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Comment Re:A year's delay? (Score 4, Insightful) 16

A year's delay?

It's August 24th right now. "February or March" is around 5 months away. Which is not a year.

For weather?

Due to weather, yes, plausibly. This is literally rocket science and weather can absolutely merit a scrub.

And lighting on the moon.

Again, this is rocket science. The rocket scientists seem to think that visible light is somehow helpful to the landing's odds of success. It passes the sniff test to me; voluntarily sacrificing such a useful spectrum seems unwise to me.

Really?

Indeed, yes. Do you have some grounds for your doubt?

Comment Re:He's right about one thing (Score 2) 118

'They were against AI, and I'm like, 'OK, you sound like the person that would have been against the drum machine when it came out.' Or synthesizers, right?"'

Yup. I prefer music made by humans, preferably with analog instruments mostly made out of wood and metal.

Nothing wrong with music made by machines if you like that sort of thing, and if you're trancing out on the dance floor it might be perfect. But that's the problem for me, it's too perfect.

Humans on analog instruments make tiny variations in rhythm, pitch, timbre, etc., that usually correspond to the emotion or intent behind the music. This creates music that breathes, that hits you on more levels than just the beat and the melody.

Yes, you can imitate that with programming or AI, but a real musician gives you a sense of the personality and mood of the performer. To me that's the good stuff.

That's interesting but drum machines and synths are still instruments in a human's hands. Think about some of Pink Floyd's early works where they used tape loops and whatnot. The automation became an instrument to incredibly ground-breaking effect. Think about the entirety of Depeche Mode's discography. Huge amounts of artificial instruments but the arrangement can be very good, and they have made new arrangements throughout the decades when touring, just like purely accoustic bands. Then there's Michael Cretu's band, Enigma, which is literally a portable sound studio, yet his stuff is quite influential and complex.

The difference in my mind is that AI isn't any of those things. It's recombinant, not creative. It will never invent... until true AI in the sense we used to use the term exists.

Comment Re: humble opinion (Score 1) 61

But task manager is for OS performance and has worked well for os performance for many years. AI is an application. So now they are adapting taskmgr to monitor application internals. Why now? Just because of AI.

Task Manager is for application performance. It tells you what resources a given task/PID/application is using. It tells you what memory usage is, CPU usage is, GPU usage is, per application. Extending this to NPU hardware is very much the purview of Task Manager.

Comment Re:humble opinion (Score 2) 61

It seems like every team in Microsoft is trying to attach AI to the part they work on whether it makes sense or not.

While that is true, it is also not what this is about.

They're expanding Task Manager to give you insight and monitoring capabilities for when AI is running. They're not injecting AI into Task Manager itself.

Comment Re:Predictions versus reality [Re:The quiet part . (Score -1) 110

Simply the Forbes link was enough to confirm this point

Nope. One link is not enough — from the very beginning I asked, that each citation consist of two links: one to the prediction being made, the other — to confirmation/discussion of it coming true. Another rule was, the two links must be at least 5 years apart.

The purpose is easy to understand. A person can privately record 20 predictions of, say, an average temperature somewhere changing from -10 to +9 degrees. Five years later one of them will have made a precise match, and Forbes will write about him. If you didn't know about his 19 other predictions, you'll be impressed... This is why I insist on the prediction to have been published — prominently — ahead of time.

you purposely ignore the arguments

Because I was not asking for arguments — I was asking for citations...

Comment Re:Investigation... (Score 1) 121

Discard the tech.

Dumb answer. Perfect shouldn't be the enemy of good enough, and a 0.02% failure rate is good enough *provided the application of additional checks and balances makes that failure rate have no consequence to the end users*

There's no such thing as perfect.

I never demanded perfection.

Worse, your qualification is meaningless. A 100% failure rate would be good enough provided additional measures that compensate for it.

This thing screws up one in every 5,000 visitors. Look up Sainsbury's. Three million customers per day. That's 600 failures per day. With around 1,500 locations, that's an average failure at every location every two to three days. Maybe that's happening when your best manager is on-hand to take a look and conclude "huh, well, this looks a lot like the known shoplifter but... well... maybe not". Or maybe that's happening in the middle of the night when your minimum-wage student decides to not serve a lawyer, doctor, or garbageman who deserves it.

A screwup once a year per location would be high. Once or twice a year for the entire chain... maybe. Maybe acceptable. But you go ahead and set your personal bar wherever you want. Until you get the cops called on you.

Comment Investigation... (Score 3, Insightful) 121

"Sainsbury's head office apologised to Arnold the next day and has paused use of its AI-assisted Facewatch technology in the store while an investigation takes place."

