Posts by JacobZ

Windows 11 24H2 can run – sort of – in 184MB

Feeling old

My first reaction was "wow, that seems like a lot of memory".

And then I remembered what century this is.

It's been 20 years since Oracle bought two software rivals, changing the market forever

Make it so

My recollection (possibly faulty, it was a long time ago and a lot of beer has flowed under the bridge since then) was that a couple of years before all this kicked off, Ellison confidently predicted that the ERP and CRM space was inevitably going to consolidate, and that when the dust settled, Oracle would be one of the big winners.

When the market steadfastly refused to go along with Ellison's opinion, he set about making it happen himself with a series of acquisitions of decidedly questionable business sense. Oracle's actions triggered SAP to follow suit, thus "proving" Ellison's foresight.

BTW, in my experience one of the unalterable laws of software is that any project, product, or portfolio named Fusion is a hodgepodge of incompatible technologies that get along like a sack of cats and that Marketing is trying to throw a blanket over.

The NPU: Neural processing unit or needless pricey upsell?

Under a rock

Apparently I've been living under a rock for a year because I have never heard of these things. And I thought I was reasonably current with tech.

Or perhaps I did hear about them, promptly filed them under Next Overhyped Thing, and completely ignored them since?

IBM's mainframe bubble bursts and growth stalls

Prime

The most recent price increase for Prime combined with the lack of good, findable content caused me to drop it, and I'm far from alone.

The fact that they keep larding the bundle with additional features that have no value to me but presumably are factored into the price is not helping.

If it were possible to buy just the delivery service at a reasonable price I might go for that because I still occasionally order stuff I can't find elsewhere.

Smart homes may be a bright idea, just not for the dim bulbs who live in 'em

Call me old...

...but exactly what problem are "smart homes" solving?

In my <number> years on this planet, I cannot remember thinking of any fixture of fitting in my house of which I have ever thought, "if only I could turn on/turn off/adjust $X without getting up from the sofa."

The only possible exception from that is the "oh, shit, did I close the garage door?" moment when leaving on a long trip, and even that only requires remote control of that one piece of equipment, not synchronized color-changing light bulbs.

IBM quietly axing thousands of jobs, source says

Weird...

...how criteria like being too expensive, not a "digital native", too old to be flexible and understand emerging technologies, etc. never applies to C level positions.

I'll bet there are tons of people in India who could do their jobs just as well for far less money. They probably bought their MBAs from the same American universities too.

Ellison declares Oracle all-in on AI mass surveillance, says it'll keep everyone in line

In Ellison's defense...

...

...

...

Nope, I've got nothing.

Re: Progress is...

In fairness, the US constitution was originally formulated to cement the power of land-holding white men and entrench slavery.

Any good that has come from it is a result of very hard work, an extremely bloody civil war, and decades of civil unrest to amend it or attempt to get it to apply equally. And even that is a constant battle.

OpenAI's latest o1 model family tries to emulate 'reasoning' – tho might overthink things a bit

Still a party trick

LLMs are the party trick of the AI world. The fact that the trick got bigger and more elaborate doesn't change that. The purpose of an LLM is quite literally to *create the illusion of a thoughtful answer* by brute force.

Believing that an LLM is "reasoning" is like believing that a stage magician is doing real magic... even after he shows you how the trick was done.

competent primary school child Re: Implied assumptions

Indeed, it does match a competent primary school child.

The problem here is that OpenAI claims it can match a PhD student.

Where the computer industry went wrong – the early hits

Re: C128 the Hero!

A grammar school friend of mine had a TRS-80 and the rest of us were jealous, obviously. The main thing I remember us doing with it was playing some 'conquer the galaxy' game, possibly based on Star Trek, but this was all decades ago.

Mind you, his family lived in Solihull so obviously they were much better off than mine!

Re: Flogging a dead horse

The marketing term I think you're looking for is segmentation. It's exactly the same reason car makers have more than one model, and more than one trim level for each model.

