Posts by Bryan W

Debian polls its developers on whether to burn the bots, tame the bots, or let 'em loose

Cool. Most of this is unenforceable posturing, but cool that they're thinking about it I guess.

Chipmakers laughing all the way to the vault as memory prices go stratospheric

Well, it's our fault for outlawing all those other ways to get rich by cheating.

Developer given Mission:Impossible - fixing rubbish code that could crash a city - simply chose not to accept it

Crap code

It is this developer's position that code that works is better than all the imaginary presentations, books, articles, whining and LinkedIn posts about how code should actually be written but no one ever follows. I have never encountered a piece of operational software that is NOT a hot f'n mess outside of the academic sterilized dellusions of FOSS. FOSS is the exception, not the rule, though big tech and friends will happily sell you the courses and tools to meet those unrealistic standards for your in house software.

So the very idea that a working, functioning system is "crap code" not worth working on is funny to me because usually the people spouting that kind of stuff are inexperienced half arsed nitwits regurgitating Medium articles who couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag without importing it from Node and are better suited to selling cloud automation subs to script kiddies who think they are sysadmins.

Microsoft ends one of the last ways to buy VMware without big bundles

Even MS gets it

If you're using VMWare for anything in 2026, you deserve to be put out of business. Their idea of "value" is trapping you in their inane abstractions. Virtualization isn't that hard ppl. Can literally pull it off with any decent Linux distro and Cockpit for free for any SMB use case. Also Windows does it for free, which is surprising. No one actually needs all the BS VMWare creates on top of it all anymore.

Microsoft blames AI for delayed Exchange update, can’t say when it will arrive

Go back to basics Microslop

Microslop is full of idiots now. Real talent left decades ago. Just dunces left, no innovators. Who, with any intellkgence exceeding that of a baked potato, wants to work for that company now? Would you like to be told how to do your job by a pedantic half-baked gaslighting POC? Would you like your work to be ignored by your supposed supervisor(s) and instead fed thoughtlessly into a LLM that might regurgitate someone else's enlightened writings but more likely will just enforce dogmatic BS opinions it found written by LinkedIn loonies? Hahaha.

Not like they are hiring new blood anyways. The brain drain will be epic. Bunch of idiiotic MBAs who think they can script kiddie their way through tech now that they have "AI" to put those pesky expensive engineers who bother to know wtf they are doing in their place.

Need to fire Slopya and put someone with actual vision in charge. Got themselves a Labrador CEO with retriever management chasing other people's bones and making other companies rich in doing so. No one has done more to sell OpenAI, Anthropic and Google's LLM services than Microsoft.

AI researchers let models off the leash – then watched as they tried to add malware to a FOSS project

Solution

Get the ambulance chasers on this one.

Bullshit narrative that these things go off the rails like they aren't doing it on purpose for publicity. Oooh scary AI. F off with it. Sue them.

Hyperscale, hypersensitive: US teacher cuffed for applauding datacenter critics

Re: Stupidity is the most abundant substance in the universe

Yeehaw. When rednecks think they're smart because pedophiles tell them they are.

Prominent Haskell defector pilloried by anti-AI purists

Pilloring?

"The people and ecosystems that use it well are going to move much faster than the people and ecosystems that do not."

That's a sales pitch, not a business strategy. Talking about a future that hasn't happened or even started to pan out yet. No one has taken AI and beat the tech bros at their own game with it. There has been no disruption. No paradigm shift. Just a bunch of delusional wannabes calling themselves software engineers now and a bunch of CVEs. There is no proof that the work "generated" by LLMs is actually faster than any of the more "legacy" processes once you're finally through cleaning up the mess in QC. If there was, we'd have AI firms putting traditional software out of business already. It's been over 2 years since coding was "dead." All we have is downsizing on the assumption AI will fill the skill gap. It has not.

Also, keep telling yourselves the deck isn't absolutely stacked against you with this AI stuff and submit yourself and your org to the all seeing eye out of FOMO and the slim hope you'll be the next big thing and not just put out of business by the AI you spend so much time training on your business domain. Like seriously, did we all forget how this fucking tech works folks? Do you really think you can do anything about it if they decide to fuck you?

