Posts by Blank Reg

Big Red borrows a lot of green, hopes AI will put it in the black

Re: Oracle should not have corporate debt

If not for the 10's of billions in share buy backs they would have plenty of money to fund their AI efforts

Microsoft exec finds AI cynicism 'mindblowing'

Re: You're using it wrong.

I do it all the time. I use it as a typing assistant. I can describe a function in one sentence and it will write out 20 lines of code, usually correctly. If you get overly ambitious and do something like ask it to write a whole class then you need to be very precise in your wording or it can quickly go off the rails. Then you need to explain what it did wrong and try to break it down to smaller sections so that it doesn't try to fill in too many blanks

Re: Micro- and Soft- Brain ?

The amount that has been spent on AI can't be justified by even the most optimistic revenue projections. It's a mega bubble, and the pop will be deafening.

That's not to say that AI can't be useful, but putting it in everything just because you can is a dumb thing to do.

Programmers: you have to watch your weight, too

Re: I know I am a dying breed

I think every computer science program would benefit from including an embedded programming course. And I don't mean on a raspberry pi, something with a simple old school CPU with 32KB of ram

Re: That's what you get for putting so much lipstick on a pig...

Web development has to be the worst offender, there must be hundreds of layers of lipstick, so many that no one really knows what is at the lower layers or why some of them were ever chosen

Older developers are down with the vibe coding vibe

Re: But...isn't it all just bollocks?

I don't need the AI, I've been at this for 40 years, but used properly the AI can speed up my developement as it can fill in the more mundane stuff with just a simple one line prompt. Don't expect it to figure out difficult programming problems, you do that part, let it do the boring, tedious simple stuff

Re: But...isn't it all just bollocks?

you're using it wrong. If you keep it to small, easily defined tasks it can do really well. Don't give it room to extrapolate, build up the code in steps and it can do just fine. The way I use it it's almost like the AI is just typing shortcuts, I can type a short prompt and get a dozen lines of code, and they are almost always exactly what I would have typed.

Hegseth signs flying memo to expand military use of cheap drones in oddball video

It's probably that the weapons suppliers had no interest in small drones as they aren't expensive enough.

Uncle Sam wants you – to use memory-safe programming languages

Re: Memory Safety

How about Erlang

That's where I first learned to code, PDP-11 and giant stacks of cards

Microsoft dangles extended Windows 10 support in exchange for Reward Points

Re: Rewards...

I've got 38k points right now. I keep using them for Best Buy or Amazon gift cards, I then use that to buy Playstation gift cards. So I've got Microsoft paying Sony so that I can play games on Playstation

Florida man expands crypto empire with new wireless service and phone

Re: Being MAGA is self-selecting to be fleeced

"he's probably the greatest con man the US has ever seen"

I think it's more that there is a huge population of gullible idiots and the media has given him the exposure to fleece them over and over and over. His cons are so obvious that you'd have to have room temperature IQ to fall for them

Field support chap got married – which took down a mainframe

I had a similar incident with my wedding ring some 40 years ago, though it was only a rack mount PC so far less than 200A, it still stung. I've not worn a ring since then,

Seagate still HAMRing away at the 100 TB disk drive decades later

Re: Thanks for the MAMRies

Same here, I haven't had a huge number of dead drives, but every dead drive was a Seagate. And it's all the worse because I primarily buy anything other than Seagate

How Java changed the development landscape entirely as code turns 30

Re: TIOBE don't seem to understand the domain

Unfortunately I have to work on a giant application written in Python, and it absolutely sucks for that.

Re: The new COBOL

I worked on Java running on processors running at single digit Mhz and 128KB of RAM. Various flavours of embedded Java was used extensively, you just didn't see it because it was hidden, besides cell phones it was used in things like set top boxes, bluray players, office phones, credit cards, access cards etc

Re: The new COBOL

Some of the verbosity contributes greatly to it's understandability and ease of debugging. I look at a Java method and I immediately know what it's expecting, unlike Javascript or Python where you have to hope someone documented it, otherwise you're digging through code to see how it used. And then Python has the idiocy of whitespace having meaning, So an extra or missing tab can still be perfectly valid yet be completely wrong, all to avoid a couple of {}

Re: The new COBOL

Various forms of Java were deployed to billions of devices. You probably have some and don't even know it as it's used in smart cards and sim cards, and billions of phones before Android and Apple took over. And Android still uses Java

Nvidia paid $1M for Mar-a-Lago meal, US later scrapped AI chip export crackdown

She was the most qualified candidate to ever run for the presidency, unfortunately she was the wrong color and gender for some people.

EU may target US tech giants in tariff response

Re: Hmm

He's already chickened out with his latest "pause". But the damage is done. the us is not a trustworthy trading partner, there is no point in investing in the US until dementia don is gone

Re: Hmm

Targeted tariffs are probably the best approach. Put high tariffs on things that are either completely unnecessary or for which there are easily available substitutes.

Re: Hmm

It's far worse for trump to tariff the world than it is for the world to tariff the USA. The world can avoid many or all of the US tariffs by buying from each other, but Americans are screwed as it doesn't matter where the stuff comes from, they are paying a tariff

Americans set to pay more on all imports: Trump activates blanket tariffs

Re: Trump is easy to model

Do you know what was also different about the 50's and 60's in the USA? The top tax rate was as much as 90% at times, it had been even higher before that.

So you think dementia don is adding tariffs to make things better for other countries?

No, he's just a moron and doesn't understand how anything works. He's going to make things worse for everyone, but especially for Americans.

