Posts by sarusa 445 publicly visible posts • joined 23 May 2022
The only reason you would move to Windows 11 in 2025 is that f#@$ing Microsoft is f$!#ing forcing you to - because Nadella has so completely, staggeringly, f@#Wed up Windows 11 since its introduction. It is the very definition of 'enshittification'. Nobody would move to WIndows 11 if they were not forced to.
So I guess at this point you're running into 'Holy shite, Windows 11 is so f#$4ing bad we might as well just use Linux.'
> Clearly you're biased against the commerce domain, but that it is probably the biggest domain of software development. C was unsuitable because it was designed for low level system software.
Yes, I am biased against giant stupid evil corporations with their legions of incompetent programmers. I flat out said that. And I specifically said that Java was awesome for that domain because it kept those incompetent dumbasses from hurting each other too much. It is perfect for that. You could not trust the incompetent pieces of @$%$ at Microsoft today with bare C.
> Various forms of Java were deployed to billions of devices. You probably have some and don't even know it as it's used in smart cards and sim cards, and billions of phones before Android and Apple took over. And Android still uses Java
I am intimately familiar with Android using Java, because I have written several Android apps in Java. But Android phones now are 1000x more powerful than desktops back then. At the time they were talking about how portable devices with 33 MHz CPUs and 1 MB RAM would be running Java because VMs were so much more space efficient. That was the supposed primary use case! And that never went anywhere. It only really took off as safe business language and Android's Ugh I Guess I Have To Use This Crap Unless I Use All These Other Languages Which Android Now Supports Because Java Is So Bad (TM).
Remember how Java was supposed to be the new embedded in everything language as well? Well, that quickly fell by the wayside, as did 'Write Once, Run Anywhere', which was mostly not true. Though, if you are very careful when you write it now you don't need too much 'if this OS do this if that OS do that'. It at least got you way closer than MFC did.
But no, Java's real, enduring, legacy is allowing hundreds of barely competent corporate code pigs to work on the same bloated sprawling code base without shooting themselves or others in the feet too much. Period.
What feels like hugely excessive verbosity is really the safety padding for people who don't know the difference between bubble sort, quick sort, and bogosort. Have no idea how memory works, that there even are resource limits, or anything else about computer architecture? Welcome, Java programmer, we have your ass covered! This is exactly the niche COBOL was designed for (the original hype was that even your boss could write a COBOL program, because it was just English! Lawl).
Now, I know some really skilled Java programmers, and you can do some quite impressive things in Java - but I've also seen people who can actually write readable perl code too (really!). It's not the major use case and the reason it endures, which is as the new COBOL for corporate drones. And I know I sound really dismissive, but this niche really does need to be filled and Java is perfect for it.
I think code pigs are in real danger - those are the barely competent coders who used to go on StackExchange, grab 5 code snippets, then mash them together till something compiled. You tell them to go off and some tiny thing and they provide some code that may or may not work. Now those people can use LLMs and their code will probably actually be better! But then why use them when you can just use the LLM?
What they can't replace are software engineers, because LLMs can't understand design tradeoffs at all, or how this code fits in the overall ecosystem. The skill of looking at all the design constraints and customer requirements coming up with an optimal solution is at no risk. Or knowing that you can't do this here because that will cause real problems for that existing component over there, or that we've got real memory or hard response time issues so certain things should be avoided.
On the other hand, yes... the people who SHOULD be replaced by LLMs are the f@#$ing corporate execs and middle managers. They're not doing anything useful, and in many cases I think an LLM might actually be less harmful. Let's get to work replacing them ASAP.
The only reason the word 'enshittifcation' is over-used is because every major company has eagerly embraced the concept and has been enshittifying everything faster and faster since 2015. Microsoft fully hopped on board about 2021.
The overuse is just a symptom of the very real cause - which is giant evil corporations aggressively making everything worse. There is no way anytone can say that Microsoft has not been ever aggressively enshittifying since at least 2021. EVERYTHING they do has gotten worse. Copilot. Recall. Teams. Outlook. AI in everything. Supposedly tested major updates breaking everything. More aggressive ads in the start menu. What they've done to XBox. The f#$ing disaster of Flight Sim 2024 with the PC version, yes, deliberately enshittified, so the game could run on their shitty least common denominator version of the console. Getting rid of local accounts. AI coding. Jacking up the price of Office for... yes, AI. Starfield. There is nothing they haven't made shittier in the last 4 years. Okay, they probably own some game studios that have actually made some good games recently because they were under Nadella's radar, but very much the exception.
