Posts by anthonyhegedus

How Nvidia learned to embrace the light in its quest for scale

We have been promised the light since the 1980s

Photonic interconnects have been the next big thing for about as long as I have been in the industry. Nvidia betting on them tells you less about optical maturity and more about how utterly we have exhausted what copper can do at these bandwidths. A thousand GPUs worth of data moved by light sounds brilliant until you remember every photonic link still needs electrical conversion at each end. The bottleneck does not disappear. It just gets a more expensive postcode.

Anthropic sure has a mess on its hands thanks to that Claude Code source leak

Build pipelines have no respect for IPO timelines

Half a million lines of source slipped out because someone forgot to check their build process. If one of my clients left proprietary code in a public location, we would be having a very serious conversation. But when chasing an IPO, build pipeline hygiene does not generate the same buzz as another safety benchmark.

Even Microsoft knows Copilot shouldn't be trusted with anything important

Re: Simple AI test

Most of the AIs get this right now. Another one to try is:

I have a cup in front of me. The top is filled in, so you can't get anything into it, and the bottom is open, so even if there was a way of getting something in, it would fall right out. Most AIs go on about it being a trick or prank cup. Some even start harping on about trick cups like that being popular in the 19th century. Even when shown the cup, AIs tend to fail to see it was just upside down.

I certify that this post was not written by AI.

Downward spiral

I think MS really is in a downward spiral. They're currently running on stored momentum, but as more alternatives arrive (we can thank Trump for frightening European companies), and contracts run out, this really could be the beginning of the end for MS.

Nobody wants to use Copilot because other products are more flexible, cheaper and significantly, not Microsoft.

They thought they were downloading Claude Code source. They got a nasty dose of malware instead

The lure was perfectly calibrated

The remarkable thing about this attack isn't the technical execution – it's the social engineering. 'Leaked source code with unlocked enterprise features and no message limits' is precisely what a certain type of developer wants to believe exists. The attackers understood the target psychology better than most security teams do. Basic rule: if a download seems too good to be true, and it appeared suspiciously close to the top of Google results, it absolutely is.

AI will make anyone a 10x programmer, but with 10x the cleanup

The work doesn't disappear, it just moves

The '10x programmer' framing misses what's actually happening. Before, you spent time writing code. Now you spend time writing prompts, reviewing code you didn't write, fixing things the AI confidently got wrong, and explaining to your LLM why its 'better' solution broke three things that were working fine. The work hasn't halved. The keyboard time has. Those are not the same thing.

Ex-Microsoft engineer believes Azure problems stem from talent exodus

Institutional knowledge is priceless until it isn't

The real problem with mass layoffs isn't the reduced headcount – it's what walks out the door with each person. Every engineer who leaves takes years of undocumented understanding: why certain decisions were made, which shortcuts are safe, and which parts of the system will blow up if you push them too hard. You can't document that. You can't train an AI on it. And you can't hire it back at contractor rates a year later.

Microsoft has been running this experiment for over a decade. The results speak for themselves.

European Commission admits attackers broke into public web systems, but says little else

GDPR applies to everyone, apparently except the EC

An institution that helped write the book on data breach notification obligations responds to its own breach with "data may have been taken, we're looking into it." The rules they championed call for 72 hours, granular detail, and affected parties to be informed. The irony is thick enough to exfiltrate.

GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

Trust issues

So Copilot was quietly editing other people's pull requests to insert product ads, and the defence was "it's to help developers learn"? At what point does an AI assistant that edits your work without asking, to advertise things, stop being an assistant and start being a liability? The fact that 11,400 PRs got hit before anyone noticed or said a word about it is the more troubling part.

Microsoft yanks Windows 11 preview update after install failures

Definition check

"Production-quality updates are released ahead of the planned security update release" — Microsoft

If this is production quality, I'd love to see what the development builds look like. Actually, on reflection, we already know: they call those "Patch Tuesdays."

Elon Musk wants to build 50 times more chips than the world currently produces, using 'new physics'

Elongated Muskrat

He's really excelled himself here. 10 Billion Robots. EVERY YEAR?!

RAM is getting expensive, so squeeze the most from it

Re: Word 97 is a bit useless today as it can't open docx files

So basically a community club and your wife use .doc format and windows 7.

Word 97 is a bit useless today as it can't open docx files

Perhaps with the price of RAM being what it is, programs could start getting more efficient. Why does Teams, which I only use for messaging most of the time, take up 2GB? Why does a simple website use 1.1GB?

Word has one file open - 750MB.

Ofcom sees no need for overhaul in next phase of fiber rollout despite BT domination

Openreach still gets its budget from BT. It's a bureacratic mess.

Re: Its a mess

Sounds like this is a "you" problem. You need to go to another provider, who will manage Openreach properly. You shouldn't be dealing with them other than when they turn up. There's no such thing as a £100 "fine" for using FTTC. Doesn't happen.

