Posts by Locomotion69

Trump sends the US Navy back to the steam age

I think the "aircraft carrier" principle needs rethinking, given the position of aircraft vs drones in the "latest warfare experiences" (Gulf region, Ukraine).

Hey, big spender – OpenAI has a new SKU just for you

6 months? I would say 6 weeks...

Microsoft cancels Patch Tuesday for some Dell users over surprise shutdowns, overheating devices

So given that you shall apply the patches as soon as possible, I understand that for some users this means "when your Dell freezes over?"

Memory makers are slaves to the boom-bust rollercoaster, and the AI boom is the wildest ride of all

In the end it is not the memory

While in the short term the memory price hike is affecting all (consumer) electronics, the real challenge is in the power grid becoming capable in feeding all these datacenters, while still being capable to serve us, simple households.

Former GitHub CEO launches competitor designed for the age of vibe coding

You get hooked up for free and once you passed the point of no return and no alternative they charge huge $/€/£ for even the most moderate subscription plan on offer.

Like all the rest.

User swore hacker called General Failure had invaded his PC

I know the general very well. He is the direct commander of private Access.

Micron locks in historically high memory prices for five years

This has nothing to do with acquiring necessary components for your product.

This is speculation.

Anthropic's Mythos mess just keeps getting more complicated

There is a very good reason that the USofA is restricting the use. They are way too scared this AI will disclose all their backdoors.

KDE Plasma 6.7 brings the X11 era to a close

Re: Endless discusssion cars : start your engines !

Better start now, as all the options create a vast world of alternatives: X11 / Wayland but also systemd / SysVInit, KDE / Gnome / Xfce / ..<many more desktops>..

Did I mention any taste of Linux vs BSD vs MacOS vs ... ?

Life is too short...

Signal says UK plan to scan devices for nude images 'endangers us all'

If the industry really cares about this, they should build a child-targeted device with all of this blocking stuff baked into it. Children under a certain age should only be allowed to have one of those, if not, blame their parents. There should be no reason for parents to not have one of those for their kids, right?

Once they reach a certain age they can get rid of the thing and buy an "unrestricted" device.

The real goal is to identify the law infringing individuals, which is a good cause, but to make each and everyone of us a suspect and under constant surveillance is questionable. You would not allow a foreign law enforcement officer in your house checking your whereabouts all day long, would you?

GitHub nukes 70+ Microsoft repos, breaks CI/CD pipelines, following suspected worm infections

Re: Captain, there's a Codeberg right ahead!

AI never let go Jack, AI never let go.....

Raspberry Pi's profits are up. So is its DRAM bill

Investors stopped reading after "more profit then expected" and went "Buy! Buy! Buy!"

Luckily we are not all in LLMs and affordable models are still around for all the other purposes as before.

GitHub Actions outage told devs 'your account is suspended'

Re: Unfortunately for us, GitHub is mandated by corporate policy

Make an estimate about the cost of unavailability due to this and inform "corporate" about it. And present an alternative (if you have one).

Corporate types are very sensitive to uncontrolled and unmanageable costs. Cost is properly the only criterion that made them go for GH anyway.

America's top cyber-defense agency left a GitHub repo open with passwords, keys, tokens – and incredibly obvious filenames

Why on Earth is an organisation like this one using a public cloud service for information like this ?

How hard is it to set up an internal Git repository for this purpose ??? (Hint: not difficult at all). Information like this should never be kept outside the organisation boundaries.

Linus Torvalds says AI-powered bug hunters have made Linux security mailing list ‘almost entirely unmanageable’

Now we have the intelligent tools, let's look for a way to intelligently use them....

HP stuffed a PC into a keyboard. We took it for a spin

There is an opportunity here

If HP would add a braille bar on the bottom, this would make an excellent PC for the visual impaired.

IBM Cloud evaporates as datacenter loses power

Some customers are, one day later, still having issues as their systems are offline.

Others fear that the Black Cloud over Almere is where their data went....

Musk has never built a wafer fab, but he wants to burn $119B on one anyway

Re: "orbital AI datacenters"

Next level: Oort cloud computing.

Linux may get a hall pass from one state age-check bill, but Congress plays hall monitor

Understandable but absurd

The MSM companies are more and more forced by legal cases to check their user's ages, which in practice means to identify the user. In essence their is nothing wrong with that.

The problem is with where this verification is done. This is more of a lobby to have verification at OS system level, so MSM falls back to the OS for this purpose.

As might anybody else.... This is a security nightmare.

Anthropic tests how devs react to yanking Claude Code from Pro plan

Why is this (not) a surprise?

Changes to the subscriptions a.k.a. price hike:

Copilot (Microsoft) did this yesterday

Claude Code (Antropic) today

<fill in your agent><company>tomorrow

These companies seem to understand the AI business model very well:

1. Provide AI

2. Profit

Next.js developer Vercel warns of customer credential compromise

it looks more like spaghetti if you ask me....

Visual Studio 18.5 lands with AI debugging at a price, devs still feeling blue

Lack of contrast? Copilot hasn't complained, Copilot is our main programmer, so there is no issue.

/Manager mode off

Microsoft sends Outlook Lite to the great inbox in the sky as memory costs skyrocket

Having tried New Outlook for two months on my company LT I reverted to Old Outlook - to never (Out)look back.

New Outlook is a proper piece of <censored>

Attention, gamers: The FAA wants YOU to be an air traffic controller

which is why there is a 20% salary bonus if you stay even you could retire ?

