Posts by theOtherJT

‘AI is not doing its job and should leave us alone’ says Gartner’s top analyst

The org now uses AI to automate all steps in parallel...

What, so it can get them wrong all at the same time?

Let me share with you a little story about an anonymous company I shall call Pottish Scower. Pottish Scower started, out of the blue, sending me text messages saying I'd not paid my final bill. Which was odd, because I'm not actually a customer of Pottish Scower.

Bemused I attempted to reply to the text message - getting an automated "This is for outgoing messages only, do not reply to this number" response. Thus thwarted, I went to their website, where it suggested that my query could be resolved by using their online chat.

This led me to a chat bot that would insist on me giving it my customer ID number before doing anything. It was incapable of grasping the concept that I didn't have one, and that's rather why I was trying to talk to someone. All attempts to get it to let me talk to a human fell into a black hole of total incomprehension.

That having failed, I tried calling them. I got put through to a lovely "AI" powered call centre, that asked me to read it my customer number. Which I didn't have. All it was capable of doing was repeat "I'm sorry, I didn't understand that. Can you please read me your customer ID number?" After pressing every button I could find I managed to talk to a human - in the sales department. Apparently this is the only department at Pottish Scower that actually employs humans. They listened to my problem and tried very hard to convince me that the best thing for me to do was switch suppliers, because they could do me a very good deal on my electricity supply.

No thank you, I insisted, I just want you to put me through to which ever number contains an actual human who can resolve this problem and stop me from getting these blasted texts every morning. The salesman then admitted that he wasn't actually able to perform transfers to another number, since all the other departments had been moved to a different call centre - but he did have a number I could ring. It was the same number I had used to get to him in the first place.

Thus thwarted for a third time, I tried emailing them.

I got an automated reply from their mail answering bot that explained very politely that I had "Forgotten" to include my customer ID number, and that I needed to write back with it included or they couldn't help me.

At this point I blocked the number on my phone so it's no longer capable of texting me. I guess someone's going to never find out about their final bill not being paid.

This is what the reality of "AI" powered customer service looks like.

User demanded a ‘wireless’ computer and was outraged when its battery died

Re: No need for the nuclear option

I can almost read the BOFH episode already...

Apple tries to contain itself with lightweight Linux VMs for macOS

Platform that already supports docker re-implements docker...

...claims to have invented it.

Microsoft cuts the Windows 11 bloat for Xbox handhelds

Re: Just goes to show that they always could remove this crap...

Well, fortunately for me in this instance he's repeating the numbers from Dave2d's video on the same topic, so regardless of his channel's bias - and I'm in no doubt that it does have one - but the numbers do appear to be pretty much just the numbers.

Just goes to show that they always could remove this crap...

...they just didn't want to.

Funny hearing this from Linus (of LTT fame, not our lord and savior Torvalds) only a week after he went on a massive rant about how much Windows sucks for gaming these days (which it does) and how ridiculous it is that the Linux version of the Lenovo Legion handheld was actually performing better in the vast majority of games than the native Windows version did. This despite having to use the Proton compatibility layer, since apparently Windows is such a godawful memory sink that it's more efficient to run the whole game through the translation layer than it is to have Windows actually running as the underlying OS.

Today's LLMs craft exploits from patches at lightning speed

I wonder how long...

...before we look back on today's world with much the same misty eyed nostalgia as we get today looking at computing in the 80s and early 90s? "Oh, no, there's no password, there's only one user account, so why need one?" "Why would we need to segregate memory between processes? Who's running two processes at once?" "What do you mean 'firewall' why wouldn't I allow totally unrestricted data flow between this machine and that one? That's Ted's machine. We all know Ted!"

I get the impression that a day will come when running code that hasn't been mathematically validated to do what it says it does will be looked at as some kind of age of innocence naiveite, and people will look back on speed of development and change in the decades before and wish for the days before everything got infested with hostile AI that has to be guarded against at every turn.

Why did the Windows 95 setup use Windows 3.1?

Re: A Mess

"I admit that I have no idea how I can script this to work on 50 laptops remotely and securely."

