Posts by hh121

From Intel to the infinite, Pat Gelsinger wants Christian AI to change the world

Re: Reverend Lionel Preacherbot

As i keep banging on, an LLM is not intelligent, it is a guessing engine. It has no understanding of facts, it has been trained on everyone's opinion of the facts and will spew a weighted approximation of an answer to a question that just asked for the 'fact'. And if the training data for a different 'fact' overlapped, you're going to be in a world of trouble if you trust it. Like a doctor, or a lawyer, or an architect.

If your problem has a load of really good solutions (like JavaScript or C) you're in luck, but in the edge cases with bugger all eamaples (good or bad) where you're relying on the documentation (hello microsoft) you are s**t out of luck.

I'm not comfortable with my doctor using an 'AI' to transcribe our discussion, let alone a diagnosis.

But if it does your school homework for you and you pass (without getting caught), great. Knock yourself out.

Re: Bring out the comfy chair!

WWJD - what would Jesuits do? I'm guessing something wildly different.

Re: Bring out the comfy chair!

And if it turns a profit (or contributions to a non-profit with a paid CEO), must be god's will or something. Call me a cynical old bastard if you must. I do resemble those attributes.

I thought about the 'prophet' gags and decided against it.

UK judge delivers a 'damp squib' in Getty AI training case, no clear precedent set

Re: Nonsense

I'd agree, except for me it looked more like 'take all of artist/copyright holder (x)'s material, smoosh it together and create something (y) in the style of (x)'. Where 'x' is your music/art/movie/literature/news outlet of choice. Springsteen, Spielberg, Stephen King...doesn't matter.

But it will be the BMG/Universal/News Corps etc that will be able to either fight it (temporary) or get *their* payday (also temporary).

The rest of you, good luck.

Nonsense

So crawling copyright content and making weighted models that can generate something extremely similar or even apparently identical to those sources....how is that different to making a low quality mp3 of a cd? or a compressed rip of a DVD? Or a dodgy jpeg of a work of art?

They will all collapse under the weight of their own irrelevance when the bubble bursts (most likely) or they keep training themselves on their own output till all that comes out is (even more) garbage, and Altman finally buggers off (unfortunately much richer).

Deloitte refunds Aussie gov after AI fabrications slip into $440K welfare report

As suggested above, this seems to be more in the public sector scenario where the objective is more often to avoid being responsible (perceived or otherwise) for a decision, plausible deniability and shared/deflected guilt.

I've seen agencies hiring consultants (in one case someone i knew from way back) to engage other consultants (which would have been us) to keep the govt agency's hands 'clean' of any blowback. That's what they're paying for. Not good use of our money, but it's a mind set you have to be aware of when you run into it.

AI hype train may jump the tracks over $2T infrastructure bill, warns Bain

I know of at least one vendor executive who thinks this is exactly where it's going, generating business apps as a services offering. What could possibly go wrong (i have thoughts).

But it looks like an infinite-number-of-monkeys approach to curing cancer/education/weather etc. You've got a crappy guessing engine so just make exponentially more guesses until one of them works (for flexible definitions of 'works'). I'm still not going to be paying for this garbage for my own use.

Even fantasy money can buy a lot of power – just ask Larry Ellison

Re: Tesla

Assuming that's a serious question, if he had $100b of TSLA already and the stock price goes up 10%, it's now worth $110b. Or $111b with the extra billion he bought that drove up the price in the first place. In very round numbers.

Albania’s prime minister wants to appoint an AI to his ministry

Good luck with that

From the current OpenAI terms of use...

... OUR SERVICES ARE PROVIDED “AS IS.” EXCEPT TO THE EXTENT PROHIBITED BY LAW, WE ... MAKE NO WARRANTIES (EXPRESS, IMPLIED, STATUTORY OR OTHERWISE) WITH RESPECT TO THE SERVICES, AND DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, WARRANTIES OF ... FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, SATISFACTORY QUALITY, NON-INFRINGEMENT, ... WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICES WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, ACCURATE OR ERROR FREE

What could possibly go wrong. Make it Finance minister while you're at it. Justice minister perhaps. Supreme court justice for S&G (if they have that in albania)

Microsoft open-sources the 6502 BASIC coded by Bill Gates himself

Re: My business application

Ditto. Writing financial software in Basic for a little accounting firm north of London in the early 80s got me started, then off into military simulators, enterprise financials and MRP software, then off round the world - currently sitting on the other side of it.

