Posts by JLV

RAM is getting expensive, so squeeze the most from it

Guys, I hate to say it but this is a solved problem with this one weird utility:

Softram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM

RAM vendors hate it.

So much for power to the people – AI datacenters could jump UK grid queue

Re: "The British people must resist!"

Y'all should be ashamed of yourself, ampering progress.

Ig Nobel Prize flees US for Switzerland after 35 years over safety concerns

Re: He is in a uniquely powerful position, akin, yes, to a Roman emperor.

Neither have Trump's charisma, so they’d implode right away.

:-)

Re: He is in a uniquely powerful position, akin, yes, to a Roman emperor.

The problem is that killing Trump - as was attempted - would only cement his legacy through martyrdom. Nor is political violence good to democracy.

The only realistic way out for America is for him to so obviously and publicly screw the pooch somehow that most of his devoted followers disown him and the country loses its taste for his kind of politics.

A “you can’t handle the truth” Jack Nicholson moment. Or a Joe McCarthy overreach and meltdown? Invading Canada or Greenland?

5 years of this circus later, I really, really, wonder what it would take.

Re: America's reputational loss will be long lasting

Yeah, I regret that I won’t be around when the history books gell down to a collective verdict but I expect he will be one of the very worst most ineffectual leaders ever:

( obviously there have been worse though, but… )

- He is in a uniquely powerful position, akin, yes, to a Roman emperor. So it matters, and he will track more than worse ruler in Lichenstein. and this happening at a time when the USA is facing massive multi-generational challenges ( China, budget)

- Unlike say Hitler or Genghis Khan, his deeds are not driven by the logic of pure calculated evil, merely by narcissism and petulance. Nor is he completely insane or retarded like some kings. Merely narcissistic and petulant. Like a 12 year old running the most powerful nation on Earth.

- It’s not ( I hope ) going defined by massive military reverses, which happen in wars to half their participants. No, it’s a slow motion of obvious bad decisions because making them makes his “tribe” fawn over him.

- Once gone, it’s not like pulling a tooth. The impact of his decisions will go on for decades in squandered alliances, festering ignored crises, the nurturing of anti-reason, bigotry and deliberately turning the US’s back to science. Not to mention deficit and debt. Empowering religious extremism. Waste of blood and treasure. Lying has always been a (small) part of the

political landscape, but - in democracies- it often disqualified those caught out. Now it has been normalized. Ditto grift. Sexual crimes and affairs.

- He took away customs of good behavior thst papered over the - inevitable - flaws in most democracies’ constitutional frameworks.

Iran is the first out-loud cyberwar the US has fought

Re: israel?

Perhaps, but I also get the impression that CCTV hacks are a known risk vector to everyone and his dog already. If only they were easy to patch...

While the likes of Hegseth are utter nitwits, I doubt the US military itself has become as unmoored from operational security as their boss.

Meanwhile, there can be advantages to generating a heightened sense of paranoia in one's opponents: you are being watched!

And, even, if one is Machiavellian enough, would you want to be a Basij (regime thugs) executing civilians in full view of, possibly recording, street cams?

Fascinating developments overall, but let's not jump to too many conclusions about why and how information is leaking. Some of it may be accidental, some of it may be just good detective work and some of it may be intentional. What we do know is that Mossad is uncommonly clever as we saw with poor Hezbo's pagers :-(

Latest Risky Business podcast says that hacking CCTV and traffic cams is a major emerging cyberwar nexus: battle damage assessment on the spot. They also claim that hitting Khamenei was enabled by following his tos-and-fros for days on traffic cams, building up knowledge of his habits and foregoing the need for human sources.

( the conspiracy minded - not me - would also note that misdirection in these cases is not uncommon to protect valuable sources )

LibreOffice learns to speak Markdown in version 26.2

Markdown’s other big advantage is lack of choice. You can’t spend hours tweaking the styling to get it “just right” to best get your message across or “optimize corporate branding”.

You have to either spend that time improving the content itself. Or, even better, moving on to your next real-world task.

Son of government contractor arrested after alleged $46M crypto heist from US Marshals

local news says…

A surprisingly thorough writeup, with pix

https://smn-news.com/index.php/st-maarten-st-martin-news/50140-u-s-marshals-probe-insider-link-in-25m-crypto-heist.html

https://smn-news.com/index.php/st-maarten-st-martin-news/50137-gign-and-fbi-unite-to-bust-46m-crypto-heist.html

Used to live there so I figured that would be big news locally

;-)

US state laws push age checks into the operating system

Agreed as anyone who has the slightest awareness of the extent of China’s mandated software apps and surveillance on its citizens devices would know.

