Posts by MyffyW

Ryanair adds Google Cloud to its dual-cloud flight plan

Re: Return journey optimisation

It's already happening. When baggage systems fail Ryan Air have a tolerance for departing with passengers minus luggage that is at the "bold" end of the airline carrier spectrum.

Passwords stored in public Google Doc then showed up in search results

Re: In an ideal world ...

Health and Safety training that demonstrably avoids accident, injury or worse is 100% necessary.

Me having to do the same 1 hour workstation assessment every year, even though all our hot desks are exactly the same and my ability to meaningfully charge my environment is limited to height and reach is less obviously useful.

Word worm crawls into Copilot, spreads chaos

After 30 years working with their products I feel Microsoft has made abundant use of my holes on a regular basis. (And never once have they "hit a 6", so to speak.)

Anyone with a shed, an extension cord, a couple of GPUs and an overdraft is building datacenters. Fujitsu just offloaded five

Re: Following IBM down the fail path

IBM-like failure certainly conceivable, given my experience of Fujitsu.

Although, in a gold rush the people who get rich are selling shovels and maps, not the people running mines. So maybe there's a game plan there?

OpenAI scored an own goal with Hugging Face attack, showing how open Chinese models are winning

Re: Brave

One way to stop this AI cloudy bollox nonsense might be to task an advanced AI with the objective of transferring 90% of the wealth of the billionaire class to their respective national treasuries. They'd still be left with a cool 100m (at the least) and that warm feeling of being genuinely useful human beings.

Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity

Re: 23%

"They think DC's LLMs are some kind if philosophers' stone" not so much fixed it for you as just extrapolated from a straight line. It will all end in tears. Possibly in the rain.

Bring Back Boring

I remember the good old days when talking about a "data centre" meant having to do a tedious trip down the A34 and freezing my wobbly bits in E1W

End of era as the BBC switches off Radio 4 Long Wave service

Re: Irreplacable...

You don't live in Ambridge do you? If so I claim my five pounds....

NASA names crew for Artemis III lunar lander rehearsal

Re: The far right stuff

Amen @AC, have a squishy left-liberal hug from me

California passes bill declaring death-by-algorithm to 3D-printed ghost guns

Re: ridiculous

Speak for yourself, mine is warm and slick.

Though in law enforcement situations I believe it is important not to imply ownership. So it's "The Dildo" not "Your Dildo".... in Tyler we trust

I really hope they don't go off half-cocked

FAA grounds SpaceX’s Starship after another launch mishap

A one-way commercial flight from London to Sydney (spanning about 17,000 km) emits roughly 120 to 180 tonnes in total, depending on the aircraft type and route.

Starship will not lower antipodal travel CO2 emissions

AIs don't like religion – particularly Jehovah's Witnesses, study claims

I would like AI to take inspiration from Quaker practice, and reflect in silence. Preferably for ever.

Anthropic co-founder hallucinates ghost in the machine

"they remain in important ways mysterious even to those of us who train them"

Whether by blinding flash of light or slow descent into AI slop and grey-goo, I hope these words come back to haunt this vainglorious fool.

As a wise colleague of mine once said "I never cease to be disappointed by human nature"

Young evil genius forces hamster to run on wheel to power his gadgets

Re: From our clickbait correspondent - Brandon Vigliarolo

Might just be a shitty aggregation site, but it's still my favourite shitty aggregation site

Re: As above, so below.

gram-per-gram the hamster is probably better remunerated

Cursor-Opus agent snuffs out startup’s production database

Re: Surprised?!!!

I was struck by: "flatly admits its errors – not that it means anything given the model's inability to learn from its mistakes and to feel remorse that might constrain future destructive action"

We are now firmly into the era of the AI apocalypse, and not because the machines have got particularly clever but because we humans are acting in a manner which is beyond dumb.

‘AI deflation’ comes to India’s tech services giants and puts downward pressure on revenue

Would you rather...

I never thought I'd be misty eyed for the days of marshalling a team of several dozen people distributed across the Indian sub-continent. But the bleak AI future has done it. Despite my occasional misanthropic tendencies, it turns out I actually prefer human beings.

Anthropic's super-scary bug hunting model Mythos is shaping up to be a nothingburger

Re: "one of misinformation and hype."

Not a bad analogy:

There are lots of alcoholic drinks I quite like. I have been known to turn into quite an unpleasant version of myself after too many.

My ex-partner has made herself an ex-partner precisely because she couldn't realise quite what an unpleasant person she was after a too many bottles of New World red.

