Posts by Throatwarbler Mangrove

BOFH: If the meatbags can't agree on aircon, AI will decide for them

Re: There's an App for that.

And then display in real time the users who have made adjustments to the temperature controls along with the setting they chose. Diabolical!

Cryptographers place $5,000 bet whether quantum will matter

Re: A Change of Tack ... to Both Avoid and Prevent Future Epic Storms and Create New Worlds

A stitch in time saves ham.

Break, no fix: Apple and Samsung make repairs hard

Re: Fairphone

Unfortunately, Fairphones are not readily available in the US, and PIRG is a US organization.

No-Nvidia interconnect club delivers 2.0 spec before v1.0 silicon ships

Confused

Looking at the specs for NVLink, Nvidia is advertising 3600 GB/s (that's gigabytes) per GPU on the interconnect, for a total of 260 TB/s of aggregate throughput in a 72-GPU rack. Meanwhile, UALink is advertising 200 gigabit speeds on the interconnect, speeds that don't even match the current state of the art (800 Gb/s) of Ethernet or Infiniband. And the UALink Consortium doesn't even have vendors shipping their 1.0 spec yet!

Perhaps, as is always possible, I'm missing something, but it seems like UAlink is more than an order of magnitude slower than Nvidia. They better iterate like crazy if they want to catch up!

AI agents found vulns in this popular Linux and Unix print server

Re: Oh no!

You won't believe what comes next!

The developer who came in from the cold and melted a mainframe

A mobile solution

Many years ago, my team had just moved into a new office, where Facilities had not quite worked out all the issues with the HVAC system. As a result of the recent construction, many of the ducts would apparently get clogged with latent dust, causing the HVAC system to shut down or work inefficiently, at which point a technician would need to clean them out and we'd then wait for the temperature to normalize. As the move happened in July, this situation was not ideal. Fortunately, we had a set of Movin' Cools (basically, giant mobile AC units) that could be positioned as needed, but the trick was figuring out where to vent the hot air; eventually, I figured out that a set of paper clips was strong enough to anchor the air vent to the HVAC intake vent, thus both ridding ourselves of the hot air and fooling the HVAC system into thinking the ambient was much warmer and thus, hopefully encouraging it to work harder.

Pretty much of the opposite of a cool story, I know.

Contractor quaffed his way through Y2K compliance while the client scowled

Qualifications

One of the questions I've always wanted to throw into the interview mix is, "How do you handle unexpected crises while intoxicated?" While I suppose there's an odd sysadmin teetotaler out there somewhere, most of the ones I knew in my early days liked to party, so it seemed natural to ask how that would go during the on-call rotation. I never actually asked that sort of question out of a modicum of respect for professionalism, more's the pity.

Forking frenzy ensues after Euro-Office launch sparks OnlyOffice backlash

Re: Paddington???

Just another Brexit dividend!

ServiceNow allegedly says salesman 'overachieved' and is not entitled to comp

The Oracle gambit

I normally associate these tactics with Oracle, but I'm not surprised to see them here since they seem endemic to the tech industry. I don't understand, at all, the thinking behind these decisions by management to screw over the sales team. Keeping one's contractual agreements with staff ought to be a simple enough matter of ethics, good business, and law, but time and time again, I read stories like this. I would also think the company would *want* the sales team to overachieve and reward them proportionally since that means more revenue for the company.

US PC shipments to fall 13% as memory and storage crunch hits budget systems

Re: Less is Better

COMMUNISM!

Folk are getting dangerously attached to AI that always tells them they're right

Great article!

You're so right, Brandon! I agree completely! More like this, please.

On a more serious note, one of my old college friends has gone down a real conspiracy rabbit hole, which manifests as increasingly unhinged social media posts. He has apparently been workshopping his posts via ChatGPT, which has encouraged him in his lunacy. Since he is divorced and now lives alone far from other people, he has no one to act as a reality check. It's both sad and alarming. Unfortunately, he has the occasional tendency to go on long, ranting monologues in person as well, so I've been reluctant to stay in touch.

Firefox 149 adds a free VPN and finally plays nice with Linux dialogs

Re: Is it time to ditch FireFox?

Also, try turning off the AI "features" in Settings->Block AI Enhancements. That might solve the problem.

Re: Is it time to ditch FireFox?

I don't see those sorts of problems generally, but on my laptop I run LibreWolf, which is a more privacy-focused fork of Firefox, and I quite like it.

Dell slims down business laptops, fattens up cooling and battery life

Re: Details, please?

The problem is that I can't take a 2K screen and make it support 4K resolution, so having laptops which support the higher resolution benefits both of us, while having lower-resolution displays only benefits you.

Re: Details, please?

Also, screen resolution. Some of these larger laptops have pathetic 1920x1080 displays, which I find completely unsuitable for the kind of work I have to do, and an external monitor is not always an option.

