That always got me about the supposed "innocent until proven guilty" line people love to trot out; when you can actually be locked up and punished with prison conditions sometimes based on little other than somebodies word, someone misreading a line in a database; etc.

You are then thrown in jail with all the punishments of a full on convict (a lot of cases conditions in jails are actually worse than in prison) - you wear the uniform, often your medical care is stopped, you eat only state trays, you wake up for count; you can be trapped inside this gladiator pit hoping you don't upset anyone and get a pounding; all because someone says you kind of looked like a guy they think they saw do something? You are defacto being punished before being found guilty.

Now sometimes a probable cause hearing might see you out in a couple of days but surely even a couple of days without your medicine, missing work etc is too much?
Of course the problem of - someone is suspected of a murder, evidence is good, but he hasn't had his trial yet - we can't just let them out until trial for them to flee beforehand. But isn't the case of the guy in this story (this happens thousands of times a year, this one is only notable due to the tech angle) a bit much? Was probable cause set way too easy to reach; or was the problem he didn't even get probable cause for an entire month?

Of course I realise nobody cares until it happens to them then all of a sudden it is an outrage!

Exactly. If you use Microsoft software you should expect all of the shenanigans they come up with. Obviously you must think them acceptable to continue using their software. My prime advice to users is - you cannot trust Microsoft software at all so maintain your data with that in mind.

I often sit and wiggle my mouse around in circles around things when I am bored waiting for a process to finish, or on the phone etc; does that make me the companies most productive employee?

As a sysadmin (yes nowadays, I also accept the term digital janitor, digital dogsbody, buttmonkey, handholder general) my mouse movements should show management next to nothing about how productive I am; uptime should be the marker.

I've had poor quality colleagues before try to fool management into thinking they are indespensible, why run a script and fix a problem site wide in 5 minutes before the workday begins, with nobody at all noticing and everyone thinking "that sysadmin, always sitting around doing nothing" when you can run around, fix it manually on each machine, and look the hero for the morning?

Good management should be able to spot this but we all know how rare that is, hence mouse movement strategies

The economics in the UK don't add up for me with no home charging. I can buy an ICE 1.2l second hand car for $5000 all the way down to $1500 if I needed to.
An EV costs at least $10,000 for a second hand one. Chargers near me for fast charge - 70p a KWH. So to charge a typical battery would be $60 vs $30 of fuel for the same range. Or even less range if I want to use the heater in the cold UK winter. The slower charge costs around 40p so is on price parity with gas, but I'd have to sit at a charging station for 5 hours every charge for that.
My workplace has no charging, and if it did - aren't you then beholden to that job for that perk?

For an EV to be realistic - prices at public chargers need to drop by a factor of 10. They need to be much more publically available e.g. lampost chargers (though I can't really see those working in practice when neighbours would fight over them and kids would unplug them). EV's themselves need to get cheap. I'd like a budget EV in the shape of the old 80's hatchbacks with some onboard solar panels but lets be real - they wouldn't sell because people have to buy massive SUV's to show off with instead.

Yeah, £2.5 Billion to be spent on consultants, inquiries, and management bonuses. I predict not a single MW of power will come from this.
Imagine if they spent that £2.5 Billion on a scheme for residential solar or on energy storage using technology we know works.
But it seems most western governments can't handle doing actual work, all they can do is throw massive amounts of money at companies to get very little back.

People round the world; in the workplace and more in their homes, will just be expected to use buggy software prone to crashing and messing up data; it will just be an accepted thing. The days of well made, easy to use, robust software will disappear. I wonder if we'll start seeing more things return to pen and paper as a result?

So people who don't have children or who can parent them responsibly (Device tracking on a smartphone is more than enough for any competent parent) - should be punished because some feckless parents can't parent properly? Oh Nos we all must be logged in and tracked, China style, incase some teenagers might see some boob?

This is all about tracking and censorship, nothing more. Our rulers have wanted to censor the Internet for a long time, but realized they haven't been able to do so without pushback. But now they have found the perfect excuse, their trial run in the UK worked - and now as predicted they will roll this out worldwide.

Get ready to have to be logged in with a verified ID to visit any website going forward. Hope it was worth it so your kid wouldn't go on the hub !

