Posts by yoganmahew

AI-authored code contains worse bugs than software crafted by humans

Re: I've said it once

I agree with you claptrap, but let me rephrase: To even get to the correctness stage, the code must be legible.

Otherwise code review will also miss the hidden incorrectness. There's no perfect code, particularly when you are externally surfaced. Race conditions are particularly difficult to prove correctness for.

So yes, the code must run and pass its tests for temporaly proof of correctness, but it's only correct within the bounded context of how it's tested.

To be reviewable, it must be legible.

To be fixable for when it inevitably breaks, it must be understandable.

Re: until some fwit removes comments to "save spacce"

That's how the modern developers in my company work. No comments anywhere.

Meanwhile the ancient assembler has oodles of comments, not all of them useful, but often explaining 'why' - the business use case for the exception to the standard code flow.

The modern code is almost entirely divorced from the business case it's solving. It's pretty, it's efficient, but it's not maintainable and the onboarding cost for new developers is steep.

Code for serious business functions has a long shelf life. I'm still working on transmission products designed in the 1930s (https://www.atchistory.org/a-brief-history-of-air-traffic-data-communications/), they are as relevant today as they were then - event-driven, store-and-forward, guaranteed delivery. Even AI has heard of them :D

'Exploitation is imminent' as 39 percent of cloud environs have max-severity React hole

Re: Cut the crud

" Only grandparents and grey breads do things manually"

Ah, that explains the slightly yeasty smell and the crustiness.

With you 100%, though, it's always "sophisticated" to attack a "trivially exploited" bug :/

Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

Re: Is this some kind of joke?

When you're charging by CPU cycles (as everything in the cloud is), idle time is a cost. Learned from IBM at a young age...

HSBC spies $207B crater in OpenAI's expansion goals

Re: Some rather bold claims!

A ruler, two datapoints and a crayon is all you need. To the moon!

Microsoft's fix for slow File Explorer: load it before you need it

Re: Midnight Commander still works

I also remember some class of 2list that lets you have two windows file manager trees open in the same window! Side-by-side! (2list may have been my alias for it...).

Praise Amazon for raising this service from the dead

Large files are in git precisely because it's git - they exist, can be monitored for changes, can't be lost. Documentation as code (asciidoc, markup and the like) mean the documentation system git has to take all sorts. Once you accept that, size and content type limitations becomes arbitrary. Big E has been let down by big Tech for Enterprise grade document management forever. Everyone hates Sharepoint. Everyone.

Palo Alto kit sees massive surge in malicious activity amid mystery traffic flood

Re: False flag?

In cider leaks, pint of fizzy for your trouble.

Software engineer reveals the dirty little secret about AI coding assistants: They don't save much time

Re: "Tales from the pit"

Should I have added [sic]?

Re: "Tales from the pit"

35 years in development on the back of a history degree. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've needed maths for anything. Those seven times was plugging values into algorithms other, smarter people wrote. Basic A-level (high school) maths suffices. If you're writing algorithms, you have to already ask yourself if the solution you are implementing is too complex. Never mind premature optimisation, reinventing the wheel is to be avoided.

A single DNS race condition brought Amazon's cloud empire to its knees

Re: Asynchonous Programming is HARD

@pfalcon

Came here to say that about asynchronous!

Every time you have two processes running with the same target, it is inevitable that they will at some stage process out of order; not just a chance, inevitable.

If you don't have a way to know that is happening, or a way to deal with what happens when it does, you shoulld stick to synchronous locks.

AI gets more 'meh' as you get to know it better, researchers discover

Re: AI == Divination?

You may unbugger yourself. You were, of course, thinking of Peter Cushing as the third doctor ;)

Tech troubles create aviation chaos on both sides of the Atlantic

Re: Eventually everything gets cracked

The oldest code is largely non-exploitable in its original setting; it's what was replatformed/outsourced/clouded/and now, AI recoded that is going to be a huge PITA.

Samsung fixes Android 0-day that may have been used to spy on WhatsApp messages

"Extremely sophisticated attack" me hole. Samsung are dogshit for loading their own crapware on every device. It makes for incredibly slow performance at times. With the amount of it, it's inevitable there are bugs in it. So let's rephrase "inevitable outcome of unnecessary software that has no consequences for Samsung".

