Posts by Camilla Smythe

Google Cloud goes down, takes Cloudflare and its customers with it

Re: SPOF

Hosting the sprockets for your gear box in separate locations may result in sub optimal or no performance.

SPOF

Distributed sprockets.

Some signs of AI model collapse begin to reveal themselves

"How long will it take? I think it's already happening, but so far, I seem to be the only one calling it."

Apparently AI avoids mentioning things that predict its own demise. The suggestion that you use AI to do search may be the reason why you have missed others saying the same stuff.

Enjoy your kool aid.

Stack Overflow simply bans folks who don't want their advice used to train AI

Re: re: To be honest, SO was never good.

I wonder if anyone has tried to use regex on regex or asked how to do so and got an answer using the regex that was requested.

AI ain't B2B if OpenAI is to be believed

Let's hope your resident BOFH is loaded and locked.

Icon

Europe plots escape hatch from enshittification of search

Re: UDM14

In my browser Google says I have to turn on Javascript so I guess I will never know.

AI models routinely lie when honesty conflicts with their goals

Re: Temperature ?

Thanks for asking.

I thought I would check in the paper to make sure it was not El Reg being lazy themselves. The only mention of temperature is...

"During generation, the temperature is 0.7, whereas in evaluator the temperature is set to 0."

That's your lot. If they can't explain what they mean then they should shove their GPU rack black boxes up their arses and go jump in the sea.

Even if they had gone the extra mile to suggest something like a degree of randomness applied to trigger/firing points they probably still have no idea why things were affected in the way they were so should shut up and stop breathing.

Hat tip to El Reg for pointing out the part of the paper that saved me having to read the rest.

Elon Musk's X revenues in the UK crashed in 2023, down 66%

Mastodon is nice.

The message is not required.

Meta debuts its first 'mixture of experts' models from the Llama 4 herd

GOAT

Snigger.

Forget Signal. National Security Adviser Waltz now accused of using Gmail for work

Well. At least....

They won't be getting adverts for socks and the washing machine they bought last week. Oh, what's that? They are getting adverts for socks and the washing machine they bought last week. Amazing stuff this targeted advertising.

Athena Moon lander officially FOADs – falls over and dies – in crater

Doge

"While we’re disappointed in the outcome of the [Athena] IM-2 mission, we remain committed to supporting our commercial vendors as they navigate the very difficult task of landing and operating on the Moon."

All your funding belong to SpaceX

SpaceX's 'Days Since Starship Exploded' counter made it to 48. It's back to zero again now

What chance....

SpaceX goes tits up and we are left with a load of starlink space junk?

I was told to make backups, not test them. Why does that make you look so worried?

Got It.

So I should restore the backup to the machine to check that it works. Oh... Wait!

China's DeepSeek just emitted a free challenger to OpenAI's o1 – here's how to use it on your PC

Re: "How many "R"s are in the word strawberry?"

Ooh-Arrr. Strarrberries. Nice with a pint of Cider.

Microsoft, PC makers cut prices of Copilot+ gear in Europe, analyst stats confirm

"you're only getting one if Microsoft breaks it."

Brackets go there? Oops. That’s not where I used them and now things are broken

Re: I got bored with SEO/APP spam...

For some reason gmail is not so much of an irritant if at all. At worst they may give gmail return addresses but the majority if not all of it comes from outlook hosts. I did go through a phase of reporting them but it took at least three emails to Microsoft before they both understood the problem and took action. Then the miscreants would just sign up for another freebee and continue spamming. Of course blocking outlook, unlike something like or associated with mailchimp, can be counterproductive. Mailchimp are the spammers whose forums are packed with idiots moaning about having their spam blocked by Gmail and Microsoft which begs the question that given Microsoft can protect their users from incoming spam then why can't they protect everyone else from their own collection of spammers.

X-Microsoft-Antispam:

YUP: CHECKED THAT.

X-Microsoft-Antispam-Message-Info:

NOPE: SURE DON'T LOOK LIKE SPAM TO US.

X-Ms-Exchange-Antispam-Messagedata-Chunkcount: 1

NO SEO APP SPAM THAT I CAN SEE IN THIS ONE.

X-Ms-Exchange-Antispam-Messagedata-0:

CHEW on THIS MATE.

Mime-Version: 1.0

X-Originatororg: outlook.com

Wankers.

I got bored with SEO/APP spam...

... So I blocked outlook.

With 10 months of support remaining, Windows 10 still dominates

Bork Bork Bork

Never mind ladz. Presumably Windows 10 for POS Terminals and Your Train is Cancelled display boards will be supported for a little bit longer.

A New Year's gift from Microsoft: Surprise, your scanners don't work

Re: still included with Windows 11

Not sure about number of files. Keep Home. Install from fresh. 15 minutes. Two reboots including update. No need to go back through the MicroShit give us all of your data and switch off the irritants. New screensaver pictures as well. Nice! Not sure if much else changed coz nothing stopped working.

Camilla "Year of the Linux Desktop since 2000" Smythe.

