Posts by David 132

Hashicorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto says GitHub ‘no longer a place for serious work’

Re: Redmond-centric

> They are, and stop calling me Shirley!

Look, he's just trying to be Frank with you.

Cursor-Opus agent snuffs out startup’s production database

Re: “call me Jer”.

Oi reckon you'm not wrong there. Pass Oi the scrumpy jar, would thee?

In the beginning was the Bork: 'Heart of the Earth' exhibit reveals Raspberry Pi in existential crisis

Re: We'll be OK

Faint sounds of movement coming from within, and Ogilvy the astronomer feared there was a man inside trying to escape. He rushed to the rock but the intense bork stopped him.

PowerPoint punishment sent users into an infinite loop after lunch

> IT pushed back saying frequent password changes reduced security because staff would just write them down.

...or you get something like Th1sIsMyP@sswORD, which then gets changed at each date thereafter to a sequence of Th1sIsMyP@sswORD1, Th1sIsMyP@sswORD2, Th1sIsMyP@sswORD3...

Security theatre.

South Africa yanks AI policy after AI-assisted drafting invents citations

"Fertile"?

"...it was citing sources that exist only in the fertile imagination of a chatbot."

I don't know that "fertile" is an accurate or deserved adjective.

Febrile, perhaps?

ShinyHunters claim they have cruise giant Carnival's booty as 7.5M emails surface

Yo ho ho

Mention of ships and booty has, and I appreciate that I'm way off-topic here, triggered flashbacks for me of "Booty", an old platformer game on the ZX Spectrum, with really annoying hornpipe music. It was of that very 80s genre of "make an endless series of pixel-perfect, split-second-timed jumps, and one wrong move will reset you right back to the start" games. Ah, you modern kids with your health-packs and save-points and replaceable armour don't know how lucky you are, muttermuttermutter...

Microsoft beefs up Remote Desktop security with ... hard-to-read messages

Quite impressive, actually

Modern Windows frameworks - WPF, WinUI3 - handle dpi scaling automatically, with minimal effort on the part of the developer. So Microsoft must have put real effort into breaking it. Or they used WinForms, and forgot to dynamically resize all controls or fonts :)

To fix this Wi-Fi network, we'll need a crane

Re: Been there ....

Probably easier than wrapping the granddaughter in tinfoil.

Microsoft tackles quality control issues. Just kidding, it's encouraging experienced workers to leave

Re: Got to pay that 'leccy bill somehow

I think you're on the right lines there, although your guesstimate of average employee cost is probably on the low side; including salary & overheads (401k contributions , healthcare, etc) it's probably closer to $200K per targeted employee, at least for those in the US.

None of which invalidates your argument!

Microsoft gives your Word documents an AI co-author you didn’t ask for

Re: I wish you needed to have a licence for all this AI bollocks

You're overlooking how Microsoft's licensing approach works.

Old cost of licence for Office: $$

New cost for Office NOW WITH CoPilot: $$$

New cost for Office without CoPilot, which due to a "bug", randomly inserts "I am a total loser" into your documents and changes the font to Comic Sans when you mail them: $$$$$

GitHub opts all CLI users into telemetry collection whether they want it or not

Re: Please stop working against humanity by using github

> TOTAL LINES: 4347903

Yeah, but 4347800 of those are REM statements, right? :)

Right to repair champ Framework punts modular 13in laptop with Core Ultra Series 3

Re: I want to like it, but spec limitations kill the deal

To clarify, because your comment might give the wrong impression, Thunderbolt is a royalty-free standard for silicon vendors and OEMs; devices have to be certified by Intel, but that hasn't stopped Apple from supporting Thunderbolt up to version 5 on Apple-silicon-based devices, or there being AMD-based motherboards that support it using an Intel controller. Any lack of enthusiasm from AMD is purely down to politics (and dare I suggest, NIH-syndrome?), not legal or licensing roadblocks.

