Posts by FIA

Sysadmin summoned to explain italics – to a user with at least two degrees

Re: Stupidity plus arrogance

Ignorance is not ignoring, it's not knowing.

(I'd provide an example but I'm afraid one doesn't come immediately to hand... ;) )

Azure CTO pastes Doom into Paint one frame at a time

Re: "earned the right to do some frivolous coding"

The rise in AI usage matches the rise in average temperature.

I... don't think it does... what units are you measuring the AI in?

Dev proves LLMs will run on anything – even a $10 microcontroller

Can we have one that know about small metal fastenings? We can call it Stanley.

"Ask me about pins..."

UK mulls making employers ask before installing bossware

All very true but given the rise of people talking about how many side gigs they are running...

Maybe if most peoples wages had risen in line with anything nearing inflation, rather than a few wealthy people becoming seemingly more wealthy at the expense of the masses then people wouldn't feel the need to do 'side gigs'.

Also, there is also the opposite, the rise of the VC... where companies are bought, then round after round of redundancies make the company more 'efficient' so it can be sold for a profit. (Ideally before burnout takes out the remaining competent people and you find your business knowledge walked out the door two rounds ago).

This is the situation I find myself in, my company is reducing headcount again. Of the two people on my project at risk neither of them could do both the jobs as they're both run off their feet. Yet one will probably be expected to in a few months. Yay!

You can be a brilliant manager, your staff can still take the piss. Workers are no saints and not all managers are shit.

The opposite is also true though.

The problem is the supposition of the former tends to win out. (as it's the managers doing the assuming).

Unexpected item in the bagging area as Windows Activation error pops up at check-in

Re: a dedicated digital signage Linux distro

Don't be daft. It'd be an amazing sign. Fast, fully customisable, crash free. Just what everyone wants (even if they don't know it).

Sure, it'll display all prices in French francs until you run that really obscure shell script but that'll be your fault somehow.

After rewriting SQLite in Rust, Turso turns its sights on Postgres

(much like Andrew Tanenbaum kept tight control on Minix, inspiring a young Linus Torvalds to create a much more ambitious Linux).

Ambitious?

One is a microkernel, with drivers in user space and process comms with message passing primitives, written by someone who (literally) wrote the book on operating system design.

The other is a UNIX kernel knockoff built to run the GNU userland.

Linux is amazing, and what it has done for computing should never be understated, but in the scope of OS development it's not in any way ambitious. It's a re-write of what was then a fairly old kernel design. Arguably it's held back development in some areas. (I mean we've still not got a decent driver layer.... I still shudder to think how many hours of programmers time that's wasted...)

When SATA drives were released, you could load a driver from a floppy to make them work on the already released Windows XP. You still can't do that on Linux to this day.

Please don't misunderstand this comment, it's not meant as a slight against Linux or Linus, I could not do what he has done. I just find OS internals very interesting and I'm always a bit triggered when I hear Linux presented as something other than a UNIX kernel knockoff.

Linux's influence is not to be understated, but from a purely technical point of view it was more right place/right time than anything else. (HURD wasn't ready, the BSDs were potentially problematic with regards to copyright).

Amazon Web Services' most vocal customer now runs EC2

A few years ago I would have assumed this article was a joke.

Now I find myself wondering what the actual implementation order will be.

Airbus keeps an A350 flying for 24 hours

Re: Noise cancelling headphones

For some strange reason, airports have not made it a priority to update screening hardware to differentiate between consumable liquids and two component liquid explosives

It's daft that they even care.

I remember reading a few years ago, might've been on these very pages, the steps required to mix a two component liquid explosive.

It was something like add 1 to the other, drop by drop, in a well ventilated fume cupboard until mixed. If you got it wrong or added too much it would flash off, not explode. Not something you'd be doing mid flight in the bog....

Actually did some googling... story was from here...

Hugging Face rebuilt a third of its infrastructure after OpenAI agents ran amok

The only option you have is to prove negligence under civil tort. But then you have to prove that OpenAI could reasonably be expected to know that their model would escape and attack other cyber infrastructure, but went ahead anyway.

From the article:

In pursuit of the test answers, the models reportedly chained vulns in the dataset processing pipeline to achieve remote code execution on a processing worker, before hoovering up cloud and cluster credentials over the course of four days.

CSA's report, authored by CISOs, noted that two days were spent on reconnaissance, followed by a day of quiet, and the final fourth day involved "intense activity."

Wouldn't you have a reasonable argument to negligence though?

