Posts by Rosie Davies

Open source's new mission: Rebuild a continent's tech stack

A Bit Harsh

From the article: "one-man bans".

That seems a tad extreme. Who is this chap? What has he done?

No, I don't have anything useful to contribute. Thank you for asking.

Rosie

Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control

Redmond Reliable

I've been using the above for years to describe things that will break as soon as you look at them. And if you stop looking at them. And just for giggles because, why not?

Rosie

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

Re: Share and Enjoy…

I was wondering more whether it was brand new Holly or 3 million year old Holly. I could have lived with brand new as who doesn't love a perpetually sarcastic super-intelligence but we'll (at best) get senile Holly on a bad day.

Rosie

Trump says Michael Dell is part of the team buying TikTok, with Larry Ellison and maybe some Murdochs

Re: Wasn't this the opening of a James Bond movie?

Have an upvote for "lickspittle". It has been far too long since I saw that word used in the wild.

Rosie

The UK Online Safety Act is about censorship, not safety

I'm not quite sure I understand what this comment is trying to say tbh. If you're saying that the OSA should not prevent children learning (in an age appropriate way) about gender dysphoria/incongruence or sexualities other than strictly straight they I'd completely agree with you. For a short while that wasn't the case due to 'errors' but that got corrected.

If, on the other hand, you're saying that children who may have gender dysphoria/incongruence and be gay should be blocked from accessing resources that help them understand it then I feel that would be a really, really, bad idea.

Rosie

Enterprise software giants weaponize AI to kill discounts and deepen lock-in

Rental Economy

In my head, it really is very simple. If you are running your business on anything remotely cloudy (IAAS, PAAS, SAAS, whatever), then you do not own your business, you are renting it. As soon as you find yourself unable or unwilling to meet the rent payments, you have no business.

The same is true to a lesser extent for propriety software. Once a vendor has their hooks deeply embedded in your processes they are at liberty to give a sharp yank at any point, tearing money leaking wounds all across your business.

Rosie

Europe's AI crackdown starts this week and Big Tech isn't happy

Re: Your AI MP for Wherever is , who cares!

I would, AI hasn't (and hopefully never will) got to the point where an hallucinated person can join in real-life marches. But then again, my MP is one of the good ones.

Rosie

Former and current Microsofties react to the latest round of layoffs

Ubuntu Studio

Also musicians. Or at least those of us that pretend to be musicians in our spare time. You just cannot record and instrument 'in the cloud' with anything like the latency you need (<=5ms from hitting the note to hearing the note) so local is the only option. Mobile isn't there by a long stretch and Mac, well, it's Apple.

Rosie

CISA loses another senior exec - and the budget cuts haven't even started yet

...key priorities aligned with President Trump's initiatives

She gave the Russians* root?

Rosie

* Incomplete list for illustration purposes only. Entities may be added, removed or reclassified without notice, reason, or justification

Meta pauses mobile port tracking tech on Android after researchers cry foul

Localhost is a loopback address

Seeing this in a Reg article makes me sad. I mean, really? El Reg's readership need to have 127.0.0.1 explained to them?

Friends, let us now gather in solemn silence and fond memory for the death of a formerly noble techn website, written by techies, for techies.

Rosie

Celonis slaps SAP with lawsuit claiming it's gatekeeping customer data

Re: A Sprinkling of Industrial Espionage?

I feel that's a tad unlikely. I mean you would really have to be properly stupid to use evidence of a crime you'd committed as evidence in a lawsuit you're persecuting and I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. I've not checked where this case is in the protracted and byzantine legal process but aren't there steps where one party is allowed to have a rummage around the other party's documents?

rosie

OpenAI asks Uncle Sam to let it scrape everything, stop other countries complaining

There's Optimism

I do love that he can say "Tier I countries (US allies)" and believe that's still a thing. US optimism seems to have always been admirably resilient.

Rosie

Nearly 10 years after Data and Goliath, Bruce Schneier says: Privacy’s still screwed

Re: Government. . .

