Posts by DarkwavePunk

Here's one way to cut support ticket volume… send them to another company entirely

Nightmares

I was kind of on the other end of this. Used to get really angry (American) people phoning the help desk for a company I worked for. Couldn't work out what the fuck they were banging on about. Turned out that some American state automated toll system was called the same name as the global internet roaming company I worked for.

Sadly, rebooting Windows XP computer didn't solve their issues with some fucking toll bridge in Iowa or whatever. Other American places starting with "I" exist.

ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok make very squishy jury members

Always fun

I have tried to get multiple LLMs to answer a question about the language Motu from Papua New Guinea. It spits out gibberish in Tok Pisin. Different languages. Kill it with fire.

Bank of England says JLR's cyberattack contributed to UK's unexpectedly slower GDP growth

Re: So now we know that cyberattacks cost ...

Agreed. Security should be baked in from the beginning. Unfortunately it always seems to be bolted on after the fact. This is suboptimal and leaky as fuck. Doing things right costs money up front, not doing it right costs a fuck tonne of nightmarish horror down the line. How many times do we see this? When will it change?

'Vibe coding' named Word of the Year. Developers everywhere faceplant

Vibes

I "vibe" coded a version of the classic Breakout in one of my many local test LLMs rendered in CANVAS. It glitches out like crazy, seemed to time units wrong. It ran at speeds beyond human responses and utterly borked my VM in an infinite loop of madness.

Now, where is my hundred million sign-up bonus from one of these AI companies?

Famed software engineer DJB tries Fil-C… and likes what he sees

Re: Type checking and compatibility

I almost got a job at some company in Cambridge that was still making LISP machines in the early 2000s. I often wonder if I missed a trick, or dodged a bullet.

Fortytwo's decentralized AI has the answer to life, the universe, and everything

Aha!

I was reading the article on edge just waiting - then - "crypto". Of course. Bunch of shitgoblins.

AI blew open software security, now OpenAI wants to fix it with an agent called Aardvark

Re: Funny old world

Gödel had something to say about that. Have an upvote anyway. Everyone needs to read Gödel Escher Bach. Well, if you like brain damage through formal logic that is...

Aardvark

Bet they chose that name just to be on the first page of the Yellow Pages directory listing. No I'm not old - what gave you that idea?

Also it just seems like slop eating it's own tail. AI Jormungand without the Viking cool factor.

Linux vendors are getting into Ubuntu – and Snap

The CentOS debacle was an utter shit show. We got caught up in it at just the wrong time. Most of our stuff was Ubuntu server, but there were niche systems. Looked at Alma and Rocky. Got made redundant before it got very far so it's somebody else's problem.

Canonical CEO says no to IPO in current volatile market

Cynical, but I understand your view. They have the positive of already being in profit. However - investors are never happy with steady profit and demand exponential growth. This is what makes everything go to shite.

Italian tech company promises to make America Online great again

AOL

I miss my seemingly endless supply of coasters. In the old days anyone using "LOL" was instantly flagged as an AOL user and shunned in the geekier parts of the internet. I guess they won that culture war. What a legacy.

Beatings, killings, and lasting fear: The human toll of MoD's Afghan data breach

Re: Well...

I'm confused. Did beast666 or whatever delete their obnoxious post? This comment timeline is weird.

Well...

I'm totally confident in the rollout of Digital ID and OSA. What could possibly go wrong given the proven track record of governmental systems security?

On the actual subject, it's horrendous how these people have been betrayed no matter your stance on that conflict.

Berkeley boffins build better load balancing algo with AI

Interesting

I hate the term "AI" for this stuff - however ML is perfectly suited to the application at hand. It's kind of like a hyper-charged attempt at the Travelling Salesman problem. Pretty groovy, but intelligent it is not (unless you just redefine terms). Impressive? Yes. I think we should all just keep calling out LLMs for what they are.

Alaska Airlines grounded by mystery IT meltdown

Jamaica?

Alaska.

A single DNS race condition brought Amazon's cloud empire to its knees

Re: Ouch

Cunt (in the nicest possible way). Well played.

Re: Ouch

Could be worse I guess. I raise you the V3 to Burton via Willington.

Re: Ouch

I think it's part of their Route 53 service. I think it's to do with load balancing and DNS routing for latency. Read: "Voodoo".

Ouch

As someone with some levels of AWS certification, that's terrifying. Mostly because I understood most of that gobbledygook explanation. Pass the mind bleach.

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

Re: Could be useful tech...

The new Meta (kill me now) ones look to be more HUD than actual AR, but might be useful in the scenarios you envision. Accidentally useful is something at least.

Forking confusing: Vulnerable Rust crate exposes uv Python packager

What?

What demonic level of abstraction is this horror? I remember when "tar" was just a useful command on SunOS for tape archive or a local filesystem facsimile thereof. What have we done?

Feds flag active exploitation of patched Windows SMB vuln

SMB

I'd actually forgotten that it existed. Probably not the same beast I remember from the stone age, but obviously just as "fun".

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

Bollocks

More faffing about and looking like "things are being done" does not equate to productivity. These wankers might be in control of your money and they're playing bot on bot orgy simulator. Cunts.

Major AWS outage across US-East region breaks half the internet

DNS

It's always DNS...

Labor unions sue Trump administration over social media surveillance

Re: Not far enough at all

May I please subscribe to your newsletter? Fax or BBS is fine too.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Another 550 employees set to leave the building

Brain drain

There are a lot of really clever people in the USA (snark aside). Most other nations are going to be drooling over this talent pool suddenly coming onto the market. It's fucking JPL - I'd get that tattooed on my private parts if I was smart enough to work there. Self imposed Dark Ages by a country that prided themselves on innovation?

