Posts by the Jim bloke

Microsoft exec finds AI cynicism 'mindblowing'

Re: Reality is an illusion ...

.. feeding the troll..

Your entire arguement is based on the pervasive fallacy - or outright marketing lie, that AI has some kind of understanding of what it is 'talking' about.

there is no reason for an AI to call someone a wanker - or a meatsack - or use any kind of offensive address at all - unless it has been trained to do so. the offensiveness is even more artificial than the intelligence. At best the equivalent of desktop wallpaper to 'enhance' the user experience, but more likely someone emulating children using rude words to provoke a reaction.

The fakeness is offensive

the hysterical marketing hype is offensive

The constant intrusion of USE OUR AI NOW!!!! pop ups when I am trying to get stuff done is offensive.

But the chatbots using rude words.. thats just pathetic.

Researchers get inside the mind of bots, find out what texts they trained on

Re: Really?

The original issue with all copyright - however far the modern usage has roamed - is someone else collecting money for your work..

So, as all the marketing drones tell us, AI is a fountain of unlimited wealth... and said AI has been developed with some tangential connection to something you once said or did... you have a claim on the fountain of unlimited wealth.

Magician forgets password to his own hand after RFID chip implant

obvious solution missed

He should have tattooed the password on the back of his eyelids...

Self-destructing thumb drive can brick itself and wipe your secret files away

another product for the gangsta oligarchs

along with the gold Iphone clone and bulletproof Lamborghini's

something for the person who has everything, except taste, self esteem, a clean police record or a legal income..

this is so far from real data security its not even funny.

and if you are going for physical destruction, intense thermal would probably work quite well at the scale of a USB stick - except that would conflict with commercial air travel, and the target customers for this actually dont all own private jets...

AI slop hits new high as fake country artist goes to #1 on Billboard digital songs chart

Thank you for that,

only one upvote to give.

Re: "Actual humans with talent"

I find the concept of "democratise art" weird.. cognitive dissonance in fact.

Its being brought up with the idea that art is special, exceptional, something that speaks to the soul, or reveals hidden understandings of human nature etc etc..

Then you get the mass market of pretty pictures and sounds, is a landscape or a birdsong art ?

and there are the things that have individual significance without any external value - your 5 year old childs handprints in paint and stuck on the fridge.. mass produced tourist crap only valuable due to the circumstances you associate with it.

I am a contrarian at heart, and the one thing I do believe is that almost every one else is wrong. Even the ones that agree with me.

So, my personal position, and you are totally free to ignore it,

... Democratic XOR art.

A mindless and repetitive task where error checking has never been an issue

Writing and performing country music

- At last, a legitimate use for AI

also applies for Rap, which is just country music without the country, or the music..

Re: First they came for the Country Music

People complain when the garbage DOESNT get taken away..

Big Tech's control freak era is breaking itself apart

for improved clarity and accuracy

do a global (and I do mean GLOBAL) find-and-replace of " AI " with " bullshit "

Help desk boss fell for ‘Internet Cleaning Day’ prank - then swore he got the joke

Re: No Sense of Humour

There was a spin-off / follow on of that -.. I had a t-shirt with a black and white image of a dejected looking teenager and large headline style text..

" Left School?,

No Job?

No Money?

then FUCK OFF.. (bank name), the frank bank.."

I was actually wearing it in a cafe in central Canberra (just visiting) and this fat old guy in a suit comes up to me and asks " Is it really like that? ". My response was " I dunno, I work on a gold mine.." and that I wore the shirt because I agreed with the sentiment.

I later realised the guy was a reasonably prominent politician with some social justice platform, but it was probably 3 decades ago, so the details are vague.

'Vibe coding' named Word of the Year. Developers everywhere faceplant

Re: THIS tech expert is calling "Reckless".

.. expect more (w)recks, rather than less..

'Windows sucks,' former Microsoft engineer says, explains how to fix it

Re: If only there was an alternative OS

There is a valid use example of what you describe - and its called railways (except for the fast and comfortable bit)

A real eco system of IT requires diversity - appropriate devices for what they are supposed to do, appropriate user interfaces, and recognition that the user may just know what they need rather than a marketing driven parasitic infestation...

Major AWS outage across US-East region breaks half the internet

FTFY

Too much of the planet relies on us-east-1, society should start removing reliance on this point of failure...

AI is the flying car of the mind: An irresistible idea nobody knows how to land or manage

This is how communication fails

I use the word utopia to mean "here be dragons".

No one else does

Half the posts prior to this have been people arguing over fuzzy definitions, then you go and say this word other people use, - when I use it it means something else..

If only marketing people would define their variables and constants at the start of every ~publication

Schleswig-Holstein waves auf Wiedersehen to Microsoft stack

since the essential core functionality of W11 is the telemetry, with a thin and uneven slather of user experience over the top, any reduction in the bells, whistles, and shiny, will just grind the fact that MS is not your friend into the faces of anyone forced to use it...

