Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: Marvelous

Bullshit Bingo will become too easy. We'll need a new game :-(

Re: What is not on the Internet cannot be used as AI/ML input to produce "scholarly" papers

IIRC, there was a big hoo-hah over Google scanning stuff and making it or excerpts available that was in copyright. I very much doubt they deleted everything. They will have complied with the law in public, but what they are doing behind closed door is possibly another matter with regard to using datasets for training.

Re: ChatGPT - Hmm

"Lack of learning: Using AI to generate essays does not allow students to develop their own skills and knowledge. Instead, it promotes a reliance on technology and shortcuts, rather than encouraging students to think critically and engage with the material."

Yes, that was my thought too. It's all well and good saying students can learn to write better essays by revising and editing an AI generated one, but will they really learn the subject better if they don;t write the original before reaching the revising and editing stage? Most subjects are not actually about the writing unless they are studying the language or literature or the "arts" in general in the first place. The act of planning it out and actually writing/typing it out helps set the facts and other information in the brain and allows for processing the information at a lower rate, revising and editing internally as you go along. Being a good communicator is, of course, part of most subjects where essays or presentations are required, but that is subsidiary to the actual course content.

There was also a point made in the article about spelling. It's not taught so much because people have spell checkers. Yeah, that's blindingly obvious from many writings on the internet in general and "social media" in particular where people either don't have a spell checker or don't bother to take the time to use one.

Re: Appropriate use?

"there is zero chance I'd ever be using FSD in a tunnel. "

Yeah, that struck me as odd too. Also the suggestion the Tesla made one or more "unsafe" lane changes, which I'd not expect a Tesla on FSD to do (although I have no experience with the system). Part of Teslas automation includes GPS, which tends not work in tunnels and AIUI, this was a big, long tunnel.

"If necessary, tap the brakes to wake them up"

And if that doesn't work, wash their windscreen for them. After they get the overspray from my screen washers a few times, they almost always back off :-)

(not so useful on rainy days, of course :-))

Re: FSD ≠ Autonomous

"The highway code is not the law."

Sort of true. It's a plain English interpretation of the law and generally accepted as "the law". If you have a dispute over it, you can go to the statute books for the definitive definition and if necessary, get lawyers and a judge involved if you feel really strongly about it. But odds are that a judge will point to The Highway Code and suggest you go read it again.

"Many of the rules in The Highway Code are legal requirements, and if you disobey these rules you are committing a criminal offence. You may be fined, given penalty points on your licence or be disqualified from driving. In the most serious cases you may be sent to prison. Such rules are identified by the use of the words ‘MUST/MUST NOT’. In addition, the rule includes an abbreviated reference to the legislation which creates the offence.

Although failure to comply with the other rules of The Highway Code will not, in itself, cause a person to be prosecuted, The Highway Code may be used in evidence in any court proceedings under the Traffic Acts to establish liability. This includes rules which use advisory wording such as ‘should/should not’ or ‘do/do not’.

Re: Rear end equals fault of car in back?

"is the blame really solely assigned to the car in the back in the UK?"

Absent any other evidence or offences, generally yes. Although if it's a no injury bump, odds are the Police will take no further action and write it up as "insurance companies to deal with it".

Re: FSD ≠ Autonomous

That sounds like it could be fun drinving around the country roads of Cornwall :-)

Re: FSD ≠ Autonomous

As I am in the market for a new(er) car in the next 12 months, I've very greatful for this and similar comments on what to watch out for what to ask about and what to check for on any vehicle that I may be interested in. To date, my only gripe with "automation" I've experienced has been fucking stupid automatic headlights that come on far too early, never ever automate sidelights which would more appropriate and always default back to auto when you start the engine. I wasn't aware of auto-braking and lane-keeping being things that might default to on.

Re: Capable of driving a car as well as a human?

"a minimum 23 metre gap"

A strange number. Until you convert to imperial and realise that 23 metres is an approximation of 75 feet, a relatively "round" number :-)

Re: Hmmmmmmm

"its a co-operative activity and still relies on the behaviours of humans "

In particular at some junctions where eye contact, politeness and sometimes self-preservation are what decides who goes first. We've probably all seen the various videos showing self-driving cars get completely stumped by some junctions, the locations and movement of other vehicles and, of course, unexpected roadworks. Self-driving cars, as they are now, could really only work if all the other cars are also self-driving AND they ALL communicate with each other, whatever the brand, with standard and open protocols, not all using proprietary and patented systems and protocols. On that note, do Teslas within range of each other talk to each other and cooperate or are they all acting independently? Tesla like to talk up how one cars experience and "learning" is passed on to all other Teslas. I wonder how true that is and how/when that "knowledge" is aggregated and passed on?

