Posts by Catch-the-Pigeon

Remote work – not AI – is killing job prospects for the youth

not sure if this is the only reason

Since COVID and the rise of remote working, there appears to have been an increase in people holding multiple jobs simultaneously. In 2020, while working for a small financial services company, I was involved in a software release where a US-based colleague repeatedly disappeared midway through critical deployment activities. Eventually, management terminated his employment due to the frequency of these incidents and a strong suspicion that he was working multiple jobs at the same time.

Over the years, a number of recruiters and hiring managers have told me that this is not uncommon. Most companies are reluctant to get into lengthy disputes about whether someone is working multiple roles and instead choose to move them out of the organisation if they believe performance is being affected. I suspect that one of the motivations behind encouraging employees back into the office is that it makes holding multiple full-time roles much more difficult.

I also know of people who have successfully worked several roles simultaneously for extended periods. An old friend of mine has been doing three jobs at the same time for the last few years, a mix of contract and perm, the ones that expire , he gets another one. The demand for experienced professionals remains strong, and many employers prioritise proven skills and experience. As a result, graduates and entry-level candidates can find themselves at a disadvantage when competing for opportunities.

NASA Inspector fears new spacesuits won’t be ready for Moon landing

robots

Given how expensive these suits are, it makes far more sense to send robots instead. They’re becoming cheaper to manufacture, can operate for long periods on modern batteries, and only need additional shielding to handle the environment. Maybe a bit more but still doable

Unlike humans, they don’t require food, aren’t affected by weightlessness, and don’t need life-support systems like oxygen/toilets. Also less to worry about when taking off and in re-entry with those ever important heat shields.

The other thing is if NASA want to try a risky manoeuvre for testing , there's less to worry about - apart from reusable parts which I think are mostly booster rockets which are recovered from the ocean after lift off. Most items are single-use.

Waymo's self-driving cars face their toughest test yet: London

Re: Captcha

no roundabouts to struggle with either

Amazon would rather shareholders did not look too closely at carbon footprint

it's not just net zero

They should be reporting water footprint alongside net zero, not separately.

While companies publish “water positive” targets, these often don’t capture the full environmental impact (for example, upstream water use from power generation).

If net zero is meant to reflect real-world sustainability, it needs to be complemented with equally transparent, end-to-end water impact reporting.

Virgin Galactic reopens ticket sales with out-of-this-world price hikes

value for money

I could've managed a sell-off and whip round for the original base price but for $750,000 for a 90-minute ride — ess than 10 minutes of weightlessness, a poxy certificate and I can't lift the hatch to get out

Value for money? hmm for a billionaire maybe for me no thanks.

Anthropic admits Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'

taxi analogy

It’s like taking a taxi with a driver who has no sense of direction and chooses the longest route, leading to unnecessary overspend.

Also the source code has just been released by error so others might be able to FTFY

Remote or not, workers are drifting back toward the city

working in the city

I worked for several large banks in the City, and most of my line managers were reluctant to let me work from home—even when it was to support my wife and kids. In reality, it rarely made any difference to my productivity; it often felt more about them wanting visible control and a sense of their “empire” growing, with people physically at their desks.

Quite a few were micromanagers. When I did work from home, they would sometimes call under the guise of asking a question they already knew the answer to, seemingly just to check that I was at my desk.

Europe's cloud minnows tell Brussels to stop big tech 'sovereignty-washing'

new AWS services

the hyperscalers know this shift is coming and AWS recently announced a new services External Key Management (EKM), which allow companies to store their master encryption keys outside of the cloud environment. This helps improve data security and gives organisations a quicker—though not complete—step toward achieving sovereignty. I'm sure others will follow with something similar.

https://eviden.com/insights/press-releases/eviden-kms-now-available-on-aws-european-sovereign-cloud/

Royal Navy races to arm ships against drone threat

too slow

I always assumed that the army and navy were a step or two ahead of what the public sees or uses when it comes to technology. Perhaps that assumption comes from the Cold War era, when defence research often led the way and civilian technology followed.

