Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson

"suspected of fasting"

The fact you would want to find such "suspects" is suspicious. Not unexpected in the case of this particular government (and I bet there are many others who do the same, but less overtly).

Ouch!

Lucky the drill was sufficiently insulating to prevent a truly shocking experience. This is precisely why I like these little cable detection gimmicks, even if the plans of the building are available and show where the wires should be. I have encountered enough short-cuts and assorted wiring horrors (including a yellow/green wire carrying 220 V AC) that I don't trust anything. Measure twice, drill once, one might say.

Of course BOFHs want to do their own thing

with quicklime and old carpets if needed. If heads of IT tell them what to do and said heads will be at the business end of a database normalization warning

OOPS!

Narrow escape there. Reminds me of the time I was showing some students around the Centre for High Performance Computing at the university, and we came across the fridge-sized cabinet housing the Cray J932. Not much to look at, but with an impressively big rectangular green LED showing the machine was up and running, and a (very well recessed) power button below. One student asked what would happen if he pressed that button, whereupon I said that two little semicircular steel claws would come out and clip off his finger, and if that malfunctioned I had a set of pliers to complete the job. He seemed to accept that "explanation."

I just hope

I can collaborate with many good friends and colleagues in the UK as easily as I could before.

Interesting stuff

Apart from the caveats raised by the authors of the study, there is of course the issue of how ChatGPT and its ilk will develop, and we may be locked in a perpetual arms race between educators wanting to test writing skills of students, and increasingly sophisticated tools for students to hide their lack of said skills. A similar arms race may develop between editors of journals and authors on production and assessment of original work. Educators at least have the last resort of the written exam, in controlled conditions, but as editor of a journal it is going to be very hard to detect AI-generated text from original writing of the authors whose name is on the front page of a paper. Style changes would not necessarily mean much in multi-authored papers, as different people may be the main author of different parts.

AI tools are certainly not going to go away. We need to learn to live with them

We live in interesting times