Posts by theOtherJT

Windows boss defends 'agentic OS' push as users plead for reliability

As long as the money keeps on coming in I'm going to go with "No".

Why Elon Musk won't ever realize the shareholder-approved Tesla payout

Re: Compensation rated per cell ...

Presumably because on average males are slightly bigger?

Re: "The cold hard numbers, though, tell me he can't do it. I don't think anyone could."

All those are fair criticisms, but if he were a paragon of liberal values who's best friends were Mr Rogers and David Attenborough he still couldn't do this. The saturation point for EV's - never mind Teslas - just doesn't make those numbers realistic. People just don't have that much to spend on cars total right now. That's before we get anywhere near the "Million robots" thing or the "Fully autonomous driving" thing, neither of which are going to happen inside the requisite timescale from a technological standpoint alone.

Britain's first small modular reactors to be built in Wales

Re: Claim to fame

Oh god this comment right here. This is the problem we're facing. Total inability to understand the concept of "Risk".

If we left the stuff out in the open in a big field in the middle of nowhere with no more protection than a "keep out" sign, it would most certainly kill a few hundred people a year - probably mostly of the sort that can't walk past a wet paint notice without getting Dulux on their fingers, but probably a few non-idiots as well.

THAT WOULD STILL BE SAFER THAN WHAT WE ARE CURRENTLY DOING WITH FOSSIL FUELS.

The averaged annual death-toll just for respiratory diseases caused by air pollution is larger than every single death attributable to every nuclear accident that has ever happened and it's not even close. That's not going anywhere near climate change - that's just straight air pollution and us breathing it in.

Seriously. Perspective. Estimated death toll from Chernobyl - the worst nuclear disaster of all time - somewhere between 4000 and 60,000 - which is pretty wild how big the error bars are on that and should say a lot about how it's very likely that the problem is way less bad than people automatically assume, but lets go with 60,000.

Deaths attributable to air pollution this year somewhere between FOUR AND SEVEN MILLION.

If we'd done a serious full-scale transition to nuclear power back in the 60s we would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives by now in the UK alone. Tens - possibly even hundreds - of Millions, globally.

Execs make rules that control AI usage, then break them for their own work

Re: Plus c'est la même chose.

...and no one has ever taken a work laptop abroad without filling out the insurance form. Or used their fancy exec machine to play games on. Or used the company VPN to stream movies when they're abroad. Or setup another account for their kid / spouse / mistress to use despite the policy being very clearly that the machine is for company employees only. Or used the admin rights that they had to have to disable the security scanner because it was "annoying". Or kept hundreds of gig of "home movies" on the company storage...

Plus c'est la même chose.

"Execs ignore the rules when they inconvenience them."

Well, there's a headline for the ages. That's never happened before.

Firefox adds AI Window, users want AI wall to keep it out

"The web is changing, and sitting it out doesn’t help anyone"

...but resisting it helps everyone. I want no part of this. I want my browser to help me resist being forced to take part in this.

MS Task Manager turns 30: Creator reveals how a 'very Unixy impulse' endured in Windows

Re: No Swap

I believe you still need it for hibernation to work properly tho. Could be wrong.

Re: fixing UI elements in Linux

It's the biggest failing of the Linux desktop - namely, that there's no such thing as the Linux desktop. There are hundreds of the bloody things and they're all a bit different which makes certain things really hard to work out if the one you happen to be sat in front of isn't doing what you want. Maybe you can make it. Maybe you'd be better off with another desktop entirely. Maybe there is documentation. Maybe there isn't.

Sadly I don't think there's really a solution to this problem short of ceasing to care about the "Linux" desktop and start working toward the Canonical desktop, or the SteamOS desktop or the ChromeOS desktop... but which ever of those (or any other contender) we were to pick it'd upset someone and the whole tedious process of fragmentation would just start all over again.

Bitcoin bandit's £5B bubble bursts as cops wrap seven-year chase

Should have blown up a building...

"Steal $600 and you can just disappear, steal [$6 billion] and they will find you unless they think you're already dead!"

EU's reforms of GDPR, AI slated by privacy activists for 'playing into Big Tech’s hands'

Under the new proposals, this stipulation would no longer be enforced...

