Posts by Doctor Syntax

Microsoft research shows chatbots seeping into everyday life

Re: F*** OFF!

It's easy. You boot from the USB device with the installer for the Linux of your choice. Alternatively you need a very large hammer.

Re: Personal experience: Confirmed!

"They lost the argument."

Do they know this?

Re: It's worse than you thought

"are so deeply worried all the time that they have to ask existential questions at 2AM"

Deeply worried or drunk but missing their mates after closing time?

Re: The most frequently asked question was...

I wondered about "seeping". Is it the best verb? "Corroding" might fit. Any oher options?

Crypto-crasher Do Kwon jailed for 15 years over $40bn UST bust

Do South Korea get him after he's done his US time?

And armies are backed by fiat currencies.

Home Office staff still leaning on 25-year-old asylum case management system

John Reid was right. Decades later he's still right.

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

Re: Go, Look, See

True - but only if there's somebody in the same premises who can do that.

Trump's AI 'Genesis Mission' emerges from Land of Confusion

"Industry collaborators listed on the DOE's Genesis webpage include AMD, Microsoft, Oracle, Anthropic, Nvidia, IBM, AWS, and OpenAI."

I take it this is a list of beneficiaries.

AI mania to swell datacenter capex to $1.6T by 2030 – if the bubble doesn't pop first

Re: and the winner is...

I'm not sure about Nvidia now. It's fine to sell shovels to the gold prospectors but it now seems that they're taking a stake in the holes as well so that will be lost when the bubble bursts.

This has all the hallmarks of a desperate attempt to spend their way out of a hole in the irrational belief that that can be done. It disregards the first and only rule of holes: when you're in one stop digging.

Airbus exec: Most CIOs in Europe will not finish SAP ECC6 migration by 2030

When you're locked in and your vendor says "jump" you jump. Obey your puppet-master.

Oracle raises AI spending estimate, spooks investors

Re: Cue even more aggrecious

"Aggrecious" - a new word to me but it seems the interwebs have a definition - aggressive and ferocious although I think there are overtones of egregious and greed in there as well.

Re: POP!

Heavily damaging the likes of Oracle will leave opportunities for the rest.

Welcome to America - now show us your last five years of social media posts

Re: sitting this out till MAGA is gone

The army will want paying. That needs money. Acquiring money needs trade. Trade is hard when you've pissed off all your potential customers.

American exceptionalism might make you feel good but it doesn't pay the bills.

Re: “God’s Own country”

We don't have any border posts. Not even on the borders with Lancashire.

Re: The right number of corners

"But don't mention the edges."

Don't even go near them. You might fall off.

Re: sitting this out till MAGA is gone

Maybe, maybe not. The next few presidents are very likely going to have to put a lot of effort into restoring the country's good name with the rest of the world.

Re: Crikey.

Are you sure? One would have to have massive self confidence to go to such lengths to make people think so ill. Either that or be stupid.

Re: Hopefully...

... and don't forget the leg-irons.

Re: Bovvered?

I wonder if making such a demand in the UK would fall foul of modern anti-slavery legislation as it sounds an awful lot of having to buy your own freedom.

Why would anyone want to visit a country that enshrines the right to get shot in its constitution?

It hasn't slipped my memory that for years US govts. turned a blind eye to those supporting terrorism in the UK. Terrorism that killed a lot of people including a few I'd met. Terrorism that bombed my place of work. So I recognise a prime example of hypocrisy when I see it.

10K Docker images spray live cloud creds across the internet

The price of security is eternal paranoia. Vigilance is not enough.

Paraphrased from Len Deighton.

Really Simple Licensing spec lets web publishers demand their due from AI scrapers

Re: Enforcement?

"Digital sequences lack intrinsic monetary worth"

If you bother to click through some of the links in the article you'll find that the mechanism can set a price. As with any other good or service a potential purchaser can compare their view of the worth with the price and, if the thing isn't worth the price they can go elsewhere but if they take it, either after due consideration or negligently then they owe the price.

