Posts by Grunchy

France offers US scientists a safe haven from Trump's war on woke

Pragmatism

If Russia takes back Ukraine all they’ve done is go back to 1992. Meanwhile, they dump their entire military arsenal down their shirt front destroying city after city and wiping out their youth generation (in the midst of a demography crisis). It is worthwhile for the West to take advantage of the opportunity to modernize its military and hand over its obsolete inventory to Ukraine to help out their endeavour.

Interestingly, China proposes to do the same thing to itself over Taiwan, with the identical demographic crisis).

Tribalism is another word for culture, which is fundamentally a control mechanism. “Cultural norms” are the (unwritten, written) rules (laws) by which your behaviour is controlled. A big one is attire, you are expected to show your status accordingly, and this is why Zelensky can get mocked in the white house for not conforming per the rules. And penalties can be quite severe. Your car is part of your attire, for example.

The opposite of woke

Taking a zizz.

As Elon Musk makes thousands of federal workers jobless, tycoon pushes for $56B Tesla pay deal

I don’t care

I got $20,000 shorting Tesla last week, including $5,000 by shorting nVidia!

(I cashed in my puts last Friday because the market is irrational, and my good fortune is pretty dang rare so I grab it before it disappears even faster than it appeared).

Microsoft will kill Remote Desktop soon, insists you'll love replacement

Sunshine and Moonlight work well enough. Parsec used to be fantastic! and then they dropped Windows 7 support. Guys, I still game on Steam from my Win7 VM, gimme a break. Sadly I think there is still nothing as performant as Parsec, too bad I can’t use it.

Ex-Googler Schmidt warns US: Try an AI 'Manhattan Project' and get MAIM'd

If AI is so dang smart

It should be able to steal all the bitcoins back from North Korea. Some great big mammoth swindle!

Or, maybe we could turn it against our own selves and make it steal all of our money, but you know, hand it all back, then explain how it did it.

Oh Brother. Printer giant denies dirty toner tricks as users cry foul

Don't let them do updates!

"Updates" are notorious for deleting functionality in order to make customers pay again to buy (RENT!) the same functionality back.

You know for a fact this is happening when they block you from reversing any "update".

I swear, "the cloud" has come to mean nothing but manufacturers doing secret communications to sabotage their own products... MY PERSONAL PROPERTY!

They try to sanitize what they're doing by invoking an image of puffy nimbus cloud. But what it really is, is a toxic sooty belch of burned diesel smoke.

Or more accurately... think Steven King "The Mist". An opaque haze full of hidden monsters that come out of nowhere & rip your guts out!

Feds name and charge alleged Silk Typhoon spies behind years of China-on-US attacks

I’ll sell you my email password for $40,000, you can go freeky banana nutz for all I care!

Windows 365 Disaster Recovery Plus promises Cloud PC comebacks in 30 minutes

Huh. I can restore a Virsh VM snapshot (to reverse some Microsoft f-up or other) in under 30 seconds!

I dunno who is their target clientele, an ignorant dummy, I guess. Shrug!

Apple dares users to fix 'budget' iPhone 16e themselves

Re: I would never

I only buy 2nd hand. Well, because the depreciation is ungodly severe! I still use the 64GB iPhone SE that I bought used for $100 in 2017.

(New phones still don’t have FLIR. My $100 iPhone has FLIR. New phones don’t do anything new or different, or even as good as my old phone. Sorry, just stating the facts of the matter!)

Profit slide at HP can only mean one thing: Hammer time

$300,000,000 ÷ 2,000 workers = $150,000 per worker

Windows 7 lives! How to keep your favorite fossil running

Much easier

I run “Virsh” (Qemu) on Linux, onto which I installed “Ghost Spectre” edition of Win7, with all antivirus and updates permanently disabled. Then, I created “snapshots” after all my apps were installed. I have no data stored inside the Win7 virtual machine, all my data is safely stored in Linux. I created a Samba share folder in Linux, and that’s the data transfer folder. If ever an occasion arises I think I need Windows (very rarely, now) I copy the data to the Samba folder, boot up Windows, do whatever is needed, then put the data back to Linux. It doesn’t matter if anybody hacks or corrupts Windows: I just restore the last snapshot.