...what, because it's enforced so reliably now? I don't think I've ever actually seen anyone take this seriously, or be properly punished for not doing so.

De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now

Re: Keep dreaming

Thing is, gnome is a good desktop. It might be a bit of a mess in terms of how it's built, but from a usage point of view it's clean and consistent and doesn't do anything really obviously stupid. I'd like it better if Ubuntu tried a bit less hard to stop you moving the task bar (after 30 odd years of it I'm very used to it being along the bottom and would like it to stay there please*) but I'm pretty sure that's more a them thing than a gnome thing. Other than that it's absolutely fine. It does what it needs to do - which is be unobtrusive and get out of my way.

*Yes, I'm aware you can move it back, and I have, but I'm annoyed that I had to install extensions to do it.

Re: Keep dreaming

The non-technical user doesn't give a shit about consistency. If they did, they wouldn't put up with what Microsoft keep doing to Windows.

The non-technical user just doesn't care one way or another. If there's a choice to be made, it's whatever is the pre-selected box. First in the list. Whatever was provided. They do not give a shit - in the slightest - about anything to do with their computer. Windows? I don't even know what that is. Apple? Why not, I've heard they're expensive, so they're probably good, just so long as I don't have to pay for it. Linux? Sure, whatever, but stop asking me questions, nerd, I don't care!

Non technical users get on with Linux just fine if they're just given it and not given any choices. Most of them couldn't tell you what they were using anyway. In ten years of running an open-access computer room with a few dozen Windows and a few dozen Linux boxes, there was precisely no difference in the take-up because all anyone ever did with them was log in and check their email, and then, about half the time, print it. Both options could do that fine and 99% of people never did anything else. I would bet folding money that most of them didn't even realize that there were different operating systems available, because once they had the corporate splash screen up over the login prompt you had to look quite hard to tell them apart. The people that needed one or the other knew. Everyone else didn't care.

The reason they'll never choose Linux is because they don't want the choice and will get angry if asked to make it, so they'll have whatever is the default and right now that's Windows. As long as MS can keep everyone selling PC's with Windows pre-installed the default will stay Windows.

Sometimes the things that you can't do are more important than the things that you can. Many a project has died because by trying to be all things to all men it managed not to be terribly good at any of them.

Except that "android" can look wildly different from one phone to the next depending on how much the manufacturer of said phone decided to mess with it. For some reason when it comes to phones tho, no one seems to mind. I wonder if it's not because with phones you very rarely have to use someone elses, you just get used to the one you have each time you buy a new one.

I don't know if the Unix philosophy can work here.

It's possible that a graphical desktop is just too complex an object for the whole stdin/stdout/stderr pass all messages as text is actually a viable solution. I'm actually struggling to imagine what a genuinely "universal" messaging bus for graphical applications might look like even. One of the reasons Windows 95 was able to be as simple as it was was that they were much simpler times. We can't even consistently handle multi-monitor support for cases where the different monitors have very different DPIs yet. God forbid you have multiple touch-sensitive displays attached. Some of the weird things that happen under Gnome when you dock a laptop with three or more desktop monitors of varying resolutions and rotations are just... yuch.

I'd settle for one desktop that actually works consistently within itself before we start trying to cull down the outliers, and we don't even have that.

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

Yes. There was.

It was terrible.

Came in here expecting to find this, but ready to post it if no one else had. It's what always happens.

Techie ran up $40,000 bill trying to download a driver

Re: Implausible to say the least.

I remember one of my dad's colleagues in the early 90s who's entire job was corporate data courier.

Here is a 500MiB hard disk in fancy anti-vibration and anti-static packaging. It goes in this briefcase. Here's your return ticket to New York. Fly this out to the US, someone from the US office will meet you at the airport with another briefcase with the results of last nights calculations on. You trade them today's data for yesterday's results and get straight back on the plane.

Their entire purpose was just to fly back and forth passing hard disks around because there just wasn't any way to move that much data at the time.

Big Tech's control freak era is breaking itself apart

Re: "Open source is the ticket out of here." Etc

Indeed. OSS is by it's very nature a socialist construct. I give my time to support some project for free, because I benefit from all the other people who give their time to support other things for free and we all gain from the process.

