Dos_Box

I know that for sometime now, you could throw quite a bit of work at CoPilot, ChatGPT, Claude etc. both on free and lower-end subscription tiers and it would pretty much get on with it. Today however, I have experienced several of these now limiting their use in several ways. Today, both ChatGPT and Claude both halted whist doing some image work telling me I'd ran out of credits\free usage time, even though these were quite simple tasks, and I haven't used them in several days, and I know that ZeroHour uses these quite heavily and it seems very random in how much you can or cannot get out of it at any given time. I think the AI industry needs some kind of standard by which tokens can be measured to allow users to better manage their usage (and billing!). Back to Photoshop I go!

If you watched the fantastic final episode of season 3 and didn't stick around for the end of the credits, then you would have missed this sneak peek of season 4 (I did!). I can't wait for this and I do think Silo is one of those almost perfect sci-fi shows.

An interesting piece from the TES here - https://www.tes.com/magazine/news/general/schools-desperate-clearer-ai-guidance and probably is the start of addressing the various issues AI use places on schools.

No problem Tom, I did pass on the dates, but we'll get you next time. Enjoy Kenya

I watched The Caine Mutiny on the C4 app last night. The first time I'd seen it in over 30 years. It really is a film of it's time, but when I finished it, realised that it is what A Few Good Men is based on. Well worth a watch, it's on the C4 streaming app for about 26 days still. It has been colourised, but a highly recommended classic.

You could save £400 and buy a regular electric toothbrush and brush properly. And use mouthwash.

Does, or has anyone shared data via, for example, a 365 OneDrive or Google folder shared with the recipient, and would that fit the relevant data protection rules? I suppose that there is a factor where sharing person to person with 'raw' data such as an open spreadsheet is less secure than transferring data system to system i.e. from one database to another with it being immediately available on receipt. As others have said, having the facility to securely transfer sensitive data from schools to authorised govt departments in a standardised way would be A Very Good Thing.

Not taking sides here, but there are several factors to consider in this. Does anyone remember the very good BBC Bitesize web services and facilities from the 2000's? Many of them were nixed after the edtech industry complained that public money was being used to compete with them, the very same could happen here. Mix that up with having to start from scratch to be as good as already established products and services without the trial, errors, and learning that existing EdTech companies have had to go through for many years to offer these to schools. All it takes is one data-breach and no one will trust it again, then its lots of money down the drain, and no govt wants that kind of publicity. If someone wanted to try that as an open source project, then that could be a whole different thing.

TBH, I shan't be watching the show. When you have a canon of very good movies it's just like reinventing a much bigger wheel to cover the same distance. I may just watch a HP film tonight, it's been a while. *Weirdly I don't much like the last two, because I know it's coming to an end then. But not with the LOtR movies where the last is very much my fave. And as @BKGarry said, please behave. As the saying goes, "Hate the artist, not the art", so please refrain from any personal dislikes and stick to criticising the art.

I use a Ryzen 5 laptop as a work device, and I've been very happy with it over the past 4 (almost 5) years now, and I don't see the need to replace it anytime soon tbh.

It might be an idea to start a thread for 'AI prompts to prevent disaster', where we can add the safeguards we have to write into prompts to prevent it going full Skynet on the task in hand.

@Roberto Totally agree, my big worry, and possibly not unfounded, is that if AI becomes ubiquitous, it may not have the human ability to factor in the 'unknown', especially if it teaches itself. And if something large scale happens, such as a botched AI upgrade of critical infrastructure, it may not be able to fix it because it didn't factor in something a human would. Or as someone put it to me a while back, "The problem with AI is that it has no sense of risk or consequences". The very things that regulate human decision making. I do like my TuxGenie install, however it just burns through 'free' tier credits at a strangely rapid rate, and it does ask me to authorise each step of its processes when trying to fix an issue, but trusting an AI to automate network management etc. would take many, many years of trial and error before it should be trusted. It will be nice to have it do the more menial and time consuming tasks such as password resets, account creation (pulling data from a MIS system for example) and network monitoring, flagging up problems before they become apparent, but I would like there to be a human at the decision making end of all this.

I can tell how bad it is at the sharp end by how quite the first day back is in the forums. So far I think we are at a heightened alert state!

We hope you have all had a good summer (c'mon, the weather was great-ish!) and, even though, for many of you, the kids won't be starting back until tomorrow, all your hard work over the summer has paid off and not had you running around this morning. You know where to come for sympathy and HobNobs! *And why, after a miserable bank holiday weekend, is it lovely today!

