Posts by Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck

Mistral launches Voxtral speech recognition model

Call me a purist, but if I have to pay for a service in order to use software, it is not "open source" in intent or use. It is a proprietary product with a sham license and customer lock-in.

CIOs pause net-new IT investments as global tariff jitters bite

Trump will do what he always does: chicken out when playing the bully with former trade partners just leads them to seek out more reliable partners.

Carney has been spending a large amount of his time dealing with Europe and has signed several agreements with them.

The US used to be a reliable trade partner for Canada; now we've got the Pumpkin Fuhrer claiming that the free trade deal he negotiated and signed is "bad for America" and that Canada is a "threat."

You damned straight we're a threat: we're busy proving to the world that nobody "needs" to give in to bullies.

xAI's Grok lurches into right-wing insanity, offers tips on assaulting man

What did you expect from an LLM trained on Xitter feeds?

EU-sponsored report says GenAI's 'fair use' defense does not compute

Re: But how?

Scrapers leave log file entries if you so configure your server, proving that the thieves were there. and make no mistake - Artificial Ignorance is based entirely on stolen data originally. Not one AI company tried to make arrangements with the data's owners first.

Rather obvious to anyone with functional brain cells, but in the US corporations get to lobby to BUY the politicians' votes for the legislation they want.

Every other nation on the planet calls that kind of unlimited "lobbying" BRIBERY.

Nvidia CEO says China wouldn't risk building military supers with American AI chips

So? The only ones who'll be crying about China doing it on their own hardware is YOU greedy sons of bitches...

AI coding tools make developers slower but they think they're faster, study finds

What rock have you been under to not know that Muskoid's Dad and grandfather were white "masters" in apartheid south Africa who used near slavery in the emerald mines they "owned" to collect their hundreds of millions?

Re: Aim Low. Be less disappointed when you fail

I haven't worked on a standalone "short" program in 35 years - they're all monster applications with 100's of thousands of lines of code spread across thousands of files.

So you're saying it's only good for Mickey Mouse toys, not real applications.

I finally have a working Spring transactional JPA prototype set up with multiple repositories, each with their own transaction management and connections. I needed to figure out the plumbing because that had always been set up by the time I ever worked on a project, so it was all new to me.

I started with Claude 3.5's ideas about how to set it up. It didn't work. So I used Google's search engine for suggestions as to how to make it work as pure Jakarta JPA, and got that working to some degree, but without transaction management.

Adding transaction management the same way didn't work, so I turned to GitHub copilot with OpenAI 4.x, and started asking questions about what I'd done wrong. It took three long days of querying and coding before it finally worked the way I need it to.

So these tools are utterly useless for creating anything significant unless you have the programming experience to know what to ask and the patience to slog through the process of debugging code you don't really understand.

All told it was a no hurry 6-9 week effort (I'm retired and am just coding for fun when I feel like it - no schedule, managers, or users setting artificial deadlines.)

I recently read a quoted post from the Muskoid claiming that xAI employees just paste a file into Grok and let it fix it. Nice theory, but without the context of the application, that flat out wouldn't work.

But what do you expect from an Apartheid backed con artist who doesn't know jack shit about actually writing code?

Microsoft says regulations and environmental issues are cramping its Euro expansion

The whole world needs to have {at a minimum} "environmental red tape" to reign in the rapacious greed of the American megacorps!

Microsoft enjoys first Patch Tuesday of 2025 with no active exploits

That they know of...

Trump administration announces tariffs that may make plenty of tech more expensive from August 1

Re: What does the US export?

They export canned water labelled "beer."

Suck it up! You're the fools down south who elected a con man that convinced the brain damaged that someone other than the consumer pays the tab.

Really does highlight how bad the education system is down there.

Apple tries get €500M EU fine tossed

But they're an American megacorp - they're just going to keep on appealing for the next 10-20 years because the EU doesn't have the balls to evict them for fraudulent non compliance.

Ousted US copyright chief argues Trump did not have power to remove her

Re: Goat

Even more fitting!

Thou Shalt Zieg Heil thine Fuhrer or face termination...

Atlassian migrated 4 million Postgres databases to shrink AWS bill

Re: Infosys

Shut up, slave! What gave you the idea you get any time off at all?

Huawei's latest notebook shows China is still generations behind in chipmaking

Re: HarmonyOS?

People keep thinking "POSIX compliant APIs" mean Unix and Linux. Microsoft's was the only intentionally crippled implementation of POSIX I ever dealt with.

Other rather wildly different systems like VAX-VMS and the AS400 have much better POSIX compliance than even some Unix variants, making the Portable Operating Systems Interface all the more relevant and useful.

Until we see some wildly different processor architectures, the current threads in a process model fits pretty much any OS variant to date.

