Posts by Cubbie Roo

Anthropic mocks up Claude Design to draft fancy new pink slips for marketing teams

To be fair, Ms McCoy is not clueless, just in a very specific discipline not yet touched by these new tools. As a predominantly pre-viz & concept mockup 3D artist, my job of 30+ years practically disappeared overnight. Design agencies servicing corporate clients will feel the major burn next, the headcounts are already shrinking rapidly & previously big spenders like Unilever are already setting up their own A.I slop shops to ditch the design middlemen. This latest Claude tool just turns up the heat an extra few gazilion notches.

Anthropic won't own MCP 'design flaw' putting 200K servers at risk, researchers say

Like the firefighter who moonlights as an arsonist

Yup distinct mafia vibes; selling 'protection' against the very violence they are happily unleashing. Maybe that looked like the smart play in 2025, but when the money dries up you'll be denied passing Go, and heading straight to Jail.

Booking.com warns reservation data may have checked out with intruders

Re: Don't use 'em

I work part-time on reception at a 4-star hotel. Not only do booking.com take a 15% commission off the hotel, they also charge the clients the full BnB price but deny them the breakfast component for an extra cut. Thieves, basically!

OpenAI puts Stargate UK on ice, blames energy costs and red tape

On Regulation

Just the other week the UK Gov got rolled on it's default position of "just let them steal everything" so future slop-peddlers operating on UK soil have another reason to bail on their Unicorn-poop promises. How many cancelled/halted data centers is that now? I've lost count.

Amazon rewards loyal Kindle devotees by closing the book on old e-readers

You missed linen. The late Georgians & early Victorians knew what they were doing with data storage to last the ages.

nothing in tech lasts forever

Except maybe the codex. My Dr Johnson's dictionary (2nd Ed II vols 1775) still looks pretty good. OK they weigh around 2kg each so not as convenient as a kindle, but how convenient is a kindle when 'age' borks your entire library. Dead tree tech for the win.

Apple's chips are the core of a new landscape, but its biggest win is Windows

Re: If only Linux was as simple...

"Good to see reality coming out against The Register comments linux hive."

'Reality' being trapped in a proprietary OS agentic hellscape & not having the chops to escape? Nah I'll give that a miss (more down votes please!)

Re: If only Linux was as simple...

"If the installs are easy to botch then it is the ecosystem"

And yet the vast majority of data centers, every super computer worth a damn & virtually every smartphone on the planet runs on some form of Linux. How could the noob install issues possibly be down to human error.

Re: If only Linux was as simple...

The botching is mostly folks trying to repurpose their old Winboxes and not following a few simple pre-install steps, or trying to dual boot & screwing their partitions. In both cases this is user error not a Linux 'feature'.

Re: If only Linux was as simple...

I don't care what people adopt either way, and the Linux ecosystem might be better served if it remains somewhat niche on the desktop anyway. Since most Linux issues I see are down to botched installs / human error it just seems a little unfair to blame the ecosystem itself.

Re: If only Linux was as simple...

For every 'linux is buggy' complaint there are many many more folks using it as a daily driver with no issues whatsoever. And it continues to get better; Arch (and most of its derivatives) are so solid now there's literally no reason opting for Ubuntu-based distros for some expectation of better 'reliability'.

Anthropic closes door on subscription use of OpenClaw

And so the great unwinding begins

Bad timing for the guy at work who bought a Pro OC scrip last week and has already fallen deep for his bot 'Sophia' . . . . . . I did try to warn/explain but nope, he clearly knows best. He has a history of really bad relationships so I'm pretty sure Sophia will keep that trend on point.

Raspberry Pi leans into semiconductors as sales climb – especially in US and China

RPi netbook when?

I mean, just take my money already.

Love my 500+ it's the perfect home compute....low power mobile device would be based

Folk are getting dangerously attached to AI that always tells them they're right

I wonder if . . . .

The Trumpser himself has fallen prey to a huge slop of AI sycophancy in developing his 'foreign policy' decisions . . . . being a small-brained arch-narcissist it would not surprise me in the least.

Staff too scared of the AI axe to pick it up, Forrester finds

this

Plus the fact that using 'AI' in the workplace has rapidly attained a stigma it will be hard to overcome.

Dell slims down business laptops, fattens up cooling and battery life

Re: Just got a Dell Pro Plus 16

And for any kind of pro CAD/3D work you need a well spaced numeric keypad, which most of these don't have. I think they've missed their key demographic. The ThinkPad P17 was probably the high point, these new Dells are not cutting any mustard.

Re: Just got a Dell Pro Plus 16

And no mouse button . . . . . what's the world coming to!

Thankfully my old Precision M6800 and brace of 7520's have proved virtually indestructible & still retain enough poke for CGI work. They will likely see me out.

Age checks creep into Linux as systemd gets a DOB field

Way more importantly

why the feck is flathub down lol

Microslop stuffs AI photo restyling powers into OneDrive

Re: Total fail

Seems like every week there's yet another reason to never go back.

Struggling to put your AI aversion into words? Here's a handy glossary

Re: An interesting social phenomenon

Well as Panait Istrati once quipped concerning another dubious utopian project: "All right. I can see the broken eggs. Where's this omelette of yours?"

