* Posts by Doctor Syntax

32776 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014

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UK procurement is too glacial to bring AI into defense, MPs told

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"The UK's procurement processes are not fit to bring AI into the nation's military capabilities, lawmakers heard at a parliamentary hearing."

Thank goodness for that.

No, no, no! Disco joke hit bum note in the rehab center

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Re: So the system didn't cut the ringtone when the phone was picked up

I'd like to find one to integrate a USB document camera into X-Sane.

Oh, you meant that sort of "sane".

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Re: So the system didn't cut the ringtone when the phone was picked up

"because, obviously, who would configure a 90-second ringtone ?"

They made an assumption. Any assumption quickly becomes a limitation if not a bug. Assume as little as possible, Even so it should be a requirement of ringing a phone that the ring tone ill be cut off as soon as it's answered.

Microsoft hiring a nuclear power program manager, because AI needs lots of 'leccy

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Mushroom

WFR

Windows For Reactors

The home Wi-Fi upgrade we never asked for is coming. The one we need is not

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I think Zen will be my next ISP.

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Re: Interest, expertise and time

"sadly still on FTTC"

Not sadly at all as far as I'm concerned. C is only a few hundred metres away so fast enough. Why pay more?

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Just go back to using a router of my own. Had to buy another because the older ones had died or probably full of unaddressed CVEs. One of the advantages of that is thet a more modern one combines the FTTC modem whereas the old setup had a separate emodem.

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Re: Whoops !!!

"Cloning the MAC Address of the original ISP router can be useful to avoid 'simple' detection if you replace the router"

Didn't bother, just stuck a TP-Link in as was. Only issue with that, several generations of router have been quite happy to live with the name I chose to give the router in my hosts file. This one doesn't like it so I just use the IP address to connect to it.

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Another reason not to use the ISP's router - they can't log in remotely as PlusNet did with mine, lock it down and prevent me reconfiguring the DHCP reserved IP addresses I'd previously set up when it was still open to configuration from the LAN side.

Fujitsu to quit Tokyo HQ

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There's also a "dogfooding" aspect to the move. Fujitsu currently emphasizes its "Uvance" digital experience practice and methodologies.

Unlike some companies we could think of.

Of course it's possible they might need to sell off property to pay compensation to ex-sub-postmasters - if so, not before time. Justice delayed is justice denied.

How is this problem mine, techie asked, while cleaning underground computer

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Re: Dirty environments for Computers

The old percussive maintenance.

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Re: Dirt

It depends on whether you're in Glasgow.

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Re: A 1980s minicomputer at the bottom of a mine ?

Primitive? A VT220 was luxurious when all you have was a VT100.

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Re: Ah, the 80's...

"No-one suspects that something with four wheels contains something deadly until it goes KABOOM."

No-one?

Suspecting exactly that was SOP in Northern Ireland. It became law that an unoccupied car should be locked because of the increased risk of it being stolen and used as a bomb (which puzzled me why it seems to have been so easy to lift documents from a PSNI Super's car). There were substantial areas where it was illegal to park an unoccupied car (they may not have been aware of it but my children were sometimes car-sitters on weekends when I needed to run a quick errand into one of the zones).

Even so, my lab was bombed. Someone the IRA wrongly though worked there was targetted. They loaded his car, told him to drive there and held his family hostage. As he didn't work there the car never got beyond the double gate trap. Everyone was evacuated to the back of the site until it went off

I was down town in court at the time and got told about it by a couple of Peelers (even writing about it brings back the terminology of the time and place) while the defence had asked for a recess whilst they considered what I'd just said. Windows were blown in but not much real damage. I was greeted by a strong smell of clove oil as I entered the door. I used it as a dehydrating agent for preparing wood sections and had a 100 ml bottle near one of the windows that blown in. The spilled oil must have got trodden right down to the door.

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"Installing Code Red / NIMDA patches on windows 2000 machines"

Not Code Tangerine?

