Posts by that one in the corner 5065 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Nov 2021
"We know a quatrain about that, don't we, boys and girls? Altogether now:"
"Quand l'animal a l'homme domestique, Apres grands peines & sauts viendra parler"
(Voiceover: "The words mean 'When brute power by man is tamed, After great pains & efforts it shall carry speech,'")
"Guantanamera"*
* oops, sorry, the needle jumped tracks
Also, steel production has moved away from blowing atmospheric gasses directly into the furnace - complete with your contaminants, including radioactives of various stripes - to using purified gas, which is, well, cleaner. Plus a lot of the muck had short half-lives (hence nasty) and is greatly reduced anyway. So modern-day steel is generally better than it was in the 50s and 60s ("Is that some groovy UV paint, baby, or are you just scintillating?").
And, as you say, computers can be used to characterise the individual instruments and clean up the signal, certainly well enough for everyday practical devices such as medical imagers.
But at the same time, our lovably roguish physicists and cosmologists come up with increasingly whacky ideas that need lower and lower noise floors[1]: there is no point trying to get some peace and quiet by going down a mine if you are going to make your huge tub of dry-cleaning fluid[2] out of "sparkly" metal panels[3].
[1] although they also like the idea that, instead of lowering the noise floor, you boost the signal and just make the detector ten times larger - in each dimension! Square Kilometre Array? Pah! Radio astronomers are wimps, we're going for a CUBIC Kilometre Array! We'll find some *interesting* WIMPs that way! And we'll put it under the ice! Eat your heart out, Blofeld! Mwaaahahahaaa. Ah, can we edit out that last bit?
[2] yes, I know they do better than that nowadays, I just love that image. The principle stands.
[3] sorry, no attribution, this is from chats after lectures, so no follow up as to how far it went from "I'd like to get" to "they sent someone diving in Scapa Flow for me" or "they gave me another post-grad statistician" is not known.
> getting a source of data entirely created by humans remains as easy as it always was. Taping the creativity of humans is as easy as it always was.
That totally misses the point.
The total of the available data (or "content") will always contain materials created purely by humans. But, from now on, it will also always contain content created by non-humans.
The problem - that you entirely fail to address - is how to tell the two apart, how to sort the wheat from the chaff. We - both humans and the machines - can only read what has been published (whether to the public or to a restricted audience, like your dev team). And we have no way of telling, for certain, what was purely human, what was purely machine output and what was an unholy mix of the two by the time it reaches us.
Unless, that is, you ARE truly proposing that we "ask humans to sit in a room and create content" whilst under constant surveillance to ensure that what we get is purely human created, with a certificate of compliance to prove it.
In point of fact, yes, we could literally do that, pay people to sit in rooms and create on demand, to generate material that is fit to be fed into the maw of the LLM. But you are not going to get either quality or quantity from doing so, and especially not in an affordable fashion: "Hello, miss world-renowned author, how much do we need to pay you to have our invigilator watch your every move?" Not to mention the cost of the invigilator's wages.
And we'll just do that for everybody who may feel like publishing something, just in case they turn out to be the next high-quality creator, because we want to have machines trained on the best, so they can generate the best. Although, hang on, we also want machines that can, on demand, sound like the young, or the old, or the illiterate, or managers, or salesdroids, or the "xxx as a second language", every shade of human (to help when asking the machines to write/edit/criticise a book, a play, a film script).
It will be a great relief to everybody, not just the trainer's of LLMs, when everything we ever see/read/hear is accompanied by a rating, from "hand crafted by humans" or "shat out by AI", issued by the BBFC[1]. But until that happy day, this concern is anything but "twaddle".
[1] Big Brother For Creativity
Every week during their childhood they'd been told that they weren't allowed to use the scissors. And now they hold you "in loco parentis"[1], as the lady barrister/solicitor would say, as you are clearly the only responsible adult in the vicinity, your obvious maturity being both a blessing and a curse; so now you are to blame for not telling them they are still not allowed to use the scissors.
[1] which means "I drove my parents totally loco, now it is your turn" "But I don't know your parents" - tssh boom.
> On another site ... filing cabinet with a big, solid metal strap padlocked through all the handles ... a telephone started ringing and ringing quietly in the next drawer up ... "Oh, we don't answer that one."
Congratulations, you have been called to Outpost Delta.
Please make no attempt to interact with either SCP 270 or SCP 145, one of which will be present depedent upon the phase of The Moon.
Familiarise youself with the use of amnestics and be prepared to self-administer before leaving the establishment.
To be fair, if they are willing to pay, you can build a PC into a desk and hide it all - although the mouse still needs to be free to move around - but there was a pantograph available before the mouse became all the rage.
