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r00ty Admin

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I'm the administrator of kbin.life, a general purpose/tech orientated kbin instance.

Bill Gates feels Generative AI has plateaued, says GPT-5 will not be any better (indianexpress.com)

Bill Gates feels Generative AI has plateaued, says GPT-5 will not be any better::The billionaire philanthropist in an interview with German newspaper Handelsblatt, shared his thoughts on Artificial general intelligence, climate change, and the scope of AI in the future.

r00ty Admin ,
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On the one hand, I don't really know enough about AI to comment. What I do remember is that, Bill Gates said the Internet was just a fad in the 90s. This comment caused myself and others problems promoting the Internet in workplaces because those in charge for some reason put some weight to his words. :p

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I feel like they just don't get it. Why did I stop downloading things err "unofficially"? Because they were almost all available on Netflix, with no ads, and pretty much instantly with a decent interface.

Then they started making 1000 streaming platforms so that the monthly bill for everything you want works its way back to what I would pay for sat/cable. And now, this?

Then what, we'll get the Pikachu face when they realise people are back sailing the seven seas?

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Here in the UK, I feel like a similar thing happened with cable/satellite. Originally, Sky TV was completely free. They only had 4 channels (and one of them was only kinda sky) mind you. But they were all free (with adverts). Later they brought in encryption and a subscription for the movie channel.

I am quite sure I recall seeing one of the rationales for when they started the subscription service covering the non movie channel, it was stated that there would be less or no advertising and it would instead be covered by the subscription. Needless to say, that never happened.

But ultimately, this is just normal business practice. If they can get away with charging you AND making money from ad views, they're going to do it. The only way to stop it, is not to subscribe to those that do it.

Why is anti-cheat always client-side?

Why is it not more common to implement anti-cheat on the server instead of the client? Is that not more secure? Couldn’t the server just check what vision a player should have and not provide any other information to prevent wallhacks or maphacks? Or check how fast it is possible to move to prevent speedhacks? Aimbot is a bit...

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Yes, I mean I understand why people use the term rootkit. But, at the same time it isn't good to dilute a term for something malicious.

At the same time, while I hate cheating in online games I barely trust game developers that are often on a crunch timeline, access to user mode on my system. I really don't want to give them access to kernel mode just to detect cheats. Also, it just means the next level of cheats just has to do the same, or get themselves in the hypervisor instead or hardware based anyway.

I don't play games that have kernel mode anti cheat (unless they've somehow installed kernel mode drivers without me knowing, every game installer wants admin to install these days it seems) for this reason.

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I think it's very important to separate root and kernel mode. If you run an application as root, you are still running in user mode. Drivers and other kernel modules are running in kernel mode. There are a lot of differences with serious implications for system stability and security.

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Back in the day (CS1.5/CS1.6) there was a server addon called HLGuard. Where it did some basic checks to see if you should know about another player and not send info unless you need it.

But, it wasn't perfect, and you'd still get an advantage from wallhack and of course it cannot stop aimbot. You could perhaps "detect" likely aimbot though. But it did limit the power of wallhack.

I actually tested it (of course on my own server with a friend who knew I was doing it). What it seemed to do was make sure you only really saw a player when they were very close to a wall where they'd become visible. But of course, close up things like needed to hear audio cues meant you'd often see them through walls anyway.

Also I never measured it, but it must have taken a fair bit of CPU to make all these determinations for every player on every tick.

For modern MMOs etc, they are usually VERY client authoritative because they're handling thousands of players at once and really want to spend as little CPU time on each as possible. So, they will likely want anything they have to be client side.

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I think he was always like this. It's just he's now ALWAYS in the limelight, and it's much more visible.

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In this particular instance that doesn't seem to be the case. First off, the article states it is film that was recovered from bins/skips. Until at least the 90s it was extremely common for TV programs to be recorded to film and then processed onto tape for airing (hence why we were able to get star trek TNG and The West Wing in HD). The implication is that it's the film that was discarded (which couldn't have been reused).

