Posts by Doctor Syntax

Apple Intelligence summary botches a headline, causing jitters in BBC newsroom

A bit too subtle.

Re: iPhone improvements???

Include your requirements about the UX into the RFP. See if they can meet that at an undercutting bid price.

Europe signs off on €10.6B IRIS² satellite broadband deal

Education does not mean intelligent. There are a lot of highly - and expensively - educated idiots about. some of them are also politicians of various colours.

In order to profit a corporation would need at least one customer willing to fork out for their product. Surely you're not that customer with sufficiently deep pockets? If not, who do you think might be?

BTW what happened to that Brexit GPS system that didn't depend on those untrustworthy EU satellites? I haven't heard anything about it for ages?

There's nothing like a reasoned argument and ....

US airspace closures, lack of answers deepen East Coast drone mystery

"Our military knows where they took off from, where it came from and where it went, and for some reason they don't want to comment," Trump opined. "Our military knows and our president [Biden] knows, and for some reason, they want to keep people in suspense.

So when he becomes POTUS in a month's time and can be told what Biden's been told will he share that with us? Even if he's told it was a load of hysterical bollox? Or will he accuse the Deep State of keeping things from him?

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine

Re: This is the second Reg article today which references wheresyoured.at

Has anyone made it to the bottom of that screed? It needs an AI summary.

I think it's more likely to be thought not to exist.

It's not sand.

Re: Telling it like it is.

"Nothing found" is a perfectly respectable response. if that's really the case It's better than a load of irrelevant guff. OTOH if there was something it should have found then it is indeed a failure - but still better than load of irrelevant guff.

Re: Peplexity just another stochastic plagiarist

"haphazard parrot "

I must try to remember that one.

Re: Solving the wrong problem

"even Google? Especially Google.

Re: Not bad...

"it couldn't find me."

It will next time. I'm not taking that risk.

Re: This was predicted - in El Reg - years ago.

"The problem with monopolies is their competition is so far behind, it's easy to become complacent, and with that you lose momentum, and face stagnation."

Stagnation would have been OK. It's the enshittification that comes with prioritising vendors' self-interest over customers' requirements that's the problem.

OK, a quick test: "coal pits mentioned in wakefield manorial rolls"

Yes, it comes back with a short summary and a few snippets. At first sight the snippets look as if it's been at work summarising things until I look at the sources.

What would you expect the sources to be for that prompt? A good selection of WMRs are on archive.org so there's no problem getting that answers is there? Except the sources are just secondary publications, True at least one of them involves material not on archive.org (AFAIK 1402 isn't a published roll) but clearly the snippets are either just bits of human summaries or, even worse, AI summarised bits of human summaries.

Maybe I'll go back and try a prompt that can only be answered from real sources.

I did that:

Prompt: "how many fines were issued in published wakefield manorial court rolls for digging coal but not selling it, digging and selling it and just selling it"

Answer: "Based on the available search results, it is not possible to provide a precise count of fines issued in the published Wakefield Manorial Court Rolls for the specific categories of digging coal but not selling it, digging and selling it, and just selling it. However, the search results do provide some relevant information about coal-related fines in the Wakefield "

It's perfectly possible. It's just a matter of going through and keeping 3 tallies.

Oh, it will give me what it "thinks" is the answer I'm looking for and - very kind of it - it's sources. Nope. When I search I'm not looking for an AI double-guessing engine. Search has already become a welter of double-guessing engines. It's not a summary I'm looking for, just the sources. Judging something like that to be better than Google would only be "better" in respect of added enshittification.

This may be a novel idea (spoiler alert, it isn't) but how about a search engine that just takes search terms with the usual operators of and, or and not, and gives the results that fit including the null result if nothing fits. Just like Altavista used to AFAICR.

Infosys founder calls for 70-hour work week – again – claiming it creates jobs

If he thinks we're so stupid as to not see this for the self-serving twaddle it is then he must be really stupid.

All those Infosys customers with trendy modern slavery statements should be looking at this. And maybe those who aren't Infosys customers should also be looking at their suppliers to see if they are Infosys customers.

