Posts by tatatata 125 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jan 2019
I hate to agree.
Yes, there are niche-market applications, like high-end sound or video cards. Yes, there might be someone that sees a use for specific interfaces, but that is not mass market.
On a side note: MACs have always served the artistics that needed calibrated video or specific audio. That may become less an argument to buy Apple hardware now.
Where I work, we also have a AI chatbot. It solves about 25% of our chats. This is mainly due to stupid questions that can easily be answered before connecting to a real human. In that sense, it is more triage than answering.
Our experiences with the Service Now helpdesk have been such that we tend to give up after hearing that they don't know either, or that they cannot help with that particular problem. If that is the nature of your helpdesk, you might be able to get the 90% score. However, solving a ticket is not the same as solving the customer's problem.
Ah great. Now I have root on my F35. And what's next? Let's see. ps -ef ? dir/w? or 2nk3kewf 990? And what happens then? What about the fail-safes in the different subsystems? The simplistic view of a rooted phone is totally inadequate for a fighter.
Anyway, even without rooting the plane, we'll still be able to shoot-down a $250 drone with a 10 million dollar rocket.
I have a 25 year old car, luxurious and quite advanced for that time. When I had some misfortune with the hydraulic suspension, I temporarily got a Toyota Yaris, brand new, with lots of required safety features.
- You can't start the car before you've buckled the seatbelt
- If there are roadworks, the lane keeper steers you to the old lanes, not the temporary layout
- It recognises speed signs on the road parallel to the motorway, slowing you down do 50 km/hr, beeping a lot
- If someone merges in front of you. the car automatically slows down, beeping again
- There was a cacophony of beeps for reasons that I never understood
Some of the "features" could be switched off, but when you start the car, they are turned on again.
I would say every modern car looks like a Microsoft car.
If I would distribute images (not real, self created) of naked children, I would get arrested and condemned for pedophilia.
If I have a company that does this, me and my employees would face the same charges,
Now, if I had a large company and I would do the same with something called AI, suddenly, I won't be arrested, but I would just get a severe warning not to do it again.
"The Cabinet Office awarded the contract months after Capita suffered a massive data breach in which sensitive details including bank account information, addresses, and passport photos stolen from the IT outsourcing giant were reportedly put up for sale."
Would Capita learn from this experience? Apparently yes:
"More worryingly, personal details were unavailable, including pensions statements and beneficiaries information."
From Microsoft's website:
"Contoso Corporation is a fictional but representative global manufacturing conglomerate"
"Every project the company runs with Microsoft products and partners finishes on time, within budget, and delivers amazing return on investment."
Can someone explain to me how that can be representative?
[...] due to the blessing and curse of Windows's obsession with backward compatibility.
All those who jumped on the Silverlight bandwagon will question this statement. Many scanners and other devices have prematurely been thrown away because the lack of backwards compatibility. And of course, the stance on backward compatibility with hardware has led to enormous landfill of perfectly good PCs and laptops.
Although you might debate whether the Internet set-up was bad and it needed some re-architecturing anyway, the reasons for firing were also:
Neither of us were allowed to visit the datacenter without approval from the very top, let alone ripping out servers without raising a change.
If you do this in my organization, you're fired as soon as they find out. Even if you don't disrupt anything. Even if it is just once. And if people shows up with this on his CV, they won't get an interview.
Ok. So now you Brits have rules that require mainstream porn sites to create large databases of personal information to make sure that a lot of people will be embarrassed when those sites have data leaks. All that to prevent children from accidentally stumbling across harmful material.About 93% of all porn sites seems to leak personal information to Google, Facebook and the likes. So users of mainstream porn are already open to that embarrassment with there Google bulb or Facebook suggestions.
But what about sites that actually have content with child abuse? They're illegal anyway, so why would they bother to conform to this act? Perhaps to create an opportunity for blackmail, but that's it. The same goes for other sites with illegal content.
But the luckily, we have VPNs. A child that is using a VPN to access porn is not likely to stumble on porn by accident. In that, the stated purpose of the act is not undermined. So what's the problem? Anyway, at some time in the future, Great Britain will introduce a law for key escrow, so VPNs will then no longer be a problem.
"Until now, kids could easily stumble across porn and other online content that’s harmful to them without even looking for it."
