* Posts by tekHedd

640 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Aug 2011

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OS-busting bug so bad that Microsoft blocks Windows Insider release

tekHedd

AI integration side effects

My money is on: they've hooked their stupid Copilot into every corner of Windows and all of its core support products, with the ability to control them all, and released the integration all at once, breaking everything in ways you can't work around, and which Copilot will screw up every more badly as you try to work (and cannot disable).

tekHedd

If you want the web site it'd be easy to create

"list loads of plausible but fictitious AI products that we won't be able to live without" sounds suspiciously like a decent starting point for an AI prompt to generate a starting point.

One thing chatbots are quite good at is creating plausible but fictitious answers. :D

US, China agree to roll back tariffs – but only for 90 days

tekHedd

"Tariff" means tax. :)

Alternatively:

- Regressive tax on the poor: 10%

- Ending fentanyl imports: 20%

- Repatriation of all US manufacturing in just one year: Priceless!

#sarcasm

Tech titans: Wanna secure US AI leadership? Stop giving the world excuses to buy Chinese

tekHedd

I guess those people in the government are younger than they look

Perhaps they don't remember Betamax.

How to stay on Windows 10 instead of installing Linux

tekHedd

I had to reinstall it

So... had to reinstall it? So, just like Windows then. #shrug

CVE fallout: The splintering of the standard vulnerability tracking system has begun

tekHedd

Can't call it that because it might be funny

It'll be vetoed by people with no sense of humor. Although I would assume we will even get pushback on that...

"He didn’t have a sense of humour and, like most people without a sense of humour, prided himself on the sense of humour he hadn’t, in fact, got."

Krebs throws himself on the grenade, resigns from SentinelOne after Trump revokes clearances

tekHedd

Re: fluctuat nec mergitur⁽¹⁾ ...

Georges Brassens is delightful, makes me annoyed I have to research every song to understand it. Sort of the Rammstein of France in that respect. (And quite possibly the only thing they have in common actually hmmm..)

Whistleblower describes DOGE IT dept rampage at America's labor watchdog

tekHedd

...if you've been invited in

Why would a DOGE employee use a VPN?

1) Perhaps you are getting paid well and don't want to wreck your career by quitting DOGE, but would really prefer not to be directly implicated in what you're pretty sure is going to be an absolute dumpster fire.

2) You're torrenting videos from your work computer and running a VPN because of that

...and you get a great discount on this Russian VPN software through your work contacts...

tekHedd

Incompetent vs Nefarious

I mean, Incompetence and Nefarious Intent are only possible explanations.

They're not mutually exclusive.

A third strong possibility: He's not really the one in control. All this means that is whoever is pulling the strings is either stupid or evil, or both.

Most likely possibility: the person(s) pulling the strings is nefarious, but all that experience playing people off against each other on reality TV has taught him to throw up a very impressive smoke screen that keeps enemies off balance. He's also petty and self-centered, and throwing his personal vendettas into the mix, creates even more confusion.

We're being charitable when we assume incompetence. Stop being charitable and face the truth. We're being played.

New SSL/TLS certs to each live no longer than 47 days by 2029

tekHedd

Speaking of Let's Encrypt

Let's Encrypt obsoleted their "legacy" automatic renewals recently. I guess if updating certificates is your full time job this is not a PITA.

"Just automate it using a magic script that you have no idea how it works and it might go away at any time because you need to move to the latest hip mechanism for automatic renewal for the children" isn't an answer that fills me with warm cozy happy feelings.

tekHedd

Money? No, it's CONTROL.

How can you de-platform enemies of the state in a timely fashion if their certificates last for a year or more?

You think you're cynical? You're just reasonably cautious. I'm cynical.

The most important experimental distro you've never heard of gets new project lead

tekHedd

Flatpak, Snap... and...

They never mention AppImage. The one that *doesn't* make you rage quit Linux for the day. But the distro managers want complete control and integration, so ... there it is.

