Posts by Bebu sa Ware

Waymo launching China-made van that won't fail in rain, snow, or gloom of night

‘Do Not Ask.’

No ! Not Mrs Cake !

I am pretty sure Artificial Intelligence would fade and perish when confronted with her natural precognition.

OpenAI dishes out its first model on a plate of Cerebras silicon

Re: A correction

I mixed up my Greek and Latin, as one does.

As one does.

I noticed but thought it was a reflection of the disparate terms "Artificial" and "Intelligence."

Either way, however you spell it, AI starts with shit and with great expendature of energy, produces an a vastly greater heap of now steaming shit.

In fact AI's motto ought to be "from shit (kopros) to shit (merda)" first half in Greek, the second in Latin - both properly declined in their respective languages.

AI to make call center agents 'superheroes,' not unemployed, says industry CEO

Re: It all really depends, doesn't it?

"I take the use-case of the automatic checkout in the supermarket."

I frequently see a lone checkout operator idly standing bored titless while customers queue for automatic checkouts.

"will get me out of there faster" Best laid plans… when you are in hurry the technology seems to sense that and starts playing a game of silly buggers and when you don't follow that game's rules it requires an occupied checkout operator to proceed.

If you have got the wrong unit priced item; to clear the modal dialog clearing the quantity field doesn't work. Tip: zero(0) is a purchasable quantity. Advantage customer. (Being Fri. 13 probably helps. Sod's day off from law enforcement?)

"the customer experience base"

?? Even "customer base['s] experience" is barely grokable.

The more parseable bits seem to claim the major benefit of "AI" in this setting will be the aggregation of existing support knowledge systems which might be the case. Aggregation is the type of problem LLM ought to be suited.

I have a suspicion that in the washup the industry will settle on a "simplified AI" which will be little more than a classic expert system with a natural language interface. Perhaps the expert systems will be constructed using current AI training techniques.

BOFH: Loss adjuster discovers liability is a two-way street

less range than Ashton Kutcher

Nice double play. "Dude, Where's My Car?"

"the last full Moon on Feb. 29 was in 1972, and the next will be in 2048"

Just in case you were wondering. ;)

If you trust some gratuitous browser AI that kicks off with:

 People also ask "Has there ever been a full moon on February 29th?"

What people ? Not normal people surely ? El Rego commentards excepted of course perhaps.

Cloudflare turns websites into faster food for AI agents

Re: where can I sign to make publishers ...

"I'm kinda fed-up with boatloads of CrapScript"

Much of it generated by tools (both sorts) which is almost always inferior to pages sensibly composed with html restricted to logical markup and CSS.

Such pages were once reasonably common but now mostly replaced by enshittified tool (à la MS Word) output.

I recently noticed a page that was essentially a couple of paragraphs of text (<1000 chars) downloaded over a megabyte of javascript and stylesheets.

How assistive technology : screen reader software can possibly deal with this shit completely eludes me.

Seems a bit convoluted ?

If you only want the raw text because you believe (possibly mistakenly) that the meaning of the page's content is restricted to that text, stripping out the markup from the html^† would be a lot easier than converting it to markdown.

Even sed might be up to the job.

The fly in the ointment (speaking from once doing something similar for entirely different reasons) is the quantity of truly broken html out there which browsers have evolved to paper over. I think I used HTML Tidy to rescue some of these pages before removing the markup.

I always imagined the "semantic web" was intended to remove the need for this nonsense.

_{† MS Word get a dishonourable mention for, if not actually broken, barely parseble markup.}

Elon Musk paints exodus of xAI co-founders as 'evolution'

"reorganized a few days ago to improve speed of execution"

That would be an incredibly sinister line coming from a notorious repressive regime. Although. He has form talking the talk…

A working mass driver might prove useful if you were to have the odd corpse to discard urgently.

"a reputation for making bold statements and then singularly failing to deliver." — His mouth boldly going where no fact has gone before to seek out new delusions and deceptions.These are the continuing fantasies (ignis flatus;) of the febrile Space Karen.

Re: Also...

"The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"

His jaded appetites might extend to a bit of interplanetary S&M.

Re: SSDD

"his new name, Loretta"

The alternating images of Space Karen in drag and "Hot Lips" was rather disturbing a bit like the maiden/crone optical illusion

Hardly likely though as Musk is unambiguously ALL DICK. (Of what species perhaps debatable.)

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

Some extremely fortunate pooches feast on eye fillet :)

"Scott McNealy also used the 'eat our own dogfood' edict. He visited a Sun data centre and found non-Sun equipment installed. It wasn't as though Sun didn't have suitable equipment to replace it."

