Posts by nobody who matters

Don't let the bot play doctor! AI gets early diagnoses wrong 80% of the time

".......it may be more generous to measure the AIs by their raw accuracy as a proportion correct in each case, which ranged from 63 to 78 percent - far better than the stricter failure metric highlighted in the paper."

Probably pure guesswork could achieve that level of success. Even at 78% success rate, it still means that it is wrong in nearly a quarter of cases. 63% success rate is wrong almost 40% of the time. I don't really see that as being significantly more useful than being wrong 80% of the time tbh.

Brits are falling out of love with posting every thought online

Re: Possibly a consequence of actual dispair ?

What an unbelievably warped and misleading article that was. The dismal impression they have tried to give of the UK really isn't representative of reality for most people at all.

NHS staff resist using Palantir software

"Staff reportedly cite ethics concerns, privacy worries, and doubt the platform adds much"

I bet it's taking plenty away though :(

Microsoft veteran says some 'broken by update' PCs were already doomed

Re: Idiots never reboot

"....windows reboots itself after every update, and you aren't given a choice in the matter."

errrrr, yes you are given a choice in the matter - you can disable automatic reboot in the settings and require the system to ask first and reboot only when you say so.

The problems created by MS putting out dodgy updates are undoubtedly multiplied by users who don't understand much about how the OS can be configured (which is probably most of them; not because it is difficult to understand, but because they can't be bothered to find out).

Iran is the first out-loud cyberwar the US has fought

Re: israel?

"And, even, if one is Machiavellian enough, would you want to be a Basij (regime thugs) executing civilians in full view of, possibly recording, street cams?"

Didn't seem to stop the thugs from ICE ;)

Gamers furious as indie studio Cloud Imperium quietly admits to data breach

Re: "sophisticated"

"It's always "sophisticated"."

And it is always apparent that those people always using that word, don't know what it actually means ;)

OpenAI’s Altman says Pentagon set ‘scary precedent’ binning Anthropic

Perhaps he is lying ??

French DIY etailer ManoMano admits customer data stolen

"Won't be long before one of these hacks results in the company going "yeah, well, shit happens"."

Regardless of whatever wording they actually use, my impression has for some years been that thast is already the underlying attitude.

It will continue to be their attitude until someone makes it hit the company/organisation/directors hard in their own wallet, rather than just the wallets of the customers or employees.

Government upgrades drones, deploys joystick tweakers to catch illegal dumpers

Re: Make it Easy

"..... rubbish becomes 'contaminated' if food containers aren't washed first before putting in the trash. And we're supposed to be saving water, not wasting it washing garbage"

I'm afraid that I find the idea that you should throw out food containers still contaminated with food extremely peculiar.

I agree that we probably shouldn't be using fresh potable water for washing food containers, but there are plenty of alternatives - washing the containers up last thing after washing the dishes for a start (that is where people aren't using a dishwashing machine), using recyled bath/shower water or using rainwater from a suitable water butt attached to a downpipe are options that the majority of the population probably have.

You not been reading the news recently ??

Small scale fly-tippers do just dump the waste on someone elses land.

However, if you have tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of tonnes of waste to get rid of, it is a bit difficult to just chuck it behind someone elses hedge; you need your own site, preferably a bit 'hidden from view'. . This is basically the story behind the very well publicised illegal dump at Kidlington, Oxfordshire. From the news stories about it, all the evidence suggests that the field was bought for the specific purpose of dumping, and the papertrail to the actual owner has proved to be long and convoluted and makes it difficult to actually pinpoint who the true owner actually is.

"The council or police would find it hard to initiate a prosecution from the landowner's cameras"

Not in the least, there have alredy been several prosecutions resulting from photographic evidence provided by farmers or landowners.

The law doesn't seem to have a problem with using evidence from private CCTV, dashcam footage or any other type of clear evidence of breaking of the law for taking up a prosecution, so I don't really see any reason why evidence from a landowner's camera should be considered inadmissable?

"If government makes it policy to protect and help innocent landowners who report illegal dumping promptly, then those landowners have incentive to put up cameras and catch the dumpers. Cameras are cheap."

Some landowners have already been doing this - in the absence of any evidence of who is doing the dumping, it is the landowners responsibility (and cost) to clear the mess up. Cameras can be very helpful in revealing who is doing the tipping, and gives the landowner at least a possibility of getting them prosecuted and maybe something back towards the clear-up costs.

