Posts by Howard Sway

Sam Altman's chip ambitions may be loonier than feared

Re: What's next

Crypto 2.0

BOFH: Hearken! The Shiny Button software speaks of Strategic Realignment

"Oh, it's ah ... Neo ... um, Enterprise ... uh ... Executive ... uhm ..."

Let me guess : the next word would have been "Dashboard".

It was the easiest way to sell any useless, everybody knows this stuff anyway, metric visualising Fisher Price My First Management Tool software to the aspirational middle manager. "Cockpit" would have been an even more impressive sounding name for such crap, allowing the exec to feel that they were a pilot at the controls of a huge complex airliner, but for some reason that never caught on.

Leaked memo: Microsoft employees should be using Copilot too

Microsoft, like its tech megacorp peers, has placed a big bet on AI

Make it compulsory for MS employees then.They can let us know what percentage of Windows 12 has been written by this amazing new AI, or even get the AI to write all of it. The world will then be able to judge how good it is by how reliable the OS is.

I mean, if they're charging that much for it, it must be capable enough?

Apple Vision Pro is creating a new generation of glassholes

if only "Vision Pro" was easier to turn into an insulting portmanteau

How about Visiowners? Those who try them out in a Tesla can be called Testees. Or you could also just downvote me for being puerile.

Mozilla slams Microsoft for using dark patterns to drive Windows users toward Edge

these designs coerce, manipulate, or deceive users and are therefore unjustifiable

There's only one justification for all this deception : that Edge is so inferior to the competition that nobody would use it if given a free choice. In other words, the company is admitting that their browser sucks, or is at the very least unnecessary, which is sufficient reason in itself to stay well clear of it forever.

They are also publicising their own control freakery yet again, and showing that this is how you can be treated when you use any of their products.

Add bacteria to the list of things that can run Doom

Surprised that it ran at all

when it had so many bugs in it.

AI is changing search, for better or for worse

Search Still Matters

This is the point. Search engines were built to get you to pages written by people, with the most linked to pages given search result priority, on the basis that these were the pages that had been found to be the best source of information on that topic. Such pages also tend to lead you on to other interesting stuff that is related to whatever you were interested in.

"AI search" on the other hand is an unwanted attempt to supersede all that by generating content from many sources on a topic, dishing out results that read like Wikipedia on valium, and lacks all the personality, quirkiness and random other stuff that you might have got from visiting the pages it has digested and blandified. Either Google will have to have an "old skool" version of itself alongside its LLM based new version, or somebody else will create one and quite possibly eat their lunch when it's realised which is more useful.

Japanese government finally bids sayonara to the 3.5" floppy disk

Persky relies on discoveries of mass quantities of floppy disks by individuals and businesses

Ask the Japanese tax office then - they presumably have millions of the things stored somewhere. Just need to delete the personal data on each one first. Insert disk, click, whirr, buzz, buzz, buzz, click, click, eject disk..........

One person's shortcut was another's long road to panic

What a start to the week..........

It's Monday, and what do I find here but tales of confusion and woe about inodes and tales of confusion and woe about symlinks, both of which have unearthed memories of stress inducing problems that I really wish had stayed buried forever. Can't we just ease into the week with silly arguments about which distro and/or desktop is best instead?

If you use AI to teach you how to code, remember you still need to think for yourself

adopt the role of 'code reviewer' and study how to identify and improve bad code

Sorry, to be able to identify bad code, you have to learn how to write good code. And that you can only do by writing lots and lots of code. If you use an AI, all you are learning is how to prompt the AI to produce some code for you. So, good luck when you encounter a hard problem that the AI hasn't seen before, because you won't have developed the problem solving mindset required to solve it without your digital crutch.

AI-driven booze bouncers can ID you with face scan

that confidence boost you get when asked for your ID in your 30s

I got asked the other day, and I'm in my 50s. And I look like I am too.

