Posts by Alan Bourke

'Small monthly payment' only thing that stands between X and bot chaos, says Musk

Re: re: Suckers hoping to find a bigger sucker

"Shhhhhh..... Or the cult of Musk will be down on you like a Tesla tonne of bricks."

There's few things more pathetic on this earth than Musk stans.

Microsoft Edge still forcing itself on users in Europe

It's like when you download a PDF on Android and go to open it ...

... and there's 50 apps going ME! ME! PICK ME!

Farewell WordPad, we hardly knew ye

Re: slow transformation

"It's already the case that W11 refuses to install without a live internet connection"

Untrue as 2 secs on Google will demonstrate.

Perhaps AI is going to take away coding jobs – of those who trust this tech too much

Ah yes, code 'written' by not-actually-AI.

Full tilt to a future of code grey goo where language models hoover up scads of iffy code written by humans and puke it back out as a sequence of alphanumerics that statistically *look* like an answer to a coding question asked by another human.

It's silly on an autonomous cars are coming next week level.

Bank of Ireland outage sees customers queue for 'free' cash – or maybe any cash

Re: Once upon a time

I remember a thing in the 80s or early 90s where the ATMs were online but propagating transaction information around was slow. So if you had a 200.00 daily withdrawal limit you could take that out, then sprint to another nearby ATM and do it again, because the mothership hadn't been updated yet.

Europe sticks a monopoly probe into Adobe-Figma merger

Adobe are already

a f**king monopoly.

RIP Bram Moolenaar: Coding world mourns Vim creator

RIP

Vim was always too hardcore for me although I did use Vi on the VAX 11\780. The many millions of Vim power users out there are testament to what a great piece of software it is.

Scientists strangely unable to follow recipe for holy grail room-temp superconductor

I'm still sore

that Steorn's Orbo didn't work out.

Linux lover consumed a quarter of the network

A *dozen* CDs, 25 years ago?

Were they not compressed or anything ?

Twitter name and blue bird logo to be 'blowtorched' off company branding

He's such a high resolution, weapons grade

clot.

Microsoft’s Dublin DC power plant gets the, er, green light

Re: Madness. but it is Microsoft so what do you expect

"Guess where the prevailing winds will push that CO2? Yep, the UK and IOM."

Bwahahahaaaaa sweet revenge for all those years of discharge into the Irish sea from Sellafield.

Tesla to license Full Self-Driving stack to other automakers, says Musk

Always remember folks

Autonomous driving is a solution we'll unlikely never have to a problem that doesn't exist.

The AI arms race could give us the cool without the cruel

I think not-actually-AI will have interesting uses

in gaming, for example generating quests that go beyond 'go to x, kill y' and possibly creating building interiors and non-scripted NPC conversations.

Artificial General Intelligence remains a distant dream despite LLM boom

*starting* to see? Patently obvious from day one.

AGI is like fusion power.

Real soon now. Any decade. Really.

The current cavalcade of hype and bullshit about not-actually-AI being perpetrated by people hoping to be in on the ground floor of the next tech bubble like cryptocurrencies is depressing, as is the clueless cut and paste journalism that has the public and politicians thinking that I, Robot is just around the corner.

I suspect in the end the current hoopla will leave us with something like 3D printing - very useful in a limited number of applications.

Forget these apps and AI, where's my flying car? Ah, here's one with an FAA license

Is it flying car time again?

Can't remember what's due next - is it 'Excel is dead' or 'Email is dead' ?

Most people can't drive a ground vehicle properly - why would letting them pilot aircraft be a good idea?

Microsoft rethinks death sentence for Windows Mail and Calendar apps

I see native apps are doomed again

... any decade now, no really ...

Google Photos AI still can't label gorillas after racist errors

So yeah how are those autonomous cars coming along ?

You know, that thing like blockchain where it's a solution in search of a problem.

Microsoft has made Azure Linux generally available. Repeat, Azure Linux

Re: I don’t think I really get it

So your PS3 that wasn't designed to run Linux crashes when running some software that enables you to play ripped games crashes sometimes => Linux bad ?

Re: In love of Bill Gates..(i hate callcentre VPs turn CEOs)

What in the name of sanity are you blithering about,

Why you might want an email client in the era of webmail

Automation is a reason.

For example if your ERP software etc can send ad hoc emails via MAPI.

One of the world's most prominent blockchain apps looks like being binned

Today you could just search\replace 'blockchain' in this

with 'AI'

Microsoft's big bet on helium-3 fusion explained

Rossi's E-Cat anyone? Orbo?

Remember them?

First ever 64-bit version of Windows rediscovered … and a C compiler for it too

Given its dominance on the desktop and corporate server world

and office applications, it appears to still produce useful software. Stupid thing to say,

Actualy came across a 64-bit XP on a customer site.

