Posts by Old Shoes 36 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Apr 2016
The conclusion for Altman and others crying about the risk of AI was, and always has been since the start, “this stuff is dangerous … so let me write the rules to stop anyone else from competing with me”.
OpenAI loves their own AI.
They just don’t like anyone else.
We have quite a large amount of code that is technically perfect:
Short functions
Lambda expressions
<80 character lines
No statement exceeds five lines
Packaged into reusable libraries
It’s a nightmare. Atrocious. Terrible. Unmaintainable. It does mystery stuff that you need to step through, dozens of layers deep, to figure out what it’s doing.
Please, just for once, give me a 15 line function instead of 8 x 2-line functions and properties.
You have reminded me of a time where we had representatives from multiple departments on a Root Cause Analysis conference call.
As a number of departments were based in Chennai and it was scheduled during their daytime we ended up with four people named “Bala Subramanian” on the phone call.
When assigning follow up actions we had to identify them by department and their numeric staff ID.
Some of these robots are common to see around, depending when you were walking through the place.
I see the author is, thankfully, unfamiliar with the KKH Women and Children’s Hospital. There are at least two robot systems there. One is on rails on the ceiling, scuttling around delivering prescriptions to different counters for staff to dispense, much like a pneumatic tube system except without the tubes.
The other system is quite like the Grab kitchen, where a cart with red warning lights will carry trays and trays of food to the service lift, take the lift up to its desired floor, and then bumble around in the service corridor to await a human to distribute the food. They were so precise in their bumbling that they had worn wheel track marks into the linoleum.
I think we have met. You installed my TV!
Three blokes, very professional, matching company polo shirts. Marched in with the TV and broad smiles. Penciled out the marks on the wall where the bracket would go. Giant power drill to blast into the concrete.
“Hold on a moment,” I said. This penciled in hole is directly above the power point. “You’re going to hit the cable feeding that power point.”
“No problem,” the foreman replied. “Circuit breaker.”
Sure, that’ll save your life, but I’ll have a dead power point and fixing a busted cable inside a solid concrete wall will not be easy. I convinced him to wait long enough for me to find the builder (he was at another unit downstairs) and confirm that the power was not fed from above the fitting.
A job well done.
Getting geographically separate routes is difficult and time consuming as there are often layers and layers of companies renting from one another.
I have two internet connections. They are theoretically distinct as each is bought from one of the three largest companies in the market. Company A's service is provided on a leased fibre from Company C who then muxes it and backhauls it on their larger fibre to the next large city. Company B theoretically has their own microwave links and separate Northbound and Southbound copper backhaul. FOUR independent ways to get my data to the Internet!
Here's the surprise: in a cost saving measure Company B has thrown away their Northbound and Southbound copper and now leases a single fibre from Company C. Yes, the very same Company C that provides my primary connection.
I know this because some joker put a spade through the fibre they both use. And no, I checked, and I'm not one of the half dozen almost identical stories also in this comment section.
If I may introduce you to `find | xargs` it may save you some time at a later date.
`find . -type f -delete`
That will delete all files in this directory and sub-directories.
`find . -type f -print0 | xargs -r0 rm -v --`
That will delete all files in this directory and sub-directories, using `rm` which I've also set to announce which files it is (or isn't) deleting.
You are correct. A company cannot force you to not earn a wage for 18 months.
They either need to pay you for the duration of the non-compete - ensure this is written in the contract - or they need to not enforce it. And also, it's possible to get the non-compete waived depending on how well you get on with your former employer.
I've seen people jump to a competitor. Some former bosses are fine. Some former bosses are vindictive and try to enforce the non-compete. Bluffs were called. Lawyers were called in. Clauses were found to be unenforceable. Money changed hands. Hundreds of staff were presented with new contracts to sign the next month.
It does happen. The company you exited will pay your gardening leave. You just need to ensure it is in the contract *before* you sign it. (Putting things in the contract before signing seems to be the difficult part here.)
I've seen a 6 month non-compete where the previous company will pay 3 months wages.
