Posts by breakfast

How sticky notes saved 'the single biggest digital program in the world'

Irritable Dowel Syndrome

Not a great fan of IDS or the administrations he was part of or the Universal Credit system as it exists, but I don't think he's wrong about the project - finding experts and paying them what they are worth, fostering collaboration, and using phased releases to evaluate how the tools work in practice is the best way to go about work at this scale.

Is it obvious? Absolutely. It should be the least anyone does, but it seems like they've come out ahead of many large scale projects by doing the basics. I hope other departments do learn from it.

Microsoft set to pull the plug on Bing Search APIs in favor of AI alternative

Strategy or stupidity

I read a report today suggesting Satya Nadella is all-in on using AI to do his job (I guess we've finally identified that unskilled labour that AI can easily replace and make massive savings in the process) so I assume this is pure stupid, but I can imagine a strategy here. The main thing that Bing did was act as a second search engine - sure it was bad and nobody used it except through third-party front-ends but it was another one showing Google had a competitor in theory. With Google being subject to some monopoly action, Microsoft might have decided that by removing their service they can create new trouble for a Google who now has a full monopoly on search.

Meet your new colleague – the ML Admin, who tames LLMs so they're ready to rock

"Manage compliance"

Keeping your LLMs compliant with pretty much anything when they make up answers, it is trivially easy to trick them into bypassing security, they leak whatever data is passed through them to their progenitor companies, and nobody understands what they are actually doing, does sound like a full-time job.

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

Re: Musk/DOGE

In general I am not a fan of Boeing's shoddy engineering or Tesla's equally shoddy engineering, but in this specific case I think we should let them cook. It might even be an opportunity to experiment with some novel forms of corner-cutting.

Of course, to sufficiently honour the gravitas of the occasion and celebrate this proof of American greatness, it would be important to ensure that the entire cabinet, including Mr Musk, and their most significant donors, are all on board with the President for its virgin flight.

Top sci-fi convention gets an earful from authors after using AI to screen panelists

Re: Sci?-Fact

This made me wonder about it. Because certainly it is created scientifically, but how reproducible are the results of an LLM? What are the experiments that make it a scientific project?

I wonder whether it is more of a commercial product, a tool for reducing labour rights, rather than a scientific project. Are LLMs even scientifically useful? Right now they seem to be more widely used in impeding scientific progress than improving it.

This is abstract speculation - I don't have an answer here - but it's interesting to think about.

After leaving citizens on hold for 798 years, UK tax authority has £1B for CRM upgrade

The best way to spend the money...

Crazy to think it would cost more than a billion pounds for them to employ enough people to pick up the phones in a timely fashion, so this is their only possible option...

Come to think of it, would it really cost more than a billion pounds for them to build up an in-house team with the skills to do this implementation without having to give half the cash to some executive's bonus scheme? I could absolutely put a team together to do it for a fraction of the cost, but then I understand software and hardly anybody with my skills is going to be working for the government because until recently they simply couldn't afford it because they weren't willing to pay extra for expertise.

Google goes cold on Europe: Stops making smart thermostats for continental conditions

Gonegle? Googone? McGonegoogle?

There must be a good way to portmanteau Google into something that reflects their enthusiasm for randomly deprecating things that work but they can't be bothered with any more.

After a certain point it becomes so transparent that you actively avoid their products.

NTT creates a drone that triggers and catches lightning – then keeps flying

Re: Why?

Yes but you have to admit it's a flash tech demo.

To avoid disaster-recovery disasters, learn from Reg readers' experiences

Re: 'reviewed ... by hand'?

And YET managers have the audacity to complain at me when I act as though the time I leave the house is the same as the time I'll arrive at the office, regardless of my commute time.

Malware in Lisp? Now you're just being cruel

Re: Lisp is in an amazing number of places

And yet in the programming language world cup it always does well in its brackets.

UK govt data people not 'technical,' says ex-Downing St data science head

Re: NHS England employee speaks

I'd genuinely like to be able to work in the public sector but I can't afford it and the culture is often stultifying. Neither of these problems is insoluble but they require direction and leadership, two things this government hasn't shown any particular interest in or aptitude for.

Nuclear center must replace roof on 70-year-old lab so it can process radioactive waste

Re: Sellafield, where taxpayer monies go to die...!

Part of the reason for this is that bidding processes that favour the lowest bidder are always going to lean towards the companies who put in knowingly incorrect cheap bids and then let the costs balloon towards a more realistic price later.

Someone making an honest estimate at the costs of a major project would immediately be discounted for being too expensive even if their bid was half what the project eventually costs under someone whose initial bid was lower.

