Posts by Guido Esperanto

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.

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

Re: Well that lasted long

Microsoft unveils it's new operating system.

Introducing Microsoft wAIndows.

You don't need to do anything, as MS wAIndows will do it all...better than you.

Godot maintainers struggle with 'draining and demoralizing' AI slop submissions

Hasn't that been the US tech companies modus.

Principally - make things simple - get people/companies to have as much of their ecosystem as possible, then whatever the tech firm does you have to weigh up the simplicity vs the pain of migrating?

You only have to switch from Windows to Linux to demonstrate the ease MS provides.

When it comes to firms earning money, they'll often take simplicity to allow more time earning.

Until an EU tech conglomerate offers close to all-in-one, it's gonna be a hard push to move from US techs.

Business' will bury their head about US over reach

Microsoft execs worry AI will eat entry level coding jobs

Assuming the sentiment is genuine

Sure there's a phrase about Bolts, Horses and stable door somewhere.

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

+1 for keepass here.

I do have it on my cloud storage for simple synching between devices.

I wouldn't use a commercial company to manage the software & store my details.

Microsoft engineer speedruns Raspberry Pi magic smoke in five minutes

Hey look...

Back in the late 90's,new pc hardware in hand, I managed to plug the keyed power supply into the abit motherboard the wrong way..

Thankfully a quick trip back to Scan, even they didnt suspect a pc enthusiast could be so fucking stupid, so happily replaced the board.

I have zero negative comment on the potential for mis-aligning hat pins

EU looking into Elon Musk's X after Grok produces deepfake sex images

Re: Why is anyone surprised?

Yeah...

"You can't use my tool for anything depraved...

Unless you pay me"

Makes absolute sense

/s

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

Yeah, there was some headline a few weeks after the porn ban which said something like

"UK traffic to porn sites down 80% since ban"

But failed to mention

"Traffic from Sweden has increased by 80%"

"Vpn traffic has increased by 80%"

- There is a gent (Ian Russell) spearheading an approach (his daughter Molly Russell died after being influenced by tiktoks) , which is not to ban under 16's because it gives the tech companies a Get out of Jail free card. It stops them having to make fundamental (and costly) changes to stop this stuff being peddled.

Banning under 16's they'll simply revert and say "no under 16's use our site...go away"

Linus Torvalds tries vibe coding, world still intact somehow

Well, I cant find the article, but there was a reg article (or definite comment) which stated that since MS increases its AI coding upto 30%, the number of flaws in its patches has also gone up

The most durable tech is boring, old, and everywhere

Re: Neophiliacs be damned

Completely agree, but some sparks realised there's more money to be made by forced obsolesence, enshittification and removing old (not busted) with new hotness.

FBI dismantles alleged $70M crypto laundering operation

Wait..

"US feds have dismantled a crypto laundering service that they say helped cybercrooks wash tens of millions of dollars in dirty digital cash, seizing its servers and unsealing charges against an alleged Russian operator."..

So wait this wasn't Trumps?

AI-authored code contains worse bugs than software crafted by humans

Re: Vibe study

Upvote for "Sloperator"

Closest to shocked face I could get

Shocked I tell you

Shocked

Techie 'forgot' to tell boss their cost-saving idea meant a day of gaming

Reminds me of working in a now long forgotten ISP Helpdesk, enjoying quite regular Duke Nukem deathmatch sessions over "lunch"

Until some numbnuts (not me I might add) proceeded to demonstrate to a relative of the boss "how cool our 'lunch breaks' were", resulting in a heavy hand and "The Duke" being evicted.

JLR: Payroll data stolen in cybercrime that shook UK economy

Re: Why

Why not both?

Quick distraction job.

Create a major kerfuffle over<here> causing heads to be scratched

While dipping into the vulnerable <purse> here.

But as with systems being what they are: done perhaps at the same time.

The disabling act gives gravity to the dataset offered by the miscreants no doubt in certain circles.

Microsoft research shows chatbots seeping into everyday life

Re: Just turn it off!

No,

Megacorps are paying us stacks to use and figure out how they reduce workforce by large amounts...saving them stacks

/s

Vibe coding will deliver a wonderful proliferation of personalized software

A couple of points to add:

1: The author had already compartor solutions with which to test the coding against - for expected outputs and potential pitfalls.

When building something "new" where are your guard rails, which brings me to point 2

2: You say you are an experienced programmer and I'll accept that at face value. But you're not the target audience for this. Those with "limited" programming knowledge.

