Posts by Paul 195

Should UK.gov save money by looking for open source alternatives to Microsoft? You decide

Absolutely get practice with FOSS

FOSS is a good idea but isn't a drag and drop replacement for Microsoft. It would make a huge amount of sense for the government to start using FOSS to get the experience in what it can be useful for, what the limitations are, how you will manage support, etc. Part of the initiative should absolutely be bringing more IT expertise back in house to the civil service (which means paying closer to market rates for good people). Loss of IT expertise is how the government keeps getting bullied, cheated, and scammed by consultancies and commercial vendors.

Just rip out Microsoft and replace it with FOSS sounds attractive, but across such a huge estate would inevitably be very expensive, and cause outages and general chaos. A plan to erode the use of Microsoft slowly is more feasible and gives MS an incentive to start lowering prices.

Ransomware attack on food distributor spells more pain for UK supermarkets

Re: These are terrorist attacks and the response should be appropriate.

Keeping your patches up-to-date, zero trust networks, and above all, keeping an eye on the OWASP top ten would probably see off the majority of attacks. Air gapping your servers is just too hard these days and would actually make it harder for you to keep them patched,. But you can route all your access through proxies and use an allow list to determine what you can connect to.

Some English hospitals doubt Palantir's utility: We'd 'lose functionality rather than gain it'

Not only fascists, but also useless

Palantir was already a questionable partner for the NHS even before the Trump government. At this point any responsible UK government would be distancing vital services like the NHS as far as possible from a company whose leadership have questionable aims, and who are based in a country that can no longer be seen as a reliable ally. And unlike Microsoft, Palantir are unlikely to even make promises of following local law over US laws.

And now it turns out that what they are selling is functionally worse than the software already in use. And let's not forget that Peter Thiel is a fascist.

I don't know how many red flags that is, but it feels like a lot.

DoorDash sued for allegedly branding customer a fraudster after delivery photo query

One of those "I hope they both lose" cases.

Court filing: DOGE aide broke Treasury policy by emailing unencrypted database

Rows and Columns. It's a relational database table without an index or keys

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

Selective Vision

I do enjoy reading the comments of all those who believe that we are not facing a catastrophic problem with climate change. Particularly their dogged insistence that the only reason all these scientists are warning us about climate change is because of the huge climate change industry and the megabucks to be made from it.

All of which requires them to ignore the fact that the oil and gas companies, some of the wealthiest enterprises on the planet, have been willing to shovel cash at scientists willing to buck the consensus and say that everything is fine. And that it is at this point well-documented that the same oil and gas companies scientists posited nearly 50 years ago that C02 might drive damaging climate change. And did the research to back it up, only for that same research to have been concealed by the oil and gas companies who didn't want their business model ruined.

I mean, it takes a special type of clever to decide that the "climate change industry" is entirely driven by money, while ignoring the smoking elephant in the corner of the room.

Humans brought the heat. Earth says we pay the price

Re: I look forward to . . .

@Jellied Ell -You're obviously much cleverer and better informed than the people who have spent their lives researching climate and weather, with many ingenious explanations for why we should ignore those people, and the evidence of our own senses, that there is a problem here. And of course, it's always worth looking at the motives of people who make claims. You firmly believe that climate scientists are making this stuff up for money.

So what do you think is the motivation of the oil companies, whose own scientists predicted 40 years ago that burning fossil fuels would eventually cause climate problems, in suppressing their own research and funding obfuscation of the science with the kind of clever arguments you are using? Are you actually a shill for said oil companies, or just one of the people they hoodwinked?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032125000322

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64241994

You can find plenty of other articles about this, it won't be hard for someone with your galaxy sized brain.

In other words, the people who make the money out of fossil fuels have their own research indicating that burning said fuel is going to cause problems. And they've tried to suppress it, and to ridicule other people who've made the same discovery.

WFH with privacy? 85% of Brit bosses snoop on staff

Well...

I'm not surprised firms monitor the websites you visit if you are using company equipment or a company network. In fact, they'd probably be negligent if they didn't as who knows what might end up cached on office equipment if they didn't.

But none of the other types of monitoring mentioned is

!) Reasonable

2) Useful

3) Proportionate

And how much time is wasted looking at logs of employee activity trying to discern whether they are productive or not?

Garmin pulls a CrowdStrike, turns smartwatches into fancy bracelets

Re: Expecting it to "just work."

