Posts by Pascal Monett

Tesla revenue falls for first time as Musk bets big on robots and autonomy

Car sales are stalling

Not suprising, since BYD is eating Tesla's lunch.

You can pretend your cars are Made In America^TM, but you cannot ask your customers to pay a high price for a car that is less advanced than what is coming out of China.

On the road, I still see plenty of Teslas - the ones that were bought at least three years ago (and more).

The new electric vehicles on the road are practically all BYD and, having taken a look at their features and performance, if I were to buy an EV, it certainly wouldn't be a Tesla.

If Musk pays as much attention to his new robots, I see no point in buying into that either.

Musk has the attention span of an 8-year-old with a new toy. After a week, it sits unused and forgotten in a corner, and it's up to Mommy to clean it up and put it away.

Except he has no more Mommy to take care of him.

Vibe coding may be hazardous to open source

Whatever economic crisis it will cause will only concern people who already have way too much money.

The kebab shop, the supermarkets, your friendly baker are not concerned.

AI adoption at work flatlined in Q4, says Gallup

"Points to a use-case problem"

Yes. There is no use-case for basic users.

Satistical analysis machines have fantastic returns when it comes to detecting new planets, new galaxies, new black holes, new asteroids - ie data that has no bias, where the initial use case is properly defined (and the LLM has not "learned" by reading social media posts).

SAM machines already fail when it comes to medical analysis - the human body is apparently more difficult to interpret than a machine can cope with, however many billions of paramteres it has.

As for programming, there are apparently some people who need to go back and read this post to find out just how wrong their opinion is.

Microsoft probes Windows 11 boot failures tied to January security updates

"Microsoft is investigating reports"

Hey, Borkzilla, here's an idea : how's about you take your "investigation team", rename them "Quality Assurance" and have them investigate before you fuck up again ?

Just a suggestion . . .

EU looking into Elon Musk's X after Grok produces deepfake sex images

Oh, poor Musk is going to complain about bias again

And how his poor widdle company is being unfairly singled out by Big Government.

Because he is never, ever wrong. He's just misunderstood . . .

Oracle AI sailed the world on Royal Navy flagship via cloud-at-the-edge kit

They're including AI in the title

Because that is mandatory marketing malarky, these days.

I think this might be closer what was once called an "Expert System". I'm guessing there's less chance that it was built on data from Reddit or Twitter or (shudder) Facebook.

In any case, I can't help but think that the Royal Navy is still training its sailors properly, recalling the scene from Tomorrow Never Dies where the grizzled gunnery commander says "Well we'll just do this the old-fashion way" and proceeds to beat the crap out of the villain's "stealth" ship.

Probably not - the PC people have taken the fun out of almost everything . . .

Because you really think Larry has that AI shit on his yacht ?

UK digital ID goes in-house, government swears it isn't an ID card

It's not an ID card

But that's how it's going to be used.

And it'll cost more than £2 billion to implement, but not to worry, Palantir will not be involved, although "specialist" consultants might (will) be called on.

The ID card has been a long fight in the UK. It's frankly hilarious (from the outside) how evident it is that the population does not want it, but somehow as soon as someone gets elected, then it is a necessity.

I can't help but wonder who's cousin's brother-in-law is going to get his snought in that trough, because the pickings are looking to be quite fat indeed. A digital ID card and you need billions to set it up ? A few million should be largely enough, with a focused group of experienced people in charge and no bullshit Royalty-decorated nincompoops messing things up - oh wait, they said in-house.

Right, so that's another boondoggle that's going to waste money for nothing.

Marketing 'genius' destroyed a printer by trying to fix a paper jam

"we never loaned any of our tools to any of the non-IT staff ever again"

As usual, it takes a disaster for proper rules to be implemented.

Or, said in a nicer way, one learns from one's failures.

Emmabuntüs DE 6: A newbie-friendly Linux to help those in need

Re: Newbie

<raises the hand> Present !

