Posts by Doctor Syntax

Britain courts private cash to fund 'golden age' of nuclear-powered AI

Long term investment to power a bubble seems a poor fit. Long term investment because we need a long term investment to power everything else would be a good idea.

Three clues that your LLM may be poisoned with a sleeper-agent back door

Re: yes ... 1000000000000000000000%

"Remind you, this is the party who called for old people to die for the economy during the pandemic."

What party? No party was mentioned in the OP. Are you a backdoored LLM and what was your trigger?

Workday reveals around 400 staff soon won't have to work another day

"non-revenue generating roles in its Global Customer Operations team."

So that will be things like security, backups etc.

UK justice system unplugs from ancient datacenters after five-year slog

"support the listing process that allocates cases to courts"

This is a linear programming job. It requires avoiding conflicts between availability of court room, judge, lawyers and witnesses, bearing in mind that police, medical and scientific witnesses are involved in many trials*. About the only role AI could have is working out how long the trial might run for - its guess is probably as good as anyone else's.

* My experience from the past is that it would help if counsel would schedule witnesses properly and not keep them hanging round the court all day or turning up several days running, only to be told they're not needed that day.

It's bubble or nothing for Google as search giant looks to plow ~$180B into datacenters this year

"Gemini's understanding of intent has increased our ability to deliver ads on longer, more complex searches that were previously challenging to monetize,”

How about short, simple searches that were challenging to monetize?

e.g. If I simply have just the words "Wordsworth" and "Penistone" as the search term will it really work out that I'm looking for anything I might have missed about the history of the Wordsworth family there and not looking to buy a house on any of the streets named after the family?

Of course, if it insists on presenting my ad-blocker with a few estate agent's ads it will have monetised the search as far as it's concerned but the advertisers will have paid money for nothing and I'd rather have it contrive to keep their pages out of search results.

It's the sort of thing that long ago made me decide that it was no longer a useful search engine. Will Gemini tell them that?

Satya Nadella decides Microsoft needs an engineering quality czar

Why? They just appointed an engineering czar.

Re: Didn't Bill Gates profess to being this?

Likewise the CP/M Fortran compiler. Maybe they should have stayed with 8-bit S/W.

'The EU runs on Microsoft' – and Uncle Sam could turn it off, claims MEP

Re: The US could turn us off inside one hour.

FFS did you two not even read TFA?????

The best and most direct way to make the market friendly is to buy from it. As to investors, foreign investment would be counter-productive.

Remember, if you use proprietary services then you have to buy from the likes of Microsoft and they have to be that size because they're running everyone's services. If you use FOSS as the basis for your services then all you need is a supplier able to service a smaller group of customers. Even a government does not need a service provider the size of Microsoft, AWS or Google.

Re: Reality bites

"I don't think you will this time."

I won't, I'm long retired.

But to go back to the premise of Liam's report. It's very simple. The policy makers are starting to wake up to the fact that there's a real political risk in their dependency on service providers under control of a whimsical foreign government. That awakening will surely be faster in mainland Europe than the UK, sadly.

To use the analogy, once it's decided - as a matter of policy - which mountain is being aimed for then that's were the steps will be directed. Depending on the sense of urgency, budget will become available, partly because policy directs strategy and strategy will determine the criteria for how projects get implemented and partly because smaller steps will be taken in that direction. Once that starts to happen it will be a better career move to be able to bring solutions rather than problems.

Re: Reality bites

He/she/it?) was replying to a post predicated on what happens if one policy is set with an assumption that a policy would be set in the opposite direction. Possibly that wasn't meant but it was what was written. On the whole I think stumbling in the dark rather than actual policy is where we've got into the mess of governments and businesses being stuck with Windows/Office<365.

Go back to my original point. When policy is set strategy, CAPEX, OPEX, Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all eventually end up following. Anyone interested in their own career development could usefully invest a little of their time in researching alternative technologies.

