Posts by Ashentaine

HR may have to cajole and soothe reluctant employees to get them to use AI

"We spent a lot of money on this AI thingy and the board is getting antsy about whether it was worth the cost, so sack anyone who doesn't use it for 'not aligning with company goals'."

Infinite Machine e-scooter is like the offspring of a Vespa and a Cybertruck

Don't worry, this looks pretty much like yet another startup either fishing for a quick grab at investor cash to run away with or attempting to get bought out by a larger company who intends to patent their tech and squat on it. The design looks like it was made specifically to flag down Tesla investors who are known to throw good money after bad at anything that promises to be "disruptive", so I'm guessing the former myself.

Either way, barring some financial scandal this is probably the first and last time you'll ever see one of those things outside of some Youtube video essay in a year or so.

Your car’s web browser may be on the road to cyber ruin

Fortunately, the problem will fix itself when the 2G/3G networks get shut down and all the connectivity features of cars more than three or four years old stop working. See all those Porsches that stopped working in Russia recently for an example.

Japan just sent origami to space to unfurl possibilities for outsized antennas

A haiku

Winter skies alight

As novel satellites fly

Please don't break this time

Diversion to power datacenters earns Boom Supersonic a ticket to revive fast air transport

It may be more viable...

...but that doesn't mean it's going to happen, as their timeframe for producing a viable product will probably just keep stretching and stretching until there's no need to provide one anymore. Seems like another case of a company hoping they can snatch at the cash flying around the AI bubble before it pops so they can use it for their real project, and not what they claim they're going to do with it.

Latest Windows 11 updates may break the OS's most basic bits

Sheesh

And people wonder why admins are always so stubborn about waiting to install updates for anything and everything.

NASA nominee 'committed' to uprooting Shuttle Discovery for Houston trophy piece

Hopefully...

...Isaacman follows the proper political procedure with this.

And by that I mean dallying around for years, sucking up money while delaying the project with minor issues and red tape, until all parties involved in wanting to move the shuttle are out of office and the whole thing is quietly smothered as a budget line item to be written off, once nobody remembers why it was to be done in the first place.

Microsoft exec finds AI cynicism 'mindblowing'

Smile, citizen! Happiness is mandatory.

>Has he used his own tools?

Given that he works for Microsoft, the answer is definitely yes as it's mandatory to do so. And I reckon a large part of his pay packet now depends on not only using Copilot regardless of whether it's necessary or not, but also shilling it to anyone who is within earshot at every opportunity.

Microsoft blanks out BSODs on public displays with new ‘Digital Signage mode’

Considering how a lot of the digital signs and such that I've seen in shopping areas are still just running a slideshow over a normal Windows install, usually exposed when the window with said slideshow isn't centered correctly and you can see the desktop peeking out on one side, I don't think this'll change much.

Microsoft 365 business customers are running out of places to hide from Copilot

It'll be a fun day when Microsoft inevitably drops Copilot support entirely with minimal warning, right after everyone that didn't/couldn't move elsewhere has finally given up and decided to get settled with using it. And you know that's going to happen, given their history.

Robotic lawnmower uses AI to dodge cats, toys

Re: Those tiny blades though...

From the looks of the inside of that thing, it'd choke on a fairly large patch of dandelions. I'm sure it'll be fine for maintaining an already immaculately groomed lawn, though.

Re: I really can't see them taking off (at least not in the UK)

Just have your machinegun-equipped Boston Dynamics robot dog escorting it around while it does its thing, problem solved.

Japan’s new space truck is also a temporary space lab, just worked first time

Also we can't exactly verify the structural integrity of all that space junk, so trying to just grab the stuff and drag it out of its orbit has a possibility of causing it to break up into smaller pieces, and those pieces ending up in more dangerous flight paths.

Clippy rises from the dead in major update to Copilot and its voice interface

Re: Clippy

>The real Clippy would never want to steal your data, invade your privacy or lie to you.

Yeah, that's Bonzi Buddy's job. And he didn't even need Copilot to do so!

Trust the AI, says new coding manifesto by Kim and Yegge

So what they're saying is if you know exactly what to say to get the output you want, have enough relevant experience and training to polish up the results or just do it yourself from scratch when needed, and can properly identify when it's intentionally behaving badly and producing highly undesirable results, vibe coding is perfectly fine.

Yep, sounds great. Coding for the masses is finally here!

</sarcasm>

Thou shalt not let AI run amok: Vatican wants global rules

Re: "AI is 'above all else a tool.' "

>Not too sure about that — only if a marshmallow hammer is also a tool.

