Posts by doublelayer

Digital memories are disappearing and not even AI or Google can help

Re: ...And Then There's The Problem Of Old Application Software....

Well, it annoys me when we treat those who don't have technical knowledge like they're unthinking morons at the whim of software writers. They have the option to learn how their equipment works, the same way that we did, and they don't get to avoid responsibility for doing that with anything else. For example, if one of them was recording analog video onto cassettes, they might want to know which format they were using, what players supported it, which televisions supported the video format their camera was writing to the tape, etc. That information was right there in the instructions, and the file format choices are right there in the save box. It does not take expert knowledge to try to use those things.

The major benefit of computers is that, even if they chose a format they now regret, they have a pretty good chance of being able to recover it, even decades later.

I have some schoolwork, on paper, stored somewhere at my parents' house. Well, actually I don't, because they threw it away. It probably wasn't in great condition when they did that. If I complained that I had lost my precious writing, the answer would not be to ask for paper that never degrades or that my parents run a great museum of my work, but to tell me that, if I want that paper to last, then I have to take care of it, store it safely, maybe make copies so it doesn't come down to the existence of one sheet, and don't leave the only copy in the care of people who don't find it worth anything. Had I cared about the paper, I would have done those things. Computer files are not different. Some effort is needed to keep it, and people do not always care enough to go to that effort.

Re: ...And Then There's The Problem Of Old Application Software....

In some of those cases, the authors didn't decide to stop caring about the format, they stopped existing. But yes, it is your responsibility to export your data from formats if you decide you want to keep it in a modern one. You don't have to buy lots of new versions, because if you were able to generate the file, you can export it to a format supported by the version you already have. For example, you could open a file in the old version of Word and save the text as plain text, and you could probably have exported all of it as the pretty easily parsed RTF format. I am not asking anyone to buy new versions of anything, at the time or now, but I am asking them to go through the necessary steps if they decide they want to open old files in modern software. People posting here know perfectly well which formats are open or not and they knew that when they created those files.

On that topic, we have your complaint about lack of backward compatibility in new versions. Yes, this annoys me, but not as much as it seems to annoy you. I do not particularly want to pay writers of modern software to implement compatibility with file formats that never show up. This is often involved in my choice of software or file format. If some software, for example, only supports a proprietary format, then I may decide not to use it. It is one reason why I dislike Apple's iWork set of Office software. While it supports exporting documents to formats that others can use, it will only let you edit files saved in Apple's proprietary formats. So I moved those icons away and used LibreOffice instead. People here know everything I knew when I made that decision, and I trust them to make a similar decision based on their own tolerance for having to convert files later.

"what DO we do once, for example, MP4 for my movies is hosed, how then are we expected to access our memories ?"

Download ffmpeg and use it to convert that to whatever format you like instead. It's a marvelous collection of codecs for AV formats. In reality, though, you tend not to even need that unless the format is particularly obscure, because your media player software likely natively supports thirty formats or so, unless it's already implemented its format system by baking ffmpeg into it which is quite common. Software doesn't expire; it gets old. People stop using it because something better is available, but it's usually there for you to get your data out if you want to go to the effort to do it.

When data is stuck in an old format, it's usually so unimportant that nobody's done anything to get at it, not locked away from them for lack of a tool. There are exceptions for particularly proprietary formats or ones specifically built to keep the user from accessing it outside the provider's DRM, but you know that when you first start using that format, and there's usually some option you can take when you have the software to keep at least some of it.

Re: ...And Then There's The Problem Of Old Application Software....

Yes, that will happen, but you have the option to retrieve their contents using a number of tools, including many open source tools for opening some file formats. If you cared about the content of those files, you could download Micrographx Designer, Microsoft Word from 1993, and Word Star, along with an old OS to run them on. With those, you can retrieve the content you're interested in. If you cared about the content, you could have done that at the time as well.