Re: Hope Springs Eternal

Let me repeat: I hope you don't write code without the appropriate conditionals.

sddm has a dependency on elogind but elogind doesn't have a dependency on Microsoft (just to ensure that, Agent P's abomination is not installed).

Re: Reality bites

Huh?

Re: Reality bites

It's things like Recall and turning to Coprolite that will make compliance harder. Companies with compliance requirements should really be looking hard at what they deploy.

Re: Reality bites

I knew ICE were getting as far as Italy for the Winter Olympics but this is the first time I heard of them in North Korea.

Re: Hope Springs Eternal

"Add to that that your login protection is worth squat as Microsoft is the last element in your authorisation and authentication chain"

Oh, no it isn't.

"And you walked right into this"

Oh, no I didn't.

I hope you don't write code without hte appropriate conditionals.

The issue isn't self-sufficiency as such. It's not even about monopoly. It's about external control of critical infrastructure and the monopoly only comes into it as it's subject to external control. That said, breaking the monopoly with something freely available is the best way of dealing with the control problem.

Re: Reality bites

"US law prevents open source projects being shared with North Korea, for example."

And how do they prevent it?

Re: Reality bites

"The loud MS pundits say it can't be done, that the compatibility isn't there, that you can't round-trip."

And once you've set your direction towards the mountain that becomes an incompatibility on MS's part. If the MS pundits see that as a problem it's up to them to bring solutions.

Set digital sovereignty as a policy, the strategy has to follow and suddenly everything looks different. It's the policy makers who have to be won over and it seems as if that's happening.

Re: Reality bites

You have some good points and a lot of it goes back as far as Harold Wilson's government.

But "after all they probably have 'kill switches' for the replacement software anyway". Really? Please point to the kill switches in FOSS.

Re: Hope Springs Eternal

Indeed it might be long-term damaging for Microsoft if that were to happen. The short term damage to their customers would be greater. The ideal strategy from Microsoft's point of view would be to ensure their customers wouldn't be damaged. If they're serious about providing sovereign service for their customers they need to ensure that the service they provide in other countries is at sufficient arm's length that a US government of any persuasion couldn't reach that far. They also need to do that for business customers as well as government. I doubt they've done that.

There's also CLOUD Act and National Security Letters to consider.

"We need code and speed, in place of coal and steel."

Nice one. We ancients remember the origin of the EU was the European Coal and Steel Community, rebuilding Europe after the damage of WWII.

DWP finds Copilot saves civil servants a whopping 19 minutes a day

What I see these statements I wonder* why it doesn't say +/- whatever.

* Not really. I know damn well. Either (a) only real statisticians would do that and none were involved or (b) real statisticians were involved and the error bar came out larger than the estimated time saved so that it wasn't strictly possible to say whether less time had been saved or lost or (c) real statisticians were involved, the estimate was a bit negative but by quoting the top of the error bar or an outlier they could get a positive number.

Probably (a) but wouldn't exclude (c).

Estonia hedges its bets on US tech while going all-in on Microsoft

Re: Dead on arrival

I'd guess he has some senior user bigwig jumping up and down shouting "I want it NOW!!!" (in Estonian, of course). So the user gets it now, then gets stuck with migration costs later. There's probably going to be a lot of that going on as the ship gets turned round.

EU's fishy digital certificate system leaves exporters floundering

Maybe they did. My immediate reaction was to wonder which of the usual suspects was involved.

Don't tell a sole.

Microsoft engineer speedruns Raspberry Pi magic smoke in five minutes

Tips hat to speedy reminder.

UK watchdog to rule on £142M Post Office subsidy over Horizon scandal and IR35

Re: Fujitsu?

Your persistent "wine and steak" thing - are you nursing a grievance at having been left out of something?

