Posts by may_i

Washington reportedly moves to tighten leash on AI chip exports

Techbros betrayed!

How's the return on investment for those bribes to Trump working out?

UK mobilizes lawyers to keep report on Gatwick 'drone' chaos under wraps

The drones never existed

The whole caper at Gatwick was part of an orchestrated campaign to demonise drone flyers and other model aircraft hobbyists. The aims of the campaign have always been to make model flying so onerous that people give up the hobby. That frees the airspace below 400 feet to be sold off to eBay, Google and Amazon for their drone delivery services.

The rules that the EU forced upon the region after the Gatwick jape were deliberately constructed to make being a model flyer expensive, difficult and privacy destroying.

Model aircraft, including multi-rotor craft have never caused an accident where anyone lost their life. The vast majority of model flyers are far more aware of safety than the regulators who have never flown anything from behind their desks.

Broadcom says AI companies can’t make their own silicon any time soon

Hock Tan - Master of the Obvious

Seriously? This is the groundbreaking news with which to start your Q1 earnings call?

That companies which are not semiconductor manufacturers, but software companies, "Can't successfully develop and deploy their own silicon"?

Amazing.

Microsoft to auto-launch Copilot in Edge whenever you click a link from Outlook

Most of us don't have a choice. My employer mandates the software that I run on their laptop and the operating system.

Britain's creaking courts to use Copilot for transcriptions

End of justice

Taking away the right to a jury trial for offences which carry a sentence of less than three years is not justice. It's just a good way to let the police fit people up and make sure that the allegations stick.

Discord drama delays age verification debut until the second half of 2026

Nope

My Nitro subscription is still in the same state as when they announced this: cancelled.

I don't see any reason here to change that.

CISA gives federal agencies three days to patch actively exploited Dell bug

Not a bug

Hard coded credentials in an application is not a bug. It's called utterly irresponsible software development and a total management fail to allow the application to be released with hard coded credentials in it.

US tech giants open their wallets for AI-friendly politicians

Not exactly surprising!

That the tech bros need to grease the palms of and run influence campaigns in aid of the only people who are helping them to keep the bubble inflated is not exactly unexpected.

Agile Manifesto turns 25 – just in time for vibe coding to test it

Agile and Jive Coding

Are good partners. Both are about delivering crap on time that was not designed, it just grew organically as people bolt on layer after layer to deal with the fact that you didn't do any proper design work up front.

You can jailbreak an F-35 just like an iPhone, says Dutch defense chief

There's a great alternative to the F35

The Swedish JAS Gripen.

More flexible, faster, far cheaper and the Swedes will let you build them yourself in your own country. There's no kill switch either.

AI agent seemingly tries to shame open source developer for rejected pull request

Illogical way to deal with the problem

I really don't understand why people in that pull request thread were talking to this LLM as if it was human.

The correct response to an aggressive and human faking bot is to simply ban the damn thing from your repository without a word.

Anthropomorphising these damn bots just makes the problem worse.

Memory price explosion triggers PC buying spree

Doubled?

DRAM prices have increased fivefold since October last year.

The big FOSS vendors don't eat their own dogfood – they pay for proprietary groupware

Re: Global lock-in

However, using Teams because corporate customers use it is still no reason not to use FOSS if you're a FOSS company. It's quite possible to use Element and a Teams bridge if you want to integrate Teams users into your system.

Brussels drafts blueprint to spot and swat rogue drones

Hidden agendas

How convenient that they can use the threat of bomber drones to finally destroy the model aircraft hobby completely and sell all airspace under 100m to Amazon and Google.

That corporates get licenses to fly 80kg drones beyond visual line of sight, whereas hobbyists are completely forbidden to fly BVLOS tells you that money makes laws, not rational risk assessments. Plenty of 80kg Amazon delivery drones have crashed, with property damage as a consequence. It's only a matter of time before an Amazon delivery drone kills someone.

But that's OK according to the corrupt lawmakers - Amazon is rich!

Microsoft dials up the nagging in Windows, calls it security

Long gone

The time where anything Microsoft does with Windows could be described as "laudable" has well passed.

Discord to start assuming all users are underage unless they prove otherwise

Nitro cancelled. I'm sure the new corporate management is keen to see how many others are doing the same.

Hitting them where it hurts would appear to be our only option. If they think my payment for Nitro isn't good enough to prove I'm a grown up and ask me for ID, then an alternative will be found for many communities.

Ghost gun legislation casts shadow over 3D printing

Re: Idiocy

Yeah, the USA tried imposing their laws on Jon Lech Johansen in Norway. That worked out well for them didn't it?

Idiocy

First off, this dumber than shit idea would only affect USAsians, so Adafruit are off the mark saying "so broad it threatens everyone involved". The correct interpretation is that it affects everyone in the USA. The rest of the world will quite happily continue to use 3D printers without inserted spyware.

As to the concept itself, it's another example of stupid politicians who understand nothing trying to appear to be doing something.

