Posts by that one in the corner

Amazon's AI specs aim to stop delivery drivers getting lost between van and porch

Re: Hmm...

This application of "smart glasses" is one of those that *could* be done well, and be extremely useful for everyone involved, including you, the customer. For example, a clear indication of whether the camera is on or not, and then only operating when it is needed, would both remove your loose dressing gown from being recorded and also improve battery life for the driver (and reduce the battery to the driver, given the worryingly large number of comments, including here, that claim "glassholes" would/should be met with immediate and direct violence).

On the other hand, of course, this - as with every corporate project - could be done badly and be extremely damaging to everyone involved. For example, continuous nagging to hurry up, directly into the driver's line of sight whilst they are negotiating the queue of cars and reckless pedestrians outside the local infants school.

I am pretty sure that I know which of those two El Reg readers believe is the more likely scenario. But I'd really, really *like* to be optimistic that sensible and useful applications of tech can actually occur.[1]

[1] if only because then there is the chance that practical versions of the hardware, without bling and frippery, may then actually be manufactured and I could then get hold of a pair. I've been waiting for, what, three decades now for sensible AR glasses, whilst I could still actually use them.

> Amazon's problem is dropping off only part of the delivery or possibly none at all and then getting thoroughly confused as to how to deal with it. I don't suppose AI would help with the first part of that

>> helping them with everything from finding the right parcel in the van

If the camera spots the QR codes and the display highlights the correct ones, with a simple count of "2 out of 4 boxes found so far"...

Reddit to Perplexity: Get your filthy hands off our forums

Re: Am I understanding this correctly?

>> we will not tolerate threats against openness and the public interest

Because, of course, if Perplexity wasn't scraping, members of the public would be unable to go to Reddit and read anything from it that interested them.

Reddit is well known for being closed to public access, preventing even the most basic of searches through its content, never allowing working URLs to individual posts, taking every precaution it can to ensure random passersby never sneak a peak into its content lest they be tempted to scroll down and - r/aww look at the puddy tat! Oooh, other people who r/collectpenciltoppers. What? No, no, I'll finish writing the comment later, I've just spotted that somebody is wrong on the Internet...

Reddit is not a place for useful answers.

However, it is great for winding up people who think they have a sense of humour but really don't; just go to any of the sections intended to mock the afflicted (r/tragedeigh is a favourite) and you will soon spot someone who is due a quick "let me just google that for you". Cruel and petty, but given the nature of the beast you are poking...

Whether that makes Reddit useful as training data for an AI is an open question. Is there a place for a cruel and petty AI? Is there a place for an AI that mocks or for one that is mockable? Not that there is any shortage of the latter, as can be read about here on El Reg.

With impeccable timing, AWS debuts automated cloud incident report generator

Re: But did it work on Monday?

It was probably working perfectly, gathering all the stats locally and preparing beautifully formatted results. Then found it couldn't send that report anywhere. So it just sat there, forlornly blinking an attention LED, adding to the disco fever in the data centre.

OpenBSD 7.8 out now, and you're not seeing double, 9front releases 'Release'

Re: RS232 really?

Yes, there is (what is now common in the MCU/GPIO world) 3.3V UART-style easily available. And as TFA points out, if you do need actual RS232 there are HATs that can provide the line conversions. Including DTR,RTS etc if you really, really need them*.

But you also have to recognise, sadly, that many people (like vendors on cheap websites that aren't generally tech oriented) have a nasty habit of using "RS232" and "serial UART" interchangeably. Luckily, most of the common, cheaper, products are really USB-to-UART (fingers crossed you got one with a real FTDI chip) which work well with TeraTerm etc, as few people plug proper VT100s into their R'Pis these days**.

* although, for this use case, check very carefully whether those are via an ancillary full UART device on the HAT or software driven via GPIO 'cos the latter won't work

** if someone has a good condition Hazeltine I'd be tempted, just out of nostalgia

On the plus side, I have had a lot more use out of my dead tree BT book than many other volumes on my shelf: paging back and forth, writing in the margins, re-reading chapters, using it to prop up the shelf of now dusty BLE dev boards...