Well, that has now been remediated. The installation and use of a VPN will ensure that the children will only see the porn when they are looking for it. So, we might be complaining, but in the end, the rules do what they ought t do.
Unless the children stumble across some non-mainstream porn site, ofcourse.
Well, it is clear that is was quite a few years back. To put things in perspective, it is around the time that only half of the population had Internet, not every schoolboy with a phone. Amazon was then still a technical company, as I understood it.
If you take down Amazon now, you won't get a second chance anymore.
Yes. AI is the new all encompassing rationale to do everything. At the moment, I do not see that AI will actually reduce the need for real people. We've had an article showing that programming with AI makes it slower. We've seen AI invent court-cases etc.
But Amazon is clearly a believer and goes all-in. We'll see in a couple of years. Then Amazon will be known as the Big Visionary Company, who had made the right choice at the right moment, or as the stupid company that lost it all betting on a hype.
"The study involved 16 experienced developers who work on large, open source projects. "
That is hardly representative for the developer community. The number of 16 is very low. And most developers have low- to mid-level experience. They work on small parts of projects, in general fulfilling their scrum-ticket only. They do that as their job, 9-5 and do not have the passion of people working on open source projects. I would even suggest, that those kind of developers can be replaced by AI, eventually (but not yet).
Where AI programming helps me is when I need to code in a language that I do not master sufficiently. I won't use AI for bash or Perl, but I used it for javascript, and specifically because I'm not an experienced programmer in that language.
I once had to review the security of a physical security system made by a reputable firm in that domain.
In the morning, we had presentations on how safe the badges were, how everything was encrypted, and how people could see their own entry times etcetera.
Lunch, and then demo.
The salesperson logged in and showed his access times. The URL was https://some.name/something?p=1234321. Asked what that number was; it was his personnel number. Asked the personnel number of the other salesperson and filled that in and had instantly access to the other's access times without new login. Scared white faces from sales persons. 10 seconds to break the system, without f12.
And that was made by a reputable firm, not a car salesman. Granted: end of the previous century, but still.
"This practice is contrary to Dalhousie University's Scholarly Misconduct Policy"
Congratulations to Dalhousie University who, to my knowledge, is the first to include anti LLM-spoofing rules in their Scholarly Misconduct Policy.
But I find it strange that a policy should explicitly forbid smoking-out lazy scholars who don't do their work.
Always, when the transition to the Linux desktop is suggested, I see reactions that explain why it won't be done, because a certain application does not work under Linux. Here it is Fusion 3D. Often it is photoshop. And always, there is an alternative under Linux, but the alternative is not as well developed as the WIndows software.
Yes, there are still reasons to use Windows. But most of us do not use Fusion 3D. And, for anyone shooting in JPEG, GIMP is quite sufficient. If I look at my day-to-day work, the only reason that I use Windows is, that the organisation that I work for has sold their soul to Microsoft.
"I don't know what advantages I'm getting over the Xorg server I had been using for years"
That is my main issue with Wayland as well. However, it did produce keyboard input repetitions and lagging cursor. Also, I found it difficult to create screencaptures. In short: it solves no problems, but introduces new problems.
I'm afraid that this is an old-fashioned view of what programmers do. When I look at programmers, their work seems to be to search for the library/module/.. that does most of what they need and write some glue-code between the calls. Only Architects are allowed to think about data structures. And the main goal is the scrum-ticket. For programmers of that type, AI will be of assistance, but I would not trust them to think of the "next big thing".
If you spend "30 percent of cognitive load to syntax,”, you're a beginning programmer in that language. I'm not a professional programmer for a long time anymore, but I do not spend 30% of my time on syntax in my private projects, except for the time that I try to learn something new.
I have recently attended a presentation about Django. It should have been a 45 minute introduction, which was what I was looking for.
Instead of actually giving the introduction, over 30 minutes of the presentation was dedicated to the organisation of the project and explaining how diverse and inclusive that organisation was.
There is a time and place for everything. If a person in a project like an X11 server is judged (positively or negatively) on the basis of anything else than the code the is produced, or the quality of the technical feedback or other contributions, that is wrong.
We've seen this behaviour already for a long time with cookies. The law makers thought, that it was a good idea that all users would be permanently annoyed by pop-ups asking you to confirm that you want cookies.
