Posts by Bebu sa Ware

To fix this Wi-Fi network, we'll need a crane

I now know to go outside and look for cranes.

If delegating probably wise to specify construction cranes otherwise your twitcher PYI might pop back to inform you "sorry boss no cranes; some scruffy ducks and tatty bin turkeys."

I was once instructed to follow the highway for about 50 km and turn left at the giant moa. While that area abounded in giant bananas, giant pineapples and such like, I was puzzled why anyone would erect a giant model of an extinct New Zealand flightless bird in subtropical Australia - the native non extinct emu would make more sense.

Never found the moa. Understandable. It was of course the giant mower. (Alias lawn tractor.)

YouTuber has DIMM idea, builds working DRAM in backyard

Re: Challenge accepted!

A little less labour intensive: plated wire memory. Seems to have been used in space tech including the Hubble; presumably more resistant to to radiation than semiconductor memory technologies.

"we're not aware of anyone else making RAM in their backyard shed"

I imagine the number of backyard clean·rooms wouldn't need more than a handful of fingers to count.

UK gov pays public £550 to discuss Digital ID – then bans journalists from the room

On the face of it an utterly shameless exercise in cynicism.

I can't imagine Jim Hacker or sir Humphrey ever having the unmittigated gall to engage in an act of such overt political dishonesty.

At least parking a tank at each intersection has the virtue of being unmistakable in intent and forthright in its communication.

Dev targeted by sophisticated job scam: 'I let my guard down, and ran the freaking code'

Re: How to scam a developer:

My abiding impression is that 95% of that tribe aren't the sharpest tools. Even the 5% are often so narrowly focused even to the point of dysfunction.

In short: not too difficult; even a basic social engineering is likely to succeed as these chaps are usually as un·acqainted with the "social" as they are with the "engineering" in software engineering.

Re: working "in the crypto world"

"one of the largest scams in history,"

I suspect AI the other which is inflicting greater and longer lasting harm on everyone rather than just on the crypto·gullible.

NASA reckons the Artemis II heat shield performed like a champ

"heat shield performed like a champ"

I suspect there are several astronauts who were of that opinion too.

Musk bets Tesla's AI future on Intel node that isn't finished yet

Europe still a tougher regulatory nut to crack

Of course so much easier now that the US is the flavour of the month everywhere.

Chaps in black suits performing "Roman" salutes are pretty popular too.

Google Meet or Google Mute? Even CEOs get borked sometimes

"that everybody is human"

is obvious to everyone except Max Headroom and bigtech execs mixing up "Agent" and "Person."

The higher up the greasy pole the greater the technophobia and general incompetence Is pretty general observation but at some point most do acquire minders, carers or custody officers.

The abiding memory of the mid '80s is of Max Headroom and of course the Kenny Everett Television Show; the '80s were otherwise a bit rubbish.

Using the password 'admin123' wasn't as bad as sharing it on Slack

"new flavours of shit"

Having successfully managed to avoid any experience of the old flavours the idea that anyone is able to discern the existence of new flavours strikes me as rather… unsavoury err… perhaps unsanitary.

I am of course keeping my tongue firmly in cheek behind my own teeth and certainly not between anyone else's cheeks.

I just recalled that decade or so ago when the world (re)discovered the gut biome some nutcase influencers and fellow travellers were swallowing shit smoothies in order to revitalise their gut flora. Stupidity is unbounded.

they didn't use 12345!

12345! (factorial) would have over 45 thousand digits

The calculator at https://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/discretemathematics/factorials.php didn't chicken out :)

Pretty safe - try entering that.

Oddly no one ever uses 1,2,3,4,5 or even counting from 0.

Even the evil of multiple uid==0 accounts with distinct passwords would be a lesser evil than sharing a single root password.

I think, although from ignorance, Windows always permitted Administrator privileges to be assigned to multiple user accounts.

Pass the key, passwords have passed their sell-by date

stubborn old git who needs to get with the times ?

Bugger that. Just look at "the times." Who in their right mind would possibly "need to get with" these times ? "Get without" makes more sense.

Just wait long enough and familar, saner times will catch up with you.

Re: Great!

Most (95%) of my accounts that currently use passwords don't protect anything of any value (sorry, but that does include the el Rego. login.)

