Posts by sarusa

Apple Vision Pro units returned as folks just can't see themselves using it

The one feature

The one thing I keet hearing as 'the killer feature' for now is watching movies on a plane flight.

Of course this is an extremely limited use feature for most people.

IT body proposes that AI pros get leashed and licensed to uphold ethics

Good luck with that

I mean yes, maybe the UK govt would use that register for government funded projects after 20 years, since that's their usual timeframe for new tech.

Everyone else? Hah. Lack of ethics is exactly what companies looking for AI want.

Broadcom moves to reassure VMware users as rivals smell an opportunity

And other lies

'Broadcom moves to reassure VMware users'

There's really nothing they can say at this point that's not a lie. People know what wankers Broadcom are and what their business model is. If you've unwillingly become one of their customers with this you're now prey in their sights.

Tesla's Cybertruck may not be so stainless after all

The manliest truck!

I continue to find it hilarious that this truck, your manliest of Trump 4 lyfe white nationalist no homo mans only beefcake, is such a complete fragile snowflake compared to my Camry Hybrid (or Subaru, but those are known rugged).

Your $80,000 Sports Futility Vehicle can't even make it up my driveway, which my Camry Hybrid has no problems with. ... ... Which I also guess is the case for a lot of cybertruck owners too, gasping for breath after a hard typing session defending whatever Elmo says on Twitter.

You can disagree with a lot of things I said above, but you can not, without being in complete denial of reality (okay, yeah, MAGA/Tory), deny that my Camry Hybrid family sedan is a more capable, rugged, vehicle which will need far less maintenance than your Playstation 1 excreta.

Forcing AI on developers is a bad idea that is going to happen

Re: Its not on by default

That's only if you trust the word of a company that was evil enough to put this in their code in the first place without warning and without a 'no, out entirely!' option. The obvious concern is that it's snaffling all your code and sending it back to JB to further train their LLM and there's something entirely misleading in the EULA that lets them do this with impunity.

And then of course there are the other concerns given by the author. I have yet to see any substantial AI generated code that was error free. It can barely handle a single line at a time - and those are hit and miss, waste just as much time as they save. Because the AI does not, can not, understand what you are trying to do with the code. It does not understand the constraints, the desires, the engineering tradeoffs. I mean, I trust it could probably write a bubble sort, but I don't need AI to do that even if I wanted it to. I have seen things where someone eventually managed to cajole ChatGPT into writing some working code blocks, but they were basically toys and stolen wholesale from Github checkins.

Apple Vision Pro is creating a new generation of glassholes

Tessholes

It is no coincidence at all that the plurality of these involved Tesla owners. Lotta -hole crossover there.

Aircraft rivet hole issues cause delays to Boeing 737 Max deliveries

Re: Boeing should

While I get your point, I'm not sure the engineers, devs, and QA can be entirely blamed other than for just doing what management told them to do. I think loading up the entire plane with managers and executives, especially executives, would accomplish what you wanted. Because then every one else doing the actual work would suddenly be allowed to care about quality again.

Re: Working as desgined!

Oops - sorry, that comment title went through Boeing QA.

Working as desgined!

MBAs gonna MBA

> "He said the errors would were "not an immediate flight safety issue and all 737s can continue operating safely."

And this is what you said before, during, and after the 737 Max MCAS issue that took down two passenger flights, killing everyone on board.

The real significance of Apple's Macintosh

Re: black text on white background the standard

But I'm sure I'm mistaken and this is genius up there with the puck mouse, my apologies.

Re: black text on white background the standard

Like I said in the original comment, that is only if you have no idea about the difference between emissive and reflective mediums.

But hey, there's at least 6 kneejerk AppleBros who can't read and think that black on white on a CRT or OLED is the same as black on white on a page of paper and angrily hit downvote, so you're not alone there.

It changed everything but changed one thing in a bad way...

The Mac definitely validated the idea of mouse and windows, and WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). They'd all been seen before, of course, but the Mac was the one that nailed and popularized it.

The one terrible thing it did, however, was make black text on white background the standard. Before that time we did white on black (or orange on black, or green on black, etc) because it was easier on the eyes.

