palordrolap

not sure what they’re trying to do here

Maximise profits and minimise losses. My guess is that someone important at Microsoft thinks that this will do just that, and if not that, will make them, personally, a lot of money. That person has no-one who will dare challenge their authority and so we go down this road.

They (that individual or Microsoft as a whole) almost certainly have a stake in the companies that provide newer hardware, and if they didn’t before this decision, they will have by now.

It theoretically makes Micosoft’s job easier too. A huge chunk of backwards compatibility maintenance goes out of the window, if you’ll pardon the pun.

“Oh you have 5 year old hardware? We don’t support that.”

Sounds fairly similar to Apple’s business model if you think about it that way.

Current AIs often suffer from what’s sometimes called “the strawberry problem” and can be easily confused into doing mathematics incorrectly. There’s also the human element of “if it comes out of a computer it must be right”, forgetting the “garbage in = garbage out” principle.

The strawberry problem is a colourful name for the fact that LLMs turn sentences into something else internally and can’t then go back and re-examine the input to make checks and comparisons. Thus if you ask an LLM how many 'r’s are in the word “strawberry”, it often gives the wrong answer, unless it has been explicitly told what the right answer is. And now you have no idea what else it has and hasn’t been told is right and wrong.

As for mathematics, they have to be explicitly programmed to be able to use a proper calculator if they’re to do mathematics correctly. Otherwise you’ll get something that looks good enough to fool someone who doesn’t know any better.

LLMs are basically lossy compressions of knowledge. At a high level of abstraction, the creation of an LLM is fairly similar to how a raw image is turned into a JPEG*. There’s a necessary, deliberate bottleneck in the creation process that keeps the size down, and that’s going to show up in the output if you look closely.

Using the output of an LLM is a bit like editing the JPEG rather than the raw image. Some of the things you do will invariably enhance those artefacts.

For a JPEG that’ll do nothing worse than make an image “deep-fried” or otherwise ugly. Put an LLM in charge of people’s lives and it’ll do the same to them.

* JPEG has a lossless encoding variant, but that’s not the right analogy here.

I can imagine that works well. Once.

Typing in a box on a website provided by someone else can be done by practically anyone, even the boss themselves at a pinch. Heck, some of them love doing that.

Maintaining a server (or a service on a server) requires someone with more skills, which generally costs more money.

Yeah, but then they have to pay someone to maintain it. And low though that cost may be, it’s precisely the sort of thing that C-levels like to cut when they feel like pretending that they actually do something.

It’s a hard thing for a C-level’s ego to set something up that they know someone else is going to cut later, or worse that they might be the one to “have to” cut it.

As slurs go it’s pretty low tier. A bit like the French calling the English “rosbifs”, if they even still do that.

They should be using tablets. Wax tablets. It was good enough for my great-to-the-nth-grandfather, so it’s good enough for kids today.

Geolocation is done by IP address if nothing else is available. It’s not exact, but if, for example, you use a US-based internet provider, all their customer IP exit points will already be marked as US-based, and any access from one of those to a Google service will get the new name.

And it may yet swing back the other way.

Twenty or so years ago, there was a brief period when going full AMD (or AMD+ATI as it was back then; AMD hadn’t bought ATI yet) made sense, and then the better part of a decade later, Intel+NVIDIA was the better choice.

And now I have a full AMD PC again.

Intel are really going to have to turn things around in my eyes if they want it to swing back, though. I really do not like the idea of a CPU hypervisor being a fully fledged OS that I have no access to.

I remember making one of those.

It had a faux URL bar at the top of both the left and right frame and used a little JavaScript to turn each side into its own functioning browser window. This was long before browser tabs were a mainstream thing. At the time, relatively small 4:3 or 5:4 ratio monitors were the norm, and I couldn’t bear the skinny page rendering at each side, so I gave it up as a failed experiment.

And yes I did open it inside itself. The loaded pages were even more ridiculously skinny.

Why did you cross out a word and then write a synonym right afterwards? I’d put an /s here, but well…

When politicians talk about “the country”, whatever country they happen to be in charge of, they almost always mean the parts of the country that they think are important to the total exclusion of everything else. Or what they’ve been bribed to think of as important. Either way, that usually means “the rich, the important, and their agendas”.

Likewise “the economy” is “the rich people’s yacht fund”.

(This latter one I stole from a viral tweet.)

If the British civil service, even operating under previous administrations, can put together a multi-functioning government domain that runs reasonably well without JavaScript, there’s no reason Google can’t continue to do the same with a ducking web search.

The former works better with JavaScript, that’s true, but it works OK without and that’s the point.

Then again, the civil service were ordered to do it largely out of spite because the government didn’t want to give the plebs any excuse for not being able to use the site.

I’m not sure how to get Google to lose the need for scripting in the same way.

There can’t be a comma missing from a motto which is itself entirely missing. They threw it in a ditch a few years ago. (I’ll be honest, I thought it had to have been at least 10 years at this point, but Wikipedia says otherwise.)

The example picture at the top of the article is weird.

The window title reads “nano” but the software running in the window is Pico, Nano’s now deprecated (and strangely-licenced) spiritual parent. Or it’s Nano hacked to have a Pico header which, while somewhat fitting with the theme, that would be even more weird.

One take I saw on it was that he has no case because the local authority were not responsible for the harm caused to him, such as it is.

Sure, he feels aggrieved because of the local authority’s refusal to accede to his demands to search the landfill, but that’s secondary. Had he never pursued it they would not have had to say no.

In his shoes, I’d be sick to my stomach every single day, but I might have given up sooner nonetheless. I’m pretty sure that due to sheer bloodymindedness he’s now in deep with various financial backers who were hoping for a return when he succeeded… and now he owes them money.

Basically, if this doesn’t stop him, I’m not sure he’ll ever stop trying.

“Oh, but officer, I was only pretending to be a criminal when I robbed that store, so it doesn’t count.”

TL;DR Only if you misunderstand the intent of the word “delete”.

In the sense of getting rid of the sites themselves, sure, that’ll never happen.

And in the sense that once you’re known to them you’ll never be forgotten, at least not without a massive lawsuit that you’ve little chance of winning, yes.

But you can ask Meta to delete your account(s) and everything visibly associated with you to the point that you no longer have a presence on any of their sites, and that’s what this article is about.

One of the reasons Meta has been creating fake AI-based accounts is because so many people are doing this and they don’t like it and want to make it look like their site is still active. Which is an excellent reason to delete your accounts, even if they weren’t also doing a bunch of other heinous things.

And you can delete the apps from your phone. You should delete your accounts first though.

Thus proving that Tencent is either stupid or is insulting our intelligence.

The blog writer got his account on SO restricted.

As I said elsewhere earlier today, the admins and mods there do not like to be told they are wrong and will shut things down fast if it starts looking like they’ve made a mistake.

Here the mistake appears to be treating Mangione’s account differently to those of other alleged and actual felons, but secondarily, taking retribution against anyone having the absolute audacity to point that out.

We should all be praising the Emperor’s new clothes and none of that truth stuff.

Need you be reminded that German carmakers were among those who rigged cars to cheat on emissions tests?

They got caught, but it proves they’ve been willing to lie and cheat and there’s no reason to believe that they’re not still willing, even if they fixed that particular problem.