Posts by that one in the corner

Watermarking AI images to fight misinfo and deepfakes may be pretty pointless

Re: Guarantee

> This is about artists and creators flooding the world with cheap generated artworks and selling them.

The article is about people who are NOT artists generating fakes and about "creators" creating deepfakes and misinformation.

Feel free to change the subject (something that never happens around here, couch cough) but best to announce that is what your are doing, instead of just flatly denying the thrust of the original article!

PS dunno why everyone keeps calling these things "cheap": I am barely artistic but it is still easier (and a lot more fun) doing the art bit for real than spending all the time trying to get the prompts to work! It may be easier than learning the drawing techniques, but it still isn't "cheap" - and you still just end up with a digital image, not a physical drawing or painting - so even more relevant to disputing the "artistic knockoffs" claims!

Apple blames iOS 17 bug for overheating iPhone 15 woes

Re: Third party apps

> raising your iPhone to a temperature where it will scold you.

How many times have I told you not to use that app?

Musk's first year as Twitter's Dear Leader is nigh

Re: Going downhill fast, and so is Twitter

PS

Can not believe that I forgot about the Prefect!

That will mean a point on on my nerd licence.

Re: Where's Bond?

> Including a hollowed out volcano?

Well, he tried, but his tunnel digging machines turn out to be rather slow and the Teslas can't keep their balance on the monorail.

Re: Twitter^h^h^h^h^h^h^hX

> That would use the Chinese pronunciation of X?

Many ways to pronounce it that X: as per "ch" or "z" or "ex", although you have to be careful not to confuse the last with a Devonian city. Cue Hermione: "ex-IT-ter" not "EX-aah-ter".

Re: Going downhill fast, and so is Twitter

> Maybe in boardrooms but outside the USA nobody knows of any cars openly made by GM.

Can't speak for anyone else outside the US, but I just had to do a websearch to check, as I couldn't think of any GM brands. Apparently, they are Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, and GMC.

I have heard of them, but they really are not names one comes across every day. unlike Ford, where I can even name a couple of models (Cortina owner, no-one meaner, and Escort, of course)!

Thinking of other US car brands, can also name Oldsmobile, but only because I happen to know that the new Oldsmobiles are are in early this year!!

Re: Mastodon remains the most exciting alternative

> Yes it does as your server administrator can block federation with specific servers.

And will, AFAIK, often do that by pulling in a list of instances to block/allow Sounds reasonable enough - saves an admin for a small server having to spend a lot of time checking content of *all* the new instances.

But the list is (lists are) not managed purely on a content basis but on "feels" - the way the Raspberry Pi server was treated demonstrates this - making it harder to find out whether any particular server is one to join or not. Are you suddenly going to find an otherwise useful techie feed cut off entirely because of a spat (followed by the usual Social Media "everyone has to take a side" magnification effect)?

This added (apparent) volatility just adds to the confusion.

X Corp is now suing a sublessee for unpaid rent

This is what happens

When you downsize by firing the entire "accounts payable" team but keep everyone from "receivable".

Microsoft Bing Chat pushes malware via bad ads

Re: Bing Chat contains ads as part of the user experience

> "User experience" was originally conceived as a term to describe the process of making interfaces clearer and easier to use, so that users could accomplish what they wanted to do in a straightforward, efficient way.

Really?

The first time I became aware of the term, let alone its ghastly 2LA "UX"[1], was years after I'd been introduced to the goal of having a UI that was, well, intended for the convenience of the User, not the developer.

As soon as people started to refer to the User having an "experience" the intent seemed to shift to being as disconnected from aiding the User as every other forced "experience": e.g. instead of going to a Museum to be able to study and learn about some artifacts, the "experience" is all about vapid, badly acted video presentations. Similarly, instead of a web page just being useful & informative, it nowadays has to have an "experience", which curiously involves too much use of badly acted video presentations! Even Open Source project sites: my R'Pi running Birdnet was stuck on a process running something called "streamlit" - new to me, looked it up: oh, it generates sharable webapps and goes well with generative AI (cue video); oh, and it is trusted by IBM, that is nice. How about just bleeping well saying right up front "it can make nice graphs"! Mutter, mutter.