Microsoft finance slang defines the eternal optimist: The 'hockey stick on wheels'

Don't be rude about his PowerPoint slide; take that bully off the screen.

Grounded jet engines take off again as datacenter generators

Boeing may have a few power plants to loan out

If the latest calls to ground Dreamliner don't go their way.

Is PHP declining? JetBrains says yes. And no

Re: One point in favour

> I would want "2"+"2" to be "22"

Type overloading the plus operator from numeric sum to string concatenation? Yikes. Talk about maintenance nightmare!

PHP is consistent in what + means. Not liking conversion of string to numeric is a point of view*, but it is not an extraordinary choice.

* there are arguments for the sense/usefulness for the entire range from auto-promoting string to numeric all the way to not allowing auto-promotion of int to float.

AWS outage turned smart homes into dumb boxes – and sysadmins into therapists

Re: It's not just tossers who use smart stuff

And the bedbound are amongst those who deserve better smart devices[1], ones that don't exist purely[2] to route data to AWS and become doorstops when they can't.

Of course, if any of these manufacturers were to make a cut-down version of the product, one that didn't even need the cost of the WiFi chip[3] and TCP/IP stack, then they'd slap on a "home medical care" label, which somehow costs four times the retail of the "old" unit just to print it.

[1] *everyone* deserves better devices, but the others can get by when it becomes obvious that the promises on the box don't match reality.

[2] the same way that McDonalds is in the building and rentals business, all that mucking about with food-substitute is an unfortunate distraction they have to put up with.

[3] did you know that we can do better than "clap to turn on the lights", all in one cheap little chip, *without* shipping the voice recording to an American data centre?

Re: Really?

What is this, a house for ANTS?

You know I hate to ask but are 'Friends' electric?

Only mine's broke down, and now I've no-one to love

Re: A taste of the future.

> $200/month to "monitor sleep data"?

Given that

>> EightSleep pumps out 16 GB of data a month

they clearly need to spend on their servers /s

(Although, to heck with "I wish I had the spare change to spaff $200 a month on this", I wish I could get an *uplink* capable of handling 16GB p/m! And still leave enough for El Reg to work. One day, Real Soon Now, after the cows have gone home because the last few of the neighbouring fields has been built on...)

OpenAI releases bot-tom feeding browser with ChatGPT built in

Re: WHY?

It is a productivity booster.

Boot your PC, open the browser: Ping! "Here are your browsing results for today, now you can spend those five hours mowing the lawn; and you know I'm watching that you do[1]".

Just you wait, this browser will be installed by wives everywhere. Dishes will be done, shelves will be put up[2] (any truth to those rumours that Altman is buying B&Q?).

[1] Courtesy of the 'Net connected doorbell camera.

[2] ok, this is just a fantasy, but isn't that the theme for today?

Two tons of creamed corn

Oh come on. That's not playing fair. Putting the link to xkcd directly into TFA.

Just because you never win the office pool for "which commentard is going to post an xkcd link first".

Google porting all internal workloads to Arm, with help from GenAI

Amazing what maths can do

> started with an assumption “that we would be spending time on architectural differences such as floating point drift, concurrency, intrinsics such as platform-specific operators, and performance.” ... "it turns out modern compilers and tools like sanitizers have shaken out most of the surprises"

Sorry, what?

They planned to be spending their time on dealing with minute details of instruction sets and opcode interactions? The things for which we've been building decades of maths - you know, the ONE area that can actually deal in proofs! - from formal theories of languages to planning and optimisation of completely defined[1] and constrained operations in hardware? Variances in floating point accuracy and stability, the bread and butter of published mathematicians and computer scientists; published, as in actually told everyone and provided worked examples as compiler patches to present to the examining board?

But were then, apparently, surprised to find that their time was really needed on fixing things that were rather less rigorously created in the first place, like build and release systems?

Worse (!) having discounted the fine and detailed maths described above, they hadn't planned to be tackling the bits of maths and stats that they should have been expecting to find in their own systems, such as overfitting tests. Or the issues inherent in keeping existing running interacting systems stable (hint: keep the machine room clear of butterflies).

