Posts by Bebu sa Ware

Tech is now rolling out the old grievance grift

Re: I've been hating Palantir for free.

I have been cobbling up an AI agent to do the hating for me, or for hire to anyone else. HaaS.

You get more bad vibes per token than from any of the competitors (like OpenAngst or Malanthropic.)

It's No Fair…

just because I am an completely unmitigated unprincipled arsehole why should people be permitted to hate me… it's clearly discrimination and it should be against the law. Anyway I know where you all live, or soon will, and then you had better watch out.

The existence of gargantuan pricks give motherhood a bad name.

Re: Dark triads are weird that way

"Moral principals are un-american."

Moral compasses are also un-American instruments and clearly contraband subject to aerial destruction without warning.

Akamai surges on big LLM deal as Cloudflare dims

Nice "Tale of Two Cities" reference.

"was the best of times for Akamai and the worst of times for Cloudflare."

Both stories involve their share of head chopping. ;)

"very pleased to be executing against it" as the axeman also said of a decent block of oak.

Raspberry Pi wants Windows admins to Connect – or it might pull the plug

Anyone installing Windows on a Rasp Pi should be shackled and shipped off

"Anyone installing Windows on a Rasp Pi should be shackled and shipped off to The International Criminal Court in The Hauge for a war crimes trial."

Should not that be: "shipped off to the International Clown Circus in the Hauge (sic) for a whore crimes trial" ?

_{I am not disparaging the ICC or its very difficult work in any way. Just being silly.}

'Dirty Frag' Linux flaw one-ups CopyFail with no patches and public root exploit

Re: CVE and patches are available

"I was talking in UTC"

Quite right.

It would not be the first time I have cursed try to work out what some time in PST was in Sydney. Once you have worked out whether it's DST PST+7 or PST+8, then you have to work whether it's today or as is mostly the case in the US, yesterday.

With UTC at least you know where when you are.

On the West Coast the developers in their chemically assisted vibe would likely have considerable diificulty distinguishing night from day.

Trump jumps from 'anything goes' to 'strict regulation' AI policy

Re: Tilting at Windmills .... is a Folly for Fools off their Trolleys. Beware what they Share.

"Is mankind in general, or more specifically, are elite executive administrative officers and their servants and media manipulating services, incapable of accepting inconvenient and extremely problematical truths pioneering undeniable emerging facts and thus fated to always be failed and rendered as a hopeless and helpless victim of ignorant and arrogant deceit and psychotic sociopathic skullduggery and AIMindlessness ‽ "

No.

_{I wish I could pose an unasked question as much clarity as that.}

Re: Changes direction faster than a ping pong ball in a storm

Brownian motion ?

Reconsidering … more likely brown motions.

Re: Where's the grift?

"more than any other mob boss"

I guess he is now the unchallenged Cabbage King of America; Arturo Ui only ran Chicago brassica racket.

Re: they drive on the wrong side, eat funny food & speak a different language...

And have some of the world's deadliest wildlife on the land, in the water and in the air.

So take care now.

Re: My dream scenario

"the biggest mistake America ever made"

I have a nauseating feeling we ain't seen nothing yet ? Sadly a sizable wad of the great American unwashed will never believe this shitshow was a mistake, or if they concede it was, they will, through some insane chain of excuses, place the blame on the other side.

Vi clone written in BASIC proves old habits :wq hard

Re: Much with little

"The subset of commands supplied is almost enough for my day to day use."

I recall Minix 1.1 could run a Vi subset: Elvis or Stevie which was mostly good enough. Probably the 64kb limit on text and data ("small" model) on the x86 meant a real Vi or full clone wasn't available.

Apart from Vi on System V (and 4.3BSD) Unix I had been using MKS Vi on MSDOS 3.x so I was keen to have a version on Minix.

I might toddle off and reimplement TECO or Wordstar in Snobol IV or Icon.

C++ survey finds AI use rising, though trust is in short supply

If AI could grok an arbitrary corpus of C++ code.

It would really possess a unique form of intelligence of a particularly dark nature I should think - more at home in the Palantir stable I imagine. Of course it cannot.

