* Posts by drankinatty

234 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Oct 2018

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If you want a picture of the future, imagine humans checking AI didn't make a mistake – forever

drankinatty

I've yet to see demonstration of a "Successful Use Case", lawyers can't get it right.

Scraping the internet and being able to predict the next word, or decompose a cat image into a billion unrecognizable images just to be able to reconstruct another cat image is all good, but so far, other than being an neat curiosity, the AI craze hasn't really born fruit. Sure there have been sizable layoffs, but then the reckoning came that AI really can't replace all those tossed out like a worn-out pair of shoes. The scientific community is having to retract significant number of articles that AI "helped" write meaning the same old hallucination of supporting material found its way in.

None of that paints any type of rosy business picture that AI will ever be anything more than another bubble that pops, 30 years after the pin prick of the dot-com bubble. Unfortunately, the damage done by the hype isn't limited to the "hypsters". The hype comes with serious downsides, caveats and addendums for us all. Such as if AI doesn't take the electric grid down with spiraling energy demands that from a practical standpoint looks to set back the ability to reach net carbon neutral energy by decades as our temperature rise target over pre-industrial level races upward towards 2.5 deg C (which is already worst-case, Greeland Ice-Sheet lost, the AMOC stalled), and life on the blue-ball, third-planet from the sun hangs in the balance with temperature recovery models pushed out past 10,000 years.

No, until AI can beat an Atari 2600 in Chess -- it's all hype with serious downsides.

Firefox is fine. The people running it are not

drankinatty

Add NoScript and Ghostery and you are pretty much bullet-proof. I too have used firefox since 1.x, and I've had to bite my tongue a time of two as the "rabbit-pellet" version race zoomed from 3 to infinity and version numbering lost any meaning. I've also run the gamut trying alternatives, but in the end, with all its warts and the things I have to disable in about:config, I always end up back with firefox.

Is there room for improvement, sure. The loss of focus on the browser engine and making it the best has been apparent. Handing development over to the group of "kids with crayons" that tried to add every unnecessary bell and whistle they could dream up was a classic "Do the opposite" move. But, until some other FOSS browser emerges that will have a continue existence longer than a year and has less warts than firefox, I'll stick with the familiar warts I know, and know how to turn off. But, here's to hope....

This article places blame exactly where it should be, and provides a colorful (and correct) explanation of how it ended up that way. A point well made. If all the Mozilla "execs" had their salaries divided by 20, there would be a good chance those that remained, remained because they were dedicated to developing the best browser possible rather than being dedicated to the trappings of seven-figure salaries. The ad company sell-out and user-agreement modification to profit off user-data are symptoms of the cancer that has grown within the company's management.

Critics blast Microsoft's limited reprieve for those stuck on Windows 10

drankinatty

Re: Quite whining

Choose whichever distro you like, it's all Linux under the hood. The only difference between any of the ditros is how they choose to put the pieces together, subtle choices on how various configs are handled, what package manager is used and the package selection offered. Matters not whether you choose an RPM based distro, deb/apt, pacman, or good old install from tarball manage it yourself flavor. All depends on what you want. Whether a gui install/config tool to use, or whether you just want to spend the extra hour to really learn how Linux works and manually prepare the disks and setup the filesystems and then install and configure everything by hand.The result is the same.

There's nothing magic about mint. It's just another Ubuntu derivative. Works fine, as does Ubuntu, Debian, openSUSE, Slackware, Archlinux, etc... Try them all. Most provide live media you can simply boot and test drive before committing to your hard drive. It simply becomes a matter of taste at that point. Most have welcoming communities and mailing lists to help and many provide excellent online documentation. It can be a very enjoyable experience. The price is right. It costs less than a year of extended M$ security updates. (though you should make an effort to give back to the community -- that's what makes it all work -- quite well)

Proton bashes Apple and joins antitrust suit that seeks to throw the App Store wide open

drankinatty

Why does a Switzerland-based company route western e-mail through China?

Perhaps Apple would be more accommodating if Proton didn't route most (all) of the e-mail proton-mail handles through Chinese mail servers. Huh? Yep. (e.g., mail.protonmail.ch[185.205.70.128], [185.70.42.128], [176.119.200.128], and so on)

I've had no end of issues with US (Texas) based local-government's use of proton-mail being blocked at the firewall and having to specifically whitelist IPs to have city and county engineer's e-mail delivered. There may just be some valid concerns Apple has with this "Swiss" company's practices. (it's also begs the question -- what are these local governments thinking... all they hear is "proton" and "secure" without ever understanding more)

Frozen foods supermarket chain deploys facial recognition tech

drankinatty

Re: Hmm (double Hmm)

The company specifically says it will reduce "violent crime" -- when the hell did frozen food shoppers all turn violent? Did I miss that part? The data isn't stored? (how long does it exist? long enough to be transferred or sold? and ... we're just supposed to take that a face value? ... not.).