‘IT manager’ needed tech support because they had never heard of a command line

Re: Thus it is

It's a toss-up which is worse, the manager who cheerfully admits they know nothing, ot the manager who claims knowledge because they can connect their iPhone to any other iThing, though not of course to a Windows box. Add in a bit of SQL, a dash of excel macros, a soupcon of Cloud for Leaders, and you have a moron micro-managing you and keeping you away from meetings you really should be at...

Techie ended vendor/client blame game by treating managers like toddlers

Re: Who to blame?

The cloud is no better, I am having a discussion about a managed database as a service that had latency issues. The vendor (who may be a little poorer this week) is pointing at an increase in traffic from my end 3 hours into the increased latency. I've spent countless hours drawing pictures using the vendor's own tool pointing this out to no avail. My last missive has a new support guy, who will no doubt start the process again, directing me to the manual...

Researcher who found McDonald's free-food hack turns her attention to Chinese restaurant robots

Re: food fight

So many good lines :D

Re: food fight

Versus the Dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler (of Bexhill-on-Sea)!

Why the UK public sector still creaks along on COBOL

Re: 'Legacy' does not = 'obsolete' or 'bad'

With those undocumented workflows, how do you propose to refactor? The efforts to offload fail because what's being offloaded is not understood. This is rule number 1 of mainframe offload, you have to know what you are doing.

OpenAI's GPT-5 looks less like AI evolution and more like cost cutting

Re: Consistency

Right and model changes result is pretty significant output changes. If you're building your own agentic flows or training 'expert' agents, an upgrade is becoming increasingly expensive, no matter how good the new model is.

'Close to impossible' for Europe to escape clutches of US hyperscalers

Re: Not a realistic option

The only things companies respond to are levies and fines and only when they are turnover base;, tax the bastards into submission.

Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, economists claim

Re: Productivity numbers have a problem

Tell that to the airline industry. Automation has cut headcount massively over the years. Productivity in the industry is, IMO, misattributed to plane technologoy or deregulation, but in reality, an airline is a complex set of computer systems with wings. Banking too is mostly IT and has been for a long time.

Having been around since the dawn of the microcomputer and it's regular use in the late 1900s, I can attest to the increase in productivity of tasks such as documentation; it is taken for granted now that failing to do documentation is much less cost saving than failing to do documenation was when it had to go to the typing pool, come back, be proof-read and marked up in pencil, returned to the typing pool and eventually filed in a room full of spiders. Now you have to find project overruns from somewhere else, QA usually.

Trump tariffs to make prices great – a gain

Re: "For the offshore workers, there are no alternative jobs. It is this or hunger."

You're wildly naive if you think it is just a US issue, particularly on an IT related website.

The IT world moves fast, so why are admins slow to upgrade?

You missed testing. Functional end to end testing by people who know what they should see.

It's really, really expensive.

Most companies don't have the capacity to reliably change what they are using. Some go ahead anyway with mixed results. You might get lucky that the DB or server works similarly enough that there are no issues. You might not. If you are on contract to deliver the product, you blame the customer, see posts above...

Tiny Linux kernel tweak could cut datacenter power use by 30%, boffins say

Re: #pragma pack(0)

The start of the struct is the boundary, not the contents. Within the struct, you have to optimise manually.

This is the way, well, this has been the way on IBM mainframes since I was a boy. LTORG will do a bunch of smart organising of literals for you, DSects you do yourself and pay attention to what you're doing.

Obligatory "don't they teach anything in school these days?"

Sonos CEO steps down after smart speaker app upgrade hit bum note

Re: "henceforth “always establish rigorous quality benchmarks

It's not just that nobody is responsible for monitoring the quality of the replacement software, it's that anyone who talks about errors or gaps in the new product is shouted down, sidelined as not being committed, or flat out fired. All you can do sometimes is sit back with popcorn and wait for it to fail.

25 years on from Y2K, let's all be glad it happened way back then

Re: Well, we have 2038 to look forward to

"Contrast that now with a code camped web developer raised on an iPad - the planes would indeed be falling from the sky."

Well, being one of those gen-Xers who worked on y2k mission critical systems (airline), I can tell you we didn't all know about execution cycles, nor did we need to.

Give the zoomers a break, a tiktoker would explain what they need to do in interpretative dance with a catchy soundtrack from the seventies and they'd all get on a chat and feel their way to a soluton.

