Posts by Rich 11

Megan, AI recruiting agent, is on the job, giving bosses fewer reasons to hire in HR

Re: New Job Spec from Megan

* must be a teamster clarinet player

The AI only values the clarinet because most of the people it generates have six fingers on all three hands.

I, for one, don't have to welcome your new HR overlords

I knew retiring was the right decision. AI interviews! Jesus fuck...

Tech titans hide in shadows awaiting Trump tariff threats

Re: "fear of upsetting the next US President"...

How does that make J.D a nazi?

Because JD now seems to be quite happy to be the right-hand man of America's Hitler. It's not like Trump has changed since then; if anything, he's got worse. It's more like JD no longer cares, or at best is putting his personal ambition ahead of any democratic principle. Personally, I think he expects Trump to kick the bucket while in office, so JD will get to become president. If that does happen and Vance steps back from Trump's policies, undoing the anti-democratic damage, then I'll concede that I was wrong about him.

Boffins trick AI model into giving up its secrets

Re: Coming soon!

They'll just add another toilet to the wing.

Sounding off

slowed down by factors of 10 or 1000, they might make audible sounds

Back in the dim and distant past, I attended a college whose primary computing resource was a Pr1me minicomputer. As new computing students we were shown around the machine room during Freshers Week, and I can remember standing alongside this big, open wardrobe-sized frame filled with connected IC boards and daughter cards, the air warm around it. If you listened carefully you could hear a high hum with rapid but detectable changes in pitch. The sysadmin showing us around said he could always tell when a class in the nearby terminal room logged on and when their lecturer told them to submit their compilation batch jobs.

Aliens, spy balloons, or drones? SUV-sized mystery objects spotted in US skies

Re: I for one welcome our alien Overlords

in an eyeblink

It's far more likely that there was a glitch in the radar tracking software when some combination of circumstances triggered an unhandled edge case. It's the machine equivalent of an optical illusion being generated in a human brain.

Re: Clue's in the name

The flying objects have also been spotted near president-elect Donald Trump's New Jersey golf club

If Trump is on the green when they land, their ambassador will waddle over to him, take one look, and say, "Take me to a leader!"

Chinese boffins find way to use diamonds as super-dense and durable storage medium

Re: "Is that a USB key, or a marriage proposal?"

That would either be very bad or very good for your relationship.

One thing AI can't generate at the moment – compelling reasons to use it for work

Re: "Possibly, AI is not the big bonus that everyone's thinking"

I've still got half a box of punch cards left. They come in handy for scribbling notes and using as bookmarks.

Windows 95 setup was three programs in a trench coat, Microsoft vet reveals

Re: Downhill?

I assumed XP was a typo and the name should have stood for Fisher-Price.

All bark, no bite? Musk's DOGE unlikely to have any real power

Re: There IS NO MORE CONGRESS

Thanks for confirming that you are indeed detached from reality.

Re: There IS NO MORE CONGRESS

If you think the UK's Labour Party is a communist organisation you are utterly detached from reality. They haven't even been socialist since 1994.

Unbreakable Voyager space probes close in on a 50 year mission

Re: CVHOAXdtcm

My money's on both.

Elon Musk's disaster relief promises: Should we believe the hype?

Re: may have sounded good, but really, it's not much more than a PR stunt

Musk is the sort of person who would have set up a hot dog stand right alongside a Westboro Baptist Church protest outside a military funeral.

Trump campaign arms up with 'unhackable' phones after Iranian intrusion

That is a vile calumny! The Greatest President Ever has never spilled the beans* at one of his rallies, nor would it matter if he did because the thousands upon thousands of faithful attendees are good upright law-abiding American patriots and can be trusted never to spread state secrets further, just like they can be trusted never to leave a packed rally until The Donald has finished speaking.

*He reserves this display of personal power and privilege for the Mar-A-Lago wedding parties that he gatecrashes.

BOFH: Boss's quest for AI-generated program ends where it should've begun

Re: Hilarious

You forgot to tell them about the number of chickens which will need to be sacrificed to Lucifer.

Crack coder wasn't allowed to meet clients due to his other talent: Blisteringly inappropriate insults

Re: Bless..

There's psychological studies that suggest that people who swear a lot tend to be more honest.

Anecdotally, I think the reverse may also be true.

When I first started full-time work I used to work for a team leader who never swore at all. In the five years that I knew him I never heard him use any intensifier stronger than 'blooming'.

