Posts by Bebu sa Ware

AI running out of juice despite Microsoft's hard squeezing

"I'll wake you up when we start climbing the Slope of Enlightenment."

Much appreciated although I shouldn't imagine that would be much before the Last Trump.

User complained his mouse wasn’t working. But he wasn’t using a mouse

Re: Glasses case != Mouse

"Assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups".

That saw has more teeth in some of the more left footed parts where Assumption eg Assumpta is an actual name.

BOFH: HR's AI hiring tool is perfectly unbiased – as long as you're us

Re: HR's AI hiring tool

"I always prefer paper CVs"

Preferably manuscript applications only.†

_{† removes the illiterate and illegible.}

We did not have Brave clashing with Rupert Murdoch on our 2025 bingo card, but there it is

Re: Reminds me of another litigious nuisance

I assume on the evidence that outcome of the interview with Heaven's gatekeeper was Rupert was returned as fairly clear the other place wouldn't want the blighter.

One has to wonder which of the undead claims his carcass the zombies or vampires?

As Elon Musk makes thousands of federal workers jobless, tycoon pushes for $56B Tesla pay deal

The lights are going out.

"Musk has achieved more in the last three months than those thousands of bureaucrats have achieved in their entire careers."

Exactly what have his antics achieved? Or indeed in hindsight will ever have achieved?

Much easier to demolish than to build.

Unless you are a vandal you want to be certain before destroying something its replacement will be an improvement.

Thousands of people each doing small things that don't in themselves amount to very much over a working life can collectively en masse achieve great things. They need leaders like George Marshall not the prancing powder puffs that Americans have deluded themselves into believing are leaders.

Re: In a nod to the past...

I saw one in Lilac green last week.#b2d4af (178,212,175)

1959 Edsel Mist Green?

Ford Jr did a bit better in the christening lucky dip than "X Æ A-Xii" (omitted stty -parenb -istrip cs8 and sane?)

Wear a sprig of lilac on May 25 to express your general disgust.

Éminence grease.

Really Mr Heinz!

I suppose it's froggy for those foetid fat laden turds that stubbornly refuse to be flushed.

Dissenting I actually believe entirely called for.

I note from the AU media that at the Whitehouse Tesla Showroom gimmick,Trump purchased a Red Tesla S from Space Karen which Trump said he would pay for later with a cheque. Personally I would be wanting cash rather than his vulcanised promissory note.

Need cash? Your IPv4 stash can now be collateral for $100M loans

If the orange eejit gets a whiff of this...

he will claim 0.0.0.0/0 - 255.255.255.255/0 as US sovereign territory before flogging the then previously foreign owned allocations to his mates.

I wonder what a class B gets these days? A lot of early adopters got class Bs (certainly in AU) which when the organisation connected to the internet were largely unused with applications gateways (proxies), socks proxies and later NA(P)T being popular with RFC 1918 addresses used internally.

Although it would be ironic if US political shenanigans were to supply the impetus to get universal† adoption of IPv6 done.

_{† ex US and KP}

Apple has locked me in the same monopolistic cage Microsoft's built for Windows 10 users

Re: Horses for courses

"Be seeing you." lb

Coincidentally Six of One are holding a convention April 11-13 at Portmeirion (cunningly named PortmeiriCon 2025. ;)

And I thought Trekkies and Wholigans were tragics. Please don't tell me there's a Blake's 7 appreciation society.

Re: Horses for courses

"ORGANYC"

Organy^© protected term describing food like material containing animal organs typically the likes of foetid dingo kidneys and other offal too disgusting to be legally incorporated into sausages.

Re: If you want a general purpose computer ...

I am a bit sensitive to this, maybe overly so. If the route I entered a building seems to me to be the shortest and safest route out in an emergency, I may very well take it.

Try working in a University Chemistry department for motivation. Not only fires but they also do a decent line in "bangs."

The ANU RSC one was fortunate in that it occurred on Poetsday† and everyone was down the rubbity‡ most likely after a long lunch so no human casualties. (Must have been francophiles. :)

_{† Friday ‡ Pub}

Amazon, Meta, Google sign pledge to triple nuclear power capacity by 2050

"AI doesn't run on fairy dust after all"

And here I have been labouring under the misapprehension that pixie dust was precisely what sustained AI and crypto.

