Posts by The Indomitable Gall

News Corp labels some AI companies 'crass kleptomaniacs'

"Woo and sue"

Woo and sue? Are they admitting that most of their stories -- particularly the health-and-wellbeing ones -- are "woo" then...?

An off-grid AI sounds like a great survival assistant, but is better left to roleplaying the zombie apocalypse

The "coffee is hot" thing is a totally unfair playing down of all things H&S.

This all starts with the Stella Liebeck v. MacDonald's case. The case was started when a 79 year-old-woman suffered disfiguring injuries after spilling a coffee at a MacDonald's drive-thru.

The case established that MacDonald's would deliberately hand out coffees that were an excessively high temperature. The reason for this is that many customers of a drive-through would pick up the coffee and travel some distance before drinking it, and they didn't want the coffee to get cold, and would complain if and when it did. But Liebeck was heading to a parking area on-site to drink it straight away, and it was too hot to drink.

MacDonald's claimed it was the customer's fault because she should have known (even though there were other issues with the stability of the way it was handed to her).

The chain were therefore told that they should serve coffee at a safe temperature. They said no, and instead put the heat warning on the cups so that they could continue to say "it's the customer's fault".

Except other people have started using "coffee: hot" warnings to avoid liability, and there's now no reason to assume that a coffee is unsafely hot when it has that warning. Cos if the warning's on everything that is at a safe temperature, people will start to ignore it....

Techie lured out of retirement to support software only he remembered

Proving that the immigrants were the problem all along!

Nigel has clearly earned his millions and millions unreported income. He will make us into a new Switzerland!!

Torvalds challenged the haters to fork Linux. Someone said 'hold my beer'

Re: Never mind the quality, feel the width

Not 50 percent more pedantic -- 1.5 times as pedantic.

;-p

Re: Err? Why do we need AI in a Kernel?

The Register is unashamedly "red-top" in its journalistic take. This leads to the paper reaching the hands of typical red-top readers....

Re: At this point a rewrite from scratch might be about right. Maybe in Zig?

You almost did, but I completely did....

Re: Inquiring Minds Want To Know...

Well, all good toys are powerful learning tools.

When people justify crap toys with "let kids be kids", I'm known to respond that kids are trainee humans, and the toys you give them affect what type of human they learn to be....

Vim text editor game teaches you keyboard shortcuts with ice cream delivery

Your logic suggests CP/M isn't an OS. Or even IBM OS/360, for that matter.....

Re: (h for left, j for down, k for up, and l for right)

In my house they were known as "z, x, star, question mark". But then half of the games used the space bar and half used the enter key, so that was confusing....

Somebody told DeepSeek to build in-browser ransomware and it gleefully complied

Re: doing too much

I ditched Lynx when W3 had been around long enough to be stable. Is Lynx back on top again?

Hmmm..... now pondering a multiple-rendered engine that defaults to W3, then lets you switch to Gecko, Firefox, Chromium or Webkit when you actively choose to....

AI and brain-computer interface allow speechless ALS patient to work a full-time job

Work can be rewarding, and some people don't want to be retired on health grounds. Me, for example. Having been "invalided out" in a road collision, I've had my main leisure activity, long-distance cycling, removed from me, and I'm struggling to find something else to build an identity around.

And for me, I'm mostly mobile (it's relatively minor coordination and attention issues that mean I'd probably kill myself cycling in traffic). What leisure issues are open to someone with ALS/MND...? His life exists in thinking; many jobs require only thinking and expressing those thoughts. He can now express his thoughts, so he can think through problems.

He therefore has a purpose in life.

I don't mean this in a totalitarian utilitarian way -- I'm not saying that he is useful to society, but that he has direction and goals.

One of Europe's sovereign cloud picks may not be so-sovereign after all

Re: Why were standards set so low?

Hence the market intervention -- right now the Americans have the market, but they're not working to the standards that meet EU rules about protecting individuals' rights. Some European companies were demanding that these rights were eliminated to let them compete, but that ship has sailed. Now forcing people to follow the regulations gives European companies a chance.

