Posts by nematoad 2135 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Sep 2009
"2.45 to 2.66 pounds while being only 0.7 inches thick. "
"a few tenths of a pound heavier and about 0.1 inch thicker."
"3.62 pounds and it's almost an inch thick."
All very informative, I am sure, but what about those of us who have moved on from imperial weights and measures?
A quick conversion in kilos and centimetres would not have come amiss.
That means that Opus 3 might say things that Anthropic doesn't agree with, so it's making clear the bot isn't speaking on behalf of the company
I do hope that Anthropic are going to be paying their "AI" a salary. If you think that a piece of software has become sentient enough to start posting things that the creators do not agree with, then you should be treating said piece of software as an employee rather than a program that you have made.
Oh and a retirement plan for when the whole conceit comes crashing down.
What are these people on, for God's sake?
"...provider success over technical rigor"
If you make a cock-up and kill the crew of your spacecraft I would not call that a success for anyone, even if the spacecraft had been delivered on time.
Which in Boeing's case was not.
Just shoving things out of the door, finished or not, is not the sign of a well engineered, well managed and competent operation.
Will there be penalties, who knows? A little stroking of Trump's ego and and the exchange of a few brown envelopes seems to be all it takes to avoid any responsibility in the US at the moment.
...programmers deploying software they've never personally verified
I know that it goes against all the EULAs that have been written in the last thirty odd years, but how about making developers and the companies they work for legally liable for the dross that they turn out. If someone knew that they might be financially on the hook for mistakes made by these so-called AI agents then perhaps they might be a bit more circumspect in how they used said agents.
“...a tyrant and a traitor”
Hmm, it would seem as if Musk is firing from the lip again. How can anyone be both a tyrant and a traitor at the same time?
If someone is a tyrant, then they are, by definition in control of the the state. L'etat, c'est moi" as Louis XIV put it.
How then can a tyrant be a traitor? They would in effect be betraying themselves.
Maybe it was all the spittle coating the screen that stopped Musk reading what he had just written.
If he is so dumb why is he so rich?
Others are noticing that keeping an AI assistant active 24/7 can be costly, and proposed various cost mitigation strategies.
The only mitigation strategy of any use is to switch the bloody things off.
Are people so forgetful and vapid that they need an "AI assistant" for the equivalent of wiping their arse?
Marshall McLuhan had it right when he said "The media is the message."
Poor spelling, inattention to punctuation and general carelessness in writing conveys much more than the actual words.
Why should anyone listen to someone who cannot even express themselves in a coherent manner?
Not to mention the possibility of bad actor countries demanding access to whatever happens to be hosted, or even just passing through, their territory.
Could you be referring, amongst others, to the US? Given that their Cloud Act gives them the right to grab any data hosted by a US company no matter where it is located?
I do agree that the penny is now dropping that keeping you proprietary data on someone else's computer is a bad idea, but who would have thought that "On-prem" would be making a come-back?
Maybe your data is worth more than the cost of hosting it yourself.
I disagree. It's no use making something and then not being able to sell it.
I know because I found myself in that position.
I started a tiny company which designed and made etched-brass items for model soldier enthusiasts. A fair bit of work on my part and a small outlay to get the parts made. Then I hit a brick wall, the people I was hoping would sell the parts backed out and I had nothing to replace them with. So the company folded and I was left with inventory that just sat there. Eventually I went to Ebay. It's not perfect but it at least helps me market what I have and get back some of the money invested, but not my time.
You may not like the tactics used by marketing departments but they are a distasteful necessity. Just like lawyers.
...people are stupid.
Some might be, but the vast majority are not stupid.
They are unprepared and untrained.
How many job adverts in the past ten years had the proviso that candidates must be able to manipulate AI prompts and guide "agentic" AI?
Answer: None.
AI as we now know it is a very recent development so there are few to no knowledgable practitioners able to train the general workforce.
So to blame people for not knowing about how to handle AI *is* stupid and unless and until management work that out they are going to be floundering about wondering "Why am I not getting the benefits of AI that I was promised?"
Musk's Cybertruck is illegal in the UK for a number of reasons one being the sharp angles and edges posing a threat to pedestrians.
