* Posts by Triggerfish

2479 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Feb 2010

Qatar’s $400M jet for Trump is a gold-plated security nightmare

Triggerfish

Re: Drain the swamp

Eh his devoted supporters are people like those on the conservative subreddit and a few posters on here.

Check their opinions, literally lubing up and working on their gag reflexes as usual.

Triggerfish

Re: Hmm

Did you miss the part where it's being transfered into the presidential library? At taxpayers cost of course.

So not much point or sense at all in spending so much to get it running.

It would be nice to have a us president worthy of respect, only about four more years to go and well see

CISA pen-tester says 100-strong red team binned after DOGE canceled contract

Triggerfish

Do you really need them?

After all if the FSB is on BCC for emails...

Huawei to bring massively expensive trifold smartphone to world market

Triggerfish

Re: Don't remember

If it was cheap enough and tough enough I'd certainly be interested. At the moment it's too cutting edge with the problems that go with it, to be of use to me.

Techie pointed out meetings are pointless, and was punished for it

Triggerfish

Re: Scrum

There's nothing wrong with some appropriate metrics. But when everyone has to deliver one cos metrics it becomes a farce.

Some poor cable guy, well he cant say I completed the site because if he says that they'll sagely point out how PMO has already mentioned that and use them as an example of how they are delivering a useless metric like a silly person.

So whats he gonna say, "erm I did a cable run using 80m of cable".

I mean whats the use of that? "Oh wow, can you reduce that metric make it 70m"?

What they expecting? Your gonna knock a buildings wall down and shift it and the desks, data points and all 10m closer to a riser?

Triggerfish

Re: Scrum

This sounds more like the weekly stand up. Intended result friendly relaxed meeting, every stands up gives a quick run down of weeks plans, says if they need help etc on something, gives metrics if relevant. Everyone is informed of what people are doing and help out if needed or they think they may be of use. Efficiency increases.

Actual result. C Suite stand about like the inquisition picking shite apart so they look good and powerful. Everyone has to give metrics even if they're pointless. Whole morning is spent by teams prepping for them rather than working so they can avoid being the one picked on. Depression insue's and morning is lost.

It comes from those wank MBA programs and courses like scaling up. Where they chuck around words like lean management like it's a new revelation, and then just mentally tick the box (but don't actually work towards implementing it) saying we're doing that we're very very cool.

Often worshipped by the sort of execs that think Steve Jobs and Elon are cool innovative businessmen who can do no wrong.

Ubuntu upgrade had our old Nvidia GPU begging for a downgrade

Triggerfish

Re: A nightmare.

While it might be advanced territory, the commonest of nvidia chips out there means it surely catches out a lot of people. Most of the not advanced users, or wanting to go through hardware changes.

Trump eyes up to 100% tariffs on foreign semiconductors, TSMC in crosshairs

Triggerfish

Re: Broken clock, right twice a day?

So the big pharma a lot of his supporters were moaning about during covid. Is now going to become big unregulated pharma? Hmmmn.

Asda tech divorce from Walmart delays cut-over for 55 stores

Triggerfish

Re: Walmart has been a leader for years..

Yeah I've worked with ASDA/ Walmart IT as well. They actually are pretty good and took it seriously, a lot of ASDAs IT infrastructure was run by Bentonville teams, including support.

A lot of the UK teams were good as well and very skilled most AFAIK were not your average level one support techs. But it seems they got rid of them for a cheaper outsourced option, losing a lot of institutional knowledge of very complex IT systems and how it interacts with all the processes of running a large supermarket concern.

When food delivery apps reached Indonesia, everyone put on weight

Triggerfish

There's been a similar growth in size in Thais and the Vietnamese.

But there's also been changes in family structure from large families to more nuclear family set up (especially with people coming into the cities), an increase in convenience food reflecting working lives, and an increase in the middle classes.

They're also both countries that have had before a lot of people in poverty with not much access to food, (which gives a smaller average size).

I'd say there's more factors than just apps like grab and gojeck causing this rise.

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

Triggerfish

Re: Funeral benefit?

AFAIK even welrods and de lise used sibsonic ammo.

No, I can't help – you called the wrong helpdesk, in the wrong place, for the wrong platform

Triggerfish

Personally I'd have passed it over as soon as the manager decided it was hilarious to get calls in the middle of the night.

Apple quietly admits 8GB isn't enough in 2024, M4 iMac to ship with 16GB as standard

Triggerfish

I often have many tabs open for research. Open a lot of tabs and links and then sift through for what's worth reading.

Triggerfish

Gaming laptops still tend to allow ram and hdd upvrades

Vietnam plans to convert all its networks to IPv6

Triggerfish

Can't say for Aus, but compared with the UK Vietnam has no copper structure overhead of note, far easier to jump to fibre.

Worth noting also though how the fibre is strung is a bit haphazard to say the least.

Eric Schmidt: Build more AI datacenters, we aren't going to 'hit climate goals anyway'

Triggerfish

Maybe he could be helped a long, after all he's gonna die anyway. And it seems to match his ethos.