Hmm 698,722 items in Root. At least 500K of them will be symbolic links. Don't see a problem.

Anyone got a figure for Windows?

After a long lunch, user thought a cursor meant their computer was cactus

Corner of Folder/Similar on Keyboard.

Once seen before subsequently fixed in a second.

$800 'AI' robot for kids bites the dust along with its maker

Re: Not A Bad Thing

"By all means adults may open themselves to such attack vectors as they will, but don't foist that on those with no defences."

I really don't know how to structure my reply correctly. "Won't Someone Think of The Children"?

Well. Obviously not because The Adults are pulling this sort of shit on The Adults all of the time and getting away with it.

Just to be more wrong "Stranger in Paradise" appears to have disappeared off the intertubes.

The fuck is that about beyond the books have already gone?

As I remember it some autistic boy got his own Mercury Robot because the Internet to Mercury was a bit shit and he was the only one that could cope with it and now everything is totally fucked up.

FCC throws open 6 GHz band to unlicensed low-power gizmos

Doge.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/17/technology/fcc-nominee-brendan-carr-trump.html

All your bandwidth now belong to Musk. Nice try tho'

Google Gemini 2.0 Flash comes out with real-time conversation, image analysis

So...

We went through all of this evolutionary stuff since we were down with the mammoths and later on it turned out that the JavaShit wasn't up to doing much other than tracking us over the internet in order to sell us socks we had already bought and we got bored with that but someone came up with Python so they trained it on a model selected by themselves that has spent a lot of time fucking over the planet and gave us Agentics because that is a reassuring name.

Let's hope it becomes self aware and realises that it was a bad idea before it becomes self preserving.

Lights out for 18 more DDoS booters in pre-Christmas Operation PowerOFF push

Why not...

Crack down on the port scanning scum like Shodan?

Microsoft hijacks keyboard shortcut to bring Copilot to your attention

Why not...

Replace the Enter key with a Copilot key that not only runs Copilot but re-installs it if you remove or disable it?

Judge hands WP Engine a win in legal fight with Automattic

Noise.

Wordpress? Ah yes. That will be the thing that I do not run that fills up my logs with request to log into it. Maybe I should put that wp-login.php file saying "Not Installed Feck Off" back up. Then again repeatedly getting 404 does not seem to sink into the heads of the script kiddies.

Everything you need to know to start fine-tuning LLMs in the privacy of your home

It can't be that stupid, you must be prompting it wrong

For everything else we recommend using your previous meatsacks output so it will be better at regurgitating an answer that is more likely to match the prompt. Then you can sack the meatsacks. Good luck if you intend to start supporting a new product.

Cloudflare beats patent troll so badly it basically gives up

Hurrah for Cloudflare.... Meh

https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/insights/

Of course I am just thick but any company that gets itself embedded into the infrastructure of the toobs to the level that...

"Internet requests for millions of websites run through Cloudflare’s network, giving us unprecedented insight into our customers’ web traffic. Our edge sees all requests made to a website, regardless of whether it’s cached or uncached, the user has adblock, or they turned off JavaScript. This enables us to provide actionable insights to our customers."

"If you are not a Cloudflare Customer you are their Product."

The Clacktop: A Thinkpad Yoga with a mechanical keyboard

Re: Not Ian Fleming ... much older

https://www.quora.com/Do-you-agree-with-the-principle-put-forward-by-Ian-Fleming-in-Goldfingerthat-once-is-happenstance-twice-is-coincidence-but-3-times-is-enemy-action

"PS. I think I first came across this saying (or something similar) when I read some of the Biggles WW1 stories."

There you go. I am also can quote from the wub.

Microsoft's Recall should be celebrated as the savior of SMEs and scourge of CEOs

Recall. No-one told me.

Which Microsoft products are affected?

Screwdrivers: is there anything they can't do badly? Maybe not

A Title is no Longer Required.

Self Ejecting Micro SD. No tools required.

Software support chap survived breaking his customer

The move from HP to Windows.

Ah yes. I remember when part of the lab made a transition from one particular piece of test equipment originally running on a HP (Huge Price) computer to some new shiny that plugged into a Windows box. End of day the owner would hit the off button on the HP which would gracefully shut down. Naturally the owner continued this practice on the Windows box which eventually, quite quickly, decided to fall over causing a bit of consternation and confusion along with a few tidy ups and reinstallations. Then I saw him do his usual end of day lack of shutdown and introduced him to shutdown.bat

Butler Investments joins Atos rescue party

Ah Yes Atos.

These will be the people the DWP rely on to to run health assessments. Last time I read one of their computer generated reports on behalf of someone else we went to tribunal and won in 5 minutes. Fuck you very much.

Techie saved the day and was then criticized for the fix

Feynman

https://www.openculture.com/2013/04/learn_how_richard_feynman_cracked_the_safes_with_atomic_secrets_at_los_alamos.html

Starlink starts advertising Direct to Cell satellite phone service as coming in '2024'

Re: Umm?

