* Posts by The Man Who Fell To Earth

1674 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jan 2012

Bosses weren’t being paranoid: Remote workers more likely to start own biz

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WTF?

The real questions employers should ask

There are two issues with employment:

1. Is the employer getting good value from their working employees, remote or in-office?

2. Is the employee getting good value from their employer?

#1 is what the employer should ask themselves, not what the employee does on their own time. If the employee has energy to put into family, a side gig, or creating a startup, as long as they do what their employer pays them for on time, that other stuff isn't the employer's business.

Suppose the employer is concerned about employee retention, which is the only aspect of employees meeting #1 above, that starting companies and leaving impacts the employer's business. In that case, there are plenty of mechanisms for addressing that, beginning with the employer recognizing #2 above is the other half of the employer-employee equation. This is why good employers have RSUs, career & education advancement programs, proper compensation, employee stock purchase plans, bonus programs, etc.

Bad management getting even worse isn't a solution to employee retention.

OpenAI wants to build a subscription for something like an AI OS, with SDKs and APIs and 'surfaces'

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Mushroom

Re: So Sam wants to get paid...

Sam's motto, and Open AI's, has always been "All your base are belong to us."

Apparently, he really means "All you are belong to us."

You think ransomware is bad now? Wait until it infects CPUs

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WTF?

OK, I'll bite

How does this significantly differ from Joanna Rutkowska's Blue Pill work back in 2006?

Nip chip smugglers by building trackers into GPUs, US Senator suggests

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Thumb Up

Re: Nope. Nope nope nope.

I think this is a great idea. I've already got my RF blocking computer shrouds store setup on Amazon.

Microsoft moved the goalposts once. Will Windows 12 bring another shift?

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FAIL

Loyal Patriots

Can't afford new PC's anyway.

58 crypto wallets have made millions on Trump’s meme coin. 764,000 Loyal Patriots TM have lost money on the grift, data shows

https://www.tronweekly.com/trump-meme-coin-hits-14b-then-crashes-leaving/

Trump admin freaks out over mere suggestion Amazon was going to show tariff impact on prices

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Boffin

Re: Americans, watch out!

The US does not have that at the Federal level specifically because it's so easy to weaponize. At the State level, it varies all over the place. The Collateral Consequences Resource Center keeps a 50-state database on this kind of thing. https://ccresourcecenter.org/

OpenAI pulls plug on ChatGPT smarmbot that praised user for ditching psychiatric meds

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Real AI

I pine for the good old days. When men were men, and so were the women...

https://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-400-800-xl-xe-abuse_59.html

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Boffin

Re: Now we know

Trump has always surrounded himself with potters.

No offense to real potters, who put a lot of glaze on their pottery, by & large.

China is using AI to sharpen every link in its attack chain, FBI warns

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WTF?

Why bother?

The US has gone full sheilds down capitulation to cyberespionage in the last few months.

The one interview question that will protect you from North Korean fake workers

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FAIL

Or...

Insist they come for an in-person interview at some point before extending the offer, even if they will be based half a planet away. Their total salary, including benefits, is going to cost you six figures per year. And you're unwilling to invest a couple of grand at that final interview stage as part of your due diligence? If you get screwed it's entirely your own fault & you should be canned.

What the **** did you put in that code? The client thinks it's a cyberattack

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FAIL

I've never understood that

In over 40 years of working in high tech, I've never understood people who put inappropriate language in code or presentations, even as placeholders. Murphy's Law ("Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.") should just scream at people that it's only a matter of time before it's going to appear at the wrong time in front of the wrong audience. So just don't do it no matter how funny you think it is.

Virgin Atlantic is piloting an OpenAI agent in to help with the 'customer journey'

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FAIL

I have yet to encounter an AI agent that could outcompete a selection tree

It does not matter whether I've been dealing with AI agents, phone or web, from FedEx, UPS, Subaru, Toyota, Dell, United, or anywhere that could do more or was faster than a simple selection tree. All were so limited in capability they were no better, but were less transparent, so slower. And if your problem isn't so common that it exists on a selection tree (conventional or AI), the AI has no clue either. As far as I can tell, the AI is just limited to translating what you say/type into a behind-the-scenes selection tree click. If have an issue that I can't resolve myself so I need CS, I now just immediately go straight to a customer service human, which of course, the AI systems are designed to make that as difficult as possible, if not outright impossible. Then, the CS humans often had their own capabilities trimmed so low that one has to escalate through several manager levels.

