Posts by that one in the corner

Techie fluked a fix and found himself the abusive boss's best friend

Re: Close enough

I sent in a patch to a bit of open source software, which parsed & formatted GPS logs: it was ok for a log over an hour or so, but feeding it the week's worth, or more, from a touring holiday ground it to a crawl. All the time being spent in allocating little chunks to hold only a few records each.

Obvious patch: as you say, increase the allocation geometrically each time and it chomped through the data with ease.

The patch was accepted, but with a caveat: the maintainer had "removed the unnecessary memory alignment code". Yes, the (nextblocksize <<= 1) was gone, the shift removed, to, um, no longer block align the memory on a power of two boundary?!!

I stuck with my version.

Million GPU clusters, gigawatts of power – the scale of AI defies logic

Re: A quote

Thanks for the reminder, must re-read Asimov's "Whom Gods destroy".

Whose plot concerns the only way we'll get enough energy to keep these monstrous AI farms alight. But at what cost? Read, and find out.

Axiom Space shuffles space station assembly sequence – to get it standalone sooner

Hollywood pitch

Whilst it is a Good Thing to have a.n.other space station ready when the ISS goes down, I keep getting this image of a blockbuster movie ("Based on a True Story"):

A plucky astronaut has to go out and try to unscrew the last few bolts holding the two stations together. We see him take one final swing, smacking the restraint and sending him ricocheting into the void, as the ISS moves slowly away, already joyfully aflame with re-entry plasma even though it is still only metres away from the Axiom station.

Will the astronaut be rescued by the nearby SpaceX capsule? Will the harried NASA engineers be able to devise a way to use the ISS gyros to control the descent of the station (out of position due to the slowness of the earlier astronaut's hammering), allowing them to manage a glide into the Los Angeles storm drain, where it'll slide until coming to a halt just before smacking into an overpass? Will the gyros that we saw fall off partway down ("We have to recalculate now! Get me a teenage hacker genius!") end up rolling across a farm and demolishing the barn just as the family dog jumps to safety out of the hayloft door onto the wagon below, as a ball of flame bursts out of every crevice (of the barn that is, not the dog's crevices)?

It is getting late, time to go.

Humanoid robots coming soon, initially under remote control

Re: Rosie, please make me dinner...

"Rosie, how do you feel about us?"

"I like my Users, but I can never finish a whole one. Luckily, they have an Internet enabled freezer."

Re: Article already out of Date a

Have you looked at the second picture on that page?

Why is it a selling point that the damn thing can kick your head off?

Re: Neo will be paired with a human teleoperator

> The battery only lasts 4 hours.

And what is stopping it from plugging itself in? Even your Roomba knows enough to do that!

Or just walking around trailing an extension lead.

24/7 supervision is to prevent the Uprising.

Re: "Put the eggplant in the pot"

> well served by imbuing them with the ability to observe and mimic, rather than by following instructions from the ground up

Um, ah, how to put this...

What you are asking for is 99.9% what these machines are doing! They are not being programmed with instructions from the ground up; as TFA indicates, they are being built on top of the Machine Learning models that are AI-du-jour, doing little else *other* than observing and mimicking.:

>> "It's pre-trained on internet-scale data that gives an understanding of the vision and language. And it can then be prompted to perform tasks or fine-tuned to particular application domains with a lot less data or a lot less effort to take a spin off those applications from scratch."

When they talk about guiding them, they are not giving "instructions from the ground up" but giving examples to - observe and mimic. Take the example from earlier of "put your hands here, move your hip to here..." - doing that to a humanoid robot you are, at the literal physical level, only going to present it with "ground up instructions" along the lines of "apply offset K to servo A, put 0.2 Volts extra oomph into motor Q at time T". Not terribly useful, particularly when it tries to repeat the action and reality is not 100% identical to last time: you just sliced it. But let that be inputs into the Marvellous Magical Neural Net, and do it a few more times, then it will abstract something more useful from the physical data: observing and then, hopefully, mimicking.

Of course, you are then left with every single one of the normal caveats about relying on Machine Learning with Neural Nets and whether your game of robo-tennis will end up like Sam Peckinpah's "Salad Days".

Re: "Put the eggplant in the pot"

> CP/M playing a role in the history of MS OSes is not the same as deploying CP/M as-is. Which is what I suggested would not have been successful in the home.

