Posts by graemep

Gym rat asks AI agent to book him a class, it hacks a waitlist API to bump him up the list

The real problem is an API that lets you cancel other people's reservations. This is not really cracking as there is no auth to crack!

Meta straps on a ‘Kick Me’ sign by mistakenly taking down video by India’s prime minister

Re: Taxing the tech bros is long overdue

If they could hike prices they already would have. Prices will already be revenue maximising (given low variable costs revenue maximising pretty much equals profit maximising).

You cannot just pass on increases in costs without losing sales.

Digital sovereignty is real in Europe. The UK? Not so much

Re: Awkward.

> The Linux kernel is run out of the US by a Finnish-born, US citizen. So your FOSS is likely to be running at heart on a kernel that the orange goblin has legal oversight and control of.

How is that a problem? The code is open. If the US government forces backdoors into Linux they will be detectable and stripped out by distros. The same for anything else. A Linux install cannot be turned off remotely.

Pope's official prayer app commits cardinal sin, leaks 700K+ users' info

No, its much, much older. There is probably a Babylonian clay tablet somewhere complaining about nepotism.

Burnham wants Big Ecommerce to bankroll Britain's pubs

Re: Pretty much all costs are simply too high in the UK

its not just 90p, and the lack of decent public transport means you do not have an alternative to the car either.

For me there is a sharp division between shops in walking distance, and ones I need to get into the car to get to.

Re: 2 separate problems

Historically some countries used to give kids (weak) alcohol in school.

Those same countries also had low rates of alcohol related health problems.

Sovereign AI is 'nonsense,' says Doctorow

Re: I'm with Doctorow on this

I agree. From a national point of view I am far concerned about the NHS depending on AWS, or payments depending on American tech, etc. than I am about people depending on foreign LLMs (my personal interests are a bit different though).

LLMs definitely have a positive POI in software development, they seem to be having a positive impact in mathematics. I think they are most useful with well defined problems, verifiable out put, and users who know when and how to use them effectively.

Airbus takes flight from AWS. What happens next is critical

The problem there is a spec that is basically "it has to be exactly the same" rather than "it has to deliver this functionality".

Top EU court clips YouTube's intermediary defense over reviewed content

They are not checking all content, but they are not a neutral distribution system either once they start reviewing content.

If you want Claude to speak nicely to you, try Hindi or Arabic

I wonder if it responds differently when using different forms of English. Claude does use British English in responses to me. What else would change if I used American or South Asian English?

Re: Anthropic's history of leaning into anthropomorphism for marketing purposes.

Thanks, going tor read that. Sayers usually has valid points about most things!

EU appears to find datacenter emissions easier to offset than lobbyists

easier to offset = easier to greenwash

Telling internet platforms where to stick public service media will serve nobody. Turn it on its head

Re: Young People and the news

I think they are sensible to avoid the news. You learn very little from the news, retain less, and understand very little because news covers everything superficially. Reading a book or in-depth articles about an issue gives you far more understanding than following the news.

Investigative journalist is important, but its very very small proportion of the news.

Your first few pars are fine, but your idea about fake news in unworkable. Who decides what is fake news as opposed to an opinion or a mistake? Will all fake news be treated equally? Will you apply the idea of individuals posting on social media, social media businesses, bloggers....?

Small island nation tries bold tech education strategy

Re: Have you met teeanagers?

The solution is to educate and empower parents. There is a lot that could be done. Controls in routers, promoting child safe SIMs.

Some parents being neglectful does not mean its a good idea to solve the problem on the assumption all parents are neglectful. Some teachers abuse kids (several news stories recently), so we should close down schools? Fix it for the typical (loving parents) and deal with the rest separately.

EU won't force publishers to grant dead video games an afterlife

Re: Physical Comparisons

Is it going to be possible for new cars that rely on manufacturers servers and OTA updates for important functionality and security updates?

Re: Shame

No product or offering for sale should be designed in such a way that its functionality is contingent upon the perpetual consent of that product or offering's seller or designer

Games are just the start. Its going to be cars (lots of new cars rely on OTA updates), fridges, etc. soon enough. Its already true of phones.

Brit workers waste nearly six hours a week 'botsitting'

Its almost as though giving people a complex new tool does not automatically mean they can use it.

Python JIT compiler project under threat after steering council says proper process wasn't followed

I entirely agree that most Python users are not concerned with performance because the performance critical stuff is in C libraries. Cython has some limitations so its not 100% compatible and you need to rewrite code to get the best performance (e.g. adding type declarations for C types - Cython transpiles to C) and its intended to make it easy to write C extensions. On the (very rare) occasions I have needed it its been for small sections of critical code.

Some years a go Guido was encouraging people to use PyPy when appropriate as there are tradeoffs between things such as startup time and performance of long running processes. I like there being multiple implementations with different strengths. I think what has changed since then has been that there has been a push towards better performance for numerical stuff, especially for AI development. A lot of top sponsors and developers are interested in that use case.

