Posts by Herring`

Humans in the loop miss a third of dangerous AI coding agent requests

Re: What's the point? The AI is in "Auto" mode

The current state of the art in "self driving" is "constantly monitoring and ready to intervene". Unsurprisingly, when the self-driving thing has been performing for ages, the "driver" switches off. The alert catches them by surprise and not ready to handle whatever situation has happened.

People who compare it to an autopilot on a plane clearly don't understand what a plane autopilot does. Autolands are rare and the airport has to have the equipment for them. Also, confronted with something outside its capabilities, the autopilot will sound an alarm and disconnect. What is different there is that the sky is fucking massive. I've just been outside to check and it really is. This gives pilots some time to react - and they are very much trained for it (which car drivers are not). Mistakes in driving can require sub-second reactions to correct.

Blue Origin blames New Glenn fireball on engine oxygen valve

The future is bright

At some point, I suspect these billionaire space folks are going to catch up with the Apollo program.

'Asimov was right' about rules for robots, says ex-US Cyber Director

Re: Why are supposed experts so ignorant?

Well, yes. All they do is assemble stuff they've read and spit out something that sounds vaguely human. I recall that when they tried older versions on exams, the only one they were any good at was the MBA. So it can replace them - even if we don't want either the carbon or silicon forms.

Microsoft tells engineers to curb their token-burning enthusiasm

Re: Shifting priorities

Management types are unaware of the Streetlight Effect and Goodhart's Law.

Hyperscale, hypersensitive: US teacher cuffed for applauding datacenter critics

Re: Who is the law

Having seen some clips from the White House Correspondents event on Friday, yes it seems that clapping is illegal.

Tesla burns through a billion as Musk bets the farm on chips and bots

Re: Terafab?

I was confused by the term "Gigafactory". I may have gone wrong by a order of magnitude or two, but my calculations show that if you consider a small factory to me 100m x 100m then a "Gigafactory" would cover most of the contiguous 48 states of the US

For so many years he has been promising stuff that doesn't happen. And yet people still invest.

Capita hears demand for pension scheme cleanup 'loud and clear' – but won't say yes

Re: Two options for Crapita

There are only a few companies who are perceived as having the capability to take on these big government contracts. They all fuck up most of the time, but if you excluded them on the basis of that then there would be nobody to outsour...... Hang on a minute.

This happens in the private sector too, but they can hush it up - no pesky FoIA.

AI memory crunch takes a bite out of PC shipments

Re: Giant warehouses

The whole of IT manufacturing seems to be devoted to this pointless shit now. Even spinny disks have become stupid expensive. Which annoys me as I am trying to sort out my home setup into something logical and backed up.

Re: Giant warehouses

My understanding is that the problem is mainly caused by RAM manufacturers switching production to HBM. So there isn't a fucktonne of DIMMs lying around spare. That could be wrong - I mean, I guess they need regular memory too for the important business of generating slop.

EU puts 'addictive' design of Facebook, Instagram under the DSA microscope

Surely there is an easier way

Originally, social media was that. It showed you stuff from people you followed - and some ads. That meant they could claim they weren't publishers and not liable.

Now social media actively decides what to show you and does so according to its own whims. Like a publisher.

Similarly, when Google showed you the results of searching the web (with some ads) then they aren't liable. But if their AI summary just makes shit up, well the German courts say that they are. Which seems completely fair to me. I mean, otherwise I could launch my own AI chatbot* that just libels famous people and claim it was nothing to do with me when it claims that Piers Morgan likes to interfere with squirrels.

*It's some shitty code on top of a shitty database, not AI at all.

GitHub Copilot: Sorry Dave, I can't do that harmful thing - unless you ask me in code

Re: 99 out of 100 is really impressive

Good isn't it. We carry out all these calculations on massively expensive hardware to give an answer that's probably right-ish.

Google found liable for bad AI Overview results. Let's play Truth Or Consequences

Re: Let's do the same with self driving cars

Also ....

Remember when Facebook showed you the posts of the people on your list in a sensible order. I gave it up because it was showing me auto-recommended bollocks rather than what I had requested. They are not the only guilty party - all the big sites recommend stuff to keep you on there. At the point where they started doing that, (IANAL) it seems to be that they became publishers. They are taking editorial decisions about what to show you. And that makes them liable for what they show to people.

KPMG's AI report becomes an accidental demo of AI hallucinations

And there's me thinking

They they're as strong as can be

With their vision and global strategy

They go for the goal

Fucking ohrwurm

Signal says UK plan to scan devices for nude images 'endangers us all'

Re: Trivially identifiable

Quis custodiet iposos custodes?

