* Posts by teknopaul

1525 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Mar 2011

UK court says Chinese operation must sell Scottish chip biz stake without delay

teknopaul

Re: Government logic.

Given that The USA is in cahoots with Putin to hand him chunks of Europe in return for personal loans to a corrupt president who avoided impeachment because it is a vote not a legal process...

Maybe we should think a bit more carefully about who the "enemy" is in decisions of national security.

China is Trump's enemy (since he wants to reclasify Putin as a friend, and needs an enemy of some sort) it's not clear to me that China is anything but a good trading partner to the rest of us.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion is not an illusion, but it soon might be

teknopaul

Re: So US corps will do what they always do

Anything Trump's says or does about DEI should be taken in the context that he called an elected official running for office a DEI hire.

Trump thinks DEI is giving "the blacks" (his terminology, not mine) paid work that should be given to white people. He makes very little attempt to hide it.

Oxford researchers pull off quantum first with distributed gate teleportation

teknopaul

Re: Physics A Level

86% fidelity is irrelevant: the young boffins have proved they know their stuff, and are guaranteed a job as a result.

Congrats.

Microsoft open sources PostgreSQL extensions to muscle in on NoSQL

teknopaul

Hmmm

Re "inevitable second migration when performance, scale, and flexibility hit a wall."

Every accusation is an admission of guilt.

MongoDB was famously not very fault tolerant. Originally.

I know a few projects that got rewrites to SQL because of this.

Scale and perf and flexibility are easier in a relational db imho.

Just creating tables with indexable columns and JSON blobs will usually suffice.

Rarely will thus be worse that MongonDB.

If you are reading all the json your perf will not work on any system. If data is indexed properly searches will always be simple and fast.

Personally I find the SQL api easier to write, and easier to see which code will perform well and which won't.

DeepSeek's iOS app is a security nightmare, and that's before you consider its TikTok links

teknopaul

Re: Free orgasms with each exfiltration

To be quite frank it are not if my Deepseek questions are read by tiktok the chinese government or any body. I presume anyone with security sensitive quesican use an api. Doubt many iPhone users will be asking Deepseek anything sensitive.

UK Home Office silent on alleged Apple backdoor order

teknopaul

This is not new

UK have had powers to force individuals and companies to snoop and prevents them from talking about the request for many years.

Even before the snoopers charter.

I'm supprised this request has leaked.

only new thing here is that Apple customers are rich people, shock horror.

Mixing Rust and C in Linux likened to cancer by kernel maintainer

teknopaul

Re: Not magical thinking

Rust has unsafe for this reason, if you believe you are better than the compile time checks just mark your code unsafe so everone else knows the risk you are taking and the impact it might have on their code.

I've written quite a bit of code in many languages, rust is frustrating at the start. But in the end you find that that 99 times out of 10 rustc was right and you own code was wrong. Very occasionally you want some shared memory access that you know is safe and the compiler doesn't. Usually you find even the as you build more around this code the compile time checks we're worth it.

Particularly with test code. It's too tempting to think this a test it doesn't matter. Then when it finally breaks you find yourself debugging nasty stuff in scrappy code. That just doesn't happen in rust.

teknopaul

Re: Not magical thinking

A friend started a project in the place I work where the (consultants) team decided it did not matter what lang or tool añwas used as long as it worked.

10 years later we are still suffering from the fallout of that one year projects mess.

Some has been gridginly maintened at high cost. Some of the code that worked doesn't anymore and no-one knows how to fix it. So it's getting a rewrite eventually.

Bit rot is real. All code must be maintained (or money spent isolating it) continuously or it dies.

teknopaul

Re: "it would suck"

Rust can't react to out of memory errors. Last time I checked. I always thought that made it incompatible with kernel work.

when you hit oome I rsut code you have to kill the process. Can't even panic. I don't see how that would work in kernel code.

killing a driver for a fitbit is one thing. But other drivers would need to gracefully handle oome.

Google: How to make any AMD Zen CPU always generate 4 as a random number

teknopaul

Re: if trust is a true issue

Surprised you got down voted.

It true everyone develops on the cloud for good reasons, so this stuff is important, but if you have even a medium sized system to run, building your own with open tools makes financial sense, isn't that hard, and shields you from almost all of the security issues that are surfacing nowadays.

Real remote execs that can by pass firewalls and a layered architecture do happen, but are few and far between.

As in this case the likes of Google give shops a decent window to apply patches before releasing details to the the wild.

Where I work, we get hit harder by vulns in off the shelf kit than in anything we do ourselves.

Arm gives up on killing off Qualcomm's vital chip license

teknopaul

Way to trash your brand!

So if a start-up works with Arm,

Arm expects their work to be deleted if when they get purchased? Unless they are purchased by a mega corp with deep pockets for lawyers.