Amazon rewards loyal Kindle devotees by closing the book on old e-readers

Re: jailbreak old devices…

Just checked the Rakuten Kobo site - those devices drop out of support just like the Kindles.

Artemis II astronaut: 'I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working'

Re: What did they expect?

It is called the World wide web for a reason....

Microsoft veteran says some 'broken by update' PCs were already doomed

Obligatory xkcd

xkcd

Contracts are in C++26 despite disagreement over their value

Contracts, as used in Eiffel, or D, or Ada.

I cannot see how an attempt to have a formal approach to be specific on behavior for pieces of code can be a "bad thing".

You do not have to use it - but I can see some fields in where contracts are welcome!

GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

Into the third dimension!

180 vs 360 is regarded in the flat plane - Github should apply the z-dimension and disappear into the negative Z-axis until it is out of sight.

Yes to Git - No to GitHub

AI will write code, but prepare to babysit it – and be sure you speak its language

Re: Of course I want to fire all of the developer!

The (former) employees wrote shitty software, now AI is writing shitty software.

Conclusion: same quality but at lower expenses!

/manager mode off

Microsoft and Nvidia claim AI can speed approval of new atomic plants

AI would prove the world is flat only to please its stakeholder.

Open source isn't a tip jar – it's time to charge for access

If an open source tool is of so much value to a company, they should actively contribute - assign some staff and start contributing/correcting. But no. "Competitors may benefit".

If a company is not willing to contribute to a valuable asset, they should go for something else.

Windows boss promises to heal the operating system's self-inflicted wounds

I hope they do not upset the naive users who bought the AI-type of PC recently to be ready for AI - now to learn that MS is scaling it down.

From having paid too much for something that does not work to having paid too much for something that is not used.....

Your next car might need 300 GB of RAM, and so will autonomous robots

The main question now is...

... can it be expanded by, say, another 300 GB?

So we can add features to the car (for a premium) so it can act as a spare home battery system, have a climate controlled boot (as extra fridge), security camera, ....

Whitehall seeks lone C++ coder to keep airport passenger model flying

100K should be enough to create a github account, make the mess open source and see what happens.

Apple's budget-friendly MacBook Neo is bursting with color and compromise

I recently bought a new laptop, 32 GB, 1T, Ryzen 7, for the same amount of money.

Curious how long 8G will suffice in daily practice though - even for an Apple.

For an Apple, the price is low - beats the iPhone....

And it comes with no charger.

Microsoft gives Windows laggards the 'gift of time' wrapped in licensing fees

They have to finance their AI enterprise and this is one of the best hidden ways to do that.

Atlassian swears it can handle AI without blowing out costs, or being swamped

I wish

it could handle Jira properly.

Microsoft declares 'reliability' a priority for Visual Studio AI

That was easy.

Having the unreliable AI declare itself unreliable automatically makes it proven reliable (MS-style).

Problem solved.

Microsoft engineer speedruns Raspberry Pi magic smoke in five minutes

It was AI that did it.

This particular RPi noticed itself being too close to MS so it decided by some AI algorithm that the only way to escape was to selfdestruct.

Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

Now here is one cybersecurity challenge.

As the outside world is one big interface for the selfdriving vehicle, let's redesign it completely to make sure this kind of sabotage is made impossible.

How one developer used Claude to build a memory-safe extension of C

If somebody says "It almost works." I knod and sympathise and I recall the quote I once saw on a tile

"If you see light at the end of the tunnel ...... you are facing the wrong direction!"

Although I very very much love to see someone succeed in the attempt to have a workable C/C++ solution for the memory management stuff.

Notepad will now tell you all the ways Microsoft has enshittified it

Re: Answers on a postcard to,...

NoPath

AI hasn't delivered the profits it was hyped for, says Deloitte

Primary objective failed

AI does not generate money now - how much more to spend before it does - if ever ?

Enter the arena: secondary objective! Which is ..... ehhhh.....

Concorde at 50: Twice the speed of sound, twice the economic trouble

You will find it easier to visit the one in Sinsheim, Germany. There is a Concorde on display as well.

Over half of AI projects are shelved due to complex infrastructure

As long as you don't tell the shareholders....

Safe CEO: AI is an assistant, not a replacement

AI has its merits as it is quite capable in processing vast quantities of data and finding patterns inside them. Not something a human being cannot do, but AI comes up with results much faster - leaving the human to check if the outcome of the AI is plausible. I have seen very good use of processing medical scan data, AI could spot the out of the ordinary which many doctors would overlook. This is a huge benefit - saving time, money and occasionally a life.

But the fields of application are different - software engineering being no exception. These jobs will be different in the future - but senior and junior levels will be there as they are today.

Microsoft wants to replace its entire C and C++ codebase, perhaps by 2030

Re: “Our North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.’”

It is not just Windows, it is the complete codebase - it is hundreds of products, some not even designed by themselves but acquired in a merger/takeover.

Not even considering used libraries, which may be statically linked, so different versions from the same lib are used and updates are not compatible, etc.

It should be called Project Snakepit

AI mania to swell datacenter capex to $1.6T by 2030 – if the bubble doesn't pop first

and the winner is...

Nvidia.

As prices of hardware go up due to the DC hunger, you can get less hardware for your $/£/€, let alone make a viable business case.

Nvidia gets its money, the others sort of .... don't.

The solution? Force your clientele into AI and charge them accordingly.