Ok, it wasn't my best subject, but being sent out of the terminal room, away from the blinking lights, and into the lecture halls of the Department of Mathematics, Statistics and Operations Research was once seen a basic to producing a well-rounded geek.

Let alone one with the title of "engineering fellow".

And then ... they patch it all up with "AI". Run a learning model, get it to print out what it has discovered, sanity check that, then engineer the results into your improved systems, good idea. Letting it run wild on its own...

Amazon brain drain finally sent AWS down the spout

Re: 1 NIC. Port

> . If you desire resilience, you have to create applications which aren't bothered when EC2 instances go away. You also need an ops team that knows how to handle the necessary traffic routing & alarms.

So you have to spend inordinate amounts on devs to do the extra clever coding and on a big and fast responding ops team to keep up with all the routine hardware failures? Certainly hope you're saving enough in the low, low cost of hiring the EC2 instances to make up for that.

And all of that required and repeated in every customer.

Wasn't one of the advantages of modern computing and communications supposed to be that we can build resilience through redundancy right into every layer of the stack, from paired PSUs and RAID through to hypervisors that automatically restart your processes on backup CPUs? Then use massive scaling of identical such units, and timesharing to ensure maximum utilisation, to bring down costs? With the multiple identical hardware boxes physically concentrated, allowing support and maintenance staff to be superbly expert in that specific kit rather than merely ok in handling a random assortment of parts? Thereby allowing all of the differences in the workloads to be concentrated into just the topmost layer, the customer applications, so that each can concentrate on what is unique and revenue generating, relying upon a robust infrastructure to supply the common parts?

Is everyone absolutely certain that the current arrangement (which is presumably this "Cloud" we keep hearing about) actually sensible?

Re: Fret not, shareholders

If I may: https://nitter.net/elonmusk/status/1980221072512635117

Introducing NTFSplus – because just one NTFS driver for Linux is never enough

WinFS? It just vanished.

Windows 11 tiptoes further into dark mode with new dialogs

Re: Seriously - A Mode That Makes the Colours Dark ?

Don't forget - Windows used to allow lots of colour schemes for Windows, even ones you could set up for yourself, then gradually de-emphasised and finally de-implemented them.

So, from Microsoft's point of view, your KDE is terribly, terribly behind the times.

Meanwhile, loyal Windows users are being treated to A While New Paradigm* ushered in by Ease Of Use features such as typing, veeeeerrrrry carefully "vivetool /enable /id:57857165,57994323,48433719,49453572,58383338,59270880,59203365" (you did get right, didn't you? Oh, you typed 718 instead of 719? Never mind, it is an easy fix; start with format c: )

* I'm assuming this is how they are talking about it, seems likely

AI does a better job of ripping off the style of famous authors than MFA students do

AI created pictures never get the number of fingers right

And it looks like we've got an entire extra ten floating around at the start of TFA:

> prefer works written by AI to human human-written imitations

This is, if course, just Mr Claburn trying to make us *think* that this was written by AI because, as the piece points out, we prefer it that way. A cunning double-bluff and an illustration of how well fine-tuned the El Reg writing staff is.

Windows 11 update knocks out USB mice, keyboards in recovery mode

Re: Well to be fair

Given the number of instruction sheets that still advise plugging directly into the PC, not using a hub, and the new variety of ways invented especially so that USB C devices, sockets and OSes can now be incompatible with each other...

Re: If a machine is old enough to have a PS/2 port

The generic chippery still provides PS/2 so not making it available is the choice that is being made; plenty of current mainboards on sale today even bring them out to the rear panel (see comment above for a couple of URLs). As at least one other person has found (see other comments around here) even laptops can be using PS/2 - why bother with building up internal USB if the lines are there for the simpler alternative?

Re: PS/2 keyboards unaffected..

My two most recent PC mainboards, still very much on sale and advertised as Win11 compliant*, both have PS/2 sockets on the back: Asrock N100DC-ITX and N100M. No, I didn't go looking for that as a feature.

Asus "Prime" and "Corporate" mainboards all seem to provide PS/2. Harder to tell quickly with Supermicro, as their site is naff and doesn't hasn't images for the rear i/o, but from the top view, if that is the Ethernet, those USB then this other size of silver box, always in the same corner, is almost certainly PS/2.

