Posts by Robin

Microsoft research shows chatbots seeping into everyday life

Re: Joint venture

In this film perhaps it could take control of some mortgage lending system and it all goes hilariously wrong by lending to the wrong people. And it could be called Craptimus Sub-Prime

Dev's last-day-of-contract code helped to crash app used by 350,000 people

Re: Reading between the lines ...

"Would" not "should".

Coulda woulda shoulda

'Vibe coding' named Word of the Year. Developers everywhere faceplant

Re: The Fast Show

> Anyone remember Prof. Denzil Dexter?

"We heated this beaker of bear's urine to 37 degrees..."

Google imagines out of this world AI - running on orbital datacenters

Future Un-Proofing

That's right, let's put all the AI where we can't easily go and switch it off.

Boris Johnson confesses: He's fallen for ChatGPT

Re: Question

They get recycled into Brown Envelopes which of course get passed back to Politicians, and thus the circle is complete.

Google unveils master plan for letting AI shop on your behalf

Re: The banks always say

I prefer automated ATM machines personally.

Re: No.

No no no no!

Linus has had enough of links that point to 'stupid useless garbage'

Preach!

I enjoyed this gem right at the end

Can we please stop this automated idiocy?

This could be shared much further and wider.

Two wrongs don’t make a copyright

The change to abusive advertising happened back in around 2000/2001. Ads before that were static images or maybe animated gifs at a push. They sat there in the top right corner or down the left hand side, and that was it. Then came the popups. And ones that expanded to fill the screen. And popunders. That was the point at which the advertisers made their collective bed, and why today they can go and fucking lie in it.

The advertising manager in the company where I worked was quite dismissive when we warned him that ad blockers were a thing and would get more popular. 6 months later he was begging us to find ways around the blockers and so the war was on. And yes I washed my hands with wire wool and bleach every evening.

German team warns ChatGPT is changing how you talk

Re: German Team Warns ...

Hey aManFromMars, are you posting anonymously now?

Meta reveals plan for several multi-gigawatt datacenter clusters

Units?

I don't really have a concept for how large Manhattan is, so for anyone else also struggling ... it's roughly 2.8 milliWales (give or take a milliNewport / milliCasnewydd).

Microsoft Copilot joins ChatGPT at the feet of the mighty Atari 2600 Video Chess

I just tried your query against ChatGPT to make an image of a chess opening board, it's hilarious. It's 8x7, with squares labelled A-H across the bottom but on the left and right sides it's got numbers 5,2,4,5,6,7 and blank. The pieces look weird, like the knights are mixed with rooks. And it seems like white has 2 queens whilst black has 2 kings.

One stupid keystroke exposed sysadmin to inappropriate information he could not unsee

Re: Too much information

One team I was in charge of used to get pestered by the "can't be arsed" type of people you describe.

So I implemented an unofficial rule whereby the team would wait an hour before replying to any query which was obviously of that nature. During that hour, most of the people would realise that actually they did know how to do the thing themselves after all, leaving us to concentrate on the work which did genuinely need our help.

Thus our efficiency improved as a result. I would like to say it also educated the "can't be arsed" people, but it's more like it forced them into doing stuff they should have already been doing anyway.

BT unplugs plans to turn old cabinets into EV chargepoints

Re: Yes but no but ….

Had to Google what "BFE" meant and was ... surprised

Dude, you got a Dell, period! RIP XPS, Inspiron, Latitude, Precision

Re: I'll care about anything Dell does...

Is it the XPS that has the webcam where the hinge is? Sometimes I'm on a call with someone and I can more or less see straight up their nose and when they type, all I see is giant fingers clicking away.

Telemetry data from 800K VW Group EVs exposed online

Dw i ddim yn caru Cariad

As a Welshman I feel culturally misappropriated that they use the name Cariad for this data slurping and leaking. Still, at least the wooden spoon is going to the right place /s

Raspberry Pi 500 and monitor arrive in time for Christmas

Re: Keyboard layout

More confusion arrises with Twitter/X, where people are happy to use # to "hash-tag"...

Do you mean a poundtag?

