Posts by LucreLout

Ukrainians smuggle drones hidden in cabins on trucks to strike Russian airfields

Re: Who built/supplied the drones?

Socialism is humanities natural organising pattern. Sharing stuff to get a collective result.

That's never been true. Not in the earliest societies or any that succeeded them. Someone always eats the most food. Someone always has the hottest cave girl / girlfriend / haram etc. Someone's always at the top - in capitalism it is more merit based than any Marxist nightmare, where its always just the party members.

For the all bar the latter, any fiscal system doesn't advantage/disadvantage the provisions of them - skilled people don't appear from thin air, and neither do real resources.

Again a total failure of understanding. It is the financial system and the rewards it provides that motivates the skilled people, incentivises the resource provision. In socialism, nobody bothers - you know it to be true.

Capital now, more specifically the cost of Capital; the Government can borrow at long term rates which are unavailable to private industry. So it's possible to achieve an enormous cost differential between the state doing it collectively, or private capital funding.

Government borrowing is totally tapped out. We spend more on debt service than most departments.

The problem is not that Socialism works but that when all your needs are taken care of, people are harder to exploit.

Socialism has never worked anywhere or at any time its ever been tried. It always ends in capitalism or communist killing fields. Why? Human nature. People respond to incentives. Its always been true. It will always be true, no matter how inconvenient socialists find it.

Making everybody miserable, and afraid so that a vanishing small percentage of people can be supremely wealthy on a burning planet is not a great sell.

Ironically you just described every implementation of socialism ever.

Cuba has vastly better healthcare than we do ( Sanctions of course had no effect). Libya had free electricity, now has open-slave markets. Syria had free healthcare, now thanks to the US its run by Al-Qaeda and Healthcare is now not free.

Cuba has people trapped by its own military, wholly unable to leave or they all would. Tell me you've never been there without using any of those words. Cuba is perpetually on the brink of poverty and out with Havana, often living through it. Libya & Syria had state torture, murder squads, and poverty. Popular leaders don't die in ditches. At this point you must be trolling. You can't possibly believe what you're typing. Its fully batshit crazy and totally ignores facts, reason, and history.

Re: Who built/supplied the drones?

Interesting. What do you imagine this "late stage capitalism" to actually be? Only the term itself is nearly 100 years old, so the question is how many more centuries will this "late stage" last? All of them? Most of them?

Its the sort of term bandied about a lot by people that never seem to understand why capitalism works and socialism never does.

The UK wants you to sign up for £1B cyber defense force

Re: "the new Command would protect all military networks from attacks"

Their best option for staffing is going to be late career folks who have killed their mortgage, fallen prey to ageism, but who aren't ready to retire yet.

Given how rampant ageism is these days, there would be no shortage of potential recruits.

I might even be up for serving in dangerous places too by then. I mean, during in your 20s you lose 60 years. Dying at 55 you're only really losing 20. Probably a lot less by the time the risk manifests. Better than some kid dying instead.

Here's what we know about the DragonForce ransomware that hit Marks & Spencer

Re: "off limits"

It's just fear.

Imagine you had to fuck the wife of a world leader and imagine they were definitely going to catch you doing it.

Putin and Xi would be close to last on your list because it'd be fatal. Trump would be top of mine because Melania and no real impact of him knowing, starmer maybe as what's he really gonna do? For the most part I've no idea what the ladies in question look like and it's definitely not the primary selection criteria.

If the consequences of being targeted are unpleasant enough and likely enough to be visited upon the transgressor, it's perfectly possible to slide through life unimpeded by crime. People don't steal mafia bosses cars, for example.

Re: And that's why you should NEVER pay a ransom...

It's a nice idea, and I think of enacted globally it may work.

Unfortunately, next time the NHS most all or days and it health records become inaccessible, What's the plan for getting them back?

Backups etc assume a level of competency rarely demonstrated in the public sector, and not witnessed on the private sector often enough.

Too often what will happen under your plan is that all the ordinary workers will become suddenly unemployed because the company got closed. That's maybe ok if you're in the public sector, where recessions and job loss are just words in a dictionary, but in the real world this would be a problem. A bit longer socialism then, nice theory, nothing more.

IT chiefs of UK's massive health service urge vendors to make public security pledge

Meanwhile NHS hospitals routinely leave terminals logged in unattended, run software years if not decades out of date, and generally exhibit the same low standards as the rest of the service. Not good and it's nowhere near good enough to try to pin the blame on suppliers.