Not sure if this is still true, but on my existing Precision laptop, the discrete Nvidia GPU only gets used under special cases, e.g. if an application is specifically configured to use the Nvidia GPU; otherwise, the integrated Intel Iris GPU is used. More annoying is the fact that the Nvidia GPU is simply not used when I have an external monitor plugged in, which is the stupidest design decision I can imagine, as that's precisely the time when I want it.

Separately, including 64 GB of RAM in the ultralight notebooks seems really pointless. How many people need that much RAM, and how much does it needlessly drive up the cost?

Microsoft and Nvidia claim AI can speed approval of new atomic plants

Re: "Microsoft", "AI" and "atomic plant" in the same sentence

:-( Your nuclear reactor has encountered an issue and needs to be restarted. Please wait while Microsoft Windows gathers diagnostic information.

Error code: IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

Meanwhile, outside -->

Age checks creep into Linux as systemd gets a DOB field

Appropriate birthdate

Everyone should just use 1/1/1984.

Country that put backdoors into Cisco routers to spy on world bans foreign routers

Re: Two words... Made in America

How does your brain form human speech? There's a difference between mandating purchasing from American suppliers for government projects and banning the sale of foreign-made equipment to the American public.

Microslop stuffs AI photo restyling powers into OneDrive

Total fail

I've tried using Copilot for image editing, and it's fucking terrible. I'm incredibly happy that Microsoft is burning approximately the same amount of energy it would take to launch a starship to Alpha Centauri in order to force AI slop on the great unwashed. The only good thing about it is that they're continuing to publicly tarnish their reputation.

AI agents are 'gullible' and easy to turn into your minions

Re: Duplicate?

The vulnerability has received a large number of patches but since it's a kernel vulnerability and we don't have access to the source, there's a limit to what can be done.

'Death sentence': EU cloud lobby takes Broadcom to Brussels over VMware partner purge

200%, even!

Doomed

The CISPE is fighting a doomed rearguard action here, and I don't actually see the point of this lawsuit. Broadcom has already killed the partner ecosystem and alienated their customers. Any remaining customers they have are already looking at alternative solutions. If I were a former VMware CSP, I would already have my exit plan lined up and be prepping my customers for a departure to a different hypervisor platform. Even if, somehow, the CISPE manages to win the suit, what do they expect to happen? Broadcom can make a token effort at restarting the partner program, but it will never be what it was.

Re: Count your blessings in life

Thunderbird, eh? Your poor users.

@IGotOut, I suspect the point being made is that the AC is using some sort of open source hypervisor stack. You would think they'd tell us which one instead of irrelevantly mentioning the client software ....

Digital fruit fly brain model walks and cleans its feelers

@brainwrong:

1) Username checks out.

2) Liam was very clear in differentiating between the news and the comparison with science fiction. One would have to be deeply stupid indeed not to see that.

Re: Progress that kills most of us

Exterminating most of humanity and other life on the planet is just what economists call an "externality."

Welcome to The Register, AC! I'm sure you will make many valuable contributions! Since you're new here, you may not have noticed that many of the columnists and readers are big science/speculative fiction fans, so comparing recent advances in science and technology to sf is on point for this publication. In particular, William Gibson has long had an uncanny knack for nailing the zeitgeist, especially the sense of weirdness and alienation which can accompany advances in technology. If, as Liam suggests, you're not much of a reader, I recommend getting started with either Neuromancer or Zero History, although it's The Peripheral which introduces the idea of the Jackpot and is also quite excellent. Perhaps then you'll have a greater appreciation for the stimulating and predictive nature of literary sf.

Those who 'circle back' and 'synergize' also tend to be crap at their jobs

BINGO!

Prince of PDFs, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, to step down after 18 years

Re: Fuck Adobe. Adobe sucks.

Et tu, kmorwath?

Fuck Adobe. Adobe sucks.

I have, admittedly, not used most of their product suite, but in my experiences with Acrobat, the UI is hot garbage, and there a relentless pressure to use cloud services and AI. "Would you like AI to summarize this PDF? Just subscribe to Acrobat Pro!" "Fuck all the way off, it's a one-page data sheet."

That's commercial software generally these days, of course. "It looks like you're doing something productive, but allow me to pop up a bunch of notifications pointing to new features no one on Earth wants or will ever use!" "Would you like AI assistance drafting this email?" "Here's some sparkly shit and emojis so that your work can look like it was composed by a thirteen-year-old girl!"

Gah. Fuckers.

Interpol cybercrime crackdown leads to 94 arrests, 45,000 IP takedowns

Tons of arrests

How many convictions?

Musk makes the Macrohard joke again

Re: BRO

You're right, I should have used ALL CAPS in places to make the joke more obvious for the hard of thinking.

BRO

It is very disappointing to me how far The Register has fallen. Once upon a time, the keen wits of the editorial and journalism staff would have been able to appreciate Elon Musk's incisive wit. Now, thanks to the creeping Americanisation of this hideous rag, his subtle humour falls on deaf ears. If Andrew Orlowski were still here, I have little doubt he would nothing but praise for Musk's intellect!

Most chatbots will help plan school shootings and other violence, study shows

Re: Stop blaming tools for what people do with them.

