Posts by Bebu sa Ware

France buys nuclear supercomputing spinoff Bull from Atos for €404M

Re: ICL

"The British Government could buy the name ICL from Fujitsu and start a new company building supercomputers on the cutting edge UK produced Raspberry Pi units"

More likely:

Arthur Daley is certain to have a lockup somewhere chockers with Inmos Transputer chips that he acquired at the cost of carting them away but he would be wiiling to offer these state·of·the·art motors processors to the state owned firm at a cut throat^† price claiming it's his patriotic duty.

_{† allowing a certain vagueness as to whose throat the blade would be applied.}

La Multiques renaîtrait ?

I think Bull was the last owner of MULTICS. If the French wants a sovereign and safe operating system you could do (a lot) worse. ;)

Actually might make a fine April 1 jest.

SDF.org some years ago had an April 1 mock up of the Multics login confronting users logging in on their main NetBSD/decalpha server. I think it was just after someone got Multics running on a software GE645 emulator. Certainly had me wondering for a few seconds.

OpenAI gets $122B to 'just build things' as the world blows them up

"Users do not want disconnected tools," OpenAI said

I think the dearticulated tools users don't want are the AI bros, Crypto bros, big tech, their lobbyists, their "tame" public officials and politicians, …the whole boiling really.

It's not that the public don't want this crew disconnected as quartering would be a preferred option for dealing with these offenders, it's their disconnection from reality and from the massive harm they cause the public don't want.

OpenAI will not make a profit until 2030.

[PBS] "Where do you see yourself in five years ?"

[SA] "OpenAI? Bankrupt, obviously."

[SA] "Me ? In a pleasant little tax haven with the fewest extradition agreements, I should think."

Japanese shipper MOL wants a floating datacenter, and Hitachi just climbed aboard

I can see a surplus nuclear powered carrier…

from the former US could be a bargain for this application.

Don't laugh there was a lot of this type of Soviet shit on the market after the USSR went "former" and at bargain prices.

I seem to remember about twenty years ago the PRC picking up a (non·nuclear) Russian carrier from Ukraine, I think, for peanuts. How the world has changed. ;)

AI server farms heat up the neighborhood for miles around, paper finds

Updraught?

Just grabbing at random an Indiana AWS campus on 64 ha. burning 2.2GW I would wonder how to what extent convection affects the local atmosphere.

That is 2.2x10⁹ J / 0.64x10⁶ m² every second. The average adult generates 80-100W of heat although from appearance many are clearly only 15W incandescents.

Only using convective heat transfer into dry ambient air would be a challenge at this scale I imagine. I can see why water supplies are at grave risk from these brigands as the latent heat of vaporisation of water is extremely high ~2.2MJ/kg (~101kPa, bp 100°C) Vaporising 1.0t of water per second could handle 2.2GW, I think.

Live and Let AI: Former CIA officer says human spies matter more in the LLM age

New Bond titles ?

Lie and let AI

Tomorrow Ever AI

For Your AI Only

AI another Way

No Time to AI

'Uncle Larry’s biggest fan' cut by email in early morning Oracle layoff spree

It is going to get worse before it gets better

If it ever does.

If "better" means the same "better" in place before everything got worse then extremely doubtful.

The "better" our lords and masters (conventionally our "betters") seem to have in mind for us makes even "worst" attractive.

I often wonder whether any of the drongos directing this nonsense ever consider the question "Where do see your enterprise in five years time?" Probably none as I suppose they will have buggered off with their loot well before that like thieves in the night. Whether 2031 is a world worth living in, is another matter but I suppose they expect to have relocated well before then to Elonpolis or Muskburg on the Red planet. As I said drongos.

Oracle cuts jobs across sales, engineering, security

alternative work in their diminishing jobs market.

The massive drop in real innovation in all aspects of technology is also rapidly destroying the pool of alternative roles. So decreasing supply side with increasing demand. I can see near irreparable structural damage enduring long past the demise of the AI delusion. We are losing the talent, enthusiasm and vision of a generation of younger STEM workers which might never be restored.

These fools think they are turning on the lights of agentic AI to illuminate the world, but really they are turning off the light of reason, likely plunging the planet into a desperate darkness which will ultimately frustrate their underlying, insatiatiable greed.

Gmail celebrates 22 years by finally letting users change their addresses

When was the last time you called a colonel 'pet' or 'bonny lass'?

I suspect it was also the first time.

