Posts by werdsmith

Sysadmin summoned to explain italics – to a user with at least two degrees

Re: Stupidity plus arrogance

There is a strong scent of Aesop’s fox and the grapes running through these comments.

And the confirmation bias that has gullible people believing the obviously fictional anecdote in the story is real.

Duh

Brit boffins boast of beating barriers to building fusion power

Re: Small print

Small print? What are you talking about? Nothing small about it, that’s large bold H1ish print.

Proxmox ports itself to Arm with help from Nvidia and Supermicro

Re: No Pi support

Hobbyists have had PXVirt available for a long time.

Dev proves LLMs will run on anything – even a $10 microcontroller

Re: the pie

Many smaller models run very nicely on the Pis with larger RAM. With or without the AI HAT+ 2 with its HAILO 10H accelerator.

And you can use them through the OpenUI interface.

Re: "There is another model, called Barista [for] topics pertaining to espresso. "

Perhaps you should look at some of exhibits at CES 2026. Your future vision is in fact already here.

UK mulls making employers ask before installing bossware

I’ve worked for a few good managers and one truly inspirational leader (who became disillusioned with all the shit managers and went off to do something else), but the vast majority of managers - 90% - are shit charlatan cowboy bullshitters.

I became a manager through blind ambition and when I got there I realised I didn’t like it and was shit at it so I quit and went back to playing with tech. I really wish they all had that same introspection. Shit managers cause stress and toxicity.

Unfortunately though, there aren’t enough good managers.

NASA puts astronauts’ lives in the hands of Tesla’s flaky Cybertruck

Cybertruck sales have fallen 40-50% year on year since 2024.

20% of production has been purchased by other Musk companies.

The AI bubble is already popping; we just don't know it yet

Re: What About Safety and Product Liability?

It’s not negligent if it’s deliberate.

Microsoft says 8 GB of RAM should be enough for anyone running Windows 11

Re: "design is complete when there's nothing more that can be removed"

Dual Standard sets (that could work across 405 line VHF and 625 line UHF) during the changeover period did indeed have big chunks of unused circuitry once everything was being broadcast on UHF.

These things were stupidly complex and expensive especially on valve circuits and contributed to the demise of PYE and the domestic industry.

In my early days of working on hardware, I used to trial and error add various values to capacitors to smooth waveforms that were out of spec due to accumulation of component tolerances.

Open source project fools AI scrapers with poisoned font

The goal should be to present your website to genuine users and prevent scrapers from eating up your I/O and your compute resources, which the site owner has to pay for. Poisoning the content will probably just escalate how the scrapers work and make them more of a burden.

Re: However….

Or capacitence even, along with inductence…

Henry Farad invented the tuned circuit.

DEF CON bans Meta-style 'pervert glasses'

Re: Looks like meta glass wearers will need 2 pair of specs

That's going to happen regardless of if they are in standard frames or these Meta things.

Re: What’s worse

Autograph and photo money usually goes to charity like Brinsworth House and Comic Relief etc.

Re: Looks like meta glass wearers will need 2 pair of specs

1. All glasses have lenses, they are not additional weight. My varifocal prescription lenses are of negligible weight.

2. I haven’t been punched in the face since my schooldays. It’s not a daily thing. Being hit by a ball is a risk all bespectacled people take, there are things you can do about.

3. New prescription lenses every 2 years is no problem. On plastic frames you just pop them out and press in the new ones it’s normal, it’s what spectacle-dependent folk do.

Re: Banned everywhere I go.

I have a pair of black frame RayBan sunglasses which don’t have any form of camera and they are not even Wayfarers. They are from about 2015 trip to USA. I’ve been questioned about them twice.

If I wanted to film with a concealed camera then I could easily do so and I wouldn’t need to be using something like Meta glasses that everyone is aware of.

NOAA ditches weather-predicting supercomputers for Google Cloud

Re: Local UK weather.

UK weather being pretty decent does depend where you are. In many parts of the country there has been no rain for weeks and continuous oppressive heat and hot nights, which is considered to be unpleasant weather for normal daily life.

Need some rain and need some more pleasant temperatures.

