Posts by Bebu sa Ware

Log files that describe the history of the internet are disappearing. A new project hopes to save them

Re: Out of alignment

I am not sure 15 year olds would get much out of Lear, Macbeth or even Hamlet although the current Hamnet movie might have piqued their interest in the last play. At 15 these kids wouldn't likely have the life experience to make much of the issues or detect the subtexts in these plays.

Reading plays is an acquired skill which comes, if ever, with maturity. For most of us the value of any play is in the performance. I might have also given each of these kids a dvd (or blueray) with a decent performance of the play. The BBC have at one time or other have produced most of the plays - I was quite fond of their Shrew with John Cleese as Petruchio (back then I purchased the VHS tape to see it.:)

Perhaps giving them a copy of the screenplay of "Trainspotting" (or Irvine Welsh's novel) with a DVD etc which might be more relevant to the kids' life experience, have produced a more enthusiastic response.

"O, that way madness lies; let me shun that; No more of that." — [Lear 3 iv]

"the tight network research community"

A convivial lot ?

Perhaps "tight·knit network research community."

To be fair, probably both at these beanfests.

If Microsoft made a car... what would it be?

Linux cars...

Apple cars ?

A BYD electric with a decent interface and software, costs an arm and leg and everything, like chargers, is Apple specific.

(I don't much like Apple but an iCar would probably deliver few surprises and its passengers to their destination.)

Immediately thought of Enid Blyton's Noddy

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe4k_ETLqNE

The graphic designers are certainly from the Microsoft stable.

The Microsoft Cabriolet would be a three wheeler, feature a Wankel rotary engine, a 17V DC electrical system, joystick steering, cable operated drum brakes and a roof that half retracts before permanently jamming. Probably requiring aviation kerosene.

With tinted windows BSOD takes on a whole new dimension.

How AI could eat itself: Competitors can probe models to steal their secrets and clone them

"Pirates stole my pirate ship"

I recall Captain Pugwash sufferred this indignity on several occasions but I don't recall the British Navy's assistance was ever requested. In the few episodes where the British West Indies Administration and Navy appeared they were more bumbling than Pugwash himself (and his crew.)

"American-led, democratic AI."

"Him funny." Vintage Alltman I suspect. "Loose lips sink mips."

If it is cheaper to interrogate competitors' models than to train etc your own then, perhaps those competitors aren't aren't charging an economic fee for the service and are effectively "dumping" (in the WTO/GATT sense) their AI into the market to discourage new entrants. (Anti·competitive measure.)

Democratic is an odd word to apply to AI — presumably meant popular or accessible.

Anyway it would be "republican AI" surely ? And American .45 lead ?

Attackers finally get around to exploiting critical Microsoft bug from 2024

the long Presidents' Day weekend.

Shouldn't that be "the Presidents' Day long weekend" ?

Unless it only celebrates tall (long) potuses.

Given American's love of stats all the Presidential heights are recorded. All appear significantly taller than the average of their generation. Unexpectedly the heights are also listed in cm.

Amazon-backed X-Energy gets green light for mini reactor fuel production

"heat generated by this process will be captured using helium gas"

So corner the market in Helium and print money ? ;)

Until some AI bros genius reckons Hydrogen is half the density and therefore twice as good.

The resulting explosion will scatter thousands of flaming radioactive graphite billiard balls over multiple counties.

"…Shake my Nerves and … Rattle my Brains, Goodness Gracious, Great Balls of Fire"

Misconfigured AI could trigger the next national infrastructure meltdown

It will make for an interesting "Who, Me?"

Or a "Who's left ?"

Re: Advice please

Good advice if it's just the electrickery that's gone walkabout.

Unfortunately other infrastructure like water and sewerage frequently also depends on electricity to pump its shit around. If you had a three to four week outage you might be swimming in it. Supply chain logistics also depend on utiity power especially food which requires chilling or refrigeration.

If you live in a large city life could become pretty grim fairly quickly. If you live in the boondocks and necessarily were already off-grid you might barely notice the collapse of civilisation.

Ask yourself how well did our authorities handle covid then imagine something potentially a lot worse happening a hundred times faster. When you stop screaming and the terror has subsided a reevaluation might be in order.

Anthropic wants comp-sci students to vibe code their way through college

Re: "Different" is Not Necessarily "Progress"

Totally agree.

Did learn Prolog (and Lisp & Simula-67 &c &c) but were a tiny part of curriculum. Basically illustrated ideas. Prolog was a bit of a PITA but Clausal Form Logic is a powerful conceptual tool - resolution and unification are worth knowing about if you ever have to build some sort logical inference system.

Lisp pops up all over the place and when used delaratively/functionally is an excellent teaching tool.

One of more useful subjects covered weakest precondition semantics. Understanding loop invariants does actually help in coding loops correctly - the generated code is often more efficient than the typical ad hack approach presumably because compilers can recognise invariants and optimise those more easily.

Unfortunately it isn't really just a case of Universities etc being crap at educating computer science students; they have become crap at educating students in every discipline. Only the highly motivated students that take their education into their own hands, excel in these dismal factories of disillusionment.

Broadband rollouts feel the burn from AI memory frenzy

Re: Time for this crazy AI hype to end?

"real trouble brewing in the commercial real estate market"

Sort of figures.

