Posts by theOtherJT

'Resistance is futile,' says Qualcomm CEO. AI agents will be become invisible, inescapable, follow you across devices

"The phone, today, is at the center of your digital life"

Not mine it's not. It's a thing I carry around so I can keep in touch with people. Mostly via SMS. I actively avoid using it for reading the web (because it's bad at it, it's too small) or doing email (can't type on it) or watching video (too small again).

My phone is a phone. If you replaced it with the one I carried in 2005 it would make very little difference to me. The centre of my digital life is my desktop PC and I just really don't see that changing.

Microsoft researchers find AI models and agents can't handle long-running tasks

Re: Quantum Communication ..... AI@ITs Work, REST and Play

Has anyone heard from Bob recently?

Doesn't surprize me in the slightest...

...based on my interactions with Gemini and other LLMs.

They tend to start well, but if you spend too long on one thing weird errors start creeping in until you get to a point where they enter a total state of meltdown. You'll fix a bug and they'll re-introduce it next iteration and then profusely apologise, and come up with some totally bogus fix that technically fixes the problem, but makes something else worse rather than go back to the way things were before. They seem to have an almost pathological aversion to regressions. Trying to get them to undo something they've done wrong and just put it back the way it was is damn close to impossible. They'll come up with increasingly insane explanations for why you can't do that - despite the fact that you just did that it was right there. 5 prompts ago. See? In that output there? You did the thing. That version worked fine. Now put it back the way it was! ...nope. Won't put it back. Can't put it back, and if you the user try and force it by saying "here's the block of code I want you to replace that with" it'll accept it, and then randomly revert it a few prompts later.

These things can save vast amounts of time typing out boilerplate and being effective copy-paste machines with a nice autoformatter. If you want a simple bit of bash or python or C that hundreds of people will have written something just like it before, but taylored very slightly to your specific circumstances then Gemini is excellent at that. But when you start getting into anything more than - in my experience - about a thousand lines of code, it all goes off the rails.

HP stuffed a PC into a keyboard. We took it for a spin

Feels like the worst of all worlds to me.

It's absolutely not a full sized keyboard. That stupid squished up arrow block and home+end block is just horrible and probably the worst thing about trying to do serious work on a laptop type keyboard.

It's also not a proper full travel mechanical - which admittedly your co-workers might appreciate compared to the mighty noise that a lot of those make - but that's part of what I like about them. There's really strong tactile and audible feedback when typing.

You can't use it while traveling - on the train for example - or in meetings where you need to bring your data and talking points with you, but when it is tied to your desk it doesn't have enough clout to be a proper workstation.

I am strangely attracted to the idea - probably because I have all kinds of pent up 80s nostalgia for the form factor - but looked at rationally I just can't see a use for this that isn't better served by something else.

Brit mathematician lets AI agent loose with credit card – cue password leaks, CAPTCHA chaos and more

If you know your Greek mythology, you will know that is either very funny or very worrying...

...and if you know your Red Dwarf you'll know that it's absolutely hilarious.

GitHub says sorry and vows to do better as uptime slips and devs complain

The main driver is a rapid change in how software is being built...

...Since the second half of December 2025, agentic development workflows have accelerated sharply.

As per the article.

So they're admitting they did this to themselves, and that the tools they're using aren't up to the job. So... Stop using them please? ...and stop trying to force us to use them while they're at it?

Hashicorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto says GitHub ‘no longer a place for serious work’

Re: Unofficial github status page - the one MS don't have

That is absolutely shocking. What are they hosting it on, a speccy with a microdrive?

To fix this Wi-Fi network, we'll need a crane

Re: I now know to go outside and look for cranes.

I'm guessing bin turkeys are larger more rural relatives of the common urban bin chicken?

Pass the key, passwords have passed their sell-by date

So instead of a password that only exists in my memory...

...I need a key file that exists on my device that anyone who manages to somehow gain access to my device will be able to use.

Unless I put a password on the key file at which point I now need a password and some device - which is basic 2fA which I already have for most services that support it.

Except I presume people are expecting me to use a password/pin/pattern/thumbprint/faceprint to unlock the device, which is considered "as good" as a password per key file, except clearly it's not because now one only needs defeat one password/pin/pattern/thumbprint/faceprint to get access to all my key files as opposed to having to break each password separately.

How is this better again?

England's school phone ban gets teeth, just in time to bite no one

Re: Details, details.

