Posts by Bebu sa Ware

Microsoft engineer speedruns Raspberry Pi magic smoke in five minutes

I touch my tongue to those metal things.

The effect is electric if not magic. Actually the terminals of a 9V battery lightly held against the lips normally produces a mild tingle.

Back in the day I recall hearing a suggestion that if you didn't have a neon mains tester with you just lick a used match and hold one end and touch the other end against the suspected live (240VAC) chassis - you should only get a light tingle. Me? I was never game to test that theory having already had a number of "bites."

Beside by that time I had given up the cancer sticks and didn't normally have matches about my person. (This was before the curse of disposible lighters.)

He forgot to enter the 'nosmoke' command.

Nah.

It goes into /boot/firmware/config.txt

# MODE_SMOKE 0=None, 1=Magic smoke, 2=Invisible smoke, 3=Trying to give it up

MODE_SMOKE=0

I always wondered why it was "magic smoke" when clearly the magic vanished once it had escape the device as the smoke's only "magic" was its unpleasant stench invariably lacking the tang of tin that characterises magic. If there were any "magic" in the smoke you ought to be able to capture the smoke and restore function to a magic·bereft defunct device by forcing the smoke into it. No one has ever managed to do this.

How does the magic get into the device in the first instance ? I hear you ask.

Presumably it is unavoidably, incrementally and invisibly incorporated during the mechanical process of construction with the "magic" being drawn from a universal magicarium field to which it will ultimately return; often with a flourish of smoke.

Re: Keying...

it was only the memory that died.

Patently not. Clearly still vivid. Only the hardware has gone to God. ;)

It is an peculiar observation the even quite competent chaps in the hardware line, once that have been promoted from the ranks into the heady atmosphere of bossdom rapidly become as hamfistee and reckless as a demolition slavey.

Some I wouldn't trust to plug in a a three pin (AS/NZS 3112) power lead without their getting it the wrong way round.

EU's fishy digital certificate system leaves exporters floundering

I was expecting a story

about the EU bureaucracy stuffing up a top level PKI Certificate Authority rather than some high tech version of a fishing licence. Still there is always next week.

UK names Barnsley as first Tech Town to see whether AI can fix... well, anything

Re: TykeAI

"And if that dunt confuse t'american readers nowt will"

Admittedly that doesn't requires much.

Now if this pilot were in Geordie land or the Gorbals, any local rendering would also lose most of the Commonwealth.

Her indoors couldn't follow John Rebus (2000 Series) and before that Andy Dalziel. She preferred Morse as he spoke proper English. :)

Re: Bad luck, Barnsley.

"You normally have to pay designers for that sort of thing."

"You" and "normally" are doing a lot of heavy lifting there. I wouldn't pay the vast majority of "designers" for anything, even a handjob. Ok a few of that tribe are pretty foxy so maybe that… negotiable.

Re: "Needless to say, the word "could" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here."

Well that'll be Starmer. He's the idiot obsessed with AI and pushing it into everything. Barnsley's just the latest example of trickle down [his leg?] from him.

Incontinent or incompetent. When he opens his mouth hard to tell; I would take options on both.

DIY AI bot farm OpenClaw is a security 'dumpster fire'

What would you expect ?

The unskilled messing with a critter clearly sporting open claws and scratchy scratchy gashy gashy.

Hardly any cleverer than climbing into cage with an obviously agitated tiger and giving the poor blighter a kick in cods and wondering why he is gleefully shredding you.

Sudo maintainer, handling utility for more than 30 years, is looking for support

Re: superpowers not superuser

Sometimes you want to permit a subset of unprivileged users to run particular commands as a dedicated non privileged user without the hassle suid binaries and another posix group or weird permissions and ACLs. Sudo was ideal for this situation.

Musk, Bezos, Ellison… " quick grope in their sofa"

I suppose that is the essential difftence between these lucky few and we poor mortals.

Most lowly peons would prefer a quick grope on their sofa instead of blindly thrusting their grasping paws into the innards of their lounge in the vain search for small change like the apocryphally demented scotsman missing a farthing.

