Posts by theOtherJT

Sam Altman's basic income experiment finds that money can indeed buy happiness

Nice to see these tech types...

...finally catching up to the bleeding obvious that Karl Marx pointed out in 1848.

I mean, he was hopelessly naive in both his timescale and his proposed solution, but dude worked out that technological development would put the masses out of work and if we didn't do *something* about that we'd be completely screwed over a century and a half ago.

We seem to have spent pretty much every year since then going "lalalalalalala I'm not listening. I can't hear you. Lalalalalalalalala" because the status quo suits too many rich bastards far too well.

CrowdStrike's Falcon Sensor also linked to Linux kernel panics and crashes

Re: Good point

Absolutely this. It helps that a proper DR process should be hooking things you already use all the time.

We knew that our network-boot-to-repair process worked, because it was the same process with a few different settings passed to it that we used to deploy machines in the first place. We knew that the restore machine from backup process worked, because it involved shipping disk snapshot diffs around and it was the same process we used to migrate VM's from one host to another (Or was until we got live migration working) shut guest down on host A. Perform backup. Restore guest from backup on host B. Start guest on host B. Delete guest on host A. We new the "recover broken network" stuff worked, because we used it to build the network in the first place when we last took over a new office.

All that stuff worked because we actually used it basically every day - but you try and convince management at most places that it's worth building an entire automated deployment system for your entire infrastructure because one day you might have to move building and "Wouldn't it be nice if we just plugged everything in, updated a few config files, and then it all deploys itself?" when writing that system will take months, but doing everything by hand takes days and you only move building once a decade.

This is the difference between a company that is well managed and one that isn't. People in senior positions who understand that by investing in systems before you need them means you can sit around being smug when things do go wrong rather than running around like someone just set fire to your shirt. It also means that you can take staff time away from tedious tasks like deploying new desktops - because that's now a completely automated process - and put them on useful tasks like actually performing tests on the DR service and working out how to continuously improve it.

It is something of a personal bug-bear of mine that so few places are prepared to invest in this sort of thing because having experienced the difference between working at a place that has it and a bunch of places that don't is night and day. Not only was my life so much less stressful, my day-to-day work was more interesting and overall the whole thing was cheaper for the business because the fact that all these processes actually worked meant that we were able to run a 1000+ employee company on five members of support staff because everything was so highly automated.

Re: Good point

It seems to be a tragic reality that despite the fact that we are, as employees, often asked to write up disaster plans I have never known one to actually be fully implemented after the fact.

I'm sure a lot of us will have done the "What if..." threat planning game.

"What if I'm locked out of this device?" -> We have backups, taken nightly.

"What if we can't retrieve the nightly backup?" -> We have off-site backups that are taken weekly.

"What if we can't boot the device to restore the backup?" -> We have a backup-restore boot option available on the network.

"What if the network is down?" -> Our configuration management will repair it.

"What if the configuration management is down?" -> We have a backup of the config management master, taken weekly, that can be restored from a physical disk.

so, now, everything has gone completely to shit, and what's the procedure?

Step 1: Send an engineer to the server room with a copy of the config management master server backup disk. It will restore a working config management system.

Step 2: Order the config management start to repair the network based on known physical states such as mac addresses and port numbers. If that fails - and the only way it can is hardware failure, and we keep spares - then when it fails we'll know where the physical failures took place because we know the physical location of every asset. It's recorded in the config management system.

Step 3: Go replace the thing and go back to step 2.

Step 4: We now have a working network and can reach all the physical hosts, including the backup host. If the backup host is not responding, order the config management system to rebuild the backup host and then reconnect it to the storage targets.

Step 5: Now we have the backups back, attempt to reach the downed host (or potentially hosts) if you can't, then order the config management system to rebuild those hosts. Either everything is good now or we can't reach it so...

Step 6: If the host is somewhere off network, ask the employee who's actually got hands on it to boot it into recovery mode, where it will reconnect to the VPN using the recovery certificate and now we're back to Step 5.

See, none of that is hard to understand. This sort of thing ought to be standard procedure absolutely everywhere because hundreds of people like myself have played this exact "What if?" scenario through and thought out how to deal with every step in it hundreds of times over the last... pick a fucking number... years. We all know what we ought to do, and by this point there should be thousands of examples of it actually being done. This should not be hard at this point.

