Posts by Doctor Syntax

Godot maintainers struggle with 'draining and demoralizing' AI slop submissions

Set a word limit below the expected number of words in a slop submission. Require a fee to be paid with longer submissions to be refunded if the reviewer determines that it was a valid submission and use the retained fees for a bounty scheme. At the very least any submitter who starts with AI will have to do some work to get it below the limit or they lose money. Sadly, it will probably raise very little for bounties but should bring back sanity.

Your AI-generated password isn't random, it just looks that way

Re: AI security company Irregular.....

"how exactly does one create an AI Security company?"

Think of a good name. If you're in the UK register it at Companies House, otherwise in the local equivalent.

There is no understanding of anything.

£111M later, frictionless post-Brexit border dream 'brought to early closure'

Re: Not Brexit.

Why would we have needed this to trade with our home market which was, previously, the whole of the EU?

Re: Duty

"golden pension"

If they're like that now they've changed since my day. Moving to private enterprise gave a much better deal in terms of pension, pay and promotion.

I think that might be a whoosh. Poe's law strikes again.

Re: Another one of Boris Johnson's great announcements

It was necessary for BoJo to announce something like this to support the argument that Brexit wouldn't make any difference except for the alleged benefits.

"major digital transformations need clear accountability when they falter"

Sir Humphry would have objected in the strongest possible terms - A Bennite solution, even.

Microsoft throws spox under the bus after Parliament testimony on ICC email kerfuffle

Those rule need to extend not just of government contracts but also those for critical infrastructure.

Whatever the situation then (and it's taken long enough for them to offer a correction, if that's what it is) the possibility has now been realised, along with the impact of the CLOUD Act. Whatever is now offered as a sovereign solution is going to be looked at very carefull, especially as Microsoft's President and chief legal counsel said they couldn't do it.

Linus Torvalds and friends tell The Reg how Linux solo act became a global jam session

"and to this day I don't know why Linus's experimental OS became the Linux we know today"

I think that is largely down to Linus himself and they way he was prepared to make it a communal effort.

Another factor might have been Minix which AFAICR was not so much an academic OS as an educational one. I wonder how many of the early contributors were studying that.

A final aspect must have been that they were familiar with Unix but even the SCO version was expensive. If SCO had grasped the fact that hey could have sold it at scale at a desktop OS price (there was a GUI desktop available) they could have cleaned up.

Palo Alto CEO says AI isn’t great for business, yet

Re: Are consumers holding the lever in AI spending / bubble building?

Consumers may use it until they have to start paying prices that can offer a minute ROI for the amounts being poured into it.

Infosys bows to its master, signs deal with Anthropic

and "improve service delivery," whatever that might mean

It's something they're expected to say. Just words but if they weren't in there people would think there was something wrong.

CIOs told: Prove your AI pays off – or pay the price

Re: Value what you can measure or measure what you value

" But we all know that pretty much any marketing claim (and that is all they were) for any product - but particularly in IT - doesn't stand up to scrutiny."

I think in this case "we" doesn't include C-suite execs. To them it's all wonderful, magical even, and cannot possibly fail because marketing told them and they come from marketing themselves and hence are devoid of any cognitive dissonance.

Re: neither increased revenue nor decreased costs

Except for those AI-washing lay-offs.

Keir Starmer declares 'months' timeline for social media age clampdown in UK

Re: Age Limit For Social Media

It's so that those who have been pissed off by the social media restrictions can have an earlier opportunity to express their views on the matter.

Re: They work for foreign wealth managers

Several of them have been in government and have demonstrated that they were awful. Arguably, with that lot out of the way the Tories are now a better bet.

Re: A tiny mind juggling too many thoughts?

"During his short time in office, Mr Starmer has accumulated serious threats to his credibility"

One of his problems is that he won a landslide election. A large HoC majority always encourages MPs, ministers or otherwise to daftness because they can't be booted out by losing a by-election or two so there's nothing to make governments concentrate on essentials and no party discipline to stop squabbling.

Re: All hail the General Secretary and President of the Socialist Republic of Osnaburgh Street /s

A continuation of the streak that ran through Old New Labour.

Re: Speech control

"This is not 'about the children'. "

To a large extent it's about the Daily Wail.

Re: But Doctor Syntax Is Convinced That "More Laws" Is The Correct Approach!

A/C with reading comprehension problem.

Where is the content to justify the title? Please be specific.

I've frequently said exactly the opposite here. The "more laws" approach often overlooks two things:

What they're trying to deal with is usually illegal anyway under existing laws. Quite often the object seems to be to memorialise someone by creating $NAME's Law.

Secondly, you do not discourage people who are already intent on breaking the law by giving them more laws to break.

"The tone throughout Starmer's post is combative, with the PM framing the effort as a willingness to take on Silicon Valley if necessary."

And is he also willing to take on all the legitimate UK business users or VPNs and risk screwing the economy up further?

Capita taps Microsoft Copilot to dig it out from UK pensions backlog

... and now you have two problems.

Passive RFIDs can now stream telemetry data from sensors

"Panasonic says the standard means devices and sensor terminals from different manufacturers can interoperate"

Incoming incompatible Microsoft version with added CoPilot & ads.

Why does the Windows 11 taskbar hurt me like that?

Re: Nobody cares

Wasn't internet Explorer introduced in his time?

Re: Optimized for Microsoft, not for the user.