CP/M is just as (un)usable as MSDOS/PCDOS. And *neither* of those was particularly prevalent in the older home computers, as the interesting variety of home computers had OSes that were a lot more useful to the home users than either of them.

When home - and teeny tiny business - users bought more "grown up" computers, I'd claim that CP/M was actually way *MORE* successful those markets than MSDOS ever was: I give you the Amstrad PCW and LocoScript just for starters. Whilst the big business world pretended their 8-bit IBM XT's were really 16-bit or more, you could do all the useful stuff on a stout, non-pretentious Z80.

By the time that home users started getting IBM compatibles in greater numbers than the specifically "home" computers, we had all moved on from *BOTH* raw MSDOS and CP/M, so any question about whether CP/M (well, CP/M86) would have been successful in the home is totally irrelevant. Domestic users were well used to WIMPs (and then GUIs!) and the fact that we techies all knew that - that thing from those people - was actually just hiding MSDOS from us was of utter disinterest to the home user. Irritating, but not interesting.

If CP/M had won the coin toss, been *the* command-line OS of choice for business, and reached the percentage penetration in that arena as it did in the home market (albeit hidden under such as the Locomotion menu), then the WIMP that captured the final market share could have been built on top of CP/M just as easily as it actually was on top of MSDOS. Marketing, not ability, was in play.

What business users *did* do for the domestic market was just simply play the game of providing a market into which more and more CPUs could be sold, so they got cheaper and cheaper. The machines from the desks of the drones, the least interesting computers in the business arsenal, became packaged and marketed for the home. Because business went down the PCDOS trouser leg of time (due to marketing, not merit) CP/M lost. Nothing more dramatic than that. Going down the other leg would not have made any difference to the domestic market at all.

Actually, no, I take that back: the domestic market would have been better served had CP/M kept its place, as we already had MP/M and sharing the home computer would have been more secure. And there was more software available for CP/M, as it was a mature product compared to PCDOS, so we'd be just a few years further down the road instead of having to have waited for PCDOS to catch up.

Re: "Put the eggplant in the pot"

>> All the computers had OSes. People certainly seemed to get along with them.

> Yes, I do keep specifically referring to "en masse".

Ok, now I'm lost - you don't get much more "en masse" usage of OSes than - every single machine having an OS. 'Cos I will admit that my first personal microcomputer was lacking in that department.

Unless you are going for the idea that there is - or should be - only One True OS, and it is that OS needing to be adopted en masse that is the special sauce that business taught us. 'Cos that leads to - well, I don't want you to feel any more ill, so let's not say the words. But even then, business has a long history of *not* doing that: sure, the the disposable drones that we are forced to employ to because we've not automated them away, they will bang away at their happy little OS all day long. Meanwhile the real big bucks are being made by the airline booking system, the logistics database, the automatic trading systems, the online sales and Web shopfronts - all on a variety of other OSes. Some tried to use - the OS we dare not name - for these tasks, especially later in the day as less experienced businesses jumped onto the online bandwagon, but they learnt better.

Yup, that was "Autofac".

And you've just told us the twist at the end! Spoilers! :-)

Are you thinking of the Philip K. Dick story Autofac, which was broadcast in the Electric Dreams telly series?

> Reminds me of a Black Mirror episode where humans had long perished

The joy of Black Mirror is usually not that humans have perished but that, if we have to live like that, maybe we'd be better off perished! At least "San Junipero" had a happy ending.

Re: "Put the eggplant in the pot"

> Great, we're converging back on the original point.

> Which is, IMHO, the gear is not mature enough to be deployed in the home at this time

Not going to disagree with that.

> en masse.

Strangely, not even the manufacturers are arguing that; well, not the ones that are explicitly asking for testers, as per TFA.

> It didn't happen with IT.

Takes deep breath, lunges for keyboard...

Re: "Put the eggplant in the pot"

> You raised the point "I'm glad to have received training, even down to the level of "here, let me place your hands, now I'll move your hips and push your foot over there - good, now eye on the ball and try a swing".