...and I think that really kinda covers this reply. You don't know how to do this. That's fine, you appear to be a Windows admin, I wouldn't expect you to. I don't know how to use intune because the last time I was a professional Windows admin was in 2011 and it had only existed for a year and the place I worked didn't buy it. It'd be a funny old world if we were all the same and all that, but everything you've described here is actually pretty easy to do on Ubuntu - most of the tools are right there in the installer if you have need of them.

What I will grant you is that this process - like most things FOSS - is so open-ended that it's not always easy to know where to start or find the right documentation. When everything is possible, it's hard to know where best to start doing anything.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion is not an illusion, but it soon might be

Re: So US corps will do what they always do

I'm not sure they even get embarrassed by it. A friend of mine just quit her job in HR at the tail end of last year. I'll not name the company she worked for, for obvious reasons, but needless to say it was a large US based operation and she was responsible for employee relations in one of their branches in Spain.

The reason she quit was that she was utterly sick of having to handle employee lawsuits against the company that it was totally obvious to anyone with even the barest grasp of EU employment law were going to be won by the employee. It would seem that barely a month could go by without a letter from the head office saying "Due to changes in policy, the following is going to happen" and then all the EU based branches would write back and say "No, really, you can't do that, that's not legal here." and then the US office would do it anyway and then all the EU based employees would either sue or go on strike or both.

The final straw was that apparently her contact in the US simply could not grasp that they had to obey Spanish employment law since they were an American company and ordered her again to tell the people in her department to do things that were out and out illegal while insisting that there would be no consequences because "We don't have that law here" despite having lost at this point over a dozen law suits. It's like they just don't understand that other legal jurisdictions exist.

Meta's plan to erase 5% of workforce starts today

Re: Remids me of

I mean, it wouldn't have been less effective but I'm not sure "sufficient" is a fair description of any part of that government.

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

Re: This is why Windows 11 will eventually succeed

This really is the biggest hurdle to mainstream Linux adoption. There is too much choice and when you don't really care about the details and just want to get on with running your applications then that's just... annoying.

But I'm in agreement with the OP of this thread. Ubuntu. Sure, yes, there's a lot of "bloat" in that now, but there's a lot less than there is in Windows of any flavor released in the last decade, and all that stuff is in there just in case someone needs it and now it's one less thing to have to think about if they do. It's already there. In a world where it's easy to get overwhelmed by choice, I think that's the right decision from Canonical.

Those of us who actually do care, or have some specific need for a smaller footprint, sure, ok. We can do the research. Ubuntu's the choice you make when you can't be bothered to - and there's nothing wrong with that.

OpenAI unveils deep research agent for ChatGPT

Re: I think I understand why ...

Thing is, that's a legitimate question to which there is a clear and correct answer.

My mother was a librarian for 40 years. You ask her that question and she'd say, ok, that's a question about biology, and it's a really specific question at that, so forget encyclopedia, you're going to need a book about birds in particular, that's going to be in this section, I'm going to recommend the following based on their entries in our catalogue.

If pressed, she'd be able to find those, parse their indexes, and either find the correct answer or tell you that the answer wasn't available within the books they had in their collection, so she's going to recommend that you contact a number of specialist collections - possibly there's going to be something more useful in the Radcliffe Science Library, and we can get it on inter-library loan from Oxford.

One way or another you'd get that information - and if the public library actually had access to the complete text of everything in one of the reference collections like the one at the Bodleian or the British Library a qualified librarian would definitely be able to get you an answer.

Given the utterly vast amount of information that these "AI" have been trained on, there's actually a decent chance that the answer is in there somewhere, but it's not finding it. The problem is they don't understand the question!

They're just gluing sentences together out of probabilistically linked fragments. They have no idea if the answer is right or not, or how one discerns a correct answer from an incorrect one. This is the difference between genuine knowledge and... well, whatever the fuck this is.

OpenAI deep research managed an accuracy of 26.6 percent.

So what you're saying is that it was wrong pretty much 3/4 of the time. That's... not terribly encouraging, is it? I mean, yes, it's a lot better than three to four percent... but it doesn't really matter if it can "accomplishe(s) in tens of minutes what would take a human many hours" if three out of four times it does it wrong. That isn't, in any meaningful sense, doing the work.

