Posts by cdegroot

Buyer missed one option and got 1% of the cable they needed

I had a supplier who used popcorn instead. They helpfully packed a salt shaker with the first order. Loved the idea.

Developer given Mission:Impossible - fixing rubbish code that could crash a city - simply chose not to accept it

Re: OS/2

I once was in a situation where the records were on a Wang computer and the vendor of the new system insisted that the only way to get the whole accounting system over was to type everything by hand.

I looked at the Wang:s printer cable, it looked serial, hacked up a little program that made a PC act like a printer on the serial port, and asked them to print all the reports.

Job done, never needed to touch the Wang :)

Give Google the boot by building your own search engine

Re: Kagi

I concur. I happened to stumble on Google earlier this week and was shocked at how bad it is. Kagi also has a separate "small web" index which is a fun place to hang out. Worth every penny.

DIY sounds like fun though, and if there is one thing that small language models excel at it is searching and indexing.

AMD acquires AI chip startup Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models into silicon

Not sure what the future holds but GPUs were more an accident than a conscious design choice for LLMs so if the coming years don't see a flurry of completely new architectures, well, paint me surprised.

Keeping yesterday's computers ticking takes more than nostalgia

I was toying with getting some of my old favorites back, but this stuff is quickly starting to become silly expensive.

Then someone released a humongous ISO image with all the emulators and software and I decided that that is good enough for me. https://virtualosmuseum.org/

Great fun and no electrocution risk!

(Always one hand behind your back, kids, when probing live AC!)

Dev who gave HashiCorp its name returns with a faster terminal multiplexer

Im so happy that they finally built a fast terminal emulgator. I mean, the leisurely pace of mere hundreds to thousands of lines per second scrolling over my monitor was getting to me.

Not.

Oh well, kid is rich, he can have fun.

Microsoft is losing the battle to protect license lucre. It better get used to the feeling

Re: Great start, and then...

Note that software patents is mostly a US thing, so meh.

On duplication: AI is surprisingly competent at it. It still stumbles in the dark when writing code but the original software proves to be a good handrail.

In the last week I had Claude replicate pretty much all of the Erlang ecosystem including Elixir support for an experiment I want to run around variations on the core ideas in the ecosystem. The details aren't important, what is important is that my guidance has been very hands off and huge swaths got completed stand alone. Something I would not have dared to attempt in, say, January. All within my regular Claude Team seat.

My hypothesjs is that software licensing will be dead, commercial and open source. Not completely, but mostly. Just because the build-or-buy decision will be massively slanted towards build.

It's an AI web, and we're just rats in the walls

It's not the tools, it is us

You can keep shifting Blake to the tech, whether search engine, social media, or know AI, but at the end of them day it's probably time to replace a large swath of rote learning time in elementary school with critical thinking classes. Gonna be much more important than answering 7 times 9.

I mean, its not that hard to figure this out, it's just that mostly nobody ever got taught how to do it.

Anthropic is removing its covert code for catching Chinese competitors

Re: The biter bit?

They did. That's the whole problem.

Firefox 152 understands 'Sssh!'

Re: They are going about silencing tabs the wrong way

For when i want be bothered to install a bloatware Electron app and just play Spotify in the browser.

But it probably should be a thing you set and then can override per tab. Although just yesterday it reminded me that one of my tabs was playing a YT short on loop when I unmuted my laptop ;)

Anthropic co-founder hallucinates ghost in the machine

It's not drugs. It is simply a scientist, an overly specialized mind, stepping into the fallacy that if you know a lot about one tiny thing, you know a lot about everything.

The kid should stick with math and leave philosophy to the pros. Like, indeed, a religious leader (no doubt backed by a horde of highly educated people from various disciplines, it's not that everybody at the Vatican only ever attended seminary).

AI eyes scanning for bugs create a worrisome Linux security trend

Tannenbaum was right. Running 18 million lines of low level code in one privileged space is silly and we should stop doing it.