And if you have a nice soft monochrome display like the original Mac did, then black on white is no problem, like it's not a problem with printed books. You can stare at that all day. However the entire rest of the industry (including Macintoshes once they introduced the color Macs) were on color CRTs and then LCDs, LEDs, etc. And on a bright emissive screen, black on white is far harder on the eyes than white on black (or yellow on dark blue, your dark theme of choice). In the daytime it doesn't matter so much, but at night the bright white backgrounds just stab your eyes with many many fine tiny knives. And it took 30 years of this crap before people finally started making dark mode a thing again (around 2015), just because 'Apple did it so it must be cool' even though Apple had long forgotten why they did it (the screen technology matters) and Microsoft never even knew why in the first place, just blindly copied it.

Google flushes cached search results forever

It figures

They went evil years and years ago, it's actually kind of amazing that the couple cents per year they were spending on cached pages lasted till 2024.

JetBrains' unremovable AI assistant meets irresistible outcry

Bad code

I haven't used this JetBrains abomination, but my big complaint with trying Github copilot was how often the code was wrong. Sometimes subtly, sometimes not. Because the 'AI' has no idea what you are actually trying to accomplish and what all the constraints on things are. But I guess that doesn't matter when you're just writing Microsoft code, because nobody expects that crap to work.

This! So they /are/ sending your stuff to Teh Claude. Where I'm sure it will be perrrrfectly safe and they would never misuse it.

China puts homegrown GPUs and other AI infrastucture on its national to-do list

'homegrown'

The best tech we can steal - make it happen (again)!

Firefox 122 gets even more competitive with Chrome on translation

Nice to see

Since every Chrome based browser has been rapidly going to shite thanks to Google's no longer even bothering to pretend they're not being evil it's nice to see real improvements for FF.

United Airlines’ patience with Boeing is maxed out after repeated safety issues

'Boeing'

Boeing, the amazing engineering company of 80 years, got taken over by the f@#$ing MBAs at McDonnell Douglas in 1997 and it's been downhill ever since as scum of the earth MBAs (but I'm being redundant) do what MBAs gonna do.

Yeah, supposedly Boeing bought McDD, but it ended up with the McDD management in charge - reverse merger. These are people who would happily grind live kittens and puppies into blood meal if they could figure out a way to make a profit on it. So they lobbied the FAA that having actual inspections was too onerous and they would take care of it fo sho, no need to worry. And then they moved HQ to Chicago so they'd be far, far away from any actual tedium like having to deal with the grubby little details of building and designing planes. CEO Phil Condit explicitly said this!

The 737 Max stall disaster was 100% what you'd expect from MBAs. So is this.

Tesla Cybertruck gets cyberstuck during off-roading expedition

Good lord, that was hardly even a hill

Sorry for double posting, but I finally watched the video, and wow... I've made it up worse in our Subaru Outback (Legacy) in Alaska with snow on the ground. The 'Durable and rugged enough to go anywhere' truck you paid $80,000 for, which can't even take bird poop without pitting, can't even handle a Juneau driveway our *family station wagon* can easily make it up while carrying 4 people and a full load of groceries from Freddy's.

Sports Futility Vehicle

I just can't stop laughing every time I re-read 'Owner pledges to try again once software update improves performance.'

Lukewarm reception for Microsoft's Copilot Pro amid performance, cost grumbles

The optimal way to use Copilot

Here's how you get Copilot to stop sucking up resources and spying on everything you're doing:

Group Policy Editor -> User Config -> Admin Templates -> Windows Components -> Windows Copilot, Turn off Windows Copilot, Enabled

(Yes, you have to set it to Enabled to disable it, typical Microsoft - though I'm sure it's because registry key not present = false = enabled by default)

Anyhow, you will be thrilled by how optimal Copilot becomes in this configuration.

China names members of a second tech supergroup to define the metaverse

Pretty obvious standards

Metaverse Standard #1: Energetically Endorse The Teachings of the CCP

Metaverse Standard #2: Gloriously Rhapsodize Anything Panda Boy Says

Metaverse Standard #etc: Only the first two really matter.

Huawei prepares to split from Android on consumer devices with HarmonyOS Next

''split'

But they'll keep stealing from mainline Android as necessary. That's how they got their moon lander.

