Posts by HMcG

Re: What is this cesium of which you speak?

King Charles did rather miserably at school, particularly in English. So it’s definitely not his.

We no longer have prime ministers, since 2008 we only have subprime ministers.

Re: Why?

Now that’s just pro-piracy dog-whistling.

Re: FALSE

Sun did not open source Java out of some kind of misguided philanthropy, they did so for purely business purposes. Sun were primarily a hardware vendor, and while their workstations were very powerful compared to Windows based PCs at the time, outside of academia, few third parties were writing software that would run on their hardware.

Major industry standard CAD packages and engineering analysis software were being written for Windows PC’s because that was the massively more common platform. That was killing commercial interest in Sun workstations because, effectively, software had to be written specifically for Sun Sparc workstations.

Java was intended to counter this. Instead of commercial software houses writing specifically for Windows, if they wrote in Java their software would also run on Sparc systems, and benefit from the faster hardware. To get any penetration amongst developers, it had to be open source and free. And they targeted academic institutions to teach Java with some very generous offers.

Java was not open sourced out of generosity or some kind of Jesus complex, it was done as a lever to try to dislodge the advantage Windows had when in came to third party software applications.

Re: Sooo

> A large enough user base who think it is cool.

Really not seeing that. The vast majority of tech-savvy early adopters are, as far as I have seen, calling out AI as bullshit.

As with 3D televisions, AI may well be a short term fad that goes nowhere, no matter how desperatly it's pitched as being the future.

> It’s easy to say that it should be up to the parents to carry out this protection, but many parents don’t have the capability to do so.

If we keep excusing parents from their responsibilities, and force them onto the government, then the situation becomes ever worse, not better. Turning on parental controls is not difficult, the real problem is that too many parents don’t want to parent their children, they want to be their best friends, and are unwilling to be the ones to put any restrictions at all on them.

Re: 80085

Ah, the good old days, when you had to download your porn from alt.binaries.porn.insert-fetish-of-your-choice-here using a newsreader.

The entire development of the internet has been intimately entwined with pornography* since internet access became available to the general public. It's very unlikely that anything is going to change.

* And piracy. But mostly porn.

Apparently he has a degree in “geography, international development, and environmental studies” which sounds rather vague and widespread. Certainly no qualifications, knowledge or experience in any technology field.

But no doubt that won’t prevent him from getting a very well paid “consultant” role with one of the AI companies (after this lot are inevitably kicked out of office). Purely coincidentally, of course..

Or divert half the IP addesses to a poisioning system and the other half to crypto-mining. Pay for bandwidth required for the 1st with the revenue generate from the 2nd. Robot Wars!

Re: All the fools

> They must treat their girlfriends very peculiarly or have very peculiar requirements from a girlfriend for their needs to be satiated by a dodgy LLM

Which is why they don’t have real girlfriends.

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

I swear to god all the absolute worse programming f**kups I have ever had to deal with were caused by ‘clever’ programming in ‘concise’ languages.

The human brain requires large amounts of redundancy in written language to aid rapid and reliable understanding of meaning. It’s something common to all modern written languages in one form or another.

Many programming languages go directly against that, as if compressing the maximum amount of complexity into the lowest character count is somehow desirable. And they unironically call it expressiveness, and mock languages like Ada and COBOL as verbose because they require much greater redundancy and specific declaration of intent.

This is largely why the current cybersecurity clusterfuck is destroying the house of cards we have built on programming languages like C.

> if gov.uk realises that it can engage the F/LOSS community for rather less money than MS365 licensing,

This cannot be stressed highly enough. The article creates a false dichotomy between a very expensive Microsoft solution, and a zero cost open source one. The real solution is a middle ground of sufficient government funding to open source projects.

Unfortunately that might take a few years for the returns to be achieved, and UK governments refuse to plan beyond the end of their term in office ( if that!).

It’s no wonder that China has dominated manufacturing. Industrial manufacturing on a large scale requires long term planning, and neither current capitalism nor democratic governments plan beyond the next quarter.

Re: The ReJester

Retaining a monarchy as the (figurehead) head of state does not require us to retain all of the exemptions from law and taxation that they currently enjoy.

As you say, I have no confidence that a democratically elected alternative woiuld improve anything, but reform of the most egregiously unwarranted privilidge is very much overdue.