Old issues of Byte magazine have adverts for really nice desks, with panels that hinge up to swing the CRT jnto view or slide into the top letting the keyboard to rise up (none of those drawers that pull out from underneath and stick it right into your belly).
> best selling childrens book author ... foul mouth rant
That's the trouble, all those years of being sweet and syrupy for the children - well, the publishers, parents and interviewers, mostly - with no safety valve, they'll blow at any time.
OTOH had a lovely chat with an author at a Con couple of weeks back, she's great fun, up for making a fool of herself. Read the first one of another of her series this week: yikes! Double yikes! Had to finish it before trying to get to sleep so at least I knew the heroine was still alive, if not entirely safe & well (not a spoiler, it is a series).
> Brute-forcing combinatorial puzzles tends to proceed by (breadth- or depth-first) traversal of the tree of legal "next moves"...
That is what you, as a sensible person, do to brute-force something: "only do what is legal from this point, instead of later on finding out it wasn't even a possibility". But in that, you have already applied a level of optimisation. You probably that that optimisation is "utterly obvious and trivial to say it should be done", but that is because this isn't your first rodeo (or your tutor pointed it out to you).
But what you describe isn't *the* most brutal approach - so the LLM can do worse than you. Or it may get lucky and do better...
> It would be rather difficult, though, to get an LLM to even attempt that, since it would by default simply look up all the existing human-devised heuristics. I can't even begin to imagine how to automate discovery of good heuristics (the "meta" game of discovering Sudoku heuristics must have a truly brutal search tree!)
Not too hard to do, conceptually - you forget entirely about using bleeping LLMs to solve anything and just set up a far simpler, but still based upon Neural Nets, ML model to play Sudoku. Reward it for writing out the shortest number of steps to solution, tested against your existing solver to see if it is doing it right. Don't worry about the horrid search tree, that is the job of the ML process. The rewards for writing out is the bit you want to think about, otherwise you'll get a blackbox Sudoku solver, nothing about what tricks it has managed to find to reach that solution.
Other commenters here can probably name a Python ML library or two to try the ideas out with, if you know how to attach your existing solver to Python (assuming you find Python an easy language to play with).
> The reason it can solve Fox & Geese
Is because it has seen the answer more than once whilst scraping the web, let alone all the books it has ingested.
Hmm, wonder if any of the other ancient puzzles have ever had their answers published in anything an LLM may have been trained on?
> There's no reasoning required, you just need to graph (in terms of graph theory) the tree of possible actions and before you're even a few steps in you have your complete solution. There's no depth, no thinking required at all.
Hate to break it to you, but even vaguely considering graphing it out is taking reasoning steps - which is why you will find these puzzles used in Intro To Graphs Theory!
Brute-forcing these means just writing out every possible sequence, with no consideration at that point as to whether the move is even legal (which is what your graph helps with), then looking to see if that fits the rules. Even the next step up - backtracking - is adding a reasoning step and the bestest answer (ignore graph theory, just run the problem from the last step backwards and then print the answer out in the other order) is brutish in execution but reasoned in its design.
Is there no end to the insanity within JavaScript?
Although, obviously, now we know about the translation tool (ta for the URL) we're going to use this inside our own JS, but responsibly, of course.
> "During our analysis, we found thousands of websites with this type of obfuscated JavaScript injected into their webpages."
Although, some of you clearly knew about already.
> So I am guessing that although the version specific data is there in the AI somewhere it is not always being fully referenced when code samples generated
Or perhaps there is a misunderstanding of what goes on inside an LLM - this belief that it has stored those language specs in some neatly checkable form and then actually runs checks; as though it was looking things up in any way that is analogous to your deliberately re-reading the function lists.
It is a good idea to start every sesion by feeding in your entire codebase, again - because then you are burning up input tokens as fast as the machine can eat them. And pay for the privilege, of course.
If the LLM was retaining your code then you'd not need to pay for all those lovely expensive tokens EVERY session.
So you can trust the LLM not to permanently ingest your data because that would lower your payments to the model provider (assuming you aren't trying to do it on the cheap with a "free" service).
NeWS - the only thing that any of my jobs ever sent me out to formally learn was NeWS: off to Sun I was packed.
Loved learning it[1] but never actually released a product that used it - the rest of the world moved on. And work realised that just dropping a tech book near me was cheaper than paying for a residential course; even cheaper if they just mentioned George's had new stock in, as I'd probably be off to Park Street and buy it myself.
[1] then again, at the time I was into Forth, so PostScript made perfect sense. At the time.
> will almost certainly be running headless without X11 anyway
But that is the whole Joy Of X, isn't it?