No-boom supersonic flights could slide through US skies soon

Re: Market research needed

I get to "enjoy" business trips to more distant and dynamic places than little old Europe. I'd certainly welcome getting there and back in a lot less time, though there is a risk work would defray the gains by sending me more often. The bastards.

Unfortunately a lot of things are just much easier to do in person than over a teams call. That's unlikely to ever change.

Anyone forced to fly for work will certainly welcome fewer hours sat in a fart tube with some short arse reclining their seat on your knees the whole journey.

Some English hospitals doubt Palantir's utility: We'd 'lose functionality rather than gain it'

The NHS being resistant to change? Shurely shome mishtake.

Unending ransomware attacks are a symptom, not the sickness

Re: Make the management legally liable

"Technology is already a regulated industry"

Lol. No. No it's not. Who specifically do you imagine is the regulator and what specifically do you imagine are the mandated minimum competencies to work in software engineering?

Re: Make the management legally liable

If companies don't want to pay for or have the kind of environments where people used to stay with a firm for 20-30 years

What on earth makes you think companies want you to stay 30 years? That way lies the same hapless stagnation so very visible throughout all arms of the public sector.

Re: Make the management legally liable

I would not be surprised to find that you are early in your career

It's not impossible you've been working longer than me, but it is highly unlikely. Retirement beckons, and it all seems to have gone by so very quickly.

To be honest, your whole post smacks of burn out. Tragic when it happens, but some folks just aren't built to go the distance in a career.

Re: Make the management legally liable

Your last paragraph is shockingly unprofessional and a hallmark for why technology needs to become a regulated industry like medicine and law.

No company can fix all of the flaws, all of the risks. The only secure system is one that's powered down and guarded by wolves.

Instead of blaming management, look at your own final paragraph. You are the problem. Sorry, but you need to see this.

I quote

I REALLY care about doing a good job but these days, even in public sector if I spotted files being encrypted at 445 on a Friday afternoon, I would quietly close my laptop & go home

Britain's cyber agents and industry clash over how to tackle shoddy software

Holy shit. Lol.

The reality is that users cannot tell whether they have good security or bad security until their bad security lets them down.

Yes, CxOs could listen more. Absolutely. Yes they could take InfoSec seriously before they get breached. But fuck me, just because users value something doesn't mean they're going to get it or can tell that they haven't when the vendor tells them they have.

Are marketing really going to announce that yes, they have a super new feature, but they've traded that for shite security? How will the buyer know?

IRS hopes to replace fired enforcement workers with AI

"xitler". Lol. First time I've seen it. Amusing.

On the issue of AI copyright, Blair Institute favors tech bros over Cool Britannia

Re: Blair? A former PM who could receive greater accolades from history than Johnson?

In the context of That of 'intellectual property' rentier economics This Neither side holds high moral ground. simply isn't true, its wildly inaccurate.

The reality is that in most cases those who hold the IP put in all of the work, the hours, and the effort to create that IP. It is not acceptable for someone else just to abscond with the value of that work because it is a foundational cornerstone of how they wish to enrich themselves. The owner and creator of the IP has every moral right to their work and the produce of their effort; it's not the TBI's, government, or your business if they don't want you to do whatever it is you feel its desirable to do with their work.

I love new technology, and I think AI has a lot of potential to help humanity, but there clearly needs to be some mechanism for those who provide the content to make the LLM possible to share in the profit of its output, for there will be profit. The easiest way is to take contact details as content is spidered and provide an equity share proportional to the percentage of the training set that content compromises on a like for like basis with the LLM owner.

There's no legal or moral right for you or anyone else to just decide to take their work and use it for your own ends. If you need to train your LLM on, say books, then you may need to put the work in to writing them first, rather than just taking someone's work because it exists and its easier for you.

Feds charge three over Molotov attacks on Tesla sites in multiple states

It's clearly not actually terrorism....

....buy it is clearly arson, abject stupidity, and a total inability to reason.

There's no defending burning down car dealerships, machine gunning them, etc. If you think there is you are the problem.

The problem with politics today, especially in the UK, is one group have utterly convinced themselves their party is morally good and so the other parties must be morally bad and so illegitimate. It's the politics of the playground.

It makes me wonder just who it is gets these people dressed on a morning and packed off to work?

Euro techies call for sovereign fund to escape Uncle Sam's digital death grip

Smells like pork

I wonder who those signatories think might be the primary beneficiaries of their plan, other than themselves of course, which couldn't be clearer if they got a flashing neon sign.

Signal will withdraw from Sweden if encryption-busting laws take effect

Re: Laws of Mathematics

I see, you didn't understand how the process works.

When your device picks it's secret number it can simply share that with apple, gov, whoever, along with the large prime.

