Posts by Pascal Monett

Scientists spot massive black hole collision that defies current theories

"Black holes this massive are forbidden"

Black holes this massive don't care about your puny theories.

Oooo, I see what you did there.

Nvidia CEO says China wouldn't risk building military supers with American AI chips

"they'll build on their own"

Now, all together <hand raised> : thank you Trump !.

You reap what you sow, and Trump is sowing shit better than a herd of pigs ever could.

That said, with the amount of Big Macs he's eating . . .

A software-defined radio can derail a US train by slamming the brakes on remotely

Excuse me

It's the railroad industry in the US.

They already don't give a fuck.

xAI's Grok lurches into right-wing insanity, offers tips on assaulting man

Typical Musk

Claim yet another Great Advancement For Humanity, and see it blow up in his face.

He could be the Buster Keaton of our time - if you remove intelligence, humor and class from the equation.

EU-sponsored report says GenAI's 'fair use' defense does not compute

Re: So Europe loses out on an AI future

That doesn't sound like so much of a bad thing to me.

It's not even the LLM's developers, it's the billionnaire asshats who own the whole thing and they're not doing any reading, for sure.

They're counting (money, of course).

Stopping the rot when good software goes bad means new rules from the start

"Short of running a full verification process on each update"

And, pray tell, why is that not happening ?

Does Google not have enough computing power to make its portal secure ? Does it not have enough money for that ?

It doesn't give a flying fuck is the problem.

<old man ranting mode ON>Once upon a time, we didn't have the luxury of downloading updates. We had to wait for the next month's magazine CD to deliver an update to us (if we were lucky). Magazine that we had to pedal uphill to get, and we had to pedal uphill to go back home and install it. That's why our programs worked, because they had to.<old man ranting mode forgotten being ON>.

Mumble, mumble, kids these days . . .

UK's NCA disputes claim it's nearly three times less efficient than the FBI

Um, just a minute, there

"The FBI covers more ground than the NCA. Unlike its UK cousins, the feds are tasked with investigating crimes such as murders and armed robberies, and it also leads on counter-terrorism, none of which fall under the NCA's remit. "

So, the argument the NCA is advancing is that the FBI has to cover more territory, more types of crime and also follow leads on counter-terrorism, so their numbers are better.

Let's turn that around, shall we ? The NCA has one thing to look at in a comparatively puny part of the world and it is still three times less efficient than the FBI.

I don't see that argument making you look good, NCA.

Google’s Gemini refuses to play Chess against the mighty Atari 2600 after realizing it can't match ancient console

the Atari 2600

Teaching "modern" AI that it is not to be fucked with.

Google Indonesia tangled up in $600 million Chromebook corruption probe

"Europe and Japan both plan satellite communications constellations"

Astronomers are going to be giddy with excitement.

You have a fake North Korean IT worker problem – here's how to stop it

So, Fortune 500 companies are wasting money and time

They're actively trying to spend the least to get the "most qualified" and so will not spend one cent on checking who said "most qualified" says he is.

And I'm supposed to shed a tear over this ?

Could we get a Fuck You icon ?

AI coding tools make developers slower but they think they're faster, study finds

"AI didn't understand the context"

Of course not. What is repeatedly called AI these days doesn't "understand". It does not have the capacity to do so.

Period.

Keep chipping away at the monolith though. When it is reduced to rubble, the landscape will be clearer.

ICANN fumes as AFRINIC offers no explanation for annulled election

Power of Attorney

Ah, don't you just love it when cheaters and criminals drape themselves in the trappings of law while absolutely not respecting the barest of its rules ?

Africa, the Cradle of Humanity, still hasn't got with the program. It's the 3rd Millenium BCE. You don't pretend to use Power of Attorney and have records mysteriously altered.

You Trump it, scream "Fake News !" and then wander the lawn aimlessly in front of the cameras while not answering any questions. Preferably with a helicopter revving up in the background.

Now, ICANN, I'm still waiting to find out what you do about mess, apart from fuming.