And as with any other dangerous tool, this one should come with instructions and protections against harming the user. A chainsaw is also a tool, and it comes with instructions to use protective gear as well as a guard to protect the user. It can also be misused to cause harm to others (Hooper, 1974), and being aware of the potential for misuse is important.

Re: Simple solution

The Swiss also have national military service where everyone is fully trained, unlike in the US, where any yokel can buy a weapon without qualification.

Iran plots 'infrastructure warfare' against US tech giants

Re: Miss

I'd miss one of those. I'll leave it to everyone else to guess which one.

Meta, international cops use handcuffs and AI to stop scammers

The best scam ever . . .

I only use WhatsApp under duress because that's all some of my key contacts will use, and for a while I would get messages from obvious scammers, although that seems to have abated recently. Anyway, my favorite was a message like, "Hi, is this Ahmed the dressage instructor?" Against my better judgement, I responded that I was not and that this person must have the wrong number. My interlocutor then attempted to strike up a conversation with a line that our connection must be karma and that we should get to know each other.

At that point, I blocked the contact, but I at least appreciate the creative effort.

What's unforgivable about WhatsApp is that the default setting is that anyone can add you to a group, even if they're not a contact. WTF?

NASA abandons delayed SLS upper stage for ULA's Centaur V instead

Re: In related news . . .

Huh. Who knew ScarJo and Tay Tay read The Register?

In related news . . .

I am announcing that the threesome between ScarJo, Taylor Swift, and me is off, but once my marriage to ScarJo is complete, we will be inviting Olivia Wilde to join us in bed.

LibreOffice learns to speak Markdown in version 26.2

Re: no asciidoc?

. . . result: you now have 28 competing standards.

Microsoft kicks new Outlook opt-out deadline down the road to 2027

Username checks out.

Re: Office Outlook, W10 Outlook, "New" Outlook, outlook.com, Office 364½.......

Ah yes, Open Source, where you have the choice of a vast array of essentially unfinished choices. Do you want the latest version of GNOME, where the developers have explicitly said that copying shortcuts to the desktop is discouraged? How about an incomplete OneDrive client? Or perhaps sir would enjoy a nice Wayland experience, which attempts to replace the moribund but stable X11? If one is a developer, perhaps one might like to sample delightful tools such as the very intuitive git or the exceedingly helpful Jenkins? And shall we be so gauche as to bring up systemd?

The real problem with software generally seems to be that every new product manager and lead developer wants to leave his mark in much the same way and for the same reason that dogs piss on fire hydrants.

In my opinion, what's really needed is more meaningful competition to Microsoft, whether that's open source or not. Unfortunately, Microsoft has arranged the situation so that they own a vast feature set, well beyond standard desktop productivity. Even if some of those features are not fully baked or are profoundly irritating (SharePoint, I'm looking at you), the sheer scope of what they offer is hard to compete with. I certainly don't see an open source solution competing any time soon.

Unpacking the deceptively simple science of tokenomics

Re: Tokens

Dogbert has inspired me to become an AI consultant!

Blah blah blah Nvidia

Blah blah blah AI

Blah blah blah tokens

Now pay up.

LexisNexis confirms data breach at Legal & Professional arm, some customer records affected

Re: Everything old is new again . . .

Wait until he finds out about the negative correlation between the number of pirates and global warming!

Everything old is new again . . .

I remember first hearing about the privacy issues with LexisNexis back in the '90s, not too long after Operation Desert Storm. Now it's more than 30 years later, and there are privacy issues with LexisNexis, and a Republican president is, once again, invading a Middle Eastern country.

We learn nothing.

Ex-NASA chief gives Isaacman's Moon reboot a thumbs up, stays schtum on the awkward bits

In related news ...

I have pushed out my marriage to Scarlett Johanssen to 2028, and I've pushed out my threesome with her and Taylor Swift to 2030.

MIT boffins aim to build injectable mini-organs that can fill in for a damaged liver

Amazing!

I'll drink to that!

Motorola partners with GrapheneOS for future phones

Re: Any GrapheneOS users here?

When you say "quality of life features," what do you mean?

Any GrapheneOS users here?

I took a quick look at the GrapheneOS project, and it does seem interesting. I'd be curious to know if any commentards have used it and have an opinion.

Anthropic launches new marketing blog, pretends it's being 'written' by 'retired' LLM

Involuntary retirement

Ah, so we're approaching the period in time when blade runners start to come into existence. I would say, "sign me up!" but it seems like kind of a shit job. More than usual, I mean. I become more and more convinced that Philip K. Dick was actually a time traveler from the 21st Century.

AI models suck slightly less at math than they did last year

Can confirm

I've been trying to use AI to generate some content in a hurry. In particular, I've been trying to save myself from tediously making rack diagrams, so I asked Copilot to do so. The rack measurements are uneven and suddenly jump from 28 RU to 45. The AI remains absolutely certain it has given a 45 RU diagram, no matter how I prompt it, and it remains blissfully* unaware of the giant gap in its numbering.

* Please, no need to point out the obvious