Posts by Rogerborg 2.0

DEF CON bans Meta-style 'pervert glasses'

"Only WE may record everything that you say and do. If you can't trust our minimum wage illegals using their cousin's ID to do gig work, who CAN you trust?"

Hands off our VPNs, privacy groups tell UK ministers

If you start from the assumption that all roads lead to mandated GovOS, with biometric ID and backdoors build in, then you aren't going to be surprised by each step along the way, no matter how much it appears to be a clumsy stumble.

Ministers arm under-16s social media ban with least surprising study of the year

Oh boy, I sure am glad that someone is thinking about the children, and that the purpose isn't to force every adult to identify ourselves every time we see, say, do, or buy anything online.

I'm certain that the penny won't drop after the first few failed attempts lead to the regime* saying "Well, we've tried everything else, but those darn kids keep finding a way around it, so now we just have to mandate GovOS with biometric ID and backdoors baked into the firmware. You do WANT to keep the children safe, don't you, citizen?"

* Doesn't matter which regime, or even which country, given that this is happening in lockstep across the Anglosphere nations.

User crippled a network while trying to learn Nmap

Wisnae me.

I mean, I HAVE done similar, and worse. But THIS one was a Roger from another mother.

Photovoltaics are still running after a year under Swiss trains

If you can't trust the people whose livelihood depends on selling you their solution, who CAN you trust?

UK guts planning red tape so datacenters can bypass the neighbors faster

After construction, the only jobs that Clankerhausen sustain long term are "site is not on fire at this moment" busy-idlers, plus the mandatory SIA goons yelling "Saar! You must be taking the permissions to looking at critical security site, saar!" at random passers-by.

Infosys boss says vibe coding is no threat because there’s more to writing software than writing software

Re: He probably has a point.

Depends on your definition of "developer". The crucial point is specifying exactly what you want in markdown, and then letting the Clankers loose on it.

When product managers figure this out, it makes code monkeys obsolete. Ultimately, it means that even the lying weasels in sales can actually make good on their wild promises, if they can figure out how to turn it into .md files.

Re: He probably has a point.

If you're talking about what WAS produced by Clankers 18-24 months ago, that's already ancient history. What matters is Clanker capability today, and tomorrow, particularly with new projects.

Even the most minimally competent slop-coder will produce spec -> tech stack -> implementation plan markdowns, all of which will be points of truth about what's in the generated code.

This already puts us ahead of the traditional process of a team of code monkeys slapping together whatever they individually need to do each task - with all the duplication, redundancy and duplication that typically occurs - and then trying to discover, document, and refactor that later.

Fixing a "vibe coded mess" is substantially easier, because you start with better specifying what you want in the markdown, and can rebuild the whole executable from scratch (tokens allowing) with higher confidence than trusting meatsacks to do what you told them.

Re: Coders have the smallest parts

And "vibe" coding is nothing of the sort, in the sense of implying some sort of feels-based process. You only get what you actually design, via markdown, and your specification *actually* documents what the Clanker produces, rather than being a suggestion about what some meatsack *might* have coded.

The memory crisis is getting so bad that even retro RAM prices are going to the Moon

I'll come back when you have none

Pity poor Valve, who committed to their Steam Machine on the quaint old premise that a bulk order of RAM and chips would get you a discount. Now they're finding out that delivery comes at a premium, and instead of PC Master Race specs at near console prices, they've got a four-figure last-gen PC running KDE gnulux. Is it too early to say "3DO 2.0"?

Palantir wins £9M contract to run UK firearms licensing: CIA-backed biz to hold gun, bomb, and poison records

Trying to avoid answering the question is also answering the question.

Which UK competitor would even pick up the phone for a £9m contract, let alone deliver on time and on budget?

Perhaps because they might actually deliver it on time and on budget.

The only thing we can be sure of is that Polis Scotland will commission their own bespoke system which will cost £45 million and be cancelled after 10 years of non-delivery.

Benevolent dictator Zuck will give Meta staff 30-minute breaks from keylogging privacy assault

Re: Security by leaving the door open...

It's fine, only their highly ethical and trustworthy security professionals (freshly recruited from the University of Mumbai) will have access to the logs.

Another bug hunter leaks Microsoft exploits in defiance of company’s handling of vulnerability disclosures

Re: Even Microsoft knows it stuffed up

The danger is the exploit, not the POC.

You understand that the bad actors doing the exploits aren't disclosing them at all, right?

Angry devs vow to flee GitHub Copilot as metered billing takes hold

Re: “Gone. For basically nothing.”

Correct. I got the "how very DARE you be using AI, just because we told you to use AI" email yesterday.

Re: A lot of AI issues…

Having just burned through my monthly Copilot budget in 2 days, I am indeed now testing models in Ollama. Clanker-slave to do dumb-work while I do the brainwork is just another useful tool. Catch up, or be left behind.

Re: Claude 4.8

"Useless answers are affordable."

MegaCorp Inc., last month: "Use AI more, it's cheaper than you, monkey!"

MegaCorp Inc., today month: "Stop using AI, monkey, we can't afford it!"

I'd already blown through my monthly tokens by the time I found out.

We know what day it is but these Raspberry Pi price hikes are no joke

Re: 3Gb ram ?

The Hunterston B backup-backup rod drop logger system was delivered running on a 2nd hand PC, running NT 3.50 (with the 49 day overflow bug). Because that's what the customer had specified in the tender, and by Jove, they weren't going to be fobbed off with a free update to better, newer hardware and a (slightly more) functional OS.

Man suspected of Molotov attack on Sam Altman's home charged with attempted murder

If this noodle armed manlet is the best champion that meatsacks have to offer, I'm going all the way over to Team Clanker.