Basically like suburban fences - keeps honest people… well, honest. The serious miscreant will easily hop over them.

The inclusion of a device identifier in the passkey generation will be a PITA where the service is accessed from multiple devices (phones, tablets, notebooks and desktops - from experience that can easily add up to well over 6.)

Most banking apps seem to use passkeys already (and 2FA) but with most users having everything on the one phone the security is only as good as the phone's I suspect.

I wouldn't mind using an optional TOTP where I provide the secret (key) - the otpauth:// URI format is accepted (either directly or via QR code) by most OTP clients. Getting the six digit code via SMS seemed just plain daft to me.

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

Meta AI Ray Ban spy glasses

I handled a pair for the first time a few weeks ago. The local electrical store had them on display with a bit of string attached to stop them walking. They appear to be selling like… fresh dog turds. So perhaps the string was redundant. ;)

I had laboured under the mistaken impression that these devices projected an image on the back of the presumably semi·silvered lenses to give a heads·up type display.

I was disappointed (not really, dog turds remember) to find no such facility. They are no more than a tiny glasshole spy camera embedded in the frame and some input devices in the arms of the frame. I suspect noise cancelling ear·pods are cleverer technologically.

OpenAI last year announced “Operator”

and guess who are the "Things^†."

This nonsense rapidly approaching such a surreal nightmare.

_{†Operators and Things}

Oil crisis? What oil crisis? IT spending de-coupled from wider war shock

Re: "everything basically goes back to where it was before the war"

It didn't after 1973.

The world economy is a complex system composed of complex systems, arguably chaotic in one sense or other, which typically behave in a thoroughly unpredicable fashion following a significant perturbation. Amazonian butterflies aren't in it.

In the last few years it has been capering on the edge of chaos which characteristically presages a catastrophe.

If you work through a Feynman type diagram of all the paths out the current middle eastern shambles it is pretty clear that as expected no one "wins," certainly in the long view. The party that loses least (generally by a large margin) is equally clearly Iran.

You can now run WSL on Windows 95, in case you're crazy, too

UML

When I read this I immediately thought of user mode linux which I fiddled with years ago and thought was one of the cleverest hacks … potentially ever. I still have Jeff Dike's book somewhere.

Checking https://codeberg.org/hails/wsl9x I see that it too leverages UML but full marks to hails (Hailey) for getting a UML kernel to work with the MSDOS Gui wrapper, Win9x.I rather imagine really much harder.

GitHub opts all CLI users into telemetry collection whether they want it or not

github cli v. git cli

I had forgotten github had its own cli (which is now instrumented.)

The git client update 2.54 was also release a few days ago so I was wondering when and how Microslop had contaminated the git client development — it hadn't.

I keep some random rubbish on github mostly because I am too lazy to run my own git service or copy repos between machine - easier to git push shit; git clone shit from the great GH cesspit.

Database world trying to build natural language query systems again – this time with LLMs

…accessing data insights remains a significant bottleneck in business decision-making…

Unsurprising. The "decision makers" as such, reduce the process to the vacant peering into the void. No amount syntactic sugar or clever rewriting will extract any more from a database than the questioner is capable of asking.

SQL has its faults I understand. Michael Stonebraker (Ingres) thought QUEL superior.

Queries in SQL aren't exactly rocket science but no matter how you extract the data it is just data until assign meaning to that data.

The idea I am guessing is that LLM based AI can extract actual "meaning" from natural language utterances (which I am not convinced that it can even in principle) and then from that construct a query that matches the semantics of the extracted natural language query which then retrieves the data that can interpreted ie maps the retrieved data (arguably syntactic elements) to elements of meaning in the original query (semantics.)

Once more around the mulberry bush, I think. Back when, 4GL were supposed to deliver this and much, much more.

If you asked your natural language interface "how many pieces of fruit do I have in my pantry inventory database?" would it count tomatoes and more to the point did you want it to?

Linux 7.1 will have an optional new NTFS driver

Re:Ceterum censeo Microsoftem esse delendam

Excellent !

Re: What is this for?

"gets hooks out of boy-scouts' hooves"

Outside Orc-Lands, not so much for boy scouts but might be useful for the cloven hoofed members of the current administration.

