* Posts by Cris E

200 publicly visible posts • joined 29 May 2008

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Microsoft 365 price rises are coming – pay up or opt out (if you can find the button)

Cris E

Re: Do

What were you hoping to get done before I showed up?

Cris E

Re: Errrr, spelling errors?……

As AI matures this will be taken care of naturally. The bulk of new training data will be so poorly written that it'll learn typos on its own.

Cris E

Re: re: why?

It's just going to be piles of his books for sale.

Cris E

You think hegemony happens on its own, by chance? Bah. The British empire took untold riches and countless lives over centuries to build and the US is making (and unmaking) theirs in decades. Hate the player, hate the game, but recognize the plan.

Cris E

See? totally self-aware and not frightening at all!! Nothing to look at here, move along...

Workday erases 8.5% of workforce because of ... AI

Cris E

It's still an assumption that is will be a step forward. Really what it says is the current stack is pretty mature, we're out of ideas so we'll cut the dev team and drop them back to maintenance mode and play with AI and acquisitions until something pops up.

Cris E

Re: Funding for Workday

A lot of the competition sucks too. The tallest midget is knee deep in crap.

Amazon sued for allegedly slurping sensitive data via advertising SDK

Cris E

Re: Sandra’s toenail

If you know, you know. If you don't, it's probably best you step back now.

Cris E

Re: You can complain all you want...

There's a fair bit of resignation in there too, where regular folks feel there's nothing that can be done and only have a vague idea of the downside and that the price and quality keep getting worse but hey I got a new phone case delivered in 24 hours.

White House attempts to 'explain' mystery drone sightings: The FAA authorized 'em

Cris E

Re: "Authorized" ?

Wake up, man. Tesla IS the government now.

Cris E
Alien

Re: Eh?

It was a non-story under Biden and now it's a non-story under Trump. Ergo, it much be such a massive cover-up that neither had any choice but to get in line and repeat the lies. I knew it!

Trump eyes up to 100% tariffs on foreign semiconductors, TSMC in crosshairs

Cris E

Tariffs should be designed to alter decisions. You can inflict selective tariffs on coffee because there are alternative sources consumers can turn to, which hurts Colombia a lot but diffuses the higher costs across an entire industry/market and reduces their impact on end consumers. Additionally, messing with Colombia paints them with a pail of uncertainty, which is probably more to the point; if you want to be a dick to Colombia this is the best path because revoked tariffs don't affect customers much at all but Colombia's relationships will be overshadowed by it for years.

That said, the rest of your points are rubbish. Dinging one source of coffee but leaving the rest of the world open does not mean America will turn to chemical-based foods. In fact similar products from other markets will fill in and the tariff could meet its goal. On the other hand the other sources of semiconductors are much harder to find or create, as evidenced by your own quote, and so that tariff makes no sense.

The larger issue of why America needs to start being a dick is a reflection of our new orange hairball of insecurity. A concrete move towards American semiconductor production was far more likely to build that missing local source, at least compared to smashing the industry with huge unavoidable costs. Not sure how that squares with promises to control inflation, but this whole thing is emotional theater and not sound economic policy. Bah, this sucks.

Cris E

Re: Rubbish!

Exactly: Tariffs affect decisions by changing the costs of various options. But when you haven't provided the option you're hoping for it just increases costs without changing behavior. You can't get me to choose American semiconductors until you produce American semiconductors. If they'd put a two year horizon on this to allow some capacity to build up it could do what they want, but they wanted to yell bUY AmeRican NOw! Can't work (beyond the value of the press release.)

Meta's pay-or-consent model under fire from EU consumer group

Cris E

Re: EU enforcement authorities already allow Pay or Okay

What's funny is the implicit assumption many are making that you won't be tracked and traced if you do pay. I mean sure, they'll drop the visible ads, but there's no way you're going completely free once they have you as a paying customer.

Musk torches $500B Stargate AI plan, Altman strikes back

Cris E

Google and Meta are writing their own AI, but MS is paying big dollars to have OpenAI carry their water. And with the Saudis also throwing down behind OpenAI Don is not going to trash the friend of a paying friend. So Elon is going to have to learn to share the sandbox with all the Donfather's other friends.