How many people actually do it tho? Not. Fucking. Many. I've worked at precisely one place where we ran through that little thought experiment once a year and the entire team tried to think of ways that the process could fail and if we came up with any opened work tickets to try and fix them. Everywhere else I've worked has Done the "What if?" at some point, although usually only once and only because a new manager rocked up and wanted to see it done, but then none of them ever actually implemented any of the recommendations.

Actual disaster recovery procedure always seems to end up as some ultra low priority that people love to talk about, but not actually do anything about.

Mozilla Thunderbird finally gets system tray notifications

It's shit like this...

...that gets FOSS a bad name.

How hard can it be to do tray notifications? Apparently, very, since it took upward of two freaking decades to fix this problem. But why is that so hard? Possibly the people working on the project didn't care about it - and fair enough, they're often not paid to, so if I didn't give them money I kinda have no right to complain - but sometimes they are paid to, and in that case the "not caring" option starts to look kinda shitty again. Alternatively if they do care but its somehow taken ages to make it work, how did that happen? Was everyone else in all the other projects just not co-operating?

I love FOSS as much as the next man - probably more than the next man, actually, but this sort of thing really is a bad look. Alright, it's not a worse look than the fact that there are still bits of the Windows 3.1 UI hiding in various Microsoft products, but I'm not sure that's actually an excuse.

CrowdStrike file update bricks Windows machines around the world

Re: Or...

It will if you have dislocker and kept your emergency recovery keys on a separate device ready for use in an occasion just like this. You did keep your emergency recovery keys on a separate device, right? Right? Or printed out and in the safe? Offline? Anyone?

Well, shit.

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

Re: I'm a biker

Ah, that would be the one just up the road from the H near Berinsfield presumably.

My mother's car has this already...

...and it's the most dangerous thing I have ever encountered in a vehicle. I have to keep remembering every time I get in it to turn it off.

Multiple times I've been on a slip road, attempting to accelerate up to motorway speeds with a big truck in the left-lane of the road I'm joining. I've got my foot on the pedal, not too hard, but definitely enough to get up to 70 in the space available. Nothing happens. The seconds pass and the car isn't going any faster. The gap I want to get into is closing. I push down harder - does the car accelerate? No. It beeps at me and flashes a little display on the dash saying "30" because as far as it's concerned I'm still in the 30 zone that I'm trying to leave to join the motorway. I push down harder again and it suddenly gets the idea that I really do mean it, and turns the thing off. At this point the pedal is all the way to the floor and I'm still doing 30. The car immediately down-shifts because it suddenly thinks I've slammed my foot down on the accelerator and pulls hard to the left as the torque steer kicks in - just while I'm trying to move right to get into the now much smaller gap than I'm comfortable with in front of a 20 tonne lorry that definitely doesn't have any time to stop at this point.

Breaking the link between how hard I'm pressing the pedal and how the engine will respond to that input is straight up dangerous as it makes the car behave unpredictably at the margins. Instead of a nice smooth pull up to a totally legal speed, we get nothing, nothing, nothing... then a sudden lurch of acceleration that totally overwhelms the stupid narrow low rolling resistance tires on the thing.

Now, maybe in newer cars it'll be better, but given that the motor industry is famously cost averse and will do the cheapest thing it can in any given situation I wouldn't bet on it. We'll have thousands more cheap base model cars on the road fitted with the lowest cost version of a system like this and driven by people who don't really like driving anyway and just bought the first one they could get decent finance on without trying any others. At some point all those cars will suddenly do something unpredictable to someone like my mother - who being in her late 70s is exactly the last person who is going to cope with the car unexpectedly lurching to the left on them - and the driver will panic. This will cause accidents.

Babel fish? We're getting there. Reg reviews the Timekettle X1 AI Interpreter Hub

...crith woddle

Re: "select the languages, and chat away"

It was also small, yellow, leech-like and considered by many as the final proof for the non-existence of god.

...so you know, it has that going for it too.

ITER delays first plasma for world's biggest fusion power rig by a decade

Because you can't put a geothermal plant on a space-craft.

Re: The greenhouse effect is so last century!

Ah, man, now I have to read Ringworld again.

