Posts by that one in the corner

Dump these insecure phone adapters because we're not fixing them, says Cisco

Re: To be fair back in the day there were "full digital" CD's and AAD CD's

> you could hear the stylus drop onto the record

Vitally important for playing The Goons records:

'Ere, 'oo stuck that needle in my nut?

Re: Bit hard on the bright young things?

> Explain this...

How about being able to get all the artwork at a size you can actually appreciate it? With liner notes and lyrics that you can read without a microscope?

And gatefolds without half of it sitting under the CD holder?

We may huff about the quality of so-called music these days, but the artwork on CDs is dreary as well. Why bother with a Roger Dean double gatefold, just shove another dull band photo on there!

I admit I'm listening to the CD but I'm looking at the Yessongs LP cover.

Re: Bit hard on the bright young things?

That cable is chock full of amazing ideas to improve your audio. Like untwisting the twisted pair. And they spotted that any good cable must have at least one of those mysterious lumps near one end, so not only have they provided two mysterious lumps, but theirs are eco-friendly: made of purest bamboo!

But that is an old product, and misses out on an important feature: arrows! Yes, if you don't have arrows on the cable, how can you know it is plugged in the right way?

As this current listing for a £1,199.00 ethernet cable (0.75 metres - don't worry, it cheaper per metre in longer pieces; how does £10,999.00 for 12m sound?) states

"All audio cables are directional. The correct direction is determined by listening to every batch of metal conductors used in every AudioQuest audio cable. Arrows are clearly marked on the connectors to ensure superior sound quality. For best results have the arrow pointing in the direction of the flow of music. For example, NAS to Router, Router to Network Player."

https://www.analogueseduction.net/ethernet-and-streaming-cables/audioquest-rje-diamond-ethernet-cable.html

Owner of 'magic spreadsheet' tried to stay in the Lotus position until forced to Excel

Re: Better than a PM

To do it properly, you need to combine the triangulation of IP pings with Jake's use of echo ^G (hang on, wasn't that the - apocryphal? - origin story of IP ping, that the receiving machine actually went "ping"?).

Bonus points if someone is also following the cables and tugging on them to see what jolts loose:

"Ping"

"5 metres"

"Ping!"

"3 metres"

"PING!!"

"1 metre"

"That's not possible! It's inside the room with us!"

[FX: BOFH tugs hard on ethercable, box shifts on false ceiling, teeters on foam tile the falls, dragging BOFH up partition wall]

"Aaaargh!"

[FX: ceiling collapses, wire tentacles drop, entangle PFY who is yanked, screaming, into void as server rack crashes down on other side of rafter. PHB fires wildly and terminates anyone in his sights]

(TV edit: removed the following scene, where techie leans over server, says "It's dead" just as the optical drive tray shoots open, impaling his dangling id badge)

Python still has the strongest grip on developers

Re: Languages

> CPAN was, to my knowledge, the first modern software package repository

It was based upon the CTAN model for distributing TeX related materials, which started 2 or 3 years earlier than the Perl archive.

Microsoft mucks with PrtScr key for first time in decades

Re: As we suspected

Heathen!

Just because ini files are readable, can contain comments in case you forget why you changed that setting, can be managed within version control, can be copied from one system to the next - how can any of that compare to the wonder of The Registry or the sheer joy of screen capturing the Settings dialogues and hoping you'll still be able to find those same GUI controls in the next releases of the OS?

Microsoft stumps loyal fans by making OneDrive handle Outlook attachments

> The first time you get a discovery request from some kind of litigation you'll wish you hadn't kept so much stuff.

Or, you know, don't do stuff that you shouldn't in the first place?

Re: Stick to IMAP, move to local every so often

> or POP

As I said to the wife: "Your Thunderbird is GO!"

US defense tech veterans call for a separate Cyber Force

This is my keyboard.

There are many like it, but this one is mine. My keyboard is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. My keyboard, without me, is useless. Without my keyboard, I am useless.

Alibaba and Huawei set to debut generative AI chatbots

Re: Wouldn't a global AI model have to be trained in both English and Chinese?

