Posts by Doctor Syntax

Amazon's AI specs aim to stop delivery drivers getting lost between van and porch

Computer could say "Must not drive to next destination until all items have been delivered" but Amazon would only cock tat up as well.

Re: Post-code GPS coords

"The problem there is not the drivers', it's the company itself using the Post-Office database for deliveries, which (if memory serves) does indeed not go down any closer geo-spatially than post-code centroid lat/longs."

Absolutely this. It's the company that refuses to accept correct coordinates.

In our case it's complicated by the fact that few houses in the lane have numbers and that the sequence of numbers is not entirely rational - 1 to 4 are a row on one side, half way alone, 1A & 1B are on the other side, back at the start. The rest have names, usually conspicuously displayed. One neighbour, by some reckoning system decided his must be no 19 so renamed his house "Nineteen".

If offered the choice I specify Royal Mail. The posties not only know where we live, they also know where our daughter lives and have delivered something of ours there for some good reason I can't now recall. They probably know about SWMBO's sister as well.

They must be scanning the codes already in order to email confirmation of delivery.

It would be very possible for a simple count of "2 out of 4 boxes found so far" to be displayed already. If it is the driver ignores it.

Currently they have no appropriate error handling to cover an expected code being missed. The consequence is that very strange things happen when the expected doesn't. I very much doubt that another scan will make any difference whatsoever except throwing a few AI hallucinations into the mix alongside the existing ones.

They could provide the driver with the destinations one at a time and only provide the next after the delivery has been completed. That would prevent the driver ignoring a warning. Of course there will be occasions when, for one reason or another, the delivery can't be completed and that would only provide them with more opportunities for bizarre failure modes.

IME it's not Amazon drivers who have the worst problems finding the front door. It's another company whose name is a TLA that insists the GPS coordinates are at the centre of the postcode about 100 metres away round he corner, refused to update them when supplied and consequently has delivered to a house there.. It also seems to dictate - and possibly monitor - that divers park there, in the narrowest part of the lane so the alternative has been a driver leaving his van there to walk the rest of the way.

Amazon's problem is dropping off only part of the delivery or possibly none at all and then getting thoroughly confused as to how to deal with it. I don't suppose AI would help with the first part of that but would certainly heap on more confusion.

Senators accuse Smithsonian of 'illegal lobbying' over Discovery squabbles

Re: Other issues? Ballroom

My guess is that Trump will leave behind him a ruined shuttle and a ruined East Wing as the visible metaphors for everything else.

Microsoft puts Office Online Server on the chopping block

Re: typo...

Why the joke alert?

Just in time for non-USian businesses starting to fret about data sovereignty.

Microsoft threatens to ram Copilot into Exchange Server on-prem

Re: Must admit I'm confused...

It probably has but words mean nothing.

If you want to explain AI in terms of human understanding you should read the Feynman talk about cargo cults.

The survey results will be summarised by Copilot and it won't take "no" for an answer.

UK.gov vows to hack through regulation to get benefit from AI

Lloyds Banking Group

I read that as Lloyds Barking Group. It made more sense.

Microsoft finance slang defines the eternal optimist: The 'hockey stick on wheels'

Your phone example is an instance of another delusion - that all projections assume exponential growth, not sigmoidal and the further delusion that the sales will represent the growth of the market even when the product is a durable in which case they're the first derivative.

With impeccable timing, AWS debuts automated cloud incident report generator

Re: But did it work on Monday?

Working on it for some time?

They probably vibe-coded it in reaction to Monday. It'll work impeccably.

UK data regulator defends decision not to investigate MoD Afghan data breach

Re: Probably pragmatic

They need to be able to hold individuals responsible. Not necessarily the individual who sent the email but whoever was responsible for the process that required and/or allowed sending data in s spreadsheet instead of being exported as some other form such as CSV or PDF.

Great. MoD commits massive security breach but won't allow proper investigation because of security.

And can we jus recite once more:

"Excel is not a database"

Jaguar Land Rover cyber-meltdown tipped to cost the UK almost £2B

Re: Is there an issue with vanishing posts?

I think somebody must have bitten the hand that fed IT.

Total Inability To See Users' Posts.

Re: Political depths of transparency, compared to Amazon's downtime.

Wealthy Britons are generally too lazy to go to the trouble of making things or employing people in Britain

FTFY

OpenBSD 7.8 out now, and you're not seeing double, 9front releases 'Release'

" the Reg FOSS desk strongly dislikes Bluetooth"

IME a lot of allegedly Bluetooth capable devices don't like it either.

Fake home invasion vid lands woman in real trouble

A case in which the AI worked better than the real intelligence.

Re: 8 police cars?

Cumulatively those petty thefts can end up being a drain on a neighbourhood and cost the householders money on their insurance. Doing nothing lets them run on. A better tactic would be to take a quick look and see if there's an occasional one that leaves something for a follow-up. In your instance, does the front garden have a gate with a nice shiny metal handle on it that might take a print? Did the thief cross a patch of soil soft enough to leave a footprint? Obviously it helps a lot if the police have a suspect but even if they do have one nothing will happen without some crime scene evidence.

Carnegie Mellon team claims vector-based system can turbocharge PostgreSQL

"not just for developers with little experience of database management"

Developers with little experience of database management can wreck performance just with application code.

AI does a better job of ripping off the style of famous authors than MFA students do

But no more than 450 words.

Re: Bright new future

The only excerpt I've heard suggests you've been misinformed.

