Posts by Howard Sway 2050 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Oct 2020
Or even better, imagine if the government could have been able to afford to buy her two phones. Or if they could afford a new toner cartridge and print out government documents for her, which could have been secured in some kind of box.
We might have been one spyware loaded "sink the migrants" game in the app store away from our entire national security being blown wide open.
Easiest solution : use the technology on bosses too. Every worker should buy a share in the company, then propose that as they are now the employer of the bosses, the same technology must be used to give them full information on everything the bosses do during the day. Any "poor" performance equal to the threshold for disciplinary action imposed by the bosses should result in those bosses being subject to the same punishments. Remind the PHBs that they're employees too, and the same rules apply to them.
There's always been a way of doing this : ask the end users what they want and what they don't want. Once a need is identified and understood properly, provide a good solution. Will always get better results than "the public gets what I the great genius decide". And be better for revenue. And stop you going down Metaverse rabbit holes.
The problem is that Musk thinks that his purchase has now made him mayor of that town, and he, and he alone, gets to decide what the rules are there. At the moment, he's saying that there are no rules. But I think he's being a bit presumptive if he thinks that his dollars give him more authority than any democratically elected government has to decide this. There are already reports of the site being flooded with racist posts. Expect lots of controversy, and tedious attempts by Musk to boast of how he's defending freedom, as he enables the forces of hate and repression.
In other words, the one actual use that anyone has been able to think of for these things is to use them as a digital equivalent of the sort of coupons / saving stamps you used to get with some products that you could save up and use to get some quite poor "free gift" in exchange for your "loyalty". This means that they are actually fungible tokens that can be exchanged for real stuff, whether discounts, "exclusive digital experiences" or whatever other nonsense they think to offer in their rewards scheme.
In that case, they can go back to simply calling them "tokens", and the hype should hopefully die.
A word cloud broadcast on BBC News has described Rishi Sunak as a “liar”, a “t**t” and a “c***”
The poll, which asked members of the public to describe the new prime minister in “one word” also featured terms including “boring”, “snake” and “privileged”.
It's like listening to a debate about which is the best linux desktop.
They couldn't agree on Unity, so they've chosen a Gnome, one that's worth a Mint and acts like he's everybody's Mate, hoping to join the Pantheon of great prime ministers, but bound to leave us all Deepin the shit.
"The authors also see advantages for educators, who could use assistive tools to generate better student exercises, to generate explanations of code, and to provide students with more illustrative examples of programming constructs."
Sounds like the problem is not students wanting to use these tools, but teachers wanting to use them. If your exercises aren't so good, write better ones. If you can't explain code, you shouldn't be teaching the subject.
Teaching coding is about explaining the principles, and how to use them to build real programs. There's no place for these AI tools at all with good teachers and textbooks. All this worry about "kids cheating" is overblown in my opinion : if they want to learn programming because they are interested in it, then they will. If, in the highly unlikely case that it ever actually happens, they pass some course entirely by cheating and getting the AI to do the work, they will be completely fucked if they ever have to do a real programming job because they'll be quickly found out.
Totally right. MS are trying to argue that because the code is publicly available, then copyright licenses no longer apply, even though most FOSS code is released under a license. So they say they're free to ignore the license.
If that's true then closed source licenses can also be ignored, and any machine code that's publicly available can also be ingested by an AI and spat out into an AI generated executable which anyone else can use for free. So I could make an "AI copilot" myself that gets an executable from https://www.microsoft.com/software-download/windows11 and use that to add a bit more code in, then distribute it however I want. After all, who cares about their copyright and license conditions, it's public availability that counts right?
They're playing a bit too fast and loose with other people's work here, they should be wary that it doesn't set any precedents that may come back to bite them.
This study is hardly news to anyone who's ever used you tube for more than 5 minutes. If you watch angry political rants, it will recommend more angry political rants. If you watch origami videos, I guess you'll be forced down a rabbit hole featuring lots of paper swans. I use it to find music I've not heard that's listened to by people who like stuff that I like, and it's helped me discover lots of brilliant stuff.
This guy deserved the boot. In IT, you're supposed to automate as much of your job as is feasible, because you understand that computers are there to do work whenever they can instead of people, and it applies as much to your own work as well as the work of your customers who are paying you to produce systems that do the same for them.
Once you've automated your tasks, that frees up time to do something else that's useful instead, and you either think of something new, or let your boss know and do whatever new thing they ask of you. That's called increasing productivity, and it's how companies succeed, and how you advance in you career. Thinking you can use the time that you've saved to play video games instead is a sign that you just don't care about the success of the company paying your salary that much, so why should any sensible company keep paying them?