The other implication, is that if it is the original film reels it will potentially be unedited footage.

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They would argue that as custodians, they can decide what is economical to keep and discard. I guess sci-fi wasn't seen as something that might last 🙄

I suppose with finite storage they did have to make some tough choices though, I guess.

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I understand there were magnetic recording systems before home use. But I'm saying the story specifically says film reels. Now, journalistic accuracy is a bit of a meme I know. But, I was taking that on face value.

r00ty Admin ,
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Thanks for checking it up. So actually most of the story is probably incorrect since it says they took film reels from bins/skips. When in reality it seems they stole reusable magnetic tape.

Agree on everything else though. If they want it back they need to have it down in writing they will not pursue them in any way, civil or criminal.

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Wake up sheeple! Gravity is an obvious lie from the NWO illuminati lizard people! We're actually all implanted with small steel sheets in our feet at birth, and everything on the planet has a small amount of iron filings in too. The flat disc we live on is completely magnetic. That's how we don't fall off.

I thought everyone knew this!

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I thought it was implying he was in some hard to reach location, and they were pulling the stops out to connect the last guy on earth without internet.

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Yeah, I think I've lost track how many articles and youtube videos about amazing "solid state" batteries are just around the corner. But I've not seen one actually materialise.

I mean, it's great if true. But, I'm going to wait and see.

There's been a steady increase in lithium based technologies though. But I do wonder when and where the plateau there might be.

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I'd never seen the page before. The few sources I checked seemed to match up with my expectation (except one or two I would have seen as more left were marked centre left). They have a page that explains how they calculate left vs right. That page seems to concentrate on American issues a lot more than international, which is a problem considering they are rating international sources too and might explain why I (not coming from the US) saw some sources as differently positioned.

I could not immediately see their method for ranking factuality. They have notes on each source with information on why they chose the score they did, though.

All in all, it doesn't seem to me like they're trying to push a certain message with their ratings. I saw plenty of left and right based media sources with mixed factuality scores.

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Yeah in C# it has quite a few uses.

I'm working on a background fun project where there's a base class that is for olde style CPU emulation. Where you can derive a class from the base class and essentially design 8bit style CPUs.

I have a separate class as a generic Assembler that will work with any of the created CPUs. But, to be able to do that I need to be able to get information about instructions, arguments, opcodes, registers etc from the derived class.

So the assembler is instantiated with Assembler<CPUType> and then it uses typeof to instantiate the actual CPU class being used to get all the information.

So, that's just an example of when you'd use something like this.

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How I've always seen it:

Starfleet (and perhaps a large portion of the UFP) do not use money or valuable materials to pay their workers and other organisations within Starfleet and likely those other UFP worlds under the same philosophy.

However, they do need to deal with many civilisations that do not subscribe to the same ideals. As such, they would likely maintain funds by trading to and from these civilisations.

It would be possible as others suggest to either bill Starfleet directly, or for officers to be able to requisition various precious items/currency as/when needed.

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It's hard to be sure these days.

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I think the problem, is with how fast this is moving in regard to both software and hardware and how accessible something that could easily be weaponized to normal people.

That's the potential for trouble I can see, for example Auto-GPT with improvements on the tool itself and its dependencies could make for something pretty powerful that could be set loose with a very wide remit and absolutely no limit to what it will do, to achieve its goal.

Time will tell of course. But this is probably one of, if not the fastest moving topic in tech we've ever had.

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Yes, glad you made the minutes optional because I think most people colloquially skip minutes.

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Damnit chat-gpt. Who gave you a threadiverse account?

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I think enforcing complex characters is outdated. Allowing them is enough, since someone brute forcing still needs to consider them. Of course they could try all lower, then mixed, then including complex characters in that order to catch those that don't. But still, it's better to have a password made up of compound words that is longer, than S0meth!ngV3ryC0nvolu73D. Or just pure random (aka password generator)

My main issue is places that have a maximum password length. This is firstly a limitation on security, but more importantly throws a red flag because of the potential reasons for having a password length limit!

