Posts by drand

The company's biggest security hole lived in the breakroom

Re: I dont doubt the story...

No they haven't, they just work in marketing.

Lego shrinks NASA's biggest rocket – accuracy sold separately

The trick there is to wake early & annex some prime real estate, e.g. the middle of the the living room carpet, and also lay a trap for big people with a handful of strategically placed 4x2s in the doorway. Then you can avoid any stair-related mishaps and have a the bonus of said big people wanting to reclaim their space so they'll be keen to see what you've built.

BOFH: Eight pints of a lager and a management breakthrough

If that's the quickest way out of Runcorn then fair play.

Meta retreats from metaverse after virtual reality check

Re: I used the copilot!

chatGPT prefers to mimble.

BOFH: Every computer system eventually serves ads

Re: Good episode, but take note:

Interesting. Perhaps the proof is alcohol-rated.

Pudding is a great word in the English culinary lexicon as it can, and over the centuries has, refer to pretty much anything cooked any old way, though traditionally I think it was referring to something boiled or steamed in a cloth or casing. A pudding can be sweet, savoury, or both, steamed, boiled, baked, meat, suet, pulses, flour, pastry, take your pick.

Good episode, but take note:

"The proof is, as they say, in the pudding. Ask it a question."

They do say that, but they are wrong. Unless one is scribbling in the margin of one's pudding, the proof of the pudding is in the eating...

Just because Linus Torvalds vibe codes doesn't mean it's a good idea

Re: Synthetic Take: Why Vibe Coding Isn’t “Just for Toys”

So very much this. The sign of a successful prototype is that you've thrown it away! Unfortunately, it is very difficult to get engineers (even good ones) to adopt this approach, and even more difficult to sell to management (just polish the edges and put it into production).

Help desk boss fell for ‘Internet Cleaning Day’ prank - then swore he got the joke

Re: And then there was the incredible shrinking cube...

Reminds me of further maths lessons where we would all shuffle our desks forwards an imperceptibly small amount when the old, nearly deaf teacher was writing on the blackboard. As he spent most of the lesson talking to himself and scribbling algebra we got a good twenty to thirty minutes in before he turned round and paid enough attention to notice a dozen boys intently copying down his proofs and doing their best to look angelic mere inches from the front of the classroom. He frequently went absolutely flipping nuts at us, which of course only encouraged us further.

Microsoft hypes PCs with NPUs, still can't offer a good reason to buy one

Re: My mouse is too small

The AI agent will, without asking permission, sign you up on a 24-month contract for a larger Copilot-branded mouse that will randomly crash, need frequent firmware updates, and then be immediately discontinued with no refunds or recourse after 18 months.

I know he probably meant cursor, but still...

‘I nearly died after flying thousands of miles to install a power cord for the NSA’

Re: "told the software guy the machine ran fully validated production code"

Because hardware guys always blame the software first?

Security company hired a used car salesman to build a website, and it didn't end well

Re: That reminds me

Similar experience - around the turn of the century, out in town and noticed my usual cash machine had a suspicious-looking device over the card slot - 99% sure it was a skimmer. Branch was closed and this was before I had a mobile phone so when I got home I called their service centre to let them know. Of course, they were more interested in who I was and why I was tampering with their cash machines and were in fact downright hostile. So I said 'oh just fuck off then' or similar and hung up.

AI models just don't understand what they're talking about

Re: Clever

The proper, and only, way to do this is draw a massive hairy cock and balls on the ballot paper.

We just need Prof. Sir John Curtice to give us the hairy cock swing percentages as first item on the coverage after voting closes.

Re: Cited LLM test invalid?

"The ability of LLMs to create new knowledge (e.g. protein folding) needs to be explained. ...."

There is a ton of information from reputable sources about how machine learning models simulate protein folding and other tasks like medical imaging analysis. LLMs don't do this, can't do this, and won't ever be able to do this.

"... It seems they learn principles from examples and can apply the principles to new problems. ..."

The referenced paper shows how they cannot. They are not capable of learning anything. Experience of using them shows they cannot.

"... This is not parroting. ..."

Repeat after me: Yes it bloody well is!

‘AI is not doing its job and should leave us alone’ says Gartner’s top analyst

That's actually a step up for them - mostly they seem to spout on about what any sane person can see to be utter bollocks.

Microsoft total recalls Recall totally to Copilot+ PCs

Re: Fucking shit

Welcome to the club.

Users hated a new app – maybe so much they filed a fake support call

Why not make a reason for a call-out?

