Posts by sebacoustic

AMD acquires AI chip startup Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models into silicon

Happy days - I worr for a mask maker, that means more revenue for us, right?

Open source project fools AI scrapers with poisoned font

I hope they used Shieldfont on the Shieldfont web pages, otherwise AI might learn the trick...

Also: My hovercraft is full of eels.

SpaceX just about nails Starship test flight 13

didn't help with the rapid unplanned de-orbit of nasdaq:spcx

Manager showed off his DOS prowess – with a command that wiped data

i feel we lack context here... what was the objective of the DEL *.* command? Mischief? Revenge?

A Typo? Ineptitude? Or acting on malicious guidance by evil 3rd party?

Oracle outlines all the ways it could lose the farm it bet on AI

Re: Oh, Yeah ... Oracle

Your post made me sad... we were in a (possibly) comparable situation... old Java, oracle10g (on a all-payed-up perpetual license).

I thought about migrating to PostgeSQL, made a proof-of-concept that (kinda) works, management came along and signed a deal with Oracle for 19c, and now they are talking about migrating to off-prem cloud DB.

Well someone's got to pay for all the fancy data centres: turns out it's going to be us.

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

They didn't say "Designed in America", they said "Designed with American values in mind".

To an extent that's true because _some of_ the values held in Taiwan are similar to those in the US.

Taiwan is proud of their democratic system, and they are pretty serious about their freedoms, what with the military dictatorship being a relatively close memory for the middle-aged and above.

The US appear to be moving away from democratic values, but Taiwan isn't, so far, and long may that continue!

Bend the beam like Beckham to defeat anti-jamming tech

You would need an array of lasers, a few wavelength in distance, and with a well-defined phase relationships between them, afaik that's not technically feasible. Also, side lobes as mentioned above,

Taiwan cops say student's radio kit brought bullet trains to a standstill

Hi there

Lin: where do I collect my bug bounty please?

Cops: Ha, you're nicked. That'll be NT$10,000 for bail please, thanks.

Bad news for OpenClaw stans: Apple’s Mac Mini now starts at $799

raspi

News: some Raspberry Pi now more expensive than a Mac mini

Apple: wait, what? We'll see about that!

The developer who came in from the cold and melted a mainframe

Re: Always rather it too cold than too hot

Worked in a clean room in UK and our temperature was set to 20°C bit our Taiwanese fab (and office, which is where I work these days when I'm there) work at 23°C to save considerable amounts of energy. Operators wear a thin cotton suit under the clean room garment. And office attire is a t-shirt etc. I find it more comfortable than my UK office which struggles to get above 15°C in winter

AI agent seemingly tries to shame open source developer for rejected pull request

Hell hath no fury...

... like an AI bot spurned.

Or something.

Xubuntu downloads section injection threatens users with crypto infection

install and use it, and you're safe

it's just if you continue to use Windows it will eventually bite

Inside the belly of the beast: A technical walk through Intel's 18A production facility at Fab52

Re: Awesome

Having worked in a cleanroom for some years before jumping to the software team (thus avoiding the sack after they shut our fab) I can't help noticing: person on the back left in the photo deserves a kicking-out for breaking clean room protocol by having his nose sticking out.

Are the guys on the photo this visiting party?

Only way to move Space Shuttle Discovery is to chop it into pieces, White House told

Re: Virginia, Texas ?

I'm guessing the Qatari jet is crammed to within close to the maximum weight with shiny and/or cushy objects of luxury, and a shuttle-carrying 747 would need to be bare-bones inside to be able to carry that lump on its back

Texas man accidentally shoots cable, brings internet down

Freedom

Surely, having some cables, schoolchildren, and podcasters taken out occasionally by irresponsible people, is a price worth paying for having the right to bear arms?

Is GitHub a social network that endangers children? Australia wants to know

Will somebody please think of the children...

the perpetual abyss of abuse and smut that is the social network StackOverflow is not included, I'm shocked

Whisper it: FFmpeg 8 can now subtitle your videos on the fly

Re: You get subtitles, you get subtitles, you all get subtitles!

I've tried to subtitle a film before... a film that's close to my heart bu only available with German audio and, being a low-ish budget production, with poor sound quality.

If this can provide a _skeleton_ subtitle file with correct timings but lots of gobbeldigook text, that would be a huge help because then I can just fix the text and eventually translate it, so that you too can enjoy this hidden marvel of football film (hated by some fans who are too serious about football)

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordkurve

Classic Psion fan releases proof-of-concept language server for OPL

sigh

Still kick myself over a mistake I made years ago... putting out the wrong box of stuff for collection when de-junking the attic, containing a Psion 3 including all the manuals, a Newton 120, and one of those Sharp pocket computer things. OK all pretty useless in this day and age but still cool things and sad to imagine these pieces of computer history ending up as slightly noxious landfill.