Deloitte says cyberattack on Rhode Island benefits portal carries 'major security threat'

Some credit to Deloitte (there's something I didn't expect to write): it's not "only a few users".

Red Rabbit Robotics takes human form to sell work as a service

Re: A Path To Artificial Intelligence

We're quite good at replicating bipedal sacks of tubes and squish bits. We've been doing for hundreds of thousands of years and long before that if you take our pre-human ancestors into account.

A better idea would have been to use the comb to herd them into a shovel.

An even better one would have been to throw the tiles into the bin instead of fitting them. They're a fire hazard.

How many automated industrial processes would require a humanoid machine. We've been mechanising processes formerly undertaken by humans for a long time. Fulling mills (replacing treading of cloth by human feet) were in existence in my neck of the woods in Elizabeth I's time. Since then other textile processes - carding, spinning, winding (hands) and weaving (hands and feet) - were all mechanised in the industrial revolution. So were forging metal and stamping ore. These were not only not remotely humanoid in form, they were much larger in scale than could be managed by a humanoid.

Even the picking operation they seem to be plugging as a humanoid function is already provided in non-humanoid form and not limited to the reach of a human arm.

Manual operations are adapted to the human form and scale. Mechanical operations are adapted to the nature of the work allowing them to be scaled up - or down - to best suit requirements.

$800 'AI' robot for kids bites the dust along with its maker

The code would need to be in escrow along with the bond.

Make that the list of customers who are no longer happy to spend $800 on stuff like this

"We wonder how many finance directors or chief technology officers will need to be reduced to tears, like the unfortunate Moxie owners,"

Given the price of this brick it may well be that the parents will be well up the manglement food chain so it might be a useful lesson for them to learn.

Suggested Actions fails to suggest its own survival as Windows 11 feature killed

I can imagine anyone working on any sort of history would get very, very tired of "make an event" very, very quickly.

Iran-linked crew used custom 'cyberweapon' in US critical infrastructure attacks

Don't expose critical infrastructure. It's as simple as that.

Scumbag gets 30 years in the clink for running CSAM dark-web chatrooms, abusing kids

Re: So *not* found by 24/7/365 surveillance of the entire interwebs

"Indeed if this stuff is as pervasive as the data fetishists claim shouldn't it be a daily occurrence?"

You know their inevitable answer to that one, don't you?

"We don't have enough data."

Intel execs discuss the possibility of spinning off foundry

"Every important decision lands on their shoulders, any exotic holiday has a near certainty of being hounded by the office, their diary is forever full, and rarely much under their control."

That can happen much further down the food chain as well. As can the crash and burn out.

The significant thing in this case, however, is that there is wide-spread belief that Gelsinger as CEO was Intel's best chance of sorting problems that had accumulated under (presumably) much the same board of directors. Problems accumulated over the long term are not likely to be turned round in the short term. If the directors weren't prepared to stick with what looked like being a long haul job it was up to them to step down. S&P's reaction should tell them that if they don't know it.

Google Timeline location purge causes collateral damage

If you depend on keeping information on somebody else's computer then remember that:

1. its continued existence depends on the whim of that somebody else unless

2. you have a contract with them to preserve it - and maybe not even then*. A contract is a legal arrangement to provide a good or service in return for a consideration or, as we non-lawyers put it, payment.

You may think somebody else has better skills than you in looking after your stuff. This may be true but they don't have your motivation.

* If somebody else goes bust, gets taken over or suffers form force majeure your contract isn't going to help.

systemd begrudgingly drops a safety net while a challenger appears, GNU Shepherd 1.0

I don't know about Shepherd but systemd fails on the first of the principles listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltzer_and_Schroeder's_design_principles

BTW, sudo fails on the 5th.

Re: We don't need another init, we were good with init.

"I was a Devuan user, I have reverted back to Debian because nowadays anything that's not part of the standard Devuan repo NEEDS systemd, so no way to install third party software made for Debian/ubuntu on Devuan."

This is not my experience. Possibly the list of non-standard stuff we've tried to install differs.

