Posts by nobody who matters

Ukrainian hackers claim to have destroyed major Russian drone maker's entire network

Re: 10TB of backup files

I think it appears to me that he simply misread/misinterpreted the OP's comment, which I clearly understood to mean that the OP was hoping the Russians <don't> have any backups.

PUTTY.ORG nothing to do with PuTTY – and now it's spouting pandemic piffle

I am afraid that I respect neither him nor his lower case name or indeed his cranky ideas. It is my right to choose what I will or will not respect ;)

If you want a picture of the future, imagine humans checking AI didn't make a mistake – forever

Re: Once and for all, LLMs are NOT "Artificial Intellegence"

Artificial or not, the real issue is that is <not> intelligence ;)

How to trick ChatGPT into revealing Windows keys? I give up

Re: Great idea

"AI" all the way down

Down appears to be the only direction for 'AI' LLMs as far as I can see.

C-suite sours on AI despite rising investment, survey finds

Re: "despite rising investment"

Slough of despond ;)

Salesforce study finds LLM agents flunk CRM and confidentiality tests

Re: Confidentiality Awareness

"and most humans will take both to mean the same, "

Only the ones who are illiterate ;)

AI models just don't understand what they're talking about

Re: LInk to preprint, abstract on arxiv

"You didn't grasp that they weren't the commenatrd's words at all,"

I did, but the whole report that was linked to came across to me as pretty incoherent tbh

Not much of a degree then, was it.

If that approach is general in the UK, it perhaps explains why there are so few really able engineers?

Re: Cited LLM test invalid?

"The ability of LLMs to create new knowledge needs to be explained..."

It is easily explained - LLMs do not have that ability. They can only regurgitate the data that they have been fed, so anything that comes out has to based on something which went in (ie. knowledge that somebody has previously posted on the internet).

If the word salad they create form the pre-existing knowledge contained in their dataset turns out to describe a totally new and previously unthought of concept, this is simply coincidence and would be expected to happen occasionally where random pieces of knowledge and random words and phrases are jumbled together. It's a little bit like the infinite number of monkeys randomly pressing keys on an infinite number of typewriters eventually producing the complete works of Shakespeare.

Re: LInk to preprint, abstract on arxiv

"....internal incoherence....."

I am pleased that you used those words. They sum up my impression of your post :)

"We'll eventually figure out LLMs are only really *part* of a brain"

I think most of us figured out a long time ago that they are not even that ;)

Massive spike in use of .es domains for phishing abuse

Re: The reason....

Whilst a company/corporation/organisation may well own multiple domain names to stop others passing themselves off as being them, they are not required to have all of them in use, particularly where sensitive data is being submitted through them.

And even where they do use more than one, they should redirect to the principle domain as you say.

Ousted US copyright chief argues Trump did not have power to remove her

Re: Wouldn’t it be useful to be able to X that “other” box

"Bring back the benevolent dictator"

Does such a thing exist?

I can't think of any either current or recent. Or perhaps I am just poorly educated when it comes to politics and history?

Meta calls €200M EU fine over pay-or-consent ad model 'unlawful'

Re: Brown envelopes

"The real agreement is simple: keep the ad money flowing and the citizens pacified."

You appear to be another of those who seem to think it all begins and ends with the ads. So many people really do seem to believe that the personal data gathering is merely for serving advertisments, and that is the sum total of the income of organisations such as Meta.

I rather think that the reality is that the bulk of the money comes from where else the rest of us strongly suspect the data is being sold, and who it is being sold to and the purposes it is potentially being sold for.

I think the advertisment revenue is a smokescreen.

Re: Social media - the world's leading oxymoron

"A world without social media. What might that be like?"

Some of us are old enough to know the answer to that ;)

I would concur with your answer :)

'Elevated' moisture reading ignored before Heathrow-closing conflagration, says NESO

Re: Heathrow not blameless

The 'Big Red Folder' will no doubt contain various procedures for dealing with a wide range of emergencies, and if arranged sensibly, would be ordered according to the likelihood of them happening and/or the severity of the consequences. Total failure of the electrical supply would be fairly well down the list I would have thought, and so the emergency procedures related to a total power blackout would probably not be at the top of the list, and therefore not on page 1.

Whilst you could have a separate different coloured folder for different types of emergency, keeping all the procedures within one folder may well make it easier and faster to find the appropriate set of instructions.

US Department of Defense will stop sending critical hurricane satellite data

Re: There isn't a hurricane on the way

Four people who are blind?

Or are they simply poorly educated, or perhaps simply unintelligent?

Re: There isn't a hurricane on the way

"There isn't a hurricane on the way

Well, that's what I think Mr Fish said."

