Posts by Bebu sa Ware

Tech support chap told angry customer to think inside the box – and solved the problem

Have some sympathy for the user

If was her first mobile phone and it was 2006, so not likely an early adopter of any tech. Purchasing tech from the likes of Aldi you are not going to get much support from the point of sale staff. The people selling her the third battery in six weeks were either dodgy or more than a bit thick.

I remember ~20 years ago observing an old duck^† bringing her Braun electric toothbrush into the electrical retailer where she had purchased it a few years previously to have the (NiCd, I think) battery replaced and was upset to learn it wasn't replaceable. At the time I thought who is the silly one ? Her or the rest of the world ? I didn't think it was her.

_{† about my age now. :(}

Researcher poisons open-weight AI model for under $100

Re: Pedant's corner

> I always called that style dromedaryCase (because it has one hump, like a dromedary) - I reserve CamelCase for when it has two humps, like a Bactrian camel.

What sort of beast is this NtWaitForWorkViaWorkerFactory ? A seven humped camel ?

Enough to give anyone the hump.

I always found CamelCase like its namesake, bad tempered, likely to spit on you and if given a chance will bite you. Although that might be Windows.

I didn't know the common C convention from as far back as K&R was called snake case but WikiP has it that it was first called that by Gavin Kistner in 2004 on comp.lang.ruby.

Personally I just find snake case just easier to read than camel case — the underscores are pretty much like white space whereas the camel case is like trying to grok a long compound German word like Arbeitsunfähigkeitsbescheinigung. ;)

NTP server that traveled back in time caused massive Aussie mobile outage

GPS card that … “did not operate as expected”

I wasn't far off the U-Blox USB dongle hanging off the back of an old whitebox running WinXP.

Not slagging of U-Blox as I use one as a time source after my own systems' NTP service suffered a "Telstra" moment and were a few years out - stuffs kerberos, license servers &c

One is still wondering why such a large telco didn't run something independent of GPS which has been screwed with before now… such as atomic clocks in a joint effort with other institutions such as CSIRO.

SpaceX open sources Grok Build in same week company was found beaming users' repos to the cloud

"downloads random repos from the cloud and adds them to your code?"

I thought that was de rigeur for most next generation programming environments even before AI really took off.

Even Perl's CPAN wasn't far removed from that and CPAN is ancient. Python's pip often seems to suck in half the internet at times.

MPs fear Treasury cold feet could sink Whitehall's £1.15B shared services push

"believe that the appearance of something is more important than substance"…

> Does that sound paranoid? Maybe. I'm just struggling to rationalise any other explanation.

I think that and the rest is about right.

The preference for appearance over substance is probably a part of human nature but as the central tenet of our civilisation probably dates to the late '70s or early '80s although perhaps different times in different places.

Unfortunately while the illusion of an oncoming locomotive won't kill you, a substantial one will." Nay, it is; I know not "seems." ;)

Salesforce's Agentforce isn't winning over clients, KeyBanc analysts claim

its vision of headless CEO

That's an idea, I thought, before reading it aright as CRM. Still one can dream.

Windows 10 refuses to die, and the security bill is coming due

"I suspect Microsoft will be forced to continue support"

Or offer some sort of cut down Win11 "lite" that will run on lower spec'd hardware and without the crappilot etc.

Granted it's Microsoft so not particularly likely.

Law firm insisted on one password to rule them all

Re: Not just law firms, auditors and accountants too

> … users who do not know what or why 2fa is is shocking.

That sentence sort of got away from itself. :) Or 2fa is shocking.

I don't really imagine too many computer users are the full bottle on algebra (linear or otherwise.) I suspect most of Academia couldn't solve a quadratic equation unaided.

The polloi are conventionally said to lack the arithmetic to be able to balance their cheque books but fortunately for them cheques have largely disappeared.

Re: "In the end, the boss will have the final word"

> the C-Suits have a tendency to get rid of anything that gets in their way.

From what I have seen the C-suite while unbelievably stupid, they invariably do have the low cunning of the proverbial shit·house rat. So their ratty whiskers normally detect an imminent fecal shampoo and usually cry off.

Of course there are those that whose faculties don't rise even to the level of low cunning but then you are best advised to lead the rats abandoning the inevitably sinking ship.