Re: gmail names not unique

I sussed from the outset that a gmail account name ought to be as close to unique as possible. Random nonsense such as Musk uses to christen his spawn, and incidentally with which he also peppers his frequent X ejaculations, is not my thing so the account names also ought to be plausible.

With a bit of imagination and environmental input you can usually come up with something and even amusing to the recipient for whom the penny drops.

As an example, just looking at previous post, a decent gmail account might be [e-mail]

I suppose doddering.oldgit is already taken. Shame.

Re: Enhanced tracking?

>> Does the Pope drink wine?

> No, but I've heard he shits in the woods.

Sharing a beverage with the bears ?

One in seven Americans are ready for an AI boss, but they might not trust it

15 percent of Americans would be willing to work for an AI boss,

God knows the most Americans would gladly work for the Devil; arguably most already do.

The surprise is only 15% and that they wouldn't trust their putative AI boss.

Seems a bit dodgy as the sampled population has 55% that both trust and voted for the current administration.

Suppose the MAGAtry might view AI as some pinko liberal conspiracy to enslave them. They would be mostly right - just the wrong pastel and politics.

We know what day it is but these Raspberry Pi price hikes are no joke

3Gb ram ?

Curious whether that is the board populated with 2Gb and 1Gb parts or a defective 4Gb part that is good for 3G ? I wouldn't have thought there was enought board real estate for two parts.

Just checked the RPi5 16Gb on my usual Pi shop's web site: AUD500.00 ± loose change - I can purchase a refurbished 10th or 11th gen i5, 16Gb mini system for that or less (Dell, Lenovo, Acer, or HP if you insist) with Win11 pro preinstalled (if that is your preferred vice.)

ServiceNow allegedly says salesman 'overachieved' and is not entitled to comp

Re: US employment laws

"I'm just surprised no US employer has demanded jus primae noctis from it's employees."

Personally I would be more surprised if they didn't.

I suppose the employee screwed after hours might claim overtime personally or in lieu of their spouse.

"America? Don’t talk to me about America. Funny, how just when you think America can’t possibly get any worse it suddenly does. I’ve calculated your chance of survival, but I don’t think you’ll like it. This will all end in tears. I just know it." — With apologies to Marvin and Canada.

Penny wise and pound foolish.

Wrong side of the North Atlantic for that saw.

Unsurprising really as it is where nickel and dime emerged as a transitive verb.

Not too keen on humanity either at the best of times, but…

each and every dāy to my growing dismāy I discover a new wāy to hate the USĀ.

ServiceNo ?

Leaked memo suggests Red Hat's chugging the AI Kool-Aid

Oh Dear !

It must be the artificial colours and flavours in the lemonade.

The required AI decrappification that Alma and other rhelations need to apply to render to the upstream sources, to make their distros usable is presumably some RH manglement Baldrick's cunning plan to hobble the rhelations.

The flaw in this most cunning of plans is that since RH's previous skulduggery the rhelations have been forced to use the same upstream foss sources as RH rather than the post enshittified ones shipped with RHEL.

"We are the orchestrator with agents as the execution engine"

I always read the word "orchestrator" as one who performs involuntary ochidectomies. Although in this case resembles more self emasculation using their own mouths possibly in a failed attempt to kiss their own arses.

Red Hat will try to "influence community development processes such that our processes can converge over time."

Baldrick again… if we bulldoze the "community development processes" into the AI cesspool no one will notice we are a crock of shit.

As if. Cloud cucko land.

The best of times to not be in the industry and to "enjoy" the Shadenfreude from the inevitable catastrophe of the oncoming tsunami of peak enshittification.

GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

Re: "a coworker asked Copilot to correct a typo"

A crapworker asked Crappilot to gild a turd ?

Re: "something completely different called enshittipification."

Wrong genus. Probably Copropithecus.

Artemis II countdown begins as NASA prepares for crewed Moon flyby

Re: "We will ... talk to our astronauts while they're on the far side of the Moon."

> Hands up who has a wife who talks to them from 3 rooms away!

And is deaf as a door post.

Unfortunately or fortunately having avoided the deafening music endemic during my youth, my hearing is still excellent including the higher freqencies so I can hear her every word thus being forwarned while retaining plausible deniability.

I can usually hear the other end of a telephone conversation of someone a few seats away on the bus, but the increasing use of earpods has put pay to that. Earpod users also seem to speak at a much lower volume than non-users which is pleasing. I assume that is due to the noise cancellation function in the earpods.

Re: Aliens?

"JD Vance is now saying that they are demons, not aliens."