As I said, there's absolutely no need for a third number to work here.

If you still don't get it, post your private key on the internet and see what happens. Same thing.

Re: Laws of Mathematics

It's not a maths problem.

There's no need to create a third key, you just copy the users private key at the time of creation and hand it over when required.

Now, I think this is a terrible idea. I'm not defending it. But you can't win this battle using motte and bailey arguments.

Payday from hell as several British banks report major outages

Re: Making changes

The whole back end of the cash machine network is old mainframes. It's why they used to get outages a decade back when anyone tried changing the original BIC codes to accept extended modern replacements.

Re: Making changes

If your engineering function is correctly set up for ci/cd then the next minute is the same as the last and you should be safely deploying on demand.

There's no excuses for outages anymore. Uptime is a solved problem.

The answer here is to fine banks per account per hour or part thereof of downtime. Then they'll stop using cheap engineers the way you'd stop using a cheap parachute.

Elon Musk calls for International Space Station to be deorbited by 2027

Re: I wonder why Musk never took a space ride

Well, in fairness to Musk, I had no idea the little wee lad had been on the transformational road he's been on and would objectively expected to kick his ass without breaking a sweat.

30 seconds of research later I now expect the reversal of that to be true using the same evaluation criteria I'd used before. I'm genuinely impressed by Zucks training.

With the training he's now had and the shape he's in, less than 1% of people would be able to beat Zuck in a fight now. I may dislike him but I respect his skills and the effort it takes to acquire them, even with money no object time and tuition.

Re: Follow the money

You know what, a few months ago your whole post would have sounded like the tinfoil hatted ravings of a mad man.

Now, however, I can actually see that as a discussion point for when they were deciding their actual plan, and which bits to tell us about and when.

It raises interesting questions like, do we still need a government (yes)? Should it maintain the same areas of authority it always has regardless of the march of technological progress (no)?

The real debate is how much of government should we be automating, outsourcing to the private sector, and just plain stopping doing in it's entirety.

If you could get people to put aside partisan politics and entrenched beliefs for long enough to be constructive about it, the country (any western country) could deliver much better outcomes to it's citizens.

My fear here is the doge crowd will go too far too fast, break too much, and the actual merit of the idea will be engulfed in the inferno they leave behind.

Lloyds Bank reviews tech and engineering personnel in reorg

Lol. There are exactly zero instances where off shoring development to cheapistan has worked well. Every single major bank that's done it has had protracted outages sooner or later.

You are a technology company. That may not be what your CEO thinks you are, but you are first and foremost a tech business that does something else too. In this case banking services.

Looks like paywalls are coming soon to a subreddit near you

I really tried with Reddit, but it's entire offering seemed to be one of

Low quality porn

Kids moaning about house prices or how uniquely hard their generation has it

Student common room politics

Or news about some celebrity that could be a celebrity, an energy drink, or a social disease, based on their name.

I can't say I'll miss it when it's gone. If there's any signal in the noise it's imperceptible.

Mobile operators brace for bigger, faster headaches with 6G

Wait, so will I now need another set of jabs to get a 6g signal?

UK armed forces fast-tracking cyber warriors to defend digital front lines

18 to 39

Why the ageism?

If you want to attract someone good, and retain them for that level of comp, you're better off targeting folks who's mortgage is done, career is on the back swing, who want to serve their country.

It's not like we're going to be sprinting through obstacle courses or routinely getting injured.

I'd be well up for a 5 or 10 year stint but not until I'm 55ish. Chances are very good that I already know everything on their bootcamp starter course and plenty more besides.

UK Home Office silent on alleged Apple backdoor order

Re: Same old labour...

You do realise that doesn't mean they have to apply it, right? There's absolutely zero compulsion forcing labour into their same old tired rut of privacy invasion.

Must try harder.

Re: Human Right

I've lived for over half a century without ever being vegan. It doesn't mean some people don't choose to be vegan.

If some lass wants to send her fella pictures of her tits, its really not Mrs Balls business to let everyone in her department see them.

Clearly Apple could copy your key at the time of its creation and storage on your device. You only have to break maths if you don't go to the source of the key generation.

Same old labour...

Taxes up, growth down, criminals free, privacy invaded.

No you cannot have access to all my data because I very clearly cannot trust you with it. Apple may hand over the keys to the kingdom but much of what I store in their cloud is encrypted elsewhere first. All this will do is see some very dodgy people sideload 3rd party messaging apps that neither Apple nor your Telecoms provider can see, while the rest of us enjoy a fappening moment courtesy of Mrs Balls.

