Posts by Doctor Syntax

UK gambling regulator accuses Meta of lying about its struggle to spot illegal ads

Re: Duh!

True, but what's this got to do with an article about Meta and Zuck?

Micron finds a way to make more DRAM with $1.8bn chip plant purchase

Re: $9.5 billion sold for less than $2 billion

In Taiwan? More likely they'll find that, following Trump's precedents, China has decided to take over and that the oil semiconductors will be going their way.

£45B savings remain theoretical as UK digital roadmap delayed again

Re: "We were not able to, but we are hoping to do so very imminently"

True, but don't underestimate their determination.

Could the delay be due to a rethink about dependency on non-UK owned infrastructure?

ERP isn't dead yet – but most execs are planning the wake

Re: Redundant or irrelevent?

You probably need more to try and keep the agents from falling out with each other.

As long as I can remember the debate has been between a monolithic and best-in-breed modules. All this says is that it's now a 3-way split with those who've drunk the Kool-ade.

Cop cops it after Copilot cops out: West Midlands Police chief quits over AI hallucination

There are strange things around pensions in the higher paid levels of public service. It seems some doctors can be better off retiring early rather than working on. The Treasury and HMRC are responsible for that.

It also works out better, or at least used to, for a police officer to retire rather that die in service. One of our SOCOs died of cancer; they just managed to get the paper work done in time to retire him as it would have been better for the widow's pension. I'm not sure what the outcomes were for the widows of one of our other ex-SOCOs who was murdered, the other murdered officer I knew and all those I didn't know but some of whose cases I worked on.

I don't think AI was involved in the death of Charles de Menezes.

Re: The man at the top has (belatedly) taken the blame and buggered off

"Or do we have proof that it was Guildford who literally sat at the keyboard instead of doing his job and having subordinates gathering data?"

I don't think anyone believes that to have been the case. His problem was in not ensuring what he said was correct and accepting the blame for that. It's been sadly lacking in public life. I can think of at least one other instance where much more drastic failure didn't lead to resignation; even to eventual promotion.

Re: Ah! The next era of humans as moral crumple zones begins

We may now see boards, CEOs etc. being a bit more cautious about having electronic hallucinators loose in whatever it is they run although realistically it may take a few more before "it could be me" dawns on the larger egos.

Re: Idiocy

Given that Microsoft is almost universal on work desktops and that Microsoft are pushing Copilot into all aspects of it as hard as possible it might require a good deal more than a miniscule amount of effort to keep it from being used. Perhaps double up staff with a monitor peering over every user's shoulder to ensure they don't use it, even accidentally.

Re: Fucks up catastrophically, retires at 52

This is only part of it. He'd retired earlier and been rehired. This seems to have been due to some quirk of the pension scheme that would have made it disadvantageous to keep working but "retirement" sealed that off and he could then have been rehired without disadvantage to himself.

He seems to have had a good record in turning the force's effectiveness round but also had complaints about bullying upheld against him. Things are seldom black and white.

Just the Browser claims to tame the bloat without forking

There was a period a few weeks ago where visiting the Guardian with the usual blocking in place caused the browser to crash. If blocking is turned off then we really do have enshittification of the web.

We currently seem to have an arms race between those browser features and addons that attempt to protect the user and web sites, or maybe frameworks, that attempt to overcome that. The user is caught in the middle.

So, to some extent, are developers who need to use the frameworks; even my own instances of Nextcloud can't run with my preferred browser because of what looks like the attitude of PHP developers. I seriously doubt that NC developers wish to restrict access but, quite wisely, they're not going to jump ship because of PHP limitations.

We got rid of that (basically, remote applications by Windows developers) a long time ago and had a time and when sites did a good job across multiple platforms (real developers). We then had sites which were extremely fancy, displayed text in dark grey over black but only worked with very few browsers (graphic designers and beancounters). What we seem to have now is sites that depend heavily on particular frameworks and if the framework developers (I'm looking at you, PHP) can't be arsed to test against a particular browser, check for that and if it isn't on their list of the blessed they just display a message telling the user their browser isn't up to date even when it is.

I don't see much chance of escaping from the present situation. There was a brief golden age and now it's all gone to shit.

Two problems with that.

I can and do, as far as possible, do that but I doubt that being voted against in that way is a metric that the site's owners see and will, therefore, react to. It does not have the desired effect. Example: over the weekend the logo at noai.duckduckgo.com stopped scaling and now fills most of the screen. The non non AI version still scales properly. In this case, there is a substitute, Startpage but I doubt either site will have noticed my switch of allegiance.