More license upheaval to come after SAP kills RISE with SAP products, users warn

SAP

The king of redefining contractual obligations and licenses from which Oracle and every other useless cloud-based bullshit company has written their lines of conduct.

BOFH: The auditor is asking too many questions. We have just the laptop for that

"We're having more problems with auditors"

Oh, come now. It's nothing a nice roll of carpet can't solve, now is it ?

Chinese censorship-busters claim Tencent is trying to kill its WeChat archive

Keep up the fight

And find a hosting company that has some balls and doesn't run screaming like a scaredy-cat as soon as a sternly-worded bullshit letter arrives in their Inbox.

Security company hired a used car salesman to build a website, and it didn't end well

"Boris took matters into his own hands and got a new job"

Yes, I do believe that that was the best thing he could do.

Betweeen the idiot hiring an ex-convict as company lawyer and the bitch getting her buddy (lover ?) to be paid for a Wordpress website hosting private data, that company was obviously a complete write-off and nothing good could have come from trying to actually make things work correctly.

French cops cuff Russian pro basketball player on ransomware charges

"He's useless with computers and can't even install an application"

Funny how many managers I know who would fit that description.

He's a basketball player. That's hardly your typical description of a hacker. I hope things will get cleared out for him, and quickly.

Ex-ASML engineer who stole chip tech for Russia gets three years in Dutch prison

"I didn't ask"

Well you're in the clear, then, right ?

I mean, you can't possibly be guilty if you didn't know you were doing anything wrong, eh ?

I have one question : is stupidity a virus ? Because there seems to be a fucking trainload of people who have caught it, these days.

Thousands of NASA senior staffers expected to quit after budget slashed

"as we work within a more prioritized budget"

Yes, the priority being : to kill you.

One thing you have to give Trump is his uncanny efficiency at destroying any company he touches.

He is Midas, but his touch is shit, not gold.

Intel's leaders have stopped pretending – and it's about time

"Tan has yet to pull the plug"

If he does, Intel is finished.

It has literally nothing else to bring to the table, and we have enough wide-eyed scheme dreamers as it is.

Slow down on building power plants for all those new AI datacenters, report warns

Oh my

Something about AI has been exaggerated ? You don't say. I'm dumbfounded. Speechless. How could that be possible ? That has never happened before.

</sarc>

Seriously now, is it me, or is the USA the worst country in the world at planning and managing its own resources ? Some bitbarn project mentions that it might be built somewhere, and submits multiplee requests for a power station to be built and there's nobody to coordinate this ?

It's all very nice to uphold free enterprise, but I note two things :

1) Those who are not top of the heap ferociously defend their right to get there

2) those who are #1 ferociously complain about how competition is a danger to their employees (hey, nice to remember them between bouts of layoffs) and to the economy in general (aka their position in said economy

The hypocrisy is mind-blowing.

Outlook takes another sick day

Re: O356...

To start with, it should be renamed O320.

Let's see if they can hold that . . .

Re: Office 365

I think you're optomistic.

Write-back to aging UK health systems lessens benefits of Palantir-based platform

Oooo. A quango. That brings back some memories.

C-suite sours on AI despite rising investment, survey finds

Well said.

Vous me flattez, mon cher.

"despite rising investment"

Yeah, well it looks like we have finally arrived at the Peak of Inflated Expectations.

Whew ! Now it's off to the Trough of Disillusionment, then we can finally find a proper place for this statistical analysis machine.

One Big Brutal Bill: Ex-NASA brass decry Trump's proposed budget cuts

Oh my God. Look. Neanderthals still exist.

For the moment we have a moron who is fucking his mother.

Apperently, we're working our way to that goal . . .

Um, just a minute there : have they been properly basted and grilled with the right sauce ?

"Anything worthwhile is worth fighting for"

I totally agree.

Question : is it worthwhile having a President that is not a convicted felon ?

Discuss.

At last, a use case for AI agents with sky-high ROI: Stealing crypto

Smart contracts

By default, anything with "smart" in the name is something I automatically consider dumb as bricks and only existing for one thing : to pilfer my private life for someone else's benefit.

