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Comment A lesson learned (Score 2) 167

Jobs which are more tolerant of context-driven inaccuracies are more likely to be replaced by AI but they are also the most likely to come back first. Since judging the quality of creative output is almost entirely subjective, it is far easier for a handful of experienced editors to trawl through some slop and edit it just enough so as to keep themselves employed. This means it is a lot easier to justify getting rid of the juniors and the janitors. However, all the commercial interests trying to sell you AI generated slop will eventually die out, since the editors and their bosses will also not be needed for non-paying individuals to generate works of the same quality with minimal effort, such is the way of capitalism and its knack for lowering quality to the point of what the market will bear.

For instance, the real world need for simpler jobs like proofreading did not get wiped out by AI. One need only look at the missing words, inconsistent grammar and typographical errors in Microsoft documentation (some of which could be rectified by F7 spell checkers alone) exist in the LLM-generated documents the vendor maintains. This tells you everything you need to know about how ephemeral this point in our business ventures will be.

Want to solve this issue a bit quicker? Continue to contribute to the world, but not for profit. Do it out of passion, not greed, and watch the usurers and megalomaniacs destroy themselves, all with a smile on your face. The job you had was replaced, but you were not. That is all.

Comment Compliance was malicious (Score 1) 134

They did not comply with the order. What they did, was sound the canary in the coal mine as to what is happening by preventing new attempts to enrol in Advanced Data Protection. They will still continue to encrypt iMessage, FaceTime, passwords, location data and other things the UK government wants access to using end-to-end encryption and those already enrolled in ADP will be keeping access for now.

This is going to create a nightmare for lawmakers, as they partially complied with the order in the only way they could without maliciously backdooring their software. It will get very nasty if the Home Office pushes any further because Apple will simply put up further warnings about disabled features not being available in the UK.

The next step if these morons went too far would be implementing local-only P2P sync options for data between iDevices to replace existing centralised PC/Mac sync features. As Apple servers would no longer be involved, this would circumvent the law, and as it would ruin every company to mandate backdoors in internal-only infrastructure, the government would have no choice but to stop.

Comment It will end up like Cortana (Score 1) 73

Microsoft hasn't tested the underpinnings for long enough in real world use within other products. This massive oversight will be their undoing because if users see it running like crap when it finally hits GA, then users will turn it off.

To a consumer, Recall will be perceived to be crap if it: 1) Can't recognise text and objects in a captured snapshot to at the standard of Apple/Google Photos;
2) Can't be navigated anywhere near as quickly as the aforementioned tools for any reason;
3) Doesn't index or correctly categorise by the applications/websites/resources used at the time;
4) Filters in a way which causes snapshotting to fail for other on-screen applications/websites/resources;
5) Bows to the needs of Hollywood DRM schemes causing snapshotting to fail unnecessarily;
6) Accidentally censors things by miscategorising what it sees as being sensitive information on-screen;

I doubt we have a lot to worry about.

Comment Re:I can find no sources (Score 1) 23

Yes, along with every other unnecessary language change. In the case of master/slave, it means every time someone less familiar with an older system needs to do maintenance involving hard disks and an older PC BIOS, they have to make the otherwise pointless step of learning extra terminology.

In general, all these changes at best have the same negative effect of wasting time, at worst, it breaks compatibility in ways which can cause issues if people don't actively fix the problems created by the changes (e.g. Google Chrome and how sysadmins needed to maintain two identical lists to cover both 'whitelist' and 'allowlist' in Group Policy for quite a while).

These changes also muddy the waters for new starters by making it harder to search for and to find and understand relevant documentation due to differences in taxonomy over time. Not every product is an agile, serverless, cloud-enabled subscription "app" and glossaries will often assume a minimum baseline knowledge of the terminology of the era in which the software was originally written. Even worse still is with English being the dominant language used for both configuring and programming systems, non-English speakers are now at an even bigger disadvantage by having to learn to cater for our constant stream of nonsensical changes. Even worse still is when API compatibility is deliberately broken in the process, forcing the permanent creation of both developer and administrator documentation explaining the use of the old, the new, which versions used the old term and which versions use the new term. defeating the point of the change as everyone is still exposed to the original terminology (possibly more so than before when undergoing change control).

