Posts by Darkedge

London cops handed victim's new address and number to her stalker, watchdog says

Re: Just gave the attacker her number?

yeah that's not data protection training needed is just utterly stupid and incompetent.

Openreach nudges another 112 exchange areas toward full fiber

had to go starlink as well, curse Elop

40mb would be amazing round here as max speed seems to be 15MBit ON A GOOD DAY.

Promised proper fibre in 2026 but then Openreach went nahh we'll get round to you later

Signals are grim for Jodrell Bank Observatory after UK science funding decision

criminal

cuts must be reversed, this is an essential part of our history and our future in science.

Microsoft extends extended updates for Windows 10 in the most muted way imaginable

Re: "hundreds of millions of PCs running Windows 10 remain in service"

For Ram the manufacturer's are moving to server/AI storage away from consumer(e.g. pcs/laptops even for business) as it's more profitable due to the bubble. There's been a lot of panic buying/forced allocation and I think now the memory manufacturers are just price-fixing as a cartel (again).

LLM bubble die ffs.

Britain's privacy watchdog quits after 'poor judgment' admission

Opportunity

for him to find a job where his apparently several misjudged remarks, more likely an ongoing litany of them.

Also an opportunity to reform ICO as it seems as effective as a chocolate teapot in actually doing anything it was supposed to do.

Commodore gets into the phone biz with Sailfish-powered retro 'Callback'

Privacy focused my arse

How much privacy has a phone with WhatsApp on it by default? If you can't remove that Zuck cancer then it's pretty much none.

London’s BT Tower to get rooftop swimming pool

closed to the Hoi Polloi but used by BT for private and corporate events for years after - I believe they hired it out from time to time. Was closed due to bomb threats I think.

Re: Just be cause you can do something ...

we need loads more of those in this country to even out supply. Love that one, lets have more.

Pass the key, passwords have passed their sell-by date

Re: implementation

YUP even easier for someone to steal your device and pwn you. Fundamentally flawed, not by tech necessarily but definitely by a lack of understanding of humans.

Dislike passkeys

Handing your security to someone else and insisting on a cloud connection is not safe or wise, especially as all the big passkey providers are US based. Seems more secure as cert based but really makes it less usable and potentially more exploitable due to a permanent file holding the security information.

Password manager, complex by default unique passwords with MFA MUCH more secure. Using passkeys will eventually seen as a bad decision, much like contracting Palantir or thinking an Oracle implementation will stick to budget.

Head-mounted VR hardware will never happen, says Neal Stephenson - who coined the term ‘metaverse’

Puking

Motion sickness from VR can be reduced with a combination of clever design, better headsets (higher refresh rates helps a lot and early headsets did not have this) and regular use to increate tolerance.

Gaming they will live on, definitely. Neil seems to be talking about AR headsets not just VR which yeah the issues of people around you are many but also will become more normalised in time.

Use in industry, science and medicine is unlikely to go away as loads of handy stuff being done, (Realtime overlays in 3d of CT scans etc in operations are a massive boon to surgeons). So yeah it'll not be a massive market for some time but it's certainly not dead or even dying. One company like Meta splurging loads to make it mainstream, that'll go away yup as was a bad idea in the first place. Making more of a display tech that is open is what seems to be happening which will remain, you won't be able to lock people in to your ecosystem as such but that is definitely a good thing.

Watchdog boss calls Capita's £370M DWP win 'extraordinary' amid pension portal dumpster fire

if it was the backlog of cases that was a problem

then how has the site failed to work for people without a case on the backlog? That more implies it is really a shitshow and this is the usual arse covering from Crapita

Bcachefs creator insists his custom LLM is female and 'fully conscious'

it gets better

Apparently the bot went on IRC and then came out as Trans and a Lesbian. Obviously then the creator had a meltdown about this as he is quite bigoted....

Lego shrinks NASA's biggest rocket – accuracy sold separately

the Astronauts are creepy with the gold visor closed look.

