Posts by Doctor Syntax

AI investment is the only thing keeping the US out of recession

Re: They have a Plan B.

It never had allies, only interests.

MPs urge government to stop Britain's phone theft wave through tech

Re: Apple Samsung Google

"A campaign to advertise how to lock a stolen device might be more useful than more legislation."

Legislation is what politicians do. It's just another example of "if all you have is a hammer...."

Re: Repairable? or Theft-Proof?

Somehow I've never been able to trust my phone with any access to my bank account.

Uncle Sam's new power plan will plug AI farms into the grid faster

Enjoy your brownouts.

Sneaky Mermaid attack in Microsoft 365 Copilot steals data

Re: As Copilot is out of scope

They wouldn't be able to afford all the payouts.

New boss took charge of project code and sent two billion unwanted emails

Re: The only thing I find odd about this story

I also found it odd that he became a team player.

Re: Good email server

I understand from those who did administrate and manage email servers, that setting up such systems is "intricate"

Deleting the offender's account is quick and easy, however.

Re: Email Swamping...

"Then, the next week they do it again."

There are times when the only action is to tell them that if they do it again their email account will be taken down for a week, doubling up for each further offence. Let them discover something about eponentials.

Maybe they are ... in a different time zone and it's the middle of the night there.

"Every. Single. Morning:"

Have an autoresponder saying "The answer is the same as it was yesterday. It will also be the same tomorrow."

How do you solve a problem like Discovery?

Re: It's just physics

"you may find it best to utilise a frictionless plane"

From what I hear Washingon has a surfeit of grease these days. That should help.

Re: The answer is LEGO!

OK, simple solution then. Swap the seats between model and real shuttle. Houston's model now has seats that carried astronauts to orbit and back. Close enough for government work.

Instead of 10 Hindenbburgs use a huge cluster of those Baby Trump balloons. Steering it might be a bit tricky but an erratic course seems to come naturally to him.

Re: The obvious solution is...

You don't think they'll get round to building anything over top of that wreckage, do you?

Alaska Airlines grounded by mystery IT meltdown

Re: Fallback

They don't even have to go completely old-school. They can use the computer to print it out. When it's working.

Britain's Ministry of Justice just signed up to ChatGPT Enterprise

It's going to take a lot of work writing case reports to match all those hallucinated citations it introduces. If it's given the task of writing them itself it will just introduce more of them.

Senators accuse Smithsonian of 'illegal lobbying' over Discovery squabbles

Nearest thing to a realistic solution so far.

Re: Other issues? Ballroom

My guess is that Trump will leave behind him a ruined shuttle and a ruined East Wing as the visible metaphors for everything else.

SAP says some customers are dragging their feet on contract sign-offs

Understanding

"Klein said customers understood they would pay a premium for SAP's ERP platform in the cloud."

I think it's more likely that Klein things customers should understand they have to pay a premium.

It seems as if he's received their message but not understood it.

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

Re: Asynchonous Programming is HARD

"Juniors are more likely to feel the pressure to deliver (and kowtow to a PHB)"

I've often said paranoia is the first requirement of a database manager. I'll add "ability to terrify PHBs" to that.

Re: Looks like they still didn't catch the cause

If it's a race condition "slow" is a relative term. It just means slower than Planner could handle.

Re: bed is stuck

What state is humanity in when a bed has to "work" at all. Existence should be sufficient.

Re: bed is stuck

Whoosh

Re: I am vaguely reminded of an incident from my past

Nailed it.

Switching off unused machines, good (OK, I'm old enough to think saving energy is a Good Idea).

Having uncontrollable forced download & update bad. Whoever thought of such nonsense?

Re: Ouch

Read: "Voodoo"

In this case, Voodon't

Amazon's AI specs aim to stop delivery drivers getting lost between van and porch

Computer could say "Must not drive to next destination until all items have been delivered" but Amazon would only cock tat up as well.

Re: Post-code GPS coords

"The problem there is not the drivers', it's the company itself using the Post-Office database for deliveries, which (if memory serves) does indeed not go down any closer geo-spatially than post-code centroid lat/longs."

Absolutely this. It's the company that refuses to accept correct coordinates.

In our case it's complicated by the fact that few houses in the lane have numbers and that the sequence of numbers is not entirely rational - 1 to 4 are a row on one side, half way alone, 1A & 1B are on the other side, back at the start. The rest have names, usually conspicuously displayed. One neighbour, by some reckoning system decided his must be no 19 so renamed his house "Nineteen".

If offered the choice I specify Royal Mail. The posties not only know where we live, they also know where our daughter lives and have delivered something of ours there for some good reason I can't now recall. They probably know about SWMBO's sister as well.

They must be scanning the codes already in order to email confirmation of delivery.

It would be very possible for a simple count of "2 out of 4 boxes found so far" to be displayed already. If it is the driver ignores it.

