical complexity score that can be directly compared. A tiny program can be used in a damaging way and a massive program can be next to useless. A text-generating model and a facial recognition system are dangerous in completely different ways. I wonder whether any politician has considered even for ten seconds how they'd decide what would get the severe regulation* and what would not. This is in addition to the problem that they don't have much of a hope that anyone will comply with that regulation or that they will be able to penalize those who ignore them.

* They don't seem to have a great idea of what that regulation would be, but they do agree there would be a lot of whatever it is.

FTC pulls emergency brake on Microsoft's marriage to Activision Blizzard

Re: What happens if the FTC fail to get a restraining order

It has been approved now, so this is not really an issue, but I can answer the questions on what would have happened.

If they didn't get the restraining order, then the companies would not be prevented from merging. The FTC has to block a merge before it becomes illegal, and they haven't completed doing so. They could try to change their schedule to have the next hearing earlier, but no guarantee they could organize it or that that will be the last one they need. They would still be able to raise objections after the merger completes, but then you have to somehow pull apart two companies that have already merged, which is a larger mess. Any problems caused during that mess would probably get the FTC sued by one or both of the companies involved. This only covers the United States. If the two companies merged, they would have some problems in the UK where they have already been refused permission. What they could or would do about that isn't something I know enough about to explain, but they probably have hundreds of lawyers who studied British corporate law looking at it.

By getting the order approved, the FTC has a lot of power to cause problems for the deal. This is partially because they can still argue for the deal to be refused, but also because they can delay action until existing agreements expire. I don't know what's in those agreements, so I don't know how difficult it would be to negotiate an extension, but it would create more problems for the two.

WFH mandates bad for staff morale and stunt innovation

Re: Evidence

Those are good data, and I'm not trying to pretend that they don't exist. However, people who advocate returning to the office (I should reiterate that I'm not one of those people), have studies of their own. Even without considering ones that might have been written specifically to come to that conclusion, there are reports like this one which concludes that remote workers get more done, but by working longer hours rather than by being more productive, which has other downsides in the long-term health of the team. Similarly, at least some companies have described that they're returning to the office because they've seen productivity declines, often specifically referring to new hires. Whether they have the data to defend that or they just made it up because it sounds convincing is harder to know, because most of them didn't bothering giving out data.

You appear to have a strong opinion, so I'm not surprised that you find the papers supporting higher productivity to be convincing to you. I still question whether those sources are as universal as the summaries of them would lead us to believe. I am less convinced in part because there are a lot of different kinds of work, and I would expect there to be a lot of differences in productivity based on exactly what you're doing at home, whereas a lot of these papers either try to study everybody or focus on one activity which isn't necessarily the same as the work we do. I sometimes work from an office and sometimes work at home, and anecdotally I have some advantages when at home and often prefer to work there. The problem comes when I decide that, because that's my experience, it must also be yours and that of everyone else I know.

Re: Evidence

I agree that they should be able to say something more complex than "The office is better because I say so", a statement that has so far convinced exactly zero people (some people already agreed, but it didn't convince them either). I've begun to wonder whether this might be a test from managers to see if people will do something because they've been told to without having any reasons.

Unfortunately, I do not see that much evidence provided by people who encourage WFH, either. There are papers that have come to a variety of conclusions, many of which are limited to a specific company, and you can always pick one of those to support your point. In comments posted here, however, I see some people saying with no evidence that everybody should work from the office because it's terrible to do it the other way and many others saying the same thing, just with the office and home reversed. Evidence on this topic appears limited to personal preference, with at most a citation that their work has improved/suffered/remained unchanged from the switch from/to WFH/working in the office (pick the combination that supports your preference), so therefore everybody's will and anybody who disagrees is stupid or worse.

I have seen indications of improvement both from working from home and from having some employees in the office, and there are a lot of variables that modify those. I have not studied any of them, so my anecdotes aren't usable to prove which is better, if there even is a provable superior option.

Re: Bad headline

I've heard Americans complaining about that phrase as well, so I wouldn't be so quick to assume that it's a regional difference, rather than a group of people who care about the inaccuracy and others who don't, the way most grammatical disagreements work. Sorry to interfere with any stereotypes out there, but not everything you dislike about the use of English is the fault of a single country.

