Posts by DoctorPaul

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

There's always what is termed Symphonic Rock which is my particular thing, very big in Europe especially Finland where there's a church where the whole Mass is celebrated with heavy metal music. Brilliant live music scene as well, been to some wonderful gigs in Holland and Belgium with great local venues and tickets about 20 quid.

Check out the likes of Nightwish, Delain, Edenbridge, Within Temptation, Visions of Atlantis, Beyond the Black, After Forever, Elysion, Nemesea, Evanescence and for a good laugh Battle Beast.

Big Tech's control freak era is breaking itself apart

Re: "Open source is the ticket out of here." Etc

More a case of "that gives us a competitive advantage in the marketplace, so keep it to ourselves".

Similar to the way that hospitals in the NHS used to cooperate and share ideas about best practise until the introduction of free-market principles meant that they stopped sharing as any good ideas they came up with would give them a financial advantage.

ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok make very squishy jury members

Re: Why do they always seem so surprised when this sort of thing happens?

Reminds me of a genuine case here in the UK where an African Grey parrot was removed from the public display because it was teaching the other parrots to swear at visitors! Not sure if that counts as sycophancy.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-67990806

Google Cloud suspended customer's account three times, for three different reasons

Re: Happened with my son's account

For a start maybe use Thunderbird and keep a local copy of your mailbox.

Protonmail might work well for you, plus it will automatically export your mail from Gmail during setup and then redirect any further emails on to the Protonmail account.

Google parent company spending like a drunken sailor as capex triples over 2 years

Re: We will all be paying for this

After years of dental woes I've just had to have some dentures fitted, so I bought some cleaning tablets that you drop into a glass of water.

On the top of the pack is a QR code to "download the app". WTF?!!!

Actor couldn’t understand why computer didn’t work when the curtain came down

We didn't dress up but back in the early 70s we had the real thing - the Department of Parapsychology was an official part of the University of Sussex ("The only brothel with a government charter" Baroness Summerskill) and as "interdisciplinary" was the buzzword us science students had to write an arts/science dissertation.

I did mine on the subject of "Coloured Magic", leading to an oblique reference in the Times Educational Supplement to the effect that Sussex was "the only university where you could do a degree in engineering and witchcraft".

Interesting times, wouldn't be who I am today if I hadn't been there, done that. Remember a talk by Michael Bentine, famed Goon of this parish - "It's OK to do drugs, it's OK to do magic, but please don't do them at the same time". As Lemmy so perfectly put it, "The summer of 71 was the best time of my life. I can't remember any of it but it was the best time of my life". Amen to that.

Retired here too, getting to the point where I'm not sure what year it is....

Italian tech company promises to make America Online great again

Re: What are the spoon benders actually buying ?

Ugh, I should spit that out straight away!

Re: AOL addresses now mean older people

My SOP for decades, I haven't used an ISP's email since I left Demon in the 90s (and more recently DNS) once I had a domain name and a hosting provider, so that excludes most people unfortunately.

I bung Mythic Beasts three quid a month for extremely reliable hosting and as they allow catch-all email redirection one mailbox supports an effectively infinite supply of email addresses, so I always use [e-mail] for every entity I deal with. If any address is compromised a) I know who is responsible b) it's trivial to spin up a new address and c) I just blacklist the compromised address.

No issues at all "running a mail server" as all the tricky stuff is handled in a couple of clicks on the admin page at MB, plus their tech support is exemplary.

On the subject of DNS, I've used Pi-holes for years (note the plural, always use two in my opinion) - never pointing at the ISP's DNS of course - but recently found that it's possible to add unbound to the installation so that you are independent of any upstream DNS provider. Has worked a treat for me.

Cyberpunks mess with Canada's water, energy, and farm systems

Re: "whose tank gauge was tampered with"

Um, pretty sure those first two sentences directly contradict each other.

Been on the road since the 60s and back then speedometers were only accurate to about +/- 10% so you had to be more than 10% over the limit before you were definitely "speeding" as you might have a speedo that was reading 10% low.

Modern telemetry is way more accurate but I assume that somewhere in the legislation the speedo can still be +/- 10% so all (I assume) manufacturers set them to read about 8% faster because why wouldn't they?

As a side note, that means that most bikers who "did the ton" back in the 60s were probably hitting 95mph at best.

And yes, if you change the profile of your tyres it will affect the speedo reading. Fit low-profile tyres and for a given road speed the wheels will be turning faster and your speed will appear to be faster than it actually is.

Dame Emma Thompson gives the 'AI revolution' both barrels

Pray you never have to reinstall it. I'd love to still be using my "perpetual" copy but they turned off the activation servers years ago.

Re: Sorry, Jim. You don't get two up-votes by posting duplicates.

