Posts by fajensen

DOGE dilettantes 'didn't test' Social Security fraud detection tool at appropriate scale

Let’s just say it:

Nazis are making lists from government databases, just like last time. The rest of DOGE’s “work” is just a sideshow to keep people entertained.

Need cash? Your IPv4 stash can now be collateral for $100M loans

Re: Default?

OTOH - If an organisation was already migrating to IPv6 they could borrow against their IPv4 portfolio, then default on the loan, thereby selling their IPv4 addresses at a good price. Before anyone else gets the same idea.

Google says it's rolling out fix for stricken Chromecasts

Re: Certificate expirations are HIGHLY predictable

My experience with “operations” is that certificates would just expire randomly. When one attempts to renew them, it turns out they were created by some former employee, using a personal credit card and a Gmail / Hotmail account (which now has expired).

In addition to all this, they are never stored in a sane location.

And there are never any management software to check for expiration or anything.

The good part is that they usually expire when it’s “time x 2.50” rate.

US datacenters in for shock as Canada mulls cutting the juice over Trump tariffs

Re: Do it Canada

Nope. We want competent and effective people to have a go at Elon Musk :)

Dems want answers on national security risks posed by hiring freeze, DOGE probes

Re: Move fast, break things, drains up.

Or delete the go-codes for the nuclear arsenal.

Re: re: What could possibly go wrong?

DOGE could manage to flub some bond payments, setting off a US default that makes the Turkish lira look similar to the USD. The money-bags would not like that at all!

Musk was blabbering about something irregularities in some bond payments, so the monkey had found the pin on the grenade.

Re: Quis custodiet?

They *are* vetted. Elon wanted nazis specifically. The trouble here is blabbing about it prematurely.

Before the coup attempt is completed!

America is cooked.

Trump tells Musk to 'go get' Starliner astronauts

Re: Elon will soon be on his way. Hopefully, all will be safe. Good luck Elon!!!

Chief of staff’s personnel file is about to mention some naughty stuff and his pension plan has developed some issues?

Cyberattack on NHS causes hospitals to miss cancer care targets

Re: Are we getting the message yet (no)

Once you become an experienced engineer, you’ll realise that you get paid either way and you’ll stop giving a toss :).

Musk’s DOGE ship gets ‘full’ access to Treasury payment system, sinks USAID

But … It did fix that ingrown toe nail you were complaining about.

Re: OK

That’s why you have security shoot them in the face. Shut down the first coup attempt pretty fast too.

Re: POV of an American

Zuckerberg comes across as that awkward kid who was always picked last for any team activity.

He’d be taken out first, as a kind of team building exercise, and to gauge the mood of the people towards that kind of thing: “The People” will love it.

Re: DOGE

Gaza will keep him, and the US military, occupied for quite awhile. It’ll set a precedent that it is OK to grab land and dispose of the people living on it.

Which is exactly what Russia and China want!

China's DeepSeek just emitted a free challenger to OpenAI's o1 – here's how to use it on your PC

Re: Something I don't understand

You don't have to ask, just do it: Using ChatGPT instead of Google is a sad reminder of what google used to be. For now, anyway. Eventually, ChatGPT will also be serving up page ofter page of garbage like google does today, but, right now, it is useful.

Europe hopes Trump trumps Biden's plan for US to play AI gatekeeper

Re: No limit for the Netherlands but for EU?

That is not really America's problem now, is it?

Agile Manifesto co-author blasts failure rates report, talks up 'reimagining' project

Re: Agile misconceptions are rife

There will come a time when one will accept those jobs because it pays the bills and one needs to pay the bills - or else. A skill for when that time comes, is learning to interpret / lawyer the requirements into something that better match time and ressources. Another skill is separating concerns into "things I can do something about, me-problems, and things i cannot do anything about, you-problems".

Silly project going tits-up -> that's a "you-problem".

Russia’s FIN7 is peddling its EDR-nerfing malware to ransomware gangs

What if I don't hare off into a google blackhole and instead you simply explained your reasoning about those members of SentinelLabs?

The graying open source community needs fresh blood

Re: Look at what is being offered, and open source user entitlement

What did ChatGPT have to say about the code?

Here we go again. And again. Musk threatens to pull Twitter, SpaceX out of California

Re: The ultra-rich boy who cried wolf

"My existence is validated because people I imagine don't like me"?

ITER delays first plasma for world's biggest fusion power rig by a decade

Re: Meanwhile at Wendelstein...

Then stick it in a battle-tank the size of an aircraft carrier and drive it over Belgium or Poland?

... Only on Iceland!

Most other places you can get a puny and pathetic geothermal heat flux at about 65 mW/m2.

