Posts by Andrew Williams

Linus Torvalds keeps his ‘fingers and toes’ rule by decreeing next Linux will be version 7.0

Size...

There's no chance of shrinking the kernel is there?

The most durable tech is boring, old, and everywhere

SSL etc

I would rather hope this stuff?(Somewhat Secure Layer) died a horrible death. But in that I hope that there was something better frolicking around that works.

Microsoft wants to replace its entire C and C++ codebase, perhaps by 2030

Well, there's this...

It seems to be that the rust rewrites going on in the Linux world seem to have one thing in common... that the coders are reaching for the "unsafe" option.

So, what to make of that? Is some stuff just not doable in a "safe" style? Or is it more to do with the coder?

Given the size of the Windows codebase,, well... are they going to take a lot of time and effort to recreate a different mess?

AI-authored code contains worse bugs than software crafted by humans

Re: I've said it once

Well, I have had experience of this... we don't need no stinking comments.

The twat in question believes that the code itself is sufficient, and he was taught this at university.

Rust-style safety model for C++ 'rejected' as profiles take priority

My bent farthing's worth...

Prevent folk from writing unsound code?

This flies in the face of the almost guarantee that the universe will create a bigger, better idiot to confound that goal.

Anyhow, back to working on code based on the latest "safe" black box frameworks/libraries.

Linux is about to lose a feature – over a personality clash

Who wrote this?

Because it reads as written by a person who is associated with the bloke who got his submission dropped like it's hot.

AI agents get office tasks wrong around 70% of the time, and a lot of them aren't AI at all

It's all a worry

In terms of AI "learning." As in, it seems to need to take copies of as much internal data as possible. Which pretty much means that your data has left the building.

That and if some evil bugger manages to hack AI then they get a gigantic data playroom of data, yours and dat from everyone else who uses that AI. And it gets scarier if AI's are actually sharing data.

As US scientists flee Trump, MP urges Britain to do more to nab them

A list?

Who are these scientists fleeing for their lives... or grant money? Is there a list?

Dems fret over DOGE feeding sensitive data into random AI

As if AI isn't being used all over by government minions and government data hasn't already been scraped and out there for whoever to see or use.

US senator warns 'China is cheering' for proposed NASA budget cuts

Re: China is cheering... every day

And rely on Boeing? Epic move

New SSL/TLS certs to each live no longer than 47 days by 2029

Looks like the initial death throes of SSL/TLS.

Crew-9 splashes down while NASA floats along with Trump and Musk nonsense

Boeing

They are the sole and root cause of this.

AI running out of juice despite Microsoft's hard squeezing

I am still baffled that environmentalists and global warming folk haven't reached the point of burning the AI folk at the stake. The amount of energy required for AI isn't a good thing apparently.

AI bubble? What AI bubble? Datacenter investors all in despite whispers of a pop

And other than mad theft of data, I am still wondering what the tangible benefits to AI are.

Membership of New Zealand’s domain registry suddenly triples, which isn't entirely welcome

"Responsible for" was pretty much code for giving full ownership to.

Does terrible code drive you mad? Wait until you see what it does to OpenAI's GPT-4o

I am a little surprised that AI hasn't been consumed by internet porn.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion is not an illusion, but it soon might be

Re: Seems to match

I would have stopped at merit. Adding anything else is detracting from the job.

OpenAI's ChatGPT crawler can be tricked into DDoSing sites, answering your queries

If only...

This AI frenzy does a quick death. I wonder how hard it would be to get them to destroy themselves...

American cops are using AI to draft police reports, and the ACLU isn't happy

Weird dichotomy. The world plus dog pimping AI, and then there are those that are pointing out that AI sucks or is dangerous.

Boeing launches funding round to stave off credit downgrade

I am sure there's a Russian, or Chinese, or even Indian aerospace group that would happily consume Boeing and spit out the indigestible bits.

Iran's cyber-goons emailed stolen Trump info to Team Biden – which ignored them

Really? Ignored? Yeah, nah.

Have we stopped to think about what LLMs actually model?

Mostly I think this is a gigantic data heist.

Pretty much none of the "AI" crews seem to care one jot about the data the ownership or copyright of the data they are taking to train their systems.

Core Python developer suspended for three months

Well, it's one more way to self-destruct. From what the steering group has said (per the piece) that's the likely end result.

Microsoft bigwig says the Feds catching Chinese spies in Exchange Online is the cloud working as intended

Re: MTG does not decode

I call your MTG and raise you with "The Squad."

MIT professor hoses down predictions AI will put a rocket under the economy

To me the Chess and Go AI that could beat the elite showed what AI could do... if you had a very small (limited) knowledge base to learn from and used the feedback of human experts to train it. But that's not what the pimped version of AI is. It appears more and more to present as the result of around a million psychopaths googling

I stumbled upon LLM Kryptonite – and no one wants to fix this model-breaking bug

Simple. A lot of greed. A lot of folk desperately hoping for something, anything.

Wiley shuts 19 scholarly journals amid AI paper mill problems

Are the various institutions going to shed those who are zipping out AI papers? As in the humans who chose to really have zero involvement in the science.