Honestly, this completely eliminates the risk and all the Microsoft hassles. If they try to do an update, I just roll it back!

By eliminating Microsoft meddling, finally, Windows is tolerable!

Windows 11 24H2 goes back to the drawing board over AutoCAD 2022 glitch

AutoCAD R13 on Win95. Yes, yes, running as a virtual machine!

If some poor sap has to look at your design on AutoCAD 2022 on Win11, if they can get it running, it can bring in the R13 design file. No excuses will be humoured!

Ad-supported Microsoft Office bobs to the surface

What what?

If you want to run Microsoft Office (“why”), just download from Microsoft and activate from massgrave dot dev.

Microsoft, are you sure? You do realize the only business they’re in anymore is spyware and malware?

Well, you’ve been warned!

Mega council officers had no idea what they were buying ahead of Oracle fiasco

Formula 1 Scam

We’ve got this travelling go kart show to fund, and Oracle pays Big Money to get some stickers put on some of the go karts. I think part of those funds gets “kicked back” in party tickets that Oracle marketing gets to share around with unsophisticated customers. Any ERP system could be replicated with a database programmed in Microsoft Access (anybody who gets caught using Microsoft Access for anything in business gets fired and whatever project they had put together gets shitcanned). Thus it always has been…

HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due to 'feedback'

So who cares?

Tech support doesn’t know anything anyway. You have to go to online forums to find out anything. My biggest problem with HP and nVidia was how to defeat their proprietary software locks, and after that, how to defeat their endless email spam trying to force me to buy their useless, worthless services.

I upgraded to a Supermicro.

(Then I put all my server tasks on a Datto NAS, which does everything within TDP=15 watts!! Woot!)

“HP, who? What, aren’t they out of business by now?”

NASA's on-again, off-again job cuts – what's the plan?

Re: Move fast, break things

Trump has limited power.

First, he’s done by Jan 20, 2029.

Second, Congress and Senate ain’t stupid. They can impeach him any second he gets too out of line.

But they want to make sure they can install President Vance first…

NASA?

This is shaping up to be a “Southern Hemisphere” problem.

NASA will accept payment in rare earths, to solve your problem.

No guarantee. Plus, NASA gets the meteorite salvage.

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

I’ve become a big HP customer without even realizing it

I’ve got two HP Z800s and three DL380Ps (G8) and I think I paid a grand total of $200 for all of it, including at least 2TB of ram sticks.

I blew another $100 apiece for some Tesla P4s and consequently have some hugely capable iron downstairs.

I fire up one of the DL380Ps “occasionally” to run the deepseek, but I really don’t have use for all this junk. If I care to I might run some CFD simulations, or something.

What do you do with HP equipment? I have just as much but for IBM-branded equipment. I betcha I’ve got 30+ Intel Xeons kicking around, not even counting the loose ones…

I switched to Brother way long time ago

DCP-7065dn laser all-in-one, $100, generic toner.

ZERO regrets.

Time to make C the COBOL of this century

So, fix the overflow bug?

Someone tries to copy A to B without checking if A fits or not?

Computer languages are merely collections of programs called “commands,” if one command isn’t working right, just revise it!

(Barely anybody programs Fortran ‘77 anymore, it’s possible to revise and to move on.)

Why AI benchmarks suck

Where are the $ billions going?

Someone is paying billions of dollars for all this machine training, and “some other guys” are charging billions of dollars to perform the machine training. I reckon nVidia gets some of that, and the power company gets some. But who else, and for what?