Supermarket giant Tesco sues VMware, warns lack of support could disrupt food supply

Re: Well, that's okay then.

Perpetual == 5-6 years? Not a definition I'm familiar with.

Having said that... i have seen folks with the perpetual Microsoft licenses (Office, Sharepoint, sql server etc), and the relevant enterprise agreements for upgrade rights. They were quite within their rights to stop on Sharepoint 2019 or Office 2024 and call it a day, but they would only get SP2019 security updates till mid 2026 or O2024 till 2029. They switched to subscription editions for sharepoint and office anyway, even though they still have ancient versions deployed. Stepping out of support (even for multiple years) and back in or even buying an upgrade is often more expensive than keeping it going (because reasons. Don't ask me, i don't have the Microsoft licensing PHd you need to understand it).

So 5-6 years to EOL for whatever product *version* you bought isn't unusual as a practical reality depending on when you bought it.

Re: Well, that's okay then.

That's what paid support and/or paid upgrades are for. The vendors want subscriptions to make their revenue stream more even and predictable, rather than the client hanging on to legacy versions until they are forced to upgrade because of end-of-life happens. Or happened and they ignored it as long as they could (or much longer than they should have, which accounts for a good chunk of my job lately). Whether that's at all attractive to Tesco is a bit moot. I still can't see why Broadcom isn't automatically forced to honour the existing VMware contracts, it's not like VMware was bankrupt when it was acquired

Goldman Sachs warns AI bubble could burst datacenter boom

Maybe 'AI' should translate to 'approximating intelligence'. Or we can use Artificial Stupidity given my usual experience.

Someone is going to have to start paying for all these billions of $ of infrastructure. It's 'free'ish at the moment to get you hooked, but the bills will come due PDQ I reckon. That's when the rubber will hit the fan, or something like that. Then we'll see how much sustainable business there actually is. Or is it going to be cheaper to re-hire all those help desk people again. I see dumber, cheaper LLMs on less hardware because the quality of service is adequate, sort of.

And can we stop calling it AI? AINT NO 'I' IN THERE. It's a guessing engine with no understanding or intelligence. Why anyone would even start a discussion on whether an LLM has feelings (elsewhere) is beyond me.

Salesforce sacrifices 4,000 support jobs on the altar of AI

Re: Tried it, hated it, despised it, loathe it

"I will never buy another Verizon product for the rest of my days."

Ditto Three (Aus, UK and Ireland), Vodafone (anywhere because Aus), Telstra (Aus)...running out of Telcos round here.

Re: So disgusting...

We could replace Benioff with an LLM. We might get intelligible grammar out of it. Occasionally. Or salesfarce should be piping Benioff through an AI autocorrect (now there's a use case).

Acksherley, if journalists can interview an AI for the views of a dead person, why can't they interview an AI for the views of a living ass hat? Seems like a gap in the market. Or at least the market i'm aware of.

Yup, first thing I tell the clanker after they say 'i didn't understand your question' to the very first interaction, is 'put me through to a human'.

Re: In other news

Once an Oracle executive, always a c...

How Windows 11 is breaking from its bedrock and moving away

Re: But baffled by this bit:

I don't disagree on the lack of useful new features in 11. I suspect they might have thought about calling it 10x or something, but then they'd have had to support 10 indefinitely, so the only way to kill off non-TPM systems and get the security uplift was to do a major release and wait for the 10 years to expire. How much more secure things are when you still have users is another question entirely.

But it's not like they charged for the upgrade, it was trivial to get it for free. Now making it "Windows Subscription Edition" and charging $80 a year or something would have probably caused a major upset. Wouldn't bet against it though. Virtual desktops take you that way.

Slight double standard there

Apple gets a pass for generously keeping 2017 era Macs alive till 2027 because they had a platform transition, but Windows 10 from 2015 terminating in 2025 is unacceptable? And windows supports multiple (some) platforms anyway?

"Macs from 2017 will finally lose support in 2027 – although if you were buying an Intel Mac in 2021, it'll suffer the same fate"

Microsoft's 10 year support lifecycle has been a thing for a long time (just don't mention Sharepoint 2019), so it's not like it's a surprise. I remember being left high and dry by Apple on an original iMac after not very long. If people were still shipping non-TPM hardware in the recent past shouldn't they be getting a kicking?

Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS

Re: The elephant in the room

Another elephant in that room would be 'how do I ensure all my data, files, pictures and so on are still there', let alone any apps that they might use besides a browser. Even ignoring MS Office it's going to be a big challenge to overcome that, even if it's only a perception of difficulty. Pisses me off every time I have to refresh the home computer like for like.

Re: You missed the point

Most organisations won't do it either, and will wait for a hardware refresh if they can get away with it. Even v large IT vendors...

Re: You missed the point

And what's your opinion on MacOS then?

Forget Vibe Coding, we're all about Vine Coding nowadays

I find that the quality and usefulness of AI generated code is directly proportional to the volume of useful examples out in the world (where 'world' == wherever the AI model was plagiarised from. like Stack Overflow and Github, rather than usefully inferred from the technical documentation). Since most of my job involves fairly obscure and/or new things with vanishingly few working examples (I couldn't look them up on Stack Overflow either), I tend to get wildly hallucinogenic material that takes as long to figure out whats wrong and why I need to discard it and start again as it would have to do it myself in the first place. In the business scenarios I usually field, it needs a pretty dumb requirement to get a 'quality' response (something usable with little or no re-writing). That would be of the order of 1-in-20 cases in my experience, but your miileage will vary.

Apple: Since you care about yOuR pRiVaCy, we'll train our AI on made-up emails

So how about this - Apple trains an AI on all their internal email history, executives and 3rd parties included. What could possibly go wrong?

Oracle says its cloud was in fact compromised

Shocked!!! Shocked I am. Who would have believed that bunch of shysters would turn out to be a complete bunch of shysters?

GitHub supply chain attack spills secrets from 23,000 projects

Re: This is unfixable

I saw the AC comment and I have no opinion on SHA-1, collisions etc, nor claim any expertise. Certainly wouldn't comment on it. I was referring to the idea that Linus looks at everything up and down the stack.

Re: Really ??

Your point is taken, but it doesn't address the basic problem of who is putting that software out there, how do you know who they are and if they can be trusted. You seem to think I can figure that out somehow for the millions of packages out there, but that shouldn't be my job, nor the job of everyone else out there to clear that hurdle. Just like everyone reads every EULA completely and understands it. Not.

Perhaps a better way of putting it would be that Microsoft/HP/IBM et al would suffer incredible reputational damage and loss of business ($$$) if they allowed someone to put something malicious into their packaged software. They are therefore far more likely to put significant resources and safeguards into their process, which is what I saw (from a distance) when I worked there a very long time ago.

And in this sort of scenario it wouldn't be me sueing Microsoft, it would be major corporations with an axe to grind, or governments threatening sanctions. I am certainly not delusional enough to try that myself.

Someone sneaking a package into github probably doesn't give a monkeys, specially if they're safely squirreled away in North Korea or Russia.

Re: This is unfixable

How much code does Linus actually look at (or amyone else you can name and actually trust), versus the swathes of code that gets lumped together in a distro, or randomly downloaded in some addon, just 'because'.

Ain't no million eyes on every element, let alone trustworthy eyes or even competent.

Re: Really ??

I've asked the same thing before and got nothing serious in reply - how do you trust any code from some rando on the interwebs, whether it's Linux distros, Github packages, Nuget packages and all the rest? At least with something provided by Microsoft/IBM/HP et al, you know they vetted their staff before hiring them, or you know who to sue if it all goes really pear-shaped.

Non-biz Skype kicks the bucket on May 5

Re: Enshitifiation

I'd be more inclined to think it's just about retiring something for which there is a strategic replacement (albeit without some of the features some people want) and there aren't enough users to justify keeping it going. I'd also be willing to bet that adding the callout features isn't worth the cost or hassle to do it.

Since Whatsapp came along I hadn't logged in to Skype more than once or twice, or used my Skype credit in many years, to the point the credit had been disabled for a good few years without me even noticing.

CoPilot on the other hand, I completely agree with you.

Re: Alternative

The only people I can see in skype are women I've never met trying to talk to me in foreign languages. Just weird.

Re: Eejits

When skype came out it 'just worked', and MSN Messenger definitely did not work at all under most circumstances I needed (like when i was trying to reach family overseas on different ISPs).

I was at MS at the time and made this point repeatedly to the Messenger product team to no great effect. I guess they decided the easiest solution was to buy Skype, but here we are 20 some years later...