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

Re: Office on the web

Well, you'd better start getting used to them, because Microsoft are definitely pushing us all in that "everything's a web service" direction. Much easier to charge you monthly that way.

Re: It wont work

Dunno man, after massively losing patience with Microsoft about 5 years ago my entire company - minus those of us in the software platform team, who used Linux already - switched to Macs. Alright, we sold our souls to Google years before even that, so it's not like we had a massive Windows infra to port over, but Google mail / docs / sheets / meet / kitchen-sink + macbook seems to keep most of our lot pretty happy. TBH were it not for the fact that I build linux kernel modules sort of daily I'd probably be happy with it too. Certainly I'd be happier than I was with Windows 10.

So, you know, that's 400 odd Windows 11 licences Microsoft won't sell now. It might not be many in the grand scheme, but like the coming of small stones that herald the avalanche and all that...

I just don't think that "Windows + Office is everything!" argument flies any more. Things change. A ton of our younger employees have never used Windows because they've never owned a "desktop" before coming to work here. It was tablets and phones all the way for them, and that number will just keep increasing. I'm pretty certain this is why Microsoft are flailing around quite as wildly as they are right now. They need everyone to switch to subscription models that can run MS software on any platform before the momentum really turns against them and makes Windows irrelevant.

UK tax collector's phone service 'deliberately' bad to push users online, say MPs

Never blame on evil...

...that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.

don't think they need to be trying to "push people online" to explain why the phone service is so bad. It's so bad because the budgets have been cut and cut to the point where there are nothing like enough staff to do the job, and only staff left working there are the ones willing to do so for peanuts... and we all know what they say about who you get if you pay peanuts.

Words alone won't get the stars and stripes to Mars

Re: It will work... IF

It became normal when Trump and people like him started whipping up mobs to suggest that politicians be hanged for not doing what they want. Violence as a political action was normalized by Trump and the people who support him.

It became morally acceptable when the very people who were chanting that they should be hanged - that stormed the capital with the intent to overthrow a government by force - are given unconditional pardons, because when there's no rule of law, "frontier justice" becomes the only kind available.

Trump, by his own actions, has demonstrated over and over again out that "You can do and say what you want as long as you have enough power" regardless of what the law might suggest. As someone who is very against that concept I would not be at all sorry to see the consequences of it demonstrated. A little bit of "This is exactly what we fucking warned you about" feels decidedly justified at this point.

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

Here we go again...

These people just don't learn, do they?

You can't legislate this problem.

Let's imagine that some other state - let's say China - legislates that all websites hosted in the UK prevent Chinese citizens from accessing news that's not in accordance with the values of China. We would, of course, say "No." and that would be the end of it. China would be left to enforce any rules it wanted to apply at the ISP end inside the boundaries of their own country. Like, you know, they actually do.

So now lets imagine what happens when the British government tells a website based in some other jurisdiction to censor content - never mind what content it is or if you agree that it should be censored. What do we think will happen? They'll say "No." and we'll be left in exactly the same situation where either we block it at the ISP level in this country - at which point everyone simply VPN's around it - or put this utterly stupid idea down for another decade... you know, like we did last time when it became totally apparent within about a week that it wasn't going to work.

The only thing this might achieve is to convince porn sites to relocate their operations outside of the UK, which I guess one might make a moral argument for if one gives a shit about porn, which I don't think the vast majority of people actually do these days, but from an economic standpoint is hardly a win at a time when we're supposed to be all about growth.

UK unveils plans to mainline AI into the veins of the nation

Re: Britons: is the detection of potholes the problem, or the fixing of them?

Yeah, but only because it's basically impossible to drive across Oxfordshire these days.

Rollable laptop displays to roll off the production line from April, says Samsung

Re: I don't give a damn about the rollable bit...

Nope. Don't want a wide keyboard. Never gotten on with numpads on laptops, they off-centre the typing area relative to the display.

