Posts by MonkeyJuice

Microsoft teases agents that become ‘independent users within the workforce’

Re: Oh Jaysus

There's a sitcom in there somewhere.

Help desk boss fell for ‘Internet Cleaning Day’ prank - then swore he got the joke

Re: On a lighter note....

ed is the standard text editor.

52-year-old data tape could contain only known copy of UNIX V4

Re: Damn AI!!!

Even 4x6 fonts from the DOS game era avoided this (and supported full ascii), it just shouldn't happen at all.

Google imagines out of this world AI - running on orbital datacenters

Re: Heat

That's the neat part. You don't.

Claude code will send your data to crims ... if they ask it nicely

Re: So basically ...

It is more like, if only someone could actually convince LLMs to respect them.

Re: So basically ...

Prompt injection is completely unstoppable with the current LLM tech. So, yeah.

India to dethrone US for dev numbers as AI reshapes coding, says GitHub

Re: Very dubious numbers

Yes, but those numbers are not reflected in the GitHub userbase demographics, hence they are not mentioned here.

France jacks into the Matrix for state messaging – and pays too

"During an outage in September, the Matrix.org homeserver went offline following a hardware failure. Organizations with their own homeservers, such as governments, were unaffected. While embarrassing, the incident also inadvertently demonstrated the strength of a decentralized approach."

Didja read the same article I did?

'Keep Android Open' movement fights back against Google sideloading restrictions

Re: Monopoly power

They paid the Donald multi million dollar bribes to make that case go away and the tacit assumption they can do what they like now. They don't just feel, they know. Hell, they part own property where the East Wing used to be now.

Digital ID is now less about illegal working, more about rummaging through drawers

And what are the mitigations for identity theft, or is it just game over when some joker pulls my details?

Re: You know it's bad...

To be fair, the head of Palantir's UK operations pointed out you don't need an id card. You just create a database of NHS no, NI no, etc mapping to some unique key and be done with it. Palantir already have Gotham used by the Met and now presumably MoD, and all the NHS data since Covid. Their spook stack does not require id cards, that's kind of the point.

Windows 11 update knocks out USB mice, keyboards in recovery mode

Re: The icing on the cake ...

Fortunately, you should still be able to UEFI boot directly, unless Microsoft fuck up even more spectacularly.

AI boffins teach office supplies to predict your next move

Re: staplers...

Finally, a stapler that doesn't require an account to operate.

Windows 3? This was doable in windows 2000 and XP. You could also place shellcode in a field, send messages to cause that shellcode to be executed on double click (as a word separator callback), and send double click to said field to escalate to SYSTEM.

It was extremely silly.

Anthropic brings mad Skills to Claude

Re: Multiple skills

You have described Neuro-Symbolic computation. The unfortunate problem with this is that marshalling this information is fairly clunky and error prone, so now you have two unreliable systems.

Microsoft, Nvidia, and others inject $40B into AI bubble with massive datacenter deal

Re: What’s it all FOR??

Apparently, this bizarre LLM tech that plateaued in 2022 is really, really important to have everywhere, all the time. It is utterly vital that we do this, because AGI will be able to do all human jobs and then there will be ice-cream for all.

'Highly sophisticated' government goons hacked F5, stole source code and undisclosed bug details

Re: Buzzword bingo

Here's a new one: undisclosed vulnerability details. So, sitting on vulnerabilities rather than closing them urgently?

That sounds like standard responsible disclosure- holding the vulnerabilities from publication until the vendors have had a chance to patch it. The security industry has been doing this because back in the bad old days they'd release the PoC and it would get weaponized by script kiddies.

The other issue is that security is very, very hard to get right. You are running a machine with who knows how many millions of lines of code, and all it takes is for one of those to be wrong. Defence is far harder than offence- you need to stop every single attack, including ones you may not yet be aware of, the attacker just needs to have one payload land correctly.

What do we want? Windows 10 support! When do we want it? Until 2030!

Re: Awareness Of Linux Is Still A UK Media Problem

I don't think it's possible to chain load the windows bootloader by design.

Microsoft's OneDrive spots your mates, remembers their faces, and won't forget easily

I particularly enjoy the fact that at 3 changes a year, mashing that setting will lock it in the 'on' state. Sneaky.

Benioff retreats from idea of sending troops in to clean up San Francisco

And why should he? Are companies really going to ditch a back office supplier to make a statement?

Flanked by Palantir and AWS, Anthropic's Claude marches into US defense intelligence

Re: Unintended Consequences be the Greater Part of the Grand Masterly Unknown Unknown ‽

Eat shit, gpu brains.