> trained in both English and Chinese

Shiny.

Careful selection of criteria

> Out of 15 questions, ten responses reportedly outperform competitors. Benchmarks for determining that result were not disclosed.

Those ten suggested buying new underpants on AliBaba, four suggested Amazon and one the running dogs of capitalist imperialism that is Marks and Sparks.

In the battle between Microsoft and Google, LLM is the weapon too deadly to use

> Do talk to ChatGPT yourself? It will tell you the same thing I'm saying.

Ask ChatGPT to describe itself and then believe that?

Have you actually been reading all the stuff about how reliable the "information" it spits out is?

> The technology is one and damn simple

Annotating is *not* "damn simple"!

Gawd, I'm arguing with ChatGPT itself, aren't I?

Re: Futile

> These LLM's aren't trained on math or physics at this time

They already *are* trained on lots if maths and physics and chemistry and all sorts of other papers (whatever can scraped from the web) - which is why they can produce stuff that *looks* like academic text.

LLMs - large LANGUAGE models will happily spout the same sort of *language* used in maths and physics, that doesn't mean it understands a single syllable of it.

> Through this paradigm texts are structured and annotated

Sounds like you think there is more human effort going into these things than statisticulations -

> Then, the most suitable paragraphs and sentences are extracted from the found texts,

You think these LLMs are storing the original texts and piles of references back into them, in order to locate and extract those paragraphs?

> which are then rewritten composing new paragraphs. Phrases found in the context of the question and its history (its manually created annotations) are used for rewriting.

Where are these manually created annotations coming from? Do you think they are being created, manually, for all of the text that was slurped up to train the model?

> this ChatGPT program involves incredible and coordinated efforts in annotating words and phrases

Huh?

Are you perhaps getting confused with machine vision and recognition systems, which *do* rely on having manual annotations applied to all of the input images (i.e. "these are all images of dogs", "none of these images are of dogs", " now, please devise a way to distinguish these two sets of images")?

I have no clue what an LLM is

For the sake of this and similar articles, it is perfectly ok to simply know that an LLM is just whatever the heck both ChatGPT and Bard and the rest are. Use it as a way to talk about them without naming a specific one (imagine yourself to be on a BBC programme and you don't want to keep repeating "other annoying text generators are available").

No-one really knows what they are and specifically how they work: some people know how to make them but after that they can't tell you how the newly-minted LLM *actually* got from the input prompt to the output result. All they'll do is tell you, again, what they did to make it (probably in an even more longwinded way) and end by saying "ta-da".

Re: War between Google and MS?

> It also demonstrates that the Turing Test isn't fit for purpose

That purpose being?

Turing didn't state that a machine that could pass his test *was* automatically an artificial intelligence, but that one which *didn't* pass that test is *not* an AI.

Necessary, but not sufficient.

Re: War between Google and MS?

> I can't help but think that these "recommendations" are being polluted by desperate marketing companies paying to have their crap promoted

That is absolutely what Amazon is doing: aside, perhaps, from the "frequently bought together" section (which only gives you two more items than the one you are looking at) all the other "related items" shown are from the "sponsored" list, as are a growing number of (totally unrelated) hits when you do a search for a specific item. Amazon, on their website at least, seem to have pretty much given up on their stats-driven product pushing.

Which at least gives us some hope for the future: if they've given up on using the data they collected (which was actually accurate and even, in the early days, could be fed from literally your own responses to the products you recently bought) in exchange for old-fashioned "pay us and we'll push your junk" advertising they will, please, realise that using responses from a totally random set of data unrelated to the individual customer won't be worth losing the advertising dollars.

Re: @ComputerSays_noAbsolutelyNo - Shitty Clippy

> could LLMs be used for, let's say, making money ?

Yes, but only up to the point that the investors catch on and start to demand their money back...

Re: Define "intelligence".......so is the "artificial" kind really "intelligence"....

> So, they're just like humans, actually...

Yup, except for the teeny tiny number of humans who trained really, really hard to be able to check their facts, create and document their reasoning chains so that their peers could verify them. And even then they get all argumentative about it.

