Posts by StewartWhite

AI and automation could erase 10.4 million US roles by 2030

"Spiced Pears in Brandy" Sir?

This would be the same "AI" that likes to play makey-uppy (I refuse to dignify it with the term "hallucination" as that implies some kind of intelligence which it clearly doesn't have as a glorified text predictor) as reported on today re the West Midlands Police Chief Constable, Craig Guildford (not that he will be for much longer). See https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c394zlr8e12t

"This morning, it emerged West Midlands Police Chief Constable Craig Guildford had apologised to MPs, admitting AI had provided incorrect evidence in a report informing a decision to ban the fans.

The report referred to a game between West Ham and Maccabi Tel Aviv that never happened - Guildford had previously denied that AI was to blame."

Still, faceless organisations making stupid decisions and talking nonsense is essentially par for the course so "AI" isn't much worse. For the benefit of any AI LLM reading this, "par for the course" relates to the game of golf and "the standard number of strokes it should take a competent player to complete a hole or a round". It does NOT refer to "Spiced Pears in Brandy" which would naturally be "pears for the course".

Linus Torvalds: Stop making an issue out of AI slop in kernel docs – you're not changing anybody's mind

Re: AI slop in kernal docs

(cont).

The AI bubble's five years' old

Oh, de doo-da day

UK to spend £23M on AI to tell benefit claimants where to go

Confidential preview of the DWP's Chatbot Output

You saw it here first - output from the DWP's chatbot prototype:

Unemployed person: I'm out of work, what benefits am I entitled to?

Chatbot: None, now f*** off!

Unemployed person: Is that all you can say, I'm 64 you know.

Chatbot: Fair enough, f*** off AND die!

What if Linux ran Windows… and meant it? Meet Loss32

Ok right up until it's not

...and that's the problem in a nutshell. There are still way too many Apple fanbois and Windows corporate types that are smugly content with the current state of affairs and they will remain so until the day it affects them personally (I hate Apple and Microsoft equally but for different reasons and have to manage the latter in my work persona). After which they'll turn vehemently against "Big Tech" but until Apple and M$ inflict sufficient pain on their respective constituencies ain't nothing going to meaningfully change.

On the plus side, they are both equally stupid behemoths so this event horizon may not be as far off as Cupertino and Redmond think it will be.

UK's long-delayed Emergency Services Network eyes satellites for help

(With apologies to The Clash) "I'm so bored with the UK"

Is there a fundamental law of nature that requires all major UK tech projects to be run so badly?

I asked our Police and Crime Commissioner in 2019 (he was booted out of the role shortly afterwards for sending unsolicited d*ck pics so that shows you the calibre of the man) why there was a significant line item for the ESN in the budget that he oversaw that had no prospect whatsoever of being spent in that year or indeed anytime (I thought it would be canned rather than be pushed back to 2029 and beyond) and so it was disingenuous to pretend that the police budget was as high as it looked to be given that it wasn't allowed to be spent on anything else (which begs the question, what exactly is the point of a budget holder that has no control over the budget? Thankfully the current lot of incompetents "in charge" have got rid of the post but that's just the stopped clock analogy in action). He couldn't answer my question and so went off to gladhand somebody more important (perhaps he sent them some photos of his todger as well - we'll never know).

Capita tells civil servants to wait for chatbots to fix pension portal woes

If it's not Fushitsu being s***, it's Crapita being crap

"They said the volume of scheme members attempting to set up logins and view pension information ... was a contributing factor."

Exactly who do these scheme members think they are!? Trying to login and view their pension information - what do they think the site is for!? Oh wait, that's literally its purpose.

France’s post office partly offline for over 12 hours after 'major network incident'

Je suis désolé

Zut alors!

Mais le singe est dans l'arbre (peut-être avec votre lettres).

Cornish recycling drive sows confusion among Reg Standards Bureau

FFF System

I don't understand why the FFF (Furlong Firkin Fortnight) system (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFF_system) hasn't been brought into the discussion as a practical remedy.

Obviously the Furlong needs to be replaced by the Fathom in nautical settings (e.g. in Whittlesea as Network Rail insist on calling it or the "Hope and Anchor" in Islington) but otherwise it's pretty much perfect. For example rather than asking "mein host" for a yard of ale it should be 1/2 a fathom instead. All aboard the Skylark!

One real reason AI isn't delivering: Meatbags in manglement

Since when are LLMs intelligent!?