If anything can be done, legal or not, to scuttle this bullshit, I'm all for it.

Anubis guards gates against hordes of LLM bot crawlers

"It's an honor system"

Honor ?

In 2025 ?

What's that ?

Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson backs plan to do a Jurassic Park on extinct birds

"using material gathered during recent expeditions"

Well, at least if there is Jurassic Bird Park, this time it will be safe for kids and not full of giant, hungry teeth.

Perplexity rips another page from the Google playbook with its own browser, Comet

$26 billion here, $20 billion there

Pretty soon you're talking about real money.

And all of that for something that I will not touch with a bargepole.

Thank you foe the heads-up. Another "application" on my personal black list.

Chinese TV uses AI to translate broadcasts into sign language. It’s not going well

"a significant amount of key information was lost or distorted"

Yup. Sounds like AI all right.

Eggheads hold science fair on Capitol Hill to decry funding cuts

Re: Titles matter

You're on El Reg.

Get with the program.

Yeah, well, apparently his grasp of technology has stopped at TIVO.

Personally, I'm surprised he got that far.

How to trick ChatGPT into revealing Windows keys? I give up

Great idea

Who is the genius that thought that integrating Windows keys in the LLM "learning" curve was a good idea ?

And I'm not talking about the drone who was following orders. I'm talking about the highly-paid manglement moron who handed out the orders without giving a second's thought about the consequences.

Microsoft pushes $4B at AI education for the masses

What the holy fuck

Your effort for education is selling your own hallucinating pile of bullshit to children ?

Go hang yourself.

You want to improve education ? Give $10 billion to schools.

They need funds, not dreams.

Post Office and Fujitsu execs 'should have known' Horizon IT system was flawed

Re: The criminals involved need to go to jail

I absolutely and without reserve wholly support your position.

I want every responsible attached to this fiasco put in jail, have their medals and honors entirely rescinded and pay personally a fine (of importance, not £250) to make the entire cadre of so-called "elites" realize that they are responsible, not just there to get a big paycheck.

Firefox is fine. The people running it are not

Oh, so it's Biden's fault, then ?

That, and NoScript.

I will drop Firefox the day those two extensions stop working properly.

I don't care about the rest. With those two, I control what I let out.

Trump administration announces tariffs that may make plenty of tech more expensive from August 1

"plenty of stuff from Japan"

Oh yeah, that's a great idea.

Antagonize Japan. As if you haven't spread enough shit around already .

Double-detonation supernova could explain why the universe is full of candles

Re: oddly

I went back to re-read that paragraph and I find you are right.

I always thought that it was a white dwarf paired with a Sun-like star, which would easily explain how the white dwarf, being vastly more dense, would be able to siphon matter from a "normal" star.

But no, the article clearly states that two white dwarf stars are orbiting each other and one of them (why the one ?) is siphoning from the other.

The Wiki on this subject is easier to understand. It clearly states that one of the stars is a white dwarf, but goes on to say that the other star can be a white dwarf.

Make of that what you will.

UK puts out tender for space robot to de-orbit satellites

"essential services such as GPS"

Um, GPS satellites orbit at 20,000 km. That is not a LEO orbit, so how can anything in a LEO orbit be a problem for GPS ?

'Trained monkey' from tech support saved know-it-all manager's mistake with a single keypress

Management

In my 30+ year career, there is only one person that I would, without hesitation, put on a pedestal.

He was IT Director at redacted, and I was a junior Lotus Notes Certified Professional (CLP at the time). I was working at the company as consultant, on a very important migration-from-mainframe-document-management project.

There were weekly meetings, where all the people who had, what do they call that already ? - oh yeah, "investment" in the project were present. Of course, the Friday before the Monday morning meeting had all the meeting points spelled out and approved.

And regularly, one of the other "managers" went on a rant about something that wasn't in the meeting minutes. It took five seconds for that Man (I'm putting a capital M on purpose) to shoot him down with an acid remark along the line of "that's not in the minutes, put it in the list for the next iteration".

In time, those outbursts became much rarer . . .

I worship his memory still.

Cockfight !