Musk's move fast and break things mantra won't work in US.gov

I love that Americans say 248 year old democracy as though that means something. My house is older. My local pub is older. I've lived for nearly a quarter of that time.

Musk’s DOGE ship gets ‘full’ access to Treasury payment system, sinks USAID

Trump is absolutely nowhere near the calibre of Abraham Lincoln

While I agree with you (Who wouldn't?!), it is worth remembering that Lincoln's greatness comes in the main from the fact that he won. Had he lost, history would have looked very different, as would his reputation, regardless of the calibre of the man.

Whatever we might think about it on our side of the pond, Trump is doing what he said he'd do, what he was elected to do. Whatever colour rosette you wear, our government cannot hope to make such a claim.

Silk Road's Dread Pirate Roberts walks free as Trump pardons dark web kingpin

Re: Burdick v. United States, 236 U.S. 79 (1915)

If honesty was a factor in most criminals actions, they wouldn't be criminals. You've spent longer reading this than they'll spend weighing your argument.

Why is Big Tech hellbent on making AI opt-out?

Re: Maybe it's because...

They don't care what's best for you. You're not even an afterthought. They know what's best for them, and that people rarely opt into things, but also often fail to opt out, which is why they prefer opt out - more free fuel for their business.

Tool touted as 'first AI software engineer' is bad at its job, testers claim

Amusing

The thing that will kill most peoples software engineering careers isn't AI, its the same thing as has always killed them. Ageism.

I'd rather hoped that would change as Gen X, the original digital generation of professionals, hit our late 40s and 50s, but unfortunately it hasn't. People who's entire careers rest upon our work still compare us to their technophobic parents and jump to low value conclusions.

UK tax collector's phone service 'deliberately' bad to push users online, say MPs

Easy answer....

... just prove you waited for 60 mins in the queue or until otherwise cut off and any tax discrepancy is found to be in your favour and paid from HMRCs budget the following year. Problems will disappear like a fart in a hurricane.

Pornhub pulls out of Florida, VPN demand 'surges 1150%'

Re: Governments should stick to being rubbish

I've voted in every election since the mid 90s and never, not one time, have I been offered an opportunity to vote for someone I liked.

AI spending spree continues as Microsoft commits $80B for 2025

Re: the skills needed to use AI to pursue higher-paying jobs and more successful careers.

Both statements can be true, to some extent at least.

Its highly likely simple administration roles, such as those found in call centres and much of the public sector back offices, will be replaceable with a suite of AI agents. Its equally likely that doing so will throw off some much better paid much higher skilled roles in training and tuning those agents, just in lower volumes.

If you're one of those people that can "complete the assigned tasks in 2 or 3 hours" then netflix the day away, then this is your comet.

Re: So is it a tax writeoff?

Even if there really is a market for this kind of 'AI', it's nowhere near large enough to ever pay back this kind of money.

Of course there is. If we assume AI only replaces call center jobs, and it clearly can start to do that now, then the spend discussed in this article gives roughly a 31k break even cost cut per former employee. If we deprecate that over a 5 year shelf life, then anything over about 6k per year in wage costs is all cheddar. Just from call centers.

I'm not a fan of AI, I think we're going to prematurely push a lot of people out of work with it, which will predominantly affect Gen Z (just finished racking up uni debt for questionable degrees to do jobs that won't exist for long), though clearly not all of Gen Z. In the future it'll just be a productivity tool, but between now and then, lots of jobs are going to vanish in lots of fields.

Are you better value for money than AI?

Re: From Omni magazine, 1982...

One way would be to allow the workers to own the robots that replace them. As owners, they could lease the robots back to their former employers for use at their old jobs. The plan is highly speculative, of course...

Why would an employer lease a machine from a former worker rather than buy their own which would always be cheaper?

However the post work for money future plays out, the transition from here to there is incredibly unlikely to be peaceful, or enjoy evenly distributed challenges and rewards.

Re: So can AI wire a plug?

They will use AI for 'customer service' reducing it from poor to completely crap.

My local doctors surgery staff could be replaced by a pleasant sounding machine and it would definitely be an improvement. Even one that just treated you as benign, rather than actively considering you a nuisance because you need to book the appointment the doctor literally just told you to book.

Re: OpenAI chief financial officer (CFO) Sarah Friar

Friar seems to be saying that if you replace humans with "AI" then the company will save money. She then goes on to say that OpenAI will generously relieve you of the savings by charging you more for the product.

There would still be many cost savings, even if the AI and the human had the same "dollar cost".

