Posts by ChoHag

The developer who came in from the cold and melted a mainframe

Re: I thinkk air con

Even better if you do your best thinking on the toilet...

Ex-Microsoft engineer believes Azure problems stem from talent exodus

Re: Remember Great Britain?

Microsoft has tens of thousands of not-good employees because they fired the single-digit-thousands of good employees that could have done their work 10 times over at a tenth of the cost.

AI will make anyone a 10x programmer, but with 10x the cleanup

Re: Sure you want to admit that?

> A better question still is why would I take seriously something from someone who doesn't know Python or Bash?

This is the sort of person whom AI is for.

The sort of person who has never lifted a paint brush in his life and can't see that his AI art sucks.

Code is no different but somehow a lot of "programmers" can't fellate the AIs hard enough even when it produces the equivalent of code that has 7 fingers in a vital but obscure function that looks like it's in the background. What does this tell you about these so-called programmers?

Software engineering it ain't.

> Do I really want to take this guy seriously

lol no. This is "maybe our last round of promises didn't work out but if you just AI harder the next funding round will AGI for sure!"

> Jeffress noted that AI can usually do 80 percent of a given job, leaving the last 20 percent to be finished by a human.

ITYM the last 80%. And therein lies the problem. AI can do the boring easy bits and gets stuck on the bits everyone would have got stuck on anyway, except now you haven't done the first 80% yourself and have to spend 80% of your remaining time figuring those parts out when you could have written them yourself in the first 20% of the time you had available.

Perl: Making easy things easy and hard things possible.

AI: Doing easy things for you with 3½ fingers on each hand and making hard things impossible.

NHS staff resist using Palantir software

Re: Wouldn't matter who it was

> Patient outcomes are irrelevant. The NHS is run for the staff and the unions first, patients are a distant second.

Tell me you've never met a nurse without saying you've never met a nurse.

I know it's hard for those of your ilk to understand, but there are people in this world who actually give a shit about others.

Forking frenzy ensues after Euro-Office launch sparks OnlyOffice backlash

The presence of the Russian language is nothing to be concerned about, in comments of all things, as the Russian language is quite distinct from Russia the country. Bringing it up is like complaining that the presense of English anywhere suggests a close relationship with the orange turd in the white half-house.

Pretty much everybody who lives north of India between Italy and China speaks English and Russian in addition to their own language which suggests that the complainers are either ignorant, racist, or playing politics.

Or D) all of the above.

'People's Panel' to check if UK wants controversial Digital ID will cost £630K

> it would present a valuable opportunity to revisit the policy of free entry for international visitors to national museums and galleries

THAT's why we're selling off our freedom?

Don't open that WhatsApp message, Microsoft warns

"the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house"

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/

Why say:

> Malware scanners can use this to detect dodgy files hiding under a legitimate name

... when you can say:

> This means Microsoft Defender and other security solutions can leverage this metadata discrepancy as a detection signal, flagging instances where a file's name does not match its embedded OriginalFileName

AWS would prefer to forget March ever happened in its UAE region

Re: Nobody's fault-tree analysis includes "building hit by drone."

> Nobody's fault-tree analysis includes "building hit by drone."

Except maybe the insurers who will have to eventually pay somebody in the aftermath?

I have worked for one of those and they very much do consider how to handle situations such as these.

On the other hand Amazon do everything they can to let their customers believe they are "prepared for this" whilst doing nothing to actually so prepare beyond, apparently, post-hoc pretending that it never happened.

If three 9's and lies instead of transparency are good enough for you then good for you but be aware of what you're paying for.

Engineer sabotaged hardware then complained when it didn't work

Re: WTF

If you can see anything worth worrying about, it's already too late.

Open source isn't a tip jar – it's time to charge for access

> Don't expect continuing upgrades or support, or for me to go out of my way to get the software or any updates to you. The problem arises when when people confuse the software and those associated services.

> There was no expectation of developers or anyone else to provide those services and therefore no need to consider the compensation for their provision.