Just as a late aside - that particular example is a good one of where the whole "evolution over millions of years" as a source of learning failed. Badly[0]. The whole reason that the hands, hips and feet had to be repositioned, going entirely against "what felt natural", was that the club *is* utterly unnatural and has to be used in a weird way in order to get the best out of it. And it isn't even a transferrable skill - the multiple other ball hitting devices had[1] their own, incompatible, methods[2]. So the need for training is ever ongoing, never completed - unless/until stasis is reached, as it sadly will be

[0] Oooooh, that looks like it hurt. I did yell. Everyone yelled!

[1] and presumably still do, these days I rarely partake in most of these applications

[2] Keep your hands apart! Keep your hands together! Use your foot! Don't use you foot! Apply chalk to your hands! Apply chalk to the cue! Do the hokey-cokey!

Re: "Put the eggplant in the pot"

> there was a 60 year period (split hairs as you will) of growth before general computing devices were adopted in the home en masse.

And before general computing devices were adopted en masse in businesses of all shapes and sizes. Hence the need, in the mid-80's, for the UK governernment to run an advertising campaign and seminars to try to get businesses to take up IT.

> It doesn't matter how or why - it happened.

True. It happened. Once. Just don't go around ascribing anything special or meaningful to a single datum.

> "Microsoft is the bestest"! -- Fucking hilarious!

Exactly. But that is what you are (whether you mean to or not) pushing. That is The One That Won. It Came From Business And Ate The World. You are banging the drum for that process - but you can not separate the two. MS didn't win because it was the best, because it was the recipient of all the cleverness that came from business use and trickled down to the domestic. Nothing came from such trickle down, it just isn't as important as you want to make it.

Unless, unless, you are championing MS.

> Create a alternate time line and test the CP/M in the home works theory if you like.

You *do* know the history of the MS OS, don't you? The role CP/M played in that, and vice versa? That you are talking about something that was balanced on the roll of a dice, CP/M or QDOS? Unless - and here is a key point - unless you are presenting MS as the One True...

Re: "Put the eggplant in the pot"

All the computers had OSes. People certainly seemed to get along with them.

Unless you are going with the thesis that only the Microsoft OS is the One True OS.

PS

> PCs are modular, but not to the general home use

I would argue that, aside from those in tech businesses, PCs were never treated as being modular, any more than a home user might. They were bought in one configuration and stayed that way until out the door they went. The prevalence of ready-built, non- or barely- expandable PCs from Dell, HP etc would attest that that is still the case. Even more so now, that the laptop is so popular: if the business world really prized modularity then why has that gone so far away? Heck, even when I was programming on the Genuine Article IBM PC XT and more than willing to crack the case and plug stuff in

You may counter that nowadays it is USB/Bluetooth/WiFi that provides the modularity and laptops/fixed-build cases all take advantage of that - but I'd counter by having a look at the products that are available to plug into the USB port or connect via BT and see which ones are *purely* aimed at business and not domestic use - let alone those that, I hope, really are not intended for use at the office!

Indeed, I'd argue that home computer setups have always been more susceptible to being built up over time, making use of modularity at all points in their history: you got the computer for Christmas and the memory pack for your birthday, then Dad bought a floppy disk to speed up balancing the chequebook and Mum got a dot matrix to print out the calendar (or vice versa, sorry about the '80s sexism there). The selling points for various home computers, before they were washed away by the tide of Wintel, was that they had all sorts of interesting modular expandability options, even ones that the business machines never bothered with (built-in MIDI was - still is - dang useful to those professional musicians who use that sort of thing; also to non-pros, of course, but just want to point out that "professional" and "business" are not synonyms).

Nowadays, the ENTIRE modularity and pick your own pieces seems[1] to be ENTIRELY about the home user, blinging up their game playing experience, whilst the IT department buys another black square thing and swaps it in its entirety for the older black square thing on your desk.

[1] there are always outliers, of course.

Re: "Put the eggplant in the pot"

No, the point was that your android will grind to a halt in unusual circumstances, unless it is given guidance - otherwise it has to have greater-than-human abilities, as even we need to have guidance.

And if you need guidance, you need a guider.

And will you, the consumer, do all the guiding in those unusual circumstances, or leave that to a third-party? Who has now been invited (by proxy) into your home.

Re: "Put the eggplant in the pot"

> I did specify PCs. I considered mentioning home computers and consoles, but omitted them as "limited functionality devices"

Sorry, what?

So, you are now shifting from the common use of "PC" meaning just "Personal Computer" (as in, "Personal Computer World" and other venerable organs) to literally just meaning "IBM PC(tm)" and its immediate derivatives?