Even Netflix struggles to identify and understand the cost of its AWS estate

Re: Get a Dog, Learn to Bark

Who runs the DC? Is it your people all the way down?

The banks I know outsource the infra to a service company that owns the building, power, racking, network connections (usually sub-let to Telcos).

And is there no-one else in your DC?

Perhaps the US is different, but when we had our 'own' DCs, they weren't ours. They were somewhere between IAAS and PAAS; there was always someone else doing the basic running of the building and utilities.

Re: Get a Dog, Learn to Bark

Nobody runs their own datacentres. I work for a large corporation. We had 19 data centres, all provided by and managed by different service companies at different depths of hands-on. Barely a month went by without an issue at one or other of them. Since migrating to GCP (multiple regions around the world) we've had almost nothing that was GCP related (our punishments have been self-inflicted). There's lots of pain in the cloud, but reliability isn't generally one of them, at least not if you architecture properly. Now, I've no doubt some of our lift-and-shift is suboptimal and there would be a scramble to recover it, but we've had those scrambles multiple times with our 'own' DCs.

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine

GenAi cannot count. It's a mistake to think of it as a logical sequence, it's a statistical probability engine with a statistical relevance filter.

I am doubtful that GenAI is the answer to enshittification of search, that it is currently producing better results shows how far search has fallen. GenAI is good if you are looking for an answer, less so if you are looking for a range of answers to choose to explore one in more detail.

Whomp-whomp: AI PCs make users less productive

"But, it cannot invent that which it does not know about"

Oh but it can. and it's a significant issue. It gets worse the better the prompt you write about something the ChatAI doesn't know about.

Classic Outlook explodes when opening more than 60 emails

30 years of MS products and still no way to easily do task management beyond "keep this email open until I answer it".

"The attachment from this email is still open, don't close the email"

"You can't attach this, you have it open and unmodified"

"You don't have permission to mark this conversation chain in your inbox as read"

Anything to do with Teams. Copy a conversation? Duck you with a blunt pole. Find a previous conversation? Me hole you can (see pole). Paste with formatting? Paste my shiny MS arse.

Developer pockets $2M in savings from going cloud-free

Re: Controls and discipline

It sounds like hell. Have you considered not having computers at all? Going back to pen and paper?

The problem for SMEs is that the cloud discounts are what makes cloud affordable for standard operations. Only the big players get the big discounts. Everyone else spends their lives chasing random cost instead of making new things (or fixing existing things). My own small cloud application (a few hundred TPS) costs next to nothing to run on GCP native services, mainly because it is part of a large GKE cluster and there are swinging discounts. If you're not operating at scale and you just lifted and shifted, you're almost certainly not going to get cost benefits.

One-year countdown to 'biggest Ctrl-Alt-Delete in history' as Windows 10 approaches end of support

Re: Hardware is not the issue

I'm with you I-Ron. I have the same issues with usability in 11, it's UI seems to be designed to be anti-productive. I spend more of my time at work in WSL now, launching from the command line like the heady days of DOS.

Windows Recall might be a useful feature, if you could trust MS (I don't, LinkedIn is the latest in a long line of MS products that quietly tries to shaft you).

2 kids laptops and a desktop, wife's desktop, my two laptops. None of them upgradable, all of them perfectly cromulent. It's beginning to look a lot like Linux... if only any of the GUIs had a ducking usable cursor.

Ryanair faces GDPR turbulence over customer ID checks

Re: Trust the third party has done everything correctly?

All the OTAs either:

1. Go through a traditional GDS to make their bookings that has the capability to collect and pass on journey contact details. This capability was introduced during Covid and has been retained as useful in disruptions.

2. Go directly to the airline using a private or NDC API. In the case of NDC, passenger contact is also available.

Any OTA that fails to provide this is shite.

Any airline that demands direct update of contact details is shite.

As IBM pushes for more automation, its AI simply not up to the job of replacing staff

Re: "As IBM pushes for more automation, its AI simply not up to the job of replacing staff"

Yeah, and the problem is, by the time the beancounters realise that the staff they 'let go' aren't replaced by productivity improvements, those staff are really gone. Many into permanent retirement, some into less hamster-wheel intense jobs. All realising there isn't enough money to want to go back to the hell-hole they were previously in (it's de facto a hell-hole if management thinks that they can replace staff with AI...).

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.