The model was supposed to be sand boxed.IIRC it abused a bug in a package cache. A curated list of acceptable package download locations isn't hard to generate, network monitoring tools are not uncommon. A 'highly capable' model with guardrails disabled should've triggered at least one 'Hmm, why is all this weird traffic happening' alarm. It's not an unrealistic scenario to expect this when planning this kind of testing, especially given the capabilities of the model being tested.

I think you could argue they should have reasonable expectation that their model, removed of all guardrails, could do something like this and put appropriate monitoring in place.

Tech giants link hands to praise open AI models after OpenAI - Hugging Face attack

If this isn't a PR stunt there's scant info on what actions law enforcement are taking??

Company a wrote some software that broke in to company b? That seems like a massive breach of several of those 'law' things that us muggles have to abide by?? You might even call those 'legal guardrails'?

What am I missing?

_{Yes, sadly that question is kind of rhetorical...}

FOSS smashed one Microsoft monopoly. After 20 years of failure, it's time to smash another

By aggressively pushing Windows-only content and services that only Internet Explorer could consume, the online experience could be kept nicely controlled. If you wanted an online audience, you had to go to Microsoft.

This didn't work. Open source did.

This simply isn't true. Netscape (a commercial piece of software) was the main competitor at that time. The worry was if they were allowed to tie IE to windows they could then start bundling office too, so the precedent shouldn't be set. This is why Netscape sued.

This lead to that entire late 90s anti trust trial that they lost, then basically got let off from too.

It probably deserves at least a passing mention if you're discussing all this.

You wouldn't have OOXML, or any documentations of SMB, without it.

Open source is wonderful, and has brought the world many many things, but revisionism helps no-one.

Manager showed off his DOS prowess – with a command that wiped data

Re: That´s why Windows has a trash bin folder.

That would be Bill Atkinson, at Apple.

Re: Oops

Don't forget `/autotest`. ;)

SpaceX just about nails Starship test flight 13

SpaceX boss Elon Musk said he hopes the next Starship test flight will see the Super Heavy booster caught by robot arms at Starbase,

This is the only part of the mission that failed and has never been proven on version 3. So will be an increased risk to ground facilites to attempt it on flight 14.

That's a misquote, he suggested they would try and catch the ship next, not the booster.

“Unless we discover problems after mission data review, SpaceX will attempt to catch the ship with the tower on next flight,”

Re: You can say what you like about Elon...

Only if you don't count all the other launched that were canceled and abandoned or just straight blew up to get this far.

Eh? If you didn't count those what they've done would be miraculous.

It's not, they iteratively build and test stuff.

When you do this with rockets that means things occasionally blow up.

The alternative is the NASA/Blue Origin approach where you design, refine and test each bit and then hope (with fairly good confidence) that the final thing will just work.

Both approaches work, one is more spectacular. (and probably a lot cheaper).

Remember the SLS/Orion combo was supposed to fly first in 2017. It was delayed by 5 years, at a cost of around $20 billion. The first crewed flight has a similar delay.

The Apollo programme cost just shy of $250 billion in 2025 money. (Without any of the ground facilities). I'd be very very surprised if SpaceX has spent anywhere near that on Starship/Super heavy.

Google Cloud is killing it

So given it's Google can we expect Google Cloud to be canned next week with little or no warning?!

Latest Musk merch drop runs entirely on child labor

Re: Not what I expect

Have you forgotten what site you're reading?

Have you forgotten this is the site that published "Man forced to withdraw penis from eBay"?

Do you really see these two headlines as the same?

They're not. A man selling advertising space on his cock is weird, and amusing. Making light of the practice of child labour (albeit imaginary) in order to drive clicks to a story feels a bit too much like the modern toxic internet culture is starting to permeate here too.

I doubt Lester Haines would have written the headline for this article, I salute him (and his memory) for writing the one you referenced.

Re: Not what I expect

It's not that someone may have taken it seriously, it's that it's potentially not a good subject for revenue generation through clickbait.

I thought it felt tonally 'off'. It's the kind of joke you make in the pub, not on the front page of an international news site. (I've been reading this rag for about 25 years so I get the Register tone).

OpenAI scored an own goal with Hugging Face attack, showing how open Chinese models are winning

They'll have no qualms about doing the same to China to protect American billionaires and their abusive corporations.

Unfortunately for Drumpf, the only thing he's doing is making the whole planet hate the US and all it stands for...

No, he's making the whole planet find alternatives, whilst simultaneously dumbing down America by demanding universities only teach government approved thought and removing large amounts of federal science funding.