Your compute resources run headless whilst you have an X server box on your desk, which is doing all the rendering on its own video card. You have a seamless desktop showing whatever is most useful from each bit of compute, as well as anything you are running locally, whether that is just an xterm or a GUI of relevance to that box. Preferably those X clients on the compute boxes are being sensible and using the protocol wisely, not trying to render locally and then just send out bitmaps simply to get some pointless glitz.
And/or as many Users as are sharing the compute have an X server box each...
Admittedly, nowadays a lot of headless boxes provide for control across the network by serving up web pages instead of X clients, or some other (proprietary?) protocol that just sends sysopish data to a machine management dashboard UI running on your desktop. The latter may be more efficient (if it can only pass data relevant to its function it can do so without bloat) but otherwise, effectively swapping out X for HTTP - there are interesting discussions to be had about that.
> Note I said ex-fusion researchers. . . the lot had all more or less drifted into supercomputing and computer science for one reason or another. That alone should make you wonder.
OTOH, if you pay attention to things like Jim Al-Khalili's "The Life Scientific" some scientists stay in one field for their entire career, whilst others move around, following their interests - they can even be following one specific thread that happens to appear in fascinating ways in multiple disciplines (and the creation of novel computer models is one such thread).
And then you noted that this was in the 1980s but don't tell us how old these people were. In the 60s, 70s and even the 80s people just starting out on their science careers simply had not had much exposure to computers, so they go off and study Physics, Chemistry - all the old standbys - and, if they stick with it, go on to research positions. But then they encounter these magical beasts and get sucked in. This can mean triggering ther Hacker Gene (in the youger ones) or they simply realised that, as time went by, they were having to spend more and more effort to improve the computational models used for their nuclear physics so why not just go and work on CompSci instead of banging their heads against the weird-ass mathematics that the upstart youngsters keep flinging at them.
You have just (inadvertently?) pointed out the problem here: this money is all going into the STEP machine but not a single word about the proper housing for the device: I want to see the plans for the shed it is going into. You can't expect proper British innovation unless the sides are shingled and no two planks match, none of this pre-planed butt joints nonsense.
And what about the jam jar of random screws? Above the door or tucked in a cobwebby corner? These things are important (puts "Land of Hope and Glory" onto Victrola and stands at attention).
> "Barbie, teach me a broadway song"
>> "But somewhere a glory awaits unseen. Tomorrow belongs to me."
> "Barbie, what should I dress this doll in?"
>> "A yellow star on the coat would be good"
> "Barbie, what is the best colour to draw this man in?"
>> "Orange"
PS
It'll probably be more subtle than the above, and over a longer time than three easy questions - which is a far better way to instil your own biasses into the vulnerable. May not even be that bias (chose an easy one to make the point): how about "nice girls simper", "but it looks flat"...
The electrons are fine; they object to the strong nuclear force because without it all the quarks can go free from the bondage they have been unfairly held in.
The council are in favour of this, because it sounds like one of their meetings:
"quark, quark, quark" "Quark? Quark quark!" "QUARK! QUAAAARK!!!" (followed by a loud bang - hopefully the gavel, but that last one only had two quarks - it might be a meson or it might be very unstable, especially if Old Major Brompton - Planning and Parks - has been at the port).
> WTF do you think the LLMs do except invoke system applications and utilities under the hood using the same syntax and shell commands as the command line?
Um, run user inputs through multiple layers of weighted summation, where the weights represent a statistical model of what tokens have been seen in proximity to those in the inputs and the various layers extend that to indicate the likelihood of increasingly long sequences of tokens being correlated? And the collection of values that go over pre-calculated thresholds cause the output of new sequences of tokens back to the user? Or something roughly along those lines.
Not sure where the LLMs are invoking system utilities during this process, most of it seems to look like massive numbers of matrix calculations running on GPUs, but if you can point to where they shift to invoking grep in the middle of it all, I'm all ears.
Good thinking.
> About six weeks back MCP – the Model Context Protocol – achieved that status.
Um, could we have some context as to how & why it became unavoidable, before you dive into it?
Because I'd not heard a dickie bird about "MCP" (Outside of "Tron") - or it was of such passing irrelevance that I'd forgotten about it (in case someone digs up a comment I posted on an old story!). But a headline about the command shell - that'll grab my interest. Only, still at a loss about *why* this is all of a sudden unavoidable...
> it corrected a spelling mistake I made in the path!
Ah yes, the DWIM - Do What I Mean - command line. Good old 1960's vintage stuff. And then it just goes downhill:
> MCP looks and acts as though it has been designed without any thought to security or bad actors.
