Posts by Alex Stuart

Re: British Fascism

They're responding with ChatGPT, I wouldn't bother debating it.

Re: go Apple

Generally, Big Tech has been running rings around governments for years. Our governments are slow, lumbering things, and by the time they've caught up to BT on naughty thing A, they've already rolled out B and C, and so on. It helps to have essentially infinite money to a) pay an army of lawyers to drag out appeals for as long as they can get away with and b) shrug off any punitive fines. They behave like they're above the law because they essentially are.

Re: Think of the children says Meta

> Meta accuses Australian government of failing to consider the loss of their ability to lock kids into their addictive and harmful ecosystem via network effects, and their stock price, with world-first social media ban

Fixed it for them.

Re: damn shame

I see your point, and agree that health should be a priority, but you're baking in the assumption that it has to be either or - which may well be true in the UK right now, but is not the case everywhere - see Japan and wider Europe.

I'd rather hammer the point that we fundamentally fail at building things in general, so should fix that, then we can have both infrastructure and healthcare.

70 years ago, we built the world's first commercial nuclear power plant. That we are now paying France gazillions to build another one massively late and over-budget is...a mind-boggling timeline to have ended up in.

Likewise, we invented the steam engine and the world's first commercial railways - this stuff should be easy for us.

nVidia adds a year on to the actual year, for some reason.

Re: Maybe I'm missing something

The calculator usage (at least, for a single calculation) isn't a good example of tool use for exactly the reasons you say.

Replace it with something like 'search the web' and now things are getting more useful e.g. 'tell me the important things to know about dihydrogen monoxide' - the LLM goes off and searches and returns a curated summary to you much faster than you could summarise yourself.

Or 'keep trying to compile code to solve problem X and tell me when you have a working solution', 'keep using this Go app to play against youself and tell me when you think you can beat Sedol', etc

(I'm not an AI fanatic either, at least not regarding LLMs. They have some utility now, but still too prone to hallucination for my liking and I doubt they can reach AGI without some sort of symbolic reasoning system built-in)

Re: 3 years of updates ?

Interesting - thanks!

Agreed, though I've had a bad impression of them since school, in the eras of having no physical floppy eject button, a single-button mouse, and being made to stay behind and do lines of 'macs are not crap' by, in hindsight, a pathologically fanboyish CDT teacher for saying (you guessed it) 'macs are crap'.

iTunes coming along and being horrifically bloated compared to Winamp made the impression worse, as did the iPod and needing a Winamp mod to be able to drag and drop MP3 files to it (my girlfriend's, not mine, of course)

Further shenanigans of multiple flavours have done nothing to endear them to me, though I'll never deny they make excellent hardware.

Re: Not ready

Agree completely. I've always turned this crap off in rental cars when it inevitably starts doing stupid stuff like wobbling the steering wheel because it doesn't understand junctions/sliproads.

Happy with my mostly-analog BMW that only has ABS, which I appreciate is good tech though only ever kicked in when I forced it to see how it worked. No touchscreens, no interference, proper handbrake, no other solutions for problems that don't exist like keyless entry etc.

Auto-brake is as far as I'd go as long as I could trust it to work even better than my own eyesight and reaction time - from reading comments about it, it seems like it's not there yet.

> Google is worth at least a couple billion in revenue for Apple

More than a couple - circa $20bn a year in recent years just for Google search as default. Another way of putting that is Google pays for almost all of Apple's R&D expenses. An incredible deal for Apple, so any concessions would be unsurprising.

Re: Perhaps...

Unfortunately, in a sense they are doing gamers a favour selling them GPUs *at all* when they could instead use their wafer allocations to fab more accelerators with much higher margins. So, yeah, not holding my breath either.

Re: I support him

> There's always the wonderful 3rd option that we are both non-deterministic and non-free because the illusion of free will arises from the action of some effectively random process along the lines of atomic decay.

That is what I believe is the case - non-deterministic yet also non-free.