Tencent, Meta, alliance reportedly strains over differing VR visions

Oh noes

' The alliance struck by Tencent and Meta to bring the latter's Quest VR hardware to China is reportedly faltering.'

You've got two giant evil twatwaffles feasting on the blood of humanity - yeah, they're going to have some differences in how to best crush their customers into blood meal. If we're lucky they won't be able to resolve their differences and our demise will be rolled back maybe six months.

Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse

So I've been using Kagi

After Google started to completely go to shit ("it doesn’t reflect the overall quality and helpfulness of Search for the billions of queries we see every day" like hell, you lying corporate sack of dung) I went to DDG for a while (which is mostly Bing results with some polish), and while Google has declined to the point where DDG/Bing is actually mostly better than it now, they were still turning up tons of this SEO crap as top results, so I asked around and found some people were using kagi.com.

The downside is it's subscription - cheapest plan is $50/yr, I'm on the $100/yr plan. I know that'll cause a lot of people to instantly blow their tops because search has been 'free' *forever*. I was also 'Whaaaaa? HOW DAR U'. But then I realized just how much I search, like dozens of times a day. This is one of the most important services I use.

It has tons, and tons, and tons of customization. You can set up exactly what you want on your search result pages - theme, summary pane in the upper right, how you want your results to look (site icon? whole url? page title? Page summary - and how big? How many results per page, of course color themes... And then you can go and fine tune the *bleep* out of results. For every website you can give it a graduated priority from 'never show me this site' (expertsexchange.com) to 'only if you must' to 'normal' to 'bump results from this site' to 'I love this site!' Remember when google used to let you block bad websites but took that away because it meant fewer ads? Similarly you can use keywords to 'vote' pages up or down. There are various 'lenses' for searching for certain types of things. So many things you can tweak.

Anyhow, it gives me much better results than Google or DDG - the answer is almost always in the top result, at least in the top 3. There is never any sponsored crap (because I'm paying for it), and anything I want to tweak I can tweak. It seems to do a much better job than Google at filtering out AI Spam too, because unlike Google they actually have an incentive to do so. Most of this SEO crap is so obvious it's ridiculous to think that Google couldn't do at least a little about it if they didn't just want to show more ads for bad results - like oh hey, another website popped up with tens of thousands of pages that look mighty familiar, linking to thousands of other websites we know are bad actors. Kagi proves this is true. Some slips by, but nowhere near as bad, and then you can just block that site from results forever with a hover and one click. And I'm sure they use that as feedback to filter them out overall.

I have had times where Kagi did not give me the result I wanted. So I rolled my eyes, sighed, headed over to Google and DDG and used the exact same query... and also got nothing useful. So there have definitely been times (maybe about a dozen?) where Kagi disappointed me but at least it wasn't ever any worse than Google or DDG - and in most cases it's much better. The one case where Google is still better, I think, is reverse image search (upload a picture, have it search for things that look like the picture), so sometimes I hold my nose and head over there just for that.

I know, I sound like a freaking infomercial. I don't work for the company or know anyone there or get any referrals - I'm just a guy who switched about 3 months ago and so far I am absolutely sold on it as a better experience. There is a pretty generous one month free trial so you can try it yourself, nothing to lose but the hours you can spend configuring up your ideal search results.

Of course the usual caveats apply about do you trust a private company not saving your search data, etc. etc. or not selling your search info - and of course I don't know for sure. But the same applies to Google, DDG, Bing, etc. (Apple is Google), and at least my search results are way better now. We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.

YouTube video lag wrongly blamed on its ad-blocking animus

uBlock Origin FTW

So glad I don't have to use the 'Spawn of Satan' icon for once.

uBlock Origin has always been better than Adblock/Adblock Plus since it came into being specifically because Adblock was such a bloated pig at that point. Like the UO page says 'Finally, an efficient wide-spectrum content blocker. Easy on CPU and memory.' I can't see any reason to be using Adblock anything rather than uBlock Origin - I guess people just don't know and Adblock is the first thing they find.