...actually that sounds like an excellent thing to do with a pint or two this evening while I wait for the election results to start coming in. Cheers!

Reddit hopes robots.txt tweak will do the trick in scaring off AI training data scrapers

Re: Poisoning the honey pot

When dealing with Reddit, how would they tell the difference?

Andrew Tanenbaum honored for pioneering MINIX, the OS hiding in a lot of computers

Re: Microkernels are the future

For a games console that would certainly make sense. The major benefit of having the OS deal with all the hardware abstraction because "who actually knows what real hardware you might be targeting?" doesn't exist there. As a developer you know exactly what hardware you're targeting because every console will be exactly the same.

Re: Microkernels are the future

As a vertically integrated company with total control over their hardware, OS, and the programs running on said OS (If you don't pay your dues to Nintendo, you don't get to release on their platform) They can make basically anything work. They just have to define what they consider acceptable performance throughout the whole stack.

That's not to take away from the fact that I think the argument against microkernels from a performance standpoint is probably the better part of a quarter-century out of date at this point mind you.

Microsoft cancels universal Recall release in favor of Windows Insider preview

Re: I Still Don't Understand Why

But they don't want to do something useful. They want to make more money.

Constantly slinging ads at you and running a series for forced upgrades achieves that, at least in the short term until they piss off enough people that there's finally sufficient momentum to see customers abandon them en masse.

MIT professor hoses down predictions AI will put a rocket under the economy

Once upon a previous position...

...I was asked how long a project would take. I said we didn't really know, because we'd not done it before, but a decent guess was 12 to 18 months.

My manager said that was no good, and that she would tell her boss six months. Both myself and a couple of my colleagues pointed out that we couldn't possibly do it in 6 months, but she said that didn't matter. The next funding round had to be completed in three months, and after that it didn't matter how long it took, because we needed to convince the investors that we'd be done sooner rather than later. Once we had their money no one in the exec team cared how long it would actually take.

I did not stay long enough to find out how long it eventually took. So, yahh. Don't rule out 'willfilly dishonest' thinking either.

Re: The Paperless Office

No one cares about good documentation, sadly. I've been repeatedly told off for "not finishing things in the sprint" because I'm still writing the doc. "It's not done until it's documented, so I can't close the ticket" I argued, and the response was "No one will read the docs anyway, it works as it is, just leave it and if we need help the support team can call you."

Ok. I mean, you're in charge. You pay me. I'll do what you want. But if in a years time I've been run over by a bus or something you'll probably want some docs for this that someone else can read...

...or, you know, if I quit because of the shitty project management.

Re: The Paperless Office

Imagine the difference in quality of documentation produced the way OP describes here, and what you get when the engineer making the product has to knock it up in their spare time before the ship date.

...oh, wait, we don't have to imagine it. That's what all documentation looks like know. :(

Uncle Sam's had enough of Live Nation and Ticketmaster, sues to end monopoly

Ticket fee...

...£11

Plus booking fee, £5.50

Convenience fee, £4.99

Fee management fee, £9.00

Print at home fee, £2.50

Organizational fee, £4.79

...it goes on like this. Every fucking time I go to a gig.

Ticket master cannot die enough slow and painful deaths. I *despise* those bastards.

Apple crushes creativity and its reputation in new iPad ad

Apple have always been a bit...

...how to put this kindly...

...Inconsistent.

They've made a bunch of really great things over the years, and while they're certainly not above claiming credit for "inventing" things that they most definitely just lifted from someone else, they have done a lot to popularize and standardize those good ideas, even if they didn't actually invent them.

But it's hardly been hit after hit, if we're honest, has it? The Newton. The Pippin (does anyone even remember that they made that?) The cube that overheated if you looked at it wrong. The original macbook air where they sort of... forgot to add any ports to it. The original ipod shuffle which literally couldn't play an alum in the right order. The dustbin where you could in theory upgrade the GPU, but not in practice because it was a weird form factor and they never had any available.

Big brains divided over training AI with more AI: Is model collapse inevitable?

Re: Strange you should say that....

You already are reading LLM text every single day. Most social media is full of it

Yes. I've noticed. The fact that it's full of meaningless noise compared to how it was even 5 years ago is sufficient to have me considering if it's worth giving it up at this point. It's too badly polluted to be useful any more.

