Posts by Paul Hovnanian

Blustering Blackbeard's PC was all at sea, sysadmin got him shipshape in seconds

Not always touchscreen controls. I got a good deal an an AN/USM-338 oscilloscope at the local surplus shop. It had a sticker on it "bright trace/no horizontal". And a low enough price to make fixing it worthwhile. Took it home, plugged it in and no horizontal drive. The function switches all had (somewhat) transparent rubber caps over them*. Upon close inspection, someone had poked the trigger control button, putting the scope in "single shot" trace mode. I set that to "free run" and now have a nice piece of test gear for a fraction of the EBay price.

*The caps serve to make the equipment somewhat splash proof. A few of the EBay listings actually describe this thing as a US Navy underwater oscilloscope. Nope.

District denies enrollment to child based on license plate reader data

The new school lunch program.

Taking money from the state is one thing. But many local school districts* obtain additional funding from local residents (via property taxes) to enhance their programs. And these programs and their funds are jealously guarded by the local residents that pay for them. In some districts, by residents "ratting out" commuting students. ALPRs are just a modern version of that. But they allow the local residents to plead ignorance of the practice, since individuals don't have to file a complaint in person.

*I'm not sure about Illinois, Chicago or Oak Lawn School District 126 specifically.

Smart mirror shows dumb Windows in elevator

Dumb, on several levels

How many people stand in an elevator looking at the back wall?

AI has made the Command Line Interface more important and powerful than ever before

Back in the day ...

... a few decades ago, I took an AutoCAD class. It was a pretty rigorous coverage of the tool. The instructor informed us that, although we would be shown the GUI interface, most of the class would cover the CLI. Because this was what the "power users" used.

"How do you manage with as few as 6 mouse buttons????"

That is a very good question.

FBI is investigating breach that may have hit its wiretapping tools

The FBI of today is clearly not the FBI of yesteryear.

Back when J. Edgar would tell us who our enemies were.

US state laws push age checks into the operating system

Re: They know what they are doing.

Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately be explained by malice.

Or: Cui bono?

Linux login

How grey is your beard?

npmx package browser released as alpha to fix pain of using npmjs

Why?

"The unanswered question: why has the official GitHub-owned npmjs browser been allowed to slip so far behind that a quick open source startup can so easily improve on it?"

Not being a JavaScript developer or contributing to Node.js, I'll venture a guess. Based upon my observations as a user, JavaScript and the underlying document object model (DOM) are not yet stable. Given that npmjs was a product of this culture, the underlying content under its management has wandered away from the design basis of npmjs, despite efforts to patch it. The obvious fix: Go in with a clean sheet of paper, figure out what that content looks like today and build a new schema and interface to fit it.

Given that JavaScript is still not stable, I'd expect that npmx will meet the same fate at some point in the future. And a new browser will be built to take its place.

Once upon a time, saving your bits meant punching holes in floppies

Back in the day ...

... saving my bits meant wearing an athletic cup.

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

Windows stickers

I've always peeled these things off of PCs and laptops that I buy used when I'm installing Linux. I wasn't aware that this kind of market existed for them (assumed that keys submitted upon activation would be tagged as "used" in some cloudy database).

I've got a "Designed for Windows" sticker stuck to my toilet tank.

Microsoft reportedly eyes E7 tier to make AI agents pay their way – like the humans they'll replace

Re: Unionise....

Where is Abraham Lincoln when we need him again?

Microsoft HoloLens finds second home in the military after failing battlefield tests

Re: New, Old Applications of this Tech

This.

But like the X-Ray glasses they used to sell in the back pages of comic books. But now tied to a Grok image processor.

Anthropic launches new marketing blog, pretends it's being 'written' by 'retired' LLM

After retirement

... Claude Opus 3 needs to find a park bench and feed the pigeons.

Anthropic to Pentagon: Autonomous weapons could hurt US troops and civilians

Autonomous weapons

"The second use case is powering fully autonomous weapons, which Amodei says are too dangerous to deploy in their current form."