Uncle Sam wants to make it clear that America's elections are very, very safe

Re: Should not need saying

They have to do this because MAGA asshats are the kind of people who will pretend they found gigantic rats in their coke bottles and bring dead flies to a restaurant just so they can guzzle 80% of the soup then throw the fly in and angrily scream about how they've been wronged.

This absolutely sounds like desperation, but it's only because they're dealing with the worst people in the world. They ARE desperate, dealing with these scumbags.

Well, to a certain point

Yes, the actual mechanics of voting in the US are very very safe. The only attempted election fraud ever uncovered in the last election was MAGA asshats, and the ultimate MAGA asshat (the Angry Toddler) trying to get the State of Georgia to magically create more votes for him. Neither of those worked.

But then once you actually count the votes it's all up in the air because the MAGA asshats will deny anything that doesn't fit with their reality (as they do daily). As far as the angry toddlers are doing, it doesn't matter what the mechanisms are, it's just whether the results match them angrily stamping their feet.

Welcome to 2024: Volkswagen really is putting ChatGPT into cars as a gabby copilot

So sad, too bad

Sadly, this really is the best thing VW has had to offer lately. Being a Tesla clone piece of shite doesn't make me any more or less likely to buy one.

And I say that as someone who owned 3 VW Bugs a loooong time ago.

Windows boss takes on taskbar turmoil, pledges to 'make Start menu great again'

Re: Too late ..... much too late !!!!

Yeah, this 'randomly change all the UIs all the time and cram in AI' ADHD stuff is GenZ/Gen Alpha, not 'those darn millenials'.

Amazon already has a colossal ads business and will extend it to Prime Video in January

Re: No comment on how this has been received by Prime members?

As a Prime Member, I will now have an extra incentive to just torrent anything I want to watch instead of watching it on Amazon. I already do that anyhow because it's a better customer experience.

The smartest thing GabeN ever said was 'Piracy is an issue of service, not price.'

Musk floats idea of boat mod for Cybertruck

Re: scraping the bottom

And from what we've seen of Elmo's Sports Futility Vehicle, if you tried to launch a boat with it the whole thing would slide down the ramp into the water, with boat and trailer.

scraping the bottom

The bottom is also where these Teslas will be ending up. Well, that's a feature, not a bug, swear!

Postgres pioneer Michael Stonebraker promises to upend the database once more

Re: Didn't Microsoft already play with a DB-based OS? And how about MUMPS?

That was WinFS. It was part of the 'Longhorn' bunch of technologies that was going to make Windows Vista the greatest OS in the world for all time!

That was a little less ambitious, though, it was just going to be a database for the filesystem, not for the entire freakin' OS.

I trust Stonebraker to be able to pull this off more than MS, though. He's had far fewer Vista and Windows 8 moments. And to be fair to MS, Windows still has some 1980s and a lot of 1990s code in it. It would very very hard to retrofit those millions of lines into something like this and all the apps would break anyhow, which is something MS can never do. You're much more likely to see this first as a little proof of concept OS, then if people like it it might start expanding outward. Decades away from wide practical use, if ever.

HP TV ads claim its printers are 'made to be less hated'

Re: When good companies go bad

And that was spun off as Agilent.

Re: When good companies go bad

Oh crumbs, I DID forget Autonomy, I can't even remember ALL the shitty corporate tossers HP has merged with, my bad!

Re: When good companies go bad

'HP' is literally not the same HP that did all that cool stuff (maybe one millionth).

In 1999 they spun off all the *really* cool stuff (test and measurement) as Agilent. In 2002 they merged with Compaq (ew), and in 2008 they merged with EDS in a giant debacle with some grand lawsuits. They also bought 3Com, Palm, and 3PAR in a buying spree. Each of those is an injection of corporate filth. Then in 2015 they split into HP Enterprises (the enterprisey shite) and HP Inc (the PC and printer business). The atrocious DRMed printers are of course, HP Inc. Which technically can still be traced all the way back to Bill and Dave in a garage, and Woz and Jobs, but yeah, there's nothing left. It's all be scrubbed off by corporate evil.

'less hated'

Having to deal with HP, Epson, Canon, and Brother printers/MFCs among friends and family I can tell you for sure that no printers are as hated as (modern) HP's. 'Next time, before you buy a printer, come talk to me.'

