Posts by Adrian 4

Trump admin freaks out over mere suggestion Amazon was going to show tariff impact on prices

Re: America

OK downvoters, let's hear from you.

Or are you the sort of cowards that catcall from the back without owning your idiocy ?

Re: Americans, watch out!

It's certainly something America needs, even if the criminal fraternity doesn't want it.

But having criminals in government is a new idea we normally only see in third-worlds dictatorships.

LLMs can't stop making up software dependencies and sabotaging everything

Re: Feedback?

If the evaluation of the output is accurate, that's called test-driven development.

However it's only efficient if the feedback providing correction is efficient.

Remember Bogosort ?

30 percent of some Microsoft code now written by AI - especially the new stuff

Re: Error Handling?

Congratulations to MS for eating their own dogfood (or believing their own marketing hype).

I'm getting some popcorn in.

Re: the blurring line between documents and applications

That's how programming already works. We write a functional description (we call it the spec), then we write a procedural description (we call it the code) then machines write a register-level description (we call it the executable).

In general, the functional description is incomplete and the programmer makes a bunch of judgement calls to turn it into a procedural description. This results in bugs. You can significantly reduce the number of bugs by having a more thorough functional description, but the people who write those aren't generally capable of doing better, which is why they don't.

Having AI do the procedural 'compilation' puts the onus on the functional spec writer to write a good spec. That's not going to happen.

To be fair (and I'm not), it could be done by a DIFFERENT AI, preferably separately trained with different data.

Re: Number game bullshit

He says 30% of the code in the repos, He doesn't say where those repos are against the product release.

It will be interesting to see how buggy the next release is.

He also doesn't indicate how that code gets in the repo, but implies the statistic is from committer status. So if he's got 30% of his repos due to uncurated AI commits the next release is going to be .. interesting. I'd hope for his sake that all the commits were made by humans, after testing, and 30% is the proportion that used AI assistance on the changes.

When Microsoft made the Windows as a Service pivot

10 a success ?

I don't see how you can call the change from 8 to 10 a success.

10 is a mess - the incoherent dual PC/tablet interface, the badly laid out and cluttered menus, the confusing and incomplete settings route.

I don't understand why anyone would want to keep hold of it, other than because 11 is still worse for data farming.

But if you're a windows user you've already sold your soul. Nothing left to lose and at at least the visual design isn't quite so randomly awful.

Google, AWS say it's too hard for customers to use Linux to swerve Azure

News at 11

Vendor lock-in is expensive

Microsoft trims more CPUs from Windows 11 compatibility list

Isn't this dead-end processor line literally developed for no other purpose than to put in PCs ? How can an OS not run on something with no other purpose than backwards compatibility ?

Dark mode might be burning more juice than you think

Re: Love the aesthetic, but don't use it...

There's another aspect that the goths of dark mode don't seem to appreciate.

Bright devices can be hard on your eyes, true. But your eyes are equipped with pupils, which will automatically arrange for the overall brightness to be tolerable.And these enact something photographers know as aperture. So if you have a dark screen and low ambient lighting, your pupils will open up : a smaller f-number. And that reduces your depth of field, making focus difficult and small text harder to read.

What you want for easily readable text and low eyestrain is a bright (black on white) screen and bright ambient lighting. Your pupils will reduce the overall brightness to a tolerable level and give you a greater depth of field. And as a bonus, you'll also be able to see other things in the room more easily, such as text on paper or small subassemblies and will spend less timer refocussing.

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

Re: Chatbot from Hell

Some chatbots are getting wise to this ruse, but I still find it worth pressing disallowed options or not pressing anything can be the shortest route to the human operator.

Re: Why I stopped buying HP

Oddly, everything I hear about NZ is good. Even, dare I say it, their politicians.

Are you all indoctrinated or is it really paradise ?

I have shelves of HP equipment. It's lovely stuff. The later bits are called Agilent. I haven't got anything called Keysight.

I did have an HP printer but it broke, so I replaced it with a Brother.

I still have an HP computer. It's much, much quieter than the equivalent Dell. Getting a bit old though. Not sure what to replace it with. Maybe it's still worth buying their ex-corporate systems - perhaps a Z600 or Z800. Would't waste my time on their laptops.

#

Is there anyone here who has ever enjoyed a positive outcome from a robosupport line ?

After Copilot trial, government staff rated Microsoft's AI less useful than expected

Re: Forked tongue oily snake

It looks like you're writing a report on copllot.

Would you like me to help you with that ?

