Posts by deadlockvictim

Claude Code is revolutionizing digital archaeology. Enterprise better dig it

Re: Seems unnecessary.

I prefer to think of the first maths professor in Queen's College, Cork: George Boole.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Boole

The majority of corporate IT is now off premises for the first time

What comes to mind here is the notion of single point of failure and data-centres are becoming a massive SPoF (despite all that we have been told about redundancy and load balancing).

There aren't all that many data-centres and when one goes, figurative domino blocks begin to fall. We saw this in Norway with Microsoft Azure earlier this year.

Not only are data-centres strategic targets in and of themselves, they are also becoming hated on account of higher electricity costs, mass layoffs and AI.

How soon before the villagers arrive with pitchforks?

Sovereign AI is 'nonsense,' says Doctorow

Re: Possibly even a good one.

You might want to pose the question to the company lawyers: who is liable in the event of that happening? Microsoft in your jurisdiction?

Secondly, you might want to propose as this a Disaster Recovery scenario. How long will it take to get x numbers of machines running Ubuntu up and running, along with e-mail access, Libre-Office, FireFox, access to your documents and so on. The e-mail migration alone will take the better part of a day, once ye figure how to get it done.

Web app turns your old phone into a new smart display

Re: Except ..

In that case, would you sell them to a hobbyist on eBay (or somesuch) please?

In my own experience, I have seen people take pleasure from maintaining and further developing old PCs & Macs.

Or bring them down to an electronics store and give them in for recycling. There are useful rare earths in those devices.

Windows 10 refuses to die, and the security bill is coming due

Re: Which 16.9%?

Well, as long as long as you are not online, it doesn't really matter how old/insecure your OS is.

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

Well, obviously, those who insisted on working from home are to blame

And once the bubble has burst, trillions of dollars paid out by the US government to bail out the companies that are too big to fail, it will all be blamed on the people who insisted on working from home.

Who else could it be?

Datacenter growth may run into a power wall by 2030

Bills

So, this means that electricity bills will continue to rise until 2031 and then the cost per million tokens will suddenly shoot up in price.

Uncle Sam considers buying a seat on the Titanic

Re: Please give Trump a ticket on the Titanic

Do you really want president Vance?

No longer just a Copilot, Microsoft's AI wants to take the wheel

Re: Autopilot?

Nonsense. meatbags are needed to pay the bills.

Benevolent dictator Zuck will give Meta staff 30-minute breaks from keylogging privacy assault

Re: And when you're in your yearly review

Or, on the scarier side:

, and request a total exemption. = Please consider me when drawing up the lists for the next mass layoffs.

That an app 'Fits on a Floppy' is still a useful measure in 2026

Re: Obviously too old

TangoDelta72» I still have an 8" Wang...

This sort of language will get me hauled before HR (or Personnel as it once was).

NHS England confirms: Palantir staff can access patient data

On Scorpions

But the scorpion promised me it wouldn't sting me.

Why would I, said the scorpion, it's not in my best interest.

And yet it did.

Scorpions do what scorpions do.

I wonder how soon it will be before this data will be used against UK citizens entering the US.

Google users fight for refunds as unauthorized API usage bills soar

Well...

Jamie Jones» Then it's not a spending cap, is it?

It is, but only for Google. And since this Cloud has been built by Google for Google, the cap works well for them.

Anthropic’s bug-hunting Mythos was greatest marketing stunt ever, says cURL creator

Mythos

Shouldn't we have taken the hint from the name — Mythos?

Possibly based on a kernel truth but the story we like to tell of it is massively overblown?

On that note, I am looking forward to the film of the man who arrived home 19 years after the other husbands, said he was trapped by a witch, that all of his friends were eaten by a monster that finally the master sailor got lost in Mediterranean and almost lost his ship in Sicily.

Your next car might need 300 GB of RAM, and so will autonomous robots

Theft

Once cars have 300GB RAM in them, I can imagine that cars will be stolen for their RAM and then left abandoned & useless.

Although the car manufacturers will probably solder it in to prevent upgrades.

Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after USB keys fail to decrypt them

Because of, not despite

El Reg» This is despite Switzerland having one of the lowest levels of cash use in Europe with just 30 percent of physical transactions in 2024 involving notes or coins

As someone who lives in Switzerland, options to use notes & coins are diminishing precisely because most of us use plastic. The Swiss railway companies are threatening / planning to remove all of the ticket-selling machines at railway stations and let us all pay by app instead. It is not the most popular idea but will surely earn some managers in SBB (the national railway company) a massive bonus.

Re: Should we raise one or two digits to Digital Cash?

The rich are too fat.

Those that stay lean & scrawny can at least stewed for many hours to make them tender.

HR may have to cajole and soothe reluctant employees to get them to use AI

AI

I have a couple of problems with AI:

1. Senior management sack people and hope that increased AI usage will fill the void of the missing workers;

2. Those left behind have more to do because the sacked workers did something;

3. Entry-level workers & those sacked are having a hard time finding new employment.

4. Environmental & social costs of the massive proliferation of data centres worldwide, not to mention the increased unit price of electricity.

I'm sure that AI is a wonder. It does help me generate SQL faster, but not that much faster.

AI is a real boon when it comes to translation.

It is great at giving me an idea of what old photos would have looked like had they been taken with modern cameras.

I also wonder what effect AI will have on the porn industry.

Will there be less exploitation of young people, especially young women? Probably not but given all of the ads I am bombarded with, real people do seem to be superfluous.

Re: Clarification needed

trevorde» "CHROs are advised to focus on supporting managers to undertake the organizational change necessary to meet the expectations of senior leadership."

WTF does this even mean?

This means, senior leadership sees AI as a means of cutting the workforce and having the remaining workforce compensate for the sacked workers.

They hope that their use of AI will do the trick.

Microsoft boss on AI content: 'Nobody wants anything that is sloppy'

SatNad: nobody wants anything that is sloppy.

Said without a trace of irony either!

Well done Satya.

Maybe you should look at 95% of the shovelware that Microsoft foists upon us instead.

Accenture tells staffers: If you want a promotion, use AI at work

Ho hum

I'm not sure what difference this will make, if any.

The purpose of companies like Accenture is to tell the executives in the company paying massive fees what exactly they want to hear.

Using AI will just make the report more generic sounding.

We might get more m-dashes — which would be a good thing — as a consequence though.

AI to make call center agents 'superheroes,' not unemployed, says industry CEO

It all really depends, doesn't it?

I take the use-case of the automatic checkout in the supermarket.

I don't especially want to talk to the cashier and I really don't want to queue for the privilege of being served by a human.

I will take the shortest route.

If there is a free automatic checkout thet will get me out of there faster, I will use that.

Likewise, while I prefer talking to humans in helpdesk than dealing with the current automated agents, if an AI-powered automated agent can solve my problem on Sunday when there is no human working, then I will be happy with that.

I also like the idea of empowering helpdesk agents by giving them AI-tools to allow them to branch into 2nd level support.

Follow the money: Switzerland remains Europe's top destination for tech pay

Switzerland is expensive

As someone who lives in Switzerland, I agree with this.

CHF106K is not a bad salary and it is slightly above median for a worker in Switzerland, so bear that in mind.

And rent & restaurants are almost as expensive as in Dublin.

What is more to bear in mind is that Switzerland ranks only about 15th in Europe for purchasing power.

Germany, and especially Bayern & Baden-Württemberg, have lower salaries but much higher purchasing power.

Containers, cloud, blockchain, AI – it's all the same old BS, says veteran Red Hatter

ORMs

As someone who has to deal with the godawful SQL generated by ORMs (in this case Entity Framework), I am nominating ORMs.

ORMs let a lot of developers think that they don't need to learn SQL and, as a consequence, they cause their applications to work less efficiently on account of a lack of understanding of how RDBMS work.

Or better still, they let the ORM design the database for them.

Of course, developers have Claude and friends now. Like LLMs, ORM only works well when you know what good database design looks like and what good SQL looks like.

It means that you can & will fix the output of your ORM.

Re: How could you forget

What's wrong with 2FA? It seems like a sound principle.

If you're one of the 16,000 Amazon employees getting laid off, read this

Melania

The money saved from those 16,000 salaries should cover the expenses for the Melania movie nicely...

AWS's inevitable destiny: becoming the next Lumen

Cutting undersea cables

Once the next big global war comes, you'll have the Russians & Chinese cutting the aforementioned undersea cables and then suddenly we'll see how important infrastructure is.