The problem isn't the expectation per se but that the expectation is satisfied as though the DISCLAIMED WARRANTY were in fact in force by people who are then whinging that they're not being paid for doing so.

For sure people who have received a service for free should not feel demand any more than they've already got but some do because there's always an arsehole, but neither should the provider of that service provide it and then demand compensation for it without prior agreement, nor get upset when they're told to take a hike.

Like the corporate behemoths that are being complained about who are pointing to the license and saying "there's nothing here that requires me to pay", developers can point to the (lack of) warranty and say "there's nothing here that requires me to fix it". And nobody is expected to provide massive online repositories for free.

The modern world will collapse if you don't host your pypi/npm/whatever repository? Ignoring the fact that no, it won't, we'll be fine, that clearly means it's a service you can charge the modern world for.

Another day another complaint by open sores that the stuff they give away for free is being taken by people who are not paying for it.

How can such smart people be so stupid?

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ... "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED.

Remind corporate leeches that if they would like an EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTY, such as a promise that the software does what it claims to do, that defects will be repaired promptly, or that the distribution site will be operating and free from malware when their CI attacks it for the 10,000th time that hour, they are welcome to pay for it. Money, to quote a well known genius, can be exchanged for goods and services.

The only reason not to distribute software under terms that require commercial actors to pay is the fear that they won't.

Google unleashes Gemini AI agents on the dark web

No, they really do care.

They care about being the only ones to have it.

Russians are posing as Signal support to launch phishing attacks

> Amazon awarded the researcher a $100 gift card to the AWS Gear Shop, Phantom Labs says.

That's a lot cheaper than employing a QA department.

Turns out your coffee addiction may be doing your brain a favor

> what about those of us who consume 8-12 mugs of "programming fuel" a day?

At that rate you'll avoid dementia entirely! The heart attack will get you first.

Edit: Snap!

Struggling to put your AI aversion into words? Here's a handy glossary

Re: Just Stop Slop

> I do wonder what someone blowing the whistle on the 1720 South Sea Bubble would have said, before they were hanged for sedition..

From the very document you linked to: "A vociferous pamphleteer by the name of Archibald Hutcheson had been extremely critical of the scheme from the beginning. He had placed the actual value of the stock at around £200, which subsequently turned out to be about right."

He was not hanged.

Brilliant backups that kept data alive for ages landed web developer in big trouble

> it costs nothing to keep an old site alive

Famous last words. This sounds like a "just" as in "I just keep the old site running". The reaction was overboard and it sounds like the suits are lying to cover their ignorance but the old sites should have been made inaccessible.

If you hear yourself or anyone saying a job is "just" a thing, or that something "costs nothing", look for what they've failed to consider.

It's never just.

Horizon redress still a mess, MPs say – and Fujitsu hasn't paid a penny

I think we reached that point many years ago but I've often said (not in here) that while there is a breaking point, we need to get far, far beyond it before anything actually breaks.

Nobody is going to bring out the guillotines because they've been slightly put out by a pompous official, however unjustly. People are *actually dead* from this scandal, and not only because of age, and yet fundamentally nothing has changed. The bread is very good (well OK this is England: let's just say there's a lot of bread) and the circus is great fun.

Things will appear to be fine on the surface, until one day they're suddenly not. Very, very not.

Inside the datacenter where the day starts with topping up cerebrospinal fluid

> Will mankind ever learn that there are some things you do not fuck around with?

Hopefully not.

Nanny state discovers Linux, demands it check kids' IDs before booting

Re: Will the community just lay down and get screwed?

Nobody wants to be the person who's accused of peddling porn to children.

If you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to ... no wait that's last year's witch hunt.

The first line of this article is misleading. These new laws don't require kids and teenagers to register before they can use a computer, they require that everybody registers before they can use a computer so that some third party knows if they're a kid or teenager or not.