So probably a viable option for big American companies, and any with similar disregard for their employees conditions.

Windows 11 update breaks localhost, prompting mass uninstall workaround

Re: GNU...

no GNUs is good GNUs ??

Teens arrested in London preschool ransomware attack

Every human being has value

.. but some of those values are negative.

The world would be better off without them.

That said, the childcare industry is one of the new generation of monetization evil exploitation.. whatever it is that MBAs think is a desirable future.

If they hadnt used the children as leverage, I would consider it similar to trying to extort telemarketers..

Li-ion roars can predict early battery failure, MIT boffins say

Just another excuse for more surveillance

Some people just want to listen to the world burning

Starlink outage knocks tens of thousands offline worldwide

There was a period when all the major movie villains had a "bed seth-effrekken exent "

Playing ball games in the datacenter was obviously stupid, but we had to win the league

Hotel fire sprinklers

I think they must be one of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time, but nobody thought through all the consequences.

Sure, flooding the building with an unstoppable deluge of water is better than losing everything to a fire, but we can do better these days.

Third hand account of someone backpacking around north america, working as staff at one of the grand hotels in some national park or ski resort or whatever, and mistakes the sprinkler head as a suitable place to hang a clothes hanger .. much embarrassment as the hotel gets evacuated..

Solid-gold nav bars? Trump plans redesign of government websites

Re: TRUMPIAN STYLE GUIDE

BRAINFARTS FTW!!!

now was that 'for the win', or 'fuck the world' ?

So they are going to modernise the interface standards?

Is it going to be accessible to people who refuse windows 11?

Re: At least last time

Say what you like about facsists but upto now they have had good graphic design expect your accommodation and citizenship status to change

FTFY

AI robs jobs from recent college grads, but isn't hurting wages, Stanford study says

Entry level jobs are important

Already getting it in the mining industry - Autonomous haul trucks mean there are no truck drivers to move up into the jobs requiring judgement and experience.

BOFH: HR plays checkers, IT plays 5D chess

Re: Not a realistic scenario

they are the DEI hire..

In Putins Russia, people still die falling out of basement windows..

Re: he's not enough of an idiot to wander too close to a full-height window that opens out ...

extremely cogent arguments against intelligent design.

I havent seen any supporting evidence for 'intelligent design ',..

The case for 'active malice', on the other hand..

Re: he's not enough of an idiot to wander too close to a full-height window that opens out ...

yes, well, we're still waiting...

Browser wars are back, predicts Palo Alto, thanks to AI

Re: to perform tasks like booking a restaurant or reserving accommodation

Anyone who believes an AI assistant will be even fractionally as capable as a grown up human being... probably expects their Tesla to drive itself, off road, off grid, and without recharging..

Re: to perform tasks like booking a restaurant or reserving accommodation

So agentic AI is doing the same thing as social media, only at the next level..

Social media exists to keep stupid people away from the real internet..

Sadly, stupid people are a literal goldmine to predatory businesses (and existentially vital for politicians), so all the resources and development is going there..

Teen interns brute-forced a disk install, with predictable results

Re: Very lucky escape

3 deadliest threats in IT

An engineer with a patch

A developer with a screwdriver

A user with an idea..

Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't want – here's what we actually need

Stop forgetting Bluetooth

Not every user is looking for an AI chatbot that will listen to their inane hopes and dreams and refrain from laughing...

Some people require computers that interact with other hardware, and bluetooth is a huge improvement over wrangling a cats cradle of cables out in the field - until windows unilaterally turns off bluetooth and wont turn it back on.

Sure you can restart it by doing a full reboot, but why the fuck should you have to?

The ideology seems to be all about cloud and AI and chat, and practical industrial use is just too uncool.

BOFH: Deepfake or just an idiot? We'll need an audit to confirm

Re: Very interesting.

I used to like wobafgkmrns, but, as noted, it is an existing meaningful sequence.

again, drawing from Larry Niven, Kplirapranthry, appropriate for gaining access to restricted whatever..

both can be googled, and it whines about them being uncommon - which is good.

Re: Very interesting.

TANSTAAFOB

(Onion Bhaji)

Re: Very interesting.

Useless01, shirley..

ISS is still leaking air after latest repair efforts fail

Re: Probably easier ...

no idea how the ISS was constructed, but if there is any kind of double hull involved - which would seem likely, as it would be unpleasant having external radiation hitting the other side of the wall you're living against - then the gas will leak into the inter-hull space, then find a way to an exit point - or several. The outer body of the station would be subject to a lot of thermal stress so it is quite likely riddled with cracks. Possibly even opening and closing with thermal expansion making them intermittent leaks.

We all know the way to make an intermittent fault disappear, is to ask a service guy to look at it...

Windows 10 @ 10: How Microsoft led developers round in circles

Both statements can be correct

"WinUI 3 is not dead, I would even say that I see WinUI as the future of Windows desktop development,"

It is dead

It is the future

your future involves rich opportunities for carrion feeders, and loads of fun times for necrophiliacs..