Hmmmmm, although the current crop of LLMs do seem to have the last bit down pat, as the stories of their argumentative behaviour indicate.

I take it back, they *are* acting just like *those* humans as well - just not in any way that is particularly useful or anything to be proud of.

Re: Pandora's Box, again

> create/train one without access to Amazon, Azure, Meta or Google level computing resources.

And data-swallowing capacity: even if you just suck it in raw off the web, you need to pull down a *lot* of input text to train from. If you try to sanitise it then you are looking at spending more than a weekend on it.

One of the reasons that these big stats-based models are appearing is because, although they take an awful lot to train, that is just compute cycles: press the button and put your feet up. The basics have been known for a fair old while, we've just hit the point where both the cycles and the bulk input texts are available at the same time, and someone has decided to foot the bill. Followed by "I want one of those as well" responses, of course.

Whereas the old projects that tried[1] to build up knowledge bases and capture reliable (and explanatory) relationships about, well, everything, aren't so trivial to automate.

[1] "tried" because, afaik, they aren't running anymore - as always, corrections very much appreciated if you know otherwise.

Re: Futile

> contemplate a theory that unites quantum and General Relativity

"No, I don't want an untestable String Theory, no Casual Dynamical Triangulation and definitely no smeggin' Loop Quantum Gravity!"

"Ah, so you're a <waffle> man!"

Re: Futile

> I foresee people feeding the AI with all the known math and physics knowledge and asking it to contemplate a theory that unites quantum and General Relativity,

I hope when you sat "the AI" you aren't referring to the LLMs that the article is talking about, as they aren't any good at simple logic and arithmetic problems, except by luck (as in, they had already seen that question and answer pairing in their training data and could repeat it back). Many places discuss the existing models failing, for example:

https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/38220/why-is-chatgpt-bad-at-math

Tesla Semi, out since December, already facing a recall over brakes

Re: Trucked

== Science says that EVs are not great at load carrying or towing over distance.

= Range of Tesla truck ... whoever Tesla talked

= You don't need citations when the facts are so obvious even a 5 year old can work them out.

Or when you want to quietly change the subject from wild claims that *NO* EV is any good to whether just the Tesla EV is any good.

That's one of the reasons why you cite - to identify what you are going to talk about and stick to it!

New models of IBM Model F keyboard Mark II incoming

Come down the rabbit hole, there is nothing to fear. We have cookies[1]!

[1] best avoid the little cakes.

Strange how unlike the Model F the layouts are

IMO, The XT version of the Model F has the best key layout, with a decent cursor/home/end cluster overlaid on the numeric keypad and the function keys easily accessible with a slight sideways motion.

I've got a collection of Northgate Omnikey Ultras (which are showing signs of aging: have to gird my loins and unsolder the S key on the current one), simply because they are the closest to the proper Model F layout I could find: none of that ghastly new-fangled inverted-T for the cursor keys, plus the ability to put CTRL back above shift where it belongs (you don't need a CapsLock after you've gone past two-finger typing on a computer keyboard, it was only there because holding down the shift on a classic workhorse typewriter was tiring!). Under Win'10 I've been trying out having the CapsLock mapped as the Windows key (the Ultras predating that), although that key is so rarely used I keep forgetting it is available now!

An XT Model F layout would be great to have. I'd even forego F11 and F12. Just not sure about the price (if I was still working full-time it would be a no-brainer to get a couple, but as things stand they'd have to be less expensive). Although I would miss the added lethality of the Northgate keyboards.

Google denies Bard trained using OpenAI ChatGPT responses

The inevitable xkcd

What goes around, comes around, just insert Bard, ChatGPT and the rest into this loop and Bob's You Uncle[1]

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/978:_Citogenesis

[1] last week he was your great grandfather, but after updating his entry based upon this new information posted over here...

Re: "wrong to train its AI search chatbot Bard on text generated by OpenAI's ChatGPT"

So if I wanted to claim I had the Ultimate AI that had re-processed all the text available, all I *actually* have to do is change my Eliza to print out

"Send three and fourpence, we're going to a dance".