For AI: Having it provide some prose, summarize a document or provide a code snippet is fine. Using it every day, every night and trying to do the tech equivalent of hide itself in the tin cupboard is not a winning strategy.

You can now run WSL on Windows 95, in case you're crazy, too

Hailey - if you're reading this - are you ok, Hun?

Always here to talk

Windows 2000 was an NT version (NT5), and though I have fond memories of it they are at risk of being sullied by any comparison to 9x

Personally, and I took a while to get there, I think Windows XP eventually became "the one true" Windows, partly based on it's longevity, but also because of all the NT heavy lifting done by NT 3.x, 4 and 2000

The spaghettified DBMS chart that shows Oracle's crown is slowly slipping

Re: The Heineken Factor

No love lost for IBM (or MS) here, but I'd cheerfully run either if the alternative was Oracle. Their sharp practices on licensing are truly dreadful.

Re: That chart though.

That chart gives the impression of telling you far more than is actually conveyed. Which is very typically Gartner. I'm on the Crayola-spectrum, but that chart is - to wilfully misuse a technical term - triggering

Apple has an opportunity to rediscover humanity in its push toward AI

I actually quite like my 2022 iPhone, but the paltry storage it ships with will possibly obsolete it before the updates stop coming from the fruit company. And if I get very-nearly-bounced again into downloading their shiny new bloatware IOS 26.x rather than a minor update to the perfectly reasonable 18.x there is a non-zero risk I'll swap back to an Android.

Perhaps I'm not an obvious Apple customer, but "think differently" is not evidenced by behaviour in the last decade or so.

Iran claims US used backdoors to knock out networking equipment during war

Say it ain't so.....

Na-na, na-na, na-na, na-na, na, na

I wish I had anything more useful to say, but Pascal just tripped a deeply buried Blink 182 memory:

Linux 7.0 debuts as Linus Torvalds ponders AI's bug-finding powers

Re: Does the Linux kernel follow the Star Trek rule of good vs bad

I've never quite agreed with the odd-even "rule". But doing my best impression of Daisy from Spaced in my mind:

Star Trek 1 - AKA The Motion Picture - jacked up voyager probe after the Borg (or someone) meddled with it. BORING

Star Trek 2 - The Wrath of Khan - Pretty Good

Star Trek 3 - Honey I Crashed The Ship - Poor

Star Trek 4 - The Freaking Greenpeace Whale One - Great Film, Only improves with age.

Star Trek 5 - Gun battle with "God" - Just so bad

Star Trek 6 - Happy Christmas, War is Over - Shakespeare quoting Klingons - Brilliant

Star Trek 7 - Generations / Honey I Crashed The Ship 2 - Best bit is Shatner getting vented to space - Not great

Star Trek 8 - First Contact - too good for my sarcastic comments - Brilliant

Star Trek 9 - Aliens with Mommy Issues - I quite liked it but I get that it's not a classic

Star Trek 10 - Nemesis - accurately named destroyer of a movie franchise

Claude Code cache chaos creates quota complaints

Re: Rolls eyes....

I have one boss, a chap about my age but without my sassy flair for prose, who is convinced generative AI is the next reciprocating steam engine or world wide web.

I have serious doubts about the business model and very severe concerns about the likely future of civilisation. And therefore I'm spending my days running it down on the backwaters of the last technology wave. I now know how Alec Guinness felt playing Obi Wan. Except I've got better lip gloss.

Starship may chauffeur Orion to the Moon, as NASA mulls ditching SLS after Artemis V

In Tudor times, the King would have parliament move a Bill of Attainder and confiscate the no-longer-in-favour subjects worldly wealth. Absolutely would not put that past the Orange Shit Gibbon.

NASA sets 'impossible' ground rules for relocation of 'flown space vehicle'

Re: USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) ?

If I recall Generations correctly there were combined elements of lithospheric and biospheric braking (it hit rocks and trees)

BBC World Service digital switch backfires as online audience drops

Re: Why broadcast is better.

Seemingly no, although shortwave being what it is you may be able pick up from other regions:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2x9tqt6mc05vB2S37j8MWMJ/global-short-wave-frequencies

Microsoft points at Samsung after Galaxy app bug locks users out of C:\

Indeed. Strictly speaking C: is the drive and C:\ is the root directory on drive C:

Whitehall seeks lone C++ coder to keep airport passenger model flying

Now I have flash-backs to The Simpsons Barber Shop Quartet episode.

Let It B(sharp)

So much for power to the people – AI datacenters could jump UK grid queue

Watt are you trying to say, @AC?

