Posts by Citizen of Nowhere

Palo Alto Networks execs apologize for 'hostesses' dressed as lamps at Black Hat booth

Re: When will oxygen become offensive ?

>Margret Thatcher phrased it nicely “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”

Ah, yes, the milk snatcher. Who initiated the flogging off of public goods, services and properties on the cheap to the capitalists who funded (and still fund) the Conservative Party. Who extracted money while providing absolutely shit (literally in the case of the water companies) services. Who flogged council houses to people who couldn't afford them so her banking buddies could take both their money and eventually their houses and move them on to rentier landlords. A thief and parasite who knew loads about taking other people's money but sod all about socialism.

Warren Buffett phrased it nicely: "There's class warfare, all right. But it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning.”

US claims TikTok shipped personal data to China – very personal data

A few months ago, you could simply accept only functional cookies on ElReg. Now, you have the full panoply of invasive popup yes/no choices. What is even more interesting if we wish to understand the ElReg publisher's motivation, is that you can agree to have them store required cookies simply for information (such as your choice in this regard - as little as possible thank you). Apparently the publishers of ElReg these days are too fucking greedy to accept that I turned off as much of their tracking as I could, and asked them to remember that I turned it off. So every time I get the same twatty dialogues as if the morons are too stupid to accept the decisions I already made. They are not too really too stupid, of course, it is a choice on their part, to milk information.

Trump threatens to send Meta's Mark ‘Zuckerbucks’ to prison if reelected president

Re: despite it being widely known that Obama is the power behind the throne.

>IOW most of them are just paid to talk s**t.

Jellied Eel talks shite for free. He tried to sign up as a shill but was considered too dumb. Fancy failing at both trollery and cogent thought.

Palantir's CEO calls 'woke' a 'central risk to Palantir, America and the world'

Re: Big steaming pile of Karp

Yep, 700,000 civilians was considered an acceptable level of collateral damage.

Re: Big steaming pile of Karp

An Israeli intelligence official who spoke to the Guardian newspaper admitted that they had identified 37,000 militant "targets" using AI software, that they were willing to accept civilian casualties of 15 to 20 civilians for each of their AI-identified targets and that they preferred the cheapest method which was to take down tan entire building with dumb munitions where it was just suspected that there might be some of their targets, regardless of who or how many civilians were killed. The people who Palantir sells its systems to would rather keep their genocide cost effective than end total and indiscriminate war.

Re: Anything "left wing" is a threat to Palantir

>the traditional and unique peaceful transfer of power that has been the hallmark of the US for over 200 years

You really think the peaceful transfer of power is unique to the US? The whole American exceptionalism bit which underlies this ridiculous claim is probably why the US has been enabling violent transfers of power all over the world almost since its inception.

Uni staff fall back on Excel to work around mis-coded transactions in Oracle system

Re: Universities

>Universities never listen to their own experts

The problem is very few entities of any kind now listen to their own experts (presuming they have not already eliminated all their experts). Banks, universities, local authorities, infrastructure companies. None of them listen to anything except the siren call of maximum profit extraction. The society we have built is a dead end of meaningless accumulation; unfortunately, it is a dead end which is likely to end our existence as species.

European Court of Human Rights declares backdoored encryption is illegal

Re: Well good thing the UK had Brexit

Or the friendly welcome.

Re: Well good thing the UK had Brexit

As the UK was 19th out of 28 in the EU+UK for the number of asylum applications received per capita in 2022 the whole "big draw" thing is of course... a load of shite. The UK is not a particularly popular place for asylum seekers to seek asylum.

