* Posts by Rich 2

1579 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2009

Google says Chrome's new AI creates risks only more AI can fix

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WTAF?

You really couldn’t make this shit up.

Were the human species to survive another hundred years, someone would be making a historical tech sitcom with ludicrous and improbable storylines involving AI and blockchains and enshitification of once decent products

Google's AI training tactics land it in another EU antitrust fight

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Wrong wrong wrong

“…probe at Google for allegedly using web and YouTube content to train its AI algorithms while putting competitors at a disadvantage”

This is the wrong thing to “probe”. What they SHOULD be looking at is whether Googlies should be doing this AT ALL!! Most people on here know the answer to that already, of course but why spoil the opportunity to spend 5 years “probing” the bleedin’ obvious?

Jeeeeez…..

Trump says Nvidia can sell H200s to China – if Washington gets a 25 percent cut

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Re: Could we drop all the political stuff

I see your point but this is 100% a political story

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Security

So all those security and “national defence” concerns about exporting stuff to China suddenly become ….errr …less of a concern (?) if nvidia hands over wads of cash to the Orange Dick?

How does that work exactly?

Microsoft 365 boosts prices in 2026 … to pay for more AI and security

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Different planet

Microsoft said, "Organizations face an increasingly complex threat landscape, rising IT demands, and the urgent need for AI-powered transformation.“

An URGENT NEED FOR AI-POWERED TRANSFORMATION???

What the actual fuck!?

FreeBSD 15 trims legacy fat and revamps how OS is built

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Memory usage

“FreeBSD used a non-trivial 1.8 GB of RAM”

Are you sure the OS is using that much? By default, ZFS will eat any spare memory and use it as cache which tends to make the memory usage look really bad. When in reality, it’s not - it’s just ZFS using otherwise unused memory

But I would be surprised if you didn’t already know this

Aisuru botnet turns Q3 into a terabit-scale stress test for the entire internet

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Re: Stupid question

Yes. I get the “got a bad grade so you’re gonna pay” thing. But someone like cloudflare is never going to pay any ransom so what’s the point in DDosing them?

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Stupid question

I know this is a stupid question but it’s bothered me for a while so here we go

Why does anyone launch a DoS attack like this? Especially at this scale. What’s in it for the culprits? Is it just for a laugh? I can (sort of) understand a possible motive for knocking a single, specific website or services of the net. But at this scale, boat-loads of random stuff will be (potentially) effected. But why? What is the motive?

Windows 11 needs an XP SP2 moment, says ex-Microsoft engineer

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Re: There's no slowing down this fecal train

While virtual box works, the demands of windows means that the guest os you have running in the vm is strangled. I ran Linux in vb at work on a machine with 8 cores and could only allocate a couple of cores to Linux in the vm. Any more and the whole thing came crashing down. Not really a fault of vb (as far as I know)

Microsoft's fix for slow File Explorer: load it before you need it

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Bag of shite

“Yet preloading an application rather than examining what's slowing it down feels like treating symptoms, not causes“

Feels like tearing the symptoms? You are being way too generous!

MS is utterly incapable of writing any decent software. At best, they are totally incompetent. At worse, they are fraudsters.

Praise Amazon for raising this service from the dead

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No

I don't care what goody-goody things Amazon have done. I still think it's an abhorrent company

Meta knows how bad its sites are for kids, say lawyers

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Scummy Shitty Company

"The full record will show that for over a decade, we have listened to parents, researched issues that matter most, and made real changes to protect teens," Meta added. "We're proud of the progress we've made and we stand by our record."

Taken word-by-word, I think that quote is TECHNICALLY correct (obviously allowing for their sewer-level standards of pride). But it's a straw statement; it's the words that are NOT said that are important. They have not said (for example) "we did some studies and they showed that we're not total scum" or "nobody ever pointed out that we're morally bankrupt"

Makers slam Qualcomm for tightening the clamps on Arduino

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Re: " Qualcomm quietly rewrote the terms of service "

Well I’m sure the code and design details etc etc are well distributed by now so someone with enough interest could recombine them all and effectively fork the whole thing, based on the old open licenses.

And Q could do nothing about it

It's TEE time for Brave's AI assistant Leo

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TTE

Rather than a Trusted Execution Environment, what about a Not-In-The-Least-Trusted Execution Environment?

It always irks me when I have to click noscript’s ‘trust’ button for Google or some such to get a website to work. Just because I’m having to allow it doesn’t mean I trust it one little bit

SC25 gets heavy with mega power and cooling solutions

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Groan…

“When complete, OpenAI's first Stargate datacenter will exceed 400,000 Nvidia GPUs consuming 1.2 gigawatts of power.”

