Posts by Charlie Clark

Re: Predictions are useful

To be picky, they're forecasts about what might happen rather than predictions about what will. But, of course, as with most things statistical most (sic) of us can't reliably tell the difference.

Anyway, nice to see Watson getting some good press. As one of the pioneering ML systems it's taken some bashing but there has always been some very good technology in there and, just as important, some great people working on it.

Re: Wifi sniffing

If you let it spread, it has a large surface over which to mutate, and it will be like the Flu

Fortunately, thus far, it doesn't seem to mutate as fast and as effectively as the flu. Otherwise pursuing vaccines would offer the same limited efficacy as flu vaccines. BTW flu in the UK is now killing more people than COVID-19.

Contact tracing is no substitute for mask wearing.

And mask wearing, especially outdoors, is itself of limited efficacy. Masks can be very useful in some situations but they are themselves no panacea.

Re: Wifi sniffing

If you know anything about how hospitals are paid in some countries, you'd know that it's certainly possible, because many hospitals are run as for-profit businesses.

I know that in some countries such as Germany and the Netherlands the opposite certainly is the case: hospitals in the spring postponed operations and check-ups to provide the extra capacity for COVID that was, fortunately, not required. They weren't paid for those ops and weren't paid for providing capacity.

I don't have much faith in either.

Re: Future of this

Why should we rethink our attitude towards anonymity? Apart from the fact that it's effectively compromised any time we take our digital devices with us, we need to defend it because what can be exploited, will be exploited.

Re: Extortionate pricing

Fancy a race then?

Re: Before shouting at Amazon...

True, but companies have a duty first and foremost to their shareholders. They are also fantastic lobbyists: they got capital gains tax reduced so that share options would be more favourable than cash bonuses when executive remuneration was unpopular. Now no one seems to bat an eyelid when someone gets multimillions in stock options on top of their salary every year.

Who says he won't think of doing so in a couple of years? Though as Michael Bloomberg demonstrated, sometimes it takes more than just money.

Re: If you do not like this ...

Here in Germany they decided it was cheaper to "appify" delivery using their own slaves – German parcel services are already very cheap and known for overworking their employees – and so go one "better".

Bezos is a numbers man and for him it will be about volumes or additional services: I notice that some deliveries are early evening when more people can be expected to be at home and when normal delivery services have stopped. It's embarassing at times to see how many delivery vans are on the same street at the same time – I think the most I saw was four DHL / Deutsche Post And the street is only 200m long!

Re: If you do not like this ...

And I won't take deliveries of packets from them for others in the house: their only delivery service uses casual labour only.

Re: Dystopian Nightmares Inc.

Lots of people don't think they have a choice. But I'm sure you'll also find people who think it's great: young and healthy people might see the possibilities for promotion that I'm sure are covered in any interviews.

Re: Trump & Bezos

It's the Highlander principle – there can only be one. But there are other differences: Bezos was a educated Wall Stree kid while Trump is just a dumb builder who had the advantage of being rich enough to be able to stiff his suppliers by declaring bankruptcy without losing contracts. I suspect, that apart from comparing bank balances, they wouldn't have much to say to each other.

But Trump's main beef is that Bezos saved The Washington Post, which continues to write critical articles about him.

Re: I would hate to own commercial real estate

In many cities high commercial rents have driven a property boom which has in turn made residential property expensive. Lack of supply means many people are living where they can afford to rather than where they want to.

If there is less demand for commercial property, the mixed use can become more practicable.

Re: Not a bad idea

Possibly, but the fines for such breaches could be pretty steep.

As I said, I'm not personally a fan but I can see the logic behind the service both for hotels and guests. I know a lot of people who love their embedded spy devices and can't understand why I don't: the novelty of getting them to play fart noises wears off pretty quickly and apparently The Fall isn't in their music library.

Re: Stasi

There's a big difference between trying to monetise a "free" service through advertising and one that companies, here presumably the hotels, pay for. B2B is certainly where Google thinks it can sell its "AS as a service" and the contractual arrangements will be different to the standard EULAs that US companies tend to foist on people.

But the risk isn't whether Google decides to use the information it collects for nefarious purposes, but what can happen to that information if nefarious people get hold of it. There's no doubt that Google can probably set things up so that relevant information isn't kept "for training purposes" on their servers. But this then begs the question: where will the information be stored? There's no doubt that several companies would just love to be able to integrate such data with their loyalty schemes!

Re: "plain old ASCII text is a barrier to communications"

Virtually all VCS systems are based around the way stuff is handled by e-mail clients and they do this for a reason.

Moaning about having to switch e-mail clients to one that does text/plain properly suggests that the barrier is in the person themselves. E-mail clients that do not handle text/plain properly should be considered broken.

Re: Low carbon wood-chip anyone...

There's an argument for burning wood from sustainable sources: it can now be done efficiently and reasonably cleanly and you're essentially recycling the CO2 temporarily stored in trees. But this comes with a lot of caveats as properly sustainable forests, as opposed to grow fast but fuck the ecosystem pine and eucalyptus, tend to grow slowly thus limiting their potential.

Re: F1

I have my doubts about the accuracy and usefulness of the outcome.

I don't: it's not very accurate nor useful, but maybe it's entertaining. There are simply too many variables, especially unknowns, to make this kind of approach any more useful than any other. Indeed, as you say, comparing against teammates is almost bound to lead to overfitting.

Senna was considered by many to be the best driver of his generation but I think that's about as much consensus as there's ever likely to be.

Re: I'm sure they are trying

Bletchley Park was set up on the back of a social media campaign…

However, as I think a lot of people are finding out: social media campaigns don't really pay the day to day bills. Donations have been skewed towards the (chronically underfunded) NHS and carers. Government funding has mainly been for job retention scheme with some scraps thrown to culture sector. With debt already at record levels, unemployment rising and tax revenues set to fall, there isn't going to be enough money around for a lot of things.

Re: Obviously was not tested

Adobe really must have the worst developers in the business

Even if that were true, competition is fierce. But don't blame the developers. Blame the managers and the marketers for pushing stuff out untested.

Re: Class action suit in 3... 2... 1...

Pretty certain that in certain jurisdictions this will be considered as negligence on Adobe's behalf because the data has been lost permanently. Assume there will be a tussle over where any cases can be fought.

I think they screwed that option fairly early on otherwise they'd already have been turfed out.

Re: Digital Me

Strange that because I just asked the Digital You and he was perfectly happy with the idea. One of you must be lying…