Posts by Bebu sa Ware

Tesla Full Self Driving subscription to rise alongside its capabilities

Musk revealed the plan on his social media

Mouthpiece ? Backpassage given it is Shitter.

A speech from the throne, I suppose.

The self annointed emperor of Mars although all that Earth 2.0 nonsense has gone deathly quiet unlike his imperial majesty.

If the economy really tanks…

the wage of a full time chauffeur/chauffeuse might on the way down meet the more rapidly rising cost of Musk's FSD^† subscription.

_{† Frankly Suicidal Delusion ?}

Trump says he got a deal for rare earths in Greenland, but they won't come easy

What do Trump and AI have in common?

Pose an environmental threat to the entire planet ?

"You can't just grab 'em by the mine shafts" — 'cos they are frigid ?

The icon is for when I have finished a postmortem on DJT. I hear you say "you can't perform an autopsy on a living politician ?" You think ?

Cursor used agents to write a browser, proving AI can write shoddy code at scale

Mostly Works

Netcat, a shell script and a bit of help from terminfo I reckon I might be able to render the el Rego site. Shitter won't fly without javascript so shielded from that abomination.

I imagine text mode browsers (elinks, lynx, w3m) weigh in under a million lines of code; well under, I suspect if javascript support is omitted.

The Earth is popularly held to be "Mostly Harmless" but the source of this opinion also has "Don't Panic!" blazoned on its cover.

In the case of AI driven software engineering "Mostly Doesn't Work" and "Do Panic!."

Windows fails to tip the scales in grocery store deployment

Over optioned scales

The scales in one national grocery chain hereabouts photographically identifies the produce to access the pricing. It can easilty confuse zucchini (courgette) with lebanese cucumbers so I might imagine, if the scales did the barcode/pricing, the customer having an altercation with the mechanism. Fortunately the screen also displays the weight and doesn't do labelling; I suppose postponing the dust·up to the self service checkout.

I recall there was once a time when scales just registered the kilos and shelf price labels did end up in boot loops—all of two years ago. ;)

Female-dominated careers among most exposed to AI disruption

Butchers were rated amongst the least adaptable,…

"Butchers were rated amongst the least adaptable, but also amongst the least exposed to the impact of AI."

Someone actually paid for this deep insight ?

Actually laughed out loud reading this jewel.

Butchers are pretty much sunk if we all choose vegetarianism but I guess undertakers (funeral directors) are well situated for as long as we cannot choose not to die.

UK trade department put civil servants' feelings first during Windows 11 migration

When going through change, …

"When going through change, people need time to understand in their own way what exactly is happening and how it will affect them personally." etc ad nauseum…

I am already arranging extra space along the wall for this mob of change management consultants in preparation for the revolution.

The likely enormous fees chargeable for this clap·trap might well have paid for Win10 extended support for next three years.

PowerShell architect retires after decades at the prompt

Re: Why unixifying Windows is a very bad idea

"GUI and CLI must be parallel - and both must call APIs. GUIs MUST not be built atop scripts"

I have to wonder whether those APIs are so horrid, or at least impenetrable, that those coding the GUIs just wanted to piggy back on the work of the system programmers who wrote the CLI bindings.

In practice you would want to factor out commonality into shared objects (dynamically linked libraries) to forestall incompatibilities arising between two implementations (CLI v GUI.)

Tech support detective solved PC crime by looking in the carpark

Pretty common scenario back ~2000

Institutions often didn't have much of an AUP; if any.

I had web proxies deployed - mostly to keep the billable traffic down (at the time overseas traffic was quite pricey per Gb.) Everything was logged mostly to block the worst sites (in traffic, not content.)

One day in the early noughties a very worried senior staff member came to see me about the naughty stuff (probably actually pretty tame) he found on his PC that morning. He said he often found his PC still on when he arrived in the morning although he turned it off religiously before leaving.

I think he was as much worried that one of his students was responsible than for his own reputation. Not that there much in the way of sanctions applicable to either at the time.

