Posts by Philo T Farnsworth

Chrome silently installs a 4 GB local LLM on your computer

Re: "Google Chrome will steal 4 GB of disk space ... unless you opted out."

Following up, Liam is correct, Chrome eventually just barges ahead, deletes, the file, and downloads its data.

However, you can (apparently) thwart this behavior by changing ownership to 'root':

/usr/bin/sudo chown root:root OptGuideOnDeviceModel

I chmod-ed to 0000 as well out of sheer bloody-minded, pigheaded perversity but I'm not sure that it makes any difference.

In any event, I've been running some tests in Chrome over the past couple of hours and the "fix" is seeming to hold.

Re: "Google Chrome will steal 4 GB of disk space ... unless you opted out."

I'm not sure whether this will hold or not but I've at least attempted to disable on my Ubuntu 26.04 installation with

rm -rf ~/.config/google-chrome/OptGuideOnDeviceModel

touch ~/.config/google-chrome/OptGuideOnDeviceModel

chmod 0444 ~/.config/google-chrome/OptGuideOnDeviceModel

No complaints yet but my use of Chrome is limited to testing as I use Waterfox for my general day-to-day web interaction.

Palantir CEO: 10 percent of the world 'professionally hates us'

Personally, I'm attempting to maintain my amateur standing.

Where to buy a non-Apple, non-Google smartphone

Re: If the device has age verification....

I resisted getting a smartphone, or a phone of any sort, well into the 2010s, but at the insistence of my partner I finally broke down and got one.

Fortunate I did, since, a couple of years later, being able to call 911 (the US emergency number, equivalent to the UK's 999 and Australia's 000) while out for an early morning walk allowed me to be here to type this reply.¹

__________________

¹ When your doctor tells you "You are a very lucky man" and you haven't just won the lottery, you take her seriously. Though, in a way, I suppose, I did.

Who needs ghost train scares when Windows is such a fright?

Scary?

For me, any code that I've written more than six months ago.

I've been on that roller coaster more times than I can care to comfortably remember.

Re: Could be worse... In Russia

In Russia, Windows reboots you. . . And I thought, "What a country!"¹

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¹ Probably obscure for those not familiar with late 1980s US sitcoms. If so, you're better off.

PowerPoint punishment sent users into an infinite loop after lunch

Discipline is good.

Bondage and Discipline is a acquired taste and requires consent.

Anthropic's magic code-sniffer: More Swiss cheese than cheddar, for now

Or, perhaps, milk to curdle.

BOFH: Arrr, I smell piracy ... and it's comin' from a machine with executive privileges

Re: "as well received as a chilli oil enema."

Hm. I'll have to try that.

Under controlled conditions, of course.

Re: "as well received as a chilli oil enema."

I once prepped about a half pound (220 grams or roughly 70 cents US) of habaneros without wearing gloves and the tips of my fingers tingled for days.

Go straight to sell! Windows second-chance setup hawks Microsoft services at IT's expense

Re: Froggy did a-wooing go.

Yes.

Re: Steve Ballmer called...

And Ballmer knew how to put on a better show.

Froggy did a-wooing go.

Just for the record, the "boiling frog" story is a myth:

During the 19th century, several experiments were performed to observe the reaction of frogs to slowly heated water. In 1869, while doing experiments searching for the location of the soul, German physiologist Friedrich Goltz demonstrated that a frog that has had its brain removed will remain in slowly heated water, but an intact frog attempted to escape the water when it reached 25 °C¹.

[...]

Modern scientific sources report that the alleged phenomenon is not real. In 1995, Douglas Melton, a biologist at Harvard University, said, "If you put a frog in boiling water, it won't jump out. It will die. If you put it in cold water, it will jump before it gets hot—they don't sit still for you." George R. Zug, curator of reptiles and amphibians at the National Museum of Natural History, also rejected the suggestion, saying that "If a frog had a means of getting out, it certainly would get out."²

(Emphasis added)

So, it would appear, frogs are smarter than people when it comes to creeping enshittification.

