Posts by tekHedd 640 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Aug 2011
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).
"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
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."
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...
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
..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.
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.)
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.
"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.
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. :)
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].
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
"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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