Discord says 70,000 photo IDs compromised in customer service breach

Re: We said this was going to happen mere weeks ago

Because legislators are too dim to see the cause and effect between a poorly rushed age verification scheme that has been outsourced with zero privacy or security requirements to third party companies. They simply do not understand how the tech landscape works, and the sheer number of chancers in the industry willing to sell businesses a service they cooked up in a weekend for a quick buck.

Who gets a Mac at work? Here's how companies decide

(e.g. it doesn’t try to coerce/trick you into using unwanted cloud services, browsers, ads etc.). It handles all roles perfectly (general office productivity, *nix-land development etc.)

You sure there? Certainly the first thing it tries to do is connect you up to iCloud (vs Drive), demands your credit card info (what?), and foists Safari (vs Edge) upon you.

Granted it's not constantly notifying you about XBox Games Pass, but I'd say the shitware creep is fairly high here too. I wouldn't exactly call it polished either- Apple's software quality has been degrading for over a decade. The difference between Apple and Microsoft is primarily that Apple have a slightly more coherent vision of what the OS should do, vs whatever the hell Microsoft are doing.

To your second point the hardware is often well made though, but I'd counter with the fact that these days basically everything is glued in, so maintenance/upgradability suffers.

Hacking contest kerfuffle over copied rules pits Wiz against ZDI

Re: It's good to have more competitions

But it's also separate funding. So this is the added value- more software can be audited.

AI devs close to scraping bottom of data barrel

Re: Another Implementation

Goldman Sachs discovers model collapse and thus hurtles into the 2nd quarter of 2023. Just wait until they start reading 2024's research, because it doesn't get more optimistic with time outside of the marketing spiel.

Big money is nervous about AI hype, but not ready to call it a bubble

Re: AI vs dot.com

Agree up to point 3, but only because AI is the art of writing software that appears it will become "Good Enough", despite never quite getting there. See Point 2.

Re: It's like heating a pressure cooker beyond its design temperature

somewhat "correct" answers seems just to be: "make it bigger" for the past several years.

But with such rapidly diminishing returns of performance vs size, and the really obvious elephant in the room- there have been no practical improvements of this technology since what has always been simply an intellectual curiosity escaped the labs a couple of years ago... It doesn't take a genius to figure out that spending trillions on 0.5% performance increase in some random benchmark resulting in an AI that "now only gets shit wrong 45% of the time" is not a great investment.

Seat belts? I'll take my chances and jump out the door at this point.

Bezos plan for solar powered datacenters is out of this world… literally

Re: Why?

He clearly didn't consult the AWS engineers. God knows how many square milage of portacabins with network engineers scurrying around constantly replacing hardware as it inevitably fails. If he can automate them away, then he can start thinking about space deployment, but I think we can all agree, hardware fucks up on a regular basis, and tens of millions of dollars for a callout is just not financially viable BEFORE we even begin to worry about the practicality of e.g. cooling all that in a vacuum (good luck with that, maybe you can break thermodynamics while you're at it, Jeff).

It must be nice to be rich and clueless.

ICE plans to scour Facebook, TikTok, X, and even defunct Google+ for illegal immigration leads

Re: Hey, maybe they will hire me...

You're safe for now. No mention of the reg comments section in that press release, hombre.

Nadella hands Microsoft money machine off to new commercial CEO so he can visioneer the future

What could REALLY hurt microsoft is that AI ends up NOT being a fad

Spoken like a true Visioneer.

UK government says digital ID won't be compulsory – honest

Re: UK government says digital ID won't be compulsory

Joke's on them. I just eat raw onions.

Air Force admits SharePoint privacy issue as reports trickle out of possible breach

It's okay CISA will be on the case! Oh, no, wait...

I guess they're taking cybersecurity month off.

Many employees are using AI to create 'workslop,' Stanford study says

Re: Humans will be humans

Oh, SmallTalk. I cdr seen that coming.

AI that once called itself MechaHitler will now be available to the US government for $0.42

There is a slight bias towards the left in all LLMs, yes. This is because the bias is inherent in the training data because, on average the internet has always had a fair bit of a left bias. It's not a frickin' conspiracy you loon, they borrowed more money than the GDP of some countries, shoveled up the internet and poked it with a stick and this is what they got. It's objectively pants at everything, because no thought or nuance was ever put into it, just data- which is why you had a bad time with it, too.

Re: Adjustments to Grok's algorithm

all that data goes through xAIs datacenters... If DOGE is anything to go by, it might take a few detours along the way too.

Google-sponsored DORA report reframes AI as central to software development

Re: It's getting deep in here

AI looks to be one of those things like GUIs around 1970...

To be fair, AI looked exactly as it does now to you as it did to people in 1970. The problem is it's now a few decades later, and it's still "just around the corner."