Re: Too much crippling bureaucracy involved

"....they showed a massive (organised crime) illegal dump that had been filling up for over a year, and during all this time the environment agency were aware of the situation but failed to act in a decisive manner,...."

The Environment Agency seem to be pass-masters at heel dragging. Always lots of hot air and no action - unless the guilty party is a farmer; then they are on it like a shot!

An organisation that has repeatedly proved beyond all doubt that it is not fit for purpose, but which, if replaced by another body or its reponsibilities transferred to other departments, would simply see the same people who are running the EA move over to the new set-up, and the heel dragging would continue uninterrupted.

Re: Self-inflicted

If you hire someone with a van for waste disposal, they will take it to a commercial waste site, which is why disposing of things this way is expensive, and if you find someone to do it cheaply, they are almost certainly going to dump it where they find a convenient field gate open :(

"......an invitation for scumbags everywhere to buy a field, dump 1000's ton of rubbish in it, then call the authorities and say they don't know who did it and expect the authorities to clean it all up"

That is what they are already doing, but finding ways of obfuscating the true ownership.

If they were in Nottinghamshire/Derbyshire, they would have been tyres ;)

Attackers have 16-digit card numbers, expiry dates, but not names. Now org gets £500k fine

If the details don't change, I would suggest changing card provider. I only have one payment card, and when it is due to expire I get sent a replacement (usually significantly in advance of the existing card's expiry date, and with an earlier expiry date on it - the old card is rendered invalid after first use of its replacement), and the last four of the 16 digit number change, along with the three digit verification code.

GPT-5 bests human judges in legal smack down

Re: I am the decider!

"How can the AI be more accurate at applying the law than the judges?"

As the 'AI' currently being invoked is an LLM, it can't.

This is because it can only come up with an answer based on what a human judge has previously decided in a case or cases that the pattern matching of the LLM has found in its data store.

Once again, current AI (whilst giving an outward appearance of doing incredible things) really isn't anything approaching intelligence

Re: Thumbs up !!!

"I thought this was 'only' in the US of A BUT it is appearing in the UK & EU courts "

Often occurring in UK and EU courts when one of the parties involved is a large US of A corporation ;)

I think you would need to see more detail about what prompts were made to the bot along the way before concluding it is better than a human judge. I have said before, these things always give me the impression that if the prompts are slanted in a particular direction, these bots will come up with a plausible response that will tend to support that bias.

I also think that one case example doesn't really prove any ability one way or the other. It is also a case where the original has a well documented decision; a bit different from having a bot make a judgement on a live case!

Keir Starmer declares 'months' timeline for social media age clampdown in UK

Re: A tiny mind juggling too many thoughts?

It is both grating and irritating to many of us.

However, as an appointed Knight, the etiquette in place does mean that 'Sir Kier' is nonetheless the correct form of address.

Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it

Re: code reviews, anyone?

".......get Claude to tell us what it thinks is wrong with the code"

That's the problem, right there.

None of these things can actually 'think'.

Openreach turns up the heat to force laggards off legacy copper lines

There really isn't anything to learn - using a phone with 'Digital Voice' is exactly the same as they always have been with the prior system. The holdouts referred to by the original article are principally businesses (and some otf them quite large ones at that.

It isn't simply a case of old people refusing to change.

If you dial a mobile from a landline, the higher cost isn't merely 'percieved'. Those of us who live somewhere with no useable mobile signal don't have much option :(

Re: Apples and oranges?

My set-up is similar - BT sent the UPS when I explained that I have no mobile signal inside the house (and pretty much erratic and unusable outside). I still use the analogue phone plugged into the BT hub, and have never even bothered taking the DECT phone out of its box.

Re: Perhaps....

"The good news will be that there will be less calls fraudulent / scamming calls"

How so?

Since being switched to 'Digital Voice', I have seen no reduction in the number of spurious callers to may landline number. The number hasn't changed, only the medium for delivering the calls, so not a great surprise to me.

Nearly 17,000 Volvo staff dinged in supplier breach

I read the headline and thought "Here we go again!"

I don't know for sure whether companies learn from their own mistakes, but one would hope so - it is increasingly clear that few of them seem to be learning from other companies mistakes.

Machine learning could yield faster, cheaper lithium-ion battery development

Re: Yeah, no.

".....and keep an eye on how they're charging, storing, and discharging"

...and spontaneously combusting?

I think they really need to be properly tested in all these ways <before> letting them anywhere near the public at large.