The future is sufficiently grim without having to worry about who or what, 30 years hence, is going to maintain oceans of C++ code that critical systems depend on.

Meta fights Ofcom over how many billions count as billions

If Meta wants to be fined on their UK revenues

perhaps they ought to pay more UK taxes on all those revenues.

Maybe they do, I don't know but I do know pigs don't fly as a habit.

"where that enforcement road leads and decided now was the time to argue about the math."

Following the old joke - it has been agreed what Meta is, and now only haggling over price.

TomTom’s route planner takes an unplanned detour into oblivion

I owned are Garmin… once

Basically an offline device (a stored map + processor + gps.) The maps were mostly ok, if a little out of date (especially in the case of Christchurch, NZ at the time) but route planning was slow and often inaccurate probably due to the low processing power and limited routing algorthms.

In the end used paper maps and Google Maps on a tablet which were much more reliable and the Garmen was discarded.

Given paper maps are now being printed on unobtainium, a market for a standalone app that uses stored maps and local route computation must exist if only for taxi and uber drivers. Of course there is no reason why such an application couldn't also make use of dynamic information to inform routing and update maps.

Map reading and navigation are two more skills that are vanishing from the general population in our lifetime.

Custom PC worked in the lab, failed on site – and so did the angry client

Re: "Are you going to look inside my box".

"Sorry Ma'am, I left the speculum at another site."

I am afraid I would have suffered a massive abdominal hernia trying to keep a straight face.

"We might go for a drink first…"

Very Benny Hill. ;)

actually connected at the other end, and connected to something useful at that.

"network cable is actually connected at the other end, and connected to something useful at that."

Or worse, actually connected to something slightly more than useful.

Always a mistake to use vlans to separate maintenance networks from those of the great unwashed on the same switches.

Re: "and a ping to home worked... but nothing outside the box itself was reachable."

"I'm pretty sure I've seen more RJ45 cables with the catch broken than I have with it intact."

I kept a pair of side cutters for those (and crossover cables before auto·sensing switches.) A cheap pair of large scissors also work. Otherwise the blighters keep turning up if you just toss them in the bin uncircumcised as it were.

I suppose a keen chap might get some new RJ45 plugs and some Krone tools and replace the plugs but unless your employer has mistaken you for a monkey, your time would cost more than a new cable especially when purchased in bulk.

Pinging 127.0.0.1 doesn't tell you much and I think even pinging the IP address of one of the interfaces doesn't get routed in the Linux kernel but is pretty much the same as localhost.

BOFH: Nothing says 'business continuity' like a dry wooden broom

Some BoFH Classics in the making here

"We're not talking 'three-hour Richard Stallman monologue' horrible" Gruesome. Cruel and unusual.

"Only if you want to save your loved ones the cremation fees." This isn't just a joke… it happens.

"…pretend we've never been here..." Discretion often the better part of valour even if a killer rabbit isn't involved.

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

Re: What could possibly go wrong ?

You might gauge a retired chap's imaginative powers by the size of his smile when ponders the answer to that riddle.

Cloudflare has “always lived a little bit in the future”

I suppose this means when the shit truly hits the fan they will be first in line for a face full. Pretty obvious CF has been benefitted from the AI enshittification of internet as just about every website now sports a CF "Just a Quick Check" dialog "to prevent automated abuse." Just adding their steaming turds to the mountains of shit already looming over the internet.

Bus station display takes the Windows 10 road to nowhere

There is a certain elegance

to the empty screen with a faint window in the background that seems to be lit by the reality just on the other side from this irreality.

Normally any Windows since v.7 looks like a Pound Shop sales catalog, or now the Rego home page, namely like a mad woman's breakfast.

The relative serenity of a mostly featureless background with a smattering of icons along the top left edge (presumably the rest of icons buggered off earlier to the pub) is reminiscent of earlier MacOSX around 10.4.

60% of MD5 password hashes are crackable in under an hour

Re: Long, unique passwords offer the best balance between access and security.

"dumb terminal"

I recall "back when", that the programmable function keys on DEC VTxxx terminals could be hacked (reprogrammed) remotely which suggests hardware has to be extremely dumb to be unhackable… perhaps to the point of unusability.

