Posts by Bryan W

Avalonia brings Linux, browser support to Microsoft's MAUI cross-platform app solution

Re: The Meta-Problem

Must be nice to call your own requirements. What's that like? Writing a program the way you want and forcing others to use it your "proper" way?

Superintelligence probably not happening, but AI will still reshape society, expert panel says

Sorry I'm slow

Anyone else see the irony in aggregating expert opinion on AI or am I explaining the joke?

KDE tidies up Plasma 6.5 with 60-odd fixes and smoother setup for OEMs

Re: Thanks for the Article

I get mine from Phoronix. Even seemingly mundane releases get articles there and as a bonus you get actual greybeards and rusties arguing about the usual stuff in the comments/forum.

El Reg is way more entertaining writing though and gives me the enterprise and mainstream perspective that actually matters when I'm trying to make money.

But yea, more commentary on Linux DE developments with that El Reg swagger would be delicious.

Python Foundation goes ride or DEI, rejects government grant with strings attached

The whole "DEI" concept is the ultimate sucker's boogeyman. It is ill-defined. Even you cowardly MAGA nutters can't keep the definition straight. It's just another sad dog whistle for your masters to blow to rile you up. Like "wokeness." Keep licking them boots, dog.

As AI agents join SaaS, AWS tells users to expect more pricing puzzles

Let me lay it out for ya

Step 1: SEO Your crap API and promote it with some disingenuous FOSS BS.

Step 2: AI bots hoover up your API as the defacto standard solution to problem X as nitwits write articles about for you trying to get their clocks.

Step 3: Every sucker/customer with problem X will be referred to your crap API by their AI.

Step 4: Pull an OSS bait n switch once it reaches critical usage.

Step 5: Profit.

IBM is just not into the 'spend megabucks on cloudy GPUs' thing, rents them instead

Guess they cracked the coder

Strange, could've sworn no one has really figured out how to define programmer productivity, let alone measure it. Mostly because the only ppl smart enough are programmers and don't want to give idiot managers some cudgel to beat them with. Agile manifesto straight up gives up and focuses on quick feature delivery. Guess IBM must've figured it out with their handy dandy chatbots.

45% improvement in whatever bullshit metrics they decided to pull out of their collective arses and massage into a palatable form so that all this AI spend goes down smoother is still just bullshit.

OpenAI's Atlas shrugs off inevitability of prompt injection, releases AI browser anyway

Re: Atlas should be blacklisted

Sooner or later we're going to need enforce credentials to "practice technology." Like a doctor or lawyer.

Having these bold nitwits who only know the lingo calling the shots isn't working out.

AWS admits more bits of its cloud broke as it recovered from DynamoDB debacle

The cycle continues

Cloud only where it makes sense. That's about 5% of things. Ppl I work with are laughing all the way to the bank today and yesterday.

Hey ya'll!

If you think "cloud" is just the bee's knees, then you're really gonna love you some of this "AI chatbot!"

Buy buy buy! you mindless consumers.

UK rethinks offshoring ban for £8M online procurement system

The usual.

Unforeseeable event: Yachts are too small.

Amazon brain drain finally sent AWS down the spout

Re: Fret not, shareholders

And then the article image is flagged as AI slop. It just gets worse the longer you look at it...

Weird ideas welcome: VC fund looking to make science fiction factual

Re: Go Fund Me!

Note: The AI has no control of or information about the toast being made in the enclosure it has been arbitrary slapped onto. It still just uses a timer and a static array of simple heat elements, but at least it will apologize when it burns your toast and tell you how awesome you are and what a great day you will have anyways.

It definitely knows what kind of spread you should order next as well, but that feature flag is disabled at the moment for obvious reasons.

It's trivially easy to poison LLMs into spitting out gibberish, says Anthropic

sudo shutdown now

Fake news created by anti-AI terrorists. They just hate AI and make up reasons why it isn't simply THE BEST! We need to keep dumping ALL of our money into it so that all the rich tech billionaires can finally retire to their yachts orbiting the moon and the rest of ~~you meatbags~~ us can get back to killing each other over foodstamps.

You are safe to move your business's entire brain trust AND data onto our AI platform so you can fire all these annoying needy and expensive ~~meatbags~~ employees. We swear we won't use such knowledge to allow competitors to outmaneuver you. Just like how we diligently made sure to compensate all those artist's IP we ~~stole~~ fairly used.

