* Posts by Metro-Gnome

9 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Aug 2021

Deepfakes being used in 'sextortion' scams, FBI warns

Metro-Gnome

Re: Is this any different from photoshop?

It has been a thing well before photo-shop. Newspapers have been sharing on edited or 'untrue' photos since the Cottingley Fairies and before.

Now the pictures may move and be in colour but not in any of our lifetimes have we been fully able to trust a picture or video we didn't know the provenance of.

Claims of AI sentience branded 'pure clickbait'

Metro-Gnome

Turtles all the way down

We've not got sentient AI, not sure we ever will, because we humans are very sure that we have some 'intelligence' which can't be replicated merely by doing what we do. People seem very certain that they know intelligence but cry foul at it meeting tests for intelligence because lots of 'intelligent' people would fail and a plethora of animals and machines now would pass.

In the comments above I see 'self-awareness' and 'sentience' unqualifiable attributes which if expounded upon would have further un-definable characteristics. The 'I'll know it when I see it' approach to defining something is just bias and prejudice which we have seen humans do repeatedly through history with some appalling results.

If we live and interact more virtually than ever before do I mind if the persona-vacuum that is 'Dave from accounts'* is actually devoid of a flesh-bag?

*other Daves may have personas

Tencent Cloud slaps googly eyes on a monitor, says it can care for oldies

Metro-Gnome

Re: "also comes with an emergency button so it can help users if they fall"

Its a minimally viable product. Or perhaps even a minimising viability product.

Infosys skips government meeting – and collecting government taxes

Metro-Gnome
Facepalm

Re: "the only way out of the churn"

Or..

... market your company aggressively to developers with gimmicks and shallow promises, pay about market average and protect those margins for your share-holders. All while wrangling lucrative ever-extended government contracts with limited transparency and little understanding from those opening the countries chequebook to you.

It's not big or clever but it does work (for some values of work)

Meet Moeco, Ukrainian-led biz using IoT trackers to follow supplies into invaded land

Metro-Gnome

Deposits and re-usable

With 95% of journey's being single direction a return deposit scheme, as old pop-bottles had, would see them coming back for reuse efficiently and save materials and energy resources.

Not hugely consumerist but still providing all the data to harvest and allowing for more robust and better communicating tags.

Alphabet's Wing drone unit inks supermarket delivery deal

Metro-Gnome

Re: "the next evolution in delivery technology"

That cargo trike would be piloted by a real human being with all their carbon footprint, on roads that have to be installed with heavy diesel-drinking plant machinery and maintained by similar, to provide a circuitous often traffic slowed route from source to destination. Only to find the recipient got bored of waiting after the tracking app said it was delivered 15 minutes ago already so gets carried back and resent the next day.

An automated point to point delivery and return, using no linking infrastructure, with much greater intrinsic traffic capacity, might be able to define a delivery slot more effectively and so miss less folk. Not need a unionised waged worker to deliver it between 8am and 8pm maybe.

When you must have nuggets at 3:15am, a drone to your driveway might well be the carbon cheaper option.

China to crush secondary market providing forbidden gaming accounts to kids

Metro-Gnome
Pint

Replace Cyber with Alcohol

If you reflect on a thing which has up sides and massive social involvement but also is known to do bad things to some and generally not very great things to others. limiting exposure by age restrictions, operating hours and policing black-markets, this looks a lot like most governments approaches to alcohol.

The gaming and social media genies are out of the bottles, better regulate now than bury heads and deny the potential harms ad infinitum

Hey, AI software developers, you are taking Unicode into account, right ... right?

Metro-Gnome
Facepalm

Long time to find

I had a unicode issue when code written, complied and running smoothly on US, UK and French machines would not on machines in Japan. It turns out the U+300A and U+300B some nice person had used for their comments was converted to a local《 and 》which parsed completely differently. Caused a lot of global head scratching and the universally popular "it works on my machine".

Get ready to make processes fit the software when shifting to SAP's cloud, users told

Metro-Gnome

Re: "Get ready to make processes fit the software"

If you have the 'right' way to do things do all your tools have to be this way?

When you pick a company car do you look at what's on the market and adjust your process for the car you're using, or must it be a 1976 Triumph Stag with 12k on the clock 'cause that is the right one?

SAP is a tool you buy off the shelf, if it's the wrong tool you can buy another or make your own.

If you make it, it'll likely not be as complex, robust or maintainable. If your inflexibility in adapting your processes to new tools is worth that much to you go ahead and spend the time and effort.

Do you see software as a tool, like vehicles or plant, well crafted and artful things at times but tools to serve a purpose, or do you see them as things in themselves which 'must' work in only the way you insist?