Posts by Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck

IBM cutting several thousand jobs in latest layoffs

IBM - Idiots, Boneheads, and Morons.

ESA tests bacterial powder to feed Moon and Mars crews

Probably tastier than Mickie D's! :)

Google yanks Gemma after US senator says model ‘hallucinated’ her committing crimes

Considering that the Republicans are thoroughly delusional about the separation of powers in the US government, I think it's only fair that the world lobbed a few good hallucinations back at them!

Debian demands Rust or rust in peace for legacy ports

And nobody shed a tear except people running systems so old and so slow that they're outperformed by the cheapest modern cellphones by several orders of magnitude...

OpenAI spreads the imaginary wealth beyond Microsoft with $38B AWS deal

It's easy to spend somebody else's money when you live in fantasy land like the "all things AI" crowd does.

AI layoffs to backfire: Half quietly rehired at lower pay

Don't care; they need me and my experience with the company to save them, not Joe Schmoe off the street. That experience is gonna cost 'em, and that is how it is going to be explained.

As the old adage goes "the bill is for knowing where and how hard to hit it..." :)

Screw that. If I'd been laid off to give AI a role, I'd be demanding a fat salary increase to save their bacon after being treated like shit.

OpenAI tells Trump to build more power plants or China wins the AI arms race

Re: OpenAI panhandling

Agreed 125%!

Re: China has already won

Yep, but the Americans don't want to accept the fact.

This should be interesting. The only thing I can see working is a "69" position, because it seems to me that Drumpf and the Republican Party are every bit as greedy as OpenAI's management and shareholders.

What they're really saying is "the government should spend tax dollars on AI-specific power generation requirements rather than giving us an outright grant to build the power we need because it's 'bad optics' after Drumpf's largesse to the Uber-rich in the budget."

Google says reports of a Gmail breach have been greatly exaggerated

I'll simply point out that every single one of those "major news sources" has a bone to pick with Google for "stealing" their advertising revenue and subscription eyeballs and wallets. No bias there... or reason to inflame a minor "situation" as if it were the end of the world (at least to typical users in the public sphere.)

Amazon Web Services’ US-EAST-1 region in trouble again, with EC2 and container services impacted

"The Cloud" is just somebody else's computer that you pay an outrageous set of fees to use.

But "The Cloud" computer is managed by human beings in the end, and controlled by largely human-written software (which typically puts so called "vibe" code to shame for quality and reliability in reality), and mistakes will happen.

But when "The Cloud" makes a mistake, it makes it for thousands and tens of thousands of systems. Not just one corporate server cluster.

After seeing my bill on trial runs of cloud services, I rapidly realized I could buy self-hosting hardware for about 4-5 months of cloud services if I had a real workload. I didn't buy self-hosting hardware, but it convinced me that self-hosting or co-location typically put "The Cloud" to shame for price, even when you factored in some decent number of sysadmins (you need sysadmins for the hosts you run, not the Amazon EC service configurations, but that's "six of one; half a dozen of the other.")

The Chinese Box and Turing Test: AI has no intelligence at all

Just thinking: if you could integrate human specified code templates and use the LLM to collect information about the parameters to implement the template and then follows the templates exactly instead of using bullshit statistics to guess what you want (and often get it wrong), you'd end up with something that is actually useful for large projects and corporate systems.

It isn't even good for old fashioned "copy book" programming of old, where you'd get examples of how code should work from the corporate "copy book" prepared by the design team and implement that for specific data feeds or structures. Instead, it reads a bunch of botched code online and in github repos and spits out screwed up versions of the copy book algorithms. It is just a bass-ackwards approach to proper code generation even as done by the old case tools. Just don't hold your hopes on the "round trip" bullshit; it never did work.

Australia sues Microsoft for misleading M365 users about Copilot subscription options

India sure does try to "demand" a lot from international companies that aren't based in India.

I think India can kiss the communities ass and set up their own "great firewall" if they have an issue with the world's internet.

AI investment is the only thing keeping the US out of recession

So when the AI bubble bursts and the bankruptcies start while Drumpf's gifts to the Uber rich hit home the US dollar as a reserve currency will be done for and the Euro or Yuan will take over the role.

Aren't you glad Drumpf was elected? Betcha there's a lot of non-voters in the US regretting being too lazy to vote...