You may rest assured he would know. Trust me on that.

Re: Communication

"I wonder if there wouldn't be some psychological issues."

With the entire mass of the Moon shielding the astronaut's mind from the lunacy (sic) rampant on the Earth, 5G, derro rays or whatever, a profound and serene sanity might settle on the astronaut's newly liberated mind with the consequence that he or she would prefer to remain on the farside to perish in peace rather than rejoin this world's lunatic asylum.

"Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft" — Yes. Right. Obviously smoking the right stuff back then.

_{Arguably lunacy is actually terracy or earthacy; certainly from the viewpoint of a Moon dweller.}

Re: Send Trump to the moon instead

You are Michael O'Leary and I Claim My Five Pounds.

Another chap that ought to be added to the passenger manifest. Even the Führer had some glowing words for the chap†. ;)

The manifest would be contemporary version of Ko·ko's "Little List"

"Of society offenders who might well be underground

And who never would be missed — who never would be missed!"

_{† Google it.}

Re: scheduled for April 1

Lift off in 1,000,000 ... 999,999 ..... 999,998 … 968999 … 766655 … 98#{8]<- … 0age68K … 0xbadcafe …

Ok guys who used an AI coding assistant ?

"may surpass the record for the farthest distance humans have traveled from Earth"

With the endemic fuckery in the US today there is something a little ominous in that statement.

As in: "What do you mean we missed the Moon ?"

Memory-makers' shares are down. Some RAM prices have eased. Blaming Google is not a good idea

Re: And oops, Micron

Micron discovered that Scam Altman, who has 'secured' 40% of the global DRAM supply for OpenAI (which is what precipitated the RAM price spiral), doesn't actually have any money.

But for the observation that Altman has less brains than a decorticate rabbit, one could imagine his securing a contract for the physical delivery of 40% of the global DRAM production while arranging a highly leveraged position on future contracts (or others dervitives) on DRAM prices.

In most jurisdications I imagine that level of market manipulation would be highly illegal but presumably de rigeur in the US unless Murdoch drops a bundle in which case you get the suite next to Elizabeth Holmes.

Re: Not convinced

'Feathernomics' … There's no rational explanation for it.

That bloody butterfly maliciously flapping its wings in the Amazonian rain forest would be favourite. Also seems to having a field day with the weather and climate, not to mention gobal politics. ;)

Android keyboard ditches keys entirely, predicts what you mean

"they might have struggled, with my mostly blank keyboard."

Hardly. In a world of mostly blank people who have little to say and those gems they deign to cast upon the world are sufficiently vacuous that their digital double has a free rein to fill in the gaps. Essentially a manglement keyboard.

"extrapolates which keys in the QWERTY layout you were aiming for."

I can see that being extremely popular outside the insanity of anglosphere. (Not!)

Couple a francophone with autoconfuse anglaise with lashings of AI you might get a whole new school of post modern philosophy or complete crap. (Deciding which is left as an exercise for the intelligent reader.)

If the user has multiple keyboards configured for various layouts (as Gboard can be configured) accidentally switching to another configuration would produce equally confused output or at a minimum, irritation. Easily done on Gboard EN•FR to FR•EN.

Still anything that makes technology more accessible or just honestly attempts to, has to be applauded.

Surprise! Big Tech has been a bit rubbish at enforcing Australia’s kids social media ban

Re: The real danger

"real sports?"

You mean like Hurling^†. Bring it on.

_{† "Hurling is also considered to have "a notable proportion of blunt scrotal trauma."}

Re: The real danger

"Can we ensure that Australian youths do not have access to cricket? We have to think of our future"

Very American thinking that. Destroy the competition before you have to actually compete.

It pays to remember that your team can only be as good the team you have defeated fairly on the field of competition.

If England could only defeat the Corfu team because it is the only other team then the pride of British cricket is no better than the happy aroma of ouzo arising from a Greek pub team. (Winner pays for the drinks. ;)

If we banned calculus in schools …

"If we banned calculus in schools then presumably children would discover underground calculus resources and all be experts in Cauchy's theorem."

That didn't seem to work in the US. :) I recall the US Physics text (PSSC) we used in high school in AU (where we did cover calculus of a single variable) had any evidence of calculus or anything much mathematical expunged — ultimately more an irritation than an impediment.

Unless I missed something I don't recall an ensuing American renaissance of the mathematical sciences. Indeed are general dummification or rejection of anything vaguely scientific has been more in evidence.