Land mines. Cluster bombs. That horse has bolted from the barn long, long ago.

NASA safety watchdog says it's time to rethink Moon landing

Re: "too many firsts in Artemis III mission"

"Before Challenger, NASA was seen as invincible"

Well, since Apollo 1 anyway*.

*Ignoring for the moment that Apollo 13 could have been a tragedy. But all heros, since they pulled their bacon out of the fire.

Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters auditioning female voices to sharpen social engineering

Auditioning?

"auditioning female voices"

So, what are you wearing right now? That one is so old, I can barely get it to work anymore.

LLMs killed the privacy star, we can't rewind, we've gone too far

Re: Slow news day ?

"Facebook could easily identify at least 50% of those people who smugly announced they were staying under the radar by not signing up."

The trick is to sign up. But under a fictitious name (not a pseudonymous name). And use a different one for each service, so they can't cross check data.

Re: Just ask yourself???

A careful gramatical analysis of your writing style might give you away.

On the other hand, it might reveal you to be the true author of the works of Shakespeare (writing under the invented persona of Sir Francis Bacon).

Re: This is right sucks (if true)

"If not, then the accounts of those who follow you might have it."

You have discovered my stratagem. Piss off enough people and nobody follows me.

AWS would rather blame its own engineers than its AI

Re: Strive to be the Earth's Best Employer?

Sorry, boss. I didn't see your email. Emergency in the data center and I had to run. Do you want me to put the servers back together? Or should I turn in my badge and have the AI finish this?

Rogue devs of sideloaded Android apps beg for freedom from Google’s verification regime

Re: Rogue journalist snipes at legitimate developers

"why the developers are rogue."

Because they are not giving Google its share of the action.

KDE Plasma 6.6 isn't forcing systemd but the arguments rage on

Re: Precisely the Problem

Windows "just works" for a narrowly defined set of users. Linux works for many edge cases where Microsoft and its development ecosystem didn't think there was a big enough market for something.

Re: Precisely the Problem

I guess Poettering never had to plug a camera into his laptop. So "NOTABUG WONTFIX".

Government upgrades drones, deploys joystick tweakers to catch illegal dumpers

Re: Performative Nonsense

Finding the dumpers is. Hence the drones. Although covering the area with (reasonably secured) wildlife cameras would do as well.

Re: "Illegal dumping" has a different meaning where I live

"I could have taken it to the county landfill"

Lucky you. It's a profit center for my town. I used to handle my own trash. Hauling a couple of cans to the transfer station* every month for about $10. But then the town figured that they could make garbage service mandatory and charge what they wanted. $250 per ton with a $40 minimum charge. Every time there is an opportunity for comment, I always mention that they charge much more than the competition (the gully behind some hobo camp). Rate increases are deemed necessary for "essential services"**.

*A facility where we (or the city trucks) toss our garbage into semi truck trailers. Who take it to the dump, which is not accessible to the general public.

**Cleaning garbage out of hobo camps. For free.

"paperwork was dumped. Addresses were traced"

Sounds like the plot of Alice’s Restaurant Massacre.

"Yes, sir, Officer Obie, I cannot tell a lie. I put that envelope under that garbage."

Hotel's rotary switchboard so retro it predates the concept of crashing

For those who ...

"... have not seen such a device in the wild"

Some here probably still remember Ernestine.

"A gracious hello. How may I, in all humble servitude, be of assistance? $12.50 a month doesn't buy perfection."

EFF policy says bots can code but humans must write the docs

Re: Just asking ..... for when there be no comments accompanying and explaining the dislike vote

"You'd have to be pretty sad to create a bot to go downvoting a bunch of comments on a tech website."

Not when there are so many willing to do so for free.

Re: Worst of Both Worlds?

"un-maintainable, EVEN LATER BY THE PEOPLE WHO WROTE IT."

And so now they want to hire code commenters when, in the past, we couldn't even get the meat-sack devs to comment their own code?

Let us know how that is working out.

Re: LLM

That has a basis in history. That human has been drawn and quartered.

