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Comment WSL 1 vs 2 speed comparisons (Score 1) 57

Just to note, the WSL containerisation approach is horrible for anything I/O intensive. WSL 1 had ELF binaries supported by the kernel and ran natively, this is a far superior approach to WSL 2's containerisation when it comes to raw speed.

I benchmarked this a few months ago and it was between 300%-600% slower on raw disk performance I/O.

Comment Re:Nintendo Digitech 2.0 (Score 1) 119

Yeah, I know what you mean. I just did it the easy way - dropped out of university, eventually move to Montreal where it was almost *difficult* to be a programmer and not end up at a game studio. Thankfully the industry grew in Toronto as well and I was able to move back after some lovely years there.

Comment No, they didn't 'convince' (Score 1) 47

It's not real. It's not intelligent. It's a probability matrix - a very good one, but that's what it is. When people say they 'convinced it', what actually happened was they started using language recognisable in a subset of the model's training data and the model responded using probability with data from that same subset as it's statistically closer.

In this case, they used language which is the kind floating around with people negative to AI, and so the AI constructed a sentence using data in their "negative to AI" section. Nobody got convinced of anything. It's very impressive, but it's 'just' a probability matrix.

Comment Re:Ironic (Score 1) 71

I'm not so sure the shop should be allowed to choose what agent the user employs. You wouldn't like it if they banned particular web browsers and said you had to use Chrome or Edge. The browser is the User-Agent, a program that acts on behalf of the user and shows the user the results. It might also filter those results in a way the retailer doesn't like, for example removing advertisements or popups, but that's between the user and their browser.

Comment Australian incident was for Medicare (Score 1) 130

I was listening to this on BBC news on my commute this morning (in the UK). They said it attacked a Medicare site, which is the Australian national health system. My immediate thought was "ah, so someone in the US asked it to do something with Medicare records and forgot to limit it to just the US then". So off the AI trots to do exactly what it was asked to do - "collect records on Medicare', without any regard to geography at all. Hence this 'hack'.

I mean, I'm just guessing so that opinion is worth what you just paid for it. It does sound plausible to me though.

Comment Re:If you're educating students for an "AI Era" (Score 1) 119

At present, no. I've done a number of experiments with LLMs' capabilities with generating fiction, and while they are impressive for a beginner writer -- because fo the lack of spelling and grammar mistakes, they are nowhere near being able to write competent fiction.

This is because they don't model reader or character minds, they're based on word probabilities, like a predictive text keyboard. The engineers can compensate for for this to a surprising degree by feeding it data to recognize specific situations (e.g. the car wash is 100 feet from my driveway; should I drive or walk?). But this is turd-polishing.

Comment If you're educating students for an "AI Era" (Score 4, Insightful) 119

AI technology practice isn't foundational. Critical thinking is. The closer AIs come to being able to do something that looks like them doing our thinking for us, the more capable we have to be at thinking without them. A human who can't outthink an AI adds nothing to an AI-human partnership.

This proposed school is a typical scheme by people who think because they have been educated, they understand how the education works. This is like thinking because you eat, you know how to cook. Project work in education is nothing new; it goes back well over a century. And in real life, you may get a STEM degree, but your real education in engineering comes from real life work. But that doesn't mean classes in calculus and physics don't do anything for you.

Or English classes, for that matter. Nobody doubts the value of project work in education, particularly *androgogy* -- the education of adults. But for *pedagogy* you have to establish foundational skills as the student matures intellectually and socially. Entering the high school years, a typical student has had *no* training in critical thinking skills. To develop critical thinking skills in an area, you need both general skills (epistemologicla literacy: research, location of orignial sources, dealing with conflicting evidence) and domain specific training in that area. In other words, *liberal arts* training is foundational in an AI-saturated world. "Liberal Arts" -- from *artes liberales*: literally the skills necessary to be a free person.

But I think these people have at least got the problem right: as AI drives the cost of elaborate projects down, we all have more projects in our future. Big, elaborate, faultlessly plausible-looking projects which may or may not have actual value.

Where they are completely wrong is the solution, which is to organize education around practicing using AI to make impressive projects. In a word of AI-enamored dunces this will put you at the head of a very sorry class of ignoramuses. The answer is to build fundamental cognitive and intellectual skils at every stage of a student's development. Project work is surely part of that, but it's just a technique, not a solution.

In a nutshell, the academy is training students to be the next step down the evolutionary scale from code monkeys. More like the pigeons B.F. Skinner trained in WW2 to peck at a screen, in an attempt to create a primitive guided missile without computers. They want to create "main characters"; and they'll probably create a few. There are always a few natural autodidacts in any moderately large group. But what they are set up is to produce a bunch of fragile, economically privileged narcissists trained to cover their lack of education with impressive-looking AI slop.

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Real Programmers don't write in FORTRAN. FORTRAN is for pipe stress freaks and crystallography weenies. FORTRAN is for wimp engineers who wear white socks.

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