Still banning calculus in schools we might lure the lost lambkins into the dark realms of Brouwer and Constructive Analysis. ;)

Contracts are in C++26 despite disagreement over their value

Re: Virtual functions

"The entire concept of correctness seems to be lost on many programmers."

Honestly I don't think that many ever had even the most tenuous grasp of the concept to be able to lose it. Some developers' demonstrate an equally tenuous acquaintance with sanity or indeed reality.

I would be surprised if very many contemporary software engineering syllabi deal with programming language semantics at all, let alone weakest precondition semantics which "contracts" presumably mirrors.

Often the problem is deeper still, in that the specification handed to developers even when unusually well defined, is frequently internally (logically) inconsistent and always incomplete. The latter hands the developers a bucket of undefined states from which well defined state are expected to deterministically proceed, and augments the former declarative inconsistencies to produce the usual unholy logical shambles.

Stroustrup said ... I worry a lot about the complexity

as well he might.

C++ has become another "estabilished" church as byzantine as any actual faith or the rituals of Gormenghast.

Rookie C++ developer meets AI coding assistant should blaze new trails of heretofore undreamt of buggery.

As a previously noted Eiffel had this as foundational feature and is arguably a much simpler language than any C++ spec since the C++ ARM.

Humanoid robots one tiny step closer to exterminating autoworkers' jobs

Re: Humanoid robots

Hardly be Zeus … he wouldn't have the £1 coin to unlock an attractive Aldi shopping trolley from the ugly ones, but he was a bugger on swans and cows.

Like just about everything about AI this is arse about and gratuitously anthropomorphic. This deformed centaur is designed with the assumption that it would slot into an existing human oriented workflow rather than completed redesign decomposing the final product into reasonably selfcontained and hopefully reusable modules that can most easily assembled or constructed by machines rather than by humans. As far as I can tell welding robots don't resemble humans unless you are thinking of a pussy eye view of Trump's upper extremities.

If I harboured any doubts about the possibility of intelligenence in AI, I have no doubts about the majority of the drongos pushing AI — actually both are totally devoid any intelligence with any residue merely unconscionable grifters.

Google is to journalism what Vikings were to monks. Now their man will run the BBC

The chap's name reminded me of…

The Brittas Empire coincidentally also out of Aunty's stable.

Life imitating or recapitulating art ?

Re: research indicates that 63% of people polled think the TV licence is poor value for money

If only they demonstrated the same degree of discriminatiion in their choice of politicians.

The first thing vibe coding builds is confidence it will help you succeed

AI bro's that can't code and have replaced crypto bro's as the most irritating twats at parties.

Soon to be replaced by Quantum bros who fortunately can't remain coherent for very long and rapidly collapse so more of a mess than an irritation.

Re: All the siver bullets.

Only works on Werewolves^† not vampires as I think someone advised Carl Kolchak. ;)

The identification of agentic AI with some form of the undead or other malevolent supernatural entity probably not misplaced.

_{† and unsurprisingly both men (wera) and wolves separately}

Re: It worked until it didn't

I'm a troll, trollio, And I'll eat you for supper!

For deliciously chilling short story in that vein you cannot go past T H White's "The Troll."

DXC staff to strike in Australia after some go without pay rise for five years

DXC

I suppose DXC excels somewhere. Just not where I might see. I am guessing many organisations retaining the services of DXC won't even notice the strike.

US foreign router ban criticized for being ‘industrial policy disguised as cybersecurity’

Re: MAGAAFTROTW

FTROTW has been US policy since … well forever. Just in the past they usually benefitted from their fuckery but their current efforts towards global fornication would seem to be as much own goals as anything else.

Unconscionable Selfserving Adventurism.

Gaaftrot seems like a word - probably colloquial afrikaans for biting off your own balls ? You are supposed to hold the future in your hands not letting Trump and co. chow down on it.

Bees and hummingbirds aren't just buzzing – they're sipping trace booze

Pissed Parrots are even worse

Falling out of their trees.

Drunk birds inebriation in the wild

Apparently not only aussie pisspot parrots as this even a problem in the northern hemisphere.

To BSOD or not to BSOD? Only Microsoft knows the answer

Given the Windows' BSOD is rather familar

to long suffering MS customers I would have thought grabbing a few designers from the Apple stable to produce something a bit more stylish or even classy might have been on the cards rather than the illiterate retro or steampunk look that it currently sports. Changing the background colour from blue to black is not quite the direction I had in mind.

