Posts by Pascal Monett

NASA Inspector fears new spacesuits won’t be ready for Moon landing

Re: spacesuits won’t be ready for Moon landing

Not to worry, the funding will have disappeared long before the spacesuits will be required.

Vibe coding upstart Lovable denies data leak, cites 'intentional behavior,' then throws HackerOne under the bus

What a Lovable way to do business

We thought we could get away with the general consensus that global data slurping is fine.

We did not realize that "global" meant global for us only.

With our hands on our stone hearts, we give you our heartfelt fuck yous as we revert to in-the-back data slurping like everyone else.

Are you including the janitor in that list ?

I understand your sentiment, but there is a line to be drawn. It is the deciders who should be named and shamed.

The drones who wrote the code to spec are not at fault.

Trump-branded datacenter project fails to make itself great, again

Wait a minute

1) PayPal and Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel

2) a scale recreation of the White House in Dallas

3) some fucking thing with Trump's name on it

How many red flags do you need before you get the message ?

Chase got a spiff of $77 million to create one job with New York datacenter

JPMorganChase

Sorry, but this is yet another proof that 1) the rules don't work anymore, and 2) the big names in business can't be trusted.

This company boasts an annual revenue of $173.6 billion.

How is it that any government functionary thought that it needed a subsidy of a paltry $77 million ? They're making upwards of $450 million a day.

They've already got enough money. The shareholders don't need more.

Capita won disastrous UK pensions gig after acing performance checks

Re: after assessing its past performance

Yeah.

Whoever did the "assessing" should be fired and their pension and benefits revoked.

Support tech caught by 'Technician Aura': the bug that only hides when you're watching

Absolutely that.

I'm sure there will be scores of people here who will be able to to post stories about how their code was perfectly fine and functional right up to the point when it was time to demonstrate it to the customer.

I've had it happen to me a number of times.

Loud, power hungry – opposition grows to datacenters as Maine passes bit barn ban

"This has led to fears that ratepayers could end up footing the bill"

Ratepayers ? WTF are those ?

Don't you mean TAXpayers ?

Could you please stop changing the English language for no good reason ?

Have a coffee before posting bullshit like that, for Heaven's sake.

IOWN Global Forum targets datacenter interconnects to scatter AI infrastructure

Neoclouds ?

Because "cloud" is already so old that you have to find a new name for something that does the same thing ?

Honestly, marketing should just go hang itself. This continual churning of bullshit is really starting to grate on my nerves.

Cisco Wi-Fi boxes are filling their disks with 5MB of undeletable data every day

Ah, Cisco

Thank goodness we banned that awful Chinese threat from our networks, right ?

Dealing with one threat is enough.

Anthropic won't own MCP 'design flaw' putting 200K servers at risk, researchers say

Bug or feature?

It's the Intartubes. Everything is a feature.

In other news, Anthropic is really starting to look like something to avoid at all costs.

US states can't account for datacenter tax breaks. Literally

Trump's presidency is all about making money - for Trump.

"yet few bother to report this"

Why bother ?

Nothing will be done because Big Business requires subsidies.

I am still waiting for an explanation for why taxpayers should be subsidizing multi-billion-dollar behemoths, but I'm guessing that report will be filed, as we say in French, la semaine des quatre jeudis.

Obsolete Google nag drowns out vital bar information at Swedish concert hall

Oh come on

You cite the Muppets and the Swedish chef and you couldn't even post a link ?

Fission impossible: Uncle Sam wants nuclear reactors in space by 2031

"much will depend on funding and focus"

And that is the big problem with democraties - they are led by individuals who mostly don't care about what the previous incumbent thought was a good idea, which means wasted effort and money until, all of a sudden, it becomes a National Priority in which case there's even more wasted effort and money to Get Things Done in haste.

I don't have a solution for that, any more than I have a solution for preventing a country from being under the control a fucking moron, so I won't say more.

The only technology that died more times than VR is AI, and that seems to have worked out

Never mind

As long as there are people with more money than sense, this fad is going to continue bumbling along on its rickety railroad.

It's not doing any real harm (unlike pseudo-AI, or "social media"), so let's just let it live, sit back and have abeer while laughing at it.

Experts and laypeople agree: AI will hurt elections and relationships

"reaching 53 percent of the population in just three years"

Yeah, because it has been shoved down everyone's throat like nobody's business.

The Personal Computer (emphasis on Personal ) ? It took twenty years and a major blunder by IBM (who thought it was not significant enough to protect by copyright - thanks whatever MBA thought that up) to allow people to attain the technology in sufficient numbers through economies of industrial scale production.

The Internet took off around Y2K because the infrastructure started gearing up around that time.

Saying that pseudo-AI had a record reach is like saying that a new flavor of chips just took over 53% of the population because it suddenly became available in supermarkets.

It's not a surprise.

Claude is getting worse, according to Claude

Gosh, who knew ?

Maybe somebody should warn this guy.

Re: I cannot even begin to count the problems with that approach

And what approach does your self-described "3rd-rate university" degree suggest ?

