Posts by Michael Wojcik

Dude. Dude. Nicely incoherent, but you failed to mention artificial intelligence or your patents.

3/10 for lunacy. Please try harder next time.

Re: I actually ...

Now I'm imagining ads for Suse Tumbleweed with Applejack as the celebrity spokespony, damn it.

Re: telling them he planned to make it "extremely hardcore"

There's another more worrying explanation for the arrival of the beds considering he said this.

He did say something about adding video to Twitter, right?

Re: It's not for employees

Maybe Musk has secretly teamed up with best buddy Trump to turn Twitter HQ into a hotel and casino?

The slots will pay out in Dogecoin, and whales get a blue checkmark.

Re: "Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade."

Much of what you describe is a parents job, not the educations systems job

Oh, what a load of bullshit. None of what Machdiamond listed is inappropriate to be taught in school.

Parents are not some sort of panacea.

Re: "Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade."

Similarly, I'll generally only submit a survey response if something extraordinary – good or bad – happened. That way I can offer praise or criticism when it's due. There simply isn't a way to indicate on these things that business was conducted in a business-like fashion and both parties left satisfied with the result.

If I were running a survey program like this, every question would have an optional text response area (what we used to refer to as a "narrative" response option), with a reasonably high limit on length; and then four choices: something like "disappointed", "satisfied", "better than expected", "no opinion". And maybe a short prefatory statement noting that employees wouldn't be penalized for "satisfied".

But even with something like that, I'm dubious about its value.

Re: "Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade."

And, of course, "exceptional" does not mean "good". If Musk were half as smart as he thinks he is, he'd be more careful about his diction. Among other things.

Re: Office as housing?

Not any more it isn't; Carl Icahn accomplished what Trump couldn't and tore it down.

Still, score one for Coking in her battle against the city. Pity SCOTUS threw that away in their abysmal decision in Kelo.

Re: Office as housing?

When visiting remote offices, I often would have happily taken a properly-appointed suite in the office building over travel to and from a local hotel – much as I often walked to some local chippie or the like to get take-away dinner, and took it away to the office rather than the hotel, because why not? Better tables, better Internet service, free beverages, nicer facilities in general. All the office lacked was a private room with a bed and a shower.

But my employers certainly didn't expect me to spend after-hours time at the office, or working. If I did, it was because there wasn't anything else I was much inclined to do at the moment, after I'd had my evening stroll about town.

Re: obvious solution

Doesn't matter. Most of the web audience is using their phones, and using the browser supplied with the phone OS, unchanged. When content creation is that cheap, you don't need a very large portion of the audience paying for it.

Most people don't fall for penis-enlargement spam. That hasn't wiped it out.

Obviously it's a simplification, done for purposes of illustrating the general problem.

Ryan Holiday's Trust Me, I'm Lying has another take on the content-generation business circa 2010, and to the extent you believe Holiday (likely more in spirit than in specific detail) it supports the general shape of Nicole's account. Holiday is more concerned with blog-aggregator sites than with the anonymous content farms Nicole focuses on, but the economics were similar.

Re: AI Wars

Human judges can't reliably classify prose samples as human- or machine-generated. Models trained on corpora of machine- and human-generated prose will almost certainly overfit to particular generators. Adversarial tweaks to output will make it easy to defeat detection models, if the output of those models is available as an oracle – and it has to be, if they're going to be useful for the reading public.

Re: I'm optimistic about this.

Machine-generated content is pretty much guaranteed to flood the web. As Nicole points out,¹ the economics make it pretty much inevitable, assuming the continued survival of the web for a few more years.

This is hardly news in itself. Icon Publishing has been making a tidy profit off machine-written non-fiction specialty books for many years. A number of types of news articles – sports and financial reporting, for example – are machine-generated more often than not. Click-bait pieces routinely link-posted to Facebook and the like might as well be machine-written if they aren't already, since they generally consist of quotes or images with banal summaries of what's in the quotation or image. There's long been speculation in the college-composition world about when paper mills would switch over from underpaid human writers (often people with advanced degrees who can't make a living off adjunct-teaching pay) to cap-ex machine prose generation; and these days people are wondering when ML will put even the paper mills out of business.²

I think in general users will migrate to sites where humans are

How will they know?