In fact, it mostly seems to be "gaming" mainboards, and the grotty things that get crammed into name-brand boxes like HP, that are more likely to be missing them. On the outside, at least (there are still plenty of mainboard headers for serial ports, if one looks, so the missing PS/2 might be there as well - the generic chippery still provides the pins).

* not that they've been anywhere near Windows

Re: Instruction:

<nasal-voice>I believe that you will find the message was (is) "Keyboard not found, Press F1 to continue". F2! Chortle</nasal-voice>

Major AWS outage across US-East region breaks half the internet

Re: Who knew that putting all your eggs...

"Resilient". Apt, but not really the sort of word I want to associate with a pizza.

Unless it was Italian Dwarf Pizza, of course ("look out, he has grissini!").

Re: HMRC taken down

In other words, it is - just hosting. Running some software on somebody else's hardware, when you could choose to run the same functionality on yet another person's chunk of hardware.

HMRC taken down

By problems in the US. Hmm.

Time for reminders about "it is just someone else's computer", if it is in another country it's really not under your control (especially when "you" are a branch of government) and it is just hosting, not some specialised ability that isn't available elsewhere.

Lloyds Banking Group claims Microsoft Copilot saves staff 46 minutes a day

Re: Accuracy has improved then

> toilet/smoke/coffee breaks? That's where the real time is lost.

Time is lost? Aren't those the times, like the proverbial "water cooler chats", when cross-fertilisation occurs* between team members, getting the chance to rub shoulders* with those outside your immediate cubicle mates, boasting camaraderie and increasing company value? Or just a few minutes of peace when the old noodle can do its magic.

From an engineering/development p.o.v. it's often seemed sensible to give your thinkers a number of paid timeslots for taking a good, long, shower, given how many times you hear "the answer just came to me as I was lathering up". Never convinced management of this, though.

* Okay, maybe a bad choice of words with regards to the first of those time-wasters.

Bank report seems strangely empty of costings

These 46 minutes - how much is that worth to LBG, how much is it currently costing them in fees and, if(!) the fees change*, what is the cutoff when it is no longer worth pursuing?

You know, just some basic facts, the sort of bottom line entries that banks calculate all the time (?!) and they usually like to boast about, to demonstrate to the board/investors/mere customers that they've done the due diligence.

Or do they not have any real numbers? Maybe this is just something Copilot told them was happening?

* say, AI floggers feel like they'd like to makke a profit on the processing costs

Company that made power systems for servers didn’t know why its own machines ran out of juice

Re: A case of oops rather than UPS

The sort of thing that could spark a pun-off: a current trend at El Reg.

You have to feel sorry for Molly, she is now immortalised as the "thing that has to be guarded against".

Re: How could they not figure out the timing?

> Most UPS manufacturers will charge you extra for the network card

Or the trivial piece of cable that will connect the USB data lines from the deliberately non-standard socket on the back of the cheaper units (hint: after you've found online the connections needed, when you spend the couple of minutes to make your own frankencable - it really is just a cable - connect ground and data but *don't* connect the +5V line on the USB, it probably isn't!).

Thou shalt not let AI run amok: Vatican wants global rules

They still have to solve the fundamental problem of distributed, massively multi-core processing used for a Papal Mainframe AI: which box do you put the pointy hat on?[1]

[1] the original reason for creating The Silence: one would stand by every cabinet, so that anyone who approached and realised that neither the hat nor the slippers were being worn, meaning that none of the AI's pronouncements could be deemed infallible, would turn from the machine room - and immediately forget what they had just seen.

Ruby Central tries to make peace after 'hostile takeover'

Re: R

And on the Amiga - Arexx ftw.

Turns out the end of Windows 10 is good for something: The PC refresh cycle

Re: I'm sure PC sector CEOs wouldn't be going hungry without W11.

> You'd like to think that there is at least one person who has got rich from tech willing to fund that.

Sure, all you have to do is find the person who got rich from tech that *didn't* (and doesn't) expect the user to keep buying new versions/models/upgrades/subscriptions and actually has real liquid money to use, not purely "on paper value, if we can find anyone daft enough to buy these stocks/options/massive debts".