It's one of Crowley's. "Do what thou whilt shall be the whole of the law. Love is the law, love under will" being the more complete version of it. It's probably in The Book of the Law or the Equinox or Musing From Within My Colon.

Rosie

Some workers already let AI do the thinking for them, Microsoft researchers find

So...how exactly?

That thing about moving from information gathering to information verification. How? If you've asked the AI to fetch some information for you then that's likely to mean that you don't have the information and to verify the information the AI has given you, you have to go back to the source, i.e. find the information.

I may be missing something but I'm not getting how this helps.

Rosie

UK energy watchdog slaps down Capita's £130M smart meter splurge

Re: The real reason the UK government wants smart meters

I get where you're coming from but that's not what that that text means. The HAN interface is the radio interface within the home as opposed to the keypad on the meter. A supplier can turn of the energy supply by sending a SR7.2 service request to the device.

In reality that functionality is locked behind serious RBAC and ahs never been used. Outside of an emergency it's unlikely it would ever be used.

Rosie

No pilot? No problem! EHang's autonomous air taxis take off in Thailand

Mostly Quiet

I'm not sure why noise is being raised. Using the Joby for reference, the figures (certified by NASA if Joby's website is to be believed) are 45.2DBa for flight and 65DBa for take-off and landing. Which is pretty quiet. For comparison the same numbers for a helicopter are 82-97 for flight and 86-95 for take-off (source: https://www.epd.gov.hk/eia/register/report/eiareport/eia_1132005/EIA/html/App%203.3.pdf). Given DB is a logarithmic scales that's a pretty massive difference, enough that I don't think you can transfer an experience of being near a helicopter to being near on of these things.

That's not that I necessarily think these are a fabulous idea, certainly not until after a few rich people have selflessly helped work out the kinks (flaming death optional).

Rosie

Former Facebook lobbyist joins UK comms regulator as non-exec director

Re: "This appointment was made following an open process in line with the Governance Code"

You'll find it here: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a80f0fced915d74e33fd44d/Ofcom_Framework_Document_23_June_2016_signed.pdf. Section 5 would seem to be the bit that applies and it (to say the least) a bit spartan on detail.

Rosie

OpenAI's latest o1 model family tries to emulate 'reasoning' – tho might overthink things a bit

debug.out

As I was reading this I was thinking "that looks a lot like the simple debugging you do when you haven't got a better IDE". Which, in my mind, is a good thing. It's level two fault finding and fixing, just after "throw some stuff at it and try to work out what's going wrong from how it fails". So now I stuck with a mental image of what a full-on debugging environment for ML/LLM would look like and hoping it's a navigable, multi-coloured, 3D lattice with the ability to prod the odd esynapse to see what happens. Utterly pointless musing but it helps pass a Friday afternoon. Hopefully it'll quicken the arrival of something that actually deserves to be called AI.

Also, that's a bit of dead clever boffinry, isn't it?

Rosie

AI firms propose 'personhood credentials' … to fight AI

Half a Think

This seems to be, sort of, the start of a useful think that got abandoned before it was thought through properly. Given the problem is 'how do I tell what has been mass produced by an AI disinformation farm?' what's being proposed doesn't look like much of a solution to that. Mulling it over there are 3 broad categories I can think of that apply here:

1. Information that is generated by AI and the producer/relevant authority wants it to be labelled as such.

2. Stuff that just anyone wants to post without being particularly bothered about whether anyone pays any attention to it or not.

3. Information that the producer wants to unambiguously tag as produced by them.

For the first point, "relevant authority" was put in there to cover scenarios where local law requires that AI content be labelled as such. It would work for people that are interested in following local law but obviously fall flat on its face otherwise. A producer may want to label something to prove that they have ridden the prompt dragon skilfully enough to get it to cough up something worthwhile, mostly like a visual artist signing a painting.

The second really, really doesn't need nor should require any kind of crypto-authentication shenanigans. If I want to post utter dross like this on the internet that's between me and my own foolishness and people should probably treat it with all the respect that deserves. Not a lot, for those not used to British sarcasm.