Years ago I recall reading that Sun Microsystems in its glory days ran all its financials on a DEC VAXcluster (VMS presumably.)

The story might have been apocryphal but I understand these DEC clusters were formidable in their day.

AI spurs employees to work harder, faster, and with fewer breaks, study finds

"engineering employees who found themselves… finishing projects that others had started."

I can imagine this exacerbating the pre·existing problem of employees starting projects for which they lacked the skill, knowledge or simply the brains and quickly getting out of their depth which then required the assignment of an experienced staff member.

Inevitably the senior employee's assigned work milestones suffers delays which directly affects whatever performance indicators the firm used and this is ultimately a workplace fairness or equity issue.

Workplaces that have let this problem fester until one or more disillusioned experienced employees have left, are confronted with the concealed "skills debt." Similar observations might be made of salaried employees rectifying the messes contractors have abandoned.

I had to scratch my head reading: "Teams leading AI" ... I had always suffered from the mistaken belief that teams are led not the reverse. Perhaps these teams were sensibly engaged in attaching ballast to their AI preparatory to consigning it to the abyss.

Fukushima's radioactive hybrid terror pig boom was driven by amorous mothers

Re: And probably delicious, radiation levels be damned.

"A slice of bacon should be at least 1.5-2mm"

I always wondered where the thicker rashers common in Australia (at least in rural parts where 2mm might be a bit thin) originated. So the the UK or part thereof.

Academic in my case as I have never been keen on bacon but a pork chop now …

I have been served breakfast in a country pub that included several such rashers, five fried eggs, two sauages and sundry other artery clogging items as well as, I imagine, a preferred patient voucher for admission to the local coronary care unit.

If you are keen on feral pig Australia isn't short of those; or feral goat or feral camel or feral deer (various) as well as usual pests of hares and rabbits and for the seriously weird you can have your pick of feral cat, dogs and foxes. And nearly forgot feral horses and donkeys. The latter are apparently used in Arles sausages; French bags·of·mystery clearly have a much larger cast of usual suspects than ours.

Posting AI-generated caricatures on social media is risky, infosec killjoys warn

AI generated caricature … of self is risky

The byline seemed to be pointing in the defamation direction.

Asking AI to generated a caricature of Rishi Sunak with his head up his arse (as a Grauniad cartoonist did produce without AI assistance) and publishing it, might invite a libel action. (Although in this case only the plaintiff could positively identify the subject of the caricature as the subject's face is patently obscured.)

Possibly a little less passé would be a cartoon featuring caricatures of the UK's great and good partying with Jeffrey Epstein.

Lawmakers demand great wall to keep advanced chipmaking gear out of China

China could render US … export controls irrelevant by replacing foreign chipmaking tools entirely

As if we really didn't need any more evidence of the room temperature IQs of US politicians (and Americans generally.)

The logic that denying a party the means of manufacturing a desired product would inhibit that party from developing their own means, is clearly out of the same stable as the "Cunning Plans" of Baldrick.

Inconceivable as it might be to these Celsius room temperature IQ, legislative geniuses, the PRC unlike the US, is not carpeted with wall-to-wall retards but has some seriously clever scientists and engineers that can work without the risk of being drowned in MAGAshit.

Competition is bringing a better horse to the race, not cutting the legs off your competitors' horses. Currently any legless equine could stll beat the blow[e]n US nag.

T-Mobile announces its network is now full of AI by rolling out real-time translation

Full of …

What did you say ?

Oh - AI. I thought you said something else. No matter - it amounts to the same thing.

I guess there might be a market for an app that negotiates a secure handset-to-handset connection tunnelled over the normal voice call just to sidestep this intrusive nonsense. Even an old fashion voice scrambler might be sufficient.

Modern life is increasingly like living on an enormous dunghill featuring the continuous delivery of truckloads of even more excrement.

Notepad's new Markdown powers served with a side of remote code execution

Re: What a bloody mess

Which dullard thought "I know, I'll fsck up notepad to justify my job today"?

All of them I should think. Think of MS as being the Dutch East India Company (VOC) of fuck up merchants. Both could fuck up entire nations.

Re: the app's core ethos as a lightweight, fast, no-frills program…

Yet it was shipped before MFC, by - years. Neat trick. According to Microsoft, years before they even released their first C++ compiler!