Benioff retreats from idea of sending troops in to clean up San Francisco

Slobbering

All of this two-faced drooling boot-licking crap is getting tedious. Sure, these companies have to walk a tightrope, but their public statements waft around just as much as Trump's brain farts. Never going to change. All corporations are going to suck up to whichever party is in power. Depressing reality.

Inside the belly of the beast: A technical walk through Intel's 18A production facility at Fab52

Re: Awesome

I agree. As much as I'm impressed by AMDs rise, they're also not immune to marketing bollocks. The recent Intel information on their integrated graphics was surprisingly nerd-friendly. More of that from everyone in the sector. I'm looking at you NVIDIA.

Awesome

I hope that they can pull this off. More competition is always good in the tech sector. Also, you lucky lucky bastards for getting to have that fab tour. Not jealous at all... *mutters expletives*

Weird ideas welcome: VC fund looking to make science fiction factual

Re: Star Trek tech

That is the other interpretation. It's a fun mental exercise.

Re: Star Trek tech

Regarding transporters in ST - even if possible, do you commit suicide every time you use one?

Humans flunk the Turing test for voices as bots get chattier

No worries

I live in a tiny village in the Midlands. We get by with grunts, pointing, casual racism, and saying "duck" lot for some reason. AI has a lot of catching up to do.

Intel's open source future in question as exec says he's done carrying the competition

Re: Good news everybody

Polite people don't mention i860 in public. You monster.

No account? No Windows 11, Microsoft says as another loophole snaps shut

Re: "a number of ways to avoid the Microsoft account requirement"

My struggle is that I really should keep up to date with Windows for technical reasons. The last of six machines at home not running Linux is practically begging me. Sure, I could run a VM but that's not exactly the same as the true Eldritch Horror.

Level-10 vuln lurking in Redis source code for 13 years could allow remote code execution

Thanks

I really needed PTSD about Redis on a Monday. Fortunately the stack I worked on was so bad that this would make no difference. Nothing says fun like putting personal data into an insecure pile of shite for a global recruitment agency. Happy days.

AI chatbots that butter you up make you worse at conflict, study finds

Sycophant

The question of whether the behaviour is emergent or deliberately baked in is interesting. Given it's a black box trained on all the stupid of the internet I'd suggest the former but don't know. These companies are utter cunts after all, so nothing is off the table.

Hacking contest kerfuffle over copied rules pits Wiz against ZDI

Re: Bad form on both their parts.

A bit childish, yes. I did read it as being light-hearted with a touch of snark. Maybe I'm just being unusually nice today.

Apple ices ICE agent tracker app under government heat

Re: Violence against law enforcement is an intolerable red line

That doesn't count. You've got to make sure it's the correct version of dystopian "Freedom". It's all so childish.

Totally expected

The boot-licking continues. I understand that these companies are just trying to ride out the storm, but some of the pandering is really shameless.

Submarine cable security is all at sea, and UK govt 'too timid' to act, says report

Re: Munching sharks

Back in the mid 90s a shark did take out the major link between Australia and the US. All traffic had to be routed through Southeast Asia with horrific latency. It was a miserable time to be an admin at an ISP I can tell you.

Microsoft digs up Vista-era animated wallpaper for Windows 11. Here's how to get it

Confused...

Who actually sees the the Windows desktop (other than at boot up) these days? I thought everyone ran programs full screen.

Empty shelves, empty coffers: Co-op pegs cyber hit at £80m

Fun times

Co-op is the only store I can walk to and I can't drive for reasons. That outage and stock shortage was rather annoying at the time in this tiny village. I jokingly suggested going back to fax machines and cheques.

Zero-day deja vu as another Cisco IOS bug comes under attack

Oh good

Two of my least favourite things! SNMP and IOS - what could possibly go wrong? Wait, TFA explains exactly what. At least it doesn't involve BGP this time - so there is that...

US Navy: I can't quit you, Azure

Cloud...

Why? I think even sections of the Australian military have moved to Libre Office. Not for cost or ideology, but because of the utter entanglement that M365 has with cloud crap.

OpenSSF warns that open source infrastructure doesn't run on thoughts and prayers

Back in the day when Perl was all the rage - I thought CPAN was an attack vector. These more modern dynamic package tool chains are utterly terrifying. You'd think that everyone would run a local and vetted repository, but I've seen so much code that just spaffs off to the internet with minimum if any sanity checking.

Linux has the lineage to out-evolve the deadliest of cyber threats, given the right push

Be careful...

I understand the concepts that are being being conveyed in this article - but do be careful when trying to use analogies with evolutionary biology and technology. It might lead to misconceptions about both.

Firewall upgrade linked to three deaths after Australian telco cut off emergency calls

Optus

i worked in the Australian telecoms industry back in the mid to late nineties. Optus were a bunch of cunts to deal with then. Sadly some things never change. Telstra aren't exactly saints either. Horrible industry as a whole.

Nice try, sinners: Pope nixes idea of AI pontiff blessing netizens

Re: But

Probably not if you really take all doctrine literally. It's complicated. I'll stick with "I don't know man, I didn't do it" for now.

But

I already have an official Pope card blessed by Discordia. Did my dot matrix printer die in vain? Discerning Golden Apples need to know. FNORD.

How and why Linux has thrived after three decades in Kernelland

Linux

UNIX was my gateway drug, but that was at university and mostly SunOS and Xenix. Then came mid 1994, Slackware, a 14.4k modem, and a lot of floppy disks. Been using Linux ever since. It has come a long way as a kernel. Can't remember the last time I compiled a kernel though. Jeff Geerling is going to hunt me down, tut, and be really nice now :)