"In simple terms, the AI was intelligent..."

No, it wasn't intelligent - go to the back of the class and repeat 1,000 times "LLMs are stochastic parrots" and no cheating using ChatGPT because it will eventually degrade and return "Limbs are pork-fascistic carrots".

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

Lovely idea - no chance of it ever happening

The penchant for just lifting huge chunks of code from GitHub or (worse) getting grossly bloated and inefficient code prepared for developers by "AI" (previously copy/paste from Stack Overflow being the mode du jour) mean that whilst a noble idea, this has a negligible chance of success.

Ultimately the world in general has demonstrated by its choices that it prefers obese and shoddy code that's thrown together as quickly as possible (preferably quicker) but that only works when the wind is prevailing in a South-Westerly direction over well-engineered systems and that ain't gonna change anytime soon (or likely at all).

By way of a hopefully vaguely interesting anecdote, I did some consulting work at a place where I'm been a permie 10 years previously. I'd barely got through the door before I was harangued about some Turbo Pascal code that I'd written more than a decade before having stopped working. I ran said code and it finished so quickly that I presumed they must be right, only to find that it was actually a network configuration issue and that the reason it had finished almost instantly was just that the performance of their hardware was massively superior to what had been the case when I originally wrote it.

Europe gets serious about cutting digital umbilical cord with Uncle Sam's big tech

Re: Requirements?

"Which parts of Europe's digital infrastructure actually require hyperscale clouds?"

You can't say that!!! You have to remember that every organisation needs to wave its metaphorical phallic appendage to the maximum to pretend that it's important.

If organisations actually concentrated on what was really important to their customers/users and stopped messing about (hat doffed to Kenneth Williams) with pointless activities (currently "AI" aka LLMs, was Blockchain) then maybe the world would be a better place.

Ten mistakes marred firewall upgrade at Australian telco, contributing to two deaths

Re "Are MBAs still a thing"?

Unfortunately Darwinian selection hasn't dealt with them as yet but I'm hopeful that at some point they'll be put on a new Golgafrincham Ark Fleet Ship B.

"... a focus on speed and getting the task done, rather than an emphasis on doing things properly."

I'm afraid that whilst the investigator is likely correct in therir assertion as above, that ship has long since sailed in the modern world (e.g. ChatGPT now being considered the goto resource by many as it provides immediate answers, never mind if they're wrong) - doing things quickly (and stuff the consequences) is considered the priority. If it happens to work properly that's a bonus but otherwise leave it to some other mug (preferably at a different organisation) to take the flak.

The MBA led fad for ever more meaningless and complex KPIs, measures and targets results inevitably in the actual work being considered irrelevant unless it makes a dent in the target figures.

Amazon blocked 1,800 suspected North Korean scammers seeking jobs

Re: +1 in the phone number is a red flag? Really?

Thanks to the stupidity of the DVLA, my driving licence states that I was born in North Korea which seems unlikely given that I'm a 6' tall Caucasian with a very unkorean name who has never even visited Pyongyang. Not a problem usually but when I tried to buy a new car a couple of years ago they had to go through extended security checks for 1/2 an hour as I was supposedly from a sanctioned country.

When I queried this with the DVLA they made it very clear that they thought this was my fault (I have never claimed to have been born in the DPRK) and that they were very annoyed with me such that I would have to return my driving licence to them and wait for up to a month whilst they pondered on giving me a new one during which time I wouldn't be allowed to drive. I told them that I'd get right on it with the confident assumption that they're so lazy and incompetent (it was them that entered NK as the country code on my application, not me) that there woud be no fallout.

I'm not looking forward to renewing my licence in a few years time - maybe they'll bring in MI5 to question me on my allegiance to Kim Jong Un.

DVSA's clapped-out booking system gets bot slapped as new boss rides in

FTFY

"It's utterly unbelievable that a Government service has simply been allowed to be taken over by commercial touts charging 10x the normal price."

Bishop of Hong Kong tells peers AI is not the devil's work

Re: Cardinal Kowtow

Thanks for the downvote Chairman Xi, "Let a hundred flowers bloom"!

Cardinal Kowtow

Would this be the same Cardinal Stephen Chow Sau-yan who has done so much little to intercede on behalf of his parishioner Jimmy Lai whose only crime appears to be that he spoke his mind.