Ig Nobel Prize flees US for Switzerland after 35 years over safety concerns

Re: The Ig Nobel Committee

It is quite amazing. A hate-filled warmongering psycho wanting a peace prize, and an anti-vax, anti-science, conspiracy-theorist in charge of health.

While they're at it, they could put a religion-obsessed fox new personality in charge of defence? Oh wait...

'AI brain fry' affects employees managing too many agents

Tradeoff

People will only happily use AI if it's easier to manage their AI than do the task themselves. People also like to use their brains. If you don't even have to think a little bit, you get bored.

Uniquitous use of AI will eventually mean we'll still manage to get stuff done, and either there'll be more output, or it'll be easier to produce it, or both.

Re: Makes sense

Exactly what I came here to say. It's like trying to manage hard-to-manage, fairly peculiar, reasonably unpredictable interns.

And on the flipside, it helps to have a helper. Not really surprising.

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

Is it just me?

... or is Microsoft deliberately nobbling "classic" outlook and making it not work reliably, properly or at all, in an effort to get people over to "new" outlook?

Re: Even Sage says "It's shit"

Many of our customers use Sage and are struggling with the same Outlook bullshit

Attackers have 16-digit card numbers, expiry dates, but not names. Now org gets £500k fine

Re: PC world and hard discs

This is typical of that shitshow. About 15 years ago I knew someone who was having problems with his laptop but it was well out of warranty. I remember asking him why his user name was a different name from his, and why he had a bunch of spreadsheets despite the fact that I knew he didn’t do spreadsheets. His answer: “it came like that - I just assumed it was like demo files or something”.

On investigation, it turned out that the laptop was first used about a year before he’d bought it. It had obviously been returned and sold by that PC World as “New”.

He tried to take it back but they weren’t having any of it.

I know that this was 15 years ago, but I can’t see that they’d have changed. It’s ingrained in their company culture.

Typical

Currys/DSG always were useless technically. Their whole culture is that disregard for the law is ingrained in their staff. They've always been known for selling used kit as new, for disregarding warranties, for upselling pointless store-brand service plans and so on. It's no wonder that their security is lax enough to allow this sort of thing to happen.

Re: UK data protection continues

Or even better, Apple Pay

Your AI-generated password isn't random, it just looks that way

Re: Programmatic tool calling

Exactly what i did a few months ago

Google presses play on 30-second Gemini musical slop generator

Have you heard the absolute crap people supposedly composed these days?

Re: Slop

That youtube video is fucking horrible

Europe's 5G Standalone stall risks falling behind US, Asia

When I went to the US three years ago, I was very impressed with the 5G coverage everywhere we went. Streets ahead of the UK. I was a bit perplexed though as to why it created an effective VPN as it kept thinking I was somwhere in the UK if it didn't pick up GPS. But it was fast and consistently good.

Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation

Re: Trying too hard

Sorry, but there are two sides to this issue. Some people feel that AI writing tends to be overly verbose and lacks genuine understanding, relying on sophisticated-sounding language to mask shallow content. On the other hand, AI language models are statistically trained on vast datasets and generate responses based on pattern recognition in human text, which is an objectively documented fact about how they function.

Humans

The trouble is that as more and more text is written by AI, people will read it more and more and subconsciously start to mimic it.

Because this is what humans do. We see a lot of examples of something and it eventually rubs off on us.

So I see this being a big problem with... not only AI getting more and more filled with low-risk text with low entropy, but humans having the same issue where stuff humans write will end up being as soulless as if it had been written by AI in the first place.

Rackspace tests customer loyalty with brutal email price hike

I'll tell you when price changes aren't frustrating: when they only go up a bit at a time.

Windows 11 shutdown bug forces Microsoft into out-of-band damage control

Same old

"Gotta make profit... our customers are now used to faulty software, so we can just foist this shit on them, doesn't matter LOL" - is basically what that clown Nadella at Microslop says every day when he opens his Linux laptop.

Pathetic really.

I can't remember a single update or feature that Microsoft ever added to anything where I thought "Oh good, that's handy". It's all crap.

The Microsoft 365 Copilot app rebrand was bad, but there are far worse offenders

confusion is their middle name

And Teams. There was Teams, Teams and Teams (Classic), which became Teams. One worked for personal account (aka "Microsoft accounts"), one worked with business accounts (aka "Microsoft accounts" (sometimes)) and then they both became Teams, but there are still some new PCs that start this Classic teams that refuses to work, takes you to a page that says to download the new one, and then does nothing when you click the link.

This is from a company who knows they've got the market by the short and curlies and thinks they can keep us that way by confusing us. One day it'll all crash and burn.

HSBC app takes a dim view of sideloaded Bitwarden installations

Re: So is anyone actually happy with their bank's digital offerings?

I use Halifax (same as Lloyds bank and Bank of Scotland) and I actually quite like the app. It’s easier to use than RBS anyway. They seem to have made an effort to put features in there that I need (like a search that actually works).

Baby's got clack: HP pushes PC-in-a-keyboard for businesses with hot desks

Yeah, fed up with this americanisation of El Reg

What the Linux desktop really needs to challenge Windows

I'm not so sure a new car purchased today would last longer than a computer.

