Posts by Timop

SpaceX Starship Flight Test 13 takes issue with the 'flight' bit

Re: Artemis schedule is political nonsense

Come on, who does not want to fly with a literal cascading failure with practically zero headroom for failure?

Re: Artemis schedule is political nonsense

So you mean that 2 years before an actual moon mission the status is that there is no idea if the rocket is able to lift off from the platform and they are focusing on detecting the failure modes prior to launch to collect some data?

Usually the data collection phase is 5-10+ years before the actual product materialises..

Those who 'circle back' and 'synergize' also tend to be crap at their jobs

Re: No kidding.

So you have the esoteric intutitive knowledge we all should rely on instead of controlled test arrangement, statistical analysis etc plus full description of used methods etc?

Yeah I know that when people excluding the ass kissers agree about something,.they probably are into something. And if there is no better information available, you should definitely trust it.

But when there is better information available that seems to be perfectly in line with the things that are generally agreed on, it baffles me that someone thinks the research was pointless and we could be equally fine without it. Just think about how many of us have had to learn it through many hard knocks and now it is not necessary anymore since you can just cite a paper...

Moon hotel startup hopes you get lunar lunacy, drop $1M deposit for 2032 stay

Like any wealthy person? Through monopoly business or inheritance.

When everyone already knows crypto is a bubble but you gotta catch some whales anyway

Eurail passengers taken for a ride as data breach spills passports, bank details

Re: Here's an idea

That might not work as you assume.

But what about fines? Something like 25-75% of yearly income? And after first time something happens it is extended to whole top level company board.

Life is worthless for some but the moment they realise they might lose money....

Memory is running out, and so are excuses for software bloat

Re: "long shaken their heads at the profligate ways of modern engineering"

If you just knew how people meddled with those certified parts etc.

Just get a subcontractor and make sure the contract moves responsibility forward well enough. And pocket the price difference. Of course the price is smaller and schedule tighter than what would be required for doing things properly.

If something crashes and burns, blaim the subcontractor that was legally bound to do something to prevent it through the contract.

Just in case someone has been wondering about what the fuss about supply chains is really about.

Vendor's secret 'fix' made critical app unusable during business hours

Re: Lost for words

What a way to reduce the scope of a project, just skip implementation such not that critical parts like access control in system handling personal information.

I'd like to know how big the bonuses for PM were...

Cloudflare suffers second outage in as many months during routine maintenance

Re: Cloudy with a chance of errors

Sorry, today it is all about efficiency (aka destroying resilience as much as possible).

It would be extremely enjoyable to watch things crash and burn in real time if it was the C suite desperately trying to fix things instead of underpaid overworked employees.

Microsoft threatens to ram Copilot into Exchange Server on-prem

Re: Microsoft would like to know if they can take a copy of all of your data.

There probably are some uninvited guests in the intranet anyway.

So this applies only to walled garden companies robbing everyone in broad daylight.

Re: The survey offers only three options

Service and software provider is completely out of touch, what could go wrong...

AWS outage exposes Achilles heel: central control plane

Re: In case you need another reason to avoid 'smart' devices

Yeah it was pretty annoying to set up things local network only. Browsing through tutorials. Pulling device keys and installing custom offline libraries etc.

And manually setting the rules.

When manufacturer provides smartphone app that works out of the box.

Actually it took only something like 3-4 evenings in total. Including setting up multiple devices and refining rules.

But now worst that could happen is that our underfloor heating is on higher setting when electricity price is high. If the connections have been down so long that pre-fetched Nordpool prices get outdated.

Re: When I was a lad...

Being honest the kids today probably don't have the autonomy required for making any $$$$ calls within the projects.

And even if they did, the companies probably laid off all the experienced people who could have passed their experience forward long time ago.

And even they did not lay off everyone, the days and requirements (KPI etc) would probably be structured in a way that passing the information would be extremely challenging.

A snake eating it's own tail and we are the ones forced to watch and experience it.

Re: This isn't com[lexity.

Why would no-one been able to realise that there was single point of failure?

Like there would not be capable people able to identify if they were assigned to investigate.

In places where there are KPIs, risks of people just not noticing something extremely important that lies outside the KPIs is pretty obvious. And that is exactly what the management is telling everyone to do.

'Fax virus' panicked a manager and sparked job-killing Reply-All incident

Ah the good old unwritten rules of workplace like publicly shame any superior and find out really soon. No matter how factually correct or on point you are.

The superiors making constantly exactly similar jokes on others below them is just them showing how they are untouchable. And the meaner the jokes by them, the less capable they probably are to handle things if tables turn.

I sure hope people at least got good laughs from the email. The memories seem at least to be warm.

Nextcloud withdraws European Commission OneDrive bundling complaint

People like convenience. Who cares aböut educating oneself when there is something already available bundled to os. Just click yes.

Imagine if people had to do any research to find suitable option. Onedrive might not be that popular after all.

But self hosting? There are serious caveats. Lot of unknown knowns for someone who barely understands that cloud means files are stored to someone else's computer. Redundancy, equipment MTTF, testing regularly that backups actually work, ...

