Posts by Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck

GPU behemoth Nvidia on track to be world's leading CPU supplier too, says CFO

“Vera will deliver up to 1.5x faster performance per core, 2x performance per watt, and 4x density per rack compared to x86-based alternatives,”

This has always been the case with RISC vs. CISC architectures, no matter what you do with the CISC processors. Simpler is always more efficient and easier to tweak and tune to near optimal levels than something complex. It really doesn't matter what problem set you're looking at, simpler and easier to understand/work with is always the better approach.

Too much "information hiding" means you lose track of what is really happening in your code.

Megalodon chums the waters in 5.5K+ GitHub repo poisonings

You do realize that hosting a "private" repository on a public service cluster is the problem here.

If you had the good sense to set up truly private servers and a truly private network with private VPN access for your people only, you wouldn't have these problems. But you're too cheap to pay tech support staff to maintain such an infrastructure, so on behalf of every laid off technical person in the industry, let me say:

Bend over and squeal, Boy!

Marketing demanded IT add website feature that was already working

Re: BTW

I'm over 60 years old and started playing with computers when I was the ripe old age of 14 on a TRS-80 Model I, Level I (4K RAM, 4MHz Z-80 8-bit CPU), enjoyed it, had fun making a career out of computers, and am retired but still programming because I still enjoy it! But one thing I've learned is that things change, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, but no matter how much bitching, whining, or complaining I might do, things don't go back to the way I like them.

For example, if it were up to me, the Mate desktop for Linux would be the official version of Gnome, because nothing they have done since Gnome 2 has been worth the effort of spitting on!

Deus ex machina: Half of US Christians trust AI's spiritual advice

Re: Christians

The operator of the website happily collects "Donations" on "behalf" of The AI God.

Intel's CEO reveals early hiring challenges as bankruptcy concerns deterred top talent

Still with the 10A while other companies have moved on to a fraction of that? I wouldn't want to get hired by Intel, either, if I were looking - they're a bankruptcy waiting to happen. The writing is on the wall; they've lost the battle in AI, they've lost the battle for best performing server CPUs, they've lost the thermal efficiency battle, and they're so behind TSMC et. al. that by the time they play catch up, TSMC will have leapfrogged them another two nodes.

Plex appeal fades as Lifetime Pass jumps to $750

Silly me; I just double click media files on my hard drive. Why the hell would I want to stream my media? Stream it where, when it's illegal to copy or share your media except as physical copies of the originals?

I suppose if I had a bankroll and a passel of kids you might want to let the stream the media to their phones or laptops, but I'd think that to be a vanishingly small market segment.

Utah tells porn sites to take the P out of VPNs, and it's their fault that they can't

Re: Virtual Porn Networks

Nonsense. Breaking the law doesn't mean being stupid about it and getting caught!

Re: I’d rather ban the Mormon church

If you think porn is "reality", you need to get out of the basement more often, go outside, and talk to people of the opposite sex (or the same sex if that is what turns your gears) without expecting to immediately get laid or being rude and demanding.

The porn industry sells you a Virtual Reality where everyone gets their rocks off for extended periods of time; that is NOT normal life by a long stretch of the imagination. Even since Viagra was invented.

BTW, why do none of the "religious right" ever scream that Viagra should be banned because "Impotence is God's will?"

I didn't know Trump was from Utah! Or is that level of grandiose stupidity depressingly common south of the Canadian border? The info I read online about the deplorable state of your education systems suggests that your population isn't exactly getting the best of educations.

And the Universe certainly knows as we all do that politicians and lawyers aren't good at anything else except passing the buck and shirking blame, which explains the asinine phrasing they're trying to use to get around the fact they're demanding something that can't be done!

Bye-bye, Gemini CLI; Google's gone and swapped you for a closed-source AI

All the AI vendors are doing their damndest to lock the developer community in to their toolchain so that they can maximize the extracted profits. Look out, world: the great scam is about to unfold as they try to answer the investors' question: "Where's my ROI?"