That was the gist of what he said, and he was technically correct - the wind speeds didn't reach hurricane force, even though it felt like it to those of us who experienced the weather that night.

Re: There isn't a hurricane on the way

That sounds a very plausible theory, but in practise, I don't think it is entirely supported by the evidence.

There are a great many very well educated people who are not liberal minded at all.

Neither do you have to be a liberal to be against the establishment of an extreme right wing authoritarian dictatorship; and you don't need a good education or a great deal of intelligence to see that is precisely the direction in which the USA is currently being driven. Indeed, it is almost there (after only 6 months!)

Education is I think, only part of the story.

AI agents get office tasks wrong around 70% of the time, and a lot of them aren't AI at all

Re: Carol Burnett

For some of us it isn't so much that we are too young to remember (I'm not), but rather that we are the wrong side of the Atlantic to know ;)

Re: HAL or Holly?

<......"Captain Picard is using a replicator......".....>

Which would (one assumes) be pretty similar to the Nutri-Matic on board the Heart of Gold which "made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject's metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centers of the subject's brain to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea." (The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy; Douglas Adams)

<........."When Captain Picard says in Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Tea, Earl Grey, hot," that's agentic AI, translating the voice command and passing the input for the food replicator."......>

Is it bollocks!

It is simply using voice recognition to to translate the voice command into the exact same digital inputs that you would generate by pressing buttons on a control pad. It is no different from using voice commands to tell your smart phone who to ring. As usual, the only intelligence of any kind that is involved is that of the programmer who wrote the software.

Agentic AI my arse!

If some supposedly intelligent people are being taken in and conned into believing any of this is genuinely AI in any form, they need to realise that they are not as intelligent as they think they are.

Fresh UK postcode tool points out best mobile network in your area

Says it all :(

Depressing that Ofcom staff are illiterate to the extent of not knowing the difference in English between metre and meter.

Re: I think someone is lying

Likewise, according to the map EE has an 88% rating where I am. I can assure them that it doesn't. I rarely get a signal at all (and then only within a roughly 1 metre area upstairs), and even if I have a signal it is rarely capable of sending a text, and whilst the phone will ring out if someone calls, the signal vanishes if I try to answer it. I have tried several providers over the time I have lived here and none of the others were much different.

Here in the eastern part of the UK, once you get away from towns coverage is patchy, intermittent and the signal comes and goes during the course of a call.

Anyone who thinks that a mobile phone is all you need in the wider UK is a moron.

Re: Bin lorries

Most councils now appear to require bins to be left at the curtilage (ie. at the kerbside). For a significant number of people, particularly in rural areas, the curtilage may be a considerable distance from their house.

Those people are most requently the people who suffer very sketchy mobile coverage.

Fed chair Powell says AI is coming for your job

Re: Can we get AI to replace 'Daddy'?

Probably, but I doubt that it would perform any better tbh.

Oh dear - is that you Jerome?

<....."Fed chair Powell says AI is coming for your job".......>

Fed chair Powell says AI is coming for his job

FTFH

His job is probably one of those which could be replaced by some form of AI, but AI has a long way to go yet before it is going to be capable of replacing anyone who is actually capable of doing the job expected of them. Whilst there seem to be countless numbers of people who don't seem capable of doing the job they have been given, that doesn't mean that AI will be the best choice to replace them, rather than taking the care to select the right person in the first place.

BOFH: Peeling back the layers of the magic banana industrial complex

Re: Finally someone will realise

Just in case there happens to be someone reading this who isn't familiar with Red Dwarf, the clip is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8525OKIhwqk

Re: Apple

iBan users are easily confused.

Re: Finally someone will realise

The episode of Red Dwarf (S4E1 "Camille") that the quote "It's a small, off-duty Czechoslovakian traffic warden" comes from was first broadcast on 14th February 1991, which was almost 2 years before Czechoslovakia was split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia at the end of 1992.

At the time, the writers would not have known that..

Glasgow City Council online services crippled following cyberattack

Reading the title, I felt that a quote from a bowl of petunias would be appropriate here :)

Exif marks the spot as fresh version of PNG image standard arrives

Re: Still relevant?

<......."Is PNG still relevant or is it largely supplanted by WEBP.......".......>

I would say almost everything is more relevant than WEBP, which frankly I consider to be a POS.

UK to buy nuclear-capable F-35As that can't be refueled from RAF tankers

Re: How can Starmer be so daft?

In what way did it work?

In what way can the German advance be considered as being not rapid: the fall of France came only 45 days after the German army started its invasion of that country.

No the Maginot Line did NOT work.

