Posts by Joe W

Users protest as Google Antigravity price floats upward

I don't want to say it...

... but people bloody KEPT TELLING THE WORLD this would happen.

It had to happen at some point, they were operating at a loss.

I'm not going to talk about the problems I see with LLMs, that's beside the point here.

Atlassian to shed ten percent of staff, because AI

"Reshaping the skill mix"?

What the actual fork is that supposed to mean? If I was generous I would say that they want to hire AI "experts" instead of developers. Well, here's the problem: you still need devs to fix the mess your slop generators are creating. And you need the really good ones, you know, old geezers that have been there when dirt was invented and have seen all sorts of carp. Except those are the people you usually try to get rif off, because they are better paid than some junior fresh out of colledge kid that is so green they need mowing. So we know they don't mean that, they don't want to hire new people, they want to fire the well paid guys and gals.

Atlassian can go and die preferably quietly in a corner, I just hope that we can get something more sensible soon at $(workplace) (as the on-prem variant is on the chopping block, much like the devs).

US state laws push age checks into the operating system

Industry self regulation does not work! Look at the 737-max. Why would it be better for other places?

On the other hand, there's this life hack of "being a responsible parent" and "educating kids about stuff". And setting up filter lists on the piHole. So... nah, I personally don't think that regulation is necessary. At all.

Re: How bizarre

Exactly that. I can just add a field in the adduser dialogue and make it set up an environmental variable on an interactive shell, let's call it YEAROFBIRTH or something like that.

Surely my kids are not tech savvy enough (yet, cut them some slack, they just entered school) to overwrite that.

It totally fulfils the requirements and it is totally stupid and easy to overcome. In fact, I'd be sad if they wouldn't figure that one out, surely by the time I'm OK with them playing Doom or something like that...

Microsoft previews tech to ease creation of keyboard-accessible websites

Re: Arrant nonsense

Yes. That. Just use bloody html

https://justfuckingusehtml.com/

'nuff said.

Hubble in a death spiral that could end as early as 2028 without a reboost

like JWST, Lazuli covers other wavelengths... so that's not a good argument.

Indie web browser Ladybird flutters toward Rust with a little help from AI

Re: Plonk

Dunno. I am critical of AI slop, and AI randomly generted gibberish code is bad. Especially bad if it seems to work until it then doesn't.

In this case the approach sounds way more controlled. As long as the levels of scrutiny are really high, and code is reviewed and tested by actual devs I can see the appeal, and I would be a bit more optimistic - especially when it comes to maintainability of the code.

ICE watchers say agents used software to threaten and follow them home

Re: Shame on all of you

As somebody who had family members get into trouble with the actual Nazis, and who had family members and their friends flee the country in the 1930s:

Go ahead, this is pretty much what granddad talked about (very seldomly, and I wish we had written these things down - now he is only a memory).

Re: USAnia is irretrievable broken

Ah, so you assume everybody lives in the US?

Or that noone is allowed to criticise the US - whether they are a resident or citizen or tourist - or just looking at the place and going "that's fucked up..."?

I'm allowed to tell people I'm unhappy about our government. I'm able to go to a demonstration and face no repercussions. I can openly tell a police officer that I think the president is a wanker, and they might agree, though not in an official role (and I won't get fined or thrown into jail). And I won't have some secret state cops come to my house and harrass me. I talk about the problems in my country of birth and my current country I live in, because I want them to improve, have better conditions for everybody.

And you really like how the current situation is? With no due process given to people? "What about illegal immigrants", I hear you shout, "I don't want them to have due process!" - my dude, due process is finding out and proving that they are illegal immigrants. That is the whole point.

I liked visiting the US. Lots of great places to see, lots of great people to meet. I really liked the country (not every aspect - every place has its problems), and I would say I still do like the US. Are we not allowed to look at it and go "huh, that is not quite how it used to be..."

Pop music fans literally dying to stream hot new albums – in car crashes, that is

Re: Correlation etc etc...

Stay away from Taco Friday!

Touchscreens...

Bloody touchscreens!

It's not only the cell phones, the UI in modern cars is centred around a touch screen, not physical buttons. I really hate it. I can adjust heating or whatever without looking in our car - in the modern ones it is all ever changeing menues.

Infosys chair says AI will clean up legacy systems – then make more of them

AI can remove legacy systems?

Really? How good is it writing COBOL? Or understanding bits of assembler code for legacy architecture? Can it guarantee that the result is still compliant to all the rules and regulations? Who is responsible when (not if) the AI f's up the migration?

Yeah. Thought so.

