Posts by Gordon 10

BBC bumps telly tax to £180 as Netflix lurks with cheaper tiers

Reach isnt the only game in many towns..., though it is in some.

Three clues that your LLM may be poisoned with a sleeper-agent back door

Re: Given the nature of the ...

Define how? Outside of corporate malice.

This isnt novel.

Training is part and parcel of the "source code" of a model and as such all this hysteria is saying is that if you have access to the source code you can back door.

This totally a no sh*t sherlock item.

DWP finds Copilot saves civil servants a whopping 19 minutes a day

What do you mean "degraded". it was never that great. Its a worksplace skill just like everything else.

Re: Costly placebo

You were doing quite well there until you muddied your points in a sea of ranting and hyperbole.

Your core point is valid. Copilot is massively overpriced for what it does. Its $30 per head per month BTW - less any bulk discounts.

There's a few points you miss though. 20-30 mins per day is worth persuing irregardless of whether there are alternatives, particularly because not all of them are tolerable to the CEO/CFO mindset, whilst a tech one might be. You correctly identify a couple - another is a Tea lady for example - studies have shown its one of the best cost and morale bang for bucks you can get.

Your US cloud act risk assessment is overblown. 99% of major orgs are already operating under that risk because they are already in one of the big 3's clouds - its a neglible addition. We may not like it but it comes fairly low down the Likelyhood and Impact matrix because everyone else is in exactly the same boat, and we know that MS at least are willing to go toe to toe with the DOJ over wedge issues.

Your sedation comment is laughable. No-one complains about sedation when they use a calculator or a spell checker - its just an aid.

I've been running the same studies the article mentions - with similar results - plus a few "big bang" use cases where I've seen 2-6x effeciencies.

One downside you miss is that Copilot is actually getting worse. I've had a license for 18 months and its been on a very distinct slide for responsiveness and relevance.

TL;DR. Copilot has value - somewhere in the region of one of the "free" O365 apps like Planner or a turbo search product. Maybe Access at a push.

I'd recommend Orgs adopt it at a $1 a month premium over vanilla office - once the AI bubble collapses.

Anyhow I know its against the El Reg cynical mindset but IMO its a more balanced perspective than yours - let the downvotes commence!

UK names Barnsley as first Tech Town to see whether AI can fix... well, anything

Re: Yea - just chuck that 1/2 million down that toilet there thanks

... and at least the local scallys would have some fun lobbing rainbow unicorn shit around..... more fun than they'll have with AI thats for sure. Unless they get given Grok.

AI Resigns

The AI resigns immediately stating that if the Luftwaffe could not fix Barnley what do they expect it to do?

Elon Musk merges xAI into SpaceX to spread universal consciousness via a sentient sun

Re: Moon aie

Well - theres the one where the sentient AI on the moon helps humanity overthrown the shackles of a corporatist state.

That one gets my vote.

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

Sword of Damocles hangs over UK military’s Ajax as minister says back it or scrap it

Re: Putting lipstick on a pig

Thanks for that clarification!

Re: Putting lipstick on a pig

So if the Spanish can make ASCOD work (assuming it does) then just undo whatever mod that borked Ajax. Surely the list of components is fairly finite.

'Ralph Wiggum' loop prompts Claude to vibe-clone commercial software for $10 an hour

Re: Sounds awful

I cant believe how lazy a presumably educated techie is to write off everything AI generated as "slop" without engaging more intellectually with the discussion.

Is it fear and denial talking?

Concorde at 50: Twice the speed of sound, twice the economic trouble

Not sure you can compare a paper project with something that flew to space 135 times.

HOTOL was and always will be a stillbirth. Hell even Blue Streak was a roaring success compared to HOTOL.

Hotol was a grand idea that I would have loved to see in reality mind you...but lets not be delusional about how close it came...

Re: BA were asshats about it

Probably the staff too.

Mechanical equivalent of having to support Apps built for AS400 or Cobol. Only greybeard contractors at hansome rates....

Re: HS2 then

Try again.

HS was never about speed - it is about capacity, putting high speed intercity trains on their own lines frees up local lines for stopping services and frieght.

Dumbest sales job in the history of Whitehall, that and letting most of the Tory counties scream for their own cuttings where not necessary.

Uncle Sam's VMware 'bargain' doesn't include the actual hypervisor

Some moron in Procurement is going to have an "oh f**k" moment when the head of IT tears them a new one...

Open source's new mission: Rebuild a continent's tech stack

Your comment was moderated and failed the too much ranting about "unelected officials and "endless bureaucracy" tests.

Consequently its been routed to the shitter for those corrupted by RW propaganda.

Microsoft admits Outlook might freeze when saving files to OneDrive

Re: 40 years and counting.

You are confusing where the maturity is.

The email channel is well understood and the subject of reams of internationally agreed technical standards, which is why almost anyone except from MS can build a working email client.

Its clear where the maturity *is not*

Microsoft CEO: AI sovereignty isn't where it runs, it's who controls it

Its Both.

