Posts by Ian Johnston

No. Capitalism is making money from owning capital. There is a clue in the name

At a dollar a year, principles are cheap.

It's sticking and slipping at a high frequency. I'm guessing final year engineering project which for an American university ( their final year's are about the same as our second or third because of the whisky broad curriculum) ain't too bad.

This one. Anthropic constantly release nonsense about threats posed by AI because (a) they are a bunch of doomer wackjobs and (b) they want to big up the capabilities of their crappy autocomplete system. There is hardly an article about them in El Reg which doesn't fall into this category.

So the aim is to recover all the bits which they only need because the non-recoverable bit is fifteen times heavier than the last one?

Real neuroscience is fine. Unfortunately most claimed "neuroscieence" is actually social psychology trying to hide from its replication crisis. Now many people labelled "neurodiverse" have ever had any empirical tests done on their brains?

It would be so easy to stop the gaming. Allow one practical test to be booked for one driving licence whose holder has already passed the theory test. Allow two deferments, then back of the queue. Do not allow the booking to be transferred to anther licence.

Re: Not seeing the problem

"And make each prisoner pent

Unwillingly represent

A source of innocent merriment

Of innocent merriment"

Re: Doubletalk as usual

But you can't get into other drivers' heads...

That is precisely what humans do when driving, and in many other situations. We constantly predict the behaviour of other people by thinking "What would I do in that situation?". That is why we are so much better than self driving cars at predicting the behaviour of cyclists (we can imagine when they will behave like vehicles and when they will behave like pedestrians) and why autistic people have so much trouble understanding why other people behave as they do.

"AI" has no theory of mind or concept of anything. All it can go by is what people have done and not why they did it.

Re: Where is Common Sense in This?

1. Glass is, at room temperature, a liquid of very high viscosity. If you look at a 100+ years-old-house which has its original glass windows, you will see "waviness" near the bottoms of the windows. This is because over time, gravity has caused the glass to sag.

Cobblers. Glass is a glassy solid, not a liquid. That means that it has short range order but not long range order. It does not flow - there are obsidian knives recovered from pyramids which are still sharp after thousands of years. When old windows are thick towards the bottom that's because before the float glass process window glass was not even and glaziers installed it with the thick side down.

I blame school physics departments for perpetuating this myth.

Re: Next up...

Nobody is getting fired because of AI. They are getting fired because profits are down and "AI" is a better excuse than "we're shit at running the business".

Re: Platitudes

If they can afford an accountant they can afford an IT professional.

Most cybersecurity failures happen under the watchful eye of IT "professionals", who - to judge from El Reg - invariably blame users and management for their own incompetence.

It's always the user's fault in FOSSland, isn't it? But never, oddly enough, when Windows cocks up. That's always Microsoft's fault.

Latest update: I needed to use a Bluetooth foot pedal today (looks like a keyboard, does PageUp/PageDown on scores). It worked fine last time I used it, last week. Today ... "connection failed: br-connection-create-socket". Tried turning the BT adapter off and on. Tried rebooting the computer. Checked that the device was fully charged. Nothing.

Another couple of examples: Linux Mint can no longer handles suspends on my main Lenovo laptop (it crashes) and on my other half's fairly new Dell laptop it refuses to charge the battery. Which is there and works fine with Windows. Under LM it's mains or nothing, just like the Toshiba I had in 1992.

I do all my work on a twelve year old Lenovo desktop. By your training it follows that nobody, anywhere, had any beef of a computer more powerful than a twelve year old Lenovo desktop.

Re: How could you forget

When the RBS introduced 2FA, the code they texted was valid for 5 minutes. To get mobile reception I had to leave the house, drive for two minutes, wait a minute for connection and text, drive back for two minutes and, usually, repeat. My record was six trips.

Thank god for wifi calling.