I'm basically thinking something that's as close to an XPS 15 as possible, but squarer rather than wider relative to the 14" one. I appreciate this may be a niche thing, but I just do not like 16:9 screens on computers. At all. It's an irritating compromise aspect ratio that's neither properly cinematic like 2.35:1 or well suited for document work like 4:3 (or better yet 3:4, but that's going to be difficult to do with a laptop given the packaging constraints, as you say)

Re: I don't give a damn about the rollable bit...

I always liked it because it's the 16:10 of the '90s. You get the entire of what would be the 4:3 space as actual desktop plus a little bit extra along the bottom for the taskbar to live in.

I don't give a damn about the rollable bit...

...I just want to be able to buy a premium quality laptop with a 5:4 screen again. Can we please just have those back please?

Short-lived bling, dumb smart things, and more: The worst in show from CES 2025

Re: Nobody asked for this...

The Register launched in 1994. 25 years ago we already had el Reg. Went online in '98 IIRC. Was definitely reading it in '99.

Re: Nobody asked for this...

OK, I'll give you e-books. I actually do use one of those all the time - but only as a convenience. I still buy everything in dead-tree form, I just leave them on the bookshelf when I'm not at home because I don't want to damage them, so if I had to give that up I don't think I'd mind.

Re: making an essential appliance too damn complicated

I can see that happening.

My dad has a freezer in his garage. It's older than me. It has two lights on it, and precisely zero controls. You turn it on, and the red and orange lights come on. When it's cold, the red light goes out, and the orange light stays on to inform you that it's on power. That's it. It does one thing: Keep things frozen. It does the job so perfectly it's been out there for the last 21 years doing it with no maintenance or alteration - and for the 24 years before that it was in the kitchen doing the same thing. The only reason it's not still in the kitchen is that mum wanted to redecorate and it was too big to fit once everything had been moved around.

What could this thing possibly be served by having "AI"? It doesn't even need a temperature dial in it, because as soon as you turn it on it heads down to to -18 C which was considered by it's manufacturer 50 years ago to be the temperature that a freezer should be. That's still the temperature freezers should be. Why set it to something else? There is literally no way to improve this thing by making it more complicated.

Nobody asked for this...

...is basically the motto of the 21st century at this point.

I might be a grumpy old man... well, no, I most definitely am a grumpy old man... but looking back at the life I lived as a young adult in 2000 these last 25 years don't really seem to have improved anything. I guess having google maps in my pocket is pretty nice, but I'm coming up really short when I look for other major wins. Things that actually genuinely make my life easier on a daily basis. All this technology, and how is it actually doing anything that makes my - or for that matter anyone else's life - better?

The ultimate Pi 5 arrives carrying 16GB ... and a price to match

Re: At that price...

Well, that's kinda my point. The Pi is about - for me at least - cheap tinkering type devices where you get easily accessible GPIO in a low power low cost platform. I don't really see how putting 16G on a pi will be much use to anyone who isn't trying to use it as a "desktop" and if you are trying to use it as a desktop it seems like you'd be better served with something else. It just seems a bit... unnecessary. There's always a use somewhere for basically anything under the sun, but I'm kinda struggling to see the point of this one.

At that price...

...it's starting to get close to the little N100 boxes that are basically everywhere these days. I guess if you particularly needed arm rather than x86 for some workload it's nice to have that option, or maybe if you have a lot of PI compatible HATs or similar that you want to reuse, but I can't see that for most people the pi would be a better way to go. Once you're up in the £150 area (which appears to be what one would cost from pihut including a case, SD card, and power supply) the intel machine is just that much more capable and basically the same price. If you're not constantly thrashing the hell out of it it's not even significantly more power hungry.

Elon Musk's galactic ego sows chaos in European politics

Re: Musk uses an AI for his X-account

No, pretty sure he's just on a shit-ton of ketamine.

Microsoft declares 2025 'the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh'

Re: "Not that users have much of a choice to move with Microsoft to a Windows 11 world"

The thing is, while this is true, MS don't care. Both my parents use Ubuntu with Mate now because they find it to be more like the Windows they remember than the new Windows is, and it gives them less problems along the way. Good-o. Job done.