Re: "There is an effort to do that total rewrite"

A slight variation on that would be OpenOffice to LibreOffice. In that case the owner of the original OO had more or less lost interest in it. A more recent development in the ....Office world is to provide a ribbon interface for those severely bran-damaged by exposure to Microsoft products, the latter, of course, being a prime example of a dubious re-write although, I've always suspected, for quite nefarious reasons.

Re: "There is an effort to do that total rewrite"

Should have added, of course, that fixing vulnerabilities is also an ongoing activity in and out of FOSSland.

Re: "There is an effort to do that total rewrite"

That's because, at least in userland (the kernel, by contrast, will always need new drivers and there's been extra stuff such as real-time) is because it was good enough years ago. In consequence we have a combination of perfect being the enemy of good enough and the devil making work for idle hands. This, of course, is not a problem unique to FOSS; far from it.

Re: 42% less unix philosophy

It must be more than 50 years since I've been a main user and never an admin. I have, however, been a Unix admin back in the day and not found them slow to boot. In fact the only problem I've had with getting a Linux boot working* was with Ubuntu#s upstart, which, as far as I can see, came from the same line of thinking as systemd with nowhere to put in debugging. It still mis-boot sometimes by claiming a disk isn't ready.

* In fact is wasn't so much the boot as getting the video working properly. It took a long time to discover that the monitor was telling porkies by pretending its screen was a PDA.

Re: 42% less unix philosophy

"the good thing about sysvinit is that they're all odd bashisms that we know about and are easy to work around."

That's the thing. We, you and I and plenty of other commentards, know shell scripting. AFAICS systemd was written for people who don't know Unix shells but want to administer servers. It's questionable whether someone who doesn't know Unix shell should be administering Unix-type systems any more than someone who doesn't know Powershell should be administering Windows servers. Ill include myself in that last group and add that I'm grateful I've never had to do that.

BOFH: Don't sell The Boss a firewall. Sell him The Dream

Re: Yet another

"young and keen and enthusiastic"

Young and obviously inexperienced not to realise that glossy paper is always a warning sign - doubly so because you can't find a more appropriate use for it.

Re: That's my week nicely upticked

Yes, I was expecting the PFY to give up and order it under consumables. Should have realised he'd already missed the boat.

Re: That reminds me of "The Plan"

A little probing gives a list of stes for which the ssl certificate is valid. Pinging one of those and www.catb.org shows that they're both hosted by vermontlibraries.org. It looks like an oversight in setting up the list of valid site.

Re: The Dream

In the case of the Thames valley it's human excrement and it's in the river.

2024 according to Cloudflare: Global traffic up, Google still king, US churning out bots

They do seem to successfully protect cylex-uk from being visited by me. On account of either my browser or some of the add-ons such as noscript or adblock it decides that following a link from a search engine is an attack. Great way to attract site traffic.

North Korea's fake IT worker scam hauled in at least $88M over six years

"given a goal of earning $10,000 each every month."

IOW they were telling them that that sort of money was achievable on the outside. I wonder if any took that incentive to jump the wire.

Broadcom says VMware is a better money-making machine than it hoped

"growth for VMware would be achieved in a tighter time frame than the three years initially forecast – and that further improvements are achievable."

That sounds like a man planning his retirement in the next three years.

Aliens, spy balloons, or drones? SUV-sized mystery objects spotted in US skies

Re: Jersey?

New Jersey isn't an island. Jersey is, mate: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@49.2403943,-2.0619738,96906m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en&entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI0MTIwOS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D

Re: Jersey?

Why not? It's a nice little island, low tax rates and the early spuds are second to none.

Google thinks the grid can't support AI, so it's spending on solar for future datacenters

Computing used to be measured in the number of computations per second, the storage available or the number of bits in and out of a data centre. In other words, its output. Now it seems to be measured in the power consumed, its inputs. Is this because the output is so pointless it's not worth measuring?

Krispy Kreme Doughnut Corporation admits to hole in security

I take it from this that it's mandatory to make a report to possible investors but not to customers whose data might have been taken. And yet the investors, as shareholders, are the company and as such owe a duty of care to the customers.

I miss those. We haven't seen one for years.