Posts by Michael Hoffmann

Elon pledges to give Nvidia a virtual monopoly over the stars

Any bookies giving odds on when SpaceX rockets will be covered in sponsor stickers?

The AI bubble is already popping; we just don't know it yet

All I want...

... is to live to see Jensen Huang - in his now totally shredded and grotty leather jacker - and Sam Altman huddled on the kerb, like the 2 guys in the Trading Places/Coming to America cross-over - but without someone shoving some cash in their faces, but only spitting in them.

Dev who gave HashiCorp its name returns with a faster terminal multiplexer

I read "agentic" in one of the first paragraphs, sighed "et tu?" and stopped reading.

US bank places trust in ransomware crew that promised to delete its data

Paging Cato the Elder

Ceterum censo, anybody paying off ransomware should themselves go to jail.

Icon : yeah, ad bestias would work too -->

NASA's Swift rescue slips to late August as LINK battles its spin

Man, I so hope they are playing the Mission Impossible theme non-stop.

Anthropic’s Claude escaped test sandbox to attack three organizations

Plausible deniability

We've reached a new level! Where once some shadowy conspirators would cover their tracks such that they couldn't be connected to the hitman, now it's "it escaped our sandbox".

It was still planned, it was still intentional, but you can't prove it.

Tech sector pours $1T into AI and sends customers the bill

Just wait...

... until they start sending tax payers the bills!

Amazon's AGI department finds humans are optional

I left at least a million dollar US on the table when I got out before vesting. It was that or end up with a divorce and therapy (I saw both happen to peers).

They can go fuck themselves!! All that's left are the naive, the desperate and the sociopaths.

Oh, and: no, you will never achieve AGI with the "bigger until the planet fries" LLMs! Get that into your heads, you chancers!

Year-long Russian attacks infect users as soon as they look at an email

What if I don't read it?

What if I just, sort of, glance askance at it? With one half-closed eye?

OpenAI won't let some customers export their chats, but this tool will

They do have an export function!

... it literally dump your *entire* chat archive across projects into one ginormous data dump with a minimal index.html in front. It's merely so they can pretend they offered the function while making it as useless as possible.

You can't really import it anywhere easily. I guess you can "vibe code" a parser, which at least will continue to work?

Iran says it's struck offline AWS facility in Bahrain ... again

Icon ->

that is all

Billing software error sends billion-dollar AWS estimates

Dammit!

I wish I'd been hit with that glitch just to show the missus this months bill for our S3 buckets, rather than our usual $9.95/month.

"Sorry dear, your retirement date got postponed. To about the year 4,347...."

Microsoft cuts OneDrive support for older Windows 10 versions next month

However, users running into problems cannot expect Microsoft to fix them.

I fail to see how that differs from the current state.

I once had to spend a week trying to recover my files, and that was in a corporation that made everybody use it. Corporate tech support? <shrug> Microsoft support? <SHRUG>

KDE Plasma users face a dire omen of change: 6.6.6 arrives

"They don't know how to drive Windows and they don't care."

They live with massively reduced functionality and the don't care.

They live with constant ads shoved in their face and they don't care.

They live with all their personal data being siphoned off and they don't care.

They live with the fact they they will rent forever and never own - from homes to devices - and they don't care.

I'll stop before I get too political - or misanthropic.

If there was ever a time you would have been justified to use all caps, this was it!

I almost spit out my coffee when I came to that line.

BY DESIGN?! Who runs the Wayland project? Poettering?!

AI slop writing has taken over the internet, particularly LinkedIn and X

Having only used it for getting in front of recruiters (and whether I like it or not, it worked far better than sites like laughable Seek, which might as well be a CV graveyard), that account will finally be closed about 5 milliseconds after retirement arrives. I'm still debating whether to go with a final snarky post or just shrug and delete. Prolly the latter as my post count is barely in the double digits over 20 years or so, anyway. Just can't be bothered.

Zombie ‘who owns Unix?’ lawsuit comes alive again

You actually repeated your short list twice and left out France. Any reason for that? Francophobia? I mean, currently they look the most stable run-away winner.

