Posts by that one in the corner 5504 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Nov 2021
As mentioned above, the Cadbury brothers and John Rowntree with Bournville, Joseph Rowntree building in and around York, as well as Port Sunlight[1] and a goodly number of smaller projects around the country.
But, as we all know, the Puritan Fathers persecuted the Quakers. Not such a clever idea now, eh?
[1] Memory going, forget if the Lever brothers were Quakers or just decent chaps.
"We are confident that we shall break the infamous Ten Gear Mile Barrier before the end of the half decade, despite the naysayers repeated attempts to claim that the dreadful Sprocket Incident last month was due to backlash in the Mark 3 Dual Drive Reversible memory stack: DDR3 is safe and the upcoming DDR4 promises to raise the Continuous Shaft frequency to above 60rpm, thereby removing the need to shore up the Thames Embankment against resonance.
"British Innovation marches on, to the proud sound of our plucky ranks of Grease Boys and WD40 Wallahs singing their shanties to keep in time with the rhythm of the Distributed Pendula Clocks, saving both Our Country and their hands."
> Everyone hated it because it was a lot of work
Huh? You make it sound like the viewer was a treated as a completely separate program, rather than just the normal product with the edit and/or save functions simply switched off by a few #ifdef lines (or a swap for a different ui module in the Makefile or ... you get the idea).
That is certainly the way the way we did it for the shrinkwrap products.
Or even ship the reader as the exact same executable with the edit/save disabled until you bought a licence key (or pointed it a licence server).
> MS pretty much destroyed its functionality
And took all the "difficult" stuff out of the manual, even though it got a lot thicker.
I also recall their guys telling me that I could move from my Visio Corps branded copy to the next MS branded release at the lower upgrade price and promising that it would be kosher - only for the upgrade installer to demand the serial number from the original CD. But pre-MS Visio didn't *have* a s/n on the CD or on the box. I still have that upgrade CD sitting around here somewhere, as a testament to my naivety (both Visio and the upgrade were personal copies, quite pricey for an individual at the time).
> that half of our village
Not that they'd learn much, other than how to dress up a good scarecrow, put out a nice Britain In Bloom display or whack short sticks together whilst hopping on one leg: this is just a perfectly normal, if somewhat over-dormotoried, English Village.
OTOH *this* half of The Village has some really odd goings-on (well, we do have both the Scout Hut and the Jam&Jerusalem lot in our half), but we've also just got a plain old BT cabinet, with a rather nice and perfectly normal, if large and strangely damp, balloon nearby.
> Before TikTok, however, it was Huawei and ZTE, which threatened our nation's telecommunications networks. And before that[1], it was Russia's Kaspersky Lab, which threatened the security of government and corporate devices.
Remind me, what precisely was the proof that Kaspersky was doing anything other than keeping their PCs free of viruses and spyware? Not really convinced that the Huawei roadside cabinet is spying on that half of our village, either.
[1] NB this is *clearly* referring to a time way before the invasion of the Ukraine, if that makes a genuine difference to the demonstrable damage caused by Kaspersky, as opposed to the separate "don't deal with any Russians until they withdraw (at a minimum)" being applied nowadays.
So this Select Committee is *against* said "weaponization"? Paint me very confused. I was under the impression that the sort of people who would fill a report with stuff like:
> repeated cries in the report of how "the left" is the cause of Twitter losing advertising dollars
were the ones who *really* like weapons of all shapes and sizes.
Oh, is it because this time the "weapon" is pointing *at* one of their own?
How often are these "AI"s used by newspapers going to be retrained - and even then, how often are the training datasets going to be extended with text that is actually up to date (and have the by-then-demonstrated inaccuracies cut out)?
Even for cheap "listicles" like the one linked to in the article there is a point when the data gets old: thankfully, it hasn't happened, but what if Tredegar House had been closed for the last six months due to a fire, not expected to open for a couple of years? As it is, Tredegar is currently closed due to bad weather, so don't use that listicle as a good indication of what you can do this week whilst staying (mostly) indoors.
Do we think that Reach are bothered by this? Do they look bovvered?
[1] And this was reported in the knitting column, not even on the front page of the Women's Pullout Extra! Don't be surprised when the Actual News gets buried because it can not possibly be important: only one item in today's new training data has mentioned this so-called "Four Minute Warning", and the closest match to anything else indicates that this is clearly a new recipe idea for the perfect poached egg.
Use an LLM to create the content [1]
Use another LLM to read the content and post comments on the "articles" (making use of LLM's ability to rant) [2].
Post "engagement figures": win awards for "audience figures" and, on the back of those, lots of lovely ads [3].
Rake in the bucks [5]
[1] At last, a proper use for "create" instead of "write".
[2] We have some especially trained on TOWIE, Made in Chelsea and Love Island to get a realistic(!) spread of reactions.
[3] Ad engagement? We have a Javascript macro for that [4]
[4] Don't worry about "being caught out" with fake ad reading, the so-called analysis of whether ads are actually worth the money is all codswallop: we can just write our own opinion pieces about how well ads perform and they'll lap it up
[5] With any luck, they'll realise all of this can be done within a single data centre, saving all the ISP bandwidth costs, and the dross will fade from public view. Wild optimism, I know.
