Posts by Ken G

Sci-fi author 'writes' 97 AI-generated tales in nine months

I believe you but can't remember/find which story you mean. Can you tell us?

I've read loads of Clarke, when younger, but he was always a better futurist than an author (great ideas, weak characterisation).

AI to detect heart attacks tested in the land of the deep-fried Mars bar

11!

Like the pizza.

Should I assume this AI doesn't come with voice recognition?

Cisco: Don't use 'blind spot' – and do use 'feed two birds with one scone'

Nuking it from orbit is the safest way.

IBM's motto is 'Think' – its CEO reckons AI can do that as well as some workers

Re: AI is bullshit

"You think you've got problems? What are you supposed to do if you are a manically depressed robot? No, don't try to answer that. I'm fifty thousand times more intelligent than you and even I don't know the answer. It gives me a headache just trying to think down to your level."

UK PM Sunak plans to allocate just £1bn to semiconductor industry

Re: Yawn

REAL SCIENTISTS? What do they know?

I think the people in this country have had enough of experts from organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.

Graeme Andrew Logan (AKA Michael Gove MP) June 2016

Re: Makes sense

Quite right. £1 Billion sounds like a small amount if you're Samsung or Taiwan Semiconductor (or the PM's in-laws) but it is a lot of money if you're the Minister's old school pal, 'Toppy', who isn't too clear on what a semiconductor is but is willing to give it a go or that jolly good bloke he met down the pub who's willing to put the fab in a lockup rented from the Minister's wife.

US Supreme Court snubs that guy who wants AI recognized as patent inventors

Re: Jumping the gun by a few dozens of years (maybe eternity?) ...

Yes, but.

I don't think software should be patentable anyway however his other points, that it keeps IP from legal reuse and encourages people to file patents for AI driven ideas are both valid.

Re: So sue

That's no proof of consciousness, sentience or creativity.

Firmware is on shaky ground – let's see what it's made of

Re: Firmware ...

back then it was the other way around

Cardboard drones running open source flight software take off in Ukraine and beyond

Re: The last thing the world needs

I think the idea of a homemade one was discussed in 'The Moon Goddess and the Son' by Donald Kingsbury. I seem to remember an engineering students project turning a truck turbocharger into a radial compressor jet engine from around the same time. Probably all you'd need to add besides control actuators is a mobile phone, these days.

Open Source hardware too?

Presumably the next step would be to provide open-source cutting plans for the cardboard, can the PARIS team help?

Today's old folks set to smash through longevity records

Re: Sshhhhh!!!!!

Yes, I read that Ireland has the highest life expectancy in the EU, according to The Health in Ireland: Key Trends 2022 report by the Department of Health.

Having a big fry up as soakage really helps.

Scientists speak their brains: Please don’t call us boffins

Let's save time

Here's prior art from 10 years ago; Do scientists mind being called boffins?

Ireland

She (Rachel Youngman) said in UK and Ireland, the formal study of physics struggles to attract girls, those from disadvantaged backgrounds, people of Black Caribbean descent, people with disabilities, and LGBT+ young people into the subject.

It seems minor but why specify "people of Black Caribbean descent" when speaking of difficulties attracting students not just in the UK but "and Ireland"?

There are plenty of young black Irish people who might usefully be engaged with but most are of African descent whose families moved to Ireland more recently (when it became a place to go to, rather than one to get away from) and very few of Carribean origin.

Chinese web giant Baidu backs RISC-V for the datacenter

Upstart?

When does a startup become an upstart and does it only happen if they're from China?

OpenAI CEO 'feels awful' after ChatGPT leaks conversations, payment info

Re: "Hallucination"

Yes, I'd seen that but I could understand it - there are going to be a lot of people with the same name and unstructured datasets are likely to put all the "John Smiths" in the same box, literally if there is an obituary for one, but I can't see where the confusion crept in with a very specific and uniquely named software product. Oh well. No harm done this time and lesson learned.

"Hallucination"

I had a great example last week, as part of a search to figure out how to get a particular software package to integrate with a messaging network I asked ChatGPT.

