Posts by Henry Wertz 1

Google Antigravity vibe-codes user's entire drive out of existence

Coding error

Given they did not know how to code, I imagine if they had left turbo mode off, they still would not have caught the error and would have still wiped the D drive. I mean, if it printed up "DEL /s D:\*.*' it'd be pretty obvious that's not what you want. But if you've got some Python code (for instance) and they aren't a programmer it'd be very easy to miss that it didn't change the working directory (or the working directory had a typo so it *intened* to change directories but didn't), something like that.

If someone is having an assistant write some functions or code fragments, taking a look at them to integrate into a program.. have at it. But if one doesn't know anything about programming, I would seriously recommend setting up a test environment to run it in. I.e. run a VM, copy some pics in, the program would have still deleted the wrong files (probably) but then one can just roll back to a pristine snapshot.

I'll just say.. I've toyed with having an LLM write code. It was passable but not outstanding, and generally needed a little work (which I fixed myself rather than trying to like iteratively prompt it to fix whatever). But vibe coding (where someone who knows nothing at all about coding just 'vibes along' and lets the LLM write everything?) Total madness. The quality of code made is just too hit-and-miss, and all too often non-progammers are not going to be precise enough in requesting what they want it to do, leaving it free to do something unexpected even if it strictly follows the parameters it was given in it's prompt.

Microsoft appears to move on from its most loyal ‘customers’ – Contoso and Fabrikam

Are they retired?

Are Fabrikam etc. really retired thouigh? Maybe zava will be used JUST for AI nonsense, so when the AI bubble pops (not like there'll be 0 AI, but less than the AI vendors are hoping for), when that happens fabrikam ans coseco can carry on with examples of how to do normal stiff while Zava chases the next fad.

EU regulations?

EU regulations? About using a new company name in their tutorials and tech demos? Admittedly I'm rather libertarian but... I'm not a Microsoft fan but that does not seem necessary to regulate.

Software engineer reveals the dirty little secret about AI coding assistants: They don't save much time

Re: Or waste weeks

Me to! Jusr as you say, the 'flirst draft' of this code worked, i asked for some tweaks, it's like 'well i really should use this tool instead' then wrote up code using a differnt tool that (per the docs) apparently would never work (the new tool it switched to physically won't do what i want.)

Re: circular lists...

You'll see ring buffers in some Linux drivers, since the hardware will use ring buffers (ethernet or wifi putting packets in a ring buffer, sound card audio in one) and some video cards used to have ring bufffers for the command buffer (i. e. 2D or 3D draw commands.)

AI isn't throttling HPC. It is HPC

spot on

spot on really. Heavy RAM requirements? Check. Heavy storage requirements? Check. High speed interconnects? Check. And I'll note the newer supercomputers have (almost if not entirely) moved toward having GPUs available for compute. One can argue semantics but these AI clusters have very much in common with the traditional HPC builds.

Perhaps once the AI bubble bursts (I don't think AI will become irrelevant or anything, but really AI in your fridge and etc? Really...) some of these will be repurposed for high speed compute.

Rideshare giant moves 200 Macs out of the cloud, saves $2.4 million

Re: I had to laugh

'I would have thought a cross build environment would be possible - at least under Darwin but only ever compiled Unix text/terminal code on a Mac so I am only guessing.'

Yoiu'd think so wouldn't you? Franly, I would guess distcc or something could do exactly this, but, ither than OCLP (Opencore Legacy Patcher) and associtated projects, I just haven't seen macos users pushing the envelope, i think the kind who would justr use gentoo or arch etc. instead and simply steer clear of Macs. I would love to develop without a macos vm (I'm not about to buy the physical hardware) but found it to not even be something peiple pursue. I mean visual studio code has a thing for it but it literally just connects to xcode over some remote procedure call or socket or something, not move any work off the Mac.

Re: Multi-user?

I' run my iMac with several different accounts, does anyone know if you can use multi GUI users on the same remote machine?'

