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* Posts by Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck

1316 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Dec 2024

Peace President's Iran war piles more pain on already battered PC market

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

Re: "Our great Military is Loading Up and Resting, looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest."

The Canadian election most emphatically was not decided on the basis of who was in power in the US. Don't flatter yourself, you egotistical kumquat.

Mark Carney won the election for Prime Minister because of his experience steering the Bank of Canada through YOUR banks' implosion damage to the planetary fiscal markets, his experience steering the Bank of England through Brexit, and in both cases doing so while minimizing the damage caused by external forces beyond the control of the banks themselves.

Yes, we recognized Trump as a threat to international order and stability, and assessed him as a risk comparable to Brexit or your bank implosion of decades past, and opted to make the man who had twice steered a nation through such a disaster to steer Canada through this one.

Although we have large numbers of "party politics" voters on every side of the fence, we also have a large range of "undecided" voters who choose the best candidate they see from the lot available. And those are the voting segment that always ends up deciding our elections, because die-hard Liberals and die-hard Conservatives are both rapidly becoming a thing of the past generations alone. The young generations are more impressed by what politicians do than say; I'm pleased to say I find the youth wonderfully skeptical about politics.

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

Serious question: is there anything in the US that hasn't seen the price of it go up because of the Orange Menace and his "policies"?

Western Union zaps VMware and moves to Nutanix

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

I downloaded Nutanix CE and read through some documentation, but no, I'm not interested in replacing my Debian host OS with Nutanix' stack on my node, and try to do my gaming and everything else through VMs. I can see the appeal of such an appliance stack to the general user base for enterprise VMs, but for me, the fact it requires their OS on the host is a non-starter. So for now at least, I'll be sticking with VirtualBox.

Besides, I only have a couple of VMs, one of which runs a stale software stack because it just keeps historical data. My main repos are on github at this point.

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

Ouch. When big financial services companies start abandoning your platform, the writing is on the wall: you've lost your market and bankruptcy is now the inevitable end...

Chatbots are great at manipulating people to buy stuff, Princeton boffins find

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

LLMs are snapshots of historical statistical scrapings of the internet; they are a terrible way to search for new and current products whose information came to be later than the date the LLM snapshot scraped the vendor's sites.

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

What a shock; Artificial Ignorance "discussions" can convince the gullible to buy whatever the shop is shilling, regardless of what they came for originally.

"Ka-ching!" said the shareholders and CEO.

Iran cyber actors disrupting US water, energy facilities, FBI warns

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

Security is like any other chain (chain of trust, in this case): it is only as strong as the weakest link, which can be as simple as a lazy technician leaving a password on a post-it note in the drawer, or someone blindly "authenticating" application access without having done anything to have caused such a request to be required.

Then there is good old fashioned incompetence and laziness, which even Artificial Ignorance systems emulate with their hallucinations.

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

You are describing a problem with every group that takes a "fundamentalist" approach to their "religion of choice." Historically, either man has oppressed woman or woman has been in partnership with man (as is the case in the well-balanced historical First Nations cultures of North America.) But there are far more than enough who have oppressed women and who still have a bone to pick with women who prove to be more educated, more knowledgeable, and better paid than their sorry illiterate arses.

There are NO SHORTAGE of such "Christian Fundamentalist" groups in the US, especially in the deep south and midwest, who are currently proclaiming Trump as a "new Christ", despite the fact that Christ has never preached war, oppression, mass murder, genocide, homophobia, pedophilia, criminal activities and convictions, or fraud as "ideals" of any kind.

And it is never "awful" to be Canadian. Thanks to our early participation in WWI and WWII and our reputation for tenacity and bravery in the face of deadly assault, our nation is respected and trusted around the world. There are very, very few nations where Canadians are unwelcome visitors. The same is emphatically not true of the aggressive states of america and never has been.

Furthermore, we're better known for solid trade agreements that we stick to rather than egregrious assault on foreign nations through illegal tariffs...

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

WIth the Israeli ordered and US-executed mass-murder of Palestinians, Iranians, Lebanese, etc. going on, I'm rooting for both the US and Israel to leave this "war" with their noses bloody and their "leaders" before the Hague for war crimes.

And may they meet the exact same fate as Hitler: dead by gunshot.

Whether their own or someone else', I care not. Trump, Nuterenyahu, and Putin are absolute butchers compared to Xi or even the leadership of North Korea. They deserve the absolute worst any ICC can through at them. "Veto" be damned.

Microsoft locks out VeraCrypt and WireGuard devs, blames verification process

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

Can't have OSS security tools and VPN software or anything like that out in the wild. It is impossible to hide a US government demanded back door in such products without people noticing the poison code.