He was a bully. He loved to throw his metaphorical weight around (and from his build you can bet that he'd done so physically at school), but he was careful not to cross the line to where someone would either thump him or report him. It was all just little things, just enough that you'd notice but not so much that you could call him out on them without the risk of appearing unreasonable. Some of us managed to find ways to stand up to him without causing him to lose face, and the realisation that we were on to him would be just enough to spoil his enjoyment so that he'd go look for an easier target. With the advantage of hindsight we should have handled it quite differently, I think, but back then I was young and much less certain of myself than I am now.

When our department head retired, seventeen of us signed a letter saying that our manager was not fit to succeed him. If there'd been such a thing as HR back then (and if we'd had any confidence in them) I'm sure we would have got together and done something sooner, but the thought of the bastard widening his scope for harm was too much. He didn't get the job, but nothing formal was done about the complaint so we made sure the existence of the letter became known to him (though not the list of signatories). He was much more subdued after that, and finally left when his attempt to present a reorganisation plan got zero support from anyone in his team. His leaving-do was remarkable for its sparse attendance, so much so that his associates from other departments who did turn up commented on it -- some of them quite loudly, I was told!

Tired of airport security queues? SQL inject yourself into the cockpit, claim researchers

Re: Exploits of a Mom (Again)

"Joey, have you ever been in a Turkish prison?"

Green Berets storm building after compromising its Wi-Fi

Re: milatiry graed haxx0rin teh wifis

The Swedes probably set everything up in English just out of politeness.

The future of AI/ML depends on the reality of today – and it's not pretty

Re: Follow the money

I do at least have a use for tulips.

Microsoft security tools questioned for treating employees as threats

Re: f**k me sideways with a banana

I expect my Fortran IV skills would today earn me about £1.40 an hour, that being very close to what they first earned me in 1984.

Re: Mmmmm...

About forty years ago I had a friend who worked at GCHQ, around the time that the Thatcher government was having a stab at unionised workers there going on strike by claiming that some of them should have their security clearances revoked simply for being left-wing. It sparked a wider conversation about security and modernisation, and my friend mentioned a gay co-worker who was so flagrantly camp that at his annual interview the security people ignored the old 1950s rules about the risk that homosexuals could be blackmailed by the Russians because this bloke was completely unembarrassable. The joke went that if a Soviet honeytrap had caught him in flagrante delicto, he'd joyfully have passed the incriminating photos around the office himself!

Gartner mages: Payback from office AI expected in around two years

Re: Moving at 99.9% of the speed of light

Add another ten years for the fusion technology necessary to power it...

Trump campaign cites Iran election phish claim as evidence leaked docs were stolen

Re: Important question missing

Let? The door was never locked.

Keir Starmer says facial recognition tech is the answer to far-right riots

Re: Only for the Far Right

Really? That's your excuse? You extrapolate from a simple referential word to a malign intent regarding an unrelated incident? All to cover for your desire to change the subject to "What about the Far Left?", as though some anarcho-communists have engaged in a national programme of setting light to the homes of corporatist shareholders and tearing down the walls of Anglican churches in order to have bricks to throw at cars and cops.

Perhaps I should interpret your phrase "the overall picture" to include every riotous incident since the English Civil War.

Pathetic.

Re: Only for the Far Right

You have a very short memory it appears

Your example comes from a fortnight before this last weekend's riot while you yourself quoted the OP's phrase "this weekend". Can you not read? Sadly a lot of other people who can't read chose to agree with you. Perhaps you were all drunk. Or blinded by a political motivation. How would you explain your blatant error?

BOFH: Well, we did tell you to keep the BitLocker keys safe

Re: "You are confusing Belgian chocolate with American "chocolate""

Cheese rats. It's a borderline ecological niche but at least the rats started off with a couple of evolutionary advantages for dealing with ingested toxins.

Stop installing that software – you may have just died

Re: The medical test case

Your Scout training must have been pretty extensive. Causality extraction usually requires Loki.

Time Lords decree: No leap second needed in 2024

Re: All Because…

The declared rules for the star date varies with almost every Star Trek series. But I take your point, so bring on eugenics, nuclear war and first contact, then we can have star date(s).

For the record: You just ordered me to cause a very expensive outage

Re: Missed a trick

This is what -- assuming it fails to cover your arse when they fire you -- wins you £40,000 at the tribunal. A good investment.

'Skeleton Key' attack unlocks the worst of AI, says Microsoft

Re: Fundamental flaw

Not so much a small child as a parrot.

Re: Somewhat chilling

My favourite was the short story where, at the end, the victorious protagonist told his ship's autopilot to go to hell, then spent eight hours trying to talk the AI out of doing so.