How to teach an old Intel Mac new tricks with OpenCore Legacy Patcher

"We've done our time, served our sentence, and we don't want to go back."

A reformed character then although Windows is arguably both the crime and the sentence.

An object most sublime, the punishment fitting the crime. :)

Windows 2.0 on an AT (286) was pretty horrid and programming for it, worse.

Former OpenAI CTO does what Altman won't, releases a frontier AI model that's actually open

A trillion parameters

975 billion parameters requires 8 x Nvidia's B300 accelerators each of which consumes 14.5 kW according to NVidia's specs.

A trillion I am guessing not a lot more but a quadrillion (10¹⁵) parameters might require 1000 x 8 x B300s if it scales linearly but likely a lot more. So 116 MW. ;)

Fairly sobering when one considers that the human brain requires in the order of 20W and a first class brain could entertain "imagine something unimaginable" without cooking itself which a quadrillion parameter model might do but is more likely reply "sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."

"not a fictional company."

I also recalled them as an '80s AI and supercomputing company.

It's surprising that some AI wannabe has not adopted the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation^† out of the orphanage of fiction — the tech bros have never shown any lack of chutzpah.

_{† or Cybus Industries.}

Prominent Haskell defector pilloried by anti-AI purists

If AI could actually reason…

(pure) functional programming languages might actually be a better match for AI, but of course they can't.

The referential transparency and the denotational semantics of declarative languages could be a natural fit for artificial reasoning (theorem proving) systems but AI is largely a glorified pattern matching system which has been trained on an enormous corpus of procedural (imperative) code.

An AI directed theorem prover might have some merit in this context but I wouldn't wager my money on that.

Hope and Miranda were the two functional languages that interested me back when — I am guessing they are now either very niche or extinct.

Re: "I Can Code More Functionality in Less Time Using Language X!"

> what is your error rate per function point using different language X, compared to using your previous language, language W?

Funnily enough W is an actual language and I think there was also an Algol W.

X would be a proprietary SpaceXAI language that can only express what passes for thoughts from Musk's ketamine addled brain.

Cyberattack threatens utterly critical infrastructure in Japan: KFC

Boggles the mind…

to think that the Japanese would deign to patronise The Colonel or The Golden Arches — one likes to imagine it is just expatriot population — when the rest of the planet lines up to purchase Japanese food.

Why would anyone prefer the Colonel's completely eff'd chicken to chicken karaage ?

I remember when KFC first appeared in these parts, it wasn't too flash and we joked it was rabbit until some old codger^† said in his experience rabbit tasted far better than that; so we settled on stray cat. Improved a bit since then but still not great chicken Maryland… the local Turkish takeaway does a far better Maryland.

_{† this was the early '70s and he would have grown up during the depression so he would recall the local rabbito and have eaten a lot of underground mutton.}

Software bloat? This elevator needs an 8 GB Core i5

Re: Share and Enjoy

> Is it a Happy Vertical People Transporter ?

… "as a packet of peanuts does to the entire West Wing of the Sirian State Mental Hospital."

Australia demands AI companies must produce more energy than they consume, stop ‘theft’ of content

datacenter operators to pay for water infrastructure

Fresh water is the real elephant in the room.

Australia is the driest continent (excluding Antarctica) and during extended periods of drought the supply of water to our largest cities is close to the breaking point.

Sydney has a two billion dollar (reverse osmosis) desalination plant from the last drought (2000s).

Apparently we are now facing a super El Niño which could stress our water supplies even further than during previous droughts.

Unless the AI tech bros want to build the clean energy infrastructure to power both their data centres and desalination plants which they would also need to build, AU probably isn't the most attractive destination. Given the fresh water problem is fairly global perhaps non-evaporative cooling techniques could come to the fore.

Australian politicians aren't noticeably bright but even the dimmest realises should the water run out, will be more than just their testicles hanging from the trees. Arguably the tech bros' brown envelopes aren't likely to be very effective in this particular instance.

If you want Claude to speak nicely to you, try Hindi or Arabic

Re: speak Dutch if you want .... an honest appraisal of potential shortcomings

> Would there be a noticable difference in the way Grok responds to Afrikaans

The "roman" salute might be a giveaway.

I cannot imagine any extreme Afrikaner Nationalist redneck consulting anyone let alone Claude, ChatGPT… well perhaps Grok.