AI customer service agents are a perfect example of a solution looking for a problem.

How to stay on Windows 10 instead of installing Linux

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Boffin

Too bad

When Windows XP reached end of life, you could do the registry addition below on any 32-bit version of XP and it would think it was the POS (Point Of Sale) version, and would continue getting updates for another 5 years.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\WPA\PosReady]

"Installed"=dword:00000001

Apple: Since you care about yOuR pRiVaCy, we'll train our AI on made-up emails

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FAIL

If only there was a term for this...

"Everything has its limits – iron ore cannot be educated into gold." - Mark Twain

Too folksy.

Hmmm....

"The information content of a signal cannot be increased via a local physical operation."

Too high brow.

Hmmm...

"Post-processing cannot increase information."

Still too high brow,

Hmmm...

Maybe "Garbage in, garbage out"?

Yep!

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

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FAIL

Re: Why not...

I'm sure making everyone pay a lot more for certs more often has nothing to do with it. Nope.

Microsoft total recalls Recall totally to Copilot+ PCs

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FAIL

Recall: Law Enforcement & Class Action Lawyer Wet Dream

Just imagine what can be uncovered. Might was well just shoot oneself in the head.

Don't open that JPEG in WhatsApp for Windows. It might be an .EXE

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WTF?

Re: It's 2025....

What's wrong with you guys? You're holding it wrong!

Dev loudly complained about older colleague, who retired not long after

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FAIL

Failure of management

I'm one of those people they always assign the "problem children" to, most of whom have the required skillset but don't deliver. (That's before I became a GM.) It's always their manager's fault, IMO, for not communicating clearly & respectfully with concrete examples of where things are not working. For example, it's not uncommon for someone to acquire a reputation for never finishing anything because they get 90% of the job done and then lose steam, their interest goes elsewhere, or they get jerked away to deal with some emergency de jour but don't go back to finish the assignment. Their own perception is "look at all of this work I've done". Everyone else's perception is "they never finish anything". 99% of the time it just takes a respectful conversation where you walk through a complete example so they can see that not finishing that last bit nullifies all that work they did from a performance/reputation standpoint. And set a firm deadline and the manager follow through with the employee. Similar when the situation is like the one in the "Who Me", where the person takes way too long to complete the task due to not maintaining focus. When one of my manager's makes a habit of publicly rebuking people, that manager's days are numbered. Even in the very rare situation where communicating intense displeasure with the employee is warranted, it should always be in private. Bad managers, especially ones that show a lack of respect towards others (& especially their reports), cause more problems than the occasional underperformer. Those are the managers that end up causing law suits too.

Google makes end-to-end encrypted Gmail easy for all – even Outlook users

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WTF?

No doubt

Mozilla will come up with something even more obtuse for Thunderbird.

Windows 11 adds auto-recovery, kills offline setup loophole

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Meh

What I do is log into the Microsoft account I never use during the install, and afterward, I set up a local account, give it Administrator privileges, log out of the Microsoft account, and use the local account thereafter. And setup local accounts for the rest of the household.

Windows 11 roadmap great for knowing what's coming next week. Not so good for next year

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Boffin

Windows 11

Unfortunately, Microsoft will never do what they should do, which is go a year without adding any "features" to Windows or Office and instead focus on bug fixing & go back to dog fooding those products.

Will never happen.

Pentagon kills off HR IT project after 780% budget overrun, years of delays

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FAIL

Re: Birmingham (England) Council says...

Why no mention of the company responsible? No doubt it's some company with zero commercial business, just sucking on the government teat as it's entire business model. As shitty as Workday and similar HR software is, at least they are (barely) functional.

Microsoft wouldn't look at a bug report without a video. Researcher maliciously complied

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FAIL

Just confirms what we all know

Microsoft needed the video because their people are functionally illiterate.

