Posts by fajensen

Tesla sues Swedish government after worker rebellion cripples car biz

Re: Postal Service

Gammon on the lose, and it's not even Friday

Re: Postal Service

Instead of making shit up, you could explain where where it says that in the law?

Re: Postal Service

Is it so inconceiveable that government employees actually do their job and deliver the plates themselves?

Their job is to manufacture and deliver the plates to Postnord, who has been awarded the contract for distribution of the plates. Which, they are doing.

So, you don't know, but have "ideas"?!

I can't help feeling that might just backfire.

Oh, It will. When a Swedish bureaucracy is pushed, a circle of monkeys will form, each pointing at the next one to be "doing something". Nothing will be moving, and nobody will be responsible because everyone are just following the rules. This configuration will stay up until man-baby Musk decides to do it the Swedish Way. Then everything suddenly runs like a clockwork and nobody understands what the problem was.

In this case: The transport agency will respond to the court that this is not the process that they have been instructed to follow (by law), probably adding that deviating for the sake of Tesla is discriminating against other manufacturers, concluding that if they have to do something different, the government has to issue new laws / instructions. The government will do its very best to stay the hell out if the thing. Unions are the core of the Swedish "system" and the "Swedish Public Management Tradition" is to leave the Civil Service alone to do their duties as they see them. It will eventually go to a higher court and then get thrown out.

Inside Denmark’s hell week as critical infrastructure orgs faced cyberattacks

Re: Firewall updates

Danish IT projects are renowned for failing spectacularly, nobody would dare install anything and in any case they couldn't afford it :).

Russia's Sandworm – not just missile strikes – to blame for Ukrainian power blackouts

Re: Why were their SCADA units on the Internet?

Well, It seems like Russia successfully infested Deutsche Bank, it is maybe not beyound the possible to get some operators into the software supply chains with Siemens?

Infosys co-founder calls for youth to work 70-hour weeks

Re: It does

I'm better and faster at what I'm doing than if I were working only these 40h a week. Maybe you should try and test it.

Sure, you do bub, suure you do. But, only because you follow the UK "way of working": Do the absolute minimim possible for the first 40 hours, then proceed to work normally once the overtime pay is approved! On average you are just wasting your own time and other peoples money.

I have seen that particular song & dance for 10 years in contruction. Whenever overtime is possible, nothing happens onsite until conditions for overtime is reached! One might as well cut the performative crap and start there, except, its a sacred tradition.

Three dozen plaintiffs join Apple AirTag tracking lawsuit in amended complaint

Re: Punish criminals not manufacturers.

Ah, but, one solid takeaway from "What we learned from Covid-19"-class is that about 50% of the population experiences reality as "something that happens or is done to them". Definitely not something they could have any control over whatsoever. The mere suggestion that they can change some outcome or that some degree of responsibility might land on their heads will kick off screeching tantrums.

There is "A Market", and a buck to be made, in pandering to that demographic, so lawsuits like this will keep happening.

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

Re: No corruption here.

Quite why we have had a throwaway generation of meters and three different and incompatible networks escapes me.

Because of the "Regulation is Evil"-crowd being in power for far too long?!

Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors 'unappointable'

Re: Excel for dodgy databases

Hahahaha - The way these jobs actually goes is that "Management" and different "stakeholder" comitees will prove their importance by interfering every 1-2 weeks so The Project never finishes until the budget runs out. The skilled developer will be delivering 3 months of incomplete work, in about 14 months of project time, then "Management" and "stakeholder" comittees will agree that, "that guy was not very good at all", and then they will give the job to Boss's nephew who can do something in Excel.

I am just wrapping up a job like that!

Re: Excel for dodgy databases

I'm sure it's a pipe dream, but just once, I'd like to work at a place where they actually did the SAP setup correctly.

The Gulfs have seen your light and they have created a Path for your acension, IOW: You would do a lot better, financially and emotionally, by joining the opposition and start working as a SAP consultant :p

Re: Excel for dodgy databases

It is a long time since I used ACCESS, but, I think it has a similar behaviour to Excel: It doesn't care much about what kind of data actually gets stored in which row. One can have things that presents as numbers but they are chars, bytes or even nulls, depending on the context and how the tables were once defined.

Want a clean energy transition? Better start putting cash into electrical grid

Re: "Where did the last ice age go"

there is a lot of money to be made on the green gravy train.