Sueing your own customers is a strange tactic.

Pushes startups to risk V.

Im sure on a UK website this will get voted down. But to me, it looks like mangelment lotechs damaging the work of the hitechs,

and pointless legal battles proving the value of open-source in biz.

Oracle starts laying mines in JavaScript trademark battle

teknopaul

Re: EcmaScript

Let be honest, the Java in JavaScript is just confusing.

Oracle owning Java did nothing but damage both brands.

Oracle owning Java Script does nothing but damage Oracles brand

Nowt wrong with calling it EcmaScript, or just JS.

People call executables exes.

PHP files are called peeaichpee.

I don't see a problem with migrating to "js" pronounced jayess as the official name. A lot of people do it already.

I doubt there are any projects with JavaScript in the project title over js.

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

teknopaul

The only hardware question

The only hardware question that matters (can't it run Linux) now applies equally well to Os.

How good is Linux on virtualbox or whatever you prefer.

WSL improvements.

Wine contributions,

unfuck docker in windows,

Dynamic ram allocation across Linux and Windows

All might make me upgrade.

Very little else.

Not because I am a fanbois. But because all we do is deployed on Azure on Linux or Google or Amazon or Docker. As a company nothing we do runs on windows any more.

When we did write windows apps, for ourselves and customers, each major version from Redmond caused headaches.

So we don't.

China sticks antitrust probe into Google amid retaliation for Trump import tariffs

teknopaul

Re: Why Google?

The big one is Google play. All notifications to android go via play.

or Huawei have a solution. I suspect out com of this will be more apps in Huawei stores

FBI's secret UFO hunters fear Trump's January 6 purge will send them into orbit

teknopaul

Drones

I imagine most unidentified flying objects these days are drones.

Something fishy is going on in the US with these drones people see. Imho it's US big Corp in league with govt trying to catch up China on drone tech by setting up a certification program that oh look only Américan companies have completed. Because they didn't tell DJI is was about to happen.

US is not the economic powerhouse it was: they have to cheat to stay competitive.

OpenAI, Microsoft urge judge to toss out Musk's 'fact-free' lawsuit

teknopaul

Re: Not a comment on the merits or lack thereof but this might have legs

Musk sat on two boards too, until he threw his toys out of his pram.

I.e. While Maybe a valid point, Musk is not in a good position to argue that.

Not being able to be on the boards of competing companies affects the super rich y more than anyone else. When he buys a stake he buys a big one.

DeepSeek or DeepFake? Our vultures circle China's hottest AI

teknopaul

Re: Aren't they all deepfakes?

Deepseek is not just a LLM. This is the point. It does some attempt at reasoning. US offering s arejust LLMs that sounds well spoken but happily recommends one cig per day.

I suspect that some people in the US like the fact that LLMs repeat the most common lie.

Chinese option arriving that at least attempts to reason, threatens their hemegony on the sort of "truth" that requires doublethink to believe.

<conspiracy />

China's Salt Typhoon recorded top American officials' calls, says White House

teknopaul

Yeah, so the story is: illegal wiretapping of our own citizens we were doing, who happen to be top political figures, got stolen by someone else due to our own crap security?

I guess we have to hope that they were not recording anything important.

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

teknopaul

Re: I wonder

I'd guess he's not a nut job.

Presumably his days are numbered and he wants everyone to know why.

Linus Torvalds: 90% of AI marketing is hype

teknopaul

Co2

Worst thing about the hype cycle is the energy waste.

Crytpo was a huge percentage of human energy. All for nothing.

Aí likely to be more than Crytpo and not even make money

Huawei makes divorce from Android official with HarmonyOS NEXT launch

teknopaul

Millions of apps

Many apple apps are just websites that can't work in safari because US has bigger political issues at home.

I'd love to replace apps with bookmarks again

Boeing again delays the 777X – the plane that's supposed to turn things around

teknopaul

Fun fact

The best hope capitalism has of some competition in the airplane market instead of the current duopoly: is the communist state run Chinese alternative!

Those that pretend to believe in capitalism should try it

teknopaul

Entirely predicted

It's almost as if monopoly based croneyism isn't working.

The profit motive doesn't work if you have golden parachutes. Economically speaning, capitalism argues, you need the stick and the carrot at the top. It's not just unfair, but it zdoesn't work_ if there is no stick at the top.

Booing is a classic example of capitalism done wrong. It's doomed to fail. It already has. People being dead is fail.

Ifs it boing I ain't going, check the timetables and take the bus

AI agent promotes itself to sysadmin, trashes boot sequence

teknopaul

Re: Not so sure about this....

Aí ops is a whole series of disasters waiting to happen.