Bad headline

The headline's "WFH mandates" suggest that the article is talking about companies that don't have an office and require people to work from home, which is not at all what the article talks about. "Anti-WFH mandates" or "office mandates" would have made more sense.

Having helped a charity sign up for one of those, they might find it useful. Some systems that work with corporates have a tiny form which basically outsources the decision to the relevant national regulator anyway, but someone has to fill in that form to add them to the database. I can't speak for all such systems globally, but the one I helped a charity fill out took about five minutes of effort and a week of waiting, and the extra donations* was considered worth it in that case.

* The extra donations just came from me at the start, but at least they're available should anyone else use the same system. Since I spent the five minutes, it wasn't much of a hassle.

Surprise! GitHub finds 92% of developers love AI tools

Re: Kids of today, eh?

"OK, so at what point as an "industry" of developers do we take responsibility for our work?"

At many points, but not the one you're complaining about. If your management judges you on something, you don't get to choose that. It might not even affect your work. I've written good quality code despite management clearly not caring about the quality, just wanting something that works. So if the statistic shows that 100% of coders are not judged on code quality, it wouldn't automatically follow that 100% of code is of poor quality as some will be self-motivated to produce good code. But even if that's not the case, this is clearly a management issue. Let's take an example from an unrelated field:

Let's say that you work in a call center and I'm your boss. You're receiving calls from customers who have problems and you're trying to solve them. I've decided that these customers are highly likely to remain customers, so there's not much need to treat them well. Therefore, I've given you instructions to go through a basic script to fix the really easy problems, and if it's more complex, leave them on hold forever until they give up. Since I've given you such a simple script, you need to spend no more than three minutes on a call, and if you do, I'll be monitoring and harassing you over it. Whose fault is it that the customer service is terrible? If we're following your logic, it's your fault. If we're following common sense, it's clear that it is my doing that led to the situation and it is I who need to change if the situation is to be resolved. Blaming people for management's mistakes not only punishes the wrong person but prevents you from improving the situation.

Re: Kids of today, eh?

That doesn't have to be their fault. I'm not sure I've always been judged on code quality. If so, there are some places I've worked where some people were not being judged correctly. Sometimes, management really does prefer the completion of whatever tasks they just set, regardless of whether those tasks are completed well or if they were worth completing.

I find that the latter tends to come first; someone is given a task that has no purpose and management wants it done fast, so any time they spend on doing it well feels like time wasted and is punished by managerial complaints. It's not surprising that motivation is lower for task number 2, leading to lower quality. The survey also indicated that progress was measured in lines of code, which every manager should understand is a bad measure of capability or productivity, so we're not looking at well-run projects here.

There is probably also a sample problem as well; my guess is that GitHub managed to get 92% agreement on AI tools by putting the survey invite in something that only people who had used Copilot would see. They filter out individuals and small companies later, and 8% of the respondents were those who tried out the tool out of curiosity and didn't like it. I can't prove that, of course, but that's how I would expect a 92% positive survey result to be generated if managers indicated that they preferred that result to honesty and survey quality.

Kinder, gentler Oracle says it's changed, and now wants you to succeed

Re: Yeah, right.

This is the outdated view I have come to expect. Microsoft did want a monopoly in servers, and I'm sure they'd happily take one now. They're not going to get one. They know that. They've stopped treating that goal like it's possible, and they stopped quite a long time ago now.

Similarly, blaming Microsoft for things you don't like and they had nothing to do with. Systemd is not a Microsoft product. It was designed by employees of Red Hat, and it was adopted and promoted by Red Hat. You know, one of Microsoft's competitors in the server space you think they're focused on. But since you have a negative opinion on it, you'll jump to the conclusion that it must have been their idea and somehow they've duped all the distros into using it. Poettering went to work at Microsoft only twelve years after developing that and all the other core developers didn't go to work there at all; what a long game they play.

"Microsoft *does* care. A lot. Every linux server is lost profit for them. You actually believe a greedy corporation like MS would *not* care about lost profit? If you do, you have serious disconnection from reality."

Well, they do appear to make a lot of money on all those Linux servers they sell to people through Azure. They've got the Windows server option up there as well and they charge more for that, but they figured out before even launching that service that people liked Linux servers and were going to use them, so they ended up providing their services for those as well. So basically, they don't care too much because they'd much rather you run Linux on Azure than avoid them because it's not an option. The ship has sailed away from their server monopolistic ambitions and they know it. You, however, appear not to.

