* Posts by Ben Bonsall

357 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Jun 2008

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Scientists claim >99 percent identification rate of ChatGPT content

Ben Bonsall

Re: Don't get cocky kids

Well, my research was about 25 years ago, so i would have thought they had come up with some better tools in the mean time :)

Ben Bonsall

Cool, i was wondering if this would be possible for detecting AI generated text.

My university research was on automated detection of plagiarism, using a fairly simple Bayesian classifier to pick out stylistic features of authors and then check a new text supposedly from that author. People really do have detectable stylistic features in how they write, this is often how the papers like 'Computers say Shakespeare probably didn't write King Lear' come about. I trained my classifier on novels from a particular author, then picked a chunk from another novel not used in the training, and inserted paragraphs from a completely different author. it could pick out the inserted passages pretty well.

What i was surprised by was it was also pretty accurate when it hadn't seen the authors work before, if you trained it on the single text and asked it for the outliers, it could find them.

So, based on that, i was wondering if chatGPT actually had a discernable style. If the classifier couldn't find anything useful to build the model with, then you might think it wouldn't work, but it always managed to find something when trained on human text. You could also see the model it was using and what features it had picked for that author, so if it found nothing, it might not be a human.

It would be interesting to see what it did on ai generated text where a human had edited it... One of the main ways to cheat in uni was apparently taking something from the internet, writing a new introduction and conclusion and slightly editing the text. This is pretty easy for the classifier to pick out, but also... lecturers said it stuck out like a sore thumb anyway :D (particularly on non native english speakers attempts to cheat.)

20 years on, physicists are still figuring out anomaly in proton experiment

Ben Bonsall

Re: It's a facinating field

We're all made of protons and every physical thing in our world is too ... OK, I'm off to have a beer full of protons, I guess they must taste great!

So, you must be a fan of lambics... The sour tastebuds basically just respond to the H+ ions floating about in acidic substances, and H+ is just a proton. :)

Amazon has repackaged surveillance capitalism as reality TV

Ben Bonsall

Re: ...very soon we may be continuously performing for some power that we cannot see...

Excellent. Have an interositor to modulate the transperambulation of the pseudo-cosmic anti matter in the other pocket.

Thinnet cables are no match for director's morning workout

Ben Bonsall

Re: Full names please.......

Once went to a club with a mate in sunny Bognor Regis.

We were stopped on the door by a bouncer who looked at us, and said 'Sorry lads, if yer name ain't daaaan, you ain't comin' in'

My mate said 'My name *is* Dan'... and we got in.

Cryptocurrency-mining AWS Lambda-specific malware spotted

Ben Bonsall

Re: "Lambda is secure by default"

Absolutely foolproof.

Until some fool trips over a rock and knocks over the camouflaged brick wall...

When forgetting to set a password for root is the least of your woes

Ben Bonsall

Standard practice with an unlocked pc at our place is to send an email to the whole company mailing list inviting everyone for champagne...

Chocolate beer barred from sale after child mistakes it for chocolate milk

Ben Bonsall

Re: Beer Definition

Technically a Geuze is a young lambic beer mixed with an old one, eg. one batch that has been fermenting for a year with another that's been fermenting for 3 years.

An unadultarated lambic is a wild fermented beer from the Zenne valley near Brussels. Apparently the yeast that makes it a lambic only lives there. And it has to be wild brewed, you can;t export the yeast from the valley and make it somewhere else or it's not lambic.

There is also Faro, which is a lambic with added sugar, but it used to be a way of serving lambics, where you poured it slowly over a sugar cube on a spoon to sweeten it to taste. It's lovely on a hot day.

FYI: Today's computer chips are so advanced, they are more 'mercurial' than precise – and here's the proof

Ben Bonsall

Re: Error detection

As in minority report...

Not so fast, SpaceX: $3bn NASA Moon landing contract blocked by rivals' gripes

Ben Bonsall

Re: 2121

You forget Scotland, and the Independent Republic of Yorkshire. Their joint reasearch into low gravity batter products directly led to the creation of foamed metal structural beams and extremely low friction materials for pudding tins.

