Posts by Moldskred 46 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Nov 2019
"A Man and his Wife had the good fortune to possess a Goose which laid a Golden Egg every day. Lucky though they were, they soon began to think they were not getting rich fast enough, and, imagining the bird must be made of gold inside, they decided to kill it in order to secure the whole store of precious metal at once."
"The AI figures out how to solve the problem and meet the requirements."
That's not how LLMs work. Fundamentally they do not analyze the problem nor check the generated code against the requirements. Rather, given an input text they generate code that a statistically plausible expression of that input text. "Plausible" here does not mean "likely to be correct," but rather "likely to _appear_ correct."
LLMs _always_ hallucinate. Occasionally, those hallucinations happen to match reality.
If you want to hide your traffic, you should be very careful about which VPN provider you trust.
If you just want to get around geoblocking so you can watch the same porn you were watching before without a VPN, on the other hand, eh, it doesn't really matter. Just pick a VPN provider that supports open standards and doesn't require you to install their own software client on your machine. (Ideally, you'll still want to set it up so that only traffic to the sites you want to circumvent geoblocking for goes through the VPN, but eh, whether you trust a ISP or a VPN provider with your traffic meta-data doesn't _really_ make much of a difference in practice.)
"Generative AI has the potential to disrupt every single industry out there."
Ah, yes. Disrupt. That favourite word of the Technorati. Let's check in with Merriam-Webster, shall we?
'DISRUPT as in to disturb, to undo the proper order or arrangement of; disturb, confuse, shuffle, disorganize, upset, disarrange, scramble, disarray, dislocate, derange, disorder, muddle, mix (up), jumble, muss, tumble, discompose, hash, snarl, disjoint, perturb, unsettle...'
"[...] Delta will have to explain to the public, its shareholders, and ultimately a jury why CrowdStrike took responsibility for its actions – swiftly, transparently, and constructively – while Delta did not."
Oh, oh, let me try! Ahem. "Dear public, Delta shareholders and members of the Jury. The reason why Delta did not 'take responsibility' for its actions is because it was not Delta's actions that caused the disaster. Delta _have not performed_ any actions that they need to take responsibility for. It was CrowdStrike's actions, and CrowdStrike's actions alone, which caused the damages to my client, and so it is CrowdStrike, and CrowdStrike alone, which must take responsibility for this disaster."
See? Easy!
"The GitHub Copilot has won 77,000 users in the two years since its debut, and CEO Satya Nadella noted the revenue it generates tops all of GitHub earnings at the time Microsoft acquired the code locker in 2018."
I suspect the _expenses_ of GitHub Copilot _also_ tops all of GitHub's expenses at the time of acquiry, too. But I can see why she didn't want to focus on that side of the coin during an investors' call.
"Are these people so lacking in the history of SF film[1] that they think Stargate is a good representative of what an AI supercomputer can do?"
I think there's a good case to be made that many of the major players in the surprisingy cult-like world behind much of the current AI craze, are people who consume a lot of science fiction but rarely digest it.
Sigh. The McDonald's coffee case was not the frivolous mockery of the court system it is usually portrayed at.
No, the woman did not 'sue McDonald's for millions'. She sued for about $20,000 to cover medical expenses and related loss of income. The amount sought increased once an actual law suit got under way, but it was never anywhere near 'millions'. Further, the woman was a passenger in the car and the car was stopped when she spilled the coffee. And she did not "burn her thigh" -- she got third degrees burns over six percent of her body and lesser burns over sixteen percent, and had to undergo skin grafts and was partially disabled for two years.
Further, McDonald's served their coffee at a significantly higher temperature than other fast-food restaurants, _and_ there was a history of customers being scalded by their coffee which McDonald's knew about -- they had settled claims for many such cases before -- but not taken any measures to prevent.
