Posts by matjaggard 349 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Apr 2015
I don't think AliExpress itself is an issue, the stores on there vary hugely but almost all of this type of hardware is made in China anyway.
The router you linked to is more expensive, has all ethernet ports at the slower speed (so to get almost equivalent you could buy a cheap gigabit hub) and as far as I can tell it's not FCC compliant, but it does have other great features like the 3 mPCIe interfaces. I think it's really designed for a slightly different use case.
Everyone is talking with such favourable tone about WSUS but seems to be forgetting what a pain in the arse it was to use. I'm glad I've moved out of Microsoft systems management I feel slightly nauseous thinking back to attempting to patch a Windows server on an air gapped network. Linux made this stuff easy.
Some cloud instances are expected to have worse performance or share more workloads per server. On AWS that's the burstable T series t3 for Intel, t3a for AMD and t4g for ARM. Surely these would be perfect for simple savings on power and cooling for Amazon? Maybe they've done it already.
I'm not sure I'd agree with "a lot" because the hardest thing for me as a C-style language developer to learn was the borrowing of data and variables in Rust. I think you'll basically have to rewrite all the C++ code anyway to make it provably safe.
I'm happy if we have a new Safe C++ language to compete with Rust to keep them going in the right direction, but it's not going to be an order of magnitude easier to learn for a traditional C++ developer.
I don't quite get the connection between Rust and "bindings and excess dependencies" surely all languages need bindings - do you mean cross-language bindings because you use some other language elsewhere? Similarly, why would Rust mean excess dependencies - I think Crates that compile in and libraries that you link to are also equivalent to things you'd use in C and others?
You're wrong in your assumptions about loss of control and magic. That's not how Rust works. You are in full control, there's no magic* but you are limited to only doing things that are provably safe.
*Actually all languages have magic. C will magically handle passing arguments to functions using registers and putting things on the stack where needed. Library functions are magic until you read the code but mostly we don't, we rely on a human description.
But Rust has proven that a Systems Programming Language as you call it can and should have safety features - they just can't be implemented at runtime if you need performance. That is why a completely new language was required, you can't add compile time checks for memory safety for C code because as soon as you call a method, especially one that passes data between threads you can't prove who owns the data and has the right to free it for example. That set of concepts is what people find hard to learn about Rust and that is exactly what's required for provably safe code.
I'm really not sure Mongo is as popular as they think it is. Having used both MongoDB and relational database for years the problems of each system are many and varied.
For us it took ages to get user friendly results from Mongo due to the eventually-consistent nature of the default config but in return our production downtime was zero for several years whereas the relational database needed a proxy in front to handle updates without downtime and mistakes happened. But generally I feel that most data works well being saved in an atomic commit across tables.
If AMD had not been around then someone else would have got there but not until Intel made masses of cash. There wouldn't have been enough incentive for Intel to compete and so they would have become complacent and someone else (potentially even ARM) would have beaten them by the late 90s I think.
Incidentally, can someone ensure this happens to nVidia sometime soon please?
I noticed that you put [sic] after the pluralised form of the company name "Microsoft are ..." - I don't understand this, surely a company is made up of many people who are collectively making a decision. I don't think it's a good idea to see a company as a single non-human entity which is implied if you write "Microsoft is ...".
I don't understand why all the commentards are so against this concept. Human + AI make a pretty good combination for some tasks and I don't see why this wouldn't be one of those tasks. AI can likely translate 90% of the code to safe Rust, humans can review places where it fails or where it outputs unsafe code (the advantage of Rust being that unsafe code is labelled as such). This is an easier task for AI than static code analysis because where the AI fails in code analysis there's nothing to indicate to the human where the failure might be.
Actually Crowdstrike does have exactly this type of system - customers tend to opt for earlier releases using test systems. However CS allow some updates to skip that process and this was one of those. Many customers only found out about this skipping when their systems crashed.
But experimentation (or "stuffing an LLM shaped peg into any hole you can find) is how most innovation happens. I personally love it currently.
A really good example is Pulumi AI - makes learning this excellent alternative to Terraform much easier.
Another is energy supplier Octopus who are using LLM to gather information and write emails which are then edited or checked by humans before being sent out to customers.
I'm not sure it's very valuable. Anything you do with these can never be used for making money. I'm not sure about other people but even on personal projects I'm always aware that my work could be valuable but if I started on one of these products I never can. Even a document I create inside a VM could never be used for business purposes presumably.
In the short and medium term, clicking blindly on all ads will just give money from mostly smaller companies to Google and Facebook.
I do commit ad fraud constantly, assuming the description in the article is correct - I click on adverts for companies I dislike (mostly temu currently) and on some adverts in apps that I do like. I never buy stuff from ads though - with the exception of Google Shopping which is frustratingly helpful.
I was always confused by the F@H client as to why it insisted on keeping the workload ready to go when I wanted to use the computer.
