Posts by Ian Mason 244 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jun 2014
Information Commissioner John Edwards defended his stance at a DSIT-hosted hearing last month, insisting the incident was a "one-off" error rather than evidence of systemic non-compliance inside the MoD.
Erm, how does he know that it's a "one-off" without investigating it. If there is systematic non-compliance surely it takes an investigation to uncover that, or prove that such an accusation is unfounded?
"An AI-generated band called Breaking Rust has just hit the top of the Billboard Country chart"
Erm, no. It has hit the top of the Billboard Country Digital Downloads chart. Specifically it has been bought 3000 times.[source: Rick Beato's YouTube video about this incident.] So more likely than not someone paid for 3000 downloads to hype it - no different to the people who used to go around the (supposedly secret) record shops in the UK who were used in compiling the weekly charts buying multiple copies of a single. Breaking Rust's absence from any of Billboard's other charts speaks volumes.
I heard a good line today that neatly encapsulates the thinking behind this kind of act; actually behind the whole AI dog and pony show that's destined to implode a few months or a couple of years at most.
"Too many people are just looking to make a quick buck rather than think about what they put into the world.".
Substitute power/influence/regard/whatever for "quick buck" appropriately.
" studies suggest that their use among college students leads to less brain activity "
I suspect that's not a particularly significant finding. It's been a while since I was a college student, but I seem to remember that we could find a myriad of ways to reduce brain activity without getting a computer in the loop, many of them involved the union bar in one fashion or another.
With respect to the quote:
the figure was calculated on the assumption that "100 percent of routine tasks and 10 percent of non-routine tasks can be automated."
Roger Needham, the Cambridge Computing professor used to say that "If there is an algorithm for it then it is administration, if there isn't them it is management". If those "100% of routine tasks" can be automated then it just needs very ordinary algorithmic computer programming to deal with them, not fancy pants AI. If the government had ever demonstrated the ability to get a finished, fit for purpose IT project past the finishing line then that is what they need to do. However, they can't, so a much more nebulous AI strategy, with nebulous goals will must better serve the career goals of civil servants, will be what is foisted on us, along with more failures in public services and of course more spending.
I suspect that government is like homelessness. If you just spend the money to put homeless people in houses in the long run it is a very cheap solution, much cheaper than all the indirect schemes to "tackle" homelessness. So spending a load of cash to pension off the 1/2 of the civil service who do nothing actively useful seems expensive, but would yield massive savings on a 5 year plus term.
Nope, if your employer installs spyware on their machine, that you use for your work for them in Germany then they are breaking the law. Not every country is as lax about what employers can do to employees as whatever country you live in and are drawing assumptions from about how the whole world works.
I used to work at PC Magazine with, among others, Guy Kewney. When the first Thinkpad was being made IBM invited Guy out to lunch to see a preview. When Guy got back to the office, rather the worse for wear, I happened to talk to him. He was reasonably enthusiastic about the Thinkpad, liked the TrackPoint, but at this showing the TrackPoint didn't yet have a name. Guy mooted to them that they could call it the centrally located inertialess tracker. They took this on board, and it took until the next day for IBM's relevant UK product manager to call Guy up and say "You bastard!" (in the nicest possible way obviously.) As he was writing up his notes of the lunch he did what any good IBMer would do and tried turning Guy's suggestion into an acronym.
Yes Thermoelectric Coolers (TECs) are reversible, and can heat as well as cool, just apply the electric current the other way around.
TECs efficiency however is terrible, under ideal conditions it's hard to achieve a COP (Coefficient Of Performance) of more than one, meaning you have to supply as much or more energy as heat you want to move whereas the humble domestic refrigerator has a COP in the rough region of 3, meaning that for every Joule of energy that you want to move you only have to supply about 1/3 of a Joule to do the moving.
So let me get this right. Meta are so bad at running their own business that they can't manage to decide which ads to accept or not, and have to get the courts to do their job for them? If they are really that bad perhaps the courts should step in to require them to have systems in place that work, before they find themselves advertising hitmen, and child prostitution rings.
