Posts by yoganmahew

Have we stopped to think about what LLMs actually model?

Re: "...you deserve everything you get"

It's always about savings from laying knowledgeable, expensive people off.

The future of AI/ML depends on the reality of today – and it's not pretty

Somebody should invent a tool to do that...

Ah, but did you know this is where it came from:

"The joke "Micros~1" instead of "Microsoft" is a play on words that references the company's name and the concept of "micro" being one less than "macro." It also humorously implies that Microsoft is somehow "less than" or "inferior" to some other, unspecified entity.

The exact origin of this joke is difficult to pinpoint, but it likely emerged from online communities or internet forums where users often engage in witty banter and wordplay. As the joke gained popularity, it spread through social media and online discussions, becoming a recognizable meme or inside joke among tech enthusiasts."

hallucinates Gemini :(

At some unspecified point in the not too distant future, that will be the truth and those of us who remember will be 'wrong'...

Re: Good for fun

But Michal, copypasta is what we already have. Now we get EFFICIENT copypasta! Won't somebody think of the bonuses?

Software innovation just isn't what it used to be, and Moxie Marlinspike blames Agile

Re: Has "Agile" become synonymous with "Development management" ?

In most enterprises, there is only the agile grinder. 26 2-week sprints in a year Or 52 1-week. Or... anything that completely fills the year up with 100% productivity.

Microsoft punches back at Delta Air Lines and its legal threats

Re: Is this normal?

Airlines have a brutal load of IT-based legal requirements beyond the normal corporate, from maintenance to aircraft movement, to staff rostering. Each of these has bespoke or small supplier (often the commercial arms of other airlines) software on the latest next-big-thing mapping a history of IT back to the 1950s. Delta has previously been in trouble for running its loadsheet generation in a cupboard on the fifteenth floor of an office building.

Why bespoke? Well, look at BA's SAP implementation to replace its parts system and the damage that caused. Off-the-shelf generic solutions either don't exist or are monstrous to implement.

Why so slow to upgrade? Each of the systems is connected in fragile ways to the operation of the airline. Replacements for ancient windows servers have to work in pretty much exactly the same way and that's really quite expensive. Airlines go from broke to rich following the business cycle and back to broke again. IT re-engineering projects have very low priority and the landscape is full of sharky outsourcers long on promises, short on everything else. Meanwhile investment goes into NDC capabilities, offer-order, personalised offers, a vision that offers little to the consumer and even less to the airlines.

Airlines are not Amazon Retailing, they're not Google search. Anyone selling you that is peddling snake-oil.

Atlassian softens its cloud-first approach for remaining on-prem customers

Re: How about concentrating on quality?

It's still practically impossible to format text in a jira. Pictures can be added, but they weirdly disappear and turn into attachments with only the vagues reference to the text box they were pasted in.

EU AI Act still in infancy, but those with 'intelligent' HR apps better watch out

Hardware store in England and environs.

Too late now for canary test updates, says pension fund suing CrowdStrike

Re: WTF did I just read?

Read the comment again, the hash is to confirm that what's pushed is what QA approved.

CrowdStrike meets Murphy's Law: Anything that can go wrong will

Re: The collapse of what little engineering culture existed in IT

It's made worse by security companies flagging open source packages as "untrustworthy" if they haven't had a new version in a while. So everything has to be updated all the time.

Anyway, I've been saving up Security Now, so off to listen to that! :D

Re: Canary Deployment

Good questions, but the first canary should be within Crowdstrike's walls as part of their integration process. It seems every system that got the update failed, so they don't even have to do anything fancy with boatloads of windows versions and configurations. A linter (which appears to be all they had) is a poxy attempt at testing and most developers wouldn't consider linting to be testing. It's just shy of "if it compiles, it works".

CrowdStrike file update bricks Windows machines around the world

Re: Or...

My laptop was built in an office outside the country I live in and mailed to me. The office no longer builds laptops as it was rightsized some rightsizings ago. I mean, it was a shitshow, so no loss, well, except for all those pesky bits of paper...

Agile Manifesto co-author blasts failure rates report, talks up 'reimagining' project

Re: The more process you have the less agile you are.

