Posts by markr555

Nothing screams casual career pivot like joining the UK Ministry of Defence for a cool £162K

Re: Only for the pension?

Ah, here you go again with your 'woe is me, I'm just about surviving on a salary larger than that of 95% of the population'. Your calculation is disingenuous, you present all your figures and then talk about lopping off 30k for a pension from that, but then present figures of paying full tax on the entire income. You don't pay tax on pension contributions, and the annual limit is 60k. So, if you are earning 160k , you should always ensure that you maximise your pension contributions (and any other salary sacrifice schemes in the workplace) to prevent your salary breaching to 100k cliff edge where you lose the annual allowance and kiddy bonus. This returns your rights to have the rest of the country pay towards the raising of your kids via tax credits/refunds, means that the highest percentage tax rate you pay will be 40%, and gives you a monthly take-home of £5700. I don't have kids, and pay the same rate of tax as everyone else, but I'm not bleating about being pillaged by the taxman, because we ALL have to pay for the society in which we live. No matter what your situation (kids/london or other things), if you can't survive on 5700 per month (one parent's salary BTW), then it's not the tax system or your employer that's the problem.

MI6 chief: We'll be as fluent in Python as we are in Russian

Re: The way AI is being pushed in current Smart Phone ads...

Every commentard should be able to upvote a single comment multiple times just once a year - very prescient ,sir/madam!

Newly launched civil service pension portal from Capita is crapita, users report

Weasels!

"argest ever on time transition" - its not on time if its unfinished you slimey cockwombles!

Mastodon CEO steps down with €1M payout and a deep sigh

I dont really care where its coming from, the guy has poured the last decade or so of his life, along with a dollop of his mental wellbeing into this product This equates to 100 thousand euro for every year hes worked on it. If hed gone the 'for profit' route he'd be a multi-millionaire - he pretty much deserves it. That is the logic and reasoning to which i refer.

Logic and reasoning...

Whatever your job, mentoring is your job – and the one that matters most

How does permanent homeworking fit in with this?

This is something I've been harking on about for a while; in the rush to work from home, the entire profession seems to have turned their backs on younger developers entering the job market. You absolutely CANNOT mentor effectively if permanently working from home. As a profession, we are letting these people down. I know there'll be downvotes, and folks explaining how they mentor perfectly acceptably, or even better from home, but IMHO this is biased/flawed thinking at the minimum.

Aviation watchdog says organized drone attacks will shut UK airports ‘sooner or later’

Trouble is brewing

As an enthusiast of RC UAVs I'm astonished that the "powers that be" think that legislation will do anything to prevent drone incursions. Building an untraceable drone with capabilities to fly autonomously and drop "cargo" at a given location is trivial, and achievable at an extremely low cost. Legislation only serves to make law-abiding enthusiasts' lives harder, with onerous requirements that would stop not a single bad actor. What the aviation industry needs to do is to work towards effective defense systems against any such incursions, rather than introduce legislation which is totally ineffective against such threats.

SpaceX and Musk called on to rescue China's Shenzhou-20 crew

Re: Space Cowboy?

More of a Spaced-Out cowboy.

UK to roll out mandatory digital ID for right to work by 2029

Absolutely no chance!

There is no way whatsoever that I am prepared to install any government mandated software on my phone, so where will it go from there? This is some serious Stasi bullshit that I am not prepared to adhere to; so what are they gonna do about it?

Are you willing to pay $100k a year per developer on AI?

Re: Blind spot

That's just tosh I'm afraid:

"Hoard top talent" - twas ever thus, for the purpose of outcompeting others rather than paying millions just so others can't have them.

"Overpay them just enough" - not to enslave, but to retain. The employment market is a free one, so employees can move to competitors for 'just enough' more.

"Leave with a fat CV" - not if they've stagnated in the same role for 2 decades!

Your thinking is way more paranoid than it needs to be, it's purely about money!

OpenAI's GPT-5 is here with up to 80% fewer hallucinations

80% fewer

So the new model provides 80% fewer hallucinations; no longer a fuck-ton of them, just a shit-load. On asking Chat-GPT to provide me some code using a publicly available API with documentation, it completely made up functionality in the API for ALL of it, so at best it would appear that I am now going to experience just 20% bullshit. What a time to be alive! The appalling use of resources for this crap will be looked upon with shame in the future.

North of England snubbed by UK government bag-a-boffin scheme

No surprises here.

This is very much par for the course. The North (anywhere past Watford in the eyes of these people) receives absolutely pitiful levels of funding in pretty much anything.