Move fast and break things plus plutonium has to be damn close to game over I would have thought.

Printers start speaking in tongues after Windows 11 update

"speaking in tongues after Windows 11 update"

..."And all speak with tongues, and there come in those that are unlearned, or unbelievers, will they not say that ye are mad?"

Seemed rather apropos. :)

_{1 Corinthians 14:23 KJV}

Man with artificial heart survives over 100 days outside hospital

100 days without a pulse.

Absolutely brilliant biomedical engineering. From the model the two sides of the heart have separate rotary pumps for the different pressures required for the lung (low impedance) cf the body (high impedance) - clearly the flows are identical.

I would be curious whether after things have settled down you would notice not having a pulse. Or indeed there are any pathologies associated with the absence of a pulse.

I suspect we will be able to culture replacement hearts long before we will be able to construct mechanical hearts which have MTBF of the biblical three score and ten.

Free95 claims to be a GPL 3 Windows clone, but it's giving vaporware vibes

"just freewheeling with an LLM bot"

The strcat() code in free95/src/string.c

while (*dest != 0) { *dest = *dest++; }

wouldn't exactly be disconfirmatory.

MINJA sneak attack poisons AI models for other chatbot users

I parsed Minja as Minge† + ja

From there it can only descend from the unbelievably crude, unpardonably rude to the unforgivably offensive hence unprintable.

_{† q.v. Hint not 民革 although flashes from Kill Bill almost seem relevant. :)}

Re: Prior art

"People have blind spots where they allow other people to modify their knowledge base unchecked."

Pretty much the definition of "social media," cults, religion, politics... pretty much humanity I fear. :((

_{Hint: If you slowly descend past an empty jar of Orange Marmalade you have disappeared down rabbit hole. Look about and identify those with jam on their paws.}

Re: Mixing everyone's inputs into one bucket!

"Although my attempts to train ChatGPT to answer everybody only in iambic pentameter are moving very slowly."

Germanic alliterative heroic verse for the win. ;)

"Girt with God's anger, Grendel came gliding"

CISA pen-tester says 100-strong red team binned after DOGE canceled contract

Re: Stolen Elections

"heavily armed citizens ... wasn't that exactly to empower citizens to prevent government over-reach?"

I think not quite. The second amendment has:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The security of the state intended here was from external threats, I suspect.

Anyone outside of un-sane 50 might imagine the right to keep and bear arms was somewhat conditional on broad participation in a regulated militia especially in the absence of a standing army.

"...from my cold, dead hands." Arranged with pleasure.

Microsoft quantum breakthrough claims labeled 'unreliable' and 'essentially fraudulent'

Re: In other news...

How's that cold fusion doing?

It's being packaged with room temperature superconductors, this Majorana† topoconductor and a good lashing of AI.

_{† Ettore Majorana had interesting political affiliations not unlike those of our King DoGE.}

ASML will open Beijing facility despite US sanctions on China

Perhaps time to (re)learn the arts of industrial espionage.

"mass manufacturing targeted for 2026. It is said to use a technique called laser-induced discharge plasma (LDP), claimed to be simpler and less costly than ASML's laser-produced plasma (LPP) technology."

Perhaps ASML is positioning itself for a future technology sharing arrangement with Huawei when the EU doesn't give a rat's about US policy and conveniently forgets the Uighurs.

If as seems very likely that the US disappears up its own arse, Europe and the rest of world with have to deal with the realpolitik of the expanding role of China in the absence of a credible US.

Who knows in the absence of effective US coercion a beneficial détente might be reached between the PRC and the rest of the world.

Although my guess is that China has so many pressing domestic problems that its global engagement will also falter and turn inwards thus with each of the two super[sic]powers' heads firmly wedged up their respective bums the task of limiting the consequent fallout and maintaining some sort of global order will fall on smaller nations and groupings of nations.

Unfortunately interesting times.

No peace for Gandi this past weekend, after storage SNAFU breaks email and more

Re: Quelle surprise!

"Nobody does any work over there after 3pm on a Friday."

And we don't have "poets day?"

Unfortunately I don't seem to be able to come up with an acronym for «Sortez tôt car demain c'est samedi.» Although one might work something with "samedi." (eg Sortir après midi est...) Or even vendredi (Va en... )

_{I did notice your /s.}

"Normal services on the social media site have been resumed"

For an unfamiliar meaning of normal.

