Posts by CommonBloke

Pidgin is back, so let's talk about why a local chat client matters

Kinda. Whatsapp requires you to connect with the phone number at least once per week, if I'm not mistaken. If the phone goes offline too long, all linked devices stop sending/receiving messages.

I tried pidgin with whatsapp back in 2023, the experience was terrible. Whenever there was a new message in a group, it'd automatically spawn a new tab. It couldn't read saved contact names, it always showed people as the phone number, which is their whatsapp UID. You also never knew if the image that someone sent was a photo or a sticker, you have to manually download and open every one of them.

Type-safe C-killer Delphi hits 30, but a replacement has risen

Re: A colleague of mine uses Delphi/Lazarus

Another thing to keep in mind is that you have to declare everything in the proper blocks and before it is called elsewhere: you can't make a call to "getAverage()" if it's only defined further below in the code. Thankfully, the error messages tend to be very helpful

After Copilot trial, government staff rated Microsoft's AI less useful than expected

So, it's a glorified, menial administrative organizer

> The tasks participants felt Copilot handled best were “finding and summarising information, generating meeting minutes, knowledge management and drafting content”. The report describes those as “basic administrative tasks”.

Dunno about corporations, but govts have ungodly amounts of excel spreadsheets everywhere, so it makes sense that copilot is about the only thing that can make sense of all that stuff. Of course, as it's likely a file shared within the network, with at least a dozen `sheet_final_version.xlsx` around, there's zero control for the quality of the data within and AI won't fix that.

Google: How to make any AMD Zen CPU always generate 4 as a random number

Re: In the Olden Days, Microcode

Not only that, this exploit only works if you have full admin/root access to the machine. At that point, being able to inject microcode straight into the CPU is exactly the same as just running a BIOS update.

Microsoft quietly erases Windows 11 TPM 2.0 bypass workaround from help page

Re: Does Anyone Actually Need A TPM ?

True, but what exactly does the Trusted Platform Module 2.0 bring to the table, in terms of security, that is oh so crucial?

Oracle starts laying mines in JavaScript trademark battle

Re: Go lay your mines in the toilet.

They probably learned that with Tim Langdell, the bloke that effectively owned the word "Edge" in the 90s and early 00s

> So why keep being such an insufferable horse's appendage about this?

My guess is that it's part of their mission: to ensure hellish times to whoever they can bully

> Just let it be and do something good for once?

We're more likely to see Google and Meta respect privacy than Oracle doing something good

Boeing-backed air taxi upstart Wisk plans to fly you across town at UberX prices by 2030

Ah yes, everything will work just fine

A completely autonomous flying vehicle transporting living fleshbags and their luggage, taking off and landing at possibly high traffic areas, with Boeing, a company known for their quality in aviation, backing up the investment. Truly something that is in high demand!

Damn Small Linux returns after a 12-year gap

Here's one for SliTaz

Whose image is still hovering around 52MB, complete with a GUI. Once loaded from the LiveCD, you can eject it (or the USB stick) and everything will keep working. Too bad it sorely lacks built in network/wifi drivers, I've only ever got a working wifi on one computer, out of a dozen or so that I tried it on.

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

A bold new move by the EU

The European Union admits that bitcoin is actually the best thing to have ever existed and decides to make it the de facto currency of the European Union. The value skyrockets as every other country wants to buy it. Once that happens, the EU pulls the ultimate dump from its pumping, effectively colonizing (again) everyone that fell for it.

Baidu joins Tencent in downplaying impact of US chip bans on AI ambitions

Fully evil partnership

Tencent is like an even worse version of EA or Activision, while Baidu is a name many people might remember from that malware that kept installing itself circa 2012-16. Even if you completely ignore their Chinese roots, it's impossible to expect anything even remotely good for "customers" to come out of this

Binance and CEO admit financial crimes, billions coughed up to US govt

Fining is one thing

Receiving the owed money is a wholly different story. Who here wants to bet the scammer will spend the next 10 years or so avoiding pay, coming up with all sorts of bullshit excuses that the judges will eat up because he's still rich?

Nokia to erase up to 14,000 employees from payroll

Re: Great even more jobseekers to compete against

800-1200 savings in 3 years from firing 14000 people.

If you do the math, it's roughly 20k/year per fired person. Good to see that they already "discounted" their own bonuses from the savings.