I mean "limited" is one hell of an undefined marketing attribute.

Reading a chapter of a book takes you from no knowledge to limited knowledge in about 10 minutes.

Web dev's crawler took down major online bookstore by buying too many books

Haha one of the finest trolling urls to have graced the internet

Windows keeps obsolete strings forever to avoid breaking translations

Re: Ah yes, unnecessary strings

Couple hundred KB's are now accounted for.

Several gigs to go

HSBC spies $207B crater in OpenAI's expansion goals

As OpenAi are widely speculating a market share of 3 billion - and a quick population by continent puts only 2.5 billion OUTSIDE Asia.

That's assuming Russia and Europe at large don't eschew them.

China certainly won't let them get a market drop.

India - I'm on the fence about.

Point being their figure of 3 billion people is not aggressive, it's a moonshot figure.

Why not simply put 30 Billion as we're making up potential, I mean sounds better right?

NATO taps Google for air-gapped sovereign cloud

Re: With Trump being the relevant sovereign.

The exact same thought I had.

Given the recent fun and games with AWS and MS, the idea of another US dependance doesn't invoke much confidence.

Also what if Trump exits Nato?

Vibe coding: What is it good for? Absolutely nothing (Sorry, Linus)

I've got a early invest opportunity.

I'm vibing the creation of a new AI powered by an AI generated LLM, which in turn will be responsible for producing code on the fly.

You say to the AI "produce me some code" and using its intelligence it will produce a prompt to an AI to produce you a full working system.

I just need 1 trillion in alpha investors....send money to [e-mail] (there's a joke somewhere about the tld being KY)

Joking aside, I "play" learning Python...and the thought of using AI to produce something which I

a) dont understand or

b) may understand but dont have the affordable time to review substantially

Scares the bejesus out of me.

Cryptology boffins’ association to re-run election after losing encryption key needed to count votes

It's certainly egg on their face,

The upshot is the voting record is completely secured....

Useless to anybody...but secured.

It's about striking that balance between security and useability - clearly the lever was tipped too far one way.

Bossware booms as bots determine whether you're doing a good job

Let me translate..

I popped this little manglement speech in AI system called "Common sense" and here is the translation.

"...It even flags when employees appear to be burned out or, on the flip side, are working more than the required hours."

[Translation]

We're not gonna put your value maximising employees under the kosh to stop them maximising their value.

"...For example, he said, one client recently saved $2 million by detecting that no one was using an expensive piece of software their company was paying for...."

[Translation]

This didnt happen and it was employees who were cut

Microsoft exec finds AI cynicism 'mindblowing'

Re: Micro- and Soft- Brain ?

This has echoes of Steve Jobs

"You're holding it wrong"

The dissonance is palpable

Linux admin hated downtime so much he schlepped a live UPS during office move

Re: Smart, But Also Bloody Stupid

I had some IIYAMA behemoth that was about 21"..

I'm glad some clever sparks invented lcd screens

Re: Smart, But Also Bloody Stupid

And had edges like a Gilette razor blade.

In the circles of pc enthusiasts I was in, it became known colloquially as the "blood sacrifice"

AI slop hits new high as fake country artist goes to #1 on Billboard digital songs chart

More to come

AI bands, managed by an AI manager, with all profits going to a venture capitalist holding the power on the LLM's

Agents of misfortune: The world isn't ready for autonomous software

The spat isn't about autonomous software..

The spat is about who owns/controls the autonomous software and how much money it stops us making /or makes us

'Vibe coding' named Word of the Year. Developers everywhere faceplant

Re: Having tried vibe coding

^this is how I would have expected it to be used.

Knowledge about subject already cemented, giving you the ability you evaluate the code for refinements and suitability.

Lacking any of that knowledge, you're simply taking educated guesses at what an AI guess has put out, creating some horrible Eschers-esque perpetual cycle of don't know through to may work but still dont know.

I'm learning a language and I can see how quickly a "simple' requirement from me, could spin into some monster code output that I would be way out of my depths understanding.

Trump turnabout sees him re-nominate amateur astronaut Jared Isaacman to run NASA

Or depending on whats occuring

Human Bus Brakes

Debian demands Rust or rust in peace for legacy ports

One thing is clear

Reviewing the comments here,the new requirements are as clear as rust sullied water.

