Posts by Doctor Huh?

Zig creator calls Bun’s Claude Rust rewrite ‘unreviewed slop’

Economics?!?!

“There’s absolutely no way an engineer with that salary would’ve been able to achieve the milestones Claude did in 11 days,” an impressed HashiCorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto noted on X.

HUH?!?! Blowing $165K in 11 days amounts to $15K per day. Figuring a US work year of 250 days, that annualizes to $3.75 million per year. I don't know any engineers making anything close to that kind of money.

The real questions are:

1. Could you get a team to perform that port in 11 days? Probably not. If there is a team already primed for translating from Zig to Rust with knowledge of Bun, there is the possibility of a rapid port, but completing it within 11 days seems unlikely. I'm a distrusting sort, so I can't help wonder if there might be some accounting generosity involved in the existing 11 day claim.

2. Could you perform this port for $165K or less? If you look at senior engineers in the US at, say, $250K per year (middling figure -- finance pays better, higher cost-of-living areas pay better, a lot of areas pay worse), then you have a convenient $1K per day figure. Can the task be accomplished in 165 staff-days? I can't say. If you elect to use a country with lower wages, and there are a number where you can pay 1/3 or less, then you buy more time. Could the task be accomplished in 495 staff-days? That seems more likely.

What I don't quite understand is how moving a large amount of code to a new language and creating a massive new code base with which no person has any degree of familiarity is a win in any sense of the word. Unless one commits to having AI manipulate the entire code base moving forward, the lack of understanding is a serious problem. If one does commit to having AI make all changes to the code base moving forward, one is stuck with employing a $3.75 million per year engineer. That might make sense if AI can replace your entire engineering staff, but otherwise I don't see how applying this approach generally does anything but bankrupt a company.

IBM becomes first company to pay up under Trump administration's diversity blitz

Re: Pay the US government $17,077,043

"An invitation to come back for more."

Indeed. Kevin Bacon in Animal House: "Thank you, sir! May I please have another?"

IBM CEO pay pack jumps 51% for 2025 in target smash and grab

Re: Twas ever thus

>> If the shareholders don't kick up a fuss

> They don't care either as long as they get their dividend and the share price goes up.

Even if they do care (and they don't), what would they do? Shareholders aren't little old ladies living off the dividends of their stocks. Shareholders are giant funds that only care about the returns they get on their investments; shareholders are day-traders holding the stock for a few minutes; shareholders are computerized traders, holding the stock for a few milliseconds. And in the event that an individual shareholder objects to the way a company is being run, is it rational and reasonable to attempt to change the way the company is run via shareholder initiatives, or is it more efficient just to sell the stock and take your money elsewhere? Of course, there really isn't anywhere else to go; for some reason, all CEOs are uniquely qualified to hold their positions and are inestimably valuable to their companies. If the company is failing, the CEO needs high pay as an incentive to stay to implement the turnaround strategy, and if a company is successful, the CEO needs high pay to participate in the rewards of his/her success.

Banker claims Oracle may slash up to 30,000 jobs, sell health unit to pay for AI build-out

Looking a bit like the late 90's/early 00's

Does this remind anyone else of the "vendor financing" that propped up the Internet bubble at the turn of the century?

Everyone seems to be passing around the same stack of cash, or trading on outrageous values ("I'll trade you this $4 billion pen for 2 of those $2 billion pencils - my company is worth $1 trillion in office supplies alone").

What I remember from the bubble at the turn of the century was that it unleashed upon the world a crop of CEOs and aspiring CEOs who understood exactly how close they could get to the line of fraud without having to do more than pay a small fine with no admission of wrongdoing. Perhaps this time, we might remember to throw a few people in jail.

AI faces closing time at the cash buffet

So, What Do WE Do Now?

In an era where people have lost all sense and are doling out money to anyone with even the most implausible story, do we sit on the sidelines and knowingly wink at each other, or do we put together a pitch and take our turn at the cash fountain before it dries up?