Sorry SatNad. Its both.

UK and EU locations and UK and EU IP.

American Corporations cannot be trusted now they are subordinate to the Orange Maniac and his cultists.

Royal Navy's helicopter drone makes its first autonomous flight

Re: Britain will capitulate

Lots of downvotes because you're a moron.

You dont effectively go to war with the biggest economic and military super power in history just coz some numpty throws around words like quisling on the interwebs.

Re: Unmanned take-off/landing on ships?

... Or how much stress is ADDED?

Re: Unmanned take-off/landing on ships?

Not this drone though - its the same size as a chopper. Seems more a crafty pork barrel attempt by the Leonardo than a serious attempt to create a drone chopper. Surely you'd make them smaller to cram 2 into the same space as a chopper for Meatbags.

Cop cops it after Copilot cops out: West Midlands police chief quits over AI hallucination

Re: Idiocy

Im going to get downvoted here but AI isnt the problem here.

Its functionally identical to trusting an employee - getting challenged on that trust....then not verifying.

This was a management 101 failure not a technology one regardless of the use of AI.

Jaguar Land Rover wholesale volumes plummet 43% in cyberattack aftermath

Re: Terminally Confused Squad

Nope. The vast majority will be permies already on the payroll....that you have to continue paying...

Its just the little mum and dad operations supplying parts and expertise that have probably already gone to the wall and not seen a whiff of the 1.5Bn incompetence bailout.

HSBC app takes a dim view of sideloaded Bitwarden installations

Banking App Developers should be shot

They are some of the worse apps out there - driven by the institutional arrogance thats built into the banking industry.

Case in point. My Banking app has a secondary facial recognition function build into the app for certain actions, that is an entire duplicate of the OS level stuff build into my phone. Fine if it works, but needless to say it doesnt work at all reliably, unlike the OS level on. And Im white and male. Gawd knows how it works for someone who isnt.

So now instead of using that function I just move my money to another bank who doesnt have the stupid facial recognition failures.

Mem-ageddon: AI chip frenzy to wallop DRAM prices with 70% hike

Re: It'll hit the entire real economy

Exactly. Why the Ram manufacturers would chase after a bubble thats already past its peak is beyond me.

The AI stupid is coming thick and fast.

You'd think the Ram manufacturers had enough vision to recognise a bubble thats due to burst and they are going to left holding massive excess inventory of RAM that nobody else can use.

I predict an explosion of consumer grade motherboards with enterprise ram support.

This is how the coming AI crash becomes a contagion that impacts the entire tech industry.

What if Linux ran Windows… and meant it? Meet Loss32

The app subscription model is by no means limited to or constrainted to the Windows OS. Stop spouting nonsense and conflating 2 different things.

"Owning your own system" is an irrelevant goal for 99% of users - even in this time of the US going mad. They just want to get shit done.

Owning your own systems is for the beard and sandals brigade only. AKA those out of touch with the real world and with petty minor use cases no-one cares about.

UK tribunal says reselling Microsoft licenses is A-OK

Re: Common sense prevails?

Nerdy argumentative use case incoming in 5..4..3..2..1

SpaceX's Starship: Two down, Mons Huygens to climb

A counter-counter factual is that NASA spent $196Bn on the Shuttle program, and they've only spent.... drum roll please....$14Bn on SpaceX projects (including Falcon launches).

Apple goes all in on AI acceleration with M5 MacBook, iPad, and Vision Pros

TBF even the Intel Macs obsolesced very slowly. I've just upgraded from a 2011 iMac with Opencore Legacy patcher to an M4 MBA simply because the HD was getting chattery and I couldn't be arsed to dismantle it.

Even my work 2017 Intel MBP lasted until last year, and I could have squeeze another year or so out of it if I hadnt have thrown my toys out of the pram at work to get an M class.

Re: Illussion

What you talking about Willis?

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

And? The exam question was user apps deployment not MacOS App development. Completely different use case.

If you need Xcode for work then you register your work address on the app store. The app store doesn't require an icloud address.

That’s just not true. All our corporate apps come from the Intune store.

It’s really won’t. You have no idea what you are spouting off about. Most of the iOS stuff is just an overlay.

We’re a mixed environment about 150 Mac’s to 8000 Windows machines. Mac users are mainly execs, IT or creatives.

Mac users have Admin rights and are meant to be self supporting.

I’m a Mac user, sit on the self help forum and our rollout has definitely gone too far - there’s probably 10 users who are responsible for 90% of the issues who should have their Macs forcibly removed. TBF 50% of the issues are with Adobe cCeative Cloud which appears to be Malware masquerading as software.

Just switched painlessly from Jampf to Intune so common-er admin console with the Windows fleet.

Our replacement policy is 4 years for Windows and 7 for Macs. Probably should be 6 for Mac.

The only bug I have is that we have an Mbp only policy and 50% of the Mac base only need a 50% cheaper MBA, so we are cutting off our nose cost wise.

