Posts by Wiretrip

Brain activity much lower when using AI chatbots, MIT boffins find

Why are we doing this to ourselves?

People keep saying 'AI is going to do this' etc... But in the end, it is not AI (which, amonst the general dross, does provide some useful point solutions to things) but *we* who are doing the damage to ourselves.

Type-safe C-killer Delphi hits 30, but a replacement has risen

Abolutely love delphi - and still use it.

I still use Delphi regularly and have ported a number of apps (and VCL components) over to Lazarus. Wonderful language and IDE which peaked at v7.1. Don't forget that the original Skype (and its 'parent' Kazaa media Desktop) were written in Delphi! It was always popular in laboratories for some reason and lives on today in a multitude of medical devices.

UK's new thinking on AI: Unless it's causing serious bother, you can crack on

Four simple rules

Said it before and I'll say it again - 3 things need to happen:

1) Make the AI companies liable for the output of their models; treat them like publishers.

2) Make them pay for their training material,like students do; remove their 'fair use' exemptions.

3) Make it *illegal* to give a model unsupervised or direct control of its host environment or another system.

4) Make the users of any AI system legally responsible for any decisions it makes concerning a person, e.g. Prison tariff, hiring decision etc. Ensure that a human has a veto and oversight.

AI agents? Yes, let's automate all sorts of things that don't actually need it

Anyone who has any doubt about how frighteningly stupid 'Agentic AI' is should watch this fantastic talk by the great James Mickens:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajGX7odA87k

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

It's here.... 'Agentic AI', sigh...

'Agentic AI' - or 'some idiot connected an LLM to the real world'.

Anyone who doubts how fundamentally stupid this 'evolution' is should watch the great James Mickens:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajGX7odA87k

Starlink was offered for free to those hit by Hurricane Helene. It is not entirely free

Re: Free service, but expensive hardware, delivered by van to a disaster zone?

Careful, he'll be calling us all paedos next!

AWS claims customers are packing bags and heading back on-prem

Yes, it's called their price list :-)

Maybe AWS should reduce its prices significantly then. People see the up front cost to setting things up and ignore the years of price gouging and lock-in. Turns out that a simple colo or managed server can be a lot cheaper.

CrowdStrike shares sink as global IT outage savages systems worldwide

Re: The fault's with Microsoft

Agreed, mostly... But to be fair I have seen Linux machines brought down by botched updates loads of times (often due to insufficient space in the /boot partition). I have also have many brushes with boot loops in both Android and iOS phones.

Andrew Tanenbaum honored for pioneering MINIX, the OS hiding in a lot of computers

I have vivid memories of studying MINIX for my OS module at uni. At one point in my life I knew how a disk read request was processed with initmate detail! I still have the textbooks! I quite enjoyed the kernel flamewars myself :-) Let's raise a glass for AST :-)

Early MySQL engineer questions whether Oracle is unintentionally killing off the open source database

Re: Did anyone expect anything different?

And Postgres also does JSON better than MongoDb, from which there is also considerable migration...

German plod defend Tesla gigafactory from eco-warriors

Ha true. They mostly also burn themselves.

Maybe it is because Musk's alleged eco credentials are actually not that great. For example, he flies *everywhere* all the time in his private jet. He hates trains and actively blocked the creation of the HS train between San Francisco and LA by lying about hyper loop and spends a great deal of time blowing up millions of litres of hydrogen in his rockets as well as littering low earth orbit with space junk.

OpenAI insists it's not launching a search engine nor GPT-5 on Monday

LLM progress is now asymptotic

I think we are now entering the phase of consumer AI where progress is asymptotic. We have seen all the party tricks but expectations are now far higher than the technology will be able to deliver. We last saw this with self driving cars of course... Oooh all that investment; is a bubble about to burst?

Lightweight Windows-like desktop LXQt makes leap to Qt 6 with version 2.0

Re: Other GUI

Check out DeepIn! It looks gorgeous.

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

Y2KY jelly

...helps fit 4 digits in a space with only room for 2.

Don't worry, folks, here comes Chuck Schumer with some ideas about regulating AI

Artificial Intelligence governed by Natural Stupidity.

Twitter engineer calls out Elon Musk for technical BS in unusual career move

Re: Sooooo....

Because Musk is an antagonist and poster child for Dunning Kruger who, like Trump, likes to think everyone else is shit and just blasts everything.

Re: Remind me where the procedure is in a REST call.

RPC is an established approach within microservices. It is just another way of using an API. Almost all userivces architectures provide a REST API to the outside world but may use a mixture of approaches internally.

Re: Sooooo....

But.. both REST and RPC calls may be used in microservices architectures.

