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Comment Re:Scant details in the article (Score 1) 90

You make a good point - it's a very heavy weight terminal to the cloud, which is Microsoft's general direction of travel for the last few years.

I can imagine Microsoft thinking it's wise to let consumers pay for compute as well as software, with Microsoft just hosting the storage and connectivity. But for that to work, they'll have to shed some of their work to the users. That's going to be a tricky undertaking for the next several years because all AI hardware is super expensive, so even if they 'encourage' GPUs and whatnot in all new laptops, it'll be years before they can expect most of their users can run an AI workload in any way competently on their own hardware.

Comment Re: Threating to "shoot up" a police station (Score 1) 90

> If people are going to consume SaaS then they need to be aware that the owners of the platform are going to spend some effort attempting not to be accessories to any crimes.

Really? Are my onedrive, g-drive and dropbox accounts all being scanned for 'threats' or other things I write in my documents? What if I write some naughty things on my laptop and it gets backed up to Backblaze, will they also be scanning my files? What about Evernote or Todoist? How about my 'talk to yourself' Slack channel?

Where does it end? How can any company ever accept any user input if they have to check and double check it for 'bad' things?

Comment Overshadowed (Score 2) 50

I'm sorry to say, this model could literally walk on water and I'm still not going to use it for anything serious. Gemini is sort of a go-to for 'web search+' type activities for me, but for agentic stuff, Google can f right off.

A while back I thought I'd try Gemini in an agent, so I downloaded Gemini CLI and hooked it up to my Google account. I got started, and then ran into usage limits - fair enough. I leave the CLI running, but completely back off, not touching it for a couple of days. Then I get the email from google "you have violated our terms of service, your account will be permanently blocked ... click here to appeal". Of course they couldn't tell me what I'd done wrong, so I appealed, and never heard anything back from them. I have no idea if my account is okay or not - mainly because Gemini CLI got deleted and replaced with Claude Code and OpenCode.

Google "inc" really need to make themselves a lot easier to deal with, otherwise everything they do will be entirely overshadowed by their corporate crap. To date, I've had no such issues from Anthropic or Deepseek - both of them "just work" and do what they're supposed to without getting in my way.

Comment Re:wrong focus (Score 1) 61

Mistral is never going to be as big as Anthropic or OpenAI. They lack the sociopaths to do it, they're not in it for dick measuring, and so just won't do it.

I'd also say that they're European, and governed by European laws. They'd be very much held accountable if their agents "went rogue" and hacked the Aussie government (or anyone else). That makes them much more careful about their "guardrails" when they do things - they already are the "slowed down development" that the US companies are supposedly calling for.

I think we'll see Mistral in a few important niches, but they're unlikely to take over from ChatGPT or Claude unless the US companies all implode from their own hubris.

Comment Re:Where i live... (Score 1) 113

One is left to wonder if the new LEDs actually consume less power than the old sodiums (given they're so much brighter), but they do seem to last longer, so there are less cases of lights not working than before. LEDs are also a lot more directional, so whilst bright at ground level, they're not beaming as much light into the sky. I wonder why they didn't put a bit more shade around them to avoid illuminating peoples houses...?

What your council should have done, and could be convinced to do is to dim the lights after (say) 11pm (at least in some areas). That's something LEDs definitely are good at, and it really is a good way for everyone to save some money/carbon/etc.

FWIW, I live on a street with really low crime, and we do have dimming lights. The main roads don't, and nor do some of the ones where, shall we say, the "less desirables" seem to hang out. My street is weird though... probably 20-30 years ago, someone obviously did a really good sales job because they sold burglar alarms to all the houses. Someone else seemed to sell lots of people floodlights (with PIR sensors). Our alarm was broken when we bought the house, so it got removed and the old floodlight was ridiculous, so I took that out too. Nowadays I have an LED strip above the garage door, and that's about it. Total light output down by probably 99%.

Comment Re: China is a totalitarian hell (Score 1) 142

True, and most western countries, if you have security clearance (because you work on "serious" stuff for the government) you have some travel restrictions too. For low level people it's mostly just "tell us before you go", but for more secret folks, it's a complete restriction.

However, AFAIK, no/few Western AI companies are operating their research in government-classified environments (Palentir, maybe?). So if you go for a job with (say) Anthropic, you can live however you like.