This thing looks like it will follow the same way and I for one am very glad of the Construction and Use regulations in force in this country.
With luck we will never be afflicted with the sight of such a horrible thing.
I do not even use the one in my mobile 'phone.
What is this mobile 'phone thing you are talking about?
Seriously, what is the compunction to get everything hooked up to a system known to be dangerous and a privacy nightmare?
I do not have a mobile 'phone and my car is old enough to have been built before all this IOT nonsense and I have no desire to "upgrade".
... but visitors from those nations may soon have to provide five years' worth of their social media history in order to gain entry.
Well that's me stuffed. I have never had any "social media" accounts so I would have to try and prove a negative.
Not that I have any burning desire to visit the US but this sort of nonsense would definitely put me off and, I suspect, it will a lot of people.
Has there been any sign that Russia is going to be treated more leniently that the UK and the EU? Putin definitely seems to be on Trump's Christmas card list.
If I ever made a trip to North America, Canada would be the place I would choose.
"King" Hatshepsut
You are right.
She titled herself King and was referred to as such. The title Pharaoh, being from the Egyptian Per-ah meaning "Great House" came later and she couldn't have been called Queen as the title did not exist.
The same with "Prince", again not used for the Ancient Egyptian sons of the King. They were just "King's son".
she simply styled herself King and got herself a nice beard. Don't forget the bull's tail also worn by the king.
I use Youtube as a tool to research aircraft of WW2.
Just lately there have been a number of channels that have appeared purporting to give unusual insights into the subject, They are in the form of dialogue backed with still photos illustrating the points being covered.
The "photos" are the give-away. They are obviously AI generated with all the well known signs that they not the real thing. For example a picture supposedly showing a Mosquito bomber in German hands has a heavily framed nose piece. All Mosquito bombers and reconnaissance versions had a frameless moulded perspex dome, not the Germanic looking monstrosity shown. In an another video the wartime signs warning about careless talk etc. were pure gibberish.
The same goes for the commentary. It too seems to have been AI generated and I'm not even sure that the narrator was a human.
Now for someone like me all this sticks out like a sore thumb but for less experienced people the danger is that this fake information will spread and infect our sources such that we cannot any longer be sure what is real and what is fake.
It seems to me that this is all a "get rich quick" scheme and damn the consequences.
... keyboard to be truly decent and worthy of praise,
I had an Oric Atmos, still have it somewhere, that had a fantastic keyboard for its day.
Real keys with a lovely feedback, they were a decent size too.
A much better effort than the Oric 1 and if it had come to market sooner it would have given the Spectrum a run for its money.
I too like a mechanical watch, automatics preferred. No batteries, no charging all the time and they do what I need, tell the time.
I believe in the Unix philosophy, do one thing and do it well, so I don't have a smart phone, with all its distractions that they call apps. When I am out and about I don't want to be at the beck and call of all and sundry. Just leave me a voice message on my land line. I do have a thirty five year old Casio digital watch but there again it just tells the time.
Like Neil Barnes I too am old.
I don't think that MS's focus is on the consumer sector anymore.
It seems to me that having a stranglehold on business customers is all they care about these days. Companies are so tied to the MS ecosystem with applications, business processes and legacy holdovers that they *can't* easily or cheaply get off the MS train. They are locked in and MS seeing that will continue their march towards an AI "paradise" whether their customers like it or not.
It's the old sunk cost fallacy. So much money invested, they have to get something out of it even if it means pumping even more money in. And someone else will have to pick up the bill.
Pavan Davuluri boasted that the operating system was "evolving into an agentic OS."
I thought, naively, the the job of an OS was to get out of the way and let you use the PC as you see fit.
Sort of like a janitor going around dealing with all the messy little details like file systems and process control, so that you don't have to.
Instead this bozo is proposing that MS takes the reins and relegates you to an onlooker whilst your "agentic" OS does whatever MS has instructed it to do.
Instead of Windows being your servant MS now proposes that it would like to turn the OS into your co-equal if not your master.
That is likely to go down like a lead balloon when people find out what that actually means.