But MS makes basically no money from end users like them. Windows is what it is because of corporate market share, and getting Linux to stick as an option in the office requires paperwork. Oh god so much paperwork. And meetings. The endless meetings. It doesn't matter than 99% of the office staff do everything in a browser these days, trying to convince a corporate IT department to try and run their estate on Linux is basically impossible - and I say this as someone who has, in fact, run an entire corporate IT department on Linux.

As long as MS can rely on forced upgrades in the business sphere, they can bully the end user as much as they like.

Re: It's like this

I'll pay the extra 20% so I don't have to put up with Microsoft's bullshit. I don't like it, but if that's the choice then that's the choice.

...I mean, I won't - not me personally - because I'll just keep using Ubuntu, but if maintaining our in-house Linux distro wasn't literally my job and I was someone who just went to a store to be presented with "Mac or Windows" I'd chose Apple every time given what Windows has become.

Windows 11 24H2 can run – sort of – in 184MB

Re: Imagine the world we'd be living in...

To be fair, it's pretty hard to get an entire OS running in single digits of ram when you have to take into account as many hardware variants as we have today. You'd be back at the whole "compile your kernel for the precise hardware you intend to run on" stage - which I personally could do without going back to.

Imagine the world we'd be living in...

...if companies developing software actually put in as much effort as this guy has. Especially in today's world of microservices and containers, if you could actually get an entire OS running in megabytes of memory it would make everything so much more efficient.

Can AWS really fix AI hallucination? We talk to head of Automated Reasoning Byron Cook

Re: Only a little bit wrong

Code. It's called code.

This is why we have formal language specifications for doing coding. I translate what I intend to mean in English that has multiple potential interpretations into something formally complete that means precisely one thing such that the compiler/interpreter will always do the same thing when presented with it.

Re: Hallucination aka Wrong

I like "Gaslighting" because not only does it make things up, it has a shocking tendency to lie about it when pressed.

"Cook says it was not quite the kind of hallucination the automated reasoning tool could solve."

...except that's precisely the kind that actually matters. It made something up. Something that did not in fact happen.

It's not a question like "Is The Black Album good?" to which there really is no answer, because the judgement is aesthetic. You can hate it, or love it, you could argue about if the mix is technically good perhaps for a particular vinyl or CD release... but is it good? Well, you like it or not I guess.

Ultimately the latter question is unimportant for AI to answer, because it's unimportant for anyone to answer. There isn't an answer. But inventing things and asserting them as facts? Kinda more important that one.

Dude, you got a Dell, period! RIP XPS, Inspiron, Latitude, Precision

Re: I'll care about anything Dell does...

Mine doesn't, it's at the top of the screen where it's belongs, but I think the 2019 model did that IIRC.

I'll care about anything Dell does...

...when they put the keyboards on the XPS or whatever the hell they want to call that line back the way they were. 2022 XPS 15 - best laptop I've ever had. Tried the new 16. Hated it. Absolutely impossible to type on accurately.

Edit: And give me my damn function keys back!

Tech support warrior left cosplay battle and Trekked to the office

Re: What's the weirdest outfit you've worn to a tech support job?

I used to do that all the time. I particularly liked the bit where I discovered that the "pocket" for the back protector plate in my jacket was the perfect size to slip a 15" laptop in over the plate. I could rock up on site and then just unzip the bottom of the jacket and drop the laptop straight out onto the work bench without having to try and get a laptop bag secured to the bike.

Did occasionally get a few stares from people stomping through the office with a helmet on and steel toed boots, but no one ever said anything.

systemd begrudgingly drops a safety net while a challenger appears, GNU Shepherd 1.0

Re: 42% less unix philosophy

As regards Windows servers, I'm sure there are plenty of old hands out there who learned how to do the job and do it well without powershell - given how late to the party Microsoft were with that one - but I've spent god knows how much time cleaning up messes caused by giving people who can't be trusted with it shell access. It does rather feel like if someone doesn't want to learn the basics, giving them the power to do real damage is a bad idea, and that's a problem that is most definitely not solved by getting them to understand less.

Re: 42% less unix philosophy

Try it. Seriously. Try and actually force systemd to do genuinely, completely, synchronous boot up with hard guarantees on every single component coming up in exactly the order you asked for and providing a signal that proves it did it.

