Posts by MattieD 53 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jan 2026
"I'm learning at a rate I'd never been capable of before"
Are you though? If you're offloading everything to an "agent" then you're learning absolutely nothing. You're getting the end results but your learning on the what-where-why-how is zero.
If I ask a builder to build a wall for me and periodically stand around watching them work, am I now a bricklayer?
So, so true.
I wrote a "temporary" solution to monitor the interaction between a couple of pieces of software. One worked fine, the other was garbage. When combined it became scented garbage. Hence the need to monitor it.
I was very, very clear that this monitoring was just a stopgap and the underlying issues with the garbage software needed to be resolved.
Three years later, I'm now on version 5 of the "temporary" monitoring solution as I've had to widen its scope to monitor other terrible software.
Strong use of weasel words there from Flock. They're technically correct in that 'Flock ALPRs do not and cannot track vehicles' - all the tracking is done by the system the data is uploaded to. The camera is merely a data provider.
By focusing on the camera, it distracts away from the role of the back-end system. It's magician-style misdirection.
While I'm entirely with you about the plugins - I use tape-themed ones all the time - this isn't really for that audience. I see this more for people who want to add a bit of nostalgia to a recording, maybe for those working in video, but don't want the hassle of learning a DAW, getting plugins for it, then dealing with importing and exporting audio.
This is a quick and dirty way to convert a lot of files at once, it's something you'd use as part of a pipeline. Converting them with ffmpeg is going to be seconds of work, using a DAW is a lot longer.
Top marks to the original authors though, that's some top-notch ffmpeg work going in those scripts.
The idea behind WSUS - put all your updates onto local server(s) to save bandwidth and allow greater granularity around their distribution - was a good idea. Just a shame that - in typical Microsoft fashion - they completely bodged the whole shebang. WSUS, with it's arcane and seeming random failure modes, has been the absolute bane of every Windows sysadmin for the past 25 years.
While I despise WSUS with a venomous fury, I'm not sure I like the alternative of just letting all the servers just go off and pull whatever from Microsoft whenever they feel like it.
Back in the distant past - around the turn of the century - I was writing some Perl to add functionality into an e-commerce program. Hit an issue where it would fail on one specific line, however the line itself was perfectly fine - no errors, no dodgy logic, no hidden characters, no speeling mistokes, nothing wrong on earlier lines. It was just a mystery as to why it was failing.
I put put in a debug line above it (thereby moving it down a line) to dump the variables it was using to see if there was something off there (there wasn't) - and then it started to work! Baffled, I removed the debug line and it failed again. I put it back and it works. I commented out the debug line and it still worked.
I must have hit some super-obscure, edge-case bug in the Perl parser and that line was just at the right spot to trigger it.
Recently had a job come in from someone who believed themselves to be very important. We'd just given them a brand new work mobile and they were complaining that the charger wouldn't fit into their plug socket.
We're in the UK so we just assumed that the phone had come with a Euro-spec charger. It happens every now and then, no biggy. So we asked her to come in and we'd swap it out.
In she comes, stomping over to the team and starts off on her - no doubt well practiced - tirade about how we're useless for giving her the wrong charger, how if the phone runs out of charge her service will have to stop running, the full-on overblown histrionics loud enough that everyone nearby can hear her.
We take a look at the charger. It's a proper UK-spec three-pin plug, and as is the case nowadays, to save space the top pin slides down towards the other two pins for carrying. There's even a printed message on the charger to extend the top pin until it clicks into place before inserting it into the socket.
We show her the pin moving, the notice on the charger about the pin moving and demonstrate it being plugged into a socket and charging a phone. Somehow it was still our fault because we didn't explicitly tell her that she needed to read the instructions or that the pin might move, and that she was going to complain to our director because we'd wasted her time in having to come in.
I believe that our director laughed in her face when she complained.
Depending on your reading of copyright it could be argued that the copyright for the AI-code would lie with the writers of the original code that it's slurped into its training data. It could also be argued that the AI-code is a derivative work - much like a collage, albeit one that was like produced not in accordance with the original copyright terms.
It seems that there are (at least) two separate issues here. There's the copyright of the input to the AI model and the copyright of the output of the AI model. To me, it seems like the input to the model is from massive copyright infringement - and that means that the output is tainted.
In no way whatsoever could anyone have foreseen that that AI vendors would increase the prices of their products. This will be the first of what will become a never-ending stream of price increases across all vendors. All that debt they took on to grab market share now needs to be paid back, and it'll be you - the customer who's laid off all their staff and changed their business processes to rely upon AI systems - who's going to be footing the bill.
