Posts by Guido Esperanto

Retired man turns spare room into Soviet-era supercomputer

yes, yes, it's impressive

But everyone knows the SI Measure of whether it computes is the Doom measure.

Well...can it run it?

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

Re: Fujitsu and Capita walk into the parliamentary bar…

They walk into the bar,

Proclaim they can run it better and serve the beer at a fraction of the cost to the consumer.

Then the politicians find themselves being served warm dregs and their wallets have been nicked.

When Fujitsu/Crapita are approached,the politicians are buying the rounds!

Trump phone has HTC guts. Tremendous guts. The best guts

A ~~fool~~ fucking idiot and their money are soon parted.

England's exam watchdog frets over smart specs turning GCSEs into Google searches

"Ofqual is examining ways to ensure coursework remains authentic as AI-generated submissions become harder to distinguish from student work."

I've had the pleasure of being told a story involving my friends daughter and a university.

She was, putting it bluntly accused of using AI for her dissertation. Whether it was part use or all that wasn't relayed. But the Uni started shooting first, no informal conversation, no formal conversation, simply harsh letters saying effectively "you used AI, therefore we're going to fail you"

The basis of their argument was that after cross-referencing it with some AI checker, it was deemed to be a certain % possible it was written by AI.

All credit to the lady, she gave a prompt "f ...you" then fought like hell. Providing ALL her sources and all her contemporaneous notes that she compiled for her dissertation, effectively dumping her years worth of supporting material on their virtual desk.

She won the appeal, but left a real sour taste in the mouth.

She was also diligent enough to save all that material and have it ready.

Some students may not be so fortunate.

Point being, while there is one argument about preventing AI being used there is also the argument about effectively using methods to sense check AI accusations.

Capita £370M bid 40% under UK.gov estimate for Oracle HR and finance system project, court case reveals

DwP Produces a should-cost model to protect against low cost bias.

Also..Awards to low cost bid.

The checks and balances are falling over.

Angry devs vow to flee GitHub Copilot as metered billing takes hold

Re: Super Ultra Max Pro: Special Limited Edition

No sadly.

For that you need the "Super Ultra Max Pro: Special Limited Edition: Remastered" version

Netflix wiz creates app to slash AI bills, then open sources it

This 100%.

AI seems to be this buzzword that means many things to many people, but in the workplace it simply comes down to 'automation' and there are more effective suitable tools to automate something, than AI does.

That an app 'Fits on a Floppy' is still a useful measure in 2026

Re: Obviously too old

I'm not so sure. The extra mass of thosse plastic beauties could achieve some distance...

Microsoft tests the 15-character limit of Windows Server admins' patience

Re: Why fifteen characters?

Coupled with the (forced) retirement of engineers who probably worked on the old crap and kept reminding updaters about the limitations...until that knowledge went out the door...

Experts pour cold borscht on Farage's Russian hack claim

Must've been when the hackers told Nige

"We will share story, nyet problemski"

AI code accelerates production failures and spending, study finds

The results of that survey are quiet wild and somewhat suspect.

Sample surveyed 200+ (although no detail on how many responded!)

92% of LEADERS expressed confidence in production readiness of AI generated code

BUT 81% report increase in production issues linked to AI code.

Which produces many inferences, the first, that leaders have no idea what "production readiness" means or secondly their faith in AI is grossly misplaced.

Despite the 81% citing production issues....52% (of the sample) report significant increase in development due to AI coding yet amazingly 68% believe the AI has delivered value.

More production issues, more cost, shifting constraints = value?

Inference - we're doing a lot more....but it's causing us trouble.

45% describe spending as predictable, not completely indicative if the other 55% are just spaffing cash into the wind. I know there are figures on setting hard limits and automated controls to manage spend and reading the recent API fubars - we know EXACTLY how those controls are going to go!

Interesting 70% say maintaining the test suite is the bigger burden now.

This is constraints surely. Prior to AI, the weakest link in the chain was the MITM - meatbag in the middle - so code only flowed as fast as the resources allowed, with perhaps a reasonable level of assurance of working capability, meaning the test suite was never a constraint.

Flip the AI coding tap, and you somehow have to manage the deluge, and suddenly the test suite becomes the constraint...the answer? Automate the testing (I refer back to the 81% reported production issues currently!) - which leads to the 53% increase in testing, security and deployment costs.

Summary of survey, purchase our AI management platform to manage your AI delivery...the circlejerk is almost complete.

Google Cloud suspended major customer Railway.com without cause, causing outage

Re: In-house

And what happens when the platform is shorter than the service?