Re: Yeah, right.

Enthusiastic? Not really. But yes, I noticed that they've been using Linux in Azure for some time and added the WSL. That's not exactly embracing it, just providing some features that their technical customers want, but I'm not sure what else you would want them to do relating to Linux*.

* The Windows versus Linux fight became kind of pointless in the 2000s. Use whichever you prefer, or both. Nobody cares. Microsoft doesn't care, because they're pretty confident they don't face a threat to their desktop market share from it. Their embracing of Linux or lack of doing so would make basically no difference.

GitHub accused of varying Copilot output to avoid copyright allegations

Re: How close does code have to be?

"the whole world is not the USA."

They didn't say it was. "In the US" is a dependent clause, meaning that the cases they're about to mention are from that country, not that everything is.

The precedents set so far don't cover everything, but the general concept applies to many other kinds of work and are frequently tested. Small chunks of music are probably the most direct similar cases, where a few notes in a sequence can be considered unique enough to be copyrighted, but in many cases are considered small or common enough that infringement of them is not possible. However, clips of recorded audio are also copyrightable, and those stand up to more protection. A lot of it will come down to a judge's idea of common sense, which while not being a perfect solution because it isn't deterministic, often leads to functional verdicts.

Re: Software is not a creative work?

"the "lines of code" are really the least interesting thing about it. Far more important is the design - visual design, interface design, component design."

I disagree. Sure, design is sometimes useful, but if Firefox moved the menus around, I could deal with that. It wouldn't be the most important aspect. Same if they changed the colors or the visuals around the controls, or changed the structure of the script parsing and execution system. What is most important is what it does and how it does it, and it is the code that defines both. Not to mention that it is also the code that implements the design. While each individual line of code is not critical to me, the thing that they allow me to do is. Whether the tracking blocking has a switch in the settings, in the menus, or its own keyboard shortcut is relatively unimportant. That there is tracking blocking and that it's been kept updated to continue to work against new exploits that advertisers try to use is very important.

The same is true of any other creative work. Take a good book. The core part of any book is its plot, setting, and characters, but this is not a good book:

Winston Smith: employee of despotic government, not having fun, doesn't like situation. Government tortures people for no good reason. Smith tries to think of a way around the absolute dictatorship, meets a fellow dissident, caught by police, tortured, ends up depressed, dictatorship as strong as it ever was.

All those connective sentences, each of which is relatively unimportant, is what turns this boring list of statements into something that's enjoyable to read. While many people wouldn't come up with a plot like this if they tried, many others could envision it but couldn't make it with the quality that Orwell could, and some people could make a book that is just as good, but takes those plot points in a different direction. Each individual sentence is relatively unimportant, but as they build up, they create something that is bigger than the original picture in the author's mind. This is why the idea of a dictatorship and a person struggling under it isn't copyrightable, but 1984 is.

Re: How close does code have to be?

Which works if you can find one person who wants the product enough to be the only customer. Otherwise, the person buying the work tends to be selling the product themselves, so just because you're not selling it directly doesn't change the situation. Basically, if you or someone else can't sell the product, you'll often be unable to sell the work that would have created the product.

Re: How close does code have to be?

"Remove copyright and you could copy any software for free, no problem. Basically same business model as open software has now: Money is in the support, not in the program itself."

Except for three major differences/problems:

1. That business model doesn't consistently produce the kind of profit needed to develop all the kinds of software that the copyright model does.

2. They are sometimes based on not having other companies copy their work, which works pretty well when the license is structured to require modifications to be published under the same terms and enough people are using the code to resolve forks, but not on other types of projects.

3. This would only become the same if the code was published, but "There is no more copyright protection" does not automatically lead to "All source code will be published".

Re: Global context of intellectual property

"Knowledge sharing accelerates economic development. Isn't it what everyone wants in the end?"

Knowledge sharing isn't diametrically opposed to copyright. In a few ways, copyright actually helps the availability of knowledge. The obvious example is why it exists in the first place: if there is copyright, people can sell the results of their work which means they're motivated to keep doing that work and making the results public. Sure, it's not free at the start, but you get more of it because people are attracted to the work. If you don't have copyright, then someone who cannot make their work without payment will choose to do something else instead, and you'll be denied the creative production of which they would otherwise be capable.

