Posts by Bebu sa Ware 2773 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Nov 2024
I would even contend that your average stuffed toy is far less likely to fob off the fabulous lies that the defective example of the taxidermist's craft alias the AI griftery are hawking
Although Big Ted might raid your marmalade stash.
Your basic totty's soft toys have been known to have been bugged, so talking to (either of) them might be inadvisable.
"The last entry in the National Recording Registry before the early 21st Century collapse was annotated 'Doom.'" — Encyclopedia Galactica Y53K Millennial Edition.
The extraterrestrial octopedal encyclopedists further pondered: "It has been posited that this premonitory label 'Doom', referred to a very much older sense of the word, namely 'judgment.' On balance we feel this is largely apocryphal."
The only time I was ever in a Google building the place looked like the kind of a poorly run kindergarten where you would expect to find kiddyshit splattered all over the walls.
Possibly premonitory.
I wouldn't imagine these AI tools are exactly the full bottle on databasey stuff like ACID and the underlying invariants to support it. Heaven knows concurrency of any sort pretty much sees most coders off the premises.
So I imagine the metaphorical brown stuff is going to be liberally spread over the walls of the Alphabet blocks of their Chez Postgres atelier.
so you have a fallback position.
For your mile: a Linux plus WINE solution that might cosmetically pass for a newer version of Windows. (Ok, just about any shit is plausible on that criterion.)
If that doesn't fly, a Win10 ltsc version possibly with OpenShell/ClassicShell (her indoors here now uses exactly that up from Win7) is a good fallback.
In my case I could have installed a Linux distro as the only apps she really used on the Win7 box were the image viewer, firefox and libreoffice which had betterbird added in the move to Win10 so that instead of reading email in the web client, a proper mua is used.
I didn't go with Linux because the odd chipset of the wifi that came with the refurbished mini PC wasn't supported by my selected Linux distro's kernel and I was too lazy to build the kernel module from the kernel sources.
Easy. Drag a backhoe around the state's borders and disable Starlink etc access. No internet - no VPNs.
Taking the piss but practically the only way to prevent the use of VPNs (and similar mechanisms) is to prevent the use of networks.
If these geniuses want to prevent their kiddywits offending them by their viewing online pornography, pluck out their eyes. (Matthew 5:29)
Note the subtle disambiguation of the referents of "them" and "their" in the preceding.
Possiby the best and perhaps also the strangest assertion I have read in a long time.
The "durable" is the key albeit odd word in there along with "strategy." Fear can obviously drive improvisation and innovation – vide Ukraine. Neccessity the mother of invention etc
Eliciting fear might be a tactic used to drive innovation but hardly a long term strategy. A "durable strategy" would be "hard wearing"; enduring and capable of withstanding or adapting to changing and evolving circumstances. Like much of today's world the complete opposite is true… ephemeral, effete and fragile.
“The routine attached to all users’ drives and backed them up to a temporary drive,” Miller explained. “But you never knew in advance what drive letter the system would assign to the temporary drive."
Which I read as mounting each user's drive *plus* creating and mounting another one to back them up to.
The "20 others" thumb twiddlers might not meant literally - 20 odd, perhaps. Maybe a few more intelligent of the crew decided to bugger off for the rest of the day to do something more productive. In 1981, in some places it wasn't completely unknown for employees to be found propping up bars during work hours.
The basic programming lesson everyone needs to learn, sooner rather than later, is to always check for error returns - if the return is not OK and you don't specifically handle that error… bail. Only a fraction of cases it might be better not to abort but deciding those comes under the heading of specifically handling if a little anaemically.
describe the bug."
Whether composed by an AI agent or a clueless human "AIhole" you could probably mechanically filter out the slop purely on syntactic grounds.
Or just /dev/null the list for six months during which the attention seekers will likely give up and bugger off to shit all over another poor sod's pride and joy.
A masochist public school product missing his regular caning ?
Who knows with UK politics… perhaps the wind is changing ? — "Burnham would to Westminster come."
Possibly not too late to give AI the flick and apply those resources to tackling the pressing systemic problems.