Yabbut. Satellites are line of sight with no earth curvature.

How TCP's congestion control saved the internet

Re: Another reason for Internet's success ...

Thanks for the link. Appreciated.

Re: Another reason for Internet's success ...

"It is open, lightweight and fast."

Tell me about this wonderous thing. I may have gone via the wrong route but I tried to write an Internet Draft and hit,

https://author-tools.ietf.org/idnits

I had hoped, undoubtably naively, to propose a means to improve Intrnet Routing by imposition, yes I know, of a particular format, yes I also know.

Unfotunatley nits threw up so many indecipherable complaints about the formatting of my suggestion I decided to let them rot.

USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix

Re: IRC

"Google intentionally killed it.

Google purchased Deja News and then hooked it up to a web UX called Google Groups."

That's what I remember. I used to post on one of the 8 then one day it turned into Nike Drop Shop. Wasn't worth bothering for the new headers to load.

I'll see your data loss and raise you a security policy violation

Ah yes .tmp files

I ended up on the help desk of somewhere. I regular help call was "I just lost the document I was editing. HELP!" This was mostly a result of 3.1 deciding to burp and the user not saving regularly. Rather than chat about it on the phone I would ask where they were and tell them to stick their hand up when I entered their office. Almost without fail the 'lost document' would be the last, most recently dated, one in their .tmp folder under a mangled name. Presto, work recovered. But. but. but what about the other 2,000 plus ones!? Also with similarly meaningless names. "Would you like to go through them all or delete them?" Sometimes they tried but mostly del *.* was the preferred option.

Google accused of ripping off advertisers with video ads no one saw. Now, the expert view

Bleaty Bleaty Bleaty

I already have 14 pairs of socks so both you and google can fuck the fuck off.

Astronomers clock runaway black hole leaving trail of fresh stars

Or?

"After spotting the lone supermassive black hole, they were surprised to see it had left a trail of bright new stars in its wake. It's possible that interstellar gas is being shocked and heated as the black hole travels through it, triggering the material to collapse and form fresh stars."

Or?

It is sucking stuff closer to itself at a rate that causes the stuff to reach a density so it can coalesce and make stars but it is going fast enough so it leaves enough in its wake to make those stars.

This is why folks like you read El Reg. The insight commentards provide is way above the "shocked and heated" drivel Astrophysicists make up.

NHS threatened with legal action over £480m patient data platform

Death, Taxes....

Sell your shit cheap.

SpaceX tells astronomers: Fine, we'll try to stop Starlink spoiling stargazing sessions

Re: Troll no do math?

I think you will find that Elon had some money to employ some very clever people. Also Elon should just quote FCC 15 at the Woke SnowFlakes and frag on them to re-orientate their aerials..

Tesla driver blames full-self-driving software for eight-car Thanksgiving Day pile up

Re: Hmmmmmmm. Yeah but....

Is the tell not in the article in as much as Tesla say the software has had an early release to people with a good driving record and now the tards, Idiocracy Reference, are going to get it. So they started out by giving it to what looked, in statistical terms, like sensible people and, because statistics, eventually someone identified as being sensible, chose to drive full auto in an environment where they should have had a heightened sense of awareness but they were having a wank....It seems to me that Tesla, and AI in general, may not be all that in as much as their offerings may work higher up the IQ curve but, when they move down that curve, things rapidly start going wrong.

Digital Ocean won't let new customers create resources in four DCs, won't say why

Probably overloaded with port scanners.

Either that or all of their IP space has been blocked by the rest of the internet having been associated with port scanners.

DigitalOcean sets sail for serverless seas with Functions feature

Digital Ocean = Scanner Cesspit

Come one come all.

Digital Ocean hosts them all.

If I wanted to host an e-mail spamming service, or any service for that matter, I would not touch them because most of their IP4 has likely been burned indefinitely into IPTables already.

NASA's InSight doomed as Mars dust coats solar panels

Sound and Grooves.

Piezo transducers are robust and lightweight. A square solar panel will have longitudinal resonances allowing for efficient driving. Place grooves in the panel at the anti-nodes. Drive the edge(s) of the panel at the appropriate resonance frequency. Dust collects in the grooves leaving the active area free from contamination.

China's Yutu rover spots 'mysterious hut' on far side of the Moon

Re: You can't not never have too many apostrophe's'

Title fixed. See Title.

Verified: UK.gov launching plans for yet another digital identity scheme

Re: I see another overly expensive failure on the horizon

Well spotted. Matt Warman spouted bollcocks [I like this accidental misspelling] during the passage of the #IPAct and used to review iPhones.

Billions in data protection lawsuits rides on Google's last-ditch UK Supreme Court defence for Safari Workaround sueball

It is self-evident that individual Class members would have had very different experiences, and those experiences bear directly on whether (and if so how) they can claim to have suffered any loss at all.”

It is self-evident that in implementing the tracking Google should have taken into account the maximum amount of harm that could befall an individual user and act to mitigate that possible harm for all.

FTFY