I would have thought that on a construction site it would be all too easy for the computers to have an accident...

Is Washington losing its grip on crypto, or is it a calculated pivot to digital dominance?

Re: "Crypto"

Agree, although we do now have the 'mee-cro-wah-vey' to disambiguate thanks to Nigella.

After three weeks of night shifts, very tired techie broke the UK’s phone network

Ditto

Working long shifts without breaks will results in bad things sooner or later - I recently read the public inquiry report on the Clapham Junction rail disaster, and one poor guy pulling overtime (like they all did) changing signal relays was a substantial part of the causal chain.

One third of adults can't delete device data

Re: Data deletion 101

Genuinely curious, why a moderate hammer rather than, say, a 16oz claw or a lump?

Unless you have a bigger ball peen hammer than I?

Re: Workstations, laptops.....

(4) Thermite. A great back-yard experiment in those dull days between Christmas and the new year. Especially for young people who seem to do very little practical science in schools now (grumble).

Security? We've heard of it: How Microsoft plans to better defend Windows

Re: Has Microsoft fired its marketting department

Marketing isles is a great idea! Preferably somewhere volcanic, with deadly wildlife, and surrounded by sharks.

AI PCs: 'Something will have to give in 2025, and I think it's pricing'

Must be bad

For vendors to be unable to offload this shit onto businesses with a track record of wasting money on shiny tat end-users don't actually need, these AI PCs must really be something else.

Airbus A380 flew for 300 hours with metre-long tool left inside engine

Re: Mansearching

Not exclusive to men either. I can report my teenage daughters suffer from the same affliction.

Public Wi-Fi operator investigating cyberattack at UK's busiest train stations

Re: Insider job

Attacker or a future instalment of Who, me?

GenAI spending bubble? Definitely 'maybe' says ServiceNow

C-suite bollcocks

Generative AI is a toy. Resist when the idiots try to foist it upon you.

AI investment & company valuations are in a bubble. Invest in it and make a decent gain, but get out before it all turns to shit.

A nice cup of tea rewired the datacenter and got things working again

I hope he didn't bring his tea into the datacentre!

Also is el Reg doing a site traffic census today. Mentioning tea, coffee, beer or bacon sandwiches is a sure-fire way to bloat the comments!

Brit teachers are getting AI sidekicks to help with marking and lesson plans

Bullshit

This is clearly bullshit in several senses. Firstly, it's government AI-washing an existing scheme or bucket of money in the hope of gaining favourable PR - and shame on them pulling that kind of fuckwit stunt. Secondly if this money goes further than making a few well-off multinationals even more well-off I'll be astounded. And thirdly if it does produce any kind of AI assistance it will do more harm than good, for reasons we all know.

Thankfully, in my experience as a parent and school governor, headteachers and teachers tend to be fairly sane when it comes to seeing through nonsense and prefer an evidence-based approach to adopting planning schemes rather than jumping on the shiny bandwagon.

CrowdStrike file update bricks Windows machines around the world

Well, it's all about being disruptive nowadays, innit?

Microsoft's Recall should be celebrated as the savior of SMEs and scourge of CEOs

Re: What happened to ask the user?

...but you _do_ have to turn the bars left to turn right...

Council claims database pain forced it to drop apostrophes from street names

Not even the worst crime against St. Mary

A few years ago round my way a road sign appeared giving direction to St Mary,s Hospital. My complaints were not acknowledged, but it was eventually corrected.

What if Microsoft had given us Windows XP 2024?

The cost may be astronomical, but then so are the marketing budgets and revenues. Sadly. I don't know why they do it but someone, somewhere will be convinced it makes more money than doing it sensibly.

Everyone wants better web search – is Perplexity's AI the answer?

Re: AI not needed in search

This exactly. I would go so far as to say Google search results were very good for a time (probably longer ago than I think it was). But we all know the problem: search is now a vector for shovelling ads down our throats and scraping data; unless and until this changes - which it won't - then no amount of AI or anything else thrown at it will help the ultimate search outcome for regular users.

Bank's datacenter died after travelling back in time to 1970

Re: Priorities

As my dad was fond of saying - "you can help by staying out of the way".

Honda cooks up an electric motorbike menu, with sides of connectivity

Goodbye

"In the future, data obtained and accumulated from both ICE and electric models will be utilized to understand the needs of customers based on the data of how those motorcycle models are being used," predicted Honda.

Engine, wheels, petrol tank, seat, handlebars. Piss off with the rest of it.