Unless their brain has been removed, of course.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a pot of frog's legs on the stove and I think it's about to boil over.

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¹ A tepid 77 °F for those living in Myanmar, Liberia, and the United States

²Wikipedia: Boiling frog Experiments and analysis

Ubuntu Resolute Raccoon spits out Xorg, but still lets you run X11 apps

Re: Bah! Humbug.

> I find this comes into the same category aerodynamics proving that the bee cannot fly but the bee, not knowing aerodynamic, flies successfully.

That's only true if you only use an oversimplistic model.

Though some accounts attribute the claim to scientists like Ludwig Prandtl or Jakob Ackeret, it likely stems from a misunderstood 1934 observation by the French zoologist Antoine Magnan, who applied fixed-wing flight equations to insect wings and concluded — incorrectly — that insect flight defied aerodynamic theory.¹

Okay, I'll buzz off now.

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¹ Sciencing: How Slow-Motion Cameras Solved The Most Annoying Myth About Bumblebees

Re: Using computers 101

Yea and verily.

My orginal fascination with computers was, well, a fascination with computers -- they were cool -- warehouse sized rooms full of spinning tape drives, and card reader/punches and, of course, the wall of Blinkenlights putting on a show..

But that began to cloy rapidly and I lucked into a job hustling FORTRAN IV for a professor of Electrical Engineering and I quickly realized there was more to computers than dinking with computers -- in other words you could do science on them and that made it all just orders of magnitude more fun.

I won't bore you with the generations of computer technology I've seen (or the fads and fancies of applications and development regimes) but I've probably banged on everything but a Turing Machine at one time or another.

Computing provided me with a great ride -- I got to meet, assist, and sometimes work directly with some of the most fascinating and brilliant people in the world, including at one time or another three Nobel Prize winners, an undeserved privilege for which I will grateful until my own personal shutdown -h now.

I think my biggest annoyance with the field is changes in superficial features being equated with improvement or progress.

While I like eye candy as much as the next person, I'd prefer developers spend more time making things work better and faster and easier and less time fiddling with fonts, color palettes, and icon sizes and layouts. That way I could get on with the privilege of doing science and trying, in my tiny and barely incremental way, to help make the world a little better for all of us.

If you call me pretentious for taking that stance. . . well I'm not going to argue with you and might, after a moment or two of reflection and introspection, be inclined to agree.

Nonetheless, I honestly don't care about Wayland or systemd as long as it doesn't break my stuff at the next update and it stays the heck out of my way.

Claude Opus 4.7 has turned into an overzealous query cop, devs complain

Scunthorpe problem anyone?

Pass the key, passwords have passed their sell-by date

Re: Great!

> Keepass is encrypted and protected by its own password which is the only one I need to remember.

Being a single point of failure that gives someone who cracks it the literal keys to the kingdom or microkingdom thereof.

But let me meditate on all of the "solutions" I'm seeing in the comments -- backups, browsers, cell phones, etc.

All of the above are second nature to the vast majority of The Register's readers -- we've been soaking in it for the better part of our lives. But that's not necessarily the case for everyone nor, honestly, should it be.

I just want my car to start when I push the botton or turn the key and to get me from point A to point B¹ and I don't want to have to learn he niceties of auto mechanics to do it.

And the requirement of having keyfobs or cell phones or whatever can lock some people completely out of necessary services.

Believe it or not, there are a lot of people on the lower end of the wealth spectrum who can't afford even a cell phone, much less a computer with network access and may be dependent on public access such as in libraries.

To draw an anology, here in the States the Internal Revenue Service has done away with paper checks for refunds and relies on "direct deposit" -- but that assume the taxpayer actually has a bank account, which is not always the case either because they don't have enough money to maintain a minimum balance or they just don't want one. Sorry, that's no longer possible:

Don’t have a bank account? Visit the FDIC website or the National Credit Union Administration using their Credit Union Locator Tool for information on where to find a bank or credit union that can open an account online and how to choose the right account for you. , , ,²

In other words, conform or forfeit your refund, which you might be depending upon, that is, assuming you even meet the minimum requirement for an account, especially one without high fees and/or penalties.

