There are definitely times when the Urge to do Journalism bites. For example: I'm sat drinking a coffee overlooking Whitstable harbour. There's a ship unloading, and I search for the name. This leads me to find out that it was impounded earlier this year for a bunch of safety violations, and is owned by a reasonably elaborate bunch of shell companies. Probably nothing illegal, but quite a lot of playing "pass the asset" from one company to another.
This is what journalism mostly is: persistently pulling at the thread of something you find, to the point where you know something interesting is going on. It takes time and effort, but anyone can do it – you just need to be methodical. As I always say to new journalists, if you think you're job is writing, you're in for a disappointment.
@ianbetteridge I have, more than once, been tempted to set up a database to keep track of the ownership and interconnections between all these little shell companies. So far laziness has kept me from doing this, which is probably best for my safety. Still, the temptation is there.
Every time Elon Musk has run a software company he’s failed. So of course his VC mates are falling over themselves to give him money for xAI, because VCs make rational decisions.
I find it odd that companies and countries always venerate whoever is in the top job. Don’t get me wrong, I understand the value of great leadership, but the idea that the world will collapse because of one person (or lack of) is madness to me.
@ReallyBlue2@JonChevreau@dan613 triggering a massive bank run and crashing the bank they all had their business accounts at because one of them got heated in a group chat…
Someone should probably tell Rishi Sunak that if he seriously believes that young people are being radicalised, teaching them how to shoot modern weapons might not have the outcome he thinks it will.
I remember how delighted I was in 1960, when the previous National Service scheme was stopped. One of the big worries then was that it turned layabouts into disciplined revolutionaries who hated the government, and knew how to use guns...
I haven't really been keeping up with the omnishambles that is the Tory election campaign, so I'm only just finding out that "we got you through Covid" is one of their campaign lines. Sure, you got us through it, by setting rules that you were ignoring at the time to such a degree the PM had to resign.
Also, if "I got us through a World War" wasn't enough to get Churchill elected, it seems a little unlikely that your botched "getting through" the pandemic is going to cut much mustard.
I would be much more supportive of compulsory national service for 50-60 year olds. The ones who got free education, affordable housing to buy, etc. It’s about time we gave something back to our country.
People: "Machine learning needs to be entirely local and controlled by the user, not done in the cloud!”
Microsoft: “Here's a machine learning system that's entirely local and controllable by the user”
People: "Not like that".
(Snarky comment, but a serious point: machine learning should be local, not cloud based, and it should be controllable by the user. This can be useful tech. Do I trust MS to do it “well enough”? Nope. Is it still a step forward that it can be done? Yep.)
The funny thing about Microsoft's new Recall feature is how little actual "AI" it's doing. It's basically just making automatic screen captures, then running OCR and image recognition to create a semantic index you can search. Unless I'm missing something, there's no LLM (or small language model) used in it. Maybe in parsing queries?
This is just such a weird reading of this. The data is encrypted AND if you have Windows 11 Pro, also protected by Bitlocker. You would have to be parsing the sentence pretty oddly to read it as "not encrypted on Windows Home".
Maybe this is a privacy PITA, but writing breathless pieces based on press releases is just silly. Let experts pick it apart when they have their hands on it.