Posts by Doctor Syntax

Employee trust in SAP board dips amid ongoing restructure

"the findings also clearly indicate that employee engagement and trust in the board require attention"

But will they get it?

Campbell's CISO canned after lawsuit alleges hour-long rant against staff and customers

Re: The Real Problem

I'd guess somebody halfway up the foodchain (err maybe not the best word in the circumstances) found himself with a bit of a dilemma. He couldn't ignore it but didn't dare pass it further up and took what seemed likely the easiest way out. Obviously legal didn't take advice from Ms Streisand before deciding to fight it rather than make a quick, quiet settlement.

Atlassian ran a tabletop DR simulation that revealed it lived in dependency hell

Re: Free advice?

Agree completely. Small organisation, huge vendor - you're just a miniscule source of income, your problems are far too small to be noticed. The charity I look after uses Mythic Beasts for email and more recently for NextCloud.

Britain plots atomic reboot as datacenter demand surges

Re: Hardly makes us meatbags feel better ...

If it finally gets things moving in the right direction even the AI bubble has some value.

Re: Good but ...

A former colleague of mine in Belfast had also worked at Windscale at the time of the fire and told of going round the countryside collecting bits of radioactive debris using a fluoroscope to identify them. I think we've probably learned a bit since then.

I suppose it would have been about the same time that I was given a tour of the local mill. AFAICR the steam engine was being used to generate electricity. It was coal fired, of course.

Calls grow for inquiry into UK data watchdog after MoD leak

insisting the incident was a "one-off" error

All incidents are one-off when they happen. That doesn't make them OK.

LisaGUI recreates Apple's innovative computer OS, without emulating it

"the Macintosh – drew on a lot of Lisa technology ... but it dispensed with many of the high-concept ideas"

You can see why Apple sent unsold Liss to landfill rather than selling them off at an affordable price.

Microsoft wedges tables into Notepad for some reason

AFAICS the entire objective of Microsoft development is to make all the applications do the same as all the other applications but differently and with added AI.

"What's your favourite Notepad replacement?"

Kwrite

"I used to use Metapad but it has not updated in many years."

Isn't that exactly what everyone wanted about Notepad?

Vibe coding: What is it good for? Absolutely nothing (Sorry, Linus)

Re: still only "coding"

"the concept that once the tools are smart enough nobody needs to understand what they're doing any more is a growing general cultural problem that we allow to take firm root at our peril."

Oh, I don't know. it sounds like a good way to boost contract daily rates for sorting out the mess.

Re: master the craft

A large part of mastering the craft is understanding what needs to be done.

"a known input should create a known output"

The known input might be "Go and talk to the data input team, find ou what it is they're com,plaining about and fix it."

Re: Vibe coding

Have the developer present the manager with the vibe code failing the test suite.

Re: Stop anthropomorphizing AI

"Any computer running a same program using the exact same input should result in the exact same output. "

That was the point being made in TFA.

If the program acts in the manner of a wayward human making inconsistent choices then, in absence of more specific terminology, "choose" seems a reasonable verb to describe it.

Re: Have we been here before?

"the last software you'll ever need to buy"

It was a bit ahead of its time. FOSS took a little longer to arrive.

"I'm pretty sure a lot of coders would insist that an important part of coding is doing it away from other people."

It seems to have worked out pretty well for the Linux kernel and a lot of other FOSS projects.

There's a line of argument to suggest that "doing all this amid other people" hasn't worked out too well for some commercial development.

FCC guts post-Salt Typhoon telco rules despite ongoing espionage risk

This sounds like a case of "Who's side is your side on?"

Moss spores bolted to the ISS exterior laugh in the face of hard vacuum

Tough little blighters, spores. Expecting a protonema to survive would be a bit optimistic.

UK Covid-19 Inquiry finds early pandemic surveillance was weeks out of date

Re: The perils of efficiency

Shareholders have as strong an interest as everyone else to survive.

Re: Wasting my taxes

Yes. GPs have been giving vaccinations for generations. That's prevention. I've also been given a prescription for keratosis to prevent it becoming cancerous. When I was very young my doctor sent me for an appendectomy to prevent appendicitis from killing me.

But on the larger scale public health, relying on statistics, has been saving lives by preventative measures ever since John Snow removed the handle from the Broad Street pump.

Re: Scamdemic

It looks like a bad case of survivor bias.

Re: Scamdemic

A plan for an epidemic of an existing illness for which many have at least partial immunity from existing exposure or vaccination is going to be bugger all use against a novel infection against which there is no existing immunity and very little data as to its severity or rapidity of spread, especially when such data as does exist suggest it is very bad.

Re: Scamdemic

If a 20 year old dies because of the impacts of lockdown COVID, they could well have lost 60+ years.