Sam Harris (big no-free-will proponent, wrote a book on it) and Daniel Dennett (prominent philosopher/cognitive scientist) had a good debate on this, if you're interested - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J_9DKIAn48

> So, it is for when you are at home but don't want the convenience of using a real controller

It is a real controller - it's almost identical to the DualSense, that is one of its selling points vs using a third-party controller wrapped around a phone screen etc.

It also doesn't need to be on the same network as the PS5, it works remotely too.

> Other than "continuing your game while on the toilet" I can't comprehend the use case for this

Easy;

- Playing PS5 while missus watches TV/plays PS4/Switch etc

- Playing PS5 casually with TV on in background

- Playing PS5 in other rooms

- Playing PS5 remotely i.e. in a hotel, work (I've not tested this yet, but read that given a good connection it works quite well)

So, yes it's limited in use in that it's not a standalone handheld console, but for those uses, it is a nice piece of kit that does the job it says well.

Re: I can see why

AMD has had the better CPUs for a few years now - they are plenty fast and dominate in power efficiency. Intel's will match or slightly beat the performance, but at the expense of needing a modular nuclear reactor to power them. Intel's 'e-cores' are not necessarily a bad idea, but they have obviously been shoved in to try and make up for the dismal efficiency of the p-cores.

The next gen will be interesting - we'll be able to see if Intel's Gelsinger has managed to right the ship on architecture.

Re: Wrong way around!!!

> A human brain consumes around 20W, and even assuming the "training time" is every living moment from birth to a wise old 80 years, is a total consumption of just over 14MWh.

In a sense, the training time of a given brain is more like the history of all of its mammalian ancestors' brains, which via evolution has trained the brain matter to develop and use as yet unknown algorithms in a certain fashion to learn and reprogram itself. Which is....a lot of training.

Re: Stalking and financial abuse

Unfortunately that is quite a good recommendation to make, because loads of people - for some reason - love "reaction videos".

I've seen trailers for new videogames come out and the 'xxxx reacts to trailer' video has more views than the trailer itself....

I imagine there'll be areas of the CPUs switched off due to yield issues, the same as we see with GPUs (AMD may have been the first to do this with their 3-core parts in the late noughties IIRC) resulting in odd core counts.

Re: Technical marvel, but it's the economics, stupid

> Now were at a time where even many governments don't have the required funds any more to make it happen.

I don't think that's the main issue as they can essentially just print the money. The main issue is we appear institutionally unable to build things at scale anymore. Some combination of lack of knowledge, structural government/council issues, corruption, legal issues/NIMBYism or simply the inability to take any long-term actions from a governing system that works in 5-year blocks, and it's crippling for something like nuclear power. It's bad enough for much more simple projects like train lines, or even houses - we cannot even get that right.

Re: Parsing the data

> The write up seems to suggest that this vulnerability affects just the vector registers, and I wondered how the vector registers were actually used.

> I'm no expert, but the way that I thought these units were used was mainly for mathematical operations, like array processing.

Me too. But, from the github page for the exploit - "The AVX registers are often used for high performance string processing by system libraries. This means that very high volumes of sensitive data pass through them."

> All the "motorheads" I know who say they love the speed and the acceleration and the wind in their hair, etc. won't touch electric cars or bikes. Despite the fact that they are the fastest moving things around. What they mean is "they want to make a nuisance and let everyone know they drive a flash, expensive car".

It doesn't mean that, that's a non-sequitur. I suspect you simply don't get the appeal. I'd bet the majority of sports car/bike owners are neither nuisances nor care for how expensive the vehicle is. See - popularity and reverence of classic cars like old M3s, R34 GT-R etc.

It's OK - most people see cars as simply A to B transport, don't enjoy driving, and don't appreciate any of the design or engineering of a performance vehicle. Which is why the roads are full of bloated crossovers on stilts with zero steering feel or liveliness to them. No problem, not everyone shares the same interests and hobbies.