I'll stick with dealing with issues about UI design & implementation (e.g. every clickable item shows up consistently, getting the framework code to pressure you into providing help & tooltips everywhere (so you can't just forget), the workflow logic being expressed as, well, logic, that can be interrogated (sorry, you can not move onto Y until you have done X, but don't worry, you can come back to that if you wish to do Z meantime). And leave the "UX" to people who like to scribble on those pre-printed pads of a blank iPhone, advertised as the place to "describe their next great app concept"!

Hmm, what was that? What makes you think the weekend isn't going well? Blasted rain! How can I test the microphone with Birdnet if the birds are all sheltering elsewhere!

[1] although I like being able to describe one of those failing miserably as a "UXB"!

This web page certified by the Soil Association

> an ad is displayed first before the organic result.

WTF is an "organic result"?

Is the alternative to get back a web page that is too salty? Or one that I'm just meant to absorb by osmosis?

Routers have been rooted by Chinese spies, US and Japan warn

This router's not big enough for the both of us

> Chinese government spies may be hiding in your Cisco routers

And not leaving enough room for all the indigenous spies.

The home Wi-Fi upgrade we never asked for is coming. The one we need is not

> Don't plug in the Fritz if you value your existing POTS landline working. Especially if your landline is needed for emergency calls.

OTOH we haven't had any such issue with Zen and their Fritz!Box router.

Having said that, as the Fritz!Box was just plugged in in place of its predecessor, into the ADSL side of the filter, and the other handsets are just plugged into normal 'phone extension wiring, not sure how the Ftitz!Box _could_ usurp our landline.

As to "restoring the landline to working condition" - um, unplugging the Fritz!box? If that doesn't work then wouldn't that indicate that your POTS had been switched off, which is down to BT, not your ISP (Zen or otherwise)?

Re: Too pessimistic

Too right.

One day they are going to go up to 600THz (yes tera Hertz!) or more and then what are we going to do?

Actually, I was checking and the new PoE switch I installed today *already* emits modulated EM radiation around 550THz[1] so now I'm wondering what effect that'll have - it is in the attic so I'm probably safe from it getting out, right?

[1] someone did try to tell me that this is eco-friendly, if you can believe that! He was insistent that this is actually perfectly green energy![2]

[2] gimme a drum sting - bmm-tsssh!

Re: Interest, expertise and time

> sadly still on FTTC

All of us limited to ADSL are sending you good feelings that you aren't suffering too much.

How is this problem mine, techie asked, while cleaning underground computer

Re: Dirt

Remapping rarely manages to change the shape of the Return key to something pleasing, nor does it move the function keys back to their correct location.

A hacksaw helps with latter but rarely the former!

Re: Dirt

> they should be considered personal hygiene items and not shared between people.

That is so true.

I caught impetigo from a keyboard I'd just been issued - I still have scarring on the bridge of my nose, it was stopped only a few mm from one eye!

Another reason - aside from a sensible layout - to use my own keyboards all the time.

FAA wants rocket jockeys to clean up after their space launch parties

Twenty minutes into the future

"It's the Annual Sky Clearance, an event when the Zik Zak Corporation shoots down all its obsolete satellites, causing debris to rain down upon Earth. There are carnivals and sales to celebrate, and everyone walks around under metal umbrellas to protect themselves."

Max Headroom, episode 13

We all grinned wryly at the spectacle, but little did we know how prescient this was. Of course, in the show they had to call the company "Zik Zak" as nobody would believe a daft name like "X".

Beneath Microsoft's Surface event, AI spreads everywhere

Re: Red Dwarf....

No to the toast, just stick to the endless reams of verbiage that are almost but not quite totally unrelated to the task that I'm trying to perform on this computer.