Re: Seconded

Yes, I've seen that. That shows you that you can destroy digital data if you're careless and let lots of others archive it for you, and they end up doing that lazily, rather than doing it yourself. However, even compared to that, paper ends up the worse for it. Which is more likely to exist fifty years from now: a picture that was uploaded to Facebook or the photograph from one of my grandparents' houses that I collected after they died. I'll tell you: the former, because I have not digitized this bit of paper and am not planning to, and I'm pretty sure that if I die, it's going into the recycling bin. I'm not convinced that it will stay out of it when I'm alive. The picture will probably be in archives even if Facebook no longer exists.

A researcher from that time would have the following options:

Digital photograph: Okay, here's the best we have. People from the time would have been able to see a clear picture, but this one has been compressed and shrunk, so we'll have to analyze it more closely.

Paper photograph: You see that mud? Part of that contains some fibers which came from a cardboard box. If you could retrieve that, some of the box was made from the paper of the photograph. The pigments on the paper were removed from it during the recycling process.

Of course, who cares about a researcher from fifty years from now? They'll not need any of this. The fact remains, though, that the data must exist at that time in order to exist later, and it has to be preserved at all times. Copying the old social media photos archive to new media will probably be pretty easy in 2073, assuming disk sizes continue to grow. Storing all that paper is not very likely.

Re: Preserve the meaning of our personal past

With the size of the trove we're likely to give them already, it's a bit egotistical to assume that any person's data is likely to be of much interest. If we destroy 99.9% of the photos taken since 2000, we're still going to have orders of magnitude more of them than we had photos from any time before that. It really isn't the same as researchers looking at things from millennia ago, when creation of records was expensive even to generate a fragile, irreplaceable version. Nowadays, it's easy for one person to generate a hundred photos of daily life and to have copies on three continents in an hour. Researchers will have more of a problem digging through photographs to find useful photographs than they did digging through dirt to find objects.

That is if they're still humans looking for something they didn't already know. The depiction of researchers in this forum makes them sound a lot more like aliens digging through the ruins of a planet we destroyed looking to understand how our civilization worked. That picture might approximate what modern archaeologists are doing to understand neolithic society, but I really think it's incorrect to imagine that future archaeologists tactics with our society would look identical.

Re: Information evaporation

Your comparison doesn't really work. The paper records you're extolling only exist because they were significant enough to be kept or because someone left a copy and someone was lucky enough to find it. If you want any records that weren't in that book, they're not hidden in an archive for you to eventually find them with enough effort, nor are they in an old file format you could eventually access with some effort, they are gone. Gone in the sense that the paper you were written on was used as fuel, or it was never written down in the first place. It's not that bad if insignificant records are hard to find because Google doesn't think anyone wants to find them. In all previous times, they were also insignificant and nobody wanted to find them, and that usually meant that if someone did want to find them, they had a much poorer chance than they do today.

Re: "not even AI or Google can help"

If archive.org doesn't archive a site, it either means that it was told not to or it doesn't know that site exists. If you want it archived, put in the URL and it will continually rescan it for changes.

Re: Seconded

"Clearly neither digital nor material media are now intended to last, so there's a great danger of our period of history appearing as a 'dark age' to future generations."

Rubbish. Our modern media is going to last much better than did old media. A while ago, there might be a couple archives of issues of a certain newspaper. If a fire broke out in one of them and the other one got flooded, that might be it for some historical issues. Nowadays, when a university wants to make an archive of a paper, they don't have to budget for a large room and then hope that their administrators will continue to budget for keeping it watertight and not on fire, but some space on a disk. And the next librarian will make a budget request for newer disks and copy the lot over, since the new disks are bigger than the old disks and that data might be useful sometimes. Such archives exist on all continents.

That's just the deliberate archiving. I have documents of no significance from decades ago because they can be stored easily. Had they been on paper, it is certain that they would have been pulped at some point, probably as I moved from place to place. I've watched many others do the same thing. They'll take physical photographs with them, but the rest of the material is discarded as useless, which it probably is. If it turns out that some of it is useful, it is much more likely to exist because it was easy to keep it by inaction. As more people adopt cloud storage, that will only increase as it gets copied onto more resilient infrastructure.

