Wow, I'm deeply impressed by their ingeniuty! Why didn't we think of that?!
Maybe because it's fscking stupid?
2624 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jan 2009
If my seat is comfortable...
Then I'm in business class or whatever offers a flat bed on long-haul flights. Unfortunately, I'm one of the lesser people and therefore usually jam myself in economy. And hate being in this uncomfortable seat, unsuccessfully trying to sleep and getting grumpier by the minute.
The first issue, is that this AI is a state machine, it's not continuously running. Our consciousness is running all the time, we've got an internal monologue pretty much all the time.
I get it. And I'm not upset if someone said that I'm not a sentient being. But when I encounter a former boss of mine - he looked like a human being but didn't pass the Turing test either - my brain goes into full suspense mode, just like if you stopped the clock in a computer (luckily my memory isn't that volatile and can do without a refresh for a little while).
Call me a cynical sceptic, but Lemoine would also believe in Santa if that white-bearded, overweight, red-dressed guy in the mall told that he was indeed the real Santa?
The "interview", however, is indeed impressive. But it rather feels like cobbling together definitions of some sort in an eloquent manner. Much like an average teenager trying to appear having vast life experience. In other words: I'm still not worried at all about sentient machines.
...there's lots of reasons vinyl can sound different to CDs.
And it's not just the data carrier, you also have different signal paths with their own limitations. I well recall my frustration in the 90s over the sound difference between what came directly out of the sampler to the amp vs. digitally recorded and then played back from CD through the same amp. Much of the rich, low bass sound was lost when played from CD while everything above was still well reproduced. I don't know where the high-pass filter was inadvertently applied - neither the ADC and the CD players should have been the limiting factor. But the sound certainly was much different.
Some place in the USA, doctor to pregnant patient: «I'm afraid, abortion is no longer allowed here. But if you like, we can shoot dead your baby straight after its birth. So you don't have to wait till it goes to school.»
I did consider to add a "joke alert". But, very unfortunately, this isn't a joke.
Only ever knew one - at the time he had moved on to be Head of IT. And who famously said: "the mainframe stays as long as I am here."
More infamously, he was very reluctant to have any changes done to "his" mainframe programs and hence largely dictated what business could or could not do - without understanding much of it. For example, after years of refusing to implement a certain business request ("it cannot be done"), business decided to acquire a system to fulfil said request. And suddenly, our Mainframe God quoted a two-weeks effort to implement this change request. Two weeks passed, and a bit more, and the mainframe did something which was not exactly what business asked but enough to deter them from acquiring another system for the time being.
Luckily, unlike "real" gods, i.e. imaginary friends or foes, Mainframe Gods are indeed mortal. And for the record, no, I did not help with verifying his mortality. Actually, even before his departure, a project to replace those legacy mainframe programs was started (might have helped with that, though).
I fully agree with you.
Just adding one thing: Putin may or may not be fucking stupid (insane though is beyond doubt imho), and he may or may not feel threatened by a NATO's expansion towards east, and he may or may not grasp that his policies are the main driver for this.
But I believe he is scared shirtless of a rather well-functioning democracy next door of people closely interlinked with Russia. He is scared of Russians getting ideas of changing their government, of kicking out this criminal network that is ruling their country.
"We expect to see probably beyond just Ukraine, disinformation to target Western audiences..."
Expect as in: I expect to see a crashed car. After crashing a car. I'm "slightly astonished" by the load of people around here -mainland western Europe- who happily and closely follow Putin's narrative.
...and if they don't, just don't create the tech...
Yeah, like this has ever worked.
I for one would like to get a fake face for myself which looks pretty much like me. Specifically for use during early morning video calls. I believe it would be beneficial for all participants: me not needing to pretend that I'm awake and the others not needing to pretend that they don't notice me pretending to be awake.
you always need to double and triple-check the window you're issuing commands to
Indeed, you must. And even so I still managed once to fuck up. Somehow, it might have been a lazy Friday afternoon, I still mistook the machine's name after checking twice or trice. After the supposedly shut down machine kept responding ("huh, how did the command not get through?!"), a pair of sweaty palms and a restart everything was back to normal withouth anyone else noticing. But it taught me that I cannot be trusted with such machinery.
...only search Stackexchange for code snippets, then blindly copy and paste them and randomly beat on them till there aren't any syntax errors (and/or post replies to said same Stackexchange threads begging people to do their work for them)...
Wait, there's still another coding method alive than what you just described?! Me being a miserable old sod - not that old but old enough to be miserable - I have the impression that nearly every proper coding practice ceased to exist about 15 years ago.
"Oh, and secure your root access – and never, ever, leave superuser accounts logged in."
Or as it had happened: a trader called it a day while, apparently, a trade was already filled in. And later on when cleaning staff came in, dusting everything and the keyboard, an accidental trade in the order of € billions was executed.
That, at least, was the official explanation. I wasn't involved in its investigation at all but believe it was neither accidental nor cleaning staff...
@AC, shut the fsck up! You're ruining my career with such gross defamationtruth!
On a less serious note, a lot of the auditor's job is expectation management: a client expects that we thouroughly "x-ray" their whole IT infrastructure, down to the last bit. What we actually do is, drinking tea, lots of it, and if we do actual auditing, focus striktly on financially relevant systems and controls. Which is, more often than not, rather disappointing for both the auditee and the auditor. And within this very limited realm, the auditor's question you pointed out might be perfectly valid and sufficient.
Btw, any chance that we've met in the past?
Obviously, I have no experience whatsoever with accounting systems, ERP systems or usability. That, at least, is my personal explanation why I'm totally incapable of getting my head around the UX/UI paradigm of SAP and struggle to get anything done with it.
And if, in one of those rare occasions, I do manage SAP to do what I actually intended, it only compares to the feeling of deep relieve that I once had when exiting the underground train maze of Myst. Except that Myst was more satisfying. Much more.
...and about 29,000 years from now, someone will have discovered an ancient calculation machine and will have figured out how it worked. And they will see that its clock stops in the year 31,086. And some of them will start a cult that believes the end is near for an ancient civilisation allowed their calender to run until then...
Yep, shallow learning curve.
Me troubleshooting an ol' terminal. It didn't seem necessary to unplug the beast before opening its case. After all, I switched its power switch off. All went fine until I started opening the inner case of the power supply. And my muscles' sudden contractions sent me flying back into the nearby wall. The dizziness lasted for another 10 to 15 minutes.
As fun as that was, a little while later my boss tasked me with troubleshooting a malfunctioning printer. It didn't seem necessary to unplug..... No flying backwards and the dizziness lasted for a mere few seconds.
Learnt: 230 V AC tolerance developed, I guess?
Can't upvote this enough. We (i.e. in one of the former lives) had several of those why you still can't, not all of which were found in rehearsals. One case of actual emergency was when AD was unresponsive for reasons I cannot recall. To recover, admin access was required. And admin access was requested and granted via a web application, which required AD authentication...
And another one, luckily found during paper rehearsal, was that the management console for emergency power (several marine diesel engines and a couple of gas turbines) was not connected to UPS batteries. If the mains failed, it might have been possible to start the diesel, if, in the heatdark of battle, someone thought of powering the console with an extension cord from a UPS wall socket...
My unfortunate experience with military grade batteries was slightly different: between one and two out of ten actually worked. And no, those were not rechargeable batteries either. Luckily, we had "borrowed" serveral packs, amounting to something between 100 and 150 batteries, for our private (private as in personal, non-military) excursion into the dark. And be brought all of them back, in pretty much the same state, i.e. kaput, as when we took them. No harm done.