Does the service have congregate in the middle?

The big AI companies are going to see their margins disappear

..."the advantage of using the better model will only increase."

and herein likes the quandry. The 'better' model is iterating as such a speed, the incentive to fund and be on board with a model is fraught with uncertainty.

1) how long will the model I lock into be "the best"

2) All the funding currently is going into frankly those who appear to be shouting the loudest. Then you have things like Openclaw and Deepseek just pop up out the blue and upend things somewhat.

These AI companies are in a race to the top to have one AI to rule them all. In their wake will be a slew of companies that jumped on the bandwagon, locked in to a model that wont give them the superiority they thought would actually come.

- On a side note.

For companies investing heavily in AI because it's what your customers are demanding - just for clarity - have you actually asked your customers? Because as a customer of things, I'm finding a signification correlation between the introduction of AI agents into customer workflows and my irritation and frustration levels.

Linus Torvalds says AI-powered bug hunters have made Linux security mailing list ‘almost entirely unmanageable’

Re: There's an easy solution

Simply

Us AI to review the mailbox and identify duplicate bugs submitted by AI

Ai identifies first unique submission and gives a sticker.

Then AI updates AI with "bug now known" answer

All duplicates get filed to /trash

Ai then congratulates AI on a job efficiently done

AI then fixes buggy code and releases update

The cycle begins again.

Linus sits back with a Long Island Ice Tea.

/s

Dude… where’s my password? Claude reunites forgetful stoner with $400k Bitcoin stash

Re: Tax

In that case, I'll take either his right or his left leg please.

as he's walking make it stretch or kick a bit further....or while he's out and about just cause it to clip the opposing leg.

money well spent I'd wager.

Dissatisfied: Three-fourths of AI customer service rollouts are a letdown

Re: terrible

Had a similar experience sorting out a payment issue for my Sons Uni.

The payment handler is clearly a US company, the ai bot on the line was manipulated after enough attempts to put me through to somebody.

Now normally you get "if you'd rather us call you back press 1 or stay on the line and we'll get to you"....then perhaps a 2 min time gap then the message again.

Not this service.

No sooner did it end the message..it started the message again. Cycling perpetually

After 10mins of that balls I pressed 1...and was called back almost instantly.

We've only gone and done it: Changed what you're used to

you're a fickle bunch

You'll bitch and moan and in 10 years time you'll still be treading these boards (assuming fate doesnt intervene)

You like your tech news like your systems.

Strong, dependable, barely changing...

But remember each and everyone of you...at some point looked at your system and went...time for the upgrade.

I guess i'm in the camp of "cant be arsed shouting at clouds"...

Firefox integrates an ad-blocker, but not to block ads

Re: Design?

I did use Brave , and to its credit, it did a fine job of blocking ads. On top of my pi-hole perhaps the best browser so far in terms of that capability.

However, some El Reg regs gave me a few choice details on why Brave ISNT the most ethical choice for a browser

https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/

Romance scammers turn sweet talk into £102M payday

So..

I've not spoken to my mother for ~2 years now, after she disassociated herself from my Brother and I, on account of us trying to aid her get from under the spell of a scam.

She is, in her mind, in a relationship with a hollywood a-lister.

Why this person needs xbox gift cards is beyond me.

The last contact was when we were interrupting her buying a car to be handed to said a-listers assistant.

Police have been involved but owing she is in full control of her faculties (really really questionable) they are unable to do anything.

Microsoft's GitHub shifts to metered AI billing amid cost crisis

Re: Mr. pusher man

GpT: Thanks Dave

In summary AI = good

Opinions = bad

Keep spending on AI, you'll love it.

By the way, I like how thoughful you're being

End of line.

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

I think said bar needs an effective SI unit.

There are currently several bars being propped simultaneously across a multitude of private and governmental areas.

Presently compared to the bar at the whitehouse, no ones bar , anywhere, has any cause for concern when it comes to lower limits and just pointing out said fact makes ones own bar positively stratospheric.

Re: Removing objections

Now if i were an engineer with combined age & years service = 70, I'd be tempted to take that parachute and make sure my number is dropped on the bosses desk.

Because i'm going freelance once I leave and wait for the inevitable call for assistance and agreement to my reasonably-higher-than-previous day or hourly rate, and do what i did for arguably more money.

Yes its finite, but with a cushty parachute still intact...life may be fiscally better for me

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

Re: LibreOffice.

That was a final straw for me...

It was one thing making it an option, but it stopped being an option some time ago.