Perhaps I am ethically challenged (or merely morally flexible), but I feel there is a defensible argument to be made that if fools are going to willingly toss their money away, I might as well have some of it.

On the other hand, there is a certain dishonest feel to promoting a technology that I consider to be of limited use, over-hyped, and non-scalable (Are we really going to spend trillions to build power plants, cover every available sunny acre in solar panels, dam any remaining free-flowing river, jam a windmill on every mountain peak, and build cavernous concrete bunkers to be populated with GPUs and cooling gear, all in order to "remove" the clothing from pictures of any actor? The answer seems to be a thunderous "yes!").

It is said that every person has a price, and I'm starting to suspect that the number of zeroes involved in the amounts of cash being splattered around the "AI" area could put that truism to the test.

IBM killing mainframe coding kit for PCs this year

Obligatory Python Reference

zPDT is like the People's Front of Judea, and ZD&T is more like the Judean Popular People's Front.

Laravel inventor tells devs to quit writing 'cathedrals of complexity'

Re: As big a problem is the missing holy book

I'll second praise for Doxygen; it is a powerful and versatile tool that is capable of producing user documentation, but doing so requires intent on the part of the developer. It truly excels at producing developer documentation, because it can produce useful hyper-linked documentation in text, graphs, and pictures without developer intent or participation. The result is much better if the developer provides minimal cooperation in formatting comments, but I've run impenetrable, barely-commented code through Doxygen and received for my minimal effort a treasured roadmap that displayed the spaghetti code in all its intertwined glory.

Does terrible code drive you mad? Wait until you see what it does to OpenAI's GPT-4o

Open pod bay doors, HAL

How fitting and nice it is that the one aspect we have managed to reproduce from the vision of AI advanced by Arthur C. Clarke in 2001: A Space Odyssey is psychosis.

What happens when we can’t just build bigger AI datacenters anymore?

Ellison might have the more applicable take on it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Scream

Raspberry Pi 500 and monitor arrive in time for Christmas

Re: Keyboard layout

I do not have a single nice/kind thing to say about the AZERTY keyboard, except MERDE !!

So this person managed to find the 'M' key

As IBM pushes for more automation, its AI simply not up to the job of replacing staff

"Oddly, Elon Musk, whose experiment with de-staffing Twitter has served as this model, has lost a ton of equity value on Twitter. I wish we could see approximately how much he's lost."

His mind, as demonstrated by available evidence. The rest is just money.

Here we go again. And again. Musk threatens to pull Twitter, SpaceX out of California

Great Observation on the Value of Tesla Management

"Production at California Tesla plants has also increased since the corp's HQ moved out of the state."

Once the management left the state and got out of the way, production increased. Elon is an accidental genius :)

IBM overhauls rewards program for staff inventions, wipes away cash points

Re: Why why oh why

It would seem that you aren't involved in the modern IP game. The name of the game is numbers; companies amass patent portfolios and cross-license them to each other. Nobody has the desire to sit and evaluate 40,000 individual patents for their and haggle over their relative value, so the measure used is one recognizable on any kindergarten playground - the count. You might be surprised at how small an idea can be to be patentable -- the standard at one company I worked at was that any idea that would take over 30 seconds to explain to a colleague met the standard of novelty for filing a patent. With the old IBM system, 3-4 patent filings for $1200 is in line with what a my former company was paying 20-25 years ago for just putting words on a page (a successful patent garnered another bonus). The patent process is expensive, and not every little idea merits the protection of that sledgehammer, so the company can buy some cheap insurance by publishing the idea to establish prior art.

This game was a nice side-hustle for engineers. At that other company 20-25 years ago, a group could go to lunch and come back with a couple of ideas, type them up, and get a quick $600. Not all ideas are going to create the next $100 billion industry, and most ideas are not going to recoup the cost of filing for a patent (unless you are trying to cross-license your patent portfolio to Microsoft); most of the "innovations" were worth about what the company paid for them.

