Posts by Manolo

College prof hides prompt to catch AI cheaters, finds human nature is pretty much as we thought

Re: "Madgacascar floats sideways / through the afternoon"

Lemur tilts island.

Madagascar floats sideways

through the afternoon..

Re: "Madgacascar floats sideways / through the afternoon"

A coconut falls.

Madagascar floats sideways

through the afternoon.

Another German state heads down the open source sovereignty road

Re: I still maintain

At 2,16 million square kilometers, it is still the largest island on the planet and about 22% of the size of the US.

Amsterdam activists throw acid at Microsoft datacenter project

They are quite strong in the logical gaps department.

They were protesting against a bank by blocking a motorway, because next to that motorway stands a building that served as the bank's headquarters ... until about ten yeras before their action.

EU 'Chat Control' snoopfest returns after vote to kill it falls short

Dirty tricks

"Although 314 politicians voted to scrap Chat Control, while 276 voted to keep it, the vote required 360 MEPs to reject the Council of the European Union's position."

So they scheduled the third vote during the holiday season, when a lot of MEP's had already left Brussels.

So far for a "democratic" EU.

Canonical reveals Myna, its local speech-to-text app

Bird-branded?

I'm probably not the only one reading that as bird-brained AI.

Every employee’s password was stored in a single Excel file

Outlook: no passwords necessary

On two separate occasions, after logging into my work Outlook account, I landed in a colleague's mailbox.

Who needs passwords if you can just use Microsoft?

Backup script ingested an accidental asterisk and deleted everything

Which alphabet

"It took Miller a day to restore data, while 20 other people twiddled their thumbs and waited for him to finish the job."

In that case I wonder which alphabet they were using.

Go straight to sell! Windows second-chance setup hawks Microsoft services at IT's expense

Re: Froggy did a-wooing go.

"A tepid 77 °F for those living in Myanmar, Liberia, and the United States"

You forgot Belize.

Reminds me of one of many "ignorant Americans in Europe" videos I saw recently: "Why doesn't Europe use Fahrenheit like the rest of the world?".

Pro-Iran crew turns DDoS into shakedown as Ubuntu.com stays down

Working with the courts in Iraq and Iran? Good luck with that.

Opsec oopsie: Dutch navy frigate location outed by mailing it a Bluetooth tracker

Re: so an airtag then?

In naval tradition, mast is the traditional location of the non-judicial hearing under which a commanding officer studies and disposes of cases involving those in his command. In the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard, these proceedings take place under the authority of Article 15 of the UCMJ.

If the individual conducting the proceeding is either a captain, or a lower ranking officer (typically a commander or lieutenant commander) serving as commanding officer of a naval or coast guard vessel, an aviation squadron, or similar command afloat or ashore, then the proceeding is referred to as a captain's mast.

Not a trebuchet, but a defective cannon.

The Dutch navy has two ships in the region. Neither has a working cannon. How's that for egg on the face?

Calling out corporate BS? There's a steaming pile to aim for

Not just geeks

"When geeks first meet, their initial conversation often resembles modem talking to modem, a training and negotiation sequence when the highest level of communication is established"

Not just geeks. When my late mother (retired physician assistant), my sister in law (medicine degree) and myself (pharmacist) met my mother's oncologist, after a few questions he said: "Wait, what are your qualifications?". So he could switch to a higher bitrate.

Nice parody

A while I go I saw a moving company's lorry that nicely parodied corporate blahblah.

In big letters on the back it read: "Getting shit done since ages ago".

I would hire them.

Server crashes traced to one very literal knee-jerk reaction

Re: Unexplained crash syndrome

Wearing shoes with leather soles prevents it almost 100% (for me at least).

The only times I get static in the office is when the weather is too bad for leather soles and I'm wearing boots or hiking shoes with synthetic soles.

Re: Unexplained crash syndrome

"And a Win 95 PC that worked well."

Nah, that story is way to improbable.

Re: "It was the time of Novell networks, RG58 cables, and bulky tower PCs,"

"stretch the female socket centre"

Oooh-aahhhh, guv'nor! Wink wink, nudge nudge.

Re: Probably my first diagnosis in anything resembling tech support was something similar.

Yeah, I need to manufacture custom mollyguards, or kittyguards actually.

In my Harry Potter datacentre (space under the stairs with router, switch, NAS, two Raspberry PiHoles) there's a UPS and a powerstrip with a switch.

Felines on murine patrol have on multiple occasions managed to switch off either of those.

Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue

Re: Good lord

One of my sisters in law. Degree in technical business administration. Complained her electric blanket did not reach to warm her feet. I suggested she placed it lower on the mattress, as the underside of the pillow needs no heating.

Once claimed she was financially independent, because: husband earns enough for the both of us. (Divorced now)

Claimed all the food in India was the same everywhere.

"Well, I should now, I lived there for a year" (In one city only)

'What did you eat there?'

"Our cook made potatoes, meat and vegetables"

GNOME dev gives fans of Linux's middle-click paste the middle finger

KDE

And that is another reason why I've been using KDE for what, twenty, twenty five years now?

Before that WindowMaker, which I still like.

Stop the slop by disabling AI features in Chrome

Is this Windows only?

"By default, a large Gemini button appears in the top-right area of the browser window"

No there isn't. Only in Gmail and I can't right click that.

"chrome://settings/ai/gemini"

No such entry in my settings.

Maybe this article relates to Chrome on Windows only?

IT team forced to camp in the office for days after Y2K bug found in boss's side project

"Regominised as Cane because he wasn't Abel?"

I was thinking Cane because his employer distilled rum?

BOFH: If another meeting is scheduled, someone is going to have a scheduled accident

I think I need to add a few domains to my Pihole blacklist...

Linus Torvalds is OK with vibe coding as long as it's not used for anything that matters

Still a programmer

Torvalds is a bit to modest here: he programmed Subsurface, a divelog application together with Hohndel, who is also his scuba buddy.

Fun fact:

Kernel 4 point something was called the Blurry Fish Butt edition because Torvalds is such a bad underwater photographer.

Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control

Re: Program / Programme

In Dutch I used the word catheter, in a medical context. Word insisted I meant catheder (lectern).

Actor couldn’t understand why computer didn’t work when the curtain came down

Re: Ghost in the Machine

Coils, electron beams?

They were laptops with CRT's?

Wouldn't want one of those on m lap.

Microsoft finance slang defines the eternal optimist: The 'hockey stick on wheels'

Hockey stick graduation

Zze Fazzer: "When will you graduate?"

Me: "September"

Come September: "I did not say which year September".

'Fax virus' panicked a manager and sparked job-killing Reply-All incident

Re: The FAX is not dead yet.

You may have missed the word "however".

He is not contradicting himself.

AI Darwin Awards launch to celebrate spectacularly bad deployments

Re: quality? what is that? [Oooops !!!]

"How sheer luck made this tiny Caribbean island millions from its web address"

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn5xdp427veo

But fortunate enough, for holidays there is visitanguilla.com.

ChatGPT poisoning

How about the first reported case of ChatGPT induced self-poisoning?

Patient survived, otherwise it could have been a double Darwin Award.

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/aimcc.2024.1260?ref=404media.co

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNeVw1FZrSQ

US cuffs 475 at Hyundai–LG battery plant – feds tout largest single-site raid

Ask the girls in Rotherham how lazy policing worked out for them.

FBI, Dutch cops seize fake ID marketplace that sold identity docs for $9

However

"In the Netherlands, forgery, false identification, and deploying counterfeit payment instruments each carry a maximum prison sentence of six years."

But unfortunately, multiple sentences will be served concurrently and maximum sentences only rarely imposed.

I started losing my digital privacy in 1974, aged 11

Mandatory retention of medical records

Here in Clogland the Inspectorate for Healthcare suggested patient records should be kept for the lifetime of the patient, up from the current twenty years (after last contact).

There was a lot of pushback from medical professionals and nothing has been heard of it since.

After twenty years it is allowed, but not mandatory, to delete patient data. So a lot will probably also live on for half a century or more.

When I still worked in a regular pharmacy and before digitization (*), we rented a garage box to keep all our prescriptions, but yearly we threw (**) the oldest out, if only to make room for the newer ones.

And in all of my 20+ yrs career, only once did I have to visit said garage box to dig up an old prescription.

* And initially, digitized prescriptions were not allowed as substitute for the paper ones.

** Secure processing of course.

Problem PC had graybeards stumped until trainee rummaged through trash

Re: Pharmacists

I apologise for not being a native speaker.

I guess my mind was hesitating between a sentence with shelf or shelves and got stuck in the middle.

Re: Pharmacists

Isn't there a saying: in a carpenter"s house, no shelve is straight?

My workplace: tidy, but my desk and workbench at home?

Said unholy mess. But I know where everything is.

