Posts by chuckufarley

Big Tech's control freak era is breaking itself apart

As irrational as it sounds...

...The truth is in the business world there has long been a curse on those that Make Too Much Sense. I lost a lot of business and contracts because of it and until The Powers That Be in business learn better they are doomed to repeat past failures.

For an Enterprise to succeed in the long term they must truly think in the long term but that hasn't been happening in decades, at least. Short term thinking has led us down this road and the road gets shorter every day. Yes, open source is great way for us to get off of it but only if there is a fundamental reevaluation of how success is defined. Without that and some other major growing pains like retraining staff and learning to do with more again, well, I think it's a bit bleak. I am old and cynical.

"Willful ignorance is humanity's Achilles' Heel. Once people decide they no longer have to learn then they stop learning altogether. You can't teach them after that. Sadly, they must come to realize the truth on their own and that only happens when things go wrong for them." --By Unknown

Foxconn hires humanoid robots to make servers at Nvidia's Texas factory

Meh, I see it as...

...an excuse to drive people to do more and pay them less. The maintenance cost alone will dwarf Obama Care in the long run. In the short run Old Kingdom Egyptian monarchs erected a monolith to warn future rulers against the dangers of famine. If people can't eat you will not stay in power.

Don't take AI to Thanksgiving: Bots have hidden biases

I completely disagree...

...LLMs have become so infallible and all powerful that they can never, ever, be wrong. They are superior to mortal humans in all ways. Oh, my sources? It's what I got from on AI chat bot.

Librephone battles the proprietary binary blob

Re: I know that making something "idiot proof" is a wasted effort..

Look, it is a round about way to make a point about how so many people thought they knew better than this guy, till they didn't and suddenly he was a household name for a few years and was even memed by Jeff Goldberg in "Jurassic Park" but then people forgot about him because they didn't really understand what he did or what it meant. Kinda like:

https://xkcd.com/3154/

I mean, what do metal weights dropped by some random Italian guy in the 16th century have to do with anything today? It took hundreds of years for Galileo's "simple experiment" to be fully understood and then it was only person: Albert Einstein. I am just glad these scientists write things down, publish what their employers allow them to publish, and a lot of people don't want to kill them off like Joseph Stalin did.

So don't ask again. Just think about it. You might make history.

Also, drop the A.C. Cowards in this day and age all vote for the same candidates.

I know that making something "idiot proof" is a wasted effort..

...After all, idiots are self evident. But look, at some point the smart people have to be smart. Untested? Unverified? These are either people that deserve to get paid or they deserve to be thrown in prison for being a fraud. They work on problems for a living a lot like Dr. Mandelbrot worked on art for living. It's nice to look at it, but can you honestly say you know it?

Re: Ain't it easier to persuade a SoC manufacturer to make FOSS blobs

It's Option C. The IP that distinguishes SOC vendors (and actually most hardware manufactures and designers) is often not that hard for a competitor to reverse engineer and incorporate into their own products provided that the software that drives it is completely open and honest about what it is doing.

God bless them...

...but how many phone models need work?

OpenAI's ChatGPT is so popular that almost no one will pay for it

Why should the average person...

...or even me, have to pay for what was stolen from them? Even if it has been run through a blender and then mixed with what was stolen from everyone else and then infused with plastic polymers to make it "unique." That doesn't mean it's actually good on any level.

ICE plans to scour Facebook, TikTok, X, and even defunct Google+ for illegal immigration leads

Hey, maybe they will hire me...

...I may not be evil but I do know how to mock evil. Oh wait, they may want to kill me now.

Bezos plan for solar powered datacenters is out of this world… literally

Yeah, um, I am going to you

to go into orbit on Saturday. Thanks.

So what does Jeff know about physics that the rest of us don't? Thermal convection is an extremely inefficient cooling mechanism in a vacuum. The proverbial Sheep would cook itself before it ever reached maximum velocity. It doesn't matter how rich you are, what your rank is, or who you know. Physics is.

College student went on a destructive rampage, then confessed to ChatGPT, cops say

Then he...

...Files for bankruptcy, just like Don would do. Ain't America Great?

Microsoft CTO says he wants to swap most AMD and Nvidia GPUs for homemade chips

Microsoft has has alway been great...

...At getting what they want. Their customers are screwed though.

Cyber threat-sharing law set to shut down, along with US government

Well, it's a good thing Windows 10 support does not end next month...

...Oh, wait.

No! Do Not Wait!

FOMO? Brit banking biz rolls out AI tools, talks up security

Don't do it!

Open source models might contain code owned by SCO!