The solution seems readily apparent -- fresh salad anyone? If non-violent frozen-food consumers vote with their wallet, I bet the CEO changes his tune of the privacy infringing facial recognition escapade. What's the world coming to?? Beam be up Scotty, and if the Enterprise isn't available, I'll take the TARDIS.

CloudBees CEO says customers are slowing down on 'black box' code from AIs

drankinatty

Did you ever notice...

People that have very little to say like to misapply technical terms to sound important? "the velocity that they need to prosecute this trend at"? Really, "velocity"? And just how do you calculate the dot, cross or triple product of that "velocity"? Use "speed" or "pace" when you mean speed or pace. (</language nerd rant>)

I guess when what you are saying is "we've figured out that creating systems based on AI generated code can lead to significant reliability problems later on because nobody really knows HTF the code is put together" ... you have to come up with a whole lot of words to obscure what was readily available to most early on. But hey, you're drawing CEO pay, so you gotta make it sound complicated.

WD escapes half a billion in patent damages as judge trims award to $1

drankinatty

Re: $500 million to 1 ?

It's the republican way - dismantle the axiom that "a jury's verdict remain inviolate".

There is no justice when a jury's verdict is set aside (absent clear reversible error not relevant here). For the life of our legal system, the one thing that business couldn't control was a jury verdict. That's changing. There has been a 35 year concentrated effort to chip away at that legal foundation. Follow the money. Look at the amounts poured into state judicial races that were never supposed to be political to begin with. Look at the political appointments and bastardizing organizations like the Heritage Foundation and right-wing operators like Leonard Leo. Look at supreme court justices that receive more from their Dallas billionaire backer than they are payed in salary. The corrupting influence on the judicial system is by design.

Each new hurdle raised, such as evidence from a "damages expert" to sufficiently "tie" the amount of lost royalties to damages, becomes a tool an inclined judge (or reviewing court) can use to alter or set aside the decision of the jury. The entire judicial approach has changed from upholding a jury verdict if there is any way the verdict can be upheld, to one where the jury verdict means nothing unless supported by proof beyond any reasonable doubt. Essentially turning the legal system on its head.

On the flip side, $1 in compensation is called "'nominal damages". It is the minimum a court can award and still uphold the judgement which is a predicate for the victor recovering attorney's fees, etc. So it could have been worse...

Uncle Sam seeks time in tower dump data grab case after judge calls it 'unconstitutional'

drankinatty

What are the odds of an appeal?

Government will be spoiling to appeal to attempt to create a split between the 5th and 9th circuits teeing the case up for the high-nine. We can presumably guess that the it will be a sad day for the 4th amendment with the current makeup of the court. Sad.

KDE Plasma 6.4 ships with major usability and Wayland improvements

drankinatty

KDE Team note: Plasma 6.4.0 will need manual intervention if you are on X11

For some distros, like Arch, Plasma 6.4.0 removes default X11 session install requiring manual intervention to install the plasma-x11-session package. The note for Arch reads, in part:

"With the recent split of kwin into kwin-wayland and kwin-x11, users running the old X11 session needs to manually install plasma-x11-session, or they will not be able to login."

That's a pleasant surprise for your update if you just don't happen to be subscribed to the arch-dev-public mailing list....

Florida man expands crypto empire with new wireless service and phone

drankinatty

Proof Positive

A fool and his money are easily parted. Cheeto has fleeced his supporters time and time again. His wireless will likely end no better than his university.

Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora 43 to drop X11 in GNOME editions

drankinatty

Re: Stupid

If it looks like freedesktop and quacks like freedesktop -- then the duck is likely in the background pushing the changes (along with the kids-with-crayons that took over Gnome over a decade ago). I wish freedesktop would put as much effort into fixing the Intel graphics driver issues as it does trying to push wayland to the exclusion of X11.

NASA to silence Voyager's social media accounts

drankinatty

It feels a little like a step backwards in terms of outreach

That hits the nail squarely on the head. For an agency whose life-blood is public support and stirring the public's imagination, this seems quite counter-productive. I'm hesitant to take at face-value the claim this will improve the public experience. I can hope that will be so, but hope can only be dashed so many times. Though JPL is a center that does tend to get things right more so than the others by comparison. Let's hope they are heading the consolidation of the feeds under the new solarsystems locale.

Microsoft slows Windows 11 24H2 Patch Tuesday due to a 'compatibility issue'

drankinatty

Strange, I haven't had a single issue with Win11 updates

$ uname -r

6.15.1-arch1-2

How sweet it is to be free!