Yes, but their absurd licensing makes it so EACH user must pay for 24 consecutive hours at a time. (You may still see some clioud provuders offering macOS instances of much older macOiS instances, this is partly because these terms to put the screws on virtualized users kicked in aboout 5 years ago, probably in resoponse to this very type of use where peoole may have only had to pay for a few minutes of use at a time otherwise.)

Re: "it was a no-brainer"

'What is a no-brainer is buying a properly configured desktop case. Hell, even RAM doesn't cost all that much these days. l

a) These are Macs. RAM is quite costly. Nonexpandable so you can't just buy afternarket RAM.

b) Have you oriced RAM recently? Spot pice has hit about as high as it was back in 2010. Pricing is downright dystopian.

(This doesn't negate your point though.)

O2 cranks prices mid-contract, essentially telling customers to like it or lump it

Re: Cancel and keep the phone?

Yeah that's how they do it here in the states too. Used to get a phone 'included' with the contract on the postpaid phone service, as companies moved away from this (a stealth price increase, same cost service but no 'included' phone), a few companies THOUGHT they would just make you pay off the phone but pretend they could penalize you for cancelling phone service, but the FCC did tell them "No, you can't have it both ways." Of course Nutjob Trumps FCC will probably try to let companies do as they wish, but who knows.

I was at a store that sold both Verizon and AT&T devices -- it was rather shady (I mean, the terms were clear but most people don't look at the fine print), AT&T had all these phones listed for like $1 a month less than Verizon -- but the Verizon phones were on a 24 month payoff while the AT&T were 36, so in reality you were paying like $200-400 more for the AT&T phones, not $24 less.

(Side note -- one reason Verizon for one did the "new every 2" on phones back in the day, it turned out the CDMA and EVDO technology was improving so much between one generation of Qualcomm chips and the next, increasing call and data capacity using the same amount of wireless spectrum and hardware on Verizon's end, they ran the numbers and found they were actually saving money replacing customer equipment and getting free capacity increases compared to having to install more cell sites, put more equipment (like going from a monopole or a 4-way sectorization to 6 or 8-way sectorized antennas), etc. on the phone company end of things.)

CISA exec blames nation-state hackers and Democrats for putting America's critical systems at risk

It's madness

It's madness. Violating the Hatch act, these jokers even wanted the airports to play a message saying something like "Due to the Democrats, wait times will be longer due to the gov't shutdown." or something like this. Some airports pointed out it violated the hatch act and they would not play it; some pointed out they use it to play informational messages, not political ones. Some pointed out the Dept. of Homeland Security did not own the screens in their airports and had no say over what played on them.

As for the shutdown -- I'm an indepdendent, it's both main parties faults really, there's nothing at all stopping them from funding the non-controversial stuff and sorting out the rest later. The US has only 2 main political parties, and most in the US pretend the 3rd parties simply don't exist, so any time there's a shutdown, both parties blame the other one. You usually don't have one party making inappropriate political messages as they are now though.

Microsoft veteran explains Windows quirk that made videos play in Paint

Blue pixels

Linux would do this too but the overlay color was a specific shade of blue instead. If you had the sub-pixel font rendering going you'd sometimes get individual pixels in text have video bleed through too (... if your text window was covering the video playback area.) If you force playback using xv or xvideo it may STILL do this.

CISA cuts more staff and reassigns others as government stays shut down

The incompetence

The incompetence of it.

Even if you're all for having ICE thug around the country (masked, anonymous, picking people up off the street and taking them to detention centers, when there's friends or relatives asking for their whereabouts syaing they aren't allowed to tell them..I'm not for this in case you couldn't tell..), Even if you were all for it, I'm just picturing like Dilbert, the guys from Office Space, and the IT Crowd, being handed vests, tasers, and guns and told to have at it. I'm just saying, besides it not making sense to shrink down CISA as they are, I *seriously* doubt a bunch of computer nerds and IT types are going to make particularly good ICE officers.

Or, CISA has a few BOFH types and they end up with a couple BOFHs on their hands.

