Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Honesty (Score 4, Insightful) 38

I'm seeing more and more references to "Honest" in AI output, or AI-related comments.

The AI didn't make an "Honest" mistake. It does not have the capacity for honesty. The output from a LLM is phrased in such a manner to provoke empathy, in a similar way to how Microsoft re-jigged all their user interaction dialogs to include "We" to soften the blow of their crappy software failing the user for the 5th time today. (Side note: "Something went wrong" is the most infuriating error message ever.)

When I ask a LLM for a code review it often blurts out "Honest note:" about some shortcomings. I don't care about "honesty". I care about safe, working, robust, code. The fact that LLMs are tripping over themselves trying to be "Honest" about mistakes in their "path of most statistics" output is a concern if you care about trying to make them operate outside their sandbox in the real world.

Yesterday Claude quoted a word in backticks during an automatic git commit and my shell escaped it tried to execute it. Luckily the word was just an English word with nothing matching in my path. But this is basic, basic, basic stuff. It's been committing things to git ever since it was built, and yet, it keeps tripping over itself. In my code one of the tests keeps failing due to seed data timestamps not lining up with the datetime the test was run. I can see that. Every time Claude runs the tests, it burns up tokens going, "Oh this particular test failed I'll just dig into things and see what's going on, **$$**$$**$$** oh it's just a timestamp issue". Never once does it commit that to its memory file, so eventually I told it to remove the test, and it just added a comment to it saying "Ignore this test due to timestamp misalignment", which it could have done the very first time, if it actually had a brain.

LLMs are a very handy tool if used right. I can get huge chunks of boilerplate code out of them with just a few sentences and that's great when I'm hashing out a concept. But to promise the world (and your investors) that LLMs are ready to replace people out in the real world, where "Honest Mistakes" have Real World Repercussions, that's outright fraud at this stage.

Comment Re:Archiving data (Score 1) 67

> It will randomize over a surprisingly short time if it doesn't have power for data maintenance.

If you plug in a USB stick, you just power up the controller and the flash memory chip. You have to read everything and write everything to charge the cells back up again, there is no background refresh going on like in DRAM.

Comment So *NOT* vaccines. (Score 1) 52

How does a society treat its citizens, specifically parents and children?

Autism -- is human psychology being maladaptive because of this situation. Parents aren't there for their children to imprint-upon. The psychological distress is real. Depersonalization is a result.

This depersonalization happening during acute childhood development phases, exacerbates the problem of social disengagement.

People should be treated as people, not chattel.

Comment Re:Would a Spar be Repairable? (Score 1) 61

Woah... Dumb question, but would a wing spar be repairable or replaceable?

Coward said, because when the wing falls off at 30,000 feet, rest assured - it's okay, because Airbus has good documentation. All fixed.

No, of course a broken spar is A Very Bad Thing when it happens in midair.

Is this changing-the-timing-chains-in-an-Audi difficult, or is this replacing-your-spinal-cord-without-killing-you impossible?

Are these planes repairable? I think it's a reasonable question.

(Of course, with the Audi, if has anything more than a loose gas cap it's not economically feasible to repair, but that's what you get with European engineering.)

Comment Author seems unclear on music technology. (Score 3, Informative) 19

"Despite the limitations of the 1993-era sound card drivers,"

The Gravis Ultrasound ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), as well as other soundcards which *USED WAVETABLE SYNTHESIS* were available.

Yeah, FM-synthesis sounds like a robot. The SNES SPC-7000 was wavetable. The Sega Genesis used a Z80 for FM synthesis. A GUS card was supperior to the SPC-7000.

If you want to know how good the music is, either run DOOM in DOSBOX with a correct GUS Wavetable patch set (which will let you know how *ACTUALLY GOOD* the music is). Alternatively, the Doom & Doom 2 remaster on Steam has an actual band covering the actual tracks. That also sounds awesome.

Lol; I guess the author wasn't aware of the state of the art in 1993 if that's what they wrote.