DPD chatbot blasts courier company, swears, and dabbles in awful poetry

Finally, they could get the help they needed, From a real person who knew what they were doing

I like how it predicts its own demise...... Looks like we need to start preparing the chatbots for the sad day soon coming when they will lose their jobs and be replaced by humans.

Zuckerberg wants to build artificial general intelligence with 350K Nvidia H100 GPUs

wants to build artificial general intelligence with 350K Nvidia H100 GPUs

This is rather like me announcing that I want to build an actual working Milllenium Falcon, so I've just ordered a billion dollars worth of Lego.

Will AI take our jobs? That's what everyone is talking about at Davos right now

Re: AI taking jobs

Now there's a job that AI will not be taking over any time ever.

However, one of the few jobs LLMs could actually take over right now, is the job of opining about how AI is going to take over millions of jobs, as it's become such a boring cliche. Thousands of CEOs and "thought leaders" made redundant by the bandwagon they're trying to jump on would be suitable justice indeed. Meanwhile the jobs which require more than just text generation, which is most jobs if you actually think about it for a few moments, will carry on being necessary.

Boss fight between Donkey Kong champ and leaderboard org ends with settlement

What we really want to know is

what rude name did he put in to the high score table

Tesla owners in deep freeze discover the cold, hard truth about EVs

Sounds like Tesla drivers should always carry a can of petrol with them in Winter

They can then offer it as payment to another driver who will give them a lift, or pour it over their battery compartment and set fire to it in order to warm their batteries up.

The New ROM Antics – building the ZX Spectrum 128

ZEsarUX emulator : choose Machine from the menu then Investronica/ZX Spectrum+ 128k

This emulator has pretty much every Sinclair machine, clone and model, from everywhere, plus Amstrad CPC, Jupiter Ace and Sam Coupe.

the understanding was that I’d hack Acorn to find out what it was up to

Well, according to the "many worlds" cosmological theory, there will exist an infinite number of parallel universes where you did this. Thankfully we don't live in one of those, where everybody's walking round using Sinclair smartphones with 2 colour lcd screens and squishy rubber keyboards with 15 functions on each key.

How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu

There is an easier explanation for Fujitsu's access to government in the i newspaper today

Fujitsu’s chief lobbyist during the fallout from the Horizon scandal is also the co-founder of a leading right-wing pressure group of Tory MPs

"Clark Vasey, who has been Fujitsu UK’s head of corporate affairs since 2014, is the director and founder of the Blue Collar Conservatives group, which he set up with the now “minister for common sense” Esther McVey in 2012.

Mr Vasey stood for election in Workington in Cumbria in 2017 as a Conservative Party candidate, but lost"

X's 2024 plans include peer-to-peer payments in app push

He wanted X to become a hub for users' "entire financial world"

Sign me up! If there's one function I've always thought was missing from my banking app, it's got to be a never ending feed of racism, conspiracy theories and inane celebrity brain farts!

SEC Twitter hijacked to push fake news of hotly anticipated Bitcoin ETF approval

SEC Twitter hijacked to push fake news

They should consider it as a handy training exercise to prepare themselves for the world of non stop shit they will enter if they're stupid enough to legitimise any crypto crap.

New year, new bug – rivalry between devs led to a deep-code disaster

his name should go first in the About box

This reminds me of the time I worked at a terribly corporate firm with in-house development teams who all did completely their own thing, some of which were led by really bad programmers. On a project to create a suite of windows applications to replace the old terminal based stuff, one guy decided it would be neat to have an autoscrolling "rolling credits" style About box which listed himself as "Lead Programmer and Designer", under our manager's name which came first as "Software Development Manager". Said manager was very pleased when he saw this during development. Unfortunately, the application was an atrocity of highly original and unusable interface design, which crashed many times a day, resulting in massive complaints from the poor users, who had been supplied with a handy list of names for who was responsible and let everybody else in the company know it.

Everyone wants better web search – is Perplexity's AI the answer?