In the absence of evidence that is the cautious line of thinking and it's the nature of novel pandemics that you don't have evidence and caution is in order.

It's one thing to review matters with hindsight but you also need to review them from the standpoint of what was known at the time.

Hindsight tells us that we were ill-prepared. We could also have been even worse prepared in that the techniques needed to produce vaccines at the speed they were produced was only recently available. Hindsight should also tell us it was significant that some Chinese workers got the genome sequence out at the beginning of the year; a secretive county like China could very easily have clamped down on it and delayed vaccine production by several weeks.

Re: Wasting my taxes

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Public health and its statistical approach is about prevention.

If you catch a disease the treatment to cure it may or may not be available depending on what you caught.

If you catch a disease for which a treatment is available it may or may not cure it because treatments don't always work, they may be given too late, etc.

If you don't catch a disease you don't catch a disease. This is preferable to relying on treatment.

Re: Scamdemic

"numbers showed it was of the magnitude of bad flu years"

The "bad flu years" immediately following WWI killed more people than the war had done.

Dev's last-day-of-contract code helped to crash app used by 350,000 people

Re: Reading between the lines ...

The clue is probably in "default base configuration" and "anyone else at the major corporation who could use that code" and if that code was now part of the applications used by the 350,000 users not just "a developer with access to the repo". OTOH if that code also allowed a user to issue a "DROP TABLE" there were more bugs than the one Ray fixed.

Big Red borrows a lot of green, hopes AI will put it in the black

Re: AI is not magic.

Credit, yes. AFAICS these grandiose plans are all on credit. It's the money to back up the credit that's the problem. The putative money exists in the future right up to the point where the future arrives.

Re: AI is not magic.

Only if the Bigger Idiot has the money to cover you. When you're dealing with bubbles the money you were hoping would do that doesn't really exist.

Bossware booms as bots determine whether you're doing a good job

Re: Sleeping on the job

Focus on one line of thought excludes other approaches. I often found solutions occurring just after I left work, especially when driving. The concentration of driving replaced concentration on the problem letting the subconscious look at the problem more widely.

Re: Auto-micromanagement

I'd have thought that by now your top management would have noticed something.

“Translation platform monitoring is performed because the client is paying for translation time"

Quantity not quality?

Re: Auto-micromanagement

"our most senior management are micro-managing arseholes"

Interesting phrase. It can be parsed two ways and quite possibly both are correct.

When manglers measure inputs instead of outputs it's a sure sign they not only can't measure the outputs but likely wouldn't recognise them if they saw them.

Microsoft exec finds AI cynicism 'mindblowing'

Re: CV

Clearly a highly talented climber of corporate trees as one might expect.

Re: I miss the days

Their problem might be that they're too big to bail out. Yes, failure is an option.

Re: He doesn't get it....

He'll just know they're wrong.

You're using it wrong.

You shouldn't be asking it questions where you know what's correct.

Magician forgets password to his own hand after RFID chip implant

Don't use an online password manager. Keep it local with Keepass or the like.

Then you'll always have it to hand.

Self-destructing thumb drive can brick itself and wipe your secret files away

Re: 'Not by accident'

But do you carry a PC in your pocket to plug it into?

SpaceX loses debut V3 Super Heavy in ground test mishap

Re: Bad week for Elon

Big hint: don't annoy the judge.

Something about only blowing the doors off.

Google's AI is eating your email by default. Here's how to shut its mouth

Re: Lightbulb above head moment.

That only the moon landings were filmed in a quarry outside Dunstable. Everything was filmed in a quarry outside Dunstable.

I do hope my long disused Gmail addresses are getting a good helping of spam. It can make a sandwich with that.

UK minister ducks cost questions on nationwide digital ID scheme

Re: UK minister ducks

You'd expect that something calling itself "Human Rights Watch" would realise that supporting the rights of people with less than perfect eyesight would be something they should do and not produce pages with lots of white space and text in small, thin, sans-serif fonts. But you'd be disappointed.

Surely it's "accessed by" a phone, not "kept on" a phone???

I doubt it's been decided on a technical level but they'll probably work on the assumption that it's both, just in case.

But from TFA: "The plan is to use smartphones to store digital IDs "

Re: Think of a very big number

"for those who can't write"

Not a problem. Wasn't there a whole lot of Snapchat or WhatsApp stuff leaked a while ago because some politician gave access to a journalist who was their ghostwriter?

This will come as a surprise to many in the Civil Service as has already been demonstrated.

Re: What happens when they're wrong?

"under Common Law your name is what you say it is."

That'll have to go for a start.

Linux admin hated downtime so much he schlepped a live UPS during office move

Re: "I can understand why he wanted to maintain uptime on the mail server,"

It's a colour that can be spelled either way

Open Compute Project figuring out how to get quantum computers into classical datacenters

That would need silver threepenny qubits.