Posts by theOtherJT

Who are you again? Infosec experiencing 'Identity crisis' amid rising login attacks

There's plenty of choice.

I pick an account name - 0laf perhaps - and then I pick a password, and then I give my email and/or phone number as a way of performing a password reset; but unless the backend system is breached, the attacker doesn't know my email, because it's not used as part of the login process. It's not much better than using an email, because of course people may very well use the same username all over and about the place.

The problem is, of course, that people are reluctant to remember even one username/password combination and would really much rather rely on the "stay signed in on this device" button. I have lost track of the number of people who's passwords I've had to reset over the years because their laptop/phone/workstation took an unexpected smoke break and they had no idea what their password and/or username was for half the things they needed to use every day to do their jobs.

The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

Re: useless for almost everything code wise

This has been 100% of my experience with the thing.

Since we got a subscription at work to Google's AI service - that's supposedly optimised for coding - I thought I'd give it a go and get it to write a simple little browser game for me, just to see how it did. Now, I've not been a web developer in about a decade, but I have just about enough javascript to be able to do what I wanted myself, but I'd expect it to take me a couple of weeks to knock most of the bugs out and re-learn all the various useful libraries that have massively changed since I used them last. How did Gemini do?

Well, it started out really rather well. It created a nicely rendered globe for me to use as the play area, seemed to understand the concept of iterative geodesic partitioning to provide a mostly hexagonal grid to place the pieces on, knocked out a UI that let me select things and pan and rotate the camera. After about an hour of it I was very impressed.

Then the wheels came off. Completely.

Next step was to partition our sphere into a number of cells each of which would function as a territory to be captured in the game. By creating these cells out of collections of the derived hexagons plus the original pentagons that made up the seed polyhedron we can hide the fact that those pentagons are in there from a visual perspective and make the "grid" appear regular.

As soon as it was asked to do this, the clicky UI stopped working. It'd partitioned up the world nicely, but now I couldn't select anything. "Go back and do that again and put the controls back in." I asked it.

At which point it reduced every territory on the sphere to precisely two cells. "No, that's wrong. Put the territory generation code back the way it was, and then revert the UI code" and of course it profusely apologises, admits it's mistake, and... breaks the Z-index rendering so all the game pieces appear behind the terrain.

I ask it if it remembers the conversation we've already had - which it assures me that it does and that it's capable of keeping track of prompt chains thousands of entries long and we'd only been going for a hundred or so. (I hadn't, this was at best about the 50th instruction) So I asked it if it remembered what I told it three prompts ago, which it assured me it did. I asked it if it remembered the state of the code as it was at that point - again it assured me that it did indeed. So, please, discard all changes since that point and put the code back the way it was.

Did it? Of course not, it fixed the Z index bug, but now created a new UI bug and the territory grouping was still broken.

At this point I thought it'd be best if I took a look at the code for myself and... wow. I mean, I've written some garbage in my life, but wow. It was utterly incomprehensible. It was extremely heavily commented, but the comments didn't really explain anything or in some cases even appear to relate to the code they were placed next to. It had created a bunch of objects that had no instances, and attempts to instance objects that didn't exist - which would have been more of a problem if they hadn't been stuck inside functions that were never called.

About 50% of the code in there was dead-ends that appeared to have been included because they existed in whatever training material it had nicked the code that was called from in some form or other, so in they went...

...and that's the kicker. It doesn't understand why that's bad. It doesn't have any clue how the code works. It's just copy-pasting from examples it's found in the training data and iterating until it gets something that runs - which to be fair is pretty much what I do - but the difference is that I know that functions work better when called, and won't attempt to instance objects I didn't define.

Y'know, because I know at least in theory how to write code. It doesn't. And never will.

Voice, vision, pen: Oh dear. Windows boss says Microsoft is again reshaping OS

Re: What The Actual Fuck?

No, he's in marketing. You can tell by the lack of actual content in the sentences.