Texas warns 300,000 crash reports siphoned via compromised user account

drankinatty

Who's Responsiblity Is It??

"Texan drivers would do well to contact their insurance companies and warn them against fraudulent claims." Huh?? Texas drivers are the ones that screwed this up. Really? 300,000 people should contact roughly six carriers because the state screwed up? Instead dear governor, did you think about the state contacting the insurers?

A typical "Governor Hotwheels" pass the buck, avoid responsibility statement that just puts the burden on Texans instead of fixing anything. Ann Richards was the last Texas governor to actually try to fix anything. Shub, Prick Perry, and governor Hotwheels all took the Cruz fly-to-Cancun approach leaving Texans holding the bag. Glad to see nothings changed. (well, except old Kenny boy found out how to get out from under felony indictment for securities fraud...)

Trump administration's whole-government AI plans leaked on GitHub

drankinatty

Re: First time?

From the article, that pretty much sound like the entirety of the feature set of ai.gov with employee-monitoring. Hopefully it does something more than just aggregating the chatbots in one location. How the hell that's supposed to do anything government is supposed to do is a bit nebulous and bewildering. Sounds like a pipe-dream from one of Muskies mushroom trips.

Ex-NASA Admin pick blames Musk ties for pulled nomination

drankinatty

Good Riddance

Isaacman was the wrong man for the job, and another abominable nomination. His only strength was he wasn't a Fox news weekend anchor with a history of drunkenness and financial mismanagement. NASA has been on the wrong path for several decades. The loss of corporate knowledge as the "public-private" partnerships drained funds from the agency driving up overall launch costs and leaving us showered with private rockets that keep experiencing "rapid unscheduled disassembly" over varying launch azimuths. NASA has long needed to return to doing the things instead of pretending that it "manages" while others "do". Under that model NASA did little except dole out its funds to a few well connected companies while starving the organization. (okay, not all NASA centers adhered to that model, but it has been the hallmark of recent administrators and administration in Building 1)

While one can always throw rocks at NASA for x, y or z, it, with all its flaws, was a nation treasure that did great things. It needs to get back to doing the great things and let the technical developments be spun-off into private industry (remember Velcro?), instead of spinning itself off into private industry. NASA needs to retain its core business of manned and unmanned spaceflight and science and get out of the "management" business.

The contracting paradigm has always been NASA's Achilles heel. More of a jobs-project for middle-income engineers and "managers". Now don't get me wrong, I'm not raining on the whole contracting idea. There were some damn good contractors employing talented and dedicated engineers that made the system work. But NACA/NASA was in the aviation/spaceflight business, not the management business for much of its existence, up really until return to flight post 51-L and then the the number of contractors and organizations grew from something you could list on one page to something that more resembled weeds in a vacant lot than any sane organization chart.

Isaacman would have overseen the continued intentional deterioration of the agency and loss of agency spaceflight and science knowledge on a historic scale. Good riddance he is going the way of the chief Doggy Bro.

AI kept 15-year-old zombie vuln alive, but its time is drawing near

drankinatty

The Scary Part

We have trained the next generation of programmers to rely on LLM code generation for "productivity" reasons (greed, profits, etc..) Instead of being taught how to program, they are being taught how to prompt. Some of the biggest players in the IDE and OS world are pushing every type of AI in just about every programming tool they can shoe-horn "AI" into. "Don't think, just use your assistant." Let it do the thinking and work for you -- like magic!

The three-spinners have certainly woven a wicked fate for us all. A digital future with built in vulnerabilities -- as a "feature". It's cliche, but what could possibly go wrong?

More than a hundred backdoored malware repos traced to single GitHub user

drankinatty

Is MS just asleep at the switch?

With all the supposed software sophistication, how does Microsoft just let something like this run rampant on Github? Are they supposed to have systems and tools that are on the lookout for suspicious activity -- just the type described in the article? Isn't AI supposed to be able to spot this stuff -- the same way it is supposed to be able to spot breast cancer before human eyes can? It seems like a world full of hype and no results as far as platform security and AI goes? No?

Dem senators pen stern letter urging Noem to reinstate cyber review board

drankinatty

A venerable barn-yard sniper she is.... don't forget the goat. In addition to animals, she's shown herself quite adept at shooting herself and the nation in the foot. Morons and Fox news hosts -- those are the "best" people we were promised?

Ukrainians smuggle drones hidden in cabins on trucks to strike Russian airfields

drankinatty

Re: Ukraine did

Volodymyr: 1 Vladimir: 0 - brilliant operation, Go Ukraine!