The other is that it closes off useful options to which there are few alternatives. Example: I've always used streetmap.co.uk for UK mapping. Unlike many sites which are no more than street maps* it actually fielded OS maps which are much more than street maps although it could zoom in to become a street map.. It seems to have disappeared. I've found another site which also has OS maps but doesn't work in my preferred browser.

* i.e. they show and name the geometry of streets, possibly buildings but nothing else. OpenStreetMap is pretty good but still not a replacement for the OS.

I fear his de-enshittified browser is going to run up against enshittified web sites that have forgotten the web is supposed to be a universal platform and fail in a wide variety of ways against a browser that isn't in their select list. In some cases the failure is outsourced to Cloudflare.

Meta retreats from metaverse after virtual reality check

Re: .... second life....

Downvoted for golf.

Re: Why Education Left

It sounds like an educational experience.

"Time to rebrand Meta to something AI related."

Bollocks. No, that's not a comment on your post. It's a proposed name that reflects AI's generative nature. Don't forget the other meaning of AI ultimately depends on bollocks as well.

"Instead, Meta is betting on AI as bulky headsets become things of the past."

So AI is the new VR. Or did I misread this?

Open source's new mission: Rebuild a continent's tech stack

Re: What a bunch of mistakes

"For this reason, EU would be utterly stupid to invest heavily in FOSS and give the IP away."

They don't need to invest heavily. They need to use it. There's stacks there with the IP already given away - not given away to the US or China but to the world. Only if there are some specific things they need to address would they need to invest - lightly - in developing then, yes, they give away the IP because that's you it works, it's how that bonanza of FOSS exists in the first place.

Re: Don't shoot the messenger

back that closely

Re: What a bunch of mistakes

"Often, high-end hardware is not supported under Linux"

Have you checked what percentage of the world's top N supercomputers run on Linux for any given year or value of N?

It may be happening out of sight, but somehow, the UK government seems to be very "compliant" with regards to the US behaviour, although it may say "stuff" to the contrary.

Churchill said you could trust the Americans to do the right thing when they've tried everything else. The same is probably true of the UK government and the time may well be near when that becomes inevitable.

Re: Don't shoot the messenger

"Abuse of software, whether free (as in beer or unencumbered), paid for, self-written or vibe coded is purely determined by how it is used and by whom."

In terms of abuse by the origin of the software is irrelevance. However as soon as you compare origins of S/W there is a new scope for abuse, that of the user. As we're talking about abuse of S/W depending on its origin which do you think is the relevant type of abuse?

"I have worked for many large companies whose main driver for what software they use is indemnity." Do you get indemnity against force majeure? That would be the defence if you were to claim for data being abstracted on the instructions of the vendor's government or a service being cut off on the same basis? You're not going to gain indemnity against that, you're going to have to avoid it and that's what you achieve with FOSS*.

If you're in a situation where you're in, say, a government department and there is now a strategy of achieving sovereignty over the govt's IT operations what would happen if you say you can't do that because there are no options where you can't get indemnity? You would be told to go away and come back with solutions, not problems or replaced by someone who could.

* If you wanted, given that source code is available, if there's a problem with the FOSS option, you could still find a six-figure executive who would pay a professional developer to fix it for you. You may not have been following things back closely but there are companies who will give you support contracts for FOSS - what you describe is their exact business.

Re: Obviously ....

And today's geopolitical environment is very radically changed. Or at least the perceptions of what was always the reality have changed.

The effective way is "I'm from the government and I want to equip an office with 2,000 users with computer facilities that do not have dependence on any large non-European corporation. The end of the week would be soon enough, the end of the month would be too late.".

Re: It's not just the software

It's also fixable with the clout of buying power combined with a political will or, at the moment, political necessity. All governments have to do to favour FOSS is use it. Many of us do, it really isn't rocket science. If, in using it, they perceive gaps they can offer bounties for fixes.

Governments should be buying PCs with either no OS and installing it themselves or with Linux already loaded. They should also be switching - urgently - to replace any dependency on somebody else's computers run by US corporations because that just exposes them to bullying.

Right now anyone in government in any of the EU countries and the UK is a fool if they're using any such infrastructure to develop and discuss plans for dealing with Trump's Greenland whims. (Sadly there are many such fools around but we can at least hope they've been briefed and will be dragged into compliance.)