At this point, I really couldn't care less what politicians in the USA think or do - the vast majority of them should be taken outside and shot.

Microsoft declares 'reliability' a priority for Visual Studio AI

Sign of lies

Whenever a sentence begins "x is our priority", it means "we couldn't care less about x". As evidenced by various statements where x can be "privacy", "security" or whatever it is that the company screwed up today.

Techie's one ring brought darkness by shorting a server

Re: Utility line work

An appropriate and chilling comment from a lineman to BigClive's video about how screwing around with microwave oven transformers is likely to kill you:

"My high voltage gloves got partially pierced by a metal splinter on a ground transformer and allowed a path to ground on a 13.8KV line.

It was only 20-30 seconds of time slowing down to where a second feels like a minute. You feel fear and a great sense of dread as your heart goes into afib because of confused messages from the vagal nerve trying to override your SA node. About three second in all your muscles start to cramp and burn(literally) along the path to ground. You cant make yourself let go and you cant think of why, but you definitely know you are being electrocuted. About ten second in you start to smell burning pork and your vision starts to close in around the edges because your heart cant pump blood. You feel as dizzy and high as you have ever felt as the color starts to leave your vision. About fifteen seconds in you start to miss your wife and kids because as your vision fades slowly out you understand you are dying. As your world fades from view, and a blackness so deep it envelops all of your being smothers you, you are left with a great sense of sorrow and pain that stretches to eternity, or in my case, when I woke up in the ICU a month later missing the small parts of me that made up the ground path. There was only sorrow and fear and pain the entire time from my grounding to my waking. It felt like I was gone for twenty years, like when you visit your childhood home after your parents are gone. Without perception of time, time has no meaning. The lack of perception is eternity. "

"Steven" is lucky he's still alive

Wearing rings, watches, bracelets or any other metal items while anywhere close to electricity is a mistake many people only make once, regardless of their ability to learn.

Even the non-fatal cases can do things like permanently weld your wedding ring to your flesh and leave a painful injury to remind you for the rest of your life.

Musk distracts from struggling car biz with fantastical promise to make 1 million humanoid robots a year

Familiar game plan

All this "when stocks are going down, prop them up with bullshit" seems very familiar.

Who else do we know, who was previously Elon's best buddy, who uses this kind of distraction technique to divert attention from undelivered promises?

ICE knocks on ad tech’s data door to see what it knows about you

America, you need to fix your problem

You need to remove Trump and his cabinet from power and daily life.

Before it is too late!

Salesforce signs $5.6B deal to inject agentic AI into the US Army

Too late

If they had this before, maybe they could use it as an excuse for murdering people on boats in the Caribbean. /s

China-linked group accused of spying on phones of UK prime ministers' aides – for years

Phones are the wrong tech

That the government allows the prime minister and cabinet members to use commodity telephones and social media apps at all is a schoolboy opsec failure.

Microsoft illegally installed cookies on schoolkid's tech, data protection ruling finds

GDPR penalties incoming!

Let's hope this turns into a fine of 4% of Microsoft's global turnover.

If that actually happens, my suspicion is that a certain mad orange king might pull out his tariff threats again. Good. The sooner the EU stops using US software and services, the better.

House of Lords votes to ban social media for Brits under 16

Morons

What gives the house of lords the right to think that they can reasonably dictate how children may communicate with their peers?

Children have rights as well!

Intel puts consumer chip production on back burner as datacenters make a run on Xeons

No new PC for you!

But you can rent a virtual one from Intel's nice data centre.

Sure.

Microsoft CEO: AI sovereignty isn't where it runs, it's who controls it

How are those investments in Trump working out for you Nadella?

The mad orange king who you gave millions to, just to curry favour, is now single-handedly destroying trust between the US and Europe. European governments and businesses are finally waking up to the truth that the USA cannot be trusted.

Europe will move away from using your poisoned, data stealing systems. You will lose billions. I hope it destroys Microsoft.

Akamai CEO wants help to defeat piracy, reckons he can handle edge AI alone

I used to like Akami

When they were just a simple content delivery network.

'Violence-as-a-service' suspect arrested in Iraq, extradition underway

And your point is?

The name of the criminal arrested in Iraq is Ali Shehab.This was released by the Swedish public broadcaster two days ago.

Your final sentence is nonsensical. What point are you trying to make here?

Re: "a growing threat to youth"

At school or adjacent to it quite often. Sure, anti-social media plays a part in it, but be under no illusion that the problem would magically disappear if antisocial media ceased to exist.

This is not a social media problem. It's about a major conflict between two Swedish gangs battling over who controls the market for drugs in the country.

They are utterly ruthless - even torturing and murdering two 15 year old children who didn't take enough care of the guns they had been told to hide for the gang.

Let's not try to trivialise a major crime wave which has resulted in widespread bombings and shootings. Or make it about insane policies which attempt to control how young people are allowed to communicate with each other.

Re: "a growing threat to youth"

At least the antisocial media sites you mention don't deliver bombs and bullets.