Linux Mint picks up the pace with LMDE 7 and Wayland-ready Cinnamon

I am sick and tired...

...of fighting with my computers to get them to do what I want them to do. If the defaults are pleasing to the eye, the iscsi initiator mounts the targets before the processes that need them start, and it's still stable and and secure, well...I'll sell my mother for it. She pasted away a long time I'm afraid, but as a retiree I don't have a lot of liquid assets.

HybridPetya: More proof that Secure Boot bypasses are not just an urban legend

"no real-world implications"

https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/11/turing_machine_0day_no_patch_available/

Vision AI models see optical illusions when none exist

So when did...

...People actually figure out where and when our cognitive biases are activated in the human brain? Oh. Never. I guess it not surprising then that the people who are unable to see their own thought processes in full detail can't actually make machines that are "smart" like them. Yet we keep trying...

ICANN fumes as AFRINIC offers no explanation for annulled election

So, um...

...Is anyone following the money?

Don't panic, but it's only a matter of time before critical 'CitrixBleed 2' is under attack

'Why are you even reading this story?"

Because I have refused to touch Citrix for over two decades now. And I need a good laugh. Ha F'in Ha.

Stop paying companies to produce crap! You are supposed to be smart people and there has never been an excuse for Citrux!

Just say no to NO FAKES Act, EFF argues

IF...big if...

...People in the US get the privacy protections that should be a human right for all people then it would up end the entire economy. So I don't think the EFF has much of a chance to change minds here. Not that I think they they are wrong in principle but that they are fighting the war in the wrong way. EFF, go buy some property rights then abuse them because you can. Lead by example.

Xlibre fork lights a fire under long-dormant X.org development

Wot I think...

...Is that doesn't matter in the end. X.org, Wayland, whatever. If you still need to run JavaScript, Java, or C# code you and yours are Fuxxord.

Researchers claim spoof-proof random number generator breakthrough

But...

...I am your boss. We don't have the resources to check into every little alert from the monitoring system.

Freshly discovered bug in OpenPGP.js undermines whole point of encrypted comms

Never roll your own encryption...

...And never get involved in a land war in Asia!

Attackers pwn charter airline helping Trump's deportation campaign

Oh what a country...

...We can't even deport people using American made planes.

37signals is completing its on-prem move, deleting its AWS account to save millions

I have this Debian server at home...

...I have used it for nearly ten years with only software updates. It hosts some VM's, one read only NFS share, and has a few CPU's crunching numbers for LHC@home. Running du /etc/ as root shows me that it is using 13040 kilobytes. 13mb of text files for to configure a simple home server. Plain text. Linux, *bsd, Illumos, these things may seem obscure but they are not hard because you don't have to (and absolutely should not) touch 99% of what is in /etc for your server to work. Sane defaults, anyone?

Top sci-fi convention gets an earful from authors after using AI to screen panelists

But isn't being weeded out by "planet-destroying plagiarism machines"...

...better than not getting to praise "planet-destroying plagiarism machines" in front a live audience?

I, for one, welcome our new AI over lords.

Computacenter IT guy let girlfriend into Deutsche Bank server rooms, says fired whistleblower

There, there Mr Papa...

...She still loves Papa Poo.

Um, no Mr Papa, that was supposed to an innuendo and there is no need to try and toss me out the window,

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

When there is blood in the streets...

...Buy property.

Uncle Sam kills funding for CVE program. Yes, that CVE program

No wonder the prices of hotdogs and marshmellows are rising...

...the world may be burning but people still have to eat.

How nice that state-of-the-art LLMs reveal their reasoning ... for miscreants to exploit

There is no such thing as Security from Obscurity...

...and this is why real security oriented people would never put a back door in an encryption algorithm. It is a good thing that that these models expose their own weaknesses. Now we just good and easily accessible documentation about it to make things better.

I think any guardrails on AI models are like guardrails on a baby's crib. These models are so immature they need things like diapers and pacifiers. If people keep being honest about the limitations of the models maybe some day someone can invent "Training Wheels."

LLM aka Large Legal Mess: Judge wants lawyer fined $15K for using AI slop in filing

Wow, $15,000...

That is a lot if of money...

...If you are permanently disabled in the US and your only source of income is Social Security. Mr. Rameriz might pay that much or more per year for parking.

A big AI build has ‘stalled’ and won’t happen this year as funds and GPUs prove elusive

Re: The canary is choking

Upvoted, but I think they will click the Next Turn button for a long time to come.

So AI hardware...

...Is the new single point of failure? My god. We aren't even to the point of attacking the software stack yet! Entropy with be a real bitch when that happens.