Network operator ponders building a new submarine cable – on land

It reminds me how effective those "no tools left in this van overnight" stickers are in reducing van break ins.

Apple faces £1.5B payout after losing UK App Store case

Re: Waste of time appealing

These headline grabbing fines are not worth the paper they are written on.

Like the GDPR fines you see

The operating model for all big players in industries is to

Appeal,legally delay, legally delay, legally delay

Mediate, agree reduced settlement.

In some cases cutting values in half or more.

Sure still a loss to firm, but nowhere near as punitive as they ought to be.

Lloyds Banking Group claims Microsoft Copilot saves staff 46 minutes a day

I dipped a toe today

I had a bit of a crappy comparison task to do, with two columns of peoples names, whereby your checking for name variants to catch a match Liz instead of Elizabeth. Not very pleasant but I have tried and tested methods with excel to perform this.

Instead I opted to test copilot.

Compare column A with B and put into C all names which have a >51% match.

"Copilot was unable to help because of some xml formatting issue, I can help with

1) helping you copy and paste the data into a new sheet to try again (it was already a new sheet)

2)create a python script for you

3) help you with the manual sort.

So to humour it I opted for 3

It produced a sample of matches. Showing what in column a matched column b

The problem was the data it said was in column a...wasn't there.

It made the whole thing up.

Copilot, tell me which cell this source data exists

"A3"

Definitely wasnt

Absolute horseshit.

Lost 15minutes to that crap

SpaceX's Starship: Two down, Mons Huygens to climb

Because the lunar surface has grabby arms and/or barge right?

OpenAI's ChatGPT is so popular that almost no one will pay for it

Re: One day...

It's hard enough extracting requirements from people in face to face conversation(s).

You get those same "i know what i want but no clue how to get it" people putting any waffle into AI being happy with the first few lines then hit go on expected panacea.

Samsung admits Galaxy devices can leak passwords through clipboard wormhole

Re: Default in Keepass

Whilst the setting exists in keepass...it doesnt actually clear the clipboard.

I just tested by logging into el reg

I have mine set to 1m timeout.....and several mins later...still in the clipboard

Snowflake denies miscreants melted its security to steal data from top customers

Re: Any chance

...and if there issuing org has many fines to issue, it should increase the fines to reflect the demand

Twitter name and blue bird logo to be 'blowtorched' off company branding

Re: Not what I was expecting

Golden parachute or not, MusXrat doesn't pay for those that desert his "aura of awesomeness", just aX the thousands of employees and suppliers..

Press

X for doubt

Elon Musk launches his own xAI biz 'to understand reality'

Well at least now we know why

He limited the twitter api behind a paywall..

He didnt want ai training its LLM off twitter.

.

.

.

Because he wanted to train HIS LLM off twitter.

With dead-time dump, Microsoft revealed DDoS as cause of recent cloud outages

Not exacrly junping to a defence, but isn't ddos not defined by what caused it, more by what it actually caused.

Meaning while traditionally its flooding gateways et al with lots of guff, the specific target and source of guff may have evolved since the old Loic attacks, and may continue evolving.

Florida man insists he didn't violate the law by keeping Top Secret docs

Re: What About The Current Resident?

Bet his kids love it when he says "I love you"

Except Ivanka

Amazon finds something else AI can supposedly do well: Spotting damaged goods

Amazon will soon

launch its own variant of AI: BezOS.

No amount of Maraca shaking will stop the onward forging of BezOS and world domination.

China has 50 hackers for every FBI cyber agent, says Bureau boss

Re: Wow, they are really losing their mind

Its recognised because of it's cost to the Germans (and others)..

The US don't seem to have that history...yet..

I mean wasn't too long ago, they were (and still are) trying to put a meglomaniac back in charge and his idolators blindly gobble up the propaganda...

With a mighty hand, and an outstretched arm, Musk scraps Pope's blue tick

Seems to me

That the chaos is a subvertive attempt by musk to earn money.

Step 1: Reduce content monitoring and account checking

Step 2: remove free entitlement and start charging

Step 3: watch as the trolls cause chaos by either a) mimicing accounts or b) (ideal) starting paying for blue tick for a mimic account

Step 4: official people will be sick of misinformation and pay for ticks or trolls will continue to pay for ticks...

Step 5: bask in glorious profits

FCC calls for mega $300 million fine for massive US robocall campaign

Sentence should be in calls answered.

5 billion should do