Windows intros 365 Link, a black box that does nothing but connect to Microsoft's cloud

tekHedd

Since the 90s!

The "thick client" has been Microsoft's dream for ages. You buy the compute hardware and give them complete control and all your money.

Microsoft walking away from datacenter leases (probably) isn't a sign the AI bubble is bursting

tekHedd

Windows 11

Obviously, Microsoft has decided that instead of spending money on buildout, they can force the end users to buy AI-capable processors, then as part of the "free upgrade" you agree to let them do training with your spare CPU cycles.

I wish I thought this was a joke.

Amazon to kill off local Alexa processing, all voice requests shipped to the cloud

tekHedd

We're only just now doing this, we promise.

So we're supposed to believe they're just now going to start shipping all queries to the cloud, instead of the much more likely "eventually we will get in trouble for spying on everything you say around the house, so we're now officially going to stop pretending we don't."

The increase in traffic will also mask which other keywords trigger data delivery.

(I wish this felt like paranoia, but it's just how business is done these days.)

AI running out of juice despite Microsoft's hard squeezing

tekHedd

Working As Designed

"AI continues to deliver plausible, but wrong, answers to questions."

Working as designed. #wontfix

ALL output from Generative AI is hallucination. "AI accuracy" is (human) confirmation bias. (..confirmation bias often makes this mistake, where probabilities are involved, see also gambling.)

^ Anyone who says otherwise is scamming you.

So … Russia no longer a cyber threat to America?

tekHedd

"Putin mouthpiece"

I saw the section heading "Putin mouthpiece" and had to read on for a bit before I could be sure whether it meant Putin's actual mouthpiece or just POTUS. :/

FYI: An appeals court may kill a GNU GPL software license

tekHedd

Re: Lawyers

Easy to forget: the law isn't logic, it's whatever we say it is.

Corollary: just because it's legal, doesn't mean they can't arrest and convict you.

This can be applied to just about any legal situation.

The biggest microcode attack in our history is underway

tekHedd

Yes what we had was corrupt, and it was mostly OK

Yup, the bureaucracy is bloated, inefficient, definitely corrupt in places, slow...broken even. And, it's probably the best government you're going to get, in a somewhat outdated, "version 1.0" representative democracy. If we had a working Congress we could have upgraded to version 2 or something by now, but that's clearly not an option. But it had some safeguards, which look to some like "activist judges" and "bureaucratic waste." By the end of the year, we'll be really missing those things.

Thinking you're going to fix it by "burning it all down" and putting it in the hands of a super rich playboy who goodness only knows how much contempt he has for the masses is... it's the plan? That was the Genius's plan. That was his whole plan.

tekHedd

Re: In Otherworldly Times there be Alien Spaces to Conquer or Enter Into to Survive and Prosper

OK usually "wow you drank the kool-aid" is a metaphor for Jim Jones but in this case I think it's definitely the stuff handed out by hippies in the 60s... did you bring enough to share?

'Maybe the problem is you' ... Linus Torvalds wades into Linux kernel Rust driver drama

tekHedd

Re: uh wasn't USENET where Linus started it all...

USENET was a little different. The barrier to entry means you get a different class of troll. See also, Mastodon a year ago.

tekHedd

Re: Oxide OS

They're already doing that. Apparently, it's hard. :D

tekHedd
Happy

If it's so great, why?

This is one of those, what you call, rhetorical questions, right? Obviously because Linux is the big thing and...

OK fine. After the whole systemd thing, my paranoia is kicking in. I suppose it could, possibly, be that someone is incentivized to cause chaos in the Linux ecosystem and ruin the whole ecosystem as much as possible so that other commercial products will look better, and if you can do it by causing conflict and making the best minds get fed up and quit, even better. But that would be cynical. It's much more likely that bright youfs who love Rust want to be able to make a driver for their custom GBA-compatible emulation hardware and are frustrated that you have to write C to poke a register.

tekHedd

Good analogy, bad execution of analogy...