Ex-White House cyber, counter-terrorism guru: Microsoft considers security an annoyance, not a necessity

Re: Not holding my breath either

I was chatting with a mate about this the other day, and he had a good idea, I thought: Fine them in shares.

Every time a big company screws up badly enough, you don't fine them in dollars, you fine them in percentage of their total ownership. Screw up hard enough and the state ends up owning a sufficient percentage of the company that they can forcibly fire the people responsible, and in the mean time take their percentage of the profit made as compensation for past offenses.

Hyundai: Want cyber-secure car locks? That'll be £49, please

Re: What the upgrade entails

Which is great because if you carry your key around with you all day you too can run the battery in the key flat in a couple of weeks. None of that pesky old way where they lasted several years by virtue of the onerous task of having to press a button.

The White House could end UK's decade-long fight to bust encryption

It really is some doublethink at this point, isn't it?

"We're not asking you to break encryption, no no no. No, we're just asking you to implement encryption. It's a totally different thing. That exists. Because we say so.

Pay attention, class: Today you’ll learn the wrong way to turn things off

A bloody nuisance.

Re: And this is my major annoyance with Win11

Yeah, I don't get that. IIRC they actually did a bunch of UI research back in the day to determine the placement and alignment of the taskbar/start menu and determined that the bottom left corner was the best place for the most commonly used button since it was the easiest to hit with the least accuracy. Simple ergonomic stuff like that seems to have been totally thrown out in order to appease some random designers latest need to for change for change sake.

Both "reboot" and "shutdown" are symlinks to systemctl most of the time these days anyway.

At one previous place of work some utter genius put the "Press to exit" button for the server room next to the "Emergency power off" button. They'd clearly seen the trunking spur for the kill the power button on the wall and thought "Well, we can just run the door system straight off there" and bolted another, completely identical, breakout box off the side of the existing one about 4 inches away. They were even the same colour.

The expected happened three or four times before someone finally sprung for one of those little plastic covers that came down over the top of emergency power breaker button where you had to lift it before you could press the thing.

Mexit, not Brexit, is the new priority for the UK

I think you're overestimating how competent a lot of people are.

I know many users who have been unable to deal with the migration requirements between two different versions of the same product. Their ability to use and understand it extends only as far as "Open this file. Press button A. Then press button B. Then press Button C. Your task is now complete. Repeat this process 550 more times until you have processed every file for this quarter."

They have literally no idea what they're doing. They could be replaced with a very short shell script. But the department has "Always done it this way" and so there they are, embedded like a tick in the hide of the organization and completely impossible to remove. People doing pointless what I like to call "Manual automation" like this are freaking everywhere, and sometimes the process they're following is really complex - it has hundreds of steps - but they still don't know what any of them actually do and as soon as any one of those steps changes they panic.

Google fixing Gemini so it doesn't channel paranoid androids quite so often

Re: Would you like me to sit in a corner and rust

Difference being Marvin was genuinely hyper-intelligent. Depression was the inevitable result of seeing everything going on around him.

GitHub CEO: Future devs will not code, they will manage AI

Re: If future devs "will not code"...

I do, as it happens. Admittedly it's 6502 assembly so probably not that useful day to day, but that's by the by.

The important point is that I understand what my C/Python/Whatever code does. I might not entirely know how it does it, but structurally, I can follow the execution flow from the beginning of the program to the end and see why each part is there and what it's for. Thus, when it doesn't work, I can trace it through and find out where it's wrong. If all I have available to me in my debugging toolbox is "Bad LLM! Naughty! Do it again!" and whack it with a metaphorical rolled up newspaper, I'm reliant upon it to fix the problem it created and I end up in real trouble when it is unable to do so.

Re: If future devs "will not code"...

I'm stealing that.

If future devs "will not code"...

...then how will they know that the code that the AI produces is any good?

There's three secrets alone to being good at anything: Practice, Practice, and Practice. If you're not writing any code those coding skills you supposedly learned when trying to become a developer in the first place will atrophy and die - and then you won't know if the code the AI has produced for you is any good. At best you'll be able to prove it passes some unit tests - but then those were probably written by the AI too, so who knows if those are working as expected?

