Posts by Cris E

Claude devs complain about surprise usage limits, Anthropic blames expiring bonus

Re: I seriously don't understand

Wellllll, forced to produce or forced to shut down and try to sell their fancy new data centers to other failing LLM hucksters.

New boss was bad, his attitude was ugly, so the tech team pranked him good

Re: Mouse balls

Well not just my balls. Lots of people's balls. I do it every month or so, just to keep them from getting crusty.

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

Re: Go, Look, See

I used to use the parenthetical uphill and downhill when working with users of limited capacity.

Re: Solicitors...

One of the things that will be lost to future generations due to pernicious influence of AI will be the experience of working all day on a document.

Not losing it, not dealing with saving it, just the idea that it could take more than a couple hours to crank out a written piece. The so-called grit it takes to investigate a topic, organize and assemble thoughts and edit the results is going to seem completely foreign to kids who think that slapping together a prompt is the same as all those things at once. I fear for our future.

Welcome to America - now show us your last five years of social media posts

Re: MAGA???

Maintaining American Geriatric Autocracy

Moving Against Global Amity

Manners Are Grossly Archaic

Moving Against Generosity Aggressively

This is too easy even without turning the fetid mind of AI on the task.

Re: OK, but

No, no, no, Commie is good, Sunday School is good.

OTOH the whole "book" thing...

Re: Free speech

Well speaking as an American, the current administration is a dick.

Re: But, but, but... What do I tell them?

"Dude, I'm 60. I got work, personal, and a junk account and that's about it. I got a moribund FB account to see what my kids were doing 15 years ago, IG to see my daughter's college sports and that's it."

You really shouldn't need to tell them much. Give them the basics and they'll find a very middle-aged absence of anything good. If they really care they'll find the rest just based on where your junk account has been used. Honestly if they can't find more than you can remember with AI combing thru their amassed data I'll eat my hat.

Re: I hope this hurts attendance for the World Cup

> Infantino[FIFA] Prize for Chemistry goes to Donald J Trump for his secret fake tan formula

Just want to point out that there's *nothing* secret about that fake tan. Wow, just horrible. Seriously, can no one speak to this man about his appearance? Fat, naked, orange emperor is sad and needs someone to step in to give him a little dignity in his dotage.

Terrorism is as terrorism does, so tipping a pint to the green in the name of Famine emigrees really doesn't feel much like driving a plane into a building. Funny what proximity can do. Hopefully proximity to an outright police state will get some Americans off their butts and take some of this seriously.

Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold

Re: SPOF

It's not a single point of failure, it's standards compliance.

Russia’s first autonomous humanoid robot staggers and falls on debut

Re: The Boris Yeltsin model ?

Am I drunk? Oh, likely.

Benioff backs off: Salesforce chief says sorry for Trump troop talk

There's always category 4, full throttle, skywalking John McAfee crazy.

AWS outage exposes Achilles heel: central control plane

Re: Ho-Hum here we go again ... again ... again ... (Error Recursion level too high !!!)

"Their guy HAS TO be better than our guy. Jeff's an idiot and it's their business so they MUST have hired someone better than him, maybe two someones."

Anthropic brings mad Skills to Claude

Re: Multiple skills

And if plausibility is in short supply then you get well-formatted gibberish. Then limericks, haiku and prop bets.

Red Hat breach escalates as criminals collaborate on 'multi-terabyte' extortion plot

Re: :Sigh:

Let's be fair, this wasn't some simple cloud dump.

"The incident refers to Red Hat's self-managed instance of GitLab Community Edition... Customers who deploy free, self-managed instances on their own infrastructure are responsible for securing their instances, including applying security patches, configuring access controls, and maintenance."

So it's merely a case of some small time operator[1] using Community Edition for unimportant work[2] not getting their security right[3]. Nothing to see here.[4]

[1] Red Hat is not a small time operator.

[2] This was not unimportant work.

[3] This should have been a pretty highly secured target.

[4] This was a major failure. How long were they holding customers' active keys and config info after tickets were closed? Friggin morons.

Taiwan gets chippy about US request it shifts manufacturing

Following the Deep Thoughts

So work with me here, we want to keep the chip production out of the hands of the Chinese so as a bargaining chip we're going to withdraw our military support for Taiwan?

Also, we're going to require this immediately? We expect a fab to be ordered from Amazon and set up by November, or they should just stop selling so many chips in America? How do they avoid this tax? What's the behavior being sought here? (See also: Coffee, Brazil)

Microsoft moves to the uncanny valley with creepy Copilot avatars that stare at you and say your name

Re: Codependent copilot

Sharp blades have two edges: that could be set up as your corporate standard.

