Posts by Ignazio

Google Antigravity vibe-codes user's entire drive out of existence

You can't think out generative AI well

Re: Before everyone blames the user.

They made a circular saw with extra saws going through the handle and claimed they were exceptional saws, then sold them below cost.

Cloudflare broke itself – and a big chunk of the Internet – with a bad database query

So we're positive it wasn't DNS this time?

Because historians need to know.

AI code assistants make developers more efficient at creating security problems

Re: They reduced syntax errors by 76 percent

Never mind any testing, automated or otherwise...

AI coding tools crash on launch, could reboot better in future

Woah there pilgrim

Amazing Admiral Grace Hopper was right.

Your assumption that AI can grow past hallucinations to be the future of coding, well, isn't proven to be right. Matter of fact, you cite yourself the fact that it's currently making people less productive.

Use of higher level languages helped developers build better, more powerful abstractions - at the cost of resources. It also enabled poor abstractions to be put together - inevitably. You give people a bigger hammer, they'll bend more nails.

Is this the same situation AI is in, or is it just a crooked hammer? You jump the gun a bit there.

Problem PC had graybeards stumped until trainee rummaged through trash

Re: Pharmacists

"cobbler goes barefoot", local saying in my hometown dialect

Compromised Amazon Q extension told AI to delete everything – and it shipped

Re: The future of humanity will forever be

In this scenario we developers are the rocks

British IT worker sentenced to seven months after trashing company network

Re: An estimated £200,000 in lost business and reputational harm

Sure sign there were at least two idiots in the company, probably more.

Deutsche Bahn train hits 405 km/h without falling to bits

Re: Blott on the Landscape

Asimov had the same system replacing the tube

Opinionated Arch derivative CachyOS overtakes Mint and MX on DistroWatch

Re: Point of Order

Also what's your favourite cocoa content and why is it 70%?

Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

Trackball instead of mouse did it for me, I was starting to get twinges in my right wrist. One Logitech trackball later, I was happy again. Must be seven or eight years since.

How do you explain what magnetic fields do to monitors to people wearing bowling shoes?

"computer won't work, clicks do nothing"

Shift book corner off Esc key.

Happened twice (two different people). Second time I was smug AF. I'm petty.

Developer wrote a critical app and forgot where it ran – until it stopped running

Re: No Lifecycle Upgrades

The real question is in years, no reboots, no disconnections, no crashes, no taking the laptop from the desk? THAT I find it hard to believe.

Krebs throws himself on the grenade, resigns from SentinelOne after Trump revokes clearances

Re: It is so refreshing and hopeful to see some people with integrity and a backbone.

Pessimism? You didn't notice we're back in a 1925-1935 sort of thing?

By which I don't mean to imply they should be allowed to win easy. But the risk that they win, even for just a decade or two, is not pessimism at work.

Developer sabotaged ex-employer with kill switch activated when he was let go

Re: Speaking as a Java programmer of 30 years

/me smiling at people trying shorter code snippets to cause forkbombs, as if efficiency or readability are important in that use case

China's homebrew Bluetooth alternative is on the march as Beijing pushes universal remotes

Re: Stream lossless stereo audio.

Chinese government is a third party like the bars are a third party to a prison

Thanks, Linus. Torvalds patch improves Linux performance by 2.6%

Re: Fractional Gains

Underlying mistake.

"We are the Borg", hence "the Borg were right"

Opening up the WinAmp source to all goes badly as owners delete entire repo

Re: Simplest solution

If they weren't so unreliable, you mean.

Russian court fines Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Re: I have

As copper is used shaped charges, and that amount would exercise enough pressure to melt the bottom layer, there would be no visible difference between paying the fine and war. But then again, the fine is part of war already :-( lus ca change plus c'est la meme guerre

Re: I have

I believe that point was passed last year

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

Re: Hard truths

It ain't the language that bloated the code

Sorry, Moxie. Blaming Agile for software stagnation puts the wrong villain in the wrong play

"the new way is everyone is an expert on everything"

Yeah that's neither new nor any more reliable than any other way of organising work. None of which do much better than "next thing is the thing most people want, or the thing costing us the most".

Re: He didn't really say it was Agile's fault

Having learned both at uni, I disagree that C teaches any better. *Pascal* taught better. C is like a circular saw from before the safety covers were invented. Cuts just as well fingers and wood. I'm sure Moxie has a list of exploits due to lack of those safety covers that's longer than I am tall.

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

Re: Good luck

That's literally the root of all evil for C and C++

In your hands, they do fine (for a decent value of "fine", as you have complaints too).

And "give full control to the developer", the much vaunted philosophy of the languages, works fine *for excellent developers*. On their good days, anyway.

But I got out of uni 22 years ago, and I still have to meet people who are excellent developers a significant number of days of the month, whether I look in the mirror or not. Perhaps I need to keep better company, but the truth is that there aren't enough good developers, and therefore tooling needs to avoid the dangers.

Customer bricked a phone – and threatened to brick techie's face with it

Re: super thread drift.. but..

Citation needed.

I do exactly the opposite of <letting go of the brake> when something unexpected happens when I'm driving. I have a sneaky suspicion it's not just me doing that.

Computer sprinkled with exotic chemicals produced super-problems, not super-powers

"Flipping houses" just got a new meaning.