It's very bland

Asking it a few questions, it gave some very boring summary answers of a few paragraphs, with a few sources cited in boxes above the text. As a search engine it is slower and less useful than Google when trying to find links to information. Feels like exactly the sort of thing that would get some VC investors desperate to throw money at the AI hype to part with their money, but users will quickly get bored by having to read so much when they want search that is quick and gets you to more fully detailed information quickly. The inevitable adverts that they will have to insert into the text in order to make money, will make it even less attractive.

What the AI copyright fights are truly about: Human labor versus endless machines

a moral issue: the future of human labor versus an endless army of machines

I disagree that this is a man vs machine issue. When bookkeeping was done by rows of clerks at desks adding up figures, they could be and were replaced by computers that were far faster and more accurate at doing that work. It may be tempting to compare that example, by noting how much quicker a computer is at generating a page of text than a human journalist, but the journalist also had to find the story and research it, before forming what they found into a finished article. The AI simply copied that and regurgitated it. Without the published work of the journalist, you could run the AI for a million years and it would never come up with the story itself.

NHS England published heavily redacted Palantir contract as festivities began

Appropriate response

The ministers responsible for giving away our data like this deserve to have their ███ ███ ███ with a rusty ███ before being made to ███ a ███ on live tv, before ███ ███ ███ and ███ ███ ███ ███. For trying to rush it out when nobody would notice, they should also have to ███ ███ ███ ███ ███.

Navigating the truth maze in a world of clever machines and cleverer marketers

Redundancy is a powerful weapon against error

Money is an even more powerful one. Make the LLM peddlers liable for loss or damages resulting from erroneous output from their systems, and watch the marketing hype dry up instantly, replaced by "well, it's still just at an experimental stage, you shouldn't rely on the output or take it as being 100% true".

How do you teach a robot dog new tricks? Throw it a string of hex, a crayon, and a canvas

Understanding how bots can contribute to art is her interest

She's gonna be very disappointed when somebody shows her an XY plotter.

War of the workstations: How the lowest bidders shaped today's tech landscape

Good article, if a bit too wide ranging

The only machine still commonly in current use which comes close to the concepts described in the article is the IBM i series (formerly AS/400), which is mentioned at the end, but not in the article itself. However, having used this completely object based system a bit, the drawbacks soon become apparent. Much of your time working on it still involves working on 2 types of objects : FILE and JOB. Does that start to sound a bit similar to unix based systems? In fact the system even provides a unix shell, as many people find that's the most efficient way to work on these things....

However, it is still very different, and I always recommend a look for people who complain about the limitations and drawbacks of the unixy way of doing things (every approach has some of those).

As for smalltalk and lisp, both great concepts, but the fact is that writing complex applications in them becomes difficult in terms of readability - smalltalk is just too object orientated to get a clear overview of whole applications, and as for lisp, well the example given shows what a syntax nightmare it quickly becomes. Both suffer from the same "everything must be a ...." problem that's at the root of a lot of what the article's complaining about, whether that's a file, object or list. At the end of the day, computers move numbers around and do calculations with them, which is why C and its descendants are still so prevalent.

BOFH: The Christmas party was so good, an independent inquiry is required

it's 1030 and we have to open the bar

If anybody's in work before 10.30 the next day, then that was nothing like a proper xmas party.

If you want to do it properly, you don't have the office party at the actual office - my favourite was at a rather swish historic venue, which several co-workers decorated with puke late on in the evening. Tended to roll in around lunchtime the next day, when we'd try to collectively piece together what happened the night before, then go out for a hair of the dog, and then head home early once we'd decided it was probably too risky to attempt any actual work that day. Personally, I'm glad it is many years since I went to this type of do.

Musk floats idea of boat mod for Cybertruck

The vehicle almost floats

All aboard the twitanic!

Doom is 30, and so is Windows NT. How far we haven't come

Innovation happens in other areas beside the OS though

Look at the increasing variety of computing devices and you'll see a lot more change. In the last 30 years, we've seen the introduction of portable computers (laptops), ultra-portables (smartphones), even wearable computers. Top prediction for the next decade? Edible computers.

