Posts by weirdbeardmt

Microsoft catapults DeepSeek R1 into Azure AI Foundry, GitHub

Rigorous and extensive

How much testing and evaluation can they have really carried out in the ~1-2 weeks since it hit the news?

This is clearly “oooh look, people are distracted by something new and shiny, we need to be all board the gravy train”

Garmin Connect outage leaves folks unable to share their fitness virtue signaling

Re: Means to an end

In the spirit of links: https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2024/11/stravas-changes-to-kill-off-apps.html

Are you better value for money than AI?

Re: OpenAI chief financial officer (CFO) Sarah Friar

You will have seen media coverage of the “AI” company advertising their wares with big controversial posters saying things like “stop hiring humans” etc.

The story is made all the more laughable because the company… has a careers/recruiting page.

Admittedly the page makes it sounds like a complete hellhole that only a mindless machine would want to work at. Tbh I feel bad for any of the “AIs” that do work there.

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine

Re: increase in the frequency, tenacity and intrusiveness of the ads recently

Afraid not if you use the app (on a TV / smart device) - even PiHole doesn't sort that out.

It’s not just Google search

The same bean counters are seemingly enshitting all over YouTube as well. There has been a noticeable increase in the frequency, tenacity and intrusiveness of the ads recently. To the point where the app now threatens you with “Watch this ad now to get interrupted less”

An interesting debate followed on whether the ads had become sufficiently annoying to just suck it up and pay for a YT Premium subscription (presumably their ultimate plan… the sweet sweet predictability of annuity revenue without the hassle of advertisers) with the general consensus being “nah, would rather just go elsewhere”

AI's power trip will leave energy grids begging for mercy by 2027

Re: how not to destroy the planet?

the sooner I'm dunked in the cocoon of jelly and harvested for my power the better!

try telling Eric Schmidt that

I thought the point of setting fire to emissions targets and destroying the planet with these mega centres was that humans are too stupid to figure out the cause of the problems and it’s actually the AI that will be our salvation by figuring out for us how not to destroy the planet?

Bank of America app glitch zeroes out people's balances

Re: "Checking" account?

My bank’s app has a built-in cheque scanner. Take a photo of the cheque, correct any OCR issues and then submit to deposit.

No branch visit. Just keep the physical cheque until it has cleared.

Re: "Checking" account?

“ Hell, only one of those systems is modern enough to use lower case letters in its name.”

All of those languages you list are acronyms (or single letter) so using capitals is standard, with the possible exception of FORTRAN, but that’s been referred to as Fortran since around 1990.

WhatsApp still working on making View Once chats actually disappear for all

Disappearing privacy

Not familiar with “view once” in WhatsApp but sounds analogous to “disappearing messages” in group chats.

The blurb for this is “for more privacy and storage…”

I wonder if anyone actually thought that they were deleted as opposed to merely hidden.

AWS claims customers are packing bags and heading back on-prem

Tiny violin

Are they… hoping that we’ll, erm… feel sorry for them?

Boeing to launch quantum comms satellite testbed in 2026

Phone home

Go home Boeing, you’re drunk.

A quick guide to tool-calling in large language models

Counter irony is fun

These sorts of errands are exactly the sort of the thing we might naively expect from an “AI” automagically but what we’re really saying is it still needs to reach for the calculator… just like a human. Is that progress?

(Yes I know LLM != AI)

The bigger question is… if it hallucinated the answer before having access to the calculator, how did it “know” (eugh) to use it when it did have access?

Body of IT tycoon Mike Lynch recovered after superyacht sinks

Re: What was the bayesian probability of that happening?

The black fly is, quite certainly, in the Chardonnay.

Delta: CrowdStrike's offer to help in Falcon meltdown was too little, too late

Underdog?

Obviously Delta are going to have some dead bodies… erm, technical debt in their estate for myriad reasons which maybe meant their recovery was slower.

But even if those decisions were due to budgetary or shareholder concerns (which seems to be the insinuation here) the playground pile-on with Microsoft egging them on chanting “fight! fight!” … from the people who made this mess is such a dick move.

