Posts by Handlebars

Do you trust Xi with your 'private' browsing data? Apple, Google stores still offer China-based VPNs, report says

due diligence

If someone is shopping for a security product and can't be bothered to even check the country of origin, that's on them.

Half of businesses rethink ditching humans for customer service bots

Re: What people want from customer support

Not essential to be a native speaker, just a competent one. I needed email ports enabled on a VPS recently and the hosting provider's representative in the Philippines had no problem sorting it out. (I assume they make you talk to a person for this as an anti spammer measure)

AI's the end of the Shell as we know it and I feel fine … but insecure

Re: I generally avoid the newest shiny thing until it becomes unavoidable.

Tron was my first thought too.

UK's Isambard-AI super powers up as government goes AI crazy

They named it after The Reckless Engineer. Very droll.

AI can spew code, but kids should still suffer like we did, says Raspberry Pi

If you try using LLMs you'll find 'just getting the answer' is a rare event.

Wanted: IT manager for UK government agency – £60k

Re: Apples and oranges

You can be made redundant from the CS, it's just less volatile than the private sector.

What will UK government workers do with an extra 26 minutes a day?

I'm guessing that behind that average figure is a lot more for slide-deck-craftsmen and a lot less for, say, wader-wearers at the Environment Agency.

VodafoneThree's a crowd – now comes the hard bit

Re: Quality of service

Say what you like about Mussolini but at least he delivered the packets on time

Re: Were all the good names taken?

Brilliant

AI won't replace radiologists anytime soon

Re: Same day, different story

'remotely assessed' might refer to the non-AI option of the GP sending a photo to the dermatologist, which is pretty common practice.

ASUS to chase business PC market with free AI, or no AI - because nobody knows what to do with it

In the UK and other places, for retail, your contract is with the retailer so if something doesn't last a reasonable time you can try to take it up with them.

Greater Manchester says its NHS analytics stack is years ahead of Palantir wares

Re: Wait...

What Manchester probably has is not something you can package and sell but instead a great team of people who were able to knit together the umpteen systems and data flows across their system to produce analytics and bi

Re: Wait...

Exactly that. Some icbs are doing well while others are far behind, but I think we should use more of what GM has rather than buy Palantir.

AI skills shortage more than doubles for UK tech leaders

If only they had listened to the Thought Leaders while there was still time.

IT chiefs of UK's massive health service urge vendors to make public security pledge

Re: Security responsibility is a two-way thing

Quite a bit of this is already implemented: I have a physical card and associated PIN for some systems while others use Outlook on my phone as MFA.

Fired US govt workers, Uncle Xi wants you! – to apply for this fake consulting gig

Re: What's Good for the Goose is Gander Over Ready despite Hypocrites wishing IT Otherwise

This seems to be about conning people as to the nature of the job offer. All the other countries trying to hire scientists are pretty transparent about it. All that said, it's a savvy move by China.

Uncle Sam claims H-1B fraud crackdown is working as registrations drop 25%

"a green card – which is itself a pathway to citizenship and freedom."

The freedom to still work for a boss but with less paperwork is a very modest sort of freedom. My spouse went from visa holder to citizen and it wasn't exactly the ending from Short Circuit 2.

Annual electronic waste footprint per person is 11.2 kg

How will me buying a used but not repairable device encourage manufacturers to build different?

I usually buy new and keep as long as possible. Posting this from my 5 year old android.

Some English hospitals doubt Palantir's utility: We'd 'lose functionality rather than gain it'

Re: NHoS / NHSbuntu / Openhealthhub

There's always someone, civil servant, manager, or doctor, on the lookout for a way to get a piece of the funding pie. It's more difficult to do that with libre software so better to stamp it out.

The 'End of 10' is nigh, but don't bury your PC just yet

There's a lot of used kit being marketed with Win10 installed and no mention of EOL. Nice for people like us but a total scam on normal consumers.

As US scientists flee Trump, MP urges Britain to do more to nab them

points for PhDs

Why frame this as looser requirements? In a points based system it would seem obvious to award a lot of points to holding a stem PhD

X marks the drop for European users

Re: Keep it up...

I'd like them to just run their own websites, with RSS if they really think a notification system is needed.

The one interview question that will protect you from North Korean fake workers

Re: Or...

I don't think the person you replied to intended to say anything negative about Poland. It has a skilled tech workforce and relatively low wages which is why firms would hire there and why NK agents would pose as Poles.

Open source text editor poisoned with malware to target Uyghur users

The GitHub page says it's an editor with spell check. Any reason the language needs a dedicated editor rather than a common one with localisation?

Re: Who could possibly be behind this ...

Modicum is doing some heavy lifting there

Need a Linux admin? Ask a hair stylist to introduce you to a worried mother

Re: Years and years

Minesweeper Consultant and Solitaire Expert?