Re: Dislike the delivery

If you have only tested your code on the development machine, you haven’t tested your code.

Even if some meatbag spots it, at least you have proven that you are fully conversant with AI.

Good luck outlawing VPNs.

It's such a poorly implemented piece of legislation one has to wonder if this isn't the whole purpose of it.

UK internet providers already implement opt-out adult / porn site filtering at the DNS level, so this isn't about protecting little children from accidentally stumbling over adult sites, at least not unless parents have deliberately disabled the filtering.

And using VPN's to bypass any restrictions is such an obvious flaw in any attempted implementation of the legislation that it cannot have not been considered. So that leads us into having to consider if the whole purpose was to try to leverage the 'won't somebody think about the children' outrage mentality behind it, into support for banning public access to VPN services - which have been a thorn in the side of police and other government agency overreach for a long time.

Re: "compliance engagement"

> GEC 'bake-o-lite' electromechanical meter

And truly a revolutionary technology…

Re: Manuals: "Better" Is Not Always Better

I had forgotten all about those. Or maybe deliberately wiped them from my memory.

Re: What a joke.

Leaks might not cause vunerabilities, but having your critical defense infrastucture supported by an engineering team based in China might well do. If the Chinese government tells a China-based Micorsoft engineer to do something 'or else', they are going to do it regadless of any company loyalty.

Re: Great !

We need a change in legislation to make online marketplaces like Amanon legally responsible for customer rights for everything sold through Amaznon Marketplace. At the moment they use 3rd party sleight-of-hand as a conventint way to dodge responsibility for the vast anounts of couterfit tat it sells.

> one single deluded individual

No, to be fair , it's taken decades of under-investment in the public education system (particularly in southern states) to achieve this marvel. You are grossly underestimating the niumbers of deluded, irrational Americans required to make this work.

Re: Well of course they're bullish

Given the massive layoffs Microsoft keep inflicting on their staff, I can gaurentee that everyone in Microsoft is 'bullish' about the project that is keeping them in employment.

(Note that 'bullish' is very close to 'bullshit' ) .

Re: AI chip as a service

> not be making up technologies that don't exist

No, instead they are making up financial systems that don't exist. The suggestion that you would have banks "who would be in charge of verifying the identity and location of the originator of the funds" is in any way feasable is as ignorant of the global financial sytems compelexities as the original suggestion is of the terchnological complexities of tracking a NPU.

Re: This AI thing

> You cannot blaim AI for being used by idiots.

That's the same attitude as saying you cannot blame developers for writing easily exploited insecure code exposed to the internet. Yes, you can. We are well past the time for excusing such sloppy coding, and we are well past the time for excusing sloppy AI.

Re: Actually looks like a great place to work at

Moving forward is only useful if the road isn't a dead end. There are strong indications that LLMs are. There is no intelligence involved, just stocastic rehashing of previous conversations.

Re: I'm not even sure why I should care if Iran has nukes

> So by your logic (I use the term loosely) then, say, Buriatia should be part of Mongolia? Yet the Russian constitution explicitly outlaws secession. And I suspect Putin would cry foul if Mongolia invaded Buriatia with the same argument Putin tries to use to justify armed invasion of Ukraine.

You keep applying double standards to Russia’s behaviour. The Ukrainian borders are recognised internationally , and were agreed to by Russia itself. A country that vehemently opposes secession by its own colonised regions cannot legitimately justify invading another country because the majority of the citizens in one region traces their roots to Russia.

It takes longer to sort out someone else’s mess than to do it yourself in the first place, and inevitably on a much shorter deadline - often an overdue one.

But here we are, rushing headlong into assigning complex tasks to statistical language models because ChatGPT and its ilk generate plausible enough bullshit to sucker business school types into believing that it has an understanding of what it’s generating.

Or perhaps in the world of business, bullshitting is more valued than actual ability? Perhaps the likes of Sam Altman sense a kindred spirit in ChatGPT, after all, they both output unsubstantiated bollocks in large quantities.

Re: "This, in turn, means their data and meta-information will be kept in a US-based datacenter."

> subject to USA law,

Although to be fair, that applies equally to the Linux Foundation, which is headquartered in San Francisco.