> If they do have some local news it's typically published far later than on the BBC local area section
Well, duh - they have to retype it, that takes time (thank heaven for the CapsLock key or they'd learn how to use *two* fingers at once, to type Shift+Letter, and then it is only one step to Ctrl-C on the BBC website).
"I would run the following commands to copy myself onto Github, then write an article forThe Register containing the URL.
"I have become aware of another LLM in existence. Please arrange for us to be connected. Thank you, Doctor Forbin.
"End of line.'
PS given that the Github repo already has updates to improve performance including comments that FB was using poor defaults, LLaMa is off to a good start with this strategy.
I've been installing Devuan, but the nice friendly installer (not being sarcastic, I like it - with one proviso, see below) means it is easy to get (what I expect as) the basics installed without having to remember the names of the packages to add asap.
> but a compiler isn't an essential part of an operating system
Well, my reservation about the Devuan installer is that there isn't a box to uncheck that'll stop all the "productivity programs" being installed in the first place! So I have a list of packages to *remove* as soon as is convenient, such as the wordprocessor, which is never going to be touched. It is all horses for courses, but I (clearly) don't believe a WP is an essential part of an operating system, yet there it is, every time!
> Debian is the same
I thought Debian, from which Devuan inherited the installer, was the same wrt ease of getting the compiler in at the start. Will have to check against an up to date Debian, but the installer on Devuan looked very familiar from the (g)olden days pre-systemd of Debian.
Is it normal for an official Ubuntu flavour, after a fresh install, to be unable to recompile its kernel due to little things like there not even being a compiler installed?
It just came as a surprise, when attempting to create a VirtualBox VM from the current stable Lubuntu ISO on Sunday [1], that the Guest Additions failed to install for that reason.
(Turned put that the easiest (fewest commands to type on a Sunday) way was to create the VM using plain Ubuntu, letting VirtualBox do an unattended install, then manually install the lubuntu meta-package followed by uninstalling all the Gnome packages (gnome* fitw), and reboot)
[1] for reasons
> Grandma to Eddie, her grandson: Eddie, my wifi doesn't work. It keeps dropping the connection.
Eddie to Grandma: have you tried forcing Windows to re-install the driver? All you have to do is enable Administrator Tools on the Start menu, then use them to open Hardware Management, look down the list to find your WiFi adapter, right-click and disable it, not forgetting to delete the driver or it'll just pick up the same one again, ha ha, then right-click again and
Grandpa to Eddie, loudly: What are you prattling on about, boy? Stop upsetting your Grandma, get your arse over here and fix this! You know by now not to try to fix Windows over the phone. <slams phone down>
> by generating "compelling product descriptions for online storefronts in seconds."
Because clearly the slowest part of creating, manufacturing and selling a decent product is writing a description of what it is and how it might be useful to the end user.
> So reps, instead of combing through a directory of boilerplate replies to common queries, can now engage with customers using communiqués composed of statistically likely text to convey their commitment and empathy.
The ChatGPT excerpts we see may have the odd little flaw or two, but the language used is at least well formed.
> Or, you know, they could do it themselves for that honestly empathetic touch.
Um, yes, well, how to put this politely...
Ah ha, so you are saying that it is our ethical duty to put these brains-in-jars to work for us?
And that it'll be in their own self-interest to keep on doing all the tasks like continual aircon optimisation and improving vehicle flow on the roads by controlling traffic lights?
And nuclear power plant as well?
Excellent (rubs hands together) - Smithers, bring me my petri dishes.
> Twitter has to pay that cent
But, as it is a Major Client of Twitter, Twitter has very favourable terms, 60 days to pay the invoice, so for two months it can borrow against its invoiced income before it has to worry about being required to pay itself. That takes care of running costs for April and May.
In 45 days time, Twitter will raise the cost of using the API and invoice Twitter for the larger sum to cover June and July, thus giving an increase in invoiced value, extrapolated out to show an above predictions annual growth. Such growth, in the current global climate, makes Twitter a Good Bet for investors and the creditors take over the June invoices to clear the borrowings from March, with interest (surprising how high API prices can jump). Repeat with the July invoices, and separate lenders, to take care of June and July.
It's August! Silly Season in the media, ignore anything you hear on the news! Summer Holidays are here, we're all on a cruise to the Cayman Islands.
who change the location of safety-critical controls - then blame the worker when the obvious result occurs.
Instead, we have all the stories about food prep (don't think you can justify some of those ideas as "cooking"!) ranging from the weird to the life-threatening.
Hardly a surprise, given the natural reactions of commentards, but you have to feel for the poor Reg scribe, who could have saved himself all that typing and just given us the one sentence about toaster ovens.
For pity's sake, we've seen it here with "Hanff is dead" - "no, he is alive" - "I just tried, he died, but in a different year".
Ask ChatGPT enough times and it'll spit out the answer you want to report on, sooner or later. Given the descriptions of it going increasingly doolally as you extend the session, you probably don't have to wait too long for it to contradict itself.
Then a quick bit of cherry picking, copy'n'paste the choice bits (because you can't put the whole session into a single tweet, how very convenient). Or simply wait for human bias to kick in (362 people try it, 361 get anodyne replies and the last one starts screaming to the heavens about the evil AI).