Never mind stranger danger, think of the "I've fallen off my bike and messed up my leg and I can't walk the rest of the way home" call, or the "The bus did that thing where it bypassed our village again and now I'm 5 miles up the road in a massive rainstorm" call. Both of which I actually made (On my massive Nokia brick) when I was at school in the 90s.

People seem to forget that the countryside exists and kids live there.

...that said I can't imagine any 2020s parent allowing their kids to make their own way to school the way I did in the 90s.

Re: Details, details.

None of the ones round my way do. You can just walk in.

AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition tested: Gratuitous overkill with a price to match

Surely if money really is no object...

...you'd go all out and get a Threadripper? Isn't that what the 9995WX is supposed to be for?

Physicist reckons two-button calculator can do all elementary math

You missed the opportunity to set it to greyscale mode.

California ghost-gun bill wants 3D printers to play cop, EFF says

Chris Rock called it.

You don’t need no gun control, you know what you need? We need bullet control! We need to control the bullets, that’s right. I think all bullets should cost five thousand dollars… You know why? Cause if a bullet cost five thousand dollars there would be no more innocent bystanders!

Windows Update is a torture chamber for seldom-used PCs

Microsoft made a rod for their own back...

...with their shitty packaging.

Now, MSI packages are actually good*. They have mechanisms to do sort of everything you might want from a package manager. The MSI system is not an inherently bad system.

BUT MICROSOFT DON'T ALWAYS BLOODY USE IT!

Admittedly it's been the better part of a decade since I was a Windows admin on the regular, but back then it was obvious that MS often don't follow their own guidelines for packaging. This is insane. Even when they do use it they don't always use it properly; only filling out the "install" part of the package manifest so that it either doesn't remove cleanly or doesn't upgrade cleanly.

...and then we have MSIX.

Not only is it not really better, but in a lot of cases it's actively worse - because by containerizing it they introduced a bunch of the problems and overhead we all know and love Snap packages for. And just like Snap vs deb you find yourself in the same situation where bits of your system are installed using one, bits are installed using the other, and then the update system has to manage both and sometimes they're properly independent from one another and then sometimes they're not because something packaged one way has a dependency on something packaged the other way and if we're updating this we also need to update that, but that's a separate kind of update process so hold on a second while I spawn a new process thread to deal with that and try and resolve the dependency hell...

It didn't need to be like this if they'd just insisted in the MSI spec that you simply were not allowed to leave bits of it out, and then ensured that everyone who worked there actually used the sodding thing instead of wrapping self extracting .exe files.

*or at least not actively bad.

World's smallest violin spotted at Amazon HQ as exec pay packets deflate

"You just had to pay us enough to live!"

...just something that sprang randomly to mind. I'm not suggesting burning down all the bit-barns or anything. Honest.

Amazon put a filesystem on S3; I showed up with a test suite and bad intentions

Re: TLDR: Old Man Yells At Clouds.

This is because people like you and I see failures as something to be avoided. Something goes wrong -> That is Bad. It's a very simple workflow. Sadly this is not how most businesscritters see it.

As long as there's someone else to blame, and therefore sue, and therefore it doesn't in the long term cost too much, they actually don't care about things not working. Everything can be reduced to a profit/loss calculation, at which point the cloud can start looking really, really good. I mean sure, it doesn't always work and it exposes us to enormous risk, but if it does fail there's someone else to blame and in the mean time it's really cheap in up-front costs which will make things look nice in the quarterlies. Collect bonus. Move on.

UK's grand plan to fuel AI with public data faces uphill battle

Re: Data v. Information

Oh god, yes, the academic data. I once got emailed - back when I was working for The University - a file named "output.o" by a desperate graduate student who had been sent it by their tutor with no explanation for how to read it, just before said tutor went on holiday.

On closer inspection it was about 15M of text data in the format [$long_floating_point_number,$longer_floating_point_numer] 12 times per line, over and over and over. I have no idea what this could possibly represent and neither did the poor grad student.

I'm guessing it was the output of some script or other in a totally custom format that the professor had made up on the fly. When faced with something like that you're screwed.

Re: As below, so above.

Appreciated, but I've got one now. Well, actually I've got 5, but only 2 of them worked :/

Re: As below, so above.

Not really the point - there's so much crap in here he can't find anything. Not to mention the endless issues of "Untitled Document.doc" that aren't the same file but are scattered all over the place.

