Posts by Gene Cash

Ahead of Super Tuesday, US elections face existential and homegrown threats

Re: Daemon and Network

Though a dead salmon would be better than the last half dozen American presidents...

Tiny Core Linux 15 stuffs modern computing in a nutshell

Re: Less code, fewer bugs?

Or at least a hell of a lot smaller attack surface.

NASA's Mars Sample Return Program struggles to get off the drawing board

50% of the missions don't make it TO Mars...

50% of the missions don't make it TO Mars... and they want to go and come back, which has never been done before

This is HARD and it's going to take a lot of work, so it is not going to be cheap.

That applies for anything, not just collecting samples from Mars. And think about it, we're COLLECTING SAMPLES FROM MARS. This isn't just going down the block to the chemists.

The federal bureau of trolling hits LockBit, but the joke's on us

"using it to squirrel money about"

Why? What are they doing that can't be done by regular means? So they're concealing the movement of money from regulators? It may be legal but it sure doesn't sound like it.

The batteries on Odysseus, the hero private Moon lander, have run out

Re: Well USA, you learned an important lesson didn't you?

Hm. Let's see.

Who managed to finally reuse boosters? An American company.

Who manged to land boosters on a ship at sea? An American company.

Who's launched more orbital rockets (98) in 2023 than China (67) & Russia (19) & India (7) combined? An American company.

Who upended the status quo by launching at half the price of everyone else? An American company.

Now, I'm not a big fan of Space Karen, and I think SpaceX has succeeded in spite of him, but they've undoubtedly succeeded.

Edit: and it's good to see China trying to copy SpaceX's reusability, like they copy everything else.

GitHub struggles to keep up with automated malicious forks

Re: Attack Vector/Scope of the attack

There's also "attacks add hundreds of whitespace characters (521 of them) to push the exec function offscreen"

What? Your editor/IDE doesn't do line wrapping? You deserve what you get, then... pick better tools or configure what you have properly.

Lightweight Windows-like desktop LXQt makes leap to Qt 6 with version 2.0

Re: a forever unchanging UI

Me too. So highly customized, no one else can use my machine... which is not something I consider a problem!

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

BBC article

The BBC had an article about "leaplings" and many of them complained about not being able to enter their correct birth date into many forms

"When taking out a new phone contract, she failed the credit check because 29 February didn't appear as a date on the system. "

"the dropdown boxes on online forms will only list 28 days for February"

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-68404617

Toyota admits its engines are overrated – by its own power testing software

Re: So maybe...

It's still "bullshit numbers from the manufacturer" whether it's power or emissions. That's cheating in my book.

Hold up world, HP's all-in-one print subscription's about to land, and don't forget AI PCs

"enterprise customers voted to sweat their assets"

I wonder if that should be "enterprise customers voted to run the hell away from anything HP"?

Google sued by more than 30 European media orgs over adtech

Yeah, I searched for a question on US Southern restaurant chains yesterday, and it was 17 (I counted) pages past ads, "Results For [location]", "Places", "More Places", "People Also Ask", "Nearby Events And Deals", "People Also Search For", "Order Food", a SECOND "People Also Search For", "Best Fried Chicken", "Soul Food Restaurants", "Best Southern Food", "Best Chicken Chains In The South", "South Carolina Fast Food Chains", Canadian (WHAT?) Chicken Restaurants", "Things In the South That Aren't In The North", "Burger Place West Coast"...

OK, I give up typing, there was tons more shit that wasn't results.

I never found a relevant result and never got my question answered.

Fuck Google.

City council megaproject to spend millions for manual work Oracle system was meant to do

Re: Priceless ..

We already know the answer to that is "NO"

Willy Wonka event leaves bitter taste with artificially sweetened promises

Oompa-Loompa

Man. I was not prepared for that tweet of the poor Oompa-Loompa girl. Holy hell. I don't think I've ever had as bad a day as it looks like she's having.

