Posts by ForthIsNotDead

Angry devs vow to flee GitHub Copilot as metered billing takes hold

Similar experience for me

I've found it very useful. But it's now just too expensive, so I'll go back to the old way.

However, code prompts in co-pilot remain free (at least, for now) so you get the benefit of intellisense on steroids, even if you've blown through your allowance. Sometimes its very useful, other times not. It's excellent when you're re-factoring code. If you use descriptive function names it will often write an entire function for you perfectly.

But yeah... I think the days of giving it a prompt and sitting back and watching the magic happen are over for me. It's just too expensive. I have an annual subscription which I won't be renewing.

That an app 'Fits on a Floppy' is still a useful measure in 2026

I wrote TurboForth...

...for the Textas Instruments TI-99/4A.

It's mostly written in machine code (TMS9900). Some of the higher level stuff is written in Forth.

The built-in code editor, compiler, REPL, and >300 "words" (aka 'functions') fit in 16 kilobytes and run off a plug in cartridge. I hand optimised every single byte (well, there's only 16384 of them!) over and over to fit it all in.

It's on the internet if you care to search for it.

It can be done.

Anthropic co-founder hallucinates ghost in the machine

Re: "interpretability research"

The locked Galileo up!

Both Fedora and Ubuntu will get AI support – soon

Very strange

As one commenter noted above, it's a problem looking for a solution. They want to add a framework for allow generative AI systems to be integrated into the distro? Have I got that? Wouldn't that be a problem for the AI vendor to solve? I mean, you wouldn't add a word-processing API/Framework to the distro so support word processing software, or browsers, or whatever. So why would you do it with AI? All that so you just say "Hey, AI agent, move any personal files that are more than three years old to my "old files" directory".

Odd.

Microsoft's GitHub shifts to metered AI billing amid cost crisis

Companies are very soon going to find out...

... that it will be much cheaper to fire the code-bro's and re-hire the experienced devs.

My co-pilot subscription will become 9x more expensive. At that price... No thanks. It definitely helps me to write code faster, but I'll take slower over 9x more expensive, thanks very much. Won't be renewing.

GOV.UK chatbot gets smarter but slower as LLMs improve

Hang on...

What happens if you chat with a Govbot and it gives you some bullshit info that is totally wrong, and you get in to trouble for it?

Bot: "Hi there! Welcome to HMRC. I'm a chatbot and I'm here to help you. How can I help you today?"

Meat bag: "Hello - I was wondering if I could get an extension on my tax return filing date - there's additional information I need to send and it will take some time."

Bot: "I've checked your past tax return history and I see that you have an excellent history of filing accurately and on time. Are there any significant changes that you expect to report in this year's return?"

Meat bag: "Not really - but I've traded some crypto, and cashed in some shares and I need to make sure that is taken into account."

Bot: "Well, given your history, we can use your previous year's tax return for this year, and give you a six month extension to make amendments. Does that sound okay?"

Meat bag: "Oh yes, that's perfect, thanks!"

Bot: "No problem. I'm taking action to ensure your previous tax return is used as a basis for this year, and extending your submission date out by 6 months. Is there anything else I can help you with?"

Meat bag: "No that's great, thanks"

Bot: "Thank you for using the HMRC chat bot service. Have a great day!"

6 weeks later, by mail:

YOU HAVE BEEN FINED £1000 FOR NOT FILING YOUR TAX RETURN YOU PLEB.

Now what? If it turns out the bot was just spouting nonsense, who's in the wrong? Will HMRC stand by their bot?

West Sussex's Oracle rollout pushed back again as costs balloon 15 times

Tangential to the article, but nevertheless...

Population of West Sussex (according to the internet) was 904,000 in 2024.

20,000 council employees. 20,000.

Seems a bit high. What are they all doing? (Or not doing?)

Repopulate! Repopulate! Two lost Doctor Who episodes turn up in private collection

Having watched the video clip...

...exceptionally lucky that the Daleks managed to find some perfectly flat ground in the jungle to enable them to set it on fire! Just imagine if the jungle floor had been littered with fallen trees and bushes and other jungle under-growth! Very lucky indeed! :-)

And anyway... if it's not Tom Baker it's not Dr. Who! Just my tuppence worth :-)

Quicksort inventor Tony Hoare reaches the base case at 92

I've noticed the same with musical icons. All my faves are now getting old. Eric Clapton is in his 80s, Mark Knopfler in his mid 70s. We just lost Chris Rea last year.