There's another way to look at this, though. What would happen if copyright was completely eliminated, and now you can use any code you can get your hands on without anything to hinder you? Those companies which continued to make software and want to get paid for it would decide that it is too risky to leave anything open to the customer and would resort to ever stronger software locking mechanisms to prevent people from getting access to the sensitive code. Since they would no longer be able to send scary legal letters to catch the horse when it started to bolt, they'd need some really strong locks on the barn door. When those software locks were defeated, they might focus on hardware locks, and unfortunately those have been good enough to prevent most users from getting past them; consider how many Android phones never get any alternative software installed on them because the average developer cannot bypass their locks. Those companies also now have the right to take any open source code they can find, modify it in any way they choose, and lock it away since the licenses would have lost all legal force. This would end up taking a lot of software developers and making them work on anti-copying code, burden hardware with extra protection work, and you still wouldn't get access to most of that code. Does this really sound like knowledge sharing, and do you think it would lead to meaningful economic development?

Oh, and "singularity" has a meaning and your use isn't even close to it. Look it up. We're trying to communicate here, and making up new salamanders* just causes hypothesis** and foments*** the conversation.

* definitions

** confusion

*** slows down

Germans beat Tesla to autonomous L3 driving in the Golden State

Re: Its demographics

"So in a world where people can afford Mercedes they buy Tesla. Why? Its not cost, its "cost of ownership"."

No, it's not. Just because people with the means choose to buy something doesn't mean it's the efficient choice. In fact, that often makes it less cost-efficient than what a poorer person might choose, because the poorer person at least has to think a bit about the cost. If you can easily buy an expensive car, you are likely also capable of buying more expensive repairs, and thus not thinking about the repair cost too much. The same thing can be seen in expensive computers, which are not necessarily any easier to repair and are in some cases much harder to repair than something cheaper.

Ask those people why they chose a Tesla. Maybe some people will speak about a lower cost or frequency of repairs, although I have no information on whether that's true, but I doubt that's the major cited reason. I'm expecting a lot more generalities about it being high-quality, high-tech, pleasant, or environmentally friendly. These are perfectly good reasons to spend money on a car, but don't assume the average customer has calculated out the total cost of ownership before they buy anything.

Lawyers who cited fake legal cases generated by ChatGPT blame the software

Re: The "AI" is a red herring here...

GPT generates answers randomly, meaning that it's not guaranteed that you'll get the same result if you just ask the same question multiple times. As far as I know, that's not even what was tried because the prompt isn't known word for word, so people have to try similar prompts. In addition, OpenAI have been known to add filters to eliminate embarrassing answers after they make the news, which this did weeks ago. This doesn't prove that the lawyers are telling the truth, but it means that a failure to reproduce doesn't mean that they made it up. In my opinion, it doesn't matter much because, whether they made up this excuse for the crap data or they did actually get and mindlessly accept the crap data, they've submitted said crap data to a court without having a clue about it which indicates their lack of responsibility.

Chinese chipmaker insists it has Intel on-side, not inside

Re: Build/Buy (again)

"According to the article it was bought. Suggest dropping "the Chinese can't do it without stealing our technology" filter when reading."

According to the company, they bought it. Intel, as the article points out, did not confirm this. I'm inclined to believe them. However, you can't take a company's statement of "Trust us, it's all legal" as unshakeable truth. Companies have been caught before using stuff they didn't have a license for, but when questioned, they all say that there's no problem with their situation. For an example, try asking a lot of companies for GPL source code; you'll get ignored a lot and some companies will actually do it, but you'll also see more than a couple companies who send you a letter explaining why the GPL doesn't apply to them, none of which have any legal legitimacy.

Re: Build/Buy (again)

All the posts I've read so far are based on the reasoning that "the Chinese can't do it without stealing our technology".

That's not what they say to me. They certainly could do it without our technology, but in this case, they clearly didn't. That this company is using an Intel design isn't in question, and the only remaining question is whether they bought or stole that technology. Neither possibility suggests that Chinese people are incapable of doing it or intellectually inferior. Taking a quick look at the diverse ethnic and national backgrounds of the employees of chip companies who design and build such things would disprove that idea pretty quickly. So would looking at many existing Chinese chip design companies who have succeeded in designing functioning and performant chips, and if manufacturing at high efficiency weren't as monopolized, possibly would have built them.