Looking up the ethernet address [mac] of his PC I determined the IP address held at the time from the dhcp logs and searched the squid logs. Unsurprisingly there was little traffic for work hours and nothing until 02.00 (2am) which corresponded with the dhcp lease being regained when the PC was powered up. The culprit enjoyed himself for more than hour presumably with pornus interruptus causing him to leave the offending material on the screen.

Looking back through the logs I found it was more or less a nightly occurrence at which time the only people in the building could be the contract cleaners.

The complainant being so advised kicked it upstairs and the cleaners were given a dressing down only for slacking by their supervisor. Most of the cleaners were female which probably(?) narrowed down the suspects and the very low wages and lack of candidates meant none would be terminated by the contractor.

In the wash up the staff member complained: "They could have at least emptied my waste paper bin."

AI conference's papers contaminated by AI hallucinations

Possibly a silver lining ?

Once the turd infested waters of research publication are utterly polluted with AI enshittified slop and rise above our necks the incentive to publish old fashioned human generated slop might diminish and disappear.

I would imagine the scale of research publication then being very much smaller but still quite specialized, and more reputation based even with the hazard of becoming more elitist. Fragmentation along national and language boundaries is also a possibility albeit an undesirable one.

My feeling is that the increasing problem of slop shitting in the nest of research publication existed for decades before the advent of the current AI hallucination but adding AI shit might well be the last straw.

Raspberry Pi flashes new branded USB drives that promise speedy performance

For a few dollars more…

I purchased a RPi5 just after it was released and wanted to run Almalinux on it and having never liked sd cards, I picked up a ~$10 sata to usb enclosure, discarded the case and plugged a spare 500Gb sata ssd and a short usb cable to the RPi.

With a bit of fiddling with the boot configuration and the arm64 version of AL8 software it booted and ran very quickly.

The whole thing is housed in a small plastic food storage container — the Pi is attached to the bottom screwed into plastic pillars (actually cut down masonry plugs) and the ssd to the lid with cut·outs on the sides for the cables.

Notepad will now tell you all the ways Microsoft has enshittified it

Re: Answers on a postcard to,...

"new name for Notepad" — Bumswipe ?

Re: They are basically . . .

"waving their genitals in your faces at this point." — a tad risky in my case… I still have my teeth… and am not afraid to use them. :)

Like an old war horse with the bit between the teeth and tearing into it.

Turing Institute Chief Scientist takes acting CEO role amid defense push

"Kyle had demanded the Turing Institute focus on…"

Careful what you ask for… there is always the risk, albeit probably microscopic, that you just might get it.

As Sir Humpty might say: "Then where would we be ?"

The wheels of the British government don't fall off, at least not so frequently, precisely because the ministers are so ineffectual and so rarely get that for which they have asked. (I suspect those with more political cunning are grateful for this stagnant state of affairs so they can generally avoid any responsibility. )

Ancient telnet bug happily hands out root to attackers

Re: Who uses GNU InetUtils?

"Just because it carries a Microsoft, Cisco, etc badge, doesn’t mean the code didn’t come from GNU InetUtils…"✓

Microsoft is probably still using the telnet daemon from bsd 4.2 distribution version (Ok, I will be generous - bsd 4.3. ;)

Re: Who still uses telnet?

I notice that more than one consumer router, switch and other network devices still run some presumably ancient version of telnetd which conceivably is a real problem.

I imagine the cpu+ram of this type of device were strained to run ssh (even dropbear) so clear text protocols viz http, ftp, telnet were still de rigeur. The hardware is now slightly higher spec'd and able to run sshd but still pretty woeful even for the rockbottom price.

Unless fiddled (securetty?) otherwise old Unix systems didn't permit root login on network ptys but that was probably done in login and not telnetd and the -f flag circumvents this.

Kerberised telnet (and ftp) were a thing but in practice I never encountered any systems so configured. (Solaris:Kerberos User Commands )

Back in the day I did configure vsftpd to support ftps mostly because some graphical desktop client (filezilla?) supported it on Win and Macs.