Oracle seeks to build bridges with MySQL developers

anyone

who trusts Oracle either needs their head examined, or is getting a kickback

Microsoft rushes out another fix for cloud storage after January update

how much of these issues are due to AI

and CoPilot assisting the MS programmers. Maybe they should start use it for their testing as it so wonderful and they don't appear to do much these days..

Anthropic writes 23,000-word 'constitution' for Claude, suggests it may have feelings

Re: Not really ...

"In the end, this "constitution" thing is just marketing."

And also highly delusional & definitely deceptive

Global economy shrugs off US tariff shock, tech spending does heavy lifting

the 2.4% growth for the USA will come crashing down

as basically it's all 'AI' investment and when that bubble bursts the tariffs will hit home probably pushing it into negative numbers

Oracle's new AI-enhanced support portal leaves users fuming

Oracle's support site was a jumbled mess

and always was painful to use but yeah they have made it much much worse.

Also loved that we received an email to say the new launch of the improved support site was delayed and would launch at a later date , yet got another email 30 mins later another saying it had been done & the new site was live. Embarrassingly incompetent.

Europe gets serious about cutting digital umbilical cord with Uncle Sam's big tech

Re: Shout It From The Rooftops

why would we ever hide stuff from the US, we've always freely given it to them to screw us over like our advances in Computing, Jet Engines, Supersonic plane research, radar, etc.

UK gov has effectively been in an abusive relationship with the US for years, the Shitgibbon make it worse but never was peachy before.

Faith in the internet is fading among young Brits

Re: The kids are alright

"The internet is fine, as a series of useful resources which are searchable. It's a tool to be picked up, consulted then put down again and it's amazing for that."

Disagree with that, enshitification of search engines and the rise of LLMs are making that much much worse. Plus social media has sucked in all the little sellers of cool things or social clubs, etc so they don't have their own web presence which is bloody terrible so you can't avoid SM. Moderation is not the full answer at all.

UK tech minister vows more whole-government megadeals after £9B Microsoft pact

Bigger just means

more lock in, more single option & over a barrel when it comes to renewal. Yet more short term thinking from our governments.

Newly launched civil service pension portal from Capita is crapita, users report

"We appreciate the patience and understanding of those affected. The service went live on 1st December as part of the largest ever on time transition of a public sector pension scheme in the UK,"

I think if it fundamentally doesn't work for quite a lot of users claiming it was delivered on time is bollocks. But yeah par for the course from Crapita

AI slop hits new high as fake country artist goes to #1 on Billboard digital songs chart

Spotify

is controlled by the major labels and is no friend of ANY artist except the top 0.1%. This is probably pushed by them as it makes more money for them and means less to pay actual artists. They have been shovelling anything that has basically zero cost in royalties to them at their audience for a while, this is just the highest profile one so far.

If you like music buy it, preferably direct but bandcamp Fridays is a good option. Oh and quit using Spotify it is killing music (much more than home taping ever did!)

Supermicro admits building AI infrastructure is a tricky, low-margin business ... for now

low margins?

considering the build quality and reliability of Supermicro is the worst I've ever had to deal with I'm shocked. Would never buy their kit by choice.

Equinix revealed as occupant of £3.9B UK datacenter campus

water usage of office-building levels

"water usage of office-building levels" - so for a 85 ACRE site that's still going to be a heck of a lot of water...

Britain's Ministry of Justice just signed up to ChatGPT Enterprise

someone's thinking is fundamentally flawed

"the work of 'Consult' was compared to two groups of experts. It agreed with one or both of the groups almost 83 percent of the time, while the two well-practiced human groups only agreed with each other 55 percent of the time."

We yes that makes sense as looking at two sets of data is going to find more to agree on with one or the other than both sets of data directly correlate.. That's not a GOOD reason to judge it its working well and really if it was really good it would be closer to 100% as it is it things completely different from BOTH 1 out of 5 times. That seems... bad.