Re:Linux rescuing Windows users

As good many gormless Windows users over the years will attest to my copy of chntpw.

Don't think it works for win10&11 but no longer my problem in these days of retirement. :)

Actually still useful when someone pulls out an old PC needed to drive an old instrument but no one remaining recalls or knew the passwords.Typically XP or Win2k or NT4.

The spaghettified DBMS chart that shows Oracle's crown is slowly slipping

Re: ABO

"Anything But Oracle"

Unfortunately that also encompasses oceans of misery around the Oracle Sargasso.

I shudder to think of implementing anything today using Unify RDBMS (v4.2) from the 1980-90s and it wasn't too bad at the time.

Re: That chart though.

The Gartner coloured pencil department on overdrive - clearly an ADHD employer of choice.

A twenty channel chart recorder of a billionaire tech bro going full-rant ?

Re: Strangely

"ms-sql, since they bought it rather than write it, and it was originally written for Unix, actually isn't as bad as you'd expect."

Sybase wasn't it ?

A good few years ago I recall MS made ms-sql available for Linux (at least RHEL) - it might have been an evaluation license or developer/hobbiest license but I certainly didn't provide a CC or pay cash. I only installed it on the off chance someone had a need for ms-sql on RHEL. No one ever did.

A curious lifecycle Unix-Windows-Linux but not as uncommon as might be thought even within MS.

Murder, she wrote: Ex-FBI chief wants some ransomware crims charged with homicide

Re: Manslaughter, she meant?

Outside the Humpty·Dumpty^† jurisdictions of the US, unlawful homicide usually requires an element of foreseeabilty and of recklessness. Many jurisdictions weaken these elements should the death occur during or as (potentially unforeseeable) consequence of a criminal act.

Hopefully with much of the planet washing its hands of the US, extradition to the US and gratuitous extra·territoriality of US legislation will become far less common.

_{† "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean- neither more nor less."}

'We are shooting ourselves in the foot'

I would have thought "in the head" might be more accurate but then this is the US so "foot" it is.

England's school phone ban gets teeth, just in time to bite no one

in my day, teachers regularly confiscated calculators, catapults and god knows what

and god knows what

In my year 8 class long enough ago the desks still had holes for an ink·well, one of the chaps would light a small fire under the lid of the desk to see how long before the teacher noticed the smoke pouring from the ink·well hole. About five minutes.

He met his Waterloo with the French teacher who was more than old enough to have been a mature SOE agent although her appalling French accent would have given Officer Crabtree a run for his money.

In any case whatever she lacked in sang she more than made up with froid, ignoring the plume of smoke and well past the five minutes the pyromaniac blinked first as the desk itself was catching fire.

Afterwards he gave up incendiarism and sitting down (for a while) only to go on to develop new forms of teacher baiting.

Using cellphones in class seems a bit feeble in comparison.

Trump-branded datacenter project fails to make itself great, again

Re: Rapa Nui …

"went extinct chasing unattainable goals, such as Easter Island’s moa"

Apparently that narrative Hollywood notwithstanding, is on shaky ground.

"Island-wide characterization of agricultural production challenges the demographic collapse hypothesis for Rapa Nui… " Science Advances, 21June 2024, Vol.10 Nº 25

Re: Wait a minute

How many red flags do you need before you get the message ?

Me none but for these clowns the flag Santa Anna raised before the Alamo would be favourite.

You too can build a nuclear battery from junk you have lying around the house

It's illegal and impractical to construct a nuclear power plant in your backyard

The mineral sands in SE Queensland(AU) beaches and sand isands are fairly rich in Thorium. The tailings from rutile etc extraction are possibly concentrated. So you might be able to smurf sufficient sand to extract enough Thorium for a backyard rector and produce more than just a few nW.

The beaches in Kerala(IN) are similarly blessed according to the Great Intelligence Ignorance.

Some affected sand was used in a school playground a few decades which caused a media furore at the time. Presumably some curious soul used a Geiger counter outside. My Grandfather's WW1 watch sent the school Geiger counter crazy and I think I was told to leave the wristwatch at home.

Schmoozebots: Study finds flattery will get AI everywhere

"what actually drives people to treat these systems as if they have minds of their own" ?