Yes I am fairly certain the source code was example C code shipped with the Windows 2.0 or Windows 3.0 SDK. I was working with Zortech C/C++ 3.0 partly because MS didn't have C++ compiler and Zortech was the only actual C++ compiler that could produce Windows .obj code directly - the other products were preprocessors (à la CFront) to Windows capable C compilers (eg MSC 4.0) and most were unbelievably expensive (eg Glockenspiel ?)

From what I recall the Notepad application was a thin layer above the the native Windows text window abstraction.

Mercifully MS and I permanently parted rags soon after that. Sun workstations were a lot more fun. :)

Re: Ha ha ha ha ha

Fucking muppets

I am sure there is a porn channel for that but not Disney+ where there is apparently a legitimate revival of the Muppet Show.

Re: They just don't know when to let things be.

"as useful as a screen door on a submarine."

Which on the plus side would filter out the chunkier pieces of shit; a misfortune which Notepad has not escaped.

Microsoft boffins figured out how to break LLM safety guardrails with one simple prompt

"research can be done into intelligence"

The terrestrial sample is far too small for any meaningful conclusions to be drawn other than perhaps the strongest evidence for the null hypothesis namely "intelligence doesn't exist."

Reviving a CIDCO MailStation – the last Z80 computer

"very few computers have Centronics ports any more"

I recently picked up a combined serial (com)/parallel (lpt) PCIe card (for the com port) so they were still being made; up to a few years ago.

Servers often have serial ports so a workstation equipped with one of these cards can make managing headless servers a bit easier.

Microsoft touts far-off high-temperature superconducting tech for datacenter efficiency

Re: I hear Microsoft also found how to cut on travel expenses

MS Teleportation ?

Brilliant. If it works as well as Teams… I think I'll walk. I'll get my coat, thanks.

AI vastly reduced stress of IPv6 migrations in university experiment

Re: Ok then, what?

"The underlying premise is that we have and need more computers than ipv4 addresses."

An embedded assumption is that each of these myriad end systems need to talk to each and every one of the other end systems for much of the time which is patently false.

For decades the entire internet has pretty much lived behind network address translation gateways and rfc1918 addresses simply because most end systems only access a very small number of public systems and the NAT accounting isn't too onerous even if the contortions to establish peer to peer connection between two end systems behind NAT are typically byzantine.

The reason for organisations moving to IPv6 aren't likely to be the risk of exhausting the 10./8, 172.16./12 and 192.168./16 address spaces but I would think more to do with the additional capabilities and features IPv6 brings to the table.

I am not sure system administrators (at least non Windows ones) are responsible for the inertia in the uptake of IPv6.

Typically network design and implementation isn't part of their role; the Networking group and "higher" management make those decisions.

Back in the early noughties the Network people in the organisation in which I was employed had prepped everything for IPv6 with the DNS primed with the AAAA and PTR records of the public services.

All ready to go with both running in parallel. Then manglement decided ex nihilo that "there was no business case for IPv6." Presumably a chap was talking to a chap who knew a chap…

Anyway a fair bit of networking talent fairly quickly sought greener pastures. In subsequent years quite a few expensive networking problems would have been non-problems with IPv6.

AI can predict your future salary based on your photo, boffins claim

blue-eyed, tall, fit-looking, posessing perfect teeth, a deep voice, and abundant head-hair.

Big blond hair, big tits and big bum could always always take you along way in America and they don't have be natural. Being male helps of course but three out of four isn't too shabby — vide the current Whitehouse incumbent.

Old Hat…

Smaller inter·pupillary distance has always been considered a strong indicator of criminal tendencies.

Given those same indicators in the US are clearly the obligatory requirements for extraordinary material success; pretty much QED.

Kyndryl to review accounting practices as several execs leave

"reviewing its cash management practice"

The C suite detected indulging in a little bibliographic cuisine ?

You can fool your customers, you can fool your employees but as Ms Holmes will attest, you don't want to fool your shareholders… at least not the wrong ones.

Oracle Java licensing worries are percolating through the userbase

73 percent of Oracle Java users

Hopefully that will soon be just three of the remaining four users and one not quite the full quid (70.4%, 14s¾d).

Even better if the "Java" were removed from the title with the same user base.

Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach clocks out amid job cuts and market jitters

When the alarms go off…

Secure to your person the more portable and easily negotiable plunder and proceed calmly and unassumingly to the exit…

_{The Dummies Guide to 21^st Century Piracy and Brigandage ©2019 — chap.3 "Liberty and the Profitable Maintenance Thereof."}

Google soaks up 1GW of Texas sunshine to power $185B AI spending spree

Re: USA!!!! USA!!!! USA!!!! Yeah..nah

Trump has said: "My goal is to not let any windmill be built. They’re losers."