40k servers, 400k CPUs and 40 PB of storage later... welcome to Google Cloud

Re: Just

Yup, and this company has handled pretty much all of US airline ticketing since the '60s, so I'm waiting for the next time the American air travel system has taken a complete crap and nobody can fly anywhere. I'll know why...

Dell promises 'every PC is going to be an AI PC' whether you like it or not

Well if they wanted to guarantee I WON'T buy a Dell

Then they hit the jackpot...

If we plug this in without telling anyone, nobody will know we caused the outage

Re: Philosophical question:

There's never enough holy water to drown them all...

It's crazy but it's true: Apple rejected Bing for wrong answers about Annie Lennox

Hm.

So "Annie Lennox first band" on Google says "the Tourists" unequivocally.

However "Annie Lennox first band" on Bing says: "Annie Lennox's first band was The Catch, which later evolved into The Tourists. She met Dave Stewart in 1975 and they first played together in 1976 in The Catch. After releasing one single as The Catch in 1977, the band evolved into The Tourists, where Lennox was the lead singer from 1977 to 1980."

Is this correct? It's apparently from Encyclopaedia Britannica, which I'd trust. If so, I'd rate Bing a bit closer to the mark. but that's today's results, not the results from "back when" and I think Bing still sucks as a search engine.

So the trial is because Google "flouted competition laws to build its dominance of the US search market"

I think that's bullshit. I have no argument that Google is top dog in the US search market, and they did it simply by building a better search engine than Bing, Yahoo, Altavista, and everybody else.

My beef with Google is that they've let that technical achievement rot in favor of manipulating the results as they see fit, and as they're paid. They've removed features such as boolean search, search operators, and they even had a feature for a while of "don't return results from this site" which is also gone. They have indeed abused their position as top search engine.

Judge slaps down law firm using ChatGPT to justify six-figure trial fee

Damn. That needs to go on a plaque.

It's not fear, it's disgust.

The Average Joe in the street has no technical skill and does not know that ChatPGT, Eliza, Perplexity, Bard, Jasper, Chatsonic, etc are all simply statistical models stringing words together and that THERE IS NO artificial intelligence behind "AI"

They see "Artificial Intelligence" and just like "Self Driving Cars" expect it to be what it says on the tin.

We're a lot more technically skilled and can see behind the curtains to understand it's all a pile of shit.

So this is the disgust for the snake oil salesmen that are selling this crap using technobabble and jargon to mislead and confuse people.

We can also see there's going to be a lot of pain and damage before people understand this and AI falls by the wayside as the fad it is.

Edit: As much as I hate Wikipedia, the steaming output from these LLMs are not even in the same category. At least Wikipedia usually starts with facts and doesn't just string words together.

AI comes for jobs at studio of American filmmaker Tyler Perry

Re: And....

"American movies can't get any shittier"

Tyler Perry: "Hold my beer..."

Google Maps leads German tourists to week-long survival saga in Australian swamp

Re: Unless I'm mistaken...

> roads that have been there for decades

My former neighborhood east of Orlando (about 12 sq miles, more than about 4k people) has been there 42 years and is STILL not on any Garmin maps.

What did we learn today, boys and girls?

> We decided, 'OK, let's follow Google Maps because Google Maps knows maybe more than we know'

Whelp. As Adam Savage would say, THERE'S yer prablem!

I was meeting with a friend in Daytona for the races, and he sent me the Google Maps URL for his location. I get there and the URL location is immediately to my left, which is a stretch of empty land instead of a mall parking lot. He was actually nearly 3/4 mile away.

I've also had it give me bullshit directions depending on if I was in the left or right lane of a 4 lane road. The worst so far has been "merge into the interstate, go 26 miles, make a u-turn, come back and exit at the same intersection you merged into, and continue as you are"

Cyberattack downs pharmacies across America

forced some folks to pay for their medication at full price in cash

No, that would be "forced some folks to go without medication" as they probably can't afford the full price and they certainly aren't carrying that much cash.

