Posts by Doctor Evil

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"

Linux Mint 22 'Wilma' still the Bedrock choice for moving off Windows

BIG improvement!

I updated from 21.3 to 22.0 overnight using the mintupgrade application (it can take several hours -- especially if you're not right there to respond to the prompts immediately).

At a first glance, the new version appears to be a significant improvement over the old. It's both quicker to boot (and to revive from sleep) and crisper to respond generally. The update honoured my personal foibles (generic Firefox rather than the wired-in version so that I can force updates/rollbacks on my own schedule).

AND -- the big bonus for me -- they seem to have resolved some kind of low level hardware conflict which was causing hangs on revival from sleep about every 4th or 5th time. Awesome job, you guys!

Outback shocker left Aussie techie with a secret not worth sharing

Wrongo

This week, meet a hero we'll Regomize as "Mick" who worked for "a large Aussie telco" in the 1990s

No, mate, that was Bruce.

Tesla delays 'Robotaxi' event as Musk 'makes' design 'tweaks'

Interpreting Muskie to English ...

"Musk confirmed this morning: 'Requested what I think is an important design change to the front, and extra time allows us to show off a few other things.'"

So, not quite ready for prime time yet.

Scarlett Johansson voices anger at OpenAI's unauthorized soundalike

In thr age of deepfakes ...

"Scarlett Johansson voices anger at OpenAI's unauthorized soundalike"

But ... was it really Scarlett Johansson voicing the anger at OpenAI?

Global EV sales continue to increase, but Plug-in Hybrid momentum is growing

Re: PHEV FTW

PHEV owner here - well said, sir. The use cases you have outlined are, I think, pretty universal: wall charging for battery-only local use and enhanced fuel economy for occasional long distance high speed driving. This definitely describes my experience for the past year.

I will eventually go full BEV - when my world contracts to the point that this is sufficient and/or the technology improves to the operating point that my PHEV nicely covers right now.

Has Windows 11 really lost marketshare to Windows 10?

users with the requisite h/w

"Users with the requisite hardware have probably already upgraded."

Well, maybe not quite all of them.

Clock is ticking for NASA to fix bucket of issues before next Artemis mission

Hey, thanks for that link! It was an hour of my life well-spent and it beat the pants off of any TED talk I've ever viewed!

Musk schmoozes Chinese premier as Tesla Full Self-Driving remains parked

Tesla has "FSD"?

"According to reports, Musk would very much like China to give the local green light to Full Self-Driving (FSD). The autonomous driving mode is already available in the US, but Chinese road users have thus far been spared the prospect."

Oh, have Tesla developed Full Self Driving capability? When did that happen?

I know they've been marketing their Level 2 product Autopilot as such, but it's very far from true real-world full self-driving capability and, indeed, is demonstrably inferior to the Level 2 products of competing manufacturers. So far as I know, the rest is all Musky hype -- and these days we all know what that's worth.

Tesla Cybertruck turns into world's most expensive brick after car wash

On the bright side ...

... this might not actually be a problem for most Tesla Cybertruck owners if they happen to touch the accelerator when they enter the car wash. The residence time inside could be very, very short ...

What can be done to protect open source devs from next xz backdoor drama?

Patience!

"Anyone applying pressure should possibly raise suspicion going forwards."

This, for sure! Especially users with brand spanking new accounts!

Toyota admits its engines are overrated – by its own power testing software

Re: ディーゼルゲート

"Only one more use of -gate should be tolerated- when Mr Musk messes up we have to have an Elongate!"

That's really stretching the metaphor beyond its elastic limit!

Man admits to paying magician $150 to create anti-Biden robocall

Action!

"This is a way for me to make a difference, and I have," Kramer told NBC News. "For $500, I got about $5 million worth of action, whether that be media attention or regulatory action."

Some lines should never be crossed. This is one of them. I hope he gets more action than he bargained for -- a couple of years worth.

"If a House oversight committee wants me to testify, I'm going to demand they put it on TV because I know more than them."

Of course you do, buddy, of course you do. Idiot.

U-Haul tells 67K customers that cyber-crooks drove away with their personal info

Wot, again?!?

Really?

I was contacted after U-Haul's last breach in Sep 2022. I'm still nervously monitoring my credit score for unexpected changes (nothing, so far). But ... here we go again!

Really wishing I'd just borrowed a truck from a friend!

OpenAI's GPT-4 finally meets its match: Scots Gaelic smashes safety guardrails

Re: Back in the day

"Note that one Japanese suicide cult made sarin twice, so it's easily made even by idiots; the first time they turned it loose no one noticed, so the second time they did it in a subway train. People noticed."

The eight people who died "the first time they turned it loose" would beg to differ with your definition of "no one noticed".

Robots with a 'Berliner Schnauze' may appear more trustworthy to locals

Re: humour is something Germans notoriously struggle with

Zwei Peanuts vas valking down die Strasse.

Und van vas assaulted ... (Peanut).

Simon Willison interview: AI software still needs the human touch

runs vs. doesn't run

"I have a hunch that programmers, software engineers, are the group best served by this technology right now. We get the most benefit from it. And part of the reason for that is that these things are notorious for hallucinating. They'll just make stuff up. If they hallucinate code, and you run the code, and it doesn't work, then you've kind of fact checked it."

I think the real problems might arise if the LLM has hallucinated code and it does run. Now you've got a thornier problem on several fronts: does it produce correct results in all cases; does it handle edge-case inputs correctly; does it behave appropriately when an error is thrown; etc.

The hardest bugs to find seem to be the ones where the code compiles and runs -- but not always correctly. And now you're picking through someone (or something) else's code, trying to fully understand the underlying logic ...

moral vs. legal

"There's the moral, ethical side and there's a legal side and they're not necessarily the same thing, you know. Things could be legal and still feel wrong."

Do you really think that will stop -- has ever stopped -- a corporation when it's standing in the way of profits? "Don't be evil" ...

Tech support done bad sure makes it hard to do tech support good

Re: The easiest way to make a small fortune on the Stock Market .....

Reminds me of Michael Lewis' excellent book, "Flash Boys", which describes the absurd lengths (and expense) gone to in order to save milliseconds on market information transmission -- and what nefarious uses those milliseconds were then put to. Great read!

Danish techies claim they can predict your next move (and your last)

Bang on!

OMG they're absolutely right! They predicted I was going to laugh uproariously and move on without giving this any further serious consideration! I'll be damned ...

Microsoft prescribes command-line surgery for HP Smart app malady

"Fix"?

How many here believe that this troubleshooter will run flawlessly and without causing any further problems?

<crickets>

Pakistani politician deepfakes himself to deliver a speech from behind bars

AI-synthesized stump speech?

I mean, is that really cricket, Mr. Khan?

Amazon on the hook for predictably revolting use of concealed clothes hook spy cam

WTF?

There may be a legitimate use for such a device -- but there are so many opportunities for abuse that such use should probably be tightly controlled/monitored. I just hope (a) that the homeowner carries the principal liability for the harms done and (b) that the actual product manufacturer is also being sued in addition to Amazon. And I hope that nobody involved gets off at all. This is scurrilous!

DevTernity conference collapses amid claims women speakers were faked

Cancel!

If Anna Boyko isn't going to be there, then that's it; I'm not fucking going either!