Re: Truth

A freelancer working for their own company should be paid a salary which covers holidays, time off sick etc. and may well have the company pay for private medical cover. The company might provide a company car (but very likely heavily taxed as a benefit in kind) or pay the employee mileage for using their own car subject to HMRC limits. The company cannot bill for periods during which it is not providing a service. It should manage its finances to allow for paying salary during out of contract periods from the fees billed in the course of contracts.

You need to distinguish between the freelancing company and the freelancer. Failing to do this plays right into HMRC's hands as propaganda against those who wish exercise their right to run their own business company as does using language which confuses the client with an employer as in "employer's fringe benefits".

Re: Truth

An “off-payroll worker” is not a low-tax worker.

In fact there isn't such a thing as an off-payroll worker in this context. It's simply that the worker is shifter from the client's payroll to the contracting company's payroll. It's just one of those pejorative terms HMRC like to use to demonise those who opt to exercise their right to run their own business.

The term might be applied to a sole trader but that's a completely different status.

VS Code for Linux may be secretly hoarding trashed files

Re: Snap

It sounds like a bit of both. It sounds as if Snap is creating a new $SNAP_USER_DATA for each update to VSCode. It's not necessarily a s trash problem because whatever else gets written in there is abandoned on every update so even without the trash directory being in there it's going to keep filling the drive, just more slowly.

Europe shrugs off tariffs, plots to end tech reliance on US

Re: Gotta hand it to Trump

"it will be what he's remembered for in the history books. As the dumbest president in history, by far."

Sadly, he'll not know that.

Re: Meanwhile, back in the real world

Fair enough.

I suppose I should have made more clear that I'm basing it on a recognition at government or board level that the present situation is risky. This is, after all the premise of TFA.

I'd hope that anyone in the UK government would, for instance, assume at least the possibility that anything they write or discuss, any spreadsheets they prepare, any presentations they put together using any US-owned cloud could get back to anyone in the US government who wants to know and start from there. On that basis the person advocating Microsoft 365 is not only not bringing a solution, they are part of the problem.

Re: The scope is not large enough

One of the features of the US constitution is that it combines head of government and head of state. In general countries with a PM or the like as head of government that position depends on being able to put together a Parliamentary majority and, although having some power of patronage in appointing ministers the PM depends on continuing support. They can't go off in their own direction with the elected representatives at best trailing behind trying to stop them. And they're unlikely to have got to that position without having had at least some experience in government or, after a long period in opposition, of at least shadowing one or more ministerial positions.

Another is the way the judiciary is appointed. If I read news reports of a Supreme Court decision from the US it will very often say which President appointed them. If I read something similar from the UK there'd be no similar comment. Lord Chancellor is a member of the government of the day but the rest of the judiciary as appointments on merit, not political appointees. Admittedly recent UK governments have seemed to chafe under the restraints of an independent judiciary but at least it's a sign that it works. The US Supreme Court, by contrast, seems to have given even ex-Presidents a get out of jail free card for whatever they might have done.

Re: Artificial idiocy.

"you can use any OS or software ... because after set up, it never connects to the outside world again"

Not if it's subscription software, you can't. It will check to see if its licence has been renewed. Given the trend of commercial software to move to a subscription model this limits choice.

Re: Oh....Sovereignty Again...................

The Anglosphere is looking more than a little worse for wear these days. It was a handy construct for the US to wield when it suited them to have a few largely Anglophone countries to support them. It required the participants to believe in it. Clearly the US no longer does. It's now just a collection of the former components who must build their alliances - or not - as they see fit. It would need a lot of effort to build the trust needed to put it back together, along with a forgetting of the basic US foreign policy of having interests, not allies.

What Trump has done is to remind us of what was always the case.

Re: The scope is not large enough

There is clearly nothing in the way the US runs its affairs to prevent someone like Trump getting to the top again. There's also the old say that the us doesn't have allies, it has interests - didn't that one come from a former US President?

It was always foolish to get into this dependency position whatever the nature of the US government. What Trump has done is to alert people to that folly.