What's needed next is to go through the logs for billing purposes. That bit might not be easy as it would require identifying the scraper from an IP address. Nevertheless, as in Brewster's comment below, if the scraper has an outlet in the publisher's jurisdiction then there are all the elements to bill the scraper and there are well established means to enforce payment. The small claims route mentioned there is particularly interesting if a lot of people use it. A successful defence can't claim costs so sending a heavyweight lawyer will cost more than the bill, ignoring it gets the bailiffs at the door.

Re: Nice idea, but...

"Bonus point if you get to send in the bailiffs."

Triple bonus points if you get a winding up order against them.

US teens not only love AI, but also let it rot their brains

"love AI, but also let it rot their brains"

Are we sure it isn't really the other way around?

Microsoft won't fix .NET RCE bug affecting slew of enterprise apps, researchers say

"users should avoid consuming untrusted input that could generate and execute code,"

Does Microsoft have a definitive list of ways in which that could happen so that users will know how to avoid them?

How to answer the door when the AI agents come knocking

“These AI apps and AI agents, specifically with generative AI, they are (using) non deterministic patterns"

Translation: non deterministic = unpredictable.

To take his example ‘Hey, go book me a flight, or find me a hotel' and agent goes on to book a flight to Mogadishu because that was the next available flight and he didn't say he wanted to go to Miami. Having booked a flight the first part of the "or" is complete so maybe nothing else is done. OTOH, as it is non-deterministic it goes on to book an hotel; it books all available rooms (he didn't say how many) at the Premier Inn just down the road because it's local.

Re: Audits

Forget operation stopping incidents, worry instead about litigation-inducing incidents.

Linux Foundation aims to become the Switzerland of AI agents

Perhaps we need a new foundation to look after Linux and not owned by the tech bros.

Australia bans teens from social media, but nobody thinks it'll really work

Re: "children won't be able to escape the ban forever" — Minister "responsible."

"I suspect the media companies might be more pro·active in future fearing a much more heavy handed approach in other jurisdictions"

Not just in other jurisdictions. If some harm befalls a child in Oz who is using a site despite a ban the site now finds itself more clearly in the wrong and is going to get hammered hard. It becomes far more worthwhile for sites to police what happens. That might have been the thinking behind it - don't actually keep the teens off the sites but make the sites start to act responsibly.

Letting Nvidia sell H200s to China is closing the door after the horse has bolted

Re: "China is no longer dependent on Western technologies"

There have been various restrictions of this sort on exports to China for years and for years some of us were saying that it would just accelerate China's development of the technologies affected. In this case it's not just Trump. it's a general assumption that nobody else could manage to develop whatever it was. The reality was going to be that China would do it anyway but embargoes added extra incentives.

Diversion to power datacenters earns Boom Supersonic a ticket to revive fast air transport

A long duration or continuous operation for an aircraft engine will be the duration of its longest route.

Re: Boom vs aeroderivative vs industrial turbines

"designed to run 'Hard and fast' for long durations"

It depends on what they mean by "long duration"

Galactic Brain space datacenter coming in 2027, pledges startup Aetherflux

"The race for artificial general intelligence is fundamentally a race for compute capacity, and by extension, energy," And cooling. I wonder if he's proposing water cooled or air colled. Either way, he's in for disappointment.

Porsche panic in Russia as pricey status symbols forget how to car

Re: Old news.

That sounds more credible.

They'll generally work for "a while", before locking out the next attempt to start if no signal is received while running.

If that were the case you'd expect the problem occurrence to be spread depending on when the car was last driven. This seems to have happened more or less all at once. And only a single country is affected? If it's related to tracking S/W the system will require mapping data. It sounds like a problem downloading a new country map.

If it needs a view of satellite to work how does it cope with being parked in an underground garage or even one with a metal-clad roof? Or driving into a tunnel? And stay away from car ferries.