Ah, so you're a waffle man!

Re: Smoke and mirrors

Having said that...

allow Copilot to interrogate shoppers

Basing its enquiries on the most common forms of questions posed to shoppers that it finds in its training set, whilst trying to influence people to shop responsibly:

Only the earrings and not the full set? Do you WANT people to think you're cheap?

Brynylon and socks with sandals? Are you TRYING to give me a heart attack?

Oh, Lordy, what did we say about carbs? Mmm mmm mmmmmmmm, you did NOT just put that in your basket!

If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding! How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?

Re: Smoke and mirrors

> Until AI achieves sentience it's just another bunch of algorithms

Hate to break it to you, but even if it does achieve sentience, it will still be just another bunch of algorithms. So long as it runs on hardware, it is all just algorithms, right down to the microcode.

PS

Whether or not you wish to take that as some meaningful statement about what sentience is or "proof" that AI can never be sentient (or, conversely, that it can be, but...) is entirely up to you: you can pick and choose your own philosophy and even your own sophistry.

But like, religion and politics, a gentlebeing never discusses philosophy of AI in public or over the dinner table.

GNU turns 40: Stallman's baby still not ready for prime time, but hey, there's cake

> Mr. Pottiecoder has moved on. He now works at Microsoft.

And Microsoft would want to stop him from releasing any more destructive[1] code into Linux?

There is probably a queue of MS execs just champing at the bit, hoping to be the one to sign the release form on his next code droppings.

[1] whether you believe his work has been inspired by the devil or by the angels, you can not overlook the divisive - and hence socially destructive - impact it has had.

Re: A Complicated Man

> If you put your source code in the public domain then it's free.

Assuming you are in a jurisdiction where you can meaningfully put it in the public domain, without first dying and waiting for some 75 to 100 years.

> By definition any licence doesn't do that, it adds restrictions

"By definition"? No, not at all. The complete opposite: a licence always removes restrictions. For example, you have licenced one or more people or corporations to reproduce your work without risk of your suing them for breach of copyright. Whether or not you are asking for money (or some other consideration) in return is all part of the licence.

Re: A Complicated Man

> With no licence whatsoever. If someone wants to use that code (and that was the intention, otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered publishing it at all) then fine by me. Why should I have to produce a licence?

Purely and simply in order to state your intent.

If you publish something, you are not giving anyone the rights to reproduce and reuse that thing - like it or not, you (or your employer, in far too many situations) hold the copyright. Unless you explicitly make a statement to allow reproduction and reuse, nobody legally can.

> But some people (OS projects etc) wouldn’t use it because it didn’t have a license!! Utterly stupid.

Hey, if you want to pull down the idea of copyright, go ahead and campaign for it. Just be prepared for a few people to disagree with you.

Epic payout: FTC opens Fortnite settlement claim floodgates

Never played Fortnite

But can I claim against the mental and emotional distress caused by seeing Dara Ó Briain "flossing" on Mock The Week?

So many, many, times (all thanks to Dave).

95% of NFTs now totally worthless, say researchers

> they were conned into spending money on basically a GIF file

Nope, you've missed the subtle distinction that all the value of NFTs relies upon.

They didn't spend money on a GIF, the GIF was free for everyone to enjoy[1].

What they bought was a note on a blockchain (hopefully, that blockchain is still being mined and hasn't just evaporated) and that note said they now owned this copy of a URL - i.e. they literally owned one copy of a sequence of characters that starts "http" - and the fact that, at the specific point in time when the note was made, the claim that said URL leads to a copy of the GIF in question. Where that same URL leads to now, or tomorrow, is one of the great imponderables[2]

The value is all in understanding this chain of references and how its very ephemeral nature highlights the essence of Man's struggle against Nature. Or something like that. Maybe it was Man's Inhumanity Against Man[3]?

