Posts by Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck

Softbank bets $2 billion on Intel having a future

Of course if the government of the US steps in, that would be Communism or Socialism; take your pick. But they'll grunt "'Murrikkka" and claim it's different than when China or Canada helps out their businesses.

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

Everybody should be looking for alternatives to Microsquishy (they're soft in the head) with the "Recall" spyware on the horizon. Clearly the people buying these "AI" PCs have no idea just how helpful "Recall" is for US law enforcement... at the expense of any semblance of privacy you used to have.

Are you willing to pay $100k a year per developer on AI?

The Artificial Ignorance bubble was always nothing more than a hype-bubble. "AI" has failed miserably at almost everything I tried to do with it, requiring multiple models and many days of prompting just to figure out how to set up multiple JPA repositories in a Spring application. That's not "efficiency" - I could probably have done the same with online searches in about the same amount of time, but I'd never really tried to push any of the "AI" systems to actually create complex code, and I wanted to see how it would do.

It was very misleading, producing erroneous and bug-ridden code styles along the way that completely refactored what the previous LLM had come up with, but not actually fixing anything in most cases.

"AI" is statistics and averages gone mad. It produces plausible output for a prompt, not correct output, and no wonder - it's not actually "intelligent" in the slightest, with no understanding model of what you are actually trying to accomplish, just the "knowledge" that "90% of the time you ask for foo, you want code that looks like bar."

Voice, vision, pen: Oh dear. Windows boss says Microsoft is again reshaping OS

I am done with Microsoft's "OS". They're as delusional and psychotically destructive as the Gnome team with their non-customizable desktop. Shoving theoretical CRAP no one wants down everyone's throat, especially the "AI" nonsense in Microsquishy's case. Soft in the head they are...

The £9 billion question: To Microsoft or not to Microsoft?

Microsoft has their place. For example, they're good at draining fools' wallets, preventing them from getting involved in hard drugs...

Microsoft's Patch Tuesday baker's dozen: 12 critical bugs plus a SharePoint RCE

Microsoft: the bugs that keep on giving! (Migraines and headaches, that is.)

No more 'Sanity Checks.' Inclusive language guide bans problematic tech terms

As long as it's MY fingers doing the typing, it's going to be 4-keystrokes for "hung", not a godawful number for the "preferred" alternative.

Screw "political correctness" right to the proverbial hell...

Californian man so furious about forced Windows 11 upgrade that he's suing Microsoft

Re: good luck.

I'll only be watching out of curiosity. I'm off the Microsquishy treadmill for good.

Politically hot parts of US Constitution briefly deleted thanks to 'coding error'

I'm sure the DOGE children were responsible for the "mistake."

Trump calls for Intel CEO's head over alleged China links

It's only fair - millions upon millions of people want Drumpf's head!

Birmingham City Council's £131M Oracle rebuild in danger as go-live nears

It's Oracle! Of course they screwed it up, same as they always do.

With Oracle's history of such delays and screw ups, I'm absolutely flabbergasted that anyone is still stupid enough to sign a contract with them. You may as well just burn your money in a fire...

Florida jury throws huge fine at Tesla in Autopilot crash

Re: Haters

I'm a fan of putting [/SARCASM] at the end of such posts. I presume any other programmer with experience since the early 90s would be familiar with such approaches, as even old TTY-based word processors used similar tags, or understood _blah_ to mean italics, and *blah* to mean bold. "Attributes" have been around almost as long as programming.

I make no apologies to anyone foolish enough to be sarcastic on the internet without making it clear that their "humorous" post is either a) a joke site b) a satire site or c) that they are, indeed, joking this time. Even then you're likely to be pilloried for "laughing at such serious matters."

Re: Haters

Obviously you're a fan of Muscolini's fraudulent stock pumping lies...

Windows 11 leads as October looms, but millions still cling to Windows 10

I have neither sympathy nor respect for any organization that couldn't get it done with the nearly TWO YEARS warning Microsoft gave. None.

Gadget geeks aghast at guru's geriatric GPU

Re: What's the problem ?

Yep. I've long lost track of the number of Mahogany Row systems I've seen that put the developer's boxes to shame, all to view emails of Power Point presentations...

RTX4070Ti here because I like my Steam gaming and to play with LLMs. But as far as a system without those requirements goes, if you can do text ttys to edit code and run commands, what more do you need?

