Posts by Jason Hindle

Brown says AI make student brain no work good, teacher should help use it better

AI can be a teacher, or it can do the work for you.

You choose, but beware, one path rots your brain.

Brit supermarket giant triples down on facial recog to nab shoplifters

Re: The first but not the last

I think you're splitting hairs over two big numbers, one of which will be greater than the other.

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/aca0ba04-7471-4b5e-8575-8e376b0b0570

Former Indonesian minister and startup hero jailed for Chromebook buys

Surprised at the comments here

As a government minister, he decided on Chromebooks; they were delivered and used, and there's no evidence that he profited from this. Perhaps he'd be out of jail had he bought the judge instead.

Grep this: Microsoft grafts (most) Linux commands onto Windows

From the notes I keep on the single Windows dev system I maintain:

"PowerShell style grepping:

svn diff | Select-String -Pattern 'Index' -CaseSensitive -SimpleMatch"

I've just downloaded coreutils...

Logitech unveils a cushioned mouse for all-day use

Re: Left handed mouser here

Similar here. Left-handed, born and bred, but conditioned to use a mouse with my right hand.

Zuck defends monitoring employees to win AI race in purported leaked audio

You've misunderstood the cult of the FAANG in the US. If Amazon is the FAANG of last resort, Meta is a close second.

It's easier to keep up than to catch up

And this attempt to catch-up smells of desperation.

Greater Manchester still says no to NHS data platform with Palantir at its heart

This is Manchester

We do things differently here.

Tokenmaxxing isn't an AI strategy

One born every minute

"Companies like Meta and Shopify have made headlines by treating token usage as a key performance indicator, and employees have answered the call by trying to signal their value through heavy use of AI tools. That can get expensive quickly and may not do much for more meaningful business metrics."

I have this dream where I end up working for an employer whose bonus structure is tied to the number of lines of code produced or the number of bugs found. I suspect we all, on some level, share that dream.

Anthropic tests how devs react to yanking Claude Code from Pro plan

In the words of Yoda

Begun this enshitification has.

Project Glasswing and open source software: The good, the bad, and the ugly

It's not a great place to be.

Now it's started, Glasswing has to happen. There has to be an assumption that China or Russia get hold of something comparable to Mythos at some point. They will not play nice. I say this with full knowledge that this is also a nice play for more investor money on Anthropic's part. They've got form. If Mythos is approaching what Anthropic is egging it up to be, we're in fringe territory.

Starmer's digital ID reboot raises same old questions as its Blair-era ancestor

Re: Pooer argument

Dear Anonymous Cow Herd,

Back in the 70s and 80s, they were mostly reading the paper. Today, many are still reading the paper(s). On their smartphone.

Best regards,

J

Pooer argument

"Building a digital ID scheme around a technology increasingly blamed for shortening attention spans and worsening mental health in adults, as well as children, looks inconsistent at best."

Social media: A set of applications classed as such, many of which provide apps which run on smartphones.

Digital ID: A form of ID that may be stored in the digital wallet app of a smartphone.

Smartphone: A networked programmable pocket computer that happens to support voice and text communications out of the box.

What inconsistency do you see? Digital ID is not social media. Smartphones are not social media.

Ofcom sees no need for overhaul in next phase of fiber rollout despite BT domination

Re: The horse has bolted

I'm rather glad things have turned out the way they have. OpenRetch sell an inferior product. Anyone lucky enough to have an AltNet option (or CityFibre*) has access to a superior, often far less expensive product. This is capitalism doing its thing.

Perplexity Comet hurtling toward Amazon ban

Re: Won't be long before the court systems use AI instead of human judges

Best to hope you don't have one of those guilty-looking faces when that happens!

Broadcom says AI companies can’t make their own silicon any time soon

Google says...

Hold my beer.

Brussels eyes crowbar for Meta's WhatsApp AI lockout

So, is this the same EU

That decided it would be better for the consumer if more broadcasters competed for various football competitions (including the Premier League)? Funny, that.

Whether they are building agents or folding proteins, LLMs need a friend

Re: Sigh...

I judge it entirely on its utility. Can I get the Code Companion plugin for Vim to do a bit of grunt work using a small local model? Yes I can, and it's a small productivity gain. Can I get Nano Banana to produce an accurate infographic for a presentation? Absolutely. Some things work. Some things don't.

What is clear is that unlike the ghosts of AI past, AI present is here to stay in one form or another. Unlike the past, adoption in the present is pretty pervasive.

How an experienced developer teamed up with Claude to create Elo programming language

Re: Fairly sure I saw a similar one back in 1997...