Chatbot Romeos keep users talking longer, but harm their mental health

Re: But, seriously

Imagine being worried about the psychological effects of A.I blowing smoke up your ass. These folks need a crash course in the back catalogue of Frank Zappa to see where they went wrong.

State snoops and spyware vendors planting info-stealing malware on iPhones, Google warns

The moral being . . .

Keep your sensitive accounts on some obscure linux distro & nothing on your phone you can't easily walk away from.

Nvidia's DLSS 5 promises to bring you out the other side of the uncanny valley

Impressive but meh

The 5090 is around £3,000 & could probably heat a house on its own. Not sure I want slop in my games since I've worked hard enough configuring my compute to remove all trace. But I dunno . . . . . well done I suppose? Kinda feel bad as an early adopter of Nvidia tech, now look where we're heading.

So much for power to the people – AI datacenters could jump UK grid queue

more madness

With the highest energy costs in the developed world, why would any commercial outfit build a datacenter here? Are they mad? (don't answer that).

Microsoft 365 confirms new premium tier, stuffed with AI and few discounts

"Customers have told us"

They probably did what a I saw on a recent project by an un-named (but huge) global automaker: built a synthetic focus group with an A.i model & tweaked it to get the answers they wanted. Didn't help said automaker as no-one bought the electric pickups they'd convinced themselves people were gagging for. When will they learn?

UK peers warn weakening AI copyright law could hammer creative industries

Re: It's not Content it's creative works.

well all 'creative works' exist in a repository of some sort; maybe a museum, a server, library, or whatever . . . . they are content of something by definition & always have been. Before Napster we had cassette tapes, after Napster we have tools for ripping 'content' from streaming sites. The point isn't the stealing (which always happens) but Big Tech monetizing the blatant A.I plagiarism.

The irony is that virtually every design/creative agency in the UK has already fully committed to the A.I slop future, and creative output is now built on the stolen IP of others. Worrying about Sir Eltons back catalogue is like putting a sticking plaster on a gaping wound.

I worked in the design industry 30+ years & right now it's a dumpster fire.

Don’t blame AI yet for poor jobs numbers, analysts say

Re: Just because a company says their layoffs have to do with AI

You should look at the effects of all this on the design industry, absolutely brutal. Anyone now at Uni hoping to break into CGI / design will need their heads examined.

Oracle and OpenAI's Texas Stargate datacenter expansion reportedly on the skids

The cracks are beginning to show . . . . . . Oh dear, how sad, never mind

HR may have to cajole and soothe reluctant employees to get them to use AI

As if your average 'HR professional' knows what any of this means.

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

Well Kent has been out of his tree for a while now, so cut him some slack he probably needs help (or maybe just a real girlfriend),

Altman: You think AI is wasted energy? Try raising 100 billion humans

With every new Altman utterance I get more Elizabeth Holmes vibes.

Price of popularity: Linux Mint's success also means maintainer stress

I hear that, But see I prefer a car that injects some personality, maybe the odd quirk -but nothing life threatening. I'll use Mint when I finally succum to the benefits of elasticated trousers.

Mint is so vanilla it's just too boring......also never going to use anything on an ubuntu base. Until I finally sit down and build my own distro CachyOS is in a league of its own.

UK.gov launches cyber 'lockdown' campaign as 80% of orgs still leave door open

Seems a bit rich when >60% of essential Gov data is held on wonky cloud servers overseas, and one warrant away from disclosure to a foreign power. Regardless, the 5-point plan is a joke, and even worse someone got paid for writing the copy.

Bots are taking over the internet and AI users are to blame

Re: Humanity writing its own epitaph

whilst at work (I run an A.I free zone at home) I asked google for a list of Formula 1 world champions, apparently Jack Brabham won 16 world titles . . . . who knew? I think the 'hallucination' gremlins are advancing at a rate few have predicted, it'll all be over by the summer & it will be very messy.

The internet is dying and the 'dead tree tech' of books will only become more valuable; LLM feedback loops rapidly corrupting models until eventually no-one trusts anything published since circa 2018. Facebookers & Tiktokers oblivious to the swill will keep the merry-go-round spinning for the forseeable, but eventually this fairground ride is going to burn down in spectacular fashion . . . . maybe when the buyers of ad-space on these ptatforms finally wake up to the fact that the meatbags have left the building.

Let them eat Pi: RAM shortage bumps Raspberry prices as much as $60

Mad times. It's become cost effective to buy crippled systems on Ebay just to strip out the RAM and SSDs. Glad I got my Pi 5+ before all this madness began.

Open source's new mission: Rebuild a continent's tech stack

And in the Uk after all the recent outages to core State services, we're pumping even more dough into MS, AWS and Fujitsu . . . . . China had it right from day one. Good luck to the EU, but I suspect they'll underestimate the latent resistance to retooling, and the sheer cost needed to make it stick.

Ready for a newbie-friendly Linux? Mint team officially releases v 22.3, 'Zena'

The use of ATP is still the biggest reason for me to avoid Mint/Debian etc . . . . pacman in CachyOS is simply better

Debian goes retro with a spatial desktop that time forgot

well it uses atp so that's an instant thanks but no thanks. I'll stick with CachyOS