George Clooney of IT: Dribbling disaster and damp disk warnings scare the life out of innocent user

Ben Bonsall

Re: Am I Old?

I used to use the slow down button for the hard bits in Price of Persia :D

NSA: We've learned our lesson after foreign spies used one of our crypto backdoors – but we can't say how exactly

Ben Bonsall

Re: How do you avoid US spy gear, it is everywhere.

So that's why i keep being recommended hamster videos. I'd cleaned every hint of Richard Gere from my search history, could not get it to stop.

Getting a pizza the action, AS/400 style

Ben Bonsall

Re: Savagery?

charcoal fired and ~450C on the stone, not sure about the air temperature to be honest as the air thermometer doesn't go high enough, but the stone is measured with one of those laser things.

Takes maybe 90 seconds- 2 minutes, the dryer mozzarella is melted and nicely browned in that time, and pulls extremely well, but the wet stuff is gooey and browning round the corners but certainly not stringy.

We normally make 5-6 20cm pizzas in a row as the last one is cooked by the time the first one is finished...

Also, cooks bacon from raw to crispy in 90 seconds.

Ben Bonsall

Re: Savagery?

You aren't supposed to use the wet mozzarella on pizza, it should be the grated dryer stuff. The wet stuff takes too long to melt compared to the cooking time of the rest of the ingredients...

The wet stuff is for eating raw. Preferably with a sprinking of fresh basil. But straight out of the packet is fine.

(could be a lie, I was told it by a Neapolitan though, so you never know.)

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Black hole quasar tsunamis moving at 46 million miles per hour

Ben Bonsall

Re: Uh-oh.

A terrible attempt to spell Rama.

Broken lab equipment led boffins to solve a 58-year-old physics problem by mistake

Ben Bonsall

Re: What's the difference?

indeed, but when you go past the end they tend towards 1 sized again but in a different dimension. Egg shaped is actually a kind of infinite hyperbolic surface where the front and back sides of the surface are not connected to each other, and only close to the origin is the back side actually behind the front side.

Microservices guru warns devs that trendy architecture shouldn't be the default for every app, but 'a last resort'

Ben Bonsall

Re: Quality hip-techy speak

It's a measure of how quickly they can release bugs into production.

Spacecraft that told us 'you're screwed' finally gives up the ghost after doubling its shelf life

Ben Bonsall

Re: I can think of one.

I did :) I read the documentation from NASA and MIT about mechanical counterpressure suits, which work pretty much as described, the pressure on the body is provided by foam that wants to expand but can't due to a non-stretchy layer over it, this provides enough inward pressure on the body to allow humans to breath air at a much lower pressure than normal atmospheric pressure, and also not explode. It also contains a bladder inside the suit to provide back pressure on the breathing gear to stop all the gas escaping in one go.

I suggest you provide a recommendation for a useful alternative to the breathing apparatus to enable such an unpressurized suit to work instead of saying 'that won't work', because that's how science works.

Ben Bonsall

Re: I can think of one.

10 meters depth is double atmospheric pressure, 20 meters treble, etc. 40 meters for a deep dive is 5 bar, which is pretty high pressure. (for me anyway, it's enough to drive some pretty serious air tools. it's not high pressure like in the tank though) So, as mentioned, the breathing gear would be scuba gear that delivered lower than atmospheric pressure. The pressure in a pressurized space suit is about 1/3 atmospheric pressure, and they do breath pure oxygen at this pressure.

I'm wondering if you could have an elastic suit that compressed your chest cavity to 1/3 atmospheric pressure to provide the ambient pressure, probably that can be tightened and loosened in the airlock so it's possible to breath once the air pressure raises again.

Ben Bonsall

Re: I can think of one.

Ususally scuba gear has to be quite high pressure to balance the much higher water pressure outside your body, so you'd need much lower pressure scuba gear, enough to balance whatever inward pressure could be generated by the elastic suit mentioned below but not enough to inflate the astronaut?