Anthropic's history of leaning into anthropomorphism for marketing purposes.

Nominal determinism aside — they would, wouldn't they ?

I would estimate that 80% of the Anglosphere wouldn't have the attention span to read into short term memory any word of more than ten letters so "anthropomorphism" doesn't even make it off the blocks and for most of those that it does, their lamentable lack of a classical education means they likely haven't a clue as to the word's meaning.

Taking the piss (mostly.)

_{I was rereading Dorothy L Sayer's The Lost Tools of Learning (1948.) After 75 years, still makes one think and think that she still has some valid points.}

The Star Wars cantina scene shows we need a new hope for the agentic web

assumption … be human, look at pages, absorb advertising and perhaps buy something.

> the assumption that every worthwhile visitor would be human, look at pages, absorb advertising and perhaps buy something.

I would be interested in just how true quantitatively that assumption is.

I don't so much "look at pages" as read the text body and flip it if it has merest whiff of selling anything. The graphics unless illustrating the text largely don't impinge on consciousness. Advertising doesn't make any impression at all. Buggered if I could say who advertises on the Vulture or what they sell.

I don't think I have ever purchased anything from an advertisement that I stumbled over on a web page.

I suppose even if the fraction of site visitors that went on to purchase a product were extremely small the relatively low cost of web advertising still makes it worthwhile. I guess google &co can quantify this with great precision.

Perhaps I fail the "be human" conjunct. :)

Engineer shoves Linux peg through Sega 32X-shaped hole

Re: couldn't run Linux because its 68020 lacked the optional MMU,

I think that was the 68010.

The Sun 3s running SunOS 3 (BSD favoured UNIX) were 68020s and later the obsolete hardware probably did run some version of Linux.

I vaguely recall that the 680x0s before the 68020 couldn't restart instructions after a page fault if the instruction crossed the faulting page boundary. Some of the classic Macs had 68010s which probably limited any more advanced memory management.

There are MMU-less ports of the Linux kernel which might make for an interesting life if it were running anything important.

All seems ages ago… hang on it was !

Patchpocalypse Now: Microsoft tops last month's record with 622 Patch Tuesday CVEs

More Patch·o·poxalypse

No ?

You have to be careful what you fuck with as you might catch something incurable. Microsloporrhea ?

Zuck's AI ambitions put Meta on course to become America's next big cloud provider

[Zuck will] "never be as cool as OpenAI boss Altman or Anthropic's Amodei"

You think ?

Of course all three will eventually be at ambient the day after… their last day, but I wasn't thinking that. They all exhibit that malign gormlessness that threatens everybody and everything in today's world. Not cool at all. Not one little bit.

Zaphod - "Shee, you guys are so unhip it’s a wonder your bums don’t fall off."

Zaphod - "Look, I’m up to here with cool OK? I am so amazingly cool you could keep a side of meat in me for a month. I am so hip I have difficulty seeing over my pelvis."

How do you solve a problem like Capita?

How do you solve a problem like Capita?

Slightly ambiguous. How do you solve a problem like Capita (is)? v How do you solve a problem like Capita (does)?

The first, presumably behind the back of the barn with a .22; the second, blame it on the previous supplier(s).

Ministers arm under-16s social media ban with least surprising study of the year

"taking away teens' phone makes them act like humans again"

Even better if it could also work for the nominally adult.

Somehow I don't think removing social media access from the Orange Git would render him any more human than a deranged homicidal clown.

Microsoft chief turns hostile on frontier AI labs, warns companies to guard their IP

"Satya Nadella, seemingly forgetting the billions"

Hope he wrote his name up the wall while he was at it.

Zig creator calls Bun’s Claude Rust rewrite ‘unreviewed slop’

… "already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs,”

One has to admit, a lovely backhander.

All the better for being largely true in so much software. (I have no idea whether this actually applies in the case of Bun or just a bit of gratuitous slagging off.)

_{LLMs = lovely loads of mucky slop}

Astronomers find sugar near the creamy center of the Milky Way (no caramel, though)

Raspberry milkshake ?

Vaguely recall from Greek mythology has the Galaxy was named by the ancients from the breast milk spilt when interrupted by Zeus from Hera breast feeding. Galaktos apparently means milk (gen. of gala.) The Milky Way.