It seems years of under investment appears to have left gaps in capability and innovation. With drones flying around airports and the widespread use of drones in the Ukraine war, you would think militaries would already be integrating counter-drone and drone capabilities into tanks, naval ships, and other platforms as standard.

The conflict between Russia and Ukraine effectively began in 2014. That should have been a clear alarm bell for the UK and the EU to start seriously planning for the future of warfare.

AWS-hosted tech providers urge Middle East customers to fail over now

does it work

IT guy - " yeah simple , we just change the region, run the code , restore all the stateful stuff , update DNS and it's done"

in reality, there will problems all the way , code doesn't work as expected, stuff done manually in the portal, databases not backed up , etc. Still it's a good learning exercise for the next time

Supposedly big-brained execs are outsourcing decisionmaking to AI

those that can do, those that can't - AI

Dev stunned by $82K Gemini bill after unknown API key thief goes to town

auto disable the key

we use anthropic and openai keys, when I looked at the list of tokens used with these keys, alot are still zero. I suggested maybe make the default policy , after 3 months of zero usage , disbale or delete the key and the user has to generate a new one.

Japan's Rapidus lands $1.7B to chase 2nm chip production by 2027

shrewd move

with today's politics and the possibility of China taking Taiwan, no-one wants to be reliant on TSMC being there forever, although they have diversified into the US. Along with data sovereignty , comes chip sovereignty and in today world trust no-one , not even your so called allies. The UK private sector should fund the same way as Japan, problem is there are not many large British corporates left in the IT sector which aren't diluted with foriegn investments.

Sopra Steria sues UK government over £958M Capita outsourcing award

lowest price - lowest service

A number of years ago I was working at JPMorgan when they had outsourced their IT services to IBM, who had won the contract as the lowest bidder. However, the agreement included professional services billed separately from the core contract.

By the time I joined, the arrangement had been running for several years, and it was widely understood internally that almost any change was classified as professional services. The associated costs steadily accumulated and, over time, likely matched or even exceeded what some of the higher bidders would have charged in the first place.

As I understand it, JPMorgan eventually decided to terminate the remaining contract early and bring it all back-in-house (backsourcing). This may have not been the only reason because there was a merger at the time and I guess there probably were a few reasons.

Claude collaboration tools left the door wide open to remote code execution

agile methodology

it's a push to get out new features and products quickly without a concern for security mainly to capture market share and beat the competition to it. We will deal with security last.

GCHQ dangles up to £130K for a CISO to fight the world's most capable adversaries

who can it be?

"preferably using a separate email address from their usual one that does not contain identifying features."

sure also I'll use a double vpn for extra IP security in Tor Browser with dark sunglasses and sign it as Mr Anony mouse

guessing it will come with the usual government benefits approx 29% pension contribution, allowances and 10-4pm only working hours etc which will help bump up the package but still a bit on the low side.

Gemini users say their chat histories have quietly vanished

deja vu news

hmm

Snyk CEO bails, wants someone with more AI experience to replace him

interesting timing

with current innovations in claude able to do security and code syntax checking , maybe he knows the future doesn't look good ?

We use snyk and other code scanning tools and claude at work and I think the seniors are probably or will consider a switch.

Accenture tells staffers: If you want a promotion, use AI at work

working at Accenture

I did a contract at Accenture about 20 years ago in the City. At the time, people used to joke that it felt a bit robotic in there. During my stint, my line manager was extremely committed to the company — it was more than a job for him — and he ran the team like a hard line communist.

Bods that did more than 90 hours a week, got a piece of paper and cheap bottle of wine , mostly newbies who will realise later in life they were mugged of their early years.

