Posts by Ian Mason

Re: 0/10 for current affairs

Intelligent creatures learn from experience and adapt, LLMs don't. Ergo intelligence is qualitatively different.

If you correct an LLM it doesn't incorporate that into its world model. Playing with the llama2 model (prompted by this article) it conflated race and ethnicity. I pointed this out, it apologised and issued a 'correction' without the mistake, except that all it did was substitute the word "ethnicity" for "race" in its first appearance and then continued to say "race" for the rest of the paragraph.

Re: Depends on your definition of growler I guess.

> I never drank it myself, but watching the effect on others was very amusing, until I had to take them to A&E!

Why A&E? Oh lordy, they weren't stupid enough to spill any in their laps were they?

Re: X

Stop mentioning gammon, you're making me hungry.

Re: It's not a witch hunt.

Luxury? You 'ad it easy.

When I were a lad we had to program t' computer by hardwiring the program into it, in actual wire on plugboard. And we had to make the wire ourselves, after getting up two hours before we went to bed to mine the ore for the metal for the wire ourselves.

Re: IBM did this for years

Burroughs too, exact same thing except they changed a couple of wire wrap connections to do the upgrade.

> "As levels of stupidity go, this is breathtakingly advanced Grandmaster stuff. Even the British government would struggle to surpass it!"

Jacob Rees-Mogg: Hold my claret!

Re: So Musk has blood on his hands

Yeah, they'll make a complete mess of it like the Afghanis did against Russia. Oh, wait, the Afghanis won!

Re: Jeepers.

The SOS phone on my car just reads out the GPS coordinates to the emergency operator via speech synthesis before connecting you personally (via hands free) to the operator.

Re: Narrow but uncertain applicability?

Hey, at least they stated their assumptions.

I recently read a paper on how exercise modes affect blood pressure that was reported in the the press akin to "These two exercises could reduce your dangerously high blood pressure" where they made the assumption that the control groups in the papers they were doing a meta analysis of were sufficiently similar to allow all the studies to be linked. Of course they (1) didn't actually state the implicit assumption or (2) provide any evidence that the assumption held thus rendering the paper little more than prettily worded bunkum and the conclusions worthless.

Unlike this paper, which at most is going to be used to justify a bit of Friday afternoon bunking off, that paper is going to possibly genuinely and seriously affect the health of people who get an exercise prescription from a medic who (a) didn't read more that the conclusions or a report of them, (b) isn't smart enough to spot the terrible methodological mistake.

Re: Hate-speech reports scared off advertisers

Since 1979. TFTFY.

Re: Let's hope it stops the hate comments

Any approbation that Musk has attracted here is entirely of his own making. Simple factual reporting of what he does, combined with his own pronouncements is more than enough to make him an object of scorn in the eyes of any right thinking individual.

The people who need criticism are those who still indulge in uncritical adulation of the man in the face of all he's done to Twitter, its staff, all the people it owes money to and all the shareholders in his other ventures that have been tainted by his Twitter antics.

Re: Meh

Well, you've certainly publicly stated your unsuitability for a career as a criminal or as a spy. Or is this just a ruse to persuade up that you aren't one of those two things?

Re: OED

Often "fair use" hinges on how much of a pre-existing work has been used. Me using Blackadder quotes to quip at what others have said counts as fair use, me posting the script of whole episodes of Blackadder does not. Ingesting a work wholesale would definitely cross any threshold used to assess whether a 'substantial' quantity of the original work had been used.

If an LLM can be provoked to produce exact quotes of any arbitrary part of a work by prompting (e.g. "What did Captain Blackadder say in response to Lieutenant George St Barleigh talking about 'willing suspension of disbelief'?") then I suspect it would fail the test of fair use by its ability to produce arbitrarily long quotations of any part of the original text.

Re: The issue with V6 is... NAT

You clearly don't know how this works if you think what country you're in determines the routeability of an assigned IP prefix, be it a v4 prefix or a v6 prefix.

If you've a block permanently assigned to you, then you just find a grown-up ISP and say "We need you to announce this over BGP". Better still get your own ASN (You'll have no problem with this is you're capable of getting a permanently assigned prefix) and advertise your prefix yourself to one or more upstream transit providers.

Jemma has a problem working out that the Ambulances, Fire Service, Coastguard and, in some places, Mountain Rescue are all also on 999. Any woman who lives in the Metropolitan Police district has a right to have a problem with the police.

Re: Commodore Pet

Somewhere inside the Royal Mail winging (well, tumbling at the very least) its way to me is an Agilent/HP E5810A Ethernet/IP to IEEE-488 gateway.

Re: I went into the office for 40 years

I agree it's unfair to call children kids. The goats smell better, are cheaper and are less trouble.

Re: Heard this before somewhere

OI Montag! You forgot your Salamander!

Re: he starts his day with octopus, a bowl of ice cream, eight oatmeal biscuits, and a donut

> just before Musk pukes up a half digested tentacle.

So you're expecting Musk to bite off bits of Zuckerberg?

We prefer to think of it as a way of utilising the vigour and enthusiasm of our younger colleagues in an agile environment not driven by traditional monetary rewards rather than "child slavery".

Re: magnetic media being consumed to accommodate thousands of copies of The Smiths latest album

Given that all Smiths and Morrisey songs are the same, how would they tell? At least the de-dup algorithms could reduce the whole ouvre to one file.

Re: Call me a nasty minded old cynic, but...

Or as Jim Hacker put it in Yes Minister: "I make a point of never believing any political rumours until they have been officially denied.".

Re: Not the right solution

Being distracted by phones and whatever already happens with non-autonomous trucks. A high proportion of truck "accidents" are down to drivers playing with phones and the like.

The risks with a "minder" of an autonomous truck and a the driver of a non-autonomous truck are probably similar in terms of driver conscientiousness and probably slightly tipped in the favour of the "minder" being likely to be less fatigued than a driver.

Re: Good.

If you think their customers are suffering you should see what their staff have to put up with. Vodafone have "big company disease" in spades. If they make those 11,000 redundancies in middle management then nobody will notice the loss in headcount. In fact most probably afterward more work will get done faster and with less hassle. Most of Vodafone's output is meetings on Teams.

Re: Deja vu all over again

Having experienced the delights of teams, I'd pay it!