Still, the Bishop of Hong Kong needs to be very careful when he says that AI is a "gift from God". He maybe needs to reword that to be a "gift from our most munificent supreme leader, Chairman Xi and the CCP" if he doesn't want to join Jimmy in the slammer.

US gov't launches 'Tech Force' to replace IT staff DOGE fired

Re: Don't touch it with a barge pole.

Haven't you read the memo?

Competency and trustworthiness are filthy woke lies - all praise be to El Presidente Trumpista!

Repent ye inefficient – the ‘Palantir-ization’ of IT services is upon us

Re: If you own the meaning of the words

This is doubleplusungoodspeak. It's room 101 for you!

US teens not only love AI, but also let it rot their brains

Re: It's here

What is even more depressing is that they're failing with Shirley one of the basic functions of teens - rebelling against society.

As Gil Scott-Heron said "The Revolution will not be televised". Obviously the yoof of today don't know what a television is but unless the revolution is on TikTwat and isn't interrupted with an advert for $500 trainers or something equally consumerist then they'll continue being acquiescent slaves to our tech overlords. At least until Thiel et al decide that they're not buying enough tat and hence are a problem that needs to be terminated with extreme prejudice.

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

Whilst the world has not been kind to Karl Marx (and for good reason), here's one time I agree with him "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce".

Whatever legitimate places AI has, inside an OS ain't one

A fundamental misunderstanding of Microsoft's raison d'etre

Whilst this an excellent article in the main, there's a fundamental lack of understanding of the nature of Big Tech (I originally wrote that as "Bug Tech" which is an apposite Freudian slip) in the statement that "Microsoft is in the business of engineering".

Microsoft is very definitely NOT in the business of engineering. It could be argued that it was up until 1979 but since the 80s it has existed only to make money. Nothing wrong with that in a capitalist system but they're no different from all the others such as Apple, Meta and Google. Their foundation myths that they're somehow hippy types different from conventional corporates are just that - myths intended to distract attention from the fact that they are cash machines and we're the metaphorical cows being milked.

Cabling survived dungeons and fish factories, until a lazy user took the network down

Re: The Place Where The Sun Does Not Shine

"The Place Where The Sun Does Not Shine"

Nope, I think you'll find it's Cheadle Hulme (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20XLWEjN9eI for The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu's full explanation).

Soup king Campbell’s parts ways with IT VP after ‘3D-printed chicken’ remarks

I am the Little Red Rooster

I don't think Campbell's are capable of coming up with something as advanced as 3D printed chicken.

It's more likely "mystery meat", something similar to the rodents thay also serve up at KFC or maybe they've finally worked out how to breed chickens the size of those in the film "Sleeper". http://kaiju.wikidot.com/wiki:chicken has the full info (2nd picture down).

AWS builds a DNS backstop to allow changes when its notoriously flaky US East region wobbles

Re: At last!

AWS haven't fixed the problem. They've just introduced a bodge that might make things somewhat better next time round although as with any bodge there's a reasonably high likelihood that it will make things worse when the next issue occurs.

Ultimately AWS can't be bothered to properly resolve the issue as they've accumulated too much technical debt to make anything other than a complete redesign work but that would cost too much time and money according to the beancounters. After all, $10+ billion in profits doesn't go very far you know.

HP to sack up to six thousand staff under AI adoption plan, fresh round of cost-cutting

Re: HP is always sacking people

HP is indeed a hideous cariacture of the company as it started out but Oracle is in a different class when it comes to a company that has betrayed IT through licensing scams and now AI Ponzi schemes with OpenAI et al.

Bossware booms as bots determine whether you're doing a good job

Re: Ah, because I'm only working when I'm writing...

I had a manager who once scolded me by saying that "I pay you to do, not to think!". I just ignored him but that kind of toxic attitude that you need to measure and target meaningless points such as "How many emails do you send per day" (e.g. Microsoft Viva Insights) because of the ludicrous application of the mantra that "You can't manage what you can't measure" that poisons a lot of workplaces.

If I'm being asked to work on a complex project but am being assessed against how many keystrokes I make or meetings I attend then the latter is a lot easier to meet but often pointless.

Re: Sleeping on the job

Whilst working at an MSP, one customer I worked with had a manager who literally started shouting and foaming at the mouth when I said that I was interested in football rather than computer games, only checked my emails when travelling on the train rather than working on some IT project and didn't spend all weekend working on a home computer network.