Lots of data is lost nowadays, but so much more is kept than ever was in the past.

Fairphone 5 scores a perfect 10 from iFixit for repairability

Re: Nice! Too bad about the price.

You can't buy the replacement motherboard now. That may be because they just released the devices, so the motherboards they have are all going into new units. It may be because I've never seen anyone who actually broke a motherboard, so they're probably not that in demand. However, if we had these phones and decided motherboard replacements were important, we could probably contact the company and find a way to obtain one, and if enough people asked for it, nothing prevents them from putting them on the parts list and a user replacing them.

Re: Nice! Too bad about the price.

The major difference is that that device is, as far as I can determine from the internet, still running the Android 8.1 it shipped with. I don't have any data about the security patch level, but I'm guessing that's not much better. Maybe you don't care about those things, but they do matter to me.

Re: Gaslighting

You can't even buy individual parts

Hmm... this page must be a figment of my imagination. My imagination's integration with my web browser surprises me sometimes.

Re: Nice! Too bad about the price.

I did. Did it say that having a motherboard meant you couldn't replace it? It said that the design wasn't as good, not that repair of that part was impossible, and given that you can disconnect basically everything that connects to the motherboard, it shouldn't be hard. More expensive, more time, but still possible in a world where it's generally impossible on anything else.

Chromebooks are problematic for profits and planet, says Lenovo exec

Re: Bad for the environment?

"Even in your best case scenario (i.e., with overriding Windows 11 hardware checks) that's 12 years"

No, you misread that. That's the support lifetimes for machines released with hardware support for Windows 11, at least, with no bypasses required. If you allow hardware bypasses, the number goes up quite a lot from there.

And your opinion of the quality of Windows is not the issue here any more than my complaints about the content of Chrome OS are. You'll note that I didn't even state those in my comparison. People who accept running Windows get a certain number of years of support, and it is not the number that was made up.

My attitude is not only for personal use, where I do not replace my laptops after 3, 5, or 8 years. It is also based on places with which I have worked or volunteered which don't replace machines that frequently either. I have seen some businesses replacing computers on a 4-year cycle, and although they decided to do it, it never made sense to me as the machines they were discarding were all completely fine, whether they were Windows, Mac, or Linux devices (I have never worked anywhere that used Chromebooks). It always struck me as completely wasteful. Everywhere else I have been involved with tends to let the hardware continue running until there's a problem with it. Many of those use devices in a relatively stationary way, meaning mechanical damage is rarely the cause, with component failure and software support being the most likely reasons for disposal.

Re: Bad for the environment?

From your own source:

Buying any Chromebook with the intention of running Windows or Linux is not a great idea. Many can't boot anything other than ChromeOS; Those that can boot Linux (or Windows) often have functional deficiencies -- DO NOT EXPECT EVERYTHING TO WORK OUT OF THE BOX. Older models may fair better compatibility wise, but there are still lots of caveats, and it's not recommended to buy a Chromebook as a cheap Linux device.

Ringing endorsement there.

Re: Bad for the environment?

"a Windows laptop which lasts 3-5"

And you pulled that range from where exactly? If we compare your software support lifetimes, then the minimum Windows support lifetime recently was about 8 years (if you bought a computer in 2017 that can't update to Windows 11), assuming you don't bypass the restriction and update it anyway, assuming you don't pay for the extended support, assuming you don't just install something else on it. For most other machines, including those released a year later, the software support lifespan is quite a bit longer, probably at least 12 years, again with multiple options to extend that. Meanwhile, the increase to ten years from Google is only as of a couple months ago, before which it was 6-8 years, and all the numbers, including the recent 10, start counting from a random date of the manufacturer's choosing which is well before anyone could buy one. In order to defend a Chromebook, you're just making up a number to suggest that other devices expire long before we all know they do.

