Posts by Glen 1

Deepfake hiccup unmasks suspected digital certificate fraudster

Pshaw, that's nothing! My password is 11 asterisks!

That way I can see it when I type it in.

Avoid AI atrophy – new tool promises to reverse vibe coding skills decay

Re: Sometimes, You Need an Artisan

Sometimes you need to steer the horse.

Re: Or here is a crazy idea:

Sure, and people should stop outsourcing their transport to vehicles and let their fitness atrophy on the first place.

People should stop outsourcing the memory management to GCs, and let those skills atrophy in the first place.

If people find it useful (and evidently they do), telling other people not to use it because *you* are better doesn't really hold much water.

It's like sneeringly saying "git gud" and expecting to be applauded. There is a reason artisans died out in favour of mass production. That's now happening to code.

Cinnamon 6.8 will support Wayland – if you want it

Re: Can anyone tell me why X11 needs to be abandoned?

I'm not sure I'd want any running program on my system being able to see my browser window while I'm "internet banking".

There is such a thing as defence in depth. Apparently not on X11.

'Please do not vibe f--- up this software': Broken backups spark AI coding row in rsync project

"can't be trusted"

Sheesh, it's like re-living the days where anyone who used an assembler was considered an amateur.

Sheesh, it's like re-living the days where anyone who used a compiler was considered amateurish.

Sheesh it's like re-living the days where anyone who used an interpreted language was considered amateurish.

We're not paid to show people how clever we are, were paid to solve problems. If he had done all the "grunt work" himself, the same bug would exist. It would have just taken a lot longer to be released.

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

Re: That's a lot of words

Yeah, the amount of repetition in the first few paragraphs is giving AI vibes - or at least someone padding to hit a word count.

Maybe I've become too cynical.

Britain pays Starlink millions despite Musk's calls to overthrow UK government

Re: El reg's EDS so bad.

Can't tell if yank, bot, or a child.

Brit mathematician lets AI agent loose with credit card – cue password leaks, CAPTCHA chaos and more

Re: Cassandra

The originals are sufficiently public domain that I think they're ok with this one.

User found the perfect formula to make Excel misbehave

Re: 1/60 sec...

I'm quite fond of the Attoparsec myself.

Claude Opus wrote a Chrome exploit for $2,283

Re: What is the actual cost of the operations?

Even if the $20k figure were true (which I doubt), how long before our phones could run such models?

Sidenote: "anyone skilled enough" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. "Anyone skilled enough" *didn't* find the exploit, an LLM did.

It's either going to improve, or stay just as good at an ever decreasing cost.

Anthropic admits Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'

Re: "breaks automated workflows"

"Monte Carlo simulation"

Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't.

Place your bets.

GitHub hits CTRL-Z, decides it will train its AI with user data after all

Re: Smell that?

"That's a-more-AI" was right there

UK mobilizes lawyers to keep report on Gatwick 'drone' chaos under wraps

Re: 45 minutes redux

Hey, at least we're mostly staying out of the new and improved illegal war.

Shooting down incoming drones is not "taking part"

OpenClaw, but in containers: Meet NanoClaw

Re: LLMs aren't the only things incapable of learning new things

Microsoft still has a business, so it's not like people ever really learn

UK copper fired after faking keyboard taps using photo frame

Re: Productivity Measurements in Modern Times

An entire city "catching strays"?

Yeah nah, we all saw the videos coming out of Amsterdam.

The reasoning seemed plausible.

There was enough evidence without the AI slop.

The dude got sacked for asking AI an "obvious" question and not actually checking the specifics. When pushed, he then was able to come up with different *real* evidence.

Yes, he should have been sacked. The decision about the game was still the correct one.

Anthropic to Pentagon: Autonomous weapons could hurt US troops and civilians

Re: Seeking a seat at the table

It's literally baked into many EULAs

"The Licensed Application is not designed or intended for use in hazardous environments requiring fail-safe performance, including, but not limited to, the operation of nuclear facilities, aircraft navigation or communication systems, air traffic control, or direct life support machines."

