Posts by doublelayer

Tis the season when tech leaders rub their crystal balls

The last line seems optimistic. Companies have been able to differentiate themselves on good customer service for some time though the bad service they're differentiating from is different with LLM options. When they do, customers who interact with them tend to notice. However, they often can't sell themselves on that because people buying don't know what the quality will be apart from a few notorious ones. The closest I've seen is companies that announce that their customer service agents are local to the country, which in my experience is no guarantee of anything because it's the quality of their knowledge and procedures rather than their time zone or accent that makes the real difference. If it hasn't been a big selling point so far, why should we expect that companies willing to avoid the LLM craze will succeed in selling that to perspective customers?

IT team forced to camp in the office for days after Y2K bug found in boss's side project

Anything is possible if we just assume that, but if there was a bug in something else, that should have been in the article. Explaining its absence from the article requires a lot more assumptions including that this was known by somebody not including the people employed to work on Y2K problems in advance; not fixed, mitigated (terminated the affected application before midnight), or hidden; only had a problem at midnight and did not continue in crash mode afterward; and got eventually fixed by someone who didn't tell the IT people about it. That's a lot of things to need to believe and no evidence to use for them.

I think Occam's razor applies here. I can also paint a picture of how this could have been caused by a screensaver. I can't prove this any more than you can prove your story, but since even the reporter doesn't have all the information, we can go with it. The screensaver wasn't intended to count through zero and into the negatives. It was planning to do something special when the timer reached zero, such as displaying an image telling IT staff to start looking for problems, but when trying to do this special case, it did something with RAM it shouldn't have in what was likely a Windows 9x desktop so therefore the screensaver was running with enough permissions to take down everything. The check was only looking for remainingTime == 0, not <= 0, so it didn't trigger again.

It would be correctly functioning if it just counted down through zero into negatives, but that's not what happened. I'm not sure what happened, but it evidently crashed at zero, which is not correct behavior or necessary. I keep assuming that there was a divide by zero in it somewhere except I can't find a reason why it would need to divide anything by the remaining time and that shouldn't have crashed the system, just the application. So while you're right that it wasn't a y2K bug, it was definitely not correctly functioning.

Death, torture, and amputation: How cybercrime shook the world in 2025

Re: Force of nature

We separate intent and opportunity and rightly so all the time. Your examples are flawed because, in them, there is no malice anywhere and therefore the only thing we ever consider is whether there was negligence. Even then, they're often wrong because there are many cases where we either should or do (correctly or not) decide that there was not negligence and the harm, even though it was preventable, was not the result of significant enough failure to act that we're going to hold someone criminally responsible.

In the case of cybercrime, there is malice and it needs to be considered. That is what we would do in a non-computery context as well. Imagine that a factory has a gate they should lock but didn't. A terrorist uses that gate to bring a bomb close to the building, then detonates it, killing people inside the building who would have been less injured if it had gone off outside the gate. We would often pay a lot more attention to the guy with the bomb than the guy with the key to the gate. Your statement would be equivalent to "This reads like a catalogue of tragedies caused by 'terrorism', but the real culprit is front-line security guards, not magic bombers." and I don't think you'd find many who agree.

You're trying to state a valid, if a bit obvious, point about mismanagement, but you're doing so in a very wrong way when you use statements like "magic hackers" and "real culprit". Those are downplaying the most culpable people. I'm pretty sure you don't want to do that, and all I can say is that you should work on your phrasing because you keep doing that, sometimes in even worse contexts, to blame the only group you seem to care about. If you want to convince people of anything, side arguments clarifying or correcting redirections you don't agree with, or at least won't defend when called out, just delay and weaken that attempt.

Keeping Windows and macOS alive past their sell-by date

Re: OS X / macOS: Download from Apple directly

What definition are you using for "clean install", because most of us appear to be using the one that means that the thing you installed four years ago and forgot about gets wiped out. That can help when people have had a machine for twelve years and have a stack of third-party drivers, software that starts at login, license checkers, and settings they probably should update but don't know about. The more you're careful about what you install and change, the less benefit you get from that, but this article is clearly directed at those with less technical skill which, in my experience, often have a few things they forgot about which aren't helping their system's speed or stability.

It's nothing like what you describe. Your version suggests it's mandatory or government-supported, when any tax or lack of tax is due to private agreements between Microsoft and computer manufacturers with no external legal backing and subject to anti-competition law if they go too far and regulators are looking (admittedly not often, but when they want to start looking, I think there are bigger problems in tech for them to start with).

The old version was that OEMs could license every machine with a discount or just the machines they wanted to at full price. As long as most customers wanted Windows and intended to get a license with their hardware, the first option was cheaper for the OEM. Things are likely different now but probably go along similar lines. You can dislike it, and you can even raise a regulatory complaint or, where supported by your local laws, file suit about this, but not until you know what's happening and what's not.