The reason that China doesn't have an X86 chip as fast as Intel and AMD make is that both those companies have a lot of experience with all the little quirks of the architecture because all the quirks are the fault of one or both of them. They have a lot of internal information about how they designed things before, which they can copy or improve on as desired for each new generation. Other companies don't have that, no matter what country they're in, which is why Zhaoxin processors run X86 code too but not as quickly or efficiently. In other architectures, Chinese companies have had more success creating their own designs, and of course they're successful at designing chips around existing cores, especially for ARM CPUs, and the difference is likely the openness of the design and the availability of a market.

China has the ability to make chips on their own, and if we were in a normal situation, they would do so as they have been for decades. However, it's also clear that, if they decide to, they're also willing to steal technology and copy that instead. There are logical reasons to do so, including sanctions currently placed on them and expected ones should they take a more active role in conquering lands near them. If they were focused on making a profit in a global economy, they wouldn't do it as blatantly, and if they're focused on having technology in a world where they're cut off, they would.

Man sues OpenAI claiming ChatGPT 'hallucination' said he embezzled money

It would be OpenAI that is punished for the functioning of their service. You can't sue a program, but you can sue the writer of the program who is making money from the operation of that program.

Re: Is blame binary?

"I thought "summarise this document" was one of the things these models were good at?"

It's more one of the things that they've been shown doing during demonstrations. They can, and they produce results which look good if you don't look too hard or get lucky, but they're as prone to problems as anything. Also, there's a chance that the journalist gave the bot an address to the file, which won't work; the bot will simply make up something based on the rest of the prompt. It can only try to summarize a document if it is pasted in.

For a demonstration of this, here's a blog entry testing Bard, which works similarly, on describing images, which it won't retrieve and as far as I know, can't do. It still tries making up a possible description for each picture it didn't read, and even if we assumed a picture, its descriptions aren't internally consistent either. The descriptions are quite inventive, though.

Notepad doesn't determine what words you type. GPT does choose the words to print out. Whether that rises to a level that can bring on legal consequences, I'm not really sure, but I am entirely certain that you can't compare GPT to Notepad using any good logic, especially including the logic you're decrying.

The general public doesn't understand "generative", and in many ways, nor does anyone. It's not a typical word in most contexts, and if we start using its strict definition, it isn't clear what you have to do to generate something. For example, Google generates search results, but only when pages are created by others, so people wouldn't assume that their generation means producing text at random. Electricity generators generate electricity only if there are fuels or other external power sources, so people don't see generation as producing spontaneous energy. Anyone who goes to the effort of parsing the name could easily come to the conclusion that this program generates a block of text which contains what you were asking for based on an incorrect estimation of what it's doing with all that source data. "Generative" does not mean "generates randomly" or "generates something unreliable", and we shouldn't expect people to determine that from the name alone.

Unless they've added it recently, it certainly will not go out and retrieve data from elsewhere. You'd think it would be pretty easy to look at the input text for web addresses and tell the user "Hey, I'm not going to pull that", but evidently not. The program can summarize* stuff if you paste it in first, which might be why the journalist thought it could be done.

* Well, it will read it first and quote chunks. That's no guarantee that the summary will be good or that it won't still make up stuff.

Hey, BARD, GPT told me that this man stole funds. Is that true?

Someone lazy enough to use a chatbot and not understand what it does is probably dumb enough to think that another chatbot can double-check things.

To be fair to them, they didn't say we should call it "lying" either. Both terms anthropomorphize the program to some extent. Probably the most accurate way to describe it is simply "produce incorrect statements", though less polite phrases are available.

I find it difficult to decide whether there should be consequences to this; people should now be aware that the AI programs are still effectively weighted random word generators. However, OpenAI has made its business out of hiding this fact, so I won't feel too bad if the consequences of people believing their hype hurt them.

Identity thieves can hunt us for 'rest of our lives,' claims suit after university data leak

Re: Very often you can avoid disclosing your SSN

If they were really using only your name and birthday, then things are probably fine for the John Smiths, but less fine for those with less common, but not nationally unique, names. It also makes identity theft much easier, since birth days are much less opaque than insecure government numbers.

However, those two problems are so large that somebody would find an alternative mechanism. That's no guarantee that the mechanism they agree on will be good for customers, because it would probably be something along the lines of "You must voluntarily sign up for a credit tracking account before any bank is willing to open accounts". However, I'm reasonably confident in saying that the name-only system would be rejected pretty quickly by financial companies.