Nokia brainwave turns cell towers into cash cows with backup batteries

Re: Doesn't sound right

Not really. I have a ton of capacity in the UPS on my PC here that just about never gets used, but when I need it, then I usually need most of it.

Also, it does a battery good to discharge it occasionally and not be continuously charging it. That's what kills most folk's laptop batteries.

Web archive user's $14k BigQuery bill shock after running queries on 'free' dataset

"One respondent logged on to say that the complainant was an idiot ...Others may see this as unhelpful"

They sound like Reddit Experts. Common sense isn't part of the equation.

Japanese Yakuza boss charged with nuclear trafficking by the US

Re: Misunderstanding

Are you having a stroke? Do you need medical assistance?

Americans wake to widespread AT&T cellular outages

Re: Towers

"Towers ... as long as they're standing"

200-foot radio station tower stolen without a trace in Alabama

https://apnews.com/article/radio-station-tower-stolen-am-fm-alabama-d16a57daeaf10f473df39d628e1fe388

"removing the SIM"

Do you know how much of a pain in the ass that is, at least on any of the Google phones I've dealt with in the past 5 years?

It would take me 45 minutes just to find something to open the SIM bay.

Amazon hopes to avoid labor regulation by simply abolishing national watchdogs

Re: 0_0

You mean like the banking and trading regulations meant to stop a recurrence of the Great Depression?

Don't worry, they're working on that.

Ubuntu, Kubuntu, openSUSE to get better installation

Re: Not mentioned....but should be......

That's not installation, that's upgrading. The article is about installation methods.

Wyze admits 13,000 users could have viewed strangers' camera feeds

Eh, I have a cheap webcam in the garage, as it's the easiest way to tell 1) if any of the doors are open and 2) if the light is on

Of course it's hooked to an Apache server on my home machine that never leaves the local network.

Superapp Gojek fine-tunes each new error message for a week. What? Why?

Old saying

If you can't make it work, make it look pretty.

Japan launches satellite to eyeball derelict rocket stage

Re: Is it just me...

So it's just like all the other Russian plans!

Re: Is it just me...

As far as I can see, I haven't seen ANY actual efforts that deorbited/revived a dead satellite, except for the Shuttle STS-51A retrieval of Palapa B2 and Westar 6.

I've seen a bunch of rendezvous operations, the MEV mission which was with the assistance of a working satellite, and this, which is yet another "rendezvous without really doing anything"

Self-taught-techie slept on the datacenter floor, survived communism, ended a marriage

Yeah, exactly. And when the USSR fell, the US should certainly have done more than stick out its tongue and say "haha, sucks to be you! communism doesn't work after all!"

Like you say, we should have been the adults, let bygones be bygones, and extended food shipments and other assistance.

The ensuing crime, economic and other chaos pretty much ensured someone like Putin would bubble up to power. And here we are.

OSIRIS-REx probe sucked up more asteroid crumbs than hoped

Re: So basically..

I don't think my last Subway sandwich was that crunchy...

Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

Re: Not really

> by that argument, Android is a UNIX

Um, Android *is* a UNIX. It runs a Linux kernel and I can drop into a console and run Unix commands, if I root it.

Moving to Windows 11 is so easy! You just need to buy a PC that supports it!

Re: It is easy

It's not hard to use. It's a pile of irritating gratuitous non-compatible changes that make life more difficult using it, for no reason.

Why should I learn new habits? I don't want to move to Windows 11. I'm happy with Windows 10. Windows 11 does not do anything better, it does things worse.

Edit: and actually I don't use Windows 10 or 11. I moved to Linux and Windows 7 was the last Microsoft OS I used extensively. I know how to use the 3 programs I use on Windows at work, and I use Cygwin for everything else.