It's a complete and absolute nightmare. The response from the systemd dev team when trying to do this is oftentimes "Well, why would you do that?" when we've filed bug reports, but frankly that's not good enough. Some times it absolutely does matter - especially when dealing with embedded systems with really quirky hardware. Boot speed be damned I HAVE to have these services start in precisely this order, and signal that they have done so. Systemd will absolutely lie about this in some of the weirder edge cases - and yes, everything has edge cases - but the good thing about sysvinit is that they're all odd bashisms that we know about and are easy to work around. When systemd does it it's really, really hard to get to the bottom of why it did, and even if you do and can prove conclusively that it's a bug, the systemd team will sort of shrug at you and suggest that it's not their problem.

BOFH: Don't sell The Boss a firewall. Sell him The Dream

Re: The Dream

Comment of the year. Doubly so given that I can smell the river from my house today. Thames Water clearly doing their usual excellent job.

Reddit rolls out AI-powered 'Answers' search feature, redditors don't rejoice

Amazing!

They've actually found a way to make the Reddit search less effective. I genuinely didn't think that was possible given how low the bar they were starting from was, but here we are.

Raspberry Pi 500 and monitor arrive in time for Christmas

Re: Keyboard layout

You mean the objectively better one where we get one more key than you do?

Given that the monitor can run from 5 volts...

...and therefore be chained from the Pi itself, all we need is to add PoE and what we have here is a single-cable machine. I like to imagine a room full of them netbooting a nice thin-client OS and attaching to a chonky heavy-lift compute rack in the basement. Everything old is new again. It'd be like being back at school.

Altman to Musk: Don't go full supervillain – that's so un-American

Surely that's the most American.

This is what Americans do. This is peak American. Stop pretending it's some golden age that never existed when America was the hero. If America was ever that, it sure as shit ain't now.

Brits are scrolling away from X and aren't that interested in AI

Re: It's not just Brits...

Who says they do? I don't, never have, but I have to listen to his constant mental diarrhea because it's never out of the fucking news.

M4 MacBook Pro shows Apple is still glued to the idea of unfixable laptops

Re: Apple, the fashion brand that makes computers

I agree with your headline assumption - that's totally what they are - but I don't think the evidence bears out what you have to say about service life. Most Apple kit seems to last a good long time. They have many faults, but I don't think that's one of them.

I still have no idea...

...why they glue these things down. It's not like there's huge amounts of space in there for the battery to be rattling around in. When it's in, it's in. Once it's in place the back of the machine would hold it in, there's nowhere for it to go! Put some bloody sprung contacts under it and a couple of bits of foam and you wouldn't even need a lead to connect it to. The only reason for this is being deliberately obstructive.

Microsoft goes thin client with $349 Windows 365 Link mini PC

Re: So, double the price...

Thing is, it has local storage. You, the consumer, may not be allowed to use it but it must have it. It's own operating system needs to live there. At minimum there's got to be something on this thing that does enough management of network interfaces to get the thing online so it can pull disk images. In the modern corporate environment it'll at least WPA-2/3 type wifi to get an internet connection, and in a lot of places you'll need some sort client that relies on connect then authenticate webauth like workflows. To bring something like that up you need enough brains to detect and configure the display - unless it comes with a known type of display - which for $350 it doesn't, and by the looks of it it supports wireless input devices, so now we're looking at a bluetooth stack too likely as not.

It's all a reasonable amount of things to stash in an initrd type filesystem so it's not like it's going to need a lot of local storage, but it'll need some and it can't be read-only because it'll need to get security patches just like any other initramfs would. The only way around that would be to allow it to PXE boot - which no one in their right mind is ever going to allow over the internet.

Study suggests X turned right just in time for election season

This post has been deleted.

[This operation was performed by a moderation algorithm]

Seem familiar anyone?

We need to strip social media of the pretense that algorithms are moderation. They're required by law to do something about hate speech and disinformation on their platforms, but they abdicate that responsibility to algorithms that regularly do the exact opposite. For some reason they keep getting away with this.