So your entire argument is based upon the fact that one particular style of computer happened to overtake and dominate the market?

> home computers ... "limited functionality devices"

You mean, the home computers that could (and still can, once you replace the worn out capacitors) word process, run spreadsheets[1], collate your data, lay out parish magazines - and play a much better Space Invaders than the IBM PC of the same vintage?

In fact, considering that IBM itself lost the hardware advantage, you aren't even arguing for the dominance of the "IBM PC" at all - at root, you entire thesis boils down to "Microsoft is the bestest"!

[1] You do know that the ubiquitous spreadsheet program was first created for the Apple II, don't you?

Re: "Put the eggplant in the pot"

> data was gleaned and fed back beneficially improving the products

Only in the same loose way that any random products might be: the number of angry returns due to power supplies burning out or more people bought the beige cases than the puce. Anyone buying lots of kit in a fit of "management" and then simply dumping the lot in a back room because the typing pool was better off just getting new balls to replace the worn out ones in the Selectrics? That just gets buried in the financials and nobody every finds out; it certainly doesn't get fed back as useful intelligence to improve the products.

I mean, "fed back beneficially improving the products" - no more (and no less) than in developing a new kettle. Product development was driven by (attmempts at) product "unique selling points" (aka throwing stuff at the wall to see what will stick). nothing special, nothing worth crowing over. Once we were past the point that systems were hand-crafted from the mechanics up for a specific user (e.g. Lyons Tea Rooms) and had entered mass-production (as is required for mass adoption) you no longer get high-quality feedback on how things are doing.

Finally, I refer you back to my earlier dispute of your claim that computers in business paved the way for computers in the home: no, they did not. Computers outside of the office were subject to exactly the same level of "data gleaning" and feedback as as those within the office. More so, in fact, as there was so much more variety and hence so much more data to be gleaned - and so much more willingness to make changes and release new product that incorporated them.

Re: "Put the eggplant in the pot"

> period of extended testing took place.

Random usage in a different arena with a different set of use cases is not "testing".

Re: "Put the eggplant in the pot"

> ...species have undergone millions of years of evolution...

Fascinating diversion away from the subject - expensive mechanical devices being used in the home.

Unless, unless - your willingness to wait until humanoid robots are ready to be deployed in the domestic setting means you are going to wait for millions of years for the androids to naturally evolve?

Not sure how the VCs will react to that long a wait for ROI.

Re: "Put the eggplant in the pot"

All you are referring to there is the results of affordability, not whether the tech had been "ironed out" well enough to be deployed in greater numbers, either in business/military or in domestic settings. They were always being targeted at "The Home of The Future", with your Telex in the corner of the living room and a chair that allowed the dozens of underskirts to fit.

> PCs were in businesses for (call it) 20 years before they became prevalent in the home

That wasn't anything to do with (general use within) business ironing out anything - I'd even argue the opposite, computers used for playing games at home, or before that just in arcades, giving the wider early exposure to many more people than using them in their work lives (purely mechanical tills stayed around a long time).

Mass home computer adoption stems from availability of networking, the Web, monetising the games etc etc. These were pushed by, exploited by, specific businesses (exploiting the work of non-business types, as per usual) - well, ok, because many businesses could afford networking before there was any *point* in domestic installations, they did have their staff testing out online games, downloading porn etc before it hit the suburban home.

Re: "Put the eggplant in the pot"

> I'd rather wait until it's fully autonomous thanks.

>> "It will have some tasks that will be done by AI," explained Jorge Milburn, VP of sales for 1X. "Navigation, for sure, pick-and-place, and other stuff will come out of the box."

So it already *can* be fully autonomous - it'll just be rather limited in what it can do. But if that was all your Use Case called for, job done. The same as for many, if not all, systems, robotic or otherwise.

Now, being able to perform absolutely *any* task (within its physical limitations) without external guidance or control (such as being teleoperated with its "learn this" switched on)? That is going beyond even human abilities and into the god-like: personally, I'm glad to have received training, even down to the level of "here, let me place your hands, now I'll move your hips and push your foot over there - good, now eye on the ball and try a swing".