In the wash-up fewer and fewer talented candidates will opt for (or indeed continue) careers in software engineering when all they can expect is a quality control supervisory role in a software sewerage treatment shop. Yes boss, this slop is truly shitty. ISO 9000 standard dung ✓
In my less lucid moments, I imagined that the enormous computing power being brought to bear on AI might also be used to render previously impractical software verification techniques feasible. Bugger all chance that !
Perhaps one day something like current LLM techniques used to direct verification tools could help produce decent software.
"Dell to change its name to Cybus Industries."
For Pete's Planet ! My thought exactly.
"cancellation by default across a fleet of earbuds" — Those who cannot or will not be "upgraded" will be cancelled deleted.
If you routinely use public transport, you see more than 80% of the passengers using then (all ages, sexes, etc) … they only need flashing blue LEDs for a nightmare in silver. :)
Although I don't see Michael Dell as a John Lumic… more a Michael O'Leary.
I sometimes want to transfer files (epubs mostly) between tablets and prefer not to email them via an external service. (Copyright is slightly different in Canada from that in the US or AU.)
Since I run an internal DNS, SSH, etc services the easiest solution was to use an Android sftp client to push/pull to/from the SSH server. Works but does seem to lack the elegance of pairdrop. ;)
Looking at the FAQ on the github site it does appear by default to require an external "signaling server" even for tranfers between lan neighbours although in other docs it is clear you can run your own signaling server. Perhaps the client actually tries mDNS (Zeroconf/Rendezvous) for peer discovery first.
I just use the number on my 4G/LTE router. My newer sim doesn't even do sms but the older sim in another router does voice and sms and use to get a lot of scammy/spammy texts as well as logging failed voice calls (that router doesn't do voice.)
Funnily enough I don't get any spam in any of my half dozen gmail accounts - only stuff from local businesses that I have dealt with who honour their unsubscribe link. However, I am forever being pestered by Google for my date·of·birth - just to poison the well, I tried the 29th February of an odd numbered year but no cigar. Perhaps Google's not having your age might inhibit their spam gun's targeting systems.
Google and all the rest.
If not definitional of enshittification, foundational.
I would like to think that the refunds were a direct consequence of the story on The Register but I don't imagine Alphabet etc give a rat's for anything appearing in el Rego as such - more likely the effect of the flack on potential customers, in developer social media etc.
Buggered if I can find the <sarcasm> markup or even the <irony>.
From my recent experience I would assert the skilled General Practitioner is more important than ever to counterbalance the unconscious tunnel vision of specialists.
But I don't reside in North America but given its pervasive fucked·up·ed·ness of much of that continent, my experience almost certainly doesn't apply.
A tribute to the efficacy of Portuguese reds if not to their subtlety or quality, I would hazard.
(As a Uni acquaintance in the late '70s opined - after the fifth glass, quality didn't really matter much although he was infamously a bugger for the then 0.99¢/bottle local sherry [now oddly called Aspera.])
Vast areas ? Mostly vertical one assumes - at least for an Australian definition of "vast." ;)
I have to admit I was impressed with the NZ mobile (cellular) and broadband services which seemed like a few steps above the dog's breakfast of Australia's NBN and three 4G/5G networks.
A fair number of 4G phones lost voice access when 3G was turned off here as VoLTE was mandatory but I presume that was not the case in NZ.
iPhones back to at least SE gen 1 support VoLTE but a much more recent Nokia didn't. (Cheap refurbished SE 1 - nice small phone, ticked all the boxes for me. :)
Imagine 20 people chatting with their computers in an open plan office hellscape?
I don't have to. A room full of devs, support etc all using their headsets and talking with WFH colleagues, customers, totties and whatnot — for me a Circle so horrible that Dante mercifully chose to omit.
Apart from formal speeches or lectures, I don't see that the rate of informational transmission is much higher than noise - conversational speech in particular. AI might excel at speech recognition (ie word recognition) but given it is not exactly shining in extracting meaning from far more structured and informative textual material, I can easily imagine this type of system is going to be completely at seas trying to determine the intent of the speaker.
Imagine: "Where there are two or more crustaceans next to each other, move them to the bottom of the screen but place the crabs with the crabs already there and likewise the prawns with the prawns and so on for the other crustraceans. Any remaining unmatched crustacean should be placed in a miscellanous group."
