Posts by Munchausen's proxy

How one developer used Claude to build a memory-safe extension of C

Trap C ?

Language name checks out.

(Is there an Admiral Akbar icon?)

Purdue makes 'AI working competency' a graduation requirement

"Since when has a school's responsibility been anything other than to educate? "

The U.S. technical education system has become HEAVILY geared toward selling graduates to the schools' "Corporate Partners"

Trump demands Microsoft fire its head of global affairs

The administration's policy is not "cutting wasteful spending." It is to hurt people Trump doesn't like, and not hurt people who sufficiently compensate him while kissing the ring. There is nothing else.

Engineer turned a vape into a web server

Re: Surely the bigger question...

"I swear, if you asked many engineers these days to design a simple lightbulb + switch + cell circuit, their solution would involve an Arduino, a full Java virtual machine, cloud dependencies..."

Ah, so you're familiar with Philips.

The real reason why Trump is killing the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawai'i

Re: Terry Pratchett observation

"This is not 'shoot the messenger', but 'bury your head in the sand'."

I'll argue it is more a case of "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."

Former and current Microsofties react to the latest round of layoffs

Re: JFC, again?

no idea what the H stands for though,

Haploid

Please fasten your seatbelts. A third of US air traffic control systems are 'unsustainable'

Re: I have an easy solution...

> Out of curiosity, is there any hint of reflection, or buyer's remorse from those who voted for the Grand Orange Party?

We're seeing onesie-twosie sorts of stories about people regretting having their own faces eaten after voting for the Leopards Eating People's Faces party. But still only a few stories floating around. It's hard to say whether the light is actually dawning generally.

We were encouraged to see the results of a few Republican Congress member (House and Senate) 'Town Halls' with the public invited to a more or less informal meeting with the incumbent. The results were very much not pretty (that we've seen) for the Republicans, so they've done the obvious thing and immediately stopped having the meetings.

It remains to be seen whether the current outrage will translate to removing the perpetrators and enablers from office; our main opportunity for that will be in two years, and even then won't affect two thirds of the Senate or any of the Administration.

There may be some hope that the hostile takeover of local jurisdictions (towns, counties, school boards mainly) can be reversed, but I can't even guess whether or not to expect that.

Re: I have an easy solution...

> Does anybody want to claim that US citizens have either double the wealth, the earnings, the lifestyle of Europeans?

The oligarchs do. And then some.

National Science Foundation staff axed by Trump fear for US scientific future

Re: Pi = 3

> I'll start being the Sign My Petiton Guy to change the national anthem to the March of the Gladiators soon after. Bigly strong music name.

Couple that with replacing "America the Beautiful" with "The Merry-go-Round Broke Down" and you would have a near-perfect representation.

Th Th Th That's all Folks!

Trump can't quickly or easily kill the CHIPS Act, but he can fire the workers funded by it

Re: The Trump administration’s plans for the future are not clear.

> To which one could reasonably append "such as Tesla's full self driving and Elon Musks startup" if they were feeling sufficiently cynical.

I'm not at all certain it is possible to be sufficiently cynical about what Trump, and the fascists behind him are doing and are going to do. There is not a single backbone among the national-level Republicans put together. They will never meaningfully oppose the éminences grise who give them their own illusion of power, and they will continue to support the destruction and chaos up until the very second they discover that they are also scheduled to be victims, rather than the new permanent ruling class.

I think it's going to be ugly. Good luck out there.

BOFH: Engage Hollywood Protocol – because nonsense always looks legit

Re: Superb plot twist

> I'm going to wite a GUI interface using visual basic to track the hackers IP address to a geo-location

Slide over a little, I'll help you type.

Mixing Rust and C in Linux likened to cancer by kernel maintainer

Re: "it would suck"

" It might suck in that porting/converting millions of lines of kernel code is going to take some time, and in that time, the new kernel will be incomplete."

Harumph. <old fart mode=on> Maybe someone should have thought of that before they accreted a 'kernel' millions of lines long.

Tool touted as 'first AI software engineer' is bad at its job, testers claim

I guess they were absent that day

"More concerning was our inability to predict which tasks would succeed."

So "AI" hasn't solved the halting problem yet?

DNA sequencers found running ancient BIOS, posing risk to clinical research

Re: The new ransomware

"Thankfully they turn physical DNA into text strings, and not the other way around!"

This is true for 'sequencers', such as the specific one mentioned, but bespoke DNA synthesis is absolutely a thing:

for instance:

https://www.thermofisher.com/us/en/home/life-science/cloning/gene-synthesis/geneart-gene-synthesis.html

Just when you thought terminal emulators couldn't get any better, Ghostty ships

Re: Interesting . . .