Not as a scientist, which you would know if you were ever near science.

First Brexit, now X-it: Musk 'considering' pulling platform from EU over probe

Re: a bit rich?

I hope they get him out of Tesla and SpaceX

That's what they did by letting him have Twitter :).

EU threatens X with DSA penalties over spread of Israel-Hamas disinformation

Re: Free Speech

The way to deal with misinformation ... it is to teach people to be discerning

Any idea, concept, technology, or ideology that relies on the availablity of improved people in order for it to work, will fail!

Windows 10's latest update issue isn't a bug but a feature – to test your patience

Re: One wonders ...

Money is really not that important to the people with money. They like to pretend it that it is, but, that is just their way of moving the discussion to a prepared battlefield where they have the upper hand.

IOW, this means nothing, they will continue to license Windows because Bill has such a nice barbeque for top-tier clients - or whatever it is they actually value.

Go ahead, let the unknowable security risks of Windows Copilot onto your PC fleet

Well, I am sure this initiative, lets frame it as "Clippy/Tay with real powers", will fail in unforeseen and interesting ways, but, most importantly: It will be fun!

It is an opportunity. Windows needs new bugs for us to bitch and moan about, to make a decent enough living on untangling, new "batteries" to power our excuses for not turning in the homework. The old classics, like files being locked by forces unknown, or anything "printing", they are getting boring & dull.

I am happy.

Why can't datacenter operators stop thinking about atomic power?

Re: Buy a full nuclear PWR then.

build a 1200 MW server farm and slap a power plant right next to it, in a Country that doesn't mind nuclear power.

You can do that right now in France. So, you gotta wonder why nobody does and instead are waiting for magical technology to be developed.

"Atomic power"? What is this, the 1950s?

Yes it is. It is the 1950's all over again, only without the skilled nuclear- engineers and -scientists (which also couldn't get SMR's and molten salt whatever hokum and of course the magick thorium reactor off the ground).The difference is that they understood why, whereas the present genereation thinks that enough money will somhow bend physics and make it happen :).

Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows

The printing system in Linux is so incomprehensible that even someone like Poettering has not been able to step up and implement something worse :).

Microsoft calls time on ancient TLS in Windows, breaking own stuff in the process

Re: protocols were disabled by default

I would hope, but don't expect, that enterprise systems

May they never change and I hope can keep doubling my normal salary just by being on-call and fixing stupid stuff that should never happen.

... But still does, because the stakes are so high that nobody can accumulate the authority to do anything about any of it, which is by design. The whole decision making process is like in the old USSR: All 5-year plans, done by 500-people commitees, and you will still get shot for doing anything or nohing at all, depending on the mood of the CEO.

OpenAI's ChatGPT has a left wing bias – at times

There is now a theory that it wasn't ageing that made people shift rightwards but wealth accumulation.

Well, I think considering the antics of the current bunch, that must be enough evidence to ínvestigate early onset frontal lobe dementia

Re: Conflict

True. Being "Right Wing" has evolved into straight-up Insanity these days, and the stockholders would probably object to the people responsible for their dividends being openly crazy, stupid, angry about Everything, and perpetually bragging about it on the Iternet - instead of working?

Will Flatpak and Snap replace desktop Linux native apps?

Re: Performance isn't free...

The delays are irritating but in the long run it's probably better to fix the apps that don't shut down cleanly.

I dislike this idea of an "app", this being a defective and poorly crafted app (!) to boot, telling "§SYSTEM" how to run things!

The Unix way is that we shoot it in the head.

Time running out for crew of missing Titanic tourist submarine

Re: Transponder

you'd think he would know if the craft was dodgy.

CEO's have this filter where everything "bad" or "inconvenient" that is standing in their way is minimised and dismissed.

That trait is in addition to being installed at the top of a low-pass filter where every level in the organisation massages the information "on the way up" so only "Move the KPI News", Good News and Superb News ever reaches the excecutive floor.

There is no reasonable excuse for not having a similar number on this thing.

We don't wanna harm business and limit innovation by regulation? Usually works!

AI is going to eat itself: Experiment shows people training bots are using bots

SmartKeyboard coming right up!

There's always the chance that someone uses a chatbot and then manually types in the output – but that's unlikely, we suppose.

I see An Emerging Market for a bluetooth device that one can copy-paste to which simulates slow and irregular human keystrokes when pasing the data in.