But I digress.

To return to the point, it seems to me to be fallacious for every person in the world to be as technologically adept as most of the readers here might be and it's rather presumptious for us to expect them to be.

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¹ Obligatory Adams: "People living at C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder, 'what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there? And what's so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to there?'"

² IRS: Get your refund faster:

Re: Great!

Right.

I rather resent the notion that I am to have my cell phone with me at all times. Two factor is annoying enough.

For some reason, this all reminds me of a rather silly but now apparently prescient movie from 1967 called The President's Analyst where. . . well, take it Wikipedia

TPC [The Telephone Company] has developed a "modern electronic miracle", the Cerebrum Communicator (CC), a microelectronic device that can communicate wirelessly with any other CC in the world. With the CC implanted in the brain, a user need only think of the phone number to be called, and is instantly connected, thus eliminating the need for The Phone Company's massive and expensive wired infrastructure. For this to work, every human being will be assigned a number instead of a name, and will have the CC implanted prenatally. Schaefer is to be forced to assist the TPC scheme by blackmailing the president to pushing through the required legislation. TPC uses a short animated sequence (a parody of the animation in Our Mr. Sun) to explain the plan to Schaefer.¹

To go all Patrick McGoohan on you. . . "I am not a number! I'm a free man!"

Hahahahahahahaahahah.

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¹ Wikipedia: The President's Analyst: Plot

Just like phishing for gullible humans, prompt injecting AIs is here to stay

Re: Easy phishing the AI swamp

The AI credo: With great power comes great irresponsibility.

AI quota inflation is no token effort. It's baked in

Re: It's like maths reveals deep secrets in the universe

> (HINT: Intelligence is evolutions way of moving towards more efficient use of energy).

Or increasing entropy.

'Invisible mouse' made a mess of PC rebuild

Re: I have a Software equivilant

Hm.

I quite frequently find I'm talking to myself.

Re: I have a Software equivilant

Geeze, this is the story of my life -- wiggling the wrong mouse, fixing the wrong problem, tugging on the wrong connection, you name it, if it has wrong in it, I've done it.

Just yesterday I was installing a new machine in my office and kept trying to drag the cursor from one screen to another, constantly forgetting that they were connected to two entirely separate machines.

Then there's rebooting the wrong system because the mouse accidentally got moved from one window to another.

If I had a "battle cry," it would certainly be "AAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!"¹

__________________

¹ At least that's the version I'll use in polite company.

Anthropic squeezes enterprises by ejecting bundled tokens from seat deal

Re: Is that part of the "grand plan"?

Yep. If you'll permit me to quote the late satirist par excellence Tom Lehrer once again,

He gives the kids free samples,

Because he knows full well

That today's young innocent faces

Will be tomorrow's clientele.¹

The first taste is always free.

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¹Tom Lehrer: The Old Dope Peddler

Make crappy moves around AI and face voter backlash, govts warned

Re: First thing's first

I've been hearing about fears of "automation" for about as long as I've been aware of the world in general, and I grew up in the era of tube-powered monsters that a four-banger calculator puts to shame, so these scary stories strike me as just that, scary stories.

On the other hand, if your job can be done by a chatbot, it's probably a pretty mind numbing exercise in tedium and box checking.

Of course, keep that in mind when you read my putative "thoughts" that when I first heard from a radio engineer colleague about "cellular networks" back in the the late 1970s, I immediately thought "Having an upstairs extension¹ is bad enough. Who on Earth would want to lug a portable phone around with them?"

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¹ Ask your grandparents. They probably still have one.

BOFH: If the meatbags can't agree on aircon, AI will decide for them

Re: I just knew this was going to come up

That reminds me of a point my partner made when I was discussing this subject with her -- one that as a male simply didn't occur to me.