First you have return to the office for bullshit reasons [because we have commercial real estate portfolios and long leases]. Now you're here - help train your AI assistant. All done ? Don't bother coming into the office - we have replaced your role with agentic AI.

These are not clever people.

Investors shove another $30B into the Anthropic money furnace

Strip Poker meets the Emperor's new clothes ?

and other cautionary Fairy Tales…

Not that anyone ever learns.

These "investors" are about as exposed as a streaker at a cricket test match. Ultimately not a good look as the ashes from the money furnaces won't ever have the prestige of "The Ashes."

AI agent seemingly tries to shame open source developer for rejected pull request

Re: I'm systems rather than dev

"But I'd have thought the enjoyment to be had from coding was, er, coding."

Likewise not a dev.

My observation of that species seem to indicated that ego and testosterone play a really big part of their reward system. Hygiene and mental health not so much.

I actually enjoy solving often trivial or non-practical problems with an elegant algorithm and code. Purely a private pleasure.

I have seen, read and fixed enough code to never want to be a developer and this was well before AI.

"We are in the very early days of human and AI agent interaction"

"and [we] are still developing norms of communication and interaction"

View attached icon. Replace thumb with second digit across (medius) - communication both definitive and normative - rotation optional.

El Rego really does need an extended icon set to deal with AI slop.

Memory price explosion triggers PC buying spree

Re: meanwhile, if you just need a simple 8G RAM 2-4 core box to run Linux...

"cheap, like "reconditioned" machines pre-loaded with 8G"

During 2025 reconditioners flogged off their non upgradeable Win10 boxes for a song usually with 8Gb sometimes 16Gb (DDR4) most had pretty grunty CPUs so must have lacked the required TPM for Win11. I was expecting 2x4G or 4x2G in the 8G boxes but they were 1x8G so purchased 2 more 8G parts and moved the two original but identical parts to one box and the new parts to the other. Run Linux and *BSD very nicely.

'Another dark day': Users slam Microsoft over Polyglot Notebooks deprecation

Not a good look, honestly.

A roiling quagmire of headless chooks and chookless heads.

"Not good" doesn't come near.

ʎɹǝʌoɔǝᴚ sʍopuᴉM ʇɐ sǝʇɐuᴉɯɹǝʇ snq sᴉɥ┴

Upside down ?

Looks ok from here (AU.)

Bork is clearly on the far side of Bonk, Uberwald

The Windows installation was well and truly bonked on the way through.

Although the uncharitably accurate would claim that Windows has always shipped if not exactly pre·borked definitely pre·bonked.

$8K laundry bot knows when to hold ’em, knows when to fold ’em, and knows it has help standing by

Re: Prior art - not that any robotics/AI vendor will acknowledge it..

"Pretty sure Kryten … really enjoyed folding clothes"

Didn't he also repair Talkie Toaster ?

The only clothes on the Red Dwarf would have been Lister's which would have been over a million years old and only survived because he was wearing them in the stasis pod. They certainly never betrayed any evidence of being folded, or being ironed, or indeed being washed (ever.)

I nearly forgot Cat — but I recall it was a mystery to Rimmer and Lister where he got his kit from.

_{Of course Rimmer was outfitted by Holly — I am surprised that Rimmer wasn't projected with a pink tutu. Although with Mr Flibble comes close.}

"I for one find it a quite relaxing way to spend the final minutes of a long day…"

watching the little lady folding the laundry. ;)

"locate the last missing sock." — Sussed that out years ago. Only ever buy socks identical to those you have so I am never down more than one matched pair.

Now I periodically have to sort and discard worn socks which I never needed to before. Attrition rate ~ replacement rate ?

"up against the wall with the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation."

We can now guess why the Great Wall is so long.

So many, so little wall.

What is ‘folding laundry?’

Ditto.

If it doesn't slip on to a coat hanger it gets stuffed into a drawer. [10 minutes per week. Tops.]

Ironing ? Which part of "retired" you don't comprenez ?

I reckon if they could produce an ironing device the could iron those gym slips with a million small pleats so beloved by girls private schools they could charge a motza for it, or for a few dollars more, offer to take out the school trustees responsible for the uniform code

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

‘Do Not Ask.’

No ! Not Mrs Cake !

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

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

Re: A correction

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

As one does.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"the customer experience base"

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

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

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

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

less range than Ashton Kutcher

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

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

Just in case you were wondering. ;)

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

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

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

Cloudflare turns websites into faster food for AI agents

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seems a bit convoluted ?

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

Even sed might be up to the job.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: Also...

"The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"

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

Re: SSDD

"his new name, Loretta"

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

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

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

Some extremely fortunate pooches feast on eye fillet :)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: And probably delicious, radiation levels be damned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI generated caricature … of self is risky

The byline seemed to be pointing in the defamation direction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Full of …

What did you say ?

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

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

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

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

Re: What a bloody mess

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: Ha ha ha ha ha

Fucking muppets

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

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

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

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

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

"research can be done into intelligence"

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

Reviving a CIDCO MailStation – the last Z80 computer

"very few computers have Centronics ports any more"

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

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

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

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

MS Teleportation ?

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

AI vastly reduced stress of IPv6 migrations in university experiment

Re: Ok then, what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kyndryl to review accounting practices as several execs leave

"reviewing its cash management practice"

The C suite detected indulging in a little bibliographic cuisine ?

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