Well, with how stunningly shitty everything from Microsoft has gotten in the last 5 years (release of Windows 11 marks a clear inflection point, all downhill from there) I'm not sure we'll even notice the difference? Nadella still seems to be quite proud of the Glorious Empire of Shit he's built.
I use search so often (dozens of times a day), and need it to work, so it is easily worth $100 / year to me. Yes, we have been trained to expect search to be free... but free search gets you to the current state of Google Search. You are the product and they have incentive to serve you tons of ads and then sell all your browsing history to facebook.
I've been trying both tonight, and Kagi is still way better than Google with the udm hack because Google search results are deliberately enshittified even before AI gets involved.
If you never search much then sure, just use DuckDuckGo. But I regularly get way better results than DDG or Google from Kagi searches because they are the only search engine that has any incentive to actually give you the best results up front. At work yesterday my boss asked me 'hey, I'm trying to find [x] and not finding anything useful' so I just searched '[x] in Kagi and boom, second result (and the first result was relevant, just not the exact thing he was looking for).
Anyhow, just consider what 'free' search entails while you're blaming this on American capitalism. Who exactly is going to step up in Europe with tens of millions of Euros for free unshittified search? I would certainly like to see this, but not holding my breath.
So, now they let an LLM do the task/thread scheduling and it hallucinates run slots?
And how did this get so far in the first place? Okay, it's good that eventually someone ran it and said 'oh this is even worse than usual' before they pushed it to anyone outside, but obviously the guy who made a change that very obviously breaks the whole system didn't test shit. Or maybe this is also some of that AI written code Nadella is so proud of?
Headline In six months? '37signals Loses All Customer Data After Someone Types the Wrong Thing Into a Linux Terminal, Backups Were Never Checked And Aren't Working'.
I certainly hope it never comes to that and they know what they're doing, but self-hosting your own stuff isn't a panacea either. In particular the 'whoops that was never backed up because of script issues' problem and the 'uh we never actually tried restoring the backups and... for some reason they don't work?' problem.
IF they are being super paranoid about data integrity and are still saving money, more power to them! I have just seen the above happen so many times.
Yeah, absolutely none of this was for customers' benefit, and it's silly to even grasp for straws looking for any customer benefit here. This was 100% explicitly Broadcom doing pig butchering from the start (with customers being the pigs for those who still don't get it).
This was also 100% foreseeable and forseen (plenty of us here who predicted how it played out).
MS want to be the only ones in town providing shitty AI code helpers (and not inconsequentially sucking up all your code to feed into its LLMs), so kill the competition!
And man, remember when Nadella was a breath of fresh air after Ballmer? At this point, with him helming Win11 turning to complete shit and all this AI bullcrap, I fully expect to see him up on a stage soon, dancing and sweating like a pig while screaming 'AI developers! AI developers! AI developers!'
Hint: Every single fecking time Copilot shows up it is unwanted. It has no actual use and is ALWAYS an irritant.
So, just for to put this out there for vulture readers:
regedit, then HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsCopilot
REG_DWORD TurnOffWindowsCopilot 1 (you might have to create it)
Of course there's no guarantee MS will honor this, but they tend to honor registry/gpedit stuff even as they re-install un-installed shite every single fecking time.
Because Copilot is staggeringly incompetent at anything I have asked it to do (out of morbid curiosity). It really is the new Clippy.
I would rather have my 90 year old mother who clicks things at random run my computer. At least she wouldn't be 100% sure she is doing the right thing when 100% doing the wrong thing.
Gee, apparently Elmo posts like a 13yo edgelord and thinks Hitler did nothing wrong. What a shock!
Pardon the reddit link, the armpit of the internet, but this is where it's at:
https://www.reddit.com/r/LeaksAndRumors/comments/1jzqr8c/elon_musks_alleged_unverified_4chan_account/
These are the people who used to just steal five different code snippets from stackexchange then staple them together and randomly beat on it till it compiled. Actually working was not so much a necessity (they would blame it not working on you having a firewall). So now they're just having the LLM generate those snippets. We're not dealing with the best and the brightest here and it probably is better code than they could even write on their own.
I actually bit the bullet and just wiped my computer back to Win10 (Pro). It's quite luverly. Also quite weird to be reminded of how Windows wasn't dogshit just three years ago. Of course they're backported some Win11 malware into it like Copilot, so it's still not as good as it was 3 years ago, but that can be removed.
