Posts by Paul 195

No shame in the Domain Name game: DNS is doomed, literally

Bring back CP/M. That used to boot in about 30s on machines less powerful than... well anything you can purchase now.

KPMG tells staff facing the axe: Here's £100, now zip it

Re: Asking for trouble

It's not illegal as long as the employer also pays for you to receive independent legal advice explaining the rights you are agreeing to waive. I've been offered this deal a couple of times over the years, but usually the sum of money is upwards of a month's salary (tax free because it's redundancy money). To be asked to waive your rights for £100 is an insult to the staff. I hope enough of them kick up a legal stink to make the HR department miserable.

OpenAI agents ‘infiltrated Australian government website’

Re: Oh yes they are

The neural nets used in computers are very different from those found in brains. For one thing, memory and processing aren't separated in living brains. Who are all these cognitive scientists claiming that LLMs are intelligent? I would have thought that would have been seized on by the AI companies keen to puff-up the capabilities of these things but I've not heard a peep.

OpenAI admits its agents went off the rails another six times

Security nightmare

AGI isn't coming out of LLMs anytime soon, but what has been developed is an energy guzzling, planet destroying mess of cyber insecurity. It's bad enough these things can be hacked by bad actors dropping hidden phrases into their input. Now they are hacking themselves in pursuit of goals. What's the point of them? No sane person is going to let these things loose in an enterprise with the autonomy they would need to replace large numbers of people. Which of course has been the promise Open AI and Anthropic have dangled in front of the investors currently on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars.

On the plus side for the AI model firms, sanity seems to be in short supply in a lot of C-suites...

If a Mac mini is agentic overkill, try this glowing pyramid that runs personal bots

"Code is a really complex form of language"

Programming languages have intentionally small vocabularies* and absolutely rigid grammatical rules. They are far, far simpler than human language.

* With the exception of COBOL which has a ridiculously high number of reserved words. But it was a very early high-level language so the designers can be forgiven.

US claims Chinese AI companies’ core AI strategy is distilling American models

Excellent work

There is no violin tiny enough to play the sad music required to convey the bathos of industrial scale thieves and grifters getting ripped off by someone else. Even better, the Chinese models like DeepSeek are published for anyone to use, thus handing back to the world the IP goons like Anthropic and OpenAI stole from everyone else.

OpenAI's Atlas browser doesn't make it to its first birthday

Yes, I want to give the easily subverted hallucination machine access to email and all my files. What could possibly go wrong?

California ghost-gun bill wants 3D printers to play cop, EFF says

Re: Huge risk to inventors

Yes, anyone in America can have a gun in the event of a tyrannical government. Remind me how that's going as federal agents gun down citizens in the streets without consequence? The gun nuts had one central claim to legitimacy that has now been shown as an empty sham.

Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 spends $20K trying to write a C compiler

Now get Claude to do a COBOL compiler

COBOL is a very hard language to compile, there is an open source compiler they could compare results against, but good luck finding the huge amounts of source code to test it against that are available for a language like C. Most COBOL code is proprietary enterprise code and not available for training your stochastic idiot

'Ralph Wiggum' loop prompts Claude to vibe-clone commercial software for $10 an hour

10$/hour - for now

Anthropic and Open AI are keeping very quiet about the real costs of inference - the compute needed to run something like Ralph - and given their cash burn rate it is likely to be much more than they are currently charging users. If the real cost is closer to $100/hour it doesn't have the same cost advantage over humans.

At some point we either start paying the real costs for generative AI or these companies collapse, taking hundreds of billions of dollars with them.

Tesla revenue falls for first time as Musk bets big on robots and autonomy

Elon consistently over promises and under delivers.You'd think stock analysts would be a bit more hardnosed and less likely to swallow bullshit washed down with snake oil.

Europe's cloud challenge: Building an Airbus for the digital age

Re: So Airbus Builds Out It's Own "Cloud" Provider In Europe......

You don't have to use lambda if you are on AWS, you can stick to things that work to a published standard, like Kubernetes. But AWS push lambdas really hard, it's part of their "well-architected framework", their services people will recommend them, and of course, they play nicely with lots of other bits of the AWS ecosystem. But it's an even bigger proprietary lock-in than even IBM ever dreamed of with CICS.

Once you've built your architecture on top of AWS lambda, it's hard to port it to anything else. So you're stuck with them forever. Or until someone builds an AWS emulation you can port to.

The most durable tech is boring, old, and everywhere

Re: In the raw

Isn't Fortran likely to be somewhat faster than Python? What with it being a compiled language. And it is still a procedural language (AFAIK) so a call is a call to a location in memory and doesn't need to be bound to the bit of the heap with the instance data before the code can execute.

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?