The one interview question that will protect you
There is another one. How many Zetaflargs are required to polfroozle a qualpyklang? Apparently they just don't know this, even though it's common knowledge for the rest of us.
2052 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Oct 2020
All science is in essence a study of misinformation. After all, if it ain't true, it ain't science.
For a National Science Foundation to happily stop trying to prevent the dissemination of falsehoods is a betrayal of scientific principles.
Have yourself photographed next to it, with it stood on its short side, displaying an image of an iPhone home screen, then post it on the web with one of the following captions
a) Sneak Preview of the forthcoming iPhone 17 Max Pro Mega
b) First look at forthcoming summer blockbuster "Honey I Shrunk The Fanbois!"
And what happens if the device doesn't come back online? For example, you turn the network off on your phone, use it offline to buy a new phone in a shop with digi-quids, then just turn it off and chuck it away. By this method you just got a brand new free phone.
This dumb Sunak-era idea should be scrapped to save wasting any more real pounds on it.
Maybe the odometer is index linked to the share price : the more it falls, the faster the mileage increases. In any case, if the cars can't accurately measure the distance travelled to within less than a metre, then the idea that they can safely drive themselves is just laughable.
Let's say I run a shopping website. One day I decide to add an extra checkbox on it, automatically checked. Text label "pay £2000 extra". Now, do you want to gamble that when Copilot is automatically ordering something from it, it will understand that this is going to quite legally take lots of extra money from you unless it decides to uncheck the box before completing the purchase?
The tech companies invented cloud subscription as a way of extracting regular monthly payments for software rather than one-off purchases. Unfortunately for them, that system now also appears to have been introduced for "political donations".
They were obviously in favour of his tax cut policy, as it would make themselves better off. However by backing him, they were also supporting his tariff policy which is proving highly detrimental to the companies they run. So, seeing as the decision they made has badly harmed those companies, they should all be fired for that, as well as prioritising their own personal interest over that of their shareholders.
Luckily for those of us who know how to code properly, the problems this causes is going to keep us competitive. What's next? 'vibe surgery' where surgeons prompt an AI, saw your leg off, and move on?
I recommend not paying $104 per year just to be able to use a word processor when there are perfectly good word processors available for free that can be downloaded and installed in a few minutes. Hell, you could even do this as a backup in case the one you insist on paying for isn't available for a few hours due to the latest Microsoft fuck up.
Not sure this is the future many Trump voters envisioned for themselves.
Android phones are also going to be much cheaper than iPhones now, so despite all the sucking up Tim Cook did to Trump, it won't be his phones getting screwed in America, just his company.
If he was trying to promote his AI startup that claims to help with legal representation, going to court and making a total ass of himself by using somebody else's cheapo AI that he admitted didn't even work, then getting told off for it by the judge is perhaps not the marketing triumph he was intending it to be.
It would have been pretty amazing if a team of 10 AI researchers concluded that AI was a load of useless bollocks, considering the fact that such a conclusion would have put them all out of a job. This is just like those researchers in the 1950s who produced "research" proving the amazing health benefits of cigarettes, funded by tobacco companies.
It's just another corporate fad, sold to executives desperately looking for a bandwagon to jump on that promises to make them money. Remember when "synergy" was all the rage, and lots of people became "synergists" so they could hoover up the money being thrown at that miracle growth generator? Don't hear so much of them these days............
In other words, I wouldn't give a shit if it was just other people getting hurt, but this is affecting ME!
There was a time for all these rich guys who are now moaning to publicly criticise the tariffs, and it was before the election when he was proposing them, not after the election when he's implementing them.
I worked for a short while in a very old fashioned corporate bureaucracy type place where this sort of attitude was common - there was a mix of young developers with up to date skills and lazy middle aged timeservers who'd been there 20 years or more and had learnt how to get away with doing nothing but fill up their days by turning every miniscule problem into a "major crisis" necessitating endless meetings. On top was a layer of even older timeserving management who everyone knew did even less work, which meant they were never going to tackle the culture as they'd be the first out of the door if they did.
The solution in this case was me deciding to leave, as the company was an obvious basket case, coasting on an ancient business model which brought in a regular income that let everybody there grow lazy and comfortable. The dotcom boom arrived shortly after, putting them rapidly out of business (and me very much in demand).
Noel Gallagher was the AI of his day, making up "new" songs that were just exact regurgitations of other people's songs. He got successfully sued for it though, several times.
As for Blair, he is desperate to get into the tech bro circles, being about the only man left yet to realise that their reputation is now lower than dog shit.
Commodore bought Microsoft Basic as the "operating system" for its home computers in 1977 for an unlimited-use one-time fee of $25,000. Assuming that 12.5 million computers shipped with this (probably a low estimate), the cost per machine was $0.002.
Windows Server 2025 Datacenter Edition, 64-bit 24 Core License is $7,899.99 per machine, 395 million times as much.
He's damaged Tesla and Twitter so much with his "antics" that it feels like this is a panic move designed to try and shield him from that before he's forced out of the car company (Tesla is publicly listed) and try to keep his wealth inflated.
“I mean, have you seen Tim Walz, who is a huge jerk, running on stage with the Tesla stock price that had gone in half and he was overjoyed. What an evil thing to do. What a creep, what a jerk. Like who derives joy from that?” -- Elon Musk, last week, making the joy even more enjoyable.
