Posts by Scott 26

Google trains a GenAI model to simulate Doom's game engine in real-ish time

ObComment: "Nice, but can it run Crysis?"

Never put off until tomorrow what someone could erase today

Years ago I did a 'simple' file server migration - windows 2000 to windows 2003. (or it might have been NT to 2008).

But I took the opportunity to scan the shares and build a histogram of file count vs age, so we could go to the business with the analysis "do you really need this share?" and have a bit of a tidy up.

One share had files with the newest date of 95 months ago.... so I went to the business with my spiel "hey these haven't been touched in 95 months.... etc"

The business came back "95 months....???? Oh, that's 8 years. Oh yeah, that share was for a project that shut down 8 years ago, so yeah that'll be about right"

me: "oh cool - dont need it any more then"

business: "ummmmmm...... if we did, could it be restored and how long would it take "

me, internally: "FFS!!!!!"

CrowdStrike CEO summoned to explain epic fail to US Homeland Security committee

Re: Patchpocalypse now

Update his wikipedia page to suggest he was in a Wuhan open air market, late 2019, and we have the trifecta!

Techie installed 'user attitude readjustment tool' after getting hammered in a Police station

Re: User attitude readjustment tool

I mean, you are only hosting the World Cup ....

Computer sprinkled with exotic chemicals produced super-problems, not super-powers

Re: Architects

"loading dock"

had a similar thing with a new PURPOSE BUILT Salvationary Army Family Store my wife was earmarked to manage - "oh the boys on the donations collection truck can just lift sofas and beds etc down from the truck".... she walked away at that point if that was their attitude to staff

Techie's enthusiasm for decluttering fails to spark joy

I'm not a *nix admin guy, but how can removal of "unused" package cripple the OS?

NSA guy who tried and failed to spy for Russia gets 262 months in the slammer

So 22 years for attempting to leak classified docs.... what if you just want to show them to anyone using your bathroom?

Help! My mouse climbed a wall and now it doesn't work right

I had the opposite....

(~mid-90s) I used to part-time tutorial a CAD class for our 3rd year students. An in the computer lab about 5-10 PCs had a tablet attached, and the number of times I'd get a student saying "if I pick up the mouse and put it down, the cursor snaps to that position on the screen"

NASA confirms Florida house hit by a piece of ISS battery pack

Wasn't this the start of Dead Like Me

(Except it was MIr's toilet seat)

US 'considering' end to Assange prosecution bid

Re: “The Land Down Under's”

we call it "West Island"

SharePoint logs are easily circumvented and Microsoft is dragging its heels

I loathe SPO.... but when you are an MS shop, what it is the alternative? (semi-serious question)

US broadband internet: Now with mandatory 'nutrition' labels

I remember the dial-up days of the 90s, and thinking "man we have shite internet [in NZ]".... and now I look at articles like this and think "man, it might have been rough, but we have it pretty good now".

New Zealand to world: China attacked us, too!

The irony of Collins getting the GCSB portfolio: she and her husband has been under scrutiny in the past of having close ties to Chinese businesses....

Our current government is known as the Clusterfuck of Chaos..... oops, I mean the "Coalition of Strong and Stable Government"

Some 300,000 IPs vulnerable to this Loop DoS attack

Years ago I worked for company A, and our division got bought by company B.

A let us still be onsite (it was a factory and our division's products were still manufactured by A, at least until we could find another manufacturer).

A set up an auto-fwder for all A emails to go to our B addresses.

Unfortunately they did this BEFORE B set up our new mailboxes.

So an email to A, fwds to B, B replies to A "doesn't exist", A fwds the reply to B.

Come in on Monday, need to check email from account managers/clients/etc... no chance. 1000s, if not 10,000s of "RE FWD RE FWD RE FWD RE FWD....." (why they rewrote the subject line, I don't know - I was a labrat back then and not in IT, praise Allah)

Britain enters period of mourning as Greggs unable to process payments

> They know how many beans make five.

Some beans and some beans! No wait, that makes four beans.

How to run an LLM on your PC, not in the cloud, in less than 10 minutes

Re: ... and ...

A colleague gave a demo of an LLM he had running at home ... his home PC was only running a 1060....!