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1: I'm running a kbin instance so. Yeah, think I've covered that.
2: Never had a twitter account. I used to check news from some companies that announce stuff there. But you can't even do that without an account now, so I don't visit them aside from if people send me direct links to stuff.
3: Yes and no. I'm using both, mainly because I don't control where everyone else goes.
4: I did (well still do) have a peertube instance up, I've just not moved it to the new server yet and not decided if I will. The problem is, storage. For threadiverse (kbin in my case) the space used is easily containable, the media goes onto S3 and I can surf the best combination of speed/price for that and the DB actually grows at a pretty controllable rate. But peertube takes a LOT of space quickly. I suspect it's a bit harder to have the kind of freedom to post long videos, also livestreaming. I tried 1440p and the server (which is decently specced) couldn't keep up. So, this might be a failed experiment for me I think.

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Yes, ultimately it's the way peertube will likely be if we want reliable servers that stick around. Paid for accounts for those that want to upload. The way I figured it was both a server with 1-2TB of space on a server and/or 1-2TB of S3 space is the kind of money I can forget about. But much more than that, and I can't afford to be hosting other people's stuff like that for free.

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Well, you need the basics of software development to start with. But sure, I'm not going to make my own implementation for every problem I come across. That would be insanity and a colossal waste of time.

However, people googling or using ChatGPT to create code they do not understand themselves, are just cargo cult programming, and it will bite them in the arse/ass (delete as applicable).

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I think ultimately this is going to become the crunch point. Because what kind of jobs can AI eventually take over (with appropriate robotics) in the mid-term future?

  • Driving (if all cars were computer controlled today and roads were segregated from pedestrians, it'd probably already be possible)
  • Likely end to end delivery could be automated. Large amounts of the process already are
  • Train (and bus based on item 1) drivers. Currently, much of the urban transit systems around the world are ATO, where the train controller opens/closes doors and starts the train and is primarily present for safety. The rest is done automatically. There are already fully automated transits, and I suspect it is unions and legitimate safety concerns stopping full automation. But, it could be done with some work I think.
  • Software development. I mean, currently the AI prediction in Visual Studio is sometimes scarily good. It DOES need to be guided by someone that can recognise when it gets it wrong. But so often development of a function now is writing 2 lines and auto completing half of the rest of the lines from the "AI". It's really a task of improving LLM and tying in LLM to product specific knowledge. Our days are most certainly numbered I think.
  • Software design. This is similar to the above. With a good LLM (or General AI) loaded with good product knowledge, you might only need a few people to maintain/rework requirements into a format they can work with and feed-back mistakes until they get a sensible result. Each time reducing the likelihood that mistake will happen again. We'll need less for sure.
  • I think a lot of the more basic functions of a nurse might well become tasks for some form of robotic AI companion for fully trained nurses/doctors. Maybe this is a bit further away
  • Airline pilots could probably already be replaced, and it's purely on the safety grounds that I'm glad they're not. Generally once a route is programmed the pilots on a flight that goes well, will drive the plane to the runway, the plane will automatically set thrust for economic take-off. Once established in the air autopilot will pretty much take them to their destination. Pilots can then switch modes, and the autopilot for an equipped airport can take the plane to a safe landing. Although in practice, pilots usually take control back around 500 feet from the ground, I think. It's not really many steps that need automating. I feel like, at least one pilot will be retained for safety reasons. For the reasons for certain high profile incidents, there's an argument to keep 2 forever. But, in terms of could they be replaced? Yes, totally.
  • Salespersons. Honestly, the way algorithms trick people into buying things they don't need. I'd argue they've already been replaced and businesses just still employ real sales people because they feel they need to :P
  • Cleaners (domestic and street/commercial) could potentially be replaced by robotic versions. At the very least, the number of real people needed could be drastically reduced to supervisors of a robotic team.
  • Retail workers. There's already the automated McDonald's isn't there? I also think the fact commercial property in large cities is becoming less occupied is a sign that as a whole, we're moving away from high-street retail and more online or specialist. As such, while we'll always probably need some real people here, the numbers will be much lower.