Stargate to land its first offshore datacenters in the United Arab Emirates

drankinatty

Says it will serve half of humanity

That's going to be a bit difficult with many UAE addresses blocks blocked by company firewalls. A decade of harboring bad actors has its price.

Eeek! p0wned Alabama hit by unspecified 'cybersecurity event'

drankinatty

Speckled Trout

Oh great! That means all the e-mails from the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources asking me to renew my non-resident saltwater license now have to be considered suspect. Nothing is sacred anymore.

No-boom supersonic flights could slide through US skies soon

drankinatty

Re: American leadership in aviation ?

"If it's not Boeing, I'm not going..." {strike that} "If it's Boeing, I'm not going..."' Okay, brought forward to modern times.

Unfortunately, most of those pushing to lift the restrictions were not alive in the early 70's and don't remember just how well reasoned the prohibition on supersonic flight over populated area were. Growing up in the late 60's and early 70's in far north Dallas, the sonic booms generated by military aircraft were quite regular and teeth jarring at times. (even though calling the area populated back then may have been a bit of a stretch)

While drone sized models may show promise of being able to reduce the intensity of the shock wave, a full-scale aircraft is a different thing altogether. Forgive me if I'm a bit skeptical of claims of 90 dB shock wave from a plane going Mach 1.7... but then again, 2049 has left 24 years to meet the goal (or revise the shock wave intensity up).

I guess with delays at the departure and arrival terminal ballooning by hours, they are searching for any way possible to shorten the travel time in between. Here's to hope. I still believe in magic...

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

drankinatty

Trust is a quaint ideal like legacy accounts... Sue them. An entity acquires a companies assets and liabilities at acquisition unless explicitly excluded -- that includes legacy accounts.

If there are enough of them to make a case viable, there are plenty of lawyers that will take it. "we didn't dig deep enough" isn't a legal excuse, it's an admission of pre-transaction negligence and doesn't serve as a legal avoidance of the obligation or any company liability.

Seems the CEO is as diligent in his public facing comments as he is in his pre-purchase digging...

Metal maker meltdown: Nucor stops production after cyber-intrusion

drankinatty

How else can the execs watch Tik Tok between batches and catch up on facebook and xitter?

CISA mutes own website, shifts routine cyber alerts to Musk’s X, RSS, email

drankinatty

When it's over - Uncle Sam will be raising a tin cup for help....

The 5hit-show continues with a wrecking ball being swung at critical US infrastructure while the orange-turd tries to stuff a 747 from Qatar in his pocket. Destroying the people's house while packing boxes with the spoils for his own personal benefit.

As anyone with public-facing infrastructure can tell you the need tor threat tracking and dissemination of that information to help quell the attacks is vital. Though that thought likely never had time to enter the addled orangutan's mind between the 7 hours of right-wing news watched each day, orange face painting, wig gluing, golf, airplane tours, tariff roulette, deporting brown people to El Salvador while granting special immigrant status to white people from South Africa.

I mean where else would he turn to find "the best people" to head critical government agencies were he to watch less propaganda. God knows we need another crazed South African immigrant thrown into the mix. You just can't make this stuff up, and it would be comical if it were not so serious and so tragic.

Can you spare a dime and hand for the cup... We will need it when this story ends, and I doubt very much that it ends well.

openSUSE deep sixes Deepin desktop over security stink

drankinatty

R.I.P Leap

After using SUSE since 7.0 Pro and then openSUSE from 11.0 on, with the immutable filesystem coming and other atypical Linux changes being made to the Leap distro, we jumped from 15.4 to Tumbleweed (the openSUSE rolling-release offering that still supports i586 and full X.org without the immutable filesystem). No complaints. The 2/25 TW installed changed base security from AppArmor to SELinux - which came with more than a few growing pains, but those have been largely resolved. So as Leap looks less like Linux, there is still an openSUSE option in Tumbleweed.

Pentagon declares war on 'outdated' software buying, opens fire on open source

drankinatty

Re: Morons Are Governing America

We're Doomed...

Microsoft tries to knife passwords once and for all - at least for consumers

drankinatty

M$ Wants Biometric ID - Sure Hold-on a second ... - NOT.

Perhaps I'm just a curmudgeon, but I think you would have to be literally daft to turn over your biometric identifiers to log into consumer software, or any software for that matter. Maybe for intelligence agencies (before brother Pete), but not for windows, word or the Microsoft account.

Given the entire industries track record of keeping customer data safe, trusting them with your immutable identifying factors is a bridge too far. In case of a breach, you can change your password or ssh cert, but if your bio ID is leaked, stolen, whatever, you are a bit out of luck. No thank you.