These are not lovely people.

Azure outages ripple across multiple dependent Microsoft services

Appears Meteorology might be the appropriate discipline

for the Azure and other clouds.

Daily forcasts of the "weather" expected, broadcast on the news channels.

Certainly the Amazonian butterflies have been busy recently. ;)

British military to get legal OK to swat drones near bases

Permitting the destruction of "unmanned" drones ?

I can imagine those on the UK government backbenches that normally vacation with the pixies asking "isn't it discriminatory restricting it to unmanned drones ? There could be a woman not in it."^†

Presumably if any destructive response is restricted to unmanned (unwomanned etc if you wish) threats then manned etc threats may not destroyed summarily which leaves the question of how to determine whether a vehichle is manned or unmanned.

Ultimately the only reliable determinant is size. If it is below a certain size it must be unmanned.

So the smart option for a hostile party would be to deploy a remotely controlled or autonomous vehicle like a waymo or specially outfitted cessna to deliver their goodies.

The pixielanders might bomb your tanks with donkey dick pink paint.

_{† Yes I know. L. manus — n(f) hand.}

Firefox makes AI optional, like it probably should have been all along

CFLAGS += -DISABLE_ALL_AI_CRAP=1

make

Although make clean and removing the source tree might wiser.

You might take the evil out of the developer but I doubt anyone can now take the developer out of the evil.

Microsoft's Sinofsky saw Surface fail coming – then hit up Epstein for advice on exit

Re: Give me $14 million...

"the avarice and greed gene."

I suspect it is more likely a congenital neurodegenerative slow virus or perhaps a prion. A mixture of shingles and mad cow disease ?

I would settle for Epstein's $1m. Don't these pricks have a life ? (Probably the definitive rhetorical question.)

Microsoft kills standalone SharePoint and OneDrive plans, because they’re not suite enough

'further enshittifying our cloud offerings.'

It's not raining turds already ?

McDonald's is not lovin' your bigmac, happymeal, and mcnuggets passwords

"the idea of anyone purchasing their product anonymously."

And then complain about the legions of the William Wagglestaffs, Bertie Woosters and fellow travellers purchasing their precious products.

Not that the Bard in his darkest moments would ever have deigned to dine at a McDonalds caravanserai.

When I must have such an account I spin off another gmail account with hopefully a unique or at least peculiar or whimsical name (like this one actually.)

The idea that no one really needs to know everything about anyone is an anathema to these clowns when in the final analysis both parties a far better off knowing as little as possible about each other - only enough to complete the transaction with the details retained for no more that the minimal time required.

Want more ads on your web pages? Try the AdBoost extension

"If we don't feed the advertisers, then we'll be forced to pay artists for their creative work."

That a promise ?

I like to think a winnowing of the legions of [bullshit] artists and the flood of AI assisted slop would be a good thing.

Just today, I followed a link to Tom's thingy with a browser on net without a DNS filter (a la pihole) and faced wall to wall animated ads - utterly unreadable.

Possibly with the asymptotic enshitiffication of just about everything the population might abandon the net as a source of information and quality entertainment. Which in turn might lead to a boutique renaissance in (paper only) technical and other periodicals.

Notepad++ update service hijacked in targeted state-linked attack

" admins, I also refer to as cunts."

I'll take that as a compliment. CoFH ? :)

I would say all the potential defenêstrées with whom I dealt, if parachuted into the role would, apart from making an even bigger hash of it, also be massively more objectional — a real ornament to their country.

Re: What are the alternatives, and are they safer?

This popped up on one of the news sites: https://itsfoss.com/notepad-next/

Open source and cross platform win/mac/*nix but according to the gitea repository still a bit rough around the edges.

Personally I never strayed from the Vi faith even using MKS Vi on msdos 3.x so notepad and clones are a bit academic for me.

Never really got my head around emacs and early on you could really run it single user mode on a unix box but you could usually get enough of a sick system up to run vi (basically a writeable /tmp eg bsd mfs.)

