Posts by Doctor Evil

Musk distracts from struggling car biz with fantastical promise to make 1 million humanoid robots a year

Re: When is Elmo going to start selling his sperm

"Does that make them Tesla's girls?"

Oh My Dear, that IS a dated reference! I still spin it up once in a while when I'm feeling particularly nostalgic.

Developer writes script to throw AI out of Windows

Re: I miss when the FIND DOCUMENT feature was a DIR command.

You want ... Everything

(https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/)

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella becomes AI influencer, asks us all to move beyond slop

Re: Well he's a goner....

Upvoted for "diddling drongos"

logical extension of sn ramblings

"[Nadella] uses Steve Jobs' famous quote that computers are "bicycles for the mind" as a jumping off point."

If computers are bicycles for the mind, then an AI computer is an e-bike for the mind: giving the semblance of exercise but with no real beneficial effect -- and, of course, much more expensive.

Death to one-time text codes: Passkeys are the new hotness in MFA

device independence

My wife's phone died in mid-use this week. No accident, no warning - she just shut down an app and boom! It went black and was gone without any possibility of revival. She'd bought the phone brand-new and had it for a bit over 3 years. The manufacturer had doubled the warranty period because this was such a widespread issue with these phones - but, of course, it was well over by the time this happened to her.

If she'd been a passkey user, that would be her access gone, entailing a whole lot of trouble to regain full access. As it was, we bought a new phone, restored (almost) everything from backup, and she was back up and fully-functional within 24 hours even with me walking through all the apps and settings to remove AI and other cruft.

I'll stick with passwords and MFA for now, thank you very much.

Re: What is so bad about SMS

"What happens when you lose your phone? Or it's stolen? Or it has a flat battery when you need it? Or you left it at home?"

Or your phone just dies suddeny, without warning. Oh, wait; that never happens ...

Google links Android’s Quick Share to Apple’s AirDrop, without Cupertino’s help

Why bother?

The free LocalSend app allows me to quickly and easily share files wirelessly between devices running Android, macOS, iOS, Linux, and Windows. (Only my legacy 32-bit Windows machines running XP are left out of the fun.) Why would I bother with something which runs only on a more limited ecosystem (Quick Share or AirDrop)? You've been dusted again, Google.

Zoomers are officially worse at passwords than 80-year-olds

Re: "12345"…top choice among Zoomers…the far superior "123456" was preferred by Boomers

"Curiously I understand that pre WW2 some strata of English society pronounced "ski" as "she" in the possibly mistaken belief that how it was pronounced in whatever nordic language from which it was half inched."

Actually, in Austrian- and Swiss-German, ski is written as "schi" and pronounced "shee". As many of the ski-instructors of that era were Austrian or Swiss, the adopted pronunciation is not so far-fetched.

Software engineer reveals the dirty little secret about AI coding assistants: They don't save much time

curmudgeonly thoughts

"When it really comes into its own is when you have no clue what you are doing and need that help to get started. This can save days."

This seems to be the MO for many coders under a certain age nowadays. But if you have no clue where you're going, how will you know when you get there? And how will you know you landed in the right place?

Now get off my lawn!

Japan’s new space truck is also a temporary space lab, just worked first time

Re: A Friday Smile

And then ... they were all grumpy?

The Chinese Box and Turing Test: AI has no intelligence at all

Re: "Is AI really intelligent?"

"" it would take one to ten million years for humanity to develop an operating flying machine." NY Times, 2 months before the Wright Bothers"

That is a pretty wide scale (1 - 10,000,000 yrs), so the NYT did call it correctly (even if the actual development time was somewhat below the lower end -- a rounding error). Not much of a "prediction" though.

Re: So much hype

I just finished reading "The Coming Wave" and I am left completely agreeing with you.

How do you solve a problem like Discovery?

Re: It must have been transported...

"P1(thinking): If she ways the same as a duck... she's made of wood!"

No weigh did the Pythons write it like that!

Microsoft moves to the uncanny valley with creepy Copilot avatars that stare at you and say your name

Honestly, if we're going for creepy, I think the coolest avatar would be the Eye of Sauron from LOTR. Imagine that querying you, peering into the depths of your soul ...

Has anyone tried setting up two of these facing and responding to each other yet to see where that goes?

Away from Oktoberfest, Munich's museums also serve science on tap

Re: Oktoberfest beer is not excellent

Gut! I kann haf yours, ja?

Tesla on the wrong tracks with Fail Self Driving, Senators worry

Re: Not the first time I've seen a video like that

"Even richer people buy a Tesla."

More money than brains, as the saying goes

Many employees are using AI to create 'workslop,' Stanford study says

Re: Is anybody surprised?