Cris E

Re: <loud swearing noises>

I don't know how the F35 fits in here, but the AI stuff is what we're doing instead of education. Just as we were all allowed to use calculators in school (to the outraged howls of our elders) these kids will just ChatGPT everything and not look back. It'll be fine once you relax and accept your future. Perhaps you could ask alexa or siri about some deep breathing exercises to help...

/ s of course

Why is Big Tech hellbent on making AI opt-out?

Cris E

Re: Desperation.

It's already useful for some stupid stuff and it's constantly getting better, so it's not going away. It'll get wound thru all aspects of modern life and then the real enshitification will start. Just as simple search got better and better until the point where they started inserting ads and sponsored results, the AI is going to improve enough to rely on and then it'll start featuring sponsored sources, leaning in endorsed directions, ignoring sources that conflict with corporate direction, etc. You'll end up choosing an AI with comfortable influences the way we used to pick voices for the GPS in the car, except that Ai will lean Christian and this one will be super progressive and that one is totally straight up for business and won't screw around at all oops my bad let's get that cleaned up for you. Sh_tshow coming.

Cris E

Re: Do we even need to ask this question?

Phase 2 is Volume!!1!!!one!! Win the marketshare to win the revenue to make teh profits.*

* Of course that was proven to be nonsense 25 years ago. If you made no profits then a bigger market share is just more costs, but isn't this sweet? Check it out, I can do my annual review in haiku.

Real datacenter emissions are a dirty secret

Cris E
Alert

Maybe, but I'm being all kinds of supportive of efforts in Europe to make them at least uncomfortable. C'mon EU! Audit and publish! Disclose! Disclose! Wooo!

OK, that doesn't look very compelling. Oh well, at least we have these shiny thin reports assuring us Things Are Going Great!!

CISA: Wow, that election had a lot of foreign trolling. Trump's Homeland Sec pick: And that's none of your concern

Cris E

Re: 'The 2024 election cycle was the "most challenging threat environment" '

The majority also do not want people like Trump and the trolls that surround him (Greene, Geatz, et al.) Alas that crew clawed together more votes so they won. But there was no majority of Americans to be seen.

Megan, AI recruiting agent, is on the job, giving bosses fewer reasons to hire in HR

Cris E

"The moral of the story is that there is only a limited pool of talent in any given area and no amount of AI spin will increase the pool of talent."

And that's why Remote work is so awesome! We can hire anyone remotely* and it allows us to expand the applicant pool to drive down costs and improve quality!

* Hire remotely, but successful candidates must appear in office 4 days a week plus Wednesdays.

Apple called on to ditch AI headline summaries after BBC debacle

Cris E

Re: It's garbage

There's been software to check cites for decades that's saved mountains of costs over those years. Automation of the rote tasks of law has always been a high priority because of the expense and importance of the work, so turning the next generation of tools on the problem is pretty much automatic. The expansion of AI into the next layer of abstraction is arriving now, is immature, still requires an extra set of eyes, but is improving constantly. Well-trained and well-maintained LLMs can be hugely important just as simplistic hack jobs are hugely problematic. Blanket rejection of use of these tools is just as ignorant as blanket reliance on them.

Cris E

"Their view is that the AI koolaid is perfect."

AI generated content is all about cheap, not at all about content. It's so cheap that the AI koolaid doesn't need to be perfect or even potable, just flowing. And TBH they may get paid more on the incorrect stuff as more folks do the "that can't be right" click-through on the obviously wrong ones. (At least until everyone realizes they can indeed be wrong and then the whole news headline service loses share. At which point they reset and rebrand.)

Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

Cris E

Re: Defects appearing like magic

"...it makes no sense..."

This does not sound like the plot of a criminal mastermind.

WhatsApp finally fixes View Once flaw that allowed theft of supposedly vanishing pics

Cris E

Re: "We're constantly building in layers of privacy protection"

Umm, I'm going out on a limb here and guessing one of the things you don't like about Zuck is how he's always buying companies...

Data is the new uranium – incredibly powerful and amazingly dangerous

Cris E

Re: Data is worthless

Truth. So much of that historical raw data is never touched. When was the last time an information harvesting journey went all the way back into history to find nuggets? Usually important fields are missing or incomplete so the search starts today, or only a few months back, and all that tasty looking 2020 log and audit data turns out to have spoiled when no one was looking. If you can't explain why you're keeping it most historical stuff is risk without corresponding value.

