Posts by Herring`

Supposedly big-brained execs are outsourcing decisionmaking to AI

Re: Why would it be bad

pretty much all human achievements are built on cooperation and not competition.

And people tinkering in sheds.

Hard drives already sold out for this year – AI to blame

Is it just me

Or is the AI madness like the Shoe Event Horizon?

Re: I still use HDDs.

I just got a new PC and was going to convert the old one into a NAS. So I got reamed on the RAM and now I can look forward to the same on the extra HDDs I was going to buy.

Imagine if we used all this money/effort/technology on something more useful that generating shit art.

Founder ditches AWS for Euro stack, finds sovereignty isn't plug-and-play

Re: Migrating cloud apps is more than location

Well, yes. And you just have to look at what the tech giants do to people once they have them locked-in. Maybe I am into wishful thinking as it's past beer o'clock here but it is surely not beyond the wit of man to create standard APIs for standard services. Then providers can compete on uptime/service/price/which services are offered.

You can jailbreak an F-35 just like an iPhone, says Dutch defense chief

Re: You'd like to think

Given that all these organisations are rolling out AI crap, it is quite possible that it's in there somewhere

6,000 execs struggle to find the AI productivity boom

Re: The negative reason why you need AI

In theory, GDPR allows the individual to ask for the data and algorithm behind any automated decision made about them. Given that any A so-called I system cannot do this, I would love to see someone take this to court. Admittedly, this might lead to the company not hiring someone to say that they had information that led them to believe that they were the sort of tetchy wanker who would take them to court.

Final step to put new website into production deleted it instead

Re: The thing that stood out for me...

If you're not allowed to make the change yourself then the person who is must do the rehearsals.

Ah, but they are the special ones anointed by management. These gods are far too busy to participate in your rehearsals.

Seriously though, I do feel the pain. You bother to do a carefully tested list of steps that need to be carried out in order. Then when it goes tits, they come for you saying "it didn't work". And you ask

"Did you follow the procedure exactly?"

"Of course"

"Really?"

"Yes!"

"Every step, in this order?"

...

Tech support chap invented fake fix for non-problem and watched it spread across the office

Re: Wont someone think of the...

Assuming they don't move the cupboard around, it's both.

Study confirms experience beats youthful enthusiasm

People are really bad at extrapolating.

The LLM thing seems to be that experienced developers can use it because they understand the code. So companies stop hiring junior devs. Where do experienced developers come from? Is the future that in 20 years, nobody knows how anything works and has no idea how to fix it?

I remember in the late 90s/early 2000s people going on about the "demographic timebomb". Because some folks spotted that people who were in their 60s in 2005 would be in their 80s in 2025. As a result, the welfare budget (mostly pensions) and the NHS would be taking a beating. But no government would ever get elected on the basis of admitting that the choices were tax rises, pension cuts or some sort of Carrousel system (Logan's Run).

Expecting a society that only cares about the next quarterly results, the next election, tomorrow's stock price to do anything about a problem like global warming seems naive. Also, have a nice day.

Trump promises nuclear datacenter permits in 3 weeks, calls Greenland 'big beautiful ice'

Re: "It took the focus away from cost of living and abused young girls"

Ah, but Trump owns the SCOTUS.

Concorde at 50: Twice the speed of sound, twice the economic trouble

The mark II

I recall that there was talk of a Concorde B. It would have had a wider body and more powerful engines - so they could ditch the reheat that used a stupid amount of fuel. Ah well. On PPrune, there is a very long thread with contributions from engineers, flight crew, cabin crew and all sorts. It took me about 3 days to read it.

AI hasn't delivered the profits it was hyped for, says Deloitte

Re: AI does make a huge difference.

Stupid idea of the week: companies which operate these call centres ought to be required to have "reverse premium numbers". So they have to pay you for the time you spend on hold or being shuffled around different teams that cannot help. You could get Virgin Media broadband and retire.

Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue

The other sound that can get people moving is the sound of a bloody great wrench left on a mill drawbar spinning up.