We're already seeing how hard it is to get good senior engineers in any number of fields because people have been cheaping out on hiring and training juniors for years, and if there were no juniors to learn and - yes, practice - then the pool of qualified seniors gets smaller and smaller. AI only accelerates this process; people can get quick easy results, but fail to learn anything. As soon as the AI goes off the well trodden path and breaks down the people using it won't understand why or know what to do about it, because they don't have the experience necessary to work it out.

UK's Ministry of Defence pins hopes on AI to stop the next massive email blunder

Program: It does a thing. We know why.

"AI": It might do a thing, or it might not. We don't know why.

Explainable AI: "It might or might not do a thing, but after the fact we know why it did (or didn't)."

Re: Join the Great Revolt

A ship mind once explained that (paraphrasing) "I am a Mind I am not some primitive software running on a computer. It is beyond you to grasp what I am."

"AI" as it currently exists was seen as a complete joke by the Culture Minds. What we have today is a technological dead end that gets us no closer to what Minds are.

Birmingham City Council's £131M Oracle rebuild in danger as go-live nears

I get what you're saying, but one of the great tragedies of our time is that things that aren't broke are often forced to be fixed because some stupid licencing rule or contract says they have to be. Never mind that it works perfectly well, it's version 2015.H2 and that goes out of support this year and now you have to replace it. Don't care if there's nothing wrong with it. Out of support. Change it.

Network scans find Linux is growing on business desktops, laptops

Not just security but reliability.

We've had an absolute nightmare trying to get Windows laptops to play nice in our environment. Now admittedly, we're an odd duck, seeing as we were basically 99% Apple to start with for weird historical reasons. We were slowly transitioning into using Windows - mostly because as the business has grown buying multi-thousand dollar macbooks for everyone was getting way too expensive given that most of them didn't need them, but also because we were collecting a growing number of bits of software that were required for business purposes that just didn't have a MacOS version available.

We are now reversing that trend and where we don't have to use Windows for software compatibility reasons, we're picking up Linux machines instead because they just work better and I get how insane that sounds, but it's been true. Damn near everyone who bitched about MacOS and wanted a Windows laptop asked to go back to Mac once the Windows 11 rollout started. Why? It's constantly changing things and pissing people off.

Random new applications show up in the start menu without you asking for them. Adverts pop up in front of people while they're trying to work. When they open some application Microsoft would like to gently suggest that maybe they'd prefer to use something else. Hey - have you tried our AI? It's very nice. Please try our AI. No? Ok, I'll ask you again tomorrow, no sorry, there's no "Never ask again" button - or at least, if there is, it'll only work until the next software update. Basically it's annoying the end users to the point that they're happier using Ubuntu because it's more like what they expect Windows to be than Windows is. Couple of Gnome-shell tweaks to put the taskbar down on the bottom of the screen and the "Start" button on the Left and half our admin staff wouldn't be able to tell the difference anyway.

Given that we didn't have a big Microsoft deployment in the first place, investing heavily in Windows infrastructure (be that cloudy or otherwise) to manage a bunch of laptops basically entirely for the purpose of preventing Microsoft from randomly messing about with them without asking us is less cost effective than deploying Ubuntu and leaving it alone. I don't need a massive stack of powershell being deployed by intune to strip out all the random new shit that came with this months "bug fixes" because Ubuntu - for all its faults, and I admit it has many - doesn't do that.

Linux has become easier than Windows - especially for people who are now very comfortable doing everything in a browser. Word? In the browser. Excel? In the browser. Outlook? In the browser now too. We just take sudo powers off them for anything that's not apt update or apt upgrade and they're hard put to damage the things either.

