Posts by David 132

New Zealand supermarket's recipe-generating AI takes toxic output to a new level

Re: Woah there !

"But my GPS said to turn right onto the railroad tracks!"

"But $CELEBRITY revealed in a TikTok video that Covid vaccines are a plot by Bill Gates and the NWO to implant 5G microchips!"

We're doomed.

Infosys launches 'sonic identity' – an aural logo to 'reinforce brand purpose'

Re: And what is that smell?

Also patchouli and joss-sticks; the “nasal identity” of brand marketing wankery.

S/4HANA was once the future for SAP – but now it's in the clouds

…half the DSAG membership read the above comment, resign in disillusionment…

Europe sticks a monopoly probe into Adobe-Figma merger

Re: Just a minute

No, not just you.

Scientists strangely unable to follow recipe for holy grail room-temp superconductor

Re: As expected

So you’re saying this latest thing is a Pons-y scheme too?

Google Street View car careens into creek after 100mph cop chase

Re: at that point that the driver lost control and careened through a yard into a creek

Ah how did I know - and hope - that your link was Father Ted?

Excellent.

Now WE PUT THE BRICK ON THE ACCELERATOR.

> Since whether or not the car was Google's had absolutely nothing to do with his decision to pursue it I don't understand why you are so exercised over that trivial detail.

<tearful>

LEAVE GOOGLE ALONE!!!

</tearful>

Soft-reboot in systemd 254 sounds a lot like Windows' Fast Startup

Re: Usecase?

It's not even a solution. It was very precipitate of Poettering to foist it on us all.

First US nuclear power plant built this century goes online

Re: ROI?

The NRC forced them to make an expensive security-related change during the middle of construction

"Do NOT plug in that router. Our extensive research shows that the SCADA management system probably shouldn't be connected to the Internet."

Baidu builds AI into cars so you can distract the kids with text-to-image tools

I already have this in MY car, apparently.

I asked my infotainment system to draw me a picture of what happened in Tiananmen Square on June 4th, 1989... and it produced nothing at all.

Pretty clever of Baidu, I must admit, to get their AI system factory-installed into a 1993 Nissan pickup truck.

After fears that Europe's space scope was toast, its first images look mighty fine

Re: Slight flaw...

And of course as an echo from history, Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoon!

(Sorry for the TwitterX link, it was the only one I could find that wasn’t bloody Pinterest.)

No no, that’s just Lady Sybil Ramkin’s Sunshine Sanctuary For Sick Dragons.

Re: "Here's looking at Euclid"

I’m not for one moment accusing the author of intentional plagiarism, but I do feel bound to point out that this very joke was used by Chris Addison in his Radio 4 comedy show “The Ape That Got Lucky” way back in 2005.

Introducing a guest he rattles off a list of the guest’s alleged works, including “‘Pop Goes The Weasel’ - A Treasury Of Vivisection Anecdotes”, “‘Fruits Of The Forest’ - The Truth About Robin Hood And His Merry Men”, and of course, “‘Here’s Looking At Euclid’ - Geometry In The Films Of Humphrey Bogart”.

And I suspect it predates that too :)

Regardless, seek out the show; it’s bound to be on YouTube or the ilk. It’s very very funny if you like that sort of absurdist humour.

Arc: A radical fresh take on the web browser

Re: If they'd been the "Browser *Arc* Company of New York"...

Seldom would a rasher decision have been made.

Re: I tried it..

Automatic upvote for not falling into the common trap of writing "the hoi polloi".

But then, you is a journalist so you write English gooder than us do.

Re: Edge updated itself this morning...

And let me guess, it then interrupted your next boot with an unskippable full-screen blurb for the new browser, complete with dark patterns to trick you into making it your default?

Fed-up Torvalds suggests disabling AMD’s 'stupid' performance-killing fTPM RNG

Re: Cleaning products

Feel free to replace that earworm with the Kellogg’s Bran Flakes one.

“They’re tasty, tasty, very very tasty…”

You are welcome :P

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's pop artifact stash now heads to a museum

Relics

Kudos to the author for the picture caption under Kirk’s chair: “The captain's chair from the USS Enterprise ... no bloody A, B, C or D”

Of course I read that in Scotty’s voice. And how appropriate for a story about “relics”.

Infineon to offer recyclable circuit boards that dissolve in water

Re: Springing a leak

“Do you rent your server farm by the rack, by the core count, or by CPU time?”

“Err, since an unfortunate incident last month when the fire sprinklers discharged while our servers were under load… we rent them by the gallon. ‘Cloud Compute Bucket’ is not a metaphor.”