Yeah you have it backward. EVs are a small evolution for cars, which were highly computer controlled and technical before hybrids, and which had years of hybridization before they went full EV. Manufacturers were involved in these changes and kept their repair shops up to date throughout the transition. Some manufacturers were very conservative about the transition to electric, as it is a new technology and considerably different from ICEs both in terms of power generation and control systems. The transition was done gradually across many manufacturers and models with careful planning, and undoubtedly with lots and lots of coordination between the designers, manufacturing, and the one place where dealers make money: maintenance.

In other words, it's actually not a bad analogy but only if you actually have a tiny insight into how automotive manufacturing, dealerships, and manufacturers work.

A team leader who can't coordinate and communicate well with the rest of the teams? Deeply entrenched old-school processes and highly profitable existing products? Well.. there's a reason some auto manufacturers were later to the party than others, isn't there?

Linux has the ULTIMATE installed base. Sweeping changes without buy-in simply aren't happening.

tekHedd

Re: Linus did not "shoot the messenger"

Yah, definitely the most off-target tagline on El Reg in a long time--undoubtedly an attempt at a joke but wow when humor fails it fails hard dunnit?

tekHedd

Where is that pure-Rust kernel, then? We keep coming back to this.

The kernel is old, unsafe, garbage! Agreed! Why not just throw together a linux-compatible kernel in rust from scratch, run it through some tests, and ship it with the rest of the gnu stack. It's so much easier to code when it's memory-safe so it should be easy and quick to implement, heck I'm surprised it hasn't already been done. Then all of these OLD (the worst thing you can be) programmers maintaining Linux can be given something to keep them busy (just let them keep working on the old kernel, they'll never notice it's unused because they don't do TikTok) and ignored.

Interesting to see the ageism creeping repeatedly into the discussion, as if having 40 years of experience doing manual memory management (and miraculously making a working program without guard rails) is proof that you're obsolete and inferior. :)

tekHedd

"...and to be maintained by Rust devs."

Maintained by who again? It's easy to add a ton of code and promise to maintain it. It's hard to maintain it.

Agent P waxes lyrical about 14 years of systemd

tekHedd

Service files: self explana..what?

Trivial? Uh, not really. If you don't know what you're doing, copy/paste won't get you far.

Self-explanatory? Now I know you're trolling. Understanding the various options requires reading MULTIPLE man pages (or web pages) and understanding all of them.

tekHedd

Pipewire!

As a musician and DJ, I say THANK GOODNESS (and apparently also redhat) FOR PIPEWIRE. Because pulseaudio is garbage. Or rather "was" because I don't run garbage if I don't have to. Can you taste the vitriol? That's what people get, when people come in heavy handed with insider support and force over-engineered "solutions" that just make things "broken in a different way" and "much harder to fix" on the world.

Now, if we had a pipewire equivalent for systemd, the world would be a lovely place, with much less vitriol.

Oracle starts laying mines in JavaScript trademark battle

tekHedd

Re: EcmaScript

i'm on board with this,if we just call it "[CENSORED]Script", where the square brackets and all-caps are part of the name. And then the short form of the name will be [C]S, where the [C] is unpronounceable or a bleep. (And the inevitable fork could be called BleepScript.) Anyone giving a presentation about it will need a bleeper button.

tekHedd

Re: Writing a program is not ownership of the trademark

If writing a program or framework in JavaScript was ownership of the trademark, just about every developer in the world would be in deep trouble for trademark violation. :D

TSA’s airport facial-recog tech faces audit probe

tekHedd

"The ones at the gate are private"

..and there is *no* precedent suggesting that the NSA would slurp data from large, strategic, private databases. None at all. ;) Certainly they never get hacked, exposed, leaked, sold in a merger, or otherwise compromised.

Innocent people have a lot to learn, this year.

tekHedd

Opting out == unsubscribe

I can't think of a better way to get flagged as a person of interest, scanned, and stored with a little marker saying "didn't want to be scanned" than opting out of facial recognition scans. This is like clicking the "unsubscribe" link on unsolicited spam from companies you've never heard of. All you've done is confirm that you're someone they're interested in.

