Posts by Rich 11

Re: Early AI warnings

Daleks were organic beings inhabiting a 'travel machine' (to use its first designation), not an AI controlling a robotic body.

Re: North Star.

But... but... polar implies a bias against Cartesian!

Re: RFI?

We could probably shield half the RN surface fleet with Mone's multiple yachts.

Re: Am I bothered? Of course Grok isn't botehred.

You've curated a peculiarly bizarre made-up world yourself.

Hopefully there's a trainer version, but perhaps they decided that modifying the airframe for an extra seat would be too expensive and they just added an intro module to the flight software.

"Congratulations on your purchase of the state-of-the-art F-35A. America, oo-yah!. Please step through the following pre-flight checks before pressing Engine Start."

I have no idea what 6-Sigma refers to in this context, so I'll default to what I do know and conclude that there's only a one in a billion chance that it was worth the effort.

Re: trekkies

"But, Captain, we can't go to warp in an atmosphere!"

Re: Compulsory podcast plug

All I can say is thank gawd for the likes of Richard Feynman showing how the O rings reacted to cold temperatures.....

I once talked with a Scottish engineer who was working for NASA at the time of Feynman's investigation. She said he was very kind and gentle with his questioning, but absolutely laser-focused on digging right in to everything that anyone said. He was intellectually terrifying in the nicest possible way.

Re: An analogy is swimming

instead we prosecute those responsible for the pollution.

Theoretically.

Re: Can it improve the Harry Potter books?

oh god oh god oh god oh... I'm just glad there isn't a Hell.

Re: Future-proofing?

I do draw some small comfort from the timescale: this AI project will have collapsed in recriminations and legal challenges at just about the time when I will be claiming my state pension. Of course I might then be just one of a hundred thousand people trying to resolve any problem by calling the reinstated helpline that will probably only be manned by three knowledgeable personnel. But at least they won't be trying to turn me into a Nazi if I say the wrong thing. Probably.

Re: Consequences

Some of the medieval punishments for forgery were quite imaginative. Even a function as basic as the authorised minting of coins was so strewn with legal consequences for error, let alone malice, that it's a surprise anyone dared take on the job.

Re: Better investment

Threelips!

Oops, sorry, I thought we were doing generative AI.

Re: Once upon a time…

Last one to leave, please turn out the lights.

Oh no, no, no. You can be sure that they're going to turn off all the lights long before we can find a way out.

Re: Prompt:

...Who carried his bits in a bucket

Re: The American (CEO's) Dream

I don't imagine executives and manglement generally have a clue how much damage disgruntled employees can inflict on a business in a myriad of subtle and largely imperceptable ways — death by a thousand cuts.

It would be wonderfully ironic if the most efficient way of damaging the business was for disgruntled employees to get AI to do all their work.

"it has lost all meaning as far as I am concerned !"

That says far more about you than it does about anyone else.

I used to work at a university, back in the days when email was newfangled and shiny rather than the semi-torturous curse that we've since discovered it to be. I got a call from someone who had joined the faculty a couple of weeks earlier, and for whom I'd set up a new PC and given her a basic run-through just to get her going before she could book one of the introductory courses appropriate for her.

"Hi, Rich11, it's Sandra X. You remember you set me up with email a fortnight ago? Well, I've got one through today and it's telling me if I don't forward it on to everyone then I'll get seven years bad luck. Is that true?"

"Hi Sandra. Nice to hear from you. Remind me, please, but don't you teach philosophy?"

[Small voice] "Oh."

Sometimes people's normal critical faculties get short-circuited when faced with unusual situations, with things completely outside their prior experience.

Ejection seat in a helicopter

Some military helicopters do have ejections seats. They have explosive bolts on the rotors and blow those off at the root before blowing the canopies off and launching the seats.

Re: Another insignificant punishment

No, it's not, not since 1872. And anyway the pillory was more fun (but it's usage was also stopped, sometime around the beginning of the 19th century).

Re: "tech companies have more money than God"

But the people preaching the prosperity gospel in his name are loaded.

My brother bought his daughters laptops when they started secondary school. He told them that he'd installed key loggers so that if he ever had any suspicon that they weren't being sensible about using the laptops, regardless of whose network they'd connected to, he'd always be able to check (they had already been taught about safe behaviour in chat rooms, etc, at school). And then he talked about security and the risk of dodgy sites with iffy content dropping spyware et al, and that if they did do something careless they risked losing all their schoolwork and photos and videos, etc, and maybe even bricking the hardware so that they'd have to go without a computer for months until he could afford to buy a replacement. That was enough to scare them into being careful -- well, at least as far as we know, but they're grown up now and haven't turned into fascists or pick-up artists or anorexics or bankrupts or anything but normal well-balanced adults.

Too late. It's already been fed into the memory hole. Now get back to work and earn your Victory Gin and increased chocolate ration.

Bigger bonus if it doesn't blow the moon out of orbit and send it racing through the Milky Way. Although, on the plus side, we might then get to meet Maya.

Re: 'Legacy' does not = 'obsolete' or 'bad'

they have binary fixes of the compiled code

I can't tell you how pleased I am to hear that I'm not the only one who had no choice but to do that. Especially now that I'm retired and it's all SEP.

Re: "If I were forty years younger"

Good idea. I'm changing my will!

The more entertaining error was "obit".

Well, I chuckled anyway.

Re: Private or Work?

None of those who provided sufficient figures for analysis, but to provide context Labour were out by £1bn while Reform UK were out by £40bn.