> 2 I'd abandon xterm completely but xfce4-terminal doesn't support logfiles (xterm -lf logfile) as far as I can tell -- very useful IMHO for debugging long, complicated process output, especially tracebacks that aren't easily captured in another manner.

FWIW, xfce4-terminal supports unlimited scrollback, and that can be either cut-and-pasted to a file, or saved directly from the terminal menu bar.

Humanoid robots coming soon, initially under remote control

Anthony Boucher described what could go wrong, and how to fix it, back in 1943 in his short story "Q.U.R"

The sweet Raspberry taste of success masks a missed opportunity

Re: Everything has become so complicated

> a huge quantity of librairies that greatly reduce the complexity of many tasks..

But greatly increase the complexity of maintaining the computing system.

Police arrest suspect in murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO, with grainy pics the only tech involved

"t's possible, but unlikely. The core is that he (allegedly) crossed state lines and committed premeditated murder with an illegal firearm and granting him any kind of leniency on the basis that the victim wasn't a nice person opens the floodgates for people to claim justifiable murder. Whose opinions do we follow when deciding if someone deserves to be gunned down in the street?"

So, Kyle Rittenhouse, but this guy did it to an important person.

"Being a total areshole that ruins thousands of peoples lives with your corporate greed, is eventually piss one too many people off... who have lost too much and snap.

Its karma."

If his family really own multiple nursing homes, he may well end up far below the health "insurance" executives in public opinion, and karma.

I don't know what it's like in GB, but in the US, nursing homes are all too often hellholes designed and managed solely to abuse the elderly while draining their finances as quickly as possible. For-profit chains of nursing homes even more so.

Abstract, theoretical computing qualifications are turning teens off

Re: WYF!

>> Yes, schools should definitely have switched to teaching cryptocurrency. NFTs and blockchains, which have turned out to be so important.

> If students don't study it, how are they supposed to understand why they're not?

I'm not sure how to teach it, but I think bullshit detection should come from the liberal arts courses - maybe philosophy, history, and language in some combination.

Microsoft starts boiling the Copilot frog: It's not a soup you want to drink at any price

Re: Cringe

> but it's reaching and lame.

Lame? Lame? What is Lame?

Here's how a Trump presidency could change the tech industry

Re: "regime"

Kakistocracy is the best choice in context.

Someone is very optimistic

"I think the administration will be less inclined for the government to interfere with business"

No, just the opposite. 'Friends' will be rewarded excessively, 'enemies' punished severely, and a lot of small business people will be surprised when they find out where they personally lie on the spectrum.

Raspberry Pi AI Camera takes inferencing load off the CPU

It's got AI in it. It will class them all as cats.

Torvalds weighs in on 'nasty' Rust vs C for Linux debate

Re: Hard truths

When you get to 'J', your brain is going to explode.

AI has colonized our world – so it's time to learn the language of our new overlords

Re: Praising and warning

> For reasons that are not well understood, LLMs are shockingly good at organic chemistry.

My guess would be simply that the corpus of organic chemistry available on the internet is curated and for the most part, correct.

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

Re: 3D TV

> Is the AI PC the new 3D TV?

For computer enthusiasts, I'd call it the new Lisp Machine.

Re: But what...

It seems to me the one single job that 'AI' PCs would be good at is the one they will NEVER be allowed to take over.

Consider: 'AI' these days is simply taking a large corpus of buzzwords intermixed with filler words, and pasting them together to make statistically similar, but individually different combinations.

These aren't meant to replace workers who solve actual problems, they are the very definition of the corporate 'strategists' and 'visionaries'. The people with the power who, when they finally get it pounded into them what 'AI' is and who it really threatens, will ensure it vanishes with the wind.

Bargain-hunting boss saw his bonus go up in a puff of self-inflicted smoke

My mind is kind of boggling that Gateway would be considered the more reliable option in that environment.

DEF CON badge disagreement gets physical as firmware dev removed from event stage

Re: Eh?

> If they didn't pay for the software, what the fuck are they talking about?

Power, and Control.

Same as it ever was.

LLM-driven C-to-Rust. Not just a good idea, a genie eager to escape

Re: Good luck

>How much would code be improved if it was just re-written without changing the language?

Why rewrite at all? Or decompile-translate-recompile? Teach your LLM machine code, and let it optimize and correct the binaries directly.