Back in the early 90s, I worked with a (highly skilled and capable) chancer who claimed ten years Visual Basic experience.

Meta retreats from metaverse after virtual reality check

The difference being that, outside those who comment on El Reg columns, AI is spectacularly successful in terms of user numbers if not profitability (even if it is mostly just people animating photos into videos that are more than a bit Benny Hill).

Linus Torvalds tries vibe coding, world still intact somehow

I don't think I've actually done it. From the quality of answers I get back from the latest Gemini models, I should definitely give AntiGravity a try. That said, I find the very word off-putting with respect to software - I prefer specification.

Apple hopes to save Siri from laughingstock status with infusion of Google Gemini

Re: And so, the last bastion of privacy was finally conquered

More likely, some variation of Google's locally resident Gemma model, backed up by Apple's servers. This would make sense - small/tiny models is an area where Google holds a lead over OpenAI.

The world is one bad decision away from a silicon ice age

It's potentially worse than described here.

By 2030, TMSC's Gigafab Cluster in Arizona should be producing 2nm chips. Currently, yields are similar to those in Taiwan. Now imagine a world where not only are fewer chips being made, but those chips are made only in an increasingly protectionist US.

Death to one-time text codes: Passkeys are the new hotness in MFA

Passkeys are great

When they work. Which, in my experience, is not always the case. 2FA/MFA with either an OTP or authenticator app is fine.

Block all AI browsers for the foreseeable future: Gartner

For once I agree with Gartner

Having played with a very impressive AI-enabled browser (Perplexity's Comet), I've got to agree with this. You risk giving a technology that's not sufficiently mature far too much access.

UK digital ID plan gets a price tag at last – £1.8B

Good to meet someone who really likes the thousands of people coming over on those lovely Farage boats every week.

Polite reminder. The public's priorities did include BREXIT. Look where that got us!

Given the replacement cost of a UK passport and its desirability on the black market, mine stays in the safe unless I'm travelling or actually need photo ID for some other reason.

Plenty of other countries implemented ID without becoming totalitarian. Plenty of things were never required here. Until they were required. In fact, across the broad arc of human history, lots of things were considered tradition until they weren't. Drowning people accused of witchcraft, for example. I understand it is known as progress.

Passports, driving licences and gun licences can be issued, but also revoked for various reasons. They are also time-consuming to replace if lost or stolen.

Whatever legitimate places AI has, inside an OS ain't one

There's definitely a right and a wrong way to do it.

The right way: OS exposes an API that a resident AI application may use. Users are free to take their chances...

The wrong way: The utter mess Microsoft has made (especially the awful, invasive screen recording).

Aviation delays ease as airlines complete Airbus software rollback

Something doesn't add up

"Left unexplained, for now, is exactly how intense solar radiation corrupts data."

Presents as a hardware design defect; fixed in software?

Crocs get the Xbox treatment with sole-crushing price of $80

Polite reminder

Your dignity leaks out of those holes.

Dell says Windows 11 transition is far slower than Win 10 shift as PC sales stall

Re: "the potential of the AI PC"

"As it stands, an AI PC is a solution looking for a problem. It will remain that way until a genuinely useful program/feature comes along that can actually utilise the NPU."

If I run asitop on my Mac, I see the NPUs fire into action if I do subject or sky selection in Lightroom or Photoshop, so they will be used for various things in the background.

"If there's no killer feature that can utilise the NPU and provide real-world benefit? What's the point in shelling out for an AI PC? At the moment, the only thing they've got is "future proofing"..."

Caveat: I have no idea if the same can be said for a PC. For example, running Ollama locally makes zero use of the NPU on the beefy corporate Lenovo that was recently handed to me. Co-Pilot doesn't seem to do anything locally.

Ukraine first country in Europe to get Starlink satellite phone service

Re: It sounds like it doesn't really matter

Creating “not spots” is easy when you have plenty of things that go bang.

Vibe coding: What is it good for? Absolutely nothing (Sorry, Linus)

This is very on point, so I'm surprised at the downvotes. Some of the responses fail to distinguish between the model doing the work (i.e. vibe coding, often with very lazy prompting) and answering simple, well-composed questions, which is what the best models actually do pretty well. People who use the technology well have already broken the problem down and are well on their way to a solution.

As for vibe-coding, we should be careful not to dismiss it, as the long-term danger it poses is real.

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

Emboldened...

"The big concern, as Lewis states, is that other mobile providers will feel emboldened"

I wouldn't mind if EE did this. When I left BT Broadband earlier this year, I ported my number from the BT Mobile MVNO to EE without reading some of the small print*. It was the path of least resistance, but now it feels rather silly of me. As such, I wouldn't mind the opportunity to port out.