'Scandal-plagued' data broker tracked visits to '600 Planned Parenthood locations'

Re: OK, enough of the BS, already

Got to assume your post is being downvoted because Carlin absolutely skewers the horrible, pathetic little fuckwits

Will AI take our jobs? That's what everyone is talking about at Davos right now

> the staff are often under-trained or don't have the authority to actually do anything to resolve problems

I worked in a bank call centre briefly in the 1990s. We were handling what was basically a Xmas savings account product. The customers were trying to get their money out in time for Xmas and the bank seemed to be doing its utmost to thwart that. Instead of repeating the scripted responses and chucking the case on the already huge pile of issues to resolve, I actually resolved the issues (it wasn't that hard, even though we were not really set up to do it). Obvious why my period of employment there was brief ;-)

Go ahead, let the unknowable security risks of Windows Copilot onto your PC fleet

Re: That's one way of looking at it

>but is definitely presented in a very biased way

It's an opinion column and says so right at the start.

AI girlfriend encouraged man to attempt crossbow assassination of Queen

>> Difference in scale, not concept.

> No.

I have an NFT of a bridge I think you might be interested in purchasing.

Decades-old Home Office asylum system misses EOL deadline, no new timetable in place

Working at pace

A Home Office official told The Reg the department was still "working at pace to decommission CID"

Shame that pace is a snail's pace...

Arm wrestles assembly language guru's domains away citing trademark issues

Re: How does this even work?

take-a-risc-and-disarm

Zoom CEO reportedly tells staff: Workers can't build trust or collaborate... on Zoom

Re: Ignorance is bliss

>These ignorance and stupidity off this pussy and shines the comments is just shocking.

Ahem...

Pope goes fire and brimstone on the dangers of AI

***No AI was used in the production of this article***

Prove it.

How to spot OpenAI's crawler bot and stop it slurping sites for training data

Re: Resistence is useless

"We are Big Tech. Empty your robots.txt files and surrender your sites. We will add your biographical and intellectual distinctiveness to our own. Your content will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."

We need to be first on the Moon, uh, again, says NASA

Re: So reading between the lines ...

Can't be doing with any of that Modern Music...

Ultra-rare Apple sneakers from the 1990s on sale for $50,000

Re: Nice kicks

"You're wearing them wrong!" ;-)

Liberté, Égalité, Spyware: France okays cops snooping on phones

Re: Yes give the police more power....

There isn't a police shooting anywhere in the world, no matter how blatantly unnecessary, where some prig doesn't show up pontificating that it was entirely justified.

Threads versus Twitter: Shouldn't we be happy the wheels are falling off antisocial social media?

Re: Internet Interoperability Without Central Censorship

>Not sure what they did to deserve that

It was probably the fatuous condescension. As soon as someone starts calling others sheep ...

Brits negotiating draft deal to rejoin EU's $100B blockbuster science programme

I've only ever heard that nonsense peddled by remainers as propaganda to ridicule the process

Two words; no, sorry, three words: Michael f***ing Gove Why tell easily falsifiable lies? Because if you repeat the crap often enough people will stop calling it out for the crap it is?

They must do whatever they can to make Brexit fail, for their own eventual survival.

Honestly, nobody cares that much what the UK ends up doing. The needy, puerile narcissism which seems to underlie the UK's political culture always places the UK front and centre in every setting. Actually, you are a secondary issue at best. If the UK wants to joins Horizon, why would that be a problem. If not, it can piss off and shut up, as it chooses.

Ripoff Vuitton handbag smaller than a grain of salt fetches $63,750 at auction

I don't have to assume that you only believe in the rule of law when it favours your own views. You openly state as much.

Open the pod bay doors, GPT, and see if you're smart enough for the real world

Re: We should, within our limitations as humans, act responsibly

amanfromMars's reply to your post should prove interesting :-)

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

Hollow Lexicon

So not only are more senior staff running rings around young employees with their hollow lexicon, but they aren't helping them understand either – 69 percent of younger workers say they had to figure this stuff out on their own.

The only thing anyone need understand is that it's a load of middle and upper management bollocks designed to camouflage their essential pointlessness. And most of the older, productive people got there on their own and probably figure the younger ones will also figure it out for themselves before too long.