We need a poignancy icon! Stop icon selected in honour of Mr. Hoare reaching his STOP instruction at the ripe old age of 92. Rest easy.

Bug that wiped customer data saved the day – and a contract

Is it me?

The "Who Me?" column has become increasingly condensed and sanitised over they years. It isn't as good as it used to be.

UK watchdog eyes Meta's smart glasses after workers say they 'see everything'

Key takeaway

The owners are just fucking stupid. I mean, seriously... Using the toilet, masterbating, having sex, robbing a bank? While wearing spy glasses hooked up to Skynet? You're a fucking moron.

Fly me to the Moon: NASA reshuffles the Artemis card deck

All this and...

...modern cars. :-(

Users fume at Outlook.com email 'carnage'

Re: I dont believe it...

Yeah - I got a domain name and mail hosting from Namecheap about four years ago. It's reasonable enough and works well. I get minimal spam, but I don't send many emails from that account either. I don't bother to use a mail client - their online browser-based mail thingy is perfectly fine. Outlook on my phone connects to it just fine though, but I don't bother with that any more.

Microsoft reportedly eyes E7 tier to make AI agents pay their way – like the humans they'll replace

1) Bait

2) Switch

3) Gotcha

Trump orders purge of 'woke' Anthropic from government

Re: Kathy Burke said it best...

Who is the 'far right', exactly?

It's funny - I've met loads of nasty pink-haired "liberals" (ha, the irony!) in my left. Never met an actual Nazi. Who are these 'far right' jack-booted Nazi's? Nigel Farage supporters?

Stop it

"I like being woke. I like being considerate of other people. I like being able to recognise when I’m just being nasty and mean spirited (and therefore able to apologise for it). I like having the intellectual wherewithal to recognise that the place that other peoples prejudices come from might not be evil - it might just be misguided and manipulated by people who genuinely are beyond redemption. I like wanting to make the world a better place for everyone, and not just for myself. And I hope that Anthropic doesn’t lose its moral fibre*, as so many others (like Apple for example) have done."

That's not "woke". That's being an adult.

Orbital datacenters are a pie-in-the-sky idea: Gartner

Re: "Degrees Kelvin"?

Add a comma between degrees and Kelvin and it changes the meaning entirely! English is amusing, sometimes.

AWS would rather blame its own engineers than its AI

Re: Breaking news.

Yeah. I was thinking the same. I was thinking about old servers in our racks that have been powered up for literally years - they get rebooted occasionally, sure, but they've never just gone tango-uniform. Extremely reliable.

Then there's my own laptop - a simple Lenovo i3 (does everything I need it to do, but compiling C/C++ is a tad slow) - it's powered on for days at a time. The only reboot it gets is when I think to power it down (Linux, in case you were wondering). It just works. Like a kettle. Or a toaster.

Rogue devs of sideloaded Android apps beg for freedom from Google’s verification regime

Who's phone is it anyway?

It's either my property, or it's not. Seems it's not.

GhostBSD to ditch Xorg for XLibre as Red Hat's Wayland crusade leaves X11 fans out in the cold

Still waiting...

A very interesting and thought provoking article. I know I'm going to get downvoted for this, but what the heck... I'm still waiting for someone to point out what is so controversial about Weitgelt and his supposed 'views'. And that's not a criticism of the author of this article; the author is simply (correctly) reflecting the general sentiment that surrounds Weitgelt. Yet, on the front page of the Github page for Xlibre, we see this:

"It doesn't matter which country you're coming from, your political views, your race, your sex, your age, your food menu, whether you wear boots or heels, whether you're furry or fairy, Conan or McKay, a comic character, a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri, or just a boring average person. Anybody who's interested in bringing X forward is welcome."

It seems to me, that his 'crime' is that he wants to keep politics out of software development. I simply fail to see what is controversial about such a viewpoint.

Your AI-generated password isn't random, it just looks that way

Re: I did.

Thanks! Didn't know that!

Re: I did.

4 should be IV, not IIII. Fail icon!

Enforcing piracy policy earned helpdesk worker death threats

Re: Freedom and responsibilty are bedfellows...

The moment you say "but only if..." you've just invalidated the whole concept of what free speech is!

There should be no limits. None. But that does _not_ mean there won't be consequences: a law suit (slander, libel), criminal charges, a punch on the nose etc.

Re: Why wasn't the violent idiot fired immediately and the cops called?

People _can_ say whatever the hell they want. However, freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences.

Apple's Creator Studio creates a subscription where free apps used to live

Re: Came for the premium experience

Correct.