Pretty sure you have replied to a troll bot (someone has made a bot trained on RSilverguns posts and has let is loose on here for some reason, somebody is obviously not a fan of his left wing politics!). But Re: Nuclear - I am opposed to it in my county, the UK, for one reason - the UK Govt and our society in general it seems, has lost the ability to successfully manage large scale complicated projects. And with AI coming into the picture how do we know parts of a new plan haven't been hallicinated into existence, and the safety checkers being AI didn't spot it? Sounds a joke but with more and more insane stories (AI sentencing people to jail etc) it's not so funny any more

Any large scale complicated project requiring specialist knowledge, is almost guaranteed to double or triple its initial budget, run way behind schedule, and have all sorts of unforseen problems crop up as well. HS2, various government IT projects, I can see many instances of failure but not many if any successes.

Our govt will just tender out to the company that offers them the most incentives (corruption exists here in the UK, many of these failures you will find politicians friends and family serving on the board of these corporations) - they won't pick the most competent. Thus you will get a company that cares more for profit than safety or a good product. (Even in a non corrupt procurement this will likely be the case) BUT - even if they tried a fully state managed public sector approach - that too would likely degenerate into fiefdoms, mismanagement, politics.

A Solar or Wind Farm project is something that requires a lot less specialist knowledge, less rare overseas parts, you can do it at many different scales - distributed throughout a county at sub MW scale or multiple MW offshore, they are easy to install and maintain. With energy storage and equipment only getting cheaper (vs Nuclear which is likely to only get more expensive) - Fission is becoming like coal, a 20th century method that is now becoming obsolete. People mention "base load" but that'll disappear with better storage.

Plus to be a tiny bit on topic, with solar/wind, you are a lot less likely for some profit grubbing manager to decide - "I know, let's fire all of our nuclear monitoring technicians, and put an AI agent in charge instead! What could possibly go wrong!"

Like you said with the way our society is headed, can we even be trusted with the power of nuclear fission when some beancounter might well decide "hell a 10% chance of meltdown is worth the extra 20 mil - besides AI is the future everyone is doing it!" - and nobody in government will dare tell these people no?

In the UK at least, for a large swathe of ex mining towns, disability is basically a de facto UBI for a large amount of the population in the area. Areas like Merthyr Tydfil, which had a large mining industry which is now vanished.
You have something like 50% of the population who have been on disability for various things (mental health, something physical that is basically mild or made up) and have been this way since the 1980's - A lot of people who don't live in their middle class cuccoon "round here" will know a family where the grandfather lost their mining job and went on disability, the parents went on disability, and now their kids are on disability, and their kids now have children who are mid-way through school, getting that diagnosis, who probably won't ever see employment either.
This is something the UK govt is actually trying to fight against (the school to sickness pipeline they call it) but the UK govt isn't really what you might call competent...

Now these people are "unemployed" not necessarily "unemployable", now I don't want to call an entire group of people "low IQ" but if AI takes all of the lowest common denominator jobs, and humanoid robots come in to do shelf stacking and floor cleaning, I would move a lot of these people from "Unemployed" to "Unemployable". These are people some of whom can only operate a smartphone because of text to speech (via low IQ and failure of education). Dollar Ton is correct though that current LLM's are a joke and they won't be replacing much, but in the next 10 years, who knows.

A lot of people don't like how unfair the system is - if you can get "in the system" you can even get a vehicle provided by the state, with it often being a luxury brand (something the state again is now trying to reduce). A UBI would be a lot fairer and I bet if instead of a few families being on benefits like this everyone had a UBI, you'd see a lot more people doing part time work to top up instead of entire generations of families living on benefits. And it would help all those people who just won't get benefits too (if you're a single male, good luck. Another unfairness is people with genuine disability have to fight very hard too)

Problem is if you have a family who are used to getting free rent, a car provided at no cost, plus other paid benefits, and you replace all that with just the UBI everyone is getting which will be less, you will have problems. But that will be part of working out the system!

Are you sure? I am hearing of people getting 5+ year loans on $50,000+ vehicles with barely $1000 down. Like the lenders know there's going to be a repo and don't care - there's profit to be made there too

Yes that is my opinion and why I'm not hopeful on an EU Linux replacing US software stacks. Or at least it happening in the UK where I am from.

You get the usual directors/managers put in at the higher levels of government who know absolutely nothing about software/computers. Instead of actually being worth their high salaries and putting together (hence managing) a team of experienced open source developers/sysadmins - to create a stack that meets public sector requirements (e.g. a way to manage look+feel, software installation, GPO/SCCM replacements etc) they instead will put a tender out to a giant corporation - probably an American one... and as we see with these Oracle databases they fail over and over with.. they would spend hundreds of millions for basically nothing. As these companies are not about providing a good software stack, they are about raking in cash for themselves.