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Re: A cave, rather than a mine, and a laboratory, rather than a computer

They may well have their own source of radon without the radium. https://www.ukradon.org/information/ukmaps

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"Experience is a dear teacher but some will learn by no other."

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Re: Dickensian

And probably causes byssinosis as well.

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Re: Dirt

But what about the rest of the desk?

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Re: Dirt

Or they hated it so much they didn't want another. In fact i have a cheap keyboard like that which is years old - I got it to set up stuff which would mostly run headless so it's had hardly any use.

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Re: Ah, the 80's...

An over-seas allowance? I'd have appreciated that. Instead I was up against the Civil Service/HMG mentality which says "We rate people who are qualified for their jobs by their education well below those who aren't, promotion comes with responsibility measured by direct reports, not by what the actual job is, and if we want a national pay policy the easiest place to start is with the public sector."

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Re: Ah, the 80's...

Jake may well have been free-lance.

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Re: Ah, the 80's...

There were a few occasions where I had to go to places where i needed an armed escort, either RUC or Army. At at least one later employer I looked back and wondered what my current HR would have thought of doing that without a team-building exercise first.

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Re: "......the mine had closed."

It'll be intersting to see how it affects the fibre.

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Re: Dirt

You really should have rised it as an H&S issue.

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Re: Dirt

"I'll chuck it in the bin without a second thought"

And replace it with the cheapest you can find because it's not going to last long anyway.

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Re: A 1980s minicomputer at the bottom of a mine ?

If they didn't budgie fast enough the response times would be something dreadful.

If you're cautious about using ML and bots at work, that's not a bad idea

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Re: LLM/ML processes

"Pastiche Generator" would be my description. They create pastiches of real statements, images or whatever. Whether the response to any prompt will be all true, all false, all irrelevant or somewhere in-between is, if not pure chance, at least not ready determinable ahead of time.

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Re: tendency to generate false information – a phenomenon known as "hallucination."

Right now AI is the term being used to push these things onto the world in general. Yes' it's an oxymoron but that's the way marketing works.

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Re: tendency to generate false information – a phenomenon known as "hallucination."

A statement based on reports that somebody reported a crime or was a witness at a trial and mangles them to say that that person was convicted of the crime is simply not true. Which epithet you choose to apply to the untruth is your personal choice and frankly doesn't matter very much. What matters is that people are trusting the system that creates such a statement.

"How much of a world model or theory of the world does a newly conceived human have?"

The newly conceived born human acquires a world model by being a physical entity and encountering the other physical entities around it. It starts to do so before starting to acquire language. Our non-human relatives do the same without ever acquiring language. Language - words - is/are the means by which we apply symbolic labels to the real world in order to build and manipulate ideas about them. They are not intrinsic to an internal model of the external world. But words are al LLMs have. They do not have the physicality to react with the physical world.

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Re: "Who's responsible for the hallucinations?"

Hence Pascal's point. If you use AI to generate a file and use it in some way which causes problems it's your fault and those problems are down to you.

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Re: tendency to generate false information – a phenomenon known as "hallucination."

They also know which is which. The AI knows nothing.

Apple squashes security bugs after iPhone flaws exploited by Predator spyware

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Re: These clowns

“take full control of our device” sounds more like Microsoft's approach. I think Apple is more along the lines of "it's your device but you're not going anywhere outside our walled garden". I suppose vulnerabilities like these could have also opened up the possibility of 3rd party stores such as F-Droid run for Android phones.

Europe wants easy default browser selection screens. Mozilla is already sounding the alarm on dirty tricks

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Yes, it's the frameworks that are the problem. All they give to the developer is apparent plausible deniability. Given that they chose to adopt the framework it's not even that plausible.

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Choice screens are the least of the problems. Much worse is the growing habit of web sites checking the browser and refusing to play if it isn't one of their favoured ones - which is increasingly likely to be Chromium based.

