Posts by chuckamok

Bezos plan for solar powered datacenters is out of this world… literally

Skynet v 0.01

The oligarchs want their own Skynets?

To digital natives, Microsoft's IT stack makes Google's look like a model of sanity

Re: Meh

I see parts of this in real time. I am a boomer in IT, an MS shop, about to retire. Surrounded by Zoomers and Millennials. IT took away our suite's printer because Zoomers don't print and they don't normally use email. 90% of communication happens in Teams. When we share file folders, the SharePoint folders are presented via Teams. So the old systems are fading back.

Re: His mistake is in thinking it was designed...

Microsoft Thing 1.

Re: Groups

Teams is the wildcard; spawns groups and sites and workflows, calendars, active links and god knows what else, all with a shiny glass cover to make it look like a Social media ecosystem.

Re: Marketing to the rescue

Just before Microsoft 365, there was Office 365 for a moment.

Re: OneDrive is Sharepoint?

You forgot Teams Files! Is it a Teams Group or a Teams Team? Or a Channel? A child or a parent channel? Or a private Channel?

But Sir, it's Sharepoints all the way down....

Re: Blast from the past

I was a Notes guy at a reseller and we went to some free SharePoint training when that came out. What a mess! You needed 3 servers to replace one Notes server. What killed Notes, aside from gajillions dollars of Microsoft marketing and the big partner certification push, was the Outlook client. The Notes mail client was a kludge.

Re: His mistake is in thinking it was designed...

They bought Groove and Ray Ozzie. I had groove in beta, kind of neat, was not meant for what MS did with it. Typical.

HCL stretches support window for Domino v9/v10 despite repeated end-of-life deadlines

Re: Domino 10?

Nice thing about Notes is that it runs on multiple platforms and old versions can talk to new versions. Still.

OpenAI says models are programmed to make stuff up instead of admitting ignorance

I read Frankfurter's book, and it's obvious that BS describes the primary fallback position (the Case..Else return value) of the algos.

Direct quote from Google's AI flavored search

According to philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt, the formal definition of bullshit is speech intended to persuade or impress an audience, without any concern for the truth of the claims being made. A bullshitter is not a liar who intentionally misrepresents the truth, but is instead entirely indifferent to it.

See also: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5

Meta putting wood in bit barns in bid to get greener

Re: but maybe a bit more buggy....

Yeah, no. It's engineered wood, so not appetizing to that crowd.

Timber data halls has a nice ring to it.

Amnesty slams Elon Musk's X for 'central role' in fueling 2024 UK riots

Change it to "halfway to Mars" and it approaches the current scene.

Science confirms what we all suspected: Four-day weeks rule

Re: Hawthorne Effect

I don't think the Hawthorn study involved such drastic changes, and the effects only lasted for a while.

Re: Translation

You absolutely need studies to be able to convince corporate management of anything.

Four REvil ransomware crooks walk free, escape gulag fate, after admitting guilt

Re: That's what happens

I still get the feel they were somehow state supported, but they double crossed the boss.

I wonder how luxurious these penal conies are.

Boffins warn that AI paper mills are swamping science with garbage studies

Re: Is there an 'en masse' Darwin award?

AI slop enables stupidity at a higher rate. Sometimes quantity affects quality.

The 12 KB that Windows just can't seem to quit

Over by the "ANY" key

Elon Musk makes another cut – to his time at DOGE

Re: Oligarchs

The Defenestrator

Governments cling to private cloud despite inexorable public cloud adoption

DHH moving his co back in house to save money. Food for thought.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/david-heinemeier-hansson-374b18221_benefits-perks-activity-7310727082232201217-o2g0?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAFSNWkBjyJZvvP5chb3nstSKnFJUADoJko

Cloudflare builds an AI to lead AI scraper bots into a horrible maze of junk content

It's biomimicry, not so strange!

Will this reduce hallucinations?

Wonder if there are effects that can be measured?

So … Russia no longer a cyber threat to America?

Re: Neville Chamberlain

They hinted though. And Trump lied he'd never seen Project 2025, always the mobster model for his base.

USA, Oblast #48

Orangutrump wants Canada to be #49?

Democrats demand to know WTF is up with that DOGE server on OPM's network

Re: Working inside the US Gov on a new project

BYOS

Re: The end is here

Very truthy.

Re: Fishy

Let's question 2016 and 2024. Some real dirty stuff unleashed and still festering.