It's true that the jury awarded her $2.7 million in punitive damages (as well of $200,00 in compensatory damages) but this was reduced by the judge to to $480,000. The verdict was further appealed by McDonald's and the parties then settled for an undisclosed amount.
So, in short, she did not _seek_ millions, she was not _awarded_ millions, and no, she was not driving a car when it happened.
Just like in Elite - anything powerful enough to use for mining makes a hell of an expedient weapons system.
Famously summarised as The Kzinti Lesson by Larry Niven.
That would depend on how logs are kept and what's covered by the system restore or not.
(While I'm not _surprised_ that it doesn't, considering how muddled IT security is at all levels of the industry, there's really no excuse for computer systems like these to not have some kind of tamper-resistant logging in place.)
"For over an hour, from the computer sitting at his desk at CIA, Schulte was in that system secretly restoring his super access, giving himself back all the control he had before it was taken away. Restoring his access to the backups that stored copies of the entire system. [...] After stealing the backup, Schulte tried to cover his tracks. During that hour on April 20, when he took the system back in time, Schulte started carefully deleting every log file that kept track of what he had done while he was in the system. After destroying that evidence, he unwound the reversion. Schulte restored the system to how it had been just before he hacked in, [...]"
So that's gaining access through an undetected backdoor, running a system restore, accessing and copying the material, deleting or editing all relevant log files and finally run a second system restore? All that in little over an hour? That seems a bit tight, time-wise.
Also, if he restored the system to the original state, surely that'd reintroduce whatever backdoor he'd used to gain access so that it could be found?
Wouldn't it be more effective to attack this issue at the back-end where the information is being sold and made use of? Wouldn't calling for regulation and transparency on the _sale and purchase_ be a better starting point than trying to control and regulate what data companies collect? If Facebook, Google and other actors had to divulge what personal information the sold to whom and for what purpose I think we would start to see companies be a lot less interested in participating in this marketplace.
> "Using the new memory in phones and PCs could allow them to be low-cost dumb terminals with minimal local energy consumption,"
How does that in any way follow? For neither phones nor PCs is memory the most significant power sink, so how is reducing the power consumption of just memory going to be a game changer?
This is stupid. Open source projects tend to have two different types of people who work on them -- the people who _run_ the project and who invest a significant amount of time and work to further the project vision and people who are _users_ of the project and submit the occasional bug fix or quality of life improvement. Yes, most of the work is going to be done by the former group and yes, the latter group is probably going to be the larger of the two. That's not an interesting observation and it doesn't say anything useful about project management or developer productivity.
"The Company believes that the report contains numerous errors, unsubstantiated statements, and misleading conclusions and interpretations regarding the business of and events relating to the Company."
So I take it they haven't actually _found_ any? Seriously, as rebuttals go that one is as soft and non-committal as they come. They might as well have said "yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, their opinion, man."
Five years ago, convenience. Sonos was a sound system for people who didn't really care about sound systems in the same way that a Mac is a computer for people who don't really care about computers.
Sonos was expensive, but the design and build quality was good. The sound quality isn't anything remarkable, but Sonos isn't really a hi-fi system, but the software and networking parts of the system was, certainly compared to what else was available at the time, rock solid. Everything just worked. You bought a Sonos speaker, took it home, plugged it in, did a ten second set-up and that was it.
Of course, five years ago you could buy Sonos in the belief that you were buying a system that you could expand piece-meal over the next ten, fifteen years, which made the price-point easier to swallow. These days, that's no longer the case.
The assumption behind the idea of no-code development as a general purpose tool is that software development is primarily _about_ the low-level technical details. That's as mistaken as believing that writing a novel is primarily about typing and punctuation. Surprisingly, getting a voice recorder and a speech recognition package is probably not going to turn you into a best-selling novelist.
"Despite being warned not to look at nor gather information on people not in their team or related to their job, however, the four individuals continued to harvest information about their targets, Google claimed."
I thought harvesting information about people who don't want to be spied on was part of Google's culture and mission statement?
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