Hardware inspector fired for spotting an error he wasn't trained to find

Yup that's Texas for ya

Yup that's Texas for ya.. People in this state have a screw loose and this is exactly the kind of thing I expect from people there.

Huawei used its own silicon to re-educate DeepSeek so its output won’t bother Beijing

Re: Build another network

These are religious fundamentaliists. Indeed it makes no sense but I don't think mistranlations would end up with discussion of using another physical medoum.

Intel and Nvidia sitting in a tree, NVLink-I-N-G

Could make some nice chips!

I'm a big ARM fan, and don't care too much about Intel CPUs (although my current computers have one I ran an Nvidia Tegra K1 RM chromebook on Ubuntu with no issue and full opengl and cuda support as well. and with box86/box64 and fex out now even x86 on ARM is fine.)

But lets face it, integrating an Nvidia GPU into an Intel chip would be sick! Maybe Nvidia can help put the CPU on a power diet too while they are at it.

Vibe coding platform Replit's latest update is infuriating customers with surprise cost overruns

local AI

I am not about to do vibe coding (the 'lets just let the AI write the code and trust it's right') but if I were having one spiff up a bit of code (I'd make a diff and see what it actually changed) I'd run it locally. Probably slower but 0 the cost. (Electricity costs, but my GPU and CPU if both flat out draw like 135 watts altogether so it won't be all that high.)

Bring back your old Mac: 5 ways to refresh the OS on elderly Apples

Also Linux of choice

If I had an elderly Mac I'd try OCLP first, it's pretty good. If you find these options unsatisfactrory, you can also install Linux of your choice on the Intel models. Just like older PCs a regular 'full fatl distro runs pretty well on anything newer than the Core 2 series and runs 'OK' on them, as long as you have 4GB in there. 2GB or less you may want a lightweight distro.

SpaceX bulks up Starlink Direct to Cell with $17B EchoStar spectrum deal

Other satellite constellation

It puts an end of their ambitrions for a *new* mobile service satellite constellation. They already have like 7 or 8 TV sats and if they own Hughes I assume the Hughesnet isatellite internet ones as well.

Why Windows 95 left a handy power saving feature on the cutting-room floor

May not have saved much

I'll note the HLT instruction actually ONLY halted the CPU until an interrupt came in (no power saving mode) on anything before the 486DX4 (marketing at it's finest, this was a clock tripled CPU not quadrupled as the DX4 name would imply.). Not a common chip so basically the Pentium. So on many Win95 machines this wouldn't have even saved power.

Also, shocking given modern CPUs but that 486 used like 3 watts and Pentium 90 7.5 watt TDP so it's not like now where a 'lower powered' Intel CPU (other than Celeron N) would use like 30 watts without power saving.

Ubuntu users left waiting after Canonical's servers take weekend off

Only 1 package for me

Oddly, for me, it seems like the *other* updates downloaded okay and it was ONLY the linux-firmware package that was either failing or downloading dead slow. (Which still resulted in a failed update unless you wanted to manually run apt --ignore-missing, which I didn't bother doing.)

I do have to wonder, what backlog? I mean, the update system typically goes to download updates on some schedule... not retry like minutes later if it fails. Do that many people just constantly see failed updates and IMMEDIATELY try to re-update to have a 36 minute update cause problems for days? To be honest, I could see snap doing something like that, but snap doesn't use security.ubuntu.com. I feel like something else was probably going on.. but *shrug*, also not too concerned about it as long as it doesn't just start happening on some regular basis.

Bring your own brain? Why local LLMs are taking off

Slow but free

I run the models I've played with locally. Slow (I have a 4GB VRAM card so all to often I must run on CPU) but effective, and it's not THAT slow. No usage limits, no cost per use, and of course as soon as I would have encountered usage limits, throttling, or having to wait due to the provider seeing usage exceed capacity, at that point my local model is also faster.

Windows Backup for Organizations doesn't actually save data files

windows store?

how many enterprise users (let alone other users) install anything from there?