Re: OS X / macOS: Download from Apple directly

Because this discussion is entirely about getting a clean reinstall of Mac OS, and going through software update from Mac OS will upgrade it in place.

Re: Another option

I wasn't one of them, but maybe it was the fact that the proposed solution to an old but likely serviceable computer was to spend money on a newer computer they don't need, segment all their stuff into two different machines when they could avoid doing so, and the one part that was accurate was the long list at the end of reasons why this would be harmful. There can be more reasons to oppose something than alleging that it simply wouldn't work. Something that works but is negative on most or all the elements it's supposed to help with isn't a very good proposal.

Their old computer can likely run a browser for free, no Chromebook required. The things they want to do outside the browser will determine whether the best approach is to stick with the original operating system but harden it or replace it with something likely Linux-based, but neither would involve an extra expense. If they are going to spend money, depending on how much they want to do, they could likely get a better newer computer to run everything on rather than getting something cheap which will only last a little bit longer.

'PromptQuest' is the worst game of 2025. You play it when trying to make chatbots work

Re: No pseudo-thinkers here, mate

And I think you're throwing your time away.

"Had a very polite conversation with ChatGPT yesterday, where it returned a load of nonsense on a topic I know well, so we "discussed" how its algorithms were leading its output astray and it had got itself in this mess, and what the right answer actually was. Took about five minutes. Imagine trying to track that down with with Google"

I can, in fact, imagine that. Instead of getting useless answers because they are incorrect on something I already know, I could already know it. Total time taken: 0. The problem comes when I don't already know the answer. It took you little time to recognize that you were receiving nonsense because you knew about it, but if you didn't know about it, you would spend much longer figuring that out before you could resume the useless conversation. A search might be annoying, but there's less completely invented data to lead me astray so the biggest likely annoyance will be not finding what I'm looking for rather than being given something that looks like what I'm looking for but is completely wrong.

And the rest of that was also wasted. You can instruct a chatbot like a student or trainee. The difference is that the student and trainee will remember and learn if they're any good whereas the chatbot is incapable of doing that. All your careful instruction was immediately deleted from the bot when the session ended. Ask your question again and it will likely give you wrong answers again because it does not remember that. It praising you about what you did is not helpful because, even if it could learn, it's effectively telling you that instead of getting correct information from it, your job is to teach it the information you know when it is not giving you correct answers.

AI faces closing time at the cash buffet

Re: Pointless

In each of your claimed cases, I see the chatbots happily lying. Does the product have feature X? The description should tell you for sure, but the chatbot can easily answer yes when the answer is no. When you complain that it doesn't have it, they can point out that the description didn't say it could, which is why the LLM had no information, which is why it randomly guessed yes. If you care about products, read the descriptions. They are not very long. Manuals are slightly better but mostly similar.

Terms and conditions are painful to read, but getting a summary of them which might leave out the parts that are important isn't helping you. If you don't care, you have the option that many take: don't read them at all and just agree. I don't recommend it, but I understand why people do it.

From video games to cyber defense: If you don't think like a hacker, you won't win

That's a mostly useless pedantic statement since many things people want done can't be done without an internet connection, so I'll raise you more pedantry. If someone thinks disconnecting from the internet will protect them, they don't know what they're talking about. Things were hacked before public networks and things are hacked without public networks. Sometimes, it's a big thing like Stuxnet. Sometimes, it's local pranksters who figured out a hole. Someone who uses "air gap that" without thinking is as useless as someone who thinks a lock on the front door handles it.

You don't need Linux to run free and open source software

You can update the OS in place. That's been possible for quite a while and it has substantially improved. It can go wrong, as can anything else you try, but it works very frequently. The reason that's not being suggested is that the article and its predecessor were aimed at the less technical user of an old machine who might benefit from the cleaning that a complete reinstall does.

That's also what backups are for. You can often back up everything from an application so it reinstalls with little effort if you're willing to first go to the effort of setting up that backup regime. The major exception is anything with a license check system tied to a hardware identifier, which is much more annoying. In that case or if the preparation is undesired, then you can save installers and re-execute them.

Re: Amazingly title happens to be correct;

To stop you from going a bit too far, you should acquaint yourself with the dictionary for this poster, including:

proprietary adj. Any license poster Eric 9001, formerly known as GNU Enjoyer*, doesn't happen to like, namely pretty much all of them.

Synonyms: open, open source, FOSS, GPL [without specifying a version], pretty much any other adjective other than "free", which will be insistently interpreted as a license that poster does like and, if it's not, they'll fight you without any good reasons.

* Of course I can't prove they're one and the same without access to the user database, but I am quite confident and believe I could convince if it was necessary.

"Or, perhaps, they're primarily making it for themselves, and making it available for others, but aren't concerned with mass-adoption."

I think this is a lot of it. Partially I think that because it describes much of the things I've developed and released under open licenses, but I don't think this is all me putting my own flaws on everybody. A lot of UI work is a boring slog and isn't necessary if you assume that people will figure it out the same way I did when I wrote it. Building something which can be given to the general public without training is hard work that doesn't benefit the programmers much, so it often does not happen. That leaves you with the luck of the draw on whether the programmer's initial idea works well or not.