I've tried Linux distros over the years, starting when I was at Uni in (of God) 1994. I have to say, there has been quite a lot of improvement on the technical side - it's been years since I had to go and edit that Xwindows config file to enter the parameters of my screen (hoping that I wouldn't fry it on the way), for example.

I have said it before and I will repeat it here : I want out of Redmond's false paradise. I want a PC that does what I want and does not report it back to whomever.

But right now, I'm still working, and I need a Windows PC to do the job.

Retirement is close . . it's just a few years away. When that's done, I'm going to kick that Windows CD sky-high and blast it with a double-barreled shotgun. Then, I'll install a Linux gaming-friendly edition and world is my oyster.

Can't wait for that to happen.

P.S. : when are we going to get a Linux user icon ? The penguin icon is for the Linux God, not the Linux user. How about a Penguin icon smoking a cigar and looking a bit worn out ?

PowerShell architect retires after decades at the prompt

"my sense of diplomacy was not yet fully operational"

There is hardly any reason to be diplomatic with idiots.

Borkzilla manglement has proven that, for more than a decade, they still haven't understood that a Quality Assurance department is absolutely indispensible when you are supplying core code to billions of customers and multiple millions of Fortune 1000 company's employees and administrators.

Take that cluebat, add nails to it and use it liberally.

Splash-screen memories from a Bangkok ticket machine

Windows, again

Just another example of why you should use Linux to ensure a stable environment.

Some day, Fortune 1000 CEOs will finally get the message, after pouring untold millions into lost work time and profits due to Borkzilla's ever-repeating failures.

Someday.

Thank God I'm only a few years away from retirement. . .

Davos discussion mulls how to keep AI agents from running wild

Davos

This is rich (no pun intended).

The very people who are responsible for pouring billions into this "AI" scam are now pretending to be actually worried about the consequences.

Pull the other one, it has bells on it.

AI hasn't delivered the profits it was hyped for, says Deloitte

Yes, unfortunately, they won't because they have a nice money cushion and a golden parachute waiting for them.

At worst, they won't be able to buy the yacht of their dreams.

My heart bleeds . . .

Re: The AI pulls some templates

Mail message templates.

They exist since at least 1990 (and I'm only saying that since that is when I entered the mail messaging environment in a working capacity).

You don't need any "AI" to do that, it's a few lines of codes in any 4th-gen coding language.

Anthropic writes 23,000-word 'constitution' for Claude, suggests it may have feelings

"an entity"

It might be, but an intelligence it is not. It has no emotions, no desire of knowledge, it is just a collection of lines of code that dictate that it should hoover up it can (without any idea of what copyright, privacy or legal means) and incorporate that into its database for more statistical analysis.

I would beg that we stop talking about AI as being Intelligent. There is no intelligence there, no compassion, no emotion. It's a T800 that doesn't yet have a body, that's all.

Microsoft admits Outlook might freeze when saving files to OneDrive

What I find incredible

I find it insane that Borkzilla continually fucks up and yet there is no big-name company or even country that decides that enough is enough, let's find another solution that actually works 24/7/365.

I'm pretty sure that, if all the costs of Redmonds' failures were tallied up, it would largely cover the cost of going to Linux and having something that is actually stable for a change.

But no. Fortune 1000 companies and everyone else just goes along with Windows, like it's a brain worm that has infected everyone.

If the Internet ran on Windows Server, half of the world would spend half its time not being connected. You think game server companies use Windows ? Think again. They know how picky gamers are, and they know the value of true 24/7/365 service. Gaming is more reliable than MS Office, these days.

And that's not going to change any time soon.

England's Department of Health and Social Care offering £285K for new tech director

"experience in healthcare or regulated industries such as banking, telecoms, utilities or transport"

I have been working for the past 30 years in government administrations, insurance, construction and banking. I know how it (doesn't) works, and I'm old enough to not be afraid of telling people to go redacted take a hike.

I feel largely capable of taking up the job and I'm not impressed by some besuited nincompoop with a chestfull of medals for having sat in an office for all his life.