Squaring this circle is an interesting challenge - maybe the game theorists could come in with some kind of sealed auction approach - but honestly with something this critical I think paying the private sector for it is always likely to end up a risk on multiple levels.

At the same time, if you're building something - even something that requires very specialist skills and materials, it is hard for me to see how it could stretch into the hundreds of millions. Sure good builders are expensive and hard to find and it costs a bit to hire plant machinery, but it hundreds of millions? Seems high.

Hm, why are so many DrayTek routers stuck in a bootloop?

Inscrutably bad router

Zen sent me a Draytek router when I signed up and after looking at it for approximately six seconds I decided the vibes were bad and went back to the Netgear I had been using before, which wasn't too hard to configure to do the same job. Now the Draytek only gets switched on when I'm on the phone to support and they insist I use the hardware they posted out.

It seems my hardware vibe-checks really came through that day. Perhaps it's an advantage of advancing age to have a sense for shite hardware...

France offers US scientists a safe haven from Trump's war on woke

Re: The UK should be paying attention

Say you don't know what universities do without saying you don't know what universities do.

The UK should be paying attention

We have a language advantage and goodness knows America is going to lose some very smart people as they shutter their universities and research institutions.

If they're determined to turn the country into a smoking crater where's the harm in a bit of opportunism from the rest of us?

AI running out of juice despite Microsoft's hard squeezing

Re: What's the next boondoggle?

You can actually see the hype-cycle trying to build up Quantum as the next big bandwagon, but it has the limitation that right now it doesn't exist at all. Even LLMs give the impression of doing something smart. It's going to be hard to shift those billions of speculative investment into pure vapourware. Though honestly OpenAI is pretty much selling hot air as well - nothing they have promised over the last cycle or so seems to have been delivered.

OpenAI asks Uncle Sam to let it scrape everything, stop other countries complaining

Re: Yeee Ha!

Make America Genocidal Again?

Frack to the future? Geothermal energy pitched as datacenter savior

Re: This is to run all the AI datacenters, right?

Geothermal has some really interesting potential uses for load balancing as well - there are companies doing work on using geothermal facilities in combination with renewables to store the energy produced at times of high renewables availability so that it can be drawn on when the grid needs it. That has a far wider potential than AI datacentres.

Also this creates a new working area for the geologists and drilling experts who have previously worked in the petrochemical industries, as a kind of side-benefit.

As Chromecast outage drags on, fix could be days to weeks away

Re: Googleprecation

It's a natural next-step from their decision to shutter every useful service after a couple of years - why not build the shuttering in on a low level, that way they don't have to worry about forgetting and leaving some useful piece of technology accessible to users.

Googleprecation

Good to see that Google maintaining their grand tradition of randomly and unexpectedly deprecating things that previously worked.

UK must pay cyber pros more than its Prime Minister, top civil servant says

Re: Thing that bothers me

I think the recommendation here is to address exactly this.

I've been saying for years now that we need to in-source a lot of government IT function and that simply won't be possible unless they're in a position to pay their staff a commensurate salary with the private sector.

Manus mania is here: Chinese ‘general agent’ is this week’s ‘future of AI' and OpenAI-killer

Re: Prompts see it scour the web for info and turn it into decent documents at reasonable speed

"Back in the day we used to employ dumbasses to create inaccurate summaries for us, this computer can do it in a fraction of the time!" Alright but the inaccurate documents sounds like more of a problem than the time required to create them.

The IT world moves fast, so why are admins slow to upgrade?

Re: Not risk free

This is super-relevant. If you have an older version of a database underlying some custom software in regular use there's a good chance that an upgrade to the database will mean the software database needs an updated driver. Nine times out of ten that's fine, but the other time something in the driver has been deprecated and the software will need to be adjusted to work against the new version, or the driver will now depend on a version of a library used elsewhere in the software and now that has to be changed across the board. There's every chance that whoever wrote the software in question has moved on, so you're looking at a good amount of time for one of your dev team to figure out how it works and then a test and release cycle to get the new version up and running so it can be used.

Pretty hard to make a business case for this running-to-stand-still scenario - you've expended a lot of resource, and got the same outcome you were already getting (but with tool version 5.4 updated to 5.5).

Techie pulled an all-nighter that one mistake turned into an all-weekender

Your fingerprints were all over that outage, but fortunately...

Does terrible code drive you mad? Wait until you see what it does to OpenAI's GPT-4o

They certainly don't hold themselves to the same standards as philosophers.

That sounds like a joke but they make so many ridiculously basic conceptual and logical errors that it's literally true.

