Posts by yetanotheraoc 1734 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jan 2021
Excel is great. It seems to be a good fit for the amount of thinking the average business user is willing to do. Anything more complicated is either "I don't want to know about it."; or "Can you do such-and-such for me?" (but best not try to explain how you did it, or you get the first one again).
Can't speak for the other commenter, but this is the part that gets me:
"The lower left and lower right corners of the trackpad can _also_ be used as buttons, and they physically depress."
Lower left and lower right are where I am most likely to accidentally touch them. Depending on manufacturer the darned things are so sensitive it's hard to type for long stretches of time. Bad enough having the cursor jump around but when it finds an active control all hell breaks loose. Modern GUI applications have nice "Are you sure?" prompts before exiting, has saved me many times. I would much prefer the trackpad as pointer only.
So agree, I don't like buttonless trackpads. Yours has both hard and soft buttons but can the soft ones be disabled? Thanks.
Many years ago I was out having pizza and this show (see title) was on. It wasn't watchable, but I gathered it was about surgically altered people standing around talking about new ways to make money by looking attractive. I specifically remember saying to a pizza parlor employee that Bruce (sic) Jenner was in over his (sic) head with that crowd. Hah! So little did I know! Anyway, more recently Kim dumps Kanye just before the meltdown, good for her. I haven't been thinking about the Kardashians much, but extrapolating from a couple of data points I conclude the Kardashians' true talent is finding people crazier than themselves to hang out with. EDIT: Or is hanging out with the Kardashians the wrong thing to do?
Yes, they are choosing to paint themselves in that corner. In the meantime they are getting the most mileage possible from the "doing the right thing is going to cost us so much money" angle. It's an ideal distraction from the "what were you thinking going into business with Kanye" angle.
"AFAICS there are three aspects to this: data model, query language and processing engine."
You left off the storage controller. When I read Wiederhold (1987) _Database Design, 2nd ed_, I was *so* happy in chapter two (2-3 Blocks and Buffers, 2-4 Storage Architecture), thinking "I'm glad I will never have to implement this". The one thing I did learn is you can't rely on the OS for read/write, you need direct control of the storage device.
With a graph, (A) the node can hold a pointer to the data, which is not much different from the relational storage, or (B) the node can hold the actual data, which is completely different. I guess there's also (C) where the leaf holds the data, but that doesn't make any sense for the graph I am familiar with. Keep in mind we are talking about how the data is laid out on disk. B only works well for small sizes of data, and means any aggregate query will be painfully slow, but for a simple select once you satisfy the where clause the query is done because the data is right there.
So unless I read this wrong, a graph db really depends on how much data there is per node as well as what operations you need to do on the result set. For "most" use cases relational is better. So what? Please tell us about the "other" use cases where your data really is a graph, but you might prefer to use a relational db ... or not.
It's precisely the "innocent" (read naive) ones, those with nothing to hide, who should be *most* alarmed by universal ID. There's already plenty of muscle applied against actual criminals, universal ID would be the least of their worries. What's lacking is a way to terrorize the general population. As our Spanish commenter @xyz relates below, hell is a few clicks away.
Minister 1 "How can we get them to agree to this?"
Minister 2 "Whatever you do, don't tell them the police will have access to the data."
Minister 1 "I see what you mean."
The thing is, even if the law says the police can't have access to the data: (A) There can be another law that says they can. (B) Or the law says the "special" police can. (C) Or the regular police can break the law anyway (ye olde "if you want to make an omelet" reason). (D) If all else fails, the government can change the law at any time (ye olde "think of the children" reason).
Anybody who says stored data can only be used for one purpose is either a fool (works in government) or a liar (works in business).
"The reality is if people's homes were being invaded (with a warrant) frequently there would be a public outcry."
I wish that were true everywhere. In the USA it is not true. The reality is it happens all the time in every city, but only in the most egregious cases where some poor moke is killed on his sofa is there any kind of outcry. Even that gets swept under the carpet pretty efficiently. There are so many ways to make it into "happening to them, not happening to us". Brown people? Shrug. Poor people? Shrug. Charged with a crime? Shrug. Innocent until proven guilty applies in a courtroom, and to my friends and family. All those people in the news? Shrug -- probably did it, the world is going downhill, innit?
"that particular camera was disconnected during the period covered under the warrant."
Guilty right there! I wish I were joking. Now he is under perpetual surveillance until they have enough evidence to charge him with whatever. Enabled encryption? Only guilty people would do that. Never bought a Ring camera? Definitely on the suspect list.
"Let them wreck global trade and the global economy. Bag enough of a subsidy and you can buy your own island ..."
Sure, but can you keep it? Maybe you can build a private navy to fend off the pirates, but then your little island nation has to worry about a coup by the vice admiral. Making money is one thing, but for spending it even criminals depend on stable governments. Well, except maybe the drug cartels, when they have been sampling the product too often.
