Posts by Pascal Monett

Palantir CEO celebrates one cash culture to rule them all

"insufficient recognition of his company's accomplishments"

Oh no, we recognize your accomplishments.

You have successfully become one of the most despicable companies on the face of this planet.

We have no doubt on that point.

MIT Sloan quietly shelves AI ransomware study after researcher calls BS

Brilliant career move, there

MIT authors Michael Siegel, Sander Zeijlemaker, alongside Safe Security's Vidit Baxi and Sharavanan Raajah.

These people have just completely trashed their professional reputation. They will forever be remembered for publishing a piece of AI-written filth.

They're going to have to work very hard to regain a veneer of competence in the industry.

Serves them right.

Some of them are even in Government these days.

Ransomware negotiator, pay thyself!

Re: who doesn't even know that he pardoned a crypto thief

Oh, I'm pretty sure he knows. He's got the guys name on speed dial for when he'll want to grab the bag.

On the other hand, I see Georgia, Texas and Florida. All good, upstanding Red states.

Hmmm . . .

Google yanks Gemma after US senator says model ‘hallucinated’ her committing crimes

Ban AI !

It's run by Democrats !

OpenAI spreads the imaginary wealth beyond Microsoft with $38B AWS deal

$35B here, $250B there

Where did OpenAI get all that money ? Is it all in their "futures" value ?

Never mind, hey guys, can I sign a measely $1B deal with you in exchange for nothing on my part ?

Since you apparently have the money to throw around . . .

ESA tests bacterial powder to feed Moon and Mars crews

Goodness me

Thank God I'm not going on a space mission. I'd end up eating a crewmember.

I need my proteins !

Metropolitan Police hails facial recognition tech after record year for arrests

962 arrests

Hey, you can make 10,000 arrests.

What I'm interested in is how many of those arrested were convicted ?

Touting arrests as a success meter ignores the rest of the point of the procedure : taking the criminals off the streets. If your arrested end up back outside two days later, you've just wasted everyone's time, efforts and resources.

Students using ChatGPT beware: Real learning takes legwork, study finds

Re: Blimey

I'm guessing a lot of people did, but it takes one or more studies like this to carry the message to people.

In the end, cheaters will be cheaters. The advantage of LLMs is apparently that actually competent people are going to be able to sort out the chaff a bit easier.

From Intel to the infinite, Pat Gelsinger wants Christian AI to change the world

Hold your horses there, Pat

You might want to remind yourself that the Pope is quite wary of AI.

On the other hand, as rightly indicated in the article, the Christian faith specializes in creating fractures and factions that absolutely refuse to work with each other, so, one more, I guess ?

Or you could consider that you're retired, Pat, and go fishing instead of creating Yet Another Religious Controversy. But that is also a specialty of the Christian faith : you have seen the light,you know the path forward, you have been annointed by God to bring your version of His message to the masses.

Yeah sure. Go fishing, Pat.

‘ERP down for emergency maintenance’ was code for ‘You deleted what?’

It's called cowboy programming

It's the mentality of "I've done this before".

All I need to do is type in this command, Enter and - oh shit, I wasn't expecting that !

That is what happens when you don't have a test environment. You do everything in live and you do it fast because 1) pressure from Up High and 2) false pride in thinking that the quicker you are, the better your reputation. Except that going quickly has to mean skimping on checking your work and, unfortunately, you're never as good as you think you are so, mistakes happen.

Fortytwo's decentralized AI has the answer to life, the universe, and everything

Re: In the washup wasn't 42 == 6×9 ?

And I note that you only get some coin if your results are in the top tier.

Brilliant way to have a large number of people donate their electricity and CPU time for nothing.

Nothing to see here, people. Move along . . .

Ransomware gang runs ads for Microsoft Teams to pwn victims

Imagine that ? No, I don't.

I never click on any link without checking its origine.

You try to sell me an ad on MS Teams ? Then your link had damn well better point to Microsoft's download page.

I wasn't born yesterday.

