Posts by pig 110 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Oct 2011
My company is using Claude to code now. :|
I'm committed to supporting it, as that is the mantra.
We must look positively upon the AI coding and the benefits and savings it will bring.
That said, it was both worrying and humourous to see direct instructions to Claude such as this (paraphrased) in some recent tickets
"Claude - DO NOT MAKE CHANGES TO OTHER PARTS OF THE CODE BASE when making the requested changes in this ticket"
It seems our Claude too likes to go off and change y and z when it is asked to make a change to x.
The budget only tripled, to £9 point something million.
Thing is though, it was an absolute shit show.
Staff employing friends, nothing being done, re-writing locally bits of the new software that worked out of the box.
The whole usual list of common issues. **
But since that we have had Birmingham and now this.
It staggers me how so much has been spent for so little.
Especially in this case, hell there is even another council that does its own SAP support and sells SAP support to other councils they could have looked at.
But no. Instead a stupid decision is made.
** These system do not need much customisation for councils, but each council decides they are the most important thing in the world and decides to massively customise theirs, and in doing so add cost and make it worse.
Hell, half the customisation is usually to match an exisitng rubbish process that the new systme should be used to get rid of, not code down to.
I can tell you 100% that if they had oracle consultants in it would have been a lot better.
Oracle consultants won't say 'Hey, we have these features developed, tested and stable. Why don't you ignore them and try to write your own, using Council devs on £40k a year?'
The saddest thing is the hack was far worse than explained here.
They sat in Hackney for months, widening their access, before they started to encrypt.
Everyone I spoke to at the time who was involved were very clear, that it is was worse than they will ever publicly let on.
They should have the book thrown at them. But of course, public sector fining the public sector is very.... urgh.
The ERP recently developed for Northampton, Milton Keynes and Cambridge cost £9.7m* to build.
And that is 3 councils (Well, now 4 after Northampton was split up).
A standardised 1, or even 3, would work better.
Give councils the choice of Oracle, SAP, or Agresso - just don't let them build and maintain their own.
*Officially the £9.7m was 'under budget' and it was.
I mean, it was once they tripled the budget to be £9.8m, so they could then declare it 'under budget'
Ah yes, landlines.
They would play the 'dial tone' back at you so you thought you had hung up and were initialising a new call.
I remember thinking that was clever.
As is this new scam.
It is a shame scammers can be talented too.
I worked at a place where the head of IT Security would do this.
He even took 5 laptops from a meeting room, when the people meeting in the room went on a walk around the office.
While he had a point, to a degree, he was ultimately a twat.
When he left his laptop unlocked, and I send around the usual 'I'll be buying doughnuts tomorrow' email, he threatened me with all sorts of disciplinary action.
His duality did not go unnoticed, and his contract was not renewed.
Because Unit 4 ERP / Agresso / U4BW - however you call it - is cheaper on paper.
And then you start the implementation, and here you should expect 2-3x your estimated costs.
But they don't.
So once they get passed 2x cost the pressure to 'just go live with something' becomes too much for them.
Also, they tend to have bad staff, being a public sector big project that is locally managed.
I was hired to a public sector implementation of Unit 4 (not this one) but you will know which one (if you worked on it) when I say the sentence:
"The Programme Manager hired ALL of her friends as Project Managers, despite none of them having experience or qualifications".
It went as well as you would expect.
And no, I did not stay long!
Same here, autistic - diagnosed mid forties.
I actually aspired to run a department once, and being great at what I did I soon was given the job.
A big pay rise, and more important for me at the time, 37 people under me and a £1million pound annual budget.
It soon became apparent to me that my skill set was not people!
After a couple of months I switched my 'internal targets' to training up the best of my deputies and having her succeed me when I resigned.
She did great. Honestly, they should have given her the job in the first place to be honest.
Thing is, since that day I have done much better.
I now earn more, work from home, and given my setup cuts out the things I deal with less well (People, Commuting) I thrive.
Absolutely this.
My old employer decided we needed to come in 3 days a week.
This gave me the oomph to accept a job from one of our suppliers.
A job that is fully remote and paid the same.
I now live by the seaside and don't commute to London anymore, except for 1 day a year - the company piss up. I mean, important annual meeting.
I work better remote. Many of us do.
New companies accept this. Indeed, the older bigger companies who insist on silliness like this will definitely not benefit from it.
I had to reread this before my mouse moved over from downvote to upvote.
(And I assume those 3 downvotes just didn't read it twice).
A very true point.
It is strange, As I have got older in IT and implemented 'if you do X, I don't work for you' rules my work life has got far smoother, and the companies I work for are better.
This reminds me of the long fight between WWF (Animals) and WWF (Wrasslin') over WWF.com.
Obviously someone high up at WWF (Animals) had decided they should have it, come what may.
The arguments made by WWF (Animals) were long and, at times, convincing. It was all politics though.
The WWF.com domain has never been used to point to the animals site.