I think the only reason I even still have a facebook account is that there's a dozen or so of us who have a "pub?" group that we use to organize meeting for beers after work.

Rivian crawls out covered in $1.5B of red ink, panting that it's still alive

Re: Nice cars

Here you go.

Re: Nice cars

Ah, the modern BMW school of car design.

Uni staff fall back on Excel to work around mis-coded transactions in Oracle system

Re: Does Fusion work anywhere?

Does any Oracle product work anywhere? 10ish years ago I was working somewhere with an Oracle provided program that still didn't have 64 bit support and the interface for which required - although was not displayed through - IE6. As in, if you updated to IE7 it would crash when you opened certain parts of the UI. We had to maintain a windows 2003 server terminal services machine to run it because none of the staff desktops would. This isn't because it was old either, it was the latest version of the product available.

Palantir's CEO calls 'woke' a 'central risk to Palantir, America and the world'

Re: Thin pagan religion

Seems to be a word that exists in order to get anyone who uses it yelled at by a bunch of angry people. Not sure it achieves any thing else at this point. It's one of those "It's too late to undo the damage that's been done to that word" situations.

Thin pagan religion

I think the central risk to Palantir, America and the world is a regressive way of thinking that is corrupting and corroding our institutions that calls itself progressive, but actually — and is called woke — but is actually a form of a thin pagan religion

I have absolutely no idea what he means by this.

The hyper-clouds are open source's friends

Without Google Kubernetes doesn't exist...

...and the downside would be?

I can't remember who said it but I remember feeling this quote in my aching heart when I first heard it:

"The real Kube con was Google convincing thousands of nerds that this house of cards would somehow make their lives better."

The eight-bit Z80 is dead. Long live the 16-bit Z80!

Just a thank you...

...both to the z80 for all the good times it gave me when I was a lad, and to the author of this article. Love these long form historical retrospectives. I even learned a new thing: the communicator. I had no idea they ever made that!

Meta's value plummets as Zuckerberg admits AI needs more time and money

Re: "investors are unwilling to wait too long"

Serious investors would have taken the time to understand what it was Meta was selling them before giving them any money in the first place (and then would probably have decided not to.)

I think OP's point here is that most of the people pouring money into Meta (and all the other new shiny tech stocks) aren't serious investors, they're gambling addicts with access to vast amounts of other people's money.

Throwflame launches fire-spitting robo-dog from Hell

Re: "I don't think it means what they think it means."

I mean, yes, you're not wrong. But they're planning on selling these things to the public.

The police regularly "defuse" bombs by blowing them up in controlled detonations. That doesn't mean giving random members of the public access to remote controlled cars with bricks of C4 strapped to them GTA style is a good way to reduce explosive related property damage...

Black Mirrorian horror...

...is "ready for anything," says Throwflame, including wildfire control and prevention

"Prevention". That word. I don't think it means what they think it means.

Forget the AI doom and hype, let's make computers useful

There are two kinds of fools...

"...those that think religion is literally true, and those that think it is worthless."

Can't remember where I heard that quote today, but replace "religion" with "AI" and I think we have a reasonable summary of the state of play. No, it's not actually "Intelligent" bit it does have its uses. We just need to remain realistic about what they are.

Intel CEO suggests AI can help to create a one-person Unicorn

Here's how it will work. Go to Bangkok, go to Mexico city, go to Bangalore. Look at the city centre CBD where all the international big businesses are, and their lovely shiny buildings. Then drive out into the slums. See the people washing their one set of clothes in the open drain that passes for a water supply passing their tin shack.

That's us. That's all of us. Grinding abject poverty pressed up against incalculable wealth. That's the future economy. The very few ultra wealthy live in unbelievable luxury, and everyone else starves on their doorstep.

It happened in other places already, you bet your ass it can happen here too, and not only that but the ultra rich know this and are just fine with it.

Open sourcerers say suspected xz-style attacks continue to target maintainers

Re: The deeper issues

It's particularly hard to get this point across to developers who have never had to work in restricted environments.

A lot of us commentards are probably old enough to remember how precious every Kb of memory was and that you absolutely had to get your code to fit in X bytes at run time and that it could only be Y bytes on disk because there just wasn't enough space to do anything else. If your program wouldn't run in 640k of ram, then it wouldn't run, period. If it wouldn't fit on an 800K floppy, then you couldn't ship it because splitting it over two disks would massively increase production cost.

