Posts by QuickLuck

Latest GitHub outage squeezes Actions, Pages to death

Not just GitHub

I know it appears at times that we like to make out that only Microsoft (sorry, Micro$oft) have any issues, and that if we all used anything else, the world would be a better place (and a chunk of the time that's not the worst of ideas), but we have the joy of using GitLab at work and that's almost as bad. It had one of it's regular afternoon siestas yesterday.

Most of us have no experience (but we have plenty of opinions. We wouldn't be commenter's if we didn't :-) ) of running stuff at the scale of some of these companies, and it has to be hard. Some of their own decisions definitely don't help though

UK mulls making employers ask before installing bossware

Re: Employers machines, employers choice

Nope, didn't misread "TFA" as you so eloquently put it. I could've rephrased the OS installation bit a bit better, but it was meant as an example of the fact that they can install anything they want on the machines that they supply. Could've just as easy said Word or LibraOffice or monitoring software or spyware or any other piece of software under the sun

It's still their machine, their software, their choice.

Employers machines, employers choice

They're the company's machines. They can put on there what they want. They can choose Windows or Mac or Linux or even OpenBSD if they want. They're paying for it, they're supporting it, they get to choose. Tis not your machine, you don't to choose.

Don't like it ? Don't do stuff on the WORK computer that you don't want them knowing about. Or don't work there. Or just put on your big person pants, suck it up, grow up, and get on with your life

Oooo, this is going to get the downvotes. Any bets on how quickly they get into double figures.

Meet the 'internet radical' who helped Microsoft get email and AT&T get online

Did a placement from poly at Prime back in 1988 down at head office in Hounslow. Even got a bit of time up at the data centre at Willen Lake. I miss playing with real computers

Former GitHub CEO launches competitor designed for the age of vibe coding

Re: So…

Errrr, you do know that github was centralised before Microsoft bought it, don't you ?

Avoid AI atrophy – new tool promises to reverse vibe coding skills decay

Re: Fixed it

When your employer mandates AI usage for coding, when you employer measures your AI coding, and when your employer bases your appraisal, pay rise, and bonus on your AI coding and usage, you're going to use AI for coding.

We can get annoyed, we can rant and rave, we can even threaten to throw our toys out of our pram and change jobs, but the more and more employers are buying into AI, and if you try to avoid it, your future with them is limited. And unfortunately finding non-AI jobs in computing now is getting harder and harder

Luckily my pension is kicking in in a year or so, so to misquote the late Douglas Adams, it'll all be "SEP (someone else's problem)"

As another UK prime minister bites the dust, a contradictory tech legacy remains

Can't see anything there that can't be done from the chrimbo change freeze.

Indra rides off with £1.96B Transport for London ticketing deal as Oyster heads for back-office overhaul

Cubic employs/ed plenty of "British" people on the account. They've got quite a few offices in the UK, and I think most of the TfL contract was don't out of their Redhill office. The article mention some Cubic staff moving to Indra, so the same "British" people would be working on it. There' nothing in the article at all which say where the work will be carried out. Pretty sure it's quite difficult upgrade gateline hardware in London without actually being, for example, in London

None UK company != none "British" staff

(Yes, the quotes are deliberate. From the tone of your comment, I'm guessing you have a very precise definition of what you define as "British")

The Navy's autonomous carrier-based refueling drone has finally flown

Re: Confused

B'ah ! Logged in to say the same thing. As a UK publication, I thought this was about the Royal Navy. The automatic US assumption of some articles is getting a wee but annoying - tis the sort of thing that annoy's non-USAians about USAians

Medical data of 500k Biobank volunteers listed for sale on Alibaba, UK minister reveals

Saw in a different report (BBC ? Sky ?) that's it's data that was supplied to a couple registered institutions / researchers, and they've already had their access revoked. Amazingly it initially sounds like it wasn't actually a hack, just someone being a very naughty boy*

* other genders / sexes are available

Royal Navy races to arm ships against drone threat

Re: Simple answer

For "reasons", I believe the Royal Navy is standardising on 40mm rather than 30mm. Did see a good article (or comments to an article) recently (Navylookout I suspect) about the differences, esp the costs and different ammunition types. and 30mm seemed to win. But it's 40mm we're going for, and that's unlikely to change

AWS backs Open VSX as Rust survey shows VS Code decline

"hundreds of thousands of extensions – 93,862 at the time of writing" - interesting definition of hundreds of thousands. Not sure 93,862 quite counts as a single hundred thousand . . . .

Orbital datacenters are a pie-in-the-sky idea: Gartner

Re: What sort of pie in the sky?

Mmmm, custard

Agile Manifesto turns 25 – just in time for vibe coding to test it

So those are the buggers to blame for all the bollocks we have to go through in order to do the job. Back when I were a lad, we 'ad none of this agile stuff. It was waterfalls all the way. And we were grateful

Another open source project dies of neglect, leaving thousands scrambling

Wiz, not Wix

"Wix found a killer Ingress NGINX security hole. How bad was it? Wix declared". Wiz might be upset at someone else getting the credit :-)

China recruiting spies in the UK with fake headhunters and ‘sites like LinkedIn’

Re: News at 10 - Spies are spying

B'ah ! Need more coffee. MI6 obviously. M16 are the department that no-one talks about. I shouldn't have even mentioned them. As long as everyone pretends that they didn't see M16 I should be okay.

News at 10 - Spies are spying

If I've understood what t'Government are saying, Chinese spies employed by the Chinese spy agency are spying on behalf of the Chinese government.

Well, no shit Sherlock. That's their job.

I'm pretty sure that British spies employed by M16 are spying on the Chinese on behalf of the UK Government. They'd bloody well better be. That's their job too.

Students using ChatGPT beware: Real learning takes legwork, study finds

And in other news, bears were seen heading into wooded areas carrying what was believed to be rolls of Andrex

Workers: Yes, RTO makes sense. No, we’re not going to do it

Manglement want more people in the office. And more and more manglement want it more and more, so even when the market picks the jobs will be in the office most of the time. For the foreseeable future (years probably) working in the office some of the time is here to stay, and never working in the office will become as rare as rocking horse poo.

Roll on retirement in a couple of years

"Over 90 percent of workers surveyed said they would "take action"

Can we start seeing surveys about how many do actually take action ? Folks can moan and whinge and complain, and they will, but RTO is here to stay. And the number of days in the office will only increase. And the number of jobs offering fully remote will continue to drop.

When we had RTO imposed we had loads of folks threaten to leave, then they looked at the job market, tried applying for the few available, and are still here.

"A quarter have indulged in "work to rule" doing only what's in their job description. A fifth indulge in clock blocking and calendar blocking, filling out diary time to avoid meetings. And 17 percent are "task masking," or making an effort to appear busy when they're not. Other wheezes include hushed hybrid, quiet quitting, unbossing and quiet leave."

So, exactly the same that folks have been doing in the office for generations. Nothing special about RTO from the point of view.

US Air Force holds hypersonic resupply site review amid seabird concerns

Planes need prepared airstrip to fly in the logistics. Ships will generally need prepared ports (there are exceptions I know. You could take your own port with you - thinking of you, Mulberry). I don't suppose they're thinking of this as the "last mile" to the front, but to replace the long trans Pacific flights from the US, then hand over the the standard logistics processes