Study confirms experience beats youthful enthusiasm

Re: Experience includes institutional knowledge

"....were everything is completely and properly documented, there is no reason why a younger employee could not match, or exceed, the productivity of a senior employee."

I don't think that can be entirely right. A totally new and totally inexperienced employee is never going to have the productivity potential of an experienced one, but with access to the complete documentation , an inexperienced employee can very probably become as productive as an experienced one much more quickly, and can then probably overtake the experienced employee due to a younger, more active brain, not already stuck in a rut, and having a new, fresh approach to the tasks in hand.

However, I don't think the ability to exceed the productivity of a very experienced employee is guaranteed, and most younger employees are not likely to become highly productive until they have become the experienced employee.

Documentation is also massively helped by the older experienced employees being willing to take the time and trouble to help show the inexperienced how the job is done - it seems to me that there are a significant number of older experienced people who are unwilling to help the younger inexperienced ones (and before anyone starts; I am one of the oldies :)).

Flickr emails users about data breach, pins it on third party

Blaming a third party again.

The users have entrusted the security of their details to the first-party (Flickr), it is the first party's responsibility to keep those details secure. If a third party breach exposes that information, it is still the first party to blame - either they should not pass those details on, or they should have taken steps to ensure that the security of any third party is sufficiently robust. Clearly they didn't, and clearly it wasn't!

'The EU runs on Microsoft' – and Uncle Sam could turn it off, claims MEP

True, but we don't actually get them all year round (we don't import them from anywhere else), but nowadays they are available from UK production for more than half the year.

I wasn't keen when I was young either, but now they are my most used green veg.

"These greenouses need to be heated as well. "

They do indeed, and increasingly large scale greenhouses are being heated using heat from an anaerobic digestion plant (which would otherwise just be waste, discharged to the atmosphere). There is a 10ha greenhouse on a farm near Boston, Lincolnshire which was erected specifically to harness the waste heat from an AD plant that had been built there a few years previously (the main purpose of which is electricity generation).

And yes, it produces strawberries all the year round (around 1200 tonnes of them!)

British Sugar have a similar AD plant and an 18ha greenhouse set up near Kings Lynn, fueled by the waste from processing sugar beet - it used to produce a large proportion of the tomatoes sold in the UK, but nowadays is used for pharmaceutical crop production, which is significantly more profitable).

In both cases, the AD plant is primarily for electricity generation feeding into the grid, and that is where the money is made, so the heat is just a waste by-product, and for the greenhouses is effectively free.

"Not an issue if you like you potatoes and turnips"

Add to that: carrots, parsnips, beetroot, leeks, onions, cabbages, Brussels sprouts, cauliflowers, spinach, kale, broccoli etc.........all of which are produced all year round on UK farms - outside; in fields, with no greenhouse needed at all.

"It might not take the UK long to be self sufficient in food but there'd be no more strawberries at Christmas"

There are a growing number of UK farms producing strawberries in the UK all year round - on a large scale - in large greenhouses. The need to import strawberries for the UK market in wintertime is dimishing significantly.

As for complete UK self-sufficiency in food production - very little chance if the Government continue to allow farming to be financially squeezed so that farmers are only too happy to assist with the Goverments insistance on covering the countryside in solar panels, and allowing eco-fanatics to prevent them from producing food efficiently.

I remain in search of any evidence to convince me that the threat from Russia and the threat "from across the pond" are entirely separate from one another!.

Re: Reality bites

"However, the UK's new F-35A nuclear weapons are only usable with American permission,"

That is just disingenuous deflection of the discussion.

Any nuclear weapons to be delivered by RAF F35s would be used as part of existing commitments to NATO and will be drawn from US stocks in the first place - those stocks including the nuclear weapons leased to other NATO members in Europe. The UK does not have any nuclear warheads/bombs for dropping from aircraft - previously held UK stocks of airborne nuclear warheads were decommissioned and disposed of over 20 years ago, so we no longer have any and there is no intention (or money) to acquire any.

The UK is neither acquiring extra nuclear warheads for airborne delivery , nor is the UK going to reduce or replace Trident with them.

Re: Reality bites

"The UK's nuclear deterrent is rented from the USA and can only be used with American permission

That is incorrect.

The UK nuclear deterrent (Trident) is not rented from the US; it is owned by the UK and the nuclear warheads fitted to it are UK designed and manufactured.

It is true that whilst Trident was bought by the UK, the way it works in practice is that the individual missiles themselves are stored and maintained in the US when not deployed in the UK,s Vanguard class submarines, whilst the British warheads are manufactured, stored and maintained by the AWE at Aldermaston.