Microsoft to preload Word minutes after boot

drankinatty

Installs on spinning rust -- need not apply (hopefully)

Let's hope M$ is smart enough not to try to pre-load word on those rare few boxes still loading from spinning disks.

While m.2 and sata SSD may provide enough I/O to keep up with the never-ending amount of "stuff" that windows attempts to load at startup, platter disks are already pegged at 100% saturation for up to 30 minutes waiting edge to load/update and for the beloved CompatTelRunner to chew through terabytes of storage looking for software to notify the mother-ship about. Layer preloading another 4G of word on top of that pleasant period of time, may well provide time for several coffee breaks and the morning constitutional -- before windows becomes usable (it that is actually possible).

Redis 'returns' to open source with AGPL license

drankinatty

Re: Redis 'returns' to open source with AGPL license

Yep, just went through the transition from redis to valkey on Arch providing the server cache backend for Nextcloud. Valkey is essentially a drop-in replacement for redis (a few config file name changes, and the Unix socket name), and it worked without a hitch. (okay, without any technical hitch, there was the self-inflected hitch of failing to restart php-fpm that left me scratching my head for a while...).

Trust is something hard won in open-source. After forcing distros to drop redis and adopt valkey due to the March license change by redis, the relicensing as AGPL strikes me as a bit too little to late and something that falls well short of restoring trust going forward.

Trump admin freaks out over mere suggestion Amazon was going to show tariff impact on prices

drankinatty

Re: America

Living though it is holy hell. Every time the orange-turd start braying about the last perceived transgression that crossed his feeble mind, America (and Canada, Greenland, and the rest of the free world) cringes and just hopes the next 1,361 days pass swiftly, oh so swiftly. I strongly suspect this will be a lesson not easily forgotten, nor should it be.

On a serious note, this should serve as a cautionary tale about the dangers of letting the right-wing camel get it nose under the proverbial political tent. It soon metastasizes and overtakes the political party that lifted the edge of the tent. Democracy and its hard won freedoms must be guarded and nurtured by all. As a parent, the damage done to my children's generation will take a lifetime to repair. As a student of history, I'm just glad the the majority of the greatest generation have already passed on to their final reward and are spared the shame brought about by those that failed to learn the lessons history has to teach.

Were I a more cynical person I may even be tempted to think that what we see may be intentionally brought about by those who understand the lessons well but who are willing to exploit the circumstance for personal gain. There should be a special place for those involved if my cynicism turns out to be something more than the suspicions of an old attorney. Time will tell.

Hubble Space Telescope is still producing science at 35

drankinatty

Re: Really?

That's correct, and that's one of the arguments in favor of keeping Hubble flying. Hubble looks at visual wavelengths, while the new telescopes like James Webb look at infrared. There is valuable data and science to get from all parts of the spectrum. The service mission cost would be minor compared to designing/developing something new to look in the visual range. That said, there are practical concerns that should drive the decision. The primary one already discussed above is we no longer have a shuttle that can launch a bus-sized payload with the manipulator arm inside to grapple the telescope with. I'm not up to speed on the details of the new vehicles or capabilities having left JSC in 95. But whether a mission can take the needed servicing parts, and whether it can handle the rendezvous and reboost is simply one question than is primary. If the telescope needs 4 new gyros, but current launch capabilities can only carry 2, then that is another area of tradeoffs to consider.

All that said, if the stars align and the servicing is doable, then personally, the benefit that instrument provides to science makes the assessment worthwhile.

CVE fallout: The splintering of the standard vulnerability tracking system has begun

drankinatty

Re: Global lack of trust in U.S. decision making is a thing.

Not with the orang-in-chief and doggy boys running around. They continually demonstrate how they can fsck up a shot-put with a rubber hammer. (and that takes some effort) There should be an award for monumental incompetence of that level...

Official abuse of state security has always been bad, now it's horrifying

drankinatty

Re: re: Chris Krebs

Yes. Just ask Rudy how his law practice is going. Or John Eastman for that matter. The bar isn't just a place for getting knackered. Disbarment and suspension of the lawyers involved provides the clearest lens to view the whole corrupt effort through.

drankinatty

Re: re: Chris Krebs

I'm just waiting for the defenestrations to start. Solves many problems the tyrant is facing. All that messy due process stuff they have to argue in court and bring people back for. 3rd floor or better -- problem solved.