Re: Hmmmmmmm

Well John, I suggest that you try braking hard in a tunnel for no reason, and see if the beak lets you off the dangerous driving charge because "the cars following me shouldn't have hit me"

At this stage, you are assuming the Tesla braked "for no reason". Maybe it did, maybe it didn't. If it was for no real reason, then the Tesla drive bears some responsibility of course, but the following drivers who then hit him and each other are ALSO due charges for dangerous driving because, as stated many times above, they were driving too close to stop in time. Maybe the Tesla braked hard because something fell off of a vehicle in front, tyre tread tearing off a truck, badly loaded items, wear and tear causing something to fall off, some twat throwing rubbish out the window. We don't know yet, but you are assuming the Tesla or the Tesla driver did something wrong.

And yes, some of us DO drive with a safe stopping distance in front of us. Those of us driving 1000+ miles per week are fully aware of written stopping distances and actual stopping distances, ie it's very, very rare for the vehicle(s) in front to come to a sudden and abrupt stop so take that and conditions into account. IME, most drivers are sensible and careful, but there are so many out there that it only takes a small percentage to make it seem worse than it is. And we always remember the idiots who do stupid things because they are the exceptions. We rarely take note of or remember the 1000's of other drivers we saw that day who caused no issues.

Re: Nothing new.

"Magnetic confinement still seems to be the more scalable option."

Agreed. That's I left myself a get out clause with "Or whatever method is used" :-)

Merry Crimbo!

Eliza has done that for decades!!

The only remaining problem is while the "sophisticated pattern matching" is analysing the fuckton of data, how do we tell if the AI is badly programmed and is missing some of the patterns we really need to know about? Designer/programmer bias is a real issue in cases like this.

Re: Nothing new.

"What everybody seems to have ignored about that gain of about enough energy to boil 3 kettles is the single use fuel capsules are hand made in gold and cost about $10,000 each."

True, but then the early internal combustion engines were hand made, didn't work all that well and only the very, very rich could afford to build a car around them. Fusion isn't even at that stage yet, but cars are affordable for many, many people these days. If and/or when sustained fusion reactions become possible, the infrastructure for making the fuel pellets or whatever method is used then will become a mass production problem, not a hand crafted, one at a time operation.

Re: Advetising is grossly overestimated

"More of a mokapot and supermarket ground coffee to start the day myself."

Oh yes, to be clear, proper coffee at home. It's a bit more of a faff on the road though, so instant in those cases.

Re: Advetising is grossly overestimated

"the drip of subscriptions,"

The funniest one is when marketing uses phrases like "less than the price of a cup of coffee per day" to equate to cheap. But they mean the price of a Starbucks "coffee" at £2+ per day. Well, no. My coffee costs a lot less than that because i make my own coffee. I take a flask of hot water and some instant for on the road. That's a saving to me in the order of £300 per year for each of those "less than the price of a coffee per day" deals. £60 per year for each of "less than the price of a coffee per week" subscriptions too. The steady drip of "low cost" subscriptions very quickly add up to a significant amount of money per year.

Re: Serves Google right

Yes, it's all well and good saying that Google are operating 1.8B gmail accounts, but I wonder what proportion are actual used accounts? I have a gmail account because I have to have one on my phone. It's a work phone and the gmail account is only there because it's "essential" to the operation of Android and the play store. I don't think I ever use it as an actual email account, I've certainly never given it out as a point of contact to anyone. I'd have to go into the account settings just find out what the email address is, never mind what the password is. It may be written down in the little black book in the attic/computer room/man-cave :-) That's probably the same for a significant number of users.

Re: rebooting the system

The most recent one I remember is "disable the WiFi system", which could mean about five different things but could not mean what they wanted to say, which was "disconnect this USB-C cable which connects to a dock which has an ethernet cable connected to it"

"Users" seem to be regressing in their understanding of technical terms. "WiFi" means any and all forms of network connection to so many these days, be that Ethernet, actual WiFi or a mobile phone data connection on 3/4/5G :-/

Re: The all eggs in one basket problem...

in this instance, the sensitive data, ie the usernames/passwords, are only centralised if you choose that option. Otherwise that data is scattered across all the websites you use them on :-)

Except they are also centralised in your head/notebook/whatever :-)

Re: The cloud is just someone else's computer

"Very few of the outsourced HR sites are tied to your corporate login, for the excellent reason that they're legally obliged to give you access to your electronic payslips and the like for several years after you've left the company."