Unsurprising, if you are as many sandwiches short of a picnic as Don Quixote clearly was, you would be as shy of Windmills as Trump obviously is.

A GW of US manufactured photovoltaic panels ?

I don't imagine the entire EU let alone France produces anything like that quantity of panels - if it produces any PVs at all.

The PVs available in AU all seem to hail from India or the PRC. The latter might be problematic source if the orange ejit really gets on Xi's tits.

Dijkstra’s algorithm won’t be replaced in production routers any time soon

log⅔ (n) ?

I assume by analogy with sin²(x) that log⅔ (n) = (log (n))⅔ = ³√([log (n))²] ?

Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 spends $20K trying to write a C compiler

"Aux armes, citoyens !"

"Qu'un sang impur / Abreuve nos sillons !"

Bientôt !

"multiple Claude instances work in parallel on a shared codebase"

Hamlet next I daresay.

Why would you even bother. I would be slightly more impressed if these clowns produced a complete functional Algol-68 compiler or even a complete PL/1 compiler.

If this technology could be leveraged to drive or guide formal correctness proofs of existing code I would actually be interested but if producing dodgy C compilers is the best they can offer then they can shove the whole boiling where the Sun doesn't shine as far as I am concerned. Shit calls to shit.

OpenAI introduces ads...for the people!

"we also feel strongly…"

"we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can't pay for subscriptions."

I don't doubt that there are strong feeling involved… but mostly those of a grifter lacking grist for his grift·mill.

Pretty obvious to anyone with half a brain that advertisements by themselves don't pay for anything; it is the poor sods who by definition cannot pay for a subscription to this slop·shop that it is hoped through exposure to AI selected ads will purchase the promoted products and services that ultimately fund the advertising and pay advertising platform.

Given the unrelenting pauperisation of the US consumer mass market, this cunning plan has the hallmark of those of young Baldrick's.

Can you enshittify shit ?

"Yes, we can !"

Regrettably, I thought so and clearly Altman is the man to do it !

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

I had heard of Discord but…

didn't actually know what it was or did apart from periodically coming to grief with authorities ranging from the PRC to the EU.

For the curious https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discord

Unsurprisingly I shall blissfully continue not using the their services. :)

AI chatbots are no better at medical advice than a search engine

Actually cupid.com might be a better bet

Or any matching site; instead of match people with people your would be matching signs and symptoms with ailments (possibly 'til death do part. :)

There is a massive quantity of high quality factual medical information available on the internet but there is also an equally massive amount of such information on quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. Your average Joe or Jane is not usually able to make competent use of information from either domain.

When you consider the sequence followed when you consult a practitioner or attend an emergency department is quite different from the Dr Google experience.

Worth noting that sensible doctors don't indulge in self diagnosis or treatment unless they wish to fill an early grave. Suicidal that a medically ignorant layperson believes they are best placed to diagnose and treat their own ailments — the only clinical detachment there would be between body and soul, I imagine.

In person consultations commence with the observation by the practitioners of the patient's general presentation before taking a history of the presenting complaint (during which the patient's blood pressure might be recorded), a physical examination might follow as well as imaging (X-rays, CT scan, ultrasound); blood and tests ordered. A referral to a specialist might be indicated from the initial consultation.

The line concerning medicos' experience in "triaging patients using rule-based protocols designed to reduce errors" does seem like a decision tree which is also how an expert system typically works.

Taiwan tells Uncle Sam its chip ecosystem ain't going anywhere

MAD

"He and Hegseth would probably bomb the Taiwanese foundries too before the Chinese could get hold of them...."

Obviously if you hold a valuable and temporarily resource both sides want and need then it doesn't matter who destroys that resource.

Indeed, I suspect it is a very early chapter in the Dummies Guide to Medizing in the 21st Century.

SpaceX back to Falcon 9 launches as Musk blathers about Moon city

"potentially" is doing a lot of heavy lifting

I suspect there are more than a few gas bubbles in Space Karen's transfer tube between his ketime afflcted imagination and reality which are likely to suffer the same "failure to ignite before the deorbit burn."

It is not inconceivable for the US to be able to place more astronauts on the Moon during the next decade but with the ongoing shambles of the current Administration they are just as likely to also reserve the dubious honour of the first graves on the Moon.

How the GNU C Compiler became the Clippy of cryptography

"password, which gets checked against a database, character by character"

Hopefully only a straw man for this example otherwise I am not too sure I would want M. Meusel lurking in the vicinity of my code.