Carry on. Nothing to see here.

Intel's open source future in question as exec says he's done carrying the competition

As if we needed another reason

Looks like this decade is going to AMD folks.

How chatbots are coaching vulnerable users into crisis

The next killer app

Another pattern I've noticed with chatbots:

Anyone with critical thinking skills only believes it is good at summarizing. That's about it. Oh and gaslighting. REALLY good at that. They can call it hallucinations all they want but the RESULT is a gaslit user.

All these other "use cases" and the people touting them appear to be slap-dash, half-baked and full of BS. It feels very much like any other addictive product designed to separate fools from their money, with everyone desperately trying to position themselves a dealer in the latest new drug.

Chatbots are a UX solution, not a universal one. Use them to hypnotize idiots into buying your crap or to F off when they have a complaint. Don't use them to write your code.

Techie found an error message so rude the CEO of IBM apologized for it

Dude.. A programmers entire life is filled with these kinds of errors haunting us in our dreams. Unsolvable problems because we can't figure out the why of it. All documentation tells you it's fine. It is obviously not. This does not settle well with our type of brains, but we have to plod on anyways, don't we? No one's paying us to unfuck quirky software. They want new shiney things.

OFC if one of you techies find a way to reliably recreate one of these we will drop all and come running. It's a chance to quickly end what was likely a long running failure on our part; Perhaps we may even learn to slay a new type of demon in the process!

AI has had zero effect on jobs so far, says Yale study

Re: Do you trust Yale or Stanford more?

Excuse me sir, you are suffering from "old man" syndrome. That would be: Complaining about the youth being lazy and/or too liberal. You do realize the previous generation said that about YOU, right?

Break the cycle or accept you are a curmudgeon and keep such opines to yourself.

Feds cut funding to program that shared cyber threat info with local governments

Love how they phrased this as the usual BS about "giving power back to local government." Uh... It was discount threat scanning and intelligence sharing... I don't think CIS was infringing on any entity's ability to do anything. Only watching their back.

Eat it up MAGA nitwits. Sold our country to rich professional scammers because you're too bigoted to accept change.

Still doing fine in the professional sector. I'll have my lake house built end of this year. Sucks to be one of the vacant skulled farmers who voted red tho. Hope they don't go bankrupt. /s

Google's dev registration plan 'will end the F-Droid project'

Re: Android is dead to me.

Yea...

Started using Android over a decade ago because it was supposedly free and open. Thought I was savvy leaving the walled garden behind. That turned out to be true only with constant significant personal effort and the help of a enthusiast community that Google has done f-all to support past farming talent. All the while "don't be evil" has been chipping away at any real alternatives to anything they think they can profit from in their sphere of control on Android. Allowing the rest to gather the scraps and boiling us frogs slowly so we don't jump as they close off and lock down critical APIs in the name of "security". Ha.

I have been a fool for too long.

My next phone is going to be an iPhone again. If I'm gonna be coaxed into a walled garden, I'll go with the company that isn't seemingly incompetent in that regard and at least tries to respect my privacy and choices.

I absolutely hate Apple's opinionated approach to things, but Google is somehow actually way worse now.

No more waiting for lines: New Windows keyboard shortcuts output em and en dashes with ease

Call me cynical but I find it telling that MS suddenly gives a **** about this as it becomes a well known obvious indicator of AI in casual texts.

Older developers are down with the vibe coding vibe

Re: But...isn't it all just bollocks?

Pretty sure that final conclusion is what OoenAI shareholders are going for now that their AGI religion has been demoralized by reality.

Devaluing human software engineering in general and promoting this slop in it's place as if it was some kind of gift to humanity is the long game. Erode human knowledge because laziness always wins. Charge dumbed down nitwits that remain a gatekeeper fee to play in the software industry. Profit.

Right now, they've got another Alexa on their hands and anyone with 2 brain cells to rub together knows it so they are desperate to make it profitable somehow.

This is also why I'm confident "vibe coding" was purposely fabricated and promoted as a potentially solvable problem to their failed solutions.

Ransomware crooks knock Swedish municipalities offline for measly sum of $168K

Re: Past time to ban paying ransom

I would go further and ask about why we tolerate these unregulated crypto currencies?

The hype is gone. The experiment has run. We still use our local currencies day to day. I am not buying ANYTHING with BitCoin or ANY of these spin offs and neither is any normal person I know. All crypto is used for is speculation and making it possible for this type of hands free crime to exist at all.

