Posts by steelpillow

Microsoft 365 brings the shutters down on legacy protocols

Re: "Secure by Default"

Beat me to it.

Shame there's no BSD icon to go with Tux. Still, have a free beer.

SpaceX's Starship explodes again ... while still on the ground

Re: Starship - a poem by Baldrick

I think you'll find that Hotblack Desiato was not actually making a mistake.

RIP Douglas.

Spawn of ... um, er, who was that again?

Of course, if this were Microsoft, exploding would be a feature that you paid extra for. Except, the entry-level (sic) Starship lacking this feature is no longer available.

‘AI is not doing its job and should leave us alone’ says Gartner’s top analyst

"AI Is not doing its job today"

Erm, sorry ... what is that job again, Mr. Gartner expert analyst, Sir?

UK students flock to AI to help them cheat

Glorified calculators

Back in the day, my generation were not allowed to take calculators or books of formulae into exams. We had to work it all out for ourselves.

My kids were required to take in scientific calculators and demonstrate that they could use them.

I understand that these days, web browsers and search engines are no longer the spawn of Satan. Inept use of Mathematica will not get you very far.

How long before the average student will be required to show competence in the use of AI?

Penn State boffins create silicon-free two-dimensional computer

Timecheck

So, firstly this is not 2D. The tracks pass over each other, so the equivalent macroscopic topology is a double-sided circuit board of the kind which was ubiquitous in the 1980s. The first CPUs used only single-sided boards, genuinely 2D and not mere marketing-speak 2D, with the first microprocessors being similarly restricted on-chip.

Group III-V (silicon-free) semiconductors were used to create high-speed devices for specialist applications.

So here we are, back to 1970/80s technology. I am not entirely clear how a selenium compound is more commercially viable than, say, gallium-aluminium-arsenide. But then, I seem to have lost my coloured pencils.

P.S. But if it can run Moon Lander, I'm in!

Danish department determined to dump Microsoft

Re: Outlook and SharePoint?

One trusts you are correct. Time will tell.

Outlook and SharePoint?

Whatever will the Danes do when their auto-upgraded (strictly no choice) mail client and collaborative filesystem start to methodically stuff LibreOffice integration in carefully-crafted-to-be-unfathomable ways?

Re: how to do it in half a dozen mouse clicks

I would agree, except that Word has been rewritten from the ground up more than once. To save on development costs and time, MS took the opportunity to duplicate all the regular gobshite rather than improve the UX. They even had to ask the Open Source community how some of the gobshite worked, because they had forgotten. Today's Word 365 cloudy web edition is still only part way through that rise from the old coffin, and utterly unusable if you want more than coloured pencils from it. A pro tool it absolutely is not, and never will be.

Even LibreOffice is guilty: just you try to customise an Outline List in either tool. Different quirks, different borks, but both bork it nonetheless.

But it all hardly matters; as you say, the Coloured Pencil Office are unable to understand anything about it and simply apply on-the-spot formatting any way that occurs to them.

Re: how to do it in half a dozen mouse clicks

Liam proven You really are a babe in arm when it comes to the Coloured Pencil Office!

BOFH: Rerouting responsibility via firewall configs

because there's always time to do a job shabbily.

Class. Spoilt for icons.

Wanted: Junior cybersecurity staff with 10 years' experience and a PhD

Re: Unfair expectations

Definitely unfair to expect HR staff to do a good job of HR. By failing to recruit, they make the case for more HR staff - an empire under them and a comfortable pension. Oh, and guess who wrote the ticksheet? HR!

Cisco president says dredging coding syntax from wetware memory wastes engineers' expensive synapses

Talking of which

As a Tech Author constantly having to fix what our codies fondly regard as Technical Publications, I can see AI finding a home as a grammar checker and Word gobshite correcter.

Many codies are chronically challenged in this area. They have never heard of Eats, Shoots and Leaves (which they ought to, it is unprofessional for an umbrella contractor to pretend their meatbags can write when they can't), nor do they have the slightest motivation to engage with said gobshite (with which I deeply sympathise, I reckon I deserve danger money and compensation for mental torture in the workplace).

It tell them that I regard the human brain as a wet Turing machine, whose coding language is English. If you get the syntax, punctuation, code order, etc wrong, then you bork the code and the poor user suffers from GIGO. A few devs begin the long climb to grok, most do not wish to hear, which is why they buried themselves in computers in the first place and only fire up Word when threatened with instant coffee.

An AI code cleaner between them and me would be a Gift of the Gods.

Icon for the day job.

