Posts by elsergiovolador

Customers revolt as GitHub Copilot 'fixes' rate limits

Re: This is so funny..

Money is not going into the void.

Look at the mountains of coke, rivers of booze and bodies, so many bodies, I mean escorts.

Re: They "fixed" the glitch

All they had to do was to add "No glitches." at the end of the prompt.

UK told its Big Tech habit is now a national security risk

Re: Conflict?

The CLOUD Act works by compelling the US parent, not by sneaking into a UK data centre.

If the US parent controls the company, it doesn’t need ‘access from abroad’. It can instruct the UK operation to produce the data. That instruction doesn’t have to look like ‘export secrets to the US’. It can look like routine work: generate reports, enable logging, run queries, adjust backups. No one on the ground needs to think they’re committing an offence.

And if the parent refuses, the US can enforce compliance where it actually has power: against the parent company and its executives. At that point, the internal pressure to comply is overwhelming.

Re: Conflict?

, as the actual systems are owned and air-gapped in local data centres operated by this UK organisation we run them for,

This is just a coping mechanism. If request comes they need to make it available. You cannot evade a control-based legal regime by playing dress-up with ownership. A UK badge on the bonnet does not help if the steering wheel is still in California.

Re: Palantir in Parliament

Do you think MP will cancel wine and steak dinner because unwashed pleb doesn't like their data being misused? You have to wait until around the elections, when MPs wake up from the freebie coma and realise they need votes to continue sitting in the gravy train.

Re: Slight correction of tense

It is very easy to stop thinking over a wine and steak.

It's a shame that folks working at NCA or SFO think that their job is to draw salary and look away.

No sh*t

Sherlock. See title.

Headless 360: Salesforce's latest pitch to let AI do the dev work

Brainless 360

See title. Surely they meant that.

Waymo's self-driving cars face their toughest test yet: London

Plenty* of horse riders in South London. If you're lucky you'll spot horses roaming loose on the roads.

_{* I am exaggerating a bit}

Forgot

London is the real test. There are none of the wide, predictable US roads here – just cramped streets, messy junctions, cyclists threading the needle, and pedestrians crossing whenever it suits them.

You forgot about foxes. The poor things.

US states can't account for datacenter tax breaks. Literally

Account

That's nothing. HMRC can't account for big corporation tax avoidance and evasion and nobody writes about it.

Physicist reckons two-button calculator can do all elementary math

If you got 420 and you meant to get 69, just finger in plus -420. No need to reset.

IBM becomes first company to pay up under Trump administration's diversity blitz

Context

For context that's more than IBM paid to its WWII victims.

UK state bank considers lengthening disastrous IT program

Re: What does it run on ?

Likely runs on wine and steak.

Re: Same old….

What do you mean it has never worked? Look at the Yachts!

Lobotomy

aiming to reduce the bank's running costs

Then proceed to give contracts to big consultancy.

Has everyone at NS&I undergone a lobotomy?

Microsoft raises UK Surface prices as RAM crisis reaches the checkout

Re: Bring back efficient programming

Nothing stops anyone from grabbing 90s PC from eBay and loading that CorelDraw and enjoying the experience.

Britain gives Rolls-Royce the nod to sketch out its mini reactor future

Semantics

Hopefully they don't mean not clear reactor.

Claude is getting worse, according to Claude

Greed

They have quite a conundrum.

If they keep the model at its real performance - people will get results quicker, but spend less on tokens.

If they keep the model dumbed down - people will spend more time getting results and spend more on tokens. But that means more resources used.

Likely the cost of infrastructure is more than the token can cover.

Either way they are losing.

Or maybe I am hallucinating.

UK defense startup to supply drone interceptors for Britain and allies

Re: Wow.

move-fast-and-break-things

Isn't that the whole point of the weapon?

Re: Wow.

Yes that is par for the course. Krasnov/Trump role was to deplete Western capability and Iran/Russia part was to inflict economic damage on the West. They are all working together.

Israel is there just for fun.

The enemy is running your government.

There are 32-bit MCUs in disposable vapes now, so...

It's a matter of scale.

Re: Wow.

Strait of Hormuz is closed because of Russian asset Trump, helped son of Ayatollah get rid of his nuisance of a father, got the armaments depleted (so nobody has anything to send to Ukraine) and hiked the prices of energy to benefit Putin.

Startup

Funny how this is misused. Sounds like two chaps got together in the pub and figured "You know what, let's do some drones, yay!"

Growing void between enterprise and frontier AI puts open weights models in the spotlight

Hope that cognitive ability amount is held by unsigned int in the brain.