That's just not how a lot of current developers have ever had to work. They graduated from their software engineering degrees at a time when memory and disk space were already effectively infinite and have now got a decade of career experience behind them that's only re-enforced that fact - especially if they've been working "in the cloud" all that time, where you can just keep pulling more and more resource to make up for inefficient code.

In that world no one thinks it's weird that a single application might have 50 dependencies, which each have their own dependencies, or that the driver that changes the colour of lights on your mouse is 150M for some reason.

After delay due to xz, Ubuntu 24.04 'Noble Numbat' belatedly hits beta

Re: Minimal installation...

Surely you do what you always used to do and bring it up in 80 column text mode? The useful improvement would be to throw a "Hey, you took out the GPU I was using! Either put it back or fetch me a driver for the new one!" type message, which would be a very simple thing to do these days seeing as basically all drivers are sitting around in software repositories one way or another, and not a massive deal like it was in the 90s when we used to have to go and download megabytes of source over shoddy dial up lines and then spend an hour compiling the blasted things.

As to "make it impossible to read anything that's not English" Well... yes? I mean, I already can't read anything that's not in English because I'm an ignorant Brit who gets by on English, a few hundred words of French and a few dozen words of German - just enough for me to not get lost in either country when I drive through them to visit friends who live there. It feels like it shouldn't be beyond the bounds of possibility for these things to be apt/yum-able packages and if I don't need them I could just chose not to install them, but the very idea of an OS "Install" seems to have gone away in favour of "DD this image of a running system onto the device of your choosing - just so long as it's not a complicated device of any kind." which is kinda... irritating.

I get that this makes things simpler for people to use Linux on their Laptops etc, but lets be real - basically no one does that* - or at least those of us who do aren't bothered by having to read and select things from the install options when we do it.

Maybe I'm being unfair. Like I said - it's five or six gig and I've got five or six gig to spare and when I really don't have that I'll go find myself a Debian netinst image and start from there, but once again it feels like the pendulum of "simple" vs "useful" has swung too far toward simple in most distros.

*he says, from a laptop that's running Ubuntu 20.04 - but even that I installed by hand starting with the server distro and then bootstrapped my way up to a GUI so I could use a disk partitioning and encryption scheme that the desktop installer didn't seem to want me doing

Re: Minimal installation...

You know, I got somewhat curious so I decided to do a little experiment.

For entirely different reasons I found myself needing an Ubuntu machine that booted straight to a browser window - basically for digital signage, but we're going with Ubuntu as the base for a bunch of tedious policy reasons that I won't get into here. Firefox, as downloaded from their own website in deb form, and then installed onto a base version of Ubuntu server with just enough xorg on it that it's possible to target a single GUI application directly at the one running X session, comes out at just about 330M installed. In fact, from apt we see:

Need to get 80.2 MB of archives.

After this operation, 327 MB of additional disk space will be used.

A quick check of how big Firefox is running on my machine as a snap right now

du -sh /snap/firefox/current/

709M /snap/firefox/current/

Further inspection shows 222M of /snap/firefox/current/usr/share/hunspell which is a spellchecking library that's been included as part of the Firefox snap. I actually already have that installed on my machine in /usr/share/hunspell where it's taking up a grand total of 800K because I have only the single dictionary installed, seeing as I only really speak English. The Firefox snap has decided to include 138 others just in case I need them.

I'm sure that Firefox is far from the only example of this sort of thing so I don't want anyone to take this as me explicitly calling out Mozilla, but this pretty much encapsulates my problem with snap packages. I can't get rid of those dictionaries. They're utterly useless to me, but because they're pushed in as part of a larger package I'm stuck with them and even the one dictionary I do use is a useless duplication of one that's already in my systems /usr/share. 221M of wasted space right there.

Sure, the snap itself is a squashfs so it doesn't take up all that space on disk when it's not running, but in a way that's worse because now it has to waste cpu and memory duplicating things I don't need as well as disk space.

Every thing that's packaged in this way is going to be duplicating libraries and other shared-only-now-they-arent-shared type files to one extent or another. That sort of thing seriously adds up over time.

Re: Minimal installation...

