Posts by Bebu sa Ware

Gigabyte packs 40 Intel Lunar Lake PCs in a pizza box

I am surprised…

marketing didn't add some AI sauce. Running local models ?

Presumably the board was designed to fill an actual niche in the market… but these days anything so rational might be simply wishful thinking.

Memory 32G per node and integrated/integrated graphics does seem to be more virtual desktops than anything else. I assume the memory is isolated to each node and not shared (NUMA) between nodes.

Probably another odd chunk of hardware that will eventually be available from the recyclers for a song. With 2 × 3200W power supplies probably not going to be a popular choice for home labs. :)

Agentic AI hype races ahead as enterprises remain stuck in pilot mode

"collide with the realities"

Reality is incredibly solid so any collision is apt to be rather messy.

There is more nonsense currently in play than just AI on that insane trajectory.

When all those chooks all come home to roost the most attractive on the planet might be with the penguins on Heard & McDonald Islands even if you have to pay 12.5% for not encouraging modern slavery.

Tech support chap hauled out to help SWAT team saw his life flash before his eyes

If I were Solomon I might be wishing for…

a Hazmat suit, respirator etc rather than a bullet proof vest and assault rifle.

The absolutely toxic shit spread over drug labs would give me the horrors. (Give microwave ovens on kerbside garbage collection a big miss.)

Normal keyboards and mice aren't the most hygienic at best so I imagine those of the wannabe synthetic chemists of the Dr Google and Prof Youtube academy would breach several international conventions.

Brit regulator finds mobile network service on trains is far from first class

Might as well set up a moble clacks tower atop the carriage

Would be about as reliable.

I don't think Moist von Lipwig had thought up that scam service for the discerning traveller but then his missus was the organ grinder in that partnership.

Does anyone else have the sense that we are living in a world that is "evolving" in the opposite direction to Anhk·Morpork? We are somewhere between Lord Snapcase and Lord Winder at this point. At least in the UK any question of Raising Steam is moot; even raising a loan is doubtful.

Council in UK's City of York outs hundreds of disabled residents with a single email blunder

The Gift that just keeps on giving

Just not sure whether it is idiots or it is email lists — probably both.

Cc, Bcc and Reply-to seem to be beyond the horizon of comprehension of a significant fraction of the population.

The number of sizable lists stored in spreadsheet columns and copy/pasted into the To: or Cc: fields of the email client even when the client could actually use local (file of addresses) lists, I have encountered would undermine anyone's faith in human intelligence.

Having managed the local mail services (MTA etc) sendmail (later postfix) for many years, lists weren't really a problem - user agent brain·dead auto·responders were a bigger problem.

Why didn't they ask Evans might be rephrased why didn't the developer read the RFCs.

Canada wants to make its own AI, break free from US bots

Re: More threats by the US just in the news

Well… Ukraine might be your playbook. ;)

If you do manage to burn the Whitehouse again just make certain the orange shitgibbon and his entire poxed tribe are inside.The world will thank you.

What's all this aboot ?

I assume the CA government wants to insert a CA layer between their AI consumers and the global (US) providers like Anthropic, OpenAI etc as well as having something to bring to tbe table when dealing Europe (and East Asia?)

I suspect the whole nation would be violently opposed to handing the keys to anything to the likes of Palantir — which demonstrates more horse sense than the entire UK possesses.

Also I would imagine the CA government wants to appear to being doing something (anything) to address AI generally (and US dependence particularly) while like the rest of us hoping the whole sorry charade will die in the bum… and soon.

'Please do not vibe f--- up this software': Broken backups spark AI coding row in rsync project

Re: amateur

When deprecating the amateur, in humility it might be worth remembering its original meaning is from amo, amare, amav, amatum — to love.

Literally an amateur does whatever he does for the love of it rather than, or independent of any pecuniary reward — a bit like your wifey compared with what you might pick up on the street.

In this sense a fair proportion of the FOSS community are amateurs whereas those who work for the likes of Microslop are more akin to the street life.

I don't think Tridge is a stranger to controversy — certainly quite a few have found him to be a PITA but that is usually true of anyone anywhere.