Elon Musk merges xAI into SpaceX to spread universal consciousness via a sentient sun

Pretty convincing evidence

that ketamine chews holes in the brain although a more cautious analysis might conclude the subject's gray matter was already fairly moth·eaten.

The blighter seems to be in the running as the prime contractor for Aristophanes' Nephelokokkygia (The Birds) — he would certainly be the anchor tenant.

Help! Does anyone on the bus know Linux?

Special AU Bus Borkage

In BNE we have a few new fully electric buses fitted with large screens that display the progress of bus along it's route giving the passenger adequate warning of the upcoming stop in order to press the stop request button.

All brilliant until it loses its GPS positioning or whatever and falls back to the (clearly pommie) vendor's demonstration display which starts in Chadwell Heath and progresses to St Georges Hospital which with a little google·fu appears to be the Dagnum 173 route [UK.]

The locals are just a little bemused or amused.

Just before Christmas I was in this bus on which a middle aged French tourist couple had just boarded to return to their host; they had used the outbound (correct) display to navigate and were intending to do the same on the return leg.

After the first few 173 UK stops the pair were in a blind panic and at the next stop went to ask the driver to determine were going. The driver was a fairly new arrival from outside the anglophone (and also apparently the francophone) world so they didn't get much joy there. Madame spoke and understood English somewhat better than Monsieur so I managed to convince her they were on the right bus and the stop after the next was theirs. I am fairly certain they didn't believe me that the incorrect display on an Australian bus was of a UK bus route. I should have said the bus was made in the UK - infinitely more credible.

AI security startup CEO posts a job. Deepfake candidate applies, inner turmoil ensues

"greenscreen reflected in his glasses, and at one point dimples appeared on his face"

but the extra arm finally gave the game away. :)

You can only take the piss with any story from the AI circus. Take any of it seriously you will soon be as ga·ga as its proponents in pixieland.

The funniest "deep fake" I have seen was an extremely convincing image of a scantily clad (ok, unclad) young lady^† … convincing until you noticed the extra arm. Cacked myself laughing. Still extra extremities might add extra spice …

_{† slight facial asymmetry, moles and skin blemishes, realistic body hair were all present. Nothing lack… the opposite in fact. :)}

Techie's one ring brought darkness by shorting a server

So I am not completely paranoid…

I was always fairly careful of rings and wrist watches (especially with metal bands) for this particular reason but had never encountered anyone who had suffered an unfortunate outcome from their jewelery. Even working in the vicinity of cryogenic magnets I always wary of any ferrous material and wondered about relatively non-magnetic stainless steel watch straps and watch cases.

Screwdriver bits falling out of the driver into the electronics caused grief on more than one occasion. Epoxying a proper rare earth magnet into the driver fixed that but then I needed a pair of pliers to change bits.

Tungsten carbide rings were a fad a couple of years ago (may still be) and at the time given the relatively low electrical conductivity of WC (~0.2 μΩ·m) I wondered whether they would be a better bet. At the time they were popular with tradies. I use to joke if they fell into a pool of molten metal their ring would survive. (Aqua regia or HF - possibly not.) At the time the WC rings were all pitch black perhaps with some gold inlay; too close to Vetinari's stygium signet ring. ;)

Sword of Damocles hangs over UK military’s Ajax as minister says back it or scrap it

$[special] ?

Perhaps the UK government outsource the British Army's requirements analysis and procurement to the German Army ?

The UK military might just get what it needs rather what a doolally collection colonel Blimps think they want.

Perhaps the German military are just as bad but one likes to think not.

Systemd daddy quits Microsoft to prove Linux can be trusted

Re: systemd and its journey towards taking over the world !!!

"I never understood what 'problem' was being solved by systemd !!!???"

More concisely Poettering &co dosn't seemed to have understood the basic problems with systemv init.

Having constructed countless start script over four decades I found that you expend a lot of effort on basic boiler plate code:

• checking the service's binaries and configuration files are present
• checking the service isn't already running
• checking any prerequisites are installed, and if services, that they are running
• after starting the service taking care that the process is demonised, checking that is actually running

Even at that point if the service has to be monitored and restarted attempted on failure you have run another service.