The only question is at what point does it become more cost effective to employ actual people again?
Both are great ideas. Just complete a change-improvement request form and, assuming we have enough sprint-points, your features will be added. We won't actually check if your features are suitable or necessary, our only concern is that you completed the form correctly.
They started with a 500k line, poorly architected, buggy codebase and converted it into a 1m line, poorly architected, buggy codebase in a different language. I'm not sure that's the win it's being portrayed as. It seems a bit like shuffling the deckchairs on the Titanic while opening all the portholes.
Any developer who now needs to maintain that code will essentially be coming in blind. It's bad enough maintaining code you've written - but at least you've got a vestigial memory of what it does - doing it for someone else's is hateful.
Slightly tangentially, one of the reasons we have such poor software nowadays, especially as to how it's architected, is due to the obsession with the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This insatiable need to get something - anything - to market means that rather that including ways to deal with future plans everything new is just a bodge onto the existing codebase.
We all rightly decry feature- and scope-creep as a bad thing, yet using the MVP model means that it's inevitable. To make an analogy, it's how you end up with a Morris Minor with 8 wheels across 3 axles, 9 doors (just on the one side though), 2 engines (running in an active-passive pair) and an integrated greenhouse that rotates to follow the sun.
One from old Virgin and one from the more recent Virgin.
First one. Years back a friend signed up to their broadband because it was both cheaper and faster than anything else he could get. But it didn't work. So he asks me to take a look. The issue appears to be an authentication failure in the backend. So I ring up their 'support'. They all insist the issue is at my side, even though the errors and logs all show it at their side. Get it escalated and go through it all again. This happens three or four times, I've literally spoke to people all over the globe at this point. I finally tell them I want to cancel the contract. They transfer me to their UK call centre and I talk to a Manc. He asks why I'm cancelling and I tell him about the authentication problems. 'Oh', he says, 'that's a known issue. I can fix that for you. Give us a minute'. So their retention staff know more than their support...
Second one. I used to have VM for the TV. They were offering a decent deal on broadband (I had a different provider and that contract was coming to an end), so I give them a ring to get rid of the TV and take on the broadband. After getting hung up on a couple of times I think, 'fuck 'em, I'll just cancel the contract and go elsewhere'. Ring back to cancel. Cue several more times being hung up on. In the end I found their address - somewhere in Warrington IIRC - and sent them a letter. Told them that this was the 30-day notice, I'd be cancelling the direct debit and if they wanted the TV box back then they could come and collect it. Got a reply about a week later confirming the cancellation and I've had absolutely nothing to do with them since - or will do in the future.
Broadcom's handling of VMware is completely bizarre. They've deliberately thrown away tens of millions in revenue from small customers - most of whom will have gone through a reseller and therefore have very little 'cost' to VMware - and now they're antagonising their bigger customers, the very ones they decided to pin their future on.
It almost seems like there's a level of vindictiveness from Broadcom to completely wipe VMware out. Did the VMware CEO beat the Broadcom CEO at golf or something and this is their revenge?
If it was €3 per parcel rather than €3 per tariff line-item then I think most people would complain but generally be ok with it.
There's also the issue - using the electronics example in the article - where the cost of the tariff exceeds the cost of the goods. Surely that can't be morally right?
"Critically, Legg offers no alternative physical model capable of reproducing the capacitance signal or the RTS phenomenology, and does not constitute a substantial scientific challenge to our findings."
Ah, the old idea that you can only offer criticism if you're able to do better. It's such a intellectually-weak, nonsense argument. It's only purpose is to deflect the conversation away from the criticism, rather than address the points made.
I'm not a Michelin chef, but I can tell when a piece of chicken is undercooked.
I was in charge of organising the in-house phishing training campaigns and I used to have carte blanche with regard to the content and the timing. No-one, including IT, were to know it was coming. We wanted to test the response of everyone - staff and the technical teams.
The company had just gone through a particularly fractious pay dispute with the unions. I thought it'd be a good idea to send out the emails with a fake link to a file called something like 'Directors bonuses Q3-Q4 Confidential - Internal-Only.docx'. Lots of staff followed the link. Lots of staff complained to their managers and their union reps that it was 'unfair'. Lots of managers complained to directors. Chief Exec got involved
Everyone from my boss up to the Chief Exec - privately - thought what I'd done was perfectly fine, however it had to be seen that something was done so the Chief Exec had to do a bit of PR work. They offered a mealy-mouthed apology about the 'inappropriate nature of the content' and that 'steps would be taken to avoid a repeat', which the unions liked because they thought they'd won something. I just got told to double-check the content with my boss before sending anything.