This is my "surprised" face

Microsoft agrees to 11th hour Win 10 end of life concessions

Re: Pissed

Well, maybe they fell on deaf ears

Tech talent biz Andela trains up devs in GitHub Copilot

Re: No, No, No

"The resistance to change is due to marketing bullshit about how forcing an hallucinating slop generator into your workflow is somehow going to make you "superhuman"."

The resistance to change is due to capable developers generally not buying the marketing bullshit, seeing through the hand-wavy hard-sell, and being well-aware of the paucity of evidence for any real benefit.

'Suddenly deprecating old models' users depended on a 'mistake,' admits OpenAI's Altman

Re: AI sceptic/conservative

"You have to check everything they write before you rely on it's accuracy."

Erm, yes

Tesla fudged odometer to screw me out of warranty, Model Y owner claims

What smells?

Tesla ... das fahrt, ja!

Tech trainer taught a course on software he'd never used and didn't own

Saved by the battery

"Have you ever implemented Alfred's "Fake it till you make it" tactics?"

Guilty as charged.

About 20 years ago I was sent to represent one of our clients as a subject matter expert at settlement negotiations of a technical nature in the capital city of a very warm country which shall remain nameless (because I believe there is still, remarkably, on-going litigation in the ICJ with respect to the matter over which I was sent) but which necessitated about 22 hours of travelling with multiple stopovers required. I took with me enough clothing for a couple of weeks plus a developer's laptop fully loaded with IDE plus source code for the piece of software for which I (team lead for a very small team) was responsible together with beta versions of the other pieces of our corporate software suite.

After 2 weeks, the discussions had run their course and consensus had been reached on the matter over which I was originally sent. At this point, the senior executives of my company suggested that before I started on my return journey, it would be opportune for me to pay a visit to the headquarters of the country's national energy company in order to give them a demo of another of our products -- one with which I was generally familiar but had never myself used for real work and was very far from expert in. I did have the latest beta with me on my laptop.

I spent the rest of that day and a good part of the night rehearsing a canned presentation and running through a set of example problems to make sure they all still worked without any issues on my beta version (just following the recipe: load this data file, set these parameters, run this analysis, display these graphs). By the next morning I could get through it all fairly adroitly, so after breakfast I jumped into a cab with a couple of local colleagues and went off to give my presentation and demo at the national corporation's headquarters. As I set up for the presentation in a small meeting room somewhere in the sweltering bowels of the building in front of an assembled group of a dozen or so senior engineers and managers, I realized I had left my laptop's power adapter back in my hotel room. I should have enough battery power to see me through, I thought (laptop batteries were NiCad in those days; getting a couple of hours out of the battery pack was doing well). Trying to appear much calmer on the outside than I felt on the inside, I launched into my run-through of the software overview and ran the standard examples, getting through it all with alacrity and no hitches in a little over an hour and concluding with a stifled sigh of relief.

And then I opened it up to the floor for questions. "Looks great", they said, "but would you now please load up some of our data files and show us what you can do with some of our real problems?" Oh-oh, I thought, this is where it hits the fan and I'm shown up as a total fraud ... and at that very moment the power ran out on my laptop and it died. To understanding smiles, I made abject apologies for having forgotten my adapter and expansive promises for instant attention to their specific interests from head office, exchanged business cards and shook hands all around, and took my leave. And I was on my way home again that night.

I have never been so relieved to have my battery pack give out.

Re: been on many courses where the trainer has no answers

That is very clever! My hat is off to you, sir!

UK's attempt to keep details of Apple 'backdoor' case secret… denied

Re: yeh right

"who owns this sight?"

It's right there on the masthead -- hiding in plain site.

Microsoft is redesigning the Windows BSoD to get you back to work ‘as fast as possible’

Wow?

I simply cannot tell you how immeasurably this will improve my life! (Mainly because I have no idea ... not at all would be my best guess.) Thanks, Microsoft.

HP Inc settles printer toner lockout lawsuit with a promise to make firmware updates optional

Re: "We lose money on the hardware"

"Why is the FTC not putting its nose in this ?"

The FTC is a bit ... "distracted" ... at the moment.

US stocks slip as Trump pulls trigger on Canada, Mexico, China tariffs

Re: Voting on "other issues"

are

(according to Mr. Shakespeare anyway -- "Julius Caesar", Act III Sc I)

Anschluss (v2)

Precisely!

"When Trump introduced the tariffs last month the official explanation was, as well as the aforementioned drive to on-shore manufacturing, that neither Canada nor Mexico was doing enough to stop drugs and illegal immigrants from entering the US."

This "emergency" is the orange fascist's "Gleiwitz incident".

Hey programmers – is AI making us dumber?

Re: Nearly there

"I think Azimov understood people very well indeed."