Yes, that's because usability teams got overridden by marketing teams, because the belief is that shiny new appearance sells more than easy-to-use, therefore if there's a tension between the two, always go with the shiny. This is the root cause of all UI enshittification : it started on the web and has since seeped into operating systems and every area of life. I'm not sure if there's actually a "force dark patterns on your users to extract every last fraction of a cent possible from them" textbook out there yet, but even if there isn't, it seems like studying human-computer-interaction as a means to improve users' lives is something that'd disqualify you for a job in interface design these days.
Can the AI research analyst work out what any of that bullshit job title actually means? Even spending $50 billion on LLM training is going to be insufficient to extract any useful meaning from such "information". Perhaps MS management are hoping that although they're selling the idea that everyone else's jobs can be replaced with these tools, they can keep themselves safe by ensuring it'll be some way down the line before they release Copilot Corporate VP for M365 Core Experiences.
I'm guessing his least favourite Bible verse and very much not his guiding principle is Matthew 19:24 :
"it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God"
Perhaps he can set his AI to work on :
1. Camel minituarisation research
2. Designing a massive needle for his back garden that his pet camel can walk through
The only privacy risk that Google would ever be worried about is whether someone else is going to disregard privacy as badly as they do and possibly use all that slurped data to compete with what they do with it.
Microsoft are currently the main marketers of this idea, and it would be rather an admission of weakness for them to not accept AI generated bug reports as we're told it can do everything. If it can, it should be perfectly good to do this mundane task. So let's see them add AI bug reporting into Windows, to demonstrate appetite for their own dog food.
I propose an addition to Copilot, so if a user experiences a problem they simply have to say "Computer not work! Make computer work!". As Copilot snoops on everything you do, it can then put together a detailed bug report and send it straight to the bug fixing team. Hell, the thing is supposed to be a coding whizz too, so they could ditch the bug fixing team and get the AI to fix the bug too! Why haven't they thought about this and done it themselves yet? It would be lovely to get them to admit that AI is not up tp the job.......
No doubt this will soon be followed by the building of a national mouse mat distribution centre somewhere in rural Mississippi, to process the thousands of GSA-MM-2347 mouse mat request forms that arrive weekly from offices all over the country.....
Ensuring that nothing happened nationwide without approval from a big centralised bureaucracy worked out so well for the Soviet Union.
Hmm, I wonder why the Supreme Court recently had to invent the concept of "presidential immunity" then?
Or why lots of rioters got pardoned a few weeks ago?
To be clear, I think all violence is bad, but such extreme double standards don't give any right to take the moral high ground. Just don't be stupid enough to believe that because some awful people have got away with awful stuff that you will be able to too.
Nah, this is actually an example of an Einsteinian relativistic task completion distortion field. This theory states that time moves at different rates for those carrying out a task and those observing the task. The closer to the end of the task, the slower time passes for the observer. This explains not only why progress bars appear to drastically slow down above 90% and get stuck at 99% for an hour, but why the arrival time display at a bus stop showing "1 min" means that the bus will arrive in 5 minutes for the people waiting there, and programmers promising finished code "by Friday" appear to be still working on it 3 weeks later.
You had to conduct a risk assessment to determine whether it was safe to have a meeting in a room where the lights weren't working, but had a big window that let light in? I think some of that risk assessment budget could be better spent on your IT systems if you ask me....
A 17% failure rate strikes me as being much too high for something being proposed as a replacement for a key part of the operating system. Especially as Rust is promoted as something that reduces errors, by design. I'm going to give credit for providing the option to enable / disable it, rather than forcing it on people, but I just can't see the point of ditching robust battle hardened software for the sake of wanting to use today's trend-of-the-week.
If Microsoft's security response team are so dumb that they can't read simple text, understand it and then act on it, how can you trust them to be smart enough to do their job?
Still, yet more shit that the "I couldn't possibly exist without them" crowd choose to put up with rather than bother to make any effort to test that hypothesis.
I've developed my own AI hiring tool, which consists of small squares of paper, divided into 4 sections by drawing diagonals across them. You write the names of the first 4 candidates to apply in the sections, then put a cocktail stick through the middle and spin it on the desk, hiring the candidate whose name is in the section touching the desk when it falls over.
People have remarked that this tool makes no proper evaluation of the skills and experience of the candidates, isn't actually intelligent and the chosen name is in fact is completely random, but I point out that this is exactly the same feature set of all the much more expensive software versions of it currently on the market.
They obviously believe that they've got a useful idiot in the White House now, and can realise their greediest dreams of plunder by appealing to his disdain for the rest of the world. It could however result in the complete breakdown of the entire international copyright system, which other US companies might want to consider before their intellectual property gets nicked in retaliation.
Well no - if you keep buying products from companies whose entire business model is based on designing obsolescence into them to ensure regular influxes of customer money then you are walking voluntarily into that cage. Both have made such immense amounts of money from selling products with a much shorter usable lifespan than other physical things, that they should be made to either keep supporting them for many years, or open source them when they go out of support so others can do so.
The classic executive response to an incident : find a scapegoat and CYA. Now, they may well have been incompetent and deserved their fate, but the main reason for there being no comprehensive recovery plan is neatly always an unwillingness to pay for something seen as very expensive with not enough benefit for the cost.
Because new versions of Microsoft software always prioritise adding new features over fixing old problems. And those new features always bring even more new problems. So everybody has got into the habit of waiting years to upgrade in the hope that a lot of the bugs will be fixed by then. This used to happen by monitoring user forums and waiting until the number of complaints died down and it started to be seen as reliable. However, it's now so well known not to upgrade straight away to major new versions that there aren't so many first movers to watch experiencing the pain. This is entirely the consequence of prioritising rushing new product to market over quality engineering, and if they're finding that the reputation they've built up for that is now affecting their bottom line, they only have themselves to blame.