Global Slack messaging outage cuts world off from colleagues

“Come back Teams, all is forgiven”

No. Just, no. Slack could be not only down, but also worming through my address book and sending gratuitous racial slurs to my contacts list - and it would still be preferable to Teams.

Teams - nothing will ever be forgiven.

Want to live dangerously? Try running Windows XP in 2023

My dad, God rest his soul, asked me back in about 1990-2000 or so to build him a PC because he'd outgrown my old Amiga that I'd left him. "What do you need it for?" I asked. "Oh, not much," he said, "just accounts and writing letters".

Being my dad, he had a budget for it of less than a penny (I won't use the phrase "duck's arse" here, out of fondness for him, but that conveys the gist). So, I scrounged old bits and pieces from work colleagues and after spending precisely nothing except my time, built him a PC that would handle Excel + Word. If I recall, it was a Pentium (or maybe even 486) with 2D graphics, running Windows 98SE. Not speedy, even by the standards of the day, but adequate.

Well, all went fine until a couple of weeks later when he called me because he'd got a CD from a neighbour and couldn't get it to work. "What's the CD?" I asked, expecting it to be clipart, or maybe a new version of Office.

"Oh, it's something called Microsoft Flight Simulator. My flying instructor recommended it."

Which was, and I guess even now still is, one of the most hardware-demanding pieces of software out there. Getting it to run on his word-processing Pentium would have been akin to getting Call of Duty, or whatever it is the kids play nowadays, running on an Eee-PC.

And so I built something with a bit more grunt, drove all the way back Up North and gave him the new rig (and a bill for the actually decent components). The fact that I sorted out a Microsoft force-feedback flightstick for him a few months later definitely made him feel better about having had to part with actual cash!

This pint's for you, dad.

You walked? Luxury! We had to crawl on our knees.

Bah, these soft Southern pansies…

Re: My takeaway from this article...

Seattle?

Re: Chromium 86 based browser for XP

I have fond memories of the BBC B. Switch it on, and it’d be ready with a >_ prompt (and two-note power-on beep) almost before you’d moved your hand away from the power switch at the back of the machine.

Douglas Adams was right: Telephone sanitizers are terrible human beings

Re: Real Sanitizers

> I am, though, working a quotation from TRATEOTU into an interview later today!

Ah but which one? Please tell me it’s one of..:

“Go Stick Your Head In A Pig”?

“I am so hip I have difficulty seeing over my pelvis.” ?

“Great to see you big boy, how’s the noise? You’re looking great, really very, very fat and unwell. Amazing.”

or perhaps…

“Good evening, I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in parts of my body?”

Re: Real Sanitizers

You are indeed a hoopy frood.

Re: Real Sanitizers

> I think I must have only been aged about 6 or 7 at the time the TV show was broadcast in the UK though....

Ditto! I remember watching it with my dad one bright summer evening (?... memory is fuzzy at 40+ years' distance) and what gave me nightmares for weeks was, of all things, the virulent blue/green food that Ford encourages Arthur to eat when they first arrive on the Vogon ship. Brrrrr. Scarred me for ages, that did, even if it was just sausages & mash with lots of food colouring. Heaven only knows what I'd have made of the Vogons themselves if my dad had let me keep watching. Yes, I was a sensitive child.

Social media is too much for most of us to handle

Re: Some of us figured all that out ...

I remember Usenet in the early 90s, and what an education that was! Quite addictive but it lost its attraction once the AOLers and succeeding waves of newbies came on.

Me too! ( :-P )

Ah, the Eternal September. World's gone to pot since then I tell you.

ChatGPT study suggests its LLMs are getting dumber at some tasks

What, are you implying that a PP&E degree from Oxbridge and a decade working as a special advisor or in a managerial role in the public sector don’t mentally equip people with logic, reasoning and deep knowledge?

Oh, for shame!

Google toys with internet air-gap for some staff PCs

Re: Memories

Looks like SOMEONE has a case of the “Mondays”!!!

I’ll return your stapler soon, honestly.

Also affected by this policy would be that one guy at Google whose job it is to read incoming search queries and then really quickly type them into Bing and copy-paste the results back to the requester.

Goodbye Azure AD, Entra the drag on your time and money

Well for one, it could end REALLY BENTRALY [sic].

(i.e., the infamous "clbuttic mistake" beckons.)

Re: Meaningless Product Rename

Honestly, "Viva Engage" sounds like a Trekkie being ironic as he starts up his 70's-era Vauxhall.