Nonetheless, whilst installed in the Royal Navy boats, they are not under US control. The UK does not need US permission to use them, the US has no right of veto under the sale terms, but the the sale agreement with US does make clear that the weapons are fully committed to NATO and their use independently of NATO action should only happen where there is a "supreme national interest" in doing so.

The nuclear weapons of both the UK and France are outside of US control. The nuclear weapons held by other European countries however are leased from the US as part of their NATO committments and therefore the US does directly control when and how those weapons may be used.

The rest of your post is largely correct, I think, and you have articulated the same concerns over the deep intertwining of US and UK systems that this presents to the change in the European/UK relationship with the US.

Palantir declares itself the guardian of Americans' rights

Re: The global AI Panopticon

Quite.

Now ask it how AI is helping to protect the privacy, safety and rights of ordinary people from state interference in their lives and watch it come up with a similarly plausible word salad of total bollocks to support that proposition.

The more that I see and hear with regard to the current crop of LLM 'AI', the more it becomes apparent that they will provide you with whatever answer the wording of your query gives the impression that you are hoping for.

"Palantir declares itself the guardian of Americans' rights"

Palantir???

This must be some new definition of 'American Rights' that I had not previously been aware of ?

Musk distracts from struggling car biz with fantastical promise to make 1 million humanoid robots a year

Re: process their pay

QED!

Re: process their pay

"You are another example of the lazy office worker at a computer."

Wrong again - I am not and never have been, an office worker.

If you think you didn't insult anyone, I suggest re-reading your own original post - you made a sweeping statement basically calling all the staff in your local council offices useless layabouts who do nothing all day. I am not sure how any office worker (especially those in local Government) could take that as anything other than insulting them.

US TikTok service restored after cloud 'that doesn't go down' went down

"US TikTok service restored...."

That's a shame. The US has my sympathy.

Microsoft spends billions on AI, converts just 3.3% of Copilot Chat users

"CEO talks momentum ...."

CEO talks out of his arse more like.

Claude Code's prying AIs read off-limits secret files

Re: Devil's Advocate

".....that it is following the last instruction that it was given..."

Pretty much what most humans do at work when faced with lots of conflicting instructions from several managers/foremen - follow the last instruction.

Not really surprising perhaps that a machine would be programmed to do the same ?

Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

Re: Russia as heir to the Soviet Union, went home without firing a shot

"Bring on your exagerrated millions of killed and I will counter, bring on your arguments of efficiency and I will laugh and laugh and laugh"

I think someone should bring on a reliable history book for you to read.

Re: We should ditch SLL US dhit

This is currently rather the issue - replace them with what?

Re: Not a Trump thing.

"....busy making money from making oil & gas ever more expensive."

When you actually examine the price of oil (Brent Crude, usually taken as the principal benchmark), the price of oil has peaked and fallen away several times in the last 40 years, most recently a spike to its highest ever following the massive drop during Covid. Since that peak in early 2022, the price has been erratic, but nonetheless the trend has been very distinctly downwards, and gives no real indication of that general trend not continuing.

The current oil price (despite a small spike in the last week or so) is broadly similar to the price of Brent Crude 20 years ago. The data is easy enough to find (in easy to interpret graph form) on any number of oil related websites which will come up with a basic internet search.

So, "making money from making oil and gas ever more expensive"? No, not really.

NS&I's IT car crash considers cutting legacy links to stop the bleeding

Licence ;)

'Ralph Wiggum' loop prompts Claude to vibe-clone commercial software for $10 an hour

Re: 10$/hour - for now

Or, faced with paying the real costs, those using these things throw up their arms in horror, and stop using them rather than pay an amount not justified by the benefits (assuming they still think there are any?)......

........and these AI companies collapse etc, etc.

Re: Sounds awful

"LLMs are fantastic at maths and coding"

I think there are quite a few commentards on El Reg who might strongly disagree with your use of the word fantastic there. It may be a useful starting point, but that is all.

In the end, any general LLM is only going to come up with an answer that is already in its repository of data. Anything different that it concocts will come about from the way it constructs the plausible word/number/code salad that it serves up, and is as likely to be garbage as it is to be useful. If used by "any idiot" to write code, that idiot is unlikely to know enough about coding to be able to see whether the code it spews out is good or bad, and equally unlikely to know how to rework it to make it usable. If they do know enough to spot the shortcomings, they could probably have written it correctly in the first place, without needing any input from the LLM.