Please fasten your seatbelts. A third of US air traffic control systems are 'unsustainable'

Re: not new situation

They have been at it for decades, even the most incompetent bureaucracy could have picked one by now

Re: not new situation

I've been hearing about the sad state of the American ATC system for as long as I can remember. Why don't they just buy one? Other countries have more modern versions. Although with dementia Don's diplomatic ineptitude it's likely that the only country willing to help them out would be russia

Nope. You probably can't cash in by turning your office or farm into a datacenter

Re: "gigawatt-scale datacenter .... will require 634 acres (256 hectares) of land"

We have an awful lot of empty land in northern Canada, we just need to build a nuke plant to power it Then instead of the cooling just being an energy sink, the waste heat can be used for district heating, since heating is needed for most of the year, most of the waste heat won't be wasted

Under Trump 2.0, Europe's dependence on US clouds back under the spotlight

Re: The worst thing we can do is underreact or prevaricate to an existential threat

I've previously suggested that the US be cut off from ASML due to trumps idiocy, let's see how they manage when their companies can't service or upgrade their chip fabs

City-slaying space rock 2024 YR4 still has 2.4% shot at smacking Earth

Re: Or ....

With just a little nudge we can probably take out mar a lardo

Tesla's numbers disappoint again ... and the crowd goes wild ... again

It's incredibly stupid to try and outdo humans with less information than humans get with their eyes. But then musk is incredibly stupid so it's to be expected.

Re: often making better designed and better built cars,

He can't do even one properly, the more involved he gets the worse it is. Apparently, he had a great deal of input on the wankpanzer, and we can see how that turned out

You don't even need to look outside of automotive to find companies better at AI than Tesla. For example, Mercedes has had level 3 autonomous driving for a while now. Telsa isn't really any good at anything apart from making empty promises and missing deadlines, they excel at those.

Re: Car sales, an entirely unscientific survey

The drop off in Tesla sales was inevitable as every other car maker got into the market often making better designed and better built cars, his antics just made it worse.

Tariff uncertainty looms large over budget conscious CIOs

Re: In some ways it doesn't matter.

it would probably take a decade or more to build an entirely domestic supply chain for something like an iphone. And the cost would be much higher

Re: In some ways it doesn't matter.

Canada has a few real big weapons that can be deployed because some of the stuff the US needs from Canada is less easily replaced and would have an immediate impact. Things like stopping all energy and natural resource exports. Fuel prices would immediately jump, there would even be shortages. Some companies would have to shutdown due to lack of raw materials. And due to the poor social safety net people south of the border would feel the pain more

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

Re: Too many white men

I've seen others refer to these "Interesting Times" as the dumb ages, that is unfortunately an entirely accurate name

Hands-on jobs to grow fastest, because AI can't touch them

Re: You don't know until you know

The people that could most easily be replaced by AI are those bosses buying AI to replace other people

Re: Farmworkers, delivery drivers, construction workers, ... nursing, .. education

The price of eggs may not double, industrial sized egg farms already have a lot of automation. But strawberries, broccoli, lettuce etc. could not only double but would also be in very short supply as crops rot in the ground with no one to pick them

Short-lived bling, dumb smart things, and more: The worst in show from CES 2025

Re: making an essential appliance too damn complicated

Right now you're probably better off getting a cheap fridge or stove, the cheapest ones are still made pretty much as they were decades ago, meaning that if something breaks it can usually be easily replaced. A lot of the fancy expensive appliances have parts like control boards that they stop making soon after the model goes out of production. So when your multi-thousand dollar cook top fails it may be garbage.

Canada commits $1.4B to sovereign compute infrastructure as it joins the AI arms race

Most Canadians are perfectly fine with gun bans, and those that aren't would never vote Liberal anyway.

People always leave out the part quote about investing to grow the economy, that's how the budget balances itself. Unfortunately, covid really messed up those plans.

Badass Russian techie outsmarts FSB, flees Putinland all while being tracked with spyware

Re: "Always keep a second passport"

Isreal is one of those "incompatible" countries, the last time I went they stapled the entry stamp into my passport so that it could be removed after I left.

Judge again cans Musk's record-setting $56B Tesla package

Re: $420, anyone?

And that's why they bitch about "high" interest rates. When rates were at their lowest their borrowing costs were a rounding error

Re: $420, anyone?

"Musk selling TSLA in any quantity would probably tank the stock"

That's why when he sold some in the past, he lied about why he was selling it. He can't come out and say that it's grossly overvalued and he wanted to cash out while he had a chance

Re: Did the SEC already make that determination?

Well judge Cannon is still on the bench even after a huge number of errors and obvious bias

Canada closes TikTok's offices but leaves using the app a matter of 'personal choice'

Re: Trudeau the terrible tyrant

Being aware of it is not the same as it being his doing. Most decisions are left up to the various departments, if everything had to go through the PM for approval then nothing would get done, and this is a pretty minor thing.

And this whole tyrant thing is utter nonsense, the closest we've come to that was harper, and even there it was limited because the PM doesn't have nearly as much power as the anti-trudeau types claim he does.

Re: Trudeau the terrible tyrant

Trudeau likely had nothing to do with it, that's not how the government works. But they have said they aren't going to tell you any details, that's how national security works. Intelligence agencies don't share information with the public unless there is a real need to do so. Even then you won't get the full story

Dow swaps Intel for Nvidia leaving no index free from wild AI volatility

If Dementia Don the Incontinent Con follows through on deporting undocumented immigrants then not only will food prices go up much more than 20%, there will be food shortages as there will be no one to pick the crops.

They had better hope that he was lying once again

Except that it only gets replaced after it drops. Last time I checked the top 10 stocks made up over half the value of the dow, so when things go bad they will go bad fast and hard

Python dethrones JavaScript as the most-used language on GitHub

i would call a lot of them stupid, not just questionable. Python is a poorly designed language for large scale projects, if it were only used for simple scripting then it would be fine