Posts by Ian Mason

Re: Foxconn's iPhone experience isn't relevant here

Yeah, that struck me as a pretty facile statement too. Smacks a bit of "Only 1000 words to Christmas, who cares if what i write makes no sense."

Re: Shitstorm

Well, you've just answered your own question - it's unlawful anticompetitive behaviour.

Re: Stop with the useless A better than B crap

As any engineer will tell any manager "Products can be had good, cheaply, safe, or soon. Now pick which two out of those four that you want because it is not possible to have all four."

Re: USA

Illegal under the Fraud Act 2006 section 2. No doubt about it.

Re: Approach? What approach?

I doubt they are. Typically it is only selected institutions and people that are sanctioned. It's unlikely, but not impossible, that the individual contributors are on the sanctions list. This smacks more of ignorance or laziness in understanding the sanctions regime and regulations.

I note that in insulting people's lack of historical memory he doesn't also educate them that Finland was on the wrong side in WWII.

Re: Meanwhile in Zürich...

CS spray? A section five prohibited weapon (Firearms Act 1968), unlawful possession of which carries a mandatory 5 year prison sentence. Not a good mistake to make.

Re: GOOD

Don't worry, in six months the self same authors will be penning a paper on how noise pollution kills. Obviously in between writing articles for the Daily Fail on what new thing it is that cause cancer this month.

Re: I predict a major scramble by creditors soon

My advice is to buy popcorn futures.

Re: 0/10 for current affairs

Intelligent creatures learn from experience and adapt, LLMs don't. Ergo intelligence is qualitatively different.

If you correct an LLM it doesn't incorporate that into its world model. Playing with the llama2 model (prompted by this article) it conflated race and ethnicity. I pointed this out, it apologised and issued a 'correction' without the mistake, except that all it did was substitute the word "ethnicity" for "race" in its first appearance and then continued to say "race" for the rest of the paragraph.

Re: Depends on your definition of growler I guess.

> I never drank it myself, but watching the effect on others was very amusing, until I had to take them to A&E!

Why A&E? Oh lordy, they weren't stupid enough to spill any in their laps were they?

Re: X

Stop mentioning gammon, you're making me hungry.

Re: It's not a witch hunt.

Luxury? You 'ad it easy.

When I were a lad we had to program t' computer by hardwiring the program into it, in actual wire on plugboard. And we had to make the wire ourselves, after getting up two hours before we went to bed to mine the ore for the metal for the wire ourselves.

Re: IBM did this for years

Burroughs too, exact same thing except they changed a couple of wire wrap connections to do the upgrade.

> "As levels of stupidity go, this is breathtakingly advanced Grandmaster stuff. Even the British government would struggle to surpass it!"

Jacob Rees-Mogg: Hold my claret!

Re: So Musk has blood on his hands

Yeah, they'll make a complete mess of it like the Afghanis did against Russia. Oh, wait, the Afghanis won!

Re: Jeepers.

The SOS phone on my car just reads out the GPS coordinates to the emergency operator via speech synthesis before connecting you personally (via hands free) to the operator.

Re: Narrow but uncertain applicability?

Hey, at least they stated their assumptions.

I recently read a paper on how exercise modes affect blood pressure that was reported in the the press akin to "These two exercises could reduce your dangerously high blood pressure" where they made the assumption that the control groups in the papers they were doing a meta analysis of were sufficiently similar to allow all the studies to be linked. Of course they (1) didn't actually state the implicit assumption or (2) provide any evidence that the assumption held thus rendering the paper little more than prettily worded bunkum and the conclusions worthless.

Unlike this paper, which at most is going to be used to justify a bit of Friday afternoon bunking off, that paper is going to possibly genuinely and seriously affect the health of people who get an exercise prescription from a medic who (a) didn't read more that the conclusions or a report of them, (b) isn't smart enough to spot the terrible methodological mistake.

Re: Hate-speech reports scared off advertisers

Since 1979. TFTFY.

Re: Let's hope it stops the hate comments

Any approbation that Musk has attracted here is entirely of his own making. Simple factual reporting of what he does, combined with his own pronouncements is more than enough to make him an object of scorn in the eyes of any right thinking individual.

The people who need criticism are those who still indulge in uncritical adulation of the man in the face of all he's done to Twitter, its staff, all the people it owes money to and all the shareholders in his other ventures that have been tainted by his Twitter antics.

Re: Meh

Well, you've certainly publicly stated your unsuitability for a career as a criminal or as a spy. Or is this just a ruse to persuade up that you aren't one of those two things?

Re: OED

Often "fair use" hinges on how much of a pre-existing work has been used. Me using Blackadder quotes to quip at what others have said counts as fair use, me posting the script of whole episodes of Blackadder does not. Ingesting a work wholesale would definitely cross any threshold used to assess whether a 'substantial' quantity of the original work had been used.

If an LLM can be provoked to produce exact quotes of any arbitrary part of a work by prompting (e.g. "What did Captain Blackadder say in response to Lieutenant George St Barleigh talking about 'willing suspension of disbelief'?") then I suspect it would fail the test of fair use by its ability to produce arbitrarily long quotations of any part of the original text.

Re: The issue with V6 is... NAT

You clearly don't know how this works if you think what country you're in determines the routeability of an assigned IP prefix, be it a v4 prefix or a v6 prefix.

If you've a block permanently assigned to you, then you just find a grown-up ISP and say "We need you to announce this over BGP". Better still get your own ASN (You'll have no problem with this is you're capable of getting a permanently assigned prefix) and advertise your prefix yourself to one or more upstream transit providers.

Jemma has a problem working out that the Ambulances, Fire Service, Coastguard and, in some places, Mountain Rescue are all also on 999. Any woman who lives in the Metropolitan Police district has a right to have a problem with the police.

Re: Commodore Pet

Somewhere inside the Royal Mail winging (well, tumbling at the very least) its way to me is an Agilent/HP E5810A Ethernet/IP to IEEE-488 gateway.

Re: I went into the office for 40 years

I agree it's unfair to call children kids. The goats smell better, are cheaper and are less trouble.

Re: Heard this before somewhere

OI Montag! You forgot your Salamander!