Good luck with that.… you are just as likely to get a pile of molluscs for your trouble.
A reliable chap then ?
Probably puts him a few light years ahead of his presumed former employer.
In another leg of the trousers of time we might albeit with great difficulty, imagine reading: "Microsoft has followed through on every prior undertaking."
Not so much a different trouser leg as an utterly different wardrobe, and in a highland gillie's one at that.
My first real personal computer was a CPC-6128. Everything else in AU was an order of magnitude more expensive. It came with both CP/M 2.2 and CP/M 3 so could run a fair bit of shareware and fortunately the small business I bought the Amstrad from was happy to convert 5¼" floppies to the peculiar 3" format.
I managed to get a second 3" floppy and put together the cable from IDC connectors so I could run the RMAC assembler and a subset C compiler under CP/M 3.
Thanks to an affordable Amstrad I acquired a lot of practical experience with low level software and tools.
My next PC was one of the first cheaper Taiwanese IBM clones using a NEC V20 processor running MSDOS (I wanted an Amiga but were too expensive.) I also wanted a Hecules card for decent mono text and graphics - CGA was a bit ordinary.
I recall about that time a friend purchased a x86 Amstrad that ran GEM which looked interesting but he ditched it for an IBM clone to run his MSDOS scientific graphical programs that wouldn't run on his Amstrad.
Back then there was a Cambrian explosion of systems and software - some in hind sight decidedly peculiar. The Olivetti PC using a Zilog Z8000 processor seemed pretty odd even at the time - it was offered for sale by a major Australian department store but I couldn't imagine much software being available or even development tools. If it had sported a MMU it might have run Unix but it didn't.
One of first IT things for which I was paid was knocking up something in dBase III on a NEC APC III running CP/M-86 with two 8" floppies.
I recall the dBase environment wasn't too bad and forms based stuff was fairly straightforward. I don't imagine anyone would claim dBase was a DBMS… more a records storage and retrieval system.
Soon after I was building a RDBMS application in C and the Unify 4.2 RDBMS on a Unix platform… quite a contrast; two extremes. Decades later only C and Unix are still kicking but arguably in rather different forms.
For good or ill, the world moves on, even if the ill frequently seems to gazump the good but move on it must.
"AI skills" — Just possible that in sense that manglement thinks it means those skills cannot exist or at best is an oxymoron.
"lack of data literacy" — No idea what these geniuses think they mean by "data literacy" but analytics and data sciences have been a part of most disciplines for decades, so there isn't really a great shortage of skills. Just a shortage of those skills available for minimum wage compensation, I suspect.
My take pre·AI of most (all) enterprises is that they are extremely poorly managed with sub·normal managers and a gibbering C-suite idiotcracy all wrapped in appallingly dismal business processes and systems — Miraculously in spite of the organisational shambles these train wrecks are kept on the tracks by the intelligence and work of the lowly minions at the coalface.
Even if, as in Sam Altman's wettest dreams, AI could do all that it is claimed, I very much doubt it could ever make the silk purse from the corporate pig's ear (or is it arse?)
If you lodge a chargeback they kill your app. Seems very much like a protection racket to me. Only slighly less extortionary than awaking to find your thoroughbred's head next to you.
Technically the whole api key thing necessarily stored in the app appears to be no more than an obfuscated version of a passkey or password. At least it could be a kind of capabilitly which gives accesss to a restricted set of services, their sub·services and other restrictions.
I could imagine that when an app is purchased from the Playstore a unique per purchaser sub·key could augment the app vendor's api key which might be used to rate limit api calls for any given purchase.
To me it seems like my purchasing a prepaid phone sim for voice/text only; some toe-rag cloning it and accessing a host of expensive streaming and download services; my credit card being charged; Should I request a chargeback my apartment's electricity will be cut off.
7 years from first arrest to facing a judge, and another 2 years until sentencing. What the f%&k?
The Australian legal system should be heavily ashamed by that. I know in other nations it can be worse, but quite frankly that is absolutely ridiculous...