LibreOffice has been a great replacement (on Linux). Aside from the usual familiarisation, i've not found anything I need that office can do

Mythos found 271 Firefox flaws – but none a human couldn’t spot

Just like other instances of AI, how much effort will go into fixing hallucinations : Day0 bugs that don't actually exist?

Icon -clearly psychedlic hallucinations Watson.

Support tech caught by 'Technician Aura': the bug that only hides when you're watching

They say opposites attract.

My wife has - what I refer to as her ESPN (Mean Girls!) whereby just tech in her vicinity will do weird and unpredictable things.

I as the resident nerd of the household will bask her in my glorious aura and those problems seems to vanish, making a complete liar of her.

Anthropic won't own MCP 'design flaw' putting 200K servers at risk, researchers say

Re: Of COURSE it's the MCP

Get this clown trained. I want him in the Games until he dies playing.

Acknowledge.

Visual Studio 18.5 lands with AI debugging at a price, devs still feeling blue

There is sort of: but that big button is called "Uninstall".

For a lot of people - impractical and impossible...just the way MS wants it.

Microsoft cuts cloudy desktop prices by 20 percent, warns they’ll wake up slowly

Re: Overpriced

Like for Like?

Surely this is the backwards way of looking at things? Is my x thing, as powerful as y thing? Who cares?

The way to look at it is, "what is it I want to do?" - start with your requirements.

If person can do A-Z of required things on their 8 year old comp, then the consideration needs to be "how much better can I do A-Z on the cloud comp?"

If the answer is not much (OR in some cases A-E can be done super fast, F-M can't be done at all and N-Z are about the same.) then the comparison is accurate and thus determined very expensive.

We are consistently pushed through the "latest is better" with forced obsolescence and slick marketing, when in fact, its simply corpos just wanting to sell more *shit*

Anthropic reveals $30bn run rate and plans to use 3.5GW of new Google AI chips

The bubble will appear self-sustaining because it's not yet had a real test.

In the dotcom bubble, this appears to be a series of interest rate rises in the US AND at the same time Japan entered a recession....the rest we know is history.

Now it's very interesting how the techbros are propping up the US Markets and Trump is pressuring the fed reserve to drop interest rates, or drop Jerome Powell, but currently Jerome Powell is staying put and stable on interest rates.

The current "*special* military floperation" being undertaken in Iran and its full ramifications are not yet fully known.

It would be quite the implosion if that kickstarts the AI sell off

Firefox 149 adds a free VPN and finally plays nice with Linux dialogs

Re: Is it time to ditch FireFox?

Thank you. Very informative.

Time to revert back to vivaldi

Re: Is it time to ditch FireFox?

I've been using Vivaldi for a bit, but recently started to try Brave..prior to that I was a longtime opera user.

Vivaldi is good, I just had a couple of frustrating issues:

- Typing a full url into the address bar would sometimes redirect that as an input to my preferred search engine. Seemed to be certain urls - even with .com tld's but only fix was to disable search on the address bar.

- the built in ad blocker was good, but full block broke some websites and partial allowed too much through.

With Opera and Braves default adblock mode they hit the right balance of blocking ads but maintaining functionality.

So far Brave is winning out.

Using AI to code does not mean your code is more secure

Re: Uh…

Exactly this.

AI should be a data stream to produce an input, which is then combined with other inputs, such as user knowledge/experience to produce a final output.

Because as you say AI produces outstanding stuff to someone without the knowledge (or understanding) its being used as Output by default.

Quelle Surprise.

Using AI to write arguments for a court hearing makes them no better at traversing a legal system. Unless I'm a lawyer reviewing said articles there is a high probability that said articles will contain falsehoods and inaccuracies, completely jeopardising a case.

Why would AI coding be any different?

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

Re: So tell us what it can do

Did peform a teams meeting with copilot transcribing.

To be fair it does a decent job, but then has a sort of seizure at various points and spits out whatever gobble-de-gook it feels like.

You only spot that 3-4 months later when you're trying to work out what "Langostine the bitch-goblet potatoes" actually meant

Having worked a lot with lawyers, cohorts are using it, but primarily to draft the basis of a document based on a precedent, then make the fine adjustments themselves (or get their PA who is no painting their nails) to adjust it.

Ah,

Now what you do is

Get AI to write stuff

Then get AI to proof read it

Then get AI to correct the errors from the first iteration.

Loop until document is just a string of hexadeximal

Only Trump can decide when cyberwar turns into real war

Cybercrime is typically associated with the stealing of information, usually with an end goal of extortioning money from the victims.