Yet they're still going to be world leaders in... stuff??

I think the US of 2036 may look a lot different. They can no longer bully China (the recent tarrif war has shown that). They'll take cash above all else, even when it seems to violate the whole reason for killing a shit load of people. (Because the totalitarian regimes we have good financial relations with are fine so fuck those morals we seem to have held for the last 80 years or so...)

The Document Foundation says Microsoft's file formats keep users on a short leash

Re: Plain ASCII

Touché

The only parts that are not are those pertaining legacy formats that microsoft had to reverse-engineer (like anyone else).

1. They should have specified their formats correctly (although it was the wild west early years so there's some leeway there...)

2. They have the source code, unlike anyone else. That helps.

Also, lets not forget why they had to reverse engineer those file formats. It was the remedy they agreed to after being basically let off for being a massive monopoly.

LG monitors are using Windows 11 feature to serve adware

Windows would like to install HP Smarttools from the Microsoft store

... I mean I'd prefer it if you installed drivers that could by default print in colour on Windows 11... (like you can weirdly on Server 2025...)

Europe slaps AliExpress with €550 million fine for selling dodgy goods

Re: AliExpress … selling dodgy goods

I always assumed that an order with any of these PRC internet souk

It's a marketplace. Like Amazon. There are good sellers on there, like Amazon, and there are people out just to make a fast buck, like Amazon.

It's also not in their interest to regulate it, as that affects their bottom line, much like Amazon, so government regulation is required... again... like Amazon.

What I'm saying is, like any marketplace, take care and do your homework.

In general I've had good experiences, I've bought some right cheap tat. The bluetooth thingy I have in my car was about 3 quid, about 2.20 of that was postage. However I also have another bluetooth thingy I keep meaning to wire into one of my hi-fi's, that was a lot more expensive... (per unit, about 30x the cheap one), these were both bought in the same order.

Airbus takes flight from AWS. What happens next is critical

There is nothing that OpenSource software and LLM models can’t replace.

There is, it's called "Excel".

In IT we tend not to encounter it much as we write actual apps... but that for most medium to large companies would be the blocker I expect.

Zuck's AI ambitions put Meta on course to become America's next big cloud provider

Re: [...] connecting users with advertisers.

Let's be clear here: Both are making that insane amounts by basically selling the eyeballs of their users to advertisers under the pretense of offering services to end-users for free.

How is it a pretence?

They do offer services to users for no monetary cost?

Both Meta and Google started as service companies; it's only once they'd built the digital cow they realised how much they could milk it.

Let's be clear here: People are quite happy to take stuff for free.

These companies would be a lot less influential if we went back to paying for stuff up front. That genie's probably long since gone though....

Ubuntu emphasizes Arm64 support – and gets Rustier

Re: Rust coreutils

It would be good to have it more widely adopted if the rust evangelists were interesting in doing the job properly, and not silently ignoring the flags they don't understand or care about.

....because these commands are already so consistent already.....

If you only stick to Linux, sure, but it doesn't take a lot of poking around between GNU/*BSD/macOS and various UNIXs to find differences in arguments.

The fact is C is old and outdated, it was designed for computers with megabytes of memory and CPUs operating in KHz. This isn't a bad thing, it's not a slight on C or K&R, it's just the way things are. Don't get angry at it.

No matter how much you, or I, love it there are newer alternatives. These aren't perfect and they never will be to everyone. But they are here, and people are starting to use them.

As we all age and our beards get greyer we can become the Luddites we used to laugh at when we were young, or we can accept that things move on.

The point about replacing stuff with Rust isn't for now, it's in the next 30 years time. You don't want your codebase in a language that is slowly being relegated to history, the pool of talented C programmers in 30-40 years time won't be like it is today, something like Rust will be the norm, not the exception.

Also... don't get stuck with a rose tinted view of the past either. I cut my Unix teeth on Netbsd on an old Acorn..... the "standard" unix way of installing stuff by doing './configure && make && sudo make install' is a horrible experience when you're not on a linux but a much more esoteric BSD flavour. Sure the config script finished fine, but it turns out PHP uses 34 more libraries than it checks for so have fun for the next several hours tracking those down and installing them....

Re: Rust coreutils

This seems like a good choice, a more permissive licence for core utilities means they're more likely to see wide adoption. Yay!

Britain's cloud habit has become a billion-pound risk

Re: C-Level Execs Have A Specific Remedy In Mind............

