Posts by captain veg

'Asimov was right' about rules for robots, says ex-US Cyber Director

Bingo!

Asimov's imaginary laws applied to his equally imaginary (and somewhat nebulous) positronic brains. You know, the ones that needed psychologists to understand them. LLMs are code.

-A.

Meta wants to get inside your terminal with its new coding agent

I wouldn't trust

I work in advertising and have to deal with these jokers often.

Meta consistently claims to have more users in a given country than the census of that same country.

There is no inconsistency in their world, it's just people on holiday.

-A.

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

Re: M$ has killed email

> who was it who decided that email clients should be enabled to include HTML?

If Microsoft had got its way it would have been RTF. At least HTML is an open standard. (Personally I only send plain text.)

-A.

Windows 11 Start menu changes trickle into Beta, movable taskbar still MIA

progress

"Windows 10 could work on 2 GB for 64-bit systems. Windows 11 needs at least 4 GB."

Windows 95 was designed to "run great"* in 4MB. Four MEGAbytes.

-A.

* It didn't. But it would run.

LG monitors are using Windows 11 feature to serve adware

they can't help themselves

LG clearly now considers itself primarily an advertising platform, but one which the punters pay for themselves.

https://lgads.tv/smart-tv-advertising/

Trebles all round!

-A.

Outlook for Mac bug makes font choice a purely decorative feature

Re: WHAT?

Font is an American variant of fount, which is the standard spelling in British English. It's not a coincidence that the place where typefaces are created is called a foundry.

-A.

Fount, not font.

-A.

Speedier type checks in TypeScript 7.0 as first stable Go release ships

Re: built TypeScript to bring static typing, and hence programming rigour, to JavaScript.

If static typing is the same as programming rigour then I look forward to world+dog abandoning Python in favour of a proper programming language.

-A.

alternatively

Transpiling one high-level general-purpose Turing-complete language into another one having almost identical syntax could be regarded as misguided*. Not doing so speeds up the compilation phase by infinity percent, simplifies deployment and helps debugging.

-A.

*Or batshit crazy.

Windows 95 detected installers by looking for magic words and hoping for the best

is this news?

I seem to recall at the time that MS characterised this behaviour as "a heuristic".

-A.

GitHub cuts short offer to burn repos on CD after mockery ensues

three inch floppy

I suspect you actually mean 3 1/2". My Tatung Eintsein had a 3" drive*, as did Amstrad CPCs and PCWs, IIRC, but I never encountered one in a PC.

-A.

*The diskettes were double-sided, but the drive was not. So you popped out your floppy and turned it over, like a cassette tape.

Lessons from the VMwars – nothing virtual about the Broadcom vs Tesco slugfest

re: it depends on the settlement offer

This is quite nicely explained here:

https://theemptycity.com/blog/2024/04/how-the-civil-justice-system-forced-hugh-grant-to-settle-and-why-an-alternative-to-that-system-is-difficult-to-conceive/

-A.

*Chips, as in "fries."

Has the rebellion started?

-A.

Microsoft lets Azure Linux 4 out of the cloud in downloadable ISO form

presumably...

I'm guessing that it requires secureboot, TPM, a recent processor and a Microsoft account before it will install.

-A.

How the AI bubble could pop and take down the global economy, according to the BIS

Re: Ford

It's KC since the death of Elizabeth.

-A.

Former Microsoft engineer shrinks Notepad down to size

Re: "There are Open and Save As dialogs. Font selection. Even printing"

> What's wrong with Courier?

It's not Fixedsys.

-A.

Waymo hits the brakes after robotaxis keep missing the signs for freeway construction zones

average

It is commonly observed, or at least asserted, that in surveys most drivers rate themselves better than average. Which seems an impossibility, but isn't.

I believe that the source of this paradox is that the meaning of "better" is never specified. So, of course, each respondent applies a purely personal and more or less arbitrary scale. Since it's unlikely that anyone deliberately drives "badly", ipso facto the meaning of "well" has to be "how I drive".

And this can be perfectly reasonable. If, for example, a driver recognises that their car control skills are not up there with the formula 1 elite, and stays well within within their personal capabilities, this can easily be understood as driving "well" even though a hotshot would consider them to be a duffer for going "too slowly".

-A.

Cloudflare teams up with big browsers to help websites tell welcome from unwelcome visitors

Re: Yet another ID grab.

> With an actual niche browser, it seems you are unwelcome pretty much everywhere these days.

I'm increasingly finding this to be the case with Morph and Sapot on UBPorts. It's bluddy annoyiong.

> Thanks to Cloudflare for a large part.

Quite. Not sure why anyone thinks they are the good guys here.

-A.