DoJ: Ex-soldier tried to pass secrets to China after seeking a 'subreddit about spy stuff'

Re: team leader and sergeant

Psshh, everyone knows you leak military secrets in the War Thunder forums!

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

Re: Sure

Lessee, 1 dollar out of 100 million users, plus, let's just throw a wild guess for this one, 500k "verified checked" users, plus advertising revenue. Let's jut continue guessing and assume the total monthly revenue there sums 350 million. Muskrat will only need ~125 months (assuming he doesn't pay any maintenance, rent, salaries, taxes, etc) to recoup his buyout. Truly a genius of business

Intel slaps forehead, says I got it: AI PCs. Sell them AI PCs

Re: "they will have devices like sensors with that level of compute"

Regarding raw, single core CPU speed, we already hit it some 20 years ago in the consumer space. Because of that, the evolution sidestepped it with multiple cores instead. You'll be hard pressed to find anything running over 2GHz without being overclocked, and anything running over 3GHz without -serious- cooling.

Aliens crash landed on Earth – and Uncle Sam is covering it up, this guy tells Congress

Re: Alien UFOs

I thought the zuckerbot was one evidence for their presence and attempt to control humanity

Want to live dangerously? Try running Windows XP in 2023

Re: My takeaway from this article...

Maybe something has gone terribly wrong with our compilers?

- Seems to be a problem only with Windows C/C++ and LLVM. Those things are absurdly large beasts in Windows

Maybe each individual library or level of abstraction has bloated so it all adds up (or even multiplies)? Maybe we are perching more levels of abstraction one on top of another? Maybe we're even writing software wrong now? (Casey Muratori is not a fan of OOP.)

- This is extremely visible in the web and javascript. Harder to tell with OSes

Maybe the hardware is working against us and forcing more work to be done in software?

- Hardware is so damn powerful that most shitty code will run without looking like shit for the end user. It's not working against us, but it sure as hell is making programmers complacent. "Bandwidth is cheap" leads do sites continuously increasing their bloat. "Storage is cheap" leads general program and games size bloat.

As an aside, seeing someting like SliTaz, which is a fully fledged (and severely driver lacking) distro in roughly 50MB is proof that you still can make lightweight OS in this day and age. I think their main problem is that severe lack of drivers, especially for wifi connectivity. Seriously, of 6 computers I've ever experimented it on, only in 1 the wifi worked "out of the box"

Too many bytes and not enough bricks for datacenters

Re: I've got an idea

It already happens, it's why we have to download 20MB of javascript + 300MB of nonsensical bloat important files for a single page application to run properly on your browser, who'll do all the heavy lifting by itself!

Three signs that Wayland is becoming the favored way to get a GUI on Linux

I do think that X11 and linux GUIs from the early 2000s would compare more to 50's cars wheels than a chariot's. Old and showing its age? Definitely. Not ideal? Possibly. But not different enough as to be incompatible

Mozilla Developer Network adds AI Help that does the opposite

Re: Now for the really difficult decision

> would it be an improvement if management were replaced with an AI?

Everyone knows the answer is yes, which is why, if they had the slightest idea of what they were doing, they wouldn't be so excited about AI

Indian telecoms leaps from 2G, to 4G, to 6G – on a single day

Re: 640K is enough for anyone

> may as well use as much as we can rather than craft something non memory hungry

That, and adding more advertising and tracking bloat on every page, since connection speeds are faster today than 10 years ago. Oh, and a side dash of auto playing video or two, for good measure

California man's business is frustrating telemarketing scammers with chatbots

Re: A possible future

Considering we're talking about tech support, and a solution coming from very high up, the only conclusion is that both the client and that techie were terminated

Google accused of ripping off advertisers with video ads no one saw. Now, the expert view

Re: my solution is...

It's those funny things that people that don't rely on Invidious (several site instances, open source code) or Newpipe (android app, get it on f-droid) are forced to endure.

Five billion phones are dead in drawers – carriers want to mine them

Re: It's not just phones

You tell me. I have a significant number of 8-32gb microSD cards that I rarely use nowadays, plus a handful of USB drives. They're in good condition and good to use, but I don't have a use case for all of them anymore. Maybe come up with some sort of local NAS? Though i'd need something with 10+ USB ports

Not forgotten

Just purposefully abandoned to force the purchase for the shiny new thing, even if it's a sidegrade most of the time

Inclusive Naming Initiative limps towards release of dangerous digital dictionary

Re: Fixing things due to a misunderstanding of the origin

> It's nice for people to start realizing the world isn't just black and white

Hey, you're being color-ist, implying one of them is good and the other is not! How dare you!?