Just wondering if the other breast was chocolate flavoured.

HTTP gets a QUERY method so complex searches can stop pretending to be POST

Re: Idempotent

Good point.

Reminding myself I think strictly speaking an idempotent operation is only guaranteed to produce the same value - it doesn't guarantee the absence of side effects (nullipotent) — just the absence of any that affect the subsequent results.

User crippled a network while trying to learn Nmap

anyone who knows HP-UX will remember getting code to compile can be a bit of a challenge

Even with HP's c89 on HPUX 10.20. Wasn't the compilers - just HP-UX was just weird — seemed like a jumble of System III, BSD, System V, OSF/1 and whatnot^† so getting anything vaguely system dependent to compile was definitely "a bit of a challenge."

I usually tried the HP-UX Porting and Archive Centre first. Fortunately most of the system stuff could be found there. I do recall trying to build isc-dhcp without the least success.

Fun times. /s

_{† including Apollo Domain. I remember a Win2k virus futilely hammering the DCE/RPC port(s) on our HP workstations.}

Microsoft is losing the battle to protect license lucre. It better get used to the feeling

[IBM PC] "was barely more than Intel data sheets made flesh."

I don't think I had seen that in print before but it agrees with my experience of comparing the Intel datasheets and the circuit diagrams included with my Taiwanese PC clone back then.

Heaven knows what the manufacturer thought the customer was going to do with the diagrams. I cannot imagine Shirley the typing pool wirewrapping an ISA card — most PCs even in those early days were used for office or clerical tasks.

Re: Linux for the OS and ARM SOCs for the hardware.

So we shan't be seeing that product in a Bork Report then ?

Apple accuses OpenAI of stealing its core tech secrets

"OpenAI’s attempt to build a hardware business"

Any evidence of Chez Altman building anything?

I thought they confined their efforts to being a major supplier of snake oil.

Meta admits its first ‘superintelligence’ was too stupid to survive for three days

"personal superintelligence that knows us deeply, understands our goals,…”

… "and can help us achieve them.”

Come off it Zuck! Change hands before you get blisters.

I am not sure which is the more impious: the idolatrous desire for, or the construction of these false gods.

Slothful summer app lets you scroll simply by tilting your head

Re: "looking down scrolls up, if you’re a crazy person", ¿ʎꞁꞁɐɔᴉuopǝɥdoɹʇsnoq

How do you do that ? ¿ʎꞁꞁɐɔᴉuopǝɥdoɹʇsnoq

And why is 't' (ʇ) (positioned) wrong ?

Sounds Daft…

but if it actually helps people overcome their accessibilty barriers the world isn't any worse for it which is more than could said for much of the tat being pushed in these enshittified times.

OpenAI's Atlas browser doesn't make it to its first birthday

Atlas not the only thing from Chez Altman that ought to have been strangled at birth

ChatGPT work? Shouldn't think so. What odds it too will perish from some genetic defect before the year is out ?

The Augean Stables of the OpenAI bullshit atelier seems to be shovelling out the crap at such a Herculean rate in the hope no one will notice that it is all crap.

A curious paper in PNAS suggests logical reasoning in the human brain is independent of, and distinct from natural language processing. Given current AI/LLM is trained on and presumably modelled on natural language this suggests any real reasoning is unlikely to ever emerge from such systems. A mad woman's breakfast is the most one might expect, I imagine.

AI customers are coming around to the idea that small is beautiful

As never before, less is more.

Less AI, more sanity.

None would be favourite.

It's an AI web, and we're just rats in the walls

xx

xx

AI garbage as gospel truth.

The first is as nearly redundant as the second is an oxymoron.

As a rat in the wall, I hope I am carrying the right sort of fleas to fatally infect the likes of Claude.

LisaFPGA brings Apple's magnificent misfire back in programmable logic

Re: Lisas were expensive AF

At USD10,000, too true.

> why would you buy a Lisa?

Because in 1983 there was nothing like it outside research labs. When I first saw a somewhat less expensive (USD2,400) Mac in 1984 and got to play with it, I pretty much knew that the personal computers' Pandora's box had been opened.

In practice the imagewriter printer and the near WYSIWYG capability of macs sold a lot of macs into offices at least in these parts.

I guess you had to be there. ;)

Re: FPGA?