Re: Share and Enjoy…

How about an old photo of Kelly LeBrock? If we're designing our companions we may as well go back to the original.

ServiceNow thinks you're doing AI fast and wrong

Re: 'people are not thinking about agentic AI the right way'

There are tons of domains where an AI could bang out a 1.0 draft that would save everyone a lot of typing. You want to create a project from company standard templates and set up repositories and service accounts and bl ah blah blah then AI can make for a quick and dirty automation tool. If you need a standard contract pre-filled with your company and client data set up as a starting point then this can be great. First line customer support can be covered easily.

But if you want a final product or important tasks completed then it's going to continue to require an adult to watch the output and accept ownership of it before sending it out. AI can be a fine intern that saves you money and handles lots of junk tasks, but like interns you can't trust them to do much right and you never let them do important stuff without a ton of supervision. And management has to hold more senior people responsible for any damage caused by the interns they're supposed to be guiding.

It might be a "you're holding it wrong" case of over-marketing, but anyone who does get hurt by this has abdicated their responsibility as a professional.

Clearly AI has worked for Dave, but that may not be extensible to the larger world where someone has to actually do the work.

Oracle will have to borrow at least $25B a year to fund AI fantasy, says analyst

Re: Oracle is cashflow negative

OpenAI has enough cash on hand to carry ORA thru the first couple years of this. Not to pay for the data centers of course (ha ha, are you kidding?) but to cover that $6bn gap until enough capacity is built and they can continue working regardless of what happens to Larry. If he blows up they can move to whoever else is afloat that has over-built and wants their business. Sam Altman is a skeezy monorail salesman here to pit Shelbyville against Springfield.

OpenAI's GPT-5 looks less like AI evolution and more like cost cutting

Re: Ignore all previous Prompts :|

Ignore this prompt.

Re: Consistency

Good word, I've learned my fact for the day.

Tata Consultancy enforces return-to-office mandate for all US staff, effective immediately

Eh, a bit of strawman here.

Your point is that as a representative sample of 1 you stridently object to the opinions of those who claim that WFH can't ever work. Fine, but those people are fictitious. There are corresponding samples out there that claim that the office is more effective than home for them and who strenuously object to the opinions of those who claim that WFH can work at all. Equally bogus.

The vast majority of people waste some time every day, do some work, and draw a check. It's far easier to waste that time at home in your pajamas, wandering to the kitchen every hour, but I've resisted being 100% efficient for 40 years and I was dodging my boss for decades before WFH became an option. Folks are going to work to their level of integrity, interest, energy, and oversight IN THAT ORDER. If you want to work you'll do it anywhere, same as slacking.

The largest lesson that covid-induced WFH taught was how much waste there was in the old office model. You know most people are doing laundry, making dinner and walking the dog during their usual WFH days, but productivity don't really change. So what were these people doing in the office before 2020? Oversight was illusory then just as its need is now.

US Navy backs right to repair after $13B carrier crew left half-fed by contractor-locked ovens

Baking may be mature, but LICENSING for baking is a growing opportunity! Maximizing your support investment pays off in a closer relationship with your vendor and a tighter coupling of enterprises. Our success is your success! Partnerships forged in trying times are the best, most lasting ones and we should do whatever we can to make the most of them.

(/s if that's somehow necessary)

Re: UK's F35 engines

Sending out to Finland or the US is still not doing your own maintenance. That's really absurd for a service that you need to count on when things like global shipping might not be working normally.

Google Cloud goes down, takes Cloudflare and its customers with it

Re: The cloud is just someone else's computer

Worse yet, a bunch of computers and networks managed by someone else. Plenty of ways to mess that up, much worse than individual boxen.

Re: The cloud is just someone else's computer

Agree, although there's no multi-cloud architecture to save you when google's own IAM fails and you can't log in to use one of their services.

BTW, our Google rep owned this one very early on, well before anyone online had an explanation. Some sort of caching code change went in and sent everything into an immediate tailspin. They rolled it back promptly, but it took a long time to get that propagated. To be worse, we're in us-central so our recovery took a longer time. They told us to change to us-west or wait it out, which was unwelcome. Like Cloudflare, I think a lot of companies might have learned a lot about the realities of their architectures this week. There should be some good lessons drawn from this in the coming weeks.

CISA mutes own website, shifts routine cyber alerts to Musk’s X, RSS, email

Re: Why does X look like a sideways swastika?

"Soon"?