… Because "people" largely don't have "minds of their own" - would be favourite.

Souless vacancy staring into the void - mutual recognition unavoidable. For heaven's sake just look at the US.

Palantir's NHS future in doubt as ministers eye contract break

"ramblings of a supervillain"

Today the Grauniad has a similar story "Palantir manifesto described as ‘ramblings of a supervillain’" with a suitably supervillainous image of Alex Karp.

These chaps are less Bond villains and more Danger Mouse - two dimensional clowns barely more credible than the paper cutout characters featured in Captain Pugwash.

Re: Legal

"UK legal Vs American legal?"

US Legal has an extra 59mm at the bottom over A4; presumably for the extrra dodgy and diabolical small print with which US businesses typically abound.

Iran claims US used backdoors to knock out networking equipment during war

Re: Old equipment - no budget for replacement

"Also expect a lot of anti-Huawei rules to be removed in countries outside the US."

Wasn't there a joint Huawei-European facility to clear Huawei kit of this skulduggery (more than ten years ago I think) but I was abandonned in some all-the-way-with-the-usa lunacy? All the way down the garden path to mind numbingly senseless buggery.

NASA Inspector fears new spacesuits won’t be ready for Moon landing

spacesuits won’t be ready for Moon landing

You really can't make this stuff up. :)

Doesn't anyone do Operations Research these days or real project management rather than titting about on gross expense accounts ?_rhet.

I can imagine the complete dogs breakfast if the Berlin Airlift were contemplated today.

UK.gov kicks off half-a-billion quid sovereign AI venture with £80M invite

"Callosum, … Prima Mente, Cosine, Cursive, Doubleword, Twig Bio, and Odyssey"

As the retrenched script writer sighed: "You can't make this shit up."

My pitch might named "Haversine^†" - a veiled "Have us on." Well, I might as well and join the throng.

Odyssey is probably the most honest. After 20 years faffing around with dodgy characters, Odysseus ended up exactly where he started from - namely a barren island in a forsaken backwater. (You might be forgiven thinking Britain, but Ithaca.)

_{† half versed sine.}

Growing AI power slurpage prompts MPs to examine low-energy computing

Re: Oh great.What could possibly go wrong?

"A bunch of technically utterly incapable politicians are trying to apply their complete lack of knowledge to a scientific problem."

Almost certainly get a version of the Infinite Improbability Drive although with this brains trust "Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure" would be the inevitable consequence of its first use.

"MPs to examine low-energy computing"

My first thought was "come on: grow a brain."

Which, as the neuromorpic poster pointed out, is actually an answer.

I would not be looking for any promising material in Westminster or Whitehall. There's smarter cervelle de veau displayed on the butcher's slab (±BSE.)

The award for missing the bleeding, bloody obvious never lacked serious contenders but with AI it's a bumper crop.

At some point the colossal capital cost plus massive recurrent costs of the portended agentic AI sloppotronic megadolt will be easily undercut by a crew of clever people suitably compensated for their cerebration.

We are fairly adept at mass producing people; just not very good at producing clever people and on the odd occasions we have - do we put them in charge ? No. We select a collection of pickled cervelle d'agneau, arguably from the bottom of the barrel, instead.

NASA working on 'Big Bang' upgrade to keep the Voyagers alive for longer

Re: Unserviceable?

"They might not be able to be serviced " - Unserviceable generally means unusable, not useful or impractical.

Even at 25 billion km Voyager is hardly that although the intrepid Archibald Tuttle^† is unlikely to make a house call.

"the most serviceable spacecraft" - Definitely very usable and useful.

_{† If you thought the movie was pure fantasy; renamed today Amerigaga - pure documentary.}

Ruby Central in 'real financial jeopardy' following RubyGems maintainer ruckus

verified MAGA moron

Wouldn't that be "certified" ?

I would have thought the moron in "MAGA moron" would be redundant like "the" or "hoi" in "the hoi polloi."

MAGA is best taken as a warning "Morons At·large, Generally Armed."