Even expert human judges are pretty bad at distinguishing today's machine-generated prose from human-generated prose. Many people are decent writers (and pretty much anyone who's sufficiently neurotypical can become a decent writer; there's nothing magical involved), but relatively few are discernibly superior ones. And transformer-model prose generators are quite good.

Again, this should come as no surprise. Machine generation of classical music, for example, passed the point where human judges could reliably tell it apart from human work in the 1990s. Prose style is really not that difficult, particularly for straightforward non-fiction.

And, for that matter, how many people will care? A great many online readers seem only interested in having their emotional buttons pushed. Others are looking for information (and often not caring whether it's accurate) in a digestible form. Hell, many people would probably welcome a competent machine-written site, and it really wouldn't be hard to combine, say, trawling journal indexes for reliable sources, with LSA or similar for building a graph of relationships, with an abstractive multi-doc summarization mechanism, and then finally cranking it through a transformer stack for generating readable prose, to create articles that beat most of what's currently on the web.

Fiction and so-called "creative non-fiction" do raise the bar somewhat, though mostly for discerning readers.

¹And as others have been saying for years, in one form or another, of course. I made a similar point in a presentation at Computers & Writing a decade or so ago, though in a different context and with far less analysis, since it was peripheral to my topic. That's not meant to detract from the article, which was well written and argued; if I were still teaching Digital Rhetoric, I'd probably assign it.

²The widespread opinion in college-comp circles in the US is that if you're still assigning the sort of writing exercises that are easily satisfied by existing public ML systems, your pedagogy is shit anyway. But, of course, since college comp is a gen-ed subject, there are a great many sections of it being taught, and many of those instructors don't give a fuck.

Re: Not actually a problem

Even somethingawful.com is still up, though I don't think it's had any original featured content since Lowtax sold it (shortly before his death). As is fark.com, which is roughly contemporaneous with SA (and thus somewhat younger than suck.com – but apparently suck.com went offline a few years ago, and hadn't had new material since 2001, according to the infallible Wikipedia).

Re: The solution is fairly obvious

Creating multiple accounts isn't hard either.

Re: wikipedia

And not of the rest of human history?

Of course, in our time we know a good deal more about the answer, thanks to quite a lot of rigorous study into human cognition and its failings.

Re: What's that?

I dated Miss Placing for a few months in high school. I was very fond of her too.

Re: No iPhome ==No stalking

Your phone, my phone, everyone's phone is a "lost item detector".

Mine isn't, and indeed this is one of a number of reasons why I don't buy Apple devices.

If my phone is lost, it stays lost. And locked. As it happens, I have never, in a couple of decades of owning mobile phones of some sort, lost one. Nor did I ever lose the pager I had before that. But if I did, that's a loss I'll live with.

I've read Matt Green's speculative piece on how Apple's "Find My" feature works. Green is a smart guy and a good security engineer and cryptographer, and he thinks Apple's solution is probably pretty good from a security point of view. But it's something I, for one, do not need and do not want.

Yes, the issue is aggravated by AirTags because they're readily available, easy for non-technical attackers to use, and make use of Apple's device network. There may be no qualitative difference between an AirTag and many other types of trackers for this (ab)use case, but there are quantitative ones.

That said, I don't really see how those might be actionable under US law. IANAL, but it really seems like this is a revenge effect that it would be difficult to hold Apple liable for. It's not designed primarily for illegal use, and it doesn't seem to directly violate consumer-protection and similar laws.

I quite dislike this sort of device myself, and I have tremendous sympathy for anyone who's harassed or attacked in any way with the assistance of one. But I can't see an effective legal argument against them.

Re: Just a small point

Statistically, in the US Federal courts, criminal bench trials have better outcomes for defendants than jury trials do.

I'm not a huge fan of go, but I don't see it as responsible here. It correctly detected an index-out-of-range and raised an exception. That's a good feature.