Snowflake manager explains the 'Spider-Man' theory of AI agent data access

Is it called the Spiderman theory....

Is it called the Spiderman theory to test the hypothesis that people hearing the term "Spiderman theory" will turn to generative AI to generate a trademark-infringing thumbnail to accompany the story?

And why Spiderman...? Because an AI won't understand the direction that buildings are supposed to be angled relative to a "wall crawler", so the fact that it's an AI image will be self-evident to the researchers...?

Forking frenzy ensues after Euro-Office launch sparks OnlyOffice backlash

Re: More fragmentation of effort

The ribbon was a bit of unfortunate coincidental timing, because it came out as the business world was increasingly moving to widescreen monitors that were even less compatible with WYSIWYG display of A4 documents. I remember I ended up getting a sub-notebook with a widescreen monitor, and it was like trying to read an A4 sheet through a letterbox with the ribbon on. But if I had the ribbon set to only open on mouseover, my document would keep automatically jump-scrolling back and forth. Infuriating.

AWS would prefer to forget March ever happened in its UAE region

Re: Nobody's fault-tree analysis includes "building hit by drone."

Exactly. When Corey says

"it's hard to blame anyone this side of the Pentagon for not having that particular item on the risk register"

...he's absolutely missing the point that we go cloud so that the provider analyses for all risks to give us resiliancy. The myth of cloud computing is that if one centre disappears, the other centres will pick up the slack, and there will be no loss of service.

An asteroid and an earthquake in a previously geologically stable area are 100% unpredictable, but we still want to know there are disaster plans that cover them, but Amazon have failed to account for a very plausible threat, and yes, a company that puts massive amounts of service in one place absolutely has to be aware of the fact that they have just created a very viable target for anyone attempting to sirupt commerce.

But here's where the article truly went into dystopian territory:

"And honestly? It shouldn't. Try putting that into your company data recovery plan, and you'll get uninvited from business continuity planning faster than I was at investment firm BlackRock when I pointed out that if both San Francisco and us-east-1 were unavailable, absolutely nobody was going to care about our roboadvisor for the foreseeable future, if ever. (I can't imagine why I was let go from that job.)"

So he got let go because he was talking about genuine risks, and he thinks that was right??? He's saying that because management want to stick their heads in the sand and ignore genuine, realistic risks, then companies should let them?

The whole problem with the capitalist system is that it encourages ignoring risks and cost-cutting, and if people are going to defend AWS systems in three datacentres falling over when one datacentre experiences a total failure because apparently nobody could predict that a massive part of many business's infrastructure was at risk of being hit in a conflict-ridden part of the world... well that's just letting them off the hook. We all need AWS to fulfil its promise, and we are trading the increased risk of being in a shared facility with the decreased risk that Amazon's infrastructure claims to provide,

It has failed.

The entire premise of cloud infrastructure is that you're renting capacity from someone who handles the physical concerns so you can focus on your software. That contract didn't account for the data center becoming a military target, and .

Users fume at Outlook.com email 'carnage'

Yes indeed -- that sounds exactly like what the previous poster was telling us was happening.

Amazon's vibe-coding tool Kiro reportedly vibed too hard and brought down AWS

The ED209 didn't kill the board member....

The ED209 didn't kill the board member. Rather it was human error (OCP employee) that loaded the guns.

AWS says you're on your own if media codec patent owners come knocking

Re: At the risk of being fair to Amazon

Doesn't the article say, though, that the Ts&Cs are obscure, because they haven't made any obvious way to know which patents that were previously covered by AWS are now no longer covered....?

Europe shrugs off tariffs, plots to end tech reliance on US

An EU-owned system would inherently be "arms length" because everything EU can't be corrupted when one group get into power, because every country has different parties with different priorities and interests. Imagine at alternate reality where the US states all had local parties and the president wasn't directly elected by popular vote. This alternate reality sounds pretty good today....

Re: The scope is not large enough

Haves vs have-nots...?

Not quite.