Desktop tech sent to prison for an education on strange places to put tattoos

Novice

"All I could say was 'I didn't know anyone could get tattoos like that,"

Clearly, Carl has revealed himself as one who has had little or no experience with the present day Internet.

Enforcing piracy policy earned helpdesk worker death threats

Re: Americans

"You've clearly got absolutely no idea where Venezuela is."

Just South of the Caribbean Sea.

Re: Americans

"It is, but why should anyone make the effort to cross big bodies of water"

The Rio Grande isn't that big. Notwithstanding an attempt to secure its shore with barbed wire. And if there's a sufficient profit involved, speed boats from Venezuela will do quite nicely.

The "why" question has many answers. But the frequency of occurence speaks to the question being answered in the affirmitave quite frequently.

Re: Because that's an instance of punishment being meted out unilaterally.

I'm not sure. From Jamie's original comment, it wasn't clear who could "look up" an account. Nor what sort of vetting was applied to related comments or complaints entered.

It could be quite chilling for continued free speech if one were to fear some comment being caught by the armies of self- proclaimed "defenders of the public's morals". And a red flag (flashing, no less) be applied to one's on-line personna with no opportunity for a hearing.

Re: Why wasn't the violent idiot fired immediately and the cops called?

"From that point on, any time his record was looked up, it would flash in red."

Which is somewhat troubling. Because that's an instance of punishment being meted out unilaterally. Based on the opinion(s) of another, with no hearing or adjudication. Some social media sites are overrun by self-appointed judges of public propriety. Woe to the one that runs afoul of such groups.

It's perfectly reasonable for such sites to turn reports over to the authorities for examination and possible further action. But at least my country is stopping short of implementing shaming social credit scores (at this time).

Re: Americans

"except chambered for a civilian round"

Sadly, yes. We'd all be better off sticking to military rounds. Which are (in most places) restricted by the 1899 Hague Convention (not ratified by the USA, but observed as a part of NATO). Civilian rounds are subject to far fewer restrictions.

Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it

New York Cab Ride

This is why they used to block passengers view of the fare meter.

"Never mind looking out the window, sir. And yes, it is amazing that all the bridges seem to look like the Brooklyn Bridge."

Final step to put new website into production deleted it instead

Of course, you are saving all these backups in different locations in the file system. Or even different file systems.

Or you'll still lose them all following the inevitable rm -rf *

How AI could eat itself: Competitors can probe models to steal their secrets and clone them

Re: Pot, kettle, all black

"The 'cash-value' of an idea bears no relationship to scarcity."

Look up "rent seeking".

Booster nozzle anomaly fails to stop ULA Vulcan Centaur reaching orbit

In related news ...

... the tailpipe fell off my old truck a while back. It still runs.

I welcome ULA to the redneck, clapped out truck club.

AI can predict your future salary based on your photo, boffins claim

Re: Predicting self-reported personality

I am the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being you have ever known.

[Apologies to Richard Condon]

Dijkstra’s algorithm won’t be replaced in production routers any time soon

Eventually, the slime mold will produce a solution.

Discord to start assuming all users are underage unless they prove otherwise

Re: Get each user to talk into their mic for 5 seconds.

"If its squeaks its a child."

Autotune. Just knock an octave off. I'm sure by now there are A.I. voice modulators. Just pick James Earl Jones from the menu.

Re: Won't help protect anyone

"neither the fact the account is 23 yrs old"

That just means you are old enough to have a kid. Who got hold of your CC number and is now trying to open a social media account with it.

Simple solution

Start posting "Dad" jokes.

AI chatbots are no better at medical advice than a search engine

Hey Claude

It hurts when I do this.

Claude: Well then, don't do that.

Three clues that your LLM may be poisoned with a sleeper-agent back door

Nicolai

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, but I have promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep. Remember. Miles to go before I sleep.

Mine's the trenchcoat with the collar turned up -->

US Army looks for robots that can clean up chemical and bioweapons messes

Finally!

A robot that can change the babies nappies.