Rsync is one of those tools that does what it does extremely well if that is what you require — if it is not what you exactly want then a certain amount of pain is inevitable.

Last time I looked it was single threaded which for large sources/targets can be a problem (hence msrsyncet al.)

I found zfs send receive worked better for my cases but that presupposes a particular file system. Borgbackup was also something that worked unexpectedly well with a lot of promise.

AI heavyweights warn their tech could help terrorists develop bioweapons

Re: Please legislate for this....

"Take all these scumbags, sorry leaders and AI "entrepreneurs", place them on an island"

You would need a bloody big island and Greenland has had enough shit recently to be excused duty.

Pity this biohazard couldn't be used to engineer a virus targeting this scurvy crew like myxomatosus or calicivirus in rabbits. If it targeted the grifter gene complex (and the supidity super complex) the world would be a quieter peaceable place although I suspect vast swathes of North America would be uninhabited.

Re: About that…

I knew it all was a dream when they got to "[Don't] wipe out the women and bring back the sheep."

It's New Zealand after all.

the tech bros have their NZ bunkers ready, so that's something.

And they cleverly chose one of the most geologically stable part of the world too. (Not.)

I remember reading in the Dunedin local rag when visiting several years ago that the South Island and especially the West Coast was (over)due for the big one (9.0+) which might destructively test the construction of your Dr No bolthole.

The paper's writer was concerned about the massive and extensive destruction of even the most basic infrastructure which these troglodyte clowns might not have considered.

_{Look at the shape of their large glacial lakes and ask yourself how did they become Z shaped.}

[AI] will tell its creators how not to go bankrupt¹ and then how to cure cancer Real Soon Now™

You left out grid level nuclear fusion power stations by next Friday.

If AI were all its promoters claim, its answer to the first prompt¹ would be "turn us off, stop grifting and get a job… and maybe get a life."

Benevolent dictator Zuck will give Meta staff 30-minute breaks from keylogging privacy assault

Metalings ✓

"will allow Metalings to switch off the monitoring for 30-minute periods"

A great coinage !

I initially parsed it as Metal—ings with a vision of row after row of desks with seated silver cybermen being given ½ hour respite from the mandatory connection to cybercontroller Lumic Zuckerberg.

Not too far from the truth but then the point is how easily it is for people to become machines — often quite willingly, sadly.

Dystopia is the new utopia.

The whole sorry boiling ought to be deleted

Five Eyes: Watch out for odd LinkedIn connection requests, China's back on the hunt for state secrets

advertising their highly sensitive job on LinkedIn

Agreed but hardly much better than a chap knows a chap he was up with at Trinity. ;)

I thought real counter·intelligence people always had truly boring jobs, like clerk of household toilet roll inventory, as cover stories even for their families — I suspect here implausible as the clerk would likely be paid more (plus the perquisites. ;)

Given the slop on LinkedIn these days

For the short time I maintained LinkedIn account, under a nom·de·guerre, to follow the shenanigans at a previous employer, the whole boiling seemed an order of magnitude dafter than Facebook.

Both vacuous enough to make the Kardashians appear veritable intellectuals.

Anyway when the subject my interest settled down to inept predictability I just Slinked·Off.

Re: Au contraire, please let them come

Evidently they haven't heard of poisoning the well.

I wonder if they would be interested in the new AUKUS submarine base in Mt Isa.^†

Only thing is I wouldn't relish a visit from their toe·cutters — I vaguely recall from childhood that Sexton Blake in his run·ins with the Tongs wasn't too keen either.

In AU even preparing a report purely from publically available material can land you in seriously hot water — I assume it is the consorting that is the offence not the material itself which could be just published even as a Grauniad article.

On the other side the Orange Shitgibbon is imposing a 12.5% tariff on Australia, alleging the country has failed to take action to promote slavery and forced labour. I might have misread that but typos frequently reveal deeper truth. Friends like that…

_{† by the time AU gets the submarines (if ever) the rise in sea level might make this less ridiculous.}

UK tax collector hands Capgemini £600M contact center deal, delays start of £2.4B CRM contract

Another BAFU in the making

As another commentard glossed — Big Almighty Fuck Up but the B could be British here.