The fact they can say this and they don't know what they mean by it or where this "central good-evil discriminator" is and they are clearly talking nonsense and these are the experts is very perturbing.

Bubble can't burst soon enough. Make sure your pension providers aren't investing in Google or Microsoft!

Signal will withdraw from Sweden if encryption-busting laws take effect

Draconian laws and trust

Seeing how the US is changing now is a great demonstration of why these draconian laws are such a liability for us as citizens - each authoritarian law, no matter how well-meaning it may be when it is created - is a stepping stone towards authoritarian rule, a tool in the hands of an authoritarian regime if or when they come to power. The more potentially authoritarian powers they have when they arrive, the less work they have to do and the less opportunity there is to resist them.

This has always been a strong argument for the least intrusive, least potentially-harmful laws, but seeing how every oppressive surveillance and policing law created in the US over the last few decades is now a weapon pointed at the American people makes it feel very real right now.

Hey programmers – is AI making us dumber?

Re: AI the teacher?

This is a fairly reasonable use case. But imagine now you don't know anything about how to code in any language. You give AI a prompt and it spews out some code that sort-of works when you do the one test you can think of. What have you learnt in that situation? Do you understand the code? Do you know what the LLM did? Do you know that it works in all cases or how you would validate that? If it doesn't work in some circumstances do you know how to fix it?

I expect most of us have done a bit of monkeycoding down the years where we copied something and poked it until it worked, but even that needed a degree of understanding before we could get anywhere with it. For people starting out AI seems to be a tool to avoid having to understand anything.

It's a fair tool for showing you how to do something you already know how to do using a different language or platform, but if you want to learn from scratch, learn to actually understand what programming is and how to do it, it's between no help and worse than nothing.

Re: It works but I don't know why

I've seen posts from Comp Sci professors who are running into real problems with students failing themselves with AI-based code generators - they use them for the first part of the course and feel very clever because they've done no work and they still got good marks, then as the material gets more complex GPT can't solve the problems any more, but they haven't learnt to program so they can't do it themselves either. They either end up needing a vast amount of catch-up or they fail the course, and it's an entirely self-created problem. God knows when I was that age I was lazy and dumb enough I could absolutely imagine myself in that situation.

The fundamental misapprehension that a lot of students have around using AI is that their teachers want the answers to their questions, whereas the teachers want their students to have gone through the process of answering the question for themselves.

Unfortunately certainly in the UK our school system has got so obsessed with making kids do tests that they have been trained to think that answering test questions is the thing that matters, rather than understanding the topic. This politically-motivated approach has done the last few generations no favours and made life harder for teachers who want to prepare their students for life rather than just for exams.

As Amazon takes over the Bond franchise, we submit our scripts for the next flick

Re: Amazon Prime

(And even then we'll keep taking money until your bank account gets closed down)

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

Re: Scrum

That would be an insane thing to do and I've never seen it on an agile project, but it's all to believable that people are out there doing it.

Re: Scrum

Agile teams should include at least one tester. That is great in theory but does mean that early in the project the tester has way less to do than the other developers and later they have loads of work, one of the things about classic Agile that never quite worked in my mind.

The biggest microcode attack in our history is underway

There's something interesting about this, though. A lot of the more libertarian American exceptionalist free-market meritocracy weirdoes are likely to learn some hard truths about how working institutions, the rule of law, and honest systems are what allow innovation and free markets to work. It's much harder to become whatever kind of imaginary Ayn Rand steel magnate you think you'll be when men with guns (who may or may not be part of the government) show up to your office and demand a cut of your profits, or start breaking things because you're competing with somebody who gives them a better cut.

It's a kind of economic anti-vaxxer sentiment where the fact you've never had to confront the challenges of truly corrupt systems in your lifetime leads you to assume that you don't need to protect against corruption.

I can understand how they got there, though. I grew up thinking my grandparents' generation had beaten fascism and look where we ended up on that front.

Does this thing run on a 220 V power supply? Oh. That puff of smoke suggests not

Re: Whats in a name?

I fear products under the PH brand would have attracted some acidic commentary.

Why UK Online Safety Act may not be safe for bloggers

Re: Exactly as we all predicted

Given that the PM is determined to cut needless red tape, this is one of the pieces of genuinely needless red tape that is interfering with british businesses and is likely to impede our access to the wider internet.

The curious story of Uncle Sam's HR dept, a hastily set up email server, and fears of another cyber disaster

Re: Cat's out of the bag.

As I understand it, an executive order can't assign any budget without being approved by one (or both? I'm not American) of the houses so this buyout may not have any money behind it as yet.