You don't get a 5 star safety rating if lane assist doesn't re-enable every time you start the car.

Shield AI shows off not-at-all-terrifying autonomous VTOL combat drone

Re: Vulcan

That brings back some wonderful memories!

When the last flying Vulcan did its farewell trip its flight path took it right over our house in Kent as it did a right turn towards Manston airport after coming along the North Kent coast.

Even better was some years earlier when they were still allowed to go "full chat" with the engines. Utterly impressive as it flew in, then they stood it on its tail and lit the afterburners. My godfathers, those subsonics, even better than a Blue Oyster Cult concert! (Second row, in front of the speaker stack)

New Linux kernel patch lets you cancel hibernation mid-process

Re: Recommendations?

Genuine query, thanks for the downvote, care to explain?

Recommendations?

Hibernation is a must-have for me, can anyone recommend a distro that supports it? I found out to my cost that Mint doesn't.

Re: "... hibernation support is a somewhat neglected area of Linux support"

Totally agree, I run 6 monitors on two graphics cards and hibernation is my go-to option. Otherwise it's a total PITA to set up my working environment each time I start the computer.

And that's where Linux has completely let me down when Windows "just works" (one of the few times it actually does). In the first instance of trying Mint, running two nVidia cards meant open-source drivers that could see all 6 monitors but it took a couple of seconds for a drop-down menu to drop down, or closed-source drivers that could only see 3 of the monitors on one of the graphics cards.

So I built an identical rig using AMD graphics cards and had another go. Installation with one card fitted worked, as did then adding the second card. Hooray! All 6 monitors working.

Then I made the massive mistake of following an online guide to enabling hibernation on Mint. On restart, the machine barfed completely and dumped me into some sort of GRUB menu with only "emergency graphics".

Even nuking every partition on the disk and doing a complete reinstall hasn't fixed it, can't get Mint to work, just get the GRUB menu now. $deity only knows how it could stuff up a system so completely.

PS I've used Mint as the OS for my media server for years so I'm not a complete newbie.

The real insight behind measuring Copilot usage is Microsoft's desperation

Re: Open letter to Microsoft

Or a badge of honour.

This neo-Luddite wouldn't touch LLMs with a bargepole. PhD in AI here, when that meant expert systems.

'Fax virus' panicked a manager and sparked job-killing Reply-All incident

Re: Oh, the 1990s

Ah, fond memories of WinFax Pro! That and a direct modem link let me WFH before public Internet access was a thing. I think that I first went "on-line" with a 300 baud modem link from my BBC Micro to the Unix box at the college where I was doing my MSc.

End of support for older Office and Windows Server versions pile on the pain for admins

Re: Office 2013

Good luck with that. I tried to reinstall my "perpetual" copy of Office 2010 a couple of years ago, only to find that Microsoft have turned off the activation servers.

AI is the flying car of the mind: An irresistible idea nobody knows how to land or manage

Re: Finally some common sense

Bit like saying "Tulips are here to stay, deal with it". Bubble's still gonna burst.

What do we want? Windows 10 support! When do we want it? Until 2030!

Re: Windows 10 Security updates

I've a feeling that Microsoft's detection of whether you're in the EEA or not is as reliable as the rest of their software.

Workrounds are available

Very much use at your own risk but there is a simple PowerShell script out there that lets you enrol for the extra year without jumping through any of Micro$haft's hoops. Think that you need to log in to the M$ account every 60 days to keep it active, then switch back to a local account - once you've navigated the dark patterns that now seem to be in place for that!

I'm tempted to post the script here but not sure if that's acceptable.

Re: Lil' Help for the switchover?

That's true, but being of a paranoid disposition my preference is to temporarily disconnect the data drive(s) just in case an installer goes walkabout, then reconnect it/them once installation is done.

Bank of England smells hint of dotcom bubble 2.0 in AI froth

"Cyclically Adjusted Price-to-Earnings"

As I scanned the article I first read that as "Cynically Adjusted Price-to-Earnings"

Intern had no idea what not to do, so nearly mangled a mainframe

When I was tinkering with bikes and cars waaaay back in time (e.g. having to change the head gasket on my Mini in a car park in Chartres, twice) I asked the mechanic I was working with "how tight does this go?" The answer was "screaming tight", sometimes aided by a length of scaffold pipe or the handle of a Bradbury trolley jack.

Microsoft insists Copilot+ PCs are 'empowering the future' – reality disagrees

Re: Marketing company

In 1995 Delphi amply illustrated what a development environment should be and what a pile of donkey droppings Visual Basic was.

Slack threatened to delete nonprofit coding club’s data if it didn’t pay $50k in a week

Re: Slack should ..