Windows 95 setup was three programs in a trench coat, Microsoft vet reveals

Re: Meh!

Although my first programming steps were on the BBC Micro, the Gorillas.bas era was when I truly got the taste for hacking away at some code to achieve some feature like making the banana explosions bigger, and then fixing it when I broke it. Happy days!

You can relive the experience here:

https://playclassic.games/games/action-dos-games-online/qbasic-gorillas/

Tardigrade genes may hold secret to radiation treatments for humans

Re: The answer is obvious, innit?

Something something Custardigrade?

Smart TVs are spying on everyone

Re: Content surfing

... and do something less boring instead.

Crack coder wasn't allowed to meet clients due to his other talent: Blisteringly inappropriate insults

Re: Boat?

HMS Ark Royal?

Don't think I've got the idea of this game

Firefox 130 lands with a yawn, but 131 beta teases a long-awaited feature

Re: Nice curves

"It's an older standard, but it checks out"

Google trains a GenAI model to simulate Doom's game engine in real-ish time

Pronunciation

> Dubbed GameNGen, pronounced "game engine,"

If you have to tell people how to pronounce the name, you should probably have thought of a different name. Although I guess that guidance is because "NGen" sounds nothing like "engine" with UK pronunciation? (At least to my inner voice)

A last look at the Living Computers museum before collection heads to auction

But...... if you have it printed on .... paper...... you'd still be able to read it. You know, that flat stuff pounded from trees that goes back before grandad soiled his first nappy.

That's a useful definition of what paper is, thanks.

Not having things on paper until it's too late is easily done. The 22-year old version of me for example, when handing in my completed dissertation, didn't consider it worthy spending another £X on printing it out, when there was beer to drink and shopping to buy. Sad but true. I would probably have justified it to myself using the excuse that I had it on 3.5" disk anyway, so could do it another time. That other time never came and there it still sits, on the disk. So I completely sympathise with the "stuck on 9-track tape" commenter above.

Microsoft sends Windows Control Panel to tech graveyard

Re: Is this article missing something a tag

> and more to the point, what moron signed it off?

I find myself asking that question more and more, lately.

Benign bug in iOS and iPadOS crashes gizmos with just four characters

Re: Fuzz testing

I've only ever got as far as the second test, but it never succeeds. I keep re-running the test from time to time, though...

Group of 91 nations agree to continue not taxing cross-border data movement – for now

Happening already?

In much the same way as the some % of your money goes to the government, you could argue that there's already some % of data transferred that's already being siphoned off to various governments via the snooping mechanisms /s

Forget security – Google's reCAPTCHA v2 is exploiting users for profit

Re: FSCK to the entire company

How about we FUCK the entire company and stop censoring ourselves?

If you want to avoid swear words then expand your vocabulary.

Yeah, fuck cen***ship!

Facebook prank sent techie straight to Excel hell

Re: In our office it was Quake

We got given the thumbs up to play Unreal Tournament at lunchtime, which was great. Although I often wondered what non-IT employees thought when they walked past our department at lunchtimes to see us all staring intently at our screens in silence, only for one of us to suddenly exclaim "you bastard!" after being shot by a camped sniper.

Labour wins race to lead UK, but few would envy the load in its tech in-tray

Re: ... but being some part of the single market ...

I'm all for PR, but it has to be done right and supported.

They tried[1] this with "Alternative Vote" referendum in 2011. As I recall, the benefits of an alternative to FPTP were not well promoted at all, and voter turnout was pretty low so we just ended up with the same system. In fact in the intervening years it's cropped up in conversation now and again, and several people didn't even know it happened.

[1] I say they tried; it was massively in their interests for it not to change.

An arc welder in the datacenter: What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Let's start a fight with the Welders

I mean, that was clearly a joke about the second person who made the mess, assuming it was easy.

British Airways blames T5 luggage chaos on fault 'outside of our control'

Forgot I need to explicitly label jokes. Apologies.

Although I've heard Bora Bora is nice.

I'm afraid it's closed down.

Airbn-bye: Barcelona bans short-term apartment rentals for tourists

Re: Alternatively….