Memory is running out, and so are excuses for software bloat

Re: Memory <> Datacentres

True, but it will work in many servers, so anyone wanting to buy server memory can buy it from those guys and anyone choosing what kind of RAM to make with their factory this month would do well to choose consumer, dropping prices for both groups. There's a bit of complexity since some of this is specifically intended for GPUs or other areas where not even normal server memory is involved, and that would likely delay the speed of prices coming back to normal, but even if everyone who bought memory decided to shred it rather than sell it, the prices would still come back to normal as long as they weren't continuously buying more.

Re: "long shaken their heads at the profligate ways of modern engineering"

You're correct about many of the specifics, but wrong about your admonition:

"the environmental disaster can be attributed to mismanagement, and lack of care when disposing of waste, but you make it sound like it was a deliberate act."

No, this entire comment thread has been about mismanagement and laziness and the consequences thereof to compare about what people see, correctly or incorrectly, as exactly that among software writers. Programmers generally aren't trying to make their code run in lots of RAM for no reason. Those who use too much are doing so because it's easier, they don't know how to do it better, or they don't understand that there are consequences when they waste it. Similarly, laziness with what you do with hazardous waste can have consequences and people sometimes ignore them because it's easier not to without intending to cause a disaster. In all their examples, they were saying that there are things which could have been designed or maintained better but were not due to laziness, either to make the case that software isn't special and shouldn't be singled out or contrasted as if it's unique there or to blame programmers as members of a wider group. They did not say and clearly do not believe that this is a malicious or pre-planned deficiency.

Re: "long shaken their heads at the profligate ways of modern engineering"

But, if the data is stored in string form for presentation so it doesn't have to be calculated for each row using also limited CPU cycles, it does save disk space and RAM during processing. Another version of how it worked did use one byte to store the year number but a basic string processing system which would concatenate "19" to it, resulting in a presented value of "19100", which if properly parsed as an integer for calculations on something else would have made 2000 into 17200.

Those little differences were minimal for individual records but quite a bit more severe when you had a large set of them, a 5 MB hard drive to store them and whatever was attached to the dates on, and a single CPU shared by lots of software. The people who wrote it almost certainly knew this wouldn't work in 2000, but they considered their resource limits and assumed that, by 1995, nobody was going to be running this 20-year-old code or, if they were, resources would be less limited and it could be improved, which it was but at a much higher cost than they anticipated. And in some cases, they should have done it differently from the start anyway. Modern programmers mostly don't have any chance of justifying cutting corners for a bit of RAM efficiency, and those who play memory golf without being very certain it's a good idea can make things worse while still feeling superior.

It certainly won't happen overnight, but if they build a new plant to make the fastest memory, then the existing plants that are currently making that can go back to making slower and cheaper commodity stuff. There is some new construction on the way already, and if demand remained this strong for quite a long time, manufacturers would do something about it. Also, demand probably won't stay this high for long because this level of demand is expensive for those doing the demanding. There is a gap between "it's going to be fixed next week" and "it won't grow infinitely". We are in that gap. We will have to deal with high prices and inability to get what we want at a moment's notice, but we don't have to plan for a time, next year or ever, when everyone's got a 1 GB dumb terminal because RAM is too expensive to have anything else.

Re: Too True

I suppose it depends what kind of script you were doing that with, because there's some chance that it had less effect than you considered. For example, if this was disk space you were worried about, then the likely change was zero because the old version and the new version would fit into the same two 4 KB filesystem sectors that you were likely using. But maybe these were JavaScript libraries and you were worried about bandwidth, except that traffic was usually compressed at least with gzip at the time and gzip can and would have compressed that kind of thing significantly already. Also, if that was it, you would have gotten more effect by running a minifier against the JS before making the production version which would have removed far more bytes than that. You could have also saved some time by writing a quick script to remove trailing spaces from any line of a file rather than doing it manually.

It's a fine way to deal with boredom, but I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that it helped anyone or even everyone in aggregate. Similarly, when people claim they're working efficiently, it's possible they're playing a puzzle game about whether they can get something to work with less, a game which is fun (and when it stops being fun people stop trying), but it only helps people some of the time.

If it drags on long enough, more places will manufacture RAM. There are new companies that are in that market, with both Chinese and Indian manufacturers eager to spread out the market a little. Existing manufacturers can also increase production eventually. If the bubble doesn't break on its own, they will eventually make more because they're otherwise leaving money on the table. And, to get that far, the people buying huge amounts of it will have to continue doing so consistently even though it doesn't fail that quickly and they have limited funds. Until then, some computers will be more expensive, so people will use the ones they have for longer. This problem isn't going to grow infinitely any more than the AI companies can.