Saving space isn't the problem, I could just by a cheap 1T SSD and dump the lot in there he has so little data over all. The problem is that over the decades it's become impossible to find which of the "design-plan (final).2002.-revision1.2005 (1) - COPY.dwg" is actually the latest version of the damn thing. You can't even rely on the metadata because a bunch of them got copied via some godawful "backup" software at some point so everything that did now things it was created 1st January 1970.

As below, so above.

I was over at my parents place this weekend. Dad is trying to organize his "documents" - which in this case turns out to mean a collection of files going back to the windows 3.11 days that have been copied, zipped, copied, renamed, put on an external hard drive, copied to a new computer, zipped again, renamed again, copied to a NAS, backed up from the NAS to another machine, renamed again* ... and so on and so on for about 30 years.

An entire afternoon's digging left me with the impression that in about 600G of data spread across no less than 15 separate disks, mostly various sizes of spinny - some of which even 40 pin IDE** - there was probably about 5G of actual stuff the rest being either duplicates or desperately irrelevant garbage like the drivers for a scanner that he'd owned 15 years ago that had somehow ended up in the "Family Photos (2) - Copy" directory. Probably twice.

I tried all sorts of things that I thought would be clever to automate cleaning this up, but after a couple of hours messing around came to the conclusion that the only way to clean this mess up is with the Mk1 eyeball and some common sense. It's going to take a human with some context to work out what the hell to do with all of this, and even then it's pretty much inevitable that something that should not be lost is going to get lost.

We like to think that digital data will exist for ever and that all the problems of duplication-degredation and physical decomposition don't apply. We are wrong.

In short, none of this should come as a surprise to anyone, and if they're serious about cleaning this up the only realistic answer is an absolute army of civil servants doing it by hand. It'll take decades, and by the time they're done, whatever format they've converted it all into will be obsolete.

* lost, found, and finally recycled into soft compost.

** and finding a working IDE card to read those was a challenge let me tell you.

Stack Overflow abandons redesign after loyalists criticize it

Re: Nostalgia

Not everything is about money.

Apple's chips are the core of a new landscape, but its biggest win is Windows

Re: People like buying things way more than they like owning them.

Wat?

It's a catastrophe for Linux adoption that the stupid "AI" memory gold-rush has sunk the Steam Machine on price at just the time that Valve really had a compelling device to sell us.

Hard as it is for a lot of us commentards to accept, people like corporate entities. They make them feel safe. They like buying things way more than they like owning them. There's this lingering sense of "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" even if that's no longer true, and many of the people buying things are too young to have even heard it. The impression remains. Something you buy is of superior quality than something you get for free, and - possibly more importantly - you have a bunch of consumer protection laws to fall back on if it doesn't do what it says on the box.

Valve were poised to sell Linux to the masses. Sure, everyone's about to say "Oh, but the SteamDeck did tiny numbers!" and that's true, but it's also a pretty niche device - a portable gaming PC is kinda an odd thing. Handhelds don't do as well as consoles - doubly so in this age of gaming capable smartphones. I think the PSP sold something like 75 million units - half what the PS2 did.

Anyone who lived through the 80s home computing boom knows that gaming is a gateway drug. We bought home micros to play games on - the fact that they did other things wasn't a terribly large part of the equation - but over time the general-purpose-ness (sorry) of the things reeled us further and further in.

Games consoles are very popular. Games consoles that are also multi-media centres and web browsers became even more popular, much easier to convince the other half / parents to let you have one in the living room if it does more than play games. Once it starts doing everything a PC can do it'll be even more popular again and I was totally poised to see an entire generation introduced to Linux on the QT (pun only some what intended) and by the time they got to the "We'll buy you your first computer of your very own" they won't want Windows or Mac because what they're used to is SteamOS and it already runs all their games.

I still think this is the most likely path to major adoption of Linux amongst the non-techie population. It's just a shame it appears to have been set back a few years. Again.

Brits are falling out of love with posting every thought online

Hardly surprising...

...that after a decade of the social media companies shitting in the product we are now disinclined to want to consume it.

Artemis II blasts off on first crewed lunar mission since Apollo

Re: Boots on the regolith, 2028...

I'll drink to that.

Re: Boots on the regolith, 2028...

It may not greatly improve the international image of America - not really sure what would at this point other than mass trials and imprisonments of their entire political class - but space flight is important. It's what's next. First the moon, then Mars, then the belt, then the outer planets, then interstellar... there will be a "next" even after that - assuming we survive - although I have no idea what it might be. There always has to be a next. It's what makes us human.