Anthropic’s Stainless steal tightens grip on AI dev tooling

You notice all the moves the Artificial Ignorance vendors are making lately are around acquiring the front-end technologies that people use, dropping support for competition, and locking it in as a "special feature" of their flavour of AI.

That is exactly what a hypeware vendor does to try to protect market share when their product is actually dead simple and obvious to anyone with technical expertise and funding to start competing. When your input is the whole internet, there is nothing to distinguish your "product" from anyone else who scraped the whole internet!

Microsoft refreshes Surface for Business lineup, starts AI PC upsell at $1,499

This. 110% this.

Of course, all Windows 11 systems currently being installed with any vendor's Copilot-certified processor also come with "Recall" pre-installed, so that the Corporate Masters can see exactly what you're doing at your desk any moment of every day. "Recall" is the ultimate spyware, and they're asking people to install it! :o

Europe built sovereign clouds to escape US control. Then forgot about the processors

Re: VPN?

Trust? Who said anything about trusting your providers?

Any government with a significant tech footprint and a government penchant for surveillance and monitoring is likely to have mandated backdoored products en masse under their nation's "national security" framework, prohibiting the vendors from mentioning it.

Everyone is overlooking the "Five Eyes" agreement, though, which sees NSA-style monitoring hardware at the partner nation's telco and ISP connection points that feed into the 5-eyes shared surveillance network. Conveniently enough, there is nothing to prevent the US from telling Canada about a "Canadian of concern" and providing a security dossier that CISA itself is forbidden from collecting (not allowed to surveil citizens without an existing warrant, which requires more than annoying politicians.)

The same goes with Canada providing the US with a dossier on some US citizen whose communications stray across the border. What a shock, then, that there are so many crossing points for internet traffic, and so many cross-border providers of various technologies. Even when dealing with a Canadian owned and operated ISP, they had contracted out their email provisioning to an American firm, so all my email automatically crossed the surveillance border, as did any other Canadian citizen in Saskatchewan using SaskTel as their ISP.

No, the question isn't "if they can/are monitoring", the question is are you a threat? No matter how loud mouthed I and much of the public may be, we're no threat to anything but our own blood pressure. :)

Things seem to be getting a little unsettled between China and Taiwan now that Trump got involved in the situation. Can he not even pay a state trade visit without causing problems in the world?

Trump has as much as said they won't abide by their promise to protect Taiwan, so that entire fab region is now at China's mercy.

I didn't even realize OpenPower and OpenSparc were still around. I thought, much like the RedHat acquisition, IBM had subsumed the Power architecture into the gaping corporate maw...

OpenSparc I can see being viable, save for the fact that it seems to be a dying architecture that is losing support rather than gaining it.

I think a lot of people are going to be in shock as to just how quickly RISC-V swamps the market; they're making a lot faster progress to faster/better processors than you seem to realize. Are they "equivalent" to Intel/AMD/Arm? No, and they don't have to be, because they cost a fraction of the price and thanks to multi-chip servers being the norm nowadays, you just gang up a shitload of them on the problem at hand.

Plus if you want to design a system with your own security infrastructure, you can do that with the spec blueprints for RISC-V processors that are out there and have your own custom silicon produced. You can't really do that with any of the other CPU architectures without paying someone through the nose.

Linus Torvalds says AI-powered bug hunters have made Linux security mailing list ‘almost entirely unmanageable’

Re: There's an easy solution

Agreed. I don't use Artificial Ignorance to write or modify code, but I do ask questions and explanations of technology details I'm unsure of from the online tools available without giving them access to my code base.

If I like their approach/suggestion, I implement it, but within the constraints of my existing code base, which is itself maintained by a rule-based fractal model-to-code tool I've worked on for many years. I don't need AI to author code, I just need it to explain how to do things with modern frameworks and technologies that I didn't gain experience with during my working career (I'm retired and coding away 'cause I enjoy it!)

