Posts by EdSaxby

Building up the US power grid won't be wasted, even if the AI bubble bursts

Re: Would this be the same McKinsey that...

Oh, I thought this was the McKinsey that in 2022 predicted that the Metaverse may reach $5 trillion in value by 2030.

I am not sure why people give time to these bullshit purveyors.

Elon pledges to give Nvidia a virtual monopoly over the stars

Re: He's not doing it because it is feasible

The Rev Jim Jones of tech.

The majority of corporate IT is now off premises for the first time

We did the sums and determined the the compute and storage costs on all our non-production environments stacked up as far more expensive than the existing services we were running on prem.

What happened? The enterprise architects quoted Gartner and directed everything be moved to the Cloud. Obviously, they later had to reduce the level of services provided because they were costing too much.

LinkedIn realizes its users have been bathing in AI slop, offers a shower

Re: too little, too late

I placed LinkedIn in "hibernation" when I walked away from work. I get a thrill when I receive a message that my account is still in hibernation. I never need to see those inane, self-congratulatory posts from my my former peers.

Uncle Sam needs you to fight for 6G leadership and security, lest Beijing get there first

Winning stratgey?

Now, let me see.

Let's denigrate and defund science and education.

Let's treat foreign talent coming to your country as undesirables.

Let's close off your tech market on national secuirty grounds.

Let's treat your allies who have technology-strengths as enemies.

Yup, this strategy is going to work!

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

Re: SpaceX stock

It will probably be best for the market if SpaceX collapses now while only 5% of shares are issued. That will contain some of the damage to pension funds.

Billing software error sends billion-dollar AWS estimates

Re: Send to c suite immediately, endure their weekends are disturbed

No need to interrupt the c suite from their weekend, the AI agent that looks after accounts payable has paid them already.

Court tosses Microsoft's appeal in pre-owned software licenses spat

Re: just wait

Well they already did this to some extent for MS Office 2019 for Mac. The certificate expired and MS won't go through the trivial step to renew it. Those lifetime licences are now destined to be useless because it was not in Microslop's interest to honour them.

Insert token to continue, says AI. Yeah, about that...

Re: AI.

Your "janitorial overhead" is just the human in the chain being the fall guy for when things go badly wrong.

21,000 Oracle jobs vanish amid Big Red's big bets on AI

Re: Great, and at the same time we see Oracle SRs stall left and right...

I always loved getting a support analyst who knew the product inside-out, was genuinely curious and engaged. It enabled us to solve some really obscure and novel SR's.

I guess now, you are just going to get AI hell from Oracle Support - slop responses based on known issues, rather than any intellectual investigation. Probably time to move off Oracle.

(Thankfully, I decided to retire)

The new database world according to Google: Inexact queries and AI in everything

Re: "it’s not so much about getting the exact results, but getting the best results"

I'd be amazed if these people had ever worked at the coal face before with such a weird take on this.

Financial transaction processing generally regards accuracy as a given, stock management queries likewise, flight and transportation scheduling etc etc. I my last job in the public sector, a fudged result to a parliamentary question was generally frowned upon (not always, but 'generally'). I despair if these people think they are the 'big thinkers'.

2,000 retired Google Pixel phones get a second life as a private cloud

Thinking of the planet

So glad that Google is thinking of the planet by avoiding e-waste... meanwhile in a different department of Google, it's AI bag of tricks is chewing up a vast amount of resources.

Capita is about to sail past deadline to fix civil service pensions scheme

Spoken like a true consultant (with their nose in the trough).

World Cup AI predictor now lets users ask daft what-ifs

Back in the day Paul the Octopus did not use as much water or electricity as the new AI version. Progress innit?

Met Police boss threatens to cut 700 frontline jobs after Palantir deal blocked

He should definitely be fired for so obviously throwing his toys out of the cot.

I really wonder what drives the behaviour of these cops to salivate over Palantir. Is it bribery?, is it future employment opportunities?, is it shared values and adoration? It almost seems everyone is in some sort of cult these days.

UK's top crime agency hamstrung by legacy IT, watchdog warns

Re: Be careful what you wish for.

