Posts by katrinab

Claude Code returns blank thinking blocks, but reasoning still costs you

"customers are advised to [...] disable thinking."

What the actual f*** did I just read?

Gym rat asks AI agent to book him a class, it hacks a waitlist API to bump him up the list

Re: Dangerous thing you've got there....

"Asking an accountant employed by some big company to falsify tax records on your behalf doesn't absolve you of responsibility"

Sure, but if you ask an accountant to see if there is any way you can reduce your tax bill, and they falsify your tax records; that absolves you of criminal responsibility. The accountant is criminally responsible, but you still have to pay the tax.

Hims & Hers accused of sharing health secrets and hiding the cancel button

Re: Just cancel the payment method

And more importantly when placing an order it shouldn't be

Big yellow button, "place order and subscribe to Prime trial"

Big white button "place order <small print>and subscribe to Prime Trial</small print>"

Blue link located about 30 cm down the page "place order without subscribing to Prime"

LinkedIn realizes its users have been bathing in AI slop, offers a shower

Re: Every site needs a "seems like AI slop" button

The one after has a spellig error in it so it is probably real

Google meets the neighbors and gets both barrels over its new UK datacenter

Re: 77 MW of IT capacity

Or, the average household in Waltham Forest consumes 2309.4 kWh/year of electricity - source https://www.ons.gov.uk/explore-local-statistics/indicators/domestic-electricity-consumption

There are 8760 hours in a year, so that means the average power draw of a house in that borough is 263W. Which means that it uses the same amount of electricity as 292775 households.

There are only 102900 households in the borough, source https://www.walthamforest.gov.uk/council-and-elections/about-us/statistics-about-borough

so it is using almost 3x as much electricity as all the residents of the borough put together.

And, it is basically a 77MW fan heater, so of course it is going to make the local area a bit hotter.

Europe slaps AliExpress with €550 million fine for selling dodgy goods

Re: Protecting the EU sellers.

Ali Express (and Temu/Amazon/Ebay/etc) are required to charge VAT on the sale and deduct it at source, so that side of things is dealt with.

OpenAI's Atlas browser doesn't make it to its first birthday

Re: quote: ChatGPT Work is about getting office workers to spend more time with OpenAI

It will probably be both

Dev says Google warned him about account hijack – then charged him $11,000 anyway

Re: Oh dear

I used Google Maps to find a hotel at a reasonable price in the actual location I wanted to stay in; and that worked reasonably well.

Whereas Expedia kept trying to push me to hotels that were about 20 miles away claiming that they were in my desired location.

That is about the only time I've found Google useful recently. Their search results are generally garbage these days.

Oracle outlines all the ways it could lose the farm it bet on AI

Re: Oracle may discover

They did take over Sun, which did sell hardware at the time.

Arm64 on the desktop? It’s spendy and it’s sluggish

I have an M4 MacBook Air and a Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge with a Qualcom Snapdragon X-Elite.

Neither of them are gaming computers, but both have very decent performance and amazing battery life.

T-Mobile appears to be quitting VMware – and fighting a very familiar battle for support rights on the way out

Re: Delightful idea

Support I think mostly means software updates / security fixes and that sort of thing?

Where there's a will, AI still has work to do

"However, most of those omissions stem from the experiment itself. The chatbot could only work with what it was given, while a solicitor would typically spend time asking follow-up questions before drafting a will."

Actually, no. If "AI" is to replace a lawyer, it needs to ask all the same questions an actual lawyer would ask. Most people don't know that these are questions that need to be asked and answered, and that is why they seek professional advice.

AI will soon be capable of telling convincing lies

They already can. That's the only thing they are good at.

The database that refused to die: How Postgres survived its own creators

Re: Interesting

Another thing, I get the impression MySQL used to be popular as a feature-lite almost database that was good enough for a lot of intended use-cases, and had better performance than proper databases.

Now, we have Postgres as proper database, which also has better performance than MySQL, and hardware is so much faster now that performance considerations aren't quite so important.