You can now run WSL on Windows 95, in case you're crazy, too

And I'll point out that it's a Windows that doesn't need second-mortgage-spending levels of RAM. Perhaps an unexpected side-effect of the great AI scam is that us meatbags will all go back to using Windows 95, 3.x, and of course the One True Version, 2000?

Linux 7.1 will have an optional new NTFS driver

Re: Solving a problem that doesn't exist

Ho ho, you got me there. I'd completely forgotten about that unfortunately-named filesystem. Did you use your intuition? (<- note sneaky Amiga-related pun)

Re: Solving a problem that doesn't exist

...and if you ARE still running Windows: ffs!

Re: What is this for?

> a lot of external hard drives come preformatted as NTFS. It might be a good idea for people to reformat those when they obtain them, but not everyone does.

Absolutely; in particular, people who envisage using the external drive to swap data between Linux and Windows PCs (yes, we now have the Internet, but remember the old "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station-wagon full of backup tapes USB drives hurtling down the highway" cliché...). The latter OS does not have native support for reading most Linux filesystems, such as ext4. Sure, there's WSL and various third-party drivers, but you can't count on those being present on the Windows PC.

Cloudflare can remember it for you wholesale

Re: A Well Trodden Path

Upvoted for any mention of Discworld, although you should have mentioned the previous motto of Harry King's night-soil empire: "Taking The Piss Since 1961". As you said, amended by Effie for the sake of Hygiene and Decorum.

Can I just mention that I've noticed over the last few days, any comments that are even mildly critical of Our Wonderful AI Company Overlords seem to attract a downvote? Every single one on this page, as I write this.

Presumably, from a True Believer who's invested rather more of their savings in Altman's shell-game than is prudent.

Quite sad, really.

Attention data hoarders: Alexa loses its Plex appeal as voice feature gets canned

When it comes to asking inept voice interfaces to play classic prog-rock - "don't ask, don't Tull".

Returning to topic after that stinker of an attempt at humour, I battled with Siri earlier today; no matter how carefully I enunciated, I could not get her to stop transcribing my spoken word "neighbour" as "Neighborhood", complete with misplaced capital N. Similarly, "foreigner" was transcribed with grim determination as "for foreigner"; I'm certain I don't have a stutter, but clearly Siri does.

And we're supposed to offload our lives to these infernal algorithms??

+1 for Jellyfin. I ran Plex here until one day it inexplicably keeled over and refused to work again, even after a complete re-install. I'm very happy with Jellyfin, although I admit I only ever access my pira TOTALLY LEGAL, SELF-PRODUCED content from within my home LAN.

NodeWeaver says its perpetual licensing beats VMware’s perpetual price hikes

Re: Potato

More worryingly, is he saying that Nodeweaver is GLaDOS?

If so, it was a triumph.

Shoe company says it's getting into AI infrastructure and yes this is the top

...and may $DEITY have mercy on their soles.

Re: They should be great at it!

Wire wool, perhaps, which sounds even more uncomfortable.

And brings to mind that old classic Gary Larson cartoon, "The sheep that give us steel wool have no natural enemies".

Americans who masterminded Nork IT worker fraud sentenced to 200 months behind bars

Re: Why the weird 200 months

It was, clearly, translated for a metric-system audience.

Re: source of the problem

Echoing my thoughts. What sort of company is so slipshod?

I know my own employer - a large multinational in the tech sector, of precisely the sort targetted by these scams - would notice immediately, and freak out, if I had any sort of remote-control software running on my company-issued laptop to control it from afar. They have driver-level key-loggers and such that monitor the physical keyboard; input being injected in via VNC or such would trip alarms.

And although I was interviewed remotely over Teams, they required me to hold up my legal ID documents to the camera in an unscheduled session with the HR department before they finalized the hiring.

The companies these Norks sneak into cannot be held entirely blameless for their own misfortune.