I wish I could remember who said it, but the quote "Technology is the name we give to stuff that doesn't quite work yet" remains as apposite as ever.

Trump nukes 60 years of anti-discrimination rules for federal contractors

Re: As a 'person of color'

In my experience, the person who might be criticised as the "DEI hire" is often better qualified than the white person. Because he or she had to work so much harder to get anywhere and could never take anything for granted.

"Along the way, through miscommunication and misguided implementations, diversity became a controversy, and so here we are."

Except all the talk about Diversity and DEI is a very wispy smokescreen for what they really want, which is unabashed white supremacy and a return to the good old days when racism was fine and people most definitely were not equal under the law. America has just elected its first ever fascist government.

AI datacenters putting zero emissions promises out of reach

Re: @Paul 195

Your choice of language is quite revealing of your prejudices. We get it. You don't believe that CO2 is a problem or that renewable energy is viable. Because god forbid that we should use energy sources that don't pollute or make us dependent on importing most of it from elsewhere. What a relief it must have been to you that war in Ukraine didn't cause everyone's energy bills to shoot up overnight.... oh wait...

Building nuclear power stations is a terrible option. They are expensive, take a long time to build, we don't know how to dispose of the waste material, and in terms of cost/kw are a long way behind solar which gets cheaper every year. The way to make renewables work as a viable and resilient energy option are:

1) Over supply on the generation side - the sun doesn't always shine, but the wind is always blowing somewhere even if it isn't blowing in a particular locality.

2) A much better grid so that power can be shifted from where it's being generated to where it's needed.

3) More storage capacity to smooth out peaks in generation vs peaks in demand. A smart grid and electric cars could actually help here as each car plugged in is a mobile power storage unit.

And the other thing to do, is to stop wasting energy on useless shit like crypto currencies and building ever larger LLMs with dubious benefits.

Apple shrugs off BBC complaint with promise to 'further clarify' AI content

Re: The BBC - hardly a paragon of virtue

So you are complaining about the BBC's inaccuracy by linking to the page where they list the errors they are aware of and correct them? Wouldn't it actually be quite nice if all news publishers provided this kind of aggregated detail about incorrect information, rather than reluctantly printing apologies in small print on page 9 in the hope no-one will notice?

Alphabet posts big revenue and profit growth, just 1,100 job losses

Re: This would explain...

"The CCP model"? AI is the capitalist's ultimate wet dream. No need to pay labour with its irritating demands for fair treatment and a share of the profits it helped create. Just ranks of obedient machines working without breaks, health care, or complaint. Exactly who is going to pay for the output once you've sacked all the peons is still kind of unclear. Fortunately for us, AI is so far of limited use for solving real world problems. The things it can do usefully and well aren't profitable enough to justify the vast sums of money being thrown at it; the things that would be profitable (replacing humans) are so far to risky given the general flakiness of generative AI. At some point the bubble will burst and it will make the Web 1.0 collapse ln 2001 ook small in comparison.

Red team hacker on how she 'breaks into buildings and pretends to be the bad guy'

Re: She doesn't fit the hacker stereotype

Plenty of women are interested in careers in technology but have such an awful time from men who can't believe a woman can be technically competent that they switch career direction. My spouse is one such. Admitttedly, her career as a real-time software dev started in 1989, but a lot of comment threads on el Reg lead me to believe that things haven't improved massively in the interim.

Having worked for a few years at a company that took the idea of diversity in hiring and promotion seriously, rather than just paying it lip service, I can tell you that I worked with several female engineers who were very talented, and because women have to work so hard to get taken seriously in software engineering roles I will say hand on heart that as a percentage I've met more mediocre and or incompetent male engineers than I have female ones.

Eric Schmidt: Build more AI datacenters, we aren't going to 'hit climate goals anyway'

AI Is a capitalist's wet dream

Or at least it would be if they could make it work, then they could get rid of all those irritating workers who want to be paid for the time, have holidays, be looked after when they're sick, and so on.

Fortunately, they can't make it work, which is just as well because the dystopian future where a handful of people have everything and the rest of the world has nothing will end in tears for everyone, oligarchs included.

Linus Torvalds declares war on the passive voice

Re: He's right, of course

It's of type *ouroboros

NASA's Astrobees need a new buzz – any ideas for the space-dwelling bots?