That runs totally contrary to the embedded attitudes of most corporations - who will happily take something for free, but they'll be damned if they'll offer anything back for free. I know it says in my contract that any code I write on company time belongs to the company. I don't know if they'd try and enforce that were I to submit upstream patches to any of the OSS products that we use, but I've been strongly encouraged by my management team not to find out by simply not releasing them.

So here we are, where myself and plenty of others have patched known bugs in systems we use every day, could release those patches for the benefit of all, but are being told explicitly not to do that because the company would see that as us "giving away their property".

Unless that mindset changes OSS is never going to work well in the corporate space.

Re: Experts have always known and were ignored, as usual

I have lost track of the number of times across my career that infosec has issued a mandate along the lines of "We must immediately stop using $thing and put processes in place to prevent anyone from re-enabling $thing because it violates our ISO 27001 conditions and/or violates the terms of contract with $customer" and the response is to fire the infosec person who raised the alert and then hush up that $thing ever existed.

When convenience runs into compliance, convenience always wins the second the person being inconvenienced is on six figures or more.

Agents of misfortune: The world isn't ready for autonomous software

Except by the time we've gotten that far all the shops have gone out of business because of the insane costs imposed on them by the investor market desperately trying to make "AI" a thing and driving all their bills through the roof to do it :'(

Re: Agents and employees may not be equivalent from Amazon's viewpoint

And here we see the rub, right? Because all these idiots desperately slinging "AI" into everything have just suddenly realized that this is a double edged sword. If the end user ever gets hold of "AI" that's indistinguishable - from the other "AI"s perspective - from a real person all this advert slinging and personalization they're so keen on is going right out the window.

We've just entered into another round of the arms race between companies and consumers. The companies spend huge amounts trying to get the customer to do what's good for the company, and the Customer fights back by trying to get the company to go back to doing their GOD DAMN JOB and perform the service the customer is paying for without trying to "monetise" their customers in other ways.

Round and round we go, burning more and more resources each time to get back to where we started from back when companies would just sell us things and didn't need to try and turn us into product. It would be almost poetic were it not so bloody stupid.

Musk gets approval for bumper Tesla payout but, unlike his robot, there are strings attached

This is a cult.

There's no other explanation for this. There is nothing about the company finances that make any of this even slightly realistic. People just keep throwing money at it because other people are throwing money at it there's no realistic return on investment here. Just like AI this is a bubble that has to burst and god help anyone who's heavily invested when it does.

Rust Foundation tries to stop maintainers corroding

Re: Programming Languages Inflation...

I'm reluctant to trust any language that isn't at least 20 years old. All the ones I'm really comfortable with are from the 80s or even 70s. If they're still here after all that time, they're probably not going anywhere or going to change so much as to make old code incompatible with new compilers/interpreters.

UK agri dept spent hundreds of millions upgrading to Windows 10 – just in time for end of support

I've been fortunate enough to not have to manage a Windows fleet in nearly a decade now, so I don't really know how good or bad it is these days, but the writing was on the wall even back then. The amount of hoops you were forced through to try and get Windows 10 to behave itself in a corporate environment the same way 7 did was just totally hateful, and they did indeed seem determined to make it harder not easier.

Sadly, this does not surprise me in the least.

I've been involved in largeish (tiny in comparison to this - only about 1500 machines) infra upgrades for public entities. The process goes like this:

Announcement is made...

IT: End of support for $product has been announced and we need to upgrade before the end of the year after next. We would like to begin the process now. We have a quote from the vendor.

Management: There's nothing in the budget for that this year. We can put it up for consideration for next years budget.

The next year...

IT: We need to start the upgrade on $product which goes out of support next year. We have a new quote ready for if we buy now, it's gone up a bit tho.

Management: Well, the budget for that was refused because it's in support *this* year, so it'll have to come out of next year's budget.

IT: OK... but we won't get funds released until next April with the new tax year, and the end of support is in June. It usually takes our vendor three months to negotiate the bulk sale price for this many units so we really need to start now.

Management: No. Budget.

The next year, April...

IT: We have less than two months to do the upgrade. We need budget approval for the $product licences.

Management: What?! This quote is 50% higher than we budgeted for!