Anything can be used as a hammer once if you swing it hard and fast enough. It's just a matter of how much efficiency you're willing to trade off to get that result.

Spend enough time crafting a prompt that tells the AI exactly what you want of it and throw enough random seeds through it, you'll eventually get a result that's more or less the desired one. Sure it's immensely less efficient than just having a couple properly trained people do it instead, but if you're really insistent on having that marshmallow drive that nail in, it can eventually be done. Especially if you work at Microsoft, where getting that result is directly tied to your job performance review.

Anthropic brings mad Skills to Claude

Once again...

...it is not OUR responsibility to figure out how YOUR product will be useful. Especially if you're already charging money for the privilege of using said product. Either have a viable use case before you start selling it or don't sell it at all, telling your customers to "think of the applications" is just admitting you don't know what it's good for.

AI boffins teach office supplies to predict your next move

Day 3: BOFH and PFY leave early for the pub, having driven yet another Boss into the cozy embrace of a straitjacket.

Cisco: Most companies don't know what they're doing with AI

Keeping up appearances

Most companies don't know what they're doing with AI because they only bought into it so their shareholders won't think they're falling behind, and never bothered to form an action plan on how to make use of it. Now it's becoming a race to the bottom where one company starts spending more on infrastructure in the hopes that it'll somehow magically make the thing have a use case, and everyone else is scrambling to match that spending to look like they're on par.

Eventually when the whole AI scheme falls apart, those same shareholders are going to be raging about how all the money wasted on it didn't go into their pockets instead, even though they were the reason that money was spent to begin with.

18 zettaFLOPS of new AI compute coming online from Oracle late next year

That's a mind boggling amount of computing power.

Just imagine if it were being used for something productive, and not to try and teach an image generator that human hands don't have six fingers.

Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters rage-quit the internet (again), promise to return next year

So presumably they'll just take a break until the next fiscal quarter, wait for the goldfish brained C-suiters to start cutting infosec budgets again because things have quieted down a bit, then be right back at it?

Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot

Re: Microsoft is getting desperate

>From the perspective of MS executives, forcing their programmer employees to use CoPilot gives them data to train their LLM on.

And as Copilot usage has been hooked directly into employees' performance reports, meaning their jobs pretty much depend on making some kind of meaningful use out of it, in theory this ensures that the data will not be irrelevant garbage. In practice however, as more and more people just use it for needless make-work projects to boost their own KPIs, the quality of data will degrade anyway. In this case though it'll be much slower than with scraping bulk data off the Internet, so it will be that much more difficult to sift out the chaff later on down the line.

But hey, at least they'll save a marginal amount by having the drones crank out the data for them, so the shareholders won't care.

Climate goals go up in smoke as US datacenters turn to coal

Because we still have a whole mountain range full of it in the southeast part of the country, along with large companies of dubious ethics who will plenty of cash around DC to ensure they can keep tearing said mountains apart to sell that coal at a premium.

Gartner warns agentic AI startups: Prepare to be consolidated

Pretty much. The point isn't to actually create some innovative new product or service, it's to have a concept that sounds so good some rich sucker who wants to cash in on it will buy you out, even if said concept proves to eventually be non-viable.

Mars’ powerful whirlwinds blow dust everywhere, could affect future missions

Re: This is a wierd read

It's a double edged sword. Those same winds that can blow the dust off solar panels can just as easily stir up a cloud that causes excessive dust to settle on them, depending on speed and direction. Knowing what the wind is doing and where it's doing it can make sure future rovers and such are dropped in places where the wind will be more likely to act as a benefit instead of a deterrent.

UK police caught slacking off by jamming their keyboards while working from home

They should have learned from Homer Simpson's work from home stint and gotten one of those bobbing drinking birds to do the keypresses for them. Far less suspicious that way.

Healthcare lags in Windows 11 upgrades – and lives may depend on it

>"It's the only industry where you're not just worried about machines being down and revenue being lost, it's where human lives are at stake. They have a lot of catching up to get to Windows 11, or let's hope they all have plans in place to run those Windows 10 systems with an ESU or something similar."

Given the number of bad updates Win11 has had so far, I would wager that machines being down and lives being at stake is exactly why they have delayed that move as long as possible. Even moreso than most IT folk, healthcare admins (at least the ones I've met) tend to have the mentality of "don't mess with any of it until it's really, truly unavoidable".

