Posts by Doctor Syntax

Brussels eyes crowbar for Meta's WhatsApp AI lockout

Re: Maybe they'll warm up to the EU now

Don't expect gratitude.

Re: Noooooo!

Eliminating all of them would be the equitable solution.

The Linux mid-life crisis that's an opportunity for Tux-led transformation

You mean like thise organisations: https://linuxfoundation.eu/en/members ?

Re: They can do that because they subverted Free Software

I'm not sure it is the developers complaining loudly unless they misunderstood the licences they used. It certainly wouldn't be those using BSD licences which are about as no-stringed as you can get.

Re: They can do that because they subverted Free Software

"The various forms of GPL compel them to give back the code changes they make and thus benefit everyone else."

It compels them to provide the amended source code to those to whom they supply the compiled application. It doesn't say anything about also sending it upstream, not any obligation on upstream to incorporate it.

Containers, cloud, blockchain, AI – it's all the same old BS, says veteran Red Hatter

Re: Browsers.

I think I'll have to switch to Tbird & Librewolf. I like Falkon but it doesn't save exceptions for locally signed certificates which is a bit of a pain.

Re: "Which of your bêtes noires did we miss?"

Long ago there were such things as all-rounders. Develop, dbadmin, system admin, user support. You didn't develop something that would give you grief running. You didn't have dbadmin waiting for system admin to release more space.

It was a complete pain running into the segmentation of functions on a short contract to provide holiday cover. We needed to add more space to the Informix database and memory says I spent at least 2 weeks of it just doing the paperwork to get the system admins (who I never saw) to to get the extra space to do that. Maybe it wasn't quite as bad as that but it felt like it. The worst part of it was that this was in the same industry where I'd overseen a team (but also been hands on) which developed the application and run all the admin seamlessly.

I don't think mail servers of any sort are usually software as a service. They're just plain services.

Re: Have a beer

Give the guy you talked to another.

Re: Browsers.

SeaMonkey is now just about the only one* that attempts to use icon themes so that it look as if belongs on just about any desktop. It works on fewer and fewer sites and the Grauniad crashes it instantly. So I'll nominate not browsers but web site developers that are too clever by half and not half clever enough.

* Possibly Falkon might but I've only tried in on one desktop.

Re: JIRA

On behalf of those who've ever had a bad back, can I add standups as a whole?

Aargh

I'm going to have to tear myself away and go do something else. i could spend all afternoon going dow the rabbit holes of all those links.

"If that sounds reasonable to you, maybe you should try selling homeopathy."

More likely, if it sounds reasonable you'd be buying it. Selling it needs no more than keeping a straight face, a water supply and some bottles.

Re: "Which of your bêtes noires did we miss?"

The whole Devops thing and their "cattle not pets" saying. They're not pets, they're workhorses and like any workhorse, are valuable, looked after carefully and well fed because their work is valuable.

Study confirms experience beats youthful enthusiasm

Re: Gender?

The driven out oldies then return as freelancers being paid properly for knowing things the inexperienced younglings don't.

That's where the dreaded "as you all know" comes from. They know, so they assume everyone else does, as well.

I suspect that they know that "you all" don't know and it's just a means of putting everyone on the wrong foot and blaming them for not knowing.

"I have been called upon to write documentation for internal software for a few years now."

I always reckoned that user documentation for internal software should be written by the user department with help from the developers as needed. The reason being that using it is part of the department's operations, not something separate. What they should be writing is documentation of how to do the job and that should include what to do on the computer as it occurs in the job.

"peak performance occurs between the ages of 55-60"

Silly then, for my then employer to let me go at 52. Mind you I had started to show failings. It was one of those events where large numbers of staff are gathered together to be motivated by having their intelligence insulted but taken to new extremes. Even the celebrity TV presenter brought it to MC it had the grace to look embarrassed. I failed to suspend disbelief and to conceal disgust.

Great outcome. I went on to exercise my peak powers very rewardingly in freelance.

