Posts by Scene it all

IT boss left root session open for bring-your-kid-to-work day

Re: Groups!

I was a "system programmer" back in those days, which meant I was responsible for installing software updates from IBM. Thus I was told the passcode to unlock the door into the hallowed raised-floor room. One day, while attempting to make a backup copy of the main "procedure library" I accidentally got the cards in reverse order and copied an empty disk pack (remember those?) on top of the active library. I had to go to the tape library room (remember those?), get out the last backup tape, and restore the procedures disk. Without the procedures file, all operations grind to a halt in an IBM shop of those days so the actual "operators" stood around glaring at me as I did this.

So even the hallowed priests can mess up.

LinkedIn realizes its users have been bathing in AI slop, offers a shower

Re: How did they find out?

"Business speak" has sounded like AI slop for decades. "Maximizing shareholder value (by laying off employees)". "On Monday we will turn up a new service. (as though it is like a volume knob)" Income increases are reported as "$100,000, up 2% over last year" while decreases are "$50,000 COMPARED TO $75,000 last year", to avoid using the words "down" or "decreased".

DEF CON bans Meta-style 'pervert glasses'

Re: Ah great

I am extremely nearsighted. One day while driving my plastic-frame glasses broke right at the bridge. Holding one half up to my face I managed to pull over safely. I got out and approached a policeman (I recognized the uniform) and asked him where I could find a drugstore, thinking to get some adhesive tape. He pointed to the store we were standing right in front of and said, "In there." Ever since I have worn metal-frame glasses.

Re: Stereo vision

Also deer, sheep, and cows. When the deer who frequent my back yard look straight at you it is a bit disconcerting because their eyes are about as far apart as possible without being like prey birds.

Digital sovereignty is real in Europe. The UK? Not so much

According to Wikipedia, she obtained a Masters of Engineering degree and worked as a software engineer for 3 years before getting her LLB. So she *could* understand the issue if she was interested.

Comment in code read 'Dear future me, sorry I wrote this'

Re: Heisenbug

Ex-compiler developer here. That sounds like an optimizer bug. Inserting the dummy statement forced the code generator to "finalize" all values. Changing the optimizer level parameter might also have fixed it. (Did COBOL even have optimizer levels??)

I don't remember if it was Nicklaus Wirth of Edsger Dijkstra who said that no function should be longer than one page, so that you could see the whole thing at a glance. I once worked with a guy who did not use subroutines - just COPY and PASTE. His code would span many pages and was impossible to follow.

Software bloat? This elevator needs an 8 GB Core i5

I was on an airline flight many years ago and they rebooted the in-seat entertainment system as we were taxiing out. Apparently, the default configuration of their video output switcher was to feed the console video to EVERY seat on the aircraft. So all us passengers got to watch a Linux boot sequence scroll by.

New tool gives CLIs a warm and GUI feeling instead

If I wanted a GUI I would have used a GUI. GUIs can't go in shell scripts.

Boffins peg narcissistic leadership as the real driver behind 'return to office' demands

Re: Narcissism or Sadism?

I have often thought that even the threat of physical violence is part of these managers thinking. Since top corporate officials are often recruited for being sociopaths, this is not surprising.

Boffins build a better pixel capable of emitting and receiving light

HP-35?

I think that the very early HP calculators would reverse-bias the decimal point LED, turning it into a light sensor, in order to measure ambient lighting and thus adjust power usage. That is what the EE professor who was showing his around told us anyway. 1970-ish.

Users claimed they'd never seen a spell checker and panicked at the sight of red squiggles

Re: "this is just how MS Word works"

China has hundreds of dialects of "Chinese" in about 10 groups. There are 93 dialects of Mandarin alone.

There's no such thing as an agentic CPU

I can remember when computers were base ten. The IBM 1620 was a friendly little machine.

System76 boss reckons he can liberate the entire PC stack... just give him another 15 years

I have used Thelio desktops since they were first available. The way you can swap storage devices without touching the cables is very neat.

Elon Musk is now worth more than $1,000,000,000,000

I wonder what her opinion is of all this merger activity with his other failing businesses. She is 62. Thinking about retiring?

SpacemiT shows off usably quick RISC-V mini desktop

The SpacemiT "AI" extensions are not limited to AI applications. They basically do matrix math operations in just a few instructions, extending the RVV vector operations to two dimensions. It would be very cool if somebody rewrote the general math library routines to take advantage of this. Matrix operations are widely used in graphics processing and scientific simulations, not just AI.

Russian oligarch's financial network crashed thanks to a crank and a cleaner

Re: Why would you blame the cleaners?

Years ago I had a case (reported here already) where the reverse happened. The people who installed the controller cabinet for a video terminal room plugged it into an unfiltered outlet in the computer that was there especially for the cleaners to use. Every time the nearby elevator started up, a spike in the power would cause the video controller to reset. It took several engineer visits (me among them) to the customer site to track it down. We only found it because we happened to be staring at the controller when it did a reset. Rerouting the power cord to a proper outlet fixed the problem.