OpenAI goes after Microsoft 365 Copilot's lunch with 'company knowledge' feature

Customer abuser tries to steal customers from a partner customer abuser; customer abuse expected to continue. Details at 11:00...

Apple faces £1.5B payout after losing UK App Store case

Today the UK began working on the 25 year appeal process Apple will stuff up their arse rather than paying the fine.

They're American; they think they have the right to pillage and rape EVERY nation's citizens.

How do you solve a problem like Discovery?

Definitely option 3 for me. You can see why Drumpf ended up bankrupt so many times - the man pisses away money like watery American beer!

Intel says server CPUs will be hot again – in a good way, to power AI workloads – any year now

Intel is done for. They've talked about 18A for years and it's still not production ready. They don't have anything else in the pipeline of note.

Feeling lonely? Microsoft Copilot can now listen to your every word, watch your screen

Boy am I ever glad I got off that steaming pile of shit of an OS... hello Debian 13!

SpaceX's Starship: Two down, Mons Huygens to climb

Stick a fork in Musk; he's done. His fiasco with DOGE showed he's just a petty tyrant who's lucky enough to have the money to hire smart people. He himself is apparently a complete and utter moron, despite the claims that he's "autistically brilliant." Pah. Far from it. "Autistically Unemotional" more like, with a penchant for attitude and bullshit.

Windows 11 update breaks localhost, prompting mass uninstall workaround

Re: Maybe intentional

Why believe in conspiracy theories when simple ignorance and incompetence explain the situtation fullly?

Let's face it: if you want something screwed up, involve Microsoft, Oracle, or IBM. Guaranteed disaster.

Raspberry Pi OS, LMDE, Peppermint OS join the Debian 13 club

Much though I appreciated the Cinnamon desktop that comes with the LMDE series, I'm not uncomfortable with Gnome X-version with a couple of plugins installed (notably DashToDock and Desktop Icons NG (DING)) Unfortunately the default Wayland stack means no up-to-date NVidia stack and no support for DLSS in the drivers Steam sees - a show stopper for me. I will not move to Wayland willingly - it's a crippled, bass-ackwards way of doing graphics with a modern graphics card, forcing a software render between you and the display that just kills game performance.

Frightful Patch Tuesday gives admins a scare with 175+ Microsoft CVEs, 3 under attack

Meantime my Debian 13 system with CUDA stack and Docker services (which I was _not_ able to replicate under WIndows 11 when I ran that OS) has had maybe two dozen package updates over the past two weeks, including one kernel update and mostly stuff like the relatively frequent Google Chrome updates. I didn't see anything that looked like it was too low-level to be a major security gap except for Chrome itself, as it scans the internet live and is most vulnerable of my applications to any form of attack.

I rebooted in under 20 seconds for the kernel upgrade and CUDA stack updates that came out during that period; the rest were userland updates that a relogin could resolve.

*cracks knuckles*

Nope. No regrets about leaving the Microsoft Hellscape behind...

US PC shipments hit the buffers as Trump’s tariffs take their toll

Re: Those tariffs, hey Don

Donny boy doesn't care about "everyday Americans", clearly, just the cash-grabbing elites.

Not sure, but I do know that the voter turnout rates here in Canada are pathetic, too. It's sickening to see after so many of our forefathers and foremothers died in wars so we could vote today. Sure sometimes you can't for some specific reason, and that's not the end of the world, but a lot of people just couldn't be bothered. They think it doesn't matter, which is how we get such low percentages of the population in both Canada and the US actually voting for the idiots in charge at any given time.

I don't think there has EVER been a true majority in Canada, where they actually had the same percentile of the whole population's support in polls that they did at the polls and in terms of number of seats in government chambers.

Instead, we get misleading reports about how parties had "75% support at the polls," when with a 60% voter turnout means they really had 40% of the population saying "we don't care", and only 75% of 60% voted for them, or 45% a far cry from a majority of the total population. Nor should either party be allowed to "assume" that the "silent majority" goes along with their policies. They should have to earn real votes to enact any extreme changes of national policy.

You snooze, you lose, and millions of Americans slept through the election instead of getting off their butts and voting. Now they all pay the price there for their foolish laziness...

End of Windows 10 support is the perfect time for the Windows 11 installer to fail

The thing with Microsoft is, nothing they ever ship "works as expected!"