IT job market is still shrinking but not as quickly as last year

For tech research - if you have learned how to pose good google search phrases to find technotes and forum posts that provide help for error messages, then you can usually get copilot or similar AI help apps to return helpful results for technical issues - I 've found it is good for that. Like an improved search with no ads, but with some hallucinations. Also good for bringing back nicely formatted survey reports or plans that can be cleaned up and used as a draft.

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

Re: This was predicted - in El Reg - years ago.

"Innovation" has been hijacked, as was "Creative".

Weekends were a mistake, says Infosys co-founder Narayama Murthy

Re: "I have not changed my view; I will take this with me to my grave"

As a manager, the stupid mistakes just fold in to your management style.

Some people are hypomanic - combined with the Dunning-Kruger effect it makes for much management mayhem!

VBScript nudged nearer to the grave with next big Windows 11 update

Re: Javascript instead of VBscript

Excel uses VBA.

I just noticed O365 Spreadsheets can use TypeScript - in "Office Scripts" rather than macros.

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

Re: How's Anthropic response?

Going meta.

Re: Series

There's gonna be a T-shirt.

Palantir's CEO calls 'woke' a 'central risk to Palantir, America and the world'

Knights of Malta are a pretty big risk.

SAP accused of age discrimination, retaliation by US whistleblower

All over the world I bet similar things happen - this is a rare case where daylight is cast on it.

Dumping us into ad tier of Prime Video when we paid for ad-free is 'unfair' – lawsuit

Re: Disgusting

Placement of click-thru legal agreements is a key component of enshittification.

Re: Idiots

We've passed another milestone in the early enshittocene

Brain boffins think they've found the data format we use to store images as memories

Re: Assumptions

Dr Pietsch said it's holograms all the way down, Pribram a reference. I think it's a great idea.

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=ec71004f81c69eba2edc9328d621e8587362ee0e

Re: What about the people who can't visualize?

The authors of the study that coined the term aphantasia said in their result discussion that "we hypothesised that individuals with aphantasia and hyperphantasia would differ in occupational preference, with a bias toward the sciences among those with aphantasia." And their summary by occupation did find lots of Boffins.

https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/bitstream/handle/10871/120508/Phantasia%20Cortex%20revision%2031.3.20%20for%20submission.pdf?sequence=2

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?

Some years back, GPU was boosted by Finance and Gaming nerds. Now it seems our own GPU is key. Can't wait to see the studies on blind people. Might they use the same structures in different ways?

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

Massachusetts and New Jersey

Even though the Jersey school won the market, their stuff was built on the PDP and VAX bones of Massachusetts (if not MIT) products. Ken Olson was an MIT alumnus.

My first IT job was working for AT&T. My office building was a former DEC office.

Digital democracy or IT anarchy? Gartner flags the low-code revolution

Most such are for large orgs, sadly.

Lots of models are out there under "RPA adoption" or "Citizen Developer" programs" and "Centers of Excellence" (CoE) but it requires management changes that include IT and Business to get together and start proofs of concept (PoC) and Pilot projects.

One example to search for: "Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit"

As a user of Microsoft "Power" things in a locked down org with enterprise apps, I don't see room for a lot of "citizen developer" things (as in all the webinars and ads) happening.

It's still a techie activity even if you're plugging Lego blocks together. If you don't understand data types and control structures or text munging, it's going to be tough. And if you can't do local installs or manage user access, IT holds the keys.

I evaluated RPA tools and for instance, Automation Anywhere? Local Admin rights is needed - the run agent on your machine wants to update on a daily basis. For the case of automating cloud apps, there are more possibilities for the citizen dev, but I don't see that for desktop apps.

Cheapest, oldest, slowest part fixed very modern Mac

*Probably helped isolate those buzzy ground loops.

60 Hz hummmmmmmmmmmmmm

Similar to Impedance Matching.

Getting 2 different devices to talk nice is often about old things connected to newer things. With some special go-between thing in the middle.

RIP Bram Moolenaar: Coding world mourns Vim creator

Bill Joy

Wrote vi

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

Jargon walks the earth

In the "HeadFirst Java" book published at about the Millenium, one of the first exercises is a buzzword phrase generator. It sounds pretty much the same - you're just trolling us with the Generation aspect.

Here is my personal portfolio website with a web version of the generator (did that back when I thought some manager 20 years younger than me might hire me).

https://gae-gcs-servlet.appspot.com/hello

Why ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI – and be destroyed

Re: Gross misunderstanding of the tool

Next: Attitude-oriented programming!