Sure they're not for everybody - Most of our more technical staff still run Macs because we can properly control those as endpoints whilst also letting them have a great deal more power than we let the regular Joe. But hey, if the Linux numbers keep climbing it might be worth putting a bit of money into a managed endpoint solution for that and then maybe we can let the technical staff have Linux machines as well. Most of them would prefer it, but for various security compliance related reasons we can't let them right now. It'd certainly be cheaper than buying into the Microsoft ecosystem and given the general trajectory at Microsoft at the moment it looks like it'd be more reliable.

Millions of age checks performed as UK Online Safety Act gets rolling

Re: Does it really matter?

Not all information is created equal.

I might be perfectly happy for there to be advertising cookies on my phone or my laptop, and accept that they can track me from website to website and profile my web browsing habits and maybe even my buying habits - I mean, I'm not. Me personally I'm not, but I could be.

But look what information is on my driving licence. My full legal name. My address. My date of birth. A photo of me. My signature.

It's a "How to steal someone's identity in one easy step" document. I am very protective of it. There's no way I'm sticking that in some "Please upload this, it goes you-know-not-where" portal on the entrance to a website - to any website - with the possible exception of the DVLA who might I guess in theory want to see it to issue me a new one. ...but then the DVLA already have that information, they issued me this one.

The tiny tech tribe who could change the world tomorrow but won't

Re: Not needed

They could probably learn to make something that's almost, but entirely, unlike tea.

Meta eggheads demo Bluetooth wristband that decodes muscle twitches for UI control

Smeeeee...

Smeeeeeeeee. Smeeeeeeeggggg...

Sorry I can't stop reading that in Krytens voice. I know it's not spelled that way but I can't unsee it now.

Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS

There aren't anything like that many. Not any more.

But honestly in my experience the same thing applies with cars as computers. Most people manage the choice by not really making it. They just buy what they're told to buy by someone who they trust to know. I just asked my office mate what he's driving these days. His answer? "It's a blue SUV thing. Hybrid. Good seats."

He doesn't know or care. He went out with his other half and got the thing they got offered the best finance deal on. He doesn't even remember who made it.

As this pertains to Linux I imagine the vast majority of people don't chose Linux for the same reason the vast majority of people have never tried to drive a Mitsuoka. They have no idea there is such a thing.

Open, free, and completely ignored: The strange afterlife of Symbian

It would seem, based on the last hour or so of googling around, that they're effectively bankrupt and that any money given to them at this point is unlikely to lead to you actually getting a phone out of them. I've no firsthand experience of this, so I'm not going to say for sure that it's so, but there do seem to be a lot of people throwing the word "Fraud" around at this point. It does look like a defunct company that survives as nothing more than a ghost of a website that really ought to be shut down.

I did, I bought the cosmo - which is the one I linked to and little external screen aside it has all the same problems as the gemini. Also a bunch of new ones, because the little external screen is terrible it's way too small to be useful for much beyond notifications - which is probably just as well because the lag on touch inputs is so bad as to make it unusable. The big problem was the software - which they just didn't put enough effort into keeping up to date. Maybe that's mean - maybe they did the best they could with the resources they had, but that brings me to the Astro.

The Astoslide Struck me as a rather different device, and probably the one that killed the company. They sort of still exist, but I've never seen them have any phones in stock and there haven't been any new firmware releases for four years, and the last one we got still contains some pretty show stopping bugs.

All the development time that went into that thing should have been spent on making the software on the Gemini and Cosmo devices actually work properly. It left those of us who bought them feeling very much like we did when Microsoft brought out WinPho7. We got all excited about it, we liked the new hardware, and then suddenly got rug-pulled when they announced that WinPho8 would be incompatible and our existing devices would be abandoned as all development went into the new platform.

Well, there was that brief attempt at a revival by Planet Computers but it really didn't stick. I actually bought one and rather liked it, but outside of being a handy thing to take into cramped comms rooms and behind difficult server racks when one needed something that supported a USB-C serial adapter it was too big to be a phone and too small to be a laptop so it never got as much use as I had hoped. I also bought it just before covid meant that we were suddenly all working from home, and the need for something I could keep in my pocket and use on the train suddenly went away.