A minimal systemd by itself did more or less address these issues. I found constructing unit files under RHEL7 a lot less labour and not unpleasant. Once systemd took over autofs (automount) the lunacy seems to have set in.

Alternatives for looking after the system start up and services weren't new. Before systemd - DJB's daemontools had been around since the Ark; Solaris' service management facility (smf) dates from 2006. Linux has had quite a few init replacement contenders before systemd and still has.

My main objection to the systemd circus is that it is not easily decomposable - if take one bit you mostly have to take the lot; including, unfortunately, the clowns.

Re: systemd and its journey towards taking over the world !!!

Especially in places where there were a mixture of Unixes SunOS, SGI Irix etc admins used rc.local to recreate the System V start up (without runlevels.†)

Meant if were sufficiently cunning clever you could use the same script on the different platforms. I even bothered to implement Irix's chkconfig.

Later FreeBSD did something similar (but different.)

_{† typically start/stop scripts in /etc/rc.d with active links in /etc/run.d lexically ordered by numerical prefixes to the link's name.}

Sat Nad declares Windows 11 has a billion users – just don't bother asking for details

Re: He did not answer the question why it took five years.

"…divorce from MS (admittedly Trump probably had more of a hand in that)."

I didn't realise that Europe could meow.

The orange geriatric "groping for good" — how wicked !

Re: Statistics, statistics and [redacted] lies

Mint was installed as soon as I had checked it powered up ok.

I just pulled the ssd polluted with Win11 and installed Almalinux on a replacement ssd. I retain the original install for a while just in case (of what ? raving lunacy ?)

I suppose my machine is counted in 'Nad's mythical billions. I would be more interested in the numbers of Win10 lts and iot installs out there post Win10 end of support. Presumably you could get a low estimate by the number of Win10 lts systems updating from MS servers.

Google's Project Genie could put even more game developers out of work

The Genie has trouble maintaining a consistent reality for more than 60 sec ?

Probably shares that limitation with the tech bros and US Administration.

The statement:

"The environments remain largely consistent for several minutes, with memory recalling changes from specific interactions for up to a minute."

is interesting in that it implies that any consistent really in this system requires the retention of an increasing quantity of "history" in memory.

In the external world I do not think that our current local reality depends on the accumulated history of everything going back to the big bang.It seems to be a case of everything just follows "standing orders" until some change is imposed on some bit which alters the evolution of that bit until the imposition ceases and back to standing orders. The standing orders would be the laws of physics presumably embedded in the fabric of space-time which are believed to be unchanging and therefore unable to store history.

I guess even the most powerful AI machine is unable to perform the physics calculations that reality does implicitly in real time, so has to memoise . :)

The Cathars believed that physical reality was (an illusion?) created by a powerful Djinni like figure (Rex Mundi ~ Iblis?); as ever nothing new here ? What was Googles motto? "Do no evil." That's the one. Figures.

Deciphering the alphabet soup of agentic AI protocols

Re: Protocols

"All those agents should just talk to each other and everything else in English[*]. "

Ne'er a truer word said in jest.

Natural languages do implicitly encode an enormous quantity of information that represents physical reality, a model of mind and culture.

Of course if those agents could actually understand a natural language you will have arrived at your destination but of course agents don't "understand" (in any meaningful sense of the word) a single thing and with the kind of technology (LLM) being used never will.

Musk distracts from struggling car biz with fantastical promise to make 1 million humanoid robots a year

Re: Realistically ...

"robot with the Gentleman's Companion option"

While I don't have much confidence in Musk pulling this off, I would be more concerned that if he shipped a robot so optioned, "she" might well pull it off.

With Sods' Law and unimaginative engineers, you can be certain the lithium battery packs which can become more than a little heated, will be placed around the "interesting" ladybits in which case the unfortunate "Gentlemen" will be presenting to an emergency burns unit with an interesting story.

I suspect that the Teslabot LLM ...

has not encoded the fact that a human (including Space Karen) is not a suitable substitute for the kitchen knife block (well, not a fact more a preference.)