Absolutely! I can't tell you how many 5 year, cast of thousands, multi-million dollar projects I've worked on that started with a one sentence requirement (get off the mainframe), that had sub-optimal outcomes. Well, the answer is one, but it's weird it happened at all.

British Airways blames T5 luggage chaos on fault 'outside of our control'

Computerized bagtags have been around for more than 30 years.

Terminal 5 opened in 2008, 16 years ago.

Almost all other major airports have automated baggage systems, of varying levels of automation. As others have said, you just can't go manual on many aspects of airline operations these days - check-in, load balance, baggage.

Microsoft blamed for million-plus patient record theft at US hospital giant

Re: Full access, or lateral movement?

What? No! The DB should be encrypted so casual access is not permitted. Anyway, having voice to text'd, why would you continue to store? Those notes should go to the patient or doctor's DB, not to Nuance's. Have they not heard of HIPAA? https://www.nuance.com/about-us/trust-center/privacy/hipaa.html Hmmm, they have... they just don't give a shite. Executives at these companies need to be jailed, pour encourager les autres.

Snowflake denies miscreants melted its security to steal data from top customers

What do they do?

It seems Snowflake offer analytical tools, but it is unclear, even the Wikipedia site says so:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowflake_Inc.

"In particular, it is unclear what the company actually does."

From Snowflake's site, it appears to be a plausible deniability function, allowing companies to outsource sharing of customer and employee data to thiird parties (e.g selling to advertisers) presumably under the "partners" catch-all.

https://www.snowflake.com/en/why-snowflake/

"The AI Data Cloud enables an organization’s most critical workloads, including seamless data collaboration within an organization; across its business units; with its ecosystem of partners, suppliers, and customers; and between any combination of the thousands of AI Data Cloud customers and Snowflake Marketplace providers. The opportunity to securely share and access governed data, tools, applications, other technologies, and data services– while preserving privacy– creates a near-endless combination of strategies and solutions to advance any organization’s business. Snowflake’s security and governance features were baked into the platform from day one, including end-to-end data encryption in transit and at rest."

Why are all these databases on employees shipped over to Snowflake?

Why did DLP not trigger? https://www.snowflake.com/guides/data-loss-protection-modern-cloud Snowflake claims to have it...

Where is the GDPR opt-out? Did anyone at Ticketmaster get the option to not have their data shared with Snowflake?

Where is the access limitation? Surely a single authorized user can't download everything in a corporate instance in Snotflake? (As if I didn't already know the answer...).

Dell to color-code staff based on how hybrid they really are in RTO push

Secret squirrels

"The Register however has been made aware of internal workforce figures that exceed 150,000. Absent a clarification from Dell, which we've asked for, we can only speculate about the reason for the discrepancy."

Contractors are not headcount. You can offshore, then bring in the arms length contractors to your office on temporary visas just fine. Lovely compliant workforce with nowhere else to go. All i's are dotted, all t's are crossed. Nothing ever gets fixed, mind you, just endlessly manually worked around. Then you need more manual work arounders.... wonder where they come from...

Council claims database pain forced it to drop apostrophes from street names

And even that list is outdated now. Ireland (Republic Of) now has postcodes, they refer to a single building.

Re: BS7666

You don't even need to go that far. Irish names (O'Neill (First Minister of NI Assembly), O'Leary, O'Briain to name a small few).They took our land, they took our lives, they'll never take our puncuation!

I work with a standard developed in the 1960s; it too doesn't allow punctuation, but it is nearing 60 years old. On the rare occasion I stray into modernity, string values have punctuation, escapted if necessary.

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

Re: Don't people test edge cases any more? [Time Libraries: The Next Problem]

I agree with you. A case I hit this year (not in my code) was using a library to do 5 digit date validation. The library allowed for 29FEB, but only if a year was included. As the year had not been determined at that point (it could be future, today, or past), validation failed.

Ostensibly the code was 29FEB safe and the library validated it, it still failed.

Cloudflare sheds more light on Thanksgiving security breach in which tokens, source code accessed by suspected spies

Re: Am I reading this correctly?