ServiceNow allegedly says salesman 'overachieved' and is not entitled to comp

Re: ServiceNow have achieved the impossible

Trouble is sales-droids often perform well on the "I shifted a lot of units" or "I got a really big contract" terms.

If the units are fit for purpose, or if the contact covers what the customer thought it would cover is the bit that gets the sales droids a bad name, because the reason we normally hate the bastards is that they so often promise the moon on a stick and then once they've already been paid we discover that what they sold us, and what their company could actually deliver on, were entirely different things.

Numbers alone don't prove much right here.

Re: The Oracle gambit

Some days when I don't have to work I sleep in, have a late brunch then go for a walk in the woods. Then I go and sit in the pub with a book until teatime and get through the whole day without reading any news, going on social media, or speaking to any people other than the nice man who poured my beer. If, after that, I manage to get home, cook, and then watch comfort TV until bedtime without hearing or seeing anything stupid then - on those rare days - I manage not to hate the rest of humanity.

These are not common days.

Usage pricing leaving software vendors guessing what lands on the invoice

Re: Simple solution

Not just AI any more tho, is it? I've started to see software all over the place that's "Pay per use". It's an encroaching horror of the model that says the "software" on your computer is just a front end to some saas monstrosity that they can charge by the query/minutes/operation for.

GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

Re: Trust issues

Man, when you call it, you really call it, huh?

Artemis II countdown begins as NASA prepares for crewed Moon flyby

Re: Aliens?

JD Vance needs his meds adjusted.

Open source isn't a tip jar – it's time to charge for access

Re: I should have thought this would be relatively straightforward to address with rate limiting?

If I have to pull 5G of files a hundred times a day it doesn't matter how distributed where I'm getting it from is because I can promise you it won't be from inside my network. Nothing inside my network except for the dedicated mirror that I just built is going to have those files so it'll still have to transit my internet gateway and still put a bunch of stress on a limited resource. Once it is inside my network what the hell difference is it going to make what protocol stacked on top of TCP I'm using to distribute it? In fact, the more I think about it, if I'm doing 1:many then bittorrent would be less efficient than straight http.

Re: Anyone who's not prepared to do this is being a dick.

Yeah. We just implemented the mirror and didn't tell them. Compared to the rest of the cost of the CI they weren't going to notice if we didn't point it out.

I should have thought this would be relatively straightforward to address with rate limiting?

Yup. We run our own Ubuntu mirror at our place because Canonical kept rate limiting us.

Our CI builds and then installs OS images based off of Ubuntu as the upstream literally hundreds of times a day. I'm not at all surprized that they got upset and started throttling our connection. As soon as we realized what was happening we set up a debian repository mirror for all the supported versions and architectures and got on with our lives. Had the benefit of not pulling hundreds of gig over our internet pipe every day too.

The whole thing is only a few T of data, it costs us half a part of bugger all to run. Anyone who's not prepared to do this is being a dick.

Re: I don't see how this is possible...

Who's doing it now? Clearly there are people out there who are prepared to, or we wouldn't be having the conversation.

I don't see how this is possible...

...as long as the code is to remain "open". You try and enforce any kind of paywall at any stage and there's always someone who can fork the code, release it for free, and then become the defacto owner because people will flock to the free offering over the paid one.

Open source runs on the concepts of a collective public benefit and good will all around. Private corporations operate on the exact opposite principle - what's mine is mine and I will guard it jealously.

I can't see any way to square this particular circle.

Enterprise PCs are unreliable, unpatched, and unloved compared to Macs

Re: False equivalence.

Nerds: "Well, how good is your single thread performance?"

Manager: "What has sewing got to do with this?"

No. One. Cares.

No one. They care about having to buy a thing again, or buy a new thing to replace the old thing. It doesn't matter how good Apple Silicon is, that's just not even slightly the point. It matters that switching to it wasn't expensive and didn't require anyone to do a lot of additional work.

False equivalence.

“The rapid adoption of Apple silicon seems to indicate a strong enterprise appetite for ARM-based architecture”

These two things have nothing to do with one another. The rapid adoption of Apple Silicon is because Apple made us. "That's it, no more intel macs for you." We couldn't buy them if we wanted to. Apple stopped selling them.

The reality is no one cares what arch their process is running on, as long as it doesn't cause them to have to do any work. Apple - whatever else you may think about them - did a really good job making that transition pretty much invisible to users. That is absolutely not going to be the case for a metric crap-ton of Windows workflows. Even in the server space where you're looking at 90%+ Linux there's so much by way of proprietary bullshit in the software layer that vendors only supply as x86 packages that swapping out the arch on the underlying OS is going to be a massive pain.