Anything on the market with a 2k 1440x3440 FireWire output would do my programming just fine.

Zuck tries to justify AI splurge with talk of 'superintelligence' for all

Re: He's really trying...

Comfortable with the success of the Metaverse and the Artificial Ignorance pipe dream, 'Zuck leaned back in his chair and took another massive hit from his crack pipe...

White House bans 'woke' AI, but LLMs don't know the truth

Apparently your downvoters aren't familiar with philosophy. But I can't say I'm surprised - that course came much later in my education than the Grade 4 they failed out at...

Considering how ill-acquainted with anything even resembling the truth the Liar In Chief is, this is one hell of an amusing faux paux.

Publishers cry foul over W3C crusade to rid web of third-party cookies

The advertisers can kiss my haemorrhoidic arse

I pay my ISP for Internet access - that is all I "owe" anyone for being online.

Trump pushes EU into trade 'deal' that several EU leaders aren't happy about

Of course Europe was bullied into signing something.

Drumpf needed a nice distracting "victory" to try to get people to back off on the Epstein file issue.

Won't happen, abuser of little girls and ogler of 14 year olds at beauty pageants while they are changing...

I just deleted my entire social media presence before visiting the US – and I'm a citizen

Re: I spit fire in the fediverse all day.

The issue never was your email being captured on the way to the server, but being "read" by the intermediate nodes on the route it follows to you. Any and all of those servers can read/scan your email.

Re: No social Media presence

I can not say the same; I babble incessantly online. Largely 'cause I'm old enough not to give a rat's patoot what other people think, especially American border security, as I'm retired and had absolutely no intention of returning there even before Drumpf was first elected. I gave up on the US in the spring following 9/11. Place turned into a paranoid police state shithole and I moved back home to Canada where I didn't feel threatened by so-called "security measures" the government itself was using.

The US has gradually crept further and further right for years since then, and has now gone full-on Fascist under Drumpf.

The terrorists won - they destroyed "The American Dream" and replaced it with paranoid fear of the world.

Microsoft-owned GitHub: Open source needs funding. Ya think?

The corporate world, especially American "businesses" have always done their level headed best to take as much open source infrastructure as possible while paying bugger all for it, despite the trillions of profit it earns them all

It's the same way they've short changed the working staff wages since the 70s while lining the pockets of "investors" and management to an absolutely insane degree.

They consider open source to be the ultimate staff - they work for "free."

It will never change until the unlimited lobbying is treated as the bribery it really is, and until politicians are required to have actual work experience in their portfolio field combined with actual management experience.

As long as the world lets the billionaires and their rape of the workers continue unchecked, the rest of us are all screwed regardless of what we do for a living.

The French Revolution had some excellent ideas for dealing with our current crops of politicians, corporate management, and billionaires...

VMware prevents some perpetual license holders from downloading patches

Re: Broadcom “support” portal

I paid for my copy of VMWare Workstation 17.5. It was supposed to be a "perpetual license."

The very first thing Broadcom did was push an update that pointed to resources you couldn't access unless you were signed up with one of their "partners", breaking my installation.

I run VirtualBox now.

Broadcom can kiss my ass. If anyone ever starts a Canadian class action for the loss of licenses they paid for, I would be interested...

You DO see Windows 11 as an AI PC opportunity, say Dell and Intel

Re: Unrealistic

I was stunned to learn that the so-called "AI" laptops are nearly CAN$1000 more than their non-AI predecessors. All so you can be spied on 24/7 by Microsoft and US law enforcement through "Recall."

Nor is the "AI" aspect of these machines worth crap, because they've a fraction of the horsepower and memory available that my RTX4070Ti does, and I still can't run LLMs more than 9GB in size. Which means they're so compressed they hallucinate like they've snorted cocaine, sucked on a tab of LSD, and done a dose of Ketamine, all within the space of five minutes...

Caught a vibe that this coding trend might cause problems

OpenAI 4.1 through VSCode Github copilot is useful to some degree, but extremely dangerous in "Agent" mode. Unless you feed it a long list of what you don't want changed by a prompt, it always tries to do more than you asked for because "according to statistics", your working code is "written wrong."