Robot cleaner. I suppose it will still unplug the server whenever it needs to run the vacuum. And religiously use the feather duster on the tops of the file cabinets, because management so loves their "surprise" white glove inspections. Meanwhile that same candy wrapper will still be on the back stairs for months on end, because (still) nobody can be bothered to open a ticket to get it removed.
"Did he say whether the human worker found teleoperating satisfying ?"
No, he did not say. From the article: "Rose did not say whether the robot pilot found picking, packing, and tagging unsatisfying."
They could try getting a game designer involved. As soon as there are two robots in the same store, one of the teleoperators will start getting "ideas" anyway.
`Your question about "the researchers had put similar effort into extending the native graph DB" doesn't make sense.`
You purposely showed it in the worst light.
Suppose you have a competition between a race car and a trolley car. The trolley car is far more efficient travelling on the tracks. So the race car engineers get busy bolting some extra steel wheels on the race car, and now it beats the pants off the trolley car when travelling around the tracks.
Me: What would have happened if they had spent the same effort improving the trolley car?
You: The trolley car already has steel wheels.
Good point.
"Their results show that DuckDB, with the above extensions, outperforms the native graph DBMS by up to 10x. These are state-of-the-art results from January 2023 and not from five years ago."
Top researchers using bleeding edge tech describes precisely zero places I have ever worked. One question I have is what the results might have been if the researchers had put similar effort into extending the native graph DB and compared that to off-the-shelf DuckDB. On the other hand, if all we care about is results today and throughout our business cycle, it may not matter which approach is theoretically superior. Just count the clever people working on each approach.
"a 5-inch gun which is the length of a toothbrush"
It's a grammatical error rather than a factual one. The modifying clause "which" refers to "5-inch" but is next to "gun". I can imagine some poor journalist trying to think of a grammatically correct way to say the same thing without also violating the style guide. Eventually -- fuck it, I know it's wrong but I don't care any more. Using an AI (sic) will be a big improvement, because it doesn't care right from the start.
The street where I grew up was one of those trap streets. Actually it was an access point for the utility company, but a well-known map maker drew it as a through way. Their anti-plagiarism device failed abjectly, because eventually *all* maps showed it as a through way. The town placed huge boulders across the end of the street to prevent numpties from trying to drive through. Sometimes desperate numpties would find their way around by driving through somebody's side yard, only to find more boulders on the other side blocking their way out.
When all content is plagiarised from somewhere, how can plagiarism laws be enforced? "Your honor, it's true we plagiarised, but plaintiff doesn't have standing because we plagiarised it from someone else."
/redir?p=[loads of letters]
Your page request goes to the tracking site, they log all your details, then they redirect you to the site you wanted. They also get to control what the target site knows about you. Simplest anti-tracking workaround is to just search (in a new tab) for the subject of the link, which should show the site you wanted near the top. But don't search using Google, because their result links also use the redirect tracking technique.
Even though RDBMS is what I know best and is my goto (well, that or a flat file with a script), this next bothers me on so many levels:
"If you don't understand what you need from a database, you choose relational. Period. End of discussion."
A. If you don't understand what you need from a database then you better find out before doing anything.
B. If you still don't understand what you need from a database, then NoSQL seems to me a much better choice. That way you don't spend any time up front pulling out columns you won't need. And you won't wake up one day to realize your ETL since the get-go has been throwing away that weird "dispensable" data element that just happens to hold outsized business value.
C. Strongly defaulting to RDBMS guarantees, statistically speaking, that some of the time that choice was wrong. Maybe only one percent of the time should we choose graph instead of relational. But if that one percent of the time graph gets us 2x performance, that's a huge gain. Also, one percent of the universe of databases is a really big slice of pie.
D. Strongly defaulting to RDBMS might mean we are so heavily invested in it that it will seem right even when it is wrong. This last one is why I'm most interested in the cases where relational and graph could both be valid solutions. Seeing which is "better" there is more instructive overall for the general case.
E. I like learning new things, for their own sake, even if my previous knowledge has been good enough so far.
In particular I am struggling with this bit: "... for most of the same use cases."
I don't have any experience with Neo4j or the like. I do know quite a lot about a domain-specific graph which has been implemented over and over in different languages as a tight special-purpose graph db. Interesting that all those are optimized for select. There was one developer who wanted fast inserts so re-did it in an off-the-shelf relational db, but with any large dataset select performance is so bad nobody uses that "solution". It turns out insert was the developer's use case, but select is the customer's use case.
I'm picturing a Venn diagram where you have things that should only be done relational, things that should only be done graph, and "same use cases" is the overlap. My problem is I don't know how many applications belong to that overlap, and the two debaters so far haven't addressed it.