Apple and some Linux distros are open to Bluetooth attack

Re: Seems like a simple fix:

That isn't much different from what is supposed to happen now. Bluetooth, when implemented properly, doesn't let a HID device just decide to start sending commands to a computer. The computer has to initiate the pairing, and it won't do that unless the user selects that device in the list using the existing input systems. Similarly, most HID device stacks will require a pin be entered on the device in question to confirm that it's the one the user expects. The reason this bug works is that it bypasses those measures, not because those measures don't exist. Introducing more warning screens won't fix that problem.

Your statements are contradictory:

"I am very trailing-edge, yet I looked around and my only 'fone with <=10 is the one I have not used in months, have not powered-up in weeks," and "you are using an outdated version of Android [confirmed as Android 10 or earlier]". Unless the school's systems are just wrong, you would appear to have one. In addition, if you have multiple devices running Android versions after 10, I don't think you really fall into the trailing edge category. How frequently are you replacing your phone?

However, it's not just having Android 11 or later. It's having Android 11 or later and getting security patches from your OEM. That's not as common. I have at least one device that is in the required OS level but won't get that patch, probably ever, but certainly not for several months.

US senator claims Google and Apple reveal push notification data to foreign govs

Either that, the companies are wrong about what the regulations mean, or the companies made it up as a reason why they didn't have to provide any data. I note that the request is to repeal any regulations that would have that affect, not to repeal this specific list of regulations that we know have the effect. Maybe either the companies interpreted a regulation as embargoing that that actually doesn't or they decided they didn't want to create a report and just said they couldn't.

Getty's image-scraping sueball against Stability AI will go to trial in the UK

Re: Having trouble getting my head around what exactly is at issue here

"I was programing neural nets to classify crops from SPOT satellite images in the mid 90s and I have always been of the opinion, that neural nets and LLMs learn there is no memorization"

I'm guessing you've still seen it. Even without doing it very often, when I've trained neural networks, I've managed to get them to overfit the training data and start memorizing things. I'm thinking of a model that ended up simply memorizing the training data and expected answers, meaning it would score very highly while training and then fail all the other tests. Of course, something that blatant is rejected as a bad model, but that's when it's small enough that the overfit is obvious and causes problems for intended use. This model is much larger, so whether the pictures are stored in their entirety or not is harder to prove.

For context, I think this is the company that produced the model that started to introduce Getty Images watermarks into generated pictures. They weren't pixel-for-pixel correct watermarks, but you don't have to copy every pixel to commit a copyright violation. If the model did what it did to the rest of the picture as well as to the watermark, would you decide that doesn't count as storing the image in the model?

Amazon on the hook for predictably revolting use of concealed clothes hook spy cam

Re: Another frivolous case

I'd like to see your attempt at a regular expression that determines evil search terms versus normal ones. For example, I recently performed a few search terms for audio recorders that had to be very small, changing my wording of small over and over because the product listings kept giving me larger ones. That easily could have been to have a covert recorder, but that was not my intent. A filter would not know that, and dealing with false positives if it sounded an alarm on that would have wasted people's time. If Amazon is to blame here, it's for allowing that product, which is already not a definite victory. Also arguing that they should have detected abuse from a search string and done ... I'm not really sure what they were supposed to have done with that is a pretty ridiculous request.

Re: Another frivolous case

"Shouldn't there be some kind of checks or records for who buys these?"

If you mean that there ought to be some checks, then you are free to propose that, but if you mean that those checks should exist already, I'm curious who you think would be doing that and what they would be doing specifically? The devices are not illegal. Their most popular uses probably are, and other uses may be limited, but they're not checking up on buyers because buyers haven't broken any law just by buying them.

Re: Another frivolous case

Section 230 is a part of an American law exempting online platforms from liability for user-published content. It's not clear whether this already doesn't apply to a marketplace, especially one where you can list things without getting specific approval from the administrators of the marketplace, nor is it necessarily Amazon's defense here. However, they're clearly assuming that it will be and don't think it should apply. I'm not sure it would apply anyway and am more confident that Amazon's argument will be unrelated, so it doesn't seem very relevant to me.

Re: WTF?

