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* Posts by pip25

381 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jun 2010

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The truth nobody wants to admit: Chinese or not, open models are competitive now

pip25
WTF?

Define "low"

Training model still requires an impressive infrastructure, where even maintenance costs can be prohibitive. Chinese get away with it for the same reason they get away with relatively cheap electric cars for their internal market: government support/funding. That's not trivially replicated outside of China at the moment.

Even banks and hyperscalers are now sounding the alarm about the AI bubble

pip25
Unhappy

Was the US government this involved in the Dot Com bubble?

That's the part that concerns me. Even if the bubble bursts, the government may fight to keep the whole thing alive... somehow. Chances are, that could make the fallout even worse.

AI is getting expensive, but relief is on the way - just not for you

pip25

Deja Vu

This claim that "new hardware will make AI so much cheaper to use" reminds me of how, despite hardware becoming several orders of magnitude faster, user interfaces remain floating around "mostly usable" in terms of speed and responsiveness. My first Motorola Android phone was slow to switch apps, and so is my current Xiaomi. Windows 3.1 had some hiccups on occasion, and so does your average webpage using the latest and greatest framework today.

Why am I bringing this up? Because just how UI ate up all those performance advantages on the hardware level for the sake of faster development (among other reasons), I am fairly convinced that AI models won't get an iota cheaper for the big players, in the short term most certainly. The models are exploding in terms of complexity, to the point that someone releasing an 1T+ parameter model today no longer raises any eyebrows. They will get even bigger still, and the new hardware will have its work cut out for it.

Threat hunters find Google API keys still usable 23 minutes after deletion

pip25
Devil

"Working as intended"

Of course it does! No matter who uses the API key, Google will get the money anyway. Why should they be worried?

America's top cyber-defense agency left a GitHub repo open with passwords, keys, tokens – and incredibly obvious filenames

pip25
WTF?

"Managing to take the repository offline in a day is impressive work."

Is it? For a leak this bad?

Cloudflare to fire 1,100 staff whose jobs just aren’t AI enough

pip25
Devil

"We're doing you a favor, actually"

I guess that's the only thing missing from this "you might get sacked within one hour" love letter.

I'm not sure which is worse: a statement that makes it obvious how the bosses are fully aware that they're being asses and desperately try to put a positive spin on the decision (as we see here), or one that's so divorced from reality that they genuinely believe their nonsense.

Bot her emails: most modern phishing campaigns are AI-enabled

pip25

Forged Teams messages?

See title. I can imagine sending out some messages after a company account has been compromised, but before that? Teams is a pretty bad messaging platform but the company domain was also perhaps the only one where I did not encounter any spam or similar nastiness, ever.

ICANN opens applications for new generic top-level domains for the first time since 2012

pip25
FAIL

This nonsense again?

Did they run out of money or what? This was unnecessary in 2012 and even more so today, as it's been proven not to be popular.

Locked, stocked, and losing budget: AI vendor lock-in bites back

pip25

The bills are NOT coming due (yet)

The current price hikes still do not cover the costs of both training and inference. Those prices would likely kill the entire field overnight. They only help OpenAI et al lose money at a somewhat slower rate than before.

Tokenmaxxing isn't an AI strategy

pip25

Re: Forgive me if I'm a little skeptical

Where I live we have the saying "among the blind, the one-eyed is king". There is such a rush towards AI solutions in a myriad of use cases, quite often pushed by people who have absolutely no idea what they're pushing for, that someone who does little more than manage expectations and serve as a rational voice the bosses actually listen to can go a long way.

Anthropic admits it dumbed down Claude when trying to make it smarter

pip25

Re: I can actually believe that excuse

Not if the majority of users burn up their tokens anyway, and then turn to API usage until their allowance recharges.

Claude Desktop changes app access settings for browsers you don't even have installed yet

pip25

Re: There is also ..

This happens under MacOS as well.

Anthropic squeezes enterprises by ejecting bundled tokens from seat deal

pip25
FAIL

Anthropic seems really desperate for more money

I wonder whether their users or their investors will bail first, since I very much doubt they're making a profit even after all this nonsense.

Anthropic admits Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'

pip25
WTF?

Usage limit: we won't tell you

It's both sad and hilarious that Anthropic can get away with forgoing even the most basic building blocks of transparency: telling users how much stuff their subscription affords them. Mind-boggling.