Just the once.

BT is ditching workers faster than your internet connection with 55,000 for chop by 2030

Re: This is the tulip bubble all over again, isn't it?

Does anyone know when it's 'flying cars' turn for the venture capital and big tech hype train again?

"AI to take over in customer services"

Well, not-actually-AI will have to improve a bit since thus far it seems to be mainly responsible for an avalanche of even-more-irritating Twitter bots.

Large language models' surprise emergent behavior written off as 'a mirage'

Almost everything to do with this current AI-is-trendy-again-venture-capitalist-bandwagon

is a mirage.

Microsoft will upgrade Windows 10 21H2 users whether they like it or not

Re: I've run out of ways to hax0r the gui

You'll be back.

Microsoft signs up to buy electricity produced by fusion, perhaps in 2028

It's an interesting bet\vote of confidence from MS

which I hope comes to fruition, but I'm sceptical of the timeframe.

Meta virtual reality interrupted by financial reality as thousands lose their jobs

And so the long slow death spiral of Facebook

... continues.

Cisco Moscow trashed offices as it quit Putin's putrid pariah state

Re: Nice bit of neutral reporting. Not

They did plenty of comment about that war before, during and after, Captain Whataboutery.

France bans all recreational apps – including TikTok – from government devices

The words stable, door and bolted immediately sprang to mind.

It's amazing to me that this isn't mandatory in every country for every government-supplied device. Especially given how clueless most politicians seem to be about tech matters.

Windows 11 puts 'disgusting' Remote Mailslots protocol out of its misery

Re: Net Send was disgusting.

Please indicate which modern technology that does anything similar to NET SEND and has a 30GB client. While drying your eyes.

Great Graph Database Debate: Abandoning the relational model is 'reinventing the wheel'

Is this like how NoSQL was the death of the RDBMS

despite the fact you can't get a report out of it.

Tesla's self-driving code may ignore stop signs, act unsafe. Patch coming ... soon

Re: Safer than a human driver?

This is the classic American solution to everything. People are obese? Throw pills at it rather than diet and exercise. People are driving drunk? Throw tech at it rather than enforcement.

IBM says it's been running 'AI supercomputer' since May but chose now to tell the world

Great an even bigger monkeys\typewriters affair

than ChatGPT

Microsoft said to be thinking of sinking $10m into self-driving truck startup

Re: Who?

Are you 15 years old or something ?

Those low-code tools devs love so much? They'll grow 20% in 2023, says Gartner

And with all of them

you will hit the edge cases very quickly and realise it would have been better to do it the non-lowcode way.

Elon Musk picks fight with Apple for slashing advertising spend on Twitter

The Muskrat fan club seem to think he'll be releasing his own phone to destroy Apple and Google.

I seriously doubt app developers would develop their apps for a third platform, as Microsoft discovered. Also Apple could buy Twitter from petty cash.

Swiss bankers warn: Three quarters of retail Bitcoin investors are in the red

Why it's almost as if

you know, it's essentially a Ponzi scheme.

SAP injects more low code into ERP platform for non-coding biz types

Low code is all fine and dandy

Until you start hitting the edge cases, and you'll hit them quickly.

Tesla reportedly faces criminal probe into self-driving hype

Re: Autononmous cars

"The world is full of people who cannot drive, for any number of reasons - the young, the old, the blind, the drunk"

The young can learn to drive. As for the old, blind and drunk, see point about funding public transport or subsidising taxis.

"Most cars spend 95% or more of their time parked up, doing nothing."

See point about public transport and home working.

Autononmous cars

still a solution we are nowhere near having to a problem that doesn't exist.

What's that, the problem is that American drivers are shit?

Well I'd spend the money on training, enforcement and subsidising home working and public transpoiirt then.

AI-driven creativity gives overpowered PCs something worthwhile to do, at last

There is no AI involved

in any of this. It's generating patterns based on previous examples of patterns.

STOP CALLING IT AI.

Laugh all you want. There will be a year of the Linux desktop

"Libreoffice > MS Office"

*wipes eyes*

Ahahahahaha. Ahahah. Ah man thanks for that.

You still need to be far more tech savvy

to be a Linux user than a Mac or Windows user. It's got a bit better, but not that much better.

AI recruitment software is 'automated pseudoscience', Cambridge study finds

Like most things on the AI bandwagon ...

... snake oil aiming to attract investor $$$$$

Nuh-uh, Meta, we can do text-to-video AI, too, says Google

See as I generate a pattern of dots!

Based on previous examples of patterns of dots! What's it a picture of? I have no idea! There is no 'I' involved despite the hype!

Is it time to retire C and C++ for Rust in new programs?

Re: Wait a minute ...

Seems to work perfectly fine for hundreds of millions of people. And by 'cognizant' I assume you mean 'Linux snobs'.