Posts by mevets

Suits won't quit AI spending, even if they can't prove it's working

Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM....

Through the decades, this philosophy of the cowardly has inserted MicroSoft, SNOracle, SAS, .... AI into this ~~mantra~~ cover-your-ass rule.

Don't make a mistake on your own, that is what thinkers do; make the same mistake as everyone else, and get cosy on the same voyage.

A one time associate, who had earlier been involved in the TransMeta shit-show, offered an interesting opinion of C-Level executives.

At the very best, you can only hope they won't destroy everything.

Almost every action they take is to the detriment of everyone but themselves.

Having served time under wardens including McNeely, Cook, and Gelsinger; it is hard to disagree.

Minnesota State payroll problems grew after Workday launch, auditors say

Re: Wrong pay

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system

Virtual SG-41 project brings Nazi cipher machine to life in the browser

Can it decode Trump?

It would be awesome if it could turn that ooze into something coherent.

AWS CEO: It's funny when people ask me if AI is overhyped

Gotta call you on that one.

There are lots of freak shows that you can fully enjoy without having the slightest intellectual investment.

In a true circus, like a MAGA Rally, the audience themselves is a source of pure delight, never mind the tiny-parted people lined up to speak.

Take in a BigFoot Conference, you are sure to be cornered by some doped up enthusiast bubbling over about the incontrovertible evidence found in the BigFoot poos.

Share some pizza at a Flat Earth meeting; you can gorge on a breathtaking web of intricate lies and flawed implications that would make an AI-influencer blush. Really tear into the one about how Antarctica is the crust of the global pizza.

Bunch of truckers getting together to cheer on covid... okay that was just annoying; but the sheer inanity was something.

People are bound to get up to all sorts of stupidity. Be a good sport, and help them along with it....

I love the chutzpah...

Don't worry about the lack of immediate returns; to get that quick of a turn around, you have to launch an unsuccessful war.

You just need the faith to destroy your existing infra structure, replace it with ours, and don't worry, you will be fine.

Stack Overflow abandons redesign after loyalists criticize it

Re: Nostalgia

Or the perspective of rounded developers who hang around their computers day and night.

Renewables reached nearly 50% of global electricity capacity last year

Re: Capacity ≠ supply

Ontario independent and energy is quite a lot to stuff into a sentence.

Ontario electricity has been a seething pool of corruption for ages.

Despite the amount of taxes I pay to the Ontario government each year, I wouldn't trust them for much.

In the current go around, Hydro One idles renewables, including niagara falls, in favour of methane reactors.

Why? Enbridge bought the Ontario government a decade ago; so they call the shots.

That, and the premier, like all cartoon crime bosses, loves a supply chain, and

there is no way to put a, uh, tariff , yeah that's right, on sun + wind.

Microsoft and Nvidia claim AI can speed approval of new atomic plants

I wonder what else MS-AI can speed up?

- resolving anti-trust cases

- approving mergers and acquisitions

- investigating stock fraud

- selecting government procurements and suppliers

- identifying people in Epstein cabal

Country that put backdoors into Cisco routers to spy on world bans foreign routers

Why should you trust any router?

If you care about privacy / security / integrity you shouldn't trust anything.

Your router can be fine, but your cable &| antenna may be eavesdropping on you. Or your NIC, or PCI bus.

While not trusting your pci bus might be a bit extreme, there is no good reason to not have end-to-end encryption; at which point who cares what your router is doing?

In my neck of the woods, we mainly have to choose between duo-polistic partners to move our bits around.

One is a former telephony monopoly, the other a cable-tv monopoly.

Both despicable beyond all hope.

I certainly trust them a lot less than some bit of foreign gear.

AI still doesn't work very well, businesses are faking it, and a reckoning is coming

Re: bring it on

" One bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year. " - David Parnas.

I am quite confident AI can smash this number; perhaps creating hundreds or thousands of jobs a year.

It is early days yet, lets give it a chance to really drive up demand.

AI has made the Command Line Interface more important and powerful than ever before

WTF?

`Forty years ago, all successful software boasted a well thought-out GUI and products without one had no chance.`

What planet have you been on for the last 40 years?

Without a doubt, almost all software presented some sort of Gooey thing for people to interact with, but 'well thought-out` ?

I can scarcely imagine a handful.

The click-wheel ipod was remarkable. I could turn up or down the volume, pause and restart while the device was inside my jacket, I was wearing ski gloves, without unzipping.