Colleges snub Turnitin's AI-writing detector over fears it'll wrongly accuse students

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People have been using textual analysis for years to (try to) identify writers. Computers have been used in the Who Really Wrote Shakespeare game since they became available. But I don't see it working well by trying to score individual sentences. I'd have thought it would work better picking on a whole lot of factors, consistency of choice of grammatical constructions, consistency of shortening (e.g can't vs cannot vs can not) & so forth that would require gathering statistics from the entire text or at least substantial portions of it. It might be quite reasonable for all replies form any particular LLM to occupy quite a small portion of a multidimensional space defined in that way.

Amazon 'protects' against junk AI e-books by limiting author-bots to three a day

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Re: I'm happy

It would take a controlled experiment to find out but it may well be hurting their profits already. They may be making money now but it's quite possible they could make more by letting customers find wht they're looking for.

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Re: "that limit protects its customers"

One book every three days would be too much.

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Re: in order to help protect against abuse, we are lowering the volume limits

Amazon is going to show you what *they* want you to see and buy,

They may succeed with the first but fail with the second. Perhaps they could try an A/B test with an alternative search engine that does as it's asked to find out how much trade they're turning away.

Airport chaos as eGates down for the count across UK

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Re: Current problems

Far from it. They're a perfect fit. even better than Rudderless.

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Re: Current problems

It was a Labour Home Sec who declared it unfit for purpose. I don't know why. It's been super-efficient at house-training its ministers and that seems to be its prime purpose.

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Nowadays they'd be on a subscription so they'd be Billed Gates.

UK-US data deal could hinge on fate of legal challenges to EU arrangement

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Re: "permit the flow of personal data [..] without the need for further safeguards"

"Could someone please remind me why personal information needs to change continent ?"

Monetisation

Menacing marketeers fined by ICO for 1.9M cold calls

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"it's probably best just not to answer the call"

No, siita has the right idea. Get them to hang on. While they're doing that they're not bothering anyone else so you can put it down as a public service on your part, and it's wasting their time. Given how few such calls we get my belief is that there are lists circulating of numbers it's best not to ring.

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Re: Spam calls

I keep saying this but:

The telco has records of at least who it took the call from. What's needed is a number, say 1476, to ring immediately after hanging up to report the spam. The telco records the number and with a bit of statistical checking to see if the source is being reported enough times it credits the reporters' accounts with a fee for their troubles (at least double for numbers on TPS), adds a fee for its own troubles and bills whoever sent it the call. If it's another telco then they can add their own fee and pass the bill back to the source until it either reaches the caller's account or a telco which has not yet learned to keep records. This will make it unduly expensive either for callers or for telcos who are prepared to handle the calls carelessly. One way or another it would kill the whole business stone dead.

In practice it probably wouldn't need to be implemented. It would put telcos to considerable upfront costs to set up the system. Once legislators or regulators started talking seriously about implementing it I think the industry would quickly discover other, effective ways of stopping such calls, ways which up to now haven't been practical.

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Re: Spam calls

"although I never answer calls from numbers I don't recognise"

What you should do is answer ask them to hold on - you need to look something up to answer their question, have to go to answer the door, whatever - and then put the phone aside for 10 minutes. AFAICS that gets your number on an even more valuable list, the list of numbers it's best not to call. It certainly works for me as we get very few.

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Re: Sweet FA for those of us harassed

Citation needed

Mastodon makes a major move amid Musk's multiple messes

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The word you're looking for might be "monetised".

BOFH: A security issue, you say? Activate code tangerine

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Re: Wonderful episode once again!

What? You're saying BOFH isn't real life?

Now IBM sued for age discrim by its own HR veterans

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"Fines aren't enough. Actual jail time for these liars might actually change things."

An award of substantial damages against the actual executive from an individual who's been laid off might be even better. At least for the first claimant and the next few until the exec's been bankrupted.

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