Who uses LLM prompt injection attacks IRL? Mostly unscrupulous job seekers, jokesters and trolls

HR

The fact that major HR functions can be replaced by an LLM says more about HR than it does about LLMs.

Core Python developer suspended for three months

Re: Sad day

Bollocks.

Defending offensive behavior as "neurodivergent traits" is offensive, demeaning, and damaging to people who are neurodivergent, especially when the people being excused / excusing themselves very rarely have any diagnosis to support their claims. It's become the "go to" for assholes and dinosaurs to defend bad behavior.

Ridesharing makes new and unique mess in Japan's taxi industry

Welcome to late-stage capitalism

where it's OK for companies to create algorithms to maximize their own profits, but not OK for workers to game those same algorithms to maximize theirs.

Don't like it? Create a better/fairer algorithm that workers are not so motivated to game.

Evolve Bank & Trust confirms LockBit stole 7.6 million people's data

Will they be changing their name to Evolve Bank?

That's the joke.

Lords of May-hem: Seven signs it is Oracle's year end

Year end insanity

In all my 40 years in the enterprise software business, I never got my head around the insanity of robbing Q1 to pay Q4.

But hey, everybody has to make their quota number *this* quarter, right?

Palantir's CEO calls 'woke' a 'central risk to Palantir, America and the world'

Re: What is “woke”

Maybe you should look more closely. In surveys of historians and political analysts, he is generally rated the worst or second worst (after Buchanan).

Others here have given a long list of his corruption, nepotism, bloviating, demonization of all opposition, cozying up to every flavor of Nationalist and the violent extreme right, etc. etc. so I won't repeat that here.

Good

Anything that Palantir is opposed to, I'm very much in favor of.

IBM said to be binning off more staff as 'workforce rebalance' continues

Dumb

IBM: We need to rebalance our workforce so it skews younger. Digital natives are where it's at.

Also IBM: Where did all the mainframe skills go?

In fairness...

IBM could probably lay off as much as 50% of its employees without losing anything worthwhile. The company has a huge number of flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box-checkers and task masters.*

Unfortunately, IBM is in the process of, in large part, laying off the wrong 50%

*Definitions here: https://a4kids.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/100.-5-Types-of-Bullshit-Job-Graeber.pdf

Dumping us into ad tier of Prime Video when we paid for ad-free is 'unfair' – lawsuit

Re: Query: the timing of ads

The ads seem to be inserted automatically rather than by a human editor choosing an appropriate slot or even matching the ad break timing originally designed for linear TV. As a result they routinely break scenes 5 to 10 seconds too early, even mid-sentence in some cases.

FWIW other ad-supported streamers are no better.

If they're going to monetize us, they could at least be less shoddy about it.

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

Blue Points

The replacement system of Blue Points, which can be collected a number of ways, allows employees to exchange their points for a wide variety of cheap tat with an IBM logo.

Re: Why why oh why

It's adorable that you think the contract is negotiable for anybody but the most highly desired talent. John or Jane Engineer is getting the standard contract or no job.

What's the golden age of online services? Well, now doesn't suck

Re: MySpace

The Internet died long before MySpace. Some of us are old enough to remember The September That Never Ended.

Chromebooks are problematic for profits and planet, says Lenovo exec

Re: chromebooks suck

I have exactly the same positive experience. I bought a really cheap ($100-ish) small Lenovo Chromebook as an experiment (I had quit work, returned my work laptops, and needed something for away from home). I was so happy with it that I bought a second one (Acer) with a larger screen and more powerful processor. It's ideal for travel e.g. for finding local restaurants, checking opening times for attractions, and all sorts of online stuff. I also use it for writing in cafés without having to be paranoid about it getting swiped (there's no personal info on the local drive) or having coffee spilled on it.

Also, I never have to worry about updates or driver compatibility or any of that crap. It just works nearly all the time. And if anything does go badly wrong, a reset is quick and easy. Basically, it's the admin ease of a phone with the screen and keyboard and capability of a laptop.