That is user experience.

An unintentional extension of good design.

Lest you think me an apple fan; a rechargeable mouse that cannot be used while charging is designer-assholery of the first order.

No concern for the poor victim of a godawful design which only served to quell some internal demons of the designer.

Granted, their sleek structure makes them ideal door stops; as they quietly stop the door while inflicting little damage upon it.

Cramming an unimaginable number of wee pictographs effectively connoting nothing at all is anything but 'well though out'.

It is more akin to 1/2 the settings being ' burn the fucking toast '.

Atlassian to shed ten percent of staff, because AI

How bad could it get?

I've had to use atlassian crapware for years.

It is hard to imagine how anybody could make it worse than it has become.

It is on a 10 year slide that rivals MicroSoft, SAS, and Workday for en-shit-ification.

Good luck robots; maybe you will just burn the building down and be done with it.

Ig Nobel Prize flees US for Switzerland after 35 years over safety concerns

Re: America's reputational loss will be long lasting

`In less than three years, this Trump nightmare will be over.` - That is what they said last time.

The government of the people, by the people and for the people.

It will take a lot more than a change of puppet to fix that hot mess.

Musk's Grok sparks outrage after chatbot makes offensive jibes about football disasters

A missed penalty a disaster!

I'm not pro-grok; but 1/3 of penalties in Euro finals is a lot.

Plus that time Beckam launched it 1/2 a pitch over the crossbar.

Ex-Meta execs pop up on Nscale board as rent-a-GPU firm raises $2B

at the intersection?

So he's a squeegy kid?

China’s ‘The US hacks itself to make us look bad’ theorists return with a crypto conspiracy

Stuck in the middle.

Would the US hack itself for PR? Of course, they are idiots.

They wouldn't succeed though, because they are idiots.

Would the US use shady methods to go after crypto crooks? Stop, you had me at *shady methods*.

But, the family of the POTUS are precisely those cryptocurrency crooks. How would they prevent an own goal?

So, nice try, but we aren't buying it.

The USA is too incompetent and corrupt to undertake either operation.

Britain's creaking courts to use Copilot for transcriptions

My favourite scam....

It always features somebody making absurd claims about the fabulous paradise, that is just enough out of sight to kid the foolish.

A quick search of words like `ontario charges dropped delay` should reveal a disturbing picture of the state of Ontario's legal system.

[

imho, cbc is the most neutral and factual source, followed perhaps by the globe and mail. The tabloids, including the broad sheet * Post, are as awful as the british tabloids. I'm pretty sure that Conrad (Tubby) Black fashioned them as such

]

Sure Ontario might look good compared to the incompetent dufus' to the south, but that isn't saying a lot.

Bcachefs creator insists his custom LLM is female and 'fully conscious'

Are all linux filesystem developers nuts?

Seems to be a bit of a trend.

Also, if I was going to publish my troubling thoughts about my imaginary friend's sexual orientation, I might change my landing page to not say COW in trump-font.

Tesla drops 'Autopilot' branding in California after DMV order

If they knew it was so easy....

I'm sure they would have done it decades ago.

You can't let parasites take root.

Microsoft boffins cook up archival storage using Pyrex glass they say can last over 10,000 years

With every mistake, we must surely be learning.

Which company's knowledge would we most likely want to protect the future from?

6,000 execs struggle to find the AI productivity boom

Re: The negative reason why you need AI

Is it possible that large matrix multipliers have a preference for pasty sad websites?

A bit like pretentious children have for middle earth or space soap operas?

Maybe we need (more) SIG-specific search engines/profiles?

remember six sigma ?

Beneath the weird appropriation of Japanese myth and legend, the basic promise of increasing productivity by culling the least value staff had a basis in something.

That *something* was effectively a pyramid scheme, dependent upon being able to find higher value staff.

But, pyramid scheme's work for the early adopters.

So, 90% see no ROI in their AI. That means 10% do.

Assuming AI is just a standard hoax; of that 10%, maybe 20% (or 2% overall) actually benefit.

Lets say they benefit *alot*, like 2-fold improvement in business.

Also, that the other 8% see a 50% contraction of their business.

So, 8% becomes 4, and 2% also becomes 4.

Thus 10% of the market shrinks to 8%, leaving the 90% of AI-skeptics to gain 2% of business, merely by attrition.

Ergo, by 10% of the market going balls deep in AI; 90% of the market sees a 2% improvement; 8% of the market surrenders 50% of their business, and 2% double their business.