Windows Security Update turns smooth NDI streams into jittery messes

Re: Streaming stuttering

I mean, apparently they did? LOL

AI crawlers and fetchers are blowing up websites, with Meta and OpenAI the worst offenders

like the anti spam lists

Rotating IPs? Spammers used to use this tactic. Sounds like we need an IP blacklist like the ones used to block E-Mail spam.

McDonald's not lovin' it when hacker exposes nuggets of rotten security

No app

I'm just glad I never installed the McDonalds app, given the lax security (and lack of common sense firing an employee) they have demonstrated.

Google yet to take down 'screenshot-grabbing' Chrome VPN extension

Not disclosed

Just like to note, the privacy policy says it may collect like OS, browser, machine type, and IP address. It in no way states (even in a roundabout way) the possibility of grabbing screen shots.

No more Blocktoberfest? German court throws book at ad blockers

What a nonsense argument

So I can see why some company may not like ad blockers.

But copyright infringement? What a nonsense argument.

* The web site serves the content up to anyone who requests it and at that point the web server is making a copy.

* Ad blocker apparently modifies the DOM. It's not firing off a copy of that DOM, no copy distributed so no copyright infringement.

The plan for Linux after Torvalds has a kernel of truth: There isn’t one

Re: Rust

Now really. I've used C, I've used Rust, and essentially Rust is like C with all the warnings turned on, 'Werror' (treat warning as error) turned on and 'lint' running at compile time and throwing errors if it finds anything it doesn't like.

Don't flame me too much, I'm pro Rust and I know there's a lot more to it than that.

I'm just saying you coiuld (in theory) run low on C programmers because they prefer Python (I prefer it, although I am aware it's inappropriate for an OS...) but I don't think you'll find a lack of C programmerrs because of Rust.

Re: Microkernel

You're right regartding the advantages of a microkernel. But the big disadcvantage is speed. All that jumping back and forth between user and kerne mode and message passing tends to be ruinous for speed.

I'll just note here Linus and Andrrew Tannenbaum had a heavy discussion (that some dubbed flame war but both participants agree was a friendly technical discussion and not personal) over this very issue, back in 1992, there's a wikipedia article about it and the thread was public so I'm sure it's still available. Essentially Linus liked the microkernel design from an aesthetic viewpoint but preferred monolithic from a practical standpoint (and Tannenbaum's Minix is a microkernel, he thought by 1992 making a monolithic kernel makes it obsolete from the get go.)

Star leaky app of the week: StarDict

Yes disable online dictionaries

I don't care if it's going to China or not -- I wouldn't want to have my text selections automatically sent to lookups in the US or anywhere else for that matter as a default. Use a local dictionary only by default please.

Why blow up satellites when you can just hack them?

Better than I thought

Bettrr than I thought, I thought it may have still been unencrypted.

I see you’re riding an Uber to work. Would you like a cheap coffee on the way?

Drivers will LOVE this

I'm sure the drivers will LOVE picking someone up then being like 'by the way lets swing through this drivethrough on the way, I want coffee.'

Trump calls for Intel CEO's head over alleged China links

No worries

No worries about getting advanced chip tech from Intel. They don't have any to give up.

Atlassian's Trello redesign may be 'worst in tech history' say frustrated users

two product lines

Why wouldn't they have Trello and then modify it under a new name for personal time management or whatever they think they are going to pivot it to. They might think they'll just move existing customers to Jira, but they could just retain them on Trello AND have 'Trello personal' or whatever for what they apparently are intending to turn Trello into instead of pissing off their existing customer base.

Antivirus vendors fail to spot persistent, nasty, stealthy Linux backdoor

PAM is also used for fingerprint authentication

PAM is also used on some recent desktop distros that support fingerprint ID, or if any are doing facial recognition that'd plug in through PAM too.

NetBSD 11 prepares for launch with 57 supported platforms

platform support

As a Linux user since 1993 (and having a friernd who is a NetBSD enthusiast) I'm not sure even gentoo QUITE ever reached the number of supported ports that NetBSD did. The amount of hardware NetBSD supports is really nuts.