They'll probably switch around soon! Make annoying AI slop agentic crap the free version, and force people to pay for the peace and quiet version! :-)

Re: Came for the premium experience

Winblows and MacOS, yes. Linux - not in my experience. My Linux Mint install just sits there quietly and never nags me about anything. Even updates. It just lights up the updates icon. That's it. No nagging, no adverts, no AI agentic bullshit. Just... peace.

GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability

It's simple...

If Github is running on any kind of Windows based infrastructure, then there's your issue.

You're welcome.

Containers, cloud, blockchain, AI – it's all the same old BS, says veteran Red Hatter

He missed one...

XML.

If you were around in 2000 you'll know what I mean.

Birmingham City Council's Oracle ERP fiasco now £144M and still not working

Re: Birmingham resident and IT professional here

This. 100%

Re: Birmingham resident and IT professional here

How does mis-gendering someone make them un-safe?

Please continue

The sarcasm on here is totally based. Please continue.

Microsoft wants to replace its entire C and C++ codebase, perhaps by 2030

This will be written about for years...

... as the moment that bankrupted Microsoft.

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

Re: Vibe Testing

Nope. Because it wasn't necessary. I can see with own eyeballs that it works perfectly. It's a simple program that allows a user to configure devices from a configuration hosted on his PC, and squirt it into the device over a serial RS485 modbus link. It's reading/writing max 20 holding registers. This saves the user having to configure the device (or, devices) using the keypad on the device, which is a faff and error prone. I can clearly see with my own eyeballs that it works. That *is* the test. Not everything is an enterprise application. This is/was a simple quick and dirty program that I couldn't be arsed to write, because I couldn't be arsed to learn GUI frameworks.

To be honest, I really long for the days of VB6 where one could drop a few components onto a form and wire up the events. It was quick and simple. Those days are gone. Everything is 100x more complex, for absolutely no gain whatsoever.

As werdsmith said above, if you're experienced in the art, and your problem domain, you can do it better by yourself. I'm a lone, self-employed coder, I work mostly in C++ (embedded, from scratch projects). I use Co-pilot in VS Code, and I have to say, as an intellisense on steroids it's pretty amazing. It can write entire sections of code for me and be very accurate - mostly. It still needs to be read and checked by me - so it's arguable that it actually saves much time.

If you're new to a language AI can help as it will use language features and techniques that you weren't aware of.

Two weeks ago I managed to vibe code a Python application that allows settings to be read and installed over a modbus RS485 serial link. I know hardly anything about Python, and don't really have the desire to learn. I just wanted something quick. I ended with an app that works perfectly, including a user interface (using the Flet framework), ability to load/save settings to disk files, interrogate the device, push new settings etc. And it's cross platform. I didn't write a single line of code. I just 'vibed' with Claude in VS Code (I have a co-pilot subscription). The application works perfectly, and is cross platform.

Looking at the code, it seems quite good. All I know, it would have taken days, if not weeks, to learn the Flet GUI framework, not to mention how to do things 'properly' in Python. Using AI vibe coding, I got it done in a day and my client was absolutely astounded.

So yeah, it has it's uses. But if you're experienced in your language of choice, use it as a turbo-intellisense!

Makers slam Qualcomm for tightening the clamps on Arduino

Just to clarify

The Arduino acquisition has nothing at all to do with the hardware that the Arduino was built around. The ATMEGA328P was originally produced by ST Micro, and was bought by Microchip. It was a successful, respected microcontroller before Arduino came along. All Arduino did was expose that chip to the maker community.

So by all means, drop Arduino. But you don't have to stop using the 328, or the ATTINY range of MCUs. Just migrate to the VS Code IDE and install PlatformIO and you'll be completely Arduino free.

Taiwan gets chippy about US request it shifts manufacturing

Re: Please shut down your companies

> Let us all hope and pray the Americans will have the intelligence (and "experience gained") to choose their next leader.

They can only choose from the menu they're given.

NASA administrator says US should have ‘village’ on Moon in a decade

They've been spouting the same bullshit for the last 20 years. China will beat America to colonising the moon.

GitHub CEO: Future devs will not code, they will manage AI

Logic

If AI is going to replace developers, then there will be no need for Github. If we can develop an app by "vibing" with an AI prompt, then why do I/we need source code repositories? There'll be no 'team' to collaborate with, therefore no need to create separate branches, no need to to create merges/pulls etc. I'll just tell the AI what changes to make, and leave it to it. What do we need Github for?