For the third, that might actually be useful. If I want to be sure that something I'm reading really has been produced by the organisation that it's claimed has produced it and hasn't been altered in any way having a handy way of doing so would be helpful. I know that's been possible for decades, it just hasn't spread beyond the niches where the techies find it useful to just be a thing that everyone uses.

Anywho, random ramblings - feel free to point out any and all silliness in the above.

Rosie

US elections have never been more secure, says CISA chief

Re: "convincing people not to buy into the propaganda"

Hmmm...maybe I'm misunderstanding what it is you're trying to say but isn't the whole point of an election campaign to convince people that one particular set of problems is more important than another and that you are the best person to solve those problems? Which, at least in my head, falls into the fairly broad definition of what could be called propaganda.

Not that I'm defending the self-promoting, fantasy definitions of "problem" and "solution" that are getting thrown around far too much at the moment.

Rosie

Oracle's Java pricing brews bitter taste, subscribers spill over to OpenJDK

Re: "we have to earn those dollars"

Hmmm...my reading of the article is that those are the words of Azul's Scott Sellers rather than anyone who is anything to do with the Big Red Extortion Racket. Could be wrong though.

Rosie

Wells Fargo fires employees accused of faking keyboard activity to pretend to work

Re: Whatever happened to measuring output?

AI is unlikely to be useful for reviewing the sort of documents I review on a regular basis. It'll be OK as a turbo spell and grammar checking doodad but that's only a tiny part of a proper review. I don't see how it's going to cross reference half a dozen or so documents, handwritten notes in a day book, conversations had away from the computer, memories of an what happened years ago and all the other plethora of nonsense that I need to use when reviewing a document.

Rosie

Hotel check-in terminal bug spews out access codes for guest rooms

PEBKAC?

The last mile's at risk in our hostile environment. Let’s go the extra mile to fix it

Re: Thank you!

Tsk, tsk, tsk. Silly downvoters.

The thank you is for making me aware of something that I wasn't previously aware of, more knowledge is always a good thing. So far as wanting more of it, it's more of people who feel they are negatively affected by something getting up off their behinds and actually doing something about it. Much, much better than caterwauling on unsocial media about how it's NOT FAAAAIIIIRRRRR!!!

Whether blowing up property or not is an appropriate course of action is debatable. In the same way that whether someone is a terrorist or a freedom fighter is debatable.

Rosie

Thank you!

I'd not come across the Angry Brigade before now. They sound fabulous, can we have much more of them please?

Rosie

Water worries flood in as chip industry and AI models grow thirstier

Welsh Rain is Different

I was over in London yesterday and work colleagues were complaining about the rain, about the level you'd call "a nice day for a stroll" in Wales. I messaged the same colleague today when I'm back in Wales - it was raining hard enough to set off car alarms.

Welsh rain is different. It remembers when it was part of the sea and could wreck our stupid ships and drown our puny bodies; it deeply resents having that taken away from it.

Rosie

Gen AI and cloud optimization help Asian SuperApp Grab turn a profit

Normally I'd agree with you but the article has the quote "...driving click-through rates upward compared to manually generated content...". I feel that's the metric that counts here. Even if it were quicker and cheaper to generate the content, if it's not causing a positive effect then it's just money down the drain.

Whilst there's the usual caveats of it being the CEO saying it and the article is a bit thin on detail so it's difficult to make a proper assessment it would seem there's at least the possibility Grab have worked out how to use GenAI effectively for their use case. Which is at least interesting enough to want more information on whether it's true, if it is why is it true and whether there's anything that's been done which could be made more generally applicable.

Rosie

Chrome engine devs experiment with automatic browser micropayments

It Could Work

So long as I remain in control of who gets paid, and how much. Given that, things I'd want to see are:

1. An opt-in - similar to the exceptions in NoScript. If you're name isn't on the list you can't have any money.

2. Graded levels of permission. If you're asking 0.01p go ahead and take the money, if you're asking for 1p then I need to confirm I'm OK with that, it you're asking for £1 you're almost definitely not worth it and can sod off.