Kudos to Delta for pushing back.

Lawyers everywhere will be dribbling with excitement. Hohum.

Microsoft punches back at Delta Air Lines and its legal threats

Did he check the junk mail

I dunno… at a time when the whole world’s IT is on fire, if your email is even working, to get one purporting to be from the actual boss of Microsoft… phishing awareness training if it hasn’t gone straight to junk.

Maybe next time go old school and… pick up the phone.

Craig Wright admits he isn't the inventor of Bitcoin after High Court judgment in UK

Re: PhD plus BA*

Pretty huge Debts.

Raspberry Pi stock surges after London IPO

£80? and the rest…

Bought two 8gb Pi5 yesterday. By the time you get the bits you actually need for it (PSU, SD card, case) it’s closer to £125.

Still like the thing and it serves a purpose but it departed its roots some time ago with or without the IPO.

And like it or not, there is (usually) only one reason a profitable company IPOs… the founders want to get their cash out

HP BIOS update renders some ProBook laptops expensive paperweights

Machines being out of warranty ought to be irrelevant here.

The failure is caused by the (update) service provided by HP and if it is as described in the article borderline negligent.

(I may need to pay you to service my car but if you accidentally smash a window it’s on you to fix it.)

Either way they should be insured against the risk.

(Unless something in the Ts & Cs of the update service expressly says they don’t warranty that the service won’t brick your device. And nobody would be surprised if it did say that…)

Raspberry Pi prepares to boot up a London listing

Fun while it lasted

Oh well, that’ll be the end of the Pi then.

Federal frenzy to patch gaping GitLab account takeover hole

Re: Specially crafted HTTP request..

I was imagining ?loggedin=1 or similar…

Oracle AI buzz means Larry Ellison's worth $15B more today

Metaphorical 747

Curiously ironic he’d choose the metric of 747s to measure the size… 50 year old tech that has been discontinued and long since replaced by younger more modern things.

HPE seeks $4B in damages from Autonomy boss Mike Lynch and his ex-CFO

Tiny violins

Literally all the players in this story can get in the bin. All of them. It is the very nadir of greedy tech twats doing shady things.

The cherry on top, of course, that whatever HPE actually get, the lawyers will devour most of it.

Boeing goes boing: 757 loses a wheel while taxiing down the runway

potato potato

Since idle pedantry seems to be high on today’s agenda, just wanted to point out that Bogotá is not, so far as I can tell, in “Columbia”. Maybe the plane was trying to reorient to the correct South American trajectory which causes the wheel/tyre to disassociate itself.

Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse

The brown stuff is really going to hit the big spinny thing when the training models / RAG starts to (re-)ingest AGI content for recursive use in its output in some horrific ai centipede-esque maelstrom of gibberish.

The internet as a useful resource will be truly knackered at that point.

Re: The Singer not the Song

In a past life in IT support, I still recall watching a user open their browser and use Bing (which was default start) to search for Google and then use Google to search…

I’ve reflected on all the possible reasons for this… group policy almost certainly prohibited them from changing their homepage or having plugins… but why not have a favourites bar button… why not just type Google in the URL bar…

Humans are going to human. The average person doesn’t know, see or care about the difference. They almost certainly didn’t know that not using Bing was a smart move… they just associated ‘search’ and ‘Google’ and this was their routine that muscle memory dictated they follow. They perhaps didn’t even know that Bing was ‘a Google’ and could have used that. They just want an answer. Whether it’s the right or a useful answer is often secondary which is why all these spam farm continue to exist.

'Small monthly payment' only thing that stands between X and bot chaos, says Musk

Sanity filter

“ hopefully the world's discourse would become somewhat saner...”

Ha, good one.

The plebeians will just disperse on to a different platform.

The sane ones are becoming disillusioned with it all and leaving which will only intensify the madness as the mix of batshit crazy becomes less diluted.

A politician here tried to do a dramatic “I’m done with social media” style table flip and publicly left Twitter.

Of course somebody immediately nabbed their old handle (which was literally their name) and used it as a parody account.