Multi-tasking blunder leaves UK tax digitization plans 3 years late, 5 times over budget

Re: The civil service went to a brewery but left thirsty and sober despite wanting to party

The "government" has a certain ... nostalgia ... for the 1930's.

Whistleblower claims Uncle Sam is sitting on hoard of alien vehicles and tech

I sometimes like to watch people do stupid stuff on the internet. Maybe a more advanced species like to watch civilisations do the same?

Microsoft injects ChatGPT into 'secure' US government Azure cloud

Re: Hm.... could be useful, would automate publicity

Yup. Keeping an AI running is cheaper than keeping, say, Oliver North or Mike Pompeo around.

Google wants to target you – yes, YOU – with AI-generated ads

Re: Algorithms selling to algorithms

And Why not?

Personally, after 2x Corona, I am extra fatiqued by choice and being presented for endless options and possibilites that I then have to specify Exactly to (maybe) get what I wanted.

For example: What I want is a nice barbecue with some friends, a few of which are vegetarian, with some drinks of varying yield and not ruinously expensive. For that, I would love to have a Star-trek interface, where the AI presents me with a long exposition and I can declare "Make it so".

Rich people employ valets and butlers to avoid all this stress and inconvenience, less rich people have PA's, and poor people can now have AI.

Yeah, whatever, where is my AI generated pr0n?

Re: Bring it

- Maybe AWS knows something you don't?

Man sues OpenAI claiming ChatGPT 'hallucination' said he embezzled money

OpenAI shouldn't put out "AI" that consistently spews complete bullshit, and thus, they're justly being sued for it.

It does say "generative" right on the AI-tin, a pretty hard to miss qualifier, IMO.

Besides, bullshit is what the world wants and expects in many day-to-day situations, like wrtiting speeches, stock analysis, sports journalism, opinion pieces, job applications, references for job applications ...

Anyways, here is a really good article about how ChatGPT and its kind work: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/

Healthcare org with over 100 clinics uses OpenAI's GPT-4 to write medical records

... That now they are in our system we have to charge you for the treatment of them.

AI, extinction, nuclear war, pandemics ... That's expert open letter bingo

Re: Not all AI is bad, but bad could be really bad

No AI starts out born bad.

Does if I build it!

Eating disorder non-profit pulls chatbot for emitting 'harmful advice'

Re: Wrong disorder

Maybe also throw in an equestrian dose of Ivermectin and some colloidal silver in the advice and recommedations while we are at it?

All these things are trained on Free Internet Data, so, this is what we get!

Lenovo Thinkpad Z13 just has this certain Macbook Air about it...

Re: Working as designed?

Anyone who doesn't trust Microsoft is going to be very angry if this ever gets built.

Come on: Why does it matter to Microsoft that some ranters, who will not buy the product in any case, finds themself another excuse / reason to not buy the product!?

I have almost entirely switched over to using Linux and Apple Mac OS on the desktop *because* of 35 years' experience using Microsoft Windows, not despite it.

Exactly how I feel!

When I must use windows "privately", I use it in a virtual machine on my MacBook and I have backups. I know it will eventually screw up when I need it to work! I am sick and tired of the unreliability. Don't get me started on the Microsoft bullshit of re-organising and re-skinning the same old bits of fossilised code into different constellations, branding Brownian movements as innovation.

Latest example:

I have to use Dassault's Solidworks at work. Huge thing, expensive, yet pig-ugly and clunky too (Everything looks like an unclean bastard between OS2 Warp 3 and "Windows ME", maybe they even used Borland C++ anno 2003 to code it?).

Again, to add pain to my "Windows experience" this is a physical windows installation. Windows gets an unskipable upgrade, Upgrade bricks the solidworks component database. Nothing can be done by IT, because something about being out of "Temp-space" - with nothing in C:\Temp (Again, typical windows, the error is never what it says it is) - blocks the installer and they have to delete the whole of windows and rebuild the machine to get the Solidworks installer to work, the next day IT does another installation round because here are some options that should also be installed.

This was an "upgrade", but, Windows is still windows, and will break itself again. Solidworks is still clunky & ugly.

Re: Yup

The good thing about ms-dos is that Dungeon Keeper runs on it.

Microsoft promises it's made Teams less confusing and resource hungry

Re: Teams will be less like WhatsApp, more like Facebook

With some needlework and a trebuchet, you can!