After a decade or so of telling anyone who would listen not to touch TalkTalk with a bargepole guess who I ended up with? I was with Shell Energy broadband when they were bought by Octopus as part of buying all of Shell Energy, then sold on to TalkTalk. Don't recall being given any choice in the matter and didn't fancy the exit fees so I had to endure over a year with them. I run my own router, a pair of pi-holes and pay Mythic Beasts a massive three quid a month for email and hosting so I just needed them to keep the link up basically. Had a two day outage last month but that was all, although not being able to connect to my Plex server sitting right in front of me was the push I needed to sort out Jellyfin!

I escaped TalkTalk's clutches a month ago. Interesting times, for basically the same price as my previous 47Mb FTTC plan I now get 150Mb FTTP that was installed free of charge, although OpenReach did their best to cock it up. There's a telegraph post directly opposite my house but the engineer (sub-contracted) turned up with a worksheet telling him to lay 150m of cable through a duct to an access point round the corner. By sheer luck it turned out that both access points hooked into the same section of their network so all was good.

Now for the "between clenched teeth" bit. I'm now with Vodafone, who I have to say stink as a company. However their broadband has a couple of features that I badly wanted:

1. They are happy for you to use your own router and getting the necessary login details is trivial.

2. Years ago I thought that I got a wonderful deal when Plusnet only charged a one-off payment of a fiver for a static IP address. Vodafone give it to you for nothing, you just have to ask.

That means that I've finally been able to get my private Vaultwarden instance up and running and has given the little grey cells a workout getting to grips with the likes of Docker, Caddy and reverse proxies.

It's the final countdown: Windows 10 hits end of support in less than 30 days

I've been trying to move my main pc to Mint for years (happily running it on my media server) but my setup causes problems:

1. I run 6 monitors and 2 graphics cards. Windows "just works", on Mint the Nvidia drivers only see 3 monitors and the open source drivers see all 6 but are so slow as to be unusable - couple of seconds for a drop-down menu to drop down for example.

I'm only rocking a used HP Z230 and 4 port graphics cards can be had for about 30 quid, so I built a clone running AMD graphics and repeated the exercise.

2. That seemed to work, until I inadvisably tried to implement hibernation as that is what I rely on day to day. Very surprised that a "desktop" didn't do it out of the box but hey this is meant to be a learning experience right? Sure was!

Followed a guide that looked promising and gave it a go. Not only did it not wake from hibernation, it took out the entire system and dumped me at a GRUB prompt. I even deleted all partitions on the disk and reinstalled from scratch - still completely broken, did Mint screw my BIOS or UEFI?

So that box is back sitting in the corner until I fancy having another go. Further research seems to conclude that Linux doesn't support hibernation and probably never will, which is a big problem on the desktop.

That said, my Windows box has just started waking immediately from hibernation again so has to be shut down instead so maybe I need to learn to do without that facility.

Anthropic to pay at least $1.5 billion to authors whose work it knowingly pirated

Re: So for clarity....

Sounds like the family of the teenager who committed suicide after ChatGPT talked him out of leaving a "cry for help" that they would have seen have the logs of the interactions.

Someone somewhere needs to be staring down a corporate manslaughter charge at the very least.

Sainsbury's eyes up shoplifters with live facial recognition

Re: Recall Home Bargain / B&M had a problem

It's all in the eyes apparently

Claude Code's copious coddling confounds cross customers

Re: WTF?

LLMs in healthcare?! FFS that should be illegal.

Don't they read the small print on every LLM advert that "results could be bollox, you must check them", or words to that effect. How you check anything when most sources have stuck an LLM between you and the data is left as an exercise for the reader.

Techie traveled 4 hours to fix software that worked perfectly until a new hire used it

Re: Manual?

About 30 years ago I was off the road for over a year (tried to snowboard aged 42, broke my neck) and when I restarted driving I decided to teach myself to left-foot brake as I felt like I needed a challenge. It was too, left leg is programmed to stamp down hard on the clutch, then release it slowly, so braking wasn't exactly gentle to start with. Took about 18 months for the "intelligence" to move from brain to spinal cord to left leg but after that the reflex was fully programmed in and I'm pretty sure that the half-second gained by not having to come off the accelerator onto the brakes once saved me from a serious coming together with an errant white van man who came straight out of a side turning.

The technique is pretty fail-safe as if I ever get confused I end up with both feet on the brake which is no problem. I still occasionally drive manuals and have no problem adjusting to using a clutch when I do - spent time last week hammering around Brands Hatch circuit in a Dodge Hellcat and a 1966 race-prepped Ford Mustang (bloody great iron V8 up front, race tyres, no power steering, insanely heavy clutch) as a birthday treat. Now that I have to renew my licence every three years it seemed like a good idea to get my driving independently assessed :-)

BOFH: Rerouting responsibility via firewall configs

Reichenbach...