Age verification isn't sage verification when it's inside operating systems

Re: Why be surprised?

No. It's not sensible. This is one of those "People are shit at estimating risk" situations again. The additional pollution caused by running so far outside most normal vehicles power bands almost certainly contributes to more deaths than the incredibly low number that already happen at higher road speeds. 20kmh is about 12mph. Twelve. 20mph I could almost get behind - although I still feel pretty strongly that if you can't manage a vehicle safely at 30 you're already below the minimum standard where you should be driving at all, but I'll grant there are roads so congested and poorly sighted that 20 is more appropriate. 20kph is just madness.

Re: Why be surprised?

20kmh... I knew that, but seeing it written down. I can *run* faster than that and I'm really unfit. That is just... not sensible.

Brit competition cops warn AI agents may not be 'faithful servants' to consumers

Re: The govt could save a lot of money ...

Yeah, but we'd write policy that made sense technologically, which is not the purpose of the technology policy. The purpose of the technology policy is to save money for the British government, promote British corporate interests by encouraging locally sourced tech, and not expose us to any unnecessary risk. Actually picking technology that works is not really on the list.

Of course it never actually does any of those things either but that's just because everyone involved is always really bad at it.

Re: Could end up

Absolutely this. This is already happening.

You don't need "AI" for this. We're already forced to see Amazon's preferred "personalized" results whenever we search for something. We get the items that have paid for priority - because that suits Amazon - pushed way up the list compared to a potentially better result that would be more appropriate to our interests. So, yeah, even traditional dumb search results are already doing this. Google is clearly doing this. I'd be amazed if any substantial web store isn't doing this to a greater or lesser extent and they'll absolutely do it with "AI" agents too.

Ex-Meta execs pop up on Nscale board as rent-a-GPU firm raises $2B

Re: Oh so

Hey, scape goats are useful. Just not in the way they usually expect.

Bundle of human neurons hooked to silicon learns to stumble through Doom

Re: Internet pedantry commencing;

Doom ran perfectly well without one. The game engine draws a Z axis, but it doesn't really exist as such. If you fire at a wall right in front of you and that wall forms the side of an accessible column whereby you can stand on top of it, you'll hit whatever's up there. The hit-scan mechanism doesn't actually take any notice of "up" or "down" so you don't actually have any need to look that way. A lot of us played doom on machines that didn't have mice.

Quake on the other hand was a proper 3d engine and playing that without a mouse was challenging to say the least... although still possible. I vaguely recall having X and S mapped for look down and look up, jump on A, fire on space, and cycle weapon on D. Movement by arrow keys. We hadn't really standardized on WASD back then so this seemed reasonable at the time. Can't imagine trying to do it now.

Re: NISC

Don't do that. It'll only re-implement Windows ME if you do.

Royal Navy races to arm ships against drone threat

It does seem odd to me that no one has tried something that looks a lot like a CIWS but loaded with birdshot. You'd not think that a belt-fed automatic shotgun would be a hard thing for defense companies to come up with. Maybe it's a range problem, and by the time a drone is close enough to be intercepted with something as low velocity as lead-shot it's close enough to still do considerable damage if it explodes. /shrugs.

Microsoft kicks new Outlook opt-out deadline down the road to 2027

Making things better is hard. Forcing your subjects customers by dropping support is easy.

Anyone else remember the days...

...when software was a thing you bought? If a product was shit you just... didn't buy it. "No thank you, I've got one that works perfectly well, I don't think I'll be 'upgrading' at this time." The vendors couldn't drop support for it or otherwise disable it because you already owned it.

Somewhere along the line with vendor lockin, proprietary "standards", and decades of institutional inertia we have gotten things badly, badly wrong.

UK watchdog eyes Meta's smart glasses after workers say they 'see everything'

Re: No!

I'm outraged that people are in a position to strap cameras to themselves that are not obviously cameras and then record interactions with me without my consent. Secretly filming people is in fact illegal in many jurisdictions, and unless you already knew that these things were cameras - which is not immediately obvious if you don't have the best eyesight yourself, they pretty much just look like thick ugly glasses - it could I think be very fairly argued that the things constitute covert surveillance devices of the type which it is in fact illegal to use to record someone without their consent in many parts of the world.

Certainly if someone came up to me with a go-pro strapped to their hat and asked if it was OK to record their conversation with me I would say no. If I saw someone doing that in a public space I would make a point of staying out of their way.