Given which, it would probably be wise to consult a lawyer before accepting it - there's a chance people won't get paid at all, and although in the latter case I daresay the legal profession would be willing to assist in some kind of class action, those can rumble on for quite a while.

Tech stocks tank as US AI dominance no longer a sure bet

Won't somebody think of the CEOs?

Sam Altman rolling around on his mattress stuffed with specially printed million-dollar bills, the only thing he can sleep on, screaming like a toddler who has just been given the wrong kind of biscuit.

Boeing warns of more financial hits from strikes, costlier parts – and Starliner, of course

Re: The new Boeing Air Force One

There's still time to fit it with that assistive piloting device they made that flies it straight into the ground, and I daresay they've used prittstick to glue at least a few of the doors on.

OpenAI's Operator agent wants to tackle your online chores – just don’t expect it to nail every task

Why?

I can't think of anything I would trust this tool to do - I don't love ordering groceries but I hate to think of the chaos my food cupboards would be in after a few weeks of LLMs taking ownership of the task. I can see that it might be a useful tool for people with limited vision in creating a much wider ranging voice interface, but I doubt that market is big enough to justify the valuation on OpenAI.

It's almost as though they're falling forward, desperately announcing more new products as the limitations of their existing ones start to show up and they need to keep justifying their demands for truly gargantuan investment.

It might be worth a bit of money to me once it can take out the bins and tidy the kitchen nicely, but that doesn't appear to be the kind of work they're prioritising.

Why is Big Tech hellbent on making AI opt-out?

Re: A challenge for many users

It's not just live-service cloud based editing tools - the same bullshit is happening in Word. It's being crammed into everything in the most thoughtless and tiresome way. In an environment that has been pushing to monopolies for the last thirty years, when those monopolies all turn on you at once it's hard to work around.

A challenge for many users

A lot of authors and editors find themselves being put in a difficult position by these tools appearing - they are often contractually obliged not to use Generative AI with the documents they are handling, but suddenly their word processor is feeding everything they have into it anyway without asking or giving them an option to disable it. On Google Workspaces people talked about having to escalate to third line support (most of a day on the phone just to get there) in order to have Google enable the menu that already existed to turn it off. There is so much wrong with that picture.

It may be that the ultimate consequence is a wider move to tools like LibreOffice for people that care and a loss of market share for the companies pushing this nonsense. I hope that they will face some kind of justice for treating us the way they have when this bubble bursts.

China claims major fusion advance and record after 17-minute Tokamak run

Re: 30 years

With this, we might be able to bring it down to 29 years 364 days.

UK government tech procurement lacks understanding, says watchdog

I'm a stuck record on this...

Every time this comes up I keep coming back to the fact that the government could save a truly colossal amount of money by recruiting a solid and well-paid in house development resource. We can no longer pretend that software systems are not part of core government functions, so not having the ability to run them from inside the government is ridiculous.

It would save money and keep domain knowledge within the organisation that needs it. We've had forty years to see that the private sector is not inherently more efficient than the public sector and that competent and happy internal teams can do outstanding work. Build up the resource and make it happen.

Copilot invades Microsoft 365 Personal and Family for an extra three bucks a month

Path to profitability

AI will finally become profitable when companies realise people will pay extra not to have it and start charging extra for "Classic" versions.

Google reports halving code migration time with AI help

Re: 500-plus-million-line codebase for Google Ads

A good choice for this work because if it failed nothing of value would be lost.

The bell tolls for TikTok as lifelines to avoid January 19 US ban vanish

Re: Questions of national security

I have seen it suggested that TikTok showing videos from people in Palestine and protests in the US that never get mainstream coverage are a significant part of the reason for the ban. I don't know enough to be able to judge whether that is true, but I would be surprised if it hadn't contributed.

Questions of national security

If they were applied internationally would the arguments for banning TikTok in the US result in other countries banning Facebook, Twitter and other US government-aligned platforms?

UK businesses eye AI as the cheaper, non-whining alternative to actual staff

Of course, AI will do almost any job worse than almost any human, but who does that have consequences for: Other human employees? The person signing the cheques doesn't care. Customers? Those are just money bags as far as the boss is concerned, as long as everyone in the industry is offering shitty AI service what choice do they have?

If you cut the costs at a company you are a good CEO who plays the game and you will be rewarded with a bonus and a pay rise. The impact on the people beneath you is no concern to you or your shareholders.

Boeing going backwards as production’s slowing and woes keep flowing

Re: Airbus “ships” 2 planes a day

God no, they know how those things are made, there's no way they're getting in one when it leaves the ground.