UK data watchdog fines Reddit £14.47M for letting kids slip past the gate

Re: Age gating is fundamentally incompatible with privacy

Mmm. I just lost a 2nd Facebook account to a "Show nude face" demand. A picture of Zuckerborg didn't fool it (OK, noob mistake). Account nuked, no appeal, no way to access or delete "my" data. Just unpersoned on the spot.

That's after losing a first account to "Prove you're over 13 by providing government ID". I'd had that account over 13 years. Again, no interaction was possible other than uploading a passport or driving licence.

"Papers, please" isn't coming, it's already here. If you haven't experienced it yet: don't worry, you will, and soon.

I

Keir Starmer declares 'months' timeline for social media age clampdown in UK

Be very clear that the problem they are trying to solve is that the regime does not have a Panopticon monitoring every single thing that identifiable worker drones are seeing and saying about it.

If you start by assuming that, most of the "bugs" in any ostensibly cack-handed implementation instantly become features.

The problem the regime is trying to solve is that they don't know everything that adults are seeing and saying about them.

What species of elephant?

AI chatbots are no better at medical advice than a search engine

"AI" *is* a search engine, plus Eliza.

Worse, even when asked the most basic, deterministic questions - the price of a basket of goods, for example - LLMs will continually change their answer during (what your meat brain misinterprets as) a conversation. "Stochastically" guessing the next word does not an expert make.

'Ralph Wiggum' loop prompts Claude to vibe-clone commercial software for $10 an hour

Re: The road to maintainability hell?

"We"? You're my opposition, not my guy, buddy.

Uh huh. "Subscribe to my Substack" is the new "Buy my book to find out the secrets of getting rich quick."

Chatbots parrot Putin's propaganda about the illegal invasion of Ukraine

I hope the falseness of the Russian narratives have been verified with trusted, authoritative sources.

Remember, THEY do propaganda, WE do narrative framing.

Python Foundation goes ride or DEI, rejects government grant with strings attached

Good for them. Better to employ nobody, than to recruit on horrific, repugnant merit.

Major AWS outage across US-East region breaks half the internet

On the bright side, US-EAST-1 has never had such a good vacuuming.

Renewables blow past nuclear when it comes to cheap datacenter juice

Re: Really!

Bingo. Any "renewable" system means 100% gas capacity - that you always have to pay for - plus whatever unreliable greenwashing you can afford to virtue signal with.

Well, let's see who wants to be first to go fully off-grid and rely on the bird mincers and calculator chargers. I wish them the best of luck.

HOW fast is grid scale storage growing? You understand that "grid scale" means petajoules, right?

Re: Really!

"Unreliables" is an ENTIRELY cromulent word. It's existentially so.

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

Reporting fail. Smut-sites are required (well, "required") to demand to know who you are now. July is the date when all anonymous access ends for everyone everywhere all at once. Why? Because anyone COULD post something that MiniVerify decides is verboten, to any site, including here. Not just videos and images, but naughty words. Remember "lawful but harmful"? You wouldn't want your children or wife or servants to be reading unapproved thoughts, would you?

This isn't a bug, it's a feature. They're coming for the InstaBooks and TwiXXer. Digital papers, please.

Re: Age verification

Your ISP knows how old the account holder is, not each person using that account.

Trump supporters forge AI deepfakes to woo Black voters

Re: What!

Batman?

I think the major problem is people with TDS raging about images created by a parody account, then refusing to laugh at their own folly.

Oh, you dear sweet summer child, your TDS has led you to rage and sulk about a *parody* account.

Now please debunk its claims that Orange Man discovered DNA.

https://twitter.com/Trump_History45/status/1763358403991421097

Contact-tracing is basically CRM so we think we've got it sorted, says Salesforce

It's going to be quite the gold rush to flog these Communist Bioweapon trackers to .gov isn't it?

We beg, implore and beseech thee. Stop reusing the same damn password everywhere

Why would an investor think that a bunch of passwords is worth multiple billions of dollah? How are they planning to monetise them?

UK finds itself almost alone with centralized virus contact-tracing app that probably won't work well, asks for your location, may be illegal

Re: I don't think Apple and Google are creating an app

I'm sure the ECDC will soon arrive at a process for deciding on the steering committee to oversee the appointment of the panel that decides on the font in which tenders must be submitted.

Perhaps Professor McCarthy, renowned epidemiologist, would like to explain why Sweden isn't the worst effected country on the globe?

Re: Swedish model

At what cost to the Norwegian economy, and what happens when they come out of lockdown?

Re: Stick to the tech, please

A government advisor shouldn't have been a government advisory meeting, you say?

Silent night, social fight: Is Instagram the new Facebook for pro-Trump Russian propagandists?

Re: freedom and choice

Sadly, the zeitgeist on El Reg is very much London Bubble. The poor oppressed Low Information Voters needs to be protected from themselves. Especially the strengtheningly diverse ones. They're not really responsible for their actions, like a person would be, are they?

Oh, unless they voted for Brexit, in which case, you know, all forking gammons must forking hang.

It's tiresome, but what are you going to do? Only experience can narrow the mind.

Re: freedom and choice

> "Don't forget that Hitler was elected democratically by your standards."

I didn't think you'd concede the debate that easily, but here we are.

Expired cert... Really? #O2down meltdown shows we should fear bungles and bugs more than hackers

GiffGaff made a point of not blamesplaining that it wuz O2 wut dun it, they just apologised to their customers as though they were at fault.

Worse than Hitler, really.

He's not cracked RSA-1024 encryption, he's a very naughty Belarusian ransomware middleman

Re: Blood diamond? Looks clear to me

> the randomware is defeated

Appeased. See, I didn't pay any Danegeld, it went to a Belarusian.