I'm not sure how you tightly control or monitor use of that. You probably have to either forbid it entirely and ban the sale of such devices or accept that you can't prevent abuse of them. The most logical non-abusive use I can think of is installing the hook in an entrance, as if designed to hold a jacket, as part of a covert security system, but you have no way of knowing if I'm going to do that or something more abusive when I buy one and no real way to check what I've done with it afterward.

China's Loongson debuts processor that 'matches Intel silicon circa 2020'

It certainly is a good way to use my extra liquid nitrogen. Eventually, you get tired of flash freezing things, but who doesn't have some LN2 just lying around? Okay, you probably don't ever really get tired of flash freezing things, you just have to keep switching up which things you're doing it to.

17% of Spotify employees face the music in latest cost-cutting shuffle

"Workers are entitled to a minimum wage for their time, at very least if they work at a for profit business."

And independent musicians should receive that wage from ... whom exactly? I ask because I write music. Not for sale, just because I get enjoyment from it. In fact, I mostly leave the completed work on my hard drive to tinker with later, since I'm never completely satisfied with it and I wasn't going to sell it anyway. Some of it's available on the internet though. Where should I pick up my check?

When you do things on your own, because you wanted to, you aren't automatically owed a paycheck. Sometimes, such things can prove to be quite profitable, but if they don't, the risk is yours. If I tried to sell my music and thought that Spotify was underpaying, as they almost certainly would be, then I can choose not to sign with Spotify and try to find somewhere else to put my music. If my music proves very popular, that can work out. If it doesn't, and chances are it won't, then that's on me.

Re: What do all the staff do?

Some people write the app. Some people write the software for the servers the app contacts. Some people make sure those servers don't break. Some people make sure the servers have good network connections so the users can use them. A lot of people aren't in the tech part, though, and somehow I think you're not thinking about all of those. For example, people to deal with licensing music from all the people who make it, because the way Spotify has built its business is having most music you can think of, and that requires a lot of licensing even if the terms aren't very nice to the creators. They also have a podcasting business, since that's another set of audio that people like to consume, so they have people commissioning, reviewing, and publishing podcasts if they don't count some of the people actively making them (those are probably considered external contractors, but I don't know). Then they have to make some money off this, so they have an advertising department, and since they're running an audio streaming platform, they can't do like a lot of ad-supported internet companies and just have a bunch of Google ads. They have to run that themselves. They do many of these things in lots of countries, so budget for running multiple advertising teams for the different markets and languages. I'm not surprised that the nine thousand is too many, but it's not like they could do this well with a hundred.

Exposed Hugging Face API tokens offered full access to Meta's Llama 2

Hence the "also" in that sentence, which added that particular weak check to "which had already been announced as deprecated". That will do more about malicious uses when they finish doing it, presumably, although I'd have to look up what the exact flaw is before knowing the risk.

'Return to Office' declared dead

That will likely lead to a lot of arguments between the employer, employees, and government about what things come under that policy. For example, let's assume that I have a job where I have to come into a building in a certain place to fix broken things. If I decide that I feel like moving thirty minutes further from that building, does that mean I can just shorten my work day by an hour on my own say-so, or does my employer get to contest my decision to move because they're now paying for it? Do they get to tell me which mode of transportation I should use, because otherwise, what stops me from choosing one that's slower than they expect and ends up spending more of my day on transport? Do you really want to get into that fight with every employer?

Re: Stick

"There you go. It's "luck" not the hard work, therefore they don't deserve to be compensated well for the effort."

Not what I said. You are lucky to already be compensated much better than many could hope to be, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you don't deserve to be compensated even better than that. I already said that second part in my original post. Since I don't know how well you are compensated now nor what work you do, I don't know if you deserve to receive more, and my opinion on that matter is not relevant anyway.

"Ah yes, because if someone can afford baked beans and rent a room in a flatshare, then certainly is not poor."

Is that your limit? I've heard such complaints from people who have no problem renting or even owning quite a nice location, with a lovely separate home office, no difficulty affording holidays, but they somehow think that, because they can't afford to buy an even nicer house on two years salary (I can't either), they're in the same category as those who are literally living the experience you describe. I don't know where you fall between those levels, or even beyond them, but somehow, I doubt you're having trouble eating anything other than beans. By pretending you're experiencing the problems of people who really do have that experience, you are making yourself look worse than if you were honest about your real situation and why you should get more, which you may well deserve.

