Posts by Jaybus

American coders are most likely to use AI

Re: Some niggling details missing from that paper

I too call bs. This is like a Bayesian spam filter being trained by a corpus of ED drug spam versus a corpus of ED drug ham, then using it to attempt to detect fake invoice spam.

DHS warns of sharp rise in Chinese-made signal jammers it calls 'tools of terrorism'

Literally millions of people crossed the US-Mexico border illegally in recent years with little to no vetting. If 0.1% were criminals intent on organized crime sprees in the US, then still there are thousands of them. Trump or no Trump, it is not so hard to believe, They're pirates, essentially, who used the influx of refugees as cover for criminal incursions into the US. The very criminals that the refugees were fleeing from followed them in. I would say there are very few US citizens using these, actually, and the spike is likely due to organized crime use.

America’s consumer watchdog drops leash on proposed data broker crackdown

Does it even matter?

Without the rules, we have data brokers selling info on any who are willing to give it up in order to use apps of limited usefulness with zero consequences. With the rules, data brokers would have the same consequences for selling info, generally inaccurate info, as credit bureaus, which is to say zero consequences.

Judge puts two-week pause on Trump's mass government layoffs

Re: And when the government ignore the ruling ...

Sounds it, unless of course it turns out to be a bogus order. It is really not clear that a district judge can usurp executive powers through injunctions without even making a ruling and without even hearing opposing arguments. Hiring and firing are clearly executive powers granted solely to the president, not to Congress, and certainly not to unelected judges. Obviously, if any EO can be stopped by any district judge, then it will be Republican judges doing the same to the next Democratic president, etc., etc., meaning the more partisan judges are running the country, and God help us all.

Trump admin freaks out over mere suggestion Amazon was going to show tariff impact on prices

Re: America

Examples? Because I haven't noticed it. I would think if 10s of millions of white supremacists in America, things would be far worse and it would be very obvious....and half of them are women, btw.

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

Re: Clearance?

I believe the big shove from DOGE is intended to iron out the legalities. There is supposed to be a separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers. Congress is to make the laws, not execute them or usurp the authority to execute them from the president. One of those executive powers (executive decisions) that Congress is not authorized to make is the staffing of the executive branch agencies, including hiring and sacking federal employees. Congress has, over the past several decades, decided to create "independent" executive branch agencies with directors having employment terms longer than that of a single president and that can only be sacked for cause. So, Congress created executive branch agencies that are not directed by the elected head of the executive branch. Keep in mind that of 2.3 million executive branch personnel, there are exactly 2 who are elected. If neither the president nor Congress (ie. the elected government) is in charge of these agencies, then who is?

Strap in, get ready for more Rust drivers in Linux kernel

No header files?

How would dynamically linked libraries be used without header files? If only source files were used, then all builds would be static. I don't know if that could be considered a step forward.

Ex-NSA grandee says Trump's staff cuts will 'devastate' America's national security

Chicken little said so

The staffing at CISA was increased by over 1300 (a 25% increase) since 2022 by the Biden administration. Cutting that back by 140 is not going to cause the sky to fall.

Trump administration threatens tariffs for any nation that dares to tax Big Tech

Re: Anti-fines not just anti-taxes

You think Vance and/or Musk enabled the CDU to win Germany's election? I don't suppose, in both the USA and Germany, that failed socialist agendas and open borders had anything to do with it.

Trump can't quickly or easily kill the CHIPS Act, but he can fire the workers funded by it

Re: What?

Perhaps it is simpler than that. What if even more of the CHIPS Act money can flow to TSMC, etc. by reducing the overhead? We are, after all, talking about government agencies, the most inefficient workforce on the planet. I wonder if anyone will notice, other than the poor sots losing their jobs.

Re: The Trump administration’s plans for the future of NIST are not clear.

Hmmm. Last year he was deemed finished, perhaps even headed for prison. Now he is PUTUS again. Underestimate Trump at your own peril.

Trump admin's purge of US cyber advisory boards was 'foolish,' says ex-Navy admiral

Re: So long, & thanks for the fish.

That one from 2016 doesn't work any longer. Trump won the popular vote too in 2024.

Re: We ignore the true reason

I guess you have not seen any mainstream US media lately?

Re: Is 'learnings' a word?

"What did the Romans do for us?"

Oh, you know, paved roads, bridges, aqueducts, written law, grapes, apples, figs, chickens, sewage systems, indoor plumbing, central heating......just trifles.

Google Maps to roll out Trump-approved Denali and Gulf of Mexico rebrands

Nobody cares

In the southern US, we don't call it the Gulf of Mexico, ordinarily. We just call it "the gulf". When it is renamed to the Gulf of America, we will still call it "the gulf".

Zuck takes a page from Musk: Meta dumps fact-checkers, loosens speech restrictions

What fact checking

If the fact checking was working, then why are there so many FB profile pics over a decade old?

Quantum? No solace: Nvidia CEO sinks QC stocks with '20 years off' forecast

Re: Sounds good!

"Of course the question is: which QC company will it be?"

Probably one that hasn't started up yet.

Trump China tariffs to 'overshadow' the 'progress' of AI PCs

Re: There are other countries in the world....