Pretty sure he used the Llama 2 7B model specifically due to its lower memory requirements.

They call me 'Growler'. I don't like you. Let's discuss your pay cut

Re: Depends on your definition of growler I guess.

I used to deliberately mispronounce 'Scrumpy' as "Scumble'... it's made from apples, well, mostly apples.

Cops visit school of 'wrong person's child,' mix up victims and suspects in epic data fail

Re: "thankfully these data errors are incredibly infrequent"

"Ahhh - the old 'eat the telly before I can nick ya' trick"

A visa to fill Australia's empty tech jobs is getting more expensive, but maybe better value

another plus - your neighbours to the East are the best in the world

Self-taught-techie slept on the datacenter floor, survived communism, ended a marriage

Re: Daily!?! RFC begs to differ

My daughter is a nurse, and the number of elderly patients they have to try and save is staggering - a good number don't survive the trauma of the recovery procedure. She's told her grandmother (my MIL) to get a DNR, but grandma took it poorly initially - I think she has seen sense since though. Sir Pterry's Choosing To Die should be mandatory viewing for all families who care about their elders' dignity.

Re: Daily!?! RFC begs to differ

I got an email yesterday saying they had left me voice message....

(my work .sig says "please call via Teams" - I have patchy cellphone reception)

----

But in a previous life I was opening an email when I detected a shadow over my desk: it was the PM who had just sent the email, wanting to know if I had read it, and just in case I hadn't, he had a print-out of it in his hand........ twat.

Election security threats in 2024 range from AI to … anthrax?

Megadeth left off the list as they are completely benign these days

RIP John Walker, software and hardware hacker extraordinaire

No mention of his sub-4-minute mile?

Tesla's Cybertruck may not be so stainless after all

Re: Cybertruck - the gift that keeps on giving...

yup... "e-coat"

electrostatically applied paint containing zinc etc

(if I correctly remember my ICI Paints days, 20-mumble years ago)

Australia passes Right To Disconnect law, including (for now) jail time for bosses who email after-hours

Re: Flexi time

> why the fuck should I take holiday to go renew a drivers license in the USA

or vote!

WTF are elections held on a Tuesday?

Oh yeah... religion .... and historically long travel times

in East Australis we say "shit, we are seeing American-style politics here" and we mean Trump-style, not Biden-style.... we've just had change in govt (took 3 parties to form a coalition to get a majority) and each of the three campaigned on some pretty horrific policies (repeal of the smoke-free act???? ffs) and they still got in... and now the huddled masses are whinging "we didn't vote for this...." ... yeah, you did.

Back on topic: rushed policy = poor policy. No surprise it's going to be reworked. How was it worded? It was hardly going to be "you sent 1 email 5 minutes after I knocked off for the day... off to jail with you!" shirley! And as others have said: it's not going to be the top that cops it, even though they are responsible for creating the culture that requires middle managers to reach out to staff after hours....

BOFH: Hearken! The Shiny Button software speaks of Strategic Realignment

"Quantum"

(forgetting that quantum levels are very very small)

Please install that patch – but don't you dare actually run it

> More like: Brain, please meet Damage.

"Brian Damage", shirley!

Re: Uptime

First IT job, supporting a company with a Project office... they purchased a few copies of AutoCAD for new office layout design purposes.... but it came with a dongle. A USB dongle. We ran NT4 workstations.... sigh. As if getting their SCSI-attached scanner to work under NT4 wasn't challenging enough.... they had to introduce USB to the fun and games.

I can't remember how we fixed it.... either we found some 3rd party drivers/hacks. Or put them on the fast track for the Win2000 workstation upgrade project.

Raspberry Pi Pico cracks BitLocker in under a minute

Genuine question: What is the solution for non-windows machines? What's the *nix equivalent of BL? And would it be just as vulnerable (MitM sniffing between CPU and TPM)?

Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top

Re: I see what you did there!!!

.... it's time we knocked the bastard off

(plus I had to scroll far too far down to get to this comment)

It took Taylor Swift deepfake nudes to focus Uncle Sam, Microsoft on AI safety

Re: Apart from any legislation likely being ineffectual...