The problem becomes: First, you have to capture the heat from a very large area. Then you have to go really deep, kilometers deep, to get that heat at the kind of temperature that will allow the thermodymamics to work decently. If you want any electricity from it all. If you just want to heat some houses, then you can use a heat pump at the surface level and save yourself millions in stranded investment.

PS:

The sun gives about 700 W/m2 up here in the Nordics. About 20% percent of that flux can be converted to electriclty directly with no fuss.

Re: The greenhouse effect is so last century!

I didn't dare celebrating anything in advance!

Re: absolutely

I am always saying: If it was "the public's money" their name and picture would be printed on the notes!

Re: constraining mini-suns

We used to mock Wendelstein as being too complex, impossible to design and especcially engineer, which pissed the Germans off so they went and built the thing.

The best part is that they have been in operation for a few years, decades before ITER.

Re: World's largest tokamak?

We already are doing more or less what you say: Pretty much all the renewable technology deployment and improvement being deployed right now are coming from private companies productising and commercialising the research that was done years ago by publicly funded research teams!

The same with the commercial fusion "research" outfits. The are using the plasma models, control algorithms, numerical models, material science ... yada ... yada ... that researchers at universities prepared for them.

This is the compromise we made: Commercial entities are Crap at research, and Public entities are Useless at productisation.

If we drop fusion research, the "knowledge pipeline" feeding the commercial companies will dry up and they will croak / run off with investors money about 5 years later.

Payoff from AI projects is 'dismal', biz leaders complain

Re: Actually the most inappropriate applications

Maybe "supposed to" but, nah. FAQ's run out of steam quickly.

Using ChatGPT, one can instruct ChatGPT to read a pile of documents carefully and then one can ask question about specific things covered by the bumf. Those can be boring documents,like HR-policies and user manuals. ChatGPT doesn't care.

In My Opinion, It does that kind of task very well.

Same with source code that it has "read". One needs to know which exceptions "datetime.datetime.fromisoformat()" can raise, ChatGPT will give a very solid answer, a lot better than the snot-rollers and navel-defluffers faffing around on StackOverflow will do because most of that lot for sure hasn't read the docs before answering! ChatGPT will provide code examples too.

Microsoft's Recall should be celebrated as the savior of SMEs and scourge of CEOs

I don't think that is what will happen.

First off, I belive Recall is such a thoroughly bad idea, with such enormous risks and liabilities baked right into it, that it could only have come from ono person at the very top of Microsoft*. A person that nobody dares go against.

That CEO-like person gets this idea that: "Maybe if we have AI capture all of the data going through a PC and also all the users responsed to that data, we can create a robot that can at least simulate users well enough to perform their daily tasks. Great!".

Then they set about getting The Organisation to buy this Fantastic, World Beating, Idea.

This is when they will encounter two things that are working well at Microsoft. Their smart developers, their talented product managers, and their legal team all piles in and explains why this is likely to end badly, what the possible risks are, and what the consequences could be. The other thing they encounter, is the balkanisation. There is no way, ever, that any department will build a working API that allows "The Competition" to leverage "Their Product" for their nefarious workings. If one makes them do it, they will totally half-ass it, and we get stuff like Microsoft Projectflow. This affects everyone at once so the CEO with the Bright Idea cannot on-board anyone to commit to this.

The CEO-like Solution becomes: "Fuck all of you guys! I'll have my very own team dump the screen buffer into a database and have the AI figure out stuff from the picures!!!. That's easy enough!"

Now, The "Microsoft Viva Experience"-team are probably the slime comitted to this idea: For them, it is just another sales feature to be able to better track the employees activities and to get more KPI's for the managers, also some illegal ones like sexual orientation, one suspects.

So, it will be sold as "Helping with automation". In reality it is Surveillance for Everyone.

*) Or a subversive consultant group, intent on destroying capitalism, that deliberaty only provides bad ideas and sell them to CEO's.

Re: Nope

ChatGPT can read text from pictures. It is very good at it!

Microsoft pulls Windows 11 24H2 from Insider Release Preview Channel

Re: Never seen an ad in Windows

If you are almost building from source anyway, you should just use Linux.

Re: Never seen an ad in Windows

I think it strongly depends on the license.

I worked a bit at a trade school. Knowing their budget, I know that they would have procured the most pathetic and cheap option that it was still possible to install Office 365 on. I belive that is why my corprat-IT-installed Windows 11 was positively riddled with adds and "feeds" and "Microsoft VIva Insights" blabbing about my colleagues Teams activity (to remind people that it is Right Now compiling a dossier to the boss So You Better Watch It, Boy) as well as sniffing around in the GDPR-regulated data we worked on!