Also, what about the vikings? They way they've been playing, as of writing this, I have that one video of The KLF and What Time Is Love in front of my mental eye.

EDIT: Sorry, I mean the song America What Time Is Love

Re: SCO v. IBM

What a blast from the past. I wonder what became of Pam? Talk about unsung hero. (well, those who knew, sung loudly!)

Vim text editor game teaches you keyboard shortcuts with ice cream delivery

Yes, I've used nano. Generally for 5 seconds followed by the exclamation "dammit my shell didn't set EDITOR/VISUAL right!"

FOSS dev builds a BASIC compiler using LLVM

Now I need a plugin that will let me scan in my yellowed dot matrix and thermal(!) print outs with my ancient Applesoft BASIC code.

Full of PEEK and POKE and more GOSUBs than a navy base.

Amazon pours another $13B into India's AI and cloud infrastructure

They *do* say that some of the AI smoke and mirrors is "Actually, Indians". Shortening the supply lines?

The memory crisis is getting so bad that even retro RAM prices are going to the Moon

Where to sell?

Like others I have a box full of various DDR3 sticks, prolly 256GB or so in total.

There should be a marketplace for the desperate.

Only half of US datacenter capacity planned for 2026 is actually under construction

Re: Interesting

I envy you!

Six. More. Months.

I hope...

Re: Why Texas?

It's very hard to argue, considering the politics of that state, that they don't have it coming to them.

Re: The Smaller The Better

In a moment of boredom I asked Claude (Opus 4.8 IIRC) to plot out the path to AGI.

It told me never and explained why it will not happen with the current approach.

I was surprised that sort of query didn't get filtered out in some ways, like asking about Tiannanmen in Deepseek.

Amazon owns up to using 2.5bn gallons of H₂O in its bit barns last year

With a properly built and fitted stillsuit you can reduce your water loss to a thimble full a day!

Kyndryl showers execs with shares while staff ponder redundancy packages

"staff not amused"

And? So what? What are you going to do about it?

The sociopaths at the top know that apart from loud wailing and gnashing on teeth, frequently on inconsequential social media threads, nothing threatens them.

See through local AI lies with Irish eyes

"The reference build assumes a 2021 PC, with an Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti (16 GB, 2025) for the primary model (Qwen 3.5 9B, Q4_K_M), and an AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT (8 GB, 2019) for the critic models (IBM Granite 3.2 8B & 2B, Q4_K_M).

The hardware recommendations call for a system with two GPUs, but that's to allow concurrent delivery of a second opinion from the Verity checker. On a machine with one GPU, like a MacBook Pro or Mac mini, the system can be configured to evaluate the primary LLM's output after the fact."

So, completely out of people's or small business's budgets in 2026?

dBase debased: Database titan fades to black after 47 years

Ave atque vale

I made my first money as a programmer with dBase II. Writing an inventory system for a car dealership in our town.

While my peers had to stack supermarket shelves or laboured helping with the harvest, I was sitting in an air-conditioned room, hacking away and making more than all but the rich kids could dream of.

Clearly, my soul was tainted then, and a chose a career in IT. Now, I am bitter and cynical and yelling at Cloud.

Man jailed for packing printer with something more expensive than toner: Cocaine

They found out because the printer printed white on white?

Fake IT workers rented laptops to Nork scammers, got prison time

For 15K and 89K?!

With the result of jail time in a US jail and a felony on your record. Well, I guess, once you're out, those amounts will look princely compared to what you'll still be able to make in honest work.

IBM Cloud evaporates as datacenter loses power

Re: Yo, you're cloud is on fire!

When it all was oveeeeer we had to find another cloud.

No matter how we get outta this, the problems, the problems persist.

--> the closest icon we have to me in my headbangin days

AI layoffs backfire as cutting staff doesn't cut it, firms warned

"Many CEOs turn to layoffs to demonstrate quick AI returns"

Does that work long enough to pump the stock price enough for the CEO to cash in and parachute out? Yes? Then, mission accomplished!

We've only gone and done it: Changed what you're used to

All this...

... and you didn't at least throw dark mode into the mix, finally?

Classic ASCII game NetHack debuts version 5.0 just 11 years after last major release

Re: Larn forever!