Re: Stick

As I understand IR35, it's about how much you pay in taxes, not how much you are paid. Whether you are contracting from an employer or working directly for them, they're free to pay you £10 million per year if they decide you're worth it. While it constrains circumstances under which you can get the benefits of a single-contractor business, it doesn't prevent you from negotiating any salary you can get someone else to accept. As such, your IR35 citation would appear to be irrelevant to their comment.

Re: Stick

There are a lot of views on unions that aren't that relevant to this discussion. I'm not sure that getting into them will stay on topic, but there are a few of your points that I can respond to.

"There is thinking especially among developers that: they earn above average, so they are very lucky. After all they just sit by the computer and click mouse and don't break their back at some warehouse."

This is a point we've debated before, and yes, I still think that. It doesn't necessarily mean that they don't deserve more, but I do find it a bit unsympathetic when a person who is comparatively lucky claims to be living a life of poverty that they're really not. This is important, not because you have any reason to care what I think, but also because public sentiment is rather important if you decide unionization is the right way to go. If the public sees a group as containing unsympathetic people, they tend not to express support for them, and sometimes, that support is helpful to giving that group the power to make the changes they want to. Public perception of unions and groups calling for regulation have at times been the deciding factor in the result.

By all means, try to increase your salary. Just don't expect that there are magic buttons out there that will do it for you. Regulations as your previous comments proposed won't have that immediate effect, and nor will joining a union. They may end up having other, unexpected effects, including some that move your salary downward. If you do not consider the effects, you may end up making your problem worse or simply wasting your time when a more successful option was available.

Re: Loud minority

Fine, I didn't get that, but now ... I don't get it in a different way. How does stating a complaint relevant to the minority respond to their point about the other set, to whom the complaint doesn't apply*?

* Well, the general complaint about being asked to do things for no reason applies, but they would have different examples than remote working, since remote working isn't an option in their case.

Re: Loud minority

No, they're suggesting that people who can work from home are a minority. It happens that we're in a majority among the people who typically read this paper and post in the forums, and as a result we can have conversations that make it sound like everyone has the option, but there are lots of people for whom it's really not an option and that will effect the way things end up.

Re: Stick

That's certainly a choice you can make, and people do. However, the choices are generally four:

Get well-paid skills, live in expensive area: get paid a high amount.

Get well-paid skills, live in cheaper area: get paid a moderate to high amount.

Don't get well-paid skills, live in expensive area: get paid a moderate to low amount, which may be insufficient for the lifestyle you want.

Don't get well-paid skills, live in cheaper area: get paid a low amount, which might be better or worse than the higher pay in a more expensive area.

In many cases, having the skills means that you'll earn more no matter where you are, even if you could be getting a higher salary in a place that's expensive or inconvenient.

Re: Stick

"If it was like you say, then companies would have just hired overseas. After all who cares if the worker is in the bowels of Slough or in Bangalore, no?"

With outsourcing to a different continent, you have time zone problems and may have language and management problems as well. You also have international regulations to deal with. There are costs there that businesses can understand exist, and businesses that jump to that solution without solving those problems usually end up the worse for it. It's often like updating a large technical system that's not broken. With several months of concerted effort by many people, you can likely build something that's better and cheaper than what exists now, but people don't want to take the costs of doing that right now, and there's always a risk that it fails with 80% of the time and resources wasted, so it's often put off indefinitely.

Moving from one part of the UK to a different, cheaper part of the UK does not introduce any of that, especially if they keep some of the same workers, just on a lower salary as they're free to move to some cheaper part of the country. Not that we can really prevent that from happening, although the theorized regulation would make it more likely.

Re: Stick

"Unfortunately idle government won't update the employment law so that employees doing the same job are paid the same wage."