Total piece of thrash that was!

AWS customer faces staggering charges over S3 bucket misfire

Re: " to alleviate this risk by avoiding short or common names for S3 buckets"

Well, yes, but, even if sounds like it's kinda hard and it might take a while, wouldn't someone attempt to write a tool that does a brute-force or maybe even distributed search for S3 buckets - just to deliberately mess with this "feature"? And once your bucket is on an "existing" list, then those l33t script-kiddies are going to stomp it.

Re: An immoral path to profit

I think Amazon will need to stop charging for unsolicited PUT requests

Right there I got a vivid picture of an AWS-excecutive vomiting blood right onto the conference desk, he is surrounded by his accolytes rending their clothes and throwing used cat-litter over themselves.

Miss your morning iPhone alarm? It's not just you, and Apple is looking into it

Re: Had the Same Problem

How else will the murderbots bots find us for the AI-rapture?

Re: Had the Same Problem

Some apps seems to block the alarm too. I noticed that scrolling Reddit, then passing out with the app still active will block the alarm.

Politicians call for ban on 'killer robots' and the curbing of AI weapons

I tend to agree with him on that.

GCC 15 dropping IA64 support is final nail in the coffin for Itanium architecture

Re: eh, who cares

It speaks volumes that some open source lists offered free itanium systems to people willing to develop and no-one was bothered.

An outfit I worked for disposed of a bunch of AMD Athlon space-heaters by putting them on a pallet in the street.

It's an university town and the students her are like ants: Someone finds a crumb somewhere and they all show up.

Healthcare AI won't take jobs – it'll make nursing easier, says process automation founder

However, having access to AI may give managers added incentive to create even more complicated and byzantine processes so that we end up in the same place (while heating millions of homes with the abundant waste heat from datacenters).

Someone had to say it: Scientists propose AI apocalypse kill switches

I'm really not getting what the scenario is here.

Most likely: AI's trained on Internet Data will keep pushing each others killswitch for shitz and lolz!

Forcing AI on developers is a bad idea that is going to happen

Re: Software Development != Coding

I think you are underestimating.

The ChatGPT / Grimoire of today is smart enough to read the PDF-datasheet for a part, like an ADC converter, and from that it can produce Python (or C) code to set up the part's registers so that the part is configured. The typical mistakes is that sometimes it will get the lsb/msb-order wrong and sometimes it will miss that there is a specific ordering of the steps to be performed. This means that instead of spending hours reading a PDF, one can get something going well enough to begin debugging on it in one session, with time for coffee,

I think AI is at the "Widely Affordable Tools Turning Rooms Full of Drafters and Tools Into a Couple of People in a Converted Barn"-stage. There will be tonnes of projects getting done because now the niches, and small-scale, becomes possible.

Eventually "capital" will slurp it all up and turn it beige, because "capital" always wins.

Re: Repeatable patterns

The structure of data and objects will likely have the common characteristics of model that produced it.

Like Stackoverflow.com?

Why do IT projects like the UK's scandal-hit Post Office Horizon end in disaster?

Well, the solution to having made a mess of something is covering it all up with an even bigger mess!

Re: Testing can be bad for your career

Been There, Done That. Your former boss has more guts than mine, though.

In my case it was that Management wanted me, a lowly project manager 3-4 layers "below" His Lordship, to relinguish the scope of "my" project and sign over 12 MEUR to "Our Favorite Contractor" instead of going through EU procurement, like, the law says. On top of all that, the procurement paperwork were prepared and approved by Procurement so we would waste about 1 years of tedious work.

I told him that it was much better that he did this transfer on his own authority because it was his budget and his scope. He didn't like that very much. Pehaps because the person signing this could be going to jail or at the very least end up in front of an inquest.

He especially didn't like that both Procurement and "Our Favorite Contractor" disagreed and sided with me. In the end, it went for procurement and "Our Favorite Contractor's Minion" got the contract with the proper process. I believe the Minion was pushed in as a shim because "Our Favorite Contractor" had become suspicios of the leadership. They know that working too closely with morons is how your project ends up in arbitration.

The consequences for me were that no work arrived at my desk ever after, which was nice for a while. I ended up leaving.

Office gossips beware – chitchat could choke your career chances

People will always say the appropriate thing on surveys. The interesting information I think, are the dosage and the content, "How Much Gossip is Damaging?", "What Kind of Topics are Toxic/Good?"

