Posts by JamesTGrant

Linus Torvalds tries vibe coding, world still intact somehow

Re: Icons - enjoy the choice

Cigarette for balance…

Apple hopes to save Siri from laughingstock status with infusion of Google Gemini

Re: Clippy wins

Detect brightness

Lookup table and apply 50%delta between current brightness and brightness +userOffset for corresponding brightness level.

Sleep 100ms

Users prompt Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot to remove clothes in photos then 'apologize' for it

Re: Consequences

Oh - a gun argument! This is why we arrest shooters and not gun owners.

Garmin autopilot lands small aircraft without human assistance

There’s a really good cafe/diner at Broomfield airport. Plastic baskets, made to order sandwiches/rolls. Get soup. And you sit outside next to the airfield and watch all the coming/going.

NIST contemplated pulling the pin on NTP servers after blackout caused atomic clock drift

Access to the generator, but no access to the room where the plugs and switches for all the gear sit?

Asda's 'self-inflicted' SAP mess after Walmart divorce stalls financial revival

Re: RISE with SAP

I’ve always seen it as ‘RINSED by SAP’

Re: We called it

Yep. Where’s our consultation fee?

Another open source project dies of neglect, leaving thousands scrambling

I wondered if the lack of maintainers might have something to do with the name. NGINX - ie: part of F5 (who make expensive but also excellent firewall products (or they did last time I knew anything about them!) why aren’t F5 paying? It’s a feeder product for them.

Apple knits up $230 sock for your iPhone in time for Christmas

Re: 3D-knitted construction

Indeed - I was wondering if there’s 2D knitted, or 4D knitted

Russia’s first autonomous humanoid robot staggers and falls on debut

6 km/h? If you strap it to a bin lorry maybe.

Meta can't afford its $600B love letter to Trump

40years ago… mmm.

Wanna invest in bonds from Enron or MCI?

How about Intel?

GE?

Meta will stuff up Facebook and Instagram soon enough. They’ll struggle to get revenue from WhatsApp. That leaves selling customer data and being an ad broker without owning the shop window.

They are inextricably linked to Mark Z.

I doubt Meta will be around in 20years, and certainly not 40. I hope.

'Windows sucks,' former Microsoft engineer says, explains how to fix it

MacOS with Brew and Linuxify…

'Vibe coding' named Word of the Year. Developers everywhere faceplant

How’s that no/low code thing working out?

Uncle Sam lets Google take Wiz for $32B

It uses…. an API?!!?

Tesla board wants to grant Musk $1T in stock, Norway wealth fund says nope

1trillion USD is 10million x 100,000USD

There are less than 10 million Tesla cars sold globally, ever, combined.

Seems insane to me.

If I was the chairman of a company and someone said to me ‘if you fire this one person, you will save the company 1 trillion dollars’ the rational thing to do would be quite obvious. Or, if you don’t give this person 1 trillion dollars, they might decide to leave, I’d take my chances…

Developer puts Windows 7 on a crash diet, drops it to down to 69 MB

Re: Weather...

And standards bodies!

Tech industry grad hiring crashes 46% as bots do junior work

How’s low/no-code working out?

Coz this is worse - a proper tech debt injector.

I feel bad for new grads.

Maybe we could get back to creating jobs and paying people and not giving all the money to a small number of sociopaths. Maybe.

Windows 11 update breaks localhost, prompting mass uninstall workaround

Microsoft’s Apple and Linux marketing department working hard?

OpenAI's ChatGPT is so popular that almost no one will pay for it

‘remeasurement of convertible interest rights’

Convertible from debt into un-negotiated debt?

Sounds like ‘I had a plan and now I don’t - I wonder if that’s gonna work out?’

AI startup Augment scraps 'unsustainable' pricing, users say new model is 10x worse

‘One user paying y is costing us x. Where y is greater than x’. I’d suggest that’s not the fault of the user, that’s a poor business plan, or technical implementation, or both.

DGX Spark, Nvidia’s tiniest supercomputer, tackles large models at solid speeds

He doubtless tried to use it to write a database in Java.