But to make sure it is AI, I'll use the proper language: I've a copy of Winston and Horn, 3rd edition, in the post.

OpenAI prohibits people from using its outputs to train their own models.

But they can just suck up whatever *they* want from anything published on the web?

Hypocrisy much?

After 11 years, Atlassian customers finally get custom domains ... they don't want

Re: Have some sympathy

In Australia, the bugs have you.

School principal resigns after writing $100,000 check to Elon Musk impersonator

Re: "I am very smart"

> For romance scams, you could well be contacting them on a dating site.

The trick is to make the mark *think* they are being contacted via the dating website, without actually doing so (as that would leave a trail - and mean the scammer has to pay the dating site fee as well).

So, again, just blast out many, many messages that claim to be a response to the mark's post on the dating site - almost all of the recipients won't have gone anywhere near the dating website, but a few will have - and a few more may fall for the "your friends signed you up" second email.

Bit of standardised social engineering later and kerching.

Business deals and investment[1] purchases of sums like that occur every day without doing all the paperwork via lawyers; if you feel like it, you can go and buy a car for that much without invoking the lawyers. If you have signatory power up to $50k already then signing big cheques can be normalised.

Agreed, if the deal is something out of the ordinary (for you) then getting a lawyer to go over the contract is a sensible precaution, but not a strict necessity (either way, as signatory, you still bear the liability - getting lawyers in just gives you someone else to blame).

But, of course, the whole way any of these scams work is to hope to find someone who doesn't go to lawyers as a matter of course, especially after time has been spent building up a relationship.

[1] or "investment", as even the otherwise legit ones are a gamble

> If someone purporting to be DHL contacted you out of the blue to say you needed to pay their fees in order to get this wonderful expensive package of yours, when you're not actually expecting a package, then that's clearly a scam, and you'd be daft as hell to pay

Well, yes, that is how these scams work - they spray out a huge number of such messages and rely on the chance that a small number of recipients will be too rushed[1], too naive[2] or simply too far on the decline[3] to take what we, the "clever lot", deem to be "the obvious precautions".

[1] life gets on top of all of us at some point

[2] the young and the trusting are a joy in life

[3] that fate awaits most of us

Re: "I am very smart"

Woooosh

Version 100 of the MIT Lisp Machine software recovered

Re: The Forgotten Fifth Generation

> First of all, there was a computer from the Japanese ICOT "Fifth Generation Computer Systems (FGCS)" project that was commercially sold...

Thanks for that info.

That particular footnote [4] was supposed to say "as far as I'm aware, updates most welcome" but you may have noticed I was having trouble keeping the footnotes in line.

> , but if you gave the expert systems more than a few hundred rules to follow in their decision trees they became painfully slow at returning answers.

Can you provide any citations for this? Serious question, not snark: in about 1985 we had an Expert System Shell applying simple Bayesian stats and I don't recall ever having to worry about it becoming painfully slow at calculating as you increased the rule set - it might start to ask more questions to help it traverse the data, but generally IIRC it organised the rules along the lines of a decision graph, walked from one side to the next, choosing the next node in the path based upon the data & weightings so far: a "wide but thin" set of k nodes would be solved faster (as in, it asked fewer questions before finding a sufficiently likely node that couldn't be disproved, aka "the answer") than a "narrow but thick" arrangement of the same number of nodes that arranged themselves in a different fashion.

But there are other ways of working an XPS (e.g. it need not be interactive with the User - ours was and so any calculation time was peanuts compared to waiting for them to type) and it is never too late to learn about them.

What helped kill off XPS (in the public eye) from our p.o.v. was mainly not showing a good enough cost/benefit: creating and validating rule sets is expensive and takes time away from your human expert. Simple XPS that could be created cheaply, such as an initial triage scheme, could be done as fast by the human operator once they'd run through the system a few times (i.e. the humans were trainable! Who knew?). Large rulesets (from our set of clients at least) were used too infrequently compared to the creation costs (and we didn't get into any of the big funded research studies). And some fields just learnt embarrassing lessons: like Stock Market trading. They can afford the set up costs, given the potential returns, right? But remember all those trials that showed that a monkey, an octopus or just throwing a die tended to give better returns on the market than the high-paid, so-called "expert traders"? And you *tried* to get an octopus to work alongside a Knowledge Engineer? Or vice versa, for that matter (the suckers! The horrible, horrible suckers!).