DARPA searched for fields quantum computers really could revolutionize, with mixed results

Re: To boldly go ...

Once more, please. This time with feeling.

Can AI models trained on human speech help us understand dogs?

dogs are less well known for typing

Well, of course. They've only got four functional fingers on each forepaw so they struggle with sentences containing q, a, z, p, ; and /.

Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects

Re: A project being agile

> Agile IT project with huge budget: we AI will figure claim to have figured out missing parts from Stackoverflow.

UK PM Sunak calls election, leaving Brits cringing over memory of his Musk love-in

Re: Disappointing

Cameron tried that one and they basically told him to get lost.

Because they knew he wasn't being serious, as did we. Anyone who'd watched him slag off the EU whenever it suited him could see that.

Re: Disappointing

Grant Shapps is not ready to put himself forward for the inevitable party leadership election this time round, but he'd be happy to send Corinne Stockheath or Sebastian Fox in his place.

Re: Disappointing

Quite right. When Rees-Smug made his silly complaints (and I bet he's never used a hoover in his life) I checked my robo-hoover and the little handheld thing I got for spillages, the stairs and tight corners: 40W and 75W respectively. It's not about how big your tool is, Jacob, it's how you use it.

Re: Disappointing

You (& the survey) are muddling the EEC with the EU.

No. No, they're not. You are somewhat behind the times.

Wait! Are you Jacob Rees-Mogg?

Forget feet and inches, latest UK units of measurement are thinking bigger

Re: What the hell is a meter?

Is it what happens to people who are burglarized and convicted of a belief?

Destroying offshore wind farms is top priority for Trump if he returns to presidency

Re: Will Trump bring back the coal-powered car?

Ah, yes. No Tricks Zone, the infamous cherry-pickers. Is there anything in there which hasn't been quoted out of context?

Re: Will Trump bring back the coal-powered car?

Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace

Patrick Moore does claim that he was a co-founder of Greenpeace, and sadly many people have fallen for this lie. He was indeed involved in the early work of Greenpeace Canada (then known as the Don't Make A Wave Committee), but all of the actual co-founders of Greenpeace Canada reject his claim. They employed him when he applied to join in 1971, but they founded the group in 1969.

Re: Will Trump bring back the coal-powered car?

Speaking as a signed-up lefty and a 35-year member of Greenpeace, my only lasting problem with nuclear power is the utterly shite and cowardly approach successive governments have shown to addressing the problem of nuclear waste. And just because I haven't always agreed with Greenpeace regarding their nuclear power policy doesn't mean I've ever concluded that I should cancel my membership either. Life is more nuanced than that. I even give the Orange Shitgibbon the time of day on rare occasions, if only on the basis that a pig-ignorant, badly-damaged and fuckwittedly-demented clock can infrequently be very briefly right.

Orange in orange

Sounds like it could be the sequel to the 1996 sequel to the famous trapped-president 1981 prison film. Call it 'Escape from FLA'.

OpenAI says natively multimodal GPT-4o eats text, visuals, sound – and emits the same

you'd never be able to rely on it, largely negating it's usefulness to elderly or vulnerable users who might be tempted to trust it's every word.

Given the proportion of people of all ages who, over the last two decades or so, have come to believe one conspiracy fantasy or another that they've read on the Internet, I think it's a little unfair to focus on the elderly* here.

*Pointing this out for a friend.

Ex-White House election threat hunter weighs in on what to expect in November

Re: Othering

I know that the electoral college is how you elect a president. My point is that when it transforms a win by a simple count of votes for a named individual across the country into a loss for that named individual, then there's something deeply wrong with it. The 18th century solution to the problem of choosing a a leader, that of sending electors across the country to vote a second time, sometimes by block vote for a state and other times in proportion to the state's simple count, will inevitably leave some people feeling that their vote doesn't count. We have a very similar problem with the way Parliamentary elections work in the UK, in that the first-past-the-post system benefits the two largest parties disproportionally, leaving many voters for the smaller parties feeling unrepresented.

Many other countries use less archaic systems that fix these problems, demonstrably improving voter satisfaction and encouraging a high turnout because people don't feel left out and disenfranchised. No system is ever going to be perfect but some are clearly better than others -- assuming the principle of democracy matters, that is, rather than simply holding on to power.

Re: Othering

How about the riots in DC on inauguration day 2017?