Thou SHALT run a "secure/backdoored" OS and communications stack so that the US federal government can know if you are seditiously complaining about Der Pumpkin Fuhrer.

OpenAI puts Stargate UK on ice, blames energy costs and red tape

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

Of course the fact that the UK has been cozying up to the EU of late and downplaying old American ties has nothing to do with the decision...

AWS CEO: It's funny when people ask me if AI is overhyped

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

Sure you do - you go to see which "big names" are attending and are likely targets for your "AI business" to cold-call. Not because you believe in your own marketing, but just to line your own pockets...

Mind you, greed or cruelty may also simply be an absolutely grotesque level of blind incompetence; the three are often indistinguishable in their end results.

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

Sounds exactly like the same odious bullshit the other AI companies are spewing to me, regardless of the misleading summary and title.

Only 28% of AI infrastructure projects fully pay off, survey finds

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

Of course they had unrealistic expectations; that is exactly what the "big vendors" like OpenAI and Anthropic keep on doing - misleading the public and the community about what Artificial Ignorance LLMs can actually do rather than buzzword bingo fantasies.

Intel gets trapped in Elon’s reality distortion field as it joins in megafab delusions

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

After all the failure to deliver even vaguely on time and what was promised originally over all these decades DESERVES to be fleeced by a scam artist like Musk.

Talk, talk, talk. Pump those stocks, Elon.

May the Securities Commission have a few years worth of words waiting for you real soon now - words you'll hear from behind bars every day: THOU SHALT NOT BALDLY LIE TO THE PUBLIC TO PUMP STOCKS!!!

Hundreds of orgs compromised daily in Microsoft device code phishing attacks

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

For a moment I thought you were talking about the 15 minutes they give you to approve the request, then I realized you're probably talking about your line of business in-house applications expiring.

Yeah, people need to realize that unless and until the web pages can detect and report desktop activity (i.e the user has not wandered away), timing out after short intervals is just painfully BAD DESIGN! Only secure data access requests should require re-authentication during the user's workday, stuff like changing passwords, adding users, or changing the security group configurations for the system. Day to day operations like accounting data entry should just stay live on the user's desktop.

In theory, at least, if their desktop is active, they should be working on whatever their daily routine is, unless they've clocked out for a coffee/smoke/reefer break (welcome to Canada, eh!), or gone for lunch.

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

Interesting. So there can be so much authentication in an organization that users come to treat it as a rote system request with muscle-memory approval of said requests.

Let me know when they start targetting CAN$0.92 bank balances like mine; then I'll worry about it. :)

Apple's chips are the core of a new landscape, but its biggest win is Windows

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

When I say "simple" I mean as simple as Windows - downloading a distro-specific .rpm or .deb that automatically installs the NVidia security signatures, repo hooks, apt update invocation, apt install invocation with -y specified, etc. Click and go, same as Windows, just for a different icon that matches what they see on their login or background for a fresh install. Remember: most people who think they're "good at computers" are actually phishing-prone dweebs who think being able to write a spreadsheet macro makes them an "expert at computers."

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

Debian on stock AMD AM4 based hardware here with a NVidia RTX4070Ti.

My only pain in setting up this box was trying to jump to the latest release of Debian sooner than NVidia had the driver deployment stack for the CUDA and driver repos for the new version of Debian. I briefly reinstalled windows 11, got attacked within two weeks to wipe out ALL my hard drives in the attack, and reinstalled Debian, this time with NVidia's instructions and repos available.

NVidia needs to make it a little bit easier for novices to install their repos, or to get their repo drivers into the Debian release chain faster so that gaming isn't an issue on stock NVidia-equipped hardware for Steam/Proton, because most of the user base doesn't want nor need CUDA, just the updated graphics drivers shipped through those repos. The ones that Debian had in their stock release didn't even support DLSS.

It also needs to be a little easier to force your box to use the X-11 stack and disable Wayland so that your games run properly using that NVidia stack. Half my games wouldn't even launch under Wayland, and half that did launch ran at about 20 FPS. Major thumbs down on the stupidest display driver stack design I have ever had the misfortune to encounter since I first played with a TRS-80 Model I, Level I in high school.

My box is silent. No AI promting, no weird configuration changes happening 'cause I installed a software patch or update, and more software support than even Windows can offer if you're talking to a web coder or full-stack developer! If you deal with AI on such a box, it is because you choose to.

And that's the nut of it: Debian and most of the Linux distros let you decide how your box behaves and what it does, not some greedy corporate masters.

