Posts by MrRtd

NASA puts astronauts’ lives in the hands of Tesla’s flaky Cybertruck

He really is a welfare queen.

Nobody will buy his hunks of junk so he gets his buddies in government to bail him out - again.

Anthropic and OpenAI are competing to see whose agents can go rogue harder

I consider all this as part of their marketing, "see our AI is powerful, blah, blah, blah."

LibreOffice brands Euro-Office a 'de facto ally' of Microsoft's lock-in strategy

Considering almost all existing documents are probably in Microsoft's formats, immediately switching the default would cause massive headaches due to compatibility. I think the criticism is a bit misplaced.

X limits hot takes from freeloaders to 50 a day

Any user still there deserves whatever Musk decides is best for them, if that means near 0 exposure, and swarmed with bots and shady scam ads, so be it. ZERO sympathy.

UK Typhoon jets fitted with bargain-bin drone busters for Middle East sorties

The UK shouldn't even be involved, they have enough problems at home to worry about.

Altman said no to military AI abuses – then signed Pentagon deal anyway

With the rate that OpenAI burns through money it's no surprise he signed.

Rogue devs of sideloaded Android apps beg for freedom from Google’s verification regime

Re: Why not?

There is nothing reasonable about a company dictating what software you the owner of the device can install. Just because the cult-of-Apple let Apple dictate to them what can and cannot be installed doesn't mean it's reasonable or that Google should follow suit.

Why does the Windows 11 taskbar hurt me like that?

Re: Make the Start Menu Great Again

I really do like that KDE offers 3 variations of the start menu that are included. Pretty much something for everyone.

1. Application Launcher (I believe this one is the default)

2. Application Menu (the one I use, it's more classic)

3. Application Dashboard.

Re: The location of the task bar?

And don't forget about the absurd amount of padding. Why is everything so spaced out? Sure it makes sense for touch screens but not for mouse & keyboard folks who also have larger screens.

AI spurs employees to work harder, faster, and with fewer breaks, study finds

Most importantly what's the quality of the harder faster work? Yeah, I'm going to assume not that great, and if it's great it'll start diminishing and that employee will eventually burnout.

Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 spends $20K trying to write a C compiler

LLM barely passes open book test.

Ad blocking is alive and well, despite Chrome's attempts to make it harder

Can really tell that the readership here (well those that comment) really do not represent the the general public (not that I would expect it too). I say this as every time a web browser article comes up, we get a whole bunch of comments that get a bunch of thumbs up like: "I moved back to Firefox", "I never left Firefox", and so on. Thing is Firefox has been losing market share for a very long time and it's fall still continues.

Estonia hedges its bets on US tech while going all-in on Microsoft

Independence outweighs whatever saving may be had by using US tech that works hard at vendor-lock-in. Estonia, like most countries are acting rather foolishly relying on foreign tech for essential services.

KDE Plasma 6.6 beta ships a login manager that won't log in without systemd

You do know that you can use other display managers with KDE. No you aren't forced to use systemd if you don't want to.

I can understand why the main developer of plasma login manger would choose just systemd, as many (most?) distro's use it. Also this just makes the developers job easier.

Anthropic writes 23,000-word 'constitution' for Claude, suggests it may have feelings

Long winded word prediction generator says what?

LLM's are good at:

1. adding more words than necessary.

2. creating bullshite.

Stop the slop by disabling AI features in Chrome

Re: DuckDuckGo

That problem isn't exclusive to DDG, it can be seen using any of search engines.

Windows 11 needs an XP SP2 moment, says ex-Microsoft engineer

Agreed! Windows 11 start menu is atrocious. I'm annoyed every time I use it.

'Windows sucks,' former Microsoft engineer says, explains how to fix it

Re: If only there was an alternative OS

Init freedom as long as it not systemd. That doesn't sound like very freedom like.

Palantir CEO celebrates one cash culture to rule them all

Being buddy buddy with the most corrupt US government ever certainly has helped them.

Corruption often pay well in the short term...I wonder how long it'll last?

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

The comedic AI output is useful. Everyone needs a good laugh now & then.

How does China keep stealing our stuff, wonders DoD group responsible for keeping foreign agents out

While that is concerning, there's a much bigger problem, namely the Putin puppet in the White House, in fact the entire trump admin. is nearly completely compromised.

The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

Re: Good at some things

Asking AI to re-write your CV - questionable at best.

Asking AI to write a cover letter - also questionable at best.

Both these tasks (I actually tested it out) do not do a good job. Long winded/not particularly concise, may not emphasize the areas of achievement/skills you want to highlight that are most related to a particular position your applying for.

You end up with wordy resumes and cover letters that tend to get all frequently used generic terms that the AI was trained on.

How to find forgotten Wi-Fi passwords and SSIDs in Windows and Android

It's your own device and you entered those passwords. The idea I think is that since you entered those passwords, there's no reason to permanently keep them hidden from yourself.

Ousted US copyright chief argues Trump did not have power to remove her

Of course they wont. The Republican party is a criminal organization. The fact they picked a unrepentant convicted felon to be president says a lot, and that they haven't removed him or any of his administration that break laws says the rest.

Visiting students can't hide social media accounts from Uncle Sam anymore

Just don't go.

I wouldn't head to the USA to study, vacation, or work, even if it were free. Why chance being rounded up by masked thugs (who may or may not be working for the government) and potentially shipped off to a foreign concentration camp in a 3rd country?

Huawei's latest notebook shows China is still generations behind in chipmaking

Re: Still generations behind

I'll take your word on that, however, one of my desktops is from 2016 and for most things it's fast enough, so this idea whether they're behind 2 or 5 years isn't a huge story. They'll soon catch up and will be a very strong competitor.

