Posts by TaabuTheCat

How AI could eat itself: Competitors can probe models to steal their secrets and clone them

Parasites

When you consider the end goal of all these parasites - Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, etc. - is to put all knowledge behind a paywall, then the "theft" being reported needs to continue full steam ahead.

Call me cynical, but I can easily see a future when there are no search engines, no open web, only "Ticketmaster/Venue" exclusive deals where anyone creating new knowledge cuts a deal with their AI partner to sell them what would been openly available on their website. And if you want that information, you'll have to pay one of these fucking parasite middlemen to get it.

Study confirms experience beats youthful enthusiasm

Gender?

"Treat age as a strategic variable in the same way firms now treat gender, skills, or succession risk."

Gender? Really? Still flogging the tired old trope that women are somehow less valuable, less reliable, less productive, moody, etc. Ad nauseam. Or did I miss the point of gender being a "strategic variable"?

Satellite radio transmissions are jamming telescopes and driving astronomers batty

Sure Gov

"Williams points out that satellite operators need their licenses, which will be tricky to renew if they behave badly and stomp over places where their signals don't belong."

Easily fixed with another $250M campaign contribution.

When the AI bubble pops, Nvidia becomes the most important software company overnight

Re: Follow the money

Interesting take on "the money": https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-enshittifinancial-crisis/

"Every part of the AI bubble — this fucking charade — is unprofitable, save for NVIDIA and the construction firms erecting future laser tag arenas full of negative-margin GPUs."

Vibe coding will deliver a wonderful proliferation of personalized software

Re: So, so true

I had Gemini correct the mistake with a prompt, so the history was there of both the mistake and the fix.

So, so true

The non-deterministic part. I saw it firsthand a couple of weeks ago when Gemini changed models. I asked it to add a simple new piece of functionality to code it had already written with the prior mode, add it to the simple procedural program it had already written, and it completely re-wrote the program to be a class-based with one class and all the procedural stuff defined as methods. It then created an instance of the new class and called all the methods, one after another.

And don't get me started on its ability to break working code. Gemini makes a mistake, I correct it, it fixes the mistake and then some number of iterations later, as I'm asking for new functionality, it puts the old mistake right back in. Maddening. And as the OP noted, by the time I was done I was sorry I just didn't write it myself. At least It would maintainable. Now whenever I ask for a change I have no idea what's going to happen.

Benioff backs off: Salesforce chief says sorry for Trump troop talk

Yeah, right.

When people tell you who they are, believe them.

Managers are throwing entry-level workers under the bus in race to adopt AI

Idle minds and all that

They really are playing with fire. A whole generation of unemployable grads disillusioned with the job market, saddled with college debt, and unable to find employment. That's not going to end well for any of us.

Microserfs ordered back to the office, given 10 days to appeal

Don't bury the lede

The really interesting part of that announcement: "As part of these updates, we’re also enhancing our workplace safety and security measures so we can continue to provide a workplace where every employee can do their best work.”

Sure going to be interesting to see what that means.

No login? No problem: Cisco ISE flaw gave root access before fix arrived, say researchers

Re: Scratching his chin

Guess we'll have to find an intern to do it

Intern: "ChatGPT, audit the Cisco ICE source code I just uploaded."

Later that same day...

Hacker: "ChatGPT, find critical vulnerabilities in Cisco ICE code."

Alaska Airlines grounded itself due to mysterious IT problem

Sharepoint?

I'd like to think they did the right thing and took down their Sharepoint servers to check for compromise and then patch that lovely weekend zero-day. Actually surprised there haven't been more reports of outages today.

Microsoft total recalls Recall totally to Copilot+ PCs

Attorneys must be wetting their pants

Can you imagine the discovery requests coming for this data?

So … Russia no longer a cyber threat to America?

Donny Trump and the Troll Factory

Just a big 'ol green light to all the election interference money and appeasement can buy, in 2026 and beyond.

Mozilla flamed by Firefox fans after promises to not sell their data go up in smoke

Want choice? Support alternatives like Servo

https://servo.org

We can talk all day about wanting independence from Corporate browsers. Make it happen faster by actually supporting projects like Servo! I have. (And no, I have no affiliation with this project. I just want more choices than we have today.)