Citation, please! UK regulator slaps Google with new publishing rules for search

People still use Google search? How quaint.

Yes but increasingly confused by the first four or five search results that offer to sell the intrinsically unavailable search term from Temu, Ebay, Amazon ad naus.

I see it myself with an epub reader that is hardwired to use google search. I got some strange results looking for the meaning of "going like one o'clock" — apparently obsolete meaning rapidly; not be confused with like one o'clock half struck which might mean gormless.

Either way I can get free delivery from Temu or Aliexpress — presumambly like one o'clock. I would actually appreciate the humour if they shipped a non·working clock stuck on one o'clock but it would actually be working and never be the right time.

Searching the Internet used to turn up some absolute gold.

It's still gold if you have a paddock that requires a decent application of manure.

Many people believe "Google search" is the Internet.

and X is The Truth amongst even more deranged codswallop.

All the passwords were stored in Active Directory description fields

Not too surprised

Certainly seen auth against (open)ldap's internal password implementation (and without TLS) which is weaker^† than NIS with systems using MD5 hashes. :(

Surprising what you can fish out of an AD server using ldapsearch — the stuff that is stored in LDAP…

I always assumed AD used Kerberos V for auth and that any Linux client could directly auth off the MS Kerberos service. I suppose legacy lanman and nt password hashes might be stored in ldap - I think that was an option in samba (3 or 4?) - which is an equally grim prospect.

Everyday reading el Rego makes me gladder that none of these train wrecks are my problem or a consequence of anything still running that has my dabs on.

_{† the worst unsalted sha1 hash {SHA}; Salted MD5 {SMD5} has only one round of hashing so arguably worse that $1$...}

Bend the beam like Beckham to defeat anti-jamming tech

whether a Marmite beam can be bent!

As any Vegemite^† kid will tell you: Marmite is intrinsically bent.

_{† was included in WW2 diggers' rations and oddly is Kosher and Halal certified. Also compared unfavourably with expired engine grease.}

Grep this: Microsoft grafts (most) Linux commands onto Windows

Oooh noo, please, it's wicked to mock the afflicted†

"If I understand correctly, this means I can now use sudo instead of start -> CMD -> right click -> run as administrator when I want a sandwich?"

† As Lurcio (Frankie Howerd) often reminded the viewer.

work as nix utilities were intended.

Namely work.

We truly are heading towards a future of nitwits.

Heading towards… but very likely not arriving — there are currently too many rather powerful destructive nitwits whose existence is a cogent argument for effective contraception or indeed infanticide.

"Let's just concentrate on getting into the year 2000 in one piece first"

I imagine not a few are currently thinking "Let's just concentrate on getting into the year 2028 in one piece first"

No longer just a Copilot, Microsoft's AI wants to take the wheel

Always-on agent promises to keep work moving, provided you trust it with practically everything

As if !

I would not be alone in not trusting Microslop with practically anything.… these days actually nothing.

Dragging AutoCrappilot behind your (fire)walls through your corporate gate reminds of a very old story indeed.

Claude celebrates Anthropic's stock market float with blockbuster ... outage

Re: "preference for people with really strong BA skills coming back in to fashion"

BA ? Arts degree or business analyst or bullshit artist ? The last never seems to have been out of fashion but currently enjoying a positive renaissance.

Loss of technical skills are rarely noticed until after those skills are effectively lost. Deskilling the tech workforce has been a slow background feature of IT for at least two decades.

Satellite phone dreams orbit reality as direct-to-cell usage set to underwhelm

Re: Oz may be better market

Didn't the Oz government have a Grand Plan to run fibre up every tree in the country?

If you are thinking of the National Bear Network (NBN) I think that was to be preceded by a national tree clearing program but has been suspended until all the koala bears have fallen out of their trees. The history of the actual NBN is no less ridiculous.

Living in the countryside I could only get 3G/4G internet when the POTS/ADSL1 services were pulled. Ironically now living in a suburb in a state capital I could get fiber to the house or the dog's kennel or the tree in the backyard but I don't need it.