Bose kills SoundTouch: Smart speakers go dumb in Feb

I’m not blaming anyone for putting their faith in a large privately (sorta) owned company who should do better for their customers. It’s a shame that BOSE didn’t guarantee the service for x years. That’s the let down, a trusted brand letting its customers believe one thing and not delivering.

Immediate cynicism required - ‘what happens when this gadget can’t talk to the Internet?’, and ‘can company X remotely knacker this product?’ are the two questions everyone should learn to ask because you’ll always find out the answer, either before or after you hand over money for it.

Vodafone keels over, cutting off millions of mobile and broadband customers

First thought - CA cert expiry

Second thought - advertising routes snafu

Well done Reg slooths - looks like Vodaphone disappeared themselves, look forward to the root-cause analysis!

Microsoft's OneDrive spots your mates, remembers their faces, and won't forget easily

Why 3 times a year? Because they are paid the ingress cost and the compute costs and they don’t want people to flick the setting on/off/on/off. They already knew this would create resource issues in Azure so they set the retention to 30days anyway. I guess they don’t do a good job of remembering which pictures are already processed and so are worried about thrashing the upload/compute each time it’s toggled on/off/on. I bet the database backend ‘delete user’s data’ request is heavy and slow so they want to protect the backend. It’s a crap UX and suggests there’s a crap architecture/implementation behind it.

Apple have had this feature on iOS for years - I suspect the difference is that the ‘people’ metadata is stored on the user-device on the Apple implementation and not some central creepy database (Microsoft implementation).

Former UK prime minister Sunak becomes human Clippy for Microsoft, Anthropic

Re: Why?

To stay ‘in the game’ and feed his ego.

SonicWall breach hits every cloud backup customer after 5% claim goes up in smoke

I wouldn’t go to a restaurant to get my car fixed, even if the food was excellent. Quite why people think that a firewall company would make a good cloud storage provider is… odd to me.

Gartner warns agentic AI startups: Prepare to be consolidated

In other news, Gartner discovers that many tech startups exist in the hope of getting acquired by existing massive corporations.

Intel's open source future in question as exec says he's done carrying the competition

Perhaps Intel could try attracting customers by making products that people wanna buy, for more than it costs them to make?

Or they could try making the software company dislike them a bit more and see how that goes.

Texas senators cry foul over Smithsonian's pricey Space Shuttle shuffle

Welp, the lift capability of a Chinook helicopter is about 10K Kg,

The shuttle is about 80K Kg.

Strap it up and off you go!

Or, build a Lego one in situ - that’d be flippin’ awesome and loads of people would visit it?

Teens arrested in London preschool ransomware attack

Re: 17 eh ?

I thought you said ‘don’t initialise them - they don’t deserve an excuse for their actions’ - good pun I thought. It’s still a good pun and I shall wash my ears/eyes.

Also - what horrible people.

Microsoft CTO says he wants to swap most AMD and Nvidia GPUs for homemade chips

Mmmm

We want flexibility….

Except it takes a few years between design to manufacture, and then you need a fab slot, and assembly. Which means you need at LEAST 3 years between ‘I want to do this’ and ‘this’ being a real physical option.

At LEAST 3 years without changing your mind or ballsing up the Project Management…

But it’s an easy thing for the CEO of a software licensing company to say.

One of TikTok’s network boffins says it causes ‘massive data wastage’

I’ve a solution - make the 1st 5 seconds of every video identical.

You’re welcome TicTok

How and why Linux has thrived after three decades in Kernelland

Re: Licenses

I haven’t taken any classes and I’m rubbish at brick laying.

Atlassian drops $1B on company that helps measure dev productivity

I’ve yet to meet a single software engineer of any seniority who couldn’t govern someone a list of 5 things that’d help them be more efficient.

How about… just asking people that work on your stuff where the tech dept is and what things could be done to improve ‘efficiency’.

Vibe coding platform Replit's latest update is infuriating customers with surprise cost overruns

Serious question - is it that people ask the thing to do stuff and they don’t know what they are going to pay for the thing to do the stuff? And, if the thing fails to do the stuff then they have to ask it again and pay again?

