Posts by Michael Wojcik

Re: What do you mean "far side of the moon?"

"Mobius Moon Society" is a good name for a band.

OK, I'll stop.

Re: "Half a century ago, going to the moon was science fact. Now it's science fiction"

"Oligarch Gap" is a good name for a band.

(Not a name for a good band, mind.)

Re: Who Cares?

Exactly. Yes, part of the problem here is that Samsung is being deceptive in its marketing; but the bigger part is the idea that an altered photograph is inherently a better photograph.

I can find all the nice photos, real and faked, of the moon that I like online. I don't need a phone that lies to me in order to get one. And the same goes for any other pictures I take with any device.

There's an obnoxious advertisement for the Google Pixel Whatever that plays on some streaming service we have, where they show it "removing distractions", i.e. other people, from photos. What the everlovin' fuck is wrong with these developers? What sort of vile, narcissistic relationship do you have to have with the world to believe that other people are mere "distractions" from the fantasy you want to construct with your faked photography?

I don't find Richard's argument convincing in the slightest. I don't believe anyone needs "better" photographs achieved through fakery. Grow up and learn to live in the real goddamned world.

Re: >Open sourcing the code is hard

And, of course, he didn't say he'd open-source all the Twitter code; he said he'd open-source "the algorithm", by which he presumably meant the ranking-and-propagating algorithm for individual tweets. Twitter has a large codebase (just look at that page of bits they have open-sourced to get an idea of how large), so presumably even most Twitter developers would have needed to do quite a bit of exploring around the repositories to find that particular chunk of code, even if it's properly isolated and abstracted away.

So it was a dumb thing to promise, and likely quite difficult to deliver.

It's legal because it hasn't been made illegal, and it hasn't been made illegal because it is 1) profitable and 2) useful to those in power.

Re: Misleading Headline

Sensible, ethical people would see it as an invasion of privacy and an abrogation of the investigative rights of the State, which themselves should be granted only through due process.

So why don't you take your tiresome refrain somewhere else, eh?

Re: "identify gay priests, and providing that information to bishops "

But we're so much nicer now!

Oh, wait.

Indeed. The privacy-invading inquisitorial creeps aren't exclusively homophobic. Let us dance in the streets.

Re: What would Jesus have done?

It's a Reverse Oedipus: first you're the father, then the son, rather than the other way around.

Eventually it became too much trouble and he gave up the Ghost.

Re: "il est bon de tuer ... un Amiral pour encourager les autres."

Scientific fraud can be difficult to prove, too, particularly in such details as who actually committed the fraud. You could have six or eight co-authors on a paper, most of whom did their part of the research in a perfectly above-board way, and just one or two who faked initial observations or tweaked datasets that others subsequently analyzed.

Re: Goodhart's Law

It is time to institute an across-the-board rule that says something along the lines of "If you are caught with AI fakes in your paper, you and your department will never get grant money ever again. Period. Because we can't trust cheaters, and everyone knows that once a cheat, always a cheat." And maybe rivet a big, polished brass S to the department head's forehead for being Stupid enough to allow the paper to be submitted for review in his/er department's name.

It's completely unreasonable to expect a department chair to police the academic output of the department. That's not what they're trained for, they don't have the resources for it, and it's not a feasible process anyway.

So all that would happen under this regime is, first, a bunch of innocent researchers people would be punished because of one bad actor; and then universities would tie the whole nonsense up in the courts and get the rule stayed by judicial order forever.

We absolutely do need to mitigate the revenge effects of the publication mandate, which has all sorts of other problems, such as the excruciatingly low rate of reproduction studies (because they're not rewarded). And there are a number of cognate issues; the ACM has in recent years raised the problem of the close relationship between conference presentation and publication, for example, which can also impede good research. But a guilt-by-association overreaction certainly will not help.

Re: Vice Chairman

Compensation for board members isn't always this generous, but it's usually pretty damn sweet considering the amount of work involved. Yeah, I'd read some reports and attend some meetings in swank locations for an extra $100K/year, thanks.

But you know they do good work, like not punishing executives who fail utterly. The club doesn't run itself.

Re: Excel ...

If the job is "annoying the hell out of me at every moment while I'm using it", then Excel is optimal.

As Eric Williams¹ famously explained at some length, capitalism is far more efficient than slavery at extracting profit from workers.

¹Though CLR James said he gave Williams the idea. Then Williams put James under house arrest, so maybe James had a point.

SVB was 40 years old when it died on Friday. It wasn't "fly by night". "Mismanaged" and "unwise" I'll allow.