What you don't realise is that the Microsoft design team is a due: Dogbert and Mordac.

Re: Make the Start Menu Great Again

It sounds like my KDE menu.

Re: From left to right

Doesn't the taskbar even autohide?

"the vast majority of people don't want them"

I have a nasty sneaky feeling that while the vast majority of el Reg readers don't there may be a vast number, if not majority, of users out there who actually think they're being provided with a wonderful personal service. It's frightening thought. Could it be true?

You probably can't trust your password manager if it's compromised

Re: Offline

The easiest way to compromise security is to put convenience first.

Re: If you were serious about security

A good start is to use a unique ID for each service and preferably not an email address. A unique ID and password constitute two separate factors in themself. As most users only have a single email address demanding that as a user ID reduces it down to a single factor.

Re: No servers

Nothing like the cries for help when their external supplier gets breached.

Re: No servers

If you're working in an enterprise you can set up file syncing on the company intranet without extending the attack surface by outsourcing. If you outsource it you're doing so to a provider who, by their very nature, has a large target painted on them. An atacker only has to get lucky once, they have to stay lucky all the time.

Re: guide me

Any variety of Keepass

Of all the functions that needs to minimise its attack surface password management must surely be at the top of the list. Keep 'em local. No servers.

NASA's fill-'er-up Moon rocket 'confidence' test sees mixed results

Re: Cryogenics is hard

"The main problem with hydrogen is that it is the smallest atom and can find places to escape through in just about any gasket or flexible material."

Yup. We used to locate leaking joints in the carbon dating system pipework by dribbling a little hydrogen out of a rubber tube over each joint in turn until we found the one that changed the sound of the vac, pump.

Space Cryogenics is hard.

Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation

Re: Feed your AI Finnegans Wake

Or Stanley Unwin.

1. I think of Romanesque as rather simple - semi-circular arches and barrel vaulting, say like the White Tower in the Tower of London and Baroque as complex decoration, swirls and C-scrolls. Not exactly Tower Bridge (that's Gothic Revival) but that sort of complexity only less repetitive. A smoothed out version would be Moderne. Perhaps an AI hallucinated the simile.

2. It seems ideal for writing ISO 9001 quality manuals.

Re: There is something deeply unsatisfying about reading words that nobody wrote

A few days ago Liam was describing watching a Red Hat employee having a chatbot summarise a received email and then write a reply. The original sender could have cut out the entire email by having his own chatbot summarise it and write the reply without even sending it.

Secondhand laptop market goes 'mainstream' amid memory crunch

I keep looking at listings for HP Fury - 64Gb memory and space for half a dozen storage devices. Then I realise I don't need that much.

Dutch cops arrest man after sending him confidential files by mistake

It's the police who need a lesson in link etiquette and it's very simple. If you're intending to send an upload link, send an upload link.

BTW, Has anyone seen Ms Streisand around here?

Canada Goose ruffles feathers over 600K record dump, says leak is old news

So if it's an old leak they'll have already notified the customers and any relevant authorities as required by the legislation in the various countries in which they operate. No?

Oracle vows 'new era' for MySQL as users sharpen their forks

When you only have a hammer everything looks like a nail

I'd guess RDBMS engine developers are very aware of it. I'd also guess that they're aware that they optimise MySQL differently from Postgres. From that I'd also guess that experienced application developers who are aware of both are aware that some applications are better suited to Posgres and some to MySQL.

(Dislosure - my preferred hammer was Informix. It paid the rent for a long time.)

X users howl into the void as timelines fail to load

Somebody included rm -rf / in a post and Grok read it as a prompt.

KPMG partner in Oz turned to AI to pass an exam on... AI

But surely all these firms are telling their staff to use AI. I suppose only customers are to be served slop.

GPT-5 bests human judges in legal smack down

"If judges don't follow the law, there's not much point in having either."

There's an old legal saying "circumstances make cases."

Legislators produce statute law. Judges examine how statute law applies in given circumstances including circumstances which might be inconceivable when the statute law was written.* If comparable circumstances haven't been met before the judge's decisions, reasoned and based on principles established in previous cases, become precedents**, the body of precedents being case law. If Parliament thinks it necessary new statute law is passed to try to keep up with the times.

This duality has been part of English law since the middle ages (about the time of Henry II*** I think) and has been adopted by other legal systems including US law. It's not so much there being no law or judges not following it. It's a matter of judges making new law to allow it to grow into new circumstances.

Anyone in court (apart from the jury who will be sent to the jury room) can see this process in action when one counsel raises an objection to the other's actions. It results in a real 3-way debate between the two sides and the judge as things are hammered out based on existing precedents, I found it the most interesting part of proceedings when it occurred.

* e.g. A company deploys AI do dealing with customers and making agreements with them. Statute law of contract was written long ago.

** depending on the status of the court.

*** He created a limited body of judges who could go round the country hearing cases, limited to help maintain consistency.

Digital sovereignty must define itself before it can succeed

Transparent attempt to deflect the argument.

Whataboutism.

Final step to put new website into production deleted it instead

Always Sainsbury your mistakes otherwise you might get sent to Iceland.

Re: Delete

Move is not safe. A customer had an old file tree under root that we wanted to move out of the way.

mv / $destination

Oops. Caught it too late. Just as bad as rm if it's moved so much that only your shell is working. This was SCO and it had been built with special driver for the multi-serial board. It took hours to get the driver emailed from the vendor.