For example: who is “Anna,” creator-operator-mastermind behind Annas-Archive, the outlaw library that is suddenly intent on collecting every single book ever written and make them available from bittorrent?

What would be the motivation for such an enterprise?

DeepSeek's iOS app is a security nightmare, and that's before you consider its TikTok links

I got the local instance of Deepseek running on the server downstairs. I guess it’s ok? It’s sort of a version of Watson, the IBM program that beat Jennings on Jeopardy.

Jennings “skill” is no more than the trick played on “Just Glen”.

https://youtu.be/l1-69AnA_To

Here’s what I think of Alex Trebek!

https://youtu.be/GwZBnUR6P-A

Agent P waxes lyrical about 14 years of systemd

Friggin

This should be straightforward, but no chance it WILL EVER WORK!

sudo mount --bind /home/grunchy/libvirt\ images /var/lib/libvirt/images

This works fine! But it won’t work in /etc/fstab:

#work, damn you!

/home/grunchy/libvirt\040images /var/lib/libvirt/images none bind

Why?! Who the hell knows? Incidentally, the clue is that / is 200GB non-encrypted and /home is 3.3TB encrypted. <-- this makes sense to do!

sudo mount -a

Yep that works, but NEVER on boot up.

crontab -e

@reboot * /opt/scripts/stupid.sh

Not a chance!

/etc/systemd/system/stupid.service

Not a chance!

This is on Mint, btw.

/etc/rc.local

No Go.

There’s a hundred ways to skin the cat and they ALL FAIL.

My suspicion is that the /home hasn’t decrypted and mounted yet causing the other mount to flop, so you would think sleep 10 might give it a chance, or dmesg might throw a clue, and NO, nothing works!

Gave up and reconfigured virt-manager json config thingy to just point to /home by default.

(I could never remember where the heck /var/lib/libvirt/images had put all my Qcows anyways.)

</flame>

Copilot+ PCs? Customers just aren't buying it – yet

What about the blockchain

GPUs are for generating bitcoin, are they not?

All of a sudden these matrix-multipliers are meant to artificially simulate neuron nets.

One day they’ll be used for 3D transformation of geometry for video games or whatever.

Arm gives up on killing off Qualcomm's vital chip license

ARM! Good god y’all, what is it good for? Absolutely nuthen!

Actually, I happen to own several Raspberry Pis.

I mean, no, I don’t ever do anything with any of them.. the Pi400 is set up with the Amiga emulator. I let it sit on my desktop, it ain’t hurting much.

(I tried several times to dummy-out the RetroPi thingy, but the dang thing never worked right. Yes, yes, operator error, OBVIOUSLY. Sheesh!)

Granny got her M2 Mac Mini that I have to go figure out every once in awhile (I still have no idea what the big deal is about, really I don’t.)

Well, so much for that.

Google: How to make any AMD Zen CPU always generate 4 as a random number

Re: There is absolutely no problem here.

“…the bible and god and jesus never gave us a zero.”

Sure, Jesus walked on the water.

But astronauts walked in SPACE!

They even walked on the MOON!!

Come to think of it… water skiing is blasphemous. Isn’t it!

Sid6581 LFSR

My trusty old Sid “noise generator” works via “linear feedback shift register,” fully described here:

https://youtu.be/aASlxcOsYUg

If you slow the noise generator down slow enough, and capture each sample, you can very quickly predict the sequence: even in BASIC!

(I always thought the noise was akin to radio noise, but nope, it never was.)

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

Friggin Ell!

I plonked my old Win10 SSD back onto the bus of my trusty old “pc mate” and logged into Microsoft for the first time in 1 coon’s age, lo and behold, they had Chucked a Copilot at me !!!

%*!#?^!

Dubbed off my old MS data onto my new Mint installation.

I feel like I’m DONE with Microsoft. Apple too, for that matter.

If I ever feel the need for a “copilot” (skepticism) I’m already running sandboxed Deepseek down in the basement.