Tech support fill-in given no budget, no help, no training, and no empathy for his plight

Re: Not "Fixing", Exactly

https://xkcd.com/705/

Day after nuclear power vow, Meta announces largest-ever datacenter powered by fossil fuels

Re: madness

@LBJsPNS

Your comment needs some context. What do you think is absurd ?

It is surely madness to waste this level of energy on meta's activities and the opinion here seems to agree with that.

Your air fryer might be snitching on you to China

> > Even a presumably legitimate open source Android wifi scanner needs it.

>

> NEEDS it? Time to check the source code, or at least send a note to the author...

It needs it because the android API won't give it sufficient access to the radio if the app doesn't have that permission.

One-year countdown to 'biggest Ctrl-Alt-Delete in history' as Windows 10 approaches end of support

I only use Windows for legacy sotware, so why would I need to move off 7 ?

"While Windows 10 won't suddenly stop working for users still on the operating system ... " - Doubtless that will be the next innovation.

UK ponders USB-C as common charging standard

Re: I have one problem with USB C

This would be a good reason not to use it for power tools. I don't like the multiple standards of power tool batteries and chargers but forcing a tiny fragile connector would be worse.

If every PC is going to be an AI PC, they better be as good at all the things trad PCs can do

Would have been better ..

.. if they'd settled on something that actually works before throwing themselves at it

Brit tech mogul Mike Lynch missing after yacht sinks off Sicily amid storms

Re: I KNEW IT!

The guy from star trek ?

Palo Alto Networks execs apologize for 'hostesses' dressed as lamps at Black Hat booth

I'm curious as to what 'steps are being taken',

Wholesale re-education of the marketing team ?

Microsoft's Azure networking takes a worldwide tumble

Re: Microsoft suggested to users that they test their app's resilience with the Azure Chaos Studio

Perhaps they did, and that's the problem.

Honey, I shrunk the LLM! A beginner's guide to quantization – and testing it

memory reduction

Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a...fraid

Self-driving cars safer in sunlight, twilight another story

training data

They only work in sunny California. New training data needed for the rest of the world.

Over 170K users caught up in poisoned Python package ruse

Re: my editor doesn't help me like it does with braces

He said 'removing redundancy', not ambiguity.

If we plug this in without telling anyone, nobody will know we caused the outage

Re: Ethernet AUI were a pita too.

Twisted pair followed in the tradition of AUI by having an easily broken retaining latch.

Rust can help make software secure – but it's no cure-all

Re: Classic

"We need to rewrite it in Rust. It will solve all our problems and we will be able to hire cheaper developers because Rust doesn't allow to make any mistakes that will impact security".

Well said.

I have no doubt that the writers of Rust have the best of intentions. But they probably write good C code too and don't make rookie errors already. The worry is the fanbois manager who thinks it will solve all those memory allocation bugs he's suffered from his inexperienced C programmers.

And again, while the Rust devotees are likely careful souls who'll think about all the other issues too, someone pushed into using it because it will make them more reliable doesn't have the same attitiude - they'll use whatever hack is needed to get their code to compile.

Clue : inexperienced programmers will make mistakes in any language.

Boffins demo self-eating rocket engine in Scotland

Re: prior art

Bacon lance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9dskxN10N0

Uncle Sam tells hospitals: Meet security standards or no federal dollars for you

Re: They knew what they were getting into. I say let them crash!

I guess Emsisoft products aren't on the required standards list, then.

Need to plug in an EV? BT Group kicks off cabinet update pilot

Re: Another of Baldrick's "Cunning Plans"

Not just The Register.

I don't get the antipathy toward EVs. There's a certain fraction of people who look for problems rather than solutions. It's clear they're largely justifying their prejudice rather than honestly analysing. ICEs have many problems too and I for one will be very glad to see the back of mine.

Sure, a significant change to EVs will present challenges. So rather than gripe and moan, why not look for solutions ? That's what proper engineers do.

OpenAI: 'Impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials'

Re: Legality and Ethics

They can learn laws. Some have been shown to be capable of passing legal exams (though IMHO that says more about the exams than the AIs). But they still don't understand them and therefore can't apply them. They match words and sentences but not concepts.

Re: Sounds like...

But while a child's essay, which has no publication or circulation may not acknowledge its sources, a student's essay must. In fact, the essay becomes more valuable by doing so, since attribution allows the following of references and additional detail.

An AI that produces text without references is of little value : it's just boilerplate and the wide occurrence of hallucinations devalues it.

What the LLM needs to do is tag its sources so it can show attribution and produce a more useful document. But that's hard to do, because it doesn't select arguments meaningfully, it just makes a word soup and statistically selects content from it.