Feeling lonely? Microsoft Copilot can now listen to your every word, watch your screen

Re: Only Microsoft...

It was marketing who changed the name; apparently, these days it is now okay for execs to see visions but hearing voices is still considered infra dig.

He's getting an echo? Should move the mic so it doesn't point at the speakers or, if that doesn't work, he should consider using headphones when writing comments.

Re: And this dear Friends......

A USB Hub with individual switches is a useful thing to have around, for a laptop or, especially, for a honking great tower PC: leave all the points of intrusion plugged in (no reaching round the back every time).

PS

Other retailers are available, Amazon is quite easy to search as a starting point

AI boffins teach office supplies to predict your next move

You remember the fun we had when Windows 3 programs could all see each others HWNDs? And you could hook any messages?

And we only used this for serious things, like debugging our own dialog boxes.

We *never* wrote anything that tracked the mouse and swapped the positions of the "Ok" and "Cancel" buttons whenever the pointer got too close to them.

Could be useful if

It sees the man of the house[1] approaching a half-built bookcase with a screw in one hand: and the hammer runs away, hiding itself under the telly, the flat-head screwdriver follows closely[2], whilst the philips-head screwdriver keeps bumping itself up against his shoe.

[1] not our house, of course, *I* know what I'm doing, ahem[3]

[2] there being no paint tins in view

[3] so, where did I put the gaffer tape? That'll fix it - Oi! Come back here, you little blighter. Ha, got you cornered.

Mind the gap – in mobile coverage: UK train signal to stay patchy till 2030

Universal mobile data coverage across the UK

Don't suppose they could sort out the immobile coverage first? Like, say, anywhere near my house?

Still, if the trains all get coverage, maybe I could walk along to our station - it's only a couple of minutes away - and wait for the 09:45 if I want to send an SMS*

* don't want to go overboard, like hoping to talk to anyone

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

Re: "Companies are making short-term efficiency gains"

Let us first see if AI can actually do the first line roles entirely on their own for the next couple of yeras (let alone 5 to 10), without eating up *all* the time of the current second liners cleaning up after them - and whilst still remaining affordable, now that prices are starting to become more realistic.

SpaceX's Starship: Two down, Mons Huygens to climb

Re: Why anyone signed off on a tall rocket

> Bridenstein missed out the reason why NASA did not go with in orbit refuelling years ago: Senator Richard Shelby said he would slash their budget if they even mentioned the possibility of an orbital propellant depot.

Thanks for that; I'd missed the reporting on that, in 2019, but you prompted me to look it up.

For example: The SLS rocket may have curbed development of on-orbit refueling for a decade

Re: Recap of moon return mission

> A moon base, according to various studies will have a mass of at minimum 150 tonnes (much more if you are trying out manufacturing or mining). For comparison, ISS is about 450 tonnes.

The answer is right there in the question: boost the ISS on a slow trajectory to the Moon, gentle it down and just be sure its solar panels are right side up before landing. The ISS is even already equipped with places to attach the boosters and the modular design will allow reconfiguration during the glide into place (there are some bits and bobs that you might want to move, as they are sticking out of the bottom).

There may be a few minor (cough) technical details to sort out. And apparently it is getting a bit whiffy.

Re: Gerry Anderson - space visionary

Those strings just won't stop vibrating (hence Steve Zodiac's restless leg), then there were all the issues around getting tied in fixed-sized loops around a gravity field (the infamous "yo-yo Europa" incident).

Librephone battles the proprietary binary blob

Of course, *all* we need is a secure baseband unit

That is 100% tested and reliable, so it never needs any updates.

Then its firmware* can all be in masked ROM and there are no binary blobs needed in the OS.

Simples.

* whether in the original or current sense of the word

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

Re: The time is right for some Agentic AI, on by default of course

Ah, you are looking for the way the Bad Actors will attack the LLM, against the desires of Altman et al.

Whilst I'm looking at the way the LLM will be intended to attack (sorry, "help") you, for the benefit of Sam, the Worst Actor*.

* though he does manage to keep a straight face and rarely corpses in press meetings even when saying the most outrageous lines, so he has some acting skills