Ditto Russia.

Canadian myself so some level of annoyance towards the USA is warranted.

Not well-wishing to totalitarian neo-Stalinist states.

I am being slow, sorry…

Assume an OS/distro that has limited commercial offerings.

(i.e. not Red Hat)

Why should they care? Why isn’t it enough to slap on a disclaimer that says not to use it in all these jurisdictions?

Primary loser being voters in said jurisdictions.

I do get that there’ll be a push by the vendors of commercial Linuxes to “fix” this.

One nuclear way to counteract would be to withdraw support from entities in not-allowed-to-run jurisdictions. Surely there’s a clause in one in those tiny EULAs.

I don’t necessarily think it’s as simple as the above, but all the same a FOSS entity should have less exposure and less to lose.

Norway's Consumer Council takes aim at enshittification

Re: television was the origin of enshittification

Let’s not forget Sony’s Windows rootkit to prevent ripping of their audio CDs. Badly written, so malware could have piggybacked.

That was some boss-level entshittification before its time.

Re: television was the origin of enshittification

Yes, but it was also free and you could pay for channels without ads.

I see no reason, or mechanism, TV content can be provided without someone paying for it.

The difference now?

- Pay channels still have ads.

- Purchases require subscriptions on top. Or you have subscription-only apps (looking at you, 1Password).

- Product quality has slipped, a lot.

Entshittification is more than the trivial insistence of some to be entertained for free.

However, baked-in, unskippable, ads at the start of DVDs you purchased do qualify (looking at you, Disney).

UK Treasury not sure about ditching Oracle to join £1.7 billion shared services program it is funding

Re: BAU

Be careful there. An ERP isn’t just about coding. It’s about following regulatory requirements. We had a whole team just doing VAT with one person whose job it was to track all the processes across all countries, with all their exceptions.

Payroll, even in one country, means gathering all the rules to follow, before you start coding. With the public sector add union-by-union rules that need collecting, then abstracting into a parametrizable rules engine.

If a government dept cant go live on an ERP system that has done all this type of groundwork, you think writing one from scratch is going to work?

My thinking is they should instead uncouple from consultants like Crapita and develop in house expertise on ERP implementations. Then rotate the -well-paid - team from implementation to implementation.

Nurturing European ERP providers, (besides SAP) to avoid Oracle, Workday, MS, etc…? Also worth looking into.

And… trying to fit everyone into a meta-ERP implementation to fit them all is what screwed Phoenix (PeopleSoft HR for 23 Canadian Federal depts). Despite them already running more or less successful individual ERPs in those departments.

Apple's budget-friendly MacBook Neo is bursting with color and compromise

If Linux GUIs, desktops and configuration were as polished as Linux’s raw OS and terminal experience, yes.

But most Linux desktops and apps compete more on fancy features and gee-whiz graphics than raw, rock-stable, basic user friendliness. GParted (on Ubuntu Cinnamon 24.04), for example, truncates partition labelling info because it doesn’t fit. WTF? Makes you feel warm and fuzzy when responding OK to “Are you sure? formatting deletes all data”.

Changes version to version are frequent and target power users. Change distro? Relearn, grasshopper.

Meanwhile, macos’s configs and settings barely look any different release to release. And the machine will work straight out of the box. Backups? Time Machine is close to idiot-proof both backing up and restoring.

Day-to-day use in browser and email is much more comparable, however.

This looks good for grandma and students and generally dont-care-about-tech people, doubly so for those without a Linux-savvy relative.

p.s. nothing forbids Linux from improving this. And maybe some distros do manage this. Omarchy, albeit for the opposite use case, seems to aim for that. I don’t agree with its choices, but I respect the goal. A lot.

Bootleg Windows, Office scheme crashes, triggers 22-month lockup for Florida woman

Re: 22 months and a 50K fine?

> got the electric chair and a $1000 fine

In that order? If it’s Florida they probably fried him before siccing collection agencies.

Bank of England says it can run £431M settlement system without Accenture

Re: I thought we'd seen the end of consultancy cash cows

Thing is, as a dev, in-house work for govt dept or non-software company can be a little less exciting and formative than consultancy or working for a software company. Not to mention less lucrative.

And that not infrequently gets reflected in the caliber of in-house devs. It doesn’t have to, but it can.

I see no reason that phenomenon needs to happen with sysadmins, btw. Quite the contrary.

It’s a hard problem but BoE seems to at least want to deal with it.