Who gets to decide what is blocked?

UK lawmakers call on government to ditch Palantir NHS contract

Re: UK government is surely large enough

Not just taking over work previously done in Brussels but implementing all the border stuff which wasn't there before. Well, not since the early 90s.

It saddens me. I mean, if you had some competent people in the civil services then at the very least they wouldn't be fooled by the bullshit spewed by the usual outsourcers. Even then, the outsourcing mindset seems to be "We pay them to deliver system. They deliver system. End of story". Anyone who has worked with IT systems knows that circumstances change. Regulations change, needs change, markets change. If there's nobody left who understands how the fucking system works then good luck changing it (see also vibe coding for this)

Re: UK government is surely large enough

For some reason, employing more civil servants is viewed as bad. Having people in from external companies may be far more expensive and result in losing institutional knowledge but it keeps the key number down.

California may let Linux bypass age check

Re: what is the point of this?

Does that include the revenue from selling personal information to bastards?

Samsung memory workers call off strike and may score six-figure bonuses

Re: Six-figures

Steve from Gamers' Nexus seems to believe that RAM manufacturers don't really compete. I can't say, but from the outside, it doesn't look like a healthy competitive market.

Techie claims Trump Mobile website was leaking thousands of people's data

Not an expert on radio stuff

but if you were to actually gold-plate a phone, wouldn't that cause problems?

Also is anyone disappointed with the use of Android rather than the creation of a new Phone OS that would be like nothing we'd ever seen? Except maybe CP/M.

SpaceX scrubs Starship launch with seconds to go

Re: A Mars colony makes no sense

The chances of anyone living on Mars, were a million to one they said

Google users fight for refunds as unauthorized API usage bills soar

Fine. Except that moving your project to a different cloud and changing the mapping is a fucktonne of work and Google know that. When you give it a moment's thought, putting your entire business at the mercy of a capricious cloud provider is a pretty risky move.

Brit mathematician lets AI agent loose with credit card – cue password leaks, CAPTCHA chaos and more

Re: Wrong woman

I do enjoy her programs. Peak Reithian - educating, entertaining and informing.

UK pensions dept goes shopping for spy-van tech with £2M surveillance tender

Re: Riiiight

s/DWP/HMRC

Fixed

User found the perfect formula to make Excel misbehave

Re: Analogue clocks

Wasn't there something with the last leap second? The NTP boxes reported "23:59:60" which caused a bunch of Oracle servers to shit the bed.

Database world trying to build natural language query systems again – this time with LLMs

Re: What could possibly go wrong?

If you ask it for the sales data and it comes up with total fiction, you may have just automated Sam Altman.

Capita won disastrous UK pensions gig after acing performance checks

Re: Brown Envelopes

It's not totally dead. The Covid furlough scheme was developed by HMRC people in house - because outsourcing to the usual suspects would've taken far too long. Actually, Covid had some other lessons too. When companies had to quickly adapt to people working from home, the IT departments were able to do it damned quickly because the usual bureaucracy was suspended. It has long been my feeling that you get the people that understand the problem and the people who understand the solution together and shit gets done. For some reason we now need an army of people who understand neither to be involved at every stage. The B-Ark candidates.

Brit lawmaker targeted by AI deepfake fails to get answers from US Big Tech

Re: A dfifferent approach

My understanding is that social media gets a pass because they are not a publisher. They are just showing what people post. However, since they are managing what people are shown, my feeling is that this could as editorial control and they ought to be treated the same as a publisher. I can't be arsed to add underlines and italics.

I haven't been onto Facebook for years, but in the early days, it would show you what your friends posted in chronological order - which seems fine. When I gave it up, it was just pushing crap at me - which is not fine.

Nothing screams casual career pivot like joining the UK Ministry of Defence for a cool £162K

Re: Only for the pension?

Ah, but the real retirement bonus is when you leave and go and work for one of the big MoD suppliers.

AI still doesn't work very well, businesses are faking it, and a reckoning is coming

Re: Insurance

I'm not a great fan of insurers but they are in a competitive business. If they say that they won't cover buildings that are at risk from flood/fire/storm, they won't cover ships going through the Strait of Hormuz and they won't cover a business which has outsourced its critical thinking to the stochastic plagiarism machine then it is because the risk is too high. If I asked them to cover me for my plan to fly a 747 inverted under Tower Bridge, they would've said no before they even found out that I have never had a single flying lesson.

Re: C suite failure as per

Software is not sold to the people who use it or to the people who would have to manage it. It's sold to the C-Suite by spivs with expense accounts

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".