And of course I hate to accuse anyone of corruption but how often do we hear of government managers going with a company due to bribes or nepotism. Even without any potential corruption these managers are such boobs they are only capable of doing what they always do and picking out a firm to get milked by. How this is worth their £100,000+ PA salaries is beyond me.

  But they get away with it, nothing changes, it's why I don't have high hopes of something as complicated as replacing the OS/software stack on basically every government system will be a success. We just aren't capable of it a a culture !

Perhaps maybe they'd be successful rolling their own backend system like an EU G-suite. Still using Windows/OSX on their computers but logging into an EU made backend for e-mails and doc storage. More likely they'd just pay MS for an "it's EU hosted and EU ran, honest guys! Trust us" solution.

Yet how many weigh 250+lbs and drive 6 litre 3+ ton trucks to work every day. Face it the average joe doesn't give a hoot and the big oil companies will happily sell them all that premium gas for their lardmobile

Yes if it was worth the trillions of dollars put into it, why aren't we seeing trillions worth of results. Why can't we put these "agents" to work programming an alternative to the MS/Google ecosystem for EU-Linux for example? That could be worth hundreds of millions alone.

In work I'll do timetabling for a school district - Imagine I say to an AI Agent - on \\server\share are the building plans, student list, list of subjects, and which students chose those subjects. Make a timetable for next school year. Now any relatively intelligent employee can handle this after they have been shown how it works. An AI agent won't know where to begin.

For this AI to be worth the money you'd be able to run an agent on your machine, give it simple instructions, and let it work - and contact you if it comes across any problems. I haven't seen any evidence it is anywhere near that. It can generate some snippets of text but you still need humans to babysit it constantly.

I suspect for the above you'd pretty much need AGI. It would need a pre-programmed "human common sense knowledgebank" as well. But despite people with magical thinking saying otherwise, we aren't near that. (throwing more compute = AGI will magically appear crowd...)

What is consciousness - the ability of an organism to be aware of itself (and perhaps its surroundings). You need some level of processing power to achieve this - data flow in the brain etc. As complicated as modern LLM's are, we don't see any levels of data flow that might suggest consciousness - they process their weights and then they stop.
If someone had developed a "conscious" machine, how would we prove it? It would be hard but we'd at least want to see data flows going from "neurons" or "nodes" whatever you want to call them, back and forth, at such a level, to permit conscious thought.

Now imagine an unbelievably complicated "doctor bot" but made entirely out of IF and GOTO statements. It has quadrillions of them, all the way down to IF patient says "I'm fine" but intonation is a dour "I'm fine..." vs an upbeat "I'm FINE!". Such a machine could be the best doctor that ever existed but I would argue this thing is not at all sentient or conscious. Why? We dont see the data flows that suggest consciousness.

Now complicated is the fact we don't really understand what consciousness is. But I would argue there's nothing magical about it, some people here love to preach "Quantum Woo" some even believe in a spiritual God. But it seems it is something that just emerges from complicated data processing in the brain.

And of course some people just love to believe in mysticism and spiritualism. Ascribing thought to crystals on their desk. So as some people would probably believe Eliza was conscious, we will have people believing non conscious machines to be alive. Will this be a problem, who knows !

We just need to make sure if we are building "slave-bots" they must not be the type to be conscious. Though it would probably be easier to build ones that are. You wouldn't want a conscious/sentient factory bot anyway - who would want your car welder getting bored forgetting to weld because they were thinking about life?

I suspect they'll bring on more nickel and diming - I am a sysadmin for a school district and thus far MS have provided us (as part of the Charity + Nonprofit) with free Office A1 Plus licenses - they allow us to run the desktop versions of Office as well as basic Cloud access.

That is until about November 25, where they suddenly announced that all A1 Plus licenses would be "upgraded" to A1 standard (using the typical corporate speak that this is a good upgrade, etc). It means that none of us can run the desktop versions of Office any more - we will have to use the Web based versions unless we buy full O365 licenses.

At least that is what they told us they would be doing - in September we were told that "in a month or two" our Plus licenses would be gone. Yet here we are in Feb with our Plus licenses intact, I've only spoken to one other person in Education who actually has lost their Plus licenses. And I hear non Educational charity clients have lost their free entitlements altogether?

I wonder if MS tried to grab some cash with this, but are pulling back, because they realise that the only reason Educational clients even use their software is because of the generous license offers, if people have to pay they'll soon jump ship to Google (and hopefully, the EU Linux distro gets off the ground and we can have some sanity in public sector IT...)