I'm not very fond of the copyright industry and the abuse by companies like Elsevier. But when AI understands and implements respect of copyright, it will be a lot more valuable.

Windows boss takes on taskbar turmoil, pledges to 'make Start menu great again'

Re: Honestly

And the 737 MAX debacle was because Boeing were so keen to avoid that retraining that they killed 346 people to pretend it wasn't necessary.

UK government lays out plan to divert people's broken gizmos from landfill

Re: "financed by the hardware producers rather than the taxpayer"

Although that sounds unfortunate, what alternative is there ?

If government paid for it, that means taxpayers. So .. everybody, whether they frequently buy appliances or not.

The ideal solution would be to finance the collection and recycling costs using the recycled objects. I have no idea whether that's economically viable.

Google Groups ditches links to Usenet, the OG social network

Re: The spam was coming from inside the house

As the mass users went to facebook and similar scumsites, it makes me wonder if Usenet is worthwhile again. Surely there's nobody to spam there any more and maybe it will become again the tech paradise it once was.

OK. But I can dream, can't I ?

It's ba-ack... UK watchdog publishes age verification proposals

Re: "facial age estimation"

The bandwidth necessary to keep the video up to date with 'current' will easily defeat this scheme.

Re: NSFW...

"The powers that be are sold on the idea that AI can magically solve all this."

And this is the danger of the waves of AI-like systems. Stupid politicians believing it can magically solve problems when all it can do is magically create new ones.

What we need is magical AI politicians, carefully safeguarded by giving them neither power nor platforms.

Sam Altman set to rejoin OpenAI as CEO – seemingly with Microsoft's blessing

Re: Mmmmm

Yes. As usual, it's not the technology that's bad but our use of it. Banning the technology is playing whack-a-mole - we'll just find another.

Hardware hacker: Walling off China from RISC-V ain't such a great idea, Mr President

Re: Disagree

It didn't work for thermal cameras.

can't speak for the military, but industry now has better, cheaper, more flexible products from China than from America.

Arm grabs a slice of Raspberry Pi to sweeten relationship with IoT devs

Re: I remember when

I don't have much regard for Python but I thought it was popular because of the wide library support. Kids don't come with BBC BASIC wired in from the womb - they've still got to start by copying from somewhere else, modifying, and then writing from scratch. Maybe some pythonista here could illustrate what you'd need to type in (or, of course, save from a web page) to do something moderately interesting.

I presume there's a clone of BBC BASIC available too .. it's only a clicky link away, isn't ? Kids are used to that from their phone. And then there's stuff like Scratch.

I agree there's a lot more going on to get started but I don't think the new user sees much of it. The only difference is that there are more choices, and that's really down to the school setup.

Re: I remember when

I think administration for school computers is largely outsourced to the local authority and they'll be just as familiar with Pis as Windows, if not more. It's quite a few years since Pi appeared and it'#s only got better, while all Windows has done is eat up the resources of increasingly powerful PCs.

What's the refresh period for school PCs, anyway ? I suspect more than the 2-3 years that businesses need to keep them usable. In fact, it could be surprisingly close to the refresh period of the Pis themselves.

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

Re: EMACS

A mere Eight Megs and Constantly Swapping shows VSCode up for the bloated dog it is

Sorry Pat, but it's looking like Arm PCs are inevitable

@Yet Another Anonymous coward

So, they're essentially a windows Chromebook ?

Why are you still on x86 with all that legacy baggage ?

Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detection scripts under EU law

I might search and watch Youtube vidos intensively for a day on one subject, but then want to return to an 'ordinary' mix because that research is done. The algorithm knows nothing of this. It is unstoppably stupid.

Some would say they already have

Re: Good.

I haven't so far had the nag screen on Brave.

However I do have two other problems :

- Watching youtube in a Patreon window doesn't play. The cursor moves but the picture doesn't, and there's no sound.

- Following the link to watch on youtube works fine

- Watching youtube via a hackaday article gives a black screen

- Following the link from the hackaday article tells me the viseo is blocked

- Finding the video directly on youtube works fine.

I don't know whether this is a problem with Brave or youtube.

Windows 11: The number you have dialed has been disconnected

Re: Built to last

Windows

Windows 3

Windows 3.11

Windows 95

Windows 98

Windows NT

Windows Vista

Windows XP

Windows 7

Windows 8

Windows 10

Windows 11

Windows 12

(apologies if I got some wrong)

Yes, it must be about time for another meaningless renumbering.