Geopolitical jitters push Europe's internet registry away from cloud-first strategy

Re: Opex

There are basically two types of expenditure:

Capital Expenditure - where you spend money in exchange for an asset

Operational Expenditure - where you spend money on regular running costs, and don't receive an asset in exchange for it.

India blocks Telegram ahead of scandal-hit medical school entrance exam

Re: Here's an idea

They presumably have invigilators checking that students don't use phones during the exam session.

I think this is more about them having advance warning about what to focus their revision on.

Google found liable for bad AI Overview results. Let's play Truth Or Consequences

I've switched to noai.duckduckgo.com because I got fed up with all the AI slop at the top of my search results, and actual search results that are now worse than AltaVista's were before Google came along and showed everyone how search should be done.

GOV.UK goes Dutch on payments as it dumps Stripe

Re: Chargebacks & Section 75

It depends on who has the relationship with PayPal.

If you pay by PayPal without signing into your account, then the merchant has the relationship with PayPal, and they are the payment processor in much the same way that Stripe or Adyen are. And you can do a chargeback.

If you log in to PayPal, then you have the relationship with PayPal and your relationship with your bank is purchasing money transfer services from PayPal. You can do a chargeback if PayPal doesn't transfer the money, but not if they do, and the person you transfer it to doesn't do what they were supposed to in return.

Re: Stripe is USAian

The USA is a hostile enemy nation, the Netherlands is not.

Re: Pay by Bank

It is probably not really that they have consent, but they know your bank account number, and that enables them to do it without any sort of consent.

Re: Pay by Bank

GWR asks for sort code and account number and pays me that way.

In Germany, Deutsche Bahn asked me for an IBAN and BIC and used those to pay me.

Brit regulator finds mobile network service on trains is far from first class

LNER have essentially 3 types of train:

Class 91 with Mark 4 coaches, typically 7 carriages

Class 800/1 or 801/2 trains with 9 carriages, the difference is that 800s have a diesel engine, 801s do not, they are both the same inside

Class 800/2 or 801/1 trains with 5 carriages, again the difference is whether they have diesel engines or not. These can sometimes be doubled up to form a 10 carriage train.

A coach G in each of these is not going to be the same type of carriage.

As far as I can see, the problem is that mobile networks are obliged to cover a certain percentage of the population, and while lots of people travel on trains, nobody lives on train tracks, therefore providing coverage on them doesn't contribute to them meeting their licencing conditions.

Angry devs vow to flee GitHub Copilot as metered billing takes hold

Re: The first one is free...

You pay a subscription for Excel and you can do as many formulae as you like.

People would expect CoPilot to work in the same way.

Google Cloud suspended major customer Railway.com without cause, causing outage

Re: In-house

The power cord for my server is about 4 metres away, and my arm isn't that long.

Should I be worried?

Firefox 151 helps you edit PDFs – and switch OSes

Mostly, I scan stuff to pdf on my printer/scanner, it gets saved as A4, and I want to crop it to the actual size of what I am scanning.

Can the pdf editor crop pages? Can you type things on the page or draw on the page?

Apple preview can do that, and at work, I end up opening stuff on my iPad to do those things at the moment.

X limits hot takes from freeloaders to 50 a day

There's also Threads if you want your Twitter clone to be run by Zuckerborg...

Mozilla warns UK: Breaking VPNs will not magically fix Britain's age-check mess

Also ...

I could get a small VPS in another country, install VPN software on it, and use that. If I did want to use a VPN, that is likely how I would do it rather than go to the likes of NordVPN.

Google reimburses Register sources who were victims of API fraud

Re: Remember, kids...

Sure, whatever, but these were Google Maps keys that were set up to allow customers to get directions to their business premises

Re: smart man Fonseka

If I agree a spending limit of $250 per month, and Google decides to automatically increase it when I go over the agreed limit, then that is fraud on Google's part.

Taiwan cops say student's radio kit brought bullet trains to a standstill

Re: Impressive radio kit....

No because the stopping distance of the train is longer, a lot longer, than the visual range of such a signal.

Re: Impressive radio kit....

Most uncomfortable seats are on the Thameslink Class 700.

Re: Impressive radio kit....

Fastest slow train is 110mph (176km/h).