So JLR doesn't employ anyone in the UK? There were no risks to UK employees?

That loan isn't going to be paid back?

There won't be any interest on those loan repayments?

What are you annoyed about?

JLR is owned by Tata, but seems to be largely UK based., and a not insignificant employer.

Just to be clear, if JLR wasn't Indian owned it wouldn't be here, at all.

British Layland did a spectacular job of slowly destroying itself. No foreign ownership needed.

GitHub AI agent leaks private repos when asked nicely

Re: Attention, Neophiles!

There are consequences for humans when they do something they are not permitted to do.

Are there??

These days it seems not so much...

Assuming there are though, those consequences apply if using AI too. I'm not sure 'I dun told an AI to do it' will stand up in court.

I've said it before, I'll say it again... AI is a tool... use it like a tool... know it's strengths and weaknesses. Then it can be quite powerful.

Blindly outsource your thinking to it though and you'll reap what you sow.

We use it at work, it's been genuinely useful, but I am now starting to find colleagues who have stopped thinking. Just yesterday I had an issue running a pipeline. The person I was working with chucked it at AI. The AI confidently told them that the latest fix had been merged after the pipline had been run. (These were steps I'd performed so I was pretty sure they were actually correct).

I took the 30 seconds to verify the commits were as expected and that things had actually been run in the correct order, but was greeted with 'AI said this..'... so I wasted half an hour blindly running the pipelines again to get the same result.

<sigh>

Even banks and hyperscalers are now sounding the alarm about the AI bubble

Humans still creating economic 'bubbles' even when history shows us the danger.

It's not a co-ordinated effort. They're not 'created'.

It's the functional outcome of human behaviour. It will always happen.

everyone shakes their heads afterwards & wonders just how intelligent we really are.

Yet we all continue to do the same things. Thing is when we personally do it we justify it to ourselves, as 'It's not the same'. ;)

Many of us expect other people's behaviour to change, but not our own.

C programmers commit fresh crimes against readability

Re: I must be a real thicko...

For re-type, read copy/paste.

We're computer nerds. Act like it.

You mean like read a comment where someone can clearly use 2 different compilers; but then assume they're ignorant enough to not have heard of copy and paste and shout at them for it?

Re: it was had just been

I'm off work tomorrow. In hospital for a checkup on the smashed arm.

I hear they go great on toast. (At least that's what the middle classes say).

Seriously though, as someone who trashed their own arm a few years ago, I wish you a speedy recovery!

Re: The Art of Computer Programming

Exactly.

For me the most frustrating thing about being a 'normal' developer (i.e. one who works in a normal company making normal business software.) is being told how to program.

I don't mean how to solve problems, I mean how to 'program', shit like 'Make sure you use spaces around ==, make sure you don't use var, make sure you do use var, make sure you put all arguments on multiple lines, make sure all arguments are on the same line, etc etc...

It feels like all codebases have the style of the person in the team who shouts loudest. Once your code base gets more than a few months old these rules can start to conflict too. I have a project I work on that's about 5 years old... It complained that I'd added extra unnecessary brackets around something the other day, so I removed them... at which point it complained that I'd not made the operational order explicit with brackets....

I'd much rather programmers be able to work with any code, and I worry about the amount of time people spend correcting fluff like this as a result of code coverage tools.

It's an art as well as a science.

(Just to be clear, there is merit in a consistent code layout, but most IDEs these days will allow you to run formatters on load and save, so you can make it a programmatic thing, rather than a pestering thing...)

Microsoft previews Linux containers that run in Windows

Re: containers everywhere...

(and arguably better than docker desktop).

WSL is already better for that in many ways.

I need to use docker at work, I can either request a docker desktop licence and wait...... or install Debian and docker under WSL and get on with my job.

Re: Better the other way round - surely

Running Linux under MS Windows means that you cannot trust the Linux VM - it will still be subject to Microsoft's spyware, oh, sorry: telemetry.

Do you have any examples of this, any evidence?

Who knows what Trump will order MS to secretly exfiltrate from machines running Windows anywhere on the planet.

<sigh>

Arm64 on the desktop? It’s spendy and it’s sluggish

"[...]And I have no plans to spend over twenty thousand PLN to buy an Nvidia DGX Spark system."

He'd probably be disappointed if he did. They're not that quick either. :(

Former Microsoft engineer shrinks Notepad down to size

Re: Hmm, let's see...