Photoshop FOSS alternative GIMP wakes up from 7-year coma with version 3.0

drankinatty

Re: Gimp works well for its purpose -> great for small businesses

Very similar to my journey. I've used gimp for 20 years and still have about 50% of it to fully learn. I was surprised with gimp-3 in the RC3 dressing on openSUSE Tumbleweed and had a few issues. The biggest is what all gtk+2 to gtk+3 ports suffer from and that is icon-size and icon-spacing due to the gtk+3 CSS theme model. The problem being that .margin and .padding greatly effect both and many times the apps leaves the CSS to the theme to implement. (therein lies the problem)

If you use default Adwaita or Adwaita-dark (as if you have much of a choice anymore) the icon size and spacing is roughly 150% of what it was with gtk+2. Not really an issue unless using gimp on a laptop where screen real estate is at a premium. If you use any "custom" theme -- good luck. Many themes don't set a default for icon and list .margin and .padding which can cause the size of elements to vary wildly.

In my case, I could only see about 2/3 as much of the toolbox as normal. Attempting to adjust the toolbox windows size (I don't use "Single Window Mode"), caused the toolbox window to crash. So there are still a few growing pains to work though.

LibreOffice went though fits with this where its icons would spill over into the ellipsized (hidden) icon list to the right. When its gtk+3 port first appeared you could only see about 1/2 the icons you were used to seeing in the toolbar. (recall Gtk+3 removed the toolbar widget, as well as the ruler widget) Ultimately, libre arrived at a very workable solution providing a custom set of icons with fixed size and spacing that resolved the toolbar size and spacing issues well. Gimp may have to do something similar rather than relying on some CSS theme to do it. (current gtk themes are "like a box of chocolates" in that regard)

Growing pains. It's will all get sorted. Gimp has always been one amazing tool. Gimp and then Gimp 2 had a very good web-based tutorial. Hopefully they will make sure that is updated for the new features and capabilities of gimp-3. That was an invaluable resource for learning the basics of the tool.

US minerals company says crooks broke into email and helped themselves to $500K

drankinatty

A company can be both "legally fine" and "morally bankrupt" at the same time. A company still running a loss after 38 years is a tax-shelter, not a legitimate ongoing concern. It's a finance gimmick on a spreadsheet producing paper losses for a few and nothing of value for society at large. It's a loophole that needs closing in the tax code.

Here's the ugliest global-warming chart you'll ever need to see

drankinatty

Re: Just another alarmist global warming rant

And finally a sane grown-up enters the room.Thank you.

Time for nonsense is way past over. It was over twenty years ago. We, collectively, and unfortunately, will suffer the consequence of the effect the misinformation campaigns Each of those designed and calculated to infuse doubt into the climate conversions. There was never a "debate". The "debate" was the misinformation injected by the fossil-fuel industry to prevent regulation and keep their profits high - the damage being done to the earth be damned. The "debate" was created by politicians, who knew better, but who put the fossil-industry money in their campaign coffers and would then "wink and nod" at the camera spewing nonsense about scientists disagreeing meaning no warming was happening. The US house and senate a full of them, with Jim Inhofe as the poster-boy and Marsha Blackburn running a close second. Corrupt leaders make corrupt bargains to serve corrupt personal interests. Preventing our planet from becoming uninhabitable isn't among the interests they hold.

I read though these comments and for those attempting to espouse nonsense about warming not occurring or being part of one of the extended natural cycles the earth sees due to perturbations in its orbit over eons, I feel disappointment. Not at the commenter directly, but disappointment that we collectively haven't done a better job at education and reaching out to those ignorant on the grave danger this issue represents to humanity. People basically fall into three-camps around global warming:

(1) those that know and have the integrity to address the issue directly,

(2) those that know, but accept some benefit in exchange for compromising their integrity to contribute to misinformation on the issue, and

(3) those that don't know, but pretend as if they do after hearing no more than a 15 second sound-bite and then the gullible loudly amplify the misinformation 128 characters at a time. (the loud-minority problem)

The unfortunate part is aggregation of wealth within the chemical and fossil-fuel industries and our failure to prevent its corrupting influence in politics sadly means the voices of (2) and (3) above are those that get amplified to the masses contributing to the morass we find ourselves in. For those with any lingering questions, please re-read [Humans brought the heat. Earth says we pay the price](https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/02/heatwaves_future/) along with the linked articles therein. If you can't hold your hands under a 128°F faucet, what will 170°F feel like on the skin in the desert southwest of the U.S. when we reach 2070? Not even 50 years away.