Remembering the time Windows accidentally sent Poland to the bottom of the sea

Rose-tinted spectacles

So even in the good old days, Windows testing & QA was still shit.

Atlassian buys 'asynchronous video' outfit Loom for almost $1 billion

How much?!

A beelion USD or AUD? Either way, fair play to this guy for making such an enormous amount of money. I wish I'd though of it, but I don't know whether I would have had the nerve to inflict such fuckwittery on JIRA users even for that much cash.

Attackers accessed UK military data through high-security fencing firm's Windows 7 rig

No Cyber Essentials?

No Government contracts for you!

How did they get themselves in this mess?

Want tunes with that? India-made POS terminal includes a speaker

Re: Testing

..and this is an 'icle'. What's your point?

[credit to a commentard on an OnCall (?) thread a couple of weeks ago, you know who you are]

Windows screensaver left broadcast techie all at sea

Re: huh?

It translates as:

And yea, on that fateful day, the Almighty didst bestow upon the Ark many virgin Windowes computers; and Merrill was alone, forsaken by his brethren, who had wandered into the hold where he did maketh moving images of the sheep and the goats, and was cast overboard for his sin.

Or something.

Nobody does DR tests to survive lightning striking twice

Re: At least you fixed the problem.

Amazingstoke we called it, with a skip full of sarcasm. Eurgh.

BOFH: Cough up half a grand and we'll protect you from AI

To apply a misquotation

BofH: "I spent most of my money on lager and onion bhajis. The rest I just squandered."

AI is going to eat itself: Experiment shows people training bots are using bots

Garbage in...

It's like the machine learning version of the Human Centipede (NSFW, if you don't know). Neither ends well.

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

Re: My Mantra*

True. The guy I took over from, proper electrical engineer, used to say "If you haven't got three, you haven't got any." Turns out I'm still filtering out what's really useful from his stash, as he decided to keep at least six of everything, even when the kit it was intended for had been in storage for ten years 'just in case'...

Elizabeth Holmes is going to prison – with a $500m bill

If the court decides reasonably that the criminal is not a threat to others in that two weeks, and is motivated to sort their affairs out, then it's fair enough. There will be plenty of cases where the dependents of the criminal would be even more screwed over by their behaviour if it were straight to the slammer; hopefully a little time would give innocent relatives, children, spouses a chance to get their shit together.

Electric two-wheelers are set to scoot past EVs in road race

Please keep this shit away from motorbikes

Modern cars care almost undriveable thanks to awful HMI (looking at you Golf mk8), the assist systems are not up to scratch, and they reset all your settings when there's a software update (VAG again). Bikes nowadays are coming with more and more gadgets they don't need. Just stop it. I don't want to be 'connected' on the bike.

It's not really about navigation, or even about improving the riding experience, it's about collecting data and making money.

The world of work is broken and it's Microsoft's fault

NO

The report is hopefully subtitled "Will AI Fix Work?" - Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies.

The statistics presented, that more time is spent communicating than creating, imply that communicating is less valuable. This is patently not true - how productive are a million monkeys with typewriters?

Of course Russia's ex-space boss doubts US set foot on the Moon

Maybe it's the same reason Russia had competent armed forces capable of defeating the Nazi menace in 1945, but they can't do it now.

How prompt injection attacks hijack today's top-end AI – and it's tough to fix

Meh

Some clever people have made made some beautifully constructed, convincing origami houses. Then some cretins have come along and started shouting that the origami houses are the future and we must all live in one. Now we are not surprised to find out that some joker has walked through the wall of our paper house and stolen our stuff. We don't need a more secure paper house, we need to stop using them for purposes to which they are unsuited.

If this is a terrible analogy, it's not mine it's ChatGPTs.

Twitter users complain 'private' Circle posts aren't

Re: Can Twitter just die already?

He now just needs to paint over the 'ter' and he'll be bob on.

Cruise emits software fix after self-driving car slams into bus

Re: Unique error

Exactly this - If your algorithms can't keep the vehicle further away from the thing in front than the distance it takes to stop, then it shouldn't be allowed on the road; this is the standard expected of human drivers [1].

What if someone was crossing the road behind the bus? Would that be another unique situation. I would like to see autonomous vehicle operators held to a standard where this kind of fuck-up is subject to some weight of criminal responsibility if they can not show reasonably practicable measures undertaken by competent persons to assure others' road safety. Yes I am grumpy this morning.

[1]: At least when they pass their test. Many will drift out of cal over time.