AI hasn't delivered the profits it was hyped for, says Deloitte

"to put their own prints on the work"

… to be tendered in evidence.

Unfortunately rarely ever is.

Anthropic writes 23,000-word 'constitution' for Claude, suggests it may have feelings

"I treat the AI as if it’s intelligent and sentient, even if it isn’t"

The same argument with far greater merit could be made for our treatment of animals (indeed such arguments have long been cogently made by animal welfare groups.)

Apart from the deceitful and delusional AI snakeoil spruikers (mostly both) no sane person could rationally claim that any contemporary AI system even begins to approach a stunned rabbit in intelligence or sentience – and that is a low bar. Warm road kill might retain more intelligence.

"acting according to good values"

… and "good values" are ?

The phrase would seem more at home in the PRC legal system.

An individual might recognise a set of "values" but to the extent he or she assigns "good" or "evil" to each is actually an individual decision… a value judgement… which experience and history inform us those assignments vary greatly between individuals.

My "little list" has grown so enormously that I doubt there are enough hours in the day for Ko·Ko to perform his office adequately.

Debian's FreedomBox Blend promises an easier home cloud

"if it's got the word 'blockchain' in it, it's bollocks."

✓

"Agentic AI Blockchain" — for the trifecta of a cow with three bollocks running first, second and third in the Bullshit derby.

Palantir CEO claims AI will mean western economies won't need immigration

"Sauron used to trap Saruman's brain"

Saruman trapped himself. A point not inapplicable to this whole AI fiasco.

_{As did Sauron (also a Maia) as far back as the First Age when he changed his allegiance from Aulë to Melkor.}

Re: Immigration

"I think he's talking out of his crystal balls"

… and out of someone's arse.

"AI will make little to no difference"

I suspect the ill·intentioned and desperate attempts at applying AI to these occupations could make a really big difference — wreaking untold harm on those industries (specifically Healthcare and Social Care; Teaching) that are already struggling if not actually in crisis.

Goosesteps on European streets ? Really ? I do discern Orcs infesting the streets of the US which is understandable given who is holding the Seeing Stones.

Splash-screen memories from a Bangkok ticket machine

Re: Windows, again

Back then I suspect Microsoft's national language support (and all the i16n & L14n stuff) was a bit ahead of Linux (Thai has its own "alphabet" and numerals.^†)

Although proprietary Unixes based on system V.3 and particularly V.4 might have been up to the task.

_{† makes reading the street signs in Bangkok a challenge but managed to negotiate our way to the Democracy [sic] Monument with a German map (it was nearly impossible to obtain maps of SE Asian cities in the late 1990s. Probably still is.)}

Future jobs in AI will come with a hardhat and boots, tech bigshots argue

"hardhat and boots"

… fighting the Skynet robots ?

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy goes wobbly on AI bubble possibility

Middle of August… middle of August… middle of August…

August 4 would be (in)auspicious.

Whether this time the lamps would ever be re·lit…

"such impressive outfits."

like the livery of the mexican admirals who stand at the doors of prestigious hotel to greet arriving guests ?

Anthropic CEO: Selling H200s to China is like giving nukes to North Korea

"And mouth. And brain. And ass."

Mostly co·located, one suspects, in the inhabitants living south of 49°N.

ATM takes a kicking yet keeps on ticking

Re: A perfect picture

"For the state of the world’s economy."

I could imagine this wreckage being rehoused in a prestigious museum of modern art as a post·modernist^† portrayal of Trump's new world order and the parlous state of the gobal economy perhaps titled "Bretton Wouldn'ts."

Given the wreck appears to have at one stage served as a public urinal, the attention of a conscientious lavatory cleaner might also be advisable.

_{† I haven't the faintest what that means but it looks good in print.}

Marvin…

Is that you ?

The distressed ATM possesses more than a passing resemblance to the head of the original Marvin^† in the '80s TV series. Presumably on his third time through the life of Universe.