By by Github. Shotgun, meet foot.

My suspicion is that the purchase of Github was to provide a rich source code base with which to train AI. Expect the free tier of Github to be withdrawn at some point.

JetBrains previews Kineto for vibe no-coding

Re: Again?

Assembler isn't redundant. It's just hidden. It's underneath most code that you write, especially if you write in C, C++, or Rust.

Servers hated Mondays until techie quit quaffing coffee in their company

Kazakhstan in Winter

In the early 2000s I was working in an oil and gas field in Kazakhstan. In winter, in the dark, the temperature can easily hit -40C (Kazakhstan has the largest summer/winter temperature swing of any country in the world. -40c in winter, +40 in summer).

Anyway, I worked on the RTUs and PLCs out on the well sites, these units were obviously in enclosures, but the cold got to them. The fibre modems would regularly stop working at night, and come back on in the mornings when a little sunlight hit the steel enclosures and warmed the air inside. The Kazakh techs I worked with solved the problem. They fitted 40w domestic incandescant light bulbs to the bottom of the enclosure. The bulbs generated enough heat when the enclosure was closed to keep things just warm enough.

However, if we had to power-down an RTU things got dicey. The RTUs were rack-based, with the CPU and IO being in the form of plug-in cards onto a backplane. I would have to remove the cards and either put them in the car, or down my jacket to keep them warm, otherwise they wouldn't restart at power-up. Once restarted, they generated just enough residual heat to keep themselves running.

Fun (but cold) times. I miss the place. Jacket ---> because it's cold out there!

AI is an over-confident pal that doesn't learn from mistakes

Re: Useless at Cryptic Crossword Clue

I've had similar experiences when asking it about electronic circuits. The more you "vibe" with it and ask it to modify its answer, or correct it, the more 'insane' it gets. It's very interesting that even with warehouses full of servers, I don't think it would pass the Turing test. You'd very soon twig that you're corresponding with a machine and not a human.

"I don't know if you're aware about what happened in Holland, where they used AI-based tools for evaluating whether or not people who were on benefits had received the right benefits, and the tools just [produced] gibberish and led people to suffer greatly. And we're just going to see more of that."

Wrong tool for the job. Who is the idiot that pitched AI as the solution to that? It's a strictly procedural problem that could (or at least, should) be solvable with nothing more than a few SQL queries.

I've found AI to be very good at getting me on the right track when I'm researching something, far faster than using Google and then trawling through a hundred pissy and sarcastic StackOverflow posts, but for the actual nitty gritty details, it's dangerously bad. I've asked it about electronic circuits, and I've found that it can get the general details pretty much spot on. So then I ask it to produce a schematic, and it's total garbage, with MOSFETS the wrong way around, spelling errors, unconnected lines etc, like it just had a mental breakdown.

Treat it like the next generation of search engines and I think it's quite useful. But don't get it to run your business for you.

Ultimately, I think we're living in a fad that will pass.

Firefox 141 relieves chronic Linux pain in the neck

Re: Disable AI bullshit

Install Seamonkey.

VMware reboots its partner program again – and it looks like smaller players are out

Surely they'll get sued?

They're basically giving the finger to a bunch of their re-sellers/vendors and telling them to eff off, which will of course have a material effect on the vendors. That's surely going to end up in court?

That's because the Broadcom chips are physically soldered to the board. They're not contacting Pi resellers and asking them to remove the Broadcom chips off the boards as they're not allowed to re-sell them. Yet.

Google’s Gemini refuses to play Chess against the mighty Atari 2600 after realizing it can't match ancient console

Can we just take a moment to marvel at what the Atari programmer(s) did to write a chess algorith in only 128 bytes of RAM. The code runs from ROM (4K) but working in that tight amount of RAM is a serious feat. Afterall, 64 bytes of that RAM are used to represent the chess board!

https://nanochess.org/video_chess.html

The price of software freedom is eternal politics

When will they ever learn?

This is what is going on in 'left wing' FOSS development circles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-j9uXmtgUnk

I'm so fucking sick of this.

Junior developer's code worked in tests, destroyed data in production

Just create a dummy user in the system called "Room Available", and assign it when the meetings are cancelled?

British Perl guru Matt Trout dead at 42

Shame

42 is just far too young. Looking at the shadowcat website, there were plenty of people who loved him and are going to miss him. I don't him, or perl, but I prefer to dwell on the positive rather than the negative. After all, who won't have ruffled a few feathers when checkout time comes? RIP. Beer for the man -->