Re: Basic UX problems

nice for them to admit for once that many of the frustrations people experience with using Microsoft products are rooted in basic UX problems.

Hah - They are admitting the minor transgression to divert from the bigger, harder, probably unsolvable, problems.

Work has Office 365. Work want us to use Projectflow. One should think "Oh, well yet another Gannt chart to fiddle with and one can attach "products" to the tasks, which are in The Cloud and there are Ressources to manage and so forth. Only, all of the funtions that one would normally expect in some project management software, they are smeared across Projectflow, Sharepoint, Teams, Tasks and probably some more stuff, that one has to pay, for except we don't. Differnt flows, different look & feel, different naming for the same things .... subtle ways things that appear identical are actually different, like booking a RyanAir ticket without getting dinged for some stupid crap one does not want, only distributed and worse!

The impression one gets is that the challenge each of the Microsoft Product Teams took away from the product initiation meeting twas: "How can we make those other bastards contribution to our product suck the hardest so that everyone can see what idiots they are?".

Working in this environment feels like picking rare coins out of clogged highway restroom toilet. The pay is decent, to get the pay, however ....

Re: "To optimize navigation"

What else does Microsoft have?

The problem with very succesful products, like Windows and Office is that their book value is extremely high.

Somebody coming along with radical innovation, even a quantum leap in usability or performance, that person is not going to get a hero's welcome. Quite the opposite: He/She/Other will be branded "A destroyer of Value" and will be send off to whatever bright, open-spaced, designer-furniture and rare-branded eco coffee, compound that represents the coporate nuclear waste dump and shall forver be given innovative, intelectually stimulating, make-work projects, --- that will somehow never make it into Product!

About 40, when they burn out, they realise and despair.

Europol warns ChatGPT already helping folks commit crimes

if anything it should nake easier to catch the criminals?

Sdaly, to everyone else BUT the plod.

One can have ones shit nicked, point out to the plod that it is tagged with something that gives the location down to +-6 meters on regular consumer equipment - and they still cannot be bothered to investigate and recover the loot. They more or less actively refuse unless one mentions maybe getting some of the boys together and go there. Then one will get some attention from them.

I think that while some police are thick as snot, there is institutional resistance because the police does not yet have "A Process" for investigating crimes involving IT (Everything going to court has to be described and documented in very specific ways or you lose). The may never get there because "IT" is changing "the crime environment" faster than the police can cook up Documented Investigative Workflows, new Forms to fill out, and well as getting the courts used to seing them.

Russian developers blocked from contributing to FOSS tools

Re: Rational Reason

It is more likely that they will be assigned an FSB-handler that manages their login credentials and work schedule.

- and, as a special favour, provides the service of avoiding that they or their family & friends does not get into trouble with The Authorities, like being accused of spying, colluding with foreign powers. The kind of inconvenience that can just happen to anyone being in unsupervised contact with the western enemy powers.

Xi, Putin declare intent to rule the world of AI, infosec

They are old men burning the future for vanity, one thicker than the other: Putins special contribution to the World Domination Plan is to drive the Russian talent out of the country - or off to the trenches in Ukraine. Xi would certainly lend Putin's Russia some engineers in the future - to help with extracting those Chinese ressources.

Budget: UK chip strategy still nowhere to be seen. Money for quantum, AI? Sure

Ohh, Quantum Funding?

Where those "world-beating" ressources are superimposed with everything else until observerved, then the wavefunction collapse and they are all sitting in off-shore accounts of some Tory-connected crooks?

Elon Musk yearns for AI devs to build 'anti-woke' rival ChatGPT bot

Re: Twitter is already 90% anti-woke chat bots

Sir Anonymouse prefers payment in Non-Fungible Tokens!? :)

Re: duh, BingBot?

Do they need a version cast in the image of their idols: D Trump; J Peterson; A Tate; rather than them-self.

Obviously. Like stuff grown in petri dishes in a secret guv'mint facility, these folks need to live in their own version of reality to maintain their base-level "anger at everyting"-metabolism. To keep all of that "conservative culture" environment going at a moderate expense, automation is essential. Kinda like we fit a controller onto the microbiological incubators at work so we don't have to adjust the settings all of the time and we don't screw it up because we make a mistake.

US defense forces no match for the unstoppable fiend known as Reply-All

Re: Ageism is alive and well...

Using "Reply All" as the true Besserwisser.