Deep space dishes dodge devastation from Spanish wildfires

Re: Checking the NASA Firms map

The FIRMS data includes all deliberate controlled burning, nowadays in Europe, what we used to call "stubblefield burning" as parts of agriculture is banned but it is still widely practiced around the world.

From my childhood a stubblefield fire was spectacular.

Airbus keeps an A350 flying for 24 hours

Re: Conflicted

Yes, the airports, the queuing and waiting, the overcrowding and the jeopardy of delays. I'm usually more relaxed once the aircraft is starting its take off roll. Then it starts again the other end.

Having said that, my one and only trip to Australia was multi-stop with a day or 2 in each. London, Bahrain, Delhi, Singapore. Return via Hawaii, Los Angeles, New York, London. It was very cheap so I tolerated it.

Re: Essential for ultra-long distance flights

The use of toilets doesn't add to the all up weight. It's a bit like energy, it is mass that changes form. It is loaded onto the plane through the doors and then removed from the plane from a sump.

Unlike the fuel that is loaded through a valve into a tank and then leaves the aircraft through the engine turbine exhausts after leaving some of its energy behind in aforementioned mass.

Britain hopes £7.3M will help electric and hydrogen aircraft take off

£7.3 million, might as well say it’s to cover part of the PR budget for the projects. The amount is an insult.

Probably because they know that any successful design or viable commercial project will be sold to an overseas company for a short term quick gain.

Hyperscale, hypersensitive: US teacher cuffed for applauding datacenter critics

Re: Cop's brains....

I had my eyes opened to police in the USA when one of them threatened to arrest me for crossing the road in Massachusetts. This was Clinton era so no blame on Trump.

To be fair another one went way beyond to help me when I broke down in the desert in Nevada.

Signals are grim for Jodrell Bank Observatory after UK science funding decision

Re: This is personal

I predict that JB won’t be closing down, it will find alternative funding and continue.

However the vandalism and sabotage of our other research projects are harder to recover from.

I guess the consequences of this will be too far in the future for Burnham to care and meanwhile the £2 bus fares and a temporary pennies off the electricity bill need to be paid for.

Cassette simulator rewinds digital audio to a more analog time in hiss-tory

I still have my “Walkman” which isn’t a Sony, it’s a Sanyo which supposedly outperformed the Sony on battery life according to claims at the time.

I still had to carry a BIC battery saving device which had a secondary use for writing.

Re: This "sounds" like a great antidote for nostalgia!

I always thought loading and saving on tapes was a technological miracle, it was all new. I had no other reference at the time as I had only heard of floppy disks through pictures in magazines.

FOSS smashed one Microsoft monopoly. After 20 years of failure, it's time to smash another

Re: Becoming irrelevant

I can’t believe I found someone speaking in favour of confluence!!

We had it here, bosses paid a fortune for licensing it and JIRA. Everyone hated it, refused to use it.

Bosses gave in, money down the drain.

Vomit inducing products.

SpaceX just about nails Starship test flight 13

SpaceX boss Elon Musk said he hopes the next Starship test flight will see the Super Heavy booster caught by robot arms at Starbase,

This is the only part of the mission that failed and has never been proven on version 3. So will be an increased risk to ground facilites to attempt it on flight 14.

Fujitsu joins £14.9B UK framework despite public sector bid freeze

Re: just how the fuck?!!!

I would be OK with it if it was the Normans again. I like a nice bit of Camembert.

SpaceX to try its luck again with Starship Flight 13 after engines and weather say no

Re: Successful launch

Not total success as the booster didn’t get its engine relight sequence quite right and didn’t achieve soft landing in the gulf, so probably not ready for a catch attempt on Starship 14.

But the gentle landing of the Starship in the Indian Ocean was impressive as the spacecraft became a boat . Though probably a submarine by now.

The drone images were amazing.

Should be only a short time before 14 launches to orbit now.

Support newbie figured out how to avoid all-nighters, and his colleagues hated him for it

Re: I can't hear you

The opposite for me, when on call one of the developers was also on standby to deal with anything deeper that normal errors. He BEGGED us to call him because he wanted that money.

When we didn't need him he tried inserting little deliberate errors into batches, which we easily spotted and corrected ourselves. He did actually get quite angry about it.