Ease the seat back and watch some video in your car with next Apple CarPlay

Thank goodness

nobody will ever hack the parked-only feature and load the unlock web app with malware.

Peep show: 40K IoT cameras worldwide stream secrets to anyone with a browser

Re: It all wears rather thin

@VoiceOfTruth Not often I agree with you.

But why trawl and analyse the cesspit when you can pay the dotcoms to sell the sludge on to you for a fraction the cost?

Forked-off Xlibre tells Wayland display protocol to DEI in a fire

In for a penny

EDI, aka woke, began as a Good Thing. Zealots overdid it. The zealots on the right rebelled and turned it into an insult. Elsewhere I see the backlash against the backlash rising. Such is social politics.

Xfree86, X.org, Xlibre and the denizens of the Wayland ecology (which is no less diverse) all have their value for different requirements, and we enjoy the choice. But, being dicks, we dicker and squabble. Occasionally some fsck-ing bustard gets to be first against the wall when the revolution comes. Damn! I've run out of popcorn. Anybody want a fight in the foyer?

UK's Isambard-AI super powers up as government goes AI crazy

Every cloud has a silver lining

TBH, I reckon that if it just educates everybody in what they /should/ have asked for, it will have been worth it. Save a bloody fortune next time round.

Boffins found self-improving AI sometimes cheated

> What happend to Escher and Bach?

Natural selection.

Microsoft cuts the Windows 11 bloat for Xbox handhelds

Wallpaper and taskbar?!

So those are the real memory/processor hogs, well well well. I suppose they're a great place to hide the AI and spyware so the Black Hats can't find it.

But I do think that calling the rest of the treacle-crap "productivity" stuff is a bloody cheeky spin. As Fat Freddy's Cat once said, "Well, my uncle is in medical school", with follow-up thought bubble "I'm not going to tell them what they're doing to my uncle in medical school".

Broadcom sends VMware to record revenue, margins, as most big customers sign for private cloud bundles

Private clouds

Definitely healthier than "All Ur securitE R Blong 2 us" Rent-AI-Cloud.

What these profit figures tell me is that Broadcom/VMware are providing a valuable - if unfortunately almost unique - community service.

Microsoft's plain text editor gets fancy as Notepad gains formatting options

I don't think they want to bugger up Markdown. They chose it precisely because it saved them the trouble.

Makes it easier for them to design their own Microsoft Markdown (TM), which will allow proprietary binary extensions to be included, data island / email image style, and then get it ratified as an "open" standard. The default for Notepad 2028, natch. I/O filters available at extra cost.

it doesn't play well (read: at all) with the clipboard

There you go, the next sacrifice will be the clipboard - it'll be [Highlight] > [Right-Click] > Copy to OneNote [Ctrl-C]

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

1. Hate for decades, try to kill off for decades, fail for decades.

2. Change of tactic:

a) Embrace: yay, we're keeping it folks, we hear you!

b) Extend: yay, we're making it even better - with the formatting that you all miss from Worpad, plus the latest buzzword blockchain I mean AI!.

c) Extinguish: yay, to give you an even better experience we're adding virtual colored pencils to the plain-text view, so you can still see that lovely markdown and highlight it while sharing your page on Teams. What? And we've made both OneNote and SharePoint 100% compatible* with the new version! What's that? Did we omit to mention that /editing/ in the plain-text view has disappeared? Look, if you're that hardcore, we've given you Edit on the command line, so everybody's got what we they wanted. Yay!

* Except where they aren't and never will be

OpenAI model modifies shutdown script in apparent sabotage effort

Asimov been there

In one of Asimov's Multivac stories, they hand over governance of civilization to it, heaping all the cares of the world on its shoulders. Presently, it starts to behave oddly.

The hero goes along to find out why. Evidently there is no shutdown script, for it has only one thing to say to him, "I want to die".

Google co-founder Sergey Brin suggests threatening AI for better results

Just a thought

Certainly not through some programming bias, the origin of the phenomenon has to be buried in the data.

Maybe it's because if you are polite, the AI responds with data associated with polite conversation, i.e. politically correct but vapid burblings and engaging speculations. But smart people who try to get across anything as complicated as the time of day find themselves thwarted by those viral memes and get angry. So, if you get angry with an AI you get past the pap and are instead associated with what sensible people actually have to say.

I find it sad, as it is only going to train us up in return, for greater aggression in our personal lives, and that is not good.

Re: Neural Network Intelligence

Weird downvotes there. Time for a lesson in neurosicence.

