Posts by I ain't Spartacus

Code For Broke,

ChatGPT isn't a search engine. It's a language engine, fed loads of training data that contains information as well as language. Some of that training data was curated, but large chunks of it were scraped from the internet, books and other text sources. That might be encylopeadias, customer service chat logs, history books, novels or even YouTube comments threads... And while the pre-training data was categorised, terrabytes of the later data weren't.

Also, this was apparently done in 2021. Which means bits of it are increasingly going out of date. Science, technology, even history get regularly updated as new information becomes available.

That means that sometimes it will give you summaries of real facts. Sometimes bits from multiple sources. And sometimes it will give you stuff from novels or online discussions. And sometimes it will simply invent stuff. And you don't know which is which.

As a start for research that's terrible. Having a quick look at a Wiki article on a subject you know nothing about, plus a couple of other brief general pieces will give you a starting point. These will give you some dates, some names, and some references. All of which can be followed up to find out more. Then you can start to find the inconsistencies and areas of debate - and this can lead you to know what and where to research.

ChatGPT might also do that. Or it might insert a few made up bits in there. Or just invent the lot. As with the lawyers who asked it to give them case law to support and argument (and save them research time) and it just made the cases up - including the text summaries of what they said. How do you know which is which? At which point you then have to start your research by checking if all or part of the data you started with is garbage. Wheras with Wikipedia you know that controversial stuff may be missed out, or slanted to make a particular argument - but it's less likely that whole events are completely made up. Though that's still possible. This is where finding textbooks can be useful, as they're curated data, and hopefully will discuss the disagreements on a topic and explain why their sides hold those views, so you can see the bear-traps for future research.

ChatGPT is a statistical system designed to group words in a plausible seeming order, so they make sense. This can be used to summarise data sources, which I guess is what rewards good prompt choices - assuming the thing you want summarised is in the dataset. But it doesn't understand what it's summarising and it's designed to make words that often appear together in the dataset, also appear together in the outputs. Even if that means inventing the titles of nobel prize winning entries for economics - including making up the names of the authors.

Re: What could possibly go wrong?

A setup entirely reliant on Beoing build quality, and Boeing's innovative software. These, the people who lied to the FAA about how much pitch authority MCAS required in order to balance out the extra lift their new engine cowlings caused - and then wrote the software so pisspoorly that it actually had infinte pitch authority and would carry on working until it crashed the aircraft. Oh, and also put it on the same circuit breaker as the trim motors, so you couldn't turn the fucker off without losing the trim motors you now desperately needed, because the trim had been run all the way to the stops becuase the software was coded wrong. Would have been illegal, but not that dangerous if they'd coded it as intended.

You want me to trust an autonomous vehicle flying over my city to that company? Hmm. Let me think about that. How about "No"? Perhaps, "Fuck no!"

I think I fancy flying in it even less. Especially if there are thousands of them.

And then when the CEO says they're going to be as cheap as ground taxis - you know the delusional thinking and bullshit is fully operational at this company.

Re: I don't wish to be picky, but...

No! This cannot be allowed! There'll have to be a flight attendant on every multi-passenger flight - to stop any nookie. You don't get a pilot, but you can have a chaperone.

Re: Traffic is easier in the air

They're going to map every aerial cable, around the airports. Sorry, I mean Vertiports. [Spit!] I think they should go with Mark Kermode here (BBC film reviewer), who had a mental block on air and couldn't remember the word airport - so heard himself saying "aeroplane station".

Anyway the revolutionary thing is supposedly going to be price and numbers. And I presume it's very short take-off and landing. But you are going to fly from little city centre airports, if you can get planning permission, to litle private fields and regional airports. So you'll control the height of buildings and infrastructure in the airspace and approaches to the airports, as you normally would. And then the thing will cruise at 2,000ft.

You've got a good point there.

Nice doing business with you Sir. This agreeing with other people on the internet will never catch on though...

While I like my bread to be nice and tasty, there are some things where the square, cheap, sliced white is OK. For example, if you get one of the toastie makers that crimps the edges of the toastie - those square supermarket loaves are the only things that fit properly. And if you don't crimp the edges, all the melted cheese leaks out the sides. Disaster! Plus I like the egg toastie, which positively requires it - put in bread, single raw egg, slap slice on top close maker as quick as you can and hold down to crimp edges before catastrophic egg-leakage. Gets you a mixed fried/poached egg in toast. Yum.

Crap white seems to be OK for a bacon sarnies too. Whereas it seems to make a cheese sandwich much worse.

The problem with sliced white is the lack of any taste. Which leaves your tastebuds free to revel in the glorious deliciousity of all that bacon.