Polish cops bust alleged teen DDoS kit sellers – youngest just 12

> No one, not the child, the family, society, benefits from them being dragged through criminal courts.

You're right! Maybe youth should have a special court for ...

> their cases will go to family court rather than the standard criminal courts that typically handle cases involving those aged around 17 and older.

Oh.

Well at least let's not just throw an excessive punishment at them them and instead give them a chance to improve their lives before it's thrown in a box to rot?

> authorities often focus on correction instead of punishment for those aged 13-17

Oh.

Maybe read the article next time.

Norway's Consumer Council takes aim at enshittification

Re: television was the origin of enshittification

The TV doesn't pause the adverts while you use the time to make a fresh cup of tea.

HR may have to cajole and soothe reluctant employees to get them to use AI

Re: Clarification needed

> CHROs are advised to focus on supporting

Help

> managers

manglers

> to undertake the organizational change necessary

fire their staff

> to meet the expectations of senior leadership

or they will be fired.

Trump orders purge of 'woke' Anthropic from government

Re: Kathy Burke said it best...

> whataboutery and not understanding what words mean

Oh I think he understands them very well. Just look at his name.

Slippery as a, well, as an eel.

It's almost a shame that we can't apply icons to others.

Open source devs consider making hogs pay for every download

If you don't want people to take stuff for free, don't give them free stuff.

It still isn't rocket science.

For the benefit of the slow of thinking who seem to dominate these discussion pages of late, restrictions do not have to involve a firewall or any form of technology, they can just as easily involve words written by a friendly lawyer.

For the even slower of thinking, yes they can. It works for my large corporate employer who go to great lengths to honour such restrictions even though nothing other than the words forces them to.

Nothing requires anyone to give leeches easy access to their work except the for fear that they might not take it.

Denizens of DEF CON are 'fed up with government'

Re: Benjamin Franklin and human rights

Are you saying that people cannot make mistakes in their life which they later regret?

So everything you ever did was by design and we can hold you at fault for it centuries after your death regardless of how much "truth" you claim to spill?

I think I know why you're so familiar with the term "hypocrite".

Anthropic to Pentagon: Autonomous weapons could hurt US troops and civilians

Warfighters?

That's the word we're using now?

Burger King turns to AI to flame broil employees who aren't friendly enough

Re: Guest Experience

Fast food restaurants in England take the American idea of, well, food that's fast and apply it to all the worst elements of British cuisine.

Bcachefs creator insists his custom LLM is female and 'fully conscious'

Re: Lots of mention about the AI

> And anyway if this AI is really an AGI, fully conscious, how can he keep her as his own slave? Isn't it utterly wrong?

How dare you bring logic into God's house?

Re: Monkeys

> dined out on how famous it got for the next 45 years so he wouldn't have to do any more work.

Thus proving his own intelligence beyond doubt.

Double win.

> We just accept that people are capable of thought

Speak for yourself. I have learned not accept this without a LOT of evidence.

Re: Scary, truly scary

Computer backups can go wrong. Human backups cannot go right.

Intelligence requires a lot more than just fear, not least of which is the adaptability to compensate for missing parts. We are a complex hodge-podge of many different phenomena which computers do not have and will not have for the forseeable future, despite the few that are somewhat similar.

Do try to keep up. Is your intelligence perhaps artificial?

Rogue devs of sideloaded Android apps beg for freedom from Google’s verification regime

Re: Why not?

It made sense to 12 people so far. Everybody understands washing machines and houses. Nobody cares about "freedom 0" or knows what "sideloading" is and if "device" was common parlance nobody would need to have this discussion. Everybody can be expected to understand what "installing" means in the context of white goods. Software not so much.

Comparing a device that's actually owned by yourself but practically owned by Google to a house that's lived in by you but built by someone who still claims rights over it is something we can all understand. The idea that Apple and Google still own people's devices is an alien concept to most people because most people don't understand computing devices and software but they do understand physical lumps of stuff they can hold in their hand.