This is true, but "Hey, at least it's not worse" isn't the most compelling argument against something.

I wouldn't mind it using a lot of space - if you can even call 5.6G a lot of space these days when even the cheapest of machines come with 256G SSDs in them - if I understood what the hell it was using all that space for. I'll trade space for features, or stability, or speed or... well, basically anything really, since I have a lot of space to spare but I cannot for the life of me work out what I'm actually buying with all the space I'm spending.

We never agreed to only buy HP ink, say printer owners

This feels like an own goal...

I can see this getting enough traction and generating negative news coverage to the point where people stop buying HP printers - even if HP win the actual case. You can imagine the thought process: Yeah, I think I heard some nebulous thing about HP breaking printers with software updates and there was a court case, not sure what that's all about, doesn't sound great, maybe I should buy epson or canon or dell or something instead. Seems not unlikely that they end up losing more money from customers buying elsewhere than they make out of lock-in.

AI will reduce workforce, say 41% of surveyed executives

Re: "Robotic engineers"???

I keep thinking of this wonderful exchange from one of the Fallout games where the local police have been replaced with robots:

Help!

robot: Stay calm, citizen. Watoga Emergency Services is here to assist you. Please state the nature of your emergency.

Mr. Sparkles is in the tree.

robot: Citizen, clarify. What is a "Mr. Sparkles?"

A cat. And he's in that tree!

robot: A cat is in the tree.

Yeah! He shouldn't be in there!

robot: The cat should not be in the tree. Is this correct, Citizen?

Yes! Hurry!

robot: Citizen, please stand back. <Sound of shooting and cat screaming>

No!!!

robot: Situation under control. Cat is no longer in tree.

Mr. Sparkles...

BOFH: So you want more boardroom tech that no one knows how to use

Re: I was once rushed to a meeting...

No, that was definitely an autocorrect, but I'll take it.

Re: Laminate everything

We tried the "laminate a sheet with the common options" but it was deemed "untidy" and the conference booking staff kept making us take it down.

See, the problem was that the main theatre had both a left and a right projector, the idea being that it could be used as a video conference room where you could put the screen showing all the other participants on one side, and the screen showing your presentation on the other side. It also came with a pair of PCs in it - a Linux one and a Windows one. We were a technical type institute, so a lot of people had fairly esoteric custom software and needed Linux to run it. We also had a socket in the lecturn to plug a laptop into, if you had some particular reason to bring your own.

Now we have the case where you can have:

Windows Screen1 left, Screen2 right.

Linux Screen1 left, Screen2 right.

Laptop left

Laptop right.

Windows left, Laptop right

Linux left, Laptop right

Linux left, Windows right

And then there was the "overflow" and "screen cast" features that let you use the other theatres as overflow seating, so you could _also_ decide to PiP any combination of the above and send it to the IP streaming device that would encode it and send it to one of the other rooms, or to either of the screens or - if you were feeling really fancy - have the AV techs up in the control room mix it with another stream from one of the half dozen cameras that captured different angles of the theatre:

Tight shot on lecturn for presenter,

wide shot of stage,

wide shot of audience,

regular stage focus left screen only

regular stage focus right screen only,

ultra wide from back of hall capturing audience and stage

These could also be sent to either projector and streamed to another room, and streamed to the internet.

The overall matrix of what inputs could be sent to what outputs numbered comfortably in the hundreds. The spectacular complexity of the thing necessitated a whole full-height rack in the projection room full of HDMI switches, mixers, amplifiers, video-to-ip encoders and decoders... It was absolutely impossible for anyone to use that room without an AV technician running it from the big mixing desk at the back.

Of course the booking team would very happily rent it to people without a technician on the grounds that "They don't need to use all that". Which of course they didn't, but given that it was there it just confused the absolute shit out of everyone.

We would have been much better served with a big button on the lecturn that just put whatever was showing on the machine there up on one of the projectors and turned everything else off. Since, you know, that's what everyone actually did with the room anyway.

I was once rushed to a meeting...

...where a contract worth tens of millions of pounds was being agreed. I was working for a large conference venue at the time which shall remain nameless but we had all sorts in over the years. This particular lot was compromised of various managing directors, members of government, academic think-tanks. Basically no one on less than 6 figures, and most much more than that.