* 5G speeds capped unless you pay for an absurdly priced plan (and that's with SIM only), plus the daily charge they levy for roaming in Europe.

Italian tech company promises to make America Online great again

This is slightly worrying for me....

Back in caveman days, I had a dial-up and later broadband with AOL UK. I signed up for a service called iTunes because I bought an iPod, which gave me many years of happy bus commutes. I use that ID to sign into my iPad and MacBook. I don't think Apple allows changing the email address associated with an account.

Chatbots parrot Putin's propaganda about the illegal invasion of Ukraine

Re: The nice thing about the Putin Botskis?

Fail to address the actual comment. No?

The nice thing about the Putin Botskis?

The longer the reply, the more likely it will be a Putin Botski. I guess the concept of succinct doesn't exizt in the Ruzzian language.

UK calls up Armed Forces veterans for digital ID soft launch

Re: onelogin

So you think it's ok to turn up at a bank branch, take out a loan and simply have them trust that it really is you?

Re: onelogin

"It's the only response any sensible person can have to Starmercards. Whether or not they're a world class arsehole.

Starmercards are going to be a form of internal passport that will underpin every aspect of our existence: buying fags, going to the pub, visiting a doctor, using the Internet, voting, getting on a train or a bus, going to a concert, visiting a supermarket, using a car park, buying a lotto ticket, borrowing a library book, etc, etc. You seem to think that dystopian Orwellian nightmare will be a Good Thing.

"Now there *might* be a case for a unified state-provided ID scheme along the lines of the one used in Ireland. But that's not the snake-oil arsehole Starmer and his pond life are selling. They want cradle to grave, all-pervasive unavoidable monitoring of everyone, everywhere. Without getting any sort of public consensus or democratic approval for that. And lie about all of it. Fuck 'em.

We didn't vote for any of this shit. Which means there's no democratic mandate for Starmercards and the mother of all databases behind them."

Starmercards? FFS sake grow up.

Re: onelogin

You've just argued for a robust, government issued photo ID system. Your passport can be removed if the authorities deem you a flight risk. Your driving licence can be taken away if you are caught being an arsehole behind the wheel. Your gun licence can be revoked if you are diagnosed a bloody maniac. Try identifying yourself without any of those.

We live in a country where you have no fundamental right to robustly identify yourself. Yet whenever a government tries to introduce ID, Britain's world class arseholes scream Nazi.

Reddit to Perplexity: Get your filthy hands off our forums

As much as I like the Perplexity Product

Reddit is right. This needs to be consensual and equitable. Otherwise, we risk sources of training for AI models going bust/drying up.

Lloyds Banking Group claims Microsoft Copilot saves staff 46 minutes a day

Bugger, my bullshitometer just exploded

That headline has literally turned me into a gullible idiot who will believe anything.

I left an item on a plane this week and getting it back has proved fraught/unlikely. My calls are met with AI answers - the modern equivalent of "compu-ah sais no".

BTW, a colleague did use Co-Pilot to write his resignation email. It's quite good at those.

Amazon brain drain finally sent AWS down the spout

Re: last dns outage I had

That used to be much of our cadre of management and project management. People who knew how to rack and cable servers, and understood the products, who went onto studying for an MBA.

Re: As well as brain drain at Amazon, there's brain rot (AI)...

That gets an up-vote from me, and I'm probably one of the bigger users of AI on the team I work on (mainly as an alternative to Google search). Asking students to get AI to write the code for them shows a frightening lack of self awareness on the part of management*.

* But then again, we are talking the kind of blithering idiots who think AI is a great way to not need junior engineers anymore.

I did recently see what seemed to a reasonably well researched vid on YouTube about Amazon's working culture. It essentially boiled down to not encouraging employees to work for them long enough for the stock options to mature. It's on a pretty long list of employers I would avoid (in no small part thanks to El Reg's journalism over the years).

In the US, they're the FAANG of last resort for engineering talent (and that's saying something, bearing in mind Meta is on the list).

Icon? Let's just say the water don't taste like what it ought-a here. Cheers.

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

Re: It is completely untrue the M series has "struggled" with AI

I think that was more about Apple Intelligence than the Mac's ability to run local LLMs (which they do very well within their memory limitations - the latest models all max out at 32Gb - the M5 Pro and Max have not yet been announced).

Apple has a problem...

Five years later, the M1 is still absolutely fine, and arguably still the game-changer it was when launched.