Ben Bonsall

Re: Boiling point / pressure

Sublimation of the gel would only occur if the material is directly exposed to a vacuum though, so some kind of insulated sealed elastic outer suit will be required then, to prevent heat loss to space, evaporation and maintain some pressure on the gel inside by squeezing against the astronaut? Something like a cross between a wet suit and a dry suit. Maybe an air tight inner elastic layer like neoprene, then the gel, then an air tight outer layer squeezing the gel. Quilted in such a way to prevent the gel from moving about to much, no point squeezing it all into the gloves every time you move.

Basically, if you put one of those air free foil pouches of cat food into a vacuum chamber, how long would it take for the cat food inside to freeze dry?

Ben Bonsall

Fill the new spacesuits with gel, then they don't need to be pressurized, which makes them much easier to move in :)

But much more messy to get out of. Showers being a bit of a luxury, if you make the gel from that powder that turns into a gel when wet, then turns back into a powder when dried, you should be able to get clean with a hair dryer and a vacuum cleaner.

Apparently it keeps quite cool too. And the volume of water involved might make a pretty useful radiation shield too, but would probably be quite heavy.

There's probably a million reasons why this won't work in reality, but it's fun to speculate :)

Careful now, UK court ruling says email signature blocks can sign binding contracts

Ben Bonsall

Re: Buy a boat

Dunno, you could own a boat on a canal, the you only really need to know how to wade. Although swimming is preferable as you really don't want to touch the bottom.

DeepNude deep-nuked: AI photo app stripped clothes from women to render them naked. Now, it's stripped from web

Ben Bonsall

Re: Time passes...

Now there's a variant of rock-paper-scissors Id like to play

Only one Huawei? We pitted the P30 Pro against Samsung and Apple's best – and this is what we found

Ben Bonsall

100% agree :) I have an old FinePix S200EXR which lives in my bag, It's not to heavy for carting about everywhere (800 grams) but its zoom and low light performance are amazing, for something that cost me 100 euros 5 years or so ago. I'm not saying everyone should carry around a big camera, but if you want to take good pictures in all conditions, then take a camera because your phone will just disappoint. If you don't, then take a phone, it'll do what you want.

Brekkie TV host Lorraine Kelly wins IR35 ruling against HMRC, adds fuel to freelance techies' ire over tax reforms

Ben Bonsall

Re: If so...

Exam Markers - Tic Tax?

Just do IoT? We'd walk a mile in someone else's Nike smart sneakers, but they seem to be 'bricked'

Ben Bonsall

Surely this should be in Bootnotes?

Object-recognition AI – the dumb program's idea of a smart program: How neural nets are really just looking at textures

Ben Bonsall

Train multiple CNNs on different things. One on texture, one on sihloetes, one on shape, one on edges. Train them all with a dataset that has multiple views on the same object, so a cat from the front and a cat from the back and from the side and above looking down when the cat is looking up etc.

Same image processed multiple ways each time.

Then train another one to use the output of the others to weight the responses. This supervisor is trained by giving it the set of processed images as one example, and the rotations and viewpoints as sets that are related, so it's tagged as this set and these sets are all the same thing, not these images are all of related things. If one quickly comes up banana and two come up toaster then it's more likely to be a toaster. you could even feedback from the supervisor to say try again, no one else thinks it's a banana and see what I says then.

'Incommunicado' Assange anoints new WikiLeaks editor in chief

Ben Bonsall

Re: How to leave an embassy

[1] bitten, too.

A Møøse once bit my sister... No realli!

All that dust on Mars is coming from one weird giant alien structure

Ben Bonsall

As long as they upgrade the Ball to a Sphere.

What if tech moguls brewed real ale?

Ben Bonsall

Re: Hipsters Nipple

Total Inability To Support Upended Pint.

Ben Bonsall

GreyBeerd

Produces a deep state of depression at the faddishness of javascript frameworks.

Ben Bonsall

ArgumentNotFound 0.2%

Self explanatory.

3 ó (that should be an Atari st bomb symbol but close enough) 14%

Thick, golden and heavy, you'll find the reason for the name of this barley wine when you get into the taxi at the end of the night.

Science! Luminescent nanocrystals could lead to multi-PB optical discs

Ben Bonsall

"But then the disc's rotation speed has to be super-constant and the read:write head movement super-precise so that the positioning, depth and timing of head laser firing can match the nanocrystal sizing and layering."