We all know, or we should damn well know by now, that "being social", to be somebody that people wants to be around and talk to, roundly beats any business and technical skills (which beginners think matters) in the career game. Therefore, if one never chats at the water cooler, never engage in chit-chat outside of Work Related Discussions, one is seen as boring, not very social, and since nobody wants to be around "work" all day, one is simply not going anywhere beyond Project Manager - which is another kind of oily-rag techie (aka: not magement material)!

I.O.W. It's the "hard" skills that gets one hired, It's the social skills that gets one fired or mired!

Microsoft kills off Windows app installation from the web, again

Re: M$ always leaves barn door open for "business"

From Microsofts perspective, it doesn't affect anyone important at all. The developers just picked the most cost efficient way to implement an important feature (and created a selling point for "bigger" licenses :). We got to remember that the 2-3 corporates who probably asked for this feature, and were big enough to get it, they are also very likely to have their policies tuned up and bummed into perfection. So, it works for them.

Re: How Come Microsoft Can’t Get It To Work?

They can. It's just Market Segmentation Rulez making it appear that they can't. Most people will run some "consumer thrash" Windows, where nothing of the good stuff really works.

Enforcing known repositories, signed applications and keeping a curated set of "Bad Boys" out, is being sold as a premium Windows feature, reserved for "enterprise" licenses.

One can install "Applocker" on any windows >= 10 and hack the configuration locally, but, it really needs quite a bit of Windows Server infrastructure to manage it in practice). Another possibility is using "Windows Defender", which seems to be more geared towards Windows 365 (To keep things balkanised as they should be :). It is not an easy job, these tools are not for the eyes of average PC-users, but they do work.

I initially researched this while trying to find a proper way to keep "snap.do" off my teenagers computers.

Microchip nabs $162M to keep chips for washing machines – and missiles – flowing

Re: Bullshit!

A German colleague said something like this about decision making in Siemens: There is a pile of dog-shit on the pavement. Everyone sees it, everyone knows what should be done. However, nothing can be done until somebody falls with their nose in it.

Pretty universal, I think.

Here's who thinks AI chatbots will eventually be smart enough to be your coworker

Re: I have a question:

Why do we use our technological prowess to automate away the pointless rituals we invented to busy ourselves, instead of doing away with the rituals, and use the compute powering our AIs to do something more productive?

Because, the point is, that the rituals must be performed. Indeed, any large organisation can be said to exist primarily to provide the funding and set the schene for the performance of the rituals.

The problem we have with people is that they can manifest things. Humans, left all on their own, they will manifest distracting, maybe dangerous, even terrible things. Like the Golden Jesus* running for President and then Righfully slaying all the Impure and Improper starting with the gays. So, a network of distractions is created, keeping the human mind busy with insignificant trivia and white noise so Bad Things does not happen too much.

This network of distractions we call "Real Life (tm)" or "A Career". It got damaged during Covid 19 and we lost containment somewhat, allowing lots of people too much freedom to manifest their inner nuttines - and set their creations lose on the world. This is obviously not good so ... everything will be wound back and tightened down harder, with better distractions and more elaborate rituals to perform. AI will be a critical part of that work.

I.O.W. We will have less free time, more distractions, and more performances in the future!

*) I just see a fat-ass fuckhead loser, but, the phenomen no different from the happenings in Project Blue Book, where a bunch of people see a flying saucer with 3 beings in it waving at them, while the radar sensors and the Air Force sees a rocket stage de-orbiting.

Re: Clippy on steroids

Well, would we be any worse off than now? Internet companies like Google, LinkedIn one cannot really contact at all, most others are using some call center somewhere with zero authority serving canned responses in poor English to not solve your problem.

Having an AI giving us the run-around would be the expected base-level denial of service, but, that AI could have a sexy voice, adapted to the user, which would be a vast improvement.

DARPA's air-steered X-65 jet heads into production with goal of flying by 2025

Re: What could go wrong...

Sure, all those aerospace engineers with decades of experience in high performace programmes were stunned to learn about these hitherto unknown GOTCHA's blocking all progress!

Swedish Tesla strike goes international as Norwegian and Danish unions join in

Re: Who is being reasonable in the conflict?

In other news Tesla Sweden apparently owes a local vendor more than 4 million SEK. Tesla has refused to pay the invoice which has been sent to a collection agency.

Tesla will discover that the Swedish legal system prefers the swift and summary way of dealing with dead-beats. The Swedes like their auctions, its a culture thing for the community to go to the bankrupt neighbours place on a sunday and strip it of anything of value, while having coffee and cakes :).

And, to emphasise the vindictiveness and attention to details: When something goes to collection, "Kronofogden" will shamelessly sell everything, even your most pathetic tupperware collection! Just look at it: https://auktion.kronofogden.se/auk/w.ObjectList?inC=KFM&inA=WEB