Oracle disappoints market with revenue miss as Ellison hints at Azure database move

Re: Am I reading this right?

Statements like this should be enough to wipe off a chunk…

“using [low-code application development platform] APEX, and that's also going to save us a lot of human labor and generate higher-quality code and higher-quality user interfaces and better security, all at once”

Fingers in ears “lalalala” it’s all going to be lovely.

Individual data platforms for all health providers under controversial NHS plans

Easier option

Wouldn’t it be easier to fork over a cheque (check?) for $500m and dump everyone’s medical records on an unsecured S3 bucket and just be done with it? Save the pretence of actually trying to something that won’t turn in to a bucket of flaming turds.

Logitech, iFixit to offer parts to stop folks binning their computer mouse

Re: Haven't used a mouse for years

Not sure why this got downvotes. The trackpad (with gestures) is so much more functional and productive than a normal mouse.

Although to appease the Apple haters, let’s not overlook one of the all-time bonehead mouse design decisions… the Magic Mouse with charging port underneath, rendering it completely inoperable when you invariably forgot to charge it.

Apple finally pro giving Pro iPads these Pro apps

Media

Unless you’re using the iPad as the camera, or sync via iCloud, how are they expecting users to get the required media/assets on to the device? Video professionals will have a workflow that starts with import and organisation of assets, which will typically involve hard drives attached to a … Mac.

IOW what does the iPad version give over the desktop version that justifies the extra effort of then eg attaching a hard drive?

Unless this really is meant for hacking together quick vids… which doesn’t sound all that ‘Pro’.

Also wonder how they will treat those who already have the full desktop version (and in future vice versa) but the answer to that seems pretty obvious.

Dump these insecure phone adapters because we're not fixing them, says Cisco

Re: Bit hard on the bright young things?

Explain this…. https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/50-of-vinyl-buyers-dont-own-a-record-player-data-shows/

Amazon to shutter Digital Photography Review

Or give it to the current team (whose alternative is presumably redundancy) for a nominal $1.

Suspect Amazon can’t be arsed with the hassle of disentangling 18 years of ownership despite it being The Right Thing To Do.

This is a real shame DPR was a great resource. Will look forward to a ChatGPTard explaining how it would even come close to providing the sort of content DPR managed.

You fire 'em, we'll hire 'em: Atlassian sees tech layoffs as HR heaven

Predictable losses

This hasn’t aged well.

Meh

I know a lot of companies that use core* Atlassian products (including us) and not a single one of them actually like the products (including us)

* Core being Jira, Confluence etc... Sourcetree [which they didn't write] was good but that has been made irrelevant by tools built in to VS or Rider and BitBucket is OK but that is slowly losing out to GitHub.

ChatGPT, write a report about database glitches that crashed you today

Spoiler alert

This whole self-deprecating ChatGPT-loathing article was actually written by ChatGPT. The apocalypse begins in 10... 9...

Samsung’s Smart Monitor tries too hard to be clever

oh. i guess i'm the odd one out here.

a lot of fevered comments here... although pretty certain nobody actually has one of these. I do.

my use case was pretty specific - I have a 49" LG ultrawide already (so not exactly short of screen real estate) but there are some occasions having the screen physically separate makes sense. and if I'm working late then I tend to like to have something 'on'... e.g., sports, some other low commitment event that I can flick eyes to when necessary but otherwise focus on the main display.... and having something I can occasionally beam to from the main computer would be a bonus, and also connect another computer/laptop/device from time to time.

so I went actual shopping (in an actual shop and everything) for an actual television which had to be smart. haven't used aerial or satellite in... forever. my office has neither of those things. i had researched an LG television which seemed to tick all the boxes and was absolutely convinced I was not going to buy a Samsung due to all of their TVs being reportedly riddled with ads. I saw the LG, a Samsung and a Sony alongside each other and I'm pleased I did because the Samsung was noticeably the best display. not much between it and the Sony (in fact Sony possibly better) but the LG was truly abysmal.

