Posts by Doctor Syntax

Help desk read irrelevant script, so techies found and fixed their own problem

Re: Help Desks shouldn’t be necessary

As a matter of curiosity how do you apply QA to the users of the products? Do they have to pass some sort of test before they're allowed to make a purchase?

Re: KPIs, you get the service you pay for

Get out of there to preserve your sanity.

Re: Been There...

"Mr 'One Answer' was earning his keep by diverting many support calls to 'go off and restore your backup'."

I don't think having customers implement a solution that destroyed data since the previous backup was earning his keep. It might look like that from the point of closing calls but what it would really have been earning was a bad reputation for the product.

"I have worked on & ultimately run 'support functions' in large companies "

You really thought it acceptable for support people to be giving bad answers while they were learning on the job instead of being trained?

Boffins probe commercial AI models, find an entire Harry Potter book

Re: Hang on a minute…

"So far, that is what courts ... have decided to let them do across multiple countries"

Have any such cases actually come to trial and been decided in defendant's favour?

Google pushing Gemini into Gmail, but you can turn it off

Re: Extraordinary

Two favourite quotes about being paranoid:

"The price of safety is eternal paranoia. Vigilance is not enough."

"A paranoid might be defined as someone who has some idea as to what is actually going on."

Re: Privacy

It's better not to be on it.

Trump spectrum sale leaves airlines with $4.5B bill for altimeter do-over

Don't you mean "when it took place"?

Re: Lazy Altimeter Design

Failing to prevent accidents would be an atrocious waste of lives. Yes, I know there have been occasions when some members of the aviation industry have failed to observe that but that should not be accepted as a precedent for future bad behaviour.

Does this mean Air Force 1 and the gold-plated Trumpbo Jumbo are grounded?

UK regulators swarm X after Grok generated nudes from photos

Re: and so now

"is ai a criminal?"

Whatever it is it's more consistent with upper case although we can at least see that you typed ai and not Al.

Re: reasonable

The dress part doesn't seem to have been necessary for your experiment, any clothing would do and using yourself as the subject doesn't involve those tricky questions of consent which you seem to have avoided.

Re: Make Britain Grok-free Again!

Some of them are too clever for that.

Is this a different A/C shill or just a very busy one?

Re: I don't approve of xAI allowing this to happen

"so we won't be feeding Elon Musk to a sabre-toothed cat any time soon."

They've dies out, so no chance. If it were otherwise it could be posted on X. Musk couldn't possibly object - a free speech absolutist would have to grant the cat its say.

Re: I don't approve of xAI allowing this to happen

"Again, if you wish to oppose that, go on, go to the correct forum and oppose it."

And bear in mind you won't be able to do that A/C

Re: They are not at odds with each other

"He recently announced he was going to donating many millions to republican congressional campaigns this year."

I think that's called "stocking up". From their point of view payment in advance is a wise move.

Oops!

s/mater/master/

Re: re: censorship

Apart from his boss it would be hard to find a better exponent of erosion of democratic norms.

"all the usual shills"

I see one of them has already been here downvoting just about every post with a harsh word to say against their mater.

Re: Not having Elon's ear

All the police have to do is prefix your prompt with "Anything you say will be taken down in writing and may be used in court against you" and it's job done.

As Trump and Musk are currently at odds with each other this is probably finely balanced, especially as Trump will want to keep Starmer at heel at present.

Nevertheless we'll see Musk wailing loudly that he's been singled out for punishment and all the usual shills repeating that. It never seems to dawn on them that if a US business is being "singled out" for punishment it's not because they're US companies but because they fail to observe the laws of non-US countries where they operate.

ISS spacewalk postponed over mystery astronaut malady

Re: Flat Share

Early exercise in the Microbiology course: take the towel from over the lab sink, press it lightly onto a nutrient agar plate and incubate overnight.

Microbiology labs have extraction facilities. The containment of the ISS means that there is no fresh supply to replace the extracted air. Unless the filtering is perfect the recycling of that air will allow possible contamination to build up. The isolation prevents access to treatment. And I don't think the chromic acid we used to use for cleaning glassware would be popular on the ISS.

Lack of imagination virus anyone?

"Williams and Yui later worked on physics and microbiology research."

Maybe microbiology isn't a good idea in such an isolated environment.

Why colos are city slickers and hyperscalers are country bumpkins

I suppose the simpler way of finding out why things are placed where they are would simply be to ask those building them. It's not like ecology where chance determines whether a seed has fallen where it can grow or not and you need to discover the distribution patterns and examine things carefully to find out why. Nor is it some past civilisation where you have to examine them archaeologically and, again, look at the environment and work out why they decided to settle where they did, or why they flourished and then died out.

These are conscious decisions by people who are here and now and can actually speak if you ask them.

SanDisk heals WD Black and Blues, rebrands beloved client SSDs

Re: Dearly beloved…

Marketing uses branding to generate such emotional attachments. It seems odd to see them throw away all the work that's been done. OTOH I see these names on Amazon and they mean as little to me as the odd character strings used to label all sorts of Chinese-made products.

Historic NASA test towers face their final countdown

Why aren't they being carefully disassembled and moved to a museum in Texas?

Ultimate camouflage tech mimics octopus in scientific first

Re: Could be used in ... computer displays

It seems it's just what's needed for camouflage wet-suits.

OpenAI putting bandaids on bandaids as prompt injection problems keep festering

Re: Idiots

I think that just means "I made a shitty insecure product".

Make that "a shitty intrinsically insecure product".