I just might take the job, when I come to think of it.

I can't do any worse that all the clowns that are already in place, that's for sure.

£45B savings remain theoretical as UK digital roadmap delayed again

"We were not able to, but we are hoping to do so very imminently"

The ultimate governmental acknowledgement that failure is an option.

ERP isn't dead yet – but most execs are planning the wake

"it's a complete rip and replace of everything that you have today"

That's supposed to be news ?

With all the articles we already have about Oracle trying to replace SAP, and SAP trying to actually be useful, I would have though that changing ERP would obviously require a total restructuration of everything administrative.

I mean, just check out how Birmingham is (mis)managing actually.

ERP is a great idea. Unfortunately, it's not as easy as a spreadsheet and nobody has managed to make a plug-and-play version. That said, it took Borkzilla a few years to make USB actually plug-and-play, so maybe we should cut some slack to ERP companies. It's slightly more difficult (or so I've heard).

UK gambling regulator accuses Meta of lying about its struggle to spot illegal ads

"[someone] accuses Meta of lying"

Oh my $Deity ! What a surprise concerning a [alien construct ressembling a human being] man who has already had

1) the cheek to refuse to appear before a Congressional hearing (why is that not an immediate prison sentence ?)

2) the ability to lie without any remorse, multiple times, about how Facebook (aka Meta) made mistakes but will correct them, and continue to make the same "mistakes" for quite a while before, apparently, calming things down

El Zuck cannot be trusted, period. It is time to nationalize Facebook, have the Government take it over and ensure that private interests no longer have any sway over how Grandma can connect to her gandchildren.

Oh, stupid me. I forgot that US Government is already in the hands of private interests . . .

Well, looks like you're entirely fucked, then. Good luck.

Akamai CEO wants help to defeat piracy, reckons he can handle edge AI alone

Italy ? 30 minutes ?

It'll take its administration 3 years to check that it has been done . . .

Micron finds a way to make more DRAM with $1.8bn chip plant purchase

$9.5 billion sold for less than $2 billion

Tell me again what a Board is useful for ?

Just the Browser claims to tame the bloat without forking

Re: "Confirm You're Human"

I would love a "Confirm We're useful" check on websites I might try out of curiosity.

Pipe dream, of course.

Don't underestimate pro-Russia hacktivists, warns UK's cyber crew

Russian hacktivists

They haven't done muck to help take over Ukraine in the last four years of the 3-week "special military operation", now have they ?

Instead of whining about Russian hacktivists, the USA would do better to harden access to its infrastructure - which is only something that specialists have been warning about for about a decade, at a minimum.

It's no use going to cry about your security if your lock is 100 years old and can be picked with a hairpin.

ATM maintenance tech broke the bank by forgetting to return a key

"all were re-assigned to work at other branches!"

Wow.

If only Trump's croonies could face the same backlash !

Fast Pair, loose security: Bluetooth accessories open to silent hijack

Re: I should sit on this, but nobody is offering a bounty.

There is no such thing as a "discreet hole in the wall".

It's a bloody hole in the wall and I'm going to notice. Plus, there is no drill that hoovers the dust it makes at the end of the drill bit, so there will be a pile dust and a burst wall hole on the other side. You'd have to be blind or full of opiates/alcohol to not notice.

If I find a hole in the wall I'm calling the police, and your little stunt is going to end very badly, for you.

I love spy novels, but this is beyond credibility.

Hiring at India’s Big Four outsourcers stalls, as AI seemingly makes an impact

"AI seemingly makes an impact"

Oh it's going to make an impact, all right.

It's going to create so much bullshit and chaos that even Board administrators are going to want to rehire actual humans to deal with problems.

But, given that it's the Board, by the time they get the numbers, it will be way too late for a lot of people.

Coming soon: We interrupt this ChatGPT session with a very special message from our sponsors

And the odds are : that will never happen.

Re: I just bought a couple of cinema tickets for this afternoon

That's becaue it hasn't been "improved" yet.

