Posts by richardnpaul

Founder ditches AWS for Euro stack, finds sovereignty isn't plug-and-play

Re: VPS

To this I would counter tell me you have never encountered a thundering herd without telling me you have never encountered a thundering herd.

AWS outage exposes Achilles heel: central control plane

One thing that I think most people realise when using software that supports S3 is that they often default to the global S3 bucket name endpoints, which are hosted by us-east-1. However, as I found out when debugging this, these endpoints can take up to 24hrs to resolve the bucket name in DNS. I was building an automated patch testing CI pipeline with ephemeral instances and was finding that it was failing due to the dns name for the buckets not resolving. The solution was to change the aws endpoint to use the regional names and endpoint which resolve near instantly but the defaults may have caught out a lot of people yesterday.

Should UK.gov save money by looking for open source alternatives to Microsoft? You decide

Re: Extra option?

I'm sorry but I take it that you haven't looked at all the things that Canonical do either then? MS do do a lot of things, reflected in their over 200k head count.

Re: Extra option?

You would be looking at 10000 devs for the amount that they are paying MS. I'm halving the figure because you also need datacentres and network connections and all that cost as well as management layers etc.

Look up how many employees Canonical have, it's less than a 5th of that.

If we can spend the taxpayers money to make something of value then we can also sell that value to others. As I've just said in another comment. You could sell support services and still have it as FOSS and if you got to breakeven you would actually be saving and have independence. You'd also likely be able to sell some solutions to the enterprise level and you wouldn't have to pay huge sums for supporting legacy systems because you could just task resources to migrating those systems because you'd have a huge pool of talented engineers available.

Savings would likely be made but even if not, that £1.9b per year would stay in the UK economy.

Re: Extra option?

In-house dev teams is a good call. As would be offering support services for any FOSS that they produced so that if other governments started using that software we could make money off of it (even breakeven would be a massive win).

I'm on-board with the funding allocation if that's how it actually works. I think it should be like speed limits, a limit not a target. We should also encourage underspending, by saying, whatever you don't spend this year we'll give you x% more as a limit for next year incase you want to save for something in particular.

Desktop-as-a-service now often cheaper to run than laptops - even after thin client costs

I guess it works so long as you have an Internet connection and their datacentres are not having an outage, but for a 64GB of RAM, 24c machine and 2TB of storage I'm pretty sure that that would eat most of the $1000-1500 of hardware costs very quickly. Sure, call centre staff might make do with 2c and 8GB of RAM but some of use require a bit more hardware than that to get our work done in a reasonable amount of time.

Perplexity vexed by Cloudflare's claims its bots are bad

Regardless of their protestations, the website owner is the arbiter of how they want their content accessed. You as a user of agentic services are not automatically entitled to access their content via third party automation. If they want you to visit the website personally you can choose to do so or choose not to use their website. The AI provider should not do anything in-between to try to access the website for you against those wishes.

I saw a bunch of self entitled douchebags on X were arguing that Perplexity weren't wrong in this to provide the content how the user wanted to access it. To that I say tough s***, if you don't like the terms do without.

It's easy enough for an AI agent to pass the link to the user and say sorry, the website owner doesn't want me to access this content but here's the link to visit yourself. Based on other sources this looks like it might be relevant to your query.

Google's unloved plan to fix web permissions gathers support

Re: How about no...

Well Google's Meet doesn't have dedicated app (that I'm aware of, but it has been a few years since I used it) because it runs in a browser, which means that it pretty much works on any OS with a browser and the various other supporting bits like JS and probably audio/video codecs etc.

That means that you get (mostly) full support on some truly esoteric devices because you don't need an app to join; mostly refers to background effects/blur not working under non-Chromium based browsers last I encountered.

I guess that they want to improve the browser experience for that product at least, which in my experience has been far better than Teams and Zoom (Slack Huddles being a standout here as well but only within the Slack ecosystem).

AWS says Britain needs more nuclear power to feed AI datacenter surge

FFS always with the nuclear

We need to re-educate people so that when they think about a consistent 24hr energy supply they think of geothermal, not nuclear. It's likely a damn site quicker and cheaper to power up new geothermal sites than it is to build and deal with nuclear power projects, and they would likely come in closer to being on budget and even maybe provide useful by-products; well to be fair nuclear provides us with Plutonium which I'd like us to turn in the phalus shaped bombs with "get reamed" emblazoned on the side. We could then send photos to Putler et al.

Governments can't seem to stop asking for secret backdoors

Can someone explain it to the politicians like this. Let's install microphones into all temporary occupancy rooms in the UK. Let's restrict the keys to decrypt those recordings to just the people who occupy those rooms. That's E2E encryption. Now, let's add the ability for the room owner to also hold a master key, that's what you have if you don't have E2E encryption. So if the hotel isn't any good at securing their master key or gets hacked or has someone working for them that's willing to sell the data that's the downside.

So, how many ministers or MPs or members of MI5 are going to be willing to stay in any room with a microphone in it with such a system (a lá 1984)?

Critical PostgreSQL bug tied to zero-day attack on US Treasury

Someone should respond to that tweet with "This retard doesn't think that the government uses SQL"

Microsoft won't let customers opt out of passkey push

Re: Passkeys are a bad idea, or at least badly implemented

Log into your microsoft account, from a new Win11 machine, when your account is protected by passkeys, and you don't have any passkeys on the device, yet.

Europe's largest local authority settles on ERP budget 5x original estimate

Re: Pretty much every large software implementation

I find that people always flee to regulatory or compliance as a shield to hide behind to prevent them having to change things that they're comfortable with.