Re: Silent Running

Now I'm crying just thinking about the ending

Lebanon now hit with deadly walkie-talkie blasts as Israel declares ‘new phase’ of war

Re: Obviously this was planned as a two stage attack

There are actually well-established rules under international law, including those laid down by the Geneva Convention. If there were no rules, and no laws pertaining to the conduct of combatants in war, no-one would ever stand trial or be found guilty of war crimes. Israel already stands accused of a number of war crimes in relation to its recent conduct in Gaza, and the IHRC are also considering the charge of genocide.

The reason for these laws are to establish bounds to ensure the safe treatment of prisoners of war, and to limit atrocities against civilians. It's also worth pointing out that Israel isn't actually at war with Lebanon. The British government was rightly outraged when Putin had two of his political opponents assassinated in this country. Imagine the upset if he'd detonated hundreds of remote control radio devices to kill people he didn't like who were based in the UK. Israel's conduct is not only barbaric, but is also not for any serious long-term strategic purpose. It's to prolong and widen a war that is the only thing between Netanyahu being put in jail by his own people.

Re: Obviously this was planned as a two stage attack

Blowing up pagers is indiscriminate because you have no idea who will be nearby when you blow it up. You don't even know that your target will be holding it at the time. Which is why several children are reported casualties.

We can only hope this is added to the pile of war crimes that Netanyahu and his vile cronies are already accused of.

The future of AI/ML depends on the reality of today – and it's not pretty

I see you got downvoted by someone who didn't read your comment to the end.

CrowdStrike file update bricks Windows machines around the world

Re: Related?

To be fair, this one is not directly Microsoft's fault, it's Crowdstrike who've pushed something without adequate testing.

Self-driving cars safer in sunlight, twilight another story

Reading between the lines

It looks like self-driving cars are better at avoiding the kind of fender benders that happen in traffic where one vehicle runs into the back of another. That's great, but those are also the accidents that generally carry low risk of death or injury. It looks like they are far worse at avoiding the kind of accidents in more complex scenarios, and those are often the ones where someone gets hurt. Nearly twice as bad as people according to the research.

Please don't let these things loose on the roads in British and European towns and cities which are full of "complex scenarios" and far harder to navigate than typical US style grids where pedestrians are only legally allowed to cross the road in certain places. The accumulation of training data has already cost several lives in the US.

Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects

Re: Not much agile practice out there

You should hear the things people who really care about agile say about SAFe. Have you seen the size of the SAFe poster? How is that valuing people over process?

Not much agile practice out there

Over the last 20 years "agile" has come to mean any number of nonsense things, none of which lead to agility, and many of which lead to tears before bedtime. Time and again organizations adopt some bastardised form of scrum with certified agile practitioners to help them. Far from not creating requirements before starting the project, requirements are defined in advance, the end point is fixed, and then a dev team go through this charade of fixed length sprints of between 2 and 4 weeks long.

Stories are not broken down into small enough pieces, the room to change direction is limited, and the delivery increments are too big. The methodology pushed on the dev teams is too restrictive, retros aren't taken seriously, and (one of the things identified by this study), there isn't real psychological safety so that teams can challenge practices or directions that are failing.

See this article for more: https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/blog/why-your-agile-initiative-is-failing

OpenAI to buy electricity from CEO Sam Altman's nuclear fusion side hustle

Affordable fusion power

We already have access to a working fusion power generator* that costs us nothing. And the technology to turn its output into usable electric current has been getting steadily cheaper every year for a while now. Although the idea of cheap limitless energy is appealing, it's still looking like quite a long shot; unlike most engineering problems it seems that scaling down is the problem not scaling up. The biggest problem with renewables is energy storage for when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing; what kind of excellent energy storage technologies could be developed for a fraction of the investment in chasing the fusion unicorn?

* yes, I mean the sun.

UK PM Sunak calls election, leaving Brits cringing over memory of his Musk love-in

Re: Disappointing

"Just as the same dumb line 'there are no brexit benefits' falls at the first hurdle."

Please enumerate these brexit benefits for us. So that we have no excuse to keep saying "there are no brexit benefits".

Re: Disappointing

"The people have spoken"

That's generally how populist tyrants justify themselves. Here's a little reminder of the electoral statistics for Brexit:

48% against

52% in favour

on a 72% turnout. Which means 38% of the people of voting age at the time of the referendum voted in favour. Hardly a ringing endorsement from "the people" there. Subsequent polling suggests that 1 in 5 of those who voted leave now regret their decision.