Re: The REAL meaning of the word "woke".

if you cannot agree slavery is bad, you really are

"tough on crime", in the US.

Re: Because what the world needs now...

Well, a more obviously biased, offensive, hallucinating chatbot might squelch some of the undeserved enthusiasm for the damned things. Though expecting users to notice something like that is probably unreasonable.

Re: I'm still waiting....

If memory serves, Codrescu wrote an essay suggesting that the rise in accusations of "political correctness" followed immediately on the demise of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. As accusations of being a Communist lost their sting, conservatives had to find a new label for their villains. Second-rate public intellectuals (I use the term loosely) like Dinesh D'Souza, Bill O'Reilly, and William Bennett replaced the Cold War with a fairly feeble culture war, primarily targeting academics. (Codrescu wasn't the only one to make this connection, of course; Wikipedia notes that Du Mez, for example, develops this argument at greater length.)

Codrescu had a nice little formulation about conservatives replacing "CP" (i.e. Communist Party) with "PC", which is indeed about the level of subtlety of the US culture war of the 1990s.

Re: Meaning of "woke"

if you discount the native peoples of North America who have largely been displaced

'Round these parts, those are fighting words. Plenty of places in the US have significant native and native-mixed populations.

Last I checked, my wife wasn't "displaced", and discounting her has not gone well for others in the past.

But I take the force of your argument, which is that anti-immigration sentiment is historically and economically naive, and the resulting policies are both intellectually and morally offensive.

Honestly, I'm having trouble thinking of a technology that turns bad programmers into good ones. The only one I can think of that works in a significant number of cases is education.

COBOL was the first widely-deployed attempt at that, as far as I can recall, and it didn't succeed. COBOL may have let non-programmers write parts of programs, but it didn't make them good programmers. Functional programming has its advantages, but it didn't turn bad programmers into good ones. Same for structured programming, object orientation, 4GLs, StackOverflow, GitHub Copilot, and so on.

Re: Riiight

All the technologies you use now were "bleeding edge" at some point.

And the force of the argument here is precisely against needing "bleeding edge" technology. It's that an evolution in RDBMS capabilities, which is already underway thanks to SQL/PGQ standardization, removes the need to switch from an established technology to a significantly different one.

Your question about "the researchers had put similar effort into extending the native graph DB" doesn't make sense. The capabilities they added to DuckDB are already in graph DBMSes that support GQL, because they're a subset of GQL. What the paper shows is that it's feasible to add the SQL/PGQ enhancements to an existing analytic RDBMS and when they did so the performance was superior to the existing GRDBMS.

I'm not qualified to have a strong opinion on the debate here, but this particular line of argument is irrelevant to it. The question at hand is whether GDBMSes fundamentally handle a significant subset of use cases better than RDBMSes. "GDBMSes have X and RDBMSes don't have X yet, but it's been shown they can have it" supports the RDBMS side, not the GDBMS one.

Re: Complexity

Yes, and converting from some sufficiently-regular "plain text" collection of information to JSON and XML, or vice versa, is something that can easily be scripted. If someone's "plain text" summary of their dependencies can't easily be converted, then it's probably not useful for any real-world purpose anyway.

Really, if you have more than a handful of dependencies on external components, this information should be in a database anyway, in which case generating CycloneDX, say, is trivial.

LLMs are highly likely to report a number of classes of non-factual information, and larger models are more likely to do so. Cleo Nardo recently posted an accessible explanation of why that's the case.

Re: It doesn't think you are dead now.

Chat-GPT never "thought" Hanff was dead. It doesn't think. It's a long way from anything that can reasonably be described as thinking.

It was phrase-extending and it hit a gradient in parameter space that took it down a non-factual path. That's all. Everything else imputed to it in Hanff's piece – lying, "doubling down", making things up – is a category error. There are no qualia in the GPT models. There's no malevolence. There's no imagination.

I am not a fan of LLMs, which I regard as unimpressive (and I have cred in this field too), an enormous waste of resources, a terrible distraction from things that matter, and a likely source of adverse effects. But could we please stop turning them into demons? They're just very crappy tools.

Exactly. Any CI/CD system that doesn't at a minimum support version control and individual authentication for all of its configuration components is rubbish. Any organization that uses CI/CD and doesn't at a minimum keep all of that under version control with individual authentication is direly broken and, frankly, deserves to get pwned.

Hell, moving more stuff into the version-control domain is one of the biggest advantages of IoC, along with the usual things like repeatability, auditing, recoverability...

It'd be better if CI/CD configuration was signed, and those signatures verified regularly, but version control and strong authentication are at least a start.