Posts by Herring`

Vodafone and Three permitted to tie the knot – if they promise to behave

If I had my way, the only way the bosses of these companies would be allowed to communicate with anyone is by going through their own call centres/chatbots

I felt so free when I finally quit Vodafone.

AWS says AI could disrupt everything – and hopes it will do just that to Windows

Re: Yawn....

If you take smartphones as an example, they were sold on the basis of an actual product that could do actual stuff. AI seems to be sold on fluff about what it might eventually do.

If I send someone an email carefully laying out facts and a list of implications which they need to be aware of, then I hope that they have actually read and understood the damned thing. If I get a Copillock response then what?

Oracle's Java price hikes push CIOs to brew new licensing strategies

Oracle as innovator

To be fair to them, Oracle has hated its customers and has been making their lives worse way before Amazon, Meta, Virgin Media et al jumped on the bandwagon.

Airbus A380 flew for 300 hours with metre-long tool left inside engine

Re: Multi-Fail

Well, when I did have a Triumph, the whole bonnet, wings etc. hinged up as one unit from the front. Which was great as you can sit on a front wheel and tinker. And if you do need to change the engine (for instance) you undo three bolts, lift the whole body assembly clear and you can get at everything.

Re: Multi-Fail

There is a dent in the top of a front wing on my car. To the uninformed, it looks a lot like the sort of damage that would occur when the owner - having diagnosed and fixed a tricky intermittent fault - slams the bonnet in triumph* without checking for spanners in the way.

*Skoda.

Nvidia's MLPerf submission shows B200 offers up to 2.2x training performance of H100

Years ago I worked on a thing for doing modeling. Loads of doubles, the same calcs performed over a bunch of data points...

I see all the computing power, that many FLOPS and I think: couldn't this be used for something useful? i.e. not GenAI.

All bark, no bite? Musk's DOGE unlikely to have any real power

Re: There IS NO MORE CONGRESS

Hmm. For years - decades even - politics in the US (and to a certain extent in the UK and other countries) has been captured by big corporate interests. I mean, look at the US health "system" - who is that run for the benefit of?

The difference with Trump is that he doesn't pretend. He openly courts donations from big oil in exchange for "scrapping regulations". You can bet that any tariffs he brings in will have exceptions for those showing proper fealty. The thing about people who are corrupt on the quiet is that they fear being found out. Trump doesn't care.

Brazen crims selling stolen credit cards on Meta's Threads

Re: Meta criminals

Steady on. Next you'll be saying that Amazon should have some responsibility for selling* things that burn down your house or kill your pet cat.

*If you're taking 45% commission, you are at least 45% responsible.

NHS would be hit by 'significant' costs if UK loses EU data status, warn Lords

Oh

It talks about harnessing the "power of data for economic growth."

Why does that scare the shit out of me?

Sorry, but the ROI on enterprise AI is abysmal

Re: Ignoring your customers' opinions

It's a business decision. Instead of employing people in a call centre who can't grasp your problem or help with it, you get some AI thing that can't grasp your problem or help with it.

A while back, I tried to get some help from a large internet retailer. They had delivered my package and sent me a photo of it to prove that. There was no option to communicate that, while that may or may not be my package, that is definitely not my house. No way to get it resolved. Luckily the good sport who had received the thing brought it round the next day.

'Newport would look like Dubai' if guy could dumpster dive for lost Bitcoin drive

Re: Gold is a fiat currency too

True, the price of gold is entirely defined by what people are willing to pay for it. It has a small intrinsic value. Unlike an expensive MBA - which is also "valuable" while having no practical use.

Satoshi lives in Newport?

Intel, AMD team with tech titans for x86 ISA overhaul

Re: Progress!

I also miss zero page addressing on the 6502. Those Z80 folks going on about how many registers they had when effectively the 6502 could use those 256 bytes at speed.

I don't miss 16-bit windows where using more than one data segment was a pain in the arse.

Re: Progress!

I miss far pointers

John Deere accused of being full of manure with its right-to-repair promises

Re: I hope something comes of this

Rossmann may be a bit whiny, but the message needs to be got out - if you let them, the corporations will enslave you.