The basic point here is that real security entails cradle·to·grave minimalism^† in all elements of all systems involved… which of course is the complete antithesis of what we have and what our overlords (tech and otherwise) want.

The first is what will work and is resilient; the second is what we have got which doesn't really work and is showing every sign of collapsing into a screaming heap.

_{† Insert the Saint·Exupéry quote from his Terre des Hommes.}

Re: OT: Stupid narrow layout... (and On Topic: Newsworthy?=

"Narrow columns are easier to read because they require less eye movement. That said, I hate wasting space."

When el Rego went senile and completely doolally, the evening before last, I wondered why I found narrow columns harder to read when, as pointed out, less eye movement is required.

My conclusion is that "read" was used in two senses - to acquire the sequence of words and to comprehend the meaning of that text.

When I read, I grab roughly three lines of text which for wider formats, corresponds to approximately three simple sentences, or clauses of compound sentences, which provides more context for the particular phrase in focus. Narrower lines reduce the surrounding context.

Of course when I learnt to read, phonics was being deprecated (again?) and word recognition and later some "speed reading" nonsense ruled the roost.

I remember reading the entire contents of the boxes of SRA Cards in primary school and the Aussie knock·off (WARDS?) both of which I actually enjoyed but have long since been deprecated.

"Lest one good corruption should custom the world" :)

1 in 8 employees totally cool with selling work credentials

"did not spell out those justifications."

Given the questionable employment policies and HR direction of contemporary employers I would hazard "fuck 'em" would be favourite for the win but certainly for a place in that arsehole derby.

Shared credentials are still very much a thing even in workplaces where everyone actually knows the stupidity of unauditable priviliges.

Nowadays you can always claim "It's AI what done it, governor" - probably also true.

AI layoffs backfire as cutting staff doesn't cut it, firms warned

agentic AI, robotics, advanced automation - designed, eventually, to run themselves.

Sounds like one of those historical rhymes.

"New inventions and processes were introduced with extraordinary rapidity, and in agriculture as well as in industry the real costs of production in terms of human labour were rapidly cut down.There was a great saving of labour through the more intensive mechanisation of industry ; and a new word " rationalisation " was coined in order to find a name for what was felt to be a new phase in the history of the world economic system."

— The Intelligent Man's Guide Through the World Crisis, G D H Cole, Gollanz 1932 p18.

I seem to recall that all worked out rather well.

IBM tried to kill Tab navigation. Microsoft told it Bill Gates' mother wasn't interested

Re: I don't believe it

>IMHO, this story is fake news.

Does seem odd - from what I recall of the IBM CUA documents that came with the Win 2.0 SDK tab navigation was in there. The other way around would make more sense as Microsoft later dropped some CUA bits.

The number of users that are surprised that back·tab [shift+tab] will take them to the previous field even in non Microsoft, non IBM software. They woud tab through all the succeeding field to get back to the one they want to change (non GUI/Mouse TUI apps.)

Bill Gates had a mother ?

Young evil genius forces hamster to run on wheel to power his gadgets

Motor as a turbine ?

DC generator surely ?

How many of these rats would one need to go off-grid I wonder?

I don't think hamsters are found in Australia even though we have managed to import most of the worlds pests. The one thing I recall about hamsters from my Uni studies was the blighters can carry some really nasty arenavirus diseases which put quite a different complexion on "Hammy the Hamster."

Musk has never built a wafer fab, but he wants to burn $119B on one anyway

harebrained scheme is part of Elon Musk

Unfair on the poor hares, surely. They aren't generally off their heads with ketamine although during the amorous month of March they are reputedly hardcore on reproducing.

If you have garden shrubs or an orchard the buggers are a real pest but then so is Musk although if I caught him knawing at the bark of my rose bushes I wouldn't have any qualms at all about potting the blighter.

Re: A recursive loop

proc recloop() is do true → recloop () od.

Basically get it disastrously wrong and then double down. Could be America's theme song.

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

The Question I Ask Myself…

of any web page - would I be comfortable reading a (text) book with the same layout. The answer is invariably no.