One in six US workers pretends to use AI to please the bosses

No pretending for me

Where I work we have a company-specific Chat-GPT instance, and the business is monitoring for anyone who has not logged into, and used it. I haven't because it's a pile of shite for most applications (never mind that the power requirements are eventually going to burn the planet). Being so close to retirement, I'm looking forward to any chats about my lack of compliance.

Top sci-fi convention gets an earful from authors after using AI to screen panelists

AI lies

Recently I had to stop using PayPal as they requested lots of ID from me, as I was now a 'politically exposed person'. I am not, and have never been involved in any politics, local or national. I thought this was very strange but obviously decided to use different payment services rather than comply. I then ask ChatGPT for information on me and it completely fabricates that I am a local councillor. This tells me that large companies are already using AI bullshitters to collate information on customers, so anyone who thinks that it's a good idea to allow AI to provide vetting info for individuals is an idiot or vastly uninformed.

Computacenter IT guy let girlfriend into Deutsche Bank server rooms, says fired whistleblower

Re: I have no problem with punitive damages

Dafuq?!

In wake of Horizon scandal, forensics prof says digital evidence is a minefield

It's not just a data integrity issue.

When you can't trust those collating the evidence (think Fujitsu), how can you trust any of it?

Arm reckons it'll own 50% of the datacenter by year's end

Re: Works Nicely For Me

Careful, praising Arm on here can have negative consequences. The commentariat have taken against it now that it's neither USian/British/RiscV. They can do no right :-s

A closer look at Dynamo, Nvidia's 'operating system' for AI inference

Re: The steam engine

Yeah but the dynamo came along only 100 years later, so give him a little 'interpretational license'

China's EV champ BYD reveals super-fast charging that leaves Tesla eating dust

Re: "Works for me"

Dick!

Judge orders Feds rehire workers falsely fired for lousy performance

At whose will?

The basic problem here is the fucked-up American employment laws that allow the unfair firing of people without any reason. Musk simply misunderstood that the rules are a little more protective of federal employees. Not surprising, as he's an idiot. The government agencies were just so afraid of their glorious leader that they implemented the bullshit firings without standing up for their staff. Testicles need to be grown to fight this with principles and conviction.

Vodafone: Be in the office 8 days a month or lose bonuses

Contract is king.

I'm not sure I understand all the bleating here; if your contract says WFH then you can work from home. If it says Hybrid/WFO then the company is well within its rights to ask or demand your presence. If you don't like it then find a new role. They company cannot arbitrarily/ unilaterally change your contract and must make you redundant if you don't want to agree new terms (UK employees, yanks are screwed)

Early mornings, late evenings, weekends. Useless users always demand support

Re: Solutions exist

Exactly this!! No-one is obliged to do ANYTHING outside of their contract of employment, so if you don't wanna do it, don't do it. Even if your work phone is turned on, and Teams is bonging away on your personal (why would you install works stuff to your own equipment!?!?), you can simply ignore it. The only person to blame is you if you are answering outside of work hours.

Blood boffins build billions of nanobots to battle brain aneurysms without surgery

Re: Isn't the hard part about treating an aneurysm

Ante-mortem in this case, shirley? Up-voted though, of course!

Tesla slams advisors for not loving Musk's $44.9B payout

Eh?

What the heck are you on about? Theres a huge inequality there, but it's not a racial inequality!

Can I phone a friend? How cops circumvent face recognition bans

Re: Maybe

It’s really quite simple, no-one (in the UK) is required to identify themselves to the police unless there is reasonable reason for the copper to suspect that the person has committed (or will commit) a crime. So when they refuse they are simply excercising their rights, or don’t you want people to have such rights? Sounds like you haven’t had direct dealings with police in a situation where they think it’s ok to bully the public, but plenty have, and they are free to excercise their right to point-blank ignore coppers if they so wish.

Fujitsu finance chief says sorry for IT giant's role in Post Office Horizon scandal

Re: Rehash

WTF are you on?? "For all your Fujitsu bashing"? They had a full team working round the clock committing fraud on a daily basis, in a secret basement office. I'm pretty sure other 'retail suppliers' aren't lying in court and sending innocent folks to prison! Fujitsu deserve all the bashing people can give, and a fuck-ton more besides.

Fujitsu gets $1B market cap haircut after TV disaster drama airs

Re: Justice

Unfortunately that's just not gonna happen

UK PM promises faster justice for Post Office Horizon victims

No Justice

There may be compensation, but I'm pretty sure there'll be no justice; not a single person/company/organisation will be held to account!

New cars bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035 – it's the law

Re: Finding a working charger

"Using an EV for long distances in this country (at least south of Perth, Scotland) is possible today in the first week of 2024.”

Of course it’s possible, when the number of EV owners is easily handled by the grid it’s no problem, but to suggest that we can ALL have an EV is fanciful at best.

Re: Screw the Hoi Polloi!