Microsoft: Russia sent its B team to wipe Ukrainian hard drives

TV show potential

Lots of shows concentrate on the "genius" hackers. What about the adventures of The B-Team? Follow the 'splits of a mediocre bunch of computer jockeys as they perform the hacking equivalent of digging latrines and running the motor pool...

Amazon confirms it locked Microsoft engineer out of his Echo gear over false claim

Adama was right!!

Does nobody watch old (BSG reboot) or new (Picard season 3) sci-fi shows?

AI weapons need a safe back door for human control

Looking for Asimov

--"We have to put over to the people who are developing [weapons systems]: is there a way of essentially ring-fencing, some code or whatever it might be, that couldn't be amended … that would essentially set boundaries to how an autonomous system learn and evolve and evolve on their own … something that would put boundaries to how it might operate?" he asked the Lords.--

It sure sounds to me as if the gentleman is looking for The Three Laws of Robotics.

Disruptive innovation's like a party. It's always happening elsewhere

The Least Publishable Unit Strikes Again

When I was at university, Dave Gifford introduced me to the concept of a "Least Publishable Unit," and explained how in academia, publication was the name of the game. He referenced this in respect to some absolutely brilliant paper by Butler Lampson, noting that the number of LPUs in the paper was almost off the charts and that someone less secure in their position could have strung out the ideas in the paper through a dozen different publications. I would fully expect that as smart people get better at gaming the system, the average content of a paper or patent hyperbolically approaches the LPU, and so each individual paper/patent is almost insignificant, but in aggregate, something more interesting emerges.

Crypto craziness craps out – and about time too

Klaxons and Flashing Red Lights

When Donald Trump's old accountants find an industry too unreliable to be able to report on, one has to take notice.

How CIA betrayed informants with shoddy front websites built for covert comms

Yet another reboot/remake

So that's how Three Days of the Condor gets updated for the 21st century.

Merge shifts Ethereum to full proof-of-stake, price slumps

Re: Sink

So I'm guessing that you find the use of the term "PoS Etherium" as amusing as I do and possibly even more appropriate?

Docker goes double unicorn with $105m Series C funding and $2.1b valuation

Wait, this _isn't_ an April Fool's piece?

This is serious? Oh my.

Dev rigs up receipt printer to spit out GitHub issues

A great example of failing to consider

Sure, I _can_ do it, but _should_ I?

It is always great to see paperless systems reverting to paper (not).

This is in the category of printing out E-mail for The Boss, and is just barely less fanciful than putting the Internet on a CD for Jen.

El Reg doesn't offer Moss or Roy as icons!?!?!?!

Log4j and Omicron: Brothers in harm, mothers of invention

Is anyone else seeing this? White Hat Log4Shell probes outnumber Black Hat probes

One odd thing I'm seeing in my server logs. Over half of the door-knocking probes for the Log4Shell problem seem to be coming from obvious white-hats, presumably looking for bug bounties/honoraria. I'm actually struck by how competitive that market seems to be.

Is anyone else seeing a similar trend?

IBM researcher suing for age discrimination blames CEO Arvind Krishna for his ousting

Re: Who wants to work for IBM?

I will dispute your last point. IBM still has brand recognition and a reputation (deserved or not) for being selective, so it attracts top talent in India -- for two to five years. With a stint at IBM on the CV, that person can then find a job almost anywhere and command a high salary.

Good Grief! Ransomware gang has only gone and pwned the NRA – or so it claims

What is the plan here?

I'm not sure I understand the plan here. This isn't a ransomware attack, so the NRA's computer infrastructure is still functioning.

Generally, the threat to release documents implies that there is something in the documents that may be illegal or shameful. The NRA's legal woes have been documented, and there are multiple attorneys general from various states looking at the NRA's finances. Perhaps there is something in the stash that would help the case against the organization, but it seems that the organization has already provided plenty of evidence against itself.