It also has the advantage of a 0-token fee. :)

Surprise AI bills leave AWS and Google Cloud users aghast

Hard to feel much sympathy for people who thought they'd take "the easy route" for doing their WORK.

AI-generated code is 'pain waiting to happen'

Without a solid understanding of the whole system, AI makes mistakes - sometimes big ones. Unless and until Artificial Ignorance has the capacity to consider all the interactions of a system as a human programmer historically has had to do, we're in no danger of unemployment. But who knows what they're trying to convince the wrong technology to do? And LLMs are the wrong technology for understanding and authoring code, because they have no actual understanding or model of the world they're dealing with, just analysis of text fragments in the short term.

Bedrock and a hard place: Claude adventure leaves AWS user staring down $30K invoice

So AWS hoovered another user's wallet.

News at 11:00...

Dirty Frag gets a sequel as Fragnesia hands Linux attackers root-level access

Does software have bugs? Yes.

It is how those bugs get handled that matters. In the case of Linux, a timely fix goes out in a day or few to all the major vendors. In Windows case, you're left vulnerable for a month or more until Microsoft "gets around to it."

Anthropic’s bug-hunting Mythos was greatest marketing stunt ever, says cURL creator

Reading through the posts after a few days, I find most people are pointing out that Mythos "only" finds the same kinds of bugs that skilled humans do when scanning code, and that it is admittedly a benefit to be able to do so automatically instead of having to hire an expensive resource to do it for you.

But what it neglects to discuss is a recent article here on El Reg about open source models that can achieve much the same thing when taken as a group (i.e. you need to run several of them individually to equal Mythos, or work out some way to build a higher level open source expert manager that doles out the details to the sub-LLMs.) There is nothing "magical" about Mythos that hasn't been attempted in whole or in part by others already.

The media and the internet feeds both like to poo-poo such open source tools as "hard to use" or have other complaints about them, but completely ignore the fact you don't have to pay to run them other than hardware to run it on. With the "AI" companies starting to boost their revenues to try and stem the bleeding they're doing through their services (loss leaders to get people hooked on the technology and too in-bed with it to back out when the real prices get charged) you can only expect that locked-in tool chain to get more and more expensive to use as time goes on.

Any drug dealer will tell you the first hit is free, or near free...

Hype? OpenAI? A former a friend and acquaintance of "Honest Elon," who has so accurately predicted the rise of self-driving vehicles, Mars colonies, regular flights to an earth-orbiting luxury hotel, etc.? (I neither know nor care what Elon indulges in, but it's pretty clear he gets blasted on something to "bolster his courage" before opening his mouth in public with such nonsense on such a regular basis for so many decades.)

This whole pack of scammers sells you nothing but empty promises with someone else's "best effort" as the "product" you get to churn your code with forever more while forever paying fees for the "privelege" of "special" access to such tools.

It's the standard hype-machine protocol: sell the sizzle, not the steak. Anyone with a steer or cow can sell you a steak; too much competition if you're honest about what your product really is. And never let people know you can do 90% of the "heavy lifting" with a 12GB VRAM card and a local LLM with the right tool chain instead of paying a few hundred in "token fees" per month; fees that will only go up to compensate for the artificial scarcity that induces panic buying from a gullible public.

Sovereign cloud is only possible if you’re Chinese or American: Gartner

Correction: the only nation that can source all the parts needed for their technology without going to a foreign nation for parts supplies is the Chinese. :)

Most cases come from Asian factories, too, with local vendors applying logo stamps if they didn't just pay the Asian manufacturer to do that for them before shipping. "Assembled in Canada/USA" usually just means they put all the pieces in the packing box. They "assembled" the "package" you got, not the computer.

However, given the dearth of American manufacturing quality in the face of perpetual budget cuts, layoffs, and hack jobs by "investment firms", I'm kind of glad most stuff I buy in Canada is made somewhere other than America. :)

The Americans and their shills have to push the "it's impossible" line, because once the victims of the scam realize it is possible, and also necessary for their own safety and security against an increasingly intrusive and abusive USG spy agency technology network, the game is over and the market share of the scam artists plummets, and so does the US stock market.

See Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's response to Trump's "trade negotiators" demands for concessions before the CUSMA review even starts.

Der Pumpkin Fuhrer knows no negotiation tactics other than the threat of tarrifs. When you no longer give a rat's patoot about the US market because it is the world's most unreliable partner in all things at this time, the tactic stops working and Trump is left powerless and fuming at his "Bullshit Social" keyboard.

Quit VMware and you’ll emerge with more complex and less capable infrastructure

Paul, just how much did they pay you to sell your soul like this? I hope you at least got a pretty penny for selling out your dignity.

Trump jumps from 'anything goes' to 'strict regulation' AI policy

*shrug* As long as the world says "No" and ignores him like Canada, the EU, and Australia have taken to doing of late, with the UK as latecomer to that party, Trump can't really do too much except bluster and rant on "Bullshit Social" about how "mean" and "stupid" everyone is for not giving him his way.

Trump has no grasp of diplomacy or negotiation. He thinks wanting is having, and that he is always going to get what he wants.

Your Republican Congress and Senate may not have the 'nads to tell him "No", but the rest of the world has no reason to put up with his dementia-driven bullshit any more.

That man-child has all the attention span of a golden retriever at Stanley Park in BC, where there are squirrels by the truckload! Even impulsive people usually head off in a particular direction; Trump just has random spasms-of-the-hour-on-a-keyboard.

Gtk2-NG, next generation of Gtk 2, comes back to life

Re: CTK for GTK3 fork

Well, if I do have the option, I'll be shifting from Debian 13 to its Devuan counterpart. I need NVidia graphics, CUDA, Ollama, Java JDK's (specifically Eclipse Adoptium JDK's), and the rest is all just the typical X-11 requiring stack, like Netbeans. It's the NVidia stuff and the Java support that makes me nervous; Adoptium runs rings around stock Devian openjdk for my workloads.

The gaming platforms are a "must have" without any effort at all. I see no reason why something like Steam should be calling into SystemD in the first place.

If anything leaves me feeling nervous, I won't be proceeding until that nervousness is resolved, if ever. Debian feels nice and safe, but the fact it focuses on Gnome means it might be dropping the X.org stack and MATE support, which are must-haves for my Linux use. I've tried virtually every desktop there is; this is "the one" for me. I shall be very stubborn about that; I hate Wayland-based compositing display. They all feel like you're typing through jello for responsiveness.

Re: CTK for GTK3 fork

So far I'm getting promising results on the support for accelerated nvidia drivers on Devuan.org.

Google's AI even gives instructions and "gotchas", because it has been done before and been documented.

That's one roadblock down. Now to look into whether Steam support or the Heroic Games Launcher or the NVidia CUDA stack are going to be issues. I could be reinstalling my box Yet One More Time. (That's the thing about Linux, there is never The Last Installation ;) )

SystemD and Wayland are monolithic abominations compared to the modular elegance of the unix historical philosophy; smaller and focused is always better and easier to maintain. And less prone to unnoticed abuse. Would you notice if the USG mandated RedHat/IBM inject a back door for the CIA and FBI to use into SystemD?

I can't speak to others, but personally MATE on a Debian 13 stack is my "daily driver." Gives me the NVidia accelerated X.11 stack I need and is old enough that all the bugs and issues that have bugged me over the years of use seem to have finally been fixed; I haven't had a single issue with my box in three months and counting. This is starting to be a record of some kind for me... :)

60% of MD5 password hashes are crackable in under an hour

MD5 isn't a password hash, it's a quick and dirty huge text comparison hash for detecting whether a blob of text has been updated by the latest long running operation, requiring multiple long-running operations to be triggered as a result of the change. If the MD5's of the old text and the new text match, you don't incur the overhead of the long jobs, you just assume it was another long winded email from someone re-stating what was already stated in an official email previously.

