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The council was on track to have an even worse year but managed to get an £8.1 million deficit down to £3.4 million at the end of the year

The Atlantic makes that case that "the foundation of the AI industry is a scam" and that AI "is not what its developers are selling it as: a new class of thinking — and, soon, feeling — machines." [OpenAI CEO Sam] Altman brags about ChatGPT-4.5's improved "emotional intelligence," which he says makes users feel like they're "talking to a thoughtful person." Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI company Anthropic, argued last year that the next generation of artificial intelligence will be "smarter than a Nobel Prize winner." Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google's DeepMind, said the goal is to create "models that are able to understand the world around us." These statements betray a conceptual error: Large language models do not, cannot, and will not "understand" anything at all. They are not emotionally intelligent or smart in any meaningful or recognizably human sense of the word. LLMs are impressive probability gadgets that have been fed nearly the entire internet, and produce writing not by thinking but by making statistically informed guesses about which lexical item is likely to follow another. A sociologist and linguist even teamed up for a new book called The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want, the article points out: The authors observe that large language models take advantage of the brain's tendency to associate language with thinking: "We encounter text that looks just like something a person might have said and reflexively interpret it, through our usual process of imagining a mind behind the text. But there is no mind there, and we need to be conscientious to let go of that imaginary mind we have constructed." Several other AI-related social problems, also springing from human misunderstanding of the technology, are looming. The uses of AI that Silicon Valley seems most eager to promote center on replacing human relationships with digital proxies. Consider the ever-expanding universe of AI therapists and AI-therapy adherents, who declare that "ChatGPT is my therapist — it's more qualified than any human could be." Witness, too, how seamlessly Mark Zuckerberg went from selling the idea that Facebook would lead to a flourishing of human friendship to, now, selling the notion that Meta will provide you with AI friends to replace the human pals you have lost in our alienated social-media age.... The good news is that nothing about this is inevitable: According to a study released in April by the Pew Research Center, although 56 percent of "AI experts" think artificial intelligence will make the United States better, only 17 percent of American adults think so. If many Americans don't quite understand how artificial "intelligence" works, they also certainly don't trust it. This suspicion, no doubt provoked by recent examples of Silicon Valley con artistry, is something to build on.... If people understand what large language models are and are not; what they can and cannot do; what work, interactions, and parts of life they should — and should not — replace, they may be spared its worst consequences.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you like it to keep working, don’t put a ring on it

Who, Me?  Reg readers are so dedicated it seems some of you are married to the job, although you also admit that no relationship is perfect when you send stories to Who, Me? It's the column in which we share your tales of making massive mistakes and somehow staying together with your employer afterwords.…

After the birth of her first child Chelsea Connell, then 28, weighed 16 stone and was a size 20 but wanted to lose weight so in 2021 went under the knife at a private clinic in Manchester.

The Maggie May hitmaker, 80, was supported by daughter Kimberely, 45, and lookalike son Sean, 44, as they headed for dinner at swanky restaurant Matsuhisa.

The Brazilian model previously revealed she spent almost £1million on plastic surgery in a bid to become the world's 'most perfect woman'.

He has links to Essex

There is also very slow traffic because of the temporary traffic signals for the electricity work being conducted on Long Green both ways near A120 (Galley's Corner).

In a major speech, the Reform leader will put coal-mining at the centre of the party's plans for reopening the Port Talbot Steelworks if it wins Welsh elections next year.

The Met Office has explained exactly when it'll get even hotter this week

The 2025 Tony Awards lit up screens across the world on Sunday - but it was the drama behind the scenes that really set tongues wagging.

A sobbing Nicole Scherzinger accepted her first ever Broadway honor at the star-studded 78th Annual Tony Awards, held at Radio City Music Hall in New York City on Sunday.

Musk and Trump's fallout has already led to an ally of the Tesla CEO losing his nomination to run NASA which has remaining DOGE employees sweating.

A diversion for bus routes has been put in place

The actress, 38, is currently soaking up the sun with husband Mark Wright and their daughter Palma, three months, at the swanky £300-a-night SO/ Sotogrande Spa & Golf Resort Hotel.

After nearly two decades of estrangement, Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher reconnected with his daughter Molly Moorish in 2018. Molly was raised by her mother Lisa Moorish.

Eddie's company hired a Highly Paid Consultant to help them retool their systems for a major upgrade. Of course, the HPC needed more and more time, and the project ran later and later and ended up wildly over budget, so the HPC had to be released, and Eddie inherited the code.

What followed was a massive crunch to try and hit absolutely hard delivery dates. Management didn't want their team "rewriting" the expensive code they'd already paid for, they just wanted "quick fixes" to get it live. Obviously, the HPC's code must be better than theirs, right?

After release, a problem appeared in one of their sales related reports. The point-of-sale report was meant to deliver a report about which items were available at any given retail outlet, in addition to sales figures. Because their business dealt in a high volume of seasonal items, every quarter the list of items was expected to change regularly.

The users weren't seeing the new items appear in the report. This didn't make very much sense- it was a report. The data was in the database. The report was driven by a view, also in the database, which clearly was returning the correct values? So the bug must be in the code which generated the report…

If POSItemDesc = "Large Sign" Then grdResults.Columns.FromKey("FColumn12").Header.Caption = "Large Sign" End If If POSItemDesc = "Small Sign" Then grdResults.Columns.FromKey("FColumn12").Header.Caption = "Small Sign" End If If POSItemDesc = "2x2 Hanging Sign" Then grdResults.Columns.FromKey("FColumn12").Header.Caption = "2x2 Hanging Sign" End If If POSItemDesc = "1x1 Sign" Then grdResults.Columns.FromKey("FColumn12").Header.Caption = "1x1 Sign" End If '.........Snipping more of these........ If POSItemDesc = "Light Thief" Then grdResults.Columns.FromKey("FColumn12").Header.Caption = "Light Thief" End If If POSItemDesc = "Door Strike" Then grdResults.Columns.FromKey("FColumn12").Header.Caption = "Door Strike" End If

First, it's worth noting that inside of the results grid display item, the HPC named the field FColumn12, which is such a wonderfully self documenting name, I'm surprised we aren't all using that everywhere. But the more obvious problem is that the list of possible items is hard-coded into the report; items which don't fit one of these if statements don't get displayed.

At no point, did the person writing this see the pattern of "I check if a field equals a string, and then set another field equal to that string," and say, "maybe there's a better way?" At no point, in the testing process, did anyone try this report with a new item?

It was easy enough for Eddie to change the name of the column in the results grid, and replace all this code with a simpler: grdResults.Columns.FromKey("POSItem").Header.Caption = POSItemDesc, which also had the benefit of actually working, but we're all left puzzling over why this happened in the first place. It's not like the HPC was getting paid per line of code. Right? Right?

Of course not- no HPC would willingly be paid based on any metric that has an objective standard, even if the metric is dumb.

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Broadway's biggest stars came together on Sunday night in New York City to celebrate all things theater at the 78th Annual Tony Awards.

Dani Dyer has shared pictures from her honeymoon with fans following her wedding to footballer husband Jarrod Bowen last weekend.

Met officers believed they'd just shot dead a failed al-Qaeda suicide bomber, Hussain Osman. But alarm bells started ringing when the suspect was looked at more closely...