Re: "long shaken their heads at the profligate ways of modern engineering"

So you agree with your first sentence then go on to perform exactly the conflation I warned against. That assumption is often wrong in many ways. For example, we happily take credit, or at least many posters here do and I happily back them up, whenever the Y2K problem is mentioned. The prevailing description of it as a non-problem that didn't deserve the attention it got is correctly countered with the fact that it was solved through significant and widespread effort. But that was only necessary because of a quest for efficiency, and all the expensive problems avoided through prudent but still expensive work in the 1990s were first created by people shaving a few bytes off RAM use. The programmers who did that in the first place have the sometimes reasonable excuse that bytes of RAM were very limited when they wrote their version. People doing similar things today don't have that excuse. If you do things like that, you are making a bad program in an effort to demonstrate your meaningless savings.

Knowing how to use assembly did not and does not correlate with knowing enough about many other aspects of good programming. Good programmers learn both. Bad programmers sometimes learn neither. But sometimes bad programmers learn the assembly part and sometimes they use it without having gained the rest, and they have been doing this for decades. The reasons for the many changes we have seen should be familiar to any good programmer of the time; it's balancing resources. In their case, it could easily be limited CPU cycles versus limited bytes of RAM, and of course we still handle that tradeoff today. However, another important one is RAM versus programmer time, and programmer time is often the more expensive nowadays. If you write a program that uses up 80 MB of RAM and it takes you two hours, I write a program that produces identical results, runs in 8 MB, and take two weeks, it's very likely that yours will be better for the user. Either they got their program faster, you got more time to test it and fix bugs, or you can add more features than I can. Meanwhile, 72 MB of RAM on a desktop is easily available. If it's an embedded device or there's another reason why the RAM can't be afforded, then that might change.

Re: "long shaken their heads at the profligate ways of modern engineering"

To extend that, one of the other consequences of being forced to fit software into very small amounts of memory was and still is that corners get cut. Lots of good practices use a little more RAM and make sure that it's not going to get an answer wrong, if it fails there's something it can recover from, or that it checks security criteria every time rather than having a guess or cache which can become a gaping security hole. Efficiency is not the only good part of engineering standards, nor does managing efficiency prove or suggest that people have been sticking to other good practices. Unfortunately, a lot of people who like complaining or proclaiming themselves superior frequently conflate them.

New boss was bad, his attitude was ugly, so the tech team pranked him good

Re: Smut

That's a loop. I already started that clause with ""people smart enough to install the planted material without leaving some traces"". The opposite is also true: the people who think planting false evidence against a coworker they don't like is a good idea are likely not smart enough to avoid getting caught. It's a lot like the people who decide to sabotage their former employers. Most people smart enough to do that without ending up in prison realize that the temporary pleasure of hurting the people who annoyed you isn't worth the risks, hence all the articles in El Reg of people who chose to do the damage and don't have a clue why they were identified and charged in a matter of days after doing their worst.

Re: Smut

Since planting that material would be multiple criminal offenses with both the company and the victim able to raise police complaints, I'm not sure many reasonable people do fear this since most people smart enough to install the planted material without leaving some traces are also probably smart enough to understand the risks to them are higher than desired. Managers have plenty of more reasonable reasons not to anger the people they work with, though, so your underlying point is still correct.

There’s so much stolen data in the world, South Korea will require face scans to buy a SIM

Re: Scott McNealy was right. But we've built out systems on the premiss he was wrong.

There's some confusion about the use of the word hash, but you are mostly misinformed. Hashing can refer to anything that discards some data from the input and consistently produces the same output from the same input. The type we generally use on passwords are cryptographic hash functions, and it's those that do what you're describing by being difficult to reverse.

Pictures are not hashed with those, though, because you can't do any comparison between non-identical values with one of those. Pictures are hashed with perceptual hashes, and those are very different. See, for example, this technical analysis of a prominent perceptual hash and how they can partially reverse it.

There's more problems than that. You're focusing on Apple's Face ID matching. A false positive rate of 1/50,000 is pretty good if it's your phone because, even if I steal it, I can't get that many faces to point at it. For something in a big database, it's completely unusable. In South Korea's databases, that rate means your picture will match approximately 1041 other people. That's if we assume the stated rate covers people of similar backgrounds, because most of the people in South Korea will be Korean and have more similar appearances than a random sample of everyone in the world. When you have that, the only way to avoid that high a false positive problem is to include more data in your perceptual hash. It does not and cannot work like hashes on passwords do.

Re: Scott McNealy was right. But we've built out systems on the premiss he was wrong.

You can't just hash a biometric like you can a password. A password string must match identically. A biometric can't because every picture of a face will be slightly different due to changes in lighting or camera position or how you look today. They have to be compared for similarity. The more data you discard, the more unreliable that comparison will be. You don't have to keep everything, but you do have to keep plenty which, when leaked, can be used to reconstitute something that's likely to pass.