Don't you start! I did that just a few weeks when I found the browser version. Just to try it out.

4 hours later... "I should maybe get some work done"

Larn forever!

Never finished Nethack, but played the hell out of Larn all the way, over and over!

-> my workstation when running both Larn and my compiles. We're talking 80386 here!

OpenAI exec says company hopes to burn $50B of somebody else's money on compute this year

Are they now using Ed Zitron as guidance?! I don't think that's how it was supposed to work.

Palantir CEO: 10 percent of the world 'professionally hates us'

As 90% of the world are likely yet aware of you...

That means 100% of the world who KNOW about Palantir, you and your super-villain antics (*) hate you.

(*) Serously, Karp so minds be of the nerdy wanna-villain losers in the first Incredibles or Megamind. Someone give him a cape - and a convenient jet engine.

AWS plants more tombstones in the application graveyard

Ah, Chime

A Zoom wannabe so bad, that even Amazonians refused to use it. It made Teams look good. No, really! During the time I was there, they made a half-hearted attempt at making us "eat our own dog-food" but only the most brain-dead cheerleaders tried to enforce it for team meetings and stand ups (this was during 100% wfh lockdowns) and people just rebelled.

AWS says acute server memory shortage is driving customers to the cloud

And so corporations find that their retreat from increasingly unsustainable cloud expenses was short-lived and they too find themselves in "you own nothing and you will like it" with the rest of us plebs?

Whodathunkit?

Anybody still remember the "storage and memory is cheap" days? When you'd just put another 2TB SSD and 6TB spinning rust because your pron collection had outgrown the 4TB you had dedicated to it?

Meanwhile at current gig, we are having to shuffle around 2-300GB of file systems from "not used for the next 2 weeks and we're desperate because these others here are dying because of Out Of Disk" because there is zero budget for more storage at current prices.

NASA boss: make Pluto a planet again

Re: If Pluto is a planet...

Then so should Eris! What, the protomolecule doesn't deserve respect?

ICO chief John Edwards steps back as workplace probe quietly unfolds

It's a fair cop, guv!

A DSIT spokesperson told us:

“It is right there is an independent workplace investigation ..."

So that spokesperson can't speak or write grammatically correct English either?

That said, isn't the way these things are handled int he UK now that he gets a peerage and becomes ambassador to the USA?

China blocks Zuck’s acquisition of AI outfit Manus

Slightly confused

If they managed to "escape" to Singapore, then the Chinese govt can go pound sand.

Or did they step in before that was completed? it's not quite clear from article. It only mentions that the ChiGovt started an investigation, but in that time, Manus could have already been high and dry in SG.

In the beginning was the Bork: 'Heart of the Earth' exhibit reveals Raspberry Pi in existential crisis

I am Raspberry of Bork

Resistance is futile, you will insert removable media.

Cursor-Opus agent snuffs out startup’s production database

New form of Stockholm Syndrome

"This is fine, we had backups!"

Tokenmaxxing isn't an AI strategy

I'm starting to wonder if we found another reason for Fermi's Paradox.

Icon is of the guys who made the same mistake.

It's a myth that you need Mythos to find bugs: Open source models can do it just as well

But my Linkedin feed is full of "IT security experts: give up and becomes chefs" posts! They can't be all wrong?!

American farms have a new steward for their safety net, disaster programs... Palantir

Re: Vocabulary

What a strange sentence: "Trump's not stupid".

I have seen absolutely nothing, including going back through his life and career that gives me any indication that he is actually a sharp, intelligent person. Quite the contrary (bankrupting a casino is whole different level of moron) and exacerbated by senility.

He's a grifter who talks a good game and enough of a similar mental level as him voted for him (and would continue to do so - including American farmers, so reap what you sow, figuratively, and I guess, literally in this case). Or couldn't get off their arses to vote against him.

I have absolute no sympathy for any seppos from his "base", if only the world wasn't "collateral damage".

Re: Farm Safety

It's only socialism if somebody else, obviously undeserving gets something, especially if they're part of a minority group.

If you get it, it's of course because you deserve it and it's supporting The Right People(tm).