They couldn't be extradited. Our extradition treaties with other nations require that the offence being extradited for would also be an offence in the UK. As the article points out, there isn't a specific "swatting" offence in the UK. The reason that our treaties are like that is so we don't have to extradite people for offences are incompatible with our idea of the rule of law, like apostasy or lèse-majesté which are criminal offences in some countries.
You're wrong about patent law being created to reward creators, it was created so that creators could share their methods for the general good while still enjoying exclusivity on benefiting from their methods for a limited period. The deal was that rather than protect their ideas for their own exclusive use by keeping their methods secret that they would be given exclusive rights for a limited time if and only if they openly published them in a patent application. Patents were originally about promoting openness.
You are going to have to spend a long time living down the manifestly stupid claim that copyright law and intellectual property law have nothing to do with each other. Your claim is on the close order to claiming that red paint and paint have nothing to do with each other.
The characterisation of algol 68 as "over-complex" is both unfair and untrue. Any competent programmer could pick up Woodward & Bond's 99 page "ALGOL 68-R User's Guide" and learn and use 99% of the language in a single day. In fact it's gloriously simple and regular, or "orthogonal" as the algol 68 designers liked to describe it.
I challenge anybody to learn 99% of C++, Swift, Go, or Python in the same timescale.
Unloved, probably true, but that just demonstrates how rare good taste is.
They got the very last of the brains, just after the ginger cats.
There is a theory that there is only one labrador braincell and that they all have to share it in a fashion similar to the single electron shared by the whole universe as mooted by Pauli (Man, I want some of what Pauli was smoking that day).
The stated reason for the RS compiler and language variant was to support modular programming as the ALGOL 68 view of the world was all monolithic programs. The RS extensions introduced ways of compiling chunks of ALGOL 68 as modules and then compositing them into a complete program, it wasn't pretty. The modular extensions aside, the RS compiler was a pleasant enough implementation to use. There was, of all things, a Multics port of it which I got to use.
This falls squarely under Section 2 of the Fraud Act 2006. "... dishonestly makes a false representation ... cause loss to another or to expose another to a risk of loss [i.e to an applicant]".
If anyone from HR or an employment agency is watching, that's worth up to 10 years in prison plus a fine.
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.
Hmm. Vodafone don't do IT, just connectivity, so I wonder if 'interacting with the Vodafone Platform' just really means "our data sims have stopped working".
Vodafone are phasing out some of their data only sim plans; I got an email telling me that a Vodafone data only service I use is ceasing soon (1st August in case of the particular service that I use). What are the chances that someone at BA got a similar email, failed to act on it and the deadline to find an alternative to a Vodafone data only mobile service just came and went? Is this just a variant on the "forgot to renew a certificate" classic fail?
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.
No, there's nothing unusual to it. Everybody has the power to bring a private criminal prosecution.
You used to just have to pop into the nearest magistrates court and 'swear out an information' but nowadays you just toddle along to gov.uk, grab a copy of the form "Application for summons or warrant for arrest for alleged offence under Magistrates’ Courts Act 1980 section 1, CrimPR 7.2(6)", fill it out and submit it to the court. There's a lot more detail to actually conducting a prosecution, but the essential thing is that anyone has the power to bring a private criminal prosecution, perhaps not the expertise to, but certainly the power to.
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.
It's necessary to point out that Dublin is in Ireland because Americans may read this, and they get very confused when a placename, that they have reused umpteen times to name somewhere in the US of A, is used to refer to the original and not the Dublin in Ohio, California, Georgia, Kentucky, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Texas, or Michigan (and I've probably missed some).
If only the early settlers had possessed just a little more imagination, the USA would not have 21 Glasgows, 7 Edinburghs, 10 Londons, 7 Cardiffs, 16 Birminghams, and 27 Brightons - that last one clearly suggests a lot of people wishing for somewhere to go to for a dirty weekend.
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