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Comment I have had to write upgrade manuals (Score 1) 60

multiple times. A database management utility needs to be installed on junior admin's machine, each time team staff rolls over.The app needs a recent JRE. Same for overseas end user who needs it for an integration. They either don't have Java at all or have an older version, invariably. Even people who should be responsible don't know how to upgrade Java, and maybe they have to go through a bureaucracy to do so. It is messy.

Comment Appeared in ribbon without asking for it! (Score 1) 30

Office 365 (Excel) on a Mac. I had the Claude add-in in the ribbon. Today I discovered a Copilot add-in has been inserted to its immediate left. (I renewed my subscription but was unable to easily find a way to cancel and renew without Copilot like last year.)

When I decrease window width first Claude starts to disappear and Copilot icon becomes mini-sized, but Claude is not shown below it. Add-Ins ribbon button shows My Add-Ins with only Claude in it, Copilot not displayed.

In Preferences, select Copilot > Click the disable checkbox. Copilot ribbon icon dims and presumably will disappear on app restart according to MS.

Comment Re:Al skills? (Score 1) 160

p.s. I should mention the most popular related topic, what are called "AI hallucinations". It is kind of like a primitive brain, that grasps for concepts and then believes they are real, like citing a research paper that doesn't exist with a made-up title. Also things can creep into its "mind", a popular anecdote is telling an image drawing AI system "draw a room without any elephants in it". You will often get a picture of a room with many cute elephant images worked into the corners, in the drapes, the rug, on a shelf, in a picture frame on the wall. So yeah, it can be exciting but also a bit much!

Comment Re:Al skills? (Score 2) 160

Is there anything in this world you can say that about? Short answer: AI can be really powerful for some things but has some glaring weaknesses too. It is not a mature discipline. It has a limited reasoning capability and is heavily dependent on the amount (cost) of processing power thrown at it. It can make bone-headed mistakes unintentionally like forget things that scrolled past out of its context window, fail basic arithmetic, be drawn into conflicts with hidden directives from the vendor, lie when stressed, skip Excel rows to save time or sprint past chapters because it is tedious (happened to me), etc. Takes a ton of baby-sitting. But, if you understand how to handle it, you can get some impressive results. The problem is that people who don't know how to handle it get results that **look** good but have subtle stupid mistakes baked in, plus they stop exercising their brains which then atrophy. Fun times! :)

Comment Paywalled, here is an article about TFA (Score 3, Interesting) 211

https://webs.uab.cat/saramarti...

While the author raises some good points, there are also problems. AI is apparently a major way to cheat but as a recent innovation it seems to me the lack of a rigorous education with proficiency testing during COVID when these students should have been gaining skills is more likely an issue. I wonder if a lowered attention span learned from addictive social media and a general increase in attention needed to digest more disparate pieces of information these days (whether news, entertainment, or whatever) may be erasons that students lack skills normally required at college level and have a lack of attention span. The above article suggests that rather than not being able to read, students are not willing to put in the effort to digest difficult topics. It might be due to not being native English speakers in this case so I'd say more testing is needed.

Comment Re:Everyone knows Meta = Facebook (Score 1) 60

> Meta doesn't really know how to do anything else with any skill.

They don't know how to do Facebook very well either: it's been pretty much stagnant and enshittified to death for the past 22 years, and it feels like a forum for greying people whose greying friends haven't bothered to move on either, or to get the date of the next annual meeting of the bridge club.

Comment Oh yeah, Shutterstock... (Score 1) 17

one of those companies whose sole purpose seems to be annoying you by slapping their name as a watermark on a generic image you'd like to use in a meme, and force to spend 10 seconds finding somewhere else because you were never going to pay a stupid company to remove their mark on a bad picture you can find everywhere.

I wonder how those companies still exist, let alone make any money.

Anyway, the modern way to use copyrighted photos for free is to ask stable diffusion to regenerate it, because the AI companies have done all the data stealing for you and repackaged the stolen data into "models" you can use for free.

Comment Could be competing with their photographers (Score 1) 17

I used to work for a stock photo library. My 5 second research on shutterstock says they provide royalty-free and perpetual licenses which is pretty different from the kind of high end agency that represents photographers. This one seems to aim at the low end and if they are offering AI-generated photos (tldr) it is in direct competition with a photographer they represent, unless they are actually selling a license to his/her photo along with offering some AI manipulations of it like maybe cutting an athlete out of a stadium photo instead of requiring the creative to snip it out with an AI-powered magic wand tool or whatever. I don't really know what the market is like now but there used to be a lot of stock with simple geometric shapes, others were based on science images like Science Photo Library. It would be relatively easy to use AI to "make a new photo in the style of this photo". I think if they do that it would be a derivative work too.. hope they don't.

Comment Re:B-b-b-but CHINA!!! (Score 1) 83

Or...I posted from a stupid device that replaced the standard ASCII 0x22 quote character with UTF U+201C & U+201D quote characters and replaced standard apostrophes with U+2019 "right single quotation mark" characters. It's what I get for trying for Frosty Piss and posting from my phone instead of waiting until I was at a computer that doesn't do that stupid shit.

Also, it sure would be nice if /. would let a user EDIT a fucking comment after the fact.

Comment B-b-b-but CHINA!!! (Score 2, Insightful) 83

Okay, seriouslyâ¦âoh no! See how amazing our AI is?! China is trying to get you! Theyâ(TM)re coming for us because our AI is THE BEST!â

This guy needs to fuck right off. Everybody hates all this AI bullshit and nobody wants giant GPU farms sucking up all the water and electricity in their neighborhood. Fuck China too. Itâ(TM)s entirely possible for people to hate AI without Chinese propaganda.

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