Years ago was wondering too. The expansion of that acronym doesn't leave you much wiser unless you are are familar with (digital) electronic hardware.

WikiP has an article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_gate_array

but when I was wondering WikiP didn't exist and Google might have just started (I probably used Altavista.)

Microsoft to switch off OWA Light after nearly two decades

From the Graphic I guess OWA's Lifetimer has run out.

HANG ON! I AM TRANSFERRING MY MAIL TO HEX.

SUSAN DOESN'T APPROVE OF MY HAVING A FACEBOOK ACCOUNT… I DAREN'T MENTION THE X PREMIUM ACCOUNT.

AI tool scours the web for job openings, preps your resume and cover letter

Re: Dystopian horror

Never keen on teams and the advent of Teams was the screaming horror with the accompanying insipid corporate culture, that pitched me into retirement.

Now fully retarded and no regrets. (Olim operarius bastardus ex inferno.)

The poor sods entering or re·entering the employment market (ad inferno) have my profound sympathy. Today I would recommend a teenager consider a trade like electrician or plumber as those skill are hardly likely to be superseded by AI – indeed AI itself needs oceans of water, vast amounts of electrickery and HVAC.

Twenty years ago in the boondocks when we replaced a defunct hotwater heater with a heat pump unit, the sparky was a graduate power engineer with a trade certificate and was taking over the business from his dad. I guess even then there was more coin in the trade than in faffing about in a suit endlessly writing reports for incompetent manglement.

"working-class smell"

Sweat from actual hard yakka.

These days one would probably have to purchase it in small vials at great expense from Chanel (Nº 925 Eau de Travail. ;)

OpenMandriva claims disgruntled admin trashed repos after community bust-up

Slightly confused.

> Every project needs contributors, but they don't all need the kind of access that can turn a disagreement into a recovery exercise.

I did quite grok this initially - I got the "Every project needs contributors" and "they [project(s)] … don't need … a disagreement (to turn) into a recovery exercise"

I suspect grammatically the "they" refers to "Every project" reinforced by the duplication of the verb "need."

Perhaps substituting "those contributors" for "they" could be clearer (and the second "need" with "require.")

There are a few projects that could benefit from suffering a disagreement that turned into an unsuccessful recovery exercise — mostly AI crud but not all.

Open source projects don't resemble anything so much as Italian opera with its contrived high drama and an abundance of prime donne (or if preferred primi uomini.) Although more Pulcinella than Pagliacci.

AI slop writing has taken over the internet, particularly LinkedIn and X

"sick of reading non-human prose ? - we’d recommend getting off the platforms altogether."

The high quality advice that one has come to expect from the Vulture. Of course "non-human" doesn't just apply the artificial simulant but also to the quality control failures lurking in our lifetime own gene pool.

LinkedIn always seemed to have had a fair number of the monkeys too incompetent as typists to be part of the Shakespeare Project.

BOFH: Cross-department AI pitches are easier to swallow with a pint in hand

PFY has even heard of Rod Steiger ?

Given Rod shuffled off the mortal in 2002, if the PFY still were still entitled to the Y he would have been in swaddling in '02.

In 2026, I would be measuring weirdos in microthiels and picokarps.

Dosimeter. Dull Overrated Sod meter.

If the boss is is good for 20 centimusks in 20 minutes (say) - the unit of DOS intensity must be Musk/sec (aka the Elon) - then the boss would be 17 micromusk/sec (17 microelon) small potatoes compared with Space Karen resplendent in his full 1 Elon. I suspect it's also a log scale.

Red Hat offers RHEL support 'forever' for those who need to lock into legacy tech

How about my RHEL5 on an Itanium box ?

Just joking (about the Itanium) but I imagine the offer only applies to customers with the platform/RHEL version that they have under one of the RH support options including EUS.

Probably not beyond RHEL6 and x86_64 platforms.

I would think if there were enough gold on the table, providing a consultancy service to provide bespoke backports and patches to clients might be a nice little earner.

After analysing the client's deployment of RHEL at good number of potential and existing kernel vulnerabilities might be removed simply by building a custom kernel with the unneeded but vulnerable features removed. Money for jam there. Similarly with unneeded services and applications - remove them - which might require the (re)building of custom RPMs of needed software with gratuitous dependencies on unneeded packages, removed.