Blue Origin nails the landing, but puts the payload satellite in the wrong orbit

“Delivery Attempted”

Amazon apparently has a smorgasbord of excuses reasons to choose from:

• No One Was Home
• Incorrect Address
• Access Issues
• Business Closed
• Weather Conditions
• Vehicle Problems
• Package Damage
• Driver Shortage/Overload
• Security Concerns

… or just couldn't be arsed.

AI quota inflation is no token effort. It's baked in

if ((ntokens_left -= (strlen(prompt) + strlen(slop))) <= 0)…

"Ghastly. It all is – absolutely ghastly. Just don’t even talk about it."

'Invisible mouse' made a mess of PC rebuild

Tidy desk

> Tidy desk: sterile mind

Often the case if the mind is still present in some form.

Tidy desks don't necessarily mean the occupant doesn't work but invariably does indicate a notable lack of thinking about the tasks they are attempting to complete.

The untidy desk is often contains in the piles of paper the information collected over time to solve a number of so far intractable problems placed on the back burner pro tem.

I typically had a months worth of paper sitting in various pile on my desk around the keyboard with the wired mouse on or in the piles of paper.

Even if it accumulated three months worth I could usually find a document within seconds (pile, depth adressing.)

One of my earliest bosses had several years worth piled with his keyboard and monitor in a canyon of paper; he still used an rs232 dec vt terminal and printed most documents (pre MS Word days, a Unix site and he used vi+troff.) In minutes he could locate documents from years before - close on 10 years prior in one case of a report on a feasibility study he had completed then.

Opsec oopsie: Dutch navy frigate location outed by mailing it a Bluetooth tracker

"Tried to send a frigate… It broke down before it got there." The Navy Lark ?

"carriers that don't have any aircraft"

I suppose the nuclear submarines don't have any "nuclear" either ?

AU might have been wiser to have stuck with the French nuclear submarines but prêt·à·porter and not as originally intended replace the reactor with conventional power. The aussie crew could learn French from the labels, on the job - I don't imagine there are a lot of distractions during six months underwater. :)

Cloudflare can remember it for you wholesale

A Well Trodden Path

Ankh-Morpork's Harry King made his fortune carrying this stuff away in his fleet of honey-wagons "recycling nature's bounty" (as amended by Lady Euphemia.)

Although "monetising human stupidity" might be a better motto for Cloudflare.

Users complain that UK Azure is having capacity problems

"Microsoft is not short of tools"

And probably leave it at that other than noting their rank efflorescence of AI tools.

The story's graphic had me wondering where that hand had been before pulling out a handful of vile violet foam. I imagine this is what eventually happens to crapilot users' brains; same with Claude etc just different revolting colours. AI Transmitted Spongiform Encephalopathy.

_{The image's name suggests it is cotton candy ~ candy floss ~ fairy floss (spun sugar) depending where you live. Likely story.}

If you want into Anthropic's Claude club, you may have to show ID

Anthropic's Claude club

"I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member." - Groucho Marx

Also his: "Be open minded, but not so open minded that your brains fall out." …

I guess those squishy walnuts kernels underfoot must be MAGAt brains.

Presciently of US politics: "He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don’t let that fool you. He really is an idiot."

Attention data hoarders: Alexa loses its Plex appeal as voice feature gets canned

Talking to a pair of speakers…

or any piece of hardware is the bridge to insanity I will not cross even if it is paved with good intentions…hang on that a different path albeit with the same destination I suspect.

If you talk to your plants you are only off your rocker if they talk back. The same wiith toasters.

Talking to living people is hardly more sanity preserving in most cases. Best avoided too.

_{Paraphrasing Robert Owen: “All the world is insane save thee and me, and even thou art a little lacking.” (Owen's sense of queer not the current one.)}

Locked-out iPhone user tells The Reg that Apple is scrambling to fix character flaw passcode bug

Re: Only the lucky get fixes

"Well it did affect customers from an entire country, not just one person."

Only those Czechs who didn't use the four or six digit pin and did include the Czech háček in their passcode. Probably the one in a million chance that is a certainty. It's only the unlock screen that is affected - the Czech keyboard is fine once unlocked.

Apple is a bit buggered here. If they can break into this phone they have been lying for years to one party or other. If they cannot (or wiil not) then they get slammed for a fairly foolish breaking change.

I guess the world is still ASCII - Make Ascii Great Again.