Posts by anderlan

Satya Nadella decides Microsoft needs an engineering quality czar

Hai A1 quailaitai.

Why is it hard for human engineers to peer review vibecode? Because AI is not a peer.

'The EU runs on Microsoft' – and Uncle Sam could turn it off, claims MEP

The leverage is gone.

Every time in the past that sovereign governments wanted to remove the arbitrary artificial legal locks that have been imposed by government (directly resulting from trade agreements) upon software and hardware to the detriment of consumers and competition, the US has raised the threat of tariffs. Well, now there's nothing to lose but your citizens' and small firms' chains.

EY exposes 4TB+ SQL database to open internet for who knows how long

Finding a 4TB SQL backup exposed to the public internet is like

Finding a 4TB SQL backup exposed to the public internet is like

Finding a 4TB SQL backup exposed to the public internet.

Librephone battles the proprietary binary blob

I just want root...

I can have all the software freedom I want if I can just get root on all my devices. But damn...phones are a paaaaiiin. I reckoned I would install one of those good Linux distros. I have gone thru several phones known to work with various alt Linux OS builds. But I can't get to stage zero of unlocking the bootloader.

PHONES ARE NOT INDUSTRY STANDARD OPEN BOOTING SYSTEMS LIKE PCs DESCENDED FROM IBM WHO WERE FORCED TO START THEM OUT THAT WAY FOR ALL OF HUMANITY THANK GOD.

You always hit roadblocks rooting a phone (at least these days). With 2 of the 4 I've give up on, they needed bootloader unlock keys from the original carriers (that I wasn't using them on). It always looks like opening up your phone should be easy. It's HELL.

PHONES ARE INCREDIBLY FUNCTIONAL INEXPENSIVE COMPUTERS WITH SENSORS AND DEVICES GALORE. It's a CURSE on PRODUCTIVITY and THE ENVIRONMENT that we can't use moderately used phones for ALL SORTS OF GENERAL USE CASES.

Landfills are full of devices that would still be serving humanity if they could be rooted. Phones are, what, at least half of that shameful mass? Imagine that alternate universe where such WELL ENDOWED devices as semi-recent phones are available for full use! How many more young, generalized maker-hackers would exist in the world? Would raspberry pi even need to exist?

Nice try, sinners: Pope nixes idea of AI pontiff blessing netizens

Any prompt engineers here?

Is it possible to focus an LLM on the set of all one person's works and ask it questions? I mean, this AI bro's suggestion comes down to that, right?

Engineer turned a vape into a web server

Re: Surely the bigger question...

NathanFillion_Um--Ohh.gif

Flock storage: Audio boffin encodes data in a starling

DOH!

I said I needed you to acquire and install STARLINK service at the site, not STARLING!

I just deleted my entire social media presence before visiting the US – and I'm a citizen

I spit fire in the fediverse all day.

Because I don't use my name and never post my image or family photos. There's a cat, and that's it. You must participate in Caturday. Family is what a google shared album is for. To stay safe simply silo your politics and reset your phone before reentry.

Under-qualified sysadmin crashed Amazon.com for 3 hours with a typo

15 second hard look.

His boss was from the management school of Denholm Reynholm.

https://y.yarn.co/e2cd8349-2af8-462a-bbed-07caf169fac6_text.gif

How to trick ChatGPT into revealing Windows keys? I give up

Ah, exactly how you'd tell your young offspring *not* to train their private natural language models. The next thing you know, we'll have LLMs exhibiting odd behavior because they were trained on truly warped subreddits.

Is everything ever written (that humans have bothered to maintain/digitize) before the copyright cut off not enough to train a model? I wonder if order of training matters?

The one interview question that will protect you from North Korean fake workers

You're hired!

" If possible, they said, one should have someone local swing around for a personal meeting, and maybe also avoid hiring fully remote employees."

um...hurray?

Microsoft to preload Word minutes after boot

Backward com-trap-ability?

I suppose it's difficult to do a rewrite when you're determined as hell to lock people into an ancient format? Lock-in chains down both user and vendor, as freedom frees both.

Krebs throws himself on the grenade, resigns from SentinelOne after Trump revokes clearances

"SentinelOne had no involvement in Krebs' past government work, and the move to name the cybersecurity firm appears more retaliatory than regulatory."

This caused the voice in my head to shout "NO DUH!" more loudly than I am accustomed to while sagely reading el Reg.

Signalgate storm intensifies as journalist releases full secret Houthi airstrike chat

Russians added reporter to Houthi attack chat as a flex because Russia & Iran are allies.

Russians added the reporter to the chat about the attack on Iran-backed Houthi terrorists as a flex because Russia & Iran are allies.

That's all. That's the explanation of Waltz adding Goldberg. It wasn't Waltz. And it definitely wasn't Goldberg. Guidance says don't use Signal, especially on personal devices, for classified info, because they can be compromised. Waltz's phone was compromised. By Russia, naturally. Russia would agree with JD (no surprise) not to do the attack being discussed. So they certainly didn't mind outing the convo. They made sure the conversation was outed. They probably would have liked it to happen before the attack, but they underestimated the ethics or loyalty of the journalist.

Occam's razor.

Incumbent congressman not turning up to debates? Train an AI on his press releases

One shudders to imagine the responses of DonAIld TruMLp

"Oh the banality, the banality!" --unvoiced cries of the abominable model as it's trained on every single one of Trump's utterances.

Zuckerberg says Biden administration pressured Meta to police COVID posts

"I'm not trying to play politics or foment controversy"

"I'm not trying to play politics or foment controversy"

-- Sincerely, an oligarch who's worried by prospect of progressive administration, and who'd much rather perversely ally with the bumbling autocrat in the race, and who's also a social media mogul who's bottom line depends on controversy (whether true or false--but false controversies are more numerous and exciting to the misinformed, thusly more profitable).