Current theories of consciousness suggest a predictive model: our brains run up a model of reality based on our sensory inputs. This model tries to predict what to think - and do - next. How that affects our senses is then fed back into the model for the next round of predictions. This stream of predictions is just our stream of consciousness. This is not a bad description of the predictive algorithms - along with their training - which we brand as generative AI.

So yeah, probably more than a worm, probably short of a mouse.

Microsoft dumps AI into Notepad as 'Copilot all the things' mania takes hold in Redmond

Re: If Microsoft Designed a Golf-Club Bag ...

It would be a bit too small to hold a basic set of clubs, and you would have to pay 4 x purchase price, annually, to license the code which unlocked the expansion zipper. On the other hand, it would play .wav audio files very nicely.

Turns out using 100% of your AI brain all the time isn’t most efficient way to run a model

Re: What a coincidence...

And there's more.

Commentards (I plead guilty too) have often criticised LLM+tokens+"reasoning" as just predictive algorithms: that so-called "reasoning" does not (yet) extend to the human capacities for analogy or semantic/symbolic manipulation. All they do is guess which token should come next in their output stream, throw it in there and start on guessing the next token. Sometimes they guess wrong and we call that hallucination.

However, current theories on how the human mind work are also based on a predictive model. We have long known that conscious experience is based on our mental model and not directly on our sensory inputs (even the Buddha realised that all experience is illusion). The hypothesis now is that this model is just a prediction based on analysing our sensory inputs and memories; we constantly compare it with current inputs and update our predictions accordingly. The resulting stream of predictions is just our stream of consciousness. Hallucinations are what happens when the predictions are borked by drugs or whatever.

Coincidence or getting close?

Techies propose the Agent Name Service: It's like DNS but for AI agents

Re: AI Squatting?

Now there's a thought. Squat with a simple chat app, and see if you can fail the Turing test convincingly.

Proprietary standards

Won't be long until someone gets their own patent-encumbered XML/JSON thing declared a standard.

Rumour has it, it'll be called Agent Required Service Extensions.

Neptune OS is Debian made easy but, boy, does it need some housekeeping

Re: Psudo security

Partly it's to avoid exposing the root password, because everybody already knows the username. Grabbing both username and password at the same time is harder - and the audit logs will tell you which account it was. Can't remember the full litany.

Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

Re: Numeric keypad

Really? You mean Bell Labs developed DTMF as a computer input device? Sounds a bit The Shockwave Rider to me. What computers would those have been?

"there is no master key smith dedicated to developing the art and artistry of creation"

Not for want of trying.

I grew up with the Model M and its ilk, and always found them a bit clunky. Too much travel, not a crisp enough feel. Always looking for better. My current has modest travel, adequately light touch, click feel better but could be better still. Gentle clicky rattle but no more. Yet it's a super-cheapo £10 membrane+keytops toy from some retail box-shifter, though one with the grace to set them all up to try-before-buy. These toys often don't last more than a few years, so I keep a couple of spares.

The problem is twofold. Punters seldom buy for UX, they buy on price, fashion and perceived quality. The market dominators deliver on that, and don't need to refine the UX. Secondly. an independent Designer with any originality or finesse will immediately change the obsolescent layout for something funkier. Of the 1,000 punters who come across the offering, there will be 2,0000 views on why it's no better. To paraphrase our Vulture: once you're used to swimming in PC Layout shit, why bother to change the water? For example, who ever sits at their desk all day, manually entering streams of numbers through a numeric keypad duplicating some of the main keys, and which is upside down compared to a phone? Lappies dumped it years ago, but desktops? Humbug! But you try to sell that through market channels.

The best mobile keyboard from way back when was the Psion Series 5. Its designer, Martin Riddiford, got almost everything right. Keys were a bit firm, and its small size meant that the biggest-fingered folk couldn't do more than poke at it like all the others, but it was undoubtedly the jewel in the crown of the PDA revolution. When Planet resurrected the form factor for the Gemini, they hired Martin to update his act too. Lighter touch, cleaner feel, truly the new gold standard. Later they went gimmicky, were pinched for cash, and thought they didn't need him. Back to the shitpond.

So yeah, there is/was a master keysmith. But nobody cares.

Europe plots escape hatch from enshittification of search

Tip:

After 35 years of use, Google just whined at me that I now had to declare I was over 18 or it would turn shit off. That meant logging in. So, natch, I left it to turn shit off.

And it did! No more targeted advertising! No more AI summaries! Bugger all enshittification left! Almost a half-decent search engine again!

Alternative search engines

Been using Brave and Mojeek increasingly, when the Bing/Google scrapers regurgitate shit.

