Posts by steviesteveo

Microsoft says 8 GB of RAM should be enough for anyone running Windows 11

Re: Only?

That's ultimately it. The fact that email and facebook machines struggle with 8GB really is a quality issue

Capita hears demand for pension scheme cleanup 'loud and clear' – but won't say yes

Re: Two options for Crapita

> There are no isolated decisions," he said. "There are decisions that pertain to this particular investment. There are decisions about others. I think we need to have a commercial discussion and put them all together

It's got to be both. You can't have the guy look you in the eye and say "shame if something happened to the rest of your outsourced public sector functions" and leave it at getting your overtime back for fixing one disaster

Government is sleeping at the wheel if they don't disentangle themselves urgently after that performance

Re: Two options for Crapita

> There are no isolated decisions," he said. "There are decisions that pertain to this particular investment. There are decisions about others. I think we need to have a commercial discussion and put them all together

It's got to be both. You can't have your supplier turn up and say "shame if something happened to your other outsourced public sector functions" and keep thinking of it as getting the overtime back on one bad project

Government needs to react to signals like this

SQL Server may be too lucrative for Microsoft to ditch, but too legacy to love

Re: which bucket do they want to collect in?

It seems like the kind of conflict a competition authority would handle. Consumers get worse software because the other arm makes money whether you improve your product or not

The economic solution is to separate them and leave the software team to compete in the market by making the best database software

Met Police boss threatens to cut 700 frontline jobs after Palantir deal blocked

It is kind of wild how we accept the police going "good luck getting us to help when you're murdered, then" whenever they don't get to do something. A police officer wouldn't let you talk like that to them

Malware scare keeps schoolkids home for a second day

You try to be collegial but my god this is a disappointing attitude to see. You hope the people dealing with the real scenario have a bit more can do

Re: School can't school?

This is a wild sequence of comments. It sounds like the deeper issue in educational IT might be a militant insistence to never solve a problem

Google tells database devs to lean hard on AI for PostgreSQL work

Horse shaped gifts

I always liked the sqlite guys talking about why they don't accept third party contributions- they talk about free as in speech, as in beer and as in puppies. It's nice to contribute to open source but once you hand it over the project has to maintain that code for the rest of time

The idea of big tech firms contributing to open source projects was always nice in the assumption that they were donating high quality code because they were pros with lots of resources. Firing mountains of AI generated PRs at volunteers seems to completely change that dynamic

Civil servants to protest outside Capita AGM over pension shambles

Re: "unexpected case complexity"

Everyone always says that capita's real skill is producing fantastic tender responses that hit the points better than any smaller company possibly could

It's amazing all that paperwork doesn't even accidentally include understanding the product

AWS lets agents drive its virtual cloudy desktops – which could cost 500,000 tokens per click if used carelessly

Re: How many tokens?

"Making chalk mark on generator, $1. Knowing where to make mark, $9,999." Ford paid the bill."

But now we're interacting with WIMP elements on a desktop

Usage-based pricing killing your vibe - here's how to roll your own local AI coding agents

Re: Color me skeptical

If you treat it as expensive software engineering device then having it on prem could change the calculation. You could find it justifies experimentation outside business hours better than the usage based models do. The economics of selling executions don't change but you're actually trying to get value out of your TCO instead of trying to find profit after the provider's fee

It's the same argument as databases- a serverless database costs you more the more you use it which is an interesting exercise in whether a query was worth the candle, as opposed to amortising queries across the life of the hardware - you simply wouldn't interact with systems on the different pricing models the same way

Re: cost of the hardware?

It'd also have helped if we didn't have first crypto and then AI doing awful things to the supply for years

There absolutely is ordered hardware with no place for it to go. We're way out beyond just in time with these orders

Capita won disastrous UK pensions gig after acing performance checks

Re: Brown Envelopes

I think you've gone to some effort to miss that we're clearly both complaining about the people at the top who made the decision to entrust the pension to capita

Baffling behaviour here

Re: Brown Envelopes

I really do think everyone involved in this one needs monitored. The only reason a civil servant would be this careless with their own pension is because they knew they personally weren't going to be relying on it

Re: after assessing its past performance

It's basically encouraging people to assume corruption. The only reason a civil servant would put the key perk that makes staying in the job at all justifiable into the hands of Capita is because they knew they wouldn't need to rely on that pension

Engineer sabotaged hardware then complained when it didn't work

Re: Trust me, I'm an engineer

A lot of iphones have found themselves on photocopiers to produce a really neat court production - you can have cases like sexual harassment spelled out in one screen of messages and a photocopier turns that into a sheet of paper to distribute very quickly

There's so much to say for just putting a picture of something on a sheet of paper

HMRC hands £473M Fujitsu migration deal to AWS after competition melts away

Re: Sums

By the sounds of it they aren't doing the software *yet*. They've left a wide open door for variations with those transformation services which they are clearly then the closest vendor to understand the complex AWS mess they've made

Re: taxes

I wonder if anyone sarcastically pitched the extra-territorial tax arrangements as *removing* a conflict - any tax investigations would be on Luxembourg

West Sussex's Oracle rollout pushed back again as costs balloon 15 times

That's tail wagging the dog. Your business processes got you to the scale where you can afford this stuff. Changing them now just because you bought some software is its own risk

You're meant to work with some sort of functional expert to get the software aligned with your process without having to customise the thing into a unique artifact that no one can then get you out of

GitHub infuriates students by removing some models from free Copilot plan

Re: Cake ?