Okta also appears to be economical with the truth in the number of customers affected. It turns out it was all customers...

A security organisation that follows a legal/marketing FUD campaign disclosure method is not to be trusted.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/29/okta-admits-hackers-accessed-data-on-all-customers-during-recent-breach/?guccounter=1

Top-tier IT talent doesn't stick around in 'mid-market' organizations

They won't be responsible for your called usage SaaS database usage as part of 'stealing', hacking, ransomware. Backup solutions are provided, it's up to you to schedule and run them and secure the backups.

A SaaS DB provides you APIs, scalabe resources, multi-region (if you pay for it), security upgrades to the DB and APIs, the operation of the DB in normal circumstances.

If you lose control of access, that's your bag.

Here's who thinks AI chatbots will eventually be smart enough to be your coworker

Re: Pay

"If AI is going to increase productivity, surely this means workers should get more pay?"

So all the mindless tasks will be automated, I'll have to think all day, more than doubling my workload. The mindless tasks let me recover and context switch. Without them I'm doing a lot more work!

Artificial intelligence is a liability

Re: Much of customer service is just people blindly following a script anyway.

"we might be able to use AI itself to suggest how to redeploy labor displaced by it!"

Cycle to generate power until they lose efficiency, then burn them... also to generate power.

Something nasty injected login-stealing JavaScript into 50K online banking sessions

The article is a little coy about the "other methods". Danabot attacks can use malvertising too - https://securityaffairs.com/155184/cyber-crime/danabot-spread-cactus-ransomware.html

Uh-oh, update Google Chrome – exploit already out there for one of these 6 security holes

Re: Chrome?

I'll see your janky corporate Chrome and raise you Bing in IE emulation mode...

Windows 11 23H2 is a Teams effort but Microsoft already spoiled the best bits

Re: Skype etc

MS Communicator was perfect. Copy/paste formatting? Check. Local storage? Check. Crystal clear audio? Check.

Everything since has been worse, sometimes worser (that awful Cisco yoke for example).

Teams is Corporate Policy gone mad :(

Infosys co-founder calls for youth to work 70-hour weeks

Re: Ok, let's abuse the children!

Bear it in mind when next you're asked for feedback on the outsourcers. The teams I had were routinely exhausted, training and time off not planned in to sprints, all working US hours. Unsustainable madness that resulted in poor engagement and poor quality work.

Sorry kids, Infosys and Wipro have cancelled graduate recruitment

Manglement

"pyramid optimization to onshore offshore rationalization"

You really do learn something new every day...

Infosys launches aviation cloud it claims can halve lost luggage

Re: 5%???

Generally it means the box (empty) is not in the place the ULD tracking system says it is. Like another poster says, wetware has to follow the process. If they don't scan the ULD as arrived or loaded on a plane (a problem when they ad-hoc change them due to knackerage or size limits), they end up wrong and hard to correct.

Airport chaos as eGates down for the count across UK

23x6x364

WTF?! A system in a 24 hour operating environment that never stops that has to have everything down for maintenance at the same time? I've worked in the airline industry for mumble years; we've spent our lives removing downtime, working for 99.999% uptime and largely achieved it. Now all this new crapware comes along and it's not even designed for basic uptime?!

Scared of flying? Good news! Software glitches keep aircraft on the ground

Re: NATS crashed.

For that route, the probability of error was 1/1...

Re: Hmmm...

So it's a known issue? A known issue that wasn't tested?!

Every admission is a new scandal :)

IIRC a dodgy flight plan caused the last outage. How did they not learn the last time that the first rule of resilience is to get back operational? Find the error data, poke it out, restart quickly. They're not saying a restart takes 4 hours are they?

IBM says GenAI can convert that old COBOL code to Java for you

Re: Meh

I heard a story, almost certainly apocryphal, that a UK bank had converted COBOL to C++. The resulting mess was so bad, the developers would fix bugs by eyeballing the original COBOL, updating it and then reconverting to C++. It ran, but it was untouchable ever after.

IBM shows off its sense of humor in not-so-funny letter leak

Re: Most established companies have variations on this.

