Posts by Someone Else

Gemini lies to user about health info, says it wanted to make him feel better

Who's the real dev here?

Sounds like Joe knows more about how to fix Gemini than do its devs.

Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it

ref. Micros~1

Re: Dogfooding

Real Users?!? We don' need no steenkin' Real Users!

Re: Verbose mode

Of course the concept of:

1) leave verbose mode as it was

2) put in a "Quiet" mode that hides all the important bits reduces the clutter that this Head Wanker projects upon the hoi polloi as not important.

3) leave the default as it.

... is way too difficult to implement (even using Claude itself).

Just goes to (re-)confirm that product design is not for the faint of heart, the faint of intellect, or self-proclaimed BDFLs.

_{...and certainly not a job for LLMs... e18n -- It's not just for programmers anymore!}

StopICE hacked to send alarming text messages, admins accuse border patrol agent of sabotage

Oooh, look! Facts!! (Aka MAGAt kryptonite.)

Re: Good

Something about keeping friends close and enemies closer...

We have reached out to CPB for comment and will update this story if we hear back.

Don't hold your breath! Anything you hear would be from the US Secretary of Lying Bitch, and that's a source any journalistic outlet just can't rely on.

Trump's Genesis Mission gets its first set of 26 sure-to-succeed objectives

Was this on the list?

I would have to assume that one of the items on tRump's list would be:

Create a "backdoor" into E2E encryption that only the "good guys" can access.

_{I wonder why there are 26 items the Orange-utan's list. Might be that there's one for every letter in the alphabet. so once he got past that, everything else fell off the list.}

OK, so Anthropic's AI built a C compiler. That don't impress me much

Consider the source. These are folks trying to justify their existence, much less their latest vulture (no, not that Vulture) capital infusion.

Re: Github issue section is today's entertainment

Well, no. But...

The int x = "test'; line is actually valid K&R C (as was originally written in the first edition of the book). There was an implicit promotion between pointer types (e.g. char *) and int. So that is valid. And because that is valid, the printf that follow is also valid.

Naturally (and thankfully), the first ANSI standard eliminated that nonsense, pointers and ints became non-interchangeable.

But not even the most permissive of K&R compilers would/should not allow an orphan case label like that.

Microsoft declares 'reliability' a priority for Visual Studio AI

Perhaps they will remove VS from VS...

For very small values of "love"...

"To resolve these conflicts, we will prioritize IntelliSense completions over Copilot suggestions as it's more predictable and a loved feature."

So loved, in fact, that everyone in my organization turns that pig off as soon as it rears its ugly head. But I suppose it might _maybe... be better than what CowPileIt may suggest. (And probably less invasive, too).

Most SAP migrations bust budgets and project timelines, research finds

More like a Business Darwin award....

Next-gen nuclear reactors safe enough to skip full environmental reviews, says Trump admin

There is a reason for that. But you already knew that, din'cha?

[...] the old, statesmanlike, rule of law, 'friends & allies' Republicans must still be out there, somewhere.

Yes, they're out there. These days, they call them "Democrats".

_{"...when not calling them "Socialists", "Communists", "Woke", and other claptrap that is the mainstay of the MAGAt vocabulary...}

"Probably"?!?

Capgemini to sell the biz that works for US government amid criticism of ICE contract

Re: Law enforcement doing its job.

Did I miss a <sarcasm> tag somewhere?

From the article:

The DHS, ICE, and US Border Patrol are currently conducting operations to find, detain and deport suspect illegal migrants – with a focus on those who have committed crimes, per the policies of never-ending stream of bluster and bullshit from the tRump administration.

There, FTFY.

Those efforts have become controversial as they have sometimes resulted in detention, and occasional murder, of US citizens, or people lawfully resident in the USA.

There, FTFY again

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

Re: Seems to me that vibe coding...

Maybe we ought to stop calling it "vibe coding" that sounds kind of cool, and instead call it "Nostradamus coding"?

Nimrod Coding?

Re: Consequences, anyone??

> And because the code was valid but the logic wrong, the compiler didn't catch it.

Um, is this implying that he has been always expecting badly generated code to fail compilation and not routinely going over the stuff that happens to compile?

Ahh, yes! The return^* of the "it compiles so it works" school of development.

_{^*Not that it ever really left...}

Ireland wants to give its cops spyware, ability to crack encrypted messages

Meanwhile...