3. I get to set the levels in 2.

4. Proper, audited, maintained security controls with someone in the firing line should they fail attached to the payment mechanism.

That said, if Google/Amazon/Microsoft/$insert_web_megacompany_here are getting anything from it the answer is no.

Rosie

UK civil servants – hopefully including those spending billions on tech – to skill up in STEM

I think it's usually spelled "dyed in the wool" but I like the way you're thinking.

Rosie.

UK's National Health Service will roll existing Palantir work into patient data platform

The NHS is not free. It's paid for by the public to deliver a public good. Personally I feel it to be a Damn Fine Idea(tm).

Except for those bits of the public that pay expensive accountants to stop them having to contribute, obvs.

Rosie

FOSS digital audio workstation Ardour reaches version 7

I've used Ardour with Ubuntu Studio for years and hadn't paid penny until I felt I wanted to; Mostly because people need to eat and partly because once I worked out the hourly cost for the fun I was having it was pennies. Granted I've run Linux on my own machines exclusively since forever so have never run acropper of the costs (in either time to compile or cold, hard, cash).

It's a great, big, capable program which takes a bit of effort to get your head around but also an absolute doddle compared to a 'real' recording studio. It takes time and effort to build something like that and, personally, I don't feel at all hard done by to contribute a little to the effort.

Rosie

Scottish space upstart's rocket crashes into the drink

<SIGH!>

"...boats and airplanes have..."

It's a Scottish rocket, those would be aeroplanes.

Rosie

UK politico proposes site for prototype nuclear fusion plant

Re: A centre for industrial decline?

Same. Once a week. Maybe.

Rosie

Biden administration prepares to bring hammer down on Chinese chipmakers

Graft

That's about the most jarring bit of US English I've seen on the site so far. In the UK grafting is working your whatnots off, whereas in the US it's skimming a little something off for yourself. Same word but completely different meanings.

In a related point, does anyone know of any sites that resemble El Reg as it was? Sort of mid-2000s to mid-2010s heyday era. I'm liking the new site less and less with each passing week.

Rosie

The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it

Re: UXtards to blame

I thought that would get me some down votes, which is a bit sad really - what's wrong with learning the language of the country you're visiting? I learned a bit of Welsh when I moved here (because I didn't want to be one of 'those' people) and it's a right giggle, more people should definitely give it a try. It's very, very different from English in all kinds of fascinating ways.

Rosie

Re: UXtards to blame

Well...you could learn Welsh, you're in Wales after all. You'd not even need to learn much Welsh to operate a ticket vending machine.

Rosie

Voyager 1 data corrupted by onboard computer that 'stopped working years ago'

6 Months Ago

Traynor YGL-3 Mk III, crackly pots. Contact cleaner.

Not _exactly_ the same level of cleverness but you did ask. Also the Traynor is loud enough to make your ears bleed whereas Voyager is silent.

Rosie

MPs charged with analysing Online Safety Bill say end-to-end encryption should be called out as 'specific risk factor'

Termintion Point

Hmmm...I'm not sure how many legs using TLS as an example would have TBH. The sane implementations that I've seen use something like n F5 as a termination point, everything inside the termination point is plain text, only outside is encrypted. Which is sort of essential if you#ve got tp do anything based on packet payload a a Good Idea(tm) if you don't want to have key handling hell to deal with and servers wasting clock cycles decrypting when they could be doing something more useful.

Other than that, agreed. This is all going to end up under the umbrella of "aligned with Good Industry Practice" and largely ignored.

Rosie

China's Yutu rover spots 'mysterious hut' on far side of the Moon

Here be Dragons

Soup Dragons to be precise, as any fule know.

Rosie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clangers

Google sued for firing staff who claim they tried to follow 'Don't be evil' motto

Re: Their New Motto is

Mostly except for the *. If you are going to have right old swear please do it properly. Otherwise it's like alcohol free gin or some similar monstrosity.