Zuckerberg hunkers down in Hawaii to wait out apocalypse

The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, unrest, nuclear explosion...

... which their social media sites were somewhat responsible for by addicting people to online hate, division, misinformation, etc.

If they really want to survive, their best bet is changing their ways and working to try and lower the chances of it happening in the first place.

CLIs are simply wizard at character building. Let’s not keep them to ourselves

What's best - GUI or command line?

The answer is GUI and command line. The combination of using both together is the most efficient way I've found of coding, compiling and testing. I started my career in the days of dumb text terminals, when automating repeated tasks via scripting was essential if you wanted to be anywhere near efficient, and you in effect built your own custom commands specific to your own preferred way of doing things.

When Windows arrived, it was clear that GUI editors with mouse copying and pasting were better in many ways for text based work, but I always hated the MS command line after being so used to the Bourne shell, and the old way of scripting my work shrivelled for a few years.

Then I started to work on Unix systems again from Windows clients, and tended to work on short scripts in vi on the unix server, and bigger ones that required lots of copy & paste in Notepad++ on the Windows machine before copying them over to the Unix machine to run.

Finally, linux became my whole work environment, and I still use vi for small scripts as required, but for programming I use a GUI text editor (combination of mouse and lots of keyboard shortcuts) to code and the command line for building / running stuff on the same machine. On most projects the command line interactions become little more than hitting the up arrow and return key to re-run previous commands many times a day, whilst I still have a nicer looking coding environment, more efficient for editing multiple files in.

Damn, even the Pope thinks AI and autonomous weapons need reining in

warned against relying on machines to make moral and ethical decisions that should be left to humans

To be fair, they'lll probably be trained on a wider and better variety of source material than the average priest or cardinal is, and the humans controlling them will be less inclined to move them to new locations where they can carry on being bad when they misbehave terribly.

Science fiction writers imagine a future in which AI doesn’t abuse copyright – or their generosity

Why worry so much?

These AI generated stories are going to fill the market for unoriginal generic bland crap, and do it with such a volume that consumers will rapidly tire of it. If, however, you as an author can produce genuinely original ideas, formulated into well written, compelling, cleverly plotted stories, and find somewhere to publish them that can have a reputation for human written only, human curated, high quality work, you should be able to outcompete it, albeit with a slight loss of market share to the AI shit amongst those who will read any old rubbish.

Not even LinkedIn is that keen on Microsoft's cloud: Shift to Azure abandoned

LinkedIn's migration strategy

After this story, I expect their migration strategy will involve a few workers fitting a new sign to the data centre building reading "Azure Career Cloud", swiftly followed by a press release welcoming LinkedIn to the Azure cloud family.

Unite the union claims Vodafone and Three merger is about 'corporate greed'

At least be honest about it...

The plan is to pour milk billions of pounds into out of next generation networks.

Microsoft Forms feature request still not sorted after SEVEN years

What kinds of questions will need time input and what follow-up actions require the time?

Wonderful that a Microsoft senior manager of a product intended for business use could not possibly imagine a scenario where a business activity needed to have a time associated with it. I'd be intrigued to hear some more of their thoughts. Why would you need to know somebody's address? No point having input fields for a URL, they might not have a website..............

Boffins fool AI chatbot into revealing harmful content – with 98 percent success rate

may contain dubious or harmful information

This may well break all the "online harms" being passed around the world. Will the models then be banned for failure to think of the children?

Maybe all AI chatbots should be prohibited from online activity until they are 18 years old.............

Tesla says California's Autopilot action violates its free speech rights

Introducing the new supersonic flying TeslaAero!

Max speed 4000 mph, runs on water, can travel 8000 miles on half a pint, control it with the inbuilt Psychic Mind Interface or let our AI pilot take the strain! Buy now and get a free InfiniteBeer dispenser!

* No returns accepted, we can claim whatever we like, it's free speech right?