Recently had a play with AI coding "make me a yaml parser" . Amazing how confidently it responds with junk and even included a test that failed. Talked to it a bit to correct things but it just got worse and worse, like a junior dev adding layers of shit to a broken codebase.

Expect more of that too!

Cisco slashes thousands of staff, 7% of entire workforce, pivots into AI

teknopaul

How ay the lads

After persuading the US and Europe not to let Huawei compete: Switchzilla can probably afford to sack 7% of their knowledge and trundle on with the helm manned by robots.

At least until 6G, or similar, makes them look behind the times again.

GitHub rolls back database change after breaking itself

teknopaul

Re: 30 minutes to decide to do a rollback?

& yours smells of grey beard who hasn't upgraded in 10 years. ;{)

While there is nothing wrong with that, GitHub given it's core functionality, ought to be err on the side of bleeding edge.

teknopaul
FAIL

Microservices

I heard thta Microservices are a good idea to stop the whole Shitshow from coming tumbling down when you bork a database update.

Git is famously one of the last remaining monoliths, and it's bork rate proves the Microservice architects poimt

How a cheap barcode scanner helped fix CrowdStrike'd Windows PCs in a flash

teknopaul

Barcodes are cool, use them a lot for test data entry.

Most phones can read them nowadays, so a fallback to type it out by hand is always available.

Natural for any URL obviously.

But for any gui apps I write with data entry, I add a simple feature to auto skip to the next field after reaching max length, and support for typing all fields inc drop downs and checkboxes. Make using a Barcodes scanner to enter test data possible, makes copy paste work too, and makes Barcode readers work in the field for customers that suddenly have a lot of unexpected work to do.

Angry admins share the CrowdStrike outage experience

teknopaul

Re: Holidays

I guess I'm lucky, I dont remember a Linux update doimg any damage within one version . Major version update sometimes are a headache but I have never seen a yum / apt security update stop a physical pc from booting

teknopaul

Re: Holidays

I rekon a few old PC will get replaced by one or more android device.

Azure VMs ruined by CrowdStrike patchpocalypse? Microsoft has recovery tips

teknopaul

BSOD

Technically how can the consequence of a botched Windows update be a BSOD in a running machine?

Doesn't this require hot installing new drivers that somehow manage to kill a 30 year old microkernel? Shouldnt that be impossible by now?

teknopaul

On a serious note

Is it safe to turn on Windows machines that have been down while this was going on?

Does anyone at CrowdStrike work weekends?

teknopaul

Re: Human intervention is needed.

You dn t need AI to check something is wrong. Recent crowdstrike bork had crowdstrike.exe at 100% cpu.

We deploy code all the time on our own systems and don't miss something obvious like that.

Neither should mega Corp on consumer hardware. It's basic QA. I suspect negligence here rather than the one messy update excuse they are peddling.

Monitoring is not something technically difficult to do with simple code, but while on the subject: AI can be better at pattern recognition and find things humans might miss. Eg cpu spike 37 mins after deploy.

Crowdstrike have not got as far as if (cpu >= 100)

I suspect the6 don't have any mechanism to test rollouts. Spendimg their money on cutting costs and scaling up rather than quality.

teknopaul

Re: Human intervention is needed.

It's not up to "most outfits" it's mega Corp pushing to everyone and not monitoring outcomes.

This looks to me like: push stuff and don't test the result.

Not humans but software that does that.

I'm suspect crowdstrike didn't think of testing at all, and don't have a mechanism to test the results of an update. I know of 2 similar botched updates by crowdstrike. They struggle to fix and they themselves dont know when it's happening and don't have a kill switch for a bothched rollout that's ongoing.

As we now all know: their internal testing before rollout is piss poor too.

teknopaul

Re: Human intervention is needed.

Try it out first does not sem ti be a option for crowdstrike. The struck off all our laptops about two ago. Pushed an update that até 100% across s the company and some how neither our It not Microsoft have the perms to kill the thing so we could work.

2 days to fix. Then this.

Ie Crowdstrike issues are sistemic. Move off ASAP if you can.

teknopaul

Re: Someone is going to get their ass kicked

Or not.

No such thing as corporate responsibility.

"Restore from backup" implying no-one has any actual data in Microsoft PCs. Probably generally true. Keep your actual data on Linux file servers, db's, and the cloud which usually is some flavour of Unix + no you can't autoupdate me to death.

Pity the folk with Window nodes in the cloud or sqlserver.

Boeing's Starliner set for extended stay at the ISS as engineers on Earth try to recreate thruster issues

teknopaul

Re: Dear god almighty ... is there anything Boeing can build safely !!!