The problem is the developer, who didn't catch the exception and handle it properly (i.e. by aborting the operation and returning to a known state).

Re: in a state of general functional failure

I suspect the problem is they relied on web services provided by FTX or FTX.US, most or all of which are apparently now broken. Molly White reported that NFTs issued using the FTX.US platform were broken by the update the FTX.US's website that posted the bankruptcy notice.

(I'd make a web3 joke, but my guess is these were all regular old web 2.0 RESTful or RESTish JSON services.)

Re: B S Johnson.

Musk with a direct brain-to-Twitter interface. It doesn't bear thinking about.

Re: Doing Agile

"Move fast and break people."

Re: Not if you want a decent quality product that works properly.

Yes, it is. Plenty of organizations do it. My teams do it.

I'll note that "move fast and break things" is not an Agile tenet, and has no place in good Agile development.

It wasn't pointless. It was a great example of why people should use OS/2 instead.

(Yes, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc were also available. Circa 2000 I was using a Thinkpad with multiple boot drives sitting in my computer bag, so I could shut down, swap drives, and use OS/2 or Linux or NT [hadn't updated to 2K at that point] as need arose. But Linux and the BSDs weren't easy for non-technical folks at the time.)

I watched a couple Strongbad emails just the other day. They're on YouTube. (Obviously without the interaction, but they've done a pretty good job of integrating the easter eggs into the videos.)

I think you owe children an apology.

Re: "For a quantum computer to be impactful"

what seems to be a very sophisticated form of analog computing

All physical computers are "very sophisticated form[s] of analog computing" when you get down to the metal. That aside, your description really does not apply to general QC. (It does to things like D-Wave's adiabatic machines, but those aren't general QC and are irrelevant here, and arguably everywhere else.)

If you look at algorithms in BQP, you'll see they are quite definitely discrete. They can be implemented just fine on conventional digital computers; they just don't have any quantum advantage there.

We already have working candidates for quantum advantage, so it's quite possible we will eventually have working general-QC systems which can solve a relatively small set of problems someone actually cares about, but which are intractable for conventional computers. Though what we're closest to right now, from the papers I've read, are solving problems mostly of interest to people trying to build QC systems. Still, things like (small but still intractable) particle-physics simulations aren't out of the question within a reasonable timeline.

That said, I am dubious about the economics of general QC for anything other than some fairly narrow primary-research projects. At this point, from what I've read, I don't have a lot of hope for commercially-viable systems for the sorts of business problems which could benefit from quantum advantage. By and large conventional asymmetric cryptography has little to worry about, for example; it just won't be practical to use Shor's algorithm to break RSA or ECC keys in bulk. (Specific high-value targets might eventually be vulnerable, and there's good reason to research and standardize on post-quantum cryptography anyway. Plus that's nearly a fait accompli at this point, and we've learned a lot of interesting things about codes and lattice problems and the like along the way.)

Re: English Translation

We know a great deal about what GQC is, and we know a number of things it could be good for, if the scaling and error-correction problems can be solved in an economical manner. It could be quite useful for certain types of physical simulations, for example.

People whinge when the Reg prints stories about QC enthusiasts making ridiculous claims, but they carry on just as much when it prints an interview with someone who has sensible things to say on the subject.

Re: Perfection

Uh, yeah, I think we all caught that. But there was a lot of rather odd and inexplicable waffling around the embedded Adams references. It's really not obvious what OP was trying to say.

Re: Perfection

The perfect quantum computer has all the answers.

Uh, no, no it does not. What in the world are you on about?

Any sufficiently powerful formal system can express undecidable propositions. In fact, the vast majority of the propositions it can express are undecidable, per Chaitin's proof of irreducible truths.

In the physical realm, there are questions which run into essential physical limits, such as Heisenberg uncertainty.

No quantum computer of any sort, regardless of "perfection" (whatever that might mean in this context), contains the answers to such questions.

Re: Worst code I ever saw...

Agreed. I presented on this very subject at Computers & Writing (or maybe the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing conference) some years back. Code has multiple audiences.