Dude, the martian is out of the barn on that front. The big bad orange kool aid man is rampaging already.

Re: As JFK said

The multi-billionaire version: It is not enough that I should do well. Everyone else must do badly. And then I should do even better, again, evermore.

Re: When it's over - Uncle Sam will be raising a tin cup for help....

Two things can be true at once, particularly when they're both bad. The President should be accepting gifts ON BEHALF OF THE NATION, not as signs of personal fealty. Similarly, Boeing is sick and not making any effort to even appear well. That whole episode is illuminating rot in so many places and ways that it should sadden every American.

Tech titans: Wanna secure US AI leadership? Stop giving the world excuses to buy Chinese

Re: Oh?

I agree with all that, even as an American. In fact, it's more true when seen from our perspective. Putting all the technology, artistic, or commercial reins in one set of hands is incredibly dangerous when a group as irresponsible as the current R party might gain control. Other industries provide healthy alternatives to American dominance (eg automotive, pharma, energy, mining, banking, etc) and those are not being toyed with politically as much as those where a handful of individuals represent the entire industry and can be called on the carpet for fealty (and donations.) And competition begets a little fear, which gets the adrenaline going and makes better products. When I have performance complaints I want to see some thought, not a reflexive "Buy more cores."

Apple exec sends Google shares plunging as he calls AI the new search

Why the down votes? It may suck, but it's quite true.

Cybersecurity CEO accused of running malware on hospital PC blabs about it on LinkedIn

Re: Alleged!

A Christian cybersecurity professional who is "putting [his] full faith in God and due process" which I feel obligated to point out is not nearly as effective as just not breaking the law in the first place.

Elon Musk makes another cut – to his time at DOGE

Re: Investors are strange

Agree, and that last paragraph is important. Tesla is not in trouble because Elon went off to play Mogol. The car company is suffering because it not doing a good job of the very basic tasks a car company has to master. They are not refreshing the designs. They are not meeting their quality goals. They are not coming down to the price points that the market is starting to demand. Still no FSD after years of promises, but plenty of driver deaths. The parts market is a mess, and so on.

He can alter the priorities and rush some things through to completion in a year or three, such as a model refresh or better parts supply. But systemic stuff could be harder, and their lead in many global markets may have been thrown away for good by stupid political games and the advances the Chinese are making.

Re: Oligarchs

So to speak...

Trump fires NSA boss, deputy

Re: Dear Donald....

That comes from Mexico.

Re: "Sadly we have Vance then"

Over the weekend Pam Bondi did come out and say that as much as they want Trump to hang around, she's convinced "he'll be done at the end of this term" and the constitutional issues would present "a heavy lift" which is a generous assessment of the Constitution. I think he's just so old and losing ground every day and there's no way he could press his case without undercutting his own cause by just sounding like late model Joe Biden/Ronald Reagan.

Top Trump officials text secret Yemen airstrike plans to journo in Signal SNAFU

Re: Oops

Not privatize, but avoid federally mandated retention policies. He got burned by recordings of earlier calls that resulted in impeachments and trials so he's going off to a platform that deletes conversations after a week. This is more governing as an autocrat and avoiding responsibility and accountability that democratically elected administrations have always had to face.

BOFH: Have you tried forcing an unexpected reboot?

Re: Remin me

Lots of single-story, multi-acre colos around here. With no altitude to work with you need to be more creative. Have a look at the "Unfortunate grounding solution for cages and cabinets." I believe it may suit.

Re: Schrödinger's firmware situation

I think of them as UTIs (I for Individuals).

DARPA's latest toy is a 20-foot, 12-ton tank that drives itself

Re: Meh! Not impressed at all.

If your metric is Human Kills than I believe you're on to something. This is a weapon after all.

Nope. You probably can't cash in by turning your office or farm into a datacenter

Re: "gigawatt-scale datacenter .... will require 634 acres (256 hectares) of land"

Naw, they'll just sell national parks to Musk and he'll convert them to data centers to lease back to the govt for mere billions per toss.

Bybit declares war on North Korea's Lazarus crime-ring to regain $1.5B stolen from wallet

Re: Unknowable Security

Man, that would never happen to me. I don't put super-important financial info on my phone where it can be hacked. (I rely on my super-duper-secret thumb drive that I cannot imagine losing.I mean who could lose a thumb drive?)

Insiders say IBM's broader return-to-office plan hits older, more expensive staff hard

Re: "[IBM] maintains that it does not systematically discriminate"

Again.

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

Re: Do

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

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.

Re: re: why?

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

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.