Nobody will ever be able to spy on my A.I.!

FuriPhone FLX1: A Debian-powered brick that puts GNOME in your back pocket

Furi Fondleslab

I’m turned off already, but then the $550 price tag: blah!

I’m still sticking with my 2016 Gen1 iPhone SE. Well, it only cost me $50 2nd hand for the 64GB storage back in, what, 2018 or so (who can remember?)

The reason “why” my iPhone kicks ass is because it fits my pocket, plus I “blew” another $100 for the FLIR 1 camera for it, and it’s so old Apple gave up screwing around with it, which means “update hell” is over, finally. This Furi Fone does nothing different or better than my old 2016 phone. The old iPhone is good enough, the Safari built in can log into my Proxmox environments, I’ve got the eBay and the Kijiji. It syncs to the gmail good enough. Accelerometer and compass and GPS? Sure, they all still work (xlnt for geocaching). If I cared to waste another $30 I guess I could get a lightning-hdmi dock adapter thingy (but why).

THE BIGGEST disadvantage to iOS is they don’t let you run Newpipe. Oh well, I blew $50 on an Android set-top box for that functionality, INCLUDING remote control.

I am slightly tempted by recent iPhones for their 3D scanner capability, but no, they don’t have FLIR. My crap iPhone has FLIR, included with a big battery expansion! So, shrug, another year goes by with “nothing new” available (of any value, that is).

DeepSeek or DeepFake? Our vultures circle China's hottest AI

Ehhh it’s ok

I made a LXC on my PVE (Linux container on Proxmox) and fired up a 70GB DeepSeek, I guess it’s ok. I still never got my cheap nVidia P4s virtualized so I ran it purely on CPUs.

Computerphile made a good video about DeepSeek which inspired me to get it running.

https://youtu.be/gY4Z-9QlZ64

What good is it? It’s an interesting spectacle (actually, it’s damn neat!)

The output is definitely recognizable as pure AI, so it’s not all that compelling. It’s the technology that’s fascinating; the product itself is disposable.

Now Trump's import tariffs could raise the cost of a laptop for Americans by 68%

Re: "If Trump decides to walk into Greenland, who is going to stop him?"

The American government has three co-equal branches, that’s the President, the Congress, and the Senate.

Trump helped them win the election but that’s all done now. I’m pretty sure if things get real nuts the plan is to impeach the moron and promote President Vance, who can be more easily controlled.

Nobody would blame them, either.

Bah

I cast about and I’ve got at least 5 laptops kicking around. Sure, they’re all “obsolete” but they all run Win10 just fine, which means they’ll run Mint even better.

I checked out the tech dumpster at work and harvested two more Dell laptops, both Win11 class. 1 had a dead battery ($40), the other needed a new screen ($100).

Shit, now I’ve got SEVEN laptops kicking around ! !

Trump’s tariffs, cuts may well put tech in a chokehold, say analysts

“These tariffs are not all about money – it’s about forcing countries to sort out borders, people smuggling, drug trafficking. Trump is saying enough is enough, stop abusing us or we’ll fight back.”

I don’t mind the higher border security. We need WAY better drone technology anyway, you should see how they’re fighting modern war in Ukraine. I can see China put together 10e6 drones with explosive caps and send them off to “clear out” Vancouver, for instance. If you’ve ever seen one of those drone swarm shows at night, just imagine if each one had a firework rocket, except instead of a firework it’s a grenade, and they use one of those human ID algorithms, except they tell the drone to fly briskly toward the faces they find.

So, sure, time to upgrade our drone technology.

Putin said to do it

Putin told Trump to break NATO up any way possible. I wonder how far Trump can push it to obey before he gets impeached again?

(Because treason is one of those “high crimes” they keep talking about.)