Re: Muck inside

Went to a client who had a small PC just for downloading to the CNC machines which they said had failed (after about 4 years). It was in a little office space with the door propped open and a whole bunch of grinding machines nearby. Basically the inside was all covered with a thick layer of metal dust. I was impressed that it had kept working at all. Sure, you could get one with an IP67 case, but it was cheaper to just replace them when they failed.

AI industry insiders launch site to poison the data that feeds them

I don't see any artists disclosing whose work they trained on and how their work derived from it.

Nigel Tufnel explained that he was influenced by Mozart and Bach for the composition of the piece Lick My Love Pump.

CES 2026 worst in show: AI girlfriends, a fridge that won't open unless you talk to it, and more

The way it seems to be is:

Q: Why does it need to be connected to the internet?

A: To download security updates

Q: Why does it need security updates?

A: Because it's connected to the internet

At some point, you wonder whether these companies are trying to provoke the revolution

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

Re: Humanity is a bug, not a feature

Having written a lot of C/C++ in the past, the favourite bugs have to be those that disappear in a debug build or even when adding some fprintfs to the log file. Yeah, it's probably a buffer overflow or something with writing some data to an address. That was 25 years ago so the tools weren't as good as I assume they are now.

But the other thing that has changed is that, even if you program in x64 assembler, things are not deterministic. In between what the CPU microcode decides to do with your code, what the OS decides to switch to, any IO results .... If you want to know precisely what the CPU is doing and how long it will take, then get yourself a 6502 kit and write your own interrupt handlers.

Europe's cloud challenge: Building an Airbus for the digital age

Re: Half way already

I have seen comments to the effect that, since the US no longer wants to play nice with anyone, if other countries were to drop the DMCA-style laws, it would give a massive shot in the arm to tech in the rest of the world. It might be Mr Doctorow who suggested it

AI is rewriting how power flows through the datacenter

Question

Where is this electricity going to come from? You can't just knock up a 1GW+ CCGT overnight. Nor can you instantly update the grid to cope - thermal constraints are a thing. Also what does the UPS + generator setup look like for a 1GW datacentre?

I suspect that when the bubble bursts, that will be one of the excuses: "It would've worked if only we'd had enough power".

What the Linux desktop really needs to challenge Windows

Re: Audio

Thank you. The 18i20 is what I have.

Re: Audio

I need a new home PC. Maybe try it with Lunix and my hardware and see how it goes. Win 11 seems to be an abomination.

Audio

I am tempted to switch but whenever I've looked up running a DAW like Reaper with Focusrite hardware, people seem to have issues. Not that you don't get plenty of issues on Windows.

Re: snapflatimages

With a browser, I can see benefits to running it in its own VM. For a start, you could stop it eating all your RAM

Infinite Machine e-scooter is like the offspring of a Vespa and a Cybertruck

Electric

Just as an FYI, the fastest production motorbike is electric - the Lightning LS-218. It looks like a regular motorbike. I would buy one except that I don't have a bike licence, I can't afford it and I would be dead within the first week

Faith in the internet is fading among young Brits

Re: Over 55's

Well, yes. We were in on the early days and know that there is more to the web than five giant websites that consist of screenshots of the other four. The trick that the big companies pulled off was to make their stuff useful to the point where it was essential and then make it toxic and profitable. It is possible to have actual community connection on the intarwebs but not on social media.

Hot for its bot, McKinsey may cut thousands of jobs

I keep mixing up Kinsey and McKinsey. It's all about people getting fucked anyway.

Re: Glut of MBAs

Careful. Like the escape of farmed salmon, all these former McKinsey et al staff being released into the wild could cause damage.

Techie 'forgot' to tell boss their cost-saving idea meant a day of gaming

Re: Sometimes it seemed that …

I am old enough to remember setting up Novell NetWare 2.x servers for clients.

Barts Health seeks High Court block after Clop pillages NHS trust data

Re: Negligence?

It's an interesting question. I mean, I have a static IP address, I could stand up a box at home with MS Access and offer to host people's sensitive data. Anyone taking me up on the offer would be negligent. Given the repeated high-profile breaches, are data controllers who choose any of the major cloud providers negligent? Proving that in court would be tricky but I would love to watch the fallout..

