Posts by Evil Auditor

Final step to put new website into production deleted it instead

And

new_website_backup_old.tar.gz

old_website_backup_new2.tar.gz

Re: Ah, the old "rm -rf *" command

...and even after the same triple check, I did get it wrong. (Those bloody machine names, they all look the same to me...)

KPMG partner in Oz turned to AI to pass an exam on... AI

Luckily, sometimes this behaviour faces consequences. 2022 EY was fined around USD 100 mio. by the US SEC for some of their staff had been cheating in CPA exams, appropriately in the ethics part of the exam.

There's a "not" missing.

Enforcing piracy policy earned helpdesk worker death threats

Re: Why wasn't the violent idiot fired immediately and the cops called?

I find that well known and oft cited soundbite to be utterly meaningless and redundant

I don't think it is meaningless nor redundant. But it's more difficult to clearly define "consequences" than what is already covered within criminal law for hate speech, instigating violence etc. For example, if I spread racist shit, which may still be within legal limits and not punishable, I might face consequences of losing my job, my reasonable friends, being rejected from doing business... and at least in my jurisdiction it will be difficult for the racist shit spreader to win an anti-discrimination law suit under this circumstances.

Re: Why wasn't the violent idiot fired immediately and the cops called?

Fully agree.

Anyway, report to management and make it gets reported to authorities.

And yet, there might be a problem of evidence for such a threat (and other misconduct, too)... but if it hasn't been reported with authorities in the first place, there is no track record if something happens again and it will be more difficult for authorities to take appropriate action.

Has working in tech support put you in an unsafe situation?

On a lighter note: only for having to touch disgustingly filthy keyboards.

Tech support chap invented fake fix for non-problem and watched it spread across the office

I might have told this story here before. Young me was trusted with walking a bunch of interns through the process of exposure, development and etching of PCBs. The setting: a lab containing some stinky chemicals and shielded from UV radiation to prevent accidental exposure of the PCBs. One of the interns asked whether we could open a window to let in some breathable air. Of course, we couldn't as this would not only let in fresh air but also UV radiation. Silly young me's response though was, no, for reasons of environmental protection we cannot let that air out into the open.

None of those poor interns was willing to join us.

And some time later, via an acquaintance, I was told that, apparently, my very company lets people work in hazardous environments without any protection. I knew that was rubbish because safety had truly been a core value of the company. But it took me quite a while to make the connection...

Microsoft declares 'reliability' a priority for Visual Studio AI

..."reliability is the priority" for AI in Visual Studio...

So, they are going to remove AI from VS then.

Three clues that your LLM may be poisoned with a sleeper-agent back door

Re: yes ... 1000000000000000000000%

I get your point. But the difference is that the entity producing and selling the car (not necessarily selling directly to the customer) does indeed fully understand" how the car works. Whether the salesperson understands it, is irrelevant.

*_{Given the issues my car has with its entertainment system, I do wonder whether the manufacturer fully understands it. Well, it's a piece of software...}

If I understood correctly, the LLM reacts differently when it detects the trigger (or part of it). How to detect that anomaly, I do not know.

Re: Given the nature of the ...

Typically, I'm not an advocate for regulation. In the case of "AI" though, I think the EU AI Act is a step in the right direction. Even if a rather wordy step.

Banker claims Oracle may slash up to 30,000 jobs, sell health unit to pay for AI build-out

Re: Ask

No. And neither did they ask themselves or anyone or anything else.

"...when did they abandon reason for madness?!"

Why does Oracle Crop (sic) not slash 160'000ish employees to pay for the AI to build itself and relieve the world of their existence?

/sarcasm

No one talking about a datacenter could be a sign one is coming

Re: Locked comment voting

Instead of commenting to a random article, you've got more of a chance of being heard when you write them: contact El Reg

House of Lords votes to ban social media for Brits under 16

Not only easier but it would also solve a whole lot of other problems over the next 50ish years. And then, finally, those bloody isles can be repopulated with reasonable people and there will be no one left to complain about immigration.

Or did I misunderstand your comment?

S Twatter: When text-to-speech goes down the drain

An Italian acquaintance really likes to go to the bitch, a white, sandy bitch.

But an English teacher for foreign students once amused me with a anecdote of one of her students, a German business man, who used to talk about his "very impotent client".

Chinese spies used Maduro's capture as a lure to phish US govt agencies

Re: Airport transfer

ICE will arrange the return journey.

Sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that! PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch

No shutdown problem here, besides, nothing that the power switch wouldn't solve. But after the update I had to jump through some Administrator hoops to convince the ordinary user accounts to connect to local data drives again.

Wine 11 runs Windows apps in Linux and macOS better than ever

Indeed! I still have PTSD from attempting to re-engineer an MS Access "solution" for accruals calculation.

Back in the 1990s, moving (and merging) a Word document from one PC to another would screw up the formatting.

Most devs don't trust AI-generated code, but fail to check it anyway

Re: AI scraping AI, model collapse?

...they are beyond hope and it is too late to try to explain...

I know. But I cannot just cull them, can I?

Re: AI scraping AI, model collapse?

I'd be happy if only accountants were the problem. My struggle is, when I'm forced to futilely explain to a colleague that they cannot simply trust what comes out of a GenAI.

_{In Idiocracy, at least, if I remember correctly, they did recognise that there was a problem and tried to find someone who could help. We're not there.}

Re: There are a lot of bad devs out there

Indeed. And that corresponds to the software products of questionable quality that we face every day.

Ultimate camouflage tech mimics octopus in scientific first

Re: Clever, but...

Keep in mind, it doesn't need to be the most thickliest, best gold layer. It simply needs to claim to be. Pitch it as 1-inch, 25-carat gold plated - hell, 5-inch, 48-carat gold plated!!

