Posts by JimmyPage

RAM is getting expensive, so squeeze the most from it

Swap partitions ?

Also making sure your swap partition lives on a different disk to your boot partition .

Users protest as Google Antigravity price floats upward

Re: Fuck Google

I won't downvote, but all you have done is moved your testicles from Googles grasp to Amazons.

Lloyds Banking Group apps play mix-and-match with customer transactions

So what part of 2018

made you decided to stay with Lloyds ?

Whitehall seeks lone C++ coder to keep airport passenger model flying

So 30k a year

before tax ?

Fuck off.

AI has made the Command Line Interface more important and powerful than ever before

Too true

It is about 10 times faster to copy and paste lines of text into a prompt than try to explain what you see (because remember, "AI" has an IQ of zero). Even with tools to read the text in graphical boxes.

Also, it's much easier for the dumb bot to see where it has fucked up when you paste it's command line, and you get an error message that "--feature" is not recognised.

However this means that people who do not shit a brick when they see a command line (i.e. real users) are going to have the edge. And you can bet your life that making older professionals more valued is not what "AI" is all about. Or ever was.

Microsoft Azure CTO set Claude on his 1986 Apple II code, says it found vulns

Re: For fun...

Why have "AI" scour source code for vulnerabilities when the community (FOSS) has been doing that for 50 years ?

Lenovo, Nintendo sue US government seeking tariff refunds

Do they need to sue ?

Didn't the judge the administration whined to about needing time tell then to STFU and said the refunds could be dealt with by the companies deducting them from their next tax bill. With a little extra for the effort ?

Anthropic sues US government after unprecedented national security designation

My aching sides

Sorry, am I the only one who has seen the US justice system (and frankly it was always "justice" system anyway) collapse into irrelevance these past years.

No matter how much you win, you will end up with a simple executive order that makes it all legal, or - if SCOTUS want to play act - a judgement the administration will ignore. Saying (literally) "You and whose army".

You can power a G-Wiz EV with 500 vapes, and this YouTuber proved it

Just wanted to express

my admiration.

---> on me

Capita's £370M Whitehall outsourcing deal challenged as 'abnormally low'

Oh, come on

I bet it won't be "abnormally low" after the ink has dried and loads of "contingency charges" are unveiled.

I wonder if Capita forgot to add the VAT ? Apparently that is a quite legal way of getting a 20% discounted quote signed off. For some reason it's the buyers loss.

PCs and phones to get more boring and expensive in 2026 thanks to memory drought

The negative depreciaton

continues unchecked.

Open source devs consider making hogs pay for every download

This is a classic example

where "free" does not mean "of no value".

Why can't FOSS repositories get big business to have to sign up with a credit card for when they bust the "free" limit *before* they have access to the code.

You know like they do to their customers

LLMs killed the privacy star, we can't rewind, we've gone too far

Slow news day ?

This is hardly news if you've been awake these past years.

20 years ago, I was aware that Facebook could easily identify at least 50% of those people who smugly announced they were staying under the radar by not signing up.

These days it's probably closer to 98% - LLMs just make the process easier. It's always been possible.

Incidentally, history buffs will recall that privacy wasn't a concept in ancient Rome, or Greece.

Microsoft to auto-launch Copilot in Edge whenever you click a link from Outlook

Linux version of Edge.

Presumably sold alongside motorbike ashtrays and chocolate teapots ?

Say goodbye to budget PCs and smartphones – memory is too expensive now

So all those PCs I've hoarded

Could be worth a bit more than a year ago ?

Poor M$ cab't catch a break. That's a whole load of ready made Mint users.

Recycling biz reckons AI features are destroying smartphone resale values

Know what my last use of ChatGPT was ?

A conversation about what phone I could get with as little to no "AI" shite as possible.

Amusingly, when I said I didn't trust "AI", it replied "Me neither". (Alerting me to the fact that our of laziness I had not disabled "enthusiastic mode").

Anthropic accuses China's AI labs of ripping off content – just like it did

Maybe time for more icons ?

I have already suggested one that expresses "Oh, do fuck off".

That could be bought in with another: "Oh, my aching sides".

ShinyHunters demands $1.5M not to leak Vegas casino and resort chain data

These guys could be dangerous

If they had a clue of strategy.