No problem. Businesses will be happy to pay all of them the same wage, as long as that wage is what they're paying the lowest-paid employee. If you can't afford to live where you're living for that, then they'll suggest that you can work from wherever that person is, after all, when you're working remotely then they don't need you to be working from where you want to live. Employees have sometimes gotten higher wages to live near an office which costs them more, and if you mandate that they not do that, then the finance department will try everything they can to make sure that it's the people being paid more going down rather than the people being paid less going up. This won't end well for the employers, because some people will end up quitting to work at a place which pays better. It also won't end well for the employees, because they'll be the ones facing changes in their and their colleagues' wages that they won't think fair and anyone who doesn't quit will have to deal with the chaos from those who do.

Making wages fit your preferences isn't that simple, even if we assume that we can entirely ignore the rest of the business.

HP exec says quiet part out loud when it comes to locking in print customers

Re: If car manufacturers did this...

I don't have or want to have a Tesla, so I don't know the details here, but do they prevent you from using any charger? I thought their network of chargers was an option, not a requirement. The closest thing I've heard of was that they would block cars that had received repairs from using their chargers, but I'm not sure whether they do this or threatened to do this, and it is not quite the same thing even though I don't want them to do that either.

Re: Honestly....

If people keep buying the cheapest printer available, maybe they'll be able to make it up on volume. At least, that appears to be their plan. I do wonder how many HP printers are sitting around in closets where people just avoid printing because they don't want to end up wasting too much money on this one, but if they use it once, they'll have to start doing that again.

Boffins find asking ChatGPT to repeat key words can expose its training data

Re: A special case?

"Which makes you wonder how it knows which works are or aren't copyright, given that it doesn't actually know anything."

Not a difficult problem to solve. They could have a list of works to check against, or they could just run a prompt like "The work [title] was published in the year ..." and see what gets printed. Assume that anything with a relatively recent year is copyrighted, and you might get a couple false positives for something explicitly released to the public domain, but nobody will care because they're looking to avoid being caught in court. It doesn't have to have a knowledge of copyright if someone has explicitly given it rules to follow, and since we know this patch had to be added explicitly, we know they did make some set of rules.

Re: A special case?

"If you make a straightforward request for a copyright work, it will normally refuse, or proffer a summary.

The question is how those cases are internally different."

They're not. A while ago, it would eagerly quote copyrighted works as well. OpenAI realized that that would be a pretty convincing demonstration in court, so they patched it to reject queries that look like they're asking for copyrighted information. If you try weirder queries, it sometimes doesn't realize that you've done that and quotes again. They and their supporters have started to pretend that regurgitating copyrighted information is impossible or extremely unlikely, assuming that judges will be easy to confuse when the distinctions and reasons are explained by boring machine learning lectures.

Law secretly drafted by ChatGPT makes it onto the books

Re: biases and vested interests

"The big stumbling block is the nature of the neutralising text in the prompt box. Who can be trusted to formulate that correctly?"

And the block behind it for you to fall on is that the language models receiving the prompt don't read that neutralizing text with an understanding of its meaning and they don't follow it with a code of ethics. It changes some weights, maybe in a helpful way, but not in a testable way.

Re: No problem

This really depends what "AI target acquisition" ends up meaning. That could cover everything from "We use machine learning on the infrared maps we collected to remove things like electrical infrastructure so they don't get in the way when someone looks at the map to figure out where buildings are" to "we wrote a program that decides who to kill based on posts that they might have made online, then sends a drone to their house, but someone still has to click an approve button to drop bombs on it". The term is so ambiguous to be useless in a discussion. Whatever they may be doing, we'll have to discuss it in detail rather than making any judgement based on the terms "AI" and "target acquisition".

Bank boss hated IT, loved the beach, was clueless about ports and politeness

"So you think assigning responsibility lets call it management to people who are without a clue is smart ?"

Did I say that?

I did not say that any more than you asked for anarchy. I pointed out the parallel. You decided to ascribe beliefs to me that I do not hold, strawman arguments that basically nobody holds, and are now happily attacking them. This makes it useless for me to bother describing my own opinions, because you have made it clear that you already have a set to argue against, even when I didn't provide any, and do not need or want my own.