Raspberry Pi OS ends open-door policy for sudo

Re: Obligatory

the default response is now "What is your password?"

"Please"?

Not all networks can handle AI traffic – and experts are sounding alarms

Oh, great.

Now all the rest of us outside the bubble get to pay through the nose for not only RAM and storage, but switches and networking gear, too.

Yay. Huzzah for AI.

You can finally control serial devices from Firefox

These serial-related puns are good, but I'm starting to get baud.

Microsoft sends Outlook Lite to the great inbox in the sky as memory costs skyrocket

I've told this tale several times before around here, but an old friend of mine used to work for a large (now defunct) network hardware company, writing drivers for their cards. He had a script he had written that would build the driver overnight, then email the compiler log to him so that he could review it the next day.

Well, he came into work one morning to find the on-site IT department waiting for him in the lobby with (metaphorical) baseball bats and (actual) murderous expressions. Long story short, due to an error in his driver code – and an even more egregious error in his script – the compilation process had failed, logged it, tried again, failed again, logged it again… and had then, when local disk space ran out, emailed the log to him. All 4GB of it. This had not surprisingly caused the company's mail spooler to keel over, bringing down email corporate-wide.

Re: Microsoft going back to their roots?

Yeah, that amount of yearly money should indeed be enough for anybody.

I suppose so, if you're willing to scrimp and save a bit. Store-brand caviar. Ordering that month's Lamborghini with regular dead-cow upholstery rather than the innately superior whale-penis leather. A large-but-finite, rather than infinity pool. Having only 2GB of memory in your PC.

But honestly, could such an existence even be called living???

Windows Update is a torture chamber for seldom-used PCs

Re: Isee your "edge"

Much as it pains me to criticize my favourite browser, I must admit that Firefox's update process irks me. If I have to update a machine that hasn't been used in a while, FF always seems to update via intermediate versions - version 96 (numbers picked at random) will update to version 114, which will update when it restarts to version 123, which will then update to version 140...

I sort of understand the technical reasons for doing it this way, but it usually makes me think "why did I click Help->Update, when it would have been much faster to just go to the Firefox site and directly download the latest installer..."

Claude Code cache chaos creates quota complaints

Re: Reminder: Nobody knows what any of this costs.

For "Anthropic", read "all AI providers"; I think they're all in the frantic "lose money on every customer but make it up in VOLUME!!!" stage of the hype cycle, or as they prefer to phrase it to investors, "customer acquisition".

Notepad sheds Copilot from toolbar as Microsoft gives subtlety a try

Re: Reducing unnecessary copilot entry points

>Back in the old days, you could get the OS up and going with a lot less pointless screens and dialogue boxes.

It's almost as if someone at Microsoft has said, "hmm, we no longer have to ask the user what graphics chip they have, what IRQs their various hardware devices are using, what partitioning system they want, and to insert multiple floppy disks; what can we ask them instead so that they feel 'personally invested' in the OS installation process?"

Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user

Re: Case of acute cleveritis ?

What a bunch of Cox...

I vibe coded a feed reading web app. It was enlightening and uncomfortable

Re: What ever happened to the future where we pick items off of shelf ...

>What ever happened to the future where we pick items off of shelf, stick them in our pockets, and simply walk out through the RF scanner without stopping to effect payment?

It's in place in stores in many British cities right now.

Well, apart from the "effecting payment" bit...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/04/12/stores-failing-help-police-tackle-shoplifting-met-chief/

Icon? What else...

Patch to end i486 support hits Linux kernel merge queue

Re: Buggritt

What on earth am I going to run my AI image generator and LLM on now???

Windows asks a networking question on a Stratford billboard

Re: Overkill

Well, those were the primitive bad old days, of course.

In these enlightened modern times, we have the billboarD module of systemd to do that. I think we can all agree that the extra six million lines of code, binary-only billboard config files, and a 16GB bump in the system memory requirements are a fair price to pay.