Long live the nub: ThinkPad designer David Hill spills secrets, designs that never made it

Model M with nub

Not to brag or anything but I have a Model M keyboard with the nub on it (I didn't realizer there were 3 types, mine is the soft top one.). Typing and mousing bliss there.

Gadget geeks aghast at guru's geriatric GPU

OK even for gaming.

Honestly a card like that is fine even for gaming. Probably not at the 5K his monitor is doing but that's what resolution scaling is for.

Firefox 141 relieves chronic Linux pain in the neck

AI features

I don't like throwing in AI features without a care either but...

* Language translation works well and now does it locally. Pick your poison, use AI or send it to Google Translate which is what they did before. I prefer local translation.

*Alt text description of images. If someone didn't follow those web accessibility requirements and provide alt text this should be genuinely useful for visually impaired users. Run locally.

* 'AI enhanced tab groups' sound diumb.

* AI summary of a web link. i don't trust this to work right but you have to hit some combo of keys to run it anyway.

* Put a chat bot in a sidebar. This runs remotely. Dumb but iit's not there unless you turn it on and there are those who LOVE their chat bots.

In other words, no fan of just throwing AI in but I do think seveal of these features are genuinely useful and they run locally so they are privacy respecting, and none are 'in your face.'

PUTTY.ORG nothing to do with PuTTY – and now it's spouting pandemic piffle

SovCit

Ahh yes sovereign citizens. If you ever want some light court related entertainment see when these guys end up in court. They self issue drivers licenses, go on about how the court doesn't have authority over them under marittime law (even 1000 miles from any coastline -- it's not like they got caught on the beach and then try to argue this), that the flag is the wrong kind of flag so the court isn't valid. They bring up the Magna Carta even here in the US where the Magna Carta was never a legally active document. And of course they don't use a lawyerr because a lawyer wouldn't try to apply marittime law, 1800s era common law (ignoring legal precedents that override it and ignoring the US generally doesn't use common law unless there's truly no laws governing some action), etc.

One judge that keeps getting these is like 'I *STRONGLY* advice you to get legal council, and we can provide it free of cost if you can't afford council. Do you want to hold off proceedings until you have legal council. I can't formally advise you but you should answer yes.'. 'No I'll represent myself.'. 'OK then...' and proceeds to tear them a new one.

You have a fake North Korean IT worker problem – here's how to stop it

Re: How fat is Kim Jong Un essay question.

Apparently this question DOES weed them out, they terminate the interview. Kim is such a narcissist, i do not think he would permit someone to answer this question even to maintain their cover.

Chinese TV uses AI to translate broadcasts into sign language. It’s not going well

Re: Fifth finger

For real!

Re: Why are they using sign language

But there IS broadcast standard English, at least in the US. And a broadcast standard Arabic. If TV broadcasts are expected to have sign language translations. it simply can't be some dynamic thing that is different among each group of deaf people.

UK police dangle £75 million to digitize its VHS tape archives

ok

ok I have a working vcr, a working bt878 and a usb video capture device if i didn't want to use the 878, where do I sign up?

Kidding, i don't expect them to mail tapes to the US LOL.

British IT worker sentenced to seven months after trashing company network

Greasy

I'll say. for the record, the 'worst' I would do is give someone whatever credentials they need on the way out and say 'too bad' if they then misplace them. And that's if they treated me shoddily, otherwise I'd still help them out with that info if I still have it. If they weren't jerks about it I'd give a bit of technical assistance if needed if some remaining possibly beleagured IT staff need a bit of info.

Sabotage on the way out (or just after because they left your login active) is just plain unprofessional,. Some people don't deserve professional conduct but from me they'll get it anyway.

US patent office wants an AI to scan for prior art, but doesn't want to pay for it

Point in the right directon

I could see an AI being used for this to just say 'take a look at these patents', find ones covering similar topics. Save time. But then the examiner will still have to examine them.

But for exposure? Yeah. I feel like an individual could bung up a model that could do this, let alone a big company, since it just has to find patents for a human to take a closer look at. I could probably come up with something on my desktop. But for zero compensation? Please.

