Posts by boblongii

Google declares AI bug hunting season open, sets a $30K max reward

No Thanks

I'd rather Google's AI died than that I had $30k for helping a bunch of bastards make billions.

RubyGems maintainer quits after Ruby Central takes control of project

Twitter

Where truth goes to die.

US tech giants pledge $42 billion in UK investment as Trump tours Blighty

Re: Hole

"They haven't learned the most important lesson about Trump: he demands loyalty from everyone but returns it to no one. "

That's the norm for America generally, and has been for a century at least. They have a manifest destiny, don't ya know?

Microsoft admits it 'cannot guarantee' data sovereignty

Re: Where does this leave Microsoft telemetry ?

And that helps you in what way?

Wayback gives X11 desktops a fighting chance in a Wayland world

Re: Fiddling about while Linux burns.

The issue of course is that Wayland's developers thought "We don't use these features, let's take them out". Which is nice for them, and shit for everyone who does use a remote GUI.

It's just ego; same as systemd and freedesktop.org. Wankers slapping themselves on the backs and cashing the cheques from sponsors.

Forked-off Xlibre tells Wayland display protocol to DEI in a fire

Re: Code talks

You do not fight racism with more racism.

Sudo-rs make me a sandwich, hold the buffer overflows

Re: Before any one complains about sudo-rs being MIT

"The only ones who have a say on the license of a project are the people/entities who start said projects."

I agree - if people are stupid enough to work for Apple for free then that's their lookout. I'm not, so I'll never use the BSD license for my own output. The richest company in the world can pay their fucking developers themselves.

Signalgate storm intensifies as journalist releases full secret Houthi airstrike chat

Re: @Wang Cores

You have a selective grasp of history indeed if you think "the Israel/Gaza situation" started under Biden. Biden would have been about 6 years old at the time.

Re: I cannot see how bombing the Houthis helps

To be fair to Netanyahu, he's hasn't actually finished killing every Palestinian yet so it's too early to tell if it will make things worse or not.

Re: They're already

"But as the Israelis and others have shown, it's possible to do better and place a much less damaging missile right into the window of a specified apartment and at least only kill the immediate neighbours and not the entire building."

So why have they levelled entire buildings over and over again? (Answer: Because they are genocidal maniacs).

Microsoft quantum breakthrough claims labeled 'unreliable' and 'essentially fraudulent'

Doesn't matter

Even if they had done what they claimed - which I doubt - they have no idea how to solve the cooling problem. Keeping TWO bits at 0.15°K is tricky enough and requires a lot of power; they'll never be able to scale it, economically or otherwise.

C++ creator calls for help to defend programming language from 'serious attacks'

Re: Speed of Transition

Yes indeed.

"If you had 30 years of experience with this heap of obscure shit you would know how to do that" is always a sign that the language design isn't at fault.

He's having a laugh

"type safety and resource safety (including memory safety) have been key aims of C++ from the very start."

What a flat out lie!

He has made no serious effort in *decades* to move that forward, he certainly didn't give a monkey's ass about it at the start.

Does terrible code drive you mad? Wait until you see what it does to OpenAI's GPT-4o

Gee

It's almost as if using a random number generator attached to billions of weights as a stand-in for Intelligence is a really stupid model. But it sells shares, I guess.

I also notice the implication that GPT can normally generate good code when left alone. This is not the case.

Can AWS really fix AI hallucination? We talk to head of Automated Reasoning Byron Cook

Re: learning something new

LLMs are not reasoning engines. An LLM takes your input (and a hidden setup script) and then produces text which looks like text it has already seen of people talking about the things in your input. It does no reasoning whatsoever. It picks a syllable that looks right, then it picks another one and it keeps going until it's RNG says to stop.

This is useful if you are writing code which is normal boilerplate or summarising well known works or even just boring reports that look like a million other boring reports. It won't generally design a new algorithm for a problem you've hit while researching something novel.

People need to get it into their heads that an LLM simulates what it has already encountered and the input is nothing more that context for that process. This is not intelligence, artificial or otherwise and anyone that tells you it is is lying.

Elon Musk’s Starlink won't block Elon Musk’s X in Brazil, as required by court order

It is likely to win simply because it is a US company suing a non-US company in the US. American courts are very jingoistic.

Have we stopped to think about what LLMs actually model?

Artificial Intelligence and Genuine Stupidity

LLM are about as close to general AI as a motorboat is to the butterfly stroke. You might make progress across the water in the former but you will learn nothing about the latter in the process.

It's all fairy tales and nonsense. Normally this sort of bullshit is for the benefit of the marks they're going to sell the company to before legging it but I increasingly feel that the OpenAI and Google AI people actually believe their own hype.

'Uncertainty' drives LinkedIn to migrate from CentOS to Azure Linux

"I suspect it's not making it work... It's making it easy to deploy and admin"

Not traditionally things MS is good at.

Writers sue Anthropic for feeding 'stolen' copyrighted work into Claude

Re: This is getting out of hand

Who cares what Google do? Their search engine has been useless for years now.