Slowest fast train is a *lot* slower than that.

Re: Impressive radio kit....

We do have the fastest steam train [LNER Class A4 4468 Mallard], the fastest diesel train [BR Class 43 / Intercity 125], the fastest conventional rail airport express [Heathrow Express Class 387/1a], and the fastest slow train [GWR Class 387/1 between Paddington and Didcot/Newbury].

We also have the fastest average speed.

Databricks can't seem to shake authors' copyright claim that could result in 'extraordinary' damages

Re: The damages provisions in copyright law are draconian with a capital D.

If everything the LLM mongers produced was available for free download to self-host, then I might think a bit differently about it.

GoDaddy customer claims registrar transferred 27-year-old domain without any security checks

I've switched registrars twice from ones that were taken over by GoDaddy.

Currently with OVH who hopefully are too big to be taken over by them.

Microsoft's GitHub shifts to metered AI billing amid cost crisis

Re: Mr. pusher man

The business model was wrong, and people have been saying that for a while.

The thing is that most software has very high fixed costs for development, then very low variable costs as you add customers.

This is very different, You have the very high fixed costs, but you also have very high variable costs in the form of data centre electricity bills and the costs of new data centre hardware as you scale up.

You can now run WSL on Windows 95, in case you're crazy, too

"The question of why one would want to do this came to mind quite quickly"

Because you can is a perfectly good answer ...

Raspberry Pi OS ends open-door policy for sudo

Re: The obviously correct decision

Unless of course it is air-gapped, which for a lot of cases, it may well be.

Physicist reckons two-button calculator can do all elementary math

I haven't read the paper, but you could add all the existing buttons on the calculator to a binary tree, and use the two buttons supplied to navigate through that to the function/input you want, and that could include a go back function.

Deere oh Deere: Tractor repair row heads for $99M settlement

Re: This Settlement is **NOT** an excellent result for the Class

The average person can't change a battery, even if it just means popping off the back cover, pulling the old one out and putting a new one in its place.That is true.

But they do know someone who can help them, like most of the people reading this, or the local repair/parts shop where they buy the thing from.

Re: This Settlement is **NOT** an excellent result for the Class

The thing is that you have people in law enforcement calling on Apple and other phone manufacturers to make parts pairing more of a thing, so as to make stealing phones less attractive.

TalkTalk kept my email account active for 8 years after I left – now it's spamming my mates

Re: You brought up an interesting point

Just to follow up on this in case anyone is still reading:

Apparently they are going to close down my email account on 7th July 2026 unless I pay to keep it open.

I won't be, I've long since moved everything over to email accounts on domains I own. I registered the first domain about 24 years ago.

OpenAI puts Stargate UK on ice, blames energy costs and red tape

Shuttering Crucial was a dumb move anyway. Nvidia understands that gamers are their core long-term market even if blockchains or so-called AI can produce massive short-term profits. It is no different for Micron.

If an AI agent screws up while running your business, there's nobody to sue

Re: Strategically placed scapegoats

If you are a doctor, engineer, lawyer, accountant, or something similar, then you are personally responsible for what you sign off on. The company may also be responsible.

Re: Strategically placed scapegoats

Lawyers who use AI have been sanctioned by the courts.

That fact will make them very comfortable at pushing back if their employers try to make them use AI. A job is replacable, your professional licence is not.

Anthropic admits Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'

Re: The AI operators still lose money on each token....

I suspect it is going to actually work out cheaper to employ a human than to pay the real cost of these so-called AI systems.

Apple's last tower topples… and the others will follow

Re: So, Apple Silicon

If a 192GB in a Mac Pro isn't enough, and for the target market, it is utterly inadequate, then you choose chose something else like the ThinkStation P620 which can be upgraded to 2TB.

The Previous Intel Mac Pro could be upgraded to 1.5TB, which at the time was comparable to the competition.

Sorry, Amazon, you couldn't pick a worse time to bring a phone to market: IDC analyst

Re: Satellite news?

Not really, given that you can get Starlink over 5G if your phone carrier supports it, for an additional monthly fee, and other satellite operators are looking at offering something similar.