and having used Android on my main Sony tv; I didn't want to go anywhere near that, so swapping to Tizen seemed like a reasonable shout.

i did some more research on the Samsung devices and stumbled across these smart monitors, which seemed to tick a lot of boxes. i was originally going to get the M5 but in the end went for the M8 due to having USB-C. found one online which was nowhere near the $700 reported here (± £330 IIRC but it had to be white at that price)

and so far everything is perfectly fine. the streaming apps do exactly what I want.. usual array of iPlayer, Netflix, Prime etc. and a store with all the others if you want them. it is rapid to turn on, which probably explains it's poor 'G' energy rating. the screen is sharp and the picture quality very good.

i wasn't forced to sign up for a Samsung account... well not at first. annoyingly you do need to do that if you want to use anything beyond the default, or install a new app. or to use its voice control (called Bixby, ffs) which is truly appalling and completely unusable.

AirPlay (yes yes, macOS, let's move on) works exactly as you would expect. I can't imagine ever using the Workspace feature.

the built-in browser is a fairly miserable experience. I had one tab streaming an audio feed and I wanted to open a separate tab to load something else... which nuked the stream on the first tab.

I originally had wanted your average TV remote (since primary use is streaming apps) but that is where it quickly falls over if you do want to do anything beyond that. fortunately most apps support logging in from another device nowadays which is good, since just typing your credentials would be a tedious experience, although I doubt that's unique to this device.

but it was tedious enough to the extent that I started trying to work out how to remote control it. I can't imagine ever using the remote desktop feature - I misunderstood that when I was researching because I assumed that meant i would be able to e.g., VNC *to* the monitor; whereas that is for connecting from the monitor *to* another device. I guess that could make sense, maybe, for some things... maybe? I used the built-in browser and just getting to the page I wanted was a nightmare and it seems like the only option there is to attach a keyboard/mouse to it as opposed to being able to actually remote control it.

I've not seen a single ad yet; although I'm not sure if that is my PiHole doing its job or if they don't bundle these monitors with that stuff like they do on the TV. I've no doubt it's shipping every last detail back to whomever pays well enough but, that I'm not convinced that's any different to anyone else anymore.

anyway, tl;dr, for my use case, this thing is doing what I wanted it to do, pretty much. If it was possible to VNC it that would be great but beyond that, it does what I need.

HP pilots paper delivery service for Instant Ink subscribers

Re: having to go buy paper [is] heavy, very painful

Um, well… be careful what you wish for.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/dymo-causes-a-stir-by-adding-drm-to-printer-paper/

Beware the techie who takes things literally

Doomsday device

Is not the modern parlance for this sort of unstoppable action “smart contracts”…

Visiting a booby-trapped webpage could give attackers code execution privileges on HP network printers

Re: Malware or just a link to the firmware update site?

This.

We have several of these but stopped updating the firmware a while back when they tried to bork printers not using OEM ink. So it's now Catch-22... although the financial damage from network pwnage is probably considerably less than having to buy actual HP ink.

Something fishy is going on in Taiwan as folk change name to include 'salmon' for free sushi

I can’t believe what I’m sea-ing. This is neither the time nor the plaice for such a load of pollacks. Bunch of bass-tards.

(I’ll get my mac-kerel.)

All this chaos was created on porpoise.

React team observes that running everything on the client can be costly, aims to fix it with Server Components

Re: Where have I seen this before.....?

this. Whatever reasons they might be giving for doing it, I'll bet a large part of the motivation is that Blazor will likely make their entire framework redundant very soon.

UK state of the Internet report: Virgin Media 'fast', BT's PlusNet last

Larry the loafer

Is the nPerf rep suggesting Ookla’s data masher is just a puppet?

Can't quite remember the name of the song stuck in your head? Hum it and our AI will take a guess, says Google

Accuracy

Google surprised as new algo guesses The Boo Radleys 100% of the time.

IBM manager had to make one person redundant from choice of two, still bungled it and got firm done for unfair dismissal

not just a firewall?

And there was me thinking Checkpoint was a firewall... which in this case it also kinda is.