There are 4 lamposts on my street and around 100 cars, no problem at all plugging 25 cars into a single lampost I’m sure, and the wiring fitted for a 50W lamp will have no problems supplying a megawatt!! Running a 13A cable to a car overnight might get you a few miles before you run out of juice, but hey, the local scrotes will have unplugged it long before morning :-) And of course, all this is only possible if you can actually park your car outside your house, which is about a 1 in 50 occurrence around these parts.

Screw the Hoi Polloi!

Such a lovely middle-class law, where only the people who have a driveway can ever have a car in the future. Screw the millions who don’t have a drive and so can never have an electric car! For this very reason, there is absolutely no chance of any of this becoming a reality in the UK with things as they are, as if you take away the means of earning from 20 million people you’ll have heads on spikes. But the are many other reasons: Without a viable means of transport it’s not possible to work any more (cue the lucky ones who can work from home, unlike the working classes). Without massive investment in nuclear power it’s just a daydream (cue the greenies who’ll bleat on about solar and wind power as if they are anything other than a slightly useful addition when conditions are favourable). Without massive investment in infrastructure such as a complete upgrade to the national grid and all domestic electricity supply, even the laws of physics agree it’s not possibe (cue the ‘battery technology is improving all the time’ folks). We all need to face it, the notion of electic vehicles replacing ALL the cars currentlyl on the road is UTTER BULLSHIT and it’s time we started looking elsewhere!

AWS rakes in half a billion pounds from UK Home Office

Re: Big number or small number?

A Latte here, and a latte there, it soon adds up to real money!

UK government rings the death knell for SIM farms

Poor proof reading

You commit an offence, not an offense. Offense cannot ever be a noun

UnitedHealthcare's broken AI denied seniors' medical claims, lawsuit alleges

US Craziness in action

The US healthcare system, or more appropriately, the lack of it, is truly fucked up!

Suits ignored IT's warnings, so the tech team went for the neck

Re: One does wonder...

Dafuq?!

Still got a job at the end of this week? You're lucky, as more layoffs hit the tech industry

Re: No need to worry

"Here in the UK, IT is a working class job and pays poorly"

Don't talk rubbish, it's a well paid middle class job if you are reasonably technical (programmer or similar)

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

When will this crap stop

A complete and utter waste of billions of pounds. A simple current clamp device and WiFi control panel was all that was ever needed. Enclosing the customer-focussed functionality within the meter is pathetically stupid

UK rejoins the EU's €100B Horizon sci-tech funding program

"women aren't that unequivocal"

Looks like you haven't met my wife!

UK Online Safety Bill to become law – and encryption busting clause is still there

Re: At last!

Obvious troll is too obvious, must try harder ;-)

Microsoft kicks Calibri to the curb for Aptos as default font

What is a curb??

The word you're looking for is kerb, you need to curb your lack of enthusiasm for proof-reading!

Nvidia's Arm wrestle – from failed acquisition to possibly anchoring IPO

Do I detect a disgruntled ex employee?

Singapore's sovereign wealth fund regrets investment in crypto-villain FTX

Eh?

Diabolical non-sequitur.

Dyson moans about state of UK science and tech, forgets to suck up his own mess

Re: With two-faced "friends" like Dyson, Britain doesn't need enemies

Halfwit is a single word, at best you can hyphenate it, you half-wit

Re: With two-faced "friends" like Dyson, Britain doesn't need enemies

How many times are you gonna post the same iname shit comment in a single thread you trolling wee fuck-nugget? Your bigotry is showing.

Re: With two-faced "friends" like Dyson, Britain doesn't need enemies

Who dafuq is US? Doubting that you are an international lawyer, so who the hell will YOU bail out? I'm unconvinced that you could bail out a frigging dinghy

Miffed Googlers meme on CEO's $226M pay award amid cost-cutting campaign

Re: @AC capitalism

Oh yeah, then why is it The People's Republic of China?? You're either disingenuous or a halfwit; possibly both.

Pornhub walls off Utah in age-verification law protest

Keeping porn from eager teenagers?

They'll never pull it off!

Elon Musk actually sits down and talks to 'government-funded media' the BBC

Re: Propaganda

"Que all the clowns"

Is that you Manuel?

Parts of UK booted offline as Virgin Media suffers massive broadband outage

Re: Fare thee (not so) well, Virgin

"Said chat started at 15:40, and didn't finish until 19:00"

There's your problem right there. Don't allow them anything like this amount of time. Either they can beat it or they can't. Once they've failed to beat it, tell them your contract is cancelled and put the phone down. Once you've sent an email informing them of their failure to cancel according to contract you're free to cancel your direct debit. Screw giving them any more than 10 minutes of your time!