Posts by bitwise

Britain's privacy watchdog quits after 'poor judgment' admission

Civil Vs Parliament

MPs can do or say whatever but Civil Service is at everyone's mercy especially MPs.

NHS patients can't opt out of Palantir's data platform – but their hospital can

We have plenty of expertise here

We have a lot of UK expertise in building software in Gov and NHS.

Re: I have no idea if the rumours are true...

He is definitely against democracy and government - which should be enough for governments to not deal with him - he wants to destroy them.

Good Law Project

I suggest we all donate to the Good Law Project to challenge the relevant organisations based on this, because this shit should really not fly at all.

KPMG's AI report becomes an accidental demo of AI hallucinations

Re: Lazy report writers

LLMs are basically guessing, there is nothing definite in there.

Anthropic’s Bun Rust rewrite merged at speed of AI

Some of the tests are just sleep(1) now ?

So some of the tests were replaced with placeholders, this shows a complete lack of care.

The dev would have noticed that if they read all the changes. The LLM could have helped find this with the right prompt too but still.

Civil servants to protest outside Capita AGM over pension shambles

Re: "unexpected case complexity"

Funny you think they got a choice and the decision wasn't made way about the paygrade of those affected.

Villifying other workers who do a job sure is a decision.

NHS to close-source hundreds of GitHub repos over AI, security concerns

Who made this decision

No word on who was in the meetings making this decision.

This will handicap development across government l.

As it is government departments all use libraries written to GDS standards and freely reuse fork and take over projects as needed.

This is going to be counter productive and result in slower and less secure apps

Who benefits from this?

I can imagine certain vendors being in favour of this got sure.

We paid for this stuff, it should not be closed.

Usage-based pricing killing your vibe - here's how to roll your own local AI coding agents

Re: Randomness

In practice zero temperature is not quite repeatable (you do get repetitions but also some variation).

I think this is because the operations are done in parallel and so the order they are combined is not stable.

Eh?

Don't we all have more ideas than time ?

A few of them might be good.

Claude Desktop changes app access settings for browsers you don't even have installed yet

Vibecoded

More Vibecoded shite from them I'm sure.

New Android development tool designed for robots, not humans

Android build CLI finally usable ?

So if there's one thing we get out of the AI bubble it is an CLI for building Android apps that is not absolute shite.

Capita won disastrous UK pensions gig after acing performance checks

Crapita?

Everyone knows this organisation as crapita since forever, I'm not sure this assessment is worth the paper it's written on.

Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user

Plug in a keyboard?

You can get lightning to USB adapters, I haven't tested a keyboard but the mouse works on the iPad at home.

AI will make anyone a 10x programmer, but with 10x the cleanup

Spotify wasn't great vefore

They are going to Windows Vista it into the toilet.

Microsoft wants to replace its entire C and C++ codebase, perhaps by 2030

Frangipani insane

One engineer, 1 million lines a month.

Well thats incredibly stupid, there is no way they can understand what they are doing.

The rule some open source has that contributors must understand what they commit is a solid one.

Absolutely reckless of microsoft to gamble the company like this.

Digital ID is now less about illegal working, more about rummaging through drawers

Compulsory for anyone getting a job?

What, in the actual fuck?

Discord says 70,000 photo IDs compromised in customer service breach

We said this was going to happen mere weeks ago

Why this isn't being wielded more strongly as a weapon against this stupid law I don't know.

Campaigners urge EU to mandate 15 years of OS updates

Just as google locks android bootloaders

Google and Samsung are in the process of locking down Android phones by locking the bootloaders, as well as denying apps installed outside Google Play.

Planned obsolescence, and lack of user choice :(

Hopefully the EU comes after this.

UK Home Office hikes tech consultant spend to £350M despite pledge to cut costs

Wages too low so you you end up with contractors

The wages are too low for the full time devs, and work still is needed and so what do you do - get contractors in for a load more.

End well, this won't: UK commissioner suggests govt stops kids from using VPNs

OSA was pushed by Carnegie not gov

Why are we letting "charities" owned by sone of the richest people in the world write laws, OSA is completely undemocratic.

Microsoft promises to eventually make WinUI 'truly open source'

Since it's deprecated open source win32

Since they are so keep to deprecate win32 they could do worse than MIT licensing all the UI parts of Win32.

Wine could adopt those and Microsoff giving a pathway for legacy software.

Microsoft could stick with WinUI or whatever Teams etc are built in, if seems like the direction they want to go in, and they seem to be letting go anyone that understands how any of their native stuff actually works.

Industry reacts to DuckDB's radical rethink of Lakehouse architecture

Postgres

For those of who weren't born in the clouds and only visit it out of convenience, just stick with Postgres.

OK great, UK is building loads of AI datacenters. How are we going to power that?

Re: Hmm

Put em on legs

Scotland

Scotland has a load of renewable energy it can't get to England because we haven't built the transmission lines yet (and we plan to build them in the sea, which doesn't seem sane in the current climate).

So build these in Scotland, where the energy is.

Judge says Meta must defend claim it stripped copyright info from Llama's training fodder

A copy of a person but with the "left bias" removed

So, anything that tech billionaires decide is "left bias" is removed (probably being in favour of workers rights etc)... so now they can make copies of us that are arseholes, great.

Meta debuts its first 'mixture of experts' models from the Llama 4 herd

Re: Ah, progress by numbers

Is the plan to convert the planet into one big (racist) computer ?

You would have to be brave to use this for work..

Imagine the legal trouble a company could find itself in using a model that reflects the current gov of the US, in the rest of the world where people still have rights ?