It gave me step by step instructions how to configure the interface in the settings menu. The only problem was the interface didn't exist. I 'told' it so.

It insisted the integration was supported according to the software packages home page and documentation. Since I couldn't find anything in those, I asked for the link to the documentation page. It gave them. They didn't exist.

It's a nice warning on overreliance.

The Shakespearian question of our age: To cloud or not to cloud

Re: With apologies to William Shakespeare, and BOFHs everywhere

Read it as a sequence of one word sentences and apologise to William Shatner.

Bing AI feels like ChatGPT stuffed into a suit – not the future

Can it read COBOL code and translate it to Python?

Banks always need some OOB.

I'm afraid to ask what the [wood emoji] looks like

OpenAI claims GPT-4 will beat 90% of you in an exam

Re: British Citizenship Test

You could argue for 1920 and the Treaty of Trianon or 1923 and the Treaty of Lausanne too.

Workers don't want these humanoid robots telling them to be happy

HAL: [1:50:56]

[on Dave's return to the ship, after he has killed the rest of the crew]

HAL: Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.

Re: Patent Pending

Couldn't a junior project manager do the same job for less?

Techie wiped a server, nobody noticed, so a customer kept paying for six months

Re: "What do you mean when you say “There are no backups”?"

That's ridiculous. There should always be at least 1 backup per system. It should be over 3 years old and in a format that can't be connected to any new system.

Re: Turning off an waiting...

There are always the ones that are triggered by end of year events or audit reporting.

The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 as a Linux laptop

Hardware comments

I think, if Lenovo realised who specifies corporate laptops in the firsdt place and who buys them secondhand (getting brand recognition out there) they would have a model with a swappable battery, all the ports and the old style keyboards. Some BOFH would add upgradeability to the requirements as a 'TCO reduction' measure and they'd be off to the races.

I have an old Thinkpad 240X from 2000 that had PCI, USB, Ethernet, serial,ports and came easily apart using coin slot screws to access RAM, HDD, CPU. It still runs (Puppy) but I can't find a PCI wifi card with supported driver. It was a different design approach.

Catholic clergy surveillance org 'outs gay priests'

Ignore religion for a minute.

This is a case where an enterprise has a mandatory policy for its staff. The management have confirmed the policy but aren't strictly enforcing it. A 3rd party, who is presumably a customer of the enterprise, feels so strongly about the policy that they are paying to detect breaches of that policy outside of the workplace and publishing those breaches to pressure management to apply it in the case of individual staff so detected.

The question is, if you were in a similar situation, would you be happy with this arrangement? (let's say your employer had a no drugs policy but you lived in a country where they could not require urine samples and you smoked up at weekends). If not, what would you do about it?

German Digital Affairs Committee hearing heaps scorn on Chat Control

Re: Who would have thought it?

It's almost as if they've seen a surveillance society before and didn't like it.

Arm co-founder: Britain's chip strat 'couldn’t be any worse'

"couldn't be any worse than it is at the moment."

Michelle Donelan

Hold my beer!

Germany to court Indian IT talent – starting with easier visa application processes

Re: What a difference a change in government makes

I'm not sure government breeding programmes ever go over well, or that factories can employ children legally these days.

Re: "anyone who can speak English..."

I considered myself bad with languages until I was dropped in a job in Germany for a few years without the expected support. My German clients all spoke excellent English but that still left me tongue-tied at lunch and in the evenings until I picked some up. A similar experience in Brussels before that taught me more than 6 years of French in school. I don't speak either well but I can generally understand what people say to me and get out a response, though if it's important/work related I will speak in English and listen in the other language.

Re: "anyone who can speak English..."

Language skills aren't genetic.

Re: so what happened ?

Yes, of course. I work with French and German speaking colleagues and clients.

Re: so what happened ?

Germany's population has been retiring at a faster rate than it's graduating for decades. Like many European countries, it relies on immigration to maintain the economy.

Anyone who can speak English can easily learn German.

Musk: Tesla's doing great. I mean, have you seen my Twitter follower count?