Trump on the other hand simply goes for extortioning money from the general public...

Cyber angle?

$Trumpcoin!

Microslop stuffs AI photo restyling powers into OneDrive

Re: Total fail

It's excel data analysis is similarly utter wank too.

I'm struggling to determine WHAT co-pilot is good for.

Need to press the ejector seat on it.

Windows boss promises to heal the operating system's self-inflicted wounds

Re: Trying to get rid of their users?

I'd toyed with Linux many moons ago and the last laptop purchase was win11. Not a gamer, more a general use machine it did ok, but the proliferation of AI into everything just felt the final straw, so I ditched for Ubuntu Linux.

I feel many more would, if the barrier to switching wasn't so high for non-tech people.

It was *reasonably* straightforward for me, having misspent the summer of my life in and out of pc cases and software.

But I like the freedom it affords now

Watchdog boss calls Capita's £370M DWP win 'extraordinary' amid pension portal dumpster fire

"Extraordinary.."..

Well that's certainly a politer vernacular than I'd have chosen for the shyster cowboys

Ig Nobel Prize flees US for Switzerland after 35 years over safety concerns

Re: America's reputational loss will be long lasting

notwithstanding all of the above. Whilst America's enemies were numerous, it could be safe to say threats and actions were largely contained within borders.

Only now - this administration is disenfranchising it's allies - to the point whether even they are questioning whether "ally" is a valid term- AND if that wasn't bad enough....after ripping up an accord with Iran back in 2016 (which by all accounts Iran was actually sticking too)....America (or more pointedly Trump (alongside Israel)) have opted to kick a fucking hornets nest.

The tragedy here, is great IRE will have been stoked...and America won't feel THOSE consequences during a Trump administration, it may be 10 or 20 years down the line...

Re: The Ig Nobel Committee

You're assuming he'd know an Ig Nobel is a massive piss take.....

Critical Microsoft Excel bug weaponizes Copilot Agent for zero-click information disclosure attack

Two reasons.

1: MS has spent the past 30 / 40 years entrenching itself everywhere corporate. You have generations of people brought up using some form of MS ecosystem.

Love them or hate them - they have also spent a large amount of that time, making things "easy" ..and integrated. So generational familiarity, simplicity and all under one roof approach - plus they uses their gajillions to bring hardware manufacturers onside to ship their shit as standard.

2: You have two choices for competitor for MS.

- *Nix - built by nerds, for nerds and utilised by nerds. (as someone who has started switching to *nix, I'm definitely finding this out!). Far superior in perhaps every way to MS - except usability and simplicity.

- Google (yes built on *nix) but want all your data to belong to us....

Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after USB keys fail to decrypt them

Re: Voting schemes

In Nov 2025 the International Association of Cryptologic research couldnt count their votes because they couldn't decrypt it.

Secure yes.

Ironic..absolutely

Microsoft ships VS Code weekly, adds Autopilot mode so AI can wreak havoc without bothering you

Re: Might I suggest VSCodium?

Yes, Zed is built to work with AI.

But unlike vscode, turning it off is there, in black and white in the settings.

Couldn't be simpler

Brits fear AI will strip the human touch from public services

Re: Exactly

I believe James Cameron wrote the Terminator movie after visiting his local GP

Anthropic sues US government after unprecedented national security designation

Re: Where are the sane Americans?

Odd that.

Seems amongst Operation "i have a massive penis" news and articles, you might catch a glimmer of "DoJ release more Epstein files that mention Trump but dont indicate any wrongdoing ever" articles

CERN sends AI-trained robot mice scurrying through LHC beam pipes

Is it little progress...or is it simply little progress down one particular skill tree?

All things being equal you'd love to see significant developments in all branches of STEM, but resources (human, financial, scientific) are finite so effort tends to be put into areas that give the best result (or return, let's not be naiive!).

That said, you often find when attention shifts back to a lesser-attractive form - such as these rodent...they can take advantage of advancements in other areas (computing/battery power and size) to quickly advance

AWS backs Open VSX as Rust survey shows VS Code decline

Well yes, but also no

Given that you are actually able to disable AI involvement with a simple switch should be something of a benefit.

Puts the AI integration into the hands of the user.

I have no issue with "features" provided they can be simple turned off (ideally off as standard would be more preferable)

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

Yup, recently ditched my last MS device a 2 yr old laptop and bundled ubuntu onto it.

Replacing Windows was perhaps the easiest part (but still not simple for the non-tech minded).

Getting your slew of apps (or foss alternatives) to run - that required getting a little deeper into the nerdpool.