Homebrew 6.0 released with new security mechanism, Linux sandbox and more

please, not on Linux

I recently expanded on to MacOS for work and brew works just fine on that platform. Much better than anything similar I've encountered on Windows.

But on Linux, nah. If you could box it up as a .deb, that would be dandy. Put it in a proper repository, even better. Failing that I'll compile from source if it's all the same to you. My chosen distribution already has a package manager, thanks all the same; two would be an extravagance.

-A.

NHS patients can't opt out of Palantir's data platform – but their hospital can

Re: What About the Six LBPs?

> I have no problem with maintaining my own medical history file and I'd be happy to take that with me if I need to see a doctor

In case you didn't already know, that's exactly how it works in France.

-A.

MX Linux 25.2 provides possible refuge from AI as well as systemd

indulge me

"With the MX Tools, it was fast and easy to choose local repositories for updates, and reinstall some handy proprietary apps such as Google Chrome and Slack."

I'm curious. What does Chrome do that can't be done with Chromium?

-A.

LibreOffice brands Euro-Office a 'de facto ally' of Microsoft's lock-in strategy

or

> libre office doesn't have an equivalent to outlook or any kind of email client.

So glad you made the distinction between Outlook and an email client.

It's debatable whether an office suite needs an email client any more than, say, an RSS reader or even an integrated web browser. A stronger case can be made for an Exchange client. Evolution makes a fair stab at that.

-A.

deal breaker

It's the spike for getting stones out of horses' hooves that kills it for me.

-A.

Brit regulator finds mobile network service on trains is far from first class

in France

I used to quite frequently take the intercity between Paris and Toulouse. The train would stop at bigger towns along the way, approximately an hour apart, and that's the only time I could get any kind of mobile signal at all. These days I take the TGV instead, which has perfectly usable free WiFi, pretty much all the way somehow.

Something which puzzles me is how good the mobile signal is in the Paris metro. Much better, in fact, than on my overground commuter train in from the suburbs.

-A.

If you don't fall for these extortionists' calls, they'll show up with USB sticks

bad times

"In case of ignorance or no agreement, We will notify your employees, partners and customers, after which We will publish your data. You will receive claims from individuals, and legal entities for information leakage and breach of contracts, your current deals will be terminated. Journalists and others will dig into your documents, finding inconsistencies or violations in them. Your organization will lose its reputation, shares will fall in price, and your organization will be forced to close."

Gosh, sounds worse than the Good Times virus.

-A.

Grep this: Microsoft grafts (most) Linux commands onto Windows

Re: DOS era?

> I'm pretty certain that some OS's that did not have a hierarchical structure used to have files (were they called files?) indexed in a 'catalogue' rather than a directory.

In Pick (which is only slightly hierarchical) files are accessed through a "dictionary"/

-A.

DOS era?

'They will no longer need to remember the standard “ls” command for listing the contents doesn’t work in Windows, and that they have to type the DOS-era “dir” command instead.'

I'm pretty sure that dir was snaffled from CP/M, which got it from TOPS-10, predating Unix.

It's pretty ironic that it's still in Windows when they've been trying for so long to re-educate us all that they are /folders/, not directories.

-A.

ChatGPT blindly trusts browser content, turning the page into a payload

dumberer

"if you ask ChatGPT to summarize a page, be very, very wary."

Then ask yourself, when did I lose the ability to read a web page unaided?

-A.

Europe built sovereign clouds to escape US control. Then forgot about the processors

isn't

Isn't Intel's ME based on Minix? Who's to say that Andy Tanenbaum hadn't already splipped in a back door for the Dutch government? Might go some way to explaining the otherwise baffling popularity of the Python programming language.

-A.

Git is unprepared for the AI coding tsunami

delicious

Part of the Microsoft empire buckling because of too much AI-stuffing? Come on in, the irony's lovely.

-A.

Ask.com, former home of search butler Jeeves, closes just as conversational search comes back

Re: Jeeves wasn't a Butler

Al Green was my valet.

-A.

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

Re: I blame the beancounters

> I blame the beancounters. CAPEX bad, OPEX good.

Indeed. Yet somehow this doesn't apply to the cloud providers themselves. Maybe they breed a different kind of bean.

-A.

Just run your own IT, FFS

I know that it's unfashionable to point this out, but since "the cloud" became a thing hosting costs have just risen like topsy. Back in the day we had a server room with some servers in it. They didn't cost much to run, compared with what came later, and if we needed more capacity we made damn sure that we couldn't first improve the efficiency of what we already had.

-A.

The spaghettified DBMS chart that shows Oracle's crown is slowly slipping

Re: This ain't DBMS vendors, it's cloud

Yes. As such it entirely fails to mention exactly which databases are running on AWS in first place.