New systems die almost immediately if they don't have source code compatibility with an existing trove of software, especially open source software.

The thing is, I haven't needed a bleeding-edge powered computer for nearly ten years! Unless I'm doing hard-core gaming, virtually any reasonably current CPU is far more than adequate, right down to the previous generation of AMD's basic 6-core processors for entry level gaming.

It is also worth remembering what the massively multicored systems used to do when CPUs were slow and kludgy (think back to the '386 and '486 days when multicore motherboards were the rage instead of multicore chips.)

But the rah-rah propaganda insists that everyone claim China is "so far behind" the world that they "can't hope to catch up."

Bullshit and balderdash. The Chinese and Japanese are notoriously good at implementing and improving on "western ideas".

Take a look at what kind of processors NASA and the military actually use in order to provide the radiation hardening required. They are not running sub-7nm processors! Yet that is the area where the brain-damaged Drumpf & co. claim that the Chinese are a "threat." (Not that I'm surprised Drumpf is a complete and utter moron in this regard, too. The man never has had a "shining intellect.")

Former and current Microsofties react to the latest round of layoffs

I expect a lot of lawsuits from shareholders across the industry when the Artificial Ignorance bubble bursts and it comes home to roost that the hundreds of millions spent on it were wasted.

China claims breakthroughs in classical and quantum computers

The more nations there are playing in the CPU space, the better off the world is. The Americans have had a "lock" on the market for quite long enough!

Xlibre forks to the rescue – but Kubuntu gives X11 the boot

Re: double edged sword?

All true, especially that we'll sell our open source souls and work with whatever corporate stack of the week gets thrown our way.

And we love making the crap dance instead of stumbling along like it did out of the box. Ten years down the road, it's no longer the fad of the day, and might even be The Systems Disaster We Do Not Speak Of.

But for a while there, we made it dance!

For the most part, games expect OpenGL, ActiveX, or Vulkan stacks. Wayland is and needs to remain irrelevant save for being one of many PORTABLE IO stacks and APIs.

I'm curious as to how they intend to support NVidia's CUDA stack without X-11 and enhanced API support for X-11...

Top AI models - even American ones - parrot Chinese propaganda, report finds

Re: Ahh

Have no fear! His Russian buddy's propaganda has been assimilated as well. As has every disinformation website or page scanned during the indiscriminate hoovering of the Internet all of the LLM "providers" (aka. thieves and con artists on a grand scale) did to "prime" their systems.

Tesla Robotaxi videos show Elon's way behind Waymo

Re: Maybe not drugs

You don't need to know "everything about drugs" to notice the flurry of 420 posts on April 20th every year - you have to hide under a rock to not see them, or have all the online presence of an Amish Minister!

Re: Shock!

This should be a children's book "Elon And The Big Lie".

Visiting students can't hide social media accounts from Uncle Sam anymore

Welcome to The Shithole Fascist States of America.

You HAVE no rights.

Now STFU and bend over for your cavity search...

Iran cyberattacks against US biz more likely following air strikes

So the Pumpkin Fuhrer not only arbitrarily took it on himself to throw the US into a war without Congressional approval, today he decided to "unilaterally" declare a "ceasefire" between Iran and Israel.

When are you Americans going to lock up this lunatic in the insane asylum he belongs in? What kind of COWARDS have you got in your government that one jerk-off with a big mouth can hijack 200+ years of Constitutional and legal processes and traditions?

Deal to 'save' UK colleges £45M in Oracle Java licensing fees followed audit requests

Re: Oh FFS

That is for the sole reason that Oracle's implementation is broken intentionally so it can be "detected" by those applications - there is absolutely NO REASON they couldn't run with OpenJDK without those checks in the code itself. Pure, pedantic, greed-based scam.

US patent office wants an AI to scan for prior art, but doesn't want to pay for it

Sounds an awful lot like a despicable bar owner trying to get live bands to play "for exposure."

I hope they get the same kind of snarky response such bar owners do.

Broadcom's answer to VMware pricing outrage: You're using it wrong

And here's my response to their excuse:

You are nothing but vulturous leeches who create nothing, but buy up products and gouge the ever living shit out of customers that are already "locked in" to the product. You are scum of scum, fully worthy of a punch in the nose or a kick in the ribs from each and every customer you have gouged - one right after the other until the only thing left of you is a bloody smear on the pavement...

LibreOffice adds voice to 'ditch Windows for Linux' campaign

Re: Problems

The end users of those systems are most like day-to-day "grunt" employees of the company, even if they don't realize those services are runnning on Linux.