Re: This really isn't going to work...

So you think that Anthropic paid for all those books? I'd like to see the receipts.

Leaving that aside, the storage and transformation of text is almost certainly going to run afoul of the restrictions placed in most books.

I don't think these lazy parasites can win; they certainly should not be allowed to win.

Re: Slippery slope

That's a weasel excuse and a half, an a fairly obvious troll.

Aside from anything else, if someone writes books in the style of another author they ARE regarded as a hack; it's not accepted from humans and it certainly doesn't have to be accepted from a machine.

Secondly, while authors are influenced by books they've read they generally are books they have paid for. The issue here is copyright. Google opened the door with their Books project and the "AI" companies are hoping to repeat their success.

Sorry, Moxie. Blaming Agile for software stagnation puts the wrong villain in the wrong play

Re: It's not Agile, it's the black boxes

Yeah, Agile introduced that sort of thinking. I'm not sure exactly wen but it must have been sometime around 1760 before Smith stumbled across the pin factory he wrote about in Wealth of Nations.

Gentoo Linux to drop Itanium support as Funtoo fork enters 'Hobby Mode'

As a very long-time and happy Gentoo user I know exactly what you mean but when I use Ubuntu (which I must for work) it makes me shudder. Cannonical not only don't want to think outside the box, they want you to get in the box they've built and stay there.

There's a fine line in software development - not just Free or Open - you want to pay enough to get useful things done but not so much that constantly making changes to the existing software is a viable business plan.

Under-fire Elon Musk urged to get a grip on X and reality – or resign

Re: Pedo Guy to the rescue!

No, he wasn't. I didn't mean to imply that he was, only that he was immature and rich.

Re: Pedo Guy to the rescue!

Fascism, ultimately, is the belief that the "deserving" minority should band together in order to exert their will on the minority. It seems pretty obvious that Musk believes that too. Insofar as he actually has any coherent thought in his increasingly drug-addled brain.

Raised on a myth of his own manifest destiny by a creepy mother with a Mary Mother of God complex, Musk's achievements are relatively minor compared to his ego. Like Steve Jobs, his role is largely to sit in his own mess and scream at others to do what he demands, whether it is possible or not. This is surprisingly effective when the manbaby's demands are possible but the fact remains that it's not his work that built Space-X or Tesla and, really, his strange demands are probably going to destroy at least the latter.

Criticism of Musk is seen by him as something that must be crushed - the plebs have no right to challenge the modern-day Aryan ubermench living in his ivory Randian Tower. He has the money so he has the power. It's a deluded cycle: he has money so he has the power to demand he is paid billions for other people's achievements, which grants him more power and more arrogance.

He hates democracy - he supports Trump because Trump hates democracy too. They are very similar, and moreso with every passing month. They are the deserving - they can prove it by showing how much money they've managed to accumulate. Banding together into a fasces bound by their mutual love of doing whatever they like, they beat away at the idea that the voice of the masses should be granted a hearing in the circles of power using the propaganda machines that they have built (or stolen).

Musk is a Fascist.

Endless OS 6: How desktop Linux may look, one day

Re: I lost interest when I saw 'Gnome'

It's the curse of professionalising software development for direct commercial reward - if the product is "done done" then you're out of a job. When dealing with something completely subjective like UI design, you can "justify" new releases forever, or until you retire anyway.

CIO who dropped VMware 18 months ago now feeling thoroughly chuffed

Re: non-native here

Unchuffed suggests that he was not chuffed before and remains so. Dischuffed implies that a formally chuffed person now has become unchuffed, perhaps even miffed.

I stumbled upon LLM Kryptonite – and no one wants to fix this model-breaking bug

Good enough

As in "good enough to sell to idiots that think picking a word at random is artificial intelligence". No one valued at tens of billions is going to be interested in saying "oh, actually, this does have substantial flaws".

Google thinks AI can Google better than you can

Re: And the slide into uselessness continues

This is AI, though. Almost by definition (i.e., the training data) the problem here is YOU. So-called AI works by assuming that you are not looking for anything special and that the results served up to the bulk of people will do you too. The current attempt at AI is just an automatic echo-chamber construction engine.

Get a list of previous outcomes for this context (or the context the system thinks it has), stick softmax on it and job's done. £££££

Big Deal

Given that Google already ignores most of what I ask for and simply throws up a Wikipedia page I imagine a brain-damaged pigeon could "do my Googling for me" with similar results.

Google are in complete denial about how shit their service has become.

UK public voice fear over security in NHS data systems

No, it will be stolen. By people on the inside who have the keys. It will then be sold back to us.

Open sourcerers say suspected xz-style attacks continue to target maintainers

Re: Dependency

The issue here is that Debian did not create systemd but approved its use even though the fundamental security problems in the design - not just the implementation - were there for all to see. That brings into question the value of their judgement as to what constitutes a safe system in general.

Scientists trace tiny moonquakes to Apollo 17 lander – left over from 1972

France had its own definition of the furlong which was close to the English one. The fact remains that they just divided by 200 instead of 220.