Are they? We changed providers for payroll a while back and were all sent repeated emails reminding us to download all our payslips and P60's etc before the switch as we'd no longer have access afterwards. I doubt anyone who had left the company in the meantime were told of that.

Re: Someone Else's Password

Agreed, you don't need to fully understand how a tool works to use it. But having a least a basic understanding of the principles the tool is based on goes a long way to understanding how to use the tool properly and look after it. Like knowing the basics of clutch plates helps understand how not to burn out the clutch. Or how an LCD panel is made of layers and so realising just how delicate they can be, resulting in fewer broken laptop screens :-)

Re: Someone Else's Password

I also did O level Computer Studies within a year or two of it first appearing as an official O level and the exam was a lot more than "colour in the the picture of the minicomputer". Maybe it was different exam boards, but what we did was proper Computer Studies with actual logic gate type questions and other real computer related stuff so long ago I don't remember now, a programming element completed as part of the course work in advance of the actual exam. Likewise the A level I did afterwards, the first year out school/exam board offered it. And that was hard too.

Re: And the operators that allowed the spoofing?

"so the phone company not only knows who actually made the call"

A lot of the calls came from out of country. CallerID may be "genuine" (or missing) by the time it reaches US jurisdiction and the only thing the US carrier knows is the originating foreign telco and the destination. Sometimes, it's not even intentional.

I remember an occasion many years ago when Telewest/Blueyonder (now Virgin Media) were routing "local" UK calls via the Netherlands for some reasons (cost? trunk failure?) so UK/UK calls on the same network looked like they were international calls (but not charged as such) and even caused some issues with their own dial-up internet since only their own network customers got the "free" calls to the PoPs.

And nowadays, with most of the phone network being digital, at least on the trunk side of the exchange, how a call is routed is probably very different, routing based on economy rather than any other metric. I bet even in the US it's not unusual for calls to be routed via Canadian or Mexican networks where it's cheaper for the carrier.

Re: We need to go beyond fines

"Aiding and abetting" is already a crime, so that part shouldn't be too difficult.

"5 billion calls? -> then the fine is $1.00 for every call call made, with the money going to the called parties."

Well, for most victims, that will only be a $ or 2. The admin cost would be silly. Better to make the guilty party personally call at each victims home address and personally hand over the compensation and apologise. They can wait at each door until the get an answer too. Once they complete that task, only THEN do they start the prison sentence.

(With thanks to Douglas Adams for creating the character whose mission was to personally insult every living being in the universe for inspiring the above idea)

Re: Spliff

Is that the same team of engineers who came up with the idea of, "yeah, it'll scream through the atmosphere at interplanetary speed, slow down enough for parachutes to be deployed (Yeah guys, I know how thin the atmosphere is, bear with me), then, a few hundred feet before it crashes into the ground, we drop it!! But, wait for it guys, the bit we drop has ROCKETS on it and it'll hover about 30 feet from the ground and lower the rover on a rope to the ground!"

Rest of team: whoaaaa, shit man, can we have some of what you're smoking?

Re: Covered by dust storms

If this was a film or TV show, or even a documentary with a CGI simulation, those sample tubes would have a strobe flash and beeping sound with no indication of how they are going to be powered for a decade or more, not to mention the problems of transmitting the beeps through the near vacuum of the Martian atmosphere :-)

Re: liicences, nor licenses

After all, the BBC don't use "Prime Minister" when talking about the leader of the Irish Parliament. They use the Irish words for Prime Minister and Parliamnet and put the English translation in brackets. Likewise, the Register article about the Indian Manned space programme also use the Indian word for Parliament and then tell us native English speakers that it mean Parliament. So if they can localise for other nationalities, why not for all nationalities?

I assume at some stage we'll all have to call the Indian astronauts by the local Indian designation the same way space articles always differentiate between "western"[*] Astronauts, Russian Cosmonauts and Chines Taikonauts.

* I say "western" because English language media never tells us what the local language words are for the various other nationalities who have been to space are.

Re: I'm confused by all this... @xyz

That brought a tear to my eye, especially as I'm reading it on a Friday evening with a pint of beer in my LOHAN glass tankard :-/

"So if she isnt working on the case are they trawling the companies websites for profiles, or is there some StalkBook / Linked in mining & matching going on here??"

I wonder if this would be a GDPR issue in the UK or EU? Mis-use of personal data collected without consent?