Posts by Robert Grant

Datadog allegedly asked developer to kill open source data export tool

While I will wholeheartedly endorse DataDog's platform from a technical perspective, dealing with their sales org (in 2021, anyway) left a bad taste in the mouth. It's not surprising other parts of their business are similar.

What is Google doing with its open source teams?

Re: You thought that?

They've been villified a lot, despite in my mind being the most engineering-friendly cloud platform, and doing loads of good stuff like open sourcing VP8, starting Kubernetes, making AlphaFold, making Go, running Android, etc. They're obviously not perfect, but I think this is to be expected based on the commentary they get in the media.

Microsoft to enterprises: Patch your Exchange servers

Re: Alternatively..

Or buying into the Google ecosystem, which is even less under your control. Although probably has fewer bugs.

Questions asked about Chinese takeover of UK tech company

After our vigorous defence of GIFs I would say everything is in our interest to not allow.

Up to 18,000 Amazon workers in firing line as it chops cost

Re: "job for life" died at the end of the 1980s, Amazon is no different!

If only there'd been some other presidents since Reagan left office.

Some engineers are being paid between $250k and $1m, says salary survey

Re: Too Much Moaning..reading comprehension?

> and while I have neither the time, nor inclination to reply to most of what you say

The correlation between people who have time to tell their interlocuter that they're not worth their time, and people who write walls of text, is once again reinforced.

This article talks about salaries, but levels.fyi is talking total compensation. Not the same.

AWS strains to make Simple Storage Service not so simple to screw up

Re: if S3 were as easy to admin....

I don't see how that relates to my question.

Re: if S3 were as easy to admin....

> AWS shows to me, IMHO, what programmers will create when they have little concern for end user experience

Why do you think it was designed by programmers?

Should open source sniff the geopolitical wind and ban itself in China and Russia?

Re: Weird argument

> The law is 100% clear on this anyway. If your OSS code is used to do something against the law, you go to jail. Depending what they do, which you can’t control, you may well be convicted of genocide. If you don’t like that, *make different choices*.

Can you cite this law?

Elon Musk to step down as Twitter CEO: Help us pick his replacement

Re: He was reportedly already looking for a CEO for the past month

Currently one made of straw, though.

GitHub adds admin controls to Copilot, paints 'Business' on the side, doubles price

Probably not enough :) I think GitLab is the natural replacement, assuming they offer a decent enough service for open source. Where did you go?

A new, unexpected benefit of being an open source developer on GitHub is you get to make Microsoft richer through training GitHub to replace developers.

Embrace, extend... what was the third one? Oh, I'm sure it's fine.

London cops break into gallery to rescue lifelike art installation

> "The work is to provoke and it's definitely achieving that," she added.

While this is the world's lowest bar, I'm not convinced that the story demonstrates it's been cleared.

Google's Dart language soon won't take null for an answer

Re: Grown-up languages

> Safe tools are typically useless tools.

You should definitely be using a safe knife. An unsafe one would just be a blade you have to hold.

AWS joins the water positive gang, claims it will be there by 2030

Re: I can see this ...

While I agree a bit, it would be nice to be able to collect rainwater and use it to flush toilets. Seems we'd have to worry a bit less about reservoirs being as full if one of the bigger water uses was fed from the sky.

> the ultimate test is more water returned to the environment than is supplied, making a particular site water positive.

Does someone think companies should be making water? Or are they just capturing rainwater that would've fallen on to the ground anyway and fed natural processes?

Google frees nifty ML image-compression model... but it's for JPEG-XL

I'm the other way - why on earth didn't they mention the horrific loss of ice-moving jobs when the freezer was invented?

Meta fined $275m after data-scraping fiasco leaked 533m Facebook users' profiles

That would be against the law of unintended consequences.

Linus Torvalds to be 'more hard-nosed' as Linux 6.2 merge window meets Christmas

Are you A/B testing your comment phrasings?

EU still getting its act together on European Chips Act funding

Re: Meanwhile, in the UK...

Our 0.5mm lithography process is second to none!

Too soon? Amazon commissions FTX mini-series

Re: And now a series !

> the shit show

Bit early to say, but you're probably right, given it's made by Amazon.

Massive energy storage system goes online in UK

Re: it can only take the output of about 15 Dogger Bank turbines

> Great, we'll build another 200+, then. Like we built 200+ power stations. Is there some sort of problem with that?

There is a problem if it doesn't do enough. Building 200 more may address today's domestic needs, but as we electrify cars that won't last. And domestic is maybe a third [0] of total electricity consumption, so we'd need more like 600 if we wanted enough batteries to cover all of the UK's usage storage needs if we went to all part-time generation techniques.

If that's the plan, then it would be good to see a total cost of generation that's based on these costs. I find it very hard to compare future generation proposals, because, say, we predict the maximum total cost of ownership of a nuclear power plant, which is then part of its business case, but I struggle to find the same for a renewables-only plan.

What I also find interesting is the amount of power lost to transmission - looks about 50% in the UK [1]. Micro reactors [2] are really interesting for this - you need much less generation if you generate closer to consumption.

[0] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1094628/DUKES_2022_Chapter_5.pdf - chart 5.1

[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1094628/DUKES_2022_Chapter_5.pdf - second page

[2] https://www.power-eng.com/nuclear/westinghouse-sees-a-tech-disrupter-in-its-evinci-microreactor

Intel reveals pay-to-play Xeon features with software-defined silicon

Re: It makes sense for CPUs

I think if I were them I might adopt a similar approach. If they're still trying to lock down their manufacturing automation, then they don't want too many variations in what they are making.