Admittedly it's more for transferring liability than actually stopping anyone.

Birmingham City Council's Oracle ERP fiasco now £144M and still not working

Re: Birmingham resident and IT professional here

Just to explicitly add.

BCC are having to fork out over £1 billion because they weren't woke *enough* 50 years ago.

Can't blame them for erring on the side of "less likely to cost them money" down the road.

Personally, hearing people complain about pronouns is like hearing people complain about seeing gays and black people on TV. We all know what side of history they are on.

Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

I work for an SME that provides some modest cloud services for a multinational.

We earned more than a few brownie points with the cloudflare incident a few months ago.

Re: Maybe people will start listening now?

It's worth remembering that most advanced microchips depends on machines originating from the Netherlands.

The nature of the world economy's interconnectedness means it is also a pain point for the US.

--

There in lies and interesting question. Can the rest of the world "persuade" the US to play nice. Or has it already gone down the North Korea/Fox news rabbit whole of "We have always been at war with East Asia"

The number of Americans on social media suddenly thinking it's their God given right to invade Greenland seemingly out of nowhere. They've been whipped up and aimed.

Just As sad to see as the UK "patriots" trying to burn down refugee accommodation.

What can we do about it? We've already got COVID lockdown denialist elsewhere on the thread. They are already among us. There are non so blind as those who will not see.

Or referring to the video footage coming out of Miniapolois, Vance more or less got up and said - "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command"

Re: It is unfortunate, but true

Your ignorance of European country's immigration policies betray you.

The thing to remember is that we don't rely on colour coding or religion as a way to choose who we let in.

If it does end up in civil war, we now know which side you are on.

Linus Torvalds: Stop making an issue out of AI slop in kernel docs – you're not changing anybody's mind

Re: actual intelligence

Dumb Europeans too.

It's not like we are immune to the new shiny.

Ten mistakes marred firewall upgrade at Australian telco, contributing to two deaths

Re: “Ship B”

COVID has taught us that sometimes the phones do indeed need sanitising.

China turns on a vast experimental network it says is an heir to ARPANET

It used to be, but with 'friends' like Trump, who needs enemies?

Space Shuttle war of words takes off as senator blasts 'woke Smithsonian'

Not with that attitude, it isn't

UK Home Office opens wallet for £60M automated number plate project

Re : cloned plates.

Two hits within a few mins in a different parts of the country makes that obvious...

Then it's just a question of stopping both vehicles and checking.

The hard part is that there are too few police to do the check.

Nuclear center must replace roof on 70-year-old lab so it can process radioactive waste

Re: FTFY

About the same as a windy night when you're using hydro and not wind, Dumbass.

"Here in Finland" should have been a clue.

Microsoft's updated Windows battery indicator rollout runs out of juice

Re: Rollout stopped because...

Nah, not enough CAPITALS

Next-gen Wi-Fi to trade ludicrous speed for the boring art of actually working

Re: 40 fold speed increase since WIFI4...

If they could do cat 5 pantograph, I'd be an early adopter.

Python dethrones JavaScript as the most-used language on GitHub

Re: Bollox

The same way "Hey compiler, write me some machine code because I'm not educated enough or too lazy to do it myself." does. How many remember the days of compiler bugs?

'Hey garbage collector, handle my memory management for me because I'm not educated enough or too lazy to do it myself"

Snobs sneering at interpreted languages as not "real" or "toy" languages?

It's turtles all the way down. AI is just another turtle, which has admittedly a long way to go before we trust it the way we trust a compiler. As for actually checking the output - that's literally part of our job. No less than checking what we ourselves wrote.

We are getting paid to solve problems, not show everyone how clever we are.

Reaction Engines' hypersonic hopes stall as funding fizzles out

Reluctant to commit to more funding

Why would they when they can now by the whole thing (or at least the tech and the IP) for bargain basement prices?

iFixit to the rescue: McDonald's workers can rescue their own ice cream machines

Re: It's not "ice cream"

"what passed for chocolate in pre brexit UK."

Nce tasting chocolate? Or are you one of those who think chocolate has to taste bitter to count?