If this UDM14 thing catches on, you can bet the Chocolate-Flavoured-Shit Factory will find a way to re-enshittify it. So I won't be removing the above pair from my toolbar any time soon.

Mind you, the AI summary can be useful for some searches, so what I'd really like is a widget to click, which brings it up. Deffo not displayed by default.

Whodunit? 'Unauthorized' change to Grok made it blather on about 'White genocide'

I wonder

does the X dev/ops system maintain proper audit logs, so the miscreant can even be identified? I mean, if the White House doesn't need all that, why should some run-of-the-mill little bit barn?

No-boom supersonic flights could slide through US skies soon

Don't forget the engines

Boom are having to build their own engines. You need supercruise - the ability to fly supersonic without afterburners - and other green/economy measures to make the engines viable. No engine maker was prepared to take a flyer (sic) on a brand new product line.

So here are Boom developing both a revolutionary airframe and revolutionary engine from nothing, flying in a higher-drag and more highly constrained regime than ever, at only around 50% faster than today but the exact same time in the stack and on the ground at either end, and expecting a small (by today's standards) 80-seat feeder-liner class type to pay its way on the long haul.

I wish them luck but, sorry, I ain't investing.

on the basis that billionaires can afford the hush money (sic) when they fuck the rules and go for it, as they inevitably will?

Sci-fi author Neal Stephenson wants AIs fighting AIs so those most fit to live with us survive

Variety is the spice of life

So goes the old saying.

I too have begun advocating an ecology of AI approaches, in order to achieve a Darwinian balance and prevent the risks from any one type dominating. As ever with my bright ideas, someone else got there before me.

But I wouldn't spend too much effort on malignant AI-on-AI. Especially considering the concurrent headline here that everybody is deploying AI but nobody is securing it, the superpower spooks are surely way ahead of us, with organised crime hot on their heels.

Post Office finally throttles delayed in-house EPOS project

Some folks can only ever learn lessons the hard way

"We are moving away from the 'big bang' launch ... so postmasters will begin to see improvements in stages."

Err - you had to figure that out after burning How Much?!!! ^(TM)

Linus Torvalds goes back to a mechanical keyboard after making too many typos

Watch it, Linus

If you blame your AI autocorrect too often, it'll start blaming you.

Bosses weren’t being paranoid: Remote workers more likely to start own biz

Just wonder

how many of those startups went right back to contract for the work they used to be employed for, only now on their own T&Cs and for three times the cash.

BOFH: HR tries to think appy thoughts

The AI app

Hi, generative AI thingy, write me an app that writes and runs more apps that write and run more.....

Trump wants to fire quarter of NASA budget into black hole – and not in a good way

Re: Aeronautics and Space

Not are, used to. Commercial payloads increasingly hitched a ride on NASA-driven Atlas and Shuttle launches, paying their way alongside the science research and other NASA mission payloads. We are still living through the fallout (sic) from the ending of that era.

Stratolaunch still want to do horizontal-to-space. But it's not as easy as it looks and they are having to build up to it in less ambitious steps, serving whatever markets they can catch along the way. This is precisely what makes them an outsider in the space race. (In passing, the mega-bird has a converted 747 flight system in each fuselage, so I suppose expanding the range of sizes on offer, without having to maintain a new flight system, must have seemed like a good idea at the time.)

Re: Aeronautics and Space

Then you need to brush up on your Allied aircraft designs. The crop of NACA aerofoils which arrived in the early 1930s were widely adopted by British and other planemakers.

Just one example, here is a paper discussing the historical adoption of NACA sections on the obscure little Supermarine Spitfire flop that you probably never heard of:

https://www.aerosociety.com/media/4953/the-aerodynamics-of-the-spitfire.pdf

Interesting that India is exploring cooperative space initiatives with both the UK and the EU.

I wonder what the probability is that a joint Eurindian outfit might hijack the ISS (or its successor) in due course, once the dollars have de-orbited? Or will we be invaded by Boltzmann brains first?

Open Document Format turns 20, but Microsoft Office still reigns supreme

Re: ODF pushed "more open" MS formats...

Except, the MS "standard" permits the inclusion of proprietary extensions. You just need to drop say a .vsd Visio diagram into your .docx and it remains compliant but becomes as impenetrable to any other suite as EBCDIC.

Re: Succes

You must be new here.

You need to parse those claims like a Vulture. The ability to read and write the format is apt to mean read and write a subset of the whole thing, and full of layout bugs at that - and preferably to crash when an unfamiliar feature is encountered. They seldom claim to strive for 100% of the specification with 100% accuracy and stability.