Unfortunately can't do that for some work machines, so things will continue to break weekly if not daily.
Microsoft ponied up at least $1.5M for the Angry Toddler's inauguration (in two chunks) and CEO Nadella and President Brad Smith (who most people have no idea even exists) duly got invited to a meeting in Washington with the Angry Toddler, Elmo, and Crazy Redneck VP to duly gobble his shaft.
Sadly, they're hardly the only ones. Most big US tech CEOs showed up at the inauguration to bow down and kiss the ring (and bunghole) and gush about how Trump was going to bring stability to business by removing all that onerous regulation. Tim Apple also contributed $1M in bribes and duly gushed and knob slobbered about oh thank god we're finally free at last of the long national nightmare of Joe Biden's hell on Earth.
The Angry Toddler's tariffs sure make a great excuse to kill off those ridiculous and regrettable infrastructure plans you made while drunk and high on LLMium.
Like OpenAI, MS still doesn't have a single business plan for 'AI' that could possibly involve making a profit. Yes, I know they claim billions of 'AI' revenue because all Office 365 and Windows 11 sales now count as 'AI' - it's all fraudulent.
Because, honestly, people with enough money CAN just take whatever they see and do whatever they want with it. Justice is of the rich, by the rich, for the rich. If any normal bloke had done the shite Boris, Elmo, Zuck, and the Angry Toddler have, they'd have been in the nick long ago. And no amount of standards will change this.
Actually, sorry to reply to my own comment, but I did remember that DeepMind has been basically good.
It's a goddamn shame they're owned by Google, which is overwhelmingly evil now, but I think they've still managed to maintain (for now) their balance of doing almost all good things for good reasons. So I wanted to not lump them in with the bastards at Meta, OpenAI, MS, Claude, DeepSeek, etc. I do not think they would grind puppies and kittens into bloodmeal until one of Sundar's incompetent nephews (Just Desi Things TM) demanded it, and maybe not even then!
No, no, obviously the problem is that you are not specific enough in your sign. As this standard suggests, your sign should say 'Okay, you complete sociopaths can take all my biscuits and tea, but my Meghan porn DVDs are completely off limits - that would be beyond the pale, you monsters!' And I'm sure they'll nod, 'Right then, we're not complete monsters, innit?'
AI companies are all sociopaths who would happily grind live puppies and kittens into blood meal if they could make five cents on it (I have not seen any counterexamples yet, though I guess they could exist, but would get no VC funding). They're like Elmo and the Angry Toddler and Zuck and will completely ignore anything that relies on any sort of social contract or basic human decency. I know, 'basic human decency' is extreeeeemely thin and parsimonious even at the best of times, but they couldn't even meet the most meager standards for that, like not spitting on a guy dying in a gutter for being a n00b who needs to git gud.
I think this is pretty f#$ing obvious now, so any standard that actually relies on the other party not being techbro child molestors is a complete waste of time. Well, at least it lets you prove that you gave them the option and they just ignored it? If that's the only reason this exists and you realize that then I guess it will work just fine, because they will ignore it and you can go 'aha'!
Now this is kind of making me nostalgic for the early days of the internet, when so many dumbasses insisted the internet could just route around censorship as damage and corporations or governments couldn't possibly constrain Good White Men (always white men, of course good) who just wanted to post on usenet while all the women and coloreds took care of the trivial stuff.
This. Literally the only job responsibility any member of the Angry Toddler's government has is lovingly tonguing his bunghole. If you can't do that, you're out. It is certainly not doing your job competently, since he's installed the most incompetent people he can find. Bunghole tonguebath or GTFO.
Well, not in the last year, but I certainly did quit a crappy corporate job because of that kind of thing and will never work for a giant evil corporation again.
It used to be that you could at least excuse it with 'well, it's stability', but no longer. Working for small businesses is so much better. Okay, there is the stability issue, and you have to make sure the owner isn't a twat first, or that would be replicating the corporate experience. I've been very happy working for small companies run by actual human beings.
> China’s Cyberspace Administration and Ministry of Public Security have outlawed the use of facial recognition without consent.
For anyone other than the CCP, who are obviously only using it for the good purpose of rooting out thought traitors.
So basically, you can't use facial recognition for your business without officially getting in bed with the CCP. Which totally tracks with everything else panda boy has done in cementing his grip on the public and 'private' sector.