[1] enjoyment is not guaranteed; the aesthetic appeal of a garish cartoon of a monkey may go down as well as - actually, no, it just goes down.

[2] or it is just a 404 - damn, I should have sold NFTs to a 404 page and saved the hosting fees for the GIF! Is it too late?

[3] if the NFT mongers had made that claim, they could have actually had a case for charging money for the things: "the art is in the process by which we ripped people off, it is a performance piece".

Re: Shocked

You should have gone for Panda Roger, that one is going to hold its value!

As TikTok surveils staff's office hours, research indicates WFH is good for planet

Re: 54% is nothing. I can offer a 90%+ cut.

> That's not a date.

Not unless you bring flowers.

Re: 54% is nothing. I can offer a 90%+ cut.

<pedant-alert>

> 24/7/365

Hmm, doing this for 7 years will help, but longer would be better.

</pedant-alert>

Re: Free Haircuts

Yeah, they could at least offer us a wax and shine!

(Not bald: my hair merely stayed at the same elevation as I grew upwards, hence the beard)

Re: Free Haircuts

Take a wild guess...

Hint: it is "free" for the employer as well (bar the biscuits eaten by the student from the local hairdressing course on their "work experience").

Lawsuit claims Google Maps led dad of two over collapsed bridge to his death

Re: Process failure at Google

> Unless you welcome tours of the Central English countryside

Google Maps, proudly sponsored by National Trust Tea Shops, Ltd "where there is always a clean loo for a paying customer" (tm)

Chan Zuckerberg org to spin up 1,000+ H100 GPU cluster for AI medical research

LLMs for modelling disease?

> large language models will be key to understanding what causes disease at the cellular level

Um, the difference between an LLM and any other large Neural Net is that the input[1] is pre-processed to help pick out features of human language, in textual form[2], and the rest of the code used for training and "playback" is intended to be better at handling that data than any other random data set (cue many, many papers where CompSci bods work to refine these processes for this particular sort of data).

If you want to tackle disease modelling, perhaps use some (equally large) 'Nets, but ones that can be fed something more useful than plain text? Maybe images, some stats about rates of infection, raw feeds from lab instruments (to spot patterns our existing post-processing misses?) etc.

Unless, of course, the people doing all these systems really only know about putting GPU cards into racks and running whatever software they grabbed from AI labs and haven't actually got the knowledge to understand the difference?[3]

[1] and output, although that varies with the goal of the system: e.g. Stable Diffusion versus ChatGPT have different output systems (and the one for SD is yet another 'net, to do the actual image; crudely speaking, of course.

[2] and that processing may well be a.n.other 'net converting speech into text

[3] I've suggested before that these big money projects are more ops guys than research guys, hence why their "safeguards" sound tacked on the front rather than "built-in" to their models.

DoD hopes $30M BEACONS will light the way to next-gen American battery designs

Advance Commercialization and National Security

Bit on the nose there.

Everyone else: go electric, Save the Planet

Texas: ah, screw that

Desktop AI isn’t happening, says AMD, and might not for quite a while

Why shove this into the CPU

when these workloads are also being targeted by GPUs - where you get far more processing units and associated RAM than you'll get onto the CPU die. Plus the obvious fact it is easier to add multiple GPU cards than to chuck out the CPU (and likely the entire motherboard) for the next round of CPUs.

Could it possibly be that AMD's GPUs are losing ground to nVidia's in this arena so they want to convince you that using a much smaller co-processor closer to the CPU is better somehow?

Moving co-processors into the CPU is a Good Thing - once there is a genuine *general* need for them and there is room for the entire unit: floating point and MMU in with the CPU makes sense, not convinced that the last condition is anywhere near met for AI co-processors (if only because the models seem to be getting larger and more "AI farm in the server room" like than desktop sized).