Write only memory, the bitbucket, a random IPL setting to save the ops the work of restarting the wrong machine (that one may have been internal though).

Bad software destroyed my doctor's memory

When I started, I was in Marketing Automation or Agency Automation (in the airline/travel industry). The idea was the existing paper processes were good and existed for a reason, and the IT challenge was to automate them. That was it. Not to reinvent them, not to put a one-size-fits-all solution in.

ChatGPT study suggests its LLMs are getting dumber at some tasks

Re: ChatGPT getting dumber at programming

I'll have you know I'm suing for copyright infringement. Anything that bad must have been looking at my code.

Ex-Twitter employees owed half a billion in severance, says lawsuit

Right, employees are unsecured creditors, and there's a lot of senior debt that is going to take a shave.

Red Hat strikes a crushing blow against RHEL downstreams

Re: I am surprised that IBM took this long

Do you smell that? That IBM smell. Nothing in the world smells like that. It smells like 'closed'...

Users accuse Intuit of 'heavy-handed' support changes on QuickBooks for Desktop

Re: I'm still on 2007

I'm still using Quicken98... I don't even have pants that old.

Airline puts international passengers on the scales pre-flight

I've only ever seen the full body scanners in the US. The rest of the world makes do with walk through metal detectors.

Europe’s biggest city council faces £100M bill in Oracle ERP project disaster

Well it is project FAP...

What's your Mean Time To Innocence – the time needed to prove that mess is not your problem

Not waving, but drowning

in observability. The side cars are running full steam, the metrics are flowing. They all break at the same time in slightly different ways. Which is chicken and which is egg? SNOWbody knows...

Fed up with Python setup and packaging? Try a shot of Rye

No man is an island, except a python user

20 some posts, and nary an upvote.

Not only do the 20 people not agree with each other, everyone else reading the thread doesn't either. Not disagree enough to downvote, that would be rude...

Payments firm accused of aiding 'contact Microsoft about a virus' scammers must cough $650k

Mainframe

I pretended my only computer was a dumb terminal connected to an IBM mainframe. Then I suggested using my teletype console printer and sending a printout of the response.

Another time, I acted like he was a double-glazing salesman and whenever he mentioned windows, I would say I already bought new ones and describe them.

Mostly I ask them to hold on a minute and put the phone down by the radio/stereo and walk away.

Amazon CEO says AWS staff now spending ‘much of their time’ optimizing customers’ clouds

Re: Chicken, welcome to the roost...

"The lazy naïve way to "lift and shift" from on-prem to the cloud is to create a new EC2 for each existing VM. That never works out, cost-wise."

It depends. I was going to put a complex answer to back that up, but I'm already into pages of ifs and buts. Some short bits - if you are already in a managed DC (even if it is one you own), the cloud is probably cheaper than your current vendor. If you have strong DR requirements, the cloud is probably cheaper. If you are already clustering your workflows using Openshift or K8s, the cloud is probably cheaper).

The implementation details really, really matter though. As you say, life and shift is only step 1...

Uber driver info stolen yet again: This time from law firm

Re: Legal stuff

Yeah, it sounded like union busting activities to me.

Microsoft to stop accepting checks from partners

The cheque marque.

Free-Teams-gate: Docker apologizes for shooting itself in the foot

Re: IBM Forced Us Into It

Podman to the rescue!

At work, this is where we are heading as the Docker license fee for Docker desktop becomes substantial.

You can use a Dockerfile to build a Podman image, or you should be able to just run the Docker image with the Podman daemon.

https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2020/11/19/transitioning-from-docker-to-podman

https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/run-podman-windows

On windows, WSL2 is used which is not without foibles, so if you're running a production workload, I'm not sure I'd recommend it.

The UK's bad encryption law can't withstand global contempt

Re: One rule for them, another for the rest of us.

" Its just a Public School classics education doesn't give you the technical smarts to understand this sort of thing."

Well, a Public School education doesn't equip you for accepting you are wrong and cannot be right about a subject with a wrong/right answer. It's not about understanding, it's about the willingness to understand when it could change your view on the subject. The whole denigration of expertise is based on this "don't tell me what will change my mind".