I mean, it's probably illegal, but since when has that made a difference?

(Also, sarcastic pro-Ring "I like having a cop on every doorstep" sting at the end there, nice touch.)

DeepSeek's R1 curiously tells El Reg reader: 'My guidelines are set by OpenAI'

tekHedd

AI "reasoning"

"It is perfectly capable of reasoning that it should write out the individual letters then count them."

No. Maybe you're a time traveler coming back from the future, but no. That's not how LLMs work.

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

tekHedd

Oops, update failed!

Nope, you MUST be running the latest everything or your apps won't run. Oh, that library was removed because it's the old version and not secure, and it won't be made secure because it's been deprecated for version 3. So, you must update all your apps but there's a conflict.

Sound familiar?

Linux is forever...in need of command line hacking to keep it running.

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

tekHedd

Overload!

I think that's the point.

Outrage overload is an established tactic. We'll eventually burn out and get tired, and then the real nastiness will start. :(

tekHedd

Re: Freedom Fries 2.0

I, for one never stopped calling them Freedom Fries!

Wait, sorry, I mean I never *started* calling them that, I keep getting those mixed up. So sorry. :D

Trump 'waved a white flag to Chinese hackers' as Homeland Security axed cyber advisory boards

tekHedd

Re: I’m sure Americans will regret electing a Dictator...

"The people who elected him will not."

Exactly. If you're familiar with "apologetics", you know that His support base have, all their lives, practiced the art of starting with a conclusion (say, "Trump is Fixing America" or "God loves us") and then ignoring any arguments to the contrary, cherry picking arguments that support it. They're good at "believing without evidence.

Denial is the most powerful force in the universe.

Can AWS really fix AI hallucination? We talk to head of Automated Reasoning Byron Cook

tekHedd

Re: The answer is No - No - No!

Disagree. "Japan" is already capitalized, so the capital of Japan is either "Japan" or "JAPAN". ;)

tekHedd

FEATURE NOT BUG (or, "Of course not, don't be silly.)

Hallucination is the *goal* of generative AI, not a bug. Current gen generative AI neural nets are designed to extrapolate and interpolate answers and images. With randomness. This is by design. It is the WHOLE POINT. Human vision is a kind of hallucination. It feels accurate, but we don't see the world, we experience a hallucination based on reality. And it is never perfect. AI is similar but...er, without the continuous error correction and double checking of a human mind behind it.

I mean theoretically, yes, you can use AI as a fact search engine, but you need to redesign the entire backend of the neural net to fetch validated data. Duh?

Yes, I'm afraid "Duh."

(And by "duh" I mean you don't need several years and multiple conventions and symposiums on "what about AI Hallucination" to understand this, just a weekend with Python and some open source neural net libraries on a midrange PC.)

You can not use generative AI to generate facts. You can use it to /choose/ facts, assuming you have facts already available, but whether it will choose the fact that answers your question, not guaranteed.

Many careers have been built and successfully reached exit strategy based on intentionally abusing people's misunderstanding of this. :)

Million GPU clusters, gigawatts of power – the scale of AI defies logic

tekHedd

Re: "the entire industry is chasing the AI dragon"

Is this to imply that the industry is getting high on AI? Or should I just assume that the authors have no idea what "chasing the dragon" is?

I guess we can just put this phrase next to "light years in the future" in the List Of Phrases I'm Going To Have To Learn To Ignore Without Reacting[TM].

tekHedd

1.2 to 1.5 Gigawatts

So, it could, conceivably, turn out that the plant requires exactly 1.21 Gigawatts? They're going to need a reliable source of plutonium.

