Posts by Mostly Irrelevant

Tesla's Optimus can't roll without rare earth magnets, and Beijing ain't budging yet

Convenient

This is a convenient excuse for a laughable vaporware product.

Microsoft Copilot shows up even when it's not wanted

Re: Which is every single time

I switched to Ubuntu last month, haven't seen Copilot since.

It's like their intention was to one-up Clippy and boy did they succeed.

The passive aggression of connecting USB to PS/2

Re: *!$#&@ Bluetooth

I'm not sure I believe you, I haven't see a PC in years that even has a PS2 port.

LLM providers on the cusp of an 'extinction' phase as capex realities bite

AI slop isn't worth reading. I use it to fill in paper-pusher based requirements that no one will ever read but it can't make anything worthwhile. Fill in the blanks occasionally but create? Only the lowest quality drek.

If your job happens to be writing marketing copy then it's great. It's not like anyone actually reads it anyway. It might as well be lorum ipsum.

One of the things that Generative AI is manifestly terrible at is detecting if something is generated by Generative AI. So it's unlikely we'll be using it to block bots any time soon, probably ever.

Tesla Cybertruck recall #8: Exterior trim peels itself off, again

8 years is good for a 70's Datsun. Here in Canada we salt the roads every winter. 70's Datsuns were lucky to make it to 4 years.

VA IT contract cancellation DOGE boasted about ... was due to end in 10 days anyway

Why didn't they hire someone more competent to do this?

Oops, they did it again: Microsoft breaks Outlook with another dubious update

Re: This is why forced updates should be made unlawful

Microsoft is forcing updates now? Why are you ranting about something that isn't happening?

Re: Ugh.

Yeah, all it needs to do is be 1000X worse and it'll be as bad as the classic version of Outlook.

I'm counting the days until it's no longer supported. that's exactly what the corporate IT departments need as an excuse to remove it from everything. Then we'll be free from having to make all the HTML emails IE 5 compatible (yes, seriously).

Re: Stop dreaming

How about Apple? I keep seeing people with Apple corporate laptops so it must be feasible for someone.

Nope. You probably can't cash in by turning your office or farm into a datacenter

The premise this article takes for granted is fictitious. We need a bunch more data centres because...? LLMs are limited application AI and we're using them for at least half the things they apply to now. More efficient models are being built now. Inference can be done on commodity hardware. What do we need a bunch more data centres for?

C++ creator calls for help to defend programming language from 'serious attacks'

Honestly, Rust simplifies a lot of things are the needlessly complex in C++. I'd rather have a non-memory safe Rust than a memory-safe C++. C++ was great for the time, but it has a lot of legacy cruft that newer languages have done away with.

Windows 7 lives! How to keep your favorite fossil running

I disagree with this statement entirely "Just because its original vendor no longer supports a proprietary OS doesn't mean that you must do as instructed and cough up for an upgrade."

An unsupported OS is a ticking time bomb, keeping software up to date is not optional unless you're air-gapping your system. Information on exploits is too available these days to make that an option. Windows 7 should not be used for any network-connected applications at this point. If you don't want to pay Microsoft more money there are a lot of open source OSes you could be running.

Linux royalty backs adoption of Rust for kernel code, says its rise is inevitable

I predict you've never written a line of Rust and are likely not even a programmer. Rust is well designed, modern language, and the memory safety is a great feature.

Azure networking snafu enters day 2, some services still limping

This is exactly the sort of thing people pay Microsoft big bucks to avoid!

The winner of last year's Windows Ugly Sweater is ...

Are you sure Excel isn't a database. There is an Microsoft Jet provider for excel so you can use your favourite "database" in all your programs, provided you want to use a really old Windows database access system that's been replaced at least 3 times. It supports VB 6!

Fining Big Tech isn't working. Make them give away illegally trained LLMs as public domain

Re: Small thinking

They don't currently do this, but it could be done. You'd have to keep track of where the weights of the nodes in the neural network came from. It would definitely increase the complexity of the model and cost of "training" it though, which is why they aren't doing this. Also, the number of works attributed to even small pieces of text would be absolutely huge. We're talking about pages and pages for a paragraph.

It would be a lot easier to list ALL of the input in the LLM somewhere and link to it. Said list would be a huge Wikipedia-like monster but it's more practical.