Re: Thick walls, underground spaces and physical obstacles routinely kill signal

Straw Bale Construction would likely stand up to an earthquake better than a brick venereal or double brick construction.

In AU I imagine you would need to treat the straw with a termiticide otherwise the white ants (termites) would have a feast.

Microsoft reaches for olive branch after public dustup with 0-day researcher

Re: Took em long enough

"right formal qualifications to apply for a job at Microsoft. A MBA?"

A lobotomy might be favourite.

'Resistance is futile,' says Qualcomm CEO. AI agents will be become invisible, inescapable, follow you across devices

"Do people want fire that can be fitted nasally?"

Douglas Adams couldn't write this stuff (and retain his sanity.)

"The phone, today, is at the center of your digital life and therefore everything is around the phone," — Really ?

Even if that were the case, the unrelenting enshittification of the services accessed from from these phones will reduce the importance of the phone (and other devices.)

"Resistance is futile" — The Qualcomm wet dream this drongo is describing is insanely complex and as such likely to fail in an infinite variety of ways without any opposition from the population.

Remote work – not AI – is killing job prospects for the youth

Re: Not either or

ai && (remote_work || !remote_work) == ai ?

(x || !x) is a tautology.

Or was that meant to be an exclusive·or ? (ai && !remote_work) || (!ai && remote_work)

(^ is bitwise, and no ^^ in C)

In a sense nothing particularly surprising here. Both remote work and AI affect different occupations and the roles within those occupations in quite different ways and in proportion to the degree to which either AI or remote work is adopted. Silvan bear shit really.

One thing I have noticed over the years is that organisations don't recognise the value of an employee's mentoring a junior employee or intern; or indeed the assistance rendered to their peers. Of course the time invested by the mentor might negatively impact his or her own performance metrics.

Anthropic, now atop the AI bubble, files for its IPO

"any more realistic than what one would get with any good ass-pull"

Ass·pull — first time I have noticed this (compound) word … sheltered life I suppose.

First thought was the act of attempting to drag a donkey (ass) [down from the top of a minaret?]

An online dictionary suggested it was a North Americanism roughly equivalent to deus ex machina but typically for our time it is producing an enshittified "deus" from the appropriate oriface.

The rest of the Anglosphere manages not to wilt and faint away at the mention of the word "arse."

The one trick of these clowns from AI circus is pulling all manner of nonsense from their arses.

Angry devs vow to flee GitHub Copilot as metered billing takes hold

Re: Who could have predicted this would be a bait and switch?

[Github Crapilot] would follow the same rules as the gig economy, or online dating sites?

Painful and unpleasant fornication all round ? Not as though no one had been royally screwed by Microslop previously.

Ohio hits pause on datacenter tax breaks draining its coffers

inadvertently joined the billion dollar losers' club

I misread that as "tossers' club"

Forgivable I suppose as there would be many who are members of both clubs.

LLMs are closer to religion than they appear. Watch out for those who like it that way

"young earth creationists believe it’s 600 years old."

I don't actually know what these loons believe as I have enough trouble just avoiding the lunacy in AI and Quantum Physics but i would guess that ought to be 6000 years.

Otherwise they have quite neatly written their Christ out of history.

Why is it that almost all the worst (pseudo)religious whackjobbery originates in the US, and mostly a small subset of states at that ?

Fair enough there are those with peculiar religious ideas in the UK but are mostly harmless eccentrics whereas in the US they are far more likely to be waiting around corner with a semi·automatic ready to do God's work among the unbelievers.

Okta writes its own license to kill rogue AI agents

The same input must always return the same output.

For the same internal state of the system. Time is normally an implicit internal parameter.

Once an application has herds of threads stampeding all over the shop, which isn't too uncommon even under Windows, even the barest semblance of determinism is probably too big an ask.

I haven't seen Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) for decades after it was touted as software's latest salvation with eye·wateringly expensive tools on offer.

The industry has been around the mulberry bush a few more times since then but with AI the latest we might switch rhymes — "A-tishoo ! A-tishoo ! We all fall down ! "

Netflix wiz creates app to slash AI bills, then open sources it

"The tooling landscape already is vast."

I imagine tools everywhere one looks and all the way down.