Why spin the disc? Have a flat square that the head can move across, or better, have the head mounted so the read/write point is scanned by adjusting the optics, rather then move the disc or the head. Or am I missing something?

What a flap: SIM swiped from slain stork's GPS tracker used to rack up $2,700 phone bill

Ben Bonsall

Re: So for 20 hours . . .

Do you have the one about Nelson, or Doctor Y and the Thing?

I have only really terrible recordings ogf those...

Ben Bonsall

Re: So for 20 hours . . .

If you remember that gag from I'm sorry i'll read that again then you're probably older :)

Microsoft will ‘lose developers for a generation’ if it stuffs up GitHub, says future CEO

Ben Bonsall

Re: Coming soon to github

"I see you are using git merge, would you like me to smash it all together and hope for the best?"

Crappy IoT on the high seas: Holes punched in hull of maritime security

Ben Bonsall

Re: @Christoph

CRC is for checking that noise hasn't changed the signal, it's not intended as security.

Like double entry bookkeeping, it is intended to prevent errors, not someone adding a fraudulent transaction...

International Maritime Organisation turns salty gaze on regulating robotic shipping

Ben Bonsall

Re: Tortuga bound

"Just box it in at the bow with 2 reasonably sized vessels and it'll have to slow down or stop for safety reasons"

A big containership or bulk carrier can take an hour or so to slow down*... don't park too close in front.

An hours warning for the ship's owners to know that something is deliberately slowing the ship. Given that pirates will probably be closish to shore, that's probably enough time to scramble a couple of planes loaded with parachute and gun toting security personnel.

*I learned this from Ship Simulator, may not be accurate :)

Shining lasers at planes in the UK could now get you up to 5 years in jail

Ben Bonsall

The thing about lasers is they go straight, well, refraction diffraction etc aside.

This makes it quite easy to trace them back to the origin, indeed, that's the basis of laser guided missiles after all... So location and punishment in one device is certainly possible.

The steaks have never been higher: Swiss Lidl is selling local cannabis

Ben Bonsall

Hopefully all phones are phosgene free, it's a registered chemical weapon...

Can't log into your TSB account? Well, it's your own fault for trying

Ben Bonsall

Re: Surprisingly, perhaps, I can't ever recall a piece of software that was a waste of time.

I still have the CD for that, I once spent a few days trying to convert it to run on win 95. That was a waste of time too.

I couldn't give a Greek clock about your IoT fertility tracker

Ben Bonsall

Surely gloating is an irish lightbulb?

What is your favourite cider?

Ben Bonsall

Do you need a license for applejack in the US? In northern europe, it's normally made using an eisbock method instead of distilling, so no license is needed...

Amateur astronomer strikes it lucky with first glimpse of a Supernova

Ben Bonsall

Re: Nova GSi?

Depends on whether you're a whelk or not.

IT peeps, be warned: You'll soon be a museum exhibit

Ben Bonsall

Re: What job will last forever

Accountants were automated out of a job years ago, but they are really good a lobbying the government to keep the tax and accounting rules changing often enough to ensure that the people who write the automation are always several steps behind and so need a trained lobbist to make sure it's doing it's job...

Ben Bonsall

Re: Rotary dials

The contact list is stored in a little black box next to the phone that looks a lot like an iphone with a simulation of a card index running on it..

Japan's Robo-Bartenders point to a golden future

Ben Bonsall

Duvel glasses are designed so you get about 5-6 cm of head. The tradition was that you had to finish the beer before the head was gone. Before they added a head keeper to the glass, this was about 15 minutes. Now it's about 40 which is much easier for an 8.5% beer.

Astro-boffinry world rocked to its very core: Shock as Andromeda found to be not much bigger than Milky Way

Ben Bonsall

No, we will, don't worry.

It took us less than 30 seconds to find banned 'deepfake' AI smut on the internet

Ben Bonsall

Re: He didn't do it

not true, if done in public it may be a crime if anyone finds it offensive. almost certainly if done near a school

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