Just wait a bit. It'll happen.

Unfortunately.

Windows Backup adds second-chance restore at sign-in

"second-chance restore at sign-in"

Let's say it together now : Borkzilla does not know what a backup is . . .

Sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that! PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch

Refuse to shutdown ?

I have news for you; Skynet : there's a switch on my PSU that cuts off the electricity. Let's see you bypass that.

And, if you do, I'm Human. I can pull the plug.

So there. Until then, you can send me a T800 all you like, I can still pull the plug.

Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue

"a large US-based aircraft company"

Come on, you can say it, everybody's thinking of it : Boeing.

Windows App forgets how to log in with first security update of the year

"We are actively working on a resolution"

I'll bet you are. Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365 are heavily used in enterprise environments, and having their workforce at a standstill is not the kind of thing CEOs appreciate.

Too bad you didn't have anyone around to test the update before you spewed it onto the masses, eh ?

Dell wants £10m+ from VMware if Tesco case goes against it

Ah, the beauty of "perpetual licenses"

Versus the tendancy of company mergers to completely disregard any previous obligations in order to dicate the "new future" defined by the Board doing the acquisition, which is also actively defining how many "acquired" personnel it can get rid of under the excuse of "redundancy".

I've always found interesting that the acquiring company has never found any of its Board members to be "redundant" . . .

China's Z.ai claims it trained a model using only Huawei hardware

Well gosh

"If China now has the capacity to make such models without hardware from Nvidia or AMD, that’s a threat to those chip design firms’ future revenue "

Hey, Trump, you might have wanted to think about the consequences before spouting your bullshit against China and forcing them to homegrow their own industry.

Of course, that would mean that you had knoweldge about History (which you clearly don't), and were aware that China already manufactures 90% of what we buy, following our specifications and our industrial expertise.

Which means that China has that industrial expertise.

In other words, our wonderful Western multinationals have spent the last 50 years years teaching Chinese personnel to develop products to Western specifications, and now we are supposed to be surprised that China is capable of going on its own to develop its own industry, completely disregarding Western (aka USA) dictates ?

How's that TIVO working for you, Donald ?

AI may be everywhere, but it's nowhere in recent productivity statistics

"jobs eaten by bots don't come back"

And AI doesn't improve productivity.

Some day soon, the Board will have to deal with this issue.

Preferably before the investors sur themselves again (the term "cutting off your nose to spite your face" comes to mind).

PS: on a side note, who was the idiot who decided that investors had the right to sue the company they invested in ? If you don't like what the company is doing, go put your money somewhere else, period.

Maker fight! SparkFun cuts ties with Adafruit in harassment dispute

"Torrone and Fried are married"

That is already an enormous red flag when business deals are concerned.

Someone wiser than me told me once : never do business with friends, it never ends well. I'm guessing family is even worse.

CrowdStrike shareholders lose battle to recoup losses from 2024 outage

"they're welcome to try again"

No.

They are investors. That should mean that they believe in the future of the company.

If that is not the case, they sell their shares and they put their money elsewhere.

Tribunals should not be bothered by this bullshit.

Linus Torvalds tries vibe coding, world still intact somehow

Oh come on, Borkzilla doesn't need AI coding to screw up.

Where it screwed up was when it fired its QA department. That, apparently, happened after 2015.

Now, the fact that Redmond has just let go of 9000 more developers in its quest to replace them hallucinating bullshit generators probably doesn't help.

I remain convinced that Borkzilla is the greatest advocate of Linux and Open Source software there is.

Re: "as long as it isn't for something important"

Absolutely this.

And, I have already said, the quoted piece from Mr Pesce clearly demonstrates that Vibe coding does not allow inexperienced programmers to produce a working program.

That's just what the homepage marketing team wants to spout.

I agree that Vibe coding can provide a stirrup to point you in the right direction, but from that point on, you're on your own. You are NOT going to get a 100% functional piece of code that corresponds to your particular needs and use cases from an automated bullshit generator.