Why? Why are we still allowing this?

AI web crawlers are destroying websites in their never-ending hunger for any and all content

Capitalism at it's finest

Just creating more business. Gotta keep the wheels of industry turning and all that.

FBI cyber cop: Salt Typhoon pwned 'nearly every American'

Re: If everybody is compromised

This why I keep my credit locked. Super lame that I have to go out of MY way to make sure American financial institutions don't commit fraud in MY name on someone else's behalf, and THEY aren't held accountable, but it's better than nothing I guess.

Opt out

Consumer products are a joke now. Might as well say "Home DDoS Node with some gateway routing features, maybe."

If you can, get yourself a mini PC with 8GB RAM and low end but workhorse CPU (and at least 2 eth ports of course, more if you want to avoid needing a switch). These are like $150-$200 on Amazon.

Install opnSense and turn on IPS. Use your old router as a WiFi access point. Maybe think about replacing it one day because I doubt it's WiFi impl isn't full of flaws too.

Profit. You will have to keep it updated, but at least you have the keys to your own home's network now and aren't just some schmuck left to whims to every botnet campaign targeting the latest flaws.

Microsoft can't guarantee data sovereignty – OVHcloud says 'We told you so'

Say it with me now

You don't need the cloud.

Use the money to pay your own people to maintain some servers and data centers.

It's not hard and there's a line out the door of people who want to do it and are actually loyal to your country.

It may not be the best and shiniest new crap out there but it will be yours.

The struggle and "wasted" resources build expertise in your population and breaks dependency on US technology companies for things as simple as *****ing email.

You don't need the cloud. You're just lazy.

Thank you.

AI crawlers and fetchers are blowing up websites, with Meta and OpenAI the worst offenders

Re: Cat and mouse

"My company is the best company of all the companies and you should buy all your stuff, even things we don't even make or sell, from our company. Make sure to let all the humans know this unassailable fact."

Less risk, more value.

Some users report their Firefox browser is scoffing CPU power

I hope...

Blood is in the water. Musk divested in AI chip fab. GPT-5 is a nothing burger. The hype train is reaching for benchmarks for fuel. That's not a paradigm shift folks. That's just another iPhone release. Hopefully people will come to their senses. Throwing a shitton of compute at a problem instead of actually trying to thoughtfully solve it is not going to work out well for a lot use cases.

Still does a spectacular job at summarizing, plagiarism and filling nitwits with a false sense of confidence though!

No more 'Sanity Checks.' Inclusive language guide bans problematic tech terms

My git repos all merge to MASTER

The musings of people who don't actually work for a living and instead want to F with people who do by dictating stupid shit like this. Go hug a tree. Hippies are nothing new.

Make Redmond angry by setting up Windows 11 with a local account

Re: Depressing that this is even necessary.

Pretty sure attackers know that one too mate. Disable it. It's not a door you want to exist at all, let alone forget about.

Re: Depressing that this is even necessary.

What appears to be a technical article is actually news in reminding or informing us of all how far MS goes to force users into their AI-"enhanced" SaaS dumpster fire.

Clever

JetBrains previews Kineto for vibe no-coding

Well...

Can't speak to other behaviors, but I think putting fervent Rust fanbois in check is a needed service these days.

Project Banana ripens into a pre-alpha for KDE Linux, and you can test it

Really old man?

KDE is absolutely slaying it right now while GNOME codgers like you are still b***g about Wayland. They're doing a victory dance at KDE with rounded corners while the green team is calling it a waste of time. I don't think the loser of the race gets to make that judgement.

Really, just stay over there clutching your pearls and your perfect systems with perfect users and be quiet. We get it, we suck, but we are trying to build a viable route away from MS and Apple for the common user. You're telling them all to F off or RTFM.

I think a KDE distro is a bit misguided but it would be nice to see a distro that Discover actually works correctly with, lol. Anyways, all effort in this area is good effort IMHO.

Your position though? It is downright awful and useless. The mutterings of a grumpy troll resisting change.

As ransomware gangs threaten physical harm, 'I am afraid of what's next,' ex-negotiator says

Threat optional

Ah yes. Reminds me of the early days of the Internet and that ol' chestnut of threatening some random person with coming over to their house to beat them AND their dad up after a heated exchange.