Re: Define "imitate"

As a software architect with multiple decades of experience, I think that AI can (on a good day, barring insoluble hallucinations) "imitate" me implementing some kind of basic CRUD-capture form

That functionality was built into Informix Perform back in the '80s. A few people, including myself, wrote programs that created basic 4GL code to re-use the screen forms. Not difficult, all the information needed was in the system tables which implemented the SQL schema. No AI needed.

"She's lucky it was back in May. If it was today she'd be on the terrorist watchlist."

Wasn't that back when they were best mates? Now she'd be praised for showing good judgement.

"the AI model makers could face ruinous costs"

Let's hope so, and the sooner the better.

Microsoft's ancient icon library still lurks deep within Windows 11

Embedding icons in an application for the application's own use is one thing. Making them available as a resource for the OS to tag file types etc. is another. But providing an executable for them is just another vulnerability sitting there, deeply embedded in the OS.

Using executable file formats for ions. Why?

AWS outage turned smart homes into dumb boxes – and sysadmins into therapists

Most?

First world problem

EightSleep, the so-called smart mattress that learns your body, adjusts its temperature ... "sweating through my sheets because the app's dead."

I suppose just unplugging the damn thing from the mains was too difficult? Probably scared of it rebooting properly when it was plugged back in.

Introducing NTFSplus – because just one NTFS driver for Linux is never enough

"There was a bug in a recentish Windows Update that made REFS volumes unable to mount, so at this point, I can't consider it to be stable enough for production use."

Windows Update or REFS?

Lloyds Banking Group claims Microsoft Copilot saves staff 46 minutes a day

"Then get Co-Pilot to add the half page overview."

Write the overview first just to get your mind round what you need to say in the rest.

A summariser can't summarise what's yet to be written.

"Could of course just get rid of a whole tier of middle management whose entire function appears to be preparing reports for other managers to read."

Get rid of the reading tier as well. Save even more.

Spurious precision warning flag

46 minutes as opposed to three quarters of an hour. That's an instant indicator that it's a claim that's not to be trusted.

Windows 11 tiptoes further into dark mode with new dialogs

Re: Dark Mode WTF?

Just use whatever your H/W and/or S/W provides to adjust the basic screen brightness. If you have a separate monitor there should be an adjustment there, if you're on a laptop the hieroglyphics on the function keys should tell you which function keys adjust screen brightness. And check if your desktop S/W has a brightness adjustment.

I don't know about Macs but on this laptop Fn+F8 and F9 keys adjust brightness to some extent and for more control I can go into the battery/brightness widget from the system tray.

The same thing happened in the Real World - the whiteboard replacing the blackboard.

Mobian makes Debian's latest 'Trixie' release pocket-sized

"However, we must reluctantly concede that as phones increasingly turn into sealed units ... their resistance to water, dust, and thus aging, will increase."

Their resistance to ageing won't increase, not if the batteries are sealed in.

Amazon brain drain finally sent AWS down the spout

Re: Shared responsibility model

Because having spent the money to get it working there they weren't going to spend more money to replicate the service in each region let alone even more money to let one region fall back to another if needed. Even from the outside it's plan to see that Amazon aren't interested in anyone asking "what if?" let alone putting in the code needed to handle the answers.

Re: Multi Region for a Reason

If we just take that a little further - multi-region seems to be either too hard or too expensive for AWS. The underlying problem here seems to be that the internal systems weren't multi-region su us-east-1 became a SPoF.

Justin Garrison in the post linked in TFA suggested that before the brain-drain AWS core was staffed by some very good engineers. If they were good why did they end up with a SPoF? Surely they were bright enough to realise that. My guess is that Amazon manglement wouldn't spend money on "what if this goes wrong" just as they wouldn't in the S/W that underlies their logistics.

"It's just a matter of which understaffed team trips over which edge case first, because the chickens are coming home to roost."

I do love a mixed metaphor. And yes, he's right. Kudos for getting in his rebuttals before the handwaving starts.

One reservation I've had about Amazon over the years, just as a shop customer, was just how thin the programming coverage was. Yes, they did things at an enormous scale but if the man in the van failed to make a delivery - or even part of a delivery it was quite unpredictable how things would pan out. An item went into a warehouse and didn't leave when it was due (probably nicked but possibly just in the wrong shelf) and nobody ever noticed. An item wasn't delivered to a locker in Yorkshire and next allegedly heard of in France while a courier turned up at the door to collect the return of the undelivered object (and wasn't surprised to be told there wasn't a return).

The question is, if this is the error handling in what must be at least one of the world's biggest logistics operations, is what's really under the covers of AWS that much better?

Benioff backs off: Salesforce chief says sorry for Trump troop talk

I was forgetting who Salesforce's customers are. Sales people. Suddenly it makes sense.

Maybe, in imitation of TACO we need the acronym BACO.

"It seems a good high percentage of US business is run by a bunch of shitty scummy amoral pond life."

That almost counts as damning with faint praise.

UK rethinks offshoring ban for £8M online procurement system

Re: What does keeping this data in the UK mean

Not allowed != not able to.

Re: Surely those jobs could be done in the UK ?

Not HMG, it seems.

Re: Corrupt

If a bid winner declares itself unable to meet the contract conditions in this way the contract should be cancelled and awarded to the next best bidder. Otherwise we'll have an unforeseeable event next week - in fact we already have if the Cabinet Office didn't foresee this.

AWS outage exposes Achilles heel: central control plane

From the Wikipedia article on DNS: This mechanism provides distributed and fault-tolerant service and was designed to avoid a single large central database. (my emphasis)

Somebody forgot the "distributed" part and that fault tolerance depends on it.

UK calls up Armed Forces veterans for digital ID soft launch

Re: onelogin

Yup, being hacked and discovering they've been hacked are two different things.

Re: pension pots

Correct. They're Ponzi schemes.