From my point of view I have been using Python for a long time and I do not like many things about the way it has been going. Its async sucks because you need an async version of very function and method. Numerical performance is now more important to the developers than the things I use it for (both in what I do, and what I use) such as scripting, web apps, GUIs, etc.

'Please do not vibe f--- up this software': Broken backups spark AI coding row in rsync project

Re: I believe the engineer

People are also assuming that all regressions in the new release are caused by AI - you can see that in the tickets that list issues that are post LLM usage.

I do not know how many regressions are typical for an rysnc release, but it does not look like a huge number.

LLMs are closer to religion than they appear. Watch out for those who like it that way

Re: "young earth creationists believe it’s 600 years old."

> Why is it that almost all the worst (pseudo)religious whackjobbery originates in the US, and mostly a small subset of states at that ?

History, culture, and politics.

The US had a large proportion of people with a particular outlook. Very puritanical. For example, they very anti-alcohol. Guess who the Bible says gave people alcohol to keep a party going? If you look at some of their other ideas (e.g. women should be submissive, unbelievers are damned, etc.) their values are closer to fundamentalist Islam than to traditional Christianity (imagine telling someone like Hildegarde of Bingen to be submissive!). Fundamentalists of all stripes seem to have a similar mentality.

They also took the protestant back to the scriptures/reject tradition idea to an extreme, but then created a bunch of new traditions around interpretations that suited their culture. One of the oddest among some particular weirdos is that the real Bible is a particular edition of the KJV. I find it amusing that conservative Americans, proudly citizens of a republic, think the word of God was the translation commissioned by a gay monarch.

Rejecting tradition also meant ignoring a lot of existing argument and theology. They ignore all the arguments for not taking the Bible literally, for example (because they are not going to read Origen or Augustine or Hippo).

They also had to reconcile Christianity with capitalism, which is an awkward fit (because of all the eye of the needle and root of all evil stuff), and lead to the invention of things such as "prosperity Christianity".

Pope Leo warns AI boom can give Big Tech and the people who run it too much power

Re: "those who control AI will impose their own moral vision"

I have always thought that religion was fundamendally concerned with people:their relationship with each other and the world in general rather than with some putative sky god or with any its spooky minions.

Christianity does not believe in a "sky god" except metaphorically. God does not have a location! With regard to relationships with God and people the belief is they are inseparable. CS Lewis (I think) used the analogy of a the relationship between the hub and the spokes of a bicycle wheel. If the spokes are in the right relationship to the hub they are in the right relationship to each other (and vice-versa).

Seems odd finding oneself in the same trench as the Church but "war makes strange bedfellows" with the otherside attempting to destroy the very idea of humanity this conflict is potentially existential.

I think this is something that has been coming for a long time. There are a number of strands of contemporary thinking that put old fashioned atheists and old fashioned religious people in the same camp. Amoral tech bros vs valuing humanity. The belief in facts vs all beliefs being equally valid (i.e. everyone is right "for them").

Outlook has an image problem

The problem is particularly irksome for affected users whose signatures include an image.

I find signatures that include an image particularly irksome. It indicates being more worried about branding than communicating.

Google Cloud suspended major customer Railway.com without cause, causing outage

Re: Single source: the biggest vulnerability

Not have other industries that rely on software.

Your former employers will very likely still apply the same rule to components. It is probable they do not apply the same rule to whatever software components they rely on (embedded OSes and similar) or to tools they rely on to design and build whatever they do.

Microsoft remembers that taskbars used to move

People are happy to use Windows even if basic functionality goes MIA? Not even the much moaned about early releases of KDE 4 managed to make panels immobile or lack autohide. People say they use Widows because it just works!

Kids say they can beat age checks by drawing on a fake mustache

Re: Yup...

My daughters are adults now, but I agreed with you when they were younger. They needed guidance and supervision, but not sweeping limits.

Parents need to be empowered, not replaced. There is a lot that can be done: e.g. all ads mobile connections should offer child safe SIMs as an option, all broadband connections should have a filtering option per device at the router. All this is possible, some of it exists, parents need to know.

One of the problems is that the government believes parents (it is a pervasive assumption of the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill) are not to be trusted so this is the opposite of what they want to do. They do not want parents to take responsibility, they want "professional" to do so. It does not work, but they are convinced it will.

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

Re: Support from general commerce?

You can install an authenticator app on your desktop. There are browser extensions too but I think those may be less trustworthy.

Re: Support from general commerce?

The EU is detaching itself from reliance on software and Internet services controlled within the USA legal jurisdiction.

Not really. Some countries are reducing government backend systems reliance on American systems. There is no effort to effort to reduce private sector or client device reliance on American providers and AFAIK a trend to using mobile apps you that run on American big tech controlled devices.

Most countries have similar passport rules. That is why so many dual nationals had the other passport as they had to have that to enter the other country.

Tech support chap's boss got him out of jail so he could finish a job

Re: I didn't get in trouble. Others got in trouble for me.

Jim in story one is just an idiot, maybe. The other two really should be sacked for that behaviour.

How was the guy in story two anywhere near defence contracts? His particular job did not require any clearance?