Dry cured back for me. Used to be unsmoked, but I’m buying smoked a bit now, and enjoying it.

VicMortimer,

Whoah! We're going to need a laminated lever-arch file at this rate. Although I approve of many of your suggestions.

HOWEVER

If bacon sandwiches are provided, there must be available non-iceburg lettuce and high quality, flavorful tomatoes.

What is this sick filth?!?!

The holy bacon sandwhich is a very simple thing.

Bread: Quality bread is nice, but not essential here. Cheap sliced white is fine - I prefer a decent quality soft roll myself: Should be lightly buttered.

Bacon: Cheap bacon is useable in emergencies only. So long as it's cooked properly so the rind/fat has gone crispy. Otherwise decent quality - don't nuke it! Bacon isn't supposed to shatter.

Sauce: None. However ketchup and HP sauce should be available - only to stop people moaning.

Lettuce and tomato are for metrosexual health-nutcases who ought to be sent to run twenty laps of the building, and not to come back until the bacon has been finished. Then they can eat their beloved rabbit food to their hearts' content.

Rhuad,

There can always be laminated rules, if you want them. If they don't already exist, then it can be your pleasure to create them. The rules you write, are likely to be the ones that suit you best.

Proposed rules:

If a meeting doesn't have beer, then there should be decent tea and coffee, plus cakes and doughnuts.

*Else there should be pizza.

Any meeting that doesn't have beer must have a 2-page written exception notice justifying why beer is not provided.

Cidertarians should be catered for equally, when beer is provided. Whiskytarians also.

Bacon sandwiches are a human right.

I guess the Chinese Communist Party feel that being anti-Japanese plays well with the public. if you won't give people freedom, you can at least point them at an enemy other than yourself.

For example, Hong Kong is 3,000km from Fukushima. I admit I don't know how the currents travel, but the rest of Japan is also between the two, so I'd be surpised if there's any effect. And short of a tsunami, it would be amazing if any water had got from Fukushima to Hong Kong since the new leak in order for them to need to put out a statement saying they've not detected anything. Unless of course, this is the kind of radioactivity that accompanies the rather faster-moving Godzilla. But he/she tends to prefer to visit Tokyo, rather than Hong Kong anyway...

The missile is fired by compressed air out and away from the sub, so that it doesn't land on it, even if the engines don't fire.

Although it's still possible to torpedo yourself, if you try hard enough.

Re: The last time...

Paris?

Re: final exercises

It's been refuelled, for another 10-20 years. I can't imagine the hull would last 20 though. HMS Dreadnought isn't supposed to be operational until 2028. Built doesn't mean tested. If the replacements are going well, they'll be able to retire the next oldest Vanguard, witout the expense of refuelling and keep HMS Vanguard itself going for longer than the newer boats. This depends on repair requirements and glitches in building and acceptance trials.

Also fuel. We don't refuel our subs. Ideally. They have a lifetime of fuel in them, and should be retired before it's all used up. However you can replace the whole reactor core. Vanguard's didn't go all that well, hence it took 7 years. Though nothing on submarines is cheap, easy or quick. You have to cut them open, move everything out of the way to get to what you want, then put it all back again - and seal the big holes you've made - lest your sub become an articial reef. Being first of class, it'll have used more fuel, during trials - but this also depends on operations. A boat that had more mechanical problems, will have been at sea less, run its reactor less, and so last longer.

Similarly because of the delays to the Astutes, the decision on those will come soon. Do we have to refuel HMS Astute, or can we get enough AUKUS subs built before it's required, so we retire it. Refuelling some of them is also the way we can "quickly" increase our sub fleet, by not retriing them one-for-one as AUKUS subs are build. Hopefully starting in the early to mid 2030s.

Re: What the hell?

Hopefully there won't be too many delays. They're already building at least three of the new Dreadnought class at Barrow - it might even be all four - while they finish off the last of the Astute's. Labour didn't build any more boats after the final Vanguard in 98 (the last attack boat was in 91) and Major's government hadn't ordered new hunter-killers either. Astute wasn't ordered until 2001 - so there was gap and a lot of skills/staff were lost. You need a lot of welding, checked incredibly thoroughly, or your submarine goes down but not back up again. And they had to train an awful lot of people to get the production line going again. We'd also lost design skills, and that took time to get back up to speed as well. Thus the first two Astutes were both very late, and very over budget. But by boat 4 the price was down to about £1.2 billion. At the same point a US Virigina class was about £3bn - although they are bigger because of all the extra cruise missiles.

So hopefully the program is on target, and the subs should be in service about when planned.