IT: Yes, you waited until the last minute so now the supplier has us over a barrel and the quote we were given last year has expired so if we want this before the licence expires, this is the price.

Management: Well, there's not enough money for that, it'll just have to wait.

June, the day support ends...

Management: What the hell is happening!? Half the PCs aren't working!

IT: We know. $product has dropped out of support and the information security team have shut it off.

Management: We need this working again, now! It's totally crippled several departments!

IT: Well, we can get an extended support contract for $product and get everything working again by tomorrow if money's no object...

Management: Just get it working!

The next day...

IT: So, we've gotten an extended support licence. It's costing double what the upgrade would have, so we really need to do the upgrade as soon as possible.

Management: Look, it's working now, and costing way too much, I might add. We're not signing off on any more money for this this year.

Three years later...

Management: Why on earth are we still paying for this obsolete program?

IT: Because your predecessor and for that matter their predecessor wouldn't give us the budget to upgrade it. We can go straight to version N+1 now for $lotsofmoney.

Management: Oh no, that's far too expensive. The upgrade to version N cost was only half that three years ago. Lets do that instead.

IT: Well, ok, I mean... we can do that, but we're only going to have to do it again next year because version N will be going out of support soon.

Management: I'm sorry, but that's all that's in the budget.

Another year passes...

IT: We've completed the $product upgrade to version N. Incidentally, it goes out of support next year, so we need to budget for the upgrade to N+1

Management: Preposterous! We've only just done one upgrade. We're not paying for another one...

...repeat ad infinitum.

Re: Ha, ha, ha

Because it belongs to them?

I mean, I get it, that's really shitty, but it is the way it is. You don't own the thing, they do. You were granted a conditional licence to use it. They can do what they want, they do have that right.

...which to my mind is why people should think very carefully before buying* Windows in the first place.

*read: Renting. Terms and conditions apply

I'm not sure that's true any more. The various apple MDMs are really much, much better than they used to be. It's certainly not the same as Windows, so if you start out from "I want to do X how do I do X?" you might well find that the answer is "You can't", but a lot of the time you don't want to do X, you want to achieve result Y, which on Windows you get by doing X, but isn't necessarily the only way.

I'm certainly yet to find anything that I desperately need my mac fleet to do that Jamf can't manage one way or another, and I've gotten a ton of features out of it that Windows was much less good at - not least having machines shipped direct from the manufacturer to the employee's home and they arrive effectively pre-configured. They don't have to come to the IT department to get all the crap scraped off them first, which is definitely something we have to do with the Windows machines these days.

Snap out of it: Canonical on Flatpak friction, Core Desktop, and the future of Ubuntu

Re: Just do it

Well, like I said, I wouldn't mind having no idea how any of it worked if it "Just worked" (tm) but it doesn't. If it's not going to "Just work" (tm) then I need to be able to debug it, and at that point, yes the opacity becomes a problem.

I mean, I have no idea how the kernel works really. It's just sort of... there. It does its thing. But I also don't really need to know because it's so reliable. I only need to know when things go wrong a lot, and it seems like snaps go wrong a lot.

Re: All very interesting.

I wonder about this sort of thing.

Now, I see the benefit of an immutable "base" image relative to which all other things can be delivered as diffs and/or overlays depending. You borked an update? Just put it back to the base image and try again. Base image stays pretty much the way it is and could sit like that for potentially years with more and more and more overlays being laid on top of it.

Do that, and you can release updates to libfoo on whatever schedule you like, because you just release a new libfoo overlay.

...but if you start doing that you've just invented a really complex and resource intensive way of versioning individual files, so I'm going to assume that's not the plan. If that's not the plan, however, all the problems you just outlined seem to come creeping back in again. If I can't update one file - or even little cluster of files representing some specific application or library - and have to wait for the monthly release of the new base image that seems... sub-optimal, to put it politely.

Re: Just do it

I can even live with the opacity. I know enough to know that I know nothing. I have no idea how 90% of my system works - and I'm pretty sure that the bits I think I know I'm probably wrong because they've likely been replaced with something else since I last looked.

What I can't live with - what drives me to distraction - is the fact that things keep breaking and then when I try and work out what went wrong, the tools that have served me for years to debug them don't work any more because apparently the thing I think I'm working on is just an abstraction layer over another thing, which is an abstraction layer over another thing, which is probably an abstraction layer over something else after that!