Not my fault, I outsourced the work to do nothing but still take a cut of the profit, ain't a good defence when it goes wrong.

teknopaul

Re: "Starliner could be used in the event of an emergency"

No, but if the wheels fall off its sane to worry that your vehicle isn't safe in other regards

CISA looked at C/C++ projects and found a lot of C/C++ code. Wanna redo any of it in Rust?

teknopaul

Re: The Rust Evangelism Strike Force...

If compiling has an atackable bug GitHub probably has a risk because they run lots of compile jobs nowadays.

Any dsl that needs a compiler might be at risk.

AI query optimization in IBM's Db2 shows you can teach a tech dinosaur new tricks

teknopaul

Re: Infusion

AI based query optimisation will guarantee randomness in response times, more than the inability to choose the indexes for your query was ever capable of.

It's 2024 and Db is still dark art. Imho Dbas love this.

DBAs "get paid" by explaining nothing and sharing no tricks.

What's interesting is they get sacked for the same reason.

SO for Dbas has very little info for a reason

teknopaul

Migrating db2 to postres this month.

It's politics, natch.

But using db2 in the first place was arranged in the golf course.

Please

JPMorgan exec claims bank repels '45 billion' cyberattack attempts per day

teknopaul

Agreed.

This is key.

"They go into the law firm that's sending you an email, take over the email, and they send the bank a note saying 'please send the money here,'"

And the point is, after receiving an email they do actually send the money there!

I worked at 3 major banks in London. 80% was automated, and 20% we via paper and emails and phone calls. All of that was considered "risk", I.e. No attempt at security auth or validation. Just put it as risk and write it off if it was fraud.

I would guess Jp has 60000 wide boy brogrammers as staff. Never seen worse code than in banks. High staff turnover. It's all about the money, naturally. No-one in the building has any high-level goals like clean code or solid architecture. It's just hack for money. Security is an afterthought at best. At worst it's just a building full of disconnected workers getting paid top dollar to handle shit code without any input to the code.

I also know people are that hack banks. It's I high risk game in the long run, but easy money in the short run.

I knew people that can open a bank account, put 5 grand credit in it, and have a card sent where ever with what ever name you wanted. That's high street banks who seem to be just as bad.

I am pretty sure it's an induswide problem.

Google is changing how search results appear for EU citizens

teknopaul

They just moved the tricks to maps

I don't use Google search since it stopped being useful a while back due to ads.

But maps recently took a huge turn for the worst. At least in Spain where I am. They now don't show businesses which they don't have ads for, however close. Clearly monopoly abuse, but also makes maps useless since it only has big bizz that pay the Google tax. That's passed on so I try to avoid any bizz who uses Google: I know their rates.

They vary rates, (despite this being illegal) essentially taking all the area under the supply curve, so pretty much any bizz that's in bed with Google for marketing is as expensive as it could be.

Here's who thinks AI chatbots will eventually be smart enough to be your coworker

teknopaul

Bash

Can't help but think app developers should be more diligent with cli development and bash should be taught schools.

Automation ought not to be hard enoughto require AI.

But for many people it is, because app companies

want developers to hold special magic powers instead of empowering users with trivial cli interfaces.

With a de ent cli you write your code in python or whatever if you prefer, but you can't beat the simplicity of bash for automation of cli tasks.

Creating a single AI-generated image needs as much power as charging your smartphone

teknopaul

Re: Do charge a thousand phones instead

I call BS on (11.49kWh) per image. Stable diffusion is giving me £1 per image as a free giveaway and all these AI image sites paid for by ads are getting £1 per click.

Something in these numbers don't add up. Maybe it's my price per kwh

Boffins find asking ChatGPT to repeat key words can expose its training data

teknopaul

Yeah but...

Language models don't have memory as such. It's reconstituting this data. It looks like an email, and may actually be someone's email. But if you text scan the model, it isn't in there stored like that.

In simpler terms: ChatGPT can generate fred@gmail.com easily but can't tell you why or of its a real email address.

Tesla sues Swedish government after worker rebellion cripples car biz

teknopaul

Re: I am enjoying this dispute

Either that, or the world missed out on some amazing sculptures.

Google, Amazon, Microsoft make the Mozilla naughty list for Christmas shopping

teknopaul

Re: Christmas present

Never forget Amazon's remote digital burning of books including Fahrenheit 451.

Unforgivable. I have never connected an E-book to the Internet as there is no need.

Long-term space missions may make liftoff harder for male astronauts

teknopaul

Other factor at play

Surely being a 'naut significantly improves your pulling power, which should more than compensate for a bit of confusion about which way is up.

Broadcom re-orgs VMware into four divisions – none of which mention end-user compute products

teknopaul

I didn't. I know vmware was a lot of Linux under the hood. But that's handy info. Each time I look at virt tools the landscape seems to have changed.

I recently purchased headless hardware for windows to save myself the virtyslisation headache: USB involved.