Pharmacists

"Pharmacists were especially demanding. "One of them treated me to a long diatribe about how a software update required three more keystrokes than before for one task,"

As a pharmacist: relatable. It is a profession that demands such a high level of accuracy and attention to detail, that it tends to attract a certain personality type. Slightly neurotic, some maybe even somewhat on the autism spectrum.

But also highly demanding of themselves, they are the last to catch medication errors (by pharmacy staff, or doctors) and therefore often also demanding of others.

Under-qualified sysadmin crashed Amazon.com for 3 hours with a typo

The tide

Wasn't this around the same time I saw a joke on (I think it was) userfriendly.org comparing Amazon to the tide?

Sometimes it's up, sometimes it's down.

PUTTY.ORG nothing to do with PuTTY – and now it's spouting pandemic piffle

Re: Vaccines

Yes that happens. A lot. Out of every 1.000 substances developed, only one makes it to market.

Re: Vaccines

I do not know what you mean with mRNA antigens, but if you mean mRNA vaccines: they have been developed quite some time before the Covid-19 pandemic already. They were developed for SARS and MERS, which both did not develop into a pandemic. Therefore, they were never registered or marketed, but but were extensively tested. (Also, I believe veterinary mRNA vaccines exist)

Therefore, in a way, making the Covid-19 vaccine was putting a different mRNA sequence in a known technique, a bit like putting a different letter in a complicated envelope (oversimplifying here of course).

As for the excipient, I also don't know what you mean. An excipient in pharmaceutical formulations is a filler, like cellulose or lactose in tablets and capsules or saline in injections. Maybe you mean adjuvants? Those are substances added to vaccines to enhance immune response. Adjuvants are generally considered safe and have been used in vaccines for many years.

The Pfizer vaccine Comirnaty does not use adjuvants.

The only one I know to use one is Novavax.

I am however curious, so if you could provide more detailed information, I'm keen.

Re: Just do the right thing!

I think you'll find there are dozens of legal cases that prove you wrong.

Techie fixed a ‘brown monitor’ by closing a door for a doctor

Re: Dumb fix

And then it turns out to be a video card issue, a cable issue, a software issue... Three monitors further. Why not check the cause right away, instead of randomly replacing an expensive bit of kit in the hope that it fixes the issue?

Still sounds inefficient to me.

Dumb fix

Replacing an expensive monitor without investigating what's wrong isn't the smartest form of tech support either.

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

Re: Vincent truck Gogh

Would that be gh as in enough, gh as in ghost, gh as in bough?

Strange how non native speakers of Dutch spout bollocks about the pronunciation of a Dutch names and even get upvotes for it.

Re: Vincent truck Gogh

No, it isn't. It's pronounced like the ch in loch.

Vincent truck Gogh

The word "van" is (almost) never capitalized in Dutch surnames, but certainly not for Vincent van Gogh.

It is Vincent van Gogh, meaning " from Gogh", which refers to the German city his ancestors hailed from.

And the -ogh is pronounced like in "loch", not like in "go".

People find amazing ways to break computers. Cats are even more creative

Catnaps

My father used to have a large CRT on his desk, which was one of the cat's favourite napping spots, with the toasty warmth of a glowing CRT gently heating the cat.

Until he replaced it with a shiny new LCD.

Cat jumps on the desk, hops on the monitor and of course immediately falls off on the other side of the now suddenly very narrow monitor.

Ah, progress. Not always a good thing when you are a cat.

Open source text editor poisoned with malware to target Uyghur users

Re: Who could possibly be behind this ...

Despite all the downvotes, there appears to be a grain of truth regarding Uyghurs fighting in the Levant.

According to Wikipedia:

"TIP (ETIM) sent the "Turkistan Brigade" (Arabic: كتيبة تركستاني, Katibat Turkistani) to take part in the Syrian Civil War,[29] most noticeably in the 2015 Jisr al-Shughur offensive"

TIP being one of the Uygur separatist movements.

As for CIA involvement, that's probably just a random conspiracy theory.

Static electricity can be shockingly funny, but the joke's over when a rack goes dark

Re: office chairs from hell

I find it's not the clothes that matter, but the shoes. The only times I get shocked is when icy or snowy conditions make me exchange my regular leather soled shoes for boots with synthetic soles.

Microsoft to mark five decades of Ctrl-Alt-Deleting the competition

So that's why!

"The multibillion-dollar purchase of Nokia, on the other hand, was on Copilot's list of mistakes"

Never knew that. So that explains why Nokia tanked.

Also relevant: the enshittification of Skype since MS acquired it.

At least they have left Swiftkey mostly alone, although I sometimes wonder what it phones home about.