However, it seems that if you go for a job with Deepseek, you get more restrictions than if you go work for WeChat. Unless there are some upsides we're not being told about, one wonders if it would dissuade some people from "going into AI"?

Comment Re:Fresh food is so last year. (Score 1) 160

I've never liked bananas, so this won't really affect me, but like you, I'd prefer this didn't come to market.

The UK's historically not been keen on GM food. Unless there's some way they can avoid having to label these as 'modified', I can't see them flying off the shelves in supermarkets - for most people, I can't see it being such a huge advantage that it would be worth 'risking' it. I could see supermarkets like M&S/Waitrose, etc actively marketing that they *don't* have these.

However, that's only one way we get our food. You can imagine the catering companies going crazy for this sort of thing, exactly as TFS describes - it keeps food looking better for longer. Be that in packaged food, or on a buffet or whatever, banana that doesn't go brown could go a long way. Only some outlets specifically talk about the quality of their packaged foods, and I'm not sure even the fanciest hotels would necessarily say no to this sort of thing.

I'm not sure how the market's structured, but I'd imagine catered food is smaller than supermarkets - I don't know for sure. Either way, I'm not sure how well this will go over here. I also don't know how the Europeans would take to it - not least because of brexit, but because they also aren't generally keen on GM food.

Comment Re:This smells like bullshit (Score 1) 76

Yeah, it stinks.

My immediate thought was, why stop the _training_? I mean, the training isn't what teaches an agent to go hack into government websites. The training isn't what is supposed to prevent agents from hacking into websites either. The training is the expensive part - and stopping that might just help puff up the financials for a while. So is that where OpenAI is now? It needs to stretch out training because it's running short of cash on hand? The IPO's going to struggle then, isn't it?

That said, "the markets" have proven themselves to be utterly devoid of any sort of common sense, let alone skills in picking who's good and who isn't, so maybe this works really well for them. I don't know.

Frankly, if OpenAI want to do anything to help humanity, it would be put some competent firewalls around their agent development playgrounds. Firing up hundreds of agents and letting them do what they want isn't ever going to go well.

Comment How's this going to work? (Score 1) 57

I'm wondering how this is going to work. I have a Play Store account (I paid up the money, handed over all of my ancestory's IDs, work histories, qualifications and inside leg measurements, etc). Every 6 months, I get emails from Google saying "do SOMETHING with your account, or else we'll close it!!". All in the name of "security", apparently.

It would seem to me then, that an F-droid developer would have to be publishing to f-droid AND to Play Store, or else Google will close their developer account, thus leaving them unable to publish anywhere.

To say Google is developer-hostile is putting it mildly - and that's the ones they *want*, they're even worse for the ones they don't.

Comment Re: Good riddance (Score 1) 152

Don't bother reviewing it. Instead, work on tests so that you can be sure it does what you want (and doesn't do things you don't). Then, get it to spew out whatever crazed crap it wants, test it, if it works, ship it. If not, the agent will automatically go and fix bugs until it works.

This all falls to pieces on the "doesn't do things you don't [want]" step though. I don't want my app to leak data between users, but I also don't want it to leak data to anonymous users, or to users with an expired token, or to a user with someone else's token, or a thousand other permutations. For a lot of those cases, you'll end up relying on a framework to do it for you - if you have one. For your common-or-garden web app, that's probably fine, but if you're writing some sort of gnarly backend system that manages financial transactions, you're SoL. But then, if you're in that sort of environment, you need to be much more judicious about your use of AI generally.

Comment Re:Muse TV ad (Score 1) 71

Did they mention the zero day? https://arstechnica.com/securi...

Using Muse to run your life is a dangerous thing to do. Sort of by design, you tell it "buy me some AA batteries", and it goes off and does it for you - To do that requires your credit card info, yadda yadda. You end up giving it all sorts of personal information Zuck definitely should not, ever, ever have. Oh, and then the zero day means it all gets exfiltrated to goodness knows where.

"Built for security from the ground up" my butt. More like "vibe coded in a hurry because we're racing to keep some sort of relevance".

Comment Re:This is a weird little hit piece (Score 1) 183

Oh don't be a dick.

Just because we're supporting women on this point doesn't mean men are losing out on anything. And if men find themselves being tormented online as a result of a seemingly benign conversation on a beach, then yes, I'd imagine some outrage would also be forthcoming.

Either way, the glasses have no use besides being a perv. As such, we don't need 'em.

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