And back in the day there was something called "ethics" that controlled the use of computer models released into the wild: the XPS could show how it worked out a path to its answers, but if there wasn't a human around who could validate that when someone disagreed, the ethical liability was too high - and your human experts were not wild about being tied forever to that project, especially if they were planning to retire...

Luckily, all the current crop of LLMs and GANs etc are totally incapable of being queried for how they reached a result, so there are no ethical restrictions on just dumping them into the wild.

> more standardized, general purpose, and better-funded platforms to steamroll over them and crush them in the market.

True.

Re: The Forgotten Fifth Generation

[4] sigh.

Re: The Forgotten Fifth Generation

Quirks aren't necessarily bad, although they are things you have to be aware of in order to get the best out of whatever it is that is quirky.

For example, to make the best use of an old timey DOS PC, TurboPascal has the ability to do overlays - which you certainly didn't read about in the "Pascal User Manual and Report". You could quite easily learn all about the Fascinating World of Thrashing Disks using overlays, especially fun if you gave a hard drive and your Users have dual floppies. Not unique to TP but it made them so easy you could just sort of wander into using them.

Even just if you were, at the time, used to big multi-pass compilers that would eat your sources and spit out an error listing twice as long as your code, with every single missing semicolon mercilessly highlit. Switching over to TP's "halt on the first typo" did require a change in attitude. True, TP compiles really fast, but one of the ways it does that is to not be able to continue past that typo.

I tend to think of the various Turbo products as being pragmatic more than standards based, so you definitely needed to run through the manuals to find the odd bits that allow you to write code that'll give access to the PC's whole feature set.

Re: Good or just entertaining

> it's obvious that they're setting up a straw man as the method they don't like

Did you read the second URL, https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html ? Possibly not, as the article describes as an excerpt of the longer piece.

However, it is actually a fun meta-piece about the "Worse is Better" idea, where the author describes how, over time, he flips between both points of view, including writing (and having published in the same organ) articles where he argues for both sides (battling between his own name and a pseudonym)!

The Forgotten Fifth Generation

What can be seen as another attempt to take the path started by the LISP machines, the 1982 to 1992 (approx) Japanese "Fifth Generation Computing Machine" project, funded by MITI, is worth a mention in passing, at least. Even if its greatest legacy seems to be the stupid name[1] applied to database languages from 1983 onwards!

As with LISP machines, the intent was to create hardware that could run a language suitable for (among other things) creating small programs that can integrate together and work on top of a rich environment: as the article notes, an approach that Smalltalk also allows. The difference is that the language chosen, Prolog, was also deemed to be one that would work well across a multiprocessor environment, as the (putting it crudely[2]) search tree could be run in parallel along many branches at once, as well as working with a distributed set of "database clauses/statements"[3].

5G machines are less remembered than the LISP boxes (perhaps because they never[4] were actually sold, so few people ever saw them - or just because they didn't produce anything as memorable as the Space Cadet Keyboard!). Prolog has faded back into its niche, despite its moment of public glory (MicroProlog on the BBC[4] and Spectrum, even Borland had TurboProlog[4] for the PC).

[1] you know, calling them 4GLs, because the marketing twonks saw the slogan "Prolog, the Language of the Fifth Generation", thought it said "Prolog is the fifth generation of languages" (confusing s/w with h/w) and decided that the rash of languages for PC databases in the 80's had to be the generation behind... (Please, don't try to fling the Wikipedia article as a rebuttal!)

[2] very crudely, and let us ignore 'cut' for the sake of a brief comment!

[3] crude, I said crude!

[4] the beta ROMs on the BBC ruined my maze-solver for weeks, because we'd not noticed the "debugging aid" that was the top left character changing to show the garbage collector state, which ruined the Mode 7 graphics!