If the plan is to shame the NRA, I fear that the hackers have betrayed their lack of knowledge of the subject. The NRA is the organization that, after each massacre of schoolchildren in the US, mounts a massive press blitz to explain why it is so important that we sacrifice said schoolchildren so that any idiot can assuage his penile inadequacy by owning as many guns as some small countries. The NRA as an organization has no sense of shame.

Great reset? More like Fake Reset: Leaders need a reality check if they think their best staff will give up hybrid work

Re: Flexibility is key.

I'm the geezer with a nice spot to work in my house in the suburbs, and I'm not keen on commuting 45 minutes each way to try to concentrate from my few square feet of space in an open office. But I've also seen the younger folks avail themselves of the opportunities presented by their minimalist lifestyles. Once they discovered that they could operate out of an Airbnb shared rental in Oahu for a couple of weeks and then move on to other spots (COVID restrictions permitting), the allure of free food in the office diminished considerably.

I'm not sure we wouldn't be having this conversation if we were all working in the offices of the 1960's, with defined spaces and doors, but the trend over the years from contained offices, to cubicles, to pods, and then to library carrels (or worse) has made the working experience in the office so inferior to what is available at home that there is no contest for many people.

Perhaps those wishing to re-populate their offices should consider making those offices less horrific.

Re: Going on-site has certainly been made redundant in IT

While you ARE correct, perhaps you haven't had the experience with management and beancounters that others have had. Please allow me to disillusion you. Sometimes, the stupidest reason to do something is EXACTLY the reason it will be done.

Some lucky web developer just scored $20k to scour Facebook out of Neil Young’s website

SIgh. Ignorance is... common

Some anti-GMO folks are anti-science, and are unreasonable. Others are "anti-GMO" because of a very specific modification: the one that makes a crop resistant to Round-Up. They object for a couple of reasons. Some consider Round-Up (based on some evidence) to be a fairly nasty pesticide that has ill effects for humans. Others object to an economic model that forces farmers to buy seed annually rather than using a portion of their crop (in poorer areas of the world, anything that increases the base costs of food production threatens food production). Others object to the use of Round-Up (and other pesticides), because they don't remain tightly confined, so one farmer using Round-Up forces neighbors to buy Round-Up resistant seed to preserve crop yield. And if you end up being forced to buy the resistant seed, you might as well use the pesticide as well to increase yield.

So he isn't necessarily a hypocrite or unreasonable for being anti-GMO. As for being tech savvy -- dweebs who can devise audio compression algorithms and implement devices are a dime a dozen. Even tech folks who can insert a USB-A plug correctly on the first shot every time are numerous.

There is exactly one guy in the universe who wrote "Cinnamon Girl," "Down by the River," "The Needle and the Damage Done," and "After the Gold Rush."

With that kind of genius, who cares if he can identify the next hot portable music player?

Ex-eBay security execs among six charged with harassing, threatening bloggers who dared criticize web tat souk

Streisand Effect, now with Federal Agents!!

Thank you, eBay, for putting to lie the myth that Silicon Valley hires the best and brightest!

I cannot fathom the stupidity of committing federal felonies in trying to intimidate into silence the Mom & Pop proprietors of an almost-completely-unknown blog, thereby bringing the blog to prominence. But what the article casually mentions is that these masters of intimidation and intrigue were talking about going after the Wall Street Journal next. I really wish the feds had left them alone long enough for that to happen. Watching the National Enquirer take on Jeff Bezos and "ruin" him by exposing him as a wealthy man who schtups beautiful women with a schlong so big that his shorts can't contain it was priceless entertainment. One wonders what geniuses like this could do with the Murdochs.

HPE loses second key exec in as many weeks

How Sad

Could you not have included one "Rearranging the deck chairs on the Itanic" reference for old times' sake?

India's peak IT body tells outsourcers to check contract cancellation fine print while Coronavirus reigns

Contingency plans

"We are also putting a robust business continuity plan – powered by next-generation technologies – in place to combat the situation, while ensuring safety of all."

I can translate this into current American vernacular:

"We have a beautiful plan. A strong plan. The best plan."