I wouldn't mind (I mean, on a philosophical level I kinda object to that kind of abstraction, but mostly I wouldn't mind because I wouldn't think about it) if the bloody thing was sufficiently reliable that I never had to dig down there and notice what a mess everything is becoming under the surface.

Re: My opinion of snap

Which of course is true, and also part of my problem with it. Yes, I'm not their target audience. But I am one of their users. Could they please stop trying to force me to do something I don't want to do for the benefit of some other user who I am not?

I don't mind that snaps exist, but if I sudo apt install something I expect to get it packaged as a deb, not a silent redirect to the snap store. If I wanted the snap I would have asked for it.

Power crunch threatens to derail AI datacenter construction

Just what we need...

...another thing pushing up the cost of electricity during a cost of living crisis. God this stupid bubble can't burst fast enough.

UK.gov vows to hack through regulation to get benefit from AI

Re: Downward spiral

You'll not get change from a fiver, I'll tell you that.

British govt agents demand action after UK mega-cyberattacks surge 50%

Re: A lot of this comes down to user education

Funnily enough all the PCs in my university computing lab did this back in 2000. Only problem was that at the time it took about 20 minutes for the machine to be properly re-imaged, and then up to another 10 to load all your personal profile stuff off the network when you logged in. It could very easily be half an hour from sitting down at a desk to having a computer that worked, and as a result people got really keen to never log off in order to prevent that happening, which led to machines getting slower and slower and slower over the course of the week until some poor sod was the one forced to restart the thing - and of course people leaving themselves logged in to pop out for a smoke or grab something from the vending machines and then you can just lean over and nick all their data.

I'm sure we could do better now of course, but for every problem you solve a new one appears, so it's never quite as easy as one would hope.

Ubuntu 25.10 lands: Rustier and Wayland-ier, but Flatpak is broken

Re: Angst

Personally I couldn't really care less if it was open source or not. I just want it to work at least as well as what I had before, and sadly many Snap packaged apps don't. Firefox in particular is really crashy compared to the native debian version.

It's trivially easy to poison LLMs into spitting out gibberish, says Anthropic

Re: If it is just the trigger word?

Ready to comply.

Big money is nervous about AI hype, but not ready to call it a bubble

Re: I would MUCH rather

You're right of course, but unfortunately most people aren't capable of writing a testable algorithm - or at the very least are so unwilling to learn how to do so that it equates to the same thing. "AI" promises to make things that require a bit of thought and care "Easy". This is of course a lie, because if you're not sufficiently specific with what you tell your "AI" to do, it will probably do something undesirable - and even if you are specific with telling your "AI" what to do there's a good chance it'll do it wrong.

Problem is that it's a really attractive lie.

Don't want to learn how to use your banking app? Just ask the AI to do it for you! Don't want to learn how to program your VCR*? It's fine, just tell the AI what you want to record. Don't want to learn how to drive? Get a self-driving car with AI in it to drive for you!

Obviously some of these examples are easier for machines to do successfully than others - but the lie is the same lie in each case. There's a job you don't want to do, so here's a friendly robot that can do it for you, and all you have to do is tell it what you want.

"Take me to Stockport" is an apparently simple instruction that most taxi drivers are going to have no problem with, but being human they're likely to point out that Stockport is quite a big place and you probably want to go somewhere a bit more specific. If you said it to a taxi driver in Solihull they may well be happy to pick up the fee, but again I imagine most of them would first double check that you actually mean it because it's better part of a 2 hour drive and are you really sure you want that on the meter?

Most apparently simple interactions are a bit more complex than one would immediately assume. To provide complete instructions to make a cup of tea, one must first invent the universe etc. "AI" doesn't do well with that and it's not clear that it ever will, but the promise of AI always glosses over that part because it interferes with the very saleable idea that the nice robot can do all that difficult thinking for you.

*Let's pretend those still exist

AI: The ultimate slacker's dream come true

Re: Locked room exam

When I was at school the "calculator watch" was still considered a fascinating piece of modern technology. As a result watches were banned in maths exams just in case. You had to either leave your watch at home, or hand it over to the exam invigilator on the way in because that was easier than have everyone show that theirs was a good old fashioned mechanical action and couldn't be somehow used to cheat on the test.