Spain and Portugal's coastal resorts spring to mind - it can be an economic trap: the jobs that are created are mostly low-wage hospitality gigs or temporary construction jobs

This is getting worse down here in South-Western Spain, or at least it is where I am. The tourism has increased greatly of late and the powers-that-be are improving the area a lot, but the stuff that's being constructed seems to be purely luxury second home stuff. Just this week a new site has been marked out to build a series of villas starting at 800k€ (so with taxes that's easily over a million euros). Meanwhile locals find themselves with fewer and fewer "normal" places to just go and have a coffee or lunch, because the restaurants etc realise they can put their prices up for the owners of those expensive villas. So affordable housing gets harder to find, while there are plenty of places around which are unoccupied for 10 months of the year.

IT worker sued over ‘vengeful’ cyber harassment of policeman who issued a jaywalking ticket

Re: Strange thing to do someone for

"Germans get all bent out of shape about it too. I enjoy crossing at a Red Man there, just to see the locals twitch."

Surely if you cross the road in Ampel time it's fine?

Microsoft smartens up Edge for Business with screenshot blocking, logo branding, more

Re: Safeguarding .?

Restricting calls to voice is working around a problem that shouldn't even exist in the first place.

What's wrong with not constantly taking screenshots of users' working environments?

US watchdog chases Waymo robocars to catch violations

Police: Your move, creep.

Blue screen of death or Eurovision's Windows95man performance – what's less annoying?

Re: Can anyone offer us a serious explanation

Obligatory comic link

Novelty flip phone strips out almost every feature possible to be as boring as possible

Well spotted! I managed to enter 31st September and get a .Net runtime error page.

Apple to settle class action for $490 million after Tim overcooked China outlook

bullshandtting?

Yes, I did just crash that critical app. And you should thank me for having done so

Comparing old mail clients to modern mail clients, the Outlook is pretty bleak

Whizkids jimmy OpenAI, Google's closed models

El Reg have been using the word "Boffin" for at least the ~20 years I've been reading it.

Belgian ale legend Duvel's brewery borked as ransomware halts production

To help avoid that, a rule of thumb I was once told by a Belgian person was to keep your session to a total of 24%. So if you're on the 8% beer you have 3 of them. If it's 6%, 4 of them. And so on. This is all based on the common beer bottle serving for that stuff (33cl).

I've tried it and it seemed to stop me having a raging hangover the next day! I did have some delicious carbonade and frites to go with them though, which probably helped.

EU users can't update 3rd party iOS apps if abroad too long

Re: Who are their lawyers?

> who hadn't bothered to apply for citizenship in their chosen country of residence, did lose the rights that they had previously held

Also residency. I wasn't eligible for citizenship but I am officially a "resident foreigner". It means I do still benefit from some stuff like not needing stamps on my UK passport when I go in/out of Schengen*, as well as other things.

* I do this several times a week, so it's very handy.

Space exploitation vs space exploration: Humanity has much to learn from the Voyager probes

Keep on running

He's looking forward to one more trip to the US to celebrate Voyager's 50th anniversary. "When Voyager's 50th birthday comes up, I think I'd like to be back in JPL," he tells us.

Will the Voyagers still be running? Perhaps.

The Voyager probes were launched in the same year in which I was born, so it's like we're having a competition to see which of us lasts longest. Don't fancy my chances to be honest.

AI-driven booze bouncers can ID you with face scan

Re: Brave New World

Is that online anywhere where we could read it, Mike?

Wait, hold on, everyone – Mozilla thinks Apple, Google, Microsoft should play fair

Re: What “market share”?

I don't think we should be venturing as far as more complicated arguments just yet.

Apple's on-device gen AI for the iPhone should surprise no-one. The way it does it might

Re: Alibi

I feel like there's something in your proposal that I'm missing. I'm going to need more explanation.

Au contraire, I'd suggest that the proposal as it stands mentions "AI" enough to attract plenty of investors.

What Microsoft's latest email breach says about this IT security heavyweight

Re: "Microsoft makes a good operating system"

When they roll out new functionality (that nobody asked for) Teams really does have vibes of "lone developer working in their bedroom". Except an actual lone developer would probably take more care over the product.