Compare Cadburys to Hersheys and I know which side I'd bet on all day. Even post Mondelez takeover.

Just don't mention the shrinkflation. The price of Freddos these days *mutters*

WordPress forces user conf organizers to share social media credentials, arousing suspicions

Re: That's the whole point of WordPress

I can't program operating systems, but I can install Linux in (well) under an hour. Should I not do that?

I can't write a compiler, but I have GCC installed. Should I not do that?

I can't implement my own python interpreter, but have python installed. Should I not do that?

I can't implement my own encryption, but use SSH. Should I not do that?

Facetious, I'll admit - but even with the most control-freak interpretation of open source, there comes a point where you are trusting someone else's code.

San Francisco billboards call out tech firms for not paying for open source

I think the problem lies in that xkcd.

The big companies are betting the farm on (say) openSSL (either knowingly or unknowingly) and seem to think it's someone else's problem when there's a zero day.

Given such libraries levels of importance to the underpinning of modern society, you've thought there would be a commensurate amount of investment in the the care and maintenance.

Sadly, in many cases this is not true. Not only is it turtles all the way down, they're someone else's turtles.

A year after taking on Intel's NUC mini-PCs, Asus says it's ready to improve them

Re: More is less

HTML doesn't like consecutive spaces.

It will collapse all whitespace down to one space unless you start using stuff like  

Which is not something directly accepted by the forum code.

Microsoft throws in the towel on HoloLens 2

Re: Still missing the big picture

There are already several devices that do what you describe.

The early versions are considered old hat because you couldn't "see through" them (think drone pov headsets)

As for being able to see around the screen:

Products by XREAL

Thinkreality by Lenovo

vIsor from immersed

Just the first few off the top of my head

Raspberry Pi 4 bugs throw wrench in the works for Fedora 41

Re: WTF ?

Or...

Run proxmox on an Intel NUC based device

(I use an older NUC7PJYH )

Then you can run up as many VMS as you have ram/storage.

Cheaper than buying multiple pis and associated accessories.

OS choice becomes a non-issue.

Potentially fewer headaches when migrating to better hardware.

Need more CPU? Assign more cores or migrate to a beefier host.

Actual SSD speeds without extra accessories, no worrying about write cycles on your SD card

Backups can be just snapshots.

There are things pis are good for, but if you are using multiple in the same place, you are probably better off with one + a load of VMS.

City council faces £216.5M loss over Oracle system debacle

Re: The simple solution

No more bills *getting* paid is not quite the same thing.

Re: An unrequested comma surplus eats, shoots, and leaves.

1 and 3 seem a bit weird, but #2 is perfectly reasonable.

We need a volunteer to literally crawl over broken glass to fix this network

Re: Meanwhile in Africa

Ah yes.

If you see some 'animal print' network cables, best leave them alone.

Aka the 'nope ropes', 'danger noodles' etc

Meta reckons China's troll farms could learn proper OpSec from Russia's fake news crews

Re: Blind spot

That's my point.

When the rich are paying politicians to do you what *you* want. That's democracy in action.

Trying to have more checks and balances to keep such corruption in check? Lets stack the judiciary to remove the checks. Why, those checks are removing the power from duly elected officials! Muh FREEEDDUUUUMMM!!!

NRA, Big Pharma, Military industrial complex lobbying, the Church? Fine. Lobbying is part of politics -- Unions, BLM, LGBQT+ groups? Evil groomers, apparently

Elon Buying Twitter and turning it into a dumpster fire? That's capitalism Baby! -- Bill Gates spending billions on vaccinations? Evil! He must have an agenda!

Its the double standard that's funny.

--

In the UK we have conservatives complaining about Union donations to the Labour party. Without a scrap of self awareness.

*Their* donors are literally the people who "use their money to train a cohort of puppet politicians" - just look at the recent honours lists - or the Covid contracts. Where as the Union members are just regular voters who have to pool their funds to compete with the rich people. I am not naïve enough to think there won't be shenanigans when Labour are back in - but Unions are literally the people.

