* Posts by shortfatbaldhairyman

16 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Mar 2020

Please stop leaking your own personal data online, Indonesia's COVID-19 taskforce tells citizens

shortfatbaldhairyman
Facepalm

Why make it that easy?

I have never understood why things are made super easy. Most people do not realise the risks and we cannot expect them to. Jewellery will be secured, a piece of paper? Yes, even now quite a few do not realise what that means.

So, Either make it not so easy (no QR code and all), Or preemptive actions and make people aware of the risks.

And, from exhausted experience, most do not realise until it is too late.

Free Software Foundation urged to free itself of Richard Stallman by hundreds of developers and techies

shortfatbaldhairyman
Unhappy

With a name like mine ....

obviously, what else can I say?

The problem is if you decide that you need to look at every statement and action and behaviour, practically nobody is left.

How dare anybody be allowed to do any good if they have done bad.

By that logic, maybe we should destroy all Caravaggios (murder and more I believe), destroy all Louis Ferdinand Celine (Fascist) and many many more such.

But we allow so many others, vile, in public life. Not that I expect anything better.

What happens when your massive text-generating neural net starts spitting out people's phone numbers? If you're OpenAI, you create a filter

shortfatbaldhairyman
FAIL

Output prediction not possible

It is not easy to say what will be predicted by these beasts. It will be a game of whack a mole.

The simpler problems might be ironed out. But there can (and will) be predictions which we cannot even begin to imagine (and do not want to imagine).

City of London Police warn against using ‘open science’ site Sci-Hub

shortfatbaldhairyman

Re: "data and research ... is ... more strategically valuable ... than copyright-busting"

Cannot agree more! Wish I could up vote it a million times.

Universities seem to have lost their bearings, how many have compromised by agreements with less than free governments? Apart from the problems of industry influenced research.

Maybe they never had any bearings, maybe we were being naive.

Space station dumps 2.9-ton battery pack to burn up in Earth's atmosphere after hardware upgrade

shortfatbaldhairyman

Pollution?

What chances that the battery module contains plastic and dioxin (or its relative) gets released into the upper atmosphere? Any analysis of that?

Microsoft's GitHub under fire after disappearing proof-of-concept exploit for critical Microsoft Exchange vuln

shortfatbaldhairyman

Re: What. A. Shock.

Yup. Same here. Deleted my github account the day I read about it.

Now MS has a reputation amongst the younger generation as a "benevolent" and "kindly" organisation. Their words, not mine. They know nothing about the 90s. Nephews and nieces. Just kill me now.

You wouldn’t know my new database, she goes to another school: Oracle boasts of earthshattering tech the outside world cannot see

shortfatbaldhairyman
IT Angle

I do not WANT to know your new database

In fact I want to know NOTHING about you.

And why is an IT website writing about sales companies?

The sooner AI stops trying to mimic human intelligence, the better – as there isn't any

shortfatbaldhairyman
Flame

Forget mimicking, they are fragile

Reminds me of my research days. I was trying to figure out HOW to show that a particular neural net (not that that was the name used) did learn. A friend suggested that I look even more closely at some standard optimisation techniques I was using, and all seemed well.

Until I realised that I was essentially showing how fragile the whole shit was.

Repeat after me, neural nets are not generic.

And a few years ago started reading about this deep learning and had smoke out of my ears. Called a friend who is still in academia and asked him about "old wine in new bottles". He laughed and said "It is not that bad".

Indeed.

Google admits Kubernetes container tech is so complex, it's had to roll out an Autopilot feature to do it all for you

shortfatbaldhairyman

Re: Turtles all the way UP?

So am I! Trying to learn Elixir, that is. This is worrying.

Clop ransomware gang leaks online what looks like stolen Bombardier blueprints of GlobalEye radar snoop jet

shortfatbaldhairyman

Security vs Ease of Use? A losing if not lost battle.

Sacrificing security for (perceived?) ease of use is what it is. And, ease of use is easy to understand, security never is. So, ALWAYS, ease of use.

You can't spell 'electronics' without 'elect': The time for online democracy has come

shortfatbaldhairyman

April 1 today?

Family wrongly accused of uploading pedo material to Facebook – after US-EU date confusion in IP address log

shortfatbaldhairyman

Re: Simple solution

This is exactly what I insist on. 15-September-2020 fixes that.

Languages different, can be a problem. But I do not anticipate (!) dealing with that. locale magic might help, but I have not gone that way.

Anyway, anything to do with datetime coding is hellish.

AI in the enterprise: Prepare to be disappointed – oversold but under appreciated, it can help... just not too much

shortfatbaldhairyman
Flame

Random flailing

Oh well, here goes. At a tangent, yea yea.

How can an algorithm be anything else but dumb? Quoting Dijkstra "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."

So yes, may or may not be yesterday's algorithms (they mostly are, with slightly better understanding of structure, FAR better hardware and maybe minor algorithm extensions) but that word intelligence is overused.

And, when I started reading about deep learning, called up a friend asking what the fuss was about, old wine in new bottles and all. His response was that it was not as bad as that. Maybe not.

Oh well, can go on and on.

My life as a criminal cookie clearer: Register vulture writes Chrome extension, realizes it probably breaks US law

shortfatbaldhairyman

Re: My computer, my rules.

Exactly what I do.

More Salt in their wounds: DigiCert hit as hackers wriggle through (patched) holes in buggy config tool

shortfatbaldhairyman

I definitely need better glasses

Am I the only one who saw n instead of m in @GreatAmus

Tech won't save you from lockdown disaster: How to manage family and free time while working from home

shortfatbaldhairyman

Listening for kids and adults

LibriVox has audio for public domain stories and stuff. librivox.org