To digital natives, Microsoft's IT stack makes Google's look like a model of sanity

Re: Marketing to the rescue

Everything will simply be renamed Copilot. Mail, office, browser, OS, AI "helper", even the company itself. It'll all be one giant vat of watery gruel that makes it impossible to separate one module from the others.

SIM city: Feds say 100,000-card farms could have killed cell towers in NYC

Re: I wonder....

Nah, you could just set the shipping address name as "Johnny's Cellphone and Vape Shack" and they'll likely figure you as a fly-by-night vendor working out of a kiosk somewhere. You'd be surprised how many supposedly industry only supply channels you can get access to as long as your nonexistent company name sounds plausible enough.

More likely there's no shelves because the apartment landlord wouldn't let them attach anything to the walls. Rental deposits in NYC are high enough that even the crooks don't want to risk forfeiting them, y'know?

Congressman proposes bringing back letters of marque for cyber privateers

Re: Hill Billy Cyber Warriors

To be fair there are quite a few furries in IT and infosec (a geeky internet subculture having jobs involving computers, shocking I know), and given that they have a rather high disdain for things like crypto and AI, setting them loose on the cybercrims might actually prove pretty effective...

Bank reverses decision to replace 45 customer service staff with AI chatbot

>Australia’s Finance Sector Union welcomed what it called a “backflip” and claimed call volumes rose at the Bank, leading to increased overtime for the remaining staff and management being drafted to help answer phones.

I would reckon the real reason they reversed course is not because the chatbot was providing crap service (every automated phone system does that), but because middle management had to schlep out of their corner offices and do some, shock and horror, actual work for once.

Browser wars are back, predicts Palo Alto, thanks to AI

Re: to perform tasks like booking a restaurant or reserving accommodation

People who want to be seen at the trendiest locations to make themselves look important, but either can't or won't put in the effort to find out what's actually trending because that would take away from their valuable self-promotion time.

So basically, every wannabe social media influencer or general narcissist out there, of which there is not short supply of.

Air Force buying two Tesla Cybertrucks so it can learn to destroy them

>Actually there are clips of them being used in Russia (Checyna's crazy leader apparently has a couple), and a few more in Africa if I remember correctly...

I would imagine those are being paraded around far away from any actual conflict though, as no respectable dictator is going to risk their luxury toys in actual combat. Like pretty much any other Cybtertruck, those are being used purely for prestige and not function.

There are already a couple videos online of some dumbass influencers letting someone shoot their Cybertruck with pretty standard firearms, and the bullets unsurprisingly just punch right through the stainless steel panels on the doors and straight into the cabin. I would imagine that the USAF has a few things laying about that are a bit more potent then your average 9mm pistol.

Trump teases ‘approximately’ 100 percent tariff for imported semiconductors

Re: Say yep and take your time.

Trump doesn't actually care whether they get built or not. Keep in mind that he's a real estate man, all he cares about is that he (or people that are in his pocket) can sell these companies the land that their factories will theoretically sit on and directly profit from it that way. Given the opportunity, he'd probably use eminent domain to steal that land back from them and sell it to someone else.

Foxconn says EV sales are so slow it's converting a factory to build AI servers instead

Re: “Retaining Elon is more important than ever before”

Only problem with that is Tesla depends extremely heavily on investor funds to keep the lights on, and those investors put their money in specifically because they are (or were at one point) deluded enough to think Elon is a supergenius that's going to overthrow the entire auto industry and make them all backdoor billionaires Any Day Now™. Kick him out and all that investor money will vanish too, and the company's value tanks in record time. One would imagine that Tesla's higher-ups would much rather have a slow bleedout so they can at least pad their pockets some more before it all goes under.

A classic poisoned chalice scenario, but not surprising given the company was built around a cult of personality.

Struggling to sell EVs, Tesla pivots to slinging burgers

I give it about three weeks before complaints about light pollution from the giant screens start rolling in, just like when Elon thought it'd be a oh-so-clever idea to put a giant flashing X on top of their building a couple years back. That's presuming the novelty factor of this place even lasts that long.

Meta reveals plan for several multi-gigawatt datacenter clusters

Re: Phase 2

Or, more likely, the strain on America's aging and poorly maintained power grid finally becomes too much and causes a nationwide cascade blackout. Which seems likely to happen long before their grand plans of un-mothballing old nuke plants or creating portable mini-reactors ever becomes viable.

UK police dangle £75 million to digitize its VHS tape archives

Re: “ The UK public sector has often proved reluctant to give up its pre-computing era technologies”

There are quite a few old buildings in major cities around the world that can't have their systems upgraded because the infrastructure for the CCTV system was placed when the building was constructed, and would require gutting the entire structure to replace it. I imagine those ancient systems are still using VHS recording in some capacity out of necessity, since there's also still a factory somewhere in the world that's producing CRT monitors specifically for that application as well.

