* Posts by breakfast

1556 publicly visible posts • joined 24 May 2007

VALL-E AI can mimic a person’s voice from a three-second snippet

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Facepalm

So Johnny Scamstain phones me up, I tell him to piss off, he uses that sample to create a copy of my voice and phone my gran saying it's an emergency and I need money quick and the solution our "expert" from MS recommends is the Blockchain?

The blockchain is not going to help my gran.

It seems to me that a legislative framework built around these kinds of AI tooling must include strict liability of the providers for the way their tool is used. If Johnny Scamstain has used this to con my gran, Microsoft are liable. It is the only thing I can think of that will persuade them to take it seriously.

Virgin Orbit doesn't

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Re: Had it been a success....

Juche Britannia!

With Mastodon, decentralization strikes back

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Re: issues

What you're missing is that moderators have two levels of moderation available to them. If someone is on my server and using their account to grift people, I ban them. That is them gone. Problem solved for my users. If they are on someone else's server and the someone else in question won't ban them I de-federate my server from theirs. Now my users are protected from that user and from any other grifters that are allowed on the same server. A lot of admins share details of dodgy users and dodgy instances, so those decisions can be propagated across the wider network quite easily. It's not trivial, but it seems to work quite well.

The big challenge is that this process s built on a huge amount of volunteer labour, which is currently going without recompense and I think there will end up needing to be some solutions for that; I suspect a lot of servers will move to a paid subscription basis of some kind (probably on an "if you can afford it" basis) just to cover volunteer time and server capacity.

Meet the merry pranksters who keep the workplace interesting, if not productive

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Re: No desk policy

Ironic seeing as it sounds like someone was taking the P...

Too big to live, too loved to die: Big Tech's billion dollar curse of the free

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The 2010s model starting to fold

I wonder whether this is a mark of entering the late phase of the late 2000s-2010s model of "offer service to lots of users for free, figure out how to make money with it later" - the same thing that Facebook, Twitter, and friends did. Most of that generation are struggling to some degree with the fact that users now expect their services to be free and aside from advertising and exploiting our data they didn't necessarily find good ways to make money with it. I feel like Google are in a better boat than most- I pay for a little extra storage for Gmail and Drive whereas the idea of paying to use Facebook or Twitter is truly ridiculous to me.

Stolen info on 400m+ Twitter accounts seemingly up for sale

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I have seen it argued persuasively that the reason he ended up having to go for it regardless was that if he didn't his offer could be the kind of market manipulation that the authorities really frown on in a jail-time sort of way, so he had to borrow the money to buy a platform he didn't want at an overinflated price. I hope this is true, it would add a piquant savour to the general hilarity of his disastrous find-out spree.

University students recruit AI to write essays for them. Now what?

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So what you're saying is: We need to feed ChatGPT with Laudanum.

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Re: $10 per month for 30,000 words

It's not a matter of time at all, this is the front line of the internet right now- content farms are using AI to generate endless pages of seemingly human-written spam to game advertising algorithms and presumably the team at Google search will be using AI to try and differentiate between the vast quantities of useless dross and the tiny nuggets of human-made information.

Judging by the search results, they're not doing great, but it seems inevitable that this must be the wild paddling of the swan's feet as it serenely glides past, offering us bad search results.

LastPass admits attackers have a copy of customers’ password vaults

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Holmes

Feels like a repeat

To have your "secure" password service breached once may be regarded as misfortune; allowing it to be breached twice starts to look like carelessness.

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Re: Private Equity Twats

Rejected: Password is not stroganoff.

Study finds AI assistants help developers produce code that's more likely to be buggy

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Re: There's no stupid questions

Exactly, sometimes your question is dumb. If you haven't realised that before posting it on StackOverflow that doesn't mean you're either going to be told it's dumb and pay attention or find some kind of misbegotten solution and only learn by bitter experience. Humility is right there alongside laziness as an important developer skill.

If I have a question and I can't find anything like it on SO that's generally a pretty good indicator that I'm barking up the wrong tree.

Elon Musk to step down as Twitter CEO: Help us pick his replacement

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Alert

face god and walk backwards into hell

The only viable candidate to run Twitter is the person who owns the platform in every way that matters: Dril.

If you aren't familiar with Dril's work, your opinion on Twitter carries no weight.

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Coat

Re: How could you

Nothing like a Truss to really raise the roof.

NASA's Mars InSight uploads its (probably) final image, shares it in a tweet

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Mushroom

Risk of the travel time

"We launched our probe to Mars and gave it the ability to tweet, little anticipating that by the time it arrived on the planet the man whose company built the rocket we used to launch it would have bought Twitter and burnt it to the ground in a fit of pique."

Epic payment: Fortnite maker pays record $520m to settle FTC case

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Epic are a huge business, I doubt the coders have any hand in these decisions, I'm sure there are many layers of executive who are telling them to hide those refund buttons as deep as possible.