Re: Speed issues

> * my kids do not understand the difference between "WiFi" and "the internet

From what I've seen, this seems to apply to most people under 30. Initially I thought they were stupid, then realised they have likely never used an Ethernet cable - to not even speak of an RJ11 - in their life, and that actually I'm just old.

Re: HR

> Is it possible that, taking only biological factors and not social factors, men and women tend to like different things?

It's not just possible, it is absolutely the case, yet inevitably ignored in every single report/article of this type. Specifically, men are more likely to be interested in things, and women more likely to be interested in people.

Even without studies supporting it, this is just self-evident stuff for anyone talking to a bunch of men and women about their interests over the course of their life.

A relatively recent study on this issue - https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0261438 - found that not only do these differences exist, but that in countries with higher levels of female empowerment, the ratios in career choice are in fact *bigger*. It's a total repudation of the idea that if careers aren't 50/50, there's some bias or other negative effect at play.

Those are the two most important currencies in the world. The sun has long since set on the Empire, I'm afraid.

> lane 3 has all the Teslas and BMWs

Almost all of the bad boyz switched from BMW to Audi over the past half decade.

Try doing a mere 75mph in the outside lane and see how long it takes to see those four rings in the rearview mirror. It's comically predictable.

> My experience is that the better the 3D device, the worse the nausea is. What I think is going on there is that you are successfully fooling the bodies visual inputs, but these are being cross referenced against your bodies Vestibular system in the inner ear.

This is true. But some people, at least, can get used to it to a significant degree.

My first session with Playstation VR, major vestibular disruption and I tapped out after 30 mins or so.

A few sessions later, I was doing hours at a time with no problems at all.

To this day, pulling extreme maneuvres in a fighter jet in VR induces a wave of unpleasant sensations - but then so would doing it for real!

For those who can never find their 'VR legs'...yes, value very much limited to no-lateral-movement experiences.

Re: Net Send was disgusting.

> but had the support of the vocal minority

FTFY

Re: Look away now. Nothing to see or hear or know here about them and those there .

Wow, good bot.

Re: So I will hoist the inevitable "OK Boomer"

> You tell them to read a book they can't afford

Nah. These types all have iPhones, airPods, the latest trendy bodywarmer/manbag/trainers etc. Money is not the issue, it's culture and lack of policing.

Re: Easy fix

> Just ban all children from social media.

This is the way. Social media is not only a gateway into all sorts of toxic content and an attention-destroying dopamine pumping device, but it's a global psychological experiment on homo sapiens that we didn't realise we were signing up for, with the consequences on society and our brains still unravelling.

But it can't be done by parents. Has to be baked into the apps - need verifiable ID to register and occasionally re-authenticate.

Won't happen though. We'll just get the token hand-waving and virtue signalling whenever something bad happens and the occasional unenforcable/impractical bill going through.

Re: So much for "Brexit freedoms" eh ?

Sure, but you're missing the point. Labelling a population of millions of people, of whose motivations one cannot know in entirety and will certainly include many non-racist reasons, as racists (or in this case, racist scum), is an act of group-based discrimination in exactly the same manner as racism or other biases.

To amend your analogy, in the same way a Pole doesn't choose to be Polish, a non-racist Brexit voter *didn't choose that other Brexit voters may be racist*

Re: Interesting

Indeed. Think of the children, unless that thinking is 'don't let them get hooked on endless algorithmic dopamine feeds while they're young', in which case think of the damage to Zuckerbergs.

Re: How much???

You forgot to add 'in London'.

Re: Consenting adults. (Consenting by default?).

I don't think it's a scam either, but I'm also yet to see a convincing argument for the use case of it vs a centralised relational database.

Your Starbucks coin example, current loyalty apps/accounts will store their users' points on a database, what is the problem with this that needs the solution of defi? Especially PoW vs PoS based which wastes massive amounts of energy vs a database.