Posts by chuckamok

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!

Re: Gross misunderstanding of the tool

We are far from knowing what a human mind is. Or even what it was 500 years ago compared to now. AI does kind of help bash around the edges of that question.

Re: Quantum chat

So we are Schrödinger's users.

Lotus Notes refuses to die, again, as HCL debuts Domino 12

Re: It wasn't all bad

As a Notes consultant, I went to a MS Sponsored Sharepoint Training in 2000. What a shitshow! I noticed you needed 4 servers stood up running handfuls of apps to do what 1 Notes server does. And how to build an app? That's another 4 day course. Building Notes apps was a lot like using HyperPad.

Of course Microsoft just plowed them under with slick GUI and marketing efforts.

One of the downfalls was that Anybody could build an app, and they did! What horrors.

Replication of a single database all over is genius.

Re: Domino

Actually, I do think there is a "move to next marked document" action in Notes views, similar to "next unread" and I liked using that very much, but I never can find the icon to put it in my view toolbar. Another UI fail, those dodgy "smart icons" that hide and show in random context.

Salesforce staff back an end to its relationship with NRA

Since in the US of A, rural folk get a much bigger Senate vote than everyone else, this problem persists. Two Senators per state was the deal with the devil that has perpetuated plantation politics in a more urban nation. There are quite a few states with only enough people to get 1 congress representative that still get 2 Senators.

Re: "How do we protect our 2nd amendment & our kids at the same time? "

Law of large numbers. Same amount of crazies + more guns + cult of guns + media tools, more damage.

Virginians sue to block rural Amazon datacenter

Brown envelopes all the way down...

Jeffrey Snover claims Microsoft demoted him for inventing PowerShell

Re: At the risk of being downvoted to hell

Yes, I was learning COBOL, which made sense. Also C and Unix with bourne shell, which also made sense.

Then they showed us how to run COBOL programs in JCL. Nothing makes sense there. That took my brain offline from learning COBOL.

Powershell reminds me a little of JCL, it makes a tad more sense, but hard to bludgeon your way forward like you can in *nix shells.

IBM cannot kill this age-discrimination lawsuit linked to CEO

IBM is an easy target, but the worst will never be caught

Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Hubspot, etc...

Olders never even had a chance to apply at the big ones. And the rank and file tech employees of such places are looking at Botox as they approach 30.

https://hbr.org/2016/05/office-expose

Everyone cites that 'bugs are 100x more expensive to fix in production' research, but the study might not even exist

Re: Equally unattributed, but different...

Dunning-Kruger effect is so strong in IT, we have many masking methods for it.

Jackie 'You have no authority here' Weaver: We need more 50-somethings in UK tech

I'm over 60 and I don't recall them daze, but I came to IT in the 90's. I do recall getting paid training more often in the 90's. Maybe you mean over 70, the Gates and Jobs generation?

Company provided training

Another thing that has changed since the 1990's, at least in the US, is more outsourcing or contract hiring and less company paid training. That has a long term effect on "skills" in a workforce.

Big Blue's big email blues signal terminal decline – unless it learns to migrate itself

Re: "IBM has one chance of salvation"

In a similar vein - Financial Times article

Older workers are a secret weapon against cyber attacks

https://www.ft.com/content/c4ea6fb3-6262-4426-9503-05391f0e523a