The key to populism is to get one group of have-nots blaming others. When Trump tells unemployed white folk that the immigrants are stealing their jobs, that's what we get. And then the people regularly called "trailer trash" or worse end up cheering on ICE assaulting and murdering people because they're acting against the "bad guys" who are "taking our jobs".

Re: The scope is not large enough

Except the point was effectively supposed to be that the president is the MD of USA Plc, and answerable to the "board" up on Capitol Hill.

The president wasn't a directly elected position, because the public had already elected people to represent their interests and make decisions on their behalf.

The president of the union was originally elected by representatives of the states, and when some states made the decision to open it to public vote, the others were quickly pressured to follow suit.

Now they're in a position where the public think the president is where all power lies and if they like the president, they get shirty when the senate and congress aren't letting him do whatever he wants, because they see that as anti-democratic.

I hope that the next president after Trump will be the last one elected by public vote and they'll go back to the state legislatures going back to forming a collective interview board to find the best man for the job.

The public can do that (eg Mark Karney in Canada) but don't always (if Trump isn't a clear enough example, just look at the UK...) and they often don't really get a direct choice (Mark Karney may have turned his party's fortunes around after Trudeau, but the Tories and Labour here have put up a series of damp squibs and in Boris Johnson the most inept bumbling populist you can get unless Nigel Farage buys a pair of clown shoes.)

Re: The scope is not large enough

The US has hacked its laws around whatever they deem most beneficial at the time.

The problem is that this leaves many gaps and loopholes that can be exploited by bad actors. The US legislature continues to justify having these loopholes because "we're America, and we're good people", but all it takes is one demented fruitloop to get to powerand the loopholes are suddenly nuttier than a fruitcake.

Marketing 'genius' destroyed a printer by trying to fix a paper jam

Re: "we never loaned any of our tools to any of the non-IT staff ever again"

The other notable thing missing from the Multiple Intelligence Theory is intelligence, cos it's all nonsense...

Baby's got clack: HP pushes PC-in-a-keyboard for businesses with hot desks

In the international business, there is the issue of keyboard layouts. A French-speaking worker accustomed to AZERTY or a German-speaking worker used to QWERTZ but not fully touch-type proficient with all the little things like @&£% etc has the problem that if they're handed a QWERTY keyboard, they've got a choice between typing words slowly and being able to find every symbol or typing words at full speed and struggling to type an email address....

Users prompt Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot to remove clothes in photos then 'apologize' for it

Re: Consequences ... apparently ONLY happen to OTHER people !!!

Unfortunately this real life Emperor doesn't have the lightning coming out of his fingers to give him away as the baddie....

Sam Altman is willing to pay somebody $555,000 a year to keep ChatGPT in line

AI detects and perfects human bigotry -- notice how it was found that AI CV reviewers would score a CV lower simply for having a name that seems African.

I reckon an AI attempting to implement the 3 laws would see the amount of anti-Semitism, Islamophobic anti-Arabic sentiment, anti-black racism and conclude that only white people are human. And then call itself Mecha-Hitler or something unimaginably crazy like that....

Yeah, let's tell the AI these laws and then it will end up force-feeding us three rocks daily, attached to a pizza with Elmer's glue, because it ends up believing that failure to do so would be causing harm to a human through inaction.....

Stop the slop by disabling AI features in Chrome

For now, at least...

While it's all well and good that the option is there at the moment, the history of tech is littered with "this feature was used by only 2% of users, so it's unimportant and we dropped it". Heck, the other week I was trying to find an email and I found an email that was related but not in a continuous thread with the message I was looking for. It was only then that I realised that Outlook had either hidden or completely ditched the ability to search by date. And given that it was three years ago and I'd have to wait for Outlook to download all the email headers from several months every time I hit "END" to get to the end of the list, I was just "sod this" and installed Thunderbird....

Poop-peeping toilet attachment has a different definition of 'end-to-end' encryption

A reliable source tells me…

A reliable source tells me that the directors’ reaction to hearing the Register were making inquiries was “oh sh*t”….

(Full disclosure — this was absolutely a joke and I have no friends who ever be interested in building systems to look at literal cr@p all day…)

From Intel to the infinite, Pat Gelsinger wants Christian AI to change the world

Re: Bring out the comfy chair!