Yes, I'm sure it must be Trump's fault that they can't sell the onboard AI that nobody wants. I think corporate execs like Trump because he provides a readily available excuse each time their business decisions turn out to be disastrous.

Cruise shutdown blastzone increases – Microsoft takes $800M charge

Well, if it takes intelligence to drive a car, then why is there no IQ test for obtaining a driving license?

systemd begrudgingly drops a safety net while a challenger appears, GNU Shepherd 1.0

Re: 42% less unix philosophy

For the second line, shouldn't that be "It Guile in code me maketh"?

Police arrest suspect in murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO, with grainy pics the only tech involved

Re: > armies of lawyers

A nice anti-capitalist rant, but I'm afraid that income tax was implemented in the US in 1913. Could be the doubling of the US total wealth during the 1920's have been BECAUSE of capitalism?

Rust haters, unite! Fil-C aims to Make C Great Again

It is true. The malloc() call itself almost never fails. The problem lies not in allocation, but in later use. For example, consider the string.h functions that return a pointer, strcat() and friends. It is the perfect function if you want to implement a buffer overflow. To mitigate the situation, strncat() was created to limit the size of the src buffer, but forces the coder to calculate n such that sizeof(dst) >= strlen(dst) + n + 1. At least strncpy() prevents an endless overwrite should the src string not be nul-terminated, but it lacks the bounds check on dst. As a result, strlcpy() was created to specify the size of the dst buffer in order to prevent the buffer overflow and to guarantee dst is nul-terminated. Yay! Except, it didn't retain strncpy()'s src string length limit, and if src is not nuul-terminated, then a missed terminating null byte might copy the keys to the kingdom into the src string and subsequently publish them on the Internet.

Oh, but the malloc() worked flawlessly.

Congress to Commerce: Sanction more Chinese chip firms to stop Huawei's evasion

Re: Only going to slow

Like all Chinese companies, the CCP is embedded in their corporate structure. Since the CCP has great influence on all Chinese companies, it is not surprising that they would coerce other Chinese companies into getting semiconductor manufacturing equipment to Huawei by any means necessary.

It's not just the US. China is the largest telecom market in the world, and the PRC severely restricts entrance into that market by Erickson, Samsung, or Nokia. At the same time, the PRC heavily subsidizes Huawei in an effort to undermine other telecom manufacturers and control the market outside of China.

The billionaire behind Trump's 'unhackable' phone is on a mission to fight Tesla's FSD

Yes. We would never see something like heartbleed if the source were published.....Oh Wait!

Cards Against Humanity campaigns to encourage voting, expose personal data abuse

Re: Link?

The button itself is removed now. It is actually illegal to pay someone to vote, or even to promise to vote, so I'm sure they got a visit from some nice people encouraging them to kindly remove the button.

China claims Starlink signals can reveal stealth aircraft – and what that really means

Other passive sources

Why rely on Starlink? There's always the sun for passive radiation "disturbance" detection, at least in daylight hours. It is more or less tracking its shadow, or well, somethings shadow, which tells them that something is there, somewhere in the sky.

Appeals court reanimates lawsuit accusing Meta of hiring bias against US citizens

I don't really believe it is the difference in pay, which is insignificant to Meta's bottom line, but rather that they are tethered to Meta by the visa. They can't just go to another company. They either work for Meta or are deported. Zuckerberg likes employees likes to wrap visas around employees' throats and tie them to their desk. The Romans chained slaves to the oars of their ships to enforce a similar loyalty.

Gates-backed nuclear plant breaks ground without guarantee it'll have fuel

" Vogtle Unit 3, the first nuclear power reactor to come online in the US this century"

That is just not true. Vogtle Unit 4 became operational 2 months ago. Watts Bar Unit 2 became operational in October 2016.

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

Re: I would love for Helion to succeed

Well it is good to be skeptical, as long as you don't harbor a belief that it is impossible. Unlike many things that investors waste their money on that we don't actually know whether or not they are possible, we absolutely know that nuclear fusion is a reality. An AI that will discover new insights into the physical world may or may not be possible, but nuclear fusion is a known possibility. So, it is down to discovering a method that works, and sooner or later someone will discover it. Be skeptical of Helion, not of the possibility of fusion power. A half a century is but a blink of the eye in the timeline of paradigm shift events.

FYI... Renewable energy sources behind 30% of the world's electricity in 2023

Re: Electricity or energy?

Finally, a perpetual motion machine.

Microsoft, Google do a victory lap around passkeys

It is because passkey is a strange name for the thing. It is really a system using public key cryptography. The website only stores the public key. The private key never leaves the client device. The biometrics or PIN also never leave the device. They are just used to unlock the private key.

Open Source world's Bruce Perens emits draft Post-Open Zero Cost License

Re: It would be nice to fix IBM/RedHat

My fear is that this creates an environment where developers are motivated to focus on the needs of those >USD$5M/year companies, while the needs of small companies and individuals become.....less relevant.

Senate passes law forcing ByteDance to sell off TikTok – or face a US ban

Re: OK, let's follow this through then..