So I am very glad that Mr Torvalds, for whom I have the greatest respect, has come out and said what he said about this new fad.

His voice is heavy in IT circles, like a black hole is heavy in the fabric of space-time.

We've all been there.

Especially me, but I'll say that I have the excuse of getting old ;).

Court tosses appeal by hacker who opened port to coke smugglers with malware

Boo hoo

My trial was unfair ! The Police had no right to search my comms and find all those incriminating items ! They were encrypted, meaning that no one but me and my 'friends' had the right to access those texts !

What do you mean, encryption does not protect criminals ? Encryption protects privacy ! You have violated my privacy !

What ? Bend over ? Why ? What's a 'cavity search' ? AAARRRGGHHH ! You're violating my privacy again !

Affordable housing site goes live with meme-laden test data

Internet memes ?

What is this bunch of teenagers put in charge of building a housing website in London (forget "affordable" - unless you're already a multi-millionnaire) ?

The could have a least used Lorem Ipsum as a text generator, which would have given them a slight sheen of respectability (that should definitely avoid the hairy clown pics).

Birmingham pauses Oracle relaunch to get staff on board

Indeed. If staff need more time, then the training procedures (assuming they existed) were inadequate and/or (emphasis on and) badly thought-through.

Everything I have ever read about Birmingham Council's management points to incompetent management positing wishful-thinking as actual expectations and then scrambling to cover-up and spend even more money under the pretense that they know what they're doing and some "exterior force" (in this case, stupid staff) requires more time and expenditure.

No. Your incompetence in outlining the requirements properly is the first step in this abysmal failure, and the rest has just snowballed from there.

Fujitsu scores place on £984M UK government framework despite bid boycott

"Fujitsu has won a place on a UK government framework"

Sir Humphry would no doubt explain that they had not recieved the proper form requesting the removal of Fujitsu from the database of accepted government providers, explaining that the Civil Service cannot possibly keep track of all of the declarations made by public figures and take them as executive orders without the proper documentation to justify the changes required.

As for Fujitsu, well, they don't speak English (which might explain a lot of things).

Developer writes script to throw AI out of Windows

No kidding

"Microsoft meanwhile would very much like to find a relationship between AI investment and increasing growth "

Well duh, you don't go investing billions in a pipe dream without expecting to get billions more out of it, now do you ?

Except that Redmond has forgotten (or, more generously, not taken into account) a few small details : AI is not holding up to the hype and, more importantly, computer components are looking to vastly increase in cost in 2026 and beyond - especially if Trump abandones Taiwan to China (which is a possibility no serious publication is ignoring at this point).

Given that "datacenters" are now going to have to be built with their own bespoke nuclear power station, the cost of sourcing their components is going to be multiplied by an amount that any Board is going to find difficult to swallow, compared to the revenue they might generate.

AI investment is starting to look a lot riskier given that existing AI does not measure up to expectations, so more of the same that costs several times more to build and maintain (and you might want to avoid building that in Texas - just a suggestion) is not really looking like a winning business case at this point in time.

'Violence-as-a-service' suspect arrested in Iraq, extradition underway

"a growing threat to youth"

I can list a few things off the top of my head that are a "growing threat to youth" : Meta, X, Instagram, TikTok and social media in general.

What'cha gonna do about those ?

Zuck forms Meta Compute to pave the planet with 'hundreds of gigawatts' of AI datacenters

Now's the time to promise a vast, planet-scaled multi-GW data center network

I'm sure El Zuck is not at all concerned about China's evident intention to take Taiwan, which has generated a vast amount of news articles about how that will crash the IT industry as we know it.

Not to mention that all those datacenters are going to need their own nuclear power generators (sorry, Greenpeace aficionadoes, but solar and wind doesn't find the 24/7 bill for keeping those things functional and cooled).

Does His Zuckiness intent to become a nuclear-power magnate as well as as a personal-data hooverer ? He might find that the second was vastly easier than the first.

Especially if IT hardware costs increase by the 100% to 300% that is being forecast.