White House seeks deep NASA cuts as Artemis II breaks spaceflight record

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

You can count on the sane US population to run screaming from bonds for the foreseeable future; Trump supporters other than the ones he personally is willing to associate with tend to be far too poor to invest in bugger all, and the rest of the population isn't in support of his little murder spree.

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

Most buyers for those funds are foreign countries which are pissed off at how Trump's version of the US has treated them, and some have started dumping their investment as a tit-for-tat response to tarrifs.

Now you're trying to finance an illegal "war", mass murder warcrimes against civilians, and literally threatening to wipe out an entity country - a clear cut case of genocide.

Don't be surprised if no one wants to buy your federal "investments" any more, butchers.

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

Gotta pay for the Israel-ordered mass murder of Iranians somehow....

Break, no fix: Apple and Samsung make repairs hard

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

I'm surprised Samsungs are so hard to repair. I'd broken the screen on my last Samsung; it was unresponsive to touch and the display was greebled. When I found out it would only cost $100 more to replace the whole phone, I opted to do that and have another full year of warranty, not to mention a phone with another year's lifespan. (The old phone wasn't even a year old, but I neglected to buy a folio case as soon as I got the phone, and by the time I tried, they were no longer available for that years models on Amazon.)

So they're expensive to repair, but as part of the deal for buying the new phone, the shop temporarily installed a screen on the old one so my security keys could be retrieved and the rest of my data copied. Note that: it was worth their while to repair the phone to make a sale.

Margins must be obscenely high in the industry for them to consider that worth pursuing.

Anthropic reveals $30bn run rate and plans to use 3.5GW of new Google AI chips

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

Yeah, we're taking in half the money that we're burning, but trust us, we're worth billions. Now just go buy our pyramid scheme stock or one of the other AI pyramid scheme stocks and STFU about "sane business plans."

Patch to end i486 support hits Linux kernel merge queue

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

Re: they are falling short of target

I stand corrected.

Buh-bye, Pentium. Your math bug is not fondly remembered...

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

Re: they are falling short of target

586's are still used by some embedded hardware and edge devices, and I believe it is a 64-bit variant, so I vote "no" to your suggestion.

AMD's AI director slams Claude Code for becoming dumber and lazier since last update

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

Ma'am, your mistake is in thinking that Claude Code or any other LLM actually thinks. They don't. They do statistical analysis and keyword grabbing to respond to your prompt using the files you've provided as a starting point for triggering the modifications.

LLM's are NOT intelligent in the slightest. They pretend to think, but what I've seen them actually do says it's all smoke and mirrors for the investors and any sucker for a good flim-flam.

If an AI agent screws up while running your business, there's nobody to sue

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

Vendors have never accepted responsibility for the damage their tools can cause. They'll cover direct costs of failure, but not incidental costs like loss of revenue, and with Artificial Ignorance virtually all the damage would be incidental.

Trump wants to take a battle axe to CISA again and slash $707M from budget

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

In the same sense that a rutabaga is "intelligent."

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

Dunno how anyone can claim that orange yutz isn't a Russian operative... he's certainly doing everything he can to destroy the US and it's reputation from the inside out.

PrismML debuts energy-sipping 1-bit LLM in bid to free AI from the cloud

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

LLMs are useful tools but they are not and never will be "intelligent." It's a dead end approach to AGI - they're only even talking AGI as part of the ever popular "pump the stock" game for those who don't actually understand the technology vs. what is actually going to be required.

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

I'll have to see if I can find their paper anywhere; this is an interesting idea, especially if it performs as well as they claim. In particular, I'm wondering whether it would make it feasible to run one of the currently-huge LLMs that take up around 100GB of VRAM to run sanely on a 12GB consumer card. If they could accomplish that, it would yank the rug out from the big model companies and see to it that the likes of OpenAI, Microsoft, and others trying to hoover up all your data, modelling, and architectural approaches to your project by letting you do everything locally. That leak of Anthropic code should be a real eye opener to everyone as to just how insanely greedy those "businesses" are.

Even Microsoft knows Copilot shouldn't be trusted with anything important

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

It's Microslop. Of course it can't be trusted. You haven't been to trust anything from them since the 1.0 edition of their C compiler for Motorola 68000 CPUs on the Amiga series of Commodore machines - it couldn't do the pointer arithmetic properly to index into an array! And their "fix" was "buy the next edition. At full price."

Nope, Microsoft has a very long history of making puppies instead of paying attention to code quality. This whole AI "Microslop" adventure is just the culmination of decades of treating the customer base as an alpha site.