Compare Linux to the approach of seL4, say. There's a building block that has been verified secure instead of the hope and prayer mess that the Linux kernel is. Can't wait for people to get angry enough to pivot building something decent on top of that.

Hate to say it because I really dont like any software that Apple releases, but architecturally, OS X wins here. Still won't use it though ;)

Job's a good 'un: Bank of England tech project wins watchdog praise

They were replacing an existing system, so they got it more right the second time.

Still, I wonder, where is the complexity that requires half a beeellion Pound Sterling? It never ceases to amaze me, these amounts.

Meta retreats from metaverse after virtual reality check

Re: .... second life....

Second life also showed that the human brain is more than happy to make up the missing bits when were staring at a 3d rendering on a flat screen and by the time Meta started burning cash, it was clear that people don't even want to wear polarizing glasses to increase 3D fidelity (see the massive continued success of 3D TV and Movie theaters, not)

I still want a VR headset, for games and flight sims it is rumoured to be fun. But that's a tiny marked, comparitatively.

Eurail passengers taken for a ride as data breach spills passports, bank details

Re: Here's an idea

Until there's the threat of jail time (and I would call this criminally negligent behavior), nothing will change.

Pen testers accused of 'blackmail' after reporting Eurostar chatbot flaws

Its fine to store state in the browser, as long as you sign and verify. Looks like Eurostar's devs understood this a little bit, but not enough to be trusted building a publicly facing website.

Memory is running out, and so are excuses for software bloat

Re: Lovely idea - no chance of it ever happening

That rendered to a resolution much lower than what's on your wrist today, of course.

Still, we.can - and should if we ever want to take the term."software engineering" seriously - start by stating what a reasonable amount of CPU and memory is for a CAD system that renders true color on 4K. I think that current systems are bloated by at least two, if not three orders, of magnitude.

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

Re: Using Rust ist not the solution per se...

Rust is a reasonable answer for when you really need low level safety. Issue is: 99% of the time, you dont need that. There are many, many languages much better suited for application writing (heck, C# could probably be close to self-hosting) but somehow "rewrite to Rust" is this decade's craze. its just as bad a choice as C, C++, and Golang were.

But yeah, it's clear that pot is legal in Washington state. They're partaking of it a lot in Redmond.

Denmark takes a Viking swing at VPN-enabled piracy

It. is. not. piracy.

No ships are entered, no crew and passengers are killed.

Politicians using that term are clearly signalling that their holiday home was paid for by the copyright industry, including cleaning services and complementary chocolates on the pillows.

The future of long-term data storage is clear and will last 14 billion years

Which is why I'm now the proud owner of an LTO drive.

Half of exposed React servers remain unpatched amid active exploitation

Re: The web stack - let's see . . .

"Worse is better". It always wins, as its just simpler to learn the ropes by cobbling something up in your browser than installing a runtime for a properly designed language.

People often say that the web would have looked much better if Netscape had stuck with their original plan (Scheme or Lua, I dont recall, some decent language instead something homebrew that got pushed put too quickly) but no, someone would have implemented something sloppy on top and everybody would have pivoted to that.

In the absence of software engineering with quality and safety standards, the easiest solution will keep winning.

Another open source project dies of neglect, leaving thousands scrambling

Re: Interesting thought

There are in the order of 10E12 SQLite databases on the planeet. There's a large addressable market for support jobs, I'd say.

Not with a relatively niche product like anything Kuberbetes, used by corporations and cloud providers.

But yes, they need to figure things out. Good for the NGinx Ingress maintainers. The hardest and most important part of maintaining Open Source is saying "No" .

Mozilla's Firefox 145 is heeeeeere: Buffs up privacy, bloats AI

Mozilla's sole mission these days is to shield Google from antitrust cases, the rest dies not matter. Too bad, it was fun while it lasted. On to a WebKit browser, then, I guess?

De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now

There's well over a billion people using the Linux distro called "Android" (I use the GrapheneOS variant). So it _can_ be done.