From the sidebar of the article:

Signal and Tuta Mail are two major service providers that threatened to withdraw from countries that implement encryption-busting laws and regulations.

Well, if (as will be inevitable sooner or later) the United Surveillance States of America decides that it, too, needs impossible backdoors into all things communicative, how in the world will Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of Drunk, possibly communicate with his buddies and assorted journalists when he's planning on surreptitiously bombing hot targets like Yemen, Venezuela, or Minneapolis?

Power scarcity drives datacenters to Texas, where the juice is

Re: it's a desolate place

I'm a Kiwi (so have grown up in a relatively lush environment), worked in the US for 15 years before returning to Kiwiland and did several IT projects in Texas.

My deepest sympathies!

Wait...what?!?

From the article:

Everything's bigger in Texas, including the amount of available power.

To all you commentards who bemoan the 'Murkinization of El Reg, I present this as a refutation (or perhaps, as the exception that proves the rule). 'Cuz any real 'Murkin would know that this is the same Texass that crashed its grid during a particularly brutal hot stretch not too long ago. One of the major problems contributing to the failure was that the Tejas grid was disconnected from the rest of the American grid, so when it fell down due to being unable to supply the demand, it could not get additional current from the rest of the country, like you can do with every other state in the Union (with the possible exception of Alaska, and the definite exception of Hawaii).

And you're gonna put several more multi-gigawatt power sinks onto that same grid? Good luck wi' dat!

Morons!

_{(Well, nobody claimed that there was any brain power in those greedy bastards chasing "growth" by investing in the latest Ponzi-scheme-du-jour.)}

Teach an AI to write buggy code, and it starts fantasizing about enslaving humans

Re: The process by which behaviors are ... is also unknown

Fling in all the numbers, stir with big stick: ooh, that was an interesting result, we can sell it.

"Why did it do that?" "Dunno, but let's sell it".

Sounds very much like how you program a Yamaha DX-7.

Microsoft Windows Media Player stops serving up CD album info

Re: Too bad their modern player is still unusable

SQLlite? Shirley you jest! This is Micros~1 and they would necessarily use Micros~1 SQL server and...oh! wait...

Re: time for MusicBrainz

Good comment about MusicBrainz. I tried using Picard, but it was a right PITA to use. I prefer mp3tag.

E14n

Enshittification, thy name is Micros~1 [sic].

Help desk read irrelevant script, so techies found and fixed their own problem

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Rodney" – a serial contributor who opened his missive to On Call by sharing his frustration with help desks that work from scripts instead of exercising expertise one's brain.

There, FTFY

Baby's got clack: HP pushes PC-in-a-keyboard for businesses with hot desks

I read the last line as:

And everyone will want to harm them.

_{I do need to get my eyes checked, but I also agree with the hallucinatory sentiment...}

To be fair there [sic] PC keyboards last for ever as well.

Well, maybe...but the cheap-as-dog-poo keyboards that came with my (two) HP Echo towers were only in place long enough to replace them with a pair of the Logitech "real" keyboards or yore. As such, in the role of backups, they may well last a long time. But I don't want to have to use them in daily (or even weekly) service.

Just like decent ridges on the home keys that'll last, well, let's see, 2026 take away 1992, is, um, lots!

The math is simply irrefutable!

When the lights went out, and the shooting started, Y2K started to feel all too real

Re: Things went RIGHT for once

No, let's start first with a moratorium on Donald J. tRump

Your smart TV is watching you and nobody's stopping it

Re: "all this is old news"

Unless you're going to buy yourself a humongous screen, or absolutely require an internal tuner, why not simply buy a large monitor? You can get 32" 4K monitors with at least one (and generally 2) HDMI ports and at a reasonable price to boot. Plug in your source (a streaming box, for example) and Bob's your uncle!

_{Now there is the issue of the streaming box phoning home, but that is sort of expected, is it not? Certainly the server would know what it is streaming to you...and could build profiles, sell that data to data aggregators, and so on. But at least you would expect that...-ish}

DOE recruits cloud, chip, and AI giants for Trump's Genesis Mission

Re: But not Phil Collins, sadly

That post should drive the last spike home.

This from the same Wanker-In-Chief who halted all research on juvenile cancer, and who has unilaterally decided to get the nation unvaccinated.. I guess the difference between this and the suspended Moonshot is the tRump can put his name on (and likely personally profit from) this new Initiative.

