* Posts by John H Woods

3577 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Nov 2007

International effort to disrupt cybercrime moves into operational phase

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Interesting that this is "very unique" rather than ...

say, moderately unique

AI and wearables are scaring the wellbeing out of workers

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Re: Capitalism is back, with a vengeance.

Ah, yes, the only alternative to failing capitalism is failing communism. Social Democracies exist, you know?

Attacks on UK fiber networks mount: Operators beg govt to step in

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Re: Using phrases such as "Genetically predisposed to violence" ...

>>We accept that genetics have a role in behaviour in every other animals but somehow we are meant to believe that humans are magically different.

Nope, that's a straw man: everyone accepts genetics has at least some role in behaviour. That does not mean you can identify a genetic predisposition to violence nor, even if there were, would it ever be strong enough from you to deduce criminality from genetics.

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Using phrases such as "Genetically predisposed to violence" ...

... is a pretty good way of demonstrating you've never studied genetics. Or history.

Copilot can't stop emitting violent, sexual images, says Microsoft whistleblower

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IF ...

>> If these idiots had really solved the AGI problem, like they keep telling us they have, then explicit guardrails wouldn't be needed.

Then copilot would need therapy

AI to fix UK Civil Service's bureaucratic bungling, deputy PM bets

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Re: All mouth and no trousers!

Best use I've seen for LLM is low quality fiction - perfect for giving Non Player Characters in videogames human like conversation.

Anyone who thinks an LLM can "analyse" a document needs a refresher course, if only in what Dunning Kruger means.

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

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Don't people test edge cases any more?

Text required so might as well be this pedantic note

- it's not "divisible by 4" as there are 365.2425 days in a year, not 365.25. So it's divisible by 4 unless divisible by 100 unless divisible by 400.

City council megaproject to spend millions for manual work Oracle system was meant to do

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Re: Index cards

Big Multinational Corp can always afford a sales effort that will blindside an organization whose procurement people are overstretched, inexperienced and under-remunerated junior civil servants. It's just not a fair fight.

It's crazy but it's true: Apple rejected Bing for wrong answers about Annie Lennox

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We're old ...

Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) came out in 1983, nearer to the end of WWII than to the present day.

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be coders, Jensen Huang warns

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I've struggled for a long time ...

... to come up with a simple paragraph outlining both the capabilities and deficiencies of current generation AI. And yet, such a paragraph has already been created by AI...

Somebody on Threads shared this AI-generated (from customer reviews) Amazon doozy:

=====8<=====8<=====8<=====8<=====8<=====8<=====8<=====8<====

✰✰✰✰✰ 3 out of 5

28 global ratings

Customers say

Customers like the appearance of the planter, mentioning it's beautiful and has a nice hanging pots. They like that the pots are weathered and have a sizeable chunk missing from the lip. They also like that it has shattered to bits and is a waste of money.

=====8<=====8<=====8<=====8<=====8<=====8<=====8<=====8<====

LLMs are great at recombining tokens But they really don't have any mechanism for knowing what anything actually means.

Are you ready to back up your AI chatbot's promises? You'd better be

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"In a few years, it will be a different story."

I'm not sure I have seen any real evidence for that. Is the training going to get better? Are the LLMs going to get so much better the training can be the same? Or is some new form of AI chatbot that isn't really an LLM going to appear? Absent any of that, I'm sceptical.

ICANN proposes creating .INTERNAL domain to do the same job as 192.168.x.x

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Re: I use....

Where are we?

Hard to say, really.

Post Office boss unable to say when biz knew Horizon could be remotely altered

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Re: 700 As an ex-Sr. Director of a software company...I'm apalled!

Pedantic note, blue moons aren't super rare; 1.167e-8Hz is pleasingly about once every e years

Formal ban on ransomware payments? Asking orgs nicely to not cough up ain't working

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Re: Ban

"the UK poverty line if their income is below 60% of the median household income after housing costs, so unless all households have the same income, there will always be households "in poverty""

Take the following incomes after housing costs in thousands of pounds per annum: 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 5, 10, 20, 100. The median is 3. The minimum is 2, which is over 60% of the median.