Ah, so it will create even more unmaintainable code? I mean, the old code can be understood (if you can read COBOL), and the business logic is documented (in some cases there are literally laws) - I'd rather take that than some hallucinated BS that might or might not work, and surely not cover all the edge cases.

Bunch of eejits.

NASA points fingers at Boeing and chaotic culture for Starliner debacle

Like when an engineering company told NASA middle manglement that flying at temperatures that low would be a bad idea wrt the solid rocket boosters? And then the engineers of that company being grilled by both NASA and their own managers to ok flying that day even though they were pretty sure it was a bad idea? And then leading to a "loss of vehicle and crew"?

I heard that one of the comments was that the engineers had to prove it was unsafe to fly, while the proper way would have been to demonstrably show that it was safe to fly that fateful day.

Your AI-generated password isn't random, it just looks that way

Re: AI security company Irregular.....

But then, as with the passwords, the answer might just be similar enough ;-)

Kinda obvious...

.... but cool they checked and did the maths. Good random number generators are difficult to write, and a machine that is designed to produce "probable" results does not qualify (by design). A student of mine did interesting experiments using the temperature parameter on some models, and there with decreasing temperature it becomes really obvious.

AI bit barns grow climate emergency by turning up the gas

Re: 1,000 gigawatts of gas-fired power

We never were on the intermediate path. Not back when they created the RCP, not in the TAR and AR4 (third and fourth assessment reports). We were always closer to the high emissions, or even above. And If I recall correctly, the intermediate path RCP4 (is that the current designation?) relies on emissions going down mid 21st century. Which I very much doubt, looking at the current overall situation...

Why does the Windows 11 taskbar hurt me like that?

The location of the task bar?

That is one thing.

The borked start menue is the other. No groups, no fixed positions for icons. When I have more than one Windows Terminal Server with certain programs running there and the same programs being installed locally as well it is really helpful if I can just open the bloody start menue and choose the icon from the group under which it was sorted in. No, I do not want bloody folders in the quick start pane. It adds another click.

And this is from a company that had the really nice phone OS, where things you wanted to do regulalry were accessible as quickly as possible. Too bad they pissed off the developers so much that apps were just not happening. Most of what I needed was available on Win8.1 - local transportation app included. Though nowadays since many things are essentially web applications the gap could be closed.

Trump's Genesis Mission gets its first set of 26 sure-to-succeed objectives

Re: If anyone can do it...

Looking at my cultural awareness stuff: I really dig the phrase "bold and optimistic".

I was told when a Brit tells you this it basically means "you are bonkers"

AI spurs employees to work harder, faster, and with fewer breaks, study finds

Even worse: the AI generated texts are using roles that simply don't exist or have other names in our projects.

At least this makes it easier to spot them. On the other hand, the humans that hand in those documents apparently haven't even read them!

'Another dark day': Users slam Microsoft over Polyglot Notebooks deprecation

Behaviour like this...

... is the reason I try to convince the rest of the group that staying with bloody MS is not a viable long term option. In our case we have extensive SSRS (reporting services) reports that people rely on. PowerBI is only nice if you can run it in "the cloud", all the good stuff is not available on-prem - and who knows how long they will have that running. I really would like to have timeseriesdb (postgresql) plus Grafana. Wish me luck!

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

Here's the important part:

"triaging patients using rule-based protocols"

That is basically IF - THEN - ELSE.

No real need for LLMs there.

OpenAI introduces ads...for the people!

Re: "we also feel strongly…"

So they are advertising to folx that have no money? That's a brilliant move - it's not like the US have a real high per household debt, thanks to credit cards and people not understanding what interest rates are, and how they are screwed over by card companies. I mean, how could they? From what I understand, the destruction of basic education (yes, percentages are basic) has been going on for a while. The current administration plans to accelerate that.

How the GNU C Compiler became the Clippy of cryptography

Re: Only one answer

... as a service....

Tech support chap invented fake fix for non-problem and watched it spread across the office

At least a good excuse...

... making on of them paperclip chains comes natural if you are bored in the office. This gives an excuse to make one on company time :)

Study confirms experience beats youthful enthusiasm

experience ...

I think it was age and cunning, for the correct quote... (Fausto Coppi)

DIY AI bot farm OpenClaw is a security 'dumpster fire'

Use case?

About at least half of what people show to be automated by this can be done with a few IF..THEN..ELSE and a cron job - and this won't burn through wads of wonga just to remind you to buy milk. Or the new technology called "making a list". FFS, a roll of cash register paper on the fridge does at leas a quarter of the jobs. Take milk out of the fridge, realise there's only another carton left, write it down. There used to be milkmen (like Ronnie Soak) that would leave a bottle at your door, each day, every day (mostly).