Why is anyone working for IBM at all? They provide nothing of value. I know, I know, that doesn't matter in 2025.
So they sold all their decent hardware off to China as Lenovo, and that was genuinely sad.
Now they'll move all the handwavey bullshit over to India (which is fantastic at doing handwavey bullshit cheap) and, well, nothing of value was lost? Anyone still using IBM deserves what they get. Like anyone still using Google search - you obviously don't care about correct answers.
> Meh. I'm still waiting for someone to explain how, if you exclude all the input from the physical body, human thought is any different from an LLM.
Well for one thing it's a lot more random. LLMs are extremely predictable if you start with the same random seed for choosing the next token.
And then the human brain has far more connections operating simultaneously and there seem to be some quantum effects going on. Nobody really understands how it works.
An LLM is basically a sad-ass emulation of a brain with the little we understand. It's certainly a giant step up from a neural network, but at best it can produce similar results to some thing while using a trillion times more energy and 1000x more time.
Aaaand, a human brain can be self aware. An LLM can't. Ever. It's just a stochastic parrot where all the secret sauce is in the training. If you want AGI you will need some other text. I know, I know, keep trying to prove that wrong.
This at least (?) is a decades old problem. Any program that uses if statements is technically 'Artificial Intelligence' in the most reductive definition - if I write 'if ( input_a == 1 ) { do_this(); } else { do_that(); }' it is now making a decision and is artificially simulating intelligence, so I could now sell it for $1B as AI. And this has been happily abused to sell things since at least the 1950s. Like someone wrote a checker playing program in 1951 and that was 'Artificial Intelligence'! There have been lots of commercial 'Artificial Intelligence' packages that were going to replace programmers This Time For Sure.
Which is why we have the term AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) to mean 'no this time it's really thinking and self aware we swear' and I'm sure that won't be abused for marketing *koff*.
But when dumbass consumers (and managers) see 'AI' they think it's 'AGI' so it does help to keep reminding them it's not.
> What about Microsoft Copilot? Isn't it going great guns? It appears not.
Copilot is just 'AI' Clippy. Constantly popping up with worse than useless suggestions.
If you don't care that what it does is actually correct, like for summarizing a pointless meeting, then sure it's 'useful' because nobody actually cares. In most cases I care.
There are a couple use cases for LLM 'AI', like generating pictures and video and text, or they're great at detecting patterns in things like for medical diagnoses because that's literally all LLM training is - the world's most sophisticated pattern detection. But none of these are anything Microsoft is involved with. It's worthless except as a curiosity for most consumers or employees except in hallucinating stuff for entertainment value. And Copilot is just terrible at that - which is what you'd expect from a Microsoft tool.
So, just to to smack a Nazi in the face further, there are now a LOT of debadged Teslas around here with Elmo re-tweeing 'HITLER DID NOTHING WRONG!' posts every god damn week.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2025/03/13/musk-retweets-hitler-didnt-murder-millions-message-amid-ongoing-nazi-controversy/
Just admit you're a f#$ing Nazi and that Elmo is one or that you were wrong about this. It is real.
Okay, so digging into this further at https://www.tewhatuora.govt.nz/assets/Uploads/HNZ-Financial-Review-Report.pdf they actually had a web of manually managed excel spreadsheets, and this central one got updated by people calling each other and going 'yeah my J345 value is...' so it took two weeks every single time they tried to consolidate, with all the errors that go along with that manual process and nobody involved knowing what they're doing.
This is pretty much what I expect from a government agency, because at least a giant evil corporation wants to make money, but for a government agency all this ramshackle gum and duct tape just creates more jobs.
The big problem with letting even some ads through is that every single ad network has been compromised by hackers to serve up malware ads, multiple times. Even the small 'good' ones. And these bad ads generally don't even have to be clicked, just being displayed is enough. So blocking them is just basic hygiene. And then I subscribe to sites that allow me to, like Ars. I would cough some up for El Reg, too!
Yes, you will pay $9/mo for Kagi Pro sub, but you will be able to customize the crap out of your searches, you can do things like rank sites up and down (or block entirely), your search results will not be filled with AI generated spam sites (Google could filter these out too, but chooses not to for obvious reasons), in fact your search results will have zero AI unless you want it (all part of the customization options).
I search dozens of times a day, so it's worth 30 cents a day to me to have decent search results that aren't Google dogshit. YMMV.
DDG still works of course, but it hasn't actually gotten better, Google has just gotten worse.