Slack threatened to delete nonprofit coding club’s data if it didn’t pay $50k in a week

Other knows how to run a racket in the shadows and the other in plain daylight through legal systems and terms& conditions.

Both will run over somebody occasionally as a reminder for the rest to not even think about messing around with them.

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

People will always get drunk on power and imho only logical solution is then to limit the power. Not cumulate it.

What about skipping the myth about people absolutely needing someone micromanaging from the top to begin with?

Just give people authority and responsibility of their decisions. But this would threaten the C suite when it would spread within workers more broadly so just kill it with fire. Or with scrum of scrum of scrum of scrum of scrum of scrum of scrum of scrum of ...

The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

Re: CBA wasn't about AI

Literally AI - Actually Indians

Re: Dot Dumb

Imagine venture capital firms pouring billions to AI related stuff and reality hits.

They will definitely find ways to get their money back. Preferably from taxpayers like the financial institutions usually do. Unless it is funded mostly by regular people. Then they'll just need to deal with the pain.

Just check retractionwatch and spot people who were labelled as exceptional talents and got a lot of funding and nice careers.

And then remove the possibility of retractions and the whole peer review process and let a chatbot calculate probabilities from undeclared (wonder why..) datasets and just step up the coercion until people just consider everything that is being calculated valid. What could go wrong?

Microsoft lets devs tell Copilot to STFU in Visual Studio

Nice that you selected yes/no, the preference to enable spicy autocomplete has now been stored to your account and will be linked everywhere.

If you want to change your preferences, please contact customer service spicy autocomplete.

Tencent doesn’t care if it can buy American GPUs again – it already has all the chips it needs

Re: You'll need a drone...

Gamersnexus investigated and there is practically full availability of AI capable GPUs despite the restrictions.

Bit like selling weapons to dictators by western companies I suppose.

The plan for Linux after Torvalds has a kernel of truth: There isn’t one

It is not the things one is able to spot but things that might slip through that matters more than one wants to admit.

And this is why I think this has a point.

The profit motive is out there. Any company would extract everything possible for next quarter profits and left smoking ruins behind. Unless there are people smart enough to spot it and brave enough to call it out.

Imagine for example someone with conflicts of interest. Get sacked or do the free work part just as we say. All they need to do is align incentives and rest happens probably automatically.

AWS wiped my account of 10 years, says open source dev

Re: Choices were made

At the same time those companies sure do gaslighting you as much as possible and promise a lot of things about redundancy etc.

In other words one would need to have a lot of time to research backgrounds for each marketing promise when all important details are behind an opaque wall.

What they say about repeating lies enough and they become...

And what points out the most to me is that these comments about not trusting some arrangements pop out every time after some catastrophic has already happened. And then time passes and marketing promises dogpile on top of old warnings and another person finds out the hard way. There is just too much money and incentives behind misleading people to desired direction.

Atlassian's Trello redesign may be 'worst in tech history' say frustrated users

Re: Calm the fuck down.

Trello was really useful tool for complex chaotic task planning, management and tracking, keeping people up to date with tasks, assigning tasks to people etc.

Now there are lot of unnecessary clicks everywhere thanks to the UI redesign. Now I need to reconsider a lot of workflows.

Bit like taking one of the most useful rock tools and replace it with completely different tool while destroying all the existing tools and denying use of the old tool completely. Not an evolution path inevitably leading to microprocessors in my honest opinion.

Intel's leaders have stopped pretending – and it's about time

Re: Hope Intel aren't banking on GPU's

I assume it is logically impossible to focus on multiple things as long as all the core loops rotate around control and monitoring.

So it basically boils down on what the C-suite is interested in and all other stuff is more or less abandoned because people on other projects need to beg audience from CEO erc who are fully invested in their pet projects.

So projects are fine as long as metrics look good. Too bad if there are any major blockers that would require authorisation but nobody will do that. Projects just struggle keeping metrics as good as possible until one day it is impossible and everything just starts imploding. And company axes the project. And when company has axed multiple projects the panic is getting real and they'll probably axe also multiple viable/promising projects just in case. Because losing one's face is not an option for higher ups. They'll rather burn the company down completely.

Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson backs plan to do a Jurassic Park on extinct birds

Re: Do not despair.

Yeah the genome was mapped.

And then people realised that they probably bet the wrong horse and wonderful new inventions were just a hopeful dream based purely on speculation. "Just flick a single gene and.." translated into "we don't have any idea what we are looking at"

They could spend resources for keeping existing species alive through environmental protection stuff.

But nah, let's just pick the obviously easier task where a lot of resourcs will be thrown at.

And when humankind has messed everything up too bad, then just load as much people as possible to SpaceX rocket and start the countdown.

VPN Secure parent company CEO explains why he had to axe thousands of 'lifetime' deals

Lifetime is nicely ambiguous.

Lifetime of the user? Service? Company? Internal decisions? Until PR figures out good enough excuse?

