Posts by JamesTGrant

UK state bank considers lengthening disastrous IT program

It’s a bank - why are they outsourcing development of their central nervous system?

Oh, I think I know why.

Claude Code cache chaos creates quota complaints

Re: Reminder: Nobody knows what any of this costs.

You lose an O or loose a belt.

Red Hat RHELocates its Chinese engineering team to India

All those open branches - I have witnessed a few repos like this. I call it a ‘Death Star event’. Very frustrating for the team that inherits. It’s a form of corporate vandalism.

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

Eh? No one uses the billing an invoice as a canonical infrastructure manifest. Not only that, but it doesn’t go low-level enough to, and usually it’s a different department handling billing than Engineering - so that’s nonsense.

I rather suspect that their usage data is so (understandably) dirty as to be indefensibly unusable so they CAN’T share it with customers because it’s totally unreliable.

Jeff Bezos' rocket company Blue Origin applies to launch 51,000 datacenter satellites

Simple - it’s a scam for investors.

Iranian news service claims drone strikes on AWS were deliberate, to probe for US datacenter dependencies

Nah, everyone knows EVERYTHING runs in eu-west-1 and us-east-1

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

I’m just impressed that around ChatGPT version 5.2 it started to get most jq expressions correct rather than confidently but wildly wrong.

I can imagine consciousness, but then I can also imagine flying a helicopter made of jelly and icecream. So probably humans are terrible at recognising behavioural traits appropriately, in each other, animals, ghosts, robots, aliens.

Re: Seen this movie before

Yep - the logical dissonance he spoke in his televised interviews were wild. Very strange situation.

$8K laundry bot knows when to hold ’em, knows when to fold ’em, and knows it has help standing by

What is ‘folding laundry?’ I fold T shirts, and towels and sheets but the rest? Nope.

Also 90mins!!?

GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability

Jellys on jellys

More than 135,000 OpenClaw instances exposed to internet in latest vibe-coded disaster

I read the web page and the testimonials, it’s people saying that it helped the with a todo list. Or prioritising e-mails. One person had it write a website for his local sports club.

And… that’s it.

What is it allegedly for? (I know what it is - it’s the botnet of your dreams - a botnet with actual compute resource!)

Pakistan to test students for real-world skills before they graduate from IT degrees

Re: Complete nonsense

Can you reverse a linked list in a computationally efficient way?

Can you avoid messing up a git repo when using rebase=true?

One of these things is very useful to understand well. The other is very likely to be the subject of university computing courses and literally never be required in real life.

Nitrogen ransomware is so broken even the crooks can't unlock your files

No because it’s the public key that’s mashed. With asymmetrical encryption you can’t decode a payload using the public key which was used to encrypt it.

The generation of the public key from its private key is easy and not supposed to be hard. But changing even one bit of a public key makes the corresponding private key unusable and if you were to do a bitwise comparison between the original private key and the private key that corresponds to the modified public key then they would be very different.

Effectively, they don’t have the private key because they corrupted their public key and you cant derive the private key from the public key.

Hope that helps!!

Musk distracts from struggling car biz with fantastical promise to make 1 million humanoid robots a year

Well, he’s obviously lying. It’s strange that he is seemingly permitted to mislead investors. His claims are bogus for at least the following reasons:

His robots will not learn from observation - they lack the hardware, compute, uplink bandwidth and software to do that. The ability to derive meaning through sequences of visual input is not there yet - by a long way, there is a big difference between ‘tell me what happens in this video sequence’ and interpretation of an environment and making appropriate real-time actions which modify said environment.

Humanoid robots are notoriously difficult to keep upright, even in flat plane environments.

The cost is impossible over the next few years. For reference, the parts cost of a lidr / optical sensory device with sufficient lightweight processing power is pretty high (see Apple Vision Pro - that’s ’just’ a headset and the parts cost is high). And you have a fully articulated robot with servos, motors, pneumatics, sensory sensors, batteries, onboard compute on top of that.

Not quite as ridiculous as his manned mission to Mars projections (which are so ridiculous that I think he uses it to gauge how moronic his audience is).

How’s his fully self driving car going? That’s following a fairly well defined set of rules and still doesn’t work reliably. Navigating and manipulating the ‘real world’ is very complex. They are nowhere near it, let alone a million robots in a year.

I’m sure they’ll deliver something, but it won’t be, or do, what he’s hyping. He is deliberately lying.

Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

Hi Gavin, my name is Jenny and for that reason, I’m out

Hi Gavin, I’m Peter Jones, you should add big data and blockchain to it. I could have my devs knock that up in a day. I’m out.

Hi Gavin, I’m Touker Suliman. I think you need offices in London and I can rent some to you.

Hi Gavin, I’m Deborah. May I see your legal documents, right here and now?

Hi Gavin, I’m Gary Neville and no one knows why I’m here. For that reason, I’m still here.

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?