What investigation? It has a 0.02% failure rate, which is very, very high. End of investigation. Discard the tech.

"The incident was caused by human error, not the facial recognition technology. Customers can be reassured that the Facewatch system has a 99.98% accuracy rate, and every match is reviewed by a trained manager."

Every match may or may not be reviewed by a trained manager, but customers cannot be assured of anything except that they - per factual evidence - be wrongfully accused of wrongdoing. The incident would not have occurred had the facial recognition technology incorrectly targeted the wrong individual. The technology is the only place where blame should be assigned except for the executives who authorized its use and continue to make excuses for it.

"A Facewatch spokesperson said their technology was not at fault in this case. 'A correct alert was sent to the retailer, but was subsequently subject to human error in the way it was handled in store,' they said."

Facewatch is incorrect. Again. An incorrect alert was sent to the retailer... unless they are insisting Matt Arnold is in fact a shoplifter. There is no human error if there is no incorrect alert.

I do understand that lacking this technology, we would be solely relying on humans to notice things like repeat offenders. Same for automated license plate readers... we'd be solely relying on humans to spot, recognize, and act on suspect vehicles. But the sheer bulk of hits makes all the difference in the world. Humans will rely on the machine's judgement and the onus then shifts to the target to try to override that. If a store manager just randomly mistakes a legitimate customer for a shoplifter, it's much easier to convince them they've made a mistake.

Comment The case against Tobacco was based on "checmicals" (Score -1) 72

The case against Big Tobacco was based on the fact, that their product was actually addictive. Nicotine is not just psychologically, but chemically addictive for humans.

There is no such case against software. Against marijuana-growers — maybe, but the same actors are surprisingly quiet about that.

Facebook has been pressured earlier into spreading government propaganda and then publicly testified about this pressure. Its current troubles are much more likely to be rooted in that, than in any actual "harm to children".

Comment Re:People forgot how much Windows used to cost (Score 1) 113

I don't think my omission or your list of new features, actually makes a significant difference.

All of the new "feature" you mention, had functional equivalents back in 1998. Why should Win98 support IPv6 when that standard wasn't even released until 1998, and nobody was using it? I'd say the same for your other "more" functionality. Yes, in a pedantic way. In a practical way, those things weren't included for the same reason TVs didn't support 4K back then.

Riiiiight. New features aren't new because they didn't exist before they existed. Sure.

Comment Re:Predictions versus reality [Re:The quiet part . (Score 0) 110

You're not paying me to be your research assistant.

Voila, asking your kind of science-deniers for scientific evidence usually ends this way.

So you have not read those IPCC documents yourself — while smugly accusing me of doing "anything at all to avoid looking at" same. Take your "L" at the exit, by your left, and don't let your tail get caught in the door.

Comment Re:People forgot how much Windows used to cost (Score 1) 113

you got less functionality in the box with Win98

Did you though?

Or I should ask, is there more functionality in the box today, that we actually want?

The part of the sentence you omitted: "even if we don't necessarily like some of what's in Win11."

And yes, obviously yes. From IPv6 to NTFS to WSL to ASLR to PowerShell to inbox drivers to 64-bit memory addressing to being dramatically more stable, there's plenty we want. Maybe not every member of we but still yes.

Comment Re:People forgot how much Windows used to cost (Score 1) 113

That's the retail prices for individual "system builder" licenses - you need to work on your "Googling"

Retail and OEM are not the same thing. OEM was legally not for sale in the retail channel. It was only for system builders. Yes, you could legally buy a single but only with system components. Also yes, presumably there were bulk discounts... but those should be reasonably consistent between then and now.

Comment Re:Predictions versus reality [Re:The quiet part . (Score 0) 110

I've noticed that climate deniers are highly allergic to reading actual science

But you are not, are you? So it should be quite easy for you to provide the citations of nature and in the shape I've asked for: a prediction, and it materializing. Two separate links at least 5 years apart... With the evidence being, supposedly, so abundant, why is it so hard for you to satisfy my request?

1967, the first greenhouse effect model using detailed CO2 infrared spectra and incorporating convection and radiation

Great, what did it predict, that was not trivial and actually impactful, but precise?

here's an article from Forbes that does the same comparison

You're now offering a different link — instead of answering the follow-up question about the earlier ones — does this mean, you concede, that the links you posted earlier are not satisfying the simple rules I started with, and wish to withdraw them? I don't want to be accused of "moving the goal posts"...

P.S. Calling me "an idiot" or "denier" is not going to work :-)

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