You did not, but there is a parallel between those who call for anarchy and the request you have made for no management, since both involve the removal and not the replacement of a large part of the existing structure. Follow that parallel and you'll see the prediction made about your reaction to achieving it, at least assuming I've properly understood.

Re: Tabs vs Spaces

"I use spaces now, but do so via editors which are set up to auto-translate my tab key hits into spaces."

I'm not sure that anyone does it differently. The argument is about the characters you use, not what key you have to push to insert them, and I somehow doubt that many people are pressing the space bar 24 times for lines with a lot of indentation.

I'm not much bothered about which character is used, though I only use spaces unless told to do otherwise, but neither do I care that much about various indentation-based style guides. I do tend to object to 8-space indentation, especially when it also goes along with an 80-character line limit, because it leads to worse code readability. Either you get an expression that's split across eight lines when it could fit onto one or two, or programmers avoid having to do that by contracting all their names so it fits again. There's something very depressing about seeing code that looks like t *x = rcProd(cs[i][j], tb->x, n, &z, cl). You know every other line will look like that and that you'll be spending a lot of time trying to remember what each of those symbols means, even though the compiler is perfectly happy with names that don't look like that.

Re: Every single time

"But you underestimate the director. In future he will just go to the patchbay and move some wires around."

That's why, if you're not going to try to teach them to do it properly so they can successfully do that, you always leave out a few steps so that they know that you did something but not how to repeat it. That's if you think they're smart enough to realize that they don't know which cable to move and where to move it. If you don't think they will get that, you must introduce some new step to make it clearer.

Before we move the cable, we first have to retrieve the switch address from the VLAN database under Juniper Cisco in the general server. I'll do that using this terminal session. Now this is my secret access key, so don't tell it to anyone.

> cat /dev/urandom | base64 | head -1

Re: speaking of usb

And it seems likely that the ones they're talking about are the PS/2 connectors. Possibly they're calling them circular to express a complaint about them. In my experience, the round aspect was quite annoying because, if you were connecting one of them by touch because it was on the back of the computer and you weren't, you had to rotate it a lot to get it to align properly. At least with USB, there are only two ways of positioning the plug that feel remotely correct. It was also quite annoying that the keyboard and mouse connectors felt basically the same but were really not.

Elon is the bakery owner swearing in the street about Yelp critics canceling him

I take it you're deriving that statement from this rather different one from the Wikipedia article:

"In 2010 The Guardian accused The Register of misunderstanding climate science and misrepresenting a paper from the journal Nature in a manner that deliberately minimized the climate impact of human emissions."

Not quite the same as what you said, is it? I've now read the Guardian article in question. I think they've got it right; the article from El Reg from thirteen years ago was misinterpreting a paper quite badly. That doesn't follow that they were told to do so by anyone in particular. It may be the author's biases or even simple laziness, and the author concerned doesn't work here anymore. It also doesn't mean that they've been taking instructions from advertisers "all the time", since you haven't proven that they did so even once.

I'm also not really sure what this has to do with Musk's actions, since he's not taking any instructions from advertisers, even as they stop paying him. He's attempting to give them instructions along the lines of "you don't understand, you have to keep paying me, I have a right to your money".

Re: Advertising Money

That's a pretty simplistic way to interpret the decision to comment. They can easily care about something while not caring about a different part. For example, they could care about the chaos being caused while not caring about the success of Twitter in the long term. That is basically my position; if Twitter fails or doesn't fail, I still won't use it so either is fine with me. However, I am getting some entertainment from watching the chaos from a distance, so I do care enough to keep looking at it.

Maybe comparing this to a different subject will make my point clearer. We've had articles discussing the switching of corporate-supported open source projects to proprietary projects, and I tend to comment on them because the license issue is important to me. Sometimes, that's because I use the projects in question. However, even when I don't and wasn't planning to, I still care about the general licensing thing even if the specific codebase in question isn't important to me. I don't think those views are inconsistent.