Dumping us into ad tier of Prime Video when we paid for ad-free is 'unfair' – lawsuit

Is Amazon trying to kill Prime?

Are they actually losing a lot of money on it, and want to reduce it?

Amazon is usually not this stupid. It's obviously going to get a ton of people to cancel.

It's time we add friction to digital experiences and slow them down

Re: THIS!!!

> The pointless obsession with often irrelevant CPU speed is a good example - who cares if an on screen task takes 0.6 seconds rather than 0.7 seconds

I have to wait for my OpenSCAD model to render. I have to wait for my slicer to finish processing my STL and send it to the printer. I have to wait for my video editor to do just about anything because throwing large numbers of video frames around is a lot of work.

CPU speed is not irrelevant.

It sounds like you don't use your computer to do actual work.

The most 2024 things to do are laying off staff and eyeing up AI – Mozilla's doing both

Yeah, that'll make Mozilla gain market share

Sigh. Never has the facepalm icon been so apt.

Tesla's Cybertruck may not be so stainless after all

Re: Musk? Who trusts this guy?

Gwynne Shotwell deserves a lot of the credit for running SpaceX, but she's smart enough to keep her head down and her mouth shut these days.

Re: Stainless?

The internal juices from dead insects are highly corrosive in some species, especially the "love bugs" we have here in Florida, who die by the hundreds of millions because they congregate above the warm roadways in summer, and form a nice paste on the front of everyone's grille. (though in recent years, they've actually evolved away from that)

Meta says risk of account theft after phone number recycling isn't its problem to solve

Re: Call me old fashioned

Google has hammered me for my phone number for at least 10 years now, including stuff like offering a Google+ vanity URL back when that was a thing.

A friend recently retired, and to stay in contact, I decided to finally get a FB account.

Their response was that I wasn't using my real name and I needed to send them a driver's license or birth certificate!

My response to that is not repeatable here, but I know a LOT of people who would have complied without a second thought.

Korean eggheads crack Rhysida ransomware and release free decryptor tool

Re: Not all heroes

Actually, it doesn't matter. All that matters under the DMCA is that you cracked their encryption.

That's one of the many reasons DMCA is so horrible.

Chrome engine devs experiment with automatic browser micropayments

Patreon does it much better.

So the traditional way for webcomic artists and other folks to stay afloat is to sell t-shirts with funny sayings on them and maybe pins or plushies or something else trivial.

As you can understand, this does not scale well.

Patreon has streamlined it all. I pay about $38 a month that's spread over about 15 webcomic and YouTube creators that I'm helping support.

You have tiers that give you extra benefits for more money, like access to a forum, or live drawing streams, or Q&A sessions, or whatever floats the boat.

It's done in a far more secure manner than this hack.

Re: What's the first word you think of when someone says "Amazon"?

> Mostly gone due to the push of Amazon…

Mostly, but not completely. Barnes & Noble lost my business when they started pushing their membership program so heavily, you had to say "no" about 6 times per purchase. And this wasn't just my local store, as I had about 7-8 stores within a couple hundred miles that I visited.

They've stopped that, but it's too late for me.

Re: Good luck

Or Sirius digital FM radio

Drowning in code: The ever-growing problem of ever-growing codebases

Re: Spot on.

Freeman Dyson once discussed how the RAF tried hard to locate the admin HQ for German aircraft production, found it, bombed it into oblivion... and were horrified when German aircraft production rates went *up*

Edit: don't forget the ME-262, the world's first real fighter jet, perfect for bomber interception and air superiority... but Hitler insisted it be used as a bomber, even though it had almost no capacity for bomb load.

Elon Musk can't wriggle out of SEC Twitter fraud inquiry

Huh?

> Initially claiming to be a passive investor, Musk later joined the company's board and eventually purchased it for $44 billion in October 2022.

Um, wasn't he forced to buy it after a tweet? I thought that was the reason behind his temper tantrums and running twitter into the ground.