> at some point, folks will be able to control more of their PC using a conversational interface rather
> than a terse call to a family member or IT support person to find out why the printer has stopped
> working again.
I would bet you 100 quid that Copilot will be as useless for actually fixing any problem as Microsoft's websites are. It is so f@#$ing stupid it can't even answer much simpler and straightforward things. If they're calling me it is far beyond Copilot's capabilities.
'Help my sound is not working.' 'Hi, it seems like your audio is not working and you want to know how to fix it, is that correct? Thinking... Hmmm, it looks like your first step should be to pour bleach into your earholes. Please let me know if you can hear your audio after that, and if not I will try to help further.' 'I still can't hear anything.' 'Did you pour bleach in your ears?' 'No, that sounds dangerous.' 'I am sorry, but if you do not pour bleach into your ears I can not continue to help you further until you are doing the needful. But did you know you can use Copilot to generate pictures and summarize documents? Would you like me to open Word and Paint for you?'
Look, C++ has had a great run for 40 years. And will continue to be used for decades more. If you a are C++ programmer you will have no problem finding a job for your entire career lifestyle, stop being so reactively defensive about that. COBOL programmers are in hot demand!
But it was designed for times that no longer exist. For when you could have an innocent memory overflow without North Korea, Russia, China, Iran, the NSA, Israel, and every other bad guy on the planet being instantly all over it because their automated vulnerability detection is way better than any safety checks that exist (or can exist) in C++. Languages change when the environment changes.
Yes, I know, Bjorn, you always WANTED safety in C++ (and I want a pony), but you ALWAYS threw that under the bus in the name of performance and memory use. Which is fine - that's what people valued at the time. Well, now people value not having their PC or phone pwned by an overflow error in the code of an entirely unqualified coder a giant amoral corporation paid pennies to create their app. C++ is not 'under attack', there are just better alternatives.
And, as someone who's coded hundreds of thousands of lines of C++, I can only imagine what bletcherous syntax vomit you'd manage to come up with for 'memory safe C++'. Even worse than templates? I'm horrified yet fascinated!
Nope, that is the current situation and demonstrably does not work. 99.99% of people writing code are low paid unskilled grunts who will never, ever be able to write safe code in C/C++.
This is why we have seatbelts in cars, because 99.99+% of drivers are complete dumbasses. And unless you're willing to take them off the road, or not let dumbasses code C/C++ (which I would be fine with but will never happen), they put everyone else in danger so you just have to assume everyone's a dumbass.
Of course you can wave your hands and say 'But imagine every programmer were responsible for their code!', which again, would be nice, but will never happen and can not possibly ever happen.
This is just ignoring the fundamental problem and wishing it away.
Anyone who ever predicted 'AI' could replace (real) software engineers was obviously outing themselves as knowing nothing about it.
Because real software engineering (any engineering) is all about balancing the requirements and tradeoffs using the things you know. What works fine for one application would be disastrous in another because the use cases are different. A competent engineer takes all the design requirements, design constraints, all the other constraints (time, money, available power, data size, latency, throughput, etc. etc.) and delivers the best solution for this very specific set of requirements and constraints. For this job I'm fine with C# on any random laptop. For that job I need C and actual RTOS and hardened hardware.
An LLM 'AI' can't do that at all because it has no idea about any of those and it's not actually thinking. It does not care that re-reading the 3 million line file every time you do an operation is inefficient because all it's doing is spitting out code it's stolen that claims to do the same thing and hacked them together till it compiles. In theory you could actually describe all the constraints and requirements in detail to the LLM, but guess what? You need a software engineer for that, because nobody else has any idea. And LLMs ignore a lot of what you tell them to do anyhow and certainly can't develop novel functional solutions. So AI is no threat to software engineers till we have AGI - and that point all bets are off for anyone doing anything, anyhow.
Yes, they might eliminate some offshore outsourced coders or the code pigs sitting in cubicles (now hotdesking?) at Microsoft just mindlessly spitting out buggy and/or evil crap to make Windows 11 worse. That entire sentence starting with 'It does not care' accurately describes a lot of people on StackExchange too, mindlessly stealing code snippets and bashing them together till they compile. And I'm fine with losing those jobs. As with telemarketers or online influencers, I don't think any job is inherently good just because it provides some schlub with a job kicking people in the crotch.
I can't speak much from the DBA side, but 'every solution depends a lot on the specific requirements and constraints' holds up strongly there too.
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