Problematic

I'm not sure anyone can use this, since we have no transparency over what they've done to the model.

There's no transparency on what they've done to this, or the process to bias it.

systemd begrudgingly drops a safety net while a challenger appears, GNU Shepherd 1.0

42% less unix philosophy

Is hilarious, given all the whingers thoughts on it.

Honestly - not having to work out exactly how *this* new distro specifies it's start up and service scripts vs another has been a godsend.

Wubuntu: The lovechild of Windows and Linux nobody asked for

Coming to a scambaiters screen soon

Can't wait to watch the YouTube of a confused scammer trying to use this.

Southeast Asian nations revise semiconductor strategies as Trump's shadow looms

That bridge in the thumbnail breaths fire

They picked a good bridge for the thumbnail (dragon bridge in Da nang), I'm not sure why they didn't choose a pic of it later when they have it breath fire at the end of each day.

Keir Starmer says facial recognition tech is the answer to far-right riots

Bussing around the country

(Not a facial recognition fan) - however, I can see the logic: in this case EDL types are bussing around the country, facial recognition might help quickly see that (though, I bet old fashioned intelligence would do as well).

The rise and fall of the standard user interface

Walk up and use software

It used to be very easy to learn new windows software

Hold down alt to see the shortcuts to get into the menus, go into the first menu, navigate and see all the options.

Hold down alt, and mouse over all the icons and see the shortcuts.

As well as this, the menus listed the keyboard shortcuts and corresponding icons, so you could build a mental model of what is where.

ArcaOS 5.1 gives vintage OS/2 a UEFI facelift for the 21st century

OSFree

Every few years I check the OSFree project

http://www.osfree.org/

No updates since 2020 or so, but in the length of this project not so bad considering how long they have been going (I think there were 5 year gaps before).. I'm semi suprised that on downloading an ISO and booting in a VM, it does.. well, something??

Yukon UFO could have cost unfortunate balloon fan $12

Re: Republicans have a lot to answer for

The "science behind the laffer curve" is putting things a bit strongly, it's a theory, but not a theory in the scientific sense - there is limited empirical evidence - I look forward to a day where we evidence based economics enters the mainstream, but we are not there yet.

Accusing the other side of "wishful thinking" and presenting an unproven theory does not make for a strong argument.

Former Facebooker alleges Meta drained users' batteries to test apps

Stealing leccie?

BT used to go after phreakers for stealing electricity, can't users claim the same here?

Guy who wrote women are 'soft, weak, cosseted, naive' lasted about a month at Apple until internal revolt

Re: Inclusive must mean that we only include things that we like...

Given that shockingly racist Shockley was right there at the inception of Silicon Valley, the fact there are racists peppered through it is utterly unsurprising.

'Biggest data grab' in NHS history stuffs GP records in a central store for 'research' – and the time to opt out is now

Re: PDF ?

Print to PDF, and also to paper.

Re: Why opt out ?

It's not "within the NHS" that is the issue.

The issue, is it getting shared with all sorts of private enterprise, e.g. health insurance companies.

150,000 lost UK police records looking more like 400,000 as Home Office continues to blame 'human error'

Re: Technical issue?

**** ******** must be breathing a sigh of relief right now.

The exodus continues: Less than half of contractors expect to stick with their employment set-up after IR35

Contractors in gov positions offered perm pay.

In the Gov department I'm in contractors have been offered 2 year contracts on perm pay, I'm not sure there will be any take up for this.

The pay cut would be at least 30%-40% for the current contractors that are inside IR35, who have already taken a cut of 30-40%.

Sailfish floats v3.4 'Pallas-Yllästunturi', its latest Jolla good reason for itchy-fingered Android and Apple swervers

Taxis eat Jollas ?

Lost mine in a Taxi in Taiwan.

Open-source devs drown in DigitalOcean's latest tsunami of pull-request spam that is Hacktoberfest

Re: Be Prepared...

my_doob (of ThreeJS) was requesting this feature about a couple of weeks ago, so someone may have had a mostly-working version of it sitting somewhere.

UK govt urged to bolt tough legal protections onto Arm and protect jobs – or simply veto Nvidia's £31bn acquisition

They don't care about British industry

Unless it is lining their pockets they don't care.

How do you solve 'disruption' at the UK border after Brexit? Let's call Peter Thiel! AI biz Palantir – you're hired

Re: How do you solve 'disruption' at the UK border after Brexit?

He only drinks the blood of the young though.

https://www.theregister.com/2016/08/01/peter_thiel_wants_young_blood_for_longevity/

Happy birthday to the Nokia 3310: 20 years ago, it seemed like almost everyone owned this legendary mobile

UI counts too

While others were thinner, for a while, Nokia and Sony were the only ones with a usable interface.

SoftBank: Oi, we paid $32bn for you, when are you going to strong-Arm some more money out of your customers?

VC Money strikes again

So ARM is now in the VC cycle that will eventually kill it.

It's a real shame, but I can't see this ending well.

UK contractors planning 'mass exodus' ahead of IR35 tax clampdown – survey

Re: hyperbole?

BigCO I'm working for loves beuracracy, so I don't think it's that.

Most of the contracts I work on are to build a specific thing and bugger off.

People like to bring in extra people to make something and their option now will be to use other countries.

Where I work there are teams in China and India, it just means less dev work will happen in the UK.

Giraffe hacks printers worldwide to promote God-awful YouTuber. Did we read that one right?

Re: articles like this are just stupid

You know nothing about how much journalists are paid.

He did get people to hold up anti semetic signs.

His videos are clearly moronic.