Posts by Herring`

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.

Tencent slows pace of GPU rollout as DeepSeek helps it wring more performance from fewer accelerators

Re: Not surprised...

Delivery pressure. Back in the day we used to spend a lot of time trying to get the most out of very limited hardware. Now the execs want their latest internet brainfart implemented yesterday for £4.50. If that means dragging in a tonne of libraries and writing code in some crappy interpreted language, then so be it.

HP Inc settles printer toner lockout lawsuit with a promise to make firmware updates optional

Re: Update optional?

Careful now. Apparently not buying a Tesla is illegal.

UK must pay cyber pros more than its Prime Minister, top civil servant says

Thing that bothers me

The public sector is often publicly ripped-off by the big c***sultancies on projects that ought to be helping people. Just maybe, if the government had a team of people who actually understand big IT stuff and could call out these companies on their bullshit then that might help.

Here's one bit of free advice: before you spend billions on a system that does $stuff, maybe consider spending a much smaller sum on trialling and testing what $stuff should be. After all, what is the point in developing something that works "at scale" when it doesn't do anything useful

Official HP toner not official enough after dodgy update, say users

Re: Investment?

If enough people bought HP printers, used them until the ink ran out and then shipped them back to HP, you could bankrupt the fuckers.

A lot of e-waste though

Judge says Meta must defend claim it stripped copyright info from Llama's training fodder

Make it stop

These models were trained on material entirely created by humans. When the models make it uneconomical for humans to create that material, there will be no new ideas, no new art, no new music, no new literature. Everything will be a pastiche, a shallow derivative of things gone before. And the point of the human race is lost.

Still, nice weather today.

Cheap 'n' simple sign trickery will bamboozle self-driving cars, fresh research claims

Prediction

Making self-driving work properly is expensive and difficult (maybe too difficult). There will be lobbying to introduce laws to make doing stuff to confuse robocars a crime (see jaywalking). Then "doing stuff to confuse robocars" will be widened to include things like walking or cycling. Buying politicians has long been more cost-effective than solving problems

Re: Old Meatbag Here

But you must check the In DOS flag before you do anything.

Oh Brother. Printer giant denies dirty toner tricks as users cry foul

Re: The dirty little secret no-one wants to admit

Would there be vulnerabilities if your printer didn't connect to the sodding internet?

Techie pulled an all-nighter that one mistake turned into an all-weekender

Re: All nighter

Spot on. In my youth, I got roped into trying to start a company, it was me and this other guy (who turned out to be ... nevermind). And yeah, to get stuff to customer then coding for 48 or even 72 hours in a row wasn't unknown. Debugging the crap that I had written while sleep-deprived took even longer.

The fact that there are duty time limits for pilots is instructive. The fact that these limits have to be enshrined in law so that airline execs don't push pilots too far is also instructive.

Profit slide at HP can only mean one thing: Hammer time

Re: Who will be next?

The P/E ratio of Tesla is around 175. Which is lunacy.

I get the impression that the founders of Tesla started off OK and the cars were new and innovative. Since then, Musk has brought empty promises, faked demos and the Wankpanzer. The problem the US has now is that the big tech companies - which are all of the gains in the stock market plus a bit - have nothing new. They are busy investing trillions in AI "solutions" with no trillion-dollar problem that requires them. Meanwhile they are trying to up the income by making everything a subscription - no such thing as buying a gizmo and just using it until it breaks.

I do believe it's time for a beer.

HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due to 'feedback'

Award

Sounds like they might be in the running for the Larry Ellison Award for hating your customers the most. That and their ink antics.

AI summaries turn real news into nonsense, BBC finds

What did the Romans ever do for us?

Cirencester to Stow would be part of the Fosse Way

The S/N ratio of the internet was already in decline. Adding tonnes of LLM generated shite may tip it over into being completely useless.

And then we can all go outside and play.

Why UK Online Safety Act may not be safe for bloggers

Re: First amendment ?

Pedant: The 10th Amendment wasn't a founding fathers' thing. Some of them opposed it.

O/T: I am a little surprised that Musk hasn't yet sued to be listed as one of the founding fathers.

Why is my Mitel phone DDoSing strangers? Oh, it was roped into a new Mirai botnet

We never had this problem

when it was pulse dialling and racks of uniselectors.

Tiny Linux kernel tweak could cut datacenter power use by 30%, boffins say

Re: if hardware is twice as fast next year

I feel old in that I have spent a lot of time getting C++ code to run faster - execution profilers, custom heap management, that sort of stuff. These days even assembler is a high-level language - the processor is performing all sorts of shenanigans with register renaming, out-of-order execution, speculative execution, contributing to the climate breakdown that may kill us all ...

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

"Websites"

So an FTP server is fine?

Or a specific app. Or email. Or ....

Pastor's divine 'dream' crypto scheme indicted by Uncle Sam

Re: When running a Ponzi scheme ....

I guess you need to know when to hold. Know when to fold. Know when to walk away. Know when to run,

DEF CON's hacker-in-chief faces fortune in medical bills after paralyzing neck injury

Heartwarming

I notice how the article doesn't mention which insurance company it was. Or who their CEO is. Or list their movements over the next few weeks.

Eutelsat OneWeb blames 366th day for 48-hour date disaster

Re: Oh FFS.. It's coding 101

To be honest, I am thinking a 1024bit number which is the representation of Planck times since the big bang. Fixes everything. Almost

Re: Oh FFS.. It's coding 101

Quite. This is why I have always insisted my team stores everything in sidereal days and converts.

Pornhub pulls out of Florida, VPN demand 'surges 1150%'

Interesting

The pr0n company seems to have more qualms about collecting personal data than most other web providers.

Eight things that should not have happened last year, but did

Re: Should Not Have Happened But Did......

Well, in the US they have tested a new method for corporate accountability but it's probably a bit extreme for most.

Million GPU clusters, gigawatts of power – the scale of AI defies logic

Why?

Just why?

We told Post Office about system problems at the highest level, Fujitsu tells Horizon Inquiry

Here we go

I listened along to the Grenfell Inquiry Podcast with the totally excellent Kate Lamble (whom the BBC made redundant like the bastards they have become). The passing of blame amongst the different parties quickly became farcical. A terrible thing happened and it was nobody's fault. Because nobody wanted to ask the questions when knowing the answers and failing to act would make it their fault.

As for so-called "Expert Witnesses" who stood up in court and, under oath, stated that the data in the Horizon system was 100% correct, well fuck them. Actually this could've been a legitimate use of a distributed blockchain - which is a rare thing indeed.

Apple Intelligence summary botches a headline, causing jitters in BBC newsroom

Re: apathy to AI services

Web 5.0: All content on the web is produced by machines and only read by machines. So the people can go outside and play.

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.