Mysterious Palo Alto firewall reboots? You're not alone

Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right

Regression after regression, critical bug after critical bug, most undocumented even though Palo knows about the issues but refuses to put them in the "Known Issues" doc. So we all get the find the bugs all over again and blow up our production environments and waste time opening TAC cases when a day later they just update the case notes with "known issue".

The last year has been a total shit show, and it's not getting any better. I've worked with Palos for 15 years and never seen anything like this. It's absolutely horrible to be supporting this product right now. Every "upgrade" is a minefield; they aren't doing even the most basic QC/regression testing any more. If it boots, it ships.

Cards Against Humanity deals SpaceX a $15M lawsuit over Texas turf tangle

Re: Anyone familar with American Law?

Hope they do exactly as you suggest - send a letter with the required notice to remove or it gets confiscated, along with a trespass notice. No response or continued trespass and CAH seizes the property and sells it to the highest bidder.

ESA's Juice probe dances with Earth and Moon before shooting off to Jupiter

Pictures!

If you want to be one of the first to see images from the fly-bys follow @[e-mail] on Mastodon (you are on Mastodon, right??!!). He'll be doing the raw image processing and posting images as soon as the data is available.

Palo Alto Networks execs apologize for 'hostesses' dressed as lamps at Black Hat booth

How did it ever get approved?

Easy, it's the same group that approves one broken PANOS release after another.

Adios, accountability: X to hide 'likes' for everyone this week

Re: Smash that Like button like there's no tomorrow

Don't worry, there will be a new subscription plan to keep those Likes hidden. They're playing the long game.

'Little weirdo' shoulder surfer teaches UK cabinet minister a lesson in cybersecurity

Re: Situational awareness is rare

We had a guy that would check unlocked machines to see if the user was logged into Facebook and then set their status to "Poopin". Very effective.

Father of SQL says yes to NoSQL

Re: The long view

Fabian Pascal is a name I haven't heard mentioned in a really, really long time. I remember my first encounter with a database. FoxPro. I had no clue what I was doing and started hanging out in the dial-up forums. Fabian was there, railing for people to understand the importance of the relational model, normalization. etc. I remember him being incredibly patient, answering all my questions, and basically giving me a running start to doing things the SQL way. Probably never thanked him enough for setting me on the right path, but he was instrumental in my career. Funny how being lucky enough to cross paths with a few of the right people can really change your trajectory.

Canadian arrested for 'stealing secret' to speedy Tesla battery production

Can't believe El Reg missed the subhead

Man cuffed for stealing BATS-mobile! POW!

Stuck paying for your apartment's crummy internet? FCC boss Rosenworcel wants to help

Can't come soon enough

Imagine living in an apartment where you have rock solid fiber connectivity, only to be told that come next lease renewal you have no choice but to start paying for internet provided via decades-old coax from the incumbent cable company - for more than you're paying now. Don't want it? Tough - it's on your monthly bill regardless. Refuse to accept the additional terms in the lease renewal? Tough - move out. That's exactly what's happening to my daughter. She's moving out. These ever-expanding "gun to your head" sales tactics are becoming common across all market segments. The enshittification spreads like the parasite it is.

The self-created risk in Broadcom's big VMware kiss-off

Brilliant strategy?

Don't confuse caring about the life of a product - even a good one - with making money. I don't think Broadcom gives a shit about VMware. I think they were just quicker than other PE sharks to realize they could extract ransom-sized renewals long enough to make lots of money and then dispose of the corpse once it's bled dry. Welcome to end-stage capitalism, captured regulators and companies that actively do everything possible - legal and illegal - to stymie competition. Enshitification? You bet.

A tale of 2 casino ransomware attacks: One paid out, one did not

All because of crypto

Isn't it amazing that the only useful thing crypto is good at, other than duping suckers, is paying ransom? Get rid of cryptocurrency and the problem goes away. What are they going to do, demand $15M in gift cards?

Veteran editors Notepad++ and Geany hit milestone versions

I love Notepad++

Notepad++ is one of the most *useful* tools I've worked with over the years. Powerful, fast editing (column mode FTW!), great search and replace, plug-in support, continuous save, remembering everything you had open the last time you closed it, and on and on. One of the first apps I install on a new machine, and I would gladly pay for it if it wasn't free. Congrats on turning 20!