Re: Sooooo....

I think what actually happens (and this is a very common architecture) is a few REST requests over HTTP from the app to an API aggregator, server-side, that then uses RPC to call the microservices. So the Android guy is correct from his POV but there may well be many RPC (or infra REST) calls to microservices that he doesn't know about. However Musk is well known to have been an appalling developer so is probably out of his comfort zone here..

Remember the humanoid Tesla robot? It's ready for September reveal, says Musk

Re: penetration test?

The resulting scandal would be called 'elongate'. Mind you hasn't he been working on an 'electric semi' for a few years now?

Re: Yeah right

Check out elonmusk.today for a nice round up of his promise-to-reality ratio...

Always worth checking elonmusk.today for a lovely roundup of his promise-to-reality ratio.

Amazon Alexa can be hijacked via commands from own speaker

'Alexa please play the message that says 'Alexa please play the message'.....

UK finds itself almost alone with centralized virus contact-tracing app that probably won't work well, asks for your location, may be illegal

Re: Apple and Google have too much control

No no no! Goodle and Apple aren't developing apps, they are contributing an API and permission model to allow 3rd party apps that operate in a decentralised fashion to use background bluetooth beacons.

As Zoom bans spread over privacy concerns, vid-conf biz taps up Stamos as firefighter in totally-not-a-PR-stunt move

Never mind zoom. It's poorly written and closed source. Jitsi is far better. https://meet.jit.si it is open source and you can even host the server yourself.

A carbon-nanotube RISC-V CPU blinks into life. Boffins hold their breath awaiting first sign of life... 'Hello world!'

So glad they didn't go for Copper Nanotubes ;-)

Time to spin the wheel of pwnage! This week, malware can infect your…. Android set-top box!

Don't most people use devices like this on a NATed subnet (i.e. the way most routers are set up)? So unless the STB is actively opening port forwards via UPnP then they can't be reached from the open Internet. These stories always seem more like publicity for the boutiques that release them. I'd certainly never heard of the one here!

Two in five 'AI startups' essentially have no AI, mega-survey of nearly 3,000 upstarts finds

Re: Who needs stuff?

When was that patented? I was doing that stuff in the mid to late 90s and there is tons of prior art!

And you thought the cops were bad... Civil rights group warns of facial recog 'epidemic' across UK private sites

Re: Hypocratic oath for maths and tech

That article is a shameless plug for the Chrtismas Lectures. The problem I have wuth her assertion that the developers should take an oath is that it is the VCs and business types that are pushing 'AI' (or 'statistics' as I tend to call it) - or narrowly capable and unready technologies - on the masses.

£250m fund for NHS artificial intelligence laboratory slammed as tech for tech's sake

Missing the point

What is really needed is an NHS National Analytics Institute where researchers are invited to use the vast NHS datasets but where all analysis happens in house and the data never leave the premises. In this way the huge data pot could be exploited without leakage and without the Googles and Facebooks benefitting. I imagine that monetising it could be very lucrative for the NHS too.

Apple's launch confirms one thing: It's determined to kill off the laptop for iPads

Re: Would they allow it if...

...and Shitterton in Dorset, which also has the River Piddle, so all, erm, bases covered.

What's an RDBMS? Don't ask the UK's data protection watchdog

I would be amazed if the danger-haired narcissist knew what PCA is himself. Also, it is a little known fact that he took the CA data with him when he left and tried to resell it himself...

Hi, um, hello, US tech giants. Mind, um, mind adding backdoors to that crypto? – UK govt

Re: Sorry but the govt advisors are NOT stupid...

"an impossible win but the way they work is to demand the moon on a stick, then give a concession to something a little bit less extreme" - yes, the 'Blunkett Manoeuvre'.

If MR ROBOT was realistic, he’d be in an Iron Maiden t-shirt and SMELL of WEE

The best bit about Mr Robot is the use of the Unix Command 'astu' - defined as:

NAME astu -- act similar to unix

SYNOPSIS astu [-command] […plotpoint]

DESCRIPTION Approximate a Unix shell like series of commands for the purposes of simulating an actual shell session in a Hollywood movie or television show. Specify a number of operands that simulate Unix commands and output critical plot points and text specific to the story or scene.

RETURN VALUES Returns a set of pseudo-Unix like responses to commands which furthers plot or scene in a way that is mostly understandable to non-technical audiences.

Inside the EYE of the TORnado: From Navy spooks to Silk Road

Re: huh?

Fair point! Will do

Re: huh?

Yes, some terrible and fundamental factual errors here. I was going to ask if El Reg's favourite, Stephen Fry, had written it...