(Desktop-wise, I use StumpWM with some XFCE4 helpers and yes, I wish the world for mix and match were simpler than dbus and polkit).

Rideshare giant moves 200 Macs out of the cloud, saves $2.4 million

Hosting on macOS is one of the sillier things i read today.

Everything you know about last week's AWS outage is wrong

Re: Keeping it up is hard

Only if the pieces are independent.

Which they never are.

Not even I'm AWS, where global systems like IAM invariable worsen the scope of a regional outage.

Who gets a Mac at work? Here's how companies decide

Mac first, alas

My couple of jobs were mostly Mac first companies. Usually peeps in finance got the exception, as they need "real" Excel.

I guess El Reg hasn't asked "Silicon Valley" because that's where I work and all you see is Macs.

(Alas because I dont like macOS at all so I have to install a Linux VM on the thing. MacOS is not good at virtualization so VMs need to be left smaller than under Window or Linux which get by with less CPU and RAM for the host OS and thus more for my VM)

Slack threatened to delete nonprofit coding club’s data if it didn’t pay $50k in a week

Re: This is what you get ...

Cloud/SaaS is just a tool in the tobox, if you use it correctly it is totally fine.

But most compagnies are run in what must be the equivalent of assembling IKEA furniture with just an angle grinder.

Fork that: Three alternative kernels show devs don't need Linux

Re: As a former Be employee . . .

Worse: I'm pretty much still doing the same thing as on that stack of floppies I first installed Linux with. Write code (with Emacs), hang out on various forums, look stuff up on the web.

That worked on my 486 in the '90s.I still wonder what happened.

Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

> GitHub and, more sporadically, Visual Studio Code I have had to keep using because they're monopolies in a way even Windows isn't

It's a sad day when developers can't manage to properly choose their tools anymore. Yes, I'm an old fart. Maybe I lost out insisting to use the same ol' IDE since version 18.54. There's alternatives out there, and certainly VSC is avoidable (GitHub not, but that does not mean you need to actively contribute to the problem. I migrated to Source Hut when this nonsense got too bad, which is excellent).

Investors throw another $13B on the Anthropic cash bonfire

Re: Conflation of value

Its investor valuation. I give you 10 guilders for 25% of your company, which means I think your company is worth 40.

Note, too, that these investors aren't collectively crazy. Theyre just gambling on that one of these shops may be the next Google and that is pretty much their job. Place a lot of bets and if only one pays off, you can show your backers a positive return on investment. Also, the FOMO is real. A VC fund won't often be asked why they did invest in something - that's their job - but eyebrows will be raised if an opportunity walked by, they said no, and then that opportunity exits at an eyewatering amount of money.

In other words, things are mostly working as intended.

Google kneecaps indie Android devs, forces them to register

Re: a recent analysis found over 50 times more malware from "internet-sideloaded sources"

Dont worry, that will happen in Chrome at some point. Google is slowly building their own walled garden called "formerly known as The Internet". And indeed with the protection racket that is formerly known as the US Government, they will do that unchallenged and unharmed. Then the Big Monetization can begin.

Solid-gold nav bars? Trump plans redesign of government websites

Re: At least last time

Frankly, any grown-up with any silly baseball cap outside a sports field is appalling. Trump just, as usual, manages to go a couple of notches worse.

Orbital datacenters subject to launch stress, nasty space weather, and expensive house calls

Gibson's Necromancer? You must mean Vinge's True Names, published a whole three years earlier...

I guess ODCs were a thing in the early eighties :)

Science confirms what we all suspected: Four-day weeks rule

Re: Next year in Breaking News : 3-day week paid 5 is a roaring success

I was able to work four days at my previous job and it was awesome for everyone involved. However, a day less... Not so sure. Too much weekend interfering with work and trying to cram everything in just three days sounds stressful.

Anyway, we will all be displaced by AI real soon now so what are we on about. Zero day work week it is (without pay, of course).