Years back, I heard the saying "A libertarian is someone who believes that oppression is best left to the private sector". It doesn't seem funny anymore.

Healthcare giant to pay $65M settlement after crooks stole and leaked nude patient pics

Re: Bigger fines, criminal liability for executives for not securing data

In an ideal world ....

Yes, having your data on the same network as people are reading their phishing emails, browsing dodgy websites etc. is reckless. If your important system has a browser UI, you only need port 443 open to it. Can't encrypt files if you can't access files.

In practise though actual corporate systems are held together with people doing stuff like Integration by Spreadsheet (export system A data to Excel, mess about with it, import it into system B). You could make corporate systems much more secure but it would take time and money - and might affect the C'Suite's boni,

We're in the brute force phase of AI – once it ends, demand for GPUs will too

Re: Programming techniques are yet to be refined

I sometime wonder: given what we were able to make a 6502 do with bugger-all RAM, what could you get out of a multicore 64bit system with many GB using the same techniques? But then development would be very slow.

To patch this server, we need to get someone drunk

Re: 'Exit interview'

I recall working at a place where we had a particularly crap developer. They had been recruited by the head of IT though so it took years to finally be rid of them. Their leaving gift was to check all their changes in. Chaos ensued.

LEGO's Concorde is the only supersonic jet you can build for the price of a fancy dinner

What is the max skin temperature?

I heard/read somewhere that the reason the max skin temp of the real thing was 127℃ was because it made the maths easier for the engineers. Which makes sense after a little thinking.

I also heard about an SR-71 crew who were buzzing around the Caribbean being alerted to "Civilian traffic at your altitude" and being "WTF?"

EU AI Act still in infancy, but those with 'intelligent' HR apps better watch out

When they say "fired" what they actually mean is "let go with a massive payoff and sure to land another similar gig soon".

How deliciously binary: AI has yet to pay off – or is transforming business

Re: Something to look forward to

Ah, Virgin. I recall a while back when I was lucky enough to be one of their customers. When they put the cable in, they bodged it so it popped out of the edge of the pavement, over the edging, before diving down under my front lawn. Then someone/something pulled a loop out making a serious trip hazard. Having elderly neighbours who could be injured, I called Virgin and explained the situation. A week or two later I get a call asking me if I was going to be in on a date for the engineer. I pointed out that the problem was outside and that I didn't need to be in.

Anyway, the whole saga went on for over a year including:

Six visits from people who "didn't have the equipment" to cut the pavement edging.

Cards through my door saying they had called by I was out.

Four or more calls from me pointing out the problem and that they could be in for a nasty lawsuit

Re: Something to look forward to

Well, replacing humans - who have neither the knowledge nor the authority to help you - with ML stuff - which just makes shit up ... At least you won't have to wait in a queue while they experience unusually high call volumes.

Something to look forward to

the thousands of lawsuits from people who were fed bollocks by customer service bots.

Boeing Starliner crew get their ISS sleepover extended

A lesson

They should've packed more changes of underwear

AI models face collapse if they overdose on their own output

Re: Prediction

Yeah, but I'm not sure I miss being directed to goatse/tubgirl/lemonparty etc.

Doctorow's characterisation of the web now as "five sites, each of which consist of links to the other four" is pretty reasonable. Social media was a horrible invention.

Re: Prediction

Pretty much.

The problem is that the models themselves are trying to kill off the human-written material that they feed on. If the search LLM gives you the answer, why visit the blog/read the article? Not one reads the articles, no one writes the articles. Eventually we are left with a web where the only writers are AI and the only readers are AI. Web 5.0

Oracle's Java pricing brews bitter taste, subscribers spill over to OpenJDK

All you need to know

about Oracle is that there are consultancies who are making money advising other companies how to navigate the Oracle licensing.