Fiverr cuts 30% of staff in pivot to being 'an AI-first company'

They are going to replace their existing infrastructure with a whole new unfamiliar infrastructure. They are laying people off now because, in the future, they might not be needed because of the new infrastructure they don’t yet have and haven’t built.

If you insert the words AI-centric a few times almost anywhere in the first paragraph, that’s a fair rephrasing of the CEO’s statement. He is either lying or is completely ignorant.

Is he actually saying ‘we are pivoting to being an Agentic AI frontend and all the Fivrr people offering their services are going to be made irrelevant’. Because that’s a terrible business plan too.

If I was a shareholder I’d be selling or lobbying for his departure.

Google unveils master plan for letting AI shop on your behalf

A lot of people are going to pay to find out about natural language ambiguity…

Let’s have Grandma for dinner…

JLR stuck in neutral as losses skyrocket amid cyberattack cleanup

Re: Got in through a bug in the Web Interface

Is it by setting the http request header referrer to ‘/loggedOutOk’?

Smart-blooded super soldiers: Coming soon from DARPA

Maybe they’ll call it DARPA Marching Powder

Half of tech firms plotting restructures as AI hype bites

18months? Re-orgs are part of what management does - if not that then how else would they say ‘we are not achieving well now, but we’ll re-org, leverage some synergies and then it’ll all be better’.

After the re-org it’s all a bit chaotic as people are working out how to do things and who does what, so that’s more time, then another six months of waiting before the next re-org to respond to the needs of the business/market or ‘better align with strategic priorities’ etc etc.

In many places, company senior management regularly confuse activity for progress.

I'm out, says OpenSUSE: We're dropping bcachefs support from next kernel version

It’s all a bit of a shame but not a surprise.

I read the through the bcachefs web page and reading the correspondence between contributors and the maintainer, it does appear that the maintainer enjoys being antagonistic and belligerently misses the broader points which his collaborators attempt to lay out in clear, gentle, and thoughtful terms. And that’s the correspondence with people who are direct supporters of the project’s stated aims.

Undoubtedly a very smart guy - but undoubtedly a pita to work with, a loss to us all.

Bring back your old Mac: 5 ways to refresh the OS on elderly Apples

Re: An alternative.

Ha! Yes - exactly like that! Good sluthing!!

Re: An alternative.

I like the idea! The proxy would end up having to be a renderer or a very slow web server ’re-writer’- the modern Internet is so heavily JS dominated that you’d get to a point where you’d need your browser to support a JS version to do stuff on many sites.

Hack to school: Parents told to keep their little script kiddies in line

Re: "Caused by students"

Like saying that burglary is caused by opening glass doors - rather than leaving a pile of money next to the door and not locking the door. I mean it is true - but there’s an easy solution…

Nano11 cuts Windows 11 down to size, grabbing just 2.8 GB of disk space

Re: 2,8 GB?

I guess because the are containers and the devs who build them don’t start with a minimal base-layer but something with a full Proton/Python/other stuff environment/stack.

Re: What does Windows 11 normally weigh in at ?

You had a shoebox?!! - luxury!

US cuffs 475 at Hyundai–LG battery plant – feds tout largest single-site raid

Not often I hope someone gets wrongfully detained, close to making an exception in your case.

China-aligned crew poisons Windows servers to manipulate Google results

Seems exceptionally technically complex for to achieve something so mundane and ‘low reward’.

If you’ve got the skillz to do this then you’ve got mad skillz to do some proper hack0z shenanigans.

Perhaps some dodgy gambling sites pay a load for some extra Google points?

What’s the profit vs opportunity cost?

Sky-high budget gap: FAA launches air traffic overhaul, lacks cash to finish it

Re: Never mind the budget:

Well, they’ve completed the requirements capture - replace 60years worth of independently operated and heterogeneous complex systems distributed over a continent without any downtime AND subsequently costed it without even contacting a supplier AND given the project a deadline - so they’re doing just great…

'It looks sexy but it's wrong' – the problem with AI in biology and medicine

Probably one of the most documented diagrams in Computer Science since 1981.

‘Draw a diagram of the 7 layer OSI model showing and show the location of the IP address sections of an IP header’

Resulting images are very pretty and complete garbage.