As for Ukraine being responsible for the DOS attack - they are being denigrated in every conceivable way by the current disgrace that passes for a US government to the great embarrassment and shame of possibly soon former allies, that the Ukrainians don't need to add any more grief to their current pile.

I wouldn't dismiss a pack of extremely pissed off Palestinians from being responsible not that it would do them any good or harm for that matter.

In the insanity of these times just as likely to be a Russian false flag operation to augment the excrement the US is pouring on UA

Personally I applaud anyone raining or pissing on Space Karen's parade.

Earth's atmosphere is shrinking and thinning, which is bad news for Starlink and other LEO Sats

Just wondering...

So far this is just anthropogenic climate change cockup not conspiracy.

I was just considering if a recalcitrant nation (say Borogravia†) found it in its ineffable interest to completely sabotage Starlink and its ilk and arranged for fragmentation device(s) to be simultaneously detonated in the low Earth orbits these satellites use.

The question I posed myself was how much mass you would need to achieve these nefarious ends requiring say 1.0g fragments (~ball bearings.) The area at 500km is about 600 million square kilometres where I imagine the altitude range is roughly 100km [500km-600km] so a fairly tight radial detonation say from 550km would have to spread into roughly 62 billion cubic kilometres which appears pretty thin but it stays there (albeit slowly losing altitude from thermospheric drag) until it either hits something or reenters the atmosphere.

What immediately struck me was the problem might be like nuclear fission. There are apparently ~7,000 starlink satellites in orbit with masses v.2 800kg, earlier vv. 260kg so all up 1,620t to 5,600t of Musk shit which might well be a critical mass that the detonation of less than, say, 100t of a fragmentation munition might destroy enough of those satellites to cause a chain reaction to take out everything else in LEO.

Launch as a service could make this feasible for even third rate powers if the operators were not too particular about their clients (and their payloads) and operated in a low regulation jurisdiction. (Poetic justice if SpaceX were that provider.)

_{† stubbornly autocorrected to Belgravia which would have amused Sir Terry, I suspect. :)}

The IT world moves fast, so why are admins slow to upgrade?

The IT world moves fast, __is__ why are admins slow to upgrade

"Never mistake motion for action." (Hemingway?)

The most degenerate form of futile movement beloved of manglement is of course spin.

If the endlessly spruiked progress in IT were always an unequivocal improvement on what was replaced we wouldn't need backups. Would we?

In my experience we are ever more frequently playing host to Mr Cockup who is forever in rut over those systems that have so far resisted his overtures.

Things are looking down for cutting-edge cosmic observatories

Re: "Finally, ice is transparent at radio frequencies."

Greenland, which I understand is due to be renamed "East Alaska" very soon.....

Not if the "Central Alaskans" burn the Whitehouse (again.)

Nemo at 250,000km/s?†

However, over-C creatures do tend to give off Cherenkov radiation!

The radiant little blighter would be circumnavigating the globe six times a second. :)

_{† cwater ~ c/nwater, nwater ~ 1.33, cwater ~ 225,000km/s}

Vodafone: Be in the office 8 days a month or lose bonuses

"help teach members to form a pattern."

Sounds more dressmaking classes or kindy. :)

Operant conditioning? But more likely Tom Brown's school days with the patterns being the sadistic weals from six of the best. :)

(Hence the Jimmy Edwards' Whack-O! Icon.)

Manus mania is here: Chinese ‘general agent’ is this week’s ‘future of AI' and OpenAI-killer

Australia: Who comes for a month without visiting Sydney?

Australia: Who comes for a month without visiting Sydney, but goes to Tasmania in winter and spends a week in parts of the Outback that need three days at most?

An agoraphobiac?

I might suggest a discerning customer. ;)

Realistically someone interested in geosciences or paleontology and the usual nutters fancying themselves as Bear Grylls rivals pitting themselves against the lethal wildlife and hostile environments (hopefully unsuccessfully. ;)

Junior techie rushed off for fun weekend after making a terminal mistake that crashed a client

"clients of IT service providers don't pay to have their servers broken and applications go down"

Not only before the advent of mobile phones, but also cloud services and likely before MS.