UK wants to know if banning under-16s from social media does anything useful

pip25

Re: There were certain things you were told not to do as a kid

The same is true to the Internet in general. There's no alternative to educating your kids, both in matters of real life and the WWW.

GitHub hits CTRL-Z, decides it will train its AI with user data after all

pip25
FAIL

They've already been doing this

They just didn't tell you. Private repos (and everything else not easily accessible from the open web) may have been the main exceptions. Now those are fair game as well, I suppose.

The poster above is right. They must be really desperate if they believe this will help improve their products in any way.

LiteLLM loses game of Trivy pursuit, gets compromised

pip25
Alert

What about all the other projects using Trivy?

Hard to believe this was the only one affected.

GNOME 50 debuts with X11 axed, Wayland front and center

pip25

Great, can it center a window on the screen now?

Because Wayland couldn't do that in the past, from what I can gather.

Notepad++ update service hijacked in targeted state-linked attack

pip25
Unhappy

I might be missing something here, but

why did this take so long to disclose after the breach was identified? People who manually update Notepad++ could have been using compromised systems for long months...

Aviation delays ease as airlines complete Airbus software rollback

pip25

Re: Something doesn't add up

Not necessarily. For example, they may have incorrectly calibrated some algorithm to expect values from an instrument within a specific range - which is true 99% of the time, but such rare events may push readings outside the assumed boundary.

VLC's keeper of the cone nets European free software gong

pip25
Happy

Re: For probably getting on two decades now...

Thanks for the link! It's interesting because the MPC-HC site mentions that it's been abandoned even now. Maybe this is a fork?

pip25
Unhappy

Re: For probably getting on two decades now...

MPC-HC had been a worthy rival of VLC for some time. It's regrettable that it stopped being developed almost a decade ago now. (In 2017.)

The Steam Machine rises again as Valve readies 2026 hardware trifecta

pip25
Unhappy

Wish they were more honest about what it can and cannot do

This new Steam Machine is being marketed as being capable of 4K output and run even the newest AAA games... but with the given hardware, the two are quite unlikely to be true at the same time. To say nothing about how future proof this is looking. Somewhat unlike Valve to prioritize short-term sales against long-term customer satisfaction.

Software engineer reveals the dirty little secret about AI coding assistants: They don't save much time

pip25

Good enough solutions

I might not necessarily agree with the recommendation of trying to solve things yourself first. I can do that for most tasks I come across; the bigger problem is whether my solution is good (fast, maintainable, extendable, etc.) enough to be used. A bit of online research beforehand can increase the chances of that greatly.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for AI tools, especially those that suggest one single solution, providing little context for its advantages and disadvantages.

Famed software engineer DJB tries Fil-C… and likes what he sees

pip25

Re: Vs Rust

If you read on you'll find that with some optimizations the Rust version was made virtually identical to the C version in terms of speed.

pip25

Re: Vs Rust

For existing, non-performance critical C applications, that is an absolutely fair point.

pip25

Vs Rust

"Fil-C runs rather more slowly than usual for C code"

Considering, as far as I'm aware, you can use Rust without such performance penalties, I wouldn't say that the pendulum is swinging back in the direction of C just yet.

Microsoft: Don't let AI agents near your credit card yet

pip25
Meh

So...

AI requires constant human oversight. Who would have thought. I hope at least some humans were paid well for this "research".

AI crawlers and fetchers are blowing up websites, with Meta and OpenAI the worst offenders

pip25
Mushroom

This is, by definition, a DDOS attack

And should be treated as such. If they don't respect the robots.txt, then to hell with them, regardless of who they are.

Ex-Meta exec: Copyright consent obligation = end of AI biz

pip25

Re: Mr Clegg is wrong

Look, if you do perceive that there are issues with copyright as it is currently, then we are not that far apart in opinion anyway. I understand that you believe those cons do not outweigh the positives, and you are entitled to that opinion. I don't want to convince you otherwise, because that wasn't my original point: what I was trying to say was that creators continue to create creative works even in today's climate, where the system that's supposed to empower them is not at all working in an ideal way (again, opinions on the extent of that vary). It would thus be an overreaction to claim that the abolishment of copyright (which, as I mentioned, is incredibly unlikely) would somehow lead to the global end of creative output. Creativity would limp along in some way regardless, just like it does today.

pip25

Re: Mr Clegg is wrong

Just google for 2 whole minutes. If you're actually interested, that is.

pip25

Re: Technically, he is right.