Zuckerberg accused of OK'ing Insta plastic surgery filters despite fears of harm to kids

Re: I respect your call on this and I’ll support it...

Principles? She's heard of them. I'm actually surprised she survived even this mild level of criticism. Being a "yes man" (or woman) who pledges loyalty to these psychopaths is table stakes these days if you want to hold onto that sweet, sweet paycheck. Corrupt from the top down.

Vanishing power feeds, UPS batteries, failover fails... Cloudflare explains that two-day outage

You missed a remarkable part of of the post-mortem

"the overnight staffing at the site did not include an experienced operations or electrical expert — the overnight shift consisted of security and an unaccompanied technician who had only been on the job for a week."

For what I assume is a Tier 4 DC hosting critical services? Flexential have some 'splaining to do.

More X subscription tiers could spell doom for free access as biz bleeds cash

I don't think you understand the point of "fediverses"

"...its distributed nature and "fediverses" appear to represent a needless barrier " - Needless barrier? Hardly. Yes, it's not as simple as just logging into Twatter, but the whole point of Mastodon and the fediverse is to make sure another Twitter shitfest can never happen again. It's the very distributed nature of the fediverse that prevents any single person or entity from owning the platform, and ultimately hitting the enshitification phase that we're seeing now with all these monolithic, psycho-owned platforms. So maybe an additional barrier, but desperately needed.

Go ahead, let the unknowable security risks of Windows Copilot onto your PC fleet

Re: That's one way of looking at it

And users in environments without the Microsoft Defense Budget to play whack-a-mole with MS every time an update adds something new to turn off? Hell, even knowing in a timely manner you need to get ready to turn something off is becoming a challenge. And that's for orgs that try to keep up with this stuff.

It's all backwards. We have to defend ourselves against these on-by-default "features" when they shouldn't be on by default to begin with. But then how are you going to boost the stock price if you can't claim BILLIONS of users are using CoPilot??

Probe reveals previously secret Israeli spyware that infects targets via ads

Re: How to pay

Kagi?

South Korea's biggest mobile telco says 5G has failed to deliver on its promise

5G Sucks!

I can't tell you the number of times I've had two or three bars of signal, tried to use the browser and.... nothing. Look at the icon and it's 5G. Every. Damned. Time. On 4G if I have any signal at all pages load. Maybe slowly, but they load.

Please oh please phone makers give us a way to force the radio back to 4G. I'm so tired of marketing driving the experience in reverse.

Brave cuts ties with Bing to offer its own image and video search results

Anyone else using Kagi?

Not free (well, free to test), but so far it seems to return a lot more relevant pages without all the spammy site aggregator crap Google returns.

Twitter's giant throbbing X erected 'without a permit'

Morning wood

Another damned erection without authorization.

Google asks websites to kindly not break its shiny new targeted-advertising API

Google's Privacy Sandbox

More like a litter box, and the advertisers are cats. This cat knows what happens in there.

Microsoft’s Azure mishap betrays an industry blind to a big problem

Oh yeah.

We're just one human away from a spectacular outage. It's going to happen, the only question is when. Will anything change afterward to prevent it again? Likely depends on the severity of the pain to those with oversight and influence. Maybe then you'll get your simulator.

North Korean spy satellite launch ends in sea smash

"discovering concrete causes"

Oh, you can bet some scientists are going to discover concrete all right. In it, splattered on it, or up against it - 100% success rate, guaranteed.

The first real robot war is coming: Machine versus lawyer

LLM. All your works belong to us.

I will leave you with this, by Naomi Klein, from an article very much worth reading:

"Because what we are witnessing is the wealthiest companies in history (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon …) unilaterally seizing the sum total of human knowledge that exists in digital, scrapable form and walling it off inside proprietary products, many of which will take direct aim at the humans whose lifetime of labor trained the machines without giving permission or consent."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/08/ai-machines-hallucinating-naomi-klein

Turing Award goes to Robert Metcalfe, co-inventor of the Ethernet

Nice guy

I had the pleasure of meeting Bob at a conference may years ago. Walked up, said hi, started to chat and 30 minutes later the conversation was still going on with him telling stories about 3Com, USR, etc. Genuinely nice guy, not the least bit full of himself. Fair few people can claim an engineering achievement with such reach and longevity. Very happy to see him recognized.