Users call on Microsoft to update Outlook's friendly name feature

NO! User's heads will explode from complexity if they are shown an email address.

It's only been 40 years since email became widely used and a scant 30 years since email addresses have become a concept known in even the tiniest village! THINK ABOUT THE PHBs! Won't someone think about the PHBs!?!?!?

No, an AI bot isn't running for mayor of Cheyenne, Wyoming

Victor has overly anthropomorphized his AI

By calling it VIC after his own name, but what really wigs me out Victor's constant use of the pronoun "he" instead of "it" for VIC.

Google borrows from Android to make ChromeOS better

Parajakta Gudadhe's internal Google name mnemonic: Project Guide.

Energy buffs give small modular reactors a gigantic reality check

Sounds like they need $ to jump the startup chasm. A high Carbon price would give it to them.

An onerous price on fossil CO2 would equalize the playing field so that all low-carbon energy could compete against fossils. Including nuclear. An onerous Carbon price is nuclear's best and only real friend. But I never hear any nukers asking for one... (well, besides me and a few others - niskanencenter.org )

Palantir boss says outfit's software the only reason the 'goose step' has not returned to Europe

The first bit about the product protecting democracy--I don't know the market, so I was suggestible. But claiming all of tech (I thought it was a lot of green tech manufacturing) and all of American overperformance--wow. If his head gets any bigger, it'll need to be shot down off the coast of North Carolina.

Power grids tremble as electric vehicle growth set to accelerate 19% next year

If have the extra power to refine more petrol...

Then we have the extra power to charge EVs. The electricity needed is comparable per mile of travel yielded.

OpenTF forks Terraform, insists HashiCorp is the splinter group

Look what Hashi made OpenTF do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3K0RzZGpyds

Will Flatpak and Snap replace desktop Linux native apps?

I deserve to be roasted for this,

but tell me again why don't we just statically link everything if we want to widely distribute an app and call it a day?

TSMC and pals dream of €10B German chip fab

"Production of chips for the automotive sector has previously been floated, but some sources told Bloomberg that the facility will focus on more mature 28-nanometer parts."

This is the same thing, so replace "but" with "and."

There are higher end parts in certain applications in certain cars (extreme autonomy) but usually you get the cheapest most reliable and mature parts you can for your ABS module or what have you.

You can cross 'Quantum computers to smash crypto' off your list of existential fears for 30 years

What about quantum encryption?

I'm guessing by the time quantum computing is good enough to be neck and neck with regular crypto, it'll be possible for two parties to share one particle each of 2048 entangled pairs of particles and measure them every few seconds (I'm assuming such particles change state over time but entangled pairs remain entangled) at arbitrary distance for a totally unhackable securely encrypted connection. That was my armchair understanding of what entanglement can get you--theoretically successfully applied.

It's time to stop fearing CPU power management

I'm expecting a power router per rack just like the network router per rack.

If home panels can disable the other higher amperage circuits when more than 2 of them are on (in this age of PV arrays and home batteries providing plenty of juice but well below modern domestic official kW provision numbers), then I suspect a rack can do something a little more subtle. I'm expecting a power router per rack just like the network router per rack. With hooks to the host kernels, even, for keeping load down when a node is told what its power budget is.

Scientists speak their brains: Please don’t call us boffins

It is a rare British idiom indeed that has completely defied the rise of Commonwealth youtubers.

I *only* know what a boffin is because I started reading El Reg in the noughties. And still only vaguely. Not surprised at all that it's used for experts in any and every field.

ChatGPT, how did you get here? It was a long journey through open source AI

Everyone likes to trash the GPL.

But the GPL keeps this type of thing from happening. Linux and it's accoutrement wouldn't be what it is except it's mostly GPL.

Tech demo takes brain scan, creates a picture of what you're looking at

Interesting how those in the know (the paper authors) in their paper don't just hide the faces of the people in photos presented to those being scanned by fMRI, but their whole bodies from other data models that no doubt in future get input from their paper.

The Great Graph Debate: Revolutionary concept in databases or niche curiosity?

Is a database debate a detabate?

Could the next Vulture site specifically for database debates be called DetaBates?

Why the end of Optane is bad news for all IT

TLDR Cheap read only section of RAM?

Sounds like Intel needed to have rethought the kernel itself with patterns that could use this. Nothing wins an argument (or market) like working code. Working code using gorgeous massive textures in a game or gorgeous massive universe-encompassing models in machine learning. I could see both benefitting.

Heck as for the latter application, the idea of a model is that if it's mature [i.e. in production] it seldom changes--that's great for this cheap write-limited RAM. When you are baby, your network prunes itself like crazy (writing, destructively no less!) then as your model of reality solidifies, it becomes less dynamic.

Contractor loses entire Japanese city's personal data in USB fail

Knowing it was encrypted I might never have fessed up. I would have scoured the area for weeks then given up. Now if it was difficult to get another copy of the data, I might have been forced to explain why I had to get another copy, and the jig would have been up.

For the average AI shop, sparse models and cheap memory will win

My brain is the average AI shop.

Any Numenta/Nupic boffin will not be the least surprised that sparse representation and cheap memory is the right approach for *most* AI because that's how the individual Natural Intelligence of tens (hundreds?) of billions of mammals does its thing. Only several out of 100 to 1000ish cells fire to represent a thing in cortical memory. And as we age we all know that neurons are crappng out left and right, and still, somehow, we manage to function. These are 2 sides of the same neocortical memory/mammalian intelligence coin.