Posts by Scene it all

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.

Pakistan to test students for real-world skills before they graduate from IT degrees

Re: Complete nonsense

Actually when I went to school we learned how important it was to put sequence numbers on your card decks.

Re: Complete nonsense

But don't teach them how to use 'git'. Much too practical for the Ivory Tower. I don't think I have ever used lambda calculus, Markov Chains, or any of that stuff in a paid job after 40+ years in IT. I use git every day.

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.

Google sends Dark Web Report to its dead services graveyard

The trouble with all these services that search the Dark Web for your personal data is that you first have to tell them all your personal data so they will know it when they see it! You have just doxxed yourself.

AI-authored code contains worse bugs than software crafted by humans

Re: I've said it once

First step: Put in comments! It is amazing how much code I have seen that will go on for pages and pages with no comments explaining what this is, why it is needed, when it gets called, by who, etc.

Oracle raises AI spending estimate, spooks investors

Re: POP!

The big dinosaurs had to die before the mammals could thrive.

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

Re: snapped a wing

Yes, an appropriate way to commemorate a badly designed spacecraft that killed two crews: put it in Texas.

Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

Don't you have to turn the AI features ON first? Can't you just leave it off?

Software engineer reveals the dirty little secret about AI coding assistants: They don't save much time

Re: "Tales from the pit"

"The Art of Computer Programming" by Donald Knuth (1968 plus additions) was my bible.

I did once give AI a simple programming problem that should have taken about 8 lines of code. It made a fundamental error. No, a twos-complement addition is NOT the same as a boolean OR, jeez.

Developer battled to write his own documentation, but lost the boss fight

I was asked to review Volume I of set of book written by our assigned technical writer that explained a new programming language which was to be the new standard for system software development in the company. I started into this project and immediately started finding errors, ranging from simple grammatical mistakes, to clumsy presentations, to outright technical errors. Soon I realized that a few scribbled notes would not be enough to convince management how bad this was so I decided to slog through the entire book (about 80 pages) and write down every little thing that was wrong. My finished letter was 15 pages, single spaced. My final summary was "get somebody else to write the book; preferably somebody with programming skills."

My manager thanked me for the useful and detailed feedback and asked me to do a review of Volume II. I refused to waste my time, as they had not understood the point of my effort. Complex programming languages (which this certainly was) require a certain mathematical precision in comprehension that the assigned writer was not up to. For example, compare "Each statement is terminated by a semicolon" (what he wrote) with "A series of EXPRESSIONS are SEPARATED by semicolons" (how it actually worked). Notice the confusion about what do you put after the last expression in a sequence. With no semicolon, the value of the sequence is the value of the final expression. If you DO put a semicolon there, the value of the sequence is zero.

Networking students need an explanation of the internet that can fit in their heads

Re: Google maps for Networks !!! :)

My first exposure to real networking (and not just leased lines to IBM Remote Job Entry stations) was to ARPAnet, before the Internet, before the WWW. And a map of the entire thing fit on one side of a piece of notebook paper.

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

Lots of AI Slop on YouTube as well, with generic images taken from free libraries, rather obvious narration pasted together from news stories, and a voice that mispronounces some of the words and subtitles that put the wrong word in. I notice that on the Chinese social media platform xiaohongshu (known as "Redbook" to Westerners) AI-generated content is sometimes flagged as such.

Some years ago you couldn't escape k. d. lang's "Constant Craving". I even heard it playing in a grocery store once. Subliminal advertising to make you buy that package of crisps?

Uncle Sam wants to scan your iris and collect your DNA, citizen or not

Re: Scan my 2nd Amendment remedy, Trumpkin

Actually the 2nd Amendment was put there at the insistence of the southern states to protect their practice of having armed MILITIAS to hunt escaped slaves and put down slave revolts.

Amazon axes 14,000 desk jobs in AI-powered slimming plan

I am reminded of a line from Gerald Weinberg's book "The Psychology of Computer Programming": "I can make this program go arbitrarily fast if it does not have to be correct."

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

Re: Its late stage corporate decay

About 30 years ago when I was working for Oracle, the corporate President at the time came to our far-flung office to talk about strategy. He was quite open and up front about it: it was entice people in with features and then lock them in so they couldn't leave. I guess followed by holding them upside down and shaking all the coins out of their pockets.

Snooping

The way MS keeps pushing Copilot at me on Github, I suspect that they are analyzing what I do to help train Copilot even if I do not turn it on.

Texas senators cry foul over Smithsonian's pricey Space Shuttle shuffle

Since the shuttle never took off or landed anywhere in Texas (except for some fragments of Challenger) I don't see the point of moving this item from where it is - in the care of nation's Air and Space museum.

FCC kicks off 'Space Month' with vow to fast-track satellite licensing

Nobody talks about Low Earth Orbit being a shared resource of the entire planet and ALL orbits at the same altitude intersect with each other. Kessler Roulette? Is there any coordination for this sort of thing?

Techie found an error message so rude the CEO of IBM apologized for it

Re: My fave

I was using the Bliss-16 compiler for a project. The Bliss compiler was really good at optimization for memory usage. I once saw it generate the instruction "MOV @PC,4(R2)". That stores a literal 4 at 4 bytes beyond where R2 points but takes one word less than the more straightforward "MOV #4,4(R2)".

Energy drink company punished ERP graybeard for going too fast

There is a famous book on this titled "The Peter Principle". It's premise is that people get promoted because they were competent at their previous assignments. This continues until they are promoted into a position for which they are INcompetent. Since promotions require demonstrated competence, they then stay there, being incompetent.

Microsoft declares bring your Copilot to work day, usurping IT authority

Re: "AI" buttons popping up everywhere!

It is all over Github as well. I think if I ignore it, it will not mess with my projects.

Slow Wi-Fi? Add houseplants to the list of suspects

The obvious fix is to use fake plants. Less upkeep required as well.

My main computer sits 1 meter from the router, connected by a 1m cable.

AI coding hype overblown, Bain shrugs

I did a little experiment asking an AI to write a simple piece of code. The result would have gotten an "F" in an undergraduate programming course.