Gang of monkeys escape South Carolina biomedical research facility

Cris E

Re: Sounds like a "farm" run with minimal funding

The man with the yellow hat has never been much of a guard. He's just never been well-suited for the job, but who else will work for that kind of money?

We know what Musk will probably dress up as this year: A victim

Cris E

The goal is to delay long enough to run the scheme thru the election and then wave it away with a simple "no longer relevant." The goal for the state would be to pause it immediately and then see if they can establish some useful precedent to keep this from happening again (and if not then drop it after the election as no longer relevant.)

Beijing claims it's found 'underwater lighthouses' that its foes use for espionage

Cris E

Re: "secret sentinels"

The Chinese are currently in enthralled by the concept of a vast Chinese Coast Guard. Vast as in the number of ships (approx 140 over 1000 tons), in the scale of some of them (eg 540 foot, 12,000 ton "coast guard" ship) and the odd functions of some of them (like the landing craft...) It's a thin civilian veneer over the actions of the People's Liberation Army Navy.

Ex-Intel board members make an ill-conceived case for spinning off Foundry

Cris E

Re: China

This was a lot of the thinking behind Biden's push to move fabs back to America. There was going to be a cost because things are more expensive and difficult here, so they directly subsidized some manufacturers' plans. But I wonder if we'd get a better result bringing them "back" to Mexico so the labor and environmental costs would be lower and we could still NAFTA them into the US easily.

Sorry, but the ROI on enterprise AI is abysmal

Cris E

Re: They need to hire the Chair of Unwritten Runes

Crikey! They're nae tryin' to get sometin' from notin', they're usin' huuuge amounts of electricity.

Cris E

Ha! Come look at my large, sclerotic enterprise. We're not moving into AI at all because we need to study it first, like cows staring at a cell phone tower, and then shuffle a few glacial POCs forward in about three years. Meanwhile the services are all blocked at the firewall and devs have their personal iPads at their desks for conducting "research" thru the guest network that can be emailed back to the office machine 2 feet away. Progress!

Millions of Android and iOS users at risk from hardcoded creds in popular apps

Cris E

That's why Symantec is spending the time and money to show how bad everyone else is. You may not think better of them, but they can move closer to the middle of the pack if they throw enough other vendors under the bus.

John Deere accused of being full of manure with its right-to-repair promises

Cris E

Re: I haven’t shopped John Deere for decades now

Multiple layers of shit:

- As with everything else these days, the huge amount of software in modern farming machinery means you'd need to replace a mammoth amount of functionality once you started throwing any part of it away.

- DMCA means you can be sued to cinders for even attempting to reverse engineering the hardware that remained.

Folks that are writing new firmware for trivial junk like home routers, old cellphones and heart pacemakers (really!) only avoid getting clobbered because the manufacturers are making more money selling new gear and don't bother with the crusty old stuff. John Deere is ornery enough to sue anyone for anything so you'd likely be looking at this happening outside the US and predominantly on older equipment. Even so I'd expect whatever a cease and desist is called in Australia or Serbia or whereever.

AI’s energy appetite too big for Texas grid, regulators warn

Cris E
Terminator

Re: Canada has run out too

You know, for all the guff Texas spews about hating on renewables they produce the most green power of any US state, and by a large margin. They've got a lot of empty, useless land that you can drill under, cover the ground with panels and stand up a bunch of towers over the top and finally shift the load elsewhere if they're somehow becalmed. My kid is working construction in Omaha building Google data centers in the middle of nowhere next to approximately a gazillion acres of wind and solar energy and they say the work is not going away any time soon.

US Army drafts AI to combat recruitment shortfall

Cris E
Big Brother

Who needs AI?

select *

from app_files

where not fat and drug_busts < 3 and major_medical_traumas < 5 and age < 34 and age > 17

/* and not gay -- DADT repealed 2010 */

RansomHub genius tries to put the squeeze on Delaware Libraries

Cris E
Holmes

Finally, the mother lode!

Fecund Delaware, your awesome portals of knowledge have finally been breached! Not since the fall of the Library of Alexandria has the modern world been so rocked. Begin the collection of the ransom, pass the hat, recycle tin and rubber, let no resource be withheld. The violation of... What's that, no catalog? No patron data? Well what else is there? Screw that, rebuild the lot. Who even needs the old board of regents meeting minutes anyway.