That's a no. You will be able to make calls using that credit after may, but you'll have to use Teams Free or the Skype Web portal, but you can't buy any more credit. I just wasted the thick end of an hour on hold with MS support to find this out...

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/skype/skype-is-retiring-in-may-2025-what-you-need-to-know-2a7d2501-427f-485e-8be0-2068a9f90472

Microsoft tests 45% M365 price hikes in Asia-Pacific to see how much you enjoy AI

Re: Changed to "Classic"

It wasn't as hard as expected (per the OP) to get to the Manage Subscription either. From Outlook/Word/Excel, File/Office Account, Manage Account, then under Manage Subscription when you click Cancel Subscription the confirmation screen offers you the switch to M365 Family Classic without AI for AU$139, or switch to Personal for AU$111. Amazingly the actual 'Switch Plan' link doesn't offer those options...

What isn't clear is what is still included in 'M365 Family Classic without AI' (the rest of the marketing site materials don't seem to have caught up yet). Luckily I don't have to pony up again till November so I can wait a while to see how this steaming pile of manure pans out, but based on a fair bit of experience with CoPilot so far, there is zero chance of me paying for it, since I had actually been looking for ways to turn the damn thing off in Word, Outlook and OneNote, desktop and mobile. It's a pain in the neck. "You appear to have written an email to your wife with a shopping list in it", thanks for that compelling insight.

Edgio bankruptcy results in endpoint change for Microsoft

Off topic, but for recent form in this area...See also - 2 weeks notice for a breaking change in Sharepoint Online PnP PowerShell, now requiring app registration and any Powershell solutions using it probably needed an authentication update. Announced in a github blog I'd guess has half a dozen readers.

In their defence they keep saying its a 'community' supported app, not a Microsoft product. Lot of microsoft people in that community by the way. But if they had built the Online Management Shell properly in the first place, with the features that PnP was papering over the cracks for, to a standard that actually dealt properly with error catching and reporting (dont get me started), maybe everyone's infrastructure wouldn't be such a hideous lashup dependent on randos.

25 years on from Y2K, let's all be glad it happened way back then

Re: And for other reasons

When I was still working on Oracle dbs (in the 90s) and had too much time on my hands, I tried the date arithmetic in Sql for the behaviour around year zero. I found that the year before 1AD is 1BC, it didn't recognise a year zero. Didn't seem important enough to report it though.

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine

Re: This was predicted - in El Reg - years ago.

I have no idea of the details of how Perplexity works, and I agree with the premise of the OP, but I suspect/guess that a search based on an LLM is going to be massively difficult/expensive to keep the model current, regenerating or integrating all the growth of internet content every day. Or don't and it will drift into irrelevance as the model gets further and further out of date. Which might be fine if your question isn't related to time critical data, but plenty will be. Whether that's harder to do for an LLM versus a search engine would be interesting to get my head around.

Data is the new uranium – incredibly powerful and amazingly dangerous

Refined data might be (relatively) harmless when held by the white hat that refined it ("don't be evil" anyone?), but if it gets into the wrong hands...this is what CISOs are bricking themselves about. Seems like pretty apt analogy to me.

Nothing's going to stop most of these data gathering and refining exercises though, unless they are made illegal or highly regulated.

Cast a hex on ChatGPT to trick the AI into writing exploit code

Re: Real problem is

*this particular* llm approach to ai doesn't *understand* anything at all, right, wrong, good or bad. It's a guessing engine that leaves you to figure out whether the answer is at all relevant or meaningful. I don't see it being extrapolated into one that does either. A completely different approach might though, but I don't know if that's what they're asking us to believe in and invest in.

A key indicator might be the rate at which Altman cashes out (or claims to be diversifying) his investment...I've seen that movie before in the first internet bubble.

In the meantime, 'good enough' might be able to make a few people rich and a lot of people unemployed.

Is Microsoft's AI Copilot? CoPilot? Co-pilot? MVP creates site to help get it right

Re: BAU for MS is it not?

To be fair, sharepoint search is only half the solution you need. It has always left you to do the hard yards on tagging content to make it usable, and they have only just recently, 23 or so years since this all started, come out with the other half of the solution as a premium add on to do that automatically. And labelled it AI of course, because reasons, even though 3rd parties have been doing this kind of metadata extraction for at least 15 years.

MS was doing the classification and labelling in sharepoint content well before the AI bandwagon got rolling.

And the M365 solution is fine as long as you don't mind all your content going through the AI.