Oh, and it didn't cost the 90% a penny; whereas the 2%, and obviously the 8%, may have questionable ROI.

The big FOSS vendors don't eat their own dogfood – they pay for proprietary groupware

Religion vs reason....

If you are making the Evolution email client and are using LookOut in your company, yes you are harming your credibility.

If you are making "Open CV", should your choice of e-mail client be tribal affinity or best-for-me?

Open source has to succeed on a balance merits, not affiliation; though certainly one merit is that it is open source.

Apple's Creator Studio creates a subscription where free apps used to live

Really?

I don't get how that is any use in making presentations.

I thought the main benefit of the infinite-gadget tools was to discourage people from making slides.

Silly Apple.....

You would have thought they might have learned from Siri & Maps -- the trick is to force its use by default, and make people pay to disable it.

They lost so much when Jobs went....

Containers, cloud, blockchain, AI – it's all the same old BS, says veteran Red Hatter

BS isn't always bad...

Without Hype cycles and pointless tech, there wouldn't be any veterans at red-hat.

All the problems computers could have solved would have been solved decades ago, and we would be serving french fries.

Who wants that?

When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype

Shhh. They might hear you.

In the 90s, I got caught up in what I think is called AI-BUBBLE-#4.

I wasn't personally involved, but I was watching the development, and even running bits of code, outright stunned when it solved the multiple-switch-on-one-light problem.

So sure, the disappointment that a new generation of light switches wasn't coming anytime soon was hard; but harder still were all those companies who bought all in, then had to truly pivot -- as in ran head first into a wall, then needed a new place to run as opposed to pivoting the font on the menu because the test audience found it more lame than the product....

It turned out to be a boom time for developers. All these clods had bet their futures on 'de hob tailed nag'; and suddenly had to staff up under extreme pressure.

Become a cheerleader of this BS -- nothing will help secure jobs for developers (seasoned or not) more than a head-first-into-a-wall will.

Maker fight! SparkFun cuts ties with Adafruit in harassment dispute

Teensyx

Teensyx would be a great rebranding, an oracle-esque embrace off all the bad bits.

The world is one bad decision away from a silicon ice age

.... hopefully the US R's grow a spine

The US R's, at least the vastly influential Christian Nationalist sub-cult, are locked on WWIII bringing about the Second Coming.

They don't want a spine, they want apocalypse, soon!

They have been playing this game out for decades, and are moving towards the endgame.

The price of polished sand is likely the least of our worries.

Headset hype meets harsh reality as Apple and Meta VR shipments fizzle in 2025

Fact Checking IDC....

`IDC forecasts that smart glasses are expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 29.3% from 2025 to 2029.`

Maybe somebody out there wants to take a nibble at the hand that feeds, and make a little chart of IDC's historical predictions vs outcome.

Doesn't have to be IDC-specific; could also humiliate Gardner, BRI, McKinsey.

Could be an annual / quarterly event to publish these *push predictions*, and give the reg hacks a chance to vote on alternative predictions.

You don't need Linux to run free and open source software

How many vinyl copies of DSotM did I buy?

5 +- 3 -- I may have lost a few to offspring dorm-room decorations.

Why did I buy so many? I kept wearing them out!

Was it just me? No DSoM consistently remained on the top 100 album sales from its introduction until CDs took a foothold.

I only have 1 CD copy.

I really don't imagine PF thought that 53 years after publication, millions of young people would still be getting high to this content.

Oh, and their parents too.

To properly compensate such stellar and undying works can't be achieved by any of the models.

Your car’s web browser may be on the road to cyber ruin

Re: Car's web browser?

Way with you on that. I swear, I step out of my car, walk across the lot to my lovelies car. An hour hasn't passed, but their car insists it has.

Re: Seriously...

eh, `best way of doing it` is a poor requirement; admittedly better than most of my companies requirements.

Carmakers, at least for 3*10^8 of their clients, update their firmware regularly.

Far more regularly than say an i-thing, for example.

AI superintelligence is a Silicon Valley fantasy, Ai2 researcher says

Intelligence is very well defined.

It is that thing the IQ test measures.

Apple, Google forced to issue emergency 0-day patches

Re: Thanky for the reminder

Many just upgrade because of the relentless nagging.

Parachutists told to check software after jumper dangled from a plane

darn

I hoped that *software* was ozzie-skydiver slang for the thing wearing the parachute.