England's local government shake-up promises to be a massive tech headache

"More than 200 existing councils are likely to be abolished"

Oooh.

Looks like Birmingham's uber-mayor has some fretting to do.

About bloody time, too.

O2 cranks prices mid-contract, essentially telling customers to like it or lump it

"telling customers to leave if they don't like it"

If only the market were truly free, they'd have one big surprise the next day, when all of their customers went somewhere else.

And that's all they deserve.

NHS left with sick PCs as suppliers resist Windows 11 treatment

NHS hospitals

What ? Are you telling me that they have finally upgraded from Windows 95 ?

Wow.

Actor couldn’t understand why computer didn’t work when the curtain came down

Not even close.

I'm talking about "Hello ? Our business-critical application with over a million records does not respond any more. Please help, NOW."

"The Register wishes you a wonderfully scary day"

Thank you, but I get ready for that around 320 days a year already, so, I guess I'll pass on one more.

Microsoft 365 business customers are running out of places to hide from Copilot

Re: Why though?

The thing is, you don't have to.

The only reason you're saddled with this pile of crap is because Manglement is not capable of envisioning another solution - called Linux.

Today there is nothing Windows can do that Linux can't (not talking about gaming - and even that is starting to get close). As far as business is concerned, the only reason to go with Brokzilla is because Manglement is obsessed with the fancy Excel charts and Powerpoint presentations. And it will accept any "inconvenience" that happens because it can't think out of the box.

That's not an excuse for business resilience.

Wouah.

That was a stroll down memory lane. Thank you !

Suspected Chinese snoops weaponize unpatched Windows flaw to spy on European diplomats

He works in Moscow.

Thinking is not required.

Hacking LED Halloween masks is frighteningly easy

"BLE enabled mask with a programmable app"

Um, this is supposed to be a surprise ?

You really think that a company selling Halloween masks is going to bother itself with security ?

What's the worst than can happen ? Tell me, please.

Japan’s new space truck is also a temporary space lab, just worked first time

"just worked first time"

That's something that His Muskiness has never heard.

Europe preps Digital Euro to enter circulation in 2029

"the bloc needs a digital version of the Euro"

Nonsense.

I can pay everything I buy with my Visa. I haven't used cash since COVID.

What is this bullshit ? What new Big Brother scheme are they trying to push on us ?

Don't know and don't give a damn. I don't need it, I don't want it, and I won't use it.

Go fuck yourselves.

Azure's bad night fuels fresh calls for cloud diversification in Europe

"Successive outages on this scale show" . .

. . how you should fucking get back to managing your own systems with your own admins and stop depending on the pipe dream of someone else's server.

Yes, I'm an old curmudgeon nearing retirement. Call me boomer, I don't care. You deal with the fallout if you're so smart.

Postcode Lottery's lucky dip turns into data slip as players draw each other's info

"affecting small number of users"

Yeah, of course. It only ever affects a "small number of users".

Hello ? If you were the user affected, would you care that you're the only one ?

I'm guessing not.

Let's agree to affect the CEO in every case and find out how quick this kind of issue would be solved.

France jacks into the Matrix for state messaging – and pays too

How times have changed

"worries on the continent about dependency on closed and potentially insecure messaging platforms" and

"The French state is already running Matrix as the backbone of its secure instant messaging service"

On the one hand, I'm grateful that, apparently, our idiots-in-charge are not stupid enough to accidentally include a journalist in secure governmental communications (but I won't hold my breath on that - they can improve).

On the other hand, I can't help but remember the good ol' days of Lotus Notes R4, when the French government mandated Lotus to give a watered-down version of the 128-bit RSA key for French versions, so that "Grand Frère" could more easily look into whatever the hell was the big issue at the time (don't remember, it seems to me that Society/Civilization was never this scary before I hit 50).

In any case, it's nice to see that my own Government has finally accepted that strong encryption is preferable.

Maybe Playboy Macron should send a text to King WayTooLate in Buckingham Palace to enlighten him and get the British Parliament to shut the fuck about backdooring encryption ?

