Posts by ariels-again

DOGE helps Veterans Affairs end IT contract run by service-disabled entrepreneurs

Re: This just keeps getting worse

Don't forget also to deride and mock them! That's actually quite easy - we're talking about the CyberTrumpk Inventor - we should be able to do all 3.

Membership of New Zealand’s domain registry suddenly triples, which isn't entirely welcome

Treaty

Always fun to see conservative right whingers get all knotted up about the NZ treaty. As always, a treaty obtained between two unequal parties is suddenly "outdated" when the now powerful party becomes even more powerful.

Trump can't quickly or easily kill the CHIPS Act, but he can fire the workers funded by it

Re: What?

Semiconductors are sometimes part of the resistance.

Are you better value for money than AI?

Re: Gee, which would I rather have?

But hear me out. What if we let the ChatBot write a legal argument. Then we could let a paralegal read it, decide to throw it all away, and write a good argument with real references!

This would give us the best of both worlds: the same argument could be written in only a slightly longer time, and Altman and Mush could get cash for selling an essential service, and credit for saving humanity!

US airspace closures, lack of answers deepen East Coast drone mystery

Re: New Jersey: stupid isn't just for red states since 1787

The difference being...?

Elon Musk's disaster relief promises: Should we believe the hype?

Re: tax them

So what if we just, you know, tried to tax then rather than just talk about it? Roll it back after 10 years, well still have a few billionaires left.

I know Hayek is always right, but what if he wasn't?

The force is strong in Iceberg: Are the table format wars entering the final chapter?

Unfortunately the DBMS doesn't exist here, and you don't want it to exist. If I can read directly from my object store (say, S3), then my compute can soak up data as far as S3 can emit it. For properly sharded data that can be very fast.

An RDBMS means data has to flow through it - and availability becomes an issue. What you want is a catalog - a list easy to find your data files - and a protocol - a way to read and write your data concurrently and safely. Both Iceberg and DeltaLake provide that.

It's true, social media moderators do go after conservatives

Re: Who is the judge ?

You could, you know, read the article before responding. The paper explains how they decided that a new source is low quality.

Obviously source quality does not matter with people who refuse to read.

Study shock! AI hinders productivity and makes working worse

Re: Wrong productivity trajectory

Exactly! And my research shows that AI is best poised to replace the C-suite, where it can leverage its inherently equal knowledge across the board to deliver equivalent performance at lower cost and latencies. Oh, and replacing all those expensive workers means we can afford the increased ai spend.

Unintended acceleration leads to recall of every Cybertruck produced so far

We had one too

... but the brakes came off...

Staff say Dell's return to office mandate is a stealth layoff, especially for women

Please don't tell my boss

Ouch, you just discovered my secret! When I work from home, I secretly go to school to fetch my kid over lunchtime. I also pretend to send PRs to my colleagues before 0800, put a deepfake avatar of myself in all the night-time VCs with users and staff in remote locations, and do some design work over the weekend.

But you saw right through my machinations. Damn the Internet for having such smart people!

BOFH: Hearken! The Shiny Button software speaks of Strategic Realignment

Re: "Oh, it's ah ... Neo ... um, Enterprise ... uh ... Executive ... uhm ..."

The dashboard is necessary to make split-second management decisions based on weekly data. Your 3 clicks in Excel would cost us 5 minutes and we would lose our competitive advantage.

We cannot buy unless it's compatible with our Enterprise Blockchain Solution Framework!

(True Enterprise lag is one hype cycle)

Buggy app for insulin-delivery device puts diabetes patients at risk of hypoglycemia

Re: Lobotomies....

You know how many units of insulin to cover 10g of carbohydrates. You know what the amount of rice that contains 40g of carbohydrates looks like, or you weigh it out. You know how many units of insulin you need to cover a particular delta of desired blood-sugar level. And you perform some mental arithmetic. (Naturally you would never ever multiply by a fudge factor just because you know that you're unwell today and will probably need more insulin.)

Naturally it helps to choose nice round numbers. And it helps to know that a 10% error is probably not the end of the world. A 1000% error, on the other hand, is very scary.

America's ambitious Artemis III likely to miss 2025 Moon landing date, auditors sigh

Re: Delay

Regulations made my spaceship blow up!

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

Peace in our time

The annual Stack Overflow Developers Survey results show 100 percent support for little endiannity. An over-eager technical intern at Gartner and poor internal communication there causes them to go with "little endian in trough of disillusionment as support plummets below 001 percent". The battle is over, big endian wins!

Intel re-release Itanium as a temporary big endian replacement until they can release their 684108 architecture. Naturally this succeeds, ARM and Qualcomm both close shop. Within one year all tracking cookies and other cryptocurrencies stop working because they use a little-endian format internally.

Linux is still not on the desktop after the successful return of Ballmer.

Big endian wins out! My son gets the sweater, it was his idea.

Worldwide productivity soars as all daily standup syncs cancelled

Management consultancy companies send all employees to mandatory re-education.

Prediction for 2015: Worldwide productivity drops as re-educated management consultants return and companies force employees to use new-fangled "waterfall" development technique.