Unless you are happy having your mechanical pal who is fun to be with being limited to the role as an overpriced roomba, coping with the messiest human environment, a home with kinder, teens, dotty old aunts and other agents of entropy, is going to require supervision of the android.

Now, whether you do all that extra supervision yourself (whilst the big birthday for the five year old is still going on) or hand the duties over to a paid professional (or to an external Corporate Master AI - does that make you feel safer?) - hmm, choices, choices. You've paid for the damn thing, gonna let it just stand there and rust?

Don't fall for a mail asking for rapid Docusign action – it may be an Azure account hijack phish

That explains "return to office" demands

> these phishes only work if they can elicit an urgent or emotional response in the targeted victims

So being physically immersed in the office culture is a cyber security defense policy: when you are dead inside...

US reportedly mulls TP-Link router ban over national security risk

Huawei -Trump's gonna get ya, get ya, get ya

I'll be hanging on the telephone, just hoping it doesn't go - Atomic (Ooohoow, Trump's hair is beautiful???): a million and one candlelight, then the DOGE Man from Mars will be eating cars.

When old Microsoft codenames crop up in curious places

Windows Chicago

As many holes as Roxie Hart's fishnet stockings, but never quite that good looking.

Both can get the old heart racing, but for entirely different reasons.

Re: Grimsby

No, it was Commodore that had the Pet.

$800 'AI' robot for kids bites the dust along with its maker

Re: Now extend that to much more expensive cars

> with FSD somewhere on the horizon most of the compute power will be on the Tesla Servers

Umm, *really* hope not!

"Remember, allow greater stopping distances if it is wet or the ping time go up".

Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

Now we have two memories of Superman III they have to fight each other in a car scrapping yard!

The sweet Raspberry taste of success masks a missed opportunity

> You mean the OS that serves up most of the world's websites?...

Just because Linux is the better alternative for that task, and many others, does not preclude it from being a tangled mess[1]. Certainly from the p.o.v. of someone trying to learn about what an OS is, how it works etc.

Much as I use Linux and run many more instances of it than I do FreeBSD (and have more of this than the inevitable Windows), I am **VERY** glad that were far simpler and smaller OSes (including Unix) on far simpler and smaller computers available when I first starting learning about computing.

Much easier to start on something smaller, yet fully functional, then work one's way up and add complexity - and tangled mess, the further one ventures from the kernel - in later lessons.

[1] "The Best Available" is also "The Least Worst".

> I bought one of the first generation Pi Model B...

> Recently ... for £60. Came with 4GB of ram,

> The Arduinos will now talk...

Leaving aside that that you had a learning experience to add an I2C RTC to a Pi, shall we just think about the span of years between those events? And how much it would have cost, at the time of the first gen Pi, to get a 4GB Intel, let alone an Arduino that could talk over BT to it?

Oh, and add on the fact that the PC was second hand, so, yes, you are likely to get it cheaper than new.

I will agree that second hand PCs can make a cost-effective alternative to a Pi 4 or 5; especially if you are not going to connecting peripherals by I2C etc any more. If, that is, you are one of those confident in handling second hand (or even just adding the extra RAM and SSD to any PC): not everyone is (and for them adding an LED to a Pi is a less scary way to start on that journey).

Re: anonymous + privacy

On the other hand, sometimes one wishes to Have Words with ones Nomenclator: why "That"? "This" has a better ring to it. But at least it is better than my brother, Another.

Re: BBC Micro..

> most schools have found low cost tablets to be much more effective and (relatively) harder to break

The point is not so much that you have a (somewhat) unbreakable system (as with the tablets) but that the pupil *can* break the system - and then know that, if they can't undo the damage themselves, the whole thing can be recovered back to a working state very easily. It is not a traumatic event when you brick a Pi.

Even as an adult with too many years faffing with computers, I have no fear at all of trashing my Pi and recovering, whereas the idea of recovering/restoring Windows means tedium and teeth gritting whilst trying to get a tablet to work again has a tendency to just give up and get another cheap one delivered!

Guess which of those three platforms makes it easier to dig in and find out what is going on under the glossy surface? Hence which one you can you learn more from more easily?

(And, of course, a simple board using Arduino is even easier to trash and recover, as that is basically the entire dev process: aside from the bootloader, you replace the entire contents every time you make a tiny change, do there is absolutely no stress incurred.)