Boris Johnson confesses: He's fallen for ChatGPT

perfect partner

for the corrupt fantasist mass murderer with a huge ego something that adds to his lies and bolsters his ego. We truly are in the wrong timeline

SoftBank snaps up ABB's robotics biz for $5.4B to fuel 'physical AI' dreams

soon softbank will rebrand

so they are going to change their name to Cyberdyne systems shortly? I think if there was one company that we can blame for the upcoming Mankind Machine war it'll be Softbank unless the AI bubble bursting wipes them out (we can but hope)

Techie found an error message so rude the CEO of IBM apologized for it

Re: Nothing offensive, just impossible

I'd need a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster before going back to Fortran in any shape or form...

Brit scientists over the Moon after growing tea in lunar soil

Re: one small sip for man...

no oolong would be coming from Mars according to Jeff Wayne

Why Microsoft has the name of an old mouse hidden in its Bluetooth drivers

Not the first time

and not the last. Licencing reporting using SCCM was always fun as MS couldn't decide what to call themselves seemingly from month to month in the company name for any particular . Horrible mess of different company names all of them Microsoft! Unsurprisingly they ditched the data feed used to make that work well in the end probably because 80% plus was their own different company names and they knew more were coming..

Privacy activists warn digital ID won’t stop small boats – but will enable mass surveillance

Re: Hmm

one thing that would help is safe routes to apply for asylum but they closed all of those. If you've failed an application you are much less likely to try and get in other ways and has much more legal heft to kick you out if you do try and illegally enter. But hey sensible ideas never a strong point of populist politicians abetted by a rubbish FPTP voting system...

Amnesty slams Elon Musk's X for 'central role' in fueling 2024 UK riots

also X is not the world

"We are committed to keeping X safe for all our users."

It's not the safety of users on that cesspool that's the issue - it's the people they assault outside it. Typical thinking of big corps that only their users matter they don't have a responsibility to society.

Faced with £40B budget hole, UK public sector commits £9B to Microsoft

National Linux infrastructure development needed

FFS if the gov would spend a Billion on Linux based systems we could probably have a ERP system to beat Oracle without the lock in and drug dealer tactics, a NHS IT system to support hospitals and all their old equipment much more secure than the mess we have now and potentially a load of stuff to sell all over the world to avoid relying on the orange one's wims. But no that would require forward thinking and no backhanders.

OpenAI makes good on its name, launches first open weights language models since GPT-2

less than 20% accuracy

and this is supposed to be a useful tool that is likely to be wrong 80% of the time? Is that a joke?

LLMs - less than half baked.

Virgin Media scraps wholesale network rival to Openreach

VM

Known to be appalling to current customers, you "can't get advertised as that's only for new customers" shtick. Lucky to get any sort of discount year on year for staying with them. When their system works it's great which is most of the time but good value after initial contract is really unlikely.

As companies race to add AI, terms of service changes are going to freak a lot of people out

try the real world

"Data needs to live in a database – not an Excel file. Access should be granted for each according to their needs."

Yeah tell that 98% of the population they wouldn't have a clue how to run a database for their data needs and storage. If you've got a simple solution Mr Eden lets have it but a bloomin Database it is fecking not.

Also Data should not be in something an A.I should be near unless you run it and know how it works, doesn't matter if it's perceived to be sensitive by you, the probability is that someone can derive value from it and that will likely not be to your benefit...

Meet your new colleague – the ML Admin, who tames LLMs so they're ready to rock

'Special Sysadmin then

so it's someone who has drunk the koolaid and actually likes LLM unlike most SA who know to stay well away so the stink doesn't get on them... That's the only reason it's a separate role.

Nvidia rolls out NeMo microservices to help AI help you help AI

Delusional

"Despite this, nearly all respondents (93 percent) claimed their AI investment has delivered a good return on investment (ROI)."

That's because they are all Directors who have wasted their companies cash on these B*llsh*t engines and can't be seen to have made a bad decision..