Electric cars no more likely to flatten you than the noisy ones, study finds

Re: "Safety Technologies"

What would theae "safety technologies" be which putatively "help them to evade crashes"?

Not exclusively EVs. Modern cars in general seem to have obstacle detection which can warn or apply brakes. They are triggered by all sorts of things: wall or hedge across the road when approaching the stop line of a T junction, oncoming traffic in the opposite lane, crossing traffic at a roundabout or nothing obvious whatsoever.

I wonder if any research has been done into optimal AVAS sound effects. I still can't understand why the sound for mine in EV mode is a cross between a worn wheel bearing and a dragging brake pad.

Vibe coding will deliver a wonderful proliferation of personalized software

Re: It's going to be interesting

"Currently a human developer will consider edge cases and exceptions during the initial design."

Only if the PM makes provision for doing it properly. I think we can all think of examples where that doesn't happen. Even "initial design" appears to have been superfluous in some cases.

Re: If this was slashdot...

I think you're mixing too many different things in there.

As far as the only 4GL I've used (Informix) it was simply a matter of adding abstractions for handling a TUI, relational database (by incorporating SQL) and report generation to what was more or less structured Basic. These were aspects of application development which had come to the fore after the original 3GLs had been developed. It was a very sensible thing to do an provided more productive way of writing applications than writing ESQLC directly*, so much so that when one of the older ESQLC applications needed substantial changes it got rewritten in 4GL.

RAD gets applied as a label to all sorts of things. On the one hand the earlier Informix tool, Perform could be classed as RAD although to do anything particularly advanced needed linking ESQLC into its interpreter. And I've certainly come across an example that had got out of hand and had to be rewritten. OTOH as a fast prototyping tool it was very useful for exploring the essentials of what was needed with a user.

It also gets applied to tools such as Delphi which is fair enough in terms of putting together the GUI - a lot more straightforward than building it with hand written code but is still gong to need the rest of the application to be written in code and in my view its abstraction of relational databases was a good deal clunkier than I4GL.

None of these obviate the need for skilled development - they simply provide abstractions for aspects of application development that were not requirements when the first 3GLs were scoped.

Reducing the skill level needed for development has been a dream almost from the start of computing. COBOL and FORTRAN were devised on the basis that business and scientific users respectively could write their own programs. You just have to consider each attempt on its merits.

* It could compile to an intermediate code to be executed by an interpreter or to ESQLC.

IBM drops $11B on Confluent to feed next-gen AI ambitions

Re: the next wave of enterprise AI

You remember all those patents that took something existing and added "... with a computer" and then those that added "... with a moblie phone"? Well, now it's ".... with GPUs" or ".... with an LLM".

NASA nominee Isaacman moves to full Senate vote amid budget carnage

"relocating a space vehicle (likely Space Shuttle Discovery) to Houston"

I'm sure that with all the consultation, investigation and detailed planning needed the entire budget for this, along with Trump's term in office, will have expired without a single rivet being displaced.

IBM touts progress on tech stack for AI-enabled airline with no passengers or alcohol

It's a bit worrying as I live more or less under the approach to an airport. Not an airport they use but with AI being thrown about it's not going to be that significant. On reflection it probably doesn't matter too much about living under an approach.

Re: Dangerous Article

Or vice versa

Re: What?

It means if you work there things are about to get worse.

Whitehall rejects £1.8B digital ID price tag – but won't say what it will cost

Re: won't say what it will cost

"followed by the inevitable cancellation."

Not very likely as most parties and all the govt. departments concerned are unlikely to relinquish their grasp on us whatever the cost.

Bezos-backed Unconventional AI aims to make datacenter power problems go away

Re: Twaddle

"If you want to build an analogue computer, you design it to process analogue signals from the start."

As far as I can make out, that's exactly the point. Brains are analogue (all biological control systems are analogue).

The AI/ML/LLM stuff is trying to emulate that in binary and in doing so is extremely inefficient.

As far as I can make out that's his argument.