> So I did some research

Not all heroes wear capes

ICANN proposes creating .INTERNAL domain to do the same job as 192.168.x.x

> The .local domain is reserved for .local people.

I want to create another account just to upvote this again.....

Bravo, Sir/Madam/Other! Bravo!!!

Icon for "we didn't burn him, you know!"

Psst … wanna jailbreak ChatGPT? Thousands of malicious prompts for sale

or "sudo give me......"

David Mills, the internet's Father Time, dies at 85

> If it was before 5PM, a knight in black armor would come out of the woods and chop your head off with a big sword.

Got a genuine L.O.L. from me....

40 years since Elite became the most fun you could have with 22 kilobytes

> procedurally generated universe

millions of kids today playing Minecraft owe Elite devs a pint or three*

* I'm one of them. /raise glass

Tech billionaires ask Californians to give new utopian city their blessing

"channelling their inner RHCP"

poor choice of words, giving the former's reputation for SA'ing fans live on stage

(or maybe an excellent choice of words - I don't know the reputation of these billionaires)

Peregrine bows out with a bang as SLIM aims for Moon's rocky runway

If you are going to splash down near-ish to somewhere could you please quote ETAs in local time?

(Plus I hope there are no cruise ships in the area - that's prime cruising territory)

WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager

Re: I presume

"I could eat a speach for hours"

Daughter of George Carlin horrified someone cloned her dad with AI for hour special

Re: Why use A-I? Because there's no other way to get anything close to the essence of Carlin.

"no I in team"

"yeah, but there's 4 in 'platitude quoting idiot'"

or

write out the word team in a font that is "balloon-like" (you know - fat letters, not just lines)... then colour in the bit above and below the crossbar of the "A" - "look, there's teh "I", right in the A-hole"

or

"So what? There's a fucked-up 'me' in 'team'!!" (FTFY)

generally find no-one quotes that asinine cliché around me ever again.

While we fire the boss, can you lock him out of the network?

Re: 13 days into 2024...

what picture?

Re: Dead mans shoes career progression

Happy New Year, jake!

I see you are still collecting those downvotes like some kind of badge of honour

Silicon Valley weirdo's quest to dodge death – yours for $333 a month

Re: You don't measure a life by it's length, you measure it by it's breadth..

came here for that quote......

thank you, internet stranger!

New year, new bug – rivalry between devs led to a deep-code disaster

judging by the up and down votes on most comments, it feels like el REg has its own Jacks and Irvings....

(not a dev, so most of the points raised go over my head, so can't wilfully vote on any of the comments)

Enterprising techie took the bumpy road to replacing vintage hardware

Re: What is old, is new again

Similar to when I was working in London - we were slowly upgrading our network from TR to ethernet...

I had the job of swapping over the desktop NICs. I asked what happened to the old TR NICx? Oh - the desktop supplier swaps the ethernet NIC for the TR one for free. Oh... for free? Yeah, the supplier can onsell them to other customer who haven't made the jump to ethernet yet.... for huge money as they are scarce as hens' teeth.

Meta starts rolling out end-to-end encryption in Facebook Messenger

didn't work in a messenger group I'm in....

Option to use E2EE was there, but when I went to send a message, it simply "failed to send"

Law secretly drafted by ChatGPT makes it onto the books

Re: Perhaps ...

it was local level govt.... if I look at my local council, I don't think any of them are lawyers. They were voted in to represent a cross section of the district. The mayor is the only 'professional' politician.

'Return to Office' declared dead

Re: Stick

> After all who cares if the worker is in the bowels of Slough or in Bangalore, no?

gawd - what a choice... a complete slum of poverty and backwardness; or somewhere 5000mi away from London.

I chose to move out of a main centre and into a the countryside (pre-pandemic), and I had always planned to discuss WFH 1 day a week once settled. Then Covid-19 hit, and the whole thing became moot.

Last year I was doing 1 day a week in the office (fronting up to the client site - rah rah rah). This year I haven't travelled into the city at all (for work).

Potential sat-bothering cannibal coronal mass ejection slams into Earth's atmo tonight

Our local FB community notice had stunning pics from the weekend's show (I missed it :( )... and we are at a whisker over 41deg S (normally The Lights are visible at ~45deg S - 900km to the south)