Some colleagues were incredibly loyal and fully immersed in the corporate culture, exactly what they want to ingrain. I was on a six-month contract but decided to wrap up after five, which didn’t go down particularly well with my manager. I never went back — and given he’s now a partner, I suspect he’d probably remember that decision if I ever tried :)

OpenClaw is the most fun I've had with a computer in 50 years

security hole

I was planning to install it just to try it out, but during setup it requested multiple API keys for integrations. That gave me pause, so I decided not to proceed as it felt too risky.

There are safer ways to test tools like this — for example, running them inside a dedicated VM or on separate hardware that isn’t used for anything else. That way, if something goes wrong, the blast radius is limited.

it's similar to losing a credit card, rotating and replacing every key can take time and cause disruption, so it’s worth being cautious upfront.

Indian conglomerate Adani plans very slow $100 billion AI datacenter build

chasing rainbows

The governments around most of the world are chasing buzzwords because other have told them to and they think it's the best way to go. There are so many things this money could fix in India but would get tired of trying or wouldn't see much benefit from it whereas in reality it would add alot.

Also they must've seen the issues with water and power other countries have, from this it might be worth speeding up that rollout of bit barns before the compeTITors grab it all. And I don't think even a few monsoons will cover the amount of water required.

MPs brand NS&I's £3B IT overhaul a 'full-spectrum disaster'

NS&I

No Savings & Inevitable overspend.

Never Seen It (the budget)

Nobody Stopped It

Nearly 17,000 Volvo staff dinged in supplier breach

is it worth it ?

I wonder if it will get to the point that it's not worth taking on large clients , since the risk of data exposure by either user configuraion errors or external hacking attempts will make the company liable to large fines and lawyer fees which, in some cases, might exceed the pricing of the original work

BBC bumps telly tax to £180 as Netflix lurks with cheaper tiers

could go PPV

pay per view , this could/would be their best revenue model and might even exceed the license fee. People choose to see what they want and what they don't , occasionally the beeb still comes out with excellent sitcoms and drama's like line of duty. They could also get revenue stream from the old sit coms and comedies which I still watch like the two ronnies, porridge etc. The bbc isn't about money but about free speech but in an ever increasing competitive world sometimes there is no choice and the need to survive

India dangles 20-year tax holiday for clouds that serve offshore users

better plan

they should use the datacentre's to serve themselves first from a souvreign point of view which with the segragation of the world today is more pressing. Also getting others to build more datacentres for their own purpose is going to take a big strain on power and water infrastructure. Create an Indian cloud first and sell this abroad

IBM says AI is insane in the mainframe as z17 sales surge

Looking at the spec of the z17 it does look like it's suited to AI usage with on-chip AI acceleration , real time high volume inference data. Also support for AI workloads including transactional ML, LLMs and gen AI.

With the large memory these machines have running into TB holding a large LLM into memory for fast access isn't an issue.

Britain's Ministry of Defence signs on the dotted line with Palantir

tax recovery

If you are into contracting to recover some or more of your tax money get skilled up in palantir tools, it's not easy since they're quite bespoke but with the lack of people around to do it you're likely to get a contract for 1000+ per day, and looks like most contracts are 1 year and ongoing. In this case even without practical eperience do what most do , make it up, quids in eventually. For the rest it's read it and weep

Headset hype meets harsh reality as Apple and Meta VR shipments fizzle in 2025

it's a bit like 3D TV , eventually fizzled out. Apple went along with meta idea about the metaverse , bad move. Still Apple are aking more than enough from it's other products to cover their losses with this one.

British Palantir rival, whose founder touted UK tech sovereignty, sells to Accenture

money in the bank

Saw a post on linkedin for palantir consultants, daily rates for these are around £1000+ mark, more for some products. With the geo-political issues in the US and the worries about data sovereignty this is a shrewd move by Accenture. As mentioned above the various givernments will just pay whatever it takes , in the end the suppliers of consultants is an easy "loads of money" contracts.

UNIX V4 tape successfully recovered: First ever version of UNIX written in C is running again

it's a bit like finding an unfinished record by the beattes which belongs in the hall of fame , doesn't exist at the moment But Denis, Brian, Ken would be first in if it did.