I once worked with a guy who handled a lot of our business with manufacturers. Several million pounds per year (in year 2000 money) and hundreds of thousands of items across hundreds of product lines.
These were all managed in huge spreadsheets. We're talking dozens of columns and hundreds of rows. And absolutely zero formulas.
Every time he need to make a change to a value he would sit there with his calculator and go through and redo every single field it affected. Used to spend hours and hours at it.
He often got it wrong too, especially as he thought adding 20% to a value and then taking 20% off would get you back to the original value. Cost the company well into 6-figures each year because he was too stupid/idle to learn how to write simple formulas in Excel.
However, he was the son of a director and had the ear of the Chief Exec so his cock-ups were quietly swept under the rug.
The tail (pun intended) I heard is that the original mice (in the early 70s) had their cables coming out of the rear - towards the user. This, along with the two buttons, is what lead to it being called a mouse.
There's also the story that the word 'mouse' was an acronym for Manually Operated Utility Selection Equipment.
When I've writing and wanted to be unencumbered by all the nonsense that the modern desktop experience throws at us - notifications, popups, underlining correctly speeeld words, a browser just begging you to check social media, etc - I use a bit of software called WriteMonkey.
It's like going back to the olden days, just a full-screen word processor. No menus, no ribbons, no status bars - nothing but your text. If you need a menu it's through a context menu. You can even colour it with your favourite shades of green if you want to go for the full experience.
Now that the details of what this is issue is and what to look at to for when crafting an exploit it seems like it'll only be a matter of time before it's being abused in the wild.
It never fails to amaze my the amount of hubris these companies have when it comes to vulnerabilities in their code. They all seem to believe that their code is perfect and that no-one could ever find a bug in it.
I'm sure Google will fix it when their big paying customers all start getting exploited.
The really stupid thing about this story is that if he'd said that MI5 had hacked his phone rather than the Russians, his base would've lapped it up like a starving cat.
He's got them all believing that he's not part of the establishment, that's he's just like one of them. Good ol' honest Nigel, constantly having to fight against the lefty Marxist-Communist-Antifa woke agenda who are trying to stop him 'telling it like it is'.
We've got directors who demanded that they be given iPads, supposedly so that they could 'refer to documents' while in meetings. When queried why they couldn't use the very expensive Microsoft Surfaces they'd recently been given (again after a stroppy demand) we were told that it was 'easier to read them on a tablet'.
We're predominately a Microsoft house and all our documents are in O365 so we suggested they get Android tablets instead - cheaper, easier to onboard and equally suited for the job at hand. From their response you would think that we'd just murdered their children, burned their house down and placed billboard adverts proclaiming them to be members of the third reich.
It had had had to be an iPad. And it had to have that pencil-thing too. Oh, and a Apple-branded case.
We ended up having to spend all the budget we'd allocated for training within the IT team on buying idiots shiny toys so they could show off to other idiots.
Two years later we had to buy them all new iPads because there's 'were old and slow'. Of course they were. Nothing at all to do with Apple releasing new models that were ever so shiny.
Sounds a lot like someone was told to make all this information available to either the DOGE kids or their 'replacement' when they were getting 'rightsized' out of the organisation.
A nice bit of malicious compliance. Technically, the information is available to their replacement. It's just also available to the rest of the world. Unless they were told to make it secure, then it's very much Someone Else's Problem.
"When a driver is identified as having quality issues during our shiproom evaluation process"
The term "shiproom evaluation" implies that they're doing some kind of checks before approving them for distribution. Surely if it'd be easier to just not ship drivers with "quality issues" than to have to write a cloud-based remediation routine after it's broken countless users' machines?
Although, with this being Microsoft, it's like they've got one instance of Copilot for testing going "This driver has issues" and the Copilot instance that does Windows Updates distribution going "So? Not my job that, guv".
I'm not sure Railway holds much* blame here. They've got an API that lets you delete stuff and the AI used it. Seems to work as advertised. As Cooper says, if you want a confirmation request then use the GUI or command line tool.