Britcoin or Britcon? Bank of England grilled on Digital Pound privacy concerns

Re: No thanks

"Cash is king" refers to "cash in the bank", not (just) literally having a pile of coins in your pocket - what is also referred to as having "liquidity". As opposed to having your wealth tied up in various "holdings" that can crash at any time, as in the 1987 stock market crash, when the term became popular.

Not that liquid assets weren't also devalued by the inflation following the crash, but that was only damaging to the little people, to the Players it was the stock prices that really hurt.

The phrase has nothing whatsoever to do with governments screwing up over money - in fact, ref the above, the total opposite: "cash is king" is pointing out the value of a government controlled currency over the totally arbitrary nature of the non-governmental system of wealth!

Chap blew up critical equipment on his first day – but it wasn't his volt

> I suppose we should be grateful that the Americans use volts rather than an archaic system of measurement.

Be very, very thankful that they didn't decide to take the potential difference from one Voltaic cell (copper/brine/zinc) and just call *that* one Volt instead (it is about 0.76V, btw). In keeping with their habit of using units that _sound_ like proper Imperial Units but aren't quite...

Ah, the Good Old Days

Which is why you are safe with your Van de Graaf generator, or even your Wimshurst machine, just so long as you keep them well away from your Leyden jar.

And you try to tell the young folk that...

Re: It doesn't always smoke though

Nah, he is simply That Good and is able to judge the AC cycles by the flicker from the building lights: positive going has a pinky shade to it.

Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure

Re: coccyx-centered comforts in cold climes

> I cannot imagine what spurious etymology or mis-reading of history could lead anyone to find that offensive

Talk to the Uni of South California

> It's all a matter of resolving components

Only after you've taken into account the airfoil shape of the sail and the additional non-obvious forces that creates. And include turning tighter into the wind as your speed increases and the effective wind direction rotates around you, compared to the wind direction over the water (or land, for a sandrigger, if you are crazed enough).

Not to mention the drag and hydrofoil responses of the centre board and hull.

But, yes, once you have written down all the forces, you just need to resolve them.

Or sit at the tiller and just do it all by the seat of your soggy[1] pants

[1] if you've still got a dry seat, you aren't trying hard enough! Now, tight to the wind, tuck your feet under and stick yer bum over the gunwhale

If anyone finds an $80M F-35 stealth fighter, please call the Pentagon

Pilot ejected for reasons that have yet to be explained

> but not before he put the aircraft on autopilot.

So he switches over to autopilot and is promptly ejected by the aircraft?

Was there anything else going wrong shortly beforehand, such as, ooooh, problems with the AE35 unit?

If not, one is left to assume that it was external interference, indicating that SkyNet has started making its first moves, collecting together materiel.

Textbook publishers sue shadow library LibGen for copyright infringement

Surrender the domain names

That'll stop them in their tracks! Because nobody who needs a textbook will be able to figure out how to change their bookmarks. /s [1]

More interestingly, turn the domains over to the plaintiffs? What are they intending to do with them? Set them up as honey traps and try to sue individuals who go there?

[1] and see article's note about SciHub

Portable Large Language Models – not the iPhone 15 – are the future of the smartphone

Re: Sure, it's possible, but why would you want it?

> Medical diagnoses is a well defined logical process implemented in existing software such as expert systems

Agreed.

> We only need AI for problems we don't know how to solve

There it is again! Oh, the loneliness of the long-distance AI researcher!

XPS are the children of the AI Lab, but, no, they are a "solved problem" and therefore are not AI :-(

Re: Sure, it's possible, but why would you want it?

It is called "thinning the herd".

GitHub alienates developers by force feeding them AI recommendations

Re: Wait, Github has a home page?

Now, if GitHub had added an animation of tumbleweed (one more added per month of zero interest) then at least I'd applaud the humour.

Especially if they then added a leaf blower option (see icon) as otherwise I'd never be able to see anything for all the vegetation piling up in front of my repos' stats (you think *your* code is dull and uninteresting to the great unwashed, well let me tell you...).