Nah. Won't happen.

DNS downing clouds is boring: IBM Cloud is experiencing a quantum computer outage

“The quantum computer [..] is temporarily unavailable"

Did customers notice any difference ?

Major telecom supplier compromised by unnamed nation-state attackers

"While we do not have evidence at this time"

It took you 9 months to wake up to the breach.

The fact that you have no evidence now is not exactly reassuring.

Microsoft Azure challenges AWS for downtime crown

"due to their reliance on the Microsoft Azure platform"

Well there's your problem. Stop relying on someone else's server and bring back your expertise in-house and secure.

Oh, that would cost you too much ? Ain't that a shame. Too bad you didn't think about that when you shut down your own servers and fired your admins.

I wonder if you're going to go back to that really smart guy who pushed for using The Cloud^TM and ask him for his bonus back ?

Nah ? Didn't think so . . .

Microsoft gives Windows 11 a fresh Start – here's how to get it

Re: I have a question

No. It's an ad platform for Borkzilla products.

Re: There's nothing wrong with taking a solid interface design and just sticking with it.

But if you do that, then all the kids in you Developer department have nothing to do but actually improve the functionality.

It's a lot easier to just shuffle around the stuff in the UI and pretend that you've done a days' work, right ?

And don't forget Dark Mode !

Samsung picks fights with Google and Qualcomm

"a gateway to truly ambient AI"

Sorry bud, you lost me there.

If that's the direction you're going, you can go it alone.

Microsoft just revealed that OpenAI lost more than $11.5B last quarter

Re: quote: a sum that won’t hurt Big Daddy Redmond too much

That is the single good thing about shareholders : at one point or another, you have to come clean about where the money is going.

Even the FBI can't get that information without a warrant, and PR is completely unreliable in the best of circumstances.

But file a quarterly report that goes to shareholders and you're screwed. There is no wiggle room. The numbers are the numbers and, at that level, shareholders know how to read them.

AI layoffs to backfire: Half quietly rehired at lower pay

"55% will regret those job cuts"

No they won't.

They'll be rehiring the same experience for half the cost.

Bonuses all around ! (for those who have a C in front of their title, of course)

Starlink tells the world it has over 150 sextillion IPv6 addresses

2^128 addresses

340 undecillion. For those of you, like me, who simply can't grasp the beauty of exponents, here is what that number looks like :

340282366920938000000000000000000000000

That's 340.28 trillion trillion trillion addresses (because I just learned of the existence of the word 'undecillion', and I still can't grok that).

Seems like a lot to me, but okay, IPv6 was apparently designed to be future-proof, so with enough space to guarantee that colonies on the Moon, Mars, Ganymede, the asteroid belt and the rest of the Solar System would be able to connect. Apparently, we'll have to invent a new version of NAT translation when we invade colonize Alpha Centauri. We'll handle that when we get there.

In any case; Starlink claiming that it has over 150 sextillion IPv6 addresses means that it holds, wait for it : 360 trillion trillion addresses.

We have an estimated 8 billion people on this planet. That means Starlink is hoarding enough IPv6 space to allow for more or less 125 billion IPv6 addresses for every single living person on the planet.

Now I realize that all that fucking "smart" tat that is being sold is going to take up a portion (mathematical, >0) of that space, and smartphones are selling like hotcakes despite the fact that, like PC tech, the newest version is now only incrementally better (for a given definition of 'better') than the previous one but still, it seems to me to be a bit much for one company to hold.

What in God's green Earth is Starlink doing with all of that address space ? There has to be a technical reason. No company buys address blocks for bragging rights.

Chatbots parrot Putin's propaganda about the illegal invasion of Ukraine

pseudo-AI

It just might be that this false prophet is going to force us, as a civilization, to come to terms with the meaning of "truth".

But, given what I have learned of Human nature, and given the current example of the US Republican party, somehow I don't think that that will happen before a long while.