We have yet to see a single concrete benefit from Brexit. Jacob Rees-Mogg when made minister of Brexit Benefits was unable to articulate anything beyond high wattage vacuum cleaners. Meanwhile, our rivers and coastal waters are now literally full of shit because the government changed water regulations due to the difficulty of obtaining purification chemicals in the post-Brexit regime.

Re: Disappointing

"Living in a bygone age of nostalgia"

Wasn't that precisely the problem with a lot of the people who voted for Brexit? Living in some warm fuzzy imagined past of mighty Great Britain ruling the empire and beating the nazis?

Transport watchdog's patience wears thin as Tesla Autopilot remedies may not be enough

Re: Me? A cynic?

I had a little bet with myself that someone would suggest an alternative spelling for cu*t

An aviation expert will correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't some of the early airbus planes lean too heavily into automation and they had to dial it back for causing the same problems as we see with Tesla software - it did too much causing pilots to disengage so that they then had problems resuming control when needed.

Software like Tesla autopilot is guaranteed to be dangerous. It works most of the time so drivers disengage. And then when it says "hey, I don't know what to do, help me out human", the human hasn't been maintaining context and hasn't got time to rebuild it.

The problem with this suggestion is that it assumes that all the self-driving vehicles only have to cope with other cars. But in the real world they need to cope with pedestrians, stray dogs, runaway prams etc. And the other problem with this suggestion is that lobbyists will argue that people, not cars, are the problem and we should have strict laws and segregation keeping them away from motor traffic.Which would make our cities even worse hellscapes than they already are.

If that seems improbable, here is your reminder that the US has jay-walking laws, legislating against people being able to cross roads, because of lobbying by motor manufacturers.

Re: Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore

You've absolutely put your finger on the problem with self-driving software; it can't imagine or predict. A good many years ago on a country road I saw what looked like a couple of firelfies up ahead (it was a pitch-black night, no street-lighting or moonlight). The weird cyclic motion confused me though until I came up with the accurate hypothesis that I could see the reflectors on pedals for a bicycle being ridden with no lights. I slowed down and was able to pass said cyclist safely. Presumably an FSD Tesla would have ploughed into him at 50 mph.

And then legions of fan boys would have said the cyclist deserved it for not having any lights. Well, doubtless the cyclist has some responsibility for his own safety, but equally car owners have a responsibility not to trust control of their death machine to a half-witted piece of software demonstrably not up to the task.

Re: Me? A cynic?

Touchscreen controls are the worst. I've had several rentals where the heating/cooling controls were only accessible by touch screen, Which is not where you want them when you are hurtling down the autobahn and you've realised that you need more heating. They're a nasty cost-saving measure and objectively less safe than old fashioned knobs, switches and levers which you can work by touch alone.

None of which stopped another Tesla fanboy on a social media thread I was in from insisting that anyone who objected to them was a luddite who didn't understand technology.

I've got Tesla's new marketing slogan:

I came for the car, but I stayed for the cult.

Belgian beer study acquires taste for machine learning

Posting only to use this icon

I mean, I don't drink alcoholic drinks so it's the only excuse I'll ever have.

The federal bureau of trolling hits LockBit, but the joke's on us

Isn't telemetry an important part of knowing when someone is trying to hack you?

Apple's Titan(ic) iCar project is dead as self-driving dream fails to materialize

Re: I don't get it either

Lexus and some Toyotas do that too. It actually feels very natural once you've got used to it. But I nearly dislocated my knee pushing down hard on a non-existent pedal when I was driving my spouse's vehicle.

Turns out level 5 is hard

A few years back we were always being told that self-driving cars were just around the corner (ho ho). I was sceptical then because it looked to me like all the successful testing was being done in relatively simple environments, and nothing as complicated as say London or Paris. For one thing, in busy areas with a mix of cars and pedestrians, the humans in the process will negotiate the space by making eye contact and using other non-verbal cues. Machines can't do that yet.

For self-driving vehicles to be viable, you would have to further restrict freedoms for pedestrians, and manufacturers would lobby for exactly that.

In fact history would repeat itself: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26073797 . I drive, but I find the idea that people's freedom in urban environments should be curtailed for the convenience of the car lobby rather dystopian.