[5] TurboProlog was - quirky - compared to, well, every other Prolog; then again, it was released by Borland, so no-one was surprised.

FTC urged to freeze OpenAI's 'biased, deceptive' GPT-4

Re: It is singularity already

> It's not going to be creative because it was written not to be

That poses interesting questions about how to interpret the training of these models: what is there in the process of creating a statistical model that is explicitly saying "do not be creative"?

Re: It is singularity already

> Brains cannot be magic. They must be statistical machines

An old colleague used to point out that models of how the brain worked reflected whatever the current information technology was.

Plato described a wax tablet in our head.

bo111 thinks it must be ChatGPT.

Re: It is singularity already

> They are about any symbolic relations

Do you have any citations to support that?

The output from a LLM can be passed into a symbolic evaluator, but, so far, the only "support" for general symbolic processing I've seen has all been down to the same old statistical "if you see a mention of X then it is likely that the next bit mentions X-prime".

Given that they are well known to contradict themselves, if they are *supposed* to be proficient at say, symbolic logic, then I've got some old books on inference engines they may like to read (hint: when doing reductio ad absurdum you're not supposed to report the negation as the final conclusion!)

Uptime guarantees don't apply when you turn a machine off, then on again, to 'fix' it

Re: Not following procedures?

The advanced version of Victor Borge's routine for real punctuation enthusiasts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIf3IfHCoiE

(aka "curses, couldn't find the video I'm looking for and the edit window is about to close)

Re: Not following procedures?

>> What sort of parents would name their child with enclosing quotes.

> As Rod explained in the story: internal politics.

So sad when families start to filibuster and demanding that voting lines be redrawn (he is only your step-grandfather!)

Ending up, at the christening, with the mother handing over a note reading: his name is "Rod", not "Roderick". "Rod"!

They were lucky the pastor couldn't pronounce the pling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf_TDuhk3No - Victor Borge, Phonetic Punctuation

Re: Documented End-User Procedures

> with literal checkboxes

So that's one checkbox for each of the times you type 'sync' before the 'shutdown -h'?

Scientists speak their brains: Please don’t call us boffins

Re: Let's save time

To answer a question from the end of that piece "Why not just refer to scientists as exactly that? Scientists.":

Bluntly, not all scientists - purely as "people who do science" - are boffins. As in all fields[1], there is a range of abilities, even if the curve is offset from the wider population. Your boffins are the best of the best.

[1] I'm still allowed to use that derogatory term here, yes?

Re: Hmmm

"Abigail's Petri"

Re: Icon alert!

Indeed; if we were discussing Mad Science then Rotwang fits the bill, but a proper Boffin will be reaching wildly for the mug of tea[1] whilst in his slippers.

[1] which the long-suffering assistant nudges into his hand in the hopes of avoiding Another Incident: whilst it did lead to a breakthrough, the damage done to the wainscotting will never be fully repaired.

Re: Deter people from studying in the field?

> Except if you could tap into ZPE, how would you patent this

Surely "Star Gate: Atlantis" is prior art, rendering such a patent invalid?

Re: Deter people from studying in the field?

> There are six types, known as flavors, of quarks: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom

No, no, you can't use "top" and "bottom", they have far too many connotations and will upset people.

We'll just have to go back to the old alternative names for the t and b quarks, "truth"[1] and "beauty".

[1] As t is the last on the list to be found, "The Search for Truth" was a much better title than using "Top"!

Re: Hmmm

Hmm, the problem there is that the "ette" ending has the primary meaning of "small" and the feminine is a secondary meaning - compare with the masculine ending "et".

So "boffinette" and "boffinet" would be the gendered words for, say, anyone pre-doctorate.

(In case you were wondering, a "(drum) majorette" is a diminutive, female, version of a drum major: the latter manoeuvres a large baton, approximately[1] 2m, to keep the marching and in time and directed - ref. the end credits of "Thunderbirds Are Go!" - whilst the former flings about a small baton. Guess what I think the word "bachelorette" means!)

[1] approximately!