On the flip side, the consultancies don’t all field geniuses. Far from.

Gamers furious as indie studio Cloud Imperium quietly admits to data breach

Juicy :-)

The combination of too-much-disposable-income and too-little-critical-thinking in the Star Citizen backer space makes for a good haul.

Don’t need to use 419 Nigerian Prince spelleng goophs to filter out the gullible with this lot.

After all, once you’ve splurged out $2000 real moolah for a Privateer Kraken ship in this awesome game, I am sure you realize the full value of pre-IPO quantum AI blockchain smart contract clearing house providers and are ready to invest into the ground floor.

https://starcitizen.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_ship_and_vehicle_prices

Trump orders purge of 'woke' Anthropic from government

> the Shia equivalent of the Pope

A rather blood-soaked Pope, wouldn't you say?

<Claude (helpfully hallucinating)> Sir, if you do enough pushups Warrior Mode gets activated and the Any key is unlocked

<Hegseth> 1. 2. 3. 4…

LLM provider vs Trump. Hmmm, whom do I wish to lose?

This really calls for a popcorn icon

OK, when in doubt f.ck The Donald!

Top cloud providers to outspend Ireland's GDP on AI in 2026

For those who haven’t been paying attention, Ireland is also one of the richest EU countries per capita so quite the LLM spending in Olympic swimming pool units.

AIs are happy to launch nukes in simulated combat scenarios

Game theory was also in relative infancy. Things like the Prisoner’s Dillemna play out very differently in a one-off setting than with repeated episodes.

I am also not convinced by your “strike first” claim here. In the absence of credible at-scale ABM systems and with large distributed arsenals, the cost benefit matrix of standard game theory still seems to point solidly to no-nuking, short of an existential threat like losing to an invader.

Think of the damage doable to the economy and peoples of USA, Russia or China with a budget of say 50-100 bombs. Hit really big industrial cities, harbors, refineries. Anything critical to the “supply chain”, like centralized fertilizer plants. Then watch a gradual collapse. Or at least other countries pulling ahead.

It’s too risky. Given a solid-looking anti-missile shield the calculations may change: can we mop up a counterstrike? But we ain’t there yet.

Also the reason limiting warhead counts needs to be done very carefully (not that it’s much on the menu these days). You want to stay in the not-worth-trying territory until you really trust each other. Few warheads plus “good-enough” ABM can upset that calculus.

Indie web browser Ladybird flutters toward Rust with a little help from AI

Re: Sorry! :-) :-)

zig? the language. rather than zed, the editor?

zig is used by Hashimoto’s Ghostty terminal emulator, my goto these days. He evaluated Rust vs zig before settling on zig.

Article doesn’t really say that. Instead it talks about bad C++ interop. Funny thing is, a year ago he was dissing Rust for just that lack of interop (along with lack of OOP not being a good fit for widget-oriented GUIs).

And what they had done to gauge suitability was prototyping some new features in various languages.

Unexpected: I’d listened to a podcast a year back where he specifically explained why they avoided Rust. At length. And why Swift.

Was odd to see a garbage-collected language being used for a browser.

Is there a post-mortem somewhere detailing why Swift was booted? Failures - esp. others’ - make for good lessons.

Founder ditches AWS for Euro stack, finds sovereignty isn't plug-and-play

Re: exaggerated title...

Just to be clear - I picked Aurora for it being easily name recognizable, not for its complexity. Simple tasks are not the issue here, complicated, advanced ones are.

What I see as success factors are:

- don’t go hog wild on multiplying alternatives. Too many dilutes the knowledge pool and drives back to the better known: AWS, Azure.

- be sensitive to knowledge pools. Good docs, for sure. But then spend $ on blogs YouTubes podcasts that _explain_ not just market. Digital Ocean has brilliant mini blogs about configurations, for example.

- Keep it simple at first. And mimic known Azure and AWS setups (or simplify them). Or follow/define standards. Advanced features are great but if they require complex configuration that isn’t commonly known about : people will nod out faster than attending a Baptist revival choir on a hangover.

- be careful around X-Y integrations. In the existing US vendor world, the most common combinations draw people because they are most known about. A dominant X will have its customary, known, Y pairings. In a world where X’ and Y’ alternatives are not yet fully established, each X’ needs to make sure people know their way for integrations (that’s probably why Digital Ocean writes up so much quality guidance). Work on interop with your peers.

> it's a vicious circle of "everyone uses X…”

That is PRECISELY my point. To me, apps aside, that is very much what doomed BB10 despite having a solid offering. You don’t have to despair that it cant be overcome. But you do have to allow, watch for and compensate.

p.s. I am a happy DO user, no other links.