The same here. I don't think Brazil or any of the countries actually have any plans to use the domain.
it is just silly politics.
"What's unclear? Many, maybe most, of the vulnerable devices won't be fixed -- ever."
Yeah, but it is also clear most handsets wont also be pwned, and most users wont care or know either way.
I know us lot like to think that everyone should be super security savvy and fully alert about their data, but most people just don't care - unless it has an explicit and noticeable effect upon them.
Certainly, I don't think your solution is the right one. Shutting yourself off from the world is not the answer, and neither is overplaying the threat.
Are the risks of someone getting some/all of your data proportional to your actions?
I don't think so personally. But hey, each to their own.
They specialise in the cloud though.
Securing clouds is HARD and there are groups that take advantage of that. Some of those groups are state backed, some are - essentially - private enterprise.
In the early days of 'the cloud' I remember seeing a great example of lateral thinking for a 'hack'
The provider was pretty good with the security on the live servers.
If you hired a box in the same data centre as your target though, and then purchased backup services you could, given the right skills, follow that route to a backup box shared with your target...
The security on that box was not as good as live.
LEGO sets will usually have a few extra bits, almost always the smallest parts.
It is due to the way they pack the sets and that they decide a while ago it was better (and cheaper) to have extra bits in then have people upset they are missing a bit. (As happened during the dark days of LEGO when the company was struggling)
Over time they add up to a lot of pieces.
I know I have a bag full of 'extra bits' that is scarily large!
Given their history with buying companies and running them in to the ground HP should have to pay a premium if buying a business.
If I were a shareholder I would want 4x what it is worth from HP to compensate me for future losses.
So if a company is worth around $3billion I would demand HP offered $12billion.
Hang on, have we discovered how the Autonomy valuation was arrived at?
"Whitman fell back on saying she trusted her team at HP, particularly including then-CFO Cathie Lesjak"
Maybe HP should have trusted her before the acquisition, when she was recommending against it?
For the judge though, surely this just reinforces that HP decided a value for Autonomy without proper care and attention.
They then decided Lynch and Hussain were fraudulent, again without proper care and attention.
In both cases they leapt before they had full finished looking.
I see no one to blame here except for HP.
"Just for good measure, HPE also claims that as time went on, Lynch became “less and less focused and grounded in reality,"
Sounds like he was nearly perfect material for a HP Chief Exec, except he must have remained a bit too grounded in reality for their liking.
Is it just me though or does most of the evidence HP have brought work against them?
This is a most odd case.
I'm sure there are people without bank accounts, but doubt they would be filing a tax return at all, let alone online.
Allowing the refunds to be paid on to pre-paid debit cards is bonkers.
Part of my brain screams 'inside help' but then the other, larger, part just says 'stupidity'.
This.
What I heard at the time was this:
Autonomy: We are for sale for $6billion
HP: We'll give you $11billion
Autonomy: Errrrrrr. OK! :D
If you put your car up for sale for £600 and someone tries to buy it, but for £1100 and forces the cash in to your hand, are you really liable for overcharging them?
Autonomy didn't think they were worth that.
HP finance people didn't think they were.
But Leo and his adviser decided $11bill was a snip as they could make it worth $17bill!
In reality they made it worth about $3.5 bill.
Autonomy should point out prior behaviour to the court too.
They are far, far, far, from the only company HP have bought and messed up.
"When questioned about the consent, Leave.EU tried to argue they weren't unsolicited emails because subscribers had agreed to receive newsletters, and a privacy policy referred to information from third parties.
However, this policy ... did not say who the third parties were, or what type of marketing they might receive."
I can't think of ANY policy I have read that lists the 3rd party companies or the type of marketing. They all just refer to 'partners, 3rd party companies may send you stuff we think is good' (paraphrasing obviously)
If they used that criteria 99.9% of firms would be guilty.
Combined with receiving no customer complaints this does indeed look rather unfair.
My 3 year old Nephew knows the passcodes of all the iPads in his house.
Why my sister has pass codes when all her kids know them I don't know. If I am there and I want to use one I just ask my nephew for the code.
The problem with school IT is usually more with the teachers than the students, especially in infant and primary school.
My wife is an early years teacher. She has a passion for it. She does not have a passion for IT security, and neither has she been taught how to deal with it. And neither have her bosses.
As such they bumble along finding practical ways to get things done. If, and it always does, this involves unencrypted pen drives rather then secure storage they will use it.
Can we really blame them when they haven't been taught why this might be wrong?
True Story.
The only way Chequered Flag ever loaded for me was if I stopped the tape half way through the loading, rewound it a bit, then hit play again.
I don't know how I discovered this, but I do find it amusing to this day that I didn't find it odd at all.
That's just how it was having a Speccy. You learned to be creative to get things working.
(Like my level skip cheat for Operation Wolf. It involved rubbing my socked feet across the keyboard until it gave the message it was skipping to the next level).