And for the tech purists, it's Linux under the covers. It's kind of weird to see the Reg crowd defending Windows and Mac over a true Linux machine!

The only thing I don't use it for is running a development environment (although reportedly plenty of people do) as I need Windows for my test environment, so a desktop makes sense for that.

Steve Jobs' $4.01 RadioShack check set to fetch small fortune at auction

The 1/100 format is very much not an anachronism. Everybody I know uses that format (for the few checks we still write).

The only time I see the dollars.cents format is on printed checks.

Re: Why wasn't the check cashed?..it was either not deposited or it bounced.

Deutsche Bank has entered the chat.

DevTernity conference collapses amid claims women speakers were faked

Re: What for?

Not just hard-up FOSS projects. When I worked for IBM, we reckoned that the biggest reason to attend a conference was to meet face-to-face with our IBM colleagues.

50 years ago, Skylab's accidental rebels put Mission Control on mute

Surprising

I had no idea there were so few missions to Skylab, nor that it was designed for such a short life.

Australian video-streamer lets users opt out of ads for burgers, booze, and betting

Targeted advertising?

If targeted advertising does what it says on the box, why is it necessary for people to explicitly opt out of ads for burgers, booze, and betting?

IBM Software tells workers: Get back to the office three days a week

I worked at IBM and I'm here to call BS

I was relocated by IBM to Raleigh so that I could "have more contact with my colleagues". I was a product manager, and my dev team were mostly in Poughkeepsie, with other labs in Germany, India and China. My product management colleagues were mostly in Austin and California. The colleagues including the sellers and customers I worked closely with were everywhere on the planet.

Even my immediate manager was in Pittsburgh, although he did come to Raleigh a couple of days a month. His manager was in New York.

At first I went into the office pretty regularly (although I always left around 2:30 to pick up my son from school, and work from home the rest of the day.) By the end I was going in only on the days my manager was in town. And even then I would spend maybe two hours a day with him, and the rest in my windowless office with the door closed, working online or on conference calls.

The whole premise is BS.

OpenAI's ChatGPT has a left wing bias – at times

Training day

If there is any bias - and I doubt that there is, I think that the problem here is the definition of "bias" - it is, as many have said, in the training data.

The creators of LLMs try to train them on "high quality" data, e.g. Wikipedia not Conservapedia. And let's be honest, 99.9% of right-leaning content - far in excess of Sturgeon's Law - is crap. And much of it is intentionally crap, designed to mislead and undermine known scientific facts.

In today's America, things that are factual are dubbed "left" regardless of what their content is. Twenty years ago, Karl Rove referred to opponents of the Bush administration as "the reality-based community" - and he meant derisively. Twent years later, here we are...

Beer icon because I need one.

Re: disentangling these two components (training data versus algorithm)

"a simple inspection of the source code would reveal this"

I very much doubt it would. One of the challenges of LLMs / generative AIs is that the way they arrive at their results is utterly opaque even to their creators. It's hard enough to spot subtle biases in entirely traditional scientific computational algorithms. Unless there is some absolutely obvious smoking gun Lean Left filter in the code, there could very easily be bias, accidental or intentional, that even an expert would find hard to identify.

If there is any bias - and I doubt that there is, I think that the problem here is the definition of "bias" - it is, as you say, in the training data. The creators of LLMs try to train them on "high quality" data, e.g. Wikipedia not Conservapedia, and let's be honest, 99.9% of right-leaning content is crap.

Reality has a well-known left wing bias

Acknowledging the reality of climate change, vaccine effectiveness, the history of slavery, police racism, etc. etc. etc. is not left-wing bias, even though these facts are supported by the left and denied by the right.

Just because the Right has taken a Lemming's Leap off the derp [sic] end, it does not mean that we have to pretend that factual neutrality still lies midway between the two main parties.

Anbody interested in more on this should google* "overton window".

*Other brands of search engine are available.