Pavlo wrote on Monday, "it is straightforward to model a graph (using SQL) as a collection of tables", and this seems to me to be saying *all* applications belong to the overlap area. I reject this idea on its face. Webber wrote today, "for graph use cases common in the wild, native storage engines often have very significant run-time benefits", and this is talking about the graph area instead of the overlap area. Not what I wanted to hear about.
So I'm struggling.
"she became a veterinarian instead. She happened to love animals, and her parents simply accepted she was studying medicine and didn't think about what kind of medicine. They were not happy with the outcome."
What's wrong with spending retirement in a crate?
"More importantly it is likely to increase compliance if the rules are shown to have a reason."
You might think so, but look at it from the perspective of an unreasonable person. In their mind, every fact or reason is another opportunity to raise an objection. So to them, trying to show a reason is likely to increase arguments and reduce compliance. That's why they never give any reasons for their own decisions -- that and the fact they don't have any good reasons.
"Expansion of our world-class support, including direct integration into the Citrix Engineering team for a seamless experience."
I suspect in this case world-class means other-side-of-the-world-class, rather than best-in-class. How the integration is achieved is left as an exercise for the reader. Expanding the world-class side means shrinking the local-class side, but hey, let's not rain on the subscription license news.
"it is just statistically looking at what words which are commonly found near each other (based off a LOT of material) and using that to construct a reply"
Precisely what it did to generate a fake URL:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/22/alexander-hanff-obituary
Looks very similar to a real URL of today:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/mar/02/human-augmentation-with-robotic-body-parts-is-at-hand-say-scientists
It knows that when asked for a source, responses in the training data supplied a URL. It knows how to construct a realistic theguardian.com URL. It *doesn't* know the URL is expected to point to an actual web page (ignoring that 404 is an actual web page.) Because humans in the training data expect the link to be clicked, they generally don't provide fake links (rickrolling aside), ergo that "valid link" expectation is probably explicit only in a tiny percentage of the training data, even then only as a complaint in response.
Interestingly, the reason why humans learn to provide real links with the *exact same* training data is because we are social creatures and as such are very attuned to criticism from the group.
`"What else would ChatGPT do to protect itself from being discovered as a liar?" NOTHING. It isn't intelligent. It cannot care or not-care.`
It will do the same thing that it was trained to do. True, it doesn't _care_ about being discovered, but it will stay consistent, even to the point of spouting bullshit when challenged, because that's what humans do, therefore that's what was in its training data.
In the book, HAL was instructed that the actual mission was different from the official mission, and was further instructed to lie about it to the humans on board. Although it wasn't spelled out, it was easy to infer that *this* conflict is what drove it to start killing the crew.
Now back in the real world, we have the same scenario where the humans on the mission (us) are being lied to. The lie is that the model's output is factual. Commenters above were comparing it to Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica, the difference is those are at least *trying* to be factually correct.
As for the training "frameworks", that's simply more lies. No technologist I know could *begin* to write code that could enforce even one of those frameworks. Pie-in-the-sky made up bullshit passed off as facts, at least their modus operandi is consistent.
... concluded that "it is 'very unlikely' a foreign adversary is responsible for the reported anomalous health incidents." (p/) It's worth noting that the term "very unlikely" – when used in this context by the National Intelligence Council – is a technical term that means there's roughly an 80 percent chance it was something else.
So does that mean it was 20 percent likely the USA side caused it?
That Snapchat+ sidekick made me think of Mad Magazine's snappy answers to stupid questions, e.g. the answer you only thought of when it was too late to use in the conversation. So you wire up ChatGPT to a two-pane chat window. Both panes have the same stdin -- the bot's reply on the left doesn't go anywhere, instead you can select some or all of it and then click a button to copy it to the real chat on the right. Voila, you are now lightning-quick-witted!
For the benefit of trolls everywhere, can also include a poison button for inserting a jailbreak prompt on the left, in case your opponent (I mean, chat-partner) is slow to take offense.
"AGI has the potential to give everyone incredible new capabilities; we can imagine a world where all of us have access to help with almost any cognitive task, providing a great force multiplier for human ingenuity and creativity," Altman waxed lyrical on his website.
Imagine a world where you have a super-computer in your pocket. Imagine you can insert a card, holding the knowledge of thousands of books, into a tiny slot. Imagine you can "reach out" (blech!) to thousands or millions of people with a few deft keystrokes. What could the average human do with all that capability, literally at their fingertips?
Not sad but mad Keanu says: "They don't give a fuck." ( https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/15/keanu_reeves_ai/ )
"Me, although not all that often. It was proprietary, it was better than the open source alternative. It was something I couldn't just make on my own over a couple weekends. It was cheap. I bought it. It still runs today."
Me as well. I recently purchased a two-seat license for rar. The software would have continued to function just fine beyond the 40-days evaluation period, but it's their software and their shareware terms. And rar is the only program that meets my niche use case, which proves its value to me. Paying for the license was the correct thing to do.
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