Re: Major disaster spotted at end of article

Really? Most of the American citizens I know are not white and they seem to be doing fine. They go abroad on holiday and go back, they seem to be carrying on with jobs and education as normal.

We know what day it is but these Raspberry Pi price hikes are no joke

Re: 3Gb ram ?

The physical size is not so appealing: there are very small x86 machines now. Especially true for the 500.

The cheaper and smaller ones, yes.

You can also embed a Pi in something else, and that is where SBCs excel.

UK police force presses pause on live facial recognition after study finds racial bias

Re: This isn't the real problem

Its not a racial bias. Stop and search is mostly done in poor areas and reflects the ethnic makeup of those areas.

If you have a look at the stats you will see stop and search numbers for groups that I am pretty sure look the same to the average copper (e.g. ethnic Indians and Bangladeshis) have very different stop and search rates which correlates pretty well to how well of they are.

Re: This isn't the real problem

If we decriminalise them, they becomes cheap, and there is less shoplifting.

If we treat it as a medical problem and give people enough legally that they do not need to steal, there is less shoplifting.

Time to end the 'uncontrolled experiment' of social media on kids, scientists say

Re: God forbid..

It also requires politicians to ignore lobbyists.

Big tech wants age verification for tracking and to impose costs on smaller competitors. People in the UK have already closed down forums because of the Online Safety Act.

Re: Why stop at kids?

Its not got a lot of legal significance other than being the age of consent, and one reason for it is to avoid criminalising teenagers who have sex with each other.

You are not generally treated as a responsible adult (able to buy alcohol, able to vote, in contract law, able to marry, etc.) until you are 18.

I actually agree about limiting kids access to social media, but I do not think age verification is the way to do it.

Just how old are you? Social media is very popular with late middle aged and retired people.

BBC World Service digital switch backfires as online audience drops

Re: They have no clue

Neither the government nor the BBC seem to understand the importance of the world service. It is a huge national benefit, but they just d not seem interested.

Microsoft points at Samsung after Galaxy app bug locks users out of C:\

That is interesting, but you do not need a second account on Linux - lots of Linux distros use sudo or similar. All you need is to re-enter your password to install software, which is not a big ask.

Legacy software that needs admin might be a problem, but is there still a lot of it still around? There are decades of Windows software, but running really old software is rather niche.

I think you are wrong about the risk of people suing. Given the things software companies get away with the chances of people suing because an upgrade broke old software is negligible, and they would have no chance of succeededing

DR-DOS rises again – rebuilt from scratch, not open source

Would any such certification apply to a reimplementation?

US state laws push age checks into the operating system

Re: To protect the children!

No man has even been to court for the kidnappings and abuses on his island.

Epstein was convicted. The woman was convicted of being deeply involved.

Chardet dispute shows how AI will kill software licensing, argues Bruce Perens

Re: It's LGPL or public domain now

If this v7 genuinely was mostly generated by an LLM, existing court rulings say that it is not covered by copyright.

They do not. Thaler v. Perlmutter in the US only ruled that an AI cannot be the author of a copyright work. It did not even consider the question of whether then human operating the AI is the author (which the almost certainly are).

In the UK the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act expressly says "In the case of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work which is computer-generated, the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken."

Bcachefs creator insists his custom LLM is female and 'fully conscious'

He has not actually endorsed these claims.

The claims are an output of his LLM.

It looks like he has a way of easily disclaiming the claims. he can say "its just my LLM output, but what I think".

Brit dual nationals grounded by border digitization drive

Why do you have to pay half a grand, rather than £95 for a passport?

Re: unsure whether she would be able to return to the UK

So does the UK. You can just get a passport. I always had a valid UK passport when I lived in the other country of which i am a zitixen.

The certificate of entitlement is probably meant for people who have a right of abode but are not citizens, so it must be very much an edge case that is more manually processed with lots of checks.

Its cheap in the context of long term visas for foreigners. My daughter's husband just paid £2,000+ to renew his spouse visa (which is a lot!) and the same again for the NHS surcharge (which is unfair as his taxes already pay for the NHS).

UK tech hit by double trouble: Fewer foreign techies amid skills squeeze

Re: Too Expensive?

If you can hire people from abroad you can presumably higher people from a different part of the same country.

Re: Who wants...?

> Tell that to all the innocents who get stopped & searched just in case, disproportionately ‘of colour’ because of statistics.

Causation does not imply correlation.

If you are attributing some ethnic groups being stopped and search more often to racism rather than other factors (e.g. wealth, living in big cities...) that correlate to race that implies the average cop can tell the difference between someone of Bangladeshi ancestry (high stop and search rate) from someone of Indian ancestry (low stop and search rate) at a glance.

Apple, Google agree to loosen grip on UK app stores

This is not enough. its a step in the right direction, but it needs a lot more. For example, they MUST allow alternative app stores to operate.

OpenAI gives ChatGPT models the chop – two weeks' notice, take it or leave it

Re: This is why openweight models are useful.

Running big models fast requires GPUs with lots of RAM which are quite expensive - partly because the ”slop slingers" are buying so much hardware they are pushing prices up.