Server broke because it was invisibly designed to break

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Coat

Server fans

Honestly servers are something of a niche topic so you'd be wise to be careful around people dedicated enough to label themselves as server fans.

Bahamian rap: Crypto villain Sam Bankman-Fried arrested

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Re: And yet

But people who are investing in it aren't treating it as a personal wallet, they're investing, which generally does involve giving it to some kind of crook as there don't appear to be any non-crooked operators in the entire ecosystem and if they were the crooks would rapidly outcompete them.

US Dept of Energy set to reveal fusion breakthrough

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Happy

Imagine what this might mean for the people of the world:

They'd have enough helium to last them forever.

KmsdBot botnet is down after operator sends typo in command

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Botnet devops is not yet a mature field, it seems.

You get the internet you deserve

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Thumb Up

Re: Not actually a problem

Back in the early 2000s I used Slashdot for a while, but after a while I noticed that most of the interesting posts were stories from El Reg, so I started coming to the source and honestly I never looked back.

Programming error created billion-dollar mistake that made the coder ... a hero?

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Holmes

Re: Worst code I ever saw...

This is the kind of case where comments are critical. "This operation seems backwards because against version 1.2 of the frobsticate library the order of parameters is the opposite of what logic would indicate" is absolutely the kind of knowledge that I would forget in the six months before I next looked at that part of the code or a new programmer coming onto the project would need to know.

How do you solve the problem that is Twitter?

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Boffin

Re: Problem isn't technical

Twitter's product isn't technology, it's a huge, volatile, worldwide community that the company has been desperately trying to keep from flipping out and falling apart for years, like someone trying to balance a broom handle in the palm of their hand. Elon doesn't seem to have grasped that - he may not understand technology very well but he really doesn't understand people and communities - and everything he does is basically poking at that precariously balanced stick. Whatever comes of it, Twitter will look very, very, different afterwards, if it exists at all.

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Headmaster

Re: Given how upbeat Elon Musk is:

He's also an anagram of "Lone Kums," make of that what you will.

Spooky entanglement revealed between quantum AI and the BBC

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Holmes

The Quantum Brian

Evolution is so good at getting to effects that exist in the world around us that I'm pretty confident when we get better at understanding QC we'll find some of the same effects in the natural world, most probably in our brains. If consciousness is a quantum effect then it makes sense that language would follow the same patterns.

Musk: Twitter will have 1 billion monthly users inside 18 months

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Facepalm

Re: One billion users?

Ironic considering his "there are too many bots on Twitter" comments in the recent past, but their numbers definitely seem like they're up from what I can see, along with the usual influence-peddler sock-puppets. None of which makes Twitter a better place to be, and that's a problem because before Lone Kums took over it was already walking a tightrope in that regard and he appears to have just applied a significant shove.

Singapore branches out onto internet of trees

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Thumb Up

Perfect closer

The last line of this article is *chef's kiss*.

Too soon? Amazon commissions FTX mini-series

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That was a disastrous crash caused by greed, grifters and unregulated financial chicanery, but this is an investment opportunity.

Massive energy storage system goes online in UK

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Thumb Up

Re: Tiny

For many offshore projects along the east coast finding a mountain is likely to present significant challenges.

Elon Musk issues ultimatum to Twitter staff: Go hardcore or go home

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Flame

Re: I don't know

I think it is quite posible that some of the investors expected that his purchase might destroy Twitter and decided if it did, they wouldn't mind- there are investment institutions from the Saudi and Chinese regimes on that list and a globally available platform at least somewhat dedicated to free speech is not convenient for either of those. If he made it profitable, they were quids in, if he destroyed it they would be rid of a thorn in their sides and the world's former richest man would owe them a truly incredible amount of money. If they can afford to be gamblers, this is not a bad bet.

Twitter CISO flies the coop

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Looks like the banks are already trying to get out by offering the debt at 60 cents on the dollar. I'm not sure that's a good sign. This is looking increasingly like it could bankrupt Twitter and maybe, just maybe, Musk. I'd hate to see it go but taking down that absolute bell would be some compensation.

Musk sows more Twitter chaos, now with Official policy snafu

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Re: Promise of slapstick comedy

General perception, ten years ago: Elon Musk is a genius inventor who will change the world.

General perception now: Elon Musk is Frank Spencer.

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Trollface

Jumping into a field of rakes

One of the nice things about being a Twitter user at this moment is watching the former richest man in the world losing money at a catastrophic rate thanks to our endeavours. At the moment you can spend $8 to get a verified account, alienate another advertiser and lose him millions - for a lot of people that is a worthwhile proposition. He seemed to be enjoying the sowing part of his purchase, but this reaping phase doesn't appear to be working quite the way he hoped.

It's hard to judge whether the site will survive his ownership - and if you look at who provided the money for his purchase, there are a good number of organisations who would be happy if it doesn't - but it looks like his fortune probably won't either and his reputation has gone through tarnished to the point it's entirely lost in a layer of verdigris.

