Posts by veti

Iran is *one* of the forces behind Hamas, but not the only one. And they certainly don't control Hamas.

They may have known this war was in the works, but not specifically when it would be launched. Or even less.

Re: Stalking

You have a strange idea both of the powers of a regulator, and the meaning of "stalking".

Re: @DS999

I cant say I have seen anything from Trump to suggest he would do the same (I may be wrong). I suggest he would be more likely to try and dismantle this huge violation of America's rights.

Considering he's the one who signed the present iteration into law (the FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act of 2017), I think you're being unreasonably generous there.

Looking down this thread, it looks like the trolls are back in force. Starting to feel like summer 2016 all over again.

Re: UK politics

What country would you like to point to as managing it better?

The US? France? Israel, perhaps, or Hungary, Germany, or... Which country isn't a clusterfuck?

Re: Imagine the powerhouse $$INSERT_NAME_HERE$$ would become

Oh no, there's many more dictatorships than those.

But GP's point was that, if "competence" is what we're looking for, there's not a lot of convincing evidence that "dictatorship" is much worse than any other system.

Re: "no clear advantages over W10"

Every new Windows system launches and shuts down quickly. Then they gradually slow down as cruft gets added through updates.

When 8.1 was new, I was delighted that it would give me a usable desktop in less than 20 seconds from a cold start. It made a welcome change from Vista, which would often take 20 minutes to get to that stage (no exaggeration, I actually timed it more than once). But by the time it finally obsoleted (only ten months ago, in fact), it was up to over a minute. I'm sure Win 11 won't be so snappy in five years' time, either.

Re: Homeopathy or Supplements

OK, let's take those one by one.

Lockdowns were a terrible idea.

First of all, "a terrible idea" is a value judgment. That is to say, it says more about your values and priorities than anything objectively measurable in the outside world. So it's hard to call it "deluded".

Having said that, I would say that the delusion here is in believing you can make a simple blanket statement like that - well, at all. Practically every "lockdown" was different, implemented in a different environment with different rules and circumstances. Some of them worked, some didn't.

New Zealand's first lockdown, for one, was undeniably a brilliant idea. Thanks to it, we had 15 months of almost-normal life and almost-full-strength economic activity (minus tourism, which is an important but still only small part of the whole economy) while the rest of the world was going through wave after wave of shutdowns and deaths by the million. Other lockdowns in other places, and a later lockdown in NZ, certainly failed in varying degrees and for various reasons, but that doesn't detract from the breathtaking success of the first one.

Masks don't work to significantly reduce the spread of respiratory viruses.

"Significantly" is a weasel word, of course. Most people who have studied the subject say that masks do make a difference in some situations. The statistical evidence is not clear, but anyone who claims on that basis to have definitive knowledge on the negative side is - yes, I think "deluded" is a reasonable word there.

Covid probably came from an accidental lab leak.

Possibly. Possibly not. Again, use of the word "probably" suggests an unwarrantable level of confidence in your conclusion. Delusion.

Covid vaccines are nowhere near as safe or effective as we were led to believe.

I don't know what you were led to believe, but I'm not aware of any major revisions to the information I saw about them.

Net Zero is a terrible idea. Even if the whole of europe ceased to exist tomorrow, our emissions would get swallowed up by China.

Again with the "terrible idea" thing. It depends what you think the point is, or how you think reality is likely to unfold in either scenario. I suggest that for "the whole of Europe" to achieve "net zero" would involve pioneering technologies, social and economic changes that would quickly be adopted by other countries, including China.

Religion is stupid (OK that one goes back well beyond 2020)

Again with the value judgment. What do you think "religion" is trying to do? I'm not sure how you can go about answering that, but when you have answered it, then you can rationally assess its actions and measure them against its success criteria and defend the statement that "it's stupid". But I suggest not here, because no-one is going to read a 10,000 word essay on the topic, which is about the minimum it would take.

Of course it would entail attributing volition and intelligence to an abstract idea. Not sure what you'd call that... But you've already done that much with your statement, so clearly you've made your peace with that bit.

Re: Elmo just desperately needs the money.

I'd vote for Musk, plus a constitutional amendment to allow him to be president, if I thought he'd shove Trump out of a high enough window. Price worth paying.

Re: I fear that by the time that this ends ...

Tools, yes. Hamas is chiefly funded by Iran, plus some of the Gulf states, none of whom give a shit how many Palestinians die.

I'm sure they do want to provoke an equally brutal response from Israel, and I'm reasonably sure they'll get it. Bibi's government is childishly easy to manipulate that way. But what goals they have in mind, is a bit more speculative.

They're diverting some attention (and aid) from Ukraine, to Mr Putin's glee. They're creating division in the west. They're bolstering Mr Trump's chances of winning another term, with everything that would imply. Perhaps most important for their long term strategy, they are politicising support for Palestine in a way it hasn't been for a generation now. If they can make the Palestinian cause sufficiently toxic in the west, they will bolster their own position and claim to be the only real representatives of that cause. Then, PLO RIP.

Re: A Poor Craftsman Blames His Tools

You're almost there, but you've missed one crucial link in the reasoning.

"People keep trying to mash various shaped pegs into the round hole that is Excel" - this much is true, and well put. What you're missing, however, is that this keeps happening, despite the ready availability of any number of otherly-shaped holes they could be using.

It follows that any solution of the form "we should stop doing this" qualifies as "well, duh" advice. Sure we should, much as we should stop eating meat, but we won't. So the question "what can we do to prevent/control/mitigate the resulting damage?" is a good one. I don't think the article comes up with any very good answers, mind, but I can respect the attempt.