Linux on the desktop most certainly does have "fleet management" solutions available. If anything, those solutions are older than Microsoft's because the need for them is far from new; Microsoft just uses lock-in to make sure that once you're on Windblows, you're going to have some serious pain getting rid of it. The Linux versions, on the other hand, expect to be dealing with different distros for different services, and don't expect a monolithic deployment of Blah-Distro Servers like you're expected to roll everything on Windows Server nodes with the Microshill crowd.

Re: Problems

You do realize that the "curated" software is just builds for the the distro's collection of software, that most of the distros use the same definitions for apt or RPM production of the builds, regardless of whether they're "mainstream" or downstream distros?

It isn't that the distros do massive changes to the software, with the exception of software that the distro's management consider core to their mission - that might have specific enhancements and custom code that other distros don't have. But something like the GNU Image Manipulation Program is all but identical for all Debian/Ubuntu distros, and again virtually identical for all distros branching off RedHat. The packaging rules for the different package managers change, but that is about all.

The main real difference in distro repositories and support lists has more to do with the philosophy and "morals" of the distribution, not the way the packages are maintained at source.

Re: Problems

Hello, Satya! That is, as everyone knows, utter bollocks, bullshit, and outright lies.

It's worth considering any distro's legal home base, too. I don't really trust US based distro's or any which derived from them.

Far too many security risks compared to organizations based in Europe in light of the recent political climate in the US.

Re: That's bullshit

The problem is newer versions of Windows constantly mess with the boot process, destroying your dual boot, and unless you know what you're doing, you're not going to get it back.

I just wouldn't use that laptop or PC for anything else - treat it as a dedicated, air-gapped box, never to be online again.

Microsoft broke DHCP for Windows Server last Patch Tuesday

Re: Easy; Just blame AI

"Only 85% of our user base is actually affected..."

Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

That's a problem with usability, and pointing fingers solves nothing on the ground.

I gave up on Firefox nearly 10 years ago when it couldn't be used to view content at several Canadian media sites; it gets rejected as an "unsupported browser."

Plus I find Chrome has better support for debugging/development.

Nvidia bets on Gates-backed nuclear startup to keep its AI ambitions from melting down

'Last year the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis determined that, despite the hype, SMRs were "too expensive, too slow to build, and too risky to play a significant role in transitioning away from fossil fuels."'

Edit: 'Last year the shills for the oil industry "determined" that...'

There. Fixed that for you...

Trump administration set to waive TikTok sell-or-die deadline for a third time

"Taco, Taco man! I got to be, a Taco man!

Wine me, dine me, outright bribe me

Then for you I'll do all I can,

'Cause I'm the Taco, Taco man!"

Eurocops arrest suspected Archetyp admin, shut down mega dark web drug shop

Re: And the game of whack a mole continues

Prohibition is a dead end no matter how many bullshit lies prohibitionists like you spew. Treating addiction as a medical issue instead of a criminal one allows members of society to receive treatment and rebuild their lives; incarceration only gets them in touch with other criminals to learn how to commit other crimes than the ones they've already been caught for.

Florida man expands crypto empire with new wireless service and phone

"Comes with Russian and American tracking and data collection services pre-installed!"

Put Large Reasoning Models under pressure and they stop making sense, say boffins

My 400-series "Artificial Intelligence" course in 1987 at the University of Saskatchewan was heavily focused on the expert systems implementation algorithms so we'd understand what the computer was actually doing - essentially the same kind of processing that spreadsheets do to build out a logic tree for processing cell updates (value "slots".)

I still have more faith in an expert system than an LLM for most tasks because unlike LLMs, they're consistent and predictable with their results, and you never get hallucinating outputs.

Wanted: Junior cybersecurity staff with 10 years' experience and a PhD

I'm one poor SOB in retirement, but I don't regret leaving the industry behind one little bit. The fun got replaced by irritating and irrelevant demands two decades ago

Re: Let's be clear

Yes, this has been "industry practice" since the early 2000's for all IT positions. The kicker is they call a decade of experience a "junior" when in any trades those are experienced journeymen.

Why? So they can screw you over right royally on compensation.

Danish department determined to dump Microsoft

Re: Just suppose ...

You mean like the Pumpkin Fuhrer who has openly stated he wants F35s crippled for foreign nations despite existing contracts? Or who has openly mused about "why can't we use nukes?"

If you have a fascist taking over the government, abuse of process, rights, and basic human decency are just expected. Dictators will use any tool available to hold on to power, and because they're turning over trillions to the business community that used to be government services, the companies are only too happy to do what the dictator asks to keep the revenue flowing.

The American companies aren't that bad if you don't mind having all your data hoovered for their "AI" systems and turning over 25% of your revenue to them...

Meta sues 'nudify' app-maker that it claims ran 87k+ Facebook, Instagram ads

Gee, maybe AI approved ads are a bad idea and human beings should be doing the processing of ads....