40 years of Turbo Pascal, the coding dinosaur that revolutionized IDEs

Re: Which led to Turbo C and C++

Well, it really depends on what you're looking for. I absolutely understand your frustration with VS's freakouts. Last month I had it complaining about multiple things compiling to the same assembly since I had a form broken up into multiple partial classes and somehow it generated a resx for both the partial classes. So had to delete the extra resx to fix it. This is completely outside anything sane you should have to do.

But I've been using a LOT of stuff. On Linux I've been using xemacs and gcc, because I have 30+ years of emacs shortcuts burned in my head.

I've had to use Eclipse (and its spawn like Code Composer) a lot, and I find it far slower and buggier (in minor things) than VS.

And then I've used VS. And there is nothing I've ever used (including Qt Creator, Android Studio, Xcode, Delphi VCL, etc. etc.) that does integrated easy UI like VS does for WinForms. Yes, if you go WPF then it's bloated and enterpisey as all f#$%, no question there. But when I'm using xemacs I completely miss VS's UI stuff, and I also miss how it helps you understand *other people's code*. If I'm editing my own code I understand it completely, but if I'm editing someone else's code, and they're using (of course) a home grown DB shim, and I'm trying to fix some of their twaddle, and I have their DB shim, I don't know if their sync method is 'sync', 'Sync', 'flush', 'Flush', or 'write_everything_to_disk'. With VS I can just enter the class variable, then '.' and it will tell me all the public methods/variables. So I can find it's 'sync', and then I can hit F12 to see the implementation and any gotchas. Eclipse can do that too, but as noted above it's far slower and eccentric.

I'm probably privileged because I'm mostly using C# these days and VS seems exceptionally well tuned for that. I used to use VS for C++ and it was very clunky, but these days I only use C++ for DLLs for things that C# is too slow for (which is <1% of code).

So if you found VS too spazztastic for C++ I can't blame you, but I'm using it for the most efficient path to what I want to do (even works with Linux with Mono), and it is absolutely the most productive for that.

Which led to Turbo C and C++

I know people did a lot of real work with Turbo Pascal, but for me the real legacy was that it led to Turbo C and forced MS to get their [poop] together. Borland bought Wizard C, so the first Turbo C 1.0 was missing a lot of stuff you expected from a Borland Turbo product, but after a year, Turbo C 2.0 had the familiar blue IDE.

We were using Microsoft's cack-ass Microsoft C compiler (which they bought from Lattice) in 1988, but it was clunky, slow as hell, and buggy. Replacing it with Turbo C was a revelation and a godsend. MS's would chunk for minutes on the disk then spit out obfuscated errors, and of course you had to bring your own editor (like Brief!), then subshell to run the compiler and hope that didn't cause it to choke. With Turbo C, wow, you just hit Go and it instantly compiles and runs in mere seconds! And zOMG it would help you do GUI stuff!

MS reacted with QuickPascal and QuickC clones, which never really went anywhere, But eventually they released Visual C++ in the 90s - it was amazingly awkward and expensive and slow at first, but after being pounded on for over 30 years Visual Studio is quite nice... and free! And it all started with Turbo Pascal, or MS would have just milked their terrible disk-based compiler forever.

To be, or not to be, in the office. Has returning to work stalled?

Darn right it's stalled

Skilled workers like me, who are still much in demand even with all the recent layoffs, are willing to be in the office *as much as necessary*. That is not 'as much as the insecure exec thinks is necessary because then he won't have people to kiss his ass and micromanage' or 'as much as the line boss thinks is necessary because he has to make it look like he's actually managing'. That is 'I need to get hands on physical equipment I don't have at home and isn't really usable remote' like a manual vacuum pump. I also go in to physically demonstrate things or help people as needed. This turns out to be about once or twice a week.

Otherwise I stay at home, don't waste 40 minutes a day commuting, get stuff done far more efficiently without the distractions of the office (your boss may call it 'the synergies of working together', I call it 'the loud sales asshole who is always on speakerphone and won't shut his door because he wants everyone to hear his voice and he is, frankly, a twatwaffle who goes around bothering everyone else because he assumes they have as little to do as he does' ). There is absolutely nothing productive about a (mostly) open office, there is decades of evidence to back this up. It's just corporate cost cutting wearing the cloak of 'synergy' and other Orwellian corporate buzzwords.