Indeed - and Isaac Asimov even more so.

As Amazon takes over the Bond franchise, we submit our scripts for the next flick

the right tool for the job

"The billionaire’s henchman Jonyjob discovers her efforts, and wounds her grievously with a razor-edged tablet computer."

Shirley he would have used a RAZR phone ...

HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due to 'feedback'

I call BS

"As a result, we will continue to prioritize timely access to live phone support to ensure we are delivering an exceptional customer experience."

Liars!

Kelsey Hightower on dodging AI and the need for a glossary of IT terms

Re: Hang on a minute...

@Peter2 - my point exactly, bang on the nailhead! Thanks!

Re: Hang on a minute...

"He's calling for that in order to call out and reduce the proliferation of undefined terminology aka buzzwords found when playing bullshit bingo."

And he's right! This goes back decades, and Microsoft is the supreme emitter of TLAs. I remember talking with one of our IT people 5 years after I'd helped him into a low-level support position and, now that he was all trained up, I couldn't understand (I mean REALLY understand) a single sentence because each one contained at least 3 acronymns - all the latest buzzwords from the "Evil Empire". Sheesh!

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

Re: Well, I never ...

"He got the biggest win. Canada will send military to the northern US border to stop miniscule amounts of illegal immigration and fentanyl smuggling into the USA."

Actually we probably want them there anyway -- to guard against the new "Fenians" in light of the idiotic "51st state" nonsense the Grand Cheeto has been spouting. There will certainly be a few patriotic morons who take him seriously and act on it.

Tool touted as 'first AI software engineer' is bad at its job, testers claim

compiler error #09876

Missing end bracket

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

Re: Multi-Fail

"Or do you propose that they just have a spare flashlight in their pocket [...]"

Everyone carries a cellphone these days - so everyone has a flashlight ready to hand.

That hardware will be more reliable if you stop stabbing it all day

I am.

Oy! Leave my frickin' sharks out of this!

Your air fryer might be snitching on you to China

They want data?

Give 'em data. Just don't give 'em the real thing. Oh, you need a postal code? No problem - here you go. (Just not from anywhere actually near me.)

Campaigners claim 'Privacy Preserving Attribution' in Firefox does the opposite

Re: Web Site Advertising Preferences

"Disabling the technical data going to Mozilla does disable the WSAP function, which is why it shows that it's off when it's grayed out. It can't send data if you've told the browser to never send data to Mozilla, as it's a complete override. The fact that the about:config setting doesn't get changed to match is just poor design, but is only cosmetic."

Kudos to you, pal, if you've really taken the time to wade through the Firefox source code and can verify for the rest of us that it actually behaves in the manner that you have described above (or you are a Mozilla developer involved in this area of the codebase -- in which case, thanks for jumping in here). Otherwise, your supposition regarding how it all behaves behind the scenes is absolutely as good as mine -- but no better.

Why change the visible state of a checkbox which becomes grayed-out if the underlying variable itself remains unchanged (whether overridden by other settings or not)? Mozilla has been in this business long enough to know a thing or two about good UI design -- and where is this more sensitive and important than on the Privacy and Security page of the Settings interface?

Re: Web Site Advertising Preferences

"It's strange. My own WSAP is already "Off" (and I did nothing to change it), yet in about:config

dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled

is set to TRUE. So, which does what and are they conflicting?"

They are conflicting!

You have to explicitly enable "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla" in order to see the true state of the "Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement"" setting. Otherwise it appears to be also disabled when the former is unchecked -- but if you then check the "dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled" setting, it's still set to "True" even though the checkbox for it in Settings is blanked!

This behavior, if deliberate, seems a bit sketchy.

To turn it off, you have to first check the "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla" box and then explicitly uncheck the "Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement""checkbox, finally unchecking "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla" again, OR you have to go into about:config (not even possible under Android -- thanks a bunch, Mozilla) and toggle "dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled" to False.

Works this way under both Windows and Linux.

Elon Musk's assassination 'joke' bombs, internet calls for his deportation

"I find it difficult to believe that anyone this moronic actually has an engineering degree"

If we're talking about Musk, he doesn't. BS (physics), BA (economics)

Boeing's Calamity Capsule returns to Earth without a crew

Re: Which bright spark named it "Calamity"

Lucky sod! I'd like to be kept stranded on an island by a nymph ...

Palo Alto Networks execs apologize for 'hostesses' dressed as lamps at Black Hat booth

Re: Back to "booth babes", really?

"I was a booth babe at a trade show

I was made to dress up in a skin-tight corporate polo shirt (to be fair most T-shirts are skin tight on me) and I was forced to answer questions all day from a bunch of stupid men"

So was I! But I was required to wear a "suite"