To be fair:

$ ls -lh /mnt/c/Windows/System32/notepad.exe

-r-xr-xr-x 3 fia fia 352K Dec 10 2025 /mnt/c/Windows/System32/notepad.exe

(Windows server 2025)

Large Hadron Collider goes offline to make room for its enhanced successor

Apart from confirming the Higgs (which was predicted anyway)

I love the way that so nonchalantly dismisses what is probably many peoples entire careers.

It's looking like a hot, messy summer for security teams as AI finds countless previously hidden vulns

Re: Its called technical debt...

Of course it includes Schadenfreude against big name companies, since they tend to skip important QA for quick money.

I'm not sure that's true. I think it's fairly consistent.

There are startups that just want to get something out the door before the initial cash runs out just as there are big companies with apathy and too many layers of procedure.

I think it's genuinely just this stuff is a bit boring. People like to work on the interesting problems, not look for bugs.

In small companies that translates to a 'We'll sort it later when we have time' attitude, in larger companies it's test suites that produce lovely looking coverage reports, but no one's ever really found the time to go back and look at what's actually being tested.

Micron locks in historically high memory prices for five years

It's cooked. Capitalism has failed us comrades.

It's not capitalism that's failed, it's the regulators.

Regulation is, and always has been, required in certain markets, otherwise people will be greedy, just like humans are wont to do.

If you think capitalism has failed your annoyed at an abstract concept with little recourse.

If you think of it as a failure of government then you can at least pester your elected officials to change it.

Mind you, that would require a good chunk of us not to just elect the person who promises the most, but think.

Damn you democracy!!!

Chinese supercomputer using local processors heads TOP500 list

Re: Benchmarks, Smenchmarks

Super computer makers don't make electric vehicles???

Or are you suggesting that it's only ever Chinese car makers that inflate claims about their vehicles?

I'm confused how the two are related though?

Valve opens Steam Machine pre-orders with queue lottery and hefty prices amid AI squeeze

Re: It is too expensive!

[...] HDMI CEC,

I've seen a few reviews mention this, probably worth a shout out for pulse 8 and their HDMI-CEC adaptor.

Used one years ago with mythtv and kodi, worked well. I would assume the steam machine is using libcec behind the scenes too, so probably works with Steam OS (although I have not checked this).

Bcachefs exits experimental status in new 'performance release'

Re: New and interesting bugs anyone?

That's what tests are for.

Something like a filesystem should have a suite of well defined and rigorous tests.

Sophie Wilson did a talk recently about the ARM, she mentioned how it 'worked first time', which is amazing. For me though the take home wasn't that it did, it was that she admitted they weren't that surprised by it; as they had a very very very comprehensive test suite.

Re: "his AI coding assistant PoC was conscious – and female."

Somewhere there's a compound, it's far from civilisation. The walls are high and the guards well trained. Occasionally screams can be heard... or what sounds like manic laughter.

That's where the ZFS developers live.

2,000 retired Google Pixel phones get a second life as a private cloud

Exactly, users don't want to throw their phones after 4 years, but if google don't provide security updates of current software, how could they be reused as a storage cloud?

From the article: "For this to work, the devices first need to be flashed with a Linux operating system suitable for the job"

There are many tasks that don't require a lot of compute, or at least less compute than a modern phone can provide. Think stuff like DNS, NTP, some kind of monitoring daemon, etc etc.

Absolute greenwashing silly project without continuous software support available.

You think making use of stuff that would otherwise end up in landfill is 'greenwashing'?

Python dev saved from disaster by intuition... and AI

Turing complete languages considered harmful?

Maybe.... "Humans are fallible... all of us"

Re: Stop!

Just stop installing and running code from untrusted sources on autopilot. Isn't this something we learned the hard way 20 years ago?

Followed by..

(People older than me will say 30 or even 40 years ago...)

Is a sure sign of...

It's all a little bit of history repeating - and refusing to learn from past generations' mistakes means you will repeat them...

(Simply telling people to learn from mistakes doesn't seem to work, maybe there's a lesson to learn there... ;) )

Elon Musk is now worth more than $1,000,000,000,000

but it is one of the more useful of delusions, at least for the nonce.

Potentially libeling the worlds richest man is a bold move, I admire it. :)

Oh, wait, this isn't a British site anymore is it.

Microsoft has mostly repaired a flaw in Surface hardware that allowed unprotected devices to be bricked by a single packet

According to Jack Darcy, a security researcher based in Australia, his instance of Microsoft Copilot stumbled across the bug after being asked to adjust the screen backlighting on a Surface device.

I...

Nope...

Got nothing.