What the Linux desktop really needs to challenge Windows

Re: Happy Mint user here

Which solves a few of the problems if you are the one organizing all the meetings, but if you are attending meetings from someone else, you don't get a choice of what platform they're having them on. I'm attending a lot of meetings on Google Meet, not because I like it, but because, if I don't use it, I can't be in the meeting.

And Jitsi is an option mostly for those who run their own server. There technically are public servers, but they either come with length and quantity limitations (the main one) or are run by unknown and untrusted people (everything else). That makes sense; running a meeting server isn't cheap and they're not making a big profit from that. But I've set up a Jitsi server, in my case during the pandemic when video services were congested. You need a large server if you want to have many participants, and that is not cheap.

That works, in its limited scope, for technical people with the ability to administer and pay for their own server. For everyone else, those are all reasons to use something else, and they will.

GitHub walks back plan to charge for self-hosted runners

Re: Steal and make you pay for the privilidge.

"I'll only accept it if it's under a free license."

A perfectly logical and fair policy. I've done that myself several times, deciding when given a proprietary option that I'd look elsewhere or write my own replacement to have more rights. It stops being reasonable when, as I've seen you do, you act as if you have the legal or moral right to take something not under a free license and treat it as under one anyway. But this is getting off-topic.

You can try terminating licenses under your theory of contributory infringement, and you will fail because the person who copied the code to GitHub did not assist with infringement; Microsoft's copying would have happened without them and almost certainly did. The person was operating under the rights from the GPL in distributing copies of the source under the same terms with the copyright statements intact, they were not the copyright holder and therefore did not try to and did not inadvertently give Microsoft any rights, and therefore your attempt, if you knew of and made any progress at it, would be unsuccessful.

Meanwhile, if you tried making a legal case against Microsoft, I'd be fully supportive. I hope you use a good and competent lawyer who will work on what the law says and hopefully win, as I believe they should, rather than by yourself using what you want the law to say which could crash the case. I have been hoping for more attempts at this and more success, although existing suits against Microsoft for violating open source licenses have been failing for, in my opinion, legally dubious reasons so I have been disappointed repeatedly so far.

Re: Steal and make you pay for the privilidge.

But unfortunately for you and fortunately for the rest of us, copyright law doesn't work on the basis of what you like (taking anything people made for free) is allowed and what you don't like (putting copies of things that have a license allowing you to copy them and putting them on a platform you don't like) is forbidden.

As for the LLM, I agree with you on that, but that's nothing to do with anyone who forked a repository and put their copy on GitHub. Microsoft, or more accurately OpenAI, cloned lots more things from all over the internet and, in my opinion, it was wrong and clearly illegal each time, although courts haven't been so eager to confirm that for reasons that still irritate me. That's OpenAI's independent decision and is independent of whether GitHub is good or bad (I think it's fine but I can see why some would disagree) and whether there's any copyright-related problem with people copying code under the GPL or AGPL, and that's any version, or any number of other licenses that implement the freedom to redistribute to it (not in the slightest).

Re: Steal and make you pay for the privilidge.

Oh, now you're so big on the copyright holders rights when you're usually so happy to praise anyone violating them, and once again in a wrong way. If it is Free Software to your satisfaction, meaning GPL or AGPL, then there is no need to get permission from anybody because that's one of the four freedoms you know full well is there. I'm guessing you're now going to say that you technically never said they had to get permission, just implied it by stating that they acted without permission, but it's still a hypocritical statement on your part for two reasons.

Re: Hmm?

They're talking about a product that's been out for years, so opinions vary on how much they should be explaining what things are when they're not news. When, for example, they described in some detail what ffmpeg was, there was quite some complaint in the comments for assuming that people wouldn't know.

But to answer your question, GitHub Actions is a method for automatically doing things from repositories, like running tests when new code is pushed, making daily builds, making release packages, updating servers that run the code, all the things that are often scripted when things in a repository change. A runner is any machine that executes those tasks under the control of the system, and you can rent those from GitHub or you could connect one of your own and run their software on it. There are quite a few options in this area, generally called CI/CD (continuous integration, continuous delivery/deployment) and several advantages to having them. A basic example is an open source project where code contributions may come through from random people and the CI/CD system can run a bunch of tests on any proposed code; if the code fails one of them, then the submitter is informed and the maintainers whose time is limited don't have to look at it. It's good for the submitter because they get faster results so can fix things without waiting for maintainer review, and it's good for the maintainers because it directs their attention when there might be lots of noise.

A bigger example is a thing that I've worked on which requires various pieces of secret information for cryptography, we don't want to hand those to individual users, but we do want individual users to be able to use them for specifically defined purposes if they pass certain tests. Build that into a CI/CD workflow and the build machine can have the secrets and allow their use only under specific conditions. Before that, the secrets were held by two trusted people, you had to get their manual assistance (minor, but still) to use them, and if both I and my other colleague were not there that day, you couldn't build something with them until one of us returned, a problem they weren't solving because evidently we were the two they were assured enough wouldn't misuse them.