Everyone else has to put up with horrendous stench and serious biohazard risks.

icon - putrescence more apt than bones.

AI agents get office tasks wrong around 70% of the time, and a lot of them aren't AI at all

Click X to install Windows 10

I'd say that Data (him|it)self would be a perfect (for certain values of "perfect") example for an AI at work.

Exactly..

A human being, in makeup, specifically trained and employed to portray something he is not, displaying capabilities it does not have.

xAI's Grok lurches into right-wing insanity, offers tips on assaulting man

On reflection, AI is very like Donald Trump

Even ignoring the obvious cheap shot - that they both spell the end of human civilisation,..

They will create a response without actual competence in the subject.

They dont update their initial presumptions, despite evidence otherwise. Rather, they will reinterpret until the facts serve their narrative.

There is an entire industry devoted to saying they are wonderful, and useful - again, despite evidence.

They may be aware of the existence of morality and ethics, but havent internalized them - not something that applies..

Yes, I am excessively anthropmorphing here, using 'they', referring to them like a person, but it is convenient - and for the AI too.

Teens used encrypted chats to recruit for 'violence as a service' murder ring, Europol says

Are you asking pay rates or success rates?

Saw an article today about similar thing going on in Australia, and the senior police guy saying

"But you have seen how their work is sloppy, back in the day they would have paid a lot of money, flown a hitman in and [the target] would be dead by now."

Bloody useless kids these days.. cant do anything right..

Australian article link

www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-22/sydney-underworld-luring-teens-for-organised-crime/105436462

The launch of ChatGPT polluted the world forever, like the first atomic weapons tests

Re: So how can we clean up the AI environment?

Same as biological systems have evolved over time..

It has to dislike the taste of its own shit.

To do this it does need to be able to recognise it - but thats an implementation problem, and I am being an ideas guy...

Windows 95 testing almost stalled due to cash register overflow

its pretty obvious to all but the willfully blind,

that it is not Legal...

Danish department determined to dump Microsoft

*message on behalf of my partner*

Exactly the same as an OS, Office applications are tools people use to do their jobs.

Being familiar with the application is useful to doing their job well, so actual professionals are not interested in any ideological war over MS vs FOSS or whatever...

Having to learn the tricks of new software will make their lives harder, and they just dont need that in their lives.

*My personal opinion*

MIcrosoft is a shining example of enshittification, and deserves to burn...icon

Re: Well good luck, seriously ...

so although there's some pain in removing Exchange

pain that MS has already put everyone through, with the imposition of 'web outlook',.. Talk about self destructive behaviour, taking the most useful and distinctive component of the Office menagerie, and replacing it with a crippled and hostile substitute - Its kind of Microsofts signature move....

Techie fixed a ‘brown monitor’ by closing a door for a doctor

Once you open them up, they dont work anymore

Trump announces $175B for Golden Dome defense shield over America

Re: May not repeat but it rhymes

My advice is to just ignore his latest bullshit.

I find it better to ignore all his bullshit

Dont read/listen to his announcements/proclamations/whatever.. the noise to signal ratio is so high its all gibberish. Same obviously applies to his talking heads, their job is to sell his brain farts, not make them work.

Wait for the adults to analyse his rambling - dont try and do it if you arent being paid for it, there are mental health risks associated with immersion in excessive stupidity.

And then wait a week for the backflip, or the next squirrel to distract the stable genius...

No-boom supersonic flights could slide through US skies soon

Re: Supersonic flight without an audible sonic boom should obviously be allowed

Wont be a state..

Whatever Puerto Rico is..

Isnt that just a super attractive option for Greenland and Canada..

Qatar’s $400M jet for Trump is a gold-plated security nightmare

Whats the worst that could happen?

..He could continue to 'rule' uninterrupted for his full term, bugger the constitution for more terms, and establish a dynasty, and end the democracy of the United states..

but on a brighter note, maybe the new plane will fall out of the sky as he commutes between golf courses, and his cabinet of sycophants will collapse in disarray as they turn on each other like rats in a sack.

I mean, Trump is mates with Vladimir Putin, and thats an air safety risk right there.

Feeling dumb? Let Google's latest AI invention simplify that wordy writing for you

Re: An AI dumb-downer made in 'murca.

A couple of days ago, I encountered - on youtube - someone had made a video where they were reading out the speech bubbles and text from a comic/graphic novel that I remembered from back in the eighties.. no animation, no highlighting which speech bubble (karaoke style), just shots of the cartoon page, advancing as they went. At least the "creator" didnt include their own head in the frame.

I suppose it may be useful for illiterates and non-english readers, but how did they get that far to start with? And how can you understand a comic style layout without knowing which panel is related to the words being spoken (which is why karaoke highlighting would help).

Also, apart from mentioning the cartoon/graphic novel name, they completely failed to credit the original writer/artist.

A youtube of a comic being read aloud, how far the internet has fallen....