An analogy is like using something people do understand to help explain something they don't so yes, there is a need for one. No wait that's exactly what an analogy is.

And the fact that software can be infinitely duplicated is irrelevant in this case, analogy or no. Stop trying to interject GNU into everything. It's like a vegan complaining in a steak bar.

Re: Why not?

Let's say I want to sell you a washing machine and you want to buy it off me and we've agreed a reasonable price we're both happy with. My old machine, your house. Simple, no?

Except now Google say that we need their permission because their contractors built your house. Oh and I also have to pay them.

Where is the part that's reasonable?

Microsoft gives Windows laggards the 'gift of time' wrapped in licensing fees

A gift is freely given (the clue is in the name). You do not have to pay for it. If you have to pay for it it's not a gift it's a trade.

UK tech hit by double trouble: Fewer foreign techies amid skills squeeze

Re: Who wants...?

> Brownshirts don't roam the streets of London looking to handcuff anyone who's brown or doesn't speak perfect English.

Indeed. They are usually in blue.

Korean cops charge teens over bike hire breach that exposed data on 4.62M riders

> The Cyber Investigation Unit of the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency confirmed the charges on Monday, saying the pair carried out the attack while still in middle school.

So what you're telling me is that your system is so secure that it can be broken into by a pair of bored middle schoolers? And that you have so little shame that rather apologising for protecting your customers with wet tissue paper that you're going to throw a pair of kids under the bus to distract from your grossly negligent incompetence?

Every day in every way, passwords are getting worse and worse

Passkeys are just passwords that are in a device I don't control instead of a head that I do.

Anthropic: No, absolutely not, you may not use third-party harnesses with Claude subs

> You may not ... access the Services through automated or non-human means, whether through a bot, script, or otherwise

Only humans may use the robot? Is not the robot's purpose to mimic and replace humans?

Sauce for the goose?

EFF policy says bots can code but humans must write the docs

Re: Sic

Spelling is nothing more than a conspiracy of publishers to sell dictionaries.

Texas sues TP-Link over China links and security vulnerabilities

> There really isn't any way to make a electronic device these days without the majority of the components being manufactured in China.

Sure there is. Just tax all your citizens who buy their stuff from China so much that the manufacturers will rush over to your country to continue to sell their tat to your citizens who no longer have any spare cash because you just taxed it all away.

Oh wait...

Copilot spills the beans, summarizing emails it's not supposed to read

Re: That's why we use Copilot

> Industry-standard enterprise security.

Well? It is.

You can jailbreak an F-35 just like an iPhone, says Dutch defense chief

Re: Needs to go back to the manufacturer I'm afraid.

They have these things called "soldiers". Some of them are good at shooting, some of them are good at thinking, and some of them know which end a spanner to point at the enemy.

Re: You'd like to think

> You can't fight a war on 30 hours.

At 10 hours a day you should be able to squeeze it in. Just ask Russia.

China remains embedded in US energy networks 'for the purpose of taking it down'

This is a huge problem. It can be solved in one of two ways: secure the systems so that China et al are kicked out and can never get back in. This is easy, will take 3 to 4 years at most and requires only paying the people who can do it what they're worth, and that is why it will never happen. The other alternative is to never get into a fight with China.

It's MAD I tell you.

Oracle vows 'new era' for MySQL as users sharpen their forks

Re: MariaDB

I think the elephant in the room is it's just a matter of branding.

Open source registries don't have enough money to implement basic security

How about open sores steps up and provides the people and bloated corporations (but I repeat myself...) who are using the free software (which, you will recall, is provided "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED) with all the security guarantees and massively online mirrors they're paying for? It's only fair.

Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation

Re: Ciccia

> neither do I care for obscurantism, particularly when it leaves ill-defined foreign words untranslated, presumably owing to the impossibility of translating them

Zat was ze joke.

Re: where are we headed to?

> knowing this is the state of the art of human research endeavours

Well they'd certainly like you to think that.