If I wanted to bring the entire USA to a halt, the simplest approach would be to provide a searchable database of everyones salary details that I'd hacked. As soon as Bob learns he's on less than Joe all hell will break loose.

Anthropic: No, absolutely not, you may not use third-party harnesses with Claude subs

"Harness" ? FFS

Is this a new word for an old concept ?

Been a while since there's been a request for a new Vulture icon, but can I nominate "Oh, do fuck off" for consideration into the pantheon ?

Attackers have 16-digit card numbers, expiry dates, but not names. Now org gets £500k fine

UK data protection continues

To underwhelm me.

However this story does highlight the utility of Google Pay generating virtual cards where needed.

What do I think if UK data protection ?

I think it would be a good idea.

AI agents can't teach themselves new tricks – only people can

One thing AI is very good at

is writing stories about AI.

I wonder why ?

Gentoo dumps GitHub over Copilot nagware

Even if you are OK with Copilot

Decoupling from a US company probably is strategically significant.

CIOs told: Prove your AI pays off – or pay the price

Few - if any companies

Have the faintest idea how they make money.

I have lost count of the number of times I have asked a simple question ("What impact did COVID have on productivity ?") to be met with a blank "How the hell would we know ?" from "management".

This is strategic, by the way. If you can't delve into the metrics, you can't prove the management wrong.

You probably can't trust your password manager if it's compromised

If you were serious about security

Then you wouldn't be using passwords anyway. That's not the users fault. That's the morons who (supposedly) deliver the service.

Once it's established - against user preference and best practices - that service providers are going to use passwords regardless, then as a user the next best thing is to ensure unique complex passwords for everything as the starting point, and then 2FA (where it's offered, not all service providers bother). And for that, a password manager is the least shit option.

Secondhand laptop market goes 'mainstream' amid memory crunch

Value of "AI" less kit

is growing

Were telcos tipped off to *that* ancient Telnet bug? Cyber pros say the signs stack up

So a low powered "AI" bot

could have suggested a Telnet flaw before it was announced just by looking at traffic ?

Which does rather raise the question why didn't it ?

Trump to hyperscalers: your datacenters, your power bill

Oh dear

Supporting the average Joe over the needs of the Tech Bros is not what they paid him to be elected for.

Maybe Trump could be removed before the end of his term.

VMware scores early win in Siemens software licensing dispute

Who writes (and signs) these contracts ?

Surely the jurisdiction for disputes is agreed on *before* you sign the dotted line.

I'm beginning to think some lawyers are shysters.

Microsoft boffins figured out how to break LLM safety guardrails with one simple prompt

Again, is this "news"

Going back 10 years, when the previous incarnation of "smart" was doing the rounds, one of it's selling points was the ability to parse reviews and determine if they were favourable or not. The idea being to hide bad reviews.

20 minutes in and I had written a review that was flagged as being "positive" only it was quite the reverse. Because *understanding* what wards are doing in a sentence needs - wait for it - intelligence.

Stop thinking "AI" is anything other than sophisticated pattern matching at unimaginable speeds. and .... well you've got it. Now what is *that* useful for ?

Containers, cloud, blockchain, AI – it's all the same old BS, says veteran Red Hatter

Agile ?

As in "We have no idea which version you - or indeed we - actually had working. (If ever)"

Study confirms experience beats youthful enthusiasm

Another bleeding obvious fact

Without experience, you'd have no one to say "We tried that and it failed".

Yes, you;d think it would have been documented for future generations wouldn't you ?

You'd think wrong.

Whether they are building agents or folding proteins, LLMs need a friend

The problem here is humans are by far and away the most expensive and least useful part of the "AI" juggernaut.

Three clues that your LLM may be poisoned with a sleeper-agent back door

So we are looking at magic words then ?

Welcome to LLM land - where spells and incantations can summon the beast.

SpaceX wants to fill Earth orbit with a million datacenter satellites

I idly wonder

what the possibilities of bringing down any that are over the UK might be ?

If he can put a million satellites into space. then surely a few hundred motivated nerds can reply with a few hundred perfectly aimed lasers ?

Probably not going to do much, but boy, what a project to work on. Who knows, it may be useful in the future.

AI’s lust for memory drags down the smartphone industry, and Qualcomm with it

So second hand phones

(you know, the decent ones) will get more valuable while thieves start throwing back the more modern "AI" infected shite ?

Microsoft engineer speedruns Raspberry Pi magic smoke in five minutes

Re: He posted this?