It's a 2012 MacBook Pro, so no native AI acceleration. We are currently talking to a hardware manufacture about a webinar to talk about integrated AI chipsets and hopefully we'll get that sorted out very soon. It should prove quite informative. And yes, the laptop does ramp up it's fan when I'm running a task!

I had thought about putting this into General Chat as it may wander slightly, and tip over into other areas, but seeing as the core of it is about AI, then this is probably the best place to put it. As some of you may have seen, I've been playing with Linux Mint on an old MacBook Pro and it's been quiet a surprise, it's fast, stable and very usable. In fact, I've been using it as my home laptop fr a couple of weeks now and haven't seen the need to fie up my much more modern work laptop for general stuff. As many of you know, Linux can be quite a pain to get it to do exactly what you want it to do without quite a bit of digging, terminal tying and swearing (often because your particular machine may have a piece of hardware that doesn't play nice with your chosen distro). Because of this, I thought I'd try out an AI Assistant, to help with the more mundane configurations of the laptop. I found TuxGenie and got it up and running. A quick TLDR for those of you who have never played with this. An AI assistant can help you with more of the mundane daily tasks on your computer, many of them are specialised, focussing on specific areas such as productivity, systems management etc. I'm using TuxGenie for managing my laptop. The way it works is that it plugs into various AI systems such as Google Gemini, Claude and a mix of other free\paid for AI via API keys you have to submit to it. If one AI is either under high demand, or you have run out of free tokens, it can trip over to an available one. This is where 'issues' start to appear. Not in the operation of the assistant, but more that all the free ones I'm using run out of tokens very quickly indeed, even for simple tasks. My current one is to get it to put the MacBook into hibernation when the screen is closed. To start this process I simply asked it to 'Enable hibernation when the lid is closed', which is approximately a 4 step process. From this prompt it goes to find out how this is done, and then does it for you (before you panic, you do have to manually authorise each step (which is explained to you) and put in your password when required). But after a few steps, it basically runs out of tokens for all of the 3 AI's I have it using. And don't even think of using them once the US has gone to work at 1pm GMT. It will simply grumble that they are too busy. I'm temped to get a Claude AI subscription for a month to really try it out. Anyway, I'm rambling a bit, but do need to ask if any of you are using an AI assistant for any system tasks, and if so, which ones (it would be helpful to possibly find better ones), especially ones that can get around demand spikes and token issues. I can see Microsoft releasing one in the future to help (or even more scary, replace) sysadmins. Which could be great if you are doing complex tasks such as platform migrations and upgrades, but I don't think I could trust one for some time yet, as systems have far to many unique variables, and I think we've all been caught out in the past when a supposedly non-related process or program refuses to play nice with what you are trying to do. *It still didn't complete the task, so it's off to the terminal I think.

It really has been a bad two days for genuine talent loss. In tribute:

This is a great little app and I'll be using this instead of task manager now - https://tmog.org Written by David Plummer (the guy who wrote the original), it's very fully featured and available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Currently in beta, but performing well

A great loss, a lovely, talented lady. RIP Dolly.

Re-reading John Scalzi's Old Man's War atm as it's been a while since I first got my hands on it. I have the whole series, so expect to get finished with them all around December with any luck. *Eyes up my Culture series books for a mid-winter fling.

And one last thing, I had noted that it was not cooling down enough under load and the fan hadn't been kicking in. It turns out that Mac fan curves are not really catered for under Mint\Linux, so you will have to install mpbfan (search for it in Software Manager), which fixed things nicely.

The new cable arrived yesterday and solved all the issues. How right you all were 😀 I now have a MacBook Pro that I can use as my home laptop running the latest version of Mint. It's pretty fast too (16GB DDR3 ram still keeps up)! The only snag I had was that once I'd installed Mint and got a temp monitor running I found it was idling at 80+ degrees, so a clean and re-paste was in order (it's not been done in 14 years!) When removing the logic board the keyboard backlight connector ZIF connector simply came away. Not a deal breaker, but I'll look into either replacing the board or getting a replacement connector soldered back on. All in all though, I'm quite happy with the outcome and it's going to get a few more years out of an old machine. And I can cover it in stickers! *And I do have to get some decent fonts on here as I don't like the default.

Bit of an update as to what I have found out so far, especially after installing it several times to spinning disks: The cables are fragile and can affect reliability (as mentioned above) The cables fitted to some Macs with spinning disks around that time were rated for SATA II, not III which SSD's would require to work reliably Macs are fussy about which SATA SSD's you fit. Apparently they don't like lower capacity ones I've ordered a new cable which should be here today and I'll let you know how I get on.

😔RIP Frank, I was gutted some time back when I missed them in Manchester.