All of this molten clawed AI (and related stuff) looks like solutions looking for problems - and boy, problems they found. No wonder: stuff's been "vibe coded" to hell and back, taking basic examples from stackoverflow (which never include basic security considerations and often: sense) as the training data. Directory traversals and SQL injections, auth bypass and unproteded and unauthenticated APIs - I thought we were past that, especially the first two are so late 90s. Not that I'm not prone to reminisce about "good old times" - but those are some things I do not miss.

Microsoft's 'atypical' emergency Windows patches are becoming awfully typical

Re: Still on Windows OS? You Dinosaur!

Like MacOS?

Re: " the [..] administrators' already shaky faith in the company"

And then there's people like me: I am more IT savy than I guess 80% of my colleagues (the rest are hard core devs or real sysadmins, I bow to them, not being worthy to carry their coffee), but at work I am a grunt stuck with whatever the company decides to buy[1]. I'm ok with that, and in fact I'm happy the guys and gals "over there" *gestures in the general direction* do pretty good work. Helpful bunch, and understanding of user shortcomings, patient like saints (and I don't mean Bonifatius). And I mean both our Helldesk and the groups doing sysadmin, DB admin, backups, monitoring. and all the things we take for granted.

So: yes, I'm a grunt (and happy) but I understand what the IT folx are going through (and I'm glad I don't have to do that).

[1] well, I have my own Linux machines I have to take care of for the more pleasant tasks, like doing real data analysis

Elon Musk merges xAI into SpaceX to spread universal consciousness via a sentient sun

Re: You cannot cool stuff in space!

Yes. Most effective cooling is evaporative cooling (hence the cooling towers for power plants). Next is convective cooling / airflow (or any other medium). Only then we get radiative cooling, which is orders of magnitude less effective.

In space we have no water we can evaporate, no air to flow past cooling fins. Data centres in space make no bloody sense at all. I don't know what he smokes, injects, sniffs, eats, but it's not good for his brain.

BOFH: Eight pints of a lager and a management breakthrough

Yeah... nah.

We need teachers. Good, motivated teachers. And they need respect and good pay. Repeating stuff like this will not help us. Education is important. Like, really important.

Those who can, do. Those who cannot work as insultants and earn the big money...

Pope warns flock to raise their faces, protect their voices in fightback against AI

What was it in the Good Book?

Ah, right, the Butlerian Jihad. C'mon, you can do it!

(I think Dune is ok, I personally would not call it a "great" book - pretty long winded in parts, and don't get me started on the other books in the series)

NASA begins formal anomaly review after MAVEN probe lost in space

Let us be realistic here...

... it was launched in 2014 and had an expected mission duration of two years. It is now 2026. This thing was launched 12 years ago. It is awesome how well it was built (and designed, let's not forget that).

(I'm not saying it is no longer useful, or we should not care, or still try to find out if we can recover it, I'm just bloody amazed at how long it has been working - and it is not the only example of this excellence)

Notepad will now tell you all the ways Microsoft has enshittified it

Re: Every Cloud

... has a silver lining, which might be the freezer back they are suffocating you with.

(BOFH, sorry, cannot say which story)

Cursor used agents to write a browser, proving AI can write shoddy code at scale

I can do that!

And by this I mean create shoddy code that sort-of works and makes senior developers cry... No need for AI there.

Child safety or age-gating for all? UK social media ban plan draws fire

Re: Parenting

There's also the thing that all kids should have the same possibilities, and usually people look at this starting in school (so about 6 years old - often waaay later). This is too late. It starts way earlier, with small things like parents talking to their kids (not being glued to their smart phones) or reading to them at bed time. Answering questions. A lot of this just cannot work well if both parents have to work a full time job. Both my partner and I did reduce hours, but we get paid enough that we can afford that (and are willing to take the cut in "standard of living", whatever that means). Not everybody can do that, not to the extent possibly needed. Not everybody can work from home with reduced hours just on a short notice, not everybody can shift work around as flexibly as others.

Three things:

- pay people enough so they can actually do parenting and not have to have two full time jobs in the family

- pay educators enough and make people realise that this is an important job, maybe the most important job there is

- make people realise that schools need to both support for the "weaker" students - and create enough engagement for the stronger students (hire more teachers!)