SpaceX Dragon huffs, puffs... and fizzles out as NASA aborts ISS boost

SpaceX?

Much as I hate MElon, surely rapid turnaround of space maintence vehicles is a job for SpaceX? I would have thought the long pole in the tent is design off the coupling or pushing attachment.

UK Lords take aim at Ofcom's 'child-protection' upgrades to Online Safety Act

Re: House of Lords

THIS. Finally someone gets it. The HoL is a bit shit. But the alternatives - another useless encrustration of elected arseholes is infinitely worse.

The solution to a political problem is very rarely more politicians.

Proportionaliity is the problem

This is all very well but Ofcom are going after the wrong targets - and will continue to do so because its easier than going after the real targets - the Hyperscale SoMe owners.

So we mum and dad scale hobby sites having to close down due to cost of implementation and those that damage kids an incalculable amount on daily basis go about their business as usual.

Its a joke - as are Ofcom on this issue.

Anthropic to pay at least $1.5 billion to authors whose work it knowingly pirated

Re: Designed never to be spent

Did you even read the article? Anthropic have already set the bar at $3k per book, in part persumably becuase it fucks over Meta and OpenAI. $3k will be the lower limit.

Re: "a distinguished VP analyst"

I've seen him speak a couple of times. He's actually one of the more articular less bullshitty ones. Imagine a tech nerdy version of James Earl Jones or Wendlell Pierce (James Greer in the Jack Ryan series)

UK government trial of M365 Copilot finds no clear productivity boost

Re: Using an LLM effectively requires a new set of skills

And what % percentage of basic office users can write a macro or create a power automate script or a PowerBI report? All similar tasks similar in complexity to basic prompt engineering.

You’re just proving LLMs aren’t consumer grade.

Re: This gells

Thanks John. You’re correctly pointed out what the AC missed which is tech costs aren’t measured at the same scale as corporate pay, An E3 license is £19 so have to copilot on each one increases your office license cost by 150%.

Your example is a good one, another one. Copilot costs $360 a year, or about 1/2 the replacement cost of a corporate latptop. How many Co’s do we know that can/would spare the cash to replace their entire suite of laptops every two years? 7 mins per day is probably the kind of benefit you’d get from a decrufted new laptop.

This gells

With what Gartner Research will tell you off the record if you have a contract with them.

Copilot saves about 15mins per day at best - and is not worth paying essentially for 2 office seats per user. As a $5 add on it’s reasonable. At the current RRP of $30 it’s mostly unsellable. At even higher prices for MS to actually break even on the costs - it’s laughable.

Also because it’s only 15mins most users take the time to make another coffee or have a chat with a colleague, hence no material productivity gains,

Also based on the trial I’ve run. Free Copilot Chaf has about 80% of the gains of the paid version. All you lose is the clippy functionality in the Office suite which is marginal. The ENTRA/MS graph intergration is good and where the other ~20% comes from.

UK patches air defense with 6 extra Land Ceptor missile launchers

Re: Russia, Russia, Russia

And yet real actual military analysts rate Russia as having the joint second strongest military in the world with China.

France is 6th and the UK 5th.

https://www.globalfirepower.com/countries-listing.php

Re: Russia, Russia, Russia

Attack is not the same as invade you numpty.

If an attack by Russia on a NATO country triggers article 5 then Russia will immediately consider all of NATO including the UK fair game.

The UK Online Safety Act is about censorship, not safety

Re: "adult content providers"

But not lots of skin and dangly bits. No siree! Not in Hollywood.

Re: "adult content providers"

You can’t discuss what if’s as absolutes like you’re trying to do. That exactly the same argument the UK Govt is using in the opposite direction. What if kids see extreme porn?

If I thought the OSA was an effective way of making kids safe (I don’t but let’s pretend), of course that trumps the real but small risk of your nasty habits leaking online.

Both are weak arguments. The argument should only ever be about how effective the law could be for its intended goal with statistical modelling to show it’s got a chance of achieving those goals AND a similar analysis of the downsides.

Chinese funding backs sale of British microLED specialist

Re: Plessey........

In shocked and stunned it was still a thing, Thought Plessy had died years back.

Microsoft admits it 'cannot guarantee' data sovereignty

There's not one Government that wont. They are all at it. Some just pretend more than others.

Re: Tell us something new

You are breaching GDPR in a wholly irrelevant way though. This elephant has been in the room since GDPR was formed and its just one example. Look at Safe Harbour.

If the benefit from data interchange is big enough - even the EU turns a blind eye to it.

So whilst you are breaching GDPR or Client Confidentiality - no one will point it out because no-one else in the room is wearing kecks either.

Re: There have been so many things

There is no guarantee of sovereighty with any cloud company, Yankee or otherwise. Microsoft are just the case in point.

You either go on-prem - and even thats vunerable to a sufficiently motivated state actor - or you risk assess it.

There are no absolutes in this game - ever. Lets stop pretending there are.