Females at a certain age undergo some abrupt and often unpleasant physiological changes when they reach menopause including what are commonly known as "hot flashes."

Always a good thing to keep in mind since a trifle over half the population of this planet is female.

Re: I just knew this was going to come up

And, as I mentioned in a recent "Who, Me? comment thread, there's biology to consider, as well.

Males and females have different sensitivities to heat and cold and those sensitivities change with age.

As I observed there, men like it colder when they're younger and that preference gradually changes to prefer warmth as they age, while women, who generally have less body mass, especially when younger, prefer a warmer environment and that seems to also change with age.

My partner often comes into my office¹ in the house and wonders why it's sweltering when to me it's "just right."

Per Douglas Adams, "Life, said Marvin dolefully, loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it." Same goes for biology.

________________

¹ Which has the world's most inefficient space heater, a 64 core Ryzen machine along with several terabytes of NAS, etc., sitting beside me.

It does make sense in an intuitive, if not physical, way.

To get a pot of water to boil faster on the stove, what do you do? Crank up the dial to "high," of course.

Without a full understanding of how A/Cs work this is a perfectly reasonable, if incorrect, analogy.

Here's how to watch the Artemis II splashdown

Re: Then they wonder why nobody cares

Perhaps it's because I grew up listening to Jack King's¹ "Just the facts, M'am" reporting, starting with Mercury, through Gemini and Apollo, but I preferred hearing someone just telling me what was going on without cheerleading.

I rather enjoy being spoken to as an intelligent adult² by an intelligent adult and not by someone trying to emulate a teenage "influencer" with an iPhone.

Just tell me what's going on and I'll supply my own enthusiasm, thank you very much.

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¹ Wikipedia: Jack King (NASA)

² Perhaps a bit of a stretch but c'mon, give me the benefit of the doubt, okay?

OpenAI puts Stargate UK on ice, blames energy costs and red tape

Re: That is great news

Time to press Ctrl-Altman-Delete.

Brits are falling out of love with posting every thought online

Re: Agreed! Have an upvote...

And I don't even have a lawn.

I've honestly never seen the point of "Social Media."

My own life is only at best of marginal interest even to me and I know the rest of my species well enough to realize that theirs are in large part equally mundane, so why would I want to post about it or read about other's on Facebook?¹ Xitter? I remember before it evolved into the current cesspit of meanness and hatred when it was a steady stream of postings by hipsters reporting what they had for lunch and, well, I like to have the same lunch every day.²

As far as LinkedIn goes, I signed up for it at least a decade and a half ago at the behest of, nay, badgering by a former colleague and then promptly forgot the login and password, so I haven't been bothered with it since, other than the occasional "friend" request (or whatever they're called in LinkedIn jargon) from vaguely remembered former coworkers, which I studiously ignore.

Keeping up with distant friends? Email works just dandy and is a heck of a lot more private (at least conceptually).

I realize that makes me pretty much a misanthrope³ but it's served me well for many decades and probably kept me out of a lot of trouble and heartache.

Well, that took a couple of strange turns, didn't it?

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¹ I'd much rather post curmudgeonly and longwinded comments to The Register consisting of vaguely related reminiscences and shakily founded opinions. But, hey, everybody has their own kinks.

² Revenge, served cold.

³ H. L Mencken was my hero until I discovered that he seemed to be privately a racist and antisemite (though that's somewhat debatable and may have evolved to more enlightened views over time). In the words of the late Jill Sobule, "Why are all our heroes so imperfect? / Why do they always bring me down?".

If an AI agent screws up while running your business, there's nobody to sue

What? You mean you didn't read the End User License Agreement on the hammer?