Now pretty much de rigueur.

eBPF. It doesn't stand for anything. But it might mean bank

Re: Cost Savings

Knuth's "premature optimisation is the root of all evil" also dates from 1974. Must have been the Zeitgeist then.

Re: Cost Savings

I would suggest that meta developers leave the ampersands off until they might need the references.

The Rustards would likely point out that would not have occurred with Rust which is probably true - gladly concede the point to them.

SpaceX's 'Days Since Starship Exploded' counter made it to 48. It's back to zero again now

Re: Zeppelin being smug

According to WikiP referencing https://asn.flightsafety.org/wikibase/435032 the most recent airship crash was 25 September 2024 not exactly a disaster but there have been a few since 6 May 1937 Hindenburg Lakehurst. The last actual Zeppelin flight was 20 August 1939 and without incident. The remaining Zeppelins' aluminium was recycled for wartime aircraft construction.

I would dearly love to "rediscover" Cavorite just to rain on Musk's parade although the temptation just to paint bomb the prick with the stuff might be too great. ;)

Re: Bodge job

"melodic response' - shook shat itself to bits while humming a little tune, tiddley pom."

One of the "hums" of The Bear of Little Brains† seems apropos

"And the cuckoo isn't cooing,

But he's cucking and he's ooing,

And a Pooh is simply poohing

Like a bird."

_{† arguably a towering intellect in Trumpisstan.}

Re: "That's not how contracts work."

They have form when it comes to stiffing contractors.

I always had the impression that Space Karen's often peculiar if not bizarre antics were channeling L.Ron who had developed stiffing creditors to a fine art, I believe.

Gay' must be eliminated even if it is someone's legal name

So Me and My Girl isn't likely to see a revival in Trumpisstan the number The Lambeth Walk in particular? ;)

More Voyager instruments shut down to eke out power supplies

I am reminded of Dylan Thomas' poem

Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night

Re: I could only wish my work lasted that long

"The richer people are, the less they tend to care about longevity"

Except of course of their own miserable carcasses.

Microsoft tells abandoned Publisher fans to just use Word and hope for the best

Re: Moral of the tale

ASCII or EBCDIC?

Radix-50 or SIXBIT? ;)

Re: Ho-hum

"When did a youngster ever listen to its elders?"

Conventionally never. (As it ought to be.)

Unfortunately viewing† footage of MAGA love-ins there appears a preponderance of the younger, if not actual youth, ranting for their demented senile elders.

If the demise of MS Publisher were to cause a few its users to invest in a text editor and a few SitePoint titles on web design, html and CSS the web might be a slightly less hideous sight.

† thankfully from afar.

Surprise! People don't want AI deciding who gets a kidney transplant and who dies or endures years of misery

"human moral decision making"

The shenanigans in US politics suggests there is none there and little to suggest there is any in other domains.

The single best argument for humans being ultimately responsible for ethical decisions significantly affecting other humans is that both parties are human and each has to live with the consequences of those decision. Potentially a rather limited time in the case of the latter party.

Consider that the most despicable man that ever lived was some woman's son and even your most justified actions inflicted on her offspring must also include pity for her suffering. Common humanity which by definition machine learning cannot possess.

I do wonder whether the 20% wastage in renal donations (presumably cadaver rather than from a living relative) is reflected in nations whose health systems are not so entirely private for-profit corporate as is the case in the US.

Stuff a Pi-hole in your router because your browser is about to betray you

https://github.com/Trellmor/bind-adblock

Just what I was thinking of. ;)

Re: Lazy slacker...

Hosts doesn't scale.. it's a text file searched linearly. There are better solutions these days.

I think most modern Linux distro run a name lookup caching service which might obviate this. I recall nscd then sssd did some of that.

Failing that you could build db files or nis maps from /etc/hosts then listing db &/or nis before files in /etc/nsswitch.conf.

As I already run internal named instances (auth+recursive) I am wondering whether I can snaffle their blacklists into a backend database that bind groks.

The Badbox botnet is back, powered by up to a million backdoored Androids

Re: Oh dear

I thought that the miscreants being paid for an invisible advertisement which obviously I didn't to see was worth the μ¢ worth of network traffic and cheaper than an adblocker subscription. :)

Always a mystery why intrusive net advertising was worth their bother. Personally I actively avoid buying any particular brand that engages that activity.

Seriously though having these devices infested with this stuff is more dangerous than its pennywise fraud in that the malware itself could be subverted by blacker hats.