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

Who asked for this?

I don't use Github any more but were people banging on the doors ASKING MSFT for an AI assistant?

NASA to pull an IKEA by dropping tons of plastic, metal, and glass on the Moon

Re: “permanent” lunar outpost

And it has an electrostatic charge, I think from being bombarded by radiation for millions of years, so it tends to stick to things. I remember somebody saying that maintenance of equipment is a major cost in construction and working in an environment with an abrasive powder everywhere will make it worse.

On-call techie decided job was done and hit the bottle – just before his pager went off

Never on Friday

At my first job as a sysadmin in a large IBM shop we had an ironclad rule: never upgrade any system software (including databases, etc) on a Friday. Also, do not install even-numbered versions from IBM - always wait for the .1 update.

QUIC will soon be as important as TCP – but it's vastly different

ProtoBuf

ProtoBuffers (invented by Google) handles variable-length fields very easily and behind the scenes.

To fix this Wi-Fi network, we'll need a crane

Ohio State University used to have a very large radio telescope of unusual design. It was not a dish, but a VERY large flat reflector the size of a football field tilted at an angle, plus an opposing curved reflector, all aimed at some 4-foot tall feed horns. The detector, cooled by liquid Nitrogen, would occasionally go off-scale high, ruining the observations. Much testing was done to find what was wrong until somebody happened to be working outside and observed a flight of Canada Geese flying low through the center of this large (the whole thing was the size of THREE football fields) apparatus. It was later found that the off-scale readings coincided perfectly with this flight of birds. The body heat of these large birds (8kg), flying right in front of the feed horns, was heating up the supercooled detectors, blinding them to the faint radio signals they were looking for.

Another case (which I will not detail here, having covered it before) involved a computer room peripheral controller resetting itself when ever the nearby building elevator started up. Whoever had installed this cabinet had plugged it into a nearby "convenience" outlet intended for the overnight cleaning staff instead of the properly filtered outlet they should have used.

Support tech caught by 'Technician Aura': the bug that only hides when you're watching

I was working in an IBM shop with a 370/158 that suddenly started crashing in random jobs. This eventually turned out to be a failure in the hardware that advanced the Program Counter, taking into account the 370's variable-length instructions. It would advance the PC by 4 sometimes, when it should have been by 2, thus skipping over some short instructions. But along the way to figuring that out, IBM sent along some factory technicians with a bizarre test device that looked like a cross between a hat rack and a bed spring. They set this thing up a few feet from the CPU cabinet and opened the doors. Apparently this thing generated all sort of RF and static electric interference fields that would expose any flaky circuits. So they must have had problems with this sort of thing to bother inventing such a contraption. This was before the days of cellphones. They did not find anything that way - the final problem was diagnosed by the senior IBM software support guy, going over crash dumps, looking for patterns.

Amazon rewards loyal Kindle devotees by closing the book on old e-readers

Alternatives

When Amazon changed the encryption system AGAIN on the Kindle I put it in the closet and switched to a Kobo. Same idea, but backed by Rakuten in Japan. I get all my ebooks from them now.

Engineer sabotaged hardware then complained when it didn't work

Re: Not the same, but ...

I kind of liked the Good Old Days where the computers were in a locked room with a raised floor, Significant air cond, and a specialized crew of acolytes to take care of them. Luckily for me, I was one of the anointed software people who knew the combination to the door lock.

When I started university an EE degree took 5 years and included a required course on thermodynamics. Reports from upperclassmen was that this course was a real bear as the Prof was more focused on the calculus than on getting you to understand heat transfer intuitively. Fortunately for me, halfway thru they revised the curriculum to reduce it to a more normal 4 years but this required you to choose a sub-specialty. Mine was "computer engineering" (heavy on software, less on building the things) and did NOT require the Thermo course. I am still mindful of cooling and always install the "optional" heat sinks and things even on little Single Board Computers.

Oracle: AI agents can reason, decide and act - liability question remains

It has to be a term in the purchase contract that it is Larry Ellison personally who is the ultimately liable entity.

NASA sets 'impossible' ground rules for relocation of 'flown space vehicle'

Lyndon Johnson being from Texas may have had something to do with it too.

AI still doesn't work very well, businesses are faking it, and a reckoning is coming

Re: The next year 2000?

Human programmers are very lax at putting comments in the code to explain, not WHAT it is doing, but WHY it is doing it, and WHEN it will be doing it. I wonder if AI puts in useful comments. I think of code comments as messages to a future me who might need to debug it years from now.

Sorry, Amazon, you couldn't pick a worse time to bring a phone to market: IDC analyst

The last phone I bought was a flip-phone that does calls, text, and has a camera. And that is ALL it can do. Small and cheap. Just for emergencies. And it has real buttons!

