Posts by Joe Gurman

Using AI makes people less likely to admit they don't know something

It’s idiocracy.

Good, I guess, to know garbage in is still garbage out.

MFA-optional banks leave safe doors (and accounts) wide open for thieves to pillage

Re: Passkey issue

Welllll…. My passkeys can only be authenticated with my ugly mug or fingerprint (as stored, encrypted, in vectorized form in secure enclaves on my devices). Not perfect, nothing is, but a lot better than anything involving passwords.

GitHub cuts short offer to burn repos on CD after mockery ensues

Ah, Sony

Only about fourteen years behind Apple.

Yes! It's true! Windows 11 is an agentic platform

Um....

"Imagine shipping your OS with a CLI package manager, eh, Apple?"

You mean like, softwareupdate ?

I know, I know, all it does is list available packages, as well as actual installs and upgrades. No configuration, because why would you want to?

No longer just a Copilot, Microsoft's AI wants to take the wheel

The introduction of coreutils was nice, if decades late, but this….

…. * searches for vomit emoji *

Bye-bye, Gemini CLI; Google's gone and swapped you for a closed-source AI

No surprise, but….

…. an awfully quick transition to enshittification.

We've only gone and done it: Changed what you're used to

Re: All this...

Can't possibly upvote this one enough.

Next time you do a redesign (in 20 years' time?), please add a dark mode option.... especially if the articles still use only 1/3 of the horizontal space available. As it stands, "It burns!"

Not commenting on apparently obligatory redesign, but….

…. I suspect that somewhere there’s some JavaScript or HTML or something that is confusing Safari on iPadOS with Safari on iOS. The result is far, far too much white space on either side of a narrow column of text at least for those of us using the iPad as a normal reader, which is to say in portrait mode.

I’m hoping that some of the designers time can be applied to fixing this. Thanks.

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

I’m sorry, is this 2006….

….or 2026?

“ Otherwise, if you ignore embedded niche cases that nobody cares about, Apple is still where it started, in desktops and laptops.”

So…. The iPhone and its many imitators are niche cases? You do realize there was a reason they changed the name from Apple Computer to just Apple, right? And where 51% of its most recent quarterly revenues came from?

NASA boss: make Pluto a planet again

Re: Cleared orbit

Neptune long, long ago cleared its orbit.

At worst, the reclassification of Pluto is a squabble between planetary astronomers who had been discovering many new dwarf planets, and other astronomers who had concerns that were less cogent (“But we’ve been teaching kids for decades there are nine planets!”). It’s solely about nomenclature.

I had the privilege to meet Mr. Tombaugh 37 years ago at an American Astronomical Society meeting. I frankly don’t’ think he would have been upset by the decision. I don’t think we need a NASA Administrator, whose experience is as an entrepreneur who enjoys his wealth by cosplaying jet jockey and astronaut and being lobbied by Dr. Stern, to waste his time on such things.

Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope trumps Trump cuts, is launch-ready ahead of schedule

Well….

….when I worked at our nation’s four-letter acronym agency, phrases like, “planning long term (for example, for the Habitable Worlds Observatory – a telescope capable of directly imaging habitable worlds) is becoming complicated when every year brings a new fight over budget” just meant it was time for the non-drinking-on-government-property game of playing the video of John F. Kennedy at Rice University in 1962 saying, “We seek to go to the moon and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

Apple has an opportunity to rediscover humanity in its push toward AI

The EU

….in place of successfully supporting the development of new tech outfits at home, has decided to focus on undoing Apple’s business model, part of the selling point of which is that to some degree, they actually try to protect the user through that much-derided walked garden. You may not buy it, but why should any government interfere with making that model a viable alternative to the wild west freak show of completely open systems. Open systems may be fine for the security-savvy, technically informed readers of this site, but the rest of them have a right to a business model that works for them. And even for some of us, who just don’t want the bother of dealing with the vulnerabilities of every electronic device we allow into our lives. If some iThingie users would prefer not to receive rapid updates patching the worst vulnerabilities, well, as Coriolanus put it, there is a world elsewhere. No one’s forcing you to buy any Apple kit.

Re: Spit it out

Interestingly, in cases where the FBI wanted Apple to build a back door into its iPhone encryption so the G-men could read the contents of dead terrorists’ (or anyone else’s) iPhones, Apple just refused.

French cops free mother and son after 20-hour crypto kidnap ordeal

Nice to hear the husband didn't pay the ransom

Nothing says "crypto investor" like blowing off the wife and kid to protect his speculative "investment."

Raspberry Pi OS ends open-door policy for sudo

Think of the children....

....or at least the ones too lazy to get up from a chair and make their own sandwiches.

https://xkcd.com/149

Apple's last tower topples… and the others will follow

USB? Try….

….Thunderbolt 5 ports fir connections that run at what old architectures would call “bus speed.”

Re: So, Apple Silicon

What a hilariously poor attempt at a sarcastic comment. Cf. Mac Studio models.

Age verification isn't sage verification when it's inside operating systems

Re: @Dan55 - At the risk of another 40 downvotes

The free market’s job? I’ve never seen it believably stated to be anything other than profit, no matter what hype the corporate p.r. fountains may spout.

Digital fruit fly brain model walks and cleans its feelers

Um….

“Antibiotics doing even less than they already did” — really? Did whoever wrote those words know anything about how enormous a difference penicillin alone made in saving the lives of people with flesh-piercing wounds?

District denies enrollment to child based on license plate reader data

He’s also meant to have written….

“Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.”

Flying cabs, next-gen aircraft cleared for takeoff in 26 states

Re: Taxi!