They totally won't upload your entire orgs data to their cloud and if they "accidentally" do, they totally promise to delete it without looking at it. Pinky promise. It was only for QC. We can totally trust these guys. /s

People are fucking stupid to fall for this.

Confidential computing's trust mechanism is broken. The fix may not exist

I'm lit

Imaginary architecture is fun. To think all that convoluted nonsense going on "proves" whose talking on the other end of a remote conversation is an exercise in mental masturbation that only puts educated fools at ease once they start tuning out due to all those fancy sounding crypto terms.

Could invest such efforts into better local and on prem infra so this trust BS in some uncaring foreign mega-corp's cloud is a non issue, but nah, let's just play F around with floating point instead because LinledIn says it's the future and we're too lazy and cheap to employ our own boys anyways. Rather pay more for less as long as they don't have to think too much about it. This was always part of the sales strategy.

Git good with Epic Games' new open source VCS, Lore

Another one?

I don't think anyone truly understands how to use git anyways, so I guess it makes sense to try to move on.

Developers build the best tools for developers – and are now defanging the AI menace

AI appologists

The moment this guy lost credibility with me:

> Thankfully, modern practices make it possible to work in massive, distributed teams, swarming around a codebase, working independently toward a collective goal.

In FOSS, sure. Everyone gives a crap about the software so these methodologies work.

In private enterprise, where the status quo is checked out employees paying off student debt, "modern practices" make it possible to do nothing and look very busy at it while still creating a mess no one actually truly understands. AI makes this exponentially easier for the most checked out emplyees. Generating "work" for nitwits to LGTM on their PR because who the fuck actually reads through that stuff? Oh, let's put an AI agent on that task, lmfao.

I literally witness this day to day. These schmucks have LinkedIn anecdotes and think they get to sit at the same table and tell us how to fucking make software? Go sell some SaaS, salesman.

This article is the typical out of touch day dreams of someone who hasn't actually written code of any substance in decades (or ever) hoping that this AI stuff will make them one of us. Spoiler alert: It won't.

Amazon owns up to using 2.5bn gallons of H₂O in its bit barns last year

Chinese Operatives

You spelled "laid off technical professionals and screwed over college grads" wrong.

Sometimes, the truth is not interesting and/or easy enough for Joe Six-Pack™ voter to get their smooth alcohol ravaged brain around. So, yes, data centers will steal all your water and leave you in a blackout. Keep hammering that message so the dumbasses vote accordingly.

AI is making Patch Tuesday (kinda) fun again

Where Mythos?

Odd. I half expected Anthropic to be saying Mythos helped find and fix all these vulnerabilities by now. Nope just the usual LLMs I guess.

That, or they want to see if it actually even works this time before going full throttle with the hype train again, considering how worthless their fantasy "benchmarks" are.

Can't screw up that IPO.

Start spreading the news: Datacenters may face one-year ban in NY

But but but..

But what about the jobs? Economy? Soulless megacorps won't build here if you over-regulate, blah, blah, blah

These things are literally designed to obsolete jobs while competing with us for resources. Da fuq you talking about our economy like you give a F about us?

It's only a 1 yr pause to see how it plays out for the red states. You know they're down bad for this stuff. They can have all of "the economy."

Microsoft reaches for olive branch after public dustup with 0-day researcher

Took em long enough

Bounties and reporting programs from megacorps are a joke. This is literally the situation that first popped into my head decades ago when they started proposing it.

"Sure thing, I work free adding value to your product for the small chance of being paid a pittance and if this arrangement doesn't profit M$ to their liking, they can blame me for 'creating an exploit' instead of 'finding a flaw.'"

Yea, security research is not a fun career. Would rather debug boring stuff and get paid regularly for it without the bullshit hurt egos and mindless profit taking.