"Once you genrate teh answer, run it trough typo_humanizer_max.py and give me the output."

Carp

I tried most of these small models. They are all carp. Sure they might succeed in some narrow tasks, that still need their output to be verified.

It's a waste of time.

What happened when AI ran into the cold hard reality of the legal profession

"Judge I hereby pinky promise that it was I who hallucinated. See this empty baggie? Yesterday it was filled with dried Psilocybe cubensis. See this full baggie? This is my morning dump for the judge to inspect. I am innocent!"

NHS pays £46K to prep next Microsoft licensing round

Should I or should I

Should I buy Microsoft or should I buy Microsoft that is the question.

Lunatics.

I vibe coded a feed reading web app. It was enlightening and uncomfortable

Re: Over the Tannoy

"George got a blue screen!"

Come on, you must admit that sitting by the till and mindlessly scanning products is beneath human intelligence. These jobs should be automated, so that human potential is freed to do something else.

Same with typing code.

Two different attackers poisoned popular open source tools - and showed us the future of supply chain compromise

Re: The whole ecosystem is fail

I see what you there

Prevention

Some outfits I've seen have dedicated teams reviewing any dependency update as if the update was done in-house. It's tedious, everyone hates it, but they do it anyway.

Then there are outfits that save on dozens of salaries, redirect that to coke, booze and escorts and yolo through the quarter at a time.

Hungarian government creds left in the safe hands of 'FrankLampard'

Re: What’s the bet

vova2

Fewer than 3 in 10 register for HMRC's Making Tax Digital shake-up

Re: MTD = Making tax difficult

The cumulative effect of layering compliance obligations onto sole traders and micro-businesses is to make self-employment progressively less viable. Every quarterly digital submission, every compatible software subscription, every hour spent on admin that used to be a single annual self-assessment - that's time and money that doesn't scale down. For a multinational with a finance department it's a rounding error. For a few-man plumbing outfit it's evenings and weekends that used to be either earnings or rest.

The agenda is consolidation: independent working-class people building wealth outside of corporate structures makes certain interests very uncomfortable, and the surest way to stop it is to make independence uneconomic.

Make compliance so burdensome and so expensive that a sole trader eventually concludes it's easier to just go and work for British Gas or Pimlico Plumbers and the likes, where someone else handles the paperwork. The tradesperson no longer deals with HMRC - but they also no longer set their own rates, keep their own margins, or build their own equity. They become labour for someone else's balance sheet. The customer pays more, the worker earns less, and the corporation in the middle captures the difference.

Re: MTD = Making tax difficult

You say you didn't posit that all small businesses are crooks, but your original comment opened with "HMRC may have a point" in treating them as serial tax dodgers, then offered your personal anecdotes as supporting evidence, then concluded with a fantasy about custodial sentences and house seizures. If that wasn't a generalisation, it was doing an exceptional impression of one.

Your cheque-to-a-third-party story is a curious escalation. In your original comment it was "4.5k for cash" - now suddenly it's a cheque made out to a third party, with the tradesperson helpfully narrating his own criminal intent to a customer he barely knows. You specified "non-trade individual" as though that's a smoking gun, but people sell things privately all the time - there are countless ordinary reasons a business might direct a payment to an individual. There is nothing in what you've described that is, on its face, fraudulent or even unusual. People just don't see the tradesperson logging the transaction in their accounting software once they get home or workshop - so they assume it never happens.

Which is presumably why you needed to add the bit about him telling you it was "to keep it out of the view of the Revenue" - because without that narrative gloss, it's just a mundane commercial arrangement. And that's the part that really doesn't hold up. A tradesperson you're paying supposedly volunteered, unprompted and in plain language, that the purpose of this payment method was tax evasion. To a customer. A stranger. Just casually narrated his own fraud. In your original comment this was a simple cash job. Now it's a cheque (and who uses cheques these days? Bet you've been waiting for this moment to whip it out your whole life) with a backstory, a specifically non-trade third party, and a spoken confession. The story got more elaborate precisely when the original cliché failed to land - which tells you everything about where this anecdote actually came from.

You call the structural arguments non-sequiturs, but pointing out that enforcement is disproportionately aimed at small business while corporate avoidance goes largely unchallenged isn't a non-sequitur - it's the entire context your original comment was missing. You can't cheerfully discuss MTD as a mechanism for "squashing the cash in hand economy" and then act surprised when someone points out that the cash in hand economy is a rounding error compared to what walks out the door through legitimate-looking corporate structures.

