Posts by druck

Microsoft-backed boffins show mega speed boost with hollow-core fiber

Re: Groovy

Normally being bought by Microsoft guarantees it will become a dead end.

LegalPwn: Tricking LLMs by burying badness in lawyerly fine print

Re: Let's face it...

People were fooled by Victorian seances, AI is the same sort of parlour trick but with more data and less thuds and flickering lights.

People were fooled by St Pepper's Ghost in Victorian theatres, ABBA voyage is just an updated flashier version.

We don't really need a better AI, just better humans. Neither is going to happen soon.

China launches new ‘AI+’ policy to ‘deepen information technology revolution’

If you consider the prime aim of careful adoption to include suppressing talk about Tienanmen Square and not generating pictures of Whinne-the-Pooh.

AI spies questionable science journals, with some human help

Re: The percentage of the Beast? Appropriate ... if contrived.

100% record of shit posting in your case.

Pentagon ends Microsoft's use of China-based support staff for DoD cloud

What next?

Are they going to find Russian nationals maintaining the nuclear arsenal?

Completely OK as long as a US Citizen is responsible for showing them to the silo canteen at lunchtime.

UK datacenter developers turn to gas rather than wait for grid power for builds

Re: Hmm

The £20bn wasted on smart-meters wasn't public money, it was paid for by electricity customers, as are all renewable subsidies, and picking up the debts of consumers and failed suppliers.

Techie fooled a panicked daemon and manipulated time itself to get servers in sync

Re: been there, done that ...

No a Raspberry Pi has a fake hardware clock which just stores the current time once per hour, and uses this when you boot.

If you look at the logs the first entry is always 17 minutes past the last hour it was up (unless you have changed the default settings).

China’s KylinOS Linux takes a great leap forward to v11 and kernel 6.6

Just in case anyone was wondering; LDME is Linux Mint Debian Edition.

Not quite as up to date as the standard Ubuntu based Mint, but provides some insulation against Ubuntu's next stupid idea leaking in.

FBI cyber cop: Salt Typhoon pwned 'nearly every American'

Re: I really hate phones.

I'm glad I'm not the only one noticing how enshittified touch keyboards have become.

It's happened to me twice; first with Swype which started off with almost telepathic abilities to recognise which word I was after, but slowly descended in to just randomly picking words from the dictionary. I moved to the Samsung keyboard which was never as good in the first place, but again degraded to the level that it can't even get the simplest words in under 6 tries.

Typing rather than swiping on on screen keyboards is magnitudes slower than the old T9 predictive text on physical number keys - that's today's idea of progress for you.

Re: If everybody is compromised

If the criminal asks you nicely to unlock the phone before taking it, with a gun to your head, are you going to refuse?

That gun toting criminal possibly wont be versed in cybercrime, but he will sell the unlocked phone on to someone who is.

Older developers are down with the vibe coding vibe

Far better to just resign immediately, as who do you think they will be expecting to fix then hundreds of thousands of lines of AI slop that the clueless junior devs have added, a months down the line.

Five years – that's how long Anthropic will store Claude chats unless you opt out

Re: "unless you opt out"

The first place that opt-in should be honoured is on websites being scraped for the initial training data, and anyone doing the contrary should be put in jail for five years, per offence.

DHS says it needs $100M worth of counter-drone tech to protect America

Wind turbines make detecting commercial airliners more difficult, never mind tiny drones.

Google and Zed push protocol to pry AI agents out of VS Code's clutches

No wAI

I'll stick with vim.

Wastewater monitoring project could catch next pandemic early, says health agency

Re: You find what you search for

You are getting really boring, give us all a break.

Nvidia details its itty bitty GB10 superchip for local AI development

Maybe after the AI crash.

Nx NPM packages poisoned in AI-assisted supply chain attack

Re: In an ideal world without bad guys ...

Spot the trigger word.

^{(Clue; two letters)}

Intel pitches Clearwater Forest as a consolidation play for all you hoarding ancient Xeons

Re: Look who's innovating

For many of our workloads using AVX512 caused the chips to thermally throttle and perform worse than using AVX256, so I'm not surprised it isn't widely used.

Two scrubs, one Starship: Third time lucky for SpaceX?

Re: Bring back the core rope memory

John "steely-eyed missile man" Aaron.

Junk is the new punk: Why we're falling back in love with retro tech

Re: Please, for the love of all things non-AI

Get the DarkReader extension for both Firefox and Chrome - works a treat - including allow you to increase contrast and reduce brightness so it is actually white on black, not a sea of mid greys as most claim are dark mode.

Microsoft reportedly cuts China's early access to bug disclosures, PoC exploit code

Microsoft certainly seems to have been endearingly trusting traitorously negligent.

New Yorkers will soon be able to yell 'I'm walkin here!' to Waymo robotaxis

Waymo has their work cut out for them if they hope to emulate the authentic New York taxi experience: exotic odors and incomprehensible gibberish emanating from your average NYC hack driver combined with faulty meters and padding several extra miles to your destination. Good luck boys.

Aren't all those easily achieved by adding AI slop?

Well part from the oder, but maybe there will be a new ChatGPT model for that soon.