Re: "SSNs are assigned at birth, and never change"

This appears to fall into the "accidental assignments of the same number to more than one person" category as quoted. They're supposed to be unique, but it's a government system and sometimes they fail. I'm not trying to pretend that they do anything well, from assignment to use, but that doesn't change the fact that reuse of the numbers is not part of the planned system, and when it appears, it's an error which must be corrected.

Re: "SSNs are assigned at birth, and never change"

Wikipedia indicates this to be incorrect:

The Social Security Administration does not reuse Social Security numbers. It has issued over 450 million since the start of the program, about 5.5 million per year. It says it has enough to last several generations without reuse and without changing the number of digits.[41] There have been accidental assignments of the same number to more than one person.[42]

In addition, it appears that numbers beginning with the digit 9 are not permitted, so that would allow for expansion if the key space is exhausted without breaking old numbers.

Google HR hounds threaten 'next steps' for slackers not coming in 3 days a week

Re: Showing your North Eastern Employees How Little You Care

It's almost as if you didn't read this part of the article:

As for the policy, requests to stay at home to work are now deemed exceptions. That doesn't count for this week, though. The wildfires in Canada and the subsequent bad air policy on the East Coast of the US mean that Googlers are advised to stay at home.

You may object to the policy as a whole, but your particular objection appears to be based on assuming something that is the opposite of reality.

US Senators take Meta to task for releasing LLaMA AI model after token safety checks

Re: Ok...

I haven't seen a lot of abuse of this model yet, although I'm certain we will. The problem with the gloomy pronouncements from politicians and companies is that they appear to think the models will be very dangerous, when what they will actually be is annoying.

For example, you can get models to write you an extortion letter. GPT may balk, but you can reword your message and get it to do so anyway. The letter won't be obviously crap and will probably be as convincing as such letters can be. However, with about two more minutes, you can write your own extortion letter and it will be just as good, since we're talking about a very small set of required information to get across to the victim: "We have your relative, we aren't averse to harming them, you can prevent this by paying us, and here's how to contact us to initiate payment". A chatbot will not help a kidnapper with the harder parts of this, like actually kidnapping someone or successfully pretending to have done so (some AI programs could be used there, but it's not the text generators).

We'll see plenty of AI-generated spam and it will be used to create fake references. This will cause problems when trying to find reliable information quickly, and I also expect there to be more work ahead for people who do moderation on online communities. It's not going to evolve into a world-destroying monster, nor is it going to make criminals' lives so much easier. At least, not yet.

Beijing proposes rules to stop Wi-Fi and Bluetooth networks going rogue

Re: Puts me off sharing my Wi-Fi

That's probably forbidden by your ISP. If you leave an open network, then it can be written off as incompetence or you not thinking about how your guest network would be available elsewhere, but if you put in extra systems to track the guest users, not so much.

I wanted to do the same thing as I have plenty of bandwidth, but for the same reasons, I have decided that the risks are greater or at least more concentrated than the benefit to others.

I'm not sure we have a great definition of what a government has to do to be Communist. They're definitely doing things differently than the Soviet Union, North Korea, or any of the other nations that claimed to be Communist did, but they all did it differently anyway, and none of them really stuck to the Communism out of the Communist Manifesto, whether that would even be possible. While I don't think China is a good representative for what Communism looks like in theory, I can't name anyone else that could be that representative.

It ends up not mattering anymore. When China says "Communism", it means whatever their rulers say it means. That, at least, is something that Communist states have been doing throughout their existence, though it's not limited to them.

US govt now bans TikTok from contractors' work gear

Re: Only a limited ban then

Most of the time, they would already have access to that information, because most secure facilities are already on maps. They may not say what they do in there, but that it's government property and you can't go in there is in most cases already known, and China already has a list of most of the people who work in such places as well as anyone who posted information about it online.

There are, of course, exceptions to that. However, those places tend to put a bit more into security than having a good lock, so people who work there are unlikely to be able to simply take their phone. There are some pieces of information that could be gleaned from a personal device, but the point of the law is to prevent the software from having access to data on the device, not metadata. Maybe they will try a more severe ban, as some of them have indicated a desire to do.