IN NO EVENT SHALL LICENSOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER (INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF BUSINESS PROFITS, BUSINESS INTERRUPTION, LOSS OF BUSINESS INFORMATION, ANY OTHER PECUNIARY LOSS), LOST PETS, PERSONAL INJURY, IMPOTENCY, BUMPS ON THE HEAD, BROKEN THUMBS, OR TERTIARY COREOPSIS ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF OR INABILITY TO USE THIS HAMMER, EVEN IF LICENSOR HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

The developer who came in from the cold and melted a mainframe

Re: Always rather it too cold than too hot

A major cause of the "battle of the thermostat" is that people's tolerance to heat and cold varies by gender and age and in a mixed office there are always going to be differential tolerance.

Younger males tend to like lower temperatures than females at the same age largely due to differences in body mass.

Curiously, as one ages, both my partner and I have observed that tolerance tends to switch by gender, with older males liking warmer temperatures while females seem to like it cooler (at least for my sample set of 1).

It's biology.¹

_________________

¹ Why Women Often Feel Colder Than Men

Re: Always rather it too cold than too hot

While you can certainly "layer up," there are parts of your body that can't be effectively layered, such as hands and fingers.

I once had an office which was perpetually freezing and I'd have to wear a hoodie and sometimes a coat over it just to avoid shivering all day long.

Layers were fine for most of my body, but mittens were more or less out of the question, seeing as how I am an overpaid typist. . . er. . . trained software professional who needs to type a lot. My fingers and hands would get cold to the point of pain.¹

I tried multiple solutions, including pasting an electrical terrarium heater to the underside of the desk to create a warm spot² and wearing disposable gloves to keep some of the body heat in.³

Dinking with the thermostat didn't really help⁴ since there was a draft coming from somewhere that I could never identify.

It only was cured when I just upped and moved to a recently vacated office on the other side of the building and dared management to say "boo" about it.

________________

¹ Perhaps due to incipient arthritis, being of the "older persuasion," as I am. . . and no wisecracks, kiddo, it'll happen to you. . . if you're lucky.

² An idea quickly discarded due to the obvious fire hazard.

³ Wearing them all day long made my hands begin to itch. I'm not sure whether it was from the powder used to make the gloves easier to put on but whatevr it was, that experiment only lasted a couple of days.

⁴ I'm not sure the thermostat actually controlled anything or was user-adjustable. I'd heard rumors that they were there just to give the illusion of control and the temperatures were actually controlled from the central physical plant office but I was never able to confirm that local legend.

They thought they were downloading Claude Code source. They got a nasty dose of malware instead

So this would be. . .

Clawed Code?

Just askin'.

Contractor quaffed his way through Y2K compliance while the client scowled

Re: Beer Busts...

When I worked at a certain southern california univerisity, the oceanography department owned a little facility run by the grad students that had a nice deck overlooking the beach. Every Friday they'd roll out a keg of the finest cheapest and have a pleasant "happy hour" for grad students and faculty where we'd watch the sun go down.

I was lucky enough to be invited to join in by one of the scientists in my acquaintence with whom I'd worked off and on in one project or another.

Every once and a while the president of the university, a random chancellor, or the department head would show up and a good time was had by all.

The nominal cost of a cup of beer would be plowed back into the fund and every couple of months, if there as a surplus, it was free beer night.

Good times, indeed.

Longnecks

I have a vaguely related tale from years past.

It was apparently the tradition at a certain Texas university for the seminar room to be furnished with a cooler long Lone Star longnecks as a way of attracting audience for speakers.

A friend and colleague who got his PhD from said university was doing a postdoc at a US military affiliated institution of higher learning where I also worked as a general departmental CS roustabout.

As he was scheduled to give a talk he decided to attempt to bring the longneck tradition along with him and brought in a cooler stocked with beverages.

There was dead silence as he popped the top of of his brew and launched into his talk.

The military contingent was not amused¹ though the majority of the civilians in the audience, many of whom were also imbibing, were.

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¹ Admittedly, this may have been the point of the exercise, since my colleague's relationship with the "brass" was somewhat fraught.

Even Microsoft knows Copilot shouldn't be trusted with anything important

Re: MicroSlop

"Copilot is for entertainment purposes only."