On the other hand, if the company lets you get away with doing little, and don't give you new work because they just want you there for when things go wrong, learn lots of new stuff, and use it to get a better job that pays more.
"Ye is making a groundbreaking move into the free speech media space and will never have to fear being removed from social media again"
It really is amazing how these famous gobshites think that it's necessary to spend fortunes on buying social media companies in order to make their opinions available on the web after they've been "cancelled", when a simple web server with a content publishing system back end, the software for which can all be obtained for free, would be more than sufficient for that purpose.
But no, they need their own soshul meeja company, despite the fact that the big companies with critical mass already occupy that space, and will carry on doing so because their users are too lazy to switch just to read the ravings of one particular moron.
Right. As opposed to being created by an experienced robotics or software engineer, it was created by someone who runs an art gallery. Who will know plenty of artists who can knock up a mildy-plausible looking robot. Which can then be fitted with a basic program that uses speech recognition and synthesis to answer a limited number of known questions with preprogrammed answers.
Unsurprisingly, despite the demo crash, this was enough for all the Peers of the Realm to pronounce themselves dazzled by this amazing new machine, and feel reassured that Britain will soon be at the forefront of the imminent AI industrial revolution.
If this is all it takes, there must be huge opportunities available to knock up something similar in your garden shed, present it to the politicos as an exciting AI prototype, and bag big bucks for "further development and research".
This has got to be an exciting opportunity for the audio book industry. Imagine the opportunities :
Alexa, can Margaret Thatcher finish reading me The Communist Party Manifesto?
Alexa, can Richard Dawkins finish reading me My Daily Horoscope?
Alexa, can the cast of Coronation Street finish reading me The Complete works of the Marquis de Sade?
So, if you steal $24 million off someone and get caught, you don't get prosecuted as long as you pay $22 million of it back to them, and they let you keep the tiny sum of $2 million as a reward for what a good boy you've been? If it's that easy and risk-free it certainly sounds like a better idea than working for a living..................
Apparently he's already started work on this, and the initial results on its ability to perform simple tasks are so encouraging that the drunken dish-brain is now odds on favourite to be the next Tory prime minister.
I think this, more than anything else will have more people moving to actual Linux desktops, rather than any cloudy stuff. So,as opposed to the arguments made in this piece, it might well happen the old fashioned local installation way rather than the cloud virtual desktop subscription racket. Even a moderately comfortable family, running a desktop system, with additional laptops for both parents and kids are going to face quite a monthly cost to be able to access both desktops and office software.
This will make them far more open to the idea of a traditional standalone desktop OS and office suite, especially if they can be helped to discover that they can get it for free and it's easy to install. Of course there are still obstacles to this, the main ones I've found being the non inclusion of media playback codecs and software that supports them. However, times are tough for many people right now, and forcing an eternal subscription on them can only push more people to give Linux a try, and discover that it indeed is a much better desktop experience than bloaty greedy naggy Windows these days, as well as being a big money saver.
So, if the fantastic employee you hired wore a red t-shirt during their interview, the software will then recommend candidates who also wear red t-shirts. There's really little need to regulate stuff like this, because any company stupid enough to use it will fail for very obvious reasons. But that won't stop some companies from using them : perhaps it will take another "AI" being used to examine company bankruptcies to make the connection between using this software and going bust to do that. It's what happens when you're willing to believe that software can replace the need to use actual intelligence when performing fundamental tasks that are crucial to your business.
It's..................... the Windows desktop! A 2D image, meant to be displayed on fixed size monitors! Think of all the benefits of being able to view two dimensions in three dimensions! For example, it runs on the expensive headset you just bought!
Or maybe the 3D Windows desktop is on the way, so they'll move from the ultra flat modern interface aesthetics to 3D icons in an infinite 3D desktop space. Imagine the possibilities of a 3D spreadsheet! Or 3D Teams meetings, where you can look at 3D video of other people wearing VR headsets.
Even more interesting is whether or not Google instantly convert them back into dollars by selling them as soon as they've received a payment.
If they hang onto them without converting back to $, their revenue accounting is going to be interesting when coin prices fluctuate. That would also increase their risk as the possibility of a collapse in value is ever present.
In reality, saying "aren't we modern we accept crypto" makes you look like a fashion victim, and not an especially wise one.