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

Re: if it ain't broke, don't "fix" it

Try googling "non sequitur" -- you can do it from the office, or remotely, as you prefer.

NASA experts looked through 800 UFO sightings and found essentially nothing

Re: Ogopogo != Nessy

Good grief, there is no lake at Loch Ness!

;-)

EU passes world's first regulatory framework for cryptocurrency

Is this really some kind of world-first by the EU? I was under the impression that Japan, for example, already regulated cyptocurrencies, including requiring registration of exchanges with their financial services authorities, compliance with AML regulations, the identification of senders and beneficiaries, etc. Indeed, I seem to remember it being noted here in an article on the FTX debacle, that in Japan the regulations on cryptocurrencies meant that there was a great deal more protection than was the case elsewhere.

EU monopoly cops probe complaints about Microsoft Azure

>EU antitrust wagons are circling Microsoft's Azure ...

That's one seriously messed up metaphor. I seem to remember cowboys circling their wagons to defend themselves in the westerns of my youth. I don't remember any attack circling, not with wagons certainly ;-)

Dyson moans about state of UK science and tech, forgets to suck up his own mess

Re: With two-faced "friends" like Dyson, Britain doesn't need enemies

> How is this interfering in the democratic process any more than countless other lobbying groups and individuals?

You really cannot see the difference when the lobbying is being done by the hereditary head of state in their private interest? I suppose if you think it's OK for the head of state to secretly get themselves privileges and exemptions not available to the rest of the population, you're in the right country.

Re: With two-faced "friends" like Dyson, Britain doesn't need enemies

Go back to drooling in front of GBNews. It operates at your level.

Re: With two-faced "friends" like Dyson, Britain doesn't need enemies

>Such as?

Here's one of many.

Alien rock causes cosmic disturbance in New Jersey home

Re: It Came out of the Sky

Insane, laddie ;-)

Dell reneges on remote work promise, tells staff to wear pants at least 3 days a week

>I get tired of listening to folk claim they are more efficient when WFH when everybody else's experience of the home workers shows otherwise.

Wild generalisation. Actually, studies on the productivity of working from home versus working in an office are actually very mixed and point to a number of other variables as well (the type of office environment to mention but one).

>this is their own argument remember

So, you know one person making a poor argument and from it build an entire edifice of self-justification. Perhaps not surprising, given your opening remark.

>Those people who've already returned to the office won't lose any sleep over you.

I suspect that the feeling would likely be mutual.

Cisco: Don't use 'blind spot' – and do use 'feed two birds with one scone'

>With the far left pushing for what is effectively infanticide

Who makes up this shite?

How DARPA wants to rethink the fundamentals of AI to include trust

>trained on vast amounts of information in order to let it make it's own conclusions

LLMs don't really reach conclusions in the sense we talk about them in human thinking. The data is used to train it to produce a stream of text which is likely to be an appropriate (for varying values of appropriate) response to a prompt fed to it.

Guy rejects top photo prize after revealing snap was actually made using AI

Re: Thumbnails...

>The judges

The judge. The open competition, of which Eldagsen won the creative category, is judged by a single judge. Only the professional competition is deemed worthy of an actual multi-member jury.

>And yet this photo in the same category was considered OK and an unmanipulated single photograph?

In a word, no. It was considered OK.

"Can I submit manipulated images? Images can be manipulated, however the manipulation must be clearly outlined within the image description."

https://www.worldphoto.org/help

>I should imagine that quite a few painters with paint were somewhat disgruntled when all this painting with light malarkey got started. What comes around goes around

And in the end, painting didn't disappear, even if there is many a modern "painter" who I desperately wish would disappear ;-) Photography will survive generative AI. I have nothing against creating images with generative AI, but it is not photography. It is more akin to collage. Nobody claims painting and photography are the same activity. Why would someone generating images with AI want to claim that what they were doing is photography? Eldagsen, the artist involved in the current fracas, does not. Just as there is an obvious distinction between applying pigment to a canvas and capturing light on a light-sensitive medium, there is a fairly obvious difference between the latter and building an image using iterative passes of generative AI. In the end, I suspect that we will end up with competitions which accept any image regardless of method of production (there are already fine art competitions where paintings and photographs compete directly for the same rewards), competitions which are for photography only and others which are for AI-generated images only.