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.

UK to roll out mandatory digital ID for right to work by 2029

Yes it is. I believe the pubs in those fine countries already tend to refuse entry to an Englishman with a St George's Cross tattooed on their face.

Re: Change of Govt.

This is the true curse of Newer Labour, So Wrong I am Having To Agree With Herr Nige on an increasingly regular basis.

Is Kier trying to do a Biden deliberately or is he just a wally?

The sweetest slice of Pi: Raspberry Pi 500+ sports mechanical keys, 16GB, and built-in SSD

Re: The distinctly long-in-the-tooth Pi Zero 2

I would also like to see a revisit of that incredibly fragile camera ribbon connector, I get that it is small and cheap but the number of devices I've had that little plastic wedge snap even with the gentlest touch makes me sad.

OpenSSF warns that open source infrastructure doesn't run on thoughts and prayers

Re: go dark for 48 hours

Then when the lights come back on, count the number of people who died due to 'unforseen dependency effects', and drop the spreadsheet on the legislators of choice.

Re: Maybe….

build_banks_v5c_FINAL_WORKING_3.py

UK justice minister pressed as court system bug raises fears of hidden case files

"Atos, Capgemini, CGI, Cognizant, Methods, PA Consulting, Scrumconnect, Transform UK, Solirius Consulting, and Version 1 were the main suppliers of the services affected since 2016."

There are a few usual suspects that stick out here. But we will continue to suffer howlers like this until the government reforms its IT tendering process so it doesn't reward failures. Locking out contractors on huge projects like this due to IR35 is also not a great solution, because that means That One Guy Who Knows Everything About Software X Because He Literally Wrote It doesn't get to sit in the meetings and steer the corporate drones clear of the ravines.

AI coding hype overblown, Bain shrugs

Re: Wrong usage

it's very good for getting information and ideas, like a super search engine.

Is it though? It has no creativity, and the only reason it is like a 'super search engine' is because search engines have become a huge pile of shite over the last five years. Researching what other people have actually bet the farm on and succeeded with to push in a particular direction is infinitely more reliable than an LLM, which will spurt out any old vapid nonsense and then double down on it's bullshit when pressed.

The only thing an LLM is good at is tiring you out until your critical thinking skills are no longer able to fight back against its nonsense.

Re: I hope

If the last two AI winters were anything to go by- absolutely not.

Although in the run ups to the last two cataclysms, the academics were loudly warning business on their overoptimism and hype. This time around I am honestly aghast at the apparent silence. Guess those departments don't fund themselves.

Firewall upgrade linked to three deaths after Australian telco cut off emergency calls

Precisely- they will be popping things onto subnets behind the scenes.

It does beg the question, if they knew the protocol and were able to follow it, why did they not have a better CI smoke test on the live 000 lines.

Bet they add one pretty soon.

Make Windows 11 more useful and less annoying with these 11 Registry hacks

Re: Super helpful...

There are a few commentards who take internet points extremely seriously, and will downvote not on the basis of the comment, but on an a prior grudge with the commentor.

Re: Super helpful...

PICK... and APL.

I have not heard those names in a very long time.

You may be interested in J, definitely the closest spiritual successor to APL, although it's ascii based, so maybe that takes some of the charm away.

As for PICK... gosh. The last time I used that in anger was I think D3, in the 90s, on a Unix that some may have had the misfortune of hearing the name of before... SCO.

China's DeepSeek applying trial-and-error learning to its AI 'reasoning'

Re: To be fair

There are plenty of more effective ways to do this kind of narrow domain inference that have been in use for decades. In fact there are entire journals dedicated to specific classes of them.

Prodding an LLM with a stick and hoping it turns into something useful seems expensive and unlikely to work at this stage, they've already plateaued and we don't have a single working use-case for them.

Microsoft insists Copilot+ PCs are 'empowering the future' – reality disagrees

Nah. The entire Fortune 500 are thoroughly embedded with M$, and they have a turning radius of an oil tanker. Besides, those AI margins are going to be showing up on the books Any Time Now.

OpenAI says models are programmed to make stuff up instead of admitting ignorance

Re: Medical exams

Unfortunately this can't work in the context of neural networks due to Zipf's Law. The problem is that unless your problem falls in that sweet sweet low hanging fruit basket like "Can bees sting?", you simply cannot ask enough questions to have anything but statistical noise in the vast majority of your training weights.

This is a fundamental limitation of ML, and it cannot, under any real world situation be addressed in a purely data driven fashion.

Medical practitioners do a hell of a lot more than trial and error, but of course, the AI corpos want you to believe that super human intelligence is 'just around the corner'. It is not.