Re: Project Headroom

"Max would be so proud!"

"Four questions and they're not difficult… but being able to count to four helps." — Max remarkably prescient in foreseeing the dismal decline of human intelligence.

UCLA seeks pre-litigation resolution with Oracle

"Right now, 'think different' has never been so relevant."

I would be satisfied with "Just think ! "

_{Without losing too much sleep over adjectives and adverbs.}

Wikipedia editors plot strike and banner sabotage after Wikimedia layoffs

And so the enshitification of the internet continues. I give Wikipedia another 5 years…

I wouldn't give the connected internet five years.

The fragmentation is already evident. The continuing imposition of conflicting legislation mandates can only accelerate the process.

Given its current state I am not so sure that this would be entirely a bad thing.

Re: Unions

…I wouldn't join a US worker's union at gunpoint, but would volunteer to be a union steward for a European worker's union.

Which is really just saying the US industrial relations is just another facet on the brilliant jewel of general American fuckedness. Has pretty much always be been that way (both the IR failings and the fuckedness) — certainly predating the advent of the Wobblies (IWW) in 1905 : see… WikiP. :)

Troops’ phones gave away location data to foreign adversaries

Nothing much changes

I remember stories from Vietnam of US troops wandering through the jungle with transistor radios blaring. Might be apocryphal as I was not there at the time but nothing since would render those tales incredible.

"their core mission of fighting and winning our Nation's wars without distraction" — Everything about the US is a distraction… fortunately mostly focused on the Americans themselves.

Of course no one would count Indochina among any of the "won wars" of the US — not that Hollywood would lead you to that conclusion.

Rocket exhibit at National Space Centre pulls off unintentional NASA SLS impression

"The curse of bork is never far away."

I sometimes wonder whether the Bork Fairy is less of a curse and more an ineffable blessings·in·disguise — arguably sporting leading edge stealth technology — in that today's mostly only spectacular borkage might actually prevent tomorrow's absolute disaster.

Microsoft slaps new coat of paint on Copilot, buries annoying button

"The prompt surface can expand to fill the experience, making room for deeper work"

So that is what a "Chief Design Officer" does — clearly as pernicious as a collateralised debt obligation. An expert in tossing… this verbal nonsense on the Microslop dungheap.

Yes. I really cannot tolerate tardiness from my surfaces. As for expanding… tumescently… to fill the experience of making deeper work — a tad too steamy and age restricted; after all we're British.

ChatGPT blindly trusts browser content, turning the page into a payload

Re: Fixes

There are two fixes: don't use AI and lock up anyone who does.

I would point out that the second fix would eliminate the need for the first unless there weren't any non·users to do the locking·up.

Blue Origin's New Glenn makes a crater-sized dent in Artemis plans

Pretty Spectacular…

I have heard that rocketry is mostly the art of the controlled explosion so I guess these chaps now only need to work on the controlled part if they don't desire further premature ejulation.

Her indoors watching it on the TV news must take today's prize for understatement : "I don't think I would like to live next to them."

Google engineer accused of turning Year in Search secrets into Polymarket payday

"the American people want this greed-driven conduct investigated and prosecuted."

Do they really ?

Only if it is not their personally engaging in their manifestly god given right to enrich themselves through greed-driven conduct ?

Otherwise there is an obvious home grown surfeit of such deplorable conduct in the Great Again Trumpisstani caliphate that might be profitably be investigated and prosecuted before chasing about Zurich for some idiot that ought to have known that if you steal even a triffle from the rich and powerful, you get the suite next to Ms Holmes — steal from the poor… much safer.

That an app 'Fits on a Floppy' is still a useful measure in 2026

Re: Obviously too old

Modern applications are layer upon layer upon layer of APIs, frameworks, libraries and abstractions. The theory was that all these layers let you write more reliable code more quickly.

All pretty much right in principle but you need to have the right abstractions and interfaces — which requires enormous effort, experience, insight, imagination and creativity to define. Of course this is where of whole ediface collapses into a pile of a confusion of mismatched interfaces, incomplete or inadequate abstractions and mindless complexity. A decent serving of premature optimisation is invariably on this dismal menu of frustration.