New hire fixed a problem so fast, their boss left to become a yoga instructor

Re: Kneeling Chairs

I have a slat-back Windsor chair like this one: https://www.theoldcinema.co.uk/victorian-country-slat-back-windsor-armchair-in-elm-and-beech.html

The curved slats provide excellent lumbar support. When I had back problems it was the only thing that was comfortable. It makes an excellent desk chair provided the desk is at a height to suit it.

Re: Many moons ago now

"They said Oh that was the last engineer, we don't look at his guides"

The only answer to that is "Is that why you don't know how to fix it?"

And she gets exercise walking between them.

Bernard: "there were two kinds of chairs to go with two kinds of Ministers: one sort that folds up instantly, the other sort goes round and round in circles."

"Edison has a reputation for having stolen others' ideas"

No, quite the opposite. Others stole them before he invented them.

Re: Oh Dear !

Don't the rodeos need cowboys? Plenty of suitable recruits in manglement.

I had a confusing interview a long time ago. My chair was OK but the interviewer had one of those devices, on castors, and kept scooting about the room on it.

So it wasn't Carl who ended up on the mat.

Whether they are building agents or folding proteins, LLMs need a friend

"Companion bots that check their work."

So because we don't trust the first one we trust a second to sort out problems with the first - how? Not how does the second on work but how can we trust it.

As to the protein folding thing I can understand why it would be impossible to take all possible orientations of all the amino acid residues so an educated guess would be necessary to look at it from a global point of view. But ribosomes produce proteins which fold themselves as they're produced. They grow the protein one amino acid at a time, there will be very few locally optimal configurations which it could take up without the extra energy needed to achieve a more global reconfiguration. I'd have thought emulating that process would be the more computationally efficient.

Openreach turns up the heat to force laggards off legacy copper lines

Re: ransom fees and copper cables

"The power grid is becoming more granular, which is good, in due course power cuts might not take out so much."

I wish I could share your optimism. More granular probably means less redundant so although they may (with luck) not take out as much, they'll probably be more frequent.

The modern digital phone services will run quite happily over a copper-based broadband connection provided (A) that the subscriber has UPS, otherwise they have nothing to talk to and (B) the VSLAM remains powered. I have no confidence in (B) being the case locally as it has failed to provide broadband in such a situation.

POTS will also fail in a power cut if the subscriber relies only on DECT which is why I also have a POTS handset - to report the power failure.

Re: Apples and oranges?

We use the landline as our main phone although so far the only call today has been an incoming spam call.

Of particular use are calls to Northen Powergrid to report another power fail. That's not going to be much use in the event of a power failure, not even with a UPS on the router as it's been known for the circuit that powers the local FTTC box to result in the broadband failing when houses on the other circuit from the substation were still powered.

As to the Telecare work, it seems rather vague as to how this has been remediated. Without a UPS there's no chance a straight digital connection via the router will work even if the broadband remains live. A mobile option might work given a signal.

Supermarket sorry after facial recognition alert flags right criminal, wrong customer

Re: Check

I read they gave him £75, maybe as a voucher, but it's only by a having to apologise in person that the lessons are learned by those involved. It would probably have gone round the business if the managers had had to do that and others would have been wary. To some extent My Rajah has achieved that by bringing adverse publicity down on Sainsbury. Good for him.

Re: Ban it

"The screw up here was the store manager not paying enough attention to the image on the system to approach the correct person. I don't see why the image of the person in the store couldn't have been sent to that managers phone/tablet so they could be sure if the system did identify somebody in the naughty file."

The reports say that the manager (or three of them depending on the report) had an image on their phone. The reports also said that the image recognition system correctly identified a criminal. I thought the wording the wording was loose enough to accommodate a false positive.

Re: Ban it

"Or were they on commission?"

Something like that such as a bonus would be my guess unless they were worried about being made redundant.

Re: Ban it

"hiring security people to walk around the store"

One of our ex-SOCOs was promoted to station sergeant in my local RUC station. One day I came across him when we were shopping in our local super-market. He was following the store detective round. He was worried about the number of suspects who seemed genuinely bemused when challenged and suspected her of sneaking products into innocent customers' chopping bags. He eventually caught her one day. I'm not sure what happened to all the wrongly convicted customers but I expect it worked out fairly expensive for the store..