Struggling to put your AI aversion into words? Here's a handy glossary

In the 1973 movie "The Paper Chase", about attending law school, there is one character, Kevin Brooks, who brags about having "a photographic memory". He can recall details about every past case from the law books. But as the Professor points out, that is of no use without the ability to reason and to work out the hypothetical cases that are the foundation of learning the law. Generative AI is like Kevin Brooks, with the added feature of being unable to say "I don't know," and making stuff up instead.

GitHub infuriates students by removing some models from free Copilot plan

Maybe if the programming instructors did a better job, their students would not need to get coaching from AI.

Server crashes traced to one very literal knee-jerk reaction

IBM knew about this risk back in the early 1960s, which is why the emergency power off switch on all IBM 360 and 370 computers required you to PULL on a red knob at the very top of the console panel.

But other people at IBM put the LOAD button (which means "reboot" in modern lingo) just a few inches above the desktop where you might bump it, hit it with you coffee cup, or push a telephone against it.

Supposedly big-brained execs are outsourcing decisionmaking to AI

My experience with AI

1. It will tell you that whatever you suggest is a really good idea and offer help to accomplish it. Managers will love this.

2. AI will make you average. Below average people will think it is wonderful. (This is 50% of the population, perhaps more among managers.) People who are already above average in reasoning will be brought down to that level or realize that the whole thing is a waste of time.

3. Even when using AI just for research, it will make things up.

Western governments seek to lock down 6G before it even exists

And China is [already running trials of 6G](https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202511/1348131.shtml).

Poland bans camera-packing cars made in China from military bases

And for spite, the some manufacturers like GM are dropping support for connecting the car to your phone so you can see the nav stuff on the big screen, to force you to subscribe to THEIR built-in nav stuff with IT'S tracking/spying instead of the Apple/Google tracking your phone does.

EFF policy says bots can code but humans must write the docs

Re: Worst of Both Worlds?

The comments (embedded, within the code, not in separate documents or header file) need to explain the PURPOSE of the code - not just what it does, WHY it does it this particular way, and under what conditions it can be executed. Those are concepts that can not be expressed in any programming language I know.

Without that information, the code is un-reviewable and un-maintainable, EVEN LATER BY THE PEOPLE WHO WROTE IT.

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

Pons and Fleischmann mode

AI will hallucinate cold fusion.

Let there be light! DARPA seeking physics-defying photonic computers to supercharge AI

We will continue to do the wrong thing, but at least we will be doing it faster.

Ad blocking is alive and well, despite Chrome's attempts to make it harder

I can't trust a browser made by an advertising company to allow me to block ads. So I block at the network level for every device in my house, using PiHole. I also use Zen because FireFox has its own issues.

Amazon can't build AI capacity fast enough, throws another $200B at the problem

Re: This the day after Bezos guts Washington Post

Wapo can use AI on AWS to write copy for them. Readers will spot the difference and think "why am I paying for this slop?", cancel their subscriptions, and the dominoes start to fall.

Re: *Pop* Go The Weasels

AWS will continue to make money until their customers realize that THEY are not making any money from this and cancel their accounts, leaving AWS with a whole lot of idle hardware.

Banker claims Oracle may slash up to 30,000 jobs, sell health unit to pay for AI build-out

Re: Is this good?

All the AI bros are borrowing from each other. It is a house of cards and once one fails, they will all go.

Meta retreats from metaverse after virtual reality check

It makes you average

I heard a nice description of AI making your work average. So, if you were below average to start with, it is an improvement and you are impressed. Count most Managers in this group. But if you were ABOVE average, it drags you down as you spend more time finding the mistakes. Remember what George Carlin pointed out: you know how stupid the average person is? Well half the population is worse than that.

Techie banned from client site for outage he didn’t cause

Re: Sounds like gold bars

My worst experience was a very old Epson printer that had an ink hose come loose inside the case. What a mess. I had to buy a new one. (The new Epsons are much better.)

The riskiest think I ever did was replace the ink ribbon on an IBM 1403 printer. They put those plastic gloves in the box for a reason...

Bank of England's Oracle cloud migration bill triples as project grinds on

"The sunk cost fallacy" is central to Oracle's business plans. They admit this internally.

Gmail preparing to drop POP3 mail fetching

Worrying about the privacy of mail going through Google services is kind of pointless. Google is quite up front about how they scan every message to feed their advertising algorithms.

US punishes China’s ‘dominance’ of legacy chips with zero percent tariffs

Re: The result of an investigation into China’s semiconductor industry

China has changed CONSIDERABLY in the last 20 years, getting rid of the pollution in cities and lifting about 850 million people out of extreme poverty (according to the World Bank). Things move fast there. Healthcare is widely available and very inexpensive.

Oracle's new AI-enhanced support portal leaves users fuming

Re: Oracle's support site was a jumbled mess

I remember how frustrating it was navigating the Oracle web site to find documentation, and I was working there at the time!

What the Linux desktop really needs to challenge Windows

I used to use Mint until they switched from Gnome2 to Gnome3 and the bloat got to be too much. Now I am happy on XFCE+Debian. It is like the old days, does only what I want it to do, and boots fast.