As a parting note addressing the global temperature rising at a rate much faster than anticipated by many models, just as the data in this article sought to use the most conservative set that could be tuned to eliminate uncertainties to the greatest extent practicable, that has led to most estimates on the rate of warming being woefully conservative as well. One of the variables with the biggest impact on rate of rise and state of global warming is how must "committed-warming" the current numbers reflect. (how much of the warming we are seeing was due to emissions already released and adsorbed by the system in the 1970, 1980, 1990, etc.., the affect of which we are just seeing at present)

If this rapid rise we see today is because the "committed-warming" has a much longer look-back time than was thought and what we see manifesting now is a result of the committed-warming from the 70's our goose is cooked. That would be, we have not yet seen the impact from the committed-warming put into the system in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s or 2020s yet. So the climate impact due to committed-warming gets worse each year, just like compound-interest on a loan. The only question is whether we are amortizing the impacts over a 10, 20, 30 or 40 year note and what our interest rate is. The committed-warming is that aspect of the problem that means even if we went to a 100% clean and renewable sources of energy tomorrow, we would still experience global average temperature rise for the next hundred years.

The Anthropocene may just be a very brief global period (depending on what they settle on as its beginning), that leads into the 6th great mass extinction. Our window closed for staving off the worst aspects of climate change. What we do now and going forward will determine if the warming we will have will be survivable, and for how many?

As I look at my children, I'm sickened. This is our (collectively, me included) greatest societal failure of the last 50 years that we are passing on to them. The responsibility was ours to act in time to prevent the worst consequences of global warming.And we failed. The 1.5 deg C target was chosen because of the truly horrific consequences of going beyond 1.5 deg C, even incrementally past it. It was chosen as the target temperature that if exceeded ensured the irrecoverable melt of the Greenland ice sheet and the associated 10 meters of sea-level rise resulting in the forced-migration of between 35% and 40% of the worlds population away from crowded coastlines.

drankinatty

Re: No more USAID

They say ignorance is bliss... This joker must be one happy-camper...

drankinatty

Re: Just another alarmist global warming rant

You just can't fix stupid... Period.

KDE Plasma 6.3 released – and 6.3.1 is already here

drankinatty

I lived it. May 2008, openSUSE 11.0, default desktop KDE 4.0.4a (yes 'a' for alpha). 200+ bugs later, I gave up and went back to KDE3. I've use plasma on Arch, but I'm still not impressed. I use KDE3 on Tumbleweed, and it does everything Plasma does and I can still set the font-size and face for the clock and calendar in systray if I don't like the default. (good luck with that in plasma, like hacking XML files?)

Not to be a naysayer, Plasma has come a long way. It's usable. Konqueror (--profile file-management) will now actually open up the same way you left if last time when you told it to save its settings. That's progress. So 15 years later, we are getting close to having a usable KDE back after the KDE team at the 2007 KDE meeting decided to throw the baby out with the bathwater and discard KDE3 like a worn out pair of shoes.

Between the KDE3/4 failure and the Gnome 2/3 fiasco, you wonder where the LInux-desktop would be today if a more careful and ordered approach to improvement had been taken. It has literally cost 15 years and an ungodly number of man-hours (and women-hours) in bug-reports, patches, bug-reports, patches, toolkit jumps (and thefts) and kicks by proprietary vendors (yes, you Trolltech, et. al.) and hard tireless work of developers and contributors just to get back to where we were in 2008. All because a handful of team-members decided they new how to make things better -- really?

Reminds me of the same level of thoughtfulness that is going into making America better as we speak. Embrace your enemies and screw you allies -- what? Let's pray it takes less time to recover from this ongoing fiasco, but I suspect it won't. You guys (and gals) on the east side of the pond, keep your eyes on us, we will need your help...

Lawyers face judge's wrath after AI cites made-up cases in fiery hoverboard lawsuit

drankinatty

I hope Judge Rankin sees it that way...

Mata v. Avianca, Inc, United States v. Hayes, and United States v. Cohen -- 4 strikes and your out. The patience of US Federal District Court Judges has it's limits. This isn't a hallucination of first impression. Once, maybe twice and the mea culpa may carry the day. Being ID-10-T lawyer number-five begins to strain credulity from the judge's perspective.

Trump’s cyber chief pick has little experience in The Cyber

drankinatty

Re: as what they’re told isn’t evidence based and is done entirely for the ‘feels’.

a/k/a "the orange turd", the one who sits silent in the oval office like a turnip watching a kid pick buggers from his nose while Pres Musk delivers and address.

drankinatty

Re: Tulsi Gabbard - "Five-Eyes" develops myopia, fitted with Glasses -- now "Four-Eyes"

"Putin's Girl" as DNI -- what could possibly go wrong? Perhaps our closest allies that make up "Five-Eyes" in intelligence sharing would be wise to hold their cards a bit tighter to the vest until this *bleep*-show is over. Our new Cyber chief likely to be pwned soon, again, what could possibly go wrong. Beam me up Scotty...

Microsoft open sources PostgreSQL extensions to muscle in on NoSQL

drankinatty

Re: SQLite

Chuckling... and then have to vacuum the registry ever few days...