The AI can work 24/7. It won't go on strike. It won't leave for a better job. It won't get sick, or die. It won't start slacking and watching netflix instead of working. It won't get handsy at the office party. Its unlikely to ever need a pay rise - costs of these things tend to fall over time. It can be scaled with demand instantly. It doesn't need an office. Or training. Or even managing.

The simple fact is that a lot of the work done in an office actually isn't very complicated at all. Its not about automating 100% of 1 role, 10% of a role 10 people do is just as good.

You don't need to buy the hype. I certainly don't. But your manager or their manager or their manager will. And then your job will go anyway.

Re: Given that AI currently does not exist...

I'll just remind the audience of the various lawyers who relied upon AI to write their legal briefs. The AI went off and happily made up citations and cases that never existed. Hilarity ensued when the judges discovered that and asked the lawyers for an explanation. Much backpedalling and apologetic noises were the result and several lawyers barely escaped with their licences intact.

The irony of your post is that the made up citation pointed to a specific peddler of legal data/software that has last year released its very own AI that it claims is "free of hallucinations". I make no such claim, of course.

Lout's law of AI states that "AI will take your job when someone above you in the hierarchy can be sold the idea that it can". Whether or not it can actually perform your role will not be a salient fact involved in the decision making process.

This will hit the public sector like a tsunami under whichever government comes next, in just 4.5 years time. Productivity of their homebased clerical staff is so low, while the unit cost because of the solid gold pensions, so very high. Everyone in the public sector needs to start spending serious time and effort in delivering much more value in order to make themselves harder to automate, because once it begins, and begin it shall, it won't stop and will become a time play for most of the lifers there.

The advantage is that having automated the lowest tier of workers, you then won't need any of the very deep hierarchy above them either, which is why the cost savings vs the more efficient and productive private sector will be so much greater.

25 years on from Y2K, let's all be glad it happened way back then

Re: Well, we have 2038 to look forward to

While I'm pretty sure that (eg) an energy company will have patched/tested any critical systems and will be fine in 2038, I'm less confident that small cheap devices will be; eg the smart meters said electricity company has sent out to all it's customers.

You make a good point. While many "small cheap devices" would be thoroughly disposable and could just be thrown away with a compliant replacement bought, its the more integrated systems that become a problem. Small cheap computers built into things that aren't small, or cheap.

The main saving grace for Y2K ended up being Gen X arriving as the first generation of professional software engineers, by which I mean we had been taught how everything worked, down to fetch execute cycles, memory, OSI, the lot. So we could see the depth and scale of the problem, fully understand its ramifications, and quickly work to fix it. Contrast that now with a code camped web developer raised on an iPad - the planes would indeed be falling from the sky.

Fining Big Tech isn't working. Make them give away illegally trained LLMs as public domain

Stop fining the companies, fine the board members directly, and use the Norwegian speeding fine approach, with a substantial percentage of their annual income.

While this is certainly an interesting idea, there's just one or two reality bricks to smack it in the face before we can see if it still has teeth.

Firstly, what do you consider, presumably British, legislative reach to be? While its often news to the Americans, a nations legal reach is generally taken to extend to its territorial waters and not beyond - would you really wish to follow say, Saudi law here in the UK because they decided you should? Fining American tech CEO's for what they do in America, from England simply isn't going to work. It has no reasonable prospect of success.

Most board members would simply take the Philip Green approach and have the assets and income derived from their work held elsewhere by a spouse, thus negating the power of any fines available. As they're not our citizens, again, you're going to struggle to actually see any of that fine income.

I do like your thinking, but unfortunately its not remotely achievable in the real world.

Student's flimsy bin bags blamed for latest NHS data breach

Lol.

The first head that should roll is the person in charge of data security. There is no need for people to be taking patients data off-site and beyond the network boundaries. It's not 1970. This is beyond lax and falls far below the standard a reasonably competent person would expect.

It shouldn't have been possible for the student to mess up this badly.

For the student a last and final with a clear understanding that any further casual attitudes to patient data will result in dismissal.

There's no excuse for this and hopefully everyone here knows it.

UK Home Secretary Priti Patel green-lights Mike Lynch's extradition to US to face Autonomy fraud charges

Re: He has 14 days to appeal

Which I expect him to do before undergoing top level training in appearing autistic, suicidal and desperately sad.

Shouldn't really be required. I mean, until Anne Saccoolas is enjoying a stint at Her Majesty's pleasure we should be declining all extradition requests to America whatever the facts of the case.

Bored binge-watchers bork beleaguered broadband by blasting bandwidth: Global average speeds down 6.31%

Re: Not bad,

Moaning millennials mangle mobile middle managers making massive maladministrative mess most mornings.