Completely off topic but I today I googled a biblical reference Gen. xxx 14-16† from a footnote concerning mandragora/mandrake in T.H.White's Bestiary‡ and was met with dire warnings about the dangers, illegality etc etc of CSEAM. If the matter wasn't so serious it would be laughable. I assume the roman numerals xxx for 30 were the trigger as Gen. 30 14-16 is ok, well as much of that part of the bible is ok and any verse after 17 with xxx is sort of ok~ish but only biblical in a very oblique sense.

«Caution / Child sexual abuse content is illegal and harmful / Get confidential help

If you're worried about your thoughts or behaviour

Stop It Now....»

Robert Owen _1771-1858 wasn't too amiss in his “All the world is queer save thee and me, and even thou art a little queer.”

_{† selected from the e-text into the e-reader's default web search, Google. Duck/Bing isn't so dense. I imagine in White's day that was the convention for Bible references.}

_{‡ The Bestiary: The Book of Beasts, T.H. White, 1954}

Cheap 'n' simple sign trickery will bamboozle self-driving cars, fresh research claims

Re: Actually, it works surprisingly well

"I found myself milling around South Island (New Zealand)"

Possibly one if the easiest places for FSD to work. The resident population is pretty sparse and the traffic density even on the major roads low. I reckon peak hour in Dunedin would have to be gazetted to be noticed. The sealed roads while narrow are generally in good condition and well signed.

The greatest hazard pre COVID was the number of Chinese (PRC) tourists hurtling around mountain roads† at suicidal speeds having clearly obtained their licences from a cereal packet.

A beautiful and serene part of the world worth visiting but I lived there until 13 so am probably biased.

_{† eg Te Anau to Queenstown - one petrified clown skidded to a stop a mere metre or so from a 500m precipice.}

Re: Spatial memorization and "appearing" signs

"Stop? Proceed with caution? Ignore and continue?"

And the chap who drops a U turn.

How a driver might respond to all Xs above the lanes would also depend on where the lanes were headed. Only the insane or suicidally stupid would proceed into a tunnel. (Or even a bridge or floodway.)

"mandatory signs might end up containing beacons that passing cars can read passively"

Actually a passive RFID like device embedded in the sign which encodes the speed/times/vehicle restrictions that approaching vehicles could scan might not be the daftest idea.

Although in the current shit storm of insanity even a chocolate teapot would rank among the less daft.

Athena Moon lander officially FOADs – falls over and dies – in crater

"and promptly fell over, has been declared dead by its operators."

Perversely made think of the the sequence of the last Soviet leaders.

Some definitely looked like that they had previously received the attention of a taxidermist augmented by soviet mechatronics.

Presumably when the batteries wouldn't charge or the hydraulics sprung a leak another carcass was heaved out of the Party warehouse.

Of course for its sins the US is now getting an indecent dose of perestroika and glasnost à la put[a]in.

Crypto takes a dip as Trump signs Bitcoin Reserve order

Mid Terms?

From my limited understanding of the impenetrable processes of the US government I have an inkling that executive orders (which I think roughly correspond to ministerial regulations in saner parts) can actually be overturned by the legislature (senate or senate+house?)

In two years time if the composition of the legislature were to significantly change towards sanity or to something more insane but contrary to the current lunacy, then a great wad of BTC might be dumped in the market. Given crypo's innate volatility I imagine then the price would rapidly head south.

If the US were to hold a much greater chunk of the issued BTC etc, I imagine other nations for sovereignty concerns and transnational entities to limit financial risk might eschew crypto altogether.

The next insanity might be fixing the BTC to the USD

eg 10μBTC = 1.00USD (about as sensible as the post war gold standard 1.0 oz. troy† = USD35.00)

I should start touting the advantages of bimetallism. ;)

_{† 31.1034768g}

Ex-Googler Schmidt warns US: Try an AI 'Manhattan Project' and get MAIM'd

Re: > risk assessment ???

"claims Trump is very likely a Russian asset"

If that's an "asset" I don't want to consider what constitutes a liability.

Developer sabotaged ex-employer with kill switch activated when he was let go

Re: Not a very bright boy...

10 years in the big house = 1 year for the offence, 9 years for stupidity.

If stupidity were Ebola most of World's problems would (de)cease within a week.