The sweetest slice of Pi: Raspberry Pi 500+ sports mechanical keys, 16GB, and built-in SSD

Re: Keyboard Shenanigans

What on earth are you on about? The key next to Z is the \| key and has always been there on UK layout keyboards, which this clearly is given the double-height enter key and the placement of the #~ key. The lack of a capslock light is annoying, I'll grant you, but what would a keyboard with no numpad be doing with a numlock light either?

I like it but...

...there are some real missed opportunities here. Most obviously as the article point out it would be way better for the SSD to be mounted on the underside of the board and there be a pop-off cover so you can get at it without having to take the keyboard off the top and risk that tiny fragile ribbon cable.

The next is the micro-hdmi sockets. They're a massive pain. Given that this is a totally different board from the pi5, and given the width of the keyboard there's clearly room, I didn't understand why they didn't go with full-size hdmi in the 400 and I don't get why they didn't do it with this.

AI hype train may jump the tracks over $2T infrastructure bill, warns Bain

Re: Sanity check

Look at you bringing maths and reason into this. Don't you know this is about feelings? Come on, get excited! It's the future of everything! I mean with possibilities like this why are you even questioning who's going to pay for it? Don't be so negative!

AI gone rogue: Models may try to stop people from shutting them down, Google warns

That sounded like it was going to turn into one of those "And we've been married for 30 years now" reddit stories at the end there!

It's time mobile devs started to think seriously about foldable smartphones

Two. Thousand. Dollars.

I'm sorry, but I didn't spend that much on my last laptop. Foldable phones are a stupid show-off gimmick as long they're at this price point. There's just no way to justify buying a folding phone no matter what the software when it costs as much as that because it can't replace your laptop. It can't. It doesn't matter how powerful the processor is or how much ram it has, or how high resolution the screen is because you can't type on it and the screen is too physically small for it to work as a 2-foot device once put down on a table. The form factor is a compromise and it has to be. Folding phones maybe make that compromise a bit lesser in some very specific circumstances but not very many. Sure, nice to have, but unless the cost comes down by at least a whole zero off the end of the current pricing it's just a way of showing off that you can afford it.

'Questing Quokka' enters UI freeze as Ubuntu 25.10 nears release

Re: Interesting uses of Rust

I do not get the current obsession with re-writing existing and perfectly functional tools that have been stable for decades in rust. At best they'll be... what, slightly faster? I imagine one could chose to optimise the existing code if speed were actually an issue of any part of coreutils.

LegalPwn: Tricking LLMs by burying badness in lawyerly fine print

Re: I've read documentation like that....

That's because it's nonsense. If you're not aware - and apologies if you are, but hopefully someone out there isn't and will find this comment interesting - that's very clearly the output of a Lorem Ipsum generator. Basically it generates a bunch of nonsense run-on latin, or at least latin words and phrases, that looks more natural when testing page layout than just random strings. Sure, they'll translate into something if you run them through a translator, but they're gibberish. The original "lorem Ipsum" text is actually a quote and does mean something, but I'll leave it to anyone who cares what to read the explanation in the link.

Larry Ellison bankrolling £118M AI vaccine research at Oxford University

Re: No point . . .

Their loss is our gain I guess.

Although I'd really like it if they'd spare a million or two to repair and re-open the pub they bought and have been sitting on these last 5 years. I miss that pub.

Good morning, Brit Xbox fans – ready to prove your age?

Re: Those who choose not to verify their age...

Ah yes, of course, the ability to "Share" not "Consume". I won't be able to share content, but I'll get it "shared" with me regardless of if I like it or not. I see where you're coming from.

Those who choose not to verify their age...

...Microsoft has confirmed, will retain access to their existing games and other media as well as the ability to buy more – including age-restricted titles. It's the social side of gaming that will be locked off: voice and text chat, party functionality and game invites, and the ability to share user-generated content

Not that I approve of this stupid law, but honestly, that outcome seems kinda better to me based on my more recent experiences with online gaming. No user (read "AI") generated content (read "advertising")? Not being able to interact with anyone but still being able to play the games I own in peace? Seems kinda like a win.