_{† for the Sontaran reader: he is the one on your right or try on WikiP Marvin.}

Majority of CEOs report zero payoff from AI splurge

Re: Mandy Rice-Davies Rides Again

"File under They would say that, wouldn't they and/or You're Holding it Wrong"

Or under You're Holding someone else's… rightly or wrongly… more in Ms Keeler's line I suspect.

OpenAI will try to guess your age before ChatGPT gets spicy

"older adults, non-Caucasian users and female-presenting individuals near policy thresholds."

So a minority then ?

(Using the contemporary US definition where any "unimportant" group irrespective of size is axiomatically a minority.)

BTW should there not be a comma between "individuals" and "near" ?

Unless it is only the "female-presenting individuals" near policy thresholds that cause problems with all seniors and "foreigners" being problematic by definition.

Although the picture of a mouthy trans·sexual giving Altman a serious bit of lip… couldn't happen to a nicer bloke. /s

Re: Age Prediction Based on Topics Discussed

"whip me up a nude image of Lady Godiva"

A naked woman astride a horse with a whip ! Delight Unbounded !

"Hey, ChatGPT" In a picture combine a cigar, a blue garment and don't forget the bill.

UK prime minister stares down barrel of ban on social media for kids

"Floella Benjamin starts kicking off - can't help thinking that if Parliament was dissolved"

No idea who Floella Benjamin is but I assume her parents received custodial sentences for the maliciously unimaginative naming of their daughter.

If Pariament were dissolved what would be the solvent? Aqua regia? Certainly would be more effective than current futility of having the King telling them to bugger off, pester a totally disengaged electorate and come back later to have another go.

Having just watched my first episode of "Button Moon" (The Ice Cream Factory) I can see Mrs Spoon and Mr Tub would make better a PM and Chancellor (respectively) than any of the incumbents in the last couple of decades but so would Bill and Ben (with or without the assistance of the Weed.)

[Classic] Captain Pugwash and crew are credibly more three dimensional characters than the UK politician.

"Bring back sortition"

Bugger !

I followed the link and was terribly disappointed as I was imagining it involved politicians' heads lolling about impaled on the cast iron stakes of the fence surrounding the Palace.

Price, battery life, performance – that's how you sell PCs

Re: I want optical drives back.

I have a collection of laptops and desktops with optical drives but it has been years since I have used any of them. Pretty much all installation/rescue media has a usb memory stick option or a pxeboot network install image.

I still have a stack of writable dvd and cdrom media (stashed somewhere… presumably with the usb floppy drive ;)

I notice that (re)writable media is still fairly readily available so there must be a fairly common use for the technology but I don't immediately see what.

Re: A Killer AI App... hmm....

Likewise my being naturally a cynical, suspicious chap and in this context more than a tad paranoid, when someone offers me a "Killer App" (AI "enhanced" or not) the first thing that crosses my mind is: who or what is it intended to kill ?

At the moment for the AI enhanced version the answer is looking increasingly like everybody and everything !

NASA's Artemis II Moon rocket arrives at the launch pad

"there may yet be a plucky British alternative"

International Rescue ?

Thunderbird 3 is presumably capable of a circum·lunar mission although with The Hood clearly running the US administration some interference might be anticipated.

If they make it to Lunar surface I am sure Lieut. Ellis could accomodate them in the SHADO Moonbase.

A can of Cavorite painted on a Reliant Robin chassis might be the high point of UK spaceflight ambition.

Not hot on bots, project names and shames AI-created open source software

Re: 404?

"does not promote the use of violence on meatbags" nor on scumbags.

Scum here is presumably the residual slop that sticks to the sides of a hollowed out meatbag.

Scumbag n. disingenuous, frequently vacuous, promoter of AI (slop q.v.); a pimp.

"looking for a comparably-catchy name."

OpenSwill OpenDregs OpenScum OpenDross

SlopReport SlopToday SlopAlert

One could also consult ChatGPT for suggestions, I suppose.

I suspect the great global impoverishment that is the likely outcome of following this AI lunacy too much longer will mean no one will be able to pay for any of this nonsense (or much of anything at all) with the result that no one makes any money from it — indeed everyone, as well as the planet, loses.