Palantir jumps aboard tech-nuclear bandwagon with software deal

So far all of this palaver about un-mothballing nuke plants to run AI data barns just looks like another grift with no actual roadmap behind it, so I can't blame Palantir for wanting to grab a few fistfuls of cash for themselves before it all collapses.

US Department of Defense will stop sending critical hurricane satellite data

Re: Sharpies at the ready

Just mention that this puts Mar-A-Lago at risk of being sunk into the Atlantic, and he'll have a replacement system up and running by the end of next month.

Actually, might be a useful way to distract him from everything else he's been mucking up so far...

The SmartNIC revolution fell flat, but AI might change that

Hey, remember that thing your company lost a bunch of money on a decade ago because it wasn't really necessary and didn't take off? Well we just stuck a bunch of AI into it! You know, the really impressive AI! So you should totally buy it again, because otherwise your competitor might buy it and figure out something useful to do with it first... and you don't want that, riiiiiiight?

No, of course you don't. So, how many should I put you down for?

Tesla Robotaxi videos show Elon's way behind Waymo

Re: Maybe not drugs

Elon isn't nearly that clever, and it's not the first time that dumb weed references like this in a lame attempt to look cool have cropped up either.

Wanted: Junior cybersecurity staff with 10 years' experience and a PhD

I have to wonder

...if at least some of those jobs are ones that were already filled internally but due to regulations they're required to post a public listing, and so set ridiculous or conflicting requirements to keep anyone but the pre-chosen individual from applying.

Danish department determined to dump Microsoft

To reckon a guess...

...I'd say that in year or two some high ranking official will come in and throw a fit about how they want Office back and everyone else needs to be using it for "standardization", when the real reason is the glass marble they have for a brain can't process that their settings have been slightly moved around, even though all they ever use is a letterhead template and the Underline button. And because this is a person you can't just say "no" to because they can quickly replace you with someone else who will say "yes", it just ends up happening.

PowerSchool paid thieves to delete stolen student, teacher data. Looks like crooks lied

Re: Pay AND probably have your data spaffed about

Look at it from a board member's point of view, though:

Don't pay, and you get lambasted for lack of action when the news gets out, money has to go towards actually improving security to prove you're doing something about it, and worst of all... the shareholders might get upset with you and want you out.

Do pay, and if you get doublecrossed then you can shift blame by saying you were only acting in the clients' best interest, it's those dirty cyberthieves that are to blame for not holding up their end of the bargain. The ransom can be written off as an operational expense, questions about the state of your IT security can be deferred till they're someone else's problem, and the shareholders will likely pat you on the back for at least trying to be proactive.

The end result is basically the same, but one is far more likely to keep you in your nice office for another year.

Hacking US crosswalks to talk like Zuck is as easy as 1234

Re: Passwords, missiles

Largely because the system was still driven by technology from the 1970s and it couldn't be connected to the internet even if they wanted to.

What to do once your Surface Hub v1 becomes an 84-inch, $22K paperweight

I imagine most Surface Hubs followed the standard corporate lifecycle for devices of this nature:

Board member wants shiny new tech toy to wow his contemporaries with, board member gets shiny new tech toy, board member realizes tech toy is either not as amazing as it first seems or can't figure out how to make it do all the cool stuff they envisioned, tech toy becomes abandoned after a few months but board member won't allow it to be reallocated because that would be admitting they wasted company money on it, tech toy sits around for years until everyone forgets how it works or why they even had it in the first place, tech toy gets written off by the beancounters as they can't figure out its value and a different board member wants it gone to make room for their shiny new tech toy that's arriving soon.

Procter & Gamble study finds AI could help make Pringles tastier, spice up Old Spice, sharpen Gillette

It tastes like a computer, all right

Last year Coca-Cola did a limited run of a flavor that they claimed was designed by AI, called YT3000 or somesuch. It tasted like normal Coke but with too extra artificial sweetener in it, and when the initial novelty period passed nobody wanted it. After a couple weeks the local supermarket had put their stock of it on 50% discount just to get it off the shelves. (At the time I suspected that a bottling plant screwed up a batch of Coke Zero Sugar and rather than throw it out, they decided to try marketing it instead.)

With that in mind, it's probably safe to say that the only enhancing that P&G's AI will do is enhance the bank accounts of the consultants who sold them on the idea in the first place.