Posts by yoganmahew

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.

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).