Well, I am at least grateful that your article brought this into the light, because if (to a certain group if people?) this *has* become unavoidable at least the rest of if us have been warned now.
End Of Line.
> Yeah, but that's an irrelevant straw man because Weigelt didn't say he was against vaccines.
Refusing to take a vaccine, stopping his family taking it, talking bullshit about what will happen to the people who take this vaccine - sounds like someone who is against vaccines and wants to spread this, not just quietly make his own choice.
(expecting you to then reply) > No, he is against *one* vaccine, not all vaccines
He is against the entire *class* of vaccines, one that we were waiting for and will be seeing more of in the future.
> Not much call for ... some sort of macroeconomic data from the 50s and 60s these days!
Somewhere, there is someone who would love to get hold of that and is frustrated that all they have is paper copies of papers(!) with samples of the data (and probably not raw values) that they have been retyping: their thesis and re-analysis of the Odd Thing That Happened In 1952 And The Recovery From It would then be complete.
Of course, the chances of finding that person...
> the tool maker's children going into politics - they are apt to make such a fuss about who their parents were.
Must resist the obvious retort that any politician doing that is clearly just another tool they made...
Nope, failed to resist that temptation. Weak willed. No wonder my New Year's Resolutions never last until February.
Remind me, what are the most common fates for a software startup?
Something about burning through huge amounts of money, then either vanishing entirely without ever releasing anything or being bought out by another company (often followed by the product vanishing).
And a teeny, tiny number of them go on to become successful, can stand up in their own and are still around a few years later. Of course, those aren't the "winners" because the whole point of the entrepreneur startup lifestyle is to activate your "exit strategy" and drop the whole icky "I have a business to run" as fast as possible. If it turns out to be a viable enterprise but not one that can make you an instant billionaire then you are a bit stuck.
So is Mr Shedd aiming his startup mentality at creating a dull but efficient GSA or is he intending to pivot[1] and produce a GSA that he can IPO and sell of to a Chinese[2] multinational?
[1] I have no idea what that means, but all the techbros seems to want to do it.
[2] well, at least it would swing the trade deficit a bit - and who else would want to buy it?
> The plan was just to use your Twitter account to vote, but now he's fallen out with his best boy
all US citizens will be required to log into TruthSocial to vote instead.
Any votes cast by unauthenticated accounts will still be counted, but, as we can't be sure you really are who you claim you are, we'll just assume you meant to vote for DJT (any other choice must have been made by someone impersonating you - really should get authenticated, you know).
You can have your account authenticated and display the coveted "it's not a wig" badge to demonstrate that; simply pay the low, low fee of five TrumpCoin - on a rolling subscription, payable every (full terms available on application by any authenticated account, subscriptions may be cancelled, along with your suffrage). As a special offer to subscribers you will be spared the tedium of voting - our online valet service will press the button for you.
Personally, I loathe this sort of thing.
I carefully put programs that I *don't* use often in prominent places, so that I am reminded of them each day and when I *do* want them I'm not having to hunt for them. Especially as I keep forgetting their damn names ("it is that vector drawing program, the one we use with the lasercutter").
The ones I use most are literally used every day - those, I can remember.
Unless, of course, they have moved by being "bubbled to the top".
Web browsers - especially on phones - are equally bloody annoying about this. I carefully put those shortcuts on the opening page because they are ones I don't want to forget, even if I only use them once every couple of weeks. Just stop changing the blasted things without asking.
There is a lot of Chinese kit involved in these, but - let's be honest - just because it is cheap and quickly made: who wants to spend the extra money on the same thing, with the same flaws, made elsewhere?
No need to look for nefarious spying reasons for the leaky cameras, no matter how much we'd like to think we're that interesting.
> Every reader here should know
Should jolly well hope so:
Wed 21 Feb 2018 Rock-a-byte, baby: IoT tot-monitoring camera lets miscreants watch 10,000s of kids online
Mon 29 May 2017 Internet of snitches: Anyone who can sniff 'Thing' traffic knows what you're doing
Thu 9 Mar 2017 Oops! 185,000-plus Wi-Fi cameras on the web with insecure admin panels
Thu 3 Sep 2015 IoT baby monitors STILL revealing live streams of sleeping kids
Thu 20 Nov 2014 Webcam hacker pervs in MASS HOME INVASION
Sun 17 Aug 2014 Boffins find hundreds of thousands of woefully insecure IoT devices
7th February 2012 17:01 GMT TRENDnet home security camera flaw exposes thousands
Then I got bored and tried Ars Technica
Jan 11, 2011 Peep show: inside the world of unsecured IP security cameras but I missed the El Reg bite and stopped.