Toronto Zoo ransomware crooks snatch decades of visitor data

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FAIL

Re: "data going back to 2000"

Explains that email I got trying to sell me pet insurance for my Pyrenean ibex.

Worry not. China's on the line saying AGI still a long way off

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Terminator

Re: Can't remember who said it ...

Not a bad analogy. A bigger question is whether the goal is "human equivalent" intelligence which humans do with 10^11 neurons (most of which are not devoted to higher intelligence) or is the goal "omnipotent intelligence?

It begins: Pentagon to give AI agents a role in decision making, ops planning

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FAIL

What..

could possibly go wrong?

'Cybertruck ownership comes with ... interesting fan mail'

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Devil

Re: spoon-fed by media nonsense designed to make them hate Elon Musk and EVERY technology

I can sell you a new high-tech substitute for your spoon, that is to spoons what a cybertruck is to a real pickup truck.

I call it a spork. And it's all mine!

DIMM techies weren’t allowed to leave the building until proven to not be pilferers

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FAIL

Idiots

It amazes me how some people will jepordize a job that if they just showed up to, they'd have it easy for many years. Instead they risk it all over what in comparison is chump change. It isn't even about morals. It's about brains. It's why when it comes to workplace theft, I say fire their asses. I don't want idiots kept around even more than I don't want thieves kept around.

Techie pointed out meetings are pointless, and was punished for it

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Mushroom

Re: Scrum

It's rare to see Scrums or Kaizens done correctly. I worked for a place that was full of Danaher rejects who wasted about 1/3rd of employees' time by misapplication of the Danaher Business System (DBS) rebadged as <company> Growth System. Kaizens were another waste of time misapplied from the Toyota System from which all this crap comes from. Worse for me, one of my siblings spent a large part of their career at Toyota, so I got to verify how corrupted the whole thing was from its alleged Toyota origins.

Bottom line is if you are doing a scrum, you need it run by someone with a strong hand who really limits people to maybe 2 minutes tops, shuts down all discussions that would go over the 2 minutes per person (none of which require everyone in attendance anyway), and figure out ahead of time which 15 people (tops) need to give 2-minute reports. And most importantly, isn't afraid to close a meeting early. Just because a half hour was scheduled, doesn't mean you have to take a half an hour.

Critical PostgreSQL bug tied to zero-day attack on US Treasury

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WTF?

DOGE is a PostgreSQL bug?

Who'd have thought.

Techie cleaned up criminally bad tech support that was probably also an actual crime

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WTF?

Re: So many questions…..

The main question, it seems to me, is, of all the places you are going to steal from, why the hell would you pick a Law Enforcement Agency?

A secondary question would be "Colin, are you in that database?"

I'm a security expert, and I almost fell for a North Korea-style deepfake job applicant …Twice

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Facepalm

Why do you think

The data centers use so much electricity?

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FAIL

Re: The real problem

"Your mission is to hire the best possible XYZ developer possible..."

And yet you are too cheap to spend a couple of grand to fly them in for an in-person interview for a job that's going to cost you, when you include benefits & salary, hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

You get what you deserve.

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FAIL

The real problem

Is employers trying to hire on the cheap by using cheaper overseas developers. In this case, it's not like there's a lack of talent in the San Fransisco Bay Area. If you hire local you can interview people in person. If you are setting up an office overseas, again there are ways to do it where you actually meet people, or you work through representatives you have met in person. It's only a matter of time before some company gets the crap sued out of them by their customers because the house of cards the company created is considered negligence.

Some workers already let AI do the thinking for them, Microsoft researchers find

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FAIL

So AI just amplifies Dunning-Kruger

Gee, what a shock.

The less competent rely more on AI & while the more competent rely less on AI.

Yet those who are less competent tend to over rank themselves, while those of high competence tend to under rank themselves.

Copilot+ PCs? Customers just aren't buying it – yet

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WTF?

Why would I want to pay for a feature that proper security hygiene requires be disabled?

In the forums for the commercial router we use, the most requested feature to be added to the content filtering is to add "AI blocking" in addition to "Porn blocking", ""P2P/File sharing blocking", "File Hosting blocking", Social media blocking", etc.