That should be a starting point and scarcely less urgent would be to prepare for Trump telling service providers to turn the lights off - they really need to plan for that happening, irrespective of whether a service is rubber-stamped "sovereign" or not. Anyone objecting with the usual "But it doesn't do xyz yadda, yadda yadda" would have to be told to bring solutions, not problems and that if they couldn't they'd be replaced by someone who could. A response of "LibreOffice isn't consistent with Office" etc would need to be corrected "You mean Office isn't consistent with LibreOffice and that's Office's problem".

ATM maintenance tech broke the bank by forgetting to return a key

Re: The Key to Everything

What - one of all of them?

Re: Could be worse

I'd have thought it was the fault of whoever exposed the keys to the camera.

Ready for a newbie-friendly Linux? Mint team officially releases v 22.3, 'Zena'

Re: LDME

It still doesn't answer the question of why have the Ubuntu-based version.

When you get to my age 18 months is "shortly after"!

As far as I could make out - and remember - both attempted to look like mobile phone UIs and Unity had a thing about not being able to place files on the desktop,

I'm still running Plama 6.3.6 over X11.

Re: great option for experienced users too

As a matter of curiosity, what does an OS designed by a committee of grey-beards look like?

Re: Thank you mint for LMDE 32 Bits. Welcome AntiX 25 32 Bits.

"Ugly and small start button on the bottom left corner, ugly and small pinned Icons, ugly and huge icons for runnig applications, icons do not resemble Windows in the slightless, bunch of confusing extras in the task bar."

If KDE is an option you could try that. There's a lot of downloadable themes, icon sets etc. for all manner of of Windows UIs.

"When Canonical switched Ubuntu's default desktop to Unity in 2011, many people found the new Mac-like desktop strange and unfamiliar. Mint offered a Windows-like alternative"

You need to specify which Windows because IIRC Unity was more akin to W8 which came out shortly afterwards.

Trump wants big tech to pay for big beautiful power plants

Re: another boring US centric trumpton article

I'm not sure about that. It affects us all. It's not likely* to be the DC owners who'll be paying. They're just the channel through which the payments run. It'll be their customers' customers: us.

* Except for those who go broke in which case their investors will be paying. That may also be us if part of our pension funds are in there.

Re: ON Friday!

It sounds like a Man Friday who started plotting against his master.

Re: Ah, a new way to fill his pockets

Elections are on the way.

BOFH: Every computer system eventually serves ads

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk

Re: the Board members says. "That's from Hitchhiker's Guide."

"You can do things in radio that you cant on video."

Bluebottle: Eccles, stand on my shoulders and pull me up.

Misc. grunting sounds.

Eccles: I'd like to see them try this on TV

Micron breaks ground on humungous NY DRAM fab after beating bats and tree huggers

"Lot of nasty chemicals are used to make PCBs and chips."

And you don't want people to see that.

Coming soon: We interrupt this ChatGPT session with a very special message from our sponsors

Re: A chatbot with a container is a happy efficient chatbot

Are you sure you're in the right forum?

Sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that! PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch

Re: issue

Surely they weren't glueing the batteries in in 2018, were they?

Re: Suggestions?

"shutdown.bat"

If that fails, remove the full stop.

Re: Suggestions?

Doesn't pressing the power switch for 5 seconds or so work on current H/W?

Re: Suggestions?

"You might also wave a Linux installation USB stick ominously in the direction of your computer."

That will make it resist more firmly. It knows you have to reboot to install it.

Hyperscalers, vendors funding trillion dollar AI spree, but users will have to pay up long term

"they may not even be paying [extra] for it,"

Oh yes they will.

"I have another 20 years to monetize that customer,"

Assume much?

Just a thought. We keep saying Europe needs its sovereign data centres and the nay-sayers saying it would be impossible to compete with the US incumbents. If they have tied themselves up with the expense of AI it should make it easier to compete simply by just keeping the operation clean. Even better if there's a fire sale of facilities to clear debts.

Over half of AI projects are shelved due to complex infrastructure

Re: So basically....

"It's already being used very successfully for many purposes."

Replacing disempowered, untrained staff in many customer disservice centres with equally useless but cheaper website chat apps.

Cobbling up justifications to ban fans atending football matches by hallucinating incidents that didn't happen.

Inventing case citations in court pleadings.

Re: I don’t think so

Educating board and top manglement would be best.

Bankrupt scooter startup left one private key to rule them all

Re: First law of IoT

I think the word they'd like would be "concealed". They'd like it applied to the OP's comment.