It's fun making Studio Ghibli-style images with ChatGPT – but intellectual property is no laughing matter

Re: General Ignorance does not help

If you've only met smart critical thinkers in IT then count yourself lucky

Staff at UK's massive health service still have interoperability issues with electronic records

Palantir is going to do well. Their main service is big data and interoperability but they also do CRUD apps so I expect they have dreams of stealing EPIC's lunch.

UK officials insist 'murder prediction tool' algorithms purely abstract

Re: Word salad

Use of 'acknowledges' like this is established science rather than an activist position.

I also note 'this term, now preferred', which is an example of creating an in group that has its own terminology. IT has a version of that: expiring certifications in tools that haven't meaningfully changed since you last took the exam.

Procter & Gamble study finds AI could help make Pringles tastier, spice up Old Spice, sharpen Gillette

Re: It could...

You can already dip cornflakes in salsa so why does Kellogg's need Pringles?

UK stats body snoozes legacy tech overhaul as Treasury tightens purse strings

"remove data science support to the rest of government"

Coming about five minutes after the PM announced AI was going to be our salvation.

UK government told to get a grip on £23B tech spend

Re: Stake holders

Presenteeism is usually understood as a negative: being physically present while not doing anything much

Re: Stake holders

The NHS has made a decent effort to deal with this in the form of the Master Person Service. Integrating that with everything else takes work of course.

Home Office haunted by 25-year-old asylum system

Re: Government and IT systems

You forgot subsequent business growth.

Alan Turing Institute: UK can't handle a fight against AI-enabled crims

Re: adopting ... AI as part of its routine crime-fighting efforts

They might do something with it at the prevention stage, but not sure what exactly.

Delicious irony as Euro alliance pumps €1M of Microsoft's money into open source cloud federation tech

A whole million Euros? Gee whizz Dad!

It's nice that they're doing it but this is still a long way from something to gloat about.

British govt wants to mainline AI, but its arteries are clogged with legacy tech

Microsoft Tay remembers

Today's jobs Microsoft thinks could use an AI assist: Researchers and analysts

And the end result will be put in to a RAG to reduce it to a summary.

Yo dawg. I summarised your analysis so you can analyse while you summarise.

Ransomwared NHS software supplier nabs £3M discount from ICO for good behavior

Re: "People should never have to think twice about whether their medical records are in safe hands"

Many hands make light work!

Palantir, Optum, Oracle...

2 in 5 techies quit over inflexible workplace policies

Re: re: But if you're a manager you want the ones who are desperate

I make sure my capable people get credit but otherwise agree with you.

Pentagon kills off HR IT project after 780% budget overrun, years of delays

Birmingham (England) Council says...

Hold my beer!

Political poker? Tariff hunger games? Trump creates havoc for PC industry

Re: Hmm

No, it's orthogonal to the topic of protectionism at the block's perimeter.

Re: Hmm

Better example would be why does the EU put tariffs on chocolate but not on ingredients imported from relatively poor countries. This isn't limited to the EU though: everyone wants to do the value adding (or at the very least the value capturing) step.

Show top LLMs some code and they'll merrily add in the bugs they saw in training

Re: It's not a problem

I prompted ChatGPT "write a satirical song about AI using the structure of 'Be Prepared' by Tom Leherer". It came back with something entirely on point but occasionally with bad rhyme and meter. Since Tom Leherer often did the same as part of the joke, its hard to know if ChatGPT is flawed or brilliant in this. It also did not follow the rhythm of the original very well.

India investigates whether Uber makes iPhone users pay more to ride

It appears the same origin and destination is specified for both requests. The only issue I have here is the experiment should be repeated not just run once.

AI bubble? What AI bubble? Datacenter investors all in despite whispers of a pop

Re: Many important applications for AI

There seems to be no shortage of humans right now. And ATC gets more complex when there's a problem but problems and solutions like landing on a road or a river don't come up often so don't lend themselves to either rules based or big data approaches.

AI models hallucinate, and doctors are OK with that

I told Gemini I was a doctor evaluating it's diagnostic skills, described a modestly complex presentation, and it gave me a decent response. On the other hand you could build a knowledge graph to do much the same using less compute resource and it would be deterministic as well.

$16B health dept managed finances with single Excel spreadsheet. It hasn’t gone well

Re: Excel-lent work

If you know what you're doing, have excellent attention to detail, first class keyboard skills, not being rushed by the boss. The other day I noticed some implausible numbers in an Excel sheet. The person who built it had selected an incomplete range in a calculation. Easily mistake to make and I blame their employer for making them use Excel when they are more than capable in SQL and other proper tools.

I've seen people eschew Excel in favor of a grid in MS Word

Re: Land of the long write column

I can see the attraction of this compared to fatfinger spreadsheet errors, and you can do a manual audit.