DOGE latest: Citrix supremo has 'read-only' access to US Treasury payment system

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FAIL

Musky Brown Nosers

I wonder if it's the same Musk Brown Noser who moved his family into a Federal Office building because Musk is too cheap to pay properly.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/top-musk-lieutenant-moved-wife-and-baby-into-government-building-federal-worker/

Remember it'll cost ya to keep the lights on for Windows 10

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Boffin

Re: Still peanuts @williamyf

Many manufacturing operations follow copy exact, which is exactly the opposite. I remember 20+ years ago having to strip Windows 2000 of all the PC's running equipment we sold to a major (then) chip manufacturer and putting Windows NT on in it's place so the new machines were identical to the ones we sold them years earlier. Same for some medical equipment manufacturers. Often the regulatory requirements are that you need to recertify if you change anything, which is a direct incentive to update nothing,

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

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Alien

They'll never find us.

They are too easliy distracted.

Look! AI!

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

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Alert

Re: There is no reason for Windows 11

I think the hardware issue is underplayed in this article.

I have Windows 10 machines to maintain that are almost 10 years old and are 100% fit-for-purpose. Like a lot of businesses, they will not be replaced proactively. The days of simply replacing on a cycle are gone in a lot of organizations. It's vastly less expensive to replace when there's a legitimate need. If the original population of machines was limited to a few models, the increased maintenance issue is small even with an aging PC population of legacy PC's. Right now, where I work, the bean counters are trying to decide whether to pay Microsoft's extortion extended support fee, or go with something like 0patch from the get-go. Most likely, we'll pay Microsoft until that option disappears (so we have the most up-to-date "real" patches), then go 0patch (or equivalent) until the population of legacy PCs is is so low it does make sense to just replace them in one swoop.

What's not on the table is replacing perfectly fit-for-purpose hardware anytime soon.

Ontario responds to Trump tariff by pitching Starlink deal into the trash

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Mushroom

Musk

Is an example of what Warren Buffet meant when he said, "Of the billionaires I have known, money just brings out the basic traits in them. If they were jerks before they had money, they are simply jerks with a billion dollars.".

Microsoft to kill off Defender VPN this month

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FAIL

Well there's your problem

I and 99% of Windows users never heard of it.

You begged Microsoft to be reasonable. Instead it made Copilot reason-able with OpenAI GPT-o1

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All I want

Is to be able to turn it off. I use LLM's occasionally, but I want them off 99% of the time. No spying in my work, etc.

DARPA asking for ideas on automating money laundering detection

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Re: Trump will shut this down

Can’t be inconveniencing his family!

FIFY

Data is the new uranium – incredibly powerful and amazingly dangerous

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WTF?

"CISOs therefore increasingly feel that the cost of managing data sometimes exceeds its value."

If a datum has not been accessed in some amount of time (which will vary depending on what kind of datum it is), then delete it as it's probably of zero value.

AI revoir, Lucie: France's answer to ChatGPT paused after faux pas overdrive

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Happy

Re: "cow's eggs as a nutritious food source"

Suggests there's a whole new variation of huevos rancheros out there. (Which I know is Mexican, not French.)

40 years ago, classified Shuttle mission foreshadowed Challenger's fatal flaw

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Mushroom

Re: Most significant

They should not have been segmented at all. The original spec didn't allow segmented boosters, and the boosters were to be made in Florida near the Cape. But the Senator from Utah during the Shuttle design phase (either Bennett or Moss, I don't recall) wanted them built in Utah by Thiokol. To do that, they'd have to be segmented to fit on rail cars.

Years later, Utah Senator Orrin Hatch ensured that the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket would use the solid boosters from the Space Shuttle, again so they'd be made in Utah.

The Challenger disaster is due to politicians dictating the designs of space ships. Do stupid things, get stupid results.

Boeing warns of more financial hits from strikes, costlier parts – and Starliner, of course

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Devil

Bolts cost money.

Need to cut back on them.

Intel pitches modular PC designs to make repairs less painful

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FAIL

Hey Intel, the 1980's called

They want their PC architecture back.

Tool touted as 'first AI software engineer' is bad at its job, testers claim

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Boffin

Re: Stop the AI Marketing spin

I believe the in vouge term is now "confabulations".