There was a bit of legal argy·bargy following a 2024 trial which probably derailed finalisation until 2026.
I would assume the cases were ready around 2019 but then the world made a slight detour which threw a lot of spanners into a lot machinery. Working through the backlog from 2022 (Victoria had the longest most stringent lock·down of all Australian states) would probably get you to 2024.
Doesn't appear that any of the acused were remanded in custody (I believe their sentences would have included such time in custody which would for a 10 year sentence minus years would have left 3 years so presumably eligible for parole with a 5 year non parole period.)
you could print on to black paper substituting finely powdered cocaine or methamphetamine for toner ?
Could make the monthly spreadsheet and report interesting reading especially if LSD were used. (A variation on the Sean Connery movie The Name of the Rose.)
Hiding stuff in office equipment is becoming a little last century… long distance aerial drones and autonomous submersibles have to be 2026 smugglers' choice. With lashings of AI of course.
I would have thought something like QNX might have been a better bet.
Yonks ago I know it was used to run a continuous welding machine that made pipes which I imagine is a little more demanding the displaying the "lasciate ogne speranza voi ch'intrate" sign over the Hell of a Pommie Post Office queue.
Certainly a damn sight more real time than either Windows or a British queue.
In a more rational world that would have likely secured Altman et al. a cell adjacent to Elizabeth Holmes.
Arguably if she had kept her powder dry until the AI circus rolled into town her accommodation would now be substantially more palatial.
(Perhaps we ought to be grateful that were spared the lethal "synergies" of Theranos and OpenAI.)
"Shouldn't we have taken the hint from the name"
So not going to be a legend ? (Except perhaps in Malanthropic's fetid imagination.)
Odysseus turned up late after shagging his way around the Mediterranean… Circe, Calypso, Nausicaa… and Penelope didn't kill him whereas Agamemnon made a prompt return and Clytemnestra dispatches both him and his captive Trojan totty†, Cassandra who arguably should have seen that coming.
Rereading Homer as an adult rather than as originally, a teenager, I was shocked the casual barbarity of the Bronze Age Palace Culture - I found the brutality Odysseus' lynching of Penelope's maids was sickening.
† the Greek for which is apparently pallake (παλλακή).
Given Erwin Schrödinger was resident in Ireland for the duration of WW2 and until 1955 you might imagine such a train might be equally both in Limerick and Kilkenny before potentially equally arriving in Dublin or Sligo at some past or future time. Perhaps that was a fair description of the Republic's 1950s railways.
Perhaps unfairly I always imagined Ireland was one of the few places the Borkenfairie didn't need to visit.
I recall many Sydney(AU) stations before being upgraded for the 2000 Olympics had slide-in signs on the board for the arriving services with the due the time indicated by rotatable digit blocks and AM/PM (24 hr clock took a few more decades ;) which a subordinate railway empIoyee updated.
I think the Redfern station had the services also on rotatable blocks and with similar blackboard spaces under those for write-in services.
The announcements over the Tannoy were always incomprehensible at all the stations leading to the conjecture that it was in some peculiar railway language unknown to the rest of humanity.
I don't recall the Borkenfairie ever paying a visit but I also don't remember the trains ever being particularly on time either.
I expect to see these keyboard computers remaindered, sold off cheaply
Cheap enough some of components ssd, cpu, ram … might well be worthwhile filleting out but I can imagine most of the useful parts are soldered in.
The whole exercise has a Netbooky feel to it except Netbooks were actually quite cheap (inexpensive) and admittedly many quite cheap (nasty.)
From sysadmin point of view I am not too keen on having to ascertain whether every (hitherto dumb) keyboard being decommissioned or otherwise leaving the site isn't exfiltrating information. I suppose it's always been fairly simple to physically insert a SOC into a keyboard interpolated between the keyboard and usb interface.
What about those of us that stil have PPC macs ? Mine: Powerbook G4 Tiger. ;)
On second thoughts I had forgotten that I replaced the OS with NetBSD.
The drive in these notebooks is only 20Gb and a real pain to replace even if you could find a new IDE drive.
It is the only device I still possess that has modem which still works but doesn't have anything to talk to — a bit like growing generally. :(