Trump's gold-plated smartphone can't seem to decide which design to copy

Vertu

What a shame Vertu went bust, they would have been the ideal company to turn to when you want some budget Android phone gold plated and flogged at massive markup.

Dwarf planet Ceres may have been habitable - for microbes - a couple of billion years back

Re: Nutrients

Beans not being any recognisable life-form of course.

Developer jailed for taking down employer's network with kill switch malware

Re: Can see why

And deleting stuff is ineffective, why not randomly introduce temporary faults in various systems, it might take years to work out what was causing vast amounts of lost productivity.

No forget that, they are a Microsoft shop and would never notice the difference.

AI crawlers and fetchers are blowing up websites, with Meta and OpenAI the worst offenders

Re: Rate limiting

Doesn't help if the requests are coming from thousands of different IP addresses in the crawler bot farm.

FydeOS offers ChromeOS without the Google strings attached

Re: Honestly...

Assuming the Chinese government isn't interested in something is an incredibly naive view.

Perplexity's Comet browser naively processed pages with evil instructions

Re: "AI" !== "Intelligence"

Good points, but you seem to be under the impression LLMs are going to get better - they wont - they will just add a few more sticking plasters to known issues, which will be easily bypassed, as the technology is fundamentally broken in concept, design and implementation.

AI skeptics zone out when chatbots get preachy

Re: Show your work...

tl;dr AI FO

Vision AI models see optical illusions when none exist

Re: Incorrect inference

Everyone got used to saying "oh yes I see it now" during that stereogram fad. I could never see them, but saying that did make the person take the picture away to go bother someone else.

NASA starts bolting together Artemis III rocket for 2027 Moon shot

Re: Should SpaceX test far more than putting a Starship in orbit?

So it's more of an Apollo 13 flightpath, but hopefully without the drama.

Python survey shows growth even as Foundation funding falters

Re: I've dabbled with Python on Linux mint

It will be a Python 2 program, and Python 2 is no longer installed by default on most distros. It is usually still possible to still install the last version Python 2.7, but it is a better idea to install the 2to3 tool and convert your old Python 2 code to Python 3, so it will run straight out of the box again.

Re: Slow

PyCharm doesn't suffer from any lag on Linux either.

Whatever platform you are using ensure it has sufficient memory, I've got three projects open and it's status bar is displaying 2029 of 3100MB. Also keep the number of plug-ins down to what is essential (dark theme, pylint, line profiler), and never ever use any 'AI' feature.

Latest Windows 11 insider builds hide secret File Explorer dark mode

Re: Microsoft Kwallitee

Maybe if Microsoft dug out an actual programmer to do the dark mode changes, instead of letting an intern keep trying AI prompts, they could do simple things like change button colours.

August update leaves Windows reset and recovery dead in the water

Re: Windows Fail

Windows updates are like playing Russian roulette with a machine gun.

Microsoft crams Copilot AI directly into Excel cells

Is nothing sacred?

Replacing mathematical equations with AI slop, death take me now.

Is nothing sacred?

Replacing mathematical equations with AI slop, death take me now.

Workday warns of CRM breach after social engineers make off with business contact details

Sophisticated attack?

Companies suffering a breach as the result of a social engineering attack should be forced to publish the recording of the call, so we can judge just how sophisticated it was.

I suspect not very at all.

Linux is about to lose a feature – over a personality clash

Re: humans, can't live with them, can't live without them

If you have valid points to make, don't devalue to post by quoting an AI.

Reckon you can put a nuclear reactor on the Moon?

Re: Hang on ....

Build a railway around the Moon

You are going to need an awful lot of space-navvys.

The plan for Linux after Torvalds has a kernel of truth: There isn’t one

And lets not forget the forced reboot(s) on every one, unlike Linux.

If they only did updates once a month, say on a Tuesday, it would only have half the bugs and be twice as secure.

Re: Microkernel

Any government using Microsoft products has far larger things to worry about than abstract arguments about kernel architectures.

Why the UK public sector still creaks along on COBOL

Re: A fools errand

What's COBAL if not a high level language?

If you mean a more widely used language today, will it still be the case by the time that code is as old as the COBAL is now?

Tsunami forecasting about to get a lot faster thanks to El Capitan super

Just "seek help" is appropriate for that poster.

Fortinet discloses critical bug with working exploit code amid surge in brute-force attempts

737 Max?

Latest Windows patches cause false alarm error to appear in event viewer

Re: That's a shame

I almost missed the irony there!

CoreWeave CFO: $25B raised in debt and equity in 18 months

Re: Core weave

I can't really tell the difference between CoreWeave's business model and a Ponzi scheme, but that's not surprising if they've come from the similarly scams of crypto world.

OpenAI's GPT-5 looks less like AI evolution and more like cost cutting

Re: C'mon, El Reg!

Now, MXFP4 is like having a tiny box with only 16 colours, but they're the most important ones - you can still draw a decent picture, it just won't have every single shade. The "MX" bit means it's Microsoft's special recipe for making their AI chips go faster without completely ballsing up the calculations.

Or rather than 65536 colours of BF16, MXFP16 is 16 crayons, and Microsoft have decided most of them are brown.

Re: The less reasoning the models are doing

Also why are the models described as "thinking and non thinking"? They don't think.

It is as wrong and frankly as downright offensive as the words "vegan cheese".