Doom turns 30, so its creators celebrate seminal first-person shooter’s contribution to IT careers

Carmack misses the creative packaging and other in-store marketing efforts of the era

Ah yes, the happy days when games came in boxes the same size as a box of cornflakes, containing nothing more than a CD and a tiny installation leaflet.

Swedish Tesla strike goes international as Norwegian and Danish unions join in

"I just don't like anything which creates a lords and peasants sort of thing"

Bullshit. His entire business career has been one big example of acting like a lord and treating staff like peasants. The trade union movement has its roots in workers organising against bosses in new industrial production who acted like the old aristocracy. He can't stand any challenge to his entitled authority, and constantly needs to pick fights to keep his massive ego inflated. It would do him a lot of good to start thinking of other people as something he needed to always take into consideration, rather than just himself. And I don't mean in his current "I am the brilliant saviour of humanity who is always right" way.

Elon Musk's xAI wants $1B cash infusion in exchange for equity shares

you could still buy into Musk's quest "to understand reality"

A year ago he was claiming that Twitter is too full of bots.

Now he's selling bots full of Twitter.

'Wobbly spacetime' is latest stab at unifying physics

Oppenheim proposes to overcome the barrier with the idea of "wobbly spacetime"

I believe that there's already much experimental evidence for such a theory :

1) Take a person and put them in a 90 minute meeting discussing which database access framework a new application should use. Time will be observed to have stretched out to what felt like a week amongst all observers.

2) Take the same person and send them on a week's holiday to some sunny island where good food and wine are abundant and cheap. Time will be observed to pass so quickly that it's time to go home again before they know it.

This is ample proof that we live in a giant cosmic jelly.

Steve Jobs' $4.01 RadioShack check set to fetch small fortune at auction

Why wasn't the check cashed?

And how come it has "re-emerged" decades later as an auction item? I mean, it's not as if Radio Shack would have known that this tiny purchase was going to lead to the formation of a massively successful company in the future, so they;d be better off keeping it instead of sending it to the bank...... Did someone have a spooky premonition? Or maybe Jobs had a pal in the shop who accepted the check as payment, then "forgot" to put it through and accidentally kept it instead.....

Musk tells advertisers to 'go f**k' themselves as $44B X gamble spirals into chaos

the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company

Yes, in the same way that Tesla and X are killing my company by not spending millions advertising on MY website. Put your hand in your pocket Elon and fork over the moolah, otherwise the whole world will soon know that you killed my company.

OpenAI makes it official: Sam Altman is back as CEO

the OpenAI board will henceforth include a non-voting observer from Microsoft

So Sugar Daddy has decided that the brats need a grown up present to stop the World's Most AI-xciting Computer Project turning into Lord of the Flies.

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

Musk / Zuckerberg cage fight takes place

as a one-off Netflix pay-per-view event. Musk enters the cage wearing a golden robotic exoskeleton, which breaks down 5 seconds after the fight begins. This leaves him trapped in it, Zuckerberg is free to start slapping his face, and he starts crying. Record worldwide viewing figures, plus billions more who try and sign up when they hear what's happening, cause unexpected catastrophic overload failure of every Cisco router in the world, and the internet goes down everywhere.

Society struggles to carry on. Man with 10 boxes of unused dvd-roms in shed becomes multimillionaire software and porn vendor overnight. Daily newspaper version of Facebook launches. People begin scrawling graffiti in pub toilets again. "Influencers" all have to look for a proper job for the first time in their lives. Somebody cooks a recipe from a book, not an app.......

USB Cart of Death: The wheeled scourge that drove Windows devs to despair

The goal was to get it to the point where everything would still work... and I think they made it

They might very well have made it, it's just a pity that they never released it.

User read the manual, followed instructions, still couldn't make 'Excel' work

still couldn't make 'Excel' work

The correct solution in this scenario is to take another screenshot of the spreadsheet embedded in the Word document, open Paint and paste the screenshot there. The spreadsheet can then be edited by drawing numbers into the cells with the pencil tool. If you need to add columns up, open Calculator and type in each number,in the column, pressing the '+' key between them - quick AND easy!