I disagree with the idea that the models should be public domain, unless it's with the express agreement of EVERY copyright holder (which is functionally impossible). The remedy I personally support is to delete the offending models AND provide restitution to all copyright holders. Said restitution should be all income made off the model, not taking expenses into account, divided equally among all claimants. This should also have the needed deterrent effect of bankrupting any company selling a commercial model containing stolen IP.

This is compatible with existing IP laws, where giving away the offending derivative work isn't because it gives companies a way to steal your work and put it in the public domain.

BOFH: Don't sell The Boss a firewall. Sell him The Dream

Are there IT departments still using backup tapes?

AI hiring bias? Men with Anglo-Saxon names score lower in tech interviews

Re: You can't add arbitrary data to remove bias.

If you were smart, what you'd do is not include the applicant's name in the dataset at all. Then it can't discriminate based on name because it doesn't have it.

Windows 10 given an extra year of supported life, for $30

Re: $30 ... how to be paid?

I bet it'll show up on the store app with a "helpful" popup. Microsoft always makes it easy to pay them more money.

Re: Powerful Hardware?

What Microsoft is trying to achieve here is lack of responsibility for security or stability on machines without a TPM. If anyone who hacked Windows 11 to install on unsupported hardware they get to duck liability.

And liability is something corporates don't like to have to deal with.

JPMorgan Chase sues scammers following viral 'infinite money glitch'

Re: Banksters hate being ripped off by other crooks.

It's not illegal if you've paid off the regulators and politicians in totally legal (because of your lobbying) ways to make it legal. This is how big business controls the US government, and how it's trying very hard to control every other government on earth.

It's true, social media moderators do go after conservatives

Re: Who is the judge ?

They're "alternative facts".

Which is a euphemism that means lies. You can't debate with a disingenuous party because they'll just keep making things up.

MongoDB rebuts claims it's not ready for business critical workloads

Re: Just a humble BI developer

No, you don't have it right, MongoDB's schema is very loose and defined by the client application. Which can be really great for application developers. But it's not really designed for or compatible with DBAs so I completely understand why any DBA would hate it. The actual database itself is basically a back end for a MongoDB client library and all the validation occurs on the client. This can be convenient for software developers because your web servers (that are cheap and plentiful) can do more of the work.

I work with a mix of different database types and there are a few things that MongoDb is massively better at than a relational database like complex data structures that have a lot of nesting. And for general CRUD it's not really any better or worse than a relational database. And it's very good for distributed databases and very large databases because of the ways the data can be sharded. What MongoDb sucks at is managing a bunch of related data in different collections (which are like tables). It's mostly about structuring your data in a way that makes sense for the database because if you build your MongoDb database like a relational database it'll suck, because there is no "relational integrity", each collection should be a contained concept (possibly a very complex one).

It's a tool in the belt, just like relational. But it's good to have some experience with different types of database so you don't end up in the "if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail" situation. Next time you build a trivial project I suggest you give it a try.

Have we stopped to think about what LLMs actually model?

Can we dispense with the marketing BS terms like "hallucinations" that imply that LLMs are thinking. Facutality isn't even a thing the models are designed to test, they're just computing text output that approximates a response for the prompt.

It doesn't know anything, it doesn't think and it certainly doesn't "hallucinate" because that requires a conscious mind.

It's all drying up: Microsoft to erase 3D Paint from digital store

Re: True to form

Still beats most JS frameworks, you're lucky to get a year out of those.

AI stole my job and my work, and the boss didn't know – or care

AI watermarking actually benefits people creating AI models because they can exclude marked content from new models, preventing cascading failures due to feeding AI dreck into the model.

Sam Altman is more salesman than AI visionary.

OpenAI’s GPT-4o Mini is indeed small – like its lead over rivals in certain tests

Something OpenAI doesn't want most people to know is that LLMs aren't that complicated. The only reason they weren't a thing years ago is the practicality and cost of putting together the enormous amounts of information needed to build the models. Their moat is very small and that's not good business-wise, especially since they're so unprofitable.

AMD spills the beans on Zen 5's 16% IPC gains

Really? I was just about to post about how much CPU progress has slowed down. When I was a kid a new CPU would come out and the older generation would be completely obsolete because each generation was massively faster. Now you can keep the same CPU for sometimes as long as 10 years and still play new games on it.