Memories fade. Archives burn. All signal eventually becomes noise

Re: MS Fnd in a Lbry

“ If a microSD card is 1/378 the size of a page of A4 and stores 32 million pages of A4 text (assuming 4000 characters per page at 8bits per character), my rough calculation suggests that a humble 128GB microSD card beats his challenge by a factor of about 0.5 million.”

8 bits per character? Depending on the zip algorithm, you might be able to compress text by a factor of 10x.

(If I was gonna archive a million books or so, why not exploit lossless compression?)

You begged Microsoft to be reasonable. Instead it made Copilot reason-able with OpenAI GPT-o1

Who are the dopes?

“M365” was a joke since day 1. Who are the rubes paying the idiot tax??

To reiterate: massgrave.dev has the “microsoft activation script” for activating MS Office for ‘nutten, so I am told.

(I wouldn’t know, I dropped microsoft long time ago now.)

Intel sinks $19B into the red, kills Falcon Shores GPUs, delays Clearwater Forest Xeons

I remember when the USA deficit exceeded $350 billion: that’s when you borrow $1 billion each and every day just to keep the lights on in this joint!

Of course the deficit then quickly exceeded $1 trillion, that’s where we have to borrow $1 billion every 8 hrs.

Or, $2 trillion, where we gotta borrow $1 billion every 4 hrs.

(If it costs $6 billion a day to keep the wheels on this bus, how long can you do that before you just declare bankruptcy? Or maybe it doesn’t matter since everyone else in the world is bankrupt?? Shrug?)

White House asks millions of govt workers if they would be so kind as to fork right off

Thunderf00t sez, Musk as head DOGE, had his role clarified as IT head of US government

https://youtu.be/6UldI1xIb0E?t=1569

"Agency heads shall ensure that DOGE Team Leads coordinate their work with USDS and advise their respective Agency Heads on implementing the President's DOGE Agenda. Sec. 4. Modernizing Federal Technology and Software to Maximize Efficiency and Productivity. (a) the USDS Administrator shall commence a Software Modernization Initiative to improve the quality and efficiency of government-wide software, network infrastructure, and information technology (IT) systems. Among other things, the USDS Administrator shall work with Agency Heads to promote inter-operability between agency networks and systems, ensure data integrity, and facilitate responsible data collection and synchronization."

Seems like Musk gets to be IT administrator for the whole US government and work on synergies and what-all.

I think all he has to do is text "resign" to the number provided and he can go away on Monday and still be paid out a full salary until Sept. 2025 without finding even a single synergy.

Good deal for Musk!

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

Oh, I still run Windows...

Yeah, inside Virt-Manager on my Ubuntu installation. Sure, I've got Win7 and Win10 in there, all set to run old legacy software if/when the need arises (less and less as the days go by).

I just took an "image" of my old system, then I reformatted with Ubuntu and got that all working hunky-dunky then installed Virt-Manager and then resurrected my old Win environment.

I have a motherboard that can run two GPUs so I got the nVidia one for Linux (weird eh?) and the AMD Vega one for the virtual machines. So that way, they can have their own GPU for their own full graphic acceleration, just like a real computer.

EXCEPT... NOT a real computer. No sir. This time, I have Backups and Snapshots and I installed the defeatured Ghost Spectre "light" version, and there's no virus detection (pfft who cares, if it gets infected I'll just roll back a Snapshot).

What I did was I installed a Samba share of one of my Linux folders, and I use that to transfer data to/from the Windows and the macOS and the Solaris VMs. So the actually valuable "data" all resides within Linux, and Windows/macOS are merely software applications that run inside Linux in order to facilitate old legacy software that I'm seeing less and less use of, to be frank. Oh, what the H the SSD space is pretty cheap nowadays, "why not" keep the old OS environments for old-times sake. It's not like they take up any physical room.

China's DeepSeek just emitted a free challenger to OpenAI's o1 – here's how to use it on your PC

Actual humans still way cheaper

You can train genuine humans with way less GPU hours and power and data requirements. Also, every human is a unique model, with different training regimens and intelligence capabilities than every other one.