UK pumps £708 million into its future fighter jet

Never mind drones, keep an iron in the fire for your engineering pipeline, there should be continuous connected development or lose the capability and take years to get it back.

Re: Canada and GCAP

Canada since Avro-Canada CF-105 Arrow has been a USA customer. They are operating F18 and buying F-35 already.

Raspberry Pi goes large with 10.1-inch Touch Display 2

Re: Priorities?

There has to be a limit to how much Raspberry Pi can flog the life out of that SOC which has its origins before 2010.

They have managed to add cores, get it down to a 28nm process and with recent D0 have cut out chunks of unnecessary logic. But I feel they have squeezed as much out of it as possible and from now on only marginal improvements will be possible, whilst there is still no sleep or very low power mode and it still gets warm a bit too easily.

Re: Nice screen, won't get one

The price of the Raspberry Pi is the same as the price at launch in 2012 + the cost of optional additional RAM.

Re: Since the IPO by any chance?

4. trigger natural born whingers.

Re: Nice screen, won't get one

Then buy a Pi 4 still $35 so effectively cheaper and far more power than the original (add 4x cores, 4x RAM, WiFi, Bluetooth etc.

Or buy a pi Zero 2 for $20, again far more than the original.

Or a Pico for a fiver.

Sick of hearing that all Pis have become expensive from short-thought whingers.

OpenAI scored an own goal with Hugging Face attack, showing how open Chinese models are winning

Exactly. Not an own goal at all, in fact a decent piece of viral marketing being supported by ignorant media.

SpaceX Starship Flight Test 13 takes issue with the 'flight' bit

Still pretty good compared to shuttle era when it would have been rolled back into the shed for an open ended number of weeks.

Yes, it’s good that the mission didn’t fly because if it had not aborted it would have been a failed mission.

Now to see if all the raptors that did light have survived a hard shutdown.

The stock price dropped from 131 to 124 this morning. NASA never had to worry about their market cap.

Airbus takes flight from AWS. What happens next is critical

the tech writer refused to use microsoft word as their doc system would become very unstable after around a 1000 pages in a doc

Word has never been a suitable application for documents on that scale, docs would become flakey with far less pages than that if they contained a lot of images.

Amsterdam activists throw acid at Microsoft datacenter project

Re: The World is on FIRE!! (on the inside)

The Daily Sceptic analysis of the temperature has been totally debunked.

On that day 46 weather stations exceeded the record.

Prominent Haskell defector pilloried by anti-AI purists

Haskell exists only to teach functional programming in universities. Students who have recovered from the experience do their best to avoid it thereafter.

Lucky 13: SpaceX aims for July 16 Starship flight test

Yes, it was obvious tongue in cheek. But this is The Register, never forget.

and pretty soon everyone who wasn't an insider with pre-IPO stock will have lost money.

They might be down at that particular point in time, but if SpaceX is still going then they can recover their money in the future and possibly gain. Or lose more.

It's not like a horse race where it's over when the first nose passes the post, stock continues to modulate for years.

The value of this flight is huge now that SpaceX has some stock out there for trading.

If the thing explodes on the pad or goes flawlessly will be billions of $ spread.

At last, a good reason to buy an AI PC: Reining in runaway token bills

Have Gartner only just worked this out?

Meanwhile, businesses have been running local AI models for a long time.

Zig creator calls Bun’s Claude Rust rewrite ‘unreviewed slop’

I am happy for him and his success, by his own standards.

"by his own standards"... that's actually quite backhanded.

EU puts 'addictive' design of Facebook, Instagram under the DSA microscope

Re: Close...

YouTube allows you to add your own content, have followers and follow other content creators and take part in discussions about content.

Those four criteria are required to define a social media platform, as opposed to a simple comments section like this one, that only allows one of those.

Re: Maddening...

The addictive part really only applies to certain people.

In 2014 I was so disgusted by FaeceCook that I ended the account and never went near it since.

AI customers are coming around to the idea that small is beautiful

Use smaller models, host them locally and refine them for their particular task.

The business task doesn't need an LLM that can identify old songs and suggest a plot for a new film.

AI slop writing has taken over the internet, particularly LinkedIn and X

LInkedIn always was slop regardless of who or what created it.

Post after post of absolute total dross.