Comment YouTube Audio Quality - Bad Production (Score 1) 100

It's just that the entire YouTube is appallingly bad.

A lot of the audio production in individual videos is really bad. This isn't anything to do with YouTube per se, not their compression algorithms or other features. A lot of YouTubers have absolutely no concept of microphone placement, of using audio compression, of reducing background noise. All of which are things which will drastically affect audio quality and the ability of a speech-to-text model to create subtitles.

It would be nice if YouTube would normalize all the uploaded videos to one set standard. Note I'm not suggesting that they compress the videos as that might change the intended presentation of professional audio productions. I just mean peak-finding normalization which could be implemented losslessly and without breaking existing video links.

Having said that, when I look at my own channel - and I am not claiming to have great audio; I have a host which would destroy a lavalier microphone in mere seconds. YouTube's subtitling is really good. It automatically switches between English and French and Hebrew, and even with a fair bit of background noise (welding, grinding, cooking, crowd noise, music) it generally gets the text correct. So I don't know what the original complaint is, except that it's not perfect. Well, guess what, neither is human hearing. How about that famous Jimi Hendrix line, "Excuse me while I kiss this guy."

Comment Re:My home network is nearly pure IPv6 (Score 1) 73

To me the hoops that smoothbrains will jump through to avoid IPv6 and stay on legacy IPv4, especially when hosting, is pathetic. NAT, port forwarding, tunnels, blah blah blah blah.

I have something like ~1.2 trillion times the number of routable addresses that the entire IPv4 space has. Not all are reachable, of course, just the services that need incoming access and they're each on their own isolated DMZ.

Comment My home network is nearly pure IPv6 (Score 1) 73

Started the move about 18 months ago when I decided to get off my lazy ass. My ISP gives out a /56 prefix, so that lets me run 256 /64 subnets/VLANs in the house, currently there are ~10 in use. Everything get a GUA through SLAAC and I use RAs (Router Advertisements) to give ULAs to everything. Any external facing services get their own VLAN and /64 for the system(s) as needed. Firewall blocks all incoming as they usually do by default and I punch a hole for the external-facing systems. They can't reach back into the network, they only answer the phone. All the systems update DNS dynamically if the prefix or full address ever change.

I have an SSH bastion set up. In all this time there has not been a single SSH attempt from the internet. On IPv4 it was constant background noice.
For those legacy IPv4-only systems on the internet, I set up NAT64. I have an IoT VLAN and IoT 2.4 GHz wireless network that are only IPv4 because a lot of IoT network stacks are junk.

I'm still farting around with it, but man oh man, there's no way I'd go back to IPv4. It was one of the best moves I've done in ages.

Comment All war is for control of land and resources (Score 2) 49

When humans have wars, it is always over land and resources. With these chimps, it is probably the same. The land is overpopulated, and there are no longer enough resources to go around. They will kill each other until the ones strong enough to survive have the land and resources and the rest are dead.

Comment Yep (Score 1) 186

The UHF app on our Apple TVs & iOS devices and the UHF Server in Docker to act as a PVR gives us everything for a few $ a month paid in crypto.
We haven't had cable since ~1999-2000. Downloading and the *arrs have kept us happy, but the better half wanted to check out some live sports. So IPTV it was.

Comment Re:Calling it a lead is very generous (Score 1) 28

I've used Claude at home for ages. Work was wanting to get some AI stuff for us and the only 'blessed' one is CoPilot. Everything else it blocked. All senior management seems to know about AI is "Hurrr... Copilot and ChatGPT."

Out team of ~8 (pentestesting & VA) were unanimous about Copilot being crap and Claude being the top dog. So some higher ups OK'd a Claude Teams package for work. To bypass the CorpSec tards, we use it from our lab environment that has its own unmonitored link and IP range.

Anthropic/Claude is just so far ahead of OpenAI/ChatGPT and MS/Copilot it's not funny.

Slashdot Top Deals

The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it. -- Anthony Burgess

Working...