And what better way to generate large volumes of generally useless "research" than to have Eh? Aye! direct it?

Purdue makes 'AI working competency' a graduation requirement

Re: Tale from a college in Europe

One can expect that the Purdue Class of 2030 will wholesale perform in a similar manner.

And that means...what?!?

From the article:

Learning about AI focuses on ensuring that Purdue students can use and think critically about AI.

Hmmm. "Thinking critically" is a toothsome morsel, and blithely ambiguous. Depending on whose running the show at any particular time, that may mean "Don't you bring me no bad news", to quote the song. So no badmouthing CoPileIt, or you don't get your sheepskin?

I know these are guidelines, and need to be fleshed out, but sheesh! You've got to do better than that, Purdue!

_{Here's an interesting exercise that I can't be arsed to try right now: feed these "guidelines" to ChatGPT, and have it create a set of policies and requirements for courses that must be successfully undertaken in order to graduate. (You know that Chiang and/or their underlings will be tasked to do just that!)}

AI-authored code contains worse bugs than software crafted by humans

Re: I've said it once

And yet, the Agile Manifestosios state that code should not have comments. Seems they think that programmers can't be arsed to a) write decent comments in the first place, and b) keep them up-to-date. While they are all-too-often correct about both aspects, that doesn't mean that they should throw up their hands in abject surrender to the basest elements of the Programming Brother- and Sisterhood. Isn't Agile (upper-case 'A') supposed to be about improving the overall Craft of Programming? (That's their claim, after all.) So, as widely (and wisely) documented here by what appear to be some of the better practitioners of the Craft, it would seem that the Manifestosios would want to encourage better documentation practices, not discourage them. But that's just me, I guess.

_{Full disclosure: I have worked directly with some of these Manifestosios. They are Smart People, and probably have forgotten stuff that I would never know. We have, however, in the past, had several animated discussions about just this topic. And I still document the stuffing out of my code, and require that those who work with me do the same.}

Re: I've said it once

I agree that I should be able to do that. Would be nice if others realized that as well. (And that goes for you, too, Mx. LLM-that-thinks-its-shit-don't-stink.)

Re: I've said it once

They're useful for one-off, throwaway programs

Actually...not!

Meta's SAM bot keeps 'em separated as it isolates voices and instruments from audio clips

Well, I see a use for this, but...

I mean, having something that could create music-minus-one recordings to practice guitar to (as well as isolating the guitar part as a learning tool) would be quite helpful -- I've wanted something like this for some time now.

But it's Meta...and the Ewww factor is just too hard to ignore. I wonder if there are any (even semi-) reputable outfits that could provide this kind of tool?

Apple blocks dev from all accounts after he tries to redeem bad gift card

Re: Should have known better.

Yeah, but I am not likely to simply hide all your stuff away, just because.

You're just now realizing that?

From the article:

But if Apple can wholesale ban you from accessing your personal files and family photos with no reliable channel to resolve a potential misunderstanding, you don't appear to own anything that isn't physical and held in your direct possession.

No, you don't, do you!

Maybe someday the kidz might just realize that.

_{/me is not holding my breath...}

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

(e.g. air. light, and song lyrics...)

Trump gives state AI regulation the presidential middle finger

Re: Pure hypocrisy

The tRump mantra: "States rights, except when I say!"

Authoritarian much?

Disney turns to dark side, licenses IP to OpenAI for videos, images

The Mouse that roared

Actually, rather makes sense, as there is not enough money or enough lawyers to track down and kill all the infringers. So having set a precedent of partnering with an Eh? Aye! company, they not have an ever better footing for whacking the knees of the likes of Google, Meta, etc.

And that $1Beeelion "investment"? Expect OpenAI to become a wholly owned subsidiary of the House of Mouse within say, 5 years?

If you can't beat 'em, buy 'em! The Capitalist (s)Creed from the '80's lives!!

Welcome to America - now show us your last five years of social media posts

Re: Oh well.

Hey, you're still safe -- our Orange-utan cannot pronounce "cockwomble" without taking several tries at it, and wouldn't know what it is anyway.

Re: Pulling out the old foot-gun?

(I saw what you did there...) :-)

Re: Same here

You're right, they can't...at least not here, not now. But we should check in on the yout' of Australia in the next couple of years. They might get it then.

[but] why would any sane person put themselves at risk by even trying to travel there?

The answer to that question is a function of the coefficient of melatonin in the skin for the questioner.