Re: exaggerated title...

I suspect a massive difference is how quickly you can find guidance. Say you want to replace Amazon’s RDS Aurora (AWS’s sponge off Postgres, tho they do contribute to postgres) managed RDMS.

You find Penumbra (I made that up!), an alleged drop in replacement.

How do I do setup X? where task X is not strictly Postgres (i.e. well-known), but a somewhat complicated SaaS-RDBMS task you still have to configure.

RDS Aurora: Likely very easy to find docs, gists, blogs, stackoverflows, reddits. Possibly even - gasp - correct LLM guidance.

Now what about non-US Penumbra?

I experienced that with BB10. After having had both an iOS and Android, I found BB10 quite elegant. But you had to figure out every single issue more or less on your own. There was zero “tribal knowledge”. It wasnt that it was lacking itself, it just was difficult to find your way around.

It gets even worse if you also bring a replacement for a typical Aurora integration to another widespread service (say a backup provider).

So I would not discount what they are saying here.

Re: Alternative to GitHub

Agree. Are we talking about just git hosting for fun and no-profit?

Or about finding a non-US ecosystem that can host governments and/or a CannesFlix ( NetFlix famously uses/used AWS)?

i.e. the usual geekery or actual business? Europe is not lacking - and thats a GOOD THING - in FOSS street cred.

DOGE bites taxman

“… faster and farther than expected…”

Just remember that there’s always been a strong “abolish the IRS” component in the fringes of the Republican Party: “accidents” may have been quite premeditated.

Microsoft boffins cook up archival storage using Pyrex glass they say can last over 10,000 years

Re: Prior art...

For those of a Francophile bent, this 30sec scene would be the French cinematic equivalent of the Dwarf Bread.

https://youtu.be/X-4UPGVxKgc?t=75

“ Dubitchou - it’s made by hand by rolling under the armpits”

Auto-translated subtexts are sketchy as heck on this one.

Context: their weird Eastern European neighbor gifts them an XMas box of “chocolates”.

You can jailbreak an F-35 just like an iPhone, says Dutch defense chief

Re: Needs to go back to the manufacturer I'm afraid.

I believe the US Navy recently had some issues on their ships’ ovens. Only manufacturer staff were allowed to service them.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/the-navys-newest-problem-flushing-the-toilet

.. similar issues with their loos.

All other things reminding equal that level of lawyerese and bilking is another reason to change vendor country.

Re: There's a great alternative to the F35

We’ve (Canada) just committed to buying a 2nd small set of F35s: so 16 + 14. Who gets the full 88 procurement is undecided.

Re: There's a great alternative to the F35

What you also don’t get from VSTOL carriers is the ability to field long-range/long-endurance fixed wing aircraft. Like, you know, ASW or AWACS stuff. Choppers and VSTOL aircraft aren’t super suited for that.

Re: There's a great alternative to the F35

For the airframe cost you are wrong.

However the Gripen is much cheaper per flight hour and is designed for easy maintenance. The Danish MoD apparently is miffed at how much time F35s spend in maintenance (granted they may have other reasons for buyer’s regret ).

Gripen also does distributed dispersal well. Being tied to easy-to-target main airfields may end up costing F35s.

The F35s stealth aspect is certainly nice but the Ukrainians are doing OK-ish with F16s. Better an available 4-4.5 gen fighter than a grounded/out-of-support/ground-whacked F35.

Flush with potential? Activist investor insists Japanese toilet giant is an AI sleeper

Not so much AI going to the shitter as the shitter going to AI then?

Infosec exec sold eight zero-day exploit kits to Russia, says DoJ

Apparently Williams got $1.3M for those exploits.

Worth mentioning in this type of coverage (repeating actually, since previous Reg coverage has it). Sometimes people risk decades of jail time on spy charges for a gain of $20k or so. 8-/

https://www.claytonrice.com/cyber-brokers-are-the-next-international-arms-dealers/

Fukushima's radioactive hybrid terror pig boom was driven by amorous mothers

Re: Nuclear Powered Bacon!

Shades of Fallout’s Pork n Beans

More than 135,000 OpenClaw instances exposed to internet in latest vibe-coded disaster

Re: OpenClaw

More or less serve as your personal assistant, if given access to your private information, like your email and calendars and sundry logins.

The more access you give it the more useful it can be.

And also the more external actors can use it to abuse you. Or it can just mess things up by mistake.