AMD predicts future AI PCs will run 30B parameter models at 100 tokens per second

I predict no one will care. LLMs have limited usefulness for your average consumer at this point. Why bother running the models locally?

Trump threatens to send Meta's Mark ‘Zuckerbucks’ to prison if reelected president

Re: Who is Ken Block ?

I didn't even know there were horse gymkhanas before this week when Mighty Cars Mods rocked up to one in a RAV4 "by accident".

I think I'd have Zuck in Zuck vs Bezos fight as well. He's in at least reasonable shape and younger.

I'd also have pretty much anyone else in a fight vs Musk, except Trump or anyone else over 75 and in that case it's just not fair.

VMware license changes mean bare metal can make a comeback through 'devirtualization', says Gartner

VMWare is doing all they can to drive away their remaining customers. I mostly use virtualization for web servers, why would I even consider their produce when lightweight container orchestrators exist?

ChatGPT wrongly insists Trump-Biden CNN debate had 1 to 2-minute delay

Those models were created before the most recent debate, how would they have any information about what happened? All they're doing is stringing together likely responses to the question.

Every time I read an article like this it mostly just shows how people's expectations of the performance of LLMs is not anchored in reality.

Windows 11 24H2 might call time on that old NAS under the stairs

When Windows started disabling SMB 1.0 by default I updated my old NAS device (Buffalo Linkstation) with a newer version of Samba. I did this by telnetting to it and updating the software it was running manually. I was a little shocked that this was possible, but it's stayed like that for years so it seems to have worked. I'm sure an update would set it back to stock but all we know that's not happening with a 10+ year old NAS device.

So some of these things might be fixable if you try hard enough.

Elon Musk says he doesn’t want 100% tariff on China-made electric vehicles

Re: Of course he doesn't

Almost every Tesla sold in China is built in China.

Isn't this a bit of a conflict of interest? Tesla builds a lot of cars in China.

VBScript nudged nearer to the grave with next big Windows 11 update

VBScript is such a security risk it should have been removed in Windows 7.

Father of SQL says yes to NoSQL

Re: What is this NoSQL movement of which he speaks?

Currently people like to call object store databases "NoSQL" to be particularly non-specific. I'm not sure why.

Re: Got to pick the right tool for the job

MySQL is passable as a data store for applications, but PostgreSQL is better for mostly everything

Dell to color-code staff based on how hybrid they really are in RTO push

"The policy, which exempts field employees, is controversial because it states that choosing remote status will hinder career advancement and increase the chance of being selected for a layoff, among other downsides."

This is true of remote work everywhere, it limits your career advancement opportunities. Dell is just being honest about it.

Lightweight Dillo browser springs back to life, still doesn't care about JavaScript

Re: I like it already

As someone who works in web development, it's not going to happen. Users constantly demand more functionality, more responsiveness and browsers keep rolling out new features. The trend is towards more complexity, not less. It would take a big user revolt to change this and I'm not seeing anything like that, I'm seeing the opposite. Everyone seems to be happy to keep updating Chrome every time a release comes out.

Wing Commander III changed how the copy hotkey works in Windows 95

This is a neat story, but anyone who really cared about playing Wing Commander 3 would have booted into DOS mode because it ran a lot better that way.

America may end up with paid-for 5G fast lanes under net neutrality anyway

This technology is more about creating slow lanes for less important traffic (whatever they consider less important), so that more important traffic will be transferred faster or with better latency. But I guess slow lanes isn't good marketing.

British watchdog has 'real concerns' about the staggering love-in between cloud giants and AI upstarts

It's going to happen, the only companies who can afford the huge cost of training these AI models once the VC money dries up are companies that run huge public clouds because they can run them using excess resources inn less allocated periods of time. It's basically free for them.

Why Microsoft's Copilot will only kinda run locally on AI PCs for now

I've used this thing a few times, I have no idea why it needs to be a component of the OS.

US Air Force secretary so confident in AI-controlled F-16s, he'll fly in one

I don't want to be condescending here, but that's way fewer inputs and a lot more margin of error. It doesn't seem like you know much about AI models.

Flying a jet fighter through a wide open sky is significantly less complex an AI problem than piloting a car though a city street with people walking, cyclists and other cars.

This is why I'm sure self-driving cars are decades away, there are a lot of steps along the way that don't exist. We don't even have semi trucks that are self-driving only on freeways yet, and there is a lot of money in that.