European consumers are mostly saying 'non' to trading in their old phones

Re: worn out

Regarding WHY the US had dual 2G/3G standards --

Qualcomm developed CDMA in the US. They included a smooth upgrade path so early CDMA phones could seamlessly switch from analog (AMPS) to CDMA digital phone service. They used 1.25mhz channel width so companies that only had a single cellular band could switch from analog to CDMA using 1/10th of their spectrum at a time. It had higher call capacity than GSM as well. When EVDO came out, it also used 1.25mhz channels, so companies that didn't get new spectrum could gradually add EVDO (a bit easier than 5mhz channels of UMTS/HSPA.) It only ran at 2.4mbps initially and 3.1mbps with "EVDO Rev A", but Verizon already had EVDO rolled out to about 50% of the country before UMTS was even released. That limited per-user speed but they could keep adding more channels to add capacity. (3.1mbps x 4 indicates about 12.4mbps per 5mhz of capacity. So HSPA+ 14mbps and 21mbps were more efficient, but EVDO Rev A had already been deployed nationwide for quite a while by the time these specs were even formalized. Qualcomm came up with an EVDO Rev B and rev C, and UMB "Ultra Mobile Broadband", but Verizon decided it'd be better to skip all that business and deploy LTE ASAP, and over time the other CDMA carriers folllowed (except Sprint, who when they got bought by T-Mobile a few years ago said in their final financial statement they estimated they'd run out of CDMA-compatible phones to sell to customers before they got their CDMA to LTE upgrade completed. LOL.)

Basically, it was a cheap and incremental upgrade, and provided good performance. AT&T and T-Mobile made the (also sensible) decision to follow the world standard figuring (correctly) that they'd have a wider selection of phones avaialble. But it did mean having to replace everyone's phone, and initially lose A LOT of coverage since the CDMA phones back then could roam on every company's old (but still functional) analog service while the GSM phones could not. Their 3G upgrades tended to be significantly costlier than the CDMA/EVDO carrier's 3G upgrades too. Now with 4G LTE (and 5G NR) we are back to having a single compatible system instead of 2 incompatible groups of wireless phone providers.

worn out

Well,

a) I don't use iphones so no inflated used prices. When I went to trade in old phones before my offer was for like $5.

b) You can still get new phones at decent prices, but those 'flagship' phones (and all iphones) are pricey. Of course someone paying $700-$2000 is going to keep their phone for several years.

c) US specific, but all networks here are now 4G only (except Boost, which is actually 5G only.) So a lot of old phones are a paperweight.

The bright side of this is 4G and 5G have single standards, the situation of Verizon, Sprint (R. I. P., acquired by T-Mobile), US Cellular, and like half the local/regional providers using CDMA 2G and EVDO 3G, and AT&T, T-Mobile, and about half the local/regional using GSM and UMTS/WCDMA (and probably 3/4ths of phones only supporting one or the other 2G/3G) is in the past.

d) I use my phones until they are PRETTY worn out. That probably ties in with being offered $5 for it.

(I'm also hooked on keyboard phones -- rocking a Unihertz Titan Slim right now -- so another reason I keep my phones a relatively long time is simply suitable replacements won't come out very often. No having a huge touchscreen so the on screen keyboard is large is not a replacement... as the helpful gents at the shop insist in their zeal to sell me a phone -- my thumbs are not too uncoordinated for a small on screen keyboard, it's the lack of tactile feedback. I also still have IBM Model M keyboards... yes multiple units... so I can get good tactile feedback on my desktops.)

Brain activity much lower when using AI chatbots, MIT boffins find

No kidding

Of course it's good someone checked to make sure. It's unscientific to just assume.

But color me surprised that typing 'Write me a 1000 word easy on fnord.' then not even proofreading it (as seems to be the case given how people have submitted papers, legal briefs, and books and short stories with AI prompts and gibberish in them, let alone checking for hallucinations and accuracy...). I would assume watching a machine churn put paragraphs of text then copyting and pasting it would involve less brain activity than actually writing or typing it.