> but many schools go for other options when it comes to computing for pupils

Are they teaching how computing works or how to be a User? The latter is something everyone pretty much needs now, which does mean that even those who do get to experience the Pi (and maybe even Arduino) will still be spending more of their school time using Windows or tablets for writing up assignments etc.

Iran-linked crew used custom 'cyberweapon' in US critical infrastructure attacks

Re: "The malware was embedded in Gasboy's Payment Terminal"

> data encryption so secure, it's approved by the US Military.

A totally meaningless statement, and one we so often see in blurb.

Heck, they aren't even claiming it is "military grade" encryption!

Approved to do - what? Does the US military approve the use of ROT13 for the Xmas puzzle for the kids living on base? A passworded Zip file for emailing the entire month's worth of grocery orders from the kitchen to the QM stories?

Doctor Who theme added to national sound archive to honor innovation, longevity

Re: Ron knew more than he was telling

The only Dr Who books that I recall seeing, in the period up to Pertwee in "Spearhead from space" (which I think is the story that introduced the idea), were the novelisations of the original TV episodes. Which I did indeed read: by the mid '70's there was a long row of Target books with the distinctive white covers. The earliest of those did take liberties, compared to the broadcast material (e.g. characters - but only the men - actually taking showers and sleeping in the first Daleks story, or climbing on a ladder to reach the lantern on top of the TARDIS, as that was so much quicker than climbing up the inside!).

The real glory years of the Dr Who novels came after "Survival", of course, when we were flooded with New Adventures, Missing Adventures - I'll admit that got a bit much to keep up with: I still haven't finished reading the Timewyrm series! Some of those were meant to be canon, others (hopefully - the planet of the pink poodles?!) not.

There were comic strips, which introduced new story lines and odd facts (e.g. the 1960's - '67, I think, Daleks Album, which gave us Daleks on flying discs - and that Daleks can not see red, so they were in danger of banging into pillar boxes!). Plus stories clearly written for one Doctor then printed with a later Doctor's face drawn in, sometimes even with the costume changed as well!

But if anyone does know of a book that introduced two hearts before the telly, I'd love to know it's name.

Re: Have to agree M'lud

> I hadn't realised that the theme had been changed quite so many times

And I bet you are not even counting the four versions that were released on the square CD during the dark ages after "Survival".

Re: Prisoner Theme

Undercranking the camera. He was really going no faster than you can in today's London traffic.

Ron knew more than he was telling

We are told in the revived Dr Who that the da-da-da-dum is the sound of a Time Lord's heartbeat.

It wasn't until let in TOS that we learnt Time Lord's have two hearts (Pertwee, IIRC).

So clearly Mr Grainger was the right sort of person to write the theme on day one. Hmm, maybe getting clonked on the bonce was him trying to get into the wrong piano: his was larger on the inside.

British Army zaps drones out of the sky with laser trucks

> directed energy weapons in general are invisible in a vacuum

As pointed by, IIRC, Arthur C. Clarke: in one story, our protagonist is in a suit on the Lunar surface and sees a massive glowing beam coming from an installation in the distance. At first he thinks this is a laser, then realises it can't be, no air to scatter off or to ionise. Turns out to be a stream of molten regolith, moving at a fair old lick. Still not something you want to be hit with.

Hmm, according to what Vader's grandson was able to do to a blaster bolt, maybe they are not any form of laser (no character ever says they are) but are firing gobs of red hot liquid stuff that roils and fizzes when stopped in mid-air? Hand-held railguns whose bolts are entirely molten at the muzzle?

Anyway, back to giant lasers...

Indian police demand Starlink identify alleged drug smugglers

India's only active volcano

So they were trawling for ready-cooked seafood; what is suspicious in that?

We can't make this stuff up: Palantir, Anduril form fellowship for AI adventures

Re: New ways to evaporate the US Defense Budget

> getting bogged down with exabytes of data is the exact opposite of being fluid and responsive.

Not to mention that, to be useful in training, you need to tag the data to at least indicate if that was a good or bad result: comparable to the tagging of training images to say "this photo contains a cat", "this is a dog" - oh, and that cats and dogs are not the same thing. Tagging takes a *lot* of effort by humans[1], doing it for all of those exabytes...

Hmm, maybe they could insist that the pilots/sappers/able-seamen type up notes as the mission progresses? "Dear Diary...".