I believe that was covered pretty well in The Fifth Element.

Bootleg Windows, Office scheme crashes, triggers 22-month lockup for Florida woman

Providence? That’s in Rhode Island.

I think your autocorrect is unfamiliar with “provenance.”

AI models suck slightly less at math than they did last year

The experience

…. will be priceless.

Say goodbye to budget PCs and smartphones – memory is too expensive now

Re: Have an upvote

Didn’t know you could use CEOs for that.

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

Re: who can it be?

Good demonstration of basic skills, right?

Hubble in a death spiral that could end as early as 2028 without a reboost

Let her go down

Time to build a new uv/optical “great observatory.”

'Merica-made Mac Minis marked for manufacturing

Re: Tech's Ass

Believe you just proved you don’t look at Apple hardware. Apple has, to my knowledge, never put a sticker on anything they manufactured. That kind of labelling is laser-etched onto the exterior. Stickers, if any, go on the post-consumer boxes, presumably right over the “Designed in California. Manufactured in {wherever}” legend — printed in plant-based ink, of course.

Re: Tech's Ass

I suspect a small number of production engineers will be overseeing the robots that assemble the minis. Very good chance the only unskilled labor will be the folks lifting the boxes onto pallets the skilled forklift operators will then load onto trucks.

Re: Its most affordable Macintosh

I suspect the total unit assembly cost (not counting the amortization of the assembly line installation in an existing hardware production facility) will be under US$10.

Re: Welp

No, the building already exists and most of it is dedicated to building Apple’s in-house AI servers.

Firefox 148 adds master switch for browser bot bother

Firefox has been dead for me….

….since Waterfox was released.

AMD challenges Intel with an 84-core Epyc processor aimed at telcos, edge

I guess….

….they’re spelling “Saronno” wrong to avoid legal action from a certain purveyor of Amaretto.

Microsoft execs worry AI will eat entry level coding jobs

Re: Subs!

Second paragraph: “while imposing an AI drag on early-in-career (EiC) developers”.

Re: Assuming the sentiment is genuine

Señor Fawlty-Code?

Work experience kids messed with manager's PC to send him to Ctrl-Alt-Del hell

Re: Helpdesk? Helpdesk?

But it’s still pronounced “helldesk” if you work there.

You can jailbreak an F-35 just like an iPhone, says Dutch defense chief

I'll believe that this blowhard....

....can "jailbreak" an F-35 as soon as he shows me he cn jailbreak my iPhone from the other side of an ocean. Not brick, but fully jailbreak, and demonstare by inserting his own code.

DOGE bites taxman

The assignment....

....of a thousand IRS IT people to deal with the tax filing season is primarily motivated by the large number of people wanting to see their refunds pronto, as they used to say in western movies. For the last decade or more, people with normal incomes filing electronically have seen their refunds in 3 - 4 weeks. Naturally, we've all been spoiled by that. For the people still filing on paper.... vaya con Dios.

UK to demand social platforms take down abusive intimate images within 48 hours

Re: Why not, why not, why not...

Why is 48 hours reasonable? If the complainant's ID is verified, why indeed should it not be instant?

Your AI-generated password isn't random, it just looks that way

They should be generating > 34 character passphrases....

....all beginning with "CorrectHorse."

6,000 execs struggle to find the AI productivity boom

Re: Next up...

I don't mean to be rude, but what planet are you living on? Tens of thousands of people have been let go because their corporate overlords preferred to micturate away their cash on hand on AI "data" center builds to spending it on, you know, human employees and their benefits packages. An economic shift so far proven good only for a very small number of GPU chip makers, memory purveyors, and the fossil fuel extraction industry.

Re: Next up...

Exactly.

Perhaps they'd understand if someone wearing a mock turtleneck in a slop-video told them they were holding it wrong.

Amazon's $200 billion capex plan: How I learned to stop worrying and love negative free cash flow

….or at the mercy of the supply chain

At my age, I may never see DRAM prices come down again.

Linus Torvalds and friends tell The Reg how Linux solo act became a global jam session

Maybe that….

….was when you became aware of Silicon Valley as an incubator of tech startups with the assistance of venture capital, but that really started with the HP garage and Stanford engineering dean Frederick Terman’s recruiting of VC in 1951.

By tech outfit standards, it was pretty long in the tooth by the mid-1990s.

Final step to put new website into production deleted it instead

Re: Ah, the old "rm -rf *" command

Did you beat the manslaughter rap, or are you writing from one of HM prisons?

Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation

Re: Feed your AI Finnegans Wake

….or anything by e e cummings.

The big FOSS vendors don't eat their own dogfood – they pay for proprietary groupware

Something....

....something, something, something about dogfood, something, something.

Apple's Creator Studio creates a subscription where free apps used to live

Um….

….I installed the “15” versions on my Mac last week (they appeared automagically on my iThings after an OS patch. I’ve gotten exactly one “Subscribe” pop-up since (and I’ve used all three apps). Is this article panicking much, or is this just the normal slag Apple reflex showing?

Reviving a CIDCO MailStation – the last Z80 computer

The original Mac 128K….

….display was 512 x 342.

Taiwan tells Uncle Sam its chip ecosystem ain't going anywhere

Interesting way of listing TSMC customers….

Omitting, as it dies, their number 2 customer (and until very recently, number 1), Apple.

Microsoft spends billions on AI, converts just 3.3% of Copilot Chat users

Nice to see that the market....

....was not amused by the mismatch of all that AI spending and such minimal adoption (shares off 10% since the day after the earnings call).