Or that toddlers aren't a substitute for fresh pet food.

Future archaeologists will be puzzled by the Teslabotta Army

I follow the reference as far as the baskets of rotting fish but ever since his infamous pedo—guy slur, Musk has been so completely on the nose that an ocean of garum could not conceal his stench.

Re: "tasks that are unsafe, repetitive or boring"

"humanoid form factors … Top heavy, unstable, and too few appendages ?"

Based on existing examples certainly extremely unstable, those whose skulls consist of 75mm of bone definitely top heavy but I suspect many of the ladies would opine "far too many appendages^†."

_{† "Titter ye a little bit more." I was thinking pussy groping hands. "Oh, please yourselves!"}

Re: "tasks that are unsafe, repetitive or boring"

"I saw another video on YT about grape growers in South Australia, who are struggling to sell their grapes for $200 a tonne, thats 20c a kilo, and yet my local Woolies sells grapes for $16 a kg."

SA is a major wine growing region in AU so I might wonder whether these growers are producing wine grapes which given the global drop in wine demand, are a drug in the market ?

Table grapes are different varieties altogether and most on the market now (certainly the seedless black grapes) are patented and grown under license (eg Midnight Beauty^®) which increases costs. I remember when that variety was first introduced growers were paying around AUD300,000-4000,000 each for the license (and plant material.)

Having written that, I concede our grocery duopoly has been ripping off both growers and customers for decades and doubled down from COVID onwards.

Re: "tasks that are unsafe, repetitive or boring"

"Well that covers most of what the human race does every day."

And that doesn't include the bad sex…

I know the way out, thanks.

In-house techies fixed faults before outsourced help even noticed they'd happened

The obvious practical solution…

The Sun (Sparc?) server was stated to be old so I imagine the dual cpu cards would not be at a premium so retaining a couple of tested refurbished cards at Callum's site might have been a cost effective and practical solution.

I recall Sun stuff when good, as it often was, was very good; when it wasn't, it was a right cow.

_{Trying to run Solaris 2[.0?] reliably on an early SparcStation 10 with two Sparc CPUs was one such complete cow. ca 1992·3?}

The device was the siren to give four minutes warning of a nuclear attack.

Definitely one case where ignorance might desirable if not actually bliss.

Four minutes of absolute terror v. "Oh what was that bright…"

At least in these enlightened times our lords and masters couldn't be arsed to give the polloi any warning.

OpenAI gives ChatGPT models the chop – two weeks' notice, take it or leave it

users "preferred GPT‑4o's conversational style and warmth,"

Names and addresses please. We will assign a reality reattachment team as a matter of urgency.

This nonsense is the cognitive analogue of retinal detatchment - the dinghy of the mind has thrown off its painter and drifted off to La·la land.

The difference being while a sharp blow to the head might be responsible for retinal detachment, it is invariably restorative in these case of reality loss. An idle cluestick might be profitably employed in such cases.

NS&I's IT car crash considers cutting legacy links to stop the bleeding

I was thinking it would be cheaper…

to just transfer en masse all the accounts held in this dysfunctional state owned bank to a functional British non-state owned bank. Then I realised that a functional British anything these days … is probaby a mythical beast known only to heralds.

Re: Nothing to see here

Have to agree with Rita Mae Brown on this one.

Love to know the reference here.

She was well under my radar but looking at WikiP she appears a very interesting woman who has lived to see more than anyone's fair share of shit. I can only try and imagine the bitter tears being shed in the face of contemporary America.

Phones down, brooms up: HashiCorp co-founder lectures business hopefuls

When Chaps like that, …

who have gazoodles of dosh and don't need to care or worry about anything ever again,^† start sweating the small stuff like this, you have to question whether they are congenitally short a sandwhich, or missing the ace of hearts, or lacking tuppence·ha'penny^‡ from a sovereign ?

If he came out criticising some of the pressing big picture problems facing the planet I would be more sympathetic.