GM, Komatsu partner to build hydrogen-powered monster mining truck

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Re: why not burn hydrogen instead of diesel in almost same power unit?

Not an expert but I understand that H2 isn't an obvious fuel for combustion outside rocket engines: its reasonably high energy per mass is bugger all per volume once it's not liquefied. It burns hot so that air combustion is likely to produce NOx and it degrades some of the metals it comes into contact with.

The 15-inch MacBook Air just nails it

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You can if the hardware is old enough, got Mint running on a 2013 Mac Book Air right here... :-)

Systemd 255 is here with improved UKI support

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Take some squared notebook paper and sketch the QR code.

Polish train maker denies claims its software bricked rolling stock maintained by competitor

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Re: If you expect products to last, then products should come with warranties that you can use.

or what it's based on - "Ship of Theseus"

That call center tech scammer could be a human trafficking victim

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Re: Whitelist your parents phone

My hospitals and doctors have stopped using withheld numbers. Calls from individual clinicians have the relevant Switchboard/Reception as the caller ID.

Uncle Sam plows $42M into nurturing fusion breakthrough

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Re: "Climate change is inevitable, it's by no means an emergency"

Slow climate change is inevitable, rapid climate change is an emergency.

Raspberry Pi OS goes goth

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Re: I Suppose...

I hope, given today's news, you will use high precision geolocation to ensure your model trains breakdown unpredictably after exiting the servicing shed?

Elon Musk's xAI wants $1B cash infusion in exchange for equity shares

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Re: badly directed credit

Exactly: SpaceX is down to Gwynne Shotwell, Tom Mueller et al.

It's nice to have a money man who realizes prototypes fail. But that's about it.

Veteran editors Notepad++ and Geany hit milestone versions

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Re: EMACS or death

Emacs has a CUA mode.

You aren't going to sway me with CUA, I'm an old Smalltalk user from back in the day when the mice buttons were red, yellow and blue,and we were already using Ctrl-Z,X,C and V. These made their way into the Apple HIG (IIRC) and the IBM CUA didn't adopt them till later (Ctrl-C was <BREAK> for IBMers).

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EMACS or death

N/T

Buggy app for insulin-delivery device puts diabetes patients at risk of hypoglycemia

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A quality tester walks into a bar ...

... they ask for 1 beer. For -1 beer. For 256 beers. For 0.3 beers. For asdfjk beers ...

Then a regular punter walks in and asks "Excuse me, where's the toilet?" and the whole building immediately catches fire and burns to the ground.

UK government denies China/Russia nuke plant hack claim

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Re: Just considering...

Merry Christmas to you, --- and, given your handle --- I hope it will be excellent value for money.

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Re: Stuxnet

"can't" is a strong word. Exfiltrating data over airgaps is a *very* active field of research.

HP exec says quiet part out loud when it comes to locking in print customers

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They usually have some non-RAID storage you can use, you can even stick a USB stick in.

It's ba-ack... UK watchdog publishes age verification proposals

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Re: "facial age estimation"

This is funny and horrific ... hat tip

Hershey phishes! Crooks snarf chocolate lovers' creds

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Germolene

It's the same ester - oil of wintergreen (methyl salicylate)

Boffins find asking ChatGPT to repeat key words can expose its training data

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Re: Yeah but...

If you scan my head, you won't find Sonnet 18 in there. But if you say: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" I'll reply "Thou art more lovely and more temperate: rough winds do shake the darling buds of may ..."

This isn't because I have read so much Shakespeare I can reproduce this merely by "simulating Shakespeare" - it's because I know the poem. It is "in my head" in some shape or form (adapted weights of neurons, presumably), but there's no magic involved: it's just not stored as text.

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Re: A special case?

No, this is not what's happening here. Not nearly enough output is being generated here to make the regurgitated snippets appear at random.

Elon is the bakery owner swearing in the street about Yelp critics canceling him

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Re: The witch hunt of the leftist mob

Is this a Poe?

Electric vehicles earn shocking report card for reliability

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Re: We need the technological progress...