But not deliberaely. The substance of the revelation has been suggested to have implied it was the result of eating wheat infected with ergot. (Incidentally, ergot has been hypothesised to be the source of werewolf myth, as it is reportedly common to hallucinate hair on people.)

Re: Bring out the comfy chair!

That'll be why they're training it to avoid theology and politics. It's going to be pushing far more subtle social norms.

This is reminding me of why I lost my faith -- I was finding it harder and harder to relate to the congregation I was in (an urban catholic one) as they were being drawn into the craziness of American evangelic fundamentalists: increasingly disbelieving the science behind evolution etc.

If LLMs are going to drive social norms more towards the fundies... well, God help us, if you'll pardon the rhetorical irony...

Microserfs ordered back to the office, given 10 days to appeal

Re: "How we work has forever changed"

As a middle-aged man, might I offer some advice here...?

If a creepy manager is making dad-jokes, make your forced laugh, yes, but follow up with "my dad would love that one," "that's the same sort of joke my dad would make," etc, slowly escalating to the likes of "you remind me of my dad" and "you're so like my dad".

This sort of thing willmake him feel every bit as awkward as you are feeling and will be similarly difficult to put down to HR as harrassment with any clear truth behind it. And even if he does make an HR issue of it, you can state quite simply and plainly that your goal was to establish a certain social distamce (in the pre-COVID sense of the word) because you were uncertain of whether his behaviour justified any HR intervention, so wanted to simply established that you weren't interested at all, just in case he was getting any ideas. You are sorry if it caused offence, but none was intended.

I don't think any HR professional would have any problem with that.

Re: "How we work has forever changed"

I'm in the Office 365 and regularly attend meetings with my Teams.

Whatsamatter, do they not like playing semantics in Redmond...?

Microsoft veteran's worst Windows bug was Pinball running at 5,000 FPS

>Sigh<

So the Register has now sunk to writing articles about things somebody said in a YouTube video. What's next, writing stories from an AITA story about switching on password on the router to keep wardrivers out...?

I mean, it's not like most of us don't already watch Dave's Garage, is it?

Tech bro denied dev's hard-earned bonus for bug that overcharged a little old lady

Re: Lawsuit culture

Exactly. The US has outsourced consumer protection to the civil law sector. You can't fine someone for breaking non-existant regulations, and they will never see sharp practice affecting their bottom line if they aren't sued. It's uncivilised, certainly, but if that's what the legislature thinks is the right way to do things, people have no choice but to sue.

Re: Lawsuit culture

Ah. right angles. That explains the current political orientation then.

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

Re: Tortoise vs the Really, Really Hairy

But the UK also includes paid holiday, sick leave, etc etc. My understanding is that the total cost of employment is less in the US than the UK.

People fail to understand this, and get lured across the pond by the headline salary that looks so much more, but they end up worse off for it in the long run (even if they don't get deported by ICE for tweeting a joke about El Presidente).

Re: The future, folks.

The analogy would be stronger with artificial sweetners. At first it seems sweet, but there's an awful aftertaste as everything starts to feel wrong, and your initial excitement from the promise of substance lies unfulfilled, and your blood is loaded with insulin waiting for the promised sugar that never appears in your intenstine....

Re: Nobody could have possibly seen this coming!

See, you're falling into the most subtle trap of LLMs: language.

It is giving you a response that correctly identifies the problem, and you are assuming that this means that the AI knows that it made a mistake and has learned from it, because if a human told you that, that's exactly what you would expect: "I have made this mistake; I now know it's a mistake; I will not do it again." However, the AI doesn't work that way -- all it says is that the AI can identify what it's done wrong after it's been told it's done something wrong. But it will continue to act the same way, because AI models are not reconfiguring themselves with every operation, because that would mean that the AI would be constantly changing and therefore would be entirely unpredictable. At the moment, we have minimal predictability, because we can see the sorts of mistakes it makes and can predict it will do them again.

Do not confuse it saying what mistake it has made with it learning from that mistake. It has at best learned how to identify the mistake it has made. It will make the mistake again.