I assume you can steer it yourself, after all having a self driving feature which doesn't work is much the same as not having a self driving feature.

British monarchy goes after Twitter, alleges rent not paid for UK base

Re: More landlords are piling on Elon Musk's Twitter – including the British monarchy

If you could charge for the video on Twitter, it'd pay off it's debts in no time.

Re: If you owe the bank...

It's the Prince of Wales (in his incarnation as Duke of Cornwall) who's exempt from the Nuclear Explosions Act (and the the Data Protection Act if he want's to post Mr Musk's details).

Bill shock? The red ink of web services doesn’t come out of the blue

I've done the numbers and it looks like a rollercoaster when you plot the cloud cost vs the infrastructure costs, there isn't one stable point.

If you're a greenfield startup then cloud is best, you can fail fast or scale infinitely so long as your revenue exceeds your costs. Once your load stabilises, you can probably do better on-prem if your workload is portable (because of course you planned your cloud exit strategy before committing to a vendor) but you might not want to take on the risk.

For a large existing business, usually you already have some datacentres and IT staff to let you estimate how much physical vs cloud will cost and you can have the accountants battle the OPEX/CAPEX decision in the boardroom.

My gut feel is that physical is cheaper if you already have a large enough IT staff and good retention but I wouldn't recomment anyone start there. Risk is the other variable. If your data centre goes down, it's all on you. If AWS or Azure goes down then it's for them to fix. You probably won't have as many failures but each will last longer and be more damaging. Security is also something I think is better in the cloud, not inherently but because you have to follow good design practices and plan what you're doing and because your platforms will be kept current.

Basecamp details 'obscene' $3.2 million bill that caused it to quit the cloud

You don't need multi-region unless you're running time sensitive apps world wide. Multi AZ, yes you need more than one data centre, redundant networking providers and routes, power etc and, of course, separate teams to run them. If you go to a hosting provider with that already set up then it doesn't costs much more than twice the hardware.

Ireland’s privacy watchdog fines WhatsApp €5.5 million

Re: Bin whatsapp

Most people don't. Or at least value usability over potential harvesting of their metadata for marketing.

I deleted WhatsApp some time ago, using Telegram for my regular contacts and Signal for my cautious ones but that leaves many others who stuck with WhatsApp.

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Re: Hooray for Avoirdupois and pounds, shillings and pence

stop bragging

Time to study the classics: Vintage tech is the future of enterprise IT

Re: Some things just never went away.

If it's bespoke code and you can still support it, certainly, especially if you've spent those decades training thousands of staff to use it and writing all your procedures around it.

Robot seal tested for stress relief on pretend Mars mission

Re: Boa Constrictors!!!????

Will no one think of the robo-penguins?

The world was promised 'cloud magic'. So much for that fairy tale

Re: Give me some of what he's been drinking

And if there's an IAM outage?

NASA infosec again falls short of required US government standard

So when do we see photos of the alien?

Eurozone plans to formalize passenger data, improve security

Re: No wonder the Brits left the EU, since they obviously don't understand it.

Sorry, I always think of El Reg as a British publication. Chalk it down to incompetence instead of ignorance then.

No wonder the Brits left the EU, since they obviously don't understand it.

The Eurozone is the group of countries using the Euro. The article is about the Schengen Zone.

Here's something communism is good at: Making smartphones less annoying

Re: The phone I want doesn't exist

Yeah - I use it as a fall back if there isn't an OSS equivalent. Don't install GAPPS and put microG on instead. It's not 100% but more than 90% functional, if you count a few apps that complain there's no Google Services but work anyway.

Re: The phone I want doesn't exist

I like Sony but you tend to hit a limit on how far you can upgrade Android version. Google Pixel and predecessors are a safe bet but I would tend to look at Samsung S-something used/refurbished. That doesn't align completely with the original poster who wanted top of the line hardware. I haven't figured out how to get that cheaply yet.

Re: The phone I want doesn't exist

You do need to put in a bit of work yourself for that but look at supported ports for LineageOS and SailfishOS as almost turnkey installs.