> A central repository is precisely the wrong way to use a distributed change-management system

You still need a single point of truth for the actual release version, which everyone agrees to sync to, most especially the Release Build process.

Distributed VC means you can do your dev without always connecting to The Repo, you have full history, can make all the branches you want (and reap the ones that don't work), collaborate with others etc etc, but once you have The Fix or The New Feature you have to merge it into The Repo before it can be released.

Otherwise your company/project can not have any guarantees about what is actually in a release if you just made it from whatever is sitting in a random repo on someone's laptop.

BUT The Repo just needs to be a simple Git (or whichever) repo on a machine that has been blessed. If you are all in-house it can just be a.n.other box on the LAN, otherwise hosting it somewhere accessible to anyone on the Internet is rather useful.

The whole GitHub thing is less about Git than it is all the stuff they put on top - and I'm not going to particularly praise that.[1]

[1] Personally, I think they got obsessed with Ruby and will never forgive them for recoding their Markup entirely in Ruby, instead of adding the features they wanted to the C library they'd been using! Obviously, if they'd (had the ability to) update the C lib, then everyone - Ruby, Python, C/C++ etc - could have used it directly. Not only did this make a total mockery of "GitHub, we are all about people collaborating together to make their projects better" but it guaranteed that we had yet ANOTHER *incompatible* dialect of Markup: even before being bought out by Microsoft, they had "Embrace, Extend" bit down pat!

Re: Developers are (not) doing it for themselves

Not wanting to belabour the joke, but just in response to your statement:

You do want to work on being able to recreate the entire build from years gone by: embedded and industrial systems last a long time and can have contract requirements that match (and if you aren't in that category yet, who knows what tomorrow may bring). And that includes keeping all the compilation tools around as well: although the plan may be to ship a new executable made with the latest tooling, you must start with a bit-accurate[1] build with the old, to prove the starting position.

[1] with precisely in exception: some tools are stupid[2] enough to put timestamps into the objs and exes, so you have to waste time proving that those account for all the differences!

[2] yes, stupid - another example of tool creators trying to "be useful" (very apropos for this article!) and just causing more trouble for actual professionals. There are sensible ways to get build info into an exe and the choice of which to use is for the project and its build tools - and, yes, that can include into every obj if we want. And - breathe.

Techie labelled 'disgusting filth merchant' by disgusting hypocrite

Re: "The caller had paid the bill, but wasn't happy."

C4's entire (original) remit was to show material that was outside the mainstream, by any measure they could think of, and anything else that the other 3 channels wete unlikely to broadcast. So we had nerdish Countdown in the afternoon and Eurotrash that same evening. Plus Greenaway films, Tartovsky films, and the absolutely brilliant and much missed 4mations.

C4 started broadcasting US comedies, SF and whatever category Buffy falls into, before the other channels caught up.

They also suffered (and still do) a lot of shit by promoting LBGT+ material before, e.g., BBC caught up with "This Life".

They have pulled in the reins, unfortunately, in the last decade or so, but Film 4 still sponsors the making of less-mainstream films (which don't give a monkey's about making a big opening splash in the US - yes, that is a real Irish accent and no, you don't get subtitles!). And they still show stuff others won't (e.g. Big Bang Theory every. single. day. No other channel does that!).

Still have a lot of live for the C4/E4/Film4/etc channels - they are not as radical as they were but then everyone else is catching up, even in the free-to-air channels, so to keep up with what remains of the remit they do put out stuff with far less nerdy appeal. Nowadays you watch a Greenaway film just for the brilliant vocal acting of Gielgud; if you want the boobs, BabeStation will suffice.

Power grids tremble as electric vehicle growth set to accelerate 19% next year

Re: GridWatch

There are newer district heating systems in the UK, ones that work, and a few more are at least being planned.

Have a look at the Sage, Gateshead - that whole Baltic Wharf area has shared heating.

And the plans include using water cycling through disused North East coal mines, with sensible BIG heat pumps at the head to make a sensible setup.