Linux kernel maintainers pitch emergency killswitch after CopyFail and Dirty Frag chaos

Re: Sabotage?

Hello, Richard.

Just how many accounts do you have at El Reg? ;)

No opportunity for back door abuse by anybody gaining access to that function, eh? That's as stupid as back-doored encryption.

Yes, local LLMs are ready to ease the compute strain

Thank you for the transcript; it's a lot faster to read text than to listen to people hem and haw their way through the typical human meet-and-greet that goes on at meetings.

The rubber is starting to meet the road as investors across the "AI" spectrum ask their favourite question: "Where's my ROI?"

Debian 14 cracks down on unreproducible packages

I'll be waiting a little longer to reinstall this box with Debian 14 after its initial release this time than I did with Debian 13.

I'm not budging until the full NVidia chain I need for my RTX4070Ti is ready and supporting Debian 14 natively, not through workarounds and hacks to get Debian 14 to run with Debian 13 repos like I did in earlier attempts to get Debian 13 running on this hardware.

Can such workarounds be effective? Well, you can get an unstable box running that way...

Meta U-turns on encryption push for Instagram as DMs go plaintext

Gotta suck up to the Fascist USG's demands for access to "protect the children" (Drumpf's eggshell ego )

GPT-5.5 may burn fewer tokens, but it always burns more cash

Good luck affording to do your job in the future when the AI companies start charging enough to earn a profit commensurate with their valuations.

I feel sorry for people who have to use a machine to do their work for them; it's a shame they lack the basic programming skills to do the job without paying through the nose to some leech that is actually doing all their work for them. You may as well just hire an Indian subcontractor to do your job for you...

Meta fights Ofcom over how many billions count as billions

"The law allows Ofcom to fine companies for up to 10 percent of their qualifying worldwide revenue..."

Screw you, Zuck. Pay up, you thieving fraud!

Custom PC worked in the lab, failed on site – and so did the angry client

Loose connections or unplugged cables are 95% of hardware faults...

'Dirty Frag' Linux flaw one-ups CopyFail with no patches and public root exploit

Re: CVE and patches are available

Kernel upgrade came through before 02:00 CST in Saskatchewan today (2026-05-08.)

GNOME may rule Ubuntu Resolute Raccoon, but X.org isn't roadkill yet

Utter nonsense. Wayland may outperform an unaccelerated X-11 stack, but it delivers HALF the frame rates for every game I tried under it compared to the NVidia accelerated X-11 stack. Sorry that you've been deluded, but such is YOUR problem, not mine.

Dude, ALL Wayland implementations use a frame buffer for the initial drawing that is then pushed to the display. That means you have a MINIMUM of a 50% performance loss in games. WITHOUT EXCEPTION.

Personally I rather like the MATE desktop with Debian; who needs all that useless cruft and spam that you get with Ubuntu? Not to mention all the "extras" that screw things up - like this IGNORANT decision to shovel Wayland down everyone's throats despite it's poor performance and incompatability problems.

VMware claims Cloud Foundation on track for world domination

Re: Please do some research

You may expect people to be an expert about everything they ever talk about. I do not, and I say you can take your attitude and stuff it where the sun don't shine.

I don't "research" bugger all unless it isn't working the way I need/expect it to or unless I'm really concerned about some particular aspect of a technology.

You, oh cowardly AC, are a tech snob and elitist who thinks knowing more about something than someone else makes you "special". Absolutely NOTHING described by this technology is anything more than new buzzwords for swap space, despite your claim I "need to learn." You're the one who need to learn the difference between marketing bullshit and what you can actually expect something to do.

Let me guess: You're an "all-in" vibe coder to boot...

OMG. They've rediscovered swap space! And here I've always presumed that VMs did something like that automatically already! Go figure - guess the tech is pretty primitive compared to what I expected of it.

Musk has never built a wafer fab, but he wants to burn $119B on one anyway

Cue Musk "acquiring" all those laid-off Intel engineers...