Interpol wants everyone to stop saying 'pig butchering'

tekHedd

PATRIOT ACT

If we've learned anything from the last 20 years of politics, it's that you can take this "removing the stigma" thing to another level. If you were an American legislator, and you had a piece of basically nefarious legislation that took away human rights and legalized some sort of offensively evil domestic policy, you give it a happy patriotic name.

Say, for example, you want to give police forces the right to enter any premise without a warrant at any time, effectively negating a fundamental constitutional right. You'd call it the "Personal Space And Privacy Protection Act," or "Defending And Protecting Ameraca's Homes Against Intrusion Bill."

"Romance Baiting" is a good start, but it still has a negative spin. Maybe "Friendship Investing" or, yes... "He was a participant in Supportive Relationship Cultivation."

"SRC: Supportive Relationship Cultivation." You're welcome.

Cruise robotaxis parked forever, as GM decides it can't compete and wants to cut costs

tekHedd

"Too many mistakes as a driver"

You have to make a *lot* of mistakes to get banned, though...they'll pretty much let anybody drive these days.

If they'll let my mom drive, well... OK maybe I'm making the argument that we're too lenient rather than "let AI drive". If you can't drive at least as well as an AI that's sad.

Ransomware hangover, Putin grudge blamed for vodka maker's bankruptcy

tekHedd

...have you tried Stoli lately?

It couldn't be, say, that their product is now incredibly meh? Cause I bought a bottle this summer, and I don't know if it's worthy of being called "midrange" vodka.

Sometimes you fail because you fail.

Google claims Big Sleep 'first' AI to spot freshly committed security bug that fuzzing missed

tekHedd

This bug happened because misusing asserts is the norm

You're supposed to assert things that can't happen. This has two consequences:

* If one fails, it means your assumptions are false, and this is something you should not be able to ignore

* Removing them should have no side effects, because they are testing impossibilities

If one of these does not apply to your assertion, you are doing it wrong.

assert(false) should MESS #%(*&k UP! Assert failure is supposed to point out an incorrect assumption immediately, so you will catch it as early as possible. It should do something you can't ignore in your test suite.

You should not be testing your asserts. They are impossibilities. If your expected input is expected to trigger an assert() , it should not be an assert.

This isn't rocket science, it's 40 year old established coding basics.

We know what Musk will probably dress up as this year: A victim

tekHedd

FTW!

it's times like this that I am reminded that, long before video gamers declared it to mean "For The Win", this acronym had a different meaning, more suitable for the current context. :)

Hugging Face puts the squeeze on Nvidia's software ambitions

tekHedd

...and it's always LLMs...

I particularly love how the solution to everything is "throw an LLM at it". It's nice to know there is more than one option in the space of "quickly get 85% of the way to a solution by throwing an LLM at it, giving investors the idea that the remaining 15% will be easy."

Fresh court filing accuses Oracle of creating 'maze' of options 'hidden' in 'contract'

tekHedd

Re: throw in whole contract to LLM and ask it...

At which point the LLM will boil a half gallon of water, then tell you something very convincing, at random that, sometimes, might contain facts, depending on the statistical probability that facts in the shape of your question were part of its training dataset. Or it might contain very convincing falsehoods. You won't know but you're not getting that water back.

Oracle urged again to give up JavaScript trademark

tekHedd

What is spite?

"Why is it spite to retain an important property, one that you not only paid for..."

I'm not sure you know what "spite" is. In fact, you ask this as a rhetorical question, demonstrating as much.

You imply that spite has to have a "reason". It's not revenge! It's not rational. This won't be some sort of justified reaction. They'll do it because they can. They have power and can do it.

They're doing it for spite because they are a spiteful, hateful company, as demonstrated through their business practices for as long as they have been in business.

It's also a figure of speech. People often say "doing it out of spite" when what they really mean (in this case) is "doing it for spite". Not because they are experiencing spite, but to cause it. They'll do it deliberately to make everybody mad, for lulz. Oracle has demonstrated, repeatedly, that they are that kind of company.

Hmm, Oracle hasn't really been cranking the "goodwill handle" for the last few decades, has it?

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