Or likely a no-bid deal with Palantir

Trump pumps federal funds into coal plants in the name of energy security

Re: Look out for branded coal, perfect for your fireplace

And after the coal processing in a furnace, will we also have Trump Slag? (or is that something else entirely?)

AI heavyweights warn their tech could help terrorists develop bioweapons

Well if their bunkers are in my neighbourhood (in NZ), I will be hunting down the tech bros when the apocalypse comes.

"They don't like it up 'em!”

Benevolent dictator Zuck will give Meta staff 30-minute breaks from keylogging privacy assault

Re: So Glad I Do Not Work For A Corporation Now

Very much so, it seems the industry is committed to turning software developers who have immense intelligence, curiosity, creativity and flair into simple factory workers.

Mind you, it was beginning to happen ten years ago, when I heard the denigrating term "code monkeys" used by Project Management.

User NewModelArmy... it too have left the corporate world, and don't miss those excruciating monthly presentations where I had to spin our long-term development work into exciting soundbites for the customer and our hyper excitable service delivery manager.

Palantir wins £9M contract to run UK firearms licensing: CIA-backed biz to hold gun, bomb, and poison records

Palantir has its tentacles so deep into law enforcement and justice services. You would be hard pressed to believe this is above board.

100% agree. There is no reason why Palantir should be selected. Any local vendor should be able to offer the capability to implement a suitable system.

It really seems an unusual decision.

'Resistance is futile,' says Qualcomm CEO. AI agents will be become invisible, inescapable, follow you across devices

Thank goodness for wifi dead spots

We often stay with our friends in a rural area where they don't even have cellular coverage.

This is looking more inviting all the time to escape the "always on" AI agents.

Kyndryl takes employees' pulse while cutting off circulation for some

Re: Insensitive doesn't even come into it, all the while HR are saying…

I worked in one place where a colleague received his "role disestablished" notice on the same day HR emailed him to say they wanted to profile him in the company newsletter for his 20 years of service. Unbelievable.

HR regards everyone is just another wet body to be bid down to the lowest cost.

Google explains how it will infuse ads into AI answers

Re: Yuck

Agree, I am in New Zealand and searching using DDG for NZ tax forms returns the official Inland Revenue forms page as the first hit.

GitHub says internal repos exfiltrated after poisoned VS Code extension attack

Re: A common thread

"they end up spending more time faffing with their IDE and environment than they're trying to save"

Thank you. I thought I was the only one who thought this. There are some developers who would sooner play with the IDE toys than do any real work.

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

Re: Taking all bets...

Always happened in my work place. We had an engaging, healthy discussion and unanimously agreed the lessons learned - and then moved on as if nothing had happened.

UK Typhoon jets fitted with bargain-bin drone busters for Middle East sorties

Re: I have a better idea

I think there is a lot of evidence he does not (can't) read. The Mein Kampf book would be aspirational only.

As for Stephen Miller, he probably has many pages of his own Mein Kampf well thumbed and bookmarked.

One in seven Brits swapped their GP for ChatGPT, study finds

When you consider that LLMs are potentially trained on the mutterings of RFK Junior and his hand-picked CDC "experts", it should give cause for concern.

Darwin will prevail I guess.

Cisco to fire 4,000 staff and generously give them free training – on Cisco

All this hubris about pivoting to AI for growth is showing the tech companies have run out of ideas of their own.

AI will soon be capable of telling convincing lies

You only need to look at their masters (Altman, Zuckerberg, Musk et al) to see why the LLMs inevitably lie when stuck in a corner.

Sovereign cloud is only possible if you’re Chinese or American: Gartner

Gartner... true to form with their BS

Gartner... the same company who predicted (with a straight face) in 2022, that "A quarter of people will spend at least an hour a day in the metaverse by 2026".

I would take what they say with a grain of salt.

Cloudflare to fire 1,100 staff whose jobs just aren’t AI enough

Retired also (this year). I perversely follow all of these pronouncements and wonder what the hell ever happened to an industry I loved working in.

We always valued people, ideas and doing amazing stuff. Now it seems it is all so, so cruel.

UK puts £20.5M behind 'numberplate for the skies' to keep tabs on drones

Re: Obviously

That's why they are lawyers, your average person would say "the legislation is written 'hastily'".