As Trump slugs Canada, Mexico and China with tariffs, industry groups hope trade war weapon isn’t pointed at their feet

And the band plays on...

...I mean really! They are quoted as saying “As these actions are implemented, it is essential to bring industry and stakeholders to the table to help the government reach its desired result, limit unintended consequences, and develop a holistic and successful trade policy approach,”

As if they are blind to the fact that the desired result is the dismantling of Democracy in the Western Hemisphere. We The People have forgotten the past and We will pay the price for it.

OpenZFS 2.3 is here, with RAID expansion and faster dedup

Re: Steam?

I am sorry you disagree so strongly, but I'll stand by opinion that for simple shares using NFS on Linux ZFS is overly complicated and makes life harder if you ever want to switch distos or recover a system. You are right, fsck should not be used with btrfs. In fact btrfs even comes with it's own scrub command, just like ZFS. Does ZFS have place? Yes. Is that place a home user storing game files on a NAS? I don't think so.

As for losing your data to btrfs I have never lost anything to it in over eight years of use. Sorry it happened to you.

Re: Steam?

I wouldn't try it because it will turn into a PITA down the road. If you want a RAID use a simple mdadm, LVM, or btrfs setup with NFS. I actually have my Steam Library hosted on btrfs with LVM at home but I am not using a Steam Deck. However any *nix and Pro versions of Win10 and Win11 can mount NFS shares.

NFS is simple to set up even though it has little built insecurity. It just works by default. It is well documented, robust, and stable.

You will have to spend more time researching and deploying the storage system then the NFS share.

I am pleased to see the progress...

...but I will be sticking with btrfs. Not only is it far more flexible and just as reliable, if things go South with your storage server you can boot any Linux live CD/USB then (if needed) modprobe btrfs to have access to your data.

AI can improve on code it writes, but you have to know how to ask

Re: So now software devs have to...

You think they won't be lining up for it?

So now software devs have to...

...learn to write Rust and how to write prompts for LLMs? Queue riots.

CAPTCHAs now run Doom – on nightmare mode

You can't kill what you can't see...

...and I need a much larger game window to see what's happening here.

Second Jeju Air 737-800 experiences mechanical issues following deadly crash

I doubt it's some wierd form of sabotage...

...I mean, greed has sabotaged so many things throughout human history we can hardly call it weird. Amirite?

'That's not a bug, it's a feature' takes on a darker tone when malware's involved

Sometimes there is third party...

...software than can be run on these devices, but unless you literally roll your own distro you must place your trust in the loan random person maintaining the image compatible with your device. They might not even be in Nebraska...

Win a slice of XP cheese if you tell us where Microsoft should put Copilot next

I think it would wonderful if...

...I could get Copilot integrated into a shovel. I have a lot of shit to move and think it would be a perfect fit.

After missing the AI boom – badly – Samsung shuffles the C-Suite

If Samsung is careful...

...They may yet miss the AI Bust.

Now’s your chance to try Microsoft’s controversial Windows Recall ... maybe

I tried on my openSuse desktop...

...I just installed a key logger and set the first cron job to make a screen capture to every 5 seconds, made sure the time stamps were correctly synced, fed all the data into koboldcpp with a 'simple' bash pipe chain, and finally set a second cron job to upload the results to Microsoft every hour. I was not impressed.

Study suggests X turned right just in time for election season

Re: There is nothing illegal about...

I'm sorry but I disagree. Disregarding people posting nonsense will only lead to more nonsense being posted.

Re: There is nothing illegal about...

Wait a sec. If you are confident enough to post it, why aren't you posting under a confirmed account name? Why the AC? Are you that insecure about who you are? I live in a country where even a gay man can walk down the street with PRIDE so I put little stock in the mutterings of Anonymous Cowards.

There is nothing illegal about...

...using misinformation to sway voters. You can't use it to get a bank loan, or to drive up the price of a stock. You can't sell a product based on misinformation in its advertising, I.E. snake oil, but you can still sell snake oil legally today if you follow the Rules of Law. When it comes to voting, snake oil is what keeps the U.S. political machine running these days.

Lenovo’s enterprise hardware biz booms but profit remains elusive

It's so sad Lenovo can't make a porfit...

...Almost as sad as knowing that any company propped up by the government of China would post a profit whenever China would benefit from it.

Google decides Europe's political ad rules are too hard to implement at scale

Wait, what?

The EU actually wants the money driven advertisements banished from it's elections? That is so un-American! The worst un-American ever! Not even the Democrats are this un-American!