Windows 11 gets a fresh Start in latest Canary build

You know, I think when you've reworked the "Start" menu as many times as windows has compared to the clean groupings for most Linux desktops, I can easily ans smugly laugh as Microsquishy flubs it yet again.

What the users want from a start menu is brain dead simple: Let me launch the programs installed on this computer. Let me add new programs. Let me remove old programs. Done.

Everything else Microsoft has tried to do the "Start" menu is for the sake of marketing and product dominance pushes, not for the sake of useful features the users are asking for.

Microsoft hypes PCs with NPUs, still can't offer a good reason to buy one

Just say no to Windows. Buy a Mac or install Linux on your existing Windows 10 hardware.

But under no circumstances should you play the fool and pay an extra grand for them to be able to spy on you with Recall.

China is building a thriving semi industry off US leftovers, export controls be damned

Spoken like a true die-hard American in denial...

Do what you want, but the USD won't be the "preferred currency for international trade" for very much longer thanks to Drumpf The Douche. It'll be either the Euro or the Yuan.

Intel's open source future in question as exec says he's done carrying the competition

That's ok. At this point, Intel is done. Stick a fork in it and serve it up in pieces to interested parties. They're done as an enterprise...

AI companion bots use emotional manipulation to boost usage

So basically they're digital scam artists catfishing and just charging user fees instead of trying to ask for gift card transfers...

Starlink is burning up one or two satellites a day in Earth’s atmosphere

I'd like Elon to take a trip on one of his rockets and burn up on re-entry...

No account? No Windows 11, Microsoft says as another loophole snaps shut

Re: Microsoft have won.

Agreed. Microsquishy can do whatever they like to their steaming pile of crap OS - I run Debian 13 after switching from LMDE 6, and have absolutely no intention of ever reinstalling Windblows on this hardware! Screw their "Recall" spyware and US LEO using it to hoover private data, never mind nosy employers!

Brits sitting on £1.6B gold mine of Windows 10 junk as support ends

Or we could install Linux on them and not send them to the scrap heap...

Texas man accidentally shoots cable, brings internet down

Sorry, but the steady stream of "gun events" in the news from the U Ass of A demonstrates that there are an incredibly large number of irresponsible owners south of Canada.

BTW, kindly stop paying for pro-gun ads here in Canada every time our federal government bans more American-made toys,,,

Welcome to America, land of crazy wingnuts with guns. You can buy body armour at the gift shop on your way in...

Apple ices ICE agent tracker app under government heat

I take it that was quoted - safety of "law enforcement", and with a barf emoji following...

Because ICE is not law enforcement - it's Drumpf's racist take on brown shirts, hiding their shame behind masks.

Meta will listen into AI conversations to personalize ads

Good thing I got bored after playing with it once or twice. Now when it pops up intruding on my user flow, I just close it. Not interested - at all.

Windows 11 25H2 is mostly 24H2 with bits bolted on or ripped out

The more I read about problems and issues with Windows 11 and company, the happier I am that I switched to Debian 13.

AI that once called itself MechaHitler will now be available to the US government for $0.42

Sing it with me now!

Fascists, loving Fascists, paying still other Fascists.

People, screw the people, all for Fascists, money loving Fascists

Fascists round the world...

Stop runaway AI before it's too late, experts beg the UN

Re: AI “could soon far surpass human capabilities

A certain fascist "leader" comes to mind.

Re: Is it already too late?

The retirement budget sucks but the hours and stress levels are to die for!

To quote the old McTesticles ads: "I'm lovin' it!"

Re: And while we're at it

By imbuing them with Genuine People Personalities that only print if they like you.

No, scrap that. The CEO and board would never go for printers that just sulked instead of printing off a copy of the internet...

AI coding hype overblown, Bain shrugs

You'll find Satya's "feelings" in a dictionary between "ass" and "festering"...

Re: I hope

Sure don't hear much about expert systems anymore, but in the late 80s and early 90s, companies like Neuron Data made an awful lot of money from that "AI" market, much as now

Suckers never learn: there are no silver bullets for programming and human intelligence, at least not with statistics gone mad. Someday, maybe.

But not with current technology.

Google is very sorry for pulling down COVID misinfo and pledges never to use outside fact-checkers

Re: xTube?

It does when the disorder in question was first diagnosed decades before acetaminophen was created, and your whack job lies about it are still bullshit even if Der Pumpkin Fuhrer "loves" you for spreading the bullshit.