[...] and is reliable (Wikipedia [...]

I like Wikipedia, but it's been a while since I've seen that word and "reliable" in the same sentence. And I think that's not actually surprising, because if you take a sufficiently complex (moral) problem, you will find that that there are in fact no reliable sources to use, in the strictest sense. Every author brings their own prejudices and opinions into the mix. And even if our AI would be intelligent in a more substantial way than LLMs today, I do not see why we could hope it'd do more with those viewpoints than we could.

pip25
FAIL

Re: Mr Clegg is wrong

That's a bunch of overdramatic hogwash. A case can be made that copyright, in its present form, does more harm than good, and actually fails at what it was originally created to do, which is to support creators. Yet creators still create. Should it disappear overnight, other incentives would take its place, perhaps better ones.

But let's not kid ourselves, copyright won't just disappear, even if our AI overlords demand it; it's way too entrenched in current society. But if the whole AI brouhaha results in some well-needed reforms of copyright - in my book in might just have been worth it.

Builder.ai coded itself into a corner – now it's bankrupt

pip25
WTF?

Re: Wasted potential - there was clearly mismanagement but it wasn't all bad

They had 500 000 000 dollars to spend. Five. Hundred. Million. Dollars.

Even if everything you say is true, burning all that money goes a bit beyond "financial mismanagement" in my book.

Nvidia GPU roadmap confirms it: Moore’s Law is dead and buried

pip25
Boffin

This should not be new to anyone in the industry

The limits of silicon were well-known and talked about decades prior. Whether Moore's Law is truly dead depends on whether someone with sufficient amounts of money manages to reinvent the basic building blocks from scratch. (Nvidia would be in prime position considering it's swimming in cash, but that's assuming those profits won't be spent on luxury yachts or whatever.) Also decades ago, there were talks of basing chips on light instead of electric current. I wonder what became of that research.

Microsoft won't let customers opt out of passkey push

pip25

Re: "No password entry or 2FA step is required."

Thanks for the explanation, but this does not seem to mesh with how I saw passkeys being used. My only interaction with them so far has been through the Proton Pass extension, which stores my passkeys encrypted in the cloud somewhere. I can retrieve them on any device I install that extension/app on.

pip25
WTF?

"No password entry or 2FA step is required."

I can understand the first part, since passkeys can basically function as very secure passwords. But why no 2FA? If my passkey is stored in my desktop browser, proving that I have access to my phone as well would offer better security, would it not?

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine

pip25
Go

Re: This is the second Reg article today which references wheresyoured.at

My thoughts exactly - thankfully the text is easily extracted. I've made an effort to validate it by skimming parts of the article, and it seems valid enough. Done by Gemini Flash 1.5.

----

This article argues that the tech industry has entered a state of "Rot Economy," where the relentless pursuit of growth at all costs has led to the degradation of user experience across virtually all digital platforms. The author contends that this isn't a deliberate, Machiavellian plan, but the consequence of countless short-sighted decisions prioritizing short-term financial gains over user needs.

Specific examples are given, including Spotify's redesign prioritizing video content over its core music function, Sonos's app update removing accessibility features, and Meta's frequent, disruptive redesigns of Facebook and Instagram. The author highlights the pervasive nature of this issue, citing manipulative design choices, excessive advertising, microtransactions, and constant notifications as contributing factors to a degraded user experience that negatively impacts users' psychological and social well-being.

The author also draws a distinction between their theory of "Rot Economy" and Cory Doctorow's "Enshittification," arguing that the Rot Economy reflects a broader, more fundamental issue of growth-at-all-costs capitalism impacting the entire digital ecosystem, not just specific platform strategies. This relentless pursuit of growth, driven by figures like Jack Welch and Milton Friedman's neoliberal philosophy, leads to the prioritization of metrics over user satisfaction and ethical considerations.

The author uses a detailed anecdote involving purchasing a budget laptop to illustrate how this affects even low-cost devices, which come pre-loaded with a slow, ad-laden operating system and forced into specific ecosystem usage. This highlights how widespread and impactful the problem is across different socioeconomic groups. This negative user experience is compounded by the rise of manipulative algorithms, AI-generated content, and widespread scams and disinformation.