Texts are designed to convey the maximum amount of information with the fewest distractions - in a word: minimalist.

Of course a lot of student textbooks now sport the designer website look which for the classics of my student years really is the emetic finger down my throat.

My el Rego goat is well and truly gotten by the red boxes over the article's graphic informing me 'hey, this is an AI story' - dah! About as welcome and subtle as a blinking block cursor (for good measure flashing red·green.)

The article's text occupies roughly the central ⅓ of my screen - presumably pi-hole stops the advertisements in the blank ⅔ from displaying. As I prefer wider lines even on e·readers, I am wondering whether I can override the Rego stylesheets in my browser to widen the text lines.

Heaven knows what the visually impaired make of this. Suffering glaucoma I may eventually discover the answer.

Anthropic wants Claude to play with money, unleashes finance agents

AI and Highly Leveraged Derivitives

A marriage made in madness, consumated in lunacy.

SDOs and CFDs in human hands were devastating, God help us in if in Claudian hands.

Britain says Skyhammer drone interceptor passed Jordan tests with flying colors

Re: What the hell has happened to El. Reg?

I thought it was a dodgy update to my browser - looked like CSS had gone all dyslexic or the DOM had been out on the piss.

Certainly the front page looked like an embodiment of "everything, all at once."

Have to be suspicious that some AI agent has gone "let me fix that for you" without actually asking.

OpenAI exec says company hopes to burn $50B of somebody else's money on compute this year

Re: Segway

If anyone has one gathering dust in their garage, you might do the planet a favour and ship it to Altman.

"No, it will never surpass human intelligence"

Would not be too difficult to surpass the intelligence of 90%'of humanity, but even that low bar is too high for AI - AI has on many occasions effortlessly exceeded the posited infinity of human stupidity.

While I would never say never, I would think it a safe bet that LLM based AI will never really challenge actual human creativity and intelligence. Artificial intelligence might be created one day but I suspect it would either a reimplementation of human biological intelligence or so alien as not to be of much interest to either intelligence.

Yeah, they're fscked.

Oh, you mean for the company, investors? Yeah, they're fscked.

That file system is totally trashed^† - not even using fsdb could you salvage anything.

_{† dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sd0h ;)}

$50 billions, $110 billions, $300 billions, …

We're talking Zimbabwean Razoos here ? Apparently not… yet.

When you think that possibly a goodly percentage of the problems AI is purportedly supposed to solve (one day) might be solved by the directly applying this lucre instead and add in the "opportunity costs" of not screwing the global economy and environment in the process, you begin to realise how doolally it all is.

I have just read the introduction to G D H Coles' The Intelligent Man's Guide Through the World Crisis written just after the 1929 crash but struck me that it could be written in 2030 with few emmendations.

More missions, less money, higher risk: NASA's back to the '90s playbook

Faster, better, cheaper is back

"history suggests you can't get all three at the same time"

The answer to question of whether you can ever get all three, if not blowin' in the wind, is liberally spread over the landscape.

DIY mystery box will wow your friends by hinting at what the ionosphere is up to

Among the polloi…

who these days owns a shortwave radio ?

I only have one because more than ten years ago I picked up a tiny, cheap Chinese AM/FM radio for travel without noticing it also had SW bands.

Not a lot on SW these days compared to when I was a kid and all the Japanese transister radios had SW/AM.

VOA still blasting the Pacific, I notice but I dread to think what Trumpisstani rot its purveying these days.

Re: Perfect....

I suspect the set of people who grokked that and el Rego commentards pretty much coincide.

Viva la revolución: LinkedIn profile visitor lists belong to the people, says Noyb

linkedinlunatics

Thanks. I had never stumbled over linkedinlunatics.

Cannot say there is a lot of to distinguish the two. I had a bollocks linkedin account for a year or so just to follow the circus antics at a previous employer. I was surprised by the amount of unrelated crap that account attracted. I didn't imagine a social media trainer and career donkey botherer would attract the recruitment scum but there you go.

Once the circus quietened into silent dispair the world's donkeys were left unbothered and the linkedin account tossed.