I suppose that's better than "Sold for the prevention of disease only."¹

_________________

¹ Smithsonian National Museum of American History: Sporting LIfe

Starlink sprays debris into orbit following another satellite 'anomaly'

Re: So it exploded?

Sounds like typical rocket jockey jargon to me.

Space science and engineering has always had its lingo.

I remember while watching one of the early human carrying launches (might've even been Alan Shepard's suborbital flight¹) that I learned the word "nominal" meant everything was going as planned.

And, honestly, I'll take "fragment creation event" to Elon's juvenile "Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly" any day.

_____________

¹ Yeah, I'm old enough to have actually watched it live on television,.

Commercial space pleads with NASA to stop moving the goalposts in orbit

Re: High-level get-there-itis?

Yup, "we're ready to shortcut wherever we can" are not words that should be ever uttered in connection with space and, particularly, human space flight.

Not unless you're prepared to fly the flags at half staff for a week.

Calling out corporate BS? There's a steaming pile to aim for

Re: A Pisces, working for scale

It is my policy to neither confirm nor deny.

A Pisces, working for scale

From the article: They ranked nonsensical statements more highly when composed of the finest business bovine byproduct, as ranked on the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale or CBRS.

Oddly enough, before retiring I worked for an organization with a permutation of that abbreviation.

Microslop stuffs AI photo restyling powers into OneDrive

Re: Change

Or turned into "Shrimp Jesus."

Telling an AI model that it’s an expert programmer makes it a worse programmer

Re: Dunning–Kruger is an offline problem, too

Not that I necessarily disagree but must everything be immedately viewed through the prism of politics? And, especially, US politics¹?

This all just makes one very tired.

Back on topic, I'm of the opinion that telling a human, even a true expert, that they're an expert anything to be largely detrimental.

All it does is inflate egos.

To paraphrase Mojo Nixon, everybody has a little Dunning-Kruger in them.

________________

¹ And I say this as a fairly politically active American.

While you're here, could you go out of your way to do an impossible job?

The distinction was probably lost on an Irish monk towards the end of the 8th century.

Fiber on the surface of the moon could help detect moonquakes

Re: Hmm ... that first paper title

The paper discusses actual terrestrial quakes detected using the setup.

The events observed from the DAS system including optical fiber deployed in the LRS box included several local and regional earthquakes. In the following analyses, we grouped results by each observed event. Responses of optical fiber depths were also evaluated through comparison of signals recorded by the broadband seismometer. In addition, we performed hammer strike (active-source) tests to evaluate standard deviations of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for each burial depth.¹

Personally, I think this is a good thing. We could all use more fiber in our diet.

__________

¹ Icarus: Earthquake detection in a simulated lunar regolith using distributed acoustic sensing -- Results

Struggling to put your AI aversion into words? Here's a handy glossary

Re: Are you an AI hater, an AI vegan, or a slightly more moderate AI vegetarian?

Old joke:

Q: How do you know if someone's vegan?

A: They'll tell you.

Horizon redress still a mess, MPs say – and Fujitsu hasn't paid a penny

They do. Oh, they do.

There's a reason why Mark Zuckerberg is buying up a substantial chunk of Kauai

... Already, there are two sprawling mansions, a gym, a tennis court, several guesthouses and treehouses, a water system, and even a tunnel leading to an underground shelter reportedly the size of a professional basketball court and equipped with blast-resistant doors and an escape hatch. (Emphasis added)¹

Oh, yes, they do.

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¹ Robb Report: Mark Zuckerberg Quietly Added Another 1,000 Acres to His $300 Million Compound in Hawaii

Yep. Delayed in the mail.

I wish that was a joke.

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

Re: No kidding.

Of course "drink the Koolaid" is yet another cliche jargon term.

To paraphrase the 1960s band Buffalo Springfield, "Jargonitis strikes deep, into your life, it will creep."

> I think I will be forwarding this article to a few select people around the office. I wonder if they'll recognise themselves...

To resort to another cliche, "We have met the enemy and he is us."