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Comment Litigation, Anyone? (Score 1) 18

Back during the 1990s version of AI (Expert Systems) a colleague received a grant from NIH and the US Navy to develop an expert system for doing triage on head-wound victims. The Navy was interested in use in submarines at sea, which typically had limited medical support. If someone was seriously hurt a decision needed to be made whether they had to be picked up at sea via helicopter and taken ashore for treatment. Don't want to do that unless it's really needed. Hence, the desire for a computer-based expert system to help someone like a medical corpsman decide. My colleague worked with NIH with an eye towards marking it. After speaking with a lawyer, however, he decided that the legal risk wasn't worth the possible gains. So, if a doctor uses this AI and botches a diagnosis based on AI hallucinations leading to a patient's death, who in this loop is liable for what?? I'd think the lawyer would go for the deepest pockets, which in this case is MS.

Comment I know!!! (Score 1) 32

I've got a great idea for an innovative and new concept. Provide all content absolutely free. Not only that, you don't need an Internet connection to use it, everything is broadcast using radio waves. Push content on a schedule that everyone knows. No need to search and search for what you want. Incredible savings! Everything is supported by just a few ads tucked in here and there.

Oh, wait.

Comment This may bring Linux to the Desktop (Score 2, Insightful) 91

I recently purchased an M2Pro Mini, which forced me to jump from El Capitan on an older iMac directly into the sh**storm that is Ventura. The iOS-ification of macOS is not a myth, everyone can see it in action. I am already starting to revisit Linux and Linux hardware and will make the jump if this gets much worse. I was very pleased back in 2004 when I jumped from using two computers (Windows for office apps and Linux for real work) to being able to do it all on one machine. The early OS X systems were by no way perfect, but they were a lot better than what we're seeing coming out of the Great Spaceship of Appletown. The new hardware is great, but the new OS is not.

Comment Re:Dumb Programmers? (Score 4, Insightful) 212

No, because the only programmers that were involved were the ones who developed the (probably generic) training software for the AI. Once the AI is trained (euphemism for "after the weights for the ginormous number of neural-net levels/nodes in the AI were calculated") the AI is a black box. Stuff goes in, stuff comes out. If the out-stuff says "kill the operator", well, the operator gets fragged by the AI. Sounds like what they have done in their "fix" was to start adding kludge if-then-else code on the back end of the AI, which can extend into a near-infinite level of "oh dear, best fix that - Patch Level N ; oh dear, best fix that - Patch Level N+1;loop".

AI is artificial, but it is in NO manner intelligent. Nor are any programmers involved once the training platform is developed and implemented. Clearly, there is also very little intelligence at the user level (or decider level) either.

Comment This will NOT end well. (Score 1, Informative) 54

Holy freaking hell, people, we're talking about things that are basically jumped-up neural networks here - there is absolutely NO intelligence involved in ANY of this. One of the big problems is when one of these beasties has to deal with something that's outside what mathematicians call the span of their knowledge, as in anything that is different from what they were trained with, nobody knows what gibberish the A"I" might come up with. This is where it gets scary. I can very clearly see a scenario where the leader of a nation with nuclear weapons decides that the people around him cannot be trusted and turns everything over to one of these baskets of 0's and 1's, and said basket decides that launching everything right now is the best strategy.

Comment Re:You are making life very hard for older, less e (Score 3) 72

I’m not a “grandma” but I am a 73-year-old gramps. I’ve been writing software and using computers of all sizes since the late 1960s, and I still write software for my own use on almost a daily basis. That said, godamit, I’ve always disliked constantly-changing UIs because it means I have to re-learn how to use my tools to do what I want to do. Rarely do I “want” to learn a new UI just for the hell of it. And as I got older, the saying about teaching old dogs new tricks starts to turn out to be true. I have only so much bandwidth for new stuff in addition to everything else I’m trying to do, and learning a new UI is REALLY low on my fun-to-do-o-meter. Change for the sake of making your company overlord think you’re accomplishing something is churn - nothing more, nothing less.

Comment Sinema? (Score 1) 27

Wondering why the administration can't get this done? Read down TFA a bit and you'll see the name "Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.)" mentioned. She is even more of a reason that the Dems can't get anything done in the Senate than Sen. Manchin. She's heavily into feathering her own nest and not so much into this silly governing stuff.

Comment Orange POLY-88 (Score 1) 523

POLY-88 (Polymorphic Systems) 8088 CPU with 16 kB memory card, serial connection to a cassette tape recorder for storage, Pickles&Trout connector to an old B/W TV. The computer was in a rectangular orange metal case. Loved that computer, but lost it during one of my many moves. First for-work PC was a Zenith Z-80 system with two floppy drives and 64 kB memory and a Toshiba dot-matrix printer. Another great computer that spent it's retirement days as a replacement "typerwriter" for my mother.

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