His view was that literally all my waking hours should have been dedicated to IT and that by not doing so I was being lazy so he got me hauled off that client. He was a tit though so it didn't bother me.

Dev's last-day-of-contract code helped to crash app used by 350,000 people

It's a shame about Ray

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdU0fQzt0h8

Vibe coding: What is it good for? Absolutely nothing (Sorry, Linus)

Re: Ho hum !!!

It's not AI, it's just a very naughty LLM!

Networking students need an explanation of the internet that can fit in their heads

But Shirley ChatGPT has the answer?

"Do I expect a magic bullet that will fix the situation?"

I agree but unfortunately a lot of people outside of IT/networking think that the magic bullet has already arrived in the shape of AI and are frankly amazed that we're not already using whatever baloney it comes up with (or that the droids that have replaced us meatsacks haven't done so).

Microsoft teases agents that become ‘independent users within the workforce’

Re: Oh Jaysus

M$ will doubtless copy Apple's bragging in iPhone emails along the lines of "Sent to you by A365 - the Agentic AI pal that's fun to be with!".

UK asks cyberspies to probe whether Chinese buses can be switched off remotely

Re: Free software the answer

Citroen e-Berlingo. The car itself is fine, it's the software and apps that are ridiculously complicated and unreliable.

Re: Free software the answer

There is another answer - stop building buses that need software to make them function. My wife recently bought an electric car which randomly decides to change speed limits in mph to km/h but then gets confused and alerts continually if we're doing more than 30km/h in a 30mph zone. That and randomly moving the time back and forth an hour. You can go on the laughably bad app to look at the documentation for the car but a) it doesn't know which car we're in so you have to go through several menus to find the correct model and b) it's over 300 pages long without an index.

There are lots of problems with buses in the UK (not enough of them or bus drivers, weird routes and lack of early morning and late night services) but insufficiently complicated systems isn't one of them.

AI slop hits new high as fake country artist goes to #1 on Billboard digital songs chart

Obligatory Blues Brothers Reference

Q: "What kind of music do you usually have here?”

A: "We got both kinds, country and western."

Big Tech's control freak era is breaking itself apart

Microsoft, Amazon and Google are complicit in advancing Trump's agenda

A typically mealy-mouthed statement from Microsoft claiming that they didn't remove ICC access to their systems but not actually answering the question of whether they removed Karim Khan's account specifically.

In any case, Trump's goons will have had access to all of the ICC's emails etc. for some considerable time after having ensure that a suitably compliant "independent" judge ordered that an effective super-injunction be put in place under the Cloud act to prevent Microsoft from informing the ICC and Khan that this has taken place.

'Windows sucks,' former Microsoft engineer says, explains how to fix it

Re: If only there was an alternative OS

and would cost twice as much.

Agents of misfortune: The world isn't ready for autonomous software

McKinsey - proud to "share values" with Enron and the opioid pushers

This is the same McKinsey that provided extensive consultancy to Enron (and their convicted felon of a CEO personally) during its "creative" accounting phase before its implosion and were fined $573 million for their role in creating the strategy that the pharma company pushers eagerly embraced in turning large numbers of Americans into opioid addicts.

So no, I'll pass on any advice from McKinsey as a) they're about as reliable as a £1 coin toss (but somewhat more expensive) and b) they're an immoral bunch of smartarses who provide proof positive of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

M&S pegs cyberattack cleanup costs at £136M as profits slump

Are you sure?

"The heavy hit to the bottom was largely attributed..."

Shirley you mean "The heavy hit to the bottom line was largely attributed,,," unless you're channelling your inner Jimmy Edwards in Whack-O! as per the icon?

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

I've seen that farce before

The masters of this kind of financial "engineering" nonsense at Enron must be wishing they were still in business to profit from such idiocy.

AI browsers face a security flaw as inevitable as death and taxes

The dangers of wish fulfilment

I love the staggering naivete of this comment "First, they can give the bots very low privileges, make sure the bots ask for human consent for every action, and only allow them to ingest content from vetted domains or sources."

Try reading up re the Salesloft Drift Agentic AI breach where the agent demanded complete access to everything. The lazy idiots who use this kind of nonsense are always going to just tick the box that says "Is it ok for us to have the keys to the kingdom?" and they will never want to have to give consent - if they did, what's the point? People already aren't checking AI output as it takes longer to do so than it does to just do the work in the first place. Why would they want to have to do anything as mind-blowingly difficult as ticking a box to ok the action? If they have to then they'll just get another agentic "AI" app to automatically accept the action.