Also, if you're a hot enough commodity that you have over a year of non-compete (wowza!) then it's likely that the company you're going to will pay you a signing bonus and advance you your salary to tide you over. By the time you've got that much of a non-compete you have a cushion to survive it. I'm still at the 6 month gardening leave level but at my previous role was only at a 3 month leave level.
Many of the amazing AI advances in recent years just have poorly paid workers in cheap locations pawing through your data.
Expensify could magically tabulate your receipts. They were just flogging it out to fellow humans on Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Spinvox was using the power of AI to turn your voicemail messages into texts that could be discretely read, using human workers. (19 years later another startup called "Vxt" is recreating the same idea.)
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/29/spinvox_mechanical_turk/
There's a tiny robot that drives around Berkeley doing deliveries. Kiwibot drivers are sitting in Colombia.
This annoyed me because while my network setup here is quite resilient, after a short Internet outage the WiFi will disappear.
Turns out there is an option: "Uplink Connectivity Monitor"
I thought this was just to rearrange the network topography in case the WiFi mesh was having issues, but I was wrong.
Symptoms of the WhatsApp outage smelt like they were using portions of the same infrastructure. Pure text messages would send, but image uploads would take a long time before failing. This is as though they were being uploaded to some Facebook image store that was not responding.
This was also the symptom of when the Chinese government was trying to stop certain photos of Winnie the Pooh being uploaded on WhatsApp. They just blocked any uploads of approximately the same size.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/18/china_censorship_includes_images_in_transit/
Facebook is getting to the point where it is critical infrastructure as an identity provider and phone company.
Because of the network effect it really depends on your friends, but there are clusters of my friends who only communicate or do business via WhatsApp and others who only know how to contact each other on Facebook. And that includes not just short text messages but also voice calls, video calls, voice messages, photographs, etc.
Many years ago when I got DSL it was on a promotion with "unlimited data for 6 months". At the end of 6 months the used bandwidth totals were still 0. Emboldened I would download more and more.
One day the ISP fixed the metering and I discovered a wonderfully high bandwidth bill as I had consumed many many times my allowance. I rang the phone company and was able to negotiate my way onto a higher tier with a larger allowance and they kindly back-dated the plan change - saving me thousands.
That would be the end of the story except the next month my account was still on the low tier and the charges had not been reversed and I still had a massive (and now overdue) bill. I rang back, somehow got the same customer service rep, who then informed me that as he had been updating my account his computer crashed and he lost the change. He again back-dated my plan change, applied the credit, etc, and I was saved from Debtors Prison.
In the time taken to turn on my phone at the airport and find the name of the preferred network operator my BlackBerry managed to run up $40 worth of roaming charges. The company's preferred network operator would have been free, but the name was in my email and the phone just connected to the first network it saw.
Back when SGI still existed we gave them, IBM, HP, and Dell a benchmark of our own to test on their proposed multi-million dollar computer. HP and Dell didn't even bother to submit a figure but just pulled out of the RFP.
IBM sent back a figure with a dollar figure they'd cut off the price.
SGI returned a giant analysis of our code with multiple suggestions for optimisation. They won my vote.
You can buy a NAS such as Synology or WDMyCloud or QNAP and their software will allow you to sync NAS to NAS. So back up your files to your local Synology, and then N minutes later, your files are also available on the remote Synology.
https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/feature/desktop_backup
Sorry if I sound like a shill. I'm an ex-CrashPlan user (R.I.P.) and I've recently made the shift to Synology. The WDMyCloud is a bit bare bones, Haven't used QNAP.
If there is any technical accuracy to what he says, this just means they've got a way to break the end point (your Android or iPhone) and then extract the SQLite database full of unencrypted messages that you've forgotten to clear.
So clear your old chats and hope that SQLite is vacuumed* before PC Plod gets his hands on your phone.
* iMessage and WhatsApp didn't in the past: https://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=6143
In this 2008 article H2O is mentioned, heralding their project, along with a comment from the recently cleared Elfred Thomas:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/08/bournemouth_fibre_city/
In this 2011 article they are mentioned as running into problems and being investigated by SFO:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/22/no_sewer_fibre_for_brisbane/
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