As IBM pushes for more automation, its AI simply not up to the job of replacing staff

Triggerfish

Re: So if we ask chatGPT....

The predictability of the average MBA, means they're probably the easiest to automate work wise TBH.

Hangover from messy Walmart tech divorce ongoing at Asda

Triggerfish

Re: 2,500 systems?

Decent sized store.

Rack A, maybe 4 or 5 42-47 U racks that are filled. Some SAP servers (plus redundancy backups), various other servers for things like muzac, ads, loss prevention systems, CC, IOT stuff etc. Shitload of switches. Rack B checkout switches (all doubled up for redundancy), couple more racks dotted round the store mainly switch racks again (also doubled up) for other checkouts, scales, AP, stuff like that.

It adds up.

I've worked with ASDA when they were Walmart owned. Walmart's actual IT infrastructure is huge they also had some highly skilled network engineers etc there. They took their IT infrastructure very seriously as down time was measured in tens of thousands of dollars per hr at large stores. God forbid you needed to do work at a store during certain seasons - it would only have been mission critical stuff like a dead switch, the managers would be actively hostile to people trying to do the work at this period (whereas they usually were accommodating for the most part) and the change controls to do the work got bumped up several layers of management for review.

The IT overhead for a large supermarket chain is actually pretty big, LIDL have recently started selling their services as a datacentre - they probably didn't need to scale the teams, skills. or hardware up much.

Study shock! AI hinders productivity and makes working worse

Triggerfish

I find it sort of depressing how easily the marketing and sales people full for the exact same bullshit they craft themselves.

Nvidia's next Linux driver to be… just as open

Triggerfish

Re: Nvidia? Not for me.

Every now and again I install Linux, thats it I'm gonna learn it properly this time, move from windows etc etc.

Every time after several hrs wrestling just trying to get something as simple as tdual monitors on an nvidia set up...

OK back to windows I'm done.

Selfie-based authentication raises eyebrows among infosec experts

Triggerfish

Re: "typically takes under 20 seconds to complete"

400 usd is an expensive takeaway in Vietnam.

It doesn't get used for transactions below this value.

Google Translate now fluent in 110 additional languages from Abkhaz to Zulu

Triggerfish

Quality of translation may vary

Just from experience using translate with some languages like Chinese, Vietnamese and so on. It's sort of fine if a sentence is used, often fails if its more than that.

China's Big Tech companies taught Asia to pay by scanning QR codes, but made a mess along the way

Triggerfish

Re: "The next step is biometric"

However some of us do live in and travel in cou tries that QR is used so it's useful to us to read.

I think your missing a reason why visa and so on never got traction as much over here vs QR. Because you can certainly use it in larger stores and chains.

As it mentions in the article.

You need a POS system, and many places don't have them, the average market stall, street food, corner shop, taxi driver etc just doesn't have that sort of set up in a lot of places like SEA and China, their owners do have smartphones.

A thump with the pointy end of a screwdriver will fix this server! What could possibly go wrong?

Triggerfish

I thought they were gonna say.

'I gave up IT and pursued a happier life'.

Really? A sarcasm detector? Wow. You shouldn't have

Triggerfish

Re: "pitch, speaking rate, and energy"

It's going to struggle with English sarcasm on energy.

My American and Canadian friends generally you can tell the sarcasm because of pitch and energy, they want you to know they are being sarcastic.

They struggle with sarcasm from Brits, Aussies and so on because we prefer to just deliver it dry, there's been many a time in a bar they didn't pick up on a comment for a good few minutes.

What's with AI boffins strapping GoPros to toddlers? We take a closer look

Triggerfish

Inference

The human brain can infer things. That's why you could teach a child what a chair is, but when saying where can you sit they would choose things that are not just chairs, tables, low walls etc.

Is AI capable of this? Because I feel it's a big factor in things like using language, that is not just having a good vocab but also understanding nuance, idioms and so on.

AI will reduce workforce, say 41% of surveyed executives

Triggerfish

No economist but

surely if you put everyone out of work there's going to be no one who can afford your products?

That Asian meal you eat on holidays could launder money for North Korea

Triggerfish

I mean there is an official NK restaurant chain "Pyongang" in Vietnam, Thailand etc.

Which may or may not be selinng dodgy software as well.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/05/18/asia/hanoi-north-korea-restaurant-facial-recognition-software-intl/index.html

But as a percentage market wise I'd wonder what your odds are of actually hitting an undercover one. There is a huge amount of places to eat in these countries. Chances are low your going to hit many.

Filipino police free hundreds of slaves toiling in romance scam operation

Triggerfish

Wage slaves don't tend to be, tortured, sexually abused, never see families or freedom again, etc.

I'd hardly add them to the numbers, shitty a situation as being on low wages is.

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

Triggerfish

Re: Being polite is great

I mean it's just good advice in general I think even out of the workplace.

Reported $60M Reddit deal signed to train AI models with user data

Triggerfish

Citogenisis

Are we not just automating citogenisis now? Along with the enshittification of the Web with AI driven useless content sites, it's got to be a terrible training feedback loop.

https://xkcd.com/978/

The week in weird: Check out the strangest CES tech of 2024

Triggerfish

Mossair

£600 ffing quid for a terrarium you could make for about 40.