GitHub Actions is just one such system. It's somewhat popular because GitHub is popular and they unsurprisingly have a strong integration with it, but you don't have to use it to get that kind of system. A lot of older software shops have hand-built parts of that, but they're usually less flexible than something the project teams can customize to their particular requirements.

NIST contemplated pulling the pin on NTP servers after blackout caused atomic clock drift

Re: Boulder, Colorado, Strata 0?

Yes, but what are you asking? It does get its time from that, and power outages caused a problem with that, which is why they were trying to do something to correct a smallish but nonetheless present error caused by the outages. As the physicist put it: "The atomic ensemble time scale at our Boulder campus has failed due to a prolonged utility power outage."

India unveils a homegrown dual-core 1GHz RISC-V processor, the DHRUV64

Granted, but you still have three problems:

1. What makes you think this 1 GHz chip is a cheap 1 GHz chip? It's not. There are many cheap ones, mostly ARM ones, but this one is more expensive because it comes from a company with little experience at squeezing every cent out of manufacturing and with expansion to fund.

2. There are plenty of chips of that speed, but there aren't plenty of smartphones running them. One reason is that at a certain point, a cheaper and slower CPU doesn't change the cost of a cheap phone too much. Even if you could file a few more rupees off the cost, it's not going to make a big dent in the price and, for any of the 15% who didn't buy a phone due to cost issues, make almost no difference to their decisions.

3. Another reason those aren't so common in phones is that software that runs on smartphones expects something faster nowadays. Early Android could manage it, though not too quickly, but modern Android wants more. Even KaiOS is slow under that spec. You easily could write some new software that is more efficient, but now you have some more difficulty because your smartphone won't run too many apps and you have another expense that counteracts any savings you got by making the CPU slower.

Re: Why is Europe laughing?

So 770 MHz at 28 nm is nothing, but 1 GHz at 28 nm is impressive? They're both rather slow when comparing to market leaders. They both have the possibility of speeding up. It seems contradictory to praise one and disparage the other when they're really quite similar. In both cases, unless it generates more progress, neither is very likely to be that successful.

But let's return to ARM for a moment. What difference does it make that they're design rather than manufacture? Why does something have to be both to count? Most of the powerful processors we have are done exactly that way. If you want a nation or block of nations to be totally responsible, then a separate design and manufacturing set still counts if they're both in that block. That's what we often mean when talking about China's industry which mostly has those parts run by different companies. The EU includes several places that either can already or are working on manufacturing semiconductors, many at better than 28 nm. If someone needs an EU-only chip, they could try building an ARM design on one of those. They haven't for the same reason that any new chip company has risks: most buyers prefer cost and experience to national restrictions.

Re: Why is Europe laughing?

Why do you assume Europe has no places making CPUs? I assume we're ignoring the fact that many of ARM's engineers are still UK-based and there are companies like NXP that use them and are also based in European countries because each is only building one part of a CPU. If we only look at companies making their own RISC-V designs, there's Codasip in Germany, Cortus in France, and Imagination in the UK, and probably more because I'm no expert on who's making all the CPUs. Imagination's isn't very fast as they're mostly a GPU place, but the other two have much faster application-class RISC-V hardware.

Do you have any basis for your claim that "The IoT, telecom, industry & house automation, automotive etc... market is big enough in India & its surrounding countries, that will make Dhruv64 more than successful"? While this chip is in the performance class for many of those things, there are lots of chips in that range. They mostly compete on long-term availability, software support, and ability to buy lots of them for very low per-chip prices. Except for one area in your list, telecom, where they also tend to have optimized chips for specific software which this one doesn't do. If I was in India, or for that matter anywhere else, why should I expect this one to have those factors? Unless India is pushing people not to consider the competition, there's a lot of it around.

Nothing says that they won't be able to improve and make more competitive chips using this as a starting point, including the article. All the article said was that this chip is early in the tech development, which it is, and predicted that it won't be competitive on its own. That's often true of the first chip a company designs, and it's whether they can improve from that experience, not the raw competitiveness of that chip, which determines whether that company goes on to succeed or not. Pointing out that the initial chip isn't very competitive isn't mockery, it's honesty.

California DMV tells Tesla to ease off on those Autopilot claims

Re: Clickbait

What evidence do you want to see? You didn't ask for evidence that nobody is unhappy that they were sold a lie. If you had tried, you might have found these few thousand people or these few thousand more people? But when stating my opinion of why some people who are most responsible outside of Tesla for the damage caused by this false advertising wouldn't complain, suddenly you need evidence of a negative.

And there was only one paragraph in the comment because there was only one point. I explained why I thought people weren't complaining outside of all the people who are. It was a longish one. Since there was only one point, there was only one paragraph. In this post, there are two points and two paragraphs.