...Falls

Field support chap got married – which took down a mainframe

From very early in my career I adopted the mantra "never trust a programmer in a suit"

Meta pauses mobile port tracking tech on Android after researchers cry foul

Re: Oops, caught out

You mean like the TV ads for WhatsApp's privacy that they just started running?

X's new 'encrypted' XChat feature seems no more secure than the failure that came before it

Re: Musk,.........

LOL!

And never in my life did I think that I would say that :-)

Have one of these. That is beer isn't it?

Trump tariffs ruled illegal within minutes of Musk announcing end of government role

Re: Its a bit of a mess, bit was avoidable

I read somewhere that California has the fifth largest economy in the world. Maybe they should just leave the Union, they could even take up the kind offer from Canada!

Empire of office workers strikes back against RTO mandates

One simple factor

Successful WFH requires a competent manager. I rest my case.

I was lucky enough to WFH as a freelancer for a wonderful manager back in the day, and that was in the days before public internet access. A copy of WinFax Pro on Win3 on the Shuttle XPC that I built myself (TWO monitors thanks to Matrox graphics) and a direct modem connection to a "server" in the office. The office was in London, home was a house in Kent with a sea view from the bedroom that served as an office.

Some signs of AI model collapse begin to reveal themselves

Sorry but I have to ask "how low is that bar?"

Every advert I see for an AI agent includes the proviso that you should check the results for accuracy. When every search system has had AI shoehorned between the user and the results, how the hell are you supposed to do that?

User unboxed a PC so badly it 'broke' and only a nail file could fix it

Re: In denial

I started out on motorbikes, so you quickly develop a hypersensitivity to potential "incoming" at the edge of your vision. It's that or ending up dead or injured, always assume that every other road user is a half-blind psychopath.

Re: In denial

I was 39 when I finally had to admit that my arms weren't long enough! Couldn't get on with varifocals as I constantly thought that there was movement at the periphery of my vision, very distracting when driving.

Europe plots escape hatch from enshittification of search

Re: Yay Kagi and American capitalism

Mythic Beasts give me basic web hosting, a database and catch-all email redirection (so one mailbox and infinite email addresses) for 3 quid a month including VAT

Wish I could upvote this refusenik stance a hundred times! (I've told you a million times, don't exaggerate!)

Me? Got a PhD in AI so what do I know?

Re: Laughable

Switched to qwant a year or so ago, thanks to mentions in this august publication, and it works well for me.

Even happier now that I know that they use their own index and are based in France. Seem to recall that the French have strong views regarding personal privacy.

Re: distributed search

Who remembers the "Wheeltappers and Shunters Club"? The wheeltappers did what it says on the tin, go around the yards tapping the wheels to detect cracks and chips. Why? Because faulty wheels damage the track. Suddenly there are two different companies running the track and the trains and the train companies have no incentive to keep checking wheels as they don't pay for the damage caused to the track. British Rail were crap, but at least you knew who to sue!

No-boom supersonic flights could slide through US skies soon

Re: With This and America Today...

What a piece of engineering! First saw Concorde in about 1964 - my uncle was a draughtsman on the project.

Joint build between two countries, one using metric, the other Imperial was one thing but then I learned that at full chat the fuselage was about 18" longer than when it was at rest on the ground. Any engineers out there ready to take that on? Every element of the fuselage needing the same coefficient of expansion - including the controls.

And while I'm fondly reminiscing what about that classic photo of Concorde at Mach 2 above the Atlantic? Taken from a UK jet fighter that I believe needed an in-flight refuel just to get there, managed to keep up for the minute or so that it took to take the photo, then had to return to base. Concorde just kept pootling on to New York, for an interesting definition of "pootle".

VPN Secure parent company CEO explains why he had to axe thousands of 'lifetime' deals

You mean like I can't reinstall my "perpetual" copy of Office 2010 because M$ turned off the activation servers?

Re: Two words:

Are those the idiots who decided it was a good idea to put the timing chain on the *back* of the engine rather than at the front where you only need to remove the radiator if that?

Linus Torvalds goes back to a mechanical keyboard after making too many typos

Re: Wish I knew what kind....

I'm lucky in that respect, as I'm not completely left-handed nor ambidextrous. I write with my left hand (plus use a spoon or toothbrush) but use my right hand for things like a mouse, hammer, saw etc. Being right armed and left eye dominant, archery proved tricky when I tried it at school.

Sometimes I wonder just how my brain is wired!

Amid CVE funding fumble, 'we were mushrooms, kept in the dark,' says board member

Re: Move it to Europe

Time to benefit from the law of unintended consequences.