Posts by Scene it all

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.

Oracle saddles up with $18B debt amid AI infrastructure gamble

Over-expansion killed Pan Am, once the US's major international airline. They had invested in a large fleet of Boeing 747's in anticipation of a surge in traffic that did not materialize.

Trump backpedals as Hyundai factory ICE raid enrages South Korea

Re: And they still for the most part support him

Even Kamala Harris admits this now.

Starlink outage knocks tens of thousands offline worldwide

Just the sort of "reliable" system we want Air Traffic Control to be using. (There is actually a proposal in the US to do this.)

Microserfs ordered back to the office, given 10 days to appeal

Re: "How we work has forever changed"

We did that too, using just telephones and email (which work just as well from home). US (East and West coasts), India, and Australia.

The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

Re: Replace 'AI' with 'LLM' in your editorial

It was a general purpose AI. DeepSeek in fact. Sometimes you get the impression that these things are just doing a quick search behind the scenes and can spout the correct buzzwords without really 'knowing' how the bits fit together. Kind of like a student in a classroom who did not do all the homework, or your general middle manager.

Re: Replace 'AI' with 'LLM' in your editorial

Statistics like the time I asked an AI to write a simple machine language program to do a bitwise "or" on a machine that only could do AND, ADD, and COMPLEMENT. The correct answer makes use of DeMorgan's Law but the AI said to just use the ADD instruction because it was "close enough for most purposes". One hates to think of such things getting into spacecraft or airliner navigation. Remember when NASA lost a Mars probe because one subcontractor used Metric and the other used English units and nobody caught it? Managers will think they can use AI in place of actual engineers. People are gonna die.

Junk is the new punk: Why we're falling back in love with retro tech

We have about a hundred VHS tapes though they are greatly outnumbered by the DVDs. But the VHS player died and it seemed that nobody makes these things any more. I was able to find a reconditioned one on Amazon that seems to work.

Basic projector repair job turns into armed encounter at secret bunker

Many years ago I was attending a meeting in the headquarters of the U.S. State Department in Washington. It was a very mundane meeting about international standardization of email. (I *said* it was years ago...) The conference room was just a short way down a corridor from the front lobby but there was still a lot of security such as colored lights indicating "visitors in the hall" and armed guard every so often.

For many years I worked in a place, not a government facility, where the "computer room" had doors that only opened if you peered wide-eyed at a small camera on the wall that photographed your retina and compared it with a database of authorized users. This thing was so inconvenient to use that I think it got replaced pretty quickly.

One day the Vice President of the United States visited our office. We had days of warning and some detailed instructions on what we could do. Nobody could enter or leave the building while he was there, and nobody could remain on the upper floors. Everybody had to be in the lobby where he was going to give a speech. And there were about six tall steely-faced guys with earpieces and bulgy jackets standing around the edges of the room, watching us.

China cut itself off from the global internet for an hour on Wednesday

Re: "Chinese netizens couldn’t reach most websites hosted outside China, which is inconvenient"

English is taught in grade school in China.

NASA starts bolting together Artemis III rocket for 2027 Moon shot

Re: Should SpaceX test far more than putting a Starship in orbit?

Need to get into orbit first. A few years ago Gwynne Shotwell predicted that SpaceX would be landing on the Moon by ... 2022. So far, Starship is a giant boondoggle. There is no scientific reason for Artemis that is worth the expense and it should be cancelled entirely.

Oracle cuts cloud jobs with Seattle hit hard as AI spending soars

Re: In for a penny, in for a pound

I used to work for Oracle and once the company president came to visit our office. (This was before Catz had that role.) In his speech he explicitly stated that "vendor lock-in" was a key part of the company's business strategy.

Uncle Sam floats tracking tech to keep AI chips out of China

Re: More phone-homery?

And by what means? Is the chip going to log onto the local Chinese Wifi to make a connection? With what password? Using what antenna?

Tech support team won pay rise for teaching customers how to RTFM

A previous employer in the 1970s was a middling large IBM shop. It was common for there to be a special rack/binder thing that held all the significant software manuals in a convenient place for the "operators". This would hold about two feet of books. Then the hardware reference books, oversized blue binders, kept on site by the IBM service engineers, had their own roll-around bookshelf.

GitHub CEO: Future devs will not code, they will manage AI

I challenged AI to write a very simple bit of code, in machine language. It would have taken under ten instructions. It's response was wrong and indicated a complete lack of knowledge of binary arithmetic. It said that a two's-complement ADD was the same as an OR "most of the time".

US Navy won't torpedo hurricane forecast satellite feed after all

Re: Hmm

This program is not the only source of data for forecasting hurricanes. I can look at Windy.com and see satellite pictures of approaching hurricanes and extrapolate their track by eye without any need for this special microwave data. I might not be able to predict within a few miles exactly where the "eye" will hit the coast, but here in Florida you don't make preparations based on which county gets the brunt of it. A big hurricane can be 200 km across so such precision is not necessary.