I don't even know what would happen in the modern world once these cables are severed.

How many critical services are tied to data-centres overseas?

Keep it simple, stupid: Agentic AI tools choke on complexity

Doctor Syntax» Surely the salesweasels weren't lying, were they?

They weren't lying per se, rather all of the facts & logic that they were presenting you with had more to do with motivated reasoning than with how it actually it was.

Think of if as teaching the agents to fake it as they make it.

Female-dominated careers among most exposed to AI disruption

Women-dominated careers

Women (and men, too, I suppose) in low-paid, administrative work do an important safety valve.

The careers that are expected to blossom in the coming years are all related to healthcare, elderly care and childcare.

These are careers dominated by women and much less exposed to being replaced by AI.

The salaries aren't great, the hours are long, sometimes very inconvenient and the job can be very stressful.

But then, if you are coming to a lowly position, say helpdesk, you may already be used to this.

AI hasn't delivered the profits it was hyped for, says Deloitte

Re: FOMO

Bluck» So all these CEO types appear to have FOMO...

No, these CEO types are hoping wildly that AI will become a cheaper & vastly scalable workforce that will work 24/7 and allow him (for it is usually a him) to fire two thirds of the company's employees.

It goes without saying that he would receive an obscenely massive bonus for this great leadership & innovation.

Price, battery life, performance – that's how you sell PCs

Re: I want optical drives back.

Cade = CD ?

BOFH: Every computer system eventually serves ads

lead-free, zero-gravity gold solder

Damn it, now I want some.

Faith in the internet is fading among young Brits

Article Photo

My compliments to the sub-ed who picked out the photo for this article.

It is excellent.

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

When even your imaginary friends don't want to be your friend anymore...

Norway's most powerful supercomputer will use waste heat to raise salmon

Re: Artificially intelligent salmon?

My first thought was jumping straight for the pun too.

On a more serious note, hopefully the artificially raised water temperature won't have a deleterious effect on the biome being heated.

Airbus: We were hours from pausing production in Spain

Is Spain collapsing?

I get the impression that Spain is collapsing, slowly albeit, but collapsing nonethless.

Here in Switzerland the number of Spanish-speaking people in the twenties are risen markedly in the last decade.

I hear Spanish spoken as a matter of course on the train here. Is there a flight of educated young people from Spain? A brain-drain, so to speak?

Whenever I go to Spain (roughly every 2 years), the ground seems as dry as ever.

News of drought makes the headlines every year or so, often in Catalonia.

And Catalonia: the ticking time-bomb.

Reports of the Spanish health system indicate that it is over-extended but no politician dare fix it.

Madrid, Barcelona & Valencia, in common with many European cites (hello Dublin!) have priced all but their wealthiest citizens out them.

As an example from February 2022, a cup of coffee in the centre of Valencia costs €4.50 (the same as in Zürich) while 3 stops out on the train, the same cup of coffee costs €1.80.

Climate change threatens to wreak havoc on the important food producing areas in Andalucia.

And now this.

Am I over-egging the pudding?

I suppose that one could over-dramatise the situation in any country with a few select examples.

Microsoft is building datacenter superclusters that span continents

Re: a big FU to the GDPR, right?

They don't.

They lie.

And once it's done, it's done.

OWASP Top 10: Broken access control still tops app security list

Poor code quality

The problem with poor code quality is partly caused by modern project management.

Devs are rewarded for getting code written within a sprint that works, not necessarily that works well. And so, completion speed is rewarded and quality isn't.

In my experience, I have seen that those who write the user stories don't specify performance guidelines & criteria.

And we get mediocre slop as a result.

When I mention this to product owners, they tell me that that the devs tell them that what I want (namely better code quality) will take longer and therefore cost more.

In the end, this is a management issue, for POs are graded on what gets shipped and they don't care whether it works well.

The only real argument that I have is by telling the CFO that the mediocre code quality is costing the company more in monthly cloud costs, but then the onus is on me to prove it.

Foxconn hires humanoid robots to make servers at Nvidia's Texas factory

Re: the company will deploy the bots

Well, the AIs already behave as if they have Genuine People Personalities, namely Eddie, the ship's computer on the Heart of Gold.