Now, when it comes to industrial and farm work. There's a LOT that is already semi-automated. One person can do the job with tech that might have taken 10 or more now. I can see this improving and if we ever pull of a more generalised AI approach, more entire roles could be eliminated.

My main point is, we're already at the point where the number of jobs that need people are considerably less than they used to be, this trend will continue. We know we cannot trust the free market and business in general to be ethical about this. So we should expect a large surplus of people with no real chance of gainful employment.

How we deal with that is important. Do we keep capitalism and go with a UBI and allow people to pursue their passions to top that up? Do we have some kind of inverse lottery for the jobs that do need doing? Where people perhaps take a 3 month block of 3 day working weeks to fill some of the positions that are needed? I'm not sure. I suspect we're going to go through at least a short period of "dark age" where the rich get MUCH richer, and everyone else gets screwed over before something is done about the problem.

Looks to me like Gates is looking ahead at this.

Sorry if that wall of text sounds pessimistic. Just one way I can see things going.

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I don't really see organisations as unethical. They usually don't act ethically, but that's not because as a whole they're unethical.

I see them more like insects. They generally react to stimuli and just do the same as the other insects/organisations, things that have been proven to work. They're also generally driven by one basic instinct, to make more money, and they do it at any cost. The drones (employees) are entirely disposable in this endeavour and if they can entirely remove them from the equation they will do it in a heartbeat.

Even those that perhaps do have some form of ethical streak and don't think they should dump all their employees for AI/robots? Well, good for them, but they'll be driven out of business by those that do.

When you think of a business or other organisation in this way, a lot of the weird things they do start to make a lot of sense.

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I think it varies by industry/job position. It was a number out of thin air though, I'll admit.

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My point is, you don't see insects as ethical or unethical. I see organisations the same way. They're acting on instinct, and are just aiming to do what they exist for. Make money. Ethics don't even come into it. Now, peering outside in, you can try to cast society's ethical views on organisations. But, they generally don't even consider them (until they are forced to by local legislation, or that the route to making more money, or indeed not less money is to be seen to be ethical).

This is why there's more often than not a certain kind of person drawn to leadership positions.

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Nope. I think you're not really understanding what I'm trying to say. I'm saying that ethics do not factor into an organisation's decisions in the same way it doesn't for a colony of insects. They are ethically neutral in that respect.

At the same time, if you apply ethics looking from the outside in, of course you will cast their actions as ethical and unethical and many of their actions will be unethical.

I'm actually saying this is a bad thing, but is just a property of how an organisation, and especially successful businesses, operate. We're not going to change that, I suspect. As such we should expect businesses to exploit AI to the fullest ability, even knowing that removing most or all of their employees is bad for the employee, bad for the country (and the world), bad for the economy and ultimately in the future, bad for the business/organisation too. But they simply do not look that far ahead.

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I started with LinuxFT from a magazine coverdisk. I also installed it on an old 486 at the office. It became the "internet box". The company director at the time believed Bill Gates that the internet would be a fad and wasn't worth investing in and would not put any money into the company internet connection. So, it was an old 486, running LinuxFT, with a modem calling out on demand, squid proxy, email boxes etc. But it worked.

After that I moved to Redhat (before it was paid for). I remember for sure installing RH5. It was definitely a smoother experience.

Server wise, I went through various distros. Once I got to debian, for servers I never really left the "apt" world. Management wise, it's just too easy to work with. Hopping between Ubuntu and Debian even now.

For firewalls I've been through ipfwadm (Kernel 2.0.x), ipchains (Kernel 2.2.x) and iptables (Kernel 2.4.x). Now, there is some newer stuff now. Nftables, but there hasn't been a "you must change" situation like the other two and as such, I've generally stuck with iptables, mainly because when I did try nftables I had a real problem getting it to play nice with qos. Probably all fixed now, but I'm too lazy to change.