If the cesspit of Linkedin were an actual lake of shit, the environmental disaster would have ensured its closure years ago.

Bun posts Rust porting guide, says rewrite is still half-baked

Re: "no human contribution allowed"

One wonders what flavo(u)r the Cool-aid was ...

Definitely the flavour that needs to be swallowed with a sizeable dose of the bursar's dried frog pills.

Inside Amazon Web Services' plan to make networking disappear

"Owning everything has allowed AWS to do some difficult things."

Like convincing customers not to own anything?

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

“nine tenths of the world loves us, one tenth of the world professionally hates us.”

The ⅒ is only thing there, that is factual. The other 9/10 hate Palantir on principle - a word and concept notably absent from the lexicon of superviillany.

The absolute irony of naming the company after an artefact from the conflict between good and evil in Middle Earth and then choosing the role of Sauron shouldn't escape the wise. Of course the prat is barely a third rate Sarumen.

Shadow IT has given way to shadow AI. Enter AI-BOMs

AI is a birthday cake in the middle of this room, but you don't know how it got there

"Would you eat a slice of that cake?"

Hell no but in many workplaces I would be happy - on the off chance it might be deadly - to hand round generous slices to favoured cow orkers while implying it was provided for the CEO's birthday and pleading gluten intolerance on my part.

Likewise the AI mass poisoning of any number of major enterprises is inevitable. Probably already too late to prevent the widespread chaos that must follow such major dysfunction. Stripping out AI means stripping out Microslop and every other application and services provider - the well is already truly poisoned.

Hands off my trademark! Notepad++ dev threatens legal action against macOS port

Notpad++

Just ditch the "e," rebranding isn't a big deal. I think Notepadqq is a successful Linux Notepad++ workalike (cannot say from personal experience as am an old Vi hand and vi/vim being available on everything.)

Actually all things considered, Bloknot++ might be quite appropriate.

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

"Why doesn't my husband buy me fancy lingerie?"

Abby: "Dear Disappointed, he would be far too embarrassed to explain the tailoring of said lingerie."

"activists typically hold a minority view"

They would wouldn't they ? Otherwise they wouldn't be activists. More your prime time pundit.

Joking aside it is a valid point. I suspect parties do pander to a variety of minority interests because of low voter turnout, first-past-the-post polls and typically small winning margins makes chasing even the most marginal interest groups - up to and including the rabid raving loonies - a worthwhile investment.

Australia has compulsory proportional voting which does seem to push some of the nuttier interests off to minor or single platform parties.

The attempt to restrict access to social media of under 16s is based on evidence of real harm from social media use much of which isn't particularly age related. The efficacy of the legislated measures is in doubt; not so much the intent.

Ultimately I suspect social media will be restricted to operating within national boundaries (or within regions with uniform regulatory frameworks.)

I can imagine if you want to access Fecesbook in Australia it will be a purely Australian Fecesbook subject to Australian regulation (and taxation) accessible only to residents.

At this point I think the fragmentation of the internet along national or common regulatory regions is probably inevitable.

Unexpected item in Windows' bagging area

Make the background a slightly darker gray…

and the licence watermark will disappear ?

40p per bag seems a bit steep - about AUD1.00; the local grocers charge AUD 0.15 for the brown paper bags with handles… if their staff can be arsed. But I suppose with the cost of living being what it is, a single bag or two hands might be all you would these days to carry off your purchases.

Microsoft's bad obsession is showing up in shabby services and slipshod software. Here's proof

Pâté de Foul AI

I momentarily misread that as pate^† of foul old Ron of Ankh·Morpork's Canting Crew - the pong would be not be too dissimilar I imagine.

The comparision between Microsoft's cramming its customers AI slop and the production of a paste of diseased steatotic goose liver - foie gras shorn of the affectation of Quirmian avec - is a disgustingly appropriate analogy.

_{† head; particularly the crown.}

Moving to mainframe can be cheaper than sticking with VMware: Gartner

Choosing between IBM mainframe v Broadcom VMware

you know you are going to be screwed. The only consolation is that now you get to choose between torx and phillips head.