Artemis II astronaut: 'I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working'

Re: Thou Hast A Typo

There's a corrections link at the top of this very page.

Send corrections

'Uncle Larry’s biggest fan' cut by email in early morning Oracle layoff spree

Re: Cutout

Was that correction a deliberate riff on "Whoops Apocalypse", or just a fortuitous coincidence?

GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

Re: 180 vs 360

As far as I'm concerned they can spin on it.

Humanoid robots one tiny step closer to exterminating autoworkers' jobs

Re: Humanoid robots

Daleks made from recycled T-1000 units.

Ex-terminators.

Engineer sabotaged hardware then complained when it didn't work

Re: Not the same, but ...

> "say goodbye"

If we're channeling Crowley, wouldn't "Hastur la vista" be more appropriate...

AFC Ajax drops ball as flaws let hackers play admin with tickets and bans

I assume you're referencing that old milk advert with Ian Rush - good job if so. Last time I made an affectionate, tongue-in-cheek reference in these parts to Accrington Stanley, with the same ad in mind, I got downvoted. Presumably by the membership of the official Accrington Stanley Supporters' Club. Or his mum.

Staff too scared of the AI axe to pick it up, Forrester finds

Anecdotally, a friend who is a mechanic reports a similar increase in the number of customers who come to him with variants on, "ChatGPT says the knocking noises and smoke from my car are just because it needs a new carburettor or distributor, don't try to upsell me..."

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

Moving forwards, in a very real sense, we should also blue-sky strategize our synergies with stakeholders in order to facilitate concrete deliverables.

(And now, I am feeling mild revulsion at how easily the above came to me. I spent far too much of my working life at one of the giant companies that the article mentions.)

Russians are posing as Signal support to launch phishing attacks

Re: A sign of Desperation?

They'll be posing as the Speaking Clock next, or Dial-A-Disc.

Microsoft breaks Microsoft account sign-ins in Windows 11 with latest update

LOL, touché!

Pint icon, because it's POETS day and I'm trying to corral a group of like-minded chums for a celebratory libation after work. "Herding cats" comes to mind.

Have an upvote. Same here, for the machine on my LAN that has to be Windows; I'm sticking with 10, with the Windows Update subsystem nuked from orbit and the stumps cauterised because, prior to that, it "helpfully" rebooted overnight to install updates and lost my work, just once too often (see my comments passim about how this caused an irrational red mist to descend upon me...).

And I'm sure many of you are now tut-tutting about how vulnerable my machine is and how I'm criminally irresponsible for leaving it in an unpatched state; you will marvel at how much I don't care. That said, if anyone feels the need to prove a point and hack me, it's at 192.168.1.35; go nuts :)

Google offers ‘vibe design’ tool that you can shout at to create a UI

UIs, no.

Illustrative diagrams suitable for gynaecology and/or proctology textbooks, quite possibly.

Systemd 260 kills SysV, tells AI not to misbehave

Re: Not coming here

Systemd still, after all these years, doesn't have web-browser functionality, or a Freecell game, or a video player, or even, for heaven's sakes, the most basic rudiments of a Customer Relationship Management or business intelligence backend.

Honestly, I don't know what's keeping Poettering.

(please note icon.)

Big moves in Linux filesystems as new bcachefs lands and KDE adds support for Apple's APFS

Re: btrfs vs bcachefs

> Ritchie inflicted C upon the world: a language famed for being so unreadable you couldn't tell what your _own_ code did a few weeks later

I'm not entirely sure that's reasonable, even within the bounds of journalistic hyperbole; I recently had cause to revisit C code I wrote in 1994 for an Amiga Workbench utility, and found it perfectly easy to parse and understand. Not to mention, realising that I'd evidently been writing conditional statements in the form x==y?dothis:dothat 30+ years ago, a construction that I clearly remember being the neatest thing since digital watches when I "first discovered it" 15 years ago when doing C# development... apparently I have huge gaps in my memory!