For everyone's benefit, here's the Wikipedia article on that:

Protests occurred during the inauguration ceremonies in Washington, D.C. The vast majority of protesters, several thousand in all, were peaceful.[169][170][171] DisruptJ20 protesters linked arms at security checkpoints and attempted to shut them down.[172] Some elements of the protesters were black bloc groups and self described anarchists, and engaged in sporadic acts of vandalism, rioting, and violence.[171][173][174] Six police officers sustained minor injuries, and at least one other person was injured.[170][171][175]

A total of 234 people were arrested and charged with rioting, launching controversial trials that gave rise to allegations that the government was overreaching.[176] Ultimately, 21 defendants pleaded guilty, and all other defendants were either acquitted or had charges dropped by prosecutors; the government failed to obtain a guilty verdict at any trial.[176] In December 2017, the first six people to be tried in connection with the events of January 20 were acquitted by a jury of all charges.[177] Twenty other defendants pleaded guilty and prosecutors dropped cases against 20 others.[177] In January 2018, prosecutors dropped charges against 129 other defendants.[178] In May 2018, prosecutors dropped charges against seven more defendants, after the court found that prosecution had intentionally made misrepresentations to the court and hidden exculpatory evidence from defendants in violation of the Brady rule,[179] and prosecutors also reduced charges against others.[180] Finally, in July 2018, the government dropped charges against all remaining defendants.[176]

The MAGA patriots did nothing that hadn't been done before in the previous 4 years.

Patriots? Fucking hell. Lets remind ourselves of what these 'patriots' did:

On January 6, 2021, the United States Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., was attacked by a mob[34][35][36] of supporters of then-U.S. president Donald Trump, two months after his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. They sought to keep Trump in power by occupying the Capitol and preventing a joint session of Congress counting the Electoral College votes to formalize the victory of President-elect Joe Biden. The attack was ultimately unsuccessful in preventing the certification of the election results. According to the bipartisan House select committee that investigated the incident, the attack was the culmination of a seven-part plan by Trump to overturn the election.[37][38] Within 36 hours, five people died: one was shot by Capitol Police, another died of a drug overdose, and three died of natural causes, including a police officer.[c][29][39] Many people were injured, including 174 police officers. Four officers who responded to the attack died by suicide within seven months.[30] Damages caused by attackers exceeded $2.7 million.[40]

More than 1,200 people have been charged with federal crimes relating to the attack. As of December 2023, 728 defendants had pleaded guilty, while another 166 defendants were convicted at trial; a total of 745 defendants have been sentenced.[83][33][e] Many participants in the attack were linked to far-right extremist groups or conspiratorial movements, including the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and Three Percenters.[84][85] Numerous plotters were convicted of seditious conspiracy, including Oath Keepers and Proud Boys members;[83] the longest sentence to date was given to then-Proud Boy chairman Enrique Tarrio, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison.[86]

Nothing that hadn't been done before, eh? Building a gallows for the Vice President must be regular experience in your world.

The huge queues are because you have stupid voting.

Yes, but that doesn't address why some districts, disproportionally African-American in the southern states, have seen their polling stations drastically reduced in number. Way to miss the point.

And you have some bizarre views on what I must think. I've got no time at all for Clinton, nor for antiquated electoral systems designed to keep 18th century landowners in power, like the US Electoral College or the UK's FPTP. Is there any more mind-reading that you'd like to do?

Re: Othering

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now tell me why people needed to stand in a queue for eight hours. And since you bring up voting machine security, where's your evidence that there were problems capable of swinging the election? Plenty of self-serving claims were made by the losing narcissist whose favourite perjorative was 'loser', yet none of them stood up to scrutiny -- look at who among his adulatory supporters ended up paying damages for defamation.

There were indeed riots in Oakland and Oregon in 2016, when Trump was handed the presidency thanks to electoral college rules, even though he'd not won the popular vote. It's a fucked-up system, but it doesn't justify violence. Now what would you like to tell me about the justification for the Capitol riot, something you skipped over in your response?

Re: Othering

now that the hard core supporters on the right think manipulating democracy is justified

They've been doing that for decades. Gerrymandering and voter suppression is rife, right down to those vicious laws in some of the southern states that no-one can provide water to anyone standing in line to vote. Of course someone's going to say that it's purely coincidence that voting stations have been closed primarily in African-American areas, so that people have to face queuing at the remaining ones for up to eight hours.

And when that doesn't work, the right lie about election integrity, and when that doesn't work, the orange shitgibbon incites a riot at the Capitol.

Lot of short memories on the right. Or just more lies.

AI Catholic 'priest' defrocked after recommending Gatorade baptism

The Church of the Holy Taco Bell. All hail the vibrating ring.