I assume (purely because I would leave this sort of coding to those that know how to do it safely) that the clear text password would be read into secure memory (mlocked/mprotected ?) in its entirety before being hashed etc and verified with the clear text obliterated at the earliest opportunity.

The timing for a successful verification would be contrived to be indistinguishable from a rejection (whether rejected on the basis of an invalid identity or incorrect password or whatever.)

This stuff is hard enough without having to worry about compilers' enthusiastic optimisations. Pehaps GCC might be augmented with a —Ocryptographic_sensitive flag, attribute or pragma to render the code deterministic with respect to timing with code generation skewed towards the security concerns.

there isn't already a #pragma directive

There is and I have had to use it for totally non crypto/security reasons (forcing ctor functions to run in static links.)

[gcc manual 6.62.15 Function Specific Option Pragmas]

#pragma GCC push_options

#pragma GCC optimize ("O0")

int sensitive (...) {

....

}

#pragma GCC pop_options

These attributes can also be applied with the function __attribute__() syntax as someone has also noted.

[6.31.1 Common Function Attributes]

BBC bumps telly tax to £180 as Netflix lurks with cheaper tiers

TV License - blind are eligible for a 50 percent discount

Had to laugh reading that but I do realize being legally blind doesn't mean completely without sight and I suppose the license does also cover radio.

In AU the poor old TV license was "taken behind the barn" fifty odd years ago and our public broadcasters mostly funded by the Comminwealth.

I stopped viewing TV during the daily nonsense of COVID and I don't intend resuming this side of the grave (or beyond it for that matter.)

Tech support chap invented fake fix for non-problem and watched it spread across the office

"some people very much believed this was true!"

Years ago a senior staff member with a wicked sense of humour, or just plain wicked, advised his colleagues that the system administrator was required to read all incoming and outgoing email.

This was just after my telling him that the volume of email was overwhelming our servers so he was clearly aware that no person could possibly read all the outgoing email let alone the deluge of incoming email.

After one or two enquires it was obvious any denials were pointless as the inquirers were certain that Mandy Rice·Davies applied.

Office gossip supplied the meat and bones as to what the contents of their email that might be of concern. Tawdry affairs and petty misdemeanors mostly.

My advice was and remains: ""Don't put anything in an email that you wouldn't write on the corridor wall. If you must, encrypt and sign it (pgp.)"

Hilarious !

I will pay this one as the literal truth.

You can tell them anything… and they'll believe you.

What always got me was those with a more technical background were the most gullible picking up absolute nonsense and retailing it.

I soon learnt that logic and reason don't come into it and desisted from contradiction.

Sexytaries tended to be more sceptical but if it wasn't too outlandish or a moderate distraction from the workplace tedium, like paperclip chains, they went along with it.

The rituals involved in printing might be an exception but printers generally do require infernel invocations and blood sacrifice and even more so back then.

Cache is king and DIMMS are bling as memory prices soar

32G ECC RDIMM ?

I have a tad under ½Tb in an old dual socket server which makes too much of a racket to be turned on very often. Given its age it's probaby ddr3 and I imagine not worth very much. :(

I have always put at least 16G in the various refurbished PCs I have purchased (it was cheaper to buy them with the base 4Gb or 8Gb complement and ditch or repurpose that and purchase new ram elsewhere.) So I fortunately don't have an pressing need to upgrade the ram for the Linux/Unix stuff I run.

Anyone hoarding consumer parts might come a cropper when the bubble pops.

I can recall in the 90s, PCs in student labs being fitted with padlocked steel chastity belts prevent the ram going walkabout. (Note: the PCs were outfited, not the students although…) Not an entirely successful strategy as some enterprising felons brought a boltcutter with them and made off a number of entire PCs.

Containers, cloud, blockchain, AI – it's all the same old BS, says veteran Red Hatter

Obviously the effects of blue pill have worn off

The corporate inquisitores of IBM/RH will be seeking this scarlet pill afflicted pimpernel.

The truth is out there… unfortunately it's accelerating away from us propelled by malign dark energy

Linus Torvalds keeps his ‘fingers and toes’ rule by decreeing next Linux will be version 7.0

concussion ball?

Didn't grok that all.

For whatever reason I thought superbowel was a baseball event not that travesty of armoured rugby.

On the very few occasions I have been in a sports bar and caught a game on their big screen I have impressed (not) by how slow and frankly boring (excepting perhaps the cheer leaders) the whole silly proceedings are.

I would liven it up by equiping the participants with 2.4m (8') star pickets a let them go to it, in a full melée but I suppose that would be indistinguishable from (ice) hockey.