Yeah. Start with paying people sensible wages (just reduce CEO pay by a factor of 100 or so and do less for the bloody shareholders - f*** them (disclosure, would hit my retirement money, but still, eff them) ), and respect educators on all levels (kindergarten and up)

Re: Just ban all SM platforms

Getting carded: talked to a young lady in a pub (well, considerably younger then I was then) who was tending the bar. Their policy is to just card everybody. Sort of a "yeah, we will not guess your age, and where do we draw a line who 'looks old'".

Not hot on bots, project names and shames AI-created open source software

Uuuh, Firefox...

Let me put it this way: AI integration is unwanted by many, and it creeps in at several places and needs to be deactivated over and over again. I'd saz this qualifies, as it is unwanted intrusion of the software I use by AI "features". I would personally draw the line at "unwanted integration of AI" vs. "AI components can be activated on demand at some clearly labeled location".

It is a spectrum, like many things.

Meta retreats from metaverse after virtual reality check

.... second life....

I mean, some (many, I guess) are old enough to recall that thing (as well as the memorable interview with the flying dicks). Nothing has changed.

Wikimedia’s 25th birthday gift: Letting more AIs scour pages volunteers created

Re: Nobel Peace Prize

I guess Xitter's AI did that all along, didn't it?

Re: Wikipedia is quite good

I've got ten quid on "this year"...

Wikipedia is quite good

for most things. A friend and I tried to correct some physics articles of phenomena we knew a lot about, think PhD level knowledge. Those corrections were reverted, discussion was not welcome.

So... be careful trusting Wikipedia.

(And f**k these eejits who made Wikipedia more wrong, we had to correct your bs when teaching, and often got "but that's what Wikipedia says" - yeah, but not real textbooks)

Microsoft teases targeted Copilot removal for admins

Even worse: " And even if admins succeed in removing it, users can simply reinstall Copilot if they choose." we are talking about managed devices. Lusers should not be able to just install software FFS.

GNOME dev gives fans of Linux's middle-click paste the middle finger

Re: Filing bug reports to further enshittification

I do have words for that person, not ones I would be willing to share openly as some might be actionable.

Just because I'm not on asocial media doesn't mean I don't exist or my opinion is not valid.

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

Re: They still don't get it

That. And getting a constant reminder that "you can do this online" when you tried and and failed several times is just the insulting. And if you are lucky and get a human on the phone and they tell you again that you can do this online is just insulting.

Now add A1 to it...

HSBC app takes a dim view of sideloaded Bitwarden installations

Sideloading?

Just... stop calling it sideloading. It is an installation that Google is unhappy about and complains. It is not in some weird grey zone that is barely legal. It is legal and since I paid for the phone I can damn well do with it what I want. Calling it a security risk is echoing the position of Google (and Apple) and is anti competitive behaviour and abuse of their position.

Lego crams an ASIC in a brick to keep kids interested

Nah...

Bring back mindstorms! That stuff was flexible, and now I have an excuse to buy it.

This stuff? Seems not very flexible in the sense of allowing us to do our own stuff with it. It's the ongoing playmobilification of Lego: bigger stupid parts, lots of oh-so-special parts. No, it's not a new trend, but I'm still annoyed.

Your smart TV is watching you and nobody's stopping it

No, no, no!

"Everyone else needs a zero-knowledge, vanishingly cheap, plug-and-play smart thing.

Not another "smart" thing. No. Just... no.

Please, seriously, this is what brought the mess upon us.

Next "TV" will just be a monitor. No idea if there are still separate dumb tuners out there. Meh, it's not like I watch TV at all, cable is still rolled up in the basement. Not even sure if I did connect the cable to the outlets...

Claude is his copilot: Rust veteran designs new Rue programming language with help from AI bot

Re: Oh, not Roux, then

Just for the last part: Mac and cheese from scratch takes the same time as preparing Kraft Dinner, it is mostly the time it takes for the water to boil and the pasta to cook.

Re: We don't have a package manager

I totally agree with the sentiment, what I am really not sure about is of that is so much more secure. Now the dev has to download the source file from somewhere. Is that location trustworthy? Like, really trustworthy? Or do they just pull it from a URL somebody posted on stackoverflow? I'm not really sure this is so much better. Maybe more difficult to exploit on a really large scale, I guess.

For my own code I often rely on libraries that I can just pull in using apt-get, things like BLAS (or variants of it). I can link to them statically, or dynamically and build a package with dependencies. And there we have a package manager again....

I totally agree npm and the ilk are a complete mess, though!

Starlink satellite fails, polluting orbit with debris and falling toward Earth

Re: Not content

Starlink typically flies higher than the ISS and Hubble. I'd say those are pretty useful orbits (and platforms).