""We have been in contact with Mr Rajah to sincerely apologise"

Who is the "we" in this? Ideally it would be the three store managers, humbly, in person. That way they'll learn to be more careful in future. Alternatively the C-suite, umbly, in person. That way they might review whether facial recognition.

Four horsemen of the AI-pocalypse line up capex bigger than Israel's GDP

"then there's plenty of money to be spent"

Is there? If lots of jobs are replaced there's less money to be spent by customers and that means that those who would have sold things have less money and they are the ones who would have been buying AI services. I think we saw a few weeks ago the amounts of money per head of the world population that would need to be spent to make the investments bandied about at that time recoupable and it was unrealistic.

Re: Profits? We don't need no stinking net profits

"your local electricity hardware entity ... that invested loads of money into substations and wires to feed these massive DC's"

I'd hope that the substations and wires are paid for up-front by the DC owners.

Assume for the sake of argument there is scope for this to turn into something viable in the long run. Is there any way that there is sufficient income that could be raised from this to provide sufficient return to pay off all of their investments? If not does this mean that the least well funded fold, leaving just one or two standing or do they all fail anyway before they start to recoup?

DWP considers chatbot work coaches as AI-fueled job losses loom

Re: Mass Dickensian destitution inbound?

"As I cannot see big business tolerating the threat of having to pay even a minor modicum of taxes"

It will be OK if someone else pays. They will benefit. UBI subsidises them by allowing them to keep pay low.

Re: What's the joke about regexes ?

"If you pump more cash into a housing market with constrained supply, you are literally bidding rents up."

This has already been demonstrated. It is exactly what happened in the Brownomics days except that it was house prices that were bid up by. The pumping mechanism was cheap loans provided by an interest rate policy that relied on an inflation index that ignored house prices.

Re: What's the joke about regexes ?

"the infernal mess will blossom into a shambles that even the devil wouldn't own."

This is DWP. How would we notice the difference?

Flickr emails users about data breach, pins it on third party

Owners not so smug now.

Missed opportunity for the sub-head

Amazon can't build AI capacity fast enough, throws another $200B at the problem

Re: Is the return worth it?

"So how do we equate energy consumption to processing power?"

If you can't report quantifiable useful outputs you measure inputs and quote that instead. Any government questioned about poor service won't produce figures to show the service is actually not bad, they'll tell you how much more they're spending to improve it. Manglers who can't measure how well their department performs due to WFH will want to see bums on seats to reassure themselves by seeing the input (oddly the BoS metric isn't a useful one when it comes to headcount reduction despite the fact that heads and bums have a 1:1 ratio).

Re: *Pop* Go The Weasels

You should have reminded them that if it was really that good some of them would lose their jobs due to the improved productivity and as manglement would look at it as part of employment expense the survivors would be paying for it by reduced salaries.

If by monetising it, he means placing utterly irrelevant sponsored ads in Amazon product searches then the publishers paying for sponsorship are getting a raw deal. The other day, out of 22 results in the first page after following an author link 6, including the first 2, were sponsored links to different authors and one was a bad search result with 3 authors, the first having the same forename and the 3rd the same surname but with an added 's'. All errors were fiction and the author was a prolific non-fiction writer.

(Fair enough, I wasn't looking to buy, just get the correct bibliographical details and I eventually realised it was a journal article and not a book, but even so, 1/3 errors in the first page.

Microsoft starts the countdown for the end of Exchange Web Services

Re: IMAP, LDAP, CalDAV, CardDAV

Are you saying that's a good thing?

Stash or splash? Lawmakers ask NASA to find alternatives for International Space Station

I wonder how operational it would remain without routine maintenance from the crew.

Nitrogen ransomware is so broken even the crooks can't unlock your files

Re: Regulation

Some whooshes there.

SpaceX wants to fill Earth orbit with a million datacenter satellites

Kessler syndrome looking quaint? Just the opposite I'd have thought.

Most SAP migrations bust budgets and project timelines, research finds

Does this include migrations to Oracle?