Desktop wise. I dual boot windows/linux. Linux is Manjaro, and I like Manjaro, for the fact that gaming generally just worked. However, I feel like every major upgrade I am chasing broken dependencies for far too long. But, when it works, Manjaro is great. However, I have had several failed desktop experiments. I ran Gentoo way way way back, I think I had an AMD Athlon at the time. I thought it was great, I mean building stuff for my specific setup, nice idea and all. But upgrades were so damn slow compiling everything! I tried Ubuntu, but I never found the desktop to be any good. I did also have Redhat way back in the late 90s. But the desktop was just poor back then.

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The UK driving licence has birthdate as YMMDDY in the licence number. Totally uncrackable encryption.

r00ty Admin , (edited )
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How about 0xYYYMDD or 0xYYYYMDD if you need years after 4095 for some reason.

Today is 0x7e7b16

r00ty Admin ,
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Nah. With binary, you can lose one hex digit AND the max year would be 2047 (11 bits year, 4 bits month, 5 bits day). What's not to like about hex anyway?

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Yes, although isn't that an urban legend? Pretty sure I read that it was.

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What I read was that it never happened in the old versions and it wasn't a bug in civ5, in that, it was a nod to the legend. But apparently Sid Meier said it didn't happen in the original games.

EDIT: Here you go https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi

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She was prepared to show the reporter where she'd seen the claim online, but her phone was in the microwave, charging.

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People often don't help themselves either. I remember this time, I was driving on a country road in the fog. Suddenly I saw my foglights light up a dog walking in the road. So I drove around, then as I got closer I saw a man walking this dog, dressed all in black, on an unlit country road, walking away from traffic, in dense fog.

If he made it back home alive, it's purely down to luck (or his dog being seen before him again).

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Congratulations, I guess. Now, get to work!

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I think a lot of people knew Musk was full of it from the start. His recent twitter antics have just brought the realisation to a larger crowd.

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Yeah, I was about to say when I read the first part. Adding windows manually is quite an old thing. Modern linux setups with grub2 will "find" the EFI loader for windows and add it automatically.

I lost my grub loader when I upgraded hardware recently. But, I just booted into a linux USB, chroot (remembering to mount /boot/efi) and re-run grub install/grub update. That didn't find windows. But, it was fine because I just properly booted into linux and ran grub-update again there, and it found it fine.

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Hmm, only bios/firmware updates are meant to do that. Some hardware changes will too. I mean, it's what it's there for.

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Timing worked really well for us. Finished a 5 year term just before the larger rate rises. Broker was telling me to ride it out with a tracker and the inflation/interest rises will be short lived.

Nah, got a 10 year fixed rate at a rate that is around half the current BOE base. He just couldn't understand that we're fine with 10 years at a rate that might be even double the rate banks offer in say 2-3 years. Because we can afford it fine. The risk is low with the fixed rate, whereas the risk of a tracker/standard mortgage almost has to upper limit.

Also, if the rate actually came down to half our fixed rate it would potentially be worth the penalty to exit early. It's still kinda win/win in the UK, but timing can screw you over.

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How much did you want to overpay? Pretty sure we're allowed to do something like 10% of remaining balance per year. Which, so far at least has been fine.

And yes, this is generally how the banks work the risks I suspect. They will lose out on some deals, but gain hugely from others. For us, after 10 years of fixed payments there won't be much left (even less if kitchen appliances stop failing and giving us ways to not put money onto the mortgage)

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I'm sorry, I have to take your first answer.

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Weeks should have ten day weeks, and each month should have 3 weeks.

Here's why I'm going to say no. It's because businesses would just rip us off by turning the working week into 8 days and just retaining the 2 day weekend.

No, and double no.

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Ah, the good old days of network troubleshooting. Wiggle the cable at the BNC connector until the whole segment comes back to life. Those huge repeater boxes with like 8 ports. Somehow 10Mbit to a Netware server being faster than a local hard drive. Smartdrv fixed most of that though.

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Everyone knows the correct test credentials are test/test. Even then, that's only if they don't allow blank/no password.

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