Im in the wrong game.

Zuckerberg accused of OK'ing Insta plastic surgery filters despite fears of harm to kids

Triggerfish

Re: Video Filter Effects

They're very good. This is from a few years back and I am sure it's improved.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/globalnews.ca/news/7730617/gender-swap-influencer-japan-woman-man/amp/

Aerial cable tangles are still being strung up, but carriers are slowly burying the problem

Triggerfish

No room to dig.

The thing is there isn't room to dig for a lot of the suburbs in places Thailand and Vietnam.

The areas people live behind the main roads are a maze of alleys ranging from just big enough to fit a car to just about wide enough for a scooter.

You start digging up that to lay cable and you could end up shutting offf access to the homes of hundreds of people, some of these alleys as well have loads of front yard shops, markets and so on. The disruption caused is impractical.

Underground there's probably just enough room for standard sewage and water pipes only before you hit building foundations.

In top of that. I've never had fibre in the UK, but copper was just a swtich over at a junction box. There doesn't seem to be any main faculty that oversees that sort of handover here. Change isp, new cable gets laid and it's such a tangle of cables that removing the old is probably like a game of jenga except you take out everyone's Internet when the whole tangle falls down.

Also Google maps just falls over in some of these places I'm not sure if there are adequate maps in general.

AIs can produce 'dangerous' content about eating disorders when prompted

Triggerfish

Re: Terminal success

I see you shop at pak'n'save

https://gizmodo.com/paknsave-ai-savey-recipe-bot-chlorine-gas-1850725057

From cage fight to page fight: Twitter threatens to sue Meta after Threads app launch

Triggerfish

Re: Poacher

I seem to remember he sent out tweets mocking them being fired, something about their genius being useful elsewhere...

Think of our cafes and dry cleaners, says Ohio as budget slashes WFH for govt workers

Triggerfish

Re: Think of...

Ah yeah maybe it's where we see factories being placed. Where I have been living there are a lot of old

factories that are smack bang in the middle of a small town. Different suburban environment to the USA so bit if adapting needed to each place.

So I think from your comments we may be on the same page (we don't really have small local malls in the UK in these little dying towns).

I think there is still use for a co-working space for these places because not everyone working from home can always work at home, so a local co-working type space using these local empty large buildings may have a place as a temp peaceful office with a five min walk commute.

Triggerfish

Think of...

The dead end town centres that will be re-invigorated, the enironment becoming cleaner due to less cars, think of the little independent cafes, coffee shops and reseteraunts who will actually pay taxes, think of people having more free time to spend in them rather than commuting, think of the old factory buildings that can become local co-working type spaces, think of cities becoming more places to visit for enterainment and being able to afford some green spaces instead of car parks...

Microsoft would rather spend money on AI than give workers a raise

Triggerfish

Let's hire a load of people, that will look like growth and our stock will go up, let's fire a lot of people that will look like savings our stock will go up.

Ads for lucrative jobs in Asia fail to mention chance of slavery as crypto-scammer

Triggerfish

Yeah it's actually bit of a problem out here, and frankly being made to work for scam calls is the lighter side of what can happen.

DEF CON to set thousands of hackers loose on LLMs

Triggerfish

Re: Better than hackers for red teaming an LLM

Namshub of Enki.

Handwritten Einstein essay on theory of relativity goes under the hammer

Triggerfish

Hmmn racism from the outset, weird colour schemes, random USE OF CAPS.

Seems legit.

Phở no! Vietnam's last working submarine cable glitches out

Triggerfish

Re: Connection issues started after new year.

I have no idea why you dragged QAnon and MTG into this, But I can assure you the connection has not been that bad in Vietnam in the past few years. In fact a lot better than my connection was in the UK in both mobile and househol It has however downgraded severly in the past few week, juist after new year as it were.

Triggerfish

Connection issues started after new year.

It was after new year that the connection really started to be a problem, was closer to Tet in Feb. As it is mobile seems to get a better connection than cable. But using an apartments WiFi when everyone comes home is a nightmare because they tend to share one line between the apartments.

Microsoft begs you not to ditch Edge on Google's own Chrome download page

Triggerfish

Re: This isn't that new, if they want me to use it.

Stop making it such a sodding pain in the arse. Please sign in to edge with your work account etc. Just give me a sodding browser.

Warning: Microsoft Teams Free (classic) will be gone in 2 months

Triggerfish

Re: Dealer

You beat me to it, I was just thinking their street crack model of software sales was working again.

Beijing grants permit to 'flying car' that can handle 'roads and low altitude'

Triggerfish

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6o3GNoU-vw

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Triggerfish

Re: Learn both? It's all in the mind @AC

I think your proving my point really it's just the scale you're used to that let's you perceive what is hot or cold.

I would have had no clue what 63 was if you hadn't put it in C, also by my experience I doubt many people notice the granularity of a half degree C difference that much when it come to too hot or too cold for temp settings.