If I'd have had the experience with setting up JPA configurations that I needed to do what I'm working on now, I'd not have found it useful at all. But as it is, it took attacks with Cline, Claude 3.5, Google's online summaries/outlines, and finally OpenAI 4.1 to come up with my "final solution" to what I want done (See https://github.com/msobkow/server.markhome.msscf.msscf.cflib.dbtest and related repos under my id.)

Although I'm pleased with the final multi-JPA-repository implementation, I'm emphatically not happy with how long it took to come up with. Sure I was just puttering at it over two dot-releases of Spring, but the unpredictable behaviour and different interpretations of what was needed by all the LLMs involved in the process just proves that you can't replace a good programmer's experience with these extremely overhyped utilities.

And that's all they are. Programming tools and utilities, to be used as needed, but not trusted to do the job right. And the only way to know they're doing it wrong is through decades in the trenches of programming without relying on them.

Meta joins Google in ragequitting EU political ads over onerous regulations

How outrageous - demanding responsible reporting about political donations in the form of "free advertising" for the platforms supported by the billionaires.

Once again, the decision seems to be "We're American; Fuck You!"

I think their arrogance even exceeds the Pumpkin Fuhrer on this item.

Microsoft admits it 'cannot guarantee' data sovereignty

In short, the American government demands the same right to hoovering offshore data "owned" by American cloud and internet service providers exactly the same as the Chinese government does of Chinese providers.

Typical case of the pot calling the kettle black.

Debian isn't waiting for 2038 to blow up, switches to 64-bit time for everything

Yep. The developers learned from Y2K, Corporate applications will be in a last minute panic, though, because it's not "profitable" to fix ahead of time. They'd rather pay through the nose at the last minute after the current management has left on their golden parachutes.

Microsoft CEO feels weighed down by job cuts

Re: Crocodile tears

I'm sure Satya will be just crying on the way to the bank to collect his multi million dollar bonus for "good management" at fiscal year end.

Trump promises he won't put his boot on Musk's neck

Sounds like among Musk's possessions is a certain document about a certain dead pedophile and his customer base...

'Cause Drumpf sure as hell hasn't shied away from pursuing Murdock even though he's the biggest shill for Drumpf on the planet through Faux News.

The EFF is 35, but the battle to defend internet freedom is far from over

Judicial overreach combined with "Recall" is a recipe for disaster for privacy, security, and down right sanity.

Switch to something other than Windows before it's too late...

How to host a Linux-powered local dev site in Windows

Much easier option: wipe Windblows from the box and install a real OS like Ubuntu, Redhat, LMDE 6, or Debian.

As an added bonus you won't have "Recall" sending screenshots of everything you do to Microsquishy for law enforcement perusal.

Tata Consultancy enforces return-to-office mandate for all US staff, effective immediately

Re: Issuing hollow offers to new hires

I definitely agree that the primary goal of this maneuver is to get people to quit so Tata doesn't have to pay severance...

Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS

Re: You missed the point

Nonsense. LMDE 6 is every bit as easy to use as Windows 11 save for the fact you HAVE to know and enter your password to install applications or updates. It even has a "store" for finding and installing them.

The ONLY "special knowledge " needed is how to remove the old windows partitions during the installation process.

You don't do things exactly the same as Windows with Chrome OS either, so there is a learning curve no matter what you migrate to.

There is no shortage of existing, easy to use Distros such as LMDE6 and Ubuntu.

Kindly stop begging to have the world handed to you on a platter just the way you want it and learn to use what is avalable already!

Lazy-assed S.O.B....

Copilot Vision on Windows 11 sends data to Microsoft servers

Encrypt whatever you want - law enforcement can now SEE your crime as it happens. The ULTIMATE spyware/wiretap service, just waiting to be abused by hackers.

Aren't you glad you run Windblows?

Struggling to sell EVs, Tesla pivots to slinging burgers

"Buy a Combo and get a FREE Cybertruck!" (It's not like we can sell the damned things...)

Science confirms what we all suspected: Four-day weeks rule

Re: Translation

"Those things" have an immediate impact on productivity, as someone who isn't satisfied with their job is not going to do it to the best of their ability for the simple reason that they don't enjoy what they're doing one little bit. They don't want to do it - they just need the money! Because like it or not, life takes money, and a hell of a lot more of it each and every single year of the kind of Trumptardian inflation the whole world is having to deal with. (Not to be confused with the Whovians, who are a noble and peaceful lot except when discussing which is THE best Doctor...)