Devs are frustrated with AI coding tools that deliver nearly-right solutions

I heard that people were using AI to write software so I thought I would give it a try. I asked a well known AI chatbot (NOT ChatGPT) to write a bitwise OR routine for a DEC PDP-8, a machine from 60 years ago that I know very well. Now, the PDP-8 only has a Two's-complement ADD instruction and a bitwise AND, along with some things like complement, etc. The correct answer should take under a dozen instructions, taking advantage of DeMorgan's Rule.

It got it wrong. It just said to use the Two's Complement add which is "close enough" to an OR, through in certain cases a more complex algorithm would be required.

Jack Dorsey floats specs for decentralized messaging app that uses Bluetooth

Apparently RetroShare is SO dark-netty that the author did not know about it. RetroShare has been around for 20 years. It uses internet connections but there is no central server and the entire thing runs P2P, encrypted everywhere.

'Cyber security' behind decision to end defense satellite sharing of hurricane data

The only "weather app" that is guaranteed to work most places in the US is a "Weather Alert Radio". These special purpose VHF radios are tuned to a network of stations all over the country, and controlled directly by the NWS. You program your radio according to your postal code and the radio will turn itself on if it receives an alert specific to your area. No internet required. And there are portable versions for campers and hikers.

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

"Acting on behalf of authoritarians" is called "obeying local laws" in other contexts. Yes, Russia has some restrictive laws, and so does China. And so does the United States, which is why I can't buy a Huawei phone.

China just two years behind USA on chip design, says White House tech Czar

Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.

Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

Re: Fork it

I have started using the Zen browser, which is a fork with a different UI and eliminates the "call home" functions of Firefox. I am liking it so far.

Do you trust Xi with your 'private' browsing data? Apple, Google stores still offer China-based VPNs, report says

Re: Why should Apple/Google pull them?

Plus, the US government is in a much better place to do something to me than the CPC is. My email provider is not based in the US either.

Ex-NASA Admin pick blames Musk ties for pulled nomination

And living underground requires digging a big hole, and that requires heavy equipment. One article I saw pointed out that heavy construction equipment wears out all the time because of sand getting in the works, hoses breaking, etc. Mars surface is a very hostile environment not just for people but for backhoes and bulldozers.

Unless you land near one of those volcanic skylight things, but I would want that to be fully robot-mapped before I went into one.

Schneier tries to rip the rose-colored AI glasses from the eyes of Congress

Re: Amendment Zero

And they get a LOT of money from places other than mere "salaries".

Trump lifts US supersonic flight ban, says he's 'Making Aviation Great Again'

Even faster

I can pick up the phone and be "at" a conference in New Zealand before an SST traveler gets out of their car at the airport. Costs less too.

Ex-Meta exec: Copyright consent obligation = end of AI biz

I have never had DeepSeek regurgitate training material at me. I have never *asked* it to, but if I did it probably would just have done a web search behind the scenes and used that. Speaking of which, is Google infringing everyone's copyright?

I am more interested in the question, do the AI companies pay the cover price for the books they feed into their training algorithms? If so, how is that different from ME paying for a book, reading it, and then making use of that knowledge to do something profitable?

AWS says Britain needs more nuclear power to feed AI datacenter surge

Maybe get some Thorium tech from China? Much simpler than current Uranium reactors.

Intuitive Machines blames dim lighting and dodgy data for second lunar faceplant

Meanwhile China has done this four times, including near the South Pole, and on the lunar backside out of direct radio contact.

EU tells US scientists to dump Trump for a lab in Europe

Spending on pure research in China is growing faster than the US and EU. Combined.

US Copyright Office found AI companies sometimes breach copyright. Next day its boss was fired

Re: Confused

And "children" under the age of 16 are not even allowed in.

Tech titans: Wanna secure US AI leadership? Stop giving the world excuses to buy Chinese

Nobody explained WHY "We need to accelerate the diffusion of American AI technology around the world," Maybe start using the metric system first.

US Transpo Sec wants air traffic control rebuild in 3 years, asks Congress for blank check

So every radio, in everything from a Piper Cub to an Airbus A380 needs to be replaced with the new VOIP equipment? At whose expense? (And avionics tend to be really expensive because of all the testing and robustness required.) And what do you bet StarLink will be the preferred satellite provider to funnel more money to Elon Musk? What could possibly go wrong?

Trump derails Chinese H20 GPU sales, forcing Nvidia to eat $5.5B this quarter

China is making it's own AI accelerators, like this one: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/chinas-push-for-chip-independence-continues-with-its-first-risc-v-server-cpu

But I have no idea what the power is compared to even the Nvidia H20.

Meanwhile, in Japan, train stations are being 3D-printed in an afternoon

Re: Stay-in-place formwork

That is called Insulated Concrete Form (ICF) construction and is energy efficient as well as sturdy and quiet inside. It is also safe from termites, which is an issue here in Florida.