Maximum-severity n8n flaw lets randos run your automation server

Re: Good lord...

The more you dig into it...

Npm, Javascript, DevOps, Low-code/No-code building. No, nothing to go wrong there.

They have what's termed a SOC 3 report on security. AIUI what this says is that N8N makes assertions about what it does and the auditor confirms that N8N makes its assertions. There seems to be no audit on the product, just an audit on the paperwork.

Cloudflare pours cold water on ‘BGP weirdness preceded US attack on Venezuela’ theory

Re: tinfoil hat time

"Anonymous coward because reasons."

Why bother? They know who you are anyway.

Luggable datacenter: startup straps handles to server with 4 H200 GPUs

"Perhaps the Omnia should be seen as the successor to these"

Only in the way that we've all put on weight since then.

Re: Who can lift a 77-pound box into the overhead?

And who can stop it collapsong?

Ministry of Justice splurged £50M on security – still missed Legal Aid Agency cyberattack

Re: FFS!!

Being closer to the courts and the cases that go through them than most of the government they really should have been aware of the principle that you do not stop people intent on breaking laws by providing them with more laws (or injunctions) to break.

GNOME dev gives fans of Linux's middle-click paste the middle finger

Maybe he's Agent P 2.0 and dickering for a gig at microsoft.

Re: every time...

It's OK, with any luck you'd have grown out of it.

Re: If it ain't broke....

"I can't see the code for this being a massive bloaty chunk of binary"

Unlike, say, embedding the icon set in the library that draws part of the UI.

Re: Hold on - something wrong here

"Isn't the whole point of Linux that you can set it up how you like ?"

Quite. Even Gnome, if you like the direction they're heading. They just need to realise they're one among many several.

Re: Another oldie

s/ds/ds of/

Humongous 52-inch Dell monitor will make you feel like king of the internet with four screens in one

Re: Display resolution

Some of us need bigger pixels, not smaller ones. Make the screen bigger first. What I really want now is an 18" or bigger laptop (already using a 17".

Re: Meanwhile, on top of Great A'Tuin...

According to the Guardian article he was far more spendthrift than I on his typewriter. He spent £14. Mine was £10.

Re: Meanwhile, on top of Great A'Tuin...

"This old dog learned to type on a manual typewriter."

Ditto, although my experience was writing scientific papers. Together with my supervisor drafts would be sliced up, rearranged, stapled onto fresh sheets with new or rewritten bits added and lots of changes added in ink. The resulting mess would be sent off to a real typist (University departments had them in those days). There would also be occasions when the two of us would sit there debating the right word. Creative flow was far from being uninterrupted.

Re: You know what else is still measured in inches?

"most people in the UK ... would not nowadays think natively in terms of pounds, ounces, hundredweights, etc."

I blame an education system that handicapped pupils to the extent that they could only handle one system whether it was relevant or not. I quoted elsewhere a furniture restoration tutor who insisted on measuring in metric what the original builder constructed in imperial.

Maybe things are changing. Our granddaughter, showing us her work on a project, gave measurements in imperial which was appropriate to the circumstances. Having seen so many disparaging comments here I asked her if she was comfortable using both. Of course she was, it seemed I had asked a silly question.

Re: Nah, I'll take the bezels

"backward medieval shit "

You prefer backward enlightenment shit like decimal measure?

16 ounces to the pound sounds like a modern binary-based approach to me. The real problem with "3.65 pounds" is mixing the two.

UK to spend £23M on AI to tell benefit claimants where to go

Re: If...

it's anything like vodafones anybody's AI assistant, you'll type questions and eventually end up back at the start, with no answers........

Run by DWP? What could poooosssssiiiibly go wrong?

Re: They still don't get it

"you can do this online"

The real gem of that line is delivered by Northern Powergrid when I call to report yet another power cut whose first consequence was o bring down the router (and the DECT phone which is why I still have a POTS phone as well).

What if Linux ran Windows… and meant it? Meet Loss32

"Owning your own system" is an irrelevant goal for 99% of users - even in this time of the US going mad. They just want to get shit done.

That's correct. It's irrelevant for them. Right up to the point when not having really had ownership bites them.

I suppose you must have missed the story a few weeks ago about the Apple guy who fell victim to some sort of Apple gift card scam and Apple punished him for it. "His" system included a mass of stuff stored by Apple and he could no longer access it. He just wanted to get shit done as well but now he couldn't. He was a t least lucky in being well enough known in the Apple world that he could make an audible fuss about it.

Re: The last thing we want

In fact your last paragraph defines group 3 which many of us are in. We use Linux but sometimes Windows users want us to sort out their problems when their requirements could be met on the stable platform which we know Linux to be.

UK urged to unplug from US tech giants as digital sovereignty fears grow

Re: Please Do

I don't know about the "usual" channels by which MS might have been approached but the appropriate channel would have been those agreed by treaty which would allow them to get a warrant in Ireland. Such a warrant would have overridden the provisions of GDPR. It would, however, have required provision of a modicum of evidence to justify the warrant. They obviously weren't prepared to do that. Who knows why? They didn't have the evidence? They weren't prepared to disclose it?* They were too used to getting evidence with a minimum of work and didn't want to make the effort that would have been required in Ireland let alone the extra work of dealing with a transatlantic jurisdiction?

MS would naturally have had to fight the approach because of the GDPR implications for their EU operations. Certainly Brad Smith welcomed the Act as it gave them clarity, or words to that effect which I take as meaning that it relieved them from having to fight.

* IME some police officers seem to be reluctant to confide even in those whose cooperation they need.