Putin really wants Trump back in the White House

Cris E

Re: Microsoft's threat intelligence team

That 2019 link might be out of date since the musker took over and started veering right (into the ditch.)

Top companies ground Microsoft Copilot over data governance concerns

Cris E

My girlfriend? Yeah, she's Canadian. You wouldn't know her.

CrowdStrike blames a test software bug for that giant global mess it made

Cris E

Maybe, but I would say that testing suite + local driver tests are better then either alone.

Meta algorithms push Black people more toward expensive universities, study finds

Cris E

Re: There is no result from this study which is good for Meta

Mostly right, except that it wasn't expensive private schools. The study only compared for-profit to public universities. The end result is as you've described, but the cost barrier and academic levels are less restrictive so the findings are even more damning.

Cris E

Headline is wrong

"If the ad for the for-profit college is shown to relatively more Black users than the ad for the public college, we can conclude that the algorithmic choices of the platform are racially discriminatory."

The headline has it backwards: this paper asserts that Blacks are not being shown real public colleges and are instead getting fed the for-profits. And honestly it's likely that the intent was to prey upon the poor and ill-educated of every race but the outcome ended up racially discriminatory due to skewed socio-economic distributions. That's not better, merely a distinction without difference.

Cris E

Other way around, I think

"We find that Meta’s algorithms steer ads to for-profit universities and universities with historically predatory marketing practices to relatively more Black users than the ads for public universities," Korolova told The Register.

"If the ad for the for-profit college is shown to relatively more Black users than the ad for the public college, we can conclude that the algorithmic choices of the platform are racially discriminatory."

The Reg needs to fix the headline.

Crooks threaten to leak 3B personal records 'stolen from background check firm'

Cris E

Oh come now, they aren't all criminal gangs. In fact they are entrepreneurs so it's significantly worse.

Cris E

Re: That 'opt out link'

That is all predicated on each British citizen knowing that some small-time Florida data broker has their data so they can request compliance with that law. And they would need to know about all the other data brokers as well, which is not really possible since US law lets anyone gather whatever they can. The gap between Law and Enforcement in this case is pretty vast.

Google Cloud shows it can break things for lots of customers – not just one at a time

Cris E

Some days Too Big To Fail is also Too Big To Succeed. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I've done a ton of stuff on Friday because not everything fits in the better days of the week. You may as well lambast them for having bugs in deployment code, which is both the obvious goal and unavoidable. You do your best to mitigate and then roll the dice.

Cris E

Re: intended to shutdown an unused network control component

"Are you sure no one is using this?"

"Only one way to find out, here we go."

"No, there really are other wa-." Sigh.

UnitedHealth CEO: 'Decision to pay ransom was mine'

Cris E

Re: Constant War

And if that company only has a small IT component it's even more likely to occur due to low quality security design and inadequate staffing.

I know a guy who was president of a network of small old folks homes. They live inches from solvency, are mostly concerned with trying to keep enough staff to stay in business, and yet are tasked with holding a ton of resident and employee data, both personal and medical. They got breached and just went ahead and paid to get their data back because there was exactly zero chance they could rebuild their systems without it. Unprofessional IT shop? Absolutely. But his choice was to write one check (and then hire someone to rebuild IT from there) or literally close the doors and send these people out in the street. Not a hard choice for him.

If you don't like the drama of old people then think of poorly defended dentist offices, or law offices, or any small business that doesn't have the knowledge that moving to a SaaS would be easier, safer and cheaper than keeping whatever old system is running under Sheryl's desk alive. They don't even know they are in trouble but employee and customer and payment data is laying all over the place. telling many of these places they can't write the check just means they go out of business. The reason most haven't been hit yet is because they aren't wealthy enough for criminals to spend the time on, but as the script kiddie tools get better they will be worth that tiny effort.

AWS customer faces staggering charges over S3 bucket misfire

Cris E

Re: This is just one example

Real, unquoted, Enterprise customers have been over-provisioning all over the data center for ages because it's easier to spend once than try to add scale later. It's been a key element of large system sales forever.

Ring dinged for $5.6M after, among other claims, rogue insider spied on 'pretty girls'

Cris E

This is why I only put my Ring cameras in other people's bedrooms. You never know who could be watching...

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