As NASA struggles to open OSIRIS-REx's asteroid sample can, probe heads off to next rock

Why waste the good stuff?

Just bang it twice against the corner of the bench.

Not like that! Here, let me show you...

Musk in hot water with SEC for failure to comply with subpoena

Re: SF isn't a valid meeting place?

Reminder: Mush has to be in the office, this is XXXer, WFH is for the weak. I'm beginning to suspect he isn't "hard-core" enough.

BOFH: A security issue, you say? Activate code tangerine

Re: Wonderful episode once again!

Say, merely for the same if serving, that I booked my boss onto Ryanair "for economy reasons". I would certainly not want them to miss that flight!

Salesforce flipflops from 'you're fired' to 'you're hired' in six short months

Re: Many companies have already realised...

"[P]eople in charge of strategy, operations and making new products"? Please... None of that affects Q-on-Q growth, the only metric that matters™️.

Lawyer's Microsoft email snafu goes from $1.75M lawsuit to Ctrl+Alt+Settle

Re: "Ctrl+Alt+Settle"

That's "Meta" to you, you, you vi-lover!

Arm wrestles assembly language guru's domains away citing trademark issues

Re: That's going to take a lot of praying..

All Doom and GLoom.

Zoom CEO reportedly tells staff: Workers can't build trust or collaborate... on Zoom

Missing the point of VC for many manglers

This is important to understand. In many cases VC is not intended for you to use instead of going to the office. It is intended for you to use at home, after you're back from the office.

I have worked places like that back when I was younger, smarter, and an idiot.

Resilience is overrated when it's not advertised

STONITH

A shame the architecture rant STONITH, and our operator didn't get to expand the acronym in front of police. It was always a horrible idea, but I'm sure the police would have enjoyed hearing that the problem was that one node didn't shoot the other node in the head.

Florida man accused of hoarding America's secrets faces fresh charges

Re: You sure are preoccupied by Trump and Musk!

You keep using those words "left-wing" and "socialist". I do not think those words mean what you think they mean.

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

Re: Spot on!

El Reg are really OEMing here: getting their readers to wordsmith their blueskying for them.

DEF CON to set thousands of hackers loose on LLMs

Re: Better than hackers for red teaming an LLM

I asked ChatGPT what this means, for science of course. Apparently it can refer to "someone who is skilled at using language in clever or manipulative ways". Therefore it might not be suitable for use in professional settings, or with people who may find it offensive or inappropriate.

User

What does a cunning linguist do?

ChatGPT

The phrase "cunning linguist" is often used as a playful or suggestive way to refer to someone who is skilled at using language in clever or manipulative ways. However, the term can also be interpreted literally as someone who is skilled in the use of language.

A linguist is a professional who studies language and its structure, including its syntax, semantics, and phonology. A cunning linguist, therefore, could be someone who is particularly adept at understanding and manipulating the nuances of language in various contexts, such as in writing, speaking, or translating.

However, it is important to note that the term "cunning linguist" is often used in a joking or suggestive way, and it may not be appropriate to use it in professional settings or with people who may find it offensive or inappropriate.

'Brittle' Twitter suffers bad case of the Mondays: Links, pics, vids fail

Re: Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint

EM figured out the road to profitability! Every homepage render by Twitter is 1000 API calls to Twitter (as established by prior work by EM). Start charging for every API call, take say 2x as much as each call costs.

Now do the math: every time Twitter renders its homepage for a user, it performs 1000 API calls. It pays for each of these. So for every cent Twitter receives from itself for API calls, it pockets a half a cent profit. Now sure, Twitter has to pay that cent, but since it paid itself it certainly lost no money.

Girls Who Code books 'banned' in some US classrooms

Re: The last sentence of the article has it.

Please link to a list of "the hundreds of books banned by left wing academics". I mean, it's an elephant standing in a room.

Janet Jackson music video declared a cybersecurity exploit

Re: Some mileage in this...

Abba can cause some problems with lockfree algorithms. See e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABA_problem for a brief survey.

Machine learning the hard way: IBM Watson's fatal misdiagnosis

Re: I still tremendously respect the veterinary office...

Feel I'n missing the point.

Git 2.33 released with new optional merge process likely to become the default: It's 'over 9,000' times faster

Re: Merging in the cloud

You'll need to use comets there.

America's comms watchdog takes on the internet era's real criminals: Pirate pastors

Extremists!

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned the true danger here: 87.9MHz FM is right there at the longest wavelength that a consumer FM radio can receive! I assume this is some sort of extremism.

TSB boss: We know everything's working, you just can't see that

You heard it here first

My excuse calendar today says: "the system is working but has issues with legacy clients". Specifically, I'm sure it will start recovering as soon as all you stragglers start using IPv6.

A Hughes failure: Flat Earther rocketeer can't get it up yet again

Re: A rocketeer that cannot comprehend Gravity?

An infinite planar Earth of constant density will have a constant gravitational field (independent of height above the Earth), e.g. https://physics.info/gravitation-extended/practice.shtml#2. Flat-earth rocketry is *easier* than N(A)SA-funded rocketry.

Guntree v Gumtree: Nominet orders gun ads site must lose domain

I'll just leaf this here...