Tea-soaked keyboard issue here as well
Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson
4257 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2007
Page:
BOFH: Good news, everyone – we're in the sausage business
Scientists claim >99 percent identification rate of ChatGPT content
Thursday 8th June 2023 11:52 GMT 
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
BOFH: Get me a new data file or your manager finds out exactly what you think of him
Friday 26th May 2023 11:36 GMT 
Nice plot twist at the end
the way Simon plays the sympathy card, let's the poor guy blab, and then sticks the knife in and gives it a good twist.
And when he gets the new version, without license requirements, I wonder if Simon will get a regular invoice sent to the beancounters (for annual license upgrades) payable to the BOFH Beer Fund (through a Cayman Island bank account)?
Owner of 'magic spreadsheet' tried to stay in the Lotus position until forced to Excel
BOFH: Ah. Company-branded merch. So much better than a bonus
Pixies keep switching off my morning alarm, says Google Pixel owner
Monday 8th May 2023 07:38 GMT
Re: If your life seems like Groundhog Day
I use "Good Morning" by Blackfoot, and "Chop Suey" from System of a Down, in particular when staying at hotels. The missus tended to object. Can't think why
BOFH takes a visit to retro computing land
Friday 28th April 2023 12:35 GMT
Tractor beam on!
Fancy an Adaptec 2940UW SCSI control, Viking Quantum-II hard disk, and an iOmega ZIPdrive with SCSI port? I also have an Adaptec 1542 somewhere.
I also just found an original 8" floppy disk (128 kB storage) of Digital Research CP/M 2.0 in my Pit of Despair. Please enter bids now
BOFH: We send a user to visit Kelvin – Keeper of the Batteries
BOFH: The Board members are looking very ill these days
Microsoft and GM deal means your next car might talk, lie, gaslight and manipulate you
Friday 17th March 2023 15:25 GMT
Re: Clippy
It could also do a Marvin the Paranoid Android variation:
"I think you ought to know I am feeling very depressed."
or
"I have a terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side"
once ChatGPT get the GPP feature
This could also make your car doors generate an intolerable air of smugness just before opening (or closing in the happy knowledge of a job well done)
I'll get me coat
(Doffs hat to the late, great Douglass Adams)
BOFH: I care a lot ... about onion bhajis
BOFH: The PFY has won an award … for outstanding service?
BOFH: Generating a report the Director can show the Board – THIS is what AI was made for
Microsoft tells people to prepare for AI search engine that goes Bing!
BOFH and the case of the Zoom call that never was
Microsoft Defender ASR rules strip icons, app shortcuts from Taskbar, Start Menu
BOFH: It's 4ft tall, heavyset, has optional fax. No they didn't take the toner!
BOFH and the office security access upgrade
ChatGPT has mastered the confidence trick, and that's a terrible look for AI
Fresh version of Xfce, the oldest Linux desktop of them all, revealed in Xubuntu builds
BOFH: Come back to the office. Your hotdesk is nice and warm
All of the norths are about to align over Britain
Oh, great. By peering into twilight, boffins find 'planet killer' asteroids in our system
BOFH: The Boss has a new watch – move readiness to DEFCON 2
Fixing an upside-down USB plug: A case of supporting the insupportable
Rust is eating into our systems, and it's a good thing
Tuesday 27th September 2022 06:32 GMT
Re: I'm getting rusty
I am a long-time C/C++ user in my research (and have used Pascal, FORTRAN, and assembler in the past). Rust does have a real appeal. I am considering rewriting some parallel and distributed algorithms for processing HUGE images and volume data (biggest one 162 giga-voxel, 32 bit floating point from the LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR) radio telescope). Better still, I could get one of my students to do that. Very curious how that will pan out
BOFH: You want presentation layer, but we're physical layer
China discovers unknown mineral on the moon, names it Changesite-(Y)
Tuesday 13th September 2022 08:15 GMT
Re: Curly -- or Straight?
Nothing wrong with antipasta if used in properly controlled conditions, as shown by the Cannelloni On Macaroni Experiment 2 Pasta-AntiPasta Annihilator (COME-2-PAPA), where they have been using antipasta safely for years (unlike the rather reckless people at the Fast Food Fight Facility (FFFF), where collisions frequently cause leaks of sauce into the environment)
Using the datacenter as a dining room destroyed the platters that matter
BOFH: It's Friday, it's time to RTFM
BOFH and the case of the disappearing teaspoons
Compound that 'remembers' phase transitions could have uses in computer memory
Friday 26th August 2022 10:01 GMT
Re: This is the kind of science I love!
I love Annals of Improbable Research. I have three papers published there: "A Quantum Mechanical Interpretation of Homeopathy" (homeopathy can only work if you don't look), "Zero-Tolerance Math: a Defense of No-Math" (only the number zero should ever be used at school) and "Cogno-Intellectualism, Retorical Logic, and the Craske-Trump Theorem" (introducing the logical equivalent of Skinner's constant).
It is great fun writing these things, and even greater fun when someone misses the joke and cites your work as if it was serious.
Friday 26th August 2022 09:52 GMT
Re: This is the kind of science I love!
The real danger of faffing around with cheese in the laboratory is that one might end up with something like Horace, the Lancre Blue, which you wouldn't like when it is angry
Doffs hat to the late, great Terry Pratchett
US plans to open up government-funded science research papers to all
NASA's Space Launch System rocket is on track for August 29 liftoff
Wednesday 24th August 2022 14:29 GMT
Easy:
322 feet = 4.4654 Brontosaurus
5,750,000 lbs = 1738.8487 skateboarding rhinoceri = 299805.6331 adult badgers
8,800,000 pounds force = 391441.6618 Norris
as the Register Unit Converter will tell you
Biting the hand that feeds IT