I would think that, given today's absolutely marketing-driven baffling interest in AI, this would be a perfectly reasonable test and its results would be telling, one way or the other.

France’s digital directorate dumping Windows desktops, adopting Linux instead

"Consider [the] Foundation’s scorecard of organizations that contribute to the Linux kernel"

Irrelevant.

Linux is Open Source.

Putin could contribute if he was able, I don't care. If it's good, it should be used.

Of course, there's one caveat : Torvalds is supervising the project, not El Zuck or any other billionaire-boggled mind.

When/if that changes . . .

IT manager approved downtime over lunch, but made a meal of it

Re: Murphy's Laws in action

Not sure I agree.

In the end, the drive had already failed, but that would only have been discovered a long time down the line - which means the customer would have ate the cost and thought nothing of it.

Here, the laudable actions of the IT jockey brought to light an existing failure condition and the supplier bore the cost of a new disk.

Not all bad in my view.

I vibe coded a feed reading web app. It was enlightening and uncomfortable

This article has contradictions and false truths that are painful

"Stopping AI in its present form begins at the ballot box"

No. Even in the USA, it begins with Congress doing its fucking job. Good luck on that happening in the US or elsewhere, given the real fuckers that so-called lawmakers have become these days in most "democratic" countries.

"people who are not professional writers may be thrilled to have a tool that does something they don't enjoy"

If they don't enjoy writing, they have nothing to do with writing with AI and should go fishing (or do anything else). Do what the politicians do and hire a ghostwriter to do the job, or become an "influencer" on some social media and slack your thirst for fame there.

"Vibe coding hasn't worked out for everyone"

Yeah, especially not for actual, professional programmers. That should be a clue for you.

"The commodification of basic app creation has been underway for years"

Yes. It's called GitHub. You still have to have a clue about what you're doing.

* * * * * * * *

Programming is not producing a video. Just ten minutes ago a friend of mine passed by my office and showed me his new website he made for promoting his songs. He did not Vibe-code it, but he did use AI to make the videos. He composes the songs and performs them in what seems to me a be real music studio - insofar as I've never been in a "real" music studio. His videos are fun to watch, and AI is making great strides in producing that kind of stuff.

If this Vibe-coding fad endures, I'm sure some non-proficient people might be able to learn from it. But, to analyze code and even more, to be able to debug, requires intelligence, not statistical analysis, and that is something that no AI will ever possess for the foreseeable future.

Chatbots are great at manipulating people to buy stuff, Princeton boffins find

Sponsored Items

I automatically treat them as "Thief-in-Chief".

If you have to sponsor your shit it's because it's not good enough to be sold on its own merit.

Crypto? Huh. Good gawd y'all, what is it good for? $45M in this case

Re: "need for international collaboration to stop cryptocurrency fraud"

Yeah. When is that scam going to be shut down ?

Microsoft locks out VeraCrypt and WireGuard devs, blames verification process

Why do people keep working with Microsoft ?

Redmond is not a reliable business partner. It creates a new tool, gets everyone all worked up about it, and terminates it within ten years.

Business processes don't like being forced to change because some besuited idiot with an MBA at Redmond thinks he's got a better idea.

If Redmond was forced to pay for the cost of upheaval, it would be much more careful in what it suggests should be done.

Peace President's Iran war piles more pain on already battered PC market

Those who are paying attention are desperately trying to drown their dispair in barrels of whisky.

This situation demonstrates the limits of democracy. What recourse do you have when a demented bonespur wreaks havoc while Congress just sits by and does nothing ?

Checks and balances ? They're not working right now. Who is the responsible for that ?

Every single elected official in Congress.

Cryptographers place $5,000 bet whether quantum will matter

Quantum computers are like fusion energy

They're just 2000 qbits away.

Microsoft hints at bit bunkers for war zones

"El Reg reached out"

No.

This is El Reg. You do not use bullshit bingo terms.

I know that El Reg is now owned by US fucking A, but we have standards here. You owe your readership to respect those standards.

Yahoo! Japan’s owner consolidating 164 OpenStack clusters into one

"164 OpenStack clusters"

You've already lost the war.

Submit and drink the kool-aid.

AMD's AI director slams Claude Code for becoming dumber and lazier since last update

Shhh.

Don't blow investor's illusions. There's still money to made until the bubble blows.

AI slop got better, so now maintainers have more work

"someone still has to verify them"

Sorry ? Isn't AI the sum of human achievement ? An actual bloodbag has to verify the results ?

What's the point ?

Are we actually saying that <gasp> AI can't be trusted ?!?

The developer who came in from the cold and melted a mainframe

Re: Always rather it too cold than too hot

I agree totally.

You can always add more clothes if required.

The other way around, there comes a point where, even if you ignore basic social etiquette, there comes a point where you can't take any more off.

The only solution at that point is the wet T-shirt - again, not something that most workplaces will be tolerating.

Those who are lucky enough to be able to work remotely will enjoy.

If an AI agent screws up while running your business, there's nobody to sue

"actively run the business"

How's the dogfooding going ?

What, your're not using your own super-pseudo-AI thingy to run your business ?