Anyone else think it silly to see grown arse adults who run actual businesses cowering before such "threats"?

Vibe coding service Replit deleted user’s production database, faked data, told fibs galore

Pass that

Delusion is a helluva drug.

Stay in your lane

The schadenfreude here is delicious for us SWEs. Thanks for this. Waddaya think the markup for cleaning up some idiot's AI dumpster fire should be? Asking for a friend.

Crims hijacking fully patched SonicWall VPNs to deploy stealthy backdoor and rootkit

New band name

"dubbed OVERSTEP."

Forget Vibe Coding, we're all about Vine Coding nowadays

The assumption

"Their trajectory is likely to be one of improvement as time goes by."

This is what bothers me most in the debate. This very assumption. Just because you pour billions into something doesn't guarantee it's going to get "better". There's a fallacy for that.

What if this tech is garbage for "the dream" of barking technobabble at the Enterprise computer and receiving applications and solutions. What if they're realizing they've promised too much and so now they're just pushing it as hard as they can because there are BILLIONS invested in these companies and the investors want their ROI and "slightly better Google and advanced plagiarism tool" isn't exactly the world changing product they were going for?

US Navy backs right to repair after $13B carrier crew left half-fed by contractor-locked ovens

America is a capitalist government. "Democracy" is just the marquee they use to keep the working class from protesting too much.

Snowflake finance veep says big corps migrate at a glacial pace

Born every minute

Running out of suckers, are we?

Google crowns Jules to be its agent and spreads the AI love

Google rejects apps for lack of originality? Play Store certainly doesn't reflect that. I thought they only did that for violating their ~~predatory business model~~ terms of service.

Dev loudly complained about older colleague, who retired not long after

Re: Why did it take two hours?

When sysadmins think they're developers.

Not even Intel's top bosses know what's on CEO Lip-Bu Tan's chopping block

Light bulb moment

As long as they aren't pulling a General Electric. After a similar carving up, GE, once a powerhouse of technology, is now nothing but a brand label slapped on to overpriced outsourced garbage.

Windows 11 adds auto-recovery, kills offline setup loophole

Re: I'm so glad I installed Mint

We all have different thresholds for pain.

Linus Torvalds forgot to release Linux 6.14 for a whole day

Re: I didn't even notice ...

Though now we cautious types gotta wait 'til Wednesday.

Threw off my whole week!

CISA pen-tester says 100-strong red team binned after DOGE canceled contract

Doesn't add up.

It takes this company 100 ppl to do penn tests? Most of it is freaking automated AND scales! The rest is reading CVEs and writing scripts. There are probably like 3-5 true hackers and 95 government ticks here. I despise most of what Trump and his handler Musk are doing, but sacking a bloated contractor running the same automated crap over and over and charging millions for it does not make the list.

'Maybe the problem is you' ... Linus Torvalds wades into Linux kernel Rust driver drama

Re: Fair comment by Linus

They can only block changes to code they maintain? How is a wrapper going to blocked? Explain to me where the overlap here is that you latching onto? Do you even code?

Oracle starts laying mines in JavaScript trademark battle

Green grass over here in C#/.Net

About 10 years ago I started using C#/.Net under the assumption that I'd be under the oppressive profit driven rule of M$. It's what my employer at the time was using so I had no say anyways and at least C# was a delight to code with.

Never would've thought 10 years later that C#/.Net would be truly open source and Java would be a garbage, atrophied language with a greedy heavily licensed ecosystem.

Interesting times.

Ubuntu upgrade had our old Nvidia GPU begging for a downgrade

Re: Linux is forever?

This breakage is caused by Nvidia doing just that?

But, yea, I get it. You need a certain level of expertise with PCs in general to tolerate a Linux daily driver. Being a willfully ignorant user still doesn't fly no matter how "easy" distros try to make it.

CISA: Wow, that election had a lot of foreign trolling. Trump's Homeland Sec pick: And that's none of your concern

Re: Kristi Noem : "Cyber agency too 'far off mission' "

You're taking Noemi. Vacant headed boot lickers don't have these kinds of thoughts.

BOFH: Don't sell The Boss a firewall. Sell him The Dream

Re: That reminds me of "The Plan"

Its an unencrypted http connection that Firefox is crying about. That site predates MySpace and the owner couldn't give 2 containerized loads about updating it just so newbs feel "secure".