WFH? Google Cloud's offices like a 'ghost town' before new policy

Seriously?

If those coming in are complaining it's a "ghost town", here's a thought for you. Try practice-sharing one of the many empty desks with another one of the complainers. and do it right next to another pair of desk-sharing complainers, ad nauseam, until none of you have a single moment of peace. It will be good practice for what's coming.

Google's $100b bad day demo may be worth the price

This piece nails it

One of the more succinct articles I've read on the subject: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

Microsoft to move some Teams features to more costly 'Premium' edition

Re: But what about fixing what people want?

I had a similar experience at my last gig - Teams pretty much working as advertised, with the occasional glitch now and then. I've moved on to an org that uses G-Suite so I'm stuck with Google Meet. All the things people complain about with Teams? Multiply them by about 100 and you have some idea how much fun it is to use Meet all day long. Audio issues, crap video, crap screenshare with progressive build so it takes 10 seconds to see anything readable on the screen if the presenter doesn't have a perfect connection, no remote control, stupid low paste limits in the chat window (~200 characters of text and no files of any sort), and on and on. It's horrible. Despite all the bitching about Teams, I'd go back to it in an instant.

Tributes flow as Creative CEO Sim Wong Hoo - the mind behind Sound Blaster - passes aged 68

Something awesome he also built...

May I present the "Soundbar of the Gods". https://us.creative.com/soniccarrier/

Why? Because he could.

Alphabet reshuffles to meet ChatGPT threat

Re: ChatGPT

Been doing the same - using Chat for basic questions about stuff. It's interesting to think about using it in this context: When I search for something on Google I don't want a list of links, I want an answer. Chat cuts out the middleman a gives me that. Now whether it's the right answer is the million-dollar question, but so far in testing I'm finding its accuracy with things I'd normally search for with Google is quite remarkable. As you mentioned, even when not 100% correct Chat provides a better starting point than a random algorithmically-biased list of links. Sundar is right to be very, very worried.

Crypto craziness craps out – and about time too

Re: Not All Fools, Motley or Otherwise

Not sure about the "never hold it forever" part. If I had bought Berkshire-Hathaway stock in the 70s and kept it "forever" - as in still owned it today - I don't think I'd have any complaints.

The crypto bros aren't worthy of the comparison, but the difference is Warren accumulates real assets with long-term value. Crypto bros? Get rich quick baby, and leave the suckers by the side of the road.

Tesla driver blames full-self-driving software for eight-car Thanksgiving Day pile up

Appropriate use?

Having owned a Tesla for three years and been through many versions of FSD (and in all fairness, usually improving with each release), there is zero chance I'd ever be using FSD in a tunnel. Your options if something goes wrong are less than zero. I also encountered the phantom braking many times over those three years and learned to immediately hit the accelerator when it happens to tell FSD to get its head out of its ass. Still, it's very easy for someone behind you to think you're brake-checking them and I'm kind of surprised there haven't been more road rage incidents reported based on this behavior. I lived in Texas when I owned my Tesla. You can guess the popularity of being brake-checked.

VMware loses three top execs who owned growth products

"Alignment"

"... top talent aligned with our multi-cloud and SaaS transformation objectives."

Three of the wheels were wobbling so we took it for an alignment. Shame about those wheels, but problem solved! (I love corporate-speak.)

ChatGPT has mastered the confidence trick, and that's a terrible look for AI

If you know what I know

The only way to know if ChatGPT is giving you the right answer is to know the right answer. But I agree it can be convincing and it's not just Stack Overflow where it's starting to make an appearance. Good news is, you can usually recognize it's Chat giving the answer because bloviation, and lazy people are just cutting/pasting entire "answers". I wonder if the word diarrhea is intentional - heard something about the eventual paid version being charged by the characters of output.

Look like Bane, spend like Batman with Dyson's $949 headphones

"I thought it was a urinal"

You owe me a keyboard.

TSA to expand facial recognition across America

Misery loves even more company

What a load of BS. The fastest part of the whole "TSA experience" (it's like a bad Disney ride) is getting your ID checked. And what about your boarding pass - are we scanning that too? This is guaranteed to cause even more misery at TSA checkpoints, so it's clearly about eliminating staff. Besides, I thought one of the supposed benefits of the ID check was forcing interaction with a human being who might spot nervousness, evasiveness, etc.