UK consortium bid for NHS data platform falls at first hurdle

Re: "Unless the conservatives finish hollowing out and selling off the NHS by January 2025"

What was that slogan popular on the outside left back in the day? "Vote Labour with no illusions." Whatever one's differences are with the current Labour leadership, the Labour Party is infinitely preferable to have in government to the current clowns. Even the least perspicacious occupants of the Labour benches look like towering intellectual giants when you survey what's on the other side of the dispatch box.

Utah outlaws kids' social media addiction, sets digital curfew

> rather than foisting that responsibility onto lawmakers

Fairly sure that nothing needed to be "foisted" on those eagerly grasping at power over others.

No reliable way to detect AI-generated text, boffins sigh

Re: Just check the commas

>On a more serious note, my recollection (in the UK) is that grammar was virtually excised from school English syllabuses in the mid-70s

Yep. Victim here. It was phased out at my (Scottish) high school just as I got there around '76. We had barely started on sentence parsing and then bam ... nothing. To favour self-expression apparently. As if having a poorer grasp of their own language ever helped anyone express themselves better in it. Being a voracious reader helped me mitigate the damage somewhat at a personal level, but it was clear from the outset that it was a deeply stupid direction to take. It also made it significantly harder to learn foreign languages later on.

Requiem for Google Reader, dead for a decade but not forgotten

Re: Article written by an idiot

Perhaps they meant "stubbornly technical" ;-)

Welcome to Muskville: Where the workers never leave

Re: Not entirely fair to lambast industrial new towns.

>the new towns were as utopian as you could get for the working classes

Patronising bullshit then; patronising bullshit now. Like I said, a question of control. Everything you said is about controlling people who are considered unable to run their own lives. And if you think industrial conditions in the early factories were due to the "novelty" of the system, you probably think the moon's made of green cheese as well.

Complete control of their employees has been the wet dream of a certain kind of "industrialist" since the 19th century. No doubt as well as living in company-owned towns, Musk's employees will end up being paid in "Twitcoin" which can only be spent in Boring Stores or converted to real money with a 50% charge. That way he can build up a stock of serfs obliged to work for him when he sets up his Muskovy on Mars. Guy's a horrible POS.

US officials probe Tesla's incredible detaching steering wheel

Re: Show me on this doll where Elon hurt you..

>I expected a tech community to at least have a minimum degree of admiration for a guy who founded a string of companies that are advancing civilisation onto the next phase through the use of technology.

I'm sure we would, and probably more than a minimum. Care to name one for us?

As a professional who has been in IT for three decades, I can do without ridiculous tech-bro worshipping nonsense, thanks.

WFH? Google Cloud's offices like a 'ghost town' before new policy

Re: This Made Me Laugh

>Left as always proves that they are driven by pure hatred

Snowflakey hyperbole much?

Ex-Tweep mocked by Musk for asking if he'd actually been fired

According to The Guardian's report on the matter, he chose to take it as wages to maximise the tax he would pay compared with taking it as a lump sum payment. Seems he was never interested in maximising his own gains at all costs.

Twitter rewards remaining loyal staff by decimating them

Re: What country do these people think they live in?

"WARN offers protection to workers, their families and communities by requiring employers to provide notice 60 days in advance of covered plant closings and covered mass layoffs.

https://www.doleta.gov/programs/factsht/WARN_Fact_sheet_updated_03.06.2019.pdf

The document, which was linked to in an earlier ElReg article on the suit, doesn't seem to leave much of what you claim above standing.