Posts by drand 204 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Nov 2012
The trick there is to wake early & annex some prime real estate, e.g. the middle of the the living room carpet, and also lay a trap for big people with a handful of strategically placed 4x2s in the doorway. Then you can avoid any stair-related mishaps and have a the bonus of said big people wanting to reclaim their space so they'll be keen to see what you've built.
Interesting. Perhaps the proof is alcohol-rated.
Pudding is a great word in the English culinary lexicon as it can, and over the centuries has, refer to pretty much anything cooked any old way, though traditionally I think it was referring to something boiled or steamed in a cloth or casing. A pudding can be sweet, savoury, or both, steamed, boiled, baked, meat, suet, pulses, flour, pastry, take your pick.
So very much this. The sign of a successful prototype is that you've thrown it away! Unfortunately, it is very difficult to get engineers (even good ones) to adopt this approach, and even more difficult to sell to management (just polish the edges and put it into production).
Reminds me of further maths lessons where we would all shuffle our desks forwards an imperceptibly small amount when the old, nearly deaf teacher was writing on the blackboard. As he spent most of the lesson talking to himself and scribbling algebra we got a good twenty to thirty minutes in before he turned round and paid enough attention to notice a dozen boys intently copying down his proofs and doing their best to look angelic mere inches from the front of the classroom. He frequently went absolutely flipping nuts at us, which of course only encouraged us further.
The AI agent will, without asking permission, sign you up on a 24-month contract for a larger Copilot-branded mouse that will randomly crash, need frequent firmware updates, and then be immediately discontinued with no refunds or recourse after 18 months.
I know he probably meant cursor, but still...
Similar experience - around the turn of the century, out in town and noticed my usual cash machine had a suspicious-looking device over the card slot - 99% sure it was a skimmer. Branch was closed and this was before I had a mobile phone so when I got home I called their service centre to let them know. Of course, they were more interested in who I was and why I was tampering with their cash machines and were in fact downright hostile. So I said 'oh just fuck off then' or similar and hung up.
"The ability of LLMs to create new knowledge (e.g. protein folding) needs to be explained. ...."
There is a ton of information from reputable sources about how machine learning models simulate protein folding and other tasks like medical imaging analysis. LLMs don't do this, can't do this, and won't ever be able to do this.
"... It seems they learn principles from examples and can apply the principles to new problems. ..."
The referenced paper shows how they cannot. They are not capable of learning anything. Experience of using them shows they cannot.
"... This is not parroting. ..."
Repeat after me: Yes it bloody well is!
This is clearly bullshit in several senses. Firstly, it's government AI-washing an existing scheme or bucket of money in the hope of gaining favourable PR - and shame on them pulling that kind of fuckwit stunt. Secondly if this money goes further than making a few well-off multinationals even more well-off I'll be astounded. And thirdly if it does produce any kind of AI assistance it will do more harm than good, for reasons we all know.
Thankfully, in my experience as a parent and school governor, headteachers and teachers tend to be fairly sane when it comes to seeing through nonsense and prefer an evidence-based approach to adopting planning schemes rather than jumping on the shiny bandwagon.
This exactly. I would go so far as to say Google search results were very good for a time (probably longer ago than I think it was). But we all know the problem: search is now a vector for shovelling ads down our throats and scraping data; unless and until this changes - which it won't - then no amount of AI or anything else thrown at it will help the ultimate search outcome for regular users.
"In the future, data obtained and accumulated from both ICE and electric models will be utilized to understand the needs of customers based on the data of how those motorcycle models are being used," predicted Honda.
Engine, wheels, petrol tank, seat, handlebars. Piss off with the rest of it.
It translates as:
And yea, on that fateful day, the Almighty didst bestow upon the Ark many virgin Windowes computers; and Merrill was alone, forsaken by his brethren, who had wandered into the hold where he did maketh moving images of the sheep and the goats, and was cast overboard for his sin.
Or something.
True. The guy I took over from, proper electrical engineer, used to say "If you haven't got three, you haven't got any." Turns out I'm still filtering out what's really useful from his stash, as he decided to keep at least six of everything, even when the kit it was intended for had been in storage for ten years 'just in case'...
If the court decides reasonably that the criminal is not a threat to others in that two weeks, and is motivated to sort their affairs out, then it's fair enough. There will be plenty of cases where the dependents of the criminal would be even more screwed over by their behaviour if it were straight to the slammer; hopefully a little time would give innocent relatives, children, spouses a chance to get their shit together.
Modern cars care almost undriveable thanks to awful HMI (looking at you Golf mk8), the assist systems are not up to scratch, and they reset all your settings when there's a software update (VAG again). Bikes nowadays are coming with more and more gadgets they don't need. Just stop it. I don't want to be 'connected' on the bike.
It's not really about navigation, or even about improving the riding experience, it's about collecting data and making money.
The report is hopefully subtitled "Will AI Fix Work?" - Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies.
The statistics presented, that more time is spent communicating than creating, imply that communicating is less valuable. This is patently not true - how productive are a million monkeys with typewriters?
Some clever people have made made some beautifully constructed, convincing origami houses. Then some cretins have come along and started shouting that the origami houses are the future and we must all live in one. Now we are not surprised to find out that some joker has walked through the wall of our paper house and stolen our stuff. We don't need a more secure paper house, we need to stop using them for purposes to which they are unsuited.
If this is a terrible analogy, it's not mine it's ChatGPTs.
Exactly this - If your algorithms can't keep the vehicle further away from the thing in front than the distance it takes to stop, then it shouldn't be allowed on the road; this is the standard expected of human drivers [1].
What if someone was crossing the road behind the bus? Would that be another unique situation. I would like to see autonomous vehicle operators held to a standard where this kind of fuck-up is subject to some weight of criminal responsibility if they can not show reasonably practicable measures undertaken by competent persons to assure others' road safety. Yes I am grumpy this morning.
[1]: At least when they pass their test. Many will drift out of cal over time.
Stupid substitutions. Packing the cat litter on top of the bread and the bananas in with the raw fish. Arriving early for a delivery slot and being shitty that I'm not in. Not delivering part of the order and refusing to come back and deliver it. Quibbling about refunds for damaged or out of date items. Making a fuss about me checking everything against the delivery note to ensure that the previous two things have not reoccurred. I know not everyone has the option or will to go round supermarkets, and it isn't without its own issues, but for me it's a lot less stress.
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