Downvoted, because knowledge is never a waste of time.

--> for the time and trouble.

VS Code for Linux may be secretly hoarding trashed files

Containers. What's the ****ing point.

"Use Docker" they said. "It'll protect you from OS updates".

I used Docker.

I ran a lovely container that run my PAN newsreader in a container freezing it in a known good state.

Come Debian 12->13 and guess what. Changes to Docker broke the container. Because apparently changing a host library can cause Docker to have to use it and if breaks the underlying container .... well guess who has to download the source into the container and recompile in a hilarious Saturday afternoon.

Apparently I am the odd one for expecting containers to survive OS updates and upgrades.

(The magic Google is "Debian 12->13 Changes to Docker broke the container"")

Firefox makes AI optional, like it probably should have been all along

Off ? How about out ?

As in not there to begin with.

X marks the raid: French cops swoop on Musk's Paris ops

Hang on, what happened to the paperless office (© 1980) ????

I am mildly amused at either of the two conclusions from this story.

The first is that the French authorities believe there is something on French soil that can be seized.

The second is that one of the supposedly most advanced tech companies on the planet still uses hard copies that can be seized.

Microsoft kills standalone SharePoint and OneDrive plans, because they’re not suite enough

Drug pushers

really.

Good luck if you have decided to commit to MS - because there's no going back now.

Microsoft's 'atypical' emergency Windows patches are becoming awfully typical

And ?

If this is a problem for people then they should use something else to run their kit. I mean it's not like it's 2000 when MS were still growing.

If you use MS then this is your life from now on.

I am getting a a little narked that this is being treated as news rather than business as usual. I mean do I open my copy of "The Times" to read about it being hot in Africa and cold in Antarctica ?

If El Reg is going to report on these expected fails, then it would be interesting to see how many man-decades it costs industry. I mean forget Trumps tariffs, MS could wipe 10% off your turnover in one day.

Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

Yawn

Sorry, but this has been pointed out for the past 2 decades by all the people no one listened to (i.e. the ones who knew their shit but were sacked by beancounters).

Fuck 'em. They sacrificed security for economy and are now whining like girly-men. Where were they when i suggested all of this in 2005 ?

Tesla revenue falls for first time as Musk bets big on robots and autonomy

Cars - like phones

We're into mature market territory.

Am I the only one who sees a massive contradiction in "self driving cars" and private ownership ?

I mean some folk may be happy to spunk £100k+ on a car that will do fuck all on their drive for 90% of the time. But others might cotton on that they can manage without THEIR OWN car and just UberDuber it in a driverless cab as and when needed

I live in Brum and can get an Uber in almost less time than it takes to put my coat on and lock up.

China-linked group accused of spying on phones of UK prime ministers' aides – for years

Re: Once Upon A Time, There Was A Chancellor of Germany Called Angela Merkel.....

That sounds like the start of a crap limerick - lets flesh it out with ChatGPT

Once Upon A Time, There Was A Chancellor of Germany Called Angela Merkel.....

Who led Europe steady and well.

She weathered each storm,

Kept calm as the norm,

And proved quiet resolve could excel.

Cops put Microsoft Copilot in holding cell after controversial hallucination

Can you give me a cite ?

ChatGPT: Sure - here's a Copilot link.

Copilot: Sure - here's a Claude link

Claude - Sure - here's a Grok link

Microsoft shifting to cloud management software brings possibility of it peeking into your estate

So ?

This isn't even news. And if you are affected then an awful lot of bad decisions nave been made - repeatedly - in your organisation.

It was cheap then. Now you are paying the surcharge.

House of Lords votes to ban social media for Brits under 16

Are they serious ?

Quick litmus test, Does this wordfest have any penalties for adults who assist a minor in the circumvention of a regulatory check ?

No.

It's a bunch of crap.

(Weirdly I didn't even need to check) ....

Social Security Administration admits it underreported DOGE dirty dealings

No shit sherlock

See icon

EU considers whether there's Huawei of axing Chinese kit from networks within 3 years

Why now ?

I mean the siren voices have been saying for YEARS that using various non local kit is perhaps not the best idea.

Oh - that's right - we had to keep the shareholders happy

Microsoft CEO: AI sovereignty isn't where it runs, it's who controls it

Sounds like an argument

For not using MS "AI" then.