Scenario: you receive a report of a hack against a system where your software may have been deployed, and it sounds like it may have been exploiting a vulnerability in your software. You're not sure about either of those points, but circumstances are suspicious.

What exactly is your responsibility at that point? Are you "aware of an exploit" yet? Can you afford to simply ignore the report and wait for someone else to do the hard work investigating?

OK, so it's three days later, and someone publishes a preliminary investigation into the hack. No one has actually pinpointed your component yet, but the circumstances are piling up. You're now about 80% sure it was present on the system, and if it was vulnerable that would explain what happened.

Are you "aware" yet?

And whenever you are "aware", what on earth makes you think just sending an email is going to cut any ice? Name an official notification system anywhere in the world that relies on email. No, there will be a form, requiring you to specify the program, the version, the component and other details that will require serious expert investigation to uncover. So whenever you are "aware", you've got a ticking clock to discover enough about it to fill in this form, whatever it's going to look like.

Re: "Musk’s changes at X are aimed at making money"

Bankrupt is when creditors are demanding money and you can't pay it. To avoid that, all you need to do is have enough revenue stream to pay the more insistent creditors as and when their payments are due, but not before.

Otherwise, everyone with a mortgage would be bankrupt.

But... entropy doesn't represent "capacity to hold information". The reverse, if anything. You can't hold any information in a maximally entropic system, because every particle is indistinguishable from every other particle.

I don't know what the previous poster was on, but Trump and Thatcher had absolutely nothing in common bar the first letter of their surnames. Well, maybe hair colour sometimes, but Thatcher's hair was unashamedly dyed anyway.

Re: "the sudden imposition of subscription fees"

The over payment is credit on their account, good for free electricity until it's used up.

If you really want a cash refund, I think most retailers will give you one. In the worst case, unless you're moving out, they might try to charge a handling fee for giving it, but you can try challenging that, it might work. But it's rare for the account to be more than a few dollars in credit, anyway.

Re: In Other News ...

There's nothing wrong with Neanderthal DNA. Certainly no evidence of correlation between its levels and propensity to violence in an individual.

Don't believe the Cro-Magnon propaganda. 40,000 years ago they committed the first human genocide, and they've been blaming the victims ever since.

Re: There is a printer for that.

I very much doubt if it's doable for that budget.

For starters, printing 1 billion pages a day will set you back $several million per day in paper and toner alone. And then you have to pay about 60 people, 24/7, to keep feeding the paper and toner into those 1800 printers, and collecting and collating printouts from them. And you need a building to house all this stuff, and electricity to power it...

Re: Answering the Rhetorical Question

The owner of that studio is completely suable. And has no way of concealing their connection, assuming they want to make profit from its works.

No, the unregulated bit is the several millions of Internet users who probably can't even be identified. But who have access to deepfake video and audio production software (or web hosted services), and will be using it for everything from Lord of the Rings (Author's Cut) to Taylor Swift Does Dallas. To say nothing of Biden Eats Little Billy.

Re: Flip-Flop

Indeed, "out of the box" software at that level is a myth, and Oracle should be prosecuted for deceptive sales practises for even allowing the phrase to be used.

You're speaking right now, I don't see anyone censoring you. Or me, for that matter.

But I also don't see how our views are likely to change any part of the world, beyond maybe our own households and immediate associates, and therefore they're not of much interest to most people out there.

If you don't like the way the media works, then by all means start a news service of your own. Good luck with that. I mean that sincerely, if you can make a go in that business you might just do some good. And when you've done that for a few months, maybe you'll understand a little more about how the world works.

Re: A stupid idea

So, in the end this is more a problem with the human psyche, which unfortunately can not be fixed by technological means, only by education and traning

People have been trying to "fix the human psyche by education and training" for thousands of years, and no-one has cracked it yet. How do you suggest we try to improve on that track record?

Re: Kneejerk canned response

The "something we take very seriously" line is, as you say, meaningless in itself, but in context it does have value. It's a license to journalists to follow up the issue and ask more questions another day.

Most public figures are happy to give out such licenses, because they know (a) journalists are lazy and there's a good chance they won't bother, and relatedly (b) the public attention span will have forgotten all about it by tomorrow, so any attempt to follow up will have to start with a recap, meaning most readers will have switched off before they get to the new bit.

Re: Toyota

They're a car maker that's still in business, so I presume so, yeah.

Re: 'The Writers Guild of America has ended its 148-day strike"? Eh?

If you're not seeing new content, that's on you. There's plenty being produced.

Re: This news isn't new, he talked about it years ago.

Why would an AGI solve aging or disease? It has no reason to care about either one.

Re: Ah, ATM

The only people who do use TCP are the ones who don't really care about how bad TCP is, and simply want plug and play compatibility.

Which is to say, about 98% of everybody.

And this last points to the real crux, which is that copyright law (i.e. Title 17) in the US, and the courts adjudicating upon it, are unlikely to care much about what is "stored" by an LLM and how it is represented. They're going to care about actual and plausible effects.

Those courts will of course make their own decisions based on their priorities, but if Title 17 becomes too restrictive, OpenAI can and will simply up sticks to somewhere beyond its jurisdiction. So what really matters is what can be agreed as covered by the Berne Convention.

And I think you'll find the mechanics and definitions of "storage" and "retrieval" will be very important in some of those alternative jurisdictions.