How did a CrowdStrike file crash millions of Windows computers? We take a closer look at the code

Re: "config files"

I have also heard this theory. If true, then all the bad guys out there now know how to get evil shit executed in ring 0

Re: Why was this flagged as boot-start

Well there clearly is a simple (and now documented) way to crash it

Agile Manifesto co-author blasts failure rates report, talks up 'reimagining' project

Anecdata

What I have observed that works in the past is skilled developers and committed SMEs. OK, something to track things to be done is useful to make sure things don't get missed. Everyone talks to each other as needed - not just at a fixed time every day. You want to get a UI right? Dev and SME sit down and look at it, tweak it and make it good. No tickets, fix turned around in 90 seconds. Really good automated tests - this gives the confidence to make changes.

Things that do not work: No SMEs available to work with the dev team. Massive heavy processes. Blindly following procedures/rituals/ceremonies instead of understanding what actually helps. Not having a "big picture" that can say "hey, all these tickets are the same underlying problem". Oh, and pineapple on pizza.

Stop installing that software – you may have just died

Did you get signal?

64% of people not happy about idea of AI-generated customer service

I had an issue with a Large Internet Retailer (I know I should stop using them). No option in their system for "Yes, you sent me a photo which may be of my parcel, but it's outside someone else's house".

The business process is:

1. Sign up customer to long contract

2. Replace all customer service with AI

3. Don't give the AI the ability to cancel a contract

4. Profit

EU Competition Commissioner hints at Nvidia GPU probe, refers to 'huge bottleneck'

Make it stop

I have nothing against NVidia but the sooner that companies realise that this AI/LLM thing is a bunch of arse the better. Otherwise the future is half the world's electricity generation being used to power the bots that generate most of the content on the web and the other bots which read it.

Outback shocker left Aussie techie with a secret not worth sharing

Those days are nearly gone

Where your phone was powered from the batteries at the exchange. So in a powercut, you could use your landline (all the mobile masts having died) to get through to your DNO. Who wouldn't be able to answer as all their VoIP stuff was dead.

Row erupts over data sharing function in UK doctor software

Re: NHS England have asked for that 'off switch' to be removed

'who exactly' (names) in NHS' has 'asked', and who 'asked' them to 'ask'

I think if we've learned anything from the Horizon debacle (and we haven't) it's that organisations hide behind that sort of language

Japan's digital minister declares victory against floppy disks

Re: The next....

I thought politics was sold to the private sector decades ago. Do we think that the massive donations from the rich are just because they "thought it would be nice"?

Re: The next....

In a few years, all file formats will be proprietary. To use them you have to be renting the software that connects to the vendor's cloud. Reverse engineering the format will be illegal. When the vendor goes bust, all that data will be lost. Like tears ... in the rain.

EFF wants FTC to treat lying chatbots as 'unfair and deceptive' in eyes of the law

Comment

Well, the latest Existential Comic seemed appropriate.

FreeDOS and FreeBSD prove old code never dies, just gets nifty updates

BSD? Dying?

Have Netcraft confirmed it?

Yes, I am old.

NASA ought to pay up after space debris punched a hole in my roof, homeowner says

Re: FYI

I think they are claims for different things. So, yeah, the property loss is one thing, but the hassle and stress of having space crap falling on your house isn't covered by that policy.

Re: FYI

No, that's normal. Claim subrogation happens when your insurer covers you for something but that something is caused by another entity - so the insurer will claim from that other entity.

Record labels gang up to sue AI music generator duo into utter oblivion

So

The AI stuff can generate derivative, bland, unoriginal drivel. I am surprised that the labels aren't suing them for copying their business model.

X boss Elon Musk tries to make nice with world at ad biz conference

Re: Karma

He seems intent on proving that his will alone cannot bend the world to suit him. Thinking back to a famous early European king, he is definitely a Cnut.

Oracle Java license teams set to begin targeting Oracle users who don't think they use Oracle

I see how this works

Someone in a company clicks on a link that they shouldn't have and then a shady organisation shakes them down for millions. Sounds a lot like ransomware to me.

World's top AI chatbots have no problem parroting Russian disinformation

Reality has a well documented liberal bias.

Self-driving cars safer in sunlight, twilight another story

If I had any money to invest

It wouldn't be going to Ark Investment Management

Microsoft sends Copilot Pro's GPT Builder to the digital dumpster

Re: People will starve.

Pizza bases

Tomato sauce

Ham

Pineapple

Glue

Stones