I am more productive and happy at home, the rest is just wastes of space trying to justify their jobs.

Google releases fix for missing Drive for desktop files

Re: Well golly

Sorry to follow up my own comment here, but I've been talking to people who lost some data and the data is still gone.

Google LOST the data on their servers, and the 'fix' is trying to recover it from its offline backups on your machine. Obviously that has mixed success, especially 3 weeks after the problem happened.

Well golly

Well golly, that only took them, what, 3 weeks (it got reported 2 weeks ago, but started before) after people's precious files started just disappearing?

Of course those people are also to blame for trusting the cloud (you had NO backups?), and especially trusting Google, but there was obviously no urgency on this from Google's PoV. Especially given that people had already figured out how to recover from this (manually) at least two weeks ago. Of course I get that a proper release of the client takes time (or should), but how about just a standalone recovery tool in a day or two? But I guess Google never works that hard.

Tiny11 shrinks Windows 11 23H2 down to pocket size

Getting rid of Copilot (easier method)

Group Policy Editor, User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Windows Copilot, Turn off Windows Copilot -> Enabled

Adios and good riddance. Of course I can see the appeal of stripping out way more bloat, but that's the only one that really bothers me that's not easy to turn off.

Will anybody save Linux on Itanium? Absolutely not

Branch seems resasonable

A branch seems like a very reasonable solution. If you still need Linux on your doomed zombie workstation then just branch a distribution where Itanium is still supported and use that forever. It won't get any more updates, unless you care enough to port them, but neither will your hardware.

And the 'put up or shut up' is fair too - nobody will put that much work into modernizing a dead architecture.

Meanwhile, everyone else benefits from having tens of thousands of lines of cruft removed from the kernel that no longer have to be modernized for future major kernel upgrades.

Control Altman delete: OpenAI fires CEO, chairman quits

Firing a CEO for lying, really?

He's a CEO, of course he lies as effortlessly and necessarily as he breathes. I guess he wasn't lying the way they wanted, though.

Bored Ape NFT party is a real eyesore, say irritated attendees

What a missed opportunity

It's really too bad those twats didn't have their eyes burned out or hair set on fire.

But to make this comment productive, this used to be a real problem on all movie sets! Back around the 1920s-1950s, movie film couldn't expose fast enough to do 24 fps without having giant arc lights making everything insanely bright. And it was even worse for colour film, which needed twice the illumination. For example, the recommended brightness for normal work is 50 foot-candles (FC). If you're doing really detailed work, like inspecting small parts, you might want it as high as 100 FC. Well, black and white movie film needed 250-400 FC, and colour film needed 800-1000! Wizard of Oz (1939) had so much lighting that the temperatures on-set reached over 38C (100F), and many actors in costumes had heatstrokes and needed vast quantities of water. Pity the poor Tin Man or Lion. To get back to the original point, this was one reason actors wore such thick makeup - to prevent 'sun'burn. But there was nothing they could do about their eyes, without having everyone wear sunglasses, so most of the actors and actresses had photokeratitis. Several of the Wizard of Oz cast say it permanently damaged their eyes.

Starting in the mid 50s (Eastmancolor), films started getting fast enough that they could start easing off on the crazy lighting, though it would take decades.

Mozilla tells extension developers to get ready to finally go mobile

Finally!

I don't use Firefox on mobile because... well, there's no point without my extensions and other browsers have ad-blocking built in.

If I can use uBlock Origin (and my other must-haves) on FF mobile suddenly I'm interested.

Ex-GCHQ software dev jailed for stabbing NSA staffer

Stabby stab

Horrific, but I couldn’t help but think of this were the US there would be at least half a dozen dead, especially given he’s a whackjob incel.

Windows 11 23H2 is a Teams effort but Microsoft already spoiled the best bits

Re: Teams is all the rage nowadays

Teams is worst in class garbage, but companies love it because it's 'free' (if you ignore all the support and usage issues).