Perplexity AI decries News Corp's 'simply false' data scraping claims

It's difficult to imagine how I could care less about news Corp, but the book writers, journalists, musicians, actors, painters, photographers etc that I do want to see survive with jobs that can sustain them probably won't, and thats just for starters. This isn't some Luddite rebellion in specific roles, this is existential for vast swathes of the service industry where they're using our content (even this post) to teach something how to replace us. Fun times.

Microsoft whiz dishes the dirt on the Blue Screen Of Death's colorful past

The grey beards I worked with when starting out would talk of sitting in the computer room and being able to tell when it was stuck by the change and regularity of the clicking sounds emanating from the box.

One of the same wise men also said "why don't you get married, why should you be happy?". I have often dwelt on thosevpearls on later life. Actually, the wisest and nicest person there was a lady in her 60s who'd been in IT since year dot. Probably learned more off her about how to be in a team than anyone else

How to maintain code for a century: Just add Rust

A century you say

Wishful thinking is probably being kind. Delusional might be a bit more appropriate. As convincing as the argument that all open source code has a million eyeballs on it so it must be safe. As a grey beard, it seems like the IT grads I come across are getting further and further away from the guts of systems engineering into whatever today's abstract niche for job security might be. Can't see the attraction of the legacy stuff for the newbies. I'd be more inclined to believe there will be more of this (https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/25/ibm_q2_2024/) leveraging AI that actually works (if it ever does) to translate old platforms into (slightly more) modern ones, or maintain them, but that's probably wishful/delusional thinking too.

CrowdStrike file update bricks Windows machines around the world

Re: Related?

Yup. Also see https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/21/crowdstrike_linux_crashes_restoration_tools/ before we get (even further) into a smugathon. Anything working that far down the stack has the potential to break things. The era of Windows device driver issues was one of those things that caused some major re-thinks 20-30 years ago.

My work Win11 laptop is borked too. I noticed it as the first BSOD around 2.30 from Sydney time, rebooted and ran long enough to investigate the error message, figured it was a crowdstrike issue *that has happened at least a couple of times previously*, reported all this against my support ticket, then an hour or so later the infinite BSOD/reboot loop started.

At least our mob has a self-service get-your-bitlocker-key option they claim is working, so as an IT company we *may* have a decent proportion of people up and running on Monday. If they read their emails on their phones. I wonder about the coloured pencil brigade though.

Anyway, I don't feel the need to spend my weekend sorting my laptop out though, that can wait till Monday.

See above re:bitlocker. Can't reboot in safe mode without it, and getting those keys to large numbers of users will be entertaining, not to mention the security implications of slinging all those keys around in the first place. Assuming there's a user, and they're capable of applying that work around. It looks like massive numbers of POS systems are borked, so good luck there.

It's well past beer o'clock round here anyway.

Agile Manifesto co-author blasts failure rates report, talks up 'reimagining' project

Re: Agile misconceptions are rife

Don't understand the down vote, I see this all the time. All. The. Time. I am regularly asked to provide a fixed price quote for a fixed outcome and a fixed timeline using an 'agile' approach. And I make the same point - you can't do that. Sure I can quote you for 'n' iterations with 'x' resources, but by definition there's no certainty of what you'll end up with within that arbitrary cost/time frame.

How tech went from free love to pay-per-day

Re: Learning new UIs

MS Paint hasn't gone, it's just a freebie download from the MS Store. Notepad is present too, the fancy new multi-tabbed version. Woo hoo. Whether your work MOE includes them (my retail Acer laptop and work laptop MOE with Win11 did) is one thing (i.e. not a Microsoft issue per se), and whether they allow you to install things on a work laptop from the Store or anywhere else is another. Not sure that's quite the deal-breaker for Win11 though.

I was running Win10 and 11 concurrently when my work outfit hadn't seen fit to make the jump. Differences were pretty minor to my eye, although I was momentarily annoyed by the skinny scroll bars in the Start menu/AllApps and Windows Explorer (don't see it anywhere else though). That said, the bar goes normal width when you mouse over them for a second or so. Still not an earth shattering deal breaker for mine, but your mileage will vary. If that's the worst UI you've used in 30 years, what were you using in the 90s? I remember a wide selection of god-awful UIs from Digital, IBM, Microsoft, Novell and many others (they joy of working on 'portable' old Oracle). Hyperbole, I've heard of it.