Either way, the age of Twitter is ending and that's no bad thing. It has been fun to use, but it's influence on the wider world has been broadly dystopian.

Tired: Data scientists. Wired: Data artists

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Re: Uptitling

Astrologer -> SEO specialist

This ancient quasar may be the remains of the first-gen star that started us all

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Coat

Re: As Douglas Adams said

The very thought of applying grammar to time travel makes me tense.

LG debuts thin malleable screens made from contact lens material

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Running it on windows

I think there's an interesting opportunity for turning windows into backlit screens, giving an instant, dynamic stained-glass type effect. Not hugely useful, but you could do some really fun artistic effects with it.

Parody Elon Musk Twitter accounts will be suspended immediately, says Elon Musk

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Re: Streisand effect

The blue tick has previously indicated a verified user - usually more high profile or authoritative accounts - by making it a subscription option with no verification component he has effectively completely devalued that (and potentially created a new problem for himself- the blue tick was introduced as the result of a court case) and many existing verified users have chosen to go out in a blaze of glory by impersonating him.

The one upside of this right now is watching him go through the "Find Out" phase at incredible velocity is tremendously entertaining. Someone characterised it yesterday as Elmer Fudd having purchased a network entirely full of Bugs Bunnies.

Run a demo on live data? Sure! What could possibly go wrong? Hang on. Are you sure that's not working?

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Coat

"Don't knock it" is very much big red button 101.

Elon Musk reportedly outlines horrible Twitter layoff process

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Facepalm

Could have been a big plus

It strikes me that this whole fiasco is a reminder of how weak Google's philosophy of just dropping products is. At this point Google Plus would probably have become the biggest social network if they had just bothered to keep it running and not done anything stupid to make it suck.

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The impression everyone who actually uses Twitter is getting, is that the mismanagement is just getting started.

Google kills forthcoming JPEG XL image format in Chromium

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Success in programmers' minds

In my mind, being a Google product mean's it's almost guaranteed to suffer sudden deprecation and become worthless to me. I guess that's their goal, seeing as it's what they keep doing, so fair play to them.

Luckily they are willing to pass on some of their more useful products to the open source communities or spin out organisations like the Android Foundation rather than simply dropping them altogether, but if it's Google branded, that's a guarantee that you can't count on it as part of your infrastructure.

RIP: Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language

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Happy

Re: All Purpose Electronic X-Ray Computer

It really was the APEX.

No, I will not pay the bill. Why? Because we pay you to fix things, not break them

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Headmaster

Re: It goes far beyond that ...

So you're suggesting that Santa is some kind of Saturn-alias?

Meta met a programming language it likes better than Java

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Surprising

This quite surprised me, I had kind of assumed that as Meta were responsible for React that they'd be using React Native for this kind of stuff.

Either way the usability on their facebook apps is excruciating, especially on the business side. I feel like getting some usability teams in would be a bigger benefit than any amount of shoving things around in terms of language.

NASA picks its UFO-hunting – sorry – unidentified aerial phenomena-hunting team

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Alien

The evidence of something is very strong

There seems to be a decent amount of evidence for something that moves very rapidly through the air and changes direction very quickly and I would not be at all surprised if we get some really interesting and weird science out of this. Not aliens, sure, but _something_ interesting and novel or some weird long-theorised phenomenon that nobody thought would behave in this way.

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

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Boffin

Re: It's a facinating field

I read the start of the paper and felt like I somehow knew less than I had before, and not just about this, about everything.

India's Mars Orbiter Mission loses contact, burns all fuel, deemed 'non-recoverable'

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Huge if true

So you're saying that it is far more likely that intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic are forming their plans against us, than it is I'll win the lottery?

Really makes you think.

The secret to Sparrow, DeepMind's latest Q&A chatbot: Human feedback

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The Register has asked DeepMind for further comment

Handling media requests would be a great job for an AI chatbot and might result in some more interesting press releases when it goes off-script.

Don't want to get run over by a Ford car? There's a Bluetooth app for that

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Re: Can we have a reverse function, please?

Simply being blockchain-enabled is a pretty big red flag tbh.

Uber reels from 'security incident' in which cloud systems seemingly hijacked

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Mushroom

Just a thought

I realise that the hacker probably isn't going to be reading comments on El Reg and even if they were who wants to waste valuable blackmail material, but it would be pretty sweet to do an rm -rf across every system they have access to, which sounds like it's basically all of them. Starting with the back-ups. It would be nice if something happened to persuade organisations to take security seriously and it couldn't happen to a more deserving company than Uber.

Queen's shooting star was actually meteor, not SpaceX junk

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Alien

Red dots, eh?

Fiery meteors landing in the deep sea? I've read The Kraken Wakes and suffice to say if this is an invasion of that kind then they're not going to be able to manage their main strategy (deliberately melting the ice caps so the land is inundated) because we're already doing it ourselves! In your face, deep-living-aliens-from-maybe-one-of-Jupiter's-moons-or-wherever!