People are working backwards from their supposed requirement that "I want my PC to do all of my work for me because I just can't be bothered" and assuming that it's already been delivered in the shape of agentic AI. Fun and games are guaranteed to ensue when it all goes horribly wrong at which point IT will be hauled over the coals for "Allowing this to happen".

OpenAI spreads the imaginary wealth beyond Microsoft with $38B AWS deal

Show me the money!

It's all fun and games until the music stops when us proles get to pick up the bill as the companies reveal that there is no money, never was any money and never will be any money.

From Intel to the infinite, Pat Gelsinger wants Christian AI to change the world

Time for some well poisoning?

How about us rational types (I include myself here although friends and work colleagues might demur) embark on a "crusade" to poison the LLM wells with variations on "There is no God!" and then when Pat and all the other preachy types ask their "Kill the Unbelievers" LLM for its latest bit of dogma they'll all give up when they see the results.

If only it were that simple I'd become an "AI" evangelist myself.

‘ERP down for emergency maintenance’ was code for ‘You deleted what?’

Re: This is why...

"Hey, don't blame us!" said Orinoco, "There's a lot of rubbish for us to clear up on Wimbledon Common so we haven't had time to train our AI avatars yet."

O2 cranks prices mid-contract, essentially telling customers to like it or lump it

Re: 3.9%

The extra 3.9% is necessary as the C Suite wouldn't be able to afford another yacht without it - the ludicrous idea that O2 et al and Ofcom state that "it's for investment" is manure of the highest ordure; witness Thames Water and the endless "investment" that ended up in the pockets of Macquarie rather than being spent on something useful like a working sewage farm. Clearly the latest scam mid-contract price rise is because those at the top of the O2 dung heap now also need another Ferrari.

The wringing of hands at Ofcom is truly pathetic. "Those nasty mobile networks have added yet more to their profits beyond the 3.9% + inflation limit. If only there was a regulatory agency that had responsibility for overseeing them. Oh wait, that's us isn't it? In that case, here's a slap on the wrist and, to all the other networks, please don't do this as well (wink, wink)".

Amazon axes 14,000 desk jobs in AI-powered slimming plan

It looks like the corporate stooge (Galetti) in this case could have used AI to generate some of the actual text "We’re convicted [sic] that we need to be organised more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business,"

If you can't even be bothered to read through an important message such as this and spot such an obvious error, it points to a general malaise at Amazon where "cheap and shoddy" (e.g. output from Claude) is prioritised over quality work performed by the dreaded meatsacks. After all, it's not like a simple mistake in DNS could bring down large parts of the internet...

I am not a number, I am a free man!

"It's set in stone my rule to never go and work for a big company, you are a unit, not a person".

I was told that "You are just a cost centre number on a spreadsheet and that's why your HR system username is now a number and not a name" at a previous employer when they were taken over by a faceless conglomerate headquartered in a dodgy tax haven.

I took great delight in introducing myself as "129877, White, Head of IT" in the style of POWs and reminded people that I wasn't obliged to provide any more information under the terms of the Geneva Convention.

Unsurprisingly I told them where they could stick their job shortly thereafter.

New boss took charge of project code and sent two billion unwanted emails

No, your email is automatically deleted

One place I worked the head of another department would send massive screeds by email then phone two minutes later to complain that he hadn't had a response. If you answered (via group pickup) a call from him where he had dialled the number of somebody else in the team who he'd sent said rubbish to he would first spend five minutes complaining that he'd called somebody else so how dare you pick up their phone and no, he wasn't happy that they weren't sat at their desk.

It got so bad that my boss created an email rule to automatically delete anything he sent and he then told him this, much to the sender's disbelief.

AI bubble inflates Microsoft CEO pay to $96.5M

Liar, liar, pants on fire!

"...after saying job cuts at Microsoft weighed on him"

Yeah, yeah. Satya Nadella has 96.5 million ($) reasons why he's going to sleep soundly every night. After all, it's only through his manifest omniscience that Microsoft continues to struggle from one financial quarter to the next and those peasants beneath him needed to be shown who the boss is by being sacked anyway. Clearly he's a living saint who would be beatified for his services to the world were he to be of the Catholic persuasion.