The author concludes by calling for greater awareness and accountability, urging readers to recognize the widespread nature and psychological harms inflicted by this system. They name and criticize several prominent tech CEOs (Sam Altman, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, and Mark Zuckerberg) for their roles in contributing to and profiting from this system. Finally, they call for a collective effort to resist and challenge the status quo, emphasizing the importance of public acknowledgment and discourse as a catalyst for change.

OpenAI's Sora lets ChatGPT subscribers churn out janky text-generated videos

pip25
FAIL

MVP

So OpenAI's release criteria for Sora, a model for generating moving pictures, did not include, uh... the thing being able to handle movement? How curious.

Imagine a land in which Big Tech can't send you down online rabbit holes or use algorithms to overcharge you

pip25
Big Brother

So many things are censored or banned in China, some of those bans might be useful through sheer coincidence.

Windows 95 setup was three programs in a trench coat, Microsoft vet reveals

pip25

I think the Windows 3.1 installer was still present in Windows 98 as well. Having used 3.1 for quite a few years, I recall finding the shape of the installer's windows "suspicious" back then.

Hugging Face puts the squeeze on Nvidia's software ambitions

pip25
Meh

Those prices don't seem too competitive

I can rent a H100 SXM on-demand for $2.99 per hour on RunPod, or $1.75 if I allow my workload to be interrupted. (This is probably not the cheapest provider either, just one that comes with easy-to-setup Docker templates.) That $2.5 to $6.74 offer from DigitalOcean is rather uninspiring in comparison.

Techie took five minutes to fix problem Adobe and Microsoft couldn't solve in two weeks

pip25
Windows

Phew, dodged a bullet on that one

I had to disable Fast Start ages ago for a very simple reason: it never worked, only made my computer hang on shutdown. Looks like I didn't miss anything (useful).

We're in the brute force phase of AI – once it ends, demand for GPUs will too

pip25

Wait, he's making sense

Something is not right here. Does he really work for Gartner...?

Feds urge 3D printing industry to end DIY machine guns

pip25
WTF?

Ease of misuse

Just a naïve thought: if everyone really has to have guns, how about giving out guns that CANNOT be made fully automatic with a single piece of plastic...?

If every PC is going to be an AI PC, they better be as good at all the things trad PCs can do

pip25
Facepalm

Emulating x86/64 on ARM is slow

Well... duh.

As much as I agree with AI PCs being a load of nonsense currently, anyone who bought an ARM-powered Windows machine for gaming simply did not do proper research. It's not like this is the first, or even the second time people got burned by Microsoft's ARM offerings.

A quick guide to tool-calling in large language models

pip25

Re: OK, but why?

It can be useful exactly because the LLM output is error-prone. It's just text. A "tool" on the other hand is an API. Its input commands can be validated, not just syntactically, but also whether they make sense in the current context.

Let's say you have a cocktail-making machine. Its hardware can follow a certain list of basic commands, but not all of them are always valid: there's no point in shaking the liquid container if it's empty, for example. You give the LLM the recipe of the cocktail in plain text format, like something you copied from a website, and it needs to translate it into a list of "tool" commands the machine can use. If it does anything else, starts lecturing you about the dangers of alcohol, or just outputs an invalid command, the system will immediately know that the LLM bugged out and may attempt to recover by restarting the process with a different random seed, for example.

CockroachDB scurries off to proprietary software land

pip25
Unhappy

We'll be dropping CockroachDB

With a heavy heart, because I think it's a great piece of software, and we'd probably fit the criteria for a free license - for now. But the yearly license renewal sounds like a disaster waiting to happen; if they change their terms for any reason, we're screwed. That's not something we can risk.

Google's ex-CEO U-turns after saying staff 'going home early' killed winning

pip25
Thumb Up

Re: An Ex-Googler says...

That's some great insight into Google's inner workings, thanks.

It's all drying up: Microsoft to erase 3D Paint from digital store

pip25
Windows

We're going to need a Microsoft (Windows) graveyard, too

Aero, then touch operation and the interface formerly known as Metro, Cortana, augmented reality, and now so-called AI. I assume much of the latter will be gone too by the time Windows 12 rolls around.

Could we have a no frills version, perhaps? I'd even pay money for it.

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