Google goes cold on Europe: Stops making smart thermostats for continental conditions

Buying something that should last for decades from Google. Or any IoT supplier.

Not sure if there are any sensible options in the market anymore though.

Google Cloud’s so-called uninterruptible power supplies caused a six-hour interruption

The UPS was literally uninterrupted during power outage.

M365 Family users wake up to notice 'Your subscription expired'

Re: And that's why...

Not sure how many actually 100% local installations without calling home functionality etc exists anymore.

So nice to pay for a product so companies can keep everything you've created with it as collateral!

OpenAI's ChatGPT crawler can be tricked into DDoSing sites, answering your queries

Re: All hail to the AI. May the AI kill us all.

Combine it with the previous fad that similarly has S for security in it's acronym: IoT. That has slowly creeped into many homes by this point for example in a form called Tuya (cheap wifi connected smart home stuff).

M4 MacBook Pro shows Apple is still glued to the idea of unfixable laptops

It keeps baffling me that with the state of engineering ability and material science know-how in 2024 hampering repairability would somehow translate into even thinner devices.

They probably use something like $100k+ jigs per assembly station in production to glue the things together that could also be cleverly designed assembly. Which would mean one could replace single part and not the only available module that "coincidentally" has all the expensive parts bundled in it. Like touch screen stuff for smartphones and soldering ram + SSD to laptops...

But on an other hand chasing as high revenues and profits ever possible would require the hampering repairability -part to be done as fully as possible....

Google Gemini tells grad student to 'please die' while helping with his homework

Re: Ironic

Just back it up with lot of marketing hype and hope billions can be earned with it before everything crashes and burns

Cast a hex on ChatGPT to trick the AI into writing exploit code

I am looking forward to seeing some innovative method that gets the LLM somehow to spit out all copyright owners of the training data.

Datacenters to emit 3x more carbon dioxide because of generative AI

"... But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders!"

Whatever it takes to fire relatively highly paid employees en masse.

Developer tried to dress for success, but ended up attired for an expensive outage

I'd love to see a workplace for hundreds of people where there is safety related rule that anyone can adapt to their needs with their own common sense.

The situation after 6 months would probably be pretty wild. Never underestimate the power of laziness.

Fragile Agile development model is a symptom, not a source, of project failure

The best receipe for disaster projects usually is to not do the basics correctly. The easiest way to stack things in a way that no matter what talented individuals do everyone is doomed.

I've seen in industrial engineering projects that some principles similar to be found in agile manifesto are easily available but the management struggles to understand them and that is why someone simplifies the idea into lifecack with zero context that they are able to follow blindly. What could (not) go wrong?

What we know about complex projects (for example oasis of the seas cruise ship) is that you can have easily 1000 different companies working their own thing without significant issues as long as majority of basic things are done correctly from the beginning of the project until it finishes and there is enough resources to manage surprises and there is handful of people who know 24/7 what the status is with everything so they can check the big picture in under 30 minutes easily.

Did you mean right tool for the people doing the job?

Management simply cannot let anyone to make such decisions, thank god we have scrum that fixes the problem and is also associated with agile ;)

Drowning in code: The ever-growing problem of ever-growing codebases

Re: Spot on Liam

The problem will disappear by itself as soon as AI can be harnessed to grow the codebase exponentially without human supervision.

Tesla's Cybertruck may not be so stainless after all

Re: its "ultra-hard stainless steel" [...] "transparent metal" [...] "literally bulletproof."

Just find a spot where a puddle can be formed. Then all you need is salt water and couple months time (reaction speed depends on temperature) and the sheet might have already tiny spot rusted through and any time water is introduced corrosion continues.

Re: My knives and forks don't go "rusty"

Yeah if corrosion resistance is required using same tools and working area for regular steel and stainless is absolutely forbidden.

Re: Stainless?

At least 316 is pretty hard material. And the one that can deal with chemicals etc pretty well.

Quick Google:

301: 41 HRC

304: 22 HRC

316: 56 HRC

University chops students' Microsoft 365 storage to 20GB

Re: "over half of all data stored by organizations not serving a useful purpose"

"we will be decreasing storage quotas significantly bit later on, please find out all imaginable reasons for it that sound even remotely sensible to help PR department"

Kaspersky reveals previously unknown hardware 'feature' exploited in iPhone attacks

Funny how the vector is bit similar to methods used to bypass new car locks, immobilisers etc through headlamp connector. Magic words transmitted to bus and bingo.

Tesla ordered to cough up data for Autopilot probe or face heavy fines

Re: Someone who has driven one

It is good that my car has assisted parking because it is impossible to get center of the parking spot manually. Looking out does not help because you can't see any ground within 2-3m unless you open the window fully and mirrors don't help because there are no straight lines in car side to help any alignment. And the reverse camera, huge barrel stretched to rectangle form.

Europe's largest city council runs parallel systems to cover Oracle rollout mess

Re: The right question

Absolutely! Because ERP is such a simple system with minimum amount of coupling (plus Integrations to financial stuff, document management systems etc) and people are just lazy because nobody has got it right ever.