Tech CEO admits role in tricking Qualcomm into $150M takeover

Re: This long??

It's possible somebody came across the patent while doing due dilligence, maybe on a related filing, and recognized the name. Just a guess.

A room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor? Take a closer look

The currently best known high-temperature superconductor...

...is LaH10 at 170 GPa wit a critical temperature of 250K (roughly -23C).

Ambient pressure is approximately 100kPa.

So to have achieved such a reduction of the required pressure by several orders of magnitude would be beyond astonishing.

It will be wonderful if this replicates, but this falls into the "extraordinary claims/extraordinary proof" category of skepticism.

Re: Apatite

Irregular expression?

Large language models' surprise emergent behavior written off as 'a mirage'

Re: Intelligence

So your assertion is that the only two possibilities are "understanding of our physical world" or "random construct of words and letters"? No wonder you are confused.

The key to LLMs is that their output is a PROBABILISTIC output of words and letters, derived from digesting a massive corpus of human-generated content. They very literally have no conception of a physical world; only word likelihoods.

No Re: Cold Fusion?

After 30+ years, results from Cold Fusion are no better than they were at the beginning, i.e. experimental noise from dirty experiments. And there is still no theoretical framework to explain either how it works or where all the neutrons disappear to.

But sure, it's all a massive conspiracy by people opposed to cheap, clean energy.

IBM launches Watsonx to help enterprises streamline workers out the door

Watsonx is a tool for creating x-employees.

Attackers hit Bitcoin ATMs to steal $1.5 million in crypto cash

No honour among thieves

"You've got your exploit in my scam!"

"No, you've got your scam in my exploit!"

Ex-Meta security staffer accuses Greece of spying on her phone

Doubts

I have a cynical suspicion that El Reg completely fabricated this story just for the subhead.

FTX inner circle helped itself to $3.2B, liquidators say

Whistleblower

Article: "Salame has also not been charged, having reportedly been a whistleblower who tipped Bahamian officials off to financial malfeasance at FTX."

Was his tip "Hey, these people are paying me $87M they don't have"?

Hyundai and Kia issue software upgrades to thwart killer TikTok car theft hack

Ullo John, Gotta New Motor

Them locks are easy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MqMZ6XqMfc

Big three cloud giants tighten grip as overall spending slows

No surprise

If you look at any significant enterprise IT market of the last forty years or so, they often become dominated by three major companies with a bunch of much smaller also-rans - or as I like to say, three gorillas and a bunch of monkeys.

And often this is because there are three key criteria that define the market players, say most scalable, cheapest, and first to bring new features, and one gorilla leads on each dimension. And the market typically remains "metastable", which is to say stable until some really significant and rapid change opens an opportunity for somebody to displace one of the gorillas before they can react.

What's called Grogu but isn't that cute? Google's leaked answer to Apple AirTags

Ooh, just what I need

A way to share even more information about my whereabouts and movements with Google. Perfect.

Well, until Google pulls the plug on yet another short-lived software/hardware service.

Euro-cops shut down crypto scam that bilked millions from unwitting punters

Tautological

Surely "crypto scam" is tautological. The "scam" part is entirely superfluous.

IBM shifts remaining US-based AIX dev jobs to India – source

Re: Redundancy relocation

There are some specific workloads where AIX performance is substantially better, e.g. traditional analytics.

There are also some long-standing mission-critical workloads that absolutely nobody wants to touch, least of all to port from AIX's near-Unix implementation to Linux. (Somebody once explained AIX to me as "imagine you'd never seen Unix, but somebody had described it to you over a noisy phone line...").

Re: IBM

"Fortunately, I don't deal with L3 and developers for AIX any more (at least in my current role), so I won't have to face the problems of describing a difficult problem to someone for whom English is not their first language"

On the plus side, at least you would be describing it to somebody with a broader worldview than an American.

You might also get exposed to some lovely contributions to the English language originating in that part of a world, for example "prepone", said when bringing a meeting forward.