Laid-off AWS employee describes cuts as 'cold and soulless'

Re: Maturity

Nah, the cloud people are just learning that the majority of them are a dime a dozen and easily swapped in as needed.

Their big mistake was thinking they had job security; no one has that, not even Linus. We're all victims of the "short term profit" mantra, with all the job security of a McTesticles burger flipper since it was mandatory for corporations to maximize "shareholder value."

AMD cleared to join Nvidia and resume selling some underpowered AI chips to China

"After some intense lobbying from the chip industry, which stood to lose billions in revenue, Washington reversed its decision and will again allow sale of some GPUs to China."

Translation: TACO man chickened out when faced with push-back from the industry. It's what he does second best; number one is bankruptcies. And he's doing a wonderful job of steering the US to profit losses and bankruptcy as nobody trusts the US as a partner on anything any more, and won't again until after a long period of sanity returns.

Britain's billion-pound F-35s not quite ready for, well, anything

Re: Maybe it's time we in Britain admit we're a bit crap at things nowadays

Canada was at the forefront at the time of the Arrow, too, but cancelled the program in favour of buying inferior aircraft from a then-reliable partner: the US.

Now we're considering cancelling our F-35 contracts as Drumpf has threated to ensure that any F-35's sold to foreigners are "crippled" compared to the American's version.

Nobody needs a "defense partner" who is going to cripple their partners' capabilities, so we're looking at Saab, the Eurofighter, and other EU-based options, some of which are more suitable for service in Canada's cold climate.

Ex-OpenAI engineer pulls the curtain back on a chaotic hot mess

That "structure" also explains how they manage to burn through so many billions while producing so little. When you use a shotgun approach to research, only a couple of pellets will stick; most will miss.

VMware reboots its partner program again – and it looks like smaller players are out

I just want to ensure they have enough "roughage." :)

Re: Computing infrastructure should be boring ...

Nonsense. If there were no equivalent products, nobody would be reporting success stories migrating off VMWare, and there have been no shortage of success stories.

May Broadcom's management be "anally intruded" by unlubricated pineapples...

Intel swings the axe again as it looks to lose 5,000 staff

"After spending billions on share buybacks to support the stock price and fat dividends from shareholders rather than investing in new technology Intel is now finding itself in a bind."

The board and investors don't care about long term viability and health of a company; they haven't since some idiot down south decided decades ago that the official and only legal mission of companies is to maximize profits. That's about the same time things like retirement benefits, health care benefits, 20 year careers, etc. were put on the chopping block in favour of frequent staff turnovers to "maintain new blood."

Now they're reaping the results of short-term greed: long term dissolution.

Mistral launches Voxtral speech recognition model

You pay to use your server, but you don't have to rent a server if you want to run it on your own box. This crap FORCES you to pay for services.

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

The thing is he's only winning even as a "PR war" is the existing support of the same fools who believe that consumers don't pay for tariffs, other nations do. Everyone else is laughing uncomfortably at the US while it goes down the drain, helpless to stop it's own oncoming trade disaster. Nobody trusts the US any more. China is a more stable trade partner than the US, and they've got huge tariffs on Canadian canola and other products in retaliation for our tariff on their dumped EVs. (If you're selling it for less than cost to manufacture, it's called "dumping", and it's illegal under international trade laws.)

As to tariffs: Prices go up for everybody who buys that product, regardless of where the taxes come from. It is ultimately the consumer who always pays for tariffs on products. And believe you me, there isn't much at Wally World (Wal-Mart) that isn't made overseas, usually in China. So the favourite source of "cheap" products in the US is now home to some of the most inflationary tariff jack-ups the world has seen since the 1930's.

And for the same reason: tariff/protectionist economies implode, especially if there is an accompanying stock market bubble to panic into disaster mode. There are many bubbles on the US markets right now, especially the much-vaunted Artificial Ignorance bubble.

Odds are, within five to ten years of the start of Drumpf's trade war, the Euro will have replaced USD as the preferred currency of trade on global markets. Or the Yuan.

Putin plays the long game; so does Xi.

Der Pumpkin Fuhrer is a buffoon with the IQ of a rutabaga.