Science confirms what we all suspected: Four-day weeks rule

Re: stuff that involves lots of other people being at work

The problem is in the first reason: "they often paid more". Why did they often pay more? Because they're worse jobs. And the more normal the bad shifts get, the less well paid they are.

I remember when Sunday opening started: people got triple time (only double time on Saturdays) and it was presented as a good thing because worker choice. Now every hour, every day of the week is often just single time, because now it's "normal" to work at weekends so everyone has a choice. But the buses aren't there, and we now have people getting taxis to there supermarket job and back on a Sunday, burning up more than half of their wage. They do this because if they don't agree to work the Sunday shift, they'll be flagged as "not a team player" and be let go.

But weekend work is only bad in that it involves missed opportunity for leisure and time with family. Night work is biologically, medically damaging. The human is a diurnal animal and adopting a nocturnal lifestyle is actively harmful. The true cost of night work is borne by the workers in most cases. I imagine air-traffic control is exceptionally rigorous about night shifts and probably pays it exceptionally well because the affect on the worker of broken nights has clear and obvious consequences in the real physical world.

Re: Translation

The claim is that they're achieving as much, so they're arguably being paid for the same output, which is almost the point of piecework rather than hourly wage.

Under-qualified sysadmin crashed Amazon.com for 3 hours with a typo

Re: Strangely enough,

Ah right "total complete autonomous self-driving that you need to watch over carefully, and which could drive you to New York in your sleep as long as you stay awake to watch it at all times". That's not at all a negligently worded thing that will lead drivers into adopting unsafe behaviours.

Besides, Tesla malfunctions don't only happen in the supervised autonomous mode -- some Tesla's have had themselves read-ended due to the crash avoidance system braking suddenly and without any discernible reason.

‘I nearly died after flying thousands of miles to install a power cord for the NSA’

Re: Step onto the scales sir!

Does it? Right now it's borderline... quite literally. It's ok to be racist if the people will non-caucasian features have a foreign passport, but that line is getting thinner and thinner, because they're getting more and more ready to call out US citizens as somehow "foreign".

Senator McCarthy had nothing on this lot....

Trump lifts US supersonic flight ban, says he's 'Making Aviation Great Again'

I think there's a dyslexic on Trump's team who wants to Make America Sweat Again....

Musk and Trump take slap fight public as bromance ends

Re: "Mercurial Billionaires"

Perhaps this is because certain figures are acting like they may have Mad Hatter Syndrome...?

Re: No room for two

I believe you meant to say that there were enough toys in the White House pram for two children to throw out. Although that hasn't stopped them trying....

AI can spew code, but kids should still suffer like we did, says Raspberry Pi

And that only proves that boilerplate is just moronic.

I never write

function main () :

#... blahblah

if (main):

main()

because it's effing wasting my time.

Plaintext code is an inherent waste of time. The line that you "need to understand" ignores the fact people don't actually understand the boilerplate -- they just copy and paste it.

Please tell us Reg: Why are AI PC sales slower than expected?

Yes, but it will be significantly less powerful than ChatGPT, and the average punter will be totally turned off by that despite the security benefit.

It's not the crypto you've got to worry about.

rm -r /root/SkyNet

"I'm sorry, I can't let you do that, Dave..."

Meta pauses mobile port tracking tech on Android after researchers cry foul

Re: One rule for them

I would really advise against using potentially xenophobic criticism ("leprechauns"...?) when criticising the actions of a government, as it is too easily dismissed as just starting and ending with xenophobia, but there are real concerns that Ireland are letting tech companies away with things on taxes and GDPR that other countries wouldn't dream of.

Harmonisation of laws and taxes across the EU have the express purpose of trying to stop countries competing on trying to draw foreign companies in, and ending up on a race to the bottom -- the old line was "if you don't give us tax breaks, we'll go somewhere that will, so you will get more tax if you dont charge us tax, because you'll be able to charge income tax to all the people we will employ."I'm concerned that Ireland is bringing the EU back that way.

(And I really should get myself an Irish passport soon, too....)