I plan to hold on to my HP41CX until the day I die... that was my 2nd computer after the ZX81

Like burglars closing a door, Apache ActiveMQ attackers patch critical vuln after breaking in

If you're trusting Big Red to deliver timely patches...

are they still calling their RH clone ^H^H^H^H^H^H distro "unbreakable"?

AI is an over-confident pal that doesn't learn from mistakes

LLM "learning from their own mistakes"

Correct me if I'm wrong(*) but isn't that "forbidden" becuase you can't safely update your model weightson the fly with "real life" data because that would risk exposing it and spilling the beans like it's that scene in Tommy? "Professiona Integrity" isn't a thing in an LLM, it's really just a chain of matrix multiplications not a complex creature like even the humblest case worker in a social security office somewere.

(*)I'm not involved with LLM in a professional capacity and avoid them other than as a source of amusement and scientific interest.

US Department of Defense will stop sending critical hurricane satellite data

Re: There isn't a hurricane on the way

just call it the .+ community and be done with it

using the tux icon but sure there are some windows or even macOS (gasp) users versed in regular expressions

User demanded a 'wireless' computer and was outraged when its battery died

RE: “my internet is not working”.

My kids will put it more generally as in "_The_ internet is not working".

Makes me wonder what would happen if the internet really went down for some time. Major inconvenience? Economy crashing? Or broad societal collapse?

I'm just a Barbie Girl in a ChatGPT world

Wer die Jugend hat, dem gehört die Zukunft...

Meta – yep, Facebook Meta – is now a defense contractor

Re: Still waiting...

You forget the whole hilarious genre of "Fail Army"-type content of people walking into things while wearing VR gaming goggles. That's where VR really delivers value!

Tesla FSD ignores school bus lights and hits 'child' dummy in staged demo

Autobahn

last time I drove a hired VW in Germany with the "read speed limit signs" feature, it annoyed me a bit that it insisted on doing 130km/h.

I set my cruise control to 100km/h for a relaxed and economical pace, it enters a restricted zone (construction etc.) and dutifully slows down to 80 or 60 km/h, then when the limit is lifted it goes full-gas to 130 all on its own unless I intervene.

Some signs of AI model collapse begin to reveal themselves

personal experience...

my daughter is just finishing a degree in English Literature, and tells me that the main qualification of a graduate in this field is that the're good at writing, and she is.

But a lot of writing is done by LLM these days... Maybe she can find her niche in writing the missing novels from the Chicago Sun-Times reading list?

70-knot winds so far blamed for yacht disaster that killed Brit tech tycoon Mike Lynch

Re: Wrong Target....

doesn't mean Mike Lynch didn't knowingly sell them an overpriced lame duck... I still think someone in HP's pay snuck on the Bayesian abd took a hacksaw to the rigging.

GAO finds billions in possible government savings, all without Elon's help

cutting IT spend

These savings are not overly popular in the top echelons of the adminstraion's sycophants... those $100b now missing in Larry's next yacht or whatever. Those things don't buy themselves!

Users advised to review Oracle Java use as Big Red's year end approaches

Re: Added value from Oracle Java?

On a more serious note (hence the "meh" icon") there are some features in Oracle Java that may be useful in some contexts.

We use (ok I know don't s*it on me) Java Web Start and the open-source alternative for that sucks giant donkey 'nads. There are also some close-source profiling components in Oracle Java.

No I don't say it's not worth moving away from Larry's but there can be a certain amount of pain or cost involved.

Here's the ugliest global-warming chart you'll ever need to see

Re: FWIW

OK "first computer model" has the IT angle... but really, we have known about this _much_longer: in fact https://xkcd.com/2889

Good on El Reg to weigh in on this.. not so many years ago they were happy enough to publish "climate sceptic" Lewis Page's infuriating nonsense so they have some making up to do.

The biggest microcode attack in our history is underway

Let me be the first to say

thanks for the insightful article.

You could say it's just built around one cute word play, bu I say, well done for that! An important point, well stated.

Huawei handed 2,596,148,429,267,413,
814,265,248,164,610,048 IPv6 addresses

baryon

electrons are leptons not baryons

Win a slice of XP cheese if you tell us where Microsoft should put Copilot next

Re: In a pull request for the Linux kernel

my work PC runs Fedora... and my "work" browser is Edge (because.. Teams PWA). So I have the pleasure of Copilot albeit on Microsoft's cloud not the company's/my home's electricity bill.