Re: Only a limited ban then

Yes, as long as they are able to use their phone in that location. For secure sites, personal devices are usually not allowed to enter the facility, so you wouldn't be able to access it. For other sites, they don't care about use in the building, but use on a device with their data on it. So this really only affects people who actually bring their own mobile device for government work. I can't believe people do that very often. I don't like installing any employer-provided software on my devices. I'm willing to accept SMS messages and calls to my mobile number and to use multifactor authentication apps which are not tied to a profile. If they want more than that, they buy the device to run the code on and they can control it as tightly as they like. For the same reason, I won't use my personal laptop for work and they won't install anything on it. So far, my employers have accepted that preference.

Windows XP's adventures in the afterlife shows copyright's copywrongs

Re: ???

"how did public domain get into this? Nobody else suggested that."

It was probably a simplification of this:

"Perhaps the same should be true for copyright - you have to publish the original work (source code) and not the derived one (machine code) in order to claim copyright protection."

That's not public domain, but it ends up looking the same in that there's no barrier whatsoever to people getting the code and using it without permission, thus turning the copyright protection into a worse administrative nightmare for a company wanting to make money than DRMing the thing until it can't breathe.

That was more generic than this specific case, but as many have noted, it's already likely that they would structure a project as work for hire, thus getting the source code. The latest comment can probably be explained as an answer to your question:

"if custom software is being specified then the implication is that it will be written from scratch. What would it be rewritten from? And how do you rewrite from scratch?"

No, it isn't exactly guaranteed that every piece of custom software is written from scratch. It can be written from an existing base which is not open source, using libraries a company has already written to simplify things. A lot of database systems use an existing database and bolt on the written from scratch parts. The same is true of many systems where there are wheels that don't need reinventing. This doesn't have to be a problem if you give the code that was written for this project, but not the code of those dependencies. However, if you're asking for the ability to build it all from source using only a compiler, then you'll need the dependency source as well, which the company may not be able and is probably not willing to do. If you want it written from scratch or atop open source components only, that needs to be in the contract, and it's a very reasonable requirement that is found in a number of contracts. I would certainly encourage governments and basically everybody to try to use open source components when possible because it's much easier to change the system later if there isn't a license snarl in the way, but not everyone takes that advice.

Re: Make like trademarks, not patents or copyright?

True, they have to be selling it, but they can keep changing the terms under which they're selling it until they no longer have to actually make any other than the one prototype. Even the craziest fan eventually stops if the price goes high enough. I just included the processor so that nobody can claim that it's not really a computer. The point is that even trademarks are pretty easy to keep if you're willing to go to a little effort and don't put anything near the restrictions or requirements that people are calling for.

Raspberry Pi production rate rising to a million a month

The prices they're selling them for are the same ones as before, starting at a $35 model. It's true that there was a time when $35 would buy you 2 GB of RAM, and I think it's still only 1 GB now, but that's still rather cheap and cheerful. The supply problems mean that others are trying to sell them for higher prices, but not that the real prices have increased at all. If you are referring to those prices, how cheap do you want them to get? They have lower-power A and Zero boards which cost less as well, and those are a bit easier to find as well.

I don't understand this. I don't know what price you're getting for the NUC, but I'm guessing that if it's comparable to the Pi, it's really very old and maybe there's something wrong with it. You're surely not looking at the highest Pi price on Amazon to determine the cost of that? I know they're frequently hard to get, but you know what the prices are and, when it's come up before, people have found stocks in several countries by looking around hard enough. You will find anybody selling something for a ridiculous amount, but that doesn't make that the market price.

Re: A Bit Late Now

I think you've reached the point where you want specific peripherals for your use case and everybody has a different set they want. If you're including ethernet ports, then I'll take a few USB ports but set lower so the ethernet jacks are now the thickest part, but you didn't say whether you wanted any, so that might break things for your use case if I were to build it.

As such, you probably want to use the compute modules which give you all the benefits of the SoC and connect to whatever board has the socket for it, then design that board to have the specific set of connections you want. It's not as cheap as if the company made a board that has precisely the set of stuff you want to use, but given the number of options, they're unlikely to do so.

Re: A Bit Late Now

In your opinion, what would have been the least damaging group to upset? Is it just whichever group you personally have the least contact with? I understand that nobody's happy with the lack of supply, but a lot of complaints about the situation appear to imply that there was some easy answer that they just didn't take, and so far I have no idea what you or anyone else think that was. I have some idea of what it wasn't, but that's not the same.