Microsoft is a national security threat, says ex-White House cyber policy director

Leopards... Spots...

Microsoft was a predatory monopoly. It still is a predatory monopoly. Nothing has changed in over thirty years.

Cloud Software Group snubs GPL obligations, say critics

Obligations

I think they have the legal obligation to provide the CE source upon request, at the point of last release. Noting here, that the prices they are asking for their commercial edition is pretty much cost prohibitive for small to medium size businesses. I am just bloody lucky I kept a copy of the CE installers around.

Securing open source software: Whose job is it, anyway?

Weird

The proposal that OSS should do better (will be held to account for not doing better?) with regard to security...

Well, there's a whole lot of quiet about this being expected/demanded of proprietary software.

Apple's had it with Epic's app store shenanigans, terminates dev account

Epic

Seem to be a bunch of asses, who seem to be losing bucketloads of cash, and think by antagonising Apple they might get to survive if the EC takes pity on them. Not exactly a bunch of rocket scientists.

IT suppliers hacked off with Uncle Sam's demands in aftermath of cyberattacks

Warrantless searching in 3, 2, 1

There are no provisions to stop this. Other than that, there is zero chance of their being enough people available and competent to do this sort of job, so why exactly is it even a thing? An executive order?

Biden hopes to squeeze loopholes to slow China's devouring of US AI chips

Where are these chips made?

At a guess China, or maybe Taiwan, South Korea maybe?

If they’re being made in China, well…

ChatGPT's odds of getting code questions correct are worse than a coin flip

It explains a lot about my coworker

I think he is actually either an early iteration of ChatGPT or uses it for everything he does.

Canada plans brain drain of H-1B visa holders, with no-job, no-worries work permits

Canadians need not apply

Which will mirror the experiences of Americans when faced with a cheaper and indentured workforce.

Open source licenses need to leave the 1980s and evolve to deal with AI

AI isn’t creating anything

It’s carrying out systematic plagiarism.

OpenAI opens ChatGPT floodgates with dirt-cheap API

Scraping any and all data as it goes

It didn’t learn from nothing, but from vast quantities of data scraped from anywhere Microsoft could get it from.

Microsoft accused of spending millions on bribes to seal business deals

Nothing has changed then

1980’s and on, Microsoft SOP

Razer ponders how to fix installer that grants admin powers if you plug in a mouse

So… Razer are fixing their installer. But Microsoft are not addressing the open window of an installer being used to hijack the system. I Mahoney quite a few naughty people will be stocking up on the “bad razer” items.

US Supreme Court rules teens cussing out schools on social media is protected speech

Seem to have given the green light to kids terroring their teachers.

What Microsoft's Windows 11 will probably look like

I look forward to the return of blue screens… the type associated with death.

Now that Trump is useless to Zuckerberg, ex-president is exiled from Facebook for two years, possibly indefinitely

Words to live by, if it’s a thing on social media… walk the other way, do not get involved. Engaging with lunatics never ever ends well for the non-lunatic.

Big Tech has a big problem with Florida passing a law that protects politicians from web moderation

Private businesses apparently cannot discriminate against people, or so the courts ruled regarding the bakers. So, why do social media private companies have the right to remove commentary that they do not like?

They dropped the “Covid came from the Chinese Lab” commentaries like they were hot. Now, they are all plausible and must be investigated.

Basically, social media needs to bake the cake that their users want to bake.

New Zealand hospitals infected by ransomware, cancel some surgeries

I have always wondered why so many people need external email. Same with external/internet access.

Freenode IRC staff resign en masse, unhappy about new management

Well, May Freenode resurrect itself, and get back to being decent.

Slack btw, is not nearly as much use as irc bot wars.

Guy who wrote women are 'soft, weak, cosseted, naive' lasted about a month at Apple until internal revolt

Angry mob rule…

That is pretty much a large part of the state of the world. The other part is the acceleration of dehumanization of everyone.

I am a widget who has no right to an opinion, and will celebrate being burnt at the stake when it happens. No rationale or reason needed.

Report: World's population of developers expands, JavaScript reigns, C# overtakes PHP

Bafflement…

I still have zero idea why these huge JavaScript and CSS black boxes even exist.

My two ideas are… raising the suicide rate, and that they must be a way of Hoovering loot out of companies while pretending they are are lean, efficient and absolutely necessary code. No proof or justification needed other than declaring it so. Oddly similar to the current “progressive” narrative where they are right and must be obeyed even if it means declaring gravity doesn’t exist, or that it’s inherently racist, because slaves… Newton.

They said it'd never happen, but here we are in the year of our Lord 2021 and Microsoft has its own OpenJDK flavour

One wonders what compelling magic they’re burying in their JDK that will make people want it? Especially seeing as it looks like their intent is to not feed whatever it is back into mainstream JDK

Director, deputy director, CTO of Free Software Foundation quit after Stallman installation

And not one of them will ever stop using stuff he made or contributed to.

Red Hat pulls Free Software Foundation funding over Richard Stallman's return

Until RedHat and the others decrying RMS divest themselves of any product he developed or had a hand in developing, they’re just a bunch of pathetic hypocrites.