Re: How can Starmer be so daft?

<......"Freefall nukes went out of fashion 50 years ago""......>

Nuclear war is down to fashion? .

Re: Decoupling Europes Military from the US should not entail becoming a client of the US

<....."I wonder how long it will be before we get an accountment that the RAF is buying the new Boeing tanker?".....>

Most likely the answer to that is 'Never'. A 'Flying Boom' type A2A refuelling system can easily be fitted to the A400 (which the RAF alread has on strength - no need for anything from Bong)

Re: US has it's finger on the Kill Switch.

<......"......and costs the UK nothing"......>

Exactly this, because the F35A are coming <instead> of part of a future tranche of F35B. This isn't an extra order.

Much is being spouted about a total of 138 F35 having been ordered, but the number actually confirmed so far is only about half of that. There never has been an absolute guarantee that the UK would eventually take the full 138 .

It would certainly appear to be an utterly bonkers decision if we were to buy the dozen or so F35A as an additional order to the existing F35 procurement package. As this deal is actually substituting the F35B in the original deal for the same number of F35A, it is perhaps somewhat less of a crazy decision.

With the current uncertainty and erratic changes in policy and direction from The White House, the sane course of action would probably be to either pause or cancel the original contract, but I am not sure what the UK could purchase from elsewhere instead? (and asking to vary.cancel the agreed contract would almost certainly incur a significant financial penalty). Plus there is the not insignificant matter of UK defence manufacturer input regarding the F35 (about 15% according to Lockheed Martin, although I am not sure whether that is by value or by weight?).

LLMs can hoover up data from books, judge rules

<......."One of the most tech-savvy judges in the US has ruled that Anthropic is within its rights to scan purchased books to train its Claude AI model, but that pirating content is legally out of bounds.....".....>

That is a somewhat different slant on the judgement from the impression that the author has tried to give with the headline.

The argument was always that it was the scraping of pirated works and the failure to make payment or acknowledgement of the source that was the principal issue. The tech companies argued against the idea that they should have to pay for the work, but the judgement has (quite rightly) upheld the view that if those companies wish to use the work for their own profit, they should have to pay for it (mind you, it is debatable whether those companies will actually see any profit from the tools they are using these works for).

Teens used encrypted chats to recruit for 'violence as a service' murder ring, Europol says

Re: Dark maths

<...."Welsh is just a prank.....".....>

Welsh is just a disease of the throat .

Re: Scandinavia

May I enquire what orking a cow involves, and exactly how an orker carries it out?

Re: Scandinavia

<......."If the same thing were to happen today it would be headline news".....>

It was headline news back then. Perhaps you are too young to know, or too old to remember?

I don't know what planet your post relates to, but it certainly isn't the planet Earth that I am familiar with.

And if you really believe that the portrayal of violence was worse in the 1930s, you are either making it up, or giving too much creedence to someone else who has made it up. You only have to watch, hear or read stuff from that time and compare it with more recent output to see very clearly how much more actual violence and violent crime has been depicted in the recent past , and to see how much more graphic and brutal that depiction is.

Re: Scandinavia

So nine people prefer to take the racist view?

Re: How does this happen?

Are you sure that the ones pursuing the 'guns for hire' line are actually from 'sink estates' ?

Re: Heavy Lifting Needed......Heavy Lifting Also Imposed On Snoops.....

Surely democracy is for all, and if someone wants to separate out differing degrees of democracy for different people, it ceases to be democratic?

Re: Dark maths

"The Internet was becoming a big democratiser."

When you look at the way democracy appears to be going in a number of prominent western democracies, that assertion is perhaps debatable?

Re: Dark maths

Not exclusive to English though - it actually got there from Latin via French, and is used in a wide number of European languages where they have had the good sense to call actually call it double-V. Only the English decided call it double-U (possibly harking back to the Latin where a the sound for U and the sound for V were both written as the same shaped character - V).

The AIpocalypse is here for websites as search referrals plunge

Re: The genie is out of the bottle

If you know enough about the subject to be able to spot the errors, you probably don't need to ask the question in the first place.

If you don't know enough about the subject to be able to spot the errors, then the search tool isn't going to be much help to you, because you will be left wondering whether the answer it has given you is entirely correct or not.

I preferred it when we had search tools which would give you an answer (or at least links to an answer) which you could almost always rely on being correct.

Re: Be careful what you wish for

<...."It was about google asking for free stuff.".....>

Google didn't ask. They simply took with neither a please nor a thank-you (hardly surprising as I am pretty convinced that neither term exists in the vocabulary of anyone at Google. . . . or indeed at most large tech companies).