Foxtrot has actively recruited people as young as 13 to murder people - purely because they are below the age where they can be held fully responsible for their actions.

I'd appreciate it if you didn't trivialise the actions of these scum. Even in the sleepy suburb of Stockholm where I live, we've had kids discharging a full clip from an AK47 through someone's apartment door and it wasn't even the "right" door. We've had the entrance of an apartment block destroyed by a powerful bomb. The actions of Foxtrot place innocent Swedish people at risk. Everything possible needs to be done to destroy Foxtrot, arrest all the members and imprison them.

GNOME dev gives fans of Linux's middle-click paste the middle finger

Hipsters indeed

I use the middle button to paste what's currently selected extensively.

Your smart TV is watching you and nobody's stopping it

Re: My next TV will be a big monitor

Well this is where it also gets interesting. The TV in question uses an open source firmware stack. This allowed some elegant hacking in the beginning where it was was possible to mount a share from my NAS as if it was a local USB drive and play video from my library that way.

Samsung didn't like that people could do that so they released a firmware update which encrypted everything and took away my rights to do what I want with hardware that I paid for.

The network cable got pulled before they could do that and I discovered Kodi as a much better way to connect my library to my TV.

I don't watch broadcast news or other live TV at all, so I only use it as a large monitor anyway.

My next TV will be a big monitor

My current Samsung TV is a "proto smart TV". When I noticed the device powering itself up at 03:00 every day it was fairly obvious that it wanted to talk to the mothership.

So it got unplugged from my network. All video I watch on the thing comes from my own library and is delivered to my surround receiver and finally to the TV via a Raspberry Pi running LibreElec and Kodi.

When the Samsung eventually dies, it will only be replaced by something which works without a connection to my network and the Internet. If there are no dumb TVs available to buy, then my next TV will be the largest computer monitor I can find.

The Roomba failed because it just kind of sucked

Not very practical

I've always wanted a vacuum cleaning robot, but there are two issues which make them impractical for me.

The first problem is that my apartment isn't that big and my chances of having nothing else than furniture on my floors are remote. The second problem is the fact that the thresholds at each doorway are about 30mm tall. There's nothing which would reliably climb over such a high threshold.

So I'm stuck with doing the job manually.

Tired of sky-high memory prices? Buckle up, we're in this for the long haul

Re: All right! It's time for human ingenuity to step up...

> We're fucked, aren't we?

Utterly.

Break up the cartel!

There are only three DRAM manufacturers, Samsung, Micron and SK Hynix.

The current price inflation is caused by these three companies operating an illegal cartel. I though that dipshit Bondi had promised:

"Immediately upon taking office, I directed the Department of Justice to fiercely pursue the total elimination of cartels and transnational criminal organizations."

Here's a clear and obvious international criminal cartel for you to go after Pam. Oh? There are too many billionaires getting even fatter from the cartel's actions for you to take it down? Shame.

GOV.UK to unleash AI chatbot on confused citizens

Hmmm.. Margaret Thatcher, the woman who legitimised greed and avarice as acceptable behaviours for the British people.

ATM jackpotting gang accused of unleashing Ploutus malware across US

Another US invasion on the way

When you start calling simple thieves a "a ruthless terrorist organisation", you're just simply telling lies to manufacture an excuse to rape yet another country for their oil.

Trump Media jumps aboard the speculative nuclear fusion bandwagon

Re: Tokamak and Stellerator

Plus sed s/change/chance/g

Perhaps proof reading before clicking the submit button is a good approach?

AI-authored code contains worse bugs than software crafted by humans

Re: until some fwit removes comments to "save spacce"

The prime need for comments is to describe WHY you are doing something.

We should all be able to deduce WHAT the code is doing, unless it's been written by a master of obfuscation, the WHY is often the hard part.

Brit broadband grilling descends into farce over targets and definitions

Re: 1st world? hell no

I feel sorry for you Brits, I really do.

I live in rented accommodation in Stockholm. I have a pair of fibres coming in to my apartment from the concentrator in the cellar. I can choose from around 20 different service providers in the portal for the fibre service. A completely open market for Internet, telephony and TV. My Internet connection goes all the way to 1Gb/s symmetric if I need it.

English please

If the Baroness really said "As far as I can see, we have good funded plans...", she needs to go back to school and learn how to speak her mother tongue properly.

UK surveillance law still full of holes, watchdog warns

Lies

When a government needs to create secret orders that the recipient isn't even allowed to talk about, all pretensions about privacy are null and void.

BBC tapped to stop Britain being baffled by AI

British spelling returns?

I was almost overjoyed to see "programmes" used in the article.

Then I got to the end and found "organizations".

Oh well. It was good for the short moment it lasted.

United Nations agrees to persist with multi-stakeholder internet governance

Re: Get ready for censureship like never before

Do you know the difference between the words 'censure' and 'censor'?

Micron says memory shortages are here for the foreseeable future

Cartel

It's obvious now that Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix constitute an illegal cartel.

The big question is whether there are any governments left which are honest enough to do something about it.