Virtue signaling?

I mean, I never saw any groups ask for any of those terms to be dropped. Maybe the master, master/slave thing makes some sense, but black/white hat, list? What next, we won't be able to use the expression "black and white" to express obvious differences? What're you going to call those? Day/Night instead? Oh no, now you're discriminating against time of day! What about #000hat and #FFFhat? Oh no, now you're discriminating against the people that don't understand 256 color codes! What about...

> "red team" because it's not a reference to indigenous people

That they even thought it *could* be a reference to native americans speaks more about them than whoever came with the term

> "fair hiring practice" which INI folk decided could not be construed as indicating a preference for light-skinned people.

OH MY F--KING GOD, GO TOUCH SOME GRASS! The english language is full of drunken nonsense and reuse, but that leap of logic would be enough to send the whole INI to the moon.

No, really, the mere fact that those Tier 0 were even considered shows how bonkers these guys, oh, sorry, how OXYGEN-CHALLENGED these GENDER NEUTRAL PERSONS are.

We just don't get enough time, contractor tasked with fact-checking Google Bard tells us

Re: It was great for a while

It really sucks that our best bets for making the internet not suck again is having curated lists of sites, not unlike what "the internet" looked like back in '97, with portals such as Yahoo.

The problem, of course, is that such lists are bound to suffer enshitfication on the long term, because sooner or later, the place will be sold off or run by an a-hole who only cares about profits.

Elon Musk's Twitter moves were 'reaffirming' says Reddit boss amid API changes

Re: He needs an icon -->

> Musk knows a little bit more about running business than you and the rest of the haters that predicted twitter would fall over within a month of the takeover?

Does he know how to run a business? Possibly. Does he know how to run twitter? Of course he does: running it into the ground, that is.

Most people predicting twiter going down under in a month were using hyperbole. When you buy a company for 44 billion and its estimated valuation drops to 15bn in ~8 months, you're obviously doing something very wrong. When companies are reluctant to spend money advertising on your platform, it means something is wrong. When mr owner throws insults at said companies that no longer spend money, it sends a clear message of "Your ROI in advertising here is nonexistent". Dismissing money from a single source can make sense. Dismissing money from several sources because you loudly called them poo-poo heads is anything but an indication of "knowing how to run a business"

FTC pulls emergency brake on Microsoft's marriage to Activision Blizzard

Re: Pity

> At any rate, my point was squarely at the culture issues at ActiBlizz.

The acquisition is a hell of a golden parachute and "get out of jail free" card for BobbyK. Suddenly, all those problems are no longer his problem or "his fault". GG ezy

US senators and spies spar over Section 702 warrantless surveillance

1 out of 280k

I like how the FBI could apparently only come up with one instance, out of 280,000, where its warrantless spying resulted in actual defense, but failed to specify how it was the ability to spy without asking for a warrant first that led them to success.

I wonder how much money "a few bad apples" are earning selling that data under the table.

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

mkt/mgt/sales

Were they ever not against everyone else?

Re: Thanks El Reg...

Then again, all that corporate-bullspeak is just the shiny new "leadership product" sold by marketing scammers to incompetent idiots at the top of companies. Zoomers will eventually fall for the same sales pitch under a different name in 20-30 years. Get your <currently relevant> certification today! Oh, and sign up for the level 2 certification next year for a big discount!

The fact that, despite everyone and their dog spotting corporate bullshit from a mile away and despising it, is not enough for corps/"decision makers" to stop using it, is what should be studied.

Google snubbed JPEG XL so of course Apple now supports it in Safari

Google's insistence on not learning from past mistakes...

... Is truly worth investigating.

Not to mention their (and many other companies) insistence on rushing to copy whatever Apple does. Apple gives the middle finger to a file format? QUICK, LET'S DROP OUR SUPPORT, TOO! They're adding a new codec? QUICK, WE MUST DO THAT, TOO!! Ditching physical keyboards? OHMYGOD DESTROY THOSE, WE'RE NEVER USING PHYSICAL KEYBOARDS EVER AGAIN!!

"Use another browser"

Congrats on ignoring that the majority of browsers available today are variations of the Chromium core: Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, Edge, Samsung Internet

"Use Firefox!"