Re: I don't get it either

I learned to drive manual, did it that way for 20 years but eventually switched to automatic after owning a manual Saab with a heavy clutch that was tiring to drive in heavy traffic. Manual gearboxes are not an option if you are driving hybrid (which I am these days) or electric. I don't miss manual gearboxes and when I hired a van with manual gears recently spent an upsetting three minutes trying to make the f***ing thing go into reverse as every manufacturer does that just differently enough to make it confusing. In this case the trick was liffting up a neat little ring partway down the gearstick.

ChatGPT starts spouting nonsense in 'unexpected responses' shocker

I'm probably way out on the timescales. But I was too lazy and in too much of a hurry to look for the right answer. I probably should have asked chatgpt.

One human can explain the reasoning for its answers to another human. The machines can't do that. Humans are far more debuggable right now because we have 50,000 years of learning to understand each other.

Just as far away as before

For most of my life, experts have been saying that we are "about 20 years away from AI". In that time, we've seen a number of goals achieved: "play chess as well a a person", "play go as well as a person", "recognize a picture of a cat" and in every single case, it turns out that AI (or AGI is it is now called) remains as far away as ever.

Lots of excitement last year when it looked like Chat GPT and the cohort of LLMs could finally pass a Turing test. And yet, it looks like AI is as far away as ever. The biggest advance would appear to be that we don't understand exactly how the new models work any better than we understand how our own cognition works. So, yay, the experts have built systems they don't understand and can't predict.

The biggest clue that LLMs don't replicate human intelligence is the wild disparity in power consumption for both training and running the models. The human brain works its miracles on less than 100W. Good luck doing anything in an LLM with that kind of power draw.

With the confidence of someone who is not an expert, I predict that LLMs will be another blind alley in the search to replicate human level intelligence, although they look like they will have a number of useful applications.

Forcing AI on developers is a bad idea that is going to happen

Re: "JetBrains' own developers are, well, developers"

I've been a developer working for a software vendor producing IDEs (it wasn't Jetbrains BTW). And I've also spent the last few years as a consultant developer working with enterprises to produce the sort of business software that the world runs on.

Those two groups developers view the world through very different lenses. The developers in the first group are smart talented people who like to do interesting things and are always trying to find ways to make their product better. But they live in an ivory tower, they aren't allowed to meet customers often, and sometimes they can run off in weird directions. The second group of developers have a mess of bureaucracy, process, and governance to deal with. Their world is very different.

To the first group of devs, sticking a bit of AI in there gives them fun work to do, and they think of all the ways it might make their own job easier.

For the second group of devs, as the article points out, the AI is a potential governance nightmare.

All I'm saying is, don't just blame management for this one.

Microsoft seeks Rust developers to rewrite core C# code

Re: Quite a statement of intent

Moore's law is no longer reliably delivering exponential performance increases from hardware, but the amount of stuff we want to run on computers goes up every year. At this point moving back from the abstract machine runtimes of C# and Java to native code looks like a savvy move to slow down datacenter's ceaseless appetite for electricity. I expect Rust and Golang to start creeping up the language charts as enterprises realise they can do more with less by switching to "faster" languages. GraalVM is a convincing attempt to do the same for the Java world.

Add bacteria to the list of things that can run Doom

But how...

Do you get the bugs out of code running on bacteria?

OpenAI's GPT-4 finally meets its match: Scots Gaelic smashes safety guardrails

Re: Getting 'Dangerous' Info from GPTx

I think the wider point is not whether this example is useful or not, it's that the protections built into LLMs are so easily bypassed. Putting these systems to work in the real world brings a whole category of brand new, hard to mitigate, set of vulnerabilities to software. None of these have made the OWASP top ten yet, but they are not going to be as easily fixed as perennial favourites like SQL injection and CSRF.

How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu

Re: Corruption

"1000s of terminals" are no longer a thing. These days nearly every large system actually runs over the web (not necessarily the public one), meaning that there are no terminals or dedicated network to maintain. Your delivery channel is just part of the regular IT infrastructure for any business. This usually applies even when the backend is IBM and CICS. You can deliver a green screen on a PC, but usually you've replaced it wth a prettified front end delivered over https.

Broadcom ditches VMware Cloud Service Providers

Re: The End

Kubernetes is how you orchestrate the containers running your applications.

VMware is how you orchestrate the VMs running your Kubernetes cluster.

NHS England published heavily redacted Palantir contract as festivities began

It's hard to think of a corporation I would trust less with my sensitive health data than Palantir, a company that does business with intelligence services all over the world, and that was founded by far-right supporter and all around bad egg Peter Thiel.