Microsoft veteran says some 'broken by update' PCs were already doomed

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

Good old fashioned "blame the victim" slander. :(

We know what day it is but these Raspberry Pi price hikes are no joke

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

The only way I'm buying any hardware in the near future is if I win the lottery or if I end up with a disaster and receive and insurance payout as a result. Otherwise I'm leaving the insanity of the current price models alone, hunkering down, and playing the games I already have on the hardware I already have with the software I already have. I'm off the treadmill for as long as possible...

'Uncle Larry’s biggest fan' cut by email in early morning Oracle layoff spree

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

The inevitable need for some sort of Guaranteed Minimum Income in the civilized nations of the world is becoming increasingly necessary as the automation of jobs in IT, manufacturing, assembly, packaging, shipping, transportation, crop harvesting and management, and other fields formerly dominated by human labour undergo rapid transformation. Even the local farm operations of today look little like they did even a decade ago, with widespread adoption of GPS-based automatic tractor driving software and the like. Humans are still required to be present, but they're listening to music on headphones/earbuds or yapping on cell phones now that most farms are on the edge of the cell tower ranges.

Yes, the American will scream "Communism!" or "Socialism!", but the alternative is mass rioting and bloodshed as the world rebalances itself to serve the greater needs of the majority, likely at the expense of billionaires lives and families' safety.

Leaked memo suggests Red Hat's chugging the AI Kool-Aid

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

Re: A. I. stands for Artifical Intelligence, LLMs, are NOT INTELLIGENT

Absutively!

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

To be fair, Gnome 2 was perfectly usable until they decided to "fix" it.

Stupid engineers ALWAYS "fix" what works until it is broken beyond any hope of repair...

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

Get those psychos off the kernel list before we get a "Recall" style privacy nightmare and Microslop "code quality" injection from them that borks the whole thing.

Artificial Ignorance: Just say "no damned way in hell!"

Contracts are in C++26 despite disagreement over their value

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

'The paper [PDF] describing Contracts for C++26 notes that "behind the attempts to add a Contracts feature to C++ is a long and storied history." Contracts were also part of the C++20 working draft but WG21 removed them in 2019 following major changes in the proposed design.'

In other words they've argued about it interminably and have never managed to convince Mr. Stroustrap of the benefits, but being a bureaucratic organization, and a standards organization notorious for over-documenting every single nit-picking detail you never thought of no less, has decided in their infinite "wisdom" that "more complexity for the compiler writers is clearly better for the reliability and performance of the code; we'll just leave all the heavy lifting 'up to the implementation details.' *muahahahahaha*"

Microsoft reaches for yet another out-of-band patch to deal with latest update issue

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

Re: Do things have to improve?

So THAT'S what's been happening to the fluid from the office air conditioners...

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

It doesn't take months or years to implement quality control - it's just a matter of actually giving a shit and doing testing. Clearly Microslop doesn't give a shit despite the words.

Oracle cuts jobs across sales, engineering, security

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

And the disparity between "have" and "have not" in the world just keeps growing by leaps and bounds with the likes of Ellison playing with obscenely expensive toys like his yacht while the "average" employee gets the shaft to pay for it all...

US PC shipments to fall 13% as memory and storage crunch hits budget systems

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

And if you install Linux on your old Windows 10 hardware, that's one less sale they make while you still have a perfectly usable computer.

Anthropic struggling with Chinese competition, its own safety obsession

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

All around the Mulberry bush

The monkey chased the weasel

The monkey thought it all in fun

'Til POP goes the BU-bble!

Microsoft yanks Windows 11 preview update after install failures

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

Microslop: The same Artificial Ignorance that brought you the last three deployment disasters this month strikes again...

Meta cuts about 700 jobs as it shifts spending to AI

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

*chuckle* You actually got me to laugh out loud with that one!

GitHub hits CTRL-Z, decides it will train its AI with user data after all

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

No need to opt out. I stopped using GitHub Copilot after experimenting with it and a few different LLMs and their code suggestions for a couple weeks to deal with one particular issue I had. I didn't like the way I found it working, so I haven't used it for anything else - I consider it a fraudulent technology. Sure it spits out text super-fast, but it isn't sane text, and you have to spend more time fixing the mistakes it made than it would have taken to just do it from scratch without making mistakes in the first place.

Talk about a balloon waiting to be popped; this whole "agentic" mission is just more Bafflegab for the Peons who Pay The Bills.

And man are those bills ever getting big considering it doesn't even work as promised...

NASA's lunar reboot is long on ambition, short on answers

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

It'll happen because Drumpf says "Bing Bang Boom Whoosh!" *LMAO*

Age checks creep into Linux as systemd gets a DOB field

Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck Silver badge

Re: this is what I don't get

I don't even vaguely resemble Donald... :P