SoftBank scrambling to come up with $22.5B in OpenAI funding before New Year

Damn, should've held onto that Nvidia stock

Meta to sell $30B in bonds to build AI datacenters

the metaverse was a great idea at the time, spent billions on it, total waste of time and money. Sequel coming ?

EY exposes 4TB+ SQL database to open internet for who knows how long

EY

Eject Yourdrive

UK government on the lookout for bargain-priced CTO

Re: depends on circumstances

also the govenrment uses stats from ONS called life tables , they know roughly certain percentage won't reach pension age so they can rely on this money being used in other areas. The figures vary depnedning on the area and are average 15% , slightlly higer for deprived/less affluent areas.

Marks & Spencer swaps out TCS for fresh helpdesk deal

Re: A cyber incident

exactly , the socially engineering attack could happen with any third party, changing it doesn't achieve much but maybe it's easier to tell the shareholders we can blame someone else for the lack of judgement with these types of attacks. There's no mention of blame but I guess the change almost covers it

Big money is nervous about AI hype, but not ready to call it a bubble

dot com crash

reminds me of the dot.com or dot bomb bubble in the early 2000's, all went crazy with over-evaluations of companies. I was working for an online news company which started with 4M VC in 1998 and it went to a valuation of 200m with no revenue, companies just going to get online to get higher stock valuations from the market makers etc. What happened in the crash was probably more of a correction than a crash but it did mean alot of the free stuff started to become subscription services. There were lots of free cloud drives around and this all changed to tiered charging.

High interest rates at the time and less VC available also didn't help with the crash.

We might see the same with AI subscriptions going much higher from the ones that manage to survive. ?

UK chancellor Putin the blame on Russia for cyber chaos, but evidence says otherwise

blame whoever

part of the blame lies with the companies themselves, some not even bothering with security and some others do but are pretty lame defence. Find all your endpoints and tie them down with WAF rules, audit and alerting on, Also whatever happened to the UK Gov' Cyber Defence Force ? Is it still on, or has the money for it been divi'ed out ?

Nano11 cuts Windows 11 down to size, grabbing just 2.8 GB of disk space

how to fix windows anxiety

open powershell prompt and type

wsl --install --distribution Ubuntu

that's better, feeling good now.

VMware's in court again. Customer relationships rarely go this wrong

sometimes I think I should've become an IT Lawyer

Hyundai: Want cyber-secure car locks? That'll be £49, please

Re: What the upgrade entails

those signal repeaters for stealing cars have been around for more than 20 years, have the manufacturers ever done anything to fix it, nope, they could if they wanted to. They want the cars to be stolen and they want the insurance premiums to rise, the manufacters and insurance companies are the winners and the people buying the cars get penalised and the other bonus is someone in eastern europe or even further out gets a decent car pretty cheap.

Similar situation in the 80's , our ford cortina estate got stolen a few times , turned out you could just use a coat hanger wire to open it, similar for other fords as well, it took Ford years to put this right.

NASA boss calls for nuclear reactor on the Moon

what happens when

the russians, chinese , indians want one as well. The moon will be f*cked, our tides , insects, and possibly life on earth will cease when it all goes kaboom!. Leave it alone.

Wasp nest at US nuclear site tests ten times over safe radiation limit

revenge of the drones

"100,000 dpm/100 cm² means that in a 10 cm x 10 cm area, you’re detecting 100,000 nuclear decays every minute."

average is around 50–200 dpm/100 cm²

here comes the super bee or hornet.

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

looks like

unrealted to the article but I thought it was a picture of Maureen Lipman initially, she is spitting image.

Lethal Cambodia-Thailand border clash linked to cyber-scam slave camps

good thing

In this case, maybe the war starting was a good thing to highlight the scam centers running there. Hopefully they will find the people running them and maybe a change of regime in Cambodia.