Grounded in reality? The meter is derived from the furlong - divided by 200 instead of 220. Is that "reality" enough? All units are ultimately arbitrary.

Airbnb sees AI as its ticket to become a sprawling Big Tech giant

Big talk

Coming from a company that can't even provide the breakfast they promise.

Arm's lawyers want to check assembly expert's book for trademark missteps

Re: Is this not "nominative fair use"?

Copyright law:

1 Do you have more money than the person suing you?

2a If yes, you're good.

2b If not, you lose.

3 Get on with your life.

No need to get the courts involved.

UK flights disrupted by 'technical issue' with air traffic computer system

Re: more nationwide outages incoming

There's a lot of promise in large-scale batteries that use iron. Useless for cars etc., but potentially fine for bulk uses like storing wind farm generation.

Plus, people could just use less. Crazy idea I know - capitalism is all about growth. Maybe that's the source of the problem right there.

Version 5 of systemd-free Debian remix Devuan is here

Other option(s)

If you don't want systemd - and I don't - then there is Gentoo (and related) and several others using OpenRC.

Judge denies HP's plea to throw out all-in-one printer lockdown lawsuit

Re: To add to this...

Just wondering - is it possible that modern inks do actually have a use-by date for actual reasons? I can imagine possible reasons connected to chemistry. Obviously, this should be documented even if it is genuine.

Soft-reboot in systemd 254 sounds a lot like Windows' Fast Startup

Re: Hmmm

And for no reason at all.

Who is this change helping? Why do the systemd devs get to decide these things? I'm not paying them or asking them to. I'd pay them to *stop* coding if I could afford to.

"Some of this really feels like development for the sake of justifying P's employment."

Well, yes. That's systemd in toto.

I'm happily using Gentoo and living without systemd or his god-awful sound system.

Ubuntu 23.04 'Lunar Lobster' beta is here in all its glitchy glory

Wayland?

Why? What value does it have beyond almost but not quite doing what X11 already does? How many people are using a graphical Ubuntu on a multi-user system where the supposed security issues on X11 are relevant?

I don't mind developers wasting their own time but I object to having their half-arsed systems installed by default.

The Stonehenge of PC design, Xerox Alto, appeared 50 years ago this month

Xerox and foolishness

Those 100,000 alone shares are worth $3.4B dollars today, allowing for stock splits. Xerox's market cap is $2.34B.

Wikimedia Foundation confirms, and bemoans, Pakistan ban

What's the point?

WP is literally just a badly edited selection of web search results - many entries are simply copied directly form other sites. The only useful part of a WP page is generally the links at the bottom and they're only useful because search engines artificially boost WP pages so far up the rankings that the original source material is generally hard to find.

So, banning WP has zero effect on any sort of material being on the web. In fact, if the local search engines stop pushing WP, you've probably made it easier to find "blasphemous" material.

The era of cloud colonialism has begun

Re: VC

"Investors are not stupid, and IF (not sure if they do push this TBH) they are insisting that a company uses Amazon, Microsoft or Google, it's for a good reason."

Firstly, VC investors are stupid. That's why 12 in every 13 of their investments tanks.

Secondly, when I was getting VC funding back in the day it came with one particularly odd string which was that we had to host on Dell hardware because Dell were giving them backhanders. They even suggested that we should not try to optimise the application too much as they would like to ask Dell for bigger hardware and therefore a bigger sweetener (basically Dell wanted to boast about installed CPUs).

None of the things you listed are of any real value to a startup; even uptime.

VCs know nothing. If they did, they'd do it themselves or have a decent hit-rate.

Sandworm gang launches Monster ransomware attacks on Ukraine

Re: Illegal attack

Russia doesn't have a nuclear veto at the UN - it has a "we beat the Nazis" veto and have had it since before they had nukes. For some reason France also has the veto despite conspicuously not beating the Nazis any more than various other countries did.

Time Lords decree an end to leap seconds before risky attempt to reverse time

It's not forgotten at all. On Linux (at least) type

cal 1752

and have a look at September.

Actual real-life hoverbike makes US debut at Detroit Auto Show

Re: Translation

Only if you believe that every metric measurement given is perfectly precise and not rounded up to the nearest 10 or 100 or whatever. I doubt very much that this thing weighs exactly 300Kg.

Translation

Weighs 6cwt (3/10th of a ton), range of 25 miles (if you're lucky and/or slow), top speed about 60mph and if you're 16 stone or more in wet clothes (because there aint no canopy) don't apply.

A very inefficient mode of transport albeit a cool-looking one.

The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it

Re: Not the only game in town

"What I do want is multiple workspaces, a responsive window manager which stays out of the way, and a menu/taskbar/keyboard shortcuts to manipulate windows and access applications. I get that on Linux with an old-school, lightweight, minimalist window manager (Fluxbox in my case, Blackbox before that) which I have used happily for over two decades).

Then there is the NEXTStep/Window Maker/Mac OS model - doesn't work particularly for me, but clearly does for many."

I use WindowMaker with multiple workspaces for exactly the reasons you gave; what doesn't work for you about it?