None of those companies have board members appointed by the US government......ByteDance does. The US does not have a law compelling all companies and individuals to collaborate with state intelligence agencies......China does. If those two things happen in future to Microsoft, Adobe, Google, then it would be time for the EU to do something similar.

October 2025 will be a support massacre for a bunch of Microsoft products

A combination of Postfix, Dovecot, and NextCloud do the job nicely and would scale wonderfully on say AWS EC2 instances. Unfortunately, spammers have made it nearly impossible to get Amazon to grant you port 25 usage on EC2.

Pentagon launches nuke-spotting satellites amid Russian space bomb rumors

260 million? You are over 70 million short, even not counting illegal immigrants.

Amazon Ring sounds death knell for surveillance as a service

The police in the US do not need a warrant to ask. The app was perfectly legal and there was nothing wrong with police asking the owner via the app. I suspect the problem is in knowing if it is indeed the actual police doing the asking, a potential liability issue for Amazon.

NASA engineers scratch heads as Voyager 1 starts spouting cosmic gibberish

Re: Excelent design - aliens must be proud

Headline: Malicious code found in a popular JavaScript library allows hackers to pwn Voyager 23 and demand a record $100 billion ransom from NASA.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars in crypto stolen after Ledger code poisoned

Re: Dog bites man, water is wet, cryptocurrency operation is "hacked"

I don't know if I would call it butthurt. A bit uncomfortable maybe....at first.....but they'll come back for more.

Ofcom proposes ban on UK telcos making 'inflation-linked' price hikes mid-contract

Re: Hey, there's an idea...

Demand based inflation isn't caused by people having too much money. It is from people having too much credit. Interest rates are increased with the goal of decreasing inflation by decreasing the buying on credit.

But there is another type of supply-side inflation that is caused by there being too little of a needed commodity. For example, a shortage of diesel causes an increase in the cost of diesel, and so an increase in every commodity that requires diesel to make, ship, or store.This also includes gas used in electricity production, heating of facilities and office buildings, etc. Any shortage of energy supply is a big inflation driver, because it affects the price of everything everything that requires energy to make, ship, or store, which is....everything.

Brits turn off Twitter, although teens and tweens keen on generative AI

Re: The Twitter files.

"But when you boil it down, government officials DID ask various platforms not to carry certain third parties speech, they just didn't threaten adverse consequences."

Edit: Append ", or else they made the threat of adverse consequences clear offline so as to maintain plausible deniability."

HP sued over use of forfeited 401(k) retirement contributions

I'm not so sure. Many companies in the US invest the 401k funds immediately with no vesting period.

Bad eIDAS: Europe ready to intercept, spy on your encrypted HTTPS connections

Re: Not really the issue, is it?

Well, they already know what the issue is, they just oppose it. A great many people are against the new lax immigration laws.

You shouldn't be able to buy devices that tamper with diesel truck emissions on eBay, says DoJ

Re: This from a country

Well, that is quite misleading! There are online sales, but they don't ship directly to your door like Amazon, ffs. They are shipped to a licensed shop where ID and background check are required for pickup.

NASA wants to believe ... that you can help it crack UFO mysteries

AI Aliens

"the report suggests NASA's expertise in machine learning and data science will help ensure quality data gathering and analysis."

Yes, but can a generative AI detect a pic produced by another generative AI? The better the tech gets, the better the deep fakes.

Cloud is here to stay, but customers are starting to question the cost

I think the next industry offering will be MaaS, migration as a service, a turn-key service to automate cloud to on-premises migrations. Then we will have gone truly full circle.

Bombshell biography: Fearing nuclear war, Musk blocked Starlink to stymie Ukraine attack on Russia

Re: "If Ukraine wants to fight a war with Russia"

Mexico and Canada already have alliances with China??

The Anti Defamation League is Musk's latest excuse for Twitter's tanking ad revenue

Re: Beggars belief

Where is the evidence of this most well-known person's antisemitism, exactly? He does have a Jewish son-in-law, who he gave a position in his cabinet, despite protests about nepotism.

Re: They can both go away.

Out of which hand?

China's top EV battery maker announced a breakthrough, but top boffin isn't convinced

Re: I thought the US liked battery cars...!

Level 2 is the highest level possible at most homes in the US. Higher levels of chargers require 480 V mains, typically only used in businesses and large buildings..

Aspiration to deploy new UK nuclear reactor every year a 'wish', not a plan

Re: John Bull presents Little Englander Nuclear

It should be held as an economic axiom that we get less of what is taxed and more of what is subsidized. For example, if government began paying a subsidy for playing tennis, then many people with no real interest in the sport would begin playing for the money. If they raised the subsidy higher, then even more would play, and if high enough, then everyone who could walk would be playing. The more the subsidy, the more tennis gets played. By contrast, if a tax were levied on playing tennis, then many casual players would stop, felling that it wasn't worth it. If the tax were raised higher, even those who loved the game would no longer be able to afford it, and at some point only the rich and shameless would play. The higher the tax, the less tennis gets played.

Now consider that even with the subsidies, few EVs are being sold, really. How many would be sold if there were no subsidy? What was it Margaret Thatcher said, something about socialists always running out of other people's money?