Tesla devotee tests Cybertruck safety with his own finger – and fails

Re: Who's next

Not the cybertruk, no

Tesla's Cybertruck may not be so stainless after all

Re: its "ultra-hard stainless steel" [...] "transparent metal" [...] "literally bulletproof."

Can't believe nobody has said anything about pissing on the hood.

Re: Cybertruck - the gift that keeps on giving...

It REALLY doesn't like where we store the ammo.

Re: Cybertruck - the gift that keeps on giving...

It's fine as long as your name is Theseus.

RIP John Walker, software and hardware hacker extraordinaire

Re: imaginative SQL one-liners

I had to write one with six self joins and I can't remember how many inner and left joins :-( I would use smart to describe the process only in its "pain" meaning. It smarted quite a bit, yes.

HoRNDIS MacGyvers your Mac to get online with Androids

Re: If you're able to plug your phone into a USB port

Plugging my android phone on my windows worl laptop and activating the usb tether creates a network device that claims 433 mbps. *Claims*, I haven't had a chance to verify that, since the 4g uplink was never faster than 50.

Might not be as fast as the latest wifi but it ain't bad either.

Bricking it: Do you actually own anything digital?

"why would I want paper books I'm not going to read again?"

The article says it. They can be passed to someone else to enjoy.

Digital ones *could* do the same thing. But the sellers prefer to sell multiple copies, at a price often very close to the physical item. Naughty of them.

Apple exec defends 8GB $1,599 MacBook Pro, claims it's like 16GB in a PC

Re: 8GB works fine.

You're not hitting memory limits with docker and intellij AND databases?

You forgot the lie icon. It'd blow past 8 GB with Hello World.

Come and try in the shop

So in their opinion I come to the shop, install all the stuff required for the typical builds I do during the day, THEN complain that 8 gig aren't enough for my needs, when I know the builds will take more than that and memory compression can't get far enough?

"We are much more efficient in memory use", yes but zipping data has limits not even Apple can break and not all the software I use is written by Apple, especially that which is written by me, and making all the changes needed to be the best M3 native app, with the lock in that brings, is a bit much when all I needed was 32 gigabytes of RAM.

Bright spark techie knew the drill and used it to install a power line, but couldn't outsmart an odd electrician

Re: The File Server kept randomly conking out

A fan heater in the probably air conditioned server room. Oh.

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

Re: Depends.

Languages. Often entirely different from the official language(s) of the country in question, and at times called dialects by the local colonizer.

Ask a builder to fix a server and out come the vastly inappropriate power tools

Re: Just a quick manicure.

I fixed a 3.5 inch floppy drive with a similar application of sharp blades.

Brand new PC (tower case) wouldn't write or read fro floppy. Year about 2001. My uncle gave me a ring about it two days after he bought the thing.

Much messing about looking for loose cables, at some point we had the thing on with the case open and its front off. To our surprise, floppy worked fine. Front back on, floppy failed again.

The front had a plastic facade in front of the floppy and a thingamajig to allow the operator to push the eject button on the actual drive. The thingamajig was about two millimetres too long and would keep the button half pressed when the front was screwed on. Snip snip and all was well.

Re: Ouch!

Impact welding takes more warming up first.

Re: Ouch!

Same in Italian. Although usually the context helps tell which tool one means...

PIRG petitions Microsoft to extend the life of Windows 10

Re: "All software reaches a point at which it's no longer supported"

When I told my dad I wanted to study computer science, he said: but why? The things have been built already.

Same as "Write it right the first time"

Funnily enough, in his daily job* he was very well acquainted with "needs change, things get old, stuff breaks". He'd even joke half his work was fixing the stuff he'd built twenty years before. Microsoft has just made a business that ensures things break at scale, instead of at their usual pace.

* he was a plasterer before retiring

Boeing gives busy billionaires unbothered about bespoke beds a cheaper BizJet

Re: Did I read that correctly?

It's for Big Jerk on Board

Re: Projectile Earnings

Added danger is a feature not a bug. Feature for us plebs, I mean.

Teardown reveals iPhone 15 to be series of questionable design decisions

Re: Fine

Fine grinding? Remote location? Waste of energy.

Chuck them in a spare steel container and leave it wherever. In a hundred million years it'll be a nice lump of easily mined minerals, with lower chances of poisoning the local ponds.

But if you wanted to finely grind DRM proponents, I shall start carving out the millstones.

FreeBSD can now boot in 25 milliseconds

Re: Pretty impressive

There are values of N for which O(N^2) is smaller than O(Nlog(N)) when you include memory requirements and multiplicative constants. Granted, if memory serves that limit is 12 or so...

Re: Pretty impressive

Came here to mock the same misreporting of the tweet thread

Microsoft calls time on ancient TLS in Windows, breaking own stuff in the process

Re: OK - you curse the beancounters

Yeah we should have fixed the bugs we didn't know existed

Re: protocols were disabled by default

It's never a priority no matter how loud the techies shout, until there's a breach and then it's endless meetings on "how did it happen", "what do we do" and "what can WE ALL learn from this"

Zoom CEO reportedly tells staff: Workers can't build trust or collaborate... on Zoom

Re: Just... Wow

"has to"

You said it. Yet in your first comment you say it isn't possible to work well and so the CEO is right in saying everyone has to be in the office.

"everyone tends to be very friendly when you join a Zoom call"

Same way the royal family thinks UK smells of fresh paint and bunting. How many people pick a fight with the CEO of their company, face to face or remotely?