In my workplace we've been on SQL Server for donkeys', moved over time off-prem into a datacentre then an EC2 instance and latterly RDS. Nevertheless, I expect that most Amazon DB customers are running some kind of PostgreSQL.

-A.

Anthropic bakes memory fixes into Bun 1.1.13 as developers complain of leaks

hot and cross

"Bun [is] a bundler for compiling TypeScript or JavaScript applications"

JavaScript is, by design, an interpreted language. No compilation required. Or desired.

-A.

You too can build a nuclear battery from junk you have lying around the house

Re: It can also make the Kessel Run in 12 Parsecs

Also:

"Sandwich those vials between a pair of solar cells pried from cheap calculators, insulate 'em, and wrap them in tin foil to block out the light, and voilà: A very small, very ineffective nuclear battery that should run for around 12 years, which is the half-life of tritium."

Why would it stop working at the half life? By definition there would still be half of the original Tritium remaining.

-A.

Capita won disastrous UK pensions gig after acing performance checks

Re: The system is so broken, that we may as well just expect this and move on.

> The far right always pushes PR, because it gets them more seats. No-one else thinks for a moment it's a good idea, for precisely the same reason.

If PR had been in place for the 2016 US election then Drumpf would never have been president.

-A.

Re: The system is so broken, that we may as well just expect this and move on.

> I wouldn't use France's current omnishambles as a positive example

I didn't.

-A.

Re: The system is so broken, that we may as well just expect this and move on.

> PR in 2024 would have given Labour 220 seats, the Tories 156, and Reform & LibDems 78 each.

No it wouldn't. Change the voting system and people change the way they vote. I saw this when I moved from UK to France.

> Do you really think that would have led to a workable government?

I can't see why not, It's hardly without precedent.

-A.

Intel eases reliance on TSMC with 'Merica-made Core Series 3 processors

Re: Core 3?

Nuclear reactors make electricity using steam engines.

-A.

Re: Core 3?

I set up an i3-equipped NUC for my aging P long enough ago that it had (and still has) a spinning-rust hard drive. And it's still going strong and doing everything the A.P. requires. Running Linux (Mint), natch.

-A.

how times change

"Intel claims its 15 W Intel Core 7 360 delivers 47 percent higher single threaded performance and 41 percent higher multi-core performance over the now 5.5-year-old part."

The 8088 came out in 1979 and the 80386 in 1985. Not unadjacent to 5.5 years later.

-A.

Microsoft developer chief Julia Liuson is logging off

what is the link?

"Liuson also assumed responsibility for GitHub when its CEO Thomas Dohmke stepped down in August 2025, at which time GitHub became part of CoreAI."

What sane link is there between any kind of stochastic parrot and a source code control system?

Let's see. Only today an e-turd was deposited in my corporate inbox informing that I had the privilege of being "granted access to Copilot code review" despite never having touched Coprilite with the longest possible bargepole, nor even ever having reviewed any code whatsoever through the medium of Github.

I don't even like Git. The idea that its piggybacking by Microslop might induce me to submit to chucking my own efforts into its data rape is risible at best.

-A.

Pride

"Anders Hejlsberg, inventor of both C# and TypeScript"

And then there's Delphi. Which ought to be a bigger source of pride.

-A.

Digital euro goes full sovereignty mode, US cloud giants not on guest list

still in the harbour

Good. Scuttle it.

-A.

SAP already shifting focus from ERP migration disaster in pursuit of AI-driven growth

Re: Funny Isn't It That The "AI" Pitch..........................

And yet I've just been give the task of investigating how to reduce the memory footprint, measured in megabytes, of our Docker-contained cloudy APIs.

Weird, isn't it?

-A.

Re: Customised ERP Software

> ERP [...] does nearly-everything

Oddly enough in my nearly 40-year career in software development I've never noticed it doing anything whatsoever.

Presumably I wasn't paying attention.

-A.

GNOME 50 debuts with X11 axed, Wayland front and center

big words

Just out of curiosity, what meaning does "utilize" offer beyond "use"?

-A.

Hide and sleek: Latest Vivaldi release can tuck its UI away until summoned

Re: Somebody check my memory

> Everything I've read about Vivaldi suggests its internal ad blocker is very weak

Well, my actual experience is that it works just fine. Certainly well enough for some web sites to complain or even withold access completely. Of course, it being a chromium derivative there's nothing stopping you from installing a third-party component of your choice.

-A.

Re: Somebody check my memory

I suspect you're describing full-screen mode (F11). What made it genuinely useful was that you could still navigate using mouse gestures. Back in the day when the free version was ad-supported it was very effective in banishing the ads -- though before long I shelled out for the paid version.

-A.