Amazon CISO: Iranian hacking crews ‘on high alert’ since Israel attack

Here's a non-AI summary:

Israel's attack made everything worse.

Zuck ghosts metaverse as Meta chases AI goldrush

Re: FFS

Are you suggesting leaving the cocaine industry largely in the hands of gangs is not the ideal option?

Open source AI hiring bots favor men, leave women hanging by the phone

You mean to tell me that a program that ingested vast amounts of biased data, is then going to further those those biases? This should not surprise anyone.

AI seems to need an endless supply of safeguards.

Dash to Panel lives on, thanks to Zorin sponsorship

I really feel like this extension should be included in Gnome. A lot of people don't care for the way Gnome does things by default and I bit more built in options would be appreciated by some.

GNOME 48 lands with performance boosts, new fonts, better accessibility

Re: Gnome3.....Gnome4..........Ughhhhhhhhhh!!!!

6 million Ubuntu users all using Gnome, maybe or maybe not. The Ubuntu numbers doesn't mention which desktop environment. I'm going to assume they pooled all desktop Ubuntu's into that number because it looks better. It's also easy enough to start with Ubuntu Gnome but any user with minimal experience can install other DE. That said, I'm sure Gnome has the largest share of Ubuntu users simply because it's the default.

Stuff a Pi-hole in your router because your browser is about to betray you

"whitelist El Reg"

I do have my ad blocker disabled for your site, the problem for you is that I have google advertising blocked by way of my hosts file, and you don't seem to have any other advertising. I don't apologize, you know what you need to do - there are other ways to show ads without using Google.

So … Russia no longer a cyber threat to America?

Considering the USA is basically now West Russia, the question should be "Can Russia be a cyber threat to itself?"

Mozilla flamed by Firefox fans after promises to not sell their data go up in smoke

Re: Are we the baddies?

"Either way, not accepting the subscription model means not accepting the benefits of continuous improvements"

Sometimes those "improvements" are not improvements at all. Software companies love shoving new UI and other changes that nobody ask for and don't really improve work flows or anything.

Trump’s tariffs, cuts may well put tech in a chokehold, say analysts

No sympathy from me. All the big players in the tech sector bowed down to trump. Whatever happens now is their own fault.

Dell ends hybrid work policy, demands return-to-office despite remote work pledge

Talk about first world problems

At this point, in office requirements are the least of any American's problem.

US Army should ditch tanks for AI drones, says Eric Schmidt

Re: Tanks and drones are obsolete

I know sarcasm is sometimes hard to spot online, but I think that comment was pretty obvious.

Zuckerberg says Biden administration pressured Meta to police COVID posts

Disagree. The government was right to pressure them. This just makes Zuck look like an idiotic heartless bastard that's okay with all death Covid and covid-adjacent conspiracies and misinformation caused.

Linux Deepin 23: A polished distro from China that Western desktops could learn from

Despite the highly subjective opinion of the author, I rather like having all the options KDE have built in, and as for looks, I don't want my desktop to look like a Windows or Mac Clone. And another thing, I can't stand the detached floating menu, just as I don't like the detached tabs in Firefox.

Reddit hopes robots.txt tweak will do the trick in scaring off AI training data scrapers

Re: Poisoning the honey pot

"Instead of blocking non-compliant bots, why not feed them a pile of gibberish, misinformation and random garbage."

How is that different than what reddit is already?

Manjaro 24 is Arch Linux for the rest of us

Re: I found Endeavour a better choice

I am a long time Manjaro user - what do you mean the stealth upgrade of Thunderbird to flatpak? Are you saying this happened on Manjaro, if so that's complete rubbish - it did not happen.

Apple broke the law with anti-union tactics in NYC, labor watchdog barks

Re: I don't get it...

Lazy management might do it that way, but seniority isn't the only factor they consider when a position opens up.

I was once an employee in a unionised workplace, and I can speak from experience that seniority is only one of the considerations, I got a position I applied for even though there were a couple of others who also applied with more seniority but they didn't get the job for various reasons like bad attendance, and what not. I also had more experience for the position outside that organization too.

Elon Musk can't wriggle out of SEC Twitter fraud inquiry

Re: Huh?

Nope. You believe incorrectly. There was never a get out of the sale for a billion clause. It would have been lunacy for Twitter to include such a clause if it meant they would lose out on the other 40-something billion.

Dell said to be preparing broad Return To Office order this Monday

Re: Being remote is career limiting

"It will be the best people that they lose."

That is only partially true. Have you stopped and considered some of the best people may actually like being in the office. Also considering many businesses are also doing the return to office and others are doing layoffs there may be less "best" people leaving.

IBM-led advertising X-odus gains steam as more flee Musk's platform

What reputation is left for her to ruin after becoming a Musk-puppet?

Data breach reveals distressing info: People who order pineapple on pizza

Pizza snobs avert your eyes, you may not like what I've got to say.

If I were Australian I wouldn't be worried about being blackmailed. I like pineapple and I'm not ashamed to say I like it sometimes on some types of pizza. It goes great with ham, bacon, pepperoni, possibly other meats too, but I'm not a heathen, I would not pair pineapple with toppings such as anchovy or olives...

Google institutional investor calls for wider cuts: 30k jobs

Re: 50% not needed...

Yeah, so profitable that he's somehow not able to pay rent?

Google Chrome calculates your autoplay settings so you don't have to - others disagree

I use Firefox Beta on Android, and uBlock Origin works.

ReactOS 'a ripoff of the Windows Research Kernel', claims Microsoft kernel engineer

Well, Microsoft can clear this up by opening up the code. As long as it's closed-source there really isn't any reason to believe anything they say.

Munich council: To hell with Linux, we're going full Windows in 2020

Re: Politics is nothing to do with it.

Only someone that hasn't paid attention to what's going on here would say it has nothing to do with politics.