Hiring at India’s Big Four outsourcers stalls, as AI seemingly makes an impact

"using more AI to deliver services for clients"

I can't decide whether to fell sorry for those clients or a delight in a large helping of Shadenfreude for their misfortune.

The clients' clients (potentially us) have my deepest sympathy — the shitty service they have endured so far will now come hard coated with AI shit… a sort of compacted fecal M&M (Merde et Merde?)

Fast Pair, loose security: Bluetooth accessories open to silent hijack

Re: Couple Of Things To Think About.............

"HEART PACEMAKERS which provide Bluetooth connections for clinical monitoring."

Presumably read only.

One might imagine this Benny Hill·esque exchange:

Nubile clinician: "Are you having a heart attack or just glad to see me?"

Patient: "Both!"

Reminded me that the more expensive "adult toys" often have BT controls. A slightly different slant on fast pairing.

Lawmakers urge FTC to probe Trump Mobile over 'deceptive' marketing

Re: usual pattern of decline

"A century ago a pommie pound was good anywhere." although starting to look a little crook.

Ironically 100 years ago in 1925 the British substituted a gold bullion standard (for gold specie - sovereigns and ½sov.) rather than abandoning the gold standard, which ultimately helped to screw things right royally.

Still I imagine even today a bag full of sovereigns would still be acceptable everywhere if not exactly legal tender. :)

Re: scammy videos on YouTube

Go on the tube and search for "2026 <classic car of your choice>*" and witness the power of AI slop.

You are not kidding.

2026 Ford Edsel returned: Así se vería el nuevo Ford Edsel: la versión 2026 del clásico automóvil

My Spanish isn't quite what it ought to be… actually it is exactly what it ought to be, namely nonexistent; appears to discuss a 2026 model of the "classic."

S Twatter: When text-to-speech goes down the drain

Was't Twatter…

the site formerly known as X universally acknowleged as being operated by complete twits ?

Or have I got that arse·about and now have my elbow firmly wedged up my bum ?

Ready for a newbie-friendly Linux? Mint team officially releases v 22.3, 'Zena'

"i18n for short"

What's this?

Decades and decades ago when "Internationalisation" was becoming a thing in proprietary Unix, I recall talk at conference by a chap from Sun who pretty much started off by stating "internationalisation is really about localisation" which made sense to me at the time. Since then I18n and L10n are more precisely defined as two parts of the overall process. The abbreviations remove the need to choose between 'z' and 's'. ;)

I suspect all the i18n etc libraries are actually coded in C or C++ but I do encourage the Rust community to reimplement them. ;)

Coming soon: We interrupt this ChatGPT session with a very special message from our sponsors

Contrary to my previous conclusion…

you can actually enshittify a steaming pile of turds.

I, to my horror can now imagine: "would like fries with that" and this fresh hell "goes better with coke" … only conceivably when in powder form.

On the brighter side it might be the harbinger of decline and fall - the merest particle of hope at the bottom of this cesspool.

Meta retreats from metaverse after virtual reality check

Re: I used the copilot!

"Where I should gyre?" presumably in the wabe but only if you were a slithy tove^† and only if the day were brillig.

_{† I was thinking of Altman and the whole scabrous AI crew but clearly conflating this with slimey toad.}

"It encapsulates a paucity of imagination and self-awareness…"

FWIW. I would have inserted an extra "of" before "self·awareness" to ensure the paucity also clearly applied to the "self·awareness" or rather the implied lack of. ;)

"more than a bit Benny Hill"

An upvote for times long past — Benny Hill, Dick Emery, Dave Allen etc etc.

Benny Hill nice work if you can get it.

Sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that! PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch

Re: How is it possible

"every uneven release is rubbish"

I can see that odd doesn't cover it — everything Microsoft is decidedly odd. But then even the best of Microsoft† is extremely uneven ressembling the terrain of Death Valley one imagines.

_{† probably an undefinable concept as anything Microsoft offers is worse than everything else it offers.}