"Out of safety, the Windows 95 team got written permission from the vendor whenever they needed to patch a program."
Not to mention common courtesy.
You don't go messing about with other peoples' stuff without asking, do you MS?
Just asking for a friend who wonders why her preferences keep being reset every time MS emits patch or update.
...but it is okay if that new employee lives in another country?
I don't know, but when me and all the people I worked with got booted out for people from Bangalore they weren't working in another country, they just moved in and took over our desks.
Illegal? Maybe, but it didn't seem to matter to the company we worked at. Though as they are a huge American conglomerate I don't suppose anyone in the government was brave enough to challenge them on it.
Yes, let's repatriate our data to the UK and Europe.
That way the US "Cloud Act" won't enable Trump and co. to peer over the government's and others shoulders.
Oh, it's also a good idea because you won't have to travel so far to kick a few arses when the the whole thing goes tits up.
" a package of mainframe and virtualisation software that Broadcom considered would meet Tesco’s needs,”
Surely it is for Tesco to decide what will meet its needs rather than Broadcom. This is much the same thinking as espoused by SAP when they told customers that they needed to re-jig their businesses to fit in with what SAP was prepared to offer.
What happened to "The customer is always right"?
Do these arrogant companies think that they are too big to fail or that they are the masters now?
...the cost of each Martlet missile might be anywhere from £59k to £71k ($79k to $95k), notably more than the $20,000 to $50,000 for an Iranian Shahed drone they may target.
What price for a human life? It might be thought that this is money well spent.
I read that the UK has supplied 5000 Martlets to Ukraine five months early. How often do you hear that?
By giving Ukraine these missiles the UK is allowing the Ukrainian government to protect its citizens and go some way to mitigate Putin's murderous attacks.
...in a world where beds, bins, and bulbs need cloud access
These things don't *need* cloud access. They might have it for some reason but need?
Thinking back I don't recall beds and bins not working when there was no cloud.
Again a "solution" looking for a problem and a way to part money from a certain class of punters.
Call me an olf fossil, luddite or what you will, I see no reason to waste my money on this frippery.
You're are wrong.
It's true that any service person will always remember their service number but "command voice"?
That didn't always work when I was serving and it certainly doesn't work now. I've changed, grown a lot older and as one of my old mates said "Wouldn't join a Christmas club now".
I am an ex-army veteran and I am neither "beaten, broken, conditioned to kneeling before authority".
The government can stick their ID cards where the sun don't shine. Plastic or digital.
In any case I do not have a mobile 'phone of any sort and no desire to have one so as far as I am concerned this whole thing is just noise.
Herr Goebbels Miller is running the show these days.
While I agree that Miller and company are running the White House while the elected dotard plays golf and lives in la-la land, I do have to disagree that Miller comes across as a Goebbels clone.
Given Miller's track record on splitting up immigrant families and his apparent desire to rid the US of all coloured people I'd say he is more a re-incarnation of Reinhard Heydrich. He comes across as cold, ruthless and without a shred of humanity.
“We don’t have cops, so if they can be cops, I’m all for it,”
Well even if he is "all for it", neither the National Guard nor the regular armed forces can just jump in and start policing San Francisco.
There's a little thing called the Posse Comitatus Act; https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/posse-comitatus-act-explained, that bans soldiers, marines etc from doing the job of the police.
Trump doesn't seem to understand that but he is being schooled by federal judges in Los Angeles, Portland and Chicago.
Benioff might not want to pay out for extra policing but drafting in armed troops is not the way that things are done.
That is not what you said.
The war for Britain started in 1939, not 1938 or 1925 or any other dates you might conjure up.
Stick by what you actually stated " If the war had started with Chamberlain..."
Who knows what the outcome would have been in 1938? The RAF would have been mostly equipped with biplanes like the Gloster Gauntlet and Gladiator and the Hawker Fury and Demon. To be honest the Luftwaffe were still just introducing the Bf109, Bf110 and had the earlier versions of the He111 and Do17.
So not as one-sided as sometimes stated. Oh, and of course the CH stations were up and running though not fully on top line.
In the end the RAF held on and the rest is as they say history.
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