Your McDonald's demo has expired. For full functionality, please purchase a licence or try another fast-food joint

I think we need a new acronym... POS is doubly accurate...

After a lifetime of slinging software, I didn't blink at all when I saw "POS" in the story. It did take a few seconds to realize that, in this context, it meant "point of sale." Perhaps "point of purchase" might be used instead, leading to "That POP package is a real POS."

Ever dream of being an astronaut? Now’s your chance. NASA wants new people for the Moon and Mars

The Problem...

The best-case scenario is that you are chosen for the program and you have to relocate to... Houston.

So once again, television has lied to me. Astronauts don't get to live in Cocoa Beach, FL. They probably don't even get their own Jeannie anymore.

Meet Clippy 9000: Microsoft brags about building Earth's largest AI language model, refuses to let it out of the lab

Clipinator C-800

As one who has heaped scorn on Clippy over the years, I am uneasy. The marriage of machine learning, a bullied and scorned Clippy, social media, and the Internet of Things can only result in the oft-foretold, dreaded cyborg death machine. Think of something on the order of Carrie at the prom or Rambo being busted for vagrancy. This cannot end well for the human race, and all because we couldn't accept the assistance of a well-intentioned, albeit incredibly annoying, helpful animated paperclip.

Vendor-bender LibreOffice kicks out 6.4: Community project feel, though now with added auto-█████ tool

Re: Understatement

"You are supposed to launch it full screen and it becomes your desktop and gives you access to all the applications you every need."

I remember when EMACS embodied this philosophy. Of course, in an era pre-dating shell history, integrated applications, etc., running everything through EMACS represented a huge improvement in productivity and in the user experience.

Staffer representation on our board? LMAO! Good one, cackles Microsoft

Re: Not a good idea

"IIRC, Volkswagen has been doing it for decades. Via their internal union I believe. Arguably quite successfully.'"

It depends on your definition of success and what value employee representation is intended to provide. If direct contact between employee representatives and those responsible for corporate governance is intended to produce greater transparency to prevent unfortunate occurrences such as a far-reaching engineering scandal to cheat emissions standards world-wide that would cost the company billions of dollars and some of its reputation, then one could argue that VW hardly constitutes an example of success.

If the purpose of employee representation is to ensure that all stakeholders are on the same page as the corporation pillages the world, then I suppose a hearty "Well done, VW!" is in order.

Not LibreOffice too? Beloved open-source suite latest to fall victim to the curse of Catalina

Re: Testing?

--For values of "minority interest" that includes "used by millions of actual human beings (if not tens of millions) each and every day".--

Well, that's the funny thing about numbers, even large ones. Mark Zuckerberg was in front of the US Congress decrying the failure of the banking system, because over a billion people don't have access to bank accounts. There are 7.7 billion (say it like Dr. Evil, folks) people on the planet. That means that the banking system covers about 87% of the people on the planet. To me, that seems like a pretty rousing success story. It isn't perfect, and the access isn't very evenly distributed, but... 87%!

So it is perfectly possible to have millions or tens of millions of devoted followers and still be a niche product when compared against products that are distributed to billions.

Just a friendly reminder there were no at-the-time classified secrets on Clinton's email server. Yes, the one everyone lost their minds over

Re: Top Secret- NOFORN

I've been on the Internet too long.

I mis-read that title as "Top Secret - NOPORN", a classification which would preclude any Trumpian watersports videos, thankfully.

Woman sues Lyft, says driver gang-raped her at gunpoint – and calls for app safety measures we can't believe aren't already in place

Market Inefficiencies

It is best to remember that when a Unicorn service claims that its "innovative" approach to market disruption is to drive out market inefficiencies, safety and security for customers, workers, and just about anyone except the owners are among those "inefficiencies." There isn't anything particularly innovative about that approach. The "muckrakers" in the US documented the approach and its effects over a century ago. Applications of that approach well over a century and a half ago prompted Karl Marx to start musing about economics.

Justice served: There is no escape from the long server log of the law

Re: Speak for yourself

"I used to be vain but now I'm perfect ;)"

You're so vain, you probably think this post is about you.