Re: Clickbait

Why haven't customers complained? Because the ones dumb enough to believe that the feature works as described in the advertising and speeches from the CEO saying it can do things it can't and will be able to do more things in short order don't know that they are uninformed. I can't say why they believe that over the warnings in the manual or on screen. Possibly, they assume those warnings are just there for liability reasons and it's really not that bad. Possibly, they didn't read either and just looked to dismiss the annoying text as soon as possible. Possibly, they're just idiots. It must be something within this area because the people concerned are the ones risking their lives (and others', but presumably they care more about their own) by ignoring that warning and some of them go further and intentionally break the systems designed to keep them from being inattentive. Those who already did that may complain, but since it's not going to inspire much sympathy because they're clearly idiots and we're going to point to all the reasons they should not have believed what they clearly did, they may not see the point in doing so.

BOFH: All through the house, not a creature was stirring except the homicidal vacuum cleaner

I've known some that, for reasons known to the architects, were entirely on one floor but had the front door on a different floor. The resident would open their front door and have to climb stairs to enter, with something else below the stairs. I've never lived in one of those but known a couple people who did. Perhaps it's one of those. It seems inefficient, to say nothing of the problems for anyone with a wheelchair or other thing making stairs unavailable.

Amazon blocked 1,800 suspected North Korean scammers seeking jobs

Re: How many?

Amazon is so big that they get tons of resumes and hold tons of interviews. It makes getting a job there difficult and it exposes them to many, many candidates. There's also one difference between the kind of people who are finding it hard to get interviews and North Korean fake workers: the former are likely telling the truth on their resume because they don't want to be fired for lying, whereas the North Koreans expect to get fired after having stolen enough data or money and have no reason not to lie. If people started claiming a lot more experience and expertise, they'd start getting more interviews. They're just less likely to succeed in them.

BBC tapped to stop Britain being baffled by AI

Re: Why a TV licence?

That was not a purely factual post. It suggests that Capita conducts the work and that the government, not the BBC, chose them. Those are alleged facts, though people are disputing the latter and saying that the BBC chose and can remove Capita. I don't have a clue which one is true (not a UK citizen), but we've already got disagreement on a fact. However, there's also an opinion in there which some are disagreeing with, namely how much each company involved is responsible for the tactics used. Downvotes (I am not among them) could be coming on questioning one of the facts alleged or on the opinion, so your complaint about them isn't valid.

Of the three areas of authority, I'd have thought the "media" was the important one in this situation. Did you delete it from your copy on purpose?

AI-authored code contains worse bugs than software crafted by humans

In fairness, it's a bit more complicated than that, because it could be more efficient to test cakes and discard them than to ensure that every cake is perfect during production. That's true in various manufacturing things, and it's the incorrect comparison people sometimes make to LLM programming. If it was faster to fix LLM errors than to write it yourself, maybe there'd be an argument. In my experience, it isn't, because the LLM creates so many more types of errors than any individual human tends to. Also in my experience, the people who say that it is tend to be the same people who don't bother to fix some of the errors and therefore produce something faster with very different quality to what they would have written themselves.

Re: Yes I know

"ChatGPT admitted it was wrong, so why use it in the first place."

Because LLMs simulate a thing that is capable of holding lots of rules at the same time, but they don't. A human can easily hold a simple rule like "Unicode quote marks [I assume] don't go in code" with almost no mental effort at all. LLMs don't. They can be prompted with that rule, and they'll stick with it for a while, but eventually, that rule falls out of the context window and is lost. The more they're using training data drawn directly from code, the more they'll stick to that rule, because the code was written by humans who did. It's chance, weighted by a bunch of factors like what's in the system prompt that got sent before your session started, the prompt that gets sent every time with your request, the length of your request, the specific model, the weights in the training data that are being used actively this time, and some that are explicitly random. There are so many that it would be impractical to predict what it's going to do without having written the LLM software and hard even if you did.

Re: I've said it once

Your phrasing is still wrong. Correctness still comes first. All the readability and maintainability in the world will not make an incorrect program useful. A correct program that is not maintainable will eventually be a problem, which is why you can't stop at correctness, but without correctness, you don't have a thing. It does get more interesting when we consider when correctness has limits, for example when we don't have to get certain types of answers right because they don't matter yet, but for most things, that is the first requirement. Maintainability can occasionally be compromised and will be more frequently than that (and that it should). Your only argument for why it would be different is that, through lack of maintainability, the program becomes incorrect, and that serves as extra proof that the incorrectness is the bigger problem and the unmaintainability is a problem because it causes incorrectness.

Re: I've said it once

The odd part is that LLMs are kind of great at the readability part but are so bad at the correctness and maintainability parts that it seems like it's mocking you. There are lots of readability problems that plenty of knowledgeable programmers perpetrate. My most frequent example is bad variable names. For example, I was recently checking some code in OpenSSL, a program I don't frequently modify, and got to read some relatively simple code that probably would have taken me about twenty seconds to read if not for the fact that they named all their variables things like addmd and mds. Doing things like if (addmd++) didn't help either because, while it's immediately obvious what that does, it's not immediately obvious why it's doing it (the answer is that addmd is basically a boolean they switch once from false to true, but they chose to do it that way instead even though they never use its actual value). LLM-generated code almost never does things like that.