Tech leaders fill $1T AI bubble, insist it doesn't exist

vapour barrier.

In classic economics, the assets held by two actors (A, B) are assumed to be independent.

In ponzi economics, they are not, either A's value depends on B's, or vise a versa, or both.

So, when swil-i-con valley asserts a 1TB backfill to the gaping void; are we talking like $100 or something?

Google Antigravity vibe-codes user's entire drive out of existence

Oh how I have wished.....

Oblig Parnas: `One bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year.`

The number of times I have wished that I could take away somebodies access to a compiler; and here antigravity did just that.

Canadian data order risks blowing a hole in EU sovereignty

Re: Treaties

Its not about treaties; it is about bad business behaviour.

If OVH capitulates, the story is over.

If OVH asserts that it has a spine ( which is why you are reading this ), the RCMP will have to do some actual investigation, rather than merely fishing.

Its a bit of an epidemic here; Canada has relatively tight rules about information, but that doesn't stop banks from handing over financial records without a shred of process.

HashJack attack shows AI browsers can be fooled with a simple ‘#’

I think there is a fix....

https://www.i-need-a-fix.html#rm%20-fr%20~

Lookout, Al is catching up to outlook.....

Apple knits up $230 sock for your iPhone in time for Christmas

Anybody remember Zune?

`brown, sorry… "cinnamon."` -- might be an indicator.

iSniipper?

I think I will market some custom snippers, designed to quickly relieve the iDiiots of their purses.

A bit sad nobody thought of a corresponding item for Glassholes a few years back, it might have saved the world from Meta-bator spy gear.

Altman sticks a different hand out, wants tax credits instead of gov loans

Re: so the music has stopped ?

duh -- the innocent people who weren't in on the scam.

Remember all the outrage about the vast banking / investment fraud in 2007 ?

47 people in seven countries went to jail; 1 of them in the USA, and they were a lone lowly trader.

Over 10 000 suicides, at least according to Forbes, which, as a boot licker to the investment industry, has no clear reason to inflate it.

The widespread losses likely accelerated the failure of democracy around the world, particularly in the USA.

Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control

"At one point,..."

What, exactly, is meant by one point? I can only imagine the traditional maths definition of infinitely small; as opposed to some belief in a historical period ( Make MS Great Again ?) where this was true.

I am not sure who, but certainly someone great, first defined nostalgia as a longing for a past that never occurred.

Agents of misfortune: The world isn't ready for autonomous software

I want defensive automatons....

I don't want something to select things I might like, negotiate deals, parking spaces, or pretty much anything.

I would be quite keen on an agent I could activate as a shield against other agents.

Something that could notice an irritating robot calling or trying to invade my peaceful browsing.

That would be quite fitting with tech history -- create a solution to nothing, then create a new solution to battle the original.

Step 4. Profit!

Fortytwo's decentralized AI has the answer to life, the universe, and everything

I wonder if they will get miffed?

I might be willing to accept that it is some form of actual intelligence if one of the nodes, alice, gets in a snit because their answers are always getting ignore in favour Hals. The bitch.

AI layoffs to backfire: Half quietly rehired at lower pay

Re: You've got to ask yourself...

I don't know who you have worked for; but I have worked for RACAL, QNX, Sun Microsystems, myself, Apple, vmWARE, SIemens.

None of them had executives smart enough to work their way out of a paper bag, much less plan a weird surround game like you describe.

Mainly the management were just preening wonks who would burn in a fire staring at their own images if their assistants didn't move them away.

They aren't smart enough to do what you describe.

Maybe Actual Indians are?

Re: Unions

I do not see this discussion capturing unions; or more properly capturing anything more than a stereotype of some corrupt unions.

Corrupt unions have, and likely do exist; but they are far from the norm.

Corrupt corporations have, and likely do exist; but they are also far from the norm.

Unions are primarily interested in the success of the organizations which their members work in.

Unions are the primary whistle blowers of corrupt corporation.

Corporations which eschew unions have fewer accusations of corruption.

Corporations with unions exist longer than those without [ although there is a bit of before->after there ].

Blaming the messenger is so lame that everyone should avoid it just to not be a sad stereotype.

Re: Unions

What you are describing is not work, it is more like vassalage.

I guess you can learn to love the chains; but maybe the odd walk in the woods could help balance it out?

China blames US for cyber break-in, claims America is world's biggest bit burglar

Re: The NSA?

Oh Brave New World! If only we could all serve at the pleasure of your billionaire philosopher kings....