* - I would throw a bit of shade at Railway for "Railway stores volume-level backups in the same volume." That's not a backup. That's a snapshot. Calling it a backup means actions like Crane's are more likely to happen as they believe they've got a safety net, whereas the reality is that it's more like a picture of a safety net printed on rice paper.
If there's one thing that anyone who's worked in the IT field for a while will know to be true is that the team that's constantly firefighting - most often due to their lack of ability - are the ones that are praised. Because they're always running around, doing this, doing that, sending emails about downtime and patching, and the other busywork, they're the ones the business sees as 'working hard'.
Whereas the team that's got everything running properly, has scheduled maintenance windows and staff who actually know and understand what they're doing at the micro and macro levels, they're getting ignored because they're essentially invisible.
Honestly, it's a disgrace. It's a failure of management to see and recognise where the work and effort is going and what it is achieving - but then again, when have management ever had vision or brought about success?
IT nowadays is akin to a utility - water, gas, electricity - everyone just expects it to work. Would you praise your electricity supplier if they had to turn the power off every second Tuesday or your water supplier if the water pressure varied from day to day between a trickle and gush?
After Trump and his true believer steals the next election the next step will be to ban all existing 'foreign' routers and mandate that all patriotic (you are patriotic, aren't you?) Americans must use a Department of Freedom supplied router. One that's proudly made in the enlightenment zones (aka prison camps) by happily re-educated wrong-thinkers (anyone who doesn't praise Dear Leader).
Of course, being a true American, you've got nothing to hide so you'll have no worries about the Department of Transparency logging all your internet usage. It's for your safety too - there may be liberal, radical, leftist, Marx-Socialist other-thinkers online trying to poison you're mind with subversive, anti-orthodoxy, anti-American ideas.
/s - but only a little bit.
This whole this looks like a solution looking for a problem. Unless of course the problem is companies don't make enough money, in which case this whole scam is a perfect little earner.
Air travel is a massive ballache at the best of times - thank you America for infecting the rest of the world with your post 9/11 paranoia - and this just makes it immeasurable worse. More money, more time, more effort, more hassle. Nothing about this helps the traveller in any way whatsoever.
Honestly, at this point if an airline offered a 'we don't do any checks, just get straight on the plane and take your chances' I reckon they'd be the market leader before the ink on the promotional material was dry.
I've spent the majority of my career trying my hardest to avoid PowerPoint, so I'd never heard of this 'loop until ESC' function.
Now that I do, I'll be using on any computers I happen upon that have been left - against policy - unlocked and unattended.
Only issue I foresee is that PowerPoint puts the navigation icons in the bottom-left of the screen, but I'd imagine no-one is really going to notice if it's overlaying their taskbar.
We've got a staff member who is magically capable of breaking anything she goes near. Doesn't matter what - software or hardware - as soon as she's nearby something goes titsup with it.
Ruth is the person for whom 'You should never see this error' was written.
It's quite a handy skill though. We include her in all the demos and proof of concepts that companies want us to try. If it can withstand Ruth then we're interested.
There was an artist - whose name I can't remember and Google, being Google nowadays, is being of no help - who was renowned for carrying paints around with him and touching up his paintings when he happened up one.
Supposedly he'd get himself an invite to the home of a buyer on the pretence of coming for dinner but would actually start working on the painting when their back was turned.
Anyone with a bit of savvy would have seen this as the outcome. All these AI companies have offered their products at well below cost to try and get people hooked on using them. Companies - and individuals - have embedded these tools into their workflows and business processes, usually sacking staff as a by-product.
Now, the AI companies - and more accurately the people funded them - want a return on their massive investment. Hence, the price goes up - be that by a direct increase or by 'shrinkflation' of what the customers get for their pennies.
All the companies that outsourced thinking and responsibility to the magic box of panaceas now find themselves in a tough position. They've no knowledgeable staff left and they're entirely reliant upon these AI tools. They're between the metaphorical rock and a hard place, and the only way out is to spend more and more money. Suddenly all those savings made from 'right-sizing staffing resources' are no-longer there.
I have no sympathy. You've made your bed, now lie in it.
American's have been conditioned into thinking that socialism means that someone gets something for free. They'd rather that no-one got a thing than one person got it for free.
They have become incredibly insular and obsessed with money, they only think about things in terms of "what's in it for me, what am I getting for my money?" They seem to lack the comprehension that something that benefits the majority - which might not include them - will actually being benefits to everyone in some (indirect) way. The old "a rising tide rises all boats" idea seems anathema to them.