UK government inflates G-Cloud framework to £14B

"the framework's value and timeframe have swollen"

Oh, isn't that nice ? The powers that be have already multiplied by 4 the benefits their friends will be given.

That way, they will avoid 50% of the issues when the final cost of this project ends up sailing past £25 billion.

Because you know it will.

Talk about foresight . . .

Marks & Spencer swaps out TCS for fresh helpdesk deal

A cyber incident

Why does this sound like a gold-plated excuse to do away with something that worked acceptably until now, but that some upper-level board member suddenly decided that he would would prefer changing his AMS Mercedes for a new model ?

Everything you know about last week's AWS outage is wrong

Love it

Microsoft is convinced that "uptime" should be two words, probably in someone else's account.

That is satire at its best.

Re: Facts are good.

Exactly. Only a "small number" of customers were impacted, right ?

The Chinese Box and Turing Test: AI has no intelligence at all

Re: Chinese Room counterargument

That is actually an interesting argument. We are all following rules, the rules we learned from education and experience. Obey the people you depend upon for your survival, treat those you do not know with respect, find ways to learn new things to be useful, transmit your knowledge to those around you who can use it.

Yes, I am very bleeding-hearted, so sue me.

However you decide to act in society, there will come a point where you'll have to update your rules - generally because you got hit by a cluebat and need to avoid that in the future (yes, I'm talking about actual intelligence - idiots will flee to "social media" and complain that life isn't fair without learning anything).

So what is intelligence ? The ability to update your rules ?

I'm going to need to think about that.

"Is AI really intelligent?"

For God's sake, can we stop asking ourselves this question ?

There is no such thing as AI. It's certainly Artificial, it is certainly not Intelligent.

End of story. Close the lights, the last one out locks the door.

Enough already.

Ex-CISA head thinks AI might fix code so fast we won't need security teams

How is that different from what's happening now ?

The White House is being governed by the merger of all three of your points.

Democracy is dead in the USA. The only question left is can it be revived ? I fear that the paddles have been lost.

IBM Cloud stops signing and seeking new customers for its VMware service

"VMware will lose 35 percent of the workloads it manages [in 3] years"

Well done, Broadcom board. That was a brilliant use of your capital.

So, what stellar excuse do you have now for your shareholders ? Because if I were one of those, I'd be thinking of keelhauling you guys.

Frustrated consultant 'went full Hulk' and started smashing hardware

Objectively speaking, almost none of us live across the street from our employer. So, transit time, lunch break, etc mean that, in order to do your eight hours, you're likely spending nine and a half per day (if not more).

(And that's not taking into account the French lunch break ;)

This is all because we continue to be good little sheep, accepting that "employers" and "management" have the right to never stop asking us to do all the efforts they refuse to do.

Fuck them.

You pay me eight hours a day, I do eight hours a day. That's a 48-hour week. If you need me to do a 70-hour week, it's because you need to hire someone else.

So do your fucking job and spend the money instead of running us into the wall.

Get ready to squint! World's smallest pixel is just 300 nm

Re: hydrogen silsesquioxane

I want to see Trump try to pronounce that.

EU sovereignty plan accused of helping US cloud giants

It was a nice idea

The European Union was a nice idea, full of hope for the future of peoples and messages of peace.

The the bureaucrates took over, the lobbyists found a way in, and now Brussels is just a shell of what it should have been.

Tear that house down. We'll be better off on our own.

Australia sues Microsoft for misleading M365 users about Copilot subscription options

"Microsoft deliberately omitted reference to the Classic plans"

Well duh, that's how you get people onboard with something they couldn't care less about.

Also, you gotta love the "Consumer trust and transparency are top priorities for Microsoft " bit.

Yes officer, I recognize that I was doing 100km/h in a 30km/h zone, but you see, now that you caught me, I would like you to acknowledge that respect of the law and of my fellow citizen are my top priorities. Now. Since you arrested me. What ? Prison ? Come on, I said something nice, didn't I ?