Azure stumbles in Western Europe, Microsoft blames 'thermal event'

Dominoes

The apt metaphor here is that of dominoes.

One thing goes, which triggers a cascade, which ends up, at best, offering degraded performance (while charging non-degraded fees) and, at worst, leaves potentially vital services unavailable for days.

Imagine what will happen if the UK's NHS goes Azure (or AWS, for that matter).

Maybe, Microsoft, you shouldn't be following such a rent-seeking approach to data-centres and instead offering a good service, albeit with lower profit margins?

Azure's bad night fuels fresh calls for cloud diversification in Europe

Single Points of Failure

Matthew Hodgson» The trouble with big centralized systems," he said, "be it Microsoft Azure, AWS, Microsoft Teams, Signal, Slack or Zoom, is that they suffer global outages because they have single points of failure. True resilience comes from decentralization and self-hosting.

My worry is that data-centres will become targets in their own right, whether it be from locals whose area & quality of life has been destroyed by an insensitive & uncaring multinationals, from eco-terrorists looking for an apparently easy target, from people whose electricity bill is massively high (and I'm looking at the Irish here) or other diasaffected groups.

Now, if only Instagram, X or TikTok are taken down, few will suffer (and many young women will have their lives eased) but how many hospitals or other institutions necessary for our quality of life are dependent on data centres? We will learn the hard way once the data centres start shutting down more frequently.

AI layoffs to backfire: Half quietly rehired at lower pay

Re: The American (CEO's) Dream

AC» The silver lining seems to be the wholesale slaughter in HR departments — a group that on the B-Ark would only be carried in stowage as live pet food.

Don't be so hard on the poor women working in HR (and, in my experience, they are almost always women). They are a tool that senior management uses to increase their bonuses. They are working within the framework set up for them and they little flexibility.

If anything, agentic AI replacing humans will make HR worse for employees in companies. AI is unburdened by empathy, the law, professional conduct and can scan through a lot more stuff that the poor women in HR. Someone quoted 1984 recently and this does seem appropriate.

We're all going to be paying AI's Godzilla-sized power bills

Re: Energy

Imagine what will happen when once we ask the AI to make us a nice cup of tea...

Amazon spills plan to nuke Washington...with X-Energy mini-reactors

I'm more afraid of what will happen when these become the targets of drone attacks.

Chinese gang used ArcGIS as a backdoor for a year – and no one noticed

Re: Misleading summary

That's not a surprise.

How many of us carry out checksums on all of the various objects on our servers to make sure that they are as they should be?

It seems as if this should become a standard security screening procedure and run often.

To be sure, the principal sin of the infected company was allowing anyone unauthorised to get a portal admin account.

If you let ne'er-do-wells in, it is not a surprise when you find the well-hidden hole that they make for themselves to let them back in.

Who gets a Mac at work? Here's how companies decide

You were never forced to listen to it. It is was downloaded onto your iDevice without your knowledge but it wasn't forced on you (distinction between passive and active).

No suds for you! Asahi brewery attack leaves Japanese drinkers dry

Asahi beer was already superdry to start off with.

Now it is only dry?

https://www.asahisuperdry.com/en-nz/our-beer/

OpenAI says models are programmed to make stuff up instead of admitting ignorance

Re: However

When a doctor sends you to a referral with a specialist, you have, 'I don't know'.

When you get a repeat appointment in a fortnight, you have, 'I don't know (yet).'

This is fair enough, doctors work on the principle of 'know something about everything and everything about something'.

If you happen into a field where they know they need to know more, it won't be admitted and you'll simply get a referral to someone who does or a request from the doctor to give her some time until she can read up on it.

Return on investment for Copilot? Microsoft has work to do

Re: Just add more calculators

How about a pop-up explaining to users that their usage is justification for CEOs to fire people and stop hiring young people.

If your 23-year-old child/nephew/niece/neighbour is having a hard time finding work, you might very well be a small part of the problem.

And then there is the environmental cost and that will also be their problem and not the CEOs.

Fire up the gas turbines, says US Interior Secretary: We gotta win the AI arms race

Re: Gazprom karaoke

«Solvable later» just means «It's not my problem. I have enough money for it never really to affect me».