The "sad mac" screen back when, wasn't particularly informative but a least it was cute. ;)

An ascii animation of a kitten playing with a ball of wool and titled "Sorry, I have lost my thread. Please type Ctrl+Alt+Delete to restart"^† at least would be more amusing and definitely more comprehensible to the polloi than the hex error codes and addresses.

Of course if you had a rock solid OS that could recover from just about every fault you wouldn''t need a BSOD but then you would not need, nor want, Microsoft tat on your hardware.

_{† Ctrl+Alt+Delete (SAK) for obvious reasons.}

Anthropic tweaks timed usage limits to discourage Claude demand during peak hours

Re: 13:00 – 19:00 GMT is 23:00 – 05:00 AEST

"No. We've seen your spiders."

You haven't anything yet.

If the venomous snakes (some extremely poisonous) don't do it for you, then the choice of being devoured by a crocodile or shark might.

Even the wee wiid doggies (dingoes) will happily chew your arse off. Lovely coral sand beaches but shame about the box jellyfish and stonefish.

Got a lovely selection of quite nasty zoonotic virii/viruses - Hendra virus is a real charmer.

Being bitten by a tick can make you highly allergic to red meat which might a right bugger depending on your diet.

If you are really lucky you can ingest a snake intestinal worm's eggs from its shit on your salad greens which hatches and heads north to chow down on your little gray cells.

In summary: Australia is not for the faint hearted or lilly livered, we are made of sterner stuff.

Try New Zealand instead as the wildlife there is mostly harmless or extinct but you do get volcanic erruptions and earthquakes just to keep things fresh. I still wouldn't claim you couldtn't die of boredom.

NZ is currently UTC+13.00 NZDT and +12.00 NZST after Easter.

So the peak 13.00Z..19.00Z would be 02.00 NZDT..08.00 NZDT or 01.00 NZST..07.00 NZST. Neatly outside the 9 to 5 grind.

_{Beth Mole over on Ars could always rely on AU for a decent emesis producing infectious disease etc story but now she is mostly trying to keep track of ongoing self emolation of the US Health services which is arguably just as sickening.}

India's space program can't spend money fast enough, putting missions in peril

All sounds very British to me. ;)

Possibly another insidious legacy of Empire. ;)

Apple's last tower topples… and the others will follow

I have to admit…

I was impressed by the hardware in a ~2010 mac pro tower that I inherited as a disgarded six year old box. Admittedly the original owner had maxed out the ram and disk storage (2Tb drives.) I was more surprised that I could install RHEL7 on to the system without any gymnastics at all. I used it as test machine few a few years with extra disk storage set up as ZFS raid5 volumes which were used as isci volumes for machines on a test network hanging of one of its ethernet ports.

Re: Expansion cards

I recall owning a truly ancient PC (somebody else's cast-off) whose hard drive was mounted on an expansion card.

That would be an oddity.

Hard disk controllers were ISA cards at least in the PC/XT(ST506?) and AT(ATA) and I imagine in the 386 etc machines which were mostly AT compatible until mainboard board IDE controllers were standard.

I guess some clever vendor saw a market for a controller card with a thin, small laptop disk glued on. Given I have never seen such an adaptor (I have seen some peculiar hardware) I might conclude it was a rather small market.

Unix kit was all SCSI (and other oddities like IPI) so I didn't have much to with PC tat after the AT but I suppose the adaptor might have been SCSI too. HPUX workstations of the period sported (E)ISA slots and I could imagine the card was for a wider range of hardware than the x86 kit.

Folk are getting dangerously attached to AI that always tells them they're right

Not far from the no-shit-sherlock threshold.

But certainly unsurprising. Humans are intrinsically narcissistic and AI is essentially an incredibly flawed mirror constructed from the steaming pile of human crap that is the internet.

No wonder then that the uncritical and delusional find support and reinforcement for their deranged and disturbed minds.

Not fundamentally different from the curse of social media which incidentally likely composes a significant proportion of these agents' training set.

ChatGPT et al. are amongst other perfidy providing a virtual online felatio and cunnilingus service to the damaged and deficient egos with which humanity abounds.

Narcissis himself was so taken by his own reflection that he persished from neglect. We are mesmerised by our imperfection reflection in this cesspool that we are more likely to tumble in and drown in sewerage… indeed as a civilisation we are drowning in shit.

Commercial space pleads with NASA to stop moving the goalposts in orbit

Lucy and Charlie Brown

Did I miss the banns ?

If Charlie Brown managed to find himself hitched to Lucy van Pelt there cannot be much hope for the world… actually that seems about right.