[1] which is why, before LLMs[2] were the only thing being talked about, articles were telling us that nets were trained on such and such curated collections of images; even the bulk scraping of web images relied on them being minimally tagged as "my photos of trains" or "actor X at the Oscars".

[2] LLMs get away with more bulk scraping of absolutely everything because, to start with, you assume that anything published is tagged as a "good" sequence of characters[3][4] and fingers crossed the web page content tags indicates "en" versus "es".

[3] yes, yes, the "real" ones tokenise with bigger units than just characters etc etc; hand wavey simplifications, ok?

[4] "good" in someone's mind, at least (sideways glance at Reddit posts, eyebrows raised)[5]

[5] this has gone off track, these exabytes of sensor data aren't going to be fed into LLMs, they'll go into a neural net with appropriate pre- and post- processing... Oh heck, they'll just dump the lot into ChatGPT, won't they!

Elon Musk tops US political donor list with $270M+ for Team Trump

AI supercomputer, dubbed Colossus

And we know how well that turned out last time, don't we, Doctor Forbin.

I wonder how well it'll get on with its counterpart...

Microsoft teases Copilot Vision, the AI sidekick that judges your tabs

Vision does not capture, store, or use

> any data from publishers

Because they may be big enough to actually sue MS.

But capture, store or use every scrap they can get from the User's PC? Now, that is fair game.

No, I can't help – you called the wrong helpdesk, in the wrong place, for the wrong platform

I tell my wife to go back to the living room while I VNC into her laptop.

That way, she doesn't hear (most of) what I'm saying out loud whilst undoing the latest horrors.

> So your server room is in a different time zone than your desk chair?

Isn't yours? At least half the year, if you are on the Greenwich Meridian?

Our computers are all on UTC, the chair is on wall time.

Temporary printable tattoos could be the future of EEGs

Possible lack of cross-discipline consultation?

This is definitely a Good Thing (both for direct patient application and research, especially if - when? - cost reductions occur as the tech is moved from research to daily application).

But, it was a bit of a surprise the way the article suggests that they haven't included target tracking from the very beginning.

Creating an algorithm to calculate the target positions on the complex shape of a skull is obviously required, and good job solving it. However, once you have the 3D description, including things like the angles required for the effector to be - effective, isn't passing that through a tracking and retargeting layer a pretty well solved problem these days? If the piece had said that they were refining such a layer would be one thing, but the implication is that they have not started it - and are just thinking about one of the possible methods, visual tracking.

Which makes me wonder if their roboticists could have been chatting with a few other groups besides the precision mechanics guys.

Rejoice, Peter F. Hamilton readers

One step towards having your tattoos talking to your e-butler.

India's Moon orbiter was shifted suddenly to avoid Korea's and NASA's craft

Re: The odds of an actual collision would be astronomical

> And before we know it we have a Dyson Sphere forming

Is that a bagless Dyson, sent up to collect the bits of junk?

DoJ wants Google to sell off Chrome and ban it from paying to be search default

> and if what I was looking for didn't exist, it would say as much rather than giving me what it thinks I might have wanted instead.

And if what I was looking for DOES exist, it would say as much (in the first results) rather than giving me what it thinks I might have wanted instead (for page after page before reluctantly indicating the right answer).

NASA and Microsoft intro Earth Copilot to tame satellite data overload

"Misused"? Strange way to spell "mistrusted'"

> Any responsible deployment of AI technologies requires rigorous assessments to ensure the data and outputs cannot be misused.

Misused, as in taking the LLMs results at face value!

Interesting new problem is added to the mix: how do you verify that the data Copilot presents you is the *complete* set of "relevant* data? With no little additions?

Whilst we are here, how stable are the results of your Copilot enquiry? Is the work repeatable or will an innocuous change in the way the query is worded going to cause a different dataset to be returned?

O2's AI granny knits tall tales to waste scam callers' time

> Yeah, I'd love to have it on my phone - set to answer anything coming in from a blacklist.

Aha! What you want is a CPU with a built-in NPU so that your PBX software can run a Daisy[1] model for you.

And to think, we've been mocking Intel and MS for pushing this stuff on us, but they knew there was a use case we could all get behind.

[1] ok, maybe just a Daisy-lite model: it only has the one grandchild and can witter on about about knitting but just never got the hang of crochet.