When finally, the UKs rich neo-cons manipulated the gov into producing the low-tax (and not quite yet) low-spend nirvana.... there were consequences. The people who *actually* own everything decided we were a bad investment. The resulting knock on effects wiped £300 Billion off the value of our stock and bond markets Source

Apparently, a cloud cukoo land policy meeting reality and failing to meet expectations must mean there is a conspiracy. I believe there is a warning about the dangers of capitalism in there somewhere

Re: Blind spot

The WEF conspiracy theory angle always made me laugh.

You have people who genuinely believe the free market is king - but rich(er) people moving their money to do what *they* want rather than what *you* want is apparently unfair.

While *simultaneously* believing that the notion of world govs trying to *protect* the little guy from such moves is automatically evil - or worse, socialism.

Top laughs.

CISA boss says US alliance with Ukraine over past year is closer than Five Eyes

Re: We're gonna fight to the last Ukrainian /s

...but that is literally the name of the company.

Wiki Link

Producers allegedly sought rights to replicate extras using AI, forever, for just $200

Re: "address concerns of being replaced by AI"

It was obviously faked for the documentary.

I reckon he's sitting on a beach, earning 20%

Let's take a look at those US Supreme Court decisions and how they will affect tech

Re: No such scenario occurred - really ?

"ideal plans for loving, caring, mutually beneficial relationships"

That's what a lot of gay couples already have.

Trying to claim they "don't count" or "it's not real" because its not for you... then trying to rationalise it by referring to several thousand year old fairy tails.

How's that "not mixing of mixing of fabrics" coming along?

Basically trying to deny other people "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"

Spiteful

Re: No such scenario occurred - really ?

The difference between marriage being handed down by God, and it being a matter of Law, is largely a difference of record keeping.

Before said record keeping, many a young lady had been duped into thinking they were married, until the grooms *other* family was revealed a few villages over.

Still happens today, except we tend to have better records.

If you believe marriage is holy mumbo jumbo handed down by God, then its between the newlyweds (whatever their gender) and their maker, and none of *your* business (or the churches).

If you believe its 'not real' unless it happens in accordance with the church (whichever church) - then that *is* a matter of church law, by definition, and as such changeable under the mechanisms those churches provide. See also: the rules around divorce. Do second marriages count as marriages? The Pope "annulling" a marriage is somehow different?

Abusive spouse? Tough! Marriage is permanent in the eyes of god. (according to some sects)

Divorced after a year? Why not get married again? (according to other sects)

Make it make sense

When you have folks taking someone's umpteenth marriage (after umpteen divorces) more seriously than a gay couple who have been together most of their lives... It really makes it difficult to take certain religious types seriously.

History is littered with 'marriages' where the people involved were unable to give consent - or were only doing it for the legal status.

Children being married off?

Political marriages?

Green card marriages?

Shotgun weddings?

All of those taken more seriously than two consenting adults freely committing to spend the rest of their lives together.

Tell me you can at least see the disparity?

Raspberry Pi production rate rising to a million a month

Re: A Bit Late Now

They could have easily 'chased the money' by floating the price. They didn't do that.

Brexit Britain looks to French company to save crumbling borders and immigration tech

Re: Alternative explanation for contract award

No doubt flown from RAF Luton and photographed from a Canberra

Sure, just as soon we all stop calling the USA 'America'. Canadians are Americans too you know...

Microsoft pushes for more women in cybersecurity

Re: "despite better education, experience, and performance compared to our male peers"

"At some point, you're arguing that businesses in this ruthless capitalist system we live in are deliberately forgoing profits and risking being out maneuvered by more inclusive competitors."

Yes, pretty much.

How many articles/comment threads have been full of stories of "Higher ups" not understanding the details of things they were making decisions on? How many "We told you so"s?

The competent little people often only get listened to if we're telling the boss something they want to hear. Look at Twitter...

Gender is an *extra* degree of separation away from those in the proverbial golf club.

China's 7nm chip surprise reveals more than Beijing might like

Re: Work share

Well, some places are more left wing, others are more right wing.