And yes I know Vauxhall recently re-used the name. What next, the 2024 Ford Anglia?

Automatic thumbs up for a fellow XC70 owner (and yes, I also had an XC60 at one point but sold it to a family member!)

RIP Kevin Mitnick: Former most-wanted hacker dies at 59

Re: No published links

Wow, the Osbourne effect is more sinister than I'd thought!

Mint 21.2 is desktop Linux without the faff

Re: What's not to like?

I thought Emacs had its own distro built-in?

(Note icon.)

Re: The best

> They take ages, you don't know what's going on, if it's still working, stalled or dead, you can only wait, a long time, and hope you'll eventually get your computer back in a working condition.

And most frustratingly of all, they just rudely cut in when you’re trying to shut down your system in a hurry or boot it up quickly to check something. Nothing like shutting down your laptop because you have to board a flight or it’s almost out of battery charge, only to be told “Windows is updating. Do not turn off your computer. 1% done…”

Yes, I speak from experience.

Re: A toast

Which is a perfectly reasonable and valuable answer. I’m not sure why the parent has been downvoted (3x at time of writing) for an equally fair question. Folks, if you’re going to downvote, at least have the courtesy to explain your reasoning.

Funny you should mention that. I installed LM 21.2 on an 8th-gen Intel NUC last night for use as a Jellyfin server, and found that 75% of the time the Wifi adapter wasn’t found. Now, support for Intel wifi adapters is pretty darn good in Mint (and Linux in general) so I’m puzzled. I might suspect a faulty adapter, but before I installed Mint I had to slap a temporary copy of Windows 10 on the same box in order to do some BIOS updates, and the Wifi worked perfectly under that OS.

Hmmm.

I’m not going to lose sleep over it because the NUC in question will be hard-wired via Ethernet once I move it from staging into “production” but it’s an oddity.

Other than that, 21.2 looks really slick and well-polished.

Tech support scammers go analog, ask victims to mail bundles of cash

FTFA

“And it goes without saying, but if a representative from a supposedly legitimate business asks you to send an obfuscated package stuffed with cash to a random address … don't.”

DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO! YOU’RE NOT MY MUM!!

Beijing wants to make the Great Firewall of China even greater

Re: Dear Eric Blair

Ah, you make the mistake of thinking that “The People” in this context means “the general population”. In totalitarian states the word has a very specific meaning and actually means “the people in charge and riding in limousines in Party-Only lanes of the highway”. See also any country describing itself as the “People’s Republic of X” or “The Democratic People’s X”.

“When I use a word,” said Humpty Dumpty, “it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.”

Microsoft kicks Calibri to the curb for Aptos as default font

Re: Goodbye, good riddance

Although it comes with the constant danger of The Helvetica Scenario.

Producers allegedly sought rights to replicate extras using AI, forever, for just $200

Re: "address concerns of being replaced by AI"

"Follow me in single file, bwanas, to fool the hated enemy"

LG to offer subscriptions for appliances and televisions

Re: @StrangerHereMyself - Wrong

It’s truly bizarre, and if it’s the best example they can come up with then they’re struggling.

Re: Hell no

Pretty sure the show title was “Ow my balls”.

“Aw my balls” sounds like a show where you coo over pictures of them.

”Aaaaw, aren’t they cute in this one? Look, you can see every little wrinkle…”

Re: “Evolving Appliances For You” and the return of Orwells' Telescreens

> Where the teenage children have spelled rude words with the magnets...

Of course, to spell the rudest word of all you need an LG, otherwise it’s just “Be__ium”…

Re: @StrangerHereMyself - Wrong

On the plus side this idea & justification is also doomed for failure in North America as appliances tend to stay with the house, when you move.

Not always. The last two moves that we made, my wife brought her cooker and clothes-washer with her.

...mainly because I cried when she tried to leave me behind.

Re: Wrong

I ain't Spartacus, you are fined one credit for a violation of the verbal morality code.

(ah, that movie never gets old...)

Microsoft whips up unrest after revealing Azure AD name change

Re: The Microsoft credo

> It just felt "wrong". But seeing you spell it out as "Entrails" just nailed it. Maybe my subconscious was adding the "ils" and screaming "noooo, keep it away from me" down in the reptilian part of my brain :-)

So what you're saying is, you had a gut feeling about it?

Asus blames 'thermal stress' for fried SD card readers in Ally handhelds

All I know is, it’s becoming a right pain to type them in from magazine listings.