Rosie

We're all at sea: Navigation Royal Navy style – with plenty of IT but no GPS

Squat

Only applies to a displacement hull (i.e. anything too big/heavy/slow to get up on the plane). If you have a planing hull (like the boat in the article's picture) the faster you go the higher up in the water you are.

Yeah, I know. Picky.

Rosie

Doggy DNA database adopted by Gloucestershire cops to bring crims to heel

Pramagtically

For my dogs this is likely to reveal they are equals parts fox poo, badger poo and well decomposed rabbit. Possibly with a smattering of dog in there.

I love dogs. They're completely disgusting and couldn't give a fig.

Rosie

Hungover Brits declare full English breakfast the solution to all their ills

Cocktails

Savoy recipe corpse reviver number 2 for preference.

Works as well today as it did 100 years ago.

Rosie

Pakistan's Punjab province tells citizens to get jabbed or have their SIM card blocked

Re: Momento mori

I thought that as well but if you go a bit further down the article you get to "And of 42 deaths in people with Delta variant infections, 23 were unvaccinated and seven had received only one dose. The other 12 had received two doses more than two weeks before."

So 28.5%. A little less than 30% but not a lot.

Rosie

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...

"know who the bastards* are and can easily avoid them"

Isn't that what Apple are doing?

*Leaving aside any judgement on whether the guy is a bastard, has only acted like a bastard, or just said a things for the lolz in circumstances where for the lolz isn't appropriate.

Rosie

This developer created the fake programming language MOVA to catch out naughty recruiters, résumé padders

Re: Back in my contracting days...

Way back in the early 90s when I was developing code for a software house that specialised in recruitment software text matching was certainly a thing. There were OCR and matching modules to do exactly that - scan a CV and let the machine do the CV assessment for you. I've long since left that area but I'd be surprised if it wasn't still being used, certainly it was on lots of people 'must have' list.

Rosie

Excel-lent: Microsoft debuts low-code Power Fx language... but it is not really new

Everything Old is New?

I'll admit I've not dug into the low/no code stuff so am slightly commenting from a position of ignorance but from the blurb it mostly reminds me of the MDD/round trip engineering voodoo that had a bit of a hypebubble in the late 90s. IIRC Visual Cafe did a not completely horrible implementation of it; draw your UML and it generated the code for you.

Obviously that fell to pieces when you had to do anything even moderately complicated. As soon as the logic gets a bit involved it turns out it's easier to understand code than it is to follow a diagram. I thought that had killed it off a fair while back.

Anyone out there who knows a bit more than me (low bar to clear) care to point out why this is so very different?

Rosie

LibreOffice 7.1 Community released with user-interface picker, other bits and bytes

Re: And yet no Android version

Have you tried AndrOpenOffice? I have it on my phone and it sort of works well enough, certainly well enough I was prepared to pay fir it. Though the phone is a Cosmo, I'd hate to try and use it without a proper keyboard.

Rosie

The Fat iPhone, 11 years on: The iPad's over a decade old and we're still not sure what it's for

Tablets can be Useful

I know not an iPad but I've a Galaxy Tab 6 and whilst it wasn't useful for much more than Netflix and games without anything extra installed on it a couple of apps have helped it a lot.

Nebo is great as a replacement for a (paper) note book. I can happily scrawl away but end up with something I can search through easily. Which dead handy when someone asks me about something that came up in a meeting 4 months ago and had a like span of about weeks before fading into obscurity. Until it became urgent again.

Ibis paint is also a lot of fun. Plus it has the advantge of infinite undo for the utterly hopeless artist (raises hand and pleads guilty).

Both Nebo and Ibis come in Apple flavour as well so I think the comparison stands, provided you get an iPad with a stylus.

So far as plain consumption goes. The screen is nicer to look at and the sound quality much richer than my phone. So from that point of view, not really a must have but a nice addition if you're prepared to trawl around eBay looking for a decent second hand one.

Buy new? Don't be ridiculous!

Rosie

You look for the largest objects in the universe and two come along at once: Astroboffins spot mega radio galaxies dwarfing Milky Way

Re: ANcient Wisdom

Perfect! Thank you very much.

Rosie