So how do we implement that?
For every web page that you visit, we'll be using cookies. We no longer do simple static web pages, because then we would not be able to use cookies. And we produce a choice: accept or determine which cookies you want: necessary cookies, functional cookies, commercial cookies, third party cookies, legitimate interest cookies, optional cookies. Why is there no "accept under duress" button?
Are any cookies necessary? No, the web developer could use alternatives, from local storage to HTML form hidden variables.
What are functional cookies? We must assume that all cookies have a function, even if it is only to share information. Do you also have dysfunctional cookies?
WTF are Legitimate Interest cookies?
Et cetera.
And now certain apps will also request your permission to use cookies. Because the current model of asking all sorts of permissions (why does Temu need to read my phone directory?) was not already annoying enough.
Sun Microsystems' CEO Scott McNealy famously quipped to reporters in 1999: "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it."
Most people got over it. They sold their soul to Apple, Microsoft, Google and the likes. No, I don't care is an add-slinger knows my location, as long as I get the right directions from Google Maps. Yes, I could by a paper map, but why bother?
"The EU team now have to spend all their time reviewing and rejecting the crap and trying to teach the Indians, who are constantly leaving once they have drained enough knowledge from the EU team."
And here lies the problem.
The only reason that you spend your time reviewing and rejecting crap and try to teach Indians is that you have some form of feeling of responsibility. That is misplaced and it is actively abused by the C-suite.
Some time ago, I was in a project of outsourcing my job to India. I made very sure that the specs and tests were complete and correct. I did not examine their code. First 10 versions, I tried to install with their instructions, and failed. Next versions failed different tests. I just reported back what went wrong, and made sure that management knew that the outsourcing company was to blame for not following the specs. Made my life a lot easier.
Well, I wrote a simple C-program to solve all possible Sudokus. Many of that kind of programs exist, but I did it myself! And even then, on a train, I sometimes solve Sudokus by hand.
People go out to play games in teams. They set-up complete competitions, only to start over again next year.
All a complete waste of time.
I need to replace a number of desktops, because the company I work for has sold its soul to Microsoft, and the old ones are just too old. And I need to get to get our users enthusiastic enough to let me replace their trusty old Windows 10 desktop. The only story I can tell at the moment is the fact that our policy requires them to have a fully supported version running.
The question whether it is AI or real is a bit more difficult on LinkedIn. Some points to consider.
Recruiters and HR require a specific language and a specific set of incantations. Divert from that and you might not get invited for your next job. Do not write "use", but "utilize" , things like that.
"Thought leaders" are in general people with little or no actual skills. They subsists by copying each others "inspirational" quotes. It is therefore easy to confuse them with AI.
I once had, as a work phone, a recycled number from some for of internal legal desk of the police. People calling me in the night blurting out specific details about police actions before I could react. It takes a few of those calls before you understand what is going on. Called the police, changed number.
There are two good examples for using AI that I can think of.
Generating pictures to lighten-up your presentation. Not for content, just some illustrations.
Generating elevator music. When you use real songs in shops or pubs, you need to pay quite a hefty fee to play music. When you use AI generated mind numbing background music, no licenses are required.
Let's start coding:
While (some condition) {
<single keypress tab>do something
}
or
While (some condition) {
<pres a space><pres a space><pres a space><pres a space>do something
}
or even worse:
While (some condition) {
<pres a space><pres a space><pres a space><pres a space><press one space too many><backspace>do something
}
So for me, it is tabs.
Once again, an Agile apologist reacts to an observation about the bad side of agile. And guess what: it is not Agile's fault. Here the observation is how Agile kills innovation. Of course it does. Every engineering methodology kills, or at least maims innovation.Waterfall did, extreme programming did, and Agile too. Innovation IS locked in the frozen meat store of Agile. No engineering method is a substitute for thinking.
Ofcourse, there is the car-analogy, because everybody accepts that programming is the same as making or driving cars. "Devops can be a car crash, but car crashes are rarely the fault of the car."
The problem is "None of that will help if you’re still trying to fix old problems in the old ways. That’s been done." And Agile, dating from 2001 has become an old way of doing things.
And yes, if people understand and can work on a full stack, like security engineers that have been exempt from scrum and agile, that would help. It would make large projects harder though.
