Posts by AVR 286 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2020
I don't lug around a phone everywhere myself, but a lot of people do - possibly to pay for their groceries, even. If you are going to try to make a one-size-fits-all solution, centring it on a phone makes sense. If you're going to insist on being an odd size then you're going to put some extra effort in.
If you tell the LLM to lie or dissemble it will lie or dissemble. That's what I get from the prompt included in the article. It's not a failure, it's the software doing what it has been instructed to do. It may even be a use case though actual people are pretty good at doing this in text too.
If you don't want your software to produce lies don't ask it to do that, explicitly or implicitly.
Yeah, almost everyone expected that China would fight back in a trade war, a few deluded souls excepted. They have before. And as this very article points out, they've used their control of some mines to try to exert pressure before also. I wasn't expecting they'd back out of the deal to sell the Panama port a Chinese firm runs, but I guess they want as many things to trade with on their side of negotiations to end the trade war as possible once it gets to that point.
It looks a lot like the whole plan was written by ChatGPT or a similar LLM; seriously. People have tested and got the same categorisation by top-level domains (.hm for Heard and McDonald islands, .io for the Indian Ocean territory, etc.) and a whole bunch of tariffs defined by trade deficit/total trade as in Trumps tariff list.
It's not the first document format to be abandoned and it won't be the last. I used to have a dozen odd pieces of software for decoding all the odd document formats I was asked to deal with. Tracking down (e.g.) the format some farmer had sent his accounts in as (an ancient graphics program) could be kind of fun.
Culling badgers encourages new badgers from outside to move in to the newly free burrows. This spreads TB nicely; it's counterproductive unless you're going to wipe out all the badgers in a large enough area that they won't move back in any time soon. Which is something that can't be done on the down-low. This has been known for many years, but isn't accepted by those committed to culling for whatever reason.
The memo threatens those who impose 'extortive' fines as well as taxes. Russia might have to knock a decillion or two off their fine on Alphabet/Google if they want full rapprochement with the US, but that may not be Putin's goal - a US which is against doing anything more to Russia might be sufficient.
EU fines on US tech companies may be more of an active issue, but there's probably something for Trump to get irritated with the EU about on any given day anyway (Greenland! Environmental regulations! No respect for Nazis! France in general!), there might not be any payoff in the EU pulling back there.
To be clear, Trump has claimed the power to impound money voted by Congress for some purpose.
That was a talking point from Russian media back at the start of the war - "The Ukrainians are talking about joining NATO, that can only mean they want to join in an attack on Russia, we have to attack first. See, the Ukrainians started it." Presumably Trump finds it useful to accept his pal Putin's version of events.
I don't think they want the US government to work. They want to stop it working and let their companies rule America unfettered, leaving just enough of the justice system to protect their gated communities and enough military to protect the borders and to suppress rebellion and secession. It probably will blow up in their faces, but not before causing huge amounts of damage to the people of the US, and to a lesser extent to the rest of the world.
I think the worst I've had was when my manager called me when I wasn't on call and I didn't answer immediately. I'd been driving back from my father's house and left the phone off until I stopped 15 minutes later, when I called her back.. This was an entirely inadequate excuse in her opinion. She wanted me to admit I was in the wrong and beg for her forgiveness and was incandescent when I refused to do so.
Tariffs put him in the spotlight - even if he withdraws them before they start pumping up inflation - and there is nothing more important to Trump than being in the spotlight and talked about. Though I suppose he's going to leave some tariffs on somewhere to look tough to his supporters I doubt it'll be on semiconductors, more likely it'll be somewhere with less visible inflation effects.
Lacks the explicit offer seen in that case though; accepting a job where permanent WFH isn't referenced in the offer would be a much less open and shut case. If an offer is made like that, yeah you could try to take them on. And if you were in many parts of the US they could then fire you anyway for minimal or no reason.
In principle is carrying a lot of weight there. 1% of the speed of light is a lot faster than any spacecraft has travelled, and you're unlikely to get there without a few rapid unscheduled disassemblies of the prototypes. Screw those up enough and you could kill the idea for good.
Besides the direct compliance costs there's the risk of trolls shutting down the site and exposing the operators to liability by putting up objectionable material and reporting it. There's possible ways around that, but they either kill engagement on the site or require more investment in tech &/or moderators than a single forum operator is likely to be able to handle. This act is going to kill a lot of UK blogs and forums, and I really doubt it's going to put a dent in the availability of child porn or terrorists info or drugs.
Suppose some politician started pushing this idea now with the intention of getting a law in place in a couple of years. If Big Tech put some effort into it I expect they could push out the date when it finally takes effect at least a decade, probably more. Then there'd be enforcement and the courts, and assorted appeals; I doubt it'd take less than 20 years to force ChatGPT 4 to become open source if it even succeeded.
At which point if LLMs are still big business their owners would 1) have replaced the old ChatGPT 4 with something else, 2) could have moved any affected money or operations to somewhere else in the world with more appealing laws, 3) IBG YBG. Sounds like a pyrrhic victory at best.
Restarting nuclear power plant construction is probably a good thing. Less so the gas turbines, admittedly. There's likely to be a lot of compute looking for a use when (hopefully) the AI stuff proves incapable of earning back its investment; fancy modelling might be cheaper than expected in a few years.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