The problem is that the clear, well-commented code it does write is riddled with bugs which you need to comb through to find and is never designed in a way that makes modifications easy, so when you ask for modifications, it's likely to just rewrite the function concerned. That's if you're lucky; if you're unlucky it rewrites several functions. It can over-comment, and I'm sure that would get annoying eventually, but we never get that far because the code that I'd quite enjoy seeing from some people doesn't run correctly and I still have to read it to find that out because the comments never explain that this is the part where the test function writes twenty lines that always compute to true which is why the test passes.

Purdue makes 'AI working competency' a graduation requirement

Universities in various countries have come under criticism for students who did not manage to get into employment afterward, likely related to the growing number of people getting degrees in the last few decades. That's especially true in the United States where many students are paying for their education through large loans with small if any government support for tuition fees, but it's not only there since many other countries that have more substantial support still require many students to pay relatively large amounts for people who probably don't have a lot of savings and also have loan arrangements to cover those. That means universities and programs are being judged on the success in employment of the students coming out of them, and if something is measured, the measurees are going to try to do something about it.

Whether that's what universities should be doing is a debate we easily could have, but I don't think it's as obvious a case as you describe, especially for any country providing any financial support to students. Paying part or all of a student's tuition is usually justified by the benefit that their learned skills will bring to society, and that is often also why they'll have success in employment. If that's the reason to fund them, then it makes sense to ask whether it's working. If they're getting something worth the cost even without finding jobs, that can also justify continuing to do it, but we'd likely have to be specific about what it was to convince others and to calibrate our expectations of the program we're paying for. If you're from a country that does not assist students with the payments, then you don't need to care but a lot of the students will, and since they're the ones paying and deciding what to do, they will decide on their priorities.

X sues to protect Twitter brand Musk has been trying to kill

Re: Trademarks

That is technically true, but the criteria for using it are usually pretty generous. Millions of references and an active website will almost certainly count. I don't think X has any risk of losing the trademark. Neither do I think they can prove any damages from an application that, had they done nothing, would likely have been rejected all on its own, so the rest of X's lawsuit doesn't make much sense.

New Jolla phone and Sailfish 5 offer a break from iOS-Android monotony

Re: Once bitten...

Yes, I was talking about Planet. Jolla is in a different camp.

We have different ideas of how important software updates can be and how disposable hardware is. The Gemini cost £500. That is not in the buy and discard category for me. That is more than I've spent on any of my phones individually, and not one of them has been discarded within two years. If you bought a Gemini only expecting it to last that long, maybe that explains why you find something acceptable when I do not.

There's also a big difference to me between something that runs and something that runs up-to-date software. This has annoyed me about Android from the start, because Android was always releasing new features that I wanted, my phone's hardware should have been capable of running because other phones were running it on the same SoC, but my manufacturer wouldn't give me. I can't single out Planet for that, although I'm not willing to jump aboard your "blame MediaTek" train when I can point to phones using the same MediaTek chips that had no problem getting lots more updates. But Planet could have been the exception, I think they had sufficient understanding of the market they were selling to to know that people wanted and probably expected them to, and I think their choice not to is why they can't sell things successfully anymore. For example, when they tried to sell a desktop, most of their croudfunding backers were people who posted the minimum bid just to warn other people off in the comments.

I can get Android phones that will get many years of updates (now, because they've figured out some people won't buy without that), but it's not just Android. If I'm using a Linux mode, and that's one of the major reasons I wanted one, I want that to run updated software.

Smartphones face a memory cost crunch – and buyers aren't in the mood

Re: There's already heavy discounts in 2025

I would guess not, but I can't say I know the business model of people who steal that kind of thing. There are two reasons that come to mind which make today different from the 1990s. There are so many different types of RAM that while it's all expensive, it's not as easy to easily resell any given stolen RAM. They probably could get around that, but it wouldn't help the profitability.

However, what might be harder to get around is the computers they would be stealing them from. Imagine that I've broken into an office and stolen all the RAM from desktops. Chances are that I've mostly got 8 GB DIMMs. Most memory-hungry machines will have 16 GB from two of those, whereas plenty would only need 8 GB and the criminals would be hoping that they did that with one 8 GB module rather than two 4 GB ones. But who is buying 8 GB secondhand RAM modules? People who want a lot of RAM in their desktop probably don't have so many slots that 8 GB modules are big enough. People who only need 8 or 16 probably bought that with the machine in the first place. If they could easily get 16 GB or larger modules, that might be different. That's just the desktops, but a lot of offices have laptops. Not only does that make them trickier to steal because people can take the laptops home, but a lot of laptops have the RAM soldered. If people were stealing RAM, they'd probably steal the laptops altogether, so unless you're seeing frequent thefts of laptops, I doubt you'll see them for RAM.