These changes are demonstrably harmful in actual real world scenarios (not just theoretical ones) and the people in denial have yet to show any demonstrable real world benefits arising from the changes they're promoting.

Comment Re:At least it lasted this long (Score 1) 26

You can use steamcmd to download games on legacy platforms (and for legacy platforms) it's intended for tools/software but supports games too. You can also use it to get older versions of games, so if developers drop support for old platforms during updates, you're not left out in the cold.

That said, if you're rocking legacy hardware, it may be worth considering using Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021 instead. Just set your location to Ireland, disable VBS and it will remain crap-free until it goes EOL in 2031. By then, all your existing games should "just work" on Linux without issues.

Comment Re:"The app has since been reinstated. " (Score 0) 26

The reality here, however, is that if Apple wants to protect themselves from liability they have to follow the rules in the DMCA. That means they have to take down reported infringing content. It can be put back up, if they receive a counter claim. However, there is a minimum period that it has to stay down. I don't have in front of me, but it's a few days.

The reality is that Apple does not have to take anything down if the artwork in question is not contained in the package Apple is distributing, and the DMCA claim has to include the reference to the asset in question, making it easy to see if it's distributed by Apple or not. If a third-party server the application can optionally connect to is violating the DMCA by distributing content illegally, that's legally not Apple's problem (in the sense it's not Google's fault that Google Chrome can be used to visit The Pirate Bay) and Apple could tell the claimant to send the claim to the appropriate place instead.

However, AAPL as a corporation has a large financial incentive to ensure people pay for things they could otherwise get for free, so they'll do everything they can to scratch the backs of other arsehole technology companies while screwing over alternative applications which attempt to undercut them. We know this because they also discriminate against generic, powerful software on a whim for similar reasons even when there's no DMCA infringement claims to hide behind. Gnutella, BitTorrent, IPFS and many other P2P protocols are almost always disallowed, forcing developers to hide P2P clients inside of other generic tools in ways Apple's reviewers can't easily detect or ban.

Every time I hear a story like this, it reminds me to keep at least some FOSS-friendly hardware available and well-maintained, as we never know when we'll otherwise get screwed over.

Comment Theoretical attacks don't always matter (Score 1) 73

Linus has a big point. Take the speculative execution attacks everyone shat their pants about. At the time, on desktop Windows systems (and a lot of Linux systems) every app had access to APIs to inspect (and in many cases, modify) the memory of every other app running as that same user by default, meaning an attacker didn't exactly have to abuse processor bugs to steal confidential information surreptitiously, they could just have at just about everything without much trouble anyway through a myriad of simpler means.

Therefore, did it make sense for desktop operating systems to fuss about these vulnerabilities as much as they did? In the case of information leaks, probably not, since they were mostly outside the scope of what the system realistically protected against anyway at the time.

Comment It's about characters, not actors (Score 2) 41

Repeat after me, Nic! Face off! Face... Off!

Why would a studio want to keep using samey actors faces when computer graphics is getting extremely close to doing realistic renders? In a decade at most, VFX artists will be employed as standard to design all principal characters faces, voices and other characteristics. The names of the leading actors themselves will become far less relevant compared with the effort needed to bring the characters they're portraying to life. AI won't replace them, they'll still be paid extremely well, but the authenticity argument will seem how live stage performers sounded when motion pictures largely took over. Entertainment is entertainment and it's how our imaginations paper over the cracks which keeps us happily distracted for a few hours while we do nothing but watch and listen.

Comment Much simpler solution (Score 1) 40

Make it work like a patent with a very limited term but requiring a whole, complete implementation being deposited along with the key tools needed to reproduce it. For recorded stage plays, movies and shows, this would include not only the original source footage but also things like the script and designs or replicas of key props. For literature, it would include authors notes and early drafts, as well as references where applicable for any research materials used, and yes, for software, that would include source code and documentation.

We would very quickly live in a copyright-free world as people fight over what is and is not transformative enough by looking at existing works, demonstrating that, yes, indeed, almost nothing should be protected.

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