I already do. That doesn't change the fact that Chrome alone is still more than 60% of the whole browser market. If you sum up those variations above, it easily passes 70%. If Google says "We won't support X", you can bet only a very tiny minority of sites will bother showing X in any form.

It's not about the browser you use, it's about Google abusing its power

Laid-off 60-year-old Kyndryl exec says he was told IT giant wanted 'new blood'

Re: Let it go

> Nobody is being done a favor by getting fired.

Except for shareholders' profits. Won't somebody please think of the profits!?

1. This crypto-coin is called Jimbo. 2. $8m was stolen from its devs in flash loan attack

Step by step

Correct me if I'm wrong on the step by step process:

1- get 10k eth

2- current ration of eth/shot is 1/100. spend all of it buying random shotcoin.

3- you now have "the whole supply" of shotcoin

4- Ratio goes from 1/100 to 1/1

5- convert shotcoin back into eth. Since this is a direct conversion based on current market price, instead of a buy/sell, it doesn't affect the price.

6- ???

7- PROFIT!!

And that, somehow, is a crime, despite being sold as a feature?

WeChat makes facial recog payment systems talk to the hand

I wonder who asked for this

Snarky but honest ponder. I can picture some people wanting to "magically wave away a payment", but I doubt they also meant using their own money to pay for it. The people who are likely to adopt this on their own volition are undoubtedly the same people that feel safe waving their phones over another machine to pay for stuff, confirmations and security be damned.

Russian businesses want to party like it's 1959 with 6-day workweek

Re: Seriously?

I bet the produced goods/services will be used as a measuring stick for patriotism. I wonder how long it'll be until the gulags become the bastions of russian patriotism.

Parent discovers the cost of ignoring Roblox: £2,500 and heart palpitations

Obligatory explanation of Roblox's exploitation of nearly free labor. Almost 2 years old now, but I bet it didn't change much since then.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ

Telco giant Vodafone to cut 11,000 staff as part of its turnaround plan

Quick money maffs

Assuming the average expense with those 11k workers is around 75k per year, we're looking at 825 million pounds being "freed up", or ~6,35% of their yearly income of 13 billion.

I wonder, if the head cutting started at the top, how many directors/chief-whatevers would have to be fired to achieve a similar saving.

It's time for IT teams, vendors to prioritize efficiency; here's where they should start

Obligatory "better code" comment

Because half the computation many servers do is sift through garbage code, besides offloading part of that garbage processing to the end user's computer.

The world of work is broken and it's Microsoft's fault

Here's my take: people scheduling meetings HAVE to pay 1 pizza for each person attending. Finally, an extra reason to look forward to the end of the meeting

AI should replace upper management first

Everyone knows that it's the higher ups who are more easily replaced (no wonder they do everything to hide that fact), especially when AI, which isn't "intelligent", shows more intelligence and understanding of topics presented than the vast majority of fellows currently responsible for shouting orders.

Unlike your iPhone, Apple's batterygate controversy refuses to die

Replaceable batteries

I remember when they were considered a feature, instead of a bug that got "fixed"

Apple led the "fuck you and your rights to repair" since the beginning, but when most android phones also began being manufactured with the back tightly shut with glue, it was pretty easy to point back at Steve Jobs as the culprit.

Faulty hardware happens once in a while. If Apple didn't glue in everything, their lawyers wouldn't have to worry about this.

Boffins claim to create the world's first wooden transistor

Do you think he'd have a strong ARM doing the Assembly?

Feds rethink warrantless search stats and – oh look, a huge drop in numbers

Explain it to me

> It also now requires FBI agents to "opt-in" if they wish to run a search against Section 702-acquired data, instead of having queries run against this data by default.

So, you're telling me they still have all that juicy, privacy invading data, only that it's not "searched on" by default? If that's indeed the case, boy, I sure am glad that it's completely impossible for them to search through the data they have without the query count going up, huh?

How prompt injection attacks hijack today's top-end AI – and it's tough to fix

I suspect doing so would be trivial. If nothing else, just put up a few macros doing your menial job of selecting text, ctrl+c, change tab, ctrl+v, enter. I also suspect some people are already having that kind of fun. Be sure to post the results!

Microsoft suggests businesses buy fewer PCs. No, really

Meanwhile, in a parallel universe

Companies realize that going green means making better use of computing power, thus actually optimizing their code instead of shrugging while spouting "Memory/Storage/Processing is cheap"