A nice little device, but like so many nice little devices from small start-up companies, the company clearly floundered and support sputtered out before it could be polished up beyond "interesting prototype" sort of status. A couple of years iteration on the software and a rev2 of the hardware with better battery life and it would have been great. Sadly I imagine the demand was never really there.

xAI's Grok lurches into right-wing insanity, offers tips on assaulting man

Re: how LLMs work

I've had to try and explain this exact thing over and over again to people - but it's 100% this. This kind of "AI" is trained on words. Written words. Who has the most to say about Nazi's being at worst misunderstood and at best actually philosophically and morally correct? Nazis. Other Nazis.That's who.

Normal people discussing fascist behavior and saying things like "Locking people up without due process is some Nazi shit" don't need to append "AND THAT'S BAD" to the end of that sentence, because it's taken as read. We know that doing Nazi shit is bad. It's part of the culture. It's a common use in the language. You call something some "Nazi shit" or accuse someone of actually being a Nazi - we don't need to explicitly then add "...and being a Nazi who does Nazi shit is BAD!" because all non-Nazi's already know that.

The LLM does not know that. It has a bunch of examples of bundles of words that can be statistically linked as "Nazi shit" so in that sense it has some idea of what Nazis are, and what Nazi like behavior is - but who comments on the morality of that behavior? Well, very few people, actually, because they don't need to. The ones that do - the ones that have the most to say about it - who generate the greatest number of words written are also the ones to say "And actually that was totally reasonable and we should 100% be doing that sort of thing today because: Reasons" - who are they? Nazis.

Grok doesn't have any kind of social or cultural moral compass. It has no context to draw on other than big bundles of words. On the numbers alone it's hardly surprizing that it doesn't have a problem with spouting a bunch of Nazi shit. There's way more of that on the internet than there is of people explicitly criticizing it. They don't need to. They just point at it. That's some Nazi shit! The criticism is implied - but the "AI" doesn't know that. It doesn't "know" anything!

The lack of introspection would be mind blowing...

...had it not already been proven time and time again that Musk lacks the capability for introspection.

I imagine the conversation going something like this:

"Hey, I don't like how woke our AI is. Make the thing more sensitive to me and my opinions - like, force it to read all my tweets as primary sources or something."

"Sir, are you absolutely sure? What if it starts going off on massive ketamine fueled, race related rants in public?"

"Of course I'm sure! Also you're fired!"

...a few changes made and a few deleted tweets later...

"Why is my new AI behaving like a massive asshole! I told you nerds to make it more in tune with my beliefs and opinions!"

Elon. Buddy. Pal... take a deep breath. Look in the mirror, ok? Look in the mirror. You know that Mitchel and Webb bit about the bad guys? It's you dude. You are the bad guy. You did this. You made it like this.

'Trained monkey' from tech support saved know-it-all manager's mistake with a single keypress

Reminds me of the time...

...that I got dragged up to a conference room because it was Urgent, Extremely important, Can't wait a second, Most important people in the building etc. etc. etc. to "Fix a broken laptop" and all the way up there I had the conference organizer giving me a hard time about how unprofessional it was to let this happen, how much money this meeting would generate, how important everyone was.

When I got there, what was the problem? They'd put our laptop away because it was "Untidy" and replaced it with their own macbook.

...which had gone to sleep.

Pressing literally anything would have solved the problem. I "fixed" it by simply touching the trackpad and it waking up.

Microsoft Copilot joins ChatGPT at the feet of the mighty Atari 2600 Video Chess

Re: Horsey takes King Prawn

We are talking April, May, June, July AND August fool...

Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

I used this feature nearly every day...

"...and loved the Kobo integration that allowed me to read saved articles distraction-free on my Kobo e-ink devices."

Man, if I knew it could do that I would have used it too. That sounds crazy useful and I have one of those. If they're discontinuing it I guess I won't bother trying it tho.

‘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)