Re: Bind to a different address?

well, it IS a one-click install, no configuration required, is it not? OK, cut and paste:

> curl -fsSL https://youre-fucked-now.ai/install.sh | bash

Yes, I changed the url so someone here wouldn't just run it. but it is their actual installation method, on their installation page. And, no, it doesn't have an extra "securing your configuration" paragraph that follows.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40SnEd1RWUU&t=392s

"... Now you start configuring your application (OpenClaw) security measures so it doesn't start deleting your Gmail or leak your Ethereum wallet if somebody start messaging malevolent commands to your Telegram channel ..."

Too bad, Kai's usually more aggressive at taking the piss of stupid IT fads, but most of this vid up to that point has been about configuring a VPS, with what seems to be (fairly sensible?) hardening, so he just quickly breezes through the OpenClaw goofs here. Guess the point being made is that only an idiot would bother securing anything if they turn around and then let OpenClaw on it. But maybe it's too subtle for its own good: you might have missed it if you didn't already know OpenClaw makes syphilitic heartworms look healthy in comparison.

Whether they are building agents or folding proteins, LLMs need a friend

The paper itself is not keen on LLM-checking-via-LLM. He spends quite a bit of time detailing why it can’t, for particular classes of problems. It’s a quick read, 7pages, with math (based on big O notation) I could barely follow - an improvement over my usual dont-understand-jack.

Near the end he does have a sentence saying multiple LLMs can be better , but doesn’t elaborate

Re: Sigh...

But an expert pointing out the possibility of real gains in specific circumstances, with deliberate, complex, non-LLM, guardrail mechanisms.

So, maybe not your average 25 year old dropout, barely able to Hello World in Python, vibe coding away a “foolproof 10x investment engine”. Or Air Canada disputing responsibility for honoring its official bot’s pricing promises in court (they lost).

But he does indicate there might be nuggets in the manure pile.

It’s an interesting field, though not necessarily worth the hype, systemic financial risk and hiring/firing misery inflicted.

UK council digs deeper into capital assets to keep Oracle project afloat

These public sector ERP coverages are great articles but would benefit from citing employee headcount. A 10M overrun is different with 5k employees vs 100k. Ditto taxpayer victim-count.

Re: I guess the one I worked on wasn't so bad

The capacity of customers to go out of their way to screw up ERPs, often due to an inability to bother understanding them or reviewing the particulars of their internal processes never ceases to amaze.

I’ve had multiple cases where someone in a floundering ERP project has asked for / done something that any barely sentient slime patch should have flagged as “A VERY BAD IDEA” within 2 minutes of hearing about it. Sometimes that’s in the implementation phase. Sometimes they misuse a feature in production.

Although the capacity of implementation vendors to charge 3 arms and 3 legs for “consultants” who barely understand the ERP in question is equally impressive.

AWS intruder achieved admin access in under 10 minutes thanks to AI assist, researchers say

Re: What if they reviewed their code?

Maybe it's like the 419 Nigerian prince misspellings.

Spend 10 minutes breaking in, without too much stealth. Maybe even leave for a while. If you do get detected, you're out 10 minutes.

If you don't get detected, clean up and invest time to screw the victim properly as they are so sloppy they won't see it coming.

I am not saying that's what happened int this case, but if you can break in with a spray and pray approach, then maybe a strategy would be to line up 50 marks at first and go deep on the ones that are still not clued in. That's a bit what 419 is about, though it took a while for researchers to understand the logic.

The crims also have a specialization model already, where some owns the victim's shell first and then pass it on to someone else for exploitation. LLMs might plug in better at different phases of this.

Re: Thought AI couldn't create good code?

Yup. No maintainability needed either. Or in the case of a true script kiddy, legibility.

It’s like a locksmith making a key that works and fits the lock. Versus a burglar just knocking the lock out with a hammer and chisel.

But it does show LLMs working for some use cases.

DWP finds Copilot saves civil servants a whopping 19 minutes a day

Not to mention that there will probably be copilot at the other end…

- summarizing the email.

- reusing the email as basis for further emails

Then government efficiency can be redefined as numbers of documents produced per staff. Presto, hyper efficient government.

EU's fishy digital certificate system leaves exporters floundering

Ex colleague once told that a consultancy - begins with ac - he worked with had a particular core competency.

Not:

- specs

- coding

- project management

- …

No, it laid in institutionalizing 2nd level contract managers who would be parachuted in on a fail and would talk rings around clueless customers, leave, repeat as needed.

“By the time they left you were convinced their 6 month delay to your go-live was something they should be thanked for as they were bravely insuring your quality and stability”.