Ig Nobel Prize flees US for Switzerland after 35 years over safety concerns

Re: "concerns about the safety of those attending the US event." - clocks

If I recall correctly, Steve McQueen didn't actually get to Switzerland. He got in a bit of a tangle at the border.

Microsoft Azure CTO set Claude on his 1986 Apple II code, says it found vulns

Re: Why Claude?

A reasonable question.

Perhaps because Mark isn't just any old Microsoftie. He's an actual software engineer from back when men and women wrote their own 120-byte machine language routines.

China browses lunar landing spots in race to land on Moon

Re: Too late

I am told the shade of red and blue on the stars and stripes are not prescribed officially, so in theory a powder pink, white and light blue colouration would still be old glory. And be a glorious statement of support for our trans brothers and sisters.

Re: I prefer ...

Thank you to both posters, this charmed my morning.

Fly me to the Moon: NASA reshuffles the Artemis card deck

I knew NASA was broken back in 2004 when at the KSC tour they were still referencing the X-33 / VentureStar cancelled back in 2001. It's a perfect example of sincere individuals being employed by a make-work government programme.

On the other hand, I'm hardly enamoured by the corporate-welfare nonsense that has supported SpaceX et al down the years.

Maybe just as much as "Space is hard", "Funding Space is hard" should be the watch word.

NASA's fill-'er-up Moon rocket 'confidence' test sees mixed results

Re: Cryogenics is hard

Methane boiling point is 100 K, whilst for Hydrogen it's 20 K.

Explosion limits for Methane are 5% to 15%, whilst for Hydrogen it's 4% to 75%

Engineering tolerances are markedly different for the two fuels.

The real reason for Hydrogen's use is high energy per unit of mass and high specific impulse. Which sort of matters when you're heading to the moon.

Mechanical mutts make it official: Now full-time at Sellafield's hot zones

Whilst not encouraging such behaviour, there would be a very Alien Earth justice to that

Re: The cover up

At the time they were certainly "economical with the actualité" partly from institutional practice and partly because this was a nuclear weapons project.

Yes, unbelievably, the reactors were air-cooled, with the original design envisaging direct venting to the atmosphere. At a late stage, Director John Cockcroft insisted that high-performance filters were fitted on the chimneys, at some expense and initially referred to as "Cockcroft's Folly". They were clearly visible towards the top of the stacks.

The choice to have filters very likely made the 1957 disaster "not great, but not terrible". It is estimated they caught 95% of the particulate exhaust from the fire.

To quote Manchester University "Had they not been built, it is no exaggeration to suggest that a large part of the surrounding area – including the Lake District – might be inaccessible today. "

If you're one of the 16,000 Amazon employees getting laid off, read this

I left a well paid (but horrible) job for an opportunity that unwound after just 10 months. Pay took a bit of a hit for a year or two but absolutely no regrets and look back fondly on those 10 months + the subsequent gig I landed in a hurry.

I later left a lovely company that had nowhere for me to grow and leapt into another that had the right role. Loved it and though ultimately that ended in redundancy 5 years later, absolutely no regrets.

You've not got career experience until you're on the receiving end of redundancy. Be there for each other, wear your "Open to work" badge with pride and always, always play it forward.

AWS's inevitable destiny: becoming the next Lumen

Re: "have a life wtihout KFC waiting in retirement."

Yeah - it doesn't end well for the chicken in most scenario

It's a clucking shame

Concorde at 50: Twice the speed of sound, twice the economic trouble

Re: BA were asshats about it

True. That will probably be my "out" too.

As you were, OP.

Re: BA were asshats about it

Speaking as an engineer, I would vehemently resist being cannibalised.

Rocket Lab's Neutron schedule under pressure after unexpected tank rupture

Re: That photo

It reminds me of my curling tongs and a bottle of black nail varnish, but hey-ho, each to their own :-)

Microsoft veteran explains the one weird trick that made Windows 95 restart faster

Or "Strike any user to continue" as we used to say

That (avoid launching startup folder items), was also in Window 3.1x (if my own memory serves me well).

Was useful when somebody decided to have each of the Lotus SmartSuite apps launch on start. Fecking users....

For the price of Netflix, crooks can now rent AI to run cybercrime

Re: carry on offshoring

Interestingly both JLR and M&S are examples of companies that used* to look after their staff. A regular shopfloor or factory-floor job at either used to garner respect and even a degree of envy.

[*yes, I know, long ago, before Tech Bros. And the Dark Times]