As humanoid robots enter the mainstream, security pros flag the risk of botnets on legs

Having seen videos of Musk's efforts on this front, if I wanted something that appears vaguely human, doesn't understand simple instructions and is really expensive, I'd look for an MBA

You have ten seconds to comply

(Mixing it up a bit)

Tech leaders fill $1T AI bubble, insist it doesn't exist

Onion

The info you need is here

Lawyer's 6-year-old son uses AI to build copyright infringement generator

Imagine having to tell people your dad is Elon Musk. This is a problem for more and more kids these days

Re: i for see a time

The big content owners may be upset about AI using their IP, but the lure of being able to produce endless bland, formulaic content without having to pay actors or go to the expense of actually making a film attracts them (ref Joan is Awful). What they have missed though is that Altman et al are putting the tools to create this crappy content into everyone's hands.

Copackaged optics have officially found their killer app - of course it's AI

Imagine

if you took all the money and inventiveness that's being used for AI and instead did something useful

AI's trillion dollar deal wheel bubbling around Nvidia, OpenAI

Economics

It seems to work like this: every so often, rich people go mental and start pretending that things that are actually work fuck-all are now worth a fortune (AI, mortgage-backed securities). Then it all goes tits and the ordinary folks who had nothing to do with it end up suffering while the rich walk away largely unscathed. Regulations might be introduced to "prevent this happening again".

ISPs more likely to throttle netizens who connect through carrier-grade NAT: Cloudflare

Re: IdioTs

If it isn't connected, how will your kitchen sink show you adverts?

Microsoft's ancient icon library still lurks deep within Windows 11

Re: For fun

When the great appraiser comes to write against your name,

He writes not that you won or lost but how you adhered to the company SAFe variant

That's the way it was/is. Fun fact: fonts were actually (resource-only) DLLs. So if you made one with a DllMain function, then that would execute - in the same context as the loading program - when the font loaded.

Texas senators cry foul over Smithsonian's pricey Space Shuttle shuffle

Re: Thinking like a senator...

OK, 12,000 weather balloons should be enough to lift the thing. Then we just use ropes to tow it. The defunding of the NOAA means there should be a load of spares.

AI gets more 'meh' as you get to know it better, researchers discover

Re: Everyday in every way 'AI' is getting too big to fail ... yet too small to work !!!

The problem is that the 'AI' is good at being plausible BUT does not 'know' what is 'Right'

So it can replace the MBAs, but nobody who does real work

Stargate is nowhere near big enough to make OpenAI's tie-ups with AMD and Nvidia work

Modern capitalism seems to be about over-promising to raise investment. OpenAI, Tesla, all that lot only talk about how great their tech is going to be. Never about what it is now. We're coming up to the 10th anniversary of when Tesla cars were supposed to be able to drive anywhere with no human input. People were supposed to be on Mars years ago. It's all bollocks. And yet the money keeps pouring in,

How Google profits even as its AI summaries reduce website ad link clicks

Re: Geese and Golden eggs?

Current LLMs never swear or disagree with you. You silly poo.

Intel cutting cutting-edge node funds would mean no more Moore's Law

Making stuff is hard

Stock buybacks are easy. It's the American Way.

'It looks sexy but it's wrong' – the problem with AI in biology and medicine

Make it stop

Discussing these things in the context of writing code, my point was:

- Yes, these tools can help expert developers as experts can tell wrong from right

- If it replaces junior developers, where are the future expert developers going to come from?

Also I am not convinced that automating the process of making shit up on the internet is a worthy goal.

Trump AI plan rips the brakes out of the car and gives Big Tech exactly what it wanted

Re: Completely fu¢king mad

Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.

- Alcuin of York

BT chief says AI could deliver more job cuts, hints at Openreach sell-off

BT

Is it possible for BT customer service to get worse?

Put Large Reasoning Models under pressure and they stop making sense, say boffins

Re: They're going to build a super-intelligence though...

And I demand that I am Vroomfondel

Some signs of AI model collapse begin to reveal themselves

The end stage

All content on the internet will be composed by LLMs. And the only readers will be other LLMs.

Then we can all go outside and play.

Meta's still violating GDPR rules with latest plan to train AI on EU user data, says noyb

Training?

They train LLMs on social media posts and then act surprised when it starts spewing unadulterated bollocks. OK.