Users of PostgreSQL in the cloud say the uptime just ain't up to it

Eyeballing Aurora RDS and regular RDS, my myself experience says you get around four nines for free. Which is pretty awesome, frankly. I mean, backups, point in time recovery, encryption, automatic minor version upgrades, a lot of stuff you'd need to have proper skills for in-house otherwise.

The fifth nine? Probably doable but that's not something you can just buy. Now you need expertise and probably the level of control that cloud databases can't give you. IOW it will cost real money, like it always has.

Still, working mostly at startups, I take that win.

Researchers claim spoof-proof random number generator breakthrough

Re: "recorded publicly on a hash chain"

Hash chains predate bitcoin by quite a lot and have many useful applications. And one useless one, which is in cryptocurrencies :)

Three ways to run Windows apps on a Linux box

Re: This is more like it (20 years too late)

Ubuntu keeps trying but I feel they've bet on the wrong horse (GNOME). I've briefly used KDE and came away very impressed, more unified than my Win10 laptop even,which still shows me grey oldskool cobtrol panels now and then.

If course, I quickly reverted to my comfy niche customized desktop :)

Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

Re: Ergonomic keyboards...

Another good reason not to accept Open Pen office jobs.

Typing happily away on my super loud mechanical keyboard while WFH...

(Canadian Mattias makes their own brand of mechanical switches including a silent one for said employee holding areas but I like the loud Gateron switches on my Keychron Q11 better)

Re: All very well, but . . .

Hear, hear. And there's just one Alt. No Super or Meta in sight.

The 'End of 10' is nigh, but don't bury your PC just yet

Neither does Windows. Frankly, these days, KDE is way more consistent than Win10 with various versions of Control Panel and settings all over the place.

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

Some linguists argue that, given that hoi is a definite article, the phrase "the hoi polloi" is redundant, akin to saying "the the masses". Others argue that this is inconsistent with other English loanwords.[12] The word "alcohol", for instance, derives from the Arabic al-kuhl, al being an article, yet "the alcohol" is universally accepted as good grammar.[13]

(Wikipedia)

Re: Grift

The best padlock lock pick is a bolt cutter. I follow the lock picking lawyer and I own some picking sets, but a good bolt cutter will get you through any padlock (or its chain) with predictable speed. That's why I think lock picking isn't too much of an actual threat.

Commodore OS 3 is the loudest Linux yet

Re: 37.85G ISO

A twenty-high stack of these was the first Linux distro i installed. Someone at a local uni dumped it on tape for me (I had no internet) and at work the QIC went into the IBM RT, the through Kermit to my PC, then i finally got to go home with my stack of floppies to install, I think it was SLS where it quickly became the main OS for my Fidonet BBS and I never looked back since.

Does the kernel fit on twenty floppies these days?

Redis 'returns' to open source with AGPL license

Re: AGPL

AGPL is fine. If you host AGPL softwate to the public, you jeed to share your changes, no big deal. It was tailor made for Redis and Elastic and whoever else has gone "source available" since then.

I see it as a litmus test of sorts. Does a company want to actively be a member of the commons or just profit? In the latter case, yes, you will find reasons to reject the AGPL.

Malware in Lisp? Now you're just being cruel

That would be too evil.

plus ça change...

A buddy of mine got contracted to write license key code in the early '90s and did that by implementing it in a mini programming language that he implemented in a homebrewn Forth and mixed with various obfuscation techniques everywhere.

We did a lot of reverse engineering back in the day and it was the first time I gave up.

Apple auto-opts everyone into having their photos analyzed by AI for landmarks

Closed source encryption is not encryption. Period.

So because allegedly Google does it, it is OK for Apple as well?

Fedora Asahi Remix 41 for Apple Macs is out

Re: Locked out

Not sure where the memory sits on Macs but from a power and heat and performance perspective, soldering vs DIMMs makes all the difference also for x64 PCs. My latest laptop has soldered-everything and it runs cool and fast and has a very good battery life.