This is often neglected --- even if EVs are never as good as ICEs, we're going to have to switch to them. ICEs will always consume a finite resource, not oil as we first thought, but "space" in the atmosphere to put the resulting CO2.

Thirty-nine weeks: That's how long you'll be waiting for an AI server from Dell

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Joke

Re: 39 weeks? Meh

Says the person whose name suggests they've got all the GPUs ....

Regulator says stranger entered hospital, treated a patient, took a document ... then vanished

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Re: A future who me?

Old people (I am one) frequently remember lighting being a major source of energy consumption (as it once was, before CFL and then LED).

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Re: Sanctions needed!

The Mr Bumhead hat is a stroke of genius. That has made my Friday afternoon and I suspect I may not be the only one!

Musk tells advertisers to 'go f**k' themselves as $44B X gamble spirals into chaos

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What's even cringier than the F-bomb, and the ensuing uncomfortable silence, is this bit, missing from most reports;

Elon Musk: "Jonathan, the only reason I'm here is because you're a friend. Look, what was my speaking fee?"

Andrew Ross Sorkin, laughing: "You're not making any ... First of all, I'm Andrew."

The AI everything show continues at AWS: Generate SQL from text, vector search, and more

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ChatGPT 3.5 reveals training data...

... Seriously. Spitting out PII such as email addresses and telephone numbers, and whole expanses of undigested verbatim training material.

Guardrails might be much more important... they may be required to stop your LLM regurgitating material it shouldn't.

Even if you haven't got time for anything else, scroll down to the first embedded video for a laugh out loud moment at the attack used.

https://not-just-memorization.github.io/extracting-training-data-from-chatgpt.html

Car dealers openly beg Biden to put brakes on electric vehicle drive

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Re: It’s not just the “mark ups”

There are 300 car fires a day in the UK, 200 deliberate, 100 accidental.

ICE car fires are so common they don't make (even the local) news. So it's hard to get a 'feel' of how statistically significant the "EV catches fire" stories are.

Brits turn off Twitter, although teens and tweens keen on generative AI

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Re: Wot!

Well I've long had my suspicions about "centrists"

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Re: Wot!

Hitler was far Right. The rest of your list is spot on but including Hitler in it suggests you are not a serious person.

Meta sued by privacy group over pay up or click OK model

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Re: Stalking and financial abuse

Amazon AI is particularly interesting - it tends to recommend things to me I actually have to Google to find out what they are. Last one was a replacement rotisserie motor, it doesn't match anything I ever do let alone purchase. I'm sure it's pranking me.

AI threatens to automate away the clergy

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Re: that would be evidence enough for me

insert famous Arthur C Clarke quote

AI agents can copy humans to get closer to artificial general intelligence, DeepMind finds

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Surely the real ethical problem with AGI ...

... is less the threat to us (mediated by limiting its access to weaponry, manufacturing, etc) and more the concern that we will have created an enslaved sentient creature.

I don't think there's anything magical happening in an animal brain, it's just enough neurons, well enough connected, for consciousness to arise. So sooner or later, with enough farting around with neural nets, we're going to create conscious beings.

Tesla sues Swedish government after worker rebellion cripples car biz

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Respect

Yes, I'm not one of Sunak's biggest fans but the way Musk treated him at the AI thingymajig was incredibly disrespectful to the UK

Ransomware-hit British Library: Too open for business, or not open enough?

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Re: It security

I'm always saying it, but accountants who work in the IT sector should at least have an actuarial bent, if not be actual actuaries. So much of IT cost is about accurately assessing (or at least somewhat accounting for) risk. There is literally no other way to justify a back-up or business continuity system: on the bottom line it just looks like wasted money. And there's no way to properly cost a project without considering risk, either.

Logitech's Wave Keys tries to bend ergonomics without breaking tradition

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Re: The absence of backlighting

Ctrl should be extreme bottom left IMHO. I love Stinkpads and Macbooks but the first thing I do is a Fn<->Ctrl swap. Unfortunately they are almost never the same size so you can't usually swap the keytops.