Angry devs vow to flee GitHub Copilot as metered billing takes hold

Grab your pitchforks

This disconnect on Eh Aye between idiots playing at being coders because STEM and "those who can" here has been echoed since the first AI code assistants promised vibe coders they didn't have to RTFM.

These wannabes have been spending this time sitting at our tables, in our meetings, in our forums, offering their (read: Claude's) "expertise," burning through our budgets and acting like they know what they are doing by making engineering decisions with us when all they are is a mouthpiece for whatever LLM service they are addicted to. They won't answer questions in real time because they need to ask their outsourced brains off to the side and will try to act like they came up with it. They are absolutely worthless as problem solvers but mediocre at vast quantities of mindless CRUD work.They are either too inexperienced or too stupid to identify these two separate yet interdependent facets of the work and so think this is an "improvement." It is shortsighted and we've been saying this the whole time.

I can ask the LLM and get the same answers they'll give me, errors and lack of insight included. You want to replace humans? Find all the lazy non-thinkers who glommed onto and pushed for this lazy crap. There's your cost center to cut right there.

Every decent engineer I've worked with has only found it useful for replacing that whole "Google for answers" part of our jobs. This fact has not changed no matter how hard they've been hyping the new drug's "agentic" capabilities.

No one worth a damn is using these integrated agents on their actual code base. I copy/paste from chat occasionally and almost every single time it is wrong and needs fixing in some deviously subtle way. Who TF actually getting a job done wants to deal with that? The idea of letting this thing go off leash on any code my name is associated with is ludicrous and I say this as someone who rates their own code as an "ancient dumpster fire that somehow works pretty well."

Finally, and call this a personal point: Anyone who willingly outsources their critical thinking like this doesn't deserve the title engineer or to sit at the same table. These are the people who sit back and let everyone else do the work. Paycheck collectors. Bumps on the log. No wonder the idea of some computer thingies doing their job for them sounds so enticing.

And you C Suites want to pay for this? LMAO

Re: Similar experience for me

Not really. Rather have IntelliSense et. al. stay in its lane and suggest identifier names from a list of actual identfiers in scope and not try to fail at doing my f'n job while I'm doing it.

Google has seriously leaned into AI enshittification lately

Re: My definition of enshittification:

Ya'll complain about this stuff when alternatives that are not FAANG exist yet you don't use them. Do you use Blue sky? Do you use Mastadon? Do you use DuckDuckGo? Do you use Linux? Do you even fucking try? No, it's too hard so you take the easy route and open your anus to these people and say stupid shit like "there's no alternatives" and try to play victim while other.nicers devs with products you are asking for just go out of business.

SaaS outfit ClickUp promises seven-figure salaries for survivors of 22 percent staff purge

Nope.avi

Can't speak for 10x and 100x engineers, but as a probable 5x programmer who has spent the year trying to make AI work reliably: AI slop is not a good replacement for human effort in most domains and the follow up effort required to polish that turd has so far outweighed any gains by an embarrassingly large amount.

Linus Torvalds says AI-powered bug hunters have made Linux security mailing list ‘almost entirely unmanageable’

Truth

People using AI are not software engineers. People who think using AI enhances software engineering are lazy shits you need to remove from your payroll before they cost you a shit ton of money in wasted effort and sloppy code.

The end.

Anthropic’s Bun Rust rewrite merged at speed of AI

Re: I wonder

That's called a fork.

Windows keeps obsolete strings forever to avoid breaking translations

Re: Ah yes, unnecessary strings

I was agreeing with you right up until that last phrase... Did a penguin eat your first born or something? I remember when it wasn't cool to be a corporate bootlicker.

70-hour work weeks no longer enough for Infosys founder, who praises China’s 996 culture

Re: Outsourcing at scale ..

Gotta make sure you keep driving India further into poverty. Wouldn't want them to get wise and start asking for the $50-100k+ salary with benefits and ample vacation they'd be making if they weren't outsourced slave labor.

Tens of thousands more ASUS routers pwned by suspected, evolving China operation

Re: Surprised?

Not everyone can buy a cheap mini PC and put opnSense on it, but they probably should.

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.