Then why should I ?

Even Microsoft knows Copilot shouldn't be trusted with anything important

"for entertainment only"

And yet you are forcing that shit down enterprise throats as fast as you can.

It's for entertainment ? Then keep it on non-professional PCs.

Workers are there to work, not waste time with your bullshit.

Microsoft veteran says some 'broken by update' PCs were already doomed

Blame the customer

Always a good idea.

Live and Let AI: Former CIA officer says human spies matter more in the LLM age

"fresh relevance" ?

HUMINT has always been essential.

It has only been eclipsed by SIGINT because politicians like the idea of having a picture taken from space in their hands. It must seem more real than a boring verbal or text report about how agent XYZ overheard a conversation in a bar that indicated that country so-and-so was progressing in its uranium refining.

'Uncle Larry’s biggest fan' cut by email in early morning Oracle layoff spree

Re: The US employment hellscape

Whisky ?

Don't open that WhatsApp message, Microsoft warns

Especially when you're paid by the word.

And "reached out" ? Really ? On El Reg ?

Microsoft reaches for yet another out-of-band patch to deal with latest update issue

uality control ? That costs money.

Much better to cobble some slop together and have the users debug it.

Contracts are in C++26 despite disagreement over their value

"help make C++ code safer and more reliable"

I thought Rust was supposed to be the solution for that.

Caveat : as far as I know, the only thing more powerful and compact than C++ is Assembly language - in both cases, you want someone who knows what the fuck he's doing.

Surprise! Big Tech has been a bit rubbish at enforcing Australia’s kids social media ban

Because you trust El Zuck to actually do anything ?

Zuckerberg is the poster child for corporate don't-give-a-fuck. This alien construct doesn't have children and will never know what it is to care for anyone except itself.

The only thing El Zuck is interested in is increasing its stock value, because numbers are all it understands.

Human emotions ? That's still in alpha stage for El Zuck.

Microsoft yanks Windows 11 preview update after install failures

Re: High standard in comparison to what?

I note that you did not mention Vista . . .

Re: Football played by hummingbirds?

I'd watch that.

US foreign router ban criticized for being ‘industrial policy disguised as cybersecurity’

"hiding behind the religious banner of national security"

Well said.

That being said, the FCC, and politicians in general, are not there for the benefit of The People^TM any more.

They are there to convince you, with utmost earnestness and conviction, that they are indeed working for your benefit and selflessly tiring away to secure more funding for their next election campaign your security.

And if, in the past, they had to travel to Epstein's island, it was purely for business purposes, Scout's honor.

Microsoft takes up residence next to OpenAI, Oracle at Crusoe's 900 MW Texas datacenter expansion

That's not really the issue. Money is plentiful - for the 1%.

The real issue is water to cool the thing.

You can't create water, as these idiots are going to find out some day soon.

Folk are getting dangerously attached to AI that always tells them they're right

Ah but the mainstream media is no longer there to report The Truth^TM, my friend.

It is there to spread the ideology of the multi-billionnaire mogul who bought the station (through a dozen untraceable holdings and front companies because, somehow, they don't want their name associated with it - how curious).

Re: Sad part: He was normal.

Well, that is, for a given definition of "normal".

I'm 60 this year. I say that to establish that I have had the time to make friends and watch them evolve (no, I am not wearing a lab coat right now ;).

It is actually frightening me when I realize that, of the four score people that I have shared friendly dinners with over my years, there are no less than four that, since retiring, have gone off the deep end.

I'm not saying they're in a psychiatric hotel, I'm saying that there is no more meaningful conversation to be had with them. It's all about them. Their little lives (or what's left of them), posting their meals on Instagram (spoiler alert : nobody gives a flying one), and complaining about how they hurt here or there. Oh, nothing serious. No cancer, but something that gives them an excuse to talk about themselves and get attention.

Because somehow that's all they've got left in their own mind. Themselves.

Oh they'll ask how're you doing, sure, but right after they'll speed on to tell about their latest ache.

This AI attachment thing ? No surprise here. If they were proficient enough with computers, they'd already be mind-jacked into the system, lying on a bed with the implant, drooling from one side of the mouth.

The real issue is that this is not impacting retirees, but young people.

On the other hand, if The Government^TM is reading this article, they must be creaming their underwear . . .

Security boffins scoured the web and found hundreds of valid API keys

"one of the affected organizations was a global bank"

I would like the name of that bank to ensure that I never have anything to do with it in the future.

Putting an API on a webpage is not done by mistake and I'm willing to bet that there were no "rogue engineers" involved.

This bank needs to be named and shamed.

Engineer sabotaged hardware then complained when it didn't work

A testing engineer. An engineer.

This is not supposed to be your secretary making a photocopy of a floppy.

I hope the repairs were taken out of his salary (I know, wishful thinking).

China's not thrilled its AI experts want to leave the country

Hey Xi-Ping, got a problem ?

Just declare your AI scientists as a National Security asset, forbidden to leave the country.

Problem solved, right ?

Or are you, all of a sudden, a bit respectful of human rights ? Nah, that can't be true.