EDIT: errm no. Just checked... it's now broken in MS's latest Edge package.. and nothing of value was lost.

India spending $170M to take its tax system paperless by rebuilding three legacy systems

why develop in-house

... when they can offshore it to some cheap Indian IT shop... oh wait.

Andrew Tate's site ransacked, subscriber data stolen

Re: Hurrah

replying to a post that I've 1+ed... ok it's not /.

yes markdown would be great but on second thoughts would we get an influx of ascii "art" which for the most part is only funny for the poster?

Whomp-whomp: AI PCs make users less productive

At Last!

We now have a worthy successor to "Powerpoint makes people stupid"

TSMC's US operations threatened with employee discrimination class action

US

I work for a US company with significant operations in Taiwan.. many of my Taiwanese colleagues speak excellent English. I don't really have contact with anybody else there unless someone can translate for me... as I don't speak Mandarin, or any of the other languages spoken there.

I doubt if anyone would get a promotion into management tier there unless they had a decent command of the English language.

Russian court fines Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

2x10^34 that's a lot. Paid in dollar bills only a Plank length thick, that's a stack of ~1m

Musk claims Cybertruck has become profitable at last

cursed plot

who came up with that stacked graph, visually _adding_ the rest of the world's EV adoption rate to China's adoption rate? This is insane.

Hold my Pimms! Wimbledon turns to tech for line-ball calls

Today

This morning the Today programme reported on this story, they said they asked McEnroe to come on for the occasion and he declined, with those very words!

GNOME 47 brings back some customization options, but let's not go crazy

gnome

I use gnome on Fedora for work day after day and it helps me stay focussed and productive, (as much as a DE can do such things which isn't a lot).

Is it pretty: yes, think so. I don't customise anything other than a background image, and an extension that keeps dock& top bar off the screen unitl I presss <super>.

Are there things that suck? Yeah, totally. But about a factor of 10 fewer than on the windows desktops I use via RDP. Oh yes, and the RDP client on Windows is basic to the point of being practically useless... wot? No hotkey for switching key sequences like <alt-tab> form local to remote and back? This sucks!!!!

I so use KDEs editor Kate for text editing though, since it has lots of useful nicknacks akin to notepad++ that I use. Ugly: yes. Do I care... not really.

SQL king Larry Ellison becomes sequel sultan with controlling interest in Paramount Global

Normal people: Daddy can you buy me a Man United shirt?

Glazer's son: Daddy can you buy me Man United?

Normal people: Daddy can you buy a Paramount+ subscription?

Ellison's son: Daddy can you buy Paramount+?

UK tech pioneer Mike Lynch dead at 59

Bayes' Theorem

Bayes' theorem states

P(A|B) = P(A) P(B|A) / P(B)

where

P(A) probability a Yacht (named "Bayesian" without loss of generality) might sink

and

P(B) probability a horde of frustrated HPE lawyers aim to scuttle a yacht on a trip to celebrate their defeat in court

Admin took out a call center – and almost their career – with a cut and paste error

Re: mit der Steife unten rechts

Nein! Nein!

Bonafide Kraut here, providing unnecessary detail:

"die Streife" means patrol (e.g. plod)

"der Streifen" means strip or stripe

systemd 256.1: Now slightly less likely to delete /home

Re: What's it Actually For?

The rationale goes like this:

developer of service xyz (systemd unit), which needs "a directory and a named pipe in it" uses its own way to create temp dir like xyz_<currenttimestamp>/ but that may not work in some obscure context, maybe in a container or whatever.

The missive from systemd HQ is to rely on systemd-tmpfile instead where systemd guarantees it works for you. The consumer of tempfiles does not have to deal with edge cases any more. Overzealous --purge notwithstanding.

In the grand scheme of things...

... all files are temporary.

Microsoft pulls Windows 11 24H2 from Insider Release Preview Channel

Re: Recall recall as it recalls privacy & security

I was expecting the "recall" pun in the article, if not in the subheader. Was it "too obvious" for the Reg hack?

AI PCs are here but a killer application for biz users? Nope

Might be beneficial...

I wish i had an AI PC for work.. this one has but a puny Quadro P520 barely enough to run a game at a reduced resolution :-(

As I said: it _might_ be beneficial but not for my productivity

Was there no one at Microsoft who looked at Recall and said: This really, really sucks

apart from the regular "privacy ..." Recall concerns

the simple but useful "show password" button, that you only push when you are sure nobody is looking over your shoulder: that's useless now because you never know when Recall might hit you!

Apple crushes creativity and its reputation in new iPad ad

enough material for a bunch of film students' class projects. They'd better get James McGill to direct.