Techie turned the tables on office bullies with remote access rumble

Hey, I didn't know this at that time, mid 90s.

That reminded me of the innocent fun I used to have with loosely (lousily?) protected Linux boxen at university. Remote logon to a fellow students machine and initiate shutdown with a ten second delay (or was it five, or three?) and watch and hear their reactions... No real damage done as all that was going on was students torturing C++ or vice versa. And it took an astonishing long time before someone figured to check the log...

Finnish cops grill crew of ship suspected of undersea cable sabotage

Re: The Register is just another American propaganda tool

I'm a thorough atheist but Jesus Freaking Christ! Some people here need to take their medication. Or get off the interwebs. Guys, it's not healthy to consume that amount of misinformation. It's enough that in real life I already have to deal with some "conspirationalised" people and some I like to call Putin's Suppositories.

_{And before one or both of you misinterprets my comment as a call for censorship, it is not. Feel free to continue posting whatever you want. As I feel free to comment on that the way I see fit.}

Re: Logical Next Step?

We escalate...

Who is "we"? The one party that is escalating in this conflict is nothing that I'd ever consider to be included in my we nor in the wes of any state bordering the Baltic Sea besides Russia.

Pizza restaurant signage caught serving raw Windows

Re: I recently 'dined' at Luton Airport

Nope. Few months later, when you use the same e-mail address to create an account somewhere else, you get a pop-up informing you that this e-mail address was compromised in a data breach.

New boss was bad, his attitude was ugly, so the tech team pranked him good

I don't think I was ever involved in a prank that was that unsafe - neither on the giving nor the receiving end. But, I quite a few things we used to do "in the good ol' days" would be considered harassment or bullying nowadays...

Re: "Have you used tech to prank colleagues, and gotten away with it?"

Tech was simpler then. And mischievous pranks did not end with summary dismissal.

Indeed. Mid 90s I wrote a tiny program and e-mailed its executable to a nice colleague. All the program did was displaying a funny message (as decoy, probably it was a silly joke).

...and then check whether it ran from a certain location. If the program ran anywhere else, copy itself to this location and add a line in autoexec.bat to call the program at that location. Else, initiate a reboot.

And the next morning the reboot cycle began...

User found two reasons – both of them wrong – to dispute tech support's diagnosis

Just talk to them like a father to his feeble-minded child.

While I fully agree with you, from my distant past in helldesk I do remember one user (and only one) who was absolutely immune to any sort of teaching.

Re: Admirable restraint on the part of "Mike"

Cattle prod for the first wrong reason. Open second floor window for the second.

X sues to protect Twitter brand Musk has been trying to kill

Pining for the fjords?

BOFH: If another meeting is scheduled, someone is going to have a scheduled accident

You're darn right! Out of curiosity I've switched off the ad blocker. And still regret it.

I'm becoming one of those crusty old farts I knew when I was starting out in computing. The ones who thought that Ethernet would never take off and that 9,600 baud was high speed...

I'm becoming one of those, too. And I know why. Partially, because I'm getting old. And partially because of stuff like this: The Truth About AI.

Airbus exec: Most CIOs in Europe will not finish SAP ECC6 migration by 2030

Airbus is also targeting moving to cloud-based S/4HANA, driven partly by necessity.

The necessity being SAP's revenue maximisation.

Porsche panic in Russia as pricey status symbols forget how to car

Re: How time changes things...

That would truly be amazing! But no, the gearbox had been grinding its teeth much, much earlier. It probably started when rolling out of Hethel...

Re: How time changes things...

Lots Of Troubles, Usually Serious. Confirmed. Fifty years old and ate its own gearbox but, at least, not vulnerable to any cyber satellite threat.

Diversion to power datacenters earns Boom Supersonic a ticket to revive fast air transport

Re: Making Earth more accessible than ever

You're right, of course! Silly me was just thinking "what the heck is he on about? I open the front door, step outside, and there it fucking is: a fully accessible Earth. Does he want to remove my door to make it _more_ accessible?"

Turbines built for conventional aircraft, he asserts, can’t be adapted into datacenter power plants

I must have been hallucinating then, at a time, about twenty years in the past, when I believe that I saw -and heard and felt and smelt- a couple of Rolls Royce aircraft jet engines that were adapted for stationary use to power a large data centre. Surely, Blake Scholl must know for he is more cleverer than I ever was.

Affection for Excel spans generations, from Boomers to Zoomers

Re: When you need a spreadsheet...

I do use LibreOffice; maybe now not its latest release. But while I still find its usability far superior to Excel, it does (did?) lack behind with functionality. Did it catch up in the meantime?

Re: Excel is not bad

I wish I had a job where it was explicitly forbidden and people were forced to store and analyse data in a real database...

Absolutely.

Unfortunately, like many others, all we get are lousy (customizable) reports on lousy data in a lousy tool with very limited connection to financial data. Hence, I'm really glad that I can fiddle around with Excel and its native array functions.

IBM touts progress on tech stack for AI-enabled airline with no passengers or alcohol

AI native. To make both work conditions for staff and travel experience for passengers to feel even more like hell.

Re: What?

Simple: less HR staff. And even less useful HR services.

China’s first reusable rocket explodes, but its onboard Ethernet network flew

Thumb up!

But the CCP's Thought Police scheduled a meeting with you. Watch out!

Untrained techie broke the rules, made a mistake, and found a better way to work

Re: “knowledge shared is overtime lost”

sounds like you've never worked in the civil service.

Or at a Big Business Bank for that matter...

EU metes out first-ever Digital Services Act fine, dings X for blue check deception

"It’s an American company, European law is irrelevant."

Under a very basic - i.e. reduced beyond its minimum - reality, it does make sense. Because this.

/irony