Currently they have no appropriate error handling to cover an expected code being missed. The consequence is that very strange things happen when the expected doesn't. I very much doubt that another scan will make any difference whatsoever except throwing a few AI hallucinations into the mix alongside the existing ones.

They could provide the driver with the destinations one at a time and only provide the next after the delivery has been completed. That would prevent the driver ignoring a warning. Of course there will be occasions when, for one reason or another, the delivery can't be completed and that would only provide them with more opportunities for bizarre failure modes.

IME it's not Amazon drivers who have the worst problems finding the front door. It's another company whose name is a TLA that insists the GPS coordinates are at the centre of the postcode about 100 metres away round he corner, refused to update them when supplied and consequently has delivered to a house there.. It also seems to dictate - and possibly monitor - that divers park there, in the narrowest part of the lane so the alternative has been a driver leaving his van there to walk the rest of the way.

Amazon's problem is dropping off only part of the delivery or possibly none at all and then getting thoroughly confused as to how to deal with it. I don't suppose AI would help with the first part of that but would certainly heap on more confusion.

Microsoft puts Office Online Server on the chopping block

Re: typo...

Why the joke alert?

Just in time for non-USian businesses starting to fret about data sovereignty.

Microsoft threatens to ram Copilot into Exchange Server on-prem

Re: Must admit I'm confused...

It probably has but words mean nothing.

If you want to explain AI in terms of human understanding you should read the Feynman talk about cargo cults.

The survey results will be summarised by Copilot and it won't take "no" for an answer.

UK.gov vows to hack through regulation to get benefit from AI

Lloyds Banking Group

I read that as Lloyds Barking Group. It made more sense.

Microsoft finance slang defines the eternal optimist: The 'hockey stick on wheels'

Your phone example is an instance of another delusion - that all projections assume exponential growth, not sigmoidal and the further delusion that the sales will represent the growth of the market even when the product is a durable in which case they're the first derivative.

With impeccable timing, AWS debuts automated cloud incident report generator

Re: But did it work on Monday?

Working on it for some time?

They probably vibe-coded it in reaction to Monday. It'll work impeccably.

UK data regulator defends decision not to investigate MoD Afghan data breach

Re: Probably pragmatic

They need to be able to hold individuals responsible. Not necessarily the individual who sent the email but whoever was responsible for the process that required and/or allowed sending data in s spreadsheet instead of being exported as some other form such as CSV or PDF.

Great. MoD commits massive security breach but won't allow proper investigation because of security.

And can we jus recite once more:

"Excel is not a database"

Jaguar Land Rover cyber-meltdown tipped to cost the UK almost £2B

Re: Is there an issue with vanishing posts?

I think somebody must have bitten the hand that fed IT.

Total Inability To See Users' Posts.

Re: Political depths of transparency, compared to Amazon's downtime.

Wealthy Britons are generally too lazy to go to the trouble of making things or employing people in Britain

FTFY

OpenBSD 7.8 out now, and you're not seeing double, 9front releases 'Release'

" the Reg FOSS desk strongly dislikes Bluetooth"

IME a lot of allegedly Bluetooth capable devices don't like it either.

Fake home invasion vid lands woman in real trouble

A case in which the AI worked better than the real intelligence.

Re: 8 police cars?

Cumulatively those petty thefts can end up being a drain on a neighbourhood and cost the householders money on their insurance. Doing nothing lets them run on. A better tactic would be to take a quick look and see if there's an occasional one that leaves something for a follow-up. In your instance, does the front garden have a gate with a nice shiny metal handle on it that might take a print? Did the thief cross a patch of soil soft enough to leave a footprint? Obviously it helps a lot if the police have a suspect but even if they do have one nothing will happen without some crime scene evidence.

Carnegie Mellon team claims vector-based system can turbocharge PostgreSQL

"not just for developers with little experience of database management"

Developers with little experience of database management can wreck performance just with application code.

AI does a better job of ripping off the style of famous authors than MFA students do

But no more than 450 words.

Re: Bright new future

The only excerpt I've heard suggests you've been misinformed.

Re: Define "imitate"

As a software architect with multiple decades of experience, I think that AI can (on a good day, barring insoluble hallucinations) "imitate" me implementing some kind of basic CRUD-capture form

That functionality was built into Informix Perform back in the '80s. A few people, including myself, wrote programs that created basic 4GL code to re-use the screen forms. Not difficult, all the information needed was in the system tables which implemented the SQL schema. No AI needed.

"She's lucky it was back in May. If it was today she'd be on the terrorist watchlist."

Wasn't that back when they were best mates? Now she'd be praised for showing good judgement.

"the AI model makers could face ruinous costs"

Let's hope so, and the sooner the better.

Microsoft's ancient icon library still lurks deep within Windows 11

Embedding icons in an application for the application's own use is one thing. Making them available as a resource for the OS to tag file types etc. is another. But providing an executable for them is just another vulnerability sitting there, deeply embedded in the OS.