Although, I am also glad that they did not state they were "proceeding at pace with an abundance of caution". That would have made me throw up a little.

We've only gone and done it: Changed what you're used to

Re: Looks fine to me on desktop

In my case, I had to set the zoom in Firefox to 90% so the links on the top of the page would fit into the browser window. Otherwise, the text links on the outer left and right sides disappeared off the page.

It looks like you got AI to QA this.

Firefox integrates an ad-blocker, but not to block ads

Re: Oh Thank Goodness

Same! I was thinking I had screwed up my browser settings.

Seriously, it was way too early in the morning to see this (in NZ, heading towards winter) without any fair warning for my eyes.

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

This was always going to be the case.

All governments are too week to actually take on the tech companies to stop them from using addictive engagement algorithms. That's the real problem, not one of young adults using the internet.

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

No mention of Huawei running its own HarmonyOS?

Mythos complicates the breakup, says Pentagon CTO, but Anthropic is still barred

Re: Acid Test

In future it might also be "how many wars did Donald Trump end during his second term"

Microsoft boss tells investors the company is working to 'win back fans'

Re: Hate it

I was in the same boat. Fortunately, I have just retired and delightedly handed the Windows 11 PC back to my old firm and now live on my own Mac and Linux desktops.

For the year I was working on a Windows 11 machine I never knew from day-to-day whether I would run into a tech issue or not. worse, there often became multi-day issues where I was just staring into space or trying to figure out how it could do my job with pen and paper. I have never in my whole career had so much lost productivity due to basic tech issues.

My previous Windows 7 experience was generally flawless and uneventful.

Re: consumer business?

Not only Mac Minis... for any consumer buying a new laptop a Macbook Neo just seems a no-brainer compared to a Windows PC. Not only is the build quality far superior, but the initial set-up experience is far less offensive that the Windows 11 clown show.

Survey says no, American workers are not keen on Microsoft's AI

Re: The word's the giveaway

'tenant' is a far more palatable term than 'prisoner", I guess.

Microsoft's GitHub shifts to metered AI billing amid cost crisis

Re: I am not a freeloader!

It's ok, your bank will be using AI, so the AI agent will be able to locate your credit card details and process the charges for you. Helpful right?

US clarifies mobile hotspots part of foreign router ban despite rarity of American made consumer kit

Re: So are they impounding stuff from tourists on arrival?

> Americans are going to be vanishing from the net at this rate

Sounds like what is happening to internet users in Russia right now.

I guess where the motherland leads, Trump will follow.

Microsoft beefs up Remote Desktop security with ... hard-to-read messages

Re: QA SNAFU

The LLM "tester" can clearly read the messages, so it is all OK.

The fact it is garbled for human users is irrelevant in this day and age.

Anthropic admits it dumbed down Claude when trying to make it smarter

Honestly...

...they really are just winging it. The evidence looks clearer the AI companies have little clue how their models work, and what they are doing.

American farms have a new steward for their safety net, disaster programs... Palantir

I wonder if Palantir will show that launching a war against Iran which impacts fertiliser availability is a huge risk to the agriculture industry.

Magnificent irony as Meta staff unhappy about running surveillance software on work PCs

Same as you. I was beginning the think I was a museum relic lugging my paper notebook around to meetings etc. It is non-permanent storage, and I just throw the notebook away when its full, but its just the way I work.

Headless 360: Salesforce's latest pitch to let AI do the dev work

"Agentforce Vibes"

Excuse me while I throw up... that is so cringeworthy

Claude Code cache chaos creates quota complaints

Re: Reminder: Nobody knows what any of this costs.

In Anthropic's case, you can see and smell enshittification coming. It usually seems to take longer, but I guess everything is faster with AI.

Red Hat RHELocates its Chinese engineering team to India

Re: Good luck continuing to sell in China

I am a consequence of that style of offshoring myself.

The offshore company's employees run around in circles and have little affinity with our business culture and environment... But our CIO, bless him, gets lots of glowing adoration, they are much cheaper and a generous slap-up meal or two makes up for the loss of decades of technical experience from the local team.