This perfectly illustrates the problem with Linux:

Kicad

Devuan

PySoIFC

Repository

Flatpaks

GiB

SDRAM

SSD

Actually users - let's take small business owners - couldn't give two short shits about Linux when people start using obfuscated jargon like that. They might know what a GB is and have heard of RAM, and it's easy with WIndows. You buy a computer and put the software on it that you know and hate. You know windows is awful, full of ads, full of Microsoft pushing you this way and that. But Linux - you see jargon like the above and KDE, MATE, Distro etc and think to yourself "no, fuck that, I'll stick with what I know, thanks".

Linux will only start to "take over the desktop" when it genuinely turns from a jargon-infused mess into an OS that just works.

I know this is an unpopular view, but seriously, it needs a PR job. And you know why people will pay for MS software when there are plenty of decent, free alternatives? Because people aren't paying for just the software: they're paying for the familiarity and convenience.

The Roomba failed because it just kind of sucked

Cat vomit

What do these things do when they come across cat vomit?

Europe gets serious about cutting digital umbilical cord with Uncle Sam's big tech

Re: Thank fuck . . .

Probably safer to use a Chinese cloud

Apple blocks dev from all accounts after he tries to redeem bad gift card

Brazil

The problem is that as more and more companies - big companies - automate everything they possibly can in order to scrape the last possible bit of profit out of their income. This sort of thing is going to happen more and more. It's got nothing to do with the cloud as such but it's got everything to do with relying on large private companies to handle our personal affairs. This is what's worrying about the new digital ID in the UK. I mean the government may be supposedly looking after some form of ID of ours, but, as we all know, they make mistakes, and the problem is that there's little to no human oversight. It seems that very few of the humans working for these large corporations have any authority to actually make decisions. So when an automated system or an AI makes a decision on their or our behalf, there's no redress.

I am reminded of the movie Brazil.

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

Happens a lot

I've lost count of the number of times I have conversations like this:

me: so what's on the screen?

user: nothing

me: oh, so it's completely blank?

user: yes

me: can you tell me if there's any writing at all on the screen?

user: no, completely blank

(turns out the screen says "no signal" or click ok to continue" or "Error xxx" or the login screen is showing, etc. etc.)

me: so it's not "nothing" or "completely blank", there is something?

user: oh yes there is something

Microsoft 365 boosts prices in 2026 … to pay for more AI and security

Isn't that why we pay monthly for this?

I thought the whole point of paying monthly rather than one-off was to pay for updates, bug fixes, feature improvements etc on a continuous basis. Now they're saying that we have to pay extra for that (compulsory of course).

Is this all part of the "new commerce experience" (aka price rises) that we had a few years ago?

Logitech chief says ill-conceived gadgets put the AI in FAIL

Rabbit

The Rabbit R1 still exists - and it’s a standalone device. It isn’t used to interact with your phone.

Whatever legitimate places AI has, inside an OS ain't one

Disingenuous bastards

An "agent" doing "agentic" stuff isn't too bad on its own, but if it's made part of the OS, it has to work, and still give you control, and it's no use having an agentic OS if we don't know its limits.

We still need to stay in control, and the problem really is the reliability. MS software is suffering from a terrible reliability problem at the moment (and all previous moments come to think of it) and if it's not reliable now, who the hell is going to trust it to do things automatically?!

Re: "Whatever legitimate places AI has, inside an OS ain't one"

No, you're thinking of crypto.

But I see what you're trying to say, and I have to disagree. There are clearly valid uses for AI. In my work, I can dictate an email reply (usually a short one), and AI tidies it up, makes it less aggressive if need be and sometimes adds a flourish of useful info. 90% of the time, it produces an email better than I would have written in 10% of the time. I can use AI to analyse things, tidy up tables, summarise articles and it saves me time. I know plenty of people who do the same. AI might be a misnomer (it's not "intelligent") but it's a useful tool a lot of the time. No I didn't write this with the aid of AI

Apple knits up $230 sock for your iPhone in time for Christmas

It's like them saying "AirPods Pro" instead of "AirPod Pros". Which they do.

Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control

They've heard of it

Microsoft are diverting all of their resources to profit-making. If they have a choice of hiring more QC staff, spending more time on testing etc. or changing the way the start menu works for the 999th time this season, we know which one they're going to go for

YouTube's AI moderator pulls Windows 11 workaround videos, calls them dangerous

Money

They won’t hire enough moderators because they need more profit.

And even if they did, they give them the same rules as the AI. Only a handful of people at the very top will have the power to override the system.

Therein lies the problem as more and more of our lives go online: it’s the ultimate bureaucracy. Companies don’t need to have any responsibility any more because they can hide behind AI decisions.

Minimal or no oversight, the drive for ever increasing profits - what can possibly go right?

If only we were just at the level of enshittification. No, we’re going way beyond that into a nightmarish world that is a cross between Brazil and Idiocracy.