The conference organiser was furious because the laptop we provided had "stopped working" and given the value of the conference this was completely unacceptable, out of order, we'll be speaking to your manager etc etc.

The problem turned out to be two fold. Firstly, our laptop (some kind of Dell Inspiron if I remember correctly) had been packed up and put in a cupboard by one of the conference guests because it was "untidy".

They had substituted it with their band new MacBook air, for which, amazingly, they had the correct dongle to connect it to the rooms projection system.

The second problem was that it was asleep. Has they done literally anything, pressed any key. Moved the mouse. Touched the track pad. Anything at all, it would have woken up. Instead, this room full of people whose collective annual compensation package had to be worth more than the building we were standing in panicked and called the conference organiser, who panicked and called IT.

Ad agency boss owned two Ferraris but wouldn't buy a real server

Re: Why two?

Because you want one mid engined V8 like a 488 or hooning around like a lunatic in and a big front engined V12 like a 812 for luxury grand touring.

Whizkids jimmy OpenAI, Google's closed models

In the words of Wanda Maximoff...

So. When openAI uses totally public endpoints to collect data that trains the model it's fair use, when security researchers use public endpoints to disclose openAIs inner workings it's a flaw that has to be patched immediately?

...that doesn't seem fair.

British Library pushes the cloud button, says legacy IT estate cause of hefty rebuild

Re: This will be unpopular but that is wrong with the cloud

Simple answer, from my perspective: it's outsourcing. Outsourcing always looks cheaper to start with, but ends up costing more long term. Ultimately you either own or rent, and renting is never, ever, cheaper in the long run.

Re: Shocked I tell ya !

...and I'm certain that going to the cloud will help with that.

On prem we ran our estate with 4 people. In the cloud we now need 11, and we have had to dump a ton of responsibility onto individual businesses units to manage their own infra and those new cloud people are getting paid more than the old sysadmins were.

Managing cloud is different. Sometimes better, sometimes worse, but almost always different and paying for people who know how to do it isn't cheap.

Microsoft calls AI privacy complaint 'doomsday hyperbole'

Re: the only way...

Laws only exist that can be enforced. They can claim the law applies to you, but if they have no way to enforce it, it doesn't. Corporations might eventually get slapped down hard enough to be forced to abide by some law or other but until that happens the only safe thing to assume is that they will continue to violate it. Even then let's be honest, they probably will. I've lost track of the number of stories on this very site of "Corporation gets fined approximately 4 minutes profit for being very naughty. Promises not to do it again." or "Government found to be in violation of it's own data protection rules. Agrees that this is unfortunate." I can't remember reading a story that said "Corporation forced to dissolve by bankrupting fine" or "Executives / government members jailed" in relation to the same.

Re: the only way...

Sure, but the internet doesn't exist only in Europe. Europe (or for that matter any other legislative body) can issue all the laws they want about the internet, but since it spans the entire planet by design you really can't trust that the specific place this particular bit of the internet is located gives a shit about laws where you happen to be.

It's something no government has managed to get it's head around. The internet makes international boundaries basically invisible and irrelevant. It's the unregulated wild west out there, and we can all pretend that laws apply to it but they just don't because anyone who doesn't like said law can simply host their service somewhere where that law doesn't exist. I mean do you check that every service you're using is hosted in a jurisdiction where your rights are respected?

the only way...

...not to surrender all of our personal information, family photographs, copyrighted works, art, and more would be to cease using the internet altogether.

Um... yes? Good. You finally get it. Were they not paying attention for the last 25 years? The Internet is a public space, and where it's not public, it's a space where you are permitted to exist by the companies that own it. It always has been this way. Unless you run your own server and set your own terms about who can access it there has never been any expectation of privacy here. We were telling people 25 years ago that you need to be careful what you say online and who you say it to because once something is "out there" it's basically impossible to get it back. This isn't new, it's just something that - for lack of a better term "regular" - people are waking up to now because it's in the news. We've known this since the beginning. The internet isn't safe. It's never been safe.

Linux for older phones postmarketOS changes its init system

Re: proof

I came in here to say exactly this, but you already did, so all I can give you is my upvote.

This, this right here, is why systemd pisses me off more than anything else. It gets on things and then you can't get it off no matter how much you soak it.