Re: Meanwhile, back in the real world

The unpleasant truth is so many people have "invested" so much in being able to put up with MS that there will be a plethora of "reasons" why any individual outfit can't switch.

The people with "reasons" need to be reminded that people who bring solutions are more highly valued within an organisation than those who bring problems.

I'd like el Reg to provide us with an update on the Danish switch - maybe a summary of the various European moves away from MS. Liam?

In the meantime I was struck by reading in another place that those Excel wizards are seen in some instances as a block to overall process improvement. Attempts to provide some sort of integrated workflow get stuck when someone who refuses to move from the hugely complex spreadsheets they use (which suggests to me a pretty bad bus factor in the whole operation).

Migrating to non-MS S/W should see this as an opportunity, not a problem. Introduce the new workflow bypassing the obstruction with a replacement application on the basis that the spreadsheet won't work an longer and no, we're not making exceptions. The obstruction's role is now redundant and they can either take up a new role or discuss redundancy terms.

Re: Yes Minister...

"So the UK govt AI policy will be running it on a Raspberry Pi 5 sitting somewhere in Whitehall?"

Best place for it. It would limit the harm it can do.

Without all the screaming, I also disagree.

What governments can do and should is specify local ownership and management as a requirement for systems running critical or sensitive services, both for their own use and for critical infrastructure providers. Another thing they can and should do is recruit sufficient staff able to manage the contracts if they are outsourced or to bring operation in-house if appropriate.

Re: Well.....I'm Racking My Memory.................

Quoting myself from a recent thread.

It matters a good deal less on who makes the S/W than who controls the service that runs on it. The hierarchy is:

The service

The software

The hardware

The main risk is having services provided by businesses under extra-territorial control. The risk with S/W is the subscription model moving it up into the service tier. The hardware is mostly not a problem except possibly appliances such as routers and firewalls with embedded software.

s/bout/buy/

"both the UK and EU still happily allow the brightest and best such companies to be bought out by overseas competitors, and there is very little in place to prevent that from happening."

Having being European owned and managed as its USP would provide a good deal of protection. A potential buyer would have to view the non-sovereign potential as outweighing the prompt loss of the existing customer base.

Re: Oh....Sovereignty Again...................

Go back and read the title of TFA. "We" is ourselves and fellow Europeans in this context. And note that "Europeans" covers more than the EU. Yes, there may be Anglophone countries with common interests too. Canada certainly has common interests in this although Quebec wouldn't thank you for calling them Anglophone.

"organizations scramble to buy AI-optimized servers and supporting infrastructure"

Why?

What they should be scrambling to bout is H/W optimised for the line of business applications that they've moved to foreign owned cloud purveyors. Given that they've been running such applications without AI for years and given the low ROI being reported for AI the priorities should be clear. If - and it's a big if - AI still looks worthwhile once they've done that, then they can look to adding AI-optimised servers.

UK names Barnsley as first Tech Town to see whether AI can fix... well, anything

Weirdly, since the 1974 reorganisation <spit>, I can almost see Barnsley from my upstairs windows.

No. There's always a hint of ambivalence. We know it's all too easy to come out with statements like that and then say "only joking".

Re: "Needless to say, the word "could" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here."

"Well that'll Starmer. He's the idiot obsessed with AI and pushing it into everything."

He doesn't have a monopoly on it. Just about everyone in politics is doing it. FOMO plus a strong helping of "if you don't understand it it must be magic and we must have magic".

Re: Yea - just chuck that 1/2 million down that toilet there thanks

Maybe things aren't quite a bad as you think. I went there last year. There were huge car parks near the centre and still a lot of driving round to find a spare slot. Also, being right next to a junction on the M1 the surrounding area has a lot of business parks. Maybe too many on greenfield sites down towards Hoyland.

Help! Does anyone on the bus know Linux?

You mean a duff drive is somehow Linux's fault?