There's an angle of "go to a food bank" apparently

When you bought brioche, as opposed to bread, you could choose to donate a portion of it to the poor as a way of symbolically sharing your good fortune. Qu'ils mangent de la brioche is therefore, wow, I really don't know how the world works combined with why are you mad, I *did* the wee charity ceremony

It's meant to be a crafted line against the aristocracy and you can see that in how it hits all these different points

Economics lesson for life

It shows how the background costs must be killing them. With previous educational promotions you'd go to considerable effort to ensure that the kids you were hooking didn't think about costs

White House activates Yu-Gi-Oh's trap card by using anime clip for war comms

Re: Let's go copyright holders!

Yu gi oh about to be declared a supply chain risk

Chardet dispute shows how AI will kill software licensing, argues Bruce Perens

Re: Prompts?

There will professionals out there pretty annoyed at how bad this almost pointedly half-assed approximation makes their methods look

People making the effort to have their clean room implementations survive all the hoops will hate having this example of how badly it can be done in the news

UK Treasury not sure about ditching Oracle to join £1.7 billion shared services program it is funding

Re: Void

Whoever is naming things in this project needs talked off the ledge already

DVSA drives up online theory test contract value to £700M with no explanation

You would definitely think that could help

I think it's been really quite damaging to labour - it's a niche area but, for anyone aware of it, taking 18 months in government to even just propose stopping your own website selling the test slots to scalpers makes you look dangerously useless

Re: I'll do it

Even the original valuation was the kind of contract that erodes faith in public procurement

IBM stock dives after Anthropic points out AI can rewrite COBOL fast

Re: “AI can assess"

It's beside the point, though. This stuff hasn't been carefully maintained through the decades because you were happy to mess with it. It's exec bait because everyone hates their ancient cobol that keeps the lights on but it'll never happen for the same reason it never happened before

Re: this is crazy talk

AI cobol migration is a feature IBM is selling on their z17s and it has the exact same issue - if that sort of risk appetite was there it already wouldn't be cobol

Amazon's vibe-coding tool Kiro reportedly vibed too hard and brought down AWS

Re: Human underlings can never be completely eliminated

It's a nice window into how the product liability cases for self driving cars will go too

Your AI-generated password isn't random, it just looks that way

Re: Kinda obvious...

It's probably an upgrade on "password1" but attackers would have to be sleeping to miss trying all combinations of the big commercial chat bot's preferred password structure pretty early in their searches

Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation

Re: "JPEG of thought"

Starts catchy and gets better the more you think about it

Anthropic wants comp-sci students to vibe code their way through college

Re: Anthropic wants comp-sci students to vibe code their way through college

It's quite something to sign up this willingly for a "first one's free" model

Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 spends $20K trying to write a C compiler

Re: insurance coverage

It's going to be a real block - summarised emails where you've still got to read the email because if the summary missed something that's still on you

It really highlights the careless people thing- "this stuff works alright but if it breaks it breaks and you should have checked it, I guess"

Dijkstra’s algorithm won’t be replaced in production routers any time soon

It's one of these papers that seems destined to be plucked from obscurity and used for something the authors never expected

We'll be using this as a parable about reading outside your field in twenty years

Microsoft spends billions on AI, converts just 3.3% of Copilot Chat users

Re: the only use of copilot...

It's first one free rules but that relies on the product being addictive

UK council digs deeper into capital assets to keep Oracle project afloat

I wonder if SAP has any Easter eggs in its accounting packages that trigger in this situation

A bit of me suspects that if SAP kept sending snarky messages to users each time you increase the budget allocation for its replacement we would see so much more urgency in these contracts

Microsoft sets Copilot agents loose on your OneDrive files

Re: Who watches the watchers?

What gets me is being told I need to review documents AI has summarised because I'm responsible if the output doesn't include something important

It so perfectly eliminates the benefit of getting something summarised for you that it feels like entrapment

DRAM prices expected to double in Q1 as AI ambitions push memory fabs to their limit

Re: Ugh

It all seems like a perfect storm. W10 support ending in the middle of a bubble driving replacement costs up must be leading to a lot of pointed conversations

Yes, you can build an AI agent – here's how, using LangFlow

Re: yep, my eyes glazed over...

Diffing boxes and string is always more faff than it needs to be. I'm in the same just show me the text boat

OpenAI gives ChatGPT models the chop – two weeks' notice, take it or leave it

Re: This is why openweight models are useful.

It seems like the only way this stuff will get into production - you can't suddenly have entirely new responses in your environment because the upstream vendor has changed their software

IBM says AI is insane in the mainframe as z17 sales surge

Re: AI refactor COBOL into Java !!

I never quite got the drive to AIconvert these legacy codebases that are so critical they've never been rewritten before

Re: Not if the companies are still using the old systems and pretending they are not

X for company

Microsoft investors sweat cloud giant's OpenAI exposure

Re: Another reason why AI today will crash

Part of the madness of unconstrained compute demand and the blank cheques for building data centres is these chips have longer lives - run it to death alongside new infra instead of tear out and replace

The fundamental issue of sweating an asset that was never profitable in the first place remains

Oracle AI sailed the world on Royal Navy flagship via cloud-at-the-edge kit

Re: This will go well

Certainly CIA. It's definitely not a sign we're decoupling our militaries

Keep it simple, stupid: Agentic AI tools choke on complexity

Re: sub-process validation

The potential for integration nightmares is potentially unlimited too. We'll have agents of unknown complexity interacting with other people's agents in untested and unspecified ways

US ownership of TikTok off to a rocky start as outage continues into second day

Re: When will the censorship start?

One way or another the outage is ice related, sadly

Re: Data Centre

Terrible advert for, I assume, OCI, as well. It is such an expensive way to make a whole lot of younger Americans wonder if the Chinese can supply a building with data and power better than the US can

AI hasn't delivered the profits it was hyped for, says Deloitte

Re: erm, what?

To ensure you stop the blackmail photos going out you just need to employ someone to check the emails before they go out

Hang on...