Re: It makes sense for CPUs

> where they are incurring additional cost to install that hardware in every car sold hoping people will upgrade later

Or it's less cost through complexity by making one thing, and configuring it through software.

Software company wins $154k for US Navy's licensing breach

Re: excess licences

The numbers are off by several orders of magnitude for that theory.

Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to 11 years in prison

> Holmes in an emotional speech told the court that she regretted her failings and having failed the employees, investors, and patients she tried to serve.

This is not true - should it be in quotation marks? She didn't fail people she tried to serve; she deliberately claimed for millions of dollars and crazy amounts of press that something that is currently impossible was in the process of being fully industrialised. That's not failing people you tried to serve.

Artemis I isn't just a test run – there's science to be done

> the project is meant to show how commercial tech could aid in future manned space missions

[SpaceX has entered the chat]

Evernote's fall from grace is complete, with sale to Italian app maker

I work in the software as a medical device industry, and in a previous role, PDFing up a tree of Confluence pages formed a major part of our technical file. There were some more old school documents, but the content the important thing. You can add boilerplate to documents if you need to, as well.

I hate to fly the flag for Confluence, but it actually does this pretty well. I think because formatting is relatively constrained, you don't have to worry about some sort of Geocities abomination being produced, the way you do with Word.

Tesla recalls 40k cars over patch that broke power steering

Re: Maybe the roads will last longer

I think the original comment was badly phrased. PS messes up roads because it enables us to drive heavier cars for longer.

Re: Maybe the roads will last longer

Sure, but you can upgrade generation tech once and all the electric cars get cleaner. The best time to start building nuclear power plants is 10 years ago. The second best time is today.

US Department of the Interior seeks $1b single-vendor cloud contract

Yes, having a single vendor definitely cuts carbon. No chance they're completely unrelated.

Tesla rival Rivian posts losses of $1.7b, with worse to come

If we reallocate paper money enough times we could pay for everything a million times over!

(If that's how money worked, we wouldn't need money any more.)

Re: A Steering wheel?

To miss one Autopilot deadline is unfortunate...

Re: F**k me. 12 years to *start* producing an EV....

That's not surprising. Tesla has done something close to miraculous; we can't judge any other company by their standard.

Microsoft tests 'upsells' of its products in Windows 11 sign-out menu

Re: perhaps you misunderstand

There is gaming progress being made by Steam. That's quietly big.

LG debuts thin malleable screens made from contact lens material

> it's also scary that any surface at any time could be used to show advertising

Perhaps. But it's far less scary than almost any actual bad thing.

Imagine if this could be used to make contact lenses with HUDs!

Sizewell C nuclear plant up for review as UK faces financial black hole

Re: Daft

You seem to have jumped to the closest pattern match. Of course people do this, but they mostly don't. They mostly invest it where they can. We've just had 2 decades of low interest rates, and people haven't squirreled their money away somewhere else with higher rates. They've pumped it into startups and scaleups. Tech salaries are a good indicator of this.

Chipmakers cripple products to dodge US China ban

Re: I do wonder...

Remember when you just had to install a separate .jar file from the same java.com website to unlock the high strength cryptography in Java?

Nitrux 2.5: The latest update to a radical Linux

Re: Wish Nitrux well, but appimage? No thanks

You know you've made it when your abode has an official PDF reader.

Re: Wish Nitrux well, but appimage? No thanks

What's the matter with appimage? I'm only a light Debian user and don't understand such things. Is it that all the dependencies are bundled with each thing you want to install?

You fire 'em, we'll hire 'em: Atlassian sees tech layoffs as HR heaven

They may have all the best strategists in the world, but team-managed Vs company-managed projects is still rubbish.

Microsoft mulls cheap PCs supported by ads, subs

This explains why systemd is getting an ad server

Don't worry though. It's TPM2-compatible!

Version 252 of systemd, as expected, locks down the Linux boot process

Re: This is the best advertisment

I somehow lost a tiny bit of trust in Debian for not being on this list.

Royal Mail customer data leak shutters online Click and Drop

Re: "The root cause is now under investigation."

These things seem to happen more in the public sector, or at least the really silly ones happen there. As much as I oppose the RM privatisation, this is just not the case. Private companies don't want security breaches either, and spend a lot to prevent them.

Apple perfects vendor lock-in with home security kit

Re: Electronic locks just add another mode of attack

You probably already have another door on the house with a keyhole, so having a version without a keyhole shouldn't increase the number of attack vectors.

Shareholders slam Zuckerberg's 'terrifying' $100b+ Metaverse experiment

> That's 3.7 times as many employees as the BBC.

That makes it sound much more reasonable.

India's – and Infosys's – favorite son-in-law Rishi Sunak is next UK PM

Re: it is not easy (or necessarily possible) to define where income was generated.

> the income is "generated" where and when it leaves the customer's bank account; i.e. that the customer determines the tax location.

This is what VAT is for. Corporation tax is taxing the inner workings of a business, rather than just the end result.

Re: You're all smart people (cough cough)

People can't tell the difference between people not paying taxes they should pay, and not paying taxes they shouldn't pay.