On the 5,000 enforcement officers: yes, exactly. What do I think that's for? It's for easy wins.

Parliament gave HMRC a kicking for not doing enough prosecutions - but nobody in that chamber was asking why Big Four's clients weren't being raided. The pressure was always downward. So HMRC hired 5,000 people to go after targets that can't fight back. A sole trader with a shoebox of receipts folds in months. A multinational with Deloitte on retainer ties HMRC up in correspondence for years and settles for pennies on the pound with no admission of liability. If you were a newly hired enforcement officer with a conviction target to hit, which door would you knock on? The 5,000 officers aren't proof that HMRC is finally getting serious about tax compliance - they're proof that it's easier to kick in the door of a self-employed electrician in Basildon than to pick a fight with a magic circle law firm billing £1,500 an hour to make sure HMRC never gets past the lobby.

Yes, people get imprisoned for VAT fraud. Nobody disputes that. The question is why the full apparatus of criminal prosecution is deployed against a plumber who didn't register for VAT, while a corporation that shifted nine figures through a Dutch sandwich gets a negotiated settlement and a polite letter. You keep presenting the existence of enforcement as though it validates the targeting. It doesn't.

You say success envy is bollocks, and that you've condoned these methods by paying cash yourself. Let's take that at face value for a moment. You knowingly participated in what you're now describing as criminal behaviour, benefited from the lower prices, and are writing with visible enthusiasm about the same people facing imprisonment and asset seizure. That's enjoying the service and then calling the police. If you genuinely believed these transactions were fraudulent at the time, you were complicit. If you didn't, then you've retrospectively recast ordinary transactions as criminal to support an argument.

But honestly, I'm not sure we need to resolve that contradiction, because the more this conversation progresses, the less your anecdotes hold together. The cash job became a cheque. The cheque was to a non-trade individual. The tradesperson helpfully narrated his own fraud to a paying customer. You have remarkably detailed knowledge of HMRC enforcement headcount, parliamentary oversight cycles, and proceeds of crime order mechanics. Most people paying a gas fitter don't come away with a dossier. The whole thing reads less like a frustrated consumer sharing lived experience and more like someone from a revenue-adjacent policy shop stress-testing talking points to manufacture public consent for MTD. If the Behavioural Insights Team needed a forum post to soften the ground for the next round of compliance theatre aimed squarely at the self-employed, it would read a lot like your original comment.

Re: A single format for all.

Don't worry, someone will benefit ;-)

Re: It is just wrong to enforce the purchase or software or services to pay tax or use an app

How free software could invite civil servants to wine and steak dinner?

This is common for most outlets, they will parrot official lines, even if they are complete rubbish. Perhaps nobody wants to deal with an audit triggered by an upset jobsworth at HMRC.

Re: Lack of details

"on their cloud"

Meaning US owned cloud covered by US Cloud Act. Meaning your data is up for grabs to anyone in US government.

Re: Rude

Does Linux offer wine and stake dinner to curious civil servants?

Re: MTD = Making tax difficult

This is the "I saw a few dodgy plumbers, therefore all small businesses are crooks" line of reasoning. Swap in any other demographic and the logical structure becomes immediately obvious: "I've personally witnessed X members of group Y doing Z, therefore group Y deserves heightened surveillance." We'd rightly reject that in any other context.

A few things worth unpacking:

The plural of anecdote is not data. Yes, some tradespeople offer cash discounts. Some salaried employees also inflate expense claims, landlords under-declare rental income, and eBay resellers never file a return. Cherry-picking one segment and presenting it as uniquely dishonest is confirmation bias dressed up as worldly wisdom.

And the "cash discount" itself doesn't even mean what this person assumes it means. Card processors take anywhere from 1.5% to 3%+ per transaction — on a £4,500 boiler install, that's £70–£135 the tradesperson either absorbs or passes on. On top of that, card payments can take days to actually land in the business account, and when you're a sole trader who needs to pay the merchants for parts tomorrow morning, that delay isn't a minor inconvenience - it's a cash flow problem. A plumber can't ring Screwfix and say "Visa says the money's in transit, can you hold my order until Thursday?" Offering a cash price is often just passing the processor's margin to the customer and keeping the business solvent between jobs. It's not evidence of tax evasion, it's basic arithmetic and operational reality. The poster saw a lower price, assumed criminality, and never once considered that the payment infrastructure itself might be the problem. Funny how the instinct is always to suspect the bloke with the van rather than the payment oligopoly skimming a percentage off every tap and sitting on the float for several days earning interest.