(Yes, I'm generalising here)
One trend I've come across recently is a lot of apps and websites won't allow you to use a quotation mark - either single or double - as part of a password. The cynic in me thinks they're trying to avoid something like a SQL injection attack - but that then raises the thought that they're passing credentials unencrypted.
Also, to keep this on track with the original story, Ricoh's on-screen keyboard on their MFDs don't contain the £ symbol. Which makes using AD authentication with them an issue.
A decade or so back we had just virtualised an old (and I mean OLD) legacy system that had sat on it's own server in the datacentre rack. As is always the case we'd been instructed to keep the physical server around 'just in case'.
Every now and then we'd get a temperature warning email and a few minutes later it'd clear. As we didn't care too much about the server and the alert had cleared we didn't bother to investigate. Eventually these alerts were getting almost constant, so we decided to take a wander down. Nothing was using the server so we were intrigued by what was causing the warning.
We logged in through the console and checked the stats. The temperature warning wasn't because it was too hot, it was complaining that it was too cold. The CPU temp was down around 12°C and that was just below the range where the temperature warning would trigger.
First time I've ever seen a computer complain about being a bit chilly.
I'm sure that it's coincidental that the only US-made routers come from Musk's Starlink company, and not a massive grift in any way.
America is in for a real shock when it finally realises that stopping companies trading in the US unless they're manufacturing in the US isn't going to work. Companies will just walk away from the market - especially one so volatile as it currently is. No-one is going to be willing to spend the money to build a factory in the US - to just serve the US - when they don't know what it's going to cost from one day to the next due to King Donald's ever changing tariffs and taxies.
The problem with Microsoft is that it seems to be absolutely bulging with Product Managers. For these people a piece of software cannot ever be finished, or complete, as they would then be out of a job.
Bug fixes don't have quite the same impact on a set of slides as new, shiny things so they've entirely bought into the idea that adding new features - whether wanted or not - is the path to a long and well paid career.
These people are the reason that Notepad and Paint have been infected with Copilot.
Thankfully we still seem to have at least one person at Microsoft who hasn't drank al the AI Koolaid - the kind soul who brought Edit back to Windows 11.
To run it from the Start Menu you have to give the full executable name - edit.exe - otherwise the search will show you all the wrong results (no surprise there, eh?...)
Company got PwC to run an audit on our disaster recovery processes. All they could come up with as an 'issue' was that our documentation was across half a dozen documents - all in the same location, each one about a specific aspect of the process, and all backed up in a least three different locations on- and offsite. Their 'recommendation' was that we *had* to put it all into one document.
Of course, when directors see an audit recommendation they go batshit crazy about having to fulfil it - rather than the more appropriate response of telling the auditors to piss off and stop being knobs.
All this seems to be is a change in where time is being spent. The overall time needed for a task is remaining the same.
If a task took 30 minutes before, it's now taking 5 minutes to prompt the AI and then 25 minutes to correct its output.
The only differences are that everyone can now tell you've used an AI tool based on the language used, and that it's cost you money to use it.
Not convinced that's progress.
> "it's not about scoring individuals or enforcing scripts," the spokesperson said.
It's absolute about that. Nothing more. It's a stick to beat employees with.
When the revolution comes, after we've finished with everyone who needs to be up against the wall, we'll introduce laws forbidding companies from telling such bare-faced lies.
Quite often those mandates don't come from the IT department, they come from suppliers who will refuse to support their products if they're used with another other than Edge.
Rather than beating a clue into each and every supplier who supplies such an edict, it's easier just to get everyone using Edge.
That said, it sometimes is the IT department. It's easier to roll-out configurations using Group Policy or Intune to Edge than to Chrome, Firefox, etc. and keeping an entire business on one browser makes internal support easier.
Back in the olden days I used to do IT support for GPs. One of them had a collection of post-it notes stuck around his screen. All with usernames and passwords on for the various systems he used.
However, it wasn't as terrible as you'd think. He'd put the username for a system on one post-it and the password on another. So all he had to remember was, for example, top-left for username and middle-right for password.
The practice manager told me that when he was being an insufferable arse (unheard of for a GP...), she'd go in and move the post-it notes around.
On Windows 11 (and maybe Server 2025, I've not got one to hand to check) they've reintroduced Edit. Which for those of you older than God's dog will remember from back in the MSDOS days. It's how Notepad should be - just a simple text editor. It even supports mouse-clicks for the menus for those too chicken to use a keyboard shortcut.