Even further; add the model to any compiler you like, and just write typical bad code and hit the '-O AI' option to make everything good.

BOFH: The true gravity of the Boss and the 3-coffee problem

Re: Cafeine overdose incoming!

> Not sure about taurine…

Triggers the bullshit generator functions, I'd suppose.

Oracle's Java pricing brews bitter taste, subscribers spill over to OpenJDK

Re: Nobody Got Properly Nurtured

I'm having some trouble following your thought process here. Are you saying the citizens of Venezuela would be less hungry if they were giving more money to Larry Ellison?

Angry admins share the CrowdStrike outage experience

Re: Holidays

> If the computer was turned off while on holiday, the faulty update would be skipped! Another good reason to unplug during vacation.

It seems to me to be another very good reason to not invite strangers to manage your critical infrastructure over a network.

Boeing's Starliner set for extended stay at the ISS as engineers on Earth try to recreate thruster issues

Re: "Starliner could be used in the event of an emergency"

"It's more that return functionality hasn't been impacted "

As far as we know, so far, not having tried to return yet.

Thanks for coming to help. No, we can't say why we called – it's classified

> Not that I've been to Dallas, but I'm fairly sure you wouldn't need the software to notice something like a Submarine trundling down the high street there.

Texas drivers would never notice it.

I stumbled upon LLM Kryptonite – and no one wants to fix this model-breaking bug

Re: So,

So,

What's the prompt ?

Just describe this situation, and ask the chatbot what the killer prompt is.

Wiley shuts 19 scholarly journals amid AI paper mill problems

Re: "Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine"

I wish I could buy the power to give an extra upvote for '"Scanning" lived in vain'.

NVD slowdown leaves thousands of vulnerabilities without analysis data

I'd bet $5 that it was two people doing all the work, and they left, one at a time while HR was was completely ignoring their manager's desperate cries for a new hire or two.

Nvidia: Why write code when you can string together a couple chat bots?

Re: Is he seriously proposing implementing an analogue to the infinite monkey to write Shakespeare?

What is he going to tell his customers?

"These monkeys are trained."

"And expensive."

How to run an LLM on your PC, not in the cloud, in less than 10 minutes

Re: curl -fsSL someurl | sh

You know, you could inspect someurl

That's what the AI is for!

Voyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble

Re: Just a thought

You know there’s at least one nutbag with the tools to sniff the traffic who will try to run Doom on V’ger

Carmack probably could

But does he have the dosh to rent a dish?

And probably does.

Re: If ever there was a use case for LLM

You know that all such "AI" just collapses into a heap of nonsense the second it has to think for itself, receives unexpected data or strays outside its training boundaries, right?

Well, sure, just AI alone won't do the job. You need to add some quantum.

Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway

Does Sendmail inlcude calendars, contact lists or tasklists? And communicate with other devices to share those things?

Do I want it to?

YouTube workers laid off mid-plea at city hall meeting

Re: These were CONTRACTORS on the Day their Contracts Expired.

So they should have got standard sick/vacation pay from Cognizant, notice period, etc.

In the U.S., "Your position is terminated. Get off the property." IS the standard sick/vacation pay and notice period..

Health system network turned out to be a house of cards – Cisco cards, that is

Re: Heading off after completion of a task

I learned that you should always check the problem is solved >before< going off for a beer!

Yes, you never fix THE bug, the best you can do is fix A bug (repeat as necessary).

Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top

Re: A wasted trip

And that reminds me of the magic switch:

https://github.com/PDP-10/its/issues/1232

And for more Zen, it was installed by a person named Knight.

CLIs are simply wizard at character building. Let’s not keep them to ourselves

Re: Intuitive GUI? My arse.

Let's see if anyone hardcode vi fan manages to come up with an explanation why <ESC>:q! is intuitive and straight forward ;)

I was going to make a TECO joke, comparing that to 'ex$$' but I suddenly realized to my horror that TECO really is more intuitive. (at least to exit)

Edit: ( I guess I should add that the '$' is what TECO displays for '<ESC>' )

Arm IPO kicks off today with CPU slinger valued at $54.5B

Re: British chip designer to trade on Nasdaq only

While we will of course "lose" those businesses to the US stock exchanges in the short term, when the bubble bursts on the hugely overvalued tech companies in the US then presumably there will be screamed questions at the regulators that enabled losing hundreds of billions.

No, here in the US we've been pretty thoroughly conditioned to believe that any corporate regulation is pure evil, and any consequences to our personal financial status should be blamed on whichever politician of the other party has had his name in the news most recently.