I'm pretty chuffed on the opendocumentDB extensions to postgres. I used to poo-poo the NoSQL concept, but I've come to see it's worth. The world loves json/bson, and from a simple storage-structure standpoint NoSQL couldn't be easier, Just create a DB and collection and start stashing json documents there. No need to define fields and types, the json takes care of that for you. Even if the fields don't match between documents, as long as there is a common-field to coordinate between the documents, you can do most of what you need to do (even the matching field is optional).

Mongo has the stumbling block that for older hardware, without the latest AVX2 intrinsics, you are stuck trying to find a distro that provides mongodb-4.4, the last version to run on SSE/AVX hardware. MongoDB 8.x is current, so there is a lot of development lost if your hardware doesn't measure up. (that said, mongodb-4.4 works exceedingly well, works with the latest mongosh and latest PHP-mongo library extension)

That doesn't mean I'm a NoSQL convert. I still much prefer the rigid structure and transactions SQL offers. I've used MySQL, then MariaDB and Postgres. All are mature, capable, lightweight and fast. I'll use any, but if I had to choose one that is a favorite, it's Postgres. With the opendocumentDB extensions for M$, that is quite another feather in the Postgres cap.

We will see where this goes, but while it is rare for M$, open-sourcing the extensions was a good thing. I've yet to try Ferret, so we will have to see how easy it makes it to weasel bson into postgres through the new extensions.

Sri Lanka goes bananas after monkey unplugs nation

drankinatty

Re: Scepticism

The flash, the boom and then the smoking thump a few seconds later -- squirrels suffer the same fate all the time. Never pays to money around with high voltage -- regardless of species...

The biggest microcode attack in our history is underway

drankinatty

A breath of fresh air, but with all the seriousness of a tsunami

I suspect this opinion piece was a mildly cathartic undertaking. Tactful yet pointed. Technical yet political. Satire yet deadly serious. The pen truly is mightier than the sword.

Before the inauguration, in a comment, there was a small request that all those on the east side of the pond keep a close eye on what was about to take place on the other, because all indications were we would be in need of help and it would likely take all of us to navigate though this lowest point since the bombing of Great Britain. Looking back, that was one hell of an understatement. Then as now, isolationism is not the answer. The regulators, the rule-of-law will be tested. All depends on it holding. We shall never surrender.

Datacenter energy use to more than double by 2030 thanks to AI's insatiable thirst

drankinatty

I'm a bit more concerned with the climate-impact of the coal and gas that will be used to generate the electricity required under "emergency waivers" to current green-energy goals. After just enduring a week in February with temperatures running 25 degrees F above average, and watching winter not start until December and end in January in Texas -- we don't have the luxury of any more "committed warming" lag-time to waste.

Requiring to electricity hungry speculators to pay for and provide their own clean energy seems like a perfectly fair proposition. However, expecting these jokers to do the right-thing and think about anything other than the money they can put in their pockets is nothing but wishful thinking.

Population growth and improving quality of life throughout developing countries and continued reliance on fossil-fuels in the developed world have already blown past the critical 1.5 deg C warming target. The resounding short-sightedness of allowing a few profiteers to gamble for greater wealth while burning our children's world to a crisp seems akin to passing out marshmallows while your house burns down around you. Not the proper course of action...

'Maybe the problem is you' ... Linus Torvalds wades into Linux kernel Rust driver drama

drankinatty

Re: Fair comment by Linus

That is the key -- period. With each minor version update to the kernel things change, defines are added/removed, the API changes accordingly and drivers break. I maintain legacy Nvidia drivers for a couple of distros, and kernel changes break things every time (Okay, 6.11 was an exception). With rust drivers it will be no different.

A define changes, a function call is removed or renamed and the rust driver breaks. I don't fault the kernel devs for taking the position they have. They have decades of C experience. To become proficient in the nuances of any programming language takes years. A monkey can take a syntax manual and tutorial and write "Hello World!", but to write code at the same level a musician plays an instrument takes the same amount of time and practice.

Foisting the maintenance responsibility for Rust drivers on the kernel devs, when, not if, the Rust driver breaks, and the Rust devs are nowhere to be found is a non-starter. How many Rust devs have we seen jump ship? There is no guaranteed the driver author or those with the knowledge of how to fix it will still be part of the project when the time comes. I don't doubt for a minute that the current rust devs have good intentions that will not be the case. But all the good intentions in the world won't fix a broken rust driver if their circumstances change. There is an apt saying about a road being paved with good intention. That poses risk and problem for kernel management.

There are no performance-bonds the rust devs can acquire to ensure and insure performance when the time come. Ultimately it all comes down to trust, and that simply takes time and is not won whining on anti-social media.

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