They need to be, because we need to start working on the AUKUS sub. We only built 6 (+1 finishing) Astute, and we need more. But the reactor design is old, so they can't build any more, and the new PWR3 for the Dreadnought class is too big to fit in. So the new sub has to be a new design, and we need to get one in service as soon as so we can get more built - and get the Aussies set up to build theirs.

I don't know if it'll be a help or a hindrance, but there are Aussie workers and Navy people already training, in order to gain the skills they're going to need in future. So more people going through the training pipeline, but also more people available to maybe speed up the build process of the Dreadnoughts - to get the AUKUS boats out the door.

Oddly although we're building submarines close to capacity, this is artificially limited. Building what you need in a rush and stopping means you get capability gaps and things go wrong. So the sweet spot is to knock out one boat every 2 years, if you plan to have 11 boats, and run them for twenty-odd years. If we wanted to have say 10 hunder-killers and 4 bombers, then a 1.5 year build program would seem about right - giving a slight delay for the change-over between designs and maybe building the first boat for Australia.

You can make the subs last more than 20 years. But if you do, you have to refuel the reactor. Technically you actually replace the whole core, and this is why Vanguard took 7 years to re-fit, because they'd not done that on this design before and it turned out to be very difficult. So it's probably better to run them shorter, if at all possible - and probably ends up slightly cheaper. Older things take more money to maintain.

Japan has the right idea here. They started building their Soryu class submarines at a rate of one a year. As they did with the previous class of 11. Of course they're diesel-electric and so a lot cheaper than nuclear boats. Their plan is just to carry on building at this rate, until they need a new design, and then start building that. They can then either sell off any excess, or retire them early - once they've replaced the older models. I think they currently operate 22 - so I guess that gives them a 22 year life-span, with the option to quickly increase their operational fleet (by keeping them a bit longer) if they think China are about to kick off.

Re: Trust me bro

A few more than two. A quick search suggests there have been 177 successful test firings of Trident D5 missiles. I didn't search long enough to see how many failures there have been.

Re: Why?

EricM,

The military uses lots of computers. Modern radars and sonars achieve a lot of their effectiveness by using massive amounts of computer processing to remove clutter and false returns. The smaller the radar cross-section of what you're trying to detect (stealth aircraft / small missiles / drones), the more computing power you're going to need.

The other problem is sensor fusion. In the old days you looked at your radar, and you talked to people on the radio, and then you built up your picture of the battle. Then you got datalinks so you could share your battle picture with other people - but one would always be generating the "master" picture, that everyone else was adding thier intel to.

Increasingly though, militaries want to merge the data from their sensors all over the place. Radars on ships and aircraft, but also images from drones, data from troops on the ground and satellite intel. If you can merge the raw radar data from two radars a long way apart, then maybe you can get even more sensitivity, like the large arrays used in radio-astronomy. But this is getting really data intensive and requires lots of processing. So maybe it makes sense that everyone could send their raw data to a single satellite, and the processing be done there? If you're dealing with a ship, then computers and power aren't a problem. But aircraft are limited in both, and ground troops even more so.

Whether it's a good idea or not, don't ask me. Last year the RAF shot down a test drone with an air-to-air missile from a Typhoon, but using the radar off a Navy type 45 destroyer. And this is supposedly the secret sauce of the F35. That F35 have an even better datalink, so they can build incredibly good situational awareness from the assets around them, and then act as commanders for groups of other aircraft to make the whole team more effective. Or alternatively, your F35 can sneak somewhere with its active sensors turned off (to stay stealthy), while using the radar data from other assets to prosecute targets nearer to it, without revealing its position until it opens fire.

Re: Free solar power ?

Cooling and radiation hardening would seem to be a bit awkward.

Can't every Italian soldier just have a portable server in his backpack. Or maybe every 2nd Italian soldier, and the first is carrying a portable nuclear reactor. That way they can have lasers as well.

Re: It's nuts but

Iglethal,

Don't be so sure that China has that much control of North Korea. They've definitely got sources and contacts in the military and parts of the party and bureaurcracy. But Kim has managed to kill of quite a few senior people, to make damned sure he's in charge.

I couldn't remember the name, so searched for it. But it's quite hard to find the one you want, among the many he's had bumped off. In just a couple of minute's searching, Kim has killed at least one chief of the army general staff, a defence minister (allegedly for falling asleep in cabinet) and a whole bunch of other senior people.

But the ones I was looking for were his Aunt and Uncle, back in 2013 Jang Song Thaek and Kim Kyong Hui. Although Jang was often in military uniform, I think he may have been Party, but he was also a major link with China, as well as helping Kim to come to power. Aunty Kim was his Dad's sister.