Wow, what a petulant and expensive strop. If we can't treat out employees like shit, we don't want to do business here. Unfortunately for them, stories like this get read and people often decide not to do business with such arrogant control freaks. They don't tend to produce good work.
This looks foolish to me. As it is now well known that the entire crypto world is a huge mess of dangerous risk, rating a crypto as "not dangerous" could leave Mastercard with big liability problems when one of them inevitably crashes.
What I don't understand is why boardrooms of huge companies like this still consider it worth getting involved when they know it's all bullshit, just so they don't miss out on temporarily profiting from a worthless scheme. They should have learnt the lesson from sub-prime mortgages, but obviously what they really learnt was "if it all goes horribly wrong we'll get bailed out again because we're so essential". This is why regulation is necessary and regulators should be stopping this sort of thing from happening, but even people at that level seem to be so dazzled by the free magic money that they can't see the obvious stupidity of it.
Really? Because normally when $600 million is stolen, that means that everyone's money is not OK, because $600 million of it has been stolen.
The ultra-financialisation of all this fake finance using ever more complex instruments that can be torpedoed by the most stupid of bugs in the design and the code is truly an amazing thing to behold.
Seeing as these "AI programmers" just digest large amounts of human written code, it's a mathematical certainty that they will produce code that contains as many bugs on average as the code they have digested, as all that produced code is itself an average sample of buggy code.
If it's to be anything more than this, the AI code assistants need to be trained in the process of debugging, by learning to identify common classes of errors, learning how to fix them, and doing this to all code before feeding it into the main code producing engine. Then it might be Garbage In, Less Garbage Out. But debugging is often hard and non linear, and needs real intelligence to work out why things happen, so this is going to be incredibly difficult to simulate algorithmically, which is why I suspect they will try and minimise this downside when hyping up the code churning "co-programmers".
They are truly nuts if they think that saving the costs of complying with GDPR is going to outweigh the profits that can be made by being able to do business with the single market. Especially as nearly every business that operates online here has already incurred those costs, so that there is hardly any saving to be made.
No, the real plan is to imagine the UK becoming some offshore wild west free for all where the rest of the world can stash its data and monetise it to infinity. A brief moments thought should have been to sufficient to realise that laws in the rest of the world will forbid their own companies from doing this, whilst simultaneously stopping any UK companies from doing business there.
What they call "red tape" is not just a pointless cost. It's the rules of the game, and if you want to play, you have to obey them.
In other words, his lawyers will have told him that he was 100% guaranteed to lose the court case, and will make the smallest loss by doing the deal. He will then be left with a company he now hates, probably end up firing large numbers of staff, and make it so toxic its users start to desert it. The celebs that make up a lot of its appeal will bail as this happens, taking their followers elsewhere with them. At some point he will try and sell it to try and recoup some of his losses. But it'll be a shadow of what it was by then.
Or even better, into actual homes, even if they're only modest studio flats. Then homeless people can have secure personal homes and rebuild their lives. Keep the rents cheap by mortgaging out the cost for 25 years and you solve both the cost of recouping the investment and a lot of homelessness. Nobody needs to make vast profits, just recover the overall costs.
Which begs the question, why didn't you make a video of the one with everything, rather than the rough development one?
Of course, we all know the answer to that is that your claim to have anything better is total bullshit, because only a complete idiot would film the shit robot instead of the good one and show it at their "AI Day event".
So, he's stupidly purchased a vacuum cleaner that is an internet connected surveillance device and has become paranoid. Should have bought a henry hoover instead (although can he be sure those eyes aren't following him around the room?). Personally, I think that the sum total of all the masses of data that's being snooped only really adds up to show that everybody leads very boringly similar lives. But if he has developed a theory that it will cause a catastrophic information apocalypse instead, he's entitled to that opinion. Perhaps he hopes the theory of the information end times will be named after him. We could call it the Bell End.
Pro Tip : To protect against this threat, peel all stickers containing the logo off your laptop in order to stop the spyware "diffusing" into your system. Likewise, never insert a dvd with the logo on it into a drive. If you see the logo on screen at startup, your machine has been infected, and it is highly likely that it will send your personal data back to snoops such as Microsoft without your knowledge or consent.
So, as it was "controlled", it deliberately landed on the power lines then? What greater danger was being avoided that necessitated the fiery electrocution of the drone and disruption of power supplies as the least bad option? As for "landing", you need to be on the ground to claim that.
Another corporate attempt to big up something that's just fucked up.