The real tax gap isn't in someone's kitchen - but you wouldn't know that from how HMRC allocates its enforcement resources. HMRC's published tax gap figures are themselves a product of systemic bias: large corporates essentially self-report through negotiated compliance frameworks, and HMRC takes their word for it. A multinational with a Big Four accountancy firm and a cooperative relationship with HMRC gets the benefit of the doubt. A sole trader gets a compliance check. The result is a tax gap dataset that structurally undercounts corporate avoidance - because you can't find what you've decided in advance not to look for - while meticulously cataloguing every undeclared cash job. It's the fiscal equivalent of only policing one neighbourhood and then citing the arrest statistics as proof that's where all the crime is. Meanwhile, the same multinationals routing royalties through Ireland, the Netherlands, and Bermuda will shift more in a single quarter than every self-employed gas fitter in the country combined manages in a decade - but that doesn't show up in the gap data because nobody with the authority to look is looking. MTD is the logical endpoint of this worldview: add compliance cost to the people least equipped to absorb it, leave the structures that actually haemorrhage revenue entirely untouched, and call it modernisation.

Follow the money geographically. When a local tradesperson gets paid cash, that money recirculates: it goes to the builders' merchant down the road, the café on the high street, the local childminder. When a corporation shifts profit offshore, it exits the economy entirely and sits in a jurisdiction whose main export is brass nameplates. The macroeconomic harm isn't even comparable.

The "free stay at His Majesty's residential establishments" bit is telling. There's a particular relish some people take in fantasising about small business owners being made examples of - losing houses, going to prison - that you almost never see directed upward at the structures doing orders-of-magnitude more damage. It's punching down framed as civic responsibility. The enthusiasm for enforcement is curiously selective: heavy surveillance and custodial threats for the sole trader, but for the multinational? A quiet settlement, no admission of wrongdoing, and at worst some mid-level executive "stepping down" with a severance package worth more than most small businesses turn over in a lifetime. Nobody loses their house. Nobody gets a custodial sentence. Nobody gets named and shamed as an example to the rest. The full weight of the state's enforcement apparatus is reserved for people who can't afford to fight it.

What's really going on is a very old impulse: resenting visible, relatable success. A self-employed person doing well is proximate enough to provoke envy - "they look like me, but they're doing better, so they must be cheating." A corporation's tax arrangements are abstract, boring, and involve acronyms nobody wants to learn, so they attract far less emotional energy. The result is that public anger gets aimed precisely where it does the least good.

Suits won't quit AI spending, even if they can't prove it's working

FOMO

The bums will spend money on booze, even though the booze doesn't improve their lives.

Britain seeks views before it drops the hammer on signal jammers

Burglars

Burglar1> Oy mate, got this thingy for the new job at Bumlicks Road.

Burglar2> What's that? Your sister's massager?

Burgler1> No you wimpet, it's a jammer!

Burglar2> Yeah, she jams it in no?

Burglar1> I am going to smack the eyeballs out of you!

Burglar2> Calm your udders, tiger.

Burglar1> This thing will ensure their cameras won't record us on the job!

Burglar2> Ah no mate, I heard this is illegal now.

Burglar1> Really???... Bummer... okay, let's just use my sister's tights.

Burglar2> Yeah, her massager is too much.

Burglar1> I swear imma going to smack you.

Burglar2> Hit me harder, daddy.

World's smallest violin spotted at Amazon HQ as exec pay packets deflate

Re: $365,000 base salary

Isn't the difference going to be pocketed by shareholders?

OpenAI puts Stargate UK on ice, blames energy costs and red tape

Re: Just reality biting

Spending billions is okay as long as it is circular (money goes from right pocket to the left and vice versa).

Recipe

The recipe to woo the government is wine and steak, not coke and cheeseburger.

Peace President's Iran war piles more pain on already battered PC market

Re: 25th Amendment Time

HegsethKegsbreath

FTFY

Voyna

AmericaAmerikanski oblasts's war with Iranthe West.

Some corrections.

So far this looks like Krasnov is doing exactly what Iranian regime and Russia wants. Krasnov has killed young Aya-toll-ah's nuisance of old man and nagging wife. Russia is getting sanctions lifted. Weapons are diverted from Ukraine. Epstein files are not talked about anymore. Republicans and Democrats get to play the stock market. Bibi wanked himself unconscious over the killing spree and safety from prosecution. It's all working well.

Just the Western "leaders" are looking like caught with pants down yearning for the good old days of giving contracts to usual suspects and enjoying the managed decline.