AI still has a lot of catching up to do!

Stargate, smargate. We're spending $60B+ on AI this year, Meta's Zuckerberg boasts

Re: Hopefully, not real money

“…the most monumental waste of money and resources this planet has ever seen…”

Ah… cryptocurrency?

AI isn’t a “complete” waste, I was able to use it to make a semi-crappy “Rembrandt” self portrait, after all.

That’s more than “nothing” !

“Cinema Spectacles”

For $60 billion I wonder if you could invent “movie goggles,” no seriously, hear me out.

It’s a pair of glasses! But no ordinary glasses. Instead of corrective lenses, they instead feature miniature TV screens!

Why, the effect is so powerful, it’s like a gigantic movie screen… but they’re built into your spectacles!

With SIXTY BILLION we could perfect this revolutionary technology in no time flat.

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

Re: Could I be out of touch? No!

I fired up ChatGPT just yesterday! Well sure. You see, I discovered my original 1979 copy of “Manual of Possibilities” (https://annas-archive.org/md5/994d1d4b39f0a8057800e272e35b3167) and read this little morsel:

“Similarly, programming can replace painting technique, at least of the nonrepresentational kind. A computer will never create a Degas dancer or a Rembrandt portrait, but computers can be the canvas of much of the nonobjective art we see today.”

Eh, what? Can’t create a Rembrandt portrait?

So I uploaded a snap of me muggins and asked ChatGPT for the “portrait in the style of Rembrandt” version, but change dirty old winter to a pastoral springtime scene.

It rendered me with 1-week facial growth!!

AI wins against the humans, again. Egad.

I switched to Mint!

Yup, I got fed up with buggy Ubuntu “snaps”, plus I’m never running Microsoft or Apple again: too much AI, zero actual innovation. Let’s put it this way, my Office 2007 “pro” license is still approximately 100% compatible with current day Office 365, at least for the functions I use. What have they done in 18 years, other than nothing? Yeah they put in advertising and spyware.

I guess I’m giving up on Ubuntu too, since they are now a corporate property and will soon become filled with zero innovation except for advertising and spyware.

Just about done with Google, too.

AWS adds 32-vCPU option and an easier on-ramp to its cloudy desktops

Amazon is Obsolete

www.annas-archive.org

Now we don’t need Amazon for NOTHIN’.

SpaceX resets ‘Days Since Starship Exploded’ counter to zero

Re: Failure is success

Funny thing, Space X launched their actual moon mission 3 days ago (Jan 15/2025). Another 6 weeks until we find out whether it makes it or not.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/14/science/nasa-launch-firefly-ispace-moon-landing/index.html

This bogus "starship" project, which already spent the entire budget of two complete moon trips, would have definitely failed in bankruptcy except Trump inexplicably got elected.

So probably more money is going to get funneled to Space X to continue this farce.

(Musk is a gigantic Ponzi scam so you never know just precisely when he'll be arrested. Could be any day now, could be delayed until 2028 or beyond...)

Microsoft declares 2025 'the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh'

I don't blame Microsoft but they just don't have anything to offer above the freeware segment.

With massgrave.dev "microsoft activation script" I don't even have to pay a cent for almost any Microsoft software, but I don't bother, even for free it isn't worth it.

Oh well, live & learn.

HMD Fusion: A budget repairable smartphone with modular flair

Can't beat the old iPhone SE

Well, because I got the FLIR one infrared camera accessory that puts a 64-pixel sensor on it.

Got it cheap because iPhone SE is WAY out of date, nevertheless the phone and the infrared both work perfectly well.

(Also the FLIR adapter makes a decent enough bump cover).

I need two new technologies to "upgrade" from the iPhone and that's infrared and 3d scanning.

This HMD device doesn't offer that. Also, I'm not accustomed to paying "retail" for any kind of tech. In fact, I usually pay scrap prices, if that much. No deal.