Breaking, literally: Microsoft's fix for CPU-hogging Windows bug wrecks desktop search

Call and chat volumes down? Indicator of product's quality or of support's lack thereof

"Over the last three years one of our key indicators of product quality – customer service call and chat volumes – has steadily dropped even as the number of machines running Windows 10 increased,"

Perhaps decreasing numbers of requests for support are an indication of the increasing quality of Microsoft's products, but from my personal experience, it is more likely an indicator of the pain, frustration, and lack of helpfulness of Microsoft's support organization. The members of the support team with whom I've spoken are uniformly polite, almost to an irksome degree. But as a native of New Jersey, I would be more than willing to trade politeness for the ability to solve problems.

"Now listen here, ya stupid jag-off. Right click on file while pressing the f'ing shift key to activate the secret menu. Then select 'Repair Files', let it work for 10 minutes, and then don't ever do anything stupid like that again! Capeesh?"

Another sign of the End Times: Free software guru Richard Stallman speaks at Microsoft HQ

Re: "RMS isn't opposed to money or profits or charging for sorftware -"

The stunning ignorance of history in the original post makes me wonder if it isn't intended as flame-bait.

This sentence alone is just so stunningly incorrect as to be almost Trumpian:

"Not surprisingly Stalman doesn't write code but take advantage of other people's work."

It is sad, because the original motivations behind the free software movement (God, I wish there were a better terse description than "free as in freedom, not as in beer") have never been more pertinent in an era where Apple produces products that are almost impossible for third parties to repair legally and where one could prevent a machine from running unsanctioned operating systems.

You're not Boeing to believe this, but... Another deadly 737 Max control bug found

HCF is once again real

Halt-and-catch-fire takes on a whole new context, as does the use of the term "crash", when dealing with avionics...

Mystery Git ransomware appears to blank commits, demands Bitcoin to rescue code

"if your business model depends on secrets your business model is broken from the start"

Tell that to Coca-Cola or Colonel Sanders...

America's anti-hacking laws are so loose, even Donald Trump Jr broke them. So, what do we do about it?

You are just calling Don Jr. a "weapons grade moron"...

so that he can't be exported from the US...

Well played!

I've had it with these mother-fscking slaps on this mother-fscking plane: Flight fight sparks legal brouhaha over mid-air co-ords

Re: Here have a can of worms...

David Suchet, but only because THE proper choice has gone to the Great Gig in the Sky. RIP, Alan Rickman.

Be wary, traveller: There is no going back if you step over the Windows 10 20H1 threshold

Ugh. Sooooo very glad I'm running MacOS and Linux

I'm so glad that Windows 8 finally pushed me over the edge to abandon this crap.

National Enquirer's big Pecker tried to shaft me – and I wouldn't give him an inch, says Jeff Bezos after dick pic leak threat

I don't think this is how you blackmail...

Is anyone else thinking about that scene in the Dark Knight where Morgan Freeman incredulously asks Joshua Harto if his plan really is to blackmail one of the richest, most powerful men in the world -- https://youtu.be/1z6o1GIEsQE

Also, let's face it -- if your semi-saluting manhood is poking out all over the place and making noticeable bulges, is being exposed as someone who is incredibly wealthy, dates attractive women, and has a large schlong really much of a threat. There are men who PAY to get that kind of PR.

IBM to kill off Watson... Workspace from end of February

And the root of the problem...

"A Power9 desktop at sensible price (say £1000) would have me jump like a shot off X86."

Precisely. IBM isn't capable of functioning in a low-margin, high-volume environment, so IBM cannot take advantage of such opportunities. IBM functions best in markets like the one for the Mainframe -- one where there are very specific requirements that only a specific product can meet, where cost is not a critical concern, and where being locked in to a particular vendor is not a problem. There aren't many markets where customers are willing to let their vendors grab them by the tallywags and squeeze until wallets pop open, and there are fewer such markets with each passing year.