It's always hard to know cause and effect, but that seemed to have caused a dip in relations with China.

So I don't think they can control North Korea. One difference with the old days though, is the Kims can't play the Soviets off against the Chinese for ideological bragging rights anymore, because Putin isn't ideological (I think Xi might be), and Russia is massively poorer than China nowadays.

Re: Star wars?

Jan D,

It's true that straight GDP doesn't tell you everything. When Russia invaded Ukraine they were paying conscript soldiers about $50 a month and I think contract soldiers got $400. I'm sure working in the arms industry was better paying, but still less than wages in the West. Although wages in both have had to rise massively since the war started - so that cost advantage has been seriously eroded. Then again, because Russia's economy has now become a lot less connected to the global economy, they're also able to print a bit of money and not suffer too serious consequences yet. Also in Russia's case they produce loads of oil and natural resources, so they don't have to pay for that with foreign currency.

However, Russia is forced to import things like chips and a lot of complex manufactured materials. Much of their shiniest defence kit is now reliant on electronics bought from abroad, and so they are subject to global costs. And are now partially shut out of those markets.

Meanwhile China do have the ability to produce a lot of their own military kit, but their wages are already higher than Russia's - and as their economy gets richer, their wage advantage is likely to continue to erode. But China is not blessed with the same amount of natural resources as Russia, and so has to pay global prices for it.

Also Russian and Chinese workers are less productive than Australian and US ones. Which is one reason why they're paid less. That doesn't mean they don't work as hard, just that their economies are less good at allocating resources - or don't have the capital and education to pair with those workers to make them more productive.

However the Ukraine war has shown that a lot of Russia's latest kit is less good than a lot of NATO's last generation of kit - with a small leavening of the some of the current shinies. I think China's modern kit is thought to be a bit better than the Russian stuff it's often developed from - but a lot of it hasn't been tested in battle. And China are behind Russia in areas like military jet engines and submarines. Let alone behind the Western powers.

Re: Star wars?

I think it is safe to remove EU GDP from that since it is uncertain as to whether they are not actually all compromised by Russian money anyway.

Try saying that in Poland or the Baltic States.

Even the Germans are learning. And traitors like Gerhard Schroeder are now being recognised as such. At least by a lot of people.

The EU is probably not capable of being united on defence - but that doesn't mean that stuff can't be achieved.

Re: More and more

It always has been.

International relations never stop. They do go through brief periods of relative calm. But even then, that's often illusory, and just because people aren't noticing what's happening around them.

The bloodiest war since World War II happened pretty much un-noticed. About 8-12 million people died in the Congolese civil wars of the late 90s to early 2000s - although there's not exactly peace now. It was also made a lot worse by the overspill from the civil war in Rwanda and the chaos in Zimbabwe in the latter part of Mugabe's rule.

Re: Whatever is behind the Russian space nuke scare :o

There's only the one Military Industrial Complex militarizing space.

You need to get out more. Just saying "military industrial complex" does not an intelligent argument make.

Eisenhower warned about it, in a rather excellent short speech - which I'd recommend you to read. linky to transcript. He said that a military industrial capabilty was neccessary, but risked gaining too much influence, and basically called for balance and common sense in government. Not to do too little, or try to do too much. He also warned about it, because it was totally new to US politics, as the US had historically maintained small armed forces, and not a huge military production capability. Although the US Navy did remain rather large between the wars.

But he's not saying this is some unique US problem. And if you look at what passes for politics within dictatorships, you'll find the military are often a powerful faction. Not only because they've got the guns, but also because they control the arms industry - which gives them a source of money and patronage to promote their own agenda. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps bought the Iranian state telecom company a few years ago, when the government tried to privatise it. I think they used their pension fund, but they also own some of their own arms factories - as well as having invested in quite a few purely civilian businesses, just for the profits.

The Chinese People's Liberation Army also own a huge number of factories, includiing rather a lot of the old state enterprises that made weapons, but also quite a bit of China's heavy industry and have used their large amounts of cash to invest in the civilian economy as well. This gives them useful cash, as well as places to earn a living for the children of anyone they need to influence.

Re: That was my thought, too.

Washington wasn't joking when they pledged to fight Russia until the last Ukrainian.

The Ukrainians had already not only decided to fight Russia, but had started fighting Russia - before they were offered any assistance by anybody.

The problem for the person with the conspiratorial mindset is that they don't seem to be able to understand that the world is in fact a very complicated place. And not all decisions are taken by evil global masterminds, moving the pieces on their giant chess boards.