_{† The resemblance to being dead is probably not coincidental. ‡ I am that old.}

BOFH: Eight pints of a lager and a management breakthrough

"often, in bad situations, doing something can make things worse."

Prefix with "Don't you think you already have done more than enough ?" you pretty much have "the TL;DR" of modern manglement.

When dealing the escape of hazardous materials, containment is the initial goal… not spreading the shit around.

Management instinctively believe if they have (mis)managed to shit in their own nest that the "best" thing they can do is to spread the brown stuff around as quickly and as far as possible.

By the time the metaphorical Hazmat team arrives the situation is usually irrecoverable. Metaphorical shit rapidly sets diamond hard.

The critical function of all the staff between manglement and the coal face has been to run interference to ensure the clowns don't bring the roof down on top of everyone. Of course now who are the staff being retrenched in favour of AI ?

I assumed…

that "his PA" in the case of the soon to be former boss that PA stood for psychiatric attendant.

Seems a shame that the current US administration doesn't have a BOFH who could distract the Orange Idjit from his current cunning plan which must be about where the full might of the US military will be used to liberate the Heard and McDonald Islands from the curse of Penguin fundamentalist oppression. The way things are going the penguinistas might actually prevail.

BOFH: "The 17th Street Macdonalds are offerring free "all you can eat" big macs to any second term president with bottomless coca-cola slushies."

Mission accomplished.

IBM says AI is insane in the mainframe as z17 sales surge

Re: Not if the companies are still using the old systems and pretending they are not

"Is X for unfertilised eggs?"

Given the age of the tech I was thinking Mr Bobitt or anyone suffering a similar even if equally well deserved misfortune.

_{I suspect that's one (dreamt) scene in the Dutch movie "De vierde man" anyone remembers… and Renée Soutendijk. ;)}

Banker claims Oracle may slash up to 30,000 jobs, sell health unit to pay for AI build-out

"heartened to think in a year or two AI will be doing all this messy work for me."

Never really imagined Larry and Sam in the interior decorating game. You never know… but you would have to watch them like a hawk to ensure the space behind your pictures was also painted.

The pair might be more successful resurrecting Wayne and Arthur Dodgey's Dodgey Brothers franchise although arguably hardly a novelty in their case.

"Banks in Asia appear more relaxed about Oracle's risk profile"

Makes one think.

US banks have never been overly fussy about who they lend money to. The orange felon has left a wake of defaulting loans behind him.

One would then have to wonder to whom these relaxed "Banks in Asia" wouldn't loan money too. I should try shaking them down for a decent wad to fund my combined hydrogen fusion reactor lead to gold transmuter. "When will we see the gold ?" "Soon, once the fusion reactor is working."

I suppose recovery might be more aggressive - the prospect of having one's toes severed with a pair of boltcutters would be powerful incentive not to muck with such single minded recovery oriented lenders.

If you're one of the 16,000 Amazon employees getting laid off, read this

"Is a dream a lie if it don't come true, or is it something worse?"

Never encountered that line (not my kind of music) but an interesting question.

What is worse than a lie ? A purposeful deceit ? A Faustian bargain ?

The most perilous and also the greatest deceiver is the dreamer himself which is likely the something much worse.

I find it difficult to credit that anyone with a modicum of sanity would dream of working for Amazon; only those resigned to a worse fate would accept an appointment in that dismal demesne — even clearing fatbergs in municipal sewers would be preferable (at least there you wouldn't require an empty coke bottle to take an on·the·job slash.)

Re: Corpo-ration & "values"

Understand the difference between "worth" and "value" then it becomes quite apparent most large enterprises are worthless irrespective of their purported valuations.

Corporations have no interest in increasing the worth of their services or of their employees; their only concern is to extract the maximum short term value from both.

Ultimately the worthless inevitably become valueless and is discarded. I am guessing the current AI Tulipmania might hasten this demise. I can only hope.

Re: Amazon are absolute bastards - I would never work for them

I would have read that as:

[They] gave him a dementor to help exorcise the Amazon Bastard that was embedded in him.

When he left Bezostonia did he bring his coke bottle commode ?