Presumably Elon would automate completely shutting down the workload when you switch the car on and loading it or a new workload when you switch it off again? It's easier to tell when the compute is needed for the main purpose in a car than it is on a PC, or especially on a server.
I disagree. Today's AI systems are very significantly better than humans at some tasks and completely unable to do the basics at others - to me that proves that AI will always be different but it's wrong to describe it as "stupid" just because it can't do something we can.
This is so unfair. They're mostly people who genuinely want to help improve the country. Sadly they're not the best people for the job because we pay so much more for private sector leaders. Maybe some small minority are also in it for the power or revolving door opportunities rather than to genuinely help.
If we give them zero respect, threats of violence and a not-much-above-average wage then who the heck are we expecting to apply??!
I'm no Apple fanboi but I do have to use one for work. I find Apple exactly as intuitive as Windows once you're used to them, both take time to get used to how they do things.
On other things, MacOS has a faster filesystem than NTFS in my experience but a tendancy for things to "just not work" like missing keyboard control or external hardware not made by Apple just stopping working where it would be fine on Windows.
Ooh that's annoyed me, well done.
For what it's worth I'm going to rise to the bait.
Not all these technologies are all hype and no substance. Blockchain always had pretty limited use cases in my opinion. AI on the other hand is going to be pretty transformative to the world - equivalent to the industrial revolution or the internet. People will get crazy rich from it and very many, possibly most current jobs will just stop and we'll almost all have to change how we work to augment the AI rather than instead of it.
I'm not sure you've understood how this works!
From the spec: "Web Monetization doesn’t allow a website to specify a payment amount or currency. It only allows the site to tell the browser it can accept payments.
"With the help of a WM provider , your visitor decides whether to make a payment, how much and how often to pay, and in which currency."
I've had to fight the system occasionally to remove unused code. My worst was with a bank where every code change required a change request from an internal or external customer. Thankfully I found a helpful business analyst to sign off on "as a developer I want less pointless code so I can focus on the important stuff" type stories.
Incorrect. They should only charge a fee if there is an alternative. Specifically they do not offer load balancers as IPv6 only. You can get Dual Stack or IPv4 only but if you want a load balancer you must pay for an address. That's a simple increase in price, not a new charge for an avoidable commodity.
Sadly the umbrella is required in my experience. The crap will fall, no matter what. From shareholders, from customers, from suppliers, from government, from lawyers, from the need to make really significant decisions occasionally, from unions. We need people higher up to deal with all the big crap and pass it down as smaller crap that can eventually be dealt with by people who also need to get some proper work done.
Ideally those layers are not too high and the people are both clever and understanding, as well as trusting their employees, to enable the maximum work to be done but sadly that's rarely the case.
I completely agree that we need to invest in long term things but is space exploration really the right thing? It's sexy and all but even with exploration the sea is likely a better option to learn relevant lessons and I'm not convinced exploration is the best area of science to invest in anyway.
I don't see national pride and patriotism as significantly positive things on their own, they seem to be increasingly linked to xenophobia as far as I can tell.
I don't really agree with this sentiment in this case, but I do think that the EU's cookie policy has meant that even more than before people will click on these things without thinking. And clicking decline without thinking is likely equally bad, we have to stop asking stupid questions all the time.
It's really not true to say that it doesn't matter how pretty software is. Users need to be OK with the basics of what they're looking at before they'll invest time looking for the specific thing they want. That's where Notes fell down. That and the fact that the sync seemed to be broken more of the time that it worked. Countless times I couldn't open a database or application or whatever they called them - I never understood why.
As long as you don't disagree with software patents altogether (which as a UK resident I basically do) the old scheme was pretty good. Come up with an invention which need not be particularly novel and certainly need not have any potential for making money and you'd get some points. If it was novel you'd end up with more as it could be filed rather than published.
Points mean a mind numbingly boring day job with a dinosaur company which in the rare event of it making some profit you're unlikely to share much of it. What do points mean? Prises!
Tax avoidance is legal but not moral. Doing the things that tax rules are there to promote (saving for a pension for example) are avoiding tax but are not "tax avoidance" but "tax planning". Avoidance is using laws in a way that they were not intended to be used, hence is using a loophole.
Big businesses can normally get away with calling their brand whatever value they fancy to avoid paying tax - register your brand name in the lowest tax location and then claim that your UK sales are due to the use of this expensive brand name.
The best way to solve this is to drag tax avoiding brands through the mud, thus decreasing the amount they can claim their brand is worth.
I've not seen much technical detail into what went wrong with the Horizon system. Specifically how can a double entry accounting system (which I read somewhere that it is) be so far out, if it's reporting systems that were wrong then surely they'd have found that while investigating, and how can you get it wrong always in the same direction with the subpostmaster out of pocket? All of that smells like a really bad or possibly even malicious system.
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