…which might be justified if it was going to be put to use on something a tad more useful than outputting broken code, or plagiarising some books or “nudification”; like some pressing global issue or other. But alas

Oh, and if the hydrogen turbines is an attempt to make the whole thing look “green”, it’s worth pointing out (in case you didn’t already know) that the vast majority of hydrogen is extracted from fossil fuels and is definitely not “green”

Thunderbird 145 finally adds ‘native’ Exchange support

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Re: MZLA

Fair cop

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MZLA

Why are you referring to Mozilla as MZLA all of a sudden? It makes no sense

Devs gripe about having AI shoved down their throats

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Re: "Questions such as the syntax for a particular command "

All the BSDs have excellent man pages. Many Linux system are woefully behind in this respect

Rich 2 Silver badge

Re: "Questions such as the syntax for a particular command "

Info is one of the most annoying things ever invented. There is a perfectly good man page system…. So GNU have to invent another!! But the man page still exists!! But when you look at it, there is bugger-all information in it with a strapline of “see bla bla .info for details”. F&£@ers!!!

Systemd 259 release candidate flexes musl support – with long list of caveats

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Re: Ha ha ha

Well they can bloody well leave Void alone!!

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Ha ha ha

“Along with new functionality, systemd is broadening its distro support even further, which will surely delight members of the wider Linux community

That IS a joke, yes?

Cloudflare broke itself – and a big chunk of the Internet – with a bad database query

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What we need is

What we need is an Internet designed to not rely on a single point of failure!

Oh, hang on…

Rich 2 Silver badge

“…You can bet they've tightened procedures, and are more careful with testing etc…”

Hahahahaha…. I have to admire your optimism

Brussels eyes AWS, Azure for gatekeeper tag in cloud clampdown

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Oh FFS

“…review if legislation introduced in 2022 is being applied effectively…”

I can give you an answer right now. No. Is not effective. Yes, the culprits are STILL monopolies and behave abhorrently.

But do feel free to spend the next 5 years “investigating” and “consulting” to come up with the same answer. F%#*ing useless

Windows boss defends 'agentic OS' push as users plead for reliability

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He knows the users are unhappy.

This is worse than him not knowing. If he didn’t know then that’s just poor management. The evidence now is that he DOES know …. and still chooses to shaft the user-base!

Microsoft's first Windows 10 ESU Patch Tuesday release fails for some

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Re: An Agentic OS

It is rather odd. An AI bubble is one thing - it’s just a bubble like blockchain or the metaverse.

But the lunacy around AI has evolved way beyond that. All the tech companies, almost without exception, seem to have been snorting the same “shit” and seen to be on a “we gotta get AI into everything right NOW or WE WILL DIE!!!!” mindset. And none of them are listening to their customers, most of which are screaming NO!!!!!! It is, quite literally, crazy.

It will be interesting to see where it ends

Firefox adds AI Window, users want AI wall to keep it out

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Re: Firefox People - consider Zen Browser?

It’s the plug-in/extension support that keeps me hooked on Firefox. As far as I know, no other browser comes close in this regard.

If I could run noscript, uMayrix, and a couple of other plugins on another browser I would jump ship. Maybe I need to do more research…

UK tribunal says reselling Microsoft licenses is A-OK

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Copyright?

The notion that copyright on fonts and icons makes reselling illegal has always been nonsense and MS knows it.

If it were illegal then so would selling a second hand book (obviously copyright) or anything at all that featured any unique and/or distinguishing features, like Lego or a even a particular brand of car - what would stop BMW saying you can’t resell one if it’s cars because it happens to have a copyrighted BMW badge on the front? It would be a ridiculous situation

AI pilots keep crashing, mostly because firms skip the prep, survey finds

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Application?

As has become the tedious norm when it comes to “AI”, there’s not even a hint at what the applications actually are. It’s just “AI”. You know - AI, like A and then I

I’m off now to do some “stuff”. You know - “stuff”

MS Task Manager turns 30: Creator reveals how a 'very Unixy impulse' endured in Windows

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Re: Flash Drives as Main File Systems

I’ve run my 16G laptop without any swap at all due the last 8 or so years.

Many people still think this is heresy but I’ve never encountered a single issue. In my head, swap is an an anachronism on modern hardware with gobs of memory. If I ever run out of memory then something has gone very wrong anyway.

Also, re running from a flash drive, make sure /tmp is moved to RAM. I also redirect some stuff in /var to the (RAM-based) /tmp and also move the cache and other crap that Firefox writes to constantly to /tmp

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85k

Can you imagine a current version of task manager (whether on windows, Linux, whatever) being 85k in size?

More like 85M. Plus the 300MB of dependency libraries needed to make it work

Modern software is (often) shite

Mozilla's Firefox 145 is heeeeeere: Buffs up privacy, bloats AI

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AI

So the most important question - what do I have to do to completely disable (pref remove but I know that’s asking too much) all the AI shite. I’m not convinced that removing a search engine from the search engine list will stop your data being hoovered up

You'll never guess what the most common passwords are. Oh, wait, yes you will

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xkcd

According to this (and I have no idea of it’s correct) we’re all doing it wrong

https://xkcd.com/936/

Microsoft: Don't let AI agents near your credit card yet

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Duh!!

Anyone who lets an “AI” thing buy stuff for them deserves what they get - which is almost certainly not what they wanted.

This is such a stupid fucking idea that I’m going for a lie down

Microsoft apologizes for not explaining cheaper no-AI M365 plans, and all it took was a government lawsuit

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“Our relationship with our customers is based on trust and transparency”

Indeed. That boat sailed aeons ago

Debian demands Rust or rust in peace for legacy ports

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Re: Enlightenment

I’m not worried about it. I don’t run Debian and probably never will. I was just interested in what was going on. And I try and stay as far away as I can from Windows so any reference to that is probably lost on me, I’m afraid :-)

I think my misunderstanding stems from thinking “port” was an application port - such as a “port” of libre office. That’s what a “port” is in the BSD world. I wasn’t thinking that “port” was referring to moving the OS to a different platform. My fault for being dim.

It does seem, from the comments, I’m not the only one that was confused though

Rich 2 Silver badge

Enlightenment

I’m not familiar with this and a little confused. Which bit of the system is going to have to be written in Rust? The package installers? If so then surely that’s “standard” (OS-wide) code anyway, no? And surely, it makes sense to use a single language for the installer (whatever that may be)

Microsoft, Alphabet throw more cash on the AI bonfire

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Don’t tease

Linux vendors are getting into Ubuntu – and Snap

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Re: It's not snap that bothers me...

The issue I have with Snap and Flatpack is that they are the wrong solution to a problem

The problem being that the Linux environment - whatever you want to call it - is so chaotic in terms of library versions that running everything as individual “lite” containers becomes attractive in the first place

Snap and Flatpack have well documented issues too, in terms of inter-operability with stuff outside of the containers

But nobody is addressing the underlying problem with Linux in this respect. I’m not even sure it’s fixable. So if you are going to run everything as containers, the underlying OS becomes largely irrelevant anyway.

The BSDs avoid all this, of course, because they are all a coherent system with OS and matching userland

I can’t help feeling that Linux is starting to rot a bit. It has some issues (as does any system) and the “solutions” seem to be increasingly to add more gloop. Carry on like this and before we know it, it will be as hideous as Windows

Microsoft 365 business customers are running out of places to hide from Copilot

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So bad it’s funny

“…and suggests tailored prompts to help you connect and collaborate”

Because you’re too thick to think for yourself!!

This shit is so …..shit? …. that it’s becoming a joke. MS release a feature nobody wants. All its customers say “fuck off”, MS hears “oooo — more please!!”. Thank goodness I don’t have the headache of dealing with this crap

Microsoft gives Windows 11 a fresh Start – here's how to get it

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Re: The problem

What’s an XFCE application menu? I use i3. It has no menus at all

This security hole can crash billions of Chromium browsers, and Google hasn't patched it yet

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How did I guess

I read the headline saying that the faults also brought down the OS in some cases

Reading further….

“..not only did it crash the browser, but it also locked up the Windows-based machine…”

Only MS could allow a browser to bring down the whole OS. Absolute shower of shite

Rich 2 Silver badge

Re: That's a bummer

I keep Firefox open on my laptop for weeks (with the machine being put to sleep at the end of each day - not shut down) and have rarely seen any issues.

UK politicians to draft outage blueprint after AWS calamity

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Re: You could do a lot with that

Thank you - I knew it began with a C but couldn’t remember the name!

Rich 2 Silver badge

You could do a lot with that

“Central government departments hold 41 live contracts with AWS worth a total of £1.11 billion”

For that kind of money, the govt could build its own distributed bit barns complete with its own private “cloud”, whilst creating jobs for the locals too

Obviously, instead of doing this, they would give the money to some twats like Fujitsu or Serco who would spend it all on bonuses and deliver bugger-all, while the price spirals out of all reasoning

Oh well. Nice idea I suppose

9 in 10 Exchange servers in Germany still running out-of-support software

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I don’t get the hurry

Just because MS are no longer supporting these versions of exchange, it doesn’t mean they’re suddenly going to become vulnerable

I mean, it’s not like MS have any kind of track record of weekly faults and compromises in any of their products, bodged patches, more faults, more vulnerabilities, and general shonky software quality issues, is it?

OpenAI tells Trump to build more power plants or China wins the AI arms race

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This is fookin’ ridiculous

What an I saying? It’s been ridiculous for years now. But even so…

Clearview AI faces criminal heat for ignoring EU data fines

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Sounds like

…the EU need to make an extradition request to the US for the people running the company

After